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Pretty much everybody at least intuitively understands that bards are great in urban environments, even if some players are kind of at a loss for exactly how to express that during game play. Some people are more natural “fits” for that kind of character class than others.I hadn’t really considered how amazing a well-played cleric could be in that same role until one of my players showed me. In fact, I was so impressed that I used that character as a template for Father Patricolo McKenny, who was a “second tier” character in the Candle’Bre novels I wrote (a step down from the main characters who served in a strong supporting role).The party rolled into a town they’d never been to before. Cleric talks to the gate guard. I think it started when I mentioned that he seemed figdety and distracted as he waved them through the gates.Full stop. Deep conversation. The guard was impatient at first and not all that willing to talk about it (and as the DM, this was a cardboard cutout character I had minimal notes on, so was making all this up on the fly). I invented that he had a sick child at home and was anxious to get off duty so he could go check in.Cleric asked to speak with the captain of the watch. Paid to get the guard off duty early. Party followed him home and the cleric healed his kid. Instant friend in the watch.From his new friend, learned all the power players in town and a fair bit about their motivations.Went to the church and asked if they’d object to him ministering to the sick. Before they could even think to raise any objection, he offered to pay a generous tithe to the church. Instant respect from the clergy.Went to the inn and rented several rooms. Asked if the proprietor minded if he spent some time ministering to the sick and infirm. Innkeeper balked at that in the tavern, but was willing to rent out some stable space for that purpose. Sold.In about ten minutes of game time, the cleric had set himself up in the stable with a long line of eager peasants needing his care, made several powerful friends in town and gave the rest of the party cover to move about freely. After that, he contented himself with the offscreen work of tending to the sick while the rest of the party did their thing in town, knowing that if they got in trouble, he’d be easy to find. Simply. Superb.Had it gone on much longer, I would have started to suspect that he was trying to steal the spotlight, but…he wasn’t. He did the minimum necessary to set the conditions in town to massively favor the party, and then he was happy to fade into the background and let everybody else shine. I was beyond impressed.

This is a complex question to answer but the simple response is that “welfare” has made an overwhelmingly positive impact on the lives of poor people. It has reduced suffering, hunger, sickness, despair and even reduced crime. The money spent on “welfare” has been shown through research to pay for itself many times over as the years pass by.Some would have you believe that welfare is a handout to the poor that allows them to do nothing and get away with it. Many Conservatives/Republicans (if not most) see it as a free handout to undeserving Black people and they have worked assiduously to punish the poor by constantly reducing any type of aid to them. They use ridiculous and demonstrably false numbers of “annual total of welfare amount received” to stir up outrage and rail on about theft and abuse. In reality it’s a mantra or racism, hate and resentment.There are many pitfalls and traps associated with making generalizations about any kind of “welfare”, the first of which is thinking of people on aid as “them” or “those people”. Once they have been labelled an unfortunate series of images comes to mind, perpetrated as part of the “big lie” by Republicans. People are being trained to see aid recipients as lazy, unmotivated, thieving, baby-makers, takers, non-producers, drains, criminals - and minorities. It’s easy to portray them as the “undeserving poor” as a result. The ironic thing is that poor Republicans who voted for Trump don’t see “their” welfare as a problem - only the welfare for “someone else”, ie urban Black people. There are even protests with competing signs telling Trump to “end welfare” and “keep your hands off my welfare”. All generalizations are false, and this one is no exception but the rule seems to be that if you are White and on welfare then you must deserve it, but if you are Black and on welfare then you must be a lazy, unmotivated criminal. Many Republicans have been trying to force welfare recipients to take drug tests to get welfare and in the two states where it was tried it showed that welfare recipients use drugs at a lower rate than the general population. And the money for the tests is exorbitant - and means less money for the poor who need it. It is again a racist, patronizing attitude held by Republicans about “them”.The US spends about 600 - 700 billion dollars a year on about 128 different aid programs, plus another 1.4 trillion on Social Security. Many people consider things like SocSec and Unemployment compensation as “welfare” but these are not government handouts - everyone pays into SocSec throughout their lives through payroll deductions and the maximum they can receive annually when they retire is about 26,000 dollars a year. Unemployment compensation is an insurance policy paid mutually by the employee and the employer. It’s not a hand-out - you paid for it.Other programs like Section 8, which provides housing vouchers, Food Stamps, School Lunches, WIC, Heating Assistance and so on are direct welfare programs where assistance is provided. The purpose of these programs is mainly to protect children. It is reprehensible to punish children for the acts of the parent. Children have no say in their coming into this world and reducing or eliminating support for them through aid to the impoverished is tantamount to punishing them for existing. The Conservatives/Republican attitude is that poor people have children to get welfare (which is untrue - welfare families have the exact family size on average as non-welfare families) or that withholding welfare will prevent poor (minority) families from “breeding” in the first place. They even accuse Democrats of offering welfare to encourage “breeding” minorities to vote Democratic, which is ridiculous on its face if you think about it for even one minute. It makes the assumption that people (minority people) have no real agency or ability to think and that because they got some welfare that they will vote Democrat because no other position, be it defense, patriotism, abortion, capital punishment, schools, environment, etc have absolutely no bearing on how they vote. It is again a patronizing, racist attitude held mostly by Republican/Conservatives who prefer children to starve rather than using tax dollars to relieve poverty.Some people look back to the “good old days” before welfare when the Church was the primary supporter of the poor and they wish to go back to that time. “Let the Church feed them” they say. Even Ron Paul, when he was running for President, said that poor people with sickness should turn to the Church for treatment, as if any parish could support even one cancer victim. I can’t speak for other churches but my church, which is one of the largest in the town, runs a 10,000 dollar a year deficit and even one cancer victim showing up for treatment would force the church to close its doors. The church is not able to support the sick and the poor, and it has neither the resources to spread support equitably throughout rural and urban areas, or in a consistent fashion, or the oversight to insure the funds they have or disburse are being managed legally and with honesty. In addition, a church may require an oath of fealty before it feeds a poor man, something that is repugnant - blackmail for food. And who would want the Church of Scientology serving up their brainwashing with the soup anyway? No, the best and most efficient delivery of aid is still the Federal government.Again, Republicans/Conservatives treat “them” on welfare as interchangeable widgets. They need to get a job. They need to stop breeding. They need to keep their hand out of my pocket. And yet even a full time job at minimum wage wouldn’t even cover the rent on a one room apartment in most places in the US, let alone food, utilities and childcare. And Republicans/Conservatives are adamant about keeping the minimum wage low. As far as breeding is concerned, Republicans/Conservatives seem to think the solution is for Black women to “Keep their legs closed” because they are constantly restricting family planning, contraceptives, sex education, birth control and abortion. They even try to define it as a “moral” issue - the poor are inherently immoral, breeding like rabbits and having many children by different fathers to get more welfare. They don’t see the hypocrisy of their own moral failures such as Republican Senator David Vitter screwing hookers while wearing diapers or the entire Fox News sexual harassment scandals from top to bottom. When you’re White and have money, morality is a flexible issue. In addition, the Republican/Conservative mantra is to “get a job” and yet they go out of their way to make it difficult be refusing to support things like child care services and so on. They are guaranteeing another generation of welfare users by providing no tools or supports for them to get out of poverty. And the change in employment opportunities, pay grades and spending power has only exacerbated the problem. The poor are expected to work one, two, three jobs at horrible wages rather than be allowed the opportunity for any kind of assistance and then the Republicans/Conservatives provide no kind of healthcare insurance opportunities for them. How is this crazy situation going to play out? Some Republican/Conservatives such as Roy Masters have proposed taking children from impoverished families and raising them in government centers, inculcating them with “their” ideology and then forcing them into the Military as a way to force them to “pay back” the government for its largesse. They never say who would pay for these childhood military barracks and camps, training, schooling and so on. I assume it would also require forced church attendance and other ideological idiocy.Now, this isn’t to say that welfare isn’t damaged and isn’t abused. There is plenty of room for improvement and the delivery of welfare services needs to be reconsidered. The plethora of programs is more of the issue than the delivery amounts. It would be far more efficient and cost effective to provide recipients with cash than program vouchers, but because there is no way to insure wise spending of the money and protection of children we have avoided that option. It may be that it would be better to use the 600 - 700 billion dollars we spend on 128 welfare programs and devise a custom “need template” and deliver that money as “monitored” or “directed” cash to individuals. This would eliminate a massive expensive bureaucracy but it would be difficult to monitor. In addition, reforms to SSI and SSDI need to be promulgated. These are among the most abused programs in the nation and it’s too easy to get on them.In the future, with a growing population and more jobs lost to automation we may find that welfare becomes solely “workfare” where child care is provided and all able bodied and even handicapped are required to work on government projects to get that check. The benefit of this approach is that it gets the idle off the streets; it gives people pride and a purpose; it provides some benefit to society through the services provided and the cost can be subsidized through the taxation of the aid provided. It provides an artificial ladder to success to replace the myriad of programs now existing and is not just a cash handout.In some ways the Conservatives/Republicans are right to be alarmed about the growing use of aid, but their assumptions are wrong and their draconian solutions ill-advised. The vast majority of people who use aid don’t do it because they are lazy and don’t want to be on it. The solution isn’t to starve the poor into becoming more industrious. The solution is to find more ways to provide opportunity, even the socialistic opportunity of something like the WPA that existed in the 30s, the forerunner of “workfare”, to allow the poor to retain their pride and give them the opportunity to climb the ladder of success instead of look for trouble on the street and turn to crime, because in the current climate, education looks increasingly less like to make a difference in the future success of a child and crime looks far more promising and inviting. When that is the case, then society has indeed bifurcated, possibly forever, into two distinct groups, those who have and with luck continue to have, and those who have not and who will never have. Only then will the Republicans/Conservatives be happy - when we live in a world without aid where the poor live in cardboard boxes at the dump, standing in their own filth, waiting for the garbage truck to deliver their next meal - but invisible to the world of the “haves” and therefore of no consequence.

I'm an entrepreneur in Indonesia. My normal weekday takes up the following template:06:30 - Wake up, breakfast6:40 - breakfast done, I review my calendar for any appointments. My secretary is my timekeeper, so I'm not always aware of what appointments I have that day. I review my "today to-do" list and pick the ones and allocate times to do it during the day. If I have more time left I'll get more to-do items.7:00 - I bathe. As I do, I let my mind roam free7:10 - I leave for the office, and having a driver means I don't need to drive, so I skim through ALL my email and RSS feeds. I immediately reply all high priority mail. I flag the ones I deem important and trash the rubbish. The rest are usually FYIs. When that's done, I sleep the rest of the journey to let my mind defrag the info.8:00 I'm at my desk, and I live by whatever my schedule tells me. I usually never set meetings before 9:30am, so my schedule usually starts with reading the flagged emails/RSS and actioning them.If not in a meeting, I take a 5 minute break every 55 minutes of work. Emails that are important immediately get actioned. I've had bad experiences where I email people who only check their email 1-2 times a day, and when I miss the window I have to wait 12-24 hours for them to read it - time which they could have used to action on the email. Any and all to-dos immediately get noted down in my to-do inbox. That's just a container until I really handle things at night.12:00 - lunch (if I don't have a lunch appointment) I always pack lunch, so I eat at my desk. Saves time that way.12:15 - done with lunch, I always brush my teeth.12:20 - go over my RSS, and read anything important12:50 - relaxation time for 10 minutes as I refresh my brain cells.13:00 back at the desk and back on my calendar until end of the working day.If I have a dinner meeting I stay in the office until such a time when I can go straight to dinner. I always sleep in the car. If no dinner meeting I'm usually home by 7:00pm7:00pm - dinner7:30pm - one hour of piano. That way I de-stress while my tummy digests.8:30pm I hit the home gym. An hour of cardio, followed by 1 (roughly) hour of weight training.22:30 - during 10 minutes of cool-down I review emails and rss again - flagging, not reading.22:40 - bathe22:50 - I review every new to-do in my inbox, and organise them in categories or projects. I make sure ALL to-do items start with a verb.23:10 - I finish whatever work is left, including remainder flagged emails and rss items. Then whenever I finish, I look at all my to-do items and decide the ones I have to do the following day, and put them all in my "today" list.Saturdays are "Strategy day" - where I set my strategic sights on what to accomplish in the next week. I swim every Saturday morning - fantastic relaxation and reflection time which helps me think, before going for some noon golf if I'm not in a meeting. 12:00 onwards I'm no longer working.Sunday is no-work day. I make a point of this. Sunday mornings I walk the dog, and I serve at church after that. I usually have lunch with family or friends, before a free schedule at night.Hope that helps?