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Very interesting paper. The categorisation of upper and lower class could be problematic however. Being a paper from the US, I presume the participants' class category corresponds to assets and income, ergo upper class being simply richer. In other countries, such as the UK, one's class has a totally different meaning.

A large federally-funded quarantine facility on the outskirts of each state capital would fulfill the need for quarantine that can operate at capacity, whilst limiting transmission. It's not rocket science, but unfortunately it is politics.

The past couple of years have caused me to really become ashamed of being Australian. Being part of an increasingly globalised society, I found the government's blanket dictat of "Australians come home now" to belong to another era. With 4% of its population living in other countries, one would assume they would try harder to not alienate their diaspora.

It strikes me as an example of Sigmund Freud's "Narcissism of Small Differences"[1]: "The thesis that communities with adjoining territories and close relationships are especially likely to engage in feuds and mutual ridicule because of hypersensitivity to details of differentiation."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...

"On the fifth day, the leading horse – a black mare known as Betsy Baker – stopped responding to the whip, and retired for two hours. She was apparently exhausted, and nothing could induce her to continue except champagne." -- The past truly is a foreign country.

For anyone interested in these topics and how they developed, James Howard Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere [1] is an informative, if sad, read.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125313.The_Geography_of_...

I think Hungary should be very much kept in the EU, so the EU can continue to exert its influence. The funding taps should be turned off however, and only turned on again subject to demonstrable and verified improvements.

We'd have new legislation within a week targeting patent trolls. I can't imagine anything that'd make a government more unpopular than taking away everyone's iPhones, iPads and Macs.

To be fair, a random dude from Essex designed the original iMac, iPod and most Apple devices thereafter.

Seems like the mobile industry and ISPs in Canada have the same problem as in Australia: too few people across too wide a space. The incumbents will only agree to improve and service their network if they are given protected positions by their government. Leads to results like 10Mbps fibre NBN "broadband" and CAD$80+/mo plans for 30GB of data. Far inferior to that enjoyed by UK and Europe.

Better to get a Ubigi or Truphone eSim, much cheaper data roaming if you're not willing to get a local SIM.

You can also buy ice packs that you wear draped around your neck. It cools the blood flowing to your cartoid artery, along with the general area. Works really well.

Where did Costa Rica go so right? In the news it always appears to be a bastion of moderation and success, especially when compared to its neighbours.

At 6:30: "It is thought that an impact like this happened 6 times in the violent past of the Earth's history." -- I wonder if this could be correct?

Rohinton Mistry's Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag is set in a Parsi community within Mumbai. Fascinating stories that throw a spotlight on their integration, beliefs and everyday lives.

Goes without saying, Mistry's A Fine Balance is probably the best book I've ever read. The story still stays with me years later and I look forward to re-reading it at some point.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3539.Rohinton_Mistry

A competing but emerging technology to keep an eye on is holographic storage.

"IBM has already demonstrated the possibility of holding 1 TB of data in a crystal the size of a sugar cube and of data access rates of one trillion bits per second"[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Data_Storage_Syste...

True. Planned impediments can help, just like making sure alcohol never enters your front door.

I've used my phone's parental features to limit usage of social apps to one hour. It's protected by a somewhat randomly chosen PIN that I don't memorize but store in my password manager. If I want to override the time limit, I have to go and look up the PIN. Most of the time... too hard, move on to something more productive.

Has anyone else tried the app "Friendly"? For a while I've wanted to stop using Facebook, but quite a few community groups I'm involved with use it as their only method of communication. Friendly is an augmented wrapper for the mobile web versions of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and a few of the other time-sappers.

I find it works really well. I still get to use an app to access the information in an convenient way, but without the bells and whistles that make hours pass like minutes, and without having to give the platforms access to my phone's metadata. Downside: it is clunkier than the respective apps, but then that's the point.

Interacting with strangers, Russians are coconuts whilst Americans are peaches. I've found Erin Meyer's Culture Map[1] a good guide to navigating different cultures.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22085568-the-culture-map

With worldwide population growth curves flattening and population pyramids inverting, countries of tomorrow will be positively clamouring for immigrants.

A good book to read on the topic is Empty Planet by Bricker & Ibbitson[1]. One of their observations is that the country best placed to weather the coming demographic storm is the US, as they have a ready supply of immigrants south of their border. Every other country will have to compete, and some such as China will be in dire straits due to past misguided policies.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37585564-empty-planet

I've noticed this for years, and always wondered "Why?" myself. Then I came across a UX blog where the author suggested doing exactly this. Their reasoning being that new users aren't familiar with your website, so they need a big garish button to help them sign up easily, whereas regular users are familiar with your website already so they will know where the Login link resides.

I don't agree with it personally, I think it reflects an organization where marketing is prioritised over customer happiness.

Your business doesn't operate in a vacuum. It is licensed and supported by society. The same society that benefits from inheritance redistribution.

We visited Sooke Harbour House back in 2016. It was a unique and charming little hotel with beautiful cottage gardens. I have lovely memories of taking breakfast on the terrace, surrounded by nasturtiums of all colours and having little hummingbirds hovering around a fountain within hands reach. One of our best meals in North America was in its cosy understated restaurant, introducing us to Okanagan Pinot.

Reading about its demise is devastating -- its beauty was a credit to both Frederique and Sinclair. If the new owners have ripped out the trees and the vegetable beds, I doubt it will retain the same magic. A special place we can never visit again, sadly.

Thank you. Really interesting articles. I've subscribed to their RSS feed in Reeder.

Reads the same as Netflix. Individuals empowered to make decisions and execute, at all levels of the organization.

With higher responsibility also comes the risk of exposing the company to situations that a more practised individual would know to avoid. It'd be interesting to hear about how these companies mitigate risk from their armies of ambitious underlings.

That would require initiative and the capability to execute. So much easier to just say "sorry, there's nothing we can do".

The broken windows theory. Cleaned up New York in the late 80s/90s.

MySQL and Oracle all over again. Perhaps time to fork Unsplash and give birth to the MariaDB of open photography?

Firefox's default scrolling behaviour didn't feel as responsive as Chrome. I changed a few settings below in about:config and now Firefox is a pleasure to use again. With the uBlock Origin, Cookie Autodelete and ClearURLs add-ons, it's better for privacy too.

  general.smoothScroll: false
  mousewheel.default.delta_multiplier_y: 300

One thing people should bear in mind when looking at Wasabi is that they have a 90 day minimum retention period for their PAYG plans. So if you upload a large file and overwrite it tomorrow, you'll be charged the storage fee for the day plus the storage fee for the remaining 89 days, and then the storage fee for the new file, and so on.

The same goes for AWS IA and Glacier classes and Google's Nearline and Coldline. Unless you're storing files for a long time, always factor in the minimum retention period before estimating costs. It'll prevent any nasty billing surprises -- speaking from experience unfortunately.

Microsoft was the talking point in a couple of the articles, and they also own Github. The rest, could be considered under the tech giants umbrella -- so I'd say the links are topical and relevant.