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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?

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.

Not to mention that people tend to lump Oceania into it too.

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...

^ "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.

either the business press is very US-bound or parochial, or more likely, it believes its readership is.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What do you call it? It's a continent, right?

It's not really that different from "Europe", especially when you listen to Americans talk about "Europe".

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.

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.

Having the option of working from the office is a good thing. It's only being unnecessarily forced to do so that's bad.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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)

I agree, 2 days a week in office is optimal. If they could coordinate which days to reduce traffic then... holy cow dream world.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Care to share how you snagged that?

Yep, your comment is deranged.

But it gets solved when we are in-person.

We could develop new technology, research culture solutions... or... meet in-person.

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.

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.

Fair enough. That's a reasonable answer.