The Trump Presidency

[A Robot Bit Me]

Might not be so good for you! haha

It's bad, I know. I usually use aspirin for migraines, but needed the 'profen to reduce my fever below the point of hallucinating so I could sleep.

It was a bad week.

[Fe 26]

Yeah IP, labor isn't necessarily the biggest expense but it is the largest that management can easily control short term. Which is why when some companies have a bad quarter the first thing you hear is layoffs.

I would argue, that for many, it is the only thing they think they can control. They have no idea how to make more or how to get consumers to buy more, so they obsess over trying to get money out of the product. And since they don't really understand the product, they focus on pulling labor out of it.

[Doc Holliday]

BABY YOU’RE A F I R E WORK!

THE HITS KEEP COMING AND THEY DON’T STOP COMING

Click for full size

[Calliander]

You guys catch SNL? No Baldwin (aka, tolerable) episode. This was great:

[Drewbacca]

Do you want to know the real reason big business is always worried about labor? Because they are stupid and/or risk adverse.

The ceos don't really know how their products are made. They don't understand the science of it. They don't understand the equipment used. And without this understanding, they are unable to make intelligent choices on what things to modernize to produce more product for less resource or on how to make different products with the same resource at a higher profit. When someone suggest this and that new thing, it all appears like a huge risk because they don't understand the present state and the suggested future state. Or they do understand and they're just cowards.

But they do understand labor. Or they think they do. Its a very visual thing. You walk into a facility, you see labor.

So if they want to increase their profitability, they decide its easier to make zero changes to their equipment and instead cut labor. So hopefully, instead of paying $100 to make widget X, they spend $99. If sales stay the same, they'll make 1% more money.


Voters believe the shit they're told about high labor costs by big business because labor is a big cost in service jobs or small firms. If you only have 10 or 20 people, labor probably does eat up a lot of your money. You probably aren't making millions of units, spreading your fixed labor cost out to almost nothing per unit.

This mostly isn't true—it's clear you haven't actually met many CEO's. When someone can't invest in the future and cut labor costs it's usually due to a shortage of cash-on-hand. That's how contract businesses (even large scale) tend to work. Then it simply becomes how much short term risk can we take for a supposed payout in 2 years? Typically high-capital businesses forecast 4-5 years out to spot cash shortfalls.

You're a smart guy that unfortunately has a terribly misanthropic bias towards authority figures (maybe some warranted, because your job and bosses seem to disregard your opinions). That's no way to live, though.

Have a turmeric tea, hippie.

I've started eating turmeric on the reg. It's legit.

[Satsuki]

This mostly isn't true—it's clear you haven't actually met many CEO's.

lol how is he wrong? You're confirming everything he is saying.
CEO doesn't necessarily mean "successful billionaire of _____ multinational company." He's speaking to a very real part of the industry that is an enormous issue - there's a huge disconnect between employees and employers, equipment is often not updated, labor is cut very often. This occurs at many small and mid level companies, as well as larger ones.
This can be due to a lack of cash on hand, but it can also speak to a innate failure of people in charge. If you blindly see every CEO as "successful businessman," I don't think I need to tell you how big of a financial hit you would take if you decided to invest in every Joe Rando with a company.

[kedawa]

In my experience, those running medium sized companies often make costly mistakes by not investing a dollar today to avert a ten dollar expense tomorrow. Being tight with the purse-strings might be wise sometimes, but it often just leads to waste and inefficiency.

[Fe 26]

This mostly isn't true—it's clear you haven't actually met many CEO's.

Have you met many that aren't in tech? Or are over more than 100,000 to 50,000 employees? Over more than 3,000?

[Drewbacca]

lol how is he wrong? You're confirming everything he is saying.
CEO doesn't necessarily mean "successful billionaire of _____ multinational company." He's speaking to a very real part of the industry that is an enormous issue - there's a huge disconnect between employees and employers, equipment is often not updated, labor is cut very often. This occurs at many small and mid level companies, as well as larger ones. This can be due to a lack of cash on hand, but it can also speak to a innate failure of people in charge. If you blindly see every CEO as "successful businessman," I don't think I need to tell you how big of a financial hit you would take if you decided to invest in every Joe Rando with a company.

There's a subtle difference—I'm not attributing the lack of investment to some bumbling CEO archetype he's describing. It's ironically what an idiot CEOs would do if they were in charge. They'd assume the last guy was a fucking idiot and make all the same mistakes without digging in to the situation. To improve something you have to ask WHY they made the decisions they made and humble yourself.

Speaking from experience when you dig in to short v. long-term investments in businesses it almost always comes down to liquidity in the business aka cash. Businesses that rely on contract services (like, say, steel factories) and have high capital investment (buttloads of 25% tariff steel) easily run in to cashflow problems. And typically they try to anticipate shortfalls in fiscal 2021, 22? That's almost always what stops OBVIOUSLY GOOD long term investments from being made. The business might risk not be around to reap the reward. Some CEOs and CFO's are more risk averse than others, like any investing. If you're working for a conservative redneck in rural Alabama I'm going to guess which kind it is.

And I didn't have to resort to saying all CEOs are nincompoop morons to understand the perspective. To properly understand I had to assume they weren't.

[Fe 26]