Students should be able to discharge their student loans through bankruptcy, and the school should be on the hook for half when they do.
Theology
Don’t pray for patience or humility, for your prayers will be answered.
Enforced Metas
DnD has a weak one: wizards take fireball.
Gurps has a hard one:
1) Setup attack
2) Evalute setup success
3) If the rest of the team is attacking, attack anyway.
4) If the rest of the team isn’t attacking, setup attack.
Exalted had, like, fifty of them, resulting in cascading paranoia combos. And then third edition happened, but no one cared.
The Business
From the perspective of a restaurant, bathrooms are a problem.
Financially, they have significant costs and no revenue. Customers who come to a restaurant expect to be able to use the bathrooms for free! There’s immediate and strong pushback against any revenue creation paradigm. What’s more, bathrooms invoke costs (space, supplies, water and lights, maintenance, decor, etc.) and cause staffing problems. Someone has to clean the bathroom, no one wants to do it, and that’s a significant issue in the modern era of labor shortages.
Therefore the best business decision is to remove bathrooms from all sit-down restaurants.
Tell me if you can see any problem with this plan.
This is how tech companies view customer service.
Patience
“Let your anger be like a monkey inside a piñata, hiding amongst the candy hoping the kids don’t break through with the stick” – Master Tang, Kung Pow
Australian Election
Australia just had an election. I applaud victors and losers for meeting the standards of democracy, but I want to talk about that, the standards of democracy for a second.
There’s a weird tendency in human nature to conflate special and important. Something special is a statistical anomaly, a rare thing, and those rare things are, if good, considered worthy of import. But important things that aren’t unusual are often ignored. A random person on the street is important. Every person is special in some context, but even in the contexts they’re not, just being a rando walking down the street, they’re still important. To even point something important out, to talk about how big a deal it is, is often taken as a point that it’s unusual.
In science, we call this a false implication. The true statement P implies Q DOESN’T imply not-P implies not-Q. The assertion to the contrary, (P -> Q) -> (P’ -> Q’), is a false implication. It’s just wrong. In colloquial English, saying I like apples doesn’t mean I don’t like peaches. The two statements are independent.
With regards to a functional democratic election, like what Australia just had, that is important. It’s significant. And the fact that it’s not unusual, that most Australian elections are functional, fair, and democratic, doesn’t reduce the import of it. If anything, the shear commonality of a such elections is itself a matter of import.
That isn’t an assertion of perfection, but denials of perfection are unnecessary. The statement, that went pretty well, doesn’t mean there were no problems. Arguing that something wasn’t perfect and therefore not pretty-good is itself a logical fallacy, conflating two disparate things.
The punchline here is that Australia just completed a routine miracle: a reasonably functional, democratic election. The long, slow arc of history seems to be pointing toward elections getting better and better, and there’s honor in taking the next step. In and of itself, having a decent election is a good important things. Having a tendency to have decent elections is also a good and important thing, for all that it erodes the specialness of the thing-individual.
I hope things get better, but I appreciate how good they are.
PCB fabrication
I need a good PCB maker, one with a decent website and customer service.
Time
It’s been a rough few weeks. I’m trying to dig my way out of some issues, but the pit is made of dry sand. It comes pouring down. Dig and step to get on top of it, I guess. Dig and step, dig and step.
And summon Shai-Hulud, may his passing cleanse the world.
The Agony and the Ecstasy
Every day I go forth and share my genius with the world, and the world does not understand.
I’m sorry for your loss.
McConnell in Kyiv
McConnell has brought some legislators to Kyiv as well. Good.
Politics stops at the water’s edge.