Yeah. I see it as dating back all the way to Mass Effect 3's horrible ending when the player base got really upset about the game/ending and Bioware had to start really locking down their comment threads and eventually shut down their forums in order to avoid the toxicity of the fanbase.
And Inquisition sold like hotcakes despite all of the chuds who said that they'd never drop another cent on Bioware.
54% of the federal workforce was required to show up at an office every day. According to the study, just 10% of federal employees worked exclusively from home. Those allowed to have hybrid schedules ended up spending an average of 60% of their work time at federal offices.
Man, hybrid schedules are where it's at. If you wake up at 4AM, you should be able to start working on the stuff you can and then get dressed and go into work at 8 and show up for your scrum saying "my day is half over, here's what I've got".
Eh, it's no so difficult to wrap your head around the meta.
Imagine two football teams. One has a coach that learned football back in the 1920s as an assistant to Knute Rockne.
Another has a coach that learned football back in the 1990s as an assistant to Marv Levy.
The coach who learned under Knute is likely to think that the coach who learned under Marv was insane and running plays that didn't make *ANY* sense. Pure madness.
If you have a narrow window, there's a lot of stuff that just won't make sense to you and will strike you as nuts.
What if we thought that Gamergate was a failed run on the part of a particular social movement that telegraphed all of the coming drama and showed the playbook that the future political fights would be using and, as such, gave away how to fight against this social movement in the future against such movements as the one pushing Harris for president in 2024 thus making Trump 47 possible?
There are people out there, essential people!, who cannot answer the question "what do you do here?"
Michael Cain notes that there are the engineering types who spend a week thinking about how to answer a question.
I've met these people. They're uncanny and I don't know that I've ever met one who was paid what they were worth.
It's when someone shifts to "therefore, the people who work for the Federal Government are like this", I'd say "whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa, hold up there, Tex."
I believe someone at Bell Labs is like that. I'm not sure that someone at USAID is like that. I'd enjoy hearing why 95% of those who work at Treasury might be like that. I would *REALLY* enjoy hearing why 95% of those who work at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would be like that.
If you want to tell me that each Federal Department has 5% of people whose job it is to deal with intangible imponderables that have zero deliverables, I suppose I'd shrug and say "okay, yeah... life's like that".
Micromanagement takes many forms. I find the kind that devours 15 minutes during your morning coffee to be less onerous than the kind that devours seven minutes every two hours.
My career since working at the restaurant has been variants of "what *KIND* of micromanagement do you want?"
Though, once in a while, I do get blessed with a period of benign neglect for a half-year or so.
The Left needs to do a much better job of explaining that answering the email would put the country in danger because the whole "yowling like a scalded cat in response to asking what you did last week" thing doesn't play well to normies.
It was excellent advice right around until I met Claude.
Now I don't know if it is, anymore.
I mean, it's the equivalent of telling someone to learn Latin. It will help their thinking. It will help their English. It will give them small amounts of pleasure as they wander about their day...
But we're at the cusp of something and I don't know that learning to code remains good advice for the same reason it was good advice in 2005.
Even if "Deliver the Product" isn't something that I do in a given week, I can do stuff like "sit with QA and discuss artifact capture/verification" because they care about that sort of thing for the previous iteration.
"I documented one of our procedures."
"I went through and made edits to Bob's documentation of his own procedures."
"I created a power point slide for management that has a picture of one of our artifacts and a link to where it's staged and a screenshot of the document that tells any given new guy how to do the same."
While it's true that I work with a handful of engineers who do work that involve letting the universe flow through them for weeks at a time before they become a perfect manifestation of God's Will, the majority of the folks I work with would be able to answer Elon's email with "I worked on the Hickory project. I squashed two bugs and only created one."
Remember "Learn to Code"? When Clinton was talking about all of the coal miners she was going to put out of work, one of the clarion calls put out by journalists and opinion journalists everywhere was "Learn to Code".
A guy who spent 22 years in the mines could retool their skillset and get a job writing HTML for the local Coca-Cola bottling plant, maybe.
The retraining of coal miners in central Appalachia became a testing ground for "learn to code" efforts.
Well, in January 2019, a bunch of Journalists started losing their jobs and posting about it and, of course, Right-Wing Trolls everywhere started posting, as the link above puts it, "a torrent of mockery and hate speech mixed with suggestions to learn to code".
All that to say: There are a bunch of public sector workers who are going on the news and telling awful stories about how awful it is to lose their jobs.
These news stories are not being met with sympathy about how awful it is to lose one's job but suggestions on how to train for new careers in different sectors of the economy.
Remember the dialog about Free Trade in the "Talking Points" episode of The West Wing?
PARSONS: I do. You were so desperate to help a bunch of soft-money-donating CEO's, that you sold us up the Ganges River.
JOSH: I'm sorry, but I-TOBY got to ask you not to public with this yet. Hard as it seems, we're growing this economy...
PARSONS: For who? Foreign investors? I mean, what good is the economy without the people in it?
JOSH: You knew we were for free trade. You knew it when you endorsed us five years ago.
PARSONS: Yeah, 'cause you told us we might lose old economy jobs - shoe manufacturing - to some dirt-poor country, but if we trained ourselves we'd get better jobs. Now they're being vacuumed out of here, too.
Parsons ended up being wrong in that episode, of course.
The Republicans were thrilled to send the jobs overseas. It'd be like sending buggy whip jobs to India. They can do the old jobs, we'll create the new ones.
Anyway, that's the setting that we'll be hearing Federal Workers talk about losing their jobs. They'll be talking about it to people who learned to code after changing careers. They'll be talking about it to people who saw their jobs outsourced and sent to Singapore or India for a few years before the jobs slowly started wandering back.
I imagine that the responses they'll get will feel like hate speech. A torrent of it, even.
I work for a corporation as part of a team that has a scrum four days a week. On the good days, when stuff happens like it should, each member of the team gives a brief (45 second) rundown of yesterday's doings (or last Thurs/Fri if it's a Monday) and says "No Blockers". This meeting may take 10 minutes if we devote some time to discussions of the weather. (On the bad days, somebody is blocked or starts a ramble and we're 10 minutes into the thought processes behind changing the order of operations of this or that process or, worse, management asks a weird question and we're stuck taking about QA/Test metrics for 20 minutes.)
Anyway, that's the context for this next part:
There might be one week a year where I don't get anything done. This week is almost always the last week prior to Christmas break in December.
If it is any other week in the year, I will have no problem coming up with a list of stuff I accomplished, tested, or blew up in my face the week prior.
So when I heard that government employees would have to send an email where they listed off the accomplishments of the last week, I will remember how *I* felt when we moved from "not having scrums" to "having scrums".
"WHAT A PAIN IN THE BUTT!!!!", I thought. The worst part was that since this transition happened right around the time we transitioned to "Safer At Home" for a year or two, we kept the old weekly meetings that daily scrums were designed to replace. (Now that we're back in the office, the weekly meetings have morphed into a slightly larger monthly meeting.)
So if the complaint is something like "how dare management expect me to list off what I did yesterday as if they pretended to understand what it is that I do?!?", then I am 100% on board. Freakin' management, man. Just leave me alone and let me do my job. Here are some tricks that *I* use to deal with the indignity...
If the complaint is "I have no responsibility to be accountable to the people who employ me", I've gotta say that "no, you pretty much have to show up and list what you did. It sucks."
And responding to *THAT* with resistance? That has me wonder "Gott damm, what *DID* you do last week?"
Then we won't have to interrogate whether suggesting that the best candidate that the Democrats had available in 2024, the one that did everything perfectly, the one who made no significant mistakes, run for president after losing a startlingly close election... whether suggesting that she run again counts as "trolling".
The serious indications of something wrong were all the way back when Biden refused to drop out, when Harris was named his replacement, and then when the Democrats looked at the 2024 election and said "Yeah, Harris was great, the problem was the voters."
We're in aftereffects of screwing up badly.
Now, you say "These would be the lawyers in charge of prosecuting military personal for war crimes and issuing illegal orders, fired."
I would ask to see whether the official reason given was something like "they screwed up by doing X" and then whether X actually happened.
Because, at that point, we get to argue over whether X was sufficient and whether they also prosecuted people for war crimes is less significant.
Lemme know if things ever get so bad that you're willing to say that maybe the Democrats should change somewhat.
FBI Director Kash Patel tonight has instructed his employees to ignore @elonmusk’s productivity inquiry, saying, essentially—we will evaluate our own people, thanks. pic.twitter.com/BkisigRPNq
I'm not finding anything about Cricket in Chicago in the 1910s... though, in 1913, there was an international Cricket match in Philly where the combined USA/Canada team took on Australia.
"What if next week they fired all the heads of the every service’s JAG?"
Quite honestly, my first thought would be that I'd probably wonder if every service's JAG helped give Article 92s to soldiers who refused the Moderna shot.
Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week.
Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/24/2025”
Yeah. I see it as dating back all the way to Mass Effect 3's horrible ending when the player base got really upset about the game/ending and Bioware had to start really locking down their comment threads and eventually shut down their forums in order to avoid the toxicity of the fanbase.
And Inquisition sold like hotcakes despite all of the chuds who said that they'd never drop another cent on Bioware.
"
54% of the federal workforce was required to show up at an office every day. According to the study, just 10% of federal employees worked exclusively from home. Those allowed to have hybrid schedules ended up spending an average of 60% of their work time at federal offices.
Man, hybrid schedules are where it's at. If you wake up at 4AM, you should be able to start working on the stuff you can and then get dressed and go into work at 8 and show up for your scrum saying "my day is half over, here's what I've got".
"
Eh, it's no so difficult to wrap your head around the meta.
Imagine two football teams. One has a coach that learned football back in the 1920s as an assistant to Knute Rockne.
Another has a coach that learned football back in the 1990s as an assistant to Marv Levy.
The coach who learned under Knute is likely to think that the coach who learned under Marv was insane and running plays that didn't make *ANY* sense. Pure madness.
If you have a narrow window, there's a lot of stuff that just won't make sense to you and will strike you as nuts.
"
Consumer revolts, man.
If we've learned anything, we've learned to have the modern audience in place *BEFORE* we abandon the old one.
"
Your definition of "sane" is too narrow.
"where do you even begin to try to counter such a nonsensical thing?"
I'd definitely support going out of your way to trying to think nonsensically as a first step. "Sense" may be holding you back as much as "sane" is.
"
What if we thought that Gamergate was a failed run on the part of a particular social movement that telegraphed all of the coming drama and showed the playbook that the future political fights would be using and, as such, gave away how to fight against this social movement in the future against such movements as the one pushing Harris for president in 2024 thus making Trump 47 possible?
Oh, it's Amanda Marcotte.
Not even.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/17/2025”
There are people out there, essential people!, who cannot answer the question "what do you do here?"
Michael Cain notes that there are the engineering types who spend a week thinking about how to answer a question.
I've met these people. They're uncanny and I don't know that I've ever met one who was paid what they were worth.
It's when someone shifts to "therefore, the people who work for the Federal Government are like this", I'd say "whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa, hold up there, Tex."
I believe someone at Bell Labs is like that. I'm not sure that someone at USAID is like that. I'd enjoy hearing why 95% of those who work at Treasury might be like that. I would *REALLY* enjoy hearing why 95% of those who work at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would be like that.
If you want to tell me that each Federal Department has 5% of people whose job it is to deal with intangible imponderables that have zero deliverables, I suppose I'd shrug and say "okay, yeah... life's like that".
Hell, make it 20%. 25%!!!
What about the other 75%?
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/24/2025”
Joy Reid is out at MSNBC. Variety has a breakdown of how she let down her queer audience down.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/17/2025”
Micromanagement takes many forms. I find the kind that devours 15 minutes during your morning coffee to be less onerous than the kind that devours seven minutes every two hours.
My career since working at the restaurant has been variants of "what *KIND* of micromanagement do you want?"
Though, once in a while, I do get blessed with a period of benign neglect for a half-year or so.
"
That one would be a good argument to throw in there. Talk about the importance of being able to WFH as well.
"
The Left needs to do a much better job of explaining that answering the email would put the country in danger because the whole "yowling like a scalded cat in response to asking what you did last week" thing doesn't play well to normies.
"
It was excellent advice right around until I met Claude.
Now I don't know if it is, anymore.
I mean, it's the equivalent of telling someone to learn Latin. It will help their thinking. It will help their English. It will give them small amounts of pleasure as they wander about their day...
But we're at the cusp of something and I don't know that learning to code remains good advice for the same reason it was good advice in 2005.
"
My heights are not quite so lofty.
Even if "Deliver the Product" isn't something that I do in a given week, I can do stuff like "sit with QA and discuss artifact capture/verification" because they care about that sort of thing for the previous iteration.
"I documented one of our procedures."
"I went through and made edits to Bob's documentation of his own procedures."
"I created a power point slide for management that has a picture of one of our artifacts and a link to where it's staged and a screenshot of the document that tells any given new guy how to do the same."
While it's true that I work with a handful of engineers who do work that involve letting the universe flow through them for weeks at a time before they become a perfect manifestation of God's Will, the majority of the folks I work with would be able to answer Elon's email with "I worked on the Hickory project. I squashed two bugs and only created one."
"
Remember "Learn to Code"? When Clinton was talking about all of the coal miners she was going to put out of work, one of the clarion calls put out by journalists and opinion journalists everywhere was "Learn to Code".
A guy who spent 22 years in the mines could retool their skillset and get a job writing HTML for the local Coca-Cola bottling plant, maybe.
Here's the wikipedia:
Well, in January 2019, a bunch of Journalists started losing their jobs and posting about it and, of course, Right-Wing Trolls everywhere started posting, as the link above puts it, "a torrent of mockery and hate speech mixed with suggestions to learn to code".
All that to say: There are a bunch of public sector workers who are going on the news and telling awful stories about how awful it is to lose their jobs.
These news stories are not being met with sympathy about how awful it is to lose one's job but suggestions on how to train for new careers in different sectors of the economy.
Remember the dialog about Free Trade in the "Talking Points" episode of The West Wing?
Parsons ended up being wrong in that episode, of course.
The Republicans were thrilled to send the jobs overseas. It'd be like sending buggy whip jobs to India. They can do the old jobs, we'll create the new ones.
Anyway, that's the setting that we'll be hearing Federal Workers talk about losing their jobs. They'll be talking about it to people who learned to code after changing careers. They'll be talking about it to people who saw their jobs outsourced and sent to Singapore or India for a few years before the jobs slowly started wandering back.
I imagine that the responses they'll get will feel like hate speech. A torrent of it, even.
"
I work for a corporation as part of a team that has a scrum four days a week. On the good days, when stuff happens like it should, each member of the team gives a brief (45 second) rundown of yesterday's doings (or last Thurs/Fri if it's a Monday) and says "No Blockers". This meeting may take 10 minutes if we devote some time to discussions of the weather. (On the bad days, somebody is blocked or starts a ramble and we're 10 minutes into the thought processes behind changing the order of operations of this or that process or, worse, management asks a weird question and we're stuck taking about QA/Test metrics for 20 minutes.)
Anyway, that's the context for this next part:
There might be one week a year where I don't get anything done. This week is almost always the last week prior to Christmas break in December.
If it is any other week in the year, I will have no problem coming up with a list of stuff I accomplished, tested, or blew up in my face the week prior.
So when I heard that government employees would have to send an email where they listed off the accomplishments of the last week, I will remember how *I* felt when we moved from "not having scrums" to "having scrums".
"WHAT A PAIN IN THE BUTT!!!!", I thought. The worst part was that since this transition happened right around the time we transitioned to "Safer At Home" for a year or two, we kept the old weekly meetings that daily scrums were designed to replace. (Now that we're back in the office, the weekly meetings have morphed into a slightly larger monthly meeting.)
So if the complaint is something like "how dare management expect me to list off what I did yesterday as if they pretended to understand what it is that I do?!?", then I am 100% on board. Freakin' management, man. Just leave me alone and let me do my job. Here are some tricks that *I* use to deal with the indignity...
If the complaint is "I have no responsibility to be accountable to the people who employ me", I've gotta say that "no, you pretty much have to show up and list what you did. It sucks."
And responding to *THAT* with resistance? That has me wonder "Gott damm, what *DID* you do last week?"
"
Hopeless is as hopeless does.
Of course, maybe the Republicans will implode.
Then we won't have to interrogate whether suggesting that the best candidate that the Democrats had available in 2024, the one that did everything perfectly, the one who made no significant mistakes, run for president after losing a startlingly close election... whether suggesting that she run again counts as "trolling".
"
Oh no! We may have open borders until the Senate does something!
"
The serious indications of something wrong were all the way back when Biden refused to drop out, when Harris was named his replacement, and then when the Democrats looked at the 2024 election and said "Yeah, Harris was great, the problem was the voters."
We're in aftereffects of screwing up badly.
Now, you say "These would be the lawyers in charge of prosecuting military personal for war crimes and issuing illegal orders, fired."
I would ask to see whether the official reason given was something like "they screwed up by doing X" and then whether X actually happened.
Because, at that point, we get to argue over whether X was sufficient and whether they also prosecuted people for war crimes is less significant.
Lemme know if things ever get so bad that you're willing to say that maybe the Democrats should change somewhat.
"
And the jockeying for position has begun:
On “Yesterday’s Heroes”
I'm not finding anything about Cricket in Chicago in the 1910s... though, in 1913, there was an international Cricket match in Philly where the combined USA/Canada team took on Australia.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/17/2025”
"What if next week they fired all the heads of the every service’s JAG?"
Quite honestly, my first thought would be that I'd probably wonder if every service's JAG helped give Article 92s to soldiers who refused the Moderna shot.
"
"
Holy crap:
"
Also, they are not in the chain of command, and cannot give orders to the rest of the military, so it doesn’t really matter what they think.
OH GOOD!
All the more reason to worry about other, more pressing, concerns.
"
My assumption is that the 28th Amendment is a null set, containing nothing.
But, you may point out, you're just an amateur! You're not an expert!
That's true.
You may go on to point out that the ABA has said that they recognize the 28th Amendment.
That's true as well.
Might be nice to have someone figure out whether Biden was right or whether the Archivist was right. I mean, *OFFICIALLY*.