WeWork becoming a case study in bad timing

Over breakfast this morning, Kate noticed an ad for a local co-working space, and remarked on the unfortunate timing there. Which led me to realize that things have just gone from bad to much, much worse for WeWork.

Think about it: their business model is all about leasing buildings, and then renting desks to folks who want to work in a group environment. For at least the next few months, that business model quite clearly makes no sense at all.

A bit of quick Googling turned up this Bloomberg article, which seems to indicate that yeah, the relevant power players had the same realization (or at least, started acting on it) yesterday. Apparently, SoftBank (the VCs behind WeWork) has a deal in the works to buy up to $3 billion of its stock -- it doesn't sound like they were technically planning on taking the company private, but something not far off. And now they are trying to pull out, because it's starting to look daft.

Granted, of the businesses that might conceivably go under as a result of the current crisis, WeWork is way, way down my priority list for shedding tears. I'm way more concerned about local stores and restaurants, and trying to keep patronizing them -- conveniently given additional incentive by Amazon's decision to de-prioritize non-essentials for the time being.

But still -- there's a lot of interesting stuff to reflect on here. The pandemic is a bit less awful than it might have been, because a fair chunk of the economy has already shifted to people working individually, in one way or another. But co-working spaces are an attempt for folks to create communities out of that individuality, and this is going to blow a hole in all of their finances...

Census time!

After years of argument about it, there's something weirdly exciting about actually filling in the stupid form, and seeing what it wound up looking like. (This gets sadder as I go along.)

PSA: fill it in. No, really -- this is how congress-critters and electoral-college votes get allocated. If you want your state to be properly represented, it's really important, even if the bastards overseeing it are diabolically evil. Refusing to fill it in because of that evil is basically cutting off your nose to spite your face -- they would be overjoyed to be able to report that Massachusetts turns out to not have so many people, so we're taking away one of your representatives now.

First impression, as I type the URL: Google is prompting me with "my2020census.gove". Uh-oh. That smells like some identity-fraud scammers may be poisoning the system and trying to divert people into a fake form.

I love the fact that you first get (paraphrasing) a "How many people will be in your household on April 1?" page. Then you get "Please list all the people in your household on April 1". Then you get "No, really -- think about it. Are there going to be more people in your household on April 1?". It does show that somebody in the form's design understands humans.

Curious that they care about whether we have a mortgage.

On the one hand, I'm glad that they explicitly acknowledge that same-sex partnership is a thing. OTOH, I'm cranky that they call it out as different from opposite-sex.

Unsurprisingly, they try very hard to draw a rigid "Male or Female", on strict biological lines. No acknowledgement of the occasional intersex "it's complicated" situations.

Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me -- they want me to not only say "White", but specify my national origins as well. I might just say "Mutt". Yeah, did so. (Seriously, even if I was confident where all my ancestors came from, it's certainly multiple countries. Stupid, stupid question.)

And I'm morbidly curious about the public justification for calling Hispanic out as a separate race (indeed, its own separate pathway from all other races), when Italian explicitly isn't. I mean, yes, the reason is raw nativist racism and an attempt at government-led terrorism of the Hispanic community, but I don't actually know what the public window-dressing for it is. It's even more nakedly offensive than I had expected.

Hah! You get to the end, and the final question is essentially, "No, really -- think about it one more time. Do some of those people you previously listed in this household actually live somewhere else?" (Actually, that last one may be a devious trick to prevent prison inmates from getting counted at all, by mucking up the accounting. Sobering possibility, that.)