The overwhelming majority of people who work around 40 hours a week have plenty of free time.
"I don't have freetime" is usually a tell sign that people either don't know how to manage their time / prioritize free time activities, or have made choice that they refuse to see as choice but as obligations instead (which implicitely just means they prioritize this activity a lot)
> The overwhelming majority of people who work around 40 hours a week have plenty of free time.
Overwhelming majority? Plenty of people don't make enough from their 40h/w job to pay all their expenses and have to get another job or have to share responsibilities with a working spouse. Having kids or aging parents is also a common demand on ones time.
If you want to argue that this doesn't add up with "The overwhelming majority of people who work around 40 hours a week have plenty of free time." then please provide sourced numbers rather than baseless internet doomerism.
Oh and I'll add that the average commute time in the US is among the shortest in the OECD, since the long commute boogeyman always end up popping up in these discussions.
Good point. Still, plenty of households can't get by on one 40h/w job. And regardless, childcare and elder parent responsibilities are things that I'd consider taking away from 'free' time, not a part of it.
Yeah. I worked 30 hours/week when I went to undergrad full time for CS. Later I went back to grad school while also working full time. There is a lot of free time in many people's day. I'm also not saying it all has to be productive, I know mine certainly isn't, but it should be deliberate. I love sitting down to watch a movie or play a game, and I hate when I get sucked into some social media for 30 mins or an hour without realizing it.
Idk if it's about my demographic, but everyone in development positions who I know has to work till 7pm. There are people at less serious positions who leave at 5.
This is not my experience at all (frequently visiting datacenters for my job).
At the main entrance, anti-tailgating locks requiring an electronic badge + fingerprints are the norm. Once inside, electronic badges required at all doors and in the lifts to navigate in the building. Badge + fingerprint to enter server rooms.
Deliveries are only received under the supervision of a DC employee (or received directly by a DC employee) and must go through a lock to enter the building. No extern (delivery person or w/ever) is allowed in (if somebody sneaks into the lock, the guard never opens the second door obviously).
The biggest weakness imo (but still requires a bit of insider access, so it's not completely out in the open for anybody to exploit) is that the registration process for new access requests seems fairly weak security-wise.
It's usually a simple email from the client to the DC provider with the date of the intervention and the identity of the person. Will the DC provider notice if the access request is sent from a spoofed domain? or from a legitimate domain but by another person than the one who's accredited to issue access requests? Will they notice if the person who shows up for the intervention has a fake ID?
Even with running - especially with running - you can easily burn enormous amounts of calories.
There are two problems with this saying.
First, nobody knows what a bad diet is in the context of this saying. How many calories are we talking? How poorly balanced is the diet?
Let's take a basic example: assume the perfect diet for a sedentary person, well balanced, exactly the right amount of calories, etc. Then on top of it, this person eats a 200g pack of Haribo 4 times a week. Surely this makes that diet insanely bad, right? Well, not really, it's only about 500 excess kcal/day which would be very easily compensated if this person had an active lifestyle. So how insanely bad does the diet need to be until the argument actually works? This saying is usually directed at people who want to lose weight, surely nobody is trying to lose weight in good faith if they drink soda daily, eat donuts left and right, and some haribos to top it off.
The second problem, is that people are scarily sedentary and view what should be a completely normal amount of physical activity as impossible. So what upper bound are we putting on the "running" part of the saying?
Doing 1-2 hours of sport 4 times during the work week, plus one longer physical activity on the week end (e.g., half a day hike or bike ride) is a completely normal amount of sport.
4-10 hours of exercise a week, for starters, is a lot more than what most people achieve. And it burns a ridiculously low amount of calories. Maybe ~300kcal/hour of excess calories burnt. That's ~3000kcal/week. You can ruin that in one sitting at Pizza Hut in under an hour.
If your goal is weight loss, and you have a choice between an extra hour of exercise, or eating one less Mars bar a week, skipping the Mars bar will be better for your weight loss.
Yes it's a lot more than what people "achieve", but it's the amount that people should be doing. Doing sport is not a chore that must be "achieved", it's a pleasant and relaxing activity that most people should be enjoying. The entire discourse around sport and physical activity is fucked up in the first place. When you hear public health official advising to do sport, they are almost apologising for it.
Counting kcal per hour of sport like that doesn't make any sense. 300kcal is 1h of brisk walking (non-sedentary people do it as part of their daily life, and probably don't count it toward their physical activity). It's also 1h of weight lifting, which most people would probably consider intensive sport. OTOH it's only 30min of jogging, which is a utterly trivial amount of sport for any healthy person. Those are rough approximations obviously.
After clicking the "reply" button of this post, I'm leaving for training with my sports club. 30min brisk walk each way to get there, and 1.5h of sport that is estimmated to burn 500kcal/h. Burning calories is trivial for active people.
That's the point though - if you get your fitness up then 600 kcal/hour should be possible on the bike and it should be sustainable to do day after day at that volume. Mix in the odd day of doing things super hard at 800-900kcal/hour and you're make an enormous difference to your weekly output.
If your goal is weight loss you should probably skip a mars bar every now and then, but I think you're underestimating what's possible after a bit of training and fitness improvement.
The exercise however will be better for your health and in the long term probably to weight loss too. The overall impact od sport on your body is not just calories burned.
I don't understand why people bring up totally ludicrous binge eating into this discussion.
Eating 3000 calories in one sitting is hard. Like, genuinely difficult, you're probably stuffing yourself uncomfortable and then in a food coma afterwards hard.
It reminds me of those silly TV shows with depressed 500lbs weirdos who just stuff their face all day. No-one normal is doing that. I mean christ it's only a bit less than half a kilo of straight mayonnaise.
We still understand what you mean, but FYI most of your numbers are off by a factor 1000.
A single calorie is a completely irrelevant amount of energy at the scale of a human body, hence the use of kcal as the basic unit when talking about nutrition. In the first paragraph you mean 3000kcal, 5000kcal, etc. Not 3kcal, 5kcal, etc.
The reference daily caloric intake is 2000kcal, not 2000 calories.
This is all made more confusing by the fact that in most of the world "kcal" is just pronounced "calories" (ignoring the 'k' which is implied in this context), while in the US "Calories" (with a capital 'C') stands for kilo calories.
But back to your point, 0.15cal/g/km = 0.15kcal/kg/km indeed passes the intuition test. For a 100kg bike+rider package that would be 15kcal/km => 1500kcal for a 100km, which seems to be the correct order of magnitude. Of course this is an obvious oversimplification, but it gets the point its trying to make across.
There's less distraction and better divide between work and private time.
When I leave the office, I'm done for the day.
I find somewhat ironic that people use an alleged higher productivity at home as justification for remote work, but but doing chores around the house throughout the day always comes up as a perk of WFH. Doing chores and being productive are antithetic.
Anecdotically I live in Europe and don't know anybody of any age who wants to work 100% remote, although obviously everybody likes the flexibility of working ~50% remote. Hating the office to the point of wanting to be 100% remote seems to be a very american thing, I wonder why. Average commute time the the US is among the shortest in the OECD btw, so the reason must lie elsewhere.
> Doing chores and being productive are antithetic.
Creative, high-leverage work like programming isn't a linear function of hours-in-chair. If working from home lets you focus better and be more creative, you can absolutely be both more productive and have time to do chores/etc.
I personally really enjoy my commute. It does take 25 minutes, but I cycle, enjoying the views of parks and multiple gorgeous monuments. It makes me move a bit, as opposed to my usual very very sedentary days when I wfh. I imagine this isn't as frequent in the US, as I live in Germany.
I have actually moved to a team that doesn't do wfh so much anymore because my days were long and boring. Life is much better seeing humans on a day to day basis (and I still have some flexibility for wfh and working from abroad).
> There's less distraction and better divide between work and private time. When I leave the office, I'm done for the day.
I am glad I have the luxury of having a separate room as my home office. When I’m done for the day, I leave that room and close the door, and don’t go back in unless it’s the next day or an emergency.
I don't know what point this article is trying to make, but I guess the author doesn't know much about running since he conflates sprinting and long distance running.
Long distance running is an endurance sport, sprinting is more aking to a very specific application of power/strength training. The stride isn't event the same.
Before doing any kind of data analysis, it's worth considering if your datapoints are even refering to the same thing.
Running fast and with high intensity is fun.
But getting faster over a same distance is a lot harder than just improving endurance to run longer distances, hence why most amateurs progress toward longer distances rather than better 5 or 10k PRs.
Not directly addressing the content of the article, just a bit of a rant:
The problem is that in a lot of cases, EVs aren't a drop-in replacement for an ICE car. The idea of driving powered by electricity is very appealing to me, but for functionally equivalent cars (size, range, etc.) EVs do not exist at a competitive price point for my use case. Just listing a few issues below.
- I have one of the smallest car available on the market (not available anymore in fact, but w/ever) and have no need nor interest in a bigger car. The catch is that I almost exclusively use my car for long day trips on the weekend, typically ranging 3-450km (I commute by train and bike/walk for other daily errands). EVs in the same convenient compact format do not have 3-450km of range. Maybe 250km advertised range at most, which will amount to less than 200km of real-world highway kms. Frankly I will not put up with (potentially multiple) recharging breaks on what is supposed to be a quick daily excursion.
- Related to the previous point. My small car cost less than 20k new. Equivalent EVs (equivalent in usability i.e. sufficient range for my use case which as stated would actually mean a much bigger car) start at ~60k. Even with the lower running cost of an EV, that price difference will never be compensated over the lifetime of the car.
- EVs are extremely convenient if you can always recharge at home, and extremeley inconvenient if you always need to recharge at a public charging station (btw the price at public charging stations is a racket in France and Switzerland, not sure how it is elsewhere). Like many Europeans, I live in an appartment and my car is parked on the street. The possibility to recharge at home does not exist. To mitigate the inconvenience you need more range to recharge less frequently, which mean a more expensive car.
> But NL is also a huge bike country. And at most roundabouts, bikes have right of way.
The fact that it's on a case-by-case basis an not actually a consistent traffic law is really awful. To add insult to injury, the only signage is usually a yield sign painted on the road that is invisible as soon as it's dark and the road is wet. And this is of course further combined with the absolute scandalous amount of cyclists who don't have lights at night and are dressed in fully dark clothes.
Roundabouts are already a traffic situation that require heightened attention as a driver, so in the interest of safety I believe crossing cyclists should yield to cars at the exit. It's too many things to worry about otherwise. But at the very least, make it the same everywhere so it's always absolutely clear to both drivers and cyclists who has the priority.
In built-up areas it's often (usually?) a bicycle lane, i.e. on the same piece of asphalt as where the cars are. In that case, bicycles always have priority. It's the same as taking a right turn: wait for bikes that go straight. Outside built-up areas it's always a separate bicycle path, often with some distance from the car lanes.
The confusion can arise inside built-up areas where there's a separate bicycle path, usually close to the car lanes.
I'm not an advanced or regular microwave user (try keeping a straight face while talking like that about microwaves lol, but I use it maybe once or twice a month averaged over the year) but frankly I don't see any performance issue with my cheap microwave compared to what one could expect from a microwave. Put food in, wait 4-5 minutes, food comes out hot.
What infuriates me are vacuum cleaners. To make them more "eco-friendly" it's even regulated in the EU now that vacuum cleaners may not use more than 900 watts. But it's not like vacuum cleaner technology has improved tenfold since I had my good old 1500 watts vacuum cleaner in the 2000s (rip). So how did they achieve this magic? Well, new vacuum cleaners don't vacuum for shit, that's how.
"I don't have freetime" is usually a tell sign that people either don't know how to manage their time / prioritize free time activities, or have made choice that they refuse to see as choice but as obligations instead (which implicitely just means they prioritize this activity a lot)