After hurricane Sandy, we instead bought a $450 3270 watt generator which is portable, won't be damaged outside, and can be shared with neighbors if need be.
And will last for a few hours until your supply of fuel runs out. Remember please that the gas station pumps are electric powered so if the power goes out you cannot get more gas than you have on hand. Some stations have generators of their own but many/most do not.
I'm curious how well solar panels would stand up to the winds in a hurricane. Most of the ones I've seen aren't mounted all that securely and could be ripped off their mounts with sufficient wind force. (not to mention damaged by flying debris)
You might call me old fashioned or sexist here, but where I'm from we get taught not to use violence against women.
Ok, you are old fashioned and sexist. How about not using violence against anyone? You're basically implying that it is acceptable to use violence against men but not women. Gender should play NO role in this discussion whatsoever. Men are no more deserving of violence than women.
You clearly don't understand my point. My point is not to pay more than you have to; my point is to stop using shady means to get out of your tax burden.
I understood your point completely and I think you are being a hypocrite. You expect companies (and presumably individuals) to pay more tax than they are legally obligated to pay while apparently not doing the same thing yourself. You seem to believe that company management should abandon their fiduciary duty and thus break the law in order to fulfill your perception of the spirit of the law by paying taxes they legally do not owe. Let me repeat that. Company management that pays unnecessary taxes is in violation of their legal duties.
I didn't put any extra money into my taxes next year, but neither did I set up offshore corporations to play accounting games.
Why not? If it is legal, beneficial and you have the means to do so but don't, then you are either lazy or foolish.
That crosses a line, and you ought to recognize that instead of defending the people who are defrauding us (or in this case, the people of the UK).
Fraud is an intentional deception. There is no deception here. These companies are being quite up front about what it is they are doing and generally speaking they scrupulously follow the laws. If you don't like what they are doing, change the laws.
Profits are easy: They get reported every quarter for the stockholders. If the CEO wants to cheat on taxes by lying and saying that the company lost money or didn't make a large profit, then he'll get skinned alive by the stock market.
Want to make a wager on that? Profits are incredibly easy to manipulate. You seem to be under the impression that financial statements are not malleable and cannot be manipulated. I'm an accountant and I can tell you that financial statements are far easier to manipulate than most people would believe. It is shockingly easy for a company to make lots of money and show it on the P&L but conveniently non of the profits came from US operations and thus no taxes need be paid.
There is no such thing as a simple flat tax. You can have a flat tax but it won't be simple. The problem isn't in defining the rate. The problem is in defining what income is. Most of the complexity in the tax code that is not loopholes or subsidies is in defining what income actually is. It's a shockingly complex problem. I'm a certified accountant and I'm telling you that a flat tax rate does NOTHING to reduce the scope of the problem and simply creates new and different problems.
No. If you answer yes, you have a sense of ethics.
How much extra did you pay on YOUR taxes last year that you did not have to pay? Or are you a hypocrite that thinks others should pay more but you aren't willing to back up your talk with action.
Paying taxes that you don't have to doesn't make you an ethical person, though it might mean you are rather stupid or at least naive. Not paying taxes you don't have to doesn't make you an un-ethical person.
As long as the tax code is complex, it will favor those with the resources to exploit the complexity.
The fundamental problem is not that the tax code is complex (though I agree that is a problem) but rather that it is really, really difficult to define income in such a way that it closes all potential loopholes. It's even more difficult to do so in a way that is politically possible, especially considering the influence corporate concerns have with elected officials. I understand what you are saying but I'm actually a certified accountant and I can tell you that eliminating loopholes in the tax code is MUCH more difficult to achieve than most people realize.
My personal opinion is that we should eliminate the corporate tax rate, removing the shenanigans altogether. Make up for this by making dividends and capital gains taxable as income.
Umm, then companies will stop paying dividends and companies can avoid paying taxes by avoiding realizing capital gains. Both are fairly easy to accomplish. You also haven't considered the effects of national and state boundaries. A lot of tax avoidance strategies are based upon exploiting differences in tax codes in different countries, states and/or municipalities.
I am glad that I left the US everyone's credibility is available for a few extra bucks
If you really believe that then we're glad you left too.
To be honest, 1.5M USD is a pretty damned small amount of money...
Are you some kind of billionaire that you think a million US$ is a small amount of money? That's more than the combined life savings of both of my (retired) parents combined. You can live very comfortably for a lot of years with that amount of money.
To be honest, 1.5M USD is a pretty damned small amount of money (his salary should be publicly available as he's a state employee in Texas), perhaps as little as 7 years salary (if a full prof.)
His salary from the University might be but payments like this aren't done through the university and likely are not subject to such scrutiny. It was clearly a huge ethical screw up for him not to disclose the information voluntarily but that doesn't mean it was public information.
Their motto is "don't be evil" which is not the same thing as saying "be a force for good". Maybe they see that as a convenient loophole in their motto.
Seriously, if Google really cared about spreading their products as widely as possible they'd be spending cubic dollars on lobbying for copyright and patent reform. But they don't seem really interested in being a leader in doing this.
What is the exact reason you think that you need all of your people actually nose to muzzle on a day to day basis??
Because we make tangible physical products and not intangible computer code. Pretty much impossible to assemble or ship a product without multiple bodies actually being present. Pretty hard for a waitress to deliver your food from her house. Very difficult for the truck driver to deliver your box without coming to your place of business.
ould it be worth it to pay US$1000 and then US$295 a month for a meeting place that is world accessable runs 24/7 and does not have the problems of folks making each other sick??
No because it would be useless to us. Maybe it would work for what you do but for most people being at the office or plant actually matters.
...considering the fact that Linux was virtually unknown outside the server room before Canonical came along and started polishing it up...
You think Canonical has gotten Linux on the desktop? Have you had some Bigfoot sightings or found the Loch Ness monster?
Linux remains unknown outside the server room and on mobile devices like cell phones and tablets. (and on the mobile devices most people don't even know linux is involved) Even the most optimistic estimates of desktop market share I can find put linux at less than 2% with little evidence of that changing anytime soon. The ONLY thing that will get linux serious desktop market share is if it starts shipping pre-loaded on PCs in large quantities and I just don't see that happening anytime soon. Outside of a few geeks like us here on slashdot, NOBODY is installing Linux in place of Windows.
They don't HAVE to use it but in actual practice they most certainly do rely heavily on GPS. It's the best system available so of course they rely on it.
If you have a license to pilot any of them, you have learned how to navigate without.
Just because people are trained to do without GPS in case of problems doesn't mean they don't rely on it in actual daily practice.
If we're so worried about China getting our jet engine tech (and we probably should be), then why is GE allowed to be in a joint Chinese venture to make engines?
The difference in those technologies is the difference between a bus engine and the engine in a Formula One car. Just because you know how the bus engine works doesn't mean you can build a Formula One engine.
Manufacturing is a jobb for robots that's increasingly being done by robots. Sick time doesn't come into it.
You haven't been in a lot of manufacturing plants have you? I've been in manufacturing for better than 25 years and run a manufacturing plant for my day job. Even in heavily automated plants there still are lots of people working there and telecommuting will remain impossible for most them. It is true that manufacturing, like farming 100 years ago, will be done by a smaller percentage of the population, but that percentage is still going to be large and those people will still need to be at their factories to do their jobs. That isn't going to change any time soon. Same for health care, retail, food service, transportation and many other industries.
Even if we accept your premise (and I do not) that "manufacturing is a job for robots" a huge percentage of manufacturing work cannot be easily automated for purely economic reasons. In most cases automation only makes financial sense for relatively high volumes of product when labor is relatively expensive because robots aren't cheap nor is the expertise to make them work. The reason we don't have more automation isn't due to technical limitations, it is due to economic ones.
Sure, with enough money it is possible to automate many tasks but that does not mean it can be done at a profit. I'll give you an example. My company makes wire harnesses. We could theoretically automate the process for our biggest product with a robot and vision system that would cost north of $1 million once you account for all the costs. That would be almost half our annual revenue (not profits, revenue). Or we can spend about $60,000 on a couple of hand presses and have workers operate them. Our biggest product sells for about $4 each and we produce about 150,000 of them a year. It would take us about 10 years to recoup the cost of the automation and we have a 5 year contract on production. In other words we'd never see a dime of profit if we were dumb enough to automate this production. Robots simply are not an economic option for many, many tasks.
If you work with people face-to-face in any job, the argument remains: you'll do more harm spreading your disease than the good you'll do by coming in.
Tell that to a single mother earning $20K per year in an hourly job where if she doesn't come in she doesn't get paid and therefore can't pay the bills. Tell that to the small business owner with a critical delivery of products that gets missed because his employee called in sick. Is the view nice from your ivory tower?
Changing sick/vacation days to PTO reduces the number of last minute call ins.
I assure you in our situation a PTO system would not reduce the number of last minute call ins. Our workers are largely unskilled and low wage for the most part. Good people but they absolutely without question would abuse a PTO system like you propose because we've seen them do it. We have a hard enough time ensuring attendance as it is.
If you seperate the sick days out, a lot of people will see them as vacation days that you are not allowed to give advance notice for.
Not in our case. I'm well aware that the PTO system works well in some cases but it creates too much uncertainty for our particular situation.
it doesn't make sense to have sick people come in!
The employer has to balance the risk of communicating illness and losing more productivity in the future with the immediate loss of productivity today. Not all illnesses are communicable nor are all of them of equal severity. Furthermore many people "call in sick" when they really are not sick at all which means the employer is possibly paying them to not work in addition to the certain loss of productivity. Overly generous sick day policies absolutely will be abused in many work places. It's not a question of being evil, it's a question of balancing the needs of the workers against the needs of the business and trying to find a happy medium.
From the worker's perspective many workers are paid hourly and if they take a day off for illness they do not get paid. Again, not all illnesses are communicable nor are all of them of equal severity. You may be miserable but able to work with a bad headache and still be productive. Many workers are professionals who take their duties seriously even when they don't feel well. And sometimes the consequences of missing a work day are worse (or perceived to be worse) than the consequences of reduced productivity.
We sort of eliminated "sick" days by combining sick, personal, and vacation days all into Paid Time Off (PTO).
That doesn't work well when you have to plan your staffing levels in advance. In our company the amount of product we can produce is a direct function of the number of people present. If we allowed people to call in last minute for any day off it would make scheduling an absolute nightmare.
quite frankly Businesses should consider trying to get as many folks to work from home as possible.
My business and the business of nearly $4 trillion of the US GDP is in manufacturing. You cannot manufacture most items from home. It is quite literally impossible. You need to be at your place of business to do most useful work in manufacturing. The same applies to retail, transportation, food service and health care industries among many others. You have to be there to be useful. Add in the fact that many, many workers are hourly employees and beyond a limited amount of sick/personal time they don't get paid if they aren't present.
IT is an exception when it comes to telecommuting. Most jobs require having a body in the office/plant for a very good reason. I know there are a lot of IT workers here on slashdot but recognize that your situation is somewhat unique compared to most.
The question is though, will it be used for telephones?
Yes but it will be kind of like the situation with smartphones. Voice simply becomes one more form of data. My smartphone is a computer that happens to be able to make phone calls. You'll still see phones but they'll eventually be VOIP phones. POTS is a remarkable bit of engineering from an earlier era and it works really, really well in a lot of ways. My father was an AT&T engineer for many years so I got to see lots of central offices and other interesting stuff the public doesn't usually see. The problem is that while POTS does a very good job transmitting voice, it's kind of a one trick pony. People want more than just voice these days and since the telecoms only get one line into the house they need to have it do more than just simple voice services.
I'm not going to argue you point for point, but here's the statistic for Norway...
Circumstances in Norway may be very different than those in the US where I live. Land line usage in the US is also declining as a percent of use but it is in no danger of disappearing any time soon.
In practice when calling to a cell phone - which now outnumber landlines almost 4:1 - landlines are no cheaper..
I can get a land line for ~$15-30/month and often less. There is almost no useful cell plan you can get here that is that cheap and that doesn't even take into account the full cost of the phone.
And this is a fairly sparsely populated country with a fully built out "traditional" telephone network, if it's not worth maintaining here then I think copper networks will disappear from most urban areas on the globe.
Most of the US is quite sparsely populated as well. Copper networks in the US aren't going away if for no other reason than they are needed for internet service to homes and businesses. POTS service will probably disappear at some point and be subsumed into VOIP once the network gets sufficiently robust. There is no money in POTS but there is plenty of money in last mile internet delivery so the copper networks are going to be with us for quite a while. In some places fiber will replace them but that is still a land line.
Let's see: They have a ton of debt, a recall that cost them $55 million, and their biggest customer is Fisker who has a cool but expensive product that is selling slowly, and new customers are coming online slowly. Basically crushing debt, a big screw up and insufficient revenues. Pretty much the fastest way I know of to get to a bankruptcy filing. If a buyer gets them post bankruptcy they probably will have a pretty good business without the debt obligations.
It may reduce their margins (minutely), but it will give them an immediate response to any allegations of massive offshoring of labor or anti-American sentiment.
Actually with the volumes Apple does they can automate the heck out of things so their margins probably won't be affected much. The biggest challenges are getting the components to the assembly plant for reasonable cost as well as flexibility but again, Apple is a big enough player that they are in a reasonable position to make that happen. Tim Cook being a supply chain guy I'm sure understands this well. US manufacturing is very competitive unless there is a very high percentage of labor cost in the product, particularly if it is unskilled labor or if the competition enjoys subsidies US companies do not.
Are the days of the office phone (and the office phone system) at an end?"
Not remotely. Sure mobile devices are going to take huge swaths of market share from land line phones but it's not hard to find use cases where a land line phone is required, useful or even preferable. Off the top of my head: 1) Managing multiple lines into a company. Could be done with wireless theoretically but much easier with landlines presently 2) Legal/statutory requirements. Particularly for certain industries like financial services there is a requirement to have a landline 3) Mobile phones get lost, land line phones don't. 4) Separation of work from personal life. With a mobile device it is harder to separate the two unless you carry two of them and who wants to do that? 5) Cost - land line phones can be a lot cheaper to own/operate and aren't obsolete after 4 years. 6) Office features including paging, multiple lines, better speaker phones, etc 7) Comfort - land line phones have handsets that are actually designed with the human head in mind 8) Sunken costs - Land line phones are already installed to most buildings in the US and other parts of the world. 9) Reliability - land line phones are FAR more reliable and have better voice quality than mobile devices almost without exception. 10) Users - lots of workers are not techie geeks and find a land line phone a preferable method of communication 11) Many users do not need to move from their desks. Why pay for the extra cost of mobile when it is not needed?
Point is, I want the NY Times product - the newspaper - to have very broad speech protections, probably almost the same protection afforded to the individual employees.
A corporation is a fictional entity. It is merely an association of individuals. Nothing wrong with that at all but a corporation by definition has no voice of its own. It's like a puppet, it only can say what the person controlling it wants it to say and the person controlling it already has free speech rights. The important bit is to make sure we don't limit the speech of individuals by limiting the corporation. (basically I'm agreeing with you) The solution SCOTUS came up with to solve this dilemma was to declare that a corporation was functionally identical (or nearly so) to a person which is clever but probably not the best solution because there are critical differences between a puppet and the puppeteer. SCOTUS basically declared Pinocchio to be a real boy even though it is obvious to everyone that the puppet isn't actually a real person.
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After hurricane Sandy, we instead bought a $450 3270 watt generator which is portable, won't be damaged outside, and can be shared with neighbors if need be.
And will last for a few hours until your supply of fuel runs out. Remember please that the gas station pumps are electric powered so if the power goes out you cannot get more gas than you have on hand. Some stations have generators of their own but many/most do not.
I'm curious how well solar panels would stand up to the winds in a hurricane. Most of the ones I've seen aren't mounted all that securely and could be ripped off their mounts with sufficient wind force. (not to mention damaged by flying debris)
You might call me old fashioned or sexist here, but where I'm from we get taught not to use violence against women.
Ok, you are old fashioned and sexist. How about not using violence against anyone? You're basically implying that it is acceptable to use violence against men but not women. Gender should play NO role in this discussion whatsoever. Men are no more deserving of violence than women.
You clearly don't understand my point. My point is not to pay more than you have to; my point is to stop using shady means to get out of your tax burden.
I understood your point completely and I think you are being a hypocrite. You expect companies (and presumably individuals) to pay more tax than they are legally obligated to pay while apparently not doing the same thing yourself. You seem to believe that company management should abandon their fiduciary duty and thus break the law in order to fulfill your perception of the spirit of the law by paying taxes they legally do not owe. Let me repeat that. Company management that pays unnecessary taxes is in violation of their legal duties.
I didn't put any extra money into my taxes next year, but neither did I set up offshore corporations to play accounting games.
Why not? If it is legal, beneficial and you have the means to do so but don't, then you are either lazy or foolish.
That crosses a line, and you ought to recognize that instead of defending the people who are defrauding us (or in this case, the people of the UK).
Fraud is an intentional deception. There is no deception here. These companies are being quite up front about what it is they are doing and generally speaking they scrupulously follow the laws. If you don't like what they are doing, change the laws.
Profits are easy: They get reported every quarter for the stockholders. If the CEO wants to cheat on taxes by lying and saying that the company lost money or didn't make a large profit, then he'll get skinned alive by the stock market.
Want to make a wager on that? Profits are incredibly easy to manipulate. You seem to be under the impression that financial statements are not malleable and cannot be manipulated. I'm an accountant and I can tell you that financial statements are far easier to manipulate than most people would believe. It is shockingly easy for a company to make lots of money and show it on the P&L but conveniently non of the profits came from US operations and thus no taxes need be paid.
Not. If. There. Were. A. Simple. Flat. Tax. That. Applied. Across. The. Board.
There is no such thing as a simple flat tax. You can have a flat tax but it won't be simple. The problem isn't in defining the rate. The problem is in defining what income is. Most of the complexity in the tax code that is not loopholes or subsidies is in defining what income actually is. It's a shockingly complex problem. I'm a certified accountant and I'm telling you that a flat tax rate does NOTHING to reduce the scope of the problem and simply creates new and different problems.
No. If you answer yes, you have a sense of ethics.
How much extra did you pay on YOUR taxes last year that you did not have to pay? Or are you a hypocrite that thinks others should pay more but you aren't willing to back up your talk with action.
Paying taxes that you don't have to doesn't make you an ethical person, though it might mean you are rather stupid or at least naive. Not paying taxes you don't have to doesn't make you an un-ethical person.
As long as the tax code is complex, it will favor those with the resources to exploit the complexity.
The fundamental problem is not that the tax code is complex (though I agree that is a problem) but rather that it is really, really difficult to define income in such a way that it closes all potential loopholes. It's even more difficult to do so in a way that is politically possible, especially considering the influence corporate concerns have with elected officials. I understand what you are saying but I'm actually a certified accountant and I can tell you that eliminating loopholes in the tax code is MUCH more difficult to achieve than most people realize.
My personal opinion is that we should eliminate the corporate tax rate, removing the shenanigans altogether. Make up for this by making dividends and capital gains taxable as income.
Umm, then companies will stop paying dividends and companies can avoid paying taxes by avoiding realizing capital gains. Both are fairly easy to accomplish. You also haven't considered the effects of national and state boundaries. A lot of tax avoidance strategies are based upon exploiting differences in tax codes in different countries, states and/or municipalities.
I am glad that I left the US everyone's credibility is available for a few extra bucks
If you really believe that then we're glad you left too.
To be honest, 1.5M USD is a pretty damned small amount of money...
Are you some kind of billionaire that you think a million US$ is a small amount of money? That's more than the combined life savings of both of my (retired) parents combined. You can live very comfortably for a lot of years with that amount of money.
To be honest, 1.5M USD is a pretty damned small amount of money (his salary should be publicly available as he's a state employee in Texas), perhaps as little as 7 years salary (if a full prof.)
His salary from the University might be but payments like this aren't done through the university and likely are not subject to such scrutiny. It was clearly a huge ethical screw up for him not to disclose the information voluntarily but that doesn't mean it was public information.
Ergo hypocrisy and no real change.
Their motto is "don't be evil" which is not the same thing as saying "be a force for good". Maybe they see that as a convenient loophole in their motto.
Seriously, if Google really cared about spreading their products as widely as possible they'd be spending cubic dollars on lobbying for copyright and patent reform. But they don't seem really interested in being a leader in doing this.
What is the exact reason you think that you need all of your people actually nose to muzzle on a day to day basis??
Because we make tangible physical products and not intangible computer code. Pretty much impossible to assemble or ship a product without multiple bodies actually being present. Pretty hard for a waitress to deliver your food from her house. Very difficult for the truck driver to deliver your box without coming to your place of business.
ould it be worth it to pay US$1000 and then US$295 a month for a meeting place that is world accessable runs 24/7 and does not have the problems of folks making each other sick??
No because it would be useless to us. Maybe it would work for what you do but for most people being at the office or plant actually matters.
...considering the fact that Linux was virtually unknown outside the server room before Canonical came along and started polishing it up...
You think Canonical has gotten Linux on the desktop? Have you had some Bigfoot sightings or found the Loch Ness monster?
Linux remains unknown outside the server room and on mobile devices like cell phones and tablets. (and on the mobile devices most people don't even know linux is involved) Even the most optimistic estimates of desktop market share I can find put linux at less than 2% with little evidence of that changing anytime soon. The ONLY thing that will get linux serious desktop market share is if it starts shipping pre-loaded on PCs in large quantities and I just don't see that happening anytime soon. Outside of a few geeks like us here on slashdot, NOBODY is installing Linux in place of Windows.
Planes and Ships don't rely on GPS.
They don't HAVE to use it but in actual practice they most certainly do rely heavily on GPS. It's the best system available so of course they rely on it.
If you have a license to pilot any of them, you have learned how to navigate without.
Just because people are trained to do without GPS in case of problems doesn't mean they don't rely on it in actual daily practice.
Because as Lenin said: "Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them"
And how well did that work out for Lenin do you think? It seems to me that the necks of the capitalist pigs are still quite intact.
If we're so worried about China getting our jet engine tech (and we probably should be), then why is GE allowed to be in a joint Chinese venture to make engines?
The difference in those technologies is the difference between a bus engine and the engine in a Formula One car. Just because you know how the bus engine works doesn't mean you can build a Formula One engine.
Manufacturing is a jobb for robots that's increasingly being done by robots. Sick time doesn't come into it.
You haven't been in a lot of manufacturing plants have you? I've been in manufacturing for better than 25 years and run a manufacturing plant for my day job. Even in heavily automated plants there still are lots of people working there and telecommuting will remain impossible for most them. It is true that manufacturing, like farming 100 years ago, will be done by a smaller percentage of the population, but that percentage is still going to be large and those people will still need to be at their factories to do their jobs. That isn't going to change any time soon. Same for health care, retail, food service, transportation and many other industries.
Even if we accept your premise (and I do not) that "manufacturing is a job for robots" a huge percentage of manufacturing work cannot be easily automated for purely economic reasons. In most cases automation only makes financial sense for relatively high volumes of product when labor is relatively expensive because robots aren't cheap nor is the expertise to make them work. The reason we don't have more automation isn't due to technical limitations, it is due to economic ones.
Sure, with enough money it is possible to automate many tasks but that does not mean it can be done at a profit. I'll give you an example. My company makes wire harnesses. We could theoretically automate the process for our biggest product with a robot and vision system that would cost north of $1 million once you account for all the costs. That would be almost half our annual revenue (not profits, revenue). Or we can spend about $60,000 on a couple of hand presses and have workers operate them. Our biggest product sells for about $4 each and we produce about 150,000 of them a year. It would take us about 10 years to recoup the cost of the automation and we have a 5 year contract on production. In other words we'd never see a dime of profit if we were dumb enough to automate this production. Robots simply are not an economic option for many, many tasks.
If you work with people face-to-face in any job, the argument remains: you'll do more harm spreading your disease than the good you'll do by coming in.
Tell that to a single mother earning $20K per year in an hourly job where if she doesn't come in she doesn't get paid and therefore can't pay the bills. Tell that to the small business owner with a critical delivery of products that gets missed because his employee called in sick. Is the view nice from your ivory tower?
Changing sick/vacation days to PTO reduces the number of last minute call ins.
I assure you in our situation a PTO system would not reduce the number of last minute call ins. Our workers are largely unskilled and low wage for the most part. Good people but they absolutely without question would abuse a PTO system like you propose because we've seen them do it. We have a hard enough time ensuring attendance as it is.
If you seperate the sick days out, a lot of people will see them as vacation days that you are not allowed to give advance notice for.
Not in our case. I'm well aware that the PTO system works well in some cases but it creates too much uncertainty for our particular situation.
it doesn't make sense to have sick people come in!
The employer has to balance the risk of communicating illness and losing more productivity in the future with the immediate loss of productivity today. Not all illnesses are communicable nor are all of them of equal severity. Furthermore many people "call in sick" when they really are not sick at all which means the employer is possibly paying them to not work in addition to the certain loss of productivity. Overly generous sick day policies absolutely will be abused in many work places. It's not a question of being evil, it's a question of balancing the needs of the workers against the needs of the business and trying to find a happy medium.
From the worker's perspective many workers are paid hourly and if they take a day off for illness they do not get paid. Again, not all illnesses are communicable nor are all of them of equal severity. You may be miserable but able to work with a bad headache and still be productive. Many workers are professionals who take their duties seriously even when they don't feel well. And sometimes the consequences of missing a work day are worse (or perceived to be worse) than the consequences of reduced productivity.
We sort of eliminated "sick" days by combining sick, personal, and vacation days all into Paid Time Off (PTO).
That doesn't work well when you have to plan your staffing levels in advance. In our company the amount of product we can produce is a direct function of the number of people present. If we allowed people to call in last minute for any day off it would make scheduling an absolute nightmare.
quite frankly Businesses should consider trying to get as many folks to work from home as possible.
My business and the business of nearly $4 trillion of the US GDP is in manufacturing. You cannot manufacture most items from home. It is quite literally impossible. You need to be at your place of business to do most useful work in manufacturing. The same applies to retail, transportation, food service and health care industries among many others. You have to be there to be useful. Add in the fact that many, many workers are hourly employees and beyond a limited amount of sick/personal time they don't get paid if they aren't present.
IT is an exception when it comes to telecommuting. Most jobs require having a body in the office/plant for a very good reason. I know there are a lot of IT workers here on slashdot but recognize that your situation is somewhat unique compared to most.
The question is though, will it be used for telephones?
Yes but it will be kind of like the situation with smartphones. Voice simply becomes one more form of data. My smartphone is a computer that happens to be able to make phone calls. You'll still see phones but they'll eventually be VOIP phones. POTS is a remarkable bit of engineering from an earlier era and it works really, really well in a lot of ways. My father was an AT&T engineer for many years so I got to see lots of central offices and other interesting stuff the public doesn't usually see. The problem is that while POTS does a very good job transmitting voice, it's kind of a one trick pony. People want more than just voice these days and since the telecoms only get one line into the house they need to have it do more than just simple voice services.
I'm not going to argue you point for point, but here's the statistic for Norway...
Circumstances in Norway may be very different than those in the US where I live. Land line usage in the US is also declining as a percent of use but it is in no danger of disappearing any time soon.
In practice when calling to a cell phone - which now outnumber landlines almost 4:1 - landlines are no cheaper..
I can get a land line for ~$15-30/month and often less. There is almost no useful cell plan you can get here that is that cheap and that doesn't even take into account the full cost of the phone.
And this is a fairly sparsely populated country with a fully built out "traditional" telephone network, if it's not worth maintaining here then I think copper networks will disappear from most urban areas on the globe.
Most of the US is quite sparsely populated as well. Copper networks in the US aren't going away if for no other reason than they are needed for internet service to homes and businesses. POTS service will probably disappear at some point and be subsumed into VOIP once the network gets sufficiently robust. There is no money in POTS but there is plenty of money in last mile internet delivery so the copper networks are going to be with us for quite a while. In some places fiber will replace them but that is still a land line.
How'd A123 fall so far, so fast?
Let's see: They have a ton of debt, a recall that cost them $55 million, and their biggest customer is Fisker who has a cool but expensive product that is selling slowly, and new customers are coming online slowly. Basically crushing debt, a big screw up and insufficient revenues. Pretty much the fastest way I know of to get to a bankruptcy filing. If a buyer gets them post bankruptcy they probably will have a pretty good business without the debt obligations.
It may reduce their margins (minutely), but it will give them an immediate response to any allegations of massive offshoring of labor or anti-American sentiment.
Actually with the volumes Apple does they can automate the heck out of things so their margins probably won't be affected much. The biggest challenges are getting the components to the assembly plant for reasonable cost as well as flexibility but again, Apple is a big enough player that they are in a reasonable position to make that happen. Tim Cook being a supply chain guy I'm sure understands this well. US manufacturing is very competitive unless there is a very high percentage of labor cost in the product, particularly if it is unskilled labor or if the competition enjoys subsidies US companies do not.
Are the days of the office phone (and the office phone system) at an end?"
Not remotely. Sure mobile devices are going to take huge swaths of market share from land line phones but it's not hard to find use cases where a land line phone is required, useful or even preferable. Off the top of my head:
1) Managing multiple lines into a company. Could be done with wireless theoretically but much easier with landlines presently
2) Legal/statutory requirements. Particularly for certain industries like financial services there is a requirement to have a landline
3) Mobile phones get lost, land line phones don't.
4) Separation of work from personal life. With a mobile device it is harder to separate the two unless you carry two of them and who wants to do that?
5) Cost - land line phones can be a lot cheaper to own/operate and aren't obsolete after 4 years.
6) Office features including paging, multiple lines, better speaker phones, etc
7) Comfort - land line phones have handsets that are actually designed with the human head in mind
8) Sunken costs - Land line phones are already installed to most buildings in the US and other parts of the world.
9) Reliability - land line phones are FAR more reliable and have better voice quality than mobile devices almost without exception.
10) Users - lots of workers are not techie geeks and find a land line phone a preferable method of communication
11) Many users do not need to move from their desks. Why pay for the extra cost of mobile when it is not needed?
Point is, I want the NY Times product - the newspaper - to have very broad speech protections, probably almost the same protection afforded to the individual employees.
A corporation is a fictional entity. It is merely an association of individuals. Nothing wrong with that at all but a corporation by definition has no voice of its own. It's like a puppet, it only can say what the person controlling it wants it to say and the person controlling it already has free speech rights. The important bit is to make sure we don't limit the speech of individuals by limiting the corporation. (basically I'm agreeing with you) The solution SCOTUS came up with to solve this dilemma was to declare that a corporation was functionally identical (or nearly so) to a person which is clever but probably not the best solution because there are critical differences between a puppet and the puppeteer. SCOTUS basically declared Pinocchio to be a real boy even though it is obvious to everyone that the puppet isn't actually a real person.