Port workers and employers restart talks

Summary

Marketplace Podcast Summary: "Port Workers and Employers Restart Talks"
Release Date: January 8, 2025

Hosted by Kai Ryssdal

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1. Supply Chain Implications: Port Workers and Automation Talks

Overview:
The episode opens with a discussion on the ongoing negotiations between the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) and the U.S. Maritime Alliance, representing port employers and shipping companies. The focus centers on the tentative deal reached in October, which included a significant 62% pay increase for dock workers on the East and Gulf coasts. However, negotiations stalled until January 15, primarily due to disputes over automation.

Key Points:

• Automation at Ports:
  Automation ranges from simple online scheduling apps to advanced robotic container cranes. Jason Miller, Professor of Supply Chain Management at Michigan State University, explains, "Automation appears not to be replacing jobs but changing them" (01:08).

• Union Concerns:
  The ILA expresses worries that increased automation could lead to job reductions. However, Miller notes that ports with higher automation have not seen payroll reductions, indicating a shift in job roles rather than outright elimination.

• Economic Impact of Potential Strikes:
  Aaron McLaughlin, Senior Economist with the Conference Board, warns that a port strike could cost the economy approximately $3.78 billion in the first week, equating to $540 million per day (02:49). Prolonged strikes could exacerbate these costs, particularly affecting perishable goods like fruit and meat.

Notable Quote:
Jason Miller emphasizes the evolving nature of port jobs:
"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." (01:46)

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2. Market and Economic Updates

Stock Market Performance:
Kai Ryssdal provides a snapshot of the day's market activities:

• Dow Industrials: Down 1.78%
• NASDAQ: Off by 3.79%
• S&P 500: Decreased by 1.1%
• Meta Platforms: Dropped by 2% following changes to fact-checking and speech restrictions.

Bond Yields:
The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 4.68%, influenced by recent Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) data indicating a rise in job openings.

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3. Trade Deficit Analysis

Current Status:
The Commerce Department reported a November trade deficit of over $78 billion, surpassing figures from both the early Trump administration and the onset of President Biden's term.

Expert Insights:
Elizabeth Troval references insights from Liz Pelly and Robert Dieckel to explain that the trade deficit is not solely detrimental:

• Economic Context:
  The deficit reflects a robust U.S. economy where consumers continue to spend heavily on imports. As Robert Dieckel points out, the surge in imports was a sign of global trade recovery post-pandemic (04:25).

• Underlying Factors:
  Scott Lincecum from the Cato Institute explains that the trade deficit correlates with the U.S.'s balance of savings and investment, noting, "Nations that tend to save less and spend more will run trade deficits." (05:29).

• Relative Perspective:
  Sam Cordam from Yale highlights that when viewed as a share of GDP, the trade deficit has not significantly fluctuated across recent administrations, providing a relative context to the absolute numbers.

Notable Quote:
Katie Russ from UC Davis states, "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." (05:03)

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4. In-Depth Interview: Liz Pelly on Spotify's Influence in the Music Industry

Guest:
Liz Pelly, music journalist and author of "Mood: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist."

Discussion Highlights:

• Evolution of Spotify:
  Initially, Spotify functioned primarily as a search tool for music. However, competition in the U.S. market led it to develop sophisticated recommendation systems, including curated and algorithmic playlists designed to personalize user experience (07:33).

• Impact on Artists:
  Pelly discusses how the shift to algorithm-driven playlists has created new gatekeepers in the music industry. Artists often find it challenging to navigate playlist ecosystems, which are now influenced by algorithmic decisions and commercial arrangements.

• Payola-Like Practices:
  Kai Ryssdal raises concerns about Spotify's "Discovery Mode," where artists or labels receive a 30% reduction in royalties in exchange for algorithmic promotion (10:36). Pelly clarifies that while not legally classified as payola, these practices share similarities by influencing content placement through financial incentives.

• Consumer Role:
  The conversation touches on user engagement strategies employed by Spotify, questioning whether consumer behavior contributes to the platform's evolving dynamics. Pelly argues that while users seek frictionless experiences, these are often designed to maximize corporate revenue (12:20).

• Future of Music:
  Pelly emphasizes the need for a political counterbalance to market forces in the music industry, advocating for space that supports independent artists and fair engagement with music beyond corporate algorithms (13:57).

Notable Quote:
Liz Pelly reflects on the industry's changes:
"Music is too important to be left to the marketplace alone and that it also requires a political counterweight." (13:57)

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5. Weather Impacts on Local Businesses: The Case of Snow Plowing

Overview:
The podcast explores how changing winter weather patterns affect individuals reliant on snow plowing as a source of income. Michael Supler from Great Lakes Snow and Ice Management shares his experiences adapting to shorter and less predictable snow seasons due to climate change.

Key Points:

• Decreased Snowfall:
  Andy Lenart, a snow plow operator in northeast Ohio, notes a significant reduction in snowfall over the past three years, impacting his side business (18:27).
  "The last two winters here have been unusually warm. Snowfall was way below average." (18:58)

• Economic Strain:
  Michael Supler highlights the financial challenges faced during warmer winters, where fewer snow events lead to decreased revenue from clients who require consistent plowing services (20:31).

• Adaptation Strategies:
  Supler emphasizes the importance of diversified income streams, such as landscaping, to mitigate the unpredictability of snow-related work (21:54).

Notable Quote:
Andy Lenart discusses the reality of climate change:
"I start talking about, you know, global warming and that, but, you know, it's like it's real. You know, it's written down on my charts." (19:15)

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6. Communal Home Ownership: A Growing Trend Among Young Buyers

Overview:
The episode features Cass Lang and Jordan Hyde, two young homeowners in Barre City, Vermont, who embarked on communal home ownership as a response to high housing costs and mortgage rates.

Key Points:

• Financial Benefits:
  By purchasing a home together, Lang and Hyde are able to pay less for their mortgage compared to their previous rent and report increased happiness and stability (23:08).

• Community Building:
  Living in a small town has allowed them to engage more deeply with the local community, attending city council meetings and fostering connections that were absent in their previous urban lives.

• Sustainability Initiatives:
  The couple has invested in solar panels and gardens, aiming for sustainable living while planning future expansions like weatherization and heat pumps (25:23).

• Future Prospects:
  They contemplate purchasing more land to expand their living space and continue building a sustainable, community-oriented lifestyle (25:54).

Notable Quote:
Jordan Hyde shares their vision:
"It’s a story that begins nor ends as one company. And also the story of streaming is as much about what's changed as it is about what's stayed the same." (14:39)

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7. Closing Economic Insights

Job Market and Inflation Concerns:
The episode concludes with a discussion on the latest JOLTS data, which revealed an increase in job openings, signifying a strong job market but also hinting at persistent inflationary pressures. Kai Ryssdal links this to the rise in bond yields, particularly the 10-year Treasury note, which climbed to 4.68% as a response to the robust job market (27:28).

Notable Quote:
Kai Ryssdal summarizes the implication:
"A trade deficit is a symptom of something else, and we're running massive budget deficits." (05:45)

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Conclusion:
This episode of Marketplace delves into the intricate balance between labor negotiations and automation in the port industry, the nuanced understanding of trade deficits, the transformative yet contentious role of Spotify in the music industry, and the broader economic and social shifts influenced by climate change and housing trends. Through expert interviews and personal stories, the podcast provides comprehensive insights into the current economic landscape.

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Timestamp Reference:

• 00:02 - Introduction by Kai Ryssdal
• 01:08 - Sabri Benishore on automation
• 02:28 - Discussion on port productivity
• 02:49 - Economic impact of potential strikes
• 04:25 - Trade deficit analysis begins
• 05:29 - Scott Lincecum on savings and investment
• 07:18 - Introduction of Liz Pelly
• 09:03 - Impact of Spotify on artists
• 10:36 - Discovery Mode and payola concerns
• 12:20 - User engagement and corporate revenue
• 13:57 - Future of music industry
• 18:27 - Snow plowing business affected by climate
• 23:08 - Communal home ownership Interview
• 27:28 - Closing economic insights

Transcript

[Kai Ryssdal]

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 bill, but they left until January 15, the most bitter part of the dispute. Automation talks resume today. Marketplace Sabri Benishore 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.

[Kai Ryssdal]

Ports like Yangshan in China can move 113 to 80 containers per hour, which is very efficient. But the majority of the ports in Los Angeles and others are around 25 per hour.

[Sabri Benishore]

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 their issues, other businesses are bracing for the impact of a possible strike. Aaron McLaughlin is a senior economist with the Conference Board.

[Kaylee Wells]

It could cost about 3.78 billion during 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 Ryssdal]

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 numbers. 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 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 1 $7.7 billion. Except that increase was a sign of something good, says Robert Dieckel with usc.

[Sabri Benishore]

All the international supply chains were screwed.

[Kai Ryssdal]

Up with the pandemic, and then that.

[Sabri Benishore]

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.

[Cass Lang]

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 Ryssdal]

It's not like we're hitting new heights of the deficit when you think of it relative to gdp.

[Liz Pelly]

That's Sam Cordam at Yale.

[Kai Ryssdal]

Sometimes these numbers can look Huge. When you look at them in dollar terms, if you look at the ratio.

[Liz Pelly]

Kind 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 Ryssdal]

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 notebook 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.

[Liz Pelly]

Thank you so much for having me.

[Kai Ryssdal]

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.

[Liz Pelly]

For a long time it has been, yeah, I would say these days, you know, 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 Ryssdal]

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

[Liz Pelly]

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 Alphabet 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 Ryssdal]

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?

[Liz Pelly]

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 Ryssdal]

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.

[Liz Pelly]

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 Ryssdal]

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

[Liz Pelly]

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 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 Ryssdal]

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

[Liz Pelly]

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

[Kai Ryssdal]

Yeah, basically.

[Liz Pelly]

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 Ryssdal]

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

[Liz Pelly]

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

[Kai Ryssdal]

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 labels struck their first deals with Spotify. Are you sure?

[Liz Pelly]

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 alone and that it also requires a political counterweight. It's a story that begins nor ends as one company. And also the story of streaming is as much about what's changed as it is about what's stayed the same. So in some ways it's kind of like pushing open space for 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 Ryssdal]

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.

[Liz Pelly]

Thank you.

[Cass Lang]

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

[Kai Ryssdal]

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. 19,000 4 8niner the S&P 500 down 66 1.1% percent 59. 09. 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 2. 10 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 fail 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.

[Liz Pelly]

This Marketplace podcast is supported by Gusto. Let your employees know you've got their back by signing up for Gusto for payroll and HR. More than 300,000 small business owners use Gusto. They offer benefits like health insurance, employee onboarding and more. Get your payroll taxes filed, deductions calculated, and your team paid fast. No more pain, just the joy of running your business. Get three months free when you go to Gusto.com Marketplace that's Gusto.com Marketplace.

[Kai Ryssdal]

Hi, this is Michael from Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania. Marketplace is both enjoyable and extremely informative. Kai and the reporters go out to all kinds of people in the community and they ask straight ahead questions like how are you holding up these days? It's very personal and as we listen we get a good sense of the challenges people face as they are trying to make it from day to day. I listen to the Marketplace podcasts every day and have been doing so for a number of years. It's a breath of fresh air that helps me understand the economic world better. Join me by making a gift to [e-mail] donate 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 temperatures 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 driveway with it.

[Kai Ryssdal]

And then a friend of mine asked.

[Sabri Benishore]

If I could do a couple driveways.

[Kai Ryssdal]

And it turned into like four drive.

[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, 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 like it's real.

[Kai Ryssdal]

I'm convinced. You know, I have facts.

[Sabri Benishore]

You know, it's written down on my charts.

[Kai Ryssdal]

You know, when I do this now.

[Kaylee Wells]

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

[Cass Lang]

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 freezes over.

[Cass Lang]

Later than it has been in years past, that would essentially give the region a longer window of time where lake.

[Kaylee Wells]

Effect snow would be possible, 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 Lenart, 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 dustings. 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.

[Kai Ryssdal]

They demand constant service. They want no chance of a slip and fall there. 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.

[Kai Ryssdal]

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.

[Liz Pelly]

Does it make me nervous?

[Sabri Benishore]

Yes, but I think it's going to.

[Kai Ryssdal]

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 Kaylee Wells for Marketplace.

[Kai Ryssdal]

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.

[Cass Lang]

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

[Kaylee Wells]

Was I supposed to.

[Cass Lang]

I thought you were gonna finish it up, 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. 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 love a deck. You can dream big. Right. 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, have friends.

[Liz Pelly]

Right.

[Cass Lang]

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 nine now, not right now. And we're happy with how it's going right now. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm excited about whatever we plan to figure out in the future. Yeah, it's unwritten.

[Kai Ryssdal]

Cass Lang and Jordan Hyde in Barre 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, Mac, 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 Yedanen, Janet Nguyen, Olga Oxman, Ellen Rothfuss, Virginia K. Smith and Tony Wagner. Francesca Levy is the Executive Director of Digital and On Demand. I'm Kai Ryssdal. We will see you tomorrow. Everybody, this is 8:00pm Hi, this is.

[Liz Pelly]

Julie from Centennial, Colorado. I listen to Marketplace on my drive home from on my three to midnight night er shifts, Kai and the gang keep me awake and interested for my 30 minute drive. For someone not in the financial field, it's a fantastic synopsis of all things business and economics. I love the commitment to showcasing a steady stream of brilliant and articulate women who are experts in their field. Join me in supporting Marketplace with a gift today. Go to marketplace.org donate.