Tahoe's hiring crisis is unraveling small businesses during its busiest season

I'd like to think that instantaneous change is merely the result of a system whose true state cannot be represented during the calm years. Permanent accumulation of durable objects is a fundamental problem. Whether it is money, land or power.

It's when their apparent value and their real value diverge that problems manifest. The solution has always been to let them deteriorate just like their physical counterparts. We have democracy with frequent elections to deteriorate power. We have inflation to deteriorate money. Where are the land value taxes that deteriorate land? Property taxes do exist but some states decided to freeze them, creating an extreme wealth transfer from the future to the past.

The housing crisis that makes the hiring crisis inevitable has been in the making for decades. If the price to rent ratio gets insane it will have to go down eventually, all at once instead of year by year. Of course it is entirely possible that people end up waiting half a lifetime for a correction.

If we want to prevent a crisis we have to do a little readjustment to reality continuously but people love to deny reality right until the moment it catches up.

Let's talk about a more familiar concept: Inflation. People hate it. They hate it so much they would rather see as little inflation as possible even if it comes at the risk of even more inflation in the future. The current inflation rate is a good example. It's high. It's definitively too high for a single year. However, when you look at the past 10 years it is just right. It's not high enough to raise interest rates because we have a lot of inflation to catch up on. We are like a student that forgot to do his homework and now has to do twice as much.

The housing market has a lot of catching up to do and when it happens it won't be pretty. Corrections are inevitable, we can only shift their date. I would argue that healthy markets merely correct themselves very frequently so the impact of every single correction is perceived to be insignificant.

> Are these people free to quit and start a remote-work job?

Got it. I see what you mean. No, they are not. Practically speaking, these jobs are not ones that can be done remotely. (But maybe another could.) More practically, absent these measures, those workers are commuting in.

In California we have a notoriously evil company called Derrel's Mini Storage. They have some of the highest employee churn, such that they have permanent now hiring signs at all locations - which are explodingat the moment due to the many people moving out of California - almost all are completely full and we have I believe more than 10 just here.

They hire teams of two and force the men to do the manual labor and the women to do the deskwork.

They force the team to work and live on site. As in, to work there yoy must reside there. They make this sound like a bonus - it's not.

Now, when you inevitably decide to leave you must first find alternative living situation, and another job to pay for it while working extremely long hours at this place (sometimes 7 days a week open to close if they cant hire a relief team- and they only hire teams).

This is beyond evil.

When I was about 19 I worked on a rock quarry in Comstock, Texas. We had to live on-site at the 'wetback shack' (owner's words, and most of the employees were indeed illegals driven over from Acuna, Mexico). This was because he wanted to start work at 4am and this ensured everyone would show up- not his only reason however.

We made minimum wage busting and palletizing rock, even if we operated heavy machinery wage didnt change. They charged us $3 per soda or water at the swear to God it literally was Company Store. We also, we found out when we got our 1st check, were charged rent to stay in the shack. I think at what 3.30/hr (one water per hour!) damn near nothing was left. We, my friends and I who had family in Del Rio, Tx, could leave, and we did. The poor bastards who worked harder than anyone and were generally shit on (the illegals) they couldn't leave. The people who were from Comstock outskirts where there were no other jobs or places to rent? They stayed.

This was in 1999.

Tying living in any way with work is disgusting and not in any way shape or form altruistic.

.... which "works out in the end", but only after lots of people suffer from the required dislocations.

Is their suffering better or worse than the "distortions" caused by "interfering" in the market?

I don’t understand the “pay people more” sentiment. It _seems_ like the correct and obvious solution, but it seems like it just moves the goal line.

Margins are razor thin in restaurants specifically. If you pay people more, you’ll need to raise your prices and that will offset the pay raise if it happens across the board.

What am I missing?