My ‘pay me’ philosophy also extends FWIW to working from home arrangements.
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@liamvhogan i do think this was an under considered downside of WFH. Instead of work's electricity, aircon, internet access, it's now all your expense. Also the need to install work crapware on your PC
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Here’s the thing about WFH: white collar workers tend to be extremely attuned to questions of hierarchy and status at the expense of their own actual material benefits, and the privilege of WFH is absolutely the former
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@liamvhogan I reckon the four hours saved per day are more than worth the electricity.
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‘They only want us to come back to the office because of the value of commercial real estate’!
That’s true, sure, but your boss is effectively renting a room in your house, how much are you getting paid for it
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Oh, the internet makes the usual well-established principles of economic agglomeration and urban centralising invalid, because the internet has special powers to invalidate space and time, or something? The 1990s are calling and they want their techno-optimism back
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‘I can be equally or more productive at home’!
Productivity questions are a manager’s problem, why are you trying to be more productive for no more pay
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VirtualWolfreplied to Liam :fnord: last edited by [email protected]
@liamvhogan I'm confused about this entire premise to be honest... I love working from home because it means I'm not commuting over an hour each way and not getting paid for it, and I already had a nice setup for my personal use well prior to WFH being a thing.
Work gives us an amount of money each year that we can spend on upgrading the home office, so I _did_ buy a better webcam and proper lighting, but that is indeed work paying for it. (Entirely unrelated to productivity... I'm not doing this for work's benefit, I'm doing it for mine.)
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@liamvhogan Because they don't pay me to commute and I'd rather spend those 2 hours a day not wedged into an overcrowded train getting groped by skeevy dudes with BO so I can sit on an uncomfortable chair in an open plan office full of extroverts who don't have an inside voice?
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@daedalus ahh, but this is the false accounting: just because commutes aren’t paid doesn’t mean the lack of a commute is more compensation from the firm. You’re still the one paying for workspace.
It’s like the joke about the kid who walks instead of catching the bus, and says Mum, Dad, I saved four dollars, and is told you idiot, you could have not caught a taxi and saved fifty
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‘People should be able to work wherever they want and be supported to locate themselves flexibly’
…is the cry of the inner-urban resident who doesn’t want more development near them, and wants to make ‘more suburban growth’ the solution to office productivity questions
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@virtualwolf @liamvhogan This - two hours less commuting per day is two more hours I get to spend with my kids.
Easy decision.
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@liamvhogan Right, because those outer suburban residents who are priced out of living closer aren't going to be happier skipping the commute as well?
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@StryderNotavi @virtualwolf but this is accounting that comes from your time, not the firm’s. They don’t care where you live. The firm doesn’t compensate you for the travel you don’t do, you’re still effectively turning home space into workspace.
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@liamvhogan It's tax deductible, so in a way, you're paying for it.
But yeah, I'll be the idiot who is already at his destination and is not sticking it to the man 10 hours a week by… commuting against the machine, or whatever it is you're advocating for here.
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@liamvhogan @virtualwolf I'm not sure why you'd think that getting time back is somehow less valuable because that time is unpaid.
I can not get paid to spend 2+hours commuting or I can not get paid to spend time with my kids.
And I already had a home office because I'm the kind of nerd who likes to tinker with things.
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@daedalus at a macro scale, encouraging WFH arrangements shifts production out of centres and across the whole of sprawled cities (and regional centres). It works against the kind of smaller city agglomeration, and densification, which would make for less commuting for everybody.
It’s been a noticed effect in small regional towns. Lots of white collar workers tree-changed in 2020-2021, but those towns just aren’t big enough to support the kind of economic life that white collar high-income workers expect. So they’re moving back to cities, because life near economic centres is good and desirable
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@liamvhogan My boss gets a timeshare of a corner of the desk I also use for personal use, and some bench space to put my work laptop/notebooks when I’m not at work. I think that getting to get up 45 minutes later is adequate rent for that.
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@acb see what you’re describing is something you created, that your work is monetising, and the trade off you feel justifies it is something your boss never would have paid for. It’s a false economics.
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@liamvhogan @daedalus wait so your argument in favor of "back to office" is, if we don't force everyone to work downtown we won't have cute downtown businesses that people like, and hip people will move away and into other downtowns that still have cute businesses?
I'll admit I'm mostly confused about why a primary source of fossil fuels is worth keeping, and the reason being "but what about brunch spots"
The Doomsday Glacier is collapsing, we should all be staying home for humanity's survival
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@wilbr @daedalus disaggregating economic production from centres means *greater* dependence on cars.
It makes sprawled suburbs viable (for work, at least) in a way that they’re not when commuting inconvenience is in play; it changes the rent-curve for outer suburban and peri-urban areas. To be clear, I think this is a bad thing.