The year is 2784. What’s left of humankind after the water wars, wildfires, rising sea levels, wet bulb events, and category 10 hurricanes of the past 700 years has managed to leave the solar system on a generation ship. The Elder Scrolls 14 has just come out after a tortured 36-year development cycle with 19 years dedicated to “rebuilding” the engine. It’s a Microsoft Holodeck exclusive. You go in and the first NPC you see clips through a boulder and starts slowly sinking into the ground after clearing it while muttering to themselves about mudcrabs. The gamma setting is slightly off and there’s no way to adjust it. You start to move forward and the world hitches as trees pop in mere meters before you in ultra-low LOD, slowly coming into full detail over a few seconds.

I’m never preordering a Bethesda hologame again.

The Todd Howard AI installed in your neutral implant chuckles quietly.

The ruling class is such a hivemind that even though it’s essentially scientifically proven that you get better work from well-paid, well-rested, happy workers they’ll never allow it to happen. I’m convinced that when all the huge corporations run the numbers on how much to pay people, they completely ignore things like:

• experienced workers make less mistakes and are therefore more productive
• a constant revolving door keeps wages down but constantly training new people is a huge waste of time and money
• remote work will save the company a ton of money (once the lease is up) and people do better work in place where they’re comfortable

None of this matters if they have to give up a modicum of power. So many companies are stripped to the bone by sociopaths and then crumble and fail in the name of doing harm to workers but this also harms the future prospects of the executive class as more and more of these industries are consolidated. There has to be some executive board that sees the writing on the wall. If every company fails and is bought out/liquidated or merges, there won’t be many positions for these ghouls left. I get that most of them are barely able to breathe without being reminded to by their secretary but there have to be a few that understand they will be thrown to the wolves at a certain point once all the free money dries up.

Or being fined $0.02 for stealing $100, which is closer to an amount that I can comprehend

Instead, if a worker steals $100 out of the register, they go to jail and pay fines exceeding what was stolen

Can I get asylum for being an oppressed minority?