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| Re: Source of the Haitian blood libel (1998345) | |||
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Re: Source of the Haitian blood libel |
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Posted by Peter Rosa on Sun Sep 15 12:02:56 2024, in response to Re: Source of the Haitian blood libel, posted by AlM on Sun Sep 15 11:30:49 2024. For the 17th time, WHF doesn't devastate the economy; it causes significant shifts that may result in temporary disruption.Consider the disruptions posed by the automobile, air conditioning (Phoenix and las Vegas would be small villages without it), and the airplane. Those disruptions were massively larger. Even fracking is a bigger disrupter, by suddenly making natural gas way cheaper than coal as a fuel for electric power. All those disruptions were gradual. Automobiles and air conditioning took years if not decades to become universal. On the other side of things, most cities that saw big declines in their major industries, think steel in Pittsburgh or autos in Detroit, did so over long periods of time and at least had the opportunities to adjust ... Pittsburgh did, but Detroit not so much (though most of the suburbs are okay, and Downtown is going through a big revival). What makes the situation in New York, and also in San Francisco, unprecedented is that they experienced huge disruptions almost literally overnight in March 2020. Everyone started working from home, and more importantly stayed working from home even after it became safe to return to the office [Note: as someone who kept going into his workplace all through Covid, as did many tens of millions of other workers, I have less than zero sympathy for the office workers who were too timid to return.] Of course cities other than NYC and San Francisco experienced WFH, and it's also been a factor in suburban office parks, but most other cities have more diversified economies. Not like NYC's eggs-in-one-basket economy that is/was hugely dependent on people working in Manhattan office buildings. It also didn't help that New York State and California kept Covid restrictions in place much longer than some other states. I consider that to be a mistake of absolutely massive proportions. Obviously this is overdramatizing the matter, but when I think of NYC's post-Covid economy I can't help but think of those once-thriving Western towns that became ghost towns as soon as the mine closed. |
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