Why don't they just dehydrate the water? A heavily-distilled source mixed with a powdered mineral profile, aerated, and sterilized would achieve the same result.
Maybe if I get elected and save up my Congressional salary, I can start a new bottled water venture. I'll have water profiles to match all kinds of water from around the world--Evian, Sheffield water (the basis of Bass Pale Ale), the wells of various famous European monestaries, you name it--and I'll synthetically produce matching water by mixing distilled or RO water with the correct minerals.
I could even work out a filter-and-feed product tuned to each city, built from an on-demand mixing station. Get water profiles from Baltimore or Seattle, produce a filter to clean it up (or bench it against a 3M AP905), then produce a cartridge profile which a mundane mixing machine can spit out on-demand but call it "3D Printing". You hook this contraption inline and it converts the whole-house-filtered water at your kitchen tap to Sheffield or Evian water.
Campaign contributions from corporations are illegal; however, you're quite right they can buy influence. They can pay full-time lobbyists to represent themselves. They can legally own PACs which, so long as they don't coordinate with any campaign committee, can do whatever they want--and the corporation can put as much money as it wants into a PAC it owns.
Using the right terms there, chief.
I'd love to see political lobbyists outlawed, period. There's no reason someone should get paid just to try to win a politician's favor on an issue when that's the job of the voting public to decide.
It'd be a hard thing to ban without causing a lot of downstream damage. Beyond that, individual citizens aren't very good at getting their ideas organized, and so communication doesn't exactly happen.
I wonder if there's a way to fix that. I'm starting to realize that the broad masses can tell me what hurts, but can't tell me how to fix it--they just don't know how. They try: they propose solutions which are really, really terrible ideas; but they don't say anything useful about good policy. The best I've got so far is to try to organize the pain points and get any expertise I can get my hands on to explain why exactly these things are happening, then search for a solution.
The UBI crowd is a good example of that. I responded to Charles Murray's interview recently, where he suggested we cut every welfare benefit, every tax deduction, Medicaid, every mobility program (e.g. education grants, things to help the poor fight their way out of poverty successfully), the lot, and just give people $10,000/year. It's all stuff like that. Georgists are on the fringe of even the UBI crowd, although I still cringe whenever someone starts going on about a land value tax.
The clear pain points are that our welfare system doesn't do what it's supposed to do; Social Security is going insolvent in 2034; people are going homeless and hungry; technical progress creates transitional unemployment (somebody loses their jobs) which, given the above, doesn't drop you onto a very strong safety net; taxes are too damned high (government spending out of control) and yet none of this works; and we have poor inner cities with broken economies, failing school systems, and resulting crime and opium problems.
Okay, so I fixed it. After four years, I've given up getting any elected official's attention; I'm just running for my district's seat myself, because damn.
So when it's my turn, how in the hell do I not miss the one guy who mows lawns for a living but has the solution to poverty? The pain points--what's broken in our system--are easy to sort out of the volume of noise; but anyone who has a real solution is a very weak signal.
My brain's already working out a potential approach. That might go nowhere, but I can already see it trying. The end result is always lobbying--a filter that sorts out the signal from the noise--but the question is... who controls the input to that filter?
Oddly enough, if 10% of the Democratic voters in my district gave me $5, I'd have $275,000. I can win this election in $50k; whether I actually will is another matter, but it's in the realm of firm possibility.
Of course not even 10% of people who want to volunteer their time are throwing me $5, so I'm reading the FEC's public records on who in my area has made political contributions (large and small) and canvassing their streets knocking on every door asking for donations. For those folks I've profiled, I've got individual plans on what to talk about and even on precisely how much to ask--if you ask for just the right amount of money, people take you seriously, and are highly-likely to give it to you.
So yeah. I need rich doctors and CEOs to give me large donations because the half a million voters here won't pitch a few dollars into my pot (not that I actually want to spend my time handling the accounting--I am so glad my financial disclosure filings are quarterly and not annually).
On the other hand, I have the sheer audacity to walk into a particular CEO's office and tell him I want him following my campaign if I start looking like I'm going to win, and to prepare his business for the policy changes, because what I have in mind needs exactly what his business supplies. Folks think rich folks donate for the privilege of having a Congressman's ear when they want something done; I'm ready to tell them I'm hitting them up for money so I can have their ear and prepare them for what I need them to do for the American people.
You've got more power than you think. The question is: do you know how to use it?
I'm not sure if Nestle makes billions, either. At this point it's not worth looking (I'm not about to sit down and tackle this problem right now), especially since Nestle's practices are known-harmful and how much they make off them is irrelevant.
Still, on the subject of how much a company makes: the gross profits are often the subject of discussion when we want to attack a business for price gouging, or for any other reason. A Wendy's franchise, for example, charges twice as much for a hamburger as the cost of the burger flipper, the burger maker, the gas, the grease, and the burger itself; yet the franchise makes an 8% average yearly profit.
Net profits include a lot of organization and things like rent and power, while gross profits skip all that and just focus on what specifically went into the assembly of a product. You also get things like the cost-of-risk, which ends you with e.g. Eli Lily making some 40% profits one year and -21% profits another year, with a five-year average of around 12% (not small, but not egregious). It's a great narrative in the prescription drug debate to call out Lily for making 40% profits [one year], or to point out that those pills cost 11 cents to manufacture; it just happens to be lies told entirely by careful arrangement of true facts.
So does Nestle have billions in revenues, or enormous revenues and billions in profits?
(The problem with seeking the truth--or maybe the best part, depending on your perspective--is you'll routinely say things that make someone on every point on the political spectrum squirm around a lot. Sometimes they throw things at you because they don't like having those thoughts.)
You glued together two different-context statements. The "at the expense of many" comment refers to the "expense" of bail bondsmen loosing their jobs, if you want to put those things together that way.
Holding up dying industries just means we invest labor into keeping something around that is going away because nobody's buying it anymore. You know,
like cassette tapes, or coal.
They try to find where the gaps exist and exploit them without thinking of what that does to everyone involved.
At the Black Caucus Town Hall meeting last night, one of our delegates talked about criminal justice reform. They were proud of having passed new laws that assigned bail based on things like flight risk and the danger a person posed to a community, reducing the amount of mass-incarceration.
They were also quite proud of having worked out the legal language such that they'd prevented a complete collapse of the bail bondsman industry. In other words: they made sure to put black people under enough financial duress to keep the bondsmen (enormous cash holders) in business using poor black peoples's money.
So, to recap: even though we think you're not a danger and not a flight risk, we're still going to make sure to transfer some of your money to that rich guy's pocket so he can continue getting rich off poor people and be happier.
They also quoted statistics that some 70% of these people weren't convicted of anything and got released, which is why it's so imperative we don't bond them on ludicrously-high bail and keep them locked up for 2 months awaiting trial. We have laws to automatically expunge their records because of this.
By the by, the reason everything you buy is available and affordable is we've spent a lot of time reducing the number of jobs involved in making anything. The first part of price--the major, immutable part--is wages, and in a more-fundamental sense, labor. We can't create time; we have to do more with the same human labor time, or w can't physically possess more, much less afford to buy it. In the end, we're trading time. So "at the expense of the many"? That "expense" is that the many have a greater standard-of-living--it's the difference between the US and a poor third-world country like Chile.
Glycerin and Propylene Glycol (my mistake), and yes. Glycerin is basically carbohydrate and won't damage your lungs any more than water (there's water vapor in the air; if you fill your lungs with water, you'll damage them). PG is toxic if you chug large amounts of it, I think? It's pretty tame.
Remember people can pop 2mg of Amphetamine and be awake; they can take 2g of Amphetamine and be dead. They can take 2mcg Amphetamine and have no biological response. Similarly, Tylenol metabolizes via three different enzymes, one of which produces an extremely toxic compound--which doesn't do anything harmful until you exceed your liver's capacity to clear it out, at which point you suddenly experience liver failure.
Automation requires more highly skilled engineers and technicians to design, build, implement and maintain.
The entire point of technology--of automation--is to reduce the total cost of each unit made. That's only sustainable when that cost is reflected in labor time (it is in the long run; in the short run, it's wage-labor cost).
So yes, you have to pay a $150,000 engineer instead of a $20,000 fry cook; and you pay 20,000 hours of $150,000 engineer time instead of 2,000,000 hours of fry cook time ($3 mil instead of $40 mil). In other words: 10 jobs to replace 1,000 jobs.
A US automation engineer and product engineer are VASTLY more skilled at cutting cost than a bunch of unskilled workers in China, especially when it comes to automated manufacture.
Your source for this? Because part of working with Chinese manufactures is the Chinese sitting down with US engineers--mechanical engineers, electronics engineers, etc.--and telling them how to alter their designs to achieve the same thing but be much more manufacturable. These changes both reduce the amount of labor (cost) in making each product unit and reduce the number of defects from mismanufacture.
In other words: part of the service provided by Chinese manufacturing firms to American engineering firms is that the Chinese will improve the American engineers's designs so they can be manufactured at lower cost and with greater success. You're claiming directly the opposite of what actually happens when American and European product engineers work with Chinese manufactories.
It takes time for companies to shift manufacturing lines to different locations due to logistics, inertia and sunk cost, it usually doesn't happen until a new line is opened
The comparison will, thus, be between the economy at the time the factory is open versus the economy as it would be if you hadn't on-shored. You're essentially trying to argue that we'll experience economic growth and spend (waste) it on local manufacturing instead of spending it on making Americans wealthier and actually growing our economy.
we are seeing it start to happen already as companies start to onshore manufacturing coupled with automation
Some, but not all, of those companies are doing so because of the political atmosphere and the fear of possible sudden costs by administrative actions (e.g. tariffs).
Some, but not all, of those companies are doing so because "Made in the USA" has a high marketing value now, and they can charge higher prices at higher margins: even with the cost being higher, they can jack it up even further and extract money, reducing the number of jobs by concentrating wealth even further.
Some, but not all, of those companies are doing so because local and state governments are paying them (Foxconn!), and many economists are predicting the states are going to lose out severely in the end. There's actually an argument for doing it, though: even if it's bad for America, you're damaging your neighboring states's employment markets to expand your own; and the short-term gain in local jobs is good politics even if it has shitty costs in local retained tax revenue and wealth.
Some of them are just small, and can't take advantage of economies of scale.
You're, again, stating a bunch of flat-wrong ideals, making conjectures with no factual basis, and looking myopically at what's in front of you. By "Myopically at what's in front of you", I mean a guy gets a job at MakeJeansCorp and you say, "Oh! A job was created! More jobs!" while not noticing that the condition of creating that job is a reduction in American buying power such that three guys at SellFluffyWidgets a half a state a way lost their jobs. If it's not directly, tightly bolted together, such that you can yank one and watch the other move, you simply act as if it's not there.
We're ingesting chemicals in ways that aren't exactly natural.
Actually, you're either ingesting a non-toxic natural glycerin vapor or an even-less-toxic synthetic polyethylglycol, plus a natural toxic alkaloid. It wouldn't be much more toxic if you ate it; for that matter, if the plant is wet, don't touch it.
Nicotine will fuck you up. Also, try ingesting a ton of ephedra--you'll get chest pains and die, thanks to a toxic alkaloid called Ephedrine, which is methamphetamine with an extra oxygen atom at the beta bind site (it's got a hydroxide there instead of a hydrogen). I guess that would be n-methyl-alpha-methyl-beta-hydroxy-phenyl-ethyl-amine.
It's an e-cig attack study. E-cigarettes cause increases in fatalities and negative health consequences (compared to not smoking). That's what they want you to think about: e-cigarettes hurt you.
You should switch from smoking to e-cigarette death pumps that will increase your rate of heart disease.
You are assuming that we do things the same way in the US that they do in China where labor is cheap. If US companies lose China as a source of cheap labor, they will hire a big team of engineers to design and build the robotics/automation necessary to make their goods economically in the US.
You assume China isn't doing things as cheaply as possible. China is highly-interested in and heavily-invested in the forefront of manufacture technology, and wants to automate their factories as soon as the technology is cheaper than labor.
If you don't automate your factories because your labor is $3/hr and the automation is equivalent to $7/hr, then moving the factories to an $8.25/hr-plus-benefits (about $11.50/hr) labor country and automating means you're running at the equivalent of $7/hr labor. That's more-expensive.
Quality goes up
Hah, no. We're not skilled at cutting corners efficiently here, and the brands are racing to the bottom on price. The Chinese can make to any quality level you want; our American importers ask for cheap and they get cheap. For the Americans to squeeze out those last few dimes, they have to cut entire limbs instead of just corners, because we're not skilled at this--not like China, anyway. So either prices go way the hell up or quality goes down.
robotics have better yields, lower amortized production costs than Chinese labor even now, don't make mistakes, get sick, need to sleep, commit suicide, etc.
No, because whenever that's true, China starts implementing the new technology to cut back on labor. That's what's actually happening. It's what global economists are talking about. It hits the news now and then, but nobody except economy nerds cares, so it quickly goes away.
The net result is cheaper, higher quality products, more high paying engineering jobs, more middle class technician/maintenance jobs, a net positive for the consumer and for the US job market.
If that were true, we'd already be manufacturing these things in the United States, selling them cheaper, and undercutting the idiot Chinese importers who were bringing in highly-expensive products. The first company to push Made in America and Cheaper than China would practically corner the market and become a multi-billion-dollar megacorporation like Disney.
Your tone isn't one of facts and strong economic arguments; it's one of conjecture and magical thinking. You've got an imaginative view of how the world works, and it's cute, but it's wrong!!!!.
It's not just that. You only have to ship 400 widgets, and you can carry 100 on a truck. 4 trucks instead of 5. You can retail-scan 100 widgets an hour. 4 cashiers instead of 5.
Trucks can carry about 2,000 pairs of pants, and Wal-Mart claims 980 retail scans per hour out of a good cashier. Then you have shelf stockers (unload the trucks, stock shelves) and the like. With fewer things vended, you can aggregate fewer stores, meaning you don't even need the people running them (loss prevention, merchandising, managers, the like), and don't need the infrastructure (power, water) to run them, which aggregates just a hair less coal or oil and thus fewer jobs there.
Tiny, tiny losses in one place or another. It's a salami slicing attack, but nobody gets the slices when we're done.
The guy says the "logic doesn't parse" because he's thinking in trickle-down terms: if we beef up the supply side, it'll trickle down productivity. I'm thinking in demand-side terms: jobs are created by consumer buying power. So he figures, hey, we'll just open a factory making 2,000,000 pants here instead of in China, and that's jobs making 2,000,000 pants--except, as you pointed out, it isn't.
Trade secrets aside, manufacturing relocation and trade deficits don't work the way most people think.
There's this thing but I think the numbers are slightly-off. 18% is a lowball figure for payroll costs (usually taxes and benefits are more like 40%-60% of payroll; wages make up the rest).
The tl;dr is that cutting off Chinese manufacture and producing (in this example) trousers in the United States would create few net jobs if wages were very low in the factories; loses more jobs as wages go up (quickly causes a net-loss of American jobs); and, in any case, permanently makes Americans poorer.
That's because Americans will have to buy the locally-manufactured good at a price representing more of their working-hours. It's the same proportional difference at any income level for the consumer; higher-income consumers are looking at a smaller absolute increase in hours worked to purchase thing. Because this exchanges for labor-hours at the factory and the number of factory workers at maximum would represent some 0.1% of the employed labor force (178k / 158,000k), most consumers get poorer, which is why you so-quickly go from a small net-gain of jobs to a net-loss.
Further, the labor force expands in abundance and stagnates or contracts in scarcity. You can see the response in the civilian labor force on the BLS, although that's a result of many factors and not a strong argument. During the height of the recession, there was news of people retiring earlier and of college students going to grad school to avoid entering a bad employment market; during recovery, more college students dropped out early to get jobs, and more people worked later into retirement (bigger Social Security pension). The rate of immigrant labor also changes.
That means that a gain or loss of jobs is a temporary thing, and quickly buffed out; while a gain or loss of poverty is just... there. It's a matter of how much things cost, which has nothing to do with the unemployed population.
The United States's biggest threat from China is that China will stop exporting to us, thus forcing us to make stuff here, destroying our buying power and decimating the retail and shipping industries by making the average American far too poor to afford all the things we used to buy (meaning jobs go away).
China's biggest threat from the US is that we'll learn to build great big automated factories with very few humans before they can offer us lower prices using the same technology paired with greater manufacture expertise and lower wages. In such a situation, China's economy would lose the capacity to sell its labor, and would collapse under the pressure of extreme poverty. In theory, Chinese wages will rise with technology, e.g. the tech makes stuff for half as much and they pay workers just under twice as much and so the price still goes down. Even if so, losing a big chunk of their export market will collapse their economy.
Both sides benefit from trade. Exports are great for the economy; so are imports. It's not a balance, where one hurts us and the other helps us.
"Middle-class" is essentially the median--there's not a semantic difference between "middle-class" and "average".
Seattle's median is actually $80,000. For software development jobs, it's over $97k. In parts of the Bay Area, $105k is "low income".
The Social Security Wage Base is worked off a median income of around $50k. In 2015, incomes above $103,057 held a total 51.1% of the income share; Social Security took 12.4% of the income below $118,500. In 1970, that upper quintile held only 43.3% of the income share.
The bigger issue is she says people should play nice. That's the long and short of it: those trolls are bad and someone should inform them they're bothering us and should stop.
What you're saying doesn't even make sense. "Directly funding a film" means funding the organization of people handling all the logistics of getting the actors, directors, editors, and story writers together to make the film--you know, exactly what Hollywood industry is--so they can have a film made. It means buying the film before the film even exists.
I assume it's not your problem because you'd be just as happy if TV shows, movies, and books didn't exist.
It's not just property tax. Amazon gets money from all over the world, pays wages, and those people have taxable income. They spend it locally, bringing your economy up with that spending. It's cash flow.
I make a similar argument for my universal Social Security: because it pays more to below-average-income households than it takes, below-average-income cities see a net cash flow. In Baltimore, MD, that would have been $2 billion in 2016. That's untaxable (it counts as income for means-tested welfare, but not for tax purposes, says my proposed policy), yet it gets spent and creates income to local businesses, wages, and so forth. Part of that flows out of the city up the corporate chain or to the suppliers; part of it stays in the city as wages. More comes twice a month, building it up continuously.
It's the end of poor inner cities.
An interesting effect, especially considering the after-tax income at every household income level and on corporate profits is higher under this system. I even slightly-lowered the payroll tax and the Federal deficit in the process.
Yes but people are frequently ludicrous and entitled.
Generally WordPress consultants and people working with WordPress charge way less than people with equivalent jobs with other focus areas. This has historical reasons and is quite frankly a huge problem. It also brings the market value down and makes it unfair. When you look at WordPress projects vs. non-WordPress projects side by side you'll notice that WordPress projects generally get quoted in the low to mid $10,000 while other similar projects on other platforms get quoted $30,000 and above. This is not because WordPress is cheaper but because the community as a whole bids itself down. Rather than asking what do people charge, ask yourself what your time is worth. Do a competitive analysis based on your skills and expertise and charge for your time. This also requires that you charge for the actual time you spend working, not the time you think you should have spent. Bill by the hour and bill what you're worth. Not the easiest answer, but that's the hard truth.
This guy is saying that non-Wordpress projects get $CASHBANK and that Wordpress projects get $SHITMONEY and that it's a huge problem and you should just charge a lot because you're entitled to it.
Mind you, I'm pushing strong for universal Social Security, which in the 2016 model would have paid every American adult $8,751/year or $729.25/month in semi-monthly payments. That's a poverty-reduction system. The economy doesn't give everyone a fair shot; it provides jobs where there is purchasing demand, and drops people to unemployment when progress is made. We owe people a safety net and a basis of support--and, as of somewhere around 2013, we can support that without high tax burdens.
That's a bit different than walking in, looking around, and declaring that you should be paid more because you think you deserve it. You'll get paid more when few people can do your job and someone really wants to keep you. Some ludicrous shit happens (like high salaries in the west of the continent and people living the same standard-of-living on half as much money in the east), but that's not my business to come in and bust up. It's also not my business to try to legislate something about people not trying for salaries way above the market rate--you'll learn fast enough on your own.
So yeah, there's some sentiment on the supply side (developers) that their wages should be $HIGHER, and some sentiment on the demand side (employers) that the wages should be $LOWER. You're seeing the spread. Low-bid companies can't attract or retain the best talent; high-bid job seekers have few job opportunities.
Yeah, the regional salary behavior in America is annoying. It does odd things, too.
In developing a universal Social Security, I used a model of a single tax on all income (business, personal). Our current Social Security system has a cap (now at $127,500) and takes 12.4%.
So you go to the western third of the country, to New York, to other regions, and you find a lot of areas where a $140k salary is basic, lower-middle-class income. So now a chunk of the middle-class has a high income, above the SSWB, right? Now what?
Social Security isn't capturing from 85% of the income; it's capturing from 45%.
There's where your insolvency came from.
The high-income earners are also taking a bit more of the income than everyone else--it's like we grow by 1%, they grow by 1.1%--which also contributes. On the other hand, the big CEOs are getting some half a penny or two pennies per hour per employee in their organization--so if we took all their income, we could all go out and buy a latte from Starbucks once a month (or at least, the top five executives of Ford Motor Company could do that for their employees if they pooled all their cash income).
That argument has been pissing off people in the UBI and the Single-Payer crowd (I favor a public option) because they envision a world where we tax the super-rich (over $0.5M or so) more and use it to pay $15,000/year or so to everyone else. They don't like being told that the rich actually don't have any money in a national sense.
You misunderstand: Hollywood pays up-front for actors, film writers, directors, and so forth. An organization of marketers and managers works out how to get a film built, hires the engineers to do it, and does it, outlaying millions of dollars.
Then: sufficient bandwidth to copy a blu-ray costs about 0.4 cents.
How does the industry get the money from consumers to pay all the actors if there is no IP law, and thus any yank can torrent a Blu-Ray, burn it to a disk, print a pretty label, and have a $1 special that he sells to folks on Amazon (because copyright infringement is not a thing) for $5? Don't say "special features", because nobody cares, and we can copy those, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't they just dehydrate the water? A heavily-distilled source mixed with a powdered mineral profile, aerated, and sterilized would achieve the same result.
Maybe if I get elected and save up my Congressional salary, I can start a new bottled water venture. I'll have water profiles to match all kinds of water from around the world--Evian, Sheffield water (the basis of Bass Pale Ale), the wells of various famous European monestaries, you name it--and I'll synthetically produce matching water by mixing distilled or RO water with the correct minerals.
I could even work out a filter-and-feed product tuned to each city, built from an on-demand mixing station. Get water profiles from Baltimore or Seattle, produce a filter to clean it up (or bench it against a 3M AP905), then produce a cartridge profile which a mundane mixing machine can spit out on-demand but call it "3D Printing". You hook this contraption inline and it converts the whole-house-filtered water at your kitchen tap to Sheffield or Evian water.
Campaign contributions from corporations are illegal; however, you're quite right they can buy influence. They can pay full-time lobbyists to represent themselves. They can legally own PACs which, so long as they don't coordinate with any campaign committee, can do whatever they want--and the corporation can put as much money as it wants into a PAC it owns.
Using the right terms there, chief.
I'd love to see political lobbyists outlawed, period. There's no reason someone should get paid just to try to win a politician's favor on an issue when that's the job of the voting public to decide.
It'd be a hard thing to ban without causing a lot of downstream damage. Beyond that, individual citizens aren't very good at getting their ideas organized, and so communication doesn't exactly happen.
I wonder if there's a way to fix that. I'm starting to realize that the broad masses can tell me what hurts, but can't tell me how to fix it--they just don't know how. They try: they propose solutions which are really, really terrible ideas; but they don't say anything useful about good policy. The best I've got so far is to try to organize the pain points and get any expertise I can get my hands on to explain why exactly these things are happening, then search for a solution.
The UBI crowd is a good example of that. I responded to Charles Murray's interview recently, where he suggested we cut every welfare benefit, every tax deduction, Medicaid, every mobility program (e.g. education grants, things to help the poor fight their way out of poverty successfully), the lot, and just give people $10,000/year. It's all stuff like that. Georgists are on the fringe of even the UBI crowd, although I still cringe whenever someone starts going on about a land value tax.
The clear pain points are that our welfare system doesn't do what it's supposed to do; Social Security is going insolvent in 2034; people are going homeless and hungry; technical progress creates transitional unemployment (somebody loses their jobs) which, given the above, doesn't drop you onto a very strong safety net; taxes are too damned high (government spending out of control) and yet none of this works; and we have poor inner cities with broken economies, failing school systems, and resulting crime and opium problems.
Okay, so I fixed it. After four years, I've given up getting any elected official's attention; I'm just running for my district's seat myself, because damn.
So when it's my turn, how in the hell do I not miss the one guy who mows lawns for a living but has the solution to poverty? The pain points--what's broken in our system--are easy to sort out of the volume of noise; but anyone who has a real solution is a very weak signal.
My brain's already working out a potential approach. That might go nowhere, but I can already see it trying. The end result is always lobbying--a filter that sorts out the signal from the noise--but the question is... who controls the input to that filter?
Hmm....
Oddly enough, if 10% of the Democratic voters in my district gave me $5, I'd have $275,000. I can win this election in $50k; whether I actually will is another matter, but it's in the realm of firm possibility.
Of course not even 10% of people who want to volunteer their time are throwing me $5, so I'm reading the FEC's public records on who in my area has made political contributions (large and small) and canvassing their streets knocking on every door asking for donations. For those folks I've profiled, I've got individual plans on what to talk about and even on precisely how much to ask--if you ask for just the right amount of money, people take you seriously, and are highly-likely to give it to you.
So yeah. I need rich doctors and CEOs to give me large donations because the half a million voters here won't pitch a few dollars into my pot (not that I actually want to spend my time handling the accounting--I am so glad my financial disclosure filings are quarterly and not annually).
On the other hand, I have the sheer audacity to walk into a particular CEO's office and tell him I want him following my campaign if I start looking like I'm going to win, and to prepare his business for the policy changes, because what I have in mind needs exactly what his business supplies. Folks think rich folks donate for the privilege of having a Congressman's ear when they want something done; I'm ready to tell them I'm hitting them up for money so I can have their ear and prepare them for what I need them to do for the American people.
You've got more power than you think. The question is: do you know how to use it?
I'm not sure if Nestle makes billions, either. At this point it's not worth looking (I'm not about to sit down and tackle this problem right now), especially since Nestle's practices are known-harmful and how much they make off them is irrelevant.
Still, on the subject of how much a company makes: the gross profits are often the subject of discussion when we want to attack a business for price gouging, or for any other reason. A Wendy's franchise, for example, charges twice as much for a hamburger as the cost of the burger flipper, the burger maker, the gas, the grease, and the burger itself; yet the franchise makes an 8% average yearly profit.
Net profits include a lot of organization and things like rent and power, while gross profits skip all that and just focus on what specifically went into the assembly of a product. You also get things like the cost-of-risk, which ends you with e.g. Eli Lily making some 40% profits one year and -21% profits another year, with a five-year average of around 12% (not small, but not egregious). It's a great narrative in the prescription drug debate to call out Lily for making 40% profits [one year], or to point out that those pills cost 11 cents to manufacture; it just happens to be lies told entirely by careful arrangement of true facts.
So does Nestle have billions in revenues, or enormous revenues and billions in profits?
(The problem with seeking the truth--or maybe the best part, depending on your perspective--is you'll routinely say things that make someone on every point on the political spectrum squirm around a lot. Sometimes they throw things at you because they don't like having those thoughts.)
You glued together two different-context statements. The "at the expense of many" comment refers to the "expense" of bail bondsmen loosing their jobs, if you want to put those things together that way.
Holding up dying industries just means we invest labor into keeping something around that is going away because nobody's buying it anymore. You know, like cassette tapes, or coal.
So they could sue people who don't have any money for using patents in their products.
They try to find where the gaps exist and exploit them without thinking of what that does to everyone involved.
At the Black Caucus Town Hall meeting last night, one of our delegates talked about criminal justice reform. They were proud of having passed new laws that assigned bail based on things like flight risk and the danger a person posed to a community, reducing the amount of mass-incarceration.
They were also quite proud of having worked out the legal language such that they'd prevented a complete collapse of the bail bondsman industry. In other words: they made sure to put black people under enough financial duress to keep the bondsmen (enormous cash holders) in business using poor black peoples's money.
So, to recap: even though we think you're not a danger and not a flight risk, we're still going to make sure to transfer some of your money to that rich guy's pocket so he can continue getting rich off poor people and be happier.
They also quoted statistics that some 70% of these people weren't convicted of anything and got released, which is why it's so imperative we don't bond them on ludicrously-high bail and keep them locked up for 2 months awaiting trial. We have laws to automatically expunge their records because of this.
By the by, the reason everything you buy is available and affordable is we've spent a lot of time reducing the number of jobs involved in making anything. The first part of price--the major, immutable part--is wages, and in a more-fundamental sense, labor. We can't create time; we have to do more with the same human labor time, or w can't physically possess more, much less afford to buy it. In the end, we're trading time. So "at the expense of the many"? That "expense" is that the many have a greater standard-of-living--it's the difference between the US and a poor third-world country like Chile.
Glycerin and Propylene Glycol (my mistake), and yes. Glycerin is basically carbohydrate and won't damage your lungs any more than water (there's water vapor in the air; if you fill your lungs with water, you'll damage them). PG is toxic if you chug large amounts of it, I think? It's pretty tame.
Remember people can pop 2mg of Amphetamine and be awake; they can take 2g of Amphetamine and be dead. They can take 2mcg Amphetamine and have no biological response. Similarly, Tylenol metabolizes via three different enzymes, one of which produces an extremely toxic compound--which doesn't do anything harmful until you exceed your liver's capacity to clear it out, at which point you suddenly experience liver failure.
You don't take much PG in from vaporizers.
Automation requires more highly skilled engineers and technicians to design, build, implement and maintain.
The entire point of technology--of automation--is to reduce the total cost of each unit made. That's only sustainable when that cost is reflected in labor time (it is in the long run; in the short run, it's wage-labor cost).
So yes, you have to pay a $150,000 engineer instead of a $20,000 fry cook; and you pay 20,000 hours of $150,000 engineer time instead of 2,000,000 hours of fry cook time ($3 mil instead of $40 mil). In other words: 10 jobs to replace 1,000 jobs.
A US automation engineer and product engineer are VASTLY more skilled at cutting cost than a bunch of unskilled workers in China, especially when it comes to automated manufacture.
Your source for this? Because part of working with Chinese manufactures is the Chinese sitting down with US engineers--mechanical engineers, electronics engineers, etc.--and telling them how to alter their designs to achieve the same thing but be much more manufacturable. These changes both reduce the amount of labor (cost) in making each product unit and reduce the number of defects from mismanufacture.
In other words: part of the service provided by Chinese manufacturing firms to American engineering firms is that the Chinese will improve the American engineers's designs so they can be manufactured at lower cost and with greater success. You're claiming directly the opposite of what actually happens when American and European product engineers work with Chinese manufactories.
It takes time for companies to shift manufacturing lines to different locations due to logistics, inertia and sunk cost, it usually doesn't happen until a new line is opened
The comparison will, thus, be between the economy at the time the factory is open versus the economy as it would be if you hadn't on-shored. You're essentially trying to argue that we'll experience economic growth and spend (waste) it on local manufacturing instead of spending it on making Americans wealthier and actually growing our economy.
we are seeing it start to happen already as companies start to onshore manufacturing coupled with automation
Some, but not all, of those companies are doing so because of the political atmosphere and the fear of possible sudden costs by administrative actions (e.g. tariffs).
Some, but not all, of those companies are doing so because "Made in the USA" has a high marketing value now, and they can charge higher prices at higher margins: even with the cost being higher, they can jack it up even further and extract money, reducing the number of jobs by concentrating wealth even further.
Some, but not all, of those companies are doing so because local and state governments are paying them (Foxconn!), and many economists are predicting the states are going to lose out severely in the end. There's actually an argument for doing it, though: even if it's bad for America, you're damaging your neighboring states's employment markets to expand your own; and the short-term gain in local jobs is good politics even if it has shitty costs in local retained tax revenue and wealth.
Some of them are just small, and can't take advantage of economies of scale.
You're, again, stating a bunch of flat-wrong ideals, making conjectures with no factual basis, and looking myopically at what's in front of you. By "Myopically at what's in front of you", I mean a guy gets a job at MakeJeansCorp and you say, "Oh! A job was created! More jobs!" while not noticing that the condition of creating that job is a reduction in American buying power such that three guys at SellFluffyWidgets a half a state a way lost their jobs. If it's not directly, tightly bolted together, such that you can yank one and watch the other move, you simply act as if it's not there.
Your arguments are pred
That doesn't tell us why this was headlined this way. We also already know how toxic nicotine is; it's not less-toxic in this use.
Possibly to create the association between vaping and death, so that you don't go changing from cigarettes to vaporizers.
We're ingesting chemicals in ways that aren't exactly natural.
Actually, you're either ingesting a non-toxic natural glycerin vapor or an even-less-toxic synthetic polyethylglycol, plus a natural toxic alkaloid. It wouldn't be much more toxic if you ate it; for that matter, if the plant is wet, don't touch it.
Nicotine will fuck you up. Also, try ingesting a ton of ephedra--you'll get chest pains and die, thanks to a toxic alkaloid called Ephedrine, which is methamphetamine with an extra oxygen atom at the beta bind site (it's got a hydroxide there instead of a hydrogen). I guess that would be n-methyl-alpha-methyl-beta-hydroxy-phenyl-ethyl-amine.
It's an e-cig attack study. E-cigarettes cause increases in fatalities and negative health consequences (compared to not smoking). That's what they want you to think about: e-cigarettes hurt you.
You should switch from smoking to e-cigarette death pumps that will increase your rate of heart disease.
See it?
They didn't compare to cigarettes.
You are assuming that we do things the same way in the US that they do in China where labor is cheap. If US companies lose China as a source of cheap labor, they will hire a big team of engineers to design and build the robotics/automation necessary to make their goods economically in the US.
You assume China isn't doing things as cheaply as possible. China is highly-interested in and heavily-invested in the forefront of manufacture technology, and wants to automate their factories as soon as the technology is cheaper than labor.
If you don't automate your factories because your labor is $3/hr and the automation is equivalent to $7/hr, then moving the factories to an $8.25/hr-plus-benefits (about $11.50/hr) labor country and automating means you're running at the equivalent of $7/hr labor. That's more-expensive.
Quality goes up
Hah, no. We're not skilled at cutting corners efficiently here, and the brands are racing to the bottom on price. The Chinese can make to any quality level you want; our American importers ask for cheap and they get cheap. For the Americans to squeeze out those last few dimes, they have to cut entire limbs instead of just corners, because we're not skilled at this--not like China, anyway. So either prices go way the hell up or quality goes down.
robotics have better yields, lower amortized production costs than Chinese labor even now, don't make mistakes, get sick, need to sleep, commit suicide, etc.
No, because whenever that's true, China starts implementing the new technology to cut back on labor. That's what's actually happening. It's what global economists are talking about. It hits the news now and then, but nobody except economy nerds cares, so it quickly goes away.
The net result is cheaper, higher quality products, more high paying engineering jobs, more middle class technician/maintenance jobs, a net positive for the consumer and for the US job market.
If that were true, we'd already be manufacturing these things in the United States, selling them cheaper, and undercutting the idiot Chinese importers who were bringing in highly-expensive products. The first company to push Made in America and Cheaper than China would practically corner the market and become a multi-billion-dollar megacorporation like Disney.
Your tone isn't one of facts and strong economic arguments; it's one of conjecture and magical thinking. You've got an imaginative view of how the world works, and it's cute, but it's wrong!!!! .
It's not just that. You only have to ship 400 widgets, and you can carry 100 on a truck. 4 trucks instead of 5. You can retail-scan 100 widgets an hour. 4 cashiers instead of 5.
Trucks can carry about 2,000 pairs of pants, and Wal-Mart claims 980 retail scans per hour out of a good cashier. Then you have shelf stockers (unload the trucks, stock shelves) and the like. With fewer things vended, you can aggregate fewer stores, meaning you don't even need the people running them (loss prevention, merchandising, managers, the like), and don't need the infrastructure (power, water) to run them, which aggregates just a hair less coal or oil and thus fewer jobs there.
Tiny, tiny losses in one place or another. It's a salami slicing attack, but nobody gets the slices when we're done.
The guy says the "logic doesn't parse" because he's thinking in trickle-down terms: if we beef up the supply side, it'll trickle down productivity. I'm thinking in demand-side terms: jobs are created by consumer buying power. So he figures, hey, we'll just open a factory making 2,000,000 pants here instead of in China, and that's jobs making 2,000,000 pants--except, as you pointed out, it isn't.
Theft is now terrorism?
Trade secrets aside, manufacturing relocation and trade deficits don't work the way most people think.
There's this thing but I think the numbers are slightly-off. 18% is a lowball figure for payroll costs (usually taxes and benefits are more like 40%-60% of payroll; wages make up the rest).
The tl;dr is that cutting off Chinese manufacture and producing (in this example) trousers in the United States would create few net jobs if wages were very low in the factories; loses more jobs as wages go up (quickly causes a net-loss of American jobs); and, in any case, permanently makes Americans poorer.
That's because Americans will have to buy the locally-manufactured good at a price representing more of their working-hours. It's the same proportional difference at any income level for the consumer; higher-income consumers are looking at a smaller absolute increase in hours worked to purchase thing. Because this exchanges for labor-hours at the factory and the number of factory workers at maximum would represent some 0.1% of the employed labor force (178k / 158,000k), most consumers get poorer, which is why you so-quickly go from a small net-gain of jobs to a net-loss.
Further, the labor force expands in abundance and stagnates or contracts in scarcity. You can see the response in the civilian labor force on the BLS, although that's a result of many factors and not a strong argument. During the height of the recession, there was news of people retiring earlier and of college students going to grad school to avoid entering a bad employment market; during recovery, more college students dropped out early to get jobs, and more people worked later into retirement (bigger Social Security pension). The rate of immigrant labor also changes.
That means that a gain or loss of jobs is a temporary thing, and quickly buffed out; while a gain or loss of poverty is just ... there. It's a matter of how much things cost, which has nothing to do with the unemployed population.
The United States's biggest threat from China is that China will stop exporting to us, thus forcing us to make stuff here, destroying our buying power and decimating the retail and shipping industries by making the average American far too poor to afford all the things we used to buy (meaning jobs go away).
China's biggest threat from the US is that we'll learn to build great big automated factories with very few humans before they can offer us lower prices using the same technology paired with greater manufacture expertise and lower wages. In such a situation, China's economy would lose the capacity to sell its labor, and would collapse under the pressure of extreme poverty. In theory, Chinese wages will rise with technology, e.g. the tech makes stuff for half as much and they pay workers just under twice as much and so the price still goes down. Even if so, losing a big chunk of their export market will collapse their economy.
Both sides benefit from trade. Exports are great for the economy; so are imports. It's not a balance, where one hurts us and the other helps us.
"Middle-class" is essentially the median--there's not a semantic difference between "middle-class" and "average".
Seattle's median is actually $80,000. For software development jobs, it's over $97k. In parts of the Bay Area, $105k is "low income".
The Social Security Wage Base is worked off a median income of around $50k. In 2015, incomes above $103,057 held a total 51.1% of the income share; Social Security took 12.4% of the income below $118,500. In 1970, that upper quintile held only 43.3% of the income share.
The bigger issue is she says people should play nice. That's the long and short of it: those trolls are bad and someone should inform them they're bothering us and should stop.
Who is going to fund films directly?
What you're saying doesn't even make sense. "Directly funding a film" means funding the organization of people handling all the logistics of getting the actors, directors, editors, and story writers together to make the film--you know, exactly what Hollywood industry is--so they can have a film made. It means buying the film before the film even exists.
I assume it's not your problem because you'd be just as happy if TV shows, movies, and books didn't exist.
It's not just property tax. Amazon gets money from all over the world, pays wages, and those people have taxable income. They spend it locally, bringing your economy up with that spending. It's cash flow.
I make a similar argument for my universal Social Security: because it pays more to below-average-income households than it takes, below-average-income cities see a net cash flow. In Baltimore, MD, that would have been $2 billion in 2016. That's untaxable (it counts as income for means-tested welfare, but not for tax purposes, says my proposed policy), yet it gets spent and creates income to local businesses, wages, and so forth. Part of that flows out of the city up the corporate chain or to the suppliers; part of it stays in the city as wages. More comes twice a month, building it up continuously.
It's the end of poor inner cities.
An interesting effect, especially considering the after-tax income at every household income level and on corporate profits is higher under this system. I even slightly-lowered the payroll tax and the Federal deficit in the process.
Yes but people are frequently ludicrous and entitled.
Generally WordPress consultants and people working with WordPress charge way less than people with equivalent jobs with other focus areas. This has historical reasons and is quite frankly a huge problem. It also brings the market value down and makes it unfair. When you look at WordPress projects vs. non-WordPress projects side by side you'll notice that WordPress projects generally get quoted in the low to mid $10,000 while other similar projects on other platforms get quoted $30,000 and above. This is not because WordPress is cheaper but because the community as a whole bids itself down. Rather than asking what do people charge, ask yourself what your time is worth. Do a competitive analysis based on your skills and expertise and charge for your time. This also requires that you charge for the actual time you spend working, not the time you think you should have spent. Bill by the hour and bill what you're worth. Not the easiest answer, but that's the hard truth.
Source.
This guy is saying that non-Wordpress projects get $CASHBANK and that Wordpress projects get $SHITMONEY and that it's a huge problem and you should just charge a lot because you're entitled to it.
Mind you, I'm pushing strong for universal Social Security, which in the 2016 model would have paid every American adult $8,751/year or $729.25/month in semi-monthly payments. That's a poverty-reduction system. The economy doesn't give everyone a fair shot; it provides jobs where there is purchasing demand, and drops people to unemployment when progress is made. We owe people a safety net and a basis of support--and, as of somewhere around 2013, we can support that without high tax burdens.
That's a bit different than walking in, looking around, and declaring that you should be paid more because you think you deserve it. You'll get paid more when few people can do your job and someone really wants to keep you. Some ludicrous shit happens (like high salaries in the west of the continent and people living the same standard-of-living on half as much money in the east), but that's not my business to come in and bust up. It's also not my business to try to legislate something about people not trying for salaries way above the market rate--you'll learn fast enough on your own.
So yeah, there's some sentiment on the supply side (developers) that their wages should be $HIGHER, and some sentiment on the demand side (employers) that the wages should be $LOWER. You're seeing the spread. Low-bid companies can't attract or retain the best talent; high-bid job seekers have few job opportunities.
Yeah, the regional salary behavior in America is annoying. It does odd things, too.
In developing a universal Social Security, I used a model of a single tax on all income (business, personal). Our current Social Security system has a cap (now at $127,500) and takes 12.4%.
So you go to the western third of the country, to New York, to other regions, and you find a lot of areas where a $140k salary is basic, lower-middle-class income. So now a chunk of the middle-class has a high income, above the SSWB, right? Now what?
Social Security isn't capturing from 85% of the income; it's capturing from 45%.
There's where your insolvency came from.
The high-income earners are also taking a bit more of the income than everyone else--it's like we grow by 1%, they grow by 1.1%--which also contributes. On the other hand, the big CEOs are getting some half a penny or two pennies per hour per employee in their organization--so if we took all their income, we could all go out and buy a latte from Starbucks once a month (or at least, the top five executives of Ford Motor Company could do that for their employees if they pooled all their cash income).
That argument has been pissing off people in the UBI and the Single-Payer crowd (I favor a public option) because they envision a world where we tax the super-rich (over $0.5M or so) more and use it to pay $15,000/year or so to everyone else. They don't like being told that the rich actually don't have any money in a national sense.
You misunderstand: Hollywood pays up-front for actors, film writers, directors, and so forth. An organization of marketers and managers works out how to get a film built, hires the engineers to do it, and does it, outlaying millions of dollars.
Then: sufficient bandwidth to copy a blu-ray costs about 0.4 cents.
How does the industry get the money from consumers to pay all the actors if there is no IP law, and thus any yank can torrent a Blu-Ray, burn it to a disk, print a pretty label, and have a $1 special that he sells to folks on Amazon (because copyright infringement is not a thing) for $5? Don't say "special features", because nobody cares, and we can copy those, too.
Browser: Firefox, Chromium, Chrome.
Seriously?
Firefox 4,500; Chrome-ish 3,000 total.
We're in 2017; I wish it meant 30 people donating $5 to my campaign.