squnch

I can imagine that there are multi-use spaces all fitted out with IKEA furniture that you can buy on the spot (but not haul out directly with you... rather, arrange same-day delivery from the suburban IKEA store nearest to that city).

A real testament to how many broken business models have been funded by VCs in the last decade... they can't even make money delivering food when the government has ordered everyone into their homes.

It's not just management... it's all white collar middle class workers in America. Why aren't they inhaling dust in a coal mine or dying of a preventable disease? None of us really have any idea.

Well you have to realize that most managers have no idea why they have it so good. When so many children are starving to death worldwide, why do they live in a 4 bedroom house with a pool? Do they have exceptional talent or intelligence? No. So they fundamentally operate from a place of fear. It’s like Twitter holding onto 140 characters forever — they had no idea why they were so successful, so their approach was “don’t touch it, you might break it.”

If you are a heart surgeon or Lebron James you can understand why you are making so much money — you have exceptional skill at something in high demand. The average manager is more like someone who found a bank error in their favor and prays every morning that it isn’t discovered.

You can do this quite affordably in huge numbers of countries if you can earn your income with a decent remote job in the US. The things to think about are time zone, tropical disease, quality of food, and safety. There are a whole range of places from Arkansas, to Costa Rica, to Panama, to Nicaragua.

The thing you'll lose out on is anyone you know, unless you can get them to go with you, or can make new friends in your destination.

Because developer efficiency reduces the cost of the app, or in many cases causes the app to exist where it otherwise would not.

There's some kind of work that's best done by individuals (writing a novel). There's some kind of work that's best done by teams (planning an invasion). The work that's best done by teams is currently much better performed in meatspace than over any kind of digital communications channel.

If you can relocate temporarily, most of Microsoft will let you go remote if you're a top performer (Top 10% roughly) after about 2 years.

If you have great skills you can do that today. If you don't have great skills and a company has made itself amenable to remote work, then why would they hire you at a Bay Area salary instead of firing you and hiring someone already in that location for half your salary?

I think Apple's engineers could develop the next version of the Apple Watch remotely. But I don't think they could come up with the idea and designs for the original Apple Watch remotely.

Almost all US case law has held that any jurisdiction can make anything illegal unless there's a specific higher-ranking (state or federal) law protecting that act from being made illegal.

I really don’t get this criticism of “laying off over Zoom.” What are they supposed to do, visit them in person at their home and infect them with Covid while laying them off? All meetings are over Zoom now.

They could be testing this on five year old samples.

The Adafruit “Arduinos” are pretty great.

Make sure you keep your mortgage under control... if remote really happens, we’ll all be competing with a vastly expanded labor supply.

I believe it on home buying that there is a blip... March and April went down so much that the buyers who can’t delay any more are buying now. So three months of 66% reduced demand are combining for a month of normal demand.

I don’t think the remote work culture will last. Remote work is fine when you already know what needs to be done. So it works well in task-based jobs. But in terms of deciding what needs to be done, and planning for the future, only the most exceptionally well-managed companies have managed to make remote work effective.

Keep hoping. Homeownership rates are very high in Republican country and the government will do almost anything to prop up home prices. Of course if they can find a policy that hurts the coastal homeowners while protecting the yeehaw homeowners they will but expect lots of money printing.

I don’t see how your first sentence is supported by the rest of them.

Single family homes? Or condos?

There’s a word you have skirted around: “slavery.” Qatar is a slave trafficking state and deserves a total embargo far more than Iran or Cuba does.

Nothing in Scandinavia or Japan is a viable concept for elsewhere unless explicitly tested elsewhere.

I think it does if the product isn't seen as best-in-class. I mean, whichever kind of fanboy you are, you have to agree that a late-model iPhone is an absolutely excellent phone. That's a different question from whether it's worth the money. I am guessing that these wheels are also excellent but that Apple hasn't communicated that well. They don't talk about how these wheels are great. They just say that they are wheels.