The Biden economy has not been good for the work force at the place I’ve been working at for 6 plus years.
During the Trump years we were booming, three warehouses at full tilt with a huge workforce including temps that we regularly recruited full time employees from. Since the dawn of the Biden years we had, the shrinking then disappearing peak season, followed by the closing of two of our warehouses, we had the laying off and buying out of a bunch of management and salary people, then we had the elimination of our 2nd shift and the buying out of hourly workers.
Yesterday just before lunch hour there was a meeting and we were told that because there is so little work at this time my shift (Sun-Wed 7-5:30) is going to have Wednesday off unpaid, although if we wish to use a vacation day. and the Monday – Friday shift is leaving 2 hours early the rest of the week.
We are told this is only for this week but they can’t promise it won’t happen again.
Now oddly enough I had planned to take the entire week off starting today because of this event of 36 years ago today:
April 9th 1988
and the beginning of PINTASTIC NE 2024 on Thursday (and it amazes me that I’m only now getting to mention it on the blog as it’s only 2 days away!) but as DaWife couldn’t get today off I decided to give it a miss. Now with the prospect of being short 25% of a week’s pay and taxes due I’ll burn the vacation day after all.
As you might guess yesterday’s announcement caused a lot of buzz but as English is the 2nd or 3rd language to Spanish & French at my place I didn’t hear most of it but there is a fellow there who speaks English that I had a chance to talk to a bit. He’s the oldest worker at the place 74 years old, naturalized citizen, used to be a teacher in the Boston schools. A Haitian gentleman who is as socialist as they come and who expresses the opinion that Haiti would be better off with China’s influence than the US in the country.
We were working the same area and expressed dismay at the situation. I commented on this being one of the costs of a stolen election and this black Haitian socialist said this:
“I don’t know if I’m going to vote this year, but if I do vote it will be for Donald Trump.”
If we’ve reached the point we’re the best case scenario for the Democrats in the Biden economy is black socialists from Massachusetts staying home then this election might be really something.
In yesterday’s Under the Fedora I mentioned both that the reason I had not made it to CPAC lately was my full time job and also how DaTipJar has been falling short to the point where this will likely be the blog’s last year.
Well it only took 24 hours for things to get worse.
Things have been nasty at my work for a couple of years. The normal peak seasons at Christmastime that were crazy during the Trump years lasted less that a week. We closed two warehouses in the area and every single temp worker at our place was let go.
All of this despite the insistence of the media/left that our economy is absolutely fantastic and we need to thank the Biden Administration for it. Well I’ll give them this much, I do give Joe Biden/Obama credit for the economy we have. I got another dose of that economy last night.
Yesterday we were told that my shift, the 2nd shift is to be eliminated. I don’t know what my new shift is going to be but the end results at minimum are
a 4% pay decrease
Daily mass at best eliminated for 3 days a week and at worst eliminated completely
A 67% chance that I’ll have to give up both running the parish Adoration and my two hours
The joys of early mornings and rush hour traffic
And not only a shift no longer corresponding with my wife but because she sleeps in a recliner due to hip issues an excellent chance of waking her each morning and disrupting her sleep every day.
At my age and with the economy we have there is not much I can do I’ve done two of the three things that can be done.
I’ve arranged a Mass with all of us at the company as the Mass intention.
I voted for Trump today when I had the chance.
The only other thing I can do is ask you to consider hitting DaTipJar and or Sharing this post for that purpose. I’ll cut back and we’ll get by the best we can.
But if you would like to give a hand it would be most appreciated.
I have a lot of little things to say but not enough for an under the Fedora Day so today we’re going to give Don Surber the sincerest from of flattery and imitate his Saturday Link Fest with a few other thoughts:
First at Stacy McCain’s site we have a story about how thanks to a family squabble an iconic business will close:
The litigation later forced the family to change the name of its original location to Tony and Nick’s Steaks in 2022. Anthony Jr.’s two sons — Anthony III and Michael, who were also employed at the sandwich empire — followed him out the door, taking copies of the company’s financial records with them and turned them over to federal investigators. Those documents revealed that Lucidonio Sr. and Nicholas Lucidonio hid the success of their business from tax collectors by keeping two sets of books almost from the day the sandwich shop opened.
While one might have an opinion of members of an Italian (Sicilian?) family turning in another member of their family to the feds may I humbly point out that if they weren’t cooking the books it wouldn’t be an issue.
As my Sicilian parents who owned business taught me young, “Always pay the government first because they’re the only ones who can take from you before you go to court.”
2nd: Was at the bank today figured it would be an easy time since I needed to convert three $20 bills into two 10’s six 5’s and ten ones so I can make change if people at St Cecilia’s church want to buy tickets to the WQPH 89.3 FM Shrove Tuesday Brunch on the 13th (Details here). I figured it would take about 30 seconds invoving:
Opening the draw
Counting the bills
Giving them to me
Not anymore. Now a machine is involved so instead the teller has to
Take the last four of my social
Feeding my bills into the reader
Do tons of typing into the computer
Wait for the machine to spit out the bills when the typing is done
Print a receipt for the bills
Give me the bills and receipt
Machines don’t make everything easier
3rd: Over at Pirates Cove Mr. Teach notices climate folks trying to link “climate change” to ancient plagues. to wit:
While modern medicine has advanced considerably since the time of the Romans, this data offers insights into how diseases might change in our own changing climate. “Within the scope of the current climate change it is of major importance to understand the links between climate and human health and we unfortunately do not understand these links as well as we would like,” Zonneveld said. “Investigating the resilience of ancient societies to past climate change and relationships between past climate change and the occurrence of infectious disease might give us better insight into these relationships and the climate change induced challenges we are facing today.
One would have thought that an empire that could conquer so much of the known world, invent formalized sanitation, arches, pioneered early medical tools, concrete, the first bound book, and so much more, would have known not to use fossil fuels, hair dryers, ice makers, and plastics
It never ceases to amaze me that tens of millions have absolute faith in the never ending predictions of doom to come in 30 years when my own local forecast for Sunday has changed three times in the last 72 hours.
4th: I’m told the Doctor that I’ve had for the last 30-40 years or so is about to retire. Baring a major accident/incident before July I will likely not see him again.
This means I will likely have to get a new doc who doesn’t know me or my family or my past. This is normal but I’m not looking forward to it. If there was one thing I had no doubt about with my old doc it’s that he cared if I lived or died. Given what we’ve seen from the medical profession the last few years it will be very hard to get that impression from a stranger.
Of course as I’m in the back nine it more a question of what do I want to die from because in the end I have to die of something.
5th: The New Neo has some thoughts about the Jean Carroll defamation case and the type of precedent it sets:
I don’t think lawsuits like this one should be actionable, whether they be against Trump or anyone else. It should not be legally actionable defamation to say your accuser is lying about you and that you’re not sexually attracted to her. Nor was Trump ever found criminally liable for raping her, because the statute of limitations had run out by the time she made her accusations. I doubt her rape case would have held up in a criminal court anyway – unless it was a court composed of jurors or a judge who hated the defendant.
I predict that once leftists and left leaning institutions like universities are charged with defamation for insisting on their innocence in cases and have judgements made against them the injustice of this will suddenly become clear to the left.
Unexpectedly of course.
6th: If anyone is interested we have some openings in both the 1972 and the 1997 league for Dynasty Baseball.
If you’re up to it and have an interest give me a shout because the window for all of this is closing.
7th: Since I quoted Don Surber for the title of this post it behooves me to mention an interesting twist to the old “learn to code” crowd:
ITEM 14: What the nation needs is coders who learn to mine.
CNBC reported last month, “The U.S. is running out of miners. More than half the nation’s mining workforce, about 221,000 workers, is expected to retire by 2029, according to the Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration, and the number of candidates willing to fill those slots is shrinking.”
Smart people are urging and/or putting their kids into trade schools where basic “manly” skills are taught as it’s becoming increasingly clear that the American left has basically evolved into the passengers of the B Ark of the Golgafrinchan fleet
8th: Since we mentioned the need for coal jobs it’s worth noting more layoffs of Journalists: First this week at the LA Times (Via Legal Insurrection):
As a general rule, most people are sympathetic when they hear about others who have lost their jobs due to layoffs, company closings, and the like.
But in the case of the now-former employees of the Los Angeles Times, that sympathy is in short supply among conservatives and others who were frequent targets of the paper’s agenda-driven news and opinion divisions.
On Sunday, Legal Insurrection reported that the left coast newspaper had announced that staff cutbacks were imminent, with around 100 people set to be let go. In response, unionized employees staged a one-day walkout and demanded, among other things, “to swap traditional seniority protections for those related to diversi
In an internal email this morning, Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng announced that the company is laying off 8% of its staff pic.twitter.com/VY6HIt7ktc
I look forward to the plethora of articles from those journalists remaining insisting that the economy is better than ever. Perhaps AI can write them at the LA Times and Business Insider.
The NFL league championships are this week and from the NFC we are guaranteed a great story of overcoming adversity no matter who wins, either Detroit FINALLY making it to the Superbowl with a rejected QB or San Francisco making it led by the very last pick in the draft born the year Brady was picked and drafted 63 places later than him (262nd).
In the east you have Lamar Jackson the pre-emptive MVP facing Patrick Mahomes who now has made the AFC title game in his first six seasons as a starter. Comparisons to Tom Brady and questions if he will beat Brady’s six titles and ten Superbowl appearances are already flying but in the end no matter what he achieves when people ask who was better the record will show that when facing Tom Brady in the AFC Championship game or the Superbowl he was 0-2 against a Tom Brady at age 40 or over.
10th and last at Elder of Ziyon which is a must visit during the Israel Hamas war they note a rather amazing phenom at the UN, collective memory loss:
Q: Given the UN’s big role in Gaza, UNRWA, has there ever been any indication to the UN that tunnels are being built under the city?
UN: Not to us. I mean… it seems to me that all this infrastructure was built in a highly secretive way. I mean, I see it just as an observer… To think that the UN had any understanding of what was… any information about those operations, I think, is… No is clearly the answer to that.
This is even though the UN has admitted in previous years that tunnels were found underneath their own schools.
In fact, former UNRWA Gaza director Matthias Schmale admitted that it is a “safe assumption” there were extensive tunnels under Gaza, in a 2021 interview:
If it wasn’t for the fact that Hogan’s Heroes was a fictional show I’d swear that the UN was recruiting heavily from descendants of the guards at Luft Stalag 13 for their uncanny ability to know nothing and see nothing.
Well the Christmas Shopping season is done and now the “unload product before I have to declare it as inventory on taxes” season is with us.
I’ve now had the full season to judge who is telling you the truth on the economy and surprise, surprise, it ain’t Joe Biden folks.
During the Trump years the Christmas volume was insane. 10 hour days, 6 to 7 day (optional) work weeks and the need for so many people that no matter how many people were crossing en masse south of the border it wasn’t enough to fill our needs. You actually had temp agencies with offices inside our warehouses in order to manage the flow of people we needed.
This Christmas, all of that was a memory. We had three or four really busy days and one client had a big last minute sale that kept us busy enough to not send home folks but the season overall was pretty dead. On the plus side this meant everything got out on time and on schedule so those who could still afford to buy Christmas gifts had no worry getting them before the days of Christmas began.
And a slow Christmas season means a slow returns season. Most people returning gifts usually don’t get them sent till yesterday or today so we might start seeing them sometime next week. But odds are the return volume will be as anemic as the shipping volume was.
That’s going to mean layoffs even with the lower staff volumes, and if it’s happening here it’s happening everywhere else in the country.
I submit and suggest this is why we are seeing the level of um… interesting… tactics and rhetoric coming from the left, the media and the courts and states they control. I have stated publicly that I think the Trump haters can’t be won over but we’re reaching the “even a flatworm knows to turn away from pain” levels generating fear that we might see a margin beyond the credible level of theft.
Of course given what the media has considered “credible” these days there might not be such a phrase.
I think we have been cursed to live in interesting times, but if that’s the case it’s been a curse we’ve brought onto ourselves as a society.
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