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So, what, Apple’s solution to everything being made in a single country is to move production out of China into another country? Call me nuts but, in order to make the supply chain more resilient, you need to be making some of your product on every continent or, better yet, every country.
And if you’re being paid more then your boss has to make more money which means that you’ll be no better off. If everyone starts being paid more, i.e. there is a higher minimum wage, then what you pay for food, rent, taxes, and everything else goes up so I don’t thinnk you’ll be any better off financially.
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I think you’ve missed the point… these things have already gone up, while wages have remained stagnant, leaving people with effectively less money. Check the charts.
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I’ll take your word for it but, once you mandate a higher minimum wage, won’t things just go up by that much more?
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Well he did post a source to his claim, so no need to simply take him at his word.
It’s a fair point. The cost of a house and a car have far exceeded the pace of inflation. There’s absolutely an imbalance compared to the past. Some people take this as a sign that capitalism cannot work, but I think that’s a bit extreme. Regulation simply must be refreshed to keep up with the world.
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I’m not an economist, so I don’t have the answer, but people should earn enough wages that they can afford to live near their work while spending less than 30% of their take home income on just rent/mortgage. Part of the problem is people willing to accept poor quality crap just because they believe cheaper is better (which I find frequently to be a faulty assumption.)
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This is a prediction and opinion. This new Comcast is radically different. They are adding streaming to Comcast. My new box allows you to pause what you are watching. It is just like streaming or on demand programming. With the changes in internet laws, I bet Comcast will make it much cheaper to stream thru their service. No internet caps if you use Comcast. If you choose internet and not use this new service enforced caps and much more expensive. Check out my recent posts. My cable box stopped working this summer. Comcast made it clear to us no one would come to our house. After more than a week my husband took the old box and traded it for a new Comcast Box. Talked to comcast support for instructions for installation. The first words from the support person were do you have a Bluray player? He said remove the HDMI cable from the Bluray player and plug it into the Comcast box. He kept saying we were lucky to have the newest box. Today while trying to fix the Comcast Box set up (Bluray player does not work on our TV any more) chatted with comcast cares on twitter. He was polite but no help. Will add a photo of the Comcast Box info.
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Yes, it is a very intricate calculation.
If the minimum wage goes up, but the average wage doesn’t go up by as much (i.e. the poor get more, those that already earn a fair wage stay where they are), those on a lower wage can afford more, but because those in the middle haven’t changed their relative income, their buying power hasn’t increased, so you can’t have hyper-inflation to make everything more expensive. It is a leveling effect.
Boost everybody’s salary at the same time, by the same amount and the prices of everything have to go up as well.
On the counter side, you have the rabid profiteering of the big companies. They are no longer making enough to make a tidy profit, they are just there to make obscene profits for a few, whilst extracting every last cent out of the market. This is a parasitic model, what we actually need is a symbiotic relationship between companies and the market. They need to extract enough to survive, but not so much that they kill the host (just look at how much debt the average person now has, just to “keep up with the Joneses”).
The way the stock market works also has no base in reality any more. It is no longer based on the performance of the company and how much they pay in dividends, it is purely based on how much they think they can extract from a company, before the business model forced on it to satisfy the market collapses under reality.
We need to go back to basics and re-think how things work. How much profit a company can make in the next quarter is a stupid metric, even more stupid is how high you can drive up the share price before dumping the stock. We should be investing in companies with long term plans - what are they planning for the short term (5 - 10 years) and mid-term (10 to 50 years). We should be rewarding companies based on their sustainability and punish companies and the stock market for seeking short term profit with no idea of how they are going to carry that forward.
We no longer make the best products we can, we make the cheapest product that is good enough to last a few months beyond the mandatory guarantee period. My mother received a mixer as a wedding present, it lasted over 40 years of seval times a week use, and then it probably just needed new brushes. I’ve had 3 mixers in the last 20 years, which were used once or twice a month and they have all burnt out.
That isn’t an improvement in technology, that is a regression!
We have started making everything “worse” that we used to. Nothing lasts, it is all based on maximum consumption. You no longer look at products and say “oh, my last vacuum lasted 20 years, so I’ll buy that one again.” You go into the shop and go “oh, shiny!” Manufacturers lose brand loyalty, because the products no longer last, so people look around for something different each time it has to be replaced, in the hope that it will last a reasonable amount of time.
We don’t make the product qualitative better, we pack it full of delicate electronics that aren’t really needed, but will ensure that it is obsolete even more quickly. This attitude of rampant consumerism needs to change.
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I was very surprised by Mike’s response to Google’s Photos debacle.
It is typical Google, shuttering a free service, but I don’t see how Google owe “us” anything. As @Leo says, they are keeping the already uploaded photos free forever and I don’t see why it is such a bad thing, that you have to pay for the storage going forward. I disagree with Mike, giving that amount of storage away for free, forever is just uneconomical, nobody could afford that forever.
Maybe I’m looking at it too dispationately. I would never trust Google with any of my data, which is why I’ve never uploaded any photos to Google and all tracking is disabled, as far as possible. I have always paid for my own cloud storage at companies that do just that, not companies that subsidise the data storage through data mining and selling “my” information on to others, either directly or indirectly (E.g. Google’s ad platform).
I do have a Gmail account, for example, but I use it for signing up to websites that I don’t want to spam my real mail address.
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@Leo, you said that Intel is a 30 year old legacy technology. What does that make ARM? The first processor using the ARM architecture was used in the Acorn Archimedes in 1987 and ARM itself (the company) is 30 years old this week.
In fact, the initial design was started in 1983.
In my early teens we covered the stock market in school, and I purchased a slim book (published, I think, by the Wall Street Journal) to learn more. It taught me how to read the stocks page in the paper; about dividends and yield, P/E ratios, short selling, bonds and bills, etc. It all seems so quaint now.
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Yes, I covered it in my business economics studies at school and college as well. The whole thing was very different.
With day trading and automated trades in a millisecond tact, the stock market has lost all meaning. It is just relational to itself, not the real external forces that should drive the market.
Agreed. That said, I am always skeptical of nostalgia in any form, so I do wonder about my ignorance in this area as well. Surely the stock market has always been home to countless financial atrocities; perhaps it is just open to a wider pool of participants now, and operating at greater speed and scale.
I had to laugh at Mike when he said Americans were conformists. Maybe he’s been in Mexico too long and missed all the protests of the shutdowns and how many people are resisting wearing masks.
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Not sure topic is correct. Topic is Comcast New Business Model.