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From superstar cities to ghost towns: Two-thirds of workplaces in major hubs have yet to reopen
By Lance Lambert September 3, 2020 10:00 AM GMT+1
Even as COVID-19 cases drop across the
nation, most workplaces in large metropolitan areas remain closed.Only 27% of U.S. workplaces in America's 20 largest metropolitan areas will be reopened by the end of September. That's the finding from a poll of more than 1,000 executives by the Conference Board between Aug. 19 and 26, which was shared exclusively with Fortune.
Another 8% of workplaces in large metros plan to reopen before the end of the year, and 21% sometime in 2021. While 40% have either no timeline to reopen (35%) or are waiting for a vaccine (5%). And 3% say they'll stay remote permanently.
This spells trouble for both the finances of big cities and small businesses, like restaurants and shops, which are dependent on foot traffic from nearby offices.
And as workplaces in big cities remain closed, some employees are already looking to leave town. Americans living in urban areas are twice as likely to say they'll move out as a result of the pandemic (11%), compared to Americans living in rural areas (5%), finds a Fortune-SurveyMonkey poll of 2,478 U.S. adults between Aug. 17 and 18.
The Conference Board poll was conducted among 1,100 businesspersons across 20 U.S. metropolitan statistical areas. It included CEOs, C-suite executives, vice presidents, and senior managers.
Remote Work Is Killing the Hidden Trillion-Dollar Office Economy
From airlines to Starbucks, a massive part of our economy hinges on white-collar workers returning to the office
For a decade, Carlos Silva has been gluing, nailing, and
re-zippering shoes and boots at Stern Shoe Repair, a usually well-trafficked
shop just outside the Metro entrance at Union Station in Washington, D.C. On a
typical day, he would arrive at 7 a.m. and stay until 8 p.m., serving the
crowds of professionals shuttling by on their way to work. But since the
near-shutdown of office work and train travel, he has been closing the shop at
4 p.m. “There is no traffic, my friend. The whole station is dead,” says Silva.
“Now it’s only a part-time job.”
In the
five months since the coronavirus forced a lockdown of U.S. businesses,
economists have focused much attention on the devastation of mom-and-pop
businesses, brick-and-mortar shops, bars and restaurants, and massive chains.
But they have mostly overlooked a looming threat to a vastly larger and more
consequential galaxy of businesses, one worth trillions of dollars a year in
GDP and revolving around a single, much underappreciated economic actor — the
white-collar office worker.
As companies in cities across
the U.S. postpone and even scrap plans to reopen their offices, they have
transformed once-teeming city business districts into commercial ghost towns
comprised of essentially vacant skyscrapers and upscale complexes. A result has
been the paralysis of the rarely remarked-upon business ecosystem centering on
white-collar workers, who, when you include the enterprises reliant on them,
account for a pre-pandemic labor force approaching 100 million
workers.
These workers shopped at small businesses like Silva’s shoe repair
shop: dry cleaners, gyms, food carts, florists, and pharmacies. But they were
also among the most vital customers and source of revenue for a slew of larger,
less obvious businesses — food delivery companies like
Grubhub and Uber Eats, and companies like Xerox, the maker of printing
supplies. Amid Covid-19, workwear destinations Brooks Brothers and J.Crew have
filed for bankruptcy protection, with Brooks Brothers selling itself last
month. And, on its quarterly earnings call in late July, Starbucks attributed
the loss of some $2 billion year on year to deserted urban office corridors.
Starting off their day at home, remote workers are simply not queueing up in
the same numbers for a morning venti latte.
----And the move to remote work doesn’t show signs of stopping
anytime soon. In recent months, many companies, including JPMorgan Chase, Ford
Motor, Twitter, and REI have announced some version of a long-term or permanent
work-from-home future. On Friday, Pinterest turned heads when it announced it
would pay a $89.5 million contract penalty to cancel its lease on a flashy new
490,000-square-foot office building planned in San Francisco, citing a permanent shift to remote work.
The pandemic has convinced these and other companies that their employees can
perform their jobs, perhaps even more productively, at home, allowing a massive
shrinkage of corporate America’s physical office footprint. It will save these
companies leasing costs and their employees their commutes, but at what cost to
the rest of the economy?
Commuters trickle back to 'ghost-town' London, data suggests
(Sep 05, 2020 03:57)LONDON (Reuters) - More people are returning to work in London, data showed on Friday, an encouraging sign for Prime Minister Boris Johnson who has urged Britons to start commuting again to help the economy recover from its coronavirus crash.
Data from Transport for London, the public transport authority in the capital which has been largely empty of commuters since the lockdown, showed an increase in the number of people using the
Underground metro system and buses, albeit from very low levels.
The number of payment card taps on readers on the Underground was 21% higher on Friday morning than a week earlier and trips on buses were up 30%, a TfL spokesman said.
The increases in part reflected the end of the summer holidays in August but were sharper than those recorded in recent days.
However, usage of London's public transport remains only a fraction of what is was before the lockdown, hit not only by people working from home but also by the slump in tourism, which usually attracts about 30 million people to the city each year.
On Thursday, card taps on the Underground were still only around a third of their level of a year ago and bus journeys were down by about half.
The rise was echoed in Google's mobility data for workplaces in other cities, such as Madrid and Berlin, but was more pronounced in London.
The largely empty commercial centre of the British capital was described as a ghost town by a business leader last week. Businesses reliant on office workers have been hard hit, a situation mirrored elsewhere in Britain and abroad.
Mobility data published by Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) on Friday, based on requests for directions on public transport by users of Apple Maps, also showed an increase (https://tmsnrt.rs/2Z800DA) in London as well as in other cities.
Johnson has called on people working from home to get back to their workplaces this week as many children returned to schools that have been largely closed since March.
Road congestion in London, and elsewhere in Britain, has been close to pre-lockdown levels for much of the past two weeks, according to data from TomTom (AS:TOM2), a manufacturer of location technology and devices.
Britain's statistics office said on Thursday that people around the country had continued to gradually return to their workplaces in late August.
Fifty-seven percent of working adults travelled to work between at least once between Aug. 26 and Aug. 30, up from 55% two weeks earlier and 33% in May, it said.
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Hotel crisis hits new milestone
Labor Day weekend traffic might be a touch lighter this year, with hotel bookings down 65% compared to last year.Why it matters: America's hotels are on life support as the coronavirus pandemic drags on, with hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue and some 2 million jobs at stake.
What’s happening: The pandemic-era travel drought has continued through major holiday weekends like Easter, Memorial Day, Independence Day and, now, Labor Day.
- As a result, the American hotel industry is projected to shrink by 45% in 2020, according to the market research firm Ibis World.
- Just 16% of Americans plan to travel for Labor Day, 25% for Thanksgiving and 29% for Christmas, per a new report from the American Hotel & Lodging Association. 14% of hotel rooms are booked for this weekend, compared with 41% last year.
- And even as states around the country begin to reopen, 4 in 10 hotel workers are still on furlough.
- Work-from-home has turned into work-from-anywhere for America's telecommuters, and vacationers prefer homes they can have to themselves over buildings they have to share with other people.
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.Fauci Warns Seven Midwest States to Be on Alert Over Labor Day
By Vivek Shankar
·
·
Memorial Day, July 4th preceded infection surges
across U.S.
Anthony Fauci, the U.S.’s top infectious disease expert, said that seven states that have seen upticks in Covid-19 cases should be particularly vigilant over the Labor Day holiday, and warned that if Americans are “careless” there could be another jump in cases this fall.
“There are several states that are at risk for surging, namely North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Arkansas, Missouri, Indiana, Illinois,” Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview this week. “Those states are starting to see an increase in the percent positive of their testing; that is generally predictive that there’s going to be a problem.”
Memorial Day marked a turning point for many newly reopened states, which saw previously moderate Covid-19 outbreaks start to spread. July 4th came just a few weeks before the worst of the U.S. spike, with new cases regularly topping 60,000 later that month. While new infections are down significantly, the daily death toll is still hovering near 1,000, based on a seven-day average.
That has many worried about how the country will fare over the long Labor Day weekend, as the U.S. outbreak tops 6 million confirmed cases and 185,000 deaths.
----There’s particular concern since the holiday comes as more Americans are going back to schools, colleges and work, and commercial travel expands.
“There is a
lot of potential to see a huge explosion of infections in September and
October,” said Eleanor Murray, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Boston
University School of Public Health who has called for more nuanced
social-distancing guidelines. “We seem to go back and forth between people
actually realizing that this is a thing that exists and taking precautions and
then deciding it’s all over.”
More
Results of Russia's COVID-19 vaccine produced antibody response: The Lancet
September 4, 2020 / 12:04 PM
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia’s “Sputnik-V” COVID-19 vaccine
produced an antibody response in all participants in early-stage trials,
according to results published on Friday by The Lancet medical journal that
were hailed by Moscow as an answer to its critics.
The results
of the two trials, conducted in June-July this year and involving 76
participants, showed 100% of participants developing antibodies to the new
coronavirus and no serious side effects, The Lancet said.
Russia
licensed the two-shot jab for domestic use in August, the first country to do
so and before any data had been published or a large-scale trial begun.
“The two
42-day trials – including 38 healthy adults each – did not find any serious
adverse effects among participants, and confirmed that the vaccine candidates
elicit an antibody response,” The Lancet said.
“Large,
long-term trials including a placebo comparison, and further monitoring are
needed to establish the long-term safety and effectiveness of the vaccine for
preventing COVID-19 infection,” it said.
The vaccine
is named Sputnik-V in homage to the world’s first satellite, launched by the
Soviet Union. Some Western experts have warned against its use until all
internationally approved testing and regulatory steps have been taken.
But with the
results now published for the first time in an international peer-reviewed
journal, and with a 40,000-strong later-stage trial launched last week, a
senior Russian official said Moscow had faced down its critics abroad.
Morehttps://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-russia-vaccine/results-of-russias-covid-19-vaccine-produced-antibody-response-the-lancet-idUSKBN25V1I2
Drugs That Fight Diabetes and Obesity May Treat Covid-19
By James Paton
September 4, 2020, 9:02 AM GMT+1 Updated on September 4,
2020, 10:45 AM GMT+1
Novo Nordisk A/S, the Danish drugmaker, is
exploring whether a new class of medicines that helps people lose weight and
control diabetes also has potential in fighting Covid-19.Research shows people afflicted by obesity and diabetes often fare worse in trying to overcome SARS-CoV-2. Now initial analysis of electronic medical records shows that GLP-1 drugs, which help patients keep blood sugar levels in check, could be a “very meaningful therapy” in helping people with diabetes battle Covid-19, Novo Chief Scientific Officer Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen said in an interview. He pointed to evidence the virus attacks cells that produce the hormone insulin.
“The early indication is that the GLP-1 class is actually beneficial in Covid-19,” he said. “That’s not unexpected because this is the class of agents that target the risk factors for bad Covid-19 outcomes.”
Novo shares recouped earlier losses to trade down 0.2% at 11:40 a.m. in Copenhagen.
GLP-1 drugs include Novo’s Ozempic for diabetes and Saxenda for obesity. Sales of such drugs, which also include Eli Lilly & Co.’s Trulicity and AstraZeneca Plc’s Bydureon, totaled more than $11 billion last year, according to a report from Grand View Research.
Novo, the world’s biggest maker of diabetes drugs, is studying the role such medicines could play as researchers and governments rush to find treatments to combat the coronavirus. The U.S. last month cleared use of convalescent plasma -- which uses blood from people who have recovered from Covid-19 to help those currently infected -- on an emergency basis for some cases.
That added to a growing list of therapies available to doctors. In May, regulators granted emergency authorization to the Gilead Sciences Inc. antiviral drug remdesivir, while dexamethasone, a widely available generic anti-inflammatory drug, has shown life-saving promise.
More.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-04/drugs-that-fight-diabetes-and-obesity-may-treat-covid-novo-says?srnd=coronavirus
Some useful Covid links.
Johns Hopkins Coronavirus
resource centre
Rt Covid-19
Covid19info.live
02 Aug 2010
Dear Colleagues We must make sure we stick to the rules on how to describe people, because to stray from consistency causes confusion.
-----If you find yourself using a word of whose meaning you are unsure, do look it up in the dictionary. When we get a word wrong it is embarrassing. It demeans us as professional writers and shakes our readers’ confidence in us. In recent weeks we have confused endocrinology – the study of the body’s endocrine system – with dendrochronology, which is the study of dating trees. More embarrassing still, we accused the eminent broadcaster Sir David Attenborough of being a naturist – someone who chooses not to wear clothes – when in fact he is a naturalist; and during a story about a coach crash in Paris the nationality of the driver changed from Austrian to Australian. Homogenous and homogeneous are not interchangeable and their respective meanings should be studied in the dictionary. Like embodied and embedded, which we also confused, effecting and affecting and eligibility and legibility, these pairs of words almost come under the heading of homophones, as do prostate and prostrate. We must take more care and ensure we are using the right word.
Homophones remain abundant and show up the writer and the newspaper or website. We are quality media, and quality media do not make mistakes such as these: “the luck of the drawer”, “through the kitchen sink”, “through up” “dragging their heals” and “slammed on the breaks”, all of which are clichés that might not be worthy of a piece of elegant writing even if spelt correctly. We have also confused Briton and Britain, hanger and hangar, hordes and hoards, peeled and pealed, lightening and lightning, stationery and stationary, principal and principle, peninsula and peninsular, licence and license and, in something of a pile-up, born, borne and bourn. If you are unsure of the meanings of any of these words, look them up before proceeding further.
Many of these mistakes are caused by carelessness and not properly reading back what one has written. We have had an increasing number of literals in recent weeks, both online and in the paper, which suggests the problem is getting worse rather than better. Heads of department have a particular responsibility to ensure that their staff perform to the best professional standards in this respect. We managed to perpetrate one of the worst literals of all recently – pubic for public- which may seem a laughing matter, but is not.
Some Americanisms keep slipping in, usually when we are given agency copy to re-write and do an inadequate job on it. There is no such verb as “impacted”, and other American-style usages of nouns as verbs should be avoided (authored, gifted etc). Maneuver is not spelt that way in Britain. We do not have lawmakers: we might just about have legislators, but better still we have parliament. People do not live in their hometown; they live in their home town, or even better the place where they were born.
Sometimes we do not properly think of the sense of what we are writing. There is a marked difference between the meanings of convince and persuade that is not recognised by some of you. If you are unsure of the distinction, look the words up. We wrote that “too many bomb disposal experts” had died in Afghanistan, which prompted an angry reader to ask what an acceptable number of dead experts would have been. We wrote of “an extraordinary killing spree” and were asked, in similar fashion, what would have constituted an ordinary one. We wrote about someone’s youngest child being her first, which was obviously not the case. Be careful too of the distinction between renting a property and letting it. And readers also asked us how there could, as we reported, be an 18-month long investigation into a crime that was committed only 14 months ago. We need to ensure that our facts, like our arithmetic, add up.
There have also been some grammatical difficulties. The style book (which, in case you have lost your copy, is also online) specifies the distinction between “compared with” and “compared to”, and it may be worth examining. One of our writers began a sentence with the phrase “us single ladies” which suggests we need to brush up on our pronouns. We should always write one in four is, not one in four are, since one is inevitably singular. Bacteria is plural. Put adverbs in a sentence where they make the most logical sense, if you have to use them at all. This will never be by splitting the infinitive, but to write “to go speedily to town” will always be preferable to “to go to town speedily”, or any other such variant. It is different from, not different to. Under age, like under way, should be written as two words.
Finally, may I mention some factual matters? Ottawa is the capital of Canada. Air Chief Marshal is spelt thus; and Mark Antony thus.
With best wishes
Simon Heffer
Associate Editor The Daily Telegraph
“It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to
carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to
initiate a new order of things.”
Technology Update.
With events happening
fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section.
Updates as they get reported. Is converting sunlight to usable cheap AC or DC
energy mankind’s future from the 21st century onwards.
NASA-Funded Scientist Claims New Thruster Could Approach Light Speed
He says his "MEGA drive" could enable spaceflight to neighboring star systems — because, miraculously, it doesn't need any propellant.
Victor Tangermanna September 3, 2020.
80-year-old lung cancer survivor and California State
University, Fullerton physics professor emeritus Jim Woodward has an
out-of-this-world idea to allow spacecraft to travel to neighboring star
systems: tiny crystals that vibrate tens of thousands of times per second when
an electric current is applied.His invention, dubbed the Mach-effect gravitational assist (MEGA) drive, makes the extraordinary promise of a propulsion system that relies on nothing but a source of electricity — no heavy combustion fuel necessary, as Wired reports in a fascinating new feature.
The idea is to accelerate slowly, but over a very long period of time. According to Woodward, a spacecraft with a MEGA drive could eventually reach velocities approaching the speed of light, with the help of an onboard nuclear reactor to supply decades worth of electric power.
The MEGA drive relies on Mach’s principle, named by Albert Einstein himself, which claims that inertia is related to distant gravitational effects. As an object’s energy changes, the very matter of space and time changes around it as well, a controversial an interpretation of Einstein’s famous mass-energy equivalence principle E=mc².
In other words, according to Wired, if part of an object — in the case of the MEGA drive, parts of tiny piezoelectric disks — were to simultaneously change its mass and energy state, it could theoretically start accelerating.
Woodward’s work on his MEGA drive has been ongoing for over thirty years. He was even awarded funding through NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program in 2017.
With the grant money, Woodward and his collaborators have even designed a conceptual uncrewed spacecraft called SSI Lambda, an unusual-looking craft that houses an array of about 1,5000 scaled-up MEGA drives.
More recently, Woodward’s latest MEGA drive produced far more thrust than all his previous prototypes.
“I was shocked at the huge increase in measured force,” Hal Fearn, close collaborator and physicist at California State University, Fullerton, told Wired.
More
This weekend’s musical diversion. Torelli again, today the Italian composer dares anyone to sleep though his music. (I know I’ve used it before, but in honour of summer passing and autumn arriving.)
Maurice André, 'Sinfonia à 4' (Giuseppe Torelli)
The Great Fire of London September 1666.
The Great Fire of London swept through the central parts of the city from Sunday, 2 September to Thursday, 6 September 1666.[1] The fire gutted the medieval City of London inside the old Roman city wall. It threatened but did not reach the City of Westminster, Charles II's Palace of Whitehall, or most of the suburban slums.[2] It destroyed 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, St Paul's Cathedral, and most of the buildings of the City authorities. It is estimated to have destroyed the homes of 70,000 of the city's 80,000 inhabitants.[3]The death toll is unknown but generally thought to have been relatively small; only six verified deaths were recorded. Some historians have challenged this belief claiming the deaths of poorer citizens were not recorded and that the heat of the fire may have cremated many victims, leaving no recognisable remains. A melted piece of pottery on display at the Museum of London found by archaeologists in Pudding Lane, where the fire started, shows that the temperature reached 1,250 °C (2,280 °F; 1,520 K)
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And no, I wasn’t there
to witness it, but I have been to Pudding Lane, and climbed the nearby
“Monument” to the Great Fire, back in the days when it was open but hardly
anyone visited it let alone climbed it.
The Monument
US Politics Betting Odds
The Monthly Coppock Indicators finished August
DJIA: 28,430 Up. NASDAQ: 11,775 Up. SP500: 3,500 Up.
The NASDAQ remained up. The DJIA and SP500 turned up in uly. With stock
mania running fueled by trillions of central bankster new fiat money programs,
especially tech stock mania in the NASDAQ, the indicators are essentially
worthless after all these years. I will discontinue this section at the end of
the month.
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