For some people, a vacation is just spending all week at home playing video games. Others will just sped time at a B&B or visit family. For them, checking email is not a big deal.
Other people are way more active and want to go camping, surfing or something else that gets them away from their phone/laptop. For these people, checking email is unreasonable because it interferes with their plans.
The two types of people cannot understand the other side. One of them thinks "Why can't you spare a little time in between checking Facebook and Twitter to check your email?" The other side thinks "Who wastes a perfectly good vacation by spending any time on Facebook and/or Twitter?"
I don't think the problem is how many emails you will receive. It's how often you will be expected to check your email and how quickly you will be expected to respond.
I mean, if I an on vacation in Hawaii, what if I want to go on an all-day snorkel trip? I probably won't be able to check my phone a lot, and I certainly can't do anything if there is a real problem.
If it is simple as copying from the government, then why aren't you doing it too? Why not take the existing medicine and resell it to the public for half of what everyone else is charging?
You would simultaneously be making a fortune, while at the same time being called a hero.
I’m arguing that they are creating an IP/patent war-chest and slowly but surely creating a fatal monopoly.
I’m saying corporations are abusing our common inheritance by plundering the commons and not contributing back to it.
“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable. “
— Aaron Swartz
Big Pharma is standing on the shoulders of giants, but are biting the hand that fed them.
We have much shared wealth, but without open or public access, and cooperative business models that steward and keep a healthy commons alive, the trend towards extortion of the lower and middle classes of America by Corporations (through rent from IP) will keep increasing, as well as US brutality towards the Global South, in trying to upkeep the US-led Global North Imperial IP regime [1].
In that future, the class divide will keep growing and many more people will continue to suffer.
In the end, without sharing and socializing progress, we run the risk of the Precariat taking down the systems completely, and throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I believe our ideal future lies in something described as Protocol Cooperativism, using distributed technologies like Ceptr and Holochain.
I would also like to see an unenclosed p2p intellectual property system that honors authorship, yet allows access for all [1].
Suddenly forcing non-remote workers to switch to remote work overnight is not going to produce great results. By the time the workers get the hang of working remotely effectively, their bosses will have already decided that it is a bad idea.
Is that what I'm missing? I find that a lot of the people here love working from home, but whenever I do it as a one or two day off event, I find that I'm not terribly productive. Do you need time to settle into it?
You absolutely do. The communication styles and social rewards of going to an office are different drastically. This is why I feel grateful to have spent the last year or so working for a remote first company- to provide myself the time to get accustomed to working from home.
A few of my colleagues hated it and returned to their FAANG(probably for financial reasons, as well), unlike myself.
IMO the entire way your team operates needs to be centered around them being remote. The worst is hybrid teams where they are half remote and half in office. I don't think they work well anyway you do it.
Also some people just aren't very suited for remote work, they need to be physically around their co-workers.
If you are curious about more details, the REMOTE book is a good primer on the different ways of working remotely compared to in an office. https://basecamp.com/books/remote
Imagine having only ever used Windows as an OS. Then one day someone hands you a Linux machine. You try it for a day or two, but then go back to Windows. And then you wonder why your coworkers keep saying how great Linux is.
You have to commit to managing your own time effectively and efficiently because nobody else is going to do that and there's no social pressure/encouragement of your co-workers around you.
You have to reach out and communicate when you're struggling or blocked because nobody will know by your body language.
You have to step away when you need to because it's easy to get sucked into non-stop work which isn't always productive work. This is even better if you're allowed to have a truly flexible schedule (e.g. you could work a few hours in the morning, take the midday to yourself, and work the rest of your day in the late afternoon/evening or switch it up and take the morning to yourself and work the afternoon/evening).
If you don't know your own calendar, then I do not want to talk to you.
I would rather talk to the person who knows and controls your calendar. They are the true source of power and they are the one who can actually get things accomplished.
“We’d love to partner with Steve on getting his frameworks and templates from his books – The Four Steps and The Startup Owner’s Manual – onto our product. Can you connect us to him?”
That sounds to me like the start of some sort of relationship. If the guy just wanted info from the book, then why not just read the book?
My entire department was unified and clearly articulated the problems we were facing and how we could improve things.
The only result was that our manager was told to get us under control or we would all be fired.
Management knows what is going on. They just don't care.
> we would like the core team (first 3-4 hires) to share our passion to some degree. Perhaps naively we'd like them to become pillars of our company and help us inspire future employees.
It sound like they don't want workers, so much as worshipers. Call me pessimistic.
For some people, a vacation is just spending all week at home playing video games. Others will just sped time at a B&B or visit family. For them, checking email is not a big deal.
Other people are way more active and want to go camping, surfing or something else that gets them away from their phone/laptop. For these people, checking email is unreasonable because it interferes with their plans.
The two types of people cannot understand the other side. One of them thinks "Why can't you spare a little time in between checking Facebook and Twitter to check your email?" The other side thinks "Who wastes a perfectly good vacation by spending any time on Facebook and/or Twitter?"