Port workers and employers restart talks

Summary

Marketplace Podcast Summary: "Port Workers and Employers Restart Talks"

Release Date: January 8, 2025
Host: Kai Rysdal

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1. Port Workers and Employer Negotiations

In this episode, Kai Rysdal delves into the ongoing negotiations between the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) and the U.S. Maritime Alliance, representing port employers. The discussions focus on a tentative deal reached in October, which proposed a 62% pay increase for dock workers on the East and Gulf coasts. However, negotiations were stalled until January 15 due to contentious issues, primarily surrounding automation and its impact on employment.

[01:24] Sabri Benishore: "Automation at ports could be as basic as just using an online scheduling app to book trucks. It could also be a robotic rail-mounted crane, nine stories tall and 200ft wide, container cranes that can essentially automatically unload ships, or also cranes that can be used to stack containers."

2. Automation in Ports: Impact on Jobs and Efficiency

The conversation explores the dual nature of automation in port operations. While automation aims to enhance efficiency—citing ports like Yangshan in China, which can handle 113 to 80 containers per hour—there are significant concerns about job displacement. Jason Miller, Professor of Supply Chain Management at Michigan State University, explains that automation is transforming job roles rather than outright eliminating them. For instance, fewer crane operators may be needed, but there is a growing demand for specialized technicians to maintain and repair automated systems.

[02:38] Kai Rysdal: "But the majority of the ports in..."

[02:40] Sabri Benishore: "...ports like Los Angeles and others are around 25 per hour."

Robert Handfield, Professor of Supply Chain Management at North Carolina State University, emphasizes the necessity of automation for maintaining global competitiveness and efficiency.

[02:50] Robert Handfield: "Port automation is essential to keep up with the increasing demands of global trade and to ensure that U.S. ports remain competitive on the international stage."

3. Potential Port Strike: Economic Implications

The episode highlights the looming threat of a port strike and its potential economic repercussions. Erin McLaughlin, Senior Economist with the Conference Board, estimates that a strike could cost the economy approximately $3.78 billion within the first week, translating to $540 million per day. The disruption would not only delay shipments but also cause perishables like fruit and meat to spoil, escalating costs if the strike extends beyond a week.

[03:05] Erin McLaughlin: "It could cost about $3.78 billion during the first week, which is $540 million a day."

4. Trade Deficit: Understanding the Numbers

Transitioning from port issues, Kai and the team examine the recent trade deficit figures reported by the Commerce Department. In November, the U.S. trade deficit widened to $78 billion, surpassing levels seen at the beginning of both the Biden and Trump administrations. However, Elizabeth Troval from Marketplace points out that raw deficit numbers don't tell the whole story.

[04:41] Liz Pelly: "A country's trade balance is tightly related to its balance of savings and investment, and the US and Americans are not big savers."

Scott Lincecum of the Cato Institute adds that trade policy, including tariffs, plays a minor role compared to broader economic factors like budget deficits and consumer spending habits.

[05:33] Liz Pelly: "And when we consider trade deficit numbers, today, the wonks have a different figure. They prefer trade balance as share of GDP."

5. Spotify’s Business Model: Playlist Dominance and Its Implications

In a deep dive into the music streaming giant, Marketplace interviews Liz Pelly, author of "Mood: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist." The discussion centers on Spotify's reliance on playlists and algorithmic recommendations, which have become central to its business model. Cass Lang, co-author, explains how Spotify evolved from a simple search-based platform to one that curates personalized music experiences.

[07:37] Liz Pelly: "Music is too important to be left to the marketplace alone, and it also requires a political counterweight."

Pelly critiques Spotify's "Discovery Mode," where artists can reduce royalties by 30% in exchange for algorithmic promotion, drawing parallels to "payola," a practice historically condemned in the radio industry.

[10:52] Cass Lang: "The program that you're referencing is called Discovery Mode, where artists or their rights holders can accept a 30% reduction in royalties in exchange for algorithmic promotion."

The conversation also touches on the broader implications for artists, highlighting concerns over transparency and the consolidation of power within Spotify's recommendation systems.

[13:42] Cass Lang: "These are ways in which people's listening is being shaped to bolster a bottom line."

6. Climate Change and Snow Plowing Businesses

Shifting focus to climate impacts, the podcast examines how warming temperatures are affecting snow plowing businesses in northeast Ohio. Meteorologist Salix Iverson notes that while milder winters might seem beneficial, they lead to longer periods between significant snowstorms, disrupting the business model of plow operators like Andy Lennart.

[17:53] Kaylee Wells: "The last two winters here have been unusually warm. Snowfall was way below average."

Michael Supler of Great Lakes Snow and Ice Management discusses the financial strain caused by fewer storms, which make each plowing event more costly for clients due to the unpredictable nature of snowfall.

[20:25] Sabri Benishore: "He charges per plow, so occasional giant snow dumps are less lucrative than consistent dustings."

7. Communal Home Ownership: A Case Study from Vermont

The episode also features a segment on communal home ownership through the story of Cass Lang and Jordan Hyden, best friends who moved from New York City to Barre City, Vermont. They share their experiences of building a community, investing in sustainable practices like solar panels, and enjoying a more affordable mortgage compared to their previous urban rents.

[22:34] Cass Lang: "Music is too important to be left to the marketplace alone, and it also requires a political counterweight."

[23:37] Jordan Hyden: "We pay less now than we did and we're happier. Right. Which is priceless."

The pair discusses future plans, including expanding their property for more sustainable living, emphasizing the balance between community building and maintaining financial stability.

[24:50] Jordan Hyden: "I think sustainable, there's some real value and utility in that. So I think we're thinking about what that could look like in the future."

8. Economic Recap: Bonds and Job Openings

Towards the end, Kai provides a brief economic update, noting that bond yields rose due to robust job openings, which, while indicative of a strong economy, also suggest persistent inflation pressures. The episode concludes with a summary of stock market movements and forecasts for the financial outlook.

[25:20] Kai Rysdal: "The Yield on the 10-year T Note rose to 4.68%. More on that later in the program, but you got to stick around to the end."

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Notable Quotes:

• Sabri Benishore ([01:24]): "Automation at ports could be as basic as just using an online scheduling app to book trucks..."

• Liz Pelly ([04:41]): "A country's trade balance is tightly related to its balance of savings and investment..."

• Cass Lang ([10:52]): "The program that you're referencing is called Discovery Mode..."

• Jordan Hyden ([22:34]): "We pay less now than we did and we're happier. Right. Which is priceless."

• Kai Rysdal ([25:20]): "The Yield on the 10-year T Note rose to 4.68%."

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This episode of Marketplace offers a comprehensive exploration of the intricate balance between technological advancement and labor, the nuanced realities of trade deficits, the monopolistic tendencies in the music streaming industry, the localized impacts of climate change, and evolving housing dynamics. Through expert interviews and firsthand accounts, Kai Rysdal provides listeners with a nuanced understanding of these multifaceted economic and societal issues.

Transcript

[Sabri Benishore]

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[Kai Rysdal]

Been a while since we've had a supply chain story, huh? We'll fix that today. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace in Los Angeles. I'm Kyle Rysnal. It is Tuesday today. This one is the 7th of January. Good as always to have you along. Everybody. Hey, so you got everything you needed toward the end of last year and over the holidays, right? Gifts, new cars perhaps? Maybe new furniture for the house or the apartment? What have you? Credit that to. The very human but also very corporate urge to procrastinate. The International Longshoremen's association and their employers, the U.S. maritime Alliance. You might remember this. Representing ports and shipping companies, they reached a tentative deal back in October that included a 62% pay bump for east and Gulf coast dock workers. But they left until January 15, the most bitter part of the dispute. Automation talks resumed today. Marketplaces of Prebenishore brings us up to date.

[Sabri Benishore]

Automation at ports could be as basic as just using an online scheduling app to book trucks. It could also be a robotic rail mounted crane, nine stories tall and 200ft wide, container cranes that can essentially automatically unload ships, or also cranes that can be used to stack containers. Jason Miller is professor of supply Chain Management at Michigan State University. The International Longshoremen's association told Marketplace it has no updates, but it's previously made clear it is concerned automation will take jobs. Miller says it's hard to say definitively, but so far automation appears not to be replacing jobs but changing them. As an example, if you have more automated container cranes, you may need less individuals in the role of being a container crane operator, but you now need more individuals with the specialized skills to fix those container cranes if they break. Miller says ports in the US that are more automated haven't shrunk their payrolls. And the U.S. maritime alliance representing employers, has said automation is needed to become more efficient. Robert Handfield is professor of supply chain management at North Carolina State. Ports like Yangshan in China can move 113 to 80 containers per hour, which is very efficient.

[Kai Rysdal]

But the majority of the ports in.

[Sabri Benishore]

Los Angeles and others are around 25 per hour. The Longshoremen's Union counters international ports are more productive because they're doing easier work like moving containers from one ship to another as opposed to sending shipments along into deep domestic supply routes involving trucks and trains. As the two sides work through the their issues, other businesses are bracing for the impact of a possible strike. Erin McLaughlin is a senior economist with the Conference Board.

[Kaylee Wells]

It could cost about 3.78 billion during.

[Jordan Hyden]

The first week, which is 540 million a day.

[Sabri Benishore]

Some shipments would just get delayed. Others, like fruit and meat, eventually start to perish. If a strike goes on beyond a week, she says, costs start to rise. In New York, I'm Sabri Benishore for Marketplace Wall Street.

[Kai Rysdal]

Today, stocks got most of the attention, as they always do. Sleep not though, on bond yields. We'll have the details when we do the number. We talked a bit yesterday on the program about the T word tariffs, specifically what they might do should President Elect Trump do what he says he's going to do, what those tariffs might do to the value of the dollar. Today, a different but related exploration of the economic Importance of the 20th Letter of the Alphabet trade. We learned from the Commerce Department this morning that the trade deficit in November was was just over $78 billion. That's more than it was when President Biden took office, and it's more than it was at the very beginning of the first Trump administration. But as marketplaces Elizabeth Troval reminds us, and for all that we are going to be hearing about them over the next four years. Trade gap numbers ain't all that.

[Liz Pelly]

At first glance, deficit numbers might make you say, Good God. Take March 2022, when the trade deficit ballooned to a record $107.7 billion. Except that increase was a sign of something good, says Robert Diekel with usc.

[Sabri Benishore]

All the international supply chains were screwed up with the pandemic, and then that was starting to mend around 2022. So there was this surge in global trade and especially imports into the United States.

[Liz Pelly]

Since then, US Consumers are still spending a lot on products coming from abroad, says Katie Russ with UC Davis.

[Jordan Hyden]

The economy is just really running strong in comparison to how other countries have been doing in 2024. And so with that, it seems like a very natural widening of the deficit.

[Liz Pelly]

A country's trade balance is tightly related to its balance of savings and investment, and the US And Americans are not big savers. Scott Lincecum is with the Cato Institute.

[Sabri Benishore]

Nations that tend to save less and spend more will run trade deficits.

[Liz Pelly]

Andy says trade policy, like tariffs, play a relatively minor role in the trade deficit, which he says is a symptom of something else.

[Sabri Benishore]

We're running massive budget deficits.

[Liz Pelly]

And when we consider trade deficit numbers. Today, the wonks have a different figure. They prefer trade balance as share of gdp.

[Kai Rysdal]

It's not like we're hitting new heights of the deficit.

[Sabri Benishore]

When you think of it relative to.

[Liz Pelly]

Gdp, that's Sam Cordam at Yale.

[Kai Rysdal]

Sometimes these numbers can look huge when.

[Sabri Benishore]

You look at them in dollar terms.

[Kai Rysdal]

If you look at the ratio kind.

[Liz Pelly]

Of comes into focus, that focus. Trade deficits haven't fluctuated much relative to GDP during both the Trump and Biden administrations. I'm Elizabeth Troval for MarketPL.

[Kai Rysdal]

Spotify has the biggest chunk, just over 30% of all music service subscriptions in the United States. That market share and the influence that comes with it have helped the company transform the music industry and its business model over the past 10 or 15 years. And yet much of what Spotify does and how it makes money are less than widely understood. That leads me to a new book out today by music journalist Liz Pelly. It's called Mood the Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. Liz, thanks for coming on the program.

[Cass Lang]

Thank you so much for having me.

[Kai Rysdal]

Let us begin with the title of this book, the Rise of the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. That is the nut of Spotify's business, the Playlist. Right.

[Cass Lang]

For a long time it has been, yeah, I would say these days what they think of as maybe their core product offering is not just a playlist, but the whole recommendation system or the whole different incarnations of how they sort of serve you the perfect recommendation at the perfect moment through both playlisting and algorithmic discovery tools.

[Kai Rysdal]

Well, so back up for us actually and take us back to how this originally started over in Europe. Daniel Ek from Sweden, obviously, and some collaborators. It didn't start with the playlist, right?

[Cass Lang]

Yeah. When Spotify started, it was really more like a search bar and the user would have to know what they were looking for, whether that be an algorithm album or an artist. And it was really after they launched in the United States and compete with some other pre existing digital services in the United States that they started to lean more into this idea of being not just a app that you could go to, to access, quote unquote, all the music in the world, but to really know your music taste better than you know it yourself, as they would frame it.

[Kai Rysdal]

So this, this idea of the playlist then is. Is critical now to Spotify's business model. I guess my question is, and we should, we should have addressed this earlier. Actually. I should have. What do artists get out of the Perfect Playlist? We know What Spotify gets, which is, you know, a third of the market or whatever the heck it is. Right. What do artists get out of it?

[Cass Lang]

Yeah, that's a great question. I think that in the early days of streaming, there were a lot of narratives that were pitched to artists as a much more democratized approach to music recommendation than perhaps the old gatekeepers like commercial radio DJs or major record labels. But as the streaming era played out, a lot of musicians, you know, saw that what had happened was it was really just that new types of gatekeepers emerged. And one of the things that originally got me interested in researching this subject was hearing musicians talk about, you know, how confounded they were by this new playlist ecosystem that they were expected to navigate and how mystified it was trying to figure out who was behind these playlists and how they're going to get onto them. The shift from the curated playlists to the algorithmic playlist has only kind of like, further entrenched the sort of mystification and consolidation of power in terms of who controls what the user sees when they open the app.

[Kai Rysdal]

Right, exactly. So this is one of the things I wanted to get to in this book, and it was really interesting to me because there has been a push on Spotify's behalf to convince artists to sort of take less of a. Of a. Of a cut of the stream, as it were, the pennies on the dollar that they get in order to get priority in a playlist. And I'm not describing it well, but there is an element of payola here. Right. It's the old pay to play thing that the FTC outlawed, like in the 50s and 60s.

[Cass Lang]

Yeah. So something that's really interesting. And I'm always, you know, I'm hesitant to use the word payola because payola has a specific legal definition.

[Kai Rysdal]

So for the lawyers out there. That's not what I said. I said. I said something else. All right, anyway, go ahead.

[Cass Lang]

You know, what I've been told is that really a more accurate phrase is calling it a paola, like practice because it has elements of payola. It's slightly different in that in the era of commercial radio payola, this was considered something that had to be done under the table, like sliding piles of cash in exchange for radio play. But today, a lot of these pay for play programs are out in the open. So the program that you're referencing is called Discovery mode, and it's a program where artists or their. Their rights holder, their record label can accept a 30% reduction in royalties in exchange for algorithmic promotion or algorithmic placement in a playlist. And the listener does not know when they're being served a recommendation that is shaped by these commercial deals. But it all operates under the banner of editorial.

[Kai Rysdal]

So about six weeks ish ago, I said to myself, I'm going to stop listening to news and political podcasts because I was overloaded and blah, blah, blah, we all know why that happened. And I said, I'm just going to turn on Spotify. When I would ordinarily listen to a podcast, I'm going to turn on Spotify and let the algorithm serve me up. Whatever is going to serve me up. Am I somehow to blame? I consumers somehow to blame for what Spotify has become? You know.

[Cass Lang]

So you're asking like, if the. If listeners are part of the problem?

[Kai Rysdal]

Yeah, basically.

[Cass Lang]

I mean, I don't know if I think that. I don't know if I think it's true that, you know, listeners are part of the problem. I think that there is a degree to which not just Spotify, but the whole. In the whole platform era, there's been a sort of obsession with frictionlessness in order to boost user engagement, similar to how we've seen across other platforms. You know, platforms use certain tactics in order to hook users, and it's kind of part of a bigger dynamic that we see play out across, like, you know, what most people know as the Internet today.

[Kai Rysdal]

Right, right. And user engagement is just a metaphor for corporate revenue.

[Cass Lang]

Right, Exactly. Yeah. You know, like these are ways in which people's listening is being shaped to bolster a bottom line.

[Kai Rysdal]

Right, Right. Last thing and then I'll let you go. This book, in addition to being deeply reported and super interesting, just in terms of learning new things about Spotify that probably a lot of people don't know, it is in some ways a cultural criticism. Right. It's really thoughtful. And I say that not to butter you up. I say it to set up this last question, which is this. At the end of the book, literally like second or third last page, you talk about where we go from here in the future of music. And you say, luckily, the future of music is not something that was unilaterally decided in 2008 when the major label struck their first deals with Spotify. Are you sure?

[Cass Lang]

I think so. I think that, you know, something that I write in a similar breath in addition to the sentence, maybe for the sake of this show, that I say that music is too important to be left to the marketplace place alone, and that it also requires a political counterweight it's a story that begins nor ends with one company. And also, like the story of streaming is as much about what's changed as it is about what stayed the same. So in some ways, it's kind of like pushing open space for, you know, independent artists and space for engaging with music in a way that is more fair. Is kind of like something that people in the music world have always had to do.

[Kai Rysdal]

If you thought you knew about Spotify, you did not. You should read this book. It's called Mood Machine. Liz Pelly wrote it. Liz, thanks a lot. I really appreciate your time.

[Cass Lang]

Thank you.

[Jordan Hyden]

Coming up, we pay less now than we did and we're happier.

[Kai Rysdal]

Can't put a price on that, can you now? But first, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrials down 178 today. 4 10%. 42,000 5 28. The NASDAQ off 379 points. That is 1 and 9 10% today. 19,489 er the S&P 500 down 66 1.1%. 5,909. We heard from Sabri about unionized dock workers negotiating over automation at port. So some shipping stocks, shall we? You try saying that 10 times fast. Star bulk carriers shined up 1%. Global ship lease grew 1.6%. Matson down about 210 of 1%. Today. Meta is going to stop fact checking and removing restrictions on speech, both Facebook and Instagram and thread. You heard that today, right? Meta down 2%. Bonds fell. Yield on the 10 year T note rose to 4.68%. More on that later in the program, but you got to stick around to the end. You're listening to Marketplace.

[Sabri Benishore]

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[Kai Rysdal]

Go to selectquote.com to get started on your free quote today. That's selectquote.com this is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rysdal. If you are in that giant swath of the country that's gotten all the snow and the frigid temper over the past couple of days, it most certainly does not feel like this winter is Going to be much less wintry than winters used to be, but it is. The national oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says the Southwest and most of the country east of the Mississippi, in fact, are going to get warmer than usual weather a lot more usually. Now that might not sound so bad unless you're the kind of person who enjoys shoveling their driveway a time or two before work in the morning. But lots of people rely on cold weather and the snow that comes with it to put food on the table. Among them, people who count on plowing snow every winter. Marketplace's Kaylee Wells spoke to some of them. In northeast Ohio, when there's a big.

[Kaylee Wells]

Snowfall in the Cleveland area, Andy Lennart is out plowing his neighbors driveways. He doesn't own a plowing business per se. He's like a lot of plowers in this part of the country. A guy looking for a little extra cash who happens to own a pickup.

[Sabri Benishore]

It came with a plow and I started doing my own drive with it. And then a friend of mine asked if I could do a couple driveways and it turned into like four driveways.

[Kaylee Wells]

Lenart grew up around here, about 40 minutes southeast of Cleveland. And he says these days the snowy seasons are a lot shorter than they used to be.

[Sabri Benishore]

I started doing this, you know, 12, say 12 times a year. And now the last three years I've only been out four or five times.

[Kaylee Wells]

The last two winters here have been unusually warm. Snowfall was way below average.

[Sabri Benishore]

You start talking about, you know, global warming and that, but, you know, it's, it's like it's real. I'm convinced, you know, it's, it's, I have facts, you know, it's written down on my, my charts. You know, when I, when I do.

[Kaylee Wells]

This now, thing is, when you live this close to Lake Erie, climate change doesn't automatically equal less snow. It's not that straightforward.

[Jordan Hyden]

It's hard to tell because being in northeast Ohio, every season is so different.

[Kaylee Wells]

Meteorologist Salix Iverson with the National Weather Service in Cleveland says the biggest snowstorms here happen before Lake Erie freezes and after it thaws. So as the climate warms, yeah, it.

[Jordan Hyden]

Freezes over later than it has been in years past. That would essentially give the region a longer window of time where lake effect snow would be possible.

[Kaylee Wells]

Which means gentle winter wonderland dustings become less common. But the school canceling lake effect blizzards can actually happen more frequently. Even drought ridden Californians know this climate story. A warming climate makes giant precipitation dumps more frequent and more intense. Not exactly great news when you're Andy Lennart, a guy with a truck who can only plow when there's room in his schedule.

[Sabri Benishore]

I got a main job, so I can't devote a whole lot of time to this.

[Kaylee Wells]

And he charges per plow, so occasional giant snow dumps are less lucrative than consistent dust d things. It's not great news for the folks who do this full time either. Michael Supler of Great Lakes Snow and Ice Management plows hospital and shopping mall parking lots. He's got employees in those parking lots monitoring the weather, ready to serve his clients at the first sign of snow.

[Sabri Benishore]

They demand constant service.

[Kai Rysdal]

They want no chance of a slip and fall there.

[Sabri Benishore]

It takes a lot of time, a lot of material, and they pay for it.

[Kaylee Wells]

And here's how the numbers worked out for one of his clients during last year's warmer than average winter.

[Sabri Benishore]

I think last year we did maybe $300,000 of time and material charges to them. You know, in a good winter that.

[Kaylee Wells]

Could be approaching $800,000 for his biggest customers. Supler doesn't charge per plow, but per season that's good value when it snows consistently. But fewer storms means every plowing is more expensive for his clients. And long term, that's not an attractive model. Nobody's canceling or demanding he create a new business model just yet, but it's still on his mind.

[Sabri Benishore]

Does it make me nervous? Yes, but I think it's going to be over a much longer range. I don't see that happening, you know.

[Kaylee Wells]

In the next ten years at least. For him, adapting is pretty straightforward. He also runs a landscaping company, so a shorter snow season means more money for his other business. In Bainbridge, Ohio, I'm Kayleigh Wells for Marketplace.

[Kai Rysdal]

With home prices and mortgage interest rates as high as they are right now, right around 7% for a 30 year fixed. A lot of young home buyers are getting help, we know that. Right, from parents maybe, or a wealthy benefactor perhaps. Or how about just a really good friend. Last year we told you about two best friends who ditched their apartment in New York City and bought a house together in Barre City, Vermont. We called them back this week to see how communal home ownership is going.

[Jordan Hyden]

Hi, I'm Cass. Language. I'm Jordan Hyden and we've been homeowners in Berry City for two and a half years.

[Kai Rysdal]

Was I supposed to.

[Jordan Hyden]

I thought you were gonna finish it off. Barry City is very much small town vibes. We've gotten involved like on a local level and you know, we go to city council meetings, which is something we never did in New York City. We've been able to really like, settle and grow roots. We see it as a partnership and we're, you know, having a home here in Vermont. We both make more money in our jobs that we currently have. And what we pay for our mortgage is less. Like if you're just comparing rent to mortgage, we pay less now than we did and we're happier. Right. Which is priceless. Yes. I think one of the biggest things we've done is we've added solar panels to our roof. That was definitely the biggest one. I mean, we've like built some gardens outside. Things will break and then we have to replace them. Yeah. So there's been some of that which has kept us from doing the more like exciting things that we're looking forward to doing. But that's just home ownership. I hear we also have two cats who tend to cost us a little bit of money. They love. They love to spend our money. They love to spend our money. I think there are some like short term goals of like weatherization and like heat pump. Heat pump things that we want to do for. I'd love a deck. You can dream big, right? But. But I think those feel more attainable. Like those are things that are like we can do in the next few years. But I think big term we are seeing the value in community building and what that has done for us and talking to other people and having them kind of be like, oh, it's kind of awesome what you guys are doing, living together as best friends and building this community. So like, how cool would it be if we just purchased a bigger plot of land where we had more space to grow food. Right. Have friends.

[Cass Lang]

Right.

[Jordan Hyden]

And I know that sounds so much like a sort of hippie commune type thing, but I think sustainable, there's some real value and utility in that. So I think we're thinking about what that could look like in the future, but in the long term, like not now, not right now. And we're happy with how it's going right now. Yeah. And I'm excited about whatever we plan to figure out in the future. Yeah, it's unwritten.

[Kai Rysdal]

Cass Lang and Jordan Hyde in Barry City, Vermont. You can tell us about your adventure in [e-mail] this final note on the way out today. Let me circle back to bonds here for a second. As promised, the Yield on the 10 year T Note was up, as I said, in no small part because of the jolts numbers out today. Job openings and labor turnover survey. Of course, we learned this morning the number of job openings in this economy rose in November, more than 8 million. About 8.1 million, should you be curious. That is a good thing, macroeconomically speaking, because it means people who are looking for them can usually find jobs. The catch is it's also a sign that inflation could prove stickier than we thought it might be. And you know what that means, right? You do, right? You do. Alright. Our Digital and On Demand team includes Kerry Barber, Jordan Manji, Dylan Mietonen, Janet Nguyen, Olga Ochsman, Ellen Rothis, Virginia K. Smith and Tony Wagner. Francesca Levy is the executive Director of Digital and On Demand. I'm Kai Rysdal. We will see you tomorrow. Everybody. This is 8:00pm.

[Sabri Benishore]

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