Chicken wings have gone down in price
I don't even think they have, though. That just sounds like one of those things you say when you're daring someone to do the leg work to prove you wrong.
zifnab25
joined 5 years ago
The USSR had a lot of women in government and STEM fields.
It had significantly more women than under the prior and subsequent governments, but they were still outnumbered 2:1 at the peak. And virtually none of them made it into senior administrative posts. Yes, you could work as a scientist or engineer, but you'd never lead a factory or a laboratory or rise particularly high in the military.
One of Mao's most famous quotes is "women hold up half the sky."
And yet how many women have held up the Politburo? They continue to drastically lag their male peers at every step of state and private administration.
Its broadly fantasy, although the real focus is on building a system that naturally integrates with a VTT rather than one that's patched in under tabletop rules. Still in pre-alpha development, too. So don't hold your breath. But it looks promising.
Like, if you're a 100% Herero masculine man who doesn't have much empathy for others, the patriarchy probably kinda rocks.
Idk. Feels like "the game of basketball is great if you're over 6 feet all". Yes, to a degree. But the patriarchy more describes an exclusionary principle than an inclusionary one. If you're the middle daughter of a rich family, you experience a gulf in benefits relative to an eldest son, because of the behaviors and impulses of your clan patriarch. However, if you're the eldest son in a destitute family, there's no inheritance to springboard off of.
Do you really want to be the king of squalor when you could live to serve in paradise?
Same with racism, sure it's used to divide the working class, but that divide is facilitated in part by giving the more privileged workers more goodies, and some people REALLY love those goodies.
Racism is, again, an exclusionary process. As a minority - a native or a migrant or a poc or a religious minority - you're cut out of the running for a position in the hierarchy. But there are plenty of folks who simply lose out on their own merits and never see the benefits of a tightly knit social circle they weren't invited into.
I think the benefits of patriarchy and racist divisions are simply more appealing in a socialist society, as the real divide in these communities is access to common public works. Patriarchy absent access to a corporate ladder or family property, racism absent access to public health care or education or housing, is just poverty couched within the language of liberalism.
Under mid-20th century socialism, a woman will bang her head on the glass ceiling of a patriarchal institutions, as her talents are ignored by free-entry public colleges and influential bureaucracies looking to promote exclusively within the male caste. She can only ever aspire to be middle class. Under mid-20th century capitalism, a woman has no colleges or bureaucracies within which to advance herself on merit and must rely exclusively on her marriage-ability and her ability to influence the senior member of her clan. She can attain the peak of wealth and privilege, so long as she enjoys a male sponsor to hold the figurehead role, but the number of roles available is contracted by the inefficient distribution of resources.
Mind you, I'm not a Maoist Third Worldist, I think there are workers in the imperial core for whom socialism is appealing, but I think we kind of need to be honest with the fact it's not like everyone who technically qualifies as a proletarian is gonna reap the same benefits here.
The fundamental sell of socialism is not that it is a panacea, but that it creates a rising tide that carries all ships. Conservatives will happily call out aspects of socialism that undermine patriarchal structures (most notably, the ability to live outside the care of a male/white patron). But racism and patriarchy can still exist comfortably in a socialist economy, so long as positions within the hierarchy remain monopolized by a given gender or race.
This is a fundamental flaw with "class reductionism", at least in so far as it exposes the social divisions among genders and races that persist even when their fundamental economic needs are all met. But the broad appeal of socialist policy is that - even as a disenfranchised minority - the proletariat will experience a better quality of life by way of more free time, more pleasant accommodations, and fewer economic uncertainties.
This still leaves a higher tier of egalitarianism to strive for. But it does not undermine the appeal of generally improved living standards enjoyed by the overwhelming majority of the population.
Don't forget Kobold Press's Black Flag and FoundryVTT's Crucible.
Palladium also decided to re-release their TMNT modern adventure line, very recently.
I think its really shaken up the industry from top to bottom. So much of the last twenty-five years of TTRPGs has leveraged the OGL. WotC effectively killed GURPs, WoD, and Rolemaster when they put everyone on the d20 standard. And with every new iteration of their core franchise - from 3.0 to D&D One - they've been promising fully integrated software support that... never shows up (which has been a huge boon for Bioware and now Lauren Studios, as D&D-adjacent video games thrived in the absence of a real VTT system).
I don't think we're going to see how badly Matel screwed the pooch on this for another decade, at least. But they punched a huge hole in the community that was churning out half of their franchise's best content.
CIA in 2003: "We should find a bunch of people who can speak Middle Eastern and Asian dialects, so that we can better translate and interpret conversations between people in these countries. Lets go find native speakers and bring them on board."
CIA in 2023: 
The original book makes allusion to the Holocaust by way of Voldemort and the Secret Wizard War his parents fight in. Except the conflict is resolved by way of a Very Special Boy, rather than the millions of lives and billions of hours of labor invested in a continent spanning slog.
Fantastic Beasts was supposed to be a different new thing. Not just some prequel to a prequel, but a Gilded Age jaunt through a magical world that gets away from Wizard High School and grows up a bit. The first movie delivered on that (even if it was a live action knock off of Card Capture Sakura). But the next two were just "Hey, y'all remember Harry Potter?" Total garbage.
Markets are a transitional mechanism for marrying wholesale raw material production with industrial manufacturers. But once those relationships are formed, the industries integrate vertically and the market becomes vestigial.
Labor makes things possible, sure. But logistics as a rarefied branch of labor is both vital to an efficient supply chain and heavily influential over the flow of revenue within and between firms. The whole idea of the "middle man" as a parasite stems from the leverage afforded to extract rents in between extractive labor, industrial labor, and retail labor.
What's curious is that this middle-man position isn't even strictly capitalism. It can be (via the ownership of transportation capital), but it can always be entirely divorced from the ownership of the machines and real estate involved in production, by way of financing or licensing or administering traffic. The real sleight of hand that markets perform is to transform the concepts of corruption and price gouging, by way of legally or physical monopolizing certain trade routes and cash flows, into economic growth and (exchange) value accumulation.
This can still exist in a socialist economy. It is just categorized as economic loss rather than economic gain.
Its not a fascist police state if I, personally, haven't been inconvenienced by the gestapo.
But also, you'd have to be an idiot to fuck with the police, and if you get arrested its probably because you're one of those stupid criminals I'm always reading about and watching in blooper reels.
Typing this out on my Casio calculator from 1987 to impress everyone in my 3rd grade math class.
Batteries are heavy and they don't get lighter while you're flying
Battery weight changes with the material used in their construction. Super-light batteries are possible, but they pose a host of safety considerations, as the lighter material presents risk of thermal run-away. At the end of the day, what you're trying to construct is a tiny electric bomb with a controlled discharge. But the same can be said of jet engines and their fuel. It took decades to perfect modern jet engine technology, and that's not even getting into super-sonics.
An electric jet would be too heavy to land, or it wouldn't be able to go very far.
Electric aircraft engineers are definitely in the future, given how the price of renewable electricity keeps falling and the cost of fossil fuels continues to climb.
How can it be racist if I am entertained? Are you calling me a racist? Well... that's a pretty racist thing to say to me, you racist.