Wow, who would-da tunk... the Branch Covidians protest and gun show at the Michigan statehouse was never about the virus, but was more about pushing around the snowflake liberals and rallying support for a putsch in the next election. Nice to see the fascists turn up for an economic meltdown almost on cue. I bet they can't wait to join Alex Jones in eating their neighbors.
Meanwhile Bloomberg reports on the dystopia that corporations are dreaming up for everyone when they return to work, from location monitoring to one-way hallways. Why would they want to? How much would that all cost? Is the increase in productivity really justify hiring elevator attendants?
IBM, along with Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are among the large U.S. employers readying offices for at least a portion of their white-collar workforce to return over the coming months. To make that happen, they’ve had to rethink the entire working experience. That has meant hiring for new jobs, such as “thermal scanner” and elevator attendants, finding ways to monitor employee whereabouts and health, and retrofitting entire skyscrapers’ worth of space.
With that I am done... ready to check out, and I think I found a good way for at least the weekend. The internet archive has hour after hour after hour of uncut MTV from the early 80s, commercials and all. I can almost go back to a time where the only thing we had to worry about was thermonuclear war. It was, as a child, like a moment that did seem to last forever, and somehow the detritus of contemporary media, the Atari brand chime or the Mountain Dew jingle, became a subconscious part of those memories in some kind of ethereal manner. And Martha Quinn. Oh Martha Quinn.
Back in the early 80s I would watch it (along with nickelodeon and Prism) at my grandmother's. She was a short and heavyset German woman who had 5 TVs in her 6 room bungalow, all turned on to the stations with the same soap operas at all times. My grandfather had lost the antenna battle in the late 70s (the thing was bigger than he was, and he was getting too old to climb the ladder to keep fixing it) so his house became an early adopter. My house didn't get cable until 84 (my father would only get basic), and when it was installed the cable guy had left the TV tuned to MTV.
MTV had fucked out that format long before the internet became a thing that went on to kill the music and cable industry in one swoop. I think it started with Beavis and Butt-head in '93 or Real World in '92, but as a suburban gen-x teenager it was almost assumed it was on in your house at some point during the day, even if no one was watching (and we tied onions to our belts, which was the style at the time). I guess it turned out that too much was more than enough.