Totally agree.

It seems like a balance could be struck, but that just isn't the way the world works.

I was going to comment that it's amazing that a platform which is heavily reliant on user generated content is treating the people who are creating and managing that content so poorly but, in reality, that's the model facebook used and it seems to be going fairly well for them. Everyone would much rather facebook show them what their friends are up to, but they just keep prioritizing ads and similar content and we keep using it.

I just don't think it's possible to build an "all-internet" message board anymore. The business guys eventually get a hold of it and the obsession to wring more and more money out of it takes hold.

At the time I might not have agreed that newsgroups were populated by mostly not garbage people but now that I have seen the depths to which online conversation can sink...USENET was the MIT or Harvard of online discussion. I miss being able to talk politics and have people actually talk about the issues rather than assign other people to a tribe and dismiss them.

The spam became ridiculous. Providers were always complaining about the amount of resources and disk space it required as well.

Google has quietly become a fairly bad search engine and it has nothing to do with reddit. The amount of spam in the results is ridiculous. You can't even narrow a search anymore...you just get the same spam pages with the additional term tacked on to the same content.

Yup.

Everyone hates it, its an objectively bad design choice, but they just keep doing it.

We are providing you with the all-in cost of the ticket including the $8.99 all in ticket pricing fee.

Ticketmaster sucks. The absolute worst. You can't even buy tickets from them anymore, the scalpers buy everything and charge you quadruple.

Is that what they're calling the homeless in SF now to try to put a prettier face on their problems? #rebrandhomelessness?

That seems like a very obvious and very obviously negative thing to do. Some of the politically correct terms that have arisen over the years are completely fair and warranted, but its increasingly being used as a shell game to keep anything from sounding too bad even when it is, objectively, very bad.

CEOs...tell me more about how you're going to retain top tier talent while forcing everyone to come to the office.

Still resisting remote work because something something office good?

The cost of living in these cities is ridiculous and what you get for those high prices is trash. This is true even for workers making good money.

I will look more in to the actual crime stats based on some comments in the thread but, subjectively, San Francisco around the convention center was really becoming a horror show. I was going out there every year for a while and it kept getting worse and worse every year. It's this ultra-progressive city and yet they can't find a way to deal with the mental health crisis which is, literally, screaming at them as they walk down the street. I read the articles about shit and needles being everywhere and I didn't actually notice until the last time I was there...when it got really bad. The homeless encampments are getting worse everywhere...LA, Denver, Boston.

Say what you will about statistics but it is not a big leap for people to want to leave these places with very visible and obvious crises for places where the numbers say you may technically be at higher risk but you're not being accosted on your way to work every day.

No one but republicans is going to say republicans do any better on these issues but it is clear that liberal cities are not managing the problem well. The one thing no political party in america can ever do is admit they are failing at something and so the problems just continue to get worse.

The issue with this type of thing is that we have no robust privacy laws in place and no reason to trust the government to follow those laws based on past experience. It's not a crazy idea from a functional standpoint, but there is zero protection for anyone on the back end.

Nonsense.

The cost of a few plane tickets and a couple nights in a decent hotel is a lot less than the rent on office space. Getting the drivers and devs together is an absolutely fantastic idea...but most of their time is better spent where they can actually do work and not constantly get interrupted, they don't need to do that every single week.

Remote work is better for the environment, better for employees' wallets, better for employees' stress levels, saves employees hours and hours per week, reduces company operating costs while increasing employee morale...the list goes on and on. Yet executives continue to try to convince us that some ethereal office kumbaya far outweighs these much more readily quantifiable benefits.

Grow up. This is business, not your favorite college dive bar on a Saturday night.

How did managers in global companies cope with employees based overseas before the pandemic if face time is so critical? As such a manager I can promise you I was not flying to multiple continents every week to get face time with people.

Are these executives ensuring they have face time with all of their directs every week? Any CEO of a multinational company is going to be spending a majority of their time on a plane. How can these companies possibly continue to function if *the head of the entire company* isn't even getting weekly face time with their directs?

The answer is, of course, that all of this is complete and utter nonsense. The good thing about executives speaking out like this is that its easier to identify companies who don't care about employee morale, aren't forward thinking, don't change with the times, don't want to take an opportunity to cut costs while actually improving morale and productivity...in short, companies you don't want to work for. They can enjoy their third tier talent while the high performers flock to companies with a better chance of future success.

The only way to win a nuclear war is not to fire any nuclear weapons. That includes if "they" strike first because, while you'll be blown to smithereens either way, at least you won't be murdering millions of people who would never want to kill you if given the option. Nuclear weapons are a tool of the demented sociopathic political class the world over.

2 grand is a little low. 20 grand would be closer to 30% for what I was quoted in a cold climate. We were redoing all of the HVAC anyway and I wanted to go with a heat pump over oil. I was willing to pay more for the heat pump, but it was a LOT more.

It's kind of amazing to me how some leaders cling to going in to the office full time. It seems very obvious that the world is changing, but I suppose there are always holdouts.

We have these traffic problems. We're spending tens of billions on infrastructure just to sit in traffic anyway. Driving to my office takes 40 minutes off peak and an hour and a half on peak. Thats 3 hours a day I'm wasting in the car, adding to my stress levels, costing me money in gas and maintenance, and why? So I can do the same thing I do at home for 2/3 of my day and the other 1/3 in person instead of on a conference.

Meanwhile, we're also needlessly creating pollution and, if you don't like that, we're needlessly increasing society's dependence on oil. A war in Russia/Ukraine we're not involved in takes a bite out of my paycheck...and for no good reason.

I would assume that a lot of people publicly pushing back on WFH have a stake in the oil industry.

Agree but, "might" is the operative word there, though. For a while there all the VPN providers were saying they didn't collect logs, and then turning those "nonexistent" logs over to law enforcement. PIA seemed to be the one genuinely not be keeping logs, but then they got acquired and turned into a privacy disaster. So even a provider that is privacy focused today might not be if they get acquired.