The cheaper/lower quality the air filter, the less particulates it filters from the air. What dust the filter doesn’t catch cycles through the system and can get caught by the AC coil. Filter effectiveness is measured by its MERV rating. The higher the rating, the more particulates it will catch. I use a MERV 13 filter but that’s because I’m alergic to the entire planet and it helps reduce airborne allergens. If you go much higher than that your furnace/air handler may struggle to blow air.
One of the benefits of an emergency fund is instant availability. I can access those funds almost immediately if needed. If my house burns down or gets wiped out by a tornado, I would rather not have to deal with liquidating investments and waiting for the funds to clear. At that point there will be more pressing issues to deal with.
Earning a return on my emergency fund is secondary to availability in terms of importance, to me at least. There are plenty of good options out there for high interest savings accounts.
They are. And it would be funny if it weren’t such utter bullshit. As if the sizeable chunk of the population that lives paycheck to paycheck could actually afford to hold on to a couple thousand dollars in stimulus funds. When shit is waaayyyy more expensive than it was 3 years ago and wages haven’t really climbed that much.
If I made 2.5x my current salary, which would be almost 400,000 a year, I would seriously consider returning to the office. Then I would retire in something like 10 years which is way earlier than I’m currently looking at. For that, RTO would actually be worth it.
My main point was that often the idea that things were working just fine when everyone was “in office” is an illusion and nothing more. Companies that are finding that remote work “isn’t working” don’t know what “working” is or looks like. If they’re blindly calling employees back to the office, then they’ve successfully solved nothing. Other than maybe adding value back to someone’s commercial real estate portfolio. They’ve just convinced themselves and everyone else further up the ladder that everything is fine while squandering vast amounts of talent and institutional knowledge so someone on the top floor doesn’t have to ask or answer the question of why their performance metrics are so bad. Don’t have to worry about performance metrics when butts in seats is the only metric.
There are organizations out there where the HR department is responsible for curating a high quality workforce and establishing a foundation of culture, including practices, that reflect the organizations principals and values as well as path to integrating that culture with the workforce. These organizations often have good leadership that understands how to successfully leverage a large distributed workforce to achieve measurable goals. The focus is on performance and there is a high degree of trust between different levels in the organization.
Then there companies where the workforce is treated like cattle and HR’s role is to just shuffle the paperwork. They don’t value their employees and have a highly rule and/or power driven culture.There is a general distrust between the levels of the org. These types of organizations tend to spend vast amounts of resources simply maintaining the bureaucracy instead of actually getting things done. Management perceives this as “productivity” but here again, it’s just a big ship going in circles in the middle of the ocean.
There are also a lot of organizations that hover somewhere in between those two examples.
But again, the problem isn’t remote work. Remote work works just fine. The problem is poor management, a lack of accountability, culture that fosters distrust and fails to set quantifiable performance goal. An organization like that is certainly prone to accept the bullshit excuse of “RemOtE wOrK iSnT wOrKiNg” rather than trying to find the real source of the problems. Especially since poor leadership is probably problem number one.
Coordination, mentoring, and culture are intentional. The problem is that in an “in person” work place, deficiencies in those areas are very easy to sweep under the rug.
What I will call “churn”, rather the flurry of activity generated by masses of employees coming, going, and doing is frequently mistaken for productivity when instead it’s professional level time wasting. The “ship” is making a lot of bubbles and waves but in reality it’s just doing very wide donuts in the middle of the ocean and not generating any real forward momentum. Hence, “churn.”
I’ve worked for fully remote orgs with excellent culture, fully in person orgs with horrible culture and vice-versa. In my experience, remote work has benefits for employees and the company. It’s saves both money and can (not necessarily does) improve the quality of life of the employees. Not all jobs can be remote. That’s understandable. White collar office jobs don’t usually fall into the “can’t be remote” category.
While remote work can impact the org culture, it usually is more of magnifying glass in that all the existing deficiencies in the orgs culture bubble to the surface and get put in display for everyone to see. CEO’s and other senior execs who are embarrassed by this, incompetent, or just don’t care immediately blame the magnifying glass instead of the root problem. Identifying and dealing with the root problem would require time and effort that they aren’t willing to invest. They’d rather sweep it back under the rug again and continue ignoring it.
And, as is now common, especially in corporate America, the attention span is so short and general state of corporate governance so poor that the only thing that matters is the stock price right at this very moment. No one cares if they’re company is even going to be here in 20 years.
So if you work for a company who’s CEO is whining about the need for “culture” and “water cooler moments” as a means to being people back into the office, rest assured that when that happens, the company will have the same shitty culture it always has, except maybe a little worse (since lots of layoff or constructive dismissals tend to damage the culture and erode trust). Nothing will change except the guys at the top will get back to pretending everything is fine, even if it’s really not.
They should have learned that with the near collapse of the American auto industry during the '07-08 financial crisis. Automated manufacturing has been part of the auto industry for nearly 40 years and it’s just going to continue to whittle away at jobs on the assembly line.
“We told our workers they could stay home forever [by quitting] if they wanted but all [the ones we didn’t just constructively dismiss] of them all but demanded that we let them return to the office.” –Some CEO, Probably
We all know people like this. The ones who are all talk and no action and will throw anyone under the bus in a heartbeat if they think it will help them climb the corporate ladder. On the other hand though, the general state of corporate governance is so poor and leadership skills so often lacking that you almost have to pat yourself on the back a little if you want to get anywhere.
Of all the bosses I’ve had, I can think of exactly two who were actually good at their jobs because they actually knew what they were doing and valued their employees. And neither of those people got the recognition they deserved.
My little window into the life of corporate America has witnessed an overwhelming amount of mediocrity and glaring failures simply because the guy who talks big often gets the promotion when in reality they don’t know shit about fuck and the cycle of incompetence is self-perpetuating.
This has been my anecdotal experience as well. Most of the time when I ask my Republican friends their opinions on specific policies I find that their views are very populist leaning toward socialist. They just happen to also be motivated by fear and easily swayed by propaganda and will readily vote against their own interests in exchange for a false sense of security.
They are then confused and frustrated when the scumbags they voted for do exactly what they said they would do and it turns out badly.
I’m sorry, but when was it exactly that the meat packing industry offered a “middle class way of life”? Was it in the early 20th century when they exploited thousands of European immigrants in the Chicago slaughterhouses? Or in the present day when they exploit immigrants from central and south America?
My dog can hear asteroid collisions on the other side of the galaxy. At least I’m assuming that’s what he’s barking at when there’s literally nothing going on around him.