Tag: covid

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Adamsplaining

2022 began with New York City getting a new mayor. Eric Adams has only been at the helm of the Big Apple for a short time, but he’s wasting none of it when it comes to NY’s economic recovery. Fola Akinnibi writing for Bloomberg reports how Mr. Adams is coaxing CEOs to end remote work policies to get people back into the city to work. The mayor said he met with 100 chief executive officers this week as part of scheduled meetings his office has with both small businesses and corporations in the city. He used the meeting to coax…

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Anti-Ambition

In a lengthy writeup for the NY Times, Noreen Malone dives into trends that bubbled up since COVID struck the workforce. The idea of anti-ambition is a phrase she explains is where our jobs have been stripped bare. Gone are the interactions, preparing to leave, the rituals, and the encounters. What we’re left with are jobs in our intimate spaces. A huge swath of luster (if any was there to begin with) is now gone. Now, though, it’s as if our whole society is burned out. The pandemic may have alerted new swaths of people to their distaste for their…

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Empty Trains

Working from home has not only been a welcome reprieve for overworked employees. It has also brought much-needed recuperation of all the time people commuted to and from work. As someone who spent 11 years commuting 2-hrs daily, I can personally attest that it will slowly rot your soul. This found time due to COVID has been brutal for the NY Transit Authority. The MTA is the main commuting system for New Jersey, Long Island and Westchester NY employees who work in Manhattan. Reporting by Matthew Haag and Patrick McGeehan at the NYT found the MTA saw a 75% drop…

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Taxlog

As of Monday, the ability to file taxes in the United States has begun. And the IRS has already stated there will be massive delays due to staff shortages and overload from working on COVID-related programs throughout 2021. More from the AP & NBCNews Agency officials are already warning filers that “in many areas, we are unable to deliver the amount of service and enforcement that our taxpayers and tax system deserves and needs,” as IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig put it earlier in the month. Delays in processing are to be expected — especially because the IRS says it still…

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E3 Learns from CES’ Mistakes

A full six months ahead of 2022’s E3 gaming convention, the Entertainment Software Association announced E3 will be virtual this year. “Due to the ongoing health risks surrounding COVID-19 and its potential impact on the safety of exhibitors and attendees, E3 will not be held in person in 2022. We remain incredibly excited about the future of E3 and look forward to announcing more details soon.” VentureBeat E3 was virtual last year too and they’re taking no chances with Omicron causing enormous spikes in cases everywhere. Contrast this with CES and their insistence that they conduct an in-person event in…

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Pocketing the Games

Console manufacturer Analogue is a well-known player in the retro-gaming scene. They make high-end gaming consoles that can play retro games. The machines emulate original hardware via fancy chips called FPGAs and they are pixel-perfect recreations of what Nintendo and Sega put out in the 80’s & 90’s. Hot on the heels of their TurboGrafx system comes the long-awaited release of their portable console, the Analogue Pocket. At a glance, the Pocket looks like production on the Game Boy never stopped and Nintendo kept revising it over the past three decades. It has basically the same form factor as the…

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Zillow Pauses Being Stupid

Lost in the bonanza of home buying was this fact: Zillow itself was buying homes. The speculation was the company did this to resell homes at a higher value, thus manipulating house values. This would benefit the listings it shows on its website. As the market has cooled in the past months, Zillow decided to pump the brakes on their hair-brained scheme. But due to a shortage of labor and supplies, Zillow can’t meet current demands to close, renovate, and resell the homes fast enough. CEO Jeremy Wacksman said the temporary pause on purchasing of new homes will allow Zillow to focus…

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The Real Reason the Supply Chain is Broken

Recently there was a fantastic segment by David Pogue for CBS Sunday Morning wherein he goes over the current supply chain problems. It’s been a royal pain in the ass to find certain products and yet we hear reports of container ships waiting outside ports for days to unload all their cargo. It all comes down to one thing: trucks. With all the technology and efficiency implemented over the years there’s a single fact that holds true: we are overly-dependent on trucks and truckers to move all these goods to and fro. The oxygen the supply chain requires is a…

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Tap to Enter: Samsung to get into the vaccine passport game

Lots of noise is made about “vaccine passports”, but one convenient thing about it is the ease and speed of proving one’s vaccination status when required to enter a building. In NY the Excelsior Pass has been around quite quickly after the vaccines were made available. Acquiring a pass requires verifying some information, then getting a QR code the state issues. The pass also has your name on it. Pair the scanned code with photo ID and you have a verifiable way for a bar or stadium to know if someone is vaccinated. Even if the QR code was a…