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Comment by goatherders | Hacker News Reader

Not sure why this is being downvoted. As a guy that travels 200k miles a year you have hit the nail on the head.

I don't think you're travelling. At 200k miles a year, your home is the airplane. Whatever you do outside of that is your travel.

I see that you disagree. As someone who's done 100k miles in a year, at 200k miles you're basically travelling every other day. 100k miles is hard on your body.

I did some quick math and that’s about 36 weeks of round trip NY to LA. Is that really so hard to believe? My understanding is that there are jobs that are essential all travel (call it 48 weeks a year).

You're basically just getting over the jet-lag when you have to leave again. It's not hard to believe, it's just very hard on your body. I've done a trip that was West Coast to South Korea for 5 days, then to South Africa for 6 days, then New York for 3 days, and back to the West Coast. Took 2 weeks to feel right again, and I was in my 20s.

That is roughly 550 miles per day, every day, 365 days a year. That is a lot, did you mean 20k miles? What kind of work do you do?

200k miles a year is very easy to hit for US folks working in the consulting sector, especially if you end up serving clients on the opposite coast. It’s also normal for consultants to rack up unholy amounts of frequent flier points and take lots of nearly-free long haul trips each year.

Source: am consultant. Have hit 200k miles/yr multiple times.

A friend works in sf and runs an eng team out of seattle. He daytrips up there weekly, or at least did pre-covid.

800 miles SFO to SEA, 45 weeks... That's 72k miles alone.

The CO2 footprint of people like that is insane.

Assuming he is flying in economy every time, that individual personally generates 13.84 metric tons of CO2 pollution every year.[0] More than 3 passenger cars' worth.[1] The average yearly carbon footprint for one person in the US is about 16 tons, so he is essentially doubling that just by flying.[2]

Here's hoping that engineering team and others like it are doing something very valuable to the world at large, because it's costing all of us. This example highlights the cost we all pay when companies and teams refuse to adopt remote work for these kinds of cases. I wonder, after a year long remote work experiment will that team go back to requiring a weekly roundtrip flight, or will they change their practices?

[0]https://calculator.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx?tab=3 [1]https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t... [2]https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/carbon...

I'd think of it more like 4000 miles a week, which is roughly a weekly roundtrip cross-country (US) flight. I wouldn't do it, but some people do, and it doesn't seem absurd enough to assume a typo. 20k miles is a quarterly cross-country trip, plus an extra one, which is barely anything if you're considered traveling a lot.

You can take that a step further: it’s actually 22 miles an hour, 24 hours a day. Which when you put it like that feels quite leisurely. You could do that on a boat.

On the other hand when you think of it as spending so much of your life flying that your average speed over a whole year is 22 miles an hour…

I also fly 200k a year (pre-Covid). But it's usually a long-haul trip once or twice every week with a mix of shorter hops; not a 3h flight every day.

Mix of an active travel lifestyle, living in hotels full time, and a lot of work meetings, events, and commitments around the world.

(Not the parent, but) 200K miles/year is roughly a monthly New York to Shenzhen round trip.

United frequent flyer status doesn't start til 25k/year, and top tier is over 100k/year. I don't think it's a typo for 20k.

I hit 50k/year just going back and forth between SFO and YYZ once a month. I'm just a software engineer, with a lot of collaboration between our SF and Waterloo offices.

It's not that extreme. A colleague flew return between CA and Switzerland every two weeks (13 hrs direct each way). That is ~250,000 miles per year or about 5,000 per week.

Regular transoceanic air travel, like on the order of once a month, can hit that number.

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