VoxAdActa

I was a Teamster when I worked for Sygma, and out of all the unions I’ve been a member of (four, now), the Teamsters were the motherfucking worst. If they were actively trying to take a revolving door of 18- and 19-year-olds just getting their first big-boy jobs and turn them into all into die-hard anti-union voters for life, they couldn’t do a better job than they’re doing right now, and I told my steward that before I quit.

They designed the whole contract specifically to offload all the real work onto the new guys, protect the older guys when they decided to throw hands on the loading dock, and give as much overtime as possible to the ancient, divorced boomers with no family to go home to, that they could spend pretending to sweep the floors while the trainees finished the actual loading. Guys would bid order picking, then use seniority to bump bid loads/receivers off their jobs and wouldn’t pick a single case for the whole contract, while getting paid picker bonuses and shift differentials.

And just to rub salt into the wound, those perks (bumping lower guys off their bid jobs and “sweeping the floor” during overtime) were specifically written out of the latest contract, so only the guys hired under the previous contract would ever get to do them. They straight robbed those kids of even anything to look forward to if they toughed out the low-seniority years. They also negotiated a different pay scale for under 5 years, 5-10 years, and 10 years in, and you can guess which end of that they weighted the raises toward. It was a complete shitshow, and when kids would quit, the Teamsters would keep their initiation fee (taken out of the first three paychecks). You could call to try to get it back, but the best they’d do would be to put it towards your initiation fee for your next Teamster job, as if any of those kids would ever willingly subject themselves to that shit ever again.

AND THERE’S MORE. I just don’t feel like typing up a fucking novel on it. Don’t even get me started on the shady shit they did during the contract negotiations I was actually present for. It was worse than maddening; it felt like it was specifically crafted by the senior guys to make sure that ladder was pulled up as high as they could behind them, while not actually making any waves for the company. And the safety issues they ignored and covered up, and the fancy fucking “union meetings” they never told anyone about so that they were only attended by the office reps, because they were being held at the most expensive restaurants in the city, on the union’s dime, and the number of stewards who were literally fucking floor supervisors, and on, and on, and on…

UIW was kind of spineless and milquetoast, but they took care of us. The Teamsters are fucking old-school mob racket motherfuckers who are single-handedly responsible for an entire generation of workers who think all unions are a scam.

Cool, glad to hear you admit that you’re full of shit and this never happened. Cheers!

Well, if it’s true, you were using another name, because “Facebones” doesn’t show up in any of the modlogs.

Weird how “trust me, bro” suddenly became the standard of proof today.

It’s news that occurred somewhere in the world, I guess. That’s what all the “US news is world news!” people were saying in the meta thread.

And from images of ice cascading into the sea, you genuinely drew the conclusion that Antarctica would be completely ice-free in less than 12 years?

So, nobody actually told you that, you just decided it was true after seeing video of ice falling into the sea. But that decision was firm enough in your mind to cause you to believe that, since there is still some ice in 2023, the doom-sayers of the Discovery channel were wrong and we had nothing to worry about?

Fascinating. I wish I had the ability to make those kinds of amazing leaps of reasoning on subjects I know absolutely nothing about and then believe them hard enough to post snarky shit in public.

What was the name of that program?

Who told you that? Name, quote, date, and source, please.

I’ve got a friend who’s otherwise a great guy, but his anxiety disorder is just bonkers bad. Climate change is terrifying to him, so he copes by just straight-up refusing to believe that it’s a big deal. It can be solved by planting a bunch of trees, or spraying some kind of plastic particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sunlight (“It’s been tested in Alaska! It works! But the government shut it down!”), or by some as-yet-unrevealed technology that’s just around the corner.

Also, he’s incredibly, unreasonably mad at Al Gore for making An Inconvenient Truth and will insist that he was wrong about literally everything and should never have opened his mouth.

I have to make a concerted effort not to argue with him too much, because I’m pretty sure that if I actually convinced him, he’d self-harm out of fear of the future.

I honestly think he’s just a more extreme, slightly-more-self-aware version of how most conservatives feel about the climate change issue. It’s scary, so it can’t be true.

Oh, some percentage of the dead people are brown or brownish? Well, that makes it all ok then!

I know at least one is getting frustrated with combat because he can’t roll to save his life.

Yeah, that’s a feature of 5e combat, not a bug. It’s what makes me despise combat. I miss three times, wait 20 minutes for my turn to come back around, miss three more times, wait 18 minutes, and then combat is over.

Some of us are just cursed. The only workarounds I’ve found so far are:

1. Specialize in making the DM roll saving throws, rather than me rolling attack rolls. A spellcaster who focuses on save-for-half spells feels so much better (because even when the monsters pass the save, the player still get to feel useful).

2. Specialize in party buffs and reaction spells. They don’t have to roll anything to Enlarge or Dragon’s Breath their friends, and they get to feel like they helped. Also, never underestimate how good it can feel to make a Counterspell bot. Even if the bad guys start upcasting their spells and your player always fails the check, they still made them waste a higher-level spell slot than they’d have used otherwise.

3. Halfling Divination Wizard with the Lucky feat. Three re-rolls, two portent dice, and rerolling all 1s once really helps brute force one’s way through being cursed. And it’s not broken when people like us play it, because we end up finally managing to get around the same number of successes that non-cursed people get normally.

Notice that none of these solutions are possible with pure martial classes. Steer your player away from those, maybe even let him make a new character. Martials are totally at the mercy of the dice.

My ultimate solution was to switch systems and play FATE instead. But that’s an extreme reaction to an extreme level of frustration.

For high-speed rail? Basically, yes. Unless you’re into spending a couple million bucks per mile to rip out big chunks of the mountain. High speed rail can’t reasonably navigate tight turns or steep grades.

“Which group were the evil ones?”

“Due to the laws of the state of Oklahoma, I am not permitted to tell you. But I’ll bet you can guess.”

Okay but why didn’t they have a usable option before killing off the stuff people use?

They didn’t fucking think about it. It literally never occurred to them to consider all the third-party work that went into being able to make their site actually usable. They just assumed that, obviously, the official app is fine, and people would just “adjust”.

The conversation they had with the mods of r/blind was a complete joke. It just never once occurred to anyone that people with accessibility needs use Reddit at all.

The following is a dramatization

“Who in your company has accessibility certifications, and which ones?”
“… uh… well, of course we do…[texting their boss what the fuck is an accessibility certification???] I just… [ding! A what? TF is that?]… am not allowed to answer that… … right now…”

“When was the last time you had a third-party accessibility audit, and who performed it?”
“…oh, we… totally… had an accessibility audit, just… like… you know, just recently! And it was performed by… uh… [texting Who the fuck does accessibility audits???]… uh, you know, that big company, from Canada… you’ve probably never met them… [ding! What audits? The fuck are those? I don’t fucking know!] I’m just… not allowed to say right now.”

Wow. You’re really sensitive to external stimuli, huh? Even just hearing someone cough disrupts your entire workflow? You know that’s not typical, right?

This was a part of the equation when I decided to pursue traditional publishing instead of going the self-publishing route. I wouldn’t be competing against other authors for the attention of publishers, I’d be competing against an ocean of ghost-written get-rich-quick schemes and bots. Sometimes gatekeepers serve a real purpose.

I gotta imagine much of them weren’t actually successful.

You’re right. Any individual person going in for these scams is almost guaranteed to lose their lunch money. But from Etsy’s perspective (and I assume Imgur’s), they only need a tiny fraction of their sellers to get the jackpot in order to keep the money train rolling. If they can get a single dollar a month out of 20% of their users, that’s still a baby dragon’s worth of a horde every 30 days. And I’m sure they have other fees and hedges to ensure that even if you never make a penny in sales, Etsy still comes out ahead on you.

It doesn’t help that a bunch of influencers descended on YouTube one day selling classes for how to get rich quick with drop-shipping. A couple thousand gullible dipshits emptied their wallets and dumped a load of cheap crap onto Etsy, with product descriptions that read like they were written by Skaven.

It’s a shark. They knew what they were getting into. If they didn’t want danger, they’d have bought a duck or something.

It’s 2030. The world has changed. Russia has fallen. Ralph Nader’s reanimated cyborg-corpse is president. Britain is back in the EU. And Lemmy is known everywhere as “The Poop Site”.

When it comes to tragedies, the number of fucks I give for the victims follows a simple formula.

I start with a billion fucks. Then I subtract the combined net worth of the people affected by the tragedy. The result is how many fucks I give about their tragedy.

For this one, I’m at about negative three billion fucks.