4 ms·

Maybe we could actually let people work remotely, and not waste billions of hours commuting. Then we could leave these fucking urban and suburban hellscapes, a

• flukus 10y ago
  Because there are too many people that think good communication is important and that good communication is comprised solely of face to face meetings. IME these people are universally poor communicators in the much more important text medium.
  • ctvo 10y ago
    I wouldn't go that far. There's a host of conscious and subconscious things we can only get when we're in the same room as someone. It's not surprising people rarely get funding, make hiring decisions, etc. solely from text communication. It's unfair to characterize people / companies who value the additional information as being backwards or old fashion (you didn't do this -- just a general statement).
• stephengillie 10y ago
  Many jobs, like cutting hair, waiting tables, and changing car oil, are hard to do remotely. If your industry has options for remote work, pursue those instead of bemoaning your current situation.
  • makomk 10y ago
    Those jobs are hard to do remotely because they involve providing services to other people who live in the area - in the case of San Francisco, that's mostly tech industry workers who could work remotely but don't for reasons of industry politics. The hairdressers and mechanics and waiters required to service them act as a multiplier on the resulting population growth, but the cause is all the jobs that could be done remotely but aren't. Every tech firm that insists on operating from SF leads to a penumbra of non-tech workers around it being stuck in SF in jobs that cannot be done remotely.
• icebraining 10y ago
  Sure, as long as you're willing to pay for the sprawl of infrastructure needed to support all those towns spread out everywhere, 'cause as an urban dweller, I sure ain't. Small towns are awesome if you want to live a mostly self-sufficient life. For most people, who want cheap crap dropped on their doorstep every other week, food coming from hundreds of miles, cable TV with 300 channels and fast internet, they just mean more roads, more trucks, more driving, more heating, more pollution.
  • twistedpair 10y ago
    > pay for the sprawl of infrastructure needed to support all those towns spread out everywhere You mean the septic tank, well, and solar panels? Plus the dirt road? Frankly the only infrastructure you really need is the high speed internet connection.
    • icebraining 10y ago
      No, I mean the hospitals, schools, warehouses, postal service, shops, electricity generation and distribution, mobile towers, roads that can support the trucks that transport everything, etc - and then the human infrastructure: courts, police, administration, etc.
      • douche 10y ago
        That stuff already exists. In many cases, it's the only thing that still exists. In the podunk little town I grew up in, every scrid of industry has been outsourced or regulated out of existence, but the schools, hospital, local college, government services, and utilites are still around, and are the primary sources of employment, by an overwhelming margin. If you could halt the brain and youth drain out of the area, and put some people that were making real money back into the community, you could support some actual businesses, besides the WalMart and the gas station. I actually have faster internet when I go visit my parents up there than I do where I live in the suburbs...
        • 10y ago
• fdej 10y ago
  By the time we actually let people do that, we will have flying cars to commute with anyway.
• m0llusk 10y ago
  That is only one of many factors involved. We are talking about communities. When a big new software innovation comes out people have meetups and talk things over. That doesn't work with a highly distributed workforce. No matter what employers do the same forces will be at work concentrating high end labor.
  • douche 10y ago
    Most people aren't really high-end labor. If you're building a website or a glorified CRUD app or the vast majority of enterprise drudgery, you can do that from anywhere; sitting cheek by jowl with your coworker is not really any better than having an XMPP or Skype channel, and tens, hundreds, even thousands of miles between you. We used to talk about things here, on the internet. We're doing it right now, in fact. I've had far more stimulating discussions with people here, and other places on the web, where you can draw people not just from one provincial area, but from the whole world.
  • ghaff 10y ago
    I don't disagree that there's value to physical concentration and face to face. But not every talented engineer (and associated financial/business/etc. people) can live in Silicon Valley or wants to. It's a constraint. Yes, there are concentrating forces but, as an industry, we need to live with the fact that there are countervailing forces. Distribution, even if its not absolute, is the reality.
  • sjg007 10y ago
    Meh, you can travel for a conference or to the city for the meetup. No different than now.