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Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

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Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

So at work today our PM council met and discussed a new edict being handed down by the executives. They decided that no project can have more than 3% contingency on the estimates provided for approval. Anything higher and we need to get management approval.

Here are industry standards: https://garudaaace2015.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/cost-estimate-class-matrix.jpg

Even their highest estimate class doesn't dip to 3% until a project is effectively done and construction has wrapped up. One of our most senior (and most well-respected) project managers in the company actually laughed out loud in the meeting discussing this with our management. He said something along the lines of "Even when I'm done with a project I don't know if I'm going to come in at 97% accuracy."

I am 100% confident management has lost their mind. It's a completely delusional expectation.

What worries me is that I know we've been having a lot of GE managers start to flood into the company. Last time this happened they almost killed the company.
 
dxmnkd316 said:
Some QC issues? That's putting it mildly. For a $90k car, a 33% drivetrain failure rate is absolutely unheard of.
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His batteries and battery packs will keep going no matter what happens to tesla. If the one you hang on a wall of your home can do what they claim. He could get the solar industry going full bore
 
Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

A thought experiment for the macro-economically literate among us. What can Bernie do to the banksters if he actually wins? Let's also assume for this counterfactual he even has a like-minded Congress and Court and a portable force field so he can't be CIAed.

Is there a way back from the stranglehold of Wall Street financial firms on US government fiscal and monetary policy? What does a post-bankster American economy even look like?
 
Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

Kepler said:
A thought experiment for the macro-economically literate among us. What can Bernie do to the banksters if he actually wins? Let's also assume for this counterfactual he even has a like-minded Congress and Court and a portable force field so he can't be CIAed.

Is there a way back from the stranglehold of Wall Street financial firms on US government fiscal and monetary policy? What does a post-bankster American economy even look like?
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I think there is. It's not going to happen overnight. It took decades to build and will take many more decades to disassemble. Or rather, reform.
 
Kepler said:
A thought experiment for the macro-economically literate among us. What can Bernie do to the banksters if he actually wins? Let's also assume for this counterfactual he even has a like-minded Congress and Court and a portable force field so he can't be CIAed.

Is there a way back from the stranglehold of Wall Street financial firms on US government fiscal and monetary policy? What does a post-bankster American economy even look like?
Click to expand...

Teddy Roosevelt trust busting. Break out the Sherman Act and force the big banks to split up. It's not the money, it's the concentration that's the problem. A bank whose failure will crash the world economy is too big to exist as a matter of national security.

Now, to the extent that one bank failure could systematically cause them all to fail regardless of size since they're all interconnected, you can never eliminate that risk entirely. But it helps if they know they won't be bailed out automatically if/when they do fail.
 
Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

GrinCDXX said:
Yeah, I don't see how this is even a question. Nationalizing all the things comes on day one, doesn't it?
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Well, Bernie's already said he has no interest in nationalizing heavy industry as was contemplated in the mid 20th Century. In Finance it's insanely complicated, since assets are diverse and in many ways non-material (typically one is buying alleged acumen and stability, not physical resources). For example, I don't know how one would go about nationalizing banking.

The obvious first step is to break up any institution that is too big to fail and restore effective measures to prevent (and punish) collusion. Changing the legal code to impose real criminal penalties on white collar criminals would help as well -- after all, without deterrents they'll still steal. And the overall change of direction of capping wealth at only disgusting rather than ludicrously disgusting levels would at least diversify the criminal field and get them fighting against (and ratting out) each other.

How do you go after any Mob? Give the small fry immunity to testify, throw the big fish away for life, and close down the inter-generational conveyor belt that keeps producing one cohort after another of well-conditioned crooks. That would about wrap it for the Eight Schools Association.
 
Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

Kepler said:
A thought experiment for the macro-economically literate among us. What can Bernie do to the banksters if he actually wins? Let's also assume for this counterfactual he even has a like-minded Congress and Court and a portable force field so he can't be CIAed.

Is there a way back from the stranglehold of Wall Street financial firms on US government fiscal and monetary policy? What does a post-bankster American economy even look like?
Click to expand...
He would have to push through something like the old Glass-Steagall Act, but it would need to look different today as technology and products have changed so drastically since 1930s America. Banks are so much more diverse now than they had been before. No longer is it a division of commercial and investment banks, but banks now own trust companies, mutual fund companies, insurance companies, real estate companies, and a few more things that escape my mind at the moment. Someone with true acumen on the subject and not just USCHO acumen would need to decide which of these components would or could create conflicts of interest for the parent banks.

It's not even guaranteed to be necessary that these divisions have to be made anymore with the passage of Dodd-Frank in addition to Sarbanes-Oxley before that. There are a great many more restrictions on how the various components of these corporations can interact than there were just a few short years prior. The people in charge, for whatever reason, don't advertise just how much Dodd-Frank changed the game during implementation that was never really advertised during its passage. For instance, I work for a large bank. Should I decide to move, to both sell my home and buy a new one, I have to be careful when choosing a real estate company because it could be considered a conflict of interest for me to use one that's owned by my employer. I have to literally make use of a competitor's firm. Ten years ago it wasn't a concern in the least. Yes, this is a little thing in the grand scheme, but there are a lot of these little things that aggregate to form large barriers.
 
Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

Kepler said:
Well, Bernie's already said he has no interest in nationalizing heavy industry as was contemplated in the mid 20th Century. In Finance it's insanely complicated, since assets are diverse and in many ways non-material (typically one is buying alleged acumen and stability, not physical resources). For example, I don't know how one would go about nationalizing banking.

The obvious first step is to break up any institution that is too big to fail and restore effective measures to prevent (and punish) collusion. Changing the legal code to impose real criminal penalties on white collar criminals would help as well -- after all, without deterrents they'll still steal. And the overall change of direction of capping wealth at only disgusting rather than ludicrously disgusting levels would at least diversify the criminal field and get them fighting against (and ratting out) each other.

How do you go after any Mob? Give the small fry immunity to testify, throw the big fish away for life, and close down the inter-generational conveyor belt that keeps producing one cohort after another of well-conditioned crooks. That would about wrap it for the Eight Schools Association.
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We need a tongue-in-cheek icon :)
 
Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

Kepler said:
And the overall change of direction of capping wealth at only disgusting rather than ludicrously disgusting levels.
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i.e. forced government confiscation? I think that runs afoul of the Constitution.

I do agree with you on the concept, however, it seems to me that social sanction not government mandate has been far more effective. Most "obscenely" wealthy people donate astonishing amounts to charity. Andrew Carnegie might be the best example, but there are scores more. Even Mitt Romney gave more money to charity than he paid in income taxes, and so he agreed with you that from a social perspective, his taxes were "too low" and he imposed a tax upon himself accordingly.

You have such a naïve faith in government, how is it warranted? on one hand you rail against the evils of "big corporations" but I cannot see any difference whatsoever between "big corporations" and "big government" except the latter has far more power to control our lives. People who work in government are motivated by self-interest as much as or more as people who work in big business, so why would giving one of them more power produce any better results than giving the other more power when they are pretty much indistinguishable from each other to begin with.
 
Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

unofan said:
Teddy Roosevelt trust busting. Break out the Sherman Act and force the big banks to split up. It's not the money, it's the concentration that's the problem. A bank whose failure will crash the world economy is too big to exist as a matter of national security.
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how about that, we do agree on some things after all! :)


I mistrust big business as much or as more than you do.

I consider government merely to be another business, and so naturally I distrust big government as well.

One of the core functions of a limited government would be anti-trust enforcement, as business left unchecked will always become "too" concentrated, it is easier for a more efficient producer to buy a less efficient producer's resources than it is to keep competing with them, and it is better for the less efficient producer to sell rather than to keep losing market share and suffer declining profits. As in Highlander, left unchecked, big business also believes "there will be only one" in the end. That's not good for the rest of us.
 
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Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

I'd rather see changes to the products a "bank" can offer. If a bank is just a bank the size of it becomes less worrisome and they may naturally begin to shrink in size. Change wall street to limit investment options to actual investments and move everything that is essentially legal gambling to Vegas casinos to run and tax the bejeezus out of gambling winnings.
 
Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

jerphisch said:
I'd rather see changes to the products a "bank" can offer. If a bank is just a bank the size of it becomes less worrisome and they may naturally begin to shrink in size. Change wall street to limit investment options to actual investments and move everything that is essentially legal gambling to Vegas casinos to run and tax the bejeezus out of gambling winnings.
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Yep, I'd like to see regulation where you have to pick one business area and stick with it. You wanna be a bank? Great, but you can't be an investment firm. Or an insurance company. And then we strengthen monopoly regulation so BofA can't buy all the banks and GS can't buy all the investment companies.
 
Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

Congress does something sensible, and the President actually agrees.

On Thursday the Senate finally passed—and the White House said the President intends to sign—a permanent extension of the Internet Tax Freedom Act.

After a series of short-term extensions since the ban was enacted in 1998, federal law will now protect against state and local governments imposing taxes on Internet access services or email.
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