I'm only casually into LOTR, but I immediately recognized her name from my beloved copy of the Dragonlance Atlas. Quite fun to read how she basically invented the field of professional fantasy cartography.
> When the future arrived, it felt… ordinary. What happened to the glamour of tomorrow?
That's the... subtitle? Thesis statement? It's the first line after the title at any rate. I stopped reading as soon as the first paragraphs felt the need to define glamour. Anyone with a modicum of life experience should already intuit one obvious answer: glamour can only exist in brief moments in reality. "The Future" necessarily only exists in fiction, and fictional works can string together glamourous moments end-to-end indefinitely.
But in real life, you can't keep the glamour turned on. People need to defecate, that toilet eventually needs be cleaned, and the sewage treatment plant needs to keep working. People have to start as infants that scream and adults that have to hold them and hear it, then toddlers that make messes everywhere, etc. Maybe dinners could all be glamourous, if you want it bad enough, but are you going to get up, do your makeup and put on your most stylish breakfast clothes everyday? Can you get away with the same outfit at lunch and still be glamorous?
"Life" cannot be glamorous unless you are fabulously wealthy AND make very specific life choices.
Plus, only a small fraction of Animal Crossing players, even lifelong series fans, will still be playing the game daily even one year later. In the real world, we need jobs done ~forever, regardless of how novel and fun they are.
Game design is fundamentally about feeding a steady flow of novelty to players. Too little and the game gets boring immediately, too much and the development team can't produce new content fast enough, or the game is too short. I can imagine someone arguing that we could rotate people through jobs as their interest fades, but we should be skeptical that we can maintain our standard of living when most jobs are being done by people whose professional experience includes novelty at the rate even a dull game offers.
Many (most?) people don't need novelty to want to keep working. Many people find fulfillment and enjoyment in the routine of their work.
Think about it, how many people are cheerfully running shops because the shop is also their community? People need to feel useful. They need to feel valued. They need community. Work provides all these things.
Also, many jobs do provide many forms of novelty as one can seek to continually improve at them.
That's true - but taxes *always* disincentivize the thing being taxed. If investment in a company is less profitable under taxation than it otherwise would be, there will be less investment in that company, no exceptions. Now the size of that effect is quite likely to be negligible for the companies in question here. But it's at least theoretically possible that taxing corporate profits could lead to a change in the marketplace, including market dropout, that might actually lead to consumers paying higher prices to the remaining members of a market with reduced competition.
Further, if all companies in an already low-competition marketplace are equally affected by the tax, then it's quite possible for all of them to ~simultaneously raise prices to offset the tax, with or without explicitly illegal coordination, knowing that the others will follow suit.
Sure, there are definitely second and third order effects. Taxing shareholders may reduce the incomes of wealthy people, who have a higher savings rate, leading to a reduced national savings rate, higher interest rates and lower asset prices, which could cause some businesses to decide against doing certain investments that wouldn't have a high enough return (relative to the interest rate on that capital).
Since everything is tied together it's hard to reason through all of this. For companies making investment decisions the interest rate will obviously be one factor, but projected consumer demand will be another, and it's easy to imagine in some cases higher middle-class incomes and consumer demand might be more important than a lower interest rate for decisions around building new factories etc.
Obviously it's complex and I don't have a strongly-held opinion. But taking a historical perspective interest rates are near record lows and financial asset prices are at record highs. On those grounds policies that might nudge us back a little into where the economy has been operating for the past 50 years (regarding interest rates etc) seem less risky than ones that push us further away from our post-WWII historical experience.
I don't think one has to takes sides on the manager vs Apple conflict to ask a much more important question:
"Why is this newsworthy to The Verge and Hacker News?"
At any given moment, several thousand people around the world are likely going through identical complaints with their employers, and have been for multiple decades. What makes this more relevant than any random similar example from a boring business outside Silicon Valley, where a manager might have a similar number of employees and say a similar thing to one of them? Is there a reasonable belief that this is being encouraged by Tim Cook himself? No? Then why is it "Apple does $Thing"?
Corporate HR and the legal system will work this out and get it right for a reasonable % of cases without involving the whole world in each one.
It's a story that fits the kind of narratives that The Verge (and their parent company Vox) specializes in. There's a large and influential chunk of audience out there who loves their confirmation bias reinforced with this kind of content, and The Verge's business model keeps succeeding in the process. Win-win for everybody, except those who might not agree with the story being painted.
I know this is about SF but Seattle seems to have essentially the same issues with their liberal response to homelessness. This local news piece was both heartbreaking and infuriating to watch. The interview with an proud, unrepentant criminal-who-is-homeless at 17:31 is something I won't ever forget.
Anyone who's parked a car often in dense areas knows the distance between legal and illegal parking is as small as the width of the bumper you stuck into the fire lane.
They can't because their business is fundamentally built on the "leave anywhere" promise to their customers, who are the ones that actually leave the scooters illegally.
There's just no customer-acceptable way of disincentivizing their bad behavior and unlike parked cars, the scooters can be trivially moved from "legal" to "illegal" parking by a single person, which means that the customer may not even be at fault.
