By this logic, no businesses should rely on the internet, roads, electricity, running water, GPS, or phones. It is short sighted building stuff on top of brand new untested tech, but everything was untested at one point. No one wants to get left behind in case it turns out to be the next internet where early adoption was crucial for your entire business to survive. It shouldn’t be necessary for like, Costco to have to spin up their own LLM and become an AI company just to try out a better virtual support chat system, you know? But ya, they should be more diligent and get an SLA in place before widespread adoption of new tech for sure.

It’s interesting because not knowing exactly how powerful something is feels more realistic. I think the uncertainty has it’s place as a narrative device. One way to mitigate the problem you’re describing would be more liberal use of passive checks, like if the party is facing down a troll, a nature check might reveal it’s a powerful ancient beast. For your 17th level fighter example, a good insight check (or passive insight) would let the DM say ‘dont mess with this guy’ without it breaking immersion too much.

You missed that crucial first step of mashing ESC at least 3 times.

True, but small businesses fail all the time for all kinds of reasons. Lack of core members is like the co-op equivalent of the trope where the original owner of a small business sells it to some idiot who makes awful decisions and it all goes down the tubes. It doesn’t really explain why for every 100+ traditional businesses that are started, only like 1 co-op is started (numbers made up, obviously, but it feels that way).

The loan part makes a lot of sense, much easier for a bank to deal with a single person rather than a whole cooperative. Funnily enough, the Cheeseboard and Arizmendi were the two co-ops I was thinking of when I made this post. I was just musing about how in the Bay Area practically every small business has all the trappings of progressive politics (the signs, inclusivity, supporting various causes) but so few actually put their money where there mouth is and organize into co-ops.

It might seem counter-intuitive, but I think what you’re describing is a better system. If unique items are too strong, when you find one you’re basically done with that entire gear slot, which limits your upgrade paths. Conversely, if a strong rare with perfect stats is better than every unique for that slot, that leaves the door open for a hypothetical future upgrade that could reshape your build, even if it’s incredibly rare to hit those BiS stats. Path of Exile does this well, in that there are only a couple unique items that are so strong they’re useful for every build (HH, Mageblood). Most unique items fall on the ‘weird/cool’ side, where they enable certain builds or skill combinations that otherwise wouldn’t have any chance of success, but they’re almost always significantly weaker than a perfect rare item.

Did a self checkout recently at a store I’d never been to before. Went through pretty smooth, shoved receipt in my pocket, and then saw they had little security gates and a receipt scanner, so I had to fish out the crumpled paper from my pocket, fumble around trying to find the barcode thing, and of course it also had a random QR code that I tried to scan for like a minute until the security guard had to come over and help me. Luckily it wasn’t that busy, but if there had been someone waiting behind me it woulda been a nightmare.

To extend your point, the fruit analogy assumes shipping is completely frictionless. In reality there are all kinds of downsides to shipping everything 12,000 miles across the world, both social and environmental. If you ship out 12 bananas and the cargo ship, train, or truck gets delayed, suddenly you have 0 bananas. Not to mention all the extra CO2, which the companies get to conveniently ignore.

It’s in Pacifica, CA, about 20 minutes south of San Francisco.

Icy-veins is legit, they’ve been around doing game guides since Wrath of the Lich King was new. I want to say the name is even a reference to the WotLK Death Knight ability. No idea who runs it or what their deal is, but they’ve been a good resource for 10+ years so they’re doing something right.