- Employees' WFH environments are even more productive now than the makeshift home offices of 2020.
- Managers don't impose RTO because they believe it will improve company performance, it's for the feeling of control and ease of scapegoating.
- Profits and stock market valuations do not significantly improve after RTO.
Is this the same commission that previously warned America “might struggle to win, or perhaps lose, a war against China or Russia? Would that be the same Russia that can't win a war of its own choosing against Ukraine, an immediately-adjacent former satellite with a GDP the size of Nebraska's?
And their carefully-considered recommendation is to raise taxes and cut nonmilitary spending to massively increase US armor and airpower in Europe? The same kind of weaponry getting obliterated by teenagers flying $1000 Chinese-made drones with grenades duct-taped to them?
Instead, how about:
- A top-to-bottom audit and "rightsizing" of military procurement and operational spending.
- Vulnerability assessment of legacy weapon paradigms in the age of drones.
- Extension of service life of existing systems.
Defense industry shills gonna shill but The Economist should be embarrassed at credulously retweeting this claptrap.
People who seek out martial arts tend to be at least somewhat interested in their fighting value, even if it's only for reasons of image, and the same goes for teachers.
If you're really just after physical fitness and self-discipline, a martial art may not be the best solution. Maybe yoga, acrobatics, or some forms of dance training. If you really want a martial art but aren't interested in combat, consider Tai Chi. The techniques do have combat applications but very few instructors teach it that way. The emphasis is usually on fitness, balance, bodily harmony, and a calm mind.
I'm no expert but I did four years of (very) traditional Okinawan karate and three more of a full-contact non-traditional "mixed" style called Jeet Kune Do, plus limited practice in other styles via seminars and training exchanges with different schools.
Schools teaching classic Asian arts like Karate, Kung Fu, Tae Kwon Do, etc tend to incorporate Asian culture and teaching methods as part of the package. A lot of people in that world are drawn to it because of that Asian-ness. If you're after discipline, regimentation, attention to exact form, and immersion in Asian history, that's where you'll find it. Emphasis on fighting effectiveness varies widely, as does the mood of various schools. One school may seem like it's full of bullies and another teaching exactly the same style will feel welcoming and supportive.
But don't count out the more combat-oriented arts. Krav Maga, for example, was originally developed as a hand-to-hand fighting system for the Israeli army and still keeps that spirit in mind, but there's a heavy emphasis on teaching and students' personal development. There definitely is contact but they're careful not to throw you into situations you're not ready for. You may find that becoming gradually acclimated to that physical rough-and-tumble in a safe enviroment (apart from the fighting per se) can transform your sense of self-confidence.
All martial arts training, including familiar western forms like boxing and wrestling, build self-discipline and personal development. It may be more tangible and visible in the Asian arts because of how they're taught (standing in lines, standardized exercises, ritualized greetings, etc) but it's there, just not as performative.
As others have said, the experience can vary hugely from one school and one instructor to the next. My advice would be to look at a number of styles and see if one of them resonates with you in a non-intellectual, intuitive way. One approach is to find seminars or exhibitions where practitioners of multiple styles do demonstrations and short instructional sessions. Trust your feelings more than your head. Wear comfortable gym clothes you can move and sweat in and go see what it's like.
Another retread of the misconceived "AI as collage machine" idea behind some the early lawsuits, i.e. training data goes in and something intelligible comes out, therefore the output is "made of" the input. Non sequitur.
The author glosses over the actual point of contention, saying "through some mechanical trickery it will blend then together with some randomness to create something that is a new song".
'Blending together' is not what's happening. The "mechanical trickery" is the transformative part.
Who thought a video like this was a good idea? If you "aren't asking or negotiating at this point", why aren't first-level managers just telling employees to get back into the office or find another job?
I don't know... I'm conjecturing a lot here, but it seems like the video was made because Bob Brisco thought it was funny, and his company's performance reviews hew towards How Often Did You Agree With Bob Brisco
Amazon's approach to RTO seemed broadly effective at getting workers into the office even though it was largely bungled at level of fine details.
1. Track badging
2. Enforce RTO via chain-of-command. SVPs, VPs, and directors have aggregate RTO compliance metrics. SVPs crack the whip on VPs to get their numbers up, VPs crack the whip on their directors, and directors crack the whip on their reports, and so on, all the way down.
The actual implementation of the policy was a mess and there was poor messaging especially at the beginning. I'm pretty sure it still doesn't take PTO or illnesses into account — if there's an issue with that, you're supposed to work it out with your manager — and from what I heard they simply handled the holidays by excluding the work weeks before and after Christmas from the metrics. But, ultimately, the chain of command approach appears to have worked very well in terms of actually getting people to come in.
edit: Just noticed from your profile that you also work at Amazon, so I guess there's nothing new in my comment for you :)
Having worked at Amazon through RTO I can tell you that it was effective at getting a lot of people to come in, but no one is happy about it and it has made work much less efficient and productive for everyone.
Most people are maliciously complying. They will come in at 11:45, grab lunch, and then leave. The clever ones then come back late at night to badge in and out again after 6pm so it looks like they were there all day, just outside. So far they aren't counting total time on campus, but when they do those people will have good numbers.
But it means they are now not working during those drive times. And they ones that are coming in all day waste a ton of everyone's time, including the remote people, looking for meeting rooms and setting up video calls, because every meeting still requires video, since all the teams are spread out over multiple offices.
And they also had to resort to denying promotions and raises for anyone who didn't RTO.
Yep, that's all true. Like I said, bungled at the level of fine details, pretty questionable if it was a good decision, but largely effective at actually getting people to come in.
People do work noticeably shorter days, a handful of people come in for less than 30 minutes (huge waste of resources and time), and yeah, there is a morale problem.
One thing I have noticed is that the more co-located a team is, the more people behave like pre-Covid — in at 9:30, out at 5. Satellite workers who are coming in are the most unhappy (for obvious reasons) and are the most likely to badge in, grab a coffee and check their emails, and then leave and finish the day at home.
Amazon is moving from being a ruthlessly-efficient corporation to becoming a pennywise pound-foolish, stifling bureaucracy to make office workers miserable and drive away talent.* As Amazon's inability to do either WfH or RTO properly, it's footgunning itself with lower productivity, lower momentum, and lower competitiveness that the Target's, Costco's, and Walmart's of the world can and will exploit. If I were the Motley Fool, I would slap a "sell" rating on AMZN because the Bezos era has ended and the era of hyperdeep PHB MBA management pyramids has begun.
* They already do their best to make delivery drivers' and warehouse workers jobs as inhuman and miserable as possible.
People are so naive to think that the big tech firms don't know exactly what theyre doing. They all more or less operate the same way.
If someone is a top performer within a highly valued part of the org, then one way or another they will be able to navigate RTO without serious problems.
For everyone else, RTO is a dial for management to fine tune voluntary attrition before having to resort to more unpleasant tools like higher PIP quotas, at a time where big tech firms all still need to cut employee costs.
My (now former) neighbor worked as a manager at AWS. Their team was ~10 people who were largely remote around the world, their job role required extensive travel, and required much time in meetings with external parties. Nothing about it is conducive to RTO and it's more like an external sales position that was traditionally WfH in tech even before COVID to save on office costs. They received the RTO ultimatum from corporate and bought a house in another area. ]:
You mean they bought a house assuming they could WFH and the RTO mandate forced them to quit since it was too far away? Or they said no to the ultimatum and bought a house elsewhere?
Misleading headline: the study shows correlation but not causation.
Recent meta-studies propose that people suffering from mental illness self-medicate to relieve distress. That is, mental illness appears to drive drug use. Or a third cause drives both.
