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"The agency’s antiquated data systems ... rely on information assembled by or shared with local health officials through phone calls, faxes and thousands of spreadsheets attached to emails."

nytimes.com/2020/06/03/us/…
Hypothesis: You can measure the quality of an organization by the quality of its software.

An organization can make itself seem effective by good PR, but software is extremely sensitive to organizational brokenness. If you start to suck, it will be one of the first things to go.
I am no fan of Trump, to put it mildly, but a further implication of this principle is that America's bungled coronavirus response was not simply Trump's fault. The CDC's software didn't get that bad just in the last 3 years.
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Paul Graham
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This trend seems to be accelerating rapidly, judging from the internal battles taking place at e.g. Vox and the NYT.
If there are going to be politically neutral news organizations in the future, they might have to be designed explicitly for that purpose by adding one new principle: assume the staff will have different opinions, and none is allowed to tell another what to say or not say.
It may be that most people just want their preconceptions confirmed, but I think there is some market for neutral news. And it could be valuable out of proportion to its size, because the people in it would probably be both smarter and richer than the rest of the population.
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Paul Graham
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Kids now have no idea how exciting a great retail store could be before the web. It used to be that you could only buy (or even know about) whatever was in your local store, which was the same as in other local stores.
A great, specialized retail store was something you'd probably have to travel to another town to visit, and that you'd look forward to for a year. I still remember going to Hamley's in London, and later to the gift shop of the National Air and Space Museum.
We still have a tradition of going on pilgrimages to famous retail stores, but without realizing why. The stuff is all stuff you could buy online. For kids, the excitement now is permission to buy something. It used to be permission to buy something better than you'd ever seen.
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People think of remote work as a way to work for tech cos without having to live in SF. But maybe it's the way the tech cos themselves can escape SF.
Many tech cos are in SF against their wills because they feel they must in order to recruit talent. If they allow remote work, they can hire people in SF without having to put the company there.
This doesn't need to mean leaving Silicon Valley. SV is a lot more than just SF.
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