u/superdurszlak

At some point of development of most of my settlements, with maybe one Amevian / Lizardkin exception (I sometimes play with Classic Races), the settlement starts to collapse.

For a long time, I manage to maintain the population happy and loyal enough, but as it grows it's more and more on the edge. Then, a single major disturbance (loss of an army, running out of money in a costly war etc) sort of tips the scale and the collapse begins. Science, knowledge and administration all drop like crazy so I lose techs to support my economy and facilities. I'll gradually have a bigger and bigger shortage of workforce, I can downscale non-critical industries or services but ultimately it only makes the collapse take more time.

Then, I tried recovering from between 50% and 90% peak population loss (sometimes under 100 citizens) and it almost never worked. At some point everything is degraded, the upgraded structures cannot be maintained anymore, everyone's unhappy even if they're fed etc.

Should I just demolish half of my city, and downgrade the other half?

How do you recover from this without essentially building from scratch?

Title.

Also can't see the trigger warning flairs that used to be there in the past, so before reading on be aware it may trigger you.

There's one coworker who for some reason just has to loudly inform everyone in the office about his political views, and his hatred towards people with particular other, otherwise benign views.

This time we were talking about corporate jobs and somehow it shifted towards working with disabilities. Within a couple of minutes I "learnt" from him that

- Hiring disabled people is some sick leftist DEI propaganda, because they hire people who are not able to contribute, so they shouldn't be hired

- But also disabled people who do not have a job and collect allowances or pensions are parasites or freeloaders

Tried to oppose him without being too specific but he was relentless, and I didn't feel like telling him I'm a working autistic. How do I know what he would do, then, hit me? Belittle me in front of other people?

I reached out to HR on the same day because I don't want to have to, I don't know, stop using the office kitchen and having meals just to avoid this guy.

I've never been hired through any DEI programmes whatsoever, always found jobs on the job market. Also when one particular company with DEI stickers all over the place found out I'm autistic, I went through some sick situations like trying to "help" with my autism through corporate trainings and rating my mental health in performance reviews. I was in a DEI working group and felt completely helpless when disabled coworkers were bullied. Now it looks like that I do not even have a right to to have a job.

I've left a job where my boundaries weren't respected at all, and there were absurd expectations not directly to my job performance, like being able to adjust myself and somehow "overcome" my disability to function in a work environment that was... unsuitable. To be honest, it was so loud and chaotic that even non-disabled coworkers must have been frustrated.

Now, I'm about to start in a new role soon, and I need to figure out how to better protect these boundaries and secure reasonable accomodations if the new environment would require any.

What's your strategy for securing your boundaries and getting accommodations without coming across as aggressive or rude? Is it even possible these days to be assertive and _not_ come across as either of these?

One of the ways I tried at my last job, and which was completely ineffective, was to present this as a way to improve my performance. Since I was a Platform/DevOps/SRE/Security Engineer (depending on day of week) and this job required lots of deep work, I tried sell the idea that having fewer meetings, in more condensed blocks would allow me to deliver far more effectively - I had 1,5d a week for relatively deep work, unless something ad-hoc happened, and the rest was lost to meetings and other interruptions. I also argued that a lot of these meetings could be replaced with asynchronous communication. I was told this is the job culture and I have to adapt, repeatedly.

In my new role, I will be a Platform/DevOps Engineer with some security-related work too, and again I will need to be able to work with as few distractions as possible. On the other hand, I'm not really comfortable with disclosing my disability during probation period, and I'm still awaiting "official" disability status, which is separate from diagnosis itself. Even though unofficially the company could learn about it from my online activity, I'd rather wait until end of probation and possibly getting my disability status reviewed before official disclosure and requesting accomodations.

Still, how do you approach this - at least at places where it's possible at all to have some boundaries?