23 years after the UK "handed over" its colony without ever asking the people who lived there, the "one country two systems" status of Hong Kong has effectively ended under the cover of the pandemic. Its (already strained) civil liberties are now subject to Beijing's control. https://t.co/YFAWItLOEw

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) June 30, 2020

I opposed the Hong Kong handover at the time, when anyone who did so was a “Western colonizer.” But it was always obvious this would happen and now it’s happening.

People are fucking stupid.

AITA for shredding my fiancé’s prom picture?

People are saying this is fake, but there are people like this out there. I know because I dated at least one! I’m not much of a sentimentalist, but I had some army mementoes that I liked. My girlfriend at the time threw them all away — even knowing I wanted them — because she said they were “holding me back” and “it’s just old junk.”

The “old junk” was a 105mm Howitzer casing I’d fired myself, my maroon beret that I wore through thick and thin, and some medals. I didn’t really care about the medals but the other stuff I was pissed about.

In hindsight, I should’ve broken up with her then and there.

What computer users see in security warning boxes #enigma2016 Very, very true. pic.twitter.com/8V4SlGwKAV

— Iain Thomson (@iainthomson) January 26, 2016

Yep. These are pointless because only 0.01% of computers users understand these — even most IT people do not.

The Long, Unhappy History of Working From Home. As the coronavirus keeps spreading, employers are convinced remote work has a bright future. Decades of setbacks suggest otherwise.

I told you the MBAs were going to push back against working from home, and hard. This is only the first shot in the propaganda campaign to come.

Within two years, most of the “work from home” gains will be reversed. Sooner if there is a vaccine before that time.

I think the biggest mistake we made is telling Americans that wearing masks is to protect other people. Know your audience!

— Jenni Konner (@JenniKonner) June 26, 2020

No, the biggest mistake was spending two months lying about the efficacy of masks, saying that they didn’t work, all the while many “progressives” claimed wearing a mask and social distancing was racism.

This was the root of the problem.

Twitter Bros told me to eat meat, lift weights, and get sun.

My doc told me none of these things.

I was sick then. I'm healthy now.

— andrew (@apdonovan1990) June 28, 2020

Doctors and their advice have been co-opted by various industries, so most of their general advice is wrong to only accidentally correct. Their specific advice (which is not usually doled out to civilians) is typically correct. So, they can tell you the merits of using fibrin and cyanoacrylate adhesive to seal arterial sutures, but for diet and nutrition advice they are actively harmful.

One of the most valuable twenty-first century skills is knowing enough to know when to depend on experts and when to ignore them completely.

I think there’s some merit to this idea, though it’s more a matter of seizing an existing opportunity.

I’m starting to get the idea that some governments (okay, just about all of them) are instrumentalizing Coronavirus (however dangerous it is) to reinforce and strengthen austerity. This isn’t the end of austerity but its final victory as most societies are ruthlessly third-worlded.

The plutes will never fail to take the opportunity to hoover up more wealth if they can. In the US, Fed “stimulus” combined with de facto austerity for states and municipalities will mean that more and more of the nation is owned by the super-wealthy. This wasn’t a necessary outcome but it’s the one that occurred and is occurring. I don’t see anything standing in the way of this trend; in fact, I expect it to worsen as we’re only in the first year of the two- to four-year long Pandemic Depression.

There is not likely to be a New New Deal.

So: bad times ahead, most likely.