I thought the article was interesting. In my personal experience, there's merit to actually seeing your coworkers and (at least in my industry) to actually seeing and interacting with the physical infrastructure of your job. It's *good* to see your job site and remember that items on a spreadsheet are real people/buildings/pieces of equipment with actual physical limitations. I don't think that necessarily means that everyone should always work from an office, only that we're still optimizing for the best value around remote work (and work-cultures which do well remotely).
I'd argue that the article really missed the point on some of their numbers though. First off - while it's true that 996 is a thing that seems to be kicking around in China, I'm not at all convinced that there's a strong 'more time = more economic output' relationship. Many problems can't be solved by throwing more hours at the wall, at least without a pretty deliberate redesign. Secondly, talking about the 'average hours worked' for Americans produces some weird things because there are a lot of under-employed people who aren't working much (uber drivers, part time work, etc), and there are a lot of people doing 80 hour workweeks. Essentially, by taking the average you're smoothing out an enormous amount of job inequality (in both time and dollars). I think the idea that we should all be working a 4 day workweek is probably correct ... but I don't think that it flows from the data the article cites.
Finally, and this is a bit of a digression, but yeah ... paywalls. I think that news/information/commentary has value, and that the people who produce it should be compensated. Once upon a time, they were paid with advertising dollars and subscriptions. The internet, for a while, promised that information wanted to be free ... but it didn't really develop a good mechanism for compensating the people who produced that information (although it enabled a bunch of companies to make absolute shit-tons of money). In the absence of good mechanisms for that free information to actually pay the people who produce it ... we're back to subscriptions. It's not my favourite answer, but it does ensure that producers actually get paid a fair wage. I'm pretty uncomfortable with the options which drive down the cost of production to near-zero so that I can consume media for free ... that just means AI written articles that are trying to sell me shit I don't want.
As I've become more financially stable, I've found it to be good value to pay for some media via subscription - it helps to support an intellectual ecosystem which I get a lot of value from. I'd love if there were better ways to help ensure that the entire public got to be well informed ... but paywalls are a pretty important part of ensuring that at least some people can be. An analogy is that I also purchase most of my meat from local farmers. It costs easily 50% more ... but it helps ensure that my community gets to exist and that the animals I eat live better lives. On top of that, it gives me economic incentives to eat less meat and be more deliberate about my consumption. Once you have some financial stability, you can deploy your wealth to help live in ways that are consistent with your values. Sometimes that means spending money.
... and that's my unrelated tangent.
