The thing is what I wish for immigrants and refugees, I wish for absolutely everyone.

But I see fascism, autocratic tyranny and the hoarding of wealth and power as sickness rather than character flaws.

Remember the meme about everyone could have a 32 hour work week and three-day weekends (and a productivity boost) but the billionaires are opposed?

Well everyone could have post-scarcity communism but the billionaires are opposed.

As we quickly learned during the George W Bush era, no news media agency can be trusted. To counter this, check reporting of the same incident from multiple news agencies and find the consistent facts. Everything else is suspect.

In a hurry, see if Reuters or AP has covered it, but verify when you have the time.

Done this way AJ is perfectly viable as a source for news, in that the bias can be filtered out.

FOX and OANN are known to lie or misrepresent facts entirely, but that gets filtered through cross-checking.

Trust, but verify.

My management tricks (which came from being managed) included calling for a 90 minute meeting if I needed 45 minutes, and bring snacks.

Oh and when someone finishes an all day job in half a day, let them goof off for the rest of the day.

But then I believed that whole happy workers are maximally productive workers thing that, well, every serious management study reports.

We may have to revise our education system so that it’s not connected to our credential system.

There’s a story about Einstein teaching physics and letting the kids who didn’t want to be there leave and do something else with the time. The ones who remained were quite attentive.

There are multiple models for teaching that do something similar, let kids approach a subject when they’re ready. Yes, they goof off a lot early on, but eventually even STEM and literature call to them, and they pass equivalency exams in their late teens.

In the meantime even when I was in high school in the 1980s, our system was created to sort kids into sports stars that might become college players, STEM kids that might become scientists and engineers, and House Hufflepuff (common laborers).

The education system has only gotten progressively worse since then, as its budget increases have not kept up with inflation. And then there’s the whole effort to insert evangelist Christianity (+ American Exceptionalism + Conservativism–Capitalism) into public school.

And to this day, we still use the lecture / lab / test model that excludes a lot of alternative comprehension and learning models. We’re not looking to teach kids, rather we’re looking to harvest the geniuses, and turn the others into bonded laborers and soldiers for billionaire vanity projects.

So it means we all get to be Spartacus.

I may be thinking of the July Revolution of 1830, in which case you’re right. They’re not the same, just related.

The French Revolution took about a century to fully process through. There were several instances of guillotines and piles of heads. We usually know about the first one (and the second one for those who’ve seen Les Misérables. ) During the post 1789 process there was also a weird cult thing that looked a bit like MAGA, until even the cultists got tired of Robespierre’s bullshit.

Marie Antoinette was a perfectly serviceable princess / queen and fielded charities and smiled at the commoners and all the things ambitious feudal ladies are supposed to do. She never said Qu’ils mangent de la brioche but the rumor of it was current, and sped her way to the guillotine. She was also accused of sexual perversities, including The German Vice (lesbianism) most of which had to be explained to her so she could deny having ever done them.

Note that Disney and Universal pirate other people’s stuff whenever they want.

Note also that all the Generative AI services are very protective of their big cistern of web-crawled data, say when China borrows it for DeepSeek.

Content, content everywhere and not a drop of principle.

Looney Tunes did it first.

These days, the best thing to be armed with when drama happens is a camera. Preferably with a tripod, a good zoom and a shotgun mic, but that is typically a big ask.

I’m getting a paywall or adblock block or something. Anyone have a less problematic link to the article?

BMW and VW are the same beasts they were when they were backers of NSDAP in Germany.

Between the VW emissions cheating and BMW’s subscription car features, it seems their attitude towards commerce has not changed a jot.

Thought about this before. I’d build out the high-speed internet structure to encompass all the populated parts of the world (omitting coverage across large swaths of open sea) and provide free, no-questions-asked WiFi internet service to absolutely everyone.

(Yes, a lot of places don’t have devices, but parallel programs already exist to get people enabled on cheap devices)

The obstruction would be legal battles with current stakeholders that have regional monopolies and are very addicted to making odious profit. (Looking at you, Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, etc.)

Then let’s see Microsoft do this with full transparency and keep a publicly accessible list of forbidden words. Then evidence this is a general policy should be plain.

If your oath against genocide has any exceptions, it’s not an oath against genocide.

So long as one person is in danger from genocide, we all are in danger from genocide.

I’d say the fake-work product from telecommuniters is by necessity of a higher grade of quality than in-office fake work. A cleric can simply run around between the copier and the coffee machine carrying a folder of papers, and that would be sufficient to entertain the boss. The at-home worker has to create a spreadsheet or chart or something that seems important and relevant to the department goals. to make sure the boss feels he got a day’s worth of work.

A very common reason is because you’re not clerical staff, you’re courtiers. The bosses want an office with people running around hurriedly doing busy stuff, which accounts for a lot of the bullshit jobs that workers are assigned, not that they need to be done, but to serve as a Tiger Repellant Rock. Or the bear patrol, which is from the same Simpsons episode.

A more conscious answer is that offices had been leased out for years at a time, and leaving them empty would mean they go to waste. While this means workers time is wasted (commute, prepping lunch out etc.) they don’t care about that as much.

When RTO orders became required (RTO or be laid off / RTO or get reassignment) that was part of the ownership class reasserting their dominance over a working class who was suddenly in demand after the lockdown and post-epidemic period. It was notable that even the Democratic officials were glad to memory-hole all the progressive programs that manifested to facilitate business during the lockdown. In fact, the telecommute controversy became the keystone issue, since workers learned they were happier and did better work at home. But the boss wanted to see them labor in their cubicle.

We suck at retaining class consciousness, or the super-giant conservative propaganda machine is really good at suppressing it. Seriously, FOX News and OAN are poison.

ETA A more comparable occupation is garden hermit which is a hired performer who lives in an aristocrat’s garden as part of the scenery, say if he’s comically eccentric. He may even have duties like ringing the hour chime or pretending to make shoes.

That Schwarzschild radius is larger than I expected. I was expecting sub-molecular.

Also BMW was a major sponsor if NSDAP when the Communists were considering nationalizing private wealth.

All the hate and cynicism directed at Bavarian Motor Works can never be enough.