A key player was Enron who was already engaging in huge levels of fraud to cover huge mistakes it had made.
No, they were engaging in fraud for the sake of fraud. They knew exactly what they were doing.
Electricity in deregulated markets is sold reverse-auction style. Electric producers bid down each other, the regulating body takes all the lowest bidders, up until the point where the demand is met. Here's how their scam worked-
Enron would bid well below their costs for a couple of the power stations under their control. They would do this for say, a 6PM to midnight block, whereopon they changed their bid (for those couple of stations) to $999/MW-Hr at midnight. OK fine- the regulator could see this and have other companies spool up their generators starting at 11:30 or so and then at midnight the regulator could drop Enron at midnight and buy electricity from someone else. This is perfectly acceptable.
The fraud comes when Enron would purposefully drop their "cheap" stations off the grid for "maintenance" at 12:01AM. The grid couldn't cover this using reserves of other companies only. So the grid regulator would be forced to buy at $999/MW-Hr from Enron until they could spool up MORE power stations owned by others.
All of Enron's scams were like this, using their control of multiple power stations to game the grid auction. There were many variations but they all followed the same general theme.
This is a huge pain in the ass. I am attending university part time and their email system uses Gmail. Switching back and forth between my main Google profile and my school email is usually a painful process, one which often dumps me into error pages, redirect loops, or back to a homepage. Other open tabs are automatically logged out of one account when I switch to the other.
Frankly, considering the economic damage he did, the thousands (if not millions) of people he screwed over and caused pain and suffering to, the time wasted to clean up his mess...
18 years is quite small, I'd have no problem with executing him. If people who commit crimes behind computer keyboards were actually punished more often, we might have less of it. As it is, the fraud and abuse online are really more like the wild west than the 21st century.
Economic damage is not a good way to assess penalties. Compare and contrast with Aaron Swartz, Jamie Thomas-Rasset, Kevin Mitnick...
No, this guy needs to go away because he was breaking the law - not because of how much he broke it.
The parent poster is advocating a more severe sentence because of the total amount of suffering caused. If I punch someone in the face, that's assault, but the damage is limited to 1 person and is relatively minor. It is also in most cases not a permanent cause of pain and suffering. The punishment is light.
If I intentionally and maliciously gave someone a papercut, that is assault too. But the amount of suffering is pretty low. In all likelihood you would have a tough time getting a court to hear your case even.
But what if I ran around intentionally and maliciously giving people papercuts? What if I inflicted papercuts on millions of people? For each person, the damage is minor. In aggregate though, it is a lot of pain and suffering.
Committing thousands or millions of small crimes used to be hard. Now with the internet and computers, it is easy.
It seems like you are arguing that multiple counts of the same crime shouldn't stack. In cases where someone hacks 1 company 1000 times or using 100 different methods, maybe you have a point. Sometimes prosecuters go a little crazy. But multiple crimes should stack if there are multiple victims who all suffered.
That would be a work place risk, probably already covered by OSHA.
If you want to get everyone pissed off, just file an OSHA complaint. They will descend on your workplace and find fault with everything from the floor tile to the overhead lights.
Depends on the locality. I filed one against a summer employer for clearly unsafe activities. Common practice was to get in a clogged hopper with the conveyor underneath still running. The site supervisor advocated the practice. An extremely serious and obvious safety hazard. OSHA looked the other way.
A lot of studies lately have been finding links between the Father's healthiness and birth defects. Everybody knows that as the age of a mother increases, the risks of potential problems also increases. But now we find that old dads are as bad as, or maybe even worse than, old moms. I can easily see a future where potential dads are given exactly the same nutritional, lifestyle, and age advice as the women. Maybe they will even put us on neonatal vitamins.
Electricity prices are higher during the work day, lower at night. The employees drive the car home and it gets charged overnight in their home on their own power bill.
Not for the vast majority of American households. Wholesale electrical rates (grid costs), commercial and industrial users have time of day differentials. This is deemed too complicated for home consumers so they just average it out and charge a flat rate.
Let's imagine some mad dictator in Northen Cubic Iran starts producing it in huuuge quantities, put into weak containers all accross the country and around his presidential palaces and says 'try to bomb me now'.
Is it feasible for such person to produce enough of this stuff that when released into atmosphere, it would make a significant effect? Not extinction in 1 year effect, but something like 'speed up global warming by 10 years and put it behind the line where Syberia undeground methane starts bubbling a lot more'?
Only a bond villain would do this considering the stuff costs in the neighborhood of $100 a pound.
Well, there are no known processes by which PFTBA is broken down or removed from the atmosphere. So the effect is basically cumulative.
We're talking about Florinert here, which many geeks have actually heard of, unlike the acronym PTFBA. It costs more than $100 a pound. I strongly doubt anybody is spraying this stuff all over the place like hairspray.
"About 1/3 of Canadian homes currently get mail delivered to their door" WHAT?
I'm an American, and I have always lived in a city or the suburbs. I guess I take to-my-door mail delivery as a basic human right. I thought all first world countries had this.
Wow. my mind is blown.
The disparity between US and Canadian mail delivery quality is so high that many Canadians on the border pay for USPS post office boxes or third party delivery boxes. They cross the border a couple times a week to buy gas and milk, and pick up the mail.
It was so commonplace in my hometown that there was a 2 year waiting list for a USPS box. Then a couple 3rd party delivery box places opened up about a mile from the border.
Sabotage? No sabotage isn't postal rates, it's requiring that the USPS prefund 75 years of retirement pension in 10 years. That means in 10 years they have to fund the retirement for employees that haven't been born yet. That's sabotage. Refusing to raise stamp prices to pay for the prefunding requirement is just following through on the real sabotage.
The low rates for a letter aren't helping. Congress has shackled them to the government's inflation estimate, which is a problem because health care costs for their workers and gasoline have been increasing faster than inflation. Plus many argue that the government's inflation estimate is manipulated into being too low.
46 cents to send a letter is really cheap. Even if I had a Prius (I don't), I could only do a 3 mile round trip to deliver a letter myself before the gas alone cost me 46 cents. That doesn't include wear and tear on the car or my time. It sometimes seems silly for me to send a letter across town, but it is cheaper, saves me time, and is more convenient. Keep a box of envelopes at home/work and a book of stamps at home/work and it isn't a chore to send a letter at all.
So many people that I know have enough money to pay their bills, and very little left over, and they tend to save that money for things like car/house problems. Also, so many people are switching from cable to Netflix for their entertainment (no advertising there that I've ever seen). I really wonder if advertising is still as effective as once thought. I know I mentally block it all out if it's on a site (slashdot gives you a choice if you're logged in, and I love that). I have never ever ever ever seen an advertisement and thought, "Holy shit, that's something that I should get." I mean, I did when I was a kid, but not since.
The key is to send your advertisement to the right person at their moment of greatest receptiveness. Suppose I walk out of a bar at 1AM. My phone knows where I am and what the local time is. Hours of operation data on most businesses is available online. I get a message "I see you have just closed Bob's Bar! Jane's Bar is open until 3AM and we are 2 blocks away! Click this button to put your phone into navigation mode".
Another example is a hot saturday morning. My phone knows location, weather data is easily looked up. I swipe my credit card at an auto parts store 4 miles away from my home at 9AM. A company connects these dots, and sends me an advertisement for 25% off iced coffee at a store on my way home. Will I take that offer? I'm probably starting (or in the middle of) some car repairs when I get home, during the hot day, so I probably would take that offer.
These are the right message for the right person at the right time. The likelihood that I will take their offer is quite high. I may even appreciate they told me about their bar. This is why companies are falling over themselves to get all the data they can about you. Their advertising budget ROI goes through the roof.
T GM goes under and so does virtually every Tier 1 supplier as well as Ford and Chrysler. Even the CEO of Toyota admitted publicly that GM being liquidated would have hurt Toyota badly because they depend on many of the same suppliers. My company would have been out of business entirely and we are a Tier 3 supplier to GM. And we would have been just one of thousands of firms that would have collapsed. Even Tesla would likely have collapsed because the supply chain would have imploded. Tesla depends on many of the same suppliers who would now be bankrupt.
I don't buy this argument. A certain amount of cars are bought every year. If there is no GM, that number of cars would have been bought from other manufacturers. Everybody elses market share would increase to cover the % lost when GM exited the market. The other manufacturers' parts orders would increase to match, and the amount of orders for the suppliers and subsuppliers stays about the same. The same amount of cars bought -> the same amount of parts from suppliers are bought.
Similarly, the people suddenly unemployed by GM's collapse would be made up for by people being hired by Toyota USA, Mercedes USA, etc expanding their lines to make cars to fill the void left by GM. Assuming GM was basically about as efficient as the other carmakers*, the same number of people are employed. Certainly people would have refused to move or not be offered a job by those companies, but overall the same number of cars need to be made.
Arguably the economy was in the toilet at that time, and people in generally weren't buying as many cars as normal. However, removing or not removing a big carmaker from the economy wouldn't have changed that one bit.
*GM probably wasn't as efficient as the other carmakers, but that just points to their noncompetitiveness and a good reason to be rid of them anyhow.
Both of my daughters have work issued Macs. One is in education and the other a tech company. When you look at the cost of a computer compared to the salary (and benefits) for an employee over the life of the computer, the cost of even an "expensive" computer is a small rounding error.
And yet I have not heard of a company doling out computers with SSD drives in them. Myself and a department full of people waste 15 minutes in the morning waiting for laptops to boot up. We did the math and the $ amount of the lost productivity was staggering.
I used to drive a 1990 Honda CRX that weighed under 2000 lbs.
I also used to drive a 2000 Audi TT that weighed over 3300 lbs.
The CRX could fit more cargo, and/or more passengers comfortably (even as a 2+2) than the TT.
That's a pretty incredible statement given that in most markets the CRX did not come with a backseat. I tried sitting in the "not backseat" rear area of mine once, and there is no way any adult taller than 5 feet could sit there at all, let alone comfortably.
I did manage to fit half a dozen 9ft planks in the CRX with all the doors and the hatchback closed so there's that.
Here is how I have been affected by our immigration "policy".
1) needed a tech from a Canadian company to go to Detroit to fix a system. He got turned back at the border. They had to get an American to come in and do the job days later.
2) a friend had her undocumented husband who lived & worked 20 years in the US and had teenage kids deported without warning after a misdemeanor traffic infraction.
3) A Danish family renting a house I own got thrown out of the country because of an H1B mixup, now I am out a few months of rent.
Screw it. I'm for open borders.
1) isn't an immigration policy issue, it is a work visa problem. While we might take issue with visas from other countries, the US and Canada really need to work on this. In reality, the system is tilted so the vast majority of cross-border workers are Canadians working in the US.
2) is a legitimate issue. I don't care who you are. I shelled out a lot of money and invested a ridiculous amount of time getting my wife into the country legally. If you want to be an illegal immigrant you take all the risks of that. No other country in the world has immigration policy like the people who use the term "undocumented" propose. The US is already one of the most open countries in the world with our "born in US = citizen" policy.
3) That is unfortunate, if it was truly a mixup perhaps they should have gotten a good lawyer. Or maybe it wasn't a mixup and they just told you that as a sob story so you wouldn't charge them lease-breaking fees.
Bitcoin may or may not be a good investment, but it certainly is not a Ponzi Scheme.
The article lists the biggest Ponzi Scheme in history as Social Security. Social Security may or may not be good public policy, but it is not a Ponzi Scheme either.
If most people come to the conclusion that Bitcoin is too volatile for them to complete monetary transactions with, they effectively become beanie babies. The value becomes zilch and everyone who holds Bitcoin when that happens walks away with nothing. Sounds an awful lot like a Ponzi scheme to me.
People have argued that when Bitcoin has more volume, the volatility will decrease. There is not a shred of evidence to support that. Bitcoin has been gaining volume for the last couple of years, and if anything, it is more volatile than ever.
You've just hit on the major problem with ALL corporations today. They are run by accountants, attorneys, HR, and pussy managers that bow to their control. When is the last time someone was hired without their involvement? 1930? This is why nothing can get done anymore. A bunch of peon wannabes in one of those departments think they run the show. It's high time CEOs, boards of directors, and other higher ups grow a pair, that includes you ladies, and tell these people, "NO, this is what we are going to do, NO we need to hire this person right now, not next month, now!" You can be diplomatic as you want but you need to put your foot. You work for me. If you don't like it, GTFO! These people need to understand they do not run the business. Until that happens you company is doomed to failure.
Involving accountants and lawyers in the process of building power plants is a necessity. Even if you ARE Bill Gates, you can't just go down to the bank and ask for 2 Billion dollars to build a power plant. They want; they HAVE to see your business plan, your financial calculations, guarantees from the grid operator that they will purchase your power, etc. They require you to set up all of your contracts to buy boilers, turbines, and cooling systems with airtight contracts. We signed a contract to sell a steam turbine a couple of weeks ago which ran to almost 1100 pages. Every possibility for project snags, supplier bankruptcy, catastrophic acts of God, etc needs to be spelled out in detail. The piles of money involved are so large that anything less would be irresponsible and reckless.
It's a mature technology, and once the newness wore off, it's not a very sexy one. Most research reactors (including the ones at both the Universities I attended) are basically just big tubs of water. And further, they can't really "do" anything.
I like it that way. Keeps out the riffraff looking for a quick path to a good salary. Look at what happened to IT (90's boom) and more recently Lawyers in the US. There is also a glut of accountants but the tax code gets bigger every year so that isn't a problem- yet.
Even with reduced regulation industry isn't going to put up the money for researchers to have fun and experiment with nuclear energy. The momentum in the prices for PV are just too scary, if that carries on nuclear is just one major breakthrough in energy storage away from obsolescence... in a field where billions are spare change and commercialization takes decades.
Nuclear is a gamble only governments would take and most governments are strapped for cash.
It isn't a gamble, it is a hedge. Nobody knows for sure what the future will bring. To say that we will in 20 years we will use only natural gas, wind, and solar is a fool's bet. Betting on "future magic solution" is even worse. Planning now for a diversified energy mix in the future isn't just a good idea, it is the safest idea.
But the Japanese do not fully acknowledge what they did in the war and a lot of the history is not taught to the young. This contrasts with Germany which basically acknowledged what was done and set about purging it from society.
The end result is the same. Germany had a fanatical idealogy focused on Hitler, ethnic purity and the Fatherland. When he was out of the picture and the country clearly was never going to win, it became relatively easy to convince everyone to throw out all the old flags and make that idealogy a crime. Ethnic purity is just not acceptable. They needed to shove that all under the rug.
Japan had a fanatical idealogy focused on honor, empire-building, and the Emperor. The Emperor lost his divine power and the US planted a democratic constitution and government, and prohibited Japan from having an offensive military. But today, they still have the Emperor, a code of honor which is nonviolent now but still around, and they still build their empire in the Pacific and elsewhere (economically). They don't need to make their old ideology a crime because they can still achieve it in different, internationally-acceptable, ways. They didn't need to purge their idealogy completely because once nonviolent boundaries were attached, it wasn't a problem anymore.
There are not "dumping" the chemicals. They want to build a secure, floating, facility for destroying the chemicals. Building this facility in an environmentally sensitive area doesn't seem that bright. I would have expected it to be better to build it somewhere dry, like an isolated desert.
Transportation is a problem, one which is somewhat tied to security. A floating facility makes sense because you only have to transport the chemicals to the coast. Securing such a facility is easier as well.
But privately, American diplomats are pushing hard to kill a provision of the Brazilian and German draft which states that "extraterritorial surveillance" and mass interception of communications, personal information, and metadata may constitute a violation of human rights
So, the Brazilians and Germans are saying that you may spy on your own citizens to your heart's content, but you can't spy outside your own territory because that violates human rights. Sorry, but I think that's backwards. I hope the US kills this provision. I want the US government to spy on foreign nations and not spy on Americans.
Both are important. Otherwise other nations can spy on US citizens, and then just report the results to the US government. It already happens.
The Nexus is an outlier, as comes with a near-zero profit margin for Google; that's not sustainable. The Moto G is much, much more interesting because Motorola's devices are still supposed to turn a profit.
The Moto G sells for $179 unlocked with no contract. It might not be as powerful as the Nexus 5 but it is 95% of the way there for most people. Chinese devices with similar specs are in the $140-$170 range on Aliexpress. I don't see how Motorola is making much of a profit on the G either. I don't see it as being "much more interesting".
Android phones are based on a high volume, low profit model. Apple is working under a high profit model. Neither is wrong but if I want a phone that isn't overpriced, I'm not going to buy the Apple one.
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A key player was Enron who was already engaging in huge levels of fraud to cover huge mistakes it had made.
No, they were engaging in fraud for the sake of fraud. They knew exactly what they were doing.
Electricity in deregulated markets is sold reverse-auction style. Electric producers bid down each other, the regulating body takes all the lowest bidders, up until the point where the demand is met. Here's how their scam worked-
Enron would bid well below their costs for a couple of the power stations under their control. They would do this for say, a 6PM to midnight block, whereopon they changed their bid (for those couple of stations) to $999/MW-Hr at midnight. OK fine- the regulator could see this and have other companies spool up their generators starting at 11:30 or so and then at midnight the regulator could drop Enron at midnight and buy electricity from someone else. This is perfectly acceptable.
The fraud comes when Enron would purposefully drop their "cheap" stations off the grid for "maintenance" at 12:01AM. The grid couldn't cover this using reserves of other companies only. So the grid regulator would be forced to buy at $999/MW-Hr from Enron until they could spool up MORE power stations owned by others.
All of Enron's scams were like this, using their control of multiple power stations to game the grid auction. There were many variations but they all followed the same general theme.
This is a huge pain in the ass. I am attending university part time and their email system uses Gmail. Switching back and forth between my main Google profile and my school email is usually a painful process, one which often dumps me into error pages, redirect loops, or back to a homepage. Other open tabs are automatically logged out of one account when I switch to the other.
Frankly, considering the economic damage he did, the thousands (if not millions) of people he screwed over and caused pain and suffering to, the time wasted to clean up his mess...
18 years is quite small, I'd have no problem with executing him. If people who commit crimes behind computer keyboards were actually punished more often, we might have less of it. As it is, the fraud and abuse online are really more like the wild west than the 21st century.
Economic damage is not a good way to assess penalties. Compare and contrast with Aaron Swartz, Jamie Thomas-Rasset, Kevin Mitnick ...
No, this guy needs to go away because he was breaking the law - not because of how much he broke it.
The parent poster is advocating a more severe sentence because of the total amount of suffering caused. If I punch someone in the face, that's assault, but the damage is limited to 1 person and is relatively minor. It is also in most cases not a permanent cause of pain and suffering. The punishment is light.
If I intentionally and maliciously gave someone a papercut, that is assault too. But the amount of suffering is pretty low. In all likelihood you would have a tough time getting a court to hear your case even.
But what if I ran around intentionally and maliciously giving people papercuts? What if I inflicted papercuts on millions of people? For each person, the damage is minor. In aggregate though, it is a lot of pain and suffering.
Committing thousands or millions of small crimes used to be hard. Now with the internet and computers, it is easy. It seems like you are arguing that multiple counts of the same crime shouldn't stack. In cases where someone hacks 1 company 1000 times or using 100 different methods, maybe you have a point. Sometimes prosecuters go a little crazy. But multiple crimes should stack if there are multiple victims who all suffered.
That would be a work place risk, probably already covered by OSHA. If you want to get everyone pissed off, just file an OSHA complaint. They will descend on your workplace and find fault with everything from the floor tile to the overhead lights.
Depends on the locality. I filed one against a summer employer for clearly unsafe activities. Common practice was to get in a clogged hopper with the conveyor underneath still running. The site supervisor advocated the practice. An extremely serious and obvious safety hazard. OSHA looked the other way.
The company went bankrupt 2 months later.
A lot of studies lately have been finding links between the Father's healthiness and birth defects. Everybody knows that as the age of a mother increases, the risks of potential problems also increases. But now we find that old dads are as bad as, or maybe even worse than, old moms. I can easily see a future where potential dads are given exactly the same nutritional, lifestyle, and age advice as the women. Maybe they will even put us on neonatal vitamins.
Electricity prices are higher during the work day, lower at night. The employees drive the car home and it gets charged overnight in their home on their own power bill.
Not for the vast majority of American households. Wholesale electrical rates (grid costs), commercial and industrial users have time of day differentials. This is deemed too complicated for home consumers so they just average it out and charge a flat rate.
Let's imagine some mad dictator in Northen Cubic Iran starts producing it in huuuge quantities, put into weak containers all accross the country and around his presidential palaces and says 'try to bomb me now'. Is it feasible for such person to produce enough of this stuff that when released into atmosphere, it would make a significant effect? Not extinction in 1 year effect, but something like 'speed up global warming by 10 years and put it behind the line where Syberia undeground methane starts bubbling a lot more'?
Only a bond villain would do this considering the stuff costs in the neighborhood of $100 a pound.
Well, there are no known processes by which PFTBA is broken down or removed from the atmosphere. So the effect is basically cumulative.
We're talking about Florinert here, which many geeks have actually heard of, unlike the acronym PTFBA. It costs more than $100 a pound. I strongly doubt anybody is spraying this stuff all over the place like hairspray.
"About 1/3 of Canadian homes currently get mail delivered to their door" WHAT?
I'm an American, and I have always lived in a city or the suburbs. I guess I take to-my-door mail delivery as a basic human right. I thought all first world countries had this.
Wow. my mind is blown.
The disparity between US and Canadian mail delivery quality is so high that many Canadians on the border pay for USPS post office boxes or third party delivery boxes. They cross the border a couple times a week to buy gas and milk, and pick up the mail.
It was so commonplace in my hometown that there was a 2 year waiting list for a USPS box. Then a couple 3rd party delivery box places opened up about a mile from the border.
Sabotage? No sabotage isn't postal rates, it's requiring that the USPS prefund 75 years of retirement pension in 10 years. That means in 10 years they have to fund the retirement for employees that haven't been born yet. That's sabotage. Refusing to raise stamp prices to pay for the prefunding requirement is just following through on the real sabotage.
The low rates for a letter aren't helping. Congress has shackled them to the government's inflation estimate, which is a problem because health care costs for their workers and gasoline have been increasing faster than inflation. Plus many argue that the government's inflation estimate is manipulated into being too low.
46 cents to send a letter is really cheap. Even if I had a Prius (I don't), I could only do a 3 mile round trip to deliver a letter myself before the gas alone cost me 46 cents. That doesn't include wear and tear on the car or my time. It sometimes seems silly for me to send a letter across town, but it is cheaper, saves me time, and is more convenient. Keep a box of envelopes at home/work and a book of stamps at home/work and it isn't a chore to send a letter at all.
So many people that I know have enough money to pay their bills, and very little left over, and they tend to save that money for things like car/house problems. Also, so many people are switching from cable to Netflix for their entertainment (no advertising there that I've ever seen). I really wonder if advertising is still as effective as once thought. I know I mentally block it all out if it's on a site (slashdot gives you a choice if you're logged in, and I love that). I have never ever ever ever seen an advertisement and thought, "Holy shit, that's something that I should get." I mean, I did when I was a kid, but not since.
The key is to send your advertisement to the right person at their moment of greatest receptiveness. Suppose I walk out of a bar at 1AM. My phone knows where I am and what the local time is. Hours of operation data on most businesses is available online. I get a message "I see you have just closed Bob's Bar! Jane's Bar is open until 3AM and we are 2 blocks away! Click this button to put your phone into navigation mode".
Another example is a hot saturday morning. My phone knows location, weather data is easily looked up. I swipe my credit card at an auto parts store 4 miles away from my home at 9AM. A company connects these dots, and sends me an advertisement for 25% off iced coffee at a store on my way home. Will I take that offer? I'm probably starting (or in the middle of) some car repairs when I get home, during the hot day, so I probably would take that offer.
These are the right message for the right person at the right time. The likelihood that I will take their offer is quite high. I may even appreciate they told me about their bar. This is why companies are falling over themselves to get all the data they can about you. Their advertising budget ROI goes through the roof.
Go ask the guy who runs Ford if there would still be a Ford if GM and Chrysler had gone under.
They would have been in a sweet market position. Ford is one of the losers in this game because they weren't needy enough to require federal bail out.
Oh yes, Ford are the losers all right. I just wish I had hung on to the Ford stock I bought at $1.50 instead of greedily selling it when it hit $4.
T GM goes under and so does virtually every Tier 1 supplier as well as Ford and Chrysler. Even the CEO of Toyota admitted publicly that GM being liquidated would have hurt Toyota badly because they depend on many of the same suppliers. My company would have been out of business entirely and we are a Tier 3 supplier to GM. And we would have been just one of thousands of firms that would have collapsed. Even Tesla would likely have collapsed because the supply chain would have imploded. Tesla depends on many of the same suppliers who would now be bankrupt.
I don't buy this argument. A certain amount of cars are bought every year. If there is no GM, that number of cars would have been bought from other manufacturers. Everybody elses market share would increase to cover the % lost when GM exited the market. The other manufacturers' parts orders would increase to match, and the amount of orders for the suppliers and subsuppliers stays about the same. The same amount of cars bought -> the same amount of parts from suppliers are bought.
Similarly, the people suddenly unemployed by GM's collapse would be made up for by people being hired by Toyota USA, Mercedes USA, etc expanding their lines to make cars to fill the void left by GM. Assuming GM was basically about as efficient as the other carmakers*, the same number of people are employed. Certainly people would have refused to move or not be offered a job by those companies, but overall the same number of cars need to be made.
Arguably the economy was in the toilet at that time, and people in generally weren't buying as many cars as normal. However, removing or not removing a big carmaker from the economy wouldn't have changed that one bit.
*GM probably wasn't as efficient as the other carmakers, but that just points to their noncompetitiveness and a good reason to be rid of them anyhow.
Both of my daughters have work issued Macs. One is in education and the other a tech company. When you look at the cost of a computer compared to the salary (and benefits) for an employee over the life of the computer, the cost of even an "expensive" computer is a small rounding error.
And yet I have not heard of a company doling out computers with SSD drives in them. Myself and a department full of people waste 15 minutes in the morning waiting for laptops to boot up. We did the math and the $ amount of the lost productivity was staggering.
I used to drive a 1990 Honda CRX that weighed under 2000 lbs. I also used to drive a 2000 Audi TT that weighed over 3300 lbs. The CRX could fit more cargo, and/or more passengers comfortably (even as a 2+2) than the TT.
That's a pretty incredible statement given that in most markets the CRX did not come with a backseat. I tried sitting in the "not backseat" rear area of mine once, and there is no way any adult taller than 5 feet could sit there at all, let alone comfortably.
I did manage to fit half a dozen 9ft planks in the CRX with all the doors and the hatchback closed so there's that.
Here is how I have been affected by our immigration "policy".
1) needed a tech from a Canadian company to go to Detroit to fix a system. He got turned back at the border. They had to get an American to come in and do the job days later.
2) a friend had her undocumented husband who lived & worked 20 years in the US and had teenage kids deported without warning after a misdemeanor traffic infraction.
3) A Danish family renting a house I own got thrown out of the country because of an H1B mixup, now I am out a few months of rent.
Screw it. I'm for open borders.
1) isn't an immigration policy issue, it is a work visa problem. While we might take issue with visas from other countries, the US and Canada really need to work on this. In reality, the system is tilted so the vast majority of cross-border workers are Canadians working in the US.
2) is a legitimate issue. I don't care who you are. I shelled out a lot of money and invested a ridiculous amount of time getting my wife into the country legally. If you want to be an illegal immigrant you take all the risks of that. No other country in the world has immigration policy like the people who use the term "undocumented" propose. The US is already one of the most open countries in the world with our "born in US = citizen" policy.
3) That is unfortunate, if it was truly a mixup perhaps they should have gotten a good lawyer. Or maybe it wasn't a mixup and they just told you that as a sob story so you wouldn't charge them lease-breaking fees.
Yeah? How about mumps and rubella. They've had an outbreak of both of those, and measles in Canada as well. All due to the anti-vaxxers.
Who could have predicted that the infection rates of Measles, Mumps, and Rubella would increase when people stopped getting their MMR vaccine?
An excellent weighing-in on the recent fluctuation. Bitcoins: The Second Biggest Ponzi Scheme in History
Bitcoin may or may not be a good investment, but it certainly is not a Ponzi Scheme.
The article lists the biggest Ponzi Scheme in history as Social Security. Social Security may or may not be good public policy, but it is not a Ponzi Scheme either.
If most people come to the conclusion that Bitcoin is too volatile for them to complete monetary transactions with, they effectively become beanie babies. The value becomes zilch and everyone who holds Bitcoin when that happens walks away with nothing. Sounds an awful lot like a Ponzi scheme to me.
People have argued that when Bitcoin has more volume, the volatility will decrease. There is not a shred of evidence to support that. Bitcoin has been gaining volume for the last couple of years, and if anything, it is more volatile than ever.
You've just hit on the major problem with ALL corporations today. They are run by accountants, attorneys, HR, and pussy managers that bow to their control. When is the last time someone was hired without their involvement? 1930? This is why nothing can get done anymore. A bunch of peon wannabes in one of those departments think they run the show. It's high time CEOs, boards of directors, and other higher ups grow a pair, that includes you ladies, and tell these people, "NO, this is what we are going to do, NO we need to hire this person right now, not next month, now!" You can be diplomatic as you want but you need to put your foot. You work for me. If you don't like it, GTFO! These people need to understand they do not run the business. Until that happens you company is doomed to failure.
Involving accountants and lawyers in the process of building power plants is a necessity. Even if you ARE Bill Gates, you can't just go down to the bank and ask for 2 Billion dollars to build a power plant. They want; they HAVE to see your business plan, your financial calculations, guarantees from the grid operator that they will purchase your power, etc. They require you to set up all of your contracts to buy boilers, turbines, and cooling systems with airtight contracts. We signed a contract to sell a steam turbine a couple of weeks ago which ran to almost 1100 pages. Every possibility for project snags, supplier bankruptcy, catastrophic acts of God, etc needs to be spelled out in detail. The piles of money involved are so large that anything less would be irresponsible and reckless.
It's a mature technology, and once the newness wore off, it's not a very sexy one. Most research reactors (including the ones at both the Universities I attended) are basically just big tubs of water. And further, they can't really "do" anything.
I like it that way. Keeps out the riffraff looking for a quick path to a good salary. Look at what happened to IT (90's boom) and more recently Lawyers in the US. There is also a glut of accountants but the tax code gets bigger every year so that isn't a problem- yet.
Even with reduced regulation industry isn't going to put up the money for researchers to have fun and experiment with nuclear energy. The momentum in the prices for PV are just too scary, if that carries on nuclear is just one major breakthrough in energy storage away from obsolescence ... in a field where billions are spare change and commercialization takes decades.
Nuclear is a gamble only governments would take and most governments are strapped for cash.
It isn't a gamble, it is a hedge. Nobody knows for sure what the future will bring. To say that we will in 20 years we will use only natural gas, wind, and solar is a fool's bet. Betting on "future magic solution" is even worse. Planning now for a diversified energy mix in the future isn't just a good idea, it is the safest idea.
But the Japanese do not fully acknowledge what they did in the war and a lot of the history is not taught to the young. This contrasts with Germany which basically acknowledged what was done and set about purging it from society.
The end result is the same. Germany had a fanatical idealogy focused on Hitler, ethnic purity and the Fatherland. When he was out of the picture and the country clearly was never going to win, it became relatively easy to convince everyone to throw out all the old flags and make that idealogy a crime. Ethnic purity is just not acceptable. They needed to shove that all under the rug.
Japan had a fanatical idealogy focused on honor, empire-building, and the Emperor. The Emperor lost his divine power and the US planted a democratic constitution and government, and prohibited Japan from having an offensive military. But today, they still have the Emperor, a code of honor which is nonviolent now but still around, and they still build their empire in the Pacific and elsewhere (economically). They don't need to make their old ideology a crime because they can still achieve it in different, internationally-acceptable, ways. They didn't need to purge their idealogy completely because once nonviolent boundaries were attached, it wasn't a problem anymore.
There are not "dumping" the chemicals. They want to build a secure, floating, facility for destroying the chemicals. Building this facility in an environmentally sensitive area doesn't seem that bright. I would have expected it to be better to build it somewhere dry, like an isolated desert.
Transportation is a problem, one which is somewhat tied to security. A floating facility makes sense because you only have to transport the chemicals to the coast. Securing such a facility is easier as well.
So, the Brazilians and Germans are saying that you may spy on your own citizens to your heart's content, but you can't spy outside your own territory because that violates human rights. Sorry, but I think that's backwards. I hope the US kills this provision. I want the US government to spy on foreign nations and not spy on Americans.
Both are important. Otherwise other nations can spy on US citizens, and then just report the results to the US government. It already happens.
The Nexus is an outlier, as comes with a near-zero profit margin for Google; that's not sustainable. The Moto G is much, much more interesting because Motorola's devices are still supposed to turn a profit.
The Moto G sells for $179 unlocked with no contract. It might not be as powerful as the Nexus 5 but it is 95% of the way there for most people. Chinese devices with similar specs are in the $140-$170 range on Aliexpress. I don't see how Motorola is making much of a profit on the G either. I don't see it as being "much more interesting".
Android phones are based on a high volume, low profit model. Apple is working under a high profit model. Neither is wrong but if I want a phone that isn't overpriced, I'm not going to buy the Apple one.