I bring my own reusable bag nearly every time I do grocery shopping. But I also live in NYC, which might as well be a different planet compared to most of the US. It’s a five minute walk (on sidewalks! Big ones!) to the grocery store.

They could make the psn account optional, and most people wouldn’t care. Make it easy to click “No thanks” once and be done. Some people would voluntarily do it because they like seeing their own stats in one place.

They could generate a unique ID for a given install and send metrics home when there’s a connection but no psn account, and most people wouldn’t even notice.

I think most of the consumer anger is coming from getting a worse experience for no gains. It makes the corporation seem unreasonable.

I don’t buy a game solely because it’s the zeitgeist or whatever. A friend of mine routinely buys games that are “the new shiny” and then doesn’t finish them, or loses interest quickly. I usually wait for a sale, some patches, and/or the dlc to be bundled into a goty edition.

Some exceptions:

I bought elden ring near launch because I’m a big enjoyer of the genre, and my friend confirmed it was good. No regrets.

I bought bg3 shortly before it’s full access. I’d liked the other games larian did, and a friend told me it was good. No regrets.

Both of those were pretty light on DLC. No season pass or “goty” editions were likely.

I’m going to wait for the dragon age game to go on sale. I don’t really trust Bioware, and I don’t know if they plan to do a bunch of dlc that will get bundled up later.

I’ve been waiting for Lies of P to get cheap. The demo was just ok when I played it, but a friend tells me it’s phenomenal.

Right now I’m playing a MUD (aardwolf). It really distills some online RPG into the essence of “go kill some stuff to level up, get new skills, and kill bigger stuff”. It’s strangely satisfying.

I have no idea why a large part of motorists does not see this concept. Instead they seem to fight against it in their own best interests.

It’s a common problem in humanity: seeing someone as an out group and hating them. That’s all. Facts don’t really matter. Cyclists are The Other and they Are Bad.

Lots of people never reach more advanced stages of moral reasoning. They don’t do bad things to avoid being punished, or maybe because they have a simple understanding of “it’s against the rules”

The current justice and prison system is abhorrent, but something needs to happen if someone tries to murder someone else. Most people are alright but there are a lot of anti social people out there, too. And a lot of people who would be alright if they were in more stable circumstances

Depends a lot on the details and execution.

Some friends can tell a good story about having a beer anywhere. Other folks would make meeting (some well liked celebrity) tedious.

I’m a little too deep into the “I had an onion on my belt” side of things, so I try to be patient with other people’s meanderings.

There’s a lot of like management being like “we gotta hit this deadline (that we made up)” combined with “if I hit all my targets and put in some overtime, the boss can buy another sports car this year”

I don’t want to work extra to make someone else richer. Maybe if I had a shit load of shares. Maybe. But I don’t. So I do my job with professional standards, but I’m not doing 12 hour days

I haven’t had to deal with much of that. I don’t know why your experiences were much worse.

Maybe NYC tends to have better built apartments? I’ve only lived here for any length of time. And I haven’t been in fancy exclusively apartments.

You may have bad luck. You may also have lower tolerance. Sometimes I hear my neighbor coming or going, but it’s unremarkable. It’s not loud or disupritve. But If I absolutely hated any reminder that other people exist, it would be a problem.

I’ve lived in NYC for ~15 years, in apartments, and I almost never hear neighbors. Nor have any of my friends complained about loud neighbors often. Problems with neighbors and noise is not an inherent property of apartments.

Then I say we enforce the social contract of “don’t be a fucking asshole”, with force if needed.

It’s a little hard to square “steam is over charging for games” with “look at all these games I bought for 80% off ($5) off”, but I guess there’s more to it.

I get a small amount of joy from clicking the “request changes” button and blocking some doofus from merging lazy untested code.

https://theauthoritarians.org/

They tend to be more authoritarian. That means they’re more likely to prioritize in-group above all else.

There’s a book about authoritarian personalities I was reading a while ago. It talks about an experiment where they did like a model UN, but secretly sorted all the authoritarian types into one game and everyone else into the other.

The authoritarians ruined the world. Like, nuclear war. When they got a do-over, they still fucked it up.

The other group basically cooperated and solved world hunger.

Authoritarians probably shouldn’t be allowed in positions of power. The GOP attracts a lot of them.

Low density places are always going to kind of suck on a lot of metrics. You just don’t have the people to support a lot of stuff. I’m sorry that small towns are dying but like there’s not really a reason they’d thrive.

Cities have been important since like the dawn of history. At least farms grow food. Suburban sprawl is the worst.

Cost of living needs to go down and wages up, but no one should be vying for low density.

There’s a book “a libertarian walks into a bear” that examines a real life attempt to do libertarianism. It ends badly, with bears and fires, and the town does markedly worse than the neighboring town that did normal government stuff.

Also, someone pitching “smaller government” is going to need to define what they actually mean and why that’s a good thing. Gutting public education, for example, I think would be a very bad thing that someone might pursue in the interest of “smaller government”

Neglecting public education is really going to keep biting us in the ass.

Something like half of US adults can’t read at a sixth grade level.

If we took some of the idiotic venture capitalist “it’s cat gifs on the block chain” nonsense and put it into education and infrastructure, we’d be so much better off.

I don’t really know how to get from here to there, either. Give me magic powers to Thanos snap away some people, maybe?

The problem with Mastodon and Twitter is structural, it’s based around following people, not topics.

I’ve long thought this but infrequently find other people who think the same!

On here (and reddit, rip) and most forums, I don’t really look at the user name. I just read the content I think that’s a better setup.

In-groups to protect, outgroups to bind