While commuting is time-inefficient activity, if you let all 22 days a year disappear...thats on you. There are plenty of things to do in a car ride, train ride, bus ride, walk that are not 'poof, gone' uses of time.
If you are driving to work the most you can do during that drive is listen to a podcast, news, or book on tape. Stuff I can already do at home doing other things too. But have to deal with things like someone just cut you off, and now you just forgot what was happening and need to rewind. It is far from a productive time period. Without having to commute I have a lot more time to do things that are much more valuable to me.
I think most of the people missed my point. I didn't say commuting was a productive time, but it doesn't have to be a complete waste either. Sure, some days people are groggy or feel like zoning out on the commute, cool. But I feel like if 100% of the days are like that, and you actively complain about it...there is something that can change.
1. Catching up on lost sleep because I had to wake up early to waste that time on commuting to the office.
2. Being wasted from a tiring day at work and not in any mood to do anything "productive" on transit, which itself further adds to fatigue and exhaustion.
As a bonus, you also get to roll the dice on whether you even get to sit. Whether it's 30 minutes or 90 minutes, holding onto a bar or strap stuffed into a metal container like sardines takes another huge mental and physical toll. Arrive at the office already tired and wasted, and arrive back home even more tired and wasted.
Yes, there are many people in situations where there is a constant domino effect of negative stressors that prevent being in a 'productive commuting mood'(having a baby for example, disorders, disabilities). But if you're in a perpetual state of exhaustion from mainly your job and 30 minutes on a train is putting you in the ground, I would go on a limb and say you're not just wasting the 22 days, you're wasting a whole lot more than that.
In my particular case, it's a 45-60 minute bus ride + a 20-30 minute subway ride. Odds are that I'm much more likely to be standing than sitting, so it is definitely not an enjoyable or relaxing experience.
The only way I can avoid it is to leave home much earlier (see my earlier comment about losing sleep because of the commute as it is) and/or leave work much later.
Or move closer to work at the cost of much higher housing expenses for a place that is smaller and older.
Or - something which I'm trying to do - leave for an entirely different metropolitan area. I've had ex-coworkers and friends who've left the Manhattan commuting hellhole for the SFBA and tell me their commutes are a heavenly 15-30 minute relaxing drive now.
Don't put the blame on them. There are plenty of reasons why it might suck: having to drive the car (and pay for it) to get to work, which also adds to the stress. Taking the train (depending on where you live) might also be uncomfortable: risk of dirt, disease, smell, and risk of assault when commuting home after working late. Cycling late at night might also increase the risk of accidents.
There are also plenty of reasons it might not suck too. A negative spin can be put on any situation, and I agree that not everyone has a posh commute in a nice car, or in a nice part of town, or on a nice rail line.
But the way I see it is that you have two choices: you can change the situation or you can change your outlook on it. Sometimes you can do the first one, but it doesn't always work out. At this point you should look to do the second one. If you don't do either, well I guess you can wait for a covid situation to do the changing for you.
Also, cycling absolutely increases the risk of accidents...doing almost anything at night increases the risk of something going wrong. I don't see how that point plays into anything. If my ride home is 30 minutes and I need to stay focused not to crash, then I ride attentively and consider it a workout. Yay I just worked out 22 extra days a year.
Also seems like you missed the point. I said nothing about the future of work and fighting or not fighting for different standards.
I'm glad you think that people who choose to listen to podcasts during transportation experiences are timidly complying with the world though, seems accurate.
I worked in a Law Enforcment office that used Facial Recognition. Every single time we would give officers a potential match, it came with a disclaimer that it was a POTENTIAL match. It was up to the detectives and officers to actually do their job and find other pillars of information.
This isn't a failure of facial recognition, its a failure of
the stupidest people I went to high school with thinking its some sort of perfect system.
You can't paint a proper moral picture of a situation by imagining your responsibility is compartmentalized and that you operate in an environment where others will or at least could in theory operate ideally.
Such an approximation must as part of the moral calculus be incrementally replaced with a more accurate picture that takes into account the actual foibles of your fellow humans actually behave.
If given how people actually behave evil or injustice is done that is your fault. Not partially your fault, your fault guilt doesn't divide it just multiplies. You are I think bound not to do the least you can do but rather the most you can do. The best idea I've heard in this thread is to always show multiple results with no indication of which was higher priority. Force a human into the loop.
Given the well-documented penchant of police to use “fits the description” as a pretext to harass the public, especially people of color, I would say it is borderline negligent to allow the use of algorithmically generated probable cause justifications.
In a previous career, I was responsible for delivering timely and accurate information to people who then went and put their lives on the line based off of that information.
I was regarded as "brash" and an "asshole" because I would correct my colleagues information as they were giving it to those individuals who were going to put their life on the line.
I wasn't doing it to demean or belittle the people who I was correcting, I was doing it because had those operators gone out with wrong information, it could lead to their deaths. And I would much rather be thought of as an asshole than quietly and kindly "talk" to my colleagues AFTER they had delivered bad information and corrected them in private.
Nah, I think he is pointing out that if more remote work becomes the norm, urban areas will see an exodus to more rural, cheaper areas to live, and the demand for living spaces will decrease lowering the costs of rent in urban areas where most poor people live.
No he's saying that less commuting will help the environment and that that's worth sacrificing poor people's jobs. I'm saying I disagree because if the goal were maximizing some kind of utility function then I have an even better solution.
Re your point: obviously you're unfamiliar with the effects of white flight to the suburbs on inner cities. White people (read: wealthy people) have already made that migration in the 50s and 60s and took all of tax revenue with them, leading to places like Detroit and South side Chicago. It was only during the 2000s that they've migrated back to cities. Heading back to the suburbs will repeat history that's literally only 50 years old.
Edit: alright which part am I wrong about mr downvoter
> less commuting will help the environment and that that's worth sacrificing poor people's jobs
No, he's saying that if some people work from home and some other people don't, fewer people will commute, the environment we all share will benefit, but people who can't work from home can still do their jobs. (Source: am the one who said it)
Great. Now map out for me what happens to counties that get the bulk of their tax revenue from property taxes and then use that tax revenue to preserve and improve the environs of that county? Just think about it for two seconds: how good is park beautification on one side of the train tracks vs the other? Is that because of commuting or something else?
>, but people who can't work from home can still do their jobs
seeing as how service jobs can't be done from home this prompts the question: for whom exactly are these people going to be providing services when all of the remote workers have fled to the suburbs? so will they actually be able to "do their jobs"?
so now we're down to "devs move to suburbs and poor people move a little closer" in order to improve the world? and you still don't think that this disproportionately hurts poor people? do i really have to do more work to show you how this is galaxy brain thinking?
If poor people are currently living in expensive, cramped housing because they’re forced like many others to all commute every day to the same few spots on the Earth we call big cities and we replace that with a system where much more land becomes easy to use to for housing because we’re not going to worship for 8 hours every day at the work temple, I think it’s quite possible that the poor and middle class are both substantially helped.
If your concern is that both are helped but the poor are helped slightly less and conclude from that that means we shouldn’t do it, well, that’s one approach I suppose.
>where much more land becomes easy to use to for housing
what are these revolutionary changes that will make the wild wild west more hospitable? is it public transportation? is it more investment in local schools? is it small walkable main streets? none of these things will happen the way you imagine they will. how do i know that? can i predict the future? am i a city planner? no. you're repeating everything that everyone said ~50 years ago when rich people migrated away from cities. i've already brought this up elsewhere in this thread. like seriously just take a step back and pattern match for 2 seconds.
Thanks for pointing out that I corrected my information, I prefer communicating accurate information. Panels and inverter have 25 year warranties. Storage is optional (the 10 year warranty you mention). If there are incentives for it, get it, but don't pay out of pocket entire yourself for the storage. Let state, local, and utility pockets pay for it.
Casinos are regulated where permitted, and often flat out banned. "Sin taxes" for junk food (particularly soda pop) are becoming increasingly common.
Vice industries often point to each other when trying to justify themselves, which I suppose demonstrates that there is safety in numbers. The strategy of tackling one problem at a time is countered by demands for all-or-nothing tactics, with "all" being obviously and conveniently impractical.
The issue with using general "Earth-like electromagnetic communications technology" is the inverse square law.
Our own communications aren't distinguishable from the cosmic background radiation even at our closest neighbor.
The only way we would find something is if they pointed a VERY powerful noise source directly at us, or us at them. And even then, we are looking at maybe a 100 lightyear bubble (~600 main sequence stars).
> The only way we would find something is if they pointed a VERY powerful noise source directly at us, or us at them.
Do you mean we could detect ordinary technological EM radiation if we pointed a sufficiently high-gain antenna at the transmitting planet ?
Otherwise if SETI assumes someone is sending an interstellar signal on purpose, I would question its value, because there's no strong reason to think anyone is doing that. I realize we did it once, but an argument can be made (and has been) that it was a fairly stupid thing to do.
IR radiation is bound by the same laws as all other forms of radiation, most namely the inverse square law.
You would have to be radiating monumental amounts of energy, more than say a red dwarf, to be detectable from "millions of light years" away without fading into the cosmic background as noise.
Think about it this way. With the naked eye you can see a bunch of individual distinguishable stars around ~4000 light years away. These stars produce more energy in a second than mankind has ever produced.
But our closest neighbor, Proxima Centuari, you can't see with the naked eye. Its a red dwarf. And while it still produces unfathomable amounts of energy AND is the closest star to our own. You can't see it.
TLDR: No, a Dyson swarm would not be detectable from "Millions of lightyears away"
In what world do you conflate "detectable" with "visible with the naked eye", particularly when talking about IR which isn't in the visible spectrum anyway?
What's more, the ratio of visible light to IR would be... highly abnormal.
> You would have to be radiating monumental amounts of energy,
You mean like the energy output of, you know, a star?
> In what world do you conflate "detectable" with "visible with the naked eye"
They are literally synonymous and only vary in the instrument we are using to detect it. Your eye versus, say, an antenna.
Visible light is also on the electromagnetic spectrum, it also abides by the inverse square law.
> What's more, the ratio of visible light to IR would be... highly abnormal.
No, it wouldn't. The sun radiates across the entire EM spectrum including IR and Visible light.
It would take ~6200 structures that have the same area as the United States including Alaska (3.8 million square miles) to block out 1% of the EM radiation that the sun produces.
>You mean like the energy output of, you know, a star?
IF a sufficiently advanced civilization could magically conjure up enough materials in the solar system strip mining the solar system AND we had 100% efficiency in collecting then radiating 1% of the energy the sun gives off.....
My current job is doing 4 days 8 hours because the boss read an article saying it increases productivity.
So, his opinion is that we should be more productive in 4 days than we are in 5. I do enjoy the 3 day weekends, but I have to admit that I don't like the immense pressure of the shortened week.
Can you just work less hard in the four days and then work on the fifth off day? It seems like that schedule should give you more options about how to work, but not require you to work the compressed schedule.
1-Hour commute time both ways: 21.8 Days a year you are spending commuting to/from work.
3-fucking-weeks of time, poof, gone.
I'll get my social interaction else where for 3 weeks of my life back. Thanks.