I have to agree, making things up is definitely amusing. Notice that I never said Pay-Pal had done any of those things, just listed a bunch of things they might have done.
I'm not sure what I would have done if I got a +1 informative.
The "Free Press" is not actually free to report whatever it feels like. Sorry if that's news to you.
No, Freedom of the press simply means that the government is specifically prohibited from doing *anything* proactive to prevent any publisher on any medium from publishing any works. You're right in that it does not protect a journalist from civil liability. It does however protect journalists from criminal liability, and also renders the federal government (and Joe Lieberman) specifically liable for their part in having Wiki-leaks disconnected. That kind of behavior was exactly what the first amendment was designed to prevent, and for the same reasons. In order for any kind of state secrets to apply, it must be demonstrated that it would harm Americas interests. It can be legitimately claimed that revealing how poorly things are going on the international scene under the current and former administration is in our greater interest because it allows us to more effectively choose our leaders.
Wiki-leaks is NOT THE PRESS! They don't operate within the ethical guidelines or standards of the press. Blanket revelations of mass quantities of classified information is not journalism. It's not free speech. It's an attack on our country.
I call bullshit. They did everything necessary to protect the people who would be wrongly harmed by the release. The DOD has admitted that there is no information released that has resulted in *any* casualties. The only people being harmed by Wikileaks are the corrupt people in charge. Yes this is damning to them, but they had the option to avoid this by not waging a war in the first damn place. It was a bad idea before it started. It started on false pretexts. They have the option to end it any time they like. The politicians running the show are too stupid to see any path forward that isn't status-quo.
Maybe I am wrong, and maybe the current path in Afghanistan is the best way, but keeping it secret is just plain wrong on every level. They are not supposed to be the enemy, and the only reason they are is because we have been treating them like the enemy. If the military activity in Afghanistan is not going as well as they say it is to the American public, then we have a right to know, and *every* journalist has the right and the responsibility to provide that information to the public. This is the very reason for the first amendment. Senator Lieberman's actions are a violation of the first amendment, and as a consequence, he should be impeached. His lack of proper understanding, and respect for our constitution is inappropriate for an elected official, and borderline treason.
the divide is good, fanning the flames to make the government crack down on our liberties even more is good, because it wakes people up.
we are ruled by a very evil bunch of elitists with our lawmakers in their pockets.
Most Americans are aware of the situation, but allow it to continue for a variety of reasons, often having to do with the lottery style hope that someday they will get to be one of the elitists themselves...
As long as the current crop of elitists doesn't exclude too large a chunk of the population all at once, they have nothing to fear from their "constituency".
Revealing the truth is *never* inappropriate behavior, only the underlying actions, that led to the "truth", are. If it would be embarrassing or politically dangerous to do something, then make damn sure its the right thing to do because one way or another you or your reputation will have to answer for it. Next?
As long as politicians believe they can get away with bad behavior, they have no real check against the drive to corruption. It is the fundamental function of journalism to provide the check against corruption. Without freedom of the press,whether you like what they say or not, there is no hope of keeping corruption from becoming pandemic.
Really, what new information could come to light about PayPal to make the seem worse than they already seem?
How about fraudulent accounting practices, Tax evasion, Bribery, Racketeering, etc... There are whole host of illegal activities that Pay-Pal could potentially have been / be involved in..
Company purchased a Persian rug for the front of the office (insured of course) and we received it with two holes straight through the rug that exactly match one of those little loading trucks.
I find it interesting that you claim UPS was the carrier because there are several glaring problems with your Story:
First, UPS did not handle packages above 120Lbs back when drives and drive assemblies were the size and weight you refer to. Crated materials were explicitly excluded until recently. That means that your drive assembly was handled by another carrier, most likely a freight forwarding company, but not UPS (UPS bought Overnight about 5 years ago, and that was their first real foray into freight).
Second, In all of the UPS facilities that I have ever been in, UPS does not use Fork trucks for moving any packages. They only use those for equipment maintenance, if they even have one at that particular facility. Freight forwarding companies use them extensively for moving pallet loads around. A Persian rug big enough for an office setting would also exceed UPS size restrictions, so again, it looks like your claim is either against another carrier, or in the case of the rug, possibly the shipper.
That's a little over the top. There are people in high places who are doing what they think necessary to accomplish their mission. They may be wrong. Their actions may not be lawful. But I don't see the entirety of the US government sitting around thinking of how much they hate freedom and democracy and conspiring ways to end it. If you want to correct a problem it helps to have a reasoned view of what motivates the participants.
The greatest danger to democracy and freedom is not the machinations of evil masterminds, but the meddling of well meaning idiots.
Hillary made "I don't recall" a house hold phrase.
Actually, Ronald Reagan Made the phrase in popular in American politics. I'm curious if you were pushing any particular political agenda yourself with your selective memory, or if you're simply too young to remember Reagan's famous hearings...
I think a lot of it is shipping. When you order online, a single item gets stuffed into a box and shipped hundreds of miles, passing through many vehicles and hands. Very inefficient, especially given the packaging talents of some companies that put a SD memory card into a cubic-foot-sized box.
By contrast, items in stores are shipped surface using more optimal routes (less time pressure) and in bulk packaging. It's a lot cheaper in gas and everything to ship 1000 items at a time from a warehouse in a truck that's full of stuff going from that warehouse to that store and then have 1000 people come a few miles to a store and pick them up than it is to ship 1000 items from a warehouse to 1000 people's houses.
You're way off base. The cost of shipping goods through the supply chain is more or less the same whether they ultimately get delivered to the end user, or to a retail store. The article is way off base, because the assumption is that each package must travel the hundreds of miles by itself. That simply is not true. For most (90%) of the trip, the package is routed in 54' trailers that are loaded to capacity, which is actually more efficient than pallet load and trailer load shipping, on average. The remaining portions of the trip are done with many other packages, where the trip can be shared among many stops so that the final cost of home delivery is comparable to the cost of driving to a store to get the package. The reason that shipping costs as much as it does is because of the cost of the labor to do all the driving, whereas if you are going to the store yourself, the cost of the labor to do the drive is assumed to be zero. If it weren't more efficient to ship to home than ship to store and retrieve, then the cost of shipping would be much higher than it is.
If you want to let them know you despise them don't handle them a blank piece of paper, it is the political equivalent of givinig them a blank cheque...
I believe you have missed the point, The GP hinted that voting vs not voting is irrelevant, because *all* of the candidates are the enemy. None of them will make the right decisions because the rights decisions are political suicide, and the stuff that matters gets done behind closed doors.
Voting for a third party is never wasted, not even in a two-party system.
Voting for any party in a political system is a waste of time. In the middle ages, they had religion to keep the masses in line, and believing they were doing right by obeying their masters. Today we have "democracy". The difference in individual situation is purely theoretical. In practical terms, we all still work for the man, while those in power use the fiction of "the will of the people" to keep the masses in line. just look at how much power the concept of patriotism carries, and you can see that the whole mess is just another way of keeping the citizenry from taking measures to separate themselves from governance.
Same in-group running the show. Different back story. End of story.
The problem for him is there is a sizable chunk of the US population that would be more than happy to see him get sent to jail or to Gitmo for this. You highly overestimate how much positive sentiment is on his side over this ordeal.
Actually, I think he is overestimating the critical thinking faculties of the average American...
That is patently absurd. Soldiers do *not* want any war at all. In the average soldiers eyes, any armed conflict should involve only one armed party: Theirs. All other conflicts should be avoided if possible. Everything the military asks for money for is to make every future military encounter as entirely one-sided as possible.
Did someone order waaaaaamburgers and french cries?
And you really think the colleagues using the software were footing the bill? Bullshit. It's about time developers stood up and demanded compensation for their inventions instead of letting idiot stock traders reap the rewards by pushing a few buttons.
The stock traders make what they do because they know what buttons to push and when. If they push the wrong button at the wrong time, they stand to lose millions for their clients and themselves. These programs have no idea as to when to buy, sell or hold. All they do is retrieve data and analyze it into reports. It's up to the trader to know what to do with it.
If being an "idiot stock trader" who makes millions is so easy, why aren't you doing it? You can push a few buttons, right?
That simply isn't true, The traders in high frequency trading have no control at all. *All* control is given to the programs. The idea is that the trades need to happen in fractions of a second from detection to buy to sell, or the differential in prices detected will disappear before the trade is complete. High frequency trading was *impossible* without very fast computerized trading, and high power processing to enable the detection of these opportunities, and act on them before they disappear. The only part the traders actually do is insert money, and take the risk. The thing is that with these programs in place, the risks are very low, and the profits are very high. That kind of a situation is bad for someone. I have the sneaking suspicion that this could be described a s money pump. It is specifically designed (and capable of) pumping money out of the economy. It begs the question: Who gets hurt, and how long will it take before it collapses?
The USPS has been self-sufficient since 1972 and have a much higher customer satisfaction rating than either UPS or FedEx. Apparently most Americans don't agree with your criticisms of the USPS
Apparently, you're making crap up because after a short search on Google, I found: this result . See the bottom of the page. for the relevant information.
A bunch of investors... like everyone's pension funds? Suuuure. Dow 5000, that's just what Joe Sixpack needs. =b
That is exactly the problem. Rather than pay the cost of fully funding the pension, pension contributions are made with the assumption that the contribution will be made now and *invested* so that even though only 5% is actually paid now, in 30 years it will be worth the full amount through the magic of mutual funds, etc. The problem is that no provision is ever made for what happens in an economic meltdown... The company basically raids its own pension fund to report higher immediate earnings, with the sincere, but misguided, belief that they will repay the "borrowed" funds later. Part of that plan makes the unstated (and patently absurd) assumption that the company will grow at 5% per year indefinitely. The fix here is simple. Pass a law requiring all pensions obligations to 100% funded as soon as the commitment is made. That will pretty much stop companies from making hollow pension promises / raiding their own pension funds, and if the company fails in the mean time, at least its pension will still have funds to pay out the pensioners as promised.
You're an idiot. The American car industry's problems aren't with its labor costs, it's with their product -- a product that apparently fewer and fewer customers want. And the products are the result of design, which is dictated by what the marketing types think the customers want. And these marketing type seemed to think that the customers were always going to want huge SUVs, and the top-level executives at these companies couldn't figure out that designs needed to be updated more often as the whims of the consumer changed.
A companies pension contributions are union negotiated amounts. They are the result of the collective bargaining agreement between the company and the union. Most companies gave away large concessions as far as pension contributions, because they were a quick easy thing that the company didn't have to pay for right away. It would be a problem, but not until the next guy in charge had to deal with it. In most cases, both the union and the company work from the assumption that the company will grow at x% per year indefinitely. There isn't even any kind of language in the contracts about what happens when the company fails to achieve growth. The actual result is that either the company is managing the pension, and they end up holding the bag, or the union is managing the pension, and is left holding the bag. Either way, without that x% growth every year, the pension goes bankrupt and takes the union / company with it. That's what killed GM.
Any way you slice it, pension cost *is* a labor cost. Either way, if the company doesn't maintain that x% growth, the pension isn't getting paid, no matter who's in charge of managing it.
That I should go check Renta-A-Coder to see if there is any well paying work available!
$6/hr is a great wage if you have a 3rd-world cost-of-living. Wage earners in the USA are getting fucked career by career. I sense the return of unions, or something like them, on the horizon. When the downsides[1] of dog-eat-dog exceed the upsides[2] for average people, you will see change.
[1] Career turmoil and stress
[2] $4 lawn-chairs
Every company that harbors a union and has non-union competition either ends up successfully unionizing the competition, or in bankruptcy. The result is invariable, because labor costs are ultimately, the one cost that is unique to a given company. All other costs can be duplicated / reduced to the lowest common denominator. So if your labor costs more than your competition, then the competition slowly drives you out of business. Unions are good for protecting workers from their own greedy bosses. There is nothing in a free market economy that can protect workers from cheaper competitors*.
On a side note, if the US government wants to fix the unemployment problem, there is a quick way to decrease unemployment: Increase overtime to 2x normal pay for any hours over 8/40, and make all employees including professional / salaried employees eligible for overtime, and protect them under labor laws. This will eliminate the incentive for companies to load up salaried employees with 60+ hour work weeks, and they will have to start massive hiring to back fill the work that needs to be done. Profits will plummet, the stock market will drop, and wages will fall, but employment will return to 95+%, but what is more important? A bunch of investors getting their 8% ROI, or Joe Sixpack actually being able to get his job back at 70% of his former pay now that the company, that layed him off and assigned his 40 hours of work / week to his overworked / salaried co-worker, is forced to hire him back rather than pay double time to get the same work done.
*Except possibly governments when they care enough to try. We have all seen how effective government is at that sort of thing...
The company clearly had no idea what the job was worth, and your ability to step in and take over made them think it was worth much less than it really was. After you left, they found out how much it was worth when the hired someone. That person either cost what you were asking, or did a horrible job.
Perhaps, but I would venture to state that in this economy, they probably got someone at the same basic skill level and pay level, and will never go back to the two person setup again. People don't understand truly yet, but the workload vs pay-rate balance has shifted, and it will *not* go back. the 40 Hours/week job from yesteryear payed what today's 60+ hour job pays, and yesterdays 60+ hour job now pay 3/4 what it used to. 10% of the American working class is unemployed, and despite everything you may have heard, and a trillion dollar bailout, this is unlikely to ever go back to the 2-3% we used to have. With all of those qualified people out there, and Obama putting hundreds of thousands more through higher education, the workforce surplus will continue into the foreseeable future. This has happened before: in the mid 90's, Japans economy weakened in a miniature collapse. Their unemployment rate doubled and more, and has never recovered in the 15 years since. France has been running almost double digit unemployment for 20 years. This collapse is not the direct result of the housing bubble as we were told. It is a fundamental shift in the world economy that has been happening over the last 50 years and has finally caught up with the USA. The housing bubble was just the trigger event that allowed companies to justify wholesale job elimination. Even when revenues come back, those jobs aren't. Long story short, that 60k per year job you had is now worth 40k on the open market. Those lucky enough to still have those high paying jobs, will find that once they leave them the high paying jobs will either suddenly become low paying jobs or will liquidate entirely. Even worse is the responsibility creep, we have been discussing all through this thread.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to agree, making things up is definitely amusing. Notice that I never said Pay-Pal had done any of those things, just listed a bunch of things they might have done.
I'm not sure what I would have done if I got a +1 informative.
I have to say I busted up laughing at blasphemy.
-=Geoskd
The "Free Press" is not actually free to report whatever it feels like. Sorry if that's news to you.
No, Freedom of the press simply means that the government is specifically prohibited from doing *anything* proactive to prevent any publisher on any medium from publishing any works. You're right in that it does not protect a journalist from civil liability. It does however protect journalists from criminal liability, and also renders the federal government (and Joe Lieberman) specifically liable for their part in having Wiki-leaks disconnected. That kind of behavior was exactly what the first amendment was designed to prevent, and for the same reasons. In order for any kind of state secrets to apply, it must be demonstrated that it would harm Americas interests. It can be legitimately claimed that revealing how poorly things are going on the international scene under the current and former administration is in our greater interest because it allows us to more effectively choose our leaders.
-=Geoskd
Wiki-leaks is NOT THE PRESS! They don't operate within the ethical guidelines or standards of the press. Blanket revelations of mass quantities of classified information is not journalism. It's not free speech. It's an attack on our country.
I call bullshit. They did everything necessary to protect the people who would be wrongly harmed by the release. The DOD has admitted that there is no information released that has resulted in *any* casualties. The only people being harmed by Wikileaks are the corrupt people in charge. Yes this is damning to them, but they had the option to avoid this by not waging a war in the first damn place. It was a bad idea before it started. It started on false pretexts. They have the option to end it any time they like. The politicians running the show are too stupid to see any path forward that isn't status-quo.
Maybe I am wrong, and maybe the current path in Afghanistan is the best way, but keeping it secret is just plain wrong on every level. They are not supposed to be the enemy, and the only reason they are is because we have been treating them like the enemy. If the military activity in Afghanistan is not going as well as they say it is to the American public, then we have a right to know, and *every* journalist has the right and the responsibility to provide that information to the public. This is the very reason for the first amendment. Senator Lieberman's actions are a violation of the first amendment, and as a consequence, he should be impeached. His lack of proper understanding, and respect for our constitution is inappropriate for an elected official, and borderline treason.
-=Geoskd
the divide is good, fanning the flames to make the government crack down on our liberties even more is good, because it wakes people up.
we are ruled by a very evil bunch of elitists with our lawmakers in their pockets.
Most Americans are aware of the situation, but allow it to continue for a variety of reasons, often having to do with the lottery style hope that someday they will get to be one of the elitists themselves...
As long as the current crop of elitists doesn't exclude too large a chunk of the population all at once, they have nothing to fear from their "constituency".
-=Geoskd
Revealing the truth is *never* inappropriate behavior, only the underlying actions, that led to the "truth", are. If it would be embarrassing or politically dangerous to do something, then make damn sure its the right thing to do because one way or another you or your reputation will have to answer for it. Next?
As long as politicians believe they can get away with bad behavior, they have no real check against the drive to corruption. It is the fundamental function of journalism to provide the check against corruption. Without freedom of the press,whether you like what they say or not, there is no hope of keeping corruption from becoming pandemic.
-=Geoskd
Really, what new information could come to light about PayPal to make the seem worse than they already seem?
How about fraudulent accounting practices, Tax evasion, Bribery, Racketeering, etc... There are whole host of illegal activities that Pay-Pal could potentially have been / be involved in..
-=Geoskd.
Company purchased a Persian rug for the front of the office (insured of course) and we received it with two holes straight through the rug that exactly match one of those little loading trucks.
I find it interesting that you claim UPS was the carrier because there are several glaring problems with your Story:
First, UPS did not handle packages above 120Lbs back when drives and drive assemblies were the size and weight you refer to. Crated materials were explicitly excluded until recently. That means that your drive assembly was handled by another carrier, most likely a freight forwarding company, but not UPS (UPS bought Overnight about 5 years ago, and that was their first real foray into freight).
Second, In all of the UPS facilities that I have ever been in, UPS does not use Fork trucks for moving any packages. They only use those for equipment maintenance, if they even have one at that particular facility. Freight forwarding companies use them extensively for moving pallet loads around. A Persian rug big enough for an office setting would also exceed UPS size restrictions, so again, it looks like your claim is either against another carrier, or in the case of the rug, possibly the shipper.
And to the 82% of people who think this is good,
Just a note, The 82% who think its good, are probably the same 82% of us who don't fly.
I have to admit we are definitely laughing our asses off...
-=Geoskd
I also think understanding what causes someone to become a terrorist will be helpful.
You mean like constant sexual harassment and sexual assault in public places...
-=Geoskd
At the risk of getting an off-topic; I don't understand that moderation either, unless it was meant in the same spirit as your original post...
-=Geoskd
That's a little over the top. There are people in high places who are doing what they think necessary to accomplish their mission. They may be wrong. Their actions may not be lawful. But I don't see the entirety of the US government sitting around thinking of how much they hate freedom and democracy and conspiring ways to end it. If you want to correct a problem it helps to have a reasoned view of what motivates the participants.
The greatest danger to democracy and freedom is not the machinations of evil masterminds, but the meddling of well meaning idiots.
-=Geoskd
Hillary made "I don't recall" a house hold phrase.
Actually, Ronald Reagan Made the phrase in popular in American politics. I'm curious if you were pushing any particular political agenda yourself with your selective memory, or if you're simply too young to remember Reagan's famous hearings...
-=Geoskd
I think a lot of it is shipping. When you order online, a single item gets stuffed into a box and shipped hundreds of miles, passing through many vehicles and hands. Very inefficient, especially given the packaging talents of some companies that put a SD memory card into a cubic-foot-sized box.
By contrast, items in stores are shipped surface using more optimal routes (less time pressure) and in bulk packaging. It's a lot cheaper in gas and everything to ship 1000 items at a time from a warehouse in a truck that's full of stuff going from that warehouse to that store and then have 1000 people come a few miles to a store and pick them up than it is to ship 1000 items from a warehouse to 1000 people's houses.
You're way off base. The cost of shipping goods through the supply chain is more or less the same whether they ultimately get delivered to the end user, or to a retail store. The article is way off base, because the assumption is that each package must travel the hundreds of miles by itself. That simply is not true. For most (90%) of the trip, the package is routed in 54' trailers that are loaded to capacity, which is actually more efficient than pallet load and trailer load shipping, on average. The remaining portions of the trip are done with many other packages, where the trip can be shared among many stops so that the final cost of home delivery is comparable to the cost of driving to a store to get the package. The reason that shipping costs as much as it does is because of the cost of the labor to do all the driving, whereas if you are going to the store yourself, the cost of the labor to do the drive is assumed to be zero. If it weren't more efficient to ship to home than ship to store and retrieve, then the cost of shipping would be much higher than it is.
-=Geoskd
Why let the fact that it is fake stop it being promoted as the truth on Slashdot? ;)
Because it doesn't have a liberal or Apple bias anywhere in it.
-=Geoskd
Not voting benefit the people in power.
If you want to let them know you despise them don't handle them a blank piece of paper, it is the political equivalent of givinig them a blank cheque...
I believe you have missed the point, The GP hinted that voting vs not voting is irrelevant, because *all* of the candidates are the enemy. None of them will make the right decisions because the rights decisions are political suicide, and the stuff that matters gets done behind closed doors.
-=Geoskd
Voting for a third party is never wasted, not even in a two-party system.
Voting for any party in a political system is a waste of time. In the middle ages, they had religion to keep the masses in line, and believing they were doing right by obeying their masters. Today we have "democracy". The difference in individual situation is purely theoretical. In practical terms, we all still work for the man, while those in power use the fiction of "the will of the people" to keep the masses in line. just look at how much power the concept of patriotism carries, and you can see that the whole mess is just another way of keeping the citizenry from taking measures to separate themselves from governance.
Same in-group running the show. Different back story. End of story.
-=Geoskd
The problem for him is there is a sizable chunk of the US population that would be more than happy to see him get sent to jail or to Gitmo for this. You highly overestimate how much positive sentiment is on his side over this ordeal.
Actually, I think he is overestimating the critical thinking faculties of the average American...
-=Geoskd
Soldiers always want more war
That is patently absurd. Soldiers do *not* want any war at all. In the average soldiers eyes, any armed conflict should involve only one armed party: Theirs. All other conflicts should be avoided if possible. Everything the military asks for money for is to make every future military encounter as entirely one-sided as possible.
-=Geoskd
And you really think the colleagues using the software were footing the bill? Bullshit. It's about time developers stood up and demanded compensation for their inventions instead of letting idiot stock traders reap the rewards by pushing a few buttons.
The stock traders make what they do because they know what buttons to push and when. If they push the wrong button at the wrong time, they stand to lose millions for their clients and themselves. These programs have no idea as to when to buy, sell or hold. All they do is retrieve data and analyze it into reports. It's up to the trader to know what to do with it.
If being an "idiot stock trader" who makes millions is so easy, why aren't you doing it? You can push a few buttons, right?
That simply isn't true, The traders in high frequency trading have no control at all. *All* control is given to the programs. The idea is that the trades need to happen in fractions of a second from detection to buy to sell, or the differential in prices detected will disappear before the trade is complete. High frequency trading was *impossible* without very fast computerized trading, and high power processing to enable the detection of these opportunities, and act on them before they disappear. The only part the traders actually do is insert money, and take the risk. The thing is that with these programs in place, the risks are very low, and the profits are very high. That kind of a situation is bad for someone. I have the sneaking suspicion that this could be described a s money pump. It is specifically designed (and capable of) pumping money out of the economy. It begs the question: Who gets hurt, and how long will it take before it collapses?
-=Eric Schumann
The USPS has been self-sufficient since 1972 and have a much higher customer satisfaction rating than either UPS or FedEx. Apparently most Americans don't agree with your criticisms of the USPS
Apparently, you're making crap up because after a short search on Google, I found: this result . See the bottom of the page. for the relevant information.
Or maybe this link would be better.
Maybe you should check your facts after you've invented them.
-=Geoskd
A bunch of investors getting their 8% ROI
A bunch of investors... like everyone's pension funds? Suuuure. Dow 5000, that's just what Joe Sixpack needs. =b
That is exactly the problem. Rather than pay the cost of fully funding the pension, pension contributions are made with the assumption that the contribution will be made now and *invested* so that even though only 5% is actually paid now, in 30 years it will be worth the full amount through the magic of mutual funds, etc. The problem is that no provision is ever made for what happens in an economic meltdown... The company basically raids its own pension fund to report higher immediate earnings, with the sincere, but misguided, belief that they will repay the "borrowed" funds later. Part of that plan makes the unstated (and patently absurd) assumption that the company will grow at 5% per year indefinitely. The fix here is simple. Pass a law requiring all pensions obligations to 100% funded as soon as the commitment is made. That will pretty much stop companies from making hollow pension promises / raiding their own pension funds, and if the company fails in the mean time, at least its pension will still have funds to pay out the pensioners as promised.
-=Geoskd
You're an idiot. The American car industry's problems aren't with its labor costs, it's with their product -- a product that apparently fewer and fewer customers want. And the products are the result of design, which is dictated by what the marketing types think the customers want. And these marketing type seemed to think that the customers were always going to want huge SUVs, and the top-level executives at these companies couldn't figure out that designs needed to be updated more often as the whims of the consumer changed.
A companies pension contributions are union negotiated amounts. They are the result of the collective bargaining agreement between the company and the union. Most companies gave away large concessions as far as pension contributions, because they were a quick easy thing that the company didn't have to pay for right away. It would be a problem, but not until the next guy in charge had to deal with it. In most cases, both the union and the company work from the assumption that the company will grow at x% per year indefinitely. There isn't even any kind of language in the contracts about what happens when the company fails to achieve growth. The actual result is that either the company is managing the pension, and they end up holding the bag, or the union is managing the pension, and is left holding the bag. Either way, without that x% growth every year, the pension goes bankrupt and takes the union / company with it. That's what killed GM.
Any way you slice it, pension cost *is* a labor cost. Either way, if the company doesn't maintain that x% growth, the pension isn't getting paid, no matter who's in charge of managing it.
-=Geoskd
$6/hr is a great wage if you have a 3rd-world cost-of-living. Wage earners in the USA are getting fucked career by career. I sense the return of unions, or something like them, on the horizon. When the downsides[1] of dog-eat-dog exceed the upsides[2] for average people, you will see change.
[1] Career turmoil and stress
[2] $4 lawn-chairs
Every company that harbors a union and has non-union competition either ends up successfully unionizing the competition, or in bankruptcy. The result is invariable, because labor costs are ultimately, the one cost that is unique to a given company. All other costs can be duplicated / reduced to the lowest common denominator. So if your labor costs more than your competition, then the competition slowly drives you out of business. Unions are good for protecting workers from their own greedy bosses. There is nothing in a free market economy that can protect workers from cheaper competitors*.
On a side note, if the US government wants to fix the unemployment problem, there is a quick way to decrease unemployment: Increase overtime to 2x normal pay for any hours over 8/40, and make all employees including professional / salaried employees eligible for overtime, and protect them under labor laws. This will eliminate the incentive for companies to load up salaried employees with 60+ hour work weeks, and they will have to start massive hiring to back fill the work that needs to be done. Profits will plummet, the stock market will drop, and wages will fall, but employment will return to 95+%, but what is more important? A bunch of investors getting their 8% ROI, or Joe Sixpack actually being able to get his job back at 70% of his former pay now that the company, that layed him off and assigned his 40 hours of work / week to his overworked / salaried co-worker, is forced to hire him back rather than pay double time to get the same work done.
*Except possibly governments when they care enough to try. We have all seen how effective government is at that sort of thing...
You've obviously never met a business major..
Or he is a business major.
-=Geoskd
The company clearly had no idea what the job was worth, and your ability to step in and take over made them think it was worth much less than it really was. After you left, they found out how much it was worth when the hired someone. That person either cost what you were asking, or did a horrible job.
Perhaps, but I would venture to state that in this economy, they probably got someone at the same basic skill level and pay level, and will never go back to the two person setup again. People don't understand truly yet, but the workload vs pay-rate balance has shifted, and it will *not* go back. the 40 Hours/week job from yesteryear payed what today's 60+ hour job pays, and yesterdays 60+ hour job now pay 3/4 what it used to. 10% of the American working class is unemployed, and despite everything you may have heard, and a trillion dollar bailout, this is unlikely to ever go back to the 2-3% we used to have. With all of those qualified people out there, and Obama putting hundreds of thousands more through higher education, the workforce surplus will continue into the foreseeable future. This has happened before: in the mid 90's, Japans economy weakened in a miniature collapse. Their unemployment rate doubled and more, and has never recovered in the 15 years since. France has been running almost double digit unemployment for 20 years. This collapse is not the direct result of the housing bubble as we were told. It is a fundamental shift in the world economy that has been happening over the last 50 years and has finally caught up with the USA. The housing bubble was just the trigger event that allowed companies to justify wholesale job elimination. Even when revenues come back, those jobs aren't. Long story short, that 60k per year job you had is now worth 40k on the open market. Those lucky enough to still have those high paying jobs, will find that once they leave them the high paying jobs will either suddenly become low paying jobs or will liquidate entirely. Even worse is the responsibility creep, we have been discussing all through this thread.
-=Geoskd