“Will cost America”
Haha no. It will not cost working class people a cent. Which is most of America.
Well you know capitalism. Privatize the profits, socialize the losses.
When corporate is losing money it's "All of us in America lost 700 million in productivity"
But when profits are higher than ever before it's "Sorry there's no bonus this year, we're giving our CEO a 50 million dollar parachute. We know you worked hard so here's a thank you card and a candy bar"
Wait... You get a candy bar?! Lucky!
"Anyone who took off the day of the eclipse is not entitled to a candy bar."
So what, it's about $ 2 per capita.
Haha. Jokes on you then cuz I got 6 cookies and a printed thank you card.
Certainly cost me a pretty penny to travel to see it. But that's not the narrative NBC is looking for
Ya I paid $100 in gas and $100 for a camp site on someone's private land (same place I camped in 2017). Well worth it tho.
Came here to say this... you beat me to it.
It won’t cost the bosses anything either cause people will likely make up for the lost time later.
Truly sad part? The tourism benefit from it was estimated at 6$ billion... but NBC doesn't want that.
Consumer money doesn't matter where it gets spent. It stays in the economy pretty much no matter what.
The benefit of tourism to the (destination) economy is that outside money is coming in. That's it.
What you say makes sense, but GDP measurement is weird. If I sell you a brick for $1 and then I buy it back the next day, for $1 I think that GDP goes up by $2.
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/
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.
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.
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
Nothing was lost. Not a single penny!
People aren't being paid for every moment they remain on task. They're getting paid for works completed! They're getting paid for doing their job. They don't have to be at their desk/station/site every single moment to remain productive!
This idea that people need to be paid less if they do less work is absolute Insanity. People need to be paid a fair wage for completing jobs, whatever that may be.
People aren't being paid for every moment they remain on task. They're getting paid for works completed!
There are lots of jobs that need to be on task on an hourly basis, this ignores a huge class of people and assumes everyone is where you are in life.
Security guards and cashiers are two immediate examples. Cashiers need to be ready to perform the entire time they are working and can't just work random flex hours as customers are relying on them. If customers show up during the stores hours they should expect a cashier to be working. Even if there are no customers in your line or store, there could be some in a minute or two. The "works completed" are transactions completed, but also the act of being available.
Security guards are paid explicitly to be present at specific times, the "works completed" is literally sitting there the entire time.
Lifeguards need to be present even if no one is swimming at the moment.
Right. Sure. I agree with you. But you're totally missing the point of what I was saying.
If the cashier/life guard/security personal left for a few minutes or maybe longer the company that person works for didn't "loose" money because they weren't at their station.
Being productive 100% isn't possible and anything less than 100% isn't a loss.
Companies aren't paying people for works performed but for works completed. The life guard being there at all constitutes them being at work. Just because they left and watched the eclipse for 10 minutes or went to the bathroom or took a personal call isn't a loss!
Which is why the only thing that matters is what work was completed not how much work they did in the time it took to complete.
We need to change the way business interpret what constitutes paid labor.
Good point!
Like I'm sure money wasn't wasted because Jim was going to be on Facebook anyway and Karen was going to check her emails one more time anyway. Most real work happens in a small window
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.
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!
"Journalism" is just rage bait now, they know exactly what they're doing with this headline and it pisses me off ... which is ironic.
Just because people get unnecessarily angry at something doesn't make it rage bait. We live in an outrage culture, and the people getting outraged over them quantifying how much people weren't working during this are just desperate to be outraged.
It can't be lost if it doesn't exist
Remind me again why people from "non-shithole" countries would want to move to the US? The priorities on display here are beyond belief.
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
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.
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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).
So it's basically like the King's coronation in the UK
Decided to do some math of what I could totally see a corporate media outlet headline saying.
"Weekends are costing America $11,199,999,999,968 a year. Is it time to end weekends?"
You should round that up to $11,200,000,000,000 to make the number look bigger
And then there will be the article about how much productivity is lost while people are sleeping.
Predictably idiotic headline. A few hours ago, before coming across this post, I visualized just such a stupid headline and chuckled to myself for thinking of such low-hanging fruit. And here it is.
A meaningless figure, mindlessly arrived at with the same abstract mathematical tools that could and should be also mentioning how much money is lost by keeping so many people poor and with hurdles, by NOT investing in education, on public health, on the environment...
But we never read these assholes talking about this in this manner, now do we?There is no fruit so low-hanging that the U.S. media will not pick it. I predicted, quite accurately, that Fox would claim that the eclipse would allow immigrants to cross over the border in the dark.
Well, no, because them suffering is worth it and if they had more everyone else might want more and the rich might have more but it would be a smaller slice, a smaller %, so obviously that's bad.
Wow its like you have no conscience. Think of the children, their emaciated little bodies, and how exploitable they are! Don't you see!?
It's the duty of every worker to produce as little value as possible while working.
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$700M in lost productivity
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$23T GDP
Not even a decimal point on a decimal point and they're still complaining
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I manage a team of 5 people. I told them all not to come in so they could go see the eclipse. I told them not to take vacation and just bill it as normal hours. Three listened to me. One took a half day. One just went and worked...
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
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?
Lmao what is $700 million to the world's largest GDP. Mfing Norfolk Southern just paid out $600 million to East Palestine residents for gasing their town.
I don’t believe anything NBC says about anything anymore
Fuck NBC
What about all the eclipse sunglasses sales?
Real economists don't count scammers.
/j
I'm tired
Hey, at least they're not blaming us for the loss entirely this time!
opinions like this are gonna cost a lot more
Seriously, was it not the employers' decisions to shut down for that? Guarantee you if people just walked out on their own, heads would roll
NBC News, how much did you get for this article?
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
Fucking Spacer’s Choice I swear on the law.
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.
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.
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.
