They were awful on the PS2. It was impossible to gauge how hard you were pressing....

and an X Server. And a driver framework for that X Server. And an init system. And....

That's sorta been the problem. Nobody ever stepped in and sorted out a _way_ to do common things. Sure, Microsoft's way isn't always the best. It's full of holes and quirks. But at least it's something. It's sorta like Ruby on Rails. It might not be the best way to write web apps, but it says to you: This is how we do it. Period. So you don't have to support 8 different ways of doing the same damn thing...

British Steel, like American Steel, couldn't compete with slave labor. Heck, I shouldn't call them slaves. You _own_ a slave, so you at least try to keep it running. Chinese Workers have even less value.

our liberal leanings are _Civilized_ standards.

Read your sig, btw. Liberty is economic security. If you lack economic security you'll do whatever the guy with money tells you to do. Sooner or later you'll get hungry enough. You'll break. Everyone does. Hunger and poverty make animals out of us all...

Right Here. Interesting read. Yeah, yeah, causation, correlation, but still an interesting read.

Oh, your position is that they are delusional rather than just whiny?

No. If anything is "delusional" [not my choice of word], it's the idea that workers in a pure capitalist economy can simply "find a new job that pays them what their time is worth." Further, that a preference can only be expressed between available options and that to characterise not choosing a non-existent option as a "revealed preference" is odd.

If people think their time is worth more than their current salary, they should go find a new job that pays them what their time is worth. Most people don't, so we have a revealed preference

No one offered them that new job that pays them what their time is worth (obviously, since no one can afford to pay them what their time is worth). So no, not a revealed preference.

In a free market people don't exchange something of lessor value for something of greater value.

Sure they do, specifically people sell their time for less than they think it is worth (and are often deeply unhappy about it) and necessarily for less than it is worth to their employer. Realistically there's not much choice as to whether we work or not and even if it's an exchange which is formally free. The situation is not symmetrical with our other decisions where our freedom to exchange (or not to) may be more real.

If I hire you do a job, I do so because I value the "work" less [more?] than my money....

Yes and when I hire people for a job (eg. the plumber yesterday) I do so on the same basis. However, this is because my income is not dependent on exploiting the difference in the cost of labour and its value.

If my income were dependent on hiring workers to generate value I could only afford to pay them more than the value they add to my business if my products could fetch a price above their value. However since people making consumption decisions are far freer than people selling their labour I will have to rely on paying my workforce less than the value they add. (Which is mellon's point).

As I keep reminding my teenage kid ... "now son, are you working hard enough? Remember if you are not making more for them than the $20/hr they are paying you, they are not going to be able to keep you on!"

but the dealers run the parts network. Also, car companies keep parts around because of laws that say they have to, not because they love you as a customer.

I don't trust Tesla not to drop me like a rock when it's no longer profitable to support me...

The idea is that you pay more than what the work is worth to the worker

Where, since one is compelled to work, what "the work is worth to the worker" is defined by what you pay them. Quite.

OP's point still stands, you must necessarily pay the worker less than the value the worker adds for you. I'm not sure, however, that the macroeconomic conclusion he draws from this observation is well founded.

thought I'd chime in on why dealerships are getting a free ride before the thread is choked with constitutionalists :P.

Dealers stock parts and provide a distribution network for said parts. This is why my '94 Honda Accord still runs (and why my Volvo 240 DL would have been running if that $#%@! hadn't rear ended me).

If we remove the dealer who is going to stock parts, deliver them, and install them? I'm sure you can come up with a thousand free market answers, but the fact is running that sort of business is _expensive_. Most of the obvious solutions become races to the bottom. Eventually either you stop getting parts and service for cars after 5 years or your start getting gouged in ways you can only imagine.

So yeah, it's a bit more complex an issue then just: Dealers Bad! Tesla Good!....

Democrat in Name Only. There's several of them. Plus the Dems aren't really in power. The Republicans have threatened to drive this country over a cliff multiple times (debt ceiling). This last time the Pres said: "Go for it, I think we can survive and you won't", but it wasn't that he called their bluff. They were never bluffing. The only reason they backed down is they thought they'd be hurt themselves....

it's that we're losing _any_. We've had 30 years of constant productivity increases. These are the sort of jobs we were promised would replace all the Manufacturing jobs that went away for those 30 years. Now some of them are going away. It's suppose to be growing, not shrinking.

when all the manufacturing moved to Mexico & China. It happened almost overnight, but they still had millions of people and a large infrastructure. Naturally the tax base collapse and the schools became hopelessly underfunded while their students struggled with a level of poverty normally reserved for blasted out sections of Afghanistan.

I know it's fashionable to blame Detroit's problems on the Evil Tax And Spend Democrats (tm), but even a cursory glance at the facts proves it otherwise.

beat me to the explanation :)