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All fines should be at least as much as was profited from the crime.

Fines should scale with wealth. If zuckerberg gets a speeding ticket, he should have to pay millions. Bonus: this might encourage cops to go after rich people instead of poor.

Tabletop RPGs are a good and cost effective hobby. You can play DND with the free "SRD" rules posted online, but you won't get the fancy pictures and all the extras.

There are other games like it that are even cheaper. My personal favorite is Fate. Free rules, only needs four six sided dice.

The main problem is finding a good group to play with. DND is mega popular so if you're just looking for social, it's a good starting point. If you're not into fantasy, you can branch off into other games later.

My friend is not vegan and married to a vegan. Somehow they make it work. Their daughter is being raised vegetarian.

Personally I would not be happy with someone who's like aggressively carnivorous. I'm not yet all the way vegan, but someone who was like "I NEED MEAT!!" would be a bad fit for long term relationships.

In the US I think it varies a lot from town to town and teacher to teacher.

I had a history teacher in like 10th grade (age ~15). He spent the first bulk of a lesson one day telling us stuff. Everyone was wrapped up in what a good story this was about whatever. Then, in the end of the class he was like "everything I just told you is bullshit. It's alterations, omissions, and lies to make the story sound better for the victors."

I don't remember what the actual subject was, but it was a good lesson in not blindly accepting what a charismatic guy in a suit tells you.

Decades. Now I have back pain and planning meetings at work. But at least I'm not so old I can't still play from soft games!

Who else is so old exams are only a dim memory?

Depending on how the html is structured, you might be able to use adblock or tamper monkey to filter it out (in a browser. Apps are less supportive of this)

I have several stories on this I like to tell.

I worked at a startup in NYC that was doing job-search related stuff. Find job postings, get resume advice, that kind of stuff. Someone in the customer service department found an article online about salaries, shared it, and then people were talking about how much they got paid. Management came down hard on this, and said it was a fireable offense to talk about salary. Everyone got real quiet on the topic after that. Was it illegal for them to do that? Maybe! But laws only matter when they're enforced, and a bunch of entry level people making $30-50k a year don't have the means to launch a legal challenge. That's even if there's enough solidarity to try, and the effort won't be scuttled by scabs and bootlickers.

For extra irony, a couple years later the company launched an "Are you getting paid enough?" salary comparison tool.

I worked at a different startup in NYC. This one loved data. Data data data. They had t-shirts made that said stuff like "Data doesn't care about your feelings" or whatever.

People started agitating about salary transparency. They wanted to know how much people were being made, because there was a sense that not everyone was getting paid the same for the same work. Also, some of us had in secret started comparing notes, and found some wide gaps.

Well, the CEO wasn't having it. He said "we have salary bands", but wouldn't provide more detail on the range of the bands, who was in what band, and how it all worked. Just we have salary bands and they're fair.

People didn't like that, so he tried changing tactics. He said, "Who here thinks they're being paid too much money? No one? No one wants a pay cut. Right. So that's why we're not going to release the specifics." As if the only solution to Amy being paid too little is to lower Bob's pay.

This is the same CEO, at the same "we love data" company, that when people brought up studies about four day workweeks being more effective, just shut it down with "We're not doing that."

Management and ownership don't care. They don't care about what's legal or just. They care about power, and profit as a close second. I knew a guy that worked in a factory, and the owner reportedly would say stuff like "If you assholes unionize I will burn this place to the ground, and I don't care if you're inside or not."

There need to be institutions, with teeth, to stop these kinds of things. If ownership even whispers an anti-union sentiment, they should lose everything.

Many times the people who would make the best decisions are not authorized to make decisions.

Should we go into the office every day? Well the workers say no, objective productivity measurements say no, the environment says no, but some insipid sack of shit feels like it's better.

Should we spend twenty minutes improving this process? No, some higher up who doesn't understand software development decided that we don't do it that way. Keep doing it manually.

Should we compensate people well enough so they don't leave after a year or two? No, pay the absolute minimum and keep hiring entry level people. Saving so much on labor costs!

Sometimes when you become too powerful, the game becomes less fun. You cruise through challenges or skip entire mechanics.

I was playing an RPG recently and, due to defeating an optional boss rather early received a massive power spike. Several extra levels, but also a new skill that essentially gave my party haste for free all the time. Double actions.

Afterwards, every enemy encounter became kind of trivial. They're still doing their part- the big moves that you need to account for, the dramatic speeches, and so on- but my party is so strong that it doesn't matter. With haste I can just heal and then attack, or attack twice. A big story boss went down before I could even get my wizard to do their cool combo move.

So that kind of sucks. Sure, I won, but it wasn't fun. I didn't get to engage with the boss's mechanics, because they died too quickly. There wasn't much danger because I could freely heal and revive my team. I could just watch a playthrough or movie if I just want to see stuff win.

Victory alone isn't fun. There needs to be struggle.

Defeating the optional boss was a big struggle. That took several tries and an hour of time. Realizing the potential of permanent haste was also fun. I changed my build so one party member could set up a combo on their own. But actually playing turned out to be disappointing. It felt hollow.

I could turn off the permanent haste. That feels weird. I know if I do so, every time I lose a fight I'll be thinking "I would've won if I'd used it".

On the other hand, there are exploits that let you skip content that's not fun. If the game demands that you catch 999 butterflies in order to unlock a cool sword, I wouldn't feel bad about using a "if you stand here and hold down the button, it does it automatically" kind of exploit. That's skipping over something I don't want to do, as opposed to the fun parts of a game.

I bet there are people who feel like the boss fights are the slog, and are happy to perma-haste through it.

I don't really know how to square these circles.

I'd rather have health than maybe marginally better cooking experiences

the truth is that what we did didn’t affect them as much as we expected, and most people don’t care as well :(

Most people don't really care about anything. They won't put up with a little inconvenience. Worse than toddlers.