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Home Front: Culture Wars
Some Things Will Never Be the Same After the Chinese Coronavirus
2020-04-16
Kurt at Town Hall
You cannot have a social upheaval like the Bat Gobbler Flu and expect everything to go back to exactly how it was before the ChiCom’s fetish for eating weird Schiff turned the world upside down. Pressure has a way of changing what it is applied to. Sometimes it makes diamonds, other times it makes things go splat. No one expected something like this to come out of leftist field and derail our booming economy. We wanted to let the good times roll, but no one saw them rolling right off a cliff.

The pandemic and the response are going to not change some things much at all. For example, once the economy gets rolling again the survivors will rally and we’ll knock unemployment way down while pumping the Dow back up. But other things are another story. Some things were changing anyway, and this body blow is going to accelerate the trends towards creative destruction as old ways of doing things fade away quicker than expected and new ones come to the forefront. We’re going to see many areas where change was always coming, and now it’s come faster. In many cases, it will help crush our enemies, which is awesome.
Posted by:g(r)omgoru

#9  Probs w videoconferencing:

1. Can't read body language of those at the table

2. Can't detect eye movements accurately i.e. can't discern skepticism, inattention, obliviousness, scorn, hostility, other warning signals that your message is either unwelcome or unheeded

3. Can't pick up on side conversations that indicate resistance or conspiracy against your plan / intentions.

4. Can't follow up with confidential and impromptu 1:1 hallway conversations.
etc

In the game that is corporate guerrilla warfare, if you're remote you're flying blind.
Posted by: Lex   2020-04-16 21:16  

#8  We-l-l-l-l... let's not get carried away. The video conferencing tools have to become a LOT better before remote workers will be on the same plane as face-to-face team members.

Currently, given the shitty state of videoconferencing, if you're not at the table then you don't count. You're out of the loop.
Posted by: Lex   2020-04-16 21:10  

#7  The 70K a year is for the country club and the sheepskin. Most student time these days is spent in activism. The actual education an afterthought and is only a shadow of what it was 50 years ago.

Only STEM is relatively untouched, and they are working on that.
Posted by: KBK   2020-04-16 20:10  

#6  Smart companies will hire the best people from all over the world and let them work at home. The best people will work for the best companies and the dinosaurs will be left with the morons.

If you can't trust your employees to work from home then you can't trust them at all. You can't breath down their necks in their cubicles all day long, you have no way of knowing if they're working in their cubicles of playing solitaire or reading Rantburg. The only thing that matters is that their assignments are completed on time.

Gridlock on the freeways will be a thing of the past. Demand for gasoline will fall as will the price of gasoline. Car insurance will be cheaper because miles driven will be less and cars will last a lot longer if they're sitting in the garage most of the time. Air pollution will decrease. Companies will spend less on buildings and more on being productive. Workers will spend less time commuting and more time being productive. Workers will have more disposable income without the companies having to increase salaries.

But there could be drawbacks. Beware of locating your home office next to the laundry room or a bathroom. Your home office must be quiet, functional and free of distractions. Beware of spouses and children who suddenly think they have access to you for stuff that has nothing to do with work. Beware of getting hooked on daytime television. It is not a vacation.
Posted by: Abu Uluque   2020-04-16 15:04  

#5  Hopefully this article is also correct...
Posted by: M. Murcek   2020-04-16 14:16  

#4  Federal student loan payments are suspended for six months and unpaid debt collection is frozen as part of coronavirus bailout
Posted by: Skidmark   2020-04-16 14:09  

#3  "DeVos"? Not the gubmint?

Is the DM's copy editor trying to tell the DM readers that it was the DeVos family that created the student loan shitshow?
Posted by: Lex   2020-04-16 12:31  

#2  DeVos reaches settlement in lawsuit over loan relief program
Posted by: Skidmark   2020-04-16 12:12  

#1  The slashing satirist speaks truth. A new Mencken for our Age of Unreason.

He's bang-on about the collapse of the American four-year bullshit-degree bacchanal that we call "higher education." If you thought hairdressers and pizza shops and millions of other small businesses were vulnerable to ruin thanks to the lockdown, apply the same logic to about 3,000 little four-year colleges. Those without big endowment funds are now dead.

Which means we can finally kill the sorta-college-but-not-really for all model that Clinton and Zero pushed, disastrously, for 20 years and that has given us $1.5 trillion in student debt, a corrupt and incompetent elite, and an unbelievably shitty "Woke" media & entertainment industry.

= progress

Posted by: Lex   2020-04-16 07:59  

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