Running games has definitely helped me run meetings.

• Establish turn order.
• let people finish their thought instead of immediately following some dumbass tangent
• take notes

Related:

"ai will make you twice as productive!’

“Cool. So I’ll be paid twice as much, or work half the hours?”

“Lol no. I’m keeping the profits”

If you own the company (or a lot of shares), you gain wealth by doing literally nothing if the company’s value increases. On top of probably just keeping the profits. Plus the “use my stock as collateral, give me a low interest personal loan, that’s not taxed as income lol” wealth back.

I’m not talking so much about the petit bourgeoisie that’s working hard every day making donuts to sell. I’m talking about big C Capital that buys something and just takes the profits.

The CEO at my old job can’t code. He can’t do UI design. He doesn’t do sales or customer service. He sometimes talks to other rich assholes to fundraise, but mostly he makes questionable decisions and hurts morale. But if the company goes big, he’ll get filthy rich and the people who actually built the thing will not.

That said, higher taxes on the wealthy (plus closing loopholes like the loan thing) would help. So would universal basic income.

It’s funny because conservatives cry about “welfare queens” that just take money for nothing, but it’s the rich who can do that. If you have a few million, you can just coast on investments. Little to no risk. Once again, projection.

You could also have salaries 🤷

The problem to solve is a handful of people who aren’t really doing much work get most of the profits. There may be other solutions.

How would you quantify ongoing projects where workers come and go and each of their specific contribution might not be easy to measure?

Probably some sort of collective ownership, profit sharing, with negotiation and consensus building. Other people more well read than me have spent a lot of time thinking about this. My starting position is that the standard capitalist model of “I pay you $10 to make a widget, and I sell it for $1000 and keep all the profits” is not okay.

Do they all also assume financial responsibility for any failures or lawsuits?

Do the owners assume financial responsibility now? I think that’s what LLCs and other corporate structures are for- to shield individuals from liability and responsibility.

Taking things too seriously, don’t most plants benefit from their fruit being eaten as part of their lifecycle?

Also it’s not like the workers typically get the long tail of profits. Most labor is only paid a salary, and the “owners” get to keep profiting. Workers should be entitled to the profits of their labor.

Make sure you speak clearly with minimal slang, or they might willfully misinterpret what you’re saying to deny your rights. Like to think you want a lawyer dog.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/10/suspect-asks-for-a-lawyer-dawg-judge-says-he-asked-for-a-lawyer-dog.html

I think Mage: The Awakening 2nd edition was a cleaner version of the game, but yeah no version is something you can just phone in.

I ran a game of it a year or so back, and one player just refused to read the book in any detail. She was always frustrated by not knowing what she could do, or how to do it effectively.

If they were smart, they would realize conservatism’s solutions (eg: hurt the queers, blacks, etc) won’t actually solve their problems.

try to talk them out of the idea of “Leveling” they get scared and run back to the system they’re familiar with.

I still think about the time in college I tried to get a D&D friend to consider Mage. I was telling him about how you can just do magic, and the real limitation is paradox and hubris. Like, it’s often not about ‘can you?’ but rather “should you?”

He couldn’t get over “you can just cast whatever you want? Fireballs every turn?”

“Yes, but that’s probably going to make a lot of paradox, and probably isn’t the best way to solve your problem”

“Sounds broken,” he said, and lost interest.

I’m partial to Fate.

It’s very open. You don’t have to worry about looking up the right class or feats. You just describe what you want to play, and if the group thinks it’s cool and a good fit for the story, you’re basically done.

Now, the downside is this requires a lot more creativity up front. A blank page can be intimidating.

I like that players have more control over the outcome. You can usually get what you want, even if you roll poorly, but it’s more of a question of what you’re willing to pay for it.

Every roll will be one of

• succeed with style
• succeed
• a lesser version of what you want
• succeed at a minor cost
• succeed at a major cost
• (if you roll badly and don’t want to pay any costs) fail, don’t get what you want

It’s a lot more narrative power than some games give you. I don’t like being completely submissive to the DM, so I enjoy even as a player being able to pitch “ok I’m trying to hack open this terminal… how about as a minor cost I set off an alarm?” or “I’m trying to steal his keys and flubbed the roll… How about as a major cost I create a distraction, get the keys, but drop my backpack by accident. Now I’m disarmed, have no tools, and they can probably trace me with that stuff later. But I got the keys!”.

It’s more collaborative, like a writer’s room, so if someone proposes a dud solution the group can work on it.

The math probability also feels nice. You tend to roll your average, so there’s less swinginess like you’ll get in systems rolling one die.

Plus, I don’t know any other system that lets me pull my intestines out of my abdomen and use them like a lasso to climb a cliff when I forgot my rope at home.

Nitpick: more narrative systems like Fate let you do this, but then you typically don’t get a lot of crunch. Plus it can vary if your group isn’t on the same wavelength about what’s cool and appropriate for the story.

You don’t understand small talk if you think it has no functional purpose. Small talk has several purposes.

One, it sends a bunch of signals. I see you. You see me. Neither of us are threats. We have a shared language.

Two, it’s how you find deeper topics to talk about. “What did you get up to this weekend?” “Oh, hung out with my friend. We saw a band I like - All Dogs - do a surprise anniversary show. You do anything big?”

Three, it lets people choose their level of engagement. “Cool, sounds fun. I stayed in, watched some TV” signals minimal interest vs “All dogs? Never heard of them but I love live music. What’s their genre?” signals interest, and now you can a little deeper on music.

If you just plunge directly into deep stuff that’s like skipping foreplay and lube. It’s probably going to make people uncomfortable.

A lot of bosses think developers’ entire job is just churning out code when it’s actually like 50% coding and 50% listening to stakeholders, planning, collaborating with designers, etc.

A lot of leadership is incompetent. In a reasonable, just, world they would not be in these decision making positions.

Verbose blogger Ed Zitron wrote about this. He called them “Business Idiots”: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

It is absolutely stupid, stupid to the tune of “you shouldn’t be a decision maker”, to think an LLM is a better use for “getting a quick intro to an unfamiliar topic” than reading an actual intro on an unfamiliar topic. For most topics, wikipedia is right there, complete with sources. For obscure things, an LLM is just going to lie to you.

As for “looking up facts when you have trouble remembering it”, using the lie machine is a terrible idea. It’s going to say something plausible, and you tautologically are not in a position to verify it. And, as above, you’d be better off finding a reputable source. If I type in “how do i strip whitespace in python?” an LLM could very well say “it’s your_string.strip()”. That’s wrong. Just send me to the fucking official docs.

There are probably edge or special cases, but for general search on the web? LLMs are worse than search.

All the leadership who made this mistake should be fired. They are clearly incompetent

But i guess it’s always labor that pays the price

I had the same thought, mostly because distracted driving is such a present threat that it’s hard to find humor in it.

But whatever. Someone’s probably going to be reading this while driving. Please stop.

I rarely use a cart anymore because I do more frequent, shorter, trips and just bring a tote bag. But the other day I went with someone to a store and we used a cart. I returned it to the cart return place and she was like “good. You can learn a lot about someone by what they do with the cart”

Outside of like NYC you have a car. It’s a bad system economically, ecologically, and socially, but many people are kind of stupid and reactionary. You show them how putting in a bike lane and adding a bus stop will lower car traffic, improve air quality, and increase economic activity and they just go “no because I feel so”. Or, “one time I had to move a refrigerator so we need to prioritize large privately owned vehicles”.