"The San Francisco coffeehouse is the new Palo Alto garage," declares Kevin Burton, 30, who runs his Internet startup Tailrank without renting offices. "It’s where all the innovation is happening." – San Francisco Chronicle article on "third places" become the new office.
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang from the Institute for the Future notes:
The shift from garages to cafes" isn’t really just about getting rid of offices, but instead reflects "a shift in preference away from [working in] spaces that are privately owned and isolated, to ones that are more public, that provide services, and offer the potential for fruitful random encounters and social interactions."
The beatnik ethic is reborn.
My office is my car on the road or the spaces I inhabit when I travel, and whichever open-air restaurant/bar I happen to take lunch at.
“…The potential for fruitful random encounters and social interactions” is vast.
Beduoin worklife is flexible, fun and you never get cooped up.
The problem could only be that exogenous shocks make it impossible to know where to stop defining a system, and sensitivity to initial conditions makes it impossible to know where to start.
Any system must have boundaries that define it, since any system without boundaries would be the universe itself. Second, no system is entirely closed. Therefore, every system is subject to exogenous, and necessarily unpredictable, shocks that introduce randomness into the system. And if you keep on expanding the boundaries to encompass the various externalities, you will need a theory of everything to have a theory of anything.
The universe isn’t infinite.
Of course there are closed systems in thermodynamics.
Regarding a theory of everything, this puts me in mind of John Lennon writing about toe jam football.
I would love to engage in a debate on the infiniteness of the Universe, but I fear it would violate the context here.
So would I on the closed systems of thermodynamics where dissipation of heat is arguably infinite and limited only by the power of its source and not necessarily by the confines of the system.