Assorted Links Wednesday

The newest LinkedIn Economic Development Newsletter is out.

Desperate U.S. cities pitch Wall Street-style sign-on bonuses: The labor constraints jeopardize essential services such as trash pick-up, and exacerbate shortages in demanding jobs like 911 dispatchers that predated the Covid-19 crisis.

🆓 Demystifying Public Speaking: Whether you’re bracing for a conference talk or a team meeting, Lara Hogan helps you identify your fears and face them, so you can make your way to the stage (big or small).

Road to decarbonization: The United States electricity mix:

How to respond to complaints on social media: Limit your responses to social media complaints to a single empathetic reply, then take it private

The next frontier of the inbox: My text messages inbox is becoming my email inbox — which had previously absorbed the marketing overflow of my mailbox and landline. The reason? Over-saturation. Put differently: my inbox no longer offers the returns brands seek.

Nobody knows anything: Wall Street during the pandemic:

“If someone would have told me in March of last year, when Covid was first rearing its ugly head, that 18 months later we would have case counts that are as high—if not higher—than they were on that day, but that the market would have doubled over that 18-month period, I would have laughed at them.” The impossible is now commonplace

Well this is good news: Cost of college tuition has remained stable since September 2019

The economy is booming but far from normal: High inflation, ghostly downtowns and a resurgent virus have rattled consumers and created new obstacles as the president tries to push his broader economic agenda.

What if they gave a job fair and nobody came: A pizzeria in Alabama has offered to 'literally hire anyone' in a sign the labor shortage continues to hit restaurants hard

🌧 They promised we could control hurricanes, but instead we got Twitter:

Maybe we’ve made enough progress with air taxis that “They promised flying cars, but instead we got Twitter” doesn’t work anymore as a snarky metaphor for technological stagnation. But there are other postwar expectations about tech progress that could serve as a substitute...

Or this option: “They promised weather control, but instead we got Twitter.” If you were a naval strategist in the 1960s who found yourself musing about the tactical implications of weather control — such as the ability to whip up a hurricane and hurl it at an enemy fleet — scientists offered encouraging news. The 1968 book Toward the Year 2018 was a compilation of expert forecasts, published by the Foreign Policy Association. It included an entire chapter on weather, written by Thomas F. Malone, director of research at Travelers Insurance and chair of the Committee on Atmospheric Sciences of the National Academy of Science. Malone believed “the next fifty years will be crucial for controlling, to a significant extent, this particularly sensitive part of our physical environment.”

What broken McDonald's ice cream machines tell us about shortages: Monopolists make money by forcing us to rely on over-engineered crappy machines. And those over-engineered crappy machines cause shortages.

Q2 2021 industrial market outlook: U.S. industrial market sets record halfway through the year.

Local fiscal relief: Emerging models and next steps for an inclusive local recovery

What is a void analysis?  Void Analysis is a tool that analyzes a trade area and identifies the gaps in certain types of retail or service businesses.

Old infrastructure, new infrastructure:

Our endless debates over infrastructure result in part from our place toward the end of the maturity curve for development. Lots of Americans have China envy. We see their gleaming cities, their expansive new subway systems, their ultra-smooth high-speed rail, and wonder why we can’t have that.

What people forget is that during our rising era of industrialization and urbanization, we did have that. We were the China of that age. We built massive electricity infrastructure, water and sewage works, trains and subways. Then we added a world-class freeway system and airport network.