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All your examples are not rent-seeking business. People justifiably, in my opinion, look down at that business as it is a zero sum game where people with access to credit bid up access to a fundamental human need.

/s ?

Smmry.com:

Startups For The Modern Workplace

The share of new patent applications in America connected to remote-working technologies more than doubled between January and September 2020.

The pitches below are from startups that aim to improve the modern workplace and are inexplicably struggling to raise capital.

Offices are being rejigged to allow more room for collaborative working.

Workers often need to make reservations to secure a spot.

Towels on Deckchairs is a German startup that uses algorithms and manual workers to claim and hold the best desks.

Our high-frequency bots can book slots as soon as reservation systems open; in offices that operate a finders-keepers system, our gig workers will physically occupy space for our customers.

Bottled Boss produces a line of fragrances designed to help harder-hearted managers display their more human side.

Class Pet takes the same contact-tracing technology used to monitor whether people have been exposed to covid-sufferers and applies it to the problem of proximity bias in the office.

By tracking how often people are physically close to each other, Class Pet can alert firms to whether bosses are giving too much face time to specific people in the office.

Employees are under scrutiny as never before, both in the office and at home.

The degree of surveillance is becoming more transparent: a law goes into force in New York state next month requiring employers to tell workers how they monitor their activities.

Chaff is a new startup that gives employees a range of options to fight back.

Chaff's customers can alter web-camera feeds to show pre-recorded looped footage of them working furiously.

Proprietary software will move cursors at random intervals in order to show that employees have not fallen asleep.

Video Vici improves the experience that people have on video calls.

We have developed a set of features that work on all the main conferencing platforms, and include the following: time-on-mic countdown clocks, to limit the amount of time that any one person spends blathering; a ticker showing how many people are not paying any attention to you at any one time; and nostril filters to help with unfortunate camera angles.

From Serene and Focusmate to Todoist and Evernote, a bewildering array of productivity apps promises to make workers more efficient.

Cull takes a new approach to this problem, by ruthlessly prioritising the things you need to do.

We use artificial intelligence to work out which colleagues are above you in the organisation, or soon might be.

Messages from these people are pulled into your inboxes and notifications, and ranked in order of seniority.

Communication from other people is automatically deleted before you even see it.

The commute into the office wastes time that could be spent a) more productively or b) snoring.

The same logic applies to the time people spend getting ready to work from home.

That is why we founded Bedesk, maker of a revolutionary piece of furniture that allows you to sleep and work in one location.

Modelled on hospital beds, Bedesks can automatically adjust their angle of recline and feature a foldable work surface with multiple charger points.

Millions of middle-aged workers are about to make some seriously embarrassing choices.

If any of these investment opportunities appeals to you, please just send a blank cheque to The Economist and we will make sure it gets to the right people.

Should be interesting to see what the payout would be... artificially manipulating your stock price is supposed to illegal... 20M personal + 20M corporate penalty doesnt change bad behavior

Or receive a greater % of their news through social media

June 21, 2021.Remember when everyone was panicking about inflation, warning ominously about 1970s-type stagflation? OK, many people are still saying such things, some because that's what they always say, some because that's what they say when there's a Democratic president, some because they're extrapolating from the big price increases that took place in the first five months of this year.

For those paying closer attention to the flow of new information, inflation panic is, you know, so last week.

Seriously, both recent data and recent statements from the Federal Reserve have, well, deflated the case for a sustained outbreak of inflation.

For that case has always depended on asserting that the Fed is either intellectually or morally deficient.

That is, to panic over inflation, you had to believe either that the Fed's model of how inflation works is all wrong or that the Fed would lack the political courage to cool off the economy if it were to become dangerously overheated.

Both beliefs have now lost most of whatever credibility they may have had.Let's start with the theory of inflation.

Since the 1970s, and especially since a seminal 1975 paper by Robert Gordon, many economists have tried to distinguish between transitory fluctuations in the inflation rate driven by temporary factors and an underlying "Core" inflation rate that is much more stable - but also hard to bring down if it gets uncomfortably high.

The idea is that policy should largely ignore transitory inflation, which is easy come, easy go, and worry only if core inflation looks as if it's getting too high.

Since 2004 the Fed has routinely published an estimate of core inflation that it derives by excluding changes in food and energy prices, which are notoriously volatile, and has used that measure to fend off demands that it tighten monetary policy in the face of inflation it considers temporary - notably in 2010-11, when prices of oil and other commodities were rising and Republicans were accusing the Fed of risking "Currency debasement."

The Fed was, of course, right: Inflation soon subsided.

The distinction between transitory and underlying inflation - a distinction that, judging from my inbox, generates an extraordinary amount of hatred from some Wall Street types - has been a huge practical success, helping the Fed to keep calm and carry on in the face of both inflation and deflation scares.

The Fed has been arguing that recent price rises are similarly transitory.

True, they're not coming from food and energy so much as from pandemic-related disruptions that caused surging prices of used cars, lumber and other nontraditional sources of inflation.

The Fed's view has been that this episode, like the inflation blip of 2010-11, will soon be over.

Prices of industrial metals like copper are coming down.

What about the alternative inflation story? It goes like this: The Biden administration's American Rescue Plan has pumped a huge amount of purchasing power into the economy, while affluent households, which built up large savings during the pandemic, are now ready to go on a spending spree.

As a result, critics warn, there will be a classic case of too much money chasing too few goods, leading to a big rise not just in volatile prices but in underlying inflation, too.

To buy into this story you have to claim not just that the coming boom will be truly huge - even bigger than most private forecasters expect - but also that the Fed, which is fully capable of reining in a runaway boom, will stand idly by while inflation gets out of hand.

Last week statements from the Fed's open market committee - the group that sets monetary policy - made such claims less plausible.

Reading such statements is often an exercise in Kremlinology - the Fed didn't announce any actual policy changes, so it's all about trying to identify changes in tone that give clues about the future.

Fed watchers considered the new releases hawkish, signaling increased willingness to step on the brakes if the economy really is exceeding its speed limit.

By suggesting that it will act if necessary, the Fed has largely undercut whatever case there was for worrying about a return to the 1970s.

So what was all that about? Monetary doomsayers have been wrong again and again since the early 1980s, when Milton Friedman kept predicting an inflation resurgence that never arrived.

Why the eagerness to party like it's 1979?To be fair, government support for the economy is much stronger now than it was during the Obama years, so it makes more sense to worry about inflation this time around.

The vehemence of the inflation rhetoric has been wildly disproportionate to the actual risks - and those risks now seem even smaller than they did a few weeks ago.

Or the Russian bear is more of a racoon

Smmry.com: The Man Who Predicted The Great Resignation Has More Big News

Not that many of us can name a single day when our life took a radically different turn.

For the US academic, Anthony Klotz, it came in February last year when a reporter was interviewing him about what even he calls his "Mini niche" area of expertise: how people quit their jobs.

The reporter was writing a story about the best ways to resign, but as she was chatting with Klotz, he said something else that caught her attention.

Although Covid vaccine rollouts were at that time raising hopes of a return to pre-virus normality, Klotz thought the pandemic was driving several trends that would unleash an unusually large wave of US resignations.

The result was a Bloomberg article last May that quoted Klotz predicting "The great resignation is coming".

With that, one of the defining phrases of the pandemic was born.

A few weeks later, new figures showed about 4mn workers, or 2.7 per cent of the workforce, had quit in April 2021, the highest level on record.

By November, that number had climbed to 4.5mn and when fresh figures came out on Tuesday last week they showed another 4.4mn had gone in February, or 2.9 per cent of the total.

Klotz, a 42-year-old associate professor of management at Texas A&M University, is still adjusting to the experience of being the Great Resignation inventor.

"It sounds so weird to say I coined it," he said with evident embarrassment when I spoke to him last week about what he thinks caused the phenomenon, and where it is headed next.

He cites four causes, starting with a backlog of pent-up resignations from the first uncertain year of the pandemic, when people stayed in jobs they otherwise might have left.

The third reason is linked to what psychologists call Terror Management Theory and the idea that people confronted with death or serious illness tend to reflect on how much meaning and contentment exists in their own lives.

"What I kept hearing was, 'Before the pandemic I arranged my whole life around work'," says Klotz, but coming out of the pandemic, people said, "I need work to work around my life."

Finally, there was the unexpected freedom that millions experienced when the pandemic forced them to work at home.

"Autonomy is a fundamental human need," says Klotz, and when people get a taste of it for months on end, they do not cede it easily.

It is worth saying here that other researchers are still studying the causes and impacts of the Great Resignation - and some suspect the theory is overblown.

British economists last month said there was evidence the UK also experienced a Great Resignation, but not because workers were quitting to live their dreams, or make drastic career changes.

Klotz thinks the numbers speak for themselves, at least in the US, but agrees there is obviously room for much more inquiry.

As for what he thinks will happen next, he starts with a big disclaimer.

"And if I was an economist, I'd be annoyed at me for doing so."

Still, he thinks resignation rates could stay above average for two or three years, partly because quitting can be contagious, and also because there is so much change in the workplace as employers experiment with new ways of working.

"I think that's going to continue to keep the labour market somewhat unsettled for a while," he says.

People are still "Sorting out their lives" and what they want their futures to look like.

He has a word of caution, pointing to recent research suggesting employees' wellbeing can fall after a job change.

He has just resigned from Texas A&M to take a new job in the UK, at University College London's school of management.

Tell me yours and I'll tell you mine.

They are sticking out like a sore thumb.

War makes strange bed fellows

Office space on Campbell parade and I'd sign up

I think we've known crypto is the future since before bitgold. Technology is about breaking monopolies. The internet broke the communication monopoly. Email took the postal monopoly. Skype the telephone. PGP broke the secure communications. Uber broke the taxi monopoly. 3d printing will break the manufacturing monopolies. Blockchains break the bank/contract law monopoly. It's just the current implementations are not very good and most of it has become ponzi schemes. Cryptocurrency is now all about artificial scarcity. Once the artificial is removed and crypto reaches it's actual stable true scarcity cost with hundreds/thousands/millions of cryptocurrencies competing for cheapest/fastest/stable price/anonymous i believe you will see mass adoption.