Electricity rates have been rising in America. Perversely, this is because of falling demand. Electricity consumption peaked in 2007, and has been falling since then. Falling demand should mean lower prices, but most generators are protected monopolies that are guaranteed a profit. So falling demand means that fixed costs must be spread over fewer kwHrs.

Actually, Germany has some of the best bread in the world, with some of the highest variety. But if you appreciate bread, you should always cut it just before eating. Pre-sliced bread is dried out and loses much of its flavour and smell. Freshly baked bread, cut into thick slices just before you eat it, that's how you do it.

Typical american white bread doesn't even register as "bread" in Germany. In the supermarket, it is sold in a seperate shelf, because toast and sandwich is the only thing it's good for.

My point is that an employee is an instrument in the hands of the people that own the company, like a screedriver but a more complex one, and the best 'respect' that an instrument can expect is his compensation for doing the job. An intelligent person would recognise this and turn it to his advantage by working as a contractor making the highest hourly wage he can master given his relative worth in the market. A person less intelligent would complain that in his role as a sophisticated screw driver he is not getting respect he believes he deserves.

An employer that is paying top dollar for his workforce can afford to treat his sophisticated tools with as much contempt as the law allows. If you are treated with more than simple master/tool interaction, you are exchanging top dollar for 'warmer' treatment, trust me on this, I worked as a permanent employee, as a contractor and I run my company now, I know all of this very intimately.

Only a complete moron would invest under those conditions. All a fund manager needs to do is take your money, walk into the closest casino, and bet it all on one spin of the roulette wheel. If he wins, he gets 40% of your money, and you get 160% back. If he loses, then you have lost 100% and he makes nothing. On average the fund manager will make 20% and investors will get 80% back, having lost the other 20%.

But there are enough morons out there to support an entire industry of investment funds that pretty much do exactly what I just described. They make risky or leveraged investments, keep a chunk of the winnings, dump the losses onto the investor, and collect generous fees for doing so.

That is a violation of the rules. Houses and hotels must be as evenly distributed as possible across properties of the same group. So it is legal to have a hotel on Park Place, and four houses on Boardwalk, or four houses on each, or four on one and three on the other. But it is NOT legal to have three houses on one and a hotel on the other. Here are the official rules.

True, and the best way to maximize the return is for the fund manager to invest in a high risk crap shoot. If the gamble pays off, they get their fee, and attract lots of new investors. If it doesn't pay off, then hey, it wasn't their money. This is exactly what high-fee managers do. They run multiple funds, make risky investments, then shut down the funds where the gamble fails, and advertise and promote the funds where it pays off. This gives investors the illusion of success, when on average, they would be much better off investing in a low fee index fund.

This rule is an understatement. Past performance is not even an indicator of future success. Fund managers that have done well in the past, are no more likely to do well in the future than predicted by random chance. There is no evidence that their past success was due to anything other than luck. There is no rational reason to pay someone to gamble on your behalf.

Funds that charge higher fees DO NOT give better returns.

Higher Fees Don't Mean Higher Returns, Study Finds
24% of Active Mutual Fund Managers Outperform the Market
In every single time period and data point tested, low-cost funds beat high-cost funds
Morningstar Study Says High Fees Are Bad for Investment Performance

Anybody that thinks that high fees are buying high performance is delusional.

Wrong. These incentives are already in place in many areas, and even small changes in price are enough to have a big influence on demand. In California, consumers can voluntarily sign up for on-demand pricing. I have signed up. So my electricity is cheaper for most of the day, around 8 cents/kwHr. But on hot days, from 2pm to 7pm, it jumps to 30 cents/kwHr. That is about the price for the base rate that most Europeans pay. But even this is enough to shave the peaks off the demand curve, and lets the electric company avoid building expensive standby capacity. We run our A/C early to "pre-chill". We also installed an attic fan and added extra attic insulation, investments that didn't make sense at 8 cents, but certainly do at 30 cents.

Business and engineering are not really separate things. Good engineering always considers cost, and engineering problem solving can often be applied to business situations. One third of the CEOs in the S&P 500 are engineers, and their companies are more successful than average.

I don't know what exactly the point of this story is, however many people think they are not getting respect or their worth of whatever, not just engineers, and many people are of-course wrong.

An employee is part of a company, a company is a machine that makes the investor/owner money, and the way it makes investor/owner money is by implementing idea/solving a problem that the investor/owner is solving. The company makes work of the investor/owner more productive by allowing the investor/owner to execute the solution to the problem in a faster/more reliable/cheaper manner and thus providing the market with the best value for money solution to the problem that is being solved.

The employees are part of the system that is set up by the investor/owner to be productive. To talk about respect in this sense is meaningless, does the watchmaker have special respect for a spring loader or for a chisel or for a hammer or for a cutting tool? Is the cutting tool more important than a welding tool? Is a welding tool deserving of more respect than a screwdriver?

Employees are screwdrivers, cutting tools, welding tools, spring loaders, etc.etc., they are part of the machine that the owner/investor has created to make himself more productive in the market, to offer his solution to the market.

Your worth to the employer can be fairly easily measured by comparing you to any other employee. A developer's worth can be measured comparing him to another developer. An employer that cannot measure relative value of his employees is probably running a suboptimal machine (company), but at the end it doesn't really matter that much, whether the solution is fully optimal or is somewhat less than optimal, the employee will only see the market discovered salary (part of the salary discovery includes the government rules and regulations, nonsensical stuff like mandatory vacation pay or wage controls or insurance controls or whatever).

I do not have a more special respect for a keyboard than a monitor for example, for a harddrive or a DVD drive, etc.etc. I know they are there to perform specific functions. I have employees, they are respected in a very specific way: they are paid what they are due and the treatment is normal, they are people and that is all there is to it.

If that fee is more than 0.1%, then you are still getting screwed.

Maybe that is intentional. When you are at the bottom of the pile, any publicity is good publicity. The saying in Hollywood is "It doesn't matter what they write, as long as they spell your name correctly."

Protests are not the only way to change society. The black people in Ferguson would likely improve there lives more if, rather than looting and burning the corner grocery store, they registered to vote.

There is little evidence that America is under-policed. Most studies have found a weak correlation between numbers of cops, and property crimes, and NO correlation with violent crimes. A meta-study found that a 10 per cent increase in officers will lead to a reduction in crime of around 3 per cent. There are far more cost effective ways to reduce crime, such as better prenatal and early childhood nutrition, better vocational training for teenagers, etc.

Those wars were NOT useless. They generated enough ethnic hatred, extremism, and anti-Americanism to ensure generous defense budgets for decades to come. From the point of view of the MIC, these wars were a big success.