Remote work:

– better for environment
– better for productivity
– better for companies
– better for diversity
– better for workers
– better for families

Offices:

– better for wasting time
– better for middle managers

Am I missing anything?

— Chris Herd (@chris_herd) January 13, 2020

Mostly, it’s not middle managers who are against remote work — it’s executives and MBA types who get a thrill from seeing their minions trapped in offices, at their beck and call. It’s part of a status competition between upper executives, mainly.

People are really surprised that Lupita Nyong’o didn’t receive an Oscar nomination for her performance in Us?

In case no one noticed, Us was a horror film, which other than for effects nearly never get nominated for anything in any Oscar category. That it happened to be by far the best movie released in 2019 doesn’t matter a whit. The snub had nothing to do with racism and everything to do with general anti-horror attitudes.

Symptoms may include: https://t.co/F40N1hvoMq pic.twitter.com/45E0zgDwJT

— Aimee Terese (@aimeeterese) January 12, 2020

The annoying “progressive” phrasebook.

A difficulty with being an anthropologist in your own society: To coherently explain certain social norms, is itself a social norm violation.

— Samo Burja (@SamoBurja) January 12, 2020

Social norms only work if they are implicit and flexible to some extent, while spelling them out transitions them more into the realm of law rather than norm.

The whole point of wokeness is to aggressively stop a large coalition political movement, this distinct possibility arose twice in the past 10 years, and at each point there were rapid accelerations like weirdos showing up to bank protests demanding people line up by skin color. https://t.co/CjWHs9CGdu

— stricture (@bog_beef) January 11, 2020

That is correct. Similarly, #metoo became about upper middle class women ruthlessly enforcing their assortative mating preferences and advertising their extreme sexual dysfunction.

I wish it weren’t true, but it is.

When I graduated high school way back in the mists of time in 1994, the price of entry to a middle class life was $30,000 or so. That’d pay for cheap room and board, four years of college at a state school, and provide a little spending money. Now, that cost of entry is closer to $100,000, and far more in many areas. That’s in constant dollars, by the way.

It’s no mystery why millennials and Gen Z are struggling. The vig for having an ok life has gone way, way up.

It feels odd to be living in a time when you still, barely, have access to the last computers and browsers that work correctly, the last time one has control of the information experience to some degree.

People don’t even realize that this control is being wrested away, walled garden by walled garden and all the “for your own good” security prevarication and fear-mongering. In my lifetime, we’ve gone from machines that could do whatever we wanted them to do to machines that only do what Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadellq and Tim Cook allow them to do.

Such a terrible change, and fuck anyone that had anything to do with it, including all the people who tell me it’s no big deal.