My parents are difficult. Not the worst people and not monsters, but at many times unpleasant.

Plus it was a house in the suburbs. Not ideal for socializing or culture.

And lastly, living with parents in the suburbs would be huge negatives for dating.

All it takes is one cop to be like “he was resisting arrest and I feared for my life so I had to shoot him 17 times in the back”.

“Top-down mandates to use large language models are crazy,” one employee told Wired. “If the tool were good, we’d all just use it.”

Yep.

Management is often out of touch and full of shit

I don’t like to think of people as immutably good or bad, but I get what you meant.

There’s a bunch of factors.

• are they honest?
• are they kind?
• do they care about things other than themselves?
• do they try to make the world better?

So, someone who lies, is cruel, doesn’t care about anyone else, and leaves the world a mess is being a pretty bad person.

Someone who just keeps their head down, goes to work, and is polite to people they meet is kind of middling.

The cap was in place because the Social Security benefit doesn’t increase above the that income.

I don’t think that’s necessarily a good reason for the cap to exist. I expect it’s a compromise to get rich people and idiots on board.

I’m not rich to the point of no longer needing to labor, but I did hit the social security cap one year. I was pissed when I learned why my take home jumped up. I would have rather kept paying.

It’s selfish to want to keep a little more of your vast wealth like you describe. That’s cartoon villainy.

It’s kind of insane to me that there’s an annual cap on social security payments. If your salary is high enough, you stop paying into it partway through the year. That’s ass-backwards. You shouldn’t pay anything for the first chunk of money, and then pay more as you make more.

It’s always been pretty bad for large chunks of the population. This seems like a low point, but there have been many lows in living memory. Civil rights movement in the 60s. Vietnam war. War on drugs. Countless cruelties done to non-whites and queer folks.

Even the idealized stuff of “buy a house on one income” was more for white people than anything else. Redlining, mortgage discrimination, “and then the white people burned down our house” were all realities.

This country has always been deeply racist. The wealthy ownership class has largely been soulless ghouls. Maybe they build libraries and museums for a while, but they still oversaw tremendous suffering and poverty.

I know a couple people here who own apartments. Median income here I think is like $115k. None of them are much more than that.

I’m pretty sure property taxes aren’t progressive and I’m baffled as to why.

Make it so like the first 100k is taxed low, and then ramp up so people with millions of property pay through the nose.

I don’t know if it’s favorite of all time but I thought of this one now:

haha and then what ;) by jawbreaker reunion. Probably gave some software nerds a headache trying to incorporate the semicolon and parenthesis. Points for a confusing band name, too.

https://jawbreakerreunion.bandcamp.com/album/haha-and-then-what

“Patches” might be my favorite track on it.

Feel like the neighbors that complained should be named, shamed, and had the ire of the state turned on them. They seem to have poor empathy, so maybe some personal experience would stir some up in them.

It’s really hard to get people to suffer mild inconvenience when they don’t emotionally connect with the benefits.

Most of facebook’s evils are remote and impersonal. Seeing your cousin’s baby photos is real and at hand.

Why are each of your lines wrapped in ellipsis?

…what many anti-fifth-edition positions miss is that it’s not about learning a new system, it’s about compatibility across a vast ecosystem of disparate settings and campaigns…

I don’t think 5e is especially compatible with disparate settings and campaigns. It’s not an actually generic system like Fate or GURPS. It’s got underbaked or entirely missing whole RPG subsystems and mechanics (eg: social conflict, succeed-at-a-cost, metagame currency). It’s highly opinionated in other regards- hit points, class and level, resting. You can hammer the peg into the hole, but you could do that with anything.

It’s not a good system for modeling anything outside heroic fantasy.

It’s certainly a popular system, but many things are popular without being good. But, if your top priority is going where people are, by all means stick to D&D 5e, reddit, facebook, etc.

Sometimes I still see job postings that are like “MUST KNOW OBJECT ORIENTED PROGRAMMING” and I’m wondering who in 2026 isn’t at least passably familiar with it.

But then again I also see job posts that are like “must know Java or JavaScript”

I’m just going to move on

That’s my point. They’re doing a self-sabotage. Some of them will then complain that they’re not getting good matches and messages, but a big factor is they’re not giving potential good matches anything to work with.

I don’t really have a lot of empathy for people who don’t want to learn a new rule system.

First off, most of those people barely know 5e to begin with. You could swap them into another system and they’d probably perform about as well.

Aside from that, maybe they don’t mean to sound anti-intellectual, but they kind of do. It’s okay to read and learn new things. I’ve had potential players put up more of a fight than it would’ve taken to just read the thing.

Related, I think there’s like a literacy crisis. Many people don’t seem to read or think great.

So many people see the prompt “what I’m looking for” and write “my keys”.

A. That’s not a terribly funny joke. It’s fine, but not great.

B. It’s not original.

C. You are wasting valuable space. Now the other person has a little less information to make a good opening message. Do you really want that many people messaging you about your keys? Really? Why are you setting yourself up for unhappy outcomes?

Most people don’t think very hard about this, and hope it’ll just work out.

Meetup.com ? They’re still around.

One problem is users are selfish idiots. They won’t go somewhere that doesn’t already have a lot of users. They don’t care that going there now moves it closer to having a lot of users, so in a few months it’ll be good and vibrant. Most people can’t even think an hour ahead.

Another problem is that there are many scammers and bad actors. You need to deal with them, and convince your real users that the scammers are dealt with.

Lastly, in this capitalist hellscape everything is expensive. How are you going to run a big service that’s got low latency and high quality?