| Some people enjoy grocery shopping. Some consider it low-key exercise (for office workers that do not engage in any actual sports, it's often the 2nd most strenuous regular activity, just after sex). It's also furthering the trend towards isolation, the segregation into precarious low-wage service jobs vs a feudal class mostly busy with co-ordinating this personal army of theirs. The latter can afford this because they have institutionalised power structures that have kept lower incomes flat for half a century while the tax structure was turned on its head, with the highest incomes now paying lower rates than day labourers. One would assume that high-paying jobs somehow correlate with value generation. But when shit hit the fan, they were the first to be sent home for half a year and economists are still trying to find anyone who actually noticed that regional key-account managers were mostly just busy with creating funny zoom backgrounds. Online sales obviously kill brick-and-mortar retail, which leads to whatever the opposite of a liveable city is. Large companies tend to run more efficiently. Or, more accurately, they are wasteful in ways that do not have the side benefits of, say, a single-proprietor sponsoring some small-town event because that's "how it's done", or continuing to employ someone even when it's a bad business decision, because they have worked with them for a decade and feel a sense of responsibility. They also heavily favour concentration of market share with just one or very few companies, who are more powerful in relation to customers, employees, and the state. While gains in efficiencies have so far dominated, the beneficiaries of this shift in power will at some point try to cash it in. Other than that, it's pretty cool. |
I don't get it. You think people were useless because when they went home, it didn't affect the economy. But you're talking about people who were and are theoretically working from home. So you seem to be begging the question. Am I missing something?