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The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

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171–180 of 209 posts

Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course I didn’t mention it. What would this have accomplished, other than upsetting her and establishing an adversarial call? I was calling in to get a task done. I got it done as quickly as possible and moved on. Next time if I get her again, I’ll request a different agent by name, who was professional and capable last time.

[flagged]

Hey, can you please not post in the flamewar style or cross into personal attack? You can make your substantive points without that.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

#172

The same inequality exists with drug testing too. A lot of low wage roles get drug tested on a regular basis while higher paying careers don’t. Outside the military, pilots rarely get tested despite the fact they’re responsible for many more lives than fork lift operators or truck drivers (who often do get tested). Doctors pretty much only get tested if they botch a surgery or someone reports them. Lawyers? Wallstree…

...I can guarantee you that most SpaceX workers are held to much higher standards, than their big boy CEO, when it comes to security clearance.

Musk submits to drug tests. But yeah just skimming news headlines would give you a different idea.

Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

#173
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Hey, can you please not post in the flamewar style or cross into personal attack? You can make your substantive points without that. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

I didn't post in the flamewar style or cross into (a) personal attack, but your shallow dismissal of my comment is mildly ironic...

Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

#174
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this comment represent a weird sentiment: if you drugt test in one field, you should equally drug test I all fields. How many airplanes crashed due to The pilot being on drugs? it seems like introducing a whole machinery to just have the same resting is an industrial scale waste of resources. However, people regularly die because of drunk and tired drivers.

There is some implicit assumption that drug testing is a safety measure. I am quite convinced it is a productivity measure.

so a truck drives faster when the driver is completely sober? the plane flies faster when the pilot is not on drugs?

Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

#175
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, can you please not post in the flamewar style or cross into personal attack? You can make your substantive points without that. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

I didn't post in the flamewar style or cross into (a) personal attack, but your shallow dismissal of my comment is mildly ironic...

Well, these things are subject to interpretation, of course, but I don't think it's a stretch to call the following a personal attack, as it creates a pejorative image and applies it to the other person (and adds negative intensifiers like "of course", "just", "got emotional", "secretly resented"): "I presume you said nothing to alert her to the issue, of course? Just got emotional about it and secretly resented the woman for having children"

Similarly for "I do find humorous the idea that you can't even fathom", which is both personal and aggressive, and written in internet snark style.

Perhaps this won't be helpful as it sounds like I've already offended you, but I think most likely what's going on here is that most of us underestimate the provocation in our comments by a considerable amount (say 10x) and overestimate the provocation in the other's comments by a comparable amount (say another 10x), and that compounds to a 100x distortion in how we evaluate these things. They generally appear very different to a neutral reader.

Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

#176
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't post in the flamewar style or cross into (a) personal attack, but your shallow dismissal of my comment is mildly ironic...

Well, these things are subject to interpretation, of course, but I don't think it's a stretch to call the following a personal attack, as it creates a pejorative image and applies it to the other person (and adds negative intensifiers like "of course", "just", "got emotional", "secretly resented"): " I presume you said nothing to alert her to the issue, of course? Just got emotional about it and secretly resented the…

So how would you have conveyed the intent of, "I don't think you're being fair to this woman, nor do I think you're attempting to engage with the problem you've described in a productive way."?

And no, I wouldn't say you've "offended me" per se, just that I find it disappointing you've chosen me, of the two people here, to reply to.

Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. But it seems widespread. The issue seems to be that many people don't consider their situation in absolute terms, but tend to look at how others have it. An interesting book on the subject is Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior (original German title: Der Neid: Eine Theorie der Gesellschaft) by Helmut Schoeck.

That book is incredibly relevant to current trends. While envy in small societies spurred improvement, in today’s complex societies it breeds destructive tendencies, vast disparity in achievement makes envy less about motivation and more about resentment, fueling calls for collectivism and redistribution. The rise of Progressive politics might be less about fairness and more about an unaddressed, deep-seated envy. We…

Envy is who has a problem with Inequality. Charity is who has a problem with poverty. Easiest way to reduce inequality is kneecap those at the top and share the lucre with your downtrodden political allies. Easiest way to help poverty is teaching a man to fish after giving him a couple fish so he doesn't need to worry about starvation during class.

Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

#178
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is a cultural problem. in asia and africa people take their kids to work all the time. part of this is because parents can't afford childcare, but part of it is also: "why not?". i find our western attitude towards kids disturbing. after living 15 years in china i have come to realize that western, and even more so the european, and especially the german and austrian attitude towards work and school is much more…

Not everyone loves children, is the unspoken unpopular thing to say. Even more unpopular: dogs. These are things I wish not to see in an office, nor a bar environment. Actually see isn't the issue, it's the uncontrollable, but considered normal, noise that I find stressful.

I agree about dogs. Children however are just like adults in how they're all different and have their own personality etc., so I think society is suffering from delaying this integration into society. We all grow up and eventually have to integrate with others, and it seems because of this separation of ages that we will have a less cohesive society and culture in so many ways (which I think is visible already, as mentioned in this thread).

Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

#179

Yet more "please return to the office" pseudo-journalism bollocks. Front-line staff have to clock on, get their toilet breaks timed, get drug tested, have weird random shift patterns, have to work at least one day on the weekend, have to cover for colleagues by doing a 16-hour shift, get paid overtime, can't nip out for a doctor's appointment, etc, etc, etc. Happy for bosses to consider making the workplace more equa…

I don’t know which part of that article you read, but the main takeaways were to have front line workers have a better quality of work. Have managers onsite more, increase pay for frontline workers to compensate for not being able to commute, and shift to four day weeks instead of five to reduce commute.

I agree that flexibility such as doctors appointments are important, and also that can be difficult if you’re one of two employees working a storefront, particularly if it’s busy. Heading out to an unplanned appointment (what I assume you mean by “nip out”) may be difficult, but accommodating planned and scheduled appointments could certainly be made easier - this is a time when the onsite manager should say “I will be in that day and I will cover for the time needed for your appointment”.

Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

#180
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many bad economic decisions were based on cocaine usage back in the day? I think the point is that with higher paying and salaried jobs you are practically exempt from having repercussions due to drug usage while a lowerpaid wage worker is constantly in fear of getting fired over it.

arguably, by a similar logic, world war 2 was started by terrible decisions made while high on speed

Has there actually been any hard evidence to support this idea? I know there's a fair bit to support Hitler being basically a junkie by the end of the war, but pre-war I'm pretty sure he was just a meglomaniacal psychopath.
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