That's not what I meant about taxes. What I meant is that in California, your property tax assessment is set at purchase time. If you move to a new house, your new property is assessed at the new purchase price. That tax situation can easily create a five-figures-per-year disincentive towards moving closer to your job when you change jobs. It may not be your employer's problem, but it absolutely affects where people choose to work.

The corollary of that statement is that if employers truly want the best people, they're fundamentally doing themselves a disservice by demanding too much in-person time, because not everyone is that easily mobile. It also tends to discriminate against older workers, who are more likely to own a home, have kids in school, have a working spouse, and have various other things that tie them to their current residence and make commuting harder.

Yes, it's a trade-off, but there's no evidence that it is in employers' best interests to force employees to make that trade-off, and that's the point I was trying to make.

And BTW, to all the people obssessed with "paleo" / "cave men" diets and think that means "meat":

While there certainly were (just like today) some hunter-gatherer societies (such as in the high arctic) that got most of their calories from meat, the average hunter-gatherer got the majority of their calories from plants. But not highly bred high-calorie plants, but rather high-fibre wild plants, meaning that they had to eat significantly more of these fibre-loaded plants. Your average hunter-gatherer ancestor ate way more fibre than a person eating a "modern" diet today eats.

A proper "paleo" / "cave man" diet isn't a high-meat diet - it's a high fibre diet.

No, the last fad was antioxidants. Bodybuilders being obsessed with protein is entirely different from maxing protein in normal consumer food products (even things as non-protein-related as water itself)

Do be careful with that. Do remember that inflammation isn't inherently bad. Inflammation is the activity of the innate immune system, doing things like fighting/preventing disease and cancer surveillance/attack. Just shutting down inflammatory reactions (for example, long-term taking prednisone or an equivalent steroid treatment) can certainly make you feel great, but can significantly shorten your expected lifespan.

Don't get me wrong, if you have a chronic inflammatory disease, it absolutely needs treatment, and the medical system is often pathetically bad about treating them. Chronic inflammation itself can even lead to cancer, such as lymphoma. But you need to find a targeted way to control your specific condition. For example, if you have say Sjögren's with small fibre neuropathy, an appropriate treatment might be IVIG or something like HyQvia or Hizentra - not broad-based immunosuppression. Unfortunately, such treatments are expensive, and doctors often resist prescribing them, or patients end up in insurance-denial hell.

They really haven't. Nutrition science has been a process of refinement as we've learned more over time. E.g.:

"Fat is bad"
"Saturated fat is bad, non is good"
"Saturated fat is bad, monounsaturated is good, polyunsaturated is bad. Oh, and trans fat is really bad."
"Well, among the polys, omega 3s are good, others are bad"
Many refinements later: "Concerning this specific fat molecule, the health impacts are X, except there's evidence that people with Y genetics have Z impact..."

The earlier statements weren't wrong, they were just overly broad.

This is part of why I had the new "ultraprocessed" label. We've been working so hard to separate out what specific things are causing what impacts, and then they just leap backwards and lump everything back together again : Homemade doughnuts deep-fried in coconut oil and lard: "not ultraprocessed". Store whole-grain bread: "ultraprocessed". Such a moronic grouping. Yes, the average of the ultraprocessed category is worse than the average of the non-ultraprocessed category, but that says nothing about individual foods. It's also a back door for anti-tech/anti-science woo to sneak into food science.

The issue is that this is only relevant to sustenance farmers, people with certain diseases, and alcoholics.

It's almost impossible to end up with an essential amino acid deficiency eating any "normal" modern diet. Even a vegan eating junk food is going to get sufficient quantities (they're going to suck at bodybuilding, but they're not going to get deficiency symptoms). There's too many staples that go into modern food. Nobody eats "only corn", "only wheat", "only potatoes", "only soy", or whatnot; it's always a mix. And there's no need to get everything all at once within a single meal - it's fine for it to be spread out not just between meals within a given day, but across multiple days.

Yeah, even on a vegan junk food diet, it's almost impossible for a modern person to not get all the amino acids they need, for the simple reason that there's not just one plant used in vegan junk food - corn, wheat, potato, soy, etc - and together, even if their protein is watered down with a lot of carbs and fat, any realistic mix still hits sufficient levels of essential amino acids, as the required amounts of each to avoid deficiency aren't huge.

Vegans have other actual things to worry more about. B12, for example, requires fortification or supplements (the body stores years worth at a time, but eventually you will run out if you don't consume it). Iron is highly likely to be in the low-but-acceptable to deficient range if either the diet isn't specifically high-iron or supplements taken. Some other minerals are real but lesser risks than iron as well. Etc.

Re: protein, they're surely talking about "in a modern diet, without disease, alcoholism, etc". Of course people in sustenance diets can readily end up with protein deficiency. Some diseases can cause it, and severe alcoholism can lead people to it as well. But a "normal" person eating any "normal" modern diet doesn't really need to think about whether they're getting enough protein.

Now, deficiency aside, people working on muscle building do need to actually think about what they're eating. But again most go too far - benefits taper off after about 1,6-2,2g/kg-d. There's some uncertainty about these figures, and it's possible that there may be some benefit to somewhat higher protein intake, but there's no benefit to living off of an extreme protein diet like some do.

Yeah, the grocery stores in Iceland stock huge amounts of "Collab" sparkling water, whose main selling point is that it contains "marine collagen". Aka fish skin. People are buying fish skin soda. En masse.

This world is insane.

No, you could always either change jobs or sell your house and take a huge property tax hit every year for the rest of your life.

That's like saying that all a new pharmacist needs to learn to get started in dispensing is one book: The PDR. The information on the medications is in there, the knowledge to comprehend it is not. If you had an infinite amount of time, and one of the really well-documented versions of Unix, what you say is true, for an educated and/or talented user. But not all man pages are very good, and some are missing entirely and it's not obvious where to find the documentation.

Some things are also only documented in the pages for programmers, but I've never seen a Unix system come with the kind of documentation you'd reasonably need to start learning C, or in most cases even shell scripting (although the modern bash man page is pretty good!)

For the overwhelming majority of roles in tech, the pandemic proved not only that those workers could be WFH, but that the company's efficiency on average went up when doing so. Yes, some workers' efficiency went down, usually because of having kids who were also at home, and struggling to manage that, but once that condition went away, there was even less reason why those workers needed to be in the office. This leaves only the people for whom physically commuting to the office was necessary to avoid distractions, which is nonzero, but is again specific to the person, not the role.

I mean, if you include things like custodians, maintenance, security, food service workers, and IT, then I suppose those roles have to be partially or completely on-site, but that's only because the roles are focused on physically maintaining the site. And most of those are outsourced to contractors in any large company anyway.

The employees who truly have to go onsite are mostly support staff, and even in a pre-pandemic, pre-WFH world, were likely to be paid far less than the ones who didn't.

Work travel is a convenience for the employer. It was never actually a requirement for working with people in other states or countries, but rather a sign that they don't know how to properly manage the time zone interactions. But yeah, if they're making you travel overseas to meet with other teams or partner companies or stuff like that, they should pay you more for having to be able to drop everything and be mobile like that. Flip side is that doing so tends to be discriminatory against people with kids, etc., so it is potentially problematic to do so. A better solution is to make work travel optional, and make it "bring your family" so that you spend a week doing work and then your family joins you for a week of paid vacation as compensation.

But the fact that your employer requires you to wear suits puts your employer in the "What decade is this?" category. That's 1980s territory right there, and makes me wonder if the reason you have to be there in person is simply because your company is so far behind the rest of the industry that they can't figure out how to enable remote work properly.

Defense contractor?

I can't speak for the GP, but making 4x my salary wouldn't be a motivator for me. The industry already pays stupid amounts of money. I have enough money to comfortably retire pretty much anywhere in the world, and I'm two decades from retirement age. So if I were in a situation where working from home 5 days a week were extremely important to me, rather than merely a case of me being annoyed at how much less work I get done post-pandemic, then yeah, I'd give that job up. But that's me, and everyone's situation is different.

Because they have decade-long commitments to leasing buildings, and that money isn't going to stop being spent just because people can't use them. Because they want to reduce headcount, and pissing off their workers is a great way to reduce attrition. Because their C-suite has large investments in companies that own buildings, which their companies lease, and if companies lease fewer buildings, it directly affects their personal bottom line. There are lots of reasons, most of which have jack s**t to do with efficiency.

It is well established that most tech companies got suddenly more efficient when everyone started working from home, at least on average, and that return-to-office mandates caused productivity to crater. Most of this is because not knowing whether your employees will be there turns out to be extremely useful, because it causes people to be judicious about scheduling meetings. As soon as we returned to the office, meeting culture came back, and we waste a quarter of our time doing nothing but status reports and listening to status reports.

If you read what I wrote, you didn't understand it.

Feel free to ask for clarification, or simply to point out any parts of what I wrote that you find unclear. I'm looking for ways to better explain this.

General public believes whoever has the most money deserves it.

Then someone new has the most money, what happened to the old guy? Fell out of God's favor? Never mind all that, we're looking at the new shiny shiny, we've got no time for any other kind of reflection.

Prosperity theology is the dominant belief system. To the winner go the spoils.

When you say that someone's argument is bad because they are allegedly unsophisticated, that is ad hominem. When you say that someone is clearly unsophisticated because of their foolish argument, that is not ad hominem. This is probably the most widely misunderstood logical fallacy, if only because it's the most familiar — if not well-known, in that it is not well-understood. It means argument from a person, and if you are not arguing that someone's argument is bad because of some thing about them which doesn't affect the argument true or not then it's not an ad hominem.

For example, pointing out that someone's argument is potentially biased because they are relevantly economically involved is a valid response to someone claiming they have no reason to make deceptive statements, but it's still not a valid argument for or against a position because it doesn't make specific testable claims. It's just window dressing intended to engender an emotional response. Even though it's not an insult, if you're depending on it to prove something did or didn't happen or to distract from a lack of proof, it's still the same logical fallacy.

If you think someone is being needlessly insulting, you can just say that. There's no need to invoke ad hominem to point out that someone is being a bell end.