> including the open-source models by Meta

"open-source"

This is great from a legal standpoint for net neutrality.

ISPs (and their FCC champions) like to claim they are not telecom services that funnel data back and forth which makes them Title II common carriers, subject to strong FCC oversight.

Instead they say they are information services who process and change data. Then they are Title I services that the FCC has little authority over.

One way they do this is by saying they have DNS, that translates domains into IP addresses.

Of course that's incidental but the more that people actually use alternative DNS, the clearer it is that DNS services aren't core to their offers, and the more evidence there is to show to a court that ISPs are Title II services.

So if you want to support the upcoming return of federal net neutrality protections and FCC oversight of ISPs, one thing you can do is choose DNS NOT provided by your ISP.

They do keep people employed in useless jobs though. Sometimes hiring shuts down, sometimes they do purges of useless jobs, but it's the larger population that shows the trend.

Nobody will sign up for that job.

what the resistance to WFH makes explicit is that when companies hire workers they don't really conceive of it as buying their labour, they conceive of it as taking control of them for eight hours and dictating how they have to behave.

That's the real reason why WFH faces so much resistance. When people are done with their work they can just play with their kid or do what they want, and it becomes obvious how much, using Foucault's analogy, of a prison aimed to discipline the office is.

I am so glad grocery store stockers can work from home now. Amazon workers too, a robot will send the package to the Amazon workers home so they can re-package it in a box and ship it via regularly scheduled pickups from the UPS and Fedex workers that work from home. (Their home, of course, is the Fifth Wheel the company is giving them to do deliveries from)

> One line I can't square with mandatory returns to office is that the same orgs and agencies requiring employees in office are also waving big flags about going green and fighting climate change. Has anyone seen a justification for the disconnect?

The type of argument

> It's hypocritical that they [group A] are the ones doing [some thing] but at the same time also being the ones [group B] doing [another thing]

with groups A and B being independent of each other often irks me. Who says they are actually the same people? What is this line of thought called, that must be a named fallacy of some kind.

No, but if many people are working from home (and socializing the costs of office space), then the company has less incentive to keep an office around at all, leaving people who prefer working from an office out of luck.

So if, say, office hours are eight hours per day, you are incentivized to move four hours away?

I have maybe a hail-mary counterpoint:

The day-to-day job on an individual scale can definitely be pointless. In aggregate though, the point of the job ends up being to keep people employed and pay taxes. That's it!

No one will like that explanation without a perspective change, and for good reason. I'd wager most people do try to put some effort into having skills and holding down a job. It obviously sucks for that effort to go to waste.

This study is, perhaps, a sign that we should view these jobs as a form of basic income in disguise. No one's going to like that ruse because it means your skills are being wasted, sure, but the alternative is ripping the band-aid off (and it's a big one) by eliminating those jobs and moving those people to socially useful ones. This action would cause chaos, which is likely why nothing has eliminated the bullshit jobs yet.

The problem is, there likely isn't enough socially useful jobs as well paying as these pointless jobs. Even if there were, you'd need training infrastructure to transition people to new jobs.

So why then should people change their perspectives? Well, the fault of having a pointless job is not really on the person, but the economy, which has grown very quickly and added jobs without regard to how socially useful they are on a long timeline. Nothing really keeps this job growth in check except market forces, which may not be rational.

If you can mentally deal with the fact that your skills are going to waste and not being used for something socially important, and frankly stop caring as much at your job, you can use the time on the pointless job for more fulfilling things.