Comment Re:Money (Score 1) 445
We're living la vida bureaucracy.
Oh yeah, it also costs a lot to tap all our phones.
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.
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 overstated.
If I were to take off my "I give a rat's flying hindquarters about humanity" hat, there's one of two ways I would set it up:
1)Low unemployment where I live, high unemployment elsewhere. Why? Because I wouldn't be hiring anyone in the states.
2)High unemployment where I live, low unemployment elsewhere(focus on international markets, hire locally).
Business in any form is a kind of arbitrage. It benefits from discrepencies and inequalities.
That's where the profit margins come from. Some market condition that allows you to get supplies or labor cheaper than your competitors.
It's kind of cool when you think about it; an economy that is down becomes more appealing for employment. So money from nations that are doing better than that one naturally start funneling money into that one.
As a small business owner, I bet you vote for the party that does though. That's disgusting. I've had enough of this kind of moral calculus: the kind of treatment works here receive is outright illegal in Western Europe. Society there hasn't collapsed: in fact, they're better off for it. So screw your pro-business rhetoric. There comes a point when being anti-business is also anti-people, but we're nowhere near that point.
You are Completely wrong.
"Yes. This is a very good thing.
Tell that to General Motors.
Yeah. Again, it is good that you can't do those sorts of things. It is good that you have to treat your employees as, you know, human beings.
No one said they're not being treated as human beings. But the fact is businesses are not bottomless pits of money. When the economy is hard, it's hard on businesses just as much as it is individuals. So sometimes *not* doing the extra little things is what is necessary for the business to stay afloat.
Your mentality is the one that human kind is struggling to dig out from under and is the cause of almost all the violence and hatred in the world.
No. No it's not. Let me tell you that there's a lot of people in a lot of countries whose lives would drastically improve given the conditions you're whining about.
Once again, look at the recession. Businesses can all fail(well, at least if they aren't bailed out). We are not trying to "dig out" from that mindset, we're trying to get people jobs at livable wages so they can survive. The frills are going to have to come later. You're part of the problem, not the solution.
You feel that just because you and an employer you are entitled to treat employees however badly you want. You do realize that when you pass down that pay cut the employee needs the money a LOT more than you do, right?
I beg to differ. First off, I treat my employees quite well (disclosure: I don't need too many, so it's not too hard to do so). But secondly, it's my money on the line every day. If I don't have money to take risks, the business doesn't grow. If the business doesn't grow, then no one is going to be making anything, because they'll all be out of the job.
I already give good benefits and wages that top my competitors by quite a bit. If I have to cut that back so the wages are only *slightly* beating my competitors, it's because I literally had to. Anyone that doesn't like it is free to leave.
You might be able to buy another yacht, but that is at the expense of your employees' kids' college money.
Yeah, because all business owners own Yachts. Get out of your dream world where we all make millions.
This mindset is psychopathy, plain and simple. All you see is your own greedy wants and the bottom line in a ledger book, but you are unable to see and feel the human cost of your decisions.
I'm incredibly aware of the human cost of my decisions. But sometimes those decisions are about making it so these people have a job at all a few months down the road. The "faceless corporation" isn't an accident. It's an intentional structure. Why? Because any business, in order to survive has to make decisions that few could make face to face.
I will be glad when the economy turns around and you can't randomly fire people for demanding fair treatment, or randomly cut pay by 20%.
It's not random you idiot. A stable business at it's heart is coldly logical. It's not a hostage situation. Businesses pay employees what they can and what they're worth. If you disagree about what the business can pay you, or what you're worth, leave.
If you're worth more, there will be demand. If not, the market has decided you're not worth more.
I would rather that you did these things on your own, that you would have a soul and a little bit of human decency, but I know that this is too much to ask. I will just be glad that you can be forced into treating people like humans, that is the way it should be.
No one's treating them like dogs.
I once thought exactly like you appear to be thinking here by the way. Then I had to run a business and got some perspective.
It's not that it kills off your soul or anything, but you're responsible for something more than yourself. You're responsible for making sure the business stays viable. Not only for your sake, but for the sake of your employees. I can't speak for everyone, but most of us are doing the best we can. If an employee can find some better way to a good life, I encourage them to take it. Not out of spite either.
Places like the New York Times have put no decent effort into getting their internet traffic to back out. Their whining is getting ridiculous.
The cost per click of advertising on sites like the New York Times is pretty high. But they put their CPC ads below the fold where users won't click on them. They take the easy branding dollars for the top placements on CPM media buys. The problem with this is that most media buys are cheaper than paying per click(since it requires a high initial $$$ commitment), and are capped at 1 view/person/12 hours. So by the 10th pageview for someone, you're really down the crap inventory.
This is 100% the lazy way out. They should be making a self serve platform (to eliminate the 30%+ cut Google and other PPC companies take), and they should be aggressively looking for advertisers. Start tagging articles, have people bid on the tags themselves(to break down the different topics better).
Move the ads into more aggressive slots, and start putting non intrusive text ads on their mailing list. Quantcast shows them getting 66.5-79.5 million US pageviews a month, and quantcast is pretty conservative. So let's say they put 3 PPC ads in a decent position, and take the high number(79.5 million).
It's not unreasonable to guesstimate the adblock as a whole would get around a 2-3% click through ratio with good targetting. Even at 2%,that would be 1.59 million clicks to the ads per month. The prices would vary so much based on keyword that guessing past that is pointless, but suffice it to say most would be paying $0.75 on the cheaper end, and much more expensive for things about insurance, etc. And that's just one adblock. They've got the resources to monetize this, they just aren't. They'd prefer to use safe but low revenue CPM buys, and to let Google take a big chunk of their PPC revenue. Idiots.
I would love the fact if Facebook was being stingy with my information to advertisers, but they're not
A bit outdated...but behold the beauty of easily scrapable ajax ad interfaces.
Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.
