Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

 The fall of the Soviet Union and socio-economic failures of Cuba, Venezuela, and other communist dictatorships steered the left toward a new god, mother earth or, simply, the environment. This religion morphed from global cooling in the 1970s to global warming a decade later, now to climate change or extreme weather -- normal cyclic events that have been a part of life on Planet Earth since long before humans existed.

 Although surveys are underway for how Covid-19 will affect these statistics, Global Workplace Analytics estimates that 56% of the U.S. workforce holds a job that is at least partially compatible with remote work, and that 25-30% of the workforce will be working at home for more than one day a week over the next two years. According to Buffer, 90% of remote workers plan on working remotely for the rest of their careers. Old thinking believes that employees must be in the office to be productive, but this mentality disregards the distractions that an office environment comes with. Socializing, unnecessarily long meetings, and loud colleagues can slow down a productive employee. Some facts: 65% of workers said they would be more productive in a home office than in a traditional office space. — FlexJobs 75% of people say they are more productive working remotely due to fewer distractions. — Flexjobs 77% of millennials report that flexible work would make them more productive. — Regus ...

 Ways to Improve Visual Studio 2019 Performance Use a 64-bit OS If you upgrade your system from a 32-bit version of Windows to a 64-bit version, you expand the amount of virtual memory available to Visual Studio from 2 GB to 4 GB. This enables Visual Studio to handle significantly larger workloads, even though it is 32-bit process. Disable automatic file restore Visual Studio automatically reopens documents that were left open in the previous session. This can prolong the times it takes to load a solution by up to 30% or more, depending on the project type and the documents being opened. Designers like Windows Forms and XAML, and some JavaScript and typescript files, can be slow to open. Visual Studio notifies you in a yellow bar when automatic document restore is causing a solution to load significantly slower. You can disable automatic file reopening by following these steps: Select  Tools  >  Options  to open the  Options  dialog box. On the...

Thoughts on Bill Gates' book  For Bill Gates, the case for net-zero is “rock solid”. The science is settled, and he is convinced that “the only way to avoid disastrous outcomes is to get to zero”. For readers already convinced of the “climate crisis” and the imperative to go to “net zero” by 2050, his book holds no surprises. For those more skeptical of popular discussions of climate change, what is most striking is that Gates – among the world’s most celebrated and successful data scientists — is so curiously unaware or indifferent to data that challenges many of the presumptions contained in his book. Thus, for example, while Gates is aware of the low energy density and intermittency of solar and wind power (when the sun sets and the wind does not blow) and the prohibitive costs of batteries to store electricity at grid-scale, he nonetheless finds it imperative that we have policies “to force an unnaturally speedy transition”. Net-zero “requires the US to build as much wind and s...