Oh, I forgot, the wonderful trickle-down-economics. /s
Give the rich more and we will all benefit from it some day instead of creating social security and subsidizing education by fairly taxing everyone equally and without exceptions and loopholes.
My company only started cracking down on it a couple months ago. Nominally the majority of employees were supposed to be working in the office three days a week as of April 2022, but most of the roles don't require physical presence so people just kept working from home. Now the company has shifted to tracking badge data to make sure people are actually coming into the office, despite three years of data demonstrating we're just as productive as home...
What happens if you don't swipe in? In almost any company I worked for they would threaten shit like this but no one ever had the bandwidth to actually check the validity of anything so it was easy to circumvent by just... ignoring it.
It's not totally clear yet. My role is fully remote, so the info I have is second-hand from memos and word of mouth. The company has apparently been using an automated system to send scary emails to people not badging in (with their manager CCed), but I don't know what happens if you just ignore those. Memos have made vague threats of implications for performance reviews, but those haven't happened yet since they announced they would be tracking badge data.
My company is just doing the big return to work push now, the turnover that they're gonna get hit with is hilarious. They have no idea how mad everyone is about it.
Here in Norway there was a marked shift to acceptance for more home office post-Corona. We did have stricter and longer restrictions than you guys though, and basically things didn't go back to normal until winter 2022. At my work I'd say 80% do home office at least 1 day per week, and 30% do home office 4/5 days in the week (we have one mandatory office day per week). I'd also say that a few percent have taken that opportunity to do "quiet quitting" and essentially do nothing (joining meetings from the car in the middle of the day on their way to IKEA and stuff like that, never engaging in or starting initiatives by themselves etc.), but that's on management for not getting rid of them.
Personally I still go 5/5 days by own choice, because I live right next by, prefer the ritual of switching into job/focus mode that it is to walk to the office, and like sitting in a separate place that has no distractions (compared to home, where I would take 5 minutes to do the dishes, take an extended trip to the grocery at lunch, etc) and that my brain only associates with working.
In the UK at least, most people I know who work in an office can choose to WFH or do hybrid working. I do hybrid by choice, I don't want to WFH full time.
Not sure about other countries, but at least in Europe we had quite a few comments, including by health officials, that the school closures should not have been done and upheld to the extent that they were.
And I agree, the impact on learning and children's mental health was not justified by the real or potential dangers of the pandemic imho
Edit: One comment from the German Health Minister here, describing prolonged school closures as a mistake
Meanwhile in Asia we moved lessons to zoom for a few weeks and that was it. But Germans think giving kids a tablet or notebook is exposing them to the devil
In many places schools weren't even really 'closed'. The number of failures stacked on top of failures is staggering. Nobody who matters will be held to account. Most westerners won't want to accept it but China's response was near flawless in comparison. And their economy continued to grow throughout. Albeit at a lesser rate. The west plunged itself into recession which it then reframed it's way out of and still hasn't recovered properly.
I mean, comparing countries with it's peers is what you should do. I could also have taken Argentina, Bulgaria, or Russia, but at the end you'll see that Germany did fairly well.
I think the question is somewhere how much death we accept against the impact of avoiding it. In this case, as I said before, there seems increasingly the opinion that school closures as a measure did not have the impact that justified its extent of use.
I feel like you only read half my comment each time.
You will always reach a point of diminishing marginal returns with measures taken, and you have to evaluate the impact of the measure against it's effectiveness.
The argument is that school closures likely did not contribute sufficiently to justify their extent of implementation, meaning you probably would have wanted a few more people dying to avoid the shortfalls in children's education and socialisation that you have now. The ends, in retrospective, arguably did not justify the means.
Lol for real, can't wait til I find a new WFH job. The brain drain that my "return to the office" job has on the way is going to be monumental. EVERYONE that doesn't have a direct report in my department is looking for a new job.
Get over it. COVID is a lot more minor than anyone made out to be. Have you not had it yet? You will if you haven’t. And then you will get over it like a cold. COVID is over for good.
I guess Lemmy is filled with a bunch of folk that like to live in a pandemic dystopian state. Fuck that. I love people’s faces and read the fucking science on it.
Nonsense, it is a novel virus, effects can vary widely. I got it for the first time last Christmas and my heart still hasn't recovered, dizzy spells after climbing stairs or bending over.
Covid put my healthy 26 yo friend in hospital when he caught it last year, and I have friends who took several years of suffering before they recovered from long covid. It's definitely not as harmless as you're implying.