The other side of it is that you also have to evaluate the quality of the customer inquiries. It doesn't help if he went from 100 inquiries with a 80 becoming customers (80%) to 2000 inquiries with only 100 becoming customers; the additional 20 customers doesn't pay for the time in handling the other 1900.
If the current agents can't handle the volume, they may end up only adding 70 new customers. Adding agents to handle those calls are now twice as expensive as before (unless they've outsourced that).
His labor costs are going to be higher, so the company will have less flexibility when it comes to hiring more people. Sure, they'll be able to attract higher quality candidates than before, but the existing staff will need to be more productive than before if they want the business to grow in order to justify the higher salaries. Adding additional phone techs is going to be twice as expensive as before, so that guy who complained about being ripped off is now going to complain that he's got to work all the time.
Money that would otherwise go into capital improvements that could grow the business is going to employees salaries.
Which is likely why the company probably contacted people in the press to tout that they're still in business after the last series of articles about them at the end of July/early August painted a less rosy picture.
According to the Inc article, the cost of the raises was supposed to cost $1.8 million and it was supposed to be phased in over three years. For this first phase, the minimum salary was bumped to $50k and then it will increase by $10k for each of the next two years. This was supposed to be paid for with the CEO's $1 million pay cut and then the rest from profits. Based on what was given in the article, 30 people would have gotten a $15k salary bump at a cost of $450k, and some random sales guy who was interviewed was given a $5k increase. But he's selling off assets like mad, working 80 hours a week (to avoid hiring someone to replace one of the people that quit?), and even renting out his house to raise $3 million for the business. Minus the $1mil in legal fees for the lawsuit with his brother, that should give them a one time shot of $2 mil plus the $1mil from his salary, they should have had more than enough to cover that, but the different articles about this company still indicate that things are very tight. What were all the other increases? Are the salary increases cannibalizing what would have been used for capital equipment purchases? If they're still struggling now, what are they going to do when there is an across the board $10K salary bump in the next two years?
I hope those 30 employees continue living as if they were making $35k so it won't be a big shock when the company fails and they must obtain job at another firm that's paying the market rate for their skills.
“A minor amount of play developed in the differential gears. Tesla replaced the entire drive system. Remarkable service!”
meaning that Tesla's field service techs don't know how to fix that, so it's easier to just remove the entire thing, send it back, and let the factory rebuild the offending part for a new customer.
I found these parts interesting:
Based on survey responses, Tesla has made a habit of replacing the car’s electric motors. The brake rotors tend to warp.
I thought low maintenance was a part of the EV-crowd's mantra. With regenerative braking, one wouldn't have to replace brake pads very often and especially not rotors. This sounds like a car that one would not like to have once it was out of the warranty period.
Nope. There are heaps of firearms in Mexico that can't be traced back to the US since they never originated from the US in the first place. The major supplier of the ones that can be tracked is the US Government via the DoD. That's right...the US military sells/gives firearms to the Mexican military and law enforcement agencies where the often go missing. It also doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that the cartels that are in the business of smuggling stuff, will also be able to get their hands on military grade firearms. That is what they are using and that stuff isn't readily available in the US outside of the military and law enforcement. The automatic or selective fire firearms manufactured after 1986 cannot be sold legally to US citizens regardless if they have a ATF class III license or not.
What is Mexico's fault is restricting their citizens' ability to defend themselves from criminals while also having a corrupt and ineffective police force. Fortunately, some politicians and citizens are trying to change that. http://www.vice.com/video/the-...
Yes, but if you wanted to go anywhere else, you would have to stay within 150 or so miles from home so you could make it back to recharge. It would have sufficient range to get to the Nashville supercharger and from there to Knoxville or Chatanooga. Once at those locations, a person could go north or south to eventually get to a east-west route with superchargers. One might be able to make it to the supercharger west of St. Louis, but why take the chance of waiting to get towed while you're sitting in a $100K along the side of a STL road? I don't know if there are other charging stations along the way, but 30 minutes at a supercharger seems like a waste of time to me, so a slower one would be even worse.
But even the 2WD SUVs still have higher ground clearance and seating positions that are higher than typical cars. This is basically the hatchback version of the Model S sedan.
I wouldn't consider it a SUV either. They put a hatchback body on a Model S platform. I guess they had to call it a SUV since most people view hatchbacks as being "cheap vehicles" and this certainly isn't cheap by any stretch. I also wonder how much rain/snow those rear doors will let in during the 6-7 seconds that Wired mentioned it will take for them to open.
Which is fine and dandy if you just want to follow the interstates from one tourist trap to another. It must suck for the couple of Tesla owners in Memphis. The closest free supercharger station for them is in Nashville. It looks as if Tesla is avoiding Arkansas like the plague.
Love Canal wouldn't have been an issue had the local government not forced the company to sell their waste disposal site so a school could be built on the site and then allow developers to build homes around it. I'm sure the developer(s) and the school board made a mint on land they obtained for $1.
Back in the day, I had a Dodge 2500 pickup that I did fence construction with. I would load that thing up to the point I was occasionally blowing out 16.5in load range D tires on the highway. It had a 318 gasoline engine. This was in the Pittsburgh areas with many long hills. My parents had a 18 foot RV with a 318 gasoline engine. It worked fine even pulling a small trailer in various areas of the Appalachians. I am not a Dodge fan, these are just examples, I am sure the equivalent Chevy 350 and Ford 302/351 was equivalent at the time. They worked fine. Would a diesel be better? Maybe, maybe not. Todays gasoline truck engines have more HP and in some cases more torque
My parents had a trailer probably similar to yours'. They went on a trip one year with some other relatives one year. Both groups had Dodge Ram pickups of similar model year (another uncle worked for Dodge so they could in on the employee discount) pulling similar RVs. My dad's pickup with a Cummins diesel only needed to stop about 1/2 as much as the other pickup with the gasoline engine. So, yes, a gasoline engine does work fine, but it will consume more fuel doing the same job as a diesel.
That would essentially put them out of business in the US. But VW has a puny market share in the US, when compared to other foreign auto producers in the VW or Audi price range. So the government in the US is probably thinking of what the collateral damage would be for VW car dealerships, independent mechanics, etc.
VW also manufactures vehicles in the US, so if they were to go out of business in the US, that plant would have to close.
The emissions per gallon requirement is why the original Aptera Motors hybrid vehicle was never produced. It was supposed to get 300+mpg with a diesel motor, but due to those emissions requirements, it could never be sold in California which was its initial target market. I guess it's probably due to they assume that the person will be sitting in a traffic jam rather than actually going anywhere.
Actually, if you look at the breakdown given on that page, it does include spending for Afghanistan/ISIS/whatever in the Overseas Contingency Operations line item. Here is what's been spent to date: https://www.nationalpriorities... If you notice, what has been spent on Iraq is less than what will be the bill for the 2009 "Stimulus Package". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The US spends a lot more because it is the largest economy on the planet, but as a percentage of GDP, it isn't that much at 3.5%. Given that 2% is widely considered to be the baseline of what a nation needs to spend on defense to actually be able to defend itself, you can see that we're really picking up the slack for a lot of our allies. Could we spend what do more wisely? Yes. Ditching the idea that we need a "jack-of-all-trades" airplane like the F-35 would be a good place to start. Developing lots of common subsystems (engines, avionics, radar, etc) to save on development costs while having the airframes tailored to what each service needs would have been a much better strategy. Cutting more is unwise if it impacts training and readiness of these forces, and that is at the point where we're at, especially with the Army.
http://data.worldbank.org/indi...
I forgot about those already getting a "Basic Income" via their SS retirement checks. Eliminating those households from this program would bring the amount to about $12k/year.
it would constitute less than the country's annual military spending to utterly eliminate homelessness, poverty, starvation, lack of education and illiteracy, as well as drastically improving a nation's psychological health.
The Feds spend well over $670B a year on anti-poverty programs already. The states kick in a little more. That is greater than the $580B or so spent on the DoD in 2014, so why weren't all of those problems eliminated?
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The other side of it is that you also have to evaluate the quality of the customer inquiries. It doesn't help if he went from 100 inquiries with a 80 becoming customers (80%) to 2000 inquiries with only 100 becoming customers; the additional 20 customers doesn't pay for the time in handling the other 1900.
If the current agents can't handle the volume, they may end up only adding 70 new customers. Adding agents to handle those calls are now twice as expensive as before (unless they've outsourced that).
usually it's a bad sign when the owner of a business needs to start liquidating his own assets in order to pay the salaries of his staff.
His labor costs are going to be higher, so the company will have less flexibility when it comes to hiring more people. Sure, they'll be able to attract higher quality candidates than before, but the existing staff will need to be more productive than before if they want the business to grow in order to justify the higher salaries. Adding additional phone techs is going to be twice as expensive as before, so that guy who complained about being ripped off is now going to complain that he's got to work all the time.
Money that would otherwise go into capital improvements that could grow the business is going to employees salaries.
Which is likely why the company probably contacted people in the press to tout that they're still in business after the last series of articles about them at the end of July/early August painted a less rosy picture.
I hope those 30 employees continue living as if they were making $35k so it won't be a big shock when the company fails and they must obtain job at another firm that's paying the market rate for their skills.
“A minor amount of play developed in the differential gears. Tesla replaced the entire drive system. Remarkable service!”
meaning that Tesla's field service techs don't know how to fix that, so it's easier to just remove the entire thing, send it back, and let the factory rebuild the offending part for a new customer.
I found these parts interesting:
Based on survey responses, Tesla has made a habit of replacing the car’s electric motors. The brake rotors tend to warp.
I thought low maintenance was a part of the EV-crowd's mantra. With regenerative braking, one wouldn't have to replace brake pads very often and especially not rotors. This sounds like a car that one would not like to have once it was out of the warranty period.
yes. Are there any three eyed fish?
like the SJW's in Green Inferno?
It's a way to Monsanto out and protect EU companies developing GM products.
yep. http://ssristories.org/categor...
What is Mexico's fault is restricting their citizens' ability to defend themselves from criminals while also having a corrupt and ineffective police force. Fortunately, some politicians and citizens are trying to change that. http://www.vice.com/video/the-...
Yes, but if you wanted to go anywhere else, you would have to stay within 150 or so miles from home so you could make it back to recharge. It would have sufficient range to get to the Nashville supercharger and from there to Knoxville or Chatanooga. Once at those locations, a person could go north or south to eventually get to a east-west route with superchargers. One might be able to make it to the supercharger west of St. Louis, but why take the chance of waiting to get towed while you're sitting in a $100K along the side of a STL road? I don't know if there are other charging stations along the way, but 30 minutes at a supercharger seems like a waste of time to me, so a slower one would be even worse.
So, it has "macho station wagon" level of ground clearance compared to a Mercedes G class or Land Rover at 12".
But even the 2WD SUVs still have higher ground clearance and seating positions that are higher than typical cars. This is basically the hatchback version of the Model S sedan.
I wouldn't consider it a SUV either. They put a hatchback body on a Model S platform. I guess they had to call it a SUV since most people view hatchbacks as being "cheap vehicles" and this certainly isn't cheap by any stretch. I also wonder how much rain/snow those rear doors will let in during the 6-7 seconds that Wired mentioned it will take for them to open.
Which is fine and dandy if you just want to follow the interstates from one tourist trap to another. It must suck for the couple of Tesla owners in Memphis. The closest free supercharger station for them is in Nashville. It looks as if Tesla is avoiding Arkansas like the plague.
Love Canal wouldn't have been an issue had the local government not forced the company to sell their waste disposal site so a school could be built on the site and then allow developers to build homes around it. I'm sure the developer(s) and the school board made a mint on land they obtained for $1.
Back in the day, I had a Dodge 2500 pickup that I did fence construction with. I would load that thing up to the point I was occasionally blowing out 16.5in load range D tires on the highway. It had a 318 gasoline engine. This was in the Pittsburgh areas with many long hills. My parents had a 18 foot RV with a 318 gasoline engine. It worked fine even pulling a small trailer in various areas of the Appalachians. I am not a Dodge fan, these are just examples, I am sure the equivalent Chevy 350 and Ford 302/351 was equivalent at the time. They worked fine. Would a diesel be better? Maybe, maybe not. Todays gasoline truck engines have more HP and in some cases more torque
My parents had a trailer probably similar to yours'. They went on a trip one year with some other relatives one year. Both groups had Dodge Ram pickups of similar model year (another uncle worked for Dodge so they could in on the employee discount) pulling similar RVs. My dad's pickup with a Cummins diesel only needed to stop about 1/2 as much as the other pickup with the gasoline engine. So, yes, a gasoline engine does work fine, but it will consume more fuel doing the same job as a diesel.
Fuel is taxed more in AU and Europe than it is in the US, so a more efficient diesel will have a lower operating cost.
So they're going to buy Elio Motors and actually build something instead of just hyping a prototype?
That would essentially put them out of business in the US. But VW has a puny market share in the US, when compared to other foreign auto producers in the VW or Audi price range. So the government in the US is probably thinking of what the collateral damage would be for VW car dealerships, independent mechanics, etc.
VW also manufactures vehicles in the US, so if they were to go out of business in the US, that plant would have to close.
The emissions per gallon requirement is why the original Aptera Motors hybrid vehicle was never produced. It was supposed to get 300+mpg with a diesel motor, but due to those emissions requirements, it could never be sold in California which was its initial target market. I guess it's probably due to they assume that the person will be sitting in a traffic jam rather than actually going anywhere.
The US spends a lot more because it is the largest economy on the planet, but as a percentage of GDP, it isn't that much at 3.5%. Given that 2% is widely considered to be the baseline of what a nation needs to spend on defense to actually be able to defend itself, you can see that we're really picking up the slack for a lot of our allies. Could we spend what do more wisely? Yes. Ditching the idea that we need a "jack-of-all-trades" airplane like the F-35 would be a good place to start. Developing lots of common subsystems (engines, avionics, radar, etc) to save on development costs while having the airframes tailored to what each service needs would have been a much better strategy. Cutting more is unwise if it impacts training and readiness of these forces, and that is at the point where we're at, especially with the Army. http://data.worldbank.org/indi...
I forgot about those already getting a "Basic Income" via their SS retirement checks. Eliminating those households from this program would bring the amount to about $12k/year.
it would constitute less than the country's annual military spending to utterly eliminate homelessness, poverty, starvation, lack of education and illiteracy, as well as drastically improving a nation's psychological health.
The Feds spend well over $670B a year on anti-poverty programs already. The states kick in a little more. That is greater than the $580B or so spent on the DoD in 2014, so why weren't all of those problems eliminated?