[luminouslow]

I don't know about you but we still use the internet/zoom etc. in the office so you still need datacenters

>lack of commuting incentivizes un-environmental and inefficient suburban sprawl

I dont understand this point, IMO commuting leads to more suburban sprawl? Also i think this is a very USA-centric problem.

[hayst4ck]

Sure zoom is still used, but I would be surprised if it's on the same order of magnitude.

I'm not trying to argue that commuting is more environmentally friendly, it's very likely not, only that I need a bit more substantiation than "it's obviously true," and I particularly would want substantiation on the long term. I also would want to understand if electric cars are being accounted for.

The reason not to live in the suburbs is a long commute to your office. Living in the city might make a commute walk-able. So a commute dis-incentivizes suburban sprawl.

Definitely a USA problem. Cars are poison, literally and metaphorically. I don't think the average American has experienced what car-less living is like and how much better it is.

My critique of your original post is that there are many reason's remote work might be better, but environmentalism probably isn't the strongest.

[bluGill]

> The reason not to live in the suburbs is a long commute to your office. Living in the city might make a commute walk-able. So a commute dis-incentivizes suburban sprawl.

Not anymore. Most jobs in a city are not in the center, they are in the suburbs as well. If you want a short commute you have to live in the suburbs.

Note that in most cases (US - other countries are different!) there are zero places to live within walking distance of the office. Suburbs don't have mixed use zoning so it is illegal to live near where you work. While city centers might allow it (not all do) in theory, in practice rent is so high in the city center that common people cannot afford to live within walking distance of a job there. At least the city center has a form that supports transit, but you still can't walk there from home.

Note that I said form not not density. Suburbs have plenty of density to support transit, but the way things are built mean a transit can't get to enough people.

[zer0tonin]

My team is located in 3 different timezones. Using zoom/meet is a requirement for absolutely every single one of our meetings, whether we are in office or at home.

Situations like this are extremely common in the industry, at least common enough to justify almost every company I've ever word equipping their meeting rooms with video-conferencing hardware.

[smaudet]

This may not be universally true, but voice-only makes a difference, too.

Audio is very low bandwidth, but for work it is usually more than adequate. Screenshare, where important, is mostly just a matter of providing small diffs over time, it's usually much cheaper both to encode/decode than normal video streaming. You can also run it point to point in smaller calls, which means fewer hops and datacenters (more routers, perhaps, but you were going to need them anyway)

[adql]

That's a nice excuse for when I want to just do what I want instead of staring at stupid camera just so someone can see me looking at them in the square on their screen.

[goosedragons]

Because if you don't have to drive to work in the city every day you're not going to care if your house is a 3 hour drive away. So you buy that new giant single family home with the large lot instead of the two bedroom condo that's in walking distance or the older townhome that has a sub-45 min driving commute. This might be a very North America problem but with the pandemic and the rise of WFH it's something that's been observed. The prices of homes outside the city have risen faster than those inside the city at least in Canada [0].

https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2022/06/staff-analytical-note-20...