311–320 of 371 posts
Re-zoning commercial buildings to residential use should be a realistic option, no?
Rezoning alone is insufficient. For traditional (but interestingly not technical) reasons, the designs of commercial and residential buildings are very different and converting between them in already built structures is going to be very costly.
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Weren't people right about this though? Institutionalized racism and sexism was everywhere, neoliberalism created the most unequal society since the era we unironically call "the robber-baron era", the carceral system is truly heinous (the ban on weed alone was just a joke), etc etc etc.
Things like racism and sexism are very real problems, but not some key component of "capitalism".
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There are large differences though. The US poverty rate is 2.5x higher than Denmark's (15% to 6%). Denmark's life expectancy is 6 years longer. The kinds of policies you'd need to close that gap in the US would be transformative. > When comparing two different economic systems, you tend to see differences on the order of "mass-famines" and "percentage of the population involved in subsistence farming". There are plen…
> The kinds of policies you'd need to close that gap in the US would be transformative. I disagree. When laid against things like the end of mercantilism, I don't think that qualifies as transformative. I think the effects would look pretty much like the existing US system, because Denmark looks pretty close to the current US system by the standards we're talking about. If you want to argue they'd be fundamentally di…
This is not correct. Under, for example, the Roman Empire, privately held land was routinely leased to free men, either for a share of the produce (métayage) or for a fixed fee. This practice lasted hundreds of years. The end of subsistence farming has everything to do with technology and nothing at all to do with capitalism.
In the eigth century in France, around 50% of the land was under a sharecropping-like system, too. This page, and the page in French wiki it links in the intro, give a good rundown of capitalist-like subsistence farming in antiquity and the middle ages : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metayage
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I've been working on an app, with a small team, of [mostly] non-tech folks. Most of our interactions are messaging (Slack, IM, etc.), with occasional Zoom calls. I T . I S . V E R Y , V E R Y , S L O W . I have never worked this slowly in my life. I literally cannot rush ahead, at my usual pace, because I make assumptions that are often wrong. A few days ago, we had an in-person meeting, at a local diner, and talked…
Why were you not able to accomplish that with a Zoom video call or voice call? Why was that not possible with a common Slack chat channel? Or a Trello or something? A lot of times these problems boil down to people not being willing or able to dedicate the time every day to work on a project or communicate properly online. Often a combination for underfunded projects. And lack of written communication ability can con…
It was an observation of what happened.
Prescribing a great deal of process and overhead is always a "solution," but, in my experience, it doesn't always have the best results. I used to work for a Japanese corporation, where Overhead was a religion. They got stuff done -often, impressively so, but it could be very painful, and not always as efficiently as we would like.
This is a very popular idea, but it doesn’t make a huge amount of _sense_. Most office-oriented employers don’t own much if any real estate; they lease it. And unless they’re really huge, what _they_ do has very little influence on the price of real estate generally; they’ve no individual incentive here. Arguably a mild counter—incentive; it’s generally to their benefit, as renters of real estate, if future real-esta…
Generally apart from break clauses (usually midway through a lease) companies are liable for the full lease cost and can't give early notice for termination. In accounting terms, leases according to IFRS 16 are recognized as a lease liability and a contra right of use asset for the full term of the lease. I'm not 100% certain on the rationale of an impairment (as it could be construed as no longer useful) but if thes…
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People want to see “the elites” as one homogeneous cabal out to protect themselves at the expense of the little guy. In reality, it’s a bunch of self-interested individuals whose incentives don’t overlap here. The companies using office space have no reason to waste money helping out their landlords, and would much rather profit by screwing them over. As you say, this theory does not make much sense.
When they talk about "the elites" they are talking about a cabal and yes, it does exist. Vanguard and Blackrock created this environment by simply owning more real estate (via other companies) than anyone else. This, combined with their ESG score, is absolutely toxic to "the little guy". They tell their constituent publicly held companies that they're losing big on real estate and the next day 2,000 articles on the r…
The "article" rehashes the well repeated meme about propping up commercial real estate, with the only callout to productivity being the authors own self admitted "bullshit job". My counter would be as someone who is loving WFH as a new dad, it is obvious to me that as a group, teams are less productive when not face to face even though individuals may think they are crushing it. This is obvious to many people I talk…
I can imagine this argument being true if and only if the team is all based in the same office, which isn't necessarily common. My team is spread across two countries and four cities, my being in the office means I'd be co-located with about 1/3rd of it currently. I think though if you are on a team that requires a lot of collaboration with people outside of where your office is (either a closely related team or people on your team) then you're better off WFH than in an open office, because calls are so much more painful in the office, especially if multiple people on the same call in the same office. The amount of managing muting your mic to prevent office noise and echoing and etc is such a drain compared from WFH
This is a very popular idea, but it doesn’t make a huge amount of _sense_. Most office-oriented employers don’t own much if any real estate; they lease it. And unless they’re really huge, what _they_ do has very little influence on the price of real estate generally; they’ve no individual incentive here. Arguably a mild counter—incentive; it’s generally to their benefit, as renters of real estate, if future real-esta…
You're missing an obvious real estate incentive: where people live. Often in very nice school districts, which they don't want to see depreciate in value due to an outflow of people to different communities. People moving into rust belt cities and revitalizing them is great for the nation, but may come at the expense of someone who's highly leveraged into a $6m 3 bedroom in the Bay Area. If productivity were the goal…
[0] https://www.kron4.com/news/real-estate/nearly-50-bay-area-zi...
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Weren't people right about this though? Institutionalized racism and sexism was everywhere, neoliberalism created the most unequal society since the era we unironically call "the robber-baron era", the carceral system is truly heinous (the ban on weed alone was just a joke), etc etc etc.
Sure, there are all sorts of problems with capitalism. But as Churchill said about democracy, it the worst form of economic organization except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.
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> A few days ago, we had an in-person meeting, at a local diner, and talked about the app for a couple of hours. What is your team doing differently with video calls that you don't end them with a complete list of items for everyone?
Oh, we get lists, but they are much shorter. For example, I want to show them where a button needs to go, I simply hold up the phone, and point. With Zoom, we have a wrestling match over screen share.
I understand that video calls aren't as "natural" or intuitive as in-person meets but having been at multiple companies that ship with remote teams, I remain unconvinced that video calls can't be as productive as in-person meetings.
Video calls require more intention, purpose, and focus. And everyone needs to learn how to use Google Meet or Zoom or whatever service. This is not an insurmountable problem, and the problem disappears pretty quickly once everyone buys in.