...looks like not much has changed. Scamming was constant there, so you stuck with the people you knew.
The very first thing you do is exchange a small list of well known people you've done business with - your references. When one matches up between your list and their list you contact them and ask how the experience went. If it was good, you move forward and don't change until you have a damn good reason to.
It's not like there's a Yelp for spammer services, or even a normal review site. Everything is word of mouth.
The drivers are vetted by positive reviews and insanely difficult minimums...and it works fantastically. I'm aware there's theoretically an introductory period where bad people can slip through(not sure what Uber does on their own) but I've never met a bad one...while I've rarely met a traditional cab driver I'd put against an average Uber.
Part of my job involves inspecting outbound network connections from android apps. Practically every ad network is sending your coordinates or location anyways. It seems a bit weird the FTC cared that the app was doing the same when it already had ads on it...
What users don't get is that the more people use adblock, the more marketers will have to extract every last penny they can out of the users they can. That means dirtier, high ROI ads, pop-ups, etc. Most users aren't going to install adblock no matter what they do.
First of all, ad views don't make money; clickthroughs make money.
I'm well aware. Though it's worth noting what you say is mostly true for text ads/hybrid ads, and some banner companies like Google, while others(pop-ups), most other large display ad networks stay with CPMs and media buys.
That said: "Dirtier" ads also make more money for the advertiser. Animated weight loss, pop-ups, biz-opp, etc. That's what I meant and that's what will become more common if adblock ever becomes the norm. The methods they use are dirtier as well, but that's more a symptom of less scrupulous companies advertising. Right now many ad networks restrict these niches and products from advertising.
And I may be in a minority (though probably not), but I'm usually not interested in any of the products or services advertised and don't trust the sales pitch of an online ad regardless.
Second, if advertisers create more intrusive ads (which didn't work so well when they did), that's just too bad. I will either avoid the ad, or else avoid the site promoting the ad. The only thing that forcing an ad on my display would accomplish is to make me not want to look at your site, and therefore be extremely unlikely to recommend your site to someone else who might actually click on an ad. If I want to learn about a product or service, I'll do the research on my own, and ads will never be a factor. I am not an early adopter, I do not make impulse purchases, and I am not your target demographic.
People who either don't know how or choose not to block ads will have to decide for themselves whether they want to patronize a site that tolerates or facilitates intrusive advertisements.
It's not about you. It's about math and the thousands of others who WILL buy. There's always a population that won't buy and another with their credit card numbers tattooed on their foreheads. What you doesn't matter as long as they keep doing what they do.
Well pop-up windows are pretty much out because all the major browsers now block them by default. I've seen a few in-page pop-ups but those are probablly pretty easy for an ad-blocker to detect.
They just make you click on something first. Using the onclick action bypasses every major popup blocker I'm aware of.
It's not that I want to hide the ads. What I want is to hide the annoyance of the ads. Keep the ads subtle and out of the flow of what I'm on a site for, and I won't want to block them.
What the marketers don't understand is that the more annoying they get, the less eyeballs they receive because of more and more people use ad-ons like Adblock to avoid the annoyance. All they seem to understand is the lazy approach. Be loud! Be garish! Be anything but smart and honest!
What users don't get is that the more people use adblock, the more marketers will have to extract every last penny they can out of the users they can. That means dirtier, high ROI ads, pop-ups, etc. Most users aren't going to install adblock no matter what they do.
The other end of it is that marketers in general are confident that they can overcome adblock if it ever becomes popular to the point where it's a problem. Adblock only works by recognizing the domain hosting the image/scripts or common path names. Toss that banner add on the cloud, or have it hosted locally by the site owners(in a non-"banners" or "ads" subdirectory) and for the most part you've got it beat. Advertisers haven't adapted because there's not a big enough incentive to. But if push ever comes to shove, they'll win.
Imagining that AdBlock provides(or could provide) enough incentive to make anyone even think about cleaning up advertising is nothing but wishful thinking.
The fact that Wkileaks is making a big deal of the stolen stash of documents suggest they are NOT in this to provide information, but rather to further a specific agenda.
Forget for a moment about the irony of bickering over "ownership" of stolen documents. The fact that Wikileaks still HAS a copy of those documents means they weren't harmed.
They are in this to provide information, but part of their self-given task is also to get the information as much coverage as possible. Controlling the flow of information is part of this in their eyes.
As their relationship with their formal partners(Guardian, NYTimes, etc) deteriorate, the leaks have been released differently. Instead of trying to create the news, they latch onto existing stories and ride on their coat tails. In Egypt for example: News about Mohamed ElBaradei and Egypt would have been ignored had it been in the original dump of releases. But by releasing the information as Egypt starts to get international attention, the information ends up showing up in a huge variety of articles on the topic. The information spreads without being the cause of the news. It compliments it instead.
Well what I think the poster was getting at is the idea that, if you're closing off all insecure ports on all your machines themselves, then firewalls shouldn't really being doing anything anyway. It's not an either-or proposition, is it? Either you have a firewall or you have unpatched computers running with all ports open?
Except that you generally don't "close off insecure ports". You're not disabling them, you're just setting them to "not open yet". A large part of the point behind a firewall is to make sure nefarious programs can't open the ports without your knowledge.
Have you ever used Grooveshark?
It's in Flash and pretty gorgeous/easy to use. In fact, a lot of the functionality I really like in it like right click menus with unique options when you're about to play a song is only possible because of Flash. It takes a little bit to load, but there's a fair amount of functionality given for it, and afterwards it runs relatively fast.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't internet ads generate their revenue through the amount of clicks they incur? I know Google's ads do this.
By using adblock, what I'm saying is: I'm never going to be clicking on any of the ads on your website.
If I didn't use it, I still wouldn't be clicking on any ads on your website and they will also annoy me.
It's most likely that the people using ad blocking don't care about the ads you display and won't be clicking on them anyway.
Small text ads are generally pay per click, large banners are generally pay per 1000 views.
Facebook has a few problems. Overuse of ajax combined with this absolutely bizarre habit of including dynamic javascript at random points in the script. These lead to slower runtimes, especially with older browsers where (upon encountering a JS file) they completely stop doing everything else to execute it.
-We are being spied on all the time.
-They lied to us to get us into Afghanistan. ...just like in Vietnam
-We have consistently overthrown governments in foreign countries.
-We've had orders that involved killing US citizens make it remarkably high up the ladder.
I agree with the examples you chose, but our government hasn't exactly given us a multitude of reasons to trust them
The United States Postal Service is a government agency. That's why punishments for interfering with mail are so harsh. The letters/mailboxes and whatnot are their property until you take possession of it. (Yes, the post office owns EVERY mailbox)
Your ISP/file/website/torrent has nothing to do with the government. Big difference.
Except that Google gets much more than $2.00 CPM on searches. MUCH more.
Checking some quick numbers from campaigns I have access to show it's actually in the double digits in some pretty low-intensity/cheap vertical.
I guess we'd have to know what percent of searches trigger an ad to get anything conclusive though.
Agreed. I'll bet if you polled the same people they'd say they hate seeing weight loss/dating/bizop ads everywhere.
But the fact is that those are the things that you can advertise to based on the general demographic of a large site. Without more specific information....yeah.
I used to work for a semi-private company/gov org doing tech support for police and fire fighters back when the MSBlast worm hit. While going around to police cars and fire stations cleaning the infections, we found out they were infected with a lot more.
Why? Because they looked at a LOT of porn. Seriously. Firefighters have a porn archive like you wouldn't believe. And a virus archive to match.
There's a difference between what the government has the ability to do, and what is a right.
Technically they could all give us free cheeseburger tuesdays, but that doesn't mean(with current legislation) you have a right to a free cheeseburger every Tuesday.
I disagree. I'm not an editor there, but I frequently read the talk pages(I find them more interesting and more telling than the main pages sometimes).
The top editors quite obviously revert edits from "lesser" users for no reason other than disagreement with POV, or just pride in what they initially wrote. Wikipedia at this point has so many rules that someone who spends a lot of time on Wikipedia can almost entirely control articles with them. If you don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of these rules(even though many are selectively enforced) you really have no control over the article. It's quite similar to the idea that police have so many laws at their disposal that they can nearly always find something wrong with your driving/car if they really want to give you a ticket(such as slight overhangs of the license plate frame)
One glaring example I remember is Bristol Palin. Someone managed to get her article removed(though she was obviously notable), redirected it a section about Sarah Palin's family, then changed the the anchor so that the place it was redirecting to had nothing to do with her. Could it be an accident? Yeah. But there's a lot of similar examples.
Also, despite the number of articles with built in criticism sections, large corporations and political figures will often remove the criticism section entirely, or move it to a separate article. Why? Because those locations get a fraction of the traffic.
Wikipedia ranks too well in the search engines for special interest groups and PR/reputation management companies to ignore. Slowly but surely, they've been building up influence and sockpuppet accounts. And Wikipedia has changed a lot as a result.
Obviously I can't cite any of this, so I understand if you guys take it with a grain of salt. But it's been something I've been seeing for quite awhile now, and I'm quite confident it's happening.
There is little intrinsic reason that must be the case. It seems more common that the market is manipulated to increase unemployment ("for the good of the economy") and then businesses that depended on consumers flush with cash take a nosedive.
Gotta respectfully disagree there. Yes there is a certain focus on automation that does lead to people losing their jobs, but at the same time in a good economy businesses want to expand, which invariably requires workers.
Low level laborers do feel the brunt of this though, simply because to a business you are generally worth the sum of your skills, and it's easier to automate. But imo expansion creates more jobs than automation loses.
Nope, it's the same paperwork with bigger numbers at worst. However, your costs are raw materials, services, rent/property, and payroll. If labor is short, the services and payroll increase in proportion to your customers' buying power. Raw materials and rent/property will lag behind offering you better margin.
Some businesses need all of those, some don't. But no. Property is barely even an expense. And raw materials will rise. Businesses that are successful(running parallel with my own) will all want more, and that causes the price to rise. Companies win/lose by their differences, not their similarities.
The bust side of the cycle happens IFF you and enough others seek out cheap wage slaves while keeping your prices high (conveniently ignoring that the buying power is contingent on full employment) that unemployment rises and consumer confidence falls. Effectively, that's a way to cash in general prosperity for private gain.
Once again, see General Motors.
Essentially, you are advicating class warefare. That is, you suggest that one class (business owners) are intrinsically in opposition to another (employees) and that for one to win, the other must inevitably suffer. If true, then it means we MUST design a better economic system. That is, out economic technology is defective. It's an engineering problem.
How are the employees suffering? If you're hiring people in areas with high unemployment and giving them jobs to sustain themselves, how is that exploitation?
Profit margins are not exploitation. They're what's necessary if you want a job.
Sometimes the worth of your skills goes down. In which case you go out, and you acquire more skills. Make yourself better. Increase your worth.
I'm not a business owner because I'm gifted at business(I'm not). I'm not a business owner because I wanted to be. I am a business owner because when I saw a problem, got off my ass, and fixed it. I didn't (and don't) have all the skills I needed, so I went out and got them(no, not through some $46k/year college either) I don't need the government to watch out for me. I don't need a restructuring of the economic model. I'll do what I have to do to make myself better and to make sure I succeed. I recommend you do the same.
If you don't like your circumstances, make them better.
And yes, after re-reading this I've become fully aware of what a confusing mistake it was to try to use chairs as a way to measure currency.
Especially when he's selling the chairs for less than the original chairs were worth.
Doh.
In your own words, "the business has to grow", and in order to do that it must make profit. The only way it can make a profit is to sell its product for more than it costs to manufacture. Economy of scale has no effect on this. In order to generate a profit, income must be greater than expenses.
Unfortunately, this means that the one thing the free market cannot do is pay people what their labour is actually worth.
No, the free market DECIDES what the labor is worth. The entire concept of 'worth' is a market concept. If someone won't pay you X amount to do Y, then your skills at Y aren't worth X.
An example: A lumberjack and a carpenter each want a chair. So the lumberjack cuts a tree, and the carpenter makes two chairs from it. Result: both the lumberjack and the carpenter worked together and got a chair each for free.
Here is how it works under capitalism: A lumberjack cuts a tree, and the carpenter builds two chairs from it and delivers them to the chair shop. They are paid for this work by a corporation. When they each want to buy a chair, they go to the chair shop and buy a chair each. They notice that the sum of their purchases is greater than what they were paid to make the two chairs, so they have to borrow the rest of the money from a bank, which lends them some money that belongs to the corporation they worked for. They then have to pay interest on the money they borrowed. Result: both the lumberjack and the carpenter built a chair for free, paid to buy it, and paid to borrow the money to buy it, effectively paying the same person for it twice, and making a net loss in the process, while the corporation makes a profit without doing anything except hoarding money.
No, that's not at all how it works under capitalism. Here's how it would work:
Lumberjack cuts down a tree. Carpenter figures out he can build 20 chairs from that tree. The corporation pays the lumberjack for the tree(let's say he gets paid 5 chairs-worth of money), and the carpenter 8 chairs worth.
These chairs are sold in a store. The lumberjack buys a chair, and is left with 4 chairs worth of money. The carpenter builds his own damn chair.
The lumberjack decides that since he's supplying all of the raw materials, he should get more than 5 chairs worth of money. The corporation disagrees. So the lumberjack cuts down 5 more trees and now has 25 chairs worth of money. He uses that to pay the carpenter 10 chairs worth of money rather than the 8 he got from the corporation. He uses the other 15 chairs worth of money to travel to a different county to convince a furniture store to start stocking the chairs the carpenter built. He undercuts the corporation by selling the chairs for 90% of what the corporation does. The lumberjack is now cutting his own wood, exporting to a furniture store, and is making 13.5 chairs per tree(would've been 15, but he's selling it for 90% of what the corporation he used to work for did).
He then hires another lumberjack so he can concentrate on selling the chairs more.
The theme of capitalism: If you don't like it, do it better.
In a world where unemployment is low or even non-existent, you can raise your prices because there's plenty of people who can afford your product anyway.The people who are most adversely affected by low unemployment are the trult rich who would just spread their money across a wide portfolio and live on the proceeds without actually doing anything for their living.
Pretty much everyone else does fine. You can grow your business because there's a lot of well off consumers out there ready to spend if you offer them anything that they want. Or you can offer something to other businesses who are ready to spend in order to help them get consumers to spend on them. They CAN spend because there's no shortage of consumer cash ready to be spent on them.
An economy where labor is in shortage encourages progress through automation. That automation causes little pain since in a labor short economy, anyone displaced will get a new job rather quickly and painlessly. An economy where labor is plentiful just leaves human beings doing unfulfilling work that can and should be done by machines.
Historically, when unemployment is low, the economy and general prosperity has grown. When it is high, only the top 5 or 10 % prosper and the rest backslide. The economy as a whole tends to slow down.
Consider the current situation for auto makers. Sales are anemic so they are in trouble. Sales are anemic because people can't afford a new car even though they would like one.
You might notice that when consumer confidence is high (that is, when people feel sure that they will continue to have a good income), retail does well and businesses that sell to retail businesses do well in turn. When consumer confidence is low (that is, people are worried they might be laid off or forced to accept a pay cut), retail tanks and so do the businesses that sell to retailers.
You just stated the first half of a cycle.
Business does well->Unemployment goes down->Workers gain more influence->Business goes down->Unemployment goes up->Workers lose benefits->Back to the beginning.
It's not a good thing or a bad thing. It's just how it is. The other thing is that there's a pretty big gap inbetween the two extremes where money is stockpiled. That later gets used to ride out the storm when shit hits the fan.
My guess is that you run a small to medium sized business. Wouldn't you love to have people with plenty of cash out there ready to pay you?
Yes, small to medium. It's 2009 though; there's always more people to pay me. It's just a question of where they are.
Consider, if due to a labor shortage you had to double your payroll and nearly double what you pay your suppliers (because they had to double their payroll), raw materials would still cost the same (no more scarce than they are now) and property would be no more expensive (same reason), and so you would have to NEARLY double your prices to tread water.
That's the beauty of a global economy. I will not have a labor shortage. I'll just have workers that live farther away.
However, your customers have FULLY doubled their buying power. The difference between NEARLY and FULLY is your added prosperity in a labor short economy.
More buying power is a good thing on my end(I like dealing with the clients that would benefit from that more than the alternative), but it doesn't matter honestly.
What you're talking about(even for a more typical business than my own) is just putting money in one pocket and taking it out the other.
I don't live off gross volume of transactions. I live off the profit margins on those. If I'm paying more and charging more, all it means is more paperwork.
If your business somehow revolves around saving labor or increasing productivity, you're in the money!
Look; this is all great in the hypothetical. But it just doesn't work that way. The effect of a global economy really can't be ov
I'm not a liberal actually, but I know what he was getting at(which is why I posted the picture). Think fiscally conservative Democrat
I tend to like the Democrats largely because I believe that one of the things that does need to be funded is education. Oh yes, and I don't like wars.
But I believe in balance.
Put too much control in the hands general population who doesn't understand business, and the idiots will run business into the ground.
Put too much in the hands of business, and they will exploit the population.
Slashdot Mirror
...looks like not much has changed. Scamming was constant there, so you stuck with the people you knew.
The very first thing you do is exchange a small list of well known people you've done business with - your references. When one matches up between your list and their list you contact them and ask how the experience went. If it was good, you move forward and don't change until you have a damn good reason to.
It's not like there's a Yelp for spammer services, or even a normal review site. Everything is word of mouth.
The drivers are vetted by positive reviews and insanely difficult minimums...and it works fantastically. I'm aware there's theoretically an introductory period where bad people can slip through(not sure what Uber does on their own) but I've never met a bad one...while I've rarely met a traditional cab driver I'd put against an average Uber.
Part of my job involves inspecting outbound network connections from android apps. Practically every ad network is sending your coordinates or location anyways. It seems a bit weird the FTC cared that the app was doing the same when it already had ads on it...
What users don't get is that the more people use adblock, the more marketers will have to extract every last penny they can out of the users they can. That means dirtier, high ROI ads, pop-ups, etc. Most users aren't going to install adblock no matter what they do.
First of all, ad views don't make money; clickthroughs make money.
I'm well aware. Though it's worth noting what you say is mostly true for text ads/hybrid ads, and some banner companies like Google, while others(pop-ups), most other large display ad networks stay with CPMs and media buys.
That said: "Dirtier" ads also make more money for the advertiser. Animated weight loss, pop-ups, biz-opp, etc. That's what I meant and that's what will become more common if adblock ever becomes the norm. The methods they use are dirtier as well, but that's more a symptom of less scrupulous companies advertising. Right now many ad networks restrict these niches and products from advertising.
And I may be in a minority (though probably not), but I'm usually not interested in any of the products or services advertised and don't trust the sales pitch of an online ad regardless.
Second, if advertisers create more intrusive ads (which didn't work so well when they did), that's just too bad. I will either avoid the ad, or else avoid the site promoting the ad. The only thing that forcing an ad on my display would accomplish is to make me not want to look at your site, and therefore be extremely unlikely to recommend your site to someone else who might actually click on an ad. If I want to learn about a product or service, I'll do the research on my own, and ads will never be a factor. I am not an early adopter, I do not make impulse purchases, and I am not your target demographic.
People who either don't know how or choose not to block ads will have to decide for themselves whether they want to patronize a site that tolerates or facilitates intrusive advertisements.
It's not about you. It's about math and the thousands of others who WILL buy. There's always a population that won't buy and another with their credit card numbers tattooed on their foreheads. What you doesn't matter as long as they keep doing what they do.
Well pop-up windows are pretty much out because all the major browsers now block them by default. I've seen a few in-page pop-ups but those are probablly pretty easy for an ad-blocker to detect.
They just make you click on something first. Using the onclick action bypasses every major popup blocker I'm aware of.
It's not that I want to hide the ads. What I want is to hide the annoyance of the ads. Keep the ads subtle and out of the flow of what I'm on a site for, and I won't want to block them.
What the marketers don't understand is that the more annoying they get, the less eyeballs they receive because of more and more people use ad-ons like Adblock to avoid the annoyance. All they seem to understand is the lazy approach. Be loud! Be garish! Be anything but smart and honest!
What users don't get is that the more people use adblock, the more marketers will have to extract every last penny they can out of the users they can. That means dirtier, high ROI ads, pop-ups, etc. Most users aren't going to install adblock no matter what they do.
The other end of it is that marketers in general are confident that they can overcome adblock if it ever becomes popular to the point where it's a problem. Adblock only works by recognizing the domain hosting the image/scripts or common path names.
Toss that banner add on the cloud, or have it hosted locally by the site owners(in a non-"banners" or "ads" subdirectory) and for the most part you've got it beat. Advertisers haven't adapted because there's not a big enough incentive to. But if push ever comes to shove, they'll win.
Imagining that AdBlock provides(or could provide) enough incentive to make anyone even think about cleaning up advertising is nothing but wishful thinking.
The fact that Wkileaks is making a big deal of the stolen stash of documents suggest they are NOT in this to provide information, but rather to further a specific agenda.
Forget for a moment about the irony of bickering over "ownership" of stolen documents. The fact that Wikileaks still HAS a copy of those documents means they weren't harmed.
They are in this to provide information, but part of their self-given task is also to get the information as much coverage as possible. Controlling the flow of information is part of this in their eyes.
As their relationship with their formal partners(Guardian, NYTimes, etc) deteriorate, the leaks have been released differently. Instead of trying to create the news, they latch onto existing stories and ride on their coat tails. In Egypt for example: News about Mohamed ElBaradei and Egypt would have been ignored had it been in the original dump of releases. But by releasing the information as Egypt starts to get international attention, the information ends up showing up in a huge variety of articles on the topic. The information spreads without being the cause of the news. It compliments it instead.
Well what I think the poster was getting at is the idea that, if you're closing off all insecure ports on all your machines themselves, then firewalls shouldn't really being doing anything anyway. It's not an either-or proposition, is it? Either you have a firewall or you have unpatched computers running with all ports open?
Except that you generally don't "close off insecure ports". You're not disabling them, you're just setting them to "not open yet". A large part of the point behind a firewall is to make sure nefarious programs can't open the ports without your knowledge.
Have you ever used Grooveshark?
It's in Flash and pretty gorgeous/easy to use. In fact, a lot of the functionality I really like in it like right click menus with unique options when you're about to play a song is only possible because of Flash. It takes a little bit to load, but there's a fair amount of functionality given for it, and afterwards it runs relatively fast.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't internet ads generate their revenue through the amount of clicks they incur? I know Google's ads do this. By using adblock, what I'm saying is: I'm never going to be clicking on any of the ads on your website. If I didn't use it, I still wouldn't be clicking on any ads on your website and they will also annoy me. It's most likely that the people using ad blocking don't care about the ads you display and won't be clicking on them anyway.
Small text ads are generally pay per click, large banners are generally pay per 1000 views.
Facebook has a few problems. Overuse of ajax combined with this absolutely bizarre habit of including dynamic javascript at random points in the script. These lead to slower runtimes, especially with older browsers where (upon encountering a JS file) they completely stop doing everything else to execute it.
-We are being spied on all the time.
...just like in Vietnam
-We have consistently overthrown governments in foreign countries.
-They lied to us to get us into Afghanistan.
-We've had orders that involved killing US citizens make it remarkably high up the ladder.
I agree with the examples you chose, but our government hasn't exactly given us a multitude of reasons to trust them
The United States Postal Service is a government agency. That's why punishments for interfering with mail are so harsh. The letters/mailboxes and whatnot are their property until you take possession of it. (Yes, the post office owns EVERY mailbox) Your ISP/file/website/torrent has nothing to do with the government. Big difference.
Except that Google gets much more than $2.00 CPM on searches. MUCH more.
Checking some quick numbers from campaigns I have access to show it's actually in the double digits in some pretty low-intensity/cheap vertical.
I guess we'd have to know what percent of searches trigger an ad to get anything conclusive though.
We're living la vida bureaucracy. Oh yeah, it also costs a lot to tap all our phones.
Agreed. I'll bet if you polled the same people they'd say they hate seeing weight loss/dating/bizop ads everywhere.
But the fact is that those are the things that you can advertise to based on the general demographic of a large site. Without more specific information....yeah.
I used to work for a semi-private company/gov org doing tech support for police and fire fighters back when the MSBlast worm hit. While going around to police cars and fire stations cleaning the infections, we found out they were infected with a lot more. Why? Because they looked at a LOT of porn. Seriously. Firefighters have a porn archive like you wouldn't believe. And a virus archive to match.
There's a difference between what the government has the ability to do, and what is a right. Technically they could all give us free cheeseburger tuesdays, but that doesn't mean(with current legislation) you have a right to a free cheeseburger every Tuesday.
I disagree. I'm not an editor there, but I frequently read the talk pages(I find them more interesting and more telling than the main pages sometimes).
The top editors quite obviously revert edits from "lesser" users for no reason other than disagreement with POV, or just pride in what they initially wrote. Wikipedia at this point has so many rules that someone who spends a lot of time on Wikipedia can almost entirely control articles with them.
If you don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of these rules(even though many are selectively enforced) you really have no control over the article. It's quite similar to the idea that police have so many laws at their disposal that they can nearly always find something wrong with your driving/car if they really want to give you a ticket(such as slight overhangs of the license plate frame)
One glaring example I remember is Bristol Palin. Someone managed to get her article removed(though she was obviously notable), redirected it a section about Sarah Palin's family, then changed the the anchor so that the place it was redirecting to had nothing to do with her. Could it be an accident? Yeah. But there's a lot of similar examples.
Also, despite the number of articles with built in criticism sections, large corporations and political figures will often remove the criticism section entirely, or move it to a separate article. Why? Because those locations get a fraction of the traffic.
Wikipedia ranks too well in the search engines for special interest groups and PR/reputation management companies to ignore. Slowly but surely, they've been building up influence and sockpuppet accounts. And Wikipedia has changed a lot as a result.
Obviously I can't cite any of this, so I understand if you guys take it with a grain of salt. But it's been something I've been seeing for quite awhile now, and I'm quite confident it's happening.
Gentlemen, grab the closest hairdryer. The time has come to melt the plastic, and make our own nation!
There is little intrinsic reason that must be the case. It seems more common that the market is manipulated to increase unemployment ("for the good of the economy") and then businesses that depended on consumers flush with cash take a nosedive.
Gotta respectfully disagree there. Yes there is a certain focus on automation that does lead to people losing their jobs, but at the same time in a good economy businesses want to expand, which invariably requires workers. Low level laborers do feel the brunt of this though, simply because to a business you are generally worth the sum of your skills, and it's easier to automate. But imo expansion creates more jobs than automation loses.
Nope, it's the same paperwork with bigger numbers at worst. However, your costs are raw materials, services, rent/property, and payroll. If labor is short, the services and payroll increase in proportion to your customers' buying power. Raw materials and rent/property will lag behind offering you better margin.
Some businesses need all of those, some don't. But no. Property is barely even an expense. And raw materials will rise. Businesses that are successful(running parallel with my own) will all want more, and that causes the price to rise. Companies win/lose by their differences, not their similarities.
The bust side of the cycle happens IFF you and enough others seek out cheap wage slaves while keeping your prices high (conveniently ignoring that the buying power is contingent on full employment) that unemployment rises and consumer confidence falls. Effectively, that's a way to cash in general prosperity for private gain.
Once again, see General Motors.
Essentially, you are advicating class warefare. That is, you suggest that one class (business owners) are intrinsically in opposition to another (employees) and that for one to win, the other must inevitably suffer. If true, then it means we MUST design a better economic system. That is, out economic technology is defective. It's an engineering problem.
How are the employees suffering? If you're hiring people in areas with high unemployment and giving them jobs to sustain themselves, how is that exploitation?
Profit margins are not exploitation. They're what's necessary if you want a job.
Sometimes the worth of your skills goes down. In which case you go out, and you acquire more skills. Make yourself better. Increase your worth.
I'm not a business owner because I'm gifted at business(I'm not). I'm not a business owner because I wanted to be. I am a business owner because when I saw a problem, got off my ass, and fixed it. I didn't (and don't) have all the skills I needed, so I went out and got them(no, not through some $46k/year college either)
I don't need the government to watch out for me. I don't need a restructuring of the economic model. I'll do what I have to do to make myself better and to make sure I succeed. I recommend you do the same.
If you don't like your circumstances, make them better.
And yes, after re-reading this I've become fully aware of what a confusing mistake it was to try to use chairs as a way to measure currency.
Especially when he's selling the chairs for less than the original chairs were worth.
Doh.
In your own words, "the business has to grow", and in order to do that it must make profit. The only way it can make a profit is to sell its product for more than it costs to manufacture. Economy of scale has no effect on this. In order to generate a profit, income must be greater than expenses. Unfortunately, this means that the one thing the free market cannot do is pay people what their labour is actually worth.
No, the free market DECIDES what the labor is worth. The entire concept of 'worth' is a market concept. If someone won't pay you X amount to do Y, then your skills at Y aren't worth X.
An example: A lumberjack and a carpenter each want a chair. So the lumberjack cuts a tree, and the carpenter makes two chairs from it. Result: both the lumberjack and the carpenter worked together and got a chair each for free. Here is how it works under capitalism: A lumberjack cuts a tree, and the carpenter builds two chairs from it and delivers them to the chair shop. They are paid for this work by a corporation. When they each want to buy a chair, they go to the chair shop and buy a chair each. They notice that the sum of their purchases is greater than what they were paid to make the two chairs, so they have to borrow the rest of the money from a bank, which lends them some money that belongs to the corporation they worked for. They then have to pay interest on the money they borrowed. Result: both the lumberjack and the carpenter built a chair for free, paid to buy it, and paid to borrow the money to buy it, effectively paying the same person for it twice, and making a net loss in the process, while the corporation makes a profit without doing anything except hoarding money.
No, that's not at all how it works under capitalism. Here's how it would work:
Lumberjack cuts down a tree. Carpenter figures out he can build 20 chairs from that tree. The corporation pays the lumberjack for the tree(let's say he gets paid 5 chairs-worth of money), and the carpenter 8 chairs worth.
These chairs are sold in a store. The lumberjack buys a chair, and is left with 4 chairs worth of money. The carpenter builds his own damn chair.
The lumberjack decides that since he's supplying all of the raw materials, he should get more than 5 chairs worth of money. The corporation disagrees. So the lumberjack cuts down 5 more trees and now has 25 chairs worth of money. He uses that to pay the carpenter 10 chairs worth of money rather than the 8 he got from the corporation. He uses the other 15 chairs worth of money to travel to a different county to convince a furniture store to start stocking the chairs the carpenter built. He undercuts the corporation by selling the chairs for 90% of what the corporation does. The lumberjack is now cutting his own wood, exporting to a furniture store, and is making 13.5 chairs per tree(would've been 15, but he's selling it for 90% of what the corporation he used to work for did).
He then hires another lumberjack so he can concentrate on selling the chairs more.
The theme of capitalism: If you don't like it, do it better.
In a world where unemployment is low or even non-existent, you can raise your prices because there's plenty of people who can afford your product anyway.The people who are most adversely affected by low unemployment are the trult rich who would just spread their money across a wide portfolio and live on the proceeds without actually doing anything for their living. Pretty much everyone else does fine. You can grow your business because there's a lot of well off consumers out there ready to spend if you offer them anything that they want. Or you can offer something to other businesses who are ready to spend in order to help them get consumers to spend on them. They CAN spend because there's no shortage of consumer cash ready to be spent on them. An economy where labor is in shortage encourages progress through automation. That automation causes little pain since in a labor short economy, anyone displaced will get a new job rather quickly and painlessly. An economy where labor is plentiful just leaves human beings doing unfulfilling work that can and should be done by machines. Historically, when unemployment is low, the economy and general prosperity has grown. When it is high, only the top 5 or 10 % prosper and the rest backslide. The economy as a whole tends to slow down. Consider the current situation for auto makers. Sales are anemic so they are in trouble. Sales are anemic because people can't afford a new car even though they would like one. You might notice that when consumer confidence is high (that is, when people feel sure that they will continue to have a good income), retail does well and businesses that sell to retail businesses do well in turn. When consumer confidence is low (that is, people are worried they might be laid off or forced to accept a pay cut), retail tanks and so do the businesses that sell to retailers.
You just stated the first half of a cycle. Business does well->Unemployment goes down->Workers gain more influence->Business goes down->Unemployment goes up->Workers lose benefits->Back to the beginning. It's not a good thing or a bad thing. It's just how it is. The other thing is that there's a pretty big gap inbetween the two extremes where money is stockpiled. That later gets used to ride out the storm when shit hits the fan.
My guess is that you run a small to medium sized business. Wouldn't you love to have people with plenty of cash out there ready to pay you?
Yes, small to medium. It's 2009 though; there's always more people to pay me. It's just a question of where they are.
Consider, if due to a labor shortage you had to double your payroll and nearly double what you pay your suppliers (because they had to double their payroll), raw materials would still cost the same (no more scarce than they are now) and property would be no more expensive (same reason), and so you would have to NEARLY double your prices to tread water.
That's the beauty of a global economy. I will not have a labor shortage. I'll just have workers that live farther away.
However, your customers have FULLY doubled their buying power. The difference between NEARLY and FULLY is your added prosperity in a labor short economy.
More buying power is a good thing on my end(I like dealing with the clients that would benefit from that more than the alternative), but it doesn't matter honestly. What you're talking about(even for a more typical business than my own) is just putting money in one pocket and taking it out the other. I don't live off gross volume of transactions. I live off the profit margins on those. If I'm paying more and charging more, all it means is more paperwork.
If your business somehow revolves around saving labor or increasing productivity, you're in the money!
Look; this is all great in the hypothetical. But it just doesn't work that way. The effect of a global economy really can't be ov
I'm not a liberal actually, but I know what he was getting at(which is why I posted the picture). Think fiscally conservative Democrat
I tend to like the Democrats largely because I believe that one of the things that does need to be funded is education. Oh yes, and I don't like wars.
But I believe in balance.
Put too much control in the hands general population who doesn't understand business, and the idiots will run business into the ground.
Put too much in the hands of business, and they will exploit the population.