Wait… so you’re 30min late for work everyday because you sleep in?

Wouldn’t the decay of one’s be a source of emission?

People who eat more beans cut the cheese.

It is downright malicious in many cases, though. A lot of times, business owners will be renting the property their office is based out of, and that property ends up being owned by a family member or friend (or they themselves) who then get to bill the company for quite a sum without that being considered payroll. If they lose the office, they lose money, and that’s all they care about.

I’m deeply introverted but prefer in-office. I’m in a leadership position and gently encourage staff to work in office too when possible. It’s not for socializing and awful pizza parties, and you don’t have to tell me about your weekend hobbies if you don’t want to.

For me it’s mainly because my work requires technical skills, problem solving, and creativity, which means it’s very helpful for me to know my staff really well in order to properly review their work. If I see something that looks odd it’s really helpful to know ‘Mary did this and that’s her strength so I’m probably wrong’ or ‘Steve did this and he sucks in this area so it probably is wrong’ etc. WFH removes all that and everyone is just a disembodied talking head, or worse, emails and texts only, so I have no idea who I’m talking to.

I truly get the allure and I still wfh when appropriate but again I encourage in office as much as possible.

‘Leaders’ also tend to own an outsize amount of real estate as well.

I’ve tried before, and almost died several times because of asshole drivers and half asleep morons still putting on makeup or drinking coffee or whatever. The bike lanes are a joke and people treat them like passing lanes to get one car length ahead in stop-go traffic.

Yeah man, I completely understand. I’m very very lucky to live in a cooler climate, only a few miles from my work, with somewhat decent bike lanes (although a joke compared to anywhere in Europe), and I don’t sweat too bad lol.

I try to convince a lot of my friends to give bicycling a try but I totally understand if they’re afraid of traffic. It’s fucked up that we’re forced to ride completely unseparated from cars and giant fucking trucks swinging all over the road.

Are there no showers in your office? I am guessing not.

Damn, appreciate the context. Sounds like you’re in a Texas city? I didn’t know housing costs were that bad there.

Ostensibly you could turn down your thermostat during the day to save money, but almost no one does this

It really depends. For larger systems you can start taking advantage of economy of scale and a LOT of homes have those shit-tacular window units. Also, during the winter you can take advantage of body heat and residual heat a lot more to not have to run the heat as much as someone in a room with poorly insulated windows would.

And that ignores offices co-located with servers where you likely already have a pretty strong HVAC system that needs to run anyway.

And then there is just the personal impact. Employees tend to not (knowingly) pay the heating/cooling bill in an office building. They do at home.

And healthier, since restaurants tend to go all out on sugar, fat, and salt to make their meals tasty.

Yeah, we make large portions when we cook so I can freeze the leftovers for lunch.

I’m lucky enough to have multiple routes to my office.

During the times that taking the back roads is dramatically slower, I’ll go on the interstate. Holy hell my stress and anger levels rocket when doing that.

Ah yah…lots of stupid drivers here just piss me off…lots of traffic compared to last year too…

I have a theory about the increase of bad drivers that seems to have happened after the pandemic. So most of the higher paid desk jobs where usually people are more intelligent mostly went to WFH. So there are less intelligent people on the road than there used to be. So now it’s all idiots in cars taking free reign of the roads. Less traffic causes the idiots to be able to more freely speed and run reds. I know since working from home I drive about 90% less and when I do I am scared for my life.

Just being stuck in traffic when you could be getting shit done is what gets me. Time/money/carbon emissions… just wasteful in every way

I changed mine before a ~1500 mile road trip summer of 2022. Flipped to the percentage (Honda) the other day just out of curiosity and it’s still at 60%, lol. I put so few miles on that thing it’s crazy. I sometimes go a few miles to lunch. Outside that we use it for hardware store runs here and there. I guess I did drive it to a wedding a couple weeks back but that was because I knew we would be parking in a farm field and it’s my only 4 wheel drive vehicle. Probably should change the oil before winter just for good measure.

It’s a good idea to change your oil every 12 months even if you don’t reach the mileage for the maintenance interval. The heat cycles from the engine creates condensation in the engine and the water reacts with the petroleum in the oil and produces some not nice stuff. I haven’t been reaching my interval but my car will still beep at me 30 days before the last oil monitor reset.

That’s great when it’s your choice. The issue is when bosses don’t give people the choice.

My boss allows people to WFH officially, but also establishes several small office spaces so people can come to hang out if they feel lonely, or want to get to know their colleagues more. I think this is the best of both world.

Control. And that is a scary thing to lose if you’re a bad manager.

The money they spend on the building and maintenance.

Idk how legit it is, but I have read that companies got deals on taxes and such for building their office in the specific city/state and that’s with the expectation that the workers will either live in the city or will be from the city, in turn creating tax income from those workers buying things in the city. Basically because wfh employees also move to cheaper cities the companies are losing their benefits

Bro, I literally want to punch everyone in the office.

As they should…

So you also make sure location discrimination is illegal as well. There can be multiple parts to the legislation.

I’ve seen that already, at least pre-Covid and in the U.S. Even though I’m pretty sure that asking that during an interview is illegal, I’ve been on post-interview sessions where someone inevitably says “yeah, but this candidate lives nearly an hour away, while this other candidate lives 15 minutes away…” so they found out somehow.

Yes and also by telling us to buy expensive electric cars because the environment needs us to.

Simpler perhaps, but not really better. High gas prices hurt the poor disproportionately because it’s a larger part of their income, they don’t have as much control over WFH policies or their locations for reducing commutes, and they can’t typically afford to upgrade to fuel efficient vehicles. Plus since almost everything is transported by truck, high gas prices make the cost of everything else go up too.

I think part of the labor shortage is from people who did the math and quit after realising that they weren’t actually earning anything after subtracting transportation costs.

In the city of Seattle, for example, every year, companies over a certain number of employees are required to participate in an annual transportation survey. The employees are surveyed. The questions ask how far the employee commutes to work, how long it takes, and by what method (private vehicle, car pool, public transportation), how many days a year they work from home, or take off, etc. The effort is to assess the impact on environment, parking infrastructure, public transportation, roads, etc.

Obviously, there isn’t a 100% response rate so the data is extrapolated from the responses to the total number of employees employeed at that site (probably why they only poll companies of a minimum size and larger).

If they wanted to implement something like this in seattle, then the next step would be to take the data they already have and start sending those companies a new bill for a new annual tax based on the assessment.

Lots of taxes work off of an estimated assessment rather than having to account for every nut snd bolt of the thing (property taxes, for example).

So how do you do it? That’s how you do it. This isn’t rocket science, and you don’t need to invent new accounting methods or worry about the accounting-sky falling to accomplish it.

Modern accounting techniques are amazing and super effective,

Hmm

The biggest weakness of accounting though is its inability to capture externalities

Oh so you mean it’s actually dog shit then, if you can’t properly look at external risks outside the clearly defined formulas and can game said fomulas to cook books to one’s liking.

How does one company record the cost of their employees commute? How do you even begin to calculate that? How do you measure the cost of extra leukemia cases in a town ten years after a train derails nearby? How do you record that in your books? How do you calculate and record the distress these huge noisy shipping vessels cause whales? It’s just so subjective and impractical.

You act like these are difficult tasks in the modern era. Commute is pretty simple, what type of vehicle, what are its maintenance costs at certain mileages, what are the crash statistics, etc. Once you have a general fomula you can add an increased payout to cover ireegular externalities to properly hedge against the edge cases. Same shit for the others. It’s not subjective and impractical, it’s just not the going to be perfectly effiecnt as you need to create a bigger financial bubble to account for edge cases. The problem is hyper fixation on extracting the most captial possible from a business. Stop trying to be the most clean cut business and focus on aiding your communities, working to better infrastructure and stop interference with local governments for tax benefits. Then progressive changes can be beneficial to both and reduce external unmitigated risks as we have a more nuanced model to work with.

But then how would they exploit the poors?

District heating (and cooling) would also alleviate the problem of people continuing to run ancient furnaces and air conditioners that are simply too old and worn down to be effective

Yup. You need a work hoodie for summer.
And there’s always that one girl that has a blanket.

definitely a perk working from home, you decide temperature/sound/etc.

But I’m talking from an overall society energy use perspective.

I’m curious if the energy efficiency of having people in one building compares to the energy efficiency of them spread out.

It will greatly vary, as some are already in apartment buildings sharing that efficiency, some are in better eff rated homes, some are in worse eff rated homes.

Not sure this study can accurately claim 54% … even if they said ±10%, it’s still probably way out to lunch.