NAO 25th March
Tackling water resource issues is one of the five priority risks
the Committee on climate Change identified in its 2017 climate
change risk assessment. If more concerted action is not
taken now, parts of the south and south-east of England will run
out of water within the next 20 years.
This will of course lead to ever more
Coronanimby moaning that we don’t have the resources to build
the houses we need. Or as bad that we should force people to move
to places where they will be rained on more and be greatful for
it.
We have absolutely no shortage of water in the UK. Rather we
let most of it flow into the sea without being used. Most
countries have long ago solved the technical problem of getting
water from where it is to where it is needed. Some solutions date
back to the origins of civilisation.
In the era of privitisation there was a reaction against large
scale interegional water transfer solutions as ‘white
elephants’ such...
A new breed has come forth on twitter in recent days. The
coronimbys. They never really liked human beings anyway, seeing
them as a resource consuming, pollution creating blight (except for
them of course), with this misanthropy used to resist housing, HS2,
new airports, new anything all in a pseudo environmental anti
development brand of eco-fascism why denies all hope of human
ingenuity to fix, mend and restore the environment.
Oh how they now welcome Covid, it gives them the perfect excuse
to say aha we now no longer need the housing. It has all gone
away because of recession. Hang on I havnt noticed a mortality
rate, like the Black Death, of 30% (which byu the way led to the
biggest wave of new settlement building in history in the 14th
Century as the economy recovered.) Of course if we can create
trillions at teh stroke of a bankers pen to keep the economy going
we can do so for housing. And if every major currency...
Ad blockers are hugely popular.
Close to 800mm people around the world use them to avoid
intrusive ads and data collection. I do not use an ad-blocker but I
completely understand why one would choose to do so.
And yet much of the media business is supported by advertising.
There are a growing number of subscription-based media services,
but many people cannot or won’t pay for content and the vast
majority of content consumed on the web is advertising
supported.
So USV has long felt that a subscription-based ad blocker would
make a lot of sense. Ad-supported publications could opt-in to get
a piece of the subscription revenue and agree to block ads to the
subscribers who have the ad blocker.
And that is why we invested in our portfolio company Scroll which makes exactly that.
And today, Scroll and Firefox are launching Firefox Better Web,
which is a service inside of Firefox ($2.50 a month to start and $5
a month in time).
I downloaded the latest version of Firefox this morning and
signed up. It...
It’s an overwhelming time right now. Everyone in the world is
focused on COVID-19, and to varying degrees, is changing the way
they live.
From an economic perspective — beyond the obvious massive
damage due to a halting of large swaths of the economy, which will
need to be addressed with some form of government bailout — there
will also be some amount of permanent restructuring.
Many people are experiencing, for the first time, how many
activities — work, learning, healthcare, and socializing — can
be done remotely and in new ways using digital tools. For sure,
when the dust settles, we will largely go back to doing things how
we’ve always done them, but I suspect that certain new behaviors
will stick, and will result in longer-term behavioral and economic
changes.
The most obvious one is business travel and remote work.
Everyone who can is learning how to do this now — including
companies/teams/individuals that may have resisted it mightily in
the past. Moving forward, it’s going to be much harder to justify
an in-person-only culture. Virtual...
For the past six months, I’ve been working on a new podcast
called Everyday Experts , where I profile people from a variety of
jobs and industries about the people and systems behind the work
they do.
I know a lot of business podcasts already exist. But I wanted
this to be different. Rather than look to people we might
traditionally perceive as de-facto experts (that’s to say, CEOs,
renowned entrepreneurs, or celebrity figures), I wanted to help
uncover great leaders in unexpected places. That’s to say, people
you might come across in your day-to-day life, but not necessarily
recognize as experts.
Bus operators. Physical therapists. Beauticians. The local bar
owner who’s always there to take a shot with you when you need
one. The veterinarian who sees you only when you’re at your worst
and worried sick about the health of your favorite pet.
To kick things off, I rounded up a group of people I’ve gotten
to know personally — all of whom work face-to-face with their
customers or clients — and I asked them:...
In the latest WFH episode of the a16z Podcast — recorded all
remotely, of course — a16z general partners Connie Chan in
consumer and David Ulevitch in enterprise discuss with Lauren
Murrow the swift rise of remote work and virtual …
The post The
a16z WFH Podcast: Remote Work and Our New Reality appeared
first on Andreessen Horowitz....
I have been teaching in one form or another since college. I
helped pay for graduate school by teaching other grad students. For
most of my life, teaching has meant standing up in front of a group
of people and explaining things to them in a large group
setting.
But, like many things, that is quickly changing right now.
I mentioned that we have a new group of analysts at USV. And we
are doing an onboarding program for them where the various partners
at USV take turns teaching them things they will need to know
during their time at USV.
When we planned this onboarding program, we thought those
classes would take place in person. But now they are taking place
online.
This week, I am going to teach a three-hour class on cap tables
and liquidation waterfalls. These are the spreadsheets we use to
track everyone’s ownership in a company and how much money each
shareholder gets in a sale transaction. While much of this is
straightforward, there are edge cases that can be pretty...
It’s kind of sad that HQ Trivia, a mobile live game show, is
no longer running. This should be its moment. Much of the world has
spent the last week quarantined in their homes and are unable to
watch live sports as every league has suspended play. Currently,
the news is the only live event we are experiencing together –
and though necessary, that’s not been a fun experience. The
synchronous lighthearted entertainment that HQ provided would be a
welcome respite from the day-to-day boredom of quarantined life.
While there will always be a place for asynchronous entertainment
like Netflix & HBO, it’s already become clear to me that live
events satiate a different need.
Over the last week of quarantine, I’ve used live products more
than I ever have before. This weekend, me and 150k others
participated in #ClubQuarantine
hosted by DJ D-Nice on Instagram Live. A friend had to cancel
his in-person birthday party, so we all hopped on a hangout to
toast drinks. Rumble, the gym I frequent in real life, began...
FORCE MAJEURE AND CORONAVIRUS: FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS Part 1:
Force Majeure and Suspension/Termination of Contracts Coronavirus
(COVID-19) is turning out to be a twin fold pandemic – that
started with affecting public health and soon spread throughout the
economy. Sudden global shutdown and travel restrictions have
brought the economy to a screeching halt, before most of us could...
Source: Pixabay
Most companies, quite expectedly, focus intensely on the
positive attributes of their products and services when
communicating with customers. They market all the benefits, and
typically, they minimize any discussion of the limitations or
drawbacks of the product. After all, who would want to shine a
spotlight on negative attributes of your products?
Well, Harvard Business School scholars Ryan Buell and MoonSoo
Choi decided to challene the conventional wisdom. They sought to
examine whether a bit more honesty and transparency might actually
be beneficial for companies. Buell and MoonSoo Choi published
their findings in a paper titled,
"Improving Customer Compatibilitywith Operational
Transparency."
The scholars worked with Commonwealth Bank, a large Australian
financial services company, to conduct a randomized field
experiment. On the bank's website, potential new customers
received one of two offers: one highlighted the best attributes of
the company's credit card, while the other also mentioned key
drawbacks that firms often tend to place in the fine print only.
In short, the company made explicit...