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!)

As long as we're throwing out unsubstantiated claims - though this is completely true - I work for a company with effectively zero on-prem non-front-line workers. And not talking about the financial services sector or some niche mom-n'-pop, it employs a few thousand people (is that less than "many thousands"? Does it matter?) in an industry we all use but isn't particularly visible; I'd call it better than 50/50 you've personally received services from my employer.

When I say "virtually all white collar work", I mean exactly that; and while I recognize your hyperbole, I have no issue with it because it's still true, at least as a proof of concept. Your own company's failure to accomplish the same is a condemnation, not a counterpoint. Sure, let's not sugar coat this - Of course there are people who can't be trusted to work remotely. That's a completely different claim, however, than saying the job itself couldn't be performed remotely.

More importantly than our respective anecdata, I'm not the one initiating this claim. I provided a cite, take it up with Marissa Shandell, Courtney Elliott, and Adam Grant as published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

/ And don't think I didn't catch that context switch between your third and fourth paragraphs... Unless you happen to be a manager of professional social media astroturfers.

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.

I agree with you overall - I work because I need income to live, not because I give the least damn about my employer.

In my opinion, that's still drastically different than working because it gives me a captive audience of people highly motivated to kiss ass. Loyalty or not, I am invested in my work (as opposed to my job) - Doing it reasonably well is directly conducive to the company remaining solvent and me continuing to draw a salary.

Am I merely deluding myself by thinking doing the job well because it's in my and my coworkers' best interest, is at least a tiny bit more noble than doing it because I like having an army of sycophants at my disposal? Maybe, Maybe not; in the context of WFH, though - I still get my work done, while the Bill Lundbergs of the world have realized to their horror they're utterly irrelevant to my productivity.

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.

That's literally the premise of this thread.

It's not that it's sacred, that's a dumb take. It's not just a job like any other, that's an ignorant take.

Perhaps it should be, but it's the private sector that should change, to provide more accountability.

DMV jobs are complicated because the law is complicated.

IRS jobs, potentially the same. It depends on the level of the person you're talking to.

Covid showed us that far, far more of us can successfully WFH than were previously doing so.

Yeah, IT is the low-hanging fruit here; but we now know virtually all white collar work can effectively be done remotely; and going further, unless your job specifically requires direct interaction with the product or customers, there's little legitimate reason to burn an extra 20% of our waking lives commuting. And that just to hang out in a noisy and disruptive environment full of people more interested in being seen than in doing the job.

The noteworthy exception is, unsurprisingly, management itself. WFH has effectively demonstrated the problem was never us worthless lazy doers, it's been managers who consider visibility as their primary role all along (or worse, ones who "oppose virtual work primarily because it threatens their access to power and status, rather than out of concern for organizational productivity."). But actually managing requires real skill. It's more palatable to leadership to conflate managing with browbeating than finding people who can actually manage.

It's much simpler than all that - Remote work proves management are exactly as useless and attention-seeking as we always suspected they were.

Leaders equating line-of-sight supervision with effectiveness found themselves without their primary management tool

having well-trained, well-motivated managers leads to massive boosts in productivity from hybrid and remote working models. The data support this argument from the flip side, too. Among companies that reported struggles with remote work, this issue was concentrated in firms in which leaders fumbled the management and coordination of their remote teams.

Remote and hybrid workers are struggling with leadership gaps that were never addressed when companies shifted out of the office. Many management habits remain rooted in on-site visibility rather than clear expectations and outcomes.

And most damning of all, The study concludes that narcissistic leaders oppose virtual work primarily because it threatens their access to power and status, rather than out of concern for organizational productivity. Shandell, Elliott, and Grant write that "leader narcissism is a critical but neglected source of resistance to remote work."

Microsoft needs OEMs to buy licenses, even at a deeply discounted rate this is important (and importantly, has been dependable) revenue. They only do that when they are selling PCs. Microsoft had to help those OEMs sell PCs to capture that revenue.

Microsoft knows that source is drying up. Companies will be able to move away from Windows. This is why they have been shifting their focus towards the cloud. Like IBM, they have become a services company as they became staid and unable to execute on delivering exciting products, or in fact products people want. Instead, the best they can do is products they're forced to use. The money is all the same color no matter what the feelings behind it are...

The methodologies of these surveys are often mysterious and when we find out how they work they are usually bad, so you shouldn't take any particular major change seriously unless you know specifically why it happened. If you read statcounter's FAQ, they basically say they publish data as they get it, and then say they make some modifications, and then say that's basically publishing data as they get it, pinky swear! So you probably shouldn't take it seriously ever.

I started using Linux at a time when it was still pretty common for people using Unixlikes on PC to not use graphics, though I did put in a 1 MB VGA card and start using X right away. Still, maybe that kind of perspective is why I consider more things to be "using Linux" than some people do. Even Android is recognizably Linux underneath, when you consider it from the shell. You can put a full userland on it and have hundreds of users logged into your phone playing rogue and using icb, if people still did that.

Lots of things including changes in methodology or changes in default browser fingerprints could have caused this.

OK, but Apple is still going to need high speed memory for all of their products after this too. They would still gain the benefits of additional vertical integration. They themselves represent sufficient demand to keep many facilities busy without any other customers, so it seems like there's no drawbacks here.

Because self-supposed leftists who are really just too lazy to vote stay home.

The basis of expectation of failure comes from experience that others have had with maintaining AI-generated code. Maybe you're right and the tech will progress, some new discovery even more profound than transformers will be found and you actually will be able to maintain that code. Good luck!