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Show HN: Find the most climate friendly meeting location

meetinglocationcalculator.com

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Re: Show HN: Find the most climate friendly meeting location

#11

Post by wolrah »

iso8859-1 wrote: post #6

Isn't it better to meet in a place where one of the people is already located? Then one less person has to fly, and they can use their saved time to work and offset the CO2 spent by the additional time traveled by the others.

> Isn't it better to meet in a place where one of the people is already located? Then one less person has to fly, and they can use their saved time to work and offset the CO2 spent by the additional time traveled by the others.

I'm not sure if the tool specifically accounts for that or if the math just ends up working out, but I was testing with various combinations of my family and it always ended up at someone's home airport.

Re: Show HN: Find the most climate friendly meeting location

#15

Post by capableweb »

wolrah wrote: post #11
iso8859-1 wrote: post #6

Isn't it better to meet in a place where one of the people is already located? Then one less person has to fly, and they can use their saved time to work and offset the CO2 spent by the additional time traveled by the others.

> Isn't it better to meet in a place where one of the people is already located? Then one less person has to fly, and they can use their saved time to work and offset the CO2 spent by the additional time traveled by the others. I'm not sure if the tool specifically accounts for that or if the math just ends up working out, but I was testing with various combinations of my family and it always ended up at someone's ho…

> I'm not sure if the tool specifically accounts for that or if the math just ends up working out, but I was testing with various combinations of my family and it always ended up at someone's home airport.

Not sure. But if you put the two locations of Caracas, VE and San Francisco, US, they suggest meeting in Houston, US.

Does it make sense? Is it more environmental friendly for two people to meet in the middle rather than having one person staying and the other going there? My gut says the latter should be more environmental friendly.

Re: Show HN: Find the most climate friendly meeting location

#17

Post by cagenut »

wolrah wrote: post #7

This is a really neat tool, but I'm having a hard time imagining situations where it'd be all that useful, where people from substantially different locations all need to meet in person, but don't care where they're meeting. How often does that happen? Am I missing something?

there is a small but growing cohort of people who both a.) work in all or predominantly remote orgs and b.) understand the carbon cost of flying.

if your team meets those critera then this is the only way to make these decisions.

even if your team doesn't entirely agree on b, those of us who do can use this to inform our votes on where to meet.

Re: Show HN: Find the most climate friendly meeting location

#19

Post by nottathrowaway3 »

wolrah wrote: post #7

This is a really neat tool, but I'm having a hard time imagining situations where it'd be all that useful, where people from substantially different locations all need to meet in person, but don't care where they're meeting. How often does that happen? Am I missing something?

Because it's designed to optimize fuel efficiency, the use case is basically corporate greenwashing.

HR: "our company meetup allows authentic inclusive in-person interactions, all while helping save the environment, by only releasing 1M tons of CO2 rather than 1.03M tons."

The most environmentally friendly meeting is obviously one that happens online. In-person meetups increase retention but -- until teleportation is invented -- that retention comes at an environmental cost.

A similar tool could be designed to minimize something else (cost, flight time, etc.) which would have a better use case outside corporate ESG politics.

Re: Show HN: Find the most climate friendly meeting location

#20

Post by jameshart »

wolrah wrote: post #11
iso8859-1 wrote: post #6

Isn't it better to meet in a place where one of the people is already located? Then one less person has to fly, and they can use their saved time to work and offset the CO2 spent by the additional time traveled by the others.

> Isn't it better to meet in a place where one of the people is already located? Then one less person has to fly, and they can use their saved time to work and offset the CO2 spent by the additional time traveled by the others. I'm not sure if the tool specifically accounts for that or if the math just ends up working out, but I was testing with various combinations of my family and it always ended up at someone's ho…

It's certainly not always the case.

In planar Euclidean geometry, for any three points, if the triangle formed by those three points has all its angles less than 120 degrees, then the sum of the distances from the three points to certain points inside the triangle will be smaller than the sum of the shortest two sides. Only if one of the angles exceeds 120 degrees will one of the three points always have the shortest total travel distance.

The relevant concept is the 'Fermat point', which is the point that minimizes total distance from the vertices of a triangle.

In spherical geometry, it gets more complicated, but the same logic applies to spherical triangles that aren't too large. You can definitely find sets of three points on a sphere, such that points inside the triangle are the one which minimizes travel distance.

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