Billionaires Want People Back to Work. Employees Aren’t So Sure
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Maybe - just maybe - this could be the unplug that helps people prioritize the things that they enjoy over their work.
I recognize that's a viewpoint that represents immense privilege. I'm in a job where I'm capable of working remotely. But it'd be a neat thing for people like me to be able to leverage.
The first two depend _very_ heavily on both your home and office environments. It is certainly not true for myself.
Some people like working from home, fine, but for many of us it's just not right.
I picked up a liquidation sale Aeron on Craigslist - totally worth it.
Also I’ve found it easier and faster to zoom since everyone is remote (don’t have to try and find an open meeting room).
I've been happy with the Aeron chair and getting up pretty often to wander around a bit.
On the response times, if your office is one of constant interruption for that, then you can simply just have video conferencing on all day rather than just for meetings. This helps with "Hey Bob, what's the answer to this?". It has the same level of distraction as being in the office and just interrupting each other all the time. (which is awful for some, and useful for others)
People defend this self-serving behaviour in the name of 'teamwork' and it needs to be called out.
No, if it's for remote W-2 work, it's not. If it's used exclusively for your own business, it is. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act eliminated home office deductions for people who are not self-employed.
Still able to deduct those in Canada tho: https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/individ...
I wonder how WeWork will fare when an entire 2 generations of people realise they can work close to home and be more productive...
I wonder how hard it would be to start a small, community co-working space.
Right now, nobody is coming in, everyone's remote. I prefer to go to the office now. Tho it's only six of us developers (company is 17 people) sharing a pretty nice office in a modern building owned by the company, I prefer to work over the wire. Unusual, huh? I realized for me it's about flexibility, not distance.
I wish you get to live the way you want. Good luck, sir.
We hire an office in a building with other remote workers and small companies. So he goes to lunch etc with those people rather than us, but at least he gets a clear work/home boundary and social interaction when he feels like.
I'm personally very pro-remote (have worked remote at corporate gigs before) and it'd be great to see more companies adopting it. There are some seriously big benefits and, if the tooling keeps improving, I think it could be a real competitive advantage for companies.
It won't. That's the problem. Being forced to do WFH unprepaerd + kids suddenly home + being in an actual pandemic, worried about the future, your family and yourself = productivity disaster. And it unfortunately will end up emotionally associated with WFH.
edit: and I feel bad for worrying because we're in a much better position than many others.
I work almost completely remotely; my colleagues are as a result of this situation, and many of them having to try to work a daycare job at the same time with nurseries/schools closed.
I'm sure they don't think their experience is representative of normal remote working, but it certainly won't make anyone in a similar position think 'hey this is great'.
Not me. I actually want to go back to the office, despite the hassle of commuting. Working from a jury-rigged home office is incredibly inconvenient.
I hope this time at home "spoils" workers as to what they're missing out on in life due to working themselves to the bone so that they can reject calls to return to our prior broken society.
No-one's skillset is that unique.
I'm sure the guys with the spreadsheets in the back would love to knock off that expensive SF office space as a line item.
And it is obvious that the rentiers of our economy want the non-rentiers to go back to work. The rentiers actually have little to lose. The article states they might get sick, but if we're being realistic, they are very well sheltered against the collapse of the healthcare system when they would, unlike the rest of us.
Instead we have healthcare tied to the job and the tech hiring cartel. Where is the revolution?
There was Occupy Wallstreet.
It's very interesting how government attacked it. Both internally and externally.
One lesson to learn from it is that a movement need few clearly defined goals. And needs to remove/distance any people who try to muddle with that (intentionally or not). Otherwise this will divide people on the inside, create infighting leading to disillusioned rudderless environment soon distant to self implode.
We're incredibly fortunate in tech that we can do a large portion of work remotely, many people aren't so lucky. One would think that we'd value life above profit but lately that doesn't appear to be the case.
i just feel like its not going to be enough.
(And I'm not a tech worker. I'm a dirt poor freelance writer, but I'm at least still working because I've done remote work for years.)
I'm trying to light my teeny, tiny little candle rather than curse the dark. The pizza place I've been going to regularly for carryout is doing a bit better than they were two weeks ago. I've discussed it with staff. They've said business is still light, but not scary like it was.
I'm trying to light my teeny, tiny little candle rather than curse the dark
Thanks for that. It's apparently frowned upon in the tech community to have a positive attitude, but I really hate negativity. Find the good in the situation and work with it.
I can’t wrap my head around this. Why would any sane person say this out loud, regardless of their opinions?
Don’t these people have PR consultants around? What am I missing?
because, sadly, they know that they will not face any consequences for this in the US.
It's like Yuval Noah Harari being invited to dinners by the same tech titans he accuses of building a dystopia. The only thing they hear is that they're powerful.
Ad spends are dropping and dropping fast. Amazon is a retailer. Apple sells luxury goods. Cloud and Microsoft are dependent on big spends from enterprise.
All of this is at risk. Tech isn’t independent of the Main Street economy.
The rich aren't going to be exposed to risks like the working folk whether they're at the office or not due to their normal distancing.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4333698-tesla-elon-musk-win...
From a pure health perspective, physical isolation is taxing both physically and mentally. Not everyone has a home gym; is 6 months of sedentary behavior going to cause more cardiovascular complications than coronavirus in the same at-risk groups?
Economics also has health and well-being effects for the many people.
When we flatten the curve, we extend the length of sedentary behavior but reduce the number of people turned away from the hospital. However, as a previous article [0] describes, if we end up turning 90% of people away anyway, because the virus is just too contagious to control, will sedentary people have weakened immune systems or encounter other complications at a rate that challenges the benefit?
As another person who doesn't really know: if I were the feds, I would be using this time to mass manufacture masks and testing for every single American to wear daily, and once those were produced and delivered, reactivate significant parts of the economy, with voluntary precautions.
The mask culture in Japan may be contributing to the slower spread. It will go down as a great gaffe all the people who shamed others from not wearing masks in the western world.
Every shelter in place order allows people to leave their homes to exercise, and there are plenty of exercises you can do indoors.
tell that to the people who have families and been furloughed for 2 months or more. Here in Vegas I dont know one person who doesnt want work to start tomorrow.
this article reeks of so much privilege its insane. The billionaires will still be billionaires if nothing happened for over a year.
The rest of us without the opportunity to have nest eggs will be in poverty.
We have no slaves today because renting turned out to be cheaper than owning with advancement of infrastructure and technology.
We still use convicts as slaves. It's worth it only if someone else (in case of convicts, the government) covers the cost of ownership.
Nonsense, I have an embarrassing number of acquaintances who've admitted to wanting slaves and that they'd have them if it weren't illegal.
It's important to keep in mind that there's no shortage of people who'd be slave owners if only it were legal.
What you see in the prison system is a modern variant but only accessible to very few. Conventional slavery was damn near ubiquitous, accessible to many.
We have no slaves because it's illegal.
[citation needed]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States#C...
My biggest question is how a "household" is defined. Does it only count landowners? Landowners are significantly wealthier than the average citizen, so of course they would be able to afford more than most.
Also, are you aware that the population of NYC was under 10,000 until 1710? So even according to that stat, 4,000 people in one of the wealthiest cities in the country owned slaves. It doesn't seem like evidence that conclusively proves your point.
Got any other sources?
I'm sure you're perfectly capable of google searches and reading about the history of slavery on your own if you're so interested.
We were taught this in school, that it was a very common practice with little to no barrier to entry in the early days, and wasn't even racially discriminated until rebellions started. There are even well-documented records of freed slaves becoming slave owners themselves, it was that trivially accessible and generally accepted.
My point was that slavery was accessible to many, contextually in contrast to prisons today, context your quote omitted. Slaves you'd acquire in units as small as an indentured servant, prisons are far more complex with substantial barriers to entry. In an environment of legalized slavery any household could easily get in on it, I can't even begin to imagine how I'd go about starting a prison yet it's presumably legal for me to try.
That's what you're going with? So what evidence are you basing your belief of of? Sounds like it's just a feeling.
Wanting if you don't have something and wanting if you have something is completely different thing.
Let alone the fact that even if you have it and want it, it still might be uneconomical for you.
You may want a pony. You may even want a pony when it shits on your floor. But it will still be financially bad for you when you have to pick up the bill to feed the damn thing.
We have no slaves because renting employees is cheaper and more flexible than keeping slaved. At least on average.
Money doesn't grow on trees. It comes from our bodies.
Billionaires just used people to convince other people that they have right to exorbitant share of what we all make in total. Some good things might have been side effect of that process. Some bad too.
Proportionally to me, that would be like if I withdrew a dollar from my bank account and lit it on fire once a year to cover all my necessities.
Of course, the number of deaths that they can't report so will nevertheless go up there too, but they will claim that they are so superior compared to those Europeans southern from them, and they could propaganda their own population that "it's not so dangerous" (by misreporting those with "other illnesses" like hypertension etc) to go back to work as their country and health infrastructure is so superior.
The German main advantage is most of their cities being relatively small, so everything is "spread" more than in many countries, less chance for news like in Spain or Italy where the army had to carry corpses because there are too many. It will be more "a few here" and "a few there" etc.
I can't quote you some specific news, except some articles in French writing about German view, that I remember reading recently (but haven't saved the links) but at least, as one additional example, if I understood correctly, something I've got delivered from somebody I know, there's some German doctor for which is claimed that he is "epidemiologist" who gets more media presence just recently, claiming that "it's not worse than flu" and that the number of deaths in Italy and Spain is only "because they have bad hygiene." Of course he ignores the fact that there was already a peak of flu season in Italy around two months before, and that now there are there 50 times more deaths per week than then, and hygiene certainly didn't get worse 50 times in so short time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Is_COVID-19_like_a_flu%3F...
So stay tuned, if I get more info, and there's some possibility to comment, I will... Or maybe some other person who reads the European news more carefully (best more than one language) will be able to write more. But as this whole topic is already flagged here, don't expect too much here.
May be true, but at the same time
>Billionaires and other members of the elite have the luxury of social distancing while making money.
1957/58 H2N2 Asian flu 2 million global deaths atrributed
1968 H3N2 Hong Kong flu 1 million global deaths atrributed
We cannot tell yet whether the total number who will die this season will be significantly greater or whether it is that the rate of deaths has increased.
It’s possible the fatality rate is slightly lower than is commonly reported and the infection rate is slightly higher, but that’s not going to make a tremendous difference in terms of the number of deaths or in the impact it has on the health care system.
edit: And South Korea has tested 345k+ and only 9k have come back positive: https://www.cdc.go.kr/board/board.es?mid=&bid=0030
This is from Dan Patrick, Texas Lt Gov. who doesn't want to sacrifice their lives for S&P 500?
It might cost more QALYs (quality-adjusted life years) to have an economic recession the size of 2008 than to have millions die from COVID-19: https://medium.com/@benfinn/coronavirus-how-much-is-a-life-w...
Sacrificing grandma to Mammon is not the answer.
Besides, as I was saying, we don't have a choice between deaths and collapse. You get collapse and fewer deaths or collapse and more deaths. We are choosing the former.
[0] https://fortune.com/2019/01/25/economic-downturn-mortality-r...
I would imagine tens of millions of deaths might trigger a recession, but it's hard to say.
It seems that throughout history some pandemics have wound up being good for the economy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22572317
Also, note that the quote "if there’s a recession as bad as the last one, it could be even worse for well-being than tens of millions of deaths" is not saying that there will be tens of millions of deaths. It's instead saying that the hit to well-being, quantified in QALYs, is greater than tens of millions of deaths.
What happened to revolution and eating the rich? Have we lost to the Mr. Money Mustaches of the world?
now (more) americans get to experience to misery, terror, and death that the u.s. has exported to to rest of the world in order to fuel its economic "growth"
Many businesses will be booming in pandemic. Just not the usual ones and that pains the owners of usual ones greatly.
This choice between "lockdown and recession" and "no lockdown and no recession" is a false dichotomy.
apparently outside suicides, deaths reduced overall
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Billionaires are billionaires because of the extreme disproportionate gains by the few at the expense of thousands/millions.
They're used to seeing the many slave away for their interests.
Not seeing that happening now is throwing their view of proper world order into chaos and they're not used to be back in a position without control.
I mean, people say a lot of horseshit about what capitalism is or isn't ("I'm a capitalist because I'm for making money and profits.", etc), or creating a fake context where the only alternative is ownership by the state.
But at the end of the day it's about the worker employer relationship, period, end of story.
There's nothing non-capitalist or non-free-market about a worker collective. There are no laws against it. Nobody will try to stop you. You don't need a change in the government.
What are you waiting for?
I’d you don’t agree with me, than what makes what I said any different than the Topic of this thread.