Of Insider, Twitter, and bedding

Last month, I canceled a bunch of stuff. In the process of doing so, I learned that some subscriptions were not going to run out for a while. So today, I went over to insider to attempt to justify having paid for so many months in advance (it was cheap, so no one needs to have negative feelings about this; this is just a classic Stupid Value Extraction move on my part, a la, hey, let’s learn to make English Muffins so I don’t have to keep recycling the plastic bag and paper insert from the English Muffins I buy at the store. Recycling that paper and plastic bag was super easy, and the amount involved was incredibly tiny so very, very poor justification. However, learning how to make English Muffins has turned out to be incredibly rewarding, which is why I keep doing dumb shit like this).

Where was I? Oh, right, insider. This stuff may be paywalled.

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-converts-twitter-offices-bedrooms-headquarters-hardcore-san-francisco-2022-12

In this story, we learn basically what that link says. Having fired a lot of people, Twitter now has some space in the office. And the remaining people are often working long hours and/or may or may not have a place to live in SF, since they had been working from home and now they are not and home might be kinda distant. So, bedding has shown up, along with some other things like bedside tables and a plant or whatever. On the one hand, this is very reminiscent of the Bogie / Hepburn “Sabrina”, or Edison’s napping bed in his NJ library / office/WTF, which you can tour still if you are so inclined. On the other hand, those were only for the Big Boss; this is weirdly … not.

Probably, democratizing sleeping in the office is bad, and also, you know, everyone involved did kinda sign up for that. Getting laid off at Twitter was pretty easy; sticking around required effort, and it’s not like anyone at this point can plausibly say they don’t know what kind of person Elon Musk is.

ALSO! There’s a not very funny joke to be made here! Generally speaking, when people make comments about Not Enough Babies, they are being racist. And Elon Musk, South Africa, blah blah, probably racist. Altho he _did_ frame it in a global population sort of way, he also made a remark about civilization dying out which, worrisome. Lots of people made the joke about how he was doing his part to make sure there were enough babies being made. Also at insider, there was an article about the commercial real estate apocalypse:

https://www.businessinsider.com/remote-work-gutted-city-downtowns-office-real-estate-apocalypse-2022-12

So, I suppose by putting bedrooms in at Twitter, Musk is doing his part to help the conversion from commercial to residential process along.

Not funny, I did say that up front!

The Commute of the Future and Office Conversion strategies

A _whole_ lot of people keep talking about the difficulty of converting a commercial building, with a large, square floor plate, to a residential building, which tends to NOT have a large square floor plate because of windows and so forth.

I’ve always felt this was kind of stupid, and I know you’re thinking, you probably liked those Charlie Munger dorms, too, walkitout, what’s wrong with you, and honestly, I _did_ think it was reasonable to at least consider the tradeoff of private room no window vs. NOT private room with window. But that’s actually not where I’m going here; I don’t really _want_ to turn empty commercial office space into the slums / flophouses of the future (altho I would support that, because I would argue that a flophouse room in a minimally converted commercial office space building would be an improvement over sleeping rough, and if you got a lock on your own private room door, so much the better, altho I would argue in favor of only doing this in buildings with an up-to-code, maintained fire suppression system).

What I _don’t_ understand is the absence of the kind of thinking that went into live/work spaces when converting from factories to residential via “loft” apartments. Factories had ceilings that were ludicrously tall, which created a problem when converting to residential, and “loft” became a trend.

Given that the offices are empty because people are working from home, and most people don’t have adequate space in their city apartments for their working from home, it does seem like a live/work setup could create bigger slices into that large square floor plate. I, personally, would want my bedroom nice and dark in the interior, and have the light for daytime in shared / office spaces at the outside. However, for legal reasons, they’d probably encourage a different pattern. But if you left it largely open space with configurable partial walls, you know, like cubicles . . .