"Liking video games" is like "liking books". Typically people prefer certain kinds of games or books, and may find any particular example enjoyable or not.
Nobody questions whether I "like books" when I say The Lost World was a lackluster sequel to Jurassic Park, right? Because there is no expectation that somebody who enjoyed one particular book should like every book, even within the same genre or franchise.
I was referring to mrec's behavior of returning most games he buys, including critically-acclaimed ones. That's not a case of disliking a certain work, but of either not knowing your own taste or disliking the medium itself.
Or possibly, he knows his taste very well and is extremely selective. Some people may only be willing to invest serious time into games that fit their tastes close-to-perfectly.
I wager you don't like most critically acclaimed books, but that certainly doesn't mean you dislike books. Rather, it's just a reflection of the fact that there is such wide variety of books that anybody is unlikely to like most of them.
Well, I've been playing them for about 35 years now, so pretty sure.
Of course, obvious side-effects of advanced fogeydom include having less free time, being harder to impress with novelty, and losing the reflexes needed for some genres.
This seems like a loaded question -- do you mean to imply that to "like video games" you must like "all video games" including inherently broken and ones that promise the world in tech demo/e3 while delivering garbage on release date?
Just because one "likes books" does not mean that they should be forced to suffer gleefully through turds like Dr. Phil's "Self Matters".
As above, I was referring to mrec's behavior of returning most games he buys, including critically-acclaimed ones. That's not a case of disliking a certain work, but of either not knowing your own taste or disliking the medium itself.
I know people who have killed for a couple thousand dollars. It's no surprise I've met many others who will lie, cheat, and connive for more. If people think you're a weakling, they will rob you. As a normal employee, you don't have many options for defending yourself besides clear verbal argument and leaving for greener pastures.
> There isn't any evidence that there is anything happening that's not biological despite 1000's of years of searching for that evidence.
If we're looking for something supernatural like a soul, then we shouldn't expect to see natural evidence. Thus the lack of that evidence does not imply its nonexistence. Relevant xkcd: https://www.xkcd.com/638/
> I work remote and get a fair market rate (for the value I add, not based on where I live)
Unfortunately there are two misconceptions here: 1) that companies pay based on added value and not on replacement cost, & 2) that "a fair market rate" does not vary with location, when in reality different locations have different labor markets.
The reason SV companies pay so much is because their candidates expect it, and part of why they expect it is the high cost of living in the area. A company that pays less than average will get worse/fewer candidates, thus a local labor market. For a remote company, paying an SV employee the same rate as a midwest employee is to effectively compensate the latter much higher, and what's fair about that?
Companies pay what you can negotiate with them. This is based on value add, and alternatives on both sides of the table. If you can pitch the value you create, you can get paid accordingly.
It's very hard to quantify the marginal business value given by a single employee, especially if they're just starting in the position.
Economics is driven by scarcity - supply and demand. Companies have no financial incentive to pay us any more than it would take to hire a replacement. They're in the business of making profit, which necessarily means paying people less than the business value they add, and if a company wants to be very profitable, the only way is to pay substantially less than the value received.
So even if you pitch based on value add, you're really just signaling that you have top skills which are in short supply, and they'd better pay you more or else some other company will. They have no obligation or incentive to pay commensurate with value add, only to pay just enough to keep getting the value add.
> If a job gets automated, now the thing being produced costs less. At scale it means you can have the same standard of living with a lower salary -- a boon for the poor.
This is making the massively optimistic assumption that cost savings will be passed onto the consumer rather than hoarded for executives & shareholders.
I understand hating that from a health perspective, but for a profit-driven entity there's no resolving this issue without compromise. Sick time will always get abused by someone, so you might as well provide some incentive to not abuse it.
That's one possibility. But there's also the possibility that encouraging presenteeism (which is what incentivizing hoarding sick days is) results in a net loss of productivity as sick employees both half-ass their work and also get their coworkers sick.
Averaging over categories of wildly distinct things is misleading. It's like taking average temperature of all human bodies in the hospital and judging public health by that measure - ignoring the fact that some of those are dead bodies in the freezer and some are running high fever. Or, another example, if you look at average wealth of people in a pub, and Bill Gates and Warren Buffet walk in to have a pint, the average wealth would jump up, but nobody really became any richer. Conclusions made on this kind of measures make sense only in specific conditions, but when we could a huge expensive car as one thing and 1000 tiny toothpicks as 1000 things and averaging over that, it can not help but being misleading.
