I'm European. I think Europe’s main problem is that its leaders and citizens are more concerned with how to distribute wealth than with creating it. In many countries, much more importance is placed on pensions than on the education of the younger generations.
Krugman’s analysis may well be accurate, but the problem is that China is now beginning to assert itself in sectors where Europe used to be strong (manufacturing, automotive, etc.). If our software is American and our hardware is Chinese, who will pay for the pensions?
Yes, but this only works as long as the economy remains competitive. Europe is rapidly squandering the human and economic capital it has accumulated over centuries, while the US and Asia continue to grow. Welfare exists as long as someone pays for it.
The best cars were built between 2000 and 2010. Pretty much the pinnacle of the internal combustion engine without all the millions of lines of buggy code that apparently no longer allow you to open your car freely.
The reality is: they have the data and the data shows that productivity is more or less the same. However, they (the execs) prefer to have everyone back in the office to keep tax incentives, real estate value and probably also because they (old school executives with strong people skills) genuinely think that in office is better.
I work remotely and I'am a big remote work enthusiast and I think that Meta is right on this one.
They are (at least at the moment) one of the most remote friendly company among the big tech ones and I think that they are following the plan that Zuck draw. He never said that Meta would become a fully remote company overnight. In fact in may 2020 he said the he expects half of the company to work remotely in 5 to 10 years[1]. Around 25% of the Meta workforce is remote and this figure could increase.
They are also the only company that admitted that onboarding is harder remotely. This can happen for a number of reasons (for example, processes not optimized for remote workers and not for an inherently inferiority of remote work) and the fact that they also said that engineers that switch from office/hybrid to remote performs the same as the ones in offices suggests that they are not done with remote work.
I guess we'll see how it will end, but I don't think that a cautios approach to remote work must necessarily be considered negative.
I think that the Gartner hype cycle can be applied to remote work. The peak was in 2022 and now we are in the trough of disillusionment. I think that an improvement in market conditions (low rates), the realization that remote first/fully remote can work at scale (it's a matter of time before the remote startups founded in the last 3 years will become unicorn/decacorn) and a stabilization in the commercial real estate and service sector (a huge crash is an hard pill to swallow, let the market adjust slowly) will push remote work In The slope of enlightenment.
Remote work became mainstream only 3 years ago. It's early for this kind of considerations. Let's see in 5 years how many remote first unicorn there are going to be.
Human players tends to maintain high APM even in "idle" situation like the beginning of the match in which you don't have many things to do. They do it because it's easier for an human to have constant APM instead of spiking in critical situation like combats. I think that this pumps the average APM of a human player.
Example of human player playing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bexWuHmV32A
Krugman’s analysis may well be accurate, but the problem is that China is now beginning to assert itself in sectors where Europe used to be strong (manufacturing, automotive, etc.). If our software is American and our hardware is Chinese, who will pay for the pensions?