Month: April 2021

Small business owners can’t compete with unemployment payments because they don’t have the money

The posts show up on my Facebook feed once every other week or so–usually white letters on a black background. Something to the effect of: Business owners are complaining that workers won’t come back because they make more on unempleyment than working. Maybe if they paid a living wage, that wouldn’t be a problem. The posts assume that business owners are rolling in cash and withhold reasonable pay so they can enrich themselves.

People over profits, donchya know?

In many cases, it’s not nearly that simple

In a completely unrelated story, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti is proposing a programe to award 5,000 small businesses $5,000 a piece to help them defray the impact of the Covid on their businesses and try to keep them afloat.

“Your city is going to have your back so you can reopen, hire up, and spread the wealth,” Mayor Garcetti said during his state of the city address.

Camille Perry, who runs bars in Sherman Oaks and Hollywood said the money won’t save her businesses. She’s amassed $90.000 in back rent amid the shutdown. She suggests that the city provide tax breaks to landlords willing to negotiate leases with their tenants.

Another business owner, Atika Enciso, runs a studio called Studio Blo. The pandemic and resulting shutdowns caused her revenue to fall from $165,000 a month to $20,000. She has $80,000 in debt and has changed locations to cut her overhead (and ability to make money).

The article references a survey from WalletHub that says more than 50 million businesses report it’ll take a year or more to return to pre-pandemic sales. In the meantime, many have significant debt. In LA County alone, almost 15,000 businesses closed since the beginning of the pandemic. Half of them will probably never re-open.

Amazon, Google, and other enormous companies aren’t the ones saying they can’t afford to compete with enhanced unemployment benefits. Most of the complainers are small businesses hanging on by a thread, with owners who mortgaged their financial futures just to stay in business. According to a Lending Tree survey from last September, three quarters of small business owners have taken on debt to manage financial losses–and that’s before the shutdowns spurred by the wintertime surge in cases.

In short, most small business owners would love to be in position to pay more than unemp[oyment pays to bring their employees back. But they’re struggling to keep the lights on, let alone taking on the additional overhead of bringing staff back in anticipation of income.

The smug, arrogant pronouncement that these people are somehow greedy and evil for not paying at least $15.00 an hour is condescending and tone deaf. It’s borne of a political bigotry that doesn’t count as bigotry–the vision of small business owners spending their ample spare time in a vault filled with cash, rolling around on it like Demi Moore in Indecent Exposure.

A typical small business owner rolling around the money bed while their employees starve

It’s insulting and belittles people whose finances have been decimated by the pandemic, many of them people of color in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

They deserve more than than condemnation masquerading as compassion.

The “world’s # 1 race baiter” uses a mentally ill man to make a stupid point

Tariq Nasheed bills himself on Twitter as “the world’s #1 race baiter. I bait racists & expose them.” He’s a journalist and a documentary maker. In his effort to bait racists earlier this week, he posted video taken by another person of a Holiday Inn Express. The video is uncomfortable, as the employee loses his everything as he tries to fix the reservation error.

https://twitter.com/tariqnasheed/status/1386455776936427522?s=20

The video doesn’t include any racist content. Mr. Nasheed’s intent in posting it is apparently to get people angry at him and react, so he can call them racists and white supremacists. Though by pointing out that the employee is white and the customer is black, there’s at least a hint that the reaction is racist.

Among the responses is a reddit post supposedly made by the employee, explaining that he’s bipolar and that he has schizoaffective disorder. Based on one of the posts, he also says he drove drunk and worked drunk (though it’s unclear whether he’s saying he was drunk at the time the video was shot). He’s quit his job and is suicidal according to the post. The posts also allege that the customer used an anti-gay slur against the employee.

None of this is confirmed.

I asked Mr. Nasheed to clarify whether anything in the original video was racist and he didn’t respond. But he did respond to criticism by saying that white supremacists are “using the man’s disorder as a way to project their anti-Black racism.” And when news coverage was sympathetic to the worker, they were spinning the story against the black customer who was somehow the target of racial aggression because of the registration screw-up.

I didn’t see harassment on the video. The customer was a kind of a schmuck, but we’ve all been schmucks a time or two when frustrated by service issues. He was a much bigger schmuck for posting the video and Mr. Nasheed is a colossal schmuck for posting it and using it to bait people into what he considers to be racist response.

The employee isn’t well-matched to his job and would probably do better somewhere else. For all I know he’s bad at his job, but by stripping the original tweet, Mr. Nasheed doesn’t allow us to see that.

What he does allow us to see is him using video of a mentally ill person under pressure to bait people into responding. The person’s struggle is immaterial to him if he can start a name-calling contest so he can pronounce people responding as white supremacists. In short, he’s acting like an asshole and seems to enjoy it.

When you act like an asshole and people call you on it, that’s not racism.

There’s real, damaging racism in this country and it’s doing material harm to people of color. The customer in the video was mildly inconvenienced getting a room and skin color appeared to be immaterial. By trying to elevate that video to something horrific, Mr. Nasheed helps no one. All he does is inflame people who might otherwise listen.

It may be coincidental that his movie, Buck Breaking, which he calls “The most important documentary film of the year” is being released soon.

https://twitter.com/tariqnasheed/status/1383894372421275652?s=20

Picking a fight with the white satan will inevitably draw defenders to him, where they’ll see the tweet about his movie pinned to the top of his feed. Seems kind of capitalistic to me–the worst kind of capitalism.

It’s important to listen to people of color–to not dismiss their complaints. But it’s also important to consider context because the moment we stop looking critically at accusations, we give people like Mr. Nasheed power. As shown by his conduct, he’ll use that power to accumulate his own power by baiting people into what he imagines is more than racism, but white supremacy.

I may be a white supremacist for saying so, but he’s as much a part of the problem as the racists he purports to bait.

The CDC loosens guidance for vaccinated people, but only a little

According to the CDC, when I’m fully vaccinated, I can return to a normal life. Starting next Monday, I head into a new post-pandemic life. My Moderna vaccine has a 94.1% efficacy rate and if I fall into that 5.9%, odds are very good that my Covid experience will be very mild, if I notice it at all. And that’s on top of the statement by CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky that fully vaccinated people are very unlikely to spread the Covid to other people, in the unlikely event that they got it.

Because of all this, I can safely engage in the following low-risk activities without masking or social distancing:

  • Walk, run, or bike outdoors alone (which I’ve been doing without a mask since the beginning) or with members of my own household.
  • Attend a small, outdoor gathering with other fully vaccinated family and friends.
  • Attenda small, outdoor activity with fully vaccinated or unvaccinated people.
  • Dine at an outdoor restaurant with friends from multiple households.

The first two of those things I could do before being fully vaccinated. It’s like a veil has lifted. To quote Aretha Franklin from the Blue Brothers: “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!”

Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!

This is a list of things the CDC suggests I can do as long as I wear a mask and remain at least six feet away from others–in spite of the fact that I’m almost certain not to get the Covid and I’m unlikely to transmit it even if I do catch it. I could do all of these things before, but they would be considered moderate or high risk.

  • Attend a crowded outdoor event, like a live performance, parade, or sports event (excluding a Tampa Bay Rays game, which is never crowded).
  • Visit a barber or a hair salon.
  • Go to an uncrowded indoor shopping center or museum.
  • Ride public transit with limited occupancy.
  • Attend a small, indoor gathering or fully vaccinated and unvaccinated people from multiple households.
  • Go to an indoor movie theater.
  • Attend a full-capacity worship service.
  • Sing in an indoor chorus.
  • Eat at an indoor restaurant or bar.
  • Participate in an indoor, high-intensity exercise class.

The CDC says it “cannot provide the specific risk level for every activity in every community. It is important to consider your own personal situation and the risk to you, your family, and your community before venturing out.” I’m assuming this means that if you want to be more cautious than this, you should, rather than the other way around.

This is the extrapolated list of activities that weren’t included on the second list, that are presumably not something I should do, even though I’m almost certain not to get infected or to pass any infection on:

  • Attend a crowded indoor event, like a live performance or sporting event (again, excluding a Rays game, which is never crowded).
  • Go to a crowded indoor shopping center or museum.
  • Ride public transit (presumably include commercial airplanes) with full occupancy.
  • Attend a larger indoor or outdoor gathering fully vaccinated and unvaccinated people from multiple households.
Rays games. Safe for everyone.

When the Texas Rangers allowed full occupancy for their home opener, there was supposed to be mass carnage. It didn’t happen. Flying was supposed to cause mass carnage. It hasn’t happened.

Last week, Los Angeles County Public Health Director Dr. Barbara Ferrer said that the vaccination is like a fence around a garden. The vaccination is like a very good fence that will keep a rabbit out.

But, to quote Dr. Ferrer, “What if there are suddenly hundreds of thousands of rabbits? So many rabbits that they climb on top of each other to get over the fence.”

Imagine this scene from World War Z, only with Covid bunnies. Now wear a mask and socially distance, vaccine or not.

There aren’t hundreds of thousands of ravenous covid bunnies in the US. The infection and death rates are both where they were in October and are likely to continue falling. And even if there are hundreds of thousands of Covid bunnies, the vaccines are like hundreds of thousands of Glenn Closes.

Come here, bunnies. I got something for you.

Staying inside and limiting activities made sense in the October-January timeframe, the data and the science are telling a different story now. And in spite of repeated forecasts of doom and rabbit infestations starting with the Super Bowl and encompassing every re-opening since, outside small pockets, the numbers aren’t there to justify substantial limits for people who are vaccinated.

Sometimes something good’s better than something easy

I had this morning’s post all written–a story about a self-appointed guardian of social justice slaying dragons on Twitter by taking aim at someone who couldn’t really defend himself. It felt like justice.

It was easy.

And then I went for a run this morning and that was easy, too, as runs go. Five and a half miles. A couple of weeks ago I struggled to walk two and a half. Last week, I spent most of the day in bed feeling for all the world like something the cat coughed up.

As I ran, I thought that surely there could be something more worthwhile to spend words on than an Internet bully.

Speaking out against injustice is important and worthwhile. It’s the only way important change happens. It’s something I’ve felt compelled to do in the time I’ve posted every day from this blog. It’s gotten me a lot of traffic.

But it’s also turned everything into a crusade and when all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail.

Hammer Time

And by the time I got back from the run, I’d decided to write about something else. I’d decided that this morning, someone else could point out injustice. After all, I just received the gift of running today. It was reasonably cool out, one of a dwindling number of days that’ll be true before the summer heat and humidity set in. I fell into a easy pace, if not a fast one–and the tension I usually feel around mile three came and went more easily than most days.

Then I came back and took a shower and drank some cold water. And that first swallow of cold water after a run is the epitome of a blessing. I usually don’t drink it right away so I can savor the anticipation. And so I can weigh myself at the lowest point of the day, before I begin to rehydrate.

There’s very little better than stepping on a scale and knowing that whatever your number is, it’s in a decent zone, headed in the right direction. And then that cool water hits the back of your throat.

The pause that refreshes

Those moments are important, too.

Injustice will never leave the world. It comes with human nature and random chance. And I may write about the Twitter warrior making Holiday Inn Express lobbies safe for bullying customers another day. But that can wait.

Sometimes it’s important to stop and mess the roses, or savor the post-run bottle of water.

Starting the day recognizing a small blessing is a great thing to do for yourself. The crap will be there any time you want to look at it.

I’m pretty sure Jesus wouldn’t applaud pissing on liberals

There are probably people well in front of me on the odds sheet for getting into heaven that voted for Donald Trump. I don’t have the tools to judge.

Not everyone is so uncertain. I saw this collection of bumper stickers or magnets yesterday when I drove my heathen ass to Publix to get banana and blueberries for breakfast.

In a free society, you get to bastardize Bill Watterson’s Calvin character all you want. If he doesn’t care, neither do I. You get to celebrate Donald Trump pissing on liberals. And you get to pledge your fealty to both Jesus and Donald Trump.

I would support you doing all those things.

But this particular collection of messages implies that rooting for a guy who urinates (metaphorically, of course) on liberals is consistent with what Jesus preaches. I also suspect that a liberal would be defined as anyone who provide unquestioning support for Trump.

I doubt Jesus would support pissing on liberals, even metaphorically. A lot of those people who seem to deserve being pissed on, the liberals, are also very devout and know Jesus better than most of the rest of us.

Put another way, if following Donald Trump as your President is on a par with following Jesus as your savior–if you can’t do the latter without doing the former–then I have no desire for heaven. If pissing on liberals is required for following Jesus, then I will gladly renounce my allegiance to Him.

I refuse to worship anyone, even God, if it requires my allegiance to someone who gleefully pisses on people assumed to be inferior.

I’m not a great Christian. My flaws are legion. My only hope in front of an infinitely just God is that he might chose to extend me his grace. If not for that, I’m sunk. I sinned enough before breakfast today to disqualify myself from eternal bliss.

I’ve messed up enough to understand just how much I’ve messed up.

Because I know where I stand in front of God, I’m not eager to proclaim judgement on his other people. But if liberals are, by definition, excluded, then I have no business being there.

There’s an old joke about St. Peter giving the tour of heaven. One of the newly admitted points to a giant walled off area that seems to rise infinitely, so they ask, “What’s that?”

“Oh,” St. Peter says, “that’s the <insert congregation here>. They like to think they’re the only ones here.”

Maybe it’s not religious affiliations that should be the target of that joke.

A little stressed about re-entry? Be kind to yourself.

My Saturday morning routine used to be getting a coffee at either Dunkin Donuts or 7-Eleven and then going to my men’s small group, where we’d sit around and talk about Jesus and stuff for an hour and a half or so.

I did that yesterday for the first time in almost 14 months. I’ve had both shots and all of them are vaccinated. Though my official Covid parole date is May 3, it was worth the almost non-existent risk.

I thought I might feel some stress about, you know, actually being around people again, but it was very nice.

A very successful Facebook friend posted yesterday that they’ve irritated two friends because even though this person’s been paroled, they’re nervous about partying like it’s 1999 again (or even 2019). Implied in their post was the possibility that they were somehow wrong for all of this.

Maybe you aren’t ready for this yet. That’s okay.

They aren’t. And if you’re a little hesitant to dive back in, you aren’t either–even if that means your friends aren’t thrilled with you.

The last 14 months are like nothing anyone in this country has ever seen. It’s been 1918, wrapped in 1929, with a bow of 1968 all wrapping it together. And that’s before you throw in first attack on a major political symbol in Washington, DC since 1812.

Other than Zoom calls, most of us have weathered this perfect storm alone. The guys I saw yesterday were the first friends I’ve physically seen since the beginning of last March. All of that’s going to leave a mark.

That mark could be a giant rumspringa–a massive orgy of public togetherness, partying, door knob licking, and even some literal orgies that make the roaring twenties look tame in comparison.

Welcome to the post-Covid world.

For some, it’ll feel like venturing out of what’s left of your house after the category-five hurricane passed.

And for some, depending on the time and circumstance, it may vary between those two massively opposite poles.

We’ve all be through a lot. Some–people who’ve lost a job or someone close to them to Covid–have been through even more.

People react differently to stress.

So if the prospect of re-entering that big insecure world with all those people doesn’t thrill you, that’s okay. It’ll come when the time is right. You’re not a freak or a hermit. You’re just managing stress a little differently.

Like everything else having to do with this dumpster fire, it’s an opportunity to be kind to yourself.

Fibro Saturday: Doing our best, which is always enough

There’s a guy named Erik Stolhanske–and actor. He played Rabbit on Super Troopers. He’s also in Plyometrics, the hardest cardio workout in the Beachbody P90X workout series. When I started doing Plyo, it took about six weeks before I could complete it without having to stop for a rest because of nausea.

Plyo is jump training. There’s plenty of jumping up and down, which is harder for Erik because he uses a prosthetic leg.

The guy in front is jumping around on a prosthetic leg.

At one point, Tony Horton tells everyone in the workout what to do and Erik says, “I’ll do my best.”

Tony says, “Did you hear that? He said he’s gonna do his best, and that’s always enough.”

This is a fitness and business superstar. He’s written a couple books and he probably commands enough in speaking fees that he could work 10 days or less and clear more than either of us make in a year.

Tony Horton. Professional Fit Guy.

I’ve had two bumpy weeks in a row. The Moderna second shot kicked my ass soundly this week. Much of the day Tuesday I didn’t know what my fever was because I didn’t care. I was in bed under all the blankets and knowing the number wouldn’t have mattered.

It’s Friday as I write this part and though I went for a run today and worked out, I feel like the product of a human/zombie mating. PS — I feel better than if I got the Covid and died. It’s a matter of perspective.

The reality of life is that I might never feel as well as I did two weeks ago again. Or I might. I might even go back to normal. Each day is its own unit of one day. I can’t compare any day to any other because my floor and ceiling move based on what the fibro allows. I ran long last Saturday, but the 2 mile walk the previous Monday was actually a lot harder because I’d crashed.

Both of those days, I did my best. One day was glorious. The other was a short, horrible, death crawl.

For me to maintain my sanity, I can’t compare the two. Neither should you.

This is a long game. The being we share our bodies with doesn’t have a pattern, or a set of rules. It does what it will. Maybe it’ll go away for a while. Or maybe it’ll kick our asses.

Anytime we do our best, it’s always enough. And we have to be proud and satisfied with our best, even if it’s trivial to others. They don’t know what we’re going through. And we won’t even know until we get to that day.

And if it’s good enough for the bad ass fitness freak, it should be good enough for us, too.

If this is your best today, count it as a win and come back tomorrow.

Links and stuff: Once again, none this week. The vaccine kicked my butt hard. This is what I could get done and that’s okay.

2021 sucks. Let’s talk about kickball and banana seats.

This week, we had the Derek Chauvin verdict, another contentious shooting in Columbus, Ohio, and news of surging Covid numbers overseas.

And I don’t care.

At least not today.

Someone on Twitter posted a picture of monkey bars, back when you could call them that–back when you could have them without getting a summons from every personal-injury attorney in the area code.

I responded with this.

The truth is, I loved those red balls we had for gym. So did my classmates. As much as we loved baseball and football on television, it was clear that kickball was the greatest of all sports, and though we were good at it, David Campacharo was the best kickball play on the face of the earth–everyone knew that. When it came to kickball, there was nothing he couldn’t do.

When he’d kick that ball, there was a satisfying pong sound that meant the ball would go a long way. And when he pitched, somehow no one could kick the ball solidly. (And he didn’t bounce the ball when he pitched, the way that cheater Glenn Mossy did, either.)

Standard regulation kickball ball

We had a way of dealing with cheaters, too. In kickball, if someone hit you with the ball while you were running the bases, you were out. It was a darn shame–a darn shame–if you accidentally got pegged in the face while running the bases. That was also the plan if someone did something to the girl you were sweet on. For me, if someone screwed with Julianne Thomas or Debbie Moore, they were getting a kickball in the head.

We knew–know–that kickball was the next big professional sport, and while David Campacharo was the best player, we were all pretty good, too. We’d all be rich and famous from playing kickball. By the time we got to junior high, we’d be too busy playing kickball to be bothered with school. (Even if that Miss Murray was like really pretty in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Just like Yeoman Rand on Star Trek.)

You might not care about the red kick ball or the revelation of David Campacharo on the kickball field (but the field behind Lincoln School in Schenectady has never seen anything like him). But your childhood certainly had your own version of this type of story, whether it was your bike, your horse, or the games you played in your back yard.

My parents got me a Rollfast bike with a banana seat like this, the greatest gift ever. And the skid marks on the sidewalks of Robinson Street were legendary.

Especially in 2021, we can’t spend every minute in the present, with all the problems of today. Sometimes we have to be little kids, whether that means coloring, watching that stupid show you loved as a kid, or just remembering the red rubber balls you used in gym class. (They were a damn sight better than the volleyballs we played dodgeball with.)

No one’s childhood is perfect. But mine was close enough.

It’s not a bad thing to spend some time there.

Nicholas Reardon isn’t Derek Chauvin, and he shouldn’t be made into him

Imagine you’re a cop, called to a scene after a report of someone trying to stab people at a home. When you pull up and get out of your car, a woman–maybe a girl, pursues one person. In spite of your telling her “Get down,” four times, she charges another person with a knife, then draws the knife to attack that person.

What do you do?

Tuesday, the cop reacted to the perceived threat and fired four times, killing 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant, He arguably saved the life of the girl in the pink outfit.

It’s unclear whether Officer Nicholas Reardon’s actions followed all the training and policies the Columbus Police Department has. It’s not clear whether protocol and criminal statutes would’ve required him to use a taser or other non-lethal force. (The taser is usually on the non-dominant side, and would require the officer to reach across to retrive it, adding time to any response.) Investigators will determine whether there’s cause to pursue criminal charges against Reardon.

LeBron James didn’t wait for the investigation. He tweeted “You’re next. #accountability” then removed the tweet. It’s an overstep on his part, but possibly not an unreasonable one. The rest of us need to take that step back, too.

Officer Reardon isn’t Derek Chavin. He didn’t slowly kill someone who wasn’t showing any threat. He’s not Kimberly Potter. He didn’t shoot someone dead when he should have and, at least arguably, wanted to tase them. He’s someone who showed up at a scene and reacted. Although you can wonder if he’d have reacted the same way with white people, there’s nothing to indicate that his actions were shaped by race or skin color.

Mayor Andrew Ginther said, “This is a failure on the part of our community. Some are guilty but all of us are responsible.” He said an investigation will determine if Reardon was wrong, “and if he was, we will hold him accountable.”

It’s easy to parse words after the fact, especially when there’s high emotion involved. But Ginther’s words carry a slight hint that someone is guilty of a crime in this shooting. If the death is the crime, only one person can be guilty, though Ginther did follow up by saying Reardon would be held accountable if Reardon was wrong.

There’s no doubt that the shooting was a tragedy. Reardon shot and killed a teenaged girl. But he probably saved another girl–another person of color.

Pending investigation, you can make a solid case that Reardon did not engage in criminal conduct, and certainly didn’t murder Ms. Bryant.

On the other hand, it’s easy for me to writ that, as I’m not black, and I haven’t seen previous cops get every benefit of the doubt for killing someone like me.

Either way, this investigation–like all of them–must be allowed to play out and findings and potential prosecution must be based on the facts of the case and either the actions were criminal.

Emotion cannot be the guide, even if it’s well-intentioned and understandable.

Vaccination carries risk. So does living.

Just getting vaccinated doesn’t mean you won’t get the Covid. And if you do get the Covid, it doesn’t mean you won’t die. That’s what they meant when they said the vaccine was less than 100% effective.

While getting vaccinated is a personal decision, enough people aren’t getting vaccinated that the concept of herd immunity is out the window, at least for now. One of the reasons would be that you can still get the Covid even if you get vaccinated. And if my experience is a model, getting vaccinated isn’t an outstanding experience.

But that’s life.

We’re still in a hold on Johnson and Johnson vaccinations because six people out of 70 million vaccinated developed a blood clotting problem. All of them were women of child-bearing years. Which holds the greater risk? The potential that fewer than one in a million get blood clotting issues, or that people get the Covid?

Life is a dangerous, forbidding place. It’s not as bad as it was a million, a thousand, or even fifty years ago, but bad things happen. People get sick. People die. Existing comes with risk.

Somewhere along the way, we decided we were owed a risk-free existence.

Morgan & Morgan, the law firm that’s solely responsible for keeping broadcast media afloat in Tampa, once had a ten-second ad that said, “Slip and fall? Call Morgan & Morgan.” Because if you slipped and fell down, someone most likely didn’t live up to their obligation to provide you a completely risk-free experience wherever you happened to be.

Who is responsible for this outrage?!?!

We’re so risk-averse that we create bigger risks in the name of eliminating smaller risks. As the vaccines were being developed and the pharmaceutical companies asked for liability protection, there was a briefly vocal minority that said that was evil because people over profits. You have to keep the risk of lawsuit to make sure those companies will act ethically.

That may, in general, be true. But without liability protection, the vaccines would still be years away from availability.

The if one life is saved model may sound nice and make you feel virtuous, but everything has an opportunity cost. How many lives are lost because of our increasingly presumptuous decision that we’re owed a risk-free, secure life?

Yes, there is risk in getting vaccinated. You may even have a couple of days of discomfort. But absent a health condition that would result in your not being able to get the vaccine, the relative risk is lower. And the payoff is immense.