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Commit to Long Term Testing

Expanding testing is very important now. It's also clearly an area we were unprepared. We should commit to having testing capacity long term, to both provide more certainty to anyone expanding testing capacity today, and to be prepared in the future. I had some thoughts about how this testing would be best structured. It's not possible to test for an contagious disease you're not aware of, but much of the infrastructure for doing so can already be in place, ready to be adapted. That infrastructure would roughly boil down to a) sample collection b) sample handling c) sample preparation d) sample analysis e) materials: reagents, etc. Scaling these up from scratch is quite a bit more work than adapting to a new contagion. A commitment to having that infrastructure would have helped a lot with the current crisis. Right now, the focus is rightfully on health care workers, suspected cases and essential workers. In terms of preparation though, in...

Office Plans

I was inspired to do some research on what types of office plans were most popular among workers. So I dived in and started looking and stumbled across an interesting failure in this area. When a particular office plan was presented, it never included images of monitors. This seems a somewhat shocking error considering that the average office worker will spend a fair amount of their time in front of screen. Consider this as an example: https://officesnapshots.com/articles/the-top-25-most-popular-offices-of-2018/ . In all 25 examples, the initial shot is of a common space. I understand that a bit, it's easier to make these distinctive, the creativity of the designer is more unbounded. But lets be honest, while these areas are useful to collaborative working, without a large screen and space for a keyboard and mouse, the personal ergonomics of them are not adequate for a lot of work. Dig a little deeper and many of the deeper reviews...

Who are the rentiers?

American cities need more housing. That is obvious to the YIMBY movement. I've heard some attempts to contest that statement, but in the overall range of discourse, it's rare for those who defend opposing viewpoints to respond to that statement directly. Instead, those discussions experience a topic change, either focusing on personal experiences, homeowner "rights", or an attack on landlords. Part of the reason for that topic change is that contending that there is enough housing in cities has to confront the supply and demand topic, and if you're not going to provide more supply, you have to change demand. That line then leads to somewhat hollow arguments about how people don't "belong" in cities and should be elsewhere. It's hard to make that argument without being oblivious to the individuals who are currently making that choice to live in a city despite the very high housing costs, or who would prefer to if they hadn't been forced out by...

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