Post pandemic, corporations are trying desperately to regain control of employees, control they think they lost when work from home became the norm. Dell just announced that WFH employees will no longer be considered for promotion.

Employers are right (partially) – getting together in the office *can* be a benefit, can be a positive experience, but it can also be a toxic nightmare. For me the benefits were never, ever worth the commute time and stress. And over my career I ran into enough sociopaths that rubbing shoulders with “teammates” at the office wasn’t much fun.

In other corporate dumbfuck moves, Glassdoor decided to start adding real names to anonymous user accounts without asking their users. I estimate it’ll take less than 90 days for all their users to run screaming away from the site. Idiots.

***

This is an absolute nightmare. What do we do about the 0.1% of people who shouldn’t have children, but do? Breaks your heart to think that this horrific story is just one of many probably playing out right now. The world is a cruel place.

***

This may be the most esoteric Reddit ever published. It’s a discussion of gravity, one of the great mysteries remaining in science. With only my undergraduate math and physics to draw upon, some of the deeper points in the comments elude me. My mental model is classic Einsteinian general relativity, where gravity is a result of mass warping spacetime. Think of a rubber mat stretched flat, and balls of various size/weights placed on it. Each ball will warp (stretch) the mat in proportion to the ball’s mass, and objects traversing this 2D model of spacetime will be drawn into the “gravity well” of each mass. (The ironic thing about that analogy is that it’s gravity forcing the stretching of the rubber mat.) Anyway, fascinating reading.