by PeakingAroundtheCorner » Sun 09 Mar 2008, 20:08:48
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'S')o they are going to replace oil with internet
Yes. The Internet can replace A LOT of oil. How? Well, I make my entire living on the Internet. Taught myself everything I know while I was a sheet metal construction worker. Made good money doing that and make only about 60% of that now.
But, guess what? Now I work at home in my pajamas. What I don't do is pump tons of CO² into the atmosphere sitting in the Dallas/Ft Worth traffic jams on a horrendous daily commute from the exurbs. I'm no longer helping to build what I see to be a doomed civilization. I no longer have the expense of a daily 100-mile round-trip commute, including gas, breakfast at Jack in the Box, lunch from the "roach coach", a three-beer stop at the pub on the way home, Cokes, gum, candy, potato chips, a stop here for a CD, a stop there for a couple of fishing lures for the weekend (you know, stuff I really didn't need but bought anyway on impulse or habit). That's a savings of 30%.
So, for a 10% overall cut in real net income after commuting expenses, I'm not doing too bad at all. I'll take that in order to write my own ticket any day. And I even seem to find a little extra money to put towards preps and I'm growing some of my own food now. But the best thing about it is that I have 3 hours of my day back that was spent getting to and from a jobsite.
Now, I can just hear you saying "but, but, but...EVERYBODY can't work on the Internet." And, to a certain extent you're right. But there are literally THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS of jobs that can be done over the Internet by tele-commuting. I would guess that we could probably take 30% of the commuting traffic off America's highways by allowing, wherever practical, employees to stay home to work.
If all those corporate administrative cubicles were moved out of all those buildings and into employees homes, that would reduce carbon emissions, reduce the use of raw materials to build floor space for those cubicles, it would relieve some of the stress on our infrastructure, and it would give our service industry a little elbow room to move around more easily, resulting, perhaps, in a more expedited and efficient system.