I agree that GM should have been allowed to fail, as should AIG and the various wall street firms that were bailed out. The first Chrysler bail-out in the 80's was a mistake that should never have been allowed, it set a very bad trend for our nation.
My point, though, is that besides what we have paid to keep our own auto makers going, and the approximate $7000/year drain on every family that owns a car across the country, there is a tremendous expenditure for roads, and the social cost of air pollution in declined health overall - a really serious problem for children in urban areas now (which might end up costing us many times as much as the roads). This all ends up losing us much more money than a railroad would or could.
Yes, but none of those things are about how your car makes a profit. They are about how your car reduces your cost and increases convenience when there isn't good mass transit to a destination. Your car does not make a profit.
The notion that the popularity of the car is due to some evil machinations of the car companies falls flat on its face when you look at Europe, where cars are also enormously popular and public transit systems are also in trouble.
If you haven't noticed, even in the United States automobile makers have for the most part required tremendous subsidies just to continue operating. For a time, the United States Government owned GM, and it is unlikely that the government will recoup all that it spent to bail the company out.
Don't be sad. It's apples and oranges. Those 10 miles might have lasted an entire year before they were replaced, weren't run at high speed, and if you look at the locomotives of the day, they have lots of "helper" wheels to keep them from derailing on crappy track. The land was free for the taking, unlike now, and there was no environmental study and the workers were essentially serfs.
Just paying for the land that's being taken to widen the right of way would be Millions, today.
onsidering tools as a liability is the reason so many managers make such poor decisions when trying to save money.
It would be a very bad manager that only considered a tool to be a liability. I pursued an MBA for a while some years ago. The first course I got was accounting. Very early in that course we had to work out cost-benefit analyses. I doubt you could get out of a legitimate management school without understanding that. Today, the result of such an analysis would be to buy a nail-gun rather than a hammer, because the reduction in labor cost is greater than the tool cost. The profit is for delivering some finished work of construction, and these days the most profitable means of doing that is often not to use a hammer at all.
Right. But the fact that you write off miles means that the car is a cost of doing business. Your customer cares that you can get to the location, and leaves the method up to you.
I have a car too. I charge my customers USD $0.739/mile, per
AAA's Your Driving Costs 2011 Edition, when mass transit isn't a good option. I use AAA's numbers with the IRS rather than IRS's standard 51 cents per mile.
I have to be very mobile too, although that usually means flying.
The flu? Really? Maybe if you have no family, spend your whole life in a cubicle, and don't ever go shopping. It would probably help your life if you got vaccinated and joined society:-)
Are you sure that you aren't actually enslaved to your car because you have no transportation choice? How much time do you spend operating it? Do you have that much quality time with your family?
The point being that if you did not have to pay the cost of your car, you would make (on average) $7000 more per year. My "analogy" was not strange or bad. It's just that you need to work on your understanding of microeconomics.
Really? Very often we do pay for such things with our taxes, like roads for automobiles, or stadiums for sports teams. It's just that someone else collects the profit.
Shouldn't they be? If the users are unable or unwilling to completely cover the costs without external help, isn't that a sign that maybe it wasn't a wise use of money in the first place?
There are places you can live where that reasoning really applies. But not nice places. The U.S. will get there eventually if people keep thinking that way.
People profit from your taking a train as from your driving your car. For example, locomotive manufacturers like GE and Caterpillar (which owns Electro-Motive), car manufacturers like Siemens and Bombardier are paid as you pay for your automobile, and in turn pay employees and suppliers. The trains use energy, either in the form of diesel fuel or electricity, which of course is paid for as you pay for gasoline. And the railroads have a staff, who are paid as well.
All of these folks make money, even though your car doesn't make a profit and is heavily subsidized, as are many railroads.
If you were to spend time in a place where there were good railroads, you would experience another sort of freedom. The freedom to go much faster, and to not be tied to the wheel, and to not be a slave to traffic jams, and to not have to worry about parking and taking care of your automobile, and to not be forced to return to the same place where you left your automobile before you can travel anyplace else.
You only think a car means freedom because you have been deprived of a good transportation system.
I use my car to get to my place of employment. Along with the purchase price there is the cost of gas and license fees, and tolls.
The salary I get from my job is more than the all these costs.
Therefore my car makes a profit.
Your automobile is an expense that you bear as part of the cost of having employment. If you were able to eliminate the cost of your car while remaining able to work and without suffering some other inconvenience, you would make more money, not less. Therefore, your car does the opposite of making a profit. The part that makes a profit for you is the services which you offer your employer.
Once people work this out, they can start to make sense about the value of transportation. Until you work this out, you will be manipulated by people who use your lack of understanding of economics against you. You'll vote the way they want, even when it is to your disadvantage.
Do you sell your services as a carpenter, or do you rent the customer your hammer and come along as the operator of the hammer? The hammer is an expense which a carpenter must bear as a cost of doing business.
Why does it have to make a profit? Other transportation modalities, like your personal automobile, are not required to operate at a profit. The police don't make a profit for the community. Some things are infrastructure, and are costs rather than profits.
If you and people like you supported having good public transportation in your community, and the auto companies allowed you to have good public transportation, you would not be taking 2.5 hours each way.
Where I live, a train is often the fastest and most reliable option.
That's an expense. If you were a company, your car would be a cost-center, not a profit center. As would be what you pay for parking, work clothes, education, child-care while you are working, etc. The IRS will allow you to write off some of these expenses. Your labor for the company would be a profit center.
The U.S. transcontinental railroads were built terribly poorly. That's how they were able to lay 10 miles of rail in one day. The assumption was that once there was an operating railroad, that it would be very much less expensive to lay good track. It worked, we still have an intercontinental railroad through the same route that was originally laid.
It might be true that large portions of the China route are similarly without good roads.
I think the theory is that they will assert their own rights and push for democracy and western-style social norms if they become bourgeoisie. But if this ends up not working in the middle-east, and those folks put Islamic dictatorships in place, that's going to kill the theory IMO. But I think already there is no going back for the West. Poor us.
Children frequently engage in constructive play, or Lego would not be so popular. My 10 year old's favorite toy, right now, is an architectural CAD system that was intended for adult use. He found this himself and demanded that I buy it! He throws off houses and landscapes, complete with 3D rendering, on a daily basis.
If you decompose play you can break it down into various motivators: social, competitive, entertainment, and constructive, and no doubt others. Nurturing that constructive urge is one of the most important things we can do in childhood education.
We're not really educating from Washington. Shamefully, the "No Child Left Behind" act which is responsible for replacement of two weeks of education each year with testing which isn't returned to the student in time to do them any good, and for giving the most powerful push to schools to teach to the test, is the product of my former congressman out here in the San Francisco East Bay.
Which brings up an important point. There is not some faceless enemy called "Washington" that does bad stuff to you from a distance. That is your own representative whom you elected.
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I agree that GM should have been allowed to fail, as should AIG and the various wall street firms that were bailed out. The first Chrysler bail-out in the 80's was a mistake that should never have been allowed, it set a very bad trend for our nation.
My point, though, is that besides what we have paid to keep our own auto makers going, and the approximate $7000/year drain on every family that owns a car across the country, there is a tremendous expenditure for roads, and the social cost of air pollution in declined health overall - a really serious problem for children in urban areas now (which might end up costing us many times as much as the roads). This all ends up losing us much more money than a railroad would or could.
Yes, but none of those things are about how your car makes a profit. They are about how your car reduces your cost and increases convenience when there isn't good mass transit to a destination. Your car does not make a profit.
If you haven't noticed, even in the United States automobile makers have for the most part required tremendous subsidies just to continue operating. For a time, the United States Government owned GM, and it is unlikely that the government will recoup all that it spent to bail the company out.
You just don't understand how money works. I hope you don't vote. Others will manipulate you in your ignorance.
Just paying for the land that's being taken to widen the right of way would be Millions, today.
It would be a very bad manager that only considered a tool to be a liability. I pursued an MBA for a while some years ago. The first course I got was accounting. Very early in that course we had to work out cost-benefit analyses. I doubt you could get out of a legitimate management school without understanding that. Today, the result of such an analysis would be to buy a nail-gun rather than a hammer, because the reduction in labor cost is greater than the tool cost. The profit is for delivering some finished work of construction, and these days the most profitable means of doing that is often not to use a hammer at all.
Right. But the fact that you write off miles means that the car is a cost of doing business. Your customer cares that you can get to the location, and leaves the method up to you.
I have a car too. I charge my customers USD $0.739/mile, per AAA's Your Driving Costs 2011 Edition, when mass transit isn't a good option. I use AAA's numbers with the IRS rather than IRS's standard 51 cents per mile.
I have to be very mobile too, although that usually means flying.
The flu? Really? Maybe if you have no family, spend your whole life in a cubicle, and don't ever go shopping. It would probably help your life if you got vaccinated and joined society :-)
Are you sure that you aren't actually enslaved to your car because you have no transportation choice? How much time do you spend operating it? Do you have that much quality time with your family?
The point being that if you did not have to pay the cost of your car, you would make (on average) $7000 more per year. My "analogy" was not strange or bad. It's just that you need to work on your understanding of microeconomics.
Really? Very often we do pay for such things with our taxes, like roads for automobiles, or stadiums for sports teams. It's just that someone else collects the profit.
There are places you can live where that reasoning really applies. But not nice places. The U.S. will get there eventually if people keep thinking that way.
People profit from your taking a train as from your driving your car. For example, locomotive manufacturers like GE and Caterpillar (which owns Electro-Motive), car manufacturers like Siemens and Bombardier are paid as you pay for your automobile, and in turn pay employees and suppliers. The trains use energy, either in the form of diesel fuel or electricity, which of course is paid for as you pay for gasoline. And the railroads have a staff, who are paid as well.
All of these folks make money, even though your car doesn't make a profit and is heavily subsidized, as are many railroads.
If you were to spend time in a place where there were good railroads, you would experience another sort of freedom. The freedom to go much faster, and to not be tied to the wheel, and to not be a slave to traffic jams, and to not have to worry about parking and taking care of your automobile, and to not be forced to return to the same place where you left your automobile before you can travel anyplace else.
You only think a car means freedom because you have been deprived of a good transportation system.
Your automobile is an expense that you bear as part of the cost of having employment. If you were able to eliminate the cost of your car while remaining able to work and without suffering some other inconvenience, you would make more money, not less. Therefore, your car does the opposite of making a profit. The part that makes a profit for you is the services which you offer your employer.
Once people work this out, they can start to make sense about the value of transportation. Until you work this out, you will be manipulated by people who use your lack of understanding of economics against you. You'll vote the way they want, even when it is to your disadvantage.
Do you sell your services as a carpenter, or do you rent the customer your hammer and come along as the operator of the hammer? The hammer is an expense which a carpenter must bear as a cost of doing business.
Why does it have to make a profit? Other transportation modalities, like your personal automobile, are not required to operate at a profit. The police don't make a profit for the community. Some things are infrastructure, and are costs rather than profits.
You weren't alive 10 years ago, were you :-)
If you and people like you supported having good public transportation in your community, and the auto companies allowed you to have good public transportation, you would not be taking 2.5 hours each way.
Where I live, a train is often the fastest and most reliable option.
That's an expense. If you were a company, your car would be a cost-center, not a profit center. As would be what you pay for parking, work clothes, education, child-care while you are working, etc. The IRS will allow you to write off some of these expenses. Your labor for the company would be a profit center.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scandal
The U.S. transcontinental railroads were built terribly poorly. That's how they were able to lay 10 miles of rail in one day. The assumption was that once there was an operating railroad, that it would be very much less expensive to lay good track. It worked, we still have an intercontinental railroad through the same route that was originally laid.
It might be true that large portions of the China route are similarly without good roads.
Railroad car and locomotive makers make money too. Indeed, they make a larger margin than automobile manufacturers.
Tell me, again, how does your car make money for you, its owner?
I think the theory is that they will assert their own rights and push for democracy and western-style social norms if they become bourgeoisie. But if this ends up not working in the middle-east, and those folks put Islamic dictatorships in place, that's going to kill the theory IMO. But I think already there is no going back for the West. Poor us.
Show me how your car makes a profit.
Children frequently engage in constructive play, or Lego would not be so popular. My 10 year old's favorite toy, right now, is an architectural CAD system that was intended for adult use. He found this himself and demanded that I buy it! He throws off houses and landscapes, complete with 3D rendering, on a daily basis.
If you decompose play you can break it down into various motivators: social, competitive, entertainment, and constructive, and no doubt others. Nurturing that constructive urge is one of the most important things we can do in childhood education.
We're not really educating from Washington. Shamefully, the "No Child Left Behind" act which is responsible for replacement of two weeks of education each year with testing which isn't returned to the student in time to do them any good, and for giving the most powerful push to schools to teach to the test, is the product of my former congressman out here in the San Francisco East Bay.
Which brings up an important point. There is not some faceless enemy called "Washington" that does bad stuff to you from a distance. That is your own representative whom you elected.