More from the article...

... Almost none of the long-term changes people said the pandemic would bring have turned out to be true. The gratitude and respect for carers and lower earners didn't last long once we were allowed to do something more exciting than clapping on our doorsteps. Even online shopping has fallen back to roughly where the pre-pandemic rise would have put it.

But one change has stuck: working from home (with the important caveat that it's rocketed among the top half of earners in particular; those working in a shop or restaurant, not so much). What affect will this have? It clearly boosts wellbeing, and is helping more mothers work full time. The research on its productivity impact is far more mixed, and I'd say comes down to a score draw. The big clear win is less time spent commuting, the benefits of which are shared between employees and employers. The losses? Missing out on the less tangible benefits of interacting with colleagues, and humans more generally.

But new research brings a different angle to the debate, suggesting that home working doesn't just cut commuting, it cuts crime. Specifically, burglaries, where the shift to working from home is given the credit for half of the 30% drop since 2019. ...

@#1

I had not thought about the burglary aspect of working from home until I read this interesting article....

@#4 ... was an early work at homer in Austin in the early 80's ...

Late 70's for me.

The company I worked for paid the monthly cost of a second phone line into my house so I could be online (at a whopping 1200bps) without tying up my main phone number.

(and... yes, that is not a typo. 1200bps I was able to work, and do the tasks my job required.)

@#6 ... Absolutely, I work from home, which means if you break in with violence I will shoot you dead in not only the evening, but the afternoon and morning as well. ...

Congrats on that.

But the big deterrent seems to be more of someone present on the property during the day.

@#7 ... Lamplighter, are you an old mainframer? ...

Back in the late 70's, commercially, mainframes were The Thing. So, yeah, in that respect, yes.

Though I had a microcomputer in the basement, a hand-assembled micro. With a S-100 bus and an Intel 8080 CPU. That CPU ran at a blazing 2MHz, and I had a whopping 64MB of memory to work in.

I also was one of the early adopters who lead my corporation (a major corporation) into the PC world, away from those rusty ole mainframes.

The stories i could tell ...

But for starters,

64MB of memory cost, let's say, $20,000 per megabyte in the 1970's...