AwesomeLowlander

Edit: Title was changed since many people don't seem to get the term 'hilariously incompetent'.

Nominal price of $2, free shipping worldwide.

On a blustery autumn evening, five old friends met in the backroom of one of the city’s oldest and most private clubs. Each had traveled a long distance — from all corners of the world — to meet on this very specific day… October 2, 1900 — 28 years to the day that the London eccentric, Phileas Fogg accepted and then won a £20,000 bet that he could travel Around the World in 80 Days. When the story of Fogg’s triumphant journey filled all the newspapers of the day, the five attended University together. Inspired by his impetuous gamble, and a few pints from the local pub, the group commemorated his circumnavigation with a more modest excursion and wager – a bottle of good claret to the first to make it to Le Procope in Paris. Each succeeding year, they met to celebrate the anniversary and pay tribute to Fogg. And each year a new expedition (always more difficult) with a new wager (always more expensive) was proposed. Now at the dawn of the century, it was time for a new impossible journey. The stakes: $1 Million in a winner-takes-all competition.

The objective: to see which of them could travel by rail to the most cities in North America — in just 7 days. The journey would begin immediately…

Taught the game to literally dozens of people, today I find out there's an actual interesting lore / backstory tidbit I could have been using to intro it! Damn!

Business Insider published an article today titled "An ex-Facebook exec said staff let Zuckerberg win at board games. But now the plot thickens."

TLDR for the article:

• In her new book "Careless People", a former Facebook executive recalls a SPECIFIC game of Catan played on an Indonesia trip in October 2014. She writes that other Facebook employees let Mark Zuckerberg win at Catan by never stealing from him and failing to block his victory.
• Another player at that game is refuting her assessment and saying that it's actually WORSE - that Zuckerberg enlisted the other players to gang up on him in order to secure the win.

What's funny to me about this article is that I'm sure we've all had at least one game session that has gone down in infamy due to it's contentiousness. It seems this specific session of Catan in Indonesia was THAT game for the players at the table that night. Over nine years later, they still recall the details of what went down. Excerpts from the article:

• She called out at one point when she saw one "particularly egregious" move and others flashed her looks.
• When she asked Zuckerberg if he really wanted to win that way [i.e. by others letting him win], he seemed "perplexed"
• "I feel the dynamics in the room shift and not in a good way."
• Hunter-Torrick said his tactic was to eliminate weaker players so he could then go after Zuckerberg, "who was the toughest player." But then something "more interesting" happened. "Zuckerberg said he was tired and wanted to sleep, and convinced the others to gang up on me so he could win! That's actually a much better story showing his ruthlessness," 

It's nice to see that I'm not the only one that doesn't let these things go! (kidding/not kidding)

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Credit u/UlisKromwell

Everybody knows what needs to be done. Parenthood needs to be sustainable for the parents. There's just no political will to implement a policy that will only start paying off in 20+ years. Every politician kicks the can down the road, or implements half-hearted policies.

Edit: Just realised I posted this to the wrong instance comm 😅

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27350429

Archive link: https://archive.ph/zm5LU