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Comment by Hercuros | Hacker News Reader

It's an interesting thought experiment IMO and you can't really resolve moral questions by looking at what the law says. After all, the law tends to be based on some moral principles, and laws can fail or be ineffective/corrupt.

It is quite conceivable that when it comes to working-from-home (and having the employer contribute to the costs that you make at home), the laws simply aren't in place yet, because we have never seen WFH on the scale that we see during the pandemic. So it is ultimately silly to try to determine what is reasonable based on the currently existing law here.

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> It's an interesting thought experiment

What is the experiment? Honestly? What's the point? That two people enjoy different advantages and that's unfair and needs to be addressed?

Here's a take on that "issue" by Vonnegut that actually is well thought out and interesting:

http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

The laws exist already, and even where they don’t directly address WiFi, they address broad enough situations to be applicable to WiFi issues. It’s also not really something that requires unique and specific laws to address. For it to be a useful practical thought experiment it ought to address the law as it exists. It’s a cut and dry issue as it relates to the law. The interesting points might be around what level it ought to shift from a civil issue to a criminal one and vice versa. The analogy in the original post between a broadcasted network signal and excess light is also a bad analogy even though technically it’s just two types of light emitted at different frequencies. It’s not analogous because of how it’s used in the two separate instances.

It’s not really that interesting of a philosophical issue either; I find the notion that it’s a novel issue to be baffling. Out of all the many novel issues arising from mass WFH this isn’t one of them.

This feels like a subtle anti-remote work puff piece to test the waters with scare phrases like:

"When organisations talk about remote working reducing their costs, it’s worth considering which of those costs are just being passed onto to the employee, and if that is fair."

I don't know a many people who lament WFH, excepting educators and middle-managers.

I’m not sure I would read that passage as lamenting WFH. It could equally be read as comment on whether is fair to pay people less if they’re WFH. Or equally it could be read as comment that companies should be passing some of their WFH savings on to employees rather than shareholders.

> Or equally it could be read as comment that companies should be passing some of their WFH savings on to employees rather than shareholders.

There's nothing about savings mentioned, just costs. Now you could really stretch the meaning of cost to possibly include inversion of value, but that's incongruous with the vernacular used in the article and is not even hinted at. Based on these things, I wouldn't agree with the interpretation of "costs".

Corporate welfare (savings go to value/bonuses/shareholders, costs go to customers) is a the norm in the US. This article goes one step farther to suggest there are costs that are being passed to the employees. It makes no sense when faced with reality, playing as FUD.

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