Gongol.com Archives: March 2021
March 25, 2021
Ford tells 30,000 employees that work-from-home options will remain after the pandemic subsides
Cities are always going to have at least some magnetism due to agglomeration effects. But the pivot to broad acceptance of working from home (WFH) and hybrid working models might detour a lot of future commercial office construction. Just because some workers may always need to be within reach of the home office (as opposed to the offices in their homes) doesn't necessarily mean that we will forevermore need to stack them floor after floor above one another. ■ In other words: If your skyline doesn't have skyscrapers now, maybe it never really will. Or, if it does, they won't be purely commercial, but will be multi-use right from the start. The "vertical city" may yet have its day. ■ It's not like the multi-use building is a new concept. Living "above the shop" has been an accepted mode of habitation for centuries. Quite obviously, farmers have long lived where they worked -- but the connection between dwelling place and workplace remained strong even after the Industrial Revolution got well underway. We still use the phrase "cottage industry", often without realizing that the term quite literally refers to work that can be produced from home. Even in modern times, buildings like the John Hancock Center have been intentionally designed for mixed use, as places where people might live, work, and shop. ■ The question is: How might the financing for tall buildings change? Life insurance companies (like John Hancock) once had significant incentives to build giant, long-term buildings. Among other reasons, insurance companies with lots of incoming float from premiums might look at that float as a cheap way to fund major construction if the interest rates available to other builders were very high. If you have ready money and your rivals have to pay 10% interest rates (or higher), then getting into the business of owning tall buildings can be very attractive. But the interest rates that prevail today are literally a fraction of the rates that prevailed in the 1970s and 1980s, so that comparative advantage has evaporated for insurance companies. And if demand for office space might truly be on a long-term downward trajectory (thus putting downward pressure on the rent payments they could hope to collect), that doesn't bode well for new construction. Will those conventional backers of big buildings be as interested in new mixed-use projects as they were in the skyscrapers of the past? Moreover, now that it's easy to invest in bundles of real-estate properties through tools like REITs, insurance companies and other investors have less incentive to invest a great deal in significant properties of their own rather than to spread out their investments into chunks that can be bought and sold with greater ease. ■ It seems less and less likely that companies will build many office towers (like the Chrysler Building or Sears Tower) in their own names, and there's usually at least someone's ego to stroke when building bold new towers. If it's not the executives in the C-suite, who will it be? The answer to that question may well shape the future of many American skylines -- or decide whether they will be remarkable at all.
On the surface, it's barely even a nuisance worth noting if you're frequently stopped in stores by other customers who mistake you for a manager. But when you're dressed entirely wrong for the job and people still make assumptions, then it's worth examining why that's happening. And it's hard to escape the conclusion that a lot of Americans still assume that the stereotypical manager is a tall white male. We need to get beyond that stereotype, because it favors some people and that means it implicitly disadvantages others.
Please put two-factor authentication on your email and social-media accounts
There's a rash of fraud going on right now. This is a small, free, and highly effective step that can make a big difference.
Storm-spotting drones capture close-up tornado angles
Drones are still under-utilized as a live storm-spotting tool. It's going to take a while before they can be coordinated safely and effectively, but there's a great deal of potential there to improve upon what spotters can see from the ground. And don't take the value of storm spotting for granted: The lack of a coordinated, widespread effort to use trained spotters contributed to one of the deadliest tornado events in Illinois history, only a little more than 50 years ago. Getting better at forecasting and spotting severe weather is no trivial matter: 55 million people are under a non-trivial threat of severe weather today. The day looks especially ominous for Mississippi and Alabama.
Two facts are utterly indisputable: (1.) Even among a terrifically talented cast, Jessica Walter was THE star of "Arrested Development". (2.) If you thought she was funny on the show, you won't believe how hard she will make you laugh on the DVD commentary.
How will the Suez Canal get reopened?
Just don't get Elon Musk started on this. He probably has a secret blimp the size of New Jersey just waiting somewhere for this very moment.
Tom Nichols: "'I've done my own research" is always the air horn that announces the arrival of a crackpot". Oddly, that research is never, ever accompanied by footnotes. But peer review isn't much of a standard when all the peers are cranks.
