Category: Business

A friend is a mid-level manager at one of the FAANG companies that enforces religious orthodoxy here in the U.S., e.g., by deplatforming those who fail to respect the rainbow flag. She expressed dismay that her division was being trimmed by 20 percent in order to shore up profits. I asked “What percentage of the people you work with aren’t worth having around even at a $0 salary because they’re either unproductive, annoying, or both?” She thought for a few moments and then answered “About 20 percent.”

So maybe the slim-down in the tech industry won’t change much.

Readers: What percentage of folks would you get rid of at your company even if these people were available at no cost to the company?

Related:

• “It’s the season of layoffs in Silicon Valley: 45,000 employees gone and it’s not over yet” (Firstpost)

“The Hidden Costs of Containerization” (prospect.org,m February 2022) was recently emailed to me by a reader. It contains some fascinating numbers:

According to data from the Marine Exchange of Southern California, as of the first week of January, there were 105 container ships backed up outside the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, by far the busiest ports in the United States. There was more cargo in the water offshore than the ports processed in all of November. Across the world, nearly 400 container vessels have piled up outside U.S. and Chinese ports, carrying 2.4 million containers.

But why? If factory output is lower due to shortages and coronapanic shutdowns, shouldn’t we actually expect there to be a smaller number of containers going through the ports and no backlog at all?

By contrast, the crisis’s big winners are the nine ocean carrier companies controlling 80 percent of global shipping, which are raking in so much money that they have no reason to fix the problems and end Valeriano’s virtual imprisonment. The price of shipping a 40-foot container from China to the United States was once around $2,000. By August, it had soared to a record $20,000, a tenfold increase. By January, rates receded, but only to around $14,000, still enough to produce incredible profits for a concentrated industry. Shippers earned $25 billion in 2020; research consultant Drewry predicted $300 billion for 2021 and 2022.

Making money is a dirty business:

Nearly all cargo ships use low-grade ship bunker diesel combustion engines to power themselves. Some of the biggest tankers can carry approximately 4.5 million gallons of fuel. Ships emit a plethora of toxic substances such as CO2, nitrous oxides, and sulfur oxides, which are known to cause acid rain. The pollution one ship emits produces the same amount of pollution as 50 million cars; emissions from just 15 ships would be the equivalent of all of the cars in the world.

Do we believe this? Cars operate perhaps 2 hours per day while ships run 24 hours per day, so we can divide 50 million by 12 = 4 million. A car engine might be producing 20 horsepower on average, so that’s 80 million horsepower continuously from 50 million cars. A big container ship uses an 80,000 horsepower engine (example: the Evergreen A-class). If we assume that the container ship uses 100 percent horsepower at all times, it can pollute more than the 50 million cars only if it produces 1,000 times as much pollution per unit of power.

The rich white people who buy all of the junk in those containers aren’t affected, of course:

Port-adjacent communities in Southern California are habitually covered in a blanket of smog emitted from ships and trucks idling in and around the ports. Yale researchers found that a 1 percent increase in vessel tonnage in port “increases pollution concentrations for major air pollutants by 0.3–0.4% within a 25-mile radius of the 27 largest ports in the United States.” Black communities are disproportionately located near ports, and Black people are more likely to be hospitalized for port-related illness.

“The communities that are being harmed by shipping activity are not evenly distributed,” said Danyluk. “It tends to be low-income communities of color … People who are already being marginalized and exploited for whatever the reason are disproportionately impacted by this activity.”

Here’s a specialized container ship docked in San Diego that everyone can love… it contains only bananas:

But why is a ship that operates in the Pacific named the Dole Atlantic?

Friends on Facebook have been celebrating a variety of companies previously condemned as “greedy” for their 20-50 percent price increases that have contributed to Bidenflation. What did these companies do to get out of the doghouse? Promise to pay for employee travel related to abortion care. “Here are the companies that will cover travel expenses for employee abortions.” (NYT):

A handful of companies have committed to helping their employees access abortion services.

Companies began to come out with policies on covering travel expenses for employees who need abortions in May, when a leaked memo from Supreme Court justices previewed their decision on the case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. This small group included Starbucks, Tesla, Yelp, Airbnb, Microsoft, Netflix, Patagonia, DoorDash, JPMorgan Chase, Levi Strauss & Co., PayPal and Reddit. Others, including Disney, Meta, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Condé Nast, joined them on Friday when the decision became final, though most of them avoided making public statements directly referencing the ruling.

“As the world’s most broadly based health care company, we strive to improve access and affordability, create healthier communities, and put health within reach for the people we serve,” Johnson & Johnson said Friday. “We also believe health care decisions are best determined by individuals in consultation with their health care provider.”

Ordinarily we assume that corporations seek to maximize profit. It is much cheaper to pay for abortion care, even if travel is involved, than to pay for parental leave and then to pay 100 percent salary for the reduced productivity of a worker with a baby at home waking him/her/zir/them up at night. But the assumption of the Righteous, who just last week were condemning these companies for “greed”, seems to be that these companies are doing the good work for altruistic/philanthropic reasons.

Yet more curious is that the folks who previously celebrated pregnant people in a rainbow of 74 different gender IDs now refer to abortion care as something only for “women”. Examples:

Women are going to die because of this horrific decision. This a cry for body autonomy, and equality itself.

Women are now second class citizens…

Are there Republicans in Congress who share the view of our [Maskachusetts] Governor Charlie Baker who will vote to protect a women’s right to choose in Congress.

I don’t want to hear from anyone about how taking away reproductive rights from women is a pro-life move.

Regardless of your views on whether abortion care should be regulated at the federal or state level (if abortion care is to be regulated at all), it seems clear that decades of progress in gender science have been wiped away by the Supreme Court.

Related:

• “Amazon will pay US staff travel expenses for abortions and other treatments” (BBC): A message to Amazon staff said that the firm will pay up to $4,000 (£3,201) in travel expenses each year for treatments not available nearby. (Why is there a limit if abortion care is important?)
• Broody hen compared to gravid human in the office (2018): Just as a broody hen negatively impacts a farmer’s productivity, a gravid human poses a significant inconvenience to her employer. That’s why companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple pay for female employees to extract and freeze their eggs. It’s great to see tech companies empowering women the same way that factory farms empower their battery hens!

From an interview with the Markus Bucher, the CEO of Pilatus (in Switzerland)….

For the first time we produced and delivered over 140 aircraft to our customers in one year, taking us virtually to the limit of our current production capacity. The enormous demand for our General Aviation aircraft, the PC-12 and PC-24, exceeds all our expectations!

The interviewer, from an in-house magazine, asks “Were our ambitious corporate goals achieved in 2021?”

2021 was a mixed year… I’m not entirely happy! Demand is incredibly positive and our finances are very health. But we work inefficiently and we remain under a lot of pressure because of the need to bypass many standardized production processes due to faulty materials and insufficient quality from our suppliers.

Readers: let me know if you can find anything similarly candid from a U.S. CEO (other than Elon Musk)!

Related:

• Santa Monica runway shortening a Swiss conspiracy?