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/
Eerily appropriate ad.
Now do the math for everyone eating Taco Bell just before their shift
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If a cashier abandons their post, a nonzero amount of people will leave without purchase instead of waiting an unknown time for them to return.
If a commercial pilot takes a detour to see the eclipse better they can cause huge ripple effects on other flights causing significant costs.
If a security guard skips out on their post for a bit the business can be robbed or otherwise liable for issues during the lapse.
If a lifeguard leaves their post unrelieved or isn’t fully paying attention and someone gets injured or dies that’s a serious financial liability (at least in the USA)
Right again, I agree that’s a liability. If the employee was negligent in their duties, that is definitely an issue.
Are you implying that every employee must be 100% productive with no deviation?
More importantly, you’re making a lot of “if” statements. Which doesn’t contradict the point that I’m making. So I’m not entirely sure exactly what it is you are arguing against?
But I will again reiterate exactly what I’m trying to say. The article is implying that there was a loss of productivity when employees went out to look at the eclipse constituting some sort of financial loss.
I am stating that there was absolutely no financial loss whatsoever because employees don’t need to be 100% productive at all times as long as the work or project is completed adequately.
I’ll use your airline pilot example. If the pilot deviates from his flight plan and a disaster incurs that pilot was negligent. Which is somewhat of a false equivalency. A better example would be if the pilot left to go, use the bathroom or talk to a passenger on the plane leaving his co-pilot in charge of flying the plane. There was no loss in productivity the work of flying the plane will still be completed. Therefore, the pilot should still be paid his regular amount of compensation. The airline didn’t lose any money because he wasn’t in the pilot seat.
A better example would be if the pilot left to go, use the bathroom or talk to a passenger on the plane leaving his co-pilot in charge of flying the plane.
So this assumes there is someone available to cover and not watch the eclipse? How can the copilot abandon their post to watch the eclipse as well?
Are you intentionally being obtuse? You know exactly what I mean.
If a cashier abandons their post, a nonzero amount of people will leave without purchase instead of waiting an unknown time for them to return.
Even if there’s no one in the store because everyone is outside looking at the eclipse?
Every single person is looking at the eclipse? I traveled during the eclipse and the majority of people around us didn’t care to go outside during the peak.
Its easy to think that everyone cares about what we do.
The commenter ive replied to was stressing that not even a single dollar was lost, and believing not a single person in the entire eclipse area was trying to make a transaction during this time is silly.
Ok so you’re simultaneously assuming 0% of customers are looking at the eclipse and 100% of the cashiers want to go out and look at it?
It feels like you’re just making up scenarios here. Seems more likely similar proportions of both cashiers and customers would be out looking at it.
Now take for example a grocery store. Did the eclipse mean that people are going to eat less? Like because there were fewer cashiers, they suddenly decided they aren’t going to buy food this week? I’m pretty sure demand for food (or any other good) disappeared because the eclipse. So what’s the actual economic cost? Some businesses would have been less busy for about 20 minutes but then more busy later on.
Thinking that a 20 minute pause in production is going to significantly impact demand is what seems silly to me. But then all of this supply side economics style of thinking is silly to me.
I’m not assuming anything, I’ve been responding to your whole argument of:
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!
There clearly are a whole section of jobs where being on call, available, or present at specific continous times is vital to their “productivity” or value.
You just want to pretend everyone works a 9-5 office desk job and can work at their own pace.
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.
I don’t think anyone is desperate to be outraged. Valid reasons for outrage are legion.
People are calling this rage bait and claiming that it’s all the media does. It’s literally just economically quantifying how much was lost to people going out to look. It even quotes someone as saying this isn’t a big deal.
And this thread is about, and filled with, people raging that they are claiming that people viewing it is bad because it’s bad for rich people. Literally raging about something that didn’t even happen, and using that rage as evidence to confirm something else they made up to rage about.
I don’t think I could come up with a better example of outrage culture if I tried.
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:
-
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.
-
Electronics cost the same everywhere.
-
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.
-
Foreign style food is almost exclusively global american brands and/or incredibly expensive - eating domestically grown and produced foods are typical.
-
Air conditioners are not affordable
-
Electricity is commonly not stable, if it exists
-
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.
-
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.
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)
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.
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.
Denmark’s population (~6m) is smaller than the state of Massachusetts (~7m).
~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…
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.
-
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)
Not to defend bosses here, because I would absolutely let people off for the eclipse, but I can see why a boss in, say, Iowa would not be cool with all of their employees taking a day trip to the other side of Illinois to see the path of totality. A lot of them just wouldn’t get it. And if you can’t take your kid out of school anyway, it doesn’t really matter.
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.
-
$700M in lost productivity
-
$23T GDP
Not even a decimal point on a decimal point and they’re still complaining
-
