The two points aren't mutually exclusive. That sort of scleroticism can happen as systems become less representative.
If there is no effective mechanism to remove populist decision makers who act like authoritarians, they will slowly accumulate and co-opt the levers of power, even in ostensibly democratic nations.
Look at nations like Turkey, Hungary, Russia. Technically democracies, with some distant memories of fair competitive elections, but everyday people have very little ability to influence their governments' actions today.
I don't follow. If you're working remotely, you don't need to spend 8h of your waking time with other office drones. You can spend it near people you care about, interacting with your coworkers briefly as needed.
Do your zoom meetings occupy eight hours a day? because that's what working in an office is.
When I work from home I might have a few meetings in a day, but I'm just a few steps away from hugging my wife, and nuzzling my dog any time I want. While the people at my office might be casual acquaintances and in some cases friends, they'll never ever compare to the bonds of family.
>It's an open invitation to move your position to the lowest cost country that outputs quality that is acceptable.
We tried that before, outsourcing was a huge trend maybe 20-30 years ago?
The problem is the second part of your sentence. There's a reason that particular business practice settled into a niche of call centers.
It turned out that good workers want to be paid what they are worth, regardless of location. Everything, including labor, is priced based on what people will pay for it - not what it costs to produce.
>im also not sure you can really correlate the fall of rome to a single oligarch hitman
Probably not, but Crassus did live in the time of Rome's centuries-long inflection point.
It's hard to use a phrase like "richest person in the world" in an age where living standards and currencies varied so much, but he was extremely, notoriously, extravagantly wealthy.
He cornered the housing market by showing up to burning buildings with a fire brigade, and offering to put out the fire only if the owners sold the property to him at a steep discount. If they didn't, he let the property burn.
He was eventually killed in a war with the Parthians, and legend has it that they found him so repulsive, they poured molten gold down his corpse's throat as a message.
The Android version of Firefox does support NoScript and ad blocker extensions, though.
Releasing it on iOS would be huge. No more almost-functional Safari ad blockers with multiple pricing tiers! No more all-or-nothing JavaScript toggle button!
Honestly, the only thing keeping me from iOS is its inability to run a browser with a decent extensions ecosystem.
You are very fortunate to have had that experience.
Usually, when a manager/director/etc decides to write a lot of code, the result is barrages of rushed pull requests made between meetings. You will be lucky if the code in any of those PRs was actually run, and you can forget about enforcing test discipline, so you have to scrutinize them much more carefully and clean up when they get merged without incorporating your suggestions.
It's cost-prohibitive to start a new business in those fields due to large-scale regulatory capture and capital barriers. How many new car companies have been successful in the past decade without the personal fortune of a multi-billionaire?
The existentence of one or two enormous hidebound sequoias in a forest is not a good indication of its overall health.
Could it be the same mentality as a copycat crime?
When a corporate executive sees a competitor decimate themselves without facing immediate consequences, they start to think that they could probably get away with it, too.
If there is no effective mechanism to remove populist decision makers who act like authoritarians, they will slowly accumulate and co-opt the levers of power, even in ostensibly democratic nations.
Look at nations like Turkey, Hungary, Russia. Technically democracies, with some distant memories of fair competitive elections, but everyday people have very little ability to influence their governments' actions today.