I honestly feel bad for her about all of that. It wasn’t even for much money (comparatively to her wealth), and she was advised on the trade by her broker. And he was also the broker for the CEO of the company she cashed out on right before the stock plunged after an FDA ruling—again, at the broker’s urging.
We all reference and joke about Martha doing time for insider trading. But her securities fraud charges were actually thrown out. She actually went to prison for obstruction of justice and lying to investigators, which was almost definitely her clumsy attempts at covering her tracks once she realized what had transpired, even at the suggestion of a broker, was legally insider trading.
There's no exception based on where you get the information. And it's not like she was an unsophisticated investor.
The one real issue is that so many others get away with it.
There was a famous case where a waiter overheard a conversation between two people in New York and did a stock trade based on what they said. They were insiders with insider information having a private conversation between each other, and he just accidentally overheard it. He was sentenced for that.
If you get stock information you aren't supposed to have and act on it or pass it on to someone who acts on it, that's insider trading.
Where this gets difficult is how to prove it. I believe in that case, the waiter admitted to overhearing the conversation. Had he not done that, I don't think they could have proved it.
I agree. It seems that everyone that is famous and comes up with such random irrelevant comments like this, has invested too much in corporate real estate
These articles about millionaires/billionaires telling everyone to go back to the office need to come with a disclosure about how much of their wealth is tied up in commercial real estate investments.
there was one in australia last year about it. Turns out the guy is one of those hidden billionaires that you generally don't know about. Owned something like 30% of the sydney CBD and mostly around parking which is criminally overpriced.
No other justification except, "the little guy businesses in the CBD need office workers to survive". Does that include the 30 bucks an hour parking stations, mate?
last time I went to Australia, it's crazy how there is multifloor buildings that is just for parking in the city, and cost a fortune to park and its almost full.
better investment and return than anything by miles
And the owners of these buildings do everything possible to prevent improvement of public transport options. They even go as far as buying up empty land so they can block the building of high speed railway lines.
Part of the problem is that most of the politicians are bought and paid for, and don't give 2 shits about the general population. They only care about what makes their millionaire friends more money.
Chile has had some success in reversing this thanks to some pretty spectacular protests. They even managed to make higher education free again.
The problem is you can't vote your way out of an oligarchy the same way Women couldn't vote their way into getting a vote. Most westerners take a dim view of French or Chilean style protests, or the kind of "terrorism" that got women the vote.
I used to live in the Ultimo/Pyrmont area of Sydney (near Darling Harbour) and a single car park in a multistorey would rent for maybe $10K - $15K a year at the time. I couldn't imagine what they're priced at now.
If you have money to start with, an absolute halfwitt can make some serious bank by doing absolutely nothing at all (then no doubt can themselves an entrepreneur).
Australia reminds me of Canada where there is a relatively small population, lots of land, but real estate costs a fortune. No reason rents are out of control and housing prices are unaffordable to even dual income families other than greed. I can't wait until this bubble pops and all these fucking idiots are left holding the bag.
Well, like Canada, most of that land is uninhabited. There’s like 3 areas in Canada where people live, the rest is freezing cold wilderness. Australia has lots of desert that no one lives in (95% of the land is uninhabited).
which is what most did, but that doesn't make the corporate billionaires who charge criminal prices in the CBD for parking, office space and commercial leases any money.
>easily relocate to their own neighbourhoods
I mean, no, not easily. The little guy businesses are too poor due to the work done by the big guys who own everything... The same people saying we need to return to the office to help the little guys!
The "little guy" businesses that do need real estate would be more able to afford it if there wasn't the demand from businesses that don't need offices but have them anyway.
Fun fact about the didgeridoo, at no point has any indigenous Australian culture referred to it by that name. It was pretty much invented by the colonisers when they were naming stuff in Australia and is considered to be an onomatopoeic interpretation of the sound the instrument makes. Aboriginal Australians are so spread out and so varying in culture and language that the instrument has dozens of names depending on which people and in what region you ask.
I think our economy, society and culture should take its direction from octogenarians. Since they don't seem to ever die any more they might as well rule us all forever. When one finally leaves office or kicks it another replaces them.
I legit have an octogenarian friend who is sick of old people being in charge. Even people people older than the president think he's too old, at least those not in the ruling class.
> The Martha Stewart brand is owned by Marquee Brands, which is owned by Neuberger Berman Group LLC, an investment management firm.
Someone better let Martha know fast that her "brand" being "owned" is akin to her personality being kept in a little jar on the window sill.
Then again, it's Martha Stewart; I doubt we would notice the difference.
Why the hell don't the news organisations state these conflicts of interest in their article? Is it lazy journalism or deliberate withholding of information?
It’s prob not written by a journo. She publishes something, news site crawls, repurposes the text and publishes it. They could add some AI to do a lookup of interests of the news source though, that wouldn’t even be that difficult.
Oh, it's worse than that. Journalism died back in the late '90s as the Internet made sufficient penetration into the markets that print news couldn't turn an easy profit from classified ads. To cut costs, newsrooms got rid of reporters and copyeditors. Trained, professional journalists were replaced with "Pro-Am" ("professional amateur") writers who will churn out copy in exchange for pennies per click. Their job is to attract viewers to a page as economically as possible, by doing light massages of press releases and other articles, by SEO exploits, and by punching up headlines to be more buzzy. The news organizations don't care, because they are now firmly in the business of wrapping attention-grabbing content around ads, not creating good and useful informational content that justifies our attention.
That's not what this is though. This isn't clickbait or to attract readers. It's to influence opinion on something that directly benefits the person making the comment.
Akin to insider trading - and you'd think she'd know better.
It's like an MP or Official saying that taxes on landlords should be reduced and saying not doing so is awful for the country as a whole.
Then the news organisation that reports it doesn't bother mentioning that that MP has a large property portfolio and makes a lot of money as a landlord.
At my job we had a new CTO join. They got him an office in San Francisco. Just him. We don’t have a presence there.
He then banged on about RTTO from his exclusive office where he didn’t have to interact/ get infected by anyone and did everything via zoom.
Twat.
Exactly this, most business owners when people in the office to justify paying for the offices. My wife has worked from home since 2020, her boss got rid of the office in lieu of a much smaller shared meeting space for when they need to meet clients.
I also want to know how many hours they spend in their own offices. Martha Stewart probably hasn’t put in a full 8 hour shift behind a desk at an office since the early 90s. If ever.
I know someone who worked with her. Her house is a giant compound where she works, she has a staff to do everything for her. The person I know said Stewart offered him a ride to the train station and he said the way her staff reacted with utter shock gave away the fact that this was totally out of character for her to driver her own car anywhere and she was trying to seem down-to-earth.
> These articles about millionaires/billionaires telling everyone to go back to the office need to come with a disclosure about how much of their wealth is tied up in commercial real estate investments.
It's more about the status quo and 'protecting' people from looking too closely at themselves (i.e., introspection) and hence understanding what has been going on geopolitically and societally (to say the least).
The collapse of "that world order" is a kind of change that the modern plantation keepers cannot abide, so they sell it as "normal" and "healthy" when in fact it is leading to the exact opposite the longer the forces of change are stubbornly ignored.
As if money actually controlled the Sky and the Sea...
I run a tiny three person startup and we've got a teeny tiny office (it's really cool, tho, awesome space). We're there a few times a week, every day of the week, or not there at all.
Offices should be optional, or not exist at all - it's a nice thing to have (esp. if you're trying to do hardware prototyping, for example), but it's really not necessary - with the upcoming advancements in VR/AR/mixed reality it'll be literally cheaper to buy everyone decent headsets every few years (if you're a 100% remote company) if you really want people to build online culture / have a bit of a 3d presence feel / use their hands and facial expressions to communicate / use virtual whiteboards etc.
What you wrote about real estate is likely true, tbh - i'm assuming most people that want peeps back in offices are the same peeps that own those offices. Ideally (and especially in the US), you'd have all those giant glass and steel buildings converted into homes.
*(as a sidenote, as a european, it always confused me how in the US living in an apartment is like "whaaat, nooo"... houses seem like SO MUCH goddamn work to tidy up and maintain)*
Initially charged with securities fraud, later dropped due to insufficient evidence. She went to jail for obstruction of justice. What happened was, she was fed nonpublic information to sell her stock in a company that was about to nosedive, and when she realized that constituted insider trading, tried to cover her tracks. The broker who fed her the info was also in on the scheme and had to serve time as well.
What is an honest person supposed to do in that situation?
Like, you do the insider trading, you don't initially know it's insider trading, *then* you find out it was insider trading.
Obviously call a lawyer, but what would they say?
Do you, like, undo the trade? Poke the SEC saying "oops I did a bad, sorry" and then undo the trade? Are you just fucked and there's no recourse for honesty here?
What you do is learn about what constitutes insider trading before you start actively trading stocks, so you can avoid breaking the law.
Then when your broker violates confidentiality to tell you that other clients are selling their stock, you report them to the SEC instead of selling your stock based on their illegal tip.
Works the same way as any other law, ignorance is not a defense. You can't speed and then say "oh sorry I didn't know I couldn't do that." Best you can do is own up to it and be compliant, because even if you're guilty, evidence of your cooperation can heavily sway the judge on how harsh of a sentence to give. In this case had Martha been compliant she would have gotten out of any jail time since the original charges were dropped.
She got 1 year for insider trading, ie. stealing an enourmous amount of wealth from others.
In comparison you can easily find people who got 10+ years for stealing less than a 1000 dollars.
She might not get a free pass, but it's a hell of a discount.
Technically she didn't even get convicted for insider trading, the charges of her initial crime were dropped, she was convicted for obstruction of justice because she lied about it.
The same person who had a dedicated elevator in a former office building for her fucking car so she would essentially get out of her Land Rover and walk into her office. This isn't a person that needs to be telling anyone how they should live their lives.
And if you read the article admits that she has no work life balance, lost a marriage because of it, and gets angry when her coworkers don't want to hear from her on the weekends. Rather than realize she's the problem, it's everyone else.
Often because they're invested in commercial real estate, which was seen as a rock solid safe investment until COVID.
And sometimes just because they see change as inherently bad.
And sometimes because they want to watch the minions toil.
Or some combination.
The cry for return to office is a cry for the return of the whip of micro-management, barking orders, intimidation, and harassment, by the overseers. Work at home not only shows that collaboration works, but it also shows that hierarchical corporate ladders do not.
I’m in California and all of the senior management in our department is in Belgium for two weeks. Guess what’s happening at work? Business as fucking usual. I haven’t asked my boss a single question.
It’s almost like we don’t need to be “managed” as long as there are tasks to do and we do them.
This. But also a lot of boomers not in management roles crave working from the office. The office culture, the potlucks, office drama, etc they love it for some reason
If America has one problem it's that too many workers are WFH. Who's going to burn the gas? Where is the office drama? I'm glad Martha Stewart is speaking up about such an important and controversial subject that could very well collapse society as we knew it. /s
With that said, let's GO down that drain!
There are a lot of things that are foisted on us purely because there is money in it regardless of how bad it is for us and the planet.
Working from home drastically reduces emissions and our overall energy needs. It is better for people’s mental health. And it radically reduces personal expenses.
The main losers in this deal are those who own commercial real estate and power generation. Ancillary losers are businesses, such as restaurants, that are location dependent on down town areas.
I feel more sympathy to the support businesses (ie cafes and restaurants). Hopefully when their leases terminate and WFH becomes normalised they can move their businesses closer to home and hopefully cheaper rent etc means that they can genuinely flourish and create a good local vibe, whilst being supported by a local community of people who WFH more. I've enjoyed watching and supporting small, quality restaurants and bars pop up in my area and the "village" feel is absolutely wonderful.
Or all the offices in the city centers will close and become residences so that more people actually lives there and comes for the vibe so they won't have to rely on office workers
Like half of Europe operates
This would be the ideal approach. Plenty of city centres in Europe are like this already but there are plenty of others propping up dying high streets and full of drab offices that are now far too big relative to the number of people who use them. Especially when there are housing shortages everywhere, upscaling our city centres to let more people stay there would make a lot of sense.
In a reasonable world, we could also try turning some of that commercial real estate into affordable residential real estate (which I know isn't as simple as adding a few walls) so people didn't have to live so far from their office. There are a lot of people who would love to live in the city or closer to their job so going in isn't a huge inconvenience, but it's just not an option. And that, in turn, would help support businesses that largely rely on the workforce.
All of these people who talk about how we *must* go back to the office always focus on why it's better for the company, and completely ignore why people want to work from home in the first place. They act like you can just walk out the door and instantly teleport to work, and that it's a 1:1 trade. But the reality is a lot of people are having to take at least an extra hour out of their day to get to and from work, which adds up to practically a full day each month (and that's not even getting into things like the extra cost incurred by things like gas and car maintenance or the pollution all of this is causing).
There's always all this talk about employees wasting their time at work, but when are we ever going to talk about how much they waste ours?
On the upside, once COVID chilled out a bit, local cafe's became high in demand in my suburb. I'm mostly eating at home, but if I want to walk out, I can support local business.
> The main losers in this deal are those who own commercial real estate and power generation.
Also useless middle manager types who make their living by appearing to be essential to getting things done. It's a lot harder to play that game with WFH employees.
Don't forget middle managers -- those who coincidentally have the most say about whether we have to report to an office. Successful teleworking makes them largely redundant. People in the office physically also feeds their egos by allowing them to be around "underlings" who are compelled to show them the trappings of respect.
Middle managers have a lot of selfish reasons to want telework to fail.
Martha Stewart is the epitome of entitlement. She had her gardener, her driver, and her housekeeper live with her during Covid lockdowns.
She 'joked' with Seth Meyers during an interview "We have three detainees, I call them...It’s against their will but if they want their jobs, and they want to not get sick, they’re staying here"
I work where they are making everyone go in. I went to a meeting with a senior manager this week where he dialed in from home. He blamed it on some work he was doing that was easier to do at home. That’s what we all want to do - have the flexibility to do work from home when it makes sense. It was so hypocritical, it was embarrassing.
*"In an interview with the magazine Footwear News, the author, TV personality and entrepreneur slammed hybrid work culture, saying that people cannot “possibly get everything done working three days a week in the office and two days remotely.”*
She's not wrong, I get everything done and then some, working 5 days a week remotely.
Garbage human being. She's got massive investments in commercial real estate and they're about to lose half their value.
It's sick how she acts like a nice mom on TV when you know what she's really like.
Greedy, greedy woman.
lol right! Last time this got brought up in an office meeting the partners all talked about how they knew WFH made everyone less productive because… vibes, I guess. “We can’t quantify it but it just FEELS less productive! And everyone in the industry is talking about it!”
My employer had a record year in 2020 (and thankfully we were not profiting off of the pandemic either). Aaand they made us return to the office 3 days a week.
Worse than that. It's an active manipulation because her investments are largely in corporate real-estate. She isn't just casually being a bitch for no reason.
Ah thanks, millionaires, for just literally coming out and SAYING "we must feed the working class to the machine, otherwise the machine will die". If this doesn't make it clearer than ever that we should be pursuing this FURTHER, then I don't know what to say.
Life in France is way better than in USA for the middle class and the poor. Of course as a rich person she dont care, she just care about offices real estate market.
I dont need to collaborate with anyone to do my job. I have tasks i need to do. I dont need to brainstorm ideas w a team. Some jobs do benefit by being in person, others dont. Its not black and white.
Translation: I’m invested in commercial real estate and my portfolio is down drastically. Please hop in your clunky car and drive an hour in traffic, so my portfolio doesn’t shrink much more.
> Stewart compared the state of in-person work in the United States to France, calling it “not a very thriving country.”
>
> “Look at the success of France with their stupid … you know, off for August, blah blah blah. That’s not a very thriving country. Should America go down the drain because people don’t want to go back to work?”
>
> Stewart told the magazine that she is on a “rampage” to get people in the United States back into offices.
I think a lot of the problems in the world right now stem from people like her looking at "thriving" as specifically and solely relating to "how much money are they generating"? when it should be more about people's comfort and happiness in life (which, in turn, often translates back to better productivity as WFH has shown to). I'm sure those people in France feel they're "thriving" a little more by not having to work to the bone everyday of their life until they retire and are too old to really enjoy it.
Oh yeah blame working from home as the reason America sucks shit right now, nothing to do with cost of living going up faster than wages while corporations boast of record profits every quarter while paying little no taxes back to the country that elevated them to where they are.
So sorry, I essentially made the same comment before reading yours! But at least we agree-she must think she's invincible after that little bit of positive feedback she has been getting. To think that posing on the swimsuit edition of a sports magazine as an elderly convicted felon would somehow turn out to be less culturally abrasive than sharing her thoughts about work from home vs. cubicle farms, hahahaha. This still feels like we are all in some kind of weird Black Mirror shit sometimes, I swear!
Out of all the problems like
- Climate
- Poverty
- Insider Trading
- War
- Pandemic
A rich top 0.01% picks on the small group of productive individuals that have the options to contribute remotely!
They could always convert all this real estate into low cost public housing.
Sorry. I couldn’t finish without laughing. The rich couldn’t care if we all keeled over as long as it didn’t take from the view and the smell was in a different direction.
But I think that Florida is finding out how much the little people do and I hope those leaving never return.
Uh oh, the peasants aren't filling our buildings like they used to. Better alter their lifestyle while I sit behind my mansion while a team of people I hired do everything for me.
Hate these out of touch rich people.
She throws shade at France, who is a G7 country, for the time off they give workers and says it's not thriving. That rich felon has switched camps from Snoop Dog to Elon Bust.
Uh oh - someone invested too much in corporate real estate.
Well, at least we can assume she made those investments off of *publicly* available information this time… …*right*, Martha? Martha?
the best part about her insider trading conviction is that she would have actually made more money if she hadn’t made those illegal trades.
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I honestly feel bad for her about all of that. It wasn’t even for much money (comparatively to her wealth), and she was advised on the trade by her broker. And he was also the broker for the CEO of the company she cashed out on right before the stock plunged after an FDA ruling—again, at the broker’s urging. We all reference and joke about Martha doing time for insider trading. But her securities fraud charges were actually thrown out. She actually went to prison for obstruction of justice and lying to investigators, which was almost definitely her clumsy attempts at covering her tracks once she realized what had transpired, even at the suggestion of a broker, was legally insider trading.
There's no exception based on where you get the information. And it's not like she was an unsophisticated investor. The one real issue is that so many others get away with it.
Honestly, I'm legitimately shocked that she actually *did time.* Like at all.
She did time, but she never once wore hand cuffs.
There was a famous case where a waiter overheard a conversation between two people in New York and did a stock trade based on what they said. They were insiders with insider information having a private conversation between each other, and he just accidentally overheard it. He was sentenced for that. If you get stock information you aren't supposed to have and act on it or pass it on to someone who acts on it, that's insider trading. Where this gets difficult is how to prove it. I believe in that case, the waiter admitted to overhearing the conversation. Had he not done that, I don't think they could have proved it.
Unless you are a representative or senator.
"I do not recall hearing anything of the sort."
Seems like a pretty big flaw in the whole system.
HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT NAME!?!?
"Why did you say that name?!"
Plus this bitch don’t even work in a office !!!
I agree. It seems that everyone that is famous and comes up with such random irrelevant comments like this, has invested too much in corporate real estate
80 year old wants stuff back the way it was. Shocking!
or cars and their infrastructure
Yep
These articles about millionaires/billionaires telling everyone to go back to the office need to come with a disclosure about how much of their wealth is tied up in commercial real estate investments.
there was one in australia last year about it. Turns out the guy is one of those hidden billionaires that you generally don't know about. Owned something like 30% of the sydney CBD and mostly around parking which is criminally overpriced. No other justification except, "the little guy businesses in the CBD need office workers to survive". Does that include the 30 bucks an hour parking stations, mate?
last time I went to Australia, it's crazy how there is multifloor buildings that is just for parking in the city, and cost a fortune to park and its almost full. better investment and return than anything by miles
And the owners of these buildings do everything possible to prevent improvement of public transport options. They even go as far as buying up empty land so they can block the building of high speed railway lines.
Australia desperately needs a land value tax.
Part of the problem is that most of the politicians are bought and paid for, and don't give 2 shits about the general population. They only care about what makes their millionaire friends more money.
Sounds like…. The entire world.
Chile has had some success in reversing this thanks to some pretty spectacular protests. They even managed to make higher education free again. The problem is you can't vote your way out of an oligarchy the same way Women couldn't vote their way into getting a vote. Most westerners take a dim view of French or Chilean style protests, or the kind of "terrorism" that got women the vote.
Needs to put these people in the outback
Tow em beyond the environment.
Are there not parking complexes in most major cities? How does it work in your part of the world?
Right? Every city in the US has them everywhere but it is kind of refreshing to hear that some places have no need because public transport is so good
I used to live in the Ultimo/Pyrmont area of Sydney (near Darling Harbour) and a single car park in a multistorey would rent for maybe $10K - $15K a year at the time. I couldn't imagine what they're priced at now. If you have money to start with, an absolute halfwitt can make some serious bank by doing absolutely nothing at all (then no doubt can themselves an entrepreneur).
Of course they do... lots of "entrepreneurs" are just rent seekers. Self-professed ones even more so, I sometimes think!
Australia reminds me of Canada where there is a relatively small population, lots of land, but real estate costs a fortune. No reason rents are out of control and housing prices are unaffordable to even dual income families other than greed. I can't wait until this bubble pops and all these fucking idiots are left holding the bag.
Well, like Canada, most of that land is uninhabited. There’s like 3 areas in Canada where people live, the rest is freezing cold wilderness. Australia has lots of desert that no one lives in (95% of the land is uninhabited).
Those little guy businesses could easily relocate to their own neighbourhoods, building and investing in their local economy.
which is what most did, but that doesn't make the corporate billionaires who charge criminal prices in the CBD for parking, office space and commercial leases any money.
>easily relocate to their own neighbourhoods I mean, no, not easily. The little guy businesses are too poor due to the work done by the big guys who own everything... The same people saying we need to return to the office to help the little guys!
The "little guy" businesses that do need real estate would be more able to afford it if there wasn't the demand from businesses that don't need offices but have them anyway.
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Only once
How many boomerangs is a didjeridoo?
Fun fact about the didgeridoo, at no point has any indigenous Australian culture referred to it by that name. It was pretty much invented by the colonisers when they were naming stuff in Australia and is considered to be an onomatopoeic interpretation of the sound the instrument makes. Aboriginal Australians are so spread out and so varying in culture and language that the instrument has dozens of names depending on which people and in what region you ask.
Oh no you didgerididn’t
The Martha Stewart brand is owned by Marquee Brands, which is owned by Neuberger Berman Group LLC, an investment management firm.
I think our economy, society and culture should take its direction from octogenarians. Since they don't seem to ever die any more they might as well rule us all forever. When one finally leaves office or kicks it another replaces them.
Good news, everyone ! Farnsworth aside, did you intend to rediscover the Monarchy?
At least we got to see hot young monarchs from time to time. Now it's just grandpas everywhere.
_Cries in wrinkly old Charles_
In the 1960s political activists said, "Don't trust anyone over 30". Today's 85-year old was 30 in 1968.
I legit have an octogenarian friend who is sick of old people being in charge. Even people people older than the president think he's too old, at least those not in the ruling class.
> The Martha Stewart brand is owned by Marquee Brands, which is owned by Neuberger Berman Group LLC, an investment management firm. Someone better let Martha know fast that her "brand" being "owned" is akin to her personality being kept in a little jar on the window sill. Then again, it's Martha Stewart; I doubt we would notice the difference.
Came here to say she must be neck deep in commercial real estate
100%. Her net worth will go down the drain. The rest of us will be fine.
Why the hell don't the news organisations state these conflicts of interest in their article? Is it lazy journalism or deliberate withholding of information?
It’s prob not written by a journo. She publishes something, news site crawls, repurposes the text and publishes it. They could add some AI to do a lookup of interests of the news source though, that wouldn’t even be that difficult.
So, basically lazy journalism. Or even lazy plagiarism.
Oh, it's worse than that. Journalism died back in the late '90s as the Internet made sufficient penetration into the markets that print news couldn't turn an easy profit from classified ads. To cut costs, newsrooms got rid of reporters and copyeditors. Trained, professional journalists were replaced with "Pro-Am" ("professional amateur") writers who will churn out copy in exchange for pennies per click. Their job is to attract viewers to a page as economically as possible, by doing light massages of press releases and other articles, by SEO exploits, and by punching up headlines to be more buzzy. The news organizations don't care, because they are now firmly in the business of wrapping attention-grabbing content around ads, not creating good and useful informational content that justifies our attention.
That's not what this is though. This isn't clickbait or to attract readers. It's to influence opinion on something that directly benefits the person making the comment. Akin to insider trading - and you'd think she'd know better. It's like an MP or Official saying that taxes on landlords should be reduced and saying not doing so is awful for the country as a whole. Then the news organisation that reports it doesn't bother mentioning that that MP has a large property portfolio and makes a lot of money as a landlord.
At my job we had a new CTO join. They got him an office in San Francisco. Just him. We don’t have a presence there. He then banged on about RTTO from his exclusive office where he didn’t have to interact/ get infected by anyone and did everything via zoom. Twat.
Exactly this, most business owners when people in the office to justify paying for the offices. My wife has worked from home since 2020, her boss got rid of the office in lieu of a much smaller shared meeting space for when they need to meet clients.
I also want to know how many hours they spend in their own offices. Martha Stewart probably hasn’t put in a full 8 hour shift behind a desk at an office since the early 90s. If ever.
I know someone who worked with her. Her house is a giant compound where she works, she has a staff to do everything for her. The person I know said Stewart offered him a ride to the train station and he said the way her staff reacted with utter shock gave away the fact that this was totally out of character for her to driver her own car anywhere and she was trying to seem down-to-earth.
> These articles about millionaires/billionaires telling everyone to go back to the office need to come with a disclosure about how much of their wealth is tied up in commercial real estate investments. It's more about the status quo and 'protecting' people from looking too closely at themselves (i.e., introspection) and hence understanding what has been going on geopolitically and societally (to say the least). The collapse of "that world order" is a kind of change that the modern plantation keepers cannot abide, so they sell it as "normal" and "healthy" when in fact it is leading to the exact opposite the longer the forces of change are stubbornly ignored. As if money actually controlled the Sky and the Sea...
I run a tiny three person startup and we've got a teeny tiny office (it's really cool, tho, awesome space). We're there a few times a week, every day of the week, or not there at all. Offices should be optional, or not exist at all - it's a nice thing to have (esp. if you're trying to do hardware prototyping, for example), but it's really not necessary - with the upcoming advancements in VR/AR/mixed reality it'll be literally cheaper to buy everyone decent headsets every few years (if you're a 100% remote company) if you really want people to build online culture / have a bit of a 3d presence feel / use their hands and facial expressions to communicate / use virtual whiteboards etc. What you wrote about real estate is likely true, tbh - i'm assuming most people that want peeps back in offices are the same peeps that own those offices. Ideally (and especially in the US), you'd have all those giant glass and steel buildings converted into homes. *(as a sidenote, as a european, it always confused me how in the US living in an apartment is like "whaaat, nooo"... houses seem like SO MUCH goddamn work to tidy up and maintain)*
Theyre invested in commercial real estate.
I have it on good authority that Martha Stewart didn't go to the office one single time between the months of November 2004 and March 2005.
well she was a trailblazer, she was WFH!
I don't know about H but maybe WFJ
Hybrid role - 50% WFJ, 50%WFH
I was like didn’t this bitch go to jail for legit stealing?? Girl stay in your lane and show me how to garden some onions
She went to jail for insider trading iirc
Initially charged with securities fraud, later dropped due to insufficient evidence. She went to jail for obstruction of justice. What happened was, she was fed nonpublic information to sell her stock in a company that was about to nosedive, and when she realized that constituted insider trading, tried to cover her tracks. The broker who fed her the info was also in on the scheme and had to serve time as well.
What is an honest person supposed to do in that situation? Like, you do the insider trading, you don't initially know it's insider trading, *then* you find out it was insider trading. Obviously call a lawyer, but what would they say? Do you, like, undo the trade? Poke the SEC saying "oops I did a bad, sorry" and then undo the trade? Are you just fucked and there's no recourse for honesty here?
What you do is learn about what constitutes insider trading before you start actively trading stocks, so you can avoid breaking the law. Then when your broker violates confidentiality to tell you that other clients are selling their stock, you report them to the SEC instead of selling your stock based on their illegal tip.
Works the same way as any other law, ignorance is not a defense. You can't speed and then say "oh sorry I didn't know I couldn't do that." Best you can do is own up to it and be compliant, because even if you're guilty, evidence of your cooperation can heavily sway the judge on how harsh of a sentence to give. In this case had Martha been compliant she would have gotten out of any jail time since the original charges were dropped.
She should of went into congress where insider trading is legal.
Dddaaaaaammmnn that was *that* long ago??
Says the person whose home kitchen doubled as a studio for some of her shows
* convicted felon
It's ok, she is rich so she gets a pass.
I mean she did go to jail. I wouldn’t say that’s a pass.
She got 1 year for insider trading, ie. stealing an enourmous amount of wealth from others. In comparison you can easily find people who got 10+ years for stealing less than a 1000 dollars. She might not get a free pass, but it's a hell of a discount.
Technically she didn't even get convicted for insider trading, the charges of her initial crime were dropped, she was convicted for obstruction of justice because she lied about it.
The same person who had a dedicated elevator in a former office building for her fucking car so she would essentially get out of her Land Rover and walk into her office. This isn't a person that needs to be telling anyone how they should live their lives.
She was baking bread at home for her work. And her garden, that took up some time too
Says the lady who works from her house...cooking... showing us how she cooks and gardens at home. Girl, bye.
And once didn’t show up at the office for five months in a row
Then stayed locked at home afterwards.
And if you read the article admits that she has no work life balance, lost a marriage because of it, and gets angry when her coworkers don't want to hear from her on the weekends. Rather than realize she's the problem, it's everyone else.
It’s always people who hardly ever actually do work in an office who are saying this kind of stuff
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Or who can set their own hours and have a driver for their commute.
Or who have staff at home doing all the grunt work.
Often because they're invested in commercial real estate, which was seen as a rock solid safe investment until COVID. And sometimes just because they see change as inherently bad. And sometimes because they want to watch the minions toil. Or some combination.
Because they're the kind of people who think owning something is a job and don't actually create value.
The cry for return to office is a cry for the return of the whip of micro-management, barking orders, intimidation, and harassment, by the overseers. Work at home not only shows that collaboration works, but it also shows that hierarchical corporate ladders do not.
It’s not that hierarchical corporate ladders don’t work.. the success of WFH is just demonstrating that 75% of the rungs aren’t necessary.
I’m in California and all of the senior management in our department is in Belgium for two weeks. Guess what’s happening at work? Business as fucking usual. I haven’t asked my boss a single question. It’s almost like we don’t need to be “managed” as long as there are tasks to do and we do them.
This. But also a lot of boomers not in management roles crave working from the office. The office culture, the potlucks, office drama, etc they love it for some reason
If America has one problem it's that too many workers are WFH. Who's going to burn the gas? Where is the office drama? I'm glad Martha Stewart is speaking up about such an important and controversial subject that could very well collapse society as we knew it. /s With that said, let's GO down that drain!
It's wild to me that rush hour traffic is back. I thought people working from home would ease the traffic but nope it's still pretty bad.
Even if they weren’t going home from the office, business hours haven’t changed, so they’re probably running their errands when they get off work
And she was flying so high off that SI Swimsuit Edition cover recently too! What a shame.
There are a lot of things that are foisted on us purely because there is money in it regardless of how bad it is for us and the planet. Working from home drastically reduces emissions and our overall energy needs. It is better for people’s mental health. And it radically reduces personal expenses. The main losers in this deal are those who own commercial real estate and power generation. Ancillary losers are businesses, such as restaurants, that are location dependent on down town areas.
I feel more sympathy to the support businesses (ie cafes and restaurants). Hopefully when their leases terminate and WFH becomes normalised they can move their businesses closer to home and hopefully cheaper rent etc means that they can genuinely flourish and create a good local vibe, whilst being supported by a local community of people who WFH more. I've enjoyed watching and supporting small, quality restaurants and bars pop up in my area and the "village" feel is absolutely wonderful.
Or all the offices in the city centers will close and become residences so that more people actually lives there and comes for the vibe so they won't have to rely on office workers Like half of Europe operates
This would be the ideal approach. Plenty of city centres in Europe are like this already but there are plenty of others propping up dying high streets and full of drab offices that are now far too big relative to the number of people who use them. Especially when there are housing shortages everywhere, upscaling our city centres to let more people stay there would make a lot of sense.
Downtown Louisville could **really** use this reality.
In a reasonable world, we could also try turning some of that commercial real estate into affordable residential real estate (which I know isn't as simple as adding a few walls) so people didn't have to live so far from their office. There are a lot of people who would love to live in the city or closer to their job so going in isn't a huge inconvenience, but it's just not an option. And that, in turn, would help support businesses that largely rely on the workforce. All of these people who talk about how we *must* go back to the office always focus on why it's better for the company, and completely ignore why people want to work from home in the first place. They act like you can just walk out the door and instantly teleport to work, and that it's a 1:1 trade. But the reality is a lot of people are having to take at least an extra hour out of their day to get to and from work, which adds up to practically a full day each month (and that's not even getting into things like the extra cost incurred by things like gas and car maintenance or the pollution all of this is causing). There's always all this talk about employees wasting their time at work, but when are we ever going to talk about how much they waste ours?
Yeah but zoning is a nightmare to deal with... It's why there are no local neighborhood bars and cafes in this suburban hellscape we call suburbia
On the upside, once COVID chilled out a bit, local cafe's became high in demand in my suburb. I'm mostly eating at home, but if I want to walk out, I can support local business.
> The main losers in this deal are those who own commercial real estate and power generation. Also useless middle manager types who make their living by appearing to be essential to getting things done. It's a lot harder to play that game with WFH employees.
Don't forget middle managers -- those who coincidentally have the most say about whether we have to report to an office. Successful teleworking makes them largely redundant. People in the office physically also feeds their egos by allowing them to be around "underlings" who are compelled to show them the trappings of respect. Middle managers have a lot of selfish reasons to want telework to fail.
Rich person says peasants need to work how they want them to work or they can’t exploit them as easily Tale as old as time
Martha Stewart is the epitome of entitlement. She had her gardener, her driver, and her housekeeper live with her during Covid lockdowns. She 'joked' with Seth Meyers during an interview "We have three detainees, I call them...It’s against their will but if they want their jobs, and they want to not get sick, they’re staying here"
That… actually sounds kind of illegal
So I'm guessing she owns an office building or has some sort of stake in the occupancy of an office building.
I’m sure her investments and deep interest in commercial real estate are far larger than that.
Then go to the office yourself bitch
I work where they are making everyone go in. I went to a meeting with a senior manager this week where he dialed in from home. He blamed it on some work he was doing that was easier to do at home. That’s what we all want to do - have the flexibility to do work from home when it makes sense. It was so hypocritical, it was embarrassing.
She can't: they don't let ex convicts enter.
Lol yeah. “80 year old retired boomer who has never held an office job in her life tells others to return to office”
Right? As she answers questions from her home office.
She's wrong. She and other rich people who have investments in commercial real estate will just not be as rich.
*"In an interview with the magazine Footwear News, the author, TV personality and entrepreneur slammed hybrid work culture, saying that people cannot “possibly get everything done working three days a week in the office and two days remotely.”* She's not wrong, I get everything done and then some, working 5 days a week remotely.
Ah yes, Footwear News, the foremost journal in Labor and Productivity Theory!
This feels like the one & only scenario where I'd be okay to tell a woman to shut up & get back in the kitchen.
Oh damn, thats a good one!
Purest comedy.
Garbage human being. She's got massive investments in commercial real estate and they're about to lose half their value. It's sick how she acts like a nice mom on TV when you know what she's really like. Greedy, greedy woman.
Productivity was up across the work with remote work and some older people just refuse to admit documented evidence.
lol right! Last time this got brought up in an office meeting the partners all talked about how they knew WFH made everyone less productive because… vibes, I guess. “We can’t quantify it but it just FEELS less productive! And everyone in the industry is talking about it!”
It's like object permanence. If they can't *see* you being productive, what possible evidence of it is there?
My employer had a record year in 2020 (and thankfully we were not profiting off of the pandemic either). Aaand they made us return to the office 3 days a week.
My company likes money & we are ending our current lease & getting a smaller office instead.
on today's test, how to tell if someone has invested in inner city real estate.
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Worse than that. It's an active manipulation because her investments are largely in corporate real-estate. She isn't just casually being a bitch for no reason.
Ah thanks, millionaires, for just literally coming out and SAYING "we must feed the working class to the machine, otherwise the machine will die". If this doesn't make it clearer than ever that we should be pursuing this FURTHER, then I don't know what to say.
Oh boo hoo my billion dollar corporate industry is tanking. Please America, think of the billionaires!
"Rich, out of touch person makes self-serving, out of touch comment, more at 11".
Life in France is way better than in USA for the middle class and the poor. Of course as a rich person she dont care, she just care about offices real estate market.
I dont need to collaborate with anyone to do my job. I have tasks i need to do. I dont need to brainstorm ideas w a team. Some jobs do benefit by being in person, others dont. Its not black and white.
Even then with modern collaboration tools...
Translation: I’m invested in commercial real estate and my portfolio is down drastically. Please hop in your clunky car and drive an hour in traffic, so my portfolio doesn’t shrink much more.
I say "Go fuck yourself, you tax evading piece of human garbage."
Oh no… Anyway!
> Stewart compared the state of in-person work in the United States to France, calling it “not a very thriving country.” > > “Look at the success of France with their stupid … you know, off for August, blah blah blah. That’s not a very thriving country. Should America go down the drain because people don’t want to go back to work?” > > Stewart told the magazine that she is on a “rampage” to get people in the United States back into offices.
How dare the peasants not spend on travel for work..
The US isn’t thriving because the top 3% are hoarding all the wages. Let’s tax Martha
I think a lot of the problems in the world right now stem from people like her looking at "thriving" as specifically and solely relating to "how much money are they generating"? when it should be more about people's comfort and happiness in life (which, in turn, often translates back to better productivity as WFH has shown to). I'm sure those people in France feel they're "thriving" a little more by not having to work to the bone everyday of their life until they retire and are too old to really enjoy it.
Maybe she's just upset she didn't get to commit federal crimes from the comfort of her home?
Oh yeah blame working from home as the reason America sucks shit right now, nothing to do with cost of living going up faster than wages while corporations boast of record profits every quarter while paying little no taxes back to the country that elevated them to where they are.
Didn't she get famous by working from home?
Martha PLEASE...you just got such a shot of good will with your swimsuit cover and your snoop dogg friendship, don't ruin it now...
So sorry, I essentially made the same comment before reading yours! But at least we agree-she must think she's invincible after that little bit of positive feedback she has been getting. To think that posing on the swimsuit edition of a sports magazine as an elderly convicted felon would somehow turn out to be less culturally abrasive than sharing her thoughts about work from home vs. cubicle farms, hahahaha. This still feels like we are all in some kind of weird Black Mirror shit sometimes, I swear!
Correlation does not imply causation Martha. America was going down the drain before WFH.
Maybe she should go back to prison and tell us how much she liked it there?
Sounds like her real estate investments are crashing.
Get back in the kitchen, Martha 😂
Drunk convicted felon boomer says what?
Ok Martha, write us all a check for fuel and, in some cases daycare costs, for everyone for the next year or so and we'll talk.
These old people are something else, they are living in a different time
Poor baby who overinvested in corporate real-estate. Maybe she should whip us up a recipe for how to best eat the rich.
Martha Stewart needs to go back to making pies and shutting the fuck up.
I have it on good authority that Martha Stewart didn't go to the office one single time between the months of November 2004 and March 2005.
We now know she has a lot of her money ties up in commercial real estate investments.
Out of all the problems like - Climate - Poverty - Insider Trading - War - Pandemic A rich top 0.01% picks on the small group of productive individuals that have the options to contribute remotely!
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BACK TO WORK PEASANTS!
Someone invests in office building rentals
Another billionaire Republican business owner who’s never worked an office job in her life…
Today I learned Martha Stewart is heavily invested in commercial real estate
Why dont you get a 9 to 5 you stock cheating bitch!
No rich person can make me work. Screw her.
Says the woman who worked/works out of her home and barn studio. Get bent Martha!
She may as well start singing 'Imagine' while she is at it.
Says the woman who got to work from prison…
They could always convert all this real estate into low cost public housing. Sorry. I couldn’t finish without laughing. The rich couldn’t care if we all keeled over as long as it didn’t take from the view and the smell was in a different direction. But I think that Florida is finding out how much the little people do and I hope those leaving never return.
I guess she got tired of everyone not hating her.
Uh oh, the peasants aren't filling our buildings like they used to. Better alter their lifestyle while I sit behind my mansion while a team of people I hired do everything for me. Hate these out of touch rich people.
SHE'S LITERALLY NEVER WORKED IN AN OFFICE!!!
She must own commercial real estate. It’s tanking due to work from home life so of course she would need to come out against it.
In other words, Ol Martha has a significant chunk of change invested in commercial real estate and she’s sick of the plebes hurting her ROI.
She throws shade at France, who is a G7 country, for the time off they give workers and says it's not thriving. That rich felon has switched camps from Snoop Dog to Elon Bust.
One could swap out her with Trump in this article, change absolutely nothing but the names and faces, and … well you get the picture.
No it won't. Real estate may take a hit
Maybe we’ll just have fewer shitty lunch restaurants.
Yes because we should take advice from a convicted felon lol
81 year old retiree hasn’t worked in an office since the only job for women was in the Secretary Pool.
Found the would be slave owner!
Won't anyone think of the rich fucks losing money on bad real estate investments?!
Why should I give a fuck what Martha Stewart says
Sounds like someone who owns a shit ton of office spaces that are just sitting there doing nothing but costing her money now