Most office workers move things from point A to B in the physical, digital, or financial world. Electricity, toys, real estate, insurance contracts, missiles, you name it. The office worker is a link in a chain of information that stretches from the beginning of causality to the final effects of human existence.

There’s a mine, somewhere in the world. In that mine is metal. A factory owner wants that metal. Office workers for that factory call or email the office for that mine, and ask for that metal. The two offices negotiate a deal.

This usually involves calls or emails to management, accounting, sales, legal - all different office workers doing different things - that ultimately boil down to:

1. agreeing to a price per unit of metal (+ applicable taxes) that can benefit both parties, and
2. logistics of when and how to deliver or pickup that metal, and how much those logistics cost.

From there, it’s pretty much the same deal. The factory isn’t making enough money. They want to sell a better product. Office workers for the factory contact other office workers at an engineering firm. Both parties make calls, send emails, design proof-of-concepts, and they negotiate a deal. Sometimes they logon to an hour-tracking software, so an office worker can bill the factory per hour another office worker spent working for that factory’s product.

A major importer wants the product that the factory made with that engineer’s designs and that mine’s metal. Office workers make calls, send emails, check tariff and tax regulations, contact representatives at the port or border, schedule times and dates, and negotiate a deal.

A major retailer wants the product that the importer purchased from the factory…

A consumer buys a product and dies. Their family hires a lawyer. That lawyer has his office workers make calls, send emails, logon to government websites, and schedule hearings and submit documents to prove that the product killed the consumer.

An insurance agency investigates the plaintiff that is suing the retailer. They google the person that died. They contact office workers that know about how people die or know about how products can kill, and they check the insurance company’s database for how often people die to that product, and they calculate the odds that the product will kill a person, and then insurance office workers renegotiate a contract with the retailer office workers for higher premiums.

An office worker in the government works for the court. They receive the lawsuit documents, they make and cancel appointments, make phone calls and send emails to other office workers, lawyers, or plaintiffs, they send data from one lawyer to another, etc.

The whole system builds and builds until you have office workers talking to office workers talking to office workers about the movement of imaginary assets that never actually move, or the buying and selling of personal data for targetting ads that everyone hates, or software engineers building cryptocurrencies designed to fail or call centers that exist only to convince you to pay them money, or tax filing software companies that only exist because they pay the government to make tax filing hard…

And there, everywhere, in everything - you have the modern day office worker.

TL;DR: Reading emails. Sending emails. Checking data. Making data. Moving data. Making phone calls. Signing contracts. Approving decisions. Buying, selling, loaning, stealing, hiring, firing, murdering, perjuring, harassing, gassing, lying, crying, building, destroying - all pixels on a screen and voices on a phone, text in an email and words in a voicemail, all the world’s wealth and all the world’s future moving piece by little intricate piece from one human to the next in an impossibly vast network of causality that nobody really understands or controls but nonetheless keeps rolling forward one dollar at a time.

(Edit - oh, and don’t even get me started on websites, apps, and spreadsheets that they use to interface with the data. There are infinite monkeys at infinite computers making the most randomized bespoke solutions to every little business niche, and every office worker has to swap between 2-6 of them on the daily)

It’ll be hard to spot but easy to follow. But the drone and the wire don’t need to go in a straight line. Anything could be waiting on the route between the operator and the drone.

I just eventually got comfortable moving the difficulty slider whenever I needed. Any other game it feels like cheating, in OG Oblivion it felt required to not drive myself insane minmaxing

Agreed. Super convenient fast travel takes something away from the game. It turns an adventure into a handful of loading screens, which is egregious in Starfield because “travel through space” boiled down to “here’s 4 more loading screens every single time you want to do anything.”

No bugs? In my bethesda game?

Literally unplayable!

That’s unacceptable!

Bethesda “supports” modders the way WOTC “supports” D&D content creators. They profit immensely off of other people’s work without lifting a finger but also try to exploit those same creators for even more profit at every possible opportunity. Usually in such a way that it does permanent harm to an otherwise thriving community.

They’re just playing games within games, people! Trying to delay the release of Skyblivion by getting the devs to start another 200 hour playthrough!

Jokes aside, I hope the remaster is good.

Oh absolutely. Perhaps “necessarily” isn’t the right word. But the point is that even if you were somehow perfectly neutral (or worse, supportive) toward this horrifying shift in geopolitics, you still wouldn’t want to invest in the US dollar.

Of course it’s not strange. It’s not even necessarily retaliation! It’s just smart business. The US is not reliable or stable, and the dollar is not reliable or stable. Neither are good investments right now.

We need to reprioritize what we value as a society, deemphasizing individuality and private ownership and moving towards community.

Except… how do you do that?

Write a book?

Post on social media?

There’s nothing actionable there. Vaguely encouraging people to consume less will literally do nothing in the face of endless advertisements and algorithms.

There is no way to change the mass behavior of human populations without doing something direct… like addressing the fact that the wealthy are hoarding all of the wealth.

I can’t hit anything with a dagger because I’m too stupid to read” doesn’t come close

This happens 3 seconds into the game, and very few modern gamers will ever RTFM. It’s far more likely to be a hard wall to a newcomer. I wouldn’t blame them, either. Invisible stamina-based dice rolls was certainly a choice.

Oblivion’s system took time to break down - long enough to actually get players invested, at least.

(Maybe someone on F-droid could get on that?)

Seconded! I read and thought the same things, something like that would be huge right now. Hell of a time crunch and hostile work environment, but it could save a lot of lives.

We simply weren’t ready for the internet. Humans haven’t really been ready for any of the advances we have ever made. Hank Green has an excellent video about the societal vulnerability to new communications technology. I don’t know how we address it, because we never really addressed the others either.

The original printing press enabled Luther to break the Church’s theocracy. More modern printing enabled newspapers to instigate the Spanish American war. The technology is still used in the modern day for propaganda and lies.

The radio enabled the Nazis and the Red Scare to fill people’s homes with hate and fear. The technology is still used in the modern day for propaganda and lies.

The TV enabled the police state and “law and order”-style Republican disinformation. People who were otherwise safe and comfortable at home were suddenly and constantly faced with escalating panic about criminals and terrorists, even while crime consistently decreased over time. The technology is still used in the modern day for propaganda and lies.

All of these new technologies didn’t just change the way we communicated - they changed the way we thought about the world. Or rather, people in the right places at the right times used that technology to change how we thought about the world. We are human, and every new communications technology gives an ever smaller group of humans ever greater influence over the world.

And finally, the internet. We thought it would be different. We thought it would give voices to the many. But instead it gave the wealthy access to the soundboards where they can silence and amplify voices, and it opened up town squares for even the most hateful and ignorant ideas to gather and fester and grow to become legitimate political forces.

The internet enabled all of the massive changes we see today.

Welcome to the internet.

Words like “fascism” ultimately serve the interests of those in power not individuals. It is used as a tool to get people emotionally engaged instead of mentally engaged.

This is nonsense, sorry. I get it. Think for yourself. Assess your sources. Think rationally. Challenge your own beliefs.

But the people in power are openly breaking the law, abusing authority that they don’t have, stripping away rights, dismantling the social safety net, shipping people off to die, and ignoring any of the constitutional and legal safeguards meant to prevent any of this. It’s fascism.

Any logical, rational, thoughtful approach to the situation will provide the same exact answer as the emotional response to seeing Trump and Bukele laugh and lie about Kilmar Abrego being a terrorist. Call a spade a spade.

If you really were a rational thinker you would have to choose your side separately for every single issue

1. You should already do this for anything you care about? It really, really doesn’t take long for the important stuff. For everything else -
2. You don’t need to take a side on things you don’t understand. If you haven’t had the time to assess something… don’t share an opinion about it. It’s perfectly functional and rational for humans to specialize and leave problems for other humans to deal with. It is only social media that convinced people they should care about literally everything.

… Yes.

It’s time for ICE to leave NY. Hochul and the other governors need to pull the trigger and outright ban the agency from operating in the state. The fed is already pulling funding across the board for state programs and dismantling the agencies that keep states running when a crisis hits. All of the carrots are gone and Trump is waving his sticks around for no fucking reason anyway. Innocents are being taken off the street and students are being harassed and expelled.

Yes, there’s probably nothing to legally give her that power, but there’s nothing legal about any of this.

More details in the announcement post: “Adding two new admins and introducing radical recalls”

The voting system allows for the community to decide on instance policies, federation decisions, even a process for instantly recalling admins like himself. He acknowledges that as server owner there is only so much that can be done to limit his power, but he appears to walk the walk. Cool stuff.

It’s a pretty cool instance. The governance is transparent with a nuanced voting system, the rules and policies are indeed based, and db0 takes decentralization so seriously that he’s apparently working on safeguarding the instance against his own influence with the governance system and admin recall votes and such.

Thanks db0 et al!

You either die a startup, or live long enough to see yourself become the butthole.