Nov 8, 2023 1:11:46 GMT c said:

Most people on work from home plans have their main internet connection and a backup, sometimes with business class support with priority customer service.

No we don't. At best we can tether a cellphone. Otherwise we just ride it out doing what we can without internet.

Bro Internet is down for Optus customers, even if they wanted to WFH, they can't.

Maybe they can, but it's off-line.

And most people don't have ridiculous back up measures hence why there's so much panic and frustration today.

Nov 8, 2023 1:20:46 GMT Gyro LC said:

Nov 8, 2023 1:11:46 GMT c said:

Most people on work from home plans have their main internet connection and a backup, sometimes with business class support with priority customer service.

No we don't. At best we can tether a cellphone. Otherwise we just ride it out doing what we can without internet.

Tethering works in a pince as does just finding a place with wifi.  It is not like if you home net goes down you stop everything and are completely unable to do anything until it returns.  

Nov 8, 2023 1:27:25 GMT NATH45 said:

Bro Internet is down for Optus customers, even if they wanted to WFH, they can't.

Maybe they can, but it's off-line.

And most people don't have ridiculous back up measures hence why there's so much panic and frustration today.

If there is a major failure and you have a job that is traditional work from home, you would be in the same situation in the office with the net down.  Being in an office does not magically make everyone else connected to you.

Nov 8, 2023 1:31:09 GMT c said:

Nov 8, 2023 1:27:25 GMT NATH45 said:

Bro Internet is down for Optus customers, even if they wanted to WFH, they can't.

Maybe they can, but it's off-line.

And most people don't have ridiculous back up measures hence why there's so much panic and frustration today.

If there is a major failure and you have a job that is traditional work from home, you would be in the same situation in the office with the net down.  Being in an office does not magically make everyone else connected to you.

The office is more likely to have a backup internet source than the average HR mouth-piece still unable to hold a Zoom meeting without leaving themselves on mute at least once.

No office I worked in had a backup internet. They went down, they called in IT.  Even the colleges did not have secondary networks.

Edit:

Likely the colleges now have a sat failover now, but we did have outages when I was at each of them.  Companies around me do not have failover as sat internet does not really work in new england.

Arguably, that was likely some time ago c

Yet the people that had the most problems were your banks and payment processors that were stopped stone cold when the net went down. Not the people working home, but the people that had to connect with a business that had it's workers all in office that were doing nothing because their internet was down.

Nov 8, 2023 1:39:34 GMT c said:

No office I worked in had a backup internet. They went down, they called in IT.  Even the colleges did not have secondary networks.

Edit:

Likely the colleges now have a sat failover now, but we did have outages when I was at each of them.  Companies around me do not have failover as sat internet does not really work in new england.

All networks in Australia now have redundancy.
We have a FTTN connection at work and at home, the modem they provide has a 4G back up so if the primary connection fails through a fault in the network you get switched over to the cellular system.
Problem with today's outage is it hit Fixed and Celular services so the primary and backup went down.
I can guarantee you a lot of companies right now are realsing they need two separate internet connections for such a reason.

It all is a bit of a mess, once upon a time our internet service used copper for the backhaul, now everything from mobile to fixed is IP based with a fibreoptic backhaul.
If something goes down in the routing or in the DNS or something like that, the whole thing falls over.

Most of the US does cellular and network but most major faults hit both as happened yesterday. Redundancy would be to then use sat, but that does not work everywhere well and not it seems few adopted that extra layer as if cellular and network are both down, usually it means a more widespread outage that is disrupting business on multiple levels.

///

Bayer the latest company to start gutting management. Same deal, saves more cash than cutting production level workers. Senior leadership will be retained, most management under them cut.

Not seen the details but the actor strike is finally over. Got everything they wanted but streaming residuals.

Nov 8, 2023 17:31:10 GMT c said:

Most of the US does cellular and network but most major faults hit both as happened yesterday. Redundancy would be to then use sat, but that does not work everywhere well and not it seems few adopted that extra layer as if cellular and network are both down, usually it means a more widespread outage that is disrupting business on multiple levels.

///

Bayer the latest company to start gutting management. Same deal, saves more cash than cutting production level workers. Senior leadership will be retained, most management under them cut.

No, outages don't normally affect both. Most faults with networks are related to the cables or the routing.

They're saying the fault yesterday related to the core network, which is not a likely point of failure as it should have redundancy.

I have only had interruptions to my cellular and fixed broadband when their were large scale power outages in the area.

Where I been in the US, if the net is down, general wifi is also down.

Cellular networks usually are still be up, but internet across cellular networks is sketchy in the US still. Can be patchy in places still, or have speed issues. Why it has not replaced broadband, just too much can interfere with it.

///

Still say though the at home worker is in a better place as if something goes wrong at home, they can move locations, and are expected to do so if you need to connect. The guy at the office, if the office goes out, you are stuck until it is fixed. Going to a local Starbucks to do a meeting is not an open for your regularly in office employee. And if in a position where you cannot find a place with internet, it means the outage is so wide scale that even if you had internet, places you need to connect with likely do not. A office would not make this any different.

Nov 9, 2023 19:29:15 GMT c said:

Where I been in the US, if the net is down, general wifi is also down.

Cellular networks usually are still be up, but internet across cellular networks is sketchy in the US still. Can be patchy in places still, or have speed issues. Why it has not replaced broadband, just too much can interfere with it.

///

Still say though the at home worker is in a better place as if something goes wrong at home, they can move locations, and are expected to do so if you need to connect. The guy at the office, if the office goes out, you are stuck until it is fixed. Going to a local Starbucks to do a meeting is not an open for your regularly in office employee. And if in a position where you cannot find a place with internet, it means the outage is so wide scale that even if you had internet, places you need to connect with likely do not. A office would not make this any different.

We have 4G or 5G everywhere now and speeds are excellent, just not as good for latency. I can hotspot my phone and work from my laptop anywhere without really noticing the difference.

It works in the US but if there an outage for broadband and everyone jump to 5g you then get congestion issues. Also not all areas have strong connections due to people fighting infrastructure upgrades thinking 5g causes cancer. My area blocked an antenna that would even pay us over fears of it giving people brain cancer.  Businesses can put in their hubs to negate this problem, but it is not cheap.

Believe there are still security issues too.

So like it can be used in pinch maybe, but not a full-proof backup and starts to like breakdown with heavy load transfers.  

I see schools pitch using 5g over wifi and the 5g is still claimed to be not reliable enough to keep a modern classroom running.

Nov 9, 2023 21:53:08 GMT c said:

It works in the US but if there an outage for broadband and everyone jump to 5g you then get congestion issues. Also not all areas have strong connections due to people fighting infrastructure upgrades thinking 5g causes cancer. My area blocked an antenna that would even pay us over fears of it giving people brain cancer.  Businesses can put in their hubs to negate this problem, but it is not cheap.

Believe there are still security issues too.

So like it can be used in pinch maybe, but not a full-proof backup and starts to like breakdown with heavy load transfers.  

There's no security issues with cellular, everything is encrypted on just about all websites these days.
That is the limitation of 5G, the bandwidth, but most of that comes down to how you do the backhaul, I'm pretty sure most of that here is now fibre optic not wireless.

For larger companies Starlink is a good option for a back up system, if I lived somewhere rural I would definitely have it.

That is what I been hearing that sat is what they are using for emergency backup.

Here a lot of companies do not want to pay for the fibre optic for a secondary network.

Security issues no idea what it is about, just heard it too with the education stuff. Not an area I follow though, just something that pops up in the tech talks. Believe the use of 5g opens the door to devices being hacked. It is not intercepting the data that is the fear, but being able to attack a device by interacting with it over 5g. Something like security around this not being as far along as network security.

Honda announced today significant raises for their workers next year. Apparently they learned from the other companies and did not press the union.

These days in Merica, millionaires consider themselves middle class just getting by. Quarter of people in the top 10% consider themselves poor or very poor. This extends to people making a million a year.

www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/11/10/survey-31percent-of-millionaires-say-they-are-part-of-the-middle-class.html

If you start to look at credit card debt, people in the 70th percentile or higher carry the majority of the debt, with steep increases for the top the 10%.

But of course it is the poor who want a living wage who need to be spanked for their spending.  Not the rich who need little yachts these days to take them to their big yacht's and consider two to three times the median income in the US to be poor, or not working and being part of the investor class, to be a part of the regular average joe middle class.  Some of which who also carry what the poor make a year on their credit cards in debt.

Well if you consider the middle class to have slowly been disappearing they kinda are right?

Us Brokies
Rich (millionaires)
Owners (billionaires)

More like:

Working class - poor
Investing class - middle class
Billionaires - doing alright

And yeah, what we considered the rich in the 80's and 90's, are now middle class.  The old middle class is now poor struggling to afford basic cost of living.  Then we get lectured how we are so rich while people around us literally die because they cannot afford the medicine they should be taking by people in countries with socialized medicine are far lower inequality rates.

What we're seeing these days are two very different definitions of 'poor '

There's those, let's call them the traditionally poor. Those living on a very low income, or none at all. Living in public housing and living on government assistance, etc. The poor.

Now there are those becoming cash poor due to the current climate. These are people who over-capitalised, who have borrowed big money and carry big debt and for much of the last 15 years we're able to live more than modest lives on their modest incomes despite how much they owe the bank. Perhaps, and likely they had a degree of disposable income and that likely accelerated their spending habits and expectations to a higher level.

Cue inflation, higher interest rates and an overall increase in cost of living, and that bit of cash that was so disposable or ensured their savings accounts were always growing, that's now gone.

The difference between the two is, the second group as long as they can make their repayments will still appear to be well off. They'll keep up appearances - still live in nice houses and drive nice cars.

What this is, is " the rainy day " as in, save for a rainy day. When things are good.. put money away, so you survive the storm.

Looks like tipping culture is starting to fail in the US due to extreme overuse. Average tip in a restaurant is now down to 15% and people are refusing a lot of tips now due to the double dip of service fees then expected tips.

www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/11/10/tipping-restaurants-pew-research-poll/71536108007/

This is going to great a massive change in the near future when it is no longer legal to pay tipped wages to waiters and service people who no longer legally qualify as tipped service workers. And while alternate min wage has been frozen in time forever, min wage in many place have not.

Sole person I tip in my everyday life is my pizza delivery dude.   Super nice Arab guy.  I do not do restaurants anymore due to cost.  If I want a $20 meal, I would rather spend the $20 on high quality ingredients and make it myself.

Canada playing back the classics. Seems they got rent strikes coming back. Basically get dozens to hundreds of tenants together and just stop paying rent. Generally get several months before legal action can be taken, and by time the landlord gets hit with a significant impact, either failing to pay out investors, or failing to make their own payments on debt they owe.

This strike came for the reason they always come, raising rent above fair market prices year after year. Likely due to the new price setting software that suggests max profit prices, and is under investigation in the US for collusion. YieldStar and RealPage are the ones under investigation in the US that suggests at least 15% price increases yearly and promise to outperform the market by 5%.

US really needs to pray this does not come here, as rent backed securities are still one of the hottest investments, and renter strike would crash that market, which will then crash the entire US economy like mortgage backed securities did.

macleans.ca/longforms/rent-strikes-canada/
www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent

There's “quiet quitting”, “lazy girl jobs” and “bare minimum Mondays” and now Gen-Z has invented the "coffee badging" trend.

Sick and tired of feeling oppressed by having to do what their employer asks, Gen-Z kids are coming into the office on their mandatory office days, having a coffee, socializing, being seen by their bosses and then skipping out the back door to go home to the safety of their bedrooms to WFH.

Ironically, an article last week highlighted how young people feel over looked for promotions, bonuses and salary increases.

( side note: Gen-Z invented "silent walking" last month, that sees young people go for a walk without a device and discovering the health benefits of being active and one with nature... I hate young people, like fuck me seriously. )

Funny, I saw people talking about this on reddit and was going to make a post but was not sure it was real. One kid said he went into the office once and now for over a year been work from home and no one noticed.

Also gen Z did not invent any of this shit, it is just terms that the media is creating to do stories on them for the Murdoch rags. It all is really the same thing though, Gen Z works on a contract and learned not to do more work without more pay. And yeah young people are not loyal to companies as companies in the US at least have not been loyal to employees for decades. My mom just hit 40 years at her job. Her new coworker was hired for just slightly less than what my mom is making, with a year experience. This is normal for the US, which is why young people do not invest in companies and do just what they are hired for. They see this everywhere they work.

Is WFH really this massive? Like are there really that many jobs out there that don't require you to be on site for a considerable portion of it? Granted I've always done low level grunt work light physical labor jobs. Or is this just sorta cubicle office culture and it's surrounding industry effects of people staying home?

Murdoch press! Murdoch press! Misinformation! Misinformation!

I don't think WFH is necessarily as big as it was, and the bitching and moaning about returning to the office is isolated to the few.

Speaking recently to a number of guys I knew who did WFH during the pandemic now describe it as an incredibly boring period, and noted how easy it was to lose engagement. A few guys said they really lost sight of their company's goals because they were just so task oriented and when they did go back in eventually, they felt disconnected. One actually left his job WFH as an accountant to take up a leadership role in a completely different sector as he wanted a more fulfilling role working with people.

Those who I know still WFH are usually just using it as a base, as they're in more client focused roles, eg: instead of driving into the office to just then drive the opposite direction to see a client or customer, they'll instead do what they have to do from home first then leave.

Most people are... and I hate to break the news, most people are social and again, it may be news.. but social human interaction is a good thing.

The pandemic is an afterthought here. A fever dream no one really talks about except those clinging into this notion of never leaving the apartment again.

Murdoch claims no reasonable person will his publications are reporting truth statements. If you believe that his publications are factual, not sure what to tell you.

WFH will only grow though as more and more management is moving into WFH roles. As they move to WFH, a lot of their teams also move to WFH. So many start to demand the CEO's, Execs and upper management start to return to the office instead of leaving it first.

Two other massive groups working from home are legal and compliance teams, and data and CS teams.  Good luck getting them back in office, far more jobs than experienced workers in those fields.  Most finance teams are also work from home still.  Again, more jobs than people with accounting degrees and certifications.

Maybe if management was in the office, they could push to get teams back, but if they have to have a remote access setup to contact them, why be in an office to do so?  If you boss is not in the office, and your work is not in the office, you should not have to be there yourself.

And if people lack the ability to communicate online professionally, that is on them.  Maybe work from home is not right for that group, but that is the minority, not the majority.

According to Forbes.

As of 2023, 12.7% of full-time employees work from home, while 28.2% work a hybrid model. Currently, 12.7% of full-time employees work from home, illustrating the rapid normalization of remote work environments. Simultaneously, a significant 28.2% of employees have adapted to a hybrid work model.

The computer and IT sector leads as the top industry for remote work in 2023.

Marketing, accounting and finance, and project management have embraced remote work, using digital tools and platforms to ensure work continuity.

The age group most likely to work remotely are those aged 24 to 35.

According to the Census Bureau, in 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, 5.7% of working Americans were working from home, but that percentage grew to 17.9% in just two years.