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Promoting Telecommuting During the Gas Dearth?
Oren F. asks: "The President of AeroAstro, Inc., a small aerospace company, has begun promoting his employees to conserve gasoline during these times of high prices by telecommuting to work each day from their homes at least once a week. How is your company responding to the current situation?"
There's no shortage of gas - especially with all the sheep in New Zealand.
..this neat conversion company!
Let's hope there will be more of them soon..
High prices! Sheesh. You should look at the price we pay in the UK (and have done for a while now).
How about everybody stop complaining about the high prices and start looking at ways of saving the environment instead. It will work out cheaper in the long run.
"Forget it"
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
Then expect us to make up the difference in the shorter ammount of time we are at work.
Someone hates these cans.
I would love to work at home, but my boss prefers to have me in the office. If I'm home there's no way he check if I'm playing a game or something and I guess they prefer to see me slack at the office, since I don't have much to do anyway...
If I would have a lot of work to do I might actually not want to be doing that at home anyway. I've done that before and I know I have a way of not getting out of my chair until something is finished which tends to shift my eating/sleeping pattern etc.
Sample this!
I've been cycling to work for the last three months and it has been great. Some days I have to use public transport if the weather is really nasty but I am averaging about 80% of my travel by bicycle. Lots of health benefits, zero emissions, very cheap to run. I cover 12 miles per day, some hills but I hardly notice them any more and it only takes me 35 mins each way.
A quick calculation to show the current price of UK fuel compared with the US:
$3.00 per US gallon (seems about average)
£0.92 per UK litre (at my local Asda)
1 US gallon = 3.79 litres (1 Imperial gallon is 4.54 litres)
£1 = $1.82
therefore, UK price is currently $6.35 per US gallon.
The other day it cost me £5 more to fill my car than it had done three weeks previously when I last filled it prior to a trip to York. I dread to think what people driving big 4x4s are paying when my little 1.6 Alfa Romeo costs £42 to fill.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
Obviously some of these are not always applicable , but where they are then they can be very useful . Both for your cash flow and the environment .. not to mention your health in some cases
:get some exercise whilst saving money and the environment
:not as good as walking , but when you're not in a position to walk to work this can help your cash flow and the environment
1: Walk or cycle to work
2: Share a car (Car pool)
3: public transportation : pretty much the same reasons as sharing a car.
4: working from home : The story does mention this , It is a great idea . You save the environment and money .
The Petrol prices here in Germany make me wish I had your Dearth . I always walk to work as if i didn't i would start creating a huge hole in my wallet .
People should be doing these things anyway , but a huge hike in Oil prices is a great way to kick it off .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
A prius does not cost $50,000. My mom bought one a few years ago and it was just a tad over $20,000.
At the time though, I thought it was a silly purchase from an economical perspective as she only drives 7,000 miles a year. Even now, with the gas prices going up, it's questionable whether the cost differential between that and a nice corolla and the increased risk of abnormal maintenance needs is worth the gas savings. 7000Mi/y / 30 MPG = 233 G. The Prius @45MPG could cover the same distance in 156 G... so you only save 77 G. $144 ($2/G) then, $231 ($3/G) now per year. If you keep the car for 8 years and gas prices remain constant, your only looking at around $1000-2000 in gas savings over the life of the car with low mileage driving patterns.
That said, many people drive 20,000 miles per year, and for them, the 3x ($3000-6000) savings may be worth it or at least around the break even point.
I think my mom bought the car for its environmental friendliness and its coolness factor rather than any perceived economical savings. There are probably other much cheaper more effective ways to help out the environment, but one can hardly argue with the coolness factor.
If you are thinking about doing an engine mod to save money, you should run the numbers before investing $10,000 into your car. In particular, look at the expected lifetime of the car and your cost savings per year. Also, it might not be a bad idea to take into account the interest you could earn on that $10,000 over the lifetime of the car. Eg, if the life of the car is 8 years, and you invest 10K at the beginning, well, that 10K earning 10% interest could pay for $1,000 worth of gass per year ($1,000/yr / $3/G * 30Mi/G = 10,000 Mi/yr... and you get to keep the $10,000.
I keep reading and hearing complaints that people live too far away from their work to bicycle.
Well, maybe we don't all need to own a house and have yard. Maybe a condo with a nearby park would also fit your needs and you could live close enough to work to *gasp* walk to work.
Our idea of the american dream has pushed the market to create huge sprawling cities with inadequate public transportation. How much will that house in the outer suburbs be worth when gasoline is $6/gallon? Could fuel prices go higher than that?
I am living my american dream. I bicycle to work in 10 minutes, I don't even own a car anymore, and tomorrow I set off on 280 mile bicycle ride that includes a little over 4000 feet of climb in 3 days. Bicycling has given me a new sense of freedom. I lost 40 lbs in the first 4 months of bicycling and have kept it off over the following 6 months...how many SUV drivers would kill for that much weight loss?
By the way, how much does it cost for you to fill up that tank these days?
I keep forgetting to look at the gas prices.
They try to make peolpe carpool more. They encourage this by saying "go ahead, carpool. If someday you're the passenger and the driver has to leave early/later than usual, we'll issue you a cab ticket worth 20$ so you can return home".
But hey, I work for an environmentally-friendly company... We don't all have the same chance.
What do you mean during petrol shortage. Prices won't be going down significantly until demand drops. Here is a good explaination of the problems with oil supply and energy exploration more generally.
What kind of circumstances do you think will cause a drop in demand significant enough to cause petrol prices to drop to the levels they were at the turn of the century?
"...we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that." B.Spears 2003
Some of the European posters have commented about options such as walking, bicycle, or public transportation. If you live in a metropolis here in USA, then those are viable options.
I live in one suburb of a small city and work in a different suburb of the small city. My commute is about 25 miles one way, 95% highway, which burns about 1 gallon of fuel.
Walking or cycling are not options, neither is public transportation (doesn't go where I go).
The only other option is car pooling, which is nearly impossible with a variable schedule including meetings at other locations that require a drive, picking up kids at day care, etc.
There's also a growing trend here in the states of people moving further away from cities into rural farming areas.
So keep in mind that some Americans have vastly different circumstances. That isn't an excuse to drive some monstrosity that gets 10 MPG though.
Because of complaints about the high cost of gas, the CEO asked my manager to draft a work-from-home policy. He's a butt-in-seat manager that doesn't trust anyone. His new policy? You can work from home for a maximum of half of the day.
I work at a university which is pretty liberal about this sort of thing, but I can make a recommendation to any private companies that want to encourage it.
Assign a work-at-home day. If everyone picks their own day then you'll never have a day where everyone is at work.
Make the work-at-home day Thursday. My experience suggests this is the day that you'll get the most productivity at home. Definitely don't do it on Monday or Friday or work-at-home day will just be a 3-day weekend! (what do you think this is, France?)
Have an online meeting at about 10:30. Set everyone up with cheap web cams and just spend 30 minutes to an hour on an informal, "here's what we did this week" meeting. Those kinds of informal meetings are good for small groups anyway.
Use an IM client. It's much better than email or phone calls for quickie questions: "hey bob, tell me again what the param list is."
Require a followup email at 5:00. Even if it's just to say, "I've been working on this all day but I'm not done yet."
On the technical side, obviously you're going to need to let employees set up a secure tunnel into a VPN - not the main company network. They need to be able to get to shares on file servers for example, and to hit their machines via remote desktop, but they shouldn't be able to hit shares on their local machines.
All of that said, I really prefer to be at work. My chair and desk here are more comfortable. I'm also one of the lucky ones who lives close to work and I try to ride my bike at least once a week.
I work for a big telecom that encourages customers to get DSL service so they can telecommute.
Our own telecommute policy? We're not allowed to telecommute. Yeah, we suck that way.
Fine, then pay for my internet connection and get me an equivalently spec'd computer for home that I use for work, and I will work from home.
Isn't the point of all this that you save money on gas? Why should your employer buy you a computer so that you can save money?? It's like if your employer says, "on friday you can wear jeans to work if you want to but obviously you don't have to." And then you cross your arms and stomp your feet and say, "FINE, THEN YOU BUY ME A PAIR OF JEANS!"
Uh no, if you don't want to do it then that's cool. Have fun driving to work.
I don't usually see sadistic pleasure, just angry frustration that a given driver is impeded and sometimes endangered because he has a bicycle in front of him in his lane.
THe bicycle is going slower than traffic, invariably, and the person stuck behind him is getting passed by people, without himself getting an opportunity to pass the cyclist.
This means the driver behind the cyclist is screwed. Of course he's going to be pissed.
Doesn't help that in my area, there's a cycle trail 15 feet to one side of the road, but most cyclists (not me for damned sure) insist on riding in the street to be "Seen" and to show off their fucking gay spandex suits, complete with fake endosement logos.
Newsflash Lance. If you're commuting to get excercise and save gas, you don't need the attention. Just admit you're showing off, and go drink bleach.
When I ride, I'm getting from point a to point b. I have no interest in becoming a spectical or demonstrating to the masses how healthy and pro-environment I'm being. Give me the lovely bicycle trail that the local government spent so much fucking money on, which I never have to leave to get where I'm going, and I'm happy.
"activist" bicyclists do none of us any good.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump