Publishers take a lot of the profit from successful books. They also end up paying a lot of advances on complete duds on which they lost money. (Same thing with music labels.) Vanity publishing has always been available to authors that think they can make more money by cutting out the middleman. (If you could convince a bookstore to carry the things... most booksellers have better things to do than wade through self-published crap.)
I agree that the traditional publishing model is now becoming outdated with the advent of e-books, but it had it's purpose at the time.
If you were to actually read TFA by the NYT, you would find that Amazon employs editors of their own, which edit books published by Amazon's publishing wing (and which has so far published 122 books.) I would assume they pay advances and edit, in return for exclusive rights to the work, just like any other publisher.
This is distinct from the platform on the website that allows anyone to sell any eBook on the website.
Galileo was a long time ago. The Catholic church, by now, has no beef with the well-settled science on Evolution, the Big Bang, etc.
Although I'm not quite sure what process they use to decide which parts should be taken literally (i.e. the resurrection of Jesus) and which should be discarded as poor translations of ancient epics (the seven days of Creation, Adam and Eve, etc.)
And it baffles me that any form of Christianity decided to include Revelation; whoever wrote that had clearly discovered some Magic Mushrooms...
Yes, the House always makes money with poker. But that's like saying that the "winner" at a car race is the guy that sells the racing fuel. Yeah, he makes money, but he's also not playing the game.
Poker is a game played with other players. The actions of the other players inform and modify your own actions. Only games where it's just you vs. the house, where you can predict exactly what your opponents odds are and actions will be, at any given moment, are that predictable (and therefore almost always unwinnable, since the house hates to lose.) There are very well-defined strategies for losing the least amount of money at fully-randomized blackjack. Over an infinite amount of time, you will lose money at exactly the rate the rules predict.
No such strategy exists with Poker when applied to a single player in a game with several of them. Certainly, the group of players will lose a fixed amount of money to the rake, but more often than not, one player will walk away with more money (and more than he started with), at the expense of the others.
Poker is a game where a machine algorithm based only on card probabilities can certainly handily beat players that do not understand the probabilities involved in the game. Once your the player has acquired the same readily obtainable mathematical game knowledge that was programmed into the machine, the player will wipe the floor with the robot. Unless, of course, the robot starts to be programmed with something that will analyze the betting behaviors of the player, but at that point you've passed out of the realm of pure math and are well into psychology, and the programmer is essentially back to playing other players.
If the game was pure probability where only the House wins, there wouldn't be Poker Bot tournaments, now would there?
So, did the one person who purchased one hack it? The marketshare of this thing is so tiny in the U.S., I can only imagine Sony continues to distribute them here out of some sense of corporate stubbornness, just as with their ATRAC music players that for years could not play an MP3. I can only imagine that these have some kind of viable market in Asia, where the Kindle and Nook don't exist. (do they?)
I suppose it's not entirely broken by design (previous models in the line had serious shortcomings), but there isn't any reason to buy it over it's much more ubiquitous competitors either.
And it just got undercut by the roughly equivalent Kindle Touch by $50.
So, when Boeing sells an aircraft made in Washington to some other random country, makes a profit, and pays taxes on it, this is some indirect way of hiding tax from US Citizens? How does that work exactly?
And Cain's proposal simply will not work in practice. An extremely high sales tax (in addition to LOWERING the standard of living by those too poor to save money by the amount of the tax) will be evaded. Constantly. Transactions simply move "underground."
And a national (high) sales tax would still have plenty of complications. Do you tax goods AND services? What's a "good", and what's a "service"? If I buy lumber to build a building, who pays the tax, or is the tax assessed multiple times? We have the guy that owned the stand of trees, the company that logged it, the company that milled it, the distributor that sold it, the builder that put something together with it, and the person that bought the building. Do we assess a massive sales tax at every link in the chain? That really hurts innovation by giving a gigantic advantage to vertically integrated conglomerates. If the person that bought the building is the only one that pays the tax, what happens when he turns around and sub-divides it? What do we do when he tears the building down and salvages it, is the lumber taxed again? Do we set up a Value Added Tax system? If so, that isn't very "simple" at all... it's a huge administrative burden and area of law in countries that use one.
These are not trivial questions, and they all have all kinds of ways of avoidance and loopholes, which you can be sure would be VERY common once there is a 30% tax to evade.
And I'm a little confused as to what Unions have to do with anything... what do Unions have to do with the tax system?
While you can indeed pick up a Incorporation Kit from Staples for $15, that isn't going to get you a corporation that will stand up to any kind of scrutiny. A corporation needs true independence from the people running it in order to qualify as a "real" corporation. This means real accounting, shares, shareholder meetings, etc. You can bet that if corporate profits were exempt from income tax, the IRS would start playing REAL close attention to small corps to see if they met the rules.
Completely waiving tax by corporations isn't a solution either. How is that, in any way, fair to companies that have not incorporated in a way that would allow them to avoid tax? (i.e. your average small business.) Due their corporate "personhood", a corporation involves a certain fixed amount of perfectly-justified administrative and legal overhead that is untenable for many small businesses.
We do collect a substantial amount of corporate income tax, even if that is far less than the official rate.
Labor is a primary expense only in unprocessed fruit and vegetable production, due to the fragility of most of those products. The vast majority of caloric intake in the U.S. necessarily consists of grain, meat, and dairy. (Fruit and veggies don't have many calories.) Meat, grain, dairy, and processed veggies or fruit are highly mechanized and have relatively little labor input, relative to the value of their output.
Now, labor is a primary expense in restaurant food production, but that doesn't affect those that purchase their food in a grocery store.
Also, Food and Fuel are NOT excluded from official inflation statistics. The CPI-U (which is used for most government programs) includes everything. The "core inflation" numbers are used only by the Fed for the purpose of setting monetary policy. (They want to insulate economic adjustments from highly volatile commodities markets, under the theory that in the long-term, those effects will show up in the the core inflation numbers.)
It's sad that this is "routine"
on
IRS Auditing Google
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This, unfortunately, is a very common way for corporations to avoid taxes. The rules to decide which country "earned" a particular chunk of income are inherently complicated (with little way to simplify them), as there are plenty of legitimate reasons for part of a company to owe a foreign subsidiary money. It's a constant cat-and-mouse game between corporations and the IRS chasing this money around.
It's a complicated problem with no good answers. (Though you would never know it to listen to people on either end of the political spectrum... on one end you have people saying we should "eliminate loopholes", betraying their ignorance of why the problem exists to begin with. On the other end you have people that argue that corporations should pay no income tax since they spend so much effort complying (or fighting) with tax laws, but offer no way to make up that lost revenue, or volunteer cuts.)
I love this! Inflation is low except for food and fuel. I would consider those the two most important things to worry about.
I didn't say they weren't important. I said that they were commodities with little labor input, which rather undercuts the GP's assertion that labor unions are the cause of runaway inflation. And the net impact of those increases on the budget of an "average" family has been quite small, due to price decreases elsewhere (housing, services, and consumer goods.)
Minor clarification: Fruits and Vegetables are rather labor-intensive, but most of that is picked by migrant laborers earning wages that would make the manager of your local burger-flipping joint blanch, as they are so low. The majority of caloric intake, however, is Grain, Dairy, and Meat, none of which take a huge amount of labor. (Efficiencies in modern industrial meatcutting and dairy collection have really reduced the labor in those industries, which used to be quite high.)
There are multiple holes in your logic, but if your response to a calm, rational post with which you disagree is a pile of ad hominem insults and unsupported assertions, I'm done, because you clearly won't read it or bother trying to understand what I'm saying.
Runaway inflation? What planet are you on? Inflation has been quite low for YEARS now. The only significant price increases have been in fuel and food, both of which are commodities with little labor input. And the size of the unionized workforce in the US is at historic lows.
"A L33T bunch of buttheads demanding regular increases in pay"... I don't think raises in line with increases in labor productivity per dollar of labor input are exactly unreasonable. Certainly their CEO bosses have no problem giving themselves raises for the same thing.
"deserving no more than nice people like you or I." What, are you mad because increased bargaining power enables them to make more money? In exactly the same way that companies negotiate the prices of anything else they buy (or sell) in quantity? And I like regular raises too...
"the cost of their highjacking [sic] industry gets passed on to you or I." I'm not sure how collective bargaining qualifies as "hijacking." Just like employers threaten to close plants if labor costs are too high, why can a union not do the same?
"we pay for the extra poor workmanship of UNION BABIES to get wealthy while we languish under inflation." Yeah, tell that to, say NYC-based ironworkers... unionized, and famous the world over for an incredible work ethic and craftsmanship, all under conditions that would make most people crap in their pants. They earn a lot of money, and deserve every dollar. Tell that to US coal miners, the most productive and safest in the world.
Yes, unions are not perfect. Some of them are unreasonable and produce an environment that drives their employers into bankruptcy, a situation in which nobody wins. Some unions are corrupt, just any collection of entities have some that are not as good as others. But to say that the very idea of workers banding together to put themselves on an equal negotiating plane with their bosses is the root of all evil is going a bit far.
These poor "reshippers" get visited by the cops all the time. Their (usually perfectly valid) defense is that they were unwitting gullible dupes in a scam. That defense isn't going to work so well when the cops see stacks of new boxes in your living room.
Yes, there is a legitimate reason for reshippers to exist. But if you are running a legit reshipping business, you have absolutely no reason to farm it out to random schmucks working out of their house. Indeed, there are a huge number of reasons NOT to do so, the need to prevent theft being the primary one. A single person can physically re-ship hundreds of packages a day; why would a legit business farm it out to a huge number of people, each of which only ships a handful a day?
But just like other work-at-home scams, the process relies on vaguely logical premises that make no sense when carried to conclusion. People desperate for a job aren't necessarily going to put a whole lot of thinking into what looks like a lifeline.
The shipping centers the article refers to are NOT the legitimate drop-shipping centers somebody in Europe, Asia, Africa, etc. can use in order to order grey-market products.
The article is referring to the people in the US that act as a drop-shipper for merchandise purchased using stolen credit cards. The merchandise is shipped overseas where it then becomes nearly impossible to track down who it's going to and recover the goods. Since the goods are purchased with stolen credit cards, they can be offered to the eventual buyer at a significant discount to the actual cost. (No matter what price the eventual destination was supposed to charge.)
If oil and water DID mix, the total volume of oil, which would have dispersed over the massive body of water that is the Gulf of Mexico, would have been a rounding error. There would have been some localized effects, but not catastrophic ones in any way.
Just being pedantic, but homogenized milk is an emulsion; milk out of the cow most certainly separates into milk and buttercream (and the buttercream itself is a high-fat emulsion; it still has a lot of moisture in it.)
If you could explain it away with polar bonds (or lack thereof), why do emulsions emulsify? The hydrocarbon and water molecules have the same number of bonds, and the same density, no matter how vigorously you shake them.
K&R was, and remains, the shining example of what a programming language reference book should be. C, while a perfectly fine language for it's time, almost surely would have been replaced by some other ALGOL-family language had C never existed. However I can confidently state that my understanding of computer programming would have been far poorer without that small little book. I am sure thousands of others feel the same.
WTF? Seriously? Is there some kind of legitimate fear that stores that can't sell HPs crappy PC's will stop selling their crappy printers? The other major printer companies don't sell PC's, and they seem to be doing just fine.
For car bodies, final assembly, etc., general purpose robots work quite well due to their adaptability.
For small, complicated parts that might only have two or three varieties across a company's entire product line, like, say, window motors, A/C compressors, evap pumps, etc., cheaper, simpler, faster, more accurate, and sturdier one-off tooling makes a lot more sense.
No, you don't want custom tooling to assemble the left taillight assembly of the TSX Station Wagon, but neither do you need universal robots to make, say, gas caps.
Maybe the day will come when we use 3D printers and/or highly-articulated robots to make damn near everything, but that day won't be here for a while yet.
Tesla is still making low-volume high-powered toys to sell to rich people. There is a world of difference between making a few of a car sold to rich people, and making hundreds of thousands of cars sold to John Q Public.
Tesla knows this, which is precisely why no automaker has snatched them up to scale up their designs and Tesla hasn't done this themselves.. If they were adaptable to a mass-production vehicle, there are any number of auto companies that would have bought them already. GM, Ford, Toyota, Mazda, Nissan, VW, Fiat, Hyundai, Daewoo, Tata, Mitsubishi, and who knows how many Chinese companies.
Yes, CNC machines now do a lot of work that used to be done by dedicated machining equipment. But for large portions of the manufacture of a complex assembly, like an A/C compressor, you have a whole series of machines bending, twisting, pushing, pulling, smashing, slicing, fastening, etc. And all of those machines require holding the assembly in a secure fashion. (So, for that matter, do the CNC machines.) Things that grip to tight tolerances usually can't be adjusted just by running a new program.
Yes, you can design those machines to be adaptable, but that also makes those same machines more complicated, expensive, and error-prone. (And those adaptions are usually done by adjusting movable chucks/grippers/etc. or swapping in new jigs, which is a lengthy, tedious, process.
Slashdot Mirror
Publishers take a lot of the profit from successful books. They also end up paying a lot of advances on complete duds on which they lost money. (Same thing with music labels.) Vanity publishing has always been available to authors that think they can make more money by cutting out the middleman. (If you could convince a bookstore to carry the things... most booksellers have better things to do than wade through self-published crap.)
I agree that the traditional publishing model is now becoming outdated with the advent of e-books, but it had it's purpose at the time.
If you were to actually read TFA by the NYT, you would find that Amazon employs editors of their own, which edit books published by Amazon's publishing wing (and which has so far published 122 books.) I would assume they pay advances and edit, in return for exclusive rights to the work, just like any other publisher.
This is distinct from the platform on the website that allows anyone to sell any eBook on the website.
Galileo was a long time ago. The Catholic church, by now, has no beef with the well-settled science on Evolution, the Big Bang, etc.
Although I'm not quite sure what process they use to decide which parts should be taken literally (i.e. the resurrection of Jesus) and which should be discarded as poor translations of ancient epics (the seven days of Creation, Adam and Eve, etc.)
And it baffles me that any form of Christianity decided to include Revelation; whoever wrote that had clearly discovered some Magic Mushrooms...
Yes, the House always makes money with poker. But that's like saying that the "winner" at a car race is the guy that sells the racing fuel. Yeah, he makes money, but he's also not playing the game.
Poker is a game played with other players. The actions of the other players inform and modify your own actions. Only games where it's just you vs. the house, where you can predict exactly what your opponents odds are and actions will be, at any given moment, are that predictable (and therefore almost always unwinnable, since the house hates to lose.) There are very well-defined strategies for losing the least amount of money at fully-randomized blackjack. Over an infinite amount of time, you will lose money at exactly the rate the rules predict.
No such strategy exists with Poker when applied to a single player in a game with several of them. Certainly, the group of players will lose a fixed amount of money to the rake, but more often than not, one player will walk away with more money (and more than he started with), at the expense of the others.
Poker is a game where a machine algorithm based only on card probabilities can certainly handily beat players that do not understand the probabilities involved in the game. Once your the player has acquired the same readily obtainable mathematical game knowledge that was programmed into the machine, the player will wipe the floor with the robot. Unless, of course, the robot starts to be programmed with something that will analyze the betting behaviors of the player, but at that point you've passed out of the realm of pure math and are well into psychology, and the programmer is essentially back to playing other players.
If the game was pure probability where only the House wins, there wouldn't be Poker Bot tournaments, now would there?
So, did the one person who purchased one hack it? The marketshare of this thing is so tiny in the U.S., I can only imagine Sony continues to distribute them here out of some sense of corporate stubbornness, just as with their ATRAC music players that for years could not play an MP3. I can only imagine that these have some kind of viable market in Asia, where the Kindle and Nook don't exist. (do they?)
I suppose it's not entirely broken by design (previous models in the line had serious shortcomings), but there isn't any reason to buy it over it's much more ubiquitous competitors either.
And it just got undercut by the roughly equivalent Kindle Touch by $50.
So, when Boeing sells an aircraft made in Washington to some other random country, makes a profit, and pays taxes on it, this is some indirect way of hiding tax from US Citizens? How does that work exactly?
And Cain's proposal simply will not work in practice. An extremely high sales tax (in addition to LOWERING the standard of living by those too poor to save money by the amount of the tax) will be evaded. Constantly. Transactions simply move "underground."
And a national (high) sales tax would still have plenty of complications. Do you tax goods AND services? What's a "good", and what's a "service"? If I buy lumber to build a building, who pays the tax, or is the tax assessed multiple times? We have the guy that owned the stand of trees, the company that logged it, the company that milled it, the distributor that sold it, the builder that put something together with it, and the person that bought the building. Do we assess a massive sales tax at every link in the chain? That really hurts innovation by giving a gigantic advantage to vertically integrated conglomerates. If the person that bought the building is the only one that pays the tax, what happens when he turns around and sub-divides it? What do we do when he tears the building down and salvages it, is the lumber taxed again? Do we set up a Value Added Tax system? If so, that isn't very "simple" at all... it's a huge administrative burden and area of law in countries that use one.
These are not trivial questions, and they all have all kinds of ways of avoidance and loopholes, which you can be sure would be VERY common once there is a 30% tax to evade.
And I'm a little confused as to what Unions have to do with anything... what do Unions have to do with the tax system?
While you can indeed pick up a Incorporation Kit from Staples for $15, that isn't going to get you a corporation that will stand up to any kind of scrutiny. A corporation needs true independence from the people running it in order to qualify as a "real" corporation. This means real accounting, shares, shareholder meetings, etc. You can bet that if corporate profits were exempt from income tax, the IRS would start playing REAL close attention to small corps to see if they met the rules.
Completely waiving tax by corporations isn't a solution either. How is that, in any way, fair to companies that have not incorporated in a way that would allow them to avoid tax? (i.e. your average small business.) Due their corporate "personhood", a corporation involves a certain fixed amount of perfectly-justified administrative and legal overhead that is untenable for many small businesses.
We do collect a substantial amount of corporate income tax, even if that is far less than the official rate.
Labor is a primary expense only in unprocessed fruit and vegetable production, due to the fragility of most of those products. The vast majority of caloric intake in the U.S. necessarily consists of grain, meat, and dairy. (Fruit and veggies don't have many calories.) Meat, grain, dairy, and processed veggies or fruit are highly mechanized and have relatively little labor input, relative to the value of their output.
Now, labor is a primary expense in restaurant food production, but that doesn't affect those that purchase their food in a grocery store.
Also, Food and Fuel are NOT excluded from official inflation statistics. The CPI-U (which is used for most government programs) includes everything. The "core inflation" numbers are used only by the Fed for the purpose of setting monetary policy. (They want to insulate economic adjustments from highly volatile commodities markets, under the theory that in the long-term, those effects will show up in the the core inflation numbers.)
This, unfortunately, is a very common way for corporations to avoid taxes. The rules to decide which country "earned" a particular chunk of income are inherently complicated (with little way to simplify them), as there are plenty of legitimate reasons for part of a company to owe a foreign subsidiary money. It's a constant cat-and-mouse game between corporations and the IRS chasing this money around.
It's a complicated problem with no good answers. (Though you would never know it to listen to people on either end of the political spectrum... on one end you have people saying we should "eliminate loopholes", betraying their ignorance of why the problem exists to begin with. On the other end you have people that argue that corporations should pay no income tax since they spend so much effort complying (or fighting) with tax laws, but offer no way to make up that lost revenue, or volunteer cuts.)
I love this! Inflation is low except for food and fuel. I would consider those the two most important things to worry about.
I didn't say they weren't important. I said that they were commodities with little labor input, which rather undercuts the GP's assertion that labor unions are the cause of runaway inflation. And the net impact of those increases on the budget of an "average" family has been quite small, due to price decreases elsewhere (housing, services, and consumer goods.)
Minor clarification: Fruits and Vegetables are rather labor-intensive, but most of that is picked by migrant laborers earning wages that would make the manager of your local burger-flipping joint blanch, as they are so low. The majority of caloric intake, however, is Grain, Dairy, and Meat, none of which take a huge amount of labor. (Efficiencies in modern industrial meatcutting and dairy collection have really reduced the labor in those industries, which used to be quite high.)
There are multiple holes in your logic, but if your response to a calm, rational post with which you disagree is a pile of ad hominem insults and unsupported assertions, I'm done, because you clearly won't read it or bother trying to understand what I'm saying.
Have a nice day.
Runaway inflation? What planet are you on? Inflation has been quite low for YEARS now. The only significant price increases have been in fuel and food, both of which are commodities with little labor input. And the size of the unionized workforce in the US is at historic lows.
"A L33T bunch of buttheads demanding regular increases in pay"... I don't think raises in line with increases in labor productivity per dollar of labor input are exactly unreasonable. Certainly their CEO bosses have no problem giving themselves raises for the same thing.
"deserving no more than nice people like you or I." What, are you mad because increased bargaining power enables them to make more money? In exactly the same way that companies negotiate the prices of anything else they buy (or sell) in quantity? And I like regular raises too...
"the cost of their highjacking [sic] industry gets passed on to you or I." I'm not sure how collective bargaining qualifies as "hijacking." Just like employers threaten to close plants if labor costs are too high, why can a union not do the same?
"we pay for the extra poor workmanship of UNION BABIES to get wealthy while we languish under inflation." Yeah, tell that to, say NYC-based ironworkers... unionized, and famous the world over for an incredible work ethic and craftsmanship, all under conditions that would make most people crap in their pants. They earn a lot of money, and deserve every dollar. Tell that to US coal miners, the most productive and safest in the world.
Yes, unions are not perfect. Some of them are unreasonable and produce an environment that drives their employers into bankruptcy, a situation in which nobody wins. Some unions are corrupt, just any collection of entities have some that are not as good as others. But to say that the very idea of workers banding together to put themselves on an equal negotiating plane with their bosses is the root of all evil is going a bit far.
These poor "reshippers" get visited by the cops all the time. Their (usually perfectly valid) defense is that they were unwitting gullible dupes in a scam. That defense isn't going to work so well when the cops see stacks of new boxes in your living room.
Yes, there is a legitimate reason for reshippers to exist. But if you are running a legit reshipping business, you have absolutely no reason to farm it out to random schmucks working out of their house. Indeed, there are a huge number of reasons NOT to do so, the need to prevent theft being the primary one. A single person can physically re-ship hundreds of packages a day; why would a legit business farm it out to a huge number of people, each of which only ships a handful a day?
But just like other work-at-home scams, the process relies on vaguely logical premises that make no sense when carried to conclusion. People desperate for a job aren't necessarily going to put a whole lot of thinking into what looks like a lifeline.
The shipping centers the article refers to are NOT the legitimate drop-shipping centers somebody in Europe, Asia, Africa, etc. can use in order to order grey-market products.
The article is referring to the people in the US that act as a drop-shipper for merchandise purchased using stolen credit cards. The merchandise is shipped overseas where it then becomes nearly impossible to track down who it's going to and recover the goods. Since the goods are purchased with stolen credit cards, they can be offered to the eventual buyer at a significant discount to the actual cost. (No matter what price the eventual destination was supposed to charge.)
If oil and water DID mix, the total volume of oil, which would have dispersed over the massive body of water that is the Gulf of Mexico, would have been a rounding error. There would have been some localized effects, but not catastrophic ones in any way.
Just being pedantic, but homogenized milk is an emulsion; milk out of the cow most certainly separates into milk and buttercream (and the buttercream itself is a high-fat emulsion; it still has a lot of moisture in it.)
If you could explain it away with polar bonds (or lack thereof), why do emulsions emulsify? The hydrocarbon and water molecules have the same number of bonds, and the same density, no matter how vigorously you shake them.
K&R was, and remains, the shining example of what a programming language reference book should be. C, while a perfectly fine language for it's time, almost surely would have been replaced by some other ALGOL-family language had C never existed. However I can confidently state that my understanding of computer programming would have been far poorer without that small little book. I am sure thousands of others feel the same.
WTF? Seriously? Is there some kind of legitimate fear that stores that can't sell HPs crappy PC's will stop selling their crappy printers? The other major printer companies don't sell PC's, and they seem to be doing just fine.
EOM
For car bodies, final assembly, etc., general purpose robots work quite well due to their adaptability.
For small, complicated parts that might only have two or three varieties across a company's entire product line, like, say, window motors, A/C compressors, evap pumps, etc., cheaper, simpler, faster, more accurate, and sturdier one-off tooling makes a lot more sense.
No, you don't want custom tooling to assemble the left taillight assembly of the TSX Station Wagon, but neither do you need universal robots to make, say, gas caps.
Maybe the day will come when we use 3D printers and/or highly-articulated robots to make damn near everything, but that day won't be here for a while yet.
Tesla is still making low-volume high-powered toys to sell to rich people. There is a world of difference between making a few of a car sold to rich people, and making hundreds of thousands of cars sold to John Q Public.
Tesla knows this, which is precisely why no automaker has snatched them up to scale up their designs and Tesla hasn't done this themselves.. If they were adaptable to a mass-production vehicle, there are any number of auto companies that would have bought them already. GM, Ford, Toyota, Mazda, Nissan, VW, Fiat, Hyundai, Daewoo, Tata, Mitsubishi, and who knows how many Chinese companies.
And where can I purchase a Ford Hybrid Malibu?
Yes, CNC machines now do a lot of work that used to be done by dedicated machining equipment. But for large portions of the manufacture of a complex assembly, like an A/C compressor, you have a whole series of machines bending, twisting, pushing, pulling, smashing, slicing, fastening, etc. And all of those machines require holding the assembly in a secure fashion. (So, for that matter, do the CNC machines.) Things that grip to tight tolerances usually can't be adjusted just by running a new program.
Yes, you can design those machines to be adaptable, but that also makes those same machines more complicated, expensive, and error-prone. (And those adaptions are usually done by adjusting movable chucks/grippers/etc. or swapping in new jigs, which is a lengthy, tedious, process.