Just for the sake of technical correctness; paying for foreign expertise with imperial extraction is a technology. It's over in the pointy section of political science; and going by the number of people who end up dead or in exile after a failed implementation, it's not a trivial matter.

One of the tricky bits, potentially one that they've had trouble with of late, is that pulling it off effectively usually means pretending that that isn't what you are doing, for the legitimacy and prestige, while keeping in mind that that is what you are doing, for realistic planning purposes. It's all well and good for foreigners and low-level patriots to think of 'Russia' and 'the USSR' as essentially synonyms; significantly less helpful if your military or economic planners even periodically lose sight of the fact that that's a handy aspirational position rather than a truth.

It's basically a year to a year and a half off people's life expectancies, from the heat alone.

Although this is not trivial, the antivaxxer movement will likely chop 10-15 years off life expectancies and greatly reduce quality of life for much of the remainder, same again for the expected massive reduction in air quality that will result from modern political movements, and the absurd puritanical movement in the US will likely chop another 10-15 years off the life expectancies of women.

These are, therefore, substantially more significant, although politically impossible to deal with right now.

I fully expect that, if current trends prevail, by 2040, life expectancies will resemble those of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages.

Attending work for 2 days means I pay £190 per week to work, with no recompense from the company. Because there's a decent amount of holiday time, my wages have only dropped £9000 per year from last year. If I needed to attend 5 days a week, I would have to leave the only job that I have ever held that actually made any functional effort to handle my disabilities. In other words, if I lost this job, I would not be capable of functionally working in any job at all, simply because most companes don't give a damn about disabilities. Legally, however, I would be deemed "capable of work". As such, I would have no wages and no benefits. Once my money ran out, I'd be on the streets. There is simply no viable alternative.

If a business guy thinks adding to the homeless is the best way to improve work morale, then maybe he's not a business guy that holds any opinion of value. He may well be listened to, which will cause a LOT of problems for a LOT of people and WILL increase unemployent and, in countries with failing industry, increase the homelessness of people who are far more competent than him, but that does not make his opinion valuable, merely incredibly stupid and sickeningly naive.

We have a pretty simple way of working - our work is split into projects for clients, and each project runs for a fixed number of days and has a deadline, a report must be submitted by the last day, and the report is done using an online reporting system that i helped write so i can see exactly when a report was submitted.

Cross referencing the report submission dates, the report deadline dates and the in-office schedule showed that 3% of reports were submitted late when the staff worked from home, and 74% were submitted late when they were office based. Our office was a terrible working environment with cheap broken chairs, poor climate control, slow flakey internet and lots of distractions all day long.

Still these cold hard facts didn't stop them mandating one day a week in office, which massively increased the number of delayed reports.

Why do you need to send a message to schedule a video call to ask a question?
Why not just use the message to ask the question?

I have several colleagues who want to schedule meetings to ask questions, and 99% of the time the answer is "i dont have that information to hand, i will have to look it up and get back to you". If they had asked the question at the start i probably would have been able to look up the answer before the video call was even scheduled.

A hybrid setup loses most of the benefits of remote.
You still have to live within proximity of the office, where housing costs tend to be higher.
You still need to maintain a car if you drive, you only save 2 days worth of gas but all the other maintenance costs remain.
If you take the train 3 single day tickets tends to be only marginally cheaper than a 5 day/weekly ticket.

Really fully remote is the way to go for any compatible job. It's good for employees, good for employers and good for the environment. The only ones that lose are commercial real estate, and they should convert those useless office spaces into residential properties to help solve the housing crisis affecting so many countries.

Easy...

Pick a 9th city where none of you are, and open an expensive office there in the middle of the business district where there is no residential housing for miles around.
Then force everyone to move to the area surrounding that city, and spend 2 hours a day commuting into that city.
Employees lose, company loses, but at least the owner of that expensive office complex gets an extra tenant full of unhappy people.

Don't call him, send him a message and wait until it's convenient to reply.
I was that "often relied on" guy in an office environment, and i spent so much of my day helping other people that i often couldn't get my own work done. Also people would tend to come to me first without trying to solve the problem themselves first.

Now people email or send me a message when they need help, and i reply to them when i take a break from my other work. It's a much better balance, and the wait time prompts people to try solving the problem themselves - often successfully.

Do you live on a remote farm in the countryside?
If not, try meeting your neighbors. Go to local small businesses where you can chat to the staff, go to the local public house and family restaurants etc, assuming they still exist, go to church or other place of worship if you're into that. It's these long commutes where people only come home tired to sleep that destroyed local communities.

Having someone office based join online meetings is the worst... Constant background noise disturbing all the other participants.

Exactly this. Periodic meetups so you can get to know people in a social setting works a LOT better.
Forced daily commuting is draining and soul destroying, and most offices are not located where people can live nearby and walk to work.

Do I really need to point out how hysterical you sound? Applying the burden of proof and standards of evidence of criminal court to a free association question? Really?

That's basically treating the possibility that someone might not want to go on a date with you as in the same category as the state laying criminal charges against you; which is lunatic tier.

Obviously, anyone treating internet hearsay as particularly reliable is about as sensible as someone who believes online product reviews; but both of those groups are an order of magnitude, or more, less wrong than someone who thinks that internet hearsay or online product reviews need to be on a beyond reasonable doubt basis with FRE and an appeals process and stuff.

There are two "opposing" factions to give people the illusion of choice. They are perfectly happy to share power with each other in order to maintain the status quo, they know that if they get voted out it will always be their buddies across the aisle who get voted in and not someone radically different. And they know that when the other side does something unpopular it will be their turn again.

You actually make a reasonably convincing argument for the idea that the republican party does have principles; they just overlap pretty weakly with the ones they pretend at.

The most striking break with history is the bit where Nixon-level criminality used to be politically problematic.

You probably don't have to imagine 25% tax; that's right around the "government revenue (% of GDP)" value for the US; though it does seem kind of wild to see something as regressive as what's basically a sales tax cranked that high unless the product in question is specifically being discouraged; which is clearly not the intent here or we wouldn't be commenting on this article.