deathmtn

I have some things to say about getting back to work on Council!

Frozen grapes are amazing after an afternoon at the pool. Also: Very easy to make!

Rich Whitehouse goes over the hypocrisy of corporate duality.

Likewise, an employee's challenging personal/financial/medical/etc. circumstances aren't necessarily cause for keeping that employee safe from the next round of layoffs. We can't make such personal considerations. We must put the business first, for the sake of all employees.

We like to say that none of it's personal, but in fact, it's all personal. Making the choice to cut an individual off from their means of survival is personal, no matter how the individual making that choice might wish to detach from it. Our global society is now dominated by capitalism, and many of us don't have any kind of workable safety net to catch us when something goes wrong. Despite the fact that almost every human on the planet is reliant upon this system for their survival, we've completely removed human empathy from the equation.

The divorce of responsibility to other humans from acting for the corporation's benefit is incredibly powerful. This is why you end up with with weird talk from corporations about how diverse hiring is important because it can be profitable. It's much like when the Roman Empire started a professional army. Wars were much easier for farmers to support when the farmers no longer had to risk their lives.

His post is mostly about the exploitation of workers that are employed by corporations. I find it astounding that I'm saying this, but that's not even the worst thing about them anymore. The incentive structure of corporations not only results in sociopathic behavior toward its employees but even more so toward the general public. Their reach goes further than ever; they have the data and tools to know and direct desire. (I feel like I've talked about this a lot, but if you feel this needs explanation, feel feee to email me.)

A good breakdown of the latest attempt by ridesharing corporations to paint themselves as ethical from Tom MacWright.

We should be wary. First, because ridesharing has already claimed to reduce emissions and traffic congestion, and has done the opposite.

See, Lyft claimed in 2015 that their service harmonized with public transit, rather than competed with it. That didn’t work out. Not only have they stolen trips from public transit, they’ve reduced support for transit and replaced walking & biking trips, too. They’ve increased traffic deaths by 2-3%, while increasing the number of cars on the streets.

(Go to his post for the cite links.)

Which brings us to the question of self-driving technology: will it be used for shared, communal transit like public transit works today, or will it be a way for rich people to have private luxury rooms?

I think you know the answer. I didn't know that the Hyperloop positioning also plays to selfishness, though.

While we were picking substitute parts for the Lego rocking horse, the guy said we have to be careful because he wants it to be safe for the kids.

Finally played Slay the Spire on the Switch. Being a deck building roguelike, it is my jam. I especially enjoy how they stripped out tile-based dungeon walking and replaced it with a decision tree.

I feel like I was defeated this week purely by having thought about what is the point of anything.

1-2-3-4 on the bar at home, following a three-mile run. I almost forgot that I had restarted running, back before vacation.

This week, I've basically only enjoyed building Lego stuff with the guy, watching TV with Katt, and working out. I'm thinking I need to get another job, but for how long will that make that eight hours a day "meaningful"?

I read that Atlantic article about professional decline, and though I think it was clickbaity with weak (or no, maybe?) cites, it did have a point about basing your happiness around accomplishments. The problem with that is that after you accomplish something, you have to find something else to accomplish.

Of course, the problem with just enjoying yourself with leisure is that you become acclimated to that leisure. So, maybe you just constantly have to flop around?

Heh, while I'm at it, what is the point of being happy? Should we just seek some Brave New World kind of existence?

Slept a ton last night. Maybe I was tired, rather than sick!

Huh, I may have been sick today. Just got hit with this sudden wave of queasiness and fatigue. I thought it was just ennui!

I can tell I've had a good Dream Quest run if I look back at my phone's camera roll and see a bunch of screenshots. (Also, I can tell because I remember playing the game.)

Typically, you want to get rid of weak cards and make your deck very potent in that game. The ranger is one of the classes that facilitates a contrary strategy. The ranger gets a lot of opportunities for equipment slots. Last night, I decided to just take as many as I could. In the end, I ended up with six.

The ranger, like most of the classes, starts off with a lot of "Attack 1" cards, which are fairly useless. They do 1 damage and nothing else. This time, I kept all of these cards because I was able to pick up a lot of things that made them valuable:

1) Scimitars: These let you play a copy of any card named Attack whenever you play an attack card. I used the mushroom field to duplicate this piece of equipment so I had two Scimitars cards.

2) Donnerschwert: It deals a point of lightning damage every time an attack card is played.

3) Cruel: This was a talent, rather than a piece of equipment, but it added one damage to every source of physical I played.

4) Expose: This was an action card (so I had to be lucky enough to draw it, unlike the above three enhancers) that added 2 damage to every source of damage I played.

So, playing a single Attack 1 card meant I actually played 3, due to the Scimitars. Then, Donnerschwert added a point of damage to each of those, and Cruel added 1. The result of playing the one card was 9 damage. If had happened to play Expose, then the total would be 15 damage.

Because I had a lot of things that let you draw extra cards, I sometimes played 5 attack cards a turn (some of them Attack 3 instead of Attack 1) resulting in 15 being played for at least 45 points of damage.

Then, I had a bunch of armor to help with not getting hurt. Most battles on the penultimate level (the last level has just the final boss) took two turns.

It's really impressive that Dream Quest 1) is still worth playing after five years and 2) facilitates very different approaches to the game.

10-4-3-3-3-4, last five sets on the weird bar because some personal training group started doing bungee stuff on the good bar. Ennui knocked back! At least for an hour.

Oh, yeah, and 5-5-5-1 on the bar at home yesterday. Arms were real crunched up, and I was particularly demotivated.

Oh, yeah, don't forget to donate to Wikipedia. It's one of the few things that's still good about the web. Really, if the world's systems were just, it would have to worry less about funding than Netflix or Spotify.

Dang.

Ginsburg is not oblivious to health concerns, but she waves away worries about her future.

"There was a senator, I think it was after my pancreatic cancer, who announced with great glee that I was going to be dead within six months," she recalled. "That senator, whose name I have forgotten, is now himself dead, and I," she added with a smile, "am very much alive."

She's also optimistic about the professionalism and impartiality Trump appointees to the SCOTUS. I dunno, man.

Was just reading some of this Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing book I haven't read in a while and thought, links are shit; books are good!

Not always, of course, but there is something to that.

This is how I start projects these days. I was doing the steps manually for quite a while before that, so I know it's worth automating.

Here's an email I received from a recruiter:

"Just because something works...doesn't mean it can’t be improved" – Princess Shuri

[Body of message here]

Cheers,P.S. “I Am Grooooooot!”

I wonder if sprinkling "nerd" references into communication is some kind of recruiter protip.