penguin

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.

Well no one can prove they have a mind to anyone other than themselves.

And to extend that, there's obviously a way for electrical information processing to give rise to consciousness. And no one knows how that could be possible.

Meaning something like a true, alien AI would probably conclude that we are not conscious and instead are just very intelligent meat computers.

So, while there's no reason to believe that current AI models could result in consciousness, no one can prove the opposite either.

I think the argument currently boils down to, "we understand how AI models work, but we don't understand how our minds work. Therefore, ???, and so no consciousness for AI"

Everyone can only do the best they can. Anyone who expects everyone to have zero impact is an idiot. Even a salad involved death and cruelty somewhere (animals caught in farm equipment, underpaid immigrant farmers who get abandoned if injured, etc).

So really, all you can do in your life if you care about these things is minimize your impact as much as you can based on what you know.

Similar to people who value giving to charity. Do they give all of their spare money to charity? No and no one should expect them to. Just giving anything to charity regularly has a positive impact and the whole "you're not doing enough" does much more damage than good.

Reminds me of vegetarians/vegans. I'm not really either, but I don't eat meat. And I'm just happy when I hear people say they want to eat less meat. Whereas most people who are against meat are only happy if someone else is also against it completely.

Every year, the government funds itself with taxes being paid now. Not years previously. If older people who are retired use the hospital, the hospital's resources were paid for by the most recent taxes.

And when I pay my taxes now, the government doesn't take a small percentage of it, put it aside, and mark it as "for road maintenance in X decades".

If working people stopped paying taxes, all programs would collapse entirely, they wouldn't keep working only for retired people who paid into them sufficiently.

It's pretty obvious that all of government needs tax payers every year

No, but it's still correct.

Retired individuals make use of tax funded systems all the time and those only work if younger people pay taxes.

He's successful in spite of himself. He makes terrible decisions constantly.

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.

Clothing doesn't require the death of anyone the same way eating meat does.

One it's possible to be cruelty free, and the other is not.

Also, if I knew for a fact that a company committed acts of evil, I would avoid them as best I could, just like I do with meat.

Complaining that eating meat is not actually wrong, it's just marketing, is just a laughable way to look at ethics and empathy.

Lastly, whataboutism is a joke of a defence.

Is killing a person a moral issue, or is that also simply marketing?

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.

I agree. I still eat shrimp and some fish. The fish bother me, but not enough to stop eating them, and the shrimp don't bother me cause they're basically underwater crickets.

For example killing an elephant is worse than killing a chicken. And everyone draws the line somewhere already (unless you're fine with eating endangered animals and even cannibalism). It's just where does your own morality draw the line at what level of creature it's ok to ask to die for your next meal?