Same here, thanks to me working from home my wife has been able to return to work (she's a teacher) which has given us more income (and less costs!) and massively improved our financial position!
Do they actually "own" it? I work for a large company who spent millions building a new office and then immediately sold it to a different company so they could lease it instead of owning it (apparently this looks better on the books!)
Or, as we have seen hundreds of times, it's sold at market price to a "third party" company that is actually owned by one of the board members or executives, which then rent it back to the company for a slight premium.
We do see this occasionally. You'll have some private equity group buy a restaurant chain like Red Lobster. They make RL lease the real estate from them after having RL sell the real estate to them. Sometimes it's not restaurants, I think this is what murdered Toys'R'Us (correct me on that if I'm wrong).
But this isn't the norm, and it's not happening to well-managed businesses. It's something a vulture does after the company has been struggling for years. If that happened with a Microsoft or an Amazon, or any of the companies we work for. It's silly to suggest that is the cause of widespread RTO mandates.
Amazon used to lease several buildings from Paul Allen for years but ended up buying them outright, and then going on a construction binge beyond that.
Depending on where you sit on the conscience/security sliding scale you might want to considering turning off “Require attention”. That solves 90% of glasses/sunglasses related issues.
I had a similar situation with my shutter blinds. The company wanted €500 to install a "smart hub" to enable voice control instead of their little remote. To hell with that, I ordered a couple of servos and an esp8266 and 3d printed some little fingers that would press the buttons on the remote and added the whole thing to HomeAssistant via ESPHome. Cost me less than €30.
I disassembled one of our gate opener's remotes, and hooked the button contacts to Raspberry Pi Zero's GPIO pins. Pi runs a tiny go webserver and Cloudflare tunnel. I hit an obscure HTTPS URL (via button on a phone's homescreen), gate opens.
I remember someone posting something about their garage opening whenever they open safari, as Safari replays GET requests from open tabs when it is un-suspended, although can't find the post right now.
Basically, they had your setup exactly, but they leave the tab open in Safari and whenever they open Safari to browse the internet, the garage door opens.
I didn't dare to hook up Pi with garage opener as well. Our gate auto-closes after a configurable delay, but garage does not. If I trigger the garage opener by accident while I'm not at home, the garage stays open for anybody to come in and take stuff. So I'd need some sort of "is garage currently open" sensor, but I want to keep things simple.
It's really pleasing to me how the "analogue loophole" continues to work. Previously, recording music through the Line Out, or what have you. Now, using a robot to press the supplied remote. It's delightful.
I remember back in the early 00's someone at work found out about my blog and news got around the office (it was a personal blog, more like a diary and I was in my late teens so it was kinda "edgy"). Anyways... within a few days I started getting a bunch of troll comments and it took all the fun out of it knowing everything I wrote was being read by my colleagues.
Booking.com BV is a Dutch Company which has subsidiaries all over the world but is also itself a subsidiary of Booking Holdings Group which also owns Priceline, Kayak, OpenTable and quite a few more companies.
The author talks about all the benefits of a "screen free" childhood and I remember my own fondly (although as an older millennial it was rapidly interrupted as technology spread). What I always wonder though, is if this kind of upbringing is so positive for kids, why are so many boomers so self-centered and spiteful? Surely, they should be happy, beautiful and kind?
I think its a very complex topic - what sort of average societal behavior then leads to some dominant trait X in given part of population. Its definitely not online vs park reduction.
Older generations experienced often very little emotional intelligence, men were told from very early age to man-up, men don't cry, you don't discuss your feelings because that would be / make you gay. Women were raised from small girls to be obedient wives and mothers and not strive for much else in lives, just shut up and listen.
I can see this massive EQ (or whatever is more appropriate term) difference myself, even me vs my dad, if you know what to look for its in plain sight and its massive. Now some folks from current generation didn't 'escape' this and are still like that, pushing this to their own kids, I somehow did and further I went away the clearer the picture was. I don't blame previous generation, this is how literally everybody functioned and how they were raised. But overall they had more freedom to play and also way more restriction and punishment.
Lets see how today's young will fare in retirement, I don't think it will be a nice picture, definitely not for new generation of young.
Boomers aren't any more self-centered and spiteful than any other generation, it seems to me. As to the younger generations, we don't know what they'll be like when they reach the age boomers are now.
Absolutely right... I used to use Pi Zero W's for IOT projects. I had several of them around my house running sensors, rgb lights and the like. Now I can do the same thing with a much smaller device like an ESP32. Setting up a device that changes light colour based on time can be done with a €3 esp8266 flashed with WLED. For other projects I will use the beefier ESP32-S2/S3 or the Pi Pico Microcontroller.
This reminds me of when I used to work for an ISP. Every November the "my internet doesn't work when we turn on the Christmas tree" calls would start. It was usually interference from cheap tree lights, but occasionally it was people unplugging the router to plug in their Christmas tree :D
