fujiwara79

I was talking about residential real estate though. commercial real estate has gotten cheaper because so many offices will become downsized due to more people choosing to work from home (even after the pandemic)

every survey I've seen recently showed that the cohort most hesitant to take the vaccine are republican men. pretty interesting. yet they brag about operation warp speed.

LOL real estate is exploding everywhere.

I'm a militant supporter in flexible schedules to meet the needs of individuals. some people can come in 5 days a week if they want; others can work from home full time if they want. i'm not a fan of having a policy of forcing everyone to come into the office under the guise of "team dynamics" or "team health". let's face it: we're not training for an Olympic relay or producing a screenplay. most people work independently at their desk even when they're physically in the office. schmoozing and politicking are very real. ideally promotions should be purely meritocratic, but they are often not. management is frequently out of touch and its human nature to be predisposed to promoting friends and acquaintances. schmoozing is an important skill if you're in sales or business development, but it's not that important for other types of technical work. the office environment creates a perverse incentive structure where schmoozing is more valued than doing actual work. it's been very apparent to us during the pandemic. well, back in the good old days, virtually all of us had to work in a centralized office location because there was no other choice. given the technology of today, it's odd that we would all choose to spend two hours a day driving to/from a centralized office location, only to spend half of our day hanging out at the coffee machine and chatting about the football game last weekend. but i'm told this improves productivity or something.

leases for commercial real estate typically are for five-year or ten-year terms. it's not an annual lease like you have for residential real estate. companies want their employees to return to the office, at least part-time, because they're stuck with these leases for at least another few years, and so, in their minds, they might as well make use of their office space. don't believe the "team building" and "collaboration" corporate buzzword nonsense. they like to use those buzzwords to convince their rank-and-file but that's not the driving force behind these decisions. flexible and remote work should have been adopted en masse at least five years ago. the baby boomer managerial regime that still prevails in the c-suite of corporate america has refused to adopt it. it's a cultural, generational thing where they simply don't believe people are working unless they can "see" your butt in a seat. micromanagers also favor forcing everyone into an office 5 days per week for obvious reasons. there are some people who climb the corporate ladder by schmoozing and navigating office politics -- not because of their work. those people have struggled recently because, well, you need an office to schmooze and politick. the hybrid option will probably be the preferred approach for many workers. although i think that some manager types will discriminate (subconsciously) against people who choose to be full-time WFH, because surely if you show up at the office, you must be a great worker. so you may have workers who go into the office strictly because of perception -- and not because it's the most productive environment for them to work in.

i think the pandemic will eventually result in the education system improving and better serving a larger segment of their students. do you guys think throwing 30 kids into a classroom and lecturing them all day was always the best way for kids to learn? for some kids, sure. but for many kids - absolutely not. does anyone question why kids hate school? too many people assume that's the best way to teach kids because "that's how we've always done it". we've had the technology to adopt a more flexible model for teaching kids based upon the diverse needs of students, and yet it took a pandemic to force people to reimagine the old one-size-fits-all model. but the boomers, doomers and gloomers will continue to lament that we're headed for societal ruin.

that p.1 variant looks particularly bad for younger people. https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n879

hugs will come back. people like to hug. but most people don't like handshakes. handshakes are one of those things we are programmed to do since childhood, and so we do it, but none of us ever question why we do it -- until recently.

old habits die hard. handshakes won't completely go away but i don't see it being cultural norm or expectation to shake hands with every stranger you meet either (especially in professional settings).

also, the treatment for faux outrage caused by BDS is to turn off cable news.

the flu is almost nonexistent this year. haven't heard of many people getting the sniffles either. there probably will be some cultural changes. for example, i don't see handshakes coming back anytime soon.

suicides, alcoholism and opioid addiction were increasing for many years pre-covid. definitely don't want to return to the pre-2020 paltry 2% growth rates. some inflation would actually be a good thing. it's been artificially low for too long. it's certainly better than deflation.

Having your politics affect your travel choices is just sad. It's also unhealthy. People should travel as much as possible and expand their horizons.

True. I’ve moved on to Dr Seuss and Potato Head. Those are the existential threats of our time.

Rooftop solar panels increase the value of your home by about 5%. So think of it like remodeling your kitchen.

Part of this is due to bad luck; the other part is that DCA doesn’t know how to measure snow.

the ingredients are there for a triple phaser.

The jackpot of this winter has been the Catoctin Mountains. Specifically, northwest Frederick County and eastern Washington County. Those areas have about 55" for the season. About 60 miles due south of there, as the crow flies, there was only about 10". Crazy N-S gradient right at that longitude.

haven't seen this much heavy snow with southerly winds since 2014.

we're going to end the season with a big snow storm. March is the new January.

if the arctic air dumps into the south central states before trudging east, then yes that's how it works. not all arctic outbreaks do that. some directly target the northeast. but we haven't had one of those in years. look at 2004 in new england. one of the coldest winters ever in new england. those arctic blasts targeted them and didn't dump into the south central states at all.

i'm not saying there's any causality. it's just a correlation. it could be random, but statistically that's very unlikely, to keep getting a very hot summer every 11th year. the solar cycle is 11 years, so maybe there's some causality there, but very difficult to prove the precise mechanism. come to think of it, i think the summer of 1933 was also very hot. so this correlation goes back a very long time.

those were historically hot summers across the northeast. not just run-of-the-mill hot around dc. it's a thing.

yesterday was the first time in two years dca had a high of 32 or less. today will be the second. so....there is that. kind of unbelievable that we haven't had a true arctic outbreak in three years. the midwest is experiencing an epic one now. dallas may go below zero on tuesday morning. but it'll just become stale by the time it gets here. personally, while snow is my #1 criteria for a good winter, i also consider the number of arctic outbreaks to be the second factor. in that area, we have been lacking for a while now.

we also seem to have scorching summers every 11 years. summer of 1944, 1955, 1966, 1977, 1988, 1999, 2010. that means this summer is going to be brutal. get ready.