Free Markets Solve Everything

Today I called the company that dumps chemicals on my lawn to get more chemicals dumped on my lawn. (I know, I’m a bad human.) It was a low quality experience. I was on hold for a loooong time listening to their pre-recorded excuse making and entreaties to log on to their website or use their app to change my plan. No, and fuck no, were my thoughts on those requests — I knew that signing up for the website or, Yahweh forbid, the app, would require me to jump through a dozen hoops that would probably include my account number or some other piece of info that I don’t have. I wanted to talk to a human to hear my alternatives for getting cancer from the chemicals leached through my front lawn, pick an alternative, and not think about it again for a few years.

When I finally talked to the harried customer service representative, she just didn’t do a very good job, probably because she was out of context. My guess is that she normally drives to some call center, sits in a tiny cube in front of her company-issued computer, talking on a company-issued phone, where she deals with idiots like me who call to talk about their lawns once every 5 years (which might severely underestimate how long it’s been since I interacted with this company other than to write them a check.) Doing that from home clearly didn’t allow her to put her best foot forward.

I think I know why: Most of the companies with whom I do business have an online site that I use to do so, but there are a few times when I want to get on the phone and deal with a human. Generally, that person is low paid, and one of the main requirements for their job is that they park their ass in a chair in some God forsaken business park for 8+ hours per day. In our gleaming new post-COVID future, the theory of the case is that these people will embrace working from home due to the convenience and savings of not having a commute.

Perhaps, but just as it is a burden to expect an employee to transport themselves to a call center, it is a much greater burden to expect them to have a reliable Internet connection, a quiet and secluded place to work, and the minimal technical wherewithal to fix minor issues with their company computer, if the company deigns to provide them one. The ability to work from home requires that the employee has a home from which they can work efficiently. And this is often not the case for employees paid $12.50 per hour, or whatever the lawn service is paying.

In other words, if you want people to work from home, you can’t pay them shit wages. You need to pay them enough so that they can maintain some kind of home office. And the fuck-the-poor salaries and benefits that these miserly enterprises dole out just aren’t enough to support a home office. So I predict as soon as this crisis has passed, these companies will pack the cubicles in their office parks, because we all know that the invisible hand just doesn’t allow a living wage.

Work At Home Only Works When You Pay People A Decent WagePost + Comments (40)

Ending the lockdowns isn’t going to happen. Next week we will probably have 2 or 3 thousand people die in New York City, which is horrific, and we’ll also probably have a continue decrease or at least stabilization of deaths in Italy, which is great. Obviously, fight like hell to keep the lockdown going, because we are talking about millions of lives here. But I just don’t see how these fuckers are going to end it.

As much as I hate to heh indeed David Frum it’s hard to improve on this commentary on Trump’s higher (but still shitty) approval ratings:

About Trump's poll numbers https://t.co/IWJ5mXADFu

They won't last pic.twitter.com/OmOb26JICE

— David Frum (@davidfrum) March 25, 2020

If any of us is still alive in November, we can pick up a lot of seats.

Tha CarterPost + Comments (119)

As Betty mentioned in her post, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have decided to cooperate, and all gyms, casinos and movie theaters will be closed. Restaurants and bars will be takeout only. Good! More to come, I’m sure. So, in our states’ rights utopia, little clusters of states will make their own healthcare policy to address a nationwide threat, while Trump alternates between shaking every hand in sight, and pushing Pence out in front of the public so mother’s husband can be scapegoated later. It’s much better to have our precious rights than our precious lives, so I can only say “keep up the good work” to Team Trump.

We can’t do much about this now, other than perhaps the changes Cheryl suggested today, but I have a couple of thoughts about what we need to do in the mid- and long-term, and what I’m storing away in my anodized titanium grudge carrier for later examination.

First, the bankers never got what they deserved after 2008, and goddamit, the fucking Republicans need to pay for all the cuts and other anti-science bullshit that caused us to be the last place country in virus testing. There should be no “bygones being bygones” on this fuckup. There will be an especially fervent effort by FoxNews to tell us that the response to this pandemic was as good as we could have expected, because it was a natural catastrophe that nobody could have predicted (except for the smart government officials that Trump fired or replaced with stupid toadies). Nope! We need a reckoning.

Second, we need to start advocating for mail-in elections, and that’s going to be a fight. Trump would prefer to have no election, so it’s in his interest to throw as much sand in the gears of changing election procedures as he possibly can. Josh Marshall has a good post on this.

Third, James Fallows makes some good points in this essay about the chaos that Trump caused at the airports, but his point is more generally applicable:

You probably can’t see this from seat 23D on United or Delta, but every commercial-flight airport has its own fire station, within a few seconds’ drive of the runway. A fire crew is standing by, every time you take off or land. That’s based on What if? thinking. What if five minutes from now, a plane comes in hard, and has a post-touchdown fire, which could threaten the passengers trapped inside? What if an airplane’s engine catches fire on the runway, and a hundred passengers have to get off all at once?

[…] I’m sure there are airports where the “equipment” has never been used in a real emergency, or not in many years. But it’s there and ready, every minute, because: What if?

Fallows makes a distinction between grinding efficiency, which keeps airlines profitable at the expense of making the experience sometimes unpleasant, and the What if? culture underlying safety systems in airplanes and airports. Our hospital system has been run on grinding efficiency, to maximize corporate profits and perhaps decrease the cost of patient care, but not so you’d notice, if you’ve received a bill lately. So we have no spare beds, we’re going to run short on protective gowns and masks because they’re sourced from China, we’re short of nurses, and so forth. When this is over, we need to What if? hospitals and the health care system in general. We need some slack in the system, some stockpiled supplies, some extra beds, increased pay for nurses and educational incentives and student loan repayments just like doctors get, and a recognition that we may “waste” some money on preparedness (just like we “waste” $800K on each of the airport fire trucks pictured). Because the What if? just happened, and we’re woefully unprepared.

The Conservative Paradise Continues to ProsperPost + Comments (224)

This story was on the TPM morning reading list:

The idea of a four-day workweek might sound crazy, especially in America, where the number of hours worked has been climbing and where cellphones and email remind us of our jobs 24/7.

But in some places, the four-day concept is taking off like a viral meme. Many employers aren’t just moving to 10-hour shifts, four days a week, as companies like Shake Shack are doing; they’re going to a 32-hour week — without cutting pay. In exchange, employers are asking their workers to get their jobs done in a compressed amount of time.

Last month, a Washington state senator introduced a bill to reduce the standard workweek to 32 hours. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is backing a parliamentary proposal to shift to a four-day week. Politicians in Britain and Finland are considering something similar.

I went to the grocery store this morning, since I work from home and have a flexible schedule, and it’s a big hassle to go when everyone else is out of work. It’s school break week here in Rochester, so a lot of kids were shopping with both of their parents, which of course isn’t the case on school days. The younger kids were just loving life: no school, and time with Mom and Dad, a very precious commodity when both parents work 40 hour weeks. It’s even worse for children of parents who have to work multiple jobs because of the shitty low wages and crap benefits.

In our robot manufacturing and service economy future, less time worked for more pay, and semi-skilled jobs that pay enough so only one parent has to work, would mean that we would have enough jobs to go around, and that parents could spend more time with their kids. But it’s kind of like a Presidential candidate saying he or she is an atheist, or perhaps even worse, for one of them to say we all need to work less. How would the Waltons and Jeff Bezos survive if they paid their employees more for less work? It’s simply unimaginable.

Everybody Works Too Damn MuchPost + Comments (90)

I want to follow up on this post about Amazon announcing that they’re bringing jobs to New York. There were two major critiques of AOC’s victory lap:

Amazon promised 25,000 jobs, this announcement is 1,500, so this is not a win. This one is easy for anyone who knows the history of these IDA (Industrial Development Authority) deals. The job promises are over a period of time (in this case, apparently, 10 years), and the promises don’t have to be kept. Amazon apparently promised 700 jobs the first year, so 1,500 is arguably better than what the original deal would have yielded.

The most important point is that whatever Amazon promised in return for $3 billion in tax breaks, these deals don’t have any penalty for companies that don’t create the promised number of jobs, so Amazon could have promised 100K jobs, delivered a small fraction of those, and paid no New York taxes for years.

Amazon is taking office space in a complex that is the recipient of tax breaks so it’s not as big a win as it could be. This one seems to be reaching, since these IDA deals are almost ubiquitous for large projects, so it would be hard for Amazon to find space that wasn’t the beneficiary of some deal or other. And, at least an IDA didn’t shell out $3 billion more in tax breaks to get Amazon to come to town.

There’s something more important than the details of the Amazon deal itself – there’s the toxic environment surrounding these IDA tax breaks and the Hunger Games lotteries that they engender. When Amazon announced the deal, all of the well-paid development marketers for our area (the Chamber of Commerce and other booster entities), fell all over themselves to show that they were competing for Amazon’s HQ2. The local paper dutifully wrote stories taking the bait, showing how, if you look at the Amazon deal in just the right way, Rochester could qualify. When Amazon chose NYC, these stories took on a tone of self-flagellation about our inadequacy and failure.

What’s taken for granted in all of the publicity around HQ2 is that this is the way business is done. Business isn’t a large corporation choosing to site a facility somewhere that has a good pool of technical employees, good housing and good transit. Rather, its a contest to see which locales can cough up the most tax breaks and other goodies to entice the corporation to come to their town. I can’t hate the player here–Amazon just took the usual IDA game and brought it to another level. But let’s give the politicians and activists who opposed the Amazon deal in NYC their due, because it would have been pretty easy to sit on the sidelines and treat IDA-style development as just part of doing business.

By the way, I’m writing from the perspective of Rochester, which is awash in IDA deals, and there’s been a pretty significant backlash against them here. Some of that backlash is driven by examples of IDA deals that yielded almost no new jobs, or money that was supposed to go to new, risky businesses that instead go to fund expansion of existing businesses like the nicest health club in town. After those deals were exposed, some of the relatively timid local politicians here are opposing them, or at least calling for reform. That’s huge in an environment where these deals used to be announced with big fanfare for the politicians involved, after which they failed in obvilion.

In short, these deals are generally bad for taxpayers, and they don’t generate many new jobs. As voters become more educated about them, they will become politically unpopular. It’s good to see some Democrats leading on these issues, despite the flack they received.

IDA ToxicityPost + Comments (53)

I guess I’m just going to embed AOC tweets for the duration, but goddam is this sweet. Those fuckers at Amazon tried to hold up NYC for $3 billion in tax breaks, cried like little babies when Mr. Backlash made them feel a little bad about themselves, and then they fucking caved.

Ha Ha Fucking HaPost + Comments (64)