Why wouldn't it work with 2 or 3 unified days onsite and 2 or 3 days wfh, with a no-meetings, minimal-interruptions directive on wfh days? I think this structure, if well managed, would work even better than the old 5-days-in-office.

I agree that this would work, and be ideal. I think it only scales to a certain size organization though. At my company, I'd guess we have over a thousand developers across hundreds of teams, and more supporting staff. There's no possibility of getting everyone in at once.

This will be counterbalanced by the fact that WFH is better for many employees from a work-life balance perspective, so higher-performing employees who have more choices will tend to gravitate toward companies that allow WFH.

I expect many companies will arrive at an equilibrium with at least 2 days WFH for focused work and 3 days in-office for collaboration. This seems to already be happening since the % of companies offering hybrid is up this year. The question is how many great employees laggard companies will lose before accepting that.

(Caveat: this does not apply to companies doing mostly ground-breaking work that have more mission-focused, highly qualified applicants than they can handle. Some companies may be surprised to find they are no longer in this bucket.)

I just thought the topic sounded interesting. It's back up now.

I read this as more of a "both, and" situation. Lots of other industries have ISACs (Information Sharing and Analysis Centers), mostly focused on information security, and they can work quite well. The FS-ISAC, for example, is quite active in the financial services sector and (IMHO) reasonably effective.

It's always been a little baffling not to see FAANGs on this list (the IT ISAC is broader than just the tech industry): https://www.nationalisacs.org/member-isacs-3

So, I think this is a good step for the AI industry. Of course regulation is still a necessary component, but an industry consortium focused on sharing lessons learned and good practices is a good step, in my view.

Absolutely, the closest state to NY with a "right to try" law is Connecticut. Pennsylvania also has one. https://righttotry.org/in-your-state/

Edit: Also, the federal law applies regardless of location: https://righttotry.org/rtt-faq/

"I do not live in a state with a Right to Try law. Can I still use Right to Try?

"Yes. S.204 makes Right to Try the law of the land. So long as a patient and treatment meet the qualifications of the federal law, Right to Try applies, regardless of whether the patient’s state adopted Right to Try."

Essay author here. Success-to-the-successful is a real feature of our current economic landscape, more than in the semi-recent past (yes, ancient feudal societies were way worse). Here’s Harvard Business Review:

“… we find that large corporations are more and more likely to maintain their dominant positions, while small corporations are less and less likely to become big and profitable.” Link: https://hbr.org/2019/08/the-gap-between-large-and-small-comp...

Here’s economist Austan Goolsbee in The New York Times highlighting growing corporate concentration even pre-pandemic: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/business/big-companies-ar...

These are success-to-the-successful trends.

Disruptive shocks (like when Google created a truly better search technology and dethroned AltaVista in the late ‘90s, or when the US gov broke up AT&T in 1984) can change those dynamics. That’s how Kodak, despite having lots of resources, lost dominance and eventually failed: they didn’t have the right non-monetary resources (innovative culture and support for change) at a critical time, so disruptive shock toppled them.

Anyway, thanks for reading!

Indeed! I do not argue at all; positive feedback loops exist in a lot of cases. Sometimes legal means limit their strength, but they look like objective properties of certain structures.

Some banks offer sweep accounts that automatically move funds over the 250k limit into accounts at other banks (again, up to the 250k limit) or into money-market funds (which have their own risks).

I believe there is no way to eliminate credit, default, and/or liquidity risk entirely in banking (when cracks in the system appear and start spreading, you may have exposure no matter what you did), but it's possible to mitigate it in ways that don't seem to have happened here.

Here's a decent explainer on sweep programs (it talks about broker-dealers using them, but banks can also offer them): https://www.sec.gov/oiea/investor-alerts-bulletins/ib_banksw...

There's a good article from September on how Australia's similar bill worked pretty well: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/should-we-save-newspapers...

Local news is in trouble, and it might be worth saving.

The Australian bill only served to move money from one set of large corporations to another set of large corporations.

what do you think of the fact that "local news" is actually owned by a single large company? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stations_owned_or_oper...

Agree that great managers are sometimes individual contributors who take on the job because they believe doing so is the only way to ensure effectiveness. But it's important to filter for ego-as-motivation, which can make for a terrible manager....

There's another type of great manager, too, whose best quality is their ability to defend the team from b.s. and politics originating elsewhere in the organization. This is especially valuable in large, established companies.

It would be interesting to see long-term results of off-sites in which a company's executives and an equal number of long-tenured average-performing and high-performing employees gather to share and learn from each other, with follow-up on-site meetings to experiment and execute afterward.

I have never encountered an off-site like this, but if you have, how did it go?