Kobolds with a keyboard.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Well, that was unexpectedly great. I’d love to hear your favorite subtle thing.

    Also curious what the book ending was, if you want to share, @Breadhax0r@lemmy.world.

    I think Stephen King is very good at writing stories, but often very bad at ending them; quite a few of his books have great setups but end in an unsatisfying or anticlimactic way. Very much liked the movie ending, though - was not at all what I expected, and very emotionally impactful.


  • I first watched The Running Man shortly after finishing the book (which I quite enjoyed), expecting to see a movie adaptation of it, when in fact the most basic details of the premise are the only similarity between the two; as a result, I was pretty disappointed, but from what I remember of it, ‘trashy good time’ is a pretty apt description.











  • The common argument for why 16 year olds flipping burgers shouldn’t make $15 / hr is that they don’t have the same expenses as an adult, so they don’t need that much, and it’s so fucking wild to me that they’d use that. Clearly what you need doesn’t factor into what people are paid in any other circumstance, otherwise the top 0.1% would be middle class, too. So why does it suddenly matter for that one specific demographic?



  • This is the shit government should be working to correct, if they weren’t all in it for the money just as much as the corporations.

    Corporations and the general population have an innately antagonistic relationship. Corporations want to make as much money as possible, the general population wants to spend as little as possible, so their goals are diametrically opposed. (I’m pooling Uber drivers in with the general population here, because they’re in the same position - being opposed to Uber’s goals.)

    Corporations inherently hold more power in this relationship; they have more money than even large groups of individuals, so they can hire expensive teams of lawyers and accountants and professionals of all kinds to further their goals, while it’s difficult if not impossible for normal folks to organize against a corporation in any meaningful way.

    In a system that worked, the government would be working to protect the population from corporate interests. They’d be spending the bulk of their time identifying and closing loopholes like this one, and enacting laws to make exploiting these loopholes not worth it, and generally would be the arm of the people.

    Instead, corporations pay government, and the government looks the other way - if not directly supports them - while they fuck over everyone they can - and the planet, while they’re at it -to reap wealth. And this shit is the result.


  • I’d actually be interested to see a cost breakdown between this and just buying a newspaper subscription; it looks like he spent about $100 on materials, plus then there’s the ongoing costs of electricity (negligible), printer ribbons, and paper. Ribbons appear to be about $1 / ea if you buy in bulk, and I don’t recall how much printing you get out of a single ribbon, but let’s assume a 24 pack is enough to last you a year. Paper seems to be about $30 / 1000 sheets, so assuming he sticks to the single-page-per-day format, that’ll last almost 3 years.

    So up front costs, $100 Ongoing costs, $35 / year, roughly.

    Newspaper subscription is about $150 / year, so this’ll actually be cost effective if he keeps it up. Of course, you’re getting a lot less news than you would from a newspaper subscription, so the relative value is questionable there.





  • KoboldCoterie@pawb.socialtomemes@lemmy.worldSelective rage
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    2 months ago

    My favorite analogy for this, and the one that really made me ‘get it’, was posted on Reddit a number of years ago, and was something to the effect of:

    Imagine you’re sitting around the dinner table with your family, and your dad is passing around a bowl of mashed potatoes. However, instead of handing it to you, it gets passed right by you to your sister. And you speak up and say, “I should get some, too!” Your dad looks at you and says, “Everyone should get some,” and the family continues passing the bowl around as before. And you’re thinking, yes, that’s true - everyone should get some, but only one of us is not getting any right now and pointing out that everyone should get some doesn’t make me any less hungry.