In my neck of the woods new rules were introduced from midnight that ban family gatherings, social events, allow only one visitor to our home and require us to stay within our county (radius 20km) with few exceptions. This is the middle of five levels of restrictions designed to limit the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes CoViD-19, which spilled into the domain of humans sometime around the end of last year. About 30 million worldwide have contracted the virus, two-thirds of those have recovered (to varying degrees) and about 1 million have died.
A viable vaccine might be developed in the next 9 months (based on the many mid-2021 estimates), so this could be the half-way point. We [click title to read more…]
We’re just around the half-way point of this year, and looking back it’s clearly been nothing short of truly awful. Three months ago, at the “first quarter” mark, I was offering a practitioner’s perspective on working from home (WFH). In the past few days some businesses have started to reopen, though the advice remains to WFH if you can, with very good reason as these depressing numbers will explain:
Over seven million infections confirmed (two million of whom are in the USA).
Over 400,000 dead, a quarter in the USA.
USA, Ireland and the Netherlands have the same per-capita death toll (~0.035%, or 350 per million[1]).
UK toll is 620 per million, Italy 560, France 440.
It’s natural to be a little lost when a familiar context is completely altered, as has happened to millions (!) of people around the world in the past few months as a result of this truly awful pandemic. Three weeks since the WHO’s declaration, there appears to be an abundance of “experts” offering advice on how to “work from home”.
I’m not a WFH expert, merely a practitioner with decades of experience and while this may seem like an opportunity for many people around the world to show just what can be achieved by a WFH workforce, it’s really not.
For one thing, in almost all cases there was no proper planning. A workforce that suddenly has to work [click title to read more…]
Despite general agreement that lower energy consumption is a “good thing”, on reflection this doesn’t seem to be a real motivator. Convenience, cost, comfort; those could be the real drivers. At least, that’s my observation with respect to my own personal circumstances.
I recently switched to an all-electric car. Was this to save the planet? Was it to reduce pollution? Honestly, no. I just don’t like noisy cars, but range anxiety has kept me away from e-cars for a few years. Until now, when ranges over 400km per charge became available. Now my trips to clients, or even just down to the supermarket, are pleasurably quiet. A 200km round trip the other day was sheer delight. Fuel costs are much [click title to read more…]
/ˈtəːmɔɪl/ – A state of confusion, disturbance or uncertainty. A very apt word, not for the word games I was playing over the holidays, but for everything else that’s going on around us. Facing in one direction I find my British cousins, friends, co-workers, or at least neighbours, convulsed in the throes of Brexit. The consequences of this poorly formulated plan to extract the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from the European Union project are vague at best and potentially disastrous at worst, and it seems that no matter what happens, roughly half of the UK citizens who express opinions on the matter will be disappointed. It’s an unhappy state of affairs, and not likely to get [click title to read more…]