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Two weeks into the government shutdown, National Parks are starting to close. The public has been getting free access, since there are no employees to collect entrance fees of up to $35 per car. But neither are employees there to collect trash and clean bathrooms. So, with overflowing trash cans and toilets posing a threat to human health and safety, parks are shutting down.
But in the nation's oldest national park, Yellowstone, local businesses are pitching in to pay park staff to keep it open — or at least parts of it.
[...] Jerry Johnson owns a business that rents snowmobiles and sends seven guided tours a day into Yellowstone in the winter. He calls it 'the trip of a lifetime.' When the shutdown began, he received a big spike in phone calls from people who had already booked trips, and he didn't want to tell them their Yellowstone adventure was cancelled because politicians in Washington D.C. couldn't resolve their differences.
[...] "If you don't groom," explained Johnson, "the trails will get very rough, and you get bumps, moguls, in them, and it'll be — it's just miserable."
So, during the shutdown, private businesses that operate inside the park are picking up the tab — about $7,500 dollars a day to groom Yellowstone's 300-plus miles of snow-covered roads, and to keep one paved road open to cars. Xanterra Parks and Resorts, which runs the only hotels operating inside the park in winter, is paying most of that — paying park service employees to perform the same grooming duties they do under normal circumstances.Xanterra asked the 13 guide services that operate in the park to chip in to help pay, and all of them did. It adds up to about 300 bucks a day for each of the guide services.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 14 2019, @05:26PM (7 children)
Greed? Is the desire to continue to make money in order to keep your business afloat, pay your staff, and feed your family greedy?
I know most fortune 500 CEOs don't but small companies sometimes care about their employees because they know them personally.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 14 2019, @06:18PM (6 children)
Yes, this is the health of the environment they are playing with. What they do affects everyone. If you were sick would you rather have a greedy capitalist try to help you or an earnest medical facility?
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday January 14 2019, @06:28PM (5 children)
Why not both?
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday January 14 2019, @06:38PM (4 children)
If companies are doing the right thing for the wrong reason, that is fine with me. The alternative is doing the wrong thing for the wrong reason, there is no way to make "companies" care about the environment, one can only regulate it.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday January 14 2019, @09:21PM (3 children)
> there is no way to make "companies" care about the environment
I disagree. And here's how to make them care. 1. Keep the sociopath leaders too scared to try any crap, and as far as possible, make sure companies are run by people who are not sociopaths. 2. Instill, or more like restore, a sense of civic duty among business leaders.
When people dismiss bad behavior as somehow expected, even think it's what companies are supposed to do, that there is no other purpose in corporate life than the almighty profit, and that there's nothing anyone can do about it, no one can change it, we empower the bad behavior. If the people cared to, if we could all agree to pull together, we could instantly terminate any business. A total boycott will kill any business no matter how big. Same with a strike.
Of course, these days, a business has to really epically screw up to turn the public against them. Even polluting the entire Gulf of Mexico isn't enough to earn a corporate death sentence.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 14 2019, @09:52PM
The government determines the rules for being a corporation, basically saying they are organizations that need to act like sociopaths if they want access to a special legal system (one of the services the government claims a monopoly on). Its no surprise that sociopaths tend to rise to the top of such organizations.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday January 14 2019, @11:01PM
Agreed: we need to make them 'care', as in "If you don't 'care', we will take all your money and send you to jail for a bum fucking long time!"
I just don't see this happening unless more Americans start 'caring'.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 15 2019, @01:34AM
Who again has the power to generate this fear? It's not going to be the clueless public. It'll be some other group of sociopathic leaders who by the nature of the above shift will be even less accountable for their actions than the alleged sociopathic business leaders were.
You're not even trying.
Let us keep in mind that a lot of the supposed bad behavior isn't even bad, like firing people who are bad workers or paying people less than they would like to be paid.
And what's the problem supposed to be here? BP for example screwed up bad with Deepwater Horizon, but it paid for that. The only disagreement, as far as I've heard, is a mercenary disagreement about whether the fines and clean up costs were high enough or not.