201–210 of 388 posts
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I think covid and the silicon shortage has shown us how JIT manufacturing completely falls apart if there's a delay in just one of your components.
I thought everybody learned that JIT is bad after 9/11. It seems like the More Bad Advice crowd wants to keep living in a fantasy world.
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>With a DB pension, you have to add agency risk to the equation. There is no need for that now when you can get a Vanguard/Fidelity/Schwab 401k and pay the same 0.03% expense ratio to get the same investment performance that a pension fund manager would. And you never have to worry about the pension fund manager stealing from it, or the politician directing investments to their nephew’s real estate company. >I would…
> But your individual investment has a big risk too - what happens when you turn 80 (90? 100?) and the money runs out? What happens if the market takes a shit the day before you turn 65? Time to start buying Alpo if you're not in a pension. You can buy target date funds to minimize how much you have to manually reallocate between equities and bonds, and you can buy an annuity from an insurance company to guarantee a…
So to minimize the risk of market crash, you have to give up probably 4 or 5 years of decent returns by sitting in bonds instead. And if you want security of annuity you have to pay for that too, plus pay for the insurance man's profits. I just did a quote to put specific numbers in, to get 80k on my 100k salary for a set period of 20 years, I'd need to pay 1.1 million. That's 11 years of salary needed after taxes. Possibly I could have it after 32 years.
>I do not understand your distinctions between liability and cost of a DB pension.
The pension fund is a big pot of money that's supposed to have enough in it to pay costs for the next 30 years, assuming that the pension closed to new hires today. So the actuary says the present value of those costs is 10 billion, maybe the fund has 9 billion, you have a 1 billion dollar liability. This can be gamed.
But the actual costs for the next 30 years, based on actuarial assumptions and existing retirees, maybe are 18 billion in nominal dollars. Again, making assumptions about payroll, we can calculate this 18 billion as a percent of payroll over the same time. In my case, 16-18% is enough to cover. Unrelated to the fact that the fund has 9 billion or 11 billion or 1 billion.
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Except in Texas, of course. But then, one might argue that utilities in Texas aren't meaningfully regulated.
They are, actually. The PUCT has historically done a great job. But, legislation (outside PUCT) has allowed the utility (generators and transmission/distribution asset owners) to cut the system to the bone and defer maintenance and expansion despite a new city's worth of people (~100k) relocating each month to Texas.
Rail companies are getting the blame here, but the real problem is that paid leave isn't a statutory employment right protected by law. Here in the UK full time employees are entitled to 28 day paid annual leave, although I have work for companies which offer more, while pay is seperate.
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Perhaps largest in aggregate, but credit card debt has spiked in the last year and is continuing to climb higher, close to a Trillion dollars. https://www.lendingtree.com/credit-cards/credit-card-debt-st... A large chunk of the population is clearly dealing with inflation through credit cards. More inflation for them just means more CC debt, and if everyone is getting as many "free balance transfer no interest for th…
Both of these can be true. All I’m saying is it makes more sense to focus on the biggest issue for the biggest impact. Average credit card debt is roughly on par with pre-pandemic levels. Dipping during Covid is probably an artifact of the govt stimulus (speculatively). Without digging further, it’s not clear to me that it’s not a return to normal. If that normal is still bad, my guess is there are more deeply rooted…
CC debt is also far more damaging to household finances, particularly during high inflation as you're just piling ~%20 CC interest rates on top of the inflation rate. So a "return to normal" is going to be far more damaging in 2022/2023 conditions than it would be in 2019 conditions. There's also no indication that CC debt is going to level out, the "normal" in 2019 was an upward spike as it was, and inflation is likely going to continue due to structural factors, which is going to continue to force people to compensate, which likely means an even sharper increase in CC debt.
Getting back to the potential railroad strike, put an extra 10% inflation on top of everything and for many people that's another 30% after they put it on a CC they can't/don't pay off. For many households it would appear we're looking at literally exponentially increasing levels of debt, mostly fueled by CCs and high inflation. That's a crisis.
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By that same logic, it's not the shareholders responsibility to sacrifice their own interests for the interests of larger society. Taking that approach is a prisoners dilemma.
You're right, it's not their responsibility to give up their cushy profits, it's the government's responsibility to ensure its citizens rights are protected, such as their right to strike.
True, but like all rights, they aren't unlimited. There are both lawful and unlawful strikes and the delineation between the two is sometimes hard to determine.
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I think covid and the silicon shortage has shown us how JIT manufacturing completely falls apart if there's a delay in just one of your components.
I thought everybody learned that JIT is bad after 9/11. It seems like the More Bad Advice crowd wants to keep living in a fantasy world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding of the FIRST big problem with PSR is that it creates trains longer than the system is designed to handle, thus all the sidings that used to allow trains to pass in single tracked areas are unavailable, which increases fragility of the system in general. This makes precision scheduling impossible... what this really is, is let's make all the workers wait (for free!) while we figure out how we can fina…
I don't really have a problem with "on-call" workers (after all, everyone on a ship is perpetually "on-call" during the tour) but it needs to be compensated and handled correctly.
Rail companies are getting the blame here, but the real problem is that paid leave isn't a statutory employment right protected by law. Here in the UK full time employees are entitled to 28 day paid annual leave, although I have work for companies which offer more, while pay is seperate.
And yet you'd have a really tough time finding a white collar gig where paid leave wasn't a bog-standard part of the package. So nah, rail companies are getting caught out because they are absolutely fucking around with this.
Edit: A more extreme example; there is a rule that says airlines mustn't make pilots work more than a certain number of hours without a rest period. This rule applies to all airlines. This rule was introduced to reduce the number of planes crashed by tired pilots.
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But they get PTO days, right? Many people in tech don't have sick days, just PTO days which include vacation, sick, etc. Unless I am missing something.
From the article: >if such workers wish to recuperate from an illness or make time to see a doctor about a nagging complaint, they need to use vacation time, which must be requested days in advance. In other words, if a worker wants to take time off to recover from the flu, they need to notify their employer of this days before actually catching the virus.