Came across this article proposing a 5% tax on people who work from home after the lockdowns. The only justification seems to be that it's a privilege so it should be taxed and since you're saving money though not paying transportation costs, you should give it to the gov't.

It seems to ignore that by working from home you use less resources, don't contribute to the city congestion, etc.  

Where you've saved money in some ways, other things are costing you more.  Paying for faster internet and possible overages in your usage.  Office supplies (pens, paper, printer ink, etc) might now be coming out of your pocket.  Electricity, Air condoning and heating costs are increased.  Heck you're now paying for coffee and toilet paper.

You've also sacrificed parts of your home.  For a while now, I've been saying I'm sick of eating on the couch and would love to have my dining room table back (it's been converted into a work space for Anne).  When people selected their homes dedicating a chunk of their space for working 8-10 hours a day wasn't in the equation.    

I'm not saying we don't need to help low income workers, but choosing this one segment of the population to do so seems wrong.

I've been spending some time thinking about what to do next with this site. I think it's time to consider a move to Drupal 9 and use it as an excuse to handle some outstanding issues.  Here is a list of tasks I am considering:

• Upgrade to Drupal 9 - since this is the goal.
• Reorganize content types - This site has its roots in Drupal 4 and had been through a number of upgrades from D5 through D8.  When I moved it into Drupal 8, I didn't have the time to do a proper analysis and I just migrated the D7 fields into the same structure.In the past 2 years I have merged 3 of my other sites into it. All this has led to redundancy, deprecated data and cruft building up.  This is a good opportunity to address all that.
• Relaunch Photogalleries - Somewhere along the line, I decided to remove my photo galleries and use Viewbug.  Although Viewbug is a good platform it was a mistake to remove the galleries from this site, so I want to reinstate them.
• Make Better Use of Drupal's Media Module - when I ported the site to Drupal 8, the media in core was not mature enough to use.  When it was, I didn't have the time to migrate the file entities to media entities and make the other changes.
• Use Layout Builder to Create Landing Pages - Layout builder didn't exist when I built this site.  Right now it's done in paragraphs.  
• Use Tome to Create a Static Version of the Site - During Drupal Camp NYC, someone was talking about the notion of using Tome to create a static version of their site and I got to thinking if that would be useful to me.  Some advantages include
  • Simplified, cheaper hosting - I could use one of the $2 / mo hosting services 
  • Performance increase - No overhead from Drupal / MYSql / etc when generating pages.
  • Improved security - since Drupal would be running locally, there is no Drupal intense to attack.

  I could run Drupal locally and just run rsync to update changes.Not saying I'm going to do this, but it intrigues me. 

Cosmetically, I'm not planning any site design changes.  At the end of all this, the site shouldn't look any different.  Just be easier to use on the backend, faster and cleaner. 

I'm planning on doing this over time, as time permits.  Right now I'm light on work so I'm spending time on this because I'm light on work.  This means there will be short sprints on this project as higher priority, paying work comes in.

As I do this, I'll be narrating my work and will provide updates.  You an follow them if you're curious.

This is not a happy cat.  Frosty used his claws to put a hole in the bottom of our boxspring and would crawl up there and sprawl out as if it was a kitty hammock.  The other day, Anne and I took apart the bed and cut away the material from the bottom of the boxspring for a couple of reasons:

• He’d hide up there when he wasn’t feeling well, which made it hard for us to care for him.  He could hide up there for days at a time.
• We didn’t want all that dander building up in a place we couldn’t clean it.

He was very confused  while the bedroom was blown up.  I can imagine that when we were done he was planning on hiding up there and was disappointed to find it all gone.

On the plus side, we put a kitty bed at the foot of the bed which he seems to enjoy.

As the election is over and we’re coming up on holiday season where we may be spending time with families, to try and break cycle of yelling over politics while we fill our faces with turkey I’d like to suggest that people read The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Dr. Jonathan Haidt. The book was written well in advance of The Trump Presidency and doesn’t take his particular brand of populism into account but goes a long way to describe why good people who are R or D vote they way they do from a psychological point of view.

A NYTimes review is linked below. The book is available wherever you normally buy books.