In the note, shared internally and viewed by the New York Times, Brin urges staff working on Google’s Gemini AI projects to put in long hours to help the company lead the race in artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Some have praised Brin’s commitment to pushing the company’s success, but others argue that his approach reflects an outdated and harmful mindset.
“The hustle-centric 60-hour week isn’t productivity—it’s burnout waiting to happen,” wrote workplace mental health educator Catherine Eadie in a post shared by LinkedIn’s news editors.
Others said they feel that hard work is essential for success, with a COO of a business analytics business writing, “Brin is just being honest—successful people have always put in long hours."
I don’t really believe private car ownership should even be allowed and should be replaced entirely by either dense cities where we can walk to our jobs or public transit, preferably trains. That way we can still have small towns, but you have to take the train now.
Ultimately you’re right, the only way to make things better is using central planning like they do in China. There is no market reform that can save us.
That doesn’t change the fact that commuting should be considered part of your job. You can’t work without it.
Unless you work remotely,! Oh look, another thing that would be incentivized by paying people for their commutes.
Okay, so you’re for completely tearing up all rural communities and abolishing farms, I can dig that. What about people who get mental health issues from living in the concrete jungle though?
Then there’s people like me. I work as a software engineer, but can’t work at home for shit. Too many distractions. However, if I started commuting to work in this proposed system, my employer would have to pay me the same for fewer hours spent on the actual work, or pay more for the same amount of hours, just because it takes me half an hour to walk to work and half an hour to walk back home as I live pretty far from the city center. I imagine I’d be told to fuck off if I wanted to go to the office. Okay, technically all this no longer applies because I’m now working for myself at home (which has been a bit of a mistake), but it would have applied a few months ago.
Also what about factories and such? They often pollute, so it’s actually better if you have them a slight distance away from major population centers. But if they have to start paying for peoples’ commutes, you’d have to have them in-between apartment buildings to save money.
No, I did say that we can have trains.
I live in Iowa, we also have a shuttle program that transports ag workers without cars. The farm to market routes are perfectly usable for shuttles (basically they’re like small buses and large taxies)
We can actually abolish private car ownership without forcing everyone to live in the concrete jungle (although I think many of the issues caused by cities could be addressed by better and safer infrastructure, I recognize cities can be overstimulating for some people).
So under the current system you are having an hour stolen from you every day because of the commute. That’s unpaid labor! Commuting is actual work! You have to do it for your job, that means it’s work.
You’re essentially saying “my employer needs to be able to steal labor time from me to make me employable” and that’s a serious problem.
Factories can be much cleaner than they have been, but zoning laws take care of this. Factories would like to not have to pay for longer commutes, but that’s too bad because the city won’t let them build inside of neighborhoods. Also, the shuttle program here in Iowa also transports factory, warehouse, and meat packing workers.
Look either the employer has to pay for the commute or the government does, but either way we need to incentivize shorter commutes and we need to pay workers for the time stolen from them by their commutes.
If commutes are paid and people are free to choose where they live, you’re incentivizing LONGER commutes.
If commutes are paid and you need to incentivize shorter commutes, either the government or the employer is going to be able to tell you exactly where you’re allowed to live. And if you and your partner work far away from each other, you’ll just have to live in separate homes.
You’re already free to live closer to your job. I could live 150 meters from the office but choose not to because I want there to be greenery around my home. So I live 3 kilometers away and walk through a pretty nice part of town, including several parks.
You’re telling me you want a system where my employer can tell me to fuck off and drive to work or pay more rent to live in a worse apartment. It’d be prohibitively expensive to build a train line I could take to work. Buses are slower than driving.
Plus think about it. Downtown rent is already super high. If your location now determines which jobs you’re allowed to work, this gets worse.
There are much less draconian solutions for what you’re after. Here’s one I literally just came up with: Mandate new developments to have a minimum occupant density. Make it dependent on total population of the city. Include downtown office and shopping zones in this law, they also need to have a minimum population capacity so you’ll have a condo tower next to an office tower, or an office tower with apartments on some floors. Include a clause that old neighborhoods are to be demolished once they haven’t been compliant to the regulations for 5, maybe 10 years. By the time this happens to anyone, the land under the house will be worth way more than the house because it could house more units and once population is up, demand for real estate goes up too.
Or just have really high congestion charges and include suburbs for it. When nobody can afford to drive to work, apartments near jobs go up in demand and more get built. Demand for public transit goes up and ideally more gets built.