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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

Vastly more business travel is done for sales or sales-support purposes than attending conference purposes.

Humans are tribal animals; we respond to communications in person better than over video conference and we tend to trust people with whom we've shared meals and drinks. Arguing that that just shouldn't be isn't likely to change anything about business behavior. I get on airplanes across oceans because it's effective. Believe me, I'd usually rather stay at home with my family and sleep in my own bed.

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Well, to be blunt, so what? That sucks for sales stuff, it's not like I said conferences are the only things that need to change. Maybe the practices there need to change there just like for conferences and other stuff. Nobody said it's easy or nice or effective or whatever for humans to do long distance. Just that you need to start sacrificing somewhere and I sure as heck find it more reasonable and humane to start at business sales trips than family visits.

"So what?" Incentives. If subgroup A doesn't travel for sales, subgroup B who travels will likely outcompete them by more than the cost of the travel, or subgroup C who is large enough to have many local offices will outcompete A, making it harder for new entrants to a market to compete and concentrating business activities in select cities (which is great if you're rich enough to live in those prosperous cities).

I'm not making moral value judgments here; I'm making economic value judgments as that drives much more behavior I think.

Whatever you do, either some subgroup will find a way to take advantage of it, or you'll find a way to mess with taxes and incentives and prices enough to mostly compensate for the side effects. That's not a counterargument for a solution, it's already a given in the problem statement. If you find some magical way to avoid any and all collateral economic damage, I'm all for it, but I don't see why people should just wait for others to come up with miracles that may never come just because some businesses will inevitably win and others will inevitably lose.

As someone in sales, I think I would be EXTREMELY supportive of all of my competition deciding to do the eco conscious thing, and declining to fly to clients. It'd be great.

No chance that businesses will stop paying for people to travel. And their budgets are much bigger than individuals visiting family. Take a look at the entire private jet market - basically a very small wedge of HNWs and lots of executives flying for business.

Yeah, it'd be great, until your clients stop viewing it as a noble thing and start seeing it as a disgusting and wasteful thing. Then your competition will be happier than you.

People's expectations are malleable. It's not easy to change them, but it's necessary and it's possible. And once that happens, the game will change, and it will force you to change your tune accordingly.

I'll happily take the opposite side of that bet.

The opposite side of that bet? So you won't change your tune and you'll happily continue to do this even after your clients find it disgusting? Be my guest I guess...

It needs to be viewed as distasteful as holding sales meetings in a strip club.

I have friends who have done this this year. Good luck with that.

Of course you are right. That's why a certificate trade is needed, to maintain a level the playing field between you and your competitors.

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