I work remotely at the moment since March 2020 and I’m over it, can’t stand it anymore. I’m single with no kids and work a LOT. I’ll frequently wake up, work twelve hours, go to bed, never leave the house. I’m looking for jobs in my field so I can at least get out of the house, go to an office and socialize a bit with colleagues and other office tenants, get lunch at outdoor cafes etc.
I also miss learning through osmosis from overhearing colleagues discussing technical concepts I’m unfamiliar with, and teaching others similarly about things I know that they don’t.
My experience working with other people all fully remotely is that it’s very difficult to coordinate as a group, and individually many people are terrible communicators. This is magnified by remote work. (Pet peeve: answer the phone and turn on your fucking camera, I want to know who I’m working 80 hours a week with ffs.)
All that said I totally agree that a lot of work can and should be done at home. A hybrid approach is difficult though unless everyone is at the office and WFH at the same time. Otherwise what’s the point of me being at the office while you are at home and vice versa. It’s very tricky and I’m not sure how to resolve.
It’s a good strategy and works indoors too. For example, I know a bunch of financial auditors who basically go into businesses and annoy the shit out of them for a few weeks making sure there’s no fraud going on. They say it’s extremely common for them to get stuck in uncomfortable spare offices, it’ll be small and cramped, too hot or too cold, they work late into nights and weekends and the client will intentionally make sure ac isn’t on late, things like that. Also works at home for getting rid of company that overstayed their welcome.
I didn’t really care about it at first. My thought was, hollywood’s writing has been such complete utter dogshit lately, I literally can’t remember the last time I walked out of a movie blown away by something new. (Dune was exceptional, Maverick was good, but those are books and sequels so not OC. Can’t think of much else…)
Then I learned about fan baiting and how hollywood is actually purposefully trashing beloved franchises just to piss off fans, save money on writing, and essentially prep us for their transition to full AI writing and soon acting. For the last decade I’ve been mistaking their dogshit for out of touch but well intentioned corporate bufoonery. Now I realize it’s just part of their large scale evil plan to stay profitable in a world where hollywood and big budget productions are becoming obsolete and irrelevant.
So I’m on the writers side, but good luck to them, I don’t think they’re going to win this one.
Did you read the article? The economist interviewed specifically said it isn’t because of price gouging, but because they anticipated future costs will be higher than they actually were.
Normally, Andrew says, profits contribute less than a third to inflation. He found that in 2021, corporate profits could account for about double that, nearly 60% of inflation, meaning it was not costs driving inflation. It was corporate profits. Now, some economists hear this and think this is proof that companies were just using inflation as an excuse to gouge customers. Andrew does not think this. He thinks companies likely raised prices not because their costs went up in 2021 - because they did not, really - but because they were anticipating that their costs would go up a lot in 2022. And by the way, costs did end up going up in 2022, although companies still made record profits.