To those who observe, may your fast be uncomplicated and your prayers rewarding!
Far less elevated, but also important:
President Joe Biden launched the largest release ever from the U.S. emergency oil reserve and challenged oil companies to drill more in an attempt to bring down gasoline prices that have soared during Russia's invasion of Ukraine https://t.co/UT1WNRTUEi pic.twitter.com/HExuKcwT2I
— Reuters (@Reuters) March 31, 2022
Biden says U.S. oil companies sitting on record profits https://t.co/jQpsUTm6SX pic.twitter.com/sC2lJtAXfk
— Reuters (@Reuters) March 31, 2022
Biden admin wants effectively a use it or lose it clause in federal oil leases. The industry is probably going to kick up a fuss about any new restrictions, but this is widely how it’s done in contracts with private landowners – where the vast majority of production comes from. pic.twitter.com/yE3Einrbhx
— Justin Jacobs (@justinjfj) March 31, 2022
U.S. Senate approves bill to ease export shipping backlogs https://t.co/eLaWiYxm8C pic.twitter.com/Z4Vz2HMDew
— Reuters (@Reuters) April 1, 2022
Hot off the wire:
"The economy has recuperated more than 90 percent of the 22 million jobs lost at the peak of the pandemic’s impact on the economy in the spring of 2020 — a far swifter rebound than forecasters initially expected."
Thanks, President Biden.https://t.co/JHvpsQ8aHJ
— Charlotte Clymer ?️⚧️?? (@cmclymer) April 1, 2022
topclimber
Waiting for Manchin to nix any lease mandate in 10,9…..0 seconds.
Baud
@topclimber:
It would need 10 Republicans anyway.
Baud
Happy Ramadan, Amir.
japa21
Good employment numbers. Construction employment is back to pre-pandemic numbers. Those are good paying jobs. Wages are up. Not quite to level of inflation, but close. Of course not all wages are up.
Pet peeve time. Wage numbers are usually presented as now over last month and then, maybe, extrapolated over a year. But monthly basis is always a low number.
However, inflation numbers are presented as compared to same time last year. That allows a continued statement of high inflation, although since a good amount of that inflation occurred over a short period of time, there is no reflection on what is really happening in the here and now. How do prices today compare to one month ago?
I actually have not noticed much of a change over the last two months in anything other than gas, which is now starting to drop.
topclimber
@Baud: It’s a revenue raiser, isn’t it. Could be part of the next reconciliation effort, say right before the mid-terms.
dmsilev
Happy Release of the 1950 Census day! I managed to find my father and his parents/grandparents without much trouble; my mom had a much more common last name so will have to sift through a whole bunch of pages to find her.
SiubhanDuinne
Ramadan Mubarak to Amir and any other jackals who observe. I wish you an easy fast and a joyful iftar.
Spanky
They’re outsourcing their editing to autofill now?
Baud
@Spanky:
Economy, heal thyself!
Cameron
“Drill, baby, drill?” I thought that was Sarah Palin’s line. Maybe this is some new form of bipartisanship.
Baud
@Cameron:
The wells have already been drilled. They just aren’t pumping.
Ken
@Baud: As Enron taught us, sometimes you make more money by not supplying your customers.
eclare
Happy Ramadan Amir
eclare
@Ken: I worked for one of Enron’s competitors back then. Yep. No matter what you did, it was impossible *not* to make tons of money.
The thing I will never understand is why Californians voted for that scheme.
Baud
@Ken:
I personally don’t mind the gas prices because I can afford it, I don’t drive a gas guzzler and I don’t drive much*. But it’s become pretty clear that most people are willing to view Dems negatively if gas prices are high, so I’m not going to fault Biden for seeking to lower them any way he can.
*ETA: Also, higher prices will help drive more sustainable technologies over the long term.
eclare
@Baud: Same here. Seems like housing/rent increases are at least of equal importance, but it all comes down to gas prices.
My parents were retired, drove very little, and would scour the city for the cheapest prices. They constantly asked me what I paid, and I had to tell them I had no idea.
Mustang Bobby
Shameless self-promotion alert: My play “Can’t Live Without You” is now published and licensed through Next Stage Press.
And my play “The Sugar Ridge Rag” will be produced by LAB Theater Project of Tampa, both live and on-demand. Synopsis: Dave and Pete Granger, age 17, are twin brothers in rural Ohio in 1970. Dave enlists in the Army as a combat medic and is sent to Vietnam. Pete, a piano prodigy and gay, goes to Canada to pursue his education in music and avoids the draft. Their parents; Hal, a veteran of the Korean War, and Deb, a nurse, are left to deal with the consequences of their sons’ actions and their future as a family. Over the next five years, their lives are changed forever by the war and the choices each of them has made.
We now return you to your regular programming.
eclare
@Mustang Bobby: Congratulations on both plays!
Baud
@eclare:
The housing market is different because voters are both sellers and buyers, and the sellers benefit from high prices. High gas prices really pits voters against gas companies.
Baud
@Mustang Bobby:
?
Another Scott
@Baud: Indeed, oil’s cost should be commensurate with the damage it is doing. But we’ve a ways to go until we get there. :-(
It sucks, but there’s a lot of speculation and hedging in oil. Tiny changes in supply and demand can lead to huge price swings.
FRED shows us that the WTI price has big drops after big runups, but it’s painful for people who don’t have money to spare during the runup.
Happy Ramadan and easy fasting, everyone.
Cheers,
Scott.
Chat Noir
@dmsilev: Excellent! I’ve been working on my family tree since July of 2020 and it’s been fascinating. Thanks for the link.
J R in WV
@Mustang Bobby:
I am (for some reason) continually happily surprised by the wide-ranging intellectual successes of the B-J community. From drama, thru music and literature, academia and science and technology, we have creative experts here in all sorts of arenas.
Or so we are told! ;~)
Seriously, congratulations, Mustang Bobby! Always glad to hear of your successes in retirement!! ( you did retire not long ago, right? congrats on that, also too!)
JML
@eclare:
I’ll admit, I’m having trouble wrapping my brain around the housing market. My home has seen an increase in market value of 3-7% for the past 4 years (pandemic or no) and suddenly the I get the report from the assessor’s office and it’s gone up by 25%!There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it. (Other than maybe my county needs some additional revenue?)
Mustang Bobby
@J R in WV: Thank you! I retired on August 31, 2019… for three days. I went back to work part-time for two charter schools in Miami doing grants administration. Between the part-time work and my pension, I have the time and wherewithal to write and go to theatre festivals.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: I saw a White House tweet yesterday that referenced “Putin’s price hike.” Don’t know if it will work, but it’s good to see the communications shop trying to reframe the issue instead of passively accepting that Dems will be blamed.
Betty Cracker
@Mustang Bobby: Sounds like fun — congrats!
Another Scott
@JML: Take a look at Zillow for your zip code. It’s rather shocking around here. :-/
Cheers,
Scott.
eclare
@JML: I’m sure it varies by area, but supposedly houses increased 19% nationwide over last Jan, and I’ve seen reports here (Memphis) of rents going up 20%.
Very glad I am not a renter right now.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Hope so. My fear that reflexively blaming Dems for everything that’s imperfect in life has become as endemic in our society as Covid. (And sadly, a lot of that comes from inside the house as well).
eclare
@Another Scott: Yeah…I couldn’t believe the asking price for my next door neighbor’s house. It sold about six months ago. Yikes!
Geo Wilcox
@JML: Corporate hedge funds are buying residential real estate all over the place and becoming land lords. They see huge profits in this and it will continue until it pops.
Betty Cracker
According to Axios, Jen Psaki is leaving in May and going to work for MSNBC.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Sorry to see her go, but it’s a nice retort to the Mulvaney hiring by CBS.
ETA: am surprised she announced her new job while she’s still press secretary.
Geminid
@eclare: A New Mexico jackal who has done a lot of organizing for the Democratic Party, particularly among young people, said they found the issue of housing affordability right up with climate change on young people’s minds, and they messaged accordingly.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: It just occurred to me — maybe she’s punking Axios for April Fools?
ETA: According to Axios, unnamed sources say Psaki is leaving, so grain assault and all that.
eclare
@Betty Cracker: No!!!!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
you know, I’d completely forgotten about Mike Allen, who combines all the worst aspects of Maggie Haberman, Chris Cillizza and Uriah Heep, yet somehow has flown under the radar for a while
Jared spoke to the 1/6 Committee for several hours yesterday. I imagine a lot of the questions were variants of “and did you receive any texts from Mrs Kushner that day?”
Baud
@Betty Cracker: Ah yes! That would make more sense. Although a real April’s fools joke would be her signing on with Fox.
zhena gogolia
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Oh, for fuck’s sake.
different-church-lady
@Ken: As Enron also taught us, sometimes you rot in prison.
Ken
What a coincidence, so have I. The evidence of my effectiveness is the outpouring of support for Ukraine.
(Slightly riffing on Henry IV Part 1, where one fellow brags he can call spirits, and another says “So can I, but do they come when you call?”)
Spanky
@Baud: To replace The Deuce in the WHPC.
Ken
@Spanky: She has finished her apprenticeship, and is ready to strike down her master and take his place.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Mustang Bobby: Congrats!
JML
@eclare: Yeah, I’m glad to have gotten out of the renter’s market; I suspect I would be paying more now than I do for my mortgage/property taxes/insurance bundle. But the sudden leap from the assessor’s office threw me: one, they’re usually more conservative, and two, they’re usually a year behind whatever the market seems to think it’s doing.
I’m also in a smaller town (30 minutes or so from a big city, 30 minutes from the smaller city in which I work) with plenty of room (aka, former fields) for expansion so it’s not like there’s a real shortage around here…
I’m also super-bummed that my part-time WFH arrangement is ending, entirely because my current supervisor doesn’t believe in WFH, so as soon as masking standards got lifted at the university and the safety protocols changed he declared that there was no need for anyone to be doing WFH any longer and everyone was expected back in the office.
Betty Cracker
So, before she joined the Trump cult, Ginni Thomas was in a different cult:
Not all that surprising, really.
eclare
@Geminid: Glad they adjusted the messaging. When I graduated college I moved to ATL…no way I could afford that now.
eclare
@JML: That sucks about not WFH anymore.
What gets me about the housing cost increases here, is Memphis is not a boom town. Also, like your area, plenty of land. Who knows? But people I know who rent pay more than I do.
Geminid
@eclare: I think these were Democrats acting in just one New Mexico county. I found it significant because I had not seen the obvious: that housing affordability is a big issue for young people.
I am not sure if Democrats have yet formed policies that deliver on this issue. But, if we can encourage companies to extract more oil in the short term, we can find ways to build more housing in the medium term.
mrmoshpotato
Brought to you by that bastard Newt Gingrich since 1990.
Omnes Omnibus
@Betty Cracker: Exactly, I would wait before offering any hot takes on “breaking news” today.
raven
@Mustang Bobby:
“The Sugar Ridge Rag” sounds particularly interesting to me.
topclimber
Ratio of price to rental cost of home is higher than the last implosion, indeed highest since 1975. And that was as of a year ago.
eclare
@Geminid: I bought my house seventeen years ago. I just looked on Zillow, which I realize is not a guarantee of sales price, and the value has nearly doubled. My salary (shocker!) has not doubled.
Benw
My work is having their first rec center open house since Covid, so I’m staffing the ultimate disc table! I’m hoping to get 10 signups. Ultimate!
The Moar You Know
@Betty Cracker: Never heard of them until now. Derived, as I expected, from that sick sack of crap Werner Erhard of est (Lifespring was founded by former employees of est). That cult and it’s offshoots have caused a stunning amount of damage to this country that has never even been acknowledged, much less held accountable for.
eclare
@Benw: Have fun!
Ken
@eclare: I’m guessing you’re not in Central London or Manhattan’s upper east side, so the increase in value is not being driven by Russian oligarchs and UAE sheiks buying up the properties.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@eclare: single-family homes are almost as deeply ingrained in a certain ideal of American life as a big vehicle.
eclare
@Ken: As far as I know, no oligarchs in Memphis. I don’t think they want to cruise the Miss River in their superyachts.
eclare
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Very true, but like I said, very glad I’m not subject to the whims of a landlord. And I have a modest house, 2 BR, 1 bath. Plenty for one person.
JML
@eclare: Heh, I just looked on Zillow for my house (in part to see if the assessor was insane) and they had the estimated market value at another 10% above the assessor! Oh my goodness. Other than the sticker shock, I’m not too worried, because the tax assessment increase isn’t bad.
What has everyone hopping mad is the increase in utilities. electric/natural gas has jumped like crazy and so has water/sewer/trash and the best explanation anyone has is that we’re all still paying for Texas failing to insulate their pipes from the previous winter. But a 40% increase on water/sewer/trash costs with no change in service or usage? people notice that shit and it makes people mad.
eclare
@JML: Oh that water/sewer/trash increase would infuriate me! Fortunate to have cheap utilities here. And a good water supply.
Brachiator
@Betty Cracker:
Interesting. I miss her already, prospectively, and wish her well. She really did a fantastic job.
Ken
@eclare: Hard to feel you’ve got the biggest yacht when you’ve got to yield to a barge tow that’s 1200 feet long and 200 feet wide. Also hard to feel you’ve got the most powerful vessel when you see the little pusher tug that’s moving the whole tow.
schrodingers_cat
@JML: Zillow is not super accurate. Inflates the home price IMHO.
Anyway
@Benw:
ooh, takes me back to grad skool. Played a lot of summer league Ultimate…
Mustang Bobby
@raven: It’s the first play I’ve written that requires a trigger/content warning for veterans and PTSD.
laura
@Betty Cracker: She was too young for Est and neither Mary Kay, Amway or Tupperware could scratch Ginni’s itch, so Lifespring it was- till it wasn’t. Her personal journey to Qanon will be release by Regnery Press in time for the holidays!
Wishing a Ramadan Mubarak and joyful Iftar to Amir Khalid and all who celebrate.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Betty Cracker:
Sounds more like a pyramid scheme. Supposed that makes Ginny Thomas a natural for Trump since Trump never meet a pyramid scheme he didn’t like.
Betty Cracker
@The Moar You Know: I’ve known a couple of former cult members (different cults), and the one thing they had in common is that you weren’t surprised when they told you they’d been a cult member. I bet the same is true of Thomas.
I don’t know if she’s full-blown QAnon or not, but some of the references in her nutty texts to Meadows suggest she might be. It’s scary how often that cult’s themes are taken up by GOP politicians and mainstreamed.
Benw
@Anyway: we rely pretty heavily on grad students who work at the lab over the summer to get enough bodies. I’m getting damn old to chase 24 yos around
Raven
@Mustang Bobby: So does someone introduce it that way? I don’t see any such indication on the website? I remember when a friend told me I “had” to see Miss Saigon but it might be difficult. It wasn’t.
Sure Lurkalot
I’ve lived in our duplex for 26 years and its valuation is over 300% of the original price. But over that time, put a ton of money in it…most recently roof, windows, HVAC. So…
Truth be told, I’d like something smaller with less yard. But the current prices of what appeals to me in terms of location and layout would be a couple of hundred grand over the current abode. It’s the wild Wild West, and not even California!
Anyway
@Benw:
Ultimate was a staple of grad school summers — so much fun. Play hard, party hard…
eclare
@Ken: Hahaha…so true. Some people kayak on that river. No way in the world I would do that with all the barges.
The Moar You Know
@Betty Cracker: laughing sadly because it’s so damn true.
Betty Cracker
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Seems like most cults are also a shakedown in one way or another.
Raven
@Sure Lurkalot: We put $70k into our rental this year, we raided the rent to $1300 per!
Sure Lurkalot
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: The first season of the podcast “The Dream” is about pyramid schemes and is quite good on the history. The FTC had almost shut them down until (wait wait don’t tell me) Amway.
eclare
@Raven: Y’all put a lot of work and nice features into that rental!
Sure Lurkalot
@Raven: Your venture seems to have turned out quite well. Everyone here loved the remodel!
ETA Eclare and I on same page.
eclare
@Betty Cracker: I still think that is why Katie Holmes left Tom Cruise when she did. Their daughter was around six, and in Scientology “auditing” can start that young.
JoyceH
@Betty Cracker: She said from the beginning that she was only going to stay 12-18 months. That tenure is pretty standard for WH jobs, they have a fast burnout rate.
Raven
@eclare:
@Sure Lurkalot:
Yea we see it as a long term investment so taking the renovation money out of the equity made sense. We really hit it with the tenants. They haven’t been back since mid-Feb and there rent arrives like clockwork. I park my truck in their driveway so it looks occupied.
Benw
@eclare: thanks! Two visitors so far, and I got both their emails. 100% baby! Lol
ETA: I’m doing better than badminton club, but getting my butt kicked by soccer club :)
Mai Naem mobile
@Geo Wilcox: i know a few of realtors and lenders. This is what happens(in Phoenix anyway.) House goes.on market. House gets a bunch of offers. Realtor/seller wants to sell to a regular buyer. Accepts offer from a regular pre approved buyer that meets the cash buyer investor bid. Deal enters lending process. Appraisal etc. 2 weeks to a month later deal falls through(appraisal, inspection whatever.) Sometimes the realtor/seller goes through same process again with a regular buyer. Eventually they give up and go with the investor cash buyer who forgoes the appraisal etc.
Raven
@Mai Naem mobile: We didn’t have to do an appraisal on our re-fi but I guess that’s because we had so much equity.
lowtechcyclist
Happy 1950 Census Day indeed! My wife was up at 12:01am to try to find our folks. 1950 was the first Census that included her parents, but she’d found them by 12:14am, and located my mother shortly after.
Raven
Does anyone here take Gabapentin?
schrodingers_cat
@eclare: Zillow price is the higher end of the normal distribution of the house prices in your area. If you take a mean of the recent sale prices of the houses on your street with similar sq footage and yard acreage that should give you a better approximation.
Ken
Don’t forget to monetize your mailing list by selling it to the Baud! 20XX campaign.
Mai Naem mobile
@schrodingers_cat: Redfin’s prices are even higher than Zillow. You can’t do algorithms in real estate anyway. Firstly they base it on what the house was bought for last so a house which was bought for a lot less a long time ago gets a lower value than a house that was bought later for more. They don’t even necessarily account for a vacant lot that was bought before the house was built. The vacant lot price becomes the base.price for the house. That’s dumb.
lowtechcyclist
@JML:
That really sucks. And sure, maybe there’s no need to be working from home, but if things have been working fine for the past two years with people doing WFH, then there’s no need to be back in the office either.
At this point, if people have proven they can be productive while working from home, there’s absolutely zero reason not to let them. Other than to assuage the insecurity of their so-called superiors.
catclub
@topclimber:
Affordability is the ratio of mean income to mean mortgage
(could be medians). My understanding was that affordabiity was best around 2013-2014, but is still better now than 2007. People are better off, or more importantly people with no income are not getting mortgages as they did before 2007. Check out CalculatedRisk blog
Mai Naem mobile
@Raven: thats for a refi. I doubt you would get a loan on a sale without an appraisal .
catclub
That makes me think the lenders are paying kickbacks to the realtors to reject cash offers.
Ken
Oh, sure, all the actual work was being done efficiently. But could the supervisor step out of his office and survey his
minionsdronesstaff in their cubicles? Without that, can we truly say that things were fine?lowtechcyclist
I’m not sure it will. There just isn’t enough housing being built near where the jobs are. Absent a massive change in housing policy, housing prices in desirable areas are going to continue to increase faster than inflation.
lowtechcyclist
@Ken: Like I said, it’s all about assuaging the insecurity of the bosses.
Another Scott
@Raven: Our last 2 dogs have been on it. It seems to help them and I haven’t noticed any ill-effects.
Cheers,
Scott.
catclub
@lowtechcyclist: the fraction of the market being bought by hedge funds or companies like Zillow is VERY small compared with the vast numbers of individual home buyers.
Benw
@Ken: ah the sweet cash from the deep pockets of the Baud PAC!
Kay
They might win this. Just amazing.
JML
@Ken: truth. and that’s what’s driving this, TBH. The boss goes in to the office every day, and even during the worst of the pandemic he did (“essential” employee, but also…no risk for him when everyone else is working from home). That’s how he’s worked his entire career. That’s how he thinks work should be done and an office “managed”. He doesn’t want to have to reach out to someone on Teams or try to do a snap zoom meeting when he wants something: he wants to drop by their office and tell them what he wants.
I keep trying to explain to my leadership that that we have to change and evolve, that the best employees and candidates are going to increasingly demand this kind of flexibility, and the response has been basically “we’re different”. But really, we’re not. Applications for positions that used to attract 20-30 qualified candidates with little to no effort now garner more like 5 applicants and often many of those don’t meet the minimum qualifications.
It’s damned stupid to base decisions like WFH on the personal preferences of the most senior manager, but there you have it. (we did pilot permanent, non-pandemic WFH for our IT dept, entirely because if we hadn’t we would have lost 40-60% of them in 2 years or less)
Another Scott
@catclub: Trouble is, of course, when inventory for sale is very low – as it is now – people/investors paying all cash distort the market even more.
Cheers,
Scott.
raven
@Another Scott: When Bohdi was failing we gave it to him and it flattened him at firstMy neuro said I might want it to help with my thigh pain since nothing else has.
Brachiator
@JML:
That’s really unfortunate. From all I can see, many companies adjusted well to remote work, and employees were not only just as productive, but often less stressed.
raven
@JML: When I first got to WFH, some 18 years ago, our unit was displaced and the staff was sent home but the boss ended up working in the office downtown because he felt the unit needed to be represented.
Kay
David beats Goliath. It’s an indie union that didn’t even exist a year ago and they beat Jeff Bezos. Just wild.
sdhays
@Kay: Holy shit.
Kay
raven
@Kay: In the middle of Trumpworld!
Another Scott
@raven: Our present mutt Ellie was hit by a car or had some other severe trauma (shattered femur, broken pelvis, etc.) as a puppy that was apparently never treated. She recovered (, somehow, the leg is shorter than the others and points out, so she has a weird gait), but seems to have episodes of pain (occasionally on a walk she’ll suddenly sit down and bite at her toes or her crotch). Over a few months she had 3 steroid injections near her tail at a doggie sports medicine place outside of Annapolis that might have helped – hard to say. (There was too much “remodeling” of the various bones for them to fix anything via surgery.)
She 5+ now and takes gabapentin twice a day and seems to have no issues with it and has seemed more comfortable on it than when she wasn’t.
Our previous dog, Sophie, had occasional seizures which seemed to be substantially reduced once she went on gabapentin. She also tolerated it very well.
HTH a little. Good luck!
Cheers,
Scott.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@JML: The place I worked tried forcing the admin types back in the office and found out that most of them were working second jobs if they really had to make a choice the second job was paying better. We lost the CFO, HR, Purchasing heads in one month.
raven
@Another Scott: Thanks. I think Bohdi did adjust but it was scary at first. As for me, I’ve had 2 years of PT, spinal surgery and a steroid injection and nothing has helped a bit. The doc suggested I try it.
Baud
@Kay:
?
Kay
@Baud:
Amazon management responded by holding a meeting where they called Smalls “inarticulate” and “not very smart”
RobertB
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Why the Uriah Heep hate? Easy Living and Stealin’ are great songs!
Baud
@Kay:
I wonder if it can be replicated outside of New York.
Mai Naem mobile
@catclub: its possible. The two realtors I am talking about are older and have gone through a couple of RE crashes here. I do think they sincerely try to sell to regular buyers. There are also plenty of sellers here who lived through the crashes and learned some lessons.
Mai Naem mobile
@Kay: now we’ll be treated to a gazillion PR ads from Amazon on how great they are and how well they treat their employees. Nothing about the sensors on the employees shoes to follow them everywhere and make sure that Jeff Bezos is not getting every minute of labor from his slaves.
Kay
@Baud:
I wonder too. I bet it could in PA or OH. The Amazon hub close to me is smack in the middle of a traditionally (and still to a large extent) unionized area. I think they would have put it further out to avoid a union in a more rural area but they didn’t want to give up the location- it’s close to 80 and 75 and very close to a major UPS hub and a USPS parcel hub.
The organizers are all so young! Big day for them.
Geminid
@Baud: The Teamsters are making unionizing Amazon, both warehouses and delivery fleets, a high priority. I read that they were going to start in Canada and work south.
Baud
@Kay:
As I get older, everyone gets younger.
buggrit
@raven: A good friend of mine takes it, and finds it effective, although it does make her fart…like, a lot.
raven
@buggrit: That won’t be much of a change!,
thanks
Kay
@Mai Naem mobile:
Amazon spent 4.3 million on anti-union consultants last year and they got beat by a warehouse worker.
Miss Bianca
@Kay:
OK, I am feeling some hope for this world again now.
Kay
@Miss Bianca:
It’s a great story.
He has one rap song and..it’s on Amazon :)
JML
@Brachiator: we also discovered that in many situations service delivery was actually better. But they’re also trying to put the onus for a “vibrant campus” on the staff because they’re totally afraid to tell the teaching faculty that they need to show up for work more. (we have a severe case of FES – Faculty Entitlement Syndrome operating)
For me personally it’s extra crappy because my department is in a converted house, and I have to share office space with someone who is unvaxx’d. There’s a barrier in place between our desks…but now I have to decide to risk her idiocy or mask at my own damn desk every day. The platooning system was working just fine, but it’s all being tossed out because of out-dated management garbage.
Brachiator
@RobertB:
Snark, right? Very droll.
Good band, evil Dickens villain.
Miss Bianca
@Kay: God bless this person. Seriously.
Gravenstone
@eclare: Zillow evaluations are a joke. My property is (allegedly) valued at almost 4X what I had it appraised at when I refinanced a few years ago. Of course, my area is a weird mix of low end stuff (like mine) and new builds. So that may skew valuations somewhat, but it’s still laughable to me.
Gravenstone
@Benw: I dabbled in Ultimate in late college. Not sure my knees have ever forgiven me.
gvg
@JML:
Take a kind of hope. My employer rushed us back to the office by July the first year. I thought it was stupid, we had way to many cases in Florida, but when I got back to the office, I found out that not all my fellow employees had enjoyed working from home. It varied a lot. Well since then it has turned out their were a lot of morale problems in the division and they did a lot of looking for answers. We were shorthanded and had trouble hiring like pretty much everyone. Naturally the biggest issue is the pay. They say they are working on that. (I don’t know if I believe that, but I think the market is going to force them eventually) However turns out lots of people wanted working from home. So they are experimenting with it. Not everyone wants to. I now get 2 days a week at home, and it looks like more options to come. We were over 18 months back in the office before this happened. There was also so significant turn over way up above me that could be behind it. I really don’t know. The change was announced without my really being aware there were real discussions going on near the top.
I have worked here 29 years. I do think new trainees would benefit from being in an office for some time to start. Me, not so much.
Chief Oshkosh
@Kay:
Who apparently is “not very smart” and “inarticulate.”
Yeah, that’s going to wear REAL well… :)
cain
@Baud:
Totally agree with you. With high gas prices the switch to electric cars will go even faster. They are doing us a favor.
Kay
@Chief Oshkosh:
Martin
@cain: I’ve been tracking the EV industry, and I don’t think that’s going to work out. I want it to. The problem is that battery costs were supposed to continue a long decline in price, and in the last year they started going up as the cheap component supply has run out. Automakers are switching over from LiIon to LFP which are cheaper but give less range/kg mainly because they tap a somewhat different set of components that still have plenty of cheap supply. But we were supposed to have EV costs below that of ICE vehicles, and that’s absolutely not happened and so we’ve falling into a bit of a pricing/production trap, which is contributing to used cars being in such high demand because the new car market is a bit busted.
The problem is that this doesn’t appear as though it can scale to the necessary levels, and it’s in a little bit of a vicious cycle as the mass of EVs continues to go up, demanding larger batteries, which weigh more, demanding larger batteries, etc. So you have this problem of diminishing returns if your primary goal is to deliver 300 mile range, and the components market doesn’t seem as though it can do that because it too has diminishing returns as greater extraction efforts increase in cost for the same yield.
And of course, the EV trend puts more strain on the grid, which itself needs more batteries for production smoothing, which just puts even more pressure on the battery market. Everyone is trying to figure out what the fuck is happening since the long forecasted trend has managed to reverse, right at the moment that the automakers are starting to make the big investments in EVs.
The underlying problem is that we’re asking for too much. Hauling around 4000 lbs of steel and 300 miles of battery so that you can go buy lunch a mile away is killing everything. It’s so preposterously inefficient and expensive that we’re just replacing one crisis with another crisis.
And yeah, I know, we’ve built our society for cars, what can we do about that. This isn’t a value judgement on how we built society, it’s just an analysis of whether that society can be sustained or not given the constraints that we’ve set for ourselves, which is the freedom to haul around tons of dead mass for essentially no reason, and I wonder how many years into this will we go before we have the come to Jesus moment that there’s no way to get to the end of it, and we’ve just wasted a few years of progress and subsidies on the wrong solution.
tl;dr: we’re going to fuck over poor and marginalized people so the upper middle class can maintain their lifestyle, and subsidize them in the process.
Origuy
I take 600mg Gabapentin every morning. I was having pins and needles in my thighs from neuropathy when I stand for a while. If I kept moving, I am ok. It seems to have cleared up the pins and needles; once in a while I take a little more if I will be standing a lot.