economics

Sue them

I have been talking about evictions and how landlords are being blamed for the problems caused through government malfeasance.

Landlords all over are saying that they are being put out of business because they are not being permitted to remove non paying tenants from their property. The government claims to offer rental assistance, but it is a sham. A year of rent free living often means that tenants owe tens of thousands of dollars in back rent. These rental assistance plans often require that landlords sign an agreement which states that they agree to accept whatever the government sends as full and final payment for all past due rent. So the landlord is expected to accept pennies on the dollar.

Instead, some landlords in New Jersey have found a better way. After fourteen months of watching their money go out without a dime in rent being paid, they have had enough. They can’t evict- but they can sue. They go to court, sue the tenant, and get a judgement for the past due rent.

Such lawsuits do not violate the governor’s eviction moratorium. That has the communists going apoplectic.

“I don’t think it’s in the spirit of the moratorium,” Albert added.

The claimed “Spirit” and legal basis for the moratorium was that people who have been evicted pose a risk for spreading COVID. It is supposedly an infection control measure. Of course, we all know the truth: the eviction moratorium is just another giveaway program- one paid for by property owners.

Communism, isn’t it great?

By Divemedic, ago

Selection Bias

This story says that people with college degrees whose parents also have a college degree make more money than those whose parents don’t have a college degree. It also found that for children without a college degree, it made no difference if their parents had a college degree or not.

Why? My opinion (you knew I would have one)

If a parent has a degree in a field that pays good money, say medicine, law, or STEM, also tends to have children who follow in their footsteps. Examples: I have a degree in the medical field. My son is a nurse practitioner. My uncle has a degree in computer engineering. My cousin got a degree in marine engineering and is on the design team for the Navy’s LCS.

What if a parent doesn’t have a degree? They assume that all college degrees have equal value. They convince the kids that they need to go to college and get a waste of a degree in Leisure studies, music, or Gender Studies. A degree is a degree, right? Example: My wife’s cousin has a degree in outdoor recreation. She is largely jobless and spends all of her time smoking weed and banging Colorado ski instructors. Or you can simply look at every Asian and Jewish family in America and observe that Asian and Jewish mothers consider an education to be a gift from God.

A parent who goes to college and gets a degree in Gender Studies or some other useless major winds up working at a McJob and decides that a degree is worthless. He tells the kid the same thing. Kid doesn’t go to college and winds up in the same company with the same McJob at the same pay as dad.

By Divemedic, ago

Evictions in Orlando

The Orlando Sentinel did a recent three part story in evictions. The story that I am posting about today was published on May 13. The woman at the heart of the first part of the story is Jocelyn Bennett, a nursing assistant who lost her job at a senior living facility. Dexter, her husband, had been between jobs, finding work through a temp agency. They were already on food stamps. In April, they couldn’t cover the rent. Their landlord told them they needed to be out in 30 days. And the family became homeless in a matter of weeks.

She claims that they cannot find a job. Bullshit. My hospital has more than a dozen openings for nursing assistants. We are supposed to have eight nursing assistants on each floor on each shift. Lately, we have had as few as three. We are also short on biomedical technicians (they repair medical devices like ECG machines, ventilators, medication pumps, etc.), we need telemetry monitors, nurses, and even people to work in the kitchens.

The article blames minimum wage, claiming that the minimum wage has only gone up by $2.50 since 2005. In 2005, Florida’s minimum wage was $6.15 an hour. They estimate that an Orlando resident would have to make $23 an hour, or a $47,840 yearly salary, to afford a two-bedroom rental that costs $1,248 per month. What? Where do they get these numbers from? Since $47K a year is far above the average wage for Orlando, how is everyone else affording all of these apartments?

Here is Bennet’s problem: She has 5 fucking kids. She couldn’t afford them before COVID. That isn’t her landlord’s fault. It isn’t because of minimum wage. It isn’t because she can’t find a job, nor is it because rent is too expensive. It is because our government pays people to have more kids, so she is literally breeding for a living.

The second woman was Alexiss Green, who quit her $50k a year job, then bought two houses while she rented another. Her intention was to flip the two houses, probably because she watches too much HGTV. Her investment failed, and she lost both houses, can no longer pay rent, and now we are all supposed to feel sorry for her and screw over her landlord by letting her live in her apartment for free.

“I’m not a deadbeat person who doesn’t pay her bills, I’m just a person in a hard situation,” Green said. She said she understands her landlord has bills, too, “but I don’t have control over what’s going on in the world right now.”

Regardless, I don’t see how any of this is her landlord’s problem. See, he made a wise business decision and is successful in his business. For that, he should be required to let her live in his home for free?

Her landlord, who’s in his 70s, says he’s on a fixed income and is using Social Security payments to pay his mortgage. He doesn’t have a lawyer, either.

A week later, the judge’s ruling arrives in the mail. Green prays over the envelope before ripping it open. It’s bad news. The judge ruled she hadn’t made any “timely partial payments,” even $5 or $10 a month. She has 10 days to move out.

Note: It has been over a year since she paid a single dime in rent. Not even a dollar. Yet we are supposed to feel sorry for her and throw the landlord out into the street.

A few days later, Green gets an email from Lake County saying she’s been approved for $9,000 in rent relief. According to county staff, it will go to the landlord who evicted her.

That is only fair, since she lived in the house for over a year- owing $22,000 in unpaid rent, with the landlord only receiving a single $4,000 government rent assistance payment. This $9,000 doesn’t even cover half of what the landlord is owed, once court costs for the eviction are factored in.

This isn’t an eviction crisis. It is a stupid people who don’t know how to run their lives, but expect everyone else to pay their freight crisis.

By Divemedic, ago

If Amazon can do it…

Amazon announced that they will increase their minimum wage to $15 an hour. The people pushing for such a wage are already using them as an example, saying if Amazon can do it, anyone can. Let me explain why that assumption is wrong, and how increased wages actually HELP Amazon.

First, the vast majority of the products sold by Amazon are produced by slaves, or people so close to being slaves that there is no real difference. Yep, most of the stuff sold by Amazon is made in China. Second, most of the things sold by Amazon that are NOT made in China are actually being sold by other companies and Amazon is the agent, not the seller. I know, I used to sell lots of stuff on there. Third, many Amazon warehouses are subcontracted out. A company owned by my brother provides services to some of those locations. Fourth, Amazon has more robots working in its facilities than it does employees. Lastly, Amazon doesn’t employ many workers for the amount of goods sold, compared to most retail sellers.

All of this adds up to $15 an hour hurting Amazon’s competitors more than it helps the workers at Amazon. In fact, Amazon’s purchase of robotics manufacturer Kiva Systems for $775 million is a bargain. When you divide that amount by the 200,000 robots they have, the cost works out to less than $4 thousand per robot.

Amazon sends about 7 billion packages a year with annual revenue of around $100 billion a year.

This warehouse near Orlando covers 59 football fields, has 800 human and several thousands of robotic workers. Every bit of it is controlled and optimized for efficiency by computers.

This is the future of the American worker. Just like Henry Ford’s invention of the assembly line made manufacturing more efficient, robotics will do the same for most other industries. Fifteen dollars an hour won’t matter when three quarters of the workforce has been replaced by machines.

Labor is pricing itself out of the market. Companies like WalMart can’t compete with Amazon unless they pay less than $15. This causes employees to say things like:

“They don’t care about the associates [entry-level employees such as cashiers] at all. They just want more money for themselves,”

Of course, Amazon has half as many employees. Their physical locations are in rural areas with lower costs. They have less employee theft. All of this means that, in order to compete and keep prices low, costs (including wages) must also be kept low.

If, as an employee, a person wants to make more money, you have to produce more value than any potential employee who could replace you. Why should you expect a raise just because you have been working for an employer for 20 years, if you are still the same employee they hired 20 years ago? What skills have you picked up in the past two decades? Have you gone to school? Learned new skills? Made yourself more valuable? If not, they why would your employer want to pay you more, when they could hire someone with the same skills and education for less?

Or replace you with a robot?

By Divemedic, ago

More inflationary signs

In yet another sign that inflation is climbing, the latest numbers from the Producer Price Index (PPI) show that the cost of production has increased 6.2% from last year.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Produce Price Index is a measure of what it costs to produce products. It is a measure of what it costs a business to create something, as opposed to the CPI, which is a measure of what it costs to consume something.

Of course, it is more a measure of the value of the dollar than it is a measure of cost. The dollar is worth 6.2% less than it was last year. This means that the dollar will lose half of its purchasing power each 11 years.

By Divemedic, ago

Wait for the appeal

The courts have finally put a stop to the government forcing landlords to absorb the cost of their unconstitutional lockdowns.

That is good, because the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was also getting involved, claiming that collecting the debt from tenants who shafted their landlord was also illegal.

According to the CFPB’s analysis and other data:

Millions of families are at risk of being evicted: In December 2020 about 18 percent of renter households were behind on their rent, which means nearly 9 million households at risk of eviction. In a typical year, there are about 900,000 evictions nationwide. Over 27 percent of households with annual income under $25,000 were behind on their rent.
Stopping evictions saves lives: Research shows that COVID-19 infection rates and mortality rates were higher when eviction moratoria were removed. The CFPB’s rule will help ensure that more renters are able to take advantage of their protections and avoid eviction.
Evictions increase racial inequality: Black and Hispanic households are more than twice as likely to be tenants than white households, and they are also twice as likely to be behind on rental payments as of December 2020, according to a March CFPB report . Evictions impose substantial costs on individuals, families, and children, and having an eviction on your record can make it much harder to find a new rental property. Even an eviction filing can make it impossible for a family to locate new housing.

You see what the real reason is? Blacks are refusing to pay rent at a higher rate than whites, so evictions are racist.

The appeal will come in 3…2…1…

By Divemedic, ago

Killing the rental market

There is a nationwide eviction moratorium. There is a push to eliminate security deposits. It sounds great, but now the landlord has to file a claim for any damages done to the property by the tenant. This increases costs and risk to the landlord.

Now the newest thing is laws that prohibit credit checks, using a prospective tenant’s rental and credit history in making application decisions, and makes the risks of being a landlord too great for most small businesses.

I know that my wife and I have decided that if this sort of thing comes to pass, the amount that we would have to increase rent to compensate for the added risk would price our rental out of the market. This means that we would no longer be making enough money to make up for the higher risk that this would entail. For that reason, we would likely not renew tenants’ leases, clean the properties up, and then sell them. I don’t think that we would be alone in that.

It’s like the left is deliberately destroying the country.

By Divemedic, ago

CDC’s job is to destroy businesses

The cruise industry has been stuck in limbo for the past year. They have been waiting for CDC guidance on exactly how, and with what procedures, cruise operators will be permitted to sail again. All they have gotten for months is a constant stream of changing rules, empty promises, and conflicting regulations.

If you can’t beat them, move elsewhere.

Cruise lines all over the world are finding ways to begin sailing again. The biggest way is for ships to either “cruise to nowhere,” in other words leave, sail around, and then return to the same port, or they set sail from a port, hit several ports within the same nation, then return.

Already, cruises have popped up in Singapore and will begin in May in Israel, countries where virus rates are low and vaccine rates are high. The UK recently determined ocean voyages for domestic passengers could resume in May, leading lines such as P&O, Cunard, Fred. Olsen, MSC, Princess and Viking to announce domestic, “round Britain” cruises exclusively for UK residents.

The United States cannot allow this, because of a pair of little known laws that were passed over a century ago in order to guarantee the profits of the robber barons and their railroad empires: The Passenger vehicle Service Act and the Jones Act.

The Passenger Vehicle Service Act states that passengers traveling between U.S. ports must do so on ships that were built in the U.S., are owned by U.S. companies (ensuring that they pay US taxes), and that adhere to the strict U.S. Coast Guard regulations to be registered (flagged) in the United States. The Jones Act prohibits the transport of goods between two U.S. ports by ships that are not owned, built and flagged in the U.S.

What this means is that ships can’t cruise from one port to the other within the US, and the CDC is no longer allowing ships to go from any US port to another country, because COVID.

Since they cannot cruise out of ports in the US, cruise lines are taking their show on the road. Crystal Cruises is sailing out of the Bahamas, Celebrity is sailing at least one ship out of St Maarten, and Royal Caribbean will soon be sailing out of the Bahamas. Plans are already in the works to homeport more than one cruise line out of Cozumel.

The longer the CDC delays on its industry guidance, the more this trend will continue. As long as cruising remains on-pause within the United States due to the CDC’s long-standing No-Sail order, it is clear that more and more lines will go abroad to restart operations. And that will hurt U.S. homeports and American workers.

The United States is increasingly making themselves irrelevant in the cruise industry. Since 9/11, the primary focus for the cruise industry has been American cruise ports that do not require domestic flights for a majority of passengers. These homeports and their related itineraries haven’t measurably changed in two decades.

All of that is changing because of Government action, or rather, inaction. Until the CDC begins working more proactively with the industry, providing technical guidance on restart that still has yet to be delivered to cruise lines nearly five months after they were promised, things will not improve.

The lines are continuing to seek dialogue with the government, to no avail. Cruise lines are also subject to extensive regulations from the CDC that do not apply to other businesses or forms of travel, including hotel, resort or airline industries. Many of the protocols put in place by the cruise lines, like a vaccination mandate for both guests and workers, as well as robust and mandatory PCR testing, are not required for other forms of travel or high risk industries.

By Divemedic, ago