What grinds my gears

This is a minor thing that bugs me: When people point out some inconsistencies or other kind of unrealistic details or events in a work of fiction, sometimes someone will say something along the lines of "this is a movie about magical unicorns and wizards and magic, and you complain that the main character can fly?" Extremely rarely, if ever, is this argument valid. If we take that arbitrary example, it's not a question of the main character being able to fly. It's about the internal consistency of the universe set up by the work of fiction, and willing suspension of disbelief. A work of fiction, no matter how fantastical, is well-written when it describes and depicts a world with consistent and plausible rules, which the work follows. It doesn't really matter if some of these rules do not follow the real world, as long as they are well-established, consistent, plausible and not changed or broken at a whim. It's a sign of bad writing when such internal ...

"Rape culture" is the concept that some people claim to exist in modern society (usually they are talking about western cultures only) where, they say, rape is not taken seriously enough, if not even excused in many cases, victims are often blamed or too heavily scrutinized, perpetrators may sometimes be protected eg. because of their status, rape apology in general, and so on. Some of this is true to some degree. However, it's only talking about rapes where a woman is the victim and a man is the perpetrator. There is another form of "rape culture" that's astronomically more prevalent, and which most people ignore completely (which, in itself, is part of the rape culture, of course.) Sure, it's significantly rarer, but it does happen: Sexual harassment where the perpetrator is a woman and the victim is male. Yes, a man can be the target of sexual harassment by a woman. The man can find the woman unattractive, unpleasant, or otherwise have zero inte...

At the beginning of the so-called industrial revolution, a bit over a hundred years ago, there was little to no governmental control over workers' rights, and there were no labor unions, which is why the working conditions in most factories were outright nightmarish. Even 14-hour shifts in horrible conditions weren't unheard of. A big revolution happened that pushed for making a 8-hour work day the legal norm (ie. no employer could require any worker to do longer days than that.) The 8-hour work day norm was so effective that it has persisted to this day, about a hundred years. However, as I see it, there are some problems with it. The major problem is that it's the standard full-day work rate for all jobs, regardless of what they are. Jobs are different, and have different requirements. And I'm not talking about skill and experience, but about low-level physical requirements. Jobs can be, very roughly speaking, divided into two types: Routine physical work, ...