51–60 of 316 posts
But housing, transportation, daycare costs make that impractical. If they really want me in the office, companies need to engage on these issues in the metros they live in. They need to clear NIMBY barriers to urban housing, support transit, and good parental leave.
My "evidence" is that trading firms that kept raking in the money, and that benefit from maximum productivity of their employees, still generally have a hybrid work culture.
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> Not in most of Europe. I live in Spain, and received WFH job offers from Spanish, French, Dutch, Swedish and German companies. For all intents and purposes, WFH doesn't seem "dead" in Europe at all, as far as I can tell. > like Netherlands has ass-in-seat requirements for American companies That might be true, but doesn't really tell us about Dutch companies, just what American companies want/does in Europe, doesn'…
> doesn't really reflect what European companies are up to Most tech employment in Europe is via American FDI. And for a large number of "European" companies it's the same management, board members, and investors as in the US. Heck, I'm on the board of a European company as well.
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Correct. Pronatalism is a just a front, sometimes for pure racism. Remember that Musk grew up in Apartheid South Africa. They're worried about demographic shifts away from white dominance of the US. Also, according to the article, Musk "called children and called declining birth rates a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming," which is not so much pro-natalism as it is dismissive of global warming, beca…
> Remember that Musk grew up in Apartheid South Africa And cited his opposition to apartheid as the central reason that he left the country as soon as he could, at age 17, because he didn't want to be a part of that system. There are so many legitimate reasons to criticize Musk, but this isn't one.
You didn't mention how "opposition to apartheid" also meant avoiding mandatory military service. Interesting coincidence, I would say. Serious question: if one cared about ending Apartheid, wouldn't it be much more effective to do that from within South Africa than from across the ocean?
See also: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/12/elon-musk...
I will die on this hill: tech firms that mandated 5 days in the office was about soft layoffs, rather than a principled stance on individual performance under WFH. My "evidence" is that trading firms that kept raking in the money, and that benefit from maximum productivity of their employees, still generally have a hybrid work culture.
Additionally, I wonder how many CxOs have corporate real estate in their investment portfolio which might influence decisions.
This article frames the behavior of Musk, Thiel, Andreessen and others as being hypocritical or misguided, that their aims are not aligned with their actions. Either the author is completely missing the point, or they're crafting a particular narrative to provide plausible deniability for these billionaires acting fully in accordance with their philosophies as they've many times publicly espoused. Far from being "pronatalist", Musk, Thiel, Andreessen, and others are only interested in rising birthrates among a particular portion of the population. Like many SV elites, they have a cozy relationship with the HBD movement within the rationalist movement, including Thiel's close association with Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug). It's /very/ obvious to anyone who has spent any time comprehending things that these billionaires are very invested in increasing birth rates among other people they consider worthy of having children, particularly elite whites, and decreasing birth rates among those they don't consider worthy of having children, particularly anyone who is not white.
To not put too fine a point on it: Musk, Thiel, and Andreessen do NOT care if their policies prevent their workers from having children. They don't want their workers having children, they only want children from the families of elite whites. They cannot be too loud in their statements, but these people are eugenicists.
"One or two hybrid days per week capture nearly all the fertility upside." That is an interesting point, and not obvious why it would be so. In fact, it kind of calls into question whether the whole relationship is causal. The people who were able to WFH longer were more often in high-income jobs (service workers never got to do it in the first place, it was almost entirely an office worker thing). They were thus mor…
Ask me how I know it...
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It isn’t political.
What isn't political? TFA? It certainly is. The term pronatalist? Maybe it shouldn't be, but TFA is a political commentary on the term. I'm just trying to understand how this word is being used. And all the answers thus far indicate that it does indeed encompass political beliefs.
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Huh? Where do you get that from?
Mix of anecdotes and law of large numbers - for every 10 person startup founded by hipsters in Berlin you have a 500-1,000 person GCC opening up in Warsaw, such as Google.