Commuting can be completely carbon free if you live near the office.

Yes, sacrifice your lifestyle, raise no family, give up your desires and get back to offices. Hopefully people considering tech as a job understand why these companies pay well - it’s not because they value people’s talent it’s because they want total ownership of them. Sit at your desk, work and be contempt. Burn out and shut up. Either avoid such corporations or simply avoid tech if you wish for a better standard of living. This is not the 80s and an office job is not the only good paying career.

The best tech companies I worked for all understood the importance of employees maintaining a good WLB.

Getting back to the main point, Microsoft uses buses for getting employees to work. You can just drive to a pickup spot and "carpool" in

Indeed, factories do provide such buses.

... the implication is that being called a factory worker is somehow an insult?

Yes correct, that was very, very clearly the implication he was making.

Man, I'm so tired of this "we need to interpret everything companies do in the most uncharitable manner possible" attitude

You are correct. And personally, if I lived a 10-15 minute walk from the office I would go every day. Unfortunately, much of the world (and especially the US) is not designed for such a lifestyle. Even NYC most likely involves riding a bus or subway for 30 minutes or more.

Is this based on a special diet? Even walking burns calories... I mean a lot less than moving at 60mph, but still those groceries had to get to the city center somehow, and the fertilizer didn't make itself.

If you're counting that, the efficiencies of using all the electricity to communicate and heat/cool your home because you're in it also matter

Well, I was responding to a comment only about commuting, but yes. Housing costs and the energy (including direct construction, for those who made it and profited from it, and maintenance/heat etc) used are enormous. It's 30-40% of most people's budget both $ and Carbon. If you're living in a $1M+ house to avoid $10k worth of annual commuting the environmental savings may not be worth it.

Well the home gets heated anyway. The fridge pump is pumping anyway.

Everyone is encouraged to get a certain number of steps in per day (some say 10,000) for health. If you don't get those steps walking to the office, you're going to have to get them some other way, like by walking somewhere else or, worse, using a treadmill that also consumes energy in the process.