But in that same vein, recognizing how people operate means you can tweak or build a process to work with them and get results you want.

I’m not in a technical role like most people on this site, but I’m often in between those departments/their products and the consumer as well as the rest of the company. I think the mistake a lot of people in dev roles make is building a system that functions and think is good, and they need to bring the people to the process. But that’s not how people work. You can maybe get a person, maybe even a few in line with your designed process. But when you have groups of people it becomes impossible.

Take that DevSecOps person above. Their solution to entire teams not using their process is to oust the leadership and bring the team to heel. I don’t think that people take the time to think how they can alter their process to get the people more likely to work with it to get the results they want. As you said, people go the path of least resistance. You have to build your product to the user, not the other way around because the “people” aren’t going to change.

My example: We had a process our level 1 team members needed to follow when filling out tickets. Most of the time, no big deal. Our system means their tickets need to be filled out and submitted almost immediately upon completion, they can’t just wait around until the end of shift. It’s a lot of real-time work. Occasionally we’d get hit by huge numbers because something vital broke and they’re our front line in dealing with the communication, then these tickets would not get filled out properly in their mad rush to get them all submitted so they can move on. Every field not filled out correctly breaks our reporting, which is vital for us. Macros were no use because they could only fill out generic info and not any of the information we really needed. Their managers tried meetings and punishment and rewards, but when shit would hit the fan, inevitably the proper protocol would be the first thing to go to keep the operation running.

So I go in, take a look at the process start to finish and talk to the team about what specific things make it harder to complete in a crisis. And then I went and created a “mass issue” ticket form to use for those scenarios instead. When something major breaks and the team is flooded with these calls and they have to go through 4-5 at once every 10 minutes, they tick a box and get a new form with just the vital info and the ability to group as many issues on it as they have. Now they can group like issues together and fill out a single ticket. Their time is saved and we still get the precious data we need. Because we built our system to work with the user and made the path of least resistance a path that works.

But I have an advantage. I now work in a tech-adjacent role but I’ve spent my life working with people, not technology. So I get to bring that viewpoint to the job where most people around me have never really given it much thought.

So which sense do we use to interpret the rules set out on how to get/treat slaves? How is that interpreted? Is it a metaphor? And how do you know which is which?

What it sounds like is you have lots of leeway to account for what you choose to believe is truth or fiction to fit your needs at any given moment. And if you’re not sure what, if any, is literally true, how do you know there’s a god at all? And you’re defending Catholicism, which is in for an even more uphill battle than most because it’s been around longer and has to account for all the beliefs that have had to be updated as knowledge and culture had changed.

I mean, I don’t believe it but bible believers do; how about the global flood? Various plagues in Egypt as well as ending the whole party with killing off all first-born sons? Commending genocide (multiple times)? Enabling chattel slavery? Obliterating Sodom and Gomora(sp?). Ooh, on that same point, didn’t he just turn Lot’s wife into salt because he looked at her? All the stuff he did to Job to win a bet? And I think Jesus set a wild bear on a bunch of kids because they were bullying some guy?

Those are off the top of my head, but I know there’s more.

It’s possible? I’m not a dermatologist or anything, it’s just what I’ve observed on my own body, specifically from my pockets is the biggest one. If you ride very frequently, maybe next time pay attention to where you’re body is making contact and causing friction. if it’s right where your balls rest on the seat and they move back and forth constantly there, it’s a good bet.

I don’t have any smooth spots on my balls, but I wonder, do you wear tighter underwear that may consistently rub in those spots? I have places on the outside of both my thighs where my pockets have rubbed against them for decades and hair no longer grows. Same on my ankles from the short, tight socks I used to wear when I played sports. I assume the friction just destroyed the follicles.

You might know this already, but the original series in that universe, The Riftwar Saga, Feist wrote about a DnD campaign he played with his friends. I picked up the first one, Magician, and it felt just like a DnD campaign, so I looked it up and sure enough it was exactly that.

I’m making my way through all of the books and haven’t gotten to the Krondor books, so I don’t know how different they are as I could clearly see his growth as a writer in just the first series. I’m currently reading through the Daughter of the Empire series that he co-wrote with another author and I’m really enjoying it.

For me it’s definitely an RP choice. I don’t always choose one or the other, but in games that give character creation options I tend to go for a quick “non-canon” play test to get a feel for the game and setting and get an idea of how I want to play it. Then I start a new file and create a character to fit that. Sometimes I go for a lithe rogue or a buff fighter, and the gender usually depends on either how I’m feeling or possible story/world stuff that makes it fit better, or sometimes just something interesting. Like in early Cyberpunk there was a glitch where you could start with a male character, then switch some settings and you’d get the female options but it would keep the original genitalia, so I played through as a trans woman because it wasn’t something I’d done before and it was interesting and fit well into the setting. It didn’t change anything in the game and I kept my character clothed so you never saw her hanging dong. But then I hit the story with the trans woman NPC and my V found a friend who they could connect with a little better. It was a fun role-play opportunity and I felt like it helped my connect to the game and the world even better when my avatar wasn’t just a puppet I used to interact with the game. Even in games like the Witcher where you’re given a named character, my Geralt always developed his own personality. I once accidentally sold all my boots and didn’t realize for a few days that he was running around without shoes. When I noticed it immediately became part of his personality that he doesn’t wear shoes. He like feeling the grass when he fights and he’s more connected with nature. It kinda fit with the default personality but I leaned heavy into the more nature-focused choices where possible and it changed how I played.

Though I’m probably not an average case-study. I tend to eschew gender norms while identifying as a straight cis guy. I wear what I want, paint my nails or wear makeup if I’m feeling it. And I do lean heavy into the single player RPG games and avoid MOBAs or shooters. I think I’ve mostly just been playing DnD in all my video games, lol.

Speaking of DnD, my BG3 playthrough started with a female Drow monk because I haven’t played any of that in DnD before, but as I played I knew I wanted a rogue so I restarted and as I built it I started with a human male but ended up with a Gith male rogue because I liked the look a bit more for it and knowing what little I did about the Gith in the opening it would be fun RP. But in my head, he’s not from a creche but was lost as a small Gith and raised in some small village by human parents. So he doesn’t fit in with the Gith he meets but also faces the fear that most people in the world experience when they see him. It just adds so much more depth to the game when they have their own personality.

Where do you think Pratchett got the idea?! They got to him first and paid him off so we’d think it was ridiculous!

No joke, it wasn’t a flat earth thing, but I had a coworker years ago who was big into conspiracy theories and he claimed that movies like Men in Black were made to make everyone think that kind of thing only happened in fiction so we’d laugh at people who think it’s real.

When I tried to point out to him that there was no evidence for the things he claimed were real, he said the lack of evidence was proof, because it meant they were hiding the evidence.

But if the flat earth goes on, what can be assumed to be, infinitely past the ice wall (since no one really gives an answer for what’s past there), think of how big maps would be! They would have to sell giant maps and make a fortune.

I mean, I’m not arguing anything other than your false equivalent. I’m sure, at some point, we’ll be able to mimic how the human brain actually works, not just imitate the results. But we’re not even close right now. Not in the same ball park. Not in the same tri-state area. We still don’t really understand how it does what it does completely. We know some of the processes, and understand that’s it’s chemicals interacting with the meat in some way, but it’s still mostly kinda just weird stuff our body does. We’re mostly just pointing at areas that light up with activity when we do a thing and saying “yep, that’s the general area that’s doing stuff.”

And that’s just understanding it, let alone figuring out how to imitate it with technology. And none of those parts of the brain work independently. They’re spread out and they overlap and exchange and change information constantly, all with chemicals. Getting a computer to mimic the outcome is still something we’re far from, but without the same processes, its not really gonna come out the same. We’ve got just… so long to go before we actually get close to simulating a human brain.

And just for fun, I do think this line of yours is funny:

The idea that the human brain is special is ludicrous and completely without evidence

Again, I wasn’t saying anything of any sort, and I’m still not really taking any stance beyond “that shits complicated and we’re not there yet.” But you’re supposing that a “synthetic implementation can achieve the same thing.” … without supporting evidence. This argument was clearly meant for someone else, but it’s not really fair to demand evidence from someone for their claim when you don’t support your own. Jumping to the conclusion that something is impossible is the same as assuming it’s definitely possible. You don’t know that. I don’t know that. No one really knows that until it’s done.

You’re equating creativity to the soul. They’re not the same thing. But we can definitely look at the brain and see what parts light up when perform creative tasks.

While right now you need to put children and teenagers through years of rigorous training and expose them to immense stress and pressure so most of them break

Uh… I don’t think that’s a necessary part of the process to making k-pop, or any kind of music. Industry people may think it’s critical to making themselves shit-loads of money, but it’s not important for the creation music or even selling the music.

Dude was a nuclear physicist, so maybe he was on to something.

Let’s not go attributing success in one area as relevant to being smart in another, unrelated area, even when they’re right. I prefer the other guy who worked in the industry agreeing rather than a nuclear physicist. Unless nuclear physicists typically get their degree by researching the insurance industry and their quality in relationship to advertisement budgets.

You’ve got some good points there, but it feels a little naive of nuance in parts.

Like, if these are natural rights, presumably this still counted before humans banded together to form the first societies. Before, even, we were small roving migratory groups that only just managed to climb out of the trees. humans, as they were, are basically animals at that point, right? I mean, we’re still animals, but you know what I mean. So we still have those rights? What makes us different than the other animals (or even other ape descendants) that we see as food? As a species, we were evolved to eat meat, which requires killing something else that presumably has these same rights that we have to violate to enforce our own right to life. Or did natural rights come later, when we were “better” and “more advanced” than the animals we hunted? Does that mean we get these rights when we reach a certain point in self-awareness?

It’s tough to argue with the base arguments you present, and I don’t disagree with them… but they can be argued against. Like your slavery argument. It goes against these natural rights that we have always had, yet we started taking our first steps toward stopping it, like, 600 years ago? Slavery predates writing. As far as we know, mankind was enslaving other people as far as we can track, and definitely hundreds, if not thousands of years before. So were they not aware of these natural rights or just didn’t care?

It sounds like you’re saying these are natural rights that everyone has because it feels right to you dues to the society you grew up in that appreciated these rights. They have to come from somewhere to be natural but only really count for some living things and not others.

Personally, I don’t believe in natural rights. We’re animals that grew opposable thumbs and learned to make tools. Human rights come about only because we live together in societies. In a way that sounds contradictory, we formed groups and gained rights among those other humans, and in the same instant traded some of those away for that group to function. Rights have to come from somewhere. Without groups agreeing on what those rights are, then the decider of rights is whoever is strongest. Might makes right started to decline only because we got into groups large enough to defend against outside forces, and even then it was only within the group in which those rights existed. Rights themselves are part of the social contract we all participate in when we exist in society and universal human rights is a relatively recent advancement, and we definitely haven’t come to a consensus as to what they all definitely are. But if society breaks down, those rights definitely disappear overnight. But I’ve always been the kind of person who needs reasons to believe a thing and have sound reasons to believe it.

I’m with you on right to life, and bodily autonomy are things that all humans should have. I think we just differ in their origin and universality.

So who decides what rights are natural ones and which ones need a government to enforce? And what are the natural rights? Not just that you believe it to be so, but why? And what you use to make that decision.

Forgive me, but I’ve been doing a lot of research lately on natural rights and their protections, limits, and origins. I’ve been reading a lot of philosophy on it and it’s extremely interesting. I’m genuinely curious how people come to these conclusions and I love hearing different viewpoints.

So where do these rights come from, if not the laws? I wonder if you may be taking free speech as a right as a given because of the time you grew up in. You speak of it as an absolute, but where does that belief come from? You say “rights” as if they’re something enshrined in our souls by a god, but like, how do you know that? Where does this information come from?

This is purely a philosophical question. I’m on the free speech wagon here. But realistically, Who gets to decide what’s actually an inalienable right that everyone has vs. rights that are encoded in laws?

You put it on a hook? The shower rod is pretty good for me when I hang it to dry. Move the curtain out of the way and spread it out and it gets pretty good airing out. When I lived in places without a shower rod or a shared bathroom I’d hang it on a door.

But if it can survive on it’s own, it’s not aborted. Were it legal to remove the fetus at that point, then it’s a delivery. It can survive on it’s own without being attached to the another’s body, so they would deliver it early.

That might be due to our heavy government surveillance system. Remember, it wasn’t that long ago that a militia was arrested before they could carry out their plan to kidnap the governor of Michigan. The year before that a Coast Guard lieutenant was arrested before he could kill journalists and Democrat politicians. There was that nutjob who took a hammer to Pelosi’s husband’s head (Didn’t even catch that one in time!) There’s tons of attempts to assassinate presidents. Kinda feels pretty par for the course.

But the original point, I think, was that it’s kinda weird for someone to say it’s not surprising for it to happen in Mexico, as if it’s some third world country run like New York in Escape from New York while pretending it doesn’t happen in the US frequently. The US is just a bigger police state so they catch most of them before anyone dies. The FBI has plants in militias and groups like them all over the country specifically to catch this kind of thing. Most governments just can’t afford that kind of manpower. The US is not special or really that much safer, and comments normalizing this kind of thing for Mexico is why anyone even made that argument. It’s definitely shitty, and probably racist to think that it’s reasonable, when it’s in Mexico, people say "Eh it happens.”

Specifically, I’m assuming they’re talking about the change in spring when we lose an hour overnight. That morning is pretty deadly, statistically. The lack of sleep causes car accidents, heart attacks, and strokes. The stress lack of sleep puts on the body is no joke, and when it hits most of the population all at once, people die. And I’m assuming men are more likely to suffer from heart attacks maybe?