Silted Dams, Cloud and The Fed
Dallas Fed: Entirely WFH Drops
In our last subscriber send, we wrote (emphasis newly added):
Compulsive extrapolators have used the current societal instability to posit the arrival of a “new normal” -- a fundamental reset in how we restructure economies and societies. There is a utopian yen among “New Normalistas” to declare the past prologue to a work from home Zoom-future that, as it happens, they kinda, sorta always wanted in the first place...This is why the New Normalistas have it wrong, at least in their broad strokes. As desirable as some of the things they want might be, and while some things will certainly change at the margin, the messy forces of humanity are arrayed against them, and these forces will not be cowed, let alone stopped. The boom, boom, boom drumbeat toward “normal” will continue, right up until there is a vaccine. There is a giant, silted, societal dam ready to burst, and on the other side is a headpond of people demanding OpenTable reservations, shopping trips, happy hours, sporting events, live concerts and cheap flights to Vegas.
And, as it turns out, the Dallas Federal Reserve is starting to see evidence of just that: “As a ratio of actual employment rather than pre-pandemic employment, 24.2 percent of workers ages 18 to 64 worked entirely from home in August, down from 35.2 percent in May.”
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Cloud Infrastructure & Startups: “That’s What Always Happens”
Recently, Eric spoke with Amy Scott from NPR Marketplace about the state of things in the Cloud Infrastructure space. You can listen here, and there is a transcript as well.
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Recently in Paul & Eric’s Backchannel Conversations...
And, finally, we close with what will become an on-going feature of these letters: Recently in Paul & Eric’s Backchannel Conversations…