Question For The Day - 27 September 2023

Ah, yes, another Cereal!

Didn't want a 'part the second' Thought or wait a day or two to get the title legit. And this really is a question.

Now dat Da Judge has here come, I find conflicting statements on the meaning of his fraud finding. And, they're significantly different. Da Judge killed the business licence(s?) of TTO, a New York entity, but the meaning with regard to Xi Donjon's business future is conflicting:
- some say without the licence(s), TTO no longer can hold the businesses sitting on ground of New York state
- some say without the licence(s), TTO no longer can hold the businesses anywhere in the Great Wide World, since their existence is grounded (so to speak) in the New York state licence

Rather some difference, say what?

Thought For The Day - 27 September 2023

And you thought the USofA had it bad in The Great Recession?? Try this for size:

Even China's population of 1.4 billion would not be enough to fill all the empty apartments littered across the country, a former official said on Saturday, in a rare public critique of the country's crisis-hit property market

Now, that's one Boy Howdy! What's that phrase about eggs and baskets?

The Tyranny of Average Cost - part the twenty second

While listening to one of the talking heads on MSNBC, I heard one of the Union folk confirm a number that felt right: the labor cost in the BoM of a car is 5%. Now, of course, that could just be aggressive posturing by one side in a fight. But, then I let my fingers do the walking through the Yellow Googles, and found this YouTube piece:

Both sides in the long strike at General Motors by the United Autoworkers Union agree on one thing, the labor deal is only 5% of the product cost to the company.

And, for the record, there are myriad other sources. And, that was the 2019 fiasco.

In the Olde Days of my undergraduate yut, it was a given that the capital/labor ratio was, is, and always will be - 80/20. Manufacturing on the whole, is really feeling the pinch of The Tyranny. Ever more automation seemed to be the way to go; get rid of all those slackers. But The Tyranny begins to bite should demand/output slacken. You can't fire a machine, now can you? Since they ain't be smart enough to increase demand, thus increasing output, and reducing capital cost per vehicle, they're resorting to the same-old same-old: squeeze the help. Problem is, how much squeeze is there? With a reported $21,000,000,000 in profit the last year, they ain't much blood left in that stone.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

It appears that the brain dead Billionaires who own most of professional sport, remain zombified. The latest example:

Robert Saleh's team still claimed a 22-16 overtime victory Monday against the reigning AFC East champs, the Buffalo Bills, despite Aaron Rodgers suffering what looks to be a devastating Achilles injury.

So far, there's only Brady (and he only had one good year with Tampa Bay); 99.99% of the other sports geezers bought for stupid-high prices have blown out some body part early on. I'd speculate that Rodgers' instant failure is the earliest of the early; any other would almost have to be in some pre-season fiasco.

The Mets proved that aging once-superstars don't help much. It looks like the Jets will prove it once again. And so it goes^{™Linda Ellerbe}.

Growth Spurt

Regular Reader will, no doubt, recall the many times these essays have made reference to the conundrum of econ growth: from the beginning of human history econ growth was explicitly tied to population growth. This is kind of ironic, since econ types have always, in their hearts and minds, based the entirety of the field on one axiom - individual wants and needs are infinite. They ain't be enough to satisfy a human.

Now, today global population is, more or less, 8 billions. In 1850, to put a pin in the argument, that number was, more or less, 1.2 billions. For the USofA, those numbers are 330 and 23 millions, more or less. By 1850, white folks had invaded the entirety of what became the lower 48; all of which was usurped from Natives and Mexicans and a few French. Propelled by Westward Expansion and Monroe Doctrine, both offered as reason (excuse?) for exploiting whatever resources might be found West of the original 13, econ growth naturally was deemed synonomous with population growth. After all, most of the West was mostly subsistence farming, and thence animal husbandry, which demanded more labor hands to make stuff. Make babies!

The Industrial Revolution which ensued drove losing subsistence farmers to cities, both as pull from factory work and push from failing farming. Even as urbanisation continued at increasing pace (today, 83% live in metropoli; they ain't be too many shithole county citizens yet they demand that only they should run the USofA), the notion of econ growth from population growth never lost its appeal.

That's starting to change, if not here in the USofA, than elsewhere.

It's days as today that convince me, once again, that the Editors of the NYT have a cynical sense of humor. As I've mentioned before, I take my Times in the Dead Trees Version, which makes it possible to see this humor on display. Today brings yet another example. The front page of the Business section has two related, or conflicting depending on one's side of the fence, reports. One from China and the continuing implosion of its residential real estate sector. The other from Japan on a new-ish thesis for solving the population/resource/growth conundrum. Given the Editors' sense of humor, the reports conclude right next to each other inside.

So, Regular Reader will not be surprised that both reports, taken together, lead to the solution expounded here: there's no reason why econ growth has to be tied to population growth. Since it is acknowleged that each human embodies infinite demand for goods and services (there's no such a ting as Too Much!), then economies can continue to expand GDP and standard of living without adding to an already taxing burden of bipeds with opposable thumbs. But that requires a systematic, which is to say global, restructuring of econ. Good luck with that.

The problem, of course, is that most of econ in most parts of the globe remains mired in the population-means-econ growth meme. How to ditch that self-destructive tendancy?

The China problem is the immediate canary in the coal mine. While the USofA had a residential real estate driven Great Recession, it was caused by invisible oversight of the real estate financial markets, China's problem is the direct result of government intervention. Fixing that will require Xi's elimination, not the Putin style, necessarily. Both China and India will be forced, either by wiser heads or Mr. Market's Invisible Hand, to accept the sorry reality: they've both tried to implement the 19th century econ growth paradigm far too late when population exceeds natural resource endowments: they ain't be any virgin land of milk and honey left. So sorry.

Xi Donjon is famous for saying that the USofA is full up. To some extent he's right. On the resource side, it's more like: it's all gone. The sub-GED knuckledraggers in the shithole counties don't have a better idea. There was a report recently about the state of USofA's aquifers: you don't miss your water til your well runs dry. Turns out, in some places, draining an aquifer is perfectly legal.

Several states including Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado have rules that allow groundwater to be pumped from some regions until it's gone. Some areas have even set official timelines for how quickly they plan to use up groundwater over the next few decades.

Just the sort of sub-GED knuckledraggers that will Make America Great Again.

Greed, Inc.

"The Da Vinci Code" is both a book I've never read, and a movie I've never seen. So looking through my cable menu, there is the film on one of the commercial infested channels. But it's listed as running 3½ hours, which is nuts since the wiki lists its running time as just 2¾. Luckily, there's the record feature and skip-ahead feature. Have to wait until tonight to see it, but it's worth it. And Hollywood can't figure out why they have a Labour Problem?