I stopped reading Drum a while ago and, coming back after such a long break, did the navel-gazing increase or did I just notice it before? "Too much evidence has piled up to credibly deny this any longer," with four hyperlinks, every one to other posts he's made with various scraps of information, some relevant, some not, all questionable?

I think Drum's element was in the Bush years when anyone with reasonable attentiveness, the time/leisure, and a rudimentary moral compass could write good stuff at the quantity the blogosphere demanded. When the key issues shifted to ones where being an Orange County suburbanite puts on blinders, he declined.

*not notice it before.

I might believe productivity is okay but not time spent at work. Midweek crowding at the ski resort in 2020-2023 was double that of 2019. Wednesdays are for college professors sneaking out before meetings and retirees, okay?

Sadly he's right about Djokovic, he's just clearly the best at this point. He's got a 3-time career grand slam! He's not only the only person to win every Masters 1000 tournament he's won them all twice! He's got most weeks at #1! He's just the best at everything. https://www.reddit.com/r/tennis/comments/14717da/_/

You can like Federer more (and you should! Novak's a shit human being!) but Djokovic is undeniably better at Tennis.

But hopefully very soon Carlitos will clearly pass Novak among active players.

I definitely feel less productive working from home but my company has entered an 8-person work death spiral. They never encouraged everybody to come back more than part time, so everyone stayed home, so they reduced building services, so even more people stayed home, so they're trying to force everyone to hot-desk... It's not that inconvenient for me to commute but there has to be people to talk to and/or equipment that makes me more productive to make it worth my while.

Meanwhile, my small business prospers as I have no need to shell out the overhead to maintain an office.

I have a hat.

6: As, indeed, does Drum's.

This reminds me of my colleague who took another job in January of 2020 because the new job offered work from home.

Oh wait, it's Matt who has the big substack - is Drum's blog free again?

Yes, Drum parted ways with MoJo and went back to independent blogging as a hobby.

In 5, "8-person" should be "in-person". That autocorrect really did some harm to the intended meaning.

Don't read Kevin Drum for tennis coverage. Read Joe Posnanski instead. Joe is among the three non-Serbian-nationals who actually likes Djokovic, but he's still pretty good on it and not going to do something dumb like conclude that 23 is unmistakeably hugely different from 22.

I still like reading Drum's blog. He throws a lot of facts in, and though he has blind spots, I have more of them. AAMYMHB, in particular he will watch Fox News and other things I don't and say "This right here (with multiple examples) is what median conservatives believe" or "This other thing is what your rightwing uncle believes" and I find that very useful. Other places I visit regularly, like Lawyers Guns and Money, are pretty caught up in "This is how horrible these people are, see?" And I get it. They are horrible. But Drum gives me a different take, and lots of graphs.

- Y + H obv

The best thing about working from home, besides no commute and not having to socialize with idiot co-workers, is that it's possible to hold two (or more) full time jobs at the same time. Your boss will appreciate your not bitching to him about how inadequate your raise/bonus was this year.

CX to him OR HER

23 is not hugely different from 22, but Nole's going to get to at least 25 and Federer is all the way down at 20. Plus Djokovic is better at *everything* even if it's relatively small gaps.

My company pulled off a global drug launch with everybody but the IT and chemistry staff fully remote, while expanding from just under 100 employees to ~450. They have put a great deal of effort into making it work and, at least so far, seem fine with the new arrangements.

Right. It's all about the cellphones.

13 is why the zeitgeist has turned against Drum, having any kind of curiosity about the other side is pretty passe right now. You're supposed to just say "evil, evil, must be destroyed" all the time. And I get why, there is a lot of evil, but still the idea that you're not supposed to even be curious or try to learn about what is happening or even worse why it's happening seems pretty bad to me.

That said, I do get very annoyed at Drum's Irvine-ness and the way that he completely dismisses any kind of problems at all existing around housing.

I don't think ogged has clearly shown that his point on remote work is different from Drum's. KD is fully committed to cynicism about all sorts of things, so I don't think he'd say there's any difference between "is worse" and "needn't be worse, but probably will be because it's harder."

The motivated reasoning on this stuff is so flagrant yet unacknowledged that I can't really engage with the discussion.

Djokovic is the worst, but unfortunately he probably is the best. Federer played such beautiful and effortless tennis, and Nadal played a tennis that looked exhausting and effortful, and in eye-searingly ugly sponsored ensembles, but so full of heart. I miss them a lot. Like UPetgi, I look forward to the reign of Carlitos.

Anyway, I think the larger issue with modern day Drum is that he's best suited to exist within a larger conversation--a sphere, if you will--that challenges and amends his positions, but that's not really there anymore. So he throws something out there, and it's either a tree falling in the forest or gets desultory "huh-uh!" responses on Twitter that don't advance the conversation at all.

I don't know what his comment section is like, so maybe there's interaction I'm missing, but the few times I looked, it didn't seem to add much value.

It's interesting to wonder about a counterfactual where clay court tennis were its own separate sport. Nadal would not only be the greatest clay-court-tennis player of all time, he'd probably be the greatest athlete in any professional sport ever.

I think 23 and 20 are kind of complementary. There's a certain mode of inquiry where everyone is curious and interested in learning and where it's ok to be wrong, and that mode is pretty unpopular now, especially on the internet.

I consider Drum family, so whether he's up or down or whatever doesn't really concern me, and I do value his time-series posts that "actually, this thing that everyone is going crazy about hasn't changed all that much..." But now that he's hopefully put cancer in the rearview, I'm happy to make fun of him from time to time.

Aren't all these people still alive? They're old, so they'd have to settle the question with a pickleball tournament.

I feel like I have an opening to talk about tennis for a moment? Remember in The Pigman by Paula Zindel, how the kids tell a story about a woman who is murdered by an assassin after crossing a river to visit her lover, and you were supposed to rank who was most to least at fault for her death, which would tell you something about your values in life? Regarding the disqualification of the Japanese/Indonesian women players, my brother and I had a disagreement about who was most at fault. My brother thought the opposing team (the Spanish/Czech women) were most blameworthy, because they complained so much. I ranked it as follows:
1. Officials (bad call!)
2. The ball girl (kid, you had one job. Keep your eye on the ball)
3. The Spanish/Czech team (their behavior was unsporting, but eh, they really wanted to win)
4. Obv, DQ'd team.
Anyway, according to the Pigman analysis, my values are: sex, magic, money, love, in that order.

I apologize for my previous comment, which I realized right after posting is comprehensible to exactly no one else on earth. Anyway I'm in the office today, so according to KD I should be working instead of commenting on unfogged, so off I go.

I'm not about to apologize for comments that no one else understands. Let's not start.

I haven't read Drum or LGM in over a decade but the description in 13 doesn't sound much like a new dynamic. "Hey, some idiot said something stupid!" was a staple of the supposed political blogging golden age and I enjoyed reading a lot of those types of posts for a good part of 2004-2006.

It would be kind of fantastic if my employer cracked down on remote work because it would make quitting very easy by reducing the awkwardness that usually comes with quitting because you don't like your job, even though you seem to be doing fine, get along well with coworkers, do things that are considered important, etc.

So from the friends-of-friends version of median conservatives, I give y'all a couple of comments from today:

* Can we go back and recharge Hillary? And Biden. He's been accused of the same thing. What about him? OR is it only because it's TRUMP? Because fair is fair. If it's wrong for the Right, it's wrong for the left. (f) (Emphasis and two spaces after a period in original)

* You also safe [the original post was a Facebook "marked safe from ... having classified documents in my bathroom" thing] from over a hundred classified documents on that unsecured private server in your closet? Not including the untold thousands of subpoenaed documents scrubbed from the server before it was handed over - we wouldn't want to include those...
How about the ones at your think tank closet or in your garage?
Personally, I think they should all be prosecuted - but I guess when your a Clintonidiot voter or Bidenidiot voter with a short/selective memory only those named Trump should be held accountable?

++++

The other side comes to me often enough that I don't need reportage from KDrum.

I did exercise restraint by only posting a link to the indictment itself in lieu of any other replies.

33 See, this is why I just have no time at all for what calls itself conservatism. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together can tell the difference between the situations of Biden and Trump wrt classified documents, and this has been explained repeatedly. People who nonetheless want to pretend that the situations are the same are not operating in good faith, and who on earth has time to interact with bad faith?

My daughter's ex thinks the earth is flat. There are apparently a whole bunch of videos on youtube supporting this: just think of the scope of the conspiracy needed to suppress the truth on this. Should I spent even a fucking minute watching that shit? No. This is what paying attention to the rhetoric of conservatives is. Bullshit and misinformation, offered in nothing but bad faith.

Obviously, paying attention to legislation that is being debated is a little different: but even then, once you see that the bill is some bullshit exercise in bad faith, the details aren't important to the casual observer. Yes people testifying in opposition need to know the bullshit talking points offered to support anti-trans bills, so they can refute them,* but for someone like me it's enough to know that bad people want to do bad shit because they like torturing people not like them. Beyond that, marinating in their propaganda isn't useful for me. Unless increased blood pressure has some good side effects.

Doug's friend of friend is advertising that he's not interested in facts. There's no point in sharing any with him.

* This never convinces anyone, but builds a record for when the laws are challenged in court. This is worth doing. Kevin Drum finding to find something good to say about these people isn't.

Today, though, I'm more interested in the kids' climate change trial that started today in Helena.

I hadn't read the judge's order from a couple of weeks ago denying summary judgment until today; she made clear what's in issue for trial: https://mtclimatecase.flatheadbeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/5-25-Order-On-Defendants-Motions-To-Dismiss-For-Mootness-And-For-Summary-Judgment-1.pdf

The best video proving the earth is flat is the one with the guy who takes a plane trip all the way across the country and he takes a level with him on the plane and videos the level for the entire trip and THE BUBBLE STAYS BETWEEN THE LINES THE WHOLE TIME YOU GUYS so that proves it, the earth is flat.

It's just six hours of looking at a level.

It's great to see the curiosity of a natural scientist.

It's very very easy to find out what conservatives are saying if you follow political journalists on twitter, often with links to clips. I don't follow anyone on twitter anymore, I just check some accounts via nitter every now and then, and I still find threads that are digests of what conservatives have said about various things, with links to clips and other source material. Often the people posting them don't agree, but it's not all presented as ridicule (though you can find that if you're into it). I know unfogged tends to think twitter is people like Yglesias and the activists who hate them, with widespread abuse and far right trolls there too, but you can sidestep a lot of that, especially if you never post.

I actually think it can be a lot more damaging for people to summarize insane shit conservatives say if the summaries don't capture the insanity of it, or to claim the remaining few anti-Trump Republicans are representative of some median Republican. It was always silly to tell people not to amplify Trump but it didn't help when news would play only a few seconds of the least batshit part of whatever speech he gave.

36: that's so much work. I just hold my hand level for the duration of the flight, and it works just as well.

36 and 40 illustrate the difference between science and math.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Holding One's Hand Level

I have a lot of affection for Kevin Drum, but his attitude about remote work seriously annoys me. I don't care if from some objective perspective he's right. He got to work from home for all those years, but the rest of us aren't worthy. Management needs to clamp down on us! Whose side are you on, Kevin?

If it makes you feel better, I'm not going to have to go back to the office regardless.

44: Right on, Moby! Power to the people!

Teaching online was the fucking worst. Except for hybrid teaching, which was worster. I didn't miss the commute though.

My commute is three miles and they pay for parking.

I understood 28! But the Pigman analysis always confused me because I couldn't see how the assassin, who personally assassinates the woman because he's an assassin, was not most to blame for the assassination, which meant that money (I think?) was my highest value in life, which I hope isn't actually the case because if so I've done a pretty poor job of honoring it.

Everyone wants to blame the assassin, but work is work.

Assassins take the blame for all kinds of bullshit.

I meant hired assassins.

Volunteers never get enough appreciation. And its not like assassinations are easy.

Yeah, sometimes you don't even get to enjoy the aftermath.

[Exudes silent contempt.]

I work 100% remotely, although I do actually have an office.* I've been looking at potentially moving jobs in search of more money and I realised that I'd genuinely need at least another 15-20% on top of my existing salary to go back to the office more than one day a week.

My company is OK at remote working, though, as we've basically always done it. I started working there in 2016 and even then, my team was mostly based in Scotland, but with a couple of people (me included) based in London. So we've _always_ run our meetings on video calls and used Slack and other tools for day to day messaging. We do also get together now and again for white-boarding** and social things.

Where I've not gotten a good approach yet, is how to be more aggressive/consistent about productivity expectations for remote workers. Most of my staff are pretty solid, but I have a couple that I suspect pretty strongly of taking the piss. One because he has procrastination issues (and may be swinging the lead) and the other because I know he covertly works on other projects (within our company, but not _my_ projects). On balance, it all works out OK, but I have a feeling they'd be more productive if they were under more scrutiny. I am not in favour of a more panoptic approach, though.

* I'm heading in there later to go for a kebab and some beers with our MD who is in town for a few days.
** tools like Miro work pretty well for doing that remotely, too.

Yeah, I was working with people in other offices (sometimes across town but usually across the country) more often than not since well before I started working from home.

At my current job before the pandemic I worked from home one day a week. In March 2020 it immediately switched to 100 percent remote and has stayed that way for me and my immediate co-workers, although not for everyone.

Reading that Gitlab link was interesting. The following bits in particular:

All-remote work promotes:
Writing down and recording knowledge (over verbal explanations).
Written processes (over on-the-job training).
Public sharing of information (over need-to-know access).
Opening up documents for editing by anyone (over top-down control of documents).

I am, maybe not "in charge" of knowledge management for my organization, but fairly involved in it, and right now at work I'm in literally three separate discussions with different teams about whether or not they should use the official library for their documentation instead of putting it in a place with no regular review and random access. (Maybe their place is the right one! I'm willing to be persuaded, but they just aren't giving me/us very good reasons so far!) And this is in a fairly tech-oriented office that already supported some amount of remote work. It's an uphill battle. On the other hand, part of my job is that top-down control. Maybe I'm the bad guy? Maybe the guidance/requirements that define my role shouldn't have been made?

Drum is probably the wrongest blogger that I read regularly. But I'm a sucker for people who operate in good faith, and Drum is always at least trying to think honestly. And he regularly comes up with takes that I hadn't considered.

All-remote work promotes:

None of what's listed there is true. Lots of training/pairing over zoom, locked down documents, etc. If you didn't have video streaming, maybe the first two points would have to be followed by necessity.

I'm currently struggling as a remote worker with productivity and motivation. Partly that's exhaustion because for much of the pandemic I was working more than 40 hours/week. Partly that's me not believing in the "product"* I work on and finding the work dull and empty. But also my organization clearly never figured out how to make my assigned work full-time year-round. It's busy when I have support from people on other teams, quiet outside of that.

*It's the best one-word description for what I work on but it's not a commercial product used by others. It could be replaced by commercial products and probably would under different leadership.

55: if he's taking the piss and swinging the lead at the same time, one problem, no doubt, is the mess.

I'm probably accepting a job offer this week; there are three on the table right now, each with noticeably different office-attendance situations.

Aside from anything else, one is mostly in-person but is fine with a day or two a week of flex; one is currently a rigid 3-day hybrid but has announced going to pre-2020 full-time in the office in the next year or two; the third has become remote-first, has an office locally but it's not clear who goes there (not anyone in my potential group, on any regular basis) and is closing their Seattle office because nobody was bothering to go in.

I kind of liked hybrid 3-day the most and am leery about ramping up and making connections in the remote-first universe of the third, but I think they're in the lead in my thoughts right now.

Good luck picking the right one.

I was starting to formulate a thought in response to 57 (esp 57.last) when I realized I had a bigger picture thought about remote work: orgs of any size will have different sorts of workers (systematic vs "creative"*, self-motivated vs needing direction, introvert vs extrovert, collaborative vs individualistic, etc). One of the things that in-person work does is to solve the problem of coordinating all these types. As with remote work, that can be done well or poorly, but what's important IMO is that, because we're inherently social creatures, and most white collar workers are socialized in similar ways, workers largely self-coordinate when they're in the same place at the same time for stretches of time.

IOW, some significant chunk of the firm coordination problem handles itself even without great management. Poor managers can, of course, prevent any kind of high function, but my argument here is that, ceteris paribus, workers will tend to collaborate and accommodate when interacting in person. By contrast, working remotely requires structure and conscious effort to achieve the same baseline of peer coordination, totally aside from the management issues that may or may not differ between in person and remote.

*for want of a better term--I don't mean artistic or whatever, I just mean a sort of hare as opposed to tortoise approach

I miss a lot of things about the office. These days when I'm being practical I have to admit I wouldn't want to go back regularly, it's not worth the time spent commuting, but communication being more effective when in person is one reason out of several. One of those discussions could probably have been resolved with 10 minutes of in-person back-and-forth discussion but it's taken weeks because it's only in emails and meetings with half a dozen invitees.

Not sure if that's relevant to 64 or not.

65.last: part and parcel IMO. It's not the whole thing I'm describing, but it's an essential factor. Low friction, nonexplicit communication of intent, preference, inclination, all without anyone needing to make a conscious (or maybe intentional) effort. And yes, there are people for whom that's hard, but A. like hell is it easier remotely*, and B. in a well-functioning group, "Bob doesn't read the room well" is precisely the sort of thing that people can wordlessly accommodate.

*one may be better at reading Slack than reading tone of voice, but that doesn't mean one's interlocutor is expressing themselves as effectively or precisely through that medium as they would in person, and that's if they even try. Online communication is very very rarely remotely as rich as in person.

Following to 64: in my experience what's hard about working remotely and collaborating is that it's harder for serendipitous conversations to happen that are adjacent to the topic but tend to be fruitful. What might have been a ten-minute conversation that happened because (e.g.) my door was open now requires me to consciously create the same opportunity. On the other hand the ability to drop links/files/the receipts in a chat is magic, and if the Apple googles mean I can do that in real life I would be so happy.

Following to 64: in my experience what's hard about working remotely and collaborating is that it's harder for serendipitous conversations to happen that are adjacent to the topic but tend to be fruitful. What might have been a ten-minute conversation that happened because (e.g.) my door was open now requires me to consciously create the same opportunity. On the other hand the ability to drop links/files/the receipts in a chat is magic, and if the Apple googles mean I can do that in real life I would be so happy.

62: good luck, that's a tricky decision.

Congrats Nathan

Don't jinx it.

66: yeah, that definitely makes me think of a certain coworker. Roughly daily I find myself wondering if his latest comment in Teams chat was matter-of-fact, outraged, or a joke.

61 is a great argument for remote work.

Uh. One of the places that gave me an offer just announced substantial layoffs today. That's.... uncomfortably exciting.

Congratulations! We're now offering two jobs for the salary and benefits of one!