A right-wing conservative think tank blasted this week’s Talking Points email to our inboxes and told us to write opinion pieces spewing their current ANTI-Work-At-Home propaganda, so this is what I did…
It’s almost like how local news networks in the USA are reading the same copy of stories by their handlers to spread propaganda. Gosh, do you think this could be the same?
why are they always doing this stupid questions where you have to click on “see more”? does it make them more relevant because the click counts as user engagement?
Why not replace the CEO with an LLM? Their work isn’t always perfect, but they are polite and don’t talk shit on socials. They’re cheaper than a human CEO too, aside from being thirsty lil devils.
Fwiw a LLM uses as much power as 10 regular Google searches… So it’s almost nothing in the grand scope of things. It might even save some for the people who don’t know how to utilize search engines properly.
We also need more data centers, not fewer. And they use almost no water compared to other utilities.
I’m not sure that’s even a valid comparison? I’d love to know where you got that data point.
LLMs run until they decide to output an end-of-text token. So the amount of power used will vary massively depending on the prompt.
Search results on the other hand run nearly instantaneously, and can cache huge amounts of data between requests, unlike LLMs where they need to run every request individually.
I’d estimate responding to a typical ChatGPT query uses at least 100x the power of a single Google search, based on my knowledge of databases and running LLMs at home.
E: I’ve cleaned up the comment for saucing ease in case you looked at it right away but I’ll quote it here for ease.
Yep, I’m familiar with it. More from previous comments since these disingenuous memes get pedaled here regularly. People love to spout stats about AI in data centers that aren’t just used for AI without having any sense of how much CO2 is produced from really really common stuff lol. Let alone it being contingent on being run in non-renewable powered areas yet 40% of the USA’s grid is clean.
How about watching TikTok? 30 minutes of video daily = 28kg of carbon a year. Calculators here: 1, 2, 3.
How about the recent ‘Oh no 1/5 a city’s water!’ The city use 770,000 gallons a day… So it uses 154,000 gallons of water for an entire piece of critical infrastructure that keeps the internet running. For the entire data center lol. And that’s for the city Carrol, Iowa with a whopping population of 10,000 people in 5 square miles lol.
A real common citation is how much carbon it takes to initially train these too. 500 tons of carbon dioxide… That’s only 33/334,000,000 Americans worth of CO2 for the year lol.
0.3Wh / request for Google 2.9Wh / request for ChatGPT
That does however reference the same paper as your linked articles, which I can’t find without a paywall: www.sciencedirect.com/…/S2542435123003653?dgcid=a…
I’d love to know how they came up with that number for ChatGPT, but it looks like I was a bit off with my estimates regardless. There’s probably some scaling efficiencies they’re taking advantage of at that size.
The big bonus is that everyone will be able to have a healthy chat with the CEO.
Hey CEO, what will be my raise this year?
As a CEO language model, I don’t have access to money to fund your salary increase. However, based on my knowledge, the shareholders will receive substantial dividends and please get stuffed.
I like my coworkers. I mean it; they’re nice people.
But I want to spend time with the people I deeply care about, who share the same hobbies or have a similar vision of the world. I can’t express myself freely around coworkers as I can with people I choose to be around in my free time.
It’s just hard to be motivated when burnt out by a company that hates it needs you and forces people to do work in a stupid way without autonomy and the goal of fucking their customers
Edit: I’m referring to post-capitalism, not justifying corporate bullshit
Edit: I have no idea what’s going on. Clearly someone doing nothing would do things not to be bored.
I can whole heartedly confirm that not everyone needs to have a job to not be bored. My ADHD ass has a whole ton of possible things I can learn the absolute basics too without being productive and moving onto the next shiny thing but work keeps getting in the way.
Learning by itself isn’t being productive because it doesn’t produce anything. Doing things with that knowledge would be productive.
Keep in mind the context of this thread is work, which gives a context to being ‘productive’ that is wasting time making someone else money to get a pittance.
Even if I did choose the company I applied to for work, I didn’t choose my coworkers, nor did I get to meet them until after I was hired. And, I certainly don’t get to choose the customers I have to interact with during my work.
Do you not have a life outside the office? I’m sorry if that’s the case.
No need to subject everyone to in-office mandates just because for some people it’s the only way they get “human contact” (going to ignore the “high-quality” part of your statement lol)
A lot of people don’t and I’m convinced that’s why they want to go back to the office. It’s not that they hate their family, it’s that they’re boring and bland so not only do they not go out and make friends doing things they love, they’re convinced the only way to have friends is to pay someone to be in proximity with them.
I pity those people. On the other hand I have a rich and fulfilling personal life that includes friends, family, solitude, and people I choose to have in my life. I don’t need those folks to fuck that up for me by making me see miserable people who need someone to be paid to be their friend.
There are also the people who have bought into the whole define yourself by your work bullshit and they don’t value their relationships outside of work.
I think that a lot of those people likely live in a very car dependent, suburban area, and therefore don’t get any regular interaction with people outside of their immediate family.
I live in a city, so I have regular infractions with people that I know when I’m out and about: I pop into the butcher shop, coffee shop or green grocer and talk to the employees I know. I walk the dog, and run into friends and acquaintances that live the next neighborhood over, etc. People in rural areas usually have similar sorts of relationships with people in the area.
Contrast that with the suburbs, where neighbors may know each other to say hello to, but not much past that, and it’s hard to build any kind of relationship with the barista at the drive-through Starbucks or any employees at the local Kroger superstore.
You’re probably right. I’m in the suburbs and I have to make an effort to do the things I mentioned. It’s part of the trade off for living here.
The sole exception was when we had the snowpocolypse a while back and no one had power. The neighborhood got together at my house and we cooked everything that was going to go bad in our freezers on my grills and made sure everyone was eating for days while we waited for electricity. I still don’t know most of them more than to just say hello, but we came together when it mattered and that was cool.
Not if you’re depressed by the fact that you’re losing 2h a day going to the office, wasting 30$ in parking fees and know that your pet is back home stressed out from being left alone for 10h.
So? Even going one day to the office is enough to make some people feel stressed out and depressed. I’m not even talking about people who need specific accommodations that they have at home but aren’t provided to them at the office.
That’s unusual. You shouldn’t be “stressed and depressed” from that. Don’t get me wrong, I love WFH, but being unable to enter an office at all is not common.
I think you underestimate the quantity of people that don’t feel good about having to show up to work in person or take part in meetings or have to deal with in person social interactions.
Heck, in the grand scheme of things it’s more unusual to have to interact with tens of people you didn’t choose to interact with because your employer said so.
Am I? I mean I wouldn’t be able to tell, of course, but I find that hard to believe. I’m not particularly extroverted myself but it’s fine for me. The only reason my team doesn’t come in is because of the commute time. And we’re IT, not like marketing or HR.
Also “depressed” and “don’t feel good” are very different in scale.
you’re losing 2h a day going to the office, wasting 30$ in parking fees and know that your pet is back home stressed out from being left alone for 10h.
Work from home makes it even better than listening to coworkers trying to chat you up when you are working. You can have “human contact” with them on optional outings with the team. A coworker isn’t a friend, it’s a colleague. They won’t stand up for you when you get treated unfairly at work, they won’t risk their job to save yours. So unless your “human contact” includes inappropriate stuff, I don’t see any benefit to it over staying home with the family you love, cuddling pets and skipping a long daily commute.
The thing being forced on everyone else in this context is a requirement to work in an office instead of work from home. In that context, someone saying high quality human contact is important, implying that is a benefit of being forced into the office and forcing everyone else into the office makes them happy.
Oh, I was just commenting on being one of the people that benefits from seeing others - a vampire. I don’t think it’s a justifiable reason to force people to go to the office.
Benefitting from being social with others doesn’t make you a social vampire. Almost everyone benefits from socializing, to the point that it is assumed to be a shared human trait.
A social vampire is someone who preys on others socially, frequently by forcing others into social situations they don’t want to be in. Forcing someone to work in the office so there is someone to be social with is a sign of someone being a social vampire.
Some people have no life outside of work. When you live in a country where you need several jobs to make rent and afford food, I’m guessing this is the standard.
Edit: gee, I guess I hit a nerve? For the record I’m from the country where working hard is illegal, as the joke goes. And very badly that we have antiallergique laws to protect our rights to have a life outside of work. And even here we have to fight tooth and nails to get WFH :/
Yeah, but you have to walk on eggshells when talking to office coworkers. If you’re wfh, you don’t have a commute eating up your schedule and have more free time for friends.
No “/s” necessary. That notation is for lazy writing. If the OP was being sarcastic, it was poorly communicated and deserves the condemnation. Sarcasm’s risky. Do it well and it’s hilarious. Do it poorly and get flamed. That’s the gamble.
If you can confidently say that your work interactions are “high quality” then I envy you lol. Work people and real people are two different sets of people to me.
An employee asked me if he can WORK from HOME permanently. Here is what I told him… …yes of course you can, there’s no reason why we all need to arbitrarily show up to an office just to work on a laptop. Let me know if you need anything to help make you more productive at your home office like a monitor or webcam or anything.
Unbeknown to the company Bob had found a Diamond mine below his backyard. So he weathered another few months saving money to rent his own excavator and pay a lawyer to deal with the excavation rights. Within four weeks of his own excavations he made enough money to buy his old company and make changes to management. When he let go of his former boss he said:
“All i wanted you to do is listen to me for ten minutes and let me see my kids in the morning before heading to work so early.”
Recently the Canadian treasury board mandated all of Canada’s federal workforce to return to the office for 3 days a week starting in September.
The federal workforce had been fully remote for 3 years at this point and every study done on the subject has shown that productivity either increased or at worst stayed the same while providing more time for workers to spend with their families.
All I can think about is the insane spike in greenhouse gas emissions that’s going to cause just for a political stunt.
I have a meeting later today for an employee who requested a reasonable accommodation to work from home for medical reasons, and it was declined (by the people who review the RA requests, not by me). The employee, like the rest of us, have been doing the job for over four years from home; how can anyone possibly make the case at this point that they need to come into the office?
The meeting description has a sentence in it that clearly states the medical documentation was sufficient to support working from home. So why are we having this meeting?
I, of course, completely support her request and will argue for it, if necessary. I wish I could come up with a similar justification for myself, honestly, but I cannot, and I’m not going to game the system and possibly affect people who really do need it.
(Our employer’s whole return-to-office thing is driven by outside forces that have little to do with our work. I suspect our leadership would continue work from home if they could. Unfortunately their supervisors do not agree.)
Sounds like you’re a good manager in a frustrating situation. Good luck with your meeting and hopefully you can talk some sense into whoever needs it.
I’m very lucky that my employer basically went totally remote first as soon as covid hit and made it clear it was a permanent change from the get go. I know many folks in this frustrating position of fully or partially in office mandates that really don’t seem to be required for the work.
Thanks. Part of me wants to find an employer similar to yours, the other part of me is like, hey, I’m planning to retire in like 7 years.
There’s a LOT of concern over what this return-to-office plan will do to staff - we think quite a few people will find other jobs. A few have said so out loud; who knows how many more are planning the same quietly (of course, some people also talk a big game, but when push comes to shove…will they really?). We’re also running into more issues hiring; another manager I know had a candidate decline because the position wasn’t remote and they didn’t want to move here. When I talk to candidates, it’s now the first thing I check, even before I schedule the interview - no point in wasting time for either of us if it’s a non-starter.
It’s kind of weird - we only have to go in once a week, which actually isn’t that bad at all - for those of us who already live in the area. But it’s harder to convince people to move across the country to a high cost of living location so they can sit in their apartment 4 of 5 days each week. But we have to support the local Popeye’s fast food joint, I guess.
Update: They kicked me out of the meeting. The employee’s first-line supervisor was still in it, and it was really short - they basically asked if the employee could do the job remotely or not. It sounded like they were going to approve the request. This whole meeting setup is very strange; it’s never happened before on any accommodation request I’ve been involved with (maybe half a dozen over the years). Maybe they review a few at random or something.
If you work for a large company, then they are also in the real estate business. It’s better for the real estate business if people work in their real estate and support the restaurants and other companies that rent from their real estate.
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