I spent a little time watching some of the local TV news and weather drones chattering about Earth Day yesterday.
I know – I forgot to celebrate it, too, right?
And the line among the various weather drones, in noting that pollution is at record lows around the planet, was simultaneously predictable and a crushing face palm;
“it just shows what people can do to Fight climate change when they set their mind to it”
Yes. When the economy slows to a record halt, vaporizing trillions of dollars in personal and institutional wealth, throwing millions/tens of millions, really, into at least short term poverty and possibly much worse, with industries shut down and hundreds of thousands of small businesses vanquished over a little more than six weeks, the air will get a little clean.
Hey, this pandemic has made a believer out of me. I now join other urbanists who commute daily by car who support public transit for others. Let’s get those other people off the roads so I have a comfortable commute.
Seriously, though, there are things we could take from this experience and make actual positive changes to people’s lives- more remote working options would be better for families. It would also help the so called housing “crisis” as some people would move away from desnse living areas and open up housing options for others. Mixing some classroom time with distance learning time would get parents more involved in their children’s education and probably improve academic achievement. But, I suspect those lessons will be lost when all this ends.
mjb003;
You made a great point about working remotely. I think that many companies are getting more flexible on that. With the overhead costs, especially with growing firms, it becomes a viable option.
For instance, I have two friends that work remotely from their lake homes in Pequot Lakes and Nisswa, respectively. They sold their houses here and moved up north. They are both do have to come down for weekly meetings and appointments, but since they are both high performance sales people, their companies actually encourage this, reasoning that “we don’t care where your live, as long as you get your job done.”
Another example is my brother in law. Two years ago, my sister accepted a nice gig for a company in Florida. My brother in law had only been working for his employer for about 20 months and loved the job, so he was bummed to have to resign. When he met with his boss to do so, she told him that she valued his work so much that she said he could work from Florida. The company set him up with a phone, laptop and multi-function printer. He logs in via the company VPN. He comes back for a couple of meetings each year, but otherwise, they use the company’s video conferencing options.
boss, and you made a great point about working remotely from places a long ways away from the “office”. There is some anxiety amongst those that live in the exurbs (the counties just outside the 7-county metro) that they will suffer some growth from “city people”. But why stop there? Perhaps all those little towns, the Windoms, the Foleys, the Thief River Falls, which are great places to live, will experience a resurgence.
jdm;
Yea, in my brother in law’s case, his boss was juggling with a floor plan to accommodate growth of her department. Her decision solved two problems; she retained a good employee, thereby saving the costs of recruiting, hiring and on-boarding a new one and gained an office space. When you boil it down, the office technology set up, will always be a fixed cost. Setting up an extra VPN connection is not a big deal. Eventually, they may run into connection capacity issues, which ultimately increases those costs.
The reprobates are not unaware of the sea changes taking place, and they don’t like what they see.
Berg’s marvelous moderation bot isn’t allowing hyperlinks today, so Duck Duck Go “harvard magazine + right now risks homeschooling”
That withered, mentally disturbed harpy sees the increase in homeschooling and wants it stopped; right now, got damn it! She’s not shy about saying why, either. Homeschooling deprives the waifs of a proper inculcation in all the degeneracy they will need to be successful in Gomorrah. How can anyone who cannot put a condom on a banana expect to be successful?
Go ahead and read it, but before you do, look at the picture accompanying the article. Lot going on there. Public school kids frolicking in the freedom of the Ministry of Education; poor homeschool wretch locked in a house made of the Bible. Whole story told right there.
jdm- yes, I think small towns getting a resurgence would be a positive, too. Hadn’t thought about that.
My company is considering a lot more remote work, and I’m doing pretty well with it. Need to come in to do lab work from time to time, but the reduction in driving is great.
Doesn’t help those who can’t do that, but hey, I can do my part and make their commutes easier. Now if only we can get people to rethink daycare subsidies, mass transit, and the like as sources of contagion, and contemplate the thought of small hospitals to hold the victims of epidemics while larger hospitals are free to do most of what they did before the epidemic came to the fore. I don’t think we could keep them at 80%, but if we could get 50%, it would be a huge benefit.
Regarding the Harvard homeschooling thing, it actually has a number of people who are disaffected homeschool graduates, including the niece of a good friend of mine. So this effort may be a lot more effective than previous efforts led by the teachers’ unions, because the new additions know homeschooling culture and how to work around it.
On the flip side, the fact that the Harvard conference was held at “places unknown” with no public admittance makes it rather mockworthy, as does the fact that they’re arguing things that are equally, if not more, characteristic of public education.
One thing that will need to be watched is the claim that home educators need to be monitored, and my response to that is not only that public schools aren’t doing so hot at it, but also in cases where real or supposed homeschoolers committed serious crimes, social services was almost always involved already. So increasing the load of social services would likely make the problems worse because they’d be spending more time monitoring innocents, which means they’d have less time and effort to devote to real problems.
Moving to the country doesn’t solve the dummy problem.
I know, not politically correct. But you know who I mean. The kids who were not academically successful, the ones who struggled to get C’s and D’s and barely graduated only to get jobs as a truck driver, hired hand on the farm, or the loading dock at Kresge’s. Not saying those are bad kids, or bad jobs, saying it’s the best they could do with what God gave them. But those of us who were blessed with gifts more useful in the classroom setting, made fun of them. Come on, you know you did. Junior high kids are all the same. We were smart, they were dumb.
Time was, any dummy could support himself and a family working as a hired man on a farm, driving a truck, working in a factory. Most of those jobs are gone. The nation survived The Great Depression because half the population lived on self-sufficient farms. We won WW II because our factories out-produced the world (and we bombed their factories into rubble). Those farm and factory jobs are gone.
The dummies will never learn to code. They won’t have jobs working from home. What will they do, now that the little machine shops and flea markets and shoe repair places are closed? Now that barbers are out of business, restaurants don’t need dishwashers, motels don’t need housekeepers?
We have a problem in this country, that the academically successful don’t notice and don’t care about. It’s not going away. Whilst we’re in the middle of remaking American into something completely new, we need to think about ALL of us, not just the National Merit scholars. What are we going to do with the dummies?
bb, I think you’re right; any parent abusing their right to educate their kids are most likely up to a lot worse. But just think about it; the slobs stomping on homeschooling are the same slobs that fight tooth and nail to support women that are putting their sons in dresses and administering drugs to turn them into mentally ill eunuch’s. The degenerate leftists will be just as quick to dredge up horror stories that support their agenda as they are to quash those that harm it. It is just another front in the war.
For every kid that got brainwashed with bs during homeschooling, there are 10 that received educations as good or better as any elite private school provides. That’s a ratio the government schools can only dream of.
I have 6 nieces and nephews that have been homeschooled since birth. The eldest took the ACT last year, at 16 yrs of age and crushed it. I expect all of her brothers and sisters will do the same. My kids went to private, parochial schools through grade 12. The excellence of their education is apparent the minute they start to speak.
So let the reprobates trot out their victims, we’ll parade our victors.
“What are we going to do with the dummies?”
Deport them and replace them with dummies with lower expectations who will work cheaper?
Funny, MP. But I’m serious. I’ve been wondering about this for decades and have never heard an answer.
The reason it matters is hope. If a man has hope of a better future for his children, he can put up with just about anything.
If a man is convinced there’s no hope for a better future because the aristocrats have stolen it, then the man has nothing to lose by burning down society. Maybe the next one will be better?
This is the stuff of revolutions. We’re not there, not yet, because welfare and Netflix are the modern equivalent of bread and circuses. But the shut-down is exacerbating the problem and our aristocrats – the bankers and reporters and politicians – are ignoring it, not solving it.
Time was, any dummy could support himself and a family working as a hired man on a farm, driving a truck, working in a factory. Most of those jobs are gone.
I’m not sure what or whom you are talking about, JD. You still can support yourself and a family. My neighbors are a framer/builder, butcher, boilermaker, sheriff’s deputy, factory worker, x-ray machine installer, USPS worker, and truck driver. All own their own houses, some have paid them off and none has a degree – well, perhaps the deputy does.
JD has a good point, especially when it is related to all of those poorly educated “illegal immigrants, just looking for a better life”, as the Dems claim. What do we do with those people, as automation takes those jobs? They will become an even bigger burden on the system than they are now.
I have friends that are trade unionistas who are furious with their unions for bringing in immigrants that don’t speak English and maybe have a 6th grade education, just to get a dues paying member. As laborers, that’s OK, but for electrical, plumbing, HVAC and heavy equipment work, someone could get killed. This problem is exacerbated because our public edumaction system, ridicules those trade jobs, discouraging even the students that may thrive in those positions from learning them. One would be lucky to find any shop classes, including auto shop in any urban school.
What will they do, now that the little machine shops and flea markets and shoe repair places are closed? Now that barbers are out of business, restaurants don’t need dishwashers, motels don’t need housekeepers?
Pornhub, my man…internet debauchery is a multi-billion dollar growth industry.
Thanks to the “inclusive sex education” kids get in public schools, the salacious influence of media and popular culture, there is an infinity of new degradation yet to be filmed, and thanks to the de-humanizing isolation of progressive, urban living, there is an infinity of lonely young men out there waiting anxiously to consume it.
Too cynical? Consider, our “Front line Superheros ™” hospital staff isn’t doing a ballroom dance while their patients wheeze away; they’re twerking and pole dancing.
The point is – the jobs that are easily done from home tend not to be the jobs that are available to blue-collar workers. All the glib media talkers, all the internet experts, all the cubicle dwellers pounding their keyboards about how brave and wonderful the governor is, and how little sacrifice he’s asking of us – are the problem, not the solution.
When all the knowledge workers are working from and all the other businesses are closed for fear of the virus – what do we do with the people who aren’t capable of being knowledge workers? How do they survive, and thrive, when the economy shuts down?
What do we do with the dummies?
Joe Doakes on April 23, 2020 at 2:01 pm said:
Funny, MP. But I’m serious. I’ve been wondering about this for decades and have never heard an answer.
The reason it matters is hope. If a man has hope of a better future for his children, he can put up with just about anything.
If a man is convinced there’s no hope for a better future because the aristocrats have stolen it, then the man has nothing to lose by burning down society. Maybe the next one will be better?
This is the stuff of revolutions.
. . .
I’ve been saying this for some time, Joe Doakes. The way you get a revolution is to put people under unbearable conditions, and then tell them that there is no way to change things within the current system.
I think that there are good aspects of modernism, and bad aspects of modernism. One of the bad aspects of modernism is the belief that man is economic man, that the value of real human beings (whom you do not know) is purely economic.
This is where modern feminism comes from. Women, to be “equal” to men, must behave like men and become breadwinners.
Capitalism and communism both are contaminated by the idea that the most important way we relate to one another is as economic objects.
… geez, and I still don’t understand, JD. Your so-called dummies are doing fine. Out here. Garbage is still picked up. Propane is still delivered. Mowers are still repaired… I could go on… I also find it difficult to deal with a loaded, as well as imprecise, term like dummies. These people, my neighbors, a group you have not addressed, are not dummies.
Out here. Garbage is still picked up. Propane is still delivered. Mowers are still repaired… I could go on…
How many garbage men do we need? How many lawn mowing, burger flipping, ditch diggers? Consider the number of kids that don’t graduate the craptastic rigors of public school every year. Then add the mob of low IQ peasants pouring in from s. America.
According to the meme, 40% of us pay the federal income tax that the remaining 60% + the millions of illegals rely on to put weed in their pockets and tortillas on the table. Many members of that 40% are nearing retirement; they will soon be out of the mix. Who’s gonna pick up their slack, jdm?
I’m not denigrating people who do shit jobs because they were dealt a crap IQ hand at birth (although they’re breeding more of their ilk like rabbits). At least they’re working. I, like Joe am worried about what happens when the hole we’re digging gets too big for Fed Treasury printers to fill with monopoly money.
“You want to be a photographer or a writer or a musician, whatever — an artist, you want to be self-employed, if you want to start a business, you want to change jobs, you no longer are prohibited from doing that because you can’t have access to health care, especially because you do not want to put your family at risk.”
-Nancy Pelosi, March 22, 2012
It is a sign of how little time Pelosi spends with people outside of her social class that she believes that when relieved from the need to work for a living, people will become artists.
Agreed on the plight of those who cannot–as I am doing right now (or rather taking a break from doing, obviously)–work from a home office. They’re the ones who make life liveable, really.
Or, for that matter, as I do things like read descriptions of life as it used to be, maybe we need to consider which of these jobs can indeed be done from a shop in one’s home, instead of a factory where one is exposed to hundreds of other people and their diseases.
Regarding Pelosi, it’s worth noting that Marx’s hypothesis was that after the dictatorship of the proletariat uprooted the entire bourgeoisie, that people would indeed end up becoming artists because of the abundance that would be unleashed. I almost wonder if her comment is something of a confession on her part of her real political views.
Decentralization through work at home is inevitable. Companies are seeing the light, and employees (mostly) are enjoying it. While the progressive Pro-Centralization cadres and government officials will try to discourage it at every turn, a large chunk of the population will realize they don’t need 40 minute commutes on crowded freeways or contagious mass transit, and employers will realize less economies in work spaces and overhead. As the WFH’ers grow into this they will look for communities and amenities to fit their lifestyle; suburbs or small towns, and the next fad in homebuilding and remodeling will be the “office”. Let the Minneapolis and St. Paul City Councils keep trying to cram people into their dense urban dystopias.
But, as pointed out here, not everyone can do a WFH job. For some, there will be more service jobs such as food and package delivery – at least until drones take that over. I’d expect that the many delivery services will likely consolidate and capitalize, and feature electric delivery vehicles and higher wages and benefits (unionization is all but inevitable, as we’re already seeing). The trades will still be needed, from plumbers to beauticians. While there may be less need for waiters and waitresses, many restaurants will realize they sell more food by dedicating more space to kitchen and prep, and less to sit-down diners, you could see more jobs for cooks and food-prep staff. Movie theaters are almost surely toast, as the home viewing experience is getting better all the time, and movie-goers will likely see paying $25-30 bucks for a new movie at home as a better deal than spending twice that to take the family to the theater and pay $10 per gallon for popcorn. There will be disruption, but people always seem to find ways to identify a need and make a living by fulfilling it. The brighter ones will come up with solutions, and then need to hire the less-bright ones to do the legwork.
NW, I agree 100% with what you’ve written, with the exception of your last statement; “The brighter ones will come up with solutions, and then need to hire the less-bright ones to do the legwork.”
They won’t. And neither will anyone else. Consider this;
There are commercially available bots to:
Mow your lawn
Pick your tomatoes
Clean your house
Do almost every labor intensive task in manufacturing
Soon, bots will drive yur car, deliver your food; drive the trucks that deliver the raw materials that g\went into making your dinner. There are no non-skilled jobs that bots won’t be doing, and plenty of skilled jobs, too. Anything that is repetitive, that can be reduced to code will be automated.
In time, the only job left for humans will be lawyer and politician….isn’t that a daisy?
I just wrote a post about bots, that Berg’s moderation bot took exception to….
bikebubba on April 23, 2020 at 5:26 pm said:
. . .
Regarding Pelosi, it’s worth noting that Marx’s hypothesis was that after the dictatorship of the proletariat uprooted the entire bourgeoisie, that people would indeed end up becoming artists because of the abundance that would be unleashed. I almost wonder if her comment is something of a confession on her part of her real political views.
I don’t think that Pelosi is a Marxist. If she was, she would know that she would be the first against the wall when the Revolution comes.
Pelosi’s whiggish forbearers would have said that the welfare state was necessary so that the poor could afford the luxury of living virtuous, middle-class lives. “Virtue” in those olden days, would have meant living lives of sobriety, frugality, temperance, and chastity within marriage.
Virtues are based on morality, and Marxists claim that morality is a false concept created by class consciousness. Without social class, there is no virtue. There is no ideal form of behavior from which we accept that we will fall short.
The Marxist idea of ethics is eschatological. Once the classless society has come, you will live in complete freedom, yet you will always do the “right” thing, it will be impossible for you to choose to do otherwise.
I saw the Cohen Brother’s film _Hail Caser!_ last night. I had never seen it before. The movie is set in an imaginary Hollywood of the 1950s. In it, there is a scene where a hungover, and possibly drugged, George Clooney, wearing the kit of a Roman soldier, stumbles into a “study group” of Hollywood writers. What are they studying? “History and science.”
Ooh-hoo! Commies.
To the credit of the Cohen brothers, the members of the “study group” are depicted as mad intellectuals, driven by jealousy, hero-worship, and intellectual vanity. They go on and on about the rights of the workers and the “Average Joe” while the house is cleaned by a dull-witted servant (whom they ignore).
Also the study group’s members were mostly Jewish, which was an especially courageous move. But then, again, most of the pro-America film people and actors in the movie were also Jewish caricatures.
The old “Good Jew; Bad Jew” routine, MP?
It’s the Coen brothers. Don’t know how seriously to take them, Swiftee. I really liked the bit where the brave, black listed Hollywood writers were portrayed as a bunch of fools. You might wanna check out _Hail Caesar_ on Netflix, George Clooney is the A list actor taken in by the commie’s BS, but plain ol’ cowboy actor Hobie Doyle won’t have any of that nonsense.