If you have management that tries to push for a return, give them this article from Microsoft and request a discussion of its many points.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/hybrid-work-is-just-work
WFH, particularly in 2020-2021, was the opportunity for managers to learn how to effectively manage remotely, using metrics and good planning practices. Those who failed to do so should be the ones questioned as to why they should remain as managers.
A big difference, however, is that houses in the 80s were 3-4 times the average income. Now that ratio is about 10x.
Younger generations always need to work harder than older people, yes, but the major difference is that working hard these days doesn't provide the same rewards that it once did.
And it didn't just go extinct by luck. It's a good case study of how to control and/or eliminate a virus (e.g. COVID):
"The rapid and global implementation of social distancing measures, masking, and the profound early reduction in international travel resulted in a substantial reduction in flu transmission."
We shouldn't concede that the public has to pay more to fix this problem. We just need to pressure our government representatives to prioritise funding for education above that of other areas.
The average teacher makes $84,810 per year.
It is estimated that there are 307,041 full time teachers.
This equates to a full teacher salary budget of $26B. We know that education is managed at the state level, but let's just experiment with a scenario whereby the federal government decides to provide a funding boost to salaries. Giving all teachers a 25% pay rise would cost $6.5B per year.
How much was the 2023 budget surplus just recently announced by the government? $22B.
So, the government could have covered a 25% pay increase to all teachers in Australia, using a third of the surplus that they realised in this year's budget.
Ok, that's for one year, but what about future years, you might ask...
Well, how about we take some of the funding from the scrapping of Stage 3 tax cuts. The Parliamentary Budget Office estimates that the cost of the Stage 3 tax cuts will be $313B over a decade ($31.3B per year). Those tax cuts could even be watered down so that they don't impact lower incomes. The top 20% of income earners in the country receive 73% of the benefit from those tax cuts.
Let's only have tax cuts for the bottom 80% of income earners. That would still give us $22.8B per year in extra budget that we allocate to education. It's that simple.
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I've been thinking about this perspective for a while now, so it's good to see the topic raised in the mainstream media. If you compare a business investment or buying shares in Australian companies with investing in property, there is much greater value to society and positive flow-on effects from business investing.
A business can use the investment to hire staff, produce more goods / services for export, and growing revenues mean more tax revenue for the government.
With investment properties, the owner buys a property by outbidding someone who may have just wanted a home and they then proceed to charge that same group with a rent burden. No additional jobs are created from the investment property and a cost burden is placed on the renter, reducing their disposable income.
As a society, we need to start thinking about investment properties in the way that we would think about fossil fuels. We know it is easy and it makes money, but it's bad for future generations and we need to transition to alternatives.
You know you can follow the tweet to learn more about the author, right?
That "random person" is Trisha Greenhalgh - Professor of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford.
Here's an excerpt from her Oxford Uni profile:
Trish is the author of over 400 peer-reviewed publications and 16 textbooks. She was awarded the OBE for Services to Medicine by Her Majesty the Queen in 2001, made a Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences in 2014, and elected an International Fellow of the US Academy of Medicine in 2021. She is also a Fellow of the UK Royal College of Physicians, Royal College of General Practitioners, Faculty of Clinical Informatics and Faculty of Public Health.
https://www.phc.ox.ac.uk/team/trish-greenhalgh
Her Google Scholar profile shows that her work has been cited almost 95,000 times in other research papers.
https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?sortby=pubdate&hl=en&user=8KQwEGcAAAAJ&view_op=list_works
I'm not sure that they ever had any data because the data would probably suggest that management had the lowest productivity out of any employee. Middle management is filled with too many meetings, they're all promoted to a level of incompetency, and have delusions that they contribute more towards the success of the business than the skilled people below them.
I wear masks on public transport and when flying. Even without reading the latest research on long-term COVID impacts, the amount of people openly sneezing and coughing is enough to convince me to keep doing it.
The situation isn't really a lack of jobs, it's that younger generations don't want to work the factory jobs (because they all studied for better jobs) and there is pressure to look after parents. Not only is there an imbalance in young vs old people due to the one child policy but China also passed a law that required children to provide mental and financial support to their parents. Some parents are effectively paying their children to look after them, thereby removing them from the workforce count.
https://www.voanews.com/a/china-elder-care-law-a-struggle-for-one-child-families/1704200.html
There are plenty of alternatives (e.g. Vietnam or Mexico), but China still offers enough advantages to make it the preferred option. This article explains it well: https://www.china-briefing.com/news/reshoring-from-china-to-mexico-how-prevalent-is-it-really/
If you look at various economic indicators, it seems likely that we have reached the peak of China's production.
Exports peaked in Dec '21: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/china/total-exports
Population - declining: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/china/population
Labour force participation rate - declining: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/china/labour-force-participation-rate
Employed persons - declining: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/china/employed-persons
Manufacturing wages - doubled in the past 10 years: https://tradingeconomics.com/china/wages-in-manufacturing
There's quite a difference between rapid prototyping on software/hardware versus the human body.
Musk's approach to developing engineering advances has worked well in the software, aerospace, and vehicular industries. Development on inorganic things is much more predictable, we can isolate variables, and it is easier to understand cause & effect. If you screw up some software on an inorganic system, your program might crash, your rocket might explode, or your car won't start. These risks can be anticipated and costed fairly well, therefore rapid prototyping has an acceptable risk/reward ratio in that environment.
The human body, on the other hand, is an extremely complex system that we still don't fully understand. Each person is a unique variation on the model and that changes over time depending on upbringing, diet, exercise, and life experiences. Applying the same engineering approaches from inorganic industries has a much higher risk once you cross into the medical realm. If you have errors in a medical situation, you risk sickening, injuring, or even killing a person. The risk/reward ratio is skewed towards ensuring that human life is protected at all costs.
Using SpaceX as an example, the first three launches failed spectacularly and a fourth failure would have ended the business but fortunately the fourth test was a success. If you're suggesting that we apply the same risk-taking to Neuralink, are you suggesting that it's acceptable for the first three patients to die, as long as the fourth is a success?