The Mobile Monopoly Edition

Summary

Slate Money – "The Mobile Monopoly Edition" (July 21, 2018)

Episode Overview

This episode of Slate Money, hosted by Felix Salmon, with regulars Anna Szymanski and Emily Peck, delves into three major topics in business and finance:

1. The European Union’s record $5 billion antitrust fine against Google for its practices with Android and mobile search—raising larger questions about digital monopoly power.
2. The chronic problems of the New York subway system, whether a new leader can fix it, and the complex political and economic roots of the mess.
3. WeWork’s new policy banning meat in all company-catered events and food reimbursements, exploring the line between corporate virtue signaling and meaningful change.

The episode’s tone was conversational, energetic, skeptical of both corporate and government actions, and often laced with humor and personal anecdotes.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The EU’s Antitrust Case and Google’s Mobile Monopoly

Background and Issue

• The EU fined Google $5 billion, having investigated how Google requires phone makers using Android to install Google’s search and Chrome apps by default (01:54).
• Android is open-source, but manufacturers must follow certain restrictions if they want Google’s services, leading to Google dominating mobile searches—well over 90% market share.

Quotes & Insights

• Felix Salmon:
  “Why would Google be giving away this incredibly valuable operating system for free? ... they bundle it with their search product.” (02:27)
• Anna Szymanski:
  "The problem ... is not just they control a lot of the market. The problem ... is that they are actually harming consumers, that this tends to be in the US that we don't regulate monopolies unless we see that consumers are being hurt ..." (03:54)

Market Share Versus Actual Harm

• The hosts move beyond market share as the sole definition of monopoly, emphasizing how Google’s control over user data creates insurmountable barriers for competitors (04:58).

EU vs. US Regulatory Attitudes

• The EU is becoming a world leader in regulating tech giants, contrasting—sometimes scathingly—with a more “toothless” U.S. approach (05:27).
• The EU’s action comes with a consent decree—Google must change its practices within 90 days or face further penalties (06:02).

2. The Difficulties of Regulating Tech Giants

Complexity of Regulation

• Regulation is complicated: Overzealous rules can hinder competition by making compliance too expensive for challengers (06:49).
• Felix Salmon:
  “Instead of trying to regulate the industry ... regulate the handful of tech giants individually.” (08:10)

Comparisons with Microsoft Antitrust Case

• The Microsoft case in the 1990s set a precedent but also had unintended positive effects: innovation and new competition flourished afterwards (08:47).

Calls for Sensible, Embedded Regulation

• Simply investigating and fining is slow; embedding regulators into large companies could be more proactive (10:15).

Rethinking Antitrust Tools

• Old antitrust tools might be inadequate; potential solutions include more aggressive actions like breaking up Google or forcing data-sharing to level the playing field (13:51).

Quote

• Felix Salmon:
  "If you broke Google up ... there are possible spinoffs and breakups which ... people should be taking seriously." (13:51)

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3. The New York Subway Crisis: Can It Be Fixed?

Degradation of Service

• Anna, the most frequent subway commuter in the group, describes steady decline that accelerated into crisis over the last year (15:51).
• Personal anecdote: “You’d have to be walked off the train because it could only go halfway into the station ... absurd things that we've never had to deal with before.” (16:04)

Causes of the Crisis

• Main factors: chronic underfunding, mismanagement, union and contractor inefficiency, and lack of political will.
• The state government has siphoned funds from MTA to other projects, including upstate ski resorts (17:15), especially after the 2008 crash and Superstorm Sandy.
• Lack of incentives to control costs: ballooning labor and project expenses compared to other world cities (20:25).

Power Structure and Politics

• State vs. city authority creates confusion; political capital spent elsewhere; unions heavily influence cost structures (22:46).

Complex Solutions, Modest Optimism

• Fixing the system will require action on multiple fronts—money alone isn’t enough.
• Even consumers (New Yorkers) complicate solutions by resisting shutdowns for repairs: “Once you give people something, you can't take it away.” (25:36)
• New MTA chief Andy Byford is experienced, seems competent, but faces daunting structural problems.

Notable Moment

• Felix notes the irony of NYC’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, only contacting the new subway chief after a major New Yorker profile came out (27:25).

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4. WeWork’s "No Meat" Policy: Corporate Virtue Signaling or Change?

Policy Details & Critique

• WeWork’s new global policy bans meat, poultry, and pork from all company-paid events, allowing fish and eggs (27:41).
• Seen by the hosts as performative, complicated to enforce, and unlikely to significantly benefit the environment.
• Emily Peck:
  “It's a marketing move. It's virtue signaling ... Part of our brand is that we're Hip and cool in this very specific enviro way ... it's not really going to help the environment in any way.” (29:19)

Impractical & Paternalistic

• The logistics are muddled—for instance, reimbursing clients who order a burger—creating awkwardness (30:01).
• Decision seen as top-down and arbitrary, typical of "fake tech companies" and founder egotism (31:16); WeWork’s other questionable moves (e.g., building a pre-K run by the founder’s spouse) are cited as examples (31:51).

Vegetarians Weigh In

• Felix shares that most vegetarians he heard from dislike the policy, seeing it as likely to create resentment and bad PR (32:42).
• Anna Szymanski (as resident vegetarian):
  “I felt exactly the same way. ... Imposing this on people ... just creates resentment.” (33:24)

Corporate Virtue Signaling as a Trend

• Broader conversation about how corporations attempt to project ethical or green credentials, often ineffectively or hypocritically (34:22).

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5. Numbers Round (Selected Timestamps)

• Emily’s Number: $25 (per hour)—intern pay in a widely discussed Refinery 29 “Money Diary,” provoking debate about privilege and NYC’s cost of living (36:27).
• Felix’s Number: 260,000—bronze coins found in a 15th-century Samurai’s house, leading to reflections on the shifting value of money (37:52).
• Anna’s Number: 5,988—the per-metric-ton price of copper, a market measure of global economic outlook, dropping below $6,000 (39:27).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Felix, on Google’s defense:
  “They've come out with statements saying we're not anti-competitive ... because other search engines are only a download away.”
  —"Oh, that's like, come on." (Emily) (12:17)

• On regulating tech giants:
  "Embed some regulators in these companies and just say, listen, let's just make sure you don't do really dumb thing[s]."
  —Felix (10:15)

• On New York Subway:
  “New Yorkers are used to ... the air conditioning never works or the fact that you will see rats on the platform. Like, these things aren't great ... but you at least expect the train to be there.”
  —Anna (16:04)

• On WeWork’s meat ban:
  “If your client gets a burger, they have to pay for it out of their own pocket or you wind up paying for it out of, God forbid, your own pocket.”
  —Emily (30:01)

• Anna, summarizing the MTA crisis:
  “What caused this is it was a team effort. ... Politicians, state, city ... the unions, the construction companies, and you even had customers.” (19:10)

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Segment Timestamps

• Introduction & Google antitrust case: [00:10]–[13:51]
• Regulating tech and monopolies: [13:51]–[15:39]
• New York subway problems: [15:39]–[27:41]
• WeWork’s meat ban: [27:41]–[34:22]
• Corporate virtue signaling: [34:22]–[36:19]
• Numbers round: [36:27]–[40:42]

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Conclusion

This episode of Slate Money brings together major stories about the power and limits of regulation—from Google’s control of our digital lives to the decaying arteries of New York, and the strange world of posturing corporations. It is rich with sharp critique, humor, and real-world understanding of how finance, policy, tech, and culture intersect.

Transcript

[A]

Hello, and welcome to the Mobile Monopoly edition of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon, joined as ever by Anna Szymenski.

[B]

Hello.

[A]

And by the Huffington Post's one and only Emily Peck. Hello. And we are going to be talking about things on the move. We are going to be talking about New York's slightly fucked up. Is that a good technical term?

[B]

I'd remove this slightly.

[A]

Subways. If you've been to New York in the past couple years, you might well have a horror story of being on the subway. And we are going to see if that is fixable. We know it's bad. The interesting question is whether it's fixable and whether it is fixable by a person. And we're going to talk a little bit about this Brit who's come in to try and fix it. We are also going to talk because it's an awesome story about what I called in a Slate piece, performative vegequarianism and which is. Which is WeWork's latest corporate policy. Certain people think it's incredibly stupid, though certain people would include myself, but mostly or initially, at any rate, we are going to talk about a rather large fine which Margareta Vestaga, the European Community or European Union antitrust chief who's kind of awesome, we like her, has brought down on Google. Emily, what's the background here?

[C]

The background is, I think about two years ago, the EU started this investigation. The issue is Android, which is Google's mobile operating system, which is ostensibly free for developers and.

[A]

Open source.

[C]

Open source. But to use it, Google makes people use only a certain version of Android and requires them to put Chrome and Google search apps on. On the phone. So when you get the phone, it already has the app, so you use the apps. He was like, no, the question.

[A]

The question is basically, you know, in. In the grand economic scheme of things, where people walk around saying there's no such thing as a free lunch, why would Google be giving away this incredibly valuable operating system for free? And the answer turns out to be because they do take a leaf out of the old Microsoft Playbook and bundle it with their search product. And the result is that if you think that Google has a monopoly on desktop search, which it does, it's like over 80%. Just wait till you see what the share of mobile search it has. It's like way up in the high 90s.

[C]

And this wasn't a certainty when everyone switched to mobile whenever it was a few years ago, because. Right, because you have Your phone. And your phone isn't like a desktop where you open up and start searching. Your phone is app driven. So if you don't have the search app, you might, you might not search. You might just go to your Gmail.

[A]

And in fact, I know one person, I believe he might even be listening to this podcast right now. Hi, Larry. If you're out there who used to have a Windows Phone, there is such a thing as a Windows Phone. And if you look at people who have Windows Phones, there aren't a lot of them. But if you look at the people who do have Windows Phones, turns out that the share of search that Google has on Windows phones is like 25%. So it's by no means obvious that, like, absent the operating system pushing you there, that you're going to be using Google.

[B]

And I think it's important when we're talking about new companies and monopoly and tech companies and monopoly, that we're going beyond simply market share, because I think that tends to be what people look at when you're thinking about whether or not a sector is competitive. But when you're talking about Google, to me, the problem is not just, you know, they control a lot of the market. The problem that I see is that they are actually harming consumers, that this tends to be in the US that we don't regulate monopolies unless we see that consumers are being hurt, usually with prices. But if you consider what's happening with Google, you could probably say the same thing with Facebook, is they're actually charging us more and more in terms of data. And so in I, this is also extremely important moving forward because if you look at where we see the economy going in terms of AI development, machine learning, that is all based on access to data. So if you have companies that have essentially created a monopoly on most people's data, they have such a competitive advantage that the idea that any other company moving forward is going to be able to compete is somewhat ridiculous.

[A]

So the idea here is that when every single person with a telephone does a search, and they probably do that, you know, however many dozen times a day in one way or another, if all of those search queries wind up getting aggregated by Google, and Google can then apply machine learning and AI techniques to that corpus of search queries to be able to create new products, that gives Google an insuperable advantage over anyone else in terms of building new products. And that's just not fair.

[C]

And it seems like the eu, as opposed to the United States, is really being tough on Google, I mean, this $5 billion fine was pretty unprecedented. The biggest ever. And find them a couple of years ago.

[B]

Last year.

[C]

Yeah, last year, 2 billion as well. And they're really making an effort to rein in technology companies over there, whereas over here it seems like we're struggling. I mean, it seems like we're even struggling to pinpoint the issue, especially when it comes to not not just Google, but Facebook also now clearly needs some kind of regulation, in my opinion, after what's happened with the elections.

[A]

And it turns out that the EU is doing that regulation. And let's be clear here that the important thing is not defined. The important thing is the consent decree, which basically says that Google needs to fix this and take out all of these forced searches within I think 90 days. And then if they don't do that, then the remedies start becoming bigger and bigger. Obviously, Google can pay 5 billion euros. That's not a slap on the wrist, but it's easily affordable. What's important is that going forward, they're not going to be allowed to do this anymore. And as you say, the reason why they're not going to be allowed to do this anymore is entirely to do with the EU Competition Commissioners and nothing to do with the rather toothless American commissioners.

[C]

Right.

[B]

And I think this is, it's my favorite word, which is complicated, is that on the one hand, I completely agree we're getting to a point where a number of companies are able to engage in the practices of a monopolist. And to me, that's the, that's the big problem, regardless of market share, that's the problem. And in the eu they are starting to crack down. And on the one hand, I think this could be good, but I also think it's important to remember, remember that regulations always have multiple effects. And when you're structuring regulations and if you make them extremely onerous, you can actually potentially make the landscape less competitive. This is something that we have seen in banking where when you have extreme, when you have like tons and tons of regulations and it's extremely expensive and time consuming, it actually makes it harder for others to compete because they can't afford that.

[A]

But I don't think that's a problem when you have a Google specific regulation.

[B]

Oh, no, I agree. I'm not, I'm not opposed to this regulation. I'm just saying if we think moving forward, forward about what it means to regulate tech companies, and I think we will and we have to, I think it's not a simple solution. It's not. And I also think it shouldn't. I personally believe it shouldn't be like the idea of punishing. It should more be the idea of I like Google, I like Amazon, I actually like a lot of these companies. I think big companies are great. What I don't think is great is when you have so much market power in a few players that then actually makes the entire landscape less competitive, less innovative.

[A]

I think the answer there and the way you avoid this problem of tying up the entire industry with regulations is to take a leaf out of the bank regulators books and instead of trying to regulate the industry qua industry is to regulate the handful of tech giants individually. Every single large bank has a permanent cadre of regulators who sit inside the bank and who basically make sure that they're keeping an eye on things. And you can do the same thing with Facebook and Google and Amazon and Apple and you wouldn't need to do it with anyone else and you'd basically cover the bases.

[C]

I went back and was looking at what happened to Microsoft in the 90s because we know the Department of Justice sued them. It was a very similar situation I think to what Google's experience, right.

[A]

They were bundling one thing with another and they were basically using their dominance in operating systems to try and get a dominance in web browsers.

[C]

They tried to force everyone to use Internet Explorer by bundling it with Windows OS which everyone was using at the time. But the problem, one of the problems was window. Internet Explorer was terrible. And so one of the analysis I was reading pointed out that once the, the, the, the case against Microsoft kind of didn't go exactly as planned and they sort of won, they sort of lost. But that the end result was more competition and the end result was a company like Google Thrive, there was more innovation in tech. The tech sector, you know, did well. Microsoft was never quite as dominant.

[A]

And today like no one uses Internet.

[C]

Explorer, no one uses Internet Explorer. No, very few, no, almost no one. But what I'm saying is the actions of the government stepping in actually serve to increase innovation, increase competition. It kind of worked. And I feel like right now the climate is such that people are afraid of these kinds of solutions. But like when you listen to that Mark Zuckerberg interview with Kara Swisher on Recode where he somehow defends holocaust deniers like a little bit, which was bizarre. I felt like he was like almost crying out for regulation. Like I know he doesn't want, they don't want to be.

[A]

But he kept on saying if you go back to his congressional testimony, we believe that good, sensible regulation is necessary. And in principle he has said that he's okay with the idea. And I just think that instead of starting with complaints, which is what you did in this case, and then investigating the specific complaint and then coming down with a fine and a consent decree, why not just as I say, embed some regulators in these companies and just say, listen, let's just make sure you don't do really dumb thing.

[B]

But I think it's gonna have to be a little bit more than that.

[A]

Right? I mean, that might not be sufficient, but it would definitely be a positive step.

[B]

Oh, certainly, I agree. But I think when people talk about regulations, the term regulations is thrown around a lot, but people tend to not always dig deep and say, well, what do you mean by that? What does it mean to regulate a company like Google? What would that actually mean? Looking moving forward beyond, you know, simply saying they can't, you know, embed all of these things. But is that really the only problem?

[A]

There's at least one ongoing investigation. Like there were three big ones.

[B]

Yeah, there's an adsense that the EU.

[A]

Was, has been engaged in. They've basically finished two of them and the third one is still open. We should say that Google is appealing this ruling and they claim that they're purist driven snow and completely innocent and don't deserve any fine at all. And I think actually this is problematic. I think this is a bad move from Google's point of view because while you can be sympathetic to Google on certain things, like I was sympathetic to Google when they had that big fight about Google books and scanning all of those books and the copyright, there are certain areas where you can sort of understand where they're coming from. With this one, it seems pretty cut and dried.

[C]

But why? I mean, I get it, like they're giving you a thing for free and they're saying in order to have the free thing, you have to do these other things. And they're doing it to keep their business.

[A]

What they're saying is, and this is absolutely ludicrous, is, you know, they've come out with statements saying we're not anti competitive against other search engines because other search engines are only a download away.

[C]

Oh, that's like, come on.

[B]

Right. And what they've also, they've tried to make the argument that because they don't make hardware in the same way that obviously Apple does, that they, they essentially just sell services. So if you're really limiting what the money they can make from those, then that is putting them in a much less competitive place. And I think that's slightly ridiculous.

[A]

Yeah. And what's clear is that the reason why Google has Android and I think this case has made this clear, is not because it's going to become a massive profit center on a par with their ad revenues. You know, the reason why they have Android and the reason why they have Chrome is, is, is like a different.

[C]

Reason to keep people in the Google. To keep that ad revenue coming in. To keep searching.

[A]

Yeah. And to keep the money.

[B]

Well, to get the data that's coming in. Exactly. And I do think that if you're moving forward in thinking of what does it mean to regulate the tech companies, I do think we're going to have to move beyond the old tools of antitrust law. We're going to have to start looking at companies acquiring their competitors, like in utero, which we've seen especially with Facebook, you know, in terms of some of the practices, the pricing practices that Amazon can engage in because of the way the capital markets work right now where people only care about capital gains. There are a lot of things that we now need to start looking at. And when it comes to Google, one thing at some point that might be an issue is that their data may need to be available to other companies at some point.

[A]

And yet there is. If, if you're saying that the old fashioned tools aren't adequate, I would agree with that. But I would say that the, the biggest old fashioned tool of all, which is breaking up companies, is actually an interesting and possibly good solution here. If you broke Google up into. If you, if you force them to spin off YouTube, force them to spin off like Gmail, force them to spin off DoubleClick, which was the number one like original sin acquisition which they made, which basically caused all of this monopoly craziness to be possible in the first place. You know, it would be hard because it's so deeply integrated at this point, but there are possible spinoffs and breakups which I think people should be taking seriously.

[B]

Yeah, I mean I do think that when you're talking about some of the tech companies, breakups might not be the best option, especially like social media. That. That seems like it.

[A]

No, I think in social media it's even more obvious. If you forced Instagram to get spun off from Facebook, then that would actually become a much more competitive.

[B]

That I would agree with. But if you're talking about like Facebook itself, there's no real way to essentially that thing.

[A]

But no, but remember that Facebook has four social networks not one. So if you forced it to break up Instagram, Facebook messenger, and WhatsApp, then that would be a much more vibrant, competitive space than having them all owned by the same company.

[B]

No, that's fair. And I also think there could be something as well of allowing a company like Google to. So they have the part of the business that's essentially just search, which at a certain point may need to be regulated like utility. But then there could still be. They could still have other segments that were not regulated like utility. So, I mean, there are lots of different solutions.

[A]

Let's talk a little bit about the mta. Which New Yorker here takes the subway the most? It's not me. I don't take it a huge amount.

[B]

I take it a pretty significant amount, especially this year.

[A]

So, Anna, as the, as the straphanger extraordinaire of the Slate Money team, how has the service declined or not over the past couple years?

[B]

Well, I've been thinking about this because I came to New York in 2000, and I kind of remember, you know, New York in 2000. I remember the subways in New York in 2000. Granted, obviously, I was young and fresh and everything seemed wonderful, but it does seem like things were. You didn't have these types of delays, things were cleaner, all of that. And it does seem like steadily there's been this decline. And then in the last few years, and especially last year, last summer, it was like everything just stopped working at once. Like, all of a sudden you would have every week, like, four times where the train was, you know, 35 minutes later than it was supposed to be, or you'd get trapped on a train, or you'd have to actually be like, I had a few times where actually had to be, like, walked off the train because it could only go halfway into the station. Like, absurd things that we've never had to deal with before. I mean, New Yorkers are used to the fact that the air conditioning never works or the fact that you will see rats on the platform. Like, these things aren't great, but you're kind of used to them, but you at least expect the train to be there.

[A]

So, Emily, do we have a feel for why this is happening?

[C]

Yes.

[A]

And is that. Is the reason why it's happening just ultimately an incredibly simple answer, which is it's the state of New York not spending enough money on maintaining the system.

[C]

We can just leave it there and say that it's that simple. But it's about 20 years of the state siphoning money away from the MTA to pay for other stuff. Most infuriating was, I believe last year the Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, took money away from the MTA to help ski resorts upstate. He diverted funds from the mta, which one of the biggest transit operations.

[A]

Transit operation in, in the United States.

[C]

Yes, for these, for these ski resorts and especially. And this, this was happening for a while, really picked up pace after the crash in 2008 and then things. So it was siphoning money away after 2008. Then Superstorm Sandy hits and the system is just a huge shock to the system, which is already really old infrastructure. And things got even worse, culminating in what I think last year they called it like the summer of hell or something like crazy like that. And now I guess there's finally a recognition after this, like really decades of just letting this whole thing go into decline. There's a recognition now that even by Cuomo, like, oh, we probably need to fix this. So enter. The reason we're talking about it is this profile of this British fellow, Andy Byford, who's been brought in from London, right to. And he was in Toronto and Toronto to fix the MTA that Anna told us about.

[A]

And the question facing the big question is can you hire this guy who by all accounts is really good at fixing subway systems? Really good, and say, hey, that's what we need to do. We've hired him and now the subway system can be fixed. Or ultimately, if the problem is at the level of New York State and the governor and the dysfunctional politics of New York State, the solution has to be at that level as well.

[B]

Well, what I think is important here is that what caused this is it was a team effort. I mean, you had, you had politicians, state city, you could even put in federal. You had the unions, you had the construction companies, and you even had customers. I mean, New York is one of the few places where people will throw their limbs into trains because, like, apparently we care more about being late than dismemberment. But like, we, we, we actually do slow down the trains. Like the New Yorkers are. Some of our, some of our habits are problem, but we're not the biggest problem. I would say the biggest problems are going to be the politicians, the unions and the construction companies. So if you're talking about how to fix this, you're going to have to work on many different levels. It's not simply saying, oh, well, we'll get some more state money and that, that's certainly a part of it, but you're talking about changing the entire signal system to this. It's like CBTC or something. I may be misremembering that acronym. A system that makes tremendous sense. It's what we've used, the number of other cities have used. But this is going to take, I mean, people are talking about like 40 years to fix this. These are big problems. And when you're talking about the New York City subway system, part of the reason that they don't have enough money is because it's so expensive. It is so much more expensive than anywhere else.

[C]

There's a great piece in the New York Times, I think it was last year that explained why the New York City sub subway system is to build things, is multiples and multiples upon multiples more expensive. Like the, that we just had something called the second Avenue subway. It's just a few stops, it's not three stops. It took over a decade to build. And they compared it to this other project in Paris. Very similar amount of track built. And the, the New York City subway system spent six times as much money than Paris. And I mean, and because for some reason the mta, when unions and construction companies negotiate on projects, the MTA doesn't have a voice. It can't say, guys, guys, costs are crazy. Like, that's too much money. Like, there's no mediation between parties that have no, it's not their money. I was floored by this.

[B]

Exactly. There are no incentives to keep costs low.

[A]

Right.

[B]

That, not surprisingly, you have a lot of these, like bizarre union requirements that you need two people on every train, which is nowhere else. There are certain machines that in other places you need like two or three people. Here you need 20. You have weird jobs. Like the person who oversees the break room, the person that watches people move things, the person that pushes the button on electric elevators. I mean, things that these are not real jobs. You had the project where there were 900 people staffed on 700 jobs.

[C]

Right?

[B]

Like, yeah, this is a problem. And the politicians agree to it for a number of reasons. Like one in the state, because the state controls the system. They control a large part obviously of the funding. But if you're a governor, you have, you're beholden to the entire state. And the rest of the state often will say, we don't want to pay for New York City's subway system, which is absurd because we pay for everything there. So it's not always in the best interest of the governor to really care about the New York City subway system.

[A]

Hang on, this, this is the bit which I don't entirely understand. Like, if I understand how the governor has non New York City things to care about and might be less inclined to spend money on the subway system than, say, the mayor of the city would be, were it up to the mayor, which it's not. But that said, surely it's still in the governor's interest to care about the costs and the expenses and to want to bring those down rather than to be very happy with them being enormous.

[C]

No, I do give a lot of money to the governor. I think the one piece I wrote was millions from the unions to the governor. They're a really big. They have a lot of political weight and capital in the state. So that kind of changes the calculation.

[B]

Exactly. And there is fiscal prudence is not exactly in vogue. So if you're thinking about, well, what, what can I do? I can really take on the unions and potentially lose a tremendous amount of voters that way, or I can take on more debt. I can kind of siphon things from other areas. I can just not pay for maintenance. I think this is the important thing, too. Once this became such an issue that people really started screaming about it, they did respond. The problem has then been, for years and years, it's been this kind of steady decline, but it hasn't been like an emergency. So it's not surprising that if you're a politician, you're not going to waste a tremendous amount of political capital for that. Now you will or not waste now you'll use that political capital. But in the past, you wouldn't.

[A]

So I think the. The big issue here is actually similar to what we've seen in London and other cities as well, which is that politically, and you actually see this even in arts organizations, it's always easier and sexier to build something new than it is to maintain something old. And so if you want to build a whole new subway line, although it did take 75 years to build this Second Avenue subway, ultimately they've managed to do that. They've managed to build the new station on the 7 train, which also cost like $3 billion or something insane like that. I think the most expensive train station in the world. And it's just like one subway station for one subway line. But those things at least you get to point to, and they're shiny and new. Whereas when you're talking about the sort of decrepit infrastructure and the need to spend enormous amounts of money just to stop it getting from even more decrepit, and then that infrastructure is like slammed by Hurricane Sandy. It just, it's the least sexy kind of spending you can get. And you see this also with like, you know, the water tunnels and the steam pipes which are exploding and like there's a bunch of just really important old infrastructure which you need to spend money on and that no politician ever loves to spend money on.

[C]

But it was actually Infrastructure Week at the federal government. Donald Trump's gonna fix everything.

[B]

Well, and last thing I just will say, just because I'm just gonna anger New Yorkers is that part of the problem, I think again is a little bit of us is that we on the one hand want everything to be fixed, but we never want the trains to be shut down. We all complain about this. And that is part of the problem too. It's one of the only 24 hour systems. And they even talked about this when they were trying to fix, I think things on like the seven where like every week there was a different reason why they couldn't fix it. And so I do think that's another issue for a lot of politicians, a lot of people in general. It's that you don't want to upset consumers, right?

[A]

I mean, New Yorkers will complain about everything and certainly 24 hour subway service. Whenever anyone hints that like fixing the subway system is going to require closing it down at night on certain lines, then you always get like, you know, some nurse who needs to come back from the hospital at three in the morning saying like now I can't do that anymore. And everyone's like you, we could just pay for your like, you know, luxury Rolls Royce to ferry you home. It would be cheaper than keeping the subway open. But there's no mechanism to do that. And so everyone just gets up in arms and says, no, we need to Keep subway open 24 hours. It's a ratchet. Once you give people something, you can't take it away. It's, and this is, I think to come back to the central question here, the kind of problem where having a really competent administrator running the whole thing and being able to communicate things well and being very clear about what he wants and trying to hold himself and everyone else accountable to those things can actually help at the margin. And I'm not completely pessimistic, I think there's no way that anything subway related you can ever really be an optimist in New York. But I think there is some reason to believe that finding the right executive is important and that he is the right executive.

[C]

He did seem, I mean, I encourage everyone to read this piece in the New Yorker. He seemed Very competent. His workers on his side. He's out visiting all the subway stations. He's really trying to fix things where he can. I mean, he's not going to be able to solve the problem of the unions and the analysts and the consulting companies and the governor. But for what can be fixed for those things on the margins. Like you were saying, this guy does seem rather competent.

[B]

Agreed. And can I just say one last thing, cuz I thought this was a detail related to the article. That was funny. So Byford has been in office since January. Bill de Blasio had not reached out to him until after the article was published. And it was noted in the article that he had never reached out to him.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, yeah, this is. You can get all of your lovely New York politics podcast you need somewhere else, I'm sure, but the idea that the mayor of New York doesn't actually talk to the person running the subways of New York, even if he's not technically in control, is kind of bonkers. Pescatarianism, vegequarianism. What are we calling it? What's the name for it? Whatever the name is, WeWork has adopted it. It is the new policy across 72 different cities around the world and 400 and some locations that if we work is paying for food in any way, shape or form. That means if they're catering anything, if they're. Or even if they're reimbursing a meal, which you've expensed, then that food cannot include any meat and it cannot include any poultry, but it can include fish and eggs, it can include farmed salmon, it can include eggs. It just can't include lamb. So I don't know if people are expensing a lot of lamb, but I always order lamb when it's on the menu. I love lamb.

[C]

No, lamb's very good. We just said we're doing a meat share now where they send the box of meat to your house and there's a lot of lamb.

[B]

And it's.

[C]

It's so good. I recommend a meat share, by the way, for everyone. Not if you work at WeWork.

[A]

So you're not a vegequarian.

[C]

No, no. And your piece on this was very good. It's just WeWork, which everyone knows what we work is, right? A company that leases out office if.

[B]

They listen to our show. We've definitely ranted about WeWork enough times.

[C]

So it's a marketing move. It's virtue signaling. It's WeWork saying part of our brand is that we're Hip and cool in this very specific enviro way. Like Starbucks is banning straws and wework is banning meat. And it's, it's not really going to help the environment in any way. It just signals this is our brand.

[B]

Right, Yeah, I completely agree. And it's just as. And as Felix, as you did not in your article, which I think it's so illogical and it doesn't make any sense from a logistical perspective. If you think of like so you're going to mean. So if you comp a meal with a client, you have to tell your client, no, I'm sorry, you can't order that. I would have covered you, but you ordered chicken soup. So like, I mean it's absurd.

[C]

Yeah, I don't understand how that works at all. Like so if your client gets a burger, they have to pay for it out of their own pocket or you wind up paying for it out of, God forbid, your own pocket.

[A]

It's pretty unenforceable, I would say. And this is, you know, I don't think this policy has entirely been thought through but what it does do is it helps to reveal WeWork as one of these companies where the founders can just have some hair brained idea one day and say hey everyone, we're going meat free. And then impose this on a company of 6,000 people in a whole bunch. A wildly diverse group of cities, many of which do not have amazing resources for people who don't want to eat meat. I mean it's always possible, but it's not always easy. And just not think twice about the practicalities of it. And I think this shows how very disorganized. I think it's symptomatic of a certain kind of add nature of WeWork as a whole. They do random acquisitions which don't make any sense.

[B]

They have community adjusted EBITDA and they.

[A]

Have community adjusted EBITDA date. Yeah, like there's a lot of weird things about WeWork which don't make sense. Not you know, at least the fact that it has this insane valuation which just that you can't get to like if you're looking at it as a real estate company and they do things which don't make sense about food as well. You know, if you wanted to care about the environment, you would probably look first and foremost at the buildings you are renting space in and say like we need these buildings to be energy efficient. Are they doing that? No sign that they're doing that.

[C]

They are building a pre K I learned called we grow that costs $36,000 a year and is run by someone with no education, experience who happens to be married to the founder. They're doing that. I don't know if there'll be meat. I guess there's no meat there either. Unclear.

[A]

I'm going to assume that these toddlers are not going to be chowing down on burgers.

[C]

Hope they're okay.

[B]

And I also think it a little bit speaks to the sometimes paternalism that you get in big tech, this idea that they know how to do one thing. Oh, granted, this is not actually a tech company, it's a fake tech company. But in general, in the kind of new economy we've done, we can do one thing. Thus we can tell you how to do everything else. You know, we saw this a little bit with Mark Zuckerberg in the Newark public school system. I think that this is something that we should question a little bit.

[C]

We question.

[B]

Yes, we question.

[A]

So I have a. So I wrote about this and I was particularly interested in the responses I got from vegetarians. There were a few militant vegetarians who were like, this is not only good but necessary and everyone should do it. And I don't eat meat and no one else should eat meat. But the majority of vegetarians were like, this is really stupid. And it actually just gives vegetarians a bad name because like the vegetarian has to be a. Vegetarianism has to be a personal choice. It shouldn't be imposed on others because that just creates resentment.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. I could see how this would make you kind of hate vegetarians a little bit.

[B]

No? And as the resident vegetarian, I will say that, yeah, I felt exactly the same way. I think the idea of imposing this on people as opposed to saying like, you know, I, you could have seen that maybe they would have been like in we work offices, they would have more vegetarian options or you know, a day where they have more plant based options or something.

[A]

Or even by all means, if you're providing lunch in the office, make that lunch vegetarian. I don't think anyone's going to complain about that. But try and do it on an office by office basis and try and get those offices to buy into it. And you know, if there's an office in Buenos Aires where like no one has any interest in vegetarian lunches, then maybe don't do it in Buenos Aires.

[C]

You know, this is just, this is just another example of a corporation trying to signal its, its worthiness and its you greenness by doing something rather absurd, ineffectual, and in this case I forgot what you called it in. Your headline wasn't moronic, it was tyrannical. Tyrannical. Thank you.

[A]

That was. Yeah, that was. Obviously, my editor used that one. I can't claim any of my own headlines. But this is the thing which I don't understand. If you think of this as virtue signaling, if you think of this as some kind of PR stunt, like, it clearly doesn't work, right? I mean, no one is. I mean, the number of people who actually think that WeWork is a cooler, better, more corporately social company as a result of these headlines is much smaller than the number of people who think that wework is off its trolley.

[C]

But now they're trying to get, like big Fortune 500 clients. And this is just the kind of nonsense that Fortune 500 companies actually do. So it might actually.

[B]

They would do this.

[C]

They wouldn't do this, but they would think about it and they'd do some, like, weird other ver. You know, they're always doing these kind of pulling, these kinds of moves that try to signal that they're so green and they're trying to be whatever it is, appealing to women or, you know, whatever bullshit. It's.

[A]

They're kind of corporate. We should have a whole, like, episode on corporate virtue signaling because I think there are interesting ways to do it. Oh, can I just come back? When it comes to corporate virtue signaling, I need to circle round, in the spirit of the circular economy, to Emily Peck's number from last week. Do you remember what your number was last week?

[C]

Oh, I heard that that number was. I learned later my number was incorrect. It was 500 million. Right. Straws a day. And that's from a child.

[A]

So the person who came up with 500 million straws a day, the source of this data point is a nine year old kid.

[C]

It was in the Times. I read it in the Times.

[A]

So it might be true, but we probably have no reason to believe that it's true.

[C]

I'm sorry.

[B]

It's probably no worse than anyone else's estimate of how many stories we use.

[C]

It was in the Times.

[A]

So I think this is our segue to move on to the numbers round. Emily, do you have a slightly more reliable number this week?

[C]

Well, not really. My number is. My number is $25. That is how much per hour this woman, this young woman who wrote a money diary in Refinery 29, which is a women's website, allegedly makes her hourly pay is $25.

[A]

An intern at an HR company.

[C]

An intern at an HR company who.

[A]

Apparently doesn't have any work to do and just sits there doing her nails.

[C]

So Refinery 29 sort of made the headline like, this is how she gets by on $25 an hour in New York City. Well, it turns out she gets by on $25 an hour in New York City by also getting an allowance of about, I think, $1,500 a month from her parents, who also pay her rent.

[A]

And some reason, $4,000 rent for a one bedroom.

[C]

And for some reason, Twitter just went crazy over this story. I think it just touched a lot of raw nerves about how expensive it is to live here and who gets.

[A]

To live here and who gets $25 an hour internships at HR companies.

[C]

And who gets DOL an hour internships at HR companies. People just went crazy. I mean, the number of hot takes spawned by this anonymous diary was actually pretty astounding.

[A]

But as a pro tip, like, I will say that one way to get very cheap food is, yes, to go to your friend's house in the Hamptons and have it made for you by their private chef.

[B]

That is one part. It works.

[A]

It's quite cheap if you. Yeah. Which is one thing she did. My number is 260,000, which is the number of bronze coins that was found in a Samurai's res, 15th century Samurai's residence in Japan. There was this huge ceramic jar, and it was filled with over a quarter of a million of these bronze coins. And these bronze coins were basically the foremost store of value in 15th century Japan. And this samurai had, like, presumably stolen this money because this is like an insane amount of money for one person to have.

[B]

Maybe he worked for the transit union and he maybe.

[A]

Exactly. And. Or possibly he was some kind of a tax collector. No one really knows. But he buried this money and it was only found, you know, 600 years later. And the reason I'm fascinated by this story is not just like, oh, my God, how do you accumulate 250,000 bronze coins? But also this whole idea that people have about the power of compound interest and, like, the stores of value. And, you know, like this guy, you know, these bronze coins are worth nothing today. They were, you know, worth like, some massive proportion of, like, Japanese GDP back then, and now. They're basically an archeological curiosity.

[B]

What is money?

[A]

Profound. So, yeah, remember that when you, you know, never sell any of your bitcoin.

[B]

Okay, well, my number is also about a metal mine is 5,988. So that was one of the lower prices I saw this week for the price of copper, a metric ton of copper that's significant because it's under $6,000 and represents this large decline we've seen in copper, which is significant because copper is known for being an indicator of where the market thinks the global economy is going to go because it's used in everything, especially in terms of infrastructure, construction, telecom. And a lot of this has to do with fears about China, especially related to the trade war and lower industrial production. And I just thought this was kind of interesting because right now everybody's talking about different indicators. Everyone's favorite is the yield curve. And I think that I'm always a little suspicious about whether an indicator means something will happen. But I do think this definitely tells us that a lot of people in the market think things are actually not going that well.

[A]

Also, bronze, it's basically copper.

[C]

Wait, what?

[A]

Bronze is an alloy. It's like 2/3 copper and one third tin.

[C]

Oh, all right. It's interesting that you're both hitting on the same thing.

[A]

We're both hitting on the value of copper. You know, it's not a great investment. Oh, we need to have a Slate plus segment and we have a good one. We are going to have an awesome Slate plus, you know, knockdown, drag out fight between Emily and Anna, something like that about Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and whether or not she's economically literate. This is going to be a doozy. So hang around for that if you're a Slate plus member. If you are not, then. And that's it for us this week. Thank you for listening to Slate Money. Keep those emails coming on slatemoneylate.com one question which I have been wondering. I've had a request from someone very important to me, my wife, for a Brexit edition, because Brexit is going particularly tits up right now and we kind of need to check back in on on that whole thing and try and work out whether an entire country of 80 million people is doomed. So the question I have for you lovely listeners out there, since you were so great to come up with Adam Toos last time, is like, who should we get on who can come into Brooklyn and talk to us about Brexit and who's an expert on European politics and trade and Brexit? Send us your nominations. Slatemoneylate.com Many thanks to all of the producers this week. It has taken at least half a dozen of them and we will talk to you next week on Slate Money.