Homework.

In the last few days, now that "smart working" has become practically mandatory, all of us who work in IT are inundated with the same request. "Please come here and in 5 minutes do what we haven't done in the past 15 years."

Let's be clear, not all companies are like this, and not even most. The transformation towards Industry 4.0 had already forced the majority to update. But there are companies here that had teleworking but were sized for 20% of users.

Now they are asked to scale to 100%, and obviously they are in trouble.

But the extravagant thing is that management does not blink in the face of prices. Now the VPN concentrators are nowhere to be found, so we are in fact installing cloud servers everywhere with open source software that acts as a VPN concentrator. But the cost is still high.

The reason why management has no budget problem is simple: as soon as they are used to working like this, they will skip the travel costs for the meetings, they will skip the costs of the offices, and therefore they will easily return.

But the problem is: if it was so simple and painless, why hasn't it been done before? Why have millions of people been forced to go to the office, being robbed of time and money?

The answers are simple:

• Realty. Causing a collapse of real estate by freeing offices would have been critical for the whole economy.
• Labor unions. They accused companies that want to do smartworking of wanting to undermine the socialization of workers.
• Labor unions. They accused companies of wanting to control workers using home office tools.
• Catering. The worker who stays at home cooks his own meal. The majority of restaurateurs live on workers.
• Transport. Parking lots, fuel, car, public transport. The free roads and the flowing traffic (here it is not forbidden to turn and the police do not stop you, the emptying has been obtained through media "nudge") are a catastrophe for the transport industry.

In short, a huge waste was justified and justifiable for the simple and simple reason that kept the industries of the waste.

This is the reason why they didn't do their homework. For years schools have not used e-learning systems (which they also had) because it was said that students had to socialize . Only today are they realizing that students are perfectly capable of socializing electronically .

I don't know how long this will last. According to a calculation made using the SIR model, by May / June we should be out of it.

But if it lasted longer, all this would become the new normal.

And if it becomes the new normal, the economy will have bad surprises.

We also take the shops. Many countries had already veered towards large retailers, whose logistics are keeping the population upright (food, basic necessities). The countries that have kept millions of little shops open have now had to close them. How long will they last closed, while out-of-pocket expenses continue?

Many sooner or later will give their cell phone number and bring things home. But many will close.

The things we are doing against coronavirus, all in one fell swoop, were the things we should have done BEFORE and we didn't do it, out of pure laziness and to keep parasitic economies up and running.

Now we are in the condition that someone informed us that the holidays end tomorrow, and you have to have all the summer homework done.

And everyone runs, they run, they run … to do the tasks that had to be done before.