Interesting Links for 03-08-2021

[andrewducker]

I think these people have opened a door into the void. Or the elemental plane of storms. Either way: don't!

(tags:weather video )

Government passed over 171 candidates to pick Bullingdon Club 'chum' of Boris Johnson for sleaze watchdog role

(tags:corruption conservatives BorisJohnson )

The 60s. When gay men married gay women and they all raised kids together. (In case you needed reminding this has been going on forever)

(tags:LGBT family history )

Medals at Tokyo olympics are recycled from discarded electronic equipment

(tags:gold Olympics recycling materials Japan )

Linus Torvalds gives a talk on why desktop Linux sucks

(tags:Linux video linustorvalds )

These states cut unemployment aid early to supercharge hiring. It isn't working.

(tags:welfare pandemic economics work )

'Lord of the Rings' Amazon Series Sets Premiere Date - and releases its first image

(tags:lotr amazon tv )

Scotland's growing sewage spill problem

(tags:waste water scotland )

Big tech companies are at war with their employees over remote work

(tags:Technology work )

Pelicans eating things they shouldn't!

(tags:birds food )

The Green Knight has a roleplaying game that's giving me flashbacks to my youth!

(tags:roleplaying movies fantasy )

A map of culture values. Which countries go together?

(tags:maps society )

I just discovered that Tom Bombadil was a playable unit in the Battle For Middle Earth computer game!

(tags:games lotr video WTF )

Comments

[dewline]

2. Why am I not surprised by this?

3. I have no doubt that this has been going on for as long as it's been needed as a survival tactic.

4. There is something heartening in this news.

6. Of course it backfired, and of course the specific US states whose governments made these decisions don't care that it backfired. Causing the pain was the whole point. They want a perpetually half-starved work force.

8. We've been working on building both bigger and better under Ottawa in order to make sure that what we dump into the Ottawa River is at least less harmful than it's been even if we can't dump less of it overall.

9. That's going to be an ongoing argument for the next year or ten, isn't it?

12. Canada doesn't even get to show up on the second version of the chart for 2020!

[andrewducker]

I suspect that the "are offices any good for working in" argument will continue indefinitely, no matter how much proof there is!

[danieldwilliam]

Our CEO made an interesting point to one of our engineers, who had been explaining to the CEO that he, (the engineer), didn't think he (the engineer) got anything extra that he needed to do his job out of being in the office and interacting in person with people, which was that his managers got something they needed to do *their* jobs out of seeing him in person.

My expectation is that organisations and people will sort themselves in to three groups over the next two years (1) always in - 90% in the office (2) Hybrid 3/2 or 2/3 and (3) always out 90% of the time out of the office. People and firms will naturally sort themselves in to the category that they think suits them. And over the five years following that many of them will decide they were wrong. Competative advantage probably lies with the always out group all other things being equal - renting offices is expensive.

[mountainkiss]

Unless you think that collaboration is creative, in which case advantage might lie with one of the other groups. It’s probably more about “how done” than “which one”.

[andrewducker]

"his managers got something they needed to do *their* jobs out of seeing him in person"

How sure is he of that? Has it been quantified? Are they being less productive with homeworking? By how much?

(Which is to say that I see a lot of statements about homeworking, both pro and anti, and very little backing them up)

[jducoeur]

Agreed. I take note of the fact that my employers, who are absolutely obsessed with metrics, formally announced a month or two ago that the official policy going forward would be that hybrid is the norm, with fully-in-office and fully-remote available as needed. I'm pretty certain that they didn't make that decision without running the numbers carefully.

[naath]

Desktop Linux is perfectly fine, I don't see what the problem is. (Ubuntu 20.04 on actually a laptop here, Dell XPS13). Work insisted on sending me a Windows laptop (exact same brand) which annoys me no end (not the spec, the design of the OS)

It's what you are used to.

Well, unless you wanna buy games, then you buy the OS on which the game you want runs. Which is why I have a PS3 and a Wii somewhere 'round here.

[andrewducker]

"Desktop Linux is perfectly fine, I don't see what the problem is."

Did you watch Linus very clearly explain what the problem is?

[symbioid]

I find it interesting to see that he has a very similar take to how Windows approaches things... (Not nearly to the fanatical view MS does, but "Don't break userspace") really does fit the "MS programs will always run no matter how old" (even if that's not 100% true it's true enough).

I do like

[naath]

yes, and I get that this situation creates a butt ton of work for some folks somewhere, which the community should fix to make life easier for devs, but I don't see that making the UX actually suck as a user. Maybe because I don't play games on my computer and nearly everything I use (for fun) is webby these days, so it's mostly the browser dev teams working hard, but they did the work, firefox on Ubuntu is just fine.

[andrewducker]

It's the dive software that Linus himself produces, which can't be web based (has to talk to the hardware) and he can't produce a build "For Linux" - it has to be many builds, because there's no backwards (or sideways) compatibility.

[anna_wing]

Whether remote-working is useful or not depends entirely on the industry and the organisation - what it is, where it is, what it does, how it does it, what it values, what it needs its employees to value. Not to mention the relative leverage that individual employees and organisation as a whole have in respect to each other, which will also vary with time, place and demographics. With tech workers, I expect that the populations will sort themselves out eventually. People who prefer personal interactions with their work will gravitate to companies that share that preference. But basically, any organisation where the expected output depends on in-person collaboration and interaction will have found its capability degraded by remote working.

The cultural values map is interesting and a useful insight. Countries do in fact have cultures, if they're around for long enough. They're not static, or monolithic (one of the major arguments against the whole "cultural appropriation" issue) but they exist, and they affect public policy.