Free market, Ceo's suck, etc ......... Split from "A successor already"


Yeah, like Apple attacking Google for Android by claiming it had copied it! Yeah right, as if having Icons on a screen was something fundamentally new!
 In all fairness, Apple was suing Samsung, not Android. And they had every reason to. It was obvious that Samsung was trying to make the Android on their devices look as similar to iOS as possible. I hate Apple, but I'm not going to deny that fact just because I do.

That's not dynamic. The way Tactus works is to set a configuration when the screen is built. Then you can get it to pop out when you want it to. It can not, however, dynamically change where those physical buttons are after the product is in the consumers' hands.

-God Ginrai
Meh...
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Ehhh...

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@SNESFAN: Since it says you are located in the US, I would assume your arguments about minimum wage relate to it. In the USA, minimum wage was not implemented to prevent sweatshop environments, but to increase the purchasing power of the working class during the Great Depression.

@ekianjo: You speak about how SNESFAN can't have an adult conversation, however you were obviously being confrontational yourself.

-God Ginrai
 
OK, this thread is derailed anyway, so I can just as well join in.

If anything, the wages have been increasing over time and not been reduced.
It depends on how you define things.

If you talk about absolute average wages, sure, those have been increasing in most countries most of the time. But of course that includes top wages that heavily influence the average (remember: wages don't have a normal distribution, I don't know the exact percentage but it could very well be the case that 90% of the people earn less than the average wage), and of course absolute numbers don't adjust for inflation.

If you adjust for inflation and consider median wages instead of average ones, wages have actually decreased in many countries.

If you look at the ratio between median wages and profits (in other words, what are employers paying as wages to their employees instead of taking profits for themselves), wages have decreased rather spectacularly in most countries.

A minimum wage is a very good thing -- especially in sectors of unskilled labor, where it is very easy for employers to force people to accept low wages, e.g. by importing cheap migrant workers or by threatening to outsource to low-wage countries. It's also good to have automatic influation adjustment, like we have in Belgium (although it is sadly eroding). It would also be good to have a much more progressive tax system so that even though there is no maximum wage, extremely high wages get taxed at maybe 90% while low wages get taxed at 5% or so.

It's nonsense that minimum wages would cause unemployment. Increased productivity (mostly thanks to technology, but also more flexibility and unpaid overtime) is what causes unemployment if not compensated by decreasing working hours. We have gone from 14 hour days, 6 or 7 days a week in the 19th century and no holidays to 8 hour days, 5 days a week, and several weeks of paid holidays by the 1960s. Since then, there has been a huge increase in productivity, but no real decrease in working hours. I'm in favor of a 32h working week (or less), without wage decrease, and with corresponding new job creation. That would solve unemployment. There are profits enough to do that; in most sectors, the companies don't re-invest their profits in the real economy but put them in the virtual financial economy (speculation etc) because it is more profitable -- they are effectively sitting on piles of cash.
 
Actually I think, yes, they should switch to an other job. If there was no one who did those jobs we would have a huge problem and their wages would need to raise to get enough personnel.
Here in the Netherlands we have much labor work in the fields (agriculture), as no dutch person wants to break his back working the long hours that autumn harvesting requires at minimum wages, it is cheaper to get Polish people, at 1/3 of dutch minimum wages working the 3 months, sleeping with 16 men in a barrack (illegal, btw). This is necessary, because the middleman (supermarkets) reap all the profit (legal, but immoral) and force the food to be cheap.  could not find a good source, but here is a dutch one: http://www.foodlog.nl/artikel/hoeveel_krijgt_de_boer_van_de_euro_die_jij_de_winkelier_betaalt_pleidooi_vo/

It is a complex situation. My 200 gram of dutch strawberries costs 8 euros (.8 euro for the farmer, a grade) here at the grocery shop. At the market they are only 2 euro (.3 euro for the farmer, b/c grade). At the supermarket they are 4 euro (.3 euro for the farmer, a/b grade). So which one do I buy...  another dutch, but for cauliflower: http://www.veldverkenners.be/vraag-van-de-maand-hoeveel-krijgt-een-teler-voor-een-bloemkool

I bought my milk from the supermarket today: 1.50 euro for 2 liters. The farmer gets €1,68 per 100 kilo milk (yes, kilo, not liter). source (dutch): http://www.boerderij.nl/Rundveehouderij/Nieuws/2013/1/Melkveehouder-verdient-28000-minder-1158500W/

But what I personally would like much more is this: An unconditional basic income high enough to live from. Other than that: free market.
I'm hearing that more and more. This means capitalism is failing bigtime. (

https://www.youtube.com/embed/slTF_XXoKAQ?feature=oembed
Not in Europe. The punishment is sometimes 2% of the money that got swindled, and no one goes to jail. People forget about it in about 2 years time. Its not a punishment, it's a 'tax'.

And sometimes the law is inapplicable (link to previous link we talked about: http://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valleys-most-celebrated-ceos-conspired-to-drive-down-100000-tech-engineers-wages/)
 
Not in Europe. The punishment is sometimes 2% of the money that got swindled, and no one goes to jail. People forget about it in about 2 years time. Its not a punishment, it's a 'tax'.
Don't make generalizations about "Europe". It's not a single country with a single body of laws. In France I can already tell you it's punishable by the Law, and such practices have been discovered and severly punished - but I agree the punishment should be more severe, it does feel like a tax more than anything else.

At the same time, I wonder if that's really necessary, because we see that the resellers who were trying to fix the market prices for themselves get screwed in the end with online retailers coming and taking the market for themselves. So the market wins no matter what, and the ones who wanted to rig the prices for themselves end up losing precious market share.  

If you adjust for inflation and consider median wages instead of average ones, wages have actually decreased in many countries.
Source?  

It would also be good to have a much more progressive tax system so that even though there is no maximum wage, extremely high wages get taxed at maybe 90% while low wages get taxed at 5% or so.
I'd rather be in favor of a flat tax, this makes more sense and is more just (in my book), plus it would not force the people who earn a lot of money to exit the country. With applying ridiculous high rax rates, all you end up losing is capital, moving to other countries - people who earn a lot WILL find ways to protect their money, don't worry about that.  
 
It's nonsense that minimum wages would cause unemployment.
No, on the contrary it makes perfect sense. It's not hard to imagine. I will give you an example: Let's say someone is paid 5 dollars an hour to wipe tables in a restaurant. The day you rise the minimum wage to 10 dollars an hour, the restaurant may decide it's not worth that amount of money anymore, and that they will do it by themselves instead. So, low-qualified jobs are actually destroyed by minimum wages, and the more so every single time the level of the minimum wage is raised. 

And I live in a country (Japan) where the minimum wage can be very low (I'm not sure if there is any threshold actually) and I can tell you a LOT of people can actually survive because of these jobs, even if they are paid little. And a number of students in college actually pay for part of their studies thanks to these low paying jobs. If the minima were to be raised, a lot of these jobs would be wiped out, the service in the shops/restaurants would suffer because of that, and these people would be applying for welfare instead, thus increasing the tax pressure on the whole of society (already bad enough in a country like Japan with 300%+ of GDP debt accumulated until now: in other words, Japan's future is dead and in the coffin already in terms of paying back these debts). 
 
I'm in favor of a 32h working week (or less), without wage decrease, and with corresponding new job creation.

Ha! I know we are on the extreme opposite of the economic policy ends, especially when I see these kind of statements. France already tried that (35 hours) and everyone has now realized it was a massive mistake (even the socialists admit it and want more flexibility) and you can see for yourself the unemployment has only been rising since then.

Of course there's always the die-hard communists like Melenchon in France who say "well it did not work because it was not enough, we should have gone to 32", yeah well why not 16 while we are at it ? No one takes them seriously because we already know it's never worked - It did not result into increased employement, because the first thing companies will do to adjust is, like you said, to increase productivity instead - it's way easier than actually increasing your running costs by hiring more people.

It's just like people who say "inflation is a good thing", then why don't we go all the way like Argentina and clock the inflation at 20%-30% a year if that's such a great way to live ? Argentinians beg to disagree that it's "very good" for them.  Very much the same line of thought.

If you want to reduce unemployment, you need to allow for employers to tailor the working time of their employees. Some companies do not need people working 40 hours for them, then let them have 32 hours contracts if they want! Some companies need more employee committment, so let them have 50 hours contracts if they want, and if they find people who actualy want to work that hard! Of course you can set upper limits (no more than xxx hours per week), but I assume you know that people who work as "cadres" in Europe actually do a lot more work than 40 hours a week and are not paid by hour but by month - I know people working as consultants who clock 70-80 hours a week (and they love it).

Freedom (both for the employer AND the employee) is where we should all be going. 
 
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There are profits enough to do that; in most sectors, the companies don't re-invest their profits in the real economy but put them in the virtual financial economy (speculation etc) because it is more profitable -- they are effectively sitting on piles of cash.
Nonsense. Companies don't sit on piles of cash. Even Sony makes actually more money by making investment with their cash than by selling their own products. At least no serious company does that. I'm not talking about your local pub manager. 

Plus, even IF they were sitting on pile of cash, safely stored in the bank, it would be a net positive for the people, since the banks would actually have real funds to loan to people who want to start up their business. Banks need capital, and to have capital you need savings first. If everyone was consuming everything they earned, there would be no savings and therefore no investment possible, because investment stems from the savings of someone else. 
 
Well the top end of the market is the one you cant access with basic skills and tools, and its the one it makes sense to corrupt, so the free market leads to this, and what is americas plan? Keep not adjusting minimum wage, seeing purchase power for citizens lowered to the benefit of a rich conglamorate of people who can afford to pull the strings?
 
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Lowering working hours seems to have worked just fine in the past. Just like increasing them worked before that. At the extremes sustainability needs to be achieved within the alloted man-hours, and on the other hand people need sleep. (edit: actually no, you just need to maintain profitability at the rate you can afford to work people to death, if its cheaper to get new workers then that "works" Slavery worked, and it works around the world to this day. Its a matter of how ridiculous you want to span the gap, but in any event)

A voluntary consultant job is not the same as an institutionalized 12+ hours a day.

There are profits enough to do that; in most sectors, the companies don't re-invest their profits in the real economy but put them in the virtual financial economy (speculation etc) because it is more profitable -- they are effectively sitting on piles of cash.
 Nonsense. Companies don't sit on piles of cash. Even Sony makes actually more money by making investment with their cash than by selling their own products. At least no serious company does that. I'm not talking about your local pub manager. 

Plus, even IF they were sitting on pile of cash, safely stored in the bank, it would be a net positive for the people, since the banks would actually have real funds to loan to people who want to start up their business. Banks need capital, and to have capital you need savings first. If everyone was consuming everything they earned, there would be no savings and therefore no investment possible, because investment stems from the savings of someone else.
Fractional reserve banking thresholds are based on that not everyone do the same thing. Those thresholds are set by a state entity, which in practice, historically shows private banks cant operate in a healthy economy. Banks leading to their own demise, corruption, or failing unrelated areas of practice, is not a healthy prospect.
A monetary system only stays healthy on the basis of its own economics, but just because that for the purpose of your flawed premise, everyone spending everything, which means the money "safely stored in a bank" isn't safe anymore, doesn't mean capital investment has to be directed through a traditional bank which operates based on your belief. Im not opposed to savings being the investment of unknown, but the path you dictate is flawed. Investment is possible by private wealth and crowd sourcing, even today. Money in the traditional bank having a positive side is good, but it doesn't excuse the broken financial economy, which is the problem it creates.

All the money, resources, interest on further energy extraction, wont be spent, thats the premise of even a bank, it is dependent on either one company owning everything, in turn discarding a free market, or all the national resources spent, which wont happen. A case remains for no (effective) state entities, and free market unregulated. The democratic state doesn't exist if its subordinate to (private) interest of a few players. And its certainly  hard enough to argue for free market economics alone.

If money is lent out at a rate it isn't returned, you have a problem, a banking approach to this is invent new interest on interest that cant be returned, loans you say? "Funds" is the moniker to avoiding think of them as peoples livelihood, even down to the price of basic foods. A state that doesn't have regard for at least its own, has a fundamental problem.

After a while bad economy cant die, and dictates the top end, where the bank is playing a profitable game it cant lose. The net interest of this in practice is to the select few, rather than people in general. An American state approach to this is to invest state money in trying to save this practice.

Give them the national bank, the treasury. Next up, pensioners fund? Cant even fight the hand enough to establish a national health care. Which is more effective to the net interest of everyone. That isn't civilized, as in civilized society.

Far less civilized is the civil society exploiting the world elsewhere and portraying it as its own labour.

Sony effectively sitting on piles of cash, and investing it, for a variation of the theme "sit on money" is a fundamental case of power fundamented into ever growing corruption. In the long run they cant afford not to. And the biggest ones left, will be the ugliest ones, monopolization till you gain the go to jail free-card in being too big to fail.

South-Korea, a country where corruption is perfected, even has banking concerns needing to get into other businesses. Super duper healty. What could possibly go wrong.

I don't know who of you is more correct, but sony just bought half of olympus, when they have a photo division, effectivly something they could afford anyways because they are in the market of entirely different products. I think they partly own zeiss too. Its funny how much plan economy they enforce, because that is more effective, but for the wrong reasons obviously. No country would be allowed to operate like that in the world economy, unless it was the biggest driving economy. A rather darwinist reality, where the predator wins over whoever doesn't cooperate against its tactics.

The irony is compelling, yet people seem to think the premise of competition not yet corrupted can just take its turn, once foundations are laid out. Foundations here being either the start of civilized society or after a crash, when plan economy saves the day.

Maybe after enough worldwide bank-fails we will finally have established enough governing on them to have a chance of healthy economy.
 
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If companies were allowed to agree on wages together (like they did in that linked case) then they would slowly lower the wages until they reach minimum wage
Yet this can never happen, because there are always smaller companies emerging
This is not true in general. For a bakery it may be true. But not for stuff like Cars, Planes, Container Ships, Highend Chip Factories etc which needs millions and billions for hardware and engineers to even start. And more several years before they can sell their products. And they need big enough marketing and numbers of sold units to get good prices against VW, Airbus, Boeing, Intel.

Minimum wages creates unemployment
Minimum wages make sure only Jobs exists legally, where you can earn enough to live from your wage. So jobs with such a little wage, you can't live from it are destroyed, but making sure that jobs which can be paid to be enough for a living, are paid this way. Pretty ok.

So, competition is actually very healthy and mimics natural selection in nature
This is the most interessting point by far. The main point at natural selection is: "the beings which works best with the current system (e.g. environmental conditions) will survive, while other will perish". In nature the fastest, strongest, most clever, most healthy animals are surviving, because the system is demanding strong, fast, clever animals. But what kind of being survives inside the free market system? 

I think we live in a world of "natural selection" with 2 systems. A system of national states and how they work together. And an economical system how production works.

The rules of the economical system are: competition and profit.

The rule of the nations are: most powerful army, economy, education and technology.

Lets just talk about the economical system. To survive you need to be the best in competition. This means you need to make most profit, have the best product and have the best price. Relative to the others. Or you won't surivive. This means you are trying to destroy your competitors at any cost (Apple suing Samsung for round corners), killing union members which are demanding work protection cloth like breathing mask since they make your product more expensive, and you are selling your product with most profit. This means you buy the food for an entire country which means 100 Millions profit. You are waiting, loosing 20% of the food because its after its expiration date. So you make 80 Millions. But because people are starting to starve, you can double the price, so you make 160 Millions.

And if you don't act like this the other companies will be more succesful and you lose your job and end up as a "starved person" in long term.

So the richest, most reckless, lying (advertising) company is the only survivor in this system.

This leads in the long way to monopolys (since the fittest survives) or very few companies. The system isn't even working on its own. You need the state as external corrector to keep the needed competition working. And you will get not the best possible product since patents are stopping engeeners to use the best technology to make the best product.

The stuff I wrote is from the real world. A Coca Cola tin factory killed unions members in Columbia by using extreme right winged para militias (Black Eagles). I read an interview with a manager of a hedge fond who said, she killed more people with food speculations than most dictators.

And this is just the competition problem.

The "must make profit system" prevents economies which just want to make enough for a good living. You won't get money to buy some land, to plant crops and give for self costs to homeless people and yourself. This economy wants profits. You can't take production goods and produce consumers goods. The production goods are owned (mostly) by the rich, who must made profits with them. Or they will lose their wealth and end up poor (see competition). The only way around it in this system, is a monopoly where competition rules are not needed, because you are the defacto king and nobody can't challenge your economic might.

An other big problem are unneeded people. You don't need all the people to produce goods for everyone. In fact you don't need half the people to do it. And since I am doing my master degree in computer science and robotics, you won't need 1/4 of the people in the next decades. But this economy is not to create a good life for as much people as possible, but to make as much profit as possible (to survive in competition), this people won't get goods (without the state) and will starve (without the state). We have more than enough for everyone on this planet, we have more than industrial power to produce for everyone everything. We have even more industrial, we can even produce more than that. But this is a problem for the current economical system. And this shows in my opinion that our economical system isn't working.

Long story short: capitalism doesn't work. It doesn't work on its own (without help from state) and it will destroy this planet in long term.

I really recommend this book: http://www.amazon.de/Kritische-Theorie-Einf%C3%BChrung-Michael-Schwandt/dp/3896575953
 
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I love the fact that america is moving more towards a more socialist nation and away from the true capitalist nature we started from. I feel we have a long way to go, but we are headed more in more in the right direction as time goes on. I don't want it to ever turn into full socialism or dread the thought full communist, but a mix of all 3 to varied degrees seems to absolutely be the best answer.

Part of the governments job is to protect the country, I very much feel that includes the survival of its people as well.
 
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Minimum wages make sure only Jobs exists legally, where you can earn enough to live from your wage. So jobs with such a little wage, you can't live from it are destroyed, but making sure that jobs which can be paid to be enough for a living, are paid this way. Pretty ok.
You didn't answer the case of the table waiter I mentioned before, explaining exactly how jobs get destroyed by minimum wages. Come back with practical examples.  
 
Lowering working hours seems to have worked just fine in the past. Just like increasing them worked before that.
To me asking every company to respect the same rule of lets' say, 40 hours a week, is nonsense, because depending on their business they may have different needs, different practices and therefore "one size does not fit all". Some may want to hire people for 30 hours only, some others for 50 hours, and so on. It should be up to the employees and employers to decide how much they want to invest in their workforce, not up to the government to artificially fix the work duration based on NOTHING. 
 
Maybe after enough worldwide bank-fails we will finally have established enough governing on them to have a chance of healthy economy.
There's never been as much regulations on banks as now and they have never done as bad, economically, as now. Correlation ? 

Try setting up a bank by yourself now, and I'll watch you drown in paperwork :)

Good luck with the myth that we live in a far-west where banks do what they want. Stop reading tabloids. 
 
Im not opposed to savings being the investment of unknown, but the path you dictate is flawed. Investment is possible by private wealth and crowd sourcing, even today.
Savings of a large population largely exceed savings of a few rich individuals, and crowd sourcing is a joke when you need to build a bridge, a motorway, an airport or something like that which requires hundred of millions, or billions of dollars of capital. I guess you have never worked in any large supply kind of industry ? Because most manufacturing facilities cost a ton of dough and there's no way you can finance that through crowdsourcing. 

The actual other way of "crowdsourcing", which exists for a very long time now, is called "stocks". That's another way for a company to increase their capital, and fund their investments on top of their profits. That works because you have constantly hundred of millions of investments occurring in real time every single day. I'm assuming that you did not refer to that when you mentioned crowdsourcing, though.
 
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You didn't answer the case of the table waiter I mentioned before, explaining exactly how jobs get destroyed by minimum wages. Come back with practical examples.
I don't want to argue neither pro or contra a minimal wage (I'm actually fond of the idea, but don't have enough background to cater an argument), but your example seems a bit short sighted to me:
Wouldn't your argument imply that that the jobs that get destroyed are actually superfluous, if employers can so easily waiving their workfore good by ?

So isn't it more likely that they will only fire a part of their workers ? Leaving the workers with more work load, but also more payment. Payment they probably won't stuff into their matress but spend on services or to consume products, which in turn could lead to a need for more workforce on the employers side.

This is of course just an intelectual mindgame and may not refelct reality.

But beeing in a waiter situation myself during my time at a university, there is no way they can just fire them all if minimal wages are a reality.

On the "opposite end" I think of small businesses like hairdresser and such which are already having a hard time around here and probably could not afford to pay their employees better.

To me asking every company to respect the same rule of lets' say, 40 hours a week, is nonsense, because depending on their business they may have different needs, different practices and therefore "one size does not fit all". Some may want to hire people for 30 hours only, some others for 50 hours, and so on. It should be up to the employees and employers to decide how much they want to invest in their workforce, not up to the government to artificially fix the work duration based on NOTHING.
But this can only work if employer and employee are on the same level, but in the current situation most employees are having a disadvantage as their competition is much bigger, so they are more prone to accept working conditions they are not realy satisfied with.
 
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