Reducing daily commute seems like a good way to improve our carbon footprint.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200317-climate-change-c...

Mind you, there are things like that going on (at least in my neck of the woods), with things like subsidies to consumers for going to battery powered cars and installing solar panels, and subsidies to e.g. energy producers for building wind farms out at sea.

Me too, but GP has an argument along these lines here.

Commute is a big, and often deciding factor, in private car ownership. Get rid of it, and most drivers will lose the major reason for owning a car. Expand the delivery systems for day-to-day stuff like groceries, and another big reason - buying in bulk - goes away. While people living in sparsely populated areas will still need their cars, the dwellers of large cities with serviceable public transport infrastructure might be more inclined to get rid of their cars, and just rent one for an occasional out-of-town errand.

In this way, normalizing work from home creates top-down pressure for reducing the number of private cars in use.

I think this is backwards.

We saw during the pandemic a mass exodus from cities. Once people could work from home, they decided they didn't want to live in a city anymore.

Once you remove the burden of commuting, suburban / rural life becomes _even more_ attractive, increasing the need for cars.

IMO it’s too early to claim that. People left the city during the pandemic because there was no point paying the premium to live in a city when all its amenities are closed. As cities open back up we might see a lot of people return. Anecdotally, I know a bunch of early career folks in their 20s that moved back in with their parents during the pandemic to save cash. That most certainly isn’t their long term plan.

I don’t doubt that a good number of folks won’t return to the city once this is over. But I wonder if that’s just an acceleration of moves they would have already made in the next 5 years or so, rather than something indicative of the death of cities.

People who are betting against urban life are basically making a bet against human nature based on short-term trends.

A city is an entirely different experience when its residents are allowed to use parks and can enjoy dining out, walking to a market, strolling to the cinema, etc...

I think the pandemic highlighted a key deficiency of cities which most people will not soon forget.

Now it's more congested, but traffic still moves pretty quick. I'm not looking forward to all the commuters going back to the office.

And the one car I do have could potentially last me the rest of my life because I've gone from commuting 12k miles per year (time 2), down to around 3000.

My last two bus trips had betwen1 and 5 people blatantly ignoring the mask requirements and this is in on of the UK covid hot spots.

Exactly. Germany banning plastic straws while simultaneously funding a new natural gas pipeline feels very much like they just want it to seem like things are improving.

Switching from brown coal to natural gas can reduce carbon footprint by about 50%. This is a good stepping stone to reduce the huge amount of brown coal that Germany uses for power. Also, the reduction in NOx and SOx is huge by switching from brown coal to natural gas. Another big win for public health.

Do I misunderstand your point?

Germany has limited places to harvest wind (North Sea) and limited solar resources. How else can they reduce their carbon footprint? I guess they can build massive solar arrays in Libya and then build the world's largest long-range DC power line to Munich? (No joke: Singapore might do this with Australia.)

But if you ask me, the long term answer is nuclear. I know it’s controversial but many of the issues are blown out of proportion.

Disposable plastics are a problem first and foremost because they cause proliferation of microplastics in the biosphere. This is an issue, but it's not an important issue right now. It's likely harmful to biosphere and to us in the long run - but as of today, there's no noticeable harm being done that can be tied to microplastics, which suggests any negative effects are weak.

Climate change, on the other hand, is a civilization-ending threat. We keep burning more fossil fuels, and it's quite likely our grandchildren will get to starve to death. Preventing this should be our absolute top priority. Microplastics can wait.

It's like trying to administer first aid to an accident victim who has a nasty skin cut on their arm, and a leg that got cut off below the knee. Yes, that skin cut is painful and it needs treating to prevent infection, but it can wait - the first priority is to deal with the leg, before the victim bleeds out.

Things that everybody is going to notice first-hand have an outsized impact on public consciousness. When combined with democracy, this has nasty consequences.

For politicians banning plastic straws is a no-brainer: easy to ban, no real impact on anything, and everyone is going to notice it and feel like something is happening. Same for plastic grocery bags and cutlery. Do it and maybe you'll grab some of those Green votes, same play as the Energiewende.

Meanwhile if you make industry even just .1% more efficient the impact is larger by orders of magnitude but nobody is going to notice, first-hand, right now. So it's pointless when you only care about votes. Which is sadly a main feature of democracy.

Bottom line is, voters may elect politicians, but companies fund their campaigns.

GP described what's a clear systemic failure inherent in the current implementation of the system. This doesn't mean we have to throw the system away - figuring out how to mitigate this problem would work too.

On this, I don't have any solid ideas. In a way, it's a marketing problem: maybe there's a way to make people more receptive to reality than to feel-good but ultimately meaningless actions?

I sometimes wonder if governments shouldn't have an official propaganda department, with an official website, explaining in layman's terms the reasoning behind various laws being introduced. You'd go to a page for plastic straws ban, and see the government's official word on why it was drafted, what problem it's meant to solve, how it attempts that, and how they track the results.

Of course, everyone would have a field day debunking every single article from a million different angles, but at least it would serve to anchor the discussion. And it would be a place for a smarter politicians/parties to explain why increasing efficiency of some industry by 0.01% is a huge win by the current administration - hopefully leading to more such actions in the future.

There's a thin line between giving clear explanations and patronizing the citizens, but I think governments need to start walking it - as it is, politics is way too complicated for regular people to follow in any meaningful sense, other than repeating soundbites.

The Netherlands have fairly lax laws on substances and are a EU member. If you take something from the Netherlands into a country that doesn't want that item within their borders you are subject to the local laws. Same thing that would happen if you brought contraband from South America to the US really.

That said, I like the balance in your comment about the known effects of microplastics. At the moment, it is just a hype story. Honestly: No one really knows, but we should continue to seriously monitor and research the issue. I have heard that stretchy clothing (aka "ath-leisure") causes a lot of micro-fibres to be shed during laundry. This is simiar to microplastics, as most ath-leisure is made with synthetic materials that are essentially refined oil (as plastics).

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/06/the-us-natural-gas-industry-...

new studies suggest the leak rate is around 2.3%, which is about twice as high as previously predicted - and at 3% you have offset all the benefits compared to coal generation. Again, obviously that's still better in terms of particulate emissions/acid rain, but you wouldn't be doing any less global warming. So it is still significantly bad in terms of greenhouse effect, not nearly the panacea the fossil-fuel industry would like to present it as.

(and conversely - the fact that it's such a distributed problem makes it difficult/expensive to clean up. you can capture CO2 and particulates from a point source - it's expensive and it sucks but you can do it. But you can't stop 2 million miles of pipes from leaking a little bit at every fitting.)

the only saving grace is that methane does oxidize relatively quickly, on the order of tens of years, whereas CO2 is pretty much there forever. but if we're still pumping out more natural gas into the atmosphere 10 years later, that's not really the fix people think it is. Again, it's 100x more potent over a 100 year lifespan than CO2, the "long term" picture isn't all that rosy either.

Unfortunately, in many places you can't produce oil without producing gas, and with so much gas right now, there's not a lot of financial incentive to capture it all. If we reduce the need for oil, we'll reduce gas leak emissions as well.

https://response.restoration.noaa.gov/oil-and-chemical-spill...

Why would it be different for other things created by the same processes? And do the pipes let less leak out than if we just left it in the ground?

Oil and gas seeps notwithstanding, the vast majority of reservoirs are stable and likely to remain so over human timescales unless we stick wells into them and start piping fluids around on the surface.

I'm also not going to let my pets freeze or bake while no one is home.

Just nobody is brave enough to do it, because it would be political suicide. Even if you gave the money back to the people in the form of tax breaks and social programmes, it would still be political suicide.

If you weigh this against spending an extra hour or two commuting, then it looks like a lousy bargain. But if you are like many people, and ended up working more hours during the pandemic, [1] then that erases some/all of the gains of not commuting.

1: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/11/24/people-a...

Wow. I cut my hours down substantially due to WFH. Pre-COVID I was doing 70+ hrs per week due to commuting into the area during the week and having nothing to do.

Now I put in maybe 40hrs per week, broken up into 1hr chunks here and there and I'm not spending over $1500/month just for a room/expenses in the area where work is.

It's great! I'm not going back to the office, like, ever.

Or are you just clocking in less, also producing less?

Once the new house is built, my office will probably be in a separate guest house.

I eat well and spend maybe $400 a month on groceries and food.

I’ve heard that Google recruiters attempt to con potential employees into some ridiculous assessment of the “free” food as a compensation benefit with numbers like those that you posited above. I can’t imagine valuing daily meals that highly.

The campus was really too big to leave for lunch unless you arrived at some stupid early hour to park underground below your office. It's a 10-15 minute walk to the south parking garage and then at least a 10 minute drive to the closest places to eat and none of those are cheaper than the cafe.

So unless you're bringing food from home you can pretty easily hit $20 for lunch per day. I doubt Cafe Macs is running a huge profit but the cost for employees is non-trivial.

I am used to pay at least 10 euros, for food + drink, unless I go to one of those special lunch time deals or street food places.

And since I am Portuguese, evenings is also a proper meal, so make it twice for the days I happen to dine outside as well.

In fact to this day I never gotten into the whole Abendbrot stuff, even though I have lived half of my life in German speaking countries.

Just explaining where I am coming from, not attacking anyone.

https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-free-food-google-cafe...

You'll be able to make it healthier though, and tune it exactly to what you like.

When you get older, you start to understand food, and you are willing to pay more for it, but now you have to count calories.

Can I survive on $10 a day? I did it on $3 a DAY when my parents were on food stamps, but I am not that crazy about going back to the "franks, rice, and ketchup" menu.

Even if you value your labor/time to cook to be worth of zero dollars, when I was at Google my cafe had fresh seafood (a rotation of different types of fish, scallops, shrimps, mussel, crab, etc) and good quality regular meat dish (I particularly liked the skirt steak with guacamole), great vegan/vegetarian options, in-house made desserts including fresh made chocolate truffles every day prepared by the chef.

And that's just lunch, at one cafe, not including breakfast and dinner and options at the other 3 dozens cafes on campus.

If you can recreate all of that for two people with a $60/week budget, then kudos to you. I know I can't.

You then mention chocolate truffles. Personally if I had my employer providing ridiculous good food for free, I’ll likely live less healthy because I will eat those nice unhealthy things every day.

If I am prepping my own food I have complete control over what I buy and can choose _not_ to buy unhealthy things.

Also in my experience a reason why food prepared by a chef tastes so good: more fat used.

I assume that Google and Facebook canteens (well that’s what they are) are better than the ones offered by companies here in Germany, but I think I would still gain weight.

That probably depends on your cultural background.

Whenever I was in the US and worked for large tech companies I found the food too fat, too sweet, (interestingly same things like Kellogs are totally different in the US than in Europe), too much artifical flavor, too much cheese, too much toppings, large unhealthy portions.

The water and Cola tasted like Chlorine and were undrinkable - I guess you don't taste it when you grow up with that taste.

I had good food here an there, especially great - and expensive - steaks in NYC and once the best fish tacos in the world on a beach in San Diego, but overall the food wasn't to my liking. I was dissapointed by the food in SF, I had very high hopes from hearing all the good things but it was just average.

Food which I did like more than the food for "those two people" in general was the food in the South of France, in Sardinia, Corsica and Rome, desserts of the Middle East, in Japan and Vietnam - also Copenhagen is so underrated concerning food.

The food for "those two people" tastes natural, has no artifical flavorings and is healthy.

So it probably depends on your cultural background, as I've said.

For the last five years we're cooking most of our meals at home, maybe go out or order food once or twice a month. The food we cook isn't as exotic, nicely looking or sophisticated as the food served at Google, but it is tasty, fresh, healthy and the groceries are pretty cheap. And despite being older, my blood results are better now than when I was leaving Google.

I understand what you're saying, but still cringed at that statement. Eating well and, by extension, cooking is hardly something I would value at $0/hour and I find it mildly insulting that someone would devalue the time I dedicate to preparing meals.

If you don't like cooking and would rather dedicate some of your income to having someone else do it for you, please frame it in that way. It recognizes it is your own decision and comes off as less judgmental of others.

I can definitely relate to him because I hate spending time cooking, I don't like the prep, I don't like the drudge work, and I don't like to have to clean up afterwards. I have a finite lifespan and I don't wanna waste any of it on things that I fundamentally do not enjoy, particularly if it's entirely avoidable.

But the best part of the day is the very first fresh ground coffee with real sugar and real cream in the morning. You just can't beat it.

Also fasting is better for you than eating all the time.

At wet markets in China/HK/TW/SE Asia, you might be able to eat for a month on 60 USD.

Buying raw ingredients and cooking them yourself is cheaper in terms of explicit dollar costs, but if you don't enjoy cooking then you also need to assign some monetary value for having to do something that you don't like.

I think I would enjoy taking a break and cooking so free food is probably not worth $60 to me personally. It's not crazy to think that my employer gets a benefit of more than $60 through increased productivity by providing me with free food though.

Once I committed to WFH life, it became a logical next step to double down on the freedom aspects and start my own consulting firm.

That meant I needed long term thinking. I learned to cook more often and turned my entire front yard into a garden.

Overall I would say WFH has been net healthier on my mind and wallet.

It will last years though, do you NEED to cook only one thing with it?

If you cook frequently enough then it's just not an issue; there's always something with not much good life left, sure, but that's what you use next.

If course if you don't cook it's not a problem either, so it's probably unfortunately the cause of some reluctance. Maybe kits help that.

However, if 1) I cook all my food, and 2) try to have a healthy diet I spend easily the equivalent of 30USD/day. Going to a restaurant sets you back around the same amount per meal.

So, assuming I work 200 days/year going to the office and get free food would save me 6k USD/year (also assuming I cook 100% off my meals). That kind of money would pay for holidays or other stuff.

Finally, my back of the envelope math didn't include the time I spend cooking and all the "premium" stuff I get at the office like fancy drinks and snacks, which I usually don't buy when WFH.

I really think a lot of this debate is colored by Americans thinking of the American commute.

Whenever a pissing contest about grocery prices happens (and don't kid yourself, if a number has been mentioned it's not a question of when but rather an indication that the pissing has begun) you must quote a lower number than the previous person. It doesn't need to be true, it doesn't need to include critical qualifying information like location and tradeoffs, it doesn't even need to be particularly likely -- but it must be lower. So it is written. Here, I'll demonstrate:

I only spend $250 per month on groceries and I cannot imagine the disgusting excess that could possibly lead anyone to waste a single cent more!

Is the cooked-for-you food free?

Anything but free. Meal plan requirements vary.

Where I lived undergrad, we had a kitchen for a suite of rooms although I ate out a fair bit. (Many dorms did not have cooking facilities though.) Both places I went for grad school (which were actually both Ivy League) had no cooking facilities of any type.

It's not free, you are required to pay for a meal plan when you are on campus dormitory housing.

In fact I'd guess it's probably a requirement here - I don't think student halls are treated any differently to any private rented accommodation, it's probably a requirement that there be access to a (possibly shared) kitchen.

It's also quite (and increasingly) common that you're only in halls (or at least only guaranteed a place) in first year, thereafter in private rented accommodation of course you'd expect a kitchen; whereas I gather in the US the vast majority are campus universities, and provide on-campus accomodation throughout all years.

Did the "The Young Ones" not get picked up in the US

Nobody buys prepared food every day, and the costs of food are negligible for a Google employee.

You could likely do that and end up spending less money than buying food and cooking for yourself. If you don't cook you can free up your time for other revenue generating activities, chores, etc. Total cost of 2x to 4x delivered meals in my area could be $20 to $80. That's ~$320 or 80 less then the $400 number quoted in other places in this thread.

It's pretty rational behavior from the employees side of things.

And, even before Google, when I started living alone I realized I couldn't buy milk anymore because I don't drink enough milk fast enough to not let it spoil. I've switched to soy purely because it lasts months I'm my fridge safely.

I don't think you're lying, although I don't think you're correct; I'm just amazed at how different people's baseline contexts are. In your context, that's a reasonable statement, or you wouldn't have said it.

> I can't even imagine how anyone could think this was true, even in multi-generational upper-middle class urban families.

In the context of the sweep of human history of about two million years, people exclusively cooking at home being relatively recent is true [1]. Restaurants are a relatively recent invention [2] [3]. What we conceive of as normal meals is relatively recent [4].

Communal was the predominant cooking setting for many modes of cooking like baking for most of human history. This was because fuel was brutally time and energy-intensive to gather and prepare until our species started to master tool-making to a sufficient level that individual households at the mainstream level could afford the necessary tools. It literally took organizing a community to sustainably run much of what we take for granted in an individual middle class developed world household kitchen today.

Cooking over an open fire is likely the oldest mode [5], and that fire takes a fair amount of effort to sustain solely at the household scale, and the archeological evidence for humans routinely and widely making fire instead of sustaining it continuously suggests routinely and widely making fire is relatively recent (100's thousands instead of millions of years ago) [6], and even then it was common to borrow fire from a neighbor than making it, so arduous it was to make fire or expensive it was to acquire the tools. Our species only really started to relatively routinely cook during the Paleolithic age about 200,000 years ago [7], starting with open fire roasting, then proceeding from there (boiling came after roasting, ironic since boiling water is considered by us as how we start teaching children to cook) [7].

There is a simple experiment you can conduct today to validate this on your own: with nothing but a flint suitable for knapping (which in itself is an accomplishment to de novo achieve), and plain cotton clothing (to give you a head start), work out what it takes to start a fire, sustainably gather fuel, sustainably gather calories and nutrition, and scale it up to a minimum genetic variability group. It is incredibly exhausting, and prone to all kinds of failure modes.

The sheer amount of agonizing, brutal, incremental effort over the millennia it took our ancestors to "just" get to the stage to develop agrarian systems (and there is even debate if even that was a prudent choice [8] [9] [10], though for the record I'm pro-agriculture) is mind-boggling. By comparison, our current state of civilization is just LARP'ing "grinding", and gamers talking about grinding take that to yet an entirely different level. I give our ancestors their due: they were a set of some tough hombres, and we collectively do indeed stand on the shoulders of giants.

[1] https://food52.com/blog/17568-the-centuries-old-form-of-publ...

[2] https://www.history.com/news/first-restaurants-china-france

[3] https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/03/home-cooking-food-h...

[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20243692

[5] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23230980-600-every-hu...

[6] https://www.livescience.com/when-did-humans-discover-fire.ht...

[7] https://lithub.com/why-and-how-exactly-did-early-humans-star...

[8] http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/538/was-adopting-ag...

[9] https://www.livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/agricult...

[10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43118

Of course they do? When I've been crunching, like just putting insane hours in, I've gone weeks without cooking and just ordering in. It costs a fortune, even at Google salary - or in my case, 'SF' salary. Not to mention the cost of living is already absurd due to rent - your salary gets eaten up faster than you might imagine.

I get what you are trying to say, but empirically false

I know many people who don't cook at all and live solely on prepared food.

(Never cooking is very, very rare here in The Netherlands so I'm curious about any anecdata here).

These are broad strokes, but my experience in rural America and in SF bears this out, rich people eat out very often and tend to be fit and the very poor also eat out more than average but tend to be obese. Everyone else is in the middle.

In The Netherlands, the cuisine tends to be really simple, and salad-kits and meal-kits are extremely popular. The fanciest food that people 'cook' is often a soup or pasta, and I'd say it's extremely rare for anyone to make pasta or sauces from scratch.

In my case, my family prepares almost all of our own food anyway. And more than a few days of eating prepared food begins to affect my health. But that doesn't mean a worker who lives on prepared food wouldn't value the benefit of free food at work.

From home, I whip something up from my kitchen every day

I'd say I spend <$10 a day on food with good quality organic local ingredients.

Most people definitely don't, at $1825 a month that's already more than the median cost of rent in the U.S.

When I get paid 200$ per hour, saving 20-30$ but losing 2h is totally not worth my time.

I would rather spend that time with family or my hobbies.

How about if your commute is <20 minutes one way?

Some of us don't really object to 90 minutes a day of quiet time where we can read tbh.

a) 3 meals prepared for me saves me time and money. I love to cook but I don't have tons of time anymore and I don't have a a good kitchen. If I want to save time via delivery I end up spending tons more, and I don't think I eat as healthy.

b) The food was ridiculous. I've eaten a lot of good food, I've eaten in numerous countries, and Dropbox's food was god tier.

c) Tons of snacks, little treats, etc. Wine as well. Given the incredible quality of the food I wouldn't be surprised to find that I was eating quite a lot in terms of money.

It was such a quality of life win, especially as someone who loves food, to just have insanely good meals every single day. Even if ultimately it probably saved me closer to 1000 a month than 5000.

ADDED: This subthread to me is such a bizarre look into a certain bubble of SV. [See also apparent disagreements with the statement that spending $60/day in restaurants is somehow abnormal.]

I remember the Japanese cafe at Google was very good at one point. This article has some pictures to give you an idea:

https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-free-food-google-cafe...

Can't stand work canteens... something about the smell of food really puts you off eating.

It feels very forced.

Prefer an impersonal sandwich shop where I just have a wall to stare at than being in something attached to my workplace.

I am surprised that the IRS hasn't gone after this like HMRC has in the UK

But the companies are presumably eating the cost.

I ate some of the best meals I've ever had while working there. After a certain point that matters more to me than an extra N dollars a year.

For me getting home before dinner would be a massive plus to getting a free meal.

(/s)

The dinner is also often relatively early, so you still have quite a lot of time after the commute (granted, if your commute is 1+ hour then it's far from a dream routine).

What I like is having the option, for example I had a late sports club that was close to work, so it was more interesting to grab a quick bite and stay there to go to the club and return home after.

I wonder, on some deeply dystopian level, if tech companies do this on purpose to keep their a large proportion of their employees single.

Maybe statistically, OK. But if you have a nice commute it may be likely the best part of your day. I have a mostly flat, 40 min bike ride in the woods every day, and it is my "me time" that I cherish and lets me unwind before and after work. Definitely not "lost time".

> it is my "me time" that I cherish

You have kids don't you? That seems to be a consistent feature of people I meet who espouse the virtues of going to work.

Yes. But my liking of bike commuting is maybe more related to the fact that it is a positive change from using public transportation, where I felt really miserable (had to take two crowded buses with an indeterminate waiting time in-between).

But you are right that having kids changes one's view to work... often, after an intense weekend, I go back to the lab and say "finally! I can relax and get some work done".

If that's the absolute best way you can imagine spending those 40 mins, you don't lose the option to do that.

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/05/younger-worke...

Personally I like the free AC.

Once you optimize your job to be close to your home, many of the benefits of wfh disappear.

It seems like a no-brainer to do this in Arizona, but I don't know the economics.

Still need to work out the numbers on the solar panels so I can decide if I should buy them, or lease them.

I live quite frugally otherwise (balking at other numbers in this thread) and $150 per month in climate cost increase for the daytimes sounds perfectly normal to me. During the hot summers I spent twice that when living in an apartment in the big city.

Also consider most people rent and have little ability to impact insulation and efficiency in their homes.

Work from home doesn't mean you have to literally work from home. There are plenty of places you can work from, ranging from free like libraries or parks, to paid like coffee shops and co-working spaces. You can get your employer to pay for the latter.

> Once you optimize your job to be close to your home, many of the benefits of wfh disappear.

Those optimizations become liabilities if you get a new job elsewhere.

Alternative framing: your life has been constrained by your career expectation of working in an office; you've optimised around that and found a local maximum.

Work-from-home doesn't remove that local maximum from you, but it creates an opening to find a higher maximum.

While money is fungible, time is not. You can't buy more time with your kids while they're young if they're already grown. You can't buy more time with someone who has passed away. And you can't buy your way out of missed opportunities in your personal life, once they've gone they're gone.

He's not coming back to the office. No way, no how. He's seen a better life.

Same thing applies to cooking, groceries, errands, etc.

Driving a car yep you're absolutely right, but if you commute via car a long distance for a considerable amount of time I think you're crazy.

For the record, I’ve commuted via public transit (both bus and train), bike, and foot for long stretches of time. All beat driving, all are much worse than just not commuting at all.

I don't what commuter line you're coming in on but it must be one with seats on the roof.

We are software engineers! There is no reason for us to put up with a worst case or even an average case commute. If we want to go into the office, it's easy for us to move house or move job.

Its not worth agonizing over a few bucks an hour, especially when going into the office has its own monetary benefits as OP mentioned. It would be a non-issue for most people here to just pay for an Uber back and forth to work, and not have to worry about driving at all.

The median and average commutes are not the worst case scenarios.

> Its not worth agonizing over a few bucks an hour

10% of a software engineer's yearly salary is nothing to balk at. A year or two of that is easily the down payment amount for a modest home, and is more than what many people make in a year.

> It would be a non-issue for most people here to just pay for an Uber back and forth to work, and not have to worry about driving at all.

I just checked Uber, and a one way trip to my last employer is $40 without surge pricing, and to another employer, it would be over $60. Assuming there's about 260 work days per year, that's at least $20k - $31k a year on Uber rides alone.

And it's not just about cost. It's also about time. Based on my last commute, I'd spend about two weeks straight just driving to work and back each year.

You maybe did it for a larger house. Or maybe for cheaper rent/mortgage.

We're not talking here about folks on minimum wage who can only afford to live 2 hours outside of the city they are working in.

The highly paid software engineers on hackernews could absolutely afford to live 5 minutes from the office, 30 minutes from the office, or 2 hours from the office.

They could afford to move to a city with good transit where they can only afford an apartment, or to a city with no transit where they can afford a giant mansion.

Secondly, you can work towards a situation where you don't have that commute, or it's cheap / clean / easy / you don't lose all the time. Spoiler: live on a trainline or buy a bicycle.

Third, I don't believe this is the main reason for commuting. I think it's because people want to live in one place and work in another, which is usually a bad idea - especially for the environment. It irks me when I choose to live reasonably close to work so I don't need to burn fossil fuels to get there, and then people driving their cars to and from some village complain about their commute whilst I have to suffer the air pollution from their vehicles.

I totally get that for some transitional periods a long commute may be required, but I don't know a single person who couldn't make their commute a 20min walk or by public transport if they moved or switched jobs.

do you suggest moving every time you change jobs? I suppose that can be done as a single person or a couple, but moving homes every 4-6 years with children who have to change schools, etc is (I'm sorry) an insane proposition.

If you are single and can just up sticks from one apartment to another then yeah, it's pretty trivial.

No, just if you move to a new job that's a long journey away from your house.

Does "commuting" only mean "driving in a privately owned car" where you are based? I'd consider travelling by rail, bus or bicycle to also be commuting.

I.e public transport

There is always a choice. Ten more miles equals one extra bedroom and so on.

Are you suggesting people live at the office?

And furthermore, even if everyone was that free-roaming, only-working, highly-paid software developer you seem to consider average, still there wouldn't be enough living space really close to many offices for all employees.

This might be technically correct. But realistically I'd count only working hours. 200 working days and roughly 2 hr commute for me a day. So it is about 400 hr commute to work/home i.e ~50 work days spent in commute.

I took a small pay cut, moved the east coast and now spend 24 minutes a day commuting, which is infinitely better.

This is true. I choose to live within walking distance of my office, and it has vastly improved my life - prior to this job, I commuted 2.5 hours a day, and that was awful.

These choices of course have complex tradeoffs, but you don't have to commute, it is a choice.

I feel like the trade off isn't that complex. Walking to work is a luxury of having a well paying job in the city.

I have to live near disabled family members so I can help take care of them. It's either work at Walmart, commute or work remotely. I've done the latter for years, but before the pandemic, most non-remote-first employers' attitudes towards remote working was either simply "no", or there was the expectation that you were to spend a year or more working in the office before asking your employer to make a special case for you to work remotely.

I will not be happy to return to the office.

If everyone remote worked half the week, I’d expect the metros to be half as full during rush hours. So it’s be a lot more enjoyable for everyone: space to sit and space to read a book.

I think the best of both worlds would be working at the office on average 2 to 3 days a week (on average; so I’d like to be able to work remotely for a week or two at a time).

This would also allow couples to alternate being home which would be nice for kids. If both parents work late at the office, who takes care of the kids, a nanny ? Expensive and doesn’t help the proximity between parents and their kids. My girlfriends mom stopped working when her kids started calling their nanny « mom ». That means that her career stopped. And that scares my girlfriend.

Finally, remote working would reduce traffic jams and hence help with our whole global warming situation.

So the 5 day at the office work week for everyone is: - not hygienic (metros more packed == greater chance of spreading the common cold, flu, stomachs etc == more money spend on healthcare == more sick leaves) - not green (why travel everyday when we do not have to) - not family friendly (who takes care of the kids when no one’s at home 60 hours a week?) - wastes everyone’s time (stand still doing nothing in the metro for an hour to work and back).

I’m all for the partial work at the office for the reasons mentioned by the grandparent comment, but go to hell companies that will bring the five days at the office back !!