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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

The planet is actually on fire, right now, as you read this.

So fuck productivity. We can manage.

We must sacrifice the inconvenience of wasting our time commuting because of some arbitrary productivity definition to stop the surface of the planet from being engulfed in flames.

There's also a pandemic that's killed 4.3 million people because productivity is apparently more important than containing the outbreak of a deadly disease.

Really, to hell with that.

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The planet is always on fire in a couple dozen places. This is about as useful as saying "The planet is actually underwater, right now, as you read this." Of course it is. That's sort of how it works. Whether or not someone rides the train isn't going to change anything.

I think the fire is metaphorical

Not really. They have become way worse as a direct result of climate change because of the way we run our civilization. It's systemic things like this (a cultural affectation for working in an office) that influence this. It's a societal problem that can't be fixed with individual action. We've tried to neoliberal our way out of it for 40 years ever since the bottling industry made the crying indian ad to blame the individual and it hasn't helped.

But it’ll change if you get significant portions of the behave differently. During the beginning of the pandemic there were loads of stories of wildlife coming back to certain areas, pollution disappearing. So everyone WFH will in fact have an impact.

I took a bit of a pay cut during the pandemic too. All this staring at my screen for longer hours was really taking a toll. Maybe this is a good time to think about what kind of lifestyle you want and how to get it. If Googlers really believe in the work they are doing and they are treated well, maybe stay. If you only want the money quit and don’t look back.

> During the beginning of the pandemic there were loads of stories of wildlife coming back to certain areas, pollution disappearing.

Most of that was fake: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dolphins-swans-italy-lockd...

"The dolphins shown in the video, it turns out, were not swimming in the iconic canals of Venice, but off the coast of Sardinia, an Italian island in the Mediterranean Sea. Dolphin sightings in that area are not a new phenomenon, as a 2017 video demonstrates.

National Geographic pointed out that the swan sightings were real, but not described accurately. “The swans in the viral posts regularly appear in the canals of Burano, a small island in the greater Venice metropolitan area, where the photos were taken,” National Geographic reported."

Fires like the ones in Athens are happening more often globally and they are a legitimate issue. Washington and California in the last year, Portugal 2 years ago.

I agree with your general idea, but society is a mechanism and many people in lower positions of power simply follow the incentives regardless of intention or impact around them.

We need people in higher positions of power, who have influence over those incentives and that believe in those climate issues, to change those incentives so that lower level power positions adopt the needed measures.

Sadly, I suspect previous generations will need to retire and new ones with direct awareness of those issues to take their place. And that will sadly take its sweet time...

> So fuck productivity. We can manage.

Higher productivity is the way out of this mess.

> There's also a pandemic that's killed 4.3 million people because productivity is apparently more important than containing the outbreak of a deadly disease.

No. See eg the covid sections in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducan...

> Higher productivity is the way out of this mess.

Lower consumption might also help.

Not gonna happen

It's already happening. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dematerialization_(economics)

> The planet is actually on fire, right now, as you read this.

This really isn't different from the person who brought a snowball into the US Senate.

> There's also a pandemic that's killed 4.3 million

Google requires employees working from the office to be vaccinated.

It's just a hyperbolic way of saying "climate change is real". Bringing a snowball into the US Senate is a hyperbolic way of denying reality. So they're different in that sense.

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