Summary as the title is a bit clickbait:

Senior executive thought fake beach background in video meeting means employee wasn't at home. Enacts new policy employees can only work from home.

While the story itself is amusing, I actually focused on the thread where they've discussed tax implications that the company may bourne due to working in another city/state. I'm not familiar with US tax law, is this really true that income taxes can vary even between cities? I understand that it varies between states, but surely it doesn't extend that there are differences between two cities in the same state?

The obvious answer to this policy is to take a photo of the inside of your home, family photos and all, and use that as your zoom background.

Learned the hard way that being an employer in the U.S. is basically opting in to being an extension of a social surveillance/control mechanism in the sense that it incurs/induces an elevated level of control over how you can conduct your life.

The larger you get the more control you are accountable to implement. Basically anything that would be shrugged off by the average citizen as either B.S. or "none of your damned business" is basically shoehorned into being handled by employers. Up to and including surveilling the physical location of H-1B workers.

My eyes were opened wide once I started to look into how the modern corporation is utilized in the U.S.

You absolutely can make this shit up, and people have been doing it since the dawn of the internet.

You could make up a better title though.

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