What's your Genelec setup, and do you use it in a living room/home theatre room, or as a PC speaker setup?

I recently bought a pair of Genelec monitors (8330) and a sub (7350), and am interested in replacing my Sonos arc soundbar, sub, and satellite ones with a proper Genelec-based 5.1 based setup. But my only concerns are price (it'd be at least 5k), and the distance to the monitors - my sofa is ~4.2m away from the television, and the maximum distance where direct sounds dominate (green in this image from https://www.genelec.com/correct-monitors: https://images.ctfassets.net/4zjnzn055a4v/3SiwbzysMQkGR6oN47...) is 3m for all but the most expensive monitors. So I'm curious if it works well for you.

The cultural reasons are not relevant, this is simply normal English being used naturally as it has been for centuries.

For example, consider the following. "I saw someone get hit by a bus this morning." "Oh, were they okay afterwards?".

"They" is clearly a singular pronoun here.

This is quite transparently FUD. Clearly many people have a vested interest in commercial real estate occupancy being high and are pushing this narrative to inflate the value of their currently declining investments.

I've been working remotely for 4 years and can assure you: no it isn't FUD. It is a real issue that can and should be addressed. And the good news is that CI/CD, Slack, Dischord and Meetup make the solutions possible. All you need is management understanding and buy in.

There are a lot of organizations that try remote with the same culture/mindset of in office. This is an error. Communication and iteration on remote work must be explicit, formalized and enforced.

I'm a huge proponent of WFH, but I do know where there are challenges.

New employee onboarding is challenging. It can be done, but it has to be very deliberate.

Any large team moves/merges are harder. Again, it can be done but there has to be a lot of deliberate work.

Interpersonal relationships are important for working. They are the lubricant that helps prevent communication friction. It used to be those relationships happened naturally in the office, but now they have to be deliberately nurtured. And that's part of WFH, not something ignore.

Office relationships can be good and also extremely toxic. I doubt there is any statistical evidence that being in the office leads to any net benefit of relationships.

Ed Zitron's phrase for this sort of article is "boss erotica". https://ez.substack.com/p/techs-elite-hates-labor

I mean many people have a vested interest in working from home as well and push the narrative of middle manager = bad, office = bad as well.

It's not that either narrative is right or wrong, they're just different.

WFH isn't the unequivocal One True Way. It's a way.

You can't deny that residential communities here in NL are quite different to those even in other European countries, let alone the main Anglosphere countries (US/UK/Canada/AU/NZ). The bikes help a lot sure, but there's more things here than the bikes that contribute to the sense of community, and it does work. (It's obviously not perfect)

Nothing is showcasing it works. We are on the downward path just as much as every other country, being more and more atomized and pulled away from friends and family due to social and economic incentives.

Dutch stereotype is to be 'friendly' outward but always keep people who you aren't close to at a distance. That attitude comes back to bite you when you move away past your early 20s or use your work life as your social lifeline in today's work environment. If it wasn't for social services, the consequences would be far worse. But those social services are also contributing to what keeps the majority from staying close together in the first place.

*socialism for the rich. The poor get the privilege of underwriting the rich's losses.

On the one hand this is very stupid, but on the other hand it is also very funny to watch idiots burn their money.

These idiots (and their like) are the people in charge of our industry cause they control the purse strings. They have no vision, and are just degenerate gamblers with money and an appetite for risk.

If you mean the Betuwelijn, that is apparently still not at full capacity - only 70-80 trains per day instead of the planned 150 or so. Which I guess is still fairly busy by American standards (3-4 TPH now, planned for 6 TPH, averaged across the whole day)

In Rotterdam, PostNL delivers the mail or packages that fit through the letterbox using someone on a bike (they're usually walking their bike, but that's beside the point I guess).

Packages are delivered by a PostNL guy driving a white van (or, more accurately, a subcontractor using their own rented non-PostNL branded van, but wearing a PostNL uniform)

There are a decent amount of big tech jobs here. Uber/Meta/Amazon have a local presence, there are many other non-FAANG tech companies HQ'd here (Booking.com, Adyen), and some household names that also hire remotely or have some presence here.

What's orwellian or horrific about a cashless society? Sure, there are valid arguments against it, but that doesn't make it orwellian or horrific, this is just hyperbole.

It does. It wouldn't happen on day one. But, slowly, it would start creeping in. As someone else commented: what if, you buy some mega turbo sex toy 3000 and a couple of years later super religious orthodox government wins elections. What if the government decides that you can buy one thing but not another. What if you want to organise a little poker night with your old buddies and so on. Look what happened with the internet. Endless scare stories about terrorism, pedophiles and eventually mass surveillance is in legislation..

If a super religious govermment wanted to punish you specifically - they don't need your transaction history. They can put you in prison using a completely made up reason. Just look what the Russian government did to Navalny.

Scare stories about authoritarian governments that still somehow respect rule of law and due process are funny.

You're missing the point, it's not a case of "we've identified zirgs as someone we want to punish so let's go through their browser history to find a reason to do it" a tyrannical government hardly needs to go to such lengths as you point out. The nightmare scenario is you get people in power who say "we can make the world a better place if we just eliminate all the people who do X" and they have the digital tools to simply filter all citizens by X and get a nice big list they can hand out to the secret police.