I might typically have 4-5 tabs open for serious work, and then 0 when not.. am I the weird one? I've never once found value with tab groups or multiple sessions
Actual access to reliable healthcare is a massive assumption to make, not everyone has incredible health insurance or lives in a country with sufficient doctors/med staff. Most places are in crisis for lack of resources, I'd rather ask chatgpt or Gemini for something urgent rather than wait 5+ hours in ER for the doctor to say "just take some aspirin and go to a walk-in tomorrow"
Not to mention, going to an ER for something that doesn't turn out to be an emergency carries a high risk of coming back home with something significantly worse.
Last time I was in ER, I accompanied my wife; we got bounced due to lack of appropriate doctor on site, she ended up getting help in another hospital, and I came back home with severe case of COVID-19.
Related: every pediatrician I've been to with my kids during the flu season says the same thing: if you can't get an appointment in a local clinic, stay home; avoid hospitals unless the kid develops life-threatening symptoms, as visiting such places carry high risk of the kid catching something even worse (usually RSV).
There are only two places I still routinely wear a mask (n95) these days: Airplanes from waiting at the gate until about 10 minutes after takeoff when the air handling system has had time to clear things out (and the same after landing), and hospital/doctors visits. It's such a high ROI.
We used to observe that our kid(s) got sick every time we flew over the winter break to visit family. We no longer have this problem. (we do still have kids.) Not getting sick turns out to be really quite nice. :-) Hanging out in the pediatrician's office surrounded by snotty, coughing children who are not mine...
The problem is, if everyone knows it going to curry favour and you're the odd man out - are you in Violation of your fiduciary duty to your shareholders?
The gamble these executives are making is that prosecutors in a different administration will not prosecute them for bribery.
If you watch House of Cards (based loosely on real life), you can see the degree of separation between corporations/lobbyists and Congressmen. These guys participating in building a ballroom are crossing that line. Juries will not have to connect so many dots compared to before in order to put someone in jail.
I've only ever worked remote professionally and I've got a track record, when I apply to a new role there's no question that I can adapt to working remotely at X company.
If I just finished my PhD in comp sci and have never worked professionally in my life let alone remotely, going day 1 remote is a huge risk
I knew this was going to turn into a shoot the messenger (or downvote the messenger) situation.
Look, I also work remote and have for years. This is just the situation that’s happening out there. Having 5 years of remote experience no longer means as much because some companies let everyone work remote and waited until now to start firing and laying people off. We’ve hired some real duds into remote roles who had years of remote experience, apparently doing the same thing they tried to do with us: Work a couple hours a week or maybe collect paychecks from multiple jobs.
Every remote manager I know has stories like this. The remote world changed a lot since COVID and the rise of /r/overemployed and “Four Hour Workweek” junk has only made it worse for those of us who just want to work remote without shenanigans.
> We’ve hired some real duds into remote roles who had years of remote experience, apparently doing the same thing they tried to do with us: Work a couple hours a week or maybe collect paychecks from multiple jobs.
Did you ever hire any duds when you were not hiring remote?
> The remote world changed a lot since COVID and the rise of /r/overemployed and “Four Hour Workweek” junk has only made it worse for those of us who just want to work remote without shenanigans.
A four hour work week is very normal in plenty of countries and in some there are common constructs built around even shorter work weeks.
> Did you ever hire any duds when you were not hiring remote?
Bingo. I had an exec ask me once how will we know people are working if they are remote? I asked back, how do we know they are working now?
Remote work is harder on management and leadership. It’s easy to see if someone is at their desk and seems friendly, it’s hard to really think about what value a person brings.
I've worked at a bank where one of the oft heard jokes was that 'I spend 8 hours per day there but I really wouldn't want to work there'. It was true too. 145 people in the IT department, and absolutely nothing got done.
This was a bit of a let-down for me, all these people, so much fancy hardware. I had a hard time believing it at first. The whole place was basically caretakers that made the occasional report printing program and that based their careers on minor maintenance of decades old COBOL code that they would rather not touch at all.
Something as trivial as a new printer being taken into production would turn into a three year project.
On Friday afternoons the place was deserted. And right now I work 'from home' and so do all of my colleagues and I don't think there are any complaints about productivity. Sure, it takes discipline. But everything does, to larger or lesser degree and probably we are a-typical but for knowledge work in general WFH can work if the company stewards it properly. It's all about the people.
> Did you ever hire any duds when you were not hiring remote?
Of course, but that's obviously a deflection.
In person hires can't physically be in two offices at the same time.
In person employees can't get a new in-person job and then not resign from their last job because they want to extract as many paychecks as they can before they get caught and fired.
In person employees can't substitute in a hired interview taker for the interview and then hope nobody notices their voice sounds too different when they start the job.
These are all real things that we've encountered with remote work (and more)
Saying X can also happen in Y! Is a classic fallacious argument used by people who want you to think two things are equal, when in fact they can have very different probabilities and risk profiles.
When I was working at a hybrid company we even had a few cases where people either couldn't focus at home (kids, family, distractions) or were insufferably combative in chat. Bringing them into the office solved it.
The two environments are not equal, no matter how many times someone tries to deflect with "That problem can also happen in the office!"
That doesn't happen remote either. Unless management is utterly incompetent, another variable a study like this should probably compensate for by increasing the sample size and pool diversity.
I don't know where you got this idea, but this happens all the time. The two most common topics in the remote channel of the big management peer group I'm in are:
1. People cheating on remote interviews (including substituting another person to take the interview)
2. People getting multiple jobs and being too obviously distracted to get work done, or the increasingly common getting a new job and not resigning from the last job because they know they can collect potentially $100K+ in paychecks and/or severance by waiting to get let go instead.
If you don't believe these things happen in remote jobs then I understand your resistance throughout this thread to any suggestion that remote and in-office are different.
It absolutely happens, and often. I don't know when the last time you tried to hire was but things are absolutely brutal right now. The most common is personnel who think they can get away with an hour or two of work a day (whether they're working multiple jobs or just screwing around at home is hard to say). Second is bait-and-switch where the interviewee is not the person who shows up day 1.. after four (!) incidents in a quarter we had to mandate at least one in-person interview during the hiring process which seems to have helped.
To add something similar: I am now at the point where maybe a few times a day I can visualize a glimpse of a memory, but otherwise it is blank and I have no visual dreams.
But it does not hinder the ability to think about complex systems in any way. My day job involves making 2D technical drawings from multiple angles, 3D modelling, and of course to come up with the solutions before putting in the work of drawing/modelling stuff.
For what definition of "visualize?" I have partial aphantasia but am great at understanding the inner workings of complex systems/processes. I used to think of it as visualization until aphantasia discourse, and then I realized it's not really visual at all, though there seem to be dimensional/spatial elements.
If I'm in a quiet place I can walk through the project, and understand where different things fit into place - even for very very complex systems, I can almost simulate algorithms and see where things go wrong without looking at my code. I realized this ability is not normal, and many people even software engineers struggle immensely with fully understanding large complex systems
I was about to write something almost exactly this. However I can "hear something" if I try but definitely not picture something in the literal sense.
Edit: I also have trouble recognising the faces of people I've only met once or twice, and I'm assuming the two things are related. Do you have the same?
Yes, because the development of AGI doesn't automatically mean the end of capitalism. Feudalism, mercantilism, and the final form, capitalism, weren't overthrown by new technologies, and while AGI is certainly a very special new technology, so was the internet. It doesn't matter how special AGI is if it's controlled by one company under the mechanisms of a capitalist liberal democracy - it's not like the laws don't matter anymore, or the contracts, debts, allegiances.
What can AGI give us that would end scarcity, when our scarcity is artificial? New farming mechanisms that mean nobody go hungry? We already throw away most of our food. We don't lack food, our resource allocation mechanism (Capitalism) just requires some people to be hungry.
What about new medicines? Magic new pills that cure cancer - why would these be given away for free when they can be sold, instead?
Maybe AGI will recommend the perfect form of fair and equitable governance! Well, it almost certainly will be a recommendation that strips some power from people who don't want to give up any power at all, and it's not like they'll give it up without a fight. Not that they'll need to fight - billionaires exist today and have convinced people to fight for them, against people's own self interest, somehow (I still don't understand this).
So, I'll modify Mark Fisher's quote - it's easier to imagine the creation of AGI than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.
>our resource allocation mechanism (Capitalism) just requires some people to be hungry
One of the observable features of capitalism is that there are no hungry people. Capitalism has completely solved the problem of hunger. People are hungry when they don't have capitalism.
>billionaires exist today and have convinced people to fight for them
People usually fighting for themselves. It's just that billionaires often are not enemies of society, but source of social well-being. Or even more often - a side effect of social well-being. People fighting for billionaires to protect social well-being, not to protect billionaires.
>it's easier to imagine the creation of AGI than it is to imagine the end of capitalism
There is no need to even imagine the end of capitalism - we see it all the time, most of the world can hardly be called capitalist. And the less capitalism there is, the worse.
> One of the observable features of capitalism is that there are no hungry people. Capitalism has completely solved the problem of hunger. People are hungry when they don't have capitalism.
This is as fascinating to me as if someone walked up to me and said "Birds don't exist." It's a statement that's instantly, demonstrably provably wrong by simply turning and pointing at a bird, or in this case, by Googling "Child hunger in the usa," and seeing a shitload of links demonstrating that 12.8% of US households are food insecure.
Or, the secondary point, that hunger is only when no capitalism, demonstrably untrue, since the countries that ensure capitalism can continue to thrive by providing cheap labor, have visible extreme hunger, such as India. India isn't capitalist? America isn't capitalist? Madagascar isn't capitalist? Palestine?
> It's just that billionaires often are not enemies of society, but source of social well-being.
How can someone not be an enemy of society when they maintain artificial scarcity by hoarding such a massive portion of society's output, and then acting to hoard and concentrate our collective wealth even more into their own hands? Since when has "greed" not been a universally reviled trait?
> we see it all the time, most of the world can hardly be called capitalist. And the less capitalism there is, the worse.
I genuinely can't understand what you're seeing in the world to think the global economy is not capitalist in nature.
> seeing a shitload of links demonstrating that 12.8% of US households are food insecure.
This is definitely not a manipulation of statistics and not a trivialization of food insecurity that are relevant to many parts of the world. And then they wonder why people choose to support billionaires instead of you lying cannibals.
> such as India
> Madagascar isn't capitalist? Palestine?
No? This countries has nothing to do with an economy built on the principles of the inviolability of private property and economic freedom. USA has more socialism than this countries have capitalism.
> How can someone not be an enemy of society when they maintain artificial scarcity by hoarding such a massive portion of society's output
because it is not portion of society's output that matters, but size of that output. What's the point of even distribution if size of the share is not enough even to not to die from starvation?
> Since when has "greed" not been a universally reviled trait?
Question is not either greed reviled trait or not. Greed is a fact of human nature. The question is what this ineradicable human quality leads to in specific economic systems: to universal prosperity, as under capitalism, or to various abominations like mass starvation, as without it.
> This is definitely not a manipulation of statistics and not a trivialization of food insecurity that are relevant to many parts of the world. And then they wonder why people choose to support billionaires instead of you lying cannibals.
There is no manipulation of statistics here, anyone that's worked in a school could tell you this, including me, personally. There are hungry children in the USA. It should be telling to you and your view on life, and the ideas you consume, that you believe a vast conspiracy to manipulate statistics is more likely than capitalism causing hunger.
> And then they wonder why people choose to support billionaires instead of you lying cannibals.
I really don't understand this insult lol, but I think it's funny that you think billionaires have more support than not. It's fine, the cycle of history that ends with the many poor realizing they outnumber the few rich 100,000:1 definitely will never ever happen again, they should keep concentrating wealth into a few people, it's totally safe this time.
> This countries has nothing to do with an economy built on the principles of the inviolability of private property and economic freedom.
Wrong, they're capitalist.
> USA has more socialism than this countries have capitalism.
Nope, wrong.
> What's the point of even distribution if size of the share is not enough even to not to die from starvation?
I don't get it, are you admitting that people do go hungry in the USA then? Well, regardless, the majority of the food in the USA is thrown away, or subsidies are provided to farmers to not grow it. It's not an issue of scarcity, it's an issue of distribution. Capitalism has no mechanism to guarantee people don't go hungry - if people going hungry is profitable (or ensuring they're fed is not profitable), then, this will occur under capitalism.
> to universal prosperity, as under capitalism, or to various abominations like mass starvation, as without it.
Mass starvation happens today, under global capitalism. Mass starvation happened in the USA once because the stock market crashed (among some other reasons). Capitalism is no more immune to mass starvation than other economic systems. Capitalism also apparently leads to people unnecessarily dying from overwork (exploiting cheap labor in other countries), lack of healthcare (America's for-profit healthcare system), etc.
Your blinders on the true nature of capitalism will only turn people away from it into my friends' welcoming arms. If you're truly interested in maintaining capitalism, you need to get better at defending it, the way neoliberals are. Get better at admitting the faults of capitalism in a way that lets you sustain them, or people are going to abandon it altogether. This dogmatic denial of the flaws of capitalism are funny to watch, but do you no good.
> The Cartels have substantially more power than the state.
This is a common misconception. The state can absolutely dominate any cartel in Mexico, they just choose not to for political reasons.
> relearning their ancient languages that were nearly destroyed by their colonizers
Nahuatl is actually a colonizer language. The Aztecs brutally subjugated other native peoples, so brutally in fact that those groups were extremely eager to ally with the Spanish to overthrow the Aztec empire.
Mexicans could start with liberalizing their gun laws since all the bad guys already have them. Zapatistas and other local resistance groups aren't afraid to fight them when they have weapons, and some of the communities that actually have gotten their hands on guns have managed to make it more trouble than it's worth for the cartels.
Well, the cartels have more power as you get away from the Valley of Mexico. Much of the power distribution in Mexico is related to geography afaik. When terrain is difficult to cross, enforcing a monopoly on power is difficult. For another example of this problem, see Afghanistan.
What kind of power are you speaking of? "Cultural power" or something? Does it mean much in practice in this context? I fail to see what its reclaim would achieve against fighting cartels.
Human beings are highly irrational. Increases in cultural power often gives them a sense of greater empowerment that causes them to take increases in political power. That's why dictatorships seek to suppress and control cultural practices that could lead to empowerment such as martial arts, religion, meditation, language, art, gender nonconformance, etc.
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