Märt Ridala's thoughts

(Neither ChatGPT, nor any other AI was used to write this article. Photos by me. But the illustrations were created by Midjourney AI. You can find the Midjourney command in Italic at the footer of each illustration.)  In this post I will cover two topics. Firstly, the hybrid and remote work practices and its challenges. Secondly, some thoughts on the huge impact the hybrid/remote work will bring about small-townization. Part 1 - Where we are with hybrid and remote work? A few weeks ago there was a fire drill in the office building of Solita Tallinn. The alarm went on and everybody in the building (the one on the photo) had to evacuate to the street. While waiting on the street for the drill to end we did a small calculation. We calculated that there should be about 800-1000 workplaces in the whole building. However, the "evacuated" crowd was only 150-200 persons strong. So roughly 10-30% of the workplaces in our office building are used. This matches the numbers we are seein

Putin turning off gas from Europe and thus fossil fuels hitting record prices is.....very good! Some fundamentals: - Capitalism (mostly) works: people prefer to pay less, companies prefer to invest into areas where there is more business and more profits to be made. It seams silly to write this statement but in energy production we have seen a lot of hope and wishes, but in reality - if making electricity from natural gas is the cheapest option then companies will build gas powerstations no matter how green their logo is. - Politicians (and when it comes to economics then also dictators) (mostly) do what people want. How do you know what people want? Well you can listen to what they say, but the true wishes are demonstrated by what they buy. So if people buy SUV-s, vacation trips to the other side of the world and fast-fashion, then the politician who wants to be popular, has to work on cheap fuel prices to ensure this.  For example, if people would want to stop climate change then the