[HN Gopher] The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do wit...
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The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 252 points
Date : 2023-08-13 17:10 UTC (5 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (www.okdoomer.io)
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Re-zoning commercial buildings to residential use should be a
| realistic option, no?
| sneak wrote:
| Rezoning alone is insufficient. For traditional (but
| interestingly not technical) reasons, the designs of commercial
| and residential buildings are very different and converting
| between them in already built structures is going to be very
| costly.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| The problem isn't the zoning. That can be fixed with literally
| a stroke of a pen. The problem is that the buildings were never
| designed for habitation, and so you run into issues with
| plumbing and windows. Sometimes these things are fixable, but
| usually at great cost, _especially_ for newer construction.
| lost_tourist wrote:
| going from office to residential is very expensive and is often
| more expensive than a complete tear down and rebuild.
| camdenreslink wrote:
| My understanding is converting huge office buildings into
| apartments/condos isn't cost effective or even possible a lot
| of the time. So they could re-zone, but possibly need to
| demolish/rebuild.
|
| Maybe this will spur innovation in building for buildings that
| can easily be converted between the two.
| taeric wrote:
| I'm still waiting to find out that there are tax implications for
| having X% of staff in an office building. In particular, if less
| than, say, 40% of staff is coming into a building, can you still
| count it as an office building?
| shrimpx wrote:
| Even though this article isn't well-argued, it hints at the core
| of the concern which is the collapse of downtowns. Lots of
| people, from real estate owners to governments, don't want that
| to happen. Whether there's a RTO "conspiracy" to avoid the
| collapse of downtowns, I don't know.
|
| Beyond real estate concerns, my take is fully remote companies
| are demonstrating how to be productive in a flatter, more
| asynchronous work structure. This is an existential threat to the
| exec and managerial class, who are demanding RTO in a fight for
| their own existence.
| nimbius wrote:
| the worst part isnt even in the article. Now that companies in
| places like LA and NYC know productivity doesnt take a hit from
| remote work, and remote packages are a selling point for hiring
| managers, they can sunset their leases and walk away from
| slumlords pushing overpriced office space.
|
| Fortune 10 and 50 companies will probably mandate everyone go
| back to work because theyre heavily invested in the type of real
| estate that could crucify them in a crash, but for the 99% of
| remaining employers the choice is an absolute no brainer. The
| small architecture firm, the payment processing company, local
| accountants and underwriters will all ignore the shot across the
| bow from elites and save a ton of cash in the process.
|
| Its not about if but when at this point. Biden sent all the
| federal workers back to the office but it isnt going to be
| enough. Elites are going to take a bite of what could wind up
| being a nearly trillion dollar shit sandwich they cooked up in
| their own kitchen.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Is there similar derivatives exposure on those commercial real
| estate loans as there was to residential mortgages in 2007/8?
| I've been thinking that there will be a a blackmail/chicken play,
| where the banks with the exposure to the loans say to government,
| "here are what we say the consequences are if these loans go
| upside down. Your choice is between another bank bailout on these
| loans with real domestic unrest risk from consequent currency
| debasement and the ability to import food and other staple goods,
| or effectively legislating most people back into offices."
|
| I lived in commercial warehouse spaces in the 90s, and not only
| were they cheap, huge, and awesome, but they created a condo boom
| for all those pretend "lofts," that cashed in on the cachet of
| that lifestyle our generation inspired. If the bulk of your
| personal net worth comes from flipping some 600sq' shoebox for
| almost a million dollars, you're welcome. The middle ground may
| be that landlords will turn a blind eye to live-ins again, and it
| will create some affordable housing for young people again, and
| with their influx, the downtowns can be revitalized from the
| globalized airport mall dead zones they have become. I think
| there's room for optimism.
| jpollock wrote:
| If your job can be done remote, it can be done offshore for 1/10
| the cost.
| jusssi wrote:
| Why would anyone with skills agree to work it for 1/10 if they
| can get 7/10?
| [deleted]
| have_faith wrote:
| Why are there so many highly paid remote tech workers then?
| Pannoniae wrote:
| No, not necessarily. And also, many office jobs can be done
| remote. Even if the policy is that you must come in to the
| office, that doesn't change the fact that it's possible to do
| it remote.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| To some extent, yes - but still, there are many challenges:
|
| - Time zones - Security - Language barrier - Work culture -
| Employment laws
|
| And the list goes on.
|
| The devs themselves can be cheap, but by the time you've jumped
| through many of the hoops to actually get them employed for you
| - they might not longer be THAT cheap.
| ahelwer wrote:
| Time zones and shared language/culture disagree? Or if you
| think you can get a 90% margin on the competition with the same
| result, go start a company and see how that works out for you.
| EliRivers wrote:
| So why isn't it? Genuine question. A enormous number of jobs
| can be done remote. Certainly mine (I've been full remote for
| over three years - one day during Covid the boss just told
| everyone to go home and we literally never went back to the
| physical office, which no longer exists). I can see entire
| companies, maybe entire industries, where vast amounts of the
| work can be done remotely.
|
| So why aren't all these companies cutting salary costs by 90%?
| That's a huge, huge amount of money. The stock price would go
| berserk. Dividends would soar. The C-suite would see incredible
| increases on their wealth. So if all these jobs can be done for
| 90% less, PLUS the savings of having no expensive office lease
| costs, why aren't they?
| nologic01 wrote:
| There are massive barriers evenif we assume that the work can
| be done 100% remotely, which in many cases is not true.
| Barriers include things like linguistic/cultural,
| legal/regulatory (domicile, contracts), financial (paying in
| a different currency).
|
| But for sure the pandemic has shown that there is also a lot
| of inertia.
| egoregorov wrote:
| 1/3 of the cost, at least in Kiev. I assume there are some laws
| preventing more than X% of company offshore
| esafak wrote:
| The internet has been around for decades; we used to call it
| "offshoring". Jobs are still here because not all workers are
| not fungible.
| esafak wrote:
| The internet has been around for decades; we used to call this
| practice "offshoring". Yet jobs are still here because not all
| workers are not fungible, and transaction costs are involved.
| That said I do believe companies are more geographically
| concentrated than they need to be.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| If your job isn't remote, it can also be offshored for 1/10 the
| cost - just get an office building.
|
| The arbitrage from offshoring is much narrower than most people
| think. You mostly get what you pay for and companies can easily
| waste a lot of money and time trying to go the low-cost more-
| employees route.
| vasco wrote:
| That's not true, the amount of US based scale-up jobs in
| Europe has risen a lot in the last couple of years also
| bringing up compensation at the top end to a bit higher than
| you used to be able to get here.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| What's not true?
| BinRoo wrote:
| You get what you pay for.
| ebiester wrote:
| The office already doesn't matter when it comes to offshoring.
| Companies are rarely in the same office already, and are spread
| across the US. Even if a team is co-located, their stakeholders
| aren't.
|
| Further, timezone-friendly offshoring is about 70-80% of the
| cost and comes with larger organizational complexity. Good (not
| mythical 10x, mind you - I mean good by standard definitions)
| developers are expensive no matter where they live.
| egoregorov wrote:
| 70-80% is incorrect, it's more like 40%. I made 22kUSD last
| year in Kiev. I think my colleague on same team in USA was
| making 65kUSD. Not SWE, just comparing numbers. I was also
| paid more than the average for my position/geography. I was a
| contractor, as was all of the UA team....don't know what
| coworkers arrangement was...
| typon wrote:
| The market is simultaneously efficient and yet refuses to
| offshore absolutely every job to make more money and increase
| profits. Strange world we live in.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| If across the board all work that could be remote were 1/10
| cost with no downside, literally every job that could be remote
| would already be offshored at this point already.
| renewiltord wrote:
| In software it's never been easier to start a company than
| before. If you have increased productivity in every part of the
| org you can outrace other companies.
|
| There are a few winner take all fields, but there's a plethora of
| fields which have multiple large players.
|
| At a straight 20% productivity boost in everything, the
| compounding gains will have you beat competitors in no time.
|
| If you're in software, and you have a magic pill for better
| everything, you should just do the thing yourself.
|
| The elite can't stop you.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| I don't really buy the argument. If commercial RE crashes, that
| means what, people take a 20% haircut on converting the buildings
| to condos and/or just selling for the value of the land?
|
| We are still seeing unprecedented housing shortages, which puts a
| pretty high floor on how much l "downtown" land values will
| crash.
| eganist wrote:
| > people take a 20% haircut on converting the buildings to
| condos and/or just selling for the value of the land?
|
| Leverage and derivatives completely turn this assumption on its
| head.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Good reply and argument. Will reconsider my thoughts on this.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| A lot of investments, including pension funds and 401ks, have
| money tied into commercial real estate through ETFs if not
| outright ownership.
|
| I'm not justifying the for-back-to-work, but to point out the
| vested interests fighting against remote workers.
| tgv wrote:
| Idk how realistic it is to convert those buildings, nor how
| much value it would take off (from the buildings themselves,
| but also from the rest of the real-estate market).
|
| But it's not unreasonable to assume fear of loss as a
| motivation, at all. However, what's the link between the people
| that can actually re-implement work-from-office and those
| holding all those office buildings?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Converting offices to condos is for practical purposes illegal
| due to the very different regulations.
|
| You can tear the buildings down and build new ones, but that
| will take a decade to get permitted, _if_ you 're in a
| construction permissive city.
| lost_tourist wrote:
| lol it doesn't take 10 years to get a new building built, 3-5
| years tops if you have the capital.
| progbits wrote:
| Office space is very expensive to convert to residential, you
| have large rectangle with windows on the perimeter only, weird
| elevator/stair layout, insufficient plumbing for many
| individual bathrooms, and poor ventilation for kitchens.
| ghaff wrote:
| Furthermore, I'm skeptical that if commercial real estate
| crashes (because far fewer people are working in cities) that
| there will be continued demand to live in those cities. There
| seems to be an underlying assumption that the only reason
| people wouldn't want to live in a city is the cost--and
| that's not true for a lot of folks.
| metalspot wrote:
| SF office buildings are selling at 60-70% off in some cases. I
| don't think anywhere else is as bad, but still probably worse
| than 20%.
|
| https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/downtown-sf-office-bu...
| https://www.globest.com/2023/06/07/wells-fargo-sells-san-fra...
| lost_tourist wrote:
| Why are all the capitalists crying, "it's just the market,
| supply and demand, dude!" . I'm sure less urban areas are
| getting that capital so it all balances out in the end. I'm
| not going to cry for someone who is rich enough to own a
| skyscraper in downtown San Francisco.
| SomethingNew2 wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| tdba wrote:
| Hopefully we actually jail some bankers in the coming corporate-
| real-estate-triggered global financial crisis.
| badrabbit wrote:
| I am ok with the general sentiment here.
|
| But the author thinks making 200k, taking selfies, paid
| internships and a bunch of other normal stuff for some reason is
| things only rich people do?
|
| Reads very us vs them classist bullshit. The people that own
| enough office real estate to care make 8+ figures a year not six.
| WFH was a thing in certain jobs long before the pandemic and even
| today a lot of jobs can't be done from home.
|
| I feel like the author doesn't get why the bullshit at office
| jobs exist. It's almost as if they were very used to hourly low
| paying jobs (same here) and recently started doing salaried
| office jobs. When you are paid salary (like the $200k bosses
| mentioned), you don't get paid by the hour, you don't even get
| paid for working the hours you have to be in the office, you get
| paid for results. You show up in the office to be available and
| visible for "bullshit" your manager or coworkers need in addition
| to results on assigned tasks. Furthermore, no one, doing any job
| at all in the world gets paid for the value of their work or
| their hard work, everyone (including salaried people) get paid
| for the perceived cost and difficulty of replacing them and to
| keep them happy enough to not look for other jobs. That's why
| unions are effective, because they change the variable and now
| replacing everyone us what the company is facing instead of
| individuals.
|
| The reality for me is, I get to deal with less in-person bullshit
| but also I get to be more productive when doing WFH, but the
| again you have slack/teams/zoom bullshit and interruptions.
| Whereas before you could at least look busy, now you have to do
| enough things that show result where bosses won't think you are a
| slacker.
|
| The main reason you have to look busy in the office is not
| because managers don't know you are not actually being busy, it
| is because others who see you slacking will think you never do
| anything and they stop being productive. But when you are a
| manager or even working in very small teams, nobody cares about
| slacking off so long as you are showing results.
| nathias wrote:
| personally I can do about 2x-4x of the work remotely compared to
| working in office
| egl2021 wrote:
| Can your boss tell? If they can, then you have no problem. If
| they can't, then you have a problem.
|
| This is the other side of "I'm so much more productive with
| WFH". Everyone who values WFH should be asking themselves how
| they will help their company measure productivity. Over time
| companies will find new ways to manage productivity, possibly
| by restructuring work to make measurement easier even if the
| tasks have to change or by reducing labor costs to make unit
| productivity less important.
| nathias wrote:
| well, I have 2x the capacity of guys in office with the same
| hours...
| egl2021 wrote:
| the question is: would your boss say the same thing?
| CPLX wrote:
| This article makes no sense.
|
| I mean I'm all for a little elite run the world consipiracy
| theory but really, I'm supposed to think that a diffuse group of
| corporate leaders are upending companies so they can spend more
| on real estate going forward, for class solidarity reasons?
|
| The reason people running companies want to end or curtail remote
| work is because it's very fucking challenging to run a group of
| people remotely. It just is. Everyone knows it, it's fucking
| hard.
|
| There are also a lot of reasons TO do it. It's possible remote is
| the "better" option on the whole as a comprehensive decision.
|
| But it takes a lot of skilled work to communicate effectively as
| a manager, it's hard, and if you get it wrong things start to
| spiral.
|
| It's not confusing AT ALL why people might consider it. Pretty
| sure everyone who leads a group of people has had at least ONE
| moment of "god dammit it would be a lot easier if we were just
| all in the same room" in the recent past.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| The challenging part is over. Everyone has had literally years
| of experience doing exactly that. We adapted. If you couldn't
| adapt as a manager, you're obsolete. Find a different job,
| because you now suck at the one you have. I'm sorry, but that's
| just the way world works.
|
| Is corporate real estate price the primary driving force?
| Perhaps not, but it's certainly _a_ driving force. There's no
| shortage of articles and opinion pieces expressly lamenting the
| state of corporate real estate and businesses that catered to
| 9-5 office worker.
|
| I'd say the main thing that's driving RTO is ego. THE FAANGs
| built multibillion dollar vanity offices right before the
| pandemic. It's a personal insult to these CEOs that the
| monuments to their greatness are empty. This plays out at a
| smaller scale down the ladder. Many people want to see their
| "human resources" as an ego trip.
|
| I heard of one tech exec say about RTO, it's just easier to
| collaborate when you can grab someone after a meeting for a
| quick chat. "What am I supposed to do on a video call? Get on
| _another_ video call?"
|
| Yeah dude. That's literally what everyone did if you couldn't
| just wait for everyone to hang up on the current one.
| stanleydrew wrote:
| Yes, this reads exactly like it was written by someone who's
| never had a leadership role, and probably doesn't want to hold
| such a role, but deigns to know exactly the motivations of
| people in those roles.
| sveme wrote:
| I run a hybrid team while working remotely. The only thing that
| is considerably more difficult remotely is getting a feeling
| for how the team members feel. Are they doing okay? Are they
| bored/annoyed? But that's more of a problem for insecure
| managers. I trust my teams, talk to each regularly and all is
| fine so far.
| jarjoura wrote:
| It's bizarre to me how religious this conversation has become.
|
| I'm not sure why people are behaving like it's either 100%
| remote or 100% in the office, and they are locked in a cage.
|
| There are PLENTY of companies who have decided to become fully
| remote and remain that way indefinitely. If remote
| opportunities are important to you and your lifestyle, there
| are plenty of options for you.
|
| Otherwise, I haven't heard of any company requiring 100% RTO
| all 5 days of a week. Everyone, even Apple, a company notorious
| for requiring in-office work, has relented and moved towards
| hybrid.
| ghaff wrote:
| >I'm not sure why people are behaving like it's either 100%
| remote or 100% in the office, and they are locked in a cage.
|
| A lot of people have very strong personal preferences (though
| probably mostly not 100% in person) and they're worried that
| you'll have a boiling the frog slide towards some outcome
| they really don't want even if they'd be OK with a more
| nuanced version.
| solatic wrote:
| > it's very fucking challenging to run a group of people
| remotely.
|
| It's very fucking hard to take a relatively random group of
| people who are used to working together in person, throw them
| behind screens with little more support than Slack and Zoom,
| and try to manage them remotely.
|
| It's much easier to take a group of people used to pro-active
| written communication, "if it's not monitored then it doesn't
| exist", async-first, https://nohello.net/en/ , actual remote
| work culture, and manage them remotely.
|
| See, management is about alignment, and alignment is about 80%
| culture and politics, very little about what actually needs to
| be done. If you hire people who culturally fit into remote
| work, you'll have an easier time managing them. If you hire the
| opposite, it'll be hell. And you can do about as much to change
| someone's (work) cultural predisposition as you could change
| someone's (personal identity) culture.
| CPLX wrote:
| Well yeah. That's another way of saying it's hard.
|
| Also everyone has to start somewhere and get their first job,
| so the idea that you just make sure everyone is really used
| to remote work seems to be missing some subtlety as a long
| term plan.
|
| I didn't say I agree with ending remote work, I said it's
| _really_ easy to understand that there might be quite a few
| people who sincerely think it 's the best way forward.
| ghaff wrote:
| The whole commercial real estate conspiracy schtick really gets
| old. There may well be cases where a company has made some
| commitments to some locale in exchange for tax breaks and
| remote work an upended that. But dumb as some people think
| corporate execs are, they almost certainly have heard of the
| sunk cost fallacy and, to my direct knowledge, a lot of
| companies are looking for ways to decrease their real estate
| footprint.
|
| I also agree that 100% remote work is not this panacea that's
| always better than going into the office at least some of the
| time. If my team were local we'd be getting together semi-
| regularly--especially with travel/in-person meeting budgets
| tight. While it's not universal, a lot of younger people just
| out of school seem to struggle with the lack of in-person
| connections.
| zwischenzug wrote:
| I wrote about this in summer 2020, about London. Maybe it's
| happening but taking longer than I thought.
|
| https://zwischenzugs.com/2020/07/25/the-halving-of-the-centr...
| lumost wrote:
| I've been called back to the office a few days a week now. It
| took 4 trips back to realize the things I dealt guilty about
| while working remote were non issues.
|
| Saw 4 managers literally walking by their employees desks
| watching them work. To add insult to injury, there were 4
| managers for 12 employees doing this.
| backtoyoujim wrote:
| Agents of oppression will ply false generosity with their
| precious attention and then castigate you for needing it.
|
| Manager with be seen as the slur that it should in 50 years.
| kubb wrote:
| Sounds about right, my manager enjoys tennis, frequent coffee
| breaks, one or two light meetings, and he activates with out of
| touch "ideas" in the last hour of the day. It's ridiculous.
| lagniappe wrote:
| I thought this type of stuff only existed in movies. Just
| curious, can you elaborate at all? I'm wondering if I'm just
| blind to this stuff assuming everyone else is nose-to-the-
| grindstone all day too.
| kubb wrote:
| He got hired into a successful team with capable
| developers, all his "ideas" were failures or detrimental,
| he presented the outcome as success to the upper mgmt and
| they believed him. No soft skills, no technical skills,
| just presenting the overachievements of his reports as
| success and easy life for years. And lots of coffee.
|
| He frequently completely bombards initiatives from within
| the team with bad faith arguments only to present them as
| his personal achievements a couple of months later.
|
| When it comes to the areas where the manager is supposed to
| be useful, like cross team communication, all the work is
| done by the devs.
| user8501 wrote:
| Yeah my manager is the busiest human being in North
| America.
| [deleted]
| lazyant wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagull_management
| oblio wrote:
| There are definitely a lot of managers like this.
|
| Individual contributors, too, but those have a much harder
| time hiding.
|
| An extrovert schmoozer can afford to not work that much as
| a manager for a long time.
|
| Just join meetings, write some short docs, etc.
| ip26 wrote:
| I theorize the prevalence depends on factors like how
| competitive the market is. In a highly competitive market,
| the organization can't tolerate gross failure for very long
| without failing, so it either manages this kind of person
| out or does not survive.
| stanleydrew wrote:
| This isn't particularly well-argued. Just a lot of handwavy
| grievance about "elites" as though there's some kind of
| coordinated conspiracy.
| deet wrote:
| The article is not well argued, yes.
|
| But there is direct evidence that politicians are influencing
| corporations to alter return to office policies:
|
| - Mayor of SF asking businesses to pledge to implement RTO
| policies: https://sfist.com/2022/03/03/mayor-breed-would-like-
| you-back...
|
| - Mayor of NYC basically doing the same:
| https://archive.is/si6xd
| symlinkk wrote:
| 2nd link is broken
| aaomidi wrote:
| Happened in Redmond too
| hodgesrm wrote:
| > But there is direct evidence that politicians are
| influencing corporations to alter return to office policies:
|
| But no evidence that this is related to property values alone
| or even in large part. SF is desperate to ensure the downtown
| does not enter a full-on doom loop which would impact all
| businesses as well as anyone who lives there or visits
| regularly. [0] Other knock-on effects include BART facing
| severe financial problems due to low ridership. They want
| people back any way they can get them so San Francisco does
| not end up like Detroit.
|
| [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/san-francisco-crime-
| downtown-do...
| hodgesrm wrote:
| p.s., Rather than downvoting it would be more productive to
| supply evidence of contrary views. I'm happy to be proven
| wrong. It happens constantly.
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| Neither mayor has any power to affect this. Further, the SF
| link is from March of last year. The WFH push didn't start
| until earlier this year, coinciding with the softening job
| market.
| camgunz wrote:
| Of course they do, permits, fines, taxes, etc. Remember
| when Amazon was shopping cities for HQ2? Just think of that
| in reverse.
| davidw wrote:
| Kind of an "Ugh, Capitalism" take -
| https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/ugh-capitalism
| camgunz wrote:
| Weren't people right about this though? Institutionalized
| racism and sexism was everywhere, neoliberalism created the
| most unequal society since the era we unironically call "the
| robber-baron era", the carceral system is truly heinous (the
| ban on weed alone was just a joke), etc etc etc.
| davidw wrote:
| Things like racism and sexism are very real problems, but
| not some key component of "capitalism".
| camgunz wrote:
| The article Op linked is about "The Man", which is
| generally the white, Christian, capitalist patriarchy.
| chanakya wrote:
| Sure, there are all sorts of problems with capitalism. But
| as Churchill said about democracy, it the worst form of
| economic organization except for all the others that have
| been tried from time to time.
| camgunz wrote:
| Eh I would say Socialism as practiced in Western Europe
| and the Nordics is doing better. They're out doing the US
| in most important metrics, and they're trending more
| Socialist (though we'll see what intensifying climate
| migration and other climate change consequences bring).
| davidw wrote:
| Anyone who thinks that, say, Denmark is not a mixed
| economy with a strong bit of capitalism as well as a
| strong social safety net has never dealt with a kid who
| wants to buy lots of Lego.
| camgunz wrote:
| There are important differences between Denmark and the
| US though. Aren't we saying the same thing?
| Kamq wrote:
| > There are important differences between Denmark and the
| US though.
|
| On the human level, sure. On the level of "fundamental
| economic system" (which is, I believe, the line of
| discussion), there really aren't.
|
| They're both WEIRD countries with market based-economies
| and a social safety net. They both end up at the top of
| the lists on economic power (adjusted for population).
|
| The differences between them are political fine-tuning of
| the system to target an extra 5-10% of the population
| with the safety net, or to target those people in
| different ways. That's incredibly minor in terms of
| economic systems.
|
| When comparing two different economic systems, you tend
| to see differences on the order of "mass-famines" and
| "percentage of the population involved in subsistence
| farming".
| mindslight wrote:
| > _On the human level, sure. On the level of "fundamental
| economic system" (which is, I believe, the line of
| discussion), there really aren't._
|
| One of the problems with this whole "debate" is that
| defenders of the status quo apply a huge motte and bailey
| to the definition of "capitalism". Both strawmanning any
| criticism of it as a rejection of all aspects claimed by
| capitalism, and also giving capitalism credit for systems
| that share some aspects of capitalism even though they
| haven't gone all-in and let capital run roughshod over
| everything else.
|
| This dynamic is so common it has become a trope -
| kneejerk cries of "socialism". The original link that
| kicked off this comment tree was basically doing the same
| thing in more words.
|
| The distinction between the motte and the bailey is
| easiest to see when aspects that we associate with
| capitalism end up in direct opposition to capitalism
| itself. For example, free markets can be directly opposed
| to capitalism, like in the context of imaginary property.
| A capital-centric view says that inventing a _new form of
| capital_ out of whole cloth is the right thing to do. A
| market-centric view says that competition should drive
| the cost of information to within an epsilon of the
| copying /distribution cost.
| Kamq wrote:
| > One of the problems with this whole "debate" is that
| defenders of the status quo apply a huge motte and bailey
| to the definition of "capitalism". Both strawmanning any
| criticism of it as a rejection of all aspects claimed by
| capitalism, and also giving capitalism credit for systems
| that share some aspects of capitalism even though they
| haven't gone all-in and let capital run roughshod over
| everything else.
|
| This is a fair call-out, given that there's so much
| drive-by arguing on the internet.
|
| I'm pretty sure I'm using a standard definition, but let
| me state the definition I'm using just to be as explicit
| as possible: A system is capitalist if it has private
| ownership of the means of production.
|
| So, to give an example, a country would be a capitalist
| country regardless of their tax scheme/welfare spending
| so long as the means of production were privately held.
| Another country that nationalized industries (the oil
| industry is a common one) would be, at the very least, a
| mixed-economy, regardless of how free their markets are.
|
| Given the above comments on Europe, I would argue that
| European countries do meet the definition of capitalist
| for the most part. While some European countries do
| completely nationalize a handful of industries, it's
| rare, and the majority of industries are privately owned,
| even if they are highly regulated.
| camgunz wrote:
| There are large differences though. The US poverty rate
| is 2.5x higher than Denmark's (15% to 6%). Denmark's life
| expectancy is 6 years longer. The kinds of policies you'd
| need to close that gap in the US would be transformative.
|
| > When comparing two different economic systems, you tend
| to see differences on the order of "mass-famines" and
| "percentage of the population involved in subsistence
| farming".
|
| There are plenty of capitalist countries that do a lot of
| subsistence farming.
| Kamq wrote:
| > The kinds of policies you'd need to close that gap in
| the US would be transformative.
|
| I disagree. When laid against things like the end of
| mercantilism, I don't think that qualifies as
| transformative.
|
| I think the effects would look pretty much like the
| existing US system, because Denmark looks pretty close to
| the current US system by the standards we're talking
| about. If you want to argue they'd be fundamentally
| different, you can make a case, but I'd like to know why
| they would produce different results.
|
| > There are plenty of capitalist countries that do a lot
| of subsistence farming.
|
| Do you have some examples? The areas I'm aware of that
| practice subsistence farming, don't have a long history
| of leaving the means of production alone in private hands
| for very long.
| chanakya wrote:
| A core element of socialism is that all industries and
| natural resources are state-owned. European countries are
| capitalist, not socialist, and got where they are by
| being so.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Technically, kind of, but not exactly.
|
| Anytime this point comes up, someone on the
| right/Republican will say any taxation is Socialism, that
| Europe is Socialist. So, to compare Europe/Nordic
| socialist policies, to US policies is not a large leap.
| You can't just say, "well technically that isn't really
| socialism so we can't use that as an example in this
| argument", when literally for a decade the 'right' has
| specifically called them socialist.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >taxation is Socialism
|
| Nonsensical strawman. Socialism has a real meaning and
| "taxation" isn't it.
| camgunz wrote:
| Sure, I'm saying:
|
| - there are big differences between US capitalism and
| European social democracy
|
| - European social democracies are trending more socialist
| all the time
|
| > European countries are capitalist, not socialist, and
| got where they are by being so.
|
| Ehhhh communist movements, multiple devastating wars, and
| unions had a hand in it too.
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
|
| This is a ranking of economic freedom which strongly
| aligns with capitalism. The U.S. ranks 25th behind
| European countries like Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway,
| Finland, Germany, Iceland, etc.
| camgunz wrote:
| It looks like this ranks things like freedom to invest,
| trade, etc., none of which are incompatible with
| socialism.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Investment directly implies private ownership of the
| means of production.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > - European social democracies are trending more
| socialist all the time
|
| Eh? Which ones? As a European this is very much news to
| be; not much seizing of the means of production going on.
| If anything, some divesting of the means of production;
| heavily regulated privatisation of state energy,
| transport etc monopolies has been going on all over
| Western Europe for a while.
|
| I realise that in the US, the colloquial definition of
| 'socialist' these days is more or less "not actively
| going around kicking poor people", but the idea that
| Europe is becoming more socialist by any reasonable
| definition is a bit out there.
| camgunz wrote:
| There's a recent rightward shift for sure, but long term
| benefits are increasing, unions are gaining power, and
| you're seeing people use democracy to force industry to
| adopt green policies. This is the power dynamic described
| by socialism: people control companies, not the other way
| around.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >you're seeing people use democracy to force industry to
| adopt green policies
|
| No, you are seeing governments force green policies
| _against_ the will of the majority.
| Kamq wrote:
| Minor quibble. The industries generally need to only be
| "socially-owned" rather than state-owned. Though I will
| admit that state-ownership is the most common in
| practice.
|
| More of an academic point though, as Europe, as a whole,
| is still basically completely capitalist under this
| definition as well.
|
| Edit: An example of a socially-owned company that is not
| state-owned would be an employee owned company.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| > Eh I would say Socialism as practiced in Western Europe
| and the Nordics is doing better
|
| It is not an easy comparison.
|
| They have the luxury of the US taxpayers taking care of
| their defense while they propped up Russia, which US is
| also paying the most by a large margin to fix now [1, 2,
| 3]. Hilariously US socialists are against US defense
| spending except when it comes to US spending on Europe.
|
| They also have the luxury of oil money which American
| "socialists" are totally against [4].
|
| All in all, a pretty neat scam if you ask me.
|
| [1] https://carnegieendowment.org/politika/88764 [2]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKEycjREgPE [3] https://e
| n.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_aid_to_Ukrain...
|
| [4] https://www.barrons.com/news/norway-earns-record-oil-
| gas-rev....
|
| Edit: All of what I say is objective. Luxurious Western
| Europe and Nordic "socialism" can't survive without
| gullible US taxpayers footing the bill over decades.
| camgunz wrote:
| Arguably the US caused the Russia problem with the
| aggressive expansion of NATO, and the failure to defend
| Crimea, so this seems fair. Also the US produces a
| bonkers amount of oil; dunno what your point is here.
|
| EDIT: how could I forget Trump's undermining of NATO,
| cozying up to Russia, and withholding aid to Ukraine?
| christkv wrote:
| Social democracy is not socialism. Please don't confuse
| the two because they are still miles away from each
| other.
| camgunz wrote:
| I think that it is. Socialism is where the workers own
| the means of production. I think a democracy that's
| nationalized significant industries fits that
| description, e.g. France:
|
| > 1982 Francois Mitterrand's proposals in the 110
| Propositions for France and alliance with Jean-Pierre
| Chevenement's Socialist Party faction CERES, committed
| France to an explicitly socialist 'rupture with
| capitalism'. Full nationalisation (100%): the Compagnie
| Generale d'Electricite, the Compagnie Generale de
| Constructions Telephoniques, Pechiney-Ugine-Kuhlmann,
| Rhone-Poulenc, Saint-Gobain-Pont-a-Mousson, Thompson-
| Brandt. Partial nationalisation (51%+): Dassault,
| Honeywell-Bull, Matra, Roussel-Uclaf, Sacilor, Usinor.
| Thirty-nine banks, two financial houses, and the
| remaining 49% of the SNCF were also nationalised, taking
| the size of the French state to unprecedented levels
| within a year of Mitterrand's election as president in
| 1981.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >Socialism is where the workers own the means of
| production.
|
| Clearly that is not the case in any European country.
|
| >Dassault
|
| Literally family owned.
|
| I don't think you realize just how capitalist European
| countries really are. State owned corporations are
| usually quite rare and generally known for being run
| extremely badly. On the other hand many of the largest
| corporations are still controlled by the families of
| their founders.
| constantcrying wrote:
| All these countries are market economies with tax funded
| social services. Not "Socialist" under any meaning of
| that word.
|
| >they're trending more Socialis
|
| Indeed. More and more ridicolous taxes and less and less
| useful social investments.
| jackmott42 wrote:
| A the top end there is a lot of coordination, big money
| conservatives get together at CPAC and other venues to make
| plans, each political party is a powerful coordinated force of
| elites, they are all on each other's boards, etc.
|
| However this article did not present any evidence of any given
| group of elites doing this, for this reason, so...
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Maybe these points were assumed?
|
| Doesn't everyone know that corporations Boards, and C-suit,
| and Republican donors, etc, etc, etc.. All vacation together,
| meet together, perhaps even chug beers with Supreme Court
| Justices together.
|
| Does the author really need to 'prove' this in order to
| reference it???
|
| This whole post is people arguing about what level of
| 'coordination' does it take before we can call it a
| 'conspiracy'. There isn't any 'conspiracy', it's just
| friendly chatting and innuendo, but of course there is a
| common 'problem with a solution we should perhaps generally
| steer towards (wink)'.
| stanleydrew wrote:
| Yeah I don't generally disagree, but the coordination usually
| has a more specific goal with more specific actions. Like,
| let's spend a bunch of money to buy ads supporting some
| legislation so that we can get lower taxes.
|
| Let's use our influence over corporate decision making to try
| to get people to use buildings in order to prop up commercial
| real estate asset prices feels like a bank-shot at best.
| itronitron wrote:
| Yeah, the article is kind of all over the place.
| asdff wrote:
| You don't need a coordinated conspiracy if the incentives of
| each person in the chain line up to this inevitability.
| mpalmer wrote:
| Sound point, but the fact that we're forced to do this
| parsing in the comments means readers of the linked piece
| will happily continue to use "the elite" as a placeholder for
| whatever they already believe.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Legally, doesn't a conspiracy require proof of
| communication? I think that communication can be indirect
| or even negative in nature, but it has to be there. But if
| everyone that owns commercial real estate has lower
| margins, that would eventually lower property taxes for
| such properties, which hurts city revenue. City planners
| can connect the dots and push for rto, no communication
| necessary.
| 1attice wrote:
| I could be wrong here but I don't read this as a claim of
| conspiracy.
|
| To my mind, this is more a systems-level description of
| currents in capital. Yes, there's a clickbaity headline
| about 'elites', but if you think more in terms of _wealth
| doing things of its own accord_ (similar to how e.g.
| Dawkins got us talking about selfish genes -- selfish
| dollars?) then this observation might cash out after all.
|
| That said, I do agree that the editorial style of the
| article is needlessly conspiratorial --- it likely
| appeals strongly to leftists (like me) who see and sense
| that capital flows and floes seem to have a mind of their
| own, but who (unlike me) think this requires smoky
| backroom deals.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| It would almost be better if it required orchestration.
| Maximizing profit is an idea, and ideas are
| bulletproof....
| chaos_emergent wrote:
| I'm just confused about causal chain that would lead to
| this happening...perhaps it's a lack of imagination.
| Like, do we think that landlords are bribing corporations
| to lease their properties?
| chaos_emergent wrote:
| This is the part I'm missing. The players who own space are
| either corporations or landlords who rent to corporations.
|
| Corporations have an incentive to not lose money on real
| estate that they've already purchased, whether or not they
| have employees warming that space.
|
| Landlords have an incentive to make money through rent, but
| they can't really exert pressure on corporations to rent the
| space landlords own.
|
| Where is the chain of incentives?
| rsynnott wrote:
| If, yes, but do they? How?
| pdonis wrote:
| I read the article more as an implied warning: a lot of paper
| wealth is tied up in commercial real estate, and that wealth
| could evaporate. The people who own that paper wealth aren't
| just going to sit back and let that happen. Yes, for many
| companies there is no direct way to force them to bring workers
| back to the office. But it might be worth taking some time to
| think about what else might be tried.
| rsynnott wrote:
| I would note that the Grand Commercial Real Estate Conspiracy
| was not notably successful in getting people to go to brick
| and mortar retail; if there was an effective conspiracy,
| you'd expect it to have put a horse's head in Amazon's bed.
| throway2452 wrote:
| > as though there's some kind of coordinated conspiracy.
|
| I don't see how this is different from consensus among actors,
| or rather it looks the same.
|
| The label or attribute conspiracy is a tool used to discredit
| findings or positive correlations.
|
| I see now that you think elite is overloaded and programmed to
| have conspiracy relation. This is not true though according to
| m-w: "a group of persons who by virtue of position or education
| exercise much power or influence".
|
| If you pay attention to main stream media, you will see almost
| all forms of dissent attributed to conspiracy.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| This isn't the first article on this.
|
| A lot of financial news outlets have been pointing out the risk
| of corporate real estate risks.
|
| Making the connection to back-to-office doesn't have to be a
| coordinated conspiracy.
|
| It just has to be a few middle managers being like "Hey Bob in
| Dev, this is Steve from Operations, I'm in a real bind with the
| empty office on 5th, can you see about filling it. Sure Man."
| skwirl wrote:
| How are "the elite" forcing companies that do not own real estate
| and who rent their office space to mandate RTO? How are they
| forcing these companies to renew their leases when they expire?
| K0balt wrote:
| PR.
|
| More content than you might expect, in a variety of "reputable"
| news outlets as well a veritable plague of blogs, is paid
| placement. Either through the outlet directly, or through a
| contributing writer that has (not all that) covert connections
| to PR firms.
|
| PR pieces are often very subtle and difficult to detect because
| they tend to be on orthogonal subjects to the intended "drive
| by" messaging.
|
| After engaging PR and marketing firms for a few years now and
| seeing the kind of things that show up on their price lists, I
| have near zero marginal faith in media as a source of unbiased
| information. You end up seeing the fingerprints of priming,
| perverse incentive and commercialised bias in nearly
| everything.
|
| Why do you think all those article writers write? Few of them
| are directly compensated.
| trzy wrote:
| IIRC, prior to the pandemic, Apple implemented a freeze on
| leasing new office space in the bay area. Big companies are
| definitely incentivized to cut down on RE expenses.
| nimbius wrote:
| Thats just it, outside of the media outlets they control and
| federal policy, they cannot. Its largely a propaganda campaign
| and a thinly veiled one at that.
|
| Biden was told by elites this was about to become a trillion
| dollar shit sandwich for the economy during a rocky period of
| high inflation and stagnation. He symbolically called all the
| federal workers back into offices (already owned by the
| government) as a show of "the right thing to do" but otherwise
| any company outside the fortune 50 will absolutely use this as
| an opportunity to tell their landlord to pound sand.
|
| There is nothing that can be done.
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| It's sunk cost. They have CRE leases they can't back out of and
| want to leverage their expensive real estate.
|
| In the future as the leases expire we may see shrinking and a
| slow return to more remote work as companies reduce the square
| footage of the leases.
|
| Smart managers know that eliminating rent from balance sheets
| improves the bottom line.
| longbrass wrote:
| Many creative companies don't own real estate and are looking
| foward to sunsetting their existing leases to go with
| something much smaller and easier to manage. In addition to
| the rental square footage NNN leases and increasing energy
| and insurance will dove that the RTW push is short-lived as
| it financially makes little sense.
| shrimpx wrote:
| How do you "leverage" the real estate if WFH is free in terms
| of office costs, and assuming there's no loss of productivity
| with WFH?
| shrimpx wrote:
| Companies who own city real estate are getting screwed. This
| includes all the big tech companies. That real estate is no
| longer an appreciating asset, and cannot be converted to
| residential, when the prospect is the collapse of downtowns due
| to people migrating out to smaller places.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| It isn't just companies. For example, one of the most central
| parts of downtown Seattle is owned by the University of
| Washington[0], a government institution. Some of their leases
| are structured as revenue share on the real estate. This is
| both an asset they borrow against and a source of income.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Tract_(Seattle)
| ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
| I have no proof but i would think share holder power?
| olalonde wrote:
| It was a rhetorical question. They don't and it's a flawed
| theory.
| praptak wrote:
| Google has full control by Brin and Page and still has RTO.
| This theory doesn't hold water.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| You don't think those two would have diversified into real
| estate?
| maxbond wrote:
| Page and Brin are shareholders. A counterexample would be
| if a worker owned business like Igalia was doing RTO (I
| think they've always been remote & remain so, so they're
| not actually a good example for or against, just to
| illustrate).
| pgeorgi wrote:
| Google has tons of office real estate that's assigned a
| certain value on balance sheets. If that tanks, the C-suite
| compensation plans and (slight conjecture here) the value
| of Brin's & Page's stock-secured liquidity will take a hit.
| lamontcg wrote:
| The big fortune 100 tech companies are also commercial real
| estate owners and landlords. Look at all the buildings that
| Amazon owns and subleases in Seattle.
|
| Those executives absolutely have an incentive to be pushing RTO
| because of their commercial real estate risk.
|
| They also have an outsized bullhorn and the industry tends to
| watch what they do and report over what they do, and they have
| PR budgets which can get articles written the way they want.
| Bezos outright owns the WaPo.
|
| Further down the ladder that PR will land on businesses where
| it just reinforces the attitudes of management towards RTO and
| gives them arguments to make in meetings. The people in those
| meetings don't necessarily have any skin in the commercial real
| estate game, but if they've spent the past 3 years reading
| articles about remote work and RTO published in the business
| press influenced by those who do have a whole lot of skin in
| the game, how do you attribute causality?
|
| They way I'd look at it is that you can't take it in isolation
| and you need to step outside of naive root cause analysis that
| looks at the manager in the company who has no skin in the game
| and says that they can't possibly be influenced by the
| commercial real estate issues. For any individual "atom" of a
| manager in this analysis their own biases will more strongly
| influence what they're doing, but everyone in that room has
| been reading the same articles, and industrial propaganda and
| PR actually is effective at shaping attitudes. They are blowing
| on the dice, or turning up the temperature, or whatever analogy
| you like that draws a parallel to statistical mechanics and the
| bulk behavior of matter in the presence of individual
| randomness.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| [flagged]
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| According to [0], Amazon owns $40B in real estate. Which
| isn't a lot compared to a $1.4T market cap. OTOH, if the
| cost of pushing people to RTO is less than $40B it's still
| worth it.
|
| [0] https://azbigmedia.com/real-estate/how-much-land-does-
| amazon...
| thfuran wrote:
| What do you mean? Unless they plan to sell, all the real
| estate value does for them is increase their tax burden.
| It's the companies that lease out commercial real estate
| that need to maintain prices.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Amazon's an outlier here, though. Most office-oriented
| employers lease most or all of their space.
| fatfingerd wrote:
| Once companies are established they also tend to insist
| all their investments are legitimate barriers to entry. I
| doubt Sears would have lasted as long as it did if people
| didn't fear its ultimately worthless real estate
| investments.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| >"Stop repeating this meme."
|
| LOL.
|
| It's literally the subject of the article. Empty Corporate
| Real-estate, offices, is driving a Return to Work effort by
| those corporations. So many people here are saying it is a
| 'conspiracy theory' hence not true. Many financial news
| outlets have reported on this, the properties are public
| knowledge.
|
| Even Amazon does check its bottom line from time to time.
| It is possible they do care about hits to it. They aren't
| so profitable that they don't care about expenses.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| 40B out of 1.4T is 2.8%
|
| Their market cap has swung by 20x that this year. It's
| fun to theorize about creepy ulterior motives but doing
| some basic arithmetic blows the whole thing up.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| A lot of people get fired, or get promotions, based on a
| swing of 2.8%.
|
| That is definitely a large enough percentage to take
| seriously and not call this 'Pizza Gate'.
| chaos_emergent wrote:
| Thank you, this is a far more cogent model of the incentives
| and behaviors in place than all the conspiratorial essays on
| a boogeyman plurality conspiring against the working class.
| stefan_ wrote:
| A conspiracy to bring people back into the office? Sounds like
| a conspiracy to lay people off because of a "recession" that
| never happens!
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-30/wall-stre...
|
| > "All of our corporate leaders need to get in the room and
| say, let's come up with a minimum," Adams said in an interview
| with Bloomberg on Thursday, referring to how many days a week
| employees should be in the office. "If it's four days a week,
| it's four days a week."
|
| You must not have been long on this world if you don't realize
| by now that of course most CEOs make decisions based on the
| same cargo cult nonsense you follow to pick the ultimate in SPA
| build systems.
| notacoward wrote:
| > How are "the elite" forcing companies that do not own real
| estate and who rent their office space to mandate RTO?
|
| Well, for one thing, the people who own real estate and the
| people who run Fortune 500 companies are _the same people_.
| What do you think the CxOs and board members do with their
| money after they cash out their outsized stock grants? Hide it
| under the mattress? No, they invest it, and often they invest
| it in whatever 's "cool" that year - in this case commercial
| real estate. Even if the exact same person doesn't have feet in
| both camps, there are likely to be favors going back and forth
| between them. So, renting isn't the smartest move for
| chairperson X's company? That's OK, says building-owner Y.
| We'll make it up with deals from the other companies I own, or
| you can get a special bonus when you jump ship to join our
| other friend Z's company because they owe me a favor.
|
| It's not a conspiracy theory when the possibilities are legion.
| No coordination is required; it's more of an emergent network-
| effect kind of thing. I've seen _people I know_ [1] make these
| kinds of deals. In general they fall below the "breach of
| fiduciary duty" line, but even when they're _clearly_ crooked
| they 're unlikely to be prosecuted. Even the DAs and such who
| aren't hoping to walk through the same revolving door lack the
| resources to prosecute such complex and uncertain cases. They
| have more career-enhancing things to do. We could argue about
| _how much_ it happens, or how much it 's driving the push for
| RTO, but the ultra-dismissive tone of some commenters here
| smells just as fishy as anything coming from the other side of
| the discussion.
|
| [1] No, not friends. I like my friends moral. But I'm not 100%
| in control of who moves into my neighborhood, who joins the
| clubs or engages in the activities I do, etc. Sometimes they
| mention these things directly, because I can pass as a
| business-savvy person and they don't even realize these things
| are wrong. Sometimes I overhear them, because braggarts tend to
| be loud. If you've never moved beyond the semi-rich techie
| circle and met people in the really-rich business circle, you
| might not appreciate just _how bad_ these people tend to be.
| gbacon wrote:
| Anecdotes about "trust fund kids," asserting a "misguided war
| on inflation," and a vague conspiracy of unidentified landlords
| make the post seem more like a rant than serious economic
| analysis.
|
| Perhaps the author missed "US inflation means families are
| spending $709 more per month than two years ago" here at HN.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37112604
| sangnoir wrote:
| The "misguided war on inflation" stood out to me too, because
| I felt the author is uninformed on economics, or some strain
| of radical belonging to an economic school of thought I'm not
| familiar with.
|
| I must say, the past few months have been weird with
| employment numbers stubbornly staying high regardless of the
| Fed's efforts as fewer jobs are usually a second-order effect
| when rates are hiked. I am glad fewer people than expected
| are currently unemployed.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Even companies that do own commercial real estate but aren't in
| that business must see it as a sunk cost and that employees are
| _volunteering_ to provide their own office space _for free_.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| This isn't true re: it being a sunk cost.
|
| Real estate like that is actually (well, in the olden days)
| an appreciating long-term asset as well as a well-lobbied
| avenue for balance sheet games. Commercial real estate is
| subject to yearly depreciation, unlike your home. It can be
| somewhat arbitarily valued or devalued (see the games that
| Trump plays with real estate and taxes, sorry to introduce
| some politics), but generally real estate is tangible and
| appreciates long term.
|
| Although if a company has a RECENTLY constructed office then
| it very much is a sunk cost, because the depreciation is on a
| 10 or 20 year schedule (don't remember exactly) and hasn't
| appreciated, and of course they haven't gotten the actual
| "house workers who make money for you" return. SO I agree
| with that. And of course all the companies don't want to see
| their already-depreciated by market appreciated values
| collapse under them. They want more sucker startups to but
| their appreciated properties once their business model ages.
|
| Now, I guess we'll see how much the author's contention of a
| bubble/apocalypse plays out, but we'll know if office tower
| -> housing becomes a recurring thing. It wasn't with
| dilapidated malls, although it probably should have been.
|
| As hinted at, the masters of office space are very well
| integrated with local politicians and the pork train. It's
| one of the pillars of local politics and local corruption.
| They'll try to find ways to get tax breaks or find a bigger
| sucker (like the local government!) to take on the burden or
| bail them out.
| dools wrote:
| Yeah I don't think elon musk is sipping whisky with his
| landlord and the small business chamber of commerce of downtown
| palo alto or wherever the "X" office is conspiring to bring the
| workers back into the office.
|
| He's just a myopic asshole.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The currency of elites is _deference_. One of the reasons why
| Musk can get away with so much is that other powerful people
| don 't want to check him because they're afraid that other
| people will check them. By showing deference you preserve
| deference for yourself.
|
| When other important people line up with Musk it is not
| because they are sipping whisky together, instead they are
| lining up like iron filings in the field of a magnet.
| pengaru wrote:
| Maybe funding sources are saying "if our real estate hedges
| implode your funding dries up, get your workers back in town
| and spreading our money around"
| ben_w wrote:
| In principle it could be straight up targeted propaganda
| "making" the bosses do that.
|
| I have no idea if the reality is more that, or more the banal
| "nobody is organising anything like this and suggestions to the
| contrary are just conspiracy theories, the bosses genuinely
| believe what they're saying".
|
| I currently have a boss who appears to sincerely want people
| back in the office; he _doesn 't want_ to be the CEO of a 100%
| remote company.
| warning26 wrote:
| I feel like often article-writers miss the fact of people
| like your boss: some people just legitimately _like_ being in
| an office and there 's no conspiracy to speak of.
|
| As someone who _likes_ being in an office, I personally feel
| that everyone becoming permanent WFH basement gremlins is a
| bad thing overall. Human contact is a _good thing_ , and my
| observations of people who are 100% WFH is that they almost
| never interact with anyone outside of their household.
| lusus_naturae wrote:
| I am 100% remote, I socialize after work by playing golf,
| going to the gym, or going to tech meets. I also get to
| explore some research topics outside of my day-to-day work
| by attending some special topic zooms during lunch times. I
| think the flexibility staves off burnout and helps my
| problem solving by enabling creativity. If I wasn't remote,
| I would lose all that to commuting.
|
| The basement gremlin comment is unnecessarily judgemental,
| especially considering that some people have movie
| theaters, gyms or marble floored, spa-like basements (yes,
| even the remote, non-elite ones may have that).
|
| But I respect that other people's way of work is not for
| me. I just don't mind if someone else goes to the office,
| and I would just expect the same courtesy.
| hollywood_court wrote:
| I interact with people outside of my household far more now
| that I'm WFH.
|
| It's allowed me time to volunteer at both the local library
| and my son's school.
|
| I've grown to become friends with two of my neighbors after
| living beside them for 8+ years. None of that would be
| possible if I were still commuting.
|
| But I suppose we all have our anecdotes. You just seem to
| think yours are applicable to everyone.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| > As someone who likes being in an office, I personally
| feel that everyone becoming permanent WFH basement gremlins
| is a bad thing overall
|
| Good thing that there are these things called _friends_ ,
| which usually aren't forced on people like work colleagues
| are.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| I like my colleagues. Many of them are my friends. Work
| is fun because I get to make projects with some of my
| friends and we get paid for it.
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| People make friends at work all the time, and usually
| that helps productivity and career success
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Surely it helps career success, but does it help
| productivity?
|
| Maybe workplaces would be more meritocratic if people
| didn't base promotions on who they like to go out for a
| beer with.
| brailsafe wrote:
| In a hilarious and ironic turn of events, at my last job
| in which I was 100% remote from a different continent, I
| made an effort to meet my boss in-person for the first
| time while traveling internationally as a break from the
| grind. We went out for pizza, and it was completely out
| of the scope of expectations and purely an effort to play
| that card and get to know one of my colleagues better.
| The ironic part is that not had the startup been
| purchased by a commercial real estate behemoth, but I'd
| face increasing demands and pressure upon arrival back
| home, then a layoff. He even paid for the meal even
| though it wasn't technically a work expense.
|
| Communication got incredibly toxic from his end; every
| sentence infused with inexplicable resentment. It was a
| very confusing result, and now I'm even less likely to
| bother meeting anyone in the future. I'm happy I avoided
| burnout by simply ignoring the toxicity, as petulant
| behaviour probably resulting from stresses in his own
| life, but still.
| supertofu wrote:
| You do realize that people who WFH have friends and
| communities outside of work, right?
| mperham wrote:
| Quite often, the bosses don't. Their social circle is the
| company and that's partly why they so desperately want
| back in the office.
| kolbe wrote:
| You do realize companies function better when employees
| are friends, right?
|
| I'm not saying forced daily association is the way to
| make them friends, but you can see the logic behind
| trying to encourage it.
| endemic wrote:
| I've gone out of my way to engage socially with co-
| workers, and I'm not sure any of those relationships ever
| progressed to the "friend" stage.
| kolbe wrote:
| 80% of my friends are ex-coworkers. Some i even made from
| WFH. So, I think making friends at work is important, but
| I'm not sure how much being in-person is necessary.
|
| Granted, I've seen how our developers rarely make friends
| with each other, so it may be more of a sales/HR/product
| thing than engineering.
| intended wrote:
| For the firm. What does that do for employee salary?
|
| It's a firms way to gain productivity. Especially after
| preventing you from socializing near your home.
|
| Wow, uh, maybe we should be against team building in
| principle.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > You do realize companies function better when employees
| are friends, right?
|
| Professionalism and trust result in more productivity -
| not necessarily _friendship_
| lamontcg wrote:
| > permanent WFH basement gremlins
|
| Office life and commutes have so completely destroyed our
| ability to have outside social lives that the solution to
| not being able to socialize is to go back to the office.
| Brilliant.
| otherme123 wrote:
| I have to deal with double faced people at work on a daily
| basis, and usually I have to play the game against my will.
| I _hate_ a couple of coworkers, and they had ruined my day
| more than once.
|
| I don't think that kind of human contact is better than
| spending more time with my wife and kids.
|
| My personal feeling about people eager to go back to the
| office is that they have empty jobs, but walking around
| from meeting to meeting, from the water fountain to the
| coffee machine, and bikeshedding other people's work makes
| them feel worthy. Of course, they _need_ other people
| around to have meetings and "work".
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| Being forced to interact with people one doesn't like, and
| having to perform work theater to maintain ones livelihood,
| is _not_ a good thing for many people.
|
| Besides which, WFH means more time with the family (also
| human contact) and skipping the commute means more time
| around people whose presence one actually enjoys.
|
| All that said, I tend to agree with your point that people
| pushing RTO more due to their personal ideology (which
| clearly I do not share) rather than some grand conspiracy
| around real-estate.
| scj wrote:
| Most WFH experiences at the moment are during the height of
| the pandemic. When people were told to limit contact with
| others outside their household.
|
| That's not really representative of what it could be.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > In principle it could be straight up targeted propaganda
| "making" the bosses do that.
|
| More than "in principle", I would be very shocked if many
| someones were not at least _trying very hard_ to make it
| happen.
|
| If PR firms can push "suits are cool again" or "maybe
| chocolate is kinda healthy for you", then they can easily
| push stuff like "in-office work is better", or "executives
| like you don't like remote-work".
|
| http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
| dv_dt wrote:
| Have you traced the networks of company boards where execs
| often sit on other boards. Or have you traced what entities
| actually invest in VC funds. Have you looked at relation of
| investment to massive private equity funds also invested
| strongly into real estate.
|
| If venture funded companies actually wanted to run efficiently
| to maximize their investment, the the last thing many should do
| is setup offices in posh downtown areas, yet before all of this
| they often signed leases in high rent spaces. Why did you think
| that happened so often before this wave of remote work?
| d_theorist wrote:
| Let me tell you how all this works: you see, Team America is
| funded by the corporations, so they fight for the
| corporations... while they sit in their corporation
| buildings... and they're all corporation-y... and they make
| lots of money!
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Someone always playing Corporation games Who
| cares they're always changing Corporation names
| We just want to dance here Someone stole the stage
| They call us irresponsible Write us off the page
|
| I'll dance from home (DFH) thank you very much.
| kolbe wrote:
| This question should have made the author delete this essay,
| and is why it has no business being promoted on a supposedly
| legitimate aggregator like hacker news.
|
| The author is either a straight up liar working to subvert what
| little is left of American capitalism. Or they're a conspiracy
| theory whacko who doesn't know the slightest thing about "the
| elite," or any of the people/factions that comprise it.
| aenis wrote:
| Yeah maybe, but maybe its helpful to think what the holders
| of commercial real estate debt do to avoid the catastrophe?
| Surely, they are not just sitting and waiting. The offices
| are empty. The companies are doing just fine. There need to
| be external pressures applied to bring people back to the
| offices, I'd think.
| kolbe wrote:
| Sure. They might be commissioning a harvard business
| professor to write about productivity gains of being in-
| office. They might lobby for some regulation to force a
| liability onto companies with remote workers. But what they
| aren't doing is getting 1000 of the richest people in the
| world into a room and coordinating a conspiracy to help
| some corner of the room not go bankrupt.
| camgunz wrote:
| Shareholders, local/state governments that are basically in the
| grip of developers and real estate investors/landlords, Wall
| Street, cocktail parties, (bad) middle managers rioting, the
| feeling that if your underlings have all the freedoms you have
| they're less like underlings and more like peers, the usual
| class warfare stuff.
| b59831 wrote:
| [dead]
| coldtea wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Unlike the caricature naive people believe it to be, such
| real world conspiracies seldom are about some shady guys
| meeting in a secret underground lair. That's so third world
| coup style.
|
| More like a huge net, cast by powerful people scratching each
| other's back, lobbying, advertising, and PR budgets, the
| media getting on with the program, and of course politicians,
| middle managers, academics, journalists, and other such types
| quickly figuring out the right things to say and the right
| signals to sent that would advance their careers - and trying
| to whip the majority into going there to.
| gautamdivgi wrote:
| It's basically the government "strongly nudging" companies to
| start their RTO. I don't think every company suddenly
| discovered they were unproductive
| notnmeyer wrote:
| i keep reading this without folks offering proof of the claims.
| where is the connection from these elites to the individuals
| running businesses in leased space?
|
| is there some smoking gun out there that i just haven't heard
| about?
| nforgerit wrote:
| Should make one suspicious if the narrative directly or
| indirectly accuses some kind of "global world elite" playing
| puppetmaster since this used to be part of Goebbels playbook.
|
| Not accusing the author, but maybe better think twice before
| making those kinds of assumptions if the easier explanation is:
| Stupidity. And as we all know, there's plenty of that in
| management rows.
| bperki8 wrote:
| The "elites"? That's a funny term for people who own commercial
| real estate.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| I think it goes beyond that. Your average pointy haired boss
| loves asses in seats.
| bperki8 wrote:
| Not sure how your comment makes it any less strange to call
| these people "elite".
| adamnemecek wrote:
| Elites are fundamentally people who have power over you.
| Your boss has power over you.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Your average line manager is no more elite than you the
| worker are. Depending on the depth of structure, to get
| to elites you need to go one or two levels up.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The "elites"? That's a funny term for people who own
| commercial real estate
|
| You think commercial real estate _isn't_ disproportionately
| owned, directly or indirectly, by the narrow _haut
| bourgeoisie_?
| bperki8 wrote:
| Where did I express any distaste for actually descriptive
| terms like "bourgeoisie"? Only on the Internet is
| purposefully misconstruing someone's statement seen as a
| valid method of communication.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Where did I express any distaste for actually descriptive
| terms like "bourgeoisie"?
|
| Who do you think the elite in a capitalist society are?
| "Elite" is accurate and descriptive, and more common in
| casual conversation, than, e.g., " _haut bourgeoisie_ ".
|
| (And "bourgeoisie" alone is different, as it includes the
| _petit bourgeoisie_ , who are both _less_ of an elite,
| though still one compared to the proletariat, and much less
| significant in terms of the thing being discussed, control
| of commercial real-estate.)
| xiphias2 wrote:
| I think it may be a lot of pension funds, where the choice
| was made by the fund managers, not the asset owners.
| vasco wrote:
| I can't take anyone serious that uses terms like "elites", I'm
| with you.
| iiikz wrote:
| Every executive I've worked under in my career would jump at the
| opportunity to reduce facility and infrastructure cost if the
| productivity and other metrics for success were met with remote
| work. This doesn't seem to be a reasonable argument.
|
| Also, I can't help but note that working from home is only really
| viable for specific categories of work. It is interesting to me
| how often those class of workers do not seem to recognize their
| privilege and make obtuse conspiratorial arguments about "the
| elite" - as if remote work is really available to all.
| faangiq wrote:
| Yes this is well known.
|
| Don't forget it's also in the interest of middle managers to
| lower the productivity of the people at work, who actually add
| value as well. This decreases the productivity gap and helps to
| not expose how useless they are.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| It doesn't seem to be going well for them.
| brentm wrote:
| Bad take. There are plenty of dumb reasons people are wanted back
| at the office but the most predominant one is probably that it
| just "feels like" it will make your company better.
|
| I'd think people would be happy that at least some remote work
| will never go away at this point. To argue that you should never
| ever even have to consider going back into an office for any
| amount of time is just silly. But to also argue you can never
| ever work from home is also silly.
| weego wrote:
| It is a bad take.
|
| Most managers were people doing stuff who got promoted into
| 'managing' stuff with no obvious output or direct value. It's
| not really surprising that a chain of these people would knee-
| jerk react weirdly in a situation they felt exposed as not
| being that useful / have their limited people a management
| skills tested in a situation they themselves likely didn't
| experience.
| ip26 wrote:
| To reframe your argument more charitably, it seems like most
| people agree that managing a remote team well is probably a
| lot harder than in person, and we already know that many
| managers have not even received the training to do well with
| an in person team. So we should not be surprised if they are
| not taking this well.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| our lab just got dinged by an employee who was trying to hold
| got another full time job on the down low....something that
| would have been caught if the work was in person.
| kelnos wrote:
| Sure, that happens. But if you think that's actually a
| significant problem (significant enough to abandon all the
| benefits of allowing workers to work from home), you're gonna
| need more than an n=1 anecdote to support that take.
|
| And regardless, that sort of thing happens even when
| employees work in an office. People can certainly get a part
| time side gig and do that work from their main job's office.
| Maybe a little more likely to get caught, but it's far from
| impossible.
| Jcowell wrote:
| Your problem isn't that this employee got another job, it's
| if their performance and work suffers for it. if they somehow
| are able to do both then your company is lucky they have an
| incredible employee and should be liking for means to retain
| them
| ip26 wrote:
| You are technically correct, but I would posit _"secretly
| holding two full time, demanding, salaried jobs"_ is an
| extremely strong predictor for failing to perform
| sufficiently at either. Given that, it's a simple matter of
| weighing those odds against the costs involved in proving
| it.
|
| One common argument is if you can't tell their performance
| is impacted, they must actually be performing adequately.
| Except, in a different context, we will happily explain how
| our own performance can't be measured by number of lines
| changed or bugs fixed.
| jaynate wrote:
| Agree. Occam's razor: The explanation that requires the fewest
| assumptions is usually correct.
| ip26 wrote:
| Not that I agree, but technically, "my boss is a psychopath"
| is only one assumption ;)
| topkai22 wrote:
| It also has to do with status and power. One of the perks of
| being a manager or executive is how people defer to you. The
| micro status signals the occur in remote work don't have the same
| effect/aren't as satisfying.
|
| Remote work also makes managers/executives jobs a bit harder even
| if it makes the firm as a whole more productive. They have the
| incentive and ability to push for return to office, so they do
| so.
| rsynnott wrote:
| This is a very popular idea, but it doesn't make a huge amount of
| _sense_. Most office-oriented employers don't own much if any
| real estate; they lease it. And unless they're really huge, what
| _they_ do has very little influence on the price of real estate
| generally; they've no individual incentive here. Arguably a mild
| counter--incentive; it's generally to their benefit, as renters
| of real estate, if future real-estate costs drop.
|
| Now, of course, you could argue that it's pension funds and
| things exerting control via ownership, but again, this is a bit
| of a stretch; it'd require a lot of coordination, and there's no
| evidence it's happening. And this would only be a real
| possibility, at most, for active funds; index funds can't really
| threaten to sell a company's stock if it doesn't do what they
| want. And, if this was a thing, you'd expect that the Shadowy
| Fund Conspiracy would have made more of an effort to save
| _retail_, whose bleeding out over the last few decades has been a
| constant problem for commercial real estate.
|
| (Also, in most cases, it's mostly _different funds_; even within
| a single fund provider, the fund that owns lots of commercial
| real estate and the fund that owns lots of tech company are
| generally different funds, with different fund managers, designed
| for people with different risk profiles. This would make the sort
| of coordination imagined here even more fraught.)
|
| I get why people like this idea; it's a just-so story. But it's
| very hard to see how it would work.
|
| I suspect companies are pushing for this because their
| leaderships genuinely believe it is good for productivity, though
| as far as I can see there's an absence of hard evidence. (I
| personally strongly dislike working from home, and got back to an
| office as soon as it was allowed, but the idea that it hurts
| productivity doesn't gel with what I've seen, at all.)
| gdubs wrote:
| You're missing an obvious real estate incentive: where people
| live. Often in very nice school districts, which they don't
| want to see depreciate in value due to an outflow of people to
| different communities. People moving into rust belt cities and
| revitalizing them is great for the nation, but may come at the
| expense of someone who's highly leveraged into a $6m 3 bedroom
| in the Bay Area.
|
| If productivity were the goal, then open plan offices would
| have been abandoned a decade ago after the nth study showing
| how poor they are for worker health, happiness, and
| productivity.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| People want to see "the elites" as one homogeneous cabal out to
| protect themselves at the expense of the little guy. In
| reality, it's a bunch of self-interested individuals whose
| incentives don't overlap here. The companies using office space
| have no reason to waste money helping out their landlords, and
| would much rather profit by screwing them over.
|
| As you say, this theory does not make much sense.
| moonchrome wrote:
| I also believe COVID fucked productivity globally and
| executives thought it was a temporary thing due to measures in
| place.
|
| But I feel like COVID situation triggered stuff that either
| accelerated existing trends or introduced new problems, and I
| don't think there's going back.
|
| People quoting productivity drops from new hires during COVID
| omit insane hiring in tech - implying that remote work is to
| blame and not their structure inability to scale to utilize
| those unprecedented numbers of new hires productively.
| Especially since most of the hiring was aimless "we need to
| grow headcount to capture the market growth". People getting
| paid serious money to literally sit around. That's going to
| cascade in other ways - I feel like entire industry standard of
| acceptable delivery sinked
|
| Getting people back to the office sounds like a nice narrative
| because it's relatively easy to fix and corelate.
|
| It's also, conveniently, entirely not the fault of upper
| management for insane over hiring and underutilization.
| [deleted]
| missedthecue wrote:
| Wouldn't it make more sense for the wall street shareholders of
| the companies to end the office leases and put the resulting
| freed-up money into extra dividends?
|
| I agree, it sounds like a conspiracy theory. Not a lot of
| evidence.
| lumost wrote:
| The divergence between small and large firms tells the story
| here. Small firms don't own their real estate and are cutting
| as fast as they can. Large firms who own are forcing their
| employees back to the office. We'll see in 20 years which is
| the better play.
| itronitron wrote:
| As for myself, I'd prefer to not bail out commercial real estate
| in order to prop up the economies of major metropolitan areas
| that will be inundated with sea water in the next decade.
|
| I think we can do better.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| close but slight correction.. sea-level rise in 15 years has
| gone from "cuckoo topic" to carefully monitored via centralized
| systems with leadership meetings. The best information that I
| can gather to date suggests that a) active port cities will
| deploy enough resources to roll with the changes, even if they
| are very expensive; b) large metropolitan areas generally will
| do the same, despite large costs; c) there is an unexpected
| threat to underground sewer and dry infrastructure, due to
| rising water tables; d) many places that do not have a lot of
| economics, really will go under water slowly.
|
| Given the track record, a wager that there will be giant
| bailouts requested is almost a certain win, and that some
| portion of those bailouts will accompany graft-corruption under
| the covers. Lots of built infrastructure that was expensive to
| build in its' day, but not crucial now, will be lost to water.
| lost_tourist wrote:
| They said they be inundated 10 years ago and 10 years before
| that, especially Miami. Make of that what you will.
| indymike wrote:
| This article dresses up truth in class warfare costume:
|
| Companies and investors who own commercial real estate are facing
| a loss.
|
| The thought is if people have to go back to the office, the
| commercial real estate is worth more, so there is incentive to
| return to the office.
|
| I suspect we're way past the point where a work from the office
| mandate is going to make any measurable difference in property
| value. CEOs sitting on big rents and big buildings should start
| preparing their investors and boards for the inevitable loss and
| not lose sign of this:
|
| Your competitors without big real estate costs are in a much
| better competitive position.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >It's about real estate. That's it.
|
| I don't think that is it. Most companies would be glad to cut
| down on office space. Certainly _some_ companies have a direct
| interest in having office space, but most clearly do not.
|
| To me it seems to be more about controlling your employees, which
| is easiest to do by proximity.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Also there is probably some level of fear that they aren't
| working as hard as they could. Even if productivity is likely
| same, as in office they would be physically present, but likely
| do about same amount of actual work.
|
| Butts in seats, not the output is what feels right and is at
| least somewhat measurable.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Yes, exactly. I think it is mostly about the _feeling_ of
| management. If the employee is present they "know" that he
| is actually working, if he is at home they are relatively
| powerless.
| kkfx wrote:
| Ladies and Gentlemen it's not _just_ real estate, it 's the
| service economy. Without enough office workers cities will be
| just a dens of poor and desperate. Without a working city who
| will:
|
| - buy ready made food delivered by a human or mechanical drone ?
|
| - use all city service where without them living in modern small
| apartments would be very uncomfortable ?
|
| - who want uber and similar transportation model, since in less
| dense areas anyone have a car except very few (the few who can't
| drive) ?
|
| - who want mobile smart crap if anyone have a home office ?
| relyks wrote:
| This argument may not realistically apply to larger companies in
| the same way, especially those that don't own their office spaces
| and have longer-term leases of 5-10 years or more. The dynamics
| are different for larger companies located in major city centers
| like NYC, where commercial leases tend to be longer term.
|
| Smaller companies with shorter-term leases likely have more
| flexibility and control over their spaces, so the argument could
| hold more weight for them. Larger enterprises are more anchored
| to their existing offices and long-term leases, limiting their
| ability to quickly shed or change office footprints.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Of course it has nothing to do with productivity. But these
| people demanding rto are anything but "elites".
| kristjansson wrote:
| This seems needlessly class-war-monegring. People slack off at
| home, people slack off in the office. Everyone's situation is not
| your situation. Everyone's work does not look like your work.
| Some people like/want/need office space to work, some people
| don't. Some people find themselves in different camps on
| different days.
|
| In any case, companies driving RTO are acting in their own
| perceived best interests, not their landlords. Either they're so
| beholden to CRE that their landlords best interests are their
| best interests (eg some law firms, maybe architects, ?),
| reasoning against sunk costs of their existing long-term leases,
| playing some petty power-game, or seeing some actual benefit to
| hybrid/in-office schedules. Some of those seem more likely than
| others, but all seem more likely than all managers being part of
| an elite cabal and doing it as a favor to their elite-cabal
| friends with CRE interests.
| wredue wrote:
| The elites are actively engaging in class war with you. I don't
| understand why so many people are so quick to be little foot
| soldiers for the people that despise their existence.
| generic92034 wrote:
| https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/123058-there-s-class-
| warfar...
|
| The denial is strong in some people.
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| I don't understand why so many people don't understand the
| "the elites" consist of multiple people, who don't all have
| the same incentives. Many elites own commercial real estate
| and would love rents up. Many elites _rent_ commercial real
| estate and would love to keep rents down, or close the office
| entirely to save money on rent.
| ip26 wrote:
| When class war is invoked too frequently, it's reasonable to
| grow suspicious about any one particular invocation without
| disbelieving the existence of a class war.
|
| Prejudice exists, but if every time a protected class was not
| hired they shouted "prejudice!" you would not be wrong to
| question them.
|
| Many of the elements of the claimed class war often struggle
| to pass basic sniff tests, as well. I like to think critical
| thinkers are naturally suspicious of grand conspiracy claims,
| requiring strong evidence and compelling argument.
|
| None of this is to deny your basic premise- perhaps this
| truly is a manifestation of the class war- but instead to
| address your question.
| jansan wrote:
| A university friend of mine is head of a European non-IT company
| with a an upper five digit number of employees. A few weeks ago
| we had breakfast and among other things talked about remote
| working. He points why he wants his people back in office were
| pretty clear:
|
| - he sees productivity slowly but steadily deteriorating
|
| - especially weaker and new employees are falling behind
|
| - restructuring has become very hard
|
| - employees who cannot work remotely (they have quite a few
| factories and workshops) feel treated unfair
|
| - he does not give a shit about commercial real estate
|
| Of course this is only anecdotal, but I only know one person who
| could be called a member of "The Elite" and his views do not
| support the author's claims.
| lazypenguin wrote:
| Correlation is not causation. I do suspect productivity is
| decreasing but more related to things like "quiet quitting" and
| myopia from inflation destroying most people's lives and less
| so because people are working from home. Hard to stay motivated
| at work when your living expenses go up 30% but companies keep
| withholding raises and bonuses because "uncertain economic
| times".
| egoregorov wrote:
| If you don't like it, leave
| AlbertCory wrote:
| who remembers this?
|
| https://money.cnn.com/2013/02/25/technology/yahoo-work-from-...
|
| pre-pandemic.
|
| Her "reasoning" if we can call it that, was that a lot of WFH
| people were not at all committed to Yahoo's success (for good
| reason, it turns out). No one knew what they were doing.
|
| I suspect that a really good company can manage with WFH, but a
| marginal one with unmotivated employees really can't. Maybe
| that's a good thing.
| rzazueta wrote:
| Surprising number of corporate bootlickers in this thread.
| [deleted]
| Boxxed wrote:
| I'm not sure I can make the mental leap that CEOs are making
| decisions based on what's best for their landlords.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| You can if you understand that the landlords are their friends
| and part of their network. They have common interests and move
| in the same circles.
| rsynnott wrote:
| I mean in most cases their landlord is going to be a REIT or
| similar, owned by pension funds and the like, one of the most
| faceless corporate entities out there. The REIT doesn't play
| much golf. Most truly large landlords aren't comedy
| plutocrats holding large sacks of cash (though,
| interestingly, medium-sized landlords often _are_; it's a
| profession that attracts real life cartoon villains).
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| the real war against remote work is coming from middle management
| who can no longer hide under the 'I keep them in line' mantra.
| Corps have become bloated by too little competition (e.g. from
| mergers) or collusion, toxic departmental politics, etc. We could
| lose half of middle management and pay the lowest tier more AND
| be more producive and profitable in many corps.
| ghaff wrote:
| My experience feels a lot like middle management has had to
| work harder to connect and coordinate people with remote
| because a lot of the sort of organic in-person connections that
| happened among people at a company isn't happening to the same
| degree any longer.
| asdff wrote:
| The issue with management (and a lot of jobs really) is that
| there is no ongoing training. You learn what you learn in
| school, you subscribe to the belief systems that seem good to
| you, and that is your dogma for your career. Being able to
| sit down and rethink your entire management approach requires
| careful studying of both what you are doing, and what the
| possibilities even are that you can do. How many managers you
| know do that, basically chose to become a life long learner
| in this space? If you know anyone like that, just tie your
| ship to theirs for the rest of your career if you can.
| Frankly most people don't care enough to be so self critical.
|
| Remote working takes doing things a little bit differently.
| Its not more challenging, its just different than what people
| come to know which seems challenging because they are a
| greenhorn again in this respect. People have been working in
| distributed teams or decades now. Some people at this point
| have probably had entire careers from college to retirement
| on distributed teams. Its not a new thing, its not an
| uncharted unknown, its not rocket science. The managers
| claiming it is have simply given up on learning to manage.
| Slava_Propanei wrote:
| [dead]
| brandonmenc wrote:
| To everyone pointing out there is no "conspiracy" here:
|
| In the mid-size city I live in, I hear small business owners and
| local execs worried _all the time_ about how a commercial real
| estate crash would send us into recession.
|
| The systemic consequences - real or imagined - are very much top
| of mind for all the - real or imagined - decision makers. They
| feel like it's their duty to steer this ship for the greater
| good. The attitude is nearly lock-step.
|
| I'd take a painful recession today if it means I still don't have
| to go into the office a decade from now. Rip the band-aid off.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The _politics of entitlement_ plays large in cities.
|
| The LIRR thinks that commuters exist to fund the LIRR, not that
| they exist to serve commuters. (Sometimes that seems true about
| public transit everywhere. Similar changing the psychology of
| this could be transformational.)
|
| I remember a state assemblywomen from Queens who thought that, to
| protect jobs, NY state should subsidize _off track betting_ , not
| even the racetrack!
|
| Some people in urban areas who are paying $90 a month for 10x the
| bandwidth speed I pay $240 a month for think they are paying too
| much. In principle their "last mile" might be 20 feet as opposed
| to my 2000 feet. The trouble is that 20 feet will cost as much to
| cover because of all the palms they have to grease to cover it
| (landlords, unions, community groups, etc.) Contrast that to a
| rural area where people will grease the skids for you.
|
| (Try to shoot a movie outdoors in Los Angeles and you'll need to
| get permits to file your permits. Try to do it in Alamaba and
| your neighbors will bake cookies for you!)
|
| In an environment like this it is like getting off the BART in
| San Francisco. You just walk straight ahead, keep moving, don't
| make eye contact with anybody. One of the few things people can
| agree upon in the entitlement economy is that don't way to pay
| any taxes they can possibly avoid.
| Clent wrote:
| You've managed to turn this into a city vs rural problem. Of
| course your prefer side, rural comes out on top!
|
| What a coincidence.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > Some people in urban areas who are paying $90 a month for 10x
| the bandwidth speed I pay $240 a month for think they are
| paying too much. In principle their "last mile" might be 20
| feet as opposed to my 2000 feet. The trouble is that 20 feet
| will cost as much to cover because of all the palms they have
| to grease to cover it (landlords, unions, community groups,
| etc.) Contrast that to a rural area where people will grease
| the skids for you.
|
| Eh... do you have evidence for this, or is it just what you
| believe to be true? In general, if it _was_ true, you'd expect
| competition to provide you with cheaper bandwidth than them.
| xyzelement wrote:
| The "article" rehashes the well repeated meme about propping up
| commercial real estate, with the only callout to productivity
| being the authors own self admitted "bullshit job".
|
| My counter would be as someone who is loving WFH as a new dad, it
| is _obvious_ to me that as a group, teams are less productive
| when not face to face even though individuals may think they are
| crushing it.
|
| This is obvious to many people I talk to who have seen it the
| other way and are seeing it now from the elevated perspective.
| sgt101 wrote:
| YMMV - it's not obvious to me. Almost no team I have worked in
| has been f2f due to offshoring and geographical distribution of
| functions in big companies. Only small companies can really do
| co-location.
| [deleted]
| gdubs wrote:
| "Vibes for me, data for thee".
|
| People lean heavily on anecdotes when it comes to worker
| productivity. But actual data is much more nuanced on the
| matter.
|
| People seem to have completely forgotten how worker
| productivity actually went up a noticeable amount during a time
| when most people were working at home - and under some very
| unusual circumstances mind you - and actually began declining
| _after_ restrictions ended and companies started asking people
| to return on a hybrid or full-time basis.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I've been working on an app, with a small team, of [mostly]
| non-tech folks.
|
| Most of our interactions are messaging (Slack, IM, etc.), with
| occasional Zoom calls.
|
| I T . I S . V E R Y , V E R Y , S L O W . I have never worked
| this slowly in my life. I literally cannot rush ahead, at my
| usual pace, because I make assumptions that are often wrong.
|
| A few days ago, we had an in-person meeting, at a local diner,
| and talked about the app for a couple of hours.
|
| I came out of that meeting with a very complete kanban list. I
| think it may have been our most productive meeting, ever.
|
| I _need_ to work on my own, at home, but I also need to have
| real (non-Zoom) facetime with my team.
|
| But that's just me.
| raydev wrote:
| > A few days ago, we had an in-person meeting, at a local
| diner, and talked about the app for a couple of hours.
|
| What is your team doing differently with video calls that you
| don't end them with a complete list of items for everyone?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Oh, we get lists, but they are _much_ shorter.
|
| For example, I want to show them where a button needs to
| go, I simply hold up the phone, and point. With Zoom, we
| have a wrestling match over screen share.
| slily wrote:
| I've had the same experience at a fully remote company,
| working for short periods face to face once or twice a year
| clarified a ton of stuff and made me far more productive than
| normal during and after the event. I have never felt more
| productive working remotely, except when I want to
| concentrate on a task that is already laid out and have to
| deal with distractions of an open environment.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Why were you not able to accomplish that with a Zoom video
| call or voice call?
|
| Why was that not possible with a common Slack chat channel?
| Or a Trello or something?
|
| A lot of times these problems boil down to people not being
| willing or able to dedicate the time every day to work on a
| project or communicate properly online. Often a combination
| for underfunded projects. And lack of written communication
| ability can contribute strongly.
|
| I don't think that we should really blame remote for all of
| that.
| tremon wrote:
| _it is obvious to me that as a group, teams are less productive
| when not face to face_
|
| Less productive, compared to what though? In most offices I've
| seen cubicles and open-plan spaces reign supreme, along with
| flex-desk policies. Which means that even when all team members
| are in the office, they are not working face to face. So while
| you may be correct that teams could be more productive if
| they're all in the same space, the typical office is not
| optimized to achieve that.
|
| Also, teams never need to be face-to-face for the entirety of
| the work: in my experience, only design and planning benefits
| from face-to-face coordination; for deep productive work the
| benefits of quick verbal checks is negated by the loss of focus
| from quick verbal checks from others.
| Clent wrote:
| I find myself knowing so much less about the day-to-day
| personal lives of my co-workers.
|
| Perhaps this is what people are referring to as team
| productivity?
|
| Do some people work better as a team with that personal bond?
| That would result in a measured change but it would be
| foolish to expand it to all teams, which makes it all the
| more plausible why some companies are pushing hard for return
| to office.
| 8b16380d wrote:
| What recourse do we as workers have? We can soft boycott and
| quit/stop applying to onsite positions, but there are hundreds of
| thousands willing and able to take these positions.
| ponderings wrote:
| compete with them
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| No, no, I have it on good authority that the optimal strategy
| is to gang up on the employer and force them to meet the
| workers' demands.
|
| This will somehow make the employer _more_ competitive,
| rather than less, and will not in _any_ way incentivize
| outsourcing and automation at the cost of the domestic jobs
| in question.
|
| I read it on HN, so it must be true.
| ponderings wrote:
| There is always an exchange of good and bad deeds between
| employees and employers. If you are a dick you should be
| treated as such. If you are a saint you should be too! You
| never just go to war with your employer or your employees.
|
| I had one employer who would sometimes get stuck in a loop
| thanking me for what I've done, how embarrassed he was he
| couldn't pay me more and that he could never do what I did
| for such little money. I would mock him by listing the
| instances of terrible things that would have happened if I
| wasn't there. If he called me right now, years later, I
| would do what I could to keep his ship afloat just because
| the idea of having to fire people haunts him in his sleep.
|
| My previous manager asked me to do an extra shift one time.
| I told him I understand why he asked it but that this must
| never happen again. Before that I told him that he couldn't
| just schedule an extra shift but that he should ask me
| first. If the place burned down around me I would use it to
| light my cigar after casually tossing my coat over my arm.
| itronitron wrote:
| Ride a bike, take the bus, report sexual harassment by
| managers, microwave fish dumplings for lunch if your in the
| office, etc.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| The labor market overall is tight but tech is in an employment
| recession so employers currently have power. Do what you need
| to do to put yourself in a position where you can bail and jump
| to a remote employer at the first opportunity. If the majority
| does this, companies will have to change or die. Going back to
| the office because of the current power dynamic is ok but
| getting complacent and not using your most powerful weapon,
| jumping to another job, is now the RTO folks win longterm.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Have somebody ,,ticket in'' for you and accept that sometimes
| bs things are parts of your job. Managers don't care as long as
| the numbers are good.
| asdff wrote:
| Maybe even more powerful than unionmaking would be coop making.
| Realistically, everyone could take their team of the 10 closest
| workers they know, form a coop, and contract their work back to
| the employer akin to a freelancer. This would help take the
| real leverage from large organizations, their magnitude and its
| ability to shape markets due to inertia alone, if that
| magnitude was more of a temporal nature on a per project basis.
| In a perfect world in this coop model, labor wouldn't be
| "locked up" on boring projects for large companies, labor would
| be free to freelance onto interesting or mutually beneficial
| projects if there was any idle time that could be filled with
| more billable work. Profits would also be shared among labor
| since ownership is distributed among labor, versus being this
| separate parasitic class carried on a palanquin by labor.
| lostdog wrote:
| Have you made a coop? Why or why not?
| sundaeofshock wrote:
| Unions.
| moshun wrote:
| It's always been the same answer for hundreds of years.
| Unions and solidarity.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| But don't you know? We are exceptional. Unions are for the
| plebs. /s
|
| But of course the reality is tech workers are the plebs
| too, far closer to the median than to capital elite.
| Treasured illusions die hard.
|
| Unions enjoy 71% public support and organizing is federally
| protected activity. The minority isn't stopping anyone,
| they can be safely ignored.
|
| (My note: I recognize I will never be obscenely wealthy; it
| does not appeal to me. The wealthy just try to buy back
| their soul with charity after leaving a wake of destruction
| on their journey. I would rather work for autonomy and
| quality of life for my peers, which if done properly, will
| lead to a better life for myself)
| jprete wrote:
| The perks of FAANG are there, IMO, to pay the employees
| with a feeling of high-class status. Meanwhile, from an
| economic-class perspective, engineering is essentially
| blue-collar - it's mostly about things and not (directly)
| about people. It's a weird dichotomy.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Unions._
|
| From my recent experience, unions can't help you keep remote
| work they way they work here today. I work(ed) at a unionized
| German company and when management call everyone back to the
| office after the Covid vaccination was done, it wasn't
| protested by the unions and everyone sowed up at the office
| without protest, and remote work was kept as "in case of
| emergency" perk you can get every now and then if you get
| approval from your manager beforehand.
|
| Unions here only serve the purpose to intervene in case of
| major force like discrimination, health and safety, layoffs,
| working hours, overtime, and the negociate mandatory yearly
| pay increases based on inflation and company profits, not
| help you keep your desired perk of not commuting to the
| office as the office is seen as the mandatory place of work
| by contract, not your home, so physical presence at work part
| is usually non-negotiable.
|
| Actually, unions here are relatively against remote work or
| at least quiet on the topic, as they assume it'll lead to
| easier off-shoring in the long run (already happening anyway)
| and the loss of their jobs , so on-site presence of the
| workforce is considered as an advantage in convincing the
| company to keep invested in Germany and not move abroad
| (generals like seeing their soldiers at work where their
| money is goes).
| PaulHoule wrote:
| In the orthodox Marxism still practiced by some
| Trotskyites, the factory worker is seen as a uniquely
| revolutionary class because of (1) the discipline that
| comes from factory work and (2) the factory as itself as a
| nexus of revolution: workers can organize there and
| ultimately seize control of the means of production.
|
| A knowledge worker who works at home on cloud servers has
| no spatial nexus to control. All communication between
| workers is electronically mediated, I guess union
| organizers can develop a parallel infrastructure, but the
| workplace itself is a natural place for organizing work to
| take place.
|
| What amuses me though is that until 1980 or so people
| thought factory work was the worst kind of work, maybe best
| expressed in the Ray Davies song "Working At the Factory"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0khnH1qi6M
|
| Once the factories left, however, people realized service
| work or no work was a lot worse and now a new factory in
| your town is one of the best things a politician can take
| credit for.
| kelnos wrote:
| Knowledge workers can seize things to a certain extent.
| Upper management (and even lower management in some
| cases) don't control or even have ready access to
| critical cloud credentials.
|
| Sure, executives can call the cloud provider and gain
| access, but not before significant damage to the business
| can be done. And regardless, that's not much different
| than factory workers getting the police called on them by
| the factory owners.
|
| I think the main issue is that knowledge workers are not
| organized (and generally look down on the idea of union
| membership), and don't really have the guts to step out
| of line like that.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Knowledge workers can seize things to a certain
| extent. _
|
| Of course they can. Let's say workers group together and
| take the website down which tanks the business completely
| rendering the business owner broke and the workers
| unemployed. Then what? Who's gonna hire you as part of
| that grop of revolutionaries who took down a business?
|
| You want unionization per sector with the blessing of
| legal authorities, and collective protest per industry,
| not per company.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> workers can organize there and ultimately seize
| control of the means of production._
|
| Workers can try to seize the means of production, but
| without state support, the police or the military will
| come shoot and arrest you, like it happened many times in
| recent history. You need populace and political support
| for such movements, otherwise you're a
| terrorist/criminal.
|
| _> A knowledge worker who works at home on cloud servers
| has no spatial nexus to control. All communication
| between workers is electronically mediated, I guess union
| organizers can develop a parallel infrastructure, but the
| workplace itself is a natural place for organizing work
| to take place._
|
| Knowledge workers have the balance of power in their
| favor, despite not having ways to physically seize the
| means of production, but as soon as the individual's
| knowledge becomes obsolete, commoditized or easily found
| elsewhere for cheaper, then those workers are shit out of
| luck if they don't keep up and adapt to a new hot thing.
|
| _> Once the factories left, however, people realized
| service work or no work was a lot worse and now a new
| factory in your town is one of the best things a
| politician can take credit for._
|
| Unfortunately, we can't have a well functioning society
| where everyone is a remote worker. Someone still needs to
| fix your toilet, teach your kids, drive the train, build
| new houses, manufacture the stuf you use in your daily
| life like food and medical supplies.
|
| Sure, you can have all your stuff manufactured offshore
| and import it, until your manufacturing trading partner
| has the upper hand and gives you the middle finger
| because he needs that stuff more urgently or he found a
| richer buyer, and now you're left wihtout stuff and with
| a bunch of laptop workers who can't manufacture the stuff
| you need because that knowledge is not open-source and
| you since lost all that knowledge over decades of
| deindustrialization when you gave it to your
| manufacturing trading partner in exchange for cheap stuff
| and access to his domestic market.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| They can if they care; New York City's municipal employee
| union negotiated just that.
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/17/nyregion/adams-remote-
| wor...
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Municipal and government workers are different, as they
| can always demand whatever they want because they don't
| have competition and don't need to turn a profit so
| you're stuck with them whether you like it or not. What
| else are you gonna do, get your permit from another
| country's government? The government's monopoly is the
| real leverage here.
| kelnos wrote:
| Many industries (in the US at least) are dominated by
| union labor. Some jobs even require union membership,
| even if you don't want to join the union. So these
| companies simply can't avoid union workers if they
| actually want staff.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but to my knowledge, unions in
| the US function very differently than unions in
| Germany/Europe.
|
| In Germany, the unions function more as partners of the
| business owners and collaborate together on finding the
| general compromise that won't disturb company profits or
| the way the business operates, while in the US it seems
| like unions must treat the business like antagonists even
| at the sake of company profits because "all business
| owners are evil so fuck them".
|
| So even if the US has fewer unions than in Europe,
| they're generally a lot more powerful, which is why many
| were infiltrated by the mob.
|
| If my memory serves me correctly the earliest unions in
| Germany were very similar to the unions in the US, as in
| they were started from clashes with the business owners,
| and they were in charge of handling stuff like healthcare
| and pensions pots of the workers, similar to the unions
| in north america today.
|
| But the Kaiser saw the growing unions and their pensions
| pots getting bigger along with their nation wide
| influence over the working class, as threats to the
| state's own influence and control over the workers, so he
| dismantled them and introduced them under the new state
| pension plan, so the modern state social pension in
| Germany stems form the Kaiser's fear of the workers'
| unions. :)
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Generally speaking one major reason is that union
| representatives are also on company boards in the Europe.
| This gives them skin in the game and also the same
| knowledge that gets shared to the rest of the board. And
| they generally err on the side of employment; American
| unions have threatened, and successfully, brought down
| companies that ceased to be a going concern due to
| demanding unreasonable concessions. (See: Yellow
| Trucking)
|
| But German unions are also very subservient given their
| tacit approvals of things like Agenda 2010.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> But German unions are also very subservient given
| their tacit approvals of things like Agenda 2010._
|
| My point exactly. Unions aren't here to fight for even
| better working conditions for you like mandatory WFH for
| everyone, but just to overwatch to make sure the company
| adheres to existing labor regulations. That's it.
|
| So yeah, unions are relatively toothless and the QoL and
| the living standards of the working class in Germany has
| been on the decline for a while.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Unions can do whatever they set their mind to, and
| whatever their membership elects to do.
|
| Like humanity itself and other broad categories, saying
| as a matter of fact that unions can't do X, when some
| unions do X, is pretty asinine, almost as much as lumping
| more than 3B people into "Asians" or other useless
| categorizations. Particularly if the article doesn't
| mention a country of origin being Germany.
|
| You don't even have to look very far from Germany to find
| a union negotiating WFH.
|
| https://rfi.fr/en/france/20201205-why-france-is-
| struggling-t...
|
| https://today.rtl.lu/news/luxembourg/a/1993852.html
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Sure, unions can in theory demand whatever they want, but
| if they don't show enough teeth, as in actually having
| strikes, they usually don't ask because the corporate
| overlords will say 'no' anyway.
|
| Unions in Germany are usually a lot more submissively
| than in France and rarely fight for gaining new perks,
| they just look after maintain the existing ones, moistly
| following the "don't bite the hand that feeds you"
| mentality.
| oblio wrote:
| Is it only a perk if it basically improves family life,
| social life, mental health for many, reduces expenses but
| it also reduces pollution, combats climate change, relieves
| pressure on infrastructure, etc?
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| It is, but German companies and management don't see it
| that way. Decisions are made top-down without consulting
| with what the workers actually want because the priority
| is the company's profits.
|
| Plus, the wellbeing of workers in Germany is already
| considered (at least on paper) to be top notch that
| mandating remote work for everyone is not considered
| necessary as "German workers already have it so good".
|
| And with German labor loosing competitiveness, unions are
| relatively toothless when demanding remote work as
| there's no government mandate to offer that like it is
| with working hours, parental leave, etc. and the
| companies often threaten with relocation/off-shoring when
| they get demands they don't like so the German government
| is in no rush to pressure them for new social perks.
|
| So it's up to you to search for a company that's fully
| WFH, not wait for your union to solve it for you. Unions
| can work only when they have teeth.
| akudha wrote:
| Yup. And electing people to office with at least an iota of
| conscience. One area the current admin is better than the
| previous one - labor issues. Not perfect (they screwed the
| railway workers) but better
| jimbob45 wrote:
| We're afraid of the companies who offshored so many jobs that
| they killed off entire industries in the US? There's nothing they
| won't do for a buck. If remote work doesn't happen now, it will
| in the near future when they realize how much they can save on
| real estate costs.
| moshun wrote:
| The problem is that lots of wealth capital (both personal and
| corporate) is tied up in commercial real estate. It's the
| reason everyone from Martha Stewart to Musk to hedge fund
| managers are screaming about how "unethical" remote work is.
| They literally can't afford to have those buildings sit empty,
| so they will have to force the peons back into them by any
| means necessary.
| asdff wrote:
| We may know who some of the bulls are. But where are the
| bears? Are there any public figures who seem to clearly be
| hedged against the commercial real estate market and are
| making pro work from home statements?
| lost_tourist wrote:
| I bet some of the Zoom corporate elites, although they want
| -their- employees to come in.
| downrightmike wrote:
| Peonage, also called debt slavery or debt servitude, is a
| system where an employer compels a worker to pay off a debt
| with work. Legally, peonage was outlawed by Congress in 1867.
| asdff wrote:
| Today we just call it wage garnishment. We seem to often
| gain rights by just moving around the specific parties
| involve through the transitive property, rather than
| actually seeing significant change from the status quo.
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