The Mentally Disabled State Of Texas (Loud And Clear)

Good for you. Lots people do not get overtime paid out. It is not required for employers to pay, they can if you negoiate it in your contract or they want to.

Your mentality "it's not happening to me, it doesn't exist".


I guess that's why businesses keep asking for more H1B1 visas, because they need more crappy IT guys. That must be it.


You are not the only one in that industry or affected by it.


Yes, because companies never, ever put in their employee contracts that any idea you work on and patent/IP is theirs not yours, or that they get first look at it. Yes, this does include offtime. Contract negotiation, important skill.

Highlighted part, I agree to a certain limit. Labor is a resource, keeping your labor up to date is important. It is why many companies pay for employees to take additional course, certifications, etc because they are already heaviliy invested in them or they are a good resource. This is not true for every industry.

Unions are not the devil. The union system in the US, currently, not that great. There are many other union systems that are working very well.

Businesses today are far too short term in outlook (1 quater away, "gots to get my stock up so I can cash out!") rather than long term. Lots of companies move their manufacturing or plants where there is cheaper labor, not because they save an amazing amount of money, but because it reflects nicely on wall st (then the whole cash out some stock options thing). Rinse, repeat.

Sorry, that was a confusing post on my part. I was not talking about management in the article. I was referring to your overtime comment, then one I quoted.

The article was about the tech industry only.

Yes, it's case law, it is attempting to figure if they have to pay them or not OT.

Edit: going to sleep now. Have fun ~

Then you never learned your lesson if your blaming other industries on failed client revenue. ***happens, bets go bad, and that's exactly what small business's are in the USA. Small business's suffer disproportionately from regulation due to them not having the money to afford a legal & financial departments.

I never said regulation was evil. Only that currently there is too much. Your mind sees that and immediately inserts a modified argument in so that you can win the argument against it. Aka strawman.

Unions are the main killers of business investment (how many times must I point this out). Unions are not concerned with your small business, there isn't enough money to suck out. Their only concerned with big corporations who have sufficient profits that a union can start siphoning off. Someone wanting to set up shop would want to stay as far away from unionized states as possible. Unions cripple business's by hyper-inflating labor costs, especially over the long term with legacy pension and other costs.

Globalization means you can purchase labor in other countries, those countries won't allow unions for that exact reason. You want to bring manufacturing back to the USA, get rid of unions.

Infinitely, unless you can provide evidence.

Your using automation equipment or manual labor? In China (and other cheap labor countries) it's actually cheaper to use manual labor with minimal automation involved.

Material costs are nothing compared to the cost of paying someone to sit there and do something. Also your forgetting labor is a multiplied cost. Your thinking "materials" is stuff like wood, someone had to cut that wood and form it. "Parts", someone had to build that part or acquire it's raw materials. The deeper and deeper you go the more and more labor / energy dominate the cost. Does anything your building use aluminum or other metallic allows? Do you know the raw energy requirements to process and mine those?

The cost of labor / energy IS inside the cost of materials. Reducing the cost of labor / energy also reduces the cost of materials. Step through the entire process, from the procurement of raw resources through their refinement and into the various stages of part creation and product production.

People are definitely entitled to pay for hours worked. If their not getting that it's because they entered into a salaried work agreement with their employer which is really stupid. I'm an "at-will" employee, my company can release me whenever for whatever reason.

And you have no idea how the IT industry works. There is nearly no demand for low end work (key pounders, call technicians, FSO's, ect..) as the field is inundated with college grads who think a few courses entitles them to a job making 50K a year (highly variable based on location). H1B1's tend to have better skills for lower end work. It's not "crappy IT guys" unless your idea of IT is the local bestbuy / Applestore person. At the top end it's the exact opposite, there is a huge demand of engineers and senior administrators / programers. Google opened a plant in Prior OK and they can't fill their senior positions. Thing is, you can't use a H1B1 for a senior position, way too risky as those positions are responsible for your revenue generation. A helpdesk worker or field technician f*cks something up and it's just a bad day, a senior engineer / systems administration f*cks something up and that's millions of USD down the tube.

Also there are many sub sectors and a whole myriad of specialties. TV is wrong, there is no such thing as one "super smart computer guy who can hack anything and make any program that does everything". It's large teams of different people with different skill sets who work together.

The Union system in the USA is evil. It exists for no other reason then to suck out revenue. I've mentioned before that it would be acceptable if it offered some added value. Some form of credentialing, licensing or accreditation of it's workers. Then and only then could they justify demanding free money.

And no dumb a$$, business's moved manufacturing to cheap locations precisely because of cheap labor. It's so much cheaper to make something in China (now Vietnam) and pay for shipping and additional QA/QC/law suits then it is to build it in the USA and have a union suck all your profit out. They use offshore manufacturing because it side steps the risk of unions stealing billions of USD in profit.

One point, before sleep >.>

The largest exporter (in terms of revenue) is Boeing in the US (last time I checked) because they sell a of a lot of planes/etc and they are *** expensive.

Labor is not the most important cost in planes. Important, yes, but it is not what drives the cost up on that product.

*** is situational.

You could argue that every part is labor intensive, but that is not how that would go down on the balance sheet it would be parts, equipment > labor.

And seriously, the profit margins that are built in to almost every product sold is insane.

Anyways, sleep >.>

Parts ARE labor. Someone needs to build them, their components came from somewhere and need to be built, the materials that compose their components came from somewhere and needed to be mined / processed.

You people keep side stepping the fact that labor and energy are multiplicative and drive costs up across the board. Labor are Energy are baseline costs, their applied at the very bottom and drive everything else up.

A 1000kg block of aluminium costs significantly more than the labor cost of a person programming the CNC machine. Pretty much regardless of where the block is sourced from. Especially if they fudge it up.

Regardless of how you cut the cake, the answer is still that it depends, particularly in the quantity/quality of the product. As quantities increase, the material cost and defect rate dominate the equation.

The greatest cost doesn't come from labor and energy, it comes from labor and production cost. The greater the production cost, the less you'll want to spend on labor. But you also need the labor to increase productivity, to put out more, newer, or better (hopefully the holy trinity of all 3) products or services.

When investing in labor wisely, it becomes a huge payoff. You can take it to the bank year after year, for decades.

If the US were to pull out of the UN, it would make borrowing money from other countries, which it uses annually to help pay for military equipment, much harder. The US would need to become a warmongering state that conquers other countries, to maintain it's current military power. It would no longer be able to pay for the high tech equipment it uses, which means no more missions where US fighter pilots continually fire at it's allies (big yay for us), but it also wouldn't be able to protect it's own people, without levying extremely high taxes and tariffs.

There are, according to business experts (not just people who work in a particular field, such as saevel, who's usually misinformed, slamming liberals for anything that happens, which usually comes from republican supporters and frontrunners).

Remember all the businesses that found loopholes immediately in the PPACA? They could cut all fulltime staffers to "save on labor" instead of using that as a launching board to increase actual profits? Instead of keeping the primary focus on generating profit by reducing production cost, they decided it was cheaper and more efficient to nickel and dime their businesses into the ground. Marketing a product or service is as important as labor cost. In many more cases than actual labor overhead, it's the poor marketing that crushes a business because of one or many of it's products or services. Labor is definitely a huge factor, especially when an employer continues to keep hiring unskilled, or untrained workers, without properly training them, or providing skill workshops.

Explain why companies are flocking to "at-will" states instead of "union" states.

Explain why it is very hard and expensive to start up shop in a union state than it is in an "at-will" state.

Explain why the cost of living is lower in "at-will" states than "union" states?

Explain why. I dare you.

oh yeah, I'm going back to lurking, people here are crazy...

Why does no one want to come out and just admit that our entire system is built on exploiting a peasant class?

Because that is given? I think all parties in this debate understand that there will always be an underclass who is forced to do the most dangerous, most painful, strenuous jobs for little to no pay. This is the modus operandi of capitalism afterall.

What is up for discussion is that the income gap is widening, the social mobility ladder is being hoisted up, a generation of young people sit under crushing debt and underwhelming jobs as our politicians ignore the problems to dance around social issues, the boogeyman of international terrorism and what dress Kim Kardashian wears to her next event.

I haven't heard anyone here make a bid for communism (not that communism eliminates the reality of exploitation) as much it gets strawmanned into arguments.

I heard the next dress is a designer dress she'll be wearing to her son's first birthday called "Shroud of Intelligence" by Armani.

I'm not convinced everyone here understands that, given how much I keep hearing about how everyone should just bootstraps their way to a better situation.

Oh no, there is not a single reason why someone would not have the same options. The chicken littles constantly proclaiming the death of capitalism and this dreadful socialist state we now live in >.>

Thats because some of the people saying to pull yourself up did it themselves. However, it is most likely they did it back when times were different. When you could start in the mailroom, give loyalty to your company and they would be loyal to you. They'd provide retirement, benefits, and other incentives to keep you working for them. They don't realize that that is not reality anymore. If you start in the mailroom, hope you can keep your job more than a year or two. By then, you'll expect a raise if you've been doing a good job, but those at the top figure its better if you quit/get fired so they can hire somebody else at the same minimum pay.

Bullsh!t, that way NEVER lead to success. At best you would get mediocrity.

To be successful you must out compete everyone else. And it gets harder as you go up not easier. There is no magical "line" that if you could somehow get above that life gets easier. Instead what happens is your peer competition gets smarter, more cut throat and more devious in their attempts to discredit you and force you under them. Instead of "putting in 40" and drinking a beer your expected to put in longer hours and devote significantly more time to personal growth and knowledge expansion.

Here is the hint, career growth comes from moving around and not staying in the same position for too long. Often this can mean taking jobs in different cities and even changing companies.

Now I can only speak for my own chosen career field, if you want to get better job offers you need to move to different companies and work different positions. Constantly be applying to jobs in different locations and fixing up your resume. I'm always applying for jobs that I have no intention of taking just to see what the salary and benefit negotiations are like. You don't want to work at too many different places, about once every two to three years is a good pace. Work a few years at one position while spending copious amounts of personal time & money to get additional training and certification. Then apply for a position with those higher requirements that pays better. Work that job for a few more years before moving on again. If your company absolutely wants you to stay then they'll offer you a higher salary or job whenever you give them the two weeks notice.

Anyone who expects to "start in the mailroom" and work at a single company for 20~30+ years is an idiot. Your accepting mediocrity and demanding a higher wage and benefits for your mediocrity.

Do you have any idea what the energy costs are to process aluminum?

http://www.rocksandminerals.com/aluminum/process.htm

Aluminum plants need to be built near power plants, typically near hydro plants but also nuclear or coal plants.

How much did the CNC machine cost to produce? How much for each of those components?

Like I said the more deeper you dig the more that labor & energy effect it. The labor / energy (their the same) used to produce that aluminum is the majority of it's cost. Not to mention transportation costs are a direct expression of energy (fuel costs) and labor (personal costs). Raw materials are extremely cheap, it's the process of turning them into useful stuff that is expensive and those process's are labor & energy intensive.

This is expressed in all society's. This is why the price of energy is so important to economic growth. It's the base unit that drives all costs (labor is just an expression of energy). Costs of energy go up and the cost of everything goes up. Labor is the same, whenever the minimum wage is raised the cost of everything goes up (inflation is a b1tch).

As an addendum. Do you guys have any idea what's possible if you had access to nearly free energy? Gen IV MSR's and LFTR's would radically enhance our quality of life, not to mention if the Navy ever gets Polywell working. p+B11 fusion would change the entire world, probably destroy a bunch of country's in the process though due to the market crash of energy prices plummeting.

We have the technology to synthesize hydrocarbon fuels, it's just significantly more expensive then drilling it out of the ground. Reduce the energy cost and suddenly it becomes a vastly superior choice. There are so many technologies that become viable if you can reduce their energy cost. Hell nanotechnology is impossible to do economically without access to cheap energy.

Watching you destroy all liberal arguments with rational debate has been like watching Rembrandt paint.

No, i just didnt feel like having a wall of text responding 3-4 pages pack to everything. Nooen has destroyed an argument yet, besides maybe any that has come out of your camp. There is a more detailed and complex reasoning behind the pricing of everything that Labor + Energy = price. You have to consider what you are making,what the costs of making these things are, what the cost of the materials are, labor, man hours, shipping, business costs, benefits cost, taxes (domestic and foreign), and a multitude of other factors. Pretty sure more "Rational debate" was held 3-4 pages ago before the "NO U LIBERAL R WRUNG" pulled up. You come in here prancing around with your feels and misinformation flaunting it around like its fact.

INB4 quote and denounce cause of Liberals R stewpid and othar perples whu werked fer ets money hungreh ad Obamer es teh devil cuse i cant has bush monehs.

If you're going to dig that deep into what adds cost to a product, you're going to get energy in EVERY catagory, so why even have catagories? Simple, because you can't analyze production costs that way. If your overhead is too high, you do a study to find places to cut cost. If you used your model, ever study would deadend at energy.

Energy is a very large part of the equation in every field, the issue with it is that beyond bargaining power with suppliers of energy (electric, gas, etc) you have very little control over the price of energy, only the volume and usage are controlable.

That generally means upgrading equipment, facilities, etc. Cutting the workforce or lowering thier wage is a much more accessible area of cutting cost, and with unemployment high, people don't have as much power to bargain.

Your arguements show a good knowledge of textbook business and economics, but a very poor understanding of applied business and economics.

I would have compared it to Jackson Pollock...

All over the place, not supposed to make sense, but pretty to look at.

TLDR: I (as in Enuyasha, not me) didn't bother looking at your post because I like being forcefed my facts in little bites. It is hard to read what anyone says if it is more than 140 characters.

/back lurking

Or, as he stated, its a wall of text outlining very basic concepts of business with a lot of inuendo and partisan BS. Why can't people discuss the facts without it becoming an "I hate liberals/conservatives" screaming match? If you're going to lurk and just throw out snyde comments, practice what you preach.

I looked at the "wall-of-text" and I see that it is basic understanding of business practices. It was not partisan at all.

Just because you don't like the answer doesn't make it partisan. Facts are not partisan, humans are.

I did not say anything about liberals or conservatives in that quoted post. I just made a snide comment showing that one poster automatically dismissed another's argument because it was long. I think that is BS on itself and shows the poster's closed-mindedness.

It's cheaper for companies to operate in at-will states and enables them to have more control over their employees...

By "start up shop" do you mean start a new business venture or start up a new store or location for your business in a Union state? I know Unions very much oppose certain types of businesses that want entry in to another market... Chicago is a good example... There is a gret deal of union influence there and they've been able to lobby and restrict the construction of any super-walmart stores within city limits... though... they exist right outside the city limits in some cases lol... You can meet resistance in that way for sure...

I was also unaware that this is true across the board, though I must admit I am woefully unaware of real estate prices outside of a few states... Though if it is it might have to do with the fact that at-will states also make lower wages than union states...

Unions used to serve a great purpose but over time they have become as much a burden as a benefit... They still do serve a purpose but they definitely need to change in order to stay relevant and beneficial...

Texas is legit.