- cross-posted to:
- antiwork@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- antiwork@lemmy.world
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If the eclipse lost 700 million dollars, imagine what we can do if we did a general strike. The oligarchy would shit themselves.
Imagine if we blot out the sun for good!
Sorry, Trump beat you to that idea.
https://time.com/6964573/trump-bizarre-solar-eclipse-campaign-ad/
Eerily appropriate ad.
This is going to be an unpopular note but . . .
IMO NBC News is right, and the commenter is being histrionic.
Like it or not, but we live in a society that uses money (this is not a strictly capitalist thing). If you recall your microeconomics class you might remember that currency is a unit of measurement (like Celsius or inches). The original story is making a point about how disruptive the eclipse was to our “normal” lives. What other universal way is there to measure changes like that? Utils?
NBC (headline) didn’t say it cost $700M and it was bad. Nor did it say it cost $700M and it was good.
The tone of the article probably went where we think it went.
I’d still disagree.
The core premise is that average worker productivity on eclipse day will dip by 1/24th (assuming 20 mins of “eclipse break” on a 8 hour workday).
And that’s BS on several fronts.
For one, many people have taken days off (PTL or similar) or move their break to the eclipse, which is already accounted for in the averaged productivity statistic.
Second, people in positions they can’t just leave (factory workers on an assembly line, cashiers etc.) will often have to skip on the eclipse.
And people who can leave (I’m thinking of white collar desk jobs here), are often spending a similar amount of worktime off-desk on other days, too, for a myriad of only indirectly productive reasons (networking, thinking on a thorny problem over a smoke…).
The formula assumes
- that all of the American workforce spends every minute of their 8 hour day actively working on their desk/station/etc.
- that every minute they don’t, is “lost”, work-wise.
- that all of that workforce is on the job during eclipse time, but will take a paid break during the actual eclipse
All of which are questionable at best.
You could talk about man hours worth of enjoyment or recreation. Or if you want to stay in the money realm, the amount of tourism it generated. Or travel, hotel accommodations/revenue, or related merchandise.
The framing of “it cost us” inherently implies a negative. Cost implies liability.
It’s the duty of every worker to produce as little value as possible while working.
I think we need to start giving wedgies and noogies to data nerds who generate statistics like this. It’s a giod stepping off point to get us to the Butlerian Jihad.
Its the Butlerian Holy War now
Remind me again why people from “non-shithole” countries would want to move to the US? The priorities on display here are beyond belief.
Would you rather have a base income with the associated purchasing power of 30k+ minimum wage (e.g. all those 15/hr minimum states) or would you rather live in a country where the middle class wage is 12k or less.
Keep in mind:
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Airfare is the same everywhere. Saving $300 in the US for a flight is practically trivial even at minimum wage compared to earning $1000/mo pretax or less.
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Electronics cost the same everywhere.
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Everything imported costs more than the US in those shithole countries because the volume of imports is way less. A $10 container of hair gel in the US costs $30+ in latin american countries.
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Foreign style food is almost exclusively global american brands and/or incredibly expensive - eating domestically grown and produced foods are typical.
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Air conditioners are not affordable
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Electricity is commonly not stable, if it exists
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Things like public sewer systems are not guaranteed. Septic is common in a lot of places. Even non-well water can be hard to find in many places.
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There are no things like food pantries in third world countries. In the greater Boston area, food pantries are everywhere and will not turn away a hungry family.
There’s so many benefits to living here that we overlook completely. We look at social media and wish we were all millionaires. There are people out there making a couple thousand dollars a year and eating “cheap” local food but otherwise living in abject poverty who would do absolutely anything to jump our border to work illegally for less than minimum wage without ever collecting social security benefits or unemployment. That’s why they do.
I live in south America and even though I only make around 900-1000 dollars a month, I can afford a room, food, transportation, health insurance, going out with friends, entertainment, studies if I want to but who wants to waste money on study when I could be buying videogames, and save for investments.
Okay now compare it to somewhere like Denmark
Nobody wants to leave livable wages and good social support programs to move to a country that is very, very backwards.
I feel like you may have misread the comment you’re replying to…
Those are all things people from “non-shithole” countries already have, and they almost certainly have even more
Not disagreeing, I agree there’s little reason why citizens of wealthy nations would come here. I’m just pointing out all the reasons why ‘shithole’ countries want in. Those things don’t really apply to countries that have living wages and good social supports.
US high wages by and large go to people who already have significant wealth. It’s all funneled upwards. All of the immigrants and the poors here work in indentured servitude to their feudal land lords. Sure slavery is gone but you still have a master who can decide your fate should they choose to… for most of us anyway.
Oh sure, it’s better than the poorest places on earth…
For the richest country on earth, that’s a comically low bar.
Oh sure, it’s better than the poorest places on earth…
Way more people live in the poorest places on earth than the US. We’re talking billions. ~652 million people live in latin america. ~1.4 billion people live in india. That’s 25% of human population right there and i’m ignoring eastern europe, lots of asia, lots of the middle east… all of africa (another 1.2 billion)
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Even some us people from shit hole countries are waking up to the truth that is better to stay or just go to some other non US owned piece of land
Whoa, we generate that much money every four minutes? That’s bonkers. …remind me again why we need the executives, then?
To create more value for the shareholders!
I’m tired
I read an article headline yesterday claiming that it would generate $6 billion in economic output due to tourism. That would far outweigh the lost productivity.
I think that number has been seriously inflated too. I was in the path of totality here in Terre Haute, IN. Traffic was normal the whole time before and after the eclipse. I didn’t go right downtown, but we went to a park with an advertised event going on and where people from other parts of the country were coming, but it wasn’t really any more full than if they had done it during the summer.
Nearby Bloomington, IN was expecting 500,000 people. They had a special event with Mae Jemson, William Shatner and Janelle Monae. They have IU Memorial Stadium there, which is designed to handle major Big 10 football games. In the photo I saw, it was maybe a quarter full and that’s being generous.
The eclipse was on a Monday and most kids didn’t have the day off from school unless they were at least close to the path of totality. The tourism boom did not appear.
That’s sad to read. The total eclipse of my lifetime was in 1999 and my place was bang in the middle of the corridor of the umbral shadow. It was truly a spectacular event. Schools and most work places were closed for that day and my godfather just told his boss “I’m not coming in, fire me, I don’t care” lol (he didn’t get fired)
Yeah and the town I went to literally had cars parked along every single street. I can only speak for myself, but I didn’t spend a single dime there. We brought a lunch and snacks and I was thinking of getting dinner while out but seeing how busy it was, I decided instead to gtfo of town before everyone else decided it was time to get on the road, basically a minute or two after totality ended. It was a “see something cool in nature” thing rather than a “go spend money” thing for me. I wouldn’t be surprised if it costed the region more money in police overtime than it brought in in tourist dollars. Though regions on the way there might have seen higher speeding ticket revenue, at least until the line of cars saturated to the point where no one was speeding (and turning left if you were going the other way would be difficult).
People get PTO. It’s built into the cost of hiring workers. From the traffic last night, a LOT of them used vacation time, and probably generated tourism revenue as they traveled to see the eclipse.
My dad definitely used his accrued vacation to post up in a nice hotel in Texas. Lots of people did the same.
But this isn’t about that. It’s about this ingrained labor culture that permeates our society. If corporate isn’t doing good then our media will sound the alarms about how every single American must be suffering and all the average Joe’s problems are because those asshole day laborers took the productivity away.
Same song as when the pandemic forced work from home. The media spent years telling us how selfish those people were. Not even because the companies weren’t still making comparable money, but because office buildings were losing tenants.
But they’d never frame that as offices becoming out dated in the age of technology. It’s obviously the selfish workers who won’t think of the poor leeches that need them to rent their office spaces or the poor middle managers who suddenly become obsolete when everything can be done from a living room.
Fucking Spacer’s Choice I swear on the law.
So, over 300 million people enjoying a once in a lifetime natural event cost “the economy” about as much money as a typical CEO steals in a day?
Sounds like misdirected anger.
It’s like we forgot why we have an economy in the first place. Wasn’t it to enjoy our lives in this planet.
Nope. Loot pillage and exploit. When we started this shit we had chattel slavery and proper empires.sigh.
Rape kill kill kill rape, in that order. Can’t believe the rubes fell for that prosperity bullshit.
We only missed starting with no slavery by a single vote. I’m not even joking. Georgia and Carolina caused the biggest and most drawn out argument of The Continental Congress, and only managed to win by a single vote. The other 11 colonies were in favor of outlawing slavery from the start, though their stance on the natives was still crap.
Uh huh. You think the votes were honest though?
What do you mean? I’m going by the official record, which was thoroughly documented.
https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/studies/7537
No really. Fucking ridiculous amount of paperwork for people that called themselves traitors to their king.
Sure but you see this in those same buildings modern day?
They need x people from their party to vote against y policy to stop it, and all of them want y to fail, so they make sure the bad thing banning y that all of them want to wring their hands over passes by exactly x votes, with a sacrificial asshole who can take the PR hit or is too old to care (let’s call him Joe man).
So nobody has to deal with y, everybody other than joe-man gets to say how much they wanted y, and everybody gets to deflect criticism of themselves at joe-man.
Not a new phenomena in the parliamentary politics every onebof these blatantly conspiratorial aristocratic scumfucks would have been familiar with.
Ahh, I see. Unfortunately the people that made the institutions made the mistake of believing that dishonest actors would be ferreted out by the system they were creating. That has proven to not hold up. The last time that I can think of that a SCOTUS judge resigned due to ethical questions was in the '60s or early '70s.
It’s the “avocado toast” people all over again. “Why are you enjoying anything in your life right now when you could be waiting to enjoy things in the last 10-20 years of your life (if you live that long)?”
Now we have to save enjoyment for the last 1-2 months.
(You’d better find a new place to live if you plan to outstay your welcome by that much though; this one won’t be habitable)
Far easier said than done.
Impoverished people in inner cities do not have the means to find anywhere else to live. That’s why they end up just dying during a natural disaster.
Oh, no, I meant earth. Whole thing.
Ah, well we’re all fucked in that case.
Yes, but line went so far up, so worth.
No only for the select few, the rest of us are serfs. At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the billionaires started calling themselves Ramesses XXVI or something.
Maybe we should, like, do something about them?
Way less than 300 million. The entirety of the West Coast had 50% occlusion or less, and as XKCD pointed out last week, that isn’t even noticable.
I’m only pointing this out to point out that they are bitching about a fraction of the country, and less than a percent of the so called economy.
Tbh my family drove 10 hours to see it and we skipped two days of work.
Glad you could enjoy nature. Everyone should be able to more frequently.
and so, spent money to travel and presumably stay someplace and eat food which actually might be a net gain to the economy given (we assume) the days off work were PTO time that would have been taken anyway?
I 100% agree with the post and the comments. But we stayed at my MIL’s house and ate mostly BBQ from her deep freezer meat supply. I took PTO, my husband did not. The only real gain was Quality of Life, which I have absolutely no guilt about.
once in a lifetime
2017 was only seven years ago but okay
You do realize that the path of an eclipse isn’t the same every time, right?
In Canada, some places last saw a solar eclipse in the 1920s and won’t see another one until after 2140.
Now do the math for everyone eating Taco Bell just before their shift
Is this real??
The article or the estimate? Because the article is real but statistics can be created to suit your needs.
The article. Thank you.
Wow, that was easy to confirm. https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/eclipse-2017/solar-eclipse-will-cost-america-almost-700-million-lost-productivity-n793801
It can’t be lost if it doesn’t exist
Please tell me this isn’t real
Why is this one of the most flabbergasting things I’ve read in a long time
OK, this is the second time in my life that I read a headline that is even not clickbaity enough for what the article itself delivers. My $deity who tf thought this was a good idea?
