At the moment it seems equally likely that some companies come out of all of this with the "lesson" that remote work caused their downturn in productivity and stock value (who can remember that every other company experienced the same when your investors only care "what have you done lately?" and "what have you done 'proactively'?") and we'll quickly see a return to "everybody needs to be in the office together" culture back backed by the same consultants that learned the wrong lessons after Marissa Mayer's Yahoo! house cleaning and were still badly ratcheting companies towards as miserable as possible colocation strategies.
It seems about 50/50 to me right now which group will prevail. At least with US public traded companies the only inertia seems to whatever shiny fad stock traders are enamored with versus whatever misery HPCs manage to sell on golf courses in C-Suite handshakes. (ETA: Some of whom, the worst stock investors and HPCs are the same people, of course.)
But working from home will expose a lot of stuff that can be done from home, a lot of employees who turn out to prefer working from home, and a lot of CEOs and accountants and so on will realize a lot of money can be saved on real estate. People are being quoted in the news along these lines, you don't have to anticipate it.
I am a advocate for working from home. But I know plenty of people and roles who are suffering a great deal from working from home.
I know working from home all the time is not optimal, but reducing the "drive to work" days and replcing then with "work from home" for people who prefer that would be great.
I'm thinking of how you have something like a powder or gravel, and you shake the container and it levels out like liquid.
This is more than "full wage" for people with low incomes since it's an extra $31K/yr ($15/hr) on top of existing state unemployment benefits. It won't be more for higher incomes.
It's state managed, and we definitely have a huge surge of unemployment claims to process, so your family may not have benefits yet due to the backlog of claims. Also, states may have eligibility requirements which your family members don't meet. Which category do your family members fall into?
a) Have been denied unemployment
b) Are in the queue for unemployment, but haven't gotten it yet
c) Have unemployment, but it's less than their previous income
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_Aid,_Relief,_and_E...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/article/coronavirus-stimulus-package...
1. We could invent a vaccine and discover that COVID mutates slowly enough that we get long term immunity. After mass vaccination in rich countries, the problem is basically solved after 1-2 years and life can go back to what it was in 2019. However, after 2 years of changed consumer habits and a set of companies and supply chains that will naturally adapt to the situation in the interim, the new normal might be significantly different than the old normal. Governments and international trade will have been changed. Investments in automation and telework will have been made. Some changes will be permanent. Like with WW2, 9/11 or the Great Recession, the ripples of causality will spread out for decades.
2. We could realize that the virus mutates fast enough that even with vaccines, we have a new endemic virus, possibly resembling the prevalence of the flu, but much more deadly. COVID will be one of the leading causes of death, up along with heart disease and cancer. People accept this increase in mortality and accept shortened lifespans. After several years of adjusting to the new reality, people start to just live with it. Some common activities completely lose their appeal due to the increased risk, such as theaters, concerts, travel, public transportation, and open offices.
3. We are unable to vaccinate against the virus, but continue aggressive measures to keep it from spreading a much as possible. We accept a new form of digital surveillance state that keeps us the goldilocks amount of isolated. We accept the new reality of algorithms determining our ability to live, work, and socialize. Life is increasingly lived digitally and in VR.
I think it's important to consider these possibilities because of the Normalcy Bias. The best way to overcome it to to seriously consider that tomorrow will not at all be like today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias
After a few months of being cautious of no major risk People will relax.
I really doubt that. Even with very dangerous disease, like Polio and Measles, most people lived their lives as normal.
The AIDS epidemic peaked in 1995 in the USA at 40k deaths per year. People absolutely made permanent changes to their sex practices as a result of the disease such as safe sex, regular STD testing, and taking preventive medications (PREP). Because of transmission characteristics, the disease spread fastest among gay men and the epidemic created huge cultural changes in gay America. Until PREP was available, the idea of having unsafe sex was extremely looked down upon and seen as an unnecessary risk, even though many men find condoms less pleasurable.
So I'd say that's pretty direct evidence that people are willing to curtail or modify their recreation when it becomes risky.
This is not a good example. Most people in the United States were never in a position to get AIDS because they are not MSMs and not promiscuous. Most sex takes place between spouses.
Gay men still have much higher prevalences of promiscuity and unsafe sex practices than the population at large. Promiscuity and 'unsafe sex' was never an issue in the general population.
Moreover, as your study points out, 'switching' who is in what role in anal sex is another effective way of spreading AIDs. Women cannot be the penetrative partners in anal sex, so even if a woman contracts AIDS via anal sex, she cannot spread it as a penetrating partner.
But to directly contradict your false narrative. I'd point out that your study was done in 2007. That's 13 years ago. Gay male sexual behavior in 2007 greatly differed from that during the AIDs epidemic. By choosing to use an article from 2007 to explain away gay sexual behavior during the AIDs epidemic of the 1980s, it is clear that you are trying to spin a narrative instead of actually look at events. In the book "and the band played on" by Shilts, the number of partners recorded during the 80s among the minority of gay men who had AIDS was regularly in the hundreds. This is clearly more than most people -- gay or straight.
Like I said, AIDS is a disease that affected a relatively small amount of people who continued to live life as normal because they could not control themselves. This furthers my point that people are not necessarily willing to sacrifice life's pleasures due to a deadly disease
Rare event? The list of pandemic/epidemic events of the last two decades alone is long. The world was simply incredibly lucky the last few times, only that the Western world ignored what happened in Asia. There's a reason why so many infections and deaths are in Western countries.
With superbugs on the rise "thanks" to abuse of reserve antibiotics in farming, it's only a question of time until the world is ravaged by another pandemic.
Not yet, that is the point. It is only a matter of time.
> Something like the bubonic plague can easily be controlled by basic hygienic practices.
Agreed, but we see with coronavirus how many people (sometimes intentionally) ignore them. Besides many places even in developed nations lack basic hygienic needs, such as prisons (see e.g. https://www.coe.int/t/dg3/health/Prisonsreport_en.asp), which leads to endemic tuberculosis outbreaks in prison inmates.
Conversely, maybe Asia could make some changes to their food and wildlife handling practices so they aren't regularly introducing novel viruses to humans.
Once those systems are developed they won't go away after the pandemic is over and those roles will likely be allowed atrophy by attrition.
Our business had seen its robotics and automation sector picking up before the pandemic hit and as other verticals have paused development plans, robotics and automation continue to press ahead.
The view here is momentum for automation already existed and the pandemic is seen as one more justification for continued investment.