Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 838

I came across this map while reading up on Hurricane Dorian :

It is a map showing the tracks of every known hurricane in the North Atlantic (1851-2013) and in the Eastern North Pacific (1949-2013). Major hurricanes (category 3 or higher) are shown in yellow and tropical cyclones (intensity less than category 3) are shown in red.

The map is from the National Hurricane Center . Some of their other maps include the points of origin for tropical cyclones ( here is August 21-31 from 1851-2015) and the total number of hurricane strikes by U.S. county ( here is Florida from 1900-2010).

What has happened is a catastrophe. UBS is already estimating the insured damages in the Bahamas to be between $500 million and $1 billion. But as is usually the case, the total economic losses will likely exceed the insured losses .

The E39 highway in Norway runs along the west coast of the country and connects Kristiansand in the south to Trondheim in the north. There's also a ferry connection to Denmark that forms part of the route. The entire highway (excluding the ferry south to Denmark) is about 1,100 km. But it takes about 21 hours to drive it because Norway's dramatic fjords (see above photo) mean that there are seven ferry crossings along E39. The Norwegian government wants to transform the route into a ferry-free highway, which would dramatically reduce travel times. But this presents a number of extremely difficult engineering challenges -- some of which haven't been solved yet. You can learn about a number of them in the below video from The B1M. If you can't see it below, click here . It's a fascinating video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCT-FurFVLQ

Photo by  Christiann Koepke  on  Unsplash

A few weeks ago the WSJ published an article about Toronto's growing tech talent pool, arguing that its base now rivals the top US cities, but that it may not be an entirely good thing for the city's ecosystem. I wrote about it here .

This morning venture capitalist Fred Wilson published a post on his blog talking about the necessity of scaling tech companies in lower cost locations . It's a good follow-up to the above article/post.

Here's an excerpt from Fred:

Last week I heard some shocking numbers about salary levels for certain kinds of engineers in the bay area. I checked them out with a few of our bay area portfolio companies and they were more or less corroborated.

The tight technical labor markets in the bay area, NYC, and a number of other regions in the US are making it hard to scale software businesses without burning massive amounts of cash.

He goes on to argue that (startup) companies now need to think about scaling in other/remote locations sooner than they ever have before -- basically as soon as the company hits about 50 engineers (or 100-200 employees).

Many companies are now working with a distributed workforce. Supposedly 2/3 of the global workforce now spends at least one day of the week working remotely. I almost never work from home, but I do get how this is possible.

So what is happening is that engineering talent is spilling over into secondary markets out of necessity. There's an economic imperative to colonize. But I would imagine that, at least initially, most of the economic benefits accrue to the colonizer.

Photo by  NASA  on  Unsplash