NostraDavid

One of a few movies that could’ve used a “Fire!” was the intro of Robin Hood: Men in Tights (fire arrows, get it?), AND THEY DON’T EVEN DO IT!

Summary: hoe_math

Right?

HOW IS THIS THE ONLY MENTION OF THE FUNGUS!?

Dialectical Materialism

How about “a tug-of-war between owners and workers for jobs, resources, and technology”

Three examples:

Factory Work and Labour Unions

Early 20th-century factory jobs involved long hours, low pay, and unsafe working conditions. When workers tried to unionize, factory owners often resisted, viewing unionized labour as a threat to profits. This created a direct conflict: owners wanting to keep costs low vs. workers demanding better wages and safer workplaces.

Automation in Warehouses

Warehouses (e.g., Amazon fulfilment centres) are increasingly adopting robotic systems to speed up sorting and packing. Employees might feel pressure to meet higher performance metrics set by a partly automated workflow, while also fearing that further automation will reduce human jobs. Here, the “tug-of-war” is between technological efficiency (and profit) vs. workers’ job security and well-being.

Tech Industry Outsourcing

Companies sometimes outsource tech-related jobs to countries with cheaper labour costs. This lowers expenses for the company but can lead to local layoffs and economic hardship for employees in higher-wage regions. The conflict revolves around the benefit of increased profit margins for the company vs. the material needs of domestic workers who lose their livelihoods.

The USA actually spends several billions, if not trillions on Medicare (meant for the old) and Medicaid (meant for the poor, and single mothers, and young children) combined.

In 2023, the federal government spent about $848.2 billion on Medicare, accounting for 14% of total federal spending.

source - and that’s just Medicare.

I agree with you that it’s weird that corporations get a bailout, instead of selling the company to competitors, but no need to act like the USA doesn’t spend a TON of money on its citizens, keeping their head above water :)

I’ve been watching the MIT 14.01 and 14.41 courses. John Gruber at one point talked about prices for flights were set by the government, so the airlines could only differentiate themselves by providing luxury.

Once the market was “freed” (or whatever you’d call it), people kept choosing for the cheaper flights, over the luxurious ones, so the luxurious ones disappeared, and now we only have “cheap” ones.

Also, because the airports were the ones with the power to force the airplane owners to pay whatever they were setting for the parking spots, it ended up the airports being the ones to set the price of a flight (indirectly). Like, if you’re an airplane owner, where else are you going to park? Pay up, bucko!

Summary: 3k hours into World of Warcraft, Retail + WotLK private server.

I’ve been playing vidya since… 1992? Classic Monochrome-green machine to play CalGames on.

Ever since then, my limit for a game tended to be about 100 hours. I got 500 hours into Clicker Heroes, sure, but that game was made to be run in the background, so that doesn’t really count.

It was not until I found World of Warcraft where I slowly pumped hour after hour into its massive world. I found it somewhere in 2021 - near the end of BFA. The Shadowlands beta was out, is when I started. OK sure, I played a few hours at a classmate’s house back in 2005, but I don’t feel that counts. Anyway, I found that there was a F2P version where I could freely try out most classes, quite a few races, and a ton of quests.

I’ve walked everywhere (I even tracked where I’ve been in a massive image of the worldmap for about 500 hours-ish?), I walked because the mounts weren’t available for F2P yet, did all the quests I could, tried every race (which includes the starter zones), every class available (had an excel where I planned it all out).

I ended up with 1000 hours. 500 for my main (Human Paladin - been wanting to play that since Warcraft 2), and another 500 spread out over my 40 or so alts. Ever since I’ve been coming back, because with each expansion release, a little bit more content becomes available, so I racked up another 500 hours there.

In the meantime, WotLK Classic was going to release, but my income was still shit, so I found Warmane, a non-Blizzard server. You could level 7x as fast, which I did a few times, simply to learn the difference between “Classic” and “Retail”.

Then it hit me. I want the Loremaster title. That meant doing a little over 3000 quests (about 99.99% of all quests in the game). But 7x made me level too fast. Luckily for me, there was a 0.5x XP option. So that’s how I grinded. I did every starter zone, every regular zone, every dungeon (I was typically the “overgeared” guy of the group, since the rest was rushing through). I had fun!

That grind took me 1000 hours total. Plus another 500 for all the alts before that.

I’m pretty sure I played over 3000 hours total.

Oh, and I ended up getting my Loremaster title, as well as the World Explorer Tabbard (because I’ve been everywhere).

My favourite places to run around was 100% the old world. Black Rock Depths just has an atmosphere that’s completely missing from TBC onwards :(

I’ve been thinking of playing TurtleWoW, but not sure if I can survive the Vanilla client - the WotLK one was already pretty rough 😂