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A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her To Work by 7 AM (nytimes.com)
From a report on The New York Times: Sheila James starts her Monday, and the workweek, at 2:15 a.m. This might be normal for a baker or a morning radio host, but Ms. James is a standard American office worker. She is 62 and makes $81,000 a year as a public health adviser for the United States Department of Health and Human Services in San Francisco. Her early start comes because San Francisco is one of the country's most expensive metropolitan areas. Ms. James lives about 80 miles away in Stockton, which has cheaper homes but requires her to commute on two trains and a bus, leaving at 4 a.m. Plenty of office workers get up at 5 a.m. or a bit before, but 2:15 is highly unusual. "Two-fifteen is early enough that some people are still having their evening," she said on a (very) early morning. But she likes to take her time and have coffee. She keeps the lights low and the house quiet and Zen-like. "I just can't rush like that," she said. When the second alarm goes off at 3:45 -- a reminder to leave for the train in 15 minutes -- her morning shifts from leisure to precision. It is a seven-minute drive to the station, where she catches the Altamont Corridor Express train.
Imagine if you had young children you were trying to get to school. I live in north Texas, where it's not nearly as bad (although it's creeping that way), and I have to drop my kids off at school no earlier than 8 AM - which means I hit the freeways at the worst possible time, which means I'm lucky if I'm in by 9 AM.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Lots of people have long commutes to work....Who cares?
...or transfer to another part of the country. It might take a while, but one can be found which will provide the same buying power with a better work life balance.
The one time I took a city bus, it made a half hour drive into a 3 hour adventure, never even considered public transportation ever again.
Who gives a shit? She chose to live where she lives, and she chose the job that she applied for. The only things she's a victim of are her own decisions.
The solution to the problems is really simple: build more housing. How do you get more housing built? Well, for starts not having some of the most restrictive zoning laws in the country, and having people fight back at any housing that is less than ideal would be a major aspect. Unfortunately, there are people who are advocates for the poor who don't get this and have gone out of their way to block housing that doesn't have affordable housing built into it, which just results in total fewer housing.
Telecommuting would solve this problem, and be a LOT cheaper to boot.
This is not tech, geeky or anything else. She chooses to live far from work. Either find a different job or move closer to work. I knew someone who commuted 4 hours each way simply because they liked their job and where they lived. No sob story.
when we replace her with a robot
it's time to fix that glitch
Its been fun, but this social shit is not what this place is for.
Good-bye
I can't appreciate enough being able to work from home even though I'm a couple miles away and easy access via public transit, Uber, Lyft, Taxi, etc. After having spent years on the CTA I'd like to think I earned it though.
Fuck Ajit Pai
Woman wakes up early and has shitty commute, film at 11:00
A friend returned from recent vacation in S. Korea and Japan was amazed by the rail systems and speaking of bay area Caltrains, "It is so 3rd world country."
I saved this from one of you posters here on slashdot, worth a mention as I was talking with someone who said high speed rail and other such things are guvmint boondoggles. For me I use a car but then I've moved here in the 20th century so I don't have to commute hundreds of miles.
“give out surveys where people rate the relative importance of things.”
That’s likely not going to get you anything useful. What it gets you is a survey of what people think is best for them. And they’re not right a lot of the time, because few people are investors and visionaries. Most people are short-term practical people.
As an example, traffic is getting worse and worse in my little city. Everyone is talking about how we can improve the roads and highways, we’re widening some, improving intersections at others, but nobody is really talking about public transportation. What we need are a couple of light rail lines from the growing suburbs to downtown and the job hubs. That would likely fix a lot of the traffic problems. But that requires people to think longer-term, and rethink how they go about their daily life.
Instead of spending 25 minutes, now 30, now 35 minutes in the car commuting, they need to think about catching a 5 min bus ride, then sitting and checking email for 20 min before getting off near work. But that’s far harder to wrap your head around than “I wish I could shave 10 minutes off my drive to work.” Survey people, and they want less traffic congestion and a better drive to work. That frankly can’t happen without public transportation, but nobody wants that.
Hmmm, our featured person already spends a lot of time on the train. Oh wait, this has been debated before but it was about cars! https://www.c-span.org/video/?...
mfwright@batnet.com
Stockton and Sacramento are about the same price, but though Sacramento is further removed from SF, it's a straight shot down from Sac to the Emeryville AmTrack Station which has bus service to SF or shuttle to the Montgomery BART Station. Plus, Sacramento has a lot more going on than Stockton, so she could use all that saved commute time to actually enjoy life a little
So what? If the job wasn't worth the time and money then she wouldn't work there. She makes $80k a year, either move, get a car, or get a new job.
What is it with 3rd-person pronouns in clickbait headlines these days?
- "She totally did a thing, now you totally want to click, right?"
- "What he did next will make you click!"
- "Five cocktails and seven martinis get her through brunch!"
At the risk of sounding ancient; who's "she", the cat's mother?
I mean, good manners don't cost nuffin' now, do they?
So she chose this life style. If waking up at 2:30 isn't her thing, she could Drive and avoid public transportation and leave at a more reasonable hour.
She doesn't have to use public transportation she can drive further (she already seems to have a car because she drives to the train station)
She doesn't need to live so far away she can choose a smaller home, or choose to get some roommates to split the cost.
She can probably find a job closer to her home.
Sure cost of living in such areas have skyrocketed to a point where non-rich people cant live in the area. Thanks to gentrification and policies that try to get rid of poor people from living in the area all under protecting your property investment. But if needed they are other options.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
...but the comments here are an absolute shit-show of whiny, self-centered assholes who can't resist telling the world how much they don't care about other people.
This was in Memphis,
My car had broke down, and I needed to get to Best Buy from Highland. First I rode my bike to the bus stop. I had to catch one bus which took 30 minutes to travel 10 miles. Then I had to wait 30 minutes for the transfer, which then took 15 minutes to stop outside Best Buy. I went in, did my business in THREE MINUTES.
Now wait 20 minutes for the next bus. 15 minute drive to the transfer, wait 30 minutes. 30 minutes ride back to my original stop, and hope no one has trashed my bike.
A simple task, exchanging an item, became a 3.5 hour exercise in waiting. I vowed to never let my car become non-functional after that bullshit.
It sure takes a special kind of stupid to live 80 miles away, basically work 18 hours a day, and think "yay, I'm successful because of where I work and my $80k/yr!" No, you ruined your life, idiot. People need to stop living in that overpriced waste of money of a city or anywhere near it and eventually companies will be forced to move to a MUCH more economical location because they won't be able to find job applicants. Unfortunately stupid people like this are propping up the broken system.
Why should all places of work be placed in high price areas?
She works in an office at United States Department of Health and Human Services, apparently doing normal office work. Sometimes she can work from home and has made a home office, which indicates that she doesn't do work, which has to be in the center of the city.
The median home value is 1/5 at her home area compared to her work area. She lives there because that's a place with prices, which matches her income. In other words her job is paid too little to avoid commuting. That would actually be the main problem.
Imagine what would happen if salaries were not allowed to be lower than making it realistic to live within half an hour of commuting. The answer is simple: the places of work would move to low cost housing areas. Right now this is ignored when deciding where to place places of work, which force people into long commits.
The worst place for this is Tokyo where many office workers have to commute across significantly longer distances. However public transport works better in Japan, which means the railroad have express trains. Maybe it's only driving 70 MPH, but they do have rush hour trains, which fills up far away and then they go non-stop into the center of the city, overtaking the trains stopping at more stations. This allows long commutes within reasonable time.
Taking a bus to connect from one train to another train doesn't sound like a well functioning public transport in San Francisco, or even just planned with the big picture in mind. It's like each line is a different company and they prefer not to cooperate.
One can have a great quality of life in the Silicon Valley, provided one brings in $300K+ a year, or one is independently wealthy. For the rest, it is a rather miserable existence. The weather tends to be nice though - except during the rainy season.
...we in the central valley LOVE the people turning our beautiful farmlands into cheap bedrooms for rich Bay Area people to commute to/from.
Live within your means, people.
There are a few solutions to this problem, pick one or more:
1. Reduce the need for people to show up for work at a physical office
2. Make transportation, both public and private, hyper-efficient
3. Pop the housing bubble around Northern California (and other large metros) by popping the Second Dotcom Bubble
4. Add more housing in the area so people aren't desperately waving sacks of money around saying, "PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let me pay $4000 a month for a 1-bedroom apartment!"
I live near New York City and back before I had kids I used to commute on the train for work; did it for a couple of multi-year stints before I had had enough. I'm about 60 miles away, and it was easily a 1.5 hour train and subway ride each direction when everything was going perfectly. There are plenty of stories like the one in the article, and I remember hearing tales of multi-hour commutes from places like Stockton and Sacramento as the First Dotcom Bubble was about to hit its peak in 1999. I did my crazy commute for financial gain; I was getting paid a New York salary and living a comfortable distance away. Sheila James, being 62 and a government employee, was most likely priced out of the San Francisco market and is trying to hang on a few more years, as federal pensions are calculated based on final average salary and years of service. These days, you'd really have to offer me a crazy amount of money to go back to doing it...even with cutting my day short and working part of it on the train, it's a life-eater. I work at a place that's closer to home, pays less, but lets me be home more which is more important to me lately.
Housing bubbles suck. Permanently overpriced real estate markets suck more. Metro NY is a perfect example...not nearly as bad as California once you leave the city, but prices are permanently high just because so much wealth is concentrated here. You have everything from "old money" to celebrities to CEOs to hedge-fund Masters of the Universe, and if they're not living in Midtown Manhattan, they want to live right outside of it. It makes it difficult to find good housing a reasonable distance from work.
It worked too well, actually. It made it far easier to outsource work to Timbuktu for $2/hr. The remaining jobs require "face time" in order to be competitive with $2/hr Timbuktuians. It's one of the few advantages a physical office worker has over them.
Table-ized A.I.
Having children is a choice, in most circumstances, and rearranging your life accordingly is one of the costs that should be accepted.
Being an inconsiderate jerk is a choice, in most circumstances too.
People have kids and that's a good thing. Refusing to acknowledge that reality is just you being a selfish inconsiderate jerk. Your parents made sacrifices for you just like everyone else's parents. Cut them some slack. Someday it might be your turn. But with an attitude like that hopefully not soon...
I have a friend who lives in Livermore (living close in was not affordable) and commutes into the city [1]. Driving the bay area freeways during rush hour is out of the question, so he only drives as far as the nearest train station, takes the train most of the way there, and then gets into his second car and drives the rest of the way to work. Part of the reason for the two car solution was that there wasn't a train/bus solution that didn't involve him leaving the house at 0-dark-thirty and hoofing it for much of the distance.
It works for him, I guess. Myself, I moved to an area with less traffic and more affordable housing.
[1] To old time bay area residents, San Francisco is "The City". Never its full name unless you're talking to out-of-towners, and never ever "frisco".
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I am not trying to be a jerk, but why should I care?
I used to work two jobs. People do what they need to do to get by.
Why is this news?
Why was this an article?
I get up at 4:30AM to catch the 6AM bus outside of my apartment complex. It takes me 90 minutes to get ready and out the door. Some of us had put our college days behind us and no longer roll out of bed wearing the work clothes from yesterday.
Are you getting ready for the prom or something? 90 minutes to get ready? Seriously? I can roll out of bed, shower, dress, feed and bathroom three dogs, grab my lunch and be on the road in under 20 minutes. If you are taking 90 minutes you are Doing It Wrong. And I haven't been an undergrad for over 20 years so don't give me the age excuse.
Yes, this is the reason I read Slashdot.
Articles like this one.
Remember when this was a website with news for nerds, stuff that matters?
I don't believe for a second that the Firehose was used to vote up this article.
You know, having children does benefit the childless as well.
I'll do my best to remember that when in a restaurant, movie theater, or airplane and a child is screaming bloody murder about something. I'll just silently chant it over and over in my head. "This will benefit me in the long run. This will benefit me in the long run."
Just kidding. Children are pretty great. Annoying to be sure, and a little smelly and messy, but generally ok.
It's the parents I tend to dislike.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
This is not news for nerds. This is some crap story that belongs on FB or BuzzF'd
She is an adult who made her own choices. She sure as shit could cut that travel time down to 1/2 if she wanted to, still living in that area on that salary.
$1,600 for the one-bedroom apartment we need some more rent controls
I got a job at a local ISP. It took me two buses and a sky train to get to work. Left home at 6:45 and got to the place 34Km away at 9:20. This was in the Greater Vancouver area from Maple Ridge to Burnaby BC.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
The Bay Area is expensive, traffic is a shit show, and public transportation takes hours to get you where you need to be.
In other breaking news, water is still wet.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
1 - Proposition 13. An anti-tax measure that may have been necessary at the time, but went way too far to the point where Bay Area cities are incentivized to approve more business developments but less housing because of the amount of revenue they bring in. The result is a massive jobs-housing imbalance as cities gain more jobs but not enough housing to keep up, resulting in long commutes from out of town.
2 - A strong NIMBY lobby. Established residents are vocal in their opposition to more housing in "their" town. Councils feel pressured to resist new developments.
3 - Induced demand. Caltrans has an unbelievably wasteful policy of widening highways in the hope that it'll alleviate traffic congestion despite a mountain of evidence that this does not work and that more highway lanes just causes more traffic as people move out to cheaper suburbs to get a bigger house for the same price and a (temporarily) reasonable commute time. By the time everyone has the same idea, highways are jammed again.
4 - Anti-transit sentiment. Roads are less efficient than rails, but it's a lot easier to get funding for them.
5 - Single-use-zoning. Putting daily needs out of walking distance of each other forces nearly everyone to drive throughout the day. The result is massive car ownership and demands for more facilities to accommodate private cars.
6 - Fragmented local government. It's very hard to get region-wide transit developments done when each city is only focused on its own interests.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
It was only recently, say around the dotcom boom where people working in SF or Silicon Valley would consider moving to Stockton. Stockton is really far when you consider the terrain, culture, and infrastructure. So there is good rail and passenger lines from Stockton but it mainly design to connect Sacramento-Stockton-San Jose. San Francisco is in the wrong direction plus you have the bay meaning the rail has to go around or through expensive tunnels.
We have a pretty efficient system called BART but is was mainly designed to circle the bay and not go to the far reaches east and south. Back when it was designed, the east bay (Richmond, Oakland, Hayward) were the affordable boondocks for SF workers. BART is starting to reach east but Stockton is just too far. If Mrs. James wants a better commute but still have some affordability, she should consider renting around Pittsburg Bay Point.
Figure out why people want to leave the country and move into the city. Change that. (No, don't kill the city jobs, enable the jobs to move out of the city.)
Hey, we're currently trying that in Europe!
Tell me: What do you think will happen when you take in a couple million people with zero marketable skill (because goat herding isn't that big an industry in your country) who don't even start to speak the language or write it (or any language for that matter) who make the Southern Baptists look secular, and throw them into a highly industrialized, practically irreligious and open minded society?
If you wanna know, take a look at Sweden or Germany. Especially around New Year's Eve.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What's going on here Slashy? What happened to News for Nerds? Why the hell are you trying to tug on heart strings? Just give me technology news please. I don't care about people who make more money than me money and how far they travel.Please don't tell me why I need to care either. You're not going to convince me. Now get back to technology. I love you. Don't change.
$81,000 is enough to afford an apartment in San Francisco or any of the immediate communities nearby. At $80,000 a year an apartment would only take up 35-40% of her monthly income. She needs to live within her means rather than stick her nose in the air and expect to live in a 3 bedroom home. Also, Stockton is where drug addicts live, wouldn't step foot anywhere in that city, might step on a needle.
She chose to move 65 miles further away from San Francisco so she could live in a larger place and save $600 a month in rent (on an income of $81,000, keep in mind). FTFA:
Ms. James used to live closer, in Alameda, Calif., about 15 miles across San Francisco Bay from her work. But three years ago, after a developer bought her building and evicted Ms. James and her neighbors, she moved to Stockton.
Stockton has more for the money: Ms. James pays $1,000 a month in rent for her three-bedroom house, compared with $1,600 for the one-bedroom apartment she had in Alameda.
There are plenty of options a lot closer to San Francisco, for less than what she was paying before, and with more space than she had before. And looking at her old rate of $1600/month (which is still less less than 24% of her income) opens up the possibilities even more.
So call it what it is: she made a deliberate lifestyle/money/time tradeoff. We all do that sort of thing all the time, and don't get dramatic write-ups in the Times for it.
I get up at about the same time and make half that. No one cries for me.... :-/
*Have* to drop them off? There's no buses
Not when the school district has had to cut back the bus service due to property tax caps.
bicycles
They're not old enough to legally work to buy a bicycle.
or feet they could use?
Until child protective services kidnaps your child for being unaccompanied.
may want to hold your horses there
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
81000 $$$ a year for a government job.
are we all ignoring this?
The lady in this story lives 80 miles away from work.
Even if there was a direct, private road from her driveway to her office and she got to drive at 80MPH the entire time, it'd take her an hour.
Look, I live less than 20 miles from where I work, and if I took public transportation it'd take me almost as long as it takes her - between 3-4 hours. And I would be *very* limited on when I could leave because buses only run by my house on a very limited schedule. And I live in Minnesota, so there'd be a lot of waiting outside in the Minnesota winter.
Yeah, public transportation is crap a lot of places (San Francisco NOT being one of them - and she's lucky she hooks up to that one)! and stories like these are hardly news.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
If I own land in those areas, not being able to sell to the developers is theft. My property rights are violated and nullified by the high handed zoning boards.
California might be bluest of the blue state, but its citizens too have the Second Amendment rights. And pushed hard, they might try second amendment solutions.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Rent control is in general a terrible idea which results in more economic problems rather than less. It destroys most incentives to make new housing. https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/08/economist-explains-19 and http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ed-miliband/10802231/Low-rent-Labour-is-positioning-itself-as-the-Ukip-of-the-Left.html are both detailed discussions of the many problems.
Ok, I'm imagining... and in my imagination she moves somewhere she doesn't have to commute for so long.
Want to work and live in CA? Pay the price.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you have a housing shortage, demand makes prices high. No commercial builder will build houses out to solve the shortage and thereby remove demand and drop the price of the product they just made.
So there is ABSOLUTELY *no way* for a housing crisis to be solved by anything other than social housing that is kept in the state's control.
Doing so will also drop the social services cost since instead of paying "market rent" in a market that has extreme demand, the state or government only pay market rate for upkeep (or pay themselves the much lower "wholesale cost" of parts and labour).
This will never be done because house price increases help the wealthy and house price drops hurt the wealthy. And most of the USA (and much of the western world now) believe with no proof that if the government does it when private industry is providing too, it must be bad for the government to do it.
Oh bs Nazi - people said the same garbage about the Irish and Italians. Get off your high horse. The superiority if the Aryan race is a myth. We Americans and the commies debunked that garbage years ago. Your superiority ideology was crushed by a mutiethnic multiracial force. Get over it already.
A lot of people think that and have children, a lot of people disagree and still end up having children.
Too few people do otherwise to balance out the population increase caused by the previous two groups.
"That's not a family photo, that's an environmental disaster, and you framed it!" - Bill Burr, a recent new father.
Get a new job. I have zero sympathy for people putting up with bad situations. You either choose to have the power to change or you choose to accept the situation.
$81k is enough to get a small apartment in the Bay Area. If she chooses to commute for 6 hours so she can have a bigger home, good for her that's a fine decision. I bought a 1500 sqft house in San Jose giving me a 20 minute commute. My burden is a massive mortgage and property tax bill.
You can't have your cake and eat it too.
SJWs invading our slashdot with their radical agenda. Who cares if she has to take hours to get to work? Make it harder. Make it longer. Gas the poor.
Ah yes, another person with shit for brains.
Plenty of those refugees are highly skilled. Some are doctors, civil engineers, or lawyers, but their licensing doesn't meet local standards and/or they aren't fluent in the local language.
You're not tied to a bus schedule or bad routing.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
He worked for some medical support vendor for a 5 percent raise over his job in another region of California, hoping to get experience to transfer into other silicon valley jobs. After a year that hadn't worked out for him and their excuse for a raise was less than his rental cost increase in the East Bay. Given the cheap raise and the high rent and the fact that the social life in SF didn't turn out to be something he enjoyed (having the majority of his social fabric elsewhere in the state) he told them: 'Either you let me telecommute, you give me a 10+ percent raise or I leave the company and you have no fallback guy when XXX retires, because I was the only one in the company who currently has the knowledge and has bothered to learn how the technologies he implemented work.' Long story short, he commutes once a week, primarily for in person meetings, and the rest of his week is spent over a hundred miles away telecommuting his job which really didn't need to be in the expensive SF Bay office to begin with. Furthermore all those tech job opportunities he was promised by locating himself in the bay turned out to be quite limited, because many of them make the job requirements so niche you will only get in if you know somebody, schmooze the hiring manager/hr reps, or have an H1B like ability to draft resumes with experience listings that are a baldfaced lie.
There is a limit the school board determines is safe for kids to walk/ride on their own. Let's call that distance "x". Above a certain distance from the school, buses MUST be provided. Let's call that distance "y".
Where I live, that's one mile (1.6 km) for elementary school, one and one-half miles (2.4 km) for middle school, or two miles (3.2 km) for high school. But this is as the crow flies. If the one-mile commute is actually two and a half in order to avoid crossing a river, railroad tracks, or a large piece of private property, too bad. And even if it is practical in fair weather, carrying a backpack full of heavy books two miles each way in a thunderstorm, winter storm, or heat advisory is not fun.
Nor do school districts feel an obligation to provide bus service for students who have a good reason to arrive or depart other than just before and after the bell. If the student has detention, too bad; the bus has already left. And if the student stays late to attend sport practice or to type homework in the school's computer lab due to not having the use of a desktop or laptop computer at home, too bad; the bus has already left. If the student would arrive early to eat breakfast in the school cafeteria or because the honors program offers an extra class period before first period, too bad; the bus does not arrive in time.
downstairs in 25 minutes, check email, leave for train-station at 0445, train leaves at 0510, at desk in DC at 0630.
One anecdote is not data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_Eve_sexual_assaults_in_Germany
At those hours of the morning, how bad could the traffic be? Think I would sleep in an extra hour or two and drive.
....isn't the goofball woman that takes nearly 2 hours to get ready in the morning, lives in an odd place, or tolerates a ridiculous commute for a barely-subsistence wage job in the MOST EXPENSIVE place in the US.
It's that the NYT can cheerfully describe her as " Ms. James is a standard American office worker" and nobody calls them on their complete bullshit.
-Styopa
... is that no one of the super-rich investors in silicon valley seems to be attacking this problem.
How difficult can it be to build stacks of micro-homes and micro-appartments and instantly make a fat ROI while doing so. Not that much I figure. Why isn't that happening? Modern homes built of refubished oversea-containers aren't that difficult to build and done right have an abundance of comfort.
Seriously, this is the next big startup idea. Is anybody working on this?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Why the fuck is this here?
What the fuck does this have to do with News for Nerds?
All this SJW bullshit, fake bleeding heart nanny state idiocy is too much. I've been a slashdot reader for 10 years. No more. I'm done. Goodbye and good riddance.
80 grand a year and STILL BITCHING.
I wish i made that for sitting on my ass in an office shuffling useless paperwork for useless people.
Yes, some are consummate professionals. Yes.
But most are not.
As with ANYWHERE on the planet ALL throughout history, human populations will have small quantities of very talented, charismatic, well educated & marketable people- mixed among large quantities of more common characteristics. This is not good or bad, just a simple metric to show that never has any population been so full of 'awesome at everything' kind of people.
So sure, there are real pros mixed in with a bunch of common unskilled regular folks. As nice as they may be, they are now bored & restless- and that is a recipie for trouble. Again from any time in history & in any country. Idleness & welfare will breed contempt for the host country.
Tokyo is much worse. Worked there for a year. I was lucky and had an expense account and lived in a nice hotel, but all the people I worked with lived 4 hrs away by train.
Some of them had efficiency apartments 2 hrs away and about 3 times a month, they'd be stuck working so late that a "capsule" sleep bay 20 min away was used.
These weren't minimum wage people either. Even director level people did this.
With her pay, I don't feel sorry for her at all. She could move somewhere else and live a very nice life for half that salary.
People make choices all the time. I think it is crazy, but for some reason lots of people put up with long commutes.
I turned down a mid-6 figure position because it had a 45 min commute and I live in a place where $70K/yr will get you a nice home. Took a job for $20K less with a 30min commute.
Money isn't everything. We are each responsible for our decisions and choices.
I'm 60 and live in Michigan.
I'm not married and have no kids.
I have a bachelors degree.
My previous career in engineering support has pretty much dried up.
I now work in retail full-time as a greeter (i actually enjoy the work).
I currently make $10.94 an hour.
I live 2 miles from the store I work at.
I can walk to work in 30 minutes if my car is in the shop (bought used and paid for)
The fixed-rate mortgage on my small condo is under $450/month.
I live simple and cheap and eat pretty healthy (most of the time).
You couldn't drag me to Silicon Valley.
Fuck me Alex Jones gets madder every year
I guess that is "normal" for those on the east/west coast. I'm in flyover country, and have a 5 mile to work daily. I get pissed off if it takes more than 20 minutes to get to work, in a city of just over 200,000
Fortunately for her since she works a government job her office closes at 11AM. So she has the rest of the day to get home and sleep.
The remaining jobs require "face time" in order to be competitive with $2/hr Timbuktuians. It's one of the few advantages a physical office worker has over them.
The other is telecommuters don't have TV shows made about them. Physical workers do.
If Everyone does 'X', it will be "horrible"... always dubious start to an argument. But first, about Japan...
One of the smaller, wealthier, but overcrowded nations in the world is having a problem replacing native Japanese with more natives? They can't afford it because prices are too high because there is too much overcrowding: Japan's population is still *increasing* at a rate greater than the replacement rate. The problem is not a lack of young replacing old, but a lack of native Japanese replacing older Japanese.
The US has the same "problem", but it isn't spun that way. Instead it's spun as being one of the largest melding pots and its been published as fact how already, and increasingly so, "Euro-descended" people are no longer a majority in most areas (though they are still a plurality in most). Within this century Euro-descended citizens will not even be a plurality in most areas.
In Japan, as in the US, the 'mix' of national-descents is changing. So little chance of _humans_ dying out in Japan or the US due to "natural causes". Statistically, its usually the smarter people who put off having children because they want to focus and ensure quality of life for their children.
You used a poor example for your "if everyone does 'X', some horrible thing will happen" line. On top of the poor example, the premise fails because no group of people ever act with the uniformity demanded by premise.
It's never the case, in the macrocosm, that "EVERYONE" agrees on something and ALL choose the same action, so using that as an argument supporting anything is meaningless. Just because it is true that almost all space is filled with 'nothing' (or almost all space is filled with vacuum), doesn't mean one has to be afraid of or worry about the concept being taken to the extreme.
Actually most if not all the people coming in to Europe HAVE skills and WANT to work.. but entry into the country does not include an automatic admission to the job pool.. So most are barred from working because of OTHER regulations.. so the people coming in are trapped in a "yes you can come in a look, but no touch!". that is the issue. So if they have no way to improve (learning a language takes either time or money, and most often both) then add on top of that, a lot of xenophobic attitudes (like you are espousing).. and its a recipe for pain.
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That long time in the morning is her choice, she presumably sleeps very early. She's likely already sleeping when the sun has set, for a good part of the year (the other part of the year, night falls while she's still commuting)
If we move that arbitrary notion of efficiency around i.e. pretend it's efficient to get to sleep when the sun sets, then she's an efficient person.
It's also a natural thing, not only to get to sleep when night has fallen, but to wake up in the middle of the night and do random activities (perhaps mammalian ancestors did to check on nocturnal predators, and possibly moved up or did something if they sensed one or more dangerous beasts around)
Then she can sleep on the train, but this sleep will get interrupted. Surely it would be better to just have one train ride but she adapted and is managing not to feel stressed or rushed.
In particular, the break in her sleep from 2:15 to 4:00 is adapted to night condition by keeping the lights low and doing small activities (i.e. living) that might be modest but are meaningful.
Lastly just by sharing to journalists her non-stressed morning routine that she holds in spite of her extreme commute, she's accomplishing her job of promoting public health. I find her inspiring ; she does not procrastinate. Importantly, although her life is entirely tied up during the 5-day week she doesn't commit the biggest and lamest of inefficiencies : being solidly in the upper middle class (though proletarian) but living a miserable and despicable, hapless, helpless existence.
or the big bad bureaucrat (which is part of the sub-text to your post, whether you realize it or not).
The reason new housing isn't getting built is we stopped building infrastructure. e.g. new roads, water and gas lines, etc. The government built all that (they also graded and prepped the land for it). The government used to do all the really expensive work involved with getting land ready for homes. It was basically a massive subsidy to home builders.
Starting in the 80s we wanted to cut taxes (especially on top earners) and that meant cutting services. Infrastructure suffered because it was one of the biggest expenditures we had. It took a while for things to catch up (the gov't had prepped a _lot_ of land already) but, well, here we are.
Like most things enjoyed by the working class you can thank government for affordable, comfortable housing.
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The housing situation in the Bay Area is a case of getting what you asked for.
Deal with it.
So she wakes up at 2:15am because it takes her nearly two hours to get ready?
1. Mass rent strike + neighborhood/borough action committees.
2. Labor unions (not the corrupt collaborationist kind).
Enough said.
Move the HHS offices out of high priced San Francisco to, say, Stockton. But that's not going to happen because HHS, of course, doesn't serve the public, it serves the interests of the high level government employees that run it.
Also: this is a 3h commute for 80 miles, or an average of about 25mph: welcome to the world of public transit. The more cities try to push us into public transit, the more we all can look forward to these kinds of commutes.
Short version of the summary: San Francisco is expensive, so some people who work there live far away and have long commutes. Boo-hoo.
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"Carmageddon" is the new Islamic pastime don't you know. 100 injured today. What a score!!!!
*MEGA KILL...ULTRA KILL!!!!*
You read the article about how she takes an hour before she makes her coffee at 3:16am, how she doesn't rush to catch the next bus on her 3 segment journey, and see her leisurely walking out of the BART station, and is it any wonder that she works for the government?
I'm guessing she isn't exactly super quick and efficient at her job functions either....
At some point, you would think an employer might have the latitude to make a judgement call about an employee who's exhausted at work all the time from having to commute 6 hours per day.
How is this news for nerds? How is this Tech related? This is just some pity me story.
Mapquest says it takes 52 minutes to drive from Stockton to the Pleasanton BART station. I have no doubt it would be longer at peak times
I would have thought that it would be possible to carpool that journey and then take BART shaving hours off each day.
I'm sure the train journey is more relaxing (I like train travel too) but it's not like there are no other reasonable faster options so the 2:15 wakeup is pretty much out of choice, fair play to her if she likes it, not my thing
Nullius in verba
In Northern Europe we have decent public transportation. Decent enough that most people don't use their cars for commuting. And a lot of families don't have cars at all. But almost everybody has bicycles.
With a combination of excellent bikepaths and public transportation, commute takes from minutes to an hour in the worst case.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
At 81k a year, and not living in the city she should be able to get a cheap car.
Wake up at 3am, have a coffee, play a bit with the dogs, read the news for about 1 hour, take a shower, get ready and leave at 5:30, drive about 1 hour no traffic, leave the office at 2:30 and back in the bed for 7pm. I love it!
So one of the few hundred assaults was made up? That changes everything!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Odd. They seem to have moved elsewhere. All I get to see around here are unemployable bums who can barely communicate in their own language. Care to point to them? I'd like to find a few of those.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Enjoy that multicultural bullshit for a while and then talk. We're at the point where the immigrants that have immigrated earlier and have been naturalized are now voting for the xenophobic-racist parties, if that gives you any ideas just how fucked up the situation is.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Between this article and the one on fat acceptance in Hollywood, we're done Slashdot. After more than 15 years of being a subscriber and an occasional paying consumer of your marketing products, I just removed myself from your email subscriber list. Both articles would have been completely relevant to me in some other setting, but they were not relevant to me as a Slashdot reader.
WTF does this have to do with us? News for Nerds? What next, a story about cats or puppies?