Ask HN: Predictions for future post Covid-19? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Predictions for future post Covid-19?

6 pointsbamazizi7 comments

Pandemics, chaos and economic down turn are not always a bad thing! I, for one, am very excited about the prospect of the future and birth of completely new opportunities! These sort of events have a tendency of clearing out industries of old, rusty and obsolete players, making room for people brave and observant enough to try new innovative ideas!

This is a global pandemic and no one has any clue what's "actually" going to happen to our macro/micro economy, jobs, real estate, businesses, society, local politics, geo political relations, potential wars and etc...! All we can do is guess ... and from guessing we can develop predictions and hopefully move to innovate!

Please share your positive and negative thoughts on the near future. i.e. 2-5 years!

The governments, specially USA, have moved to release a huge stimulus packages worth trillions ($2-8+T). However, I personally think it's premature and misses the entire core of the epidemic and USA's own nature of capitalism. They simply try to copy 2008 QE strategy and assume business as usual once people move out of quarantine! It's only a failed attempt at short-term avoidance and delay of the inevitable.

Restaurants, movie theatres, concerts, weddings, hotels & vacations and most other social structures will not get packed with people immediately. It will take years for them to become booming businesses once again. But if things are going to be different, how would they look like? share your guess...

Most likely we'll see that more companies will make more of their roles remote. Especially for smaller business, office space rent can be expensive. With COVID-19 they've probably seen that many jobs can be performed remotely, so hopefully we'll see more flexible business jobs. (This of course makes sense for software stuff more than hardware/service...)

So does this mean the tall skyscraper office buildings are becoming somewhat irrelevant and potentially obsolete? The icons and fabric of downtowns could be turned residential

The iconic Empire State building is too old structurally to create what corporations like for offices— large, unobstructed open areas.

So it's turning mostly into residential.

And when you think about it... what you're suggesting is like step n of "internet-era social organization" because we now have the infrastructure to make it work. Have mainstream broadband for >90% of the population? ⇒ you may remote massively entire categories of jobs (probably leave a skeleton crew on-prems for peace of mind).

Be nice if the pandemic resulted in the death of the open office with it's noise, distractions and germs. Oh yeah and large pointless all hands meetings.

I think we'll recover within that time frame and things will mostly return to normal.

The efficiency of WFH will be forgotten and the rat race will continue.

If you think about how fast we adapted to life quarantined at home, it should be obvious to everyone how fast people are going to adapt back to normal, especially in the summer weather.

Never underestimate the predictability of human nature.

Covid 19 is very mild compared to the first colds unleashed on humanity that wiped out civilizations. It just seems worse now since we are experiencing it.

2-5 years, the whole world will become infected and gain resistance. Minor changes in behavior will be established such as masks becoming socially acceptable in western countries.

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