Even in the capitalist hellscape of tech startups, we have like a frontend group that makes decisions about the front end code that’s separate from the entire engineering org. Likewise there’s one for the backend, for devops concerns, and so on.

Some orgs are disorganized and require a lot of vertical approval steps, but that’s not an inherent nature of committee

Yeah I feel like 400 years ago in a life where you’ve never seen sparkling colors, they were impressive. We have many other colors and lights now with fewer downsides.

Oof.

I (a man who doesn’t date me) personally feel like past five or so years in either direction it tends to rapidly fall off. Look weird and hard to relate to.

Short and sweet is great!

They’ve really shortened the game. Lair used to be 8 floors. Orc was 5. I think they shortened hell, too.

The qol stuff has generally been pretty solid.

The only change I actively dislike is the opportunity attacks you suffer when moving. I added a “blink the screen yellow when it happens” to my config to alert me, but I just think the mechanic isn’t fun.

Ok, I do kind of miss the yellow wands (heal, haste). And being able to learn Controlled Blink as a spell. That stuff was nice.

Usually some people will take initiative and some people will delegate their responsibilities. Form committees , that sort of thing.

Congrats. I play a lot of crawl, and have pretty regularly since v0.16 or so. There’s been a lot of changes (there used to be food! Spells made you hungry!) but the core of it remains very good.

At one point I had a win with every species, but they added new ones and removed some since then.

Minotaur Berserker was my first win. Can’t go wrong with screaming and headbutting, I say.

Gargoyle Earth Elementalist was also fun. If you get Shatter online it can delete a lot of stuff outright. You just need another solution for flying stuff and jellies.

I think it’s an Ice spell now, but the one that takes a couple turns and then just kills the nearest creature was amazing. Did the extended endgame with that. Blew up so many pandemonium lords.

I don’t usually do the extended anymore. Hell is, appropriately, unpleasant. Pandemonium isn’t as bad, but there’s always the risk of popping in next to a very bad crowd.

Also the tomb can get fucked.

The ascent with the orb is usually pretty safe, with the occasional heart stopper. I’ve lost at least two dudes on the way up. One gargoyle ate a high damage spell from one of those hell sentinels. Should have blinked or fogged or something. One felid ate a pan lord’s chain lighting that was more than his max health.

Hm I’m rambling. Great game. Highly recommend.

My dad said something like this a couple months back. He didn’t think workers could run a business. When I pointed out all the bad decisions I’ve seen my bosses make, especially the ones made over the injections objections of workers, he didn’t have much of a response.

People believe things emotionally. (All of us are susceptible to this, sadly.)

Edit: fix strange autocorrect of injections instead of objections

NYC is one of the few places in the USA where you can mostly just get on a train or bus and go. It’s pretty great. There’s room for improvement - some lines are better than others, and off peak you can wait half an hour if you just miss it. But mostly it just works

I got the vaccine as soon as it was available. A good friend procrastinated. We saw their little nephew together and hung out indoors one day. The nephew got the flu. My friend got the flu. I seem to be fine. My friend was bedridden for about a week.

They got their flu and COVID shots after they recovered, at least.

I’ve read your post a dozen times and I’m confused.

Are you at the $5 million cap in this scenario? You’re certainly not going to waste away with $500k/year coming in, labor free.

Or are you closer to median income of like $80k, and thus have no funds for a big passion project?

Either way, you can always pool resources and form an organization of some sort. We don’t really want a ton of power collected in individuals. Especially not if the only reason they have that power is because they had money.

No one needs more than $5 million. That’s enough for a conservative investment portfolio to give you a mid six figure income without doing any labor. Watch TV all day and eat chips, still net six figures.

Maybe then no one can afford mega mansions and mega yachts, but I’m okay with that. We don’t need that much concentration of wealth.

It kind of bothers me that people use “introvert” to mean like “crippling social anxiety and agoraphobia”.

Maybe it’s just online spaces accumulate more people who identify with those disorders, and “introvert” sounds nicer .

Yeah I’m at a job that pays dirt, and doesn’t pay for holidays. I asked my boss if he could just say my assignment on Thanksgiving was to eat dinner, and pay me for the day. He was like “mm maybe”, but had to ask his boss. She, allegedly, said no.

I’m not watching a video but based on the title “capitalism is theft” I can guess what it says.

The problem is we can barely get people to understand that the company is not their friend and they have any rights at all.

You can’t teach a child calculus if they can barely do arithmetic. People are fish that don’t realize there’s water. It’s going to be hard to get them to build a space program. A noble goal, but not one with an easy direct path.

I feel like every retro I’ve attended has been a farce.

“What went bad? We said doing it this way would be harder and more risk prone. Management insisted we do it that way, and it took longer than and caused a site outage.”

"What should we do differently?’

“Listen to the team next time”

“That won’t happen”

Tabletop RPGs are a good and cost effective hobby. You can play DND with the free “SRD” rules posted online, but you won’t get the fancy pictures and all the extras.

There are other games like it that are even cheaper. My personal favorite is Fate. Free rules, only needs four six sided dice.

The main problem is finding a good group to play with. DND is mega popular so if you’re just looking for social, it’s a good starting point. If you’re not into fantasy, you can branch off into other games later.

In the US I think it varies a lot from town to town and teacher to teacher.

I had a history teacher in like 10th grade (age ~15). He spent the first bulk of a lesson one day telling us stuff. Everyone was wrapped up in what a good story this was about whatever. Then, in the end of the class he was like “everything I just told you is bullshit. It’s alterations, omissions, and lies to make the story sound better for the victors.”

I don’t remember what the actual subject was, but it was a good lesson in not blindly accepting what a charismatic guy in a suit tells you.

Depending on how the html is structured, you might be able to use adblock or tamper monkey to filter it out (in a browser. Apps are less supportive of this)

I have several stories on this I like to tell.

I worked at a startup in NYC that was doing job-search related stuff. Find job postings, get resume advice, that kind of stuff. Someone in the customer service department found an article online about salaries, shared it, and then people were talking about how much they got paid. Management came down hard on this, and said it was a fireable offense to talk about salary. Everyone got real quiet on the topic after that. Was it illegal for them to do that? Maybe! But laws only matter when they’re enforced, and a bunch of entry level people making $30-50k a year don’t have the means to launch a legal challenge. That’s even if there’s enough solidarity to try, and the effort won’t be scuttled by scabs and bootlickers.

For extra irony, a couple years later the company launched an “Are you getting paid enough?” salary comparison tool.

I worked at a different startup in NYC. This one loved data. Data data data. They had t-shirts made that said stuff like “Data doesn’t care about your feelings” or whatever.

People started agitating about salary transparency. They wanted to know how much people were being made, because there was a sense that not everyone was getting paid the same for the same work. Also, some of us had in secret started comparing notes, and found some wide gaps.

Well, the CEO wasn’t having it. He said “we have salary bands”, but wouldn’t provide more detail on the range of the bands, who was in what band, and how it all worked. Just we have salary bands and they’re fair.

People didn’t like that, so he tried changing tactics. He said, “Who here thinks they’re being paid too much money? No one? No one wants a pay cut. Right. So that’s why we’re not going to release the specifics.” As if the only solution to Amy being paid too little is to lower Bob’s pay.

This is the same CEO, at the same “we love data” company, that when people brought up studies about four day workweeks being more effective, just shut it down with “We’re not doing that.”

Management and ownership don’t care. They don’t care about what’s legal or just. They care about power, and profit as a close second. I knew a guy that worked in a factory, and the owner reportedly would say stuff like “If you assholes unionize I will burn this place to the ground, and I don’t care if you’re inside or not.”

There need to be institutions, with teeth, to stop these kinds of things. If ownership even whispers an anti-union sentiment, they should lose everything.

Many times the people who would make the best decisions are not authorized to make decisions.

Should we go into the office every day? Well the workers say no, objective productivity measurements say no, the environment says no, but some insipid sack of shit feels like it’s better.

Should we spend twenty minutes improving this process? No, some higher up who doesn’t understand software development decided that we don’t do it that way. Keep doing it manually.

Should we compensate people well enough so they don’t leave after a year or two? No, pay the absolute minimum and keep hiring entry level people. Saving so much on labor costs!