8 ms·

Not only that, but the 40h/week ignores commutes. For some people that's an additional 15h/week. Also hunger-gatherers lived right beside the people they knew.

by wmil 9y ago

Not only that, but the 40h/week ignores commutes. For some people that's an additional 15h/week. Also hunger-gatherers lived right beside the people they knew. They just had to step outside to meet up with friends to socialize.

mietek 9y ago
> Also hunger-gatherers lived right beside the people they knew. They just had to step outside to meet up with friends to socialize. Outside of what, the ministry of hunting and gathering?
- coldtea 9y ago
  Outside of their tents/caves/etc homes.
smallnamespace 9y ago
> with friends to socialize Or, sometimes, rival tribes to fight with and kill -- not everything is (necessarily) hunky-dory in every tribal society.
- jahaja 9y ago
  Well, the history of killing each other (and others!) in western civilization is nothing to brag about.
  - jff 9y ago
    If you think it's just western civilization, you haven't spent much time looking at non-western civilizations.
- jasonmp85 9y ago
  I have little knowledge about the truth here but I'd heard that this sort of warring stuff only ramped up after agriculture became common, no? Why kill other tribes' members unless they have a hoard of food? I suppose "to reduce competition" is one answer, but if everyone can hunt/gather for enough food, the motivation seems reduced. OTOH if I can ignore preparation for winter and just raid your village for grain stores, the calculus changes.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Why kill other tribes' members unless they have a hoard of food? I suppose "to reduce competition" is one answer Yes, and not just for food and similar non-human resources. Reducing competition for mates is a common reason; even well past hunter-gatherer society, killing the men to take the women as mates remained a thing.
    - LordKano 9y ago
      It remains a thing now. What makes a bigot crazier than anything? Seeing one of "our" females with one of "their" males.
  - nlowell 9y ago
    Tribal warring is common even in apes. Territorialism is especially strong. There are also plenty of things to war over besides food, such as space, shelter, mates, glory, gods, historical feuds, etc. Remember if we don't sacrifice one human before nightfall, the sun won't rise tomorrow.
  - avn2109 9y ago
    The usual tribal conflict pattern is to seize territory as a hunting ground. Note that for nomadic tribes, there is no village and therefore no fixed location to raid. E.g. the Comanches had a longstanding war* with the Apaches not because they wanted to seize each other's grain stores, but rather because they wanted control of the best buffalo hunting grounds. * Not a war in the sense that we'd call it today. There were e.g. no organized charges, battle lines etc. Maybe "long slow series of irregular cavalry skirmishes" is more accurate than "war."
  - zipwitch 9y ago
    I am not an anthropologist, but I believe that's a popular misconception. Many technologically primitive tribal cultures have low absolute numbers of violent deaths, but they also typically have very low populations compared to agricultural societies. Their per capita casualties from intra- and inter-tribal violence are quite high.
  - 9y ago
r00fus 9y ago
The commute and school dropoffs are the real lifestyle killer I think. Imagine having an extra 5-15h a week to hang out and do things. Imagine having that much more sleep (if you happen to be burning the midnight oil a lot). I used to remember my parents letting me walk to the school bus stop (near our apartment) and then walking to work or taking the bus themselves. Nowadays we pack the kids into the car drop them off at 2 different schools, and both drive to work 30+m away. We also pick them up. That's got to be 3h a day per parent. The picture complicates with after school activities. It's a wonder I don't WFH more often (which reduces my back/forth for kids to 40m total).
- fapjacks 9y ago
  Honest question: Why do people do this with the school pickup/dropoff? What is the point of that? Do schools still have buses?
  - whatshisface 9y ago
    I can recount for you the story that I've heard from those in my area who have kids: First, the most dedicated full-time parents decided to pick their kids up and drop them off, so that they would have more time with their kids and the kids would spend less time in transit. Then, some unruly kids caused some trouble on the buses (the district isn't going to station a warden on the bus, and the driver has a route to keep), so some more parents started driving their kids. Now it was super-involved parents and also parents of bullied kids. A huge fraction of kids get bullied, so now we're looking at a bus filled with the lower half of the parental protectiveness bell curve. Obviously that's doing to distill the troublemakers, further lowering the level of protectiveness a parent would have to have before taking their kids off the buses. This forms a vicious cycle. The good kids are no longer diluting (and providing social pressure to) the bad ones, and the buses gain a (deserved? I have no way of knowing) reputation for being where bad parents dump their kids to be tortured by other bad kids. Now there's a social stigma. The set of parents that drive their kids now include the very-involved, the protective, and the responsive to social stigmas. So, finally, the children of the poor (whose parents don't have the means to fall in to one of the above groups) are stuck alone with the bad kids - and now we're at our present state, where cars line up around the street and everyone is spending an hour trying to pick their kids up from school.
randcraw 9y ago
15h / 5 days is 3h / day -- 1.5 hours each way, that's a long commute. The average commute in the US is 20 min each way. Suburbanites mostly jump to nearby suburbs. It's the urbanites & rurals who outlie, with interminable train rides or stops-and-gos via SUV & long highway drives to a bigger town an hour away. A map of US commute times: https://lifehacker.com/this-map-shows-the-average-commute-time-in-every-u-s-c-1796559696 https://lifehacker.com/this-map-shows-the-average-commute-ti...
- tjic 9y ago
  I did this for six months. I live in NH, I got a well paying contract in MA, and they needed me to work 60 hrs/week to rescue a project. The 60 hrs/week is key, because it made the ratio of billable hours to wasted hours plausible - 15 hours of commute to 40 of billable is terrible, but 15:60 made some sense. Those six months (plus the side remote consulting gig I did on the weekend) almost killed me, but they also let me pay off about 1/3 of my mortgage in half a year.
  - skinnymuch 9y ago
    Would you do it again if something awful happened and you all of a sudden were in the same spot you were when you did that work (less or none of your mortgage paid off or something). Just wondering. Seems like it sucked but worthwhile if it paid off 1/3 of your mortgage. Good job!
- cm2012 9y ago
  I did that commute for 5 years in NYC. Now work from home:)
- StillBored 9y ago
  The map is cool, but you will notice the longest commute times are also where the majority of the population lives (a few big cities).
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
gebeeson 9y ago
The commute has been an issue of mine for a while - and listening to podcasts or audio books helps but, I'd rather just step outside to get to work. I blame this on where I live and my absolute reluctance to move. So yeah, commuting is my choice in the end.

by wmil 9y ago

mietek 9y ago

> Also hunger-gatherers lived right beside the people they knew. They just had to step outside to meet up with friends to socialize. Outside of what, the ministry of hunting and gathering?

coldtea 9y ago
Outside of their tents/caves/etc homes.

smallnamespace 9y ago

> with friends to socialize Or, sometimes, rival tribes to fight with and kill -- not everything is (necessarily) hunky-dory in every tribal society.

jahaja 9y ago
Well, the history of killing each other (and others!) in western civilization is nothing to brag about.
- jff 9y ago
  If you think it's just western civilization, you haven't spent much time looking at non-western civilizations.
jasonmp85 9y ago
I have little knowledge about the truth here but I'd heard that this sort of warring stuff only ramped up after agriculture became common, no? Why kill other tribes' members unless they have a hoard of food? I suppose "to reduce competition" is one answer, but if everyone can hunt/gather for enough food, the motivation seems reduced. OTOH if I can ignore preparation for winter and just raid your village for grain stores, the calculus changes.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Why kill other tribes' members unless they have a hoard of food? I suppose "to reduce competition" is one answer Yes, and not just for food and similar non-human resources. Reducing competition for mates is a common reason; even well past hunter-gatherer society, killing the men to take the women as mates remained a thing.
  - LordKano 9y ago
    It remains a thing now. What makes a bigot crazier than anything? Seeing one of "our" females with one of "their" males.
- nlowell 9y ago
  Tribal warring is common even in apes. Territorialism is especially strong. There are also plenty of things to war over besides food, such as space, shelter, mates, glory, gods, historical feuds, etc. Remember if we don't sacrifice one human before nightfall, the sun won't rise tomorrow.
- avn2109 9y ago
  The usual tribal conflict pattern is to seize territory as a hunting ground. Note that for nomadic tribes, there is no village and therefore no fixed location to raid. E.g. the Comanches had a longstanding war* with the Apaches not because they wanted to seize each other's grain stores, but rather because they wanted control of the best buffalo hunting grounds. * Not a war in the sense that we'd call it today. There were e.g. no organized charges, battle lines etc. Maybe "long slow series of irregular cavalry skirmishes" is more accurate than "war."
- zipwitch 9y ago
  I am not an anthropologist, but I believe that's a popular misconception. Many technologically primitive tribal cultures have low absolute numbers of violent deaths, but they also typically have very low populations compared to agricultural societies. Their per capita casualties from intra- and inter-tribal violence are quite high.
- 9y ago

r00fus 9y ago

The commute and school dropoffs are the real lifestyle killer I think. Imagine having an extra 5-15h a week to hang out and do things. Imagine having that much more sleep (if you happen to be burning the midnight oil a lot). I used to remember my parents letting me walk to the school bus stop (near our apartment) and then walking to work or taking the bus themselves. Nowadays we pack the kids into the car drop them off at 2 different schools, and both drive to work 30+m away. We also pick them up. That's got to be 3h a day per parent. The picture complicates with after school activities. It's a wonder I don't WFH more often (which reduces my back/forth for kids to 40m total).

fapjacks 9y ago
Honest question: Why do people do this with the school pickup/dropoff? What is the point of that? Do schools still have buses?
- whatshisface 9y ago
  I can recount for you the story that I've heard from those in my area who have kids: First, the most dedicated full-time parents decided to pick their kids up and drop them off, so that they would have more time with their kids and the kids would spend less time in transit. Then, some unruly kids caused some trouble on the buses (the district isn't going to station a warden on the bus, and the driver has a route to keep), so some more parents started driving their kids. Now it was super-involved parents and also parents of bullied kids. A huge fraction of kids get bullied, so now we're looking at a bus filled with the lower half of the parental protectiveness bell curve. Obviously that's doing to distill the troublemakers, further lowering the level of protectiveness a parent would have to have before taking their kids off the buses. This forms a vicious cycle. The good kids are no longer diluting (and providing social pressure to) the bad ones, and the buses gain a (deserved? I have no way of knowing) reputation for being where bad parents dump their kids to be tortured by other bad kids. Now there's a social stigma. The set of parents that drive their kids now include the very-involved, the protective, and the responsive to social stigmas. So, finally, the children of the poor (whose parents don't have the means to fall in to one of the above groups) are stuck alone with the bad kids - and now we're at our present state, where cars line up around the street and everyone is spending an hour trying to pick their kids up from school.

randcraw 9y ago

15h / 5 days is 3h / day -- 1.5 hours each way, that's a long commute. The average commute in the US is 20 min each way. Suburbanites mostly jump to nearby suburbs. It's the urbanites & rurals who outlie, with interminable train rides or stops-and-gos via SUV & long highway drives to a bigger town an hour away. A map of US commute times: https://lifehacker.com/this-map-shows-the-average-commute-time-in-every-u-s-c-1796559696 https://lifehacker.com/this-map-shows-the-average-commute-ti...

tjic 9y ago
I did this for six months. I live in NH, I got a well paying contract in MA, and they needed me to work 60 hrs/week to rescue a project. The 60 hrs/week is key, because it made the ratio of billable hours to wasted hours plausible - 15 hours of commute to 40 of billable is terrible, but 15:60 made some sense. Those six months (plus the side remote consulting gig I did on the weekend) almost killed me, but they also let me pay off about 1/3 of my mortgage in half a year.
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  Would you do it again if something awful happened and you all of a sudden were in the same spot you were when you did that work (less or none of your mortgage paid off or something). Just wondering. Seems like it sucked but worthwhile if it paid off 1/3 of your mortgage. Good job!
cm2012 9y ago
I did that commute for 5 years in NYC. Now work from home:)
StillBored 9y ago
The map is cool, but you will notice the longest commute times are also where the majority of the population lives (a few big cities).

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

gebeeson 9y ago

The commute has been an issue of mine for a while - and listening to podcasts or audio books helps but, I'd rather just step outside to get to work. I blame this on where I live and my absolute reluctance to move. So yeah, commuting is my choice in the end.