People aren't being paid for every moment they remain on task. They're getting paid for works completed! They're getting paid for doing their job. They don't have to be at their desk/station/site every single moment to remain productive!
This idea that people need to be paid less if they do less work is absolute Insanity. People need to be paid a fair wage for completing jobs, whatever that may be.
People get PTO. It’s built into the cost of hiring workers. From the traffic last night, a LOT of them used vacation time, and probably generated tourism revenue as they traveled to see the eclipse.
I read an article headline yesterday claiming that it would generate $6 billion in economic output due to tourism. That would far outweigh the lost productivity.
Predictably idiotic headline. A few hours ago, before coming across this post, I visualized just such a stupid headline and chuckled to myself for thinking of such low-hanging fruit. And here it is.
A meaningless figure, mindlessly arrived at with the same abstract mathematical tools that could and should be also mentioning how much money is lost by keeping so many people poor and with hurdles, by NOT investing in education, on public health, on the environment...
But we never read these assholes talking about this in this manner, now do we?
I think we need to start giving wedgies and noogies to data nerds who generate statistics like this. It's a giod stepping off point to get us to the Butlerian Jihad.
I manage a team of 5 people. I told them all not to come in so they could go see the eclipse. I told them not to take vacation and just bill it as normal hours. Three listened to me. One took a half day. One just went and worked...
Lmao what is $700 million to the world's largest GDP. Mfing Norfolk Southern just paid out $600 million to East Palestine residents for gasing their town.
IMO NBC News is right, and the commenter is being histrionic.
Like it or not, but we live in a society that uses money (this is not a strictly capitalist thing). If you recall your microeconomics class you might remember that currency is a unit of measurement (like Celsius or inches). The original story is making a point about how disruptive the eclipse was to our "normal" lives. What other universal way is there to measure changes like that? Utils?
NBC (headline) didn't say it cost $700M and it was bad. Nor did it say it cost $700M and it was good.
The tone of the article probably went where we think it went.