Work from home is very very much here to stay. Employers have ZERO leverage over this. What are they gonna do, hire illegal mexicans to do their engineering, analysis, coding, management, research..lol
Article is spot on....work from home needs to be banned..
- Thread starter S2007S
- Start date
What's the alternative? I think you either have cities or country; suburbs are the worst of both. Convenience of city life is pretty good.
Downtowns were fucked way before this work-from-home from Covid. In fact, downtowns have always been fucked ever since they started the concept of suburban living and building highways to connect the suburbs to downtowns. Has nothing to do with Covid. If you look at any city in United States, downtowns are essentially unlivable and there was never any life let alone vibrancy in downtown. Gentrification only went so far to change that but mostly downtowns are just offices surrounded by crime areas. Right now with the work-from-home arrangement, even the offices are getting abandoned so that just exacerbated the problem with downtown that it is now cutting into the bottom line of the city coffers. So at the end, just like everything else, this is not a moral issue; this is an economic issue. Those big corporations with office buildings are losing rent money and can't even sell the buildings with profit and they need bodies to be put back there for them to at least earn rent.
We're talking about the difference between a ball slowly rolling down a hill vs. a dude jumping off a cliff in a squirrel suit.
Many successful start ups are heavily remote. It's mostly backwards or jealous people saying remote work has to be rolled back. S2007S is often a moron so I'm not surprised he wants it banned a ridiculous impractical concept. I could get into the career path a family member took but it suffices to say almost a decade of 100% remote work has paid off enormously.
Speaking for Oakland, CA where I grew up, downtown had always been poor, deserted and dangerous for those overlooking from the hills. When former governor Jerry Brown became mayor in the late 90s he set about to increase population density to attract small businesses. It took well over 10 years to realize his plan but it worked. Many parts of downtown became gentrified (I always use this term positively) and vibrant with lots of shops and restaurants while cops ensured East and West Oakland poverty didn't disturb the efforts. When I left in 2019 Oakland had become the cool city to live in.
Covid and stay at home snapped that drive right out of existence. Gangs reclaimed their loot zones, thugs roamed the streets for any opportunity crimes and many young tech workers moved out as soon as they began to feel unsafe.
Today, Oakland is back to its pre 2k era.
Covid and stay at home snapped that drive right out of existence. Gangs reclaimed their loot zones, thugs roamed the streets for any opportunity crimes and many young tech workers moved out as soon as they began to feel unsafe.
Today, Oakland is back to its pre 2k era.
Hospital group where the wife works let the HR department stay work from home withe the show up up every so often edict. All that has meant for the leaders below the execs is they now have to do more interview screening, all the onboarding, and go through paperwork for new hires that used to be HR's job when they were on site. In other words the management below the C level are stuck doing HR work and adding hours to their day to get their work done and HR work done, while the HR people put in 8 hour days on the whole, assuming they aren't just using the mouse shaker for a part of their day.
So, work from home maybe acceptable at some levels, but is a real pile of b.s. at other levels.
So, work from home maybe acceptable at some levels, but is a real pile of b.s. at other levels.
That's pretty accurate but I would say Oakland already improved a lot by the early 2000s. I worked at a startup in downtown Oakland (The Franklin Building, Franklin & 17th) from 1998-2008. It was pretty good around that neighborhood. It was pretty safe, even East Oakland was okay.
I think the defund the police movement really destroyed whatever gains Oakland made. They can't even hire cops anymore, the same as SF. Parking near Lake Merritt just leads to bipping aka stolen car or smashed windows and stolen property (BiP == Burglary in Progress).
They also have a leadership problem. The voters keep voting in leftists as Mayor and they do nothing to fix the problem. The current mayor is under suspicion for taking bribes. Thao has been AWOL for like a month or 2 since the Feds raided her apartment. There's basically no mayor of Oakland currently.
In Miami the downtown today is a huge magnitude of a difference then lets say 15 year ago. 15 years ago it was office buildings during the day and bums/homeless at night, mostly a ghost town. Now its pricey condos/apts, restaurants, bars and even more homeless.