I think I replied to something similar already, so you can enjoy the answer if you like.

For the same price, NASA could have SpaceX build and launch ten rockets.
Alternatively, they could spend the same money to have SpaceX build ten rockets, then throw nine away and launch one.

That's what they've done, spent resources that can build ten rockets and ending up with one. That's PRECISELY equal to building ten rockets, then destroying nine of them.

Alternatively, they could have paid SpaceX to build the one rocket, then burned a few billion dollars in cash. They'd end up in the exact same position - billions of dollars gone, and one new rocket. It ends up precisely the same as just burning the cash.

But that simply indicates that the economy in USA is in such shambles (which I argue it is) that there are so few actual real jobs available that it is possible to get people to work for little money and no other benefits. However if that it the case (and the economy in USA is dying AFAIC due to government created inflation and destruction of individual freedom, which caused massive capital outflow and massive loss of productivity, huge growth of deficits, debts, destruction of full time jobs that are either not replaced at all or are replaced with worse quality, lower paying, part time jobs) then it stands to reason that in fact the worker in USA cannot afford to take a paid vacation and this is not a problem that is created by an employer, this is a problem created very democratically (mobocratically) by the employees (majority voters) and politicians who promise this free lunch to the majority voters. Employers do not make weather in terms of the government pushing policy through that is catered towards the majority voters.

Employers search for ways to avoid being taxed and being driven out of business, so employers move to other countries, they search for ways to reduce their total costs, this includes cost of labour and taxes and regulations.

So when you are saying that the situation in USA is bad, I agree with you, it is. It is bad for reasons that are much beyond most /.ers, so never mind, you can read my journal. However this still does not mean that government can force an employer to add something on top of what an employer would pay for labour.

Labour has a price, however this cost is paid for, no employer will be overpaying. The market conditions are such, that American workers cannot expect anything anymore, not because any one of them is particularly bad or lazy, but because the system is such that their productivity is worth less than before, much less than before the dollar was actually redeemable in gold, much less than before there were any income taxes, any government labour laws, any government business regulations.

A Ford employee back in 1913 was making 5 dollars a day, working 5 days a week, 8 hour shifts. An ounce of gold was 19 dollars. There were no income taxes that applied to anybody pretty much (and by the way, the income tax is illegal for so many reasons, again, a different discussion).

5 days x 5 dollars = 25 dollars a week. That bought 1.25 ounces of gold in a week. Under current prices that would mean about 1625 USD per week or 6500 USD a month or about 78000 a year. No taxes. No payroll tax, no income tax, no Medicare, no Medicaid, no SS, no business taxes of any kind, no education taxes, no road taxes, not even gasoline taxes.

Yes, there were import taxes and some duties, alcohol accounted for 50% of taxes in USA at the time. But you didn't actually have to pay those taxes because you could avoid buying those products.

So what does it mean in today's terms in USA to make 78000 after tax? You can easily more than double that amount just to start understanding what it means, you really have to do more than double it though, because at the time prices for things were going down, not up.

The dollar was gaining value, not losing it. A man could save money, buy a house, no mortgage, have a family, 10 kids or more, stay home wife, she didn't have to work though 10 kids is probably more than enough of work. But people had live in help and it was possible because there were no welfare checks coming to anybody to do nothing.

My point is, when you talk about low standard of living in USA today I agree with you! I think 19th century lifted the standard of living of Americans more than the 20th century and since 1971 the standard of living of Americans has been falling actually because their productivity was falling due to all this government, all the rules, regulations, taxes, inflation and all the government debt financed spending.

You can't use more government to fix problems created by government and no amount of government mandated paid vacation time will lift your standard of living, it only ends up lowering it further as businesses move out and automate more and more.

I'll go through this with you one step at a time.

For the same price, NASA could have SpaceX build and launch ten rockets.
That would be ten times as many scientific experiments launched or whatever good thing the rocket is doing.
Alternatively, they could spend the same money to have SpaceX build ten rockets, then throw nine away and launch one.
That's virtually exactly the same as what they're doing - taking billions of dollars from taxpayers and ending up with one rocket.
It ends up exactly the same as throwing away nine rockets, removing from the economy whatever value those nine rockets have.

They could also spend the same amount of money having SpaceX build one rocket, then spending a few billion dollars sending kids to college. So, for the same price you can have either a) one rocket built by NASA or b) one rocket built by SpaceX plus provide a college education for a thousand people.
So what's the difference between those two? Both add a rocket to the economy. The difference is whether people get a college education or not. Which do you think is better for the economy, college graduates earning good money, or those same people flipping burgers? Waste REMOVES value from the economy.

I worked as a contractor software developer/architect for 10 years, always negotiating everything I needed to negotiate in every contract. I had probably negotiated 30 or so contracts (and contract extensions) in that time period and nothing was off the table. I worked for large companies and for small, negotiation was always part of the process.

Sure there are reasons that our methods have changed, of course. That's just not really related to the point I was making. TFS claims that the military is trying to find ways to kill more people, and that's simply the opposite of the truth. They've been working on ways to only blow up a specific room rather than blowing up a building or a city block. Secondly, IF they wanted to kill lots of people, they wouldn't need need to work on methods to do so. They've had the B-52 for 60 years or so. A single B-52 could kill thousands of people per day if you wanted it to. We COULD have wiped out Iraq in about a day and half. Building a democracy in Iraq is much, much more difficult than killing them would be.

- you mean I know what I am talking about. I run my company, so you are correct, I am a manager - managing a business. I make hiring decisions, I make product decisions. I am also the chief architect, every one of my employees comes to me with the question "what do I do next?" when they are done with the current task. I deal with the clients, I search for new ones, I decide what internal products we are building, I decides what technology we use, I decide what everybody does here. Yes, I manage the place and I do know what I am talking about whether this concerns technology or hiring or client communications and of-course writing checks.

I'm quoting their official platform. Are you saying that they're lying about what policies they advocate?

Their official platform has a list of new and expanded powers they want the FCC to have. That's their official platform. They just haven't thought through the fact that the FCC is run by cable industry lobbyist Tom Wheeler, so new powers for the FCC IS new powers for a top cable lobbyist.

- 'bzzzt'? That is your opinion and if you think that somebody is asking for more than they should be getting in the market, then obviously you are not going to hire those people. If somebody else decides to hire them, then it stands to reason that person is worth that to the other employer. However when you are talking about bubbles then you have to take into account the fact that they are not normal market creation, they are created by the Federal reserve pumping money into the system. Bubbles are created by government inflation and under those circumstances the scarce resources, including labour and money and land are misused, misallocated.

So certainly there can be misallocation of scarce resources in the economy that is not free from government intervention. That is what recessions are for: removing the misallocations, but the governments and the central banks work together to squash any recessions' attempts at fighting the misallocation of resources and eventually the bubbles grow bigger and then even the entire economies can collapse.

Is that normal free market behaviour? No, it's normal for governments to behave that way because politicians love to sell you the bill of goods to stay in power. But again, this is a tangent, it's only marginally pertinent to the discussion only from point of view that yes, governments cause misallocation of resources. Government intervention misallocates resources, this is just as true in case of money printing (inflation) as it is in case of labour laws, such as minimum wage or these forced paid vacation days.

I'll give you a thousand dollars if you can get a current copy of MS Word to read old MS Word documents, like OpenOffice can. Since Microsoft can't pull that off, I'm guessing you won't either. I suppose you could shellExecute(OpenOffice.exe) from a Word macro. :)

So yeah, you COULD throw out all your company's documents in order to avoid having two "power users" of Word learn different menu locations for a few things. That would make sense, if you had Balmer's dick in your mouth.

- and you won't budge on your hourly rate, it takes two to tango. I am an employer, I negotiate with my employees all the time, nothing is off the table.

No, I am running my own business, I am creating value out of nothing by building stuff that didn't exist before I decided to build it. It's not a zero sum game, that's how businesses make money by making new products.

However this is not the subject under discussion here, while the economy is not a zero sum game your total value to me as an employee has a minimum and a maximum levels on it, so your total compensation will be within certain boundaries, thus if government dictates a minimum number of paid vacation days, those will be counted as part of your total compensation and your hourly wage is also part of that total compensation, so is the payroll tax (both sides of it, the employee and the employer portion), so is anything else.

The minimum boundary to your total compensation package is the your value in the market and the minimum dictated level of compensation by the government. So what you are going to get into your hands will be the delta: total compensation package minus all the other expenses that are government mandated (taxes, minimum paid vacation, whatever), the cash that you receive is the rest of it.

You are not going to be paid more than you are worth in the market and you are not going to be paid more on top of what you are worth in the market regardless of what the government dictates. Your total pay will include all of those components.

This, by the way, is a huge problem for the economy. To pay somebody 18,000 dollars for example, the employer has to shell out 27,000 (or so), so the labour prices are high while the wages are low.

Well, that's what you get for all this government, that and the falling value of your money and the rising cost of living.

>> In its latest bid to kill more people, more efficiently, and at less cost

> Isn't this what we want all government agencies to strive for? When the military's actual job is to figure out how to kill people and destroy things with maximum effectiveness

In WWII the US military wanted to kill more people, more efficiently. They were pretty good at it.
Since then, it seems the challenge has been to find ways to kill the FEWEST possible number of people, while achieving a strategic goal. We tried to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis. Germans - we just blew them up.