There was another article in the Sydney Morning Herald [0] behooving everybody to get back to the CBD because...mental health...cafes will close...
What if you work in a tech park that has few or no amenities, or your work office is in a cruddy bit of town you really dislike? When the house is tidy and the washing done in the 10 minutes an hour I can wander away from the work laptop, I feel a lot happier than worrying about trying to get it done on the weekends or the evenings.
I'd rather quit and find some other job. I'm tired of articles telling me that something I hated to do was somehow a sacrifice I have to make for made up reasons that really don't add up to a hill of beans.
I started working remotely in late 2015 and when I first stepped into the office after some months of this it struck me as insane that we expend all these resources just to have people in particular places, at particular times, producing massive traffic in the process.
It bothers me that it took a pandemic for companies to embrace remote work.
...and yet the people in charge of those companies are starting to revert back to 'the good old days' of making everybody commute sometimes hours to sit at a (generally worse) workspace to do the work. It's maddening to me.
It’s like they want to enforce letter writing after the invention of email, or horse-drawn carriages instead of cars, or in-person work instead of videoconferencing from anywhere.
All because of some romantic notion about some essential element being lost.
The beauty of capitalism is that competition will either replace those people, or eventually the companies entirely.
Luckily this stance makes it very easy to identify and isolate the old guard. I should add that some kinds of engineering has to be on site due to it revolving around rockets or factories or mines or construction sites. But for IT, huge red flag. I’ve had so many offers to work on site and now I don’t even have to bother researching those clients.
It may be a lot of money in total but the amount of money you spend per capita tells a different story. Big cities have traffic problems, but good cities have public transit and you don't need a car. Small towns have low traffic but the amount of money you spend, per capita, on infrastructure like roads, water, electricity is higher.
I find it odd that for decades, people were shamed for wasting money at cafes ...but then as soon as people stopped going to cafes, it's suddenly an economic disaster?
I think there is some truth to that. My parents went to eat out like once a year for quite a while. They saved as much as they could and succeeded at that.
but the multipliers were also different. with saving a house was realistically affordable for a single income household. today? in many regions not at all unless you save 20 years or have a windfall event like an inheritance
Let's say you and your partner go out to each weekly and spend $100 per dinner. That's $5,000 a year. Cutting this entirely lets you have a loan a little less than $100,000 larger at a 6% rate.
This is a case of eating out a lot, cutting it entirely and the effect doesn't even cover the amount a typical home has appreciated by in the past five years.
Generation of our parents lived much more frugal lives from current perspective. Less traveling, adventures, exciting matters and more grind of work & kids care. I utterly respect them for that, but its not a life I would call ideal and strive to have.
Financials now for buying real estate became ridiculous for many places globally. It can be counted from ie how many salaries of similar jobs you need to buy a house in same place before and now. Not exact, but this shows how things skyrocketed due to cheap debt and speculation.
Is that actually true? Yes people now have less kids, but are they really having adventures more in some large numbers?
I mean, there are regular outrages here over people living frugal - not buying cars, living with parents, generally having less, having massively larger college debt to pay. It is combined with outrage over them not buying this or that subscription someone is pushing. Bycicle transport is cheaper then car and is money saving move for people living at right place too. People watch Netflix rather them going ro movie theater and pay for tickets + popcorn.
They do tons of money saving choices, get blamed for them. And then they get blame for buying anything that did not existed 30 years ago.
There is no epidemic of expensive avocado toasts being bought out in large numbers.
Anecdotally among my peers, we make more money than our parents, yet mostly need two incomes instead of one to have kids and not all of us can buy a house. I'm 40 and can't buy my house but my parents could just get a mortgage in their 20s. I doubt they even considered renting, it was just normal to buy a house if you had a job.
The number of big vacations is similar to our parents (about once in five years). We probably eat in/order from restaurants more than our parents but the high cost of groceries and fact that both parents work means it's not as simple as claiming we are simply not being frugal. We have Netflix and smartphones but these are hardly the reason we can't afford houses.
In terms of adventures, many of my friends' parents had a cabin and boat, and as kids most of our families went on weekend trips skiing, to a lake beach/cabin, camping etc multiple times per year. As middle aged adults now, none of us have cabins and weekend trips might be done 1-2 times per year instead of 5-6 times per year because it's so expensive.
Anyway, it's easy to check inflation and cost of housing vs salaries to verify that the problem is cost of living and wages, not excessive vacationing and avocado eating.
Also note that this website is heavily skewed towards American software developers, so things are generally worse than indicated by the comments here. Even the discussion about remote work is a fairly privileged one, as most workers need to do work at a workplace (factory, warehouse, retail, service, etc).
It's kind of interesting, house prices have exponentially gone up while wages remain stagnant and there's more commodities to spend your money on. I don't necessarily think our parents' generation would've been off much better if we adjusted them for our current conditions now honestly. They had less credit compared to our buying power parity, so I think ultimately down the line we probably represent the same economic spending potential despite having access to a lot more things.
More importantly though, I don't think they were necessarily much happier than us either. "Settling down" essentially meant giving up your life. Nowadays you can go to a geeky renaissance fair and find it packed with all sorts of people with kids of all ages. Same thing with like, anime conventions and whatnot.
> Remote working brings potential risks and consequences. It could see many jobs moving offshore if this becomes entrenched as a viable way of doing business.
This is an interesting (and probably the only interesting) point. Normalisation of remote working likely does lead to offshoring. Hard to put that genie back in the bottle.
It heavily depends on which army you are joining and what cause they fight for. Joining army can be step towards supporting atrocities and it can be step towards preventing them.
Just like with joining police - in some places it is good thing to do. In others, you are joining another criminal organization.
Yeah, there was no difference between joining SS and resistance or American army. Or, between fighting against invading army (like Russia) and being invader.
Soldiers from both sides in every conflict will commit war crimes, including horrible war crimes. That's the grim reality and you can either accept it or put on propaganda blinders. Modern war is hell.
And yet, sone armies commit way more of them then others.
Some armies habe those attrocities as mandates, it is their job to commit genocide. Others don't. In some armies you have to participate in others don't.
It is just not true that it would all be the same. Complete pacifism is just enabling the biggest genocides that go on while congratulating yourself.
"We're invading to defend the people against a brutal oppressor" is the argument always used. By Americans in WWII, by Russia today. Some of the worst war crimes and genocides in history have been committed systematically by the armies you've so far mentioned: Germany, America and Russia. These atrocities have been ordered from the highest leadership in these nations. Modern war is hell and there are no good guys left when it's over. If you believe that, they are recruiting volunteers.
Americans did not happened to be the invading brutal oppressor commiting genocide in WWII. Their standard behavior during that time was was remarkably better then behavior of Soviet army which was better then behavior of German army.
Your position is that joining Jewish resistance is as bad as joining SS and both are totally the same as being member of an American army.
What if you work in a tech park that has few or no amenities, or your work office is in a cruddy bit of town you really dislike? When the house is tidy and the washing done in the 10 minutes an hour I can wander away from the work laptop, I feel a lot happier than worrying about trying to get it done on the weekends or the evenings.
I'd rather quit and find some other job. I'm tired of articles telling me that something I hated to do was somehow a sacrifice I have to make for made up reasons that really don't add up to a hill of beans.
[0]https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/sydney-it-s-time-to-get-...