Texas

So I have other government workers fill in for those on strike, and somehow it results in higher paychecks. Guess wages across the board have increased to reduce the odds of a strike?

Issues Test Bed wrote:

Up until now, I thought I was the only person on the planet who knew about Elle Cordova. I think she would make a fine ex-wife.

I think I missed a memo during this weekend's travel. What strike?

NS issue. It resulted in me gaining 2 banners related to higher wages.

Elle Cordova is a talented lady, she's done a few Trek related videos as well.

Roma Augusta wrote:

Obviously the actual answer is I’m overthinking it and it’s just a game, but that’s my two cents on the accuracy of this issue.

The people pulling the levers on this game are almost exclusively left wing indoctrinated left wing thinkers with absolutely no grasp on the real world economics.

Roma Augusta wrote:

The flipside is you’ve got to draw the line somewhere though. If you just accede to every demand, even if it’s reasonable, you set a precedent that you’ll be a pushover next time round, whether it’s reasonable or not. And sooner or later you end up in the situation my home country (the UK) ended up in during the 1970s, where industries were hopelessly uncompetitive and in thrall to unions who constantly went on strike as a matter of course.

My philosophy on business is simple. If I own the business, it is my checkbook. That means I decide who I write those checks to and how much those checks will be. The minute someone with no skin in the business tells me how much I have to pay, or who I have to pay, that business closes.

I hear these young'uns spouting off nonsense about workers must have a seat in the board room. That's hogwash. If the workers want a seat in the board room then they can invest enough capital in that business to buy that seat.

The young'uns will tell you that workers deserve a slice of the profits. Also hogwash. The worker's slice of that pie is their wages. You don't see workers taking a pay cut when profits are down. You don't see the workers actually kicking in cash when the company is losing money either.

Like the UK, unions are a huge problem here. Millions of jobs left the US for the pacific rim over labor problems. Even heavy industrial jobs like steel production.

Let's take steel for example. In the late 1960's Japanese business men toured Bethlehem Steel with the goal of buying steel from them. The left the place astonished. Bethlehem had a payroll of 5000 people. There was zero automation. And there were people standing around while one or two actually did the work. Representatives of Bethlehem explained that union rules and negotiations are behind staffing levels and the ban on automation.

The Japanese went back to Japan totally disillusioned.

Three years later the Japanese opened a behemoth, state of the art, fully automated steel mill in Oita. The total payroll was 500 people. When it opened, it had four times the capacity of Bethlehem. The quality of the steel coming out of Japanese plant was better than anything the US could do at the time.

Here's the kicker: It became cheaper to mine the iron ore, nickle, cadmium, chromium, etc. here, put it on a boat to the pacific rim, have it made into steel and then shipped back here than it was to buy it from Bethlehem.

That same scenario played out over and over again across almost every industry in the United States. Even solid bastions of US industry like automobile manufacturing found many of their jobs outsourced overseas as instead of building assemblies to put into the cars, those assemblies are showing up from some foreign already built.

There are other economic factors here. But for the most part, unions and labor problems own the majority of job loss overseas here.

Issues Test Bed wrote:

That same scenario played out over and over again across almost every industry in the United States. Even solid bastions of US industry like automobile manufacturing found many of their jobs outsourced overseas as instead of building assemblies to put into the cars, those assemblies are showing up from some foreign already built.

There are other economic factors here. But for the most part, unions and labor problems own the majority of job loss overseas here.

Indeed. And the long term consequences of this have been that many once thriving industrial cities in the USA, the wealthiest country in the world, are literally crumbling into ruin. If your industry isn’t competitive, your industry will slowly die. You can ameliorate this with tariffs but ultimately there’s no defying the laws of supply and demand.

I think many young people, largely people of my generation, have this idea that greedy tycoons are doing everything they can to deny workers their wages. They would be quite shocked, I think, to see how businesses actually operate.

Corgeia wrote:

Going off on a slightly different road, it appears rather strange to me that a large portion of the community is just fine with Communists and such, with them having a decent presence here on NS, yet going on the opposite side of the aisle you'll find a very harsh condemnation of Fascism by the community. Though I do agree with the condemnation of Fascism (As it is a horrible ideology which has killed a lot of folks) nonetheless I find it rather strange that no such condemnation exists for Communism, an ideology which has killed even more people and isn't that far from Fascism in certain aspects (the promotion of the "collective interests" which often means the removal of an individual's liberty is just one example)

Western societies generally do have this bias where one genocidal, mass murdering ideology is seen as more or less socially acceptable amongst elite white liberals, while the other is rightly condemned by nearly everyone. I find it sad, but not especially strange. Communism flatters the ego of a certain type of privileged, educated leftist because they can imagine themselves as part of the elite coterie who make decisions and ‘five year plans’ on behalf of others. Ironically, for all their high and mighty rhetoric, every study indicates that conservatives and libertarians give far more of both their money and their time to charity than leftists…

Why did Weather worsen 0.13%? High Base

What changed
Mysterious factors changed

Census result
Weather worsened

Ah yes, the mysterious factors that effect how much sunlight the nation gets.