Back when the regime started imposing medical tyranny under the aegis of hastening the return to normal, the internet sages prophesied that “normal” would never come back. Like Vietnam or 9/11, our rulers’ response to Corona-chan marked a point of no return the culture could never bounce back from.
Take it as a cope if you’d like, but not every change wrought in Corona-chan’s name has been for the worse. Remote work and homeschooling, once seen as the province of shut-ins and weirdos, have now carved out places in the new normal. It makes sense when you think about it. Once people realized they could work in their PJs and educate their kids in two hours a day, they never looked back. That it took a civilization-altering event for people to reach these conclusions is a testament to the prior social conditioning.
A related lesson imparted by Corona-chan is just how many office workers did no productive work at all. Cubicle farms emptied out, but businesses kept running – as long as they weren’t restaurants. That seeming contradiction shed light on what many had suspected for years: The Pareto principle applies in the workplace. 20 percent of employees do 80 percent of the work.
That revelation brings up the question of who the other 80 percent are and what they’re doing. If you’ve spent any time working in the corporate world or government bureaucracy, you know the answer, even if you’re afraid to say it aloud. Everyone in tech has personal stories of whole departments replaced with second world labor to cut costs. Or HR denizens who occasionally take breaks from playing Minesweeper to scold productive workers. Upon taking over Twitter, Elon Musk fired the company’s four top executives – people whose main occupation has been making the site’s users miserable.
And that’s before getting into the anti-white bias that’s become an article of faith among the managerial elite. Private companies wanting to go public are now denied an IPO if they’re too white and male. How discriminating against straight, white, men jibes with equality under the law and corporate leaders’ fiduciary duty remains unexplained.
The US Supreme Court has given signs that it doesn’t see how companies can square that circle, either. SCOTUS is set to hear cases that will put Harvard’s and UNC’s discriminatory admissions policies to the test. The strong expectation is that race-based college admissions – and affirmative action on the whole – will be struck down.
It may be a turn of cosmic justice – or humor – that the affirmative action decision is expected to coincide with the major economic downturn market analysts have warned about. Next year, Corona-chan may give us another belated gift, as corporations are forced to cut the dead wood to survive.
At this point, normies may fantasize about Hollywood and Big Tech companies handing resident Wokies their pink slips. Not to rain on anyone’s parade, but diversity hires are objects of worship to the Death Cult. These megacorps have leveraged their too-big-to-fail status to install a Mandarin class of race hustlers that flit from one high-pay, low-work job to the next, all the while producing nothing of use. Instead, their one asset is providing the diversity their fellow cultists venerate.
Apple, Disney, Google, and Meta will not let their idols go. They will lay off the productive people first.
The tech industry is already in crisis. The A.I. and machine learning they counted on to run the store are producing ever more erroneous and bizarre results. Most of the people who know how they work are retired or dead. And our tech oligarchs will fire the rest before sacrificing their sacred cows.
That may mean the folks who called Big Tech censorship a self-solving problem were right all along. The whole project may well succumb to its inheritors’ incompetence. Like careless campers, the Death Cultists in tech may fall victim to a cleansing fire of their own making.
And you can help fan the flames.
“Apple, Disney, Google, and Meta will not let their idols go. They will lay off the productive people first.”
Absolutely. Question is how far they can leverage their debt before a total collapse. Or perhaps a total collapse is the main goal.
In theory, they can get infinite government subsidies and loans backed by their IPs forever. In practice, unlimited leverage doesn’t do much good if your people are too incompetent to work the levers.
I just did a quick glance of the history of government bailouts. Banks and transportation companies where you could sorta (not really) argue public utility. I’d really say we are at maximum clown world if the gov bailed out the entertainment industry because people won’t buy their woke crap anymore.
An excellent and salutary reminder that things aren’t always bad. I’m also thankful that, despite not making as much money as some of said high-paying IT folks, I’ve never doubted for a second that my factory job is genuinely useful and productive.
Praise God for honest work at a just wage!
By the way, remember when the Left claimed to represent labor – in manufacturing to be specific? Now they cater to, and are composed of, perfumed princes who’ve never held down a real job.
Just look at the last 3 UK PMs.
Indeed. One might quibble “but Brian, the last 3 UK PMs have been Tories!” Which is exactly the point – the Tories aren’t conservative any more and haven’t been for at least 30 years if not more. Labour is predicted to sweep the next general election, not because of becoming more popular with the people, but because Tory voters are tuning out of politics en masse, because why wouldn’t you if your alleged representatives are hardly distinguishable from your enemies? The absurdity of the situation is such that the only candidate willing to be openly proud of English history with its Dead White Men was a Nigerian woman (who will, of course, never be allowed near the levers of power). By contrast, Labour “merely” has to deal with a civil war in their ranks between the Centre-Left and the hardline Communists. The entire shop is a mess. God willing, the recent trend passing through Italy and Sweden will visit England again, and they will come to their senses before being destroyed. Coming from an Irishman, that’s not a thing said lightly.
Divine chastisement can always be mitigated, even if it can no longer be avoided. That said, the English will become a minority in their own country by 2050.
Meanwhile, Catholics now outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland for the first time ever.
Your point about the people who really know how things work retiring and dying is equally applicable to the Military Industrial Complex in the collective West. It no longer has the human capital required for a campaign of mass rearmament.
That take jibes with reports I’ve heard of the US running out of weapons. The proxy war in These the Ukraines could turn out to be a blessing in disguise for Western dissidents.
Brian,
Brian,
It’s fascinating to read the tech press outlets like Zdnet and CNET post articles about the pros and cons of remote work. Their perspective is remote/hybrid work is here to stay so manager had better embrace the reality.
And still too many managers insist workers to keep the downtown afloat by coming back to the office. But the workers rightly resist.
xavier
This article – and the comments – have been the best news I’ve read for a long time!
thanks.
I also find it deliciously ironic that this article admits that even the founder of the American Public School System refused to send his kids to them and homeschooled them instead.
Every school wants a “data science” program and every new program contains less and less math, stats and CS. The trend now seems to be to get things down to one or two calculus classes, an intro to stats and an intro to program and maybe an algorithms course. Some programs have gotten the math component down to just remedial high school algebra. I’ve seen some programs with NO math or stats requirements; they get away with this by putting all the math and stats courses in electives categories, and then make sure that there are enough electives that you can avoid taking any of them (and the department will be sure to advise students to not take those electives.)
So what does that leave you with? Pretty much the ability to use established algorithms on large data sets to crunch out things, which can sometimes be impressive just based on the sheer size of the data sets and length of computing time. But there is no structure for students to understand any of what they are doing, nor for them to fix problems as they come up, nor to innovate and develop new methods. And remember the people who would normally be interested in CS are being told that Data Science is what they REALLY have to study.
A generation of this and no one will know how to maintain anything.