+1. A lot of pushback I've seen is along the lines of "but all these business owners will have to close their businesses!". What short sighted BS. We are talking about decades and decades of wage stagnation and business models that are not teneble with living wages. We are talking about a history of having the public subsidize the profits of these businesses through social programs for their workers, while the money stolen from labor goes right into the pockets of the owner.
Will some, or even many, businesses need to close? Yes. Should they have to? Yes. We collectively need to get out of this mindset that MBA-think is the way. It is not.
Yep. Fewer tips while retaining a living wage should be the goal. Tips remove the burden of the livable wage from the business and place it on the consumer, where it will never be guaranteed. Lots of businesses likely have completely untenable business models if they had to pay fair wages without tips.
Let's stop having the average person subsidize companies.
This. I've struggled to explain the general malaise, especially to older people, but you are completely right here. There is simply no point to anything anymore. Things used to operate such that hard work = reward. Now, the reward has been almost universally removed. The system itself is failing, and any hard work just makes some other rich person richer.
Lol right? So many of these headlines about work culture feel like they’re just things everyone knows as facts and has done for years. Serious disconnect between what workers know and what the ruling class (and perhaps by association, the press) thinks they know.
I have really adored Strange New Worlds. It feels far more like Star Trek than most of the later stuff, IMHO. I’m glad they kept Ethan Peck as Spock, because he was one of the few things I liked in Disco.
I felt like most of Picard wasn’t great – especially season 2. But I’m just not a fan of big season arcs, at least not the way they do them now. One great draw for me to things like TNG is the fact I can drop in whenever. Long arcs do exist, but they don’t tend to be the point of every. single. episode. Picard felt to me like it had little to offer except the same arc all the time. Most things are just put together like 8- or 13-hour movies now – but I much prefer planet-of-the-week.
In fact, I make the same argument when discussing the Orville. Sad it was canceled, because it felt even more like Trek than SNW.
I don’t hate it, but I also strongly dislike Trek that doesn’t follow the episodic formula, meaning I can’t drop in anywhere and have an enjoyable experience. I disliked Picard for the same reason. SNW is much more planet-of-the-week, which I greatly prefer.
I’ve always felt like the TOS movies were better than the TOS show, but the TNG show was better than the TNG movies.
My reasoning is: the TOS campiness was great, but the 2-3-4 trilogy especially highlighted the strengths of the cast, and the slightly more militaristic Starfleet actually worked (and don’t even get me started on them red uniforms… Mm). STVI is likely the best political story in the entirety of the TOS canon.
Meanwhile, TNG the show was tackling themes that TOS would have never touched. I suspect it actually may have a lot to do with the fact that the last few TOS movies and the TNG show were made at roughly the same time.
One major difference in the US is: many cannot afford to not be at work to instead be protesting. And we don’t have universal healthcare, so if you lose your job, regardless of the wage theft you may also be enduring there, you’re extra fucked if you’re relying on its “benefits”.
A similar argument could be made about voting. You don’t get the day off to go vote, and in some states, voting takes hours.
The executive imagines the meetings they missed, leading to lost opportunities. So they see a loss of productivity.
This is a fantastic point, and one I had not considered.
From this standpoint, the side pushing for return to office really does feel like they’re in the right. I think I would argue that a subset of those folks are still pushing a return for the wrong reasons (e.g. thinking that remote work lowers productivity naturally, not just based on an observation of their own missed meetings or face time), but otherwise I agree entirely.
