powderfreak

The gov't agencies were a pain in the a** on good days in the past... pre-COVID a DMV experience here was 1-2 hours (BTV), but if you drove up to Newport on the Canadian border you could do it in 15 minutes, ha. Afterwards I haven't even tried. They still mailed me my new license and our registration cards renewed online fine and arrived in the mail. I remember waiting in the Albany DMV to get my learners permit for over 2 hours decades ago. The employees are always nice but like anything that seems to be running at the break point there can be hassles.

I think college being remote last year absolutely lost that age group that would be at UVM, St Mike’s, Northern VT universities. Hopefully they come back. I was at UVM yesterday for a job fair and it was encouraging… students coming back and staying here this winter. Looking for ski pass and weekend work at “fun” jobs like ski instructors or lift ops. Older demographic and young are missing… like 22-45 ages seem normal. High school, college and retiree or older crowd with money having midlife crisis or just moving north. Like 50-60 years old, who moved north after making money elsewhere, gets bored hanging out with wife all the time, decides to come hang out with young people at a ski area. Surprising amount of those folks. I had a guy work for me who owned a seat on Wall Street floor. Just wanted to stay busy but didn’t need money.

That’s the great question. And if they aren’t in the unemployment statistics… just not working? I do think we saw mass retirements as well but that can’t explain it. Here working age individuals seem normal but we lost all the part-time help, retirees keeping busy, college kids, high school kids, people with money from previous careers that just want to hang out at a ski resort (we’ve had previous CEOs, car dealership owners, others who built a business and sold it, former stock brokers who move to the mtns in their 50s in mid-life crisis, etc). All those are gone.

Yes but those folks would be included in unemployment numbers. Why is/was unemployment so low in many states (especially ones relying more on service industry than others) if everyone just takes the free money? It makes total sense what you are saying and sure some did, but there has to be stats to back it up somewhere if it occurred that much. Yeah but you also lose unemployment benefits too.

How do you avoid being added to the unemployment rate but sit on the sidelines? Leave the work force entirely? I know a lot of people retired earlier than they had planned but hung up their coats and checked out. Truly curious if I’m missing something. This thread made me look at the numbers and the unemployment rate seems to follow the vaccine rollouts very closely, not stimulus payments. Honestly never noticed that before. The rates hit lowest points in the late winter/spring when vaccine became available to all people. That correlation between vaccine and unemployment would seem to support you’re idea they come back when felt safe to do so, vs milking stimulus payments. I want to stay out of political territory but like talking about the economy.

There’s been no difference in the service/tourism/hospitality industries between during extra unemployment money and afterwards… at least not yet. Unemployment rates returned to lower than 2012-2016 last winter…. Even though free money continued through September 1st. There has to be something more going on than just blaming gov’t stimulus money. All last winter the unemployment rate plummeted despite stimulus. If anything unemployment looks not tied to stimulus at all… it looks tied to vaccination availability and rates. Lowest unemployment rates hit when the vaccine became widely available last spring which is something I hadn’t noticed before. We are bottomed out again on unemployment rate all summer and still vastly understaffed in all facets of hospitality/tourism/service/restaurants, etc.

Yeah hasn’t broken there then. Its still been record warm relative to normal but not uncomfortable if that makes sense. I bin a lot of obs into A/C vs using heat. Summer weather is fans or A/C… winter weather is cranking heat 24/7. We have been stuck in between those two things for 6 weeks now . Averages keep going down but the temperature remains the same.

Yup for sure. Haven’t ran my AC since summer’s back broke on Sept 1st. Ran it more than ever before prior to that.

Departures this month so far: MVL is +7.8. MPV is +9.0. BTV is +6.7. In 14 days this month we have not hit the average minimum temperature once on any day. Average today is 58/36. We should pretty much be seeing frost nightly here this week if it's a "normal" routine. Yesterday was a +15 daily departure . It's rare but BTV has a lower departure because the minimums have been high. So the interior VT sites are just getting roasted while BTV is used to not cooling off at night.

64/62 with drizzle lol. Dews in the 60s are back.

No, they are likely getting more. 7-day a week operations but they have had to close some days due to short staffing levels. So maybe not. Closed Tuesdays due to lack of staff. 11am-9pm for 10-hour shifts.

$20/hr to make pizzas here. Resort town but these places need staff to operate. $20/hr for 40 hours is $800 a week…. That’s $41,000 a year job. With a signing bonus.

I agree. I know how I’d raise my kid these days… but it’s still probably hard to not want the world for them. I’m just saying that people now in days have been brainwashed for so long by so many people regarding jobs like that. Need more people like that “Dirty Jobs” guy advocating that it’s ok and pays well to do those jobs.

It’s the years and years of parents, teachers, Hollywood, TV shows, career counselors, etc telling youngsters they are worth more. Even parents who are truck drivers tell their kids they want better for them, don’t do what I did. Its years of brainwashing essentially that you are better than that. Blue collar parents wanting their kids to not follow their footprints. I think it’s more than just saying people now in days are above those positions. They were taught by everyone (even truck drivers) to be above that.

The great economic reshuffle. In the end many are just finally getting the increases that might not have happened for years past in certain industries. Those years of even 0% cost of living increases or where 3% was the most you’d get regardless of performance . Supply and demand are still the single largest economic factors. A lot of people retired or left the workforce earlier than planned too with COVID. Companies have been forced to pay to compete for employees… now is a very good time to be good at your job and show anyone above you that you are worth it. Because opportunities are sky high. The replacement cost of losing an employee is exorbitant right now. That gives everyone working leverage.

This is the largest wage increase in many people's entire lives. I can't complain, we’ve seen a 13% increase even at a management level to avoid compression and keep separation from lower positions that saw increases of as much as 30%. Thousands and thousands of extra dollars over the course of a year for the same exact job as past years. My wife is seeing the same thing. When people start at $30-35K/yr as the most basic entry level, all the sudden $60K a year turns into $70K a year above them. The labor costs this winter are going to be insane. None of us will ever see this type of wage adjustment happen in our lives, IMO. It's been waiting to happen in many industries (stagnant wages) but this labor shortage tipped the scale. And those costs end up somewhere.

Yeah that's probably better comparison... you have ports with fixed capacities. They can't just all the sudden start processing two ships for every one ship. So once the backup happens, it's nearly impossible to unf*ck it. I mean the other thing is as Americans we can try to prioritize what we get. We are a spoiled country used to creature comforts. Like getting vehicles seems like a higher priority to me than Best Buy getting their containers of 60-inch flat screen TVs. Same with ski equipment. There should be a priority lane, ha.

Yeah I'm on the same page as long as people know what they are looking at vs. it being a scientific image. That one above is too blown out for my liking too. I think there's a difference between dehazing, adding clarity to the horizon and such vs. just taking the saturation slider bar on an iphone and jamming it all the way to the right . There isn't a single image any of us see in our daily life though in magazines, advertisements, brochures, websites, etc that isn't at least a little touched up. But photoshop is getting insane at what is possible. I could add 2,000 feet to Mansfield, flip it over so the northern end looks like its south, add snow to the top and then put a giraffe running down Nosedive so much that it looks dead real. The algorithms and coding is getting insane the tools you can use. Can insert rainbows, remove buildings, etc.... heck for Forky I could start dropping red barns into all foliage shots and it would look real because of how good the coding is.

I think it’s one of those things where the system was working at its max, redlining even, but any stoppage and slow down just overwhelms it and it then takes X-time to unf*ck. I almost think of it like a ski lift and lift line. Ski lift has an 10-minute stop on a busy holiday to reset an electrical switch. The line grows massive because 4 bodies aren’t being ferried up every 12 seconds. Even once the lift is running again, you can’t add carriers to the haul rope so it’s a fixed capacity that takes a long time to untangle. The only way to do it is if people go to other lifts for a bit to let it back to equilibrium (like sending cargo to another port)… otherwise the same fixed amount is still trying to go through and you never clear the backlog. I just think those ports handle so much volume that even a few month slow down can’t be unscrewed because there are only 24 hours in a day and fixed infrastructure.

We can’t get anything at the ski area… skis, boots, all winter equipment and merchandise sitting in containers off the coast of LA. Snow tires are going to run out in the northeast and North America soon so get them if you need them.

Gene I get what you are saying, but photography is also an art and can be abstract. I guess it depends on how someone describes their photo? Like a photographer who's prints someone is likely to want to print and put on their wall or view for fun might be different than someone taking photos to document an event for a newspaper or something. Lets be honest, every single photo you've ever seen in National Geographic, in a scenic calendar you have hanging in your kitchen, postcards, magazines, posters, etc all were post processed. Are National Geographic cover photographers lying to you? Maybe a bit but they are sick photos. Same with someone taking photos under the sea of fish life in that Nat Geo mag... it's probably a lot more murky, dark, and boring than the photos look in the article on fish. In the photos above, I don't even notice the fall color as much because the foliage isn't that vibrant around the lake in either one. It's more of a warmth alteration. To me the top one is well refined and has an awesome wow factor but really...it's just "warmer" (red hued) and one is colder (blue hued) IMO. The midday light is going to lead to a more blue photo (how the light passes through the atmosphere casting a blue tint, just like late day or early day light is warmer/red. The crazy difference is in the background... can clearly see the wind farm vs. not even visible in the bottom. The clarity in the background is nuts. I think if someone was trying to take photos for a scientific experiment/comparison purpose, obviously post-processing would skew it. But if you are a big fan of Newfound Lake and want to print a cool shot for your house to remind you of a beautiful place, which one of the two would you put on your wall? Would you care or think about it any further if it's sitting on your living room wall? Someone buys that beautiful sunset photo over the ocean for their beach house... the photo was played around with or tweaked but it's still beautiful to look at. To me it's about what the photographer is claiming the photo is. If they are going for an artistic piece, or a scientific observation would matter.

I’m not sold Saturday is bad… I think it’ll trend to be mostly along the FROPA with only scattered fast moving showers ahead of it. Even 24 hours ago the models had more robust pre-frontal precip. It seems that doesn’t develop more often than not and it’s more just a line of showers with the FROPA Saturday night. Looks like the front is decently after dark… I bet Saturday is fine and mild ahead of the FROPA with nighttime band of rain moving through. 2pm Saturday GFS/GGEM/NAM:

Some sort of strange liquid falling right now.

Replant the garden?

Torch! We a lot of bare trees ha.