Responses to News

[jsburbidge]

1. Observed as a headline on Google News: "I Was Rejected After a Manager Looked at my LinkedIn Profile" - unlike many other things online, your LinkedIn profile is entirely under your own control. It does not track history. It is meant to be for selling yourself. If you post things which might drive off potential employers, it's your own fault.

2. A CBC article on the movie "The Green Knight" does not inspire confidence in the research skills of its author when, after a reasonable amount about the poem at second hand (interviews with academics) it references The Lord of The Rings in its last paragraph without noting that the standard edition of the poem is co-edited by Tolkien and that he did a translation of the poem into modern English.

3. Multiple stories (notably from Alberta and Ontario, but also refracted from other locations) suggest that politicians (and some people) are focussed with tunnel vision on "returning to normal" (Alberta in general, schools in Ontario). They seem not to have realized that there will be no return, but rather the establishment of a new normal; or, more likely, they are in active denial. (One way of illustrating this is to look at the UK, where opening discotheques became legal a few weeks ago but where the venues are floundering in uprofitability because not enough people are coming out to them. The fact that something becomes legal does not necessarily mean that enough people will start to behave as though it is 2019 for a "return to normal".) I attribute this in part to bias (governments which are conservative/mammonite will be less likely to accept change constraining economic activity), partly to geography (conservative governments have a disproportionate number of rural members, who overwhelmingly want to see the end of restrictions of any sort), and partly to a general propensity for governments of any stripe to want to push a "good news" narrative even when it means getting out in front of the facts.

(Masks are not going away for many people, even if others enthusiastically ditch them. I expect heavy vaccine mandates in the private sector, both for employees and (in places such as indoor restaurants, gyms, and the like) customers. I expect the profitability of running a cinema to become very iffy. I expect workplaces where coming in to work while sick in any way becomes a major social blunder and possible disciplinary issue rather than a signal of dedication to the job. I am sure there are consequences I do not foresee; the current labour market suggests other changes.)

Comments

[jsburbidge]

My guess with regard to commercial real estate is that it may have fewer defenders than you might think.

My previous employer was actively looking at moving tech workers to a hybrid work model two years before the pandemic to reduce real estate prices. That was one large bank (TD). It wasn't going anywhere as far as I could tell (when I left in 2019) but not for want of trying. I fully expect them to be accelerating those attempts under current conditions.

My current employer is taking the opportunity to give up the lease on four floors of our building and merge those of us from those floors into four other floors based on a hybrid two-days-on, two-days-off (Fridays optional) model for coming in vs. working from home. (This means not returning to the office at all until at least November.) This is a second large bank (RBC).

That's not just indicative, that's two major tenants in commercial real estate with a huge share in the system as it is, as they're also representative of those who have loans out to REITs and other commercial landlords. I suspect they're willing to take the generalized risks of a commercial real estate quasi-meltdown in order to limit their own costs, and may be expecting to gain advantage for themselves in the medium term, even if they take a haircut on loan defaults now.

Reports coming out on the labour market suggest that even employers who want to force everyone back will have problems. Commuting is going to drop willy-nilly.

(I do wonder what the TTC will do about its pass system. A two-days-a-week body of commuters will pay hob with their model which is designed (unlike the GO model) not to save money for commuters but to avoid losing the TTC money.)

I expect masking to be driven not only by Delta but also by "gee, it was nice not to get a cold or the flu last year".

I have no idea when the bills come due in politics. I suspect that a situation where there is no real return to the old Normal to make worse the nascent rifts in the Canadian Conservative coalition, as it is likely to put moderates and more extreme members at each other's throats over appropriate responses. The governmental legitimacy level ... let's see where we are in six months.

[graydon]

It could well be!

I think public transit is going to convulse; do we, for example, now actually need the TTC downtown relief line? the opportunity to not spend the money is going to be intensely attractive. Grand River Transit publishes rolling-average ridership numbers, and current usage is around a third of the pre-pandemic numbers. Did they really need the light rail line?

The TTC has a long history of making the monthly passes only worthwhile if you are a M-F commuter. I suspect they're going to go right on doing that. I would hope there isn't going to be a fare increase to make up the revenue short fall, because people won't cope with ten dollar TTC tickets.

I see so few people in masks that I wonder how much connection to "didn't get a cold" people are making. I hope you are right.

You being right about the commercial real estate would be excellent; there's a lot of volume that could be put to other uses involved. (Though if I'm feeling cynical it might be the case that the cost of retrofitting adequate ventilation -- which is not known to be possible without requiring hearing protection -- is going to have an affect on this, too.)

I figure the whole question of mandatory vaccination is going to be interesting, and probably really interesting in six months.

[jsburbidge]

The TTC historically has priced its passes so that you break even if and only if you take more than 10 trips a week. Somebody who lives in the inner suburbs who uses TTC Monday to Friday but uses a car on the weekends might buy a pass for convenience, but subsudizes the TTC. (There was also a discounted pass model which was offered through employers which made a 10-trip-a-week model attractive, but it involved committing for a year .... which meant that you'd be buying a pass for months when you were on vacation.)

Passes made more sense back when every trip was a new fare. With the two-hour model they have now, the number of extra trips a week, which a pass made possible without extra cost, has dropped precipitously. The TTC seems to have been backed kicking and screaming into the model by the fact that the attempt to model the old transfer system (predictably) ran into implementation issues. (I wouldn't have wanted to program it to allow for handling all the edge conditions, especially when a bus or streetcar is rerouted.)

What they do with Presto is equally revealing. The GO has simple limit: if you go over N trips on a given line, further trips on that line are free for the rest of the month. The limit corresponds to the old pass cost. The TTC has explicitly refused to follow this model.

There are good climate-related policy reasons for extending transit regardless of the drop in ridership. (Part of that drop is not WFH but people taking cars.) I don't expect enlightenment from the Ford government, but subways are something in which Ford has a lot of ego invested, which may do as much to preserve the relief line.

(We're seeing evidence in polls that people are becoming actively angry with the wilfully unvaccinated, especially where their presence leads to stricter protocols being enforced. The Ford government is currently anti-mandate but I don't think that will last under public pressure.)

[graydon]

There are excellent climate related reasons to get rid of diesel busses entirely, sure. And to prefer even the buses to cars. But I don't think that's what's going to happen. The post-Harris-slow-descent-into-madness TTC exists to punish the poor for being poor more than it exists to move people around. It doesn't know how to be a transit system anymore.

So I will hope for the subway AND the drainage fixes downtown.

My expectation is that the Ford government will stay anti-mandate; it's a core right wing touchstone now. Dougie has not lost his political ambitions. At best, we'll get something mostly useless like the sick days.

Me, I want smallpox rules for COVID vaccinations. If we do get a federal election and a solid liberal majority hopefully we'll get that.