I can almost guarantee this is about commercial real estate taxes more than productivity. If agency review is months behind, they need to hire more people, not force their existing employees to lose hours a day to commuting.
A city I know of mandated that the largest employer institute return-to-office or lose their tax breaks due to the impact it would have on the local economy of the city.
>I can almost guarantee this is about commercial real estate taxes more than productivity.
As simple as that. I was looking at the numbers of one of our partners that has gone bankrupt in Europe. He made the brilliant decision to invest everything in Office space just before Covid. They expected to recover money after Covid, but it is not happening.
A lot of big guys invested there, specially politicians, and of course expensive taxes. They will do everything they can to delay the sinking.
A fun little thought-experiment to inject into these debates is to analyze commute-hours and fuel costs as if they were-wages/expenses that the employer had to pay for.
When corporate RTO-advocates are faced with paying the costs themselves instead of pushing it all onto employees, suddenly it becomes "impractically expensive" and "wasteful".
Hey guys, commutes were always costly and (sometimes) wasteful, if you've finally realized that you can at least stop demanding employees undertake it for dumb reasons.
P.S.: To give a napkin-math example to show that it lands in the right order of magnitude...
Suppose Joe Exampleson has a 30 mile round-trip, taking 1 hour because company "core hours" match when congestion occurs. His car manages 30 miles per gallon and gas is $5/gallon, and we assume other car-costs are things he'd bear anyway even without the job. He normally earns ~$30/hr while working but here he has to act as a driver.
That's ~14.6% of his pre-tax income, or $8,750/year.
_______
Now, I know somebody will think: "That's too high because his real job is harder or more important and driving is easy, plus he can enjoy listening to the radio or whatever."
Those observations aren't wrong, but it risks a certain kind of... economic hypocrisy. Why would those aspects matter now but not for Joe's regular pay? It is safe to assume Joe's employer does not pay him based on how difficult or painful his job is, or even how important it is for the work to occur! No, they're paying based on the marginal cost of replacing him with somebody else.
I think the RTO policy is in part influenced by economic recovery research funded by the city [0]. My own conjecture is that it’s also influenced by SEPTA (regional transit) ridership recovery being a sticking point for funding from the state.
With all the talk of the impending fertility crisis, I very much believe that WFH helps significantly.
1) It makes parenting easier by letting the parent be more present. 2) It allows parents to buy houses with more bedrooms and more greenspace further from expensive cities. 3) It allows workers to stay in one location for a long time, helping form community.
It's probably too simplistic to just look at a global average. Developed countries (largely Western and Asian ones) have fertility rates well below their replacement levels, while sub-Saharan African nations (many of which are on food aid) have fertility well above replacement levels. These don't cancel one another out in terms of effects on humanity. Not economically, not culturally, not geopolitically.
Well pretty sure we know how to fix that. Go have some kids! Seriously folks need to breed more. You wanna spread your ideals? Have a family. Wanna sway politics in the long run to your ideals? Tell your kids to have big families too. Religions have been doing this for yonks. It's not rocket science. It strikes me as absurd the academic class hasn't worked this out.
A lot of people want to have families... you're making it sound like there's a marketing problem, but the conversation is on whether or not there's the right platform for the middle class to have children; i.e. childcare, family, home, money, etc. People want to maintain their station in life while having children.
But somehow you're looking at the problem like "why don't people know they could achieve religious and political gain by having more kids?" Gosh, these dumb academics haven't figured it out. And who is thinking that academics even has serious political sway on these matters?
Hey look I'm poor as I've ever been and have 3 step kids. Gonna send it for another two kids soon regardless of our finances. Why? Well because we want to and we're not getting any younger! Mate childcare, house sizes, money. Eh well make it work. No point worrying about problem that might not even happen.
It is a marketing problem largely. People got too high a expectations these days. They expect everything to be perfect and are largely massively selfish in doing it.
We might be poor, we might be cramped in a tiny house. But the kids are fed, clothed and are in a loving family. It's better than a lot of wealthy fams I know where the kids are depressed because the parents rarely cross the giant house to have a chat or hang out with them. Everybody is hidden behind thousands of dollars of screens.
The middle class has a massive marketing problem re. Having kids and families.
I think what you're proposing will happen, but over time. Birth control has separated sex from reproduction, for anyone with access to it and the desire to use it. So nature's former trick of making sex enjoyable in order to incentivize reproduction doesn't work as well any longer. The next trick will have to be an actual desire to have children, instead of a desire to have sex with the results also including children. That desire may be genetic or memetic (e.g. in the form of a religion), or most likely a synthesis of the two.
The usual complaint is that the pyramid scheme stops working (not enough people working to pay the pensions of the old people). This is simplistic: the real problem is that there aren't enough doctors/garbos/crop-harvesters etc as a proportion of the population. Either way the fix is straightforward: bring in some people who'd like a job.
Some rethinking is required -- in the USA Social Security was put in place when the typical recipient was expected to receive a payout for...less than three years.
I have friends in the "reduce the birth rate" community, and they are at least as thoughless if not more than the "birth rate too low" crowd. In the former case their "diagnosis" is inevitably that the wrong people are having too many kids though they hate it when you point that out.
A higher birth rate in sub saharan africa is hardly a crisis: every person in the US emits 5X the CO2 of a person in Africa. Dropping population in the rich, polluting countries can be a step in the right direction.
(Personally I'm pretty indifferent to either position. As Herb Stein famously put it: "if something cannot go on forever it will stop". Sure, the latency in this case is quite high but people deal with worse all the time.)
> This is simplistic: the real problem is that there aren't enough doctors/garbos/crop-harvesters etc as a proportion of the population. Either way the fix is straightforward: bring in some people who'd like a job.
That "fix" doesn't work when the birthrate problem is widespread. It just moves the problem around so it hits the poorest the hardest.
> Some rethinking is required -- in the USA Social Security was put in place when the typical recipient was expected to receive a payout for...less than three years.
Yes. Social security's payout formula should factor in the number offspring. Anyone who has less than two gets a significantly reduced or no payout, because they didn't sufficiently contribute to the next generation's labor pool to provide the goods and services they payout would be used to buy. The tax payments would be kept but re-conceptualized as support for elderly parents. To make it fair, the government should pay for fertility treatments, and count a certain number of good-faith attempts as children in the formula.
> It just moves the problem around so it hits the poorest the hardest.
Could you expand on this? I can’t think of a scenario where that is the case.
> Social security's payout formula should factor in the number offspring.
Ha, how will you track it? I have no offspring in this country (USA) bc they decided things are better elsewhere. But they were born here.
Germany just does it directly: when your kids are little you have to support them (assuming you can); when you are old and decrepit your kids have some responsibility for your wellbeing.
>> It just moves the problem around so it hits the poorest the hardest.
> Could you expand on this? I can’t think of a scenario where that is the case.
Pretty straightforward: there's no unlimited wellspring of young people from poor countries for rich countries to tap, there is a limited amount. Those poor countries also have declining birth rates, they're just a few decades behind on the trend. It's unlikely there are enough poor young people satisfy the labor demands of all the depopulating rich countries.
So the rich countries suck up all the available young "doctors/garbos/crop-harvesters" from the poor countries. That leaves the poor countries with screwed up, unbalanced demographics (without necessarily even fixing the screwed up, unbalanced demographics of the rich countries), and they're in an even worse position to deal with the problem, since they're poor.
So poor African grandma's doctor moves to American to treat rich American Grandma, and African grandma gets to do without.
> Ha, how will you track it?
How does the government track anything? They come up with rules and definitions and bureaucracy, then implement them.
And the types of records needed to implement the idea for 90%+ of cases have been kept for 100+ years.
It wasn’t you but GP who started this thread stated:
> sub-Saharan African nations (many of which are on food aid) have fertility well above replacement levels
So which is it ? Are they above or below replacement levels?
> How does the government track anything?
While I get where you are aiming at this didn’t work in China and they have arguably the most perfect surveillance state worldwide - I don’t think this is desirable, the tradeoff in freedom and security is just too big.
> So which is it ? Are they above or below replacement levels?
Is is now or is it later? We're dealing with statistics that change over time.
An idea that depends on certain areas having "fertility well above replacement levels," like using immigration to compensate for demographic decline, falls apart when the fertility in those areas drops.
Then there's the additional problem of do the numbers even add up for that idea to work in the short to medium term. There are a lot of very large places with sub-replacement or near-replacement fertility right now: Europe, China, India, Russia, etc.
And there are even more problems! Everything above is a one-dimensional analysis, which assumes bodies can be moved around frictionlessly to do labor, and the only question is "do you have enough?". IMHO that still points to immigration not being a solution for fertility problems, but add more dimensions, and I think the idea becomes even more unworkable.
>> How does the government track anything?
> While I get where you are aiming at this didn’t work in China...
What didn't work in China?
The US government already reliably tracks births and parentage, and that would only get more reliable if there was a new financial incentive that it be accurate. That's pretty much all that's needed for my idea. Tracking a "certain number of good-faith attempts" at fertility treatments for fairness could be covered by similar processes to those already used by health insurance.
Historically, periods of mass migration have also been periods of immense turmoil and even violence. What will make the proposal to try it again, this time on absolutely unprecedented scale, go better?
I dispute your assertion. The late 19th and early 20th century USA had a population boom largely from immigration. There was no immense turmoil and violence.
But there was violence. Between Protestants and Catholics, between English-Americans and the newcomers from Ireland, Germany, Italy, Poland, etc. Lutheran Churches were firebombed during the First World War. For example, many German-Americans today don't even know this, but there was immense pressure to severe ties with Germany, e.g. to stop speaking German, to Anglicize their names, to adopt a more "American" cuisine, etc. Immigration was more or less halted for the half century between 1924 and 1965 due to a great deal of this turmoil.
And that's just describing inter-ethnic conflicts among White Americans. These groups have histories that intertwine extending back to their homelands in Europe. There was also a great deal a inter-racial violence and tension.
I don't blame you for not knowing about any of this. It's just not something the United States really touts about its own history. And knowledge of the problems it caused 100 years ago raises uncomfortable questions about the current levels of immigration into the US. So it's something that goes largely undiscussed today.
I’m not claiming that there was no violence. However there is no evidence that the rate of violence went up during this time. The Dillingham Commission (who weren’t open borders types) even concluded during that there was no substantial evidence for immigrants as a source of increased crime.
However it’s very clear you’ve made your mind up and everyone else is uninformed. Enjoy your enlightenment. Have a nice day.
The context of the Johnson–Reed Act is more complex than you make it and significantly restricted people you would call “white”, not just other “undesirables”.
Most of the violence of the early 20th century was political (especially, but not only, during WWI, which is the example you chose) and seemingly had more to do with age demographics than racial (a similar problem arose a millennium earlier, driving the invention of crusades). The biggest period was after the Johnson-Reed act, as part of a broader increase in crime.
Yes there was an enormous amount of racial violence, but most of it was directed against black citizens, none of whom were recent immigrants.
I have followed this history because without the 1965 Immigration act I would not have been permitted to come to the US and attend school. And I come from a country with twice the immigration rate of the US, but little violence.
Only if it was uniform. Fewer and fewer kids mean within a few generations, we have more and more old people who rely on others to survive. If a society has 50% people over 60 and 50% young'uns, then they have a big problem.
> FWIW it's a fertility "crisis", not the. Globally, the fertility rate exceed the replacement rate -- there are plenty of people being born.
Right now. IIRC, current projections are for global populations to start to decline before the end of the century, and I think fall sharply in the next. I think only sub-Saharan Africa is the only region that reproduces at much greater than replacement rate, and even there birthrates are declining. Formerly high reproduction rate places like India are now at replacement rate, and their birthrates are continuing to fall.
Lower population density does not necessarily equate to higher carbon footprint, especially when commuting downtown for work has been eliminated. Above a certain point density has diseconomies of scale of its own.
For example, if you are comparing, say, a three bedroom house in a large metropolitan area versus a four bedroom house in a small town, the reduced total driving time because driving distances are less in the small town (everything is in town, but town is tiny) can make up for a lot of efficiencies of scale.
The common argument is that we should put people into apartments instead, but that isn't always a clear total system win. For example if somebody is really into fishing letting them live near a lake with space to store their own boat will be more carbon efficient than stuffing them into an apartment where every weekend they drive to the storage place on the outskirts of town to pick their boat up, then drive three hours or so to the lake.
Having houses spread out and lowering population density is bad for environment. More roads need to be built, more infrastructure needs to be built, etc. We consume too much. America is not in danger of having too much population density. We are too spread out as it is.
If people want to live in cities, I am all for making it possible. My only request is to control outdoor lighting. Nighttime outdoor lighting has many negative side effects on humans, animals, and plants.
However, cities are not for me. I work in my home office on the outskirts of a minor city. Right now I am listening to house finches and goldfinches arguing over places on the thistle feeders and smelling petrichor as rain showers move in.
Here is the important takeaway: I would never try to force you to live outside of a city. I hope you can grant me the same consideration and not force me to live in a city.
I don’t care where anyone lives. I’m just stating the fact that being more spread out, having larger homes, larger yards, etc. is not a low carbon option.
I agree it's not a lower-carbon option. I think if smaller cities would cover all their parking lots with photovoltaics (complete with a big ass battery) and covers many rooftops with photovoltaics, it would go a long way to reduce the impact of spread-out properties. I would also try to change city practices to encourage rewilding of one's property. I've done a small amount of rewilding, and we have so many more birds in just two years. Of course, we lost a lot of produce to birds and chipmunks, but, heck, they deserved to eat as well.
Bigger houses in a bigger sprawl means you have a higher heating / cooling requirement. It also means someone else has to drive to deliver your Amazon package or ship gas/groceries/medicines to a store nearby.
Firstly, sprawl is the result only if it is around a central core(s) to which many people need to travel on a frequent basis. If few people need to travel to those cores regularly then you don't get sprawl, but rather more in-fill nodes along pre-existing highways.
Secondly, those things you mention are true -- all else being equal. But everything else isn't equal. Eliminating thirty miles of driving a day can make up for a lot of extra heating costs. Houses can cheaply avoid major cooling costs like urban heat island effects, and lack of shade suffered by apartment buildings. Economies of scale in shipping is a thing, but past a tractor-trailer a day they diminish rapidly.
So it isn't as clear that, with the way people actually live in cities today, that the systematic carbon costs, or even financial costs, favours cities the way it might have fifty or eighty years ago.
Firstly, sprawl is the result only if it is around a central core(s) to which many people need to travel on a frequent basis.
This is wrong. As an extreme example consider this. If all families in the U.S. were as evenly distributed as possible with each family having at least a 1 acre lot then it would be correct to say that we are sprawled out. Sprawl in the sense we are taking about refers to spreading out.
Car commuting is a carbon problem. So is buying a larger house, lower living density, and larger yards. I’m addressing solely the claim about this being lower carbon footprint. I’m not addressing any other issues or concerns.
There isn't a definitive statement that can be made about fertility crisis. The number of 2.1 as the replacement rate is based on some estimate of human labor output. This could very well be lower in reality (i.e humans can be more efficient with technology that is not currently reflected in economics)
I always understood 2.1 to be the replacement rate because it would be two children to 'replace' two parents, with the 0.1 being to cover the inevitable deaths of a person before reproducing or for infertility.
Maybe what they were saying was that that 0.1 may actually be lower in developed countries with lower infant mortality? Maybe it's more like 2.05 in developed countries? (not sure what "human labor output" has to do with it, though)
>The number of 2.1 as the replacement rate is based on some estimate of human labor output.
Replacement rate has to do with keeping the actual population number stable, not labor output whatsoever. It's 2.1 instead of just 2 because of infertility, child mortality (and mortality before reproducing generally), etc.
It has literally nothing to do with robots or efficient labor. Any TFR lower than ~2.1 will result in the total population shrinking.
So are you saying its based on genetics? I always thought that it was related to economics of keeping things like supply chains for food going and other factors.
Not even genetics, just simple population numbers. It takes 2 humans to make a new human. If each female human on earth isn't making, on average, 2 new humans (plus the .1 extra to make up for infertility and mortality) then the population of the world will shrink. Simple as.
> houses with more bedrooms
> further from .. cities
> low-carbon to boot
those seem contradictory. How can a suburban/exurban sprawl be low carbon? And even if WFH workers don't drive themselves, someone still needs to drive to ship their Amazon deliveries to their homes or to move groceries and gas to nearby stores.
> Mayor Parker has cited the many thousands of city employees — sanitation workers, social workers, the water department — who never had the ability to work from home.
Of all of the flimsy, illogical and back-ass-wards excuses I've heard for returning to offices, this might be the flimsiest, most illogical, and most profound 180 from asswards I have heard. Of course some classifications of workers can't work from home. One cannot remotely pick up garbage, or service sewers from the comfort of their own sofa. What on earth does that have to do with all the kinds of workers who can?
This will impact public institutions the same way it has been private ones. Those with options, the best workers, will leave, likely in droves, because they have seen what is possible and are no longer prepared to settle for what is expedient. The brain-drain is going to get quite real quite soon.
Work from home is a boon to everyone in our society except commercial real estate investors and pushy middle-managers, it just is, whether you as a leader choose to recognize the benefits you reap from it or not, you are reaping them. Productivity goes up, carbon emissions go down, morale goes up, people have an easier time just... living in our modern world with a flexible schedule, saving money on eating out less, saving money on buying less gas and running cars into the ground much slower, on, and on, and on. This is a rare instance where basically everyone wins and paradoxically, that seems to be driving the leadership of some places even more insane. They just can not fucking deal with seeing their workers lives improve.
It's hard to not reach for my tinfoil hat to explain this. I cannot fathom what the issue is, beyond the fact that workers are less stressed, less busy, and therefore consuming less... everything. Wasting less food, using less gas, buying fewer cars, etc. and like, I don't really think there's a shadowy room somewhere where the owner of the local gas stations is slamming his fist on the table about his sales being down, and the mayor promising to get people back to their commutes soon, but like... it's hard to see it as anything else than a deliberate middle finger to every WFH worker. "Yeah we know this works better for you and a ton of other people, but the downtown businesses are making less money and we can't have that. Go drive 90 minutes every day."
If you can't beat 'em, interview elsewhere and flee low quality, malevolent employers. Mayor Parker controls her employees without caring about their wellbeing, and frankly, they have options. Unemployment is low, interest rate cuts are coming (which is going to fire the economy back up), and the federal government is always hiring remote [1].
Mayor Adams in NYC had to learn this the hard way as well [2] [3] [4]. These people always need to learn the hard way, because they're used to being in control, and no one gives up control willingly. "I'm the boss" mental model.
"What Can NYC Do
The City should take steps to modernize its hiring and retention practices, by implementing recommendations in the Comptroller’s office’s Title Vacant and the 5BORO Institute’s Solving the Staffing Crisis.
Both of those reports recommend expediting hiring, allowing hybrid work for appropriate positions, reconsidering compensation levels for key hard-to-recruit slots, and designating Chief Talent/Recruitment/Retention Officer(s) to drive this work.
In the recently-announced tentative agreement between the NYC Office of Labor Relations and DC 37 (the City’s largest municipal labor union), the parties agreed to establish a “Flexible Work Committee” to discuss options to provider greater flexibility and enhance employee morale, including remote work, compressed and flexible work schedules, and improve transit benefits. The parties’ goal is to begin a pilot program that includes remote work no later than June 1, 2023." [2]
Note the union support in NYC; Philly's union is trying to fight Parker on the return to office mandate, but that will take time. Faster to bounce from the city for individual optimization.
>Mayor Parker has cited the many thousands of city employees — sanitation workers, social workers, the water department — who never had the ability to work from home.
Parkers goal is to make happy workers miserable instead of making miserable workers happy. That's cruel. Why not use the $$$ spent on RTO and use it provide daycare or other services to improve the life of the folks who do work in the field?
This is what "equity" looks like in practice. Actually lifting up the miserable is a lot harder than simply cutting down the happy, so that's what's done.
I was talking to a shuttle driver the other day. She can't stand working for the post office because she doesn't like being alone. I prefer it. We both agree that different people have different ways they prefer to work. Seems to me, having a variety is sensible, and ultimately, makes for a more resilient economy. This "leadership philosophy" framed around equality (that not everyone can be in remote jobs) seems bunk to me.
Also, there's is an increasing exposure for commercial real estate. Cities that have given corporations a tax break for having offices, are either leaving, or trying to mandate return-to-office for employees because they can't get out of those leases. People who don't come into the office are also not spending money on the various service businesses catering to office workers. A collapse of the commercial real estate in a city may well affect the residential markets as well.
I think the mayor of Philadelphia is trying to head off a collapse for Philly. She can't say to the public, "we are in deep trouble because no one is coming into the office anymore, so that is why you have to come back". It remains to be seen whether that will have the intended effect on protecting the city from a commercial real estate market collapse, and whether that is worth sacrificing the longer-term quality-of-life benefits that remote work brings for the people who prefers it.
> Parker has also made clear she wants the city’s return-to-office plan to be a model for private-sector employers, part of her effort to make a more economically vibrant Philadelphia.
At least they're being honest (as honest as a politician can be, I suppose) about what this is really about - a stimulus package for downtown businesses and landlords.
For an additional layer of irony, apparently she said during her campaign, quote "I'm uniquely prepared to make the city the safest, cleanest, greenest big city in the nation with access to economic opportunity for all". I fail to see how forcing people to commute (public transport or not) achieves anything but the opposite, but perhaps I just don't see the genius in that.
And while commuting might account for some fraction of the added footprint, larger houses mean more heating/cooling and larger sprawl means someone is driving to deliver daily essentials (grocery, gas, medicines, teaching, cleaners etc).
Said it time and time again. Why is there a culture war over this? Why is there even a debate? The servers we use daily are managed by people miles away, and the world keeps turning 24/7. If you want to fish for a living, work on a boat where the fish are. If you work in HR and Marketing and use the internet, take advantage of collaborative tools and work wherever you want.
There's significantly less culture war over this, at least, I haven't noticed much of it and I enjoy keeping up on what the culture warriors are mad about at the current moment. This is strictly a war between the wealthy/aspirationally wealthy, and literally everyone else.
One group is seeing the value of their held real estate in offices cratering in the near future as it's been thoroughly demonstrated that having physical offices is a massive cost center with very little to show for itself in terms of business benefits. And the other is all the business-parasite types who no longer have a small group of folks they can lord over in the office and flex their authority upon, and who's "skill" (if you want to be generous and call it one) is best described as "politics" which largely translates to inserting themselves in the projects of others and taking credit for them. And that's harder outside of an office. Literally everyone else loves work from home and would prefer to work from home.
Not a culture war. WFH for some orgs was never official, it was always temporary until COVID was over. So unless there is a WFH policy in writing at your org, always assume RTO was inevitable.
Two I witnessed being being born were Net Neutrality and Muni Broadband. Both were technical debates (in response to ISP practices) for well over a decade.
Eventually, those issues started to get some traction. All over the US, parroted talking points and lobbyist-written legislation suddenly appeared from the recipients of ISP campaign funds.
There is a culture war because most of the world did not get a WFH advantage during covid. Tech, some sales, and knowledge workers were already moving towards hybrid or WFH, but others were not…and in a lot of cases even in the heat of the pandemic employers still required people to go to their place of work because that is where they needed to be for their work to get done.
You don’t get the advantage of the nurse, grocery worker, call center worker, shop keeper, laborer, basically the general public taking up your cause. They don’t give a shit if you have to RTO. You have no social pressuire traction from outside your industry.
Everyone complaining about RTO on HN always approaches it from how it affects them. If your company has a RTO policy and you dont like it, make the case how RTO adversely affects the organization to your leadership making the RTO decision. If you can’t make that case, your organization is likely making the correct decision to RTO.
It's a theoretically great political wedge issue. It's available to some people and not others, something some people want and others don't, negatively impacts some people and positively impacts others, and at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter.
Covid mostly rearranged our lives was for the better. We were just exiting a decade of hunger-level poverty and the pandemic helped further along our escape. It was really nice to not be devastated for once.
Then the housing crisis hit and our long-time rental was sold. We landed okay but only because we beat extremely long odds.
Presently, this is the stability my kids have ever known; it's the most stable I've been since the early 1980s.
The argument for coming back to the office is flimsy. It’s framed as fairness but in reality it is not about that. Different jobs have different downsides and different perks. She claims that because sanitation workers can’t work from home neither should anyone else. Why not take away chairs for some more added fairness?
God this is disgusting. The mayor is making thousands of city employees' lives worse because...
> Parker has also made clear she wants the city’s return-to-office plan to be a model for private-sector employers, part of her effort to make a more economically vibrant Philadelphia.
Ah, yes, got it. The commercial real estate sector has been losing money, and those constituents are more important to her than the people who actually work for the city. I get the pressure to "revitalize downtowns", but this is not the way to do it.
> Mayor Parker has cited the many thousands of city employees — sanitation workers, social workers, the water department — who never had the ability to work from home.
Ah, yes, got that too. Some people's jobs unfortunately can't be done from home, so instead we should make everyone suffer, instead of trying to find ways to make work hours/arrangements better and more flexible for the workers who have to do their jobs on-site. Hell, at the very least you can take some of the money you're saving on office space and pay on-site-required workers more for their trouble.
> In Philadelphia, city officials acknowledged the return-to-office decision wasn't driven by concerns about productivity. Rather, it was in pursuit of what they called a leadership philosophy.
If there is a silver lining then how the prevailing reasons for mandatory office work are increasingly revealed to be bullshit, forcing higher-ups to admit that this hasn't anything to do with productivity.
TLDR: I think there should be a compromise between strict 9-5 schedule, and “WFH 100%, do whatever”
I don’t have any experience of being a parent but here’s my 2 cents on WFH in cases where you’re basically in front of a laptop for work:
I think it sucks that big offices are in these huge cities centrally where the only reason people live there is for the work, it becomes a bit of a loop at times, you could have the company a bit more on the edge of a large city.
I DO prefer when people are all in office. It’s much easier to have small work conversations without the hassle of calling them up.
I think there’s a happy medium where you have 1-2 hours flexibility in start/end times of when you work to allow parents to pick up kids etc. especially where there’s adequate work that you can do by yourself
If a team has say 2 days WFH policy, I think it’s best if it’s always the same days, otherwise you just have the same problems as before
I think software engineers are WAY WAY WAYYYY too picky and delicate about their work environment and how meetings are scheduled. For example, “if we have standup at 11am I won’t be able to have a block of uninterrupted work time”, as if software engineering required you to constantly be in an elevated state of consciousness and clarity that a 15 minute block of talking about work would destroy… so I think teams should just change regular meetings around when best suits people with the weird schedules.
Covid to me proved that people WFH does work, I would see a company that required 5 days in office for a software engineering job in a different light. I agree with the article that you can’t put toothpaste back in the bottle. We know that hybrid doesn’t tank productivity
If I have coworkers that are parents/have to look after relatives then I don’t mind if they work until 3, log off until 6, come back on for a few hours etc. I look at allowing that as a very positive thing in a company.
I’m going to be starting a job soon that’s remote, but I still plan on travelling (across EU) to the main office at some point because it definitely makes a difference if you’ve hung out with your co-workers in real life vs on slack and meetings where everyone’s camera is off.
This is my opinion. My preferences are my own and they’re not everyone’s cup of tea. Just my opinion in a comments section :)
One note, the 15 minutes blocks are work killers. I'm assuming it depends on the person, but I'm currently working to reorganize my calendar so that I have big 2 hours chunks of work.
one hour + interruption doesn't work, been discussing this with my manager and pm for a while (i'm a team lead, so i have plenty meetings, but i also code)
It is certainly a double edged sword. In our team we are in control, and we have working hybrid in different kinds - at the moment completely voluntary. Some people mostly work from home, others are one or two days in the office. What I find interesting however, is that one young collegue who experienced COVID during the final years of his study, he prefers working in the office and tries to be there whenever he can (which might be >98% of the time). He is a very good developer too. It would be waste to lose him because most of the team works at home most of the time, and he doesn’t. Granted, he doesn’t have kids and we do see that both the presence of young/caring-needing kids or long travel distance play a factor in how much people work from home.
It's simply about time telling those who ask for sacrifice, FOR THEM, that they can sacrifice themselves if they like, but others do not want sacrifice for nothing in return.
It's about time to ORGANIZE heading to MANDATE for human, social and economical reasons, WFH for all eligible jobs, because it's a needed evolutionary step for the humanity to DE-URBANIZE, because that's what we need to implement the Green New Deal and keep evolving, or ultimately stay alive.
Many humans need to be slaves, they can't self-regulate, and rulers like them and like to impose the same scheme for all, it's about time to take an evolutionary step, been able to be a spread population to be resilient, in comfort, able to face change and evolve. Cities have only a future: being ghetto's for poor, and such arrangement can't keep up for long.
As a dad, wfh has been a blessing. Contrary to common sense, I'd rather have a 3 bedroom condo in a city than a big house out of the city, as long as the city is well equipped for the children (schools, playgrounds, indoor playgrounds, sports/activities).
Even if I'm working, having them around all the time fills me with joy, which makes me more productive. And I can hug them during meetings or I can save them from scary stuff, or prepare them a snack while I make my own snack
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadAs simple as that. I was looking at the numbers of one of our partners that has gone bankrupt in Europe. He made the brilliant decision to invest everything in Office space just before Covid. They expected to recover money after Covid, but it is not happening.
A lot of big guys invested there, specially politicians, and of course expensive taxes. They will do everything they can to delay the sinking.
When corporate RTO-advocates are faced with paying the costs themselves instead of pushing it all onto employees, suddenly it becomes "impractically expensive" and "wasteful".
Hey guys, commutes were always costly and (sometimes) wasteful, if you've finally realized that you can at least stop demanding employees undertake it for dumb reasons.
Suppose Joe Exampleson has a 30 mile round-trip, taking 1 hour because company "core hours" match when congestion occurs. His car manages 30 miles per gallon and gas is $5/gallon, and we assume other car-costs are things he'd bear anyway even without the job. He normally earns ~$30/hr while working but here he has to act as a driver.
That's ~14.6% of his pre-tax income, or $8,750/year.
_______
Now, I know somebody will think: "That's too high because his real job is harder or more important and driving is easy, plus he can enjoy listening to the radio or whatever."
Those observations aren't wrong, but it risks a certain kind of... economic hypocrisy. Why would those aspects matter now but not for Joe's regular pay? It is safe to assume Joe's employer does not pay him based on how difficult or painful his job is, or even how important it is for the work to occur! No, they're paying based on the marginal cost of replacing him with somebody else.
[0] https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-bri...
1) It makes parenting easier by letting the parent be more present. 2) It allows parents to buy houses with more bedrooms and more greenspace further from expensive cities. 3) It allows workers to stay in one location for a long time, helping form community.
And it's low-carbon to boot.
Your points are good regardless of the fertility rate.
But somehow you're looking at the problem like "why don't people know they could achieve religious and political gain by having more kids?" Gosh, these dumb academics haven't figured it out. And who is thinking that academics even has serious political sway on these matters?
It is a marketing problem largely. People got too high a expectations these days. They expect everything to be perfect and are largely massively selfish in doing it.
We might be poor, we might be cramped in a tiny house. But the kids are fed, clothed and are in a loving family. It's better than a lot of wealthy fams I know where the kids are depressed because the parents rarely cross the giant house to have a chat or hang out with them. Everybody is hidden behind thousands of dollars of screens.
The middle class has a massive marketing problem re. Having kids and families.
People who want to are welcome to -- you be you.
People who don't want to should not be pressured to do so.
Some rethinking is required -- in the USA Social Security was put in place when the typical recipient was expected to receive a payout for...less than three years.
I have friends in the "reduce the birth rate" community, and they are at least as thoughless if not more than the "birth rate too low" crowd. In the former case their "diagnosis" is inevitably that the wrong people are having too many kids though they hate it when you point that out.
A higher birth rate in sub saharan africa is hardly a crisis: every person in the US emits 5X the CO2 of a person in Africa. Dropping population in the rich, polluting countries can be a step in the right direction.
(Personally I'm pretty indifferent to either position. As Herb Stein famously put it: "if something cannot go on forever it will stop". Sure, the latency in this case is quite high but people deal with worse all the time.)
That "fix" doesn't work when the birthrate problem is widespread. It just moves the problem around so it hits the poorest the hardest.
> Some rethinking is required -- in the USA Social Security was put in place when the typical recipient was expected to receive a payout for...less than three years.
Yes. Social security's payout formula should factor in the number offspring. Anyone who has less than two gets a significantly reduced or no payout, because they didn't sufficiently contribute to the next generation's labor pool to provide the goods and services they payout would be used to buy. The tax payments would be kept but re-conceptualized as support for elderly parents. To make it fair, the government should pay for fertility treatments, and count a certain number of good-faith attempts as children in the formula.
Could you expand on this? I can’t think of a scenario where that is the case.
> Social security's payout formula should factor in the number offspring.
Ha, how will you track it? I have no offspring in this country (USA) bc they decided things are better elsewhere. But they were born here.
Germany just does it directly: when your kids are little you have to support them (assuming you can); when you are old and decrepit your kids have some responsibility for your wellbeing.
> Could you expand on this? I can’t think of a scenario where that is the case.
Pretty straightforward: there's no unlimited wellspring of young people from poor countries for rich countries to tap, there is a limited amount. Those poor countries also have declining birth rates, they're just a few decades behind on the trend. It's unlikely there are enough poor young people satisfy the labor demands of all the depopulating rich countries.
So the rich countries suck up all the available young "doctors/garbos/crop-harvesters" from the poor countries. That leaves the poor countries with screwed up, unbalanced demographics (without necessarily even fixing the screwed up, unbalanced demographics of the rich countries), and they're in an even worse position to deal with the problem, since they're poor.
So poor African grandma's doctor moves to American to treat rich American Grandma, and African grandma gets to do without.
> Ha, how will you track it?
How does the government track anything? They come up with rules and definitions and bureaucracy, then implement them.
And the types of records needed to implement the idea for 90%+ of cases have been kept for 100+ years.
> sub-Saharan African nations (many of which are on food aid) have fertility well above replacement levels
So which is it ? Are they above or below replacement levels?
> How does the government track anything?
While I get where you are aiming at this didn’t work in China and they have arguably the most perfect surveillance state worldwide - I don’t think this is desirable, the tradeoff in freedom and security is just too big.
Is is now or is it later? We're dealing with statistics that change over time.
An idea that depends on certain areas having "fertility well above replacement levels," like using immigration to compensate for demographic decline, falls apart when the fertility in those areas drops.
I'll live to see global fertility at sub-replacement levels at current trends: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/WLD/wor....
Then there's the additional problem of do the numbers even add up for that idea to work in the short to medium term. There are a lot of very large places with sub-replacement or near-replacement fertility right now: Europe, China, India, Russia, etc.
And there are even more problems! Everything above is a one-dimensional analysis, which assumes bodies can be moved around frictionlessly to do labor, and the only question is "do you have enough?". IMHO that still points to immigration not being a solution for fertility problems, but add more dimensions, and I think the idea becomes even more unworkable.
>> How does the government track anything?
> While I get where you are aiming at this didn’t work in China...
What didn't work in China?
The US government already reliably tracks births and parentage, and that would only get more reliable if there was a new financial incentive that it be accurate. That's pretty much all that's needed for my idea. Tracking a "certain number of good-faith attempts" at fertility treatments for fairness could be covered by similar processes to those already used by health insurance.
And that's just describing inter-ethnic conflicts among White Americans. These groups have histories that intertwine extending back to their homelands in Europe. There was also a great deal a inter-racial violence and tension.
I don't blame you for not knowing about any of this. It's just not something the United States really touts about its own history. And knowledge of the problems it caused 100 years ago raises uncomfortable questions about the current levels of immigration into the US. So it's something that goes largely undiscussed today.
However it’s very clear you’ve made your mind up and everyone else is uninformed. Enjoy your enlightenment. Have a nice day.
The context of the Johnson–Reed Act is more complex than you make it and significantly restricted people you would call “white”, not just other “undesirables”.
Most of the violence of the early 20th century was political (especially, but not only, during WWI, which is the example you chose) and seemingly had more to do with age demographics than racial (a similar problem arose a millennium earlier, driving the invention of crusades). The biggest period was after the Johnson-Reed act, as part of a broader increase in crime.
Yes there was an enormous amount of racial violence, but most of it was directed against black citizens, none of whom were recent immigrants.
I have followed this history because without the 1965 Immigration act I would not have been permitted to come to the US and attend school. And I come from a country with twice the immigration rate of the US, but little violence.
They're not white until they're normalized. Ben Franklin would not have considered Germans to be white.
https://qz.com/904933/a-history-of-american-anti-immigrant-b...
Similarly, Hispanic did not exist until the late 20th century. People who used to be white became Hispanic as the group was othered.
https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
The reports I hear from demographics is that is not true
Depending on your definition of "plenty"
Below replacement rate in most developed countries.
Upending economic arrangements everywhere.
IMO not a bad thing.
So what -- are those people somehow special?
The economic arrangements since forever are predicated on natural increase
Yes, big time
> A natural reduction could be a net good.
Only if it was uniform. Fewer and fewer kids mean within a few generations, we have more and more old people who rely on others to survive. If a society has 50% people over 60 and 50% young'uns, then they have a big problem.
Right now. IIRC, current projections are for global populations to start to decline before the end of the century, and I think fall sharply in the next. I think only sub-Saharan Africa is the only region that reproduces at much greater than replacement rate, and even there birthrates are declining. Formerly high reproduction rate places like India are now at replacement rate, and their birthrates are continuing to fall.
Lower population density does not necessarily equate to higher carbon footprint, especially when commuting downtown for work has been eliminated. Above a certain point density has diseconomies of scale of its own.
For example, if you are comparing, say, a three bedroom house in a large metropolitan area versus a four bedroom house in a small town, the reduced total driving time because driving distances are less in the small town (everything is in town, but town is tiny) can make up for a lot of efficiencies of scale.
The common argument is that we should put people into apartments instead, but that isn't always a clear total system win. For example if somebody is really into fishing letting them live near a lake with space to store their own boat will be more carbon efficient than stuffing them into an apartment where every weekend they drive to the storage place on the outskirts of town to pick their boat up, then drive three hours or so to the lake.
However, cities are not for me. I work in my home office on the outskirts of a minor city. Right now I am listening to house finches and goldfinches arguing over places on the thistle feeders and smelling petrichor as rain showers move in.
Here is the important takeaway: I would never try to force you to live outside of a city. I hope you can grant me the same consideration and not force me to live in a city.
Secondly, those things you mention are true -- all else being equal. But everything else isn't equal. Eliminating thirty miles of driving a day can make up for a lot of extra heating costs. Houses can cheaply avoid major cooling costs like urban heat island effects, and lack of shade suffered by apartment buildings. Economies of scale in shipping is a thing, but past a tractor-trailer a day they diminish rapidly.
So it isn't as clear that, with the way people actually live in cities today, that the systematic carbon costs, or even financial costs, favours cities the way it might have fifty or eighty years ago.
This is wrong. As an extreme example consider this. If all families in the U.S. were as evenly distributed as possible with each family having at least a 1 acre lot then it would be correct to say that we are sprawled out. Sprawl in the sense we are taking about refers to spreading out.
Many people don't want to be in dense cities. Lack of open/green space, noise, crime, and the worst place to be during any sort of crisis.
Replacement rate has to do with keeping the actual population number stable, not labor output whatsoever. It's 2.1 instead of just 2 because of infertility, child mortality (and mortality before reproducing generally), etc.
It has literally nothing to do with robots or efficient labor. Any TFR lower than ~2.1 will result in the total population shrinking.
those seem contradictory. How can a suburban/exurban sprawl be low carbon? And even if WFH workers don't drive themselves, someone still needs to drive to ship their Amazon deliveries to their homes or to move groceries and gas to nearby stores.
Of all of the flimsy, illogical and back-ass-wards excuses I've heard for returning to offices, this might be the flimsiest, most illogical, and most profound 180 from asswards I have heard. Of course some classifications of workers can't work from home. One cannot remotely pick up garbage, or service sewers from the comfort of their own sofa. What on earth does that have to do with all the kinds of workers who can?
This will impact public institutions the same way it has been private ones. Those with options, the best workers, will leave, likely in droves, because they have seen what is possible and are no longer prepared to settle for what is expedient. The brain-drain is going to get quite real quite soon.
Work from home is a boon to everyone in our society except commercial real estate investors and pushy middle-managers, it just is, whether you as a leader choose to recognize the benefits you reap from it or not, you are reaping them. Productivity goes up, carbon emissions go down, morale goes up, people have an easier time just... living in our modern world with a flexible schedule, saving money on eating out less, saving money on buying less gas and running cars into the ground much slower, on, and on, and on. This is a rare instance where basically everyone wins and paradoxically, that seems to be driving the leadership of some places even more insane. They just can not fucking deal with seeing their workers lives improve.
It's hard to not reach for my tinfoil hat to explain this. I cannot fathom what the issue is, beyond the fact that workers are less stressed, less busy, and therefore consuming less... everything. Wasting less food, using less gas, buying fewer cars, etc. and like, I don't really think there's a shadowy room somewhere where the owner of the local gas stations is slamming his fist on the table about his sales being down, and the mayor promising to get people back to their commutes soon, but like... it's hard to see it as anything else than a deliberate middle finger to every WFH worker. "Yeah we know this works better for you and a ton of other people, but the downtown businesses are making less money and we can't have that. Go drive 90 minutes every day."
Mayor Adams in NYC had to learn this the hard way as well [2] [3] [4]. These people always need to learn the hard way, because they're used to being in control, and no one gives up control willingly. "I'm the boss" mental model.
"What Can NYC Do
The City should take steps to modernize its hiring and retention practices, by implementing recommendations in the Comptroller’s office’s Title Vacant and the 5BORO Institute’s Solving the Staffing Crisis.
Both of those reports recommend expediting hiring, allowing hybrid work for appropriate positions, reconsidering compensation levels for key hard-to-recruit slots, and designating Chief Talent/Recruitment/Retention Officer(s) to drive this work.
In the recently-announced tentative agreement between the NYC Office of Labor Relations and DC 37 (the City’s largest municipal labor union), the parties agreed to establish a “Flexible Work Committee” to discuss options to provider greater flexibility and enhance employee morale, including remote work, compressed and flexible work schedules, and improve transit benefits. The parties’ goal is to begin a pilot program that includes remote work no later than June 1, 2023." [2]
Note the union support in NYC; Philly's union is trying to fight Parker on the return to office mandate, but that will take time. Faster to bounce from the city for individual optimization.
[1] https://www.usajobs.gov/search/results/?rmi=true
[2] https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/understaffed-underserved...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/06/nyregion/nyc-workers-hiri...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/nyregion/labor-shortage-n...
Parkers goal is to make happy workers miserable instead of making miserable workers happy. That's cruel. Why not use the $$$ spent on RTO and use it provide daycare or other services to improve the life of the folks who do work in the field?
Also, there's is an increasing exposure for commercial real estate. Cities that have given corporations a tax break for having offices, are either leaving, or trying to mandate return-to-office for employees because they can't get out of those leases. People who don't come into the office are also not spending money on the various service businesses catering to office workers. A collapse of the commercial real estate in a city may well affect the residential markets as well.
I think the mayor of Philadelphia is trying to head off a collapse for Philly. She can't say to the public, "we are in deep trouble because no one is coming into the office anymore, so that is why you have to come back". It remains to be seen whether that will have the intended effect on protecting the city from a commercial real estate market collapse, and whether that is worth sacrificing the longer-term quality-of-life benefits that remote work brings for the people who prefers it.
At least they're being honest (as honest as a politician can be, I suppose) about what this is really about - a stimulus package for downtown businesses and landlords.
For an additional layer of irony, apparently she said during her campaign, quote "I'm uniquely prepared to make the city the safest, cleanest, greenest big city in the nation with access to economic opportunity for all". I fail to see how forcing people to commute (public transport or not) achieves anything but the opposite, but perhaps I just don't see the genius in that.
And while commuting might account for some fraction of the added footprint, larger houses mean more heating/cooling and larger sprawl means someone is driving to deliver daily essentials (grocery, gas, medicines, teaching, cleaners etc).
Who cares? In the real world, the sprawl already exists. Forcing RTO re-introduces commuting that had been eliminated; it's not green at all.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/10-cities-with-the-highest-t... (Its #2)
There's significantly less culture war over this, at least, I haven't noticed much of it and I enjoy keeping up on what the culture warriors are mad about at the current moment. This is strictly a war between the wealthy/aspirationally wealthy, and literally everyone else.
One group is seeing the value of their held real estate in offices cratering in the near future as it's been thoroughly demonstrated that having physical offices is a massive cost center with very little to show for itself in terms of business benefits. And the other is all the business-parasite types who no longer have a small group of folks they can lord over in the office and flex their authority upon, and who's "skill" (if you want to be generous and call it one) is best described as "politics" which largely translates to inserting themselves in the projects of others and taking credit for them. And that's harder outside of an office. Literally everyone else loves work from home and would prefer to work from home.
Not a culture war. WFH for some orgs was never official, it was always temporary until COVID was over. So unless there is a WFH policy in writing at your org, always assume RTO was inevitable.
Generated wars are playbooks in action.
Two I witnessed being being born were Net Neutrality and Muni Broadband. Both were technical debates (in response to ISP practices) for well over a decade.
Eventually, those issues started to get some traction. All over the US, parroted talking points and lobbyist-written legislation suddenly appeared from the recipients of ISP campaign funds.
You don’t get the advantage of the nurse, grocery worker, call center worker, shop keeper, laborer, basically the general public taking up your cause. They don’t give a shit if you have to RTO. You have no social pressuire traction from outside your industry.
Everyone complaining about RTO on HN always approaches it from how it affects them. If your company has a RTO policy and you dont like it, make the case how RTO adversely affects the organization to your leadership making the RTO decision. If you can’t make that case, your organization is likely making the correct decision to RTO.
Then the housing crisis hit and our long-time rental was sold. We landed okay but only because we beat extremely long odds.
Presently, this is the stability my kids have ever known; it's the most stable I've been since the early 1980s.
> Parker has also made clear she wants the city’s return-to-office plan to be a model for private-sector employers, part of her effort to make a more economically vibrant Philadelphia.
Ah, yes, got it. The commercial real estate sector has been losing money, and those constituents are more important to her than the people who actually work for the city. I get the pressure to "revitalize downtowns", but this is not the way to do it.
> Mayor Parker has cited the many thousands of city employees — sanitation workers, social workers, the water department — who never had the ability to work from home.
Ah, yes, got that too. Some people's jobs unfortunately can't be done from home, so instead we should make everyone suffer, instead of trying to find ways to make work hours/arrangements better and more flexible for the workers who have to do their jobs on-site. Hell, at the very least you can take some of the money you're saving on office space and pay on-site-required workers more for their trouble.
If there is a silver lining then how the prevailing reasons for mandatory office work are increasingly revealed to be bullshit, forcing higher-ups to admit that this hasn't anything to do with productivity.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/16/1174938708/commercial-real-es...
I don’t have any experience of being a parent but here’s my 2 cents on WFH in cases where you’re basically in front of a laptop for work: I think it sucks that big offices are in these huge cities centrally where the only reason people live there is for the work, it becomes a bit of a loop at times, you could have the company a bit more on the edge of a large city. I DO prefer when people are all in office. It’s much easier to have small work conversations without the hassle of calling them up. I think there’s a happy medium where you have 1-2 hours flexibility in start/end times of when you work to allow parents to pick up kids etc. especially where there’s adequate work that you can do by yourself If a team has say 2 days WFH policy, I think it’s best if it’s always the same days, otherwise you just have the same problems as before I think software engineers are WAY WAY WAYYYY too picky and delicate about their work environment and how meetings are scheduled. For example, “if we have standup at 11am I won’t be able to have a block of uninterrupted work time”, as if software engineering required you to constantly be in an elevated state of consciousness and clarity that a 15 minute block of talking about work would destroy… so I think teams should just change regular meetings around when best suits people with the weird schedules.
Covid to me proved that people WFH does work, I would see a company that required 5 days in office for a software engineering job in a different light. I agree with the article that you can’t put toothpaste back in the bottle. We know that hybrid doesn’t tank productivity If I have coworkers that are parents/have to look after relatives then I don’t mind if they work until 3, log off until 6, come back on for a few hours etc. I look at allowing that as a very positive thing in a company. I’m going to be starting a job soon that’s remote, but I still plan on travelling (across EU) to the main office at some point because it definitely makes a difference if you’ve hung out with your co-workers in real life vs on slack and meetings where everyone’s camera is off.
This is my opinion. My preferences are my own and they’re not everyone’s cup of tea. Just my opinion in a comments section :)
It's about time to ORGANIZE heading to MANDATE for human, social and economical reasons, WFH for all eligible jobs, because it's a needed evolutionary step for the humanity to DE-URBANIZE, because that's what we need to implement the Green New Deal and keep evolving, or ultimately stay alive.
Many humans need to be slaves, they can't self-regulate, and rulers like them and like to impose the same scheme for all, it's about time to take an evolutionary step, been able to be a spread population to be resilient, in comfort, able to face change and evolve. Cities have only a future: being ghetto's for poor, and such arrangement can't keep up for long.
Even if I'm working, having them around all the time fills me with joy, which makes me more productive. And I can hug them during meetings or I can save them from scary stuff, or prepare them a snack while I make my own snack