UnderpantsWeevil @ UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

That’s a bit of a gimmick related to airlines betting (correctly) that flight demand would rebound after covid ended and wanting to keep their spot in line.

It's an illustration of a market incentive that doesn't reflect consumer demand. It was also a prelude to a bunch of federal and state bailouts for the industry (much like after the crashes in '08 and '01), intended to keep businesses that can't stay profitable in the black.

If there was a true societal shift and people flew less

The societal shift would need to be a reduced demand for travel not a reduced desire to fly on a plane. That's what COVID created (temporarily) but it still didn't drop plane flights to the point of consumer demand, because of these private contractual arrangements intended to keep airports profitable.

I fucking hate flying. I know lots of other people who hate flying. It's stressful, it's expensive, it's obnoxiously bureaucratic (especially as we switch to Real ID / tighten security at borders / etc). But it is also the only practical way to get between big states in less than a day.

If you want a True Societal Shift, you need to present alternatives to air transport. HSR was supposed to be that alternative, but it never got delivered. For some mysterious reason, passenger railroad companies that had crisscrossed the country a century ago just evaporated. Cities grew increasingly hostile towards municipal bus depots and rail terminals. Highway expansion and airline construction dominated the priority of municipal and state governments.

Also, there WERE a lot fewer flights during covid, ghost planes notwithstanding.

There was a floor below which the number of flights could not drop due to - what are functionally - political reasons. Similarly, there were restrictions on travel that were lifted far too soon, and reignited the rapid spread of the virus, for political reasons. And there was further M&A of smaller airlines intended to monopolize the supply of travel, because finance capital demanded air travel receive priority over other civilian alternatives.

These are not personal consumer choices. These are corporate and state policies.

Corporations aren’t evil

At least from the perspective of "evil" as an all-consuming selfishness that comes at the detriment of your neighbors, Corporations are explicitly designed to be evil.

The airline industry as it exists today - a poisonous, clumsy, alarmingly fragile, wasteful, gluttonous dinosaur of a mass transit system - is the consequence of a few cartelized industrial leaders bribing and strong arming key public sector bureaucrats into subsidizing itself, as the senior executives and investors plunder the cash flow on the back end.

Announcing that you will be bicycling from LA to NY in protest does not change any of their economic calculus.

I’m getting real “my truck is bigger than your truck” vibes.

Hardly a sentiment alien to the Great White North.

Contrary to some beliefs, running a country is actually more than making money.

Ah, but all the Tories need to run is a marketing campaign. They can worry about running the country later, kinda like how Johnson and Starmer were left to sort things out after Brexit.

I know it can be hard for some people to see past a single policy though.

I mean, American liberals said that about immigration 20 years ago. Kicked the can down the road even when they had supermajorities in Congress and a free hand to write whatever reforms they pleased.

Now, here we are.

Cost of living increases in Canada are driving people crazy. But the only response either party seems able to field is "More structured privatization, more subsidies, more deficit hawkery, more neoliberalism".

The Alberta Solution hinges on the theory that they can outrun capital consolidation if everyone becomes a roughneck earning six figure salaries at the well-head. Obviously bullshit. But you can at least point to current salaries and all those middle-income riggers and truckers with their big cars and nice homes and pretend it's a serious solution.

Carney's up the same shit creek as Trudeau, though. He can't do any real economic reforms that run afoul of the country's biggest private stackholders. So he's just left fiddling around the edges of policy, hoping Toronto housing prices magically deflate sometime in the next five years.

👅 Thank goodness for D&D, a game where character optimization and mechanical balance has never been an issue.

The thing about Mage is that you probably can engineer a way to fling fireballs every round if you're reasonably clever. It's a modern setting, hand grenades and incendiary bombs and flame throwers exist, and shoving a rag (covered in arcana) into a beer bottle would probably be enough to cause any witnesses to accept what they were seeing at face value.

But the game isn't D&D. Who do you think you're throwing that fireball at? As often as not, the primary antagonists are The Cops, the Corporate Executives, the Pharmaceutical Industry, and Silicon Valley. You can't beat a Pentex sponsored Facebook smear campaign or an FBI/Palantir partnered surveillance state by spamming it with Fire damage.

sigh

Easy enough to hash out between folks who have seriously played the game. Much harder to explain this to someone who only ever knows how to roll for initiative.

He's in tight with O&G, his wife literally works for Goldman Sachs, and he's jumped into Opus Dei. The man has more money and institutional support than any three other Senators you could name, despite being a turd in the Texas punch bowl the rest of the year.

Meanwhile, his most competent opponents have been the Skateboarding Take Your Guns guy chanting "demographics is destiny" to a bunch of conservative Latinos and the Linebacker in sheriff cosplay who ran on being tougher on the border than Republicans.

When your options are constantly Republican or Republican Lite, is there any surprise when the Republican wins?

We were on the American bus, not the Trump bus.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith visits Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago

One poll in the 2020s, noted by the Toronto Star, showed that about 50% of Americans are against Canada joining, 25% are in favour, and 25% are not sure

And this shit is snowballing as reactionaries drive the media cycle, particularly in states like Alberta.

Anyway the only thing about 5e that does suck is Wizards of the Coast.

The race/class system, the leveling mechanics, the Vancian Magic mechanics, and the general need to get into conflicts in order to progress the story / advance your characters has been a thorn in the side of the entire d20 universe from day one.

5e stripped out a lot of the math (which is good for bringing in new players but bad because actually having lots of gritty math in a game can be part of the fun of designing and playing) and smoothed the edges off 3.5e. But 4e also did this arguably too aggressively, giving us a game that was so bland and so generic that people flocked to alternatives for a good five years.

WotC is a mixed bag of old school TTRPG nerds and corporate suits that have somehow managed to keep the game cheap and fun while heavily investing in promotion. As enshittification goes, it could have been a lot worse. They're a meaningful improvement over TSR, which is a low fucking bar. Lots to dislike, but nothing I can point to that I wouldn't find in another system easily enough.

I’m more of a Pathfinder 2e guy tho.

IMHO, the math on PF2e is bad. They stripped out a lot of the more interesting abilities and features of 1e to make the game simpler. But, as a result, writing encounters is a balancing act between "trivially easy" and "functionally impossible". Like, why even use the d20 if you're going to build a game this way? Just make it an entirely points-based resource management game, with High Fantasy color.

I'd rather run up against the Big Red Dragon and have my DM say "You swing with all your might, but the beast barely notices" than to get handed a d20 while the DM laughs up his sleeve.

I think part of the problem is that 5e is so pervasive and baked into the "people who play TTRPGs" population that you need to sell them on why 5e isn't good before you can get them to consider why your alternative is good.

Frankly, I'm a White Wolf die-hard. I love Exalted. I love Werewolf. I love Mage. I tolerate Vampire. But as soon as I show someone a set of d10s and try to talk them out of the idea of "Leveling" they get scared and run back to the system they're familiar with. I also have a special place in my heart for Rollmaster/Hackmaster/Palladium and the endless reams of % charts for every conceivable thing. And then there's Mechwarrior... who doesn't love DMing a game where each model on the board has to track it's heat exhaust per round? But by god! The setting is so fucking cool! (Yes, I know about Lancer).

I will freely admit that these systems aren't necessarily "better" than 5e (or the d20 super-system generally speaking). But they all have their own charms. The trick is that selling some fresh new face on that glorious story climax in which three different Traditions of Magi harmonize their foci and thereby metaphorically harmonize fundamental concepts of society is hard to do on its face. By contrast, complaining about the generic grind of a dice-rolling dungeon crawl is pretty straightforward and easy.

Ducks: ducks are cool and not to be under-estimated.

Maybe 20%, with another 60% that just wasn’t worried about it very much.

Enough that the Liberals were on their way to a historic wipe out absent Trump pissing all over the Canadian export industry. Pierre Poilievre was fully on the American bandwagon, straight up echoing Republican talking points word-for-word in his campaign appearances, prior to January. The 60% that "wasn't worried" was happy enough to support a Vichy Canadian government practically days before the vote.

Fascism was trendy and influential in polite circles all through the 1920’s and early 30’s.

Comically easy to forget how half the English royal family was Nazi-pilled right up until the bombs started landing. Or that American big business profited handsomely from the reconstruction of the German War Machine.

Folks really don't like to think further back than 1941 when it comes to global political history. And even then... Yalta might as well have had Stalin airbrushed out.

I bought it and really tried to use it, but the reality was just too clunky for primary use. It has no dpad, a single crappy convex analog stick, terribly placed ABXY buttons, horrible shoulder buttons, and just a bit too much input lag on the trackpads.

Hard truths.

Why did they feel the need to replace analog controls with these weird, inconsistently responsive, difficult to map touch controls when every other console platform had already demonstrated why that's a bad idea?

Was the SC innovative, bold and ahead of its time in many ways?

NO. It was kitsch and poorly engineered and obviously not play tested sufficiently before release. It was a hobbyist's attempt at reinventing the mousetrap that got shoved into a major distribution pipeline when Playstation and Nintendo and XBox had already demonstrated why you don't build controllers this way ten years earlier.

If you can provide her with 1960s health care and living costs, she might be willing to sell you her house for 1960s real estate prices.

Would you be replacing her hip for an authentic 1973 mint edition Jefferson Nickel?

Grandma is not the problem.

You can't go blaming the institutions for the high cost of living when it is very clearly this one anonymous old person who isn't giving this other anonymous young person a sweetheart deal out of misplaced nostalgia.

Fun Fact: There are 16 million vacant homes nationwide.

Okay, but a bunch of them are in the Rust Belt, where de-industrialization eviscerated the economy and caused a mass exodus to the Gulf Coast and the Mountain West in pursuit of lower wage service sector and sales employment.

I suppose you're going to claim that the wholesale restructuring of the manufacturing economy was the fault of a handful of 90s-era Wall Street bankers and Corporate Executives, rather than millions of Boomer-era suburbanites with pocket change in their retirement accounts 40 years ago?

Likely. Fucking. Story. This is just bigotry against the 1% is what it is.

Half of Canada was fully on the Trump bus the day before the tariffs hit. Canadian conservatives are as rife with MAGA anti-environmentalism, xenophobia, and rabid imperialism as their peers in Michigan, New Hampshire, and Idaho.

They just don't like being on the receiving end of Trumpism.

Edit: We'll see who is getting downvoted once the Alberta Separatists are running your biggest oil wells.

No politician is ever gonna run on a “no meat” platform lol.

Plenty do, in countries where the agricultural industry isn't dominated by animal farming.

When meat over-production threatens the general quality of life, the issue flips from an anti-consumer issue to a luxury waste issue.

Just like with private jets and super yachts, the issue only becomes untouchable when your slate fills up with anti-populist corporate flaks.

when covid hit a and fewer people where buying plane tickets there where a lot fewer planes in the air

Thousands of Planes Are Flying Empty and No One Can Stop Them

In January, climate activist Greta Thunberg tweeted her disbelief over the scale of the issue. Unusually, she was joined by voices within the industry. One of them was Lufthansa’s own chief executive, Carsten Spohr, who said the journeys were “empty, unnecessary flights just to secure our landing and takeoff rights.” But the company argues that it can’t change its approach: Those ghost flights are happening because airlines are required to conduct a certain proportion of their planned flights in order to keep slots at high-trafficked airports.

This is important.

It's the downstream consequence of decades of outsourcing, kicked off in earnest in the Reagan Administration. "Right to Repair" is just the tip of an enormous iceberg of military privatization.

Money that could be redirected into more important stuff, but alas our corrupt politicians will find other things to waste it on.

That's the nut of it. This money is being wasted in the general sense. But it isn't wasted in the eyes of crony legislators and bureaucrats who see themselves on the receiving end of the kickback stream.

This goes back to the BBB and its rampage through some of the most high efficiency Medicaid programs on offer, in order to shuttle somewhere between $175B and $541B (depending on who is counting) to a national security system that's just legions of badged up bullies harassing locals for the entertainment of a few hooting chuds.

why can’t the military fix their own equipment or farmers fix tractors?

Because

and SaaS is how corporate industry has decided it will continue to grow its profits indefinitely.

Was on the beach in Cozumel and had a raccoon that lived in a stack of surf boards solicit me for nachos.

He did the little 🙏 gesture and then stuck out a tiny paw. Came back half a dozen times once he realized we were suckers for this act.

Hands down, favorite part of the trip.

They aren’t producing that meat for the fun of it

They're overproducing because they're heavily subsidized and operating under a functional price floor thanks to the wholesale market and industrial application of their products.

Grocery store ground beef is practically a waste product. Agg Business produces far more of it than they can ever hope to sell retail.

Its still true that less meat would be produced if less people purchased it

Less people in a single dense region, sure. If half of New York went meatless, you'd see a sharp drop in beef sales to the Five Boroughs.

But if you distribute those 4M people across the entire Continental US, there's no market mechanism to reduce distribution that granularly. All you're impacting is relative expected future profit margins per venue. No single business has an incentive to reduce wholesale purchases.

When populations are starving to death in 2044

You don't have to wait. Sudan, Yemen, Gaza, Haiti, Chad, Afghanistan, Syria... All undergoing starvation level famines right now.

when I buy from them, they’re polluting on my behalf.

But that's just it. The plane doesn't burn less fuel because you didn't buy a ticket. Hell, I've been on planes that were half full (in the wake of COVID).

They're polluting whether you are on them or not. The only remedy is regulation / downsizing / nationalization. There's no future in which people individualistically shrink the industry. No more than you could have saved someone's life in Iraq by not paying your taxes.