If it counts, I encountered a Java file that, unbeknownst to me at the time, was duplicated across two different places. The project was essentially abandoned for years, and the file was one that didn’t change much so I left it alone for a year or so.

Eventually I had to add a method to it. Compiled just fine, runtime threw a no such method error. Turned out Eclipse was using one, but when Maven did its build it used the old duplicate I didn’t know existed.

Took me a while to find that one!

Especially when you consider that big rewards are not offered when detectives can figure things out pretty easily. The ante goes up with severity and difficulty. I’m sure there was a reward for Osama bin Laden, but I wasn’t not turning him in because the reward was too small or I didn’t believe I’d get paid. I just didn’t know where the dude was, let alone how I could get him turned in

Would it have killed them to say who, though?

Oh yeah, clicks.

Fuck that headline. It was the president of Portugal.

Choose a house with 1 extra room, courtesy of your WFH savings.

You’re not totally off-base there

An itemized cost paid straight by your employer will have the effect of encouraging them to waste less of your time with a commute.

When WFH is an option. Where it isn’t (eg, the sandwich dude)…

They might try to hire locally, might pay for moving expenses, might keep you out of rush hour traffic, might be worried about keeping you late such that now you’re driving on overtime, might actually align their concerns with the planet’s by reducing all the oil going literally up in flames to transport people around to do knowledge work in a cubicle.

I have a really hard time seeing this actually happening in practice, especially on low-level jobs. Or people who live with their family (of whom others work elsewhere). Or when you say “hire locally” I say “can’t get a damn job in my field because I don’t live nearby and moving would take my wife away from her job”

Ingo

From a financial perspective, and IF one does make significantly more, I guess maybe.

From a relationship perspective, using my 2x 30 minute commutes for workplaces an hour apart example, if I had to take two additional hours out of my day away from home every work day, while my partner had to take 2 minutes… Woof. Even if there’s a perfectly logical financial reason that’s hard not to feel resentment over.

You’re talking about giant differences in location (cross-country) which, of course, would need some hard decisions to be made. I’m talking about realistic compromises that may have to be made between a couple with very different work locations in the same general area. When I talked about Lincoln vs Omaha, NE, those two cities are an hour apart. But could be a 30-minute commute in opposite directions for each. Maybe one person works in downtown Chicago, while the other works in the O’Hare airport. Maybe people work in two different boroughs of NYC. If the employer incentived an employee to live nearby, what about their family who works across town? Things crumble apart with that.

Coming in hot with my personal financial situation, eh? Nice. For what it’s worth a major reason I was able to buy the home I have is because we’ve been here over a decade - bought just as the crash started to recover. And if you re-read what I said, cost was absolutely a factor in my choosing where to live. If I could afford to spend at least double for a similar house in the middle of the city, maybe I would have. But I couldn’t. The last thing I want to do is take a “fuck you, I’ve got mine” attitude but that doesn’t mean I can’t point out giant issues with ideas people are coming up with. You’re welcome to pick apart those arguments, but if you feel the need to go after me personally instead, maybe you should think about why that is.

Like when you bring up taking location into account for an office location. I live on one side of the metro area, many of my coworkers live elsewhere. Take a company with enough people working somewhere, and their “average” location will probably end up near the middle of the city - more than likely a downtown area. Which brings us right back to where we started.

What’s more, everything you say may theoretically work for one person going to one workplace from one home. What about a married couple who work in entirely different places? If one person has a job in (for example) Omaha, NE and the other in Lincoln, that couple could conceivably live in between those two cities and each have a sorta long but doable commute. If a company were to “provide a benefit like a subsidized loan for property closer to the work” (you mean like a mortgage?) that would not only be insane for that random shop with 3 employees (not all business owners are automatically in the <1%) but it would put that employee’s partner at a disadvantage by making them have a longer commute.

Your not ready

Grammar… in moderation 😉

Because I’m talking about different things: paying for commute times for jobs that could be done at home, and paying for commute times in general.

I mean, I agree with a lot of what you said but also we haven’t had any federal minimum wage bumps in a decade and a half. States that follow federal minimum wage haven’t exactly kept their cost of living frozen.

Arguably there is an average commute time baked into the wage already along with other expenses people have in life. I’m not sure it needs to be itemized out as its own thing.

And this also assumes an IMO flawed assumption that working from home is entirely expense-free. I have a decent work area in my home. If I didn’t, that space could be used for another kid’s bedroom. Or a craft room for the wife. Or a dedicated Lego room. Or a sex dungeon. Maybe some of those things can be paired up with an office easily enough, but that’s my choice, not my employer’s. Plus there are other day to day costs, like the electricity to run my equipment, the Internet connection I probably would have had in the 21st century but technically don’t have to, heating/cooling costs… You get the idea.

The implication of this is that if that job can’t be done from home, it’s not theft. So the guy making pretty decent money in an office job that could be done at home should get compensated for their commute, but the sandwich artist making far less should not because that can’t be done at home?

And before we start saying that everyone should have their commute compensated, that has a lot of baggage to it too. I live in the suburbs. I chose to live there knowing there was a trade-off between having more house for the money, but also spending more time in my car to get anywhere. If I were searching for a job, I wouldn’t want to be passed over for it because of the longer commute time I was expecting to have from my own choice in where to live. And let’s say I decided to move 3 hours away to be closer to my in-laws or something. But don’t worry boss, I’ll keep working here! I just won’t be in the office for more than 2 hours a day unless you want to pay me overtime. That’s… A little ridiculous.

Ok, so we have a lot effed up in our system right now and I’m not trying to discount that. But this is like high school economics level stuff when I ask…

At $150/hr, you could afford to buy a an average home with a years pay.

Between the lowered supply of creating houses (in that it becomes more expensive to produce a house because everyone is getting paid a hell of a lot more) and the increased demand for housing because everyone has a bigger number in their bank account… Do you really expect that housing prices would just… Stay the same?

I’m also curious when any society at any point in history has been able to sustain decent housing with about a year’s worth of wages?

It most certainly is

Nah. If I’m learning a new language, I’m going to speak like a toddler at first. I’m more likely to be accused of that than an LLM capable of long paragraphs giving minimal accuracy about stuff

Basically a repeat of 2014 after Russia took Ukraine Crimea and 8 years later they wanted more and there was nothing to stop them but the Ukrainian pushback (which, honestly, kudos for holding out this long).

So what’s going to happen in 2030?

Do you know where to start with something like that? I’m pretty handy, love working with electrical stuff, and live in a very sunny area (Colorado)… But I am also afraid of heights and have a really high roof on my split-level house. Is there any reasonable way to buy the material, hire out anything that involves a ladder, and do everything on the ground myself? I always thought it would be pretty much all or nothing (DIY vs having it done) but now you have me thinking…

“I know! Let’s make our logo the first letter of our product! It’ll make for a great app icon especially, because they’ll easily recognize that sharp logo”

(I have 18 apps with a monogram logo icon)