IMO, "ish". You can reliably and repeatedly produce good teams _if_ you reliably and repeatedly invest in your people.

IMO, what's really happening is that small, effective teams aren't _fungible_ - you can't just swap people around without breaking the magic in a team, and you can't just move a team around an organization without similarly breaking the magic (although the latter _is_ way more possible).

IMO, it's sort of an organizational version of "context switching". It takes time for a team to get up to gel and get up to speed. If you're swapping out team members, you break that cohesion. If you move around teams, you (somewhat) reset that "getting ramped up" process.

So that seems like a pretty good actual "what's DEI?" - Does race/gender/sexuality/etc affect some outcome? Should it? If it does affect it and shouldn't, what we can we do about it?

That said... yeah, not gonna get a room full of anyone to agree on that. Starting with that "should".

I find it pretty interesting that, AFAICT, the dominant engineering paradigm of an era is also the dominant “this is what reality is” metaphor: cathedrals and architecture and the spheres; steam and clockwork and mechanical; now - computation and information!

1) It’d be exactly twice as easy but for Tsiolkovsky!

So I’d bet it’s not that you’re masking that terror when you’re with your therapist, but that it isn’t present.

From what I can tell on RR+P; if you write a decent story regularly (or a tremendous story occasionally) you can make some money. If you then also strike a nerve with the audience, you can make a lot.

Gate keeping is one of the primary means by which a community defines itself; it both requires that the community have some idea of “us/not us”, either deliberately and explicitly, or incidentally; and it is a primary means of implementing that identity.

It can also be a means for induction; the “gate” is one of the best places to introduce someone to the cultural norms, etc, of the community they’re entering. Related, it can also be a way to catch people who’ll have a bad time in that community, even if they’d otherwise be welcomed.

It can be done well and it can be done poorly.

Positive examples that come to mind:

- New Zealand has aggressive biological border control

- Costume parties that turn you away at the door if you’re not in costume

- Men’s and women’s circles - Everyone on the boat has to know how to sail

- Everyone on the ski trip has to WANT to be in winter weather

Depends what you’re writing about. The chicken xianxia is something like $10k/mo, a Friren-inspired fic is a whopping 30k (and like 3mo old from a complete unknown), and Dungeon Crawler Carl has fully broken out into mainstream.

“Fun” things do seem to be making money, and if they hit a nerve they seem to be wildly successful.

(To be fair, I’m in favor of that)

Edit: Oh, no commas.

But the depth of character, discussions on morality - I still reference the MJ12/Illuminati portrayal from Deus Ex as a discussion on leadership and morality - the depth of gameplay, the way it created a feel of a much bigger, open world.

…your family around the notional holiday dinner table? The personal is what’s important, kinda by definition. The point is the subjective and emotional.

…and you usually find out they’re shitty because of how they handle (or don’t) “political” conversations.

Pro tip: You don’t get to decide for someone else what’s “just” politics. If someone else says it’s important, while you’re interacting with them, it’s important.