Right. You can’t pick the lesser evil in the election today, then go do nothing, and expect good outcomes.

Harm reduction has a place but it’s not the whole solution

Any modern robin hood would be vilified and most people would believe it.

Monogamy often allows some less healthy facets of people flourish. Sometimes people will be like “oh I’m just so jealous I can’t help it. I don’t like when he plays soccer on that co-ed community team, so I don’t let him”. Like, what. That’s so immature and untrusting.

At one of my old jobs, we had a suite of browser tests that would run on PR. It’d stand up the application, open headless chrome, and click through stuff. This was the final end-to-end test suite to make sure that yes, you can still log in and everything plays nicely together.

Developers were constantly pinging slack about “why is this test broken??”. Most of the time, the error message would be like “Never found an element matching css selector #whatever” or “Element with css selector #loading-spinner never went away”. There’d be screenshots and logs, and usually when you’d look you’d see like the loading spinner was stuck, and the client had gotten a 400 back from the server because someone broke something.

We put a giant red box on the CI/CD page explaining what to do. Where to read the traces, reminding them there’s a screenshot, etc. Still got questions.

I put a giant ascii cat in the test output, right before the error trace, with instructions in a word bubble. People would ping me, “why is this test broken?”. I’d say “What did the cat say?” They’d say “What cat?” And I’d know they hadn’t even looked at the error message.

There’s a kind of learned helplessness with some developers and tests. It’s weird.

Every time I see this I think about opportunity costs. What got skipped in favor of this dubious effort?

Usually a brief “I just read/played/watched such-and-such”

If they know it, we can chat about it. If they don’t, and they’re interested, we can chat about it. Otherwise, the conversation moves on and the social rite is concluded successfully.

Try not to think too hard about how most of the evidence points to shorter work weeks being better on pretty much every metric.

Or that most of the “return to office” mandates are counter productive cruelty.

I think I saw an article that claimed most office workers in the UK do like 3 hours of work a day, and the rest is puttering and looking busy.

Our system is stupid and it’s stuck stupid because of people. It’s not physics. It’s not biology. Like there’s not much you can do to fix like humans need to eat and sleep, but the workday is just made up.

Right. No fast change will undo decades of damage.

I guess I just want more concrete plans. Like, universal basic income, no more wealth exploits (eg: low interest loans against stocks, no tax), changing the election system to something like ranked choice, uncapping the number of representatives, statehood for DC and peurto rico… now I’m just rattling off ideas.

Maybe policy can come later, and trying to nail it down would lead to infighting and failure? But it needs to happen eventually.

A core principle behind Hands Off! is a commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values, and to act lawfully at these events.

Ok, but like what are we going to do? Marching on the streets alone isn’t going to fix anything. We don’t have to march into DC, drag the republicans onto the street and shoot them (but that would fix a lot of problems). What’s the next step?

It’s like…

• They’re dismantling the government and doing other bad stuff
• We march in the street
• ???
• Things are better

What’s the ??? there? Strikes? Sabotage (or is that violent?)? Voting? That feels too slow to save much.

I wonder if there’s a market for a comic like this, but where the idiot protestor gets shot in the head. Just full on revenge porn.

I live in New York City and have no desire to move to the suburbs or countryside. It’s great here.

• I can walk to most of my needs. Several grocery stores, pharmacies, a big park, bars, restaurants. I don’t need a car.
• there’s a thriving music scene. I can go see live stuff of many genres every night if I want
• a deep dating pool. Lots of people. Lots of queer people too, if that’s your jam.
• I like there being people around. The empty streets of the suburbs feel spooky and hostile to me.
• more people means it’s easier to get group activities going. Join a soccer team. Brass band. Bird watching group. Knitting community. There’s everything. Usually more than one, in case a particular group isn’t your vibe.
• stuff is open later.

Some of the things people imagine about cities aren’t really true

• it’s not constant noise
• I typically can’t hear my neighbors
• people don’t typically interact with you on the street, but if you need help someone will usually step up
• it’s not shoulder to shoulder constantly. People seem to imagine it’s always times Square on NYE, but it’s just not.

While you’re not unseen like you might be in the countryside, no one really cares that they do see you.

Some people want “more space” but I don’t really know what for. A one bedroom apartment is fine for me. What would I do with more rooms?

If I had kids, I wouldn’t want to put them in the suburban hell cage like I had. Nothing to do. Can’t get anywhere on your own. Don’t like the few dozen kids in your school? Well that’s your whole pool of friendship options. I was always so jealous of the kids I knew that lived in the city. They could just get on the train and go to the beach, or go skating, or go to a punk show, or whatever. I had to beg my parents to drive me anywhere interesting, and usually they didn’t want to.

It’s kind of annoying and distracting. It makes me think they have some emotional damage (don’t we all?) and then I start wondering what else is going to break under stress.

A sincere apology and owning fault is a power move. Apologizing four times because the chair made a weird sound when you adjusted it makes you look sad and impotent.

As more people are laid off, “I gotta go to work” becomes less compelling.

We really should be organizing to fight the right wing, because they’re pretty unified.

It does feel like unrest is coming. I don’t want to live in a world with car bombs in the US, but I do want all the republicans dead, so.

Monogamy? Suck it up. Focus on the good things in your life.

Non monogamy? See if they’re also open, and ask them out.

Maybe something that reflects on all the loss. Dead from COVID, chaos from government programs shutting down, allies betrayed, and a mirror in the center that says something like “you did this”.

I think a lot of people are struggling economically, and movie theaters are kind of expensive. If labor had a bigger slice of the pie, more of them would probably spend it on movies.

I used to go to a theater that served food and drink right to your seat, and enforced silence from the crowd. It was pretty good. But that’s also like $50 a go.

I enjoyed the simplicity of old video game RPGs where the price of the item directly scaled with the value of the item. Armor for 1000gp was just straight out better than the one for 300gp.

If we were all in the room, we could strangle Sam Altman or whatever other capitalist dog was calling the shots.

I suppose you this touches on how I’m in the US, where everything is skewed towards insane nonsense. It would be extremely unusual to find a conservative of any sort here that would support anything remotely anti-car, for example. Even if it would save money.