The Dismal Science

That's exactly what I said. Those businesses don't seem to be willing to pay wages that can lift people out of poverty. Not sorry for them.

No they aren't. But you just parrot some TV interviews, not data. You don't have an idea if the problem is real.

They have to compete with other businesses, foreign and domestic.

And workers have to compete for jobs, with workers foreign and domestic, unless they elect to not work, or belong to unions.

Are you saying that people who don't work ARE productive?

Google around. The problem - simultaneous unemployment and labor shortages - seems to be real.

Things will get ugly.

I don't think anyone considers 6.1% unemployment to be a high number. Why are you going on about this?

albert@cherry.(none) (albert) wrote in news:609ba7a2$0$29321$ snipped-for-privacy@news.xsall.nl:

Absolutely true. It gets in and remains in the blood and denies the absorption of Oxygen.

Employers in first world countries have to invest more in automation to make their more expensive workers productive enough to compete with cheaper workers in foreign countries. Operating complicated machinery takes training, which means the workers have to be educated, which tends to be paid for by higher taxes in the first world country.

The American way os to cheap-skate on the education and offshore the production to places where labour is cheaper.

Being a member a trade union doesn't stop you having to compete for jobs. It does stop employers from paying very low wages to people who are particularly desperate to get paid work. Employers with capital have a tactical advantage over individuals who don't.

They can be. Stay-at-home mothers are the standard example. Grandparents who provide free child-minding for their grandchildren are another.

Things are ugly already, and have been for quite a while. Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx documented the ugliness more than century ago. The trade union movement has made things less ugly. The political solution preferred by Karl Marx hasn't worked as well.

The answer - which is to train the un-employed so that they can do the jobs that employers are finding hard to fill - works in Germany, where the unemployment rate is now 3.03%. America doesn't like the idea - the rich end up having to pay out more taxes to cover the cost of training the people they'd like to hire after they had been trained.

Yeah dey do. But if they can't pay wages that people can LIVE OFF, what's the point?

And if they're out-competed they don't have a job. But since you can't just let people starve or be homeless, they need welfare. I don't find that hard to understand.

I said "no they aren't", meaning no they're not productive. The important question is not if a non-working person is (economically) productive. The important question is if there is so many of those people that there is a problem. Apart from some anecdotal stuff you see on TV this doesn't seem to be an issue.

So make a proposal of how to fix that.

The business owners should pay overtime till September, when the enhanced unemployment benefits mostly run out. That seems to be what they're doing.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

That must be wrong. In a perfect capitalistic society everyone is given what they are worth. Well, what they are worth in a materialistic way. Well, they are given that if it exists to be given to them. There are plenty of times when there simply is not a need for everyone who is would have worth in other times when they are needed. So the idea of a person's "worth" in a perfectly capitalistic society is like the "worth" of a material object, what someone will pay for it at that moment. If you aren't needed, f*ck off and die!

I wonder if Larkin thinks his equipment has value in the say way as people? When not needed, does he sell tools for scrap?

The trouble is we don't actually have much unemployment. It's about 6% at the moment. When it gets down to 4% employers complain they can't find enough employees. We seem to be seeing that now, but there are many reasons. With kids not in schools lots of parents stay at home. It's hard to wait tables over the phone.

They can go out of buisness and we can buy imports.

Or they can automate and eliminate jobs.

If people aren't productive, eventually we run out of resources for food and housing. We can't just print money to make everyone happy.

Don't tax businesses, and don't make employment more expensive than the actual cost of labor. Heck, make it *less* expensive.

Re-do the unemployment insurance and Social Security systems, which discourage hiring.

Have a base-level national health system, with lots of local physian aides or nurse practitioners, without huge liability costs.

Get government revenue from sales (consumption) tax, not business taxes. Make imports share the tax burden.

Stop government from treating business as the enemy.

Stop funding useless college courses through student loans. Fund more trade schools.

Control immigration, or accept illegal-immigrant wage levels.

Do like some countries: make the losing party in a law suit pay all the costs.

A little efficiency would be good. Walking over the freeway this morning, a few guys were manually picking up trash along the side. There were six vehicles involved, including a CHP SUV and one truck pulling a trailer with a porta-potty.

You mean buy workers, bring them to this country and let them do the jobs? I prefer a waiter be able to speak adequate English.

You want to be waited on by Robbie the Robot?

This country has pretty much never had a problem with resources. It was Ireland that had the potato famine.

I would support not taxing companies, but it would mean taxes on anyone making over $70,000 would get very, very steep. Is that your proposal?

Social security? You want the retired to go back to work? Those are the people no one wants to hire because it runs up your insurance premiums.

Unemployment insurance only pays those out of work. It doesn't affect hiring at all unless you mean to starve people to take lower wages.

YES! National health is a great idea. It will need to be funded by a tax on companies roughly in proportion to the insurance premiums they are currently paying. Otherwise it needs to be funding by raising taxes across the board and the employers get a windfall.

Sales tax is already high in many states. To provide enough revenue for the present level of government would require another tax on top of the local taxes. Better to tax those getting the windfall from lower business taxes with higher income taxes.

I think that's already a law, or maybe in the Constitution. Yeah, Article 8.

Yup, we're working on that. I think they've already removed Useless 101. Useless 201 is next.

Allowing large parties with lots of money to ride roughshod over those with less money? We already do that in cases of extreme abuse. I think that's good enough.

What's your point? Are you suggesting someone design a machine to automate that?

On Monday, 10 May 2021 at 07:40:02 UTC-7, snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote: ...

Didn't you say that you paid your manufacturing people when they couldn't work due to the lock-down.

Why do that if it doesn't work?

kw ...

Some people came in and some took kits and assembled stuff at home. Some had little to do, but we paid them all as usual. There was also some PPP money conditional on keeping everyone employed.

We would have paid them if there was not enough work, but we built stuff. We would have paid them because we like them and wouldn't want to lose them. They could have painted or taken inventory or something too.

We think long-term, so want to keep everyone happy, partly so they would remain productive long-term. In other words, it does work.

Some businesses lay off employees is there's a short-term lull in business. Even shift by shift. I'm glad we aren't in that situation.

+1. Very good business model. Good people are hard to find. They are the core of your business. If you let them go, it is very hard to find talented people when you need them.

The very first company I worked for let everyone go when there was a lull. They never recovered when business improved. Everyone knew what they had done to their employees, and they could not find people willing to risk working for them. So they went out of business.

A local car company here does the same thing. Car repair turns out to be cyclical. They keep paying their people during lulls. I asked the manager why, and he said they have some of the best people in the business. If he let them go, he would never be able to find anyone later when business picked up.

A simple strategy, but it means so much.

It doesn't work if a business is out of cash, which many small shops are.

Instead of extended unemployment payments, it would have been better to pay people to stay at work. PPP sort of did that, but there was no needs test.

Put money aside for the lean times. If there is not enough profit to support this, don't bother going in business in the first place. Competing on price is bad business. Compete on quality and excellence. Customers will eventually find that is the cheapest way for them to go.

For sure. Use RSA as described in Knuth. It can be implemented using `dc' a simple compiler that is hard to subvert. Recompile it using a simple c-compiler. You can't subvert a c-compiler such that it compiles dc.c to a subverted dc calculator. If you're paranoid you can increase the size of the cipher. If you're paranoid (the calculation being generic) it can be repeated by a totally different package like mathematica.

I used to think like that, but now I'm not so sure anymore.

Just a few days ago I came across a reference to an article by Ken Thompson where he describes a way to subvert a C-compiler without any of that subversion showing in the compiler source code. There is no easy way to defend against such a compiler detecting cryptographic algorithms compiled using it and covertly spill the beans.

The article is fascinating, for those who are into such things.

Jeroen Belleman

I'm well aware of this article. Now read the article and my comment above, and realise how I address the issue.