501–510 of 531 posts
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In many families, summers are typically full of "summer camps" that are actually "themed daycare for older kids". Those were mostly closed as well during the pandemic lockdown phase, and some still haven't come back (in the US, anyway).
What rich bubble do you live in where kids go to summer camp?
It is strange that the top known factors for this are not even mentioned in this or other similar news stories. First, closing of schools caused large numbers of women to leave the workforce in order to care for children. Until schools are fully open and day care is available those women will probably not be going back to work. Second, all markets are cultivated things. Employers in the most troubled sectors have rec…
> All of this stuff about workers disappearing and people reconsidering their lives is pretty much a sideshow of projected narrative that is detached from what is really going on. Well said. We’ve been bombarded with news articles and thought pieces about how COVID has forever changed the workforce, how people are refusing to work jobs they don’t like, how people are quitting en masse because their employers won’t al…
I don't agree. The pandemic is still very much happening and low-paid workers are expected to be on the front lines. If this had all happened when I was working retail, I probably would have made the decision to not go to work and catch covid while making 8/hr.
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It tells me we need a higher minimum wage. No individual can raise prices without losing competitiveness, but clearly higher prices would fix some of these serious issues. A higher minimum wage would prevent the “they’ll just go next door” issue.
> No individual can raise prices without losing competitiveness, but clearly higher prices would fix some of these serious issues. A higher minimum wage would prevent the “they’ll just go next door” issue. That seems right on the face of it. But then there's another issue: are you sure that the same number of people would continue eating out? Personally, I wouldn't bet on it. I don't often eat out, mostly because it'…
Post Covid I am down to 2 Lunches and Dinner ever other week...
I am considering dropping to 1 lunch as lunches with tip are now climbing to $15-20 where 4 years ago I could easily get out of the door at most places for under $12 with tip for a lunch.
if Lunches go above $20... I cease it completely
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As a VP does that $4 difference really mean anything to you?
We've switched many of our family's Friday night pizza nights to "make pizza at home". Can I afford $4 more? Of course. Do I see the same level of value in a ~50% more expensive pizza? Of course not.
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I don't think it's likely that the Kentuckians would help out if the tables were turned
This is just baseless speculation. Also that's a great reason why the federal government exists.
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So, why should we subsidize them? I’m Californian and my taxes should go to help my home state, not those who hate me and my home? Kentucky and the rest of those moocher states should pull themselves up by their boot straps, stand on their own two feet and sink or swim.
Why stop at taxes? Let’s talk about water, why should all these states be subsidizing California’s water use? Why aren’t they bootstrapping desalination plants? Quit mooching.
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> In a market economy there is no such thing as a "shortage" of workers You can't meet the demand by producing more workers per hour in some plant though If you need X doctors and only have X/2, no matter how much you pay them, they won't be enough.
Sure you can, skills based immigration. Poach from other countries. In the 1970s the USA had a crippling shortage of nurses and doctors which was filled by relaxing skills based immigration laws and importing trained medical talent from the Phillipines en masse.
there's no guarantee people will come to your country.
for example: would you go to work on the Iranian nuclear project?
Could you even go?
Would your country let you do that?
You keep counting on the fact that people will come to you instead of everywhere else, like it's the 70s.
But more importantly, the conversation is specifically about the hard stop on immigration that Brexit created.
You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Market can't fix stupidity.
I think it's time some nations, like UK, begin thinking about restructuring their society to adjust to the fact that their relevance has plumbed and will keep going down for the next decade.
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Shorter work week, more vacations. Spread the work across more people. Instead of 1 person working 50 hours, have 2 people work 25 hours. Instead of 2 weeks off a year, have 2 months. Oh, and untie healthcare from employment.
That was the idea behind the 35 hour work week in France. Didn't work out as expected: unemployment didn't go down. More recently, they had removed some tax breaks on overtime, but it turned out that that only hurt the people needing to work overtime; still no effect on unemployment. At least some of the breaks are now back. I think the broader issue is that most people having to work crazy hours with multiple jobs d…
At some point crimes of desperation will become rampant.
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> And a regular truck driver can be trained in a few months. It's not rocket science. I get why you've said this, but I'm not sure this kind of flippant remark is helpful -- what exactly isn't rocket science? Is it the actual act of training a truck driver? Is it the act of writing down the things needed to get more truck drivers? Actual process is non-trivial, expensive ( you need to persuade people to leave their f…
> Sure the market will probably eventually sort it out, but that seems neither a quick nor an efficient way of doing things in this case, where this was widely predicted years previous + is now critically required Isn’t the whole idea behind the benefit a free/freeish market provides that it is the most efficient system for allocating resources? Mind you efficient != resilient
(to be fair to the gov, not sure how they could have operated differently without advising everything the remain side was warning against. Which would have worked I guess, but would have also been bizarre and probably tanked the economy [more])
So based in that, how can it efficiently allocate resources? Given time, sure, maybe in theory. Which is great unless you're a. a business that has actual costs now or b. a real person that needs to eat and pay rent now.
With above in mind, I don't think it's about resilience. Maybe that ultra-simplified answer works! But it seems a pat free market 101 answer -- ignore the context, market will fix it.