Back to Work--Or Not

 I retired just over a year ago--in the middle of the pandemic--so this doesn't affect me directly, but it's interesting to read the many speculations on why hiring people has become so problematic in recent months.

You'll hear that unemployment payments are too high, that wages are too low, that people are still concerned about the virus, that they do not have reliable child-care. I suspect that, depending on the individual and the job, any one of those might be the reason. On the other hand, if an extra $300 a week in unemployment pay is enough to keep people from taking a job with your company, maybe you were never paying a sufficient salary in the first place. If your prospective employees are still concerned about getting sick, maybe your workplace precautions are not good enough...or maybe you should be looking at what you offer in terms of health insurance. And if child-care is an issue for a sufficient number of your applicants, either you should be thinking about offering flex-time, or expanding the pool of candidates into people for whom that won't matter.

Just a few thoughts.

Space Flight and Business

 Fifty-two years ago, man first landed on the moon. If you want some idea of the scale of that accomplishment, remember that man first flew in a heavier-than-air vehicle just 66 years before that, and commercial aviation began only about 40 years earlier. The first manned spaceflight was in 1961. 

And today, there are people complaining about three very rich men who are once again planning to make spaceflight a regular occurrence, with plans for a return to the moon and eventually land on Mars. "Why aren't these billionaires using their money to solve world hunger, or homelessness, or climate change or whatever major problem is at the top of their list?" these people ask. Of course, the solutions to those problems are infinitely (and I mean that literally, infinitely) more complex than simply being able to reach escape and orbital velocity. They require cooperation among national governments, aid organizations, and massive bureaucracies. Merely throwing money at these problems will not result in them going away.

Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk are not statesmen or diplomats; they are very very wealthy businessmen. And, as I have frequently noted in conversations with friends and acquaintances. their wealth is not like that of Scrooge McDuck. It does not consist of a huge vault filled with coins and paper money, in which they can go swimming for amusement. It is in the form of investments in their own companies and others. To access it in the way these people would like would require the dismantling of those businesses, probably putting a significant number of their employees out of work.

Even when the government broke up the big trusts of the early 20th century--Standard Oil, US Steel--it did not insist that the owners give away their fortunes. It simply required that the wealth be spread around to other businessmen to foster competition. If that's what you wish, then say so.

Gas Pains?

 A constant complaint I see in the local paper is that gasoline prices are on the rise, and a certain very vocal group blames that rise on President Biden's policies--notably the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline and suspension of new drilling permits on federal land. Of course, the problem is, neither of those decisions have any direct effect on gas prices, and certainly not in the short term we're talking about here.

None of the oil that would have gone through the Keystone XL pipeline would have wound up  in US refineries that produce gasoline. It was all destined for refineries on the Gulf Coast that make products that go into manufacturing plastics used in foreign countries. Any new drilling planned for federal lands now would not have produced oil for years, possibly decades.

What's causing the rise? First and foremost, the OPEC members have all cut production because (after a year of a worldwide lockdown) there's a glut of oil on the world market. Second, as the US comes out of lockdown, more people are driving--but the refineries had cut production over the past year and it takes time to build inventory again.

But I have a question for these complainers: where are you going with that gas in your car? I filled my tank over a week ago...and I still have three-quarters of a tank left. Local traffic is still way below pre-lockdown levels (and I can tell because I live on a main artery). Are you just taking joy-rides, because you're certainly not commuting to work. And business at local stores and restaurants is still way down, so you're not going there.

Why do I have the feeling these are just pro-Trumpers who have to find something to blame Biden for, even though eight weeks of his administration can hardly have had any real impact?