Not nicer. Just you’d be more likely to see those going to backstab you deliberately. OK, everyone has their own opinion

Those same middle school politics

Sorry, but as far as I have seen, not having what you called that at all is a precious rarity.

I dunno if I’m more productive on average

You are saying this as if you were flexing your old age to me, while so am I.

No. You can’t see their face.

Chat rooms and web forums were in some sense safe spaces. There would be intrigue, but somewhat limited by what concerns a specific forum, or even a specific part of it, or a specific chat. Even conflicts in one place between two people would often not extend to some other place.

And also, believe it or not, people frequenting same spaces would sometimes have offline meetings and know each other personally. Especially moderators and such.

But I agree that what you mentioned was like halfway there from today’s online communication which sometimes seems just useless.

Because those who see each other’s faces coordinate closer socially and might eat you. We live in a society, not a friendly place sometimes.

If you’ve read Lem’s Fiasco, then that’s the alternative scenario where “they” are the society lower technologically. It’s very well written and tragic.

Yes, convenience is often ruining discipline, not for me (ASD) and perhaps not for you, but social ties form between coworkers. That part about behind closed doors - see, they always will.

I mean, we live in a society. Not seeing the faces of the others is a weakness. It’s not all about work.

I’ve described a situation - where you’d want to talk something over a cigarette or a cup of tea with your coworker, for example. Or participate in sporadic conversations while walking around the office, help some colleague, get help from some other colleague.

It’s not that simple, there’s also esprit de corps and discipline and networking.

Yes, for work productivity right now right here it makes sense that working remotely is good.

That has always been known and normal for people who can work remotely. Writers, or anyone who can synchronize their work through runners with envelopes or, later, fax and telephone.

But also people who can work remotely would always have situations where they’d prefer not to.

My sympathies with remote work are because I’m spoiled and because of retrofuturistic promises of (almost) everyone working like that, my concerns are because you’d want sometimes to see people you’re working with, and if many people work in one place and some work remotely, then even if the latter work well, they are ruining discipline.

That was how USA used China against the socialist bloc after all. Of course they did.

If that’s going to be one humongous superstructure, zoned inside, then if this fails, they might get a new city. Superstructures like this are nice, just nobody usually builds them (after 50s and 60s, I suppose) for residential areas.

One can repurpose the space for multi-story apartments (I suppose ceilings will be much higher than needed), or malls, or literally everything.

Or factories, if there are problems with exporting orders to southeast Asia.

If this even gets built.

Or if it doesn’t fail, then heat and noise pollution, I suppose. And grid load. Not nice.

Yes, that’s what they are officially talking about, to reduce the amount of foreign traffic so to reduce the load on TSPU (which is the Russian alternative to China’s GFW). Pretty open about it.

If you’d seen the original statement in Russian, you’d realize this person has no idea what they are talking about at all, and with their job title, the purpose of it is just to present some kinda more liberal viewpoint for appearance.

And yes, it’s possible, Iran and North Korea are doing it, and there are plenty of countries with heavy censorship and regulation, and there’s a piece of good engineering advice I once got - “you get to your goal faster if you don’t pick up boss fights”, meaning that while it’s cool for a commenter on the Web to imagine them taking the hardest and most expensive path to solving the problem of censorship and control, they have different choices.

Less demand for actual children - lower prices for trafficking, which improves every pedo’s level of life, think of the pedos

Americans are also the primary target it’s all adjusted for. Ads are a social mechanism.

Even ads for non-American audiences sometimes copy ads aimed at Americans in various detail which doesn’t make sense there.

Somewhat similar to perception of fashion differing between living in a big city or in a rural area. In a big city everything is happening around you. In a rural area you learn of things happening, might get interested, might not.

OK, I might be simplifying things.

That’s the eco-friendliness we deserve, and from Japan no less.

As someone in a sanctioned country, I actually approve of yet another “official” identifier since it will be used by someone making me less dependent upon my local ID, and since technically everyone not in an Indian or sub-Saharan African village is already being tracked. There too probably.