Geo 230 blog

 Blog Post 2 The Department of Defense mission statement is quite succinct in "Our mission is to provide the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nations security." (DOD 2023).  This mission statement explicitly only focuses on providing military forces and does not take in to account other nation-building tasks.  One might think that the Department of Defense will always delegate these roles to other government agencies such as the Department of State, but the Department of Defense has not always done so, the Office of Civil Operations and Rural Support (CORDS) (NARA 2023) in Vietnam was tasked with " the military, para-military, political, economic, and social process of establishing or re-establishing a local government that the people would support". Having a functioning local government could allow the local villagers to trust that the occupying government did actually mean to improve their lives and not simply kill the enemy no matter what the co

WORK FROM HOME :Poisoned chalice?  The Covid-19 pandemic caused many people to make changes to their lives. One such change was to the workplace, the ability to remotely work had been viable in the years before the pandemic but the additional constraint of lock-downs finally drove adoption to many jobs.  Jose Barro, Nick Bloom, and Steven Davis  paper estimated that 20 percent of full workdays will be provided from home after the pandemic compared to 5 percent before the pandemic. They also estimated that spending in major city centers will decrease 5-10 percent. Some workers will also move from urban Megalopolises to smaller towns and cities with lower costs of living.  That brings me to the article I chose for the first blog assignment.  Bloomberg   The article by Bloomberg reporter Charlie Wells interviews a few workers who made the move to lower cost-of living areas hoping to capitalize on their earning higher salaries working for large tech corporations, while saving money living