TipRing

Well now, that's an actual play by the Democrats, I'm a little surprised. Of course the Republicans have to vote against it because they have to protect President Smooth Brain, but this then drags out the story over another news cycle when Trump is desperate for people to stop talking about it.

Now, all this means nothing because the base will eventually get to "it's ok for Trump to have raped those girls because he was saving them from the evil Democrats who would have done worse" but at least there's a small moment where I can imagine things matter.

Definitely read the original SecureAnnex article as well. The behavior of this software and the people behind it are damning.

They added a toggle at some point when creating a sim so you could be a male who could get pregnant, if you wanted a sim to be a trans man, for example.

At least I think that's vanilla. I have so many mods its hard to remember anymore.

Men could get pregnant in Sims 4 for awhile, I think. I guess the bug is it that neighborhood stories aren't working and checking if someone is in a relationship and has the 'can be pregnant' tag.

He will for sure Taco this one. Increasing costs for the health insurance lobby and right-wing alt health idiots will end up with paying triple for their Ivermectin or whatever? That is more heat than taco Trump can take.

Well knot that shocked.

A song about leaving a committed relationship with someone to go sow your wild oats? Troi doing some deep cut heckling here.

Germany has been on my list of places to flee to if the fascists here start rounding up LGBT folks. I have lapsed fluency from when I lived there 30 years ago but I am confident it would come back quickly. The problem is that my husband doesn't speak any German at all and I think it would be a culture shock for him.

My take is that Borderlands 1 was boring, Borderlands 2 had decent game play but was held up by excellent writing and characterization and every Borderlands game since has been trying to recapture the magic of the second game but just feels hollow. They aren't terrible, but they aren't amazing either.

I design contact centers for a living. I have done so for almost a quarter century now, until very recently I only had worked for Fortune 200 companies (moved to the public sector which is a nice change of pace).

A quick bit of jargon definition: We refer to various means of communication as "channels". A contact center is multi-channel if you can reach it by more than one channel (i.e. phone, SMS, chat, email, etc.). It is considered omni-channel if you can switch between these channels (supposedly seamlessly, but see below).

This article gets several points dead on and misses several more. Here is my professional take, make of it what you will.

1. Call centers are expensive. Licensing and software costs are very high. There are few vendors who offer scalable omni-channel offerings and the licensing costs end up being exorbitant. And you need omni-channel contact centers because:

2. Phones are the least efficient way to service customers. An agent can only be on the phone with a single customer at a time, but they can staff around 6 chat or email sessions simultaneously. For a customer, this devoted attention is a boon, but for a company it's very costly because Agents, even poorly paid ones, are the most expensive part of your contact center if you are paying benefits, and if you aren't you will not get good agents.

3. Agent turnover is very high. Agents are poorly paid and their job sucks. They are driven by metrics that are poorly thought out, intended to drive efficiency but ultimately create poor behavior; the article gets this very correct. A lot of poor service you get is caused by agents trying to hit impossible metrics. Don't blame the agent, the managers are the problem here.

4. The technology has gotten better - and worse. VOIP infrastructure radically reshaped contact center design and the migration to CCaaS reshaped it again, with some good sides and a lot of bad sides. Telephone technology is an aging tech with a substantial demographic issue. I am consistently the youngest member of my teams and I have been doing this for almost 25 years. Expertise is aging out of the field and taking a lot of knowledge with them. Further, the number of disciplines you need for expertise has dramatically increased. It is no longer enough to just know CCNA-level networking, wiring, PSTN tech, linux and windows servers administration, codecs, basic related legal knowledge (wiretapping laws, Ray Baume's Act, TEHO laws in India, etc.), design and infrastructure theory (like Poisson distribution), but now you also need to know Kubernetes, docker, ESXi (or equivalent), AWS, Azure, etc. It's a lot and nobody can know it all, the complexity of modern design and no education program to get there means there's just a lack of comprehensive understanding of the technology at a pretty fundamental level for most people trying to design and maintain this stuff. The result? A system designed around 99.999% uptime is now failing to meet that SLA, hell some vendors won't even promise it anymore but most will just lie and claim that they do. So there are reliability issues.

5. AI. This one hits pretty closet to home for me because of a personal experience so a quick anecdote: at one job, I had a spirited discussion with the head of our IVR technology group over how effective AI would be at reducing call volume into the center. He initially had great success, reducing call volume by ~30% in the 6 months. He received accolades and commendations, a big bonus, he was riding high and honestly he deserved to be. The problem, and what prompted my attempt to intervene, was his promise to continue that trend, predicting that his AI tech could reduce human-required calls by 60% within the next 2 years.

   To me, this was madness. His initial success was because he moved the payment system into the IVR instead of having agents do it. This is a no-brainer. Computers are quite capable of taking payments or listing basic account information, but more complex tasks involve a much greater up-front cost in technology development and we didn't have that budget, it was a massive over promise and I told everyone who I could to not take his estimation seriously. Unfortunately, he had a PhD and I am a college dropout, so they listened to him and cut 50% of their agent count via attrition. The results were predictably disastrous and the company hasn't yet been able to fix it years later (thankfully, I left that place).

6. I don't think this is intentional per se. Having been in numerous meetings with leadership about contact center issues, I can say that they are just as upset by poor customer service as you are. There is no top-down effort to make your life suck. But line must go up and contact centers are always cost centers which means companies hate them, they don't view customer service as integral to making money despite understanding that angry customers will leave them so there is a constant budget short-fall. The issue isn't someone at the top thinking "If we treat our customer poorly enough they will stop calling and we'll save money!" It's just standard corrosive capitalism creating perverse incentives that make everything worse. It's a systemic problem.

Anyway, that's my view for whatever it's worth. I am glad to be in the public sector now, which has its own issues, but at least everyone is focused on actually providing service because the service is the value.

It takes a level of buy-in from players that is hard to get. I couldn't run it at my table for years due to having a few players for whom the magic system and general focus on esotericism were RPG kryptonite. The main thing I have noticed is that the game changes pretty dramatically at Gnosis 3, so I establish at the start that the entire cabal has to go from 2->3 at the same time.

I had to stop due to some IRL stuff, but I am hoping to start a new campaign soon or I might try running Mummy: The Curse since I find it really interesting.

World of Darkness is a setting that includes Mage: The Ascension which OP is referencing. (MTAs)

The same publisher released a later gameline now referred to as Chronicles of Darkness which includes Mage: The Awakening (MTAw) with a similar dynamic magic system.