rkbabang

:-\ Trying to decide if that makes it better or worse :-\

Sure I like to live within an hour drive of a city (I'm about an hour drive from Boston), but do you go to the theater or the hospital everyday? Cities are nice places to visit, but I wouldn't want to live (or work) there.

Why have cities always been desired? When travel and communication was more difficult and time consuming cities brought people and ideas together in one spot. Population density was a necessity for ideas to spread and serendipitous meetings to take place. Also it allowed an economy of scale for businesses. All of that still happens in cities, but, I don't know if that is still entirely necessary. People now meet and talk online just as easily as off, and with modern shipping the whole country is your marketplace.

The choices here are not 6 days or 50? Maybe the best thing to do is reduce it to 15 days. This way you realize most of the cost savings and still have some margin of safety for supply problems and delays.

I'm in IC design and now because of consolidation in the EDA industry just about all of the software we use is made by either Cadence (CDNS) or Synopsys (SNPS). I haven't used Autocad since I took a drafting class as an elective in my freshman year of college.

Yes, you have the break room and the watercooler. In my office we had free coffee! But does anyone else think it is a bit dehumanizing to spend all day everyday in a small box inside another box? After driving through traffic to get there and then you get to drive through traffic afterwards to home when you're done? Maybe city dwellers who live inside small boxes inside of bigger boxes anyway don't see the difference, but it isn't just about work, it is a quality of life issue as well. I guess I'm just not a city-person. Why anyone would want to spend their lives inside a giant human anthill has never been something I've understood.

Works just fine. I agree. I think I spend more time chatting and talking with my co-workers now than I did in the office. I tended to stay at my desk for long stretches when I was working on something and not look up or talk to anyone. Now everyone is a keyboard stroke away. Not sure why you are so negative about other people. I haven't seen this happen through X number of distributed teams. People like that will not last in the organization. If an employee needs a babysitter, do you even want them back at the office? You can goof off at your desk in the office as well. People do their jobs or they don't. No different. None of this is an issue. Yeah, sure people send emails and messages at weird times. And other people answer them when they can. It's not an issue unless you make it one. In good distributed team nobody makes it into an issue. This is personal preference. I've always had the ability to email my co-workers at 3AM from my phone and sometimes did. I also never found it weird to come in in the morning and find that someone emailed me at 3AM and I'm checking it when I check it. I've spent the last 2 years with 4 people on my team in China, so this is just normal for me. I've never felt the need to check my email 24 hours a day. You need to discipline yourself to work when your working and forget about it when your not. The emails will be there in the morning when you start your day. Not an issue. Actually possibly positive since hiring then is done on merits and not based on (unconscious) biases. This definitely isn't an issue. I've interviewed by phone/skype and it is just as effective even with hours long technical interviews. I wonder if age has something to do with this. Many are just set in their ways and eventually enough people in that age group will retire and the world will change. Sometimes changes are like that.

What this situation has proved beyond a reasonable doubt is that for many industries and types of workforces working from home is doable and productive. What remains to be seen is whether or not people will want to long term, or whether management will let them. My CEO just told us all that we probably will not ever return to an always in the office way of doing things and that working from home will be a large part of how we operate going forward even after this is all over. I think in tech at least office space will be much reduced in the future. Tech people being probably the least social (as a general rule anyway) and the work most doable from home, the effects should be most visible there. I've talked to my uncle who is an insurance executive in Boston and he was saying how shocked he is how little having everyone working from home has effected their day to day business. The work is all getting done and he would never have predicted that. He doesn't like working from home personally though, but the company being headquartered in downtown Boston makes it problematic to re-open anytime soon since most of their employees take transit to work. So who knows which industries and/or companies will change permanently, but what has changed is that it is no longer about whether or not it is possible.

I think anybody investing in Tesla should be 100% concerned about how big of a role Elon Musk plays in it. He has a cult-like following and that contributed greatly to his ability to raise capital for the company. There were a few times where Tesla seemed to be at the brink. I think some percentage of his employees buy into him and they might not follow another person. Tesla wouldn't have worked without a person like Musk, but Tesla investors are also at the mercy of his weird quirks and impulses. There are many companies who could not have become what they are without their founders. Amazon wouldn't be what it is without Bezos, Apple without Jobs, etc... The question is can Musk get it to the point where it can survive without him? Jobs did it with Apple, Amazon is at that point by now. Tesla still is not yet. There is a danger there, but Musk is relatively young and should be able to stick with it for a while yet.

I found myself agreeing with you as I was reading this, but how do you explain Walmart? Every rule has its exceptions?

Another thing about the bottom group is they are full priced stores, where the top group are more lower priced or discounted priced merchandise. Although I don't know if that applies Burlington or Ross, because I'm not very familiar with either of them. I do know that buying clothes at Abercrombie, J Crew or Macy's are a lot more expensive than TJX. And Bed, Bath and Beyond is always overpriced on everything they sell. Costco basically sells at cost and makes money on membership fees. It could be a consumer movement against overpriced retailers. The internet making finding a better price easier to do maybe?

Yes. As short a term as possible. With the ideal, of course, being a term of 0.

Wow....you do realize that the design of the internet was the product of government research right? :) In fact when I read the history of how it happened I think it would have been pretty difficult for the internet to have been done without government since it required a 20 year incubation period where all the kinks were worked out. Actually these days I can't even imagine it being done within government...time horizons have shrink too much. I don't really see how that's relevant. If the transistor or the integrated circuit had come out of a government lab you'd be telling me that only government research could do such basic R&D. But it didn't, so you're not. I think some technologies are almost inevitable. Once you have computers, linking them together is kind of the next thing you want to do.

Carlo Gambino was a "neighborhood advocate".

Government and organized crime. They both leach off of the productive and provide "protection" (mostly from what they will do to you if you don't pay and obey). Just parasites like viruses are to biological systems or different kinds of viruses are to computer networks. "All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites" --Cory Doctorow

I voted "just fine same as ever was". I haven't read the coronavirus thread at all, so maybe that has shielded me from what others are experiencing.

The internet is pretty robust, the protocols are all fairly simple and straightforward, and it routes around damage fairly well. There won't be a "hack" that "takes down the internet". You might take down some companies or even cut international cables, but the internet as a whole would probably remain. I think you'd have to take out the electrical grid in a large area to completely cut off the internet to that area. But even then, some people will have satellite connections and generators.

You would think that large corporations, especially tech companies will have secure VPNs and other security measures in place. But yeah, all it takes is one idiot employee to be logging on from a Starbucks public wifi. Twitter will let some employees work from home 'forever' https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/12/tech/twitter-work-from-home-forever/

I think most people are not taking seriously the possibility of civil unrest. In the US and elsewhere. If the lockdowns are not lifted, businesses start closing, and (most scary) food grows scarce, it could get really scary, really fast. People will go from neighborly to savages in very short order if the grocery shelves go bare.

I've lost a few pounds, about 5 as of a few days ago (I didn't weigh myself today). Without my 35min commute in the morning and 45min commute in the afternoon, I find I've been starting work earlier, ending work later, yet taking short breaks throughout the day to go for short walks with my wife or do 10min on the rowing machine. Also I've been eating better (low carb) since I don't have co-workers asking me if I want to go out to eat with them. I tend to eat much better at home than I do when I go out.

Don't get it. I did not sleep last night because kids are just small stupid people. Seriously who invented these things. My wife always said that kids act like mentally ill adults. It's true. Whenever watching a group of kids playing add 30 years to their ages in your mind and picture them acting in the same way. It's hilarious. Anyway, I'm not stepping on that lady's floor.

Great show so far. I'd also recommend ZeroZeroZero (Prime)... similar feel to the movie Sicario. Also, recently added to Netflix: WACO and The Last Dance. I’m 3 episodes into ZeroZeroZero & it’s pretty intense. Really good so far. I hope it ends badly for all the main characters. My wife and I are watching "Little Fires Everywhere" on Hulu. It's pretty good, but I absolutely hate every character. I hope they all die in a fire at the end. ;D I've had that one on my watchlist for a while. I'll try it next. I may have mentioned it before but Soundbreaking is a great series on the evolution of music technology & production. If I remember right, you play? Super inspirational! At one point they discuss the popular "disco sucks" movement, which I bought into, where synthesizers, vocoders & sampling were viewed as heretical. Fast forward 30ish years & here I am with a Yamaha MOXF8 experimenting with features those guys could only dream of. Awesome. I'll look for that one. Thanks. And I was exaggerating a little about Little Fires Everywhere. I hope the youngest rebellious daughter Izzy survives, everyone else can die horribly though.

Great show so far. I'd also recommend ZeroZeroZero (Prime)... similar feel to the movie Sicario. Also, recently added to Netflix: WACO and The Last Dance. I’m 3 episodes into ZeroZeroZero & it’s pretty intense. Really good so far. I hope it ends badly for all the main characters. My wife and I are watching "Little Fires Everywhere" on Hulu. It's pretty good, but I absolutely hate every character. I hope they all die in a fire at the end.

Some things never change