Fuck This Bitch

    • Jamie Dimon thinks remote work doesn't cut it for all roles.
    • The JPMorgan CEO said he understands why an employee may not want to spend time on a long commute.
    • But it "doesn't mean they need to have a job there either," he told The Economist in an interview.

This, we know: JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon is an outspoken advocate of the return to office movement. He has held his stance, despite pushback from his staffers.

He is now doubling down on his stance against remote work, saying employees can take up another job if they don't like the commute.

"I completely understand why someone doesn't want to commute an hour and a half every day, totally got it. Doesn't mean they have to have a job here either," Dimon told The Economist in a wide-ranging interview released Tuesday.

Dimon told the publication that some roles at JPMorgan can be hybrid or remote, but such arrangements just do not cut it for some positions.

"It doesn't work for younger kids in apprenticeships, it doesn't really work for creativity and spontaneity, it doesn't really work for management teams," he told The Economist.

"There are real flaws," he added.

Dimon told the media outlet he wasn't opposed to remote work if it works, but he doesn't mind getting rid of it if it doesn't work.

"We're not going to make that decision because we're pandering to employees — that is not the way to build a great company," he said.

He is particularly opposed to those in leadership roles not being around in the office.

"I don't know how you can be a leader and not be completely accessible to your people. I do not believe you can be a leader and not be accessible to your people," he told The Economist.

In January, he told CNBC in an interview that while remote work can work for jobs like coding, those in research, and women in caregiving roles, the arrangement doesn't apply to all roles.

Dimon's comments came amid a furious debate about the future of remote work as the world exits from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The future of where and how employees work could have a huge impact on the economy, including in the real-estate sector.

Lower demand for office space due to remote work could wipe out $800 billion real-estate value across major cities globally, according to a McKinsey report released on Thursday.

I want him gone. I want him locked up in miserable conditions for the rest of his pathetic life. I want his social media network taken down and I want each and everyone of his supporters to wake up and see how they've been swindled. I want to wake up one days and see the headline, "Trump Dies In Prison."

If that makes me a horrible person, so be it.

The Right's War on Brands Is Stupid and Terrifying

From New Republic:

The anti-LGBTQ attacks of Bud Light and Target are no mere boycotts—the aim is to intimidate companies into submission.

Even by the right's recent standards, the ongoing backlash to Bud Light is convoluted and stupid. To the extent that it can be summed up, it goes something like this. Last month, the perfectly acceptable beverage company sent trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney some beer to celebrate her first year of womanhood. Mulvaney then did what influencers do when they receive free stuff: She posted about it in conjunction with a sweepstakes associated with March Madness. Right-wingers saw this, freaked out, and began a boycott. The beer's sales have subsequently plummeted; right-wingers claimed victory after the company parted ways with two executives who were responsible for the very normal brand promotion—and then continued the boycott anyway.

The Mulvaney episode is now a playbook for the right. If a company makes any statement, however minor or tepid, in support of LGBTQ rights, launch a boycott and cause a firestorm—it doesn't matter if anything makes sense. What matters in the end is that the company is left without any credible means of responding to the contretemps. Bud Light has backed down somewhat—again, two people lost their jobs over something extremely trivial—but it hasn't amounted to "amends" as far as the braying lunatics who kicked off this firestorm are concerned. They have managed to turn being a mewling, whining infant into a political identity: They see a woman with some beers, and they throw a tantrum. And they don't stop.

Target is the latest company to find itself on this newest and stupidest front of the culture wars. Its sins go something like this: In honor of Pride Month, the big box retailer put some shirts with rainbows on them in the store. Conservatives saw this and absolutely melted down, demanding—you guessed it—a boycott. Target responded by backing down: It moved Pride displays from the front of its stores to the back; its opponents declared victory—and then kept up the boycott anyway. Again: The objection here is T-shirts. With rainbows on them.

J.D. Vance, who once wrote a book about how people need to remember how to be tough and use their bootstraps while having a stiff upper lip, more or less summed up the "objections" of this group of whiners:

Much like Bud Light's crime, Target's sin is stupendously anodyne. Companies have been acknowledging Pride Month for years; selling merchandise—and profiting—from this sort of thing is precisely the business that Target is in. More importantly, these shirts don't actually do anything. For one thing, they're shirts. For another, they simply acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ people during a month aimed at celebrating Pride.

But this is ultimately the objection here, to the extent that anything coherent can be pulled from these actions. The right-wingers storming the barricades of Target—Target!—want to pull back decades of cultural progress and return to a world in which gay liberation isn't a thing. It's profoundly reactionary, even by recent standards.

But it's also a profoundly nihilistic and fascistic impulse. The movements that have sprouted up in protest of Bud Light and Target—and Disney, in Ron DeSantis's case—are designed to intimidate. These groups want to terrify companies into toeing a line that their tiny faction—and they alone—dictate. There are no rules to follow and no hard lines drawn; the confusion is the point: Cross the pissbabies, and your stock price will tank, your quarterly earnings will collapse, and your executives will be fired. There's no acceptable response other than total, preemptive capitulation. Needless to say, this is profoundly un-American.

There are stray elements of this larger movement on the right that are geared toward trying to replicate American consumer culture but with a right-wing bent. Black Rifle Coffee, the burnt-tasting coffee company with a big gun on the bag—so you know they have the right politics—is arguably the leader of this trend. Actively courting Trump voters for years—the coffee company endorsed the Muslim ban for some reason, among other execrable political acts—the company has attempted to replicate Starbucks's popularity with some success: Their coffee is available at gun ranges and convenience stores across the country. When Bud Light fell afoul of right-wing influencers, some enterprising marketers attempted to profit—again, with limited success. (Presumably the boycotters have moved on to some of the many similar beers, some of which are made by Bud Light's parent company, the absolutely massive and monopolistic AB InBev.) These efforts, to stand up a parallel free market in which brands are always flexing their political identity (ironically after many years in which the same people professed a desire for major brands to be apolitical) are stuttering, but they are not going away anytime soon.

Still, the biggest aspect of the ongoing Target and Bud Light brouhaha is as a naked, stupid, and often terrifying example of power—one for which a response has yet to be developed: It's hard to see how the silent, sane majority of Target shoppers can rise up in the company's defense. The opponents of these companies are menacing; they want to scare these brands and their employees on the front line. (Indeed, Target moved its displays citing employee safety.) They're also hardly aimed at Target and Bud Light alone. This is a war aimed at corporate America writ large: Make any statement acknowledging the existence of anyone we don't like, and you're next.

So now they're implementing TFA (two factor authentication) at work when using VPN. Like everything else Main ITS does, this was not completely thought out. First off, several of us got a "Final Warning" email on Wednesday advising us that we hadn't set up our PINs and that this needed to be done because this was going into effect the following day.

Excuse me? FINAL NOTICE?! This is the first I've heard of this!

When word got back to them that no one had received any previous notification, they backed off and said implementation would be postponed until next week. Gee, thanks!

They held a zoom meeting for all departmental I.T. staff yesterday morning and walked everyone through setting this up, creating PINs, downloading the app onto your phone, etc.

Someone brought up a very salient point: what if a user doesn't have a cell phone? (I mean, it's rare, but there are people who aren't on the grid.) "Uh…we'll get back to you on that. Let's move on."

So yeah. While I had no trouble setting it up for my use, two of my colleagues were unable to create the initial PIN number.

Needless to say, Monday is going to be interesting a clusterfuck because as of 4:30 pm on Friday, no enterprise-wide email had gone out to inform the unwashed masses of this imminent change or what they needed to do to set it up.

Kirk Cameron Claims 'Nefarious Forces' In Public Schools Are 'Killing God' In Mind-Numbing Rant

From Comic Sans:

Actor and far-right Evangelical Christian activist Kirk Cameron is the latest figure to attack teachers in a bizarre rant delivered on right-wing propaganda network One America News.

In his remarks, Cameron implied teachers and other public school staffers are evil liberals in league with some kind of malevolent spiritual force, bent on indoctrinating children to the usual Republican bogeymen, "socialism" and "communism."

Cameron also claimed these so-called "nefarious forces" are actually "killing God."

That was only the beginning of the list of things that made very little sense in Cameron's rant, which you can watch below.

Cameron began his rant by claiming liberals always use children as the targets for their "woke" evil.

"The target is always children and that's why God gave children to parents and not to governments and woke institutions that are staffed and manned by those who want to undermine the faith and values that made America great, that advanced the good."

So it follows, according to Cameron, liberals in league with the dark side always choose children as their battle ground.

"We shouldn't be surprised that nefarious forces are targeting children because the goal is ultimately the collapse of the family and the killing of God in America."

"What that does is that it destabilizes our moral and societal structures so they can then be replaced and reorganized with something different like progressive, socialist, communist ideas…and that has always been the plan."

"Whose plan?" you may be asking.

Cameron did not elucidate, nor did he explain how liberals are able to defeat God Himself when He is, you know… God.

Cameron's comments did not go over well with anyone online who is remotely in touch with reality.

Also missing from Cameron's comments?

An explanation for how overworked, underpaid teachers have the energy to fight God Himself via their students, or how this supposed cabal of "nefarious forces" has the numbers to do so given teachers are resigning en masse at unprecedented rates.

Almost seems like he made this whole thing up.

So This Happened Yesterday

Ben's fine; just a burn on his arm from the airbag. His new knee is fine. The other driver is fine. Fucking I-10!

We're expecting the insurance company to call this a total loss. He's already got a deposit down on a replacement vehicle. Just waiting for everything to sort itself out now.