Hits and Misses
Smoking is costly, both in terms of money spent and lives that are cut short, and the personal finance website WalletHub deserves a hat tip for tallying the precise costs of lighting up in Pennsylvania. The commonwealth is the 10th most expensive state in which to smoke, and smokers who go through a pack a day will spend $149,851 in their lifetime. The health care cost per Pennsylvania smoker is $181,156, according to WalletHub, and the financial opportunity cost is $1.3 million. The total cost over a lifetime per smoker is close to $2 million. If improving your health and adding years to your life isn’t sufficient incentive for someone to quit, maybe seeing how much it costs will do the trick.
The definition of chutzpah is “shameless audacity; impudence,” and that more than adequately sums up the actions of Monessen Mayor Matt Shorraw. After being AWOL from City Council meetings for almost two years, Shorraw wandered into a meeting earlier this month, mustered a majority of votes on council and fired the city’s solicitor and administrator. Without any prior notice, Shorraw and his allies on council also decided to change the times and dates of meetings without even deigning to ask other council members, and adjourned the meeting without public comment. Shorraw said he was taking the city “in a new direction,” which is a pretty brassy move considering his presence has not been felt in Monessen for most of his tenure as mayor. One resident has filed suit, asking that the actions by Shorraw and his friends be tossed out. Whether a judge will agree remains to be seen, but it is hard to take Shorraw seriously as a leader following his extended absence and his actions upon his return.
Critics of the Trump administration have argued that it is trying to drag the country backwards, and the executive branch has definitely adopted an old-school approach when it comes to telework. It is calling hundreds of federal employees back to their cubicles on the apparent belief that if an employee is at home and they can’t be supervised by their boss, then they must be slacking off. It reportedly made the decision without any kind of study or data to back it up, and the administration is completely ignoring the fact that plenty of successful and highly profitable corporations, such as American Express, Google, Highmark and Cigna, allow their employees to telecommute. It is, of course, richly ironic that this administration is drawing back on telework considering that President Trump works from his home, sometimes doesn’t get to the office until 11 a.m., and he seems to have plenty of “executive time” during the workday in which to tweet and imbibe at the well of Fox News. If the administration is concerned about slacking off, it should start at the top.
The Houston Astros won their first World Series in 2017, and came within a couple of innings of repeating the feat last fall. Right now, they are one of Major League Baseball’s powerhouses, alongside the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers. But the team’s image has been tarnished after it was discovered that they were stealing pitching signs from their opponents throughout the 2017 postseason. The Astros were apparently using video technology to determine what pitches would be coming, with the scheme being hatched by players and not managers. However, the team’s manager, A.J. Hinch, and general manager, Jeff Luhnow, have been punished with one-year suspensions. Wouldn’t the punishment have been more meaningful if some players had also been suspended?