There was talk about renaming the Krugman thread for this purpose, but that seems to be going nowhere. Besides which, I feel the Krugman thread should be left to discuss Krugman while this thread can be used for more general economic discussion.
Discuss:
- The merits of competing theories.
- The role of the government in managing the economy.
- The causes of and solutions to our current economic woes.
- Comparisons between the economic systems of different countries.
- Theoretical and existing alternatives to our current market system.
edited 17th Dec '12 10:58:52 AM by Topazan
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![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
While this side of the Atlantic, I'd say it sounds offensivenote . You wouldn't get away with it here.
VW takes 4,000 cars off the UK market
VW said it was a temporary measure and that it intended to return the vehicles for sale once a fix is identified for the cars. Despite the scandal that began almost two weeks ago, VW customers could still buy vehicles that had the rogue software. The cars taken off the market represent 3% of VW's stock in the UK.
The company will continue to sell new vehicles, with the latest, cleanest engine technology. From last month all new diesel cars sold in Europe must be fitted with the latest Euro 6 engines, designed to significantly reduce the levels of pollutants emitted.
EU rules also allow manufacturers such as VW to continue to sell cars with the older, more polluting, Euro 5 engines to clear stock. These models will continue to be on the market well into next year. But VW has confirmed that 11 million of its vehicles have Euro 5 engines with the so-called "defeat device".
On Wednesday the company confirmed that almost 1.2 million vehicles sold in the UK were affected by the scandal. Owners - who will be contacted in coming weeks - will be asked to take their cars in for a service procedure that some experts have warned could affect fuel economy and performance.
Earlier this week sales of some Seat, Volkswagen, Audi, Skoda and VW vans with Euro 5 engines were suspended in Spain. The move affected 3,320 vehicles. Switzerland has also ordered a temporary halt to sales of vehicles with the engine in question. In the United States, VW has also stopped the sale of all new diesel cars.
It's a weird cultural footnote that in the UK derp and spaz are seen as highly offensive and in the U.S. they're things you affectionaly use or your friends. Most people in the U.S. arent even aware that they have any ties to the handicapped.
That said, can someone explain to me how Trump thinks money works?
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick
A procrastination in of itself
Oddly enough I think derp is becoming more accepted, while "spaz" is still very much not a thing you should say.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
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"Handicapped" — it's been several turns of the euphemism treadmill since that was widely used in that sense here. Not really used these days, and apparently can be offensive. Disabled may be heading that way.
edited 1st Oct '15 2:29:10 PM by Greenmantle
Keep Rolling On
A nice butterfly
People give it to him, he never gives it back, and he threathens to sue people for it if they ever claim it back.
His economic policy is based on the 5 year old policy of "no backsies"
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes
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Can you charge double and still keep your customers coming back? — On Miele, and German Business
Mr Miele says that's not the way they think.
"We like the appliances to last, because not everyone wants to change all their things every day," he says.
Fortunately Miele doesn't only sell vacuum cleaners. A customer impressed with his vacuum cleaner can come back for a washing machine, a tumble dryer, a cooker, or a coffee machine. It's brand loyalty the company is after. And as they like to point out at Miele, no-one enjoys reading a new instruction manual.
"People like to change their mobile phones more often, or TV sets maybe, but not your washing machine or tumble dryer. It's a replacement market we're in," says Mr Miele.
Its a strategy, readily associated with German manufacturing, from hi-fi to industrial machinery, build quality products that last, and you'll win over customers in the long run. And it is working for Miele. Despite the fact that a typical Miele machine costs around twice the mid-market standard one, sales are growing year-on-year. But recent trends are making those customers a little harder to win over and keep.
Like a BMW on the drive or a Hermes handbag, kitchen appliances are becoming increasingly about aspiration. You can blame celebrity chefs, or the revival of the kitchen-diner. Or put it down to the growth of middle class spending power. As the latest hi-tech features migrate from our phones to our homes, machines that were previously merely functional, have become a fashion statement, from American-style fridge-freezers to your at-home barista station. Competition is hotting up. Both fellow German brands like Bosch and Siemens and far eastern ones, such as Samsung, are targeting the kind of well-heeled customer Miele holds dear. With so many new features on offer customers may be tempted to upgrade more often after all.
And the quality of less expensive brands is catching up. While it might seem as though your appliances are constantly failing and needing replacing, Anthony Williams at market research company, GfK, says the trend is actually for improving durability.
"Evidence suggests manufacturers are putting in money to ensure good build quality," he says. "There are so many standards that now have to be adhered to, particularly for hi-tech products, by the nature of the product they have to make sure the [manufacturing] environment is very carefully monitored."
Mr Miele refuses to be cowed by these challenges. From the time when his great-grandfather developed the company's first washing machine out of a butter churn, their strategy has been to focus on durability. In demonstration, Mr Miele takes a one euro coin and hammers the front of a brand new washing machine with it. It is a hard currency still, he quips. Yet it leaves no mark on the machine's enamel surface.
Here at Miele's Gutersloh headquarters, washing machines operate around the clock to check they can withstand the equivalent of 20 years of use. And walking across the factory floor we pass a shift worker employed to rub a ladies nylon stocking around every drum the company produces to check for snagging.
The backbone to this rigorous quality control, though, is maintaining a tight-knit operation. "We have a lot of our production concentrated in Germany, more than 90%" says Mr Miele. "With our own factory it's of course much easier to control the quality because we talk to our own people, and if something goes wrong they can react very fast." They don't outsource any components. None of this means a Miele machine is cheap to produce.
Yet the management has come under no pressure from its shareholders to switch production overseas, or to chase more customers by moving downmarket. That's because the firm is still owned and run by the two families that first established it.
Mr Miele splits his role with a co-chief executive Reinhard Zinkann - the great-grandson of the other of the company's original founders. Mr Zinkann says filial devotion to the Miele cause has brought them a long way.
"If two partners know from the very beginning that they are in a marriage that cannot be divorced, because if they divorce then it will be the end of the company, then that is very helpful."
And, unlike some other privately-owned German brands, so far they've managed to avoid high-profile fall-outs at the top. Mr Zinkann says in the 24 years he's been at Miele every management and every shareholder decision has in the end been taken unanimously.
Its all quintessentially German - family-owned, a long-term perspective, engineering prowess and attention to detail. But if in the past that might have been seen purely as a strength, after the recent scandal at Volkswagen, "brand Germany" looks suddenly vulnerable.
Tosson El Noshokaty, from the Berlin branding consultancy, Prophet, thinks this will present a new challenge to the company.
"No one would have expected a German brand to be the Lance Armstrong of the motor industry," he says, and that undermines any company, from Leica to Heckler & Koch, that trades on the country's reputation for engineering prowess.
"Miele is really playing out German engineering, as a core essence of their brand," he says. "Their story is German engineering perfection," he says. "That's why you'll have these side effects."
The Mod with the Migraine
Hilton offers to pay for employees to get their GED. Is it wrong that my first thought was, "they hire people without diplomas?"
Hilton is partnering with the nonprofit Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL). Employees who choose to take part will get one-on-one sessions with an adviser — an initial meeting and weekly check-ins — as well as study guides or online test prep tutorials. Hilton will also cover the cost of the four-part GED test, which averages $30 per subject area, according to CAEL.
While obtaining a GED won't be directly tied to a worker's pay, it could help in the future. "We believe that successfully completing the program will lead to career advancement opportunities and the chance to increase pay," said Matt Schuyler, chief human resources officer at Hilton Worldwide. All full-time employees who have been at the company at least six months can take advantage of the new perk. The company said roughly 5,000 workers do not currently have a high school diploma.
CAEL has worked with other companies to offer various career and education resources, including Mc Donalds, Starbucks and Verizon. In April, Mc Donalds announced it would cover the costs for workers' classes to obtain a high-school diploma.
Last month, Hilton beefed up its parental leave benefits. Starting next year, all new mothers at the company will get 10 weeks of paid maternity leave. New fathers and adoptive parents will be able to take two weeks at full pay.
Jupiterian Local
Speaking as someone who works in the hospitality industry, hotels employ a lot of working-class minorities (often immigrants), particularly as housekeepers, and to a lesser extent as maintenance people. You can usually tell the dominant minority (if that phrase makes any sense) in an area by who hotels hire for those positions. (tldr, in the south, they're hispanic, in the east, they're black, and on the west coast, they're asian.) Front desk employees, by contrast, are usually young and often white. (Housekeepers are virtually always women and maintenance staff virtually always male, for the record. I can probably count the exceptions on one hand, after travelling to roughly one hotel a week on average for the last two years. Front desk employees are more even, but skew slightly female.)
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
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Absence of 90-seat turboprop a curious market failure — One where there's demand but no supply, for a number of reasons outlined below:
Now just one project – China’s initially 70-seat Xian Aircraft MA700 – remains active. India’s Hindustan Aeronautics Limited/National Aerospace Laboratory RTA-70 is not publicly canned, but neither is it any further along since its 2007 launch.
Bombardier is no longer in any financial position to move forward on a 90-seat version of the Q400. And ATR’s 90-seat project – once so promising – has been scuppered by resistance from the Airbus half of the joint venture.
Finally, this week brings confirmation that the last of those five projects is no more. Although Korean firms KAI and KAL-ASD never warmed to the idea, Seoul’s administration pursued a 90-seat development project for several years with great fervour. But the project was quietly shelved a year ago.
It would be easy to assign blame for the disappearance of the 90-seat turboprop to pure market forces. A new era of collapsing fuel prices diminishes the urgency for launching a fuel-efficient turboprop into a market dominated by regional jets.
But the absence of a successful 90-seat turboprop is still a curious example of market failure. Natural upgauging forces have pushed regional jets from 50 to beyond 110 seats in the last 20 years. A modern turboprop larger than the Q400 or ATR 72-600 is long overdue.
The market, however, has failed. Bombardier and ATR should be in a position to respond, but the former’s finances and the latter’s internal feuding prevent a product launch. Meanwhile, the enormous barriers to entry leave solely state-owned firms in a position to break in. In the last 46 years, only Embraer has navigated that path market success, leading to a curious lack of supply despite clear demand.
A new, albeit less ambitious, project is rising in Turkey, however. It mainly revolves around reviving the jet-powered Dornier 328 and 628 programmes, but includes turboprops too. It combines the expertise of US-based Sierra Nevada with two state-owned Turkish firms.
It represents a new hybrid model for the aerospace industry, a globalised partnership of the private and public sectors. It may or may not prove more successful, but hopefully it can work. The industry clearly needs new ideas.
The enormous barriers to entry include the costs of design, construction — and probably the largest of all — certification, since safety is paramount. Aircraft (even the most simple light aircraft) aren't cheap to purchase or operate.
Keep Rolling On
Must-Read: Jared Bernstein: September Jobs
(Krugman) Why Bankers want rate hikes (because it makes them more money)
edited 2nd Oct '15 3:37:40 PM by PotatoesRock
I learned a new word today - tontine.
It's a form of "group" insurance wherein the surviving participants get bigger payouts.
I see the logic of it, but... murder motives everywhere.
edited 2nd Oct '15 10:18:22 PM by probablyinsane
Plants are aliens, and fungi are nanomachines.
Must-Read: Justin Wolfers: A Nation of Part-Timers?
TL;DR: "No, Obamacare didn't make us a nation of Part-Timers"
Jupiterian Local
Yep, it's actually illegal in many jurisdictions, precisely because it provides tailor-made motivation for murdering folks.
Fuck you, Fascist sympathizers
Huh, that article makes a good point. For a pension, you need to pay more to the people who live longer because end-of-life care is the highest burden on families and Medicare, so if the ones who live longer get more than there's a logic to it.
But the question is, say, centenarians don't die of more peaceful causes than people who die of illness at 65. Maybe they could be arranged by health-risk pools, and if they were done on a large enough scale that you would have no idea of who was in your specific pool, it would fix the murder problem; completely anonymized, even to the corporations who run it (they'd know who their customers were and how much to pay out, obviously, but the pooling would be done by computer and kept away from human eyes).
The Mod with the Migraine
Oracle decides to close down for the Christmas-New Year week, by forcing all of its employees to burn their vacation days.
Lots of tech companies do that. But in Oracle's case, it is mandating that all employees pay for this furlough with four days of their PTO/vacation time, according to several sources we spoke to. That's far less common.
"We all know that it's actually a trick to get rid of accrued PTO on their balance sheet before the next year," one employee told us. "Needless to say, people are clearly very unhappy about this announcement, especially since it just happened this week and holiday season is just around the corner."
The really harsh part is that Oracle isn't particularly generous when it comes to vacation time.
For the first five years, employees are entitled to two weeks off and after five years, three weeks off, employees tell us. However some managers are more generous with time off than others, according to reports on Glassdoor, and sick days are not counted as PTO, according to Oracle's website.
Employees also get eight federal holidays off, working through holidays like Martin Luther King Day.
But compared to say, HP, where long-term employees can earn four and even five weeks of vacation, Oracle's vacation policy isn't all that competitive.
Some employees are blaming Mark Hurd for the mandatory vacation days plan, since he was known for his extreme cost-cutting when he was CEO at HP. We're hearing that other cost-cutting efforts are also being rolled out, such as trimming back on car allowances for some people in the marketing sales teams that report to him.
An Oracle spokesperson declined comment, but did point out that Oracle isn't going into a wholesale cost cutting phase. It's still hiring like crazy, with nearly 10,000 open jobs listed on its website, for instance, and it has ratcheted up R&D a bit, spending $8.7 billion in its last fiscal year (ended in August) compared to $8.6 billion in fiscal 2014.
Lost in Space
Brad DeLong: Is there a correct monetary policy? Yes.
Correct policy has been known for well over a century: it is that policy which the government exerts to make Say's Law true in practice — that adjusts the supply of money to equal the demand for money.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
"A full account of the battles over the Fed policy would require us to step beyond asking bankers and economists what they think and even asking economists what they think. We might instead ask the media to broaden its coverage, by asking a wider range of people about what is “correct” than “just” the economic theorists."
There are economic problems for which there is no correct answer, or for which a strictly economic analysis may tell us very little ("What is the Matter with Kansas").
But even I think that the money supply isnt one of them. What does Gourevitch think that public debate is going to reveal? That there is a population of people who prefer inflation?
Note to brain - must inform relatives in America - piano and violin not leet enough. Must go with rich white sports.
Plants are aliens, and fungi are nanomachines.
Well, there isn't an ideal monetary policy right now. Zero lower bound, and all that.
I wonder if that's part of what's constraining the Fed's thinking. They want to do something to feel in control, and keeping the rate parked at zero for the foreseeable future is just not sexy.
If you can't afford a polo horse, then you don't deserve a real job!
edited 5th Oct '15 12:40:27 AM by Ramidel
People like Smith dont get it: The human race cant eliminate scarcity, no matter what technology we invent. They will sell those replicators for what the market will bear, and that wont ever equal "free".
Also, hiring practices in large, successful corporations aren't intended to promote the performance of those organizations. They are intended to protect the privileges of those people who currently control the corporations.
edited 5th Oct '15 5:49:10 AM by DeMarquis
Lost in Space
Specifically, they are intended to protect the "networks" by which those in privileged positions maintain their rarefied circle of influence.
Also, the Trekonomics article is talking about the economic situation seen in Star Trek, with the Required Secondary Powers to make it work, and how it relates to our current situation. Note that the necessary psychological shift from scarcity to post-scarcity has not yet occurred for us, yet all of us know plenty of people (including ourselves) who would gladly adopt such a model and become creative or charitable workers rather than drudges at jobs we hate.
The obstacle, clearly, is the rent-seeking motives among capitalists, which must be torn down as a precondition for a post-scarcity economy to function.
edited 5th Oct '15 6:40:43 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Lost in Space
Also, @Ramidel: In this case, fiscal policy (direct transfers of wealth in one form or another) become incorporated in that ideal monetary policy that Keynes et. al. discussed. In fact, the ZLB is precisely when Keynes said that doing so is most effective.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
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Sports Direct site 'called ambulances dozens of times'
A total of 76 ambulances or paramedic cars were dispatched to the distribution centre's post code between January 2013 and December 2014, with 36 cases classed as "life-threatening", including chest pains, breathing problems, convulsions and strokes. A further seven calls for ambulances were made but cancelled.
The figures, which came from a Freedom of Information request made by the BBC's Inside Out team to East Midlands Ambulance Service, also revealed the service received three calls about women having pregnancy difficulties, including one who gave birth in toilets at the site. The details have since been passed to the Health and Safety Executive which has said it will examine the data. Of the 999 calls, six were about car accidents on a road or car park next to the centre, one was for a dog bite and at least two were for a store on the site.
His daughter Liga Zarina-Shaw said Mr Zarins had gone to work with flu symptoms because he was too frightened to take time off. The family does not blame Sports Direct or the agency which employed him for his stroke but Ms Zarina-Shaw said her father was worried about his job. "He [was] even scared to take one day sick," she said.
"Now I know why, because what is happening there is not normal," she added. Mr Zarins was paralysed down his right side but has since had another stroke and has returned to hospital.
Ms Zarina-Shaw said workers were worried about a "six strikes" policy used by an agency that supplies staff to Sports Direct. A document produced by one of the agencies states: "Any person who exceeds six strikes within a rolling six-month period will have their assignment at Sports Direct ended."
The document adds agencies can end an assignment "at any time without reason, notice or liability". Unite said it had been told that last year there were about 3,000 agency workers at the Shirebrook headquarters of Sports Direct, which was founded by billionaire Mike Ashley.
Sports Direct has also reported accidents in its warehouse have doubled in the past financial year. The firm put the rise in accidents down to on-site building work, which has resulted in "increased footfall and decreased workspace".
According to council figures, there were 38 accidents reported across 2013 and 2014, including a fractured neck, when somebody was struck by a moving object, a crushed hand from moving machinery and back and head injuries.
At the firm's annual meeting, Keith Hellawell, the chairman, told shareholders he was satisfied the company complied with health and safety regulations and any concerns were investigated immediately.
The firm has previously been criticised as "Dickensian" in its employment practices.
I find it hilarious that the word "derp" has entered the public lexicon to the point that Paul Krugman (not exactly a meme-slinging internet cool guy) is using it in his articles.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.