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Comment by adiffview99now | Hacker News Reader

In the short term, kinda curious what would happen to all the people who are sustained by the economic activity of the things you deem superfluous. Someone works those jobs. Provides lunch, cleans the offices, sets up the furniture and AV, maintains the building, etc...

The pure fact that it provides increased economic activity and therefore is able to support different jobs and the second/third order consequences of those makes perfect sense to me.

In your stay at home model, what would all those people do instead?

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I've never understood the argument that we should continue doing something just for the sake of jobs. At bowling alleys, we used to have pinsetters who replaced the pins after you knocked them down. We had leech collectors who would collect leeches for bloodletting. We had 'computers' who would calculate equations by hand. It'd seem ridiculous today if I told you that we should've ignored advances in medicine, software, and automated pinball machines in order to protect those jobs. Irrespective of whether or not working from home is a good idea, society changes once new technologies are invented or social norms change, and sometimes that means we have to find people new jobs.

I didn't realize it was my responsibility to find these people employment. I especially didn't realize I needed to keep paying for a car, consuming gasoline and destroying Earth's biosphere, contributing to smog, and wasting my time so that these people will stay employed. Maybe, just maybe, our system needs a top-down reevaluation and maybe we can find other ways to house, clothe, and feed people who don't have jobs. Or maybe we realize there's other, more important work, for these folks to be doing.

Who's going to conduct the top-down reevaluation?

The top-down reevaluation will inevitably happen from the bottom-up.

I don't think it's your responsibility, but the proposed and in-process change is going to continue to be very disruptive, nonetheless.

One way to think about offices is that they are appealing for much the same reason that people demonstrably prefer to live in urban areas instead of rural areas. Over time, people flock to cities because of the efficiencies of having many people in a concentrated area. In many ways, the same thing is true with office jobs.

People living in suburbs or exurbs shouldn't expect to have a dozen eateries within a few blocks of their home, but it's quite common to have those options at work. The economics works because there are many more people per square mile or meter at the office than at home.

Personally, I keep groceries in my house, and almost never go out for lunch, but most people eat lunches out, and offices make that easier.

The short term will obviously be problematic for those people. However, in the mid term they can move some of those service activities to residential areas instead of business districts (provided that zoning regulations become less senseless than they are now), and in the long term those demographics can be redirected to more productive endeavours (by the combination of the appearance of new industries that leverage increased workforce availability and a general decrease in working hours).

It reminds me the 5th element: https://youtu.be/UkFAcFtBD48?t=50

(it hints at that there is something wrong with such logic).

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