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Comment on Playing with Toys While People Are Dyingparent

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Games are entertainment. They provide escapism and fun when we are bored or sad. This improves our wellbeing.

Does it?

I think sheer boredom improves our well-being.

As usual "What doesn't kill you makes you tougher". Escapism and fun leaves you vulnerable to the brutal real-world.

Yeah, we shouldn't have books, games, websites, sports, arts, music, etc. because fun is bad

Lots of those are work or productivity related. Actual fun things are already banned.

If it's fun, it's most likely already illegal.

Starcraft is productivity related?

Micromanaging a zerg rush isn't productive management?

Some of the better minecraft mods require some exercising of your 3-d design abilities and budgeting skills and navigation of dependency trees. There is a certain lower cognitive limit to make a cobbleworks in modded minecraft and above that there's a lot of engineering going to time/space tradeoffs and energy budgets and various design criteria. Not to mention making it look nice and troubleshoot-able.

There are also secondary effects such as you can make a great pile of economic activity by shoving kids thru schools to give them skills that are not economically useful in general or if you have X economically useful job slots opening per year you can make twice the tuition revenue by graduating 2X the number of kids and blaming the individual for individual failings when the macro effect of 2x supply impacts 1x demand. Or the school produces grads ignoring the effects of ageism, racism, sexism, but the employers are certainly under no illusion they need to be as color blind as the schools. Then when the only work they can find is as baristas or maybe nothing at all, perhaps a lively home life as a minecraft player will tranquilize them to the point of society lasting a little longer, squeezing blood out of a couple more rocks, getting that national aggregate student loan debt to a higher score than ever, before the great reboot that rights all wrongs.

I have a lot of managing experience. Can I send you my resume? I'm a C Zerg user on the iccup server.

No, since it decreases productivity and well-being.

Never trust the well-being of anyone that can't be bored. They are broken people.

If that were true, people with really boring jobs would have higher wellbeing, all other things being equal.

Actually, there might be some truth in that.

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