I've long said that WFH is an easy win climate change solution that costs nothing, is well loved by everyone who participates (except management). Turns out in times like this, it's also an energy security measure.
I'm introverted but very glad I have the option of working from the office and being among fellow staff, we also have a lunchtime exercise club once a week. It's much better for my mental health.
In fact, I've added two days working outside of home instead of one because of the benefits. I think 3 days home/2 days office is the sweet spot.
We've been slowly creeping back toward being fully RTO, and my mental health has been in what I can only describe as "steep decline". I don't know if I pin it all on RTO, but it sure isn't helping the situation. I love my job, but hate the in-office requirements - I'm a systems admin.
Sorry to hear that. Being a sysadmin, I guess you're mainly interacting with systems rather than people and need to focus. They should exempt you from RTO except for the odd "all hands" meeting days.
I'm a software engineer in a Product Engineering team and it's about 75% hands-on engineering, 25% Slack/Teams interaction and alignments between people. I find being in the office helps to make connections with other staff in other teams (eg. bumping into people while making coffee in staff kitchen etc). I think thats important from a career perspective.
The hubris of our generation damning our species into a global warming catastrophe just because we want to stand around the water cooler and have lunchtime exercise club for these last few decades at our apogee.
Zero days in office is the sweet spot. Get rid of all physical infrastructure. Its mind boggling that we are building a completely unnecessary second space for work and then build transportation infrastructure to move between two spaces all, compel people to drive back and forth, deal with traffic congestion and waste 2 hours/day, buy cars, pay for insurance, deal with accidents, use up precious mind space in driving through horrible traffic. If people have mental health issues, it doesn't mean that we need to build a second space for them. There are other ways to deal with mental health issues.
My sweet spot is the same. I like being at the office (because I like my colleagues), but with almost an hour commute each way, going every day is very draining. I'm glad my employer is giving us pretty much total flexibility.
While this is true and many people echo this, I also think this is partially caused by an over-reliance on work.
Ideally, we should not be put in a situation where we have to get necessary social health through our jobs. It should be through our hobbies, our passions, our friends, and our family. The people and things we choose to spend time with.
I'm not judging you either, because this is also the case for me. But, I think, if I was WFH, I would have a lot more free time. I could dedicate that to social interactions. Most people don't, but they could.
Even 3 days in office, 2 days home feels significantly better because that's the point at which one is spending less days out of the week in the office
I get that, and a lot of people like to be social with other people. But just because 10% (made up number) like it, there's no reason to force it on the rest of the workforce (not that you are).
I encourage people who are remote but want human contact to rent a desk once a week at a co-working space.
For me personally, I want to do my work as efficiently as possible, in as little time as possible, and then have my social time, which has very little in common with my work and/or colleagues.
I might be an exception, but I get up very, very early and work almost right away, and I don't want to be on a roll and then have to pack up, get in the car at a terrible traffic time where (some) people are driving like animals, hunt for parking and then find a desk. That's a huge _tax_ on my productivity.
But I don't expect or demand that the rest of the world do this.
As a side comment, I would agree with you though, that 2 in the office is better than one. But I also had a very effective pattern around 10 years ago, where I spent 2 days in the office per month, and that worked really well for me (though those days were far, far less productive than my at home work days).
Now, if the world adopted a 32 hour, 4-day work week I would probably be ok with the office 1 day a week.
What's your commute like? There are many aspects to the RTO vs. WFH debate, but having to waste away 1-3 hours a day on the road, coupled with the energy use in the OP, really cancels out the mental health aspects of being in office. It even detracts from the amount of work done.
The London office commute is 30 minutes train and 25 minutes walk. I really like that balance as it gives me sunlight, exercise and fresh air.
I work from a library on the other day, thats a 30 minute drive. I tend to leave before 0700 when the roads are peaceful. My car is pretty fuel efficient, i try to hypermile it and get ~50mpg.
Imagine how much more sunshine you could enjoy working in the evening and enjoying the outdoors during the day - good thing they've got the exercise club.
I know it's a meme on HN to say everyone likes WFH, but I (and many but not ICs around me) thrive more in person.
I am 100% more effective in person where I can dev and my desk and bounce ideas off if team mates around me verbally. This can be recreated in a remote environment by having things like a team Discord that folks sit on, but it can feel forced at times (just like communiting to the office I suppose).
My take might be heavily skewed though. I am in games and our environment is highly collaborative.
> where I can dev and my desk and bounce ideas off if team mates around me verbally.
Can't you fucking do your homework beforehand, think your idea thoroughly, and then have at least a small written paragraphs about it before interrupting your colleagues.
Really, I am not a co-processor in a bus for you to dispatch a job to me and raise an interrupt line whenever the fuck you fancy doing it.
> Can't you fucking do your homework beforehand, think your idea thoroughly, and then have at least a small written paragraphs about it before interrupting your colleagues.
They never said they didn't.
> Really, I am not a co-processor in a bus for you to dispatch a job to me and raise an interrupt line whenever the fuck you fancy doing it.
I am! I'm perfectly capable of managing my own time and shoeing others away if needed. Please bother me! That's why I have a cell phone and a salary.
Almost certainly relevant: I work in manufacturing.
>"I know it's a meme on HN to say everyone likes WFH"
I work from home for the last 25 years (I am an independent vendor, design and develop business critical products for medium size businesses). I have no desire to socialize with employees of my clients and when I am in a mood I have real fiends to spend time with.
Can't imagine wasting my time in corporate cubicles or open concept offices
I'm in games as well. I'm pretty mixed on it. For my experience
- first job, fully onsite. More traditional cubicle space
- second job, on-site until COVID came around. Literally a WeWork building as a sattellite office to HQ in San Fransico.
- third job, "0-100%" on site. There was an office and I could come into it never or all the time. More of an open office setup.
I will say it's nice to not need to spend 5 days commuting, and I really don't think we need to do that much collaboration to be productive. If you're local, I think a suggestion of 2-3 days in office would do wonders, reserved for "brainstorming" days or cross team syncs. for job 3, that was pretty much my schedule; typically come in TWTh, unless I was feeling sick (this was still the tail end of COVID).
But some camaraderie was nice. The games scene was really friendly for the most part (in my experience. I have heard second hand stories and don't want to discount those). There were community events, tribal wisdom you'd hear over water-cooler talk, impromptu group lunches, and seasonal parties. It was nice, being around other passionate people who had similar interests to you. I definitely miss that most.
Productivity-wise, I'm not sure I noticed much difference. I had enough space to setup a dedicated office room, so that's definitely one privilege I had. But I had on-off days in office and remote. Maybe my most productive days were in office, but that was usually over guidance from a lead.
I don't think everyone needs to be on-site per se. But I do see some situations where on-site is beneficial to have, at least in partial capacity.
1. Juniors definitely need some on-site guidance (and by that extension, leads need to be available those days). I really cannot imagine those early mentoring being as effective over a screen. There's so much "body language" style of knowledge gained that doesn't come up in zoom meetings (and while proposed, I really hate the idea of an "always on" chat-room)
2. brainstorming, architecturing , and conceptualizing felt much better in person. So some periods may need more in-office time than others where it's focused on development (which feels to have minimal impact, given the nature of "head down" work).
3. Office space might be a consideration depending on your living space. If you are in a small apartment with little desk space, I can see that having a huge impact to productivity.
I hate WFH, personally. My company is actually closing the office I work out of due to lack of use, so I'm in the opposite scenario from "forced-RTO", I'm being moved to "forced-WFH." It's the right call objectively, the office is genuinely very empty, but I'm a bit annoyed about it. I'm actually going to be paying to rent a desk out of a coworking facility so I don't have to WFH. If this situation sucks, there's a real chance I'll be changing jobs later this year because of this.
I pretty much dislike WFH and for many of the reasons you mention and more, so took a local in-office job last year after being at home since COVID. I was excited to return to a more social environment until I found that "the office" itself was itself entirely problematic. Cheapass flatpack desks all rammed in together. No noise or sound proofing, giant sweatshop room. Sub-par monitors and equipment generally. Grumpy coworkers complaining constantly about the very conversations (both on-topic and off-topic/non-work) that I came in to have a chance to experience again.
And half the staff was just WFH anyways, or remote, so the collaboration opportunities... diminished.
I even saw this happening at Google before I left there, which had formerly been a ... luxury office. Packing people in like sardines, forcing people to "reserve" desks. Bad parking and/or transit situations.
I get it when employers face financial or real estate crunches. But in the last 10-15 years (I've been working for 30) -- even pre-COVID -- I feel like some switch went off in tech industry leadership brains that is just outright disrespectful. Paying high salaries to engineers and then providing them with uncomfortable accommodations. Makes little sense to me.
I'm back to WFH and the isolation that comes with it. In part because the office environment was actually not what I was hoping for. Because the industry ruined it.
If you genuinely "thrive" more in person then go live next to your office. No point sitting in a 30-60 minute commute. America/UK took the brunt of the cost transitioning towards knowledge work, but kept the costs of manufacturing (shipping people around). Even if it's slightly more productive, the cost is externalized on the workers making them poorer and sickly.
>Oh no you don't understand I need a compress decompress cycle I TRIVE when I burn as much gas as possible
Sadly, your job (especially in the games industry) is a lot more mobile that your living dwellings. I had a housing situation and took the commute over trying to move.
In the end cars are just a means to an end. People want to minimize their transportation spending.
People bought bigger houses or renovated. They upgraded their PCs and were more likely to subscribe to broadband and less likely to cancel. Empty office buildings are ever so slowly being converted to housing. Professional clothing purchases dipped and then rebounded.
Yeah, I've always seen it as a hot potato issue. I think a lot of people who don't play ball on dealing with climate change aren't deniers, they just want the next guy to have to do the work. It's very, very hard to sell to anyone, "this is going to be incredibly costly and painful for you and you won't enjoy any of the benefits. Your grandkids might."
Agreed. I care enough about it to sell my car, stop buying stuff I don't need, give up most meat, and live in a small energy efficient house.
However I do know people who really do not care. They may say they care but their actions and voting record show that in fact they don't care (or don't want to make it a real priority). But those same people get very upset when they're stuck in traffic
Absolutely not. There are tens of millions of Americans who have jumped full speed onto the "It's not even happening" train, let alone the "It's actually a good thing because plants" or "It's not our fault" or "We can't fix it so we shouldn't try" or "It's too expensive to fix and I can't do long term math" trains.
And this is a massive reversion too. In the mid 2000s republicans were openly advocating that we needed to do something about climate change and that it was a serious problem and then we opened the cash floodgates to American federal politics and would you look at that, oil companies have a lot of cash.
Keep in mind that the real cost of transitioning is very likely to be less than what we spent on the stupid oil wars of the 2000s. We can literally afford it now, let alone if we hadn't burned all that cash bombing the desert because of oil politics.
Oil companies themselves are fine to be "Energy" companies and invest in Solar and other renewables. They will be profitable just fine. Our country is tearing itself apart over a lie to ensure they remain more profitable.
In 2008 McCain openly talked about greenhouse gas cap and trade. I think the driving force behind it was fear of peak oil. Secure your energy supply. With fracking supply concerns went away.
In the mid-2000s there might've been individual Republicans concerned about climate change, but it was the Bush administration who opposed the Kyoto Protocol and pushed for adaptation to climate change on the basis of protecting the economy.
WFH was great to begin with, but as somebody living alone, the isolation starts to have an effect after a while when you're 'working alone' too
And for many people WFH has other problems - if you're a dual-WFH couple in a small home, lack of home office space is a very real problem. (Although if WFH was a permanent thing, many people could choose less expensive places to live, and have more space)
Still, anything to eliminate a miserable and environmentally wasteful commute.
> And for many people WFH has other problems - if you're a dual-WFH couple in a small home, lack of home office space is a very real problem. (Although if WFH was a permanent thing, many people could choose less expensive places to live, and have more space)
Sure I get meetings you need to go to separate rooms, but how is the rest is different from a regular open office? Oh no, my co-working space has the person I like to spend time with?
Sounds like whoever is scheduling meetings need to adapt to a new asynchronous environment whereas many meetings isn't necessary.
I'm not saying everyone must be WFH or that everyone must have a home office. I'm just having hard time imagining how two people cannot WFH in a 1-bedroom apartment. Unless both of them work in a call center.
> Sounds like whoever is scheduling meetings need to adapt to a new asynchronous environment whereas many meetings isn't necessary.
I agree, and a lot of my 'participation' in these meetings these days is read the papers, write my opinion, attach it to the documents and tell people I'm not attending.
That said we're 5 years in to this thing and people haven't adapted.
I would love to have a coworking-space-on-every-block (or in every building) where all the WFHers can go to be around other people (just not the coworkers)
> Our auditoriums are provided as a public service for use by individuals, institutions, groups, organizations, and corporations for a small fee, when not being used for library-affiliated or sponsored activities.
Yeah, I was spoiled by my college town. Libraries open until 2AM, a 24 hour space for students. Even a few cafes downtown open 24 hours a day. Suburb life is mostly fine, but that's one thing I miss most.
Gotta travel 20 miles to downtown for anything resembling night life.
And maybe we can pool them a bit by profession, because they often need the same tools and can help each other. Any maybe they can even work on some of the same projects, so we can remove meetings.
> is well loved by everyone who participates (except management)
Most of management hates it too. I manage a team where everyone is remote, yet I have to go to the office few days a week to sit on zoom, why? And up a level, my manager has an even longer commute and probably hates it more than I do.
This stuff is pushed down by HR, most of management hates it.
We may never know which sector of the economy you are in to believe WFH is a good idea unless you explicitly state it but given this is HN, I'm just going to make a lazy assumption for software dev or engineering. WFH sounds great in theory only if _everyone_ participates in it but is hardly the case in reality.
For example: If you can sustainably and reliably source your daily necessities like having the ability to cook or maintain a decent home environment that support it, kudos. Thought the covid lockdowns showed us how fragile that system can be especially for those _essential people_ to be physically around to feed you or keep your shit running.
As a side note: how do you feel about being snookered by your local government's policy under the pretext that _essential work_ just gives your employers the ability to maintain the same minimum wage labor cycle just so you can feel giddy about how good this idea is?
but then again, vehicle miles travelled per-capita has been mostly increasing in the US since as far back as 1975. There could be a lot of confounding factors. Like astronomical housing prices in urban areas forcing people live very far away and incur more VMT at a faster rate than WFH decreases VMT. I'm no expert here, I'm just spitballing.
WFH doesn't actually stop driving. They don't commute, but they do run errands and other stuff during the day. This can actually result in more traffic during high peak periods since it can cause congestion build up to start earlier
I think the bigger point was that pandemic traffic immediately showed effects. Smog cleared up in Los Angeles in less than a month.
But no, it won't ever be that level without major infrastructure change. Not all jobs can be wfh. We can get close by a major public transportation overhaul, but that will take decades (even without the inevitable pushback).
> is well loved by everyone who participates (except management).
So? The only people who matter are shareholders and their proxies (management). To everyone else: you don't matter as much as you think you do, quit being selfish and be happy you get anything at all. The world doesn't revolve around you.
I love WFH but how is it a win climate change solution for anyone outside of the USA? If my office building WFH, instead of heating a building we need to heat 500 people homes all day. And most of the people commute by public transport.
Vast majority of people are not touching their thermostat much at all when going to the office.
But these are stupid made up arguments. WFH or not both the homes with no one in them and the offices with no tenants are getting heated still to keep the pipes from bursting.
So 500 people leave for office and turn off the heating at their homes, even if there are other people (kids, elderly) or animals (cats, dogs, birds) living there?
Kids are at school during office hours, I'm not sure about pets but they I don't think they care whether the house is 23° or 16° considering most of them go outside without any issue.
How is their commute relevant? If they are WFH, theres less people needing to commute. Thats less fuel or more efficient fuel economy for public transport to use
Most energy goes into making up for the temperature delta. If you turn the heating down, the delta at either evening or morning goes up.
Note, some people even think that would take even more energy in total per day, but that's not correct because a cooler house doesn't emit as much energy as a warmer one.
I would hazard a guess that (x houses @ minimal heating + x amount of petrol burned during a commute + emissions from heating an office) > whatever amount of emissions x houses would generate going from minimal heating to comfortable heating.
It's too bad that countries only consider things like this to address a crisis in fuel costs. Why not enact measures like this to curb the pollution and CO2? I guess it says a lot about what humanity truly values.
I worked from home but a few times I needed to go to my parents house during what used to be rush hour. Less than 5% of normal traffic and fuel demand dropped so much that prices were lower.
My job went hybrid in 2022 and then return to office full time last year. Everyone hates it. It's a waste of time and resources.
Less pollution, less traffic means we don't need to use tax revenue to expand roads and less wear and tear means less repairs.
Take it one step further and give tax breaks to businesses that let employees work from home and close physical offices. Then this means less new office construction which can be used for housing to help the housing crisis. It's a win win for everyone except control freak managers.
Optimizing performance management and labor cost controls is more important to those making these decisions than climate change. Misaligned incentives.
Cheap and efficient solar power didn't seem to require any actual breakthroughs or real investment. Maybe better power electronics for inverters and things? Batteries are a real issue but storage could have been totally ignored for a while.
So, maybe when Carter put those (thermal) solar collectors on the White House we should have thrown a hundred billion dollars at solar panel work and had abundant solar power decades ago.
But no, Carter was "weak" so we had to instead elect the guy who ignored AIDS because he hated gay people, pushed absurd drug policy, put us in bed with the middle east, and started the process of removing taxes from any rich person and racking up national debt for stupid reasons.
Why was Carter "weak"? Well you see, Iran was a huge Bad Guy that we needed to stop!
> Why not enact measures like this to curb the pollution and CO2?
It does seem like a glaring contradiction, but it's actually not. In the West, at least, climate rhetoric is a tool primarily to discipline and control the masses through fear, with actual concern for the climate a distant secondary factor. This is why those elites can cry crocodile tears for the environment while also riding on private jets to private islands and staying mum about intentional environmental disasters caused in the ongoing wars (which they support, of course).
In the current fuel crisis, mandatory WFH is also an attempt to manage populations through controlled demand-destruction, which avoids more volatile forms of demand-destruction that result in unrest, like not being able to afford food.
From an (cynical) governance perspective, there is no contradiction here.
You can’t collapse countries and humans down to four sentences and conclude that’s what they value. Do you want to analyze the problem or throw quips at the wall?
Global climate change will make much of the world barely habitable, and devastate crop yields. Those living outside "the West" will far and away be the most adversely affected. Reducing CO2 emissions is an urgent global priority.
No it doesn't. That economoic activity when done from home, raises their local neighborhoods now where mom and pop businesses can thrive instead of competing in a costly rental market based on scarcity.
Ah yes, because economics and resource allocation are already perfectly optimal and balanced, and it is against the physical laws of the universe to raise quality of life via any other methodology
Over My whole life, 5 out of 7 full days of work always felt so daunting and almost dehumanizing.
But 4/7 is mentally close to half and just feels way different qualitatively. If you have a job you mostly like, 4 days a week feels really sustainable.
I work 4 days a week (started because of a medical condition) and I think more people should do that. I even think that in those 4 days i get as much done as most others in 5 days because I can focus better, and sometimes when I feel like working in the non-work day I work a few hours for fun and interest.
I‘m a big fan of the four day workweek idea, but let’s not kid ourselves. 5 days are 5 days. I work 10h days usually and I just wouldn’t be able to fit all that work into 4 days.
I don't think human production is linear. There's definitely an optimal point, and it probably varies from person to person. I think, actually, past that point your productivity declines rapidly.
I would not be surprised at all if working 70 hours a week yields more productivity than 80, which yields more than 100.
I've been working 4/10 schedule (4 days, but 10 hours/day, so I still work 40 hours). It's a HUGE perk, and is the biggest thing keeping me at my current job.
Happiest and most productive I've ever been was working 4/10 with a start time at 2 p.m. No morning sluggishness walking into work after lunch, zero-traffic commute, off Fridays so I'd still have a social life far, far away from morning people. Dated a nurse who also worked night shifts and just went on weekday lunch dates or closed down bars.
Honestly I think the dirty secret is most peoples work output, especially in white collar work, is not linear. I'm willing to bet if you are even able to quantify your output (I don't believe most people can do that unless they are merely a fungible cog in some production process), you'd get the same exact amount of work done in a year working 4 10s or 4 8s or 4 5s I'd even bet.
Think of the classic case of the deadline and what it actually means. Case A, you didn't procrastinate. You took plenty of time to think on the problem, work on a solution at an unhurried pace, put it aside, come back to it, and solve it before it is due. And then, it is done.
Case B, you did procrastinate. You have no time at all to think all day, you immediately do and iterate. Four hours later you've sprinted and delivered. And then, it is done, same as it would have been if you didn't procrastinate, maybe 10 fold reduction in time.
And that is worst case examples. Typical case is probably somewhere between these A and B, but the point is non linear time to output.
Long-term planning rarely hooks-up with reality until it's too late. It's abundantly clear "Asia" should spend the remaining 20% of their working week directly on ripping away their dependency on fuel.
In my company, customer service and finance departments still have work-from-home options carried over from 2020. Most use it to take two workdays a week to avoid the commute. I notice the difference in rush-hour traffic; my location is in a dead-end road with only one way in and out.
Something I heard from an analyst online (can't find source unfortunately) said that China has a 90 day supply for gas, whereas it's 10 days for Taiwan. Not sure this applies to all fuel types, but it may give an indication of the buffer that some of these major Asian countries are working with.
And its worth pointing out that China recently stocked up their strategic oil reserves to a significant degree. They would be the very tipping top high end of reserves.
Labor laws in the US are designed for companies to skirt around the spirit of the law to satisfy the letter of the law. Probably to prevent rioting in the street from making people realize they haven't won the change they thought. Case in point, certain benefits that kick in at 40 hours to you know help people out.
Companies responded by saying awe shucks, guess we will only schedule you 39 hours and if you want more you have to work another job. Oh and the law only cares about hours done at one job so doesn't matter if you are working 120 hour weeks you only get part time benefits.
My friend actually drives more when we switched to wfh. 10 miles to gym and back. 20-30 miles in misc errands and grocery shopping. Yoga class, kids sports.
I suspect it’s mostly a naming convention. Wars are often labeled after the territory where the fighting occurs rather than the actors involved. That’s why we say “Ukraine war” or “Iraq war,” even though multiple states may be involved.
In this case, “Iran war” is a bit misleading because the conflict is largely a missile and proxy confrontation affecting several territories (Iran, Israel, and parts of the Gulf), not just one battlefield.
Personally, I find it clearer to name conflicts after the primary actors involved. For example:
Russia–Ukraine war
U.S. & Israel–Iran war
That makes the participants explicit instead of implicitly framing the war around a single country or location.
Seems to be convention. If you search for "Russian war", the top hit is "Ukraine war", second hit "Ukraine-Russia war". Most results seem to mention both parties but when brevity is needed, the place where it's taking place seems to take priority over the belligerents
Just observing, not saying it's a good or bad linguistic practice
Ukraine war, Nagorno Karabakh war, Iraq war, Kosovo War, Gulf War, Falklands War, Vietnam war, Korean war, wars frequently are named for where they are fought.
Because we're sitting here on the American side. In Iran it's probably called the America war or the Israeli war.
Another way to name wars, when they aren't happening to you, is based on where they happen. The war is happening in and around Iran. It's very unlikely that Iran will manage to bring the war to America. You could also call it the Gulf of Persia war.
You can also name them propagandistically, as in the "2023 Israel-Hamas war". Thankfully this hasn't happened in this case.
Point of view. If you are American its the war with Iran. If you are in most other English speaking countries you would go along with that. That said, I have also seen it referred to as "the Middle East war" and one headline calls it "Trump's war".
Asia rolled it out? Wow, imagine the coordination that took to get all of those disparate countries (like, 48 or 49 countries make up Asia) on board with a 4 day work week... and so quickly, too!
My homeowners association can't pull off a neighborhood playground cleanup without conflict, disorder and confusion even with 6 months of planning so again, kudos to the 48+ countries of Asia for coming together in this herculean example of speed, unity and coordination.
Both Canada and the US are net exporters of oil, and have median wages higher than in the countries adopting these measures, so neither physical shortages nor rising fuel prices are issues as urgent as they are in (e.g.) the Philippines.
We consume 101 million barrels of oil per day. The amount of oil humans consume per day has doubled since 1980. Is this the way we finally wake up to the urgency of addressing the climate crisis caused by burning fossil fuels?
Does this mean that President Trump is the (unexpected) champion of the remote working crowd? Not the hero we need but the hero we deserve, and all that.
The thing I feel like is really important to remember whenever thinking about the world and demographics is that most people are Asian. As in more people live in Asia then outside of it. Conversely when a headline or something mentions Asia, it is rare they actually mean the majority of the continent or people living there.
My favorite is when people say they like "asian cuisine" or "asian food". China alone has several distinct cuisines. Why do we act like this is a monolithic concept?
Because there was a lot of cultural cross-contamination between these countries, there is a huge overlap in ingredients due to climate similarities and trade between neighboring countries.
I group European & American food into their respective groups as well.
> Asia rolls out 4-day weeks, WFH to solve fuel cris...
Makes no sense, same with "I'm in a mood for asian food"
> Makes no sense, same with "I'm in a mood for asian food"
Thai, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indian food / cuisine even thought different is more probably closer to each other same like e.g. Polish and Spanish is closer to each other than to most other asian cuisine.
Asian countries developed with more overlap in basic ingredients, cooking techniques, and historical influence networks than Europe did. Historically there were 3 influence zones in Asia. There is a lot of pickling, fermenting, salting, drying. In Asia of these techniques were more or less unified. Fish sauces from different countries are Pepsi vs Coca-Cola level of difference.
> Polish and Spanish is closer to each other than to most other asian cuisine.
I'd say Polish has a lot of similarities with Asian cuisine. Sure, both have stews and sausages, but flavor profiles are very different: acidic vs sour.
I won't be able to tell difference between gyoza & wonton if they shaped the same, but surely I can tell difference between ravioli & uszka. Uszka is IMO closer to any dumpling from Asia than to anything European.
Those were brought to them most likely by China in one way or another.
> Yes, a filled pasta is a very different thing from dumpling,
You saying it like a filled pasta and a dumpling isn't the same twist on "filling encased in thin dough".
> There is nothing in South Asian cuisine similar to sashimi or to soy heavy stir fries.
Dish is ingredients and method. Stir-frying is a Chinese technique (technically multiples, but all originated in China). Ingredients get replaces all the time for various reasons. You're telling me Poriyal is not close relative to the OG stir-fry?
I'm not sure how you arrive at that opinion. Take the example of Punjabi food. It's heavily based around ghee and dairy. Does anything in Thai cuisine use butter except European style pastries?
The only major similarities I see uniting the national cuisines you listed (not regional ones) are things like curries and rice. The former arrived in Japan with European influence (where it's also common in colonial countries) and the latter isn't a feature common to all Asian cuisines (e.g. Mongolian).
American food = contains corn (maize), in all its glorious (ex. nixtamalized, unprocessed, flour, etc.) and unholy (ex. high fructose corn syrup) forms.
Oddly enough, many Canadians use the word "American" to refer to Unitedstatesians, so presumably they'd use it to describe cuisine that same way (as in, poutine is Canadian but disco fries are American). This is extremely analogous to the Asia conversation, in that of course people know the term comes from the continental scale, but using that scale is less common, so it must be specifically invoked.
And then you've got Puerto Ricans, who are definitely US'ian but eat more like the non-US'ian Americans, so who knows what they would think of if you ask about American food, but it wouldn't surprise me if Contiguousunitedstatesian is the default (i.e., the same cuisine the Canadians would be referring to).
"American" is as broad as Asian and even more annoying. I ate some great food in Surinamese restaurants, but I'm guessing that's not what you meant by using that word.
The same goes for "European", Nordic cousine is very different than the Balkan cousine, which is very different than the Iberian cousine and so on.
When someone outside of America thinks of American food, do you think they will think of Cajun gumbo, TexMex, Clam Chowder, or something you'd find on the menu at McDonalds?
>When someone outside of America thinks of American food, do you think they will think of Cajun gumbo, TexMex, Clam Chowder, or something you'd find on the menu at McDonalds?
Statistically this random non-american is some sort of Asian. Therefore the answer is finger lickin good.
In vulgar American English, "Asia" mostly just refers to the wider Confuciosphere + some parts of Central Asia (though rarely thought about.) Most Americans will look at you funny if you call Pakistan or Jordan Asian, because that's not how we use the word.
> China alone has several distinct cuisines. Why do we act like this is a monolithic concept?
When someone is talking about "Chinese food", they almost certainly are talking about the cuisine established by Chinese immigrants in their country, not food as it exists within China. This isn't unique to China.
More American vulgarism fun facts, "Chinese" wasn't pan-Chinese until somewhat recently. It pretty much exclusively meant Cantonese outside of very specific contexts, like geopolitics. This changed slowly starting in the 1970s, but emphasis on slowly and it still persists in interesting ways today.
Asian can also have different meanings in different places. If you say someone is Asian in Britain it means South Asian, whereas in the US it seems to mean East Asian.
It's similar to how people say "Europe does this or that". Basically the part of their thoughts dedicated to that part of the world is so small that all they can afford is a tiny box, and everything has to go in there, reality be damned.
Not really, it's not sovereign. The EU can pass laws that each European country chooses to implement. If they don't implement enough EU laws, they can get kicked out, which means more pieces of paper are written and some European countries might choose to afford them less privileges.
No. EU laws are of two kinds: directives and regulations. Directives work roughly as you describe, while regulations have direct effect like regular laws.
Those countries may also ratify EU laws if they wish. I think the UK has something similar to GDPR and Switzerland also picks and chooses which laws it thinks make sense.
And I doubt the contents of any of those menus are particularly close to what you'd find in the countries they claim to be from. It's really more like "Asian-inspired."
We hosted an exchange student for a few weeks, and he was from Nanjing. Before he left the country, we took him to a Chinese restaurant and warned him that it was likely going to be more like American-Chinese.
He went through the menu and pointed out the dishes which were authentic and those which were not. I was surprised at how many were actually authentic -- it was about half of the menu. Maybe we were at a more authentic Chinese restaurant, as the menu was in both English and Chinese.
He was a great kid, and I really enjoyed the experience. He loved peanut butter and jelly, had to spit out ranch dressing, and did not care at all for pumpkin pie.
There's also the question of authentic/traditional to which part of china, in particular in cases where dishes with the same name aren't made the same. But beyond that, just because there's a dish on the menu one recognizes from their homeland doesn't mean it's prepared the same.
Authentic places certainly exist. That's not generally the sort of place that has menus covering multiple countries, though.
There are also places where they can make stuff like home, but usually won't. They might have made "proper" stuff owing to the presence of your exchange student.
Because that is how it's presented to "us". If the cuisine that we could access where we live was more diverse, we would think differently about the entire set (which is not happening for another set of entirely good reasons, but alas.)
I was watching some travel show on PBS, which I can't recall the name of. They were going through Egypt and met up with a guy from the area who walked them through getting the local food.
So much of what they had looked the same as the food that you could find in Greece, but they were fiercely adamant that it was both different and better.
Because much of the Asian food the average American will come across isn’t necessarily identifiable to a specific region or country in Asia, or is a blend of various Asian cuisines.
Or they are broadly referring to the various cuisines of Asia as a singular group, because unless you’re very familiar with those cuisines, they may see broadly similar.
That's always been a weird one for me. If I might quote Gemini's summary since it seems accurate enough:
> Geographical/Historical: The Bosporus Strait in Turkey is historically considered the dividing line between Europe (West) and Asia (East).
> Prime Meridian: The 0° longitude line running through Greenwich, England, is used to technically separate the Eastern and Western Hemispheres.
> Cultural/Political: Cultural definitions are often more relevant, placing countries like Australia, New Zealand, and North America in the "West" due to historical ties, despite their geographic location.
I suppose you're leaning into the "Bosporus Strait" option more than the "Prime Meridian" option, given that the former would put most of Europe in the West while the latter would put most of it in the East.
Because some places didn’t get immigration or even access to imported products. Being small town in Lithuania I didn’t even tried pizza until late 90s, chinese 2000s and indian probaly 2010s. There’s still like less than 5 Indian restaurants in country and probably none korean, etc.
Also things like asian fusion can evolve independently.
When Asians use the term, we usually use it to loosely mean "my home cuisine and other cuisines that share similar characteristics"
When my wife or I say "I feel like eating something Asian today" it usually means spicy-Chinese adjacent, i.e. served hot, vegetables fully cooked, heavy on flavor, paired with either rice or freshly made noodles.
Korean qualifies, Sichuan food qualifies, Thai food qualifies, Indian food maybe sort of borderline qualifies on some days but only if we haven't eaten it recently.
We don't usually mean Japanese food when we say that. That's just our mutual understanding of what we call "Asian food". Yeah, I guess we unapologetically kicked Japan out of culinary Asia :) It doesn't matter. The system works for us. We don't dislike Japanese food, but we'll say "Japanese food" when we feel like having Japanese food.
Another Asian family from a different part of Asia probably uses the term to refer to a different subset of Asian cuisines.
Like just about everything else in Asia, it's a fluid term that means different things to different people. I've only ever seen people in the west be pendantic about terms like this. I also think of it as a very western ideology to want to have a term have a singular global definition.
>" Why do we act like this is a monolithic concept?"
Under "we" you mean white / the westerners? Because the majority of us do not give a flying fuck about other parts of the world. Not important enough. One can easily see how our media reacts to tragedies on one one side comparatively to the other.
As for food. I live in Toronto and can clearly distinguish between quite a few different "Asian" cuisines.
>I now believe China’s actual population may be as low as 300–400 million
that we now live in a world where people are confident enough to make claims this stupid in front of a camera should frighten anyone.
Some basic logic, if China had the population of the United States it would have magically acquired the per capita economic output of the US in ~30 years, consume several times the energy and food it imports and somehow have produced several cities the size of Tokyo. The fact that China produces ~50% of the world's ships and has the manufacturing output of of the G7 combined is impressive with over a billion people, but hey they must have some space age technology to do it with 3% of the world's population!
In philosophy there's a concept called the coherence theory of truth, if you want to know if something is true check if it doesn't defy basic logic or other facts you know, great tool instead of believing what youtubers say
because that would mean virtually every place in the country would look like Singapore, it would be significantly richer ,per capita, than Taiwan, millions of economic migrants would have left the country for no reason, and I suppose also be conjured out of thin air given that the Chinese diaspora is about 40 million people large. Which is shockingly enough comparable to Indians abroad, not Americans
Youtube videos are always a poor quality source - the UN doesn’t accept China’s numbers exactly but they believe the total number is broadly correct due to cross referenced data, and expert independent demographers largely agree. The figure of 1.4 billion is likely within the ballpark and the idea that this is off by hundreds of millions is considered a fairly fringe theory, almost a conspiracy theory.
Especially because it sounds like the Philippines is pushing for a 4 day workweek, but the rest of SEA is asking people to work from home, use less AC, take the stairs…
It's also Vietnam, Thailand, and unofficially Pakistan.
The reality is the bigger Asian nations like China, India, SK, and Japan that worked on building resilient alternatives after the 2022-23 ONG shock due to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine aren't as dramatically impacted. The others didn't or were hit by other crises at the same time.
For example, in Pakistan's case, their government raised fuel taxes by around 33% because they didn't meet their IMF loan terms [0] but somehow found $11M to buy a private jet [1] for the CM of Punjab who is also the niece of the PM and the daughter of the former PM and Pakistan is in the middle of a war with Afghanistan [2].
Edit: can't reply
> gas cylinder booking...
The gas cylinder/LPG issue is due to consumer habits - induction and electric stovetops have been available in India for decades, but there has been a cultural aversion to adopting electric.
Even Indian Americans in the US prefer using Gas Stovetops over Electric for cultural reasons (eg. I've had my parents say the "taste" of food is worse on electric instead of gas stovetops despite living here since Clinton was president).
And dhabas and restaurants used to use coal briquettes or kerosene until those were banned in the 2000s-2010s for pollution reasons (much help that did /s) and to promote LNG and CNG, and will most likely revert back to those.
Additionally, India has shifted from Qatari to Omani LNG [3], which was what India was already using before the India-Qatar FTA led to a diplomatic thaw between the two.
It's the same situation in Vietnam as well.
> freight is pretty much fucked
Indian diesel prices are being subsidized and kept constant [4]. That said, this is a good forcing function to begin India's shift to electric trucks.
And freight and passenger rail is already around 98-99% electrified in India [5] which reduces the need for diesel.
> eg. I've had my parents say the "taste" of food is worse on electric instead of gas stovetops
If you are using the cooking technique of "bhunai" [1], which is quite common in South Asian cooking, there is a large difference in food quality you can make with an electric and with a gas stove. Gas stoves are able to provide higher heat at consistent levels, and you can tilt the pot to concentrate heat in one corner to intensify the cooking. So I don't disagree with your parents.
[1] bhunai is when you cook meat with spices at very high heat while rapidly stirring it. I think the willingness to burn the spices during this process is what sets this apart from similar techniques in other cuisines, but I am no expert.
My mom doesn't cook bhunai - she's pushed for a low oil household since I was a kid and is extremely health conscious verging on "crunchy".
I've also done bhunai with electric stovetops and ceramic cookware like Dutch ovens and green pans and gotten close enough to an authentic taste - the marginal differences that exist are due to differences in ingredients in the US (eg. lower milkfat percentages, onions instead of shallots, different cultivars of vegetables, etc) and some inexperience of non-Westerners with Western cookware.
It's a very solvable problem. For example, the Indian restaurants my parents like and feel taste "authentic" use electric stovetops as well in the back, but discriminate on ingredients and masalas.
Yeah, my induction range will get a carbon steel wok really fucking hot really fucking quick.
Like, I can't really stir-fry on max because my range hood can't keep up and I set the smoke detector off. Outside of crappy rentals, I'm pretty sure electric ranges here are up to whatever, high-heat cooking wise.
Yep! My SO's Vietnamese and we've both been able to cook pretty decent Viet and Korean (Hallyu wave is a thing) food with electric stoves despite her being used to LNG and charcoal in VN.
The marginal difference in taste is literally just due to certain cultivars not being available here. Ofc, a half decent Vietnamese sourced nuoc mam solves everything but those are available at our Costco.
>"the "taste" of food is worse on electric instead of gas stovetops"
it highly depends on what and how is being cooked. Foods that rely on particular dynamics of cooking temperature profile often can not be made the same quality / taste. Regular electric range is absolutely not capable of driving Wok properly for example.
There's currently a gas crisis in India. A country that had a $10 billion investment in an Iranian port to trade oil and gas directly with them, except they decided to become America's bitch and halted the project after American sanctions.
Anyways, everyone's affected - gas cylinder booking requests which usually take a couple of days to fulfill currently have a 30 day period to fulfill in some major cities. Roadside vendors are shutting down temporarily, as are many restaurants.
At least EVs have had a good success rate in adoption, so commuting isn't as much affected. But freight is pretty much fucked.
Again, this is a country that could have gotten a sweetheart deal from Iran, just like China, but apparently decided to become a little bitch.
The benefits of living in an authoritarian state. The CCP says "we will provide for cheap electric trucks" and it happens, no matter if that displaces tens, if not hundreds of thousands of workers in ICE car manufacturers.
Poverty doesn’t have the luxury to choose or take moral stands. When a dollar worth oil price fluctuation can lead to thousands going hungry for a day, you as a leader will do everything to avoid catastrophic sanctions.
India agreed to capitulate on the Iranian port investments before the US-Israeli invasion, when Trump was playing the tariff games. If a growing economy can be subverted and forced to act against its interests, is it really a superpower at that point?
Guess the US Deputy Secretary was right when he stated that they'll never make the same mistakes with India that they made with China.
> Again, this is a country that could have gotten a sweetheart deal from Iran
India has a deal with Iran as well and the first ship to sail via Hormuz after the conflict started (the Shenlong Suezmax) ended up in India [0]
India giving sanctuary to an Iranian naval ship and offering sanctuary to a second one - which their captain rejected and is now at the bottom of the Indian Ocean (IRIS Dena) [1] - bought India the goodwill needed to implement the deal mentioned above.
Edit: can't reply
> We could have an entire Indian-owned port, outside the straits in question, with an attached O&G pipeline that we paid for, connected directly to the oil and gas fields in Iran
Duqm Port in Oman, Sohar Port in Oman, Fujairah Port in the UAE, and Shahid Beheshti Port in Chabahar, Iran are all either Indian operated or include an Indian financial stake with first right of refusal for Oil and LNG exports and outside the Straits of Hormuz.
> Yay, we got one ship to cross the straits
Did you even read the Bloomberg article? There were only 20 Indian LNG ships within the strait of Hormuz at this time, and they are being given passage. These aren't overnight tankers (that isn't even a thing at this size). The war only started a week ago and it's a Suez Supermax at that - they won't go beyond 15 mph/19 knots.
> the rare earth minerals in Afghanistan that we had received sanction to mine prior to the war, that would also have been shipped through this port
India still has access to Shahid Beheshti Port, and it's not like India has even completely taken advantage of the existing critical minerals within India, let alone hypothetical and high risk critical minerals projects in Afghanistan - a country literally in the middle of a war with Pakistan.
We could have an entire Indian-owned port, outside the straits in question, with an attached O&G pipeline that we paid for, connected directly to the oil and gas fields in Iran. Not to mention all the rare earth minerals in Afghanistan that we had received sanction to mine prior to the war, that would also have been shipped through this port.
The cognitive dissonance in nationalist Indians is honestly tiresome and unsurprising at this moment.
Same for exports as well depending on the country.
For example, India worked with Oman, the UAE, and Iran to build export hubs like Duqm, Fujairah, Sohar, and Chabahar (the US has ignored Indian operated Shahid Beheshti port and is hitting Konarak on the other side of the Chabahar Bay) that aren't blocked by Hormuz.
By making sure Indian SOEs were equity partners in those projects, this meant India got first right of refusal on exports.
China, Japan, and South Korea all implemented similar projects as well.
Other Asian countries could have implemented similar redundancies as well, but they didn't despite this exact situation happening 3-4 years ago during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.
I’m living in one of these countries. Abject failure from powers that be to even consider 4-day workweek as an alleviation. Not the first time it happens yet they learn nothing.
Tbf, from what I've heard within my professional network and extended family, most bureaucrats who are not associated with BCA are functionally paralyzed right now because of the political changes going on - no one wants to put their name on some initiative that falls under the anti-corruption radar.
This paralysis has been going on for 2-3 years now and I know of an EV battery FDI project that shifted to Indonesia as a result of this paralysis. Even VinGroup and VinGroup tier companies aren't immune.
It's a common pattern in HN headlines to assign agency to non-US continents and countries. We hear Europe and China doing stuff all the time as well. It's strange.
Isn't that a good deal more reasonable though? China, as a polity, does indeed have agency. It's strange to suggest they don't, as if only America can do things on the world stage.
Sure, the usages aren't all flawed. But it's far more likely to see "Europe" doing something than "US" doing something in the headlines in similar cases, I feel.
Same goes for China, if a couple of companies do something, often in the headline it's just the general "China" doing it. For example we'll see China doing something with EVs whereas for the US we'd see Tesla doing something with EVs.
If someone attributed something to Europe but the only a handful of nations, which didn’t even include the largest ones, were engaging in the behavior, it would also be incorrect.
“Parts of Europe” or “Europe increasingly” etc would be ok (the latter if there was an expected progression of these policies to other European nations).
Europe usually is (inaccurately) used to mean the EU. Even if not, it never seems to include the biggest European country by land area and population (even if you count just the European part of it).
And Korea. And Japan. And Bangladesh. At least according to the article. Sure it would be more precise if they said "some countries in South, South East, and East Asia".
There's no reason for Italy and Iran/Iraq to be pronounced similarly. (Cf Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Idaho?)
But FWIW, the EYE-rack thing is because GWB (most prominently, but others before and after) intentionally mispronounced the name of the country, in a "real american" kind of way, and also to annoy SAD-dumb Hussein as a kind of "we're stupid but we're going to kill you anyway" kind of psyop. Or maybe just "we disrespect you in advance of killing you"?
Americans of other political persuasions usually pronounce the names correctly.
I've lived in over a dozen states and I've never heard either called anything other than EYE-(ran/raq) in conversation.
The extremely, I mean extremely rare occasion when someone pronounces it differently on TV, it's almost like they get side-eyed by other people as trying to "talk fancy".
Well, I've lived in four states in the last 20 years.
Anecdotally, the pronunciation popularity has split neatly along statewide-prominent political lines. For my four example states, three were correct/respectful, and one wrong/disrespectful.
Correct pronunciation has also had an inverse correlation with the rates of active/former military employment, which might be more directly indicative. And a positive correlation with education levels. So the answer is in there somewhere, I suspect.
National TV "news" programming might have a style guide which dictates pandering to the audience by speaking in real american, no matter how well-educated the hosts might be.
I've been thinking about this a bit more and I think we're actually talking about two (or more) different pronunciations.
There is a VERY hard "I" that Lindsey Graham does. I think that's the specific version you're talking about, and that one is intentionally offputting. It's like "EYEEE RACK", but that does sound different from "AYERAK" or "EYEROQ".
Yes, I think you're right. The middle ground, which I'll phoneticize as "uh-RON" or even "uh-RAN" is what I hear in most places.
The effete "ih-RAHN" is the voice that you mentioned might get side-eyes. This is the closest to how Iranians that I know pronounce it, except that we don't have a phoneme quite like their R, which to my ears sounds like a D, L, and R all smashed together.
But these side-eyes are mostly fair, I think. It's like Americans prounouncing France as "Frawhce", or Paris as "Pahdee". Ostentatious and pretentious, for an English-speaker.
And Lindsey's provocative "EYE-ran" is very present in some locations, I think because GHWB and GWB's affected pronunciations were pounded into the American consciousness during Gulf Wars 1 and 2. Although Reagan did it too, IIRC, and I'm not sure about Clinton.
I didn't think of it in time to update my previous comment, so I'll add another!
Decades ago, I knew people who pronounced "Italian" as eye-TAL-yun. They were usually older, sometimes WW2 veterans. This was in an area of the US that has a large Italian immigrant population, FWIW.
I don't know if it was due to historical disrespect of Mussolini-era Italy, some contemporary xenophobia, or just simple ignorance.
They all pronounced "Italy" in the normal way though.
I agree that ignorance is the most likely explanation.
But it's not like these folks didn't grow up with "Italy" and "Italian" being on the radio/TV all the time, spoken correctly by newscasters.
So there's a disconnect there, and it's also undeniable that there was an anti-Italian sentiment in the then-previous waves of naturalized immigrants. So I can't say for sure.
Calling Eurasia a continent would make more sense. "Asia" doesn't have a really sensical physical boundary. May as well say Mexico is a different continent from the US just because there's a big cultural and ethnic difference across the border.
The term "North America" almost always means US or US and Canada, hardly ever the technically correct "US, Canada, Mexico" except in things like NAFTA.
And "Central America" often means "Mexico and countries south that speak Spanish" even though LATAM might be a bit closer.
Other nonsensical terminology also existing would imply nothing about the usage of "Asia". That said, I'm not sure I see the same incorrect usage of North America as you do, either.
Sensible boundaries for dividing continents? Do the Rocky Mountains count as dividing North America into east and west subcontinents? Does the Baltic Sea partition the Nordic countries into their own continent? Are you really expecting that logic to work even a little bit?
> Do the Rocky Mountains count as dividing North America into east and west subcontinents?
The east part would be a bit small, but after a bit more seismic activity that may be sensible.
> Does the Baltic Sea partition the Nordic countries into their own continent?
Could be a subcontinent border yeah, it is a common division in Europe.
> Are you really expecting that logic to work even a little bit?
Yeah, there are multiple aspects of continents and topology is one part. Others are cultural and political and I think there the division is even more clear.
It's all Asia. Europe is in Asia. Europeans are West Asian. The traditional boundary of the Ural Mountains is a fabricated one. There is no reason to separate Europe out of Asia except for that "people that look like that go over there."
The traditional boundaries of Asia were Bosporus and Nile. Europe, Asia, and Africa were names given to the lands surrounding the Mediterranean. Because sea enabled travel, while land was difficult to cross, the extension of those names to lands beyond the Mediterranean world was of little consequence.
Not really. there is no entirely accepted definition of a continent. If you want to refer to them as one continent the term is Eurasia.
> There is no reason to separate Europe out of Asia except for that "people that look like that go over there."
People that look like what? A lot of west and central Asians look far more like Europeans than like South Indian or Chinese people, and the latter resemble two do not resemble each other at all.
You cannot put it down to racism dividing white vs non-white because that is very recent. It predates the invention/introduction of racism to Europe. Even better, until well into the 20th century (literally millennia after people separated Europe from Asia) South Asians and some North Africans were regarded as belonging to the same race as Europeans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race
It's a somewhat vaguely defined region. It often excludes India and the Middle East. It always excludes Europe, despite there being no sensible reason to consider them to be two separate continents.
Consider this sentence from the article: "Asia is particularly dependent on oil exports from the Middle East." That's a bizarre statement if you take "Asia" literally. The Middle East is in Asia. Is Saudi Arabia dependent on oil exports from the Middle East? Is Iran?
Yes though Europe is a lot more culturally similar and has a shared government for the most part.
Asia has very distinct countries and in some cases is even at war even if it's a cold one. Like India vs Pakistan, India vs China, North vs South Korea, China vs Taiwan. And customs, languages and (where applicable) religions are more radically different than within Europe too.
It makes less sense calling it "Asia" than it is calling Europe "Europe" :)
At least in the case of "europe" it could refer to the EU (which obviously is not correct because it doesn't encompass all of europe). But when they are talking about "Asia"—what governing body would they even be referring to? It's obviously non-sensical.
> in the case of "europe" it could refer to the EU (which obviously is not correct because it doesn't encompass all of europe)
Not just that. If we get really pedantic, the EU is not only in Europe but includes territories in Africa (parts of Spain) and Asia (the entirety of Cyprus). And that's not even getting into the intercontinental shenanigans of France!
Terrible headline. “Asia” isn’t a thing apart from a region on a map. These are separate countries doing their own thing.
Equally annoying is when folks say “Asian” as an ethnicity. That’s glossing over a whole bunch of different countries that have relatively little to do with each other apart from being in the same general area on the planet.
The office serves only one purpose: to keep people in the city. The city exists to house the masses who own nothing, who live in rented accommodation, use public transport, buy useless fast tech as status symbols to show off, fast fashion for the same reason, and order takeaway food with all the massive waste of packaging etc. etc. etc.
It serves no other purpose and, in particular, it isn't sustainable in terms of scale/natural resources.
Whether you like it or not, technology defines the era: when we moved from bronze to iron, those still using bronze were slaughtered by those who had iron. Today, technology dictates Distributism because, like it or not, the "new deal" works through things like domestic p.v. with small-scale storage, an EV integrated in the garage, not skyscrapers and massive solar power plants. Digital tools work well when you HAVE to use them, so you're forced to do it properly or you fail; in other words, by working remotely. In person, steps are "skipped" leaving information gaps and creating inefficiency, and so on and so forth.
Makes sense for short term damage control. However, I think in the medium and long term you end up having productivity hits from such measures.
I know its unpopular to say, but when I have my 2 programmers in office, we get sooo much more done than at home. Someone gets stuck and we don't message/call, we just talk.
Although, if you want to justify WFH, introverted-like people do not get the same level of benefit as extroverted-like people in this situation. The extroverted people will just start talking. The introverted people need to be asked.
I'd like to think that you see "my 2 programmers" as "my team" but I've come to expect phrasing like "when we have our 2 programmers in office". That perspective emphasizes that we're all in this together, rather than serfs working for the benefit of the lord.
The "my programmers" phrasing plays into my prejudice that one reason you like having "your programmers" in office is the exhilaration you feel in seeing them at your beck and call.
> I know its unpopular to say, but when I have my 2 programmers in office, we get sooo much more done than at home. Someone gets stuck and we don't message/call, we just talk.
The technology exists to "just talk" in high-definition audio and video. If somebody isn't asking for help when they're stuck that's a people problem, not a remote work problem. There are several possible reasons for their avoidance; if multiple people are exhibiting the same behavior it could be cultural (specific to your workplace, not the person's upbringing). Using physical presence to force their hand is curing the symptom, not the underlying cause.
> develop new technology, research culture solutions.
The technology and culture solutions have existed and been evolving for 20 years. It really sounds like your experience with remote work is not representative.
Almost 100% of companies are stupid and make bad, bad software that their customer's begrudgingly put up with, so I'm not surprised.
Seriously, how much software have you used that was genuinely good? For me, almost none. All the software I use, I tolerate.
Look, companies are made up of people and have all the downsides of humanity. That means the people making the decisions are egotistical, emotionally-driven, irrational, and a bit narcissistic. They still do okay enough, and that's all they need to achieve.
If you want my perspective, I think WFH ended just because executives did not like it. That's it. They didn't like how much autonomy it gave their workers, it didn't feel fair to them, so they said no, because they can. All the other analysis is mostly bullshit.
I mean, Jesus Christ, do you think my company makes just about any decisions because of data or economics? No! That's not to say they don't have data behind it. Of course they do, it's just very obviously bullshit. Everyone knows what's going on. People want things done a certain way, so they do that and then just make up a justification later to tell their dumbass investors who couldn't tell a hole in the ground from their asshole. Nobody has the balls or humility to say "look, I just want it this way". So, everyone has to lie and make up numbers and reasoning.
you can just send "hey you got 5 mins"? you have to do that in person. you do that on chat. nothing different. this is a made up reason. I do this all day, everyday
You're getting a lot of replies from other ICs that do well in a WFH setting, but I can say from a manager perspective, it's not always the manager or process. I've been managing remote teams for years since before covid and some people just don't do well without the in-person structure.
It's possible to build a high performing remote team, but it's not easy.
> some people just don't do well without the in-person structure
Structure is what makes remote work well. IME places that rely on everyone being together in-person to make sure things get done have poorly-defined structure.
You could reduce your labor costs and reduce the aggravation you are causing teammates if you changed your attitude.
It's possible to drive results and create a culture of accountability without dragging people into the room with you just so you can interrupt their work in-person.
Considering it’s very easy to send a how’s it going Slack message or whatever this seems more like a issue of keeping the conversation on task than a slack issue
Sounds like you don't have a lot of remote work experience.
The majority of my career (years before the pandemic) has been remote work. I find in office work painfully slow. I pair program quite often remote, and when someone gets stuck we also "just talk". Honestly I prefer screen sharing to leaning over someone's shoulder (much easier to doing supporting work in parallel).
I find it really depends on the type of org though. Large corporate places do tend to suffer from remote work because so much of the work is performative anyway. Remote small companies and startups the velocity is very high, but you do need more senior people capable of independent work.
Especially when you factor in the easy of "after hours" work, the amount of emergency stuff I've shipped around midnight is incomparable to the 'in office' equivalent.
Though I suspect the key word here is "my 2 programmers", I find managers don't feel like their doing work unless they're physically watching it get done.
Not understanding how to run a remote team is not the same as remote teams not being effective in principle.
Why take weekends off? Why take nights off? There are probably teams in some basement in china out working you right now. Don't you want a worker that can commit fully to your product? Have you measured hit to output from producing and rearing offspring? Those are jobs for the broodmares not engineers! Specialize specialize specialize!
> if you want to justify WFH, introverted-like people do not get the same level of benefit as extroverted-like people in this situation
I'm introverted and did just fine in an office, because the company culture was that coworkers all talked to each other about how they preferred to work (preferably no more often than once a quarter) and then respected that. When we moved to WFH during lockdown, that practice continued.
I've also WFH at remote-first companies that did not practice, encourage, or enforce ICs communicating to find and document better ways to work together, and have not been served remotely as well by the result.
But I also am a bit reluctant to hire introverts for this specific (entry level) job. They will not ask for help to their and my detriment.
Being a bit casual and not making grand claims: I should hire Senior introverts and have them WFH. I should hire entry level extroverts and have them in person.
so you are accepting that you discriminate and acknowledging the in office unfavorably favors extroverts which is what everyone in this thread has been saying.
But would you be more productive in person? I am just describing my experience. In a 4 hour block, people will ask a dozen questions in-person. WFH, I'm lucky to get a single phone call despite begging them to call to ask questions.
I entered the workforce during covid, underwent a return to office mandate only to get a new job that is fully WFH.
I am easily twice as productive in my own hive than I am in the office. The office is full of distractions, noise, it is not as ergonomic as my setup at home and i get to waste 90min a day commuting.
In some very specific instances i see value in going to the office, productivity during everyday work is not among them
I know what you mean. I'm not sure why my office doesnt have distractions. We take breaks, but its not like when I was at a fortune 20 company where I'd spend an hour drinking coffee and catching up with people in other departments.
If I had to guess, we are such a small office that its obvious if someone is distracted and I can nudge them back to work.
Saying all of this outloud, you are making me realize I have the office style of a panopticon. At least my workers seem to genuinely like working.
I've long said that WFH is an easy win climate change solution that costs nothing, is well loved by everyone who participates (except management). Turns out in times like this, it's also an energy security measure.
I'm introverted but very glad I have the option of working from the office and being among fellow staff, we also have a lunchtime exercise club once a week. It's much better for my mental health.
In fact, I've added two days working outside of home instead of one because of the benefits. I think 3 days home/2 days office is the sweet spot.
We've been slowly creeping back toward being fully RTO, and my mental health has been in what I can only describe as "steep decline". I don't know if I pin it all on RTO, but it sure isn't helping the situation. I love my job, but hate the in-office requirements - I'm a systems admin.
Sorry to hear that. Being a sysadmin, I guess you're mainly interacting with systems rather than people and need to focus. They should exempt you from RTO except for the odd "all hands" meeting days.
I'm a software engineer in a Product Engineering team and it's about 75% hands-on engineering, 25% Slack/Teams interaction and alignments between people. I find being in the office helps to make connections with other staff in other teams (eg. bumping into people while making coffee in staff kitchen etc). I think thats important from a career perspective.
Vote with your feet.
https://hiring.cafe
(no affiliation)
The keywords that you are not saying are "is a sweet spot FOR YOU"
If it is a sweet spot for you fine, I am happy you found it. But DO NOT FORCE all of US who have different sweet spots to meet you at yours.
I don't think GP was forcing anyone to do anything.
Thanks pal, I was not forcing anyone... but I guess my wording made it sound "this applies to everyone!".
I put my comment out there to trigger just this kind of discussion.
Says that guys that FORCED all of America into car dependency
So you hate waffles?
The hubris of our generation damning our species into a global warming catastrophe just because we want to stand around the water cooler and have lunchtime exercise club for these last few decades at our apogee.
Zero days in office is the sweet spot. Get rid of all physical infrastructure. Its mind boggling that we are building a completely unnecessary second space for work and then build transportation infrastructure to move between two spaces all, compel people to drive back and forth, deal with traffic congestion and waste 2 hours/day, buy cars, pay for insurance, deal with accidents, use up precious mind space in driving through horrible traffic. If people have mental health issues, it doesn't mean that we need to build a second space for them. There are other ways to deal with mental health issues.
True, and then think of all the real estate that gets opened up for third spaces
Having the option of working from the office is a good thing. It's only being unnecessarily forced to do so that's bad.
My sweet spot is the same. I like being at the office (because I like my colleagues), but with almost an hour commute each way, going every day is very draining. I'm glad my employer is giving us pretty much total flexibility.
While this is true and many people echo this, I also think this is partially caused by an over-reliance on work.
Ideally, we should not be put in a situation where we have to get necessary social health through our jobs. It should be through our hobbies, our passions, our friends, and our family. The people and things we choose to spend time with.
I'm not judging you either, because this is also the case for me. But, I think, if I was WFH, I would have a lot more free time. I could dedicate that to social interactions. Most people don't, but they could.
Even 3 days in office, 2 days home feels significantly better because that's the point at which one is spending less days out of the week in the office
I get that, and a lot of people like to be social with other people. But just because 10% (made up number) like it, there's no reason to force it on the rest of the workforce (not that you are).
I encourage people who are remote but want human contact to rent a desk once a week at a co-working space.
For me personally, I want to do my work as efficiently as possible, in as little time as possible, and then have my social time, which has very little in common with my work and/or colleagues.
I might be an exception, but I get up very, very early and work almost right away, and I don't want to be on a roll and then have to pack up, get in the car at a terrible traffic time where (some) people are driving like animals, hunt for parking and then find a desk. That's a huge _tax_ on my productivity.
But I don't expect or demand that the rest of the world do this.
As a side comment, I would agree with you though, that 2 in the office is better than one. But I also had a very effective pattern around 10 years ago, where I spent 2 days in the office per month, and that worked really well for me (though those days were far, far less productive than my at home work days).
Now, if the world adopted a 32 hour, 4-day work week I would probably be ok with the office 1 day a week.
What's your commute like? There are many aspects to the RTO vs. WFH debate, but having to waste away 1-3 hours a day on the road, coupled with the energy use in the OP, really cancels out the mental health aspects of being in office. It even detracts from the amount of work done.
The London office commute is 30 minutes train and 25 minutes walk. I really like that balance as it gives me sunlight, exercise and fresh air.
I work from a library on the other day, thats a 30 minute drive. I tend to leave before 0700 when the roads are peaceful. My car is pretty fuel efficient, i try to hypermile it and get ~50mpg.
Imagine how much more sunshine you could enjoy working in the evening and enjoying the outdoors during the day - good thing they've got the exercise club.
I know it's a meme on HN to say everyone likes WFH, but I (and many but not ICs around me) thrive more in person.
I am 100% more effective in person where I can dev and my desk and bounce ideas off if team mates around me verbally. This can be recreated in a remote environment by having things like a team Discord that folks sit on, but it can feel forced at times (just like communiting to the office I suppose).
My take might be heavily skewed though. I am in games and our environment is highly collaborative.
> where I can dev and my desk and bounce ideas off if team mates around me verbally.
Can't you fucking do your homework beforehand, think your idea thoroughly, and then have at least a small written paragraphs about it before interrupting your colleagues.
Really, I am not a co-processor in a bus for you to dispatch a job to me and raise an interrupt line whenever the fuck you fancy doing it.
> Can't you fucking do your homework beforehand, think your idea thoroughly, and then have at least a small written paragraphs about it before interrupting your colleagues.
They never said they didn't.
> Really, I am not a co-processor in a bus for you to dispatch a job to me and raise an interrupt line whenever the fuck you fancy doing it.
I am! I'm perfectly capable of managing my own time and shoeing others away if needed. Please bother me! That's why I have a cell phone and a salary.
Almost certainly relevant: I work in manufacturing.
>at least a small written paragraphs about it before interrupting your colleagues.
Game design is messy and some things can only really be talked through.
Also, nothing here implies that GP doesn't think through their thoughts before bouncing off ideas.
Damn. Glad I don’t work with anyone like you
>"I know it's a meme on HN to say everyone likes WFH"
I work from home for the last 25 years (I am an independent vendor, design and develop business critical products for medium size businesses). I have no desire to socialize with employees of my clients and when I am in a mood I have real fiends to spend time with.
Can't imagine wasting my time in corporate cubicles or open concept offices
I'm in games as well. I'm pretty mixed on it. For my experience
- first job, fully onsite. More traditional cubicle space
- second job, on-site until COVID came around. Literally a WeWork building as a sattellite office to HQ in San Fransico.
- third job, "0-100%" on site. There was an office and I could come into it never or all the time. More of an open office setup.
I will say it's nice to not need to spend 5 days commuting, and I really don't think we need to do that much collaboration to be productive. If you're local, I think a suggestion of 2-3 days in office would do wonders, reserved for "brainstorming" days or cross team syncs. for job 3, that was pretty much my schedule; typically come in TWTh, unless I was feeling sick (this was still the tail end of COVID).
But some camaraderie was nice. The games scene was really friendly for the most part (in my experience. I have heard second hand stories and don't want to discount those). There were community events, tribal wisdom you'd hear over water-cooler talk, impromptu group lunches, and seasonal parties. It was nice, being around other passionate people who had similar interests to you. I definitely miss that most.
Productivity-wise, I'm not sure I noticed much difference. I had enough space to setup a dedicated office room, so that's definitely one privilege I had. But I had on-off days in office and remote. Maybe my most productive days were in office, but that was usually over guidance from a lead.
I don't think everyone needs to be on-site per se. But I do see some situations where on-site is beneficial to have, at least in partial capacity.
1. Juniors definitely need some on-site guidance (and by that extension, leads need to be available those days). I really cannot imagine those early mentoring being as effective over a screen. There's so much "body language" style of knowledge gained that doesn't come up in zoom meetings (and while proposed, I really hate the idea of an "always on" chat-room)
2. brainstorming, architecturing , and conceptualizing felt much better in person. So some periods may need more in-office time than others where it's focused on development (which feels to have minimal impact, given the nature of "head down" work).
3. Office space might be a consideration depending on your living space. If you are in a small apartment with little desk space, I can see that having a huge impact to productivity.
I hate WFH, personally. My company is actually closing the office I work out of due to lack of use, so I'm in the opposite scenario from "forced-RTO", I'm being moved to "forced-WFH." It's the right call objectively, the office is genuinely very empty, but I'm a bit annoyed about it. I'm actually going to be paying to rent a desk out of a coworking facility so I don't have to WFH. If this situation sucks, there's a real chance I'll be changing jobs later this year because of this.
I pretty much dislike WFH and for many of the reasons you mention and more, so took a local in-office job last year after being at home since COVID. I was excited to return to a more social environment until I found that "the office" itself was itself entirely problematic. Cheapass flatpack desks all rammed in together. No noise or sound proofing, giant sweatshop room. Sub-par monitors and equipment generally. Grumpy coworkers complaining constantly about the very conversations (both on-topic and off-topic/non-work) that I came in to have a chance to experience again.
And half the staff was just WFH anyways, or remote, so the collaboration opportunities... diminished.
I even saw this happening at Google before I left there, which had formerly been a ... luxury office. Packing people in like sardines, forcing people to "reserve" desks. Bad parking and/or transit situations.
I get it when employers face financial or real estate crunches. But in the last 10-15 years (I've been working for 30) -- even pre-COVID -- I feel like some switch went off in tech industry leadership brains that is just outright disrespectful. Paying high salaries to engineers and then providing them with uncomfortable accommodations. Makes little sense to me.
I'm back to WFH and the isolation that comes with it. In part because the office environment was actually not what I was hoping for. Because the industry ruined it.
> No noise or sound proofing, giant sweatshop room
My kingdom for an office with a ceiling, lmao. The exposed ductwork cheap-ass offices are so awful.
As an old guy who used to make fun of them for their sterility when I was young...
I'd just like cubicles back.
If you genuinely "thrive" more in person then go live next to your office. No point sitting in a 30-60 minute commute. America/UK took the brunt of the cost transitioning towards knowledge work, but kept the costs of manufacturing (shipping people around). Even if it's slightly more productive, the cost is externalized on the workers making them poorer and sickly.
>Oh no you don't understand I need a compress decompress cycle I TRIVE when I burn as much gas as possible
Sadly, your job (especially in the games industry) is a lot more mobile that your living dwellings. I had a housing situation and took the commute over trying to move.
It's bad for the EcOnOmY, less wear and tear in cars, less jobs for mechanics, less gas consumed, less lunch bought in fast food chain, &c.
The entire system is designed around making the numbers go up, not down
In the end cars are just a means to an end. People want to minimize their transportation spending.
People bought bigger houses or renovated. They upgraded their PCs and were more likely to subscribe to broadband and less likely to cancel. Empty office buildings are ever so slowly being converted to housing. Professional clothing purchases dipped and then rebounded.
Yep. The broken window fallacy and the tragedy of the commons*, darkening the future of basically every vertebrate on the planet.
* A solved problem, btw.
and if you're talking to somebody who doesn't care about climate change just substitute "climate change" with "traffic"
In my experience, everybody cares about climate change. A lot of people just don't like the idea of caring about climate change.
But ya, probably best to just call it "traffic" then, and they might be more receptive.
Yeah, I've always seen it as a hot potato issue. I think a lot of people who don't play ball on dealing with climate change aren't deniers, they just want the next guy to have to do the work. It's very, very hard to sell to anyone, "this is going to be incredibly costly and painful for you and you won't enjoy any of the benefits. Your grandkids might."
I think we saw during covid that we most certainly can see the benefits in our lifetime if we took it more seriously.
Agreed. I care enough about it to sell my car, stop buying stuff I don't need, give up most meat, and live in a small energy efficient house.
However I do know people who really do not care. They may say they care but their actions and voting record show that in fact they don't care (or don't want to make it a real priority). But those same people get very upset when they're stuck in traffic
Absolutely not. There are tens of millions of Americans who have jumped full speed onto the "It's not even happening" train, let alone the "It's actually a good thing because plants" or "It's not our fault" or "We can't fix it so we shouldn't try" or "It's too expensive to fix and I can't do long term math" trains.
And this is a massive reversion too. In the mid 2000s republicans were openly advocating that we needed to do something about climate change and that it was a serious problem and then we opened the cash floodgates to American federal politics and would you look at that, oil companies have a lot of cash.
Keep in mind that the real cost of transitioning is very likely to be less than what we spent on the stupid oil wars of the 2000s. We can literally afford it now, let alone if we hadn't burned all that cash bombing the desert because of oil politics.
Oil companies themselves are fine to be "Energy" companies and invest in Solar and other renewables. They will be profitable just fine. Our country is tearing itself apart over a lie to ensure they remain more profitable.
In 2008 McCain openly talked about greenhouse gas cap and trade. I think the driving force behind it was fear of peak oil. Secure your energy supply. With fracking supply concerns went away.
In the mid-2000s there might've been individual Republicans concerned about climate change, but it was the Bush administration who opposed the Kyoto Protocol and pushed for adaptation to climate change on the basis of protecting the economy.
WFH was great to begin with, but as somebody living alone, the isolation starts to have an effect after a while when you're 'working alone' too
And for many people WFH has other problems - if you're a dual-WFH couple in a small home, lack of home office space is a very real problem. (Although if WFH was a permanent thing, many people could choose less expensive places to live, and have more space)
Still, anything to eliminate a miserable and environmentally wasteful commute.
> And for many people WFH has other problems - if you're a dual-WFH couple in a small home, lack of home office space is a very real problem. (Although if WFH was a permanent thing, many people could choose less expensive places to live, and have more space)
Sure I get meetings you need to go to separate rooms, but how is the rest is different from a regular open office? Oh no, my co-working space has the person I like to spend time with?
Meetings aren't infrequent for many jobs. As well, small homes may not have the desired desk space for multiple full-time offices.
Sounds like whoever is scheduling meetings need to adapt to a new asynchronous environment whereas many meetings isn't necessary.
I'm not saying everyone must be WFH or that everyone must have a home office. I'm just having hard time imagining how two people cannot WFH in a 1-bedroom apartment. Unless both of them work in a call center.
> Sounds like whoever is scheduling meetings need to adapt to a new asynchronous environment whereas many meetings isn't necessary.
I agree, and a lot of my 'participation' in these meetings these days is read the papers, write my opinion, attach it to the documents and tell people I'm not attending.
That said we're 5 years in to this thing and people haven't adapted.
I would love to have a coworking-space-on-every-block (or in every building) where all the WFHers can go to be around other people (just not the coworkers)
Everyone is paying for wework to do what their branch library can probably do for them.
Only issue is that my libraries close 5pm on weekends and 7pm on weekdays. Nothing for night owls.
If there would be enough demand to pay for it, it would stay open longer.
Libraries aren't paid for that demand though
The libraries in my city get paid by membership. That's not exactly visits, but a correlated proxy.
Also if it would become really crowded they would probably think of prolonging opening hours.
They could be!
Here's a line from my local library's site:
> Our auditoriums are provided as a public service for use by individuals, institutions, groups, organizations, and corporations for a small fee, when not being used for library-affiliated or sponsored activities.
Yeah, I was spoiled by my college town. Libraries open until 2AM, a 24 hour space for students. Even a few cafes downtown open 24 hours a day. Suburb life is mostly fine, but that's one thing I miss most.
Gotta travel 20 miles to downtown for anything resembling night life.
And maybe we can pool them a bit by profession, because they often need the same tools and can help each other. Any maybe they can even work on some of the same projects, so we can remove meetings.
I don't see how that's necessary at all. All the arguments that WFH might be a good idea in the first place would still hold.
A place where We all work. Call it a WeWork maybe.
I agree, 2 days a week in office is optimal. If they could coordinate which days to reduce traffic then... holy cow dream world.
> is well loved by everyone who participates (except management)
Most of management hates it too. I manage a team where everyone is remote, yet I have to go to the office few days a week to sit on zoom, why? And up a level, my manager has an even longer commute and probably hates it more than I do.
This stuff is pushed down by HR, most of management hates it.
We may never know which sector of the economy you are in to believe WFH is a good idea unless you explicitly state it but given this is HN, I'm just going to make a lazy assumption for software dev or engineering. WFH sounds great in theory only if _everyone_ participates in it but is hardly the case in reality.
For example: If you can sustainably and reliably source your daily necessities like having the ability to cook or maintain a decent home environment that support it, kudos. Thought the covid lockdowns showed us how fragile that system can be especially for those _essential people_ to be physically around to feed you or keep your shit running.
As a side note: how do you feel about being snookered by your local government's policy under the pretext that _essential work_ just gives your employers the ability to maintain the same minimum wage labor cycle just so you can feel giddy about how good this idea is?
> costs nothing
1. for other businesses and jobs though, people staying at home costs a lot. one can call it a polarizing option.
2. these kind of jobs are likely prime candidates for AI already.
Don't forget about holders of commercial real estate debt and the owners of commercial real estate and restaurants who depend on foot traffic!
Except driving in the U.S. following the pandemic was significantly higher than driving before the pandemic even though WFH was much higher.
This claim might be true but it’s simply not showing up in the data which suggests that even if true, the effect is probably minor.
but then again, vehicle miles travelled per-capita has been mostly increasing in the US since as far back as 1975. There could be a lot of confounding factors. Like astronomical housing prices in urban areas forcing people live very far away and incur more VMT at a faster rate than WFH decreases VMT. I'm no expert here, I'm just spitballing.
WFH doesn't actually stop driving. They don't commute, but they do run errands and other stuff during the day. This can actually result in more traffic during high peak periods since it can cause congestion build up to start earlier
Because people didn't go back to taking transit
I think the bigger point was that pandemic traffic immediately showed effects. Smog cleared up in Los Angeles in less than a month.
But no, it won't ever be that level without major infrastructure change. Not all jobs can be wfh. We can get close by a major public transportation overhaul, but that will take decades (even without the inevitable pushback).
> is well loved by everyone who participates (except management).
So? The only people who matter are shareholders and their proxies (management). To everyone else: you don't matter as much as you think you do, quit being selfish and be happy you get anything at all. The world doesn't revolve around you.
Being against WFH because 'think of the shareholders' is certainly a take.
The world might not revolve around me, but thankfully, I do get a vote in who I chose to work for, and I chose an employer that lets me work remote.
I sure don't nowadays. My industry is in free fall.
> is well loved by everyone who participates
You don't speak for me :)
I hate it.
Wfh is debatable, but what's not to love about 4 day work weeks? 8t gives you even more time to work on your own stuff if you still want to work.
I was only replying to the part about WFH. Four day weeks would be great.
I love WFH but how is it a win climate change solution for anyone outside of the USA? If my office building WFH, instead of heating a building we need to heat 500 people homes all day. And most of the people commute by public transport.
Vast majority of people are not touching their thermostat much at all when going to the office.
But these are stupid made up arguments. WFH or not both the homes with no one in them and the offices with no tenants are getting heated still to keep the pipes from bursting.
>stupid made up arguments
All arguments are made up.
>getting heated still to keep the pipes from bursting
If I work from home my home must be kept at 19°. If I go to the office, my house can go down to 14-16° no problem.
So 500 people leave for office and turn off the heating at their homes, even if there are other people (kids, elderly) or animals (cats, dogs, birds) living there?
Kids are at school during office hours, I'm not sure about pets but they I don't think they care whether the house is 23° or 16° considering most of them go outside without any issue.
How is their commute relevant? If they are WFH, theres less people needing to commute. Thats less fuel or more efficient fuel economy for public transport to use
Yes but we are offsetting their lack of commute (being public transport, a small impact anyway) with having to heat many more houses.
Most energy goes into making up for the temperature delta. If you turn the heating down, the delta at either evening or morning goes up.
Note, some people even think that would take even more energy in total per day, but that's not correct because a cooler house doesn't emit as much energy as a warmer one.
I would hazard a guess that (x houses @ minimal heating + x amount of petrol burned during a commute + emissions from heating an office) > whatever amount of emissions x houses would generate going from minimal heating to comfortable heating.
It's too bad that countries only consider things like this to address a crisis in fuel costs. Why not enact measures like this to curb the pollution and CO2? I guess it says a lot about what humanity truly values.
We saw how much less pollution there was during the pandemic
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/04/8110190...
I worked from home but a few times I needed to go to my parents house during what used to be rush hour. Less than 5% of normal traffic and fuel demand dropped so much that prices were lower.
My job went hybrid in 2022 and then return to office full time last year. Everyone hates it. It's a waste of time and resources.
Less pollution, less traffic means we don't need to use tax revenue to expand roads and less wear and tear means less repairs.
Take it one step further and give tax breaks to businesses that let employees work from home and close physical offices. Then this means less new office construction which can be used for housing to help the housing crisis. It's a win win for everyone except control freak managers.
The visibility in socal was astounding at the time. Like 50 mile days, catalina and the san gabriels both crystal clear.
Some believe that few organizations are actually real-estate businesses masquerading as tech, restaurant or other types.
For those kind of business having full occupancy is more important than worker productivity.
One is an immediate impact in your pocket, the other one has an impact lag that you count in years/decades.
Optimizing performance management and labor cost controls is more important to those making these decisions than climate change. Misaligned incentives.
"Leave the petro-billionaires alone!" Seems to be the driving force
Imagine if the world had aggressively invested in renewables at any time in the past ten years!
Make that the past 100 years.
Cheap and efficient solar power didn't seem to require any actual breakthroughs or real investment. Maybe better power electronics for inverters and things? Batteries are a real issue but storage could have been totally ignored for a while.
So, maybe when Carter put those (thermal) solar collectors on the White House we should have thrown a hundred billion dollars at solar panel work and had abundant solar power decades ago.
But no, Carter was "weak" so we had to instead elect the guy who ignored AIDS because he hated gay people, pushed absurd drug policy, put us in bed with the middle east, and started the process of removing taxes from any rich person and racking up national debt for stupid reasons.
Why was Carter "weak"? Well you see, Iran was a huge Bad Guy that we needed to stop!
Oh.
Politicians only think of their donors. Every country has an oligarchy who controls oil and gas. So for their wealth, we all have to suffer.
South Asia is suffering like anything right now. There is an cooking gas shortage. In some countries there is a petrol shortage.
But nobody will learn lessons from this crisis and focus to switch to renewables within a decade.
> Why not enact measures like this to curb the pollution and CO2?
It does seem like a glaring contradiction, but it's actually not. In the West, at least, climate rhetoric is a tool primarily to discipline and control the masses through fear, with actual concern for the climate a distant secondary factor. This is why those elites can cry crocodile tears for the environment while also riding on private jets to private islands and staying mum about intentional environmental disasters caused in the ongoing wars (which they support, of course).
In the current fuel crisis, mandatory WFH is also an attempt to manage populations through controlled demand-destruction, which avoids more volatile forms of demand-destruction that result in unrest, like not being able to afford food.
From an (cynical) governance perspective, there is no contradiction here.
You can’t collapse countries and humans down to four sentences and conclude that’s what they value. Do you want to analyze the problem or throw quips at the wall?
Because the economic activity which generates pollution and CO2 also raises standards of living and provides for the needs of their societies?
Let me guess, you live in the West and don't need to worry about your family's basic needs being met?
Global climate change will make much of the world barely habitable, and devastate crop yields. Those living outside "the West" will far and away be the most adversely affected. Reducing CO2 emissions is an urgent global priority.
No it doesn't. That economoic activity when done from home, raises their local neighborhoods now where mom and pop businesses can thrive instead of competing in a costly rental market based on scarcity.
> don't need to worry about your family's basic needs being met?
So... Office workers commuting every day create food to put on people's table?
Ah yes, because economics and resource allocation are already perfectly optimal and balanced, and it is against the physical laws of the universe to raise quality of life via any other methodology
I wish we’d all go to four day work weeks.
Over My whole life, 5 out of 7 full days of work always felt so daunting and almost dehumanizing.
But 4/7 is mentally close to half and just feels way different qualitatively. If you have a job you mostly like, 4 days a week feels really sustainable.
I work 4 days a week (started because of a medical condition) and I think more people should do that. I even think that in those 4 days i get as much done as most others in 5 days because I can focus better, and sometimes when I feel like working in the non-work day I work a few hours for fun and interest.
I‘m a big fan of the four day workweek idea, but let’s not kid ourselves. 5 days are 5 days. I work 10h days usually and I just wouldn’t be able to fit all that work into 4 days.
I don't think human production is linear. There's definitely an optimal point, and it probably varies from person to person. I think, actually, past that point your productivity declines rapidly.
I would not be surprised at all if working 70 hours a week yields more productivity than 80, which yields more than 100.
That’s because you actually work 6 days a week.
Yeah but what's the argument?
Perhaps you should split the load with another human?
That's out of my control.
I've been working 4/10 schedule (4 days, but 10 hours/day, so I still work 40 hours). It's a HUGE perk, and is the biggest thing keeping me at my current job.
Happiest and most productive I've ever been was working 4/10 with a start time at 2 p.m. No morning sluggishness walking into work after lunch, zero-traffic commute, off Fridays so I'd still have a social life far, far away from morning people. Dated a nurse who also worked night shifts and just went on weekday lunch dates or closed down bars.
Honestly I think the dirty secret is most peoples work output, especially in white collar work, is not linear. I'm willing to bet if you are even able to quantify your output (I don't believe most people can do that unless they are merely a fungible cog in some production process), you'd get the same exact amount of work done in a year working 4 10s or 4 8s or 4 5s I'd even bet.
Think of the classic case of the deadline and what it actually means. Case A, you didn't procrastinate. You took plenty of time to think on the problem, work on a solution at an unhurried pace, put it aside, come back to it, and solve it before it is due. And then, it is done.
Case B, you did procrastinate. You have no time at all to think all day, you immediately do and iterate. Four hours later you've sprinted and delivered. And then, it is done, same as it would have been if you didn't procrastinate, maybe 10 fold reduction in time.
And that is worst case examples. Typical case is probably somewhere between these A and B, but the point is non linear time to output.
You just discovered Amazon and startup work culture, work at a frantic pace! But why work frantically for 4 days instead of 5?
Care to share how you snagged that?
All of this was caused by a global bully and their handler.
Agreed. Hard to find a bigger global bully than Iran with all the terrorism they sponsored. And it was great to take out their handler as well.
Long-term planning rarely hooks-up with reality until it's too late. It's abundantly clear "Asia" should spend the remaining 20% of their working week directly on ripping away their dependency on fuel.
We're going to get a 6-day work week, aren't we? :(
Isn't that very fitting with the spirit of the times?
Reading 4-day week futurism while working 5 days as you always did, hoping it doesn't get to 6.
This one and UBI are the two classics of 2000s optimism and naivety.
Anyone who thinks that UBI will ever be Universal has too much faith in their legislators.
We'd save even more fuel for the military apparatus if we just slept at work
In my company, customer service and finance departments still have work-from-home options carried over from 2020. Most use it to take two workdays a week to avoid the commute. I notice the difference in rush-hour traffic; my location is in a dead-end road with only one way in and out.
Are these countries being very conservative or do their oil supply get impacted by a couple weeks of war? If so that is a very concerning situation
Something I heard from an analyst online (can't find source unfortunately) said that China has a 90 day supply for gas, whereas it's 10 days for Taiwan. Not sure this applies to all fuel types, but it may give an indication of the buffer that some of these major Asian countries are working with.
And its worth pointing out that China recently stocked up their strategic oil reserves to a significant degree. They would be the very tipping top high end of reserves.
The closest gas station in my area is out of stock already. I'm in Philippines, totally miles away from the war.
A better and more accurate title: “4-day week, WFH roll-outs in Asia to solve fuel crisis caused by Iran War”.
a better title should be include the word "consider" because in tfa japan and korea for example are not implementing that just yet...
You could never do this in America because 50x judges would pile on and there'd be 100x lawsuits.
Labor laws in the US are designed for companies to skirt around the spirit of the law to satisfy the letter of the law. Probably to prevent rioting in the street from making people realize they haven't won the change they thought. Case in point, certain benefits that kick in at 40 hours to you know help people out.
Companies responded by saying awe shucks, guess we will only schedule you 39 hours and if you want more you have to work another job. Oh and the law only cares about hours done at one job so doesn't matter if you are working 120 hour weeks you only get part time benefits.
The US air force literally bombs striking union workers (yes, US citizens in the US) when needed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
Oh naw, but what will happen to PrODucTiviTy and ColLaBOraTIoN?!
My friend actually drives more when we switched to wfh. 10 miles to gym and back. 20-30 miles in misc errands and grocery shopping. Yoga class, kids sports.
Did they not grocery shop when they worked in the office?
They didn’t have time during the week.
Do they live in an exurb
Why are they calling it the "Iran war". It's more like the US/Israeli War. Or more specifically, the US/Israeli assault on Iran.
I suspect it’s mostly a naming convention. Wars are often labeled after the territory where the fighting occurs rather than the actors involved. That’s why we say “Ukraine war” or “Iraq war,” even though multiple states may be involved.
In this case, “Iran war” is a bit misleading because the conflict is largely a missile and proxy confrontation affecting several territories (Iran, Israel, and parts of the Gulf), not just one battlefield.
Personally, I find it clearer to name conflicts after the primary actors involved. For example:
Russia–Ukraine war U.S. & Israel–Iran war
That makes the participants explicit instead of implicitly framing the war around a single country or location.
Seems to be convention. If you search for "Russian war", the top hit is "Ukraine war", second hit "Ukraine-Russia war". Most results seem to mention both parties but when brevity is needed, the place where it's taking place seems to take priority over the belligerents
Just observing, not saying it's a good or bad linguistic practice
Ukraine war, Nagorno Karabakh war, Iraq war, Kosovo War, Gulf War, Falklands War, Vietnam war, Korean war, wars frequently are named for where they are fought.
Because we're sitting here on the American side. In Iran it's probably called the America war or the Israeli war.
Another way to name wars, when they aren't happening to you, is based on where they happen. The war is happening in and around Iran. It's very unlikely that Iran will manage to bring the war to America. You could also call it the Gulf of Persia war.
You can also name them propagandistically, as in the "2023 Israel-Hamas war". Thankfully this hasn't happened in this case.
Point of view. If you are American its the war with Iran. If you are in most other English speaking countries you would go along with that. That said, I have also seen it referred to as "the Middle East war" and one headline calls it "Trump's war".
I wonder what they call it in Iran?
The question is rhetorical (I hope). It is obvious why it's called a name based on the frame and context.
The US is involved in too many wars to call them all the "US war".
Fair enough. That's a reasonable answer.
That would made it hard to distinguish all the wars US started, threatened or will start.
Asia rolled it out? Wow, imagine the coordination that took to get all of those disparate countries (like, 48 or 49 countries make up Asia) on board with a 4 day work week... and so quickly, too!
My homeowners association can't pull off a neighborhood playground cleanup without conflict, disorder and confusion even with 6 months of planning so again, kudos to the 48+ countries of Asia for coming together in this herculean example of speed, unity and coordination.
This is what happens when someone doesn't read the fine article.
4 day work week would be so rad.
The government of asia rolled it out?
Why don't we (Canada, America I guess) do this too?
Both Canada and the US are net exporters of oil, and have median wages higher than in the countries adopting these measures, so neither physical shortages nor rising fuel prices are issues as urgent as they are in (e.g.) the Philippines.
We consume 101 million barrels of oil per day. The amount of oil humans consume per day has doubled since 1980. Is this the way we finally wake up to the urgency of addressing the climate crisis caused by burning fossil fuels?
To some, being independent of a finite and politically unstable resource like oil is woke.
It was abundantly clear that one of Iran's methods would be to shut down the Strait of Hormuz.
Sadly, there are people in charge who think the former and ignored the latter.
Thank you Donald Trump for reducing our dependency on fossil fuels!
paywalled but I found: https://archive.ph/ujecr
Does this mean that President Trump is the (unexpected) champion of the remote working crowd? Not the hero we need but the hero we deserve, and all that.
I love WFH but I'd also rather we not blow up schools.
And all he had to do was make it too expensive to even travel to your usual working location.
Truly the hero we deserve.
Will be hilarious if there is another call for WFH just after the bigs forced everyone back
"Asia" didn't roll out anything. Thailand, Vietnam, The Philippines, and Pakistan rolled out independent measures.
The thing I feel like is really important to remember whenever thinking about the world and demographics is that most people are Asian. As in more people live in Asia then outside of it. Conversely when a headline or something mentions Asia, it is rare they actually mean the majority of the continent or people living there.
My favorite is when people say they like "asian cuisine" or "asian food". China alone has several distinct cuisines. Why do we act like this is a monolithic concept?
Because there was a lot of cultural cross-contamination between these countries, there is a huge overlap in ingredients due to climate similarities and trade between neighboring countries.
I group European & American food into their respective groups as well.
> Asia rolls out 4-day weeks, WFH to solve fuel cris...
Makes no sense, same with "I'm in a mood for asian food"
> Makes no sense, same with "I'm in a mood for asian food"
Thai, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indian food / cuisine even thought different is more probably closer to each other same like e.g. Polish and Spanish is closer to each other than to most other asian cuisine.
Asian countries developed with more overlap in basic ingredients, cooking techniques, and historical influence networks than Europe did. Historically there were 3 influence zones in Asia. There is a lot of pickling, fermenting, salting, drying. In Asia of these techniques were more or less unified. Fish sauces from different countries are Pepsi vs Coca-Cola level of difference.
> Polish and Spanish is closer to each other than to most other asian cuisine.
I'd say Polish has a lot of similarities with Asian cuisine. Sure, both have stews and sausages, but flavor profiles are very different: acidic vs sour.
I won't be able to tell difference between gyoza & wonton if they shaped the same, but surely I can tell difference between ravioli & uszka. Uszka is IMO closer to any dumpling from Asia than to anything European.
I disagree with that. There is nothing in South Asian cuisine similar to sashimi or to soy heavy stir fries.
Very few east Asian dishes use the spices most popular in South Asia.
Spaghetti is far more similar to noodles than it is to any South Asia equivalent I can think of.
Yes, a filled pasta is a very different thing from dumpling, but a lot of European cuisines have dumplings.
> but a lot of European cuisines have dumplings.
Those were brought to them most likely by China in one way or another.
> Yes, a filled pasta is a very different thing from dumpling,
You saying it like a filled pasta and a dumpling isn't the same twist on "filling encased in thin dough".
> There is nothing in South Asian cuisine similar to sashimi or to soy heavy stir fries.
Dish is ingredients and method. Stir-frying is a Chinese technique (technically multiples, but all originated in China). Ingredients get replaces all the time for various reasons. You're telling me Poriyal is not close relative to the OG stir-fry?
Japanese food and Indian food are as different from each other as Indian food and Italian food.
I'm not sure how you arrive at that opinion. Take the example of Punjabi food. It's heavily based around ghee and dairy. Does anything in Thai cuisine use butter except European style pastries?
The only major similarities I see uniting the national cuisines you listed (not regional ones) are things like curries and rice. The former arrived in Japan with European influence (where it's also common in colonial countries) and the latter isn't a feature common to all Asian cuisines (e.g. Mongolian).
Ah I think I get it.
Asian food = contains rice
European food = contains wheat
American food = contains liquefied synthetic cheese?
American food contains maize, obviously. This works for multiple understandings of the word "American" :)
American food = contains corn (maize), in all its glorious (ex. nixtamalized, unprocessed, flour, etc.) and unholy (ex. high fructose corn syrup) forms.
Pretty much, but not exactly. There is also a cooking technique (so American will be deep-fried).
Most national dishes are nothing more than adaptation of dishes from another country. Sometimes tweaks to ingredients, sometimes tweaks to techniques.
A popular carnival dish in the American South, is deep-fried Twinkies.
A popular incendiary device in the US, is a turkey fryer; traditionally ignited in November.
> I group European & American food into their respective groups as well.
If by "American" you mean "Unitedstatesian" then I agree. But Latinamerican food is worlds apart from what the US and Canada eat.
Oddly enough, many Canadians use the word "American" to refer to Unitedstatesians, so presumably they'd use it to describe cuisine that same way (as in, poutine is Canadian but disco fries are American). This is extremely analogous to the Asia conversation, in that of course people know the term comes from the continental scale, but using that scale is less common, so it must be specifically invoked.
And then you've got Puerto Ricans, who are definitely US'ian but eat more like the non-US'ian Americans, so who knows what they would think of if you ask about American food, but it wouldn't surprise me if Contiguousunitedstatesian is the default (i.e., the same cuisine the Canadians would be referring to).
"American" is as broad as Asian and even more annoying. I ate some great food in Surinamese restaurants, but I'm guessing that's not what you meant by using that word.
The same goes for "European", Nordic cousine is very different than the Balkan cousine, which is very different than the Iberian cousine and so on.
What would you consider the major differences between European and American?
I feel like as Europeans, we're as good at importing American food as America is about importing European.
> I feel like as Europeans, we're as good at importing American food as America is about importing European.
What you call European food is a direct result of importing American food. Just different Americans...
American food is things like beef jerky, pemmican, maize breads.
European food is things like hamburgers, French fries, hotdogs, and apple pie.
This is getting silly
Edit: added a missing comma
As European as American apple pie or as American as European apple pie?
Globally, everyone does this.
When someone outside of America thinks of American food, do you think they will think of Cajun gumbo, TexMex, Clam Chowder, or something you'd find on the menu at McDonalds?
All of the above. I like the first three.
>When someone outside of America thinks of American food, do you think they will think of Cajun gumbo, TexMex, Clam Chowder, or something you'd find on the menu at McDonalds?
Statistically this random non-american is some sort of Asian. Therefore the answer is finger lickin good.
Ah, a fan of Korean fried chicken, I see.
I thought that McDonald's was considered Scottish cuisine?
In vulgar American English, "Asia" mostly just refers to the wider Confuciosphere + some parts of Central Asia (though rarely thought about.) Most Americans will look at you funny if you call Pakistan or Jordan Asian, because that's not how we use the word.
> China alone has several distinct cuisines. Why do we act like this is a monolithic concept?
When someone is talking about "Chinese food", they almost certainly are talking about the cuisine established by Chinese immigrants in their country, not food as it exists within China. This isn't unique to China.
More American vulgarism fun facts, "Chinese" wasn't pan-Chinese until somewhat recently. It pretty much exclusively meant Cantonese outside of very specific contexts, like geopolitics. This changed slowly starting in the 1970s, but emphasis on slowly and it still persists in interesting ways today.
Asian can also have different meanings in different places. If you say someone is Asian in Britain it means South Asian, whereas in the US it seems to mean East Asian.
It's similar to how people say "Europe does this or that". Basically the part of their thoughts dedicated to that part of the world is so small that all they can afford is a tiny box, and everything has to go in there, reality be damned.
Europe at the very least has one parliament that sometimes passes laws that apply to almost the whole continent
Europe does not have a parliament. The EU does, but it is not even sovereign over the EU countries.
Not really, it's not sovereign. The EU can pass laws that each European country chooses to implement. If they don't implement enough EU laws, they can get kicked out, which means more pieces of paper are written and some European countries might choose to afford them less privileges.
No. EU laws are of two kinds: directives and regulations. Directives work roughly as you describe, while regulations have direct effect like regular laws.
> The EU can pass laws that each European country...
Each EU member state, the UK, Switzerland and Russia don't really get involved
Those countries may also ratify EU laws if they wish. I think the UK has something similar to GDPR and Switzerland also picks and chooses which laws it thinks make sense.
No, they don't. The UK was a member of the EU when GDPR was passed, and chose to adopt it as law. When it left the EU it didn't repeal it.
They may both decide to copy, or imitate laws similar to the ones the the EU has, but they can't 'ratify' them.
A lot of the places by me have both a Chinese menu and a Japanese menu. Some even have a Thai menu.
So when you're going out for Asian food, it really is that. No sense in being pedantic here.
And I doubt the contents of any of those menus are particularly close to what you'd find in the countries they claim to be from. It's really more like "Asian-inspired."
I often wondered about that.
We hosted an exchange student for a few weeks, and he was from Nanjing. Before he left the country, we took him to a Chinese restaurant and warned him that it was likely going to be more like American-Chinese.
He went through the menu and pointed out the dishes which were authentic and those which were not. I was surprised at how many were actually authentic -- it was about half of the menu. Maybe we were at a more authentic Chinese restaurant, as the menu was in both English and Chinese.
He was a great kid, and I really enjoyed the experience. He loved peanut butter and jelly, had to spit out ranch dressing, and did not care at all for pumpkin pie.
There's also the question of authentic/traditional to which part of china, in particular in cases where dishes with the same name aren't made the same. But beyond that, just because there's a dish on the menu one recognizes from their homeland doesn't mean it's prepared the same.
Yes, and we tested this as well by letting him order some of them. He said that they were like the food he would get at home.
One other amusing bit, I had to stop him before he shoved an entire fortune cookie in his mouth and ate the paper. Those are 100% American.
Authentic places certainly exist. That's not generally the sort of place that has menus covering multiple countries, though.
There are also places where they can make stuff like home, but usually won't. They might have made "proper" stuff owing to the presence of your exchange student.
I went to a combo thai-chinese place once... Now I want sesame chicken...
Because that is how it's presented to "us". If the cuisine that we could access where we live was more diverse, we would think differently about the entire set (which is not happening for another set of entirely good reasons, but alas.)
I don't know about that. Japanese food and Thai food have very little in common besides rice. Possibly there is some overlap in curry but not much.
Sure. And most people I knew are able to differentiate between "sushi" and "Thai curry".
Isn't there a concept of regional cuisine like "Mediterranean cuisine"?
I was watching some travel show on PBS, which I can't recall the name of. They were going through Egypt and met up with a guy from the area who walked them through getting the local food.
So much of what they had looked the same as the food that you could find in Greece, but they were fiercely adamant that it was both different and better.
Anyway, it's Mediterranean food in my mind. :-)
Mediterranean cuisine = contains olive
Because much of the Asian food the average American will come across isn’t necessarily identifiable to a specific region or country in Asia, or is a blend of various Asian cuisines.
Or they are broadly referring to the various cuisines of Asia as a singular group, because unless you’re very familiar with those cuisines, they may see broadly similar.
The term "Western" is often used in an equally broad sense, referring to Europe/North American culture.
That's always been a weird one for me. If I might quote Gemini's summary since it seems accurate enough:
> Geographical/Historical: The Bosporus Strait in Turkey is historically considered the dividing line between Europe (West) and Asia (East).
> Prime Meridian: The 0° longitude line running through Greenwich, England, is used to technically separate the Eastern and Western Hemispheres.
> Cultural/Political: Cultural definitions are often more relevant, placing countries like Australia, New Zealand, and North America in the "West" due to historical ties, despite their geographic location.
I suppose you're leaning into the "Bosporus Strait" option more than the "Prime Meridian" option, given that the former would put most of Europe in the West while the latter would put most of it in the East.
I feel shame because I once thought a restaurant's sign said "Asian Place" when it actually said "A Siam Place"
It's a category that makes sense to people and communicates something clearly..?
Because some places didn’t get immigration or even access to imported products. Being small town in Lithuania I didn’t even tried pizza until late 90s, chinese 2000s and indian probaly 2010s. There’s still like less than 5 Indian restaurants in country and probably none korean, etc.
Also things like asian fusion can evolve independently.
When Asians use the term, we usually use it to loosely mean "my home cuisine and other cuisines that share similar characteristics"
When my wife or I say "I feel like eating something Asian today" it usually means spicy-Chinese adjacent, i.e. served hot, vegetables fully cooked, heavy on flavor, paired with either rice or freshly made noodles.
Korean qualifies, Sichuan food qualifies, Thai food qualifies, Indian food maybe sort of borderline qualifies on some days but only if we haven't eaten it recently.
We don't usually mean Japanese food when we say that. That's just our mutual understanding of what we call "Asian food". Yeah, I guess we unapologetically kicked Japan out of culinary Asia :) It doesn't matter. The system works for us. We don't dislike Japanese food, but we'll say "Japanese food" when we feel like having Japanese food.
Another Asian family from a different part of Asia probably uses the term to refer to a different subset of Asian cuisines.
Like just about everything else in Asia, it's a fluid term that means different things to different people. I've only ever seen people in the west be pendantic about terms like this. I also think of it as a very western ideology to want to have a term have a singular global definition.
We rarely say "Asian food" - we would be more specific.
>" Why do we act like this is a monolithic concept?"
Under "we" you mean white / the westerners? Because the majority of us do not give a flying fuck about other parts of the world. Not important enough. One can easily see how our media reacts to tragedies on one one side comparatively to the other.
As for food. I live in Toronto and can clearly distinguish between quite a few different "Asian" cuisines.
Wait until you hear someone talk about "begging the question"
It's too broad a term - it covers too many disparate countries and ends up being like using Americas to refer to Canada and the USA or similar.
I read the headline and assumed it was "Japan and China" but it wasn't.
TBF the entire Western Hemisphere is about the population of China, so it's actually far far worse.
It is quite unclear how big China's population really is; see for example
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFbMWq-xvXU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymmaYswXm78
>I now believe China’s actual population may be as low as 300–400 million
that we now live in a world where people are confident enough to make claims this stupid in front of a camera should frighten anyone.
Some basic logic, if China had the population of the United States it would have magically acquired the per capita economic output of the US in ~30 years, consume several times the energy and food it imports and somehow have produced several cities the size of Tokyo. The fact that China produces ~50% of the world's ships and has the manufacturing output of of the G7 combined is impressive with over a billion people, but hey they must have some space age technology to do it with 3% of the world's population!
In philosophy there's a concept called the coherence theory of truth, if you want to know if something is true check if it doesn't defy basic logic or other facts you know, great tool instead of believing what youtubers say
Why is it impossible that China acquired the per capita economic output of the US?
because that would mean virtually every place in the country would look like Singapore, it would be significantly richer ,per capita, than Taiwan, millions of economic migrants would have left the country for no reason, and I suppose also be conjured out of thin air given that the Chinese diaspora is about 40 million people large. Which is shockingly enough comparable to Indians abroad, not Americans
I don't agree. The USA has the economic output of the USA, but not every place in the USA looks like Singapore.
Youtube videos are always a poor quality source - the UN doesn’t accept China’s numbers exactly but they believe the total number is broadly correct due to cross referenced data, and expert independent demographers largely agree. The figure of 1.4 billion is likely within the ballpark and the idea that this is off by hundreds of millions is considered a fairly fringe theory, almost a conspiracy theory.
The equivalent term is "The West."
Don't bring Valinor into it.
Just wait for "the Shield of America" too (bleh)
Not to mention that people tend to lump Oceania into it too.
AKA the "Valerieperis circle":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle#/media/Fi...
Especially because it sounds like the Philippines is pushing for a 4 day workweek, but the rest of SEA is asking people to work from home, use less AC, take the stairs…
It's also Vietnam, Thailand, and unofficially Pakistan.
The reality is the bigger Asian nations like China, India, SK, and Japan that worked on building resilient alternatives after the 2022-23 ONG shock due to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine aren't as dramatically impacted. The others didn't or were hit by other crises at the same time.
For example, in Pakistan's case, their government raised fuel taxes by around 33% because they didn't meet their IMF loan terms [0] but somehow found $11M to buy a private jet [1] for the CM of Punjab who is also the niece of the PM and the daughter of the former PM and Pakistan is in the middle of a war with Afghanistan [2].
Edit: can't reply
> gas cylinder booking...
The gas cylinder/LPG issue is due to consumer habits - induction and electric stovetops have been available in India for decades, but there has been a cultural aversion to adopting electric.
Even Indian Americans in the US prefer using Gas Stovetops over Electric for cultural reasons (eg. I've had my parents say the "taste" of food is worse on electric instead of gas stovetops despite living here since Clinton was president).
And dhabas and restaurants used to use coal briquettes or kerosene until those were banned in the 2000s-2010s for pollution reasons (much help that did /s) and to promote LNG and CNG, and will most likely revert back to those.
Additionally, India has shifted from Qatari to Omani LNG [3], which was what India was already using before the India-Qatar FTA led to a diplomatic thaw between the two.
It's the same situation in Vietnam as well.
> freight is pretty much fucked
Indian diesel prices are being subsidized and kept constant [4]. That said, this is a good forcing function to begin India's shift to electric trucks.
And freight and passenger rail is already around 98-99% electrified in India [5] which reduces the need for diesel.
[0] - https://www.dawn.com/news/1979709
[1] - https://www.arabnews.com/node/26978/pakistan
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Afghanistan%E2%80%93Pakis...
[3] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/india-gail-buys-oman...
[4] - https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/petrol-diesel-prices-to-rema...
[5] - https://infra.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/railways/ind...
> eg. I've had my parents say the "taste" of food is worse on electric instead of gas stovetops
If you are using the cooking technique of "bhunai" [1], which is quite common in South Asian cooking, there is a large difference in food quality you can make with an electric and with a gas stove. Gas stoves are able to provide higher heat at consistent levels, and you can tilt the pot to concentrate heat in one corner to intensify the cooking. So I don't disagree with your parents.
[1] bhunai is when you cook meat with spices at very high heat while rapidly stirring it. I think the willingness to burn the spices during this process is what sets this apart from similar techniques in other cuisines, but I am no expert.
My mom doesn't cook bhunai - she's pushed for a low oil household since I was a kid and is extremely health conscious verging on "crunchy".
I've also done bhunai with electric stovetops and ceramic cookware like Dutch ovens and green pans and gotten close enough to an authentic taste - the marginal differences that exist are due to differences in ingredients in the US (eg. lower milkfat percentages, onions instead of shallots, different cultivars of vegetables, etc) and some inexperience of non-Westerners with Western cookware.
It's a very solvable problem. For example, the Indian restaurants my parents like and feel taste "authentic" use electric stovetops as well in the back, but discriminate on ingredients and masalas.
Yeah, my induction range will get a carbon steel wok really fucking hot really fucking quick.
Like, I can't really stir-fry on max because my range hood can't keep up and I set the smoke detector off. Outside of crappy rentals, I'm pretty sure electric ranges here are up to whatever, high-heat cooking wise.
Yep! My SO's Vietnamese and we've both been able to cook pretty decent Viet and Korean (Hallyu wave is a thing) food with electric stoves despite her being used to LNG and charcoal in VN.
The marginal difference in taste is literally just due to certain cultivars not being available here. Ofc, a half decent Vietnamese sourced nuoc mam solves everything but those are available at our Costco.
>"the "taste" of food is worse on electric instead of gas stovetops"
it highly depends on what and how is being cooked. Foods that rely on particular dynamics of cooking temperature profile often can not be made the same quality / taste. Regular electric range is absolutely not capable of driving Wok properly for example.
There's currently a gas crisis in India. A country that had a $10 billion investment in an Iranian port to trade oil and gas directly with them, except they decided to become America's bitch and halted the project after American sanctions.
Anyways, everyone's affected - gas cylinder booking requests which usually take a couple of days to fulfill currently have a 30 day period to fulfill in some major cities. Roadside vendors are shutting down temporarily, as are many restaurants.
At least EVs have had a good success rate in adoption, so commuting isn't as much affected. But freight is pretty much fucked.
Again, this is a country that could have gotten a sweetheart deal from Iran, just like China, but apparently decided to become a little bitch.
Freight will eventually go electric as well. It's crazy how fast it's happening in China:
https://www.electrive.com/2026/01/23/year-end-surge-electric...
> It's crazy how fast it's happening in China
The benefits of living in an authoritarian state. The CCP says "we will provide for cheap electric trucks" and it happens, no matter if that displaces tens, if not hundreds of thousands of workers in ICE car manufacturers.
But until that happens in India, the country's freight is still dependent on oil prices.
Poverty doesn’t have the luxury to choose or take moral stands. When a dollar worth oil price fluctuation can lead to thousands going hungry for a day, you as a leader will do everything to avoid catastrophic sanctions.
India agreed to capitulate on the Iranian port investments before the US-Israeli invasion, when Trump was playing the tariff games. If a growing economy can be subverted and forced to act against its interests, is it really a superpower at that point?
Guess the US Deputy Secretary was right when he stated that they'll never make the same mistakes with India that they made with China.
> Again, this is a country that could have gotten a sweetheart deal from Iran
India has a deal with Iran as well and the first ship to sail via Hormuz after the conflict started (the Shenlong Suezmax) ended up in India [0]
India giving sanctuary to an Iranian naval ship and offering sanctuary to a second one - which their captain rejected and is now at the bottom of the Indian Ocean (IRIS Dena) [1] - bought India the goodwill needed to implement the deal mentioned above.
Edit: can't reply
> We could have an entire Indian-owned port, outside the straits in question, with an attached O&G pipeline that we paid for, connected directly to the oil and gas fields in Iran
Duqm Port in Oman, Sohar Port in Oman, Fujairah Port in the UAE, and Shahid Beheshti Port in Chabahar, Iran are all either Indian operated or include an Indian financial stake with first right of refusal for Oil and LNG exports and outside the Straits of Hormuz.
> Yay, we got one ship to cross the straits
Did you even read the Bloomberg article? There were only 20 Indian LNG ships within the strait of Hormuz at this time, and they are being given passage. These aren't overnight tankers (that isn't even a thing at this size). The war only started a week ago and it's a Suez Supermax at that - they won't go beyond 15 mph/19 knots.
> the rare earth minerals in Afghanistan that we had received sanction to mine prior to the war, that would also have been shipped through this port
India still has access to Shahid Beheshti Port, and it's not like India has even completely taken advantage of the existing critical minerals within India, let alone hypothetical and high risk critical minerals projects in Afghanistan - a country literally in the middle of a war with Pakistan.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-12/india-in-...
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2e4yxj0pd3o
Yay, we got one ship to cross the straits!
VS
We could have an entire Indian-owned port, outside the straits in question, with an attached O&G pipeline that we paid for, connected directly to the oil and gas fields in Iran. Not to mention all the rare earth minerals in Afghanistan that we had received sanction to mine prior to the war, that would also have been shipped through this port.
The cognitive dissonance in nationalist Indians is honestly tiresome and unsurprising at this moment.
Maybe a better title would say "Asian nations [independently] roll out 4-day weeks, WFH to solve fuel crisis"?
^ "Some" Asian nations.
It's still 5/6 day workweeks in the office in China, India, SK, Japan, HK, and Singapore. Same in the Gulf.
Well, the gulf probably won't be affected? As they can just be supplied by fuel truck or pipeline instead of ship.
Same for exports as well depending on the country.
For example, India worked with Oman, the UAE, and Iran to build export hubs like Duqm, Fujairah, Sohar, and Chabahar (the US has ignored Indian operated Shahid Beheshti port and is hitting Konarak on the other side of the Chabahar Bay) that aren't blocked by Hormuz.
By making sure Indian SOEs were equity partners in those projects, this meant India got first right of refusal on exports.
China, Japan, and South Korea all implemented similar projects as well.
Other Asian countries could have implemented similar redundancies as well, but they didn't despite this exact situation happening 3-4 years ago during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.
I wish India did this. Millions of copy paste workers, would ease up traffic.
Particularly funny because of course Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Iran are all themselves in Asia
I remember when I first visited Cyprus and realized I was in Asia.
I’m living in one of these countries. Abject failure from powers that be to even consider 4-day workweek as an alleviation. Not the first time it happens yet they learn nothing.
Tbf, from what I've heard within my professional network and extended family, most bureaucrats who are not associated with BCA are functionally paralyzed right now because of the political changes going on - no one wants to put their name on some initiative that falls under the anti-corruption radar.
This paralysis has been going on for 2-3 years now and I know of an EV battery FDI project that shifted to Indonesia as a result of this paralysis. Even VinGroup and VinGroup tier companies aren't immune.
It's a common pattern in HN headlines to assign agency to non-US continents and countries. We hear Europe and China doing stuff all the time as well. It's strange.
Isn't that a good deal more reasonable though? China, as a polity, does indeed have agency. It's strange to suggest they don't, as if only America can do things on the world stage.
Sure, the usages aren't all flawed. But it's far more likely to see "Europe" doing something than "US" doing something in the headlines in similar cases, I feel.
Same goes for China, if a couple of companies do something, often in the headline it's just the general "China" doing it. For example we'll see China doing something with EVs whereas for the US we'd see Tesla doing something with EVs.
If someone attributed something to Europe but the only a handful of nations, which didn’t even include the largest ones, were engaging in the behavior, it would also be incorrect.
“Parts of Europe” or “Europe increasingly” etc would be ok (the latter if there was an expected progression of these policies to other European nations).
This headline is similarly misleading.
Europe usually is (inaccurately) used to mean the EU. Even if not, it never seems to include the biggest European country by land area and population (even if you count just the European part of it).
China is a country so what is the problem there.
Right? Weird title.
not only these, other asian countries are also falling into this fuel crisis.
And Korea. And Japan. And Bangladesh. At least according to the article. Sure it would be more precise if they said "some countries in South, South East, and East Asia".
either the business press is very US-bound or parochial, or more likely, it believes its readership is.
Right this is a terrible title. An equally bad and catchy title would have been Asia orders people to take stairs instead of elevators.
Can't expect Western media to write well. I saw a funnt reel today. It's Italy to Americans but Eye-ran and Eye-raq...
There's no reason for Italy and Iran/Iraq to be pronounced similarly. (Cf Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Idaho?)
But FWIW, the EYE-rack thing is because GWB (most prominently, but others before and after) intentionally mispronounced the name of the country, in a "real american" kind of way, and also to annoy SAD-dumb Hussein as a kind of "we're stupid but we're going to kill you anyway" kind of psyop. Or maybe just "we disrespect you in advance of killing you"?
Americans of other political persuasions usually pronounce the names correctly.
I've lived in over a dozen states and I've never heard either called anything other than EYE-(ran/raq) in conversation.
The extremely, I mean extremely rare occasion when someone pronounces it differently on TV, it's almost like they get side-eyed by other people as trying to "talk fancy".
Well, I've lived in four states in the last 20 years.
Anecdotally, the pronunciation popularity has split neatly along statewide-prominent political lines. For my four example states, three were correct/respectful, and one wrong/disrespectful.
Correct pronunciation has also had an inverse correlation with the rates of active/former military employment, which might be more directly indicative. And a positive correlation with education levels. So the answer is in there somewhere, I suspect.
National TV "news" programming might have a style guide which dictates pandering to the audience by speaking in real american, no matter how well-educated the hosts might be.
I've been thinking about this a bit more and I think we're actually talking about two (or more) different pronunciations.
There is a VERY hard "I" that Lindsey Graham does. I think that's the specific version you're talking about, and that one is intentionally offputting. It's like "EYEEE RACK", but that does sound different from "AYERAK" or "EYEROQ".
Yes, I think you're right. The middle ground, which I'll phoneticize as "uh-RON" or even "uh-RAN" is what I hear in most places.
The effete "ih-RAHN" is the voice that you mentioned might get side-eyes. This is the closest to how Iranians that I know pronounce it, except that we don't have a phoneme quite like their R, which to my ears sounds like a D, L, and R all smashed together.
But these side-eyes are mostly fair, I think. It's like Americans prounouncing France as "Frawhce", or Paris as "Pahdee". Ostentatious and pretentious, for an English-speaker.
And Lindsey's provocative "EYE-ran" is very present in some locations, I think because GHWB and GWB's affected pronunciations were pounded into the American consciousness during Gulf Wars 1 and 2. Although Reagan did it too, IIRC, and I'm not sure about Clinton.
Well, the rest of the world calls Italy as eetaly. Iran as eeran and Iraq as eeraq
It's interesting that Idaho is spoken as Eye-Dahoe. So maybe its a regional thing and not whatever the reel was purporting it to be
I don't think the "rest of the world" does anything consistently! :)
But the pronunciation difference between Indiana ("short I", in-dee-ANN-uh) vs Idaho ("long I", EYE-duh-hoe) isn't necessarily meaningful.
The letter I just has multiple common pronunciations in English, which I'm told is confusing for learners!
I didn't think of it in time to update my previous comment, so I'll add another!
Decades ago, I knew people who pronounced "Italian" as eye-TAL-yun. They were usually older, sometimes WW2 veterans. This was in an area of the US that has a large Italian immigrant population, FWIW.
I don't know if it was due to historical disrespect of Mussolini-era Italy, some contemporary xenophobia, or just simple ignorance.
They all pronounced "Italy" in the normal way though.
This is hilarious. I don't think this is xenophobia. Otherwise why is Idaho called eyedaho? Maybe its a regional thing or just ignorance.
I agree that ignorance is the most likely explanation.
But it's not like these folks didn't grow up with "Italy" and "Italian" being on the radio/TV all the time, spoken correctly by newscasters.
So there's a disconnect there, and it's also undeniable that there was an anti-Italian sentiment in the then-previous waves of naturalized immigrants. So I can't say for sure.
"Asia" is one of the dumbest archaic misnomers still in use by Western people
What do you call it? It's a continent, right?
Calling Eurasia a continent would make more sense. "Asia" doesn't have a really sensical physical boundary. May as well say Mexico is a different continent from the US just because there's a big cultural and ethnic difference across the border.
The term "North America" almost always means US or US and Canada, hardly ever the technically correct "US, Canada, Mexico" except in things like NAFTA.
And "Central America" often means "Mexico and countries south that speak Spanish" even though LATAM might be a bit closer.
Other nonsensical terminology also existing would imply nothing about the usage of "Asia". That said, I'm not sure I see the same incorrect usage of North America as you do, either.
The Ural mountains, the Black Sea and the Bosporus aren't sensical physical boundaries?
Sensible boundaries for dividing continents? Do the Rocky Mountains count as dividing North America into east and west subcontinents? Does the Baltic Sea partition the Nordic countries into their own continent? Are you really expecting that logic to work even a little bit?
> Do the Rocky Mountains count as dividing North America into east and west subcontinents?
The east part would be a bit small, but after a bit more seismic activity that may be sensible.
> Does the Baltic Sea partition the Nordic countries into their own continent?
Could be a subcontinent border yeah, it is a common division in Europe.
> Are you really expecting that logic to work even a little bit?
Yeah, there are multiple aspects of continents and topology is one part. Others are cultural and political and I think there the division is even more clear.
The phrasing and implication is all wrong.
“4-day week, WFH roll-outs in Asia to solve fuel crisis caused by Iran War” is better.
It's all Asia. Europe is in Asia. Europeans are West Asian. The traditional boundary of the Ural Mountains is a fabricated one. There is no reason to separate Europe out of Asia except for that "people that look like that go over there."
The traditional boundaries of Asia were Bosporus and Nile. Europe, Asia, and Africa were names given to the lands surrounding the Mediterranean. Because sea enabled travel, while land was difficult to cross, the extension of those names to lands beyond the Mediterranean world was of little consequence.
Not really. there is no entirely accepted definition of a continent. If you want to refer to them as one continent the term is Eurasia.
> There is no reason to separate Europe out of Asia except for that "people that look like that go over there."
People that look like what? A lot of west and central Asians look far more like Europeans than like South Indian or Chinese people, and the latter resemble two do not resemble each other at all.
You cannot put it down to racism dividing white vs non-white because that is very recent. It predates the invention/introduction of racism to Europe. Even better, until well into the 20th century (literally millennia after people separated Europe from Asia) South Asians and some North Africans were regarded as belonging to the same race as Europeans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race
The way they use it is what "Oriental" used to mean: East Asia: Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam etc.
It's a somewhat vaguely defined region. It often excludes India and the Middle East. It always excludes Europe, despite there being no sensible reason to consider them to be two separate continents.
Consider this sentence from the article: "Asia is particularly dependent on oil exports from the Middle East." That's a bizarre statement if you take "Asia" literally. The Middle East is in Asia. Is Saudi Arabia dependent on oil exports from the Middle East? Is Iran?
It's not really that different from "Europe", especially when you listen to Americans talk about "Europe".
Yes though Europe is a lot more culturally similar and has a shared government for the most part.
Asia has very distinct countries and in some cases is even at war even if it's a cold one. Like India vs Pakistan, India vs China, North vs South Korea, China vs Taiwan. And customs, languages and (where applicable) religions are more radically different than within Europe too.
It makes less sense calling it "Asia" than it is calling Europe "Europe" :)
Russia and Turkey have a shared government with Norway and Spain?
Europe does not have "shared goverment". They have union and some harmonization, but nothing remotely close to a "shared goverment".
At least in the case of "europe" it could refer to the EU (which obviously is not correct because it doesn't encompass all of europe). But when they are talking about "Asia"—what governing body would they even be referring to? It's obviously non-sensical.
> in the case of "europe" it could refer to the EU (which obviously is not correct because it doesn't encompass all of europe)
Not just that. If we get really pedantic, the EU is not only in Europe but includes territories in Africa (parts of Spain) and Asia (the entirety of Cyprus). And that's not even getting into the intercontinental shenanigans of France!
How do you define "Western people"?
Terrible headline. “Asia” isn’t a thing apart from a region on a map. These are separate countries doing their own thing.
Equally annoying is when folks say “Asian” as an ethnicity. That’s glossing over a whole bunch of different countries that have relatively little to do with each other apart from being in the same general area on the planet.
The office serves only one purpose: to keep people in the city. The city exists to house the masses who own nothing, who live in rented accommodation, use public transport, buy useless fast tech as status symbols to show off, fast fashion for the same reason, and order takeaway food with all the massive waste of packaging etc. etc. etc.
It serves no other purpose and, in particular, it isn't sustainable in terms of scale/natural resources.
Whether you like it or not, technology defines the era: when we moved from bronze to iron, those still using bronze were slaughtered by those who had iron. Today, technology dictates Distributism because, like it or not, the "new deal" works through things like domestic p.v. with small-scale storage, an EV integrated in the garage, not skyscrapers and massive solar power plants. Digital tools work well when you HAVE to use them, so you're forced to do it properly or you fail; in other words, by working remotely. In person, steps are "skipped" leaving information gaps and creating inefficiency, and so on and so forth.
There’s a special place in hell for people who vocally support working in offices.
"Asia" is about 60% of the total world population.
I just hope they don't hold a grudge.
Meanwile germany goes to a 7-day week where people need to generate electricity with muscle power to save the climate.
we only need to connect Merz to a device that generates electricity out of bullshit and we will never have any problems again
Makes sense for short term damage control. However, I think in the medium and long term you end up having productivity hits from such measures.
I know its unpopular to say, but when I have my 2 programmers in office, we get sooo much more done than at home. Someone gets stuck and we don't message/call, we just talk.
Although, if you want to justify WFH, introverted-like people do not get the same level of benefit as extroverted-like people in this situation. The extroverted people will just start talking. The introverted people need to be asked.
> when I have my 2 programmers in office
I'd like to think that you see "my 2 programmers" as "my team" but I've come to expect phrasing like "when we have our 2 programmers in office". That perspective emphasizes that we're all in this together, rather than serfs working for the benefit of the lord.
The "my programmers" phrasing plays into my prejudice that one reason you like having "your programmers" in office is the exhilaration you feel in seeing them at your beck and call.
Yep, your comment is deranged.
> I know its unpopular to say, but when I have my 2 programmers in office, we get sooo much more done than at home. Someone gets stuck and we don't message/call, we just talk.
The technology exists to "just talk" in high-definition audio and video. If somebody isn't asking for help when they're stuck that's a people problem, not a remote work problem. There are several possible reasons for their avoidance; if multiple people are exhibiting the same behavior it could be cultural (specific to your workplace, not the person's upbringing). Using physical presence to force their hand is curing the symptom, not the underlying cause.
But it gets solved when we are in-person.
We could develop new technology, research culture solutions... or... meet in-person.
> develop new technology, research culture solutions.
The technology and culture solutions have existed and been evolving for 20 years. It really sounds like your experience with remote work is not representative.
Given basically 100% of companies ended remote work, its probably the majority experience.
Almost 100% of companies are stupid and make bad, bad software that their customer's begrudgingly put up with, so I'm not surprised.
Seriously, how much software have you used that was genuinely good? For me, almost none. All the software I use, I tolerate.
Look, companies are made up of people and have all the downsides of humanity. That means the people making the decisions are egotistical, emotionally-driven, irrational, and a bit narcissistic. They still do okay enough, and that's all they need to achieve.
If you want my perspective, I think WFH ended just because executives did not like it. That's it. They didn't like how much autonomy it gave their workers, it didn't feel fair to them, so they said no, because they can. All the other analysis is mostly bullshit.
I mean, Jesus Christ, do you think my company makes just about any decisions because of data or economics? No! That's not to say they don't have data behind it. Of course they do, it's just very obviously bullshit. Everyone knows what's going on. People want things done a certain way, so they do that and then just make up a justification later to tell their dumbass investors who couldn't tell a hole in the ground from their asshole. Nobody has the balls or humility to say "look, I just want it this way". So, everyone has to lie and make up numbers and reasoning.
The number of remote companies is enormous but they're not loud about it.
you can just send "hey you got 5 mins"? you have to do that in person. you do that on chat. nothing different. this is a made up reason. I do this all day, everyday
I'm the manager. They do not send that message. They either are trying and never giving up, or... doing dishes.
I check in, and it ends up being story time about non-issues.
In person, its a 'hows it going?' and they say either 'good, still working' or 'stuck...'.
I would love if WFH was as effective. I could reduce my labor costs and probably have happier workers.
You're getting a lot of replies from other ICs that do well in a WFH setting, but I can say from a manager perspective, it's not always the manager or process. I've been managing remote teams for years since before covid and some people just don't do well without the in-person structure.
It's possible to build a high performing remote team, but it's not easy.
> some people just don't do well without the in-person structure
Structure is what makes remote work well. IME places that rely on everyone being together in-person to make sure things get done have poorly-defined structure.
You could reduce your labor costs and reduce the aggravation you are causing teammates if you changed your attitude.
It's possible to drive results and create a culture of accountability without dragging people into the room with you just so you can interrupt their work in-person.
Considering it’s very easy to send a how’s it going Slack message or whatever this seems more like a issue of keeping the conversation on task than a slack issue
But it introduces a whole new set of problems for your employees... but not for you, so you don't care.
Sounds like you don't have a lot of remote work experience.
The majority of my career (years before the pandemic) has been remote work. I find in office work painfully slow. I pair program quite often remote, and when someone gets stuck we also "just talk". Honestly I prefer screen sharing to leaning over someone's shoulder (much easier to doing supporting work in parallel).
I find it really depends on the type of org though. Large corporate places do tend to suffer from remote work because so much of the work is performative anyway. Remote small companies and startups the velocity is very high, but you do need more senior people capable of independent work.
Especially when you factor in the easy of "after hours" work, the amount of emergency stuff I've shipped around midnight is incomparable to the 'in office' equivalent.
Though I suspect the key word here is "my 2 programmers", I find managers don't feel like their doing work unless they're physically watching it get done.
Not understanding how to run a remote team is not the same as remote teams not being effective in principle.
Why take weekends off? Why take nights off? There are probably teams in some basement in china out working you right now. Don't you want a worker that can commit fully to your product? Have you measured hit to output from producing and rearing offspring? Those are jobs for the broodmares not engineers! Specialize specialize specialize!
> if you want to justify WFH, introverted-like people do not get the same level of benefit as extroverted-like people in this situation
I'm introverted and did just fine in an office, because the company culture was that coworkers all talked to each other about how they preferred to work (preferably no more often than once a quarter) and then respected that. When we moved to WFH during lockdown, that practice continued.
I've also WFH at remote-first companies that did not practice, encourage, or enforce ICs communicating to find and document better ways to work together, and have not been served remotely as well by the result.
So you're saying we should only put extroverted people in the office and introverted people get to WFH? ;)
Honestly... maybe... I've thought about this.
But I also am a bit reluctant to hire introverts for this specific (entry level) job. They will not ask for help to their and my detriment.
Being a bit casual and not making grand claims: I should hire Senior introverts and have them WFH. I should hire entry level extroverts and have them in person.
so you are accepting that you discriminate and acknowledging the in office unfavorably favors extroverts which is what everyone in this thread has been saying.
That's not a global issue though - I have people who I have worked with for years, we're highly productive and we've never met in person.
Especially these days where it's soooo easy to chat, video call, share screens, etc.
But would you be more productive in person? I am just describing my experience. In a 4 hour block, people will ask a dozen questions in-person. WFH, I'm lucky to get a single phone call despite begging them to call to ask questions.
I entered the workforce during covid, underwent a return to office mandate only to get a new job that is fully WFH.
I am easily twice as productive in my own hive than I am in the office. The office is full of distractions, noise, it is not as ergonomic as my setup at home and i get to waste 90min a day commuting.
In some very specific instances i see value in going to the office, productivity during everyday work is not among them
I know what you mean. I'm not sure why my office doesnt have distractions. We take breaks, but its not like when I was at a fortune 20 company where I'd spend an hour drinking coffee and catching up with people in other departments.
If I had to guess, we are such a small office that its obvious if someone is distracted and I can nudge them back to work.
Saying all of this outloud, you are making me realize I have the office style of a panopticon. At least my workers seem to genuinely like working.
I'm not sure that counting "How it's going?" as a productivity stat is the win you think it is.
When they say 'stuck...' and we fix a problem, I'd count that as a win.
Sounds like your problem is that management hasn't provided the right tools to be productive.