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RPG Review, IT Rant, and Isocracy Article
Jan. 10th, 2016 10:20 pmIn some significant news gaming wise, the RPG Review Cooperative is now officially incorporated. On Thursday played Laundry Files with a wrap-up denouement of the Lovecraft Beowulf cluster scenario. Today, finished a long-oustanding review and played All Flesh Must Be Eaten. We used the Little Town of Hamelin introductory scenario which takes a new take on the classic medieval story. Overall it worked reasonably well, but the combat system (rather important in a zombie narrative) was a bit on the dull side.
This week finally finished a rant on Enduring Problems with HTML Email and Proprietary Attachments which had been sitting as a partially-finished text file for many weeks. It was an interesting week work-wise when the cluster's NFS server fell over (fortunately I was able to bring it back in a working state fairly quickly), a situation not helped by several dead disks. Nevertheless, it's been humming along at around 70-85% utilisation, so all's well there.
Had dinner inadvertently with the vice-president and friends of the Isocracy Network tonight from a chance meeting, which follows with a more planned dinner with other Isocracy and Victorian Secular Lobby committee members the evening previous. From that latter group, plans are afoot to have the mayor of Bendigo speak out our AGM next month. In the meantime, for the Isocracy Network, I have penned an article on What Labour Markets Are Really Like (also cross-posted on talk_politics, which explains the issues of monopsonistic markets and how they impoverish workers and society in general. It's a long article, but so much of it comes down to John Steinbeck's graphic portrayal in Grapes of Wrath (1939) of how many labour markets actually operate:
This week finally finished a rant on Enduring Problems with HTML Email and Proprietary Attachments which had been sitting as a partially-finished text file for many weeks. It was an interesting week work-wise when the cluster's NFS server fell over (fortunately I was able to bring it back in a working state fairly quickly), a situation not helped by several dead disks. Nevertheless, it's been humming along at around 70-85% utilisation, so all's well there.
Had dinner inadvertently with the vice-president and friends of the Isocracy Network tonight from a chance meeting, which follows with a more planned dinner with other Isocracy and Victorian Secular Lobby committee members the evening previous. From that latter group, plans are afoot to have the mayor of Bendigo speak out our AGM next month. In the meantime, for the Isocracy Network, I have penned an article on What Labour Markets Are Really Like (also cross-posted on talk_politics, which explains the issues of monopsonistic markets and how they impoverish workers and society in general. It's a long article, but so much of it comes down to John Steinbeck's graphic portrayal in Grapes of Wrath (1939) of how many labour markets actually operate:
Look," the young man said. "S'pose you got a job a work, an' there's jus' one fella wants the job. You got to pay 'im what he asts. But s'pose they's a hunderd men." He put down his tool. His eyes hardened and his voice sharpened. "S'pose they's a hunderd men wants that job. S'pose them men got kids, an' them kids is hungry. S'pose a lousy dime'll buy a box a mush for them kids. S'pose a nickel'll buy at leas' somepin for them kids. An' you got a hunderd men. Jus' offer 'em a nickel - why, they'll kill each other fightin' for that nickel. Know what they was payin' las' job I had? Fifteen cents an hour. Ten hours for a dollar an' a half, an' ya can't stay on the place. Got to burn gasoline gettin' there." He was panting with anger, and his eyes blazed with hate.
