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#81
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A real reason for gravel bikes?
On Fri, 21 Feb 2020 07:54:55 -0600, AMuzi wrote:
On 2/20/2020 9:49 PM, Frank Krygowski wrote: On 2/20/2020 10:38 PM, AMuzi wrote: When I was young, one might easily travel the country, always confident of finding a day or two of work everywhere and anywhere (As I did. Everywhere.) . Interesting. I did some of that too, when I was young. I also did it while not traveling, just to get spending money. But my success rate while on the road was pretty low. It seemed I'd have to spend many hours waiting inside a Manpower office to have a chance at getting anything at all. This is no longer true, to the greater loss of the nation's wealth and productivity, no more painfully felt than at the bottom of society, those who suffer most. I really am sympathetic to those people. Say what you will, many have very high barriers in front of them. And changes in work itself. It was once possible to show up at any truck terminal around midnight and to transfers (truck-to-truck, dock-to-truck) which was badly paid unskilled manual labor. Now, almost everything is palletized and moved (more efficiently) by machines. There are no mason's helpers (really crappy job and very hard work). Even dishwashing has a much lower labor content. In the larger sense these are improvements but, again, a closed door to the marginal human. Certainly true, and of course those who can't find work, for one reason or another, are paid, in essence, not to work, by "the government". I remember reading about a program, in Detroit before the decline, to find work for the unemployed. The car factories joined in by making unskilled work available but the program failed, simply because the 3nd and 3rd generation of unemployed couldn't imagine a relationship between work and income. -- cheers, John B. |
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#82
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A real reason for gravel bikes?
On Fri, 21 Feb 2020 15:06:44 -0800, sms
wrote: On 2/20/2020 4:55 PM, John B. wrote: snip Or perhaps the "Prison Farm" solution as was used in Mississippi, among other states. That could, if managed properly, turn out to be a profit making establishment. Or is working now deemed to be a cruel and unusual punishment? A lot of the high cost is in medical care, personnel, and food. Highly unlikely that enough money would be generated to offset those costs. Plus it would take jobs away from non-criminals. The Mississippi State Penitentiary farm used 600,000 man-hours in fiscal 2012, planting over 5,700 acres in vegetables, rice, corn, wheat, and soybeans and producing over two tons of vegetables worth more than $1.3 million and almost half a million eggs. Oklahoma's highly organized prison farm system, Agri-Services, produces or processes some 723,000 pounds of beef, 115,000 pounds of pork, 1,445,000 pounds of processed meat, and 568,000 gallons of milk, along with 7,500 tons of hay and 4,500 tons of livestock feed, in a typical year. In the late 1990s the Georgia Department of Corrections enjoyed a per-inmate food cost that was 30 percent below the national average thanks to its 10,000-acre farm system and food processing and distribution network. Traditionally, in the East,prisons have manufactured things like auto number plates and mail bags. The root cause will be unlikely to be addressed. Used to be a lot of living wage union jobs in auto manufacturing, large appliance manufacturing, ship building, etc.. Those jobs have been shipped to China, Mexico, etc.. California's been especially hard hit in that regard, the only automobile factory left is Tesla. Used to have multiple Ford and GM plants, as well as the shared GM/Toyota factory that Tesla took over. Well, yes. You inflate your living and salary costs and are amazed that developing countries can "make it cheaper". But this shouldn't come as a surprise, after all this is exactly what Japan was did after WW II. Lots of people out of work, created businesses that used this cheap labor, sold stuff to the U.S. cheaper than the U.S. could make it. But then, as they old saying goes, "those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it". Manufacturing continues to be hard hit under Trump, partly because of tariffs. In just the four months following Trump’s swearing-in nearly 12,000 American jobs were moved abroad. On top of GM’s layoffs, Ford recently announced that about 24,000 out of 202,000 workers, may lose their jobs. It probably goes a bit deeper than just Trump, not that I want to extol his virtues, as the Chevrolet plant here in Thailand has been closed and sold. Said to be because the poor sales for Chevy pickups in Asia. -- cheers, John B. |
#83
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A real reason for gravel bikes?
On Friday, February 21, 2020 at 4:04:11 PM UTC-8, John B. wrote:
On Fri, 21 Feb 2020 11:14:17 -0500, Frank Krygowski wrote: On 2/21/2020 8:54 AM, AMuzi wrote: On 2/20/2020 9:49 PM, Frank Krygowski wrote: On 2/20/2020 10:38 PM, AMuzi wrote: When I was young, one might easily travel the country, always confident of finding a day or two of work everywhere and anywhere (As I did. Everywhere.) . Interesting. I did some of that too, when I was young. I also did it while not traveling, just to get spending money. But my success rate while on the road was pretty low. It seemed I'd have to spend many hours waiting inside a Manpower office to have a chance at getting anything at all. This is no longer true, to the greater loss of the nation's wealth and productivity, no more painfully felt than at the bottom of society, those who suffer most. I really am sympathetic to those people. Say what you will, many have very high barriers in front of them. And changes in work itself. It was once possible to show up at any truck terminal around midnight and to transfers (truck-to-truck, dock-to-truck) which was badly paid unskilled manual labor. Now, almost everything is palletized and moved (more efficiently) by machines. There are no mason's helpers (really crappy job and very hard work). Even dishwashing has a much lower labor content. In the larger sense these are improvements but, again, a closed door to the marginal human. Another example: I was once doing robotics work at a large manufacturing facility. A problem we were trying to solve was orienting components. Injection molding machines were spitting out thousands of components, but their orientation was random. The robotic assembly operation downstream needed perfectly consistent orientation and location. Vibratory bowl feeding is the most common solution, but couldn't work with these parts. Oh, and there was a similar problem on a different line, where the parts were larger but had to be consistently oriented to pack them for shipping. The company was trying all sorts of cutting edge technology, up to multiple machine vision systems controlling multiple robots just to get the parts oriented. At one point, I asked why we couldn't just hire people from one of the local "developmental disabilities" programs, and give them jobs orienting things. It was my understanding that some such people welcome work like that. It would give them fulfillment, pride of work, a bit more independence, etc. Nope. Not permitted. It would violate a union contract, and nobody had any interest in wading into contract modifications. When I left there, they were still wrestling with the orientation problem. In contrast, Thailand has, effectively, more than 100% employment with some 2 million registered foreign workers employed and probably nearly another 2 million unregistered foreign workers. And, yes, some of the largest factories have robots but work is essentially still done by hand. Of course, we don't have labor unions either. Minimum wages are set by the central government and actual wages are set largely by supply and demand. For example, my wife's "woman who comes in to help with the heavy work" (free translation) gets paid about 30% more than the minimum rate simply because there is a large demand for her services and she can charge that much. Which somehow seems pretty fair to me. -- cheers, John B. That is what is known as a Free Market Economy John. This is what the Democrats hope to destroy in the USA. |
#84
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A real reason for gravel bikes?
On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 14:48:59 -0800 (PST), Tom Kunich
wrote: On Friday, February 21, 2020 at 4:04:11 PM UTC-8, John B. wrote: On Fri, 21 Feb 2020 11:14:17 -0500, Frank Krygowski wrote: On 2/21/2020 8:54 AM, AMuzi wrote: On 2/20/2020 9:49 PM, Frank Krygowski wrote: On 2/20/2020 10:38 PM, AMuzi wrote: When I was young, one might easily travel the country, always confident of finding a day or two of work everywhere and anywhere (As I did. Everywhere.) . Interesting. I did some of that too, when I was young. I also did it while not traveling, just to get spending money. But my success rate while on the road was pretty low. It seemed I'd have to spend many hours waiting inside a Manpower office to have a chance at getting anything at all. This is no longer true, to the greater loss of the nation's wealth and productivity, no more painfully felt than at the bottom of society, those who suffer most. I really am sympathetic to those people. Say what you will, many have very high barriers in front of them. And changes in work itself. It was once possible to show up at any truck terminal around midnight and to transfers (truck-to-truck, dock-to-truck) which was badly paid unskilled manual labor. Now, almost everything is palletized and moved (more efficiently) by machines. There are no mason's helpers (really crappy job and very hard work). Even dishwashing has a much lower labor content. In the larger sense these are improvements but, again, a closed door to the marginal human. Another example: I was once doing robotics work at a large manufacturing facility. A problem we were trying to solve was orienting components. Injection molding machines were spitting out thousands of components, but their orientation was random. The robotic assembly operation downstream needed perfectly consistent orientation and location. Vibratory bowl feeding is the most common solution, but couldn't work with these parts. Oh, and there was a similar problem on a different line, where the parts were larger but had to be consistently oriented to pack them for shipping. The company was trying all sorts of cutting edge technology, up to multiple machine vision systems controlling multiple robots just to get the parts oriented. At one point, I asked why we couldn't just hire people from one of the local "developmental disabilities" programs, and give them jobs orienting things. It was my understanding that some such people welcome work like that. It would give them fulfillment, pride of work, a bit more independence, etc. Nope. Not permitted. It would violate a union contract, and nobody had any interest in wading into contract modifications. When I left there, they were still wrestling with the orientation problem. In contrast, Thailand has, effectively, more than 100% employment with some 2 million registered foreign workers employed and probably nearly another 2 million unregistered foreign workers. And, yes, some of the largest factories have robots but work is essentially still done by hand. Of course, we don't have labor unions either. Minimum wages are set by the central government and actual wages are set largely by supply and demand. For example, my wife's "woman who comes in to help with the heavy work" (free translation) gets paid about 30% more than the minimum rate simply because there is a large demand for her services and she can charge that much. Which somehow seems pretty fair to me. -- cheers, John B. That is what is known as a Free Market Economy John. This is what the Democrats hope to destroy in the USA. Goodness Gracious, such wisdom... and I live here and never realized it. And another thing I hadn't realized, that the Democrats were the cause of the current world wide economic downturn? -- cheers, John B. |
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