Uriel238 [all pronouns]

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.

France revolted violently for less… and again after Charlie X started stripping away the Napoleonic rights.

Is that her face?

Is that the sound of fast-approaching leopards?

Is it face-eating season?

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.

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’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.

They want baby teeth which are turned into happiness charms for grandparents.

When I had four adult teeth yanked for orthodontics, I felt horrified and sad and they gave me silver dollars (post 1976) for them.

I think they just felt sorry for me.

According to the Trump administration, the entire population within a specific range of millennials are gang members to the last.

OG Boomers and Silents are gang members, but they’re called lodges and esoteric societies, sometimes churches for tax reasons.

Remember that the primary efforts of Black Panthers and Hezbollah are community support (often cooperating with NGOs like Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders), we can expect that other terrorist organizations are similarly extremist.

In 2008 during the California Proposition 8 controversy, there were was a clever ad suggesting You want to stop gay sex? Let them get married. It showed a gay couple transitioning from honeymooning to blasé cohabitation and even bickering as old spouses are wont to do.

He’s doing a suck job of it. The things he’s gutting are pennies towards his dark-souled oligarch masters. Cutting small government projects like the NEA, PBS or like FOSS grants is only used as an appeal to fiscal responsibility conservatives that aren’t willing to cut into old-people benefits like Social Security and military sacred cows. Not because gutting tiny projects does anything useful, rather it gives the vibe that representatives are doing something.

This is an appeal to the imbicile MAGA though the tech bros might have specific FOSS projects that compete with their own commercial offerings. Not enough to cut all FOSS grants, though.

I was eccentric when I was seven years old. They had meetings about me.

Was diagnosed with ASD around 50 years.

This is, really, any choice terrain occupied by a regional people that is equally coveted by nearby empires. Another example is Korea, wanted by China, Russia and Japan so much you could make an epic RTS game out of the fighting going on there. It also features its own legends, like Queen Min who refused to stay in her place as a woman, ran a spy network that saw the industrialization of Japan (and the imminent threat that posed), and she was ultimately assassinated by a platoon of literal ninjas.

Poland has its own legends, including obtaining the Enigma machine and making sure the allies all had one and the current protocol two weeks before the Germans invaded.

I like the Polish Home Army version of the Molotov Cocktail which added sulfuric acid and a sugar–potassium-nitrate saturated (dry) rag, that didn’t need to be pre-ignited, but would self ignite when the bottled fluid mixed with the rag.

No, I’m saying the species as a whole is failing because 77 million people could be simultaneously fooled into voting against their own better interests. It shows that democracy can always be subverted. People, brilliant rocket scientists, in the case of my own father, can be tricked by demagogy into backing malicious despots and kleptocrats, and the plutocrats and oligarchs can afford to find and hire them.

Careening towards more than one imminent great filter, it’s going to take some miracles of innovation to successfully navigate them, and more divine providence in sociopolitical theory to reorganize people into some sort of community-focused government system that resists subversion by those who seek power. So while we’re not completely fucked, we’re absolutely playing long odds.

Granted, not all is completely lost. Homo Erectus went through phases where their species was reduced to less than ten thousand, and they had to suffer through a harsh epoch of millennia before recovering and populating the world until they were weeded out by competing cousin species. We may still survive in small, meager tribes, but all this culture is going to be lost, ground into the geological record.

We may get lucky, but that is not to say we can evade catastrophe at this time (not without extra-terrestrial intervention or other deus-ex-machina techological development that its inventor doesn’t try to restrict and license), but a tenth of our population might survive, and every day we do nothing, or stay subjugated to far-right efforts to cling to power, is a day that more of us are doomed to perish, or rather fewer that our world will be able to sustain, while we figure out how to migrate offworld.

77 million people voting for an autocrat is a symptom of a greater problem, one that has plenty of other symptoms, and has shown us we are just not foresighted enough to act early; we can only be rational with effort, and are otherwise prone to emotion and fixed action patterns. It’s easier to blame the weirdos and marginalized in a society, than to recognize class conflicts, or acknowledge the wealthy fuck the rest of us over to retain their wealth and power.

Feel free to provide evidence that I’m wrong. I often present harsh reality as I understand it with hopes that someone knows a development I don’t. And sometimes that even works! But for now, we have to face the dildo of consequences unlubed.

You think political illiteracy is an epidemic only of white European descendants?

When 77 million people do the thing, you can’t really blame it on character. At that point it’s a failure of the species. Don’t worry, we won’t be plaguing the world for too much longer.