I just finished reading “Effective Remote Work”, and I really liked! But one thing I disagree is when the author calls the Covid-19 pandemic “The Biggest Remote-Working Experiment in History”. I’ve written a blog post about this. Experiments should be run in a prepared and controlled environment, and that’s exactly the opposite of the pandemic.
I haven’t read the book but I imagine the author meant that govts and companies took the opportunity to use it as an experiment - of sorts. Just like I imagine they do, opportunistically, for all sorts of things…
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I really like how your thought is untainted by the evil of this world, but in my opinion it could be expected that whatever politic say it’s going to be used in more or less bad way. In similar way pandemic was called a window of opportunity. Again how it was carried out was almost exact opposite of what good thing could it gave. 
I really had a hope that it would positively affect many companies forcing them and therefore making them used to work remotely. That was definitely one of the biggest chances for us, developers. How it ended we can see in many threads on for example Elixir forum. US companies never learn. They are crazy by definition i.e. trying the very same thing expecting different results. It’s so bad that all they do is just complain and not see the problem in their “politics”. 
Also I really liked many things about healthcare in Asia which were before pandemic. They have used masks in a good way i.e. they had used them when they need to go to shop, but had an obvious symptoms or were guided to do so by doctor. I was always thinking that it would be amazing if the same would be applied to the rest of world, but once again such change was brutally wasted - sometimes literally. 
Currently many people see masks as same as Jewish armbands in ghettos during WWII. Even I has been blamed by “police” (!) for saying “conspiracy theories” when I was simply saying that the masks stand alone are not good as firstly they need to be a good masks and secondly they should be used in proper way. In exchange for that my human rights has been denied which was one of many things that forced me to relocate. 
Similar things I was saying about AI in other threads. They could be used to help us a lot, but of course the world have other plans for us. I wouldn’t blame anyone who would come to the conclusion that AI dominating or even killing people would not be seen as a bad thing. As somebody noticed we in fact live in the world of the reverse Decalogue. 
Unfortunately it looks like that actually it was an experiment and that’s the worst thing. I recommend to read about Event 201. In short right before covid has been “popular” in media rich people organised an “exercise” to simulate what could happen if pandemic, which by coincidence looks like the one we experienced, would occur and how “world” should “cooperate” to fight it. Of course by another coincidence they have proposed few “ideas” which has been applied during covid, for example a daily conferences. Of course by another coincidence during pandemic the censorship has been applied on all mainstream media and social networks causing a serious trouble for a real experts which were just trying to chill out others and give constructive arguments. 
In result all we end up is 0 trust rule for governments and media, so if something would really happen lots of people would not trust them and therefore instead of working together on serious problems we would only have a chaos which may soon already happen because of protests in countries like Germany or Romania. 
Tbh nothing would surprise me Tom! I just think that 95% of the time those evil entities are opportunistic - so while they might not plan to carry out certain events (tho I suspect they also do carry some out) that when those events happen they use them for their own purpose or experiments, possibly having already accounted for them.
You just need to follow the money - money/greed and the desire for power is the root of all evil 
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