People work longer and different hours under lockdown

Your rubric isn't very useful. Else you would conclude that taking heroin or posting on HN all day must be the most valuable way to spend your time.

You don't account for the fact that we actively sabotage our true ambitions. Not many of us are on HN going "definitely glad I'm here wasting my time instead of working towards things that actually fulfill me." It's just constant procrastination.

Being unable to identify this procrastination usually stems from rationalization. "Hmm, if something was more important to me, I'd surely be doing it!" being a great example of that faulty bargaining.

By the same token, exercise isn't worthless just because most of us avoid it. And we are often slaves to what is easy to do.

What is easy to do doesn't always agree with what we want to do.

There are certainly opportunities where workers in developing countries can do the same job for substantially less money, but very few companies do the hard work of really integrating these workers with their existing teams so it's just colonialism 2.0 where westerners who are trusted by management are told to create robotic tasks for the cheap labor in such a way that no one can meaningfully fuck it up. It creates a predictable result.

On more of a 25-50 year perspective, it has always been impossible for the majority of the world to be lifted out of poverty without those people eventually competing with us. The 20th century economic advantage and resulting broad equality of prosperity in the US and western Europe was a historical fluke of right place, right time that will likely never be repeated. I expect developed countries to start looking a lot more like developing countries do now in terms of economic equality.

I started my career in Poland, just before the foreign startups decided it's an interesting market to outsource to. A number of US owned startups and medium-sized tech companies started offering salaries 2-3x higher than the local firms. I moved from a place where my last conversation was "No web developer can hope for more than $4/h rate, come on" to, well, a $10/h place. A lot of this was made easier by EU, a lot was just US companies being encouraged by the economic growth, stability and the prospect of saving the half of their bottom line. With salaries at ~$20-30k a year everyone was happier than before.

Then a natural thing happened, the market became increasingly competitive. Ten years later, a good senior developer in Poland could earn $60k, but crucially, costed the company close to $100k due to employer taxes and other costs of running business. Some companies are fine with it, but some understand that it's ever closer to what an employee in their HQ costs, and some are slowing down the growth or moving out alltogether. Surprise, over-the-pond communication is not so easy even on a good day, and there are cultural differences to deal with too. Some moved further east, I'm curious to see how that plays out.

Going back to the remote work pushing down the salaries, I think that's unlikely to be the reason, because lower wage locations are rarely saving that much in the long run. Maybe we see a temporary dip, but I also look forward to moving out of big city and lowering my cost of living.

What I think is more likely is that the economy shrinks and the endless supply of engineering jobs dries out, moving us back to employer's market. That can have all kinds of ripple effects on the local and outsourced jobs.

I have no interest in cars and find it quite ridiculous that they can be seen as a social status, so I agree with your statement. But, people have different interests... some will spend their money travelling or playing golf, and some people just like cars!

So is cooking, eating, sleeping, daydreaming...

I won't try to glorify a banal commute, but moving from place to place is pretty fundamental to living.

This shouldn’t be depressing, this should give you hope. Imagine a world where even the poorest of people can have access to luxuries of their choosing.

The alternative is a world where if you are poor, you must drive a beat up car or more likely have no car at all, while the upper classes drive shiny brand new cars that become more powerful status symbol, because now the poor unwashed masses can no longer get their grimy hands on them. This widens the inequality gap, and stimulates rage.

And believe me, many people who have grown up with nothing aren’t sophisticated enough to understand the real goal should be “peace of mind” or sound financial decisions, rather than having a new car or whatever. What’s the average savings rate again?

Better to placate them with shiny objects and a consumerized roadmap to happiness than to tell them they’re poor and need to live accordingly so they can find happiness another way, while everybody else gets to be happy by buying cool shit.

There were expensive cars rolling around though: due to rich people were passing through from expansive suburbs to the financial district, creating pollution and externalities that the poor neighbourhood had insufficient power to deal with.

I don't see how cars can be status symbols if you can just buy a 3 year old car at a steep discount. Nobody is going to know the difference between a new car owner that kept his car for more than 3 years and someone who bought a 3 year old used car.

In fact, you could argue that what will suffer is living close to suburban office nodes in order to save commute times. Even more young people may choose to live in cities if they can avoid the schlep out to their suburban office (think Google bused from SF to Mountain View, but where you only need to take them for big meetings in the office rather than every day).

(For my personal case, I have a car and drive a lot, but rarely for commuting. I usually commute by bicycle+Caltrain, and only use car for commuting when it rains, to drive to my nearest Bart station, as I really don't like to bike in the rain. Lucky for me it rarely rains in the Bay Area.)

It's actually lack of density that inflates the costs. Nearly every major US city has zoning laws that keep density much lower than what the market would support, which artificially restricts supply and increases prices. If city cores allowed increased density, housing costs would be lower in both the city and the suburbs, and as a bonus, fewer people would need to drive.

I see all the talk of higher density living without car ownership as primarily driven by corporate interests to keep labor more concentrated and more easily controlled (secondarily driven by cohorts of people who haven't experienced anything better than that and therefore wanting to keep status quo), at the expense of quality of life for the average person. The monied interests wouldn't care one way or another in lowering this standard of living, but I'm surprised to see how many ordinary citizens get swept up by the rhetoric.

I'm open to arguments about environmental impact (and also others may prefer the NY style of living and that's fine too), but I generally see a lot of negativity about cars on in this (HN) culture that runs counter to my own preferences, and the apparent revealed preferences of a huge portion of Americans. Inflated real estate costs due to lack of mobility also meant I could afford a much bigger place in LA than in Manhattan.

Now, working from home, I often start the day with a bike ride, but since I’m not forced to go between two specific points, I can choose a route that has a lot less risk. I am also not limited by the length of my commute, so rather than 40 minutes of riding split in two 20-minute segments, I can instead ride for a full hour if I want.

When (if?) it’s time to go back into the office, I will go back to using a steel cage with crumple zones and air bags to traverse the dangerous intersections. The cycling for fun and exercise will continue to be on my own terms with whatever routes I think are safest.

Public transit "sucks" for a number of reasons, many of them car-related: (-) buses have to share roads with cars, so they have to put up with the congestion they are trying to solve, (-) money that would have been spent on public transit is being spent on road expansions to "solve traffic", and others.

> cars are the worst solution except for all the others.

This doesn't explain cities that have successful public transit systems...

We wouldn't have built our offices and homes so far from each other if the expectation was to walk/bike/bus everywhere.

Unfortunately this is a chicken-and-egg problem, where things may need to get worse temporarily for things to get better.

Where I live, my commute to work by bus is only 7 minutes slower than doing the same commute driving myself alone. And for those 7 minutes, I do not have to pay any attention except once to remember to get off at the appropriate stop for a transfer. (I could avoid the transfer by walking but I'm not that motivated.) And I am not concerned with not being able to rush out for an emergency because my employer, or my county if my employer did not offer this benefit, will call me a taxi if I need to leave in a hurry and arrived to work without driving myself.

Because the bulk of my transport needs are now handled, I can also see what the transport network can do for me in other areas. As of two years ago, my family moved to a place in our city where we need not own a car, so we sold our last one. If we desire one for a few hours or a day, there are services (far cheaper than the few hundred dollars per month required to maintain one for our exclusive use) that will provide one upon request. They even take care of fuel.

We can make these choices to wean from cars; we choose not to. And at what cost to ourselves, our neighbors, and our planet?

Driving you need to pay attention and navigating traffic and worst of all stand in a smog filled traffic jam on a highway, which is absolutely awful.

Cars and their associated infrastructure (roads, parking) cause and/or enable the distance.

It would involve me driving my car something like 15 minutes to the nearest train station and paying for parking (an amenity that is free at my employer's office). Then I'd have to take something like two different trains, followed by two bus rides which would drop me off at a location that is about 3/4th of a mile away from the office. The walk is then along a route that is not pedestrian friendly in any way because it partially along the major access ramps on/off a tollway.

So yeah. :(

The whole point is that in a dense city, you don't need to cover a long distance. 75% of car trips in NYC are under 5 miles, which is an easy distance to cycle with proper infrastructure.

Oh, I guess this is why low-density Florida and Texas are doing so well with Coronavirus, and all those super-dense Asian cities are having a tough time managing it.

Of course, if people are super dense between the ears disease transmission starts becoming more of a hazard. General population density evidently has little to do with it.

You couldn't be more wrong. There is mountains of evidence that attention spans have shorted, and parent comment was a perfect example of that. Can't be arsed to deal with whatever you should be doing? Ctrl + pgdown to the twitch tab.