Quote:
Originally Posted by Stay Stoked Brah
and post 9/11 people had to return to work because the internet was still in its early beginning. today, we have 5g, tablets, smart phones, high speed fiber gigablast internet, zoom, FaceTime, electronic signatures. you don't even have to show up to court or a senate hearing today.
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For NYC at least, this isn't the first time that the city has been crippled during the internet age. Many of us who were here during Sandy also spent weeks, or months, working from home because office buildings and train infrastructure had been severely damaged. Sandy was far more of an existential threat to New York than the pandemic. I know people whose apartment buildings were inhabitable for months after Sandy. Large office towers in lower Manhattan were shut for the better part of a year.
Sandy was the first real life demonstration of what climate change could mean for NYC, and also exposed the unique vulnerabilities of NYC versus other large cities like Chicago or Dallas. After the storm a lot of companies started to think about disaster scenarios, the risks of staying in NYC versus relocating, etc. Most, if not all, large companies decided to move critical computer infrastructure away from New York, but no large company that I know of made a decision to relocate from New York because of Sandy. The damage from Sandy still hasn't even been fully repaired, but since then extremely high-risk lower Manhattan has added workers, and so has Midtown, particularly in Hudson Yards. I'm bringing all of this up to say that there is little precedent that the pandemic will disproportionately affect New York.