21–30 of 155 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We the people of the United States of America elect the people that write the laws. If we don't like what they're doing, vote them out and vote in people that will write the laws we want.
To do that should I vote Democrat, Republican or Independent?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We the people of the United States of America elect the people that write the laws. If we don't like what they're doing, vote them out and vote in people that will write the laws we want.
To do that should I vote Democrat, Republican or Independent?
You should vote in your jurisdictions’ meaningful primaries, get involved with campaigns and causes that represent you and organise like-minded citizens.
I worked at Marsh from 2005-2015 in both corporate and the store. We were always skeptical of Sun, the CEOs that would cycle through didn't grasp the basics of grocery, and as an organization we failed to invest in basic infrastructure that would reduce our overall costs which are huge in the 2% margin grocery business. At the store we had registers with an OS from the 80's, a common thing if you look around, but we…
I wonder how much of that was politicking, where someone was keeping something purposefully bad so that they could sell a solution that "saves so much money" when a far cheaper solution would save as much money and cost way less.
Defined benefit pension plans create a huge moral hazard and are just too risky for employees, employers, and taxpayers alike. As a society we should be aggressively phasing out pensions and replacing them with defined contribution plans like 401(k) and 403(b). That way each employee's retirement funds are in an individual named account held by a brokerage and can't be taken away. Even if your employer goes bankrupt,…
I'm doing the latter and dumping it all into real estate, that seems to be the best bet at the moment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how much of that was politicking, where someone was keeping something purposefully bad so that they could sell a solution that "saves so much money" when a far cheaper solution would save as much money and cost way less.
Sometimes companies maintain high friction/high cost crap like that to scare off acquisition. A friend worked for a regional bank that had a strategy of purposeful obsolescence to maintain control with the core shareholders, who were mostly from one family. They were using 1980s era AS/400 systems with terminals as late as 2008, and had only 1 PC assigned to a manager in the branches, with connectivity via ISDN.
I don't know how much of this got sent out of Marsh and up to Sun though.
This kind of thing is horribly common in declining firms - a last minute attempt to asset-strip everything of value and transfer it out of the corporate entity, which can then go bankrupt, stiffing creditors and employees. See also Radio Shack, Toys R Us, Maplin, and British Home Stores: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/feb/28/philip-gree... (The astonishing thing there is that somehow the thief was shamed i…
There is a county in Georgia (Sandy Springs) that effectively went private. Rather than offering a state pension to their employees (other than ones they were legally required to), they calculated the value of the pension contribution they would make and simply tacked it on to employee salaries. I personally think this is a good approach (with some room for incentives that help protect people from themselves).
Note: not trying to mount a defense of PE - often people ask what is the purpose/role or value of PE in society. In a somewhat perverted sense, this is it. There are not many mechanisms that can almost instantly re-habilitate an enterprise that was mismanaged or made severely consequential long term false promises to employees. The alternative is a slow, timely and painful decline similar to Sears or Kmart and rather than this article we'd be reading articles about the towns that Marsh left behind.
Still amazing to me that owners and equity firms get money before pension funds. The literal theft - a pension is part of your income, and being able to sell off a company without paying off pension debts literally means retroactively stealing wages from workers. Remember that banks, etc all have insurance on their debt, apparently that doesn’t matter - companies are simply stealing from money that is not theirs, and…
The government does the same thing with SS. If you pass away before collecting benefits, those benefits aren't passed on to those who inherit your estate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We the people of the United States of America elect the people that write the laws. If we don't like what they're doing, vote them out and vote in people that will write the laws we want.
To do that should I vote Democrat, Republican or Independent?