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IBM Promised Domestic Jobs, But is Firing Thousands of US Workers and Moving Some Jobs Overseas (siliconbeat.com)
As companies fall all over themselves to hype creation of U.S. jobs, IBM is catching flak for promising thousands of new ones while firing folks right and left. From a report: Company CEO Ginni Rometty said in a December USA Today op-ed that her firm would hire 25,000 people for U.S. positions in the next four years, 6,000 of them this year. "She didn't mention that International Business Machines Corp. was also firing workers and sending many of the jobs overseas," reports Bloomberg. Big Blue wrapped up its third round of 2016 firings -- or "resource actions" in IBM HR parlance -- in late November, and job losses for the year likely totaled in the thousands, current and former employees told Bloomberg. Many of the jobs were shipped to Asia and Eastern Europe, and the firings have continued into this year, employees said.
Another Trump victory! All hail the chief!
You thought IBM meant 25,000 net jobs?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
That's 25,000 overseas people to replace U.S. positions.
Release the kraken err Trump!
Just a reminder that the name of the company is INTERNATIONAL Business Machines, not American Business Machines. Just because the company is based in the US doesn't mean it will necessarily hire people in the US. IBM gets roughly 65% of their revenue outside the US. One would expect their staffing to reflect that fact.
I am NOT trying to defend IBM's actions. Merely pointing out that they aren't necessarily surprising and without more context it's hard to make an informed judgement about them. I'm all for the home team but that may or may not make sense for that particular company.
From my experience with IBM, they seem to churn a lot of jobs. For example, SoftLayer picks up, while another division gets offshored.
What isn't mentioned are the contractors. IBM seems to use a lot of those, and for every actual employee IBM lays off, they boot many more contractors. Because contractors are not on the books, it allows IBM to easily gain and lose headcount without it making the news.
That's the trend now - for many companies. They can get someone just as smart for half the price overseas. It's been working out very well for us. Development is all over seas and in a few months, domestic IT is going to be a contracting firm (read H1-b).
Unless you are very very sharp - like you can read the paper on MP4 encoding - and implement it from scratch and understand the math and everything on a desert island, you'll have a future.
Those of you who are Java/C# .NET developers web developers or whatever, you can be easily replaced - and you will be - overseas. I heard some companies are doing the same with embedded systems.
There are 7.3 billion people in this world with a net increase of about 65 million every year. There are at least over 700 million people in the 90th percentile of intelligence and with the internet and all the cheap computing available, accessing them is very easy.
Unless you have capital these days, you are in the peon class and the only way is down for us in the developed World.
Don't worry, I'm be out the door with the rest of them.
It's IBM, International Business Machines not DBM, Domestic Business Machines.
All they're doing is being true to their name. Now if Apple would go back to selling fruit, and Amazon started selling warrior women the world would be less confusing.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
You probably don't know this, but IBM is also protecting US based management jobs while they are letting US based employees hit the bricks. Were you aware of that? I have a sort of relative by marriage (related to someone related to me through marriage) and he's been in middle management at IBM for probably at least 20 years now. IBM will keep him around forever even as they lay off other US based employees where he works. I'm guessing that maybe they make these people remotely manage foreign employees, but he hasn't given a lot of details and I rarely see him. I only know that he's said he has zero worries about ever losing his job there. A lot of what IBM is doing doesn't actually make a lot of sense. It's just designed to prop up the stock value.
Six years of jobs coming faster than people. Falling unemployment. Lay-offs all over the place by the tens of thousands, job growth by the millions.
If you gave someone a million gold coins, they'd only see the scratch in the dusty used bowl you brought them in.
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It isn't about foreign or domestic jobs. It's about wealth and income inequality. These foreign workers or foreign nations aren't bad people. It's the US capitalist corporate heads who obtain monopolies or near so, who see huge declines in labor costs by using foreign labor, while seeing their product revenue stagnate, generating huge profit windfalls for those at the top and those who own stock in the company (usually those at the top).
Foreign labor would be fine if it didn't mean a massive transfer of wealth from the many lower / middle / lower upper class human beings, to the very very very few super wealthy that own EVERYTHING.
CEOs realize that if they're cutting thousands of American jobs, they have to allow Trump to claim that he was a hero to American workers, even if it means keeping two sets of books. We already saw this with Carrier. Trump is very good at deflecting hard questions by insulting the questioner.
Being removed from the GSA schedule for goods and services should be a good wake up call pour encourager les autres. After all, a vendor that is essentially angling itself as a foreign company shouldn't expect federal contracts.
Why don't you give me a million gold coins first, and then we'll see what I see in them. Wake up, we're trading good jobs for Uber sleeping in the parking lot jobs. Low unemployment may mean people are desperate and taking whatever they can.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Trump will perform a golden shower on Ginni and she'll bring the jobs back.
They are all about laying off Americans and hiring cheap, clueless labor overseas. They should not be able to sell to the US Goverment!
Additionally they are a bunch of hypocrites, saying they support LGBT rights and won't tolerate discrimination, but since they have a major campus in Raleigh, NC, they MUST discriminate against LGBT people due to the NC "bathroom laws"!!!
What choice does IBM have when Americans are the highest paid yet the least qualified for their jobs?
Businesses have their own ways of maximizing the profits no matter what the elected officials utter. They follow the law, but they shouldn't be doing everything that the politicians and elected officials ask them to do.
Not really. We have a measure for marginal employment (UE, U6--currently around 9.2%) and a measure for full-time employment (UE3). What's left is minimum wage or its replacement with a universal social security.
All part-time underemployed make up 3.7% of the labor force as of December 2016, with U-3 at 4.7%. In December 2000 (best month in the past 16 years), U-6 was 6.9%, U-5 was 4.7%, and U-3 was 3.9%--so your "Uber sleeping in the parking lot" jobs were 2.2% of the labor force with U-3 at 3.9% and U6 at 6.9%.
So those are similar, although the 2000 statistic looks more-favorable.
December 2009's 9.9% U-3 was part of a 17.1% U-6 and 11.3% U-5. That means 5.8% of the labor force was "Uber sleeping in the parking lot jobs" and "people [...] taking whatever they can".
Between 2009's peak unemployment and now, U-6 has fallen by 7.9%. Of that, we reduced the part-time unemployed "Uber sleeping in the parking lot jobs" portion of the population by 2.1%, and added 5.2% to the "good jobs" portion of the population. We've reduced the amount of shitty jobs and added good jobs.
That's, like, the opposite of what you said, isn't it? A smaller proportion of the labor force is working shitty Uber jobs, and a larger proportion of the labor force is working good, solid employment.
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Last year they had only 422,000 jobs in the US, but this year they will be increasing that to 397,000 jobs! It's a win for everyone - more jobs, more cost savings, and 397,000 US jobs. How can you possibly argue with that?
Oh, and chocolate rations are going up again, too.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Why don't you give me a million gold coins first, and then we'll see what I see in them. Wake up, we're trading good jobs for Uber sleeping in the parking lot jobs. Low unemployment may mean people are desperate and taking whatever they can.
"Falling" unemployment is a bullshit lie due to people permanently giving up on finding employment and thus not being counted in the unemployment statistics. THAT is the reality.
Where their revenue is made is irrelevant. What created the revenue IS relevant. If American-based ingenuity is still their moneymaker, then their hiring practices should reflect that.
Presumably IBM is well aware of the source of their "moneymaker". Probably far better than you and certainly better than me. Show me your evidence that US based talent would provide a better outcome (greater profits) to IBM than what they are doing. Frankly you are talking in unsupported hypothetical ideas rather than evidence based facts.
Furthermore where their revenue is made is very much a relevant consideration as is the location of the best talent to make it. IBM is a global company and has the resources to identify talent wherever it might come from. The notion that 5% of the world's population would constitute a disproportionate share of the talent pool is an irrational assumption unsupported by evidence and IBM is big enough to actually have that evidence. Also conveniently you also have neglected to consider costs which only a fool would ignore. The purpose of a company is to make profit, not revenue. You cannot consider profit without considering both revenue and costs. If they can get the same or similar outcomes with lower priced foreign talent, what possible justification is there for hiring overpriced US workers? What makes US workers such special snowflakes?
Look I get it that there are huge and real problems with stuff like H1B hires and the like but there is a reason that companies feel the pressure to do that sort of thing. US labor is among the most expensive in the world. Only a fool buys something more expensive if the performance doesn't justify the extra cost.
I figured the 3 or 4 they had left would be gone by now.
Uber is just the circling vulture over the dead carcasses. How many full time jobs have gone to crap? More work crammed into less hours, a longer commute, higher house prices. How does that show up in your numbers? The productivity of the American worker is declining because they are burnt out. Most people are trying, but they're tired. Then they get pissed off about it and vote for Trump.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I prefer Feuer Frei
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkW-K5RQdzo
When you add all of those U-X numbers up, what do you get? Have you done that? All the under-employed, unemployed, people with jobs that don't pay what their last job did (are we even tracking that?) etc - what does this equal?
blacklist from the HB1 system!
It makes the Pwetious Swowflake in Thief http://edition.cnn.com/2017/01..."fwustwated.
He DID have the biggest and bewutifuwest inaguwation! He DID! HE DIIIIIIDDD!!!
Stop demowawazing the Pwedident! It'll huwt his pwetious thiewings!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I have many friends working in the Boulder, CO branch of IBM. They all agree that the company is going down to heck in a hurry. The buildings are like ghost towns with long empty corridors and only a few people working in the scattered offices; that site used to be one of the jewels of the company. Every year brings more rounds of layoffs and the only way that they still win contracts is because of name recognition. Their product and service offerings are noncompetitive. This is what happens when a CEO only has the desire for advancing the bottom line for the next 3 months and has absolutely no vision of how to keep the company operational for the next 30 years.
Ginny stated she would hire 25,000 in the US over the next few years.
Which is roughly the number of people who would normally retire or otherwise leave IBM over the same timeframe. This was more about backfill than adding positions. (I suspect the number hired would still represent an overall loss to the US employment figures).
If they say "jobs" they mean outsourcing.
If they say "fewer regulations" they mean fewer regulations protecting Americans and making it easier to pollute and outsource.
Always. Remember. They. Lie.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
... I understand where they are coming from.
The labor market for a lot of what they do is truly global. Not everything - some things really do need a team that is co-located or at least in the same country as their managers, their customers, or other teams - but a lot of it.
If they can get a project done at a lower net overall cost using non-US labor without having a noticeable impact quality, then they should do so.
Likewise, if a non-US company (think Toyota and Honda in the last 30 years or so) can find cost savings by moving jobs to the United States, they should do so (granted, shipping cars is generally a lot more expensive than shipping PCs or shipping information).
Some advice for techies in the "developed world" (US, Canada, Western Europe, some Far East countries, Israel, etc.): Unless you are in the defense industry or some other industry where offshoring is not an issue, or you are a "superstar," expect your wages to come into parity with your intellectual- and skill-peers in developing economies (China, India, Eastern Europe, Mexico, etc.) over the next couple of decades. Either their wages will go up, your wages will fall, or some combination of the two. This is particularly true for developing economies where today's children will be fluent in English by the time the are adults.
Trump will make them remove the "I"; they'd then be called "BM", as in "bowel movement". Fitting.
Table-ized A.I.
> What makes US workers such special snowflakes?
They're special little snowflakes because teacher told them they are.
Next question?
And adjusted for inflation, stagnant or dropping wages.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
With Alternative facts.
Housing is actually an odd market. It's not a productive market per se; it's more of a traded commodity, and speculators have convinced homeowners their houses are worth a lot. At the same time, falling mortgage rates mean the $1,200/month you're willing to pay for a house buys a bigger sale price--$350,000 instead of $120,000--so the same house has a higher price, yet comes with the same mortgage payment. You sort of pay about the same either way.
At the same time, the size of new-construction houses and apartments increases over time. The average new-construction single-family home was 982sqft in 1950, and over 2,300sqft in 2000. People build additions onto their homes. Cities occasionally tear down urban blight and replace cramped row homes with sprawling semi-detached or single-family parcels.
In terms of decades, the price per 1,000sqft of housing has steadily decreased the same as food, clothing, and other goods and services; in terms of continuous running price, the housing market is a somewhat inelastic commodity market and behaves somewhat like a security (stocks, commodities) and somewhat like a product.
The productivity of the American worker is declining because they are burnt out
Productivity is tied to technical progress, and we supply more with less labor today than 10 years ago. We do have some issues with overworked overtime employees; however, they tend to be unproductive because they leave those jobs and go to other businesses instead. Revolving doors in an office environment are incredibly expensive, and the constant turn-over takes its toll on those businesses; I'm working in a rather large shop that had that problem 4 years ago, and has since more than doubled the IT department size and implemented more project management so as to increase the proportion of work successfully completed and decrease strain on employees.
It's notable that the employees of the late-1800s and early-1900s complained a lot because they worked 90-hour work weeks. 6 days per week, 16 hours per day. They won a 60-hour work week--6 days per week, 12 hours per day, two 1-hour lunches--and then the modern 40-hour work week through decades of protests, rioting, and murder. I feel 28-32 hour work weeks should be viable rather soon, if we handle the transition carefully; we'll be less-wealthy than if we just stick to a 40-hour week, since we'll essentially be trading away productivity gains for time instead of wealth (e.g. when you make in 4 hours what you used to make in 5, you work 3.2 hours and make the same--you get no richer nor poorer, but you have more leisure time).
Most people are trying, but they're tired
Most people are just fine. Many people are conditioned by having the same bullshit repeated at them, whether it's by Hillary, Bernie, Trump, Ron Paul, Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, the anchors on CNN, or some other idiot without a clue. They form ideals and they won't break away from them.
Look at minimum wage. Minimum wage is established to ensure a certain amount of labor is compensated for a certain proportion of buying power--that is, we pay minimum wage workers enough to buy a certain amount of things made by people who aren't minimum-wage workers. Debt allows us to move money into the economy at the bottom to handle population expansion and generally avoid deflationary currency; and inflation is necessary for a stable, functional economy--especially one with debt. Inflation reduces the buying power of that minimum wage, so we have to increase it now and then.
Long story short: we need to raise minimum wage to keep up with inflation. It is necessary.
The same people who agree with this also can't accept that increasing minimum wage concentrates the same money into fewer hands, causing some minimum-wage workers to lose jobs as a result of the increase. It doesn't matter how badly they have to violate the simple laws of mathemati
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Gosh, it's almost like they were fibbing...
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Pfft, this is just leftist nonsense. I prefer the Alternative Fact that everything is just peachy and IBM is hiring locally just as Trump told them to.
I got tired of being asked to train the offshore team. I put it off as long as I can, never trained the bastards. I started to look for an opportunity that could not be outsourced. So I found one with a Defense Contactor.
IBM sucks. With outsourcing great paying System Engineer to India & China. IBM Global Sucks! Now add Watson. I just heard and Insurance Company laid off most of their appraisers and replaced them with Watson. The insurance company forgot that no only do they exist to offer Insurance, but to provide jobs.
It's time to put IBM in it's place. USA IBMers.. post to Slashdot, Reddit, and Twitter.. let them know what's going on.
I miss my Sr. Infrastructure Engineer job. I heard the outsourced tools are not as good as what I provided at the Bank.
The thing is, at one point in time, a large company like IBM would invest in its employees by helping them to develop their skills. Over the duration of their career, they could move within the company to put their evolving skill set to use. But nowadays, if IBM has a bunch of people with outdated skill "X" and they want a bunch of people with sexy, new skill "Y", they fire the "X" people and hire the "Y" people from outside the company. Or, more likely, acquire a handful of startups and small companies that specialize in skill "Y". They save themselves the trouble of having to teach the "X" people how to be "Y" people.
The median $54,000 income in 2015 buys roughly 42% more than what the median income in 2000 bought.
The expense share of food and clothing has fallen. At the same time, cars, phones, computers, and other electronic products have become highly-complex. Rather than spending $20 (in 1995) or $10 (in 2005) to buy a CD with 9 songs, you can spend $10/month and have Spotify. Rather than $21 for a DVD, you have Netflix for $9/month. Rather than $35/month for 128k ISDN (1998), you spend $83/month for 200,000k Cable Internet ($55,000/month worth of ISDN).
You can consume more today with the median income than you did 10 years ago. A lot more.
Here's what people don't realize: inflation doesn't mark the buying power of a labor hour.
Let's say you improve food production by 100%. Instead of paying 4.8 hours of farm labor for a week's worth of a household's food, you pay 2.4 hours of labor. That means maybe there were 3,000,000 farmers, chemists, machinists, oil refiners, and so forth working in the food supply chain, and now there's 1,500,000 supplying the same amount of the same food. They all get paid for the same labor-hours.
Well, if nobody's wage goes up, then the price of food comes down. Those farmers and everyone else involved made $20/hr before, and they make $20/hr now? That means you used to pay $96/week for food, now you pay $48/week. If the median income is $30,000 and your income doesn't go up, then you're only $48 richer.
So now what happens if, across this process--say we don't do this overnight, but over 10 years--we have a 120% increase in wages? We issue more dollars and the incomes go up.
Well, that means those farmers are making $44/hr. The food that cost $96/week now costs $105.60. That's inflation, right? Food costs increased by 10%--so you have 10% inflation.
Caveat: The median income is now $66,000. We've gone from $4,992/year out of $30,000 (16.64%) to $5,491.20/year out of $66,000 (8.32%).
Think about that for a minute. What does inflation really tell you?
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The labor participation rate tells you what percentage of working age people are employed. This figure tells the true story. The unemployment rate doesn't.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment-to-population_ratio
The fact is that IBM just reported its 19th straight quarter of declining revenue. They will have zero jobs soon unless they turn it around.
IBM cognitive solutions and technology/cloud platforms divisions reported small year-over-year revenue increases. Meanwhile, global business services saw revenues sliding 4% lower, and systems sales came in 12.5% below the year-ago period.
Higher cost of product ==> fewer buyers ==> fewer sales ==> lower revenue ==> layoffs ==> more people on welfare ==> Thanks Trump!!
Really, when you think about it, if a company eliminates positions for 1,000 workers, then later hires 1,000 new workers for NEW positions, is that not a net gain in new employment? Remember, those jobs were no longer required...
These job losses are YOUR fault, just like those few you saved were, so no cherry picking you orange bastard.
IBM had an ingenious strategy for downsizing!!
"Managing people out of the company" was the term they used.
Here's how it happened to me:
November: reviews are completed. employees are given a "score": 1, 2+, 2, or 3. 1="God", 3="Performance Plan"
Managers are limited in how many 1,2+, and 2's they're allowed to award. It's VERY hard to get a 1.
December: managers are quietly informed of a hiring freeze.
Freeze excludes high-level jobs (director, exec, etc.) and hard-to-fill jobs (sales reps for unpopular products, mainframe-related, phone support)
January: products/projects are cancelled. Employees in those areas are given a long list of open IBM jobs, and told they have 1 month.
Jobs are throughout IBM, all over the country.
February: employees panic. They start asking questions, like what happens in 1 month(?), but aren't given clear answers
March: employees discover:
- if employees score is a 2 or 3, they're screwed. IBM Managers don't want to hire 2's or 3's
- even if a manager wants to hire a 2, they have to get director approval. 3's don't stand a chance
- hard-to-fill jobs usually aren't in high rent places like SF, NY, etc.
- good chance you'll be working remotely
mid March: employees panic more, start looking outside
April: employees that haven't already quit or transferred discover what happens after the 1 month period lapses:
IBM might find something for you, but it's likely not what you want.
Otherwise, you get a layoff package.
IBM's goals are:
1. you quit. No layoff, no package, no bad press
2. or they fill one of those "lower" jobs. Usually at a lower pay.
3. or, if you were already on a performance plan, it's called a "Resource Action" (aka. termination)
4. Final option: layoff
They're saying that the "single-score" system has changed. Regardless of the scoring system, I'll bet it's still quota-based.
And the people who have been out of work for 6 months or a year, how are they tracked? What's that number doing?
FWIW, the unemployment numbers have been "fixed" so many times that I have no trust at all in them. One way the "part-time unemployed" numbers are reduced is by stopping counting them.
That said, just expect this to get worse. Robots are increasingly cheaper to use than humans for an increasing number of jobs. It's not a steady trend, but it rarely reverses.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If IBM thinks itself to be invulnerable, time to disabuse them of that notion.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
If they want US protections, they play US ball. Even if that means actually having to hire US citizens en masse.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM MIKE PENCE
WASHINGTON (WHPB)—Vice-President Mike Pence has issued the following message to the American people:
Dear American People,
What with all the hoopla and hullabaloo of Inauguration Week, we didn’t really get a chance to get to know each other. And so, if you don’t mind, I thought that I’d take a minute or two to tell you a thing or two about Mike Pence.
I’m what most people would call a “fun guy.” In my spare time, I enjoy golf and heterosexuality. And I’m something of a voracious reader. My favorite book, of course, is the Bible, but I enjoy other books, too. I’m a big fan of “The Da Vinci Code,” which has a lot of stuff about the Bible in it. And Paul Ryan just gave me a copy of “Atlas Shrugged,” by Ayn Rand. I just started reading that one, so I haven’t gotten to any parts in it about the Bible yet, but it’s darn good.
Another thing I read recently, and it’s probably become my second-favorite piece of reading material right after the Bible, is the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. It’s all about how to remove the President and replace him with the Vice-President. I have to admit that it was a kick to start reading the dusty old Constitution for the very first time and see yours truly right in there!
It turns out that the Twenty-fifth Amendment says that the country can remove the President if he is found to be “incapacitated.” That can mean anything from physically incapacitated, like being in an irreversible coma, to mentally incapacitated, like being seen raving like a lunatic during a visit to the C.I.A. Either way, if folks decide that it’s time to put a fork in you, see you later, alligator!
Whenever I read something great, I tell everyone I know to go out and read it, too. And so, my fellow-Americans, I encourage each and every one of you, history buffs or otherwise, to read the Twenty-fifth Amendment today—especially Section 4, which is a little complicated but really exciting, too. If you enjoy reading it as much as I did, let me know. I’m in my office in Washington and you can reach me anytime—I’m of sound mind and body.
Well, I’m super-glad we had the chance to get to know each other a little better. Until next time, here’s Mike Pence saying, God bless America. And God bless the Twenty-fifth Amendment.
-MP
I notice you didn't mention the price of shelter, education, health care, or transportation. Cars are at the point where people are having problems affording them, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/0.... Do I have to even link to stories about health care, education, or housing prices? So what if the new gadget is cheaper. If your wages can't afford those big items you are screwed.
Your simple model is deeply flawed and doesn't account for things like farmers turning their farms into developments if they can't get good prices for their crops due to over production. This is partly why family farms are disappearing, the kids of the farmers see more money in real estate development.
Inflation tells me people are losing ground. The trend I see is more and more ostensibly middle class people, including myself, shopping in thrift stores, using craigslist, or going sites like free cycle. The middle class is in trouble.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Whenever I see someone like you talking about gadgets like they have anything to do with the quality of life, I think that they must be very very young.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Is there a circular line around the plant where fired people exit one door and enter the door next to it and get hired?
Employees in most and certainly all large companies are "let go" at the drop of a hat to make the quarter's numbers. This employment flexibility in the USA is cherished and oft-used to maximize profit. Only new * laws * to protect employees against such rapid instability can change this behavior.
I don't know why a lot of people go on about how we are getting more square footage for the dollar today when we buy a house. What matters to me when I buy a house is the area that it exists in, as well as whether it will work for me. Perhaps 950 square feet worked for a family back then, but today even if I wanted to buy such a small house I would be living under a freeway and not living in an area conducive to family living. So there are limits to the kind of house I can buy today, you cannot ignore it. I found an interesting comparison of the cost of living between 1975 and now on this page: http://www.mybudget360.com/cos....
The average cost of a house has gone from 209k to 270k. The average cost of a car has doubled from $16.5k to $31k and I dare say a vehicle is more expensive to maintain today and more necessary than ever before as public transportation is stretched to meet today's population in most districts. The cost of schooling, also more necessary today, has gone from $8k to $19k for public college and $16k to $42k for private. These are the costs that make up a life and people are being dragged out more and more. The article also correctly brings up the fact that the price of a barrel of oil seems to rise and fall but the cost at the pump only rises.
Google on the decrease of the output of the American worker over the last few years, there are several articles on it. In spite of technological increases the amount produced by the American worker is steadily decreasing today. People are out there working hard and their families are only falling further behind for it. Salaries have not increased as much as prices have risen in the last 40 years. Lack of performance is the result. People are tired.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
"Jobwashing" - Similar to "greenwashing" but updated for the present era.
IBM is on their way out, they have made a series of bad business and PR decisions lately and their management is clearly set on "Self Destruct Mode".
This has been going on since about 2011 when some idiot high up in the chain there decided it was ok to lay of employees and give a set percentage of them bad references for no reason. (And they admitted exactly this publicly.) Any company that does idiotic shit like that is not going to survive in the 21st century.
Seriously, the feds can simply stop all contracts with IBM and open them up to American companies.
And no, Companies like IBM, HP, GE, MS, (increasingly Google), etc are not American companies, but international ones.
It is time for us to spend our trillions on American companies, just like China does on Chinese companies and Europe does on European companies.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Thanks Trump!
And the people who have been out of work for 6 months or a year, how are they tracked? What's that number doing?
That's U-3. They're tracked by knowing the population over age 16 and the jobs taken. When you're legally hired, your employer files identifying documents (SSN, driver's license, etc.--the W-9 stuff) with the IRS. The BLS publishes statistics by counting unique jobholders and comparing that to birth records, death records, immigration records, census, etc. That gives them population, age, and number of employed.
Persons unemployed who have sought employment in the past 4 weeks are U-3. Persons unemployed who have a desire to seek employment but have not sought employment in the past 4 weeks are U-4 (discouraged workers). These are tracked statistically by a monthly survey called the Current Population Survey.
Robots are increasingly cheaper to use than humans for an increasing number of jobs. It's not a steady trend, but it rarely reverses.
Wooden shipping pallets, power tools, electricity, railroads. The hot blast furnace produces 86,000 tonnes of iron per week; an 18th-century cold-blast furnace would produce 400 tonnes per year using the same labor.
Technical progress is the reduction of labor used to produce an outcome. 100% of all increases in total global wealth--that is, increases not localized by trade (we get wealthier by employing low-wage Chinese)--have come from the reduction of labor required to produce an outcome. Even discovering a rich gold or coal mine means you found a mine where less work produces more ore (if you dig out 100 tonnes of mostly-gold, that's the same labor as digging out 100 tonnes of dirt containing 1 tonne of gold--but it's a lot more gold).
Robots are more of the same. The question is if we replace 50% of our jobs in 10 years, or 50% of our jobs in 10 weeks. A steady pace of job replacement by technical progress is safe and profitable; whereas sudden bolts of technology faster than with which the labor market can keep pace cause widespread unemployment.
That's why we need things like regulation to enable the use of self-driving cars. Imagine if 1% of cab drivers and freight drivers lost their jobs every month for the next 5 years. A whole lot of nothing would happen. That's 233,900 cab drives and 1.5 million truckers, or about 1,830,000 Americans. Per-month, a 1% replacement is 18,300 jobs or a 0.012% uptick in unemployment--a loss which would turn over by the end of the year, at which point a total 0.144% would be affected. Note that, currently, the US has around a million layoffs per year due to job obsolescence (both from outsourcing labor to other countries and by blunt technical progress): 183,000/year is a significant number, but not unreasonable.
The other side of this is the cost of freight and cab fair goes down. There's suddenly no need to pay the cabbie or the truck driver, and your main retail products--most notably food--tend to react price-wise in a span of months if not weeks. That means the savings folds back into consumer hands, which means buying more stuff, which means more retail jobs, more mechanic jobs (keeping the self-driving freight trucks running--1 mechanic's hour for several thousand miles rather than 1 trucker's hour per 60 miles, call it 1 mechanic replacing 500 truckers), marketing and sales of these vehicles and of the consumer goods, and so forth. That's how the jobs lost to technology get replaced.
(Jobs lost to trade get replaced by the population and labor force simply not growing as fast for a little while; likewise, job gains result in sudden growth of labor force until unemployment increases to ~5% again.)
Imagine if we didn't get the right regulations in place fast enough.
Rather than replacing those jobs, we spend 5 years developing the technology. Businesses salivate over ready-to-go self-driving cabs and freight trucks while Congress and state legislat
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Cars are at the point where people are having problems affording them, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/0... [nytimes.com].
You linked an article that says cars are more affordable in some cities than others, and that the median-income household can't afford the average price of a new car. That's a statistical trick: you're confounding between different classes. There are economy cars, luxury cars, and loads of things in-between.
In the real world, families buy lots of new cars. The price paid for a new car is typically 56% of the household income--$30,000 for the median income--financed over a 5-year loan. That's been true for decades.
Let's take a look at the argument on your link:
In San Jose, Calif. — the heart of Silicon Valley — the median income is about $84,000, and an “affordable” new car purchase price is about $33,000 — close to, but still below, the average new car price.
$33,000 is only 39% of the median income. How does that compare to history?
In 1950 the average income per year was $3,210.00 and by 1959 was $5,010.00. In 1950 the average cost of new car was $1,510.00 and by 1959 was $2,200.00
In 1950, the average cost of a new car was 47% of the average income. In 1959, it was 44%.
$33,000 on a 5-year loan at 3.3% is only $600/month. That's out of a $4,900 after-tax income. That's only 12%, and leaves $4,300/month to spend on food, rent, etc. Hell, I'm looking at buying a car at that price, and I don't make $84,000.
Do I have to even link to stories about health care, education, or housing prices
People spend more on healthcare, and buy better healthcare today. They spent 4% in the 1980s and spent 6% in 2000, and received better care.
I addressed housing prices elsewhere. There are a number of issues. One is that mortgage rate changes have caused a $120,000 house that garnered a $1,200/month mortgage to now sell for $350,000 with a $1,200/month mortgage. Another is that houses have gotten bigger over time and, trending over decades, the price of housing per square foot continues to decrease; while trending over shorter terms, it fluctuates due to being a semi-commodity (bought and sold by owners, rather than newly-produced).
Workforce development--the thing used as "education" so we don't have to talk about education--was moved off the risk and responsibility of businesses and onto the shoulders of the individual. This is wasteful and has caused out-of-control costs in the collegiate system. That's a known issue due to specific bad policy.
Your simple model is deeply flawed and doesn't account for things like farmers turning their farms into developments if they can't get good prices for their crops due to over production.
It doesn't attempt to describe that; I described money and technical progress to demonstrate that inflation and income are not tied together as a zero-sum game.
Inflation tells me people are losing ground.
Then you don't understand what inflation is. You understand what you see and inappropriately attribute things you don't like to things you can identify. This is the same as when you go to a poverty-stricken inner city, notice the level of crime, and identify that black people have an in-born genetic propensity to rape, murder, and drugs because 98% of the people in the city are black--as opposed to identifying the social pressures surrounding the people in the city, such as poverty and racism.
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Well, gadgets are food--gadgets like pickles, wheat, and the like. Gadgets are clothes--gadgets like shirts, pants, etc. Air conditioning. TV. Medical technology. Cars. Ovens.
If I strip you naked and drop you into the middle of the African jungle, what's your quality-of-life like?
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So there are limits to the kind of house I can buy today, you cannot ignore it.
This is true. You also can't get a car built out of a big block engine tied to an axle with no management systems or safety systems. Besides regulation, you generally can't buy things which aren't in sufficient demand to warrant their production.
That means the houses which are available are available because they serve a sufficiently-large market--the same proportion of the population as back in 1950, in fact, in terms of affordability and demand.
The average cost of a car has doubled from $16.5k to $31k and I dare say a vehicle is more expensive to maintain today
Ha.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
"A vehicle is more expensive to maintain today." That's rich. God, you people. You could work on cars in the 70s--we know this because you were always working on the car in the 70s; the fucking things never stopped breaking!
You seem to have completely missed the part about the price of things not increasing as fast as the income per person. You're, again, looking at something that cost $10 when you had $100, complaining it costs $15 now that you have $200, and ignoring the fact that you could buy 10 back then but can buy 13 now. You're also making shit up about the cars being supposedly more-expensive to maintain, unless you're trying to count just dollars and not look at the cost in proportion to income.
Let's put this into simple terms: Ignore money and compare all changing costs in terms of hours the median-income worker has to work to pay for a thing.
The article also correctly brings up the fact that the price of a barrel of oil seems to rise and fall but the cost at the pump only rises.
Oil vs gasoline. Looks like gasoline prices fall across America as oil prices fall. Don't let facts get in the way of your Trumpshit, though.
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1) What do you mean by "lots"? Is it growing as fast as the rate of population growth?
2) Silicon Valley income is over inflated compared to all US wages. Nice job picking the highest paid workers in the US. People in Flint make far less.
3) Americans get the best health care they can afford or go without. Incomes continue to drop while health care costs rise. Income: http://www.weeklystandard.com/... and health care costs:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/...
4) If you are making $10 an hour then 600 USD a month is unaffordable.
5) Price per square foot doesn't matter it is the monthly income that matters. Median US income is about 57K USD see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... or 3800 assuming a 20% tax bracket (which may be low). This works out to about 40% of take home which is above the 1/3 of income reccomended for housing.
http://www.investopedia.com/mo... and see http://www.bankrate.com/calcul...
The number for a 30000 home I came up with is 65K USD WITHOUT the cost of food, clothing, transportation, education and medical care.
6) You concede the cost of education to me.
7) Inflation is a zero sum game. If costs of goods goes up and incomes lag, workers lose.
8) OK. WHat is your definition of inflation? If prices go up and income does not keep pace we have inflation. Note the CPI does not include many items of importance such as food and transportation.
All I can say is that what I see and is conveyed to me by others can be explained by statistics.
The price of gadgets doesn't matter real people need real goods.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Let he who hath never shopped around for the best price for a good or a service cast the first stone.
~ 2 Economisians 3:16
A publicly-traded, for-profit corporation is legally obliged to maximize profits. If profits, dividends, growth, performance, "ROI" is greater by shipping jobs overseas... they MUST.
Don't hate the player, hate the game. Capitalism... AS PRACTICED, is unsustainable and unjust, suffers multiple fatal flaws that for decades had been held in check by a political system that mitigated much of the problem. That has utterly and abjectly failed. It's probably beyond repair which means, in short...
We're fucked. To put it bluntly.
The 25,000 hires will be call center "associates" and the 6,000 fires will be engineers.
And you all really continue to wonder why so many people are forced to try and make a living on a minimum wage job, or two?
What do you mean by "lots"? Is it growing as fast as the rate of population growth?
That was phrased poorly. Families at all levels buy new cars--that is, "lots". I was intending to indicate that the price of a new car ranges from $12,700 (Ford Focus) to several million dollars, and people at a broad range of income levels actually buy these things. Your basic premise is that people with X amount of income can't buy a "new" car; the fact is they can, but...
... the used car market is pretty vibrant; it's always been larger than the new car market, and there's a rather lively dispute between people who think "buying a used car is buying someone else's problems" and those who think "new car are sold to the guy paying the $10,000 depreciation cost for my next car" (i.e. buying a new car is financially-unsound and you're a moron for doing so).
More importantly, 95% of Americans own cars; 85% of Americans get to work by car. Most Americans have ownership of a serviceable vehicle (a more important statistic than "did you buy that new, or did you get a $10,000 discount?").
The market has fluctuated recently. In 2009 (deep in the recession), 10.4 million new cars (light vehicles) were sold, and 35.5 used cars were sold, 22.7% vs 77.3%. This compares to 2005 17.0 million new vs 44.14 million used, 27.8% vs 72.2%.
Vehicle sales slowed during the recession--61.13 million total sales in 2005, 59.11 million total sales in 2006, 57.80 million total sales in 2007, 49.80 sales in 2008, and 45.93 million total sales in 2009 (22.7% new). There's a sharp drop around the recession. This accelerated afterwards, with 48.48 million total sales in 2010 (23.9% new); 51.57 million sold in 2011 (24.8% new); 55.01 million in 2012 (26.34% new); and 57.57 million in 2013 (27.1% new).
The average service span of vehicles has been increasing, and consumers have been buying used. The used car market has always been fairly large, and it's grown even larger as vehicles have become better-made and capable of holding in long service. My current vehicle is a 2004 Mazda 3; I'm looking to buy myself a Mazda 3 hatchback soon--possibly a new one, actually, at around $30,000; I can't find one I like used, and the prices for ones I'm interested in are around $20-$22k (yes, I'm considering spending $8,000 to get it in a different color with fancier trim--I make $75k; I can handle that). I bought the 2004 for $14,000 with 40,000 miles, in-dash GPS, leather seats, a sun roof, a 6-CD changer, and built-in Bluetooth module. I've still never had the thing run poorly on me, although one valve is tapping (the lifter is probably sticking).
2) Silicon Valley income is over inflated compared to all US wages. Nice job picking the highest paid workers in the US. People in Flint make far less.
I quoted that directly from the article you gave me. Are you waffling?
4) If you are making $10 an hour then 600 USD a month is unaffordable.
I said $600 USD/month is affordable for someone making $84,000. If you're making $10/hr, you can buy a brand-new Ford Focus for $229/month with no down payment. Yes, people do that.
5) Price per square foot doesn't matter it is the monthly income that matters.
NOPE! You said housing gets more-expensive, I gave a counter-argument. Changing to a different tact doesn't mean you're not wrong.
If costs of goods goes up and incomes lag, workers lose.
That's why we increase minimum wage periodically, although that does eliminate jobs each time we bump it (those jobs come back as wages lag--or rather, the number of jobs expands to meet the amount of goods purchaseable and the labor required to facilitate that purchasing, and lower wages at the lowest end as minimum wage lags facilitate more jobs than are left after raising minimum wage).
There are alternate policies to minimum wage
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In the UK it seems that house prices go up, but new houses are smaller, hence the desirability of ones from the 1930s.