samr71

Unionizing Tesla would almost certainly not "accelerate the advent of sustainable transport". More likely cause it to wither and stagnate for the gain of a privileged few as we saw with GM et al.

Even at megacorps, most work for most people is done with their immediate team. Most do work together in meatspace most of the time.

And the students I know all say the teachers are phoning it in...

Anecdotes aren't useful here. I suspect once the data starts coming out, we'll see some serious educational deficits in most kids.

In the United States, maybe, but this is not true everywhere. In Japan, for instance, houses are treated more as depreciating assets like cars.

You can buy a brand new 4 Bedroom house in a nice part of Tokyo for ~$300,000, but don't expect to make money on the deal.

This is a fantastic point I don't think I've ever seen brought up before. I'll need to think on this.

I'm sure most of the people working in Tech in the Bay Area could go get a job at some firm in Cincinnati, with substantially lower COL. Of course, they would have a substantially lower salary as well, probably low enough to make the Bay Area the better option economically, even including the high COL.

Of course, that doesn't mean we can't lower the COL of the Bay Area! Make Silicon Valley as dense as Tokyo, and I assure you rents will fall.

All of the things you listed are solvable problems, with hundreds of thousands of people working tirelessly to solve them. Fear porn about the impending collapse of everything helps no one, and is the reason why that the 9 year old is having an existential crisis about polar bears at all.

Should we worry about these things? Absolutely! But the incessant hysteria is counter productive. Us ceasing having children in a form of civilizational suicide is not a solution.

Such doom and gloom! You really believe the future is gonna be so bad that children would be better off not existing at all?

The world has huge issues, sure, but it's still far better to be alive now than any time in human history. The only way the future could be worse is if this idea becomes mainstream and the prophecy self-fulfilling.

I'd think that's the point behind most push from big business for a higher min wage. For them, it's another form of regulatory capture. Amazon or McDonalds can afford $15 nationally, but small mom-and-pop firms?

I feel that's a bit of a strawman.

It's generally closer to: "Every time it's been tried it's been either bad or disastrous, clearly we have no reason to learn from it or try again"

Which I think is fair! Hell, even the original strawman is a fair argument IMO. Fascism didn't work once, and I don't think there's much there to learn from (and we certainly shouldn't try it again).

I can't help but feel that this is going backwards. Cities are effective engines for value generation. Being in a city is valuable due to network effects, density, and overall efficiency that suburbs lack. Increased urbanization has gone hand-in-hand with increased prosperity for centuries. People don't pay $4.5k for a one bedroom in SOMA (just) to be close to the office.

It's too early too say if the historic value of cities will be replaced by the internet, IMO. YC makes each batch move to SV for a reason.

> Unless we expand beyond this planet, I suppose

The asteroid belt has the resources for millions of O'Neil cylinders and Stanford Toruses -- we'll be fine.

These all potentially could or could not happen, but I think they're possible given multi-year mass WFT. I'm not guaranteeing these, but I've seen them discussed.

For the company: - Lower productivity (burnout, people not adequately connected, people not on same page, more difficult to manager remote workers, more distractions) - Less innovation - Less / No company culture - Less employee satisfaction; harder to recruit at all WFT firms - Difficulty onboarding new employees

For employees: - Competing with talent globally, lower wages - Fewer perks - Less community, more atomization

If a tech company is sourcing engineers in an office work environment, they need to pay salaries competitive for the location of said office. (You can find great engineers in Jakarta, but you have to relocate them to SV and pay SV rates)

If everything is remote work, you hire the same worker, and pay them Jakarta rates (you can sub Jakarta for any very-low COL city).

Not sure how that refutes the size argument. The variation between California and New Hampshire is much smaller than the variation between California and India. It's not really apples to apples in the latter case.

Until they're replaced with a team in Jakarta or Dhaka making 10% of what they made.

What does a large GDP prove? It is the largest state after all. A smaller state, that doesn't happen to contain some of the country's best real estate and most productive industries (say, New Hampshire) could be better run, but of course with a smaller GDP to show for it.

California's large GDP could then be in spite of its management, not a product of it.

This will almost certainly be bad for most everyone but company shareholders, unfortunately.

We've only been doing mass WFH for a year. Many companies have been saying things very similar to Coinbase, but I'm not sure if long-term mass WFH will prove to that great (for the company, I'd argue it certainly won't be great for the average worker).

Assuming this is not sarcasm, this can be taken to any logical extreme of "tolerable". I'm sure there are many other new restrictions we can put in place that would make people's lives (more) miserable, that are nevertheless "tolerable".

Furthermore, can the world really handle the restrictions in place indefinitely? We've been locked down for a year, and it's certainly starting to feel like the wheels are coming off for many. The economic devastation alone has been staggering.

Epidemiologically speaking, sure, doing this forever would save the most amount of people from COVID. But we can't just look at this from that point of view.