The money that was taxed at the 0.05% is money that they claimed were exempt from taxes because they were set aside to be repatriated and pay taxes. Apple’s statement about waiting until a tax holiday or comprehensive tax reform likely read to the EU as “never” and therefore meant that they could go after them for it.
Apple is playing the long game, waiting 10 or 20 years for a tax holiday makes a lot of sense from their standpoint. That this is much longer than the election cycle makes it politically painful for politicians, but that seems self inflicted.
It is a matter of public record that Apple Inc. is the single largest taxpayer to the Department of the Treasury of the United States of America with an effective tax rate of approximately of 26% as of the Second Quarter of the Apple Fiscal Year 2016.[392]
In 2015, Reuters reported that Apple had earnings abroad of $54.4 billion which were untaxed by the IRS of the United States. Under U.S. tax law governed by the IRC, corporations don't pay income tax on overseas profits unless the profits are repatriated into the United States and as such Apple argues that to benefit its shareholders it will leave it overseas until a repatriation holiday or comprehensive tax reform takes place in the United States.[393][394]
On August 30, 2016, after a three-year investigation by the EU's competition commissioner that concluded that Apple received "illegal state aid" from Ireland, the EU ordered Apple to pay 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion), plus interest, in unpaid taxes.[13] Specifically, the commissioner found that Apple had benefitted from Irish Department of Revenue tax rulings that allowed it to split the profits recorded by Apple Sales International internally between its Irish branch and a stateless "head office" entity lacking employees or premises (permitted under Irish law until 2013).[395]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.#Tax_practices
So basically the Commission is trying to say what the law should have been before 2013. I suspect we're looking at a "spirit of the law" vs "letter of the law" sort of thing. Multinationals who have lots of intellectual property have HUGE amounts of choice in terms of where to pay taxes on their stuff. Given that country's tax rates are more than high enough to justify these sorts of games, these games are played.
The cleaning company is a third party.
The uniform company is a third party.
The airline is a third party.
The government inspector is a third party.
None of these groups reach into my wallet. Nor do they insist that they have the ability to represent me and make life decisions such as how much I earn nor whether or not I'm allowed to work at all. Nor do they threaten me with violence if I don't follow their religion.
You’re required, by the terms of your employment, to deal with *all sorts* of third parties.
"Deal with" isn't the same as "hand over my personal money and follow their ideology".
I don't personally have an economic relationship with most of the groups you mentioned. I do have an economic relationship with the company's customers, but that's serving as the company's agent and even there I'm not expected to spend my own money.
I’m sorry, but you sound like a complete moron.
Personal attacks don't strengthen weak arguments.
So, tell me, should companies be *forbidden by law* from signing a *voluntary contact* with unions that has them agreeing to only hire union members?
"Voluntary contract"? If the union is striking are we supposed to believe the company wants all of it's workers to strike with the union? Further, companies have very little control over the personal lives and wallets of their employees.
And comparing it to rape is just completely absurd.
Words which describe involuntary relationships where one party is benefiting at the expense of another are usually pretty ugly.
This is not as strong an argument as you want it to be, because, well, this is how democracy works.
This is close to treating unions as governments. There's something to this as a paradigm (especially for explaining pro-union attitudes), governments are allowed to tax people, use force, and do things to their 49% without consent.
If I had to change one bit of current union regs, I would make it so that ‘religious’ objectors are anonymous to the union, and not just hidden, but like HIPAA anonymous...
If we use the religious paradigm, then those objectors are heretics. If we use a union-is-a-government paradigm, then those objectors are traitors.
As long as we allow a union to force unwilling people to join, imho it's going to be impossible to prevent the abuse of it's heretics & traitors.
Mylan's CEO's father is Joe Manchin, i.e. the senior US Senator from West Virginia.
He's on the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. One of that Committee's subs is Consumer Protection & Product Safety. Among other things they get to haul in the FDA for questioning.
This would be the same FDA which has systematically prevented any of her competitors from introducing a competing drug.
The usefulness of a product is determined, in the market, by whether or not people buy it.
Agreed, but this is an odd thing to say in the context of forcing people to join a union.
And you do realize that all unions that exist exist because 50%+1 of the workforce supports them, right? All unions are ‘bought by the market’ of workers at that company.
And the other 49% are going to be forced, at legal gun point, to buy the product?
That 49% can include entire groups who correctly believe the union doesn't serve their interests and they can even be abused by the union as long as the 50%+1 is fine with that. These groups can include, the young, the talented, the educated, blacks/asians, and/or entire professional classes.
And after having been outvoted and forced unwillingly to join a union, they can continue to be grouped with numbers of people whose interests don't align with their own and have no recourse.
For example, the Michigan Home Health Care workers were forced to join a union by missing the vote (50%+1 being of just the people who voted), and then forced to stay in the union until they got an individual right to leave, whereupon 80% of them did at the first opportunity.
Since they worked from home, the union did nothing for their working safety condition, their pay didn't go up (the union and gov needed to bend over backwards just to give them an employer at all), etc. The union just collected dues and collaborated with pro-union gov officials to keep the captive workers captive.
Unions can just, poof, exist, no vote at all, containing exactly however many people want to be in them.
Sure could. And stage slowdowns, hold completed work hostage, and (as I observed in RL) get fired for that. My expectation is a union would need to pass a minimum 'power' threshold to work with management.
And you *also* have to demand that the union *no longer has to negotiate for people not in it*, unlike how it works now under current law.
Agreed. But my strong impression is it's the unions which would object to this. 'Negotiating' for the freeloaders gives them more power than not doing so. Having a non-union group of workers around making more than the union would be a problem. Which implies the high value people leave the union and do their own thing.
And you’re probably going to be in the poorly ventilated part of the mine.
:Amusement: If you're going to describe a situation where the union is actually adding value, then getting people to join won't be an issue.
...then wonder what the *hell* happened to their salary after the union negotiated a good portion of it to union workers, and, incidentally, away from them.
This assumes salary isn't set by the market. Offering people less than they're worth is a problem both short and long term.
Do concede, then, that union violence a century ago shouldn’t be used to justify a rejection of unions now?
Yes, absolutely.
It’s interesting to me how a claim that one party uses violence to achieve its ends is, when countered with a claim that the competing party uses violence too, viewed as a justification of union violence.
How the hell does that happen?
Don't know. What really gets me is how pretty recent threats/violence somehow gets related to century old problems.
Personally I think the whole violence thing is because they've got nothing else to bring to the table. If management isn't evil they've got no dragon to slay, no reason to exist.
The “violence” argument cuts in more than one direction.
Ludlow and Homestead were both more than a century ago, they might as well have been on different planets. If we limit the whole "violence" thing to the last 50 or so years we keep it within the current culture and legal framework.
IMHO management violence or threats thereof from last century should not be used to justify union violence now.
There is the small matter where unions don’t have even the small power they do in the US, those same corporations to pretty much the same things they used to do in foreign countries and continually lobby for relaxation of various regulations that were passed due to union pressure years ago.
What "regulations" are you talking about?
Somehow I doubt we're going to being "The Jungle" any time soon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle
I will just look at history, back when we didn’t have any union regulation, and note that unions often won their fight...
This is in the context of management killing people. So yeah, unions won then and they deserved to. And I've fully admitted an abusive management deserves the union it gets.
Let me see if I’m following this? There’s a slowdown, so we fire everyone.
I said, "everyone involved". And yes, that's the way it's worked when I've seen it attempted by a small group who figured they were a lot more critical than they turned out to be.
Of course if you can get everyone to do it, then we're back to the union having enough control over the minds and hearts of the workforce to make that happen, and more than likely there's a good reason for that.
In a street fight between labor and capital, labor always wins.
They won decades years ago. The abuses which created unions are illegal and high on management's list of things not to do, mostly they're a thing of the past.
Modern unions mostly exist to create mid 6 digit jobs for their leaders and donations for the democratic party. Where that's not the case and they're actually useful, then more power to them and they shouldn't have a problem convincing the workforce that they're needed.
But this is why you need to constantly bring up crimes and conditions which are decades or even centuries old rather than point to conditions on the street.
DarkMatter: Here we’re talking about being forced to financially support a leftist political organization whose economic “services” might be (worse than) useless to you and with whose political/policy goals you strongly disagree.
DavidTC: First of all, ‘conditions of your employment’ very often includes ‘You have to spend some money on a certain thing’, which is entirely legal. (As long as it don’t result in someone actually being paid less then min wage.)
DavidTC: But perhaps more importantly, how does this differs with working for a company whose political leanings you don’t agree with how, exactly? Employees, after all, are just as ‘forced’ to earn money for their company as they are ‘forced’ to pay union dues.
The issue is one of consent and who is paying and benefiting. If I'm a worker, the company's name is on the checks they're giving me, so clearly I'm getting value from them and I consented to the economic relationship of which I'm taking part.
The Union is a third party. They don't sign my checks. I don't make widgets for them. They're not actually needed (other companies work just fine without unions). I'm forced to deal with them because the union benefits by me doing so, and they have the political power to make me. Whether I personally benefit isn't even a consideration. If this were sex, this would be rape.
The closest corporate example I've seen is the United Way. The United Way comes in every year, and there's a lot of happy talk about their grand history and all the great things they do for me and the community. What it really comes down to is the United Way wants my money, and they have the political/social power to get the company to put pressure on us workers to give.
IMHO the United Way is an extra, unneeded, layer of abstraction on charitable giving. Me giving money to the food pantry says things about my priorities and lets me evaluate the charity in question for things like corruption. Me giving money to the United Way says nothing, because all they do is give to other charities.
If the company actually forced me to give to the United Way, then the comparison would be total. I don't personally benefit from the United Way, the money in question would come from my pocket, and I'd have no choice but give.
Of course at the end of the day, after the pretend pressure and 'togetherness' talk, the company always folds. They don't actually attempt to force anyone to give. Making someone give money to a 3rd party purely for that 3rd party's benefit would be unethical and is in the realm of the government (taxes) and shakedown schemes.
Another possibility is how end of life is handled. The very old sometimes simply refuse to eat until they die. The issue then becomes, how is that written up?
RE: And I also suspect that it would make more sense compare naturally-occurring (Not including accident or violence) death rates of various income levels, instead of trying to figure out which deaths are ‘malnutrition’.
The death rate across all income levels holds steady at 100%
RE: I think ‘letting the mentally ill wander the streets without food’ is sorta an economic issue. As is the failure to have any sort of elderly monitoring program.
We'll have to disagree. Social and/or cultural, certainly, but the issue seems to be unlikely to be one of lack of money.
RE: It seems like a big part of malnutrition, at least in developed nations, would be how healthy the *cheapest* food is, the food people select when they have absolutely no money.
Locally the cheapest food is basically handed out at church run food pantries. I think it's mostly potluck (donations from people and businesses... probably including grocery stores). As far as nutrition, potluck wouldn't be a bad way to go. I assume it's stuff the stores somehow got oversupplied on, but it's possible there's more intelligence involved than that.
I believe his argument is going toward utility. If we have OSHA, what is the utility of worker safety rules from a union?
More like "marginal utility".
With OSHA (and for that matter, the increasingly 'office' nature of work and the shift in culture in the last century), there is less need for union created safety.
If it's unsafe work, and/or if management only does the bare min, then sure, a union can probably justify it's existence.
If it's safe work and/or if management prides itself on having zero injuries, then the need for a union is clearly less, but presumably the cost of having one would be the same.
Doing things that are conditions of your employment is not, generally speaking, involuntary, since you can always quit.
Normally the phrase "conditions of your employment" applies to things like...
A: Job description - defining the role, responsibility level (eg Manager, Deputy Manager, Assistant etc).
B: Entitlement - rate of pay, benefits, bonus/overtime rates, etc.
C: Responsibilities: working hours, dress code, reporting illness/absence, annual assessments, complaints procedures, notice periods for leaving/dismissal, requirements to change working hours.
D: General: Depending on the type of job, there might be other conditions restricting the employee taking other part-time work, confidentiality clauses, using company equipment for private use (eg phones, computers, vehicles) general codes of behaviour and adherence to certain corporate practices, health & safety regulations, etc.
Here we're talking about being forced to financially support a leftist political organization whose economic "services" might be (worse than) useless to you and with whose political/policy goals you strongly disagree.
You get to object to calling it "involuntary" when it's actually "voluntary".
To be fair to Sam, elsewhere in this thread, he does suggest some fixes, like better record keeping (which may have enabled doctors to know that the parent in this case had been shopping around for treatments); more followup testing, when the first test proves negative for an ailment.
My experience has been that really good tracking and information just results in a more competent monster.
This is, incidentally, higher than most of Europe, except for France, which has a *horrific* rate of 2.25 for some reason.
The "best" countries all report rates of zero, which I don't believe. Nor do I believe that North Korea does a much better job than France.
IMHO what these numbers tell us is that starvation/malnutrition simply aren't due to economic issues in the first (or even 2nd) world. My expectation is we're looking at mental illness and elderly shut-ins as the real problems here.
France may do a better job reporting it's numbers than most, or it may do a worse job helping it's elderly.
1) In the real world, operating a union is an *annoyance*, not some sort of money-making position
In the real world, union officials earn a LOT of money.
In Washington, D.C., and the 24 states without right-to-work laws, workers can be forced to pay a union in order to have a job. For many Americans, this means paying tribute to aggressively left-wing union officials with incomes ten or twenty times greater than their own.
Stillwater: “Why not just reduce the sentence for situations like this?” Because doing so will open up lots more murders under color of law.
Which implies, to me, that what we currently have is the best system possible. Which, again, strikes me as a really high compliment…
The number of cases "like this" is roughly zero. That means any changes we make are mostly going to be applied in cases which are NOT "like this"; and the benefits for cases "like this" is going to be roughly zero.
Read my post at the bottom for how this works mechanically, and let me stress monsters like this are seriously skilled, smart, determined, and they're going to manifest as concerned parents. Unlike the movies they don't wear black hats and the people dealing with them will have NEVER seen anything similar to this before. Even the local experts in child abuse (including judges, counselors, etc) will have NEVER seen this before.
So with all that in mind, what, exactly, do you suggest which is going to make things better without making them worse?
As far as I can tell, the only way to treat Dee Dee differently is to treat everyone differently. If you have a different solution, please put it on the table.
And modern life, being more Interconnected and complex than ever before, is a particularly bad place for big sweeping principles.
Pass a law so complex and long that even it's authors can't read it and have little idea what's in it (or pass several conflicting ones over the years). Hand this over to multiple bureaucracies with conflicting ideas on what to do, give them authority (i.e. guns) to enforce their will, let them build their little empires. Be surprised that the larger players build their own bureaucracies to deal with yours.
Now complain about how complex modern life is, and claim that because it's so complex we need multiple bureaucracies.
Expecting things to work better by handing them over to a large, complex, government command-and-control bureaucracy is itself a sweeping principal. Somehow we're always shocked that there are unintended consequences, poorly aligned incentives, and we ignore the massive cost/overhead which comes with this solution.
Banking regulations are there because there is a ginormous disparity in the ability of the bank shareholders and the ability of the bank’s retail customers(*), and their community, to withstand a bank failure.
We have FDIC because of this, and that's great. By all means protect the little guy against the big one.
However what we've seen is, over time, banks capture their regulators and/or figure out ways to twist those regulations into profit and blow themselves up. Then we step in to bail them out and create new regulations/regulators. We've gone through multiple iterations of this.
The principled way to handle it without command and control would be to let the banks do whatever they want, and then when we need to bail them out make sure the top three levels of management suffer appropriately for it. Fire them and retroactively take back the bonuses they earned blowing things up.
Dark Matter: Anyone who has to deal with a monopoly can be hurt by substandard service and by their interests not lining up with your own.
DavidTC: Hell, if unions *were* monopolies, they wouldn’t have to negotiate at all!
We're talking about workers dealing with their unions, especially unions they're forced to join against their will.
So what do unions "negotiate" with their subject workers?
If a worker thinks he'd get paid better if he represented himself, can he?
If a worker thinks his political money would be better spent on the GOP, can he redirect it?
If a worker thinks a different union would do a better job, can he switch?
If the union wants to strike and a worker wants to work, can he still?
The core question wasn't on the definition of the word "monopoly", the core question was what happens when the worker thinks he is poorly served by the union and his interests don't line up with its. Or worse, what can he do if he thinks he's actually being abused by the union.
That list is *both* union and anti-union violence…but you’ll notice while reading it that a rather large majority of it is anti-union, with very few parts of it being union-initiated.
That's a list of workers killed. The most recent death was in 1959, and before that 1940, so everything is 50+ years ago and the bulk is 75+ years ago. However that list skips both non-workers killed by union activists and union-on-union violence.
So the 98 tourists burned to death by union activists in 1987 for using the wrong hotel aren't on the list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dupont_Plaza_Hotel_arson
If we limit things to the last 10 years, then we still have things like assault and murder threats because of political views in 2012 (Lansing), and beating up non-union workers in 2013 (Philadelphia Ironworkers).
The US tax code really isn’t that bad — for most people.
I use turbo tax. Twice in the last several years the IRS has sent me a check because they believe I filled out my taxes incorrectly.
I've no idea what the problem was, Turbo Tax claimed both times there were no problems.
So either the engineers who created TurboTax don't know how to read the tax code or the IRS doesn't know how to read it. I'm not sure which alternative is more likely or worse.
I have at least three other examples in this sort of thing separate from TT where the black letter of the tax code I'm reading apparently isn't what the IRS wants to hear. Once again, in each case, I really don't know what planet they're on because the black letter is the black letter. Presumably there's something buried in another document that I simply haven't read which says something else.
Sam Wilkinson: . So far, everything I have proposed has been dismissed with an insistence that to do anything differently will cause suffering. So perhaps the better question is: what changes would you be willing to consider?
I'm confused. What exactly have you proposed?
The ideas I've come up with seem likely to be far more damaging than the current reality. The math and reality are grim and suggest false positives will dominate to a silly degree, however I'd love a way to put some of these evil nuts in jail or at least get their kids out of harm's way.
If you have some actual proposal which sidesteps the math and emotion in this case, please put it on the table for evaluation.
On “ITV: Plans to deny surgery to obese and smokers ‘put on hold’”
Wow. Is it more expensive to operate on the heavy? ...Ignoring that extreme athletes can have high BMIs.
On “Tim Cook: A Message to the Apple Community in Europe”
@mo
Apple is playing the long game, waiting 10 or 20 years for a tax holiday makes a lot of sense from their standpoint. That this is much longer than the election cycle makes it politically painful for politicians, but that seems self inflicted.
"
It is a matter of public record that Apple Inc. is the single largest taxpayer to the Department of the Treasury of the United States of America with an effective tax rate of approximately of 26% as of the Second Quarter of the Apple Fiscal Year 2016.[392]
In 2015, Reuters reported that Apple had earnings abroad of $54.4 billion which were untaxed by the IRS of the United States. Under U.S. tax law governed by the IRC, corporations don't pay income tax on overseas profits unless the profits are repatriated into the United States and as such Apple argues that to benefit its shareholders it will leave it overseas until a repatriation holiday or comprehensive tax reform takes place in the United States.[393][394]
On August 30, 2016, after a three-year investigation by the EU's competition commissioner that concluded that Apple received "illegal state aid" from Ireland, the EU ordered Apple to pay 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion), plus interest, in unpaid taxes.[13] Specifically, the commissioner found that Apple had benefitted from Irish Department of Revenue tax rulings that allowed it to split the profits recorded by Apple Sales International internally between its Irish branch and a stateless "head office" entity lacking employees or premises (permitted under Irish law until 2013).[395]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.#Tax_practices
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Apple_Inc.#Tax_practices
--------------------------
So basically the Commission is trying to say what the law should have been before 2013. I suspect we're looking at a "spirit of the law" vs "letter of the law" sort of thing. Multinationals who have lots of intellectual property have HUGE amounts of choice in terms of where to pay taxes on their stuff. Given that country's tax rates are more than high enough to justify these sorts of games, these games are played.
On “Globalism vs Populism vs Empricism”
@davidtc
None of these groups reach into my wallet. Nor do they insist that they have the ability to represent me and make life decisions such as how much I earn nor whether or not I'm allowed to work at all. Nor do they threaten me with violence if I don't follow their religion.
"Deal with" isn't the same as "hand over my personal money and follow their ideology".
I don't personally have an economic relationship with most of the groups you mentioned. I do have an economic relationship with the company's customers, but that's serving as the company's agent and even there I'm not expected to spend my own money.
Personal attacks don't strengthen weak arguments.
"Voluntary contract"? If the union is striking are we supposed to believe the company wants all of it's workers to strike with the union? Further, companies have very little control over the personal lives and wallets of their employees.
Words which describe involuntary relationships where one party is benefiting at the expense of another are usually pretty ugly.
"
@oscar-gordon
This is close to treating unions as governments. There's something to this as a paradigm (especially for explaining pro-union attitudes), governments are allowed to tax people, use force, and do things to their 49% without consent.
If we use the religious paradigm, then those objectors are heretics. If we use a union-is-a-government paradigm, then those objectors are traitors.
As long as we allow a union to force unwilling people to join, imho it's going to be impossible to prevent the abuse of it's heretics & traitors.
On “Scott Alexander: Reverse Voxsplaining – Drugs vs. Chairs”
Dont' know if anyone else pointed this out but...
Mylan's CEO's father is Joe Manchin, i.e. the senior US Senator from West Virginia.
He's on the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. One of that Committee's subs is Consumer Protection & Product Safety. Among other things they get to haul in the FDA for questioning.
This would be the same FDA which has systematically prevented any of her competitors from introducing a competing drug.
And yes, this is not "proof".
On “Globalism vs Populism vs Empricism”
@davidtc
Agreed, but this is an odd thing to say in the context of forcing people to join a union.
And the other 49% are going to be forced, at legal gun point, to buy the product?
That 49% can include entire groups who correctly believe the union doesn't serve their interests and they can even be abused by the union as long as the 50%+1 is fine with that. These groups can include, the young, the talented, the educated, blacks/asians, and/or entire professional classes.
And after having been outvoted and forced unwillingly to join a union, they can continue to be grouped with numbers of people whose interests don't align with their own and have no recourse.
For example, the Michigan Home Health Care workers were forced to join a union by missing the vote (50%+1 being of just the people who voted), and then forced to stay in the union until they got an individual right to leave, whereupon 80% of them did at the first opportunity.
Since they worked from home, the union did nothing for their working safety condition, their pay didn't go up (the union and gov needed to bend over backwards just to give them an employer at all), etc. The union just collected dues and collaborated with pro-union gov officials to keep the captive workers captive.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/09/26/michigan-seiu-branch-allowed-to-keep-millions-in-dues-skimmed-from-stealth.html
http://dailycaller.com/2014/04/30/after-right-to-work-80-of-mi-healthcare-workers-desert-union/
http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/16241
http://www.btlaborrelations.com/fight-over-unionization-of-michigan-home-health-care-workers-continues-in-federal-court-and-at-the-ballot-box-in-november/
Sure could. And stage slowdowns, hold completed work hostage, and (as I observed in RL) get fired for that. My expectation is a union would need to pass a minimum 'power' threshold to work with management.
Agreed. But my strong impression is it's the unions which would object to this. 'Negotiating' for the freeloaders gives them more power than not doing so. Having a non-union group of workers around making more than the union would be a problem. Which implies the high value people leave the union and do their own thing.
:Amusement: If you're going to describe a situation where the union is actually adding value, then getting people to join won't be an issue.
This assumes salary isn't set by the market. Offering people less than they're worth is a problem both short and long term.
"
I agree with all of that.
"
@stillwater
Yes, absolutely.
Don't know. What really gets me is how pretty recent threats/violence somehow gets related to century old problems.
Personally I think the whole violence thing is because they've got nothing else to bring to the table. If management isn't evil they've got no dragon to slay, no reason to exist.
"
@stillwater
Ludlow and Homestead were both more than a century ago, they might as well have been on different planets. If we limit the whole "violence" thing to the last 50 or so years we keep it within the current culture and legal framework.
IMHO management violence or threats thereof from last century should not be used to justify union violence now.
"
@jesse-ewiak
What "regulations" are you talking about?
Somehow I doubt we're going to being "The Jungle" any time soon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle
"
@davidtc
This is in the context of management killing people. So yeah, unions won then and they deserved to. And I've fully admitted an abusive management deserves the union it gets.
I said, "everyone involved". And yes, that's the way it's worked when I've seen it attempted by a small group who figured they were a lot more critical than they turned out to be.
Of course if you can get everyone to do it, then we're back to the union having enough control over the minds and hearts of the workforce to make that happen, and more than likely there's a good reason for that.
They won decades years ago. The abuses which created unions are illegal and high on management's list of things not to do, mostly they're a thing of the past.
Modern unions mostly exist to create mid 6 digit jobs for their leaders and donations for the democratic party. Where that's not the case and they're actually useful, then more power to them and they shouldn't have a problem convincing the workforce that they're needed.
But this is why you need to constantly bring up crimes and conditions which are decades or even centuries old rather than point to conditions on the street.
"
The issue is one of consent and who is paying and benefiting. If I'm a worker, the company's name is on the checks they're giving me, so clearly I'm getting value from them and I consented to the economic relationship of which I'm taking part.
The Union is a third party. They don't sign my checks. I don't make widgets for them. They're not actually needed (other companies work just fine without unions). I'm forced to deal with them because the union benefits by me doing so, and they have the political power to make me. Whether I personally benefit isn't even a consideration. If this were sex, this would be rape.
The closest corporate example I've seen is the United Way. The United Way comes in every year, and there's a lot of happy talk about their grand history and all the great things they do for me and the community. What it really comes down to is the United Way wants my money, and they have the political/social power to get the company to put pressure on us workers to give.
IMHO the United Way is an extra, unneeded, layer of abstraction on charitable giving. Me giving money to the food pantry says things about my priorities and lets me evaluate the charity in question for things like corruption. Me giving money to the United Way says nothing, because all they do is give to other charities.
If the company actually forced me to give to the United Way, then the comparison would be total. I don't personally benefit from the United Way, the money in question would come from my pocket, and I'd have no choice but give.
Of course at the end of the day, after the pretend pressure and 'togetherness' talk, the company always folds. They don't actually attempt to force anyone to give. Making someone give money to a 3rd party purely for that 3rd party's benefit would be unethical and is in the realm of the government (taxes) and shakedown schemes.
"
@davidtc
RE: France
Another possibility is how end of life is handled. The very old sometimes simply refuse to eat until they die. The issue then becomes, how is that written up?
RE: And I also suspect that it would make more sense compare naturally-occurring (Not including accident or violence) death rates of various income levels, instead of trying to figure out which deaths are ‘malnutrition’.
The death rate across all income levels holds steady at 100%
RE: I think ‘letting the mentally ill wander the streets without food’ is sorta an economic issue. As is the failure to have any sort of elderly monitoring program.
We'll have to disagree. Social and/or cultural, certainly, but the issue seems to be unlikely to be one of lack of money.
RE: It seems like a big part of malnutrition, at least in developed nations, would be how healthy the *cheapest* food is, the food people select when they have absolutely no money.
Locally the cheapest food is basically handed out at church run food pantries. I think it's mostly potluck (donations from people and businesses... probably including grocery stores). As far as nutrition, potluck wouldn't be a bad way to go. I assume it's stuff the stores somehow got oversupplied on, but it's possible there's more intelligence involved than that.
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@oscar-gordon
More like "marginal utility".
With OSHA (and for that matter, the increasingly 'office' nature of work and the shift in culture in the last century), there is less need for union created safety.
If it's unsafe work, and/or if management only does the bare min, then sure, a union can probably justify it's existence.
If it's safe work and/or if management prides itself on having zero injuries, then the need for a union is clearly less, but presumably the cost of having one would be the same.
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@pillsy
Normally the phrase "conditions of your employment" applies to things like...
A: Job description - defining the role, responsibility level (eg Manager, Deputy Manager, Assistant etc).
B: Entitlement - rate of pay, benefits, bonus/overtime rates, etc.
C: Responsibilities: working hours, dress code, reporting illness/absence, annual assessments, complaints procedures, notice periods for leaving/dismissal, requirements to change working hours.
D: General: Depending on the type of job, there might be other conditions restricting the employee taking other part-time work, confidentiality clauses, using company equipment for private use (eg phones, computers, vehicles) general codes of behaviour and adherence to certain corporate practices, health & safety regulations, etc.
Here we're talking about being forced to financially support a leftist political organization whose economic "services" might be (worse than) useless to you and with whose political/policy goals you strongly disagree.
You get to object to calling it "involuntary" when it's actually "voluntary".
On “Gypsy Blancharde Is In Jail For Killing Her Mother”
@gabriel-conroy
My experience has been that really good tracking and information just results in a more competent monster.
On “Globalism vs Populism vs Empricism”
@davidtc
That sounds about right, and thanks for the link.
The "best" countries all report rates of zero, which I don't believe. Nor do I believe that North Korea does a much better job than France.
IMHO what these numbers tell us is that starvation/malnutrition simply aren't due to economic issues in the first (or even 2nd) world. My expectation is we're looking at mental illness and elderly shut-ins as the real problems here.
France may do a better job reporting it's numbers than most, or it may do a worse job helping it's elderly.
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@davidtc
In the real world, union officials earn a LOT of money.
In Washington, D.C., and the 24 states without right-to-work laws, workers can be forced to pay a union in order to have a job. For many Americans, this means paying tribute to aggressively left-wing union officials with incomes ten or twenty times greater than their own.
http://watchdog.org/261142/meet-bosses-americas-highest-paid-labor-union-officials/
On “Gypsy Blancharde Is In Jail For Killing Her Mother”
@stillwater
The number of cases "like this" is roughly zero. That means any changes we make are mostly going to be applied in cases which are NOT "like this"; and the benefits for cases "like this" is going to be roughly zero.
Read my post at the bottom for how this works mechanically, and let me stress monsters like this are seriously skilled, smart, determined, and they're going to manifest as concerned parents. Unlike the movies they don't wear black hats and the people dealing with them will have NEVER seen anything similar to this before. Even the local experts in child abuse (including judges, counselors, etc) will have NEVER seen this before.
So with all that in mind, what, exactly, do you suggest which is going to make things better without making them worse?
As far as I can tell, the only way to treat Dee Dee differently is to treat everyone differently. If you have a different solution, please put it on the table.
On “Globalism vs Populism vs Empricism”
@j_a
Pass a law so complex and long that even it's authors can't read it and have little idea what's in it (or pass several conflicting ones over the years). Hand this over to multiple bureaucracies with conflicting ideas on what to do, give them authority (i.e. guns) to enforce their will, let them build their little empires. Be surprised that the larger players build their own bureaucracies to deal with yours.
Now complain about how complex modern life is, and claim that because it's so complex we need multiple bureaucracies.
Expecting things to work better by handing them over to a large, complex, government command-and-control bureaucracy is itself a sweeping principal. Somehow we're always shocked that there are unintended consequences, poorly aligned incentives, and we ignore the massive cost/overhead which comes with this solution.
We have FDIC because of this, and that's great. By all means protect the little guy against the big one.
However what we've seen is, over time, banks capture their regulators and/or figure out ways to twist those regulations into profit and blow themselves up. Then we step in to bail them out and create new regulations/regulators. We've gone through multiple iterations of this.
The principled way to handle it without command and control would be to let the banks do whatever they want, and then when we need to bail them out make sure the top three levels of management suffer appropriately for it. Fire them and retroactively take back the bonuses they earned blowing things up.
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@davidtc
We're talking about workers dealing with their unions, especially unions they're forced to join against their will.
So what do unions "negotiate" with their subject workers?
If a worker thinks he'd get paid better if he represented himself, can he?
If a worker thinks his political money would be better spent on the GOP, can he redirect it?
If a worker thinks a different union would do a better job, can he switch?
If the union wants to strike and a worker wants to work, can he still?
The core question wasn't on the definition of the word "monopoly", the core question was what happens when the worker thinks he is poorly served by the union and his interests don't line up with its. Or worse, what can he do if he thinks he's actually being abused by the union.
That's a list of workers killed. The most recent death was in 1959, and before that 1940, so everything is 50+ years ago and the bulk is 75+ years ago. However that list skips both non-workers killed by union activists and union-on-union violence.
So the 98 tourists burned to death by union activists in 1987 for using the wrong hotel aren't on the list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dupont_Plaza_Hotel_arson
If we limit things to the last 10 years, then we still have things like assault and murder threats because of political views in 2012 (Lansing), and beating up non-union workers in 2013 (Philadelphia Ironworkers).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_violence_in_the_United_States
If we limit ourselves to the last 50 years, then yes.
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@morat20
I use turbo tax. Twice in the last several years the IRS has sent me a check because they believe I filled out my taxes incorrectly.
I've no idea what the problem was, Turbo Tax claimed both times there were no problems.
So either the engineers who created TurboTax don't know how to read the tax code or the IRS doesn't know how to read it. I'm not sure which alternative is more likely or worse.
I have at least three other examples in this sort of thing separate from TT where the black letter of the tax code I'm reading apparently isn't what the IRS wants to hear. Once again, in each case, I really don't know what planet they're on because the black letter is the black letter. Presumably there's something buried in another document that I simply haven't read which says something else.
On “Gypsy Blancharde Is In Jail For Killing Her Mother”
@sam-wilkinson
I'm confused. What exactly have you proposed?
The ideas I've come up with seem likely to be far more damaging than the current reality. The math and reality are grim and suggest false positives will dominate to a silly degree, however I'd love a way to put some of these evil nuts in jail or at least get their kids out of harm's way.
If you have some actual proposal which sidesteps the math and emotion in this case, please put it on the table for evaluation.
On “Globalism vs Populism vs Empricism”
:sigh: I meant "involuntary" to be bold.
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