Shortages and stuff

Could not find outlet low-voltage outlet boxes. Had to scour a 3-hour area to finally find the 4 I need. Fortunately they were on the route we were driving, but really annoying to have to hit 3 different places for them.

Local restaurants are definitely short-staffed. My fast food gauge of where we are with respect to full employment is screaming “we’re a couple feet below the bottom of the barrel.” The local Burger King is only open 9a-7p, the local Taco Bells are 7a-10p and 9a-12a respectively. Others “fast food” places are more like 11a-7p or so. McDonald’s isn’t cutting hours yet, but they’re signaling “we need help or we’re going there.”

I wonder how much of shortages is due to businesses being in operation that, if we had gone through a normal economic cycle and unprofitable businesses had to shut the doors, they would be long gone but we’ve done everything possible to keep them alive and so they’re employing people who would have found jobs elsewhere.

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Wonder how much of that is due to the nice unemployment benefits still going on. Or whether they’re still going on. 'cause those jobs suck compared to getting paid to do nothing.

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Yeah, the $300/week federal unemployment ends next Friday. I suspect that will spur people back to work.

Their canned cat food is still out by me. Hopefully it returns soon.

I had a fridge go out and a lawnmower blow up. I found replacements for both but had to settle for what was available.

Me too and it was a long wait to get the replacement delivered. Wound up being a bit of an exercise plan for us as the basement fridge was the primary fridge for a few weeks.

I had a fridge get testy with ice cream in the freezer part. I think the whole unit basically sucks. I put it at the coldest setting, and it now keeps stuff frozen, but it still sucks. my ice cream is now too frozen. apartment life with a tiny kitchen limits the options there anyway, so I suspect i’d have trouble finding a new one.

I thought this had been looked at with states that ended beneifts early and early data suggests they didn’t see a meaningful uptick in employment. I’m sure there are people who are sitting on unemployment for the extra money, but like the oft-touted “people are on welfare because they don’t want to work” line from the 90s, I don’t think it’s as common as people want to claim.

[Entire discussion on longtime resentment of the poor omitted.]

The digital sound is the same at this price point, and the p 515 is the most expensive portable model. For the CLP models you’re paying for stuff like better speakers, the wooden enclosure, and a different action. People seem to have different opinions on whether the more expensive CLP actions are better so I just said they were different.

The P515 doesn’t have good speakers at all, I have to connect them to external speakers to make it sound good. But if you connect them to good speakers they should sound as good or possibly better than the CLPs.

@ao_fan how old is your current piano?

I can tolerate higher prices usually if it means I don’t have to buy from some random person on ebay

ah, I probably should have looked into the P515 in that case since speakers are not that important to me. I use headphones most of the time as a considerate neighbor. I should stop being so considerate cause my neighbors suck.

i bought my current clavinova in 2002 I think, but I took a long break from playing it, maybe 13 years or so, and started playing it again in late 2019. it’s a CLP-930. only issue with it is the E key sticks. I might try and get it fixed and give it to my sister, but the dude I emailed to fix it, that I got from the people from Faust Harrison, isn’t replying to my emails!

Move to the 'burbs.

I also wonder how many are “waiting” for min wage to also increase before actively seeking a job.

I think the data seems to indicate that it does increase employment, but not uniformly. Only something like a quarter of the unemployed went back to work.

I didn’t see day by geography, it seems like that could be important. $300/week in rural KS is very different than $300/week in NYC.

Anecdotally, I have a friend in rural KS who’s in this situation. He nets about $900/week between state and federal unemployment. He generally makes $20-$25/hour working construction.

Maybe I hang out on Reddit too much and my sample is biased. It does seem like some segment of the population is sick and tired of working fast food or retail for $7.25/hr. I don’t blame them. Want workers? Pay more. Yes, I will pay an extra quarter for my taco if it means the person making it can put rent.

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Nitpick: I’ll pay a quarter extra for that taco if the person working can actually fix the taco correctly and count change accurately.

I used to have a list of all the times I would go to a fast-food place and order something and present cash and get change back that was wildly different from what it should have been. I’m talking “the order was $3.21, I gave $5.25, I got back $1.67 and said that was wrong, so they redid it and gave me $2.43” type transactions. It’s how I developed my “fast food” indicator for where we were in the employment cycle, because that stuff happened far more often when unemployment was under 5% and was more frequent the lower unemployment went.

The “getting food right” thing is just an annoyance and happens regardless of where we are in the economic cycle, but seriously - if you’re going to have a job, do it right. I’m not paying you $11 an hour to semi-regularly fuck up and then ask for more for just showing up for a week.

Your anecdote on your friend sitting on UI kind of underscores my point. We all know someone who’s doing it, and way too many people extrapolate from there to “everyone’s doing it.”

I agree. It’s a lot more nuanced. I think some people are gaming the system, but I don’t think it’s the majority.

I like the fast food indicator. Now that we have apps for everything, I wonder if folks at the McD’s HQ are tracking the number of complaints vs unemployment. Wait, can you complain on the app? I’ll look into that.

Hope yours wasn’t part of the recent recall. Sounds fairly bad with quite a few doggy deaths.

I keep hearing a friend that manages a truckstop/gas station/minimart. But our unemployment rate is down to 2.9% with the national rate at 5.9%. So I don’t think that is having the same affect around here.

But a few fast food places only have their drive thru’s open. At first I was thinking they were worried about COVID but now I’m thinking they just don’t have enough workers to be able to serve people inside and drive thru.

And I have noticed shortages of instant ramen at Walmart. Someone else complained about lack of ice cream. Not really sure what would generate those kinds of shortages. We did find the ramen but even then the variety and quantity was fairly limited.