Also to not use ANY of the conservative buzzwords they have conditioned them to hear and associate with certain things. Also don't say anything related to all their Thought Terminating Cliches.

Don't say: Socialism, Communism, Capitalism, Immigrants, anything LGBTQ, anything economy, anything equality, anything related to DEI, anything they fixate on.

Instead, use actual basic terms and explanations without using the shortcut words that they have been conditioned/brainwashed with. It's a minefield, but can be done. Don't say the economy is bad, say the cost of food is very high and I wish we had better pay or cheaper prices. Don't say you want democratic socialism, say it would be great if medical costs were fair and we had more help with everyday things we all want and need.

Oh man, spot on.

Bigots and selfish really are both lost causes, good news is those 2 groups are a tiny fraction of the overall US population. Maybe 5-10% each. The 3rd group you named I 100% agree are idiots, but it isn't like they are idiots in all aspects. They are just politically and maybe empathetically / emotionally idiots. They fell for an absolute moron's very obvious lies and grifts. They fell for the most basic political cons. They fell for the same lies and grifts he has been doing for DECADES where he uses people and throws them under the bus at the end of their usefulness. He makes deals and doesn't pay. He gets support and doesn't hold up his end. He sells things with a promise that never comes true. Not to mention he is in the Epstein Files more than Jesus is in the Bible. Not to mention the 34 felonies. Not to mention all the bankruptcies. Not to mention all the laws he violates. Not to mention the insurrection and treason. Not to mention his corrupt ties to foreign governments and powers. Not to mention the pile of red flags with his character and behavior. AND THEY FUCKING SAW ALL THAT AND VOTED FOR HIM ANYWAY!

Yeah, in their daily lives they may be a smart farmer and know how to grow crops well, they may be a smart business person and know sales and management well, they may be a smart person and know a dozen difficult skills and be smart in many other ways.

But with politics and empathy, they are absolute bottom of the barrel, blind as a deaf bat morons and it is embarrassing to see just how gullible and dumb they are and it would be absolutely hilarious if it weren't for the fact that we have to be in the same boat as them.

Oh that's crazy, almost as if there was systemic oppression and injustice and rampant racist laws and police and policies for hundreds of years and that it still hasn't fully ended because people can be absolutely horrible to each other over something as trivial as skin color.

I would love to see the comparison to people in other countries to prove that point. Because the racists will look at the headline and go "yep, because they don't work hard, blah blah blah", but it is actually the residual effects of slavery and racism that persist to this day in every single aspect of our society. From laws, to police, to medicine, to jobs, to housing, to finance, to our language to the damn foods we have. It is insane and the racists will proudly and wrongly stand up and declare that racism ended with slavery.

My entire department, and honestly probably 95% of my company do all of our work on a computer on the network, that's the only requirement, it can be a PC at a desk on site or a laptop on WiFi at a coffee shop or home or the beach for that matter.

My company did the big RTO mandate last year after 6 years of WFH since Covid first started. Those 6 years marked some of the highest productivity and highest job satisfaction ever.

Then the C suite decided they either didn't like not being able to watch their worker bees go, or maybe they also had financial investments in the commercial district (conflict of interest if they do IMO) or maybe they got lonely? Or maybe they just read a stupid article that told them they should assert control by making their employees lives harder, who knows? But ours, like so many, all did it seemingly blindly like a fad, with no real reason or goal and just a vague empty promise of "collaboration and culture" whatever THAT even means.

Also really funny that in the same paragraph they will praise "cloud data", "cloud AI", "remote servers", but the humans can't be remote because reasons.

The real sore point that I resent VERY much is that half the company is out of state, so exempt, including my supervisor. So now me and my team commute in to an office to sit in a sad cube by ourselves and then we still have to join a video call for every meeting, but doing that from a conference room is hell compared to a headset and your own laptop, not to even mention all the technical issues we keep having while everyone at home stares blankly waiting for us, it's so dumb.

All I know is for me and my team and every single person I've talked to, the collaboration is so much worse in-person. The communication is worse. They wave their hands and say "collaboration", but then if one person is talking on the floor it is disrupting 50 people that can easily hear every word. The morale is worse. Everything takes so much long to do. So much time and money is wasted sitting in cars in traffic for no reason. I don't get it. It was a huge win-win when we all went WFH. We worked more, did more, were happier and more productive, saved money, saved time, communication was better since everyone was on the same level field.

Mandating RTO is wild to me, it feels like going back to typewriters in a world of laptops, because "well we used typewriters in the past, it's the way it's been done"

Then on the flip side, some people want and do better in a central office, fine, have that available, but don't mandate everyone does it. It should be up to each worker or their managers to figure out the actual need and what is best. "One size fits all" doesn't work, it fits 1 person and excludes 10.

I'm going to start a recruiting company to find this recruiting company a better job listing.

CEO gets the golden parachute, employees get the golden shower.

Don't forget that he is only president NOW because we are already ignoring the constitution. Don't act like breaking a different amendment is any different. We already lost our constitution and rule of law when we stopped enforcing them.

14th amendment - Section 3

"No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability."

He engaged in insurrection, Congress never voted to remove it, he is holding office NOW despite our constitution stating quite clearly he is ineligible.

Illegitimate president.

I don't know about you guys, but my company just mandated RTO a few months ago.

As expected, we now spend waste 8 hours: Commuting, Walking to and from meeting rooms, etc.

And the meetings, and the "collaboration", which are basically non stop all day long now, are just us talking round and round about all the things we need to do and how to do them for the 8th time, without actually doing them. But we sure LOOK really productive and busy. And I guess that's what management wants? Who knows.

With remote work I would do my job for 8+ hours per workday in pure focus mode. Knocking out solution after solution. You want XYZ to happen? Already done, here's a link to it. Have a meeting? Click join Teams call 1 minute early, listen and talk, while continuing to working on XYZ. You think we should try ABC for the XYZ project? Ok, I'll have it ready by tomorrow.

In office work is now spent walking from meeting to meeting, and you gotta leave 15 minutes before and it takes 15 minutes to get back and settled and you did not work on anything during. And they ask "so, how is project XYZ going?" "Good, good. Should be done in a few more weeks." And you maybe work on XYZ for 30 minutes uninterrupted that entire day, decide to skip any testing or QC, skip those extra features, skip checking with other teams if it will impact them, you have to skip all that to get it done on time. And it takes 3 weeks to do a 5 minute task. And it's inferior. And you talk about XYZ every meeting of every day, time after time, updates and statuses and comments on the ticket. And you finally announce you got XYZ completed and it's "yay good job" and management asks how the RTO is going and everyone is terrified to say "this is stupid and a gigantic waste of everyone's time and your money to put us in a giant expensive building just to not work on work, but to talk about working on work and we are getting only 10% done vs remote work". So we say "oh, fine" and management puts a little golden star on their report they made for themselves and they feel all warm and fuzzy that work is going great.

And thus, project XYZ was finally completed. A task that would have taken 1 person a few hours to do remotely, has now taken 8 people, 3 weeks of in office meetings and status updates and endless interruptions and discussions over every aspect of the project over and over again to finally complete. But we all LOOKED super busy doing it. And that's the important thing.

I'm personally, loving the RTO. I thought I would hate it, but I get to talk with friends all day and sit in meetings and daydream and the day flies by and I barely turned my brain on.

I'm happy to just do my job at home uninterrupted at my desk, but they sure don't seem to want that, so fine. Hope that works out.

My entire life has been a constant trend of prices going up, wages staying flat. That's now spanned across like 7 different administrations for me.

Some have been dramatically worse, like Trump, others just mild, but the trend has been the same for decades and it really all ties back to Reagan. Since then it's been a steady decline for 99% of Americans and a steady increase for the 1%.

But everyone keeps voting to help the 1% while simultaneously bemoaning the costs and pointing fingers at each other. It's wild.

They stopped making them out of gasoline.

It sure killed the last tiny iota I had left. My company had some WFH before COVID, we all did 6 years full WFH until just recently, they also announced a big "WFH is the future!" Thing last year. Then this year changed their minds and issued an RTO mandate.

I could MAYBE understand working in the same building if my whole team all worked directly together on the same project and we were all in the office, but a giant chunk of the company is all over the country, 3/4 my team is remote, but me and a few unlucky chumps have to drive in to join the video calls from a conference room that never connects correctly and is 10x harder to hear and communicate in.

But this is "for collaboration" we were told. It's been almost a year now and I have yet to have an 100% in person meeting or any meaningful collaboration or anything positive really. It's cost me more money, cost me and the company a lot of wasted time sitting in a car, it made work 10x slower and harder to do, my mental health dropped drastically and a ton of our best coworkers all left and the extra work got dumped on us that stayed.

It's hell. I also "quietly quit" because they don't even care about actual work getting done, only if everyone looks busy and the spreadsheet numbers look all pretty. I used to work hard and enjoyed my job, not anymore, and RTO + strict helicopter management is the cause.

My big company just did a full RTO mandate after 5 years full WFH since COVID started. It quickly swung from a good enjoyable job with plenty of work able to be done during all the bullshit meetings to an open office cubicle farm nightmare with harsh bright lights, tons of noise and distractions, and having to physically move from home to office and from desk to meeting room on different floors all the time eating up every last second of available time to do my ACTUAL job. And we are doing a bastardized version of Scrum and it's miserable.

I got reprimanded one day because in our daily standup I simply said that I had not made any progress on my tasks since yesterday because I was in meetings all day. Apparently that wasn't being a team player.

I have 3 decades of experience in programming. I started with QBasic on an IBM386. I learned what system files to not delete out of Windows or Linux. I went to university and learned Java and .Net and SQL. I've done web. I've done server admin. I've got decades of Windows and Linux and shell scripting and databases of every flavor and just... All of it.

What do I do lately at work? I fill out spreadsheets with information that already exists in 7 other spreadsheets, but we need this in THIS format for THIS VPs request. And I fill out status updates. And I go to meetings and listen for an hour as everyone talks about their status updates on projects I don't even know anything about or care.

My manager asks us to make sure we are learning and using AI. Why? Well, the C and VP suites think we should be. Does it actually help or make anything better? Not really. But ok, fine.

And then the real irony kick in the balls. As we push literally everything in the company to be "Cloud This" and "Distributed That" and "AI more!" and "Be flexible !" .... and they did the big RTO mandate last year. The fuck? You want everything to be remote and cloud and distributed and modern and agile, except employees must commute in and sit in this specific chair to join their video call meeting. And 3/5ths of my team is out of state and so exempt from the RTO mandate, including my supervisor. What the fucking fuck? I have to drive in and sit in a shitty cube while they get to kick back at home? Fuck that.

Decades of knowledge and experience and talent, and I fill out spreadsheets with duplicate information IN PERSON while coworkers get all the benefits of WFH and the same damn pay.

I don't even know what my supervisor does except ask us "is XYZ done yet?" a couple times per week, that seems to be it, I don't think they even know what we do tbh. They just sit at home and make sure all our check boxes get checked. But if you mention a single detail of a project beyond "done" or "not done" they get confused. Fucking hell.

And it hurts even more knowing the CEO makes 100x my pay + benefits + stock + who knows wtf else.

What are we doing?

Addon: Oh! And then there have been layoffs. And cutbacks. And hiring freeze. And no promotion or raises beyond a basic 2-4% yearly "cost of living" raise, even though the cost of living has fucking gone up like 300% in the past few years.

I haven't actually programmed anything in so long. It's depressing to be wasted pointless effort in a bureaucratic corporate nightmare.

There are approximately 146,000 people named Mario in the US alone. Any one of them could do the FUNNIEST THING.

The USA is just 3 Corporations in a trench coat. And corporations are just pyramid schemes.

People will lose their minds if you suggest giving someone medical care for free, but they keep ignoring all the landlords and CEOs and private equity groups and all the middlemen extracting the vast majority of all the wealth out, while also contributing the absolute least.

The fact that we have a system where one person works every waking minute of their life and still can't afford basic food and housing and another person sits around all day on their 3rd yacht sipping one of a kind wines and rakes in billions is insanity.

Somehow, Darth Turtle has returned.

All these things haven't suddenly become woke, YOU JUST BECAME A RACIST BIGOTED XENOPHOBIC ASSHOLE!!! AKA MAGA.

Love Weird Al Hate weird AI

Typical parent.

The fraud is rampant. It's called gerrymandering, closing polling locations, poll taxes (ID requirements that cost money), propaganda, voter intimidation, etc

Republicans are obsessed with voter fraud because they are the ones doing it and they can't comprehend that everyone else wouldn't be too. "I cheat all the time, how come I can never catch the other guys cheating?"