I’m really hoping his cult of personality dies with him. (Or tries to glom on to Junior, who lacks, well, everything required to make him an effective populist leader).

Of all the people in the Trump orbit, I am most afraid of Jared. He seems to have been smart enough to avoid getting stuck in any of his father-in-law’s messes. And he is way, way too close to dictators abroad. I don’t think he wants to actually insert himself into politics. But he could end up being the one that finances the next attempt a dictatorship in the US.

Not exactly the same playbook. Hitler was much younger when he tried his coup. And I don’t think Trump is writing any manifestos, unless he gets put in the same cell with his ghost writer.

If Trump goes to prison, he’s old enough that he will likely die there, even with a shortish sentence. And there’s a chance that a smarter buffoon takes over the party, but did you see the clown show last night? I doubt any of those has what it takes.

Trump is not the next Hitler, no matter how badly he wants to be. My fear is that the next Hitler is just around the corner, and uses the Trump playbook to come to power.

Perhaps this “Biden Crime Family” thing was just projection all along…

I was very ambivalent about WFH all through the pandemic. But I had a job which involved hardware development. When I was forced home due to the pandemic, I had to bring half my lab home. When we were contemplating going back and being hybrid, I told my boss that I had too much physical shit to interact with on a daily basis to be in two places. I either had to stay home, or move all my shit back to the office and stayed there. But I had an actual cubicle and a lab there. If I needed privacy to get stuff done, I could sort of get it.

Meanwhile, I got a fully remote job offer and took it. It is more of a systems role, and I can do much more of it remotely, so it works well. I still make several trips a year to the home office though, in an extremely HCOL area. Their office is one of the super-open-floorplan offices. Before the Pandemic, I was told it was packed and nobody liked it at all. But during the pandemic, people literally got days of their life back because they no longer had to spend 2+ hours a day commuting.

They’ve been trying to get folks back to the office at least once a week, but they’re not forcing the issue. If anything, the managers end up there more often than the workers. When I go there, I have the advantage of being able to expense my travel, so I can stay close. And with the exception of that one day a week, the office itself is a ghost town. There might be a few dozen people in a place that can “hold” hundreds (like sardines). But on that one day, there are so many people talking that if I have a critical meeting, I just stay in my hotel instead. Plus, so many meetings are with offsite people anyway (the company has employees around the world) that even with so many people on site you’re still doing the meeting over the Internet anyway.

Open floorplans are an absolute joke. They need to die.

I didn’t know you could buy insurance for fucking