We have a country where the wealth class and political class work hand-in-hand to degrade social systems, impede community-organizing and mutual aid, destroy education, embrace fascism over democracy, and remove opportunities for advancement from everyone but their own children…
…and people wonder why we have a society that is so sick that children are lashing out with self-destructive violence?
And of course that violence and social degradation is then used as justification to further erode rights and autonomy.
Texas is like a cat, convinced of its independence while being completely dependent. Anything we got gone is due to being part of the Union. We’d be Cuba 2.0 on our own at best.
Abbott, Patrick, and Paxton are all about provoking a confrontation that they can milk for rage-bait headlines. But I’m wondering if this doesn’t somehow tie into Patrick’s that too front Biden from the ballot. Like maybe they’ll say a confrontation would be insurrection against the state or something stupid like that.
What it makes me think about is how much of the police in Uvalde was theater. They supposedly had training and even a SWAT team. There is a real difference between on paper and in reality.
The trick is to use a DNS-based blocker + uMatrix instead of cosmetic filtering. I block all js by default, use adguard dns and firefox’s reading mode.
Opinion: The absurdity of the return-to-office movement 5 - 7 minutes Pedestrians walk towards Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York, US, on Thursday, July 6, 2023.
Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room” also on Apple and Spotify and was the founding editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.
CNN —
I host a podcast, “In the Room with Peter Bergen,” which focuses on national security issues. Every day, I see the merits of being part of an entirely remote workforce. Peter Bergen
We have a production team, around half of whom live in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and the others live in places like Chicago, Mexico City and San Francisco. We have met in person only twice in the year that the production has been up and running, and we have put out dozens of highly produced episodes, often featuring multiple guests, which go through many rounds of edits.
In my four decades of working in media, I have never worked somewhere with a better esprit de corps, creative energy and a collective willingness to help everyone else out.
And yet, some corporate titans are still pushing for their employees to return to their offices. Banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase and tech giants like Meta are demanding that their staff be back at the office several days a week.
Those return-to-office demands are often couched in non-falsifiable claims about the necessity of having chance encounters at the office where folks bounce creative, productive ideas off of each other.
Typical of this view is JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who claimed in 2021 that working from home “doesn’t work for spontaneous idea generation.” There is no empirical evidence for this claim, and the desire for employers to see their employees working in their offices seems to be more about the need for control and an attachment to the old ways of doing things.
The return-to-office demands also make little sense from an overall economic perspective at a time when a third of Americans who can do their job remotely now only work from home, up from only 7% before Covid, according to the Pew Research Center, yet the economy is very strong in terms of low unemployment and GDP growth. If working from home suppressed innovation, productivity and creativity, you would expect quite different economic results.
Further, working from home saves Americans an average daily commute of 72 minutes a day, to say nothing about the reduced pollution and energy consumption that comes from fewer commuters, according to a 2023 University of Chicago study.
Working parents, in particular, benefit from not having to waste time, money and flexibility commuting to an office. A 2023 Bankrate survey found that 74% of working women with children are in favor of remote work, while 64% of all working Americans support it.
I have some insight into this as a parent who now works mostly from home. This arrangement gives me a lot more time to spend with my kids, and if there is any kind of unforeseen emergency, I can be there for them in a way that, during the era of the office, I couldn’t be.
The internet and cell phones obviate so much of what was once done at the office, which is, after all, largely an artifact of the 20th century thanks to the rise of mass transportation, the ability to build tall office buildings and the previous immovability of the “work” telephone, which was stuck to a desk. All this, thankfully, is going the way of the dodo.
During the office era, so many workers spent so much time at their desks that workplaces often tried to present themselves as some kind of alternative family. You had your “work husbands” and mandatory “team building” events. Of course, this all came at the expense of your loved ones at home, as you had to spend time away from them while doing all your office-based events and tasks.
I am writing this column in Washington, DC, but work with editors in New York, London or Atlanta. In fact, I have written several hundred of these columns over the past dozen years and I have never met most of the editors I work with, and yet I still have a warm, productive relationship with them.
To be sure, a Starbucks cappuccino is not going to make itself, and certain kinds of work environments — such as hospitals, restaurants, film sets or government offices where classified material is handled in a secure environment — require employees to be in person.
But for much of the economy where work doesn’t need to be in person, the demand to “return to office” is not rooted in any concern for employees, a large majority of whom want to work from home — not because they are lazy or don’t want to be productive, but because it gives them more freedom and control over their own lives.
So why do some bosses still feel it necessary to prolong the slow and necessary death of The Office? Beats me.
getting into power in corporate env usually takes fairly strong narcissistic traits so no wonder such control freaks will try to abuse their power to micromanage the “human resources”
I live in a city with a severe smog problem. Throughout 2020 and 2021 things got better. Then of course there was energy crisis, but traffic actually got so terrible that so did the air, with pollution levels not seen in 5-6 years. It’s literally a silent assault.
Companies that say they care about the environment but insist on unnecessarily forcing employees drive to an office everyday are infuriating. Everything is awful.
Jesus Christ why aren’t they just throwing in residuals from the start of the negotiations at this point?
It’s a lot easier to come to a compromise number if you don’t start with no. Market hagglers don’t open negotiations by saying they’re just gonna take whatever they wanted and the vendor can eat shit.
But for much of the economy where work doesn’t need to be in person, the demand to “return to office” is not rooted in any concern for employees, a large majority of whom want to work from home — not because they are lazy or don’t want to be productive, but because it gives them more freedom and control over their own lives.
So why do some bosses still feel it necessary to prolong the slow and necessary death of The Office? Beats me.
Well, that’s the answer. Some bosses don’t want their employees to have any freedom or control over their lives.
The Boss wants control over every aspect of their employee’s lives: from how early they need to get up, to how long they must sit in a car for on their commute, to when they eat/shit/smoke/stretch, to how long they stare at their computer monitor, to how many useless meetings they can squeeze into each day.
This is only about control, not empty office buildings or productivity or creativity. 100% control over everyone beneath them.
If somebody could politely explain to me, why is the economy doing well but my paycheck provides less and less each month? I feel like these numbers are divorced from my everyday experiences. Does the inflation of goods not factor in?
The economy booming means that shareholders make big returns. It doesn’t have any connection to workers. Worker benefits are rarely connected to how well economies or companies are doing. It doesn’t really relate to inflation. It’s just a measure of how well businesses are doing. They are doing well thanks to taking more out of your monthly.
This is exactly along the lines of what I thought. It’s just so strange to me to have people cheer a good economy when it can mean so little for your average peon.
Jobs that dont pay enough to afford a house, rent, healthcare or basic living standards. Also its probably a lot of people who got hired for a second or third job
Bingo. The company I work for just announced their 2023 results: successful but not as wildly successful as they’d hoped. Accordingly, stockholders get larger dividends than ever before while employees get layoffs, rolling furloughs, and pay cuts.
This so called “economy” loosely translates to like, 12 or 15 companies siphoning away the financial benefits produced by the working class, hence the discrepancy between it doing well and the low wages people have to survive with.
Usually in reports like this there are mentions of job growth (ie new recorded hiring) unemployment going down and average income levels rising.
Ok so yes, jobs are created, wonderful.
But lots of things arent recorded as job losses.
Generally speaking, if you dont file for unemployment, or dont qualify, but still lost a job, you dont show up without doing far, far more exhaustive research than these headline numbers illustrate.
And any prole has either had this happen to themselves or someone they know by this point, at least amongst people I know.
Or, if you are out of the workforce due to an injury, illness and/or esrly retirement, that usually doesnt show up as a job loss, but does show up as ‘not in the workforce’.
And, if youre not in the workforce, you are not considered unemployed, as you are not in the pool if possibly employable workers.
So, wonderful, that not in work force number is still high compared to historical norms, as a proportion of the whole population. Its going up.
Income. This one is easy.
Thats usually always a headline of average income.
Cool. Averages dont mean dick in an economy where the vast number of people earn little, and only a few earn a lot. So what did we learn in basic statstics hopefully?
5 5 5 5 5 has an average of 5
1 1 1 2 20 /also/ has an average of 5.
Further compounding things, Americans are now drowning in personal debt, so much so that even quite a lot of people who /appear/ to be well off actually have as much net worth as many who appear not well off.
The maths and data on that is /way/ more complicated, but the rough breakdown is:
1/4 of Americans have significantly negative net worth, ie -5000 or worse.
1/4 of Americans have roughly 0 net worth.
1/4 of Americans have roughly positive net worth, ie up to 10k.
Then the higher you go from there its an exponential scale of less and less people having more and more money.
Ending up with something like the richest 1% of Americans have more net worth / wealth than the bottom 60%.
The confusing part is that for incomes below basically about a quarter mil a year, there is again actually significsntly wide variance in the relationship of yearly income to net worth.
Many people of modest means are actually in financially better positions than many people who would basically be their boss, or bosses boss…
But can you imagine that the richer ones either hide this and lie about it, or act like its fine and not a problem for them, but it /is/ a problem for those of lower income, and /they/ are irresponsible and need personal austerity finances, while they (the higher incomed folks) dont?
So anyway, there ya go, theres /some/ explanation of whats going on from someone with a bachelors in econ, specialty in econometrics and environmental econ, and another bachelors in poli sci.
For me to actually lay all this out with proper cited studies and data sets would basically be a phd thesis, im tired, go away.
Basically the title of this thesis would be ‘How the American Economy Enforced And Solidified An Economic Caste System Structure Following the 08 Financial Crisis’ and would focus heavily on how income mobility has been extremely reduced for large segments of society in the past 15 years.
Hilariously I cant afford to pay for a PHD, so whats the fucking point rofl.
EDIT;
2 other major factors: Rent and Healthcare.
Both of those are absolute shit shows right now, and vaaaaastly take more proportional income from a poorer person than a richer one.
Remember when most people owned homes by their 30s?
Haha, yeah, good one, me neither.
EDIT 2: Alternative spicy title for the PHD Thesis would be:
“An aggregate, ends justify the means, moral argument for the justness and validity of,
at best,
letting all the baby boomers die scared and alone in old folks homes with poorly trained and paid staff who will abuse them until they die painful, terrifying, lonely deaths,
or, at worst,
why we should actually just start killing /enough/ of them that it scares the rest of them into selling their barely-not-foreclosed-on second homes they are renting out based not on actual market rates but on the prices dictated by their mortgage payments… why we should kill enough of them that they sell these properties for about 1/4 of what they think they are worth.”
Marx explained this very phenomenon in Das Kapital. Creating jobs is a meaningless metric when employers aren’t required to pay people a living wage. Minimum wage in US is nowhere close to being livable at this point, and what happens is that people are simply having to get multiple full time jobs to pay their bills. In fact, 37% of the population is now working two full time jobs now.
Low unemployment and rising wages means it’s a good time to find a new job that pays more. The absolute best time to get more money is to get a new job. Staying in the same job for a long time almost always means your wages will stagnate, most companies don’t reward loyalty, they abuse it
For the average Joe, economy doing well means the job market is healthy, robust in the aggregate. All this does is give you the leverage to renegotiate salary/benefits or change jobs.
Regardless how much money your boss makes, even if he makes tenfold from last year, he's not going to voluntarily increase your pay beyond annual adjustments.
At the end, you need to take the initiative to change your income.
[This job market keeps rewriting the history books.
The latest superlative: The unemployment rate has now stayed safely below 4% for two full years. The last time the unemployment rate was this low for this long, Richard Nixon was in the White House.]
Because the advent of computers allows for all kinds of creative new ways to massage numbers to “prove” something to people, even when it flies in the face of what is obviously happening in the real world.
That’s exactly why. All that money you aren’t making is what’s fueling the economy for investors and stockholders. Can’t do millions of dollars of stock buybacks with your own money.
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