In my utopia, Google would be forced to continue to pay out the current annual contract sum, at a decreasing percentage every year, for some number of years, to all affected companies, giving them the opportunity to divest and pivot.

The root problem doesn’t get fixed if the company with enough money to be a monopolist still has the money when this is “resolved.”

RIP Mitch :(

Give https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html a read. Might sway you, might not.

If dropping a database scares you, you are either unaware of the disaster recovery process, or there isn’t one. Edumacate yourself, or the org, as appropriate, so as to increase your confidence when dropping databases.

It is totally fine to kick or knee or headbutt someone for your unarmed strikes when your hands are busy–this is true with or without Tavern Brawler

Post office too. Really any government office where the public is allowed inside.

Underpaid workers trying to explain bureaucratic minutiae (for which they are not responsible) every single day to people who are not versed in that minutiae, do not want to learn it, cannot learn it, and are preemptively frustrated that they have to have this interaction in the first place. There is no winning–mental health isn’t cheap, do the workers’ resilience only lasts for so many years/months/days before they default to hating the clients, and the clients don’t trust publicly available instructions, thus dooming themselves to the shitty interactions.

The only way to fix this is to take both people out of the equation–preprocess everything that might need to happen for everyone, to the point of turning every transaction into a single trasaction. That requires for every city, county, state, national, international agency to federate, so that you never have to file multiple documents to do a thing.

Capitalism has been touted as superior to the alternatives (Socialism, Communism, etc) b/c it has been claimed to be “self-regulating” and “self-correcting” and “even if we don’t understand why, it fixes itself”–basically the only choice among bad ones that, given our collective small brains, has any chance of sustaining itself and society in the absence of an ability of individuals or government to do so intentionally.

What it really is is an opportunity to stay anonymous while gaming the system, all the while convincing everyone else that they too can game the system (thereby being gamed). It is not a net benefit to society when taken to extremes.

Capitalism is great for the consumer in the micro. If there is a coffee shop on your street that sucks, and you start a coffee shop two blocks away to compete with it with your better coffee, you are participating in the version of capitalism that “works as intended.”

It doesn’t work in the macro. When, instead of continuing to manage your mom & pop business that barely breaks even, you vertically integrate, buy up or otherwise destroy your competition, and then reduce the quality of your product to bare minimums in favor of profits and shareholder value and growth, you take capitalism to an extreme that makes everyone else (the consumers, the workers, the would-be-competitors) have a worse quality of life.

People prefer better quality of life. Capitalism in the modern age is so far in that macro extreme that it no longer makes people’s lives better. East Palestine train derailment as an example… why would they prioritize safety over cost cutting? Bam, a town is cancerous. It’s not unreasonable for people to point at a corruptible system and blame it for the corruption that exists.

Problem is, people are corruptible, so whatever alternative we think is better, someone will come along and ruin it for personal gain.

RE Battlemaps: strongly opposed to allowing them. Lemmy.world already has a battlemaps community. Ttrpg.network is welcome to make such a community too, I suppose. That content works for many more ttrpgs than dnd, so putting it in its own space makes more sense than allowing it in here.

RE artwork, if someone wants to post a hand-drawn scene of their group’s epic win/loss against the bbeg, that’s cool. I think we like seeing dnd success stories from folks, and a picture can be worth a thousand words. But, if that person is open for commissions, I would strongly prefer not to know about it.

IMO advertising needs to be segregated to opt-in communities kept exclusively for that purpose, much like LFG posts get their own space to mot pollute the general discussion.

(Similarly, links out to other sites that have comment sections, like youtube, should IMO be required to have actual supporting text content worthy of discussion, as without it they are just more advertising. That’s outside the scope of the original discussion tho.)

Edit: RE homebrew–IMO it too should be sequestered, as it represents a divergence from everyone else’s frame of reference.