It has nothing to do with real estate. This is often echoed on social media but is baseless.

Companies typically chase quarterly growth over all else. Working from home benefits that while trying to fix real estate values is a long term thing, only offering a payout if they sell the building, which most companies aren’t worried about. Companies tend to be very hesitant to hurt quarterly growth in favor of long term, iffy investments.

Even if they did care about real estate value, they’d rather all other companies return to office, boosting those values, while they could then remain remote and take advantage of both the higher real estate values and also the numerous advantages of remote work.

Boosting real estate values in this way is a collective action problem where most companies would need to work together for the greater good (as they see it). But if you hold this world view, that CEOs will screw over their employees for their bottom line, why wouldn’t they also screw over other companies? They would. They would want other companies to work together to fix the real estate values while also benefitting from remote work. So it would all fall apart.

Here are more likely scenarios:

• SHAREHOLDERS. Shareholders don’t like unused assets. “Use it or lose it”. So, CEOs force return to office because they think it’ll help the stock price. Shareholders are also likely to blame as evidenced by publicly traded companies being more likely to mandate a return to office.
• Personal preference. CEOs, and other executives who make this decision, simply prefer to work in the office and they prefer a full office to an empty one. Either cause: they have a very extroverted personality (likely how they got the job in the first place), they feel more powerful with all their underlings around, or they have a harder time working from home and can’t fathom anyone being different.

I think it’s almost at the point where the only games that don’t work are games with anti cheat that refuse to play nicely.

For people who value reading: if they have no books on their shelves. They might be avid readers of ebooks, or just use the library.

But this should clear itself up with a rather simple discussion started by mentioning a book you read recently.

The people who claim “real estate value!” have just latched onto the simplest reason they can which aligns with their worldview.

The reasons I suspect companies are forcing return to office are more:

• shareholders don’t like unused assets, so they tell the ceo to “use it or lose it”
• the people who make the decision have the type of extroverted personality where they actually do work better in the office and they can’t fathom people being different
• the people who make the decision prefer to have the office full because it makes them feel more powerful. They can see the people they lord over.

Fireplaces?

It would help all of their competitors. A non zero number of people would move from windows to each of the others.

Whether or not the number moving away from windows and on to each of the others is significant or not is a different matter.

The biggest thing helping Linux right now is Valve’s work improving the gaming experience, IMO.

I have 64 too and my usage breaks down to basically be 32 for windows, 32 for different VMs.

I did the same thing and have the same attitude. I still watch what few Netflix shows are any good. They just aren’t getting any of my money any more 🙂

I think it’s more common for people to rotate which service they’re subscribed to each month.

But piracy is still increasing in popularity.

It can be as simple as running a VPN on your computer, and downloading torrents through a torrent app on the same computer. Then you can just watch the videos you download however you like.

If you want a Netflix-like interface for what you’ve downloaded, run Plex or Jellyfin and point them to your downloads. Get the plex or jellyfin app on your tv, tablet, phone, etc as well. The app will see plex running on your computer and you’re good to go.

You can keep getting more advanced depending on what you want. For example you can use apps like Sonarr and Radarr to automatically send movies and shows to your download app as they come out. You can also use things like Bazarr to automatically get subtitles. Tdarr to encode what you download if you want to do something like make sure everything works on your tv and a specific streaming stick (eg: roku).

And on and on.

I use all of that, and have it set up through docker on a server which has access to a giant NAS for storing the files.

Or classic torrents combined with a VPN.

Tesla under pays compared to other car companies.

Duck duck go has kept getting better and google has kept getting worse.

I find the results are pretty even now and often lean in DDG’s favour (but not always, obviously).

Because of this, I’ve set my default everywhere to DDG and give Google a whirl sometimes if that doesn’t work out for a specific search.

Nah. The managers prefer in-office and companies are addicted to “corporate culture” which they can’t control if you’re working from home.

It has nothing to do with firing people (unless you want the most competent people to quit) nor does it have anything to do with real estate (no company will try to help fix a collective action problem voluntarily unless the attempt gives good PR or profits)

I agree. I think people are just missing the point. It’s really far from being able to replace a worker.

It’s current capabilities at best can help that worker be slightly faster at certain things. It’s akin to a type of search engine.

It can generate simple stuff accurately quite often. You just have to keep in mind that it could be dead wrong and you have to test/verify what it says.

Sonetimes I feel like a few lines of code should be doable in one line using a specific technique, so I ask it to do that and see what it does. I don’t just take what it says and use it, I see how it tried to solve it and then check it. For example by looking up if the method it used exists and reading the doc for that method.

Exact same as what I would do if I saw someone on stack overflow or reddit recommending something.

I like it for certain techy things. I just used it to create a linux one-liner command for counting the unique occurances of a regex pattern. I often forget specific flags for Linux commands like how uniq can perform counting.

And something like that is easy to test each piece of what it said and go from there.

As long as you treat it like a peer who prefaced the statement with “I might be wrong / if I recall correctly” it ends up being a pretty good aid.

I just don’t understand how people find accounts they like to follow.

Millennials, according to Wikipedia,

The generation typically being defined as people born from 1981 to 1996

After that is Gen Z and Gen Alpha starts somewhere around 2010.

So 1997 would be an older Gen Z

No this isn’t right. It’s cheaper to have an empty building than a full one so companies who own their buildings would still make more money letting their employees work from home.

Also, even if it was true, no company is going to try to solve a problem like that. Companies are selfish. They’d rather everyone else go back to work to boost the value of commercial real estate while they continue to work from home to increase their profits everywhere.

The only reason companies are forcing people back is because upper management simply prefers that work environment. They like to sit in their corner office, surrounded by their peons. A sense of power.

Or, they have the kind of personality where they thrive surrounded by people and can’t understand how anyone could be productive at home, data be damned.

It has nothing to do with real estate.