If this joke was a person, it would be in 2nd grade and know how to read and write.

Democrats need to get more radical. The current system isn’t working for most people, and it’s certainly not working for the environment. Nationalized health care. Public housing. Basic income.

Conservatives will lose their mind, but some of them are assholes that want fascism, so fuck them. And a funny thing about some conservatives is they’ll defend whatever the current state is. They just don’t like change. Once you get something like nationalized health care in, some of the people who are screaming about how it’s the worst idea will scream at anyone trying to change it.

Many people have said they voted for trump because he’s “a change” or "something different’. Yes, it’s a little stupid to be like “i’m tired of eating gruel, i’m going to change it up by eating rusty nails”, but that’s people. Offer a change and get them.

But I think there’s too much rich people influence in our politics and media for that to easily get off the ground.

Anyone entering through web development. If you’re self taught or did a “coding boot camp”, it might be the only language you’ve used. A lot of places use it for backend stuff now, too

I think my cat chews on plastic because he knows I’ll come running out and interact with him. I’m like, you could just meow. If you meow I’ll come, too. He is old and set in his ways.

. I’m sure there are efficiencies and they need to be enacted but we need to ask why we use the systems we use.

Yes. This is sometimes known as chesterton’s fence

https://theknowledge.io/chestertons-fence-explained/

G.K. Chesterton was an early 20th century English writer known for his clever paradoxes.

He once wrote: “There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’”

In other words, don’t be so quick to tear down things you don’t understand. That fence may have been put up for a very good reason, even if that reason is not immediately obvious. To ignore that reality risks unintended and potentially negative consequences.

I saw that one too and thought similarly!

I don’t know about “fine”. It has a lot of weird stuff baked in. Hoisting. Unexpected type coercion. Too many ways to loop over something and I always forget which one is which. “There’s more than one way to do it” is kind of a recurring problem, come to think of it. Several function declaration syntaxes. Dot notation AND bracket notation for objects.

Also it will forever bother me that object keys aren’t quoted.

const foo = "hello"; const bar = { foo: "world" }

That should be, in my mind, { "hello": "world" } . It’s not. It’s { "foo": "world" }

But if you want to do that, you need to do const bar = { [foo]: world }. Which looks like your key is an array with one entry, a string with a value of “foo”

You also end up learning a whole framework, with its syntax and idioms, every couple years. Angular. React. Redux. Whatever.

There’s also a lot of people who have never used anything else, and want to use javascript for everything.

Javascript is basically D&D. Wildly popular. Full of legacy jank. People try to use it for anything even though there are better or more specialized tools.

Republicans aren’t fit to govern.

banning opinions just drives them underground

which means fewer people will find them and engage with them.

You’re going to get more people turning to Nazis if it’s just out and about in the open. If YouTube was running ads for nazisim, they’d get converts. If the only nazi stuff you see is scribbled on the bathroom walls, it has less legitimacy and thus fewer converts.

I’m reminded of that Sartre quote again

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

Folks should unionize. The people mandating these “return to office” schemes can’t do shit unless labor cooperates.

Well, if you want to have a conversation go ahead and read the rest of the post. Otherwise you’re just kind of jerking yourself off

At the very least form unions. That will help with stuff like wage theft, some people getting underpaid, BS firings, etc.

More aggressively, maybe some sort of collective ownership. Not this “options” bullshit where they never even vest for most people. The whole thing where management pays you $100 and sells what you made for $3000 needs to go. That $3000 needs to be more fairly shared among the people that made it happen.

But I don’t really know. I’m just some guy with entry level knowledge and a sense that the current system is wrong.

They could live more modest lives in more rural areas

Living in a rural area for many people is literal hell, on top of having an array of less obvious costs. The big one is going from not needing a car to needing one. Your rent might drop $500 but you need to spend a lot on gas, insurance, maintenance, etc.

Also the social options might fall off a cliff. Humans are social creatures. I live in a city and I can walk to dozens of social activities, many of them free. Board game meetups, free music in the park, free museums with tours, free sport leagues, etc. Out in the countryside there just aren’t as many options.

If you’re queer or another minority, you might also have a worse time in the countryside. Maybe even fatally. A city is going to have a queer scene.

Also, there are likely more jobs in the city. Remote work and economic upheaval have changed things, but even so, most of those offices in Manhattan are full of jobs. There’s just more stuff where there’s more people.

Now, to your point, some people are certainly living in a $5900/mo apartment with a doorman and in-building gym that they can’t afford. They could move to a less “nice” place in south Brooklyn or Queens for less than half that, likely at the cost of a longer commute, and losing easy access to a neighborhood they feel a part of. There is a housing crisis though, and people are getting priced further away. That’s probably not going to be solved any time soon because capitalism doesn’t care and will happily eat itself.

Anyway. Long tangent but I’m extremely pro city so I spoke up.

The level scaling in Oblivion and Skyrim are worse, true. It’s kind of impressive how bad an idea and execution the level scaling in Oblivion was. They place enemies based on your total level, so if you leveled up from non-combat skills then you’ll have a bad time. It makes exploring kind of pointless, because you’ll never find anything interesting. And then there were the bandits wearing thousands of GP worth of equipment mugging you for 100gp.

one of the original developers recently came out and said it was a huge mistake: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/elder-scrolls-4-oblivions-level-scaling-was-a-mistake-says-designer-so-why-is-it-in-the-remaster

In morrowind, not much scales with you so it matters less. You can’t raise a skill above its stat, so you can kind of paint yourself into a corner with bad leveling. (Though I think you can use fortify-attribute to get around that at trainers)

Morrowind’s combat system is… if you’re feeling generous: weird. if you’re not: bad.

You click on an enemy and it rolls dice to see if you hit. Your chance to hit is determined by your skills and stats, and your fatigue. yes, fatigue. If you’ve been sprinting and your fatigue is empty, you’ll probably miss more. This combos badly with the glacial movement speed of the game.

You also want to hold the attack button a little longer to do more damage.

If you start with a good axe skill (like 50), you can often hold to attack and knock people over, then finish them off. You might want to set “always use best attack” to true in the options- weapons typically have like a few moves, but one is usually better.

The “bound weapon” spells are also good- they’re kind of cheap, and give you a high damage weapon that also boosts your skill by 10. There’s a merchant that sells a couple weapons that turn into bound weapons in Balmora.

Blocking is also just a dice roll. I think it’s better to just get a giant two-hander and kill them faster, but opinions differ.

Also fun: If you damage someone’s strength to 0, they can’t move. If you have a spear, your reach is probably longer than theirs. You can kill almost anything this way.

also, while i’m here, the native leveling system is bonkers. You gain levels when your major skills improve. You get three stat increases based on any skills that went up. You can get up to +5 for each stat increase. This is not retroactive. If you level up and pick a +2 in strength, that’s what you get. This creates some utterly bizarre incentives. People would pick skills they don’t want to use as their major skills so they can control leveling, and pay trainers to bump skills tied to stats they want to increase. It’s horrible. You can kind of ignore it, but you’ll be much weaker than you would be if you play into it.

I used a lot of mods, but I don’t remember all of them right now

“Natural growth and decay” I think was the one I got for stats, because I didn’t want to deal with the original’s insane leveling system. It was pretty good, but had some bugs. Once you got money to pay for training, the wheels fell off because you could rocket up all your skills and stats.

Once you have the skills for Frenzy100 and a spear, you can get unlimited money by taking out the guards that carry ebony weapons. Ok, that kind of wackiness is a little charming.

I also got a mod so NPCs had more money, because hitting every merchant in town and advancing time so they refresh is really tedious.

Oh, and I got one so Magicka regenerates, because constantly sleeping or chugging potions is tedious.

And one so you can have up to 12 marks saved.

If you have any recs let me know

I keep hoping this will spark some sort of anti-capitalist zeitgeist. But labor might be too scattered and individualistic.

Like, why are we all scrambling for a handful of jobs when the rich have so many resources?

People should probably protest this. go in person and demand to speak to your rep. or whatever. i don’t know how to organize a protest. i just go when i hear about them happening.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Ald'ruhn#Notes

It’s the Ald’ruhn fighter’s guild. Apparently it’s not a full set, but it’s a lot of it.