On the other, it's completely unfair to local businesses that do have to pay taxes
Why is it unfair? The local business in Rhode Island is using local government resources -- fire, police, etc. The guy operating out of his garage in Utah selling to people in Rhode Island isn't using Rhode Island's fire, police, etc. And really, don't the local businesses in Rhode Island have the same opportunity to sell to people in Utah as the guy in Utah? So they can take advantage of the tax situation as well.
If states are looking at shortfalls because of inter-state commerce, they should use other revenue sources. If a bunch of people in your state are evading local taxes by buying out of state, guess what, you can make that money up by raising their property taxes and income taxes. If a bunch of businesses in your state are evading local taxes by selling out of state, guess what, you can make that money up by raising their property taxes and income taxes, which they'll have to pass on to their out of state customers by raising prices.
Governor Quinn asked the families of retirees to talk to them over Thanksgiving dinner. My kids told me that I should not agree to give up any part of my retirement benefits. They weren't sure they could afford to support me.
Even if the state's portion of pension funds was completely cancelled, you would still have some retirement benefits. Did you factor that in?
Some of these retirees are making less than $12,000 annually, and may not be able to keep their homes if Quinn's proposals go through.
The way you said that I imagine you get or will get more than $12k/year. So you're saying that if you lived with your kids and paid them $1000/month rent, they still couldn't afford to support you? I find that hard to believe!
The idea that there might be mobs of old people living on the streets is ridiculous. Humans are social creatures and have a strong sense of family. It would be a small number of people who fall through the cracks, and they can probably count on charity, unless they are violent or mentally ill, in which case, yeah, the state should provide some basic quality of life through welfare.
That's a totally different, and much more affordable, solution than pretending that our society can afford to pay for ALL RETIREES to live in comfort and independence. That's the key -- you can be comfortable living in the converted basement apartment of your daughter's house. You can't be independent. Independence is the expensive part and perhaps it's a luxury we can't afford.
Because there isn't a moral issue like slavery that people are willing to fight about. Seriously, if North and South Dakota decided to secede and join Canada, would you say "Fuck this, I'm sending my sons into battle to stop those bastards."
So if they did show they voted for fully funding it, then they deserve what they were promised?
If it wasn't fully funded, the voters should have said "Hey you're not fully funding these pensions, what's going on??" Then elect people who fully fund them.
The responsibility still doesn't transfer to future taxpayers.
All that transfers is a feeling of guilt for screwing people who worked for something they ended up not getting. And that's why very few people say stuff like "Cancel the pensions and screw them, haha!"
But it's entirely reasonable to say "Well, you're not going to get quite what you expected because we can't afford it. It's got to be cut X%."
Retroactively deciding that they don't get it the pension is no better than retroactively taking $25 out of their salary every month, except that since the salary is already in their pocket and the pension isn't it's a heck of a lot easier to take away the pension.
Yeah, there's risk in doing something for the promise of a reward in the future and because of that risk the promise has to be even sweeter. But in the end if the society of the future can't afford it, it can't afford it and that's just all there is to it. Look at Social Security, it's in the same boat. You think I don't know today that in 35 years when I retire there's a huge chance SS won't pay me even as much as I put in, let alone the promised growth of those investments?
But here's one thing I promise you. In 35 years when I hopefully retire, I WILL NOT be bitching and moaning about the politicians 35 years from now and the greedy young people 35 years from now "making it retroactively shittier" by not giving me everything that was promised by someone else, decisions that the young people never even had a chance to vote on. I guess I have too much compassion to force other people to work harder than I did to give me a more comfortable life than they will ever have despite their hard work.
The only time inter-generational debt is morally defensible is when the future generation benefits from the debt as well. I'm not a balanced-budget radical.. if we take a loan to build an interstate system that is useful for 100 years, it's fine for the people 100 years from now to share in that debt (though still a bit unfair since there might be better alternatives in the future, and it's prone to legitimate miscalculations that leave them with a useless project). What isn't fine in any sense is to take a 200 year loan for a project with a 100 year useful lifespan. That's theft. And I believe that's one reason Congress is unable to "bind" future Congresses by passing laws. In 104 years, people will start saying "Hmm.. why are we paying for this crap?"
What you can take away from that, and what you should have learned in your youth by simply watching the news once in a while, is that you can't trust the government with long-term financial promises. That lack of ability to trust the government is built into our system and serves as a warning to those who would seek to profit today on the work of those who aren't even born yet: your plan has a good chance of failing. After putting in the work, you'll end up with a bunch of paper obligations that aren't worth anything.
If we need to screw a few teachers unions to remind everybody of this truth, so be it! We'll be better off in the long run.
Are you assuming we have to stop global warming no matter what the cost? If fighting it ends up being 3.33 times more expensive than we thought why couldn't that tip the balance into a wait-see-mitigate strategy?
I suspect the 30% figure has already been accounted for in the cost of the carbon credits, but I agree with the op that it is disturbing that there could be so much overhead simply for facilitating carbon credits. Seems ripe for corruption and abuse.
The data is unsourced but the analysis of the data is correct. Look at the bar graphs and you see that the top 1% and the bottom 80% have both lost a little bit of ground to the next 19%. The 90s were hard on this upper-middle/lower-upper class, but in 2001 they grew quite a bit and have largely held on to that growth.
I don't know how much of that 19% is Federal employees and those who benefit from government wealth distribution but it seems plausible that they're related.
Finally! I was scrolling down looking for this comment. I can't believe so many commenters think individual students will be graded or curved based on their race and huge threads are based on that flawed premise.
Of course, this change isn't really going to help anybody except the schools -- they don't want to look bad for failing to meet their goals, so now the goals are easier to achieve. It's not going to stop the dumbing down of the curriculum or the elimination of gifted programs and "non-core" programs, because getting the lower performing groups to improve will still require that. This is purely to let schools say "Hey we got an A+ on NCLB! Heh heh! Don't look at the numbers too closely though."
The problem I have is that race is being used as a proxy for what is most likely a set of complex socio-economic factors.
I don't have a source off hand but from what I recall the racial achievement gap exists even after controlling for economic level. Social factors are much harder to quantify so I'm sure that has an effect but it's hard to say what it is or which factors are of interest. Not to mention they're a lot harder to find out than income and assets. We can't send an observer to every child's home to see what kind of role model the mother is, what kind of friends the kid has, or what kind of music the kid listens to and how many minutes he spends listening.
Maybe race is correlated with some important social factors and that's a reason the racial achievement gap persists when income is controlled for (if my memory is correct).
Even if a group doesn't go out of its way to hurt other groups, promoting one group over all others is still anti-other. A "Whites Only Bank" that never hurt blacks directly in any way but whose mission was to give low interest loans to whites only would be correctly described as anti-black, anti-Asian, etc.
Feminism is not a group, it's a philosophy. In theory it's about promoting equality between men and women, and that's not anti-male. A group that implements feminism by helping women at the expense of men or in place of men would be anti-male. For example, a scholarship open to women with no male counterpart is anti-male. A scholarship open to men and women is pro-feminism and simultaneously not anti-male. These days since women are actually more successful and more likely to go to college than men, a scholarship open to men and women couldn't be considered pro-feminism; but decades ago when women had less opportunity it would have been.
Visa provides a shit ton of services that you may not be aware of. I just got Visa to refund me all my unused nights at a terrible hotel that had a "no refund" policy for prebooked stays. Try that after you paid the hotel with cash and agreed to a no refund policy.
Merchants benefit a lot from it too. If I go buy a big screen TV on my card, then decide not to pay the bill, well, the store gets paid. It's the bank and Visa who are left to scramble after me.
I can't say the same of PayPal, which I've heard is liable to freeze people's accounts for sketchy reasons. But whoever started Visa is a saint.
That's a good idea. I think you should tell him you're interested in cleaning up some of the older or miscategorized documents. Ask him what should be done within the current system to accomplish that. I think that's more worthwhile than just learning the system in general.
If you run into problems talk to him again and ask him how hard it would be to do a bulk export, let you clean it up (perhaps via google docs for collaboration), then a bulk import. Maybe the bulk import never happens and you transition to a new system.
If you don't run into problems then you're solved the organization problem and you've learned a bit about the system so that you won't be completely lost if Bob quits later.
Hopefully the card will be smart. You're at a grocery store, Google Wallet selects your Amex card with 6% rebate on groceries. You're at an ATM.. it's in the Allpoint network.. Google Wallet selects your debit card with the lowest fees for that network or the one that has a few fee rebates left for the month. Maybe its e-ink display says "Just around the corner there's a free atm" without you having to open your phone and run your bank's free atm locator app.
That same e-ink display could show scannable barcodes that lets it imitate all of your store loyalty cards.
Like you I have several rewards cards that pay different rates depending on the type of purchase. What I'm hoping for this Google Wallet card is that since it's still tied to your existing cards, it might be able to automatically select which back-end card to use based on the type of purchase. That would be a killer feature, especially for the rotating reward cards that are so common these days.
Do you really pay 2-3% for credit cards? When I looked into a merchant account for a friend who wanted to sell stuff online the rate was around that but the in-person swipe rate was less than 2%.
Btw, I love Phydeaux! It's a very lovely pet store. I used to live really close to the store in Chapel Hill. Now I live in Raleigh and just wish that the Raleigh store's parking lot was bigger and/or more private. Good problem to have I suppose.
I assumed this was the major reason some businesses like cash. For instance I got a decent "cash discount" with a landscaping company to do some one-time work this fall. I know it's not because they wanted to avoid a 2% merchant bank fee for getting a credit card.
Gas stations are one of the few places I wouldn't mind paying extra to use a credit card at the pump. I still remember the days before pump card readers were common.. saving 10 cents per gallon (a whole dollar on a typical fill-up) probably wouldn't be worth the hassle of going inside, standing in line, waiting for the guy in front of you to pick out which cigarettes he wants or the group of teenagers struggling to decide on twizzlers vs snickers.
I've used a credit card for every purchase that I can for several years now. Not only that, I signed up with Mint to explicitly track my purchases. Not only credit cards, but loans and bank accounts too.
If you had asked me a few years ago to "come back in a few years and tell us how good it was for you to surrender your buying habits to google or some other behemoth" -- well, I would be coming back right now to let you know. So here it is.
It's great. My purchases are automatically organized into categories for budgeting purposes. I get targeted ads that give me suggestions for saving money or making more money. For instance, Mint might say something like "Your savings account pays X%, you could make more if you switched to Y Bank." I ignore 90% of these because after switching the first time, it's not worth switching again for a tiny bit more.
Do you have a reason for thinking that the next few years will be worse than the last few years?
Be serious.. paying 30x more for a faster flight and more leg room is not a realistic proposition for people with budgets. For a $1000 round trip ticket, I would definitely pay $1100 to get 10% more total space. No question. I'd pay $1150 to get 10% more space.
It has to be advertised -- travelocity etc have to know that certain seats have more space. It has to be reasonable -- paying 15% more for 10% more space is reasonable, paying 100% or 1000% more is not. It has to make a difference -- I won't pay more for "extra space" in terms of head room or how far your seat leans back or a different configuration for your food tray.
If ticketing sites had comparison info about leg room, I would pay more for more leg room on any long flight. I can't afford to pay 5x more for business or first class though. It has to be somewhere in between -- a little more leg room for a little more money.
One thing in particular makes me think there are fewer labor protections for some non-US airline workers: the difference in age and beauty of the staff. It's quite clear that some airlines are not faced with restrictions about who they fire and why because they maintain a staff of model-like stewardesses. As for the US flights I've been on in my entire life (I'm 30), the staff has tended to be more normal -- older, not very pretty, not very friendly but decent at doing their jobs. Do an image search for something like "delta stewardesses" and you'll see pictures from 40-50 years ago with attractive flight attendants, and then modern pictures where they are largely unattractive. Then do an image search for "korean air stewardesses."
It's less blatant but still true for Western countries. The attractiveness of the staff on Air France seems higher than in US companies.
I'm assuming that if it's easier for companies to hire an attractive young female workforce, that's because they have more leeway with who they hire and fire than US airlines. That translates into lower costs because they aren't paying more for experience and probably have very low health care costs and no retirement issues to worry about. Of course another aspect is that they are passing on some of those costs to the government.. maybe that makes it more socially permissible to be more discriminatory in business, because the older or less attractive workers are taken care of already.
It sounds like your friend wanted a sensationalist headline. "Business Doesn't Create Jobs." Okay, well, "The demand drives the business to create more jobs." So actually businesses do create jobs? I think your friend meant that businesses don't create jobs out of charity. There has to be a profit-generating reason for the job to exist. So?
Growing a business isn’t the same as growing an economy. As Apple grows demand for its products, it grows demand in no small part by taking business away from its competitors.
Same with economies. China's manufacturing growth comes at the expense of less competitive economies who used to be able to charge more money to make up for their uncompetitiveness. But that's only half the story, because...
Apple does well, but Microsoft does less well that it otherwise would. Getting one business to do better is not the same thing at all as growing an overall economy so everyone does better.
Apple does well, and so do the hundreds of companies that work with Apple, not in direct competition but as suppliers and customers of Apple. Even competitors can benefit from a successful company, because that success can create or expand the overall market. Would you rather have 100% market share in a $1 million industry, or 1% market share in a $10 billion industry dominated by another company?
And, for what it's worth, 80 years of data supports the Keynesian economic model - governments should save money (e.g. under Clinton) so that they can spend more money (e.g. under Bush and Obama) when the economy turns down, evening out the economic booms and busts.
Governments "should" save money, but don't. Even under Clinton, for a short time we had a budget surplus but the magnitude of the surplus is much smaller than deficits we have run before and after. There's simply no political will to pay off the debt when times are good. Instead we make projections 10 years out and say "Oh wow we can spend much more money than we thought!" Look at this old article: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=88866&page=1#.UH71_MV2xCc
President Clinton today projected that the United States will have a $1.9 trillion budget surplus over the next decade. He said the increase in the expected surplus means the government will be debt-free by 2010.
Funny huh?
It could have been worse - the same kind of "austerity" thinking took stronger hold in Europe, where it did more damage.
The good thing about austerity is it doesn't depend on projections. If you save money by cutting spending, that money is saved right now, not 10 years from now. Then later when the economy is doing well you can bring back the programs that were cut. In the end, the process is more fair and makes more sense to people. There's not much that upsets people more than when times are tough and then the governments picks certain groups to lavish with spending while everyone else suffers.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other, it's completely unfair to local businesses that do have to pay taxes
Why is it unfair? The local business in Rhode Island is using local government resources -- fire, police, etc. The guy operating out of his garage in Utah selling to people in Rhode Island isn't using Rhode Island's fire, police, etc. And really, don't the local businesses in Rhode Island have the same opportunity to sell to people in Utah as the guy in Utah? So they can take advantage of the tax situation as well.
If states are looking at shortfalls because of inter-state commerce, they should use other revenue sources. If a bunch of people in your state are evading local taxes by buying out of state, guess what, you can make that money up by raising their property taxes and income taxes. If a bunch of businesses in your state are evading local taxes by selling out of state, guess what, you can make that money up by raising their property taxes and income taxes, which they'll have to pass on to their out of state customers by raising prices.
Why isn't that a fair solution?
Governor Quinn asked the families of retirees to talk to them over Thanksgiving dinner. My kids told me that I should not agree to give up any part of my retirement benefits. They weren't sure they could afford to support me.
Even if the state's portion of pension funds was completely cancelled, you would still have some retirement benefits. Did you factor that in?
Some of these retirees are making less than $12,000 annually, and may not be able to keep their homes if Quinn's proposals go through.
The way you said that I imagine you get or will get more than $12k/year. So you're saying that if you lived with your kids and paid them $1000/month rent, they still couldn't afford to support you? I find that hard to believe!
The idea that there might be mobs of old people living on the streets is ridiculous. Humans are social creatures and have a strong sense of family. It would be a small number of people who fall through the cracks, and they can probably count on charity, unless they are violent or mentally ill, in which case, yeah, the state should provide some basic quality of life through welfare.
That's a totally different, and much more affordable, solution than pretending that our society can afford to pay for ALL RETIREES to live in comfort and independence. That's the key -- you can be comfortable living in the converted basement apartment of your daughter's house. You can't be independent. Independence is the expensive part and perhaps it's a luxury we can't afford.
Because there isn't a moral issue like slavery that people are willing to fight about. Seriously, if North and South Dakota decided to secede and join Canada, would you say "Fuck this, I'm sending my sons into battle to stop those bastards."
So if they did show they voted for fully funding it, then they deserve what they were promised?
If it wasn't fully funded, the voters should have said "Hey you're not fully funding these pensions, what's going on??" Then elect people who fully fund them.
The responsibility still doesn't transfer to future taxpayers.
All that transfers is a feeling of guilt for screwing people who worked for something they ended up not getting. And that's why very few people say stuff like "Cancel the pensions and screw them, haha!"
But it's entirely reasonable to say "Well, you're not going to get quite what you expected because we can't afford it. It's got to be cut X%."
Retroactively deciding that they don't get it the pension is no better than retroactively taking $25 out of their salary every month, except that since the salary is already in their pocket and the pension isn't it's a heck of a lot easier to take away the pension.
Yeah, there's risk in doing something for the promise of a reward in the future and because of that risk the promise has to be even sweeter. But in the end if the society of the future can't afford it, it can't afford it and that's just all there is to it. Look at Social Security, it's in the same boat. You think I don't know today that in 35 years when I retire there's a huge chance SS won't pay me even as much as I put in, let alone the promised growth of those investments?
But here's one thing I promise you. In 35 years when I hopefully retire, I WILL NOT be bitching and moaning about the politicians 35 years from now and the greedy young people 35 years from now "making it retroactively shittier" by not giving me everything that was promised by someone else, decisions that the young people never even had a chance to vote on. I guess I have too much compassion to force other people to work harder than I did to give me a more comfortable life than they will ever have despite their hard work.
The only time inter-generational debt is morally defensible is when the future generation benefits from the debt as well. I'm not a balanced-budget radical.. if we take a loan to build an interstate system that is useful for 100 years, it's fine for the people 100 years from now to share in that debt (though still a bit unfair since there might be better alternatives in the future, and it's prone to legitimate miscalculations that leave them with a useless project). What isn't fine in any sense is to take a 200 year loan for a project with a 100 year useful lifespan. That's theft. And I believe that's one reason Congress is unable to "bind" future Congresses by passing laws. In 104 years, people will start saying "Hmm.. why are we paying for this crap?"
What you can take away from that, and what you should have learned in your youth by simply watching the news once in a while, is that you can't trust the government with long-term financial promises. That lack of ability to trust the government is built into our system and serves as a warning to those who would seek to profit today on the work of those who aren't even born yet: your plan has a good chance of failing. After putting in the work, you'll end up with a bunch of paper obligations that aren't worth anything.
If we need to screw a few teachers unions to remind everybody of this truth, so be it! We'll be better off in the long run.
Are you assuming we have to stop global warming no matter what the cost? If fighting it ends up being 3.33 times more expensive than we thought why couldn't that tip the balance into a wait-see-mitigate strategy?
I suspect the 30% figure has already been accounted for in the cost of the carbon credits, but I agree with the op that it is disturbing that there could be so much overhead simply for facilitating carbon credits. Seems ripe for corruption and abuse.
The data is unsourced but the analysis of the data is correct. Look at the bar graphs and you see that the top 1% and the bottom 80% have both lost a little bit of ground to the next 19%. The 90s were hard on this upper-middle/lower-upper class, but in 2001 they grew quite a bit and have largely held on to that growth.
I don't know how much of that 19% is Federal employees and those who benefit from government wealth distribution but it seems plausible that they're related.
Finally! I was scrolling down looking for this comment. I can't believe so many commenters think individual students will be graded or curved based on their race and huge threads are based on that flawed premise.
Of course, this change isn't really going to help anybody except the schools -- they don't want to look bad for failing to meet their goals, so now the goals are easier to achieve. It's not going to stop the dumbing down of the curriculum or the elimination of gifted programs and "non-core" programs, because getting the lower performing groups to improve will still require that. This is purely to let schools say "Hey we got an A+ on NCLB! Heh heh! Don't look at the numbers too closely though."
The problem I have is that race is being used as a proxy for what is most likely a set of complex socio-economic factors.
I don't have a source off hand but from what I recall the racial achievement gap exists even after controlling for economic level. Social factors are much harder to quantify so I'm sure that has an effect but it's hard to say what it is or which factors are of interest. Not to mention they're a lot harder to find out than income and assets. We can't send an observer to every child's home to see what kind of role model the mother is, what kind of friends the kid has, or what kind of music the kid listens to and how many minutes he spends listening.
Maybe race is correlated with some important social factors and that's a reason the racial achievement gap persists when income is controlled for (if my memory is correct).
Even if a group doesn't go out of its way to hurt other groups, promoting one group over all others is still anti-other. A "Whites Only Bank" that never hurt blacks directly in any way but whose mission was to give low interest loans to whites only would be correctly described as anti-black, anti-Asian, etc.
Feminism is not a group, it's a philosophy. In theory it's about promoting equality between men and women, and that's not anti-male. A group that implements feminism by helping women at the expense of men or in place of men would be anti-male. For example, a scholarship open to women with no male counterpart is anti-male. A scholarship open to men and women is pro-feminism and simultaneously not anti-male. These days since women are actually more successful and more likely to go to college than men, a scholarship open to men and women couldn't be considered pro-feminism; but decades ago when women had less opportunity it would have been.
Visa provides a shit ton of services that you may not be aware of. I just got Visa to refund me all my unused nights at a terrible hotel that had a "no refund" policy for prebooked stays. Try that after you paid the hotel with cash and agreed to a no refund policy.
Merchants benefit a lot from it too. If I go buy a big screen TV on my card, then decide not to pay the bill, well, the store gets paid. It's the bank and Visa who are left to scramble after me.
I can't say the same of PayPal, which I've heard is liable to freeze people's accounts for sketchy reasons. But whoever started Visa is a saint.
That's a good idea. I think you should tell him you're interested in cleaning up some of the older or miscategorized documents. Ask him what should be done within the current system to accomplish that. I think that's more worthwhile than just learning the system in general.
If you run into problems talk to him again and ask him how hard it would be to do a bulk export, let you clean it up (perhaps via google docs for collaboration), then a bulk import. Maybe the bulk import never happens and you transition to a new system.
If you don't run into problems then you're solved the organization problem and you've learned a bit about the system so that you won't be completely lost if Bob quits later.
The funny thing is I can't tell if you're an ultra right wing conservative or an ultra left wing commie.
Can you clarify whether your rant applies more to the 1% or the 47%?
Hopefully the card will be smart. You're at a grocery store, Google Wallet selects your Amex card with 6% rebate on groceries. You're at an ATM.. it's in the Allpoint network.. Google Wallet selects your debit card with the lowest fees for that network or the one that has a few fee rebates left for the month. Maybe its e-ink display says "Just around the corner there's a free atm" without you having to open your phone and run your bank's free atm locator app.
That same e-ink display could show scannable barcodes that lets it imitate all of your store loyalty cards.
Holy crap Google I hope you're listening.
Like you I have several rewards cards that pay different rates depending on the type of purchase. What I'm hoping for this Google Wallet card is that since it's still tied to your existing cards, it might be able to automatically select which back-end card to use based on the type of purchase. That would be a killer feature, especially for the rotating reward cards that are so common these days.
Interesting..
Do you really pay 2-3% for credit cards? When I looked into a merchant account for a friend who wanted to sell stuff online the rate was around that but the in-person swipe rate was less than 2%.
Btw, I love Phydeaux! It's a very lovely pet store. I used to live really close to the store in Chapel Hill. Now I live in Raleigh and just wish that the Raleigh store's parking lot was bigger and/or more private. Good problem to have I suppose.
I assumed this was the major reason some businesses like cash. For instance I got a decent "cash discount" with a landscaping company to do some one-time work this fall. I know it's not because they wanted to avoid a 2% merchant bank fee for getting a credit card.
Gas stations are one of the few places I wouldn't mind paying extra to use a credit card at the pump. I still remember the days before pump card readers were common.. saving 10 cents per gallon (a whole dollar on a typical fill-up) probably wouldn't be worth the hassle of going inside, standing in line, waiting for the guy in front of you to pick out which cigarettes he wants or the group of teenagers struggling to decide on twizzlers vs snickers.
I've used a credit card for every purchase that I can for several years now. Not only that, I signed up with Mint to explicitly track my purchases. Not only credit cards, but loans and bank accounts too.
If you had asked me a few years ago to "come back in a few years and tell us how good it was for you to surrender your buying habits to google or some other behemoth" -- well, I would be coming back right now to let you know. So here it is.
It's great. My purchases are automatically organized into categories for budgeting purposes. I get targeted ads that give me suggestions for saving money or making more money. For instance, Mint might say something like "Your savings account pays X%, you could make more if you switched to Y Bank." I ignore 90% of these because after switching the first time, it's not worth switching again for a tiny bit more.
Do you have a reason for thinking that the next few years will be worse than the last few years?
Be serious.. paying 30x more for a faster flight and more leg room is not a realistic proposition for people with budgets. For a $1000 round trip ticket, I would definitely pay $1100 to get 10% more total space. No question. I'd pay $1150 to get 10% more space.
It has to be advertised -- travelocity etc have to know that certain seats have more space.
It has to be reasonable -- paying 15% more for 10% more space is reasonable, paying 100% or 1000% more is not.
It has to make a difference -- I won't pay more for "extra space" in terms of head room or how far your seat leans back or a different configuration for your food tray.
If ticketing sites had comparison info about leg room, I would pay more for more leg room on any long flight. I can't afford to pay 5x more for business or first class though. It has to be somewhere in between -- a little more leg room for a little more money.
One thing in particular makes me think there are fewer labor protections for some non-US airline workers: the difference in age and beauty of the staff. It's quite clear that some airlines are not faced with restrictions about who they fire and why because they maintain a staff of model-like stewardesses. As for the US flights I've been on in my entire life (I'm 30), the staff has tended to be more normal -- older, not very pretty, not very friendly but decent at doing their jobs. Do an image search for something like "delta stewardesses" and you'll see pictures from 40-50 years ago with attractive flight attendants, and then modern pictures where they are largely unattractive. Then do an image search for "korean air stewardesses."
It's less blatant but still true for Western countries. The attractiveness of the staff on Air France seems higher than in US companies.
I'm assuming that if it's easier for companies to hire an attractive young female workforce, that's because they have more leeway with who they hire and fire than US airlines. That translates into lower costs because they aren't paying more for experience and probably have very low health care costs and no retirement issues to worry about. Of course another aspect is that they are passing on some of those costs to the government.. maybe that makes it more socially permissible to be more discriminatory in business, because the older or less attractive workers are taken care of already.
It sounds like your friend wanted a sensationalist headline. "Business Doesn't Create Jobs." Okay, well, "The demand drives the business to create more jobs." So actually businesses do create jobs? I think your friend meant that businesses don't create jobs out of charity. There has to be a profit-generating reason for the job to exist. So?
Growing a business isn’t the same as growing an economy. As Apple grows demand for its products, it grows demand in no small part by taking business away from its competitors.
Same with economies. China's manufacturing growth comes at the expense of less competitive economies who used to be able to charge more money to make up for their uncompetitiveness. But that's only half the story, because...
Apple does well, but Microsoft does less well that it otherwise would. Getting one business to do better is not the same thing at all as growing an overall economy so everyone does better.
Apple does well, and so do the hundreds of companies that work with Apple, not in direct competition but as suppliers and customers of Apple. Even competitors can benefit from a successful company, because that success can create or expand the overall market. Would you rather have 100% market share in a $1 million industry, or 1% market share in a $10 billion industry dominated by another company?
And, for what it's worth, 80 years of data supports the Keynesian economic model - governments should save money (e.g. under Clinton) so that they can spend more money (e.g. under Bush and Obama) when the economy turns down, evening out the economic booms and busts.
Governments "should" save money, but don't. Even under Clinton, for a short time we had a budget surplus but the magnitude of the surplus is much smaller than deficits we have run before and after. There's simply no political will to pay off the debt when times are good. Instead we make projections 10 years out and say "Oh wow we can spend much more money than we thought!" Look at this old article: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=88866&page=1#.UH71_MV2xCc
President Clinton today projected that the United States will have a $1.9 trillion budget surplus over the next decade. He said the increase in the expected surplus means the government will be debt-free by 2010.
Funny huh?
It could have been worse - the same kind of "austerity" thinking took stronger hold in Europe, where it did more damage.
The good thing about austerity is it doesn't depend on projections. If you save money by cutting spending, that money is saved right now, not 10 years from now. Then later when the economy is doing well you can bring back the programs that were cut. In the end, the process is more fair and makes more sense to people. There's not much that upsets people more than when times are tough and then the governments picks certain groups to lavish with spending while everyone else suffers.