Re: Sebby is a dumbass
 

Growing up around union workers, this stuff is just assumed for me, including having some sense (even if a 30 years out of date sense) of just how enormous the wage differentials are. My union relatives had decent homes in decent burbs with decent cars in front of them. They listened to the Talking Heads. The types I knew who were non-union doing the same thing lived in trailer parks or rundown apartments and listened to Black Sabbath.

Re: Sebby is a dumbass
 

Charlie Baker is an ass.

Re: Which side are you on, boys?
 

In my experience, it's the "I won't check emails while I'm out" group that has a hard time taking a break from their job, which is why the need the hard and fast rule. Others are capable of low-level monitoring and distributing without it being a major source of stress.

Personally, I'm going to be looking at my phone for stuff anyway, so it's a pretty small thing to monitor email too.

Re: Sebby is a dumbass
 

From a purely stimulative point of view, I'm not sure it makes any difference whether a dollar gets spent on food or a Canyonero. Of course, if no dollars get spent on Canyoneros, you don't get a Canyonero industry maybe you want one. for reasons beyond stimulus. On the other hand, the nature of discretionary income is that there's discretion, which means that person can also choose to save.

Re: Sebby is a dumbass
 

JFC, this makes no sense at all. If the government pays wages to non-union workers, they have money to spend that they wouldn't otherwise.

When the government spends $100 million, that money goes somewhere. It doesn't just disappear. The argument all of you are making is that if you think of the different ways the money can be spent (low, non-union wages; higher, union wages; materials; land acquisition; equipment; salaries to managements; profit to capitalists), of all of them the one that ripples through the economy and has the most cumulative beneficial impact is the higher, union wages. Maybe that's so.

The basic intuition is that money that gets paid to the middle class gets spent again and circulates through the economy, but money that gets paid to the wealthy just gets put in a bank account (where it doesn't disappear, but gets reinvested by a bank with some positive impacts -- just not as much as with wages). I AGREE WITH THIS SO ALL OF YOU CAN STOP EXPLAINING TO ME AS IF I DISAGREE.

Maybe -- maybe -- it's true that middle-class wages are more effective stimulus than lower-class wages, but I doubt it, and if they are it's *not* because the lower-class spends 0. They spend everything they make.

I suspect that the biggest reason why union projects are more effective stimulus is that they are more expensive, and if you think that the government is going to spend whatever it takes to solve given problems instead of spending a certain amount on whatever projects are next in line, then you get more infrastructure spending with union jobs. I agree! I suspect government spending is more often driven by demand for specific projects, rather than Congress's assessment in the abstract of how much to spend in different categories. But that's not an answer to the question I started with, or the comment Sebby made that I reacted to.

Re: Sebby is a dumbass
 

That's the ostensible rationale, but it's also about the gains to politicians from being about to hand out the work, which, as you say, comes with its own effective taxes.

My grandfather told me that the only two organizations that ever did anything for him in his life were the Democratic Party and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. He was an Elk, too, but that was different.

Re: Sebby is a dumbass
 

It does more for the economy than having that army sitting idle and getting paid nothing.

Re: Sebby is a dumbass
 

A real apples-to-apples comparison would show a smaller delta than you get comparing wages in NJ to national wages. Unions are stronger in places with higher wages and higher costs of living. But, point taken.

Re: Which side are you on, boys?
 

I look at email too. If your auto-reply says, "I am on vacation and am not checking emails -- call me if you need me," that doesn't keep you from checking. But I try very hard not to respond, and usually I succeed. Once you respond, people think you are on email or miss that you are on vacation and just keep emailing you, and then it's even harder not to respond.

Re: Sebby is a dumbass
 

Right. If you want to spend a government dollar and ensure that it gets spent on current consumption and not saved, give it to the poorest first.

Re: Which side are you on, boys?
 

The very last thing I'd want is people to choose to call me, though. I take your point that they don't do it lightly, but still, I'm not encouraging that.

If my auto-reply says "I may take longer than normal to respond" they don't call me and I get to decide whether what they need is worth further interruption of my vacation and not them.

Btw: None of this is criticism. Do what works for you. I definitely know people who have a strict "I'm not checking emails" policy because they can't disengage if they don't. Good for them.

Re: Sebby is a dumbass
 

A friend of mine who owns a company here with the word "manufacturing" in it's descriptor just acquired a company in Ohio, and asked my spouse about what the workers there were like, culture-wise, and expectation. My husband (from Cleveland) described EXACTLY what you describe above (though he would have eliminated the music preferences). My friend was shocked at the differences of expectations of workers in the two locations.

Re: Which side are you on, boys?
 

I can't really handle the unopened email notification, so I check. I may not respond, but I generally take a look at it.

Re: Which side are you on, boys?
 

Me too. I am perpetually at zero unread emails. Which does not mean I've read them all closely. But I can't have a number there.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Also, I suspect that the chilling effect on men who plaster their not-at-all-creepy vans with inflammatory political stickers will be minimal.