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Shorten the Workweek to Reopen Safely

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Re: Shorten the Workweek to Reopen Safely

#31

Post by forgot_my_pwd »

adrianN wrote: post #27
forgot_my_pwd wrote: post #19

How many of us don't want to commute to the office 5 days a week, but also don't necessarily like the idea of working from home when not at the office? My personal ideal is a dedicated office space in a location very close to my home, like in the nearest downtown, where I would pay a certain amount per month in return for a set of days on which I could reserve personal office space. The issue with working from home f…

If your work location is farther away than the nearest downtown you should look for either a new job or a new place to live imho. Commuting more than an hour a day is awful.

I live in a great town that's about an hour commute from the big city where I work. I would never make as much money as I do now (or find as engaging work) if I looked outside the city. I also have no interest in moving.

Granted I don't hate commuting. Since I take the bus I get a significant amount of reading done.

Re: Shorten the Workweek to Reopen Safely

#32

Post by eikenberry »

fiblye wrote: post #6
tehjoker wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm concerned that if we go this route on a permanent basis without a more powerful labor movement, it'll mean that work and home will seamlessly merge. Employer surveillance will enter the home and corporate domination will seep into every pore of our existence... and that's for white collar workers.

If work from home ends up really sticking around, I'm sure plenty of cost-cutting employers will expect everyone to buy their own computers, but expect employees to all install keyloggers and monitoring software in order to work. And people will accept it, because they'll be fired if they refuse and someone more desperate will deal with it so long as they get paid at some point.

And those employers will suffer for it by getting sub-standard employee as the competent ones will find jobs at places that don't play big brother.

They could possibly get away with it by paying exceedingly well. But that would afford workarounds, like buying a work-only computer for the spyware to live on.

Re: Shorten the Workweek to Reopen Safely

#33

Post by nosuchthing »

twunde wrote: post #26
SeeTheTruth wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NO. You risk spreading it, young and healthy people are still dying or having severe outcomes - we still don't know enough to predict how it will go. And we still don't know if catching one strain once confers immunity, or for how long. So you won't be "done with it". If you do get sick you become a burden on an overloaded healthcare system. The people talking about this option are rightly being shut down.

To reiterate NO! Something that's not talked about enough is that the coronavirus is causing neurological issues[1]. The full effects aren't known, but examples of neurological diseases are MS, Parkinson's and cerebral palsy. That's not something to want to voluntarily get. oh, and that's not to mention that you're likely to get lung scarring or have a long-term cough[2]. The survivors will have major long-term compl…

+ Kidney issues.

Kidney failure could explain the swelling of feet, cardiac issues, and strokes being observed in Covid-19 infected cases.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.12.20022418v...

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/04/22/health/strokes-coronaviru...

Re: Shorten the Workweek to Reopen Safely

#34

Post by capdeck »

adrianN wrote: post #24
fiblye wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If work from home ends up really sticking around, I'm sure plenty of cost-cutting employers will expect everyone to buy their own computers, but expect employees to all install keyloggers and monitoring software in order to work. And people will accept it, because they'll be fired if they refuse and someone more desperate will deal with it so long as they get paid at some point.

Keyloggers and monitoring software are illegal even on employer issued computers in Germany afaik.

It will all be done in the name of "security" - in this case you don't have to justify or even explain what security issue your are trying to solve. And security software vendors will helpfully lend you an amazingly designed fear-mongering powerpoint.

Re: Shorten the Workweek to Reopen Safely

#35

Post by daxfohl »

twunde wrote: post #26
SeeTheTruth wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NO. You risk spreading it, young and healthy people are still dying or having severe outcomes - we still don't know enough to predict how it will go. And we still don't know if catching one strain once confers immunity, or for how long. So you won't be "done with it". If you do get sick you become a burden on an overloaded healthcare system. The people talking about this option are rightly being shut down.

To reiterate NO! Something that's not talked about enough is that the coronavirus is causing neurological issues[1]. The full effects aren't known, but examples of neurological diseases are MS, Parkinson's and cerebral palsy. That's not something to want to voluntarily get. oh, and that's not to mention that you're likely to get lung scarring or have a long-term cough[2]. The survivors will have major long-term compl…

But what is the plan? We can't sit around for five years until there is a vaccine. By then we'll all have caught it anyway. Nevermind that food supply chain will have dried up way before then and nobody will have a job anymore. Even with my posh job at a big cloud provider, I can't imagine the public still caring about any new feature dev if this goes on more than a year, so bye bye "recession proof" job. I can't imagine many other jobs surviving much more than that. That is as much of a non plan as an unmitigated reopen.

I just don't think that works. I think we're going to have to end up making some hard choices about acceptable risk, and how we can use that to get to a better outcome.

Re: Shorten the Workweek to Reopen Safely

#36

Post by adrianN »

capdeck wrote: post #34
adrianN wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keyloggers and monitoring software are illegal even on employer issued computers in Germany afaik.

It will all be done in the name of "security" - in this case you don't have to justify or even explain what security issue your are trying to solve. And security software vendors will helpfully lend you an amazingly designed fear-mongering powerpoint.

Even in the name of security you can't take away certain privacy privileges in Germany, as far as I understand the laws.

Re: Shorten the Workweek to Reopen Safely

#37

Post by em-bee »

forgot_my_pwd wrote: post #19

How many of us don't want to commute to the office 5 days a week, but also don't necessarily like the idea of working from home when not at the office? My personal ideal is a dedicated office space in a location very close to my home, like in the nearest downtown, where I would pay a certain amount per month in return for a set of days on which I could reserve personal office space. The issue with working from home f…

that's what coworking spaces are for. and it's absolutely a good option, if you can find one near your home. of course it may add to your cost, depending on how much space you have at home

Re: Shorten the Workweek to Reopen Safely

#38

Post by icelancer »

tehjoker wrote: post #3
aphextron wrote: post #2

We just need to make the office an optional place that people can gather when they feel the need to. I have no problem at all working a 5 day 40 hours work week from home. But this nonsense of everyone waking up at the same time, sitting in traffic, and cramming into "open plan" work spaces has to go.

I'm concerned that if we go this route on a permanent basis without a more powerful labor movement, it'll mean that work and home will seamlessly merge. Employer surveillance will enter the home and corporate domination will seep into every pore of our existence... and that's for white collar workers.

If WFH becomes permanent on any sort of meaningful basis, outsourcing companies are going to lobby very hard while companies are simultaneously trying to cut costs. People who are enjoying this WFH revolution would do well to think about secondary effects.

Re: Shorten the Workweek to Reopen Safely

#39

Post by icelancer »

daxfohl wrote: post #35
twunde wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To reiterate NO! Something that's not talked about enough is that the coronavirus is causing neurological issues[1]. The full effects aren't known, but examples of neurological diseases are MS, Parkinson's and cerebral palsy. That's not something to want to voluntarily get. oh, and that's not to mention that you're likely to get lung scarring or have a long-term cough[2]. The survivors will have major long-term compl…

But what is the plan? We can't sit around for five years until there is a vaccine. By then we'll all have caught it anyway. Nevermind that food supply chain will have dried up way before then and nobody will have a job anymore. Even with my posh job at a big cloud provider, I can't imagine the public still caring about any new feature dev if this goes on more than a year, so bye bye "recession proof" job. I can't ima…

>> But what is the plan?

There isn't one. Government has done little to nothing with the time they bought with our sacrifices. Mostly this is due to the fact there isn't a lot TO do - getting the hundreds of millions of tests that people want so some large percentage of the country can be tested daily is impossible anytime soon due to raw materials/resources.

Governments release plans to reopen that don't feature a single metric that holds them accountable, much less anything resembling open source / open data that drives their decisions. They bastardize the word "science" as something they are theoretically being guided by. The first tenets of science are transparency, open data, and falsifiability. No plan put forth by a state fits these criteria.

Anyone who points this out on Hacker News is downvoted massively, as you are undoubtedly noticing. As someone on Twitter very aptly put it, the Slack/Zoom/WFH class is more than happy to act sanctimonious about the whole thing while unemployment marches on to 20%.

EDIT:

>> making some hard choices about acceptable risk

People are bad at evaluating risk. Think about all the "Project Zero" slogans out there - no deaths from not wearing a seatbelt, no cancer deaths, no XYZ, no accepting risk of contracting COVID-19 until we get a perfect vaccine, etc. All completely unattainable. But if you point that out or try to have a conversation about it, someone swings down from the top rope with a story about how their grandma died of COVID-19 or that one young person somewhere died of it or had permanent scarring of their lungs (nevermind the statistics showing median age of death from COVID-19 being extremely high and the reproducibility of the lung damage being quite poor) and then you get massively booed and sometimes doxxed/reported to your employer.

It's politically untenable to talk about risk, hence a bunch of halfcocked "plans" of locking everyone in their houses to hide from the virus. We went from "don't overwhelm hospitals" to justifying layoffs/furloughs in hospitals nationwide by saying "oh you want to reopen? well volunteer your grandma to get it first" pretty quickly.

If people were good about evaluating risk, we wouldn't have the lottery fund education, for example.

Re: Shorten the Workweek to Reopen Safely

#40

Post by Eric_WVGG »

twunde wrote: post #26
SeeTheTruth wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NO. You risk spreading it, young and healthy people are still dying or having severe outcomes - we still don't know enough to predict how it will go. And we still don't know if catching one strain once confers immunity, or for how long. So you won't be "done with it". If you do get sick you become a burden on an overloaded healthcare system. The people talking about this option are rightly being shut down.

To reiterate NO! Something that's not talked about enough is that the coronavirus is causing neurological issues[1]. The full effects aren't known, but examples of neurological diseases are MS, Parkinson's and cerebral palsy. That's not something to want to voluntarily get. oh, and that's not to mention that you're likely to get lung scarring or have a long-term cough[2]. The survivors will have major long-term compl…

And blood clotting, strokes in the 30-40 age set, including one youngish actor who had a leg amputated.

https://www.vox.com/2020/5/1/21244171/stroke-coronavirus-sym...

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