This right here. There are some commutes that you cannot pay me enough to tolerate... because while I consider the elevated salary the money necessary to cover the time wasted while commuting, the employer will look at it as a need to treat you like you're the inventor of sliced bread and expect a higher level of performance/results.

Don't you just love those meetings that could have been resolved by email?

I still remember at a small company our COO told us that if you are asked to come to a meeting and within the first 10 minutes, if you do not have an agenda or you realize the meeting does not concern you, you were free to get up and leave with no consequences.

That works fine if your project assignment has some amount of work that can be done at an unclassified level. If you are fortunate enough to work on a project like that, you can do hybrid.

It's nice to be able to commute a couple of days so you can interact with people... it's also nice to be able to just fire up stuff at home, work there, and get things done without spending the time commuting. Unfortunately, this does not work for people doing government work who deal with classified information. That will always and forever require commuting to a secured facility unless you want to build such a room/add-on at your house/on your property, spend the money to get the classified networks in, add a Faraday cage and other cell/radio communication restrictors, and all kinds of other controls that will require periodic inspections and audits... assuming you can even get appropriate permissions and authorizations to do such a thing.

Aside from all of the browser extensions, or using a mobile browser like Brave, the biggest problem is that these ads are intrusive and put in at random times rather than being inserted at the typical "commercial break" spot. Hulu used to allow you to watch a video without interruption if you watched some extended unblockable ads up front, and quite frequently I would do just that when I had a Hulu account. It was convenient and let me watch my video uninterrupted. If YouTube would implement something like this, I would actually be OK with it when watching stuff at home.

Then there's the fact that unless I am on wifi, I get to pay for the privilege of watching an intrusive unskippable ad AND have my video disrupted while using any mobile client or non-blocking browser. I won't use the YouTube app because they don't let you block the QUIC protocol on your phone. If you could block QUIC, a lot of the YouTube ads would be more easily blocked.

So you are saying you do not understand that the software companies and the tax preparation companies will be lobbying Congress to keep the tax rules as complex as possible so they can keep their fiefdom of tax preparation and deciphering all of these complex laws and regulations.

Sure it does. A flat tax would apply the same percentage across everything and eliminate the need for calculating your AGI... which is the worst part of this entire process. Generally speaking, I would prefer FairTax over a flat tax.

The rules themselves may not... but simplifying things and not having to do 200 page novels in order to file your taxes does. The software makers and tax preparation companies have built an industry around this... if you simplify the rules, the industry is no longer needed... which means those companies go away... so Block, Intuit, Jackson-Hewitt, et al, will do their level best to lobby Congress to NOT simplify the rules.

That's the obvious solution... simplify taxes to the point we don't have to write a 200 page novel in order to complete the task. However, if you think companies like H&R Block, Intuit (TurboTax), Jackson-Hewitt, and others are going to go down without a fight, guess again. These tax preparation companies and services are heavily invested in having as complex a set of rules and regulations as possible so that they can make their money. Eliminate this need by repealing the Federal Income Tax and using either FairTax or some kind of flat tax and you eliminate the need to have the IRS as big as it is... and you basically eliminate the entire individual tax return preparation industry.

I tend to view it as writers focusing more on agenda than telling a good story. It's happening all over the place. If you tell a good story, people will watch it, read, it, or listen to it. If you slap someone in the face with a message every three to five minutes, you will turn people off if that message does not match the consumer's ideology. Once that happens, you will have a difficult time winning back the audience you lost.

Part of the problem with ads is not just that nobody seems to be responsible for their content when they install nastyware, but also that the ads never seem to fit in the allotted space when a web designer includes a certain window size for them... so they end up expanding that window to fit the ad rather than either shrinking the ad proportionally or just going with, "This space is LxW and I will cut it off when it achieves that so anything outside of those dimensions will not be seen." It ends up distorting the page in question. I can also do without autoplay on video ads.

You had "Highlander" which was a great film... then "Highlander 2" which flopped onto its posterior, slightly below the coccyx... then "Highlander 3" (the apology for "Highlander 2")... then "Highlander 4" (the apology for the apology)... and then they finally realized they should quit while they're behind. The TV series was decent.

Oh wait... we're talking about "The Matrix"... a really good film... followed by its sequel that had my friend and me walking out, looking at each other and going, "Huh? We could have finished that story with about 15 more minutes if the characters made better decisions"... which was then followed by the third film that the same friend and I had to go see just because they set us up in the previous one... and we still weren't that impressed.

Generally speaking, Hollywood is sequel and franchise happy. They haven't had original ideas in along time and a lot of studios aren't willing to drop some money on a new one that ends up flopping so hard they can't even recover the deposit on all the soda and water bottles they end up providing... so we end up with reboots and sequels hoping to draw on nostalgia.

The biggest problem I see every time this argument rears its ugly head is that many people do not understand the difference between the two and will conflate them. Net Neutrality is about the source/provider and destination/consumer not being part of any equation, while QOS is all about the types of traffic such as streaming video vs reading email. With the two being conflated, people are erroneously led to believe that streaming video and email need to have the same priority, while NN should sooner be about Netflix vs Hulu receiving the same priority and gmail vs any other mail service receiving the same priority, while QOS will be more about video VOIP calls and streaming video receiving a larger chunk of the bandwidth at a higher transmission priority than viewing a relatively static web page or downloading and reading your emails. Are ISPs going to prioritize or enhance speeds within their own networks for stuff originating in their networks and being consumed by their customers? Absolutely. I don't know if you can really stop that, and if you try to enforce it by law all you are doing is effectively recreating Ma Bell. If an ISP is deliberately slowing traffic from a competitor, then yes... you have an anti-competitive practice and that needs to get nipped in the bud posthaste.

Let's not forget about being forced to spend some amount of your data plan for the "privilege" of downloading and viewing the ads... and that several of those ads will install malware, nagware, scareware, etc., if you miss the "close/dismiss" button. Of course, when you complain to the websites about it, they will say that they get all of their ads from RandomAdNetwork... and if you ask RandomAdNetwork, they'll tell you that they're just a distributor and aren't responsible. So basically, until someone tells me where I can point the finger of blame when these ads do nasty stuff to my phone, tablet, or computer, I will use whatever ad blockers I please, and if I can't read whatever site it is because they won't allow ad blocker usage, well, I guess I'll go elsewhere.

In other news, water is wet, the sky is blue, and politicians lie every time their lips move.