Consultants extract money from the "job creators" and return it to the economy. Even if they did no work at all, that extraction justifies their existence.
I'm coming to your house and breaking your windows. Then you can return some money to the economy. The glazier will be happy.
I never hire independent consultants. They don't understand the use of project management, and just hack things together as quickly as possible. This is, of course, compounded by management wanting to not give proper budget to work with consultants properly so that they have time to write not-shit-code.
Getting the programming consultant into meetings is the only way to get good quality work out of them. Throwing a requirements list at people doesn't help as much as folks think; you discuss that with the consultant, but you also bring them into the meetings with the primary stakeholders. That way they get to see what's going on, hear about the features needed, the use cases, and, in agile models, get feedback on each incremental deliverable. This allows the programmer to raise questions about what exactly is being asked of him, instead of just getting shoved in a room with a spec and then told him he didn't do it right--when there's 100 ways to implement what's on the spec and only 2 are apparently acceptable.
William Strunk covered this in 1914. You're never supposed to put quotes around words like that, as it puts on airs to show the audience that you're using some vulgar slang, but we're all better than that.
Quotes are used when referencing a term. We call this "using quotes". If you otherwise "use quotes" around "things" in your "sen-tance", you look like a "huge jackass" like Dr. Evil.
Oh, you're connecting the need to work with the ability. Yeah, that's a bad assumption.
If you don't work, you live in a 244sqft apartment with 144sqft living space, the rest kitchen and bathroom. You can't buy anything good, and have to live on extremely strict finances. Luxury doesn't exist, and you probably won't have very good dating prospects; you don't have any money to go out to the bars, either.
In our current system, getting a job is a bad deal. If you have Social Security Disability Income, you can string that out forever at $676/mo. Once you get a job, that vanishes immediately; your wages are less $676/mo, because that's what you pay *every* *month* to have a job. If you get fired, you can't go back to SSDI. Same with unemployment (you lose it upon employment, and, If you're fired because you're a dickhead, you don't collect unemployment again).
Getting a job on welfare is risky, and discounts your monthly pay by the amount you were gaining on welfare. Rather than working 0 hours and getting $676, you are working 160 hours and getting $1,160. That makes a minimum wage job $3/hr, with the risk of getting no unemployment or SSDI if you get fired (you haven't worked in 8 months--do you still know how to not fuck off?).
With a UBI, you don't need to work. We don't need a minimum wage; if they don't pay you well, don't work. On the other hand, if you do work, you will always gain the full benefit of employment, and will never have your UBI taken away from you. Working is always a good deal, and gainful employment carries no risk. If you so decide, you could even live with just UBI, and provide volunteer time for the community--it won't gain you anything, but you won't be stuck inside, and you won't have to worry about your expenses because you don't necessarily need a job per se--but you have to be pretty hard core to take that deal.
Except the stock has movement, and there is some probability that it will move up or down. Savvy investors have more information: they know general trends in stock movement, and can predict more accurately which way it will move. Non-savvy investors don't: they work on the principles of stability, that being that a nice, safe stock that's been climbing will continue climbing, and so they buy in as the stock gains value.
The second group tends to believe the stock is undervalued more when its spot price has climbed longer. They think it will go up forever. The first group has target prices and technical analysis, and starts to sell out at a certain point; this creates a visible stock movement that tips off more risk-tolerant investors who also do technical analysis, who sell out later. Eventually, the small-time traders who want to buy have "enough", or are out of money; the big-time traders who think the stock is overvalued aren't buying; liquidity decreases; and sale price becomes lower.
This difference in evaluation means different groups of people will think the stock is overvalued or undervalued. Even though their methods are different and their valuation of the stock is different, they're both purchasing "stock should increase in price from here". My point was that they're not investing in companies.
They're investing money in the idea that the stock is undervalued.
Revenues up, profits down. Odd. Revenues up all the time because inflation.
Stocks don't reflect real business performance.
You consider a world where nobody has to work as a utopia. My observation is just the opposite. If you take effort away from people, they tend to become entitled, lazy, selfish, and (ironically, with more leisure time) miserable.
Where are you getting this from? I detect a very basic failure to either apply critical thinking or reading comprehension.
We produce Mo-99 isotopes of Molybdenum for medical use by nuclear fusion. Certain other medical isotopes of Cadmium are also produced by fusion. Doing so is simple: You produce a high electrical charge on two coils, and pump ionized gas between them. Each ion will gain 11,000 kelvin per volt of acceleration; you can readily reach 200 million kelvin or so in this way. There is a small probability of particle collision, as all ions are accelerating toward a rough center; these collisions release X-rays, neutrons, heat, and light; although x-rays, heat, and light are redundant. Collisions in this way initiate nuclear fusion.
Anti-corrosion plating for sewer pipes is not valuable? There would be less work maintaining sewer pipes! For that matter, platinum is awesome and allows a large increase in hardness of metal; tungsten also allows hardness and heat resistance; not to forget Iridium and Rubidium, both of which are exceedingly rare and highly useful. Titanium and Nickel are somewhat common, but nowhere near as common as iron.
Without energy scarcity, most can be automated. The most scarce resource is not energy--that's the second most scarce, and it's distanced greatly from the third. The most scarce resource is people who want to work for the common good, our philosophers and our philanthropists.
When we have enough energy that we only need their labor to direct largely-automated processes, we will have zero scarcity.
The biggest difference between time and space is that you can't reuse time. -- Merrick Furst
