In practice the spiteful billionaire will monthly send you offers $10K over the higher of your estimate or fair market value. So you'd be moving every month and incurring all the moving costs continually, or just continually dealing with the legal dealings of such an offer.
The transaction closes and the billionaire just sells the house at a small loss. The situation is asymmetric because the billionaire never actually uses the house.
At 100 people, every desk-job company is already a remote company, even if they don't know it yet.
Travel distance between desks has already become so large that many people won't do it for small things. For decades now those situations would be handled by a phone call or email.
Meeting in the coffee room to chat becomes rare because schedules and tastes (eg. office coffee versus off-site coffee, bagged lunches versus going out) differ. Also there's too many people and too much churn to really get to know anybody.
Arranging meeting times becomes difficult outside smaller 5-10 person units so asynchronous communication becomes predominant.
What I've seen work is not trying to co-locate a full team at all. Doing so only leads to silos and hiring difficulties. Instead have small offices which people from a small geographic area use. Those people will be on different teams and in different departments -- which is good for inter-team communication and synergy. This is exactly what offices normally miss because teams are co-located resulting in a relatively high 'distance' to build a rapport between teams.
Your average, rather small, gasoline pump 'charges' an ICE at an average speed around 4000 KW, effectively 1200 KW after accounting for moderate efficiency -- hybrids will get better. Good EV charging today is a peak around 300 KW with a much lower average.
Honestly, _averaging_ 300 KW is probably within a factor of 2 of the highest we'll do for light vehicles given economic (how much electric distribution infrastructure can an 8-32 stall charging station have?) and practical (how heavy and stiff can the charging cable be?) limits.
It's unlikely EV charging speed will ever match existing ICEs. Relatively long recharge times are an intrinsic trade-off of BEV technology which needs to be engineered around, mostly by having enormous and heavy batteries.
Or you could have drop in batteries? You pull up to a charging station, they take your battery and replace it with one charged to 100%.
Does this require further work? Yes of course. We are definitely not there yet, and we may never get there. But let's not pretend that this is an insurmountable problem.
Battery swapping has so many serious pragmatic problems I don't think we'll ever see it offered at scale for public use. It could be a fit for large private fleets however.
On the engineering side:
- Swapping requires standardization of batteries across models and manufacturers. To accommodate different vehicles the batteries will need to be rather small so most vehicles will need multiple swapped every time
- Requires more space and weight because the battery cannot be structural. This will reduce the overall range of EVs
- Connectors for high voltage, signalling, cooling fluid, and high strength mechanical rated for thousands of cycles in the face of road grime and poorly maintained swap robots will not be small. Cooling system contamination will be a serious concern.
On the financial side:
- Batteries are expensive, how do you track and reclaim them across the entire continent? What about theft? Destruction insurance?
- With swappable batteries the incentive is to store them at 100% then run them 100% to 0%, which is especially bad for battery longevity
- How do you deal with batteries swapped at different 'swap' networks?
On the user side:
- What if the swap station is out of batteries when you need them? Are you always gambling on holiday weekends that you won't need to sit for hours charging (if that is even possible!)?
- Since some batteries will be more worn than others, how do you deal with constant variability of range because maybe last week you got a new set of batteries and next week you'll get an older set with only 80% capacity left.
- Are you allowed to charge at home? How is the wear from that charged?
- Did I buy a battery with my car, or are cars no longer batteries included? If my car came with a battery, how do I know I get it back? Do I get paid for the wear other users put on it? Do I need to retrieve my battery from the same station on the way home after a road trip?
That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are others. Most of these issues are solvable with unlikely levels of corporate cooperation or immense levels of excess capital expenditure. However, they all cost money and will reduce the economic viability of battery-swap EVs versus every other vehicle type.
I've never understood why people have such trouble with having their camera on during video meetings. Is it just some people being conscious of the always true fact that everybody else in the meeting can see you zoning out of the meeting?
As far as I can tell the rule is simple: If you are not expected to speak in the meeting, your camera should be off; otherwise your camera should be on the entire meeting.
Some days I don't shower and I look like a gremlin and I just want to get work done without worrying about my appearance. I don't work in a position where appearance actually matters for anything.
Also, what is the value in having it on? I've worked places where they want your cameras on during all staff meetings with 100+ people on them. I don't actually understand the upside to having it on.
If leadership wants to have their own cameras on because they feel it conveys intent and emotion better when I can see their face... that sounds like they made a decision. Leaders often have to lead with emotion so wanting to convey emotion better might be a good choice for them. Most of the meetings I'm in are about facts. And I dont feel like I need facial expressions to express data more effectively.
Anyone who worked pre-Zoom for a large corporation with offices spanning multiple cities will remember having conference calls simply because everyone was in office, but there were 2-3 offices to connect together. And you could see people in your own office, but you couldn't see people in other offices, and not being able to see people was never an issue back then. This isn't even a new concept. It worked for DECADES just fine.
It wasn't just fine, otherwise there would be no need for business travel, and Skype's been around since 2003 so video calls have also been around for decades at this point.
Video calls. If you aren't having at least one video call a day something is probably wrong. Configure it such that starting a video call takes no more than 4 clicks.
Have a company-wide General/Coffee chat where people talk about arbitrary things. It's better if this chat has history which expires in 24 hours.
Write lots of short documents -- especially for designs. Review them much like you would review code. This can be as simple as Markdown documents in your repository using your normal code review tool. Ensure all documents are listed in a single easy-to-find index of some sort.
> If you aren't having at least one video call a day something is probably wrong.
Depends on how you work? A video call every day would be too much for me, but two a week seems alright. I'm also not a fan of daily meetings in person either, though.
Agree with the occasional relaxed "coffee chat", and having a repository full of good documentation, but...
>If you aren't having at least one video call a day something is probably wrong.
That seems excessive to me, especially if everyone is also staying connected via chat, emails, etc. Weekly meetings are about my limit, considering I also have work to do, meetings with external stakeholders, ad-hoc meetings, etc.
At least one video call a day is more about socialization than work; chat and email doesn't really strengthen psychological feelings of connection to the team. Regularly putting a face to the nickname is important.
I consider small meetings (say <10 people) within the team, ad-hoc or otherwise, to count against the once a day minimum. It doesn't need to be a purely social call to be effective.
Different people want different levels of socialization attached to their job duties. If the meetings are a requirement, having them daily is too much for my taste and is more likely to strengthen my psychological feelings of being annoyed.
In any case, not having a daily meeting does not mean something is wrong, as the parent poster stated.
> It's better if this chat has history which expires in 24 hours.
This sounds fun to have a b.s./watercooler chat channel. It'd be cool if Slack had that feature but I wonder if that's a non-starter for corporate reasons.
Workspace Owners and Org Owners can adjust retention settings for public channels. Private Channels and DMs can also be set by members if allowed by admins.
Note that not everyone likes being filmed. I somehow find it quite different to meet irl compared to being on camera, perhaps because then I can observe what they're looking at. Video calling is like being on stage. (I don't mind being on stage much, just like how video is not a big deal either, but the feeling is similar)
it is insane that we can have face to face and even video meetings that are not logged, but we can't have text based chats like that? what if we meet on IRC? should that be illegal without a bot to log the conversation?
Sadly, I'm sure that the only reason that face to face meetings are not logged is technical capability more than anything else. The law just hasn't metaphorically noticed yet that those can all be recorded to. It's still on the pricy side at the moment. (Don't forget not every business is a tech business that still reasonably expects 20%+ profit margins.)
I often bang on the fact that laws made in the 20th century are often written against an implicit background of what is physically possible that people underestimate, like, the number of laws that people nominally break every day but are impossible to enforce because we don't all have an assigned police presence assigned to us. We should not casually assume that once we acquire the capability to enforce these things that we should. Another example of this is that while I understand the drive to document what a company is doing, we need a certain amount of ability to speak to each other off the record, even in a corporate environment. Yes, it is used to do bad things, but we are humans, we need that slack, and it is used to do good things too.
“Slack” under the law is quite an interesting concept. “Inherent logistic pseudo-discretion” might make me think less about a friendly guy smoking a pipe, but it has some disadvantages, too.
I’m interested by the fact that you and I could travel to Nebraska and whisper to each other in a cornfield in ways that violate the law left and right. Why is this not a huge problem? Because inherent in the logistics of getting there is a presumption that most law enforcement will use their discretion not to care.
Is cornfield-whispering becoming more powerful as other comms get weaker? Is it becoming less powerful as fewer of us choose to go to those lengths? Interesting stuff to consider in the golden age of surveillance.
The friendly guy smoking a pipe was merely ahead of his time. If we are flinging ourselves into an AI-driven total surveillance state we're all going to miss slack more than ever. Hopefully if anyone survives the AI-driven total surveillance state will eventually realize that with the degree of control it has it doesn't have to crack down on literally everything just because it can.
in the culture series iain banks paints an optimistic picture of an AI driven idealistic utopian post scarcity society where nothing is secret, from the AIs at least.
some of the ideas seem to be that in post scarcity many crimes become meaningless, and that the AIs keep your privacy.
well, it depends on the country. in germany this kind of surveillance is illegal unless ordered by a judge, and there is a high bar to get that order. even at work recording of conversations is generally illegal to protect employees privacy. however i think logging of text chats and storing emails is legal. and i believe some people want to make it mandatory.
it is a constant back and forth between both sides.
earlier i have made the argument why written communication should be treated just like the spoken one:
My vague understanding of the related laws is that as long as the company has a consistent retention policy and is under neither a court order to increase retention nor retaining records for specific incidents as part of policy, that a short retention period is fine.
I expect legal would actually be happy about shorter retention periods since it makes their job easier. HR of course wants infinite retention periods because it gives them a bigger stick, but universally longer retention is not the only way to address those desires.
It sounds like a good deal, hopefully they have mortgage support arranged with their local banks.
For many young people, the ticket to getting ahead these days is moving away from the big cities. Unfortunately it takes effort on the part of small towns to receive those young people in productive ways.
Some of it comes down to the rocket equation because it takes a lot of energy to warm a battery up. If that energy has to come from a battery itself, then the vehicle needs even more battery. Carrying around that extra battery all the time will consume even more energy. And you lose about 8% total electrical energy by putting it through the lithium battery.
In comparison two litres of diesel fuel with a nearly 100% efficiency can absolutely be more efficient from a full-system standpoint.
I think the author is reversing cause and effect and so not coming to a terribly useful conclusion. It rather seems to me that fewer men (proportionally) are attending college because the value proposition has substantially declined. Similar things have happened in many other careers formally dominated by men.
In some cases this is simply due to oversupply leading to declining salaries. For example decades ago a Bachelors of Philosophy would qualify you for a number of high paying jobs. Now it qualifies you to be a checkout clerk. You can't expect to approximately double the number of candidates without reducing wages.
In the particular case of college it's been ever more clear for more than ten years now that college is mostly only valuable if you treat it as a trade school (ie. BSc of CS into software development), if you need it for immigration purposes (eg. the booster Masters), or if you are part of the academic or political elite where a PhD or two is table stakes. For everybody else college costs too much in time and treasure for the employment advantages.
In other cases the underlying market has changed. One interesting example of this is Science Fiction writers. Starting about a decade and a half ago a ton of mid-career mid-listers who wrote science fiction switched to other genres, mostly mystery, because the market for SciFi kind of dried up. You see many more female writers in SciFi than you used to, but they don't make the same kind of money SciFi writers would have thirty years ago -- the money simply isn't in the genre anymore.
If you look at the authors examples I think most of them fit this latter case. Being the tutor to the scion of a business magnate is probably just as good and competitive gig now as two hundred years ago, but 'teaching' as a market has filled out immensely since then and is now at least 25% day care -- something which cannot be prestigious because it is common and cannot command large wages.
> It rather seems to me that fewer men (proportionally) are attending college because the value proposition has substantially declined.
That's exactly what the article is saying. It, however, argues that the presence of women is what has caused that decline in value.
> In the particular case of college it's been ever more clear for more than ten years now that college is mostly only valuable if you treat it as a trade school
Right, while it posits that the historical value of college was that it offered a higher social status to those involved, which for those not reading between the lines means that it offered improved mating opportunities for men. Now that women are going to college in droves, men are no longer seeing a higher social standing from attending college – with it placing them on the same social plane as women. So men are moving on to the "next big thing" that offers higher social status today.
> something which cannot be prestigious because it is common and cannot command large wages.
It seems you are essentially on the same page as the article. I suspect that it would suggest that money is only a proxy for status, while you seem to be suggesting that status is a proxy for money, but I'm not sure that makes any difference in the grand scheme of things.
The big difference between my position and the article is that I don't believe the presence of women is a significant portion of the cause. At the core I'm making an economic supply and demand argument where the number of 'certified workers' matter, but whether the additional 'certified workers' are women, previously uncertified men, or immigrants is immaterial.
It's entirely plausible to have a situation where more women attend college than men, but where the women are using it as a dating pool and don't apply their degrees in the workforce. That situation wouldn't have much of an effect on the value of a college degree for men.
Mating opportunities (proxied by prestige and money, which are only loosely correlated) is undoubtedly the predominant male driving force, but it's an optimization function on the landscape which does not shape the landscape itself.
Tangentially to that I'm noting that the entire discussion is somewhat muddy due to terminology creep over the decades -- eg. a "tutor" today is fundamentally not the same thing as a "tutor" two hundred years ago.
The trouble with your position is that economic conditions haven't changed through the rise of college. Incomes have held stagnant as can be from when college was unheard of right through until today. While the labour market is certainly driven by supply and demand like any other, college doesn't have an impact on the supply or demand in any meaningful way.
The fix in your edit isn't an obviously workable fix though. When talking about the rich, it's best to talk about private corporations -- because that's really how the operate.
Firstly, do you want to prevent corporations from taking loans against their assets? Preventing that seems like it would be quite detrimental.
Secondly, how do you differentiate legitimate corporate expenses from personal expenses? Is a billionaire having one of their corporations rent a yacht from another of their corporations for a business meeting with another CEO who just happens to also be their friend a legitimate business expense or a personal expense? What if the yacht rental company rented it to the CEO's company instead?
In practice the spiteful billionaire will monthly send you offers $10K over the higher of your estimate or fair market value. So you'd be moving every month and incurring all the moving costs continually, or just continually dealing with the legal dealings of such an offer.
The transaction closes and the billionaire just sells the house at a small loss. The situation is asymmetric because the billionaire never actually uses the house.