I have three close friends who work in IT. Two work for companies that don't HAVE offices anymore. The third works for a local council. He has no need to be in the office, but the council has imposed a RTO 2 days a week directive on all its employees. The idea is that is that its employees will support the local economy...

Yes, it requires a different approach to managing; you don't just count the number of bums on seats every day, you have to look at whether the work is getting done. And not that the fact that a bum is on a seat does not mean work is getting done.

How are the prospects for an early earthquake in California... ;)

'The undersea research was funded by the EU.'

no - let's say:

'The undersea research was funded by the EU taxpayers'.

Sounds like a great discovery, but let's not pretend that it was funded from a magic money tree.

It's undoubtedly the case that parents do carry a lot of the blame for letting this develop into the crisis that it has become. However given that many parents will not step up and do something about it, do we therefore let the abusers run wild and make no attempt to hold them accountable?

Or so believe based on centuries of experience. The USA however is a nasty, dangerous place. ;)

In BBC TV's 'Yes Minister' the civil servant refers to the year in which a lot of flooding destroyed files as a good year as it allowed them to get rid of embarrassing material that reflected badly on civil servants.

You may well be right in theory, but the reality is that it won't happen; the heavily committed capitalists and national partisans aren't going to let it occur. Sad but true. Block it in the USA, watch China carry on.

In those humanity and AIs coexist, with the most superior AIs, the Minds, running the place whilst lesser AIs are treated as having full rights along with the humans. This is on the basis of a post scarcity society where people can have pretty much everything they physically; the real challenge for them being to find something sufficiently entertaining to do.

Let's hope that the AIs that we create prefer to have us around rather than get rid of us as irritating and annoying.

So bad actors will know what's in place and so how to go round them? What could possibly go wrong?

'a million-year-old human skull found in China suggests that'

Telepathy? Telekinetic control of a keyboard to write to a screen? ;)

There's a reason why computer programmers are hated by the mundanes...

We will always look for an excuse to ignore the correct answer when there's a reason to do so. The WHO's mess up on this issue adds justification to the attitude of many in ignoring scientific advice on everything from diet through to climate change. This isn't about 'doing the opposite', it's about having an extra reason to do exactly what we want.

n/t