Workers are calling out sick in droves
npr.org
npr.org
I hate how headlines like this loosely frame it as a problem with workers. It's like the "worker shortage" kind of garbage... we've got plenty of workers in most sectors, but there's a shortage of companies willing to pay what they're asking. Why is it never a "wage shortage"?
Not to say that people aren't getting sick or that they aren't calling out but it's clear that the author has no authoritative basis to make any claim on the subject.
The reason they used "worker" is because its the largest class of individuals and it IS having real supply chain issues. It ISN'T because people aren't getting paid enough but because people are sick and shouldn't work so as not to infect other people.
It's telling that 13/52 and 13/90 have stuck around so well because those are real, factual numbers. Perhaps they're entirely misleading but, at the very least, newsreaders appear to be far more interested in those real numbers than "feelings-based" articles like the one above.
Part of the magic of FiveThirtyEight early on was their deep commitment to showing the statistical analysis behind every single article. You didn't have to just trust their reporters because they had the MiniTab or MATLab printout on every article that you could read for yourself. They fully describe their methodology behind their pollster ratings and election forecasts, even if you don't agree with them. 538 has since gotten away from their statistical analyses a bit and their viewership and credibility has suffered accordingly.
They're not the BLS. If you're expecting that level of coverage then there's virtually no news stories aside from whatever government stats came out that day.
Just to check the accuracy, how did you arrive at this number? AFAICT, United Airlines has 93k employees, so alone represents approximately 0.028% of the US workforce, roughly 300x your guess, right?
At MOM's Organic Market, some of its East Coast stores have had to deal with 15 out of 50 workers out on a single day.
And at the community health center Mary's Center in Washington, D.C., half of the COVID-19 Response Team tested positive for the virus over the past few weeks."
The article literally starts with the CEO of a public company that employs several tens of thousands of people saying that 1/3 of their workers at one of their busiest facilities called out sick. The MOM's source is...their Chief of HR. The sources for the hospital were its CEO and chief nurse.
Whatever ideological point about journalism you thought you were trying to make, you did not make it.
true. we were going to cancel a family birthday last weekend because people had covid but we found out each family currently has it so we kept it. Omicron is spreading like a flame on summer grass.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
About half have had symptomatic infections, all from different sources (not due to us getting together), in the past couple weeks. Everyone in the house, even little kids, are getting sick (fever, at least, every time), in every single case so far (unless, again, some of us have had it pass through and no-one in the house had symptoms).
If that 1/4 symptomatic rate holds for omicron (I'm doubting it, but maybe) then something like 3-4% of the country's contracting it per day. Even if not, then it's still somewhere around 1%/day, minimum.
Just because it doesn't mention families doesn't mean that there is some strange weird deliberate bias.
There seems to be an undercurrent of bias that faults workers in a lot of reporting. Maybe it's confirmation bias on my part, but it doesn't make a lot of sense.
In this case, the droves of people claiming sick time are most likely genuinely sick.
We're seeing this here in Spain a lot now. A bit higher up in this thread someone mentioned not cancelling a birthday because all the guests had COVID anyway. But work environments are more strict.
I have a feeling this is what they meant by stating it that way, not implying that the workers aren't actually sick. A case of COVID is easily verified anyway.
Is there any mention of hazard pay, investing in more safety measures aside from a plexiglass screen, or anything else worker-focused?
No.
And this is NPR! NPR!!!!
Indeed.
Instead the headline is "workers are calling out sick in droves".
[EDIT] gruez noted below that the original post was based on an error, please don't punish their Internet points too much.
Because salaries are not transparent.
Wages don't occur in a vacuum. If people want more pay than can be made back by selling the products, then there is no job and no product.
How about instead on focusing on ensuring there are multiple companies competing for workers of every skill level (which there are), in which case the wages are likely close to what can be paid.
Therefore any price that people are unwilling to pay will not be because the competition offers a lower price, but because they are unwilling to purchase the product at all at that price. If that happens and it causes some businesses to be unviable because no one will pay the price required, then maybe we don't need those businesses.
If companies can't afford higher wages because it would make their products so expensive that they couldn't find enough customers for them, then you can hardly call that "artificial".
I'm saying I don't think we've reached that point yet. In other words, I think prices are often as low as they are not because people won't pay more, but because companies have exploited the labor market to lower prices creating a race to the bottom.
There are very few products where a price increase won't result in less sales. Economists even have a term for it: elasticity. And they also estimate it across a massive range of goods, finding the opposite of what you think.
Look at how much trouble a inflation is causing people to see quite clearly that small price increases on goods causes significant problems for consumers.
>creating a race to the bottom
So far this "race to the bottom" has resulted in just about the richest, best paid people on the planet. Even our poverty line is about the top 15% of global income, and that's pre-tax transfer. Post-tax transfer poverty line people make significantly more.
So I don't think there's really much evidence of your claimed "race to the bottom," unless we're spectacularly bad at racing.
Because they are competing with other companies.
>They are perfectly willing to spend on other things.
No companies generally try to lower costs anywhere it makes sense, in order to compete with other companies that will also do so to compete.
If companies could simply pay magic wages, out of the tens of thousands in the US, don't you think one would buck the trend and suddenly pay awesome wages and attract the best talent and win all the markets?
Either all 10,000 companies are in cahoots, or there are market forces causing a lot of the wages to be similar. Which is more likely? That Apple and Walmart and Rural King are agreeing on wages? Or that each competes against similar companies for workers and sales?
I guess you know more about Apple's more competent co-conspirators than I do:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7449737
But there's no need to do anything technically illegal companies discuss how to screw employees and customers as industry groups all the time. They reach agreements not to do various things and to co-ordinate spending on political lobbying. They will for example try to share your salary data using an intermediary to avoid one of them giving you a larger raise. That helps both companies that might lose you and companies that are trying to hire you for bellow what free market wages would settle on if we all had the same information.
I didn't write that.
You seriously think this is what's happening? People that are demanding higher wages are not getting them because it's eating too much into margin to make products viable?
If that's the case I'd argue those products shouldn't exist, but from where I'm sitting it looks like business as usual... the people in charge of pay ultimately don't want to share their profits.
So a product shouldn't exist because you don't get the wage you feel entitled to when making it?
Apparently a lot of others are willing to work making, selling, and buying products you think should not exist. I prefer the market solution.
Anyone can start a company, and pay workers awesome magical wages. Does this not happen because every single company owner is evil, or is it because there are real constraints to this dream of entitled wages, divorced from market clearing rates? Go make that company and make your ideal world reality.
The article is about employee shortages due to sick workers. I don’t think the title is misrepresenting that.
The connotation of the headline is absolutely that workers are faking sick, even if the content of the article doesn't say that.
My previous jobs have all given me a grand total of 2 sick days plus 2 personal days. Anything beyond that would have cut into vacation days.
I think people are so accustomed to clickbait-y headlines, they see an agenda in the headlines of an organization that actually practices strong journalistic standards and plays it "safe" with its headlines, saying less than more.
"Workers are using sick days, and businesses do not have enough workers not on sick days" is a plain jane version
Is there another term for calling out sick that you believe doesn’t have such a connotation?
I'm going to assume you're not from the US, because if you are you've got to be pulling my leg.
The US has no mandated time off for workers, so many people will "call out sick" if they need time off for anything. This is especially true of lower wage workers.
Before starting to work in my career I literally never had vacation time. If something came up (good or bad) I'd have to "call out" (colloquially the "sick" is often dropped, which may indicate how normal this is). Usually this only works for a day or two at a time.
So sure, I'd call out if I were sick... but I'd be just as likely to call out for a friend's birthday, a hotly anticipated video game, or some other frivolous thing.
Right now, the US population is higher than it's ever been, but there are several million fewer workers than in 2019. That's the definition of a shortage.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
For reference, unemployment rates in the US are recorded by six increasingly-broad measures (from U-1 to U-6). U-3 is the internationally-defined "official" unemployment representing 'everyone actively working, or actively looking for work'. U-6, the broadest measure, includes U-3 as well as "all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force" [basically, unemployed people who stopped looking for work (but theoretically want to work), as well as the underemployed].
U-3 alone does not provide a full picture of unemployment. Sometimes U-3 can go down, but U-4, U-5, or U-6 increase because workers are leaving the labor force entirely.
Based on the BLS data, unemployment has been trending down by all measures. This suggests to me that the continued decreases in the unemployment are real and not misleading.
Other tables also indicate that U-3 has decreased among all industries and age ranges:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t14.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t10.htm
My armchair suspicion is that, though the "worker shortage" was a very real issue in 2021, the problem [at least nationally] has broadly leveled-out, and that discussions on a national "worker shortages" continue to emerge from a type of, say, 'conversational inertia' when discussing localized labor shortages (e.g. problems with industry X in state/county Y) or acute shocks to supply (e.g. large numbers of people getting sick at the same time). Localized shortages or acute shocks are also meaningful and need to be resolved as they come up, but they may be only tangentially-related to a national worker shortage.
I'd love to hear more thoughts on this if others want to chime-in. I didn't do any sort of rigorous analysis on this. There could also be still substantial multi-state/regional shortages hidden among the numbers. I didn't really delve into "reality" or how the data may not actually reflect "real life" or other labor-related issues (e.g. income) -- I just like looking at these stats every now and then.
From the original comment, I was more interested in the part "It's like the 'worker shortage' kind of garbage... we've got plenty of workers in most sectors" and was curious about unemployment rates.
Whether or not it is 'distracting' is arguable, but I apologize if it was distracting.
Because big media outlets tend to side with big business over labor, despite cries about "the liberal media".
Two other managers are currently out, multiple department heads and regular associates are out, and it's just the two of us running the show. I pulled a 12 hour shift Sunday just so said coworker could have a day off, and they're doing the same today for me. Just trying to open/close on time has been incredibly difficult lately, having to call around to cover morning/night shifts that people suddenly call out for. I'm not sure how much longer I can do this. I need this whole pandemic to come to a close solely for the sake of my own physical/mental wellbeing, if not also for everyone else's.
Plus contrary to some romanticized images of the successful small business owner driving Porsches, most store/restaurant owners probably barely make enough to make ends meet.
My daughter tested positive today.
I believe the majority of parents are testing their kids with LFTs daily.
Until now we had maybe had 2-3 in total all pandemic in the year group.
The good news is it doesn't seem to be affecting parents much, even siblings don't seem to be necessarily going positive.
At the rate its blowing through our school/town right now I would expect us here to be well past the worst of it in about three weeks.
My wife and I got it on Christmas from my family. She, I, and all of my family members have had three vaccine doses. All of my rapid tests were negative but my PCR was positive.
My daughter is currently lying on our bed with a very high temperature - although LFT still testing negative. I had booked a PCR tomorrow morning but I don't think we'll be able to make it.
As other's have said - this thing is like wild-fire at this point.
This has obvious negative consequences.
So none of this should be surprising at all. But rates of new cases are already plummeting in the places with the biggest Omicron peaks (the Northeast), so the "labor shortage" is a very short term issue, just like the various other "shortages" the media harps over, which all end up amounting to nothing but a brief inconvenience.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailycases
The peak number of cases reported daily in 2020 was in mid-December, at about 200,000. As standardUser says, we were having about 800,000 cases per day last week.
On the other hand, we have vaccines now, and the current variant seems to be less deadly. As a result:
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailydeaths...
Current new hospital admissions (right axis, completely different scale) are about 20,000 per day, versus 16,500 per day in early January 2021, and 1,700 deaths versus 3,000 last January.
[EDIT] For some evidence that we may get a de facto shutdown anyway: our (large) school district was short three hundred teachers the other day, and only managed to get one hundred subs. The schools are barely hanging on and shutting down or going remote for a week or two to cool things off and/or wait out the peak is a distinct possibility, which will have knock-on effects for the rest of the economy, which is also already dealing with high absence rates due to illness or direct exposure (which, with Omicron, is equivalent to "definitely has it, just waiting for symptoms").
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2022/01/11/governor-newsom-signs-exec...
[EDIT] this is actually yet another case where a universal healthcare system would help. $120/day and an uncertain schedule is a lot more appealing when your healthcare's covered. Not saying it's great, but that would help a lot.
So, the idea is to spread the force accelerating retirements in education to the rest of the state workforce, while whining about the “labor shortage”?
At least, if OK's state government works like ours, that's the situation. This will be fun to watch if they actually try it.
[EDIT] I just looked it up and it seems like the idea is that state employees can optionally work as subs without losing their current pay, position, et c., not that they're being directed to. That's less crazy.
[EDIT EDIT] Oh, never mind, they wouldn't get the sub pay on top of their normal state salary, just their state salary. Yeah, approximately zero people will do this unless they really hate their usual job. Not crazy, just pointless, then.
The striking part of all this is that the goal seems to keep schools open rather than keep educating kids. My son's high school has 400 kids out last week, that's about 45%. Yet the "important" thing is to keep the school doors unlocked which is the only factor used in determining total success. It doesn't actually matter if anyone is there or if anyone is being educated, or even if the "educator" is trained to educate in anyway.
It's very frustrating to see your public schools constantly receive less and less over the years and then all of a sudden we need to fix the schools with random people showing up for a day here or there (and nobody shows up).
This is a very specific claim that gets thrown around a lot with zero evidence.
"There's no way to flatten this curve."
If people were dying now at the same rate they were dying in the first wave, the curve would be flattened because people would once again be cowering in their homes while only ambulances and hearses roamed the streets.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
If you think it will be possible to avoid the virus forever then please explain how that could be accomplished in the real world? Because people aren't going to continue with social distancing or wearing PPE for the rest of their lives, regardless of the risks.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
[EDIT] barring other risk factors, obviously. Some kids definitely are at significant risk.
What... have you been looking at that has you thinking otherwise?
[EDIT] I mean for the colloquial "everyone" that means "so close to everyone that there's not much practical difference", not necessarily "literally zero people anywhere won't get it"—because it's really looking like "everyone" in the US is gonna get it within ~3 months, from what I see, which is just totally ordinary sources about infection rates.
Aside from people who are sick themselves, kids are getting sick causing parents to use sick leave to care for them at home (and exposing themselves to illness in the process)
Complicate that by sick teachers and carers interrupting normal child care routines, also causing parents to miss work.
My wife works in childcare and isolating waiting for a result (36 hours and counting for a PCR test-in some states tests aren’t being processed for 7 days and then are thrown out) has been told by her supervisor that Covid-positive staff may have to work. We have a pack of RATs and she was negative on one, but they are extremely scarce, so we’re not using a second.
Daycare and, soon, schools are going to allow covid to spread through with no mitigation attempts. The same lack of exposure to the world that allowed it to escape earlier waves has also led Australia to adopting extreme parodies of policies in place everywhere else: for example they opened up without any rapid testing and without improving PCR testing availability (you can’t get tested outside of weekday office hours). Lockdowns of any sort, school closures and remote learning have been a totally ruled out because that’s what the Australian state and federal governments imagine has happened in the rest of the world, despite the reality being more complex.
Mary's Center serves a population with low income, and probably sees bunches of small children. If you really want to catch COVID, Mary's Center is probably a great place to volunteer.
in the last two months i know half a dozen confirmed sick, canada has limited testing capacity so it would probably be higher if we had that availability
So they'll pay you an extra $2/hr to work sick? Nice.
Representatives do reflect the will of the people who elected them. The real problem is, on an individual level, your vote is statistically irrelevant, so it's easy to disassociate, and to blame "the others" who, collectively, have a vastly more powerful say over who represents you than you do. "They ought to vote more like how I want them to." you can say, "They don't vote correctly and I can't stop them, so it's the system's fault for giving them power over me!" This, of course, completely undermines the entire point of democracy, that it represents the collective will of the people, not any individual's arbitrary will.
A representative democracy works even if you don't believe it does. It stops working if everyone doesn't believe it does, which is certainly not even close to the case in the US.
It’s easy to pretend we’re collectively helpless just because we individually are, but being individually helpless is by design.
You were never meant to have more of a say than your neighbor, even if practically you may have at one point.
First, this is false. Policy in the US is dictated by campaign contributions, not voter sentiment.
Take a wildly popular idea, like universal background checks for firearm purchases. This enjoys something like 80-90% support among both Republican and Democratic voters, but it will never get through Congress, because of the NRA.
Second, "the people who elected them" is not itself representative of society as a whole. The US Senate and the US Presidency are decided by mechanisms that intentionally award oversized representation to certain geographical areas. There are only ten states with a population higher than Los Angeles County, but those states still get two Senators.
So American democracy is built to reflect the will of the monied, and the will of small population centers. Most of us are not rich, and most of us live in dense population centers. This means our system of government is giving us the exact opposite outcome we should be looking for.
American democracy does not reflect the will of the monied, it reflects the will of the people, you just don't like what that aggregate will represents because it's not your will. No matter how much money gets dumped into elections, people actually have to vote in them, and you cannot serve in any elected capacity without first being elected.
Maybe the will of the people can be changed with money, and maybe it can be changed to reflect views that are ultimately harmful to the very people who hold those views, but it is the will of the people.
Wealth doesn't actually, literally, buy votes, and it is "1+1=3" kind of false to claim it does.
You may not like what your system of government produces as its outcomes, but it's exactly what it should be producing; a reflection of what its people want. I'm sorry it's not what you want, and I'm sorry that individual issue polling doesn't reflect reality, but when the polling actually matters, people vote differently than when a single issue is up for a non-binding, theoretical discussion.
This is absolutely untrue, because representation is intentionally not proportional to population. Our electoral system produces a reflection of what some people want, and those people are typically from smaller, more conservative, less populated, less economically viable areas.
Because of this, US policy does not reflect the will of the majority on most major issues.
Most people support taxing the ultra-wealthy at a higher percentage of their income, but this is not US policy.
Most people support background checks on all firearms sales, but this is not US policy.
Most voters support campaign finance reform, but this is not US policy.
Most voters support a ban on Representatives actively trading stocks, but this is not US policy.
More than half of voters support at least some form of student loan forgiveness, but this is not US policy.
You can basically walk the link of current important issues, and find that the will of the people is not represented at the Federal level. I don't like what our system of government produces, not because it goes against what I want, but because it goes against what most people want. It is a majority held hostage by the tyranny of a minority, and that is becoming less and less tenable as time goes on.
You claim "most people support" a bunch of things here, but how do you know? A poll conducted on one specific issue, without discussing tradeoffs? "If you could snap your fingers and get this for free with zero downside?" style polling options? They're not realistic and don't give people any stake, which means people will answer in ways they wouldn't otherwise if actually given the choice (and all its downsides).
These things you list aren't US policy because people don't actually want those things to be US policy. They trust their selected representative to dive into the details of those issues, and when those representatives do, those reps tend not to support them to the degree that you claim the people do.
You're upset your favorite things don't get the attention you want them to get, but that's the point; one person doesn't wholly determine anything in the US government. It's built to keep one group of people from crushing other groups of people, and it's working.
But as for the Senate and Presidency being decided by mechanisms that aren't directly tied to population—that's by design. The United States is comprised of 50 States that jointly gave up some of their sovereignty to become a republic. They're more than just administrative districts of a national government. Aforementioned issues aside, the House of Representatives is supposed to represent the will of the _people_ while the Senate is supposed to represent the will of the _States_. The Senate is the States' representation at the Federal level. (Indeed, before the 17th Amendment US Senators were elected by State legislatures, not popular vote. Part of the motivation for the 17th Amendment was—wait for it—corruption in the state legislatures!)
It may be that moving to more population-based representation scheme would alleviate some issues. It also brings a downside: less populated states would get steamrolled by the more populated ones. (This was the Virginia Plan at the Constitutional Convention.) The 10th Amendment explicitly states that any power not expressly granted to the Federal government by the Constitution is retained by the States (States' rights/sovereignty), so basing Senate representation on population rather than giving each State equal representation would disenfranchise some States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_Compromise
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_U...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Plan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenth_Amendment_to_the_United_...
edit: formatting
https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16
US states are free to impose universal background checks on firearm purchases, and several have. It doesn't need to be done at the federal level.
I don't think it is the best system, but you can't say that PACs aren't working toward the will of the people that put the money behind them.
If you didn't realize we have the senate and the house of representatives, one is proportional to population and one is based on state-hood. I think it creates a reasonable balance, especially because small states would otherwise have almost no voice in the federal government. The densely populated cities in the US already have a lot of sway in general elections and especially in state-wide elections, which have a greater influence on their lives anyway. Making sure less-densely populated regions, which are vital for the country in their own way, is not a terrible thing, as much as that irks Democrats that would like more control.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/16/americans-o...
National issues do not impact the nation equally, and the US's legislative body represents that fact.
Deciding how we, as a group of people, live together is much more complex than, "Let's just vote on each thing!" A system like that is rife with all kinds of "wolves vote to eat the sheep" problems, to a degree much worse than any system we might have right now in the US.
If you'd like to make an argument that our national representative system weighs voters from different states unequally, I'm open to that. But that's the kind of thing that will generally get you a few percentage points, not 10%. Or translate the argument to medical marijuana which per that link is supported by 91% of Americans. That magnitude can't be explained away with weighting or quantization error.
I'm very aware of the tyranny of the majority ("wolves vote to eat the sheep"), and would have included such a caveat that following the will of the voters is not always just and that it's an assertion to judge by simple majority, but that is not what we're discussing. Also on the topic of marijuana deillegalization, this isn't a majority wanting to aggress onto a minority and take away their rights, but rather a majority wanting to end such aggression - tyranny of the majority does not apply.
How do you know this? I'm sure polls have been conducted, but without stakes, and understanding of the consequences, of the downsides, of the costs, there's no way a random voter would be capable of executing a policy decision as complex as legalizing a drug.
That's why they elect representatives, and at a national level the people have not chosen to elect representatives who have made this an important enough priority to create and pass legislation making this view into law. At a state level, some voters have chosen to prioritize this, by picking representatives who value this view over other views, and prioritize passing legislation. The system worked, for those people.
The point here is that if your favorite poll were accurate, and did indeed reflect the will of the people, they'd prioritize it highly enough to vote accordingly. However, it isn't important enough to supercede other issues, so it remains not the will of the people.
It's a lot more complex, figuring out what people want, than just asking them.
> The point here is that if your favorite poll were accurate, and did indeed reflect the will of the people, they'd prioritize it highly enough to vote accordingly. However, it isn't important enough to supercede other issues, so it remains not the will of the people.
You're essentially falling back to a simple tautology, shoehorning the "will of the people" to simply mean how they voted, even though a vote is an extremely limiting expression of a voter's overall will. This is utterly useless when discussing the effectiveness of our specific voting/representational system.
The will of the people is (usually, always federally) expressed in selecting a representative, not in any single issue, and that's by design. "The will of the people" isn't, "Legalize marijuana" it's, "My representative figures out a way to sanely legalize marijuana while balancing thousands of other initiatives and objectives according to their urgency and importance in a way I would, overall, approve of."
Very few people want chaos, so very few people are voting simply on, "I just want this done, regardless of the cost."
I don't think you're interpreting these single issue polls in a way that's applicable to how Americans want the US as a whole governed, instead you're interpreting those polls to just mean what you want them to mean, because it's a useful thing to point out as a mismatch between expectation and reality.
It is not, however, a mismatch at all.
The problem isn't that you're saying they're different. The problem is that you're defining "will of the voters" narrowly, being equivalent to the result of an election. This makes your argument itself a tautology - if the "will of the voters" consists purely of how they voted, then of course the currently elected representatives are always the will of the voters. But if we're discussing how effective our representational system is, then your tautological definition is completely uninteresting.
> The will of the people is (usually, always federally) expressed in selecting a representative, not in any single issue, and that's by design. "The will of the people" isn't, "Legalize marijuana" it's, "My representative figures out a way to sanely legalize marijuana while balancing thousands of other initiatives and objectives according to their urgency and importance in a way I would, overall, approve of."
You're doing it again here, presupposing that a "voter's will" can only consist of what they can express through the current voting system, as opposed to what they would like to express when voting but cannot.
My reference to a single issue opinion pole is precisely to show how voters' desires differ from their representatives' actions (with the assumption that pollees are representative of voters). If we use your definition, then the obvious "will of the voters" is to keep marijuana illegal, but this isn't saying much. Whereas using the broader definition, then we can talk about how the representative and plurality systems thwart the will of the voters by making them express their will in terms of constrained choices.
I did presuppose that you understood that. Maybe that was not appropriate, but I'm not willing to discuss it, because I find it, a priori, a non-starter.
This is well trod intellectual ground, and if you're curious, you can find ample writings debating the topic of a direct democracy vs. a representative democracy elsewhere that'll more accurately frame the discussion than anything I could come up with off the top of my head for free on HN.
Given that a direct democracy results in substantially negative outcomes for the people who participate, therefore a representative democracy is about voting for the person, not the policy, and in that environment, the will of the people is indeed expressed as the selection of their representative, not on any isolated "What if you could magically have something with no downsides?" issue based polling.
Narrowly focusing on one specific issue is naive. the US doesn't exist in a single-issue bubble, it exists in a complex web of political and practical (not to mention entirely unpredictable) needs which all have to be balanced simultaneously. If you want to pretend legislators can snap their fingers and make any individual issue "just happen" that's fine, but it's not reflective of reality on any level. You will continue to be confused and disappointed if you decide to live that way.
But that doesn't really have bearing on what I said. Voter opinion on individual issues is merely one metric we can use to evaluate how well the "will of the voters" is being represented. Another one, more focused on representational government, would be whether most voters are happy with the vote they cast, or whether they feel they had to compromise and vote "strategically".
These questions are important for being able to discuss changes to our system. For example, posing the question of whether RCV/Condorcet would represent the will of the voters better than party-controlled primaries plus first past the post.
To me, seeing that 91% of people support medical marijuana while representatives continue to do nothing is pretty damning.
Just for context here, I don't have a personal stake in the marijuana question. I just think such a governance failure is galling.
I already did.
> Narrowly focusing on one specific issue is naive. the US doesn't exist in a single-issue bubble, it exists in a complex web of political and practical (not to mention entirely unpredictable) needs which all have to be balanced simultaneously. If you want to pretend legislators can snap their fingers and make any individual issue "just happen" that's fine, but it's not reflective of reality on any level. You will continue to be confused and disappointed if you decide to live that way.
What's more interesting is why you'd claim I hadn't, when I very clearly did.
It's almost like you're not even reading what I'm writing...
Specifically about this point, I disagree. You're greatly exaggerating the intrinsic difficulty of change - witness any "emergency" bill that gets passed after a few months with very little debate. I agree there are bureaucratic difficulties in general, but when discussing how well representatives represent the will of the voters, the inefficiency due to those difficulties are still quite relevant! The argument you're making basically lets you write off any outside metrics that aren't the ballot box - deferring to the opaque paternalism of "that's just how the system works" and shutting down any criticism of the representative bureaucracy itself.
Furthermore on the topic of marijuana deillegalization, most of those bureaucratic difficulties simply do not exist. No legal regime needs to be pondered and crafted, rather the laws that criminalized it in the first place simply need to be repealed - strike them by number and name. That we're likely to end up with more complex legislation rather than a straightforward repeal is entirely due to the corruption of the system where all of these incumbent moneyed interests get their says before the will of the voters can become law. That corruption is exactly what you're defending by rejecting basic objective critiques of the system's effectiveness.
It’s funny, how misdeeds can transcend profession.
If you can’t accept that passing national legislation is an incredibly complex, subtle, and nuanced activity that requires delicacy and care, then I simply cannot help you.
This comes up all the time in redistricting conversations; very often the goal for some of the strangers gerrymandered districts is to keep populations together.
People should have a say in how their day-to-day lives are governed, and not just be ruled by a huge cluster of people on a completely different part of the planet.
Congress (and the rest of the federal government) can and does do all of the absurdities you are suggesting is prevented by the people having no direct say.
It's by design that people have no direct say, however. That's a substantially worse system, by nearly every measurement, to generally employ.
I’m not here to debate why that is, I’m pointing out the stretch of the imagination involved to consider the outcome to reflect an aggregate voter will, versus basically accidents.
Obligatory Nitpick: the shoe bombing attempt happened in December 2001:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_American_Airlines_Fligh...
That said, the vaccines do seem pretty focused on the 2019 variant of COVID-19. It's 2022 now, and that variant is dead. So we're definitely getting imperfect protection. (I got my 3rd dose anyway, of course. And I'm still treating the pandemic like a pandemic. I skipped holiday travel, I don't go out unless absolutely necessary, etc.)
The vaccines, imperfect as they are, seem to have dramatically reduced the incidence of severe symptoms requiring hospitalizations and of death due to Covid. My wife is a vascular surgeon & one of her colleagues handles the placement of ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) for patients with severe respiratory failure. Since the vaccines have become available, the only patients going on ECMO are unvaccinated.
I'd call the Covid-19 vaccines pretty remarkable and only condemnable if your criteria for success is 100% effective in preventing all cases of Covid-19 with no risk of adverse effects.
Is that why there's now more vaccinated people hospitalized for COVID than unvaccinated? I seriously can't understand how people participate in these mental gymnastics. There's more COVID "cases" now than ever before. How does that lend credit to vaccination?
There's also a highly transmissible variant, which shows some level of resistance to vaccination.
These aren't difficult concepts to understand.
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/19843315.covid-scotland-...
> Case rates lowest in unvaccinated as double-jabbed elderly drive rise in hospital admissions
Must be fake news though, right?
What you are seeing here is classic Simpson's Paradox. It is exactly the same thing we saw earlier with Israel with delta. Here was an article on that which covers how Simpson's Paradox works in that situation [1].
[1] https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-...
Double vaccinated and hospitalized. Must mean the vaccine is working, right?
When you are dealing with a population that is nearly 100% vaccinated, even though unvaccinated people are hospitalized at 10x the rate of vaccinated people you will still have almost all hospitalizations be vaccinated.
Oh we're just guessing numbers now? How quickly the discussion devolves into something other than science.
[1] https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/...
Vaccinated person goes to the hospital for a cough and fever - "oh no dear, it can't be COVID because you're vaccinated, it must be the common flu" - not counted.
Unvaccinated person comes in for a wrist sprain, tests positive on the PCR - "OMG UNVAXXED HOSPITALIZATION" - probably counted twice, too.
What I've witnessed is the opposite of trying to skip testing vaccinated people to shift numbers. You're just making things up.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/about-50-percent-of...
And this is only what they're being forced to admit.
Btw F-Npr they used to good but now it’s a New York Times like propaganda network.
My child's classroom closed for a week because of a positive case. My child tested negative, so she can still potentially get sick which would cause _another_ closure plus she would have to quarantine for 10 days. There are 8 kids in the classroom, so I could be looking at losing 7*5+10 days of child care before this is over.
It's a cascading failure, and it doesn't stop there. The parents end up watching their own kids and have to call out of work themselves (or work remotely at greatly reduced capacity).
I don't know how you convince anyone in the current environment to be a childcare provider or teacher, when there are robust alternative employment options available that pay more for a better work environment.
And no, closing classrooms isn't necessary to protect teachers. They've been vaccinated for months now, and are free to wear PPE if they choose.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
Not familiar with NPR as a European, what do you mean by this
They famously hold funding drives a couple times a year, interrupting much of their usual programming to ask their listeners for donations... but these are also only a small part of their funding, and the drives amount to a kind of roundabout advertising or PR more than anything else.
Most of their funds come from corporate and non-profit donors. [EDIT] And these get ads on the stations, read by NPR staff. "Donors", but actually many are just businesses paying for ads, like any other station has. This practice has gone from "they might name their donors sometimes" to "they frequently read ad copy on-air for them" in the last couple decades.
On the left—so, among their traditional listenership—they are perceived, increasingly, as having a strong pro-corporate and pro-status-quo bias. This crowd perceives them as staunch defenders of the neo-liberal consensus that's driven US economic and foreign policy since the 80s, though they are (as corporations have, now that it's convenient, become) left-leaning on many social issues.
Basically, lots and lots of people, right and left, don't like them. One might take this as a sign they're doing something right, but... well, I'll leave it to the listener to judge the quality of their coverage, whatever its leaning, for themselves. Suffice it that I, at least, think it's gone from "pretty good" in the '00s to total crap, now. IMO the best news coverage in a given broadcast day, for my local NPR affiliate, is when they're just re-broadcasting the BBC.
Why did he cough? Choked on a peanut in his lunch.
Thankfully the union made sure he was reimbursed for his missed time - but I (anecdotally) know plenty of other people who were forced to stay home for some ridiculous reason or another. Another one off the top of my head was a spouse that tested positive on a rapid test, he tested negative, and neither of them had any symptoms at all but he was forced to quarantine. PCR test for the spouse ended up coming back negative - the rapid test was a false positive. Both missed 5 days of work with no union to fight for either of their wages.
I've heard way too many stories like this to think this "sick worker crisis" is nothing but self-inflicted hysteria on the part of businesses.