Why does any comment always assume the average American is commuting ludicrous distances each morning. People do this, but its very, very rare. Hyperbole is getting in the way of discussion.
1-hour one way commutes are NOT rare at all in Amazon's hub locations. Housing near the office is supremely expensive, school districts are also not the best, and most people have partners and need to live in a location that balances 2 peoples' commutes. On top of that, Amazon is such a big employer that they single-handedly make the traffic worse in at least Seattle.
Also, keep in mind that it isn't just the commute time. For a 1-hour commute I also need to prepare for the 1-hour commute, which includes making and packing up a lunch (because many offices have no cafeteria or no options that I'm able to eat), packing up my electric toothbrush and water flosser (because I need to brush 3 times a day for my braces and they won't let me leave shit at the office). Others need to deal with feeding pets, blah blah. For people with train commutes they need to deal with uncertainty in traffic just getting to the train station, so they have to leave an extra 15-20 minutes early and kill time waiting for the train on the platform because the next train won't come for a fucking hour (this is America), and leave time to line up to buy the goddamn parking ticket for the train station.
For the past 2 years people were able to roll out of bed and into a meeting, grabbing something from the fridge on the way. That's why stuff was efficient. Now we're going back to an inefficient world with the same high expectations of an effecient world.
Again, if we are talking about FANG HQs, anything in the Bay Area, Austin, or NYC then yea sure. I'm just suggesting that rhetorically this is a losing strategy because it's such an outlier. Most Americans don't work at the headquarter(s) of the most successful company on Earth.
Counting the time to get dressed and brush your teeth towards the office is comically absurd, in my opinion, even if I take your point. THAT SAID good luck with the braces I don't miss the constant brushing. That would make me want to WFH. Cheers
Newspapers used to have very geographically limited competition in advertising for things like apartment rentals, for-sale listings, and job listings. They also got a fair bit of national brand advertising, even after TV eclipsed them. The lack of competition enabled them to do things that don't make money -- like in-depth investigative journalism. A newspaper that contained only meaty investigative journalism could not cover its costs with advertising, even back in 1990.
This is similar to how today's high-margin advertising funded companies (e.g. Google, Facebook) can afford to pursue out-there projects with no prospect of making money in the short term. Investigative journalism was a vanity/halo product that usually didn't make money, funded by people overpaying to advertise in the newspaper.
In a case of perfect competition and low barriers to entry, newspapers have to prioritize minimally expensive content as a supporting scaffold for advertising. Newspapers are much closer to this "perfect competition" case now than they were in 1990. (A very few newspapers like the New York Times achieved "escape velocity" to reach a national audience on the strength of their reporting.) Likewise, if Google were up against a dozen other nearly-as-good search engines, neither it nor its competitors would have the luxurious cash surpluses for "moonshot" projects.
The golden ages of AT&T and IBM were also back when they enjoyed monopolistic pricing power. They could afford to do Nobel Prize winning research instead focusing slavishly on cost efficiency. They overcharged everyone, and a bit of that surplus money was reinvested in scientific research and product quality that was higher than what an equilibrated competitive market would converge on.
I wouldn't give AT&T a telephone monopoly again just to bring back Bell Telephone Laboratories. But certain kinds of positive externalities seem to emerge only from businesses enjoying fat margins and high pricing power. One of those positive externalities, in the case of newspapers in the 20th century, was deep reporting.
The employer pays it for both part and full-time workers. The rates differ by province, but generally this works out two weeks of wages for the first few years with an employer - they can increase this if they want but that's the legal minimum.
In practice this just means that you can take two weeks and still get paid. You can forgo your vacation in some instances, but you still get paid out the vacation money. I used to do that when I worked part-time in college and was short of cash for whatever reason.
> "I know what I'm doing," Lambert said, as he put his files — and his pen — into a bag. Then he stood up, bumped into a chair and walked off, saying "Ciao" and waving his hand, before returning because he had neglected to pay the bill.
> As he paced around the restaurant waiting for the check, Lambert refused to answer questions about who he worked for or why no trace of his firm could be found.
My god. This would be perfect comedy if wasn't so concerning that it happened at all.
> Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said. “It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.”
That's a really great idea for kids drawings. I'll always keep a select few special ones, but any parent knows you'll end up with an art gallery if you keep everything. Making a digital art gallery of that stuff is a really good approach to letting go.
I wouldn't go that far. No digital gallery will keep the physicality of your kids' art and you'll really cherish that part when they're older, and throwing away what your kid makes is really going to squash any interest in making more of it.
