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Comment by robg | Hacker News Reader

The homestead of the future is one where multiple generations live together while working remotely. Knowledge work had been reducible to bits for 20 years, now they can be transmitted anywhere in milliseconds, just in time for a family lunch or dinner or movie.

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It sounds nice, but there are extremely large segments that keep society functioning that don't involve knowledge work and can't be done remotely. It's easy to forget how much it takes behind the scences to keep the machine humming smoothly.

> It's easy to forget how much it takes behind the scences to keep the machine humming smoothly.

Until your toilet gets clogged.

Somewhat similar to climate crisis. If we shut off AC's globally for two days, we'd figure out the solution.

Can you clarify?

Here in France, a wealthy industrialized nation, most houses and buildings (even those of rich people) don't have AC. In my experience, this is typical of most of Europe.

Then again, we have figured out the solution to the climate crisis, it's nuclear power

Indeed. It is a considerable oddity how very material the lives of us wealthy knowledge workers are, yet how immaterial our labor.

It will work for a lot of people, and further the divide we have going on now :D.

You don't need every person in the household to work remotely, just enough to be able to collectively handle the housework. You're more likely to cross that threshold with six adults than with two.

Transmitted anywhere in milliseconds also means transmitted to a lower cost country, so be careful with this flexibility.

Outside of the bean counters, I’ve never heard anything good about the outcomes of any outsourcing project.

> I’ve never heard anything good about the outcomes of any outsourcing project

Cloud computing.

Isn’t it made by teams of EU and US engineers at amazon for the most part? These jobs stayed in the EU/US and didn’t go to sweatshops in LCOL countries.

Sounds like hell to me, I left home at 16.

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