would be the choice between being the average American, who makes $40,000 and saves $500, and the average Canadian, who makes $35000 but only spends $33000. Note that again, the American is clearly richer, while the Canadian has more savings.
The low net worths of Americans indicates that we aren't saving enough, not that we are getting paid less than our fair share, which the OP tried to imply. Almost every time variations of this statistic are cited, this same illogical mistake is made.
If I make $500,000 each year and spend the same, I have zero net worth. Meanwhile, if you make $20,000 but only spend $19,000, you gain $1000 in net worth each year. Yet who would you rather be?
The only relevant statistic is how much we earn per hour (ie, productivity), and yes, we beat Canada, Europe, Japan, etc. The fact that we choose to work more and spend more on average is not a public policy issue. If someone is using "net worth" in a political debate, they are probably full of it, and in almost all cases, looking at total earnings or earnings per hour will paint an entirely different picture.
CEO, who actually is a scientist, of all things. However, is her opinion worth 80 times that of my manager, or myself, both of whom are also PhDs? My manager is about the same age as her, understands the business well and is very smart. I hope people will say the same of me when I am mid/late-career. I could buy the argument that she should receive something like half a million - but not eight million.
Figuring that leaves me with $3 million to work with...that should get me two university professors, two hot-shot MBA grads, two accountants, two lawyers, two scientists/engineers in the relevant business, a doctor just for balance, four secretaries - and a cool half million for me.
I am sure that together we can make just as good of decisions as your precious CEO.
Actually, I think the problem here is the Lake Wobegon Effect - no company is will to admit that it would dare hire a below average CEO. Therefore, of course theirs deserves pay greater than the average...
So does soda. The former have a large volume and are fragile, the latter is heavy. Heck, the transportation costs for gasoline are more than 5%...and gas is easy to move. I not have a color printer. Waste of money and effort. I can print pictures for 12 cents at dozens of online shops. Printing b&w on my crappy inkjet is similar in cost to having it done at a print shop (8-10 cents/page).
There are virtually no drugs for "the common cold". There are over-the-counter treatments of the symptoms, but nothing I know of for treating the disease is actually out of the lab.
Most of those econ PhDs are making six figures and/or and have summers off. Tough life.
cost 200 times what a potato does (or your computer's main processor costs a few hundred million times what the dirt it was made from cost) then we do not have much to discuss. I have no idea what you are talking about in most of these cases. You can buy cheap crappy cables, awesome cables, and everything in between. The difference is more on the outside than the inside - are they coated in cheap plastic or quality material? I don't think I want a printer cartridge that is five times as big. Five times as cheap would be nice, but ink ain't cheap. There is plenty of competition in that market. Are you just bothered by the "sell the razor cheap, sell the blades high" business model? It is quite common, and is not indicitive of a problem. If you think big pharma could cure the common cold but chose not to you are absolutely ludicrious, and know virtually nothing either about medicine OR business. Curing the "common cold" is like curing cancer - both are not one condition, but hundreds of variants. Therefore, there is no "cure". And yes, big pharma has done lots of work on tackling some of the more common types of viruses. If and when they make a successful drug, they will make zillions.
Uh huh...the econ PhDs are wrong. I should trust a guy on slashdot, who just says it is so!
costs unless they wanted to. They simply could license the technology to GM, Ford, Toyota, etc. Actually, this is what they would do. They could license it to close to $3k per engine (allowing the car companies and consumers a small cut, just to lure them along). It would then lose a few hundred bucks in gas profits for each license sold. This is absolutely safe and sure as rain. What would be dangerous is to hide the technology and hope no one figures out a way around your patent.
My company regular introduces products that replace the need for old ones - we eat our own lunch all of the time. So does every other company on earth. Why? Because if our new product is better than the old one, we can sell it for more. There is more surplus benefit (consumer + producer) to capture, more pie to be divided. As long as we hold the patent, we can make the consumer just a whee bit better off and keep the rest of the new pie for ourselves. This is a mathematical certainty.
That changes things, but not in the way that you expect. It makes it even MORE impossible to keep the genie in the bottle, according to basic game theory. Exxon would have every incentive to introduce the engine under this scenario they did before. So would Shell or GM or whoever owned the competing technology. Any way you cut it, the marginal choice is $2000 or $300 (actually, the $300 is too high, because Exxon would not be eating just its own business, but that of Shell, Chevron, etc). Outside of idiotic regulation, which is essentially implausible in this situation, nothing would stop this from coming to market.
They make a lot more money from owning oil (lately at least) than selling it.
Under this hypothetical scenerio, Exxon trades $3k in sales for $3k in profits. That is ALWAYS a winner. The numbers will always work out this way, because margins are always less than or equal to one (and typically much, much less).
or technology? Yes, they keep an aura of sentimentality around "natural" diamonds in order to keep the prices high in the face of cheaper synthetics, but that is a different issue - taking advantage of customer irrationality. Reminds me a lot of Whole Foods and the like, actually.
I work for a major corporation. Even in our notoriously-fast segment (electronics manufacture), we project everything into the indefinite future. The bottom line is whether it will pay off in the long run, assuming normal rates of interest, depreciation, etc. We do also have shorter-term targets, as cash-flow is another major issue for a corporation.
Don't be confused by sunk costs. If you built a widget factory, and now realize that a wadget factory would make you zillions, you will build a wadget factory. Yes, they can afford to lose $300 to make $2000...who couldn't? who wouldn't?
The problem of stickiness and compatibility is a real market failure, but unrelated to what we are talking about.
And even if they did, Exxon is getting a 10:1 trade. I am sure Exxon would be willing to let all of its oil fields disappear into the void if I could make ten times as much selling cars.
You need to rephrase your numbers...would I rather have one million in capital, depreciating to zero over five years (standard assumption for a corporation) and making $30k/year, or scrap the capital few hundred thousand and license for my new patent to GM and Ford for $250k/year? You are being confused by sunk costs.
In other words, $2000 MORE than I would pay for a non-super engine. This is 100% profit for Exxon. Actually, since I assumed gas was $3.00/gal, that number should be $3000, not $2000.
example is one most often cited and quickly refuted. If Exxon, or anyone else, had such a device, they could make far more money selling the engine than the oil - a LOT more. So much, in fact, that any tiny market imperfection would be dwarfed and correspondingly ignored.
Think about it this way - if Exxon could build an engine that saved me 1000 gallons of gas over the lifetime of my car, I should be willing to pay at least a $2000 premium for it, right?
Now, how much money does Exxon make selling me 1000 gallons of gas? Figuring a un-realistically high margin of 10%, they make no more than $300.
Now, if you are greedy-bastard Exxon exec holding the patent for this new engine, which do you do? Sell engines or sell oil?
My carbon offsets for my vehicle are independant of my green electricty program. I pay someone to offset my truck's carbon (actually, I overpay, according to their statistics). It is of no matter to me how they do it, as long as they do. As for my electricity, my company purchases green power with the money I pay them. Because of this program, they are installing a number of wind generators right now in part of my state.
The people there have a birthrate FAR below replacement. Saying that a couple of young men living together in a tiny apartment in Manhattan use less energy than a family of five living in the burbs is rather meaningless. Those couple of guys either have to move out of their hole in the wall or we go extinct. Also, NYC cannot provide its own food, energy, materials etc. That Iowa farmer with the F350 isn't just driving it for himself - he is driving it for you.
High-density living is probably more energy efficient on the whole (due to public transport and smaller homes) but not as much as you are estimating.
I don't give much credit for planting trees, unless you bought the land and converted it from something else to forest. Trees will grow on their own if you let them.
of someone buying a patent to "bury" a good technology. Just about every elementary economics textbook clearly demonstrates how that if the technology truly has a benefit, the company would make MORE money by using the new technology than hiding it.
I can and do offset the carbon emissions from my small truck for $50/year, and get all of my energy from green sources (mostly wind and biomass) by paying an extra 1.6 cent/kwhr.
I am almost completely green for $120 a year. Why aren't you?
50% of people (and 99% percent of liberals) whine about the environment, and what the government should do to force everyone else (especially big business) to do something about it. 1% do something avoid hypocrisy and do something themselves.
The vast majority of these pirates are likely to be among the heaviest downloaders on their system, akin to the biggest hogs at the buffet line. Depending on what kind of system you are talking about, it is likely that these hogs are making the system slower for everyone else. My ISP (the local cable company) never performs anywhere near their advertised "up to XXX megabits/sec" speed because so many people in my apartment complex use them (which I can infer from the absurd number of wireless systems I can pick up).
By slaughtering a few of these cheating hogs, you lose them (and maybe a couple of their other cheating hog friends in protest), but in return remove a lot of fat from your system.
that, people quickly unlearn what the taxes are. Quick question - what is the sales tax in your state? Now, what is the gasoline tax? Odds are just about every middle-school student can answer the first one, but few people can answer the last one. European governments need to hide their ridiculous taxes, so they bury them in the price.
If you think someone is actually selling flights for a euro, you DESERVE to get scammed.
campground in Chicago, me and my gf my have a good time on our vacation there. Buying used stuff does not mean that you are escaping the companies...you are just one step removed, and still dependent on them. I am willing to bet that you used 50 items containing or produced with products from my company in the last week, even though you probably have no idea who we are. Actually, your computer and car almost certainly contain several such materials.
Strange that I never have a problem with "hidden fees" - which inevitably means "I was too lazy to read fees". Yes, you pay taxes at a hotel...where do you think the water comes from? the streets? the cops?
Defense is about a quarter of the federal budget, or about an eighth of the total government (state and local spend roughly equal to the feds). If we could cut that eighth by half, we would be spending about as much as those non-war-mongering Europeans. Of course, then no one would be there to protect them...
Yes, government is wasteful, but not THAT wasteful. In any case, most of the waste occurs before they get your money (because you and everyone else bends over backwards to avoid having to pay, which is a waste of time and resources that goes unaccounted). I would be interested in knowing by what standard you judge our society corrupt - I would argue that it is one of the least-corrupt societies in history.
made your clothes, your house, your car, and your computer, and virtually everything else you own or consume.
Please sell everything you own, and stand outside naked in the rain. Or admit that you really are willing to deal with "normal" businesses. Most black/grey market stuff is either cheap knock-offs, or costs less due to failing to reward everyone who created it, or by dodging taxes. I do not like taxes either, but they are the price we pay to live in a civil society. Suck it up and pay your fair share.
Slashdot Mirror
would be the choice between being the average American, who makes $40,000 and saves $500, and the average Canadian, who makes $35000 but only spends $33000. Note that again, the American is clearly richer, while the Canadian has more savings.
The low net worths of Americans indicates that we aren't saving enough, not that we are getting paid less than our fair share, which the OP tried to imply. Almost every time variations of this statistic are cited, this same illogical mistake is made.
If I make $500,000 each year and spend the same, I have zero net worth. Meanwhile, if you make $20,000 but only spend $19,000, you gain $1000 in net worth each year. Yet who would you rather be?
The only relevant statistic is how much we earn per hour (ie, productivity), and yes, we beat Canada, Europe, Japan, etc. The fact that we choose to work more and spend more on average is not a public policy issue. If someone is using "net worth" in a political debate, they are probably full of it, and in almost all cases, looking at total earnings or earnings per hour will paint an entirely different picture.
CEO, who actually is a scientist, of all things. However, is her opinion worth 80 times that of my manager, or myself, both of whom are also PhDs? My manager is about the same age as her, understands the business well and is very smart. I hope people will say the same of me when I am mid/late-career. I could buy the argument that she should receive something like half a million - but not eight million.
Figuring that leaves me with $3 million to work with...that should get me two university professors, two hot-shot MBA grads, two accountants, two lawyers, two scientists/engineers in the relevant business, a doctor just for balance, four secretaries - and a cool half million for me.
I am sure that together we can make just as good of decisions as your precious CEO.
Actually, I think the problem here is the Lake Wobegon Effect - no company is will to admit that it would dare hire a below average CEO. Therefore, of course theirs deserves pay greater than the average...
So does soda. The former have a large volume and are fragile, the latter is heavy. Heck, the transportation costs for gasoline are more than 5%...and gas is easy to move. I not have a color printer. Waste of money and effort. I can print pictures for 12 cents at dozens of online shops. Printing b&w on my crappy inkjet is similar in cost to having it done at a print shop (8-10 cents/page).
There are virtually no drugs for "the common cold". There are over-the-counter treatments of the symptoms, but nothing I know of for treating the disease is actually out of the lab.
Most of those econ PhDs are making six figures and/or and have summers off. Tough life.
cost 200 times what a potato does (or your computer's main processor costs a few hundred million times what the dirt it was made from cost) then we do not have much to discuss. I have no idea what you are talking about in most of these cases. You can buy cheap crappy cables, awesome cables, and everything in between. The difference is more on the outside than the inside - are they coated in cheap plastic or quality material? I don't think I want a printer cartridge that is five times as big. Five times as cheap would be nice, but ink ain't cheap. There is plenty of competition in that market. Are you just bothered by the "sell the razor cheap, sell the blades high" business model? It is quite common, and is not indicitive of a problem. If you think big pharma could cure the common cold but chose not to you are absolutely ludicrious, and know virtually nothing either about medicine OR business. Curing the "common cold" is like curing cancer - both are not one condition, but hundreds of variants. Therefore, there is no "cure". And yes, big pharma has done lots of work on tackling some of the more common types of viruses. If and when they make a successful drug, they will make zillions.
Uh huh...the econ PhDs are wrong. I should trust a guy on slashdot, who just says it is so!
costs unless they wanted to. They simply could license the technology to GM, Ford, Toyota, etc. Actually, this is what they would do. They could license it to close to $3k per engine (allowing the car companies and consumers a small cut, just to lure them along). It would then lose a few hundred bucks in gas profits for each license sold. This is absolutely safe and sure as rain. What would be dangerous is to hide the technology and hope no one figures out a way around your patent.
My company regular introduces products that replace the need for old ones - we eat our own lunch all of the time. So does every other company on earth. Why? Because if our new product is better than the old one, we can sell it for more. There is more surplus benefit (consumer + producer) to capture, more pie to be divided. As long as we hold the patent, we can make the consumer just a whee bit better off and keep the rest of the new pie for ourselves. This is a mathematical certainty.
That changes things, but not in the way that you expect. It makes it even MORE impossible to keep the genie in the bottle, according to basic game theory. Exxon would have every incentive to introduce the engine under this scenario they did before. So would Shell or GM or whoever owned the competing technology. Any way you cut it, the marginal choice is $2000 or $300 (actually, the $300 is too high, because Exxon would not be eating just its own business, but that of Shell, Chevron, etc). Outside of idiotic regulation, which is essentially implausible in this situation, nothing would stop this from coming to market.
They make a lot more money from owning oil (lately at least) than selling it.
Under this hypothetical scenerio, Exxon trades $3k in sales for $3k in profits. That is ALWAYS a winner. The numbers will always work out this way, because margins are always less than or equal to one (and typically much, much less).
or technology? Yes, they keep an aura of sentimentality around "natural" diamonds in order to keep the prices high in the face of cheaper synthetics, but that is a different issue - taking advantage of customer irrationality. Reminds me a lot of Whole Foods and the like, actually.
I work for a major corporation. Even in our notoriously-fast segment (electronics manufacture), we project everything into the indefinite future. The bottom line is whether it will pay off in the long run, assuming normal rates of interest, depreciation, etc. We do also have shorter-term targets, as cash-flow is another major issue for a corporation.
Don't be confused by sunk costs. If you built a widget factory, and now realize that a wadget factory would make you zillions, you will build a wadget factory. Yes, they can afford to lose $300 to make $2000...who couldn't? who wouldn't?
The problem of stickiness and compatibility is a real market failure, but unrelated to what we are talking about.
And even if they did, Exxon is getting a 10:1 trade. I am sure Exxon would be willing to let all of its oil fields disappear into the void if I could make ten times as much selling cars.
You need to rephrase your numbers...would I rather have one million in capital, depreciating to zero over five years (standard assumption for a corporation) and making $30k/year, or scrap the capital few hundred thousand and license for my new patent to GM and Ford for $250k/year? You are being confused by sunk costs.
In other words, $2000 MORE than I would pay for a non-super engine. This is 100% profit for Exxon. Actually, since I assumed gas was $3.00/gal, that number should be $3000, not $2000.
example is one most often cited and quickly refuted. If Exxon, or anyone else, had such a device, they could make far more money selling the engine than the oil - a LOT more. So much, in fact, that any tiny market imperfection would be dwarfed and correspondingly ignored.
Think about it this way - if Exxon could build an engine that saved me 1000 gallons of gas over the lifetime of my car, I should be willing to pay at least a $2000 premium for it, right?
Now, how much money does Exxon make selling me 1000 gallons of gas? Figuring a un-realistically high margin of 10%, they make no more than $300.
Now, if you are greedy-bastard Exxon exec holding the patent for this new engine, which do you do? Sell engines or sell oil?
My carbon offsets for my vehicle are independant of my green electricty program. I pay someone to offset my truck's carbon (actually, I overpay, according to their statistics). It is of no matter to me how they do it, as long as they do. As for my electricity, my company purchases green power with the money I pay them. Because of this program, they are installing a number of wind generators right now in part of my state.
The people there have a birthrate FAR below replacement. Saying that a couple of young men living together in a tiny apartment in Manhattan use less energy than a family of five living in the burbs is rather meaningless. Those couple of guys either have to move out of their hole in the wall or we go extinct. Also, NYC cannot provide its own food, energy, materials etc. That Iowa farmer with the F350 isn't just driving it for himself - he is driving it for you.
High-density living is probably more energy efficient on the whole (due to public transport and smaller homes) but not as much as you are estimating.
I don't give much credit for planting trees, unless you bought the land and converted it from something else to forest. Trees will grow on their own if you let them.
of someone buying a patent to "bury" a good technology. Just about every elementary economics textbook clearly demonstrates how that if the technology truly has a benefit, the company would make MORE money by using the new technology than hiding it.
I can and do offset the carbon emissions from my small truck for $50/year, and get all of my energy from green sources (mostly wind and biomass) by paying an extra 1.6 cent/kwhr.
I am almost completely green for $120 a year. Why aren't you?
50% of people (and 99% percent of liberals) whine about the environment, and what the government should do to force everyone else (especially big business) to do something about it. 1% do something avoid hypocrisy and do something themselves.
Join the one percent...
The vast majority of these pirates are likely to be among the heaviest downloaders on their system, akin to the biggest hogs at the buffet line. Depending on what kind of system you are talking about, it is likely that these hogs are making the system slower for everyone else. My ISP (the local cable company) never performs anywhere near their advertised "up to XXX megabits/sec" speed because so many people in my apartment complex use them (which I can infer from the absurd number of wireless systems I can pick up).
By slaughtering a few of these cheating hogs, you lose them (and maybe a couple of their other cheating hog friends in protest), but in return remove a lot of fat from your system.
I know people who still choose to live without TELEPHONES, let alone the internet.
Is the internet useful? Yes. Comparable to food, clothes or shelter? Absolutely not.
that, people quickly unlearn what the taxes are. Quick question - what is the sales tax in your state? Now, what is the gasoline tax? Odds are just about every middle-school student can answer the first one, but few people can answer the last one. European governments need to hide their ridiculous taxes, so they bury them in the price.
If you think someone is actually selling flights for a euro, you DESERVE to get scammed.
campground in Chicago, me and my gf my have a good time on our vacation there. Buying used stuff does not mean that you are escaping the companies...you are just one step removed, and still dependent on them. I am willing to bet that you used 50 items containing or produced with products from my company in the last week, even though you probably have no idea who we are. Actually, your computer and car almost certainly contain several such materials.
Strange that I never have a problem with "hidden fees" - which inevitably means "I was too lazy to read fees". Yes, you pay taxes at a hotel...where do you think the water comes from? the streets? the cops?
Defense is about a quarter of the federal budget, or about an eighth of the total government (state and local spend roughly equal to the feds). If we could cut that eighth by half, we would be spending about as much as those non-war-mongering Europeans. Of course, then no one would be there to protect them...
Yes, government is wasteful, but not THAT wasteful. In any case, most of the waste occurs before they get your money (because you and everyone else bends over backwards to avoid having to pay, which is a waste of time and resources that goes unaccounted). I would be interested in knowing by what standard you judge our society corrupt - I would argue that it is one of the least-corrupt societies in history.
made your clothes, your house, your car, and your computer, and virtually everything else you own or consume.
Please sell everything you own, and stand outside naked in the rain. Or admit that you really are willing to deal with "normal" businesses. Most black/grey market stuff is either cheap knock-offs, or costs less due to failing to reward everyone who created it, or by dodging taxes. I do not like taxes either, but they are the price we pay to live in a civil society. Suck it up and pay your fair share.
Calls to my mom, grandma, and my Japanese girlfriend...hmmm....are there lots of terrorists in Japan?