Nice article about teleconferencing (including Qwaq, which is based on Croquet) versus travel.
I wonder if there’s real data on the relative merits of the energy used in office buildings vs. telecommuting. Office buildings are potentially more efficient through scaling, although the economic incentives are so lacking that there’s usually a lot of waste. While homes are energy hogs, we do already have and heat them for our non-work time.
I appeared today before Heritage committee as I emphasized concerns with regulatory capture by legacy lobby groups on Bills C-11 & C-18. But the appearance provided the chance to sound the alarm on antisemitism and need for accountability and to speak out.
https://x.com/SarahFischer__/status/1729561117268029617?s=20
My initial thoughts on Google deal. Good news there is an agreement, but hardly a big win with less than $100M in new money in a deal available a year ago, harm from Meta’s news exit and government upending Bill C-18’s core principles to salvage the bill.
https://x.com/mgeist/status/1729966880222249257?s=20
Excellent piece on the contribution of private antitrust enforcement by @LeeHepner that is well worth your time, citing scholarship by @Robert175295943 and @JoshuaPDavis3.
Black Jews exist, and plenty of them are Israeli. Confused? let her school you.
Next stop for the @NTIAgov National Spectrum Strategy: An Implementation Plan. In 4 months, we will publish a plan for executing the activities called for by the Strategy. Today, we are seeking public input on that Plan. Please send us your best ideas!
https://www.ntia.gov/federal-register-notice/2023/notice-national-spectrum-strategy-implementation-plan-request-input
For the last 3+ years of my employment at Laszlo Systems, I worked mostly from my living room in my house on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. Every few weeks I would get on boat, which took me to a bus 45 minutes away, which I rode for 1.5 hours to Boston, where a colleague would pick up me and one or two other people & drive us to his house 15 minutes away, where we would meet for the day, when I would go home by reverse route.
My house is tiny.
About 8 times a year I would get on an airplane to go to California, to work at the “mother ship” office in San Mateo. I n 4.5 years of doing that, I never rented a car, but always took public transportation from airport to hotel & hotel to office.
As part of an environmental awareness course my wife was taking, we calculated our “carbon footprint”.
It was pretty horrendous. All the goodness of working from home in a small house, taking public transportation, etc, was undone by all that air travel. Without air travel, I was a carbon-footprint saint. But when you include air travel, I was a carbon-footprint pig.
I suppose a few of those trips were not necessary, but many of them were; there was no substitute for “being there.” I think that if we had had a good qwak-like telepresence system I could have cut down my travel by 1/2 to 2/3.
On a different topic, this kind of technology does raise interesting questions about the future of geographically defined nation-states. That whole concept is going to be highly stressed over the next decade, at least.