Can you please not take HN threads further into flamewar and/or do the ideological battle thing here?

(Btw, I appreciate that your comments have improved away from this direction in general.)

Can we not do these straw man arguments?

I am a remote worker. I'm certainly not for making my own life worse.

Surely we can see a mismatch, however, when there are people who are considered essential enough to risk their lives, but not considered essential enough to be paid enough to own their own home or car. I think there are a lot of non-remote jobs which can't be done remotely, but I do think we could pay those workers more.

... even if letting the people who can work remotely do so is a net win overall for everybody when you consider the reduced environmental impact.

And if continued forever, reduced pressure on high housing costs, which currently hit lower income earners very hard.

That’s purely a regulation issue. We could easily have more affordable housing by increasing supply. If you move people from one area to another without changing supply, you’re just gonna cause issues in the next area.

But if the "one area" is one of ~10 expensive cities and the "another" is 100s of smaller cities, suburbs and large towns, it's much easier to build to meet the change.

Theoretically but that’s just a burueacratic hurdle. Struggling towns would likely build if they knew people would come in but could get stonewalled by local people too. (Don’t let in them city slickers!)

The issue is regulation. And I think it’d be better if we just allowed for taller buildings in some of these areas rather than sprawling out everything. Many people don’t want a SFH with a little yard and are happy with an apartment.

Nah, I think he is pointing out that if more remote work becomes the norm, urban areas will see an exodus to more rural, cheaper areas to live, and the demand for living spaces will decrease lowering the costs of rent in urban areas where most poor people live.

No he's saying that less commuting will help the environment and that that's worth sacrificing poor people's jobs. I'm saying I disagree because if the goal were maximizing some kind of utility function then I have an even better solution.

Re your point: obviously you're unfamiliar with the effects of white flight to the suburbs on inner cities. White people (read: wealthy people) have already made that migration in the 50s and 60s and took all of tax revenue with them, leading to places like Detroit and South side Chicago. It was only during the 2000s that they've migrated back to cities. Heading back to the suburbs will repeat history that's literally only 50 years old.

Edit: alright which part am I wrong about mr downvoter

> less commuting will help the environment and that that's worth sacrificing poor people's jobs

No, he's saying that if some people work from home and some other people don't, fewer people will commute, the environment we all share will benefit, but people who can't work from home can still do their jobs. (Source: am the one who said it)

Great. Now map out for me what happens to counties that get the bulk of their tax revenue from property taxes and then use that tax revenue to preserve and improve the environs of that county? Just think about it for two seconds: how good is park beautification on one side of the train tracks vs the other? Is that because of commuting or something else?

>, but people who can't work from home can still do their jobs

seeing as how service jobs can't be done from home this prompts the question: for whom exactly are these people going to be providing services when all of the remote workers have fled to the suburbs? so will they actually be able to "do their jobs"?

Houses get cleaned and other service jobs get done in suburbs too.

but now the poor people have to commute to the suburbs completely negating the environmental benefits lol

If they're unable to move, that's 100% right. If they're able to move, even if it's just closer, it could still be a win.

so now we're down to "devs move to suburbs and poor people move a little closer" in order to improve the world? and you still don't think that this disproportionately hurts poor people? do i really have to do more work to show you how this is galaxy brain thinking?

If poor people are currently living in expensive, cramped housing because they’re forced like many others to all commute every day to the same few spots on the Earth we call big cities and we replace that with a system where much more land becomes easy to use to for housing because we’re not going to worship for 8 hours every day at the work temple, I think it’s quite possible that the poor and middle class are both substantially helped.

If your concern is that both are helped but the poor are helped slightly less and conclude from that that means we shouldn’t do it, well, that’s one approach I suppose.

>where much more land becomes easy to use to for housing

what are these revolutionary changes that will make the wild wild west more hospitable? is it public transportation? is it more investment in local schools? is it small walkable main streets? none of these things will happen the way you imagine they will. how do i know that? can i predict the future? am i a city planner? no. you're repeating everything that everyone said ~50 years ago when rich people migrated away from cities. i've already brought this up elsewhere in this thread. like seriously just take a step back and pattern match for 2 seconds.

> he's saying ... that that's worth sacrificing poor people's jobs

I'm not sure we read the same comment - I didn't read anything about sacrificing anyone's jobs.

Every time there's an article on hn highlighting how a vulnerable/at risk/marginalized group of people is being put further at risk the typical response is exactly yours: selfish instead of charitable.

They're not miserable people simply because you don't get to have another luxury. They're circumspect and compassionate for not simply being complacent and instead exploring all of the effects. You do realize the authors themselves benefit from remote work right?

Guess what: if the world is going to improve for poor people then we rich people are going to have to forgo some luxuries; reagonomics/"rising tide raises all ships" doesn't work (how well are the poor people in SF doing?). Casting aspersions on people (authors here) for sounding the alarms on yet another impending structural shift that will further weaken the poor is a special kind of immoral.

> Guess what: if the world is going to improve for poor people then we rich people are going to have to forgo some luxuries; reagonomics/"rising tide raises all ships" doesn't work (how well are the poor people in SF doing?).

How does rich people forgoing luxuries help poor people? Moreover, the poor people in SF are doing a hell of a lot better than many parts of the world. I lived in Africa for two years and a minimum wage worker in the US would be considered almost unimaginably wealthy.

Poor is relative, and the working class in America would be doing great if not for the massive inflation in college, housing, and healthcare prices. And what do all three have in common? You guessed it, the government! It should be no surprise to anyone that the natural result of pumping absurd amounts of money into these sectors (student loans, government subsidized mortgages, medicare/medicaid) is inflated prices.

I think if the world is going to improve for poor people, then individuals who aren't poor are going to have to learn how to not oversimplify reality into simplistic narratives for their own mental comfort. If you admit that reagonomic "rising tide rise all ships" rhetoric is structurally flawed (which is certainly true), then I think you can probably make the next step towards understanding that unless you have four commas in your bank account, you do not have enough clout to change the structure of the current socioeconomic system. And from there, you can probably make the next step towards understanding that it's built that way for a reason, that the hierarchical aggregation of socioeconomic capital towards the top of the hierarchy was designed intentionally.