re: Back in the office full time for the first time since March, everyone has lost weight

Ive lost weight from running more but have lost some muscle mass from gym being closed and not having heavy enough weight to workout from home

quote:

---

This is a little ridiculous. You realize a lot of these people have been working from home, right?

---

Tell me how working from home compares to driving to the office and being there for 8+ hours a day. People working from home are in their pajamas and putting in a grueling two or three hours max.

Don’t be mad because I’m more efficient at home.

quote:

---

People working from home are in their pajamas and putting in a grueling two or three hours max.

---

I mean, they probably were doing a few hours of actual “work” at work. But they were required to sit there for 8 hours a day. That’s the whole point, reduce lease expenses if they don’t need to be there.

Oh, well if this happened in your office, that settles it then.

I've certainly gained weight. Typically at the office, I would bring lunch or just skip it. I could usually justify not eating to save money. Now that I'm at home, I have all the food in the house at my disposal. If I try to skip lunch, I get hunger cravings at around 2:00 and no amount of water can make them go away.

Before Covid, I was fasting 2-3 times per week and going to practice twice a week. I'm sure that once I get back into routine, the excess weight will fall right off, but until then. Stay fat my friends.

FIFY

A lot of government workers never started working

quote:

---

Well, Gen X’s earliest members are in their early 40’s now.

---

You mean their youngest members?

quote:

---

Yes. History tells us that, over the long term, this is exactly what happens. As technology enhances productivity, competition requires companies to adjust their standards accordingly. One example I use a lot - look at drafting. One designer working in AutoCAD today can put out the same amount of work product as 10 drafters in the years before AutoCAD became the norm. But CAD operators actually make less money now (adjusting for inflation) than drafters did previously. There are tons of examples, but they can all be summed up with this statement: despite technological advances, wages consistently grow at a slower pace than productivity.

---

Sure, over the long term, but I don't think it's going to work like that for a relatively quick transition to working from home. And I'll just point out that in the example of consolidating two employees into one and getting the same productivity, any raise less than a doubling of wages is still wages growing at a slower pace than productivity.

quote:

---

when you look at the future and AI. But that’s another conversation entirely.

---

No doubt.

quote:

---

But as long as the 40-hour work week is the standard for full-time in the US, I wouldn’t expect companies to a) allow a large number of employees to work 20 hours for 40 hours’ pay or b) double someone’s pay because they are twice as productive at home. Ultimately it will come down to the job market.

---

What I was kind of getting at is it's the 40 hour week that will need some rethinking. I don't think standard business hours will go away any time soon, and for a lot of jobs simply being available and reachable at particular times is the value that is provided, and they won't be able to knock off after half the day. And of course for many others actually being present is required. And then there are the jobs we are really talking about, where certain units of work need to be accomplished, and whether it takes the person 4 or 8 hours does not change the value that is generated from the work. If a person can provide the value required in 20 hours in order to be compensated enough to achieve their desired standard of living, I don't see why the market wouldn't pretty quickly adjust to paying by a measure other than hours. We already see it with a lot of the "gig" jobs, where the more you hustle the more you earn per hour. It's a more direct relationship between output and earnings than your typical incremental raises.


I'm sort of working this out in my head as I go, so bear with me.

Maybe we'll start to see more flexible compensation packages for people who work from home, more contract workers instead of payrolled employees. I want $X to do this work per week, and/or I want $X/hr for absolute availability during these hours, and/or I want $X/hr to be on-call during these hours, etc. I think this can work out for everyone, where employees earn more per hour, employers pay less per unit of productivity, and more actually gets done, all thanks to the efficiency and savings realized by working from home.

The benefits are many. Commutes are wasted time. Fuel costs are pure expense, there is no value added there. Wear and tear on our roads is pure expense.

Think about the economic benefits if we can shift ~20% of the workforce to WFH, that would be about 30 million people. That's a bare minimum of 15 million hours saved PER DAY in commute time, or nearly 4 BILLION HOURS saved per year. That's also at least 100 billion road miles saved, which would save about 5 billion gallons or $10-15 billion of fuel, as well as over 1,000 lives saved from traffic fatalities. It would reduce maintenance costs by a few percent, and speed up the commutes of people who still have to go in due to less traffic. Insurance rates might drop.

That's really just scratching the surface, and already that's a lot of time and money that can be pumped back into the economy toward more productive, value-adding, and wealth building ways rather than the pure expenses currently involved in commuting. And we haven't even gotten to the savings on the office side.


Anyway, we are way off topic here, but I've enjoyed talking it out.