Slavery never went away, it just shifted to encompassing the whole work force
Yea getting paid six figures to do a White Collar Job from home is slavery. Nice hyperbole.
Try not working and see how long you live. For most people, not very long.
WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
231–240 of 367 posts
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those with the most to lose benefit the most from having a just and civil society, but that realization never seems to percolate through.
A just and civil society being one where the harder I work, the more taxes I pay? Where stores are closing right and left because theft isn’t prosecuted but I have to pay $7,000 to get a bathroom permitted while an RV on the street outside my house is considered a home and gets to dump shit on the street with no repercussions?
Sucks that some people have no better choice than to live in an RV and dump their shit on the street.
Sorry about the cost of your bathroom addition though.
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
[deleted] I failed to consider the audience.
What is your actual contribution to society? I'm going to assume you work at some useless startup (like most of us) that will be gone in a few years, having left nothing useful to society. Is your work really helping society?
What, you’re not “Making the World a Better Place through Paxos algorithms for consensus protocols”?
In seriousness, I wish there was more self-awareness like this in our field.
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
And so they would...continue...to work...for things that cost more than food and shelter do?
Very often, yes. But if their boss harassed them (or say tried to force RTO), they could quit and not worry about ending up on the street.
That was what I was getting at, yeah. ;)
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#235Honestly lots of people are doing miminal hours WFH, not just IT, all office workers. I think companies really dont know what to do about it.
Let them discover just how little work is done when people are in the office. So many people who are professional water cooler talkers. Few people are putting in a full eight hours a day.
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
And so they would...continue...to work...for things that cost more than food and shelter do?
Very often, yes. But if their boss harassed them (or say tried to force RTO), they could quit and not worry about ending up on the street.
This is the real reason I like the idea of UBI. It’s not because I want to do nothing all day, it’s because I want to shift the power dynamic. For example, imagine a worker living paycheck-to-paycheck who needs their employer-provided health insurance, with an asshole boss who refuses to let them take a day off to attend a family member’s funeral: the UBI improves their ability to tell that boss to get fucked without ending up broke and homeless.
Basically I’m for any system that allows people to tell bad bosses to get fucked.
Also a good argument for universal health care.
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Quit the bad ones, join the good ones. This is why universal income is extremely important, so that people can pursue better jobs without risking being vulnerable.
Some people don’t want to work. They’ve told me so. I think UBI would destroy these people, like easy wealth does to the newly rich. A better solution is to focus on worker’s rights and labor regulations. Of course that opens the internationalism question, but so too would ubi.
UBI is a solution to the problem of structural unemployment when due to advances in automation we don't have enough reasonable jobs for people who are capable of working, when we don't really want everyone to work as much.
If we need everyone who can work to actually work, if we want to force people to work with a threat that if they don't contribute to society then they'll be (for example) homeless - well, then we don't (yet) need UBI and should not implement UBI until(if) we get the problem which UBI would fix.
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#238Nearly 20 years ago we used to install monitoring software to tell if a user's mouse or keyboard hadn't been used in a while. More and more places use traffic inspection "for security". Desks now use sensors to tell when warm bodies are near. Doesn't matter whether you're working from office or in the home, surveillance is here to stay. Good businesses should only care if work is getting accomplished. Bad businesses…
> Bad businesses will continue to use draconian methods to try to squeeze productivity rather than foster it What about jobs that aren't creative like coding or graphic design? Some jobs are simply "sit in your chair and do work". The productivity metrics aren't speculative - they are measurable. You may argue "these are jobs for AI" - but realistically alot of jobs are a way off from this. Why shouldn't the "product…
> What about jobs that aren't creative like coding or graphic design?
I don't understand, those are creative?
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some people don’t want to work. They’ve told me so. I think UBI would destroy these people, like easy wealth does to the newly rich. A better solution is to focus on worker’s rights and labor regulations. Of course that opens the internationalism question, but so too would ubi.
So if you have the opportunity to stop working and keep being paid, wouldn't you take it? I'm sure the mayority of people don't want to work. It's not a natural thing to do.
If I had the opportunity to stop working and keep being paid half or third of my salary, that would be an interesting consideration, where I'd probably work but work less, and I know people who'd do differently in both directions; the doctors would still keep their patients, but some struggling people would stop working for pay and work on their dependents (both kids and elderly/sick parents).
The whole point of UBI is that it keeps incentives for working, as most people - especially the most valuable employees - do want much more than a basic income, - and also supports partial employment (as opposed to things like means-tested welfare). What it would change the most is the situation regarding "shit jobs" which are both poorly paid and undesirable; and if the desperate workers get some alternatives, then these jobs would have to pay more, improve conditions, or not get done if they aren't that needed; and that seems a good effect to me.
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can accuse UBI of many things but unfair it is clearly not, hence the "universal". Everyone gets the same amount - but the assumption is most will then choose to work and earn extra income on top of that.
> but the assumption is most will then choose to work and earn extra income on top of that. Also important to stress that most (limited) experiments suggest this assumption to bee true. UBI is not as radical as many people pretend it is. It is essentially a one size fits all solution replacing all existing welfare programs with, in many cases, better outcomes.
You can’t quit when you’re in an experiment that will end. Unless payments are for life, the experiments of UBI are invalid.