Time(zone) Travel and Virtual Jet Lag

Normally I’d be flying around the world to attend a handful of conferences between the end of summer and end of the year. Here in 2020, we instead get the global, online, virtual conferences.

Earlier this week I attended The Future Summit, hosted annually by the Segal Family Foundation. Lovely event. Only trouble was that it was scheduled for East Africa Time, GMT+3, and I live in Pacific Time, GMT-7 this time of year. So for me, the conference was 2am-11am.

The Sankalp Global Summit is in a month. It is scheduled in India Time, GMT+5.5, and this time I’m speaking. The lovely organizers know I’m 11.5 hours behind them and are scheduling me mid-day, around midnight or 1am my time.

Anyhow… timezone travel feels a lot like jet lag. 24 hours and one good night sleep later, I’m tired but feeling way better than yesterday. I should be 100% by tomorrow.

Jet lag without the cramped seats, bad food, and endless stream of movies. Welcome to the 2020s.

There are a lot of great posts buried in this blog’s archives that are still quite apt. Today is another reprise, this time revisiting the (often invisible) tradeoff between efficiency and resilience. Last time I explained that tradeoff with the case study of electricity blackouts in Texas and how that related to Google’s monopoly on search and Amazon’s dominance of eCommerce...

“History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes” (Twain). Wednesday, November 6th, and it feels a bit more repeat than rhyme. Eight years ago I posted Plan 11. It seems apt to reprise that post. 2016 Every event in Seattle this week seems to start with a lamentation of last week’s election results. Three days after posting about #lemonade and I’m getting more funny...

The amazing Berkshire Hathaway set two new huge milestones this week: (i) The stock price of the BRKA shares are now more than $700,000 each, up from $7.50 when Warren Buffett bought his first share in December 1962. And with that (ii) the market cap of the company now exceeds $1 trillion. Quite amazing unto itself, but even more amazing when you look at the other trillion dollar companies of the...

It’s quite rare when the U.S. media has something nice to say about Africa. This week was an exception, in The New York Times, in an interactive digital article about the population growth and economic growth of the African continent. The median age in Africa here in 2023 is just 19 years old, nearly a decade younger than in India and the rest of South Asia. By 2050, more than 1/3rd of all...

In the fight to eliminate global poverty, a statistic often quoted is the World Bank’s claim that the poverty rate is below 10%. True, but only when measured against a global poverty line of $2.15 per day. $2.15 is about the same as American’s spend per day on their dogs and cats. Progress is still positive if you pick a more realistic poverty line, but at $3.65 there are nearly 2...