Society has moved mountains to make work-at-the-office from 9 to 5 (WATO95) possible. It's mind boggling how much society has been bent to pay the _EXTRAORDINARY_ costs of WATO95.
Now, given that society is what it is, right now WATO95 seems cheap. But it really isn't. Some fun facts:
-- the electric car longevity problem --
Electric cars have this giant, unaddressed problem. A normal 'explode dead dinos' style car, even if well engineered, has about a million kilometers tops and then it's just done. Just about every component inside is at the end of its useful lifespan, from the entire engineblock to the wheels (those probably ended earlier), to even the interior; at some point people want a new style.
A well engineered electric vehicle is nothing like this; loads of components (not the batteries or the wheels, but most of the rest) have a lifetime 4x to 10x that easily.
The problem is, an individual car owner is NEVER going to clock that many miles on a car. After 10 years of ownership even if the materials can easily go for another 90, there are newer designs, more comfort, etc.
How do we solve this problem? We could, especially with self driving cars, go to a model where we pool cars: You don't own a car, you just order one, one will drive on its own to your front door within 5 minutes, you use it, and when you're done, it drives off. This pushes utility-per-day up to the levels required to actually use up the components in a 10 year span.
But that is not practical because of WATO95: At about 7am-9am, everybody wants a car, so that whole re-use thing just does not work. We can keep WATO, but then 95 thing has _GOT_ to go; that morning commute needs to be smeared way out; a single car needs to be busy from 5 in the morning to noon bringing at least 4 people to work, hopefully more.
-- traffic jams --
Here in the Netherlands, if ~10% of the workforce does not drive to work at all on any given day, there'd be no traffic jams. As is, there's hundreds of kilometers of traffic jam every workday. How much fuel, and lost hours is that? How many billions upon billions of dollars of value is society throwing down this hole to support WATO95?
-- health --
yeah the corona thing. It's complicated; isolation is very bad for mental health. But is 'drive to the office' (even if we get rid of 95, keep the WATO) the best option? Can we go for an alternative solution with more advanced connectivity (proper video calling, social solutions to staying connected even without an explicit appointment somehow?) Can we move everybody to a '2 days at home, 3 days a the office' model?
The list is way, way longer than this. You're not wrong; working from home as all sorts of major issues, but let's not lose sight of the incredible cost of WATO95 culture either.
Society has moved mountains to make work-at-the-office from 9 to 5 (WATO95) possible. It's mind boggling how much society has been bent to pay the _EXTRAORDINARY_ costs of WATO95.
Now, given that society is what it is, right now WATO95 seems cheap. But it really isn't. Some fun facts:
-- the electric car longevity problem --
Electric cars have this giant, unaddressed problem. A normal 'explode dead dinos' style car, even if well engineered, has about a million kilometers tops and then it's just done. Just about every component inside is at the end of its useful lifespan, from the entire engineblock to the wheels (those probably ended earlier), to even the interior; at some point people want a new style.
A well engineered electric vehicle is nothing like this; loads of components (not the batteries or the wheels, but most of the rest) have a lifetime 4x to 10x that easily.
The problem is, an individual car owner is NEVER going to clock that many miles on a car. After 10 years of ownership even if the materials can easily go for another 90, there are newer designs, more comfort, etc.
How do we solve this problem? We could, especially with self driving cars, go to a model where we pool cars: You don't own a car, you just order one, one will drive on its own to your front door within 5 minutes, you use it, and when you're done, it drives off. This pushes utility-per-day up to the levels required to actually use up the components in a 10 year span.
But that is not practical because of WATO95: At about 7am-9am, everybody wants a car, so that whole re-use thing just does not work. We can keep WATO, but then 95 thing has _GOT_ to go; that morning commute needs to be smeared way out; a single car needs to be busy from 5 in the morning to noon bringing at least 4 people to work, hopefully more.
-- traffic jams --
Here in the Netherlands, if ~10% of the workforce does not drive to work at all on any given day, there'd be no traffic jams. As is, there's hundreds of kilometers of traffic jam every workday. How much fuel, and lost hours is that? How many billions upon billions of dollars of value is society throwing down this hole to support WATO95?
-- health --
yeah the corona thing. It's complicated; isolation is very bad for mental health. But is 'drive to the office' (even if we get rid of 95, keep the WATO) the best option? Can we go for an alternative solution with more advanced connectivity (proper video calling, social solutions to staying connected even without an explicit appointment somehow?) Can we move everybody to a '2 days at home, 3 days a the office' model?
The list is way, way longer than this. You're not wrong; working from home as all sorts of major issues, but let's not lose sight of the incredible cost of WATO95 culture either.