Varifrank: Changing the world - One cable modem at a time.

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Changing the world - One cable modem at a time.

Once while watching TV and seeing a Dodge Ram pickup commercial, my brother-in-law began to opine about the obvious fuel inefficiency of Dodge pickups and what a fool anyone would be to buy one. He offered that anyone who didn’t buy a Honda was an idiot, as only Hondas could get decent gas mileage, and thus were the only cars “good for the environment”. I then reminded him of something he knew, that I owned a Dodge pickup and that he had parked right next to it in the driveway. After he acknowledged that I then told him something he didn’t want to hear.

“My Dakota is more efficient than you Honda”, I said.

He laughed back and said to me in mid guffaw that there was no way that could possibly be true. The poor bastard didn’t know he was being set up.

“When was the last time you bought gas?” I asked him. He said he bought gas on a weekly basis, and a tank of gas is 12 gallons. I told him I had not bought gas in 8 weeks, and my tank held 18 gallons and as a result, it was clear that My V-8, 5 speed manual transmission Dodge Dakota was more efficient than was his Honda. .

You see, My Brother-in-law used his Honda to go to work. His work was 40 miles from home and it took him 90 minutes and two bridge crossings to get from where he lived to where he worked.

He traveled all that way to sit in a standard office cubicle farm, where he would have a networked company PC and telephone. He worked with no one at that office, as most of his contacts were actually other companies and other employees around the globe. His management team was actually in London.

My manager is based on the east coast. His manager is in another state. The Vice President of our division is not an American. Our customer base is globally and in every country except North Korea, Libya and Iran. I work at home. My commute is exactly 14 steps down my stairs into my office. I rarely drive a car for work, unless I’m going to the airport for a trip out of town, which is becoming more and more rare as remote access technology advances with the times.

Am I Efficient? You bet your ass, and I don’t need a Honda or a big expensive public transportation system to be that way.

I need three things.

I can do this type of work because networking infrastructure companies like Cisco invested and developed VPN (Virtual Private Network) technology, which allows me to use public networks to access internal corporate networks as if I were inside the office.

I can do this because the company I work for wants to remain competitive on a global basis, and wants to be as cost efficient and effective as it can be.

Most of all, I can do this because the city I live in made the decision back in the 1970’s to use the then advanced technology of fiber optics not just for business offices, but for all residential telephone access. When they put it in, no one could foresee the existence of home computers, much less the existence of the Internet. Today, the local phone company not only offers phone services, but it also offers high speed broadband and ‘video on demand’ services, all on a single pipeline to the consumer. This was a hell of a good investment on the part of the city owned utility.

I am not unique in my situation. In my neighborhood over the past 5 years I have seen a number of people do the same. In my cul-de-sac, half of the 8 homes in it now have people working from home during the day, all for different companies, all former “cube farmers” like myself.

Think of it that for a minute; 8 homes – on average driving an hour and 20 minutes each day, just for work. Now, with no law passed, with no dictate from “the central committee” our little neighborhood cut the total miles driven by the people in this one cul-de-sac in half.

5 days a week, times 80 minutes for 8 homes = 53 hours a week.
5 days a week, times 80 minutes for 4 homes = 26 hours a week.

Half.

Think of it from a fuel ‘supply and demand’ basis, we dramatically dropped demand and use of fuel in our little cul-de-sac. Which would do what to the price of gas?

Exactly.

Do you think a Toyota Prius could do that? No. How ‘bout a neat Hydrogen Car? No.

Now, I’m not saying that everyone can or should try working remotely. I am saying that a very high percentage of people today can and should do it. It will never be 100% and that’s just fine, the impact is the same whether you go into work or not. What is stopping most people from doing it is more of an ingrained cultural habit than not the lack of infrastructure. We are raised to “go to work”. No one stops and asks “ what am I doing when I get there that I cannot do from home”( and as I often say – What is there left that I can not do BETTER from home?).

The next time you are driving to work, try this exercise. Count four cars, now on the fourth car, imagine that it’s gone, that it’s not on the road. Keep repeating that until you get to where you are going. That’s what a 25% drop in traffic would be like.

Now, what do we need to make this revolution happen? Do we need years of expensive ‘Research and Development’ with only the hope of a “maybe” at the end of it all? This is what is being proposed with Hydrogen Car technology, its possible, but its still a maybe and even if it worked and worked well tomorrow, it would take a great deal of time and money to roll out the technology.

In the case of “working remote” it’s already happening. There’s even a name for it, its called “Homesourcing”. Rather than companies “outsourcing” their work to far off parts of the world, they are learning that it’s often just as cheap if not cheaper to allow their employees to work remotely rather than coming to an office. The company doesn’t require as much office space (and thus real estate) and employees get a tremendous benefit of being able to work without the added cost of commuting. As I’ve illustrated with my little part of the world, it’s a trend that is already underway without government edicts. The market itself has forced companies to be as competitive as they can be, and the same technology and systems that allow US companies to outsource to India can also be used to let you work in your pajamas from your ancestral home in Mt. Airy North Carolina instead of the inner city hell you once had to settle for because thats where the work was.

I say this with total command of my faculties that fully 25% of the US workforce could start working remotely within 90 days.

Again, 25% of the manhours and miles driven (and thus gallons of gas saved) spent driving to and from work could be eliminated within 90 days.

This is achievable. Today.

Imagine what would happen to the world fuel markets if there were anything like a 25% drop in demand for fuel. Just a 5% change would have dramatic effect. I didn’t choose 25% because it’s the ceiling either, I just picked it because I think its doable today, with little or no effort on the part of companies or the government. I say this because I watched it happen once before.

In 1989 I was a part of a vast experiment in forced “homesourcing”. Like 3 million other people, I was working in an office in San Francisco when the Loma Prieta earthquake occurred. The loss of the Bay Bridge and the damage to streets and offices in the city itself put a severe cramp in the ability of people to get to and from San Francisco to work.

Did they stop working? Did the form an office worker ‘trail of tears’ and migrate to other climes where the hunting and gathering was better? Did they die of starvation at the side of the road?

No. They took their new office PC’s home and began to work out of their homes, coming into the city only when it was absolutely necessary. PC’s had only just arrived, but they made a world of difference in the ability to distrbute work. Now, in 1989, Corporate data networks were still kind of primitive, there was no Internet and frankly there was no broadband, but you could get your email and you could certainly write you documents and send them to others. It worked. Processing power was now portable; you no longer had to be at the office to get something done.

Your work was where you were, rather than the other way around.

Most people came out of that experience saying that while they could not work at home every day, it was sure nice to not have to commute, and they were all shocked at how productive they were because everyone expected that productivity would go down with the disruption. It didnt, to everyones surprise, it went up. Six months after the quake, things were back to normal in the city, but people continued to work at home at least one day a week. 1989 was the start of “work at home’ Fridays, a part of modern corporate life that we’ve all learned to accept today as normal, but it wasn’t always so.

Now I loathe discussing the idea of the government stepping in and “doing something”. The worst political disease I know of is the “Do Something” disease. I see it happen all the time, and I see it in the Presidents proposed Budget with the R&D dollars for Hydrogen technology. I also see it on the left with the knee jerk reactions about “the need for more dollars for AMTRACK. When I see it I just want to scream:” THE WORLD HAS CHANGED – GET WITH THE PICTURE!!”

We don’t live in tenements at the edge of cities. We don’t work in factories powered by the wheel at the old millstream. We live in cities that are a mix of work and suburb. The “Age of Hierarchy” is over; this is “the Distributed Age”. We all work in the global market, and many more of us every day are working with people we will never meet as a normal part of our daily work.

So, why are we still going to an office? If I want to talk to coworkers in India, I pick up the phone, I can do that anywhere. If I need to correspond, I send an email, again I can do that anywhere. If we are working together on a particular problem, we use desktop collaboration software so that they can watch as I demonstrate the situation from my desktop, just as if they were sitting in the same cubicle with me, again I can do that anywhere.

So, why are we still going to an office? Our coworkers arent there, Our customers arent there, our bosses arent there! For far too many people who work in offices, it is done for no other reason than its always been done that way, and for me, that is the absolute worst reason to do anything.

For the left and all its talk about wanting to "save the environment", it’s just talk. They are more interested in the power that comes with the extortion dollars they get scaring the hell out of businesses. If you really want to save the environment, do something to encourage homesourcing. You see, unlike all the other solutions for “saving the environment” or “making the US less dependent on foreign oil” “homesourcing” is largely a cultural problem, not a technology problem. Homesourcing can be put into practice and have an immediate and dramatic effect - TODAY. And the effect would be staggering.

If everyone who could do it worked remotely for just one day a week, the impact to fuel demand in the US would be amazing. People don’t need to buy new fuel efficient cars, and we don’t need exotic new fuels, we just need to drive less. Until recently, driving less meant a dramatic decrease in productivity. However, with the advent of the internet, there is no longer any loss of productivity just because you don’t go anywhere. In the 1970’s if you could not get to work, you were screwed and that was it. In the 1980s, it was better, you could at least use a PC at home if you had to, but it was still less than what would be optimum. But since the 1990s with the full availability of goods and services via the Internet, you no longer suffer if you are not in a particular place.

The work is now where you are, rather than the other way around.

Everyday, in every city more and more people have access to broadband network facilities. If I were to get the government to do anything, it would be to accelerate the expansion of broadband networks in the US, but it isn’t necessary, it would just be nice. If I were to get the government to do anything it would be to encourage more homesourcing, but it isn’t necessary, it would just be nice.

If you are a small town and you want to become more competitive as an economic base, there is no better way to do it than to ensure that you have broadband facilities in your town. Once upon a time, the Federal government devised a program called “Rural Electrification” that brought electric power to farms and ranches. It also brought paved roads, which helped bring goods out of the hinterlands and into the markets. The result was an order of magnitude improvement in efficiency for farming and ranching in the US. Rural Electrification was a huge project, The Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Hoover, Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams were all a part of it. It changed the face of America and it was a damn good investment.

For my money, I would prefer to see the President propose “Rural Internet-ification” to take the place of the “Rural Electrification” project. I would prefer this as opposed to the boondoggle of “Hydrogen powered cars”. If Democrats were more interested in helping people than proving to themselves that “Bush is an Idiot” then they would begin to propose programs like “Rural Internetification” to actually help people in general and help the "red states" become Democratic again.

Let’s see the Democrats propose a program that actually makes American business more competitive on a global basis like widespread access to broadband to employees to make Homesourcing a reality for more people. Let’s see Democrats propose a program that could actually improve the lives of people, rather than just increase the power of politicians over their lives.

While they are doing that, I will be working with my neighbors, quietly and without fanfare transforming the world in which we live, one cable modem at a time.

Clarification: I'm not "blaming Democrats" for anything that I'm not also "blaming Republicans". Both parties are reacting to budget priorities in terms of what helps their parties maintain and achieve power, rather than what is actually effective and helpful in peoples lives.

It's just that Democrats say that they are "for the people" so I expect more of them in that area as a result. When people discuss the problem of "what are we going to do about fossil fuels" I would like to hear some other answer except " let's put everyone on a train". My essay should have provided you with another direction to take the conversation.

also - I have no intention of ever getting a Prius. In the world I live in you are free to buy whatever the hell you want for whatever reason that suits you without fear of retribution from the thought police.

I hope the world you live in is also liberated from the tyranny of the mob.

(UPDATE:) Reason #24 for why there is a Second Amendment to the Constitution can be found here at Vodkapundit.

Posted @ February 10, 2005 01:10 AM | Current Events

So you seem to believe that working from home is:

a) Republican initiative and
b) A viable solution to reducing the drain on fossil fuels.

You realise that if you were actually dead your Dodge would have even better mileage than a Honda? Somewhere I think you miss the point. But hey, it gave you a chance to blame democrats for...the Toyota Prius. Well done.

Posted by: Adamant at February 10, 2005 05:01 AM

VF,

You are a right-wing, capitalistic pig, trying to keep the working man down. You openly admit that not everyone can take advantage of this home-sourcing idea, and therefore you are disenfranchising a good portion of the population. Remember the mantra of the Democrats, if something isn’t good for everyone, its not good for anyone (as with personal accounts for social security). Or is that the mantra of a socialist? I always get the two confused.

Sarcastically yours,

Ray-Ray

Posted by: Ray-Ray at February 10, 2005 11:23 AM

Hey! I am one of you. I actually work out of my home office 70% of the time. I only go down to the main office in town for three days a month and that is to interact with the staff there. Sometimes you can just get more from face to face meetings. People occasionally feel disassociated from people who aren't in their office all the time and don't know or don't feel comfortable about what they should or could be asking.

The rest of the time, I travel via air plane to other locations, about 6 days of the month.

As a matter of fact, I drive an F150 V8 with a 20 gallon tank. I last filled it up two weeks ago. Strangely, when I do drive it now to go visit family or shop on the weekends, it actually has gotten BETTER gas mileage. I recently calculated that I am now getting 21mpg. when I was driving down to the office, I was only getting 18.

I am with you that many things can be done from home and would make it so much cheaper for companies.

You are right also that people are concerned about productivity. Whether good or bad, what I noticed was that I might have to leave a project in the middle of the day, but I can go back and address it in the evening with a fresh perspective and sometimes get better results. That's good because the company get's more of my "productive" time without having to worry about whether I am at the office by 8:30 and leaving at 5.

The difficulty is in balancing out the time. We could drift into a situation where we have run our work time totally into our play time. For a worker, on average that means that we are getting less per hour (for a salaried person). However, as a salaried person that did the office thing, too, I noted that going into the office didn't stop me from working late or working from home anyway. So, deducting the commute time, I am either working the same amount anyway or am working less.

I do believe that this idea as a cost saving initiative was pushed also in the 90s when internet became more prevalent. I don't blame the dems or the reps for this problem. What you have to get around is the corporate culture, as you note. Corporations fear that kind of change because they can't see it, touch it and manage it to the nth degree. At least they think that. They fear that "lost productivity" issue very much.

so, how do we change the corporate culture?

Posted by: Kat-Missouri/USA at February 10, 2005 05:52 PM

May I stand and applaud? What an excellent essay!

Six years ago, due to a death in the family and an aging parent, we made the decison to move 2000 miles across the country.

I was already working from home at the time,and as such, I had no concerns about employment. I was able to pack up my sytem, and 4 days later, unpack it in a new home, plug it in and get back to work. It removed what would normally be a huge source of stress.

Also, since my husbands "real world" job at the time required him to be on the road, we weren't restricted to living in a certain area.

We were able to purchase a home 90 miles from the nearest "big city", where housing and living expenses are substantially lower..and honestly, make our dream of returning to rural living a reality.

I'm doubly foutunate, as I have a disability which makes it difficult for me to work under normal circumstances. Since my job only requiired results, and didn't require a set schedule, they didn't care if I was working at 3 am, or 8-5, it didn't matter to them if I worked in 2 hour increments, and then went to take a nap..as long as the results were there, that was all that mattered.

As a result. I was able to keep working when normal circumstances would have kept me out of the workforce. As a result, I no longer require a corporate wardrobe, as a result, we only require 1 vehicle in the family instead of two. As a result, that vehicle (A Dodge Ram 1500) generally sits in my driveway a majority of the time, and like you, it only requires gassing up once every few weeks.

The cost of living in our household has dropped by more than half, when you take into account the housing/tax costs, the fuel costs, the savings from only owning and insuring one vehicle. It made it possible for us to take some of that savings, and build a second home on the property for my husbands mother.

Then there are the benefits that can't be assigned a cost or a savings. Since my job only required a phone, a computer and internet access, I was able to travel with my husband quite often. You can't put a price on the benefit that had to my marriage. And then there is the biggie....My health has improved and directly attibute that to a MUCH lower stress factor.

Oh, there was a biggie for hubby as well. He was able to afford that Harley that he has always wanted.LOL

There were only two negatives for me. The lack of human face to face interaction, I did miss the social aspect of working within an office, and learning to pace myself so I didn't take on too much instead of learning to walk away from my office when that days project was complete.

The change is already rapidly coming in colleges and universities. My daughter was able to complete more than half of her degree in online courses. Again, a savings of fuel, as well as a savings on moms nerves, as I knew she didn't have to travel in winter weather. She scheduled all of her winter classes online.

Kat is right, this isn't a rep, dem thing, this is a corporate thing, and I hope to see that change for others in the future. For us, it's been a win/win/win situation.

Posted by: AGruntsWife at February 10, 2005 09:04 PM

As one of those in the cubicle farm, I'm not sure that I entirely agree with 1 out of 4 employees working from home. We've outsourced a large amount of our IT admin work overseas in the last year and, so far, there's no payoff yet. In fact, it's costing us money. Too much happens in the office, and keeping the offsite people in the loop can be excessively difficult.
However... I'm not disagreeing with you AT ALL re: the benefits of working offsite. In fact, I'd make a bet that, at minimum, 50 to 60% of us in the cubicle farms could easily work from home one day a week. Now, what might that do for fuel efficiency?

Posted by: kellymo at February 13, 2005 07:19 PM

That's going to work ok for the people who can actually do worthwhile work from home, probably 25-50% of people at most. For many of those that won't be an option.

Hybrid cars are still are good option for the remainder.

But you are right, this is a good partial solution. I'm not sure how it's much better than DSL though, which is rolled out everywhere (at least in terms of being able to work).

Posted by: 2468 at February 13, 2005 07:36 PM

"So you seem to believe that working from home is:...
b) A viable solution to reducing the drain on fossil fuels."

Um, yes, Adamant. It's obvious. Did you even read the story?

Posted by: Les Nessman at February 13, 2005 08:01 PM

VF,

I'm with you. I've done lots of work from home and can recommend it, and would add the following to your very good points:

1. Some office time is nice, as it keeps you socializing. We are a social species and need to avoid going too far into the cocoon; not good for us. Most people will, however, find this balance on their own if they have the choices.

2. The Left will oppose you, not just cuz they're so into being anti-Bush, but for their own Machiavellian reasons, too: e.g. working from home is not at all conducive to joining a union. The whole ethos of the Left is kinda the opposite of decentralization (not their words; their deeds).

3. The time & fuel saved would be even greater than the time & fuel saved by the non-commuters. Traffic would move more smoothly for those who did dirve (less stop & start) and the number of roads, bridges etc. would drop dramatically.

4. Housing prices could drop as we move out of the cities and into more humanely-sized small cities (I think most people would prefer a city of 50k-500k; big enough to have everything you need but small enough to get around in). The cities of today may be near a peak, worldwide, for as large as cities will ever again need to get.

Posted by: ras at February 13, 2005 09:28 PM

"That's going to work ok for the people who can actually do worthwhile work from home, probably 25-50% of people at most. For many of those that won't be an option."

Assuming you are correct, the other 50-75% of the "less privileged" people get the benefits of less congestion, safer roads, less road construction, and cheaper fuel. That's a regressive tax I'll gladly pay for.

Posted by: johnd01 at February 13, 2005 09:51 PM

Wouldn't the trade-off to working from home be increased energy consumption at home rather than in the car or at work? I'm just thinking aloud, more positing than protesting. But your post makes an excellent point, that fuel efficiency isn't just a matter of the mileage of your car. It's also the number of cars on the road.

One point on your "rural Internetification" idea. As most jobs in rural America are traditionally blue collar, they require an on-site presence (farms, service-sector, manufacturing, etc...). R.I. would be better for us, the suburban illuminati, than for them. It would allow us to move to rural America (as one of the above comments alludes to) to complete our tasks, and if enough people do that in one area, you have a kind of gentrification like you see in Boone, NC or the parts of the Pennsylvania Poconos, where the rural people are actually pushed out due to taxes and increased cost. Of course, increased internet access broadens their work opportunitites and overall quality of life, so there are trade-offs.

Posted by: Chris at February 14, 2005 05:26 AM

Great post. It is worth exploring in more depth.

Theorists like Thomas W. Malone have been working on this for years, but I think it will be the power of citizen publishers (bloggers) that tips the scales.

The sheer mass of day-to-day accounts of real life activity in distributed working situations will provide overwhelming anecdotal evidence that distributed workplaces are a solution for companies trying to stay competitive.

The fact that this is a non-zero-sum game makes it almost inevitable.

Keep up the interesting posts.

Posted by: David St Lawrence at February 20, 2005 01:20 AM

Great post!

The benefits of telecommuting are numerous and it is heartening to think that it may also reduce congestion and pollution.

I think the economic analysis is a bit weak though. The impact of any change in US driving habits will be minimal to the global economy. An analysis I give far more credence to is that the Chinese and Indian economies are modernizing radiply and their thirst for energy resources, in particular oil, will drive the prices up (as demand increases and supply availability decreases) and this more than anything will drive technological innovation (such as hydrogen) and a reduction in our consumption (when telecommuting will really take off).

I think that you also discount the need for face-to-face interaction too heavily. Many of us in the cubicle world rely on the social networking built through personal interaction to accomplish much more than we could using phones, e-mail, instant messaging, video conferencing and other online collaborative tools. I agree that we could certainly reduce our need for offices, but the greatest obstacle to this is entrenched corporate culture and old habits.

I look forward to reading more of your blog.

Posted by: Stuart Berman at February 20, 2005 07:26 PM