201–210 of 371 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You do realize that people who WFH have friends and communities outside of work, right?
You do realize companies function better when employees are friends, right? I'm not saying forced daily association is the way to make them friends, but you can see the logic behind trying to encourage it.
How are "the elite" forcing companies that do not own real estate and who rent their office space to mandate RTO? How are they forcing these companies to renew their leases when they expire?
More content than you might expect, in a variety of “reputable” news outlets as well a veritable plague of blogs, is paid placement. Either through the outlet directly, or through a contributing writer that has (not all that) covert connections to PR firms.
PR pieces are often very subtle and difficult to detect because they tend to be on orthogonal subjects to the intended ”drive by” messaging.
After engaging PR and marketing firms for a few years now and seeing the kind of things that show up on their price lists, I have near zero marginal faith in media as a source of unbiased information. You end up seeing the fingerprints of priming, perverse incentive and commercialised bias in nearly everything.
Why do you think all those article writers write? Few of them are directly compensated.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that lots of wealth capital (both personal and corporate) is tied up in commercial real estate. It’s the reason everyone from Martha Stewart to Musk to hedge fund managers are screaming about how “unethical” remote work is. They literally can’t afford to have those buildings sit empty, so they will have to force the peons back into them by any means necessary.
We may know who some of the bulls are. But where are the bears? Are there any public figures who seem to clearly be hedged against the commercial real estate market and are making pro work from home statements?
Bad take. There are plenty of dumb reasons people are wanted back at the office but the most predominant one is probably that it just "feels like" it will make your company better. I'd think people would be happy that at least some remote work will never go away at this point. To argue that you should never ever even have to consider going back into an office for any amount of time is just silly. But to also argue yo…
Agree. Occam’s razor: The explanation that requires the fewest assumptions is usually correct.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In principle it could be straight up targeted propaganda "making" the bosses do that. I have no idea if the reality is more that, or more the banal "nobody is organising anything like this and suggestions to the contrary are just conspiracy theories, the bosses genuinely believe what they're saying". I currently have a boss who appears to sincerely want people back in the office; he doesn't want to be the CEO of a 10…
I feel like often article-writers miss the fact of people like your boss: some people just legitimately like being in an office and there's no conspiracy to speak of. As someone who likes being in an office, I personally feel that everyone becoming permanent WFH basement gremlins is a bad thing overall. Human contact is a good thing , and my observations of people who are 100% WFH is that they almost never interact w…
It’s allowed me time to volunteer at both the local library and my son’s school.
I’ve grown to become friends with two of my neighbors after living beside them for 8+ years. None of that would be possible if I were still commuting.
But I suppose we all have our anecdotes. You just seem to think yours are applicable to everyone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The big fortune 100 tech companies are also commercial real estate owners and landlords. Look at all the buildings that Amazon owns and subleases in Seattle. Those executives absolutely have an incentive to be pushing RTO because of their commercial real estate risk. They also have an outsized bullhorn and the industry tends to watch what they do and report over what they do, and they have PR budgets which can get ar…
[flagged]
[0] https://azbigmedia.com/real-estate/how-much-land-does-amazon...
I don’t really buy the argument. If commercial RE crashes, that means what, people take a 20% haircut on converting the buildings to condos and/or just selling for the value of the land? We are still seeing unprecedented housing shortages, which puts a pretty high floor on how much l “downtown” land values will crash.
Converting offices to condos is for practical purposes illegal due to the very different regulations. You can tear the buildings down and build new ones, but that will take a decade to get permitted, if you're in a construction permissive city.
If your job can be done remote, it can be done offshore for 1/10 the cost.
- Time zones - Security - Language barrier - Work culture - Employment laws
And the list goes on.
The devs themselves can be cheap, but by the time you've jumped through many of the hoops to actually get them employed for you - they might not longer be THAT cheap.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
our lab just got dinged by an employee who was trying to hold got another full time job on the down low....something that would have been caught if the work was in person.
Your problem isn’t that this employee got another job, it’s if their performance and work suffers for it. if they somehow are able to do both then your company is lucky they have an incredible employee and should be liking for means to retain them
One common argument is if you can’t tell their performance is impacted, they must actually be performing adequately. Except, in a different context, we will happily explain how our own performance can’t be measured by number of lines changed or bugs fixed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh I would say Socialism as practiced in Western Europe and the Nordics is doing better. They're out doing the US in most important metrics, and they're trending more Socialist (though we'll see what intensifying climate migration and other climate change consequences bring).
A core element of socialism is that all industries and natural resources are state-owned. European countries are capitalist, not socialist, and got where they are by being so.
Anytime this point comes up, someone on the right/Republican will say any taxation is Socialism, that Europe is Socialist. So, to compare Europe/Nordic socialist policies, to US policies is not a large leap. You can't just say, "well technically that isn't really socialism so we can't use that as an example in this argument", when literally for a decade the 'right' has specifically called them socialist.