Workers Don't Like Being Threatened
to force a return to an office where the boss likes to threaten them
Links are at the end, longing for a human touch.
Barely anybody clicks on the links, and I wonder what I’m doing wrong in that regard. If you have a theory, please let me know in the comments.
“Bosses across the country are tiring of remote work and mandating a return to the office, citing the desire for more teamwork and mentorship, as well as concerns about lost productivity at home.”
Lots of people who worked remotely during the past few years miss the office and want to get back, looking for water cooler camaraderie and escaping from less than ideal work-at-home circumstances. About a third, though, for a variety of reasons, want to stay home, and don’t like being strong-armed back to the office.1
You know things are getting serious when a process earns an acronym. RTO is “Return To Office,” and GAFC is “Get A Fucking Clue;” inhabitants of executive suites everywhere, baffled by resistance from the work-at-home contingent, are hiring RTO consultants to discover why people don’t want to come back, and how best to inveigle them into doing so on at least a part-time schedule.
The answer, according to these well-paid consultants (dubbed ‘office whisperers’ in the Times) is “don’t be a simple-minded asshole.” It’s less about persuading workers than it is about gentling the boss.
Who knew. Who knew that workers might resent getting muscled by CEOs who make on average more than 300 times the average wage of their employees.2 We’re a family!
“250-foot asteroid speeding towards Earth; NASA clocks terror rock at 38102 kmph”
Great moments in headline writing. Ed Kazala says that terror rock is “a hybrid offshoot of Black Metal and Death Rock.” The story is in the Hindustan Times, which has a compendium of asteroids with homicidal intent.3
Fortunately NASA is designing an asteroid-killing rail gun, as discussed here a day or two ago.4
“Exxon Mobil is reviving its plans to reach production goal of 1 million barrels of oil equivalent per day in the Permian Basin by 2027, although the path forward is expected to include some peaks and valleys.”
That’s about double what they’re producing at the moment.5
Climate scientists have said we need to keep pretty much all the remaining oil and gas in the ground beginning now if we want to keep global warming below 1.5° Celsius, which is just under 3° Fahrenheit, by midcentury, but a new study from researchers at Stanford using an AI model suggests that we’ll exceed that target sometime in the 2030s no matter what we do in the interim.6
The study, published Jan. 30 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides new evidence that global warming is on track to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial averages in the early 2030s, regardless of how much greenhouse gas emissions rise or fall in the coming decade.
It’s a compound interest sort of thing.
Have we talked about Fermi’s Paradox? It’s a question posed by physicist Enrico Fermi in the 1950s. Fermi thought the math indicated that intelligent life must have developed somewhere in the universe, with the prospect of advancing to an interstellar travel phase. If that’s so, why haven’t we met them, or seen any signs of them?
One suggested resolution to the paradox is that civilizations reach a certain point of technological sophistication and inevitably destroy themselves.
We’re on track to do that after only 100 years or so of sending signals out to the universe, accidentally at first and deliberately later. That’s a pretty narrow window even if we last another century or two. Unless somebody out there is looking this way at exactly the right moment, they won’t have seen us, and we’ve had an even narrower window in which to detect other civilizations.
People have suggested other resolutions, but the self-destruct button is a popular element of a popular answer.7
We weren’t technologically unable to avoid climate hell but we’re obviously temperamentally incapable of doing so. Maybe we’ll figure out how to live with it long enough to develop bug out science. For about a hundred people. Meeting our neighbors out there in the æther, on their own space-faring superyacht: “Oh, you wrecked your planet? Us too!”
Hold still while we blast your tentacled ass.
Meanwhile, how about some universal health care to treat the various impending medical insults from climate change and the more mundane, existing day-to-day ones? How about declaring a climate emergency? Declaring a climate emergency takes one guy. One guy could do that, but then he’d have to act on it to avoid looking stupid. The bar is too high.
“Pearson became well-known in his district in 2020 when he led the charge to stop a planned crude oil pipeline from running through his neighbors’ backyards.”
That’s Justin Pearson, the Black state representative who along with his colleague Justin Jones was booted from the Tennessee legislature ostensibly for protesting in the state house against the lack of action on preventing gun violence.
One can’t help but think, though, that maybe expelling Pearson was a twofer, with another motivation being that he cost GOP donors a bunch of money with his successful environmental justice activism.8
Pearson became well-known in his district in 2020 when he led the charge to stop a planned crude oil pipeline from running through his neighbors’ backyards. At the time, oil giant Valero and pipeline company Plains All American were planning to build the 49-mile Byhalia Pipeline through predominantly Black communities in Memphis—an area which the companies believed would be “the point of least resistance.”
One year and lots of national press later, the Byhalia Pipeline was cancelled—and MCAP and Pearson’s work was largely credited for the win. That work included “months of multiracial and multi-socioeconomic coalition building across the country, fierce pipeline opposition from Memphians, negative national press coverage about the pipeline and environmental racism, legislation being proposed at the county and city level, and court cases challenging eminent domain,” Pearson wrote.
Jones is back in the legislature now, after the Nashville Metropolitan Council voted unanimously to fill the vacancy created by his expulsion with him. Pearson may be returned by his own county commission sometime this week.9
Both men will be running in special elections to replace themselves.
Music!
Selections recently have been on the gloomy side, a trend that ends with Luscious Jackson and The Gits, who one supposes could be considered gloomy but are at least more energetic about it, particularly The Gits, fronted by the late Mia Zapata.
Kaleida, “Odyssey;”10 This Mortal Coil, "It'll End In Tears;"11 Luscious Jackson, "Fever In Fever Out;"12 The Gits, "Frenching the Bully."13
That, Comrades, is all there is
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Why don't we click on links? Lazy.
Why haven't advanced life forms from the universe contacted us? They noticed what we're like and decided they didn't need that kind of trouble.
I might be the wrong guy to ask, I turned off comments a long time ago.
That said, I've kind of made it my schtick to provide a daily roundup of interesting links that people, if they may, can click through on. Wither or no they do is not on you. I find them a ripe field for harvest.
That would be Thomas Jaxon 'Tommy Jack' Ten Bears, and what he said ...