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I don't think it is really that complicated. When you get to be a supervisor you are high enough that you have something to lose by being fired by not yet experienced enough to be hard to replace.
So a better way to say it is you wish the Canadian government hadn't helped with the bailout. Which is fair. Saying you wish they had folded altogether is myopic at best.
Perfectly makes sense, in that the attitudes and expectations of a white collar worker have arisen when the only want to move large amounts of information about were to pay a human to pick them up and take them physically elsewhere. The output of blue collar workers is somethign physical and is tracked at the very least by the amount of money that the factory has after selling them. It's only recently that we've now got enough stats and metrics to start measuring almost everything.
If I can't measure and check your work, you get the benefit of the doubt since you are clearly performing some function and to actually test that could harm or even ruin me. If I can then we're talking the complete opposite, where you're guilty of not meeting my expectations unless you can prove otherwise. Trend seems to be that this is moving upwards.
Whole thing is linked heavily to the whole purpose of work and why we even bother with a 'free market' system in the first place. Modern Conversativism is heavily based on an an age based around outdated technologies. I think labour definitely needs to start pushing towards the New Dialectic - it's not longer a case of pitching a planned system against an evolutionary one in order to work out which produces the least waste, since we've now got the ability to see actually what is being spent where and why (expect for very specific instances and small companies where there is no real data as of yet). The big questions now are focused more on the state run vs local co-op, sharing information with other co-ops. We don't need to fail businesses to learn lessons, we learn the lessons far more easily and well in advance of what a 1960s tycoon would be able to. We can also monitor the process of monitoring the processes - why accept the guaranteed percentage of waste required by shareholders/profit seeking owners when you can generate metrics regarding efficiency?
This is really pretty damn laughable. It's like you live on a completely fucking different planet. Um where the hell is this the big question? More importantly on that planetdid an entire metric and model driven industry not get it's ass reamed in 08?
More on point, The abilities to manage large amounts of information becomes more valuable the larger the pool of information you have to work with. Wal-mart benefits more from improved shipping & tracking than a Mom & Pop store. Small local co-ops are the less efficient method, that's why walmart is huge and small local stores are closing. You're entire conclusion makes no sense as an efficiency argument. You're basically saying that now that we can build better planes than ever before, Trains and Steamboats are what we really should focus on for transportation.
Sims would be planned, actually doing the grunt work, setting up the businesses and relying on the free market to select the more efficient schemes would be the pure evolutionary approach. Probably didn't pick the right word there, especially if you're referencing the outcome of the cold war.
Small local mom and pop stores are not the sort of organisation I'm talking about, as they're pretty much entirely discrete units and don't really make much use of any potential interconnectivity between similar stores. I'm saying that the real argument is between the advantage of better specialists at a state/federal level and the more specific knowledge you have at the community level (and to be honest I think I fall more towards the former, assuming you can get the right information where it is needed). There's a lot more of this in the UK than the US, with various local power generation and network infrastructure schemes popping up alongside the big Co-Op and John Lewis stores.
Wall-mart can build a bigger network than a single family owned shop, a country can build a bigger an better network than Wal-mart. Unions are really just the stepping stone between the two, with co-ops being almost the result of a union owning it's own business.
Except for those so efficient that they managed to survive every bit of economic warfare we could throw at them, necessitating actual war. Also, Cuba still exists and is voluntarily moving to a mixed economy so there's that.
Perhaps.
I will say that Canada's money bought us little, if anything, since GM is shutting down Ontario plants and moving them south. Great for the US, but shit, I guess 8 billion CDN just got flushed. Further to that is Canada has no domestic car, so I really don't get why we cared if GM continued to operate or not. I wonder if Toyota or Honda would get the same consideration, considering all the Canadian plants they operate.
And who is that again?
In the period real output dropped, inflation moved to 100%+, surges in black markets due to price controls: these are not signs of massive success. Chile's economy was and remains a lot like a petrostate - dependent on the demand for its key export, namely copper. If copper is in high demand, Chile prospers. Otherwise, watch out.
What 'high horse'? The 'high horse' of annoyance?
It doesn't stand very tall and hasn't won me any races yet.
You might want to check user names before accusing me of being 'the same silly goose as before', because I didn't write the post you quoted. In fact, if you check your own post, you'll see there are two different username attributions. I haven't attacked GnomeTank's lifestyle and have no idea, nor do I care, about his marital status. I said that it annoys me that someone making 100,000 a year claims to be struggling (it's been said that this isn't specifically what GnomeTank meant. Okay. Johnny Cache still made his case for the 100,000 dollar income, and it still grates my nerves, so there you go).
It is worth mentioning, though, that while Chile was able to export copper at a decent price, their economy did very well. That's by no means a total slam-dunk for communism, of course, but it does suggest that communism certainly can be viable so long as the resources are available.
Nice tie back union mentality. You think protecting jobs making poor selling products in mass is better than letting the companies fail and hopefully something comes to take it's place that makes products we need. The point of my post was to say "If you can't make a profit at making cars you shouldn't be making cars"
Probably a similar treatment. Things would not have been good if GM and Chrysler had just folded up. Ford would've been next and then the entire North American manufacturing sector (possibly slight hyperbole, but not much).
In the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression, you don't do that to over a million jobs tied to the auto industry. Remember Ford would have gone under as well even though they didn't need bailout money directly. There's a large supplier industry that's dependent upon the auto industry that would have folded up as well.
Secondly, GM and Ford have profitable operations. In GM's case it was the legacy cost that were crushing them, not just on the worker but also on the dealer franchise side. In normal times, a structured bankruptcy would have seen them bought, not liquidated. Romney was advocating ("Let Detroit Go Bankrupt") for that.
What he and you are not taking into account is that the financial system was completely frozen. There were no private lenders. The Big 3 would have been liquidated. That is an extraordinarily stupid thing to let happen to such a huge agglomeration economy. And keep in mind that the owners, the shareholders of GM, were wiped out. The shares of GM that are trading now were from the debtors that got converted into equity, just as should happen in bankruptcy.
Russia is a kleptocracy run by a cartoon strongman and its economy does fine so long as oil and gas prices are high. Saudi Arabia is a frickin' monarchy and it does fine as well. Lots of ridiculous forms of government become feasible when all you need to do to balance the books is dig a hole in the ground.
Example: a machinist make 80 grand a year and pays 10 grand in taxes. If he looses his job and the government has to pay unemployment which costs 20 grand. So the government can pay 30,000 dollars for the machinist to keep their job and come out even.
Edit: I forgot the part about the machinist actually making something instead of sitting on the couch so it's a even better deal.
Well, most companies that were profitable before the recession were forced to re-evaluate their business models (reasonable business models aren't built on demand being halved over-night...the recession may not have been a black swan to the banking industry, but the fallout was a balck swan to the rest of us)
But besides that - you're ignoring how inter-levered the car companies are with other businesses. The effects on shipping, steel, mining, mechanical fabrication, even marketing, would have been devastating. Car dealerships are also loaded with cashflow debt of their own - they don't pay cash wholesale for every vehicle on their property.
It really, really is more complex than just "the big three would have shut their doors for 4 months, and some rich person would have bought all their fixtures and resumed production, and made MGs and Brycelers and Fnords instead, and the regular guy would just have to go four months without a brand new car and regular old competition would have kicked in with him getting a cheaper car"
If life was as simple as the conservative worldview constantly implies, this could have been the case. But the reality is the year or so it would take to happen (best case) would have really, really fucked up the economy, above and beyond a massive glut of skilled blue collar labor hitting the job market at once. (who wouldn't have been able to find jobs at once, who would have hit unemployment lines at one, who would have all lost their houses at once in a saturated housing market...there are reasons you, as a government, do not permit massive downward movement in vast swaths of your taxbase at the same time)
Remember, the big three don't just make the shit you buy - they make a lot of buses, semis, oil rigs, cranes, etc, and where they don't participate directly in the markets for these hard to import items, they prop up the parts industries and labor pools for them. It would be bad if you couldn't buy a car, but manageable. You could take a bus or a cab - oh, wait, they aren't getting parts or replacements, either. You could drive a well maintained used car, always a good option - oh, wait, millions of used cars are rotting into junk because they can't get maintenance? I'll get my parts at a junkyard and change them myself! Oh wait, they're charging more, and I don't know how? Ok, I'll just drive a Japanese car, they're assembled here anyway, right? Oh, the prices on them, new and used, are trending up, when wages are trending down? Ripples? Butterfly wings? What? huh?
It's also worth pointing out a major sticking point between US unions and companies is the weight of legacy benefits costs for commitments the companies made. This stealth labor cost is a major reason we're less competitive in labor - moreso, IMO, than the hourly wage.
You know what reduces legacy costs for private industry? Public health care.
A public health care and other strong social welfare programs could just, maybe, fix the ridiculous situation where the country with the most wealth can't figure out how to use that national wealth to keep its middle class competitive and healthy.
I host a podcast about movies.
Do you have a tumblr I could subscribe to?
You've probably already seen it? it's called insanity wolf?
I host a podcast about movies.
Hell, look at Texas.
Can't vouch for the truth in it, because I can't remember where I specificaly read it, but if true shows how much of a double edged sword resource extraction is to the economy.
That particular debate is getting quite heated now, actually. The leader of the opposition, Tom Mulcair, has been going on about that particular development for the last few months, and it has raised the ire of the federal Conservatives as well as the conservative Western premiers.
It is hard to deny that a strong dollar hurts our exports though, and there is most definitely a correlation between the strength of the loonie and the end of the secular bear market for commodities in the early '00s.
So the question is: Are we better off yanking the rug out from under the loonie to preserve export prices, or is Canada's economy better with a strong loonie?
I doubt people's sincerity when they try to 'blame' the oilsands for the strong loonie. I'm starting to think no one actually cares, it's just the favoured whipping boy right now because it's in the national consciousness.
In comparison that is.
When you border only one country and that country is the largest economy in the world. Its really decided for you. Either way the US will find some way to profit.
And it's about time some patriotism was directed in the right direction, for once.
It's an irony of history that china and russia are probably nowadays opposed to global unionized labor the most..
The irony isn't lost on me. I actually have a feeling we're about to go full on fascist here in the US. The only question is, who will become the sub-human scapegoat? Muslims or Hispanics?
well, dirty liberals obviously too. organized labor and socialist ideas have always been pretty alien to and detested by fascist regimes.
To the workers:
To management: