Four to five weeks of vacation is pretty standard in Europe and I don’t think it has anything to do with productivity. AFAIK, a German or Belgian would pretty much get the same amount of vacation. I’m in Montreal and the standard by law here is two weeks but my contract with a local employer is giving me four weeks. And, I’m still working when I’m working, even if I have some vacation time at some point?!

I took eight weeks this year. So you’re saying I (or a French person?) am not getting anything done when I work, because I took some extended vacation time?

I know this behaviour from big corporations is not exclusive to French companies but my type of work allows me to work from home and I’ve never seen a company despise WFH so much than my once French employer.

This was before the pandemic and I had the habit of working from home with my previous employer when I was sick. When I changed employer to work for a French hosting company in Montreal, they were adamantly against WFH. Even if sick. They preferred that you missed a day (or two, you know, take your time to recover!1!!) from work, taking “generous” sick days, than letting anyone from the lower ranks WFH. This was a pretty big red flag for me. Anyway their work culture was pretty toxic and I ended up quitting after a few months, but the “no work from home even if sick” policy is the first thing that hit me when I started there.

My current employer allows me to WFH and I’ve been looking a bit around to see if I could find something else, but they mostly all seem to require some sort of hybrid schedules at the office now, which obviously sucks.

I have no idea. Electricity, heat and hot water are included in my rent.

I do try to be aware of my water supply. If I’m in a place where water is limited by default, like having a well, or when in a Caribbean country, I’ll be careful as I know others will depend on that source in the very near future. But I live in Canada and from my immediate point of view, the St-Lawrence and the Great Lakes are not going to be dry soon. The only scarcity here is the energy required to pump the water (also provided by water), and its treatment.

And I do understand that our little collective efforts do add up. However, the issues are systemic. Only in a single region of my province (a region!), around 18 corporations and businesses are using more than 75 000 litres a day. We know just because they have to report it past that point. It adds up to billions of litres in a year. For a single region. The provincial government here also allows corporations to just pump the ground water for about $35 CAD by million of litres.

So again, I know that I could make a difference, if we all really tried. But because of the system, and since the pandemic, I’ve lost faith in our societies. I don’t think most people care. While all hiding in our places a few years ago, while the production slowed down, people have seen the changes in nature, the air clean up… and they said fuck it we just want to go back to how it was before.

Just seeing multiple police cars running their engines 24/7 to stalk and bully some oh so dangerous anti-genocide students made me see that any effort to reduce air pollution on my part will be nullified by the system in general. It doesn’t matter if I have car or not, if I recycle plastic while it’s produced in the first place, or if I try to save a few litres of water while Nestlé… sigh.

Sorry but… yeah.

Yes I let it run. Because honestly, I don’t care. People will try make you feel guilty over using water while continuing to make excuses to drive everywhere and why they really need an electric car to “save the planet”. Oh and please recycle while the city that collects the recycling sends it to the dump because this industry is not profitable. And use less water because giant tech companies are going to need it in order to cool and power some more AI servers.

I never owned a car and have driven only once in 40 years. But I know that whatever I do individually to reduce the amount of pollution in the air, it is absolutely useless and pointless. The army or the police will annihilate a lifetime of individual efforts in one day, or even a few hours. I could get a car right now and 90% of people would probably tell me I did the right thing, as a car is sooo useful. No problem as long as it’s electric!

So uuh, I let the water run when I feel like it.

I use them to worsen my personal impact on climate change, since those things are consuming vast quantities of energy. It makes me feel more manly to know that I’m contributing to the slow destruction of our habitat every time I use them. It’s like having a second SUV to go to the closest corner store multiple times a day. These changed my life for the better, made it easier, and I can’t live without them now.