Over My whole life, 5 out of 7 full days of work always felt so daunting and almost dehumanizing.
But 4/7 is mentally close to half and just feels way different qualitatively. If you have a job you mostly like, 4 days a week feels really sustainable.
Equally annoying is when folks say “Asian” as an ethnicity. That’s glossing over a whole bunch of different countries that have relatively little to do with each other apart from being in the same general area on the planet.
I just hope they don't hold a grudge.
My homeowners association can't pull off a neighborhood playground cleanup without conflict, disorder and confusion even with 6 months of planning so again, kudos to the 48+ countries of Asia for coming together in this herculean example of speed, unity and coordination.
I know its unpopular to say, but when I have my 2 programmers in office, we get sooo much more done than at home. Someone gets stuck and we don't message/call, we just talk.
Although, if you want to justify WFH, introverted-like people do not get the same level of benefit as extroverted-like people in this situation. The extroverted people will just start talking. The introverted people need to be asked.
Truly the hero we deserve.
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...
Companies responded by saying awe shucks, guess we will only schedule you 39 hours and if you want more you have to work another job. Oh and the law only cares about hours done at one job so doesn't matter if you are working 120 hour weeks you only get part time benefits.
In this case, “Iran war” is a bit misleading because the conflict is largely a missile and proxy confrontation affecting several territories (Iran, Israel, and parts of the Gulf), not just one battlefield.
Personally, I find it clearer to name conflicts after the primary actors involved. For example:
Russia–Ukraine war U.S. & Israel–Iran war
That makes the participants explicit instead of implicitly framing the war around a single country or location.
Just observing, not saying it's a good or bad linguistic practice
Another way to name wars, when they aren't happening to you, is based on where they happen. The war is happening in and around Iran. It's very unlikely that Iran will manage to bring the war to America. You could also call it the Gulf of Persia war.
You can also name them propagandistically, as in the "2023 Israel-Hamas war". Thankfully this hasn't happened in this case.
I wonder what they call it in Iran?
The majority of my career (years before the pandemic) has been remote work. I find in office work painfully slow. I pair program quite often remote, and when someone gets stuck we also "just talk". Honestly I prefer screen sharing to leaning over someone's shoulder (much easier to doing supporting work in parallel).
I find it really depends on the type of org though. Large corporate places do tend to suffer from remote work because so much of the work is performative anyway. Remote small companies and startups the velocity is very high, but you do need more senior people capable of independent work.
Especially when you factor in the easy of "after hours" work, the amount of emergency stuff I've shipped around midnight is incomparable to the 'in office' equivalent.
Though I suspect the key word here is "my 2 programmers", I find managers don't feel like their doing work unless they're physically watching it get done.
Not understanding how to run a remote team is not the same as remote teams not being effective in principle.
I'd like to think that you see "my 2 programmers" as "my team" but I've come to expect phrasing like "when we have our 2 programmers in office". That perspective emphasizes that we're all in this together, rather than serfs working for the benefit of the lord.
The "my programmers" phrasing plays into my prejudice that one reason you like having "your programmers" in office is the exhilaration you feel in seeing them at your beck and call.
It does seem like a glaring contradiction, but it's actually not. In the West, at least, climate rhetoric is a tool primarily to discipline and control the masses through fear, with actual concern for the climate a distant secondary factor. This is why those elites can cry crocodile tears for the environment while also riding on private jets to private islands and staying mum about intentional environmental disasters caused in the ongoing wars (which they support, of course).
In the current fuel crisis, mandatory WFH is also an attempt to manage populations through controlled demand-destruction, which avoids more volatile forms of demand-destruction that result in unrest, like not being able to afford food.
From an (cynical) governance perspective, there is no contradiction here.
The entire system is designed around making the numbers go up, not down
It was abundantly clear that one of Iran's methods would be to shut down the Strait of Hormuz.
Sadly, there are people in charge who think the former and ignored the latter.
I'm introverted and did just fine in an office, because the company culture was that coworkers all talked to each other about how they preferred to work (preferably no more often than once a quarter) and then respected that. When we moved to WFH during lockdown, that practice continued.
I've also WFH at remote-first companies that did not practice, encourage, or enforce ICs communicating to find and document better ways to work together, and have not been served remotely as well by the result.
Let me guess, you live in the West and don't need to worry about your family's basic needs being met?
Imagine if the world had aggressively invested in renewables at any time in the past ten years!
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/04/8110190...
I worked from home but a few times I needed to go to my parents house during what used to be rush hour. Less than 5% of normal traffic and fuel demand dropped so much that prices were lower.
My job went hybrid in 2022 and then return to office full time last year. Everyone hates it. It's a waste of time and resources.
Less pollution, less traffic means we don't need to use tax revenue to expand roads and less wear and tear means less repairs.
Take it one step further and give tax breaks to businesses that let employees work from home and close physical offices. Then this means less new office construction which can be used for housing to help the housing crisis. It's a win win for everyone except control freak managers.
In fact, I've added two days working outside of home instead of one because of the benefits. I think 3 days home/2 days office is the sweet spot.
You don't speak for me :)
I hate it.
This claim might be true but it’s simply not showing up in the data which suggests that even if true, the effect is probably minor.
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)
Still, anything to eliminate a miserable and environmentally wasteful commute.
So? The only people who matter are shareholders and their proxies (management). To everyone else: you don't matter as much as you think you do, quit being selfish and be happy you get anything at all. The world doesn't revolve around you.
It's still 5/6 day workweeks in the office in China, India, SK, Japan, HK, and Singapore. Same in the Gulf.
If you are using the cooking technique of "bhunai" [1], which is quite common in South Asian cooking, there is a large difference in food quality you can make with an electric and with a gas stove. Gas stoves are able to provide higher heat at consistent levels, and you can tilt the pot to concentrate heat in one corner to intensify the cooking. So I don't disagree with your parents.
[1] bhunai is when you cook meat with spices at very high heat while rapidly stirring it. I think the willingness to burn the spices during this process is what sets this apart from similar techniques in other cuisines, but I am no expert.
Anyways, everyone's affected - gas cylinder booking requests which usually take a couple of days to fulfill currently have a 30 day period to fulfill in some major cities. Roadside vendors are shutting down temporarily, as are many restaurants.
At least EVs have had a good success rate in adoption, so commuting isn't as much affected. But freight is pretty much fucked.
Again, this is a country that could have gotten a sweetheart deal from Iran, just like China, but apparently decided to become a little bitch.
The technology exists to "just talk" in high-definition audio and video. If somebody isn't asking for help when they're stuck that's a people problem, not a remote work problem. There are several possible reasons for their avoidance; if multiple people are exhibiting the same behavior it could be cultural (specific to your workplace, not the person's upbringing). Using physical presence to force their hand is curing the symptom, not the underlying cause.
Especially these days where it's soooo easy to chat, video call, share screens, etc.
Closed schools. Work-from-home demands. Price caps.
Asia’s governments are scrambling to manage a fuel shortage caused by high oil prices and a closed Strait of Hormuz. Asia is particularly dependent on oil exports from the Middle East; Japan and South Korea respectively source 90% and 70% of their oil from the region.
The energy crunch is forcing governments to adopt more extreme measures to save fuel.
On March 10, Thailand ordered civil servants to take the stairs rather than the elevator, and to work-from-home for the duration of the crisis. It increased the air-conditioning temperature to 27 degrees Celsius, and will tell government employees to wear short-sleeved shirts over suits. (Thailand has about 95 days of energy reserves left, according to Reuters).
Vietnam also called on businesses to let people work-from-home to “reduce the need for travel and transportation.” The Philippines is pushing for a four-day work week, and has ordered officials to limit travel “to essential functions only.”
South Asia is getting hit hard too. Bangladesh brought forward the Eid-al-fitr holiday, allowing universities to close early in a bid to save fuel. Pakistan also instituted a four-day week for government offices and closed schools. India suspended shipments of liquefied petroleum gas to commercial operators to prioritize supplies for households, leading to worries from hotels and restaurants that they may be forced to close without fuel supplies.
Asian countries are also intervening more directly into fuel markets.
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung on Monday said the country would introduce a price cap on petroleum products, and warned that the current crisis presented a “significant burden on the country’s economy.” Around 1.7 million barrels of Korea-bound oil has been held back per day due to the ongoing conflict, presidential policy advisor Kim Yong-beom noted during a March 9 press briefing.
Ryosei Akazawa, Japan’s industry minister, didn’t rule out dipping into Japan’s national oil reserves on Wednesday, adding the country “will take all possible measures to ensure stable supplies of energy”.
On Monday, Indonesia’s finance minister said the Southeast Asian country would set aside 381.3 trillion rupiah ($22.6 billion) for energy subsidies and pay state energy firms like Pertamina to keep fuel and electricity prices affordable for its residents.
Thailand plans to freeze cooking gas prices until May, and encourage consumers to use alternative energy sources, like biodiesel and benzene. Vietnam is also considering scrapping its tariffs on fuel imports.
Oil prices have had a volatile few days. WTI crude prices surged to over $115 per barrel on Monday, only to swing back and forth as competing statements emerged from Washington. WTI Crude is now past $90 per barrel, as of Wednesday evening.
On March 11, the International Energy Agency’s 32 member countries unanimously agreed to release 400 million barrels of oil from their emergency reserves.
Flows from the Middle East are still constrained, with the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed to maritime traffic. “While oil reached $150/bbl [per barrel] in inflation-adjusted terms during the 2022 Russia/Ukraine crisis, this situation could prove more severe…supply volumes at risk this time are dimensionally bigger—and real,” wrote Wood Mackenzie analyst Simon Flowers in a research note. “In our view, $200/bbl is not outside the realms of possibility in 2026.”
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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.
So... Office workers commuting every day create food to put on people's table?
For those kind of business having full occupancy is more important than worker productivity.
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
I read the headline and assumed it was "Japan and China" but it wasn't.
https://www.electrive.com/2026/01/23/year-end-surge-electric...
I've also done bhunai with electric stovetops and ceramic cookware like Dutch ovens and green pans and gotten close enough to an authentic taste - the marginal differences that exist are due to differences in ingredients in the US (eg. lower milkfat percentages, onions instead of shallots, different cultivars of vegetables, etc) and some inexperience of non-Westerners with Western cookware.
It's a very solvable problem. For example, the Indian restaurants my parents like and feel taste "authentic" use electric stovetops as well in the back, but discriminate on ingredients and masalas.
We could develop new technology, research culture solutions... or... meet in-person.
But ya, probably best to just call it "traffic" then, and they might be more receptive.
I'm a software engineer in a Product Engineering team and it's about 75% hands-on engineering, 25% Slack/Teams interaction and alignments between people. I find being in the office helps to make connections with other staff in other teams (eg. bumping into people while making coffee in staff kitchen etc). I think thats important from a career perspective.
I work from a library on the other day, thats a 30 minute drive. I tend to leave before 0700 when the roads are peaceful. My car is pretty fuel efficient, i try to hypermile it and get ~50mpg.
(no affiliation)
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?
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.
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.
There's no empirical basis for that statement, the people behind it have been making similar apocalyptic predictions for decades that never materialized, their models have no predictive power.
I group European & American food into their respective groups as well.
> Asia rolls out 4-day weeks, WFH to solve fuel cris...
Makes no sense, same with "I'm in a mood for asian food"
When someone outside of America thinks of American food, do you think they will think of Cajun gumbo, TexMex, Clam Chowder, or something you'd find on the menu at McDonalds?
So when you're going out for Asian food, it really is that. No sense in being pedantic here.
Under "we" you mean white / the westerners? Because the majority of us do not give a flying fuck about other parts of the world. Not important enough. One can easily see how our media reacts to tragedies on one one side comparatively to the other.
As for food. I live in Toronto and can clearly distinguish between quite a few different "Asian" cuisines.
The benefits of living in an authoritarian state. The CCP says "we will provide for cheap electric trucks" and it happens, no matter if that displaces tens, if not hundreds of thousands of workers in ICE car manufacturers.
Like, I can't really stir-fry on max because my range hood can't keep up and I set the smoke detector off. Outside of crappy rentals, I'm pretty sure electric ranges here are up to whatever, high-heat cooking wise.
For example, India worked with Oman, the UAE, and Iran to build export hubs like Duqm, Fujairah, Sohar, and Chabahar (the US has ignored Indian operated Shahid Beheshti port and is hitting Konarak on the other side of the Chabahar Bay) that aren't blocked by Hormuz.
By making sure Indian SOEs were equity partners in those projects, this meant India got first right of refusal on exports.
China, Japan, and South Korea all implemented similar projects as well.
Other Asian countries could have implemented similar redundancies as well, but they didn't despite this exact situation happening 3-4 years ago during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.
However I do know people who really do not care. They may say they care but their actions and voting record show that in fact they don't care (or don't want to make it a real priority). But those same people get very upset when they're stuck in traffic
I am easily twice as productive in my own hive than I am in the office. The office is full of distractions, noise, it is not as ergonomic as my setup at home and i get to waste 90min a day commuting.
In some very specific instances i see value in going to the office, productivity during everyday work is not among them
The technology and culture solutions have existed and been evolving for 20 years. It really sounds like your experience with remote work is not representative.
And this is a massive reversion too. In the mid 2000s republicans were openly advocating that we needed to do something about climate change and that it was a serious problem and then we opened the cash floodgates to American federal politics and would you look at that, oil companies have a lot of cash.
Keep in mind that the real cost of transitioning is very likely to be less than what we spent on the stupid oil wars of the 2000s. We can literally afford it now, let alone if we hadn't burned all that cash bombing the desert because of oil politics.
Oil companies themselves are fine to be "Energy" companies and invest in Solar and other renewables. They will be profitable just fine. Our country is tearing itself apart over a lie to ensure they remain more profitable.
Note, some people even think that would take even more energy in total per day, but that's not correct because a cooler house doesn't emit as much energy as a warmer one.
You're say things that even climate denialists aren't claiming are true.
I put my comment out there to trigger just this kind of discussion.
If by "American" you mean "Unitedstatesian" then I agree. But Latinamerican food is worlds apart from what the US and Canada eat.
So much of what they had looked the same as the food that you could find in Greece, but they were fiercely adamant that it was both different and better.
Anyway, it's Mediterranean food in my mind. :-)
Asian food = contains rice
European food = contains wheat
American food = contains liquefied synthetic cheese?
Thai, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indian food / cuisine even thought different is more probably closer to each other same like e.g. Polish and Spanish is closer to each other than to most other asian cuisine.
Statistically this random non-american is some sort of Asian. Therefore the answer is finger lickin good.
I feel like as Europeans, we're as good at importing American food as America is about importing European.
If I had to guess, we are such a small office that its obvious if someone is distracted and I can nudge them back to work.
Saying all of this outloud, you are making me realize I have the office style of a panopticon. At least my workers seem to genuinely like working.
I check in, and it ends up being story time about non-issues.
In person, its a 'hows it going?' and they say either 'good, still working' or 'stuck...'.
I would love if WFH was as effective. I could reduce my labor costs and probably have happier workers.
The only major similarities I see uniting the national cuisines you listed (not regional ones) are things like curries and rice. The former arrived in Japan with European influence (where it's also common in colonial countries) and the latter isn't a feature common to all Asian cuisines (e.g. Mongolian).
> Polish and Spanish is closer to each other than to most other asian cuisine.
I'd say Polish has a lot of similarities with Asian cuisine. Sure, both have stews and sausages, but flavor profiles are very different: acidic vs sour.
I won't be able to tell difference between gyoza & wonton if they shaped the same, but surely I can tell difference between ravioli & uszka. Uszka is IMO closer to any dumpling from Asia than to anything European.
We hosted an exchange student for a few weeks, and he was from Nanjing. Before he left the country, we took him to a Chinese restaurant and warned him that it was likely going to be more like American-Chinese.
He went through the menu and pointed out the dishes which were authentic and those which were not. I was surprised at how many were actually authentic -- it was about half of the menu. Maybe we were at a more authentic Chinese restaurant, as the menu was in both English and Chinese.
He was a great kid, and I really enjoyed the experience. He loved peanut butter and jelly, had to spit out ranch dressing, and did not care at all for pumpkin pie.
European food is things like hamburgers, French fries, hotdogs, and apple pie.
This is getting silly
Edit: added a missing comma
It's possible to drive results and create a culture of accountability without dragging people into the room with you just so you can interrupt their work in-person.
It's possible to build a high performing remote team, but it's not easy.
that we now live in a world where people are confident enough to make claims this stupid in front of a camera should frighten anyone.
Some basic logic, if China had the population of the United States it would have magically acquired the per capita economic output of the US in ~30 years, consume several times the energy and food it imports and somehow have produced several cities the size of Tokyo. The fact that China produces ~50% of the world's ships and has the manufacturing output of of the G7 combined is impressive with over a billion people, but hey they must have some space age technology to do it with 3% of the world's population!
In philosophy there's a concept called the coherence theory of truth, if you want to know if something is true check if it doesn't defy basic logic or other facts you know, great tool instead of believing what youtubers say
Very few east Asian dishes use the spices most popular in South Asia.
Spaghetti is far more similar to noodles than it is to any South Asia equivalent I can think of.
Yes, a filled pasta is a very different thing from dumpling, but a lot of European cuisines have dumplings.