ORH_wxman

Well that's your first problem. Learn how to count cards and ply a little blackjack. Foxwoods still has a decent game to beat. They deal pretty deep into the shoes there.

New Hampshire and Maine nobody gave a shit last summer when we were up there. Didn't make it up there this winter unfortunately, but last year was pretty much business as usual except wearing a mask inside stores. Almost nobody wore them outside.

Not sure, Baker has had some weird hills to die on during this. MA was pretty lenient about travel early on and gave a lot of leniency to stores being open, but then he had this weird battle with golf course owners that basically made no sense last spring. The outdoor mask mandate was really bizarre too this past winter after not having one at all last year except in cases where you were unable to stay 6 feet away from people for more than 5 minutes or something. But then changing it to all the time made no sense. Either way, glad it's all coming to end soon.

I'm more interested to see when the "removing all restrictions" happens in MA. Right now, the date is 8/1 but I bet it gets moved up at some point.

2010 was pretty good for summer....we had a warm March, pretty warm April, and then were popping 90s in May on the way to a torrid summer. Agree that it's easier to pull off a front-loaded winter though. Our geography just sucks for trying to get a front-loaded summer.

Definitely a spring "cool" airmass when you have these dews.

Only 39 days until the sun angle starts decreasing again.

Black bears will def go down to near Taunton. SE MA is actually pretty woodsy. We get black bear sightings around here all the time in Holliston (one destroyed my bird feeders two years in a row too). But like powderfreak said, they will wonder wherever they find food. Easy garbage to access or bird feeders, doesn’t matter to them. Lots of woods helps obviously since it keeps them stealthy. If they try and wonder around Brighton MA they’ll get animal control called on them pretty fast.

Back then you could deduct things like country club memberships and luxury items. Rich people had pretty similar effective tax rates as today because of that. The only exception is like the extreme super rich...we’re talking like top 0.01 to 0.10%...billionaires with the stock options. They could do something about that for sure...but it would not generate much extra tax income simply because there just aren’t enough of them. It would be a fraction of a drop in the bucket. It doesn’t mean that’s a reason to not do it though. There were some good things going on in middle 20th century policy-wise (we actually still enforced antitrust still back then), but the United States was also uniquely lucky. The rest of the developed world had temporarily been bombed back to the Stone Age in WWII so it was basically the Americans providing goods to the rest of the world for a solid decade or two with little competition from overseas. Once competition started to stiffen, we couldn’t keep paying Bethlehem steel workers the same raises every few years.

I felt like public pressure was going to be very strong going into the summer. There’s also the empirical aspect of it that was going to have to be reconciled...states that lifted all restrictions a couple months ago never saw a big resurgence. That empirical reality can’t be ignored...especially as vaccinated percentages are only increasing with time. If lifting restrictions two months ago wasn’t a big problem, lifting them in May and June would be even less of a problem.

There's always been "get rich quick" schemes....we just see every story now with social media. Before, you'd have to wait until some newspaper ran a story about how some college kids played arbitrage in the currency markets in Asia because of computer programs they wrote or some schmuck made a fortune turning POGs into a multi-million dollar industry.

I worked a summer job for a dot-com company in June/July 2000 in Austin, TX....that was really close to peak dot-com absurdity and Austin was probably like a top 5 or 10 city for that crap. I made 15 bucks an hour doing "network monitoring" (basically I was a glorified button pusher every 15 minutes). 15 bucks per hour back then was pretty sweet for a 19 year old. The place was filled with tech bros who were swimming in more cash than to know what to do with and the place was like stocked to the gills with whatever food or drink you wanted on the house. These dudes in their 20s were obsessing over how they wouldn't have to work in like 10 years with how much cash was sloshing around there. It was also in a fancy office park that overlooked the river and the city beyond that. You would've thought you were working for Goldman Sachs if you didn't know any better. The place was busted out by 2003. I always think of that place when I hear about the dot-com bubble or people talk about a new bubble happening in some other sector. At the time, it looked invincible, but then it all came tumbling down like a house of cards.

My 5 year old already had covid, so I don't think we'll be getting him vaxxed any time soon.

Probably a combo of both. The cynical view is the first one where they just did it because some insurance company told them it would reduce premiums and they don't care if it's safer or not. But there's also a famous line about how don't attribute malice to something that can be perfectly explained by stupidity or ignorance. So Phin could be right too that some idiot convinced them it would actually make customers happy.

Yes. But it really doesn't matter who is in power. I don't want to make these discussions partisan....because they actually aren't and then the thread just becomes toxic anyway. It's basically been zero anti-trust since the middle 20th century. Doesn't matter who has been in power at any given time. You hardly ever hear libertarians talk about it anyway...some of their anti-gov urge is so strong, they are perfectly happy to let the country be run by a few monopolistic entities as long as it doesn't have "government" next to their name. Regardless, I don't think anyone disagrees that the virus lockdowns and the unemployment that goes with it have distorted the labor market for now. There will be a clearer picture when the enhanced unemployment benefits wind down.

Cost of living would depreciate or at least stabilize in many areas if we let it. But instead we insist on subsidizing things like the stock market. As long as you have tons of $$ sloshing around, the wealthy will continue to buy up real estate and drive prices up on everyone else. Our anti-trust enforcement is a joke too nowadays. If free market/libertarian people want a true free market, then they have to grit their teeth and be OK with some government anti-trust enforcement ala early/mid-20th centruy. Otherwise, there's no point to claiming "liberty, baby!" when it is Amazon and Facebook oppressing/ruling over the country instead of the government....just replace one with the other...same shitty difference. You could argue the latter is even worse.

Yep, that is the model now that many are striving for. Though many are afraid of this "purge" of low skilled jobs, it's probably overhyped because they will just be replaced by other low skilled jobs.

This is econ 101 too...if you can't find people to fill your crappy job, then give them more incentive (raise wages and/or benefits). We'll see what happens when unemployment winds down more, but it takes 2 to tango. A healthy job market will have plenty of competition. Now, we can go down the rabbit hole on how healthy competition is stifled by things like monopolies (and very generous unemployment benefits), but no need to go down there. Bottom line (whether it's "fair" or not, all barriers aside), if you want to attract workers, make it worth their while.

The obesity trends in the United States certainly support this. Though not all of this is due to lifestyle/employment....we subsidize obesity in the U.S. All you have to do is look which food products are subsidized and which ones aren't to see why. Corn syrup anyone? One day, we'll eventually start subsidizing produce instead. Who knows when.

I am not sure how different it would be if this same thing happened 30 years ago. Maybe on the margins but probably not the larger picture. This is econ 101....when you subsidize something (in this case unemployment), you get more of it. When you tax something, you get less of it. These days, everything gets amplified with millions of opinions on social media too. Either way, it's going to be winding down this year so we'll see how the employment numbers respond. I was saying earlier, that this may be a golden opportunity for would-be entrepreneurs over the next year or two....a lot of small businesses folded up so there will be some demand to take advantage of.

Charlie Ward was a freak. Ended up in the NBA but I always thought he could’ve been a bigger football star. He was a tad small though...esp for back in the 1990s when you could knock QBs back to the Stone Age and not get a flag. Health wise he def made the better decision. I remember the epic FSU/ND game late that season. FSU was #1 and ND was #2. ND pulled it off and then the very next week (I think?), BC goes into South Bend and upsets undefeated ND. That was back when BC had Tom Coughlin as head coach and Glenn foley at QB. They were good but still massive dogs in that game. A lot of people said that game was the beginning of ND’s decline as a perennial powerhouse. I don’t think they’ve been ranked #1 since that 1993 game.

A lot of trade schooling is very tough work. One of my cousins went through welding courses/certification and I saw how much crap he had to master and remember.

There’s still never been a winter storm that killed dozens of people while on their commute like that. All those people who died on 128 stuck while snow piled up around them. Only other commute that comes close in the past 40 years is 12/13/07...blizzard of 78 was like ‘07 except if the snow didn’t taper off that evening and just stayed heavy for another 24 hours and much higher winds.

Yes it is. Very valuable education too. But the trades have been demonized for so long that it’s been tough to shake the stigma. The narrative is definitely starting to turn but it doesn’t flip overnight. There will be more attacks against them because of how much money is at stake.