The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
The Mayflower Subcompact
The full service hotel no longer has full services.
I have stayed at the Mayflower Hotel many times. For nearly a century, the Hotel has been a landmark in D.C. It is one of my favorite places to stay. The Mayflower is also home for the Federalist Society National Convention. On any given day, the hotel bustled with energy. The concierge lounge brimmed with movers and shakers. It was a place to be. But no more.
Yesterday, I checked into the Mayflower for the first time since the pandemic began. It is not the same place. The concierge lounge on the tenth floor is closed. The front desk clerk told me there was not enough capacity to justify keeping it open. Marriott Platinum members receive a $27 credit for breakfast at Edgar's, which will not cover a full breakfast with tax and tip. Moreover, there is no room service. I got in late, so I ordered Dominos. The hotel is also quite dead. There was no conference going on. The grand hall was empty. I felt like I was in a bizarro world.
Alas, this full service hotel no longer has full service. I hope things improve for November, when the National Lawyers Convention will be held.
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Domino's was a good choice. In about 20 years, the Federalist Society annual convention might be held at a sidewalk table outside a Domino's.
Even if occupancy increases, they still may not have the staff. No one wants to work in hospitality after covid.
Well, certainly not *during* Covid. I'm less pessimistic than you about what life post-Covid will look like.
You're definitely less pessimistic than me if you believe that the Cathedral will allow there to be a "life post-Covid."
It seems to be endemic across ALL Marriott properties. We were in Maui just after Hawaii removed a lot of the restrictions. Had to stand in line to place a breakfast order and it was delivered to the table in either plastic or cardboard "to go" containers. Dinner "service" had a grand total of TWO choices (aside from burgers and bar food) and plastic utensils. You try eating a steak with a plastic knife and fork.
The pandemic is no longer a reason, it's an excuse.
No breakfast buffets? That's certainly not cool. I stayed in a Hampton's a few months ago and they had the hot breakfast buffet.
All the cheaper hotels still have them. Last hotel I stayed at even had a sausage gravy pump for the biscuits.
Depends how cheap. I needed to stay at a Howard Johnson's recently. Their breakfast option was 5 Bananas and packets of oatmeal. Literally...
Not just Marriott. I was on a recent trip and stayed in a former Hilton, now rebadged as a Doubletree by Hilton I've stayed at several times before. There was no restaurant, there was no breakfast service, only a buffet. Food was not served between 10AM and 5 PM and then only at the bar which closed at 10 PM.
On the same trip I stayed at an Aloft (a Marriott brand), their advertised breakfast was discontinued as was their food service, again except for a limited selection at the bar. A catered event served cold food.
Neither hotel had daily maid service.
Darth, I have had somewhat similar experiences, and I am a lifetime Gold Elite with Marriott. Post covid (12/2019 onward), there has definitely been a downgrade in quality and service. I've stayed in a number of Marriotts around the country in the last 16 months and it is a pretty universal thing...quality and service are just not what they were.
Labor shortages are not helping matters.
Yes, the universal excuse for laziness, as I have been saying.
The unemployment stimulus has convinced ne’er do well servitors that they can live like well retired Boomers.
The conspiracy of ignorance masquerades as common sense.
I hope it was deep dish!
Also, McDonald's still doesn't have the all-day breakfast menu back. I want my egg McMuffin in the evening!
I've always wanted to go to one of those all-day breakfast places, but I've never had enough time.
I've always wished that they had an all day hamburger menu; Breakfast menus are hell for guys on the third shift; You get out of work, all you want is a burger, and all you can get are eggs on biscuits. It's been decades since I was third shift, but I still remember being annoyed about it.
Save up those annoyances Bellmore. The VC depends on you to remember them.
Go to Hong Kong. The McDonalds breakfast menu ends at 10am. After which egg McMuffins switch to the daytime menu....at one third of the price as on the breakfast menu.
Thank Mayor Bowser. In D.C. you have to wear a mask in a gym, even if you’re vaccinated.
Of course, Bowser and her friends can go to a wedding and reception unmasked.
Them and us.
Wow, what a lot of non-sequiters. Is Mayor Bowser to blame for all the other service changes in all the other hotels not in DC that people further up the page mentioned?
FWIW, no one has to wear a mask at an outdoor wedding reception in DC, including the Mayor.
This was indoors.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dc-mayor-bowser-maskless-after-reinstating-mask-mandate
And D.C. is losing more hotel revenue peer capita than surrounding Maryland and Virginia counties and municipalities.
https://wtop.com/business-finance/2021/10/business-travel-bookings-at-dc-area-hotels-just-13-of-normal/
This is one form that inflation takes.
Indeed. Cutting of services.
The government shut down businesses for no good reason, they pay people more and more not to work (and if you work they'll stop paying you). That didn't destroy the economy enough to their liking, so they make it illegal to work without getting government jabs.
And what would be the government's motivation to destroy the economy?
It's cheaper to buy the votes of poor people. Policitians value the wealthy, as efficiently taxable, and able to afford to pay graft, and they value the poor, whose votes can be bought cheaply. (And you can threaten to sic the latter on the former, if they get uppity!)
But the people in between? A waste of skin, really, too well off to show gratitude if you give them stuff, and not rich enough to hire your kids for remunerative no-show jobs.
It must be terrible to go through life so cynical that you can't possibly imagine that at least some politicians honestly want to make life better for people.
Oh, I believe a few of them do, and they don't pursue policies which predictably will drive up income inequality and ravage the economy.
In other words, they're Democrats.
No, in other words, they aren't. Democrats talk about trying to reduce income inequality, but all their actions have the opposite effect. Such as flooding the country with illegal immigrants to drive down wages at the bottom.
There are ways to admit immigrants and reduce income inequality at the same time. Most of them unpalatable to Republicans.
Sure. And there are ways to extinguish a fire while pouring gasoline on it, too, if you want to be technical. But nobody who saw you pouring gasoline on a fire would conclude you meant to extinguish it.
"to make people more dependent on the government" seems like an obvious answer
Government burrocrats don't know enough about the economy to understand the consequences of any of their actions, let alone something new like shuttering "non-essential" businesses. No, their motivation was strictly a knee-jerk response to Trump; they have none of them yet understood, even today, that Trump was popular precisely for not being a typical forked-tongue politician. Their two impeachments were even weaker than the Clinton impeachment; everything they tried just made him more popular. So when the usual burrocrats (Fauci!) suggested lockdowns in response to covid, they jumped at the chance, because it was something Trump had no control over, and something they could do to look powerful and decisive, because they mistakenly thought that was why Trump was popular.
Government bureaucrats understand the concept of double digit unemployment, and if you think they want it, you're even crazier than I thought.
I clearly said they don't understand the economy well enough to understand the consequences of their actions. I clearly did not say they wanted those consequences.
Oh, I think anyone with an IQ above room temperature, regardless of their politics, would understand the correlation between a shutdown and an increase in unemployment.
Then politicians have lower IQs. No one with an IQ above room temperature would shut down an economy and then be surprised when there are shortages.
So who's been surprised by shortages?
The question is whether shutting it down was necessary, not whether it would be painful.
There's no question it wasn't necessary.
Doesnt mean they know why it happened or how to fix it.
1) Trump was never popular.
2) He's only atypical in that he lies more than any other politician in history ever did.
"And what would be the government’s motivation to destroy the economy?"
Centralization of wealth and power. It is a force of nature all its own without the help of any intentionally bad acts, though we have plenty of those as well.
But we don't need government for that; we already have trickle down economics. You think too much government caused the massive income shift from middle class to wealthy we've seen over the past few decades?
"too much government" is too simplistic for me. That's a big part of it, yes. But there is more to it.
"Inequality" of wealth or income is a red herring, just a bugaboo for people using the cheap trick of inflaming base envy for political purposes. Cratering the middle and working class is a very real thing. It can be related to inequality, but it isn't the same thing.
There has been no such shift. The middle class has grown tremendously.
Okay, just hear me out on this one:
Maybe people really didn't travel that much during the pandemic, and that led to hotels having low capacity and hence service cutbacks?
I haven't traveled for work since the start of the pandemic. There was certainly some of that which was the result of government shutdowns, but 80+% of the time has been because of company policy, not anything the government is mandating.
Pandemic? More like PLANdemic to ruin Josh's favorite hotel! The liberals strike again!!
"The concierge lounge on the tenth floor is closed."
Let's hear it for First World Problems!!!
Well, when they're charging First World prices ....
First World prices are also First World problems.
And I know first-hand since I live in the Great State of Northern Virginia and the Other Lesser Counties.
"The richest counties in the U.S. also tend to be the most expensive counties," Kiplinger wrote in the introduction to the rankings. "So although residents of the richest counties might enjoy the highest incomes, they also often bear the highest costs of living."
The rankings were therefore based on the median household income as adjusted for the percentage by which the counties' cost of living is above or below the U.S. average, based on data from the Council for Community and Economic Research (C2ER). Despite the adjustment, Loudoun County, which is first in many such rankings, still finished first, far outpacing second-place Stafford County. Fairfax County was fourth, and Prince William County was seventh.
Here's the complete ranking, with the percentage cost-of-living adjustment and adjusted median income for each county in the top 10:
1. Loudoun County, 12.3%, $126,674
2. Stafford County, 4.8%, $106,048
3. Forsyth County, Ga. (Atlanta suburb), 3.9%, $103,161
4. Fairfax County, 21.1%, $103,100
5. Douglas County, Colo., 17.3%, $102,110
6. Delaware County, Ohio (Columbus suburb), 4.9%, $101,897
7. Prince William County, 5.3%, $101,720
8. Los Alamos County, N.M., 21.6%, $99,813
9. Fort Bend County, Texas (Houston suburb) -1.8%, $99,515
10. Williamson County, Tenn., 14.3%, $98,841
BTW, I definitely am NOT complaining.
"So although residents of the richest counties might enjoy the highest incomes, they also often bear the highest costs of living."
If you spend all your money, you're not rich!
"Let’s hear it for First World Problems!!!"
Just pass the 3.5 trillion "Build Back Better" bill and all our first world problems will be over.
That's almost half of what we wasted by attacking the wrong country (Iraq) and funding the war profiteers and mercenaries far too long in Afghanistan!
Because we wasted money before, it's OK to waste more money?
The church of exalted reason, eh?
I am pleased to make tax payments that fund meals for children.
I expect antisocial, disaffected, obsolete right-wing losers to disagree.
Your tax payments pay for the same stupid shit as everyone else's tax payments.
Or don't pay for it, since the government runs on borrowed money.
Only deluded left-wing nitwits like you disagree,
That's $3.5 Trillion how fast?
Well, Josh, if you are so disappointed, why aren't you actively lobbying for an end to the "emergency" take over of the US economy?
The emergency would be over a whole lot faster if people would just get their damn vaccinations.
Yes, that's how you get dictators to go away, by obeying their orders. They never come back with new orders once they're assured you're obedient, after all.
On recent evidence, dictators don't seem to be so big on vaccinations. https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-belarus-president-who-claimed-vodka-could-ward-off-covid-19-says-he-survived-virus-on-his-feet-12038414
But I'm sure that's not true for the imaginary dictators in your head...
Different dictators vary as to what orders they issue, obviously. Their unifying characteristic is not accepting "no" for an answer. The really gone ones even refer to themselves in the plural.
I'm talking about the Covid emergency, not what you view as a political emergency. At this point, Covid is almost entirely a disease of the unvaccinated; get everyone vaccinated six months ago and we'd be well on the way to the health crisis being over.
At this point it's not an emergency anymore. It hasn't actually been an emergency for months.
Case and death numbers beg to differ. But I guess for anti-life nihilists like yourself, things like that don’t matter once you’ve decided it’s not a big deal anymore.
LTG, it's yet another case of only being pro life until birth. After that he don't care.
We're all born to die, LTG, and I got over being afraid of it while I was going through chemo over a decade ago. I'm not especially eager to have my life over, but I don't lose sleep over it.
But, you know, Covid is only the third largest cause of death in America, and it's not even a close third.
Average daily deaths
Heart disease: 2,050
Cancer: 1,621
Covid: 727
Accidents: 553
Stroke: 440
And, soon enough, Covid is going to drop down the chart to 4th, 5th, 6th... Fourth place was as high as it got at peak death rates, after all.
So, if all these mandates are justified for the distant third cause of death, (Even as it ebbs again!) what orders would you feel comfortable issuing to reduce the first two? Mandatory calisthenics and weight loss? Outlawing sugary drinks and banning snack foods? Heavy taxes on motor vehicles to force more people to bicycle to work?
Yes, the obvious question is, if Covid justifies everything they're doing now, what would much worse medical problems justify? Or to put it the other way around: If much worse problems never justified half this intrusive of measures, how can these mandates be justified?
I’ve also had a near death experience. But it didn’t turn me into a nihilist.
So, you don't want to actually address my point, which is that there are much bigger causes of death that we don't go half as police state about?
No because it would be pointless. Since you don’t believe you have any moral duties to other people and that any government intervention is the same as slavery and Nazism it would be a fruitless conversation.
This is stupid, even for you.
Brett, I will address your point.
In the United States, the number of people who are killed in car accidents is roughly 38,000 per year, which is many times the number of people killed annually in terrorist attacks. By comparison, about 3500 people died on 9/11. So, by your logic, since far more people die in car accidents, we should ignore doing anything to protect ourselves from terrorism, since the numbers are so much smaller, until the car accident problem has been taken care of.
Do I really need to explain why that's a really stupid argument?
You know what would be justified? Firing up that "warp drive" again. You know, we got the Covid vaccines in record time, and while part of that was advances in medical technology, most of it was having a President who was willing to order the FDA to get out of the freaking way of saving lives. But that ended back in January, and the FDA is back to its delaying games.
They've actually got vaccines fine tuned for all the new variants, and the FDA is sitting on approving them! Why doesn't THAT get your ire up? Saving lives by reducing regulatory burdens doesn't get you excited the way ordering people around does?
"the FDA is back to its delaying games."
Perhaps for good reasons?
Nope, just because that's what they do. They just stopped being in a hurry back in January, because nobody was forcing them to be in a hurry anymore.
Warp Speed didn't really help the FDA, it did help BARDA.
Heart disease and cancer aren’t infectious. As for worse problems which *are* infectious, I am curious what restrictions (if any) you would be OK with if a COVID variant arose which were as contagious as measles and as deadly as Ebola.
You mean, would I treat a real emergency the same as I do a fake one? No, obviously not.
But I tend to think genuine emergencies require *more* rational responses, not less. And a lot of the responses to Covid have been just plain stupid. Forcing nursing homes to take people who were contagious. A complete 180 on wearing masks. Refusing to distinguish between people who haven't had Covid and people who've had it. Heavy controls on the border if you enter legally, shipped to the interior and dropped off without testing if you enter illegally.
Covid isn't a reason for 90% of this stuff, it's an excuse. It's not public health, it's public health theater, like 90% of the idiocy after 9-11.
How is the search for Obama’s birth certificate progressing, Brett Bellmore?
Ehhh... Some forms of cancer are infectious, if you look at the cause...
First, Covid deaths have been considerably higher than 2000 per day at times. Heck, they're at about ~2K per day *right now*. They idea of the restrictions is to keep it that way.
Second, if we could mandate that everyone got a shot that would make daily heart disease deaths fall from 2000 to 500 per day, or if everyone wearing a mask indoors would reduce cancer deaths by 20%, I'm sure there would be discussions about these things. But it turns out that there aren't similarly low-cost interventions for these other causes of death. On the other hand, we do mandate seat belts, airbags, etc. because they have a pretty dramatic effect on reducing the "Accidents" deaths, also at a fairly low cost. So when you make apples-to-apples comparisons, we mostly behave pretty similarly.
Whether it is an "emergency" and whether there are still many cases are far from the same statements.
As Delta wanes there are two variants of interest in the wings that are more vaccine resistant and ready to drive a next wave. Is that an emergency? Semantics. Is it of concern? Yes.
It does not take a snark to realize that.
Then why not start firing people at the FDA until they start approving the updated vaccines?
Because the new administration doesn't see better vaccines as urgent. It sees Americans falling in line as urgent.
Or start shooting people?!
Urgent is not an exigency that justifies all, quit playing games.
Brett,
What is your source about new vaccines?
The Admin does not see new vaccines as urgent (I'll take your word for it because it is continually denying the science concerning fading immunity and vaccine resistant variants
Setting aside that I have enough understanding of mRNA vaccines to realize that they would certainly have them already? They had the mRNA vaccine for the original Covid within a couple weeks, after all, all the delay was regulatory. Updating mRNA vaccines is practically like pushing out a software update, after all, you can do it absurdly fast.
See, for instance: mRNA Was Supposed To Stay Ahead Of Variants. Why Aren't We Using Its Full Potential?
Well, at least they're doing a clinical trial on it. Should be done by the time we're trying to cope with Sigma, or maybe Tau.
" At this point, Covid is almost entirely a disease of the unvaccinated" except for the 20% to 25% of covid cases that are among the vaccinated.
Yeah but the vast majority of those don't pose risk nor do they require treatment
Old, "yeah, but" is up to it again. But he has little epidemiology to back it up the statement regarding contagion as there are no measures of the frequency distribution of superspreaders among the recovered-immune, the vaccinated-immune, and the covid-naive unvaccinated.
If he provides such a citation, I'll withdraw my objects
What the hell are you talking about? I'm not addressing those points. I'm saying that if you have the vaccine you are significantly less likely to be hospitalized... making the concerns about entirely trivial.
Though you are still contagious, and still a reservoir for the virus to remain with us.
Hospitalization/fatality is an important metric, but it is not the only important metric.
Again a side step by ole IPL. Just shit post after shit post.
The Great Stop Sign Compliance Project seems to be going well.
I have compared mask mandates to seat belt laws. It's not medical decision making; it's a safety measure, and it does in fact save lives. But then, I suppose some here consider that to be the first step toward gulags too.
K_2,
It is VERY far from clear that the emergency would end any sooner, it just might make more room for the lambda and mu variants to become dominant in a next wave.
How can an emergency "end" if there was never an emergency?
On the bright side, I'm sure that clubs like Emperors Club VIP are still sending their professionals to serve guests at the Mayflower.
Mayflower Hotel and bad food restaurant Edgar's have a big problem - they are no longer "hot". What a disgrace!
WPP
As usual Josh's "I'm an important person, accustomed to living large" subtext is easy to see. Otherwise why post this?
Because Josh needed something to bitch about.
The next half-century of continuing American progress will provide more than enough for Prof. Blackman to complain about . . . right up to the moment of replacement.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Waste of brain cells warning
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Kookland is performing his weird trick of "footnoting" using a music video. I didn't follow it, but hovering over it shows "youtube". So there's no need to click on it.
And then there's his tiresomely triumphal crystal ball.
That exhausts his bag of tricks. No use in saying "Roll over, boy!" That's beyond his abilities.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Subtext?
Can’t wait for his next four part series on why lines should cater to his needs as a member of the Supreme Court bar.
True fact: today my family, visiting my daughter in college, is at a Motel 6. They don't have that little coffee machine any more, or even the front room where you can sit on a couch, read, or look at the "local attractions" brochures.
The coffee wasn't too good, and it was just creamer, but it was charming. Also I associate it from years back with recovering from really good sex. But now there's not even that.
What, no more really good sex? How sad. But I'm not sure you can blame Motel 6, or COVID.
No more good sex -- that is, not with my brother and law and his son sharing the room. Snuggling is all my wife and I can do.
As a former Mayflower visitor this is disappointing. But the most discouraging thing is that $27 will not cover breakfast. What kind of nation is this where breakfast costs more than $10?
Here's a tip for you'all. Find the nearest Waffle House and enjoy!
Sidney,
Wake up.
In DC a bagel and a cappuccino plus tax costs one $10.
There's a good breakfast place in DC called Lincoln's Waffle Shop (in)appropriately located right across from Ford's Theater.
Menu: https://www.lincolnswaffleshop.com/breakfast-menu.html
Looks pretty good...I'll check it out when I am in DC for sure. Decent prices, too.
But it still does not fulfill finkel's claim about a $10 breakfast.
Upscale hotel breakfasts are some of the most ludicrously priced good/services in the world. This is hardly a new phenomenon, though.
True.
My last experience (a couple of years ago, when I was at the Sheraton for a lawyer's convention) was a $25 breakfast for which they gave you what you get for $8 at Denny's. In fact it wasn't as good.
Treating you bad and making your life worse is what Biden's America is all about. Anything that inconveniences you is good for The Earth and promote "justice".
Josh doesn’t have as great of a time at a luxury hotel as the last time he was there.
You: Biden’s America is all about treating you badly.
You need to get a grip, dude.
You figure customers had a better experience during the final year of the Trump administration than in the first year of the Biden administration?
Melbourne Is For Lease (video)
https://twitter.com/EliseiNicole/status/1445507386240737285
What kind of idiots book conferences/travel outside of Florida? Highly recommend the Hyatt Regency Clearwater Beach, they will take care of your family and your conference. Businesses there actually try to limit the impact of the labor shortage and the state is operating the closest to normal.
Keanu did it better.
youtube.com/watch?v=J1okpAj7Fhw
You should know better than to have your conference in a Blue Zone. I bet the Greenbriar Resort in WV would love to pick up your business, for example. Just stay away from those hellscapes. Out in the country you can still breathe.
I thought the arrangement with the Mayflower Madam ended decades ago.
Hey Josh, I'm sure there will be more men's bathroom stall toe-tapping in the near future. Don't worry yet!