Because you literally act like a mouthpiece with your constant apologetics for the aggression and war crimes of a tinpot dictator.

How much does Putin pay you?

The measures they use to say the economy is ‘good’ have one thing in common: they fail to account for value whatsoever.

They account for value in dollars, that’s true. But they fail to account for value in any sense that matters: the usefulness of a product or service on the one hand and the labor that produces it on the other. Instead, we look at wages, employment rates, profits, and prices. Those are admittedly easy to quantify and play around with, but they aren’t really anchored to anything meaningful.

For example, let’s say your company makes on-the-go smoothies, sold in grocery stores and convenience stores. You’ve got a quality product: a relatively thick smoothy with quality ingredients and a good variety of purees and juices. You product isn’t cheap, but that’s because you use quality ingredients, pay your employees a fair wage, and use reasonable labor practices in your bottling plant. As a result, people love your product and enjoy working for your company. Soon you come to take up a prominent position on shelves, because your regular customers will reliably buy up your stock.

Now let’s say you do an IPO. Once the board members have sway, they want to iron out some of these ‘inefficiencies’ in your company to increase their profits. First, they come for the ingredients. You wind up with fewer purees in smaller proportions, a greater proportion of inexpensive juices, and the most expensive ingredients dropping off the list entirely. Your loyal customers are annoyed that their smoothies aren’t as thick, but it’s still better than the other options, so they keep coming.

At your bottling plant, wages start to stagnate. Benefits aren’t eliminated, but a new management technique is introduced in which hours are spread out to make it difficult to meet the minimum to qualify. Shifts begin increasingly running on skeleton crews as hours are spread thinner. Of course, the same amount of work still needs to be done, so the employees are doing two to three times as much work as they used to.

Long-term employees who once made the company what it was start to see the change and look for other options before things get worse, leading to a fresh generation of new employees with no clue how much better the company used to be.

At the end your profits are up, employment is up, and you’re selling just as much or nearly as much of your product as you were before. If you only look at the numbers, it seems like this whole endeavor was a fantastic win for your company.

Except you’ve just made the world a little worse. The market presence you earned with your high-quality product no longer has an equivalent product taking it up, degrading the real value of the market itself. Employees are running themselves ragged making a perhaps flat or slightly rising wage per hour, but a wage that’s actively diminishing in terms of the labor required to earn it and the purchasing power it comes with.

Now what happens when you take this model and project it to the entire economy?

All the numbers say record profits, low unemployment, stocked shelves full of high-demand products. And yet the reality is that we have to work more to pay for less of shittier and shittier products. Even the people who win don’t really win, because they make a worse world for themselves where they can’t get a good smoothy.

The whole thing is a mirage that we’ve been killing our society chasing.

I’d love to see someone figure out how to up the player limit or link games. Baldur’s Gate would be such a great medium for a D&D roleplay server if it could be set up to handle it.

That’s horrible. Haldol is like a punch to the brain. They’re going to turn these poor kids into chemical zombies.

The Sega game was pretty cool. You could be a dinosaur!

Nah, it’s a subscription service, but it’s got a few notable YouTubers and they tend to drop extra content there. PhilosophyTube is on there, 12Tone, a bunch of people. As a platform it’s a lot less bullshit, but it’s also obviously less content.

Though now I realize you actually have to get referred by one of the other members in order to start posting, so I’m not really sure they stand to benefit that much. It kind of explains why the content has been lacking. It certainly won’t ever have the diversity of content that YouTube has with that approach.

Honestly learning that it’s more of a market stall than a garden makes me less enthusiastic. It’s there to curate what’s already on YouTube without YouTube’s limitations, not to create a better alternative that’s actually sustainable.

uBlock Origin works fine for me on youtube. Just make sure you keep it updated and don’t run multiple blockers.

This could honestly be really good for Nebula.

You have literally no idea who I am or what I do.

I used GIMP to make a mock-up of a sign for a restaurant just yesterday. Is it going to be the tool I use for the final product? No, because that’ll be in vector, but it’s a lot easier to slap something together in than Inkscape or Krita.

‘Killer apps’ are meaningless in comparison to useful apps. I’m an artist who needs usable tools for her work. GIMP qualifies. Personally, I find it way easier and more intuitive to navigate than Krita, Inkscape, or any of Adobe’s suite. It may not be for you, that’s cool.

But what isn’t cool is to pretend you know about other people’s lives and what they need. Speak for yourself, you are perfectly capable of doing that. If you don’t like GIMP’s UI, that’s great. If you think GIMP’s UI is absolutely horrible for every user and nobody would ever use it for professional work… you’re literally just completely wrong.

This is a repost. Also, like, do we need to keep spamming Beehaw’s tech section with headlines that reference rape as like, a casual way to say that a company did something dishonest? Cause I’m not really into it.

Like, seriously, is there a creepier version of this headline?

It would be nice if companies like this came out with a budget model so more people could participate in supporting their products. Lotta poor folks into FOSS.

Wait, wait, wait. Alyaza are you a fellow Masshole? :o

Do you subscribe to a worldview that includes compassion? This may disqualify you from joining our capitalist shit show.

5-7-5 is pretty stable tbh.

“Here I was, trying to burn down a building, and in swoops fucking Russia! Do prdele!”

I’m not sure I’d call buying up and burning other companies like furniture in a fireplace ‘sustainable’.

Headline reads like the PM is annoyed that Russia botched the arson.

There isn’t one best tabletop RPG system, or one best edition of tabletop RPG system. There’s nothing inherently better about using one system over another. The only real difference is your own preference.

Like, Pathfinder, the first one, is a really interesting and robust system. It’s great if you know it, but if you don’t know it there are a lot of pitfalls and trap feats built in, and it can be hard to make a character that keeps up with the curve if you don’t know what you’re doing. Kind of reminds me of Magic: the Gathering in that; lots of options that seem good out of context, but aren’t really. That’s fine for some groups, for others it’s a lot of extra headache.

Does D&D 5e treat your characters as being more robust and capable than, say, AD&D 2e? Yes, absolutely. But like, even that is just the default behavior of the system. That factors in, but a competent DM can run a ruthless game in 5e too, it’s just a matter of shifting the numbers.

If your partner feels like 5e is too much of a power fantasy for his tastes, I’d recommend trying Dungeon Crawler Classics. You generate a handful of random level 0 characters and take like 4 per player into a dungeon that’s an absolute meat grinder for them. They progress, you add new level 0s if you need to, and you keep going. It’s a lot of fun watching your shitty little level 0 farmer grow into a fighter or a wizard or something. DCC is an absolutely ruthless system though, so be prepared to lean into it.

On the other hand, there is still plenty of AD&D 2e material out there. Maybe more than 5e, I’m not really sure. It was pretty robust, though, and less forgiving than 5e without being quite as bad as DCC, but your little level 1 wizard with 4 health can still get one-shotted by pretty much anything.

Of course, you can always just tune these systems to do what you want. Want to play 2e but don’t feel like figuring out how THAC0 works or ever bothering to calculate it? Great! Don’t. Just slot modern AC and hit rolls in. Start AC at 10 and when 2e says to go down, go up instead. Whenever something would make your THAC0 go down, treat that thing as an attack bonus instead. Hey, check it out, we’ve just stumbled into 3e’s Base Attack Bonus system.

Tabletop rule sets aren’t a god for you to worship, they’re a tool for you to make as flexible as you need it to be. Take the pieces you want, toss the pieces you don’t, add your own stuff. That’s how any of this stuff got made to begin with, and it’s how it progresses.

Want to make 5e more ruthless? Design an injury system and implement it.

But don’t just get sad that some people have some milquetoast criticism about the one edition you happen to have stumbled across first. Who cares? Check out some other systems and develop your own opinions and contexts.

I hope your partner sorts it out!

No, because they mixed up “parties’” and “party’s” and didn’t catch it, along with a couple of other weird writing quirks and clunky usages. Also it’s a pretty messy headline. There’s also a lot more descriptive and poetic language than is actually helpful for getting their point across. Like to the point that it’s wandering into New York Times levels of fluffing the length with flowery language. The writer could have used a couple of notes that they clearly didn’t get.

I agree with the writer’s position on the DNC’s failure to find their compassion and humanity on immigration. It’s the editing that needs work.