7 ms·

> It's a unique trait of tech companies to encourage cold but polite relations with your coworkers. I don't know how you can assert this, among any other "stuc

> It's a unique trait of tech companies to encourage cold but polite relations with your coworkers. I don't know how you can assert this, among any other "stuck in a cubicle" office environment. Opportunities to be social are brief anyway. I'm on the side of 'give people time off enough to develop relationships outside of work'. 4 day work weeks would go a long way to helping people get the socializing we need.

mschuster91 1y ago
The problem is the lack of "everyday" socializing, and commute is the cause of that. In ye olde heavy industry days, workers lived relatively near to their workplace, and often gathered for a beer after work - just visit any of the old heavy industry towns here in the Ruhrpott, there's so damn many pubs situated closely to the mines, pits and smelters. That also was the prerequisite for why and how unions got popular - the employer could ban unions from entering the workplace itself, but they could not restrict political activity on third party places such as beer halls. Today, all of that is gone. Average commute times tend to be measured in hours, so with regular "overtime" you're looking at 12 hours of being away from home for work purposes - eight hours of working , two hours of commute, one hour of lunch break, one hour of overtime. And on top of that, work is condensed ever more by everything being tracked, can't even take a piss any more as a call center worker before the supervisor gets a notification that you haven't picked up a call in 60 seconds.
- nxor 1y ago
  Here in the US, urban sprawl is still the norm, and attempts to criticize it seem to be outweighed by "but more houses -> more money" :(
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - gadflyinyoureye 1y ago
    Let's be a bit gracious. A big issue is how much value is destroyed forcing people who don't necessarily want to live in a big city to live in a big city. Take Dallas. If you condense it into a 10 mile super city, you lose the sprawl. You gain a short commute, maybe? But you now have people sitting on top of each other. Is this good? No more sprawl, sure. But good?
    - dangus 1y ago
      Not everyone wants to be required to purchase and operate a 5-figure transportation device where you must be abled to operate it, it depreciates to dust and might kill you in a crash, etc. Why is that the standard of “freedom” but “living on top of each other” is a bad thing? Comfortable suburbs do not have to be wasteful of land, purposefully difficult to walk around, and built so that you must own a car to get around. You can live in a single family home without consuming an excessive amount of land. There are many examples of single family homes suburbs and neighborhoods within city limits where land isn’t wasted like crazy and residents are confined to living life in their vehicles. Americans literally spend thousands of dollars on vacations to the great cities of the world (and Disney World) where people gladly “live on top of each other” in order to enjoy the benefits of walkable urban fabric. I will also point out that sprawl is horrendous for the natural environment. Dense cities are better for the planet and our long-term survival. Replacing fertile farmland and natural habitats with development has negative consequences. Your preferences to live in sprawl don’t outweigh humanity’s collective needs.
      - xp84 1y ago
        > Your preferences to live in sprawl don’t outweigh humanity’s collective needs. What is the benefit of having this type of argument with people? It sounds like you're saying that you'd prefer to live in a fascist dictatorship that just bulldozes insufficiently-dense neighborhoods as it builds large, dense apartment blocks downtown to forcibly relocate the residents into, for the "good of humanity." Setting aside logistics of this (such as who's going to pay for that project, how many gestapo do you need to force people out of their homes) you first would need absolute dictatorial powers -- and I bet you will say you don't want that. You just want all of the non-city people to all change their minds at once and move to the city. Not really a proposal that's going to be very impactful, because that's never going to happen. For one thing, because most of the people who already live in the city hate the idea of building any new housing anywhere at any time. They hate low-income housing because it's wildly unfair to give it to a lucky few while everyone else struggles, and they hate market rate housing, because (eat the rich/hate those gentrifiers/etc). And everyone agrees they would hate for Transit System or the streets to become more congested. It's better to focus, instead of on shame, on making the cities that already exist more attractive to people you think should want to live there. Work on crime, work on transit that makes people be glad to not be driving, rather than miserable that they can't afford to park a car there as they watch a full bus bypass their stop or wait 25 minutes for one to come. But also, cities would need to have a lot more high quality housing large enough for families, which again isn't something the suburbanites can fix for cities.
  - screye 1y ago
    Yep, Dense urban neighborhoods and aggressively increasing net-new-housing production would solve some of these issues. The housing theory of everything really is a theory of everything.
- Lammy 1y ago
  Caused by commute sure is a funny way to say caused by lack of housing near jobs, like it's the roads' and rails' fault? :p
  - swiftcoder 1y ago
    'commute' seems like a decent proxy for all the various intentional decisions in urban planning and transit investment that got us into this mess
    - Lammy 1y ago
      I strongly disagree, because that argument just becomes an attack on people's freedom of movement rather than an attack on the structural issues which led to long commutes being the least-worst option for many people. This is evident in the way people immediately screech “induced demand!!!!1” the second anyone talks about widening a road, like the point of building _anything_ isn't for people to use it. Nobody ever says induced demand when we build houses and people want to live in them lol
      - autoexec 1y ago
        If somebody widens a road and it's instantly filled with more cars that's not "induced" demand, the demand was clearly already there, just not being met by the narrow street. Destinations drive demand, not traffic lanes. A road can be so inadequate that the traffic makes it painful enough that might I decide to just stay home when I'd rather go somewhere, but the demand is obviously there either way. Infrastructure should enable us to do the things we want and get to the places we want to be. I don't understand how people view making or keeping streets so shitty that many people can't or won't use them to get to where they want to go as a good thing.
        swiftcoder 1y ago
        > If somebody widens a road and it's instantly filled with more cars that's not "induced" demand, the demand was clearly already there, just not being met by the narrow street. Widening the road doesn't necessarily create demand (although it may, by making a given route more attractive to folks who would otherwise have worked/shopped/traveled elsewhere), but it does shift demand away from mass transit and towards individual vehicles.
nxor 1y ago
I agree with the first sentence, but not the rest: even 4 days of work and 3 days of weekend means I am still around work friends more than I am around outside-of-work friends. I'm also wondering if a 4 day work week would only then make it easier to work two jobs, since there will be people who don't want to be 'idle' for three days, and others who will not use that time to be more social.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

mschuster91 1y ago

The problem is the lack of "everyday" socializing, and commute is the cause of that. In ye olde heavy industry days, workers lived relatively near to their workplace, and often gathered for a beer after work - just visit any of the old heavy industry towns here in the Ruhrpott, there's so damn many pubs situated closely to the mines, pits and smelters. That also was the prerequisite for why and how unions got popular - the employer could ban unions from entering the workplace itself, but they could not restrict political activity on third party places such as beer halls. Today, all of that is gone. Average commute times tend to be measured in hours, so with regular "overtime" you're looking at 12 hours of being away from home for work purposes - eight hours of working , two hours of commute, one hour of lunch break, one hour of overtime. And on top of that, work is condensed ever more by everything being tracked, can't even take a piss any more as a call center worker before the supervisor gets a notification that you haven't picked up a call in 60 seconds.

nxor 1y ago
Here in the US, urban sprawl is still the norm, and attempts to criticize it seem to be outweighed by "but more houses -> more money" :(
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- gadflyinyoureye 1y ago
  Let's be a bit gracious. A big issue is how much value is destroyed forcing people who don't necessarily want to live in a big city to live in a big city. Take Dallas. If you condense it into a 10 mile super city, you lose the sprawl. You gain a short commute, maybe? But you now have people sitting on top of each other. Is this good? No more sprawl, sure. But good?
  - dangus 1y ago
    Not everyone wants to be required to purchase and operate a 5-figure transportation device where you must be abled to operate it, it depreciates to dust and might kill you in a crash, etc. Why is that the standard of “freedom” but “living on top of each other” is a bad thing? Comfortable suburbs do not have to be wasteful of land, purposefully difficult to walk around, and built so that you must own a car to get around. You can live in a single family home without consuming an excessive amount of land. There are many examples of single family homes suburbs and neighborhoods within city limits where land isn’t wasted like crazy and residents are confined to living life in their vehicles. Americans literally spend thousands of dollars on vacations to the great cities of the world (and Disney World) where people gladly “live on top of each other” in order to enjoy the benefits of walkable urban fabric. I will also point out that sprawl is horrendous for the natural environment. Dense cities are better for the planet and our long-term survival. Replacing fertile farmland and natural habitats with development has negative consequences. Your preferences to live in sprawl don’t outweigh humanity’s collective needs.
    - xp84 1y ago
      > Your preferences to live in sprawl don’t outweigh humanity’s collective needs. What is the benefit of having this type of argument with people? It sounds like you're saying that you'd prefer to live in a fascist dictatorship that just bulldozes insufficiently-dense neighborhoods as it builds large, dense apartment blocks downtown to forcibly relocate the residents into, for the "good of humanity." Setting aside logistics of this (such as who's going to pay for that project, how many gestapo do you need to force people out of their homes) you first would need absolute dictatorial powers -- and I bet you will say you don't want that. You just want all of the non-city people to all change their minds at once and move to the city. Not really a proposal that's going to be very impactful, because that's never going to happen. For one thing, because most of the people who already live in the city hate the idea of building any new housing anywhere at any time. They hate low-income housing because it's wildly unfair to give it to a lucky few while everyone else struggles, and they hate market rate housing, because (eat the rich/hate those gentrifiers/etc). And everyone agrees they would hate for Transit System or the streets to become more congested. It's better to focus, instead of on shame, on making the cities that already exist more attractive to people you think should want to live there. Work on crime, work on transit that makes people be glad to not be driving, rather than miserable that they can't afford to park a car there as they watch a full bus bypass their stop or wait 25 minutes for one to come. But also, cities would need to have a lot more high quality housing large enough for families, which again isn't something the suburbanites can fix for cities.
- screye 1y ago
  Yep, Dense urban neighborhoods and aggressively increasing net-new-housing production would solve some of these issues. The housing theory of everything really is a theory of everything.
Lammy 1y ago
Caused by commute sure is a funny way to say caused by lack of housing near jobs, like it's the roads' and rails' fault? :p
- swiftcoder 1y ago
  'commute' seems like a decent proxy for all the various intentional decisions in urban planning and transit investment that got us into this mess
  - Lammy 1y ago
    I strongly disagree, because that argument just becomes an attack on people's freedom of movement rather than an attack on the structural issues which led to long commutes being the least-worst option for many people. This is evident in the way people immediately screech “induced demand!!!!1” the second anyone talks about widening a road, like the point of building _anything_ isn't for people to use it. Nobody ever says induced demand when we build houses and people want to live in them lol
    - autoexec 1y ago
      If somebody widens a road and it's instantly filled with more cars that's not "induced" demand, the demand was clearly already there, just not being met by the narrow street. Destinations drive demand, not traffic lanes. A road can be so inadequate that the traffic makes it painful enough that might I decide to just stay home when I'd rather go somewhere, but the demand is obviously there either way. Infrastructure should enable us to do the things we want and get to the places we want to be. I don't understand how people view making or keeping streets so shitty that many people can't or won't use them to get to where they want to go as a good thing.
      - swiftcoder 1y ago
        > If somebody widens a road and it's instantly filled with more cars that's not "induced" demand, the demand was clearly already there, just not being met by the narrow street. Widening the road doesn't necessarily create demand (although it may, by making a given route more attractive to folks who would otherwise have worked/shopped/traveled elsewhere), but it does shift demand away from mass transit and towards individual vehicles.

nxor 1y ago

I agree with the first sentence, but not the rest: even 4 days of work and 3 days of weekend means I am still around work friends more than I am around outside-of-work friends. I'm also wondering if a 4 day work week would only then make it easier to work two jobs, since there will be people who don't want to be 'idle' for three days, and others who will not use that time to be more social.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]