Yep. But give it a few decades for the money to figure out how to wall off outsiders, insulate their little cadres of influencers and firm up networks of fake and real methods to direct popularity.

Still - probably better than Hollywood in the long run, and more accessible, even in the hellish direction it will undoubtedly go.

I’m several inches over 6’ and if I don’t get a fire exit seat I’m highly likely to get seated behind someone who will call me “extremely rude” for wrangling uncomfortably and bumping their seat uncontrollably when they inevitably decide that extra 6 degrees of recline is worth more than my knee cartilage.

Is it not likely that people are more motivated to collaborate, talk about their work, plan together, feel a sense of excitement about work, etc. when they are communing in person? The ol watercooler mindset or whatever.

I mean - there’s this popular topic of the issue of loneliness lately. People are less motivated to do things that would maybe normally bring them social joy and get them out of their own homes and bring them together with others in the flesh. You’d expect people to be motivated to do that kind of thing, maybe? But it’s hard. And it’s harder every day when there’s a zeitgeist of growing isolationism.

I certainly don’t think the inflexibility of a 5 day in person work week with a hellish, uncompensated commute is the answer to the loneliness issue, nor the lack of motivation to do good work. But maybe there is some middle ground that would serve as a kick in the pants of sorts, without making us all miserable little ants going to and fro once again, that could help people get back out there in a way that helps.

I mean, at least, it doesn’t seem like the metaverse or whatever else is filling that gap as the techno-seers foresaw… but maybe future generations will prove that to be more realistic than bringing people back out together in meatspace. Or maybe we just stoop deeper into this new reclusiveness without any real stand ins for grabbing lunch together at all.

Maybe if the office was not a hellscape? Not just the commute, the offices themselves.

I didn't work in a properly colocated team since 2017, and that was mostly by accident. The norm is zoom/teams calls, often taken from the desk (which is 3-4 in a row with rows densely packed) because there's never enough space for meeting rooms so it becomes norm to not give a fuck that nobody can concentrate because someone is talking loudly on a work meeting.

And the watercooler is either office politicking or discussing how much the place sucks

Exactly this, its great that the person next to me can stand and talk to someone 2 desks down, over my shoulder while I'm on a teams call with someone from the other side of the floor, as there are only 3 conference rooms, and managers have priority. If you want people back in the office, redesign the whole space to small working areas where people can actually focus. Open office environments are the worst office experience possible, but i guess it makes the C-suite feel powerful or something having all these people sitting outside their office.

Well yeah, and that's actually the point: if you don't like it, you're free to leave! Headcount reduction without severance payment and getting rid of an unmotivated employee, win-win! At least for federal employees they had the decency of spelling it out clearly: https://traumaawareamerica.org/2025/04/28/deliberate-strateg... - the rest of us have to keep listening to the "it's all for your best" BS...

Sometimes the "quiet layoff" [1] aspect of RTO leaks publicly though.

[1] If they get to call shit on workers with "quiet quitting" etc. they get the same back

Sure, if you feel lonely and want the company of your co-workers, you're free to come to the office as often as you want. It's being forced to come to the office 3/5/whatever days that is actually decreasing motivation...

Plausible deniability dried up as the blatantly skewed results of this “conflict” became impossible to ignore.

And Israel will still get away with it. There will be delays, complaints, but 10 years from now Israel will have Gaza and at best the Palestinians, reduced in number, will live in a small ghettos. At worst somewhere else or dead

They will get away with it if we believe we are powerless to change it. Russia has been proven to be pushing defeatist propaganda similar to your sentiment, and I'm sure Israel has been as well.

To a lurker scanning this thread, this comes off as “I’m more interested in semantics and winning an argument than condemning abusive and antisocial behavior.”

What should i say instead?

This, and there’s something all-too human about ignoring or even basking in the suffering of others, including children. Pretending it’s somehow less than human to be on that side of things feels a bit head-in-sand.

A certain amount of ignoring human suffering is positively required to exist in the modern world, otherwise it would be an impossible-to-defend-against exploit to walk up to happy people in the first world and say “ten thousand children die every day from lack of access to clean water”, because then you would permanently alter or ruin their life.

FWIW this is true on Earth today.

It is required to turn a blind eye to slavery and oppression and hunger and thirst and preventable death and disease otherwise it would be impossible to have any semblance of a happy life in the good parts of the world, because the scale of preventable human suffering is both epic and, thus far, neverending.

Having played both of these games I agree that Lorelei stands out as a sort of foil for blue prince. And my opinion is that that is a huge endorsement of blue prince. Lorelei’s puzzles felt so inelegant and largely detached from the ideas being explored. Felt like a logic puzzle book, with some esoteric story stuff on top that just did not keep me interested.

Blue prince’s rng is quite well thought out imo. Once you pick up on some of the unwritten rules about the room drafting system and start building strategies around what to prioritize and how to adjust your goals, it starts feeling a lot like many other popular card-based strategy games.

There are weak points, for sure, and your contrasting it with Lorelei makes sense. But Lorelei’s puzzles felt so plain and unchallenging. I like that blue prince is keeping me on my toes.

I don’t see how this changes the problem where there is an expected guarantee of a rapid response except that now two people are expected to be available and would now need to directly coordinate in order to ensure one person’s going for a swim doesn’t interfere with the other’s WoW raid.

That's more or less what my team does. It works well. At least much better than saying you can't for for a swim at all.

I guess to me that seems worse because that’d effectively double the number of off-hours accountability per teammate. Not only do you need to be first on call for your primary hours, therefore severely restricting the quality of your “free time” but now you ALSO have to be secondary on call for that irresponsible coworker that goes afk without properly communicating for 2 hours, dipping twice into your actual free time.

Compliance and capital vs. defiance and disaffiliation.

And socialized medicine solves many of the employment-dependent privatized medicine problems! Funny world.