Here’s an interesting fallout from this pandemic… Toll roads and bridges have collapsing revenue streams.
The Golden Gate Bridge is losing nearly $3,000,000 a week because we’re all staying home. The GG Transit Authority needs that money for not just the constant repainting and maintenance of the bridge, but that revenue pays for other requirements in the area as well.
How many toll roads and bridges and ferries and bus lines and small airlines, and regional airports and… will suffer or fail without a few months’ revenue?
I’ve been reading about the permanent ramifications of this situation and the idea that companies have /finally/ been forced to adopt the fact that telecommuting works. Information workers CAN stay at home and get shit done. I wonder if middle-managers everywhere are quivering in their boots, they’ve got no one to lord over, prowling the cube-halls, spot-checking your bathroom breaks.
The world (at least the work world) will never be the same.
Anonymole - apocryphal agitators 
$3 million a week. That is $156 Million a year. Does it really cost that much to keep up or are they over charging to use the money elsewhere?
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They apparently use the bridge proceeds to fund other transportation maintenance.
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I suppose that’s acceptable.
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I found it very easy to manage people. I only worked with self motivated self starters who I never had to have the least concerns for what they would do. Just lucky I guess. Many of them went on to become top level performers in top positions. The trick was to fully appreciate them and let them know how great they were – how appreciated they were, how important they were to the mission at hand. And we celebrated all of our success together as the team we were.
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After commuting for 3 hours a day for the last few years, I can’t believe I finally get to work from home, and there’s no way they’re making me go back. And if there AREN’T robots by 2110, it will be an Age of Sadness for me. And I want flying cars, dammit.
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Hi A.Mole,
I’m finding that the only thing I really like is my dick, but it’s an unreliable friend at best. This is the Age of Sadness where isolation comes easily and Covid-19 is nothing more than just another reason to close the door and draw the shades. A few thousand years from now some interplanetary archaeologist will find a copy of Steppenwolf and decide that this must have been their bible, the poor bastards. Thanks. Duke
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I’m rather attached to mine as well, (or is it attached to me?) Either way, we still get along.
Every four or five generation we have an Age of Sadness. I wonder what the 2110’s will be about. Robots?
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I didn’t know until I read this blog post that the Golden Gate Bridge still charged tolls.
I’d have been surprised if I had crossed it if I was visiting San Francisco.
It would have been like that MAD Magazine scene of the original Godfather with Marlon Brando where someone approaches a toll booth and ends up getting shot with machine gun fire while someone remarks, “I warned him never to approach a toll booth waving a $20 bill.”
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Middle Management. I don’t know if you remember a world without committees when managers could and would make decisions without checking with finance or logistics or Jim Bob the Tamale Cart Dude. No more. The only place the MM still functions is in privately-held businesses. (read that as despotic nepotism) I went to the post office today, there’s a pretty hefty two-story office building that houses a pretty hefty SIAA insurance brokerage. “Family owned and operated..” The parking lot was full of cars. I’m sure the cubes were packed with masked “associates” on the stand-and-deliver quota system, Pops and Junior cracking whips.
I’ve never suffered supervision well. Five days, four times a year for tradeshows liked to killed me.
Saw a woman tellin’ her Oklahoma tornado tale on the news. Wanted to order you the shirt she was wearin’.
I USED TO BE A PEOPLE PERSON
Until People Ruined It For Me
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I think I’ve come to the conclusion that even though I might like people, I can at least study them and then write about my findings — through prose.
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The trick there would be to humanize the equations. Or over arc their stereotypes. Or revel in their cardboardness with slapstick!
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Yeah, downloaded your book from SmashWords…registered for an account, bla bla, but being unfamiliar with the format, not sure if I got the entire book! Will start reading and let you know!!
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Don’t get your hopes up. The writing is primitive and unrefined. The characters flat.
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Of course they are. Because you’re about as much fun as a fire hydrant. 🙂 Primitive is good, as in Grandma Moses or Picasso’s line drawings. If it is primitive as in can’t write a straight line, that’s entirely different. I think we should be able, on occasion, to plug a paragraph into the equivalent of a field sobriety test. I know this guy in Norman, Oklahoma, had the only machine between Nashville and LA where you could stick a guitar in, close the door and it spit out how to align the neck before it tweaked the frets, cut the nut gave him the string height at the bridge. Like a guitar chiropractor. Here’s my paragraph…tune this bitch for me, will ya?
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Google’s writing that creature ALANN automatic literary analytic neural network. Tensorflow and AI DeepMind and shit. Gawd knows they have enough material to train it on. Trouble would be keeping it up to cultural date. Feed it Austen, Bronte, Joyce and Dickens (copyright free) and all you’d get was run-ons, semis, ramblings and passivity.
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Dickens got paid by the page. If I was getting paid I’d write two page sentences. Page one of “Little Women” is one of my favorite examples of adverb hell, and I wonder if it was lazy, as considered today, or anti wordy expeditious. Using the ‘said’ supporters got through a room full of personalities and attitudes much faster than writing them out. I had a teacher say that if one wanted to write, read the Bible and Shakespeare and in my narrow youth I said WTF. No, not for style, but how to tell a hell of a story. Style. Eeeek.
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Hey man, you did it! How many pages is it? Yes I downloaded but need to verify I got it all! You’re everywhere and you don’t give up! That’s the thing. And yeah, saw this was dated 2018, so I’m sure you’ve come a long way!!
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Might have been dated 2018, but it was written 2 years before that…
There’s a map and a honorarium or something at the end.
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What ‘Mudge said. Corona Virus has stripped away the shroud from our fucked up delusions…my son wanted to work at home…was told “we’re not set up for it…” I informed him they just want to stare at his face…that it’s a power play and screw these bastards…now, working from home is fine, no problem, more productive even! Geee…
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Said so many times before.
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Yup. And I’m a-saying it one more time. (Every time there’s a big shift, I’m sure it’s said.)
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I hope you are correct about that because the new work world that you envision is probably the only form of “working” that I can tolerate anymore. I’ve become so unreasonably anti-authoritarian that even the smallest fish in a power hierarchy (a/k/a middle management) are intolerable to me.
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