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Honestly, I can only imagine this is informed by a relatively privileged place in society. First of all, your focus on this boogeyman of work/life balance assu

Honestly, I can only imagine this is informed by a relatively privileged place in society. First of all, your focus on this boogeyman of work/life balance assumes that all but a small percent of the global population even has enough autonomy in their employment to enjoy any balance whatsoever. Most everyone in the world is at sustenance levels of labor, "work/life balance" is the work of being alive. Secondly, JIT everything worked for the past 100 years, failed during an unprecedented in history event (we've had pandemics, but we've never "shut down" society) and will probably recover to do well until the next once-in-a-century event. Solving the global emissions crises isn't going to occur via the wealthiest working remotely or "learning to live with less". Population growth is far and away the biggest contributor to global climate change. Not your commute to the office, but growing enough food, building enough homes and providing for nearly 10 billion people and counting. Again, most of these people don't have anywhere near the luxury of bemoaning a poor work/life balance. It is so telling that the answer you see to solve the woes of modern society -- which as you are commenting on HN, you and me and the rest of us are beneficiaries of -- is to work less and remotely. What sacrifice you make for the good of the world! I am sorry I just am beyond over the sanctimony and self-importance of everyone. Now that _you_ have _yours_ and can relax in relative comfort, lets call it a day and cut off the engine that rose you and yours out of poverty for those poor schmucks still dreaming of the comfort of a 40-hour work week.

cableshaft 5y ago
I mean, this is Hacker News, most people here are in a privileged place compared to the rest of the world. That's kind of the audience. I'm fully aware not everyone is in this position to request or push for work/life balance. I've worked a decent amount of shitty jobs in my day, in fast food, retail, shipping/receiving, warehouse work. I've gone through periods where I was so physically exhausted after work I didn't do much more than go home and pass out and wake up and go back to work again. It sucks. And I don't know what they can do exactly, I'm too far removed from that now. I believe I did say that shutting down and working remotely brought our emissions down only 13%, not "solving the global emissions crisis". I said it was a painful wake-up call that even with all that happened last year, it wasn't anywhere near enough. So we need to try to do as much of that as possible and a lot, lot more if we are to get anywhere close. I don't know what that might be. I was listening to Bill Gates' 'How to Avoid a Climate Catastrophe' and he thinks there's several technologies that can possibly get our emissions to zero in the next decade or two. But after listening to that book I'm more dubious than he is. It sounded like even with his optimism he just inadvertently kept making a case for how fucking hard it is, how every piece of the solution has downsides and problems to overcome to work at scale, and how there's no way we're going to change enough hearts and minds or provide enough incentives to do enough to get us to 50% reduction in the next decade, or all the way down to zero by 2050. I don't think just staying home means we solved it, not by a long shot. We (and I mean corporations in this too, they're the bigger culprits than individuals) need to be doing all the things and a whole lot more, if possible, and even then I don't see it being enough totally avert catastrophe. I'm just hoping instead of like, 4-8 degrees warming (and likely human extinction or near extinction), maybe we'll somehow bring it down to only 2-3 degrees of warming. And that will still lead to terrible things. And it'll be hard to give up creature comforts. I'm failing pretty hard at this more than I'd like to myself right now. I'm trying to get better, though, but even if I do, it's going to make such a tiny, unnoticeable difference by itself. We can expect things to get fucking bad regardless, I think, I'm just hoping we can make things slightly less bad instead of everyone just shrugging our shoulders and accelerating and steering directly into the iceberg.
- PraetorianGourd 5y ago
  My main thesis is that this is almost purely a population problem. The developed world can give up all their creature comforts and it would still not nearly be enough to even put a dent in anything. We are already dealing with famine and disease in many places of the world. Independent of whether or not this is climate caused, we can't solve it without expending large resources and using the industrial might that we've built. The conundrum is that the place with massive population growth aren't really the places with the resources to implement green energy solutions. Coal is easier, coal is cheaper. Yes, the developed world's love of meat is a major source of deforestation, but so is the need to grow the food to feed 10 billion people. Retarding population growth is _the_ single biggest thing we can do as a species to reduce climate damage. This is one of the reasons I am not planning to have kids, when I die the relative population to my existence drops by one. Even if my kid rode their bike their whole life, lived in a climate friendly passive heating/cooling house and ate locally sourced food, their existence would produce more climate gasses than my ICE could ever dream of producing.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Retarding population growth is _the_ single biggest thing we can do as a species to reduce climate damage Retarding economic growth is, a better candidate, if you limit it to “retarding growth”; you’d need substantial and rapid population reduction (not just “retarding growth”) to offset the expected effects of near term economic development outside of the West. Obviously, the biggest thing we could do to end anthropogenic clomate change is species-scale mass suicide. No anthropos, no anthropogenic climate change. OTOH, most people who want to address that problem don’t actually think that doing the most we can on that unconditionally overrides all other concerns.
    - PraetorianGourd 5y ago
      That is sort-of the subtext of my thinking on this whole thing. Want to limit famine? You will warm the globe. Want to cool the planet? Production and industrialization needs to halt which will increase famine. It is all a balancing act and I am not convinced any balance we find won't result in massive suffering and loss of life somewhere.

cableshaft 5y ago

I mean, this is Hacker News, most people here are in a privileged place compared to the rest of the world. That's kind of the audience. I'm fully aware not everyone is in this position to request or push for work/life balance. I've worked a decent amount of shitty jobs in my day, in fast food, retail, shipping/receiving, warehouse work. I've gone through periods where I was so physically exhausted after work I didn't do much more than go home and pass out and wake up and go back to work again. It sucks. And I don't know what they can do exactly, I'm too far removed from that now. I believe I did say that shutting down and working remotely brought our emissions down only 13%, not "solving the global emissions crisis". I said it was a painful wake-up call that even with all that happened last year, it wasn't anywhere near enough. So we need to try to do as much of that as possible and a lot, lot more if we are to get anywhere close. I don't know what that might be. I was listening to Bill Gates' 'How to Avoid a Climate Catastrophe' and he thinks there's several technologies that can possibly get our emissions to zero in the next decade or two. But after listening to that book I'm more dubious than he is. It sounded like even with his optimism he just inadvertently kept making a case for how fucking hard it is, how every piece of the solution has downsides and problems to overcome to work at scale, and how there's no way we're going to change enough hearts and minds or provide enough incentives to do enough to get us to 50% reduction in the next decade, or all the way down to zero by 2050. I don't think just staying home means we solved it, not by a long shot. We (and I mean corporations in this too, they're the bigger culprits than individuals) need to be doing all the things and a whole lot more, if possible, and even then I don't see it being enough totally avert catastrophe. I'm just hoping instead of like, 4-8 degrees warming (and likely human extinction or near extinction), maybe we'll somehow bring it down to only 2-3 degrees of warming. And that will still lead to terrible things. And it'll be hard to give up creature comforts. I'm failing pretty hard at this more than I'd like to myself right now. I'm trying to get better, though, but even if I do, it's going to make such a tiny, unnoticeable difference by itself. We can expect things to get fucking bad regardless, I think, I'm just hoping we can make things slightly less bad instead of everyone just shrugging our shoulders and accelerating and steering directly into the iceberg.

PraetorianGourd 5y ago
My main thesis is that this is almost purely a population problem. The developed world can give up all their creature comforts and it would still not nearly be enough to even put a dent in anything. We are already dealing with famine and disease in many places of the world. Independent of whether or not this is climate caused, we can't solve it without expending large resources and using the industrial might that we've built. The conundrum is that the place with massive population growth aren't really the places with the resources to implement green energy solutions. Coal is easier, coal is cheaper. Yes, the developed world's love of meat is a major source of deforestation, but so is the need to grow the food to feed 10 billion people. Retarding population growth is _the_ single biggest thing we can do as a species to reduce climate damage. This is one of the reasons I am not planning to have kids, when I die the relative population to my existence drops by one. Even if my kid rode their bike their whole life, lived in a climate friendly passive heating/cooling house and ate locally sourced food, their existence would produce more climate gasses than my ICE could ever dream of producing.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Retarding population growth is _the_ single biggest thing we can do as a species to reduce climate damage Retarding economic growth is, a better candidate, if you limit it to “retarding growth”; you’d need substantial and rapid population reduction (not just “retarding growth”) to offset the expected effects of near term economic development outside of the West. Obviously, the biggest thing we could do to end anthropogenic clomate change is species-scale mass suicide. No anthropos, no anthropogenic climate change. OTOH, most people who want to address that problem don’t actually think that doing the most we can on that unconditionally overrides all other concerns.
  - PraetorianGourd 5y ago
    That is sort-of the subtext of my thinking on this whole thing. Want to limit famine? You will warm the globe. Want to cool the planet? Production and industrialization needs to halt which will increase famine. It is all a balancing act and I am not convinced any balance we find won't result in massive suffering and loss of life somewhere.