7 ms·

The right to work 100% from home is what really makes sense, because only then people can pick their place of living freely. This way, we could actually improv

by Varqu 3y ago

The right to work 100% from home is what really makes sense, because only then people can pick their place of living freely. This way, we could actually improve the housing situation across the country, because otherwise, it all concentrates in the biggest cities.

andsoitis 3y ago
> This way, we could actually improve the housing situation across the country, because otherwise, it all concentrates in the biggest cities. Less concentrated human habitation is not without cost…
- alaxsxaq 3y ago
  Indeed, as are concentrated forms of human habitation, and, your point is?
  - LeifCarrotson 3y ago
    Subsequent to the agricultural revolution, big cities have been more economically efficient than suburban and rural areas. The productivity of cities massively subsidizes small towns and cul-de-sac neighborhoods. Hedonistically, everyone wants to live on a big lot on a low-traffic road... with friends, family, and work/shopping/services a short distance away. If everyone does have that kind of housing, then - quickly - no one will have it, because evetything will be too spread out; you need to drive a big, polluting car fast through someone else's low-traffic neighborhood to get to yours. The costs of concentrated habitation are less than the benefits - there's enough tax base and density to support roads and (emergency or mundane) services and businesses. The costs of distributed habitation are higher, and don't work if the entire nation switches to that kind of housing.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      >big cities have been more economically efficient than suburban and rural areas. The productivity of cities massively subsidizes small towns and cul-de-sac neighborhoods. Environmentally and sustainably speaking, the "productivity" of big cities is zero. Cut from the outside, a city like New York would die in a few months when food dissapears, with people eating one another. Cut from urban centers, rural towns and villages will continue to be able to drink and feed themselves just fine. They only exist because the people living there are subsidized, for water, food, and other such essentials, from outside. Even factory production lives outside those cities. That's how they started actually, when the rural production because so larger, as to be able to sustain not just itself, but also a parasitic, mediating and administrating, urbal class. >If everyone does have that kind of housing, then - quickly - no one will have it, because evetything will be too spread out; you need to drive a big, polluting car fast through someone else's low-traffic neighborhood to get to yours. There's nothing inevitable about this, it's just how US suburbs were designed, to be car-centered. In decentralized suburbs with local walkable distance shops (walkable as a stronger condition as opposed to merely "a short distance away"), and with local jobs and more extended work from home, it doesn't matter if they "spread out", because you don't have to drive a "a big, polluting car fast through", as the need to go elsewhere is less frequent: work, socializing, shopping is nearby. Add a good public transportation service, and you don't even need a car.
      - esafak 3y ago
        It's not parasitism, it's mutualism. If the country nurtures, the city pays the bills. I would not want to live in a country without both. Heck a country without cities probably would not last long except as a vassal.
- WeylandYutani 3y ago
  In a city even a 20 mile daily commute with a train can be soul crushing. I know someone who does Den Haag-Amsterdam every day but he's Japanese so he is trained in the art of salary man.
- coldtea 3y ago
  If you mean environmental cost, that's mainly when we only consider "less concentrate human habitation" as combined with existing patterns of consumption and waste.
katbyte 3y ago
It’s also much better for the environment
randomdata 3y ago
> we could actually improve the housing situation across the country The benefit of concentrating people together is that it also concentrates capital, which makes people rich, which allows them to do things like buy expensive homes. Spread people around and the sticker price will be lower, but the capacity to buy the homes will be reduced commensurately.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
  If only there was a way that people could communicate, collaborate, and move money around without being next to each other. If that ever gets developed, it will revolutionize the world.
  - randomdata 3y ago
    Well, we have the highway, but it turns out that trucking mills and lathes around to each worker's home is less efficient than bringing people to where the capital sits. I know a nuclear reactor powering a chip fab in everyone's garage is the dream, but...
    - paulryanrogers 3y ago
      What percentage of jobs require so much equipment it must be onsite?
      - randomdata 3y ago
        All jobs in the modern economy require capital to be on-site. Some capital is more realistically held at home than others, of course. What kind of threshold are we using to draw a dividing line? I know a number of people who really do have lathes and mills at home, so we need to be more specific here about where the line is drawn.
        RufusJacksons 3y ago
        I have a lathe and a mill at home. Quit my job in the city 1.5 hours away during covid and now run a business from home / get to be a parent. It’s the best. I gave up $190k salary to barely make my mortgage, best decision I ever made!
teki_one 3y ago
I think it has the opposite effect on housing. Big cities are built for many ppl. Allowing 100% remote work makes it possible to move to smaller towns/cities, which are not prepared for the extra intake. Many towns struggle with this exact issue in Australia. You can view it as just a temporal issue as it will settle on the long term. But on the short term many of the locals can not afford to live in the town they grew up and the same goes for their children too.
- dougmwne 3y ago
  This really feels like a bad take to me. Cities are out of room and can only grow by increasing the commutes even more. Being able to share that growth with towns that have plenty of room to expand seems like a huge win. And preventing people with money from coming to your poor town is an excellent way to make sure the people who live there stay poor.
  - marssaxman 3y ago
    > Cities are out of room and can only grow by increasing the commutes even more. ...or more effectively, by abandoning the flawed concept of single-family zoning, thereby allowing market forces to increase housing supply where it is needed.
    - majormajor 3y ago
      You still end up with a ton of commuting needs. And you get an induced demand loop with development still: lots of jobs popped up in this area around the transit stops! Now more housing is built so people can live closer to it! Now even more commercial and retail is needed and gets built! Which makes even more people want to work/live there. And not all of those people are gonna want to both work and live there (consider the trivial case, even, of a couple with one job per person, with the jobs in different parts of town), so you've also increased your commuting demand, which means fuller trains, longer waits... I've had coworkers who lived and worked in Beijing without cars - they still had 40+ minute each direction commutes. And that's a city that was extremely aggressive in expanding its transit. It's just a basic queuing/graph problem, though.
majormajor 3y ago
In smaller towns utilization for things like restaurants, mechanics, etc is usually much lower in big cities. The amount of time spent waiting because shit was full was a big shock to me when I moved to a very large city. So if everyone with a job that's possible to do remotely distributed themselves across the country, I think that would actually result in more people, proportionally, in in-person service-industry jobs, since each employee of those businesses would be serving fewer other people per day. (Which would be less stressful for a lot of people, probably! But it's very short-sighted to think anything like "100% work from home" is realistic for that many people.) But I'm also not convinced by the main claim, here. Bigger, denser cities are more expensive. That's because they're more in demand. Some of that is "because that's where the jobs are." But a lot of that is things like weather, entertainment, shopping, availability of services... so I think you also open up the possibility of someone who was working in-person for an employer in Tulsa, say, now being able to move to Dallas instead for more free-time options. In the last hundred years in the US the most effective ways of distributing people were two things: weather (sun belt vs cold-ass winters) and in-person work that got geographically distributed for big-govt/strategic reasons (e.g. let's make sure our new defense project is going to employ people in as many states as possible to get votes, or let's spread out our industry to be more robust against Soviet bombs, etc).
- astrange 3y ago
  > Bigger, denser cities are more expensive. That's because they're more in demand. It's mainly because they don't build enough housing. There's no fundamental reason it would happen otherwise; they use land more efficiently and have lower energy costs than suburbs do, and that should matter more than the higher competition. Of course, there's also a selection effect; more interesting things to spend money on causes people to spend more money. (That's why people who earn more per hour tend to work more, not less.)
  - majormajor 3y ago
    > It's mainly because they don't build enough housing. There's no fundamental reason it would happen otherwise; they use land more efficiently and have lower energy costs than suburbs do, and that should matter more than the higher competition. Ok. So why does that happen? It happens basically everywhere in the world: the dense cities are more in demand and more expensive than the middle of nowhere. If nobody can build "enough housing" in their cities, to make their cities as cheap as their rural land, I think that tells us something. We can' simply take demand entirely out of the picture, since adding more supply is both (a) a lagging process and (b) a process that itself helps promote more demand by necessitating more service business, more jobs at those businesses, etc. I.e., if you make the land more attractive to everyone, everyone who wants to use that land for their business or residence has more competition for securing a spot on it.
astrange 3y ago
People like living in big cities because they're more interesting. Conversely, companies will sometimes locate themselves in suburbs just to make it harder for employees to leave. IIRC that's why IBM is in Armonk.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >People like living in big cities because they're more interesting. Some people like living in big cities, usually because they're young and starry eyed about the "possibilities" of them being interesting. Quite often they grow out of this, and get to hate the big cities and their stress and uglyness....
  - esafak 3y ago
    Don't forget the social opportunities: it's easier to find a mate in a bigger pool.
    - klardotsh 3y ago
      Exactly this. I moved from Seattle to rural Whatcom County for a year, then out onto my sailboat for a year. It's been a great reset, but I'm now headed back to either a quiet neighborhood of the outskirts of Seattle proper, or maybe one of the suburbs/exurbs that still has a proper downtown and isn't just a bedroom community, and it's entirely for social reasons. Life in the boonies solo is hard, and the dating pool in your 20s is barely a drop, forget a puddle.
dxbydt 3y ago
Not just the housing situation. The biggest contribution, by far, to mitigate the climate change crisis, would be to let your employees work remote. Commuting adds a ton of waste to the environment, no matter how energy efficient you get. Even if you go 100% ev, particulates are never going away,directly/indirectly killing 100k+ people annually in the US alone. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/07/electric-vehicles-tires-wearing-out-particulates/674750/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/07/elect...
- andrepd 3y ago
  If only there was a way to move lots of people very efficiently... Perhaps some sort of vehicle on rails... :)
  - phrno8 3y ago
    [dead]
  - esafak 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
  - supertrope 3y ago
    You mean sit in the same metal box as a hobo? /s
- dlisboa 3y ago
  That's probably more of an issue in the US. Not that commuting doesn't pollute, but in other countries a great part of the daily commute is done by public transportation or much more carbon efficient personal transportation (scooters, bicycles, etc).
  - aequitas 3y ago
    You’ve probably never heard of the poster child of livable cities, the Netherlands, where almost everyone still owns a car and drives to work every day. Traffic jams are now growing even worse then pre COVID[0]. Lack of proper (investment in) public transport is still a major issue for everyone living or working outside of the big cities. And due to the density of our country it has a major impact on nature here. [0] https://www.anwb.nl/verkeer/nieuws/nederland/2023/juli/filezwaarte-juli-2023 https://www.anwb.nl/verkeer/nieuws/nederland/2023/juli/filez...
dionidium 3y ago
> This way, we could actually improve the housing situation across the country, because otherwise, it all concentrates in the biggest cities. When people are allowed to live wherever they want they choose the biggest, best, most expensive cities.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  A lot do, yes. And a lot don't.
- digging 3y ago
  Only if they can afford to, which means their jobs were already in those cities.
Alupis 3y ago
> right to work 100% from home is what really makes sense *for some particular jobs That bit is always ignored. We're arguing for a right, but that right can only possibly apply to a small subset of the entire workplace. There will never be remote gas station attendants. There will never be remote mechanics. There will never be remote construction contractors. There will never be remote warehouse receiving clerks. So this can't possibly be a right. Rights apply to humankind, regardless of where you exist or your job situation. So... what people are arguing for is a privilege, for some particular industries, and protected by government regulation. Seems like that's just never going to happen. Instead, people need to negotiate for remote work. And if an employer wants you to go to an office in exchange for a paycheck, well, get over it or find somewhere else to work.

by Varqu 3y ago

andsoitis 3y ago

> This way, we could actually improve the housing situation across the country, because otherwise, it all concentrates in the biggest cities. Less concentrated human habitation is not without cost…

alaxsxaq 3y ago
Indeed, as are concentrated forms of human habitation, and, your point is?
- LeifCarrotson 3y ago
  Subsequent to the agricultural revolution, big cities have been more economically efficient than suburban and rural areas. The productivity of cities massively subsidizes small towns and cul-de-sac neighborhoods. Hedonistically, everyone wants to live on a big lot on a low-traffic road... with friends, family, and work/shopping/services a short distance away. If everyone does have that kind of housing, then - quickly - no one will have it, because evetything will be too spread out; you need to drive a big, polluting car fast through someone else's low-traffic neighborhood to get to yours. The costs of concentrated habitation are less than the benefits - there's enough tax base and density to support roads and (emergency or mundane) services and businesses. The costs of distributed habitation are higher, and don't work if the entire nation switches to that kind of housing.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >big cities have been more economically efficient than suburban and rural areas. The productivity of cities massively subsidizes small towns and cul-de-sac neighborhoods. Environmentally and sustainably speaking, the "productivity" of big cities is zero. Cut from the outside, a city like New York would die in a few months when food dissapears, with people eating one another. Cut from urban centers, rural towns and villages will continue to be able to drink and feed themselves just fine. They only exist because the people living there are subsidized, for water, food, and other such essentials, from outside. Even factory production lives outside those cities. That's how they started actually, when the rural production because so larger, as to be able to sustain not just itself, but also a parasitic, mediating and administrating, urbal class. >If everyone does have that kind of housing, then - quickly - no one will have it, because evetything will be too spread out; you need to drive a big, polluting car fast through someone else's low-traffic neighborhood to get to yours. There's nothing inevitable about this, it's just how US suburbs were designed, to be car-centered. In decentralized suburbs with local walkable distance shops (walkable as a stronger condition as opposed to merely "a short distance away"), and with local jobs and more extended work from home, it doesn't matter if they "spread out", because you don't have to drive a "a big, polluting car fast through", as the need to go elsewhere is less frequent: work, socializing, shopping is nearby. Add a good public transportation service, and you don't even need a car.
    - esafak 3y ago
      It's not parasitism, it's mutualism. If the country nurtures, the city pays the bills. I would not want to live in a country without both. Heck a country without cities probably would not last long except as a vassal.
WeylandYutani 3y ago
In a city even a 20 mile daily commute with a train can be soul crushing. I know someone who does Den Haag-Amsterdam every day but he's Japanese so he is trained in the art of salary man.
coldtea 3y ago
If you mean environmental cost, that's mainly when we only consider "less concentrate human habitation" as combined with existing patterns of consumption and waste.

katbyte 3y ago

It’s also much better for the environment

randomdata 3y ago

> we could actually improve the housing situation across the country The benefit of concentrating people together is that it also concentrates capital, which makes people rich, which allows them to do things like buy expensive homes. Spread people around and the sticker price will be lower, but the capacity to buy the homes will be reduced commensurately.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
If only there was a way that people could communicate, collaborate, and move money around without being next to each other. If that ever gets developed, it will revolutionize the world.
- randomdata 3y ago
  Well, we have the highway, but it turns out that trucking mills and lathes around to each worker's home is less efficient than bringing people to where the capital sits. I know a nuclear reactor powering a chip fab in everyone's garage is the dream, but...
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    What percentage of jobs require so much equipment it must be onsite?
    - randomdata 3y ago
      All jobs in the modern economy require capital to be on-site. Some capital is more realistically held at home than others, of course. What kind of threshold are we using to draw a dividing line? I know a number of people who really do have lathes and mills at home, so we need to be more specific here about where the line is drawn.
      - RufusJacksons 3y ago
        I have a lathe and a mill at home. Quit my job in the city 1.5 hours away during covid and now run a business from home / get to be a parent. It’s the best. I gave up $190k salary to barely make my mortgage, best decision I ever made!

teki_one 3y ago

I think it has the opposite effect on housing. Big cities are built for many ppl. Allowing 100% remote work makes it possible to move to smaller towns/cities, which are not prepared for the extra intake. Many towns struggle with this exact issue in Australia. You can view it as just a temporal issue as it will settle on the long term. But on the short term many of the locals can not afford to live in the town they grew up and the same goes for their children too.

dougmwne 3y ago
This really feels like a bad take to me. Cities are out of room and can only grow by increasing the commutes even more. Being able to share that growth with towns that have plenty of room to expand seems like a huge win. And preventing people with money from coming to your poor town is an excellent way to make sure the people who live there stay poor.
- marssaxman 3y ago
  > Cities are out of room and can only grow by increasing the commutes even more. ...or more effectively, by abandoning the flawed concept of single-family zoning, thereby allowing market forces to increase housing supply where it is needed.
  - majormajor 3y ago
    You still end up with a ton of commuting needs. And you get an induced demand loop with development still: lots of jobs popped up in this area around the transit stops! Now more housing is built so people can live closer to it! Now even more commercial and retail is needed and gets built! Which makes even more people want to work/live there. And not all of those people are gonna want to both work and live there (consider the trivial case, even, of a couple with one job per person, with the jobs in different parts of town), so you've also increased your commuting demand, which means fuller trains, longer waits... I've had coworkers who lived and worked in Beijing without cars - they still had 40+ minute each direction commutes. And that's a city that was extremely aggressive in expanding its transit. It's just a basic queuing/graph problem, though.

majormajor 3y ago

In smaller towns utilization for things like restaurants, mechanics, etc is usually much lower in big cities. The amount of time spent waiting because shit was full was a big shock to me when I moved to a very large city. So if everyone with a job that's possible to do remotely distributed themselves across the country, I think that would actually result in more people, proportionally, in in-person service-industry jobs, since each employee of those businesses would be serving fewer other people per day. (Which would be less stressful for a lot of people, probably! But it's very short-sighted to think anything like "100% work from home" is realistic for that many people.) But I'm also not convinced by the main claim, here. Bigger, denser cities are more expensive. That's because they're more in demand. Some of that is "because that's where the jobs are." But a lot of that is things like weather, entertainment, shopping, availability of services... so I think you also open up the possibility of someone who was working in-person for an employer in Tulsa, say, now being able to move to Dallas instead for more free-time options. In the last hundred years in the US the most effective ways of distributing people were two things: weather (sun belt vs cold-ass winters) and in-person work that got geographically distributed for big-govt/strategic reasons (e.g. let's make sure our new defense project is going to employ people in as many states as possible to get votes, or let's spread out our industry to be more robust against Soviet bombs, etc).

astrange 3y ago
> Bigger, denser cities are more expensive. That's because they're more in demand. It's mainly because they don't build enough housing. There's no fundamental reason it would happen otherwise; they use land more efficiently and have lower energy costs than suburbs do, and that should matter more than the higher competition. Of course, there's also a selection effect; more interesting things to spend money on causes people to spend more money. (That's why people who earn more per hour tend to work more, not less.)
- majormajor 3y ago
  > It's mainly because they don't build enough housing. There's no fundamental reason it would happen otherwise; they use land more efficiently and have lower energy costs than suburbs do, and that should matter more than the higher competition. Ok. So why does that happen? It happens basically everywhere in the world: the dense cities are more in demand and more expensive than the middle of nowhere. If nobody can build "enough housing" in their cities, to make their cities as cheap as their rural land, I think that tells us something. We can' simply take demand entirely out of the picture, since adding more supply is both (a) a lagging process and (b) a process that itself helps promote more demand by necessitating more service business, more jobs at those businesses, etc. I.e., if you make the land more attractive to everyone, everyone who wants to use that land for their business or residence has more competition for securing a spot on it.

astrange 3y ago

People like living in big cities because they're more interesting. Conversely, companies will sometimes locate themselves in suburbs just to make it harder for employees to leave. IIRC that's why IBM is in Armonk.

coldtea 3y ago
>People like living in big cities because they're more interesting. Some people like living in big cities, usually because they're young and starry eyed about the "possibilities" of them being interesting. Quite often they grow out of this, and get to hate the big cities and their stress and uglyness....
- esafak 3y ago
  Don't forget the social opportunities: it's easier to find a mate in a bigger pool.
  - klardotsh 3y ago
    Exactly this. I moved from Seattle to rural Whatcom County for a year, then out onto my sailboat for a year. It's been a great reset, but I'm now headed back to either a quiet neighborhood of the outskirts of Seattle proper, or maybe one of the suburbs/exurbs that still has a proper downtown and isn't just a bedroom community, and it's entirely for social reasons. Life in the boonies solo is hard, and the dating pool in your 20s is barely a drop, forget a puddle.

dxbydt 3y ago

Not just the housing situation. The biggest contribution, by far, to mitigate the climate change crisis, would be to let your employees work remote. Commuting adds a ton of waste to the environment, no matter how energy efficient you get. Even if you go 100% ev, particulates are never going away,directly/indirectly killing 100k+ people annually in the US alone. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/07/electric-vehicles-tires-wearing-out-particulates/674750/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/07/elect...

andrepd 3y ago
If only there was a way to move lots of people very efficiently... Perhaps some sort of vehicle on rails... :)
- phrno8 3y ago
  [dead]
- esafak 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
- supertrope 3y ago
  You mean sit in the same metal box as a hobo? /s
dlisboa 3y ago
That's probably more of an issue in the US. Not that commuting doesn't pollute, but in other countries a great part of the daily commute is done by public transportation or much more carbon efficient personal transportation (scooters, bicycles, etc).
- aequitas 3y ago
  You’ve probably never heard of the poster child of livable cities, the Netherlands, where almost everyone still owns a car and drives to work every day. Traffic jams are now growing even worse then pre COVID[0]. Lack of proper (investment in) public transport is still a major issue for everyone living or working outside of the big cities. And due to the density of our country it has a major impact on nature here. [0] https://www.anwb.nl/verkeer/nieuws/nederland/2023/juli/filezwaarte-juli-2023 https://www.anwb.nl/verkeer/nieuws/nederland/2023/juli/filez...

dionidium 3y ago

> This way, we could actually improve the housing situation across the country, because otherwise, it all concentrates in the biggest cities. When people are allowed to live wherever they want they choose the biggest, best, most expensive cities.

JohnFen 3y ago
A lot do, yes. And a lot don't.
digging 3y ago
Only if they can afford to, which means their jobs were already in those cities.

Alupis 3y ago

> right to work 100% from home is what really makes sense *for some particular jobs That bit is always ignored. We're arguing for a right, but that right can only possibly apply to a small subset of the entire workplace. There will never be remote gas station attendants. There will never be remote mechanics. There will never be remote construction contractors. There will never be remote warehouse receiving clerks. So this can't possibly be a right. Rights apply to humankind, regardless of where you exist or your job situation. So... what people are arguing for is a privilege, for some particular industries, and protected by government regulation. Seems like that's just never going to happen. Instead, people need to negotiate for remote work. And if an employer wants you to go to an office in exchange for a paycheck, well, get over it or find somewhere else to work.