(1) Steve Green, Bill Whittle, and Scott Ott (remember “Scrappleface”?) comment on “what if you built the biggest, best, greenest headquarters office space and nobody came”?
“Over the last year, we often felt not just unheard, but at times actively ignored. Messages like, ‘we know many of you are eager to reconnect in person with your colleagues back in the office with no messaging acknowledging that there are directly contradictory feelings amongst us feels dismissive and invalidating.”
Leaving aside the dripping sense of entitlement[*] and the nauseating pop-psych speak, the COVID19 pandemic triggered a number changes waiting to happen. One of them was the normalization of telecommuting (a.k.a. “remote working”) for many office jobs: we saw first-hand that yes, many of these can be done from home just fine.
I telecommuted for months myself: since my employer worked under a quota, they asked everyone who could work from home to do so, in order to free up quota slots for essential lab workers. How efficiently one can work from home depends on a number of factors: some of us cannot deal with auditory distractions, others thrive on noisy environments (these are the ones who, pre- and post-pandemic, might go to cafés to go write or design). There’s the stereotype of the blogger / writer in pajamas; others (like yours truly) made a point of dressing for work even at home — to flip the “you’re at work now” switch in the brain, so to speak.
I’m certain there are plenty of jobs at Apple that can be done just fine from home with a fast internet connection, and using Zoom (or, since everybody at Apple is in the Apple ‘ecosystem’, Facetime) instead of long meetings. (I actually prefer online over realspace conferences, personally: trying to outshout each other doesn’t wo
But I was also reminded of something not mentioned in the video: Parkinson’s Law of the perfect headquarters building. The British naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson make several trenchant observations about the dynamics of large organizations, collectively known as “Parkinson’s Laws”. [Archive of original article in the Nov. 19, 1955 issue of The Economist; ] Some you may have heard of include: work expands to fill the time available to completion; officials make work for each other; officials want to multiply subordinates, not rivals; and Parkinson’s Law of Triviality, according to which the more trivial the expense, the more debate it entails.
Parkinson also observes that:
During a period of exciting discovery or progress there is no time to plan the perfect headquarters. The time for that comes later, when all the important work has been done. Perfection, we know, is finality; and finality is death. […]
Great hopes centered on the League [of Nations] from its inception in 1920 until about 1930. By 1933, at the latest, the experiment was seen to have failed. Its physical embodiment, however, the Palace of the Nations, was not opened until 1937. It was a structure no doubt justly admired. Deep thought had gone into the design of secretariat and council chambers, committee rooms and cafeteria. Everything was there which ingenuity could devise– except, indeed, the League itself. By the year when its Palace was formally opened the League had practically ceased to exist. [It is presently the United
C. Northcote Parkinson, “Parkinson’s Law”, book into which the Economist article was expanded. [PDF available here.]NebbichNations office at Geneva.]
Yes, I know Apple has a market cap over $2 trillion, and that their just-released M1 CPU has the potential to be transformative. (I’ve been an Apple user for over 35 years myself.) At the same time, I can see “bureaucratic entropy” affecting Apple as it becomes ever more invested in luxury beliefs and ever further from the Steve Jobs-era passion for making ‘insanely great’ products.
Now they have a perfect headquarters building, into which enormous amounts of time, money, and energy have gone — and a substantial percentage of its own employees prefer to telecommute from their spare bedrooms…
(2) Global chip shortage. This is not all about COVID: as this ColdFusion video explains, a perfect storm has hit the chip manufacturing sector: a historical drought in Taiwan (chip fabbing is very water-intensive); increased demand for GPUs due to historically high cryptocurrency prices (leading to record ‘bitcoin mining’, generally done on GPUs); … Go watch the whole things
The big shock to me was just how high a percentage of the semiconductor ‘foundry’ market is held by just one company: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, better known as TSMC.
What ‘fabless semiconductor’ companies are TSMC’s most important clients? AMD, Apple, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Broadcom,…
(3) “Bidenflation”: it’s a thing now. Just three links via Insty:
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Deutsche Bank Issues a Terrifying Warning for America Under Biden. “Already, many sources of rising prices are filtering through into the US economy. Even if they are transitory on paper, they may feed into expectations just as they did in the 1970s. The risk then, is that even if they are only embedded for a few months they may be difficult to contain, especially with stimulus so high.”
Related: CPI inflation indicator hits 5 percent. “Trillions of dollars of proposed new deficit spending would further increase inflation, and would mostly stimulate the politically connected. The Federal Reserve should resist political pressure to further flood the money supply in hopes of stimulating a faster COVID recovery.”
DO TELL: Not a drill: Inflation is here. “The optimists, including those at the Fed, believe that the current inflation is temporary — a combination of demand spiking as the economy reopens while the supply chains haven’t fully recovered from the disruptions of the pandemic lockdowns. But this understates the scale and scope of what we are seeing. There are reasons to believe that the current moment is different from previous economic recoveries.”
And what for? Half of the pandemic’s unemployment money may have been stolen. “Criminals may have stolen as much as half of the unemployment benefits the U.S. has been pumping out over the past year, some experts say. . . . Blake Hall, CEO of ID.me, a service that tries to prevent this kind of fraud, tells Axios that America has lost more than $400 billion to fraudulent claims. As much as 50% of all unemployment monies might have been stolen, he says. Haywood Talcove, the CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions, estimates that at least 70% of the money stolen by impostors ultimately left the country, much of it ending up in the hands of criminal syndicates in China, Nigeria, Russia and elsewhere.”
But the most telling item, perhaps:
INFLATION: Why is Blackrock buying every single family house they can find, paying 20-50% above asking price?Why would they pay such a premium?
Gee, whodathunkit? Runaway gov’t spending fueled by what amounts to money printing: this isn’t quite the 1923 Weimar Republic [Biden: “hold my beer”], but as Herbert Stein’s law goes: “that which cannot go on forever, won’t”…
[*] not to mention the unpunctuated run-on sentence, a hallmark of a certain overcredentialed, undereducated generation
Spin, strangeness, and charm 
In re:
Criminals may have stolen as much as half of the unemployment benefits the U.S. has been pumping out over the past year, some experts say
I am aware of two states (Wa and Ca) where the banks called the state to tell them that they were sure fraud was happening and they were told to shut up and go away. I suspect similar in others. And the banks were reporting on blatant, obvious frauds like dozens (hundreds?) of claims for different people going to the same ‘address’ and bank account. Or cases where the money was immediately wired to the same bank in Lagos. etc.
I’m sure the banks have been keeping all the communication records because they know that eventually someone is going to try blaming them.