WendyTheWillow

"Work from office" is just "work". That's the default; you go somewhere, provide value in exchange for money, and go home. There was no "shifting" unless you mean pre-capitalistic agrarian societies where "work" meant doing literally everything yourself.

It's hardly a caricature, when you realize that by working remotely, you're asking someone else to pay the costs of you not being in the room. Maybe for some it's fine, and that's what your manager can do for you, but if you're WFH and your whole team isn't, the cost is shifted to someone else.

But for workplaces that presume WFH is cost-free and all benefits, someone there is suffering on behalf of the people who WFH.

It's fascinating to me that "work from home" for many really means, "work from anywhere but the same place your coworkers are."

Comments about "separate buildings" and "renting office space" kind of underscores the real value wfh provides; less human interaction. The only problem with that is human interaction actually ends up making much work easier, not harder.

No, but it does show you need to resort to insult in order to argue, which in turn reveals the weakness of your beliefs and hurts your own advocacy by not putting forward the best form of your argument.

That’s what we’re discussing; I’m saying that an individual is protected in their speech while operating on behalf of a corporation, and that it’s not corruption. You declaring it so doesn’t make it so.

And yes, the individual risks acting in ways their company doesn’t like, but they can do things to lower that risk, such as asking other individuals within that corporation what their desired action is.

But it’s still individuals acting, so they’re afforded all of the protections the Constitution provides.

Yes, and the reasoning holds; an individual decides to do that. There’s a name on that check, a specific person who authorizes the transfer of funds. How could you ethically stop a person from authorizing that check?

But that’s not the claim. A “company” doesn’t speak, individuals do. Just because the individuals do as a result of compensation, doesn’t mean they lose their right to free expression.

You’re focusing on the “group” aspect of this, but that’s irrelevant to the argument. A PR spokesperson has individual rights, even if they choose to use that voice to advance a company’s goals.

You may not like their motives or incentives, but I don't see a compelling argument that makes their expression less legitimate than mine.

What’s not clear to me is why a corporation’s specific governance would matter. When a company “speaks”, it’s still an individual ultimately expressing themselves, just with the benefit of compensation.

It’s exceptionally hard to financially justify exploration, when so many other problems could see substantial improvement given the costs required.

Clusters of humans cohabiting a confined space? If you squint hard enough…

You disagree with reality then, because what I'm writing is descriptive and not subject to opinion.

Neither of these things are even remotely related to what the person I replied to suggested, but nice equivocation.

Colloquially perhaps, but it is wrong from a technological perspective, and IMO that matters.

No, it’s not. Good lord…

pirate bad yarr

They gave up the power to forcibly allow abortions. The "government" doesn't operate as a monolith, the executive branch now cannot universally do pro-choice related things.

This is an exceptionally real example. People invent things all the time and build companies around their ideas.

It's not "should", it's "is". This is happening, all over the place, right now.

> the hypothetical Jimmy would eventually be replaced by someone else who would invent this pencil.

As I've seen it historically, here's the crux of your argument. "If not for this employer, some other person would have done what they did, so it's not even really their value."

The problem becomes the devaluation effect this has on ideation, which misaligns incentives away from innovation and progress. Since when do we presume someone would have done something, discounting the person who actually does? This wouldn't apply to the laborer who constructed the pencil, I observe. "Well, anyone could have constructed this pencil, so why value the production?" Nobody makes that argument.

Additionally, this devalues the organizational contribution of coordination between the lumberjack and the miner. Jimmy coordinates their raw materials into an environment where they can be combined in the first place. Even if he doesn't invent the pencil, he still creates value by building the environment for the job to exist. Absent someone in Jimmy's role, none of the pencil-construction jobs would exist.

It's not my opinion, it's the only rational conclusion.

"Prove conclusively" is not how any of this works.

Jimmy didn't do any of those things. The claim was that Jimmy can't produce value, but he did.

And even so, the work the people making the pencils for Jimmy would not exist without Jimmy. Jimmy, in yet another way, provides value. Jimmy figured out to put the wood with the graphite, not them. Who actually does it is irrelevant; or are you suggesting that if Jimmy kept his operation entirely mechanical, that'd be better?

What ceiling are you talking about? AFAICT there is no earnings or wealth ceiling in the Western world, and there certainly isn't one in the United States.

Again, you rely on the utterly false notion of a "zero-sum" economy, when in fact it may only be possible to pull everyone out of poverty if we allow people to be proportionately rewarded for their contributions.

Quality contribution; thanks for commenting.

If Jimmy turns a piece of wood and some graphite into a pencil, he has created value. That didn't require exploiting the lumberjack or the miner. Jimmy did not steal value from either. He created value by inventing a new way for their raw materials to be useful to other people. Jimmy didn't need to "stand atop" anyone to do this.

What's "pathetic" are the ad hominems and insults the people in this thread have to resort to when they can't argue like adults. You're not right because you're angry, and you weaken your advocacy by trying to use your frustration as leverage over people giving reasoned arguments.

I would even argue that "working hard" is dying, if not already dead, as a means of escaping poverty in developed nations.

What matters substantially more is working "intelligently," which is even harder for those in poverty, given their lack of education.

I grant you all of this (for argument's sake). However, none of it actually addresses the merits of the "zero-sum" claim about capitalism or the claim that economic disparity will in the future be regarded in the same way as racism.

Also maybe I'm blind, but I don't think we've interacted before.

A shallow dismissal is less valuable than an excellent critical comment. Please share with me (and others) what's wrong with my thinking. I'm trying to be transparent about my reasoning in child comments, so hopefully, you will have enough to work with.

No, I'm telling you why it is you agree to copyright, as you seem unaware. Or rather, why a moral version of you would. If you choose to act immorally, fine. But at that point, you're acquiescing to my claim that piracy is immoral.