Titanium's advantage is imo not so much its weight, as aluminium is better still in that respect. Titanium is mostly better where corrosion and temperature resistance are important. Relative to weight, high grade steel, titanium and aluminium are about equal in tensile strength.
There is a good reason: profits and management pay. And greed is good, right?
> the problems are fixable
Fixable in theory. The US would first have to fix the underlying issue, which i.m.o. is government, media and even judicial capture by financial interests. Billionaires are now openly buying "shares" in those. I don't see any sign of it changing anytime soon. It only seems to get worse.
It's not just profits and management. Administrators, nurses, and yes, definitely doctors, get paid far higher in the U.S. than in other countries. Who wants to be the one to say we need to cut staff, and cut wages for nurses and doctors, in order to bring down costs? Just cutting fat from insurance companies, or having the government step in as insurer with no other changes, wouldn't move the needle much.
I'm pretty sure healthcare costs in the US are also higher as a percentage of GDP compared to EU, so higher wages would not explain the difference. Also productivity should be higher?
I think pharmaceutical, hospital, insurance and legal companies take all the money.
Yes there’s tons of overhead and extra costs, but it isn’t mostly at the insurance company level. It’s spread all around the system, that was my point. There’s no one “quick fix” that leaves everyone with the same job and fat salary as they had before.
It's very worrying that consumer protection against poisoning in the US comes from a for-profit company that makes money by short selling companies they found to have issues and then covering their back this way against lawsuits, which any less aggressive reviewer would face.
The investigating is great, the problem is who is doing it and for what reason.
If the misdeed is done by a non-public or poor company there is no money to be made so they would never even investigate it. And not accepting a payoff that returns more than the short position would be ignoring fiduciary responsibility, so some investigations could disappear.
Most Newspapers are profit driven. The only difference is how the profit is derived. It seems to me that the choice is to have this information come to light or not have it all.
With all the anger over illegal immigrants taking US jobs, as a European it surprises me that nobody in the US seems to even mention the idea of punishing the employer for employing illegal workers.
If I want to hire someone (local or remote) as an employer here, I better make sure the worker has a valid working permit. Fines for non-compliance towards the employer are huge, even for a single day of work. All paperwork has to be complete before any work is done. Even when hiring through intermediary companies who guarantee it's all legal, liability and fines remain in place for the ultimate employer if it turns out to be not so.
In the US, there is no reliable way to verify employment eligibility. What systems do exist tend to produce many false positives and false negatives. Furthermore, you are required to accept documents the demonstrate employment eligibility at face value, even if they are likely to be fraudulent.
In industries that famously have many illegal employees, the companies have cover because the employees always have fraudulent documents. And since the company is required to accept those documents and not discriminate, the company can't be held liable for hiring them even though they are illegal.
Underlying this situation is that it is unconstitutional for the Federal government to issue mandatory ids to citizens that could be used to reliably determine employment eligibility.
I'm an employer, and this is the form that needs to be filled out when we hire someone.
Notice the 2nd page of eligible documentation. A "School ID" and "birth certificate" are adequate documentation for employment. Both can be easily forged and difficult to verify.
Also notice the bottom of the 2nd page: it allows (for a temporary period) a "receipt" of the document to be considered acceptable if it is "stolen" - meaning you don't even need to have the physical document at all.
And here's the kicker: This form does not need to be submitted to any government agency. (You literally just fill it out and put it in a filing cabinet)
> A "School ID" and "birth certificate" are adequate documentation for employment
No, they're not. They're adequate to establish identity. (List B).
> form does not need to be submitted to any government agency. (You literally just fill it out and put it in a filing cabinet)
Correct. We're on the same page in respect of employers having no real requirement to verify work authorisation. This appears part of the policy choice that lets certain politicians rail against illegal immigration without threatening the economics they support.
Turning away potentially underage drinkers is encouraged (and not doing so badly punished) but denying someone legal allowable employment is subject to litigation.
"ANTI-DISCRIMINATION NOTICE: All employees can choose which acceptable documentation to present for Form I-9. Employers cannot ask
employees for documentation to verify information in Section 1, or specify which acceptable documentation employees must present for Section 2 or
Supplement B, Reverification and Rehire. Treating employees differently based on their citizenship, immigration status, or national origin may be illegal."[0]
It is against Federal law to reject any reasonable documentation that satisfies the I-9 requirements. Historically, you can bootstrap your way to meeting those requirements with not much more than affidavits and basic forgery.
There are many people who are US citizens that due to history or circumstances have no reliable documentation of such with which to bootstrap an ID -- I have people with no foundational documents in my own family. The system is designed to enable these people to bootstrap their paperwork without a reliable root document, which is of course exploitable by people that are in the US illegally.
State-issued IDs do not contain sufficient information to ensure eligibility for employment under Federal law.
There is already a Federal law that punishes employers who do not accept documents that satisfy the I-9 requirements. Illegal immigrants have documents that satisfy these requirements.
> Illegal immigrants have documents that satisfy these requirements.
This reminds me of a Beavis and Butthead scene: "At the border. -Policeman: let them through. -Other policeman: Why ?. -Policeman: Mexicans know the capital of Texas, Americans don't"
How many times does everyone who knows have to explain that it is illegal NOT to accept the documents. The more the law is enforced, the more such documents must be accepted.
There are conflicting valid problems, different problems that are both valid, but the solution to one inhibits the solution to the other, and the law as it stands favors preventing discrimination as being the higher priority over preventing illegal employment.
I doubt either you or I knows if that is even a wrong priority, because I can't say which is the bigger problem. I'll say I don't begrudge any immigrants getting jobs, whether they are technically illegal or not. They are human and until they actually commit theft or violence I don't get off on making them suffer.
Regardless, the problem is not enforcing the law. The law says you must accept the documents. There is no "diverted blame". If you find the prospect of the wrong person getting a job so outrageous, the "blame" is on the government for making it easy to fabricate their documents. The various documents that the law says you must accept, should not be so easy to fake up, and there should probably be some office that accepts these documents and vets them instead of just telling employers to file them and never looking at them.
The people who complain about illegal immigrant labor in the US also like their cheap chicken and other fruits from illegal immigrant labor.
It's a weird case where one business undercuts another by hiring cheap labor, and then the other business has to do the same thing or else risk going out of business.
Better enforcement might help, but remember, people like cheap chicken; it doesn't matter which way you vote.
People say this, but I always wonder if some rejiggering of the revenue allocation calculus might make it possible to keep chicken cheap while paying the workers a living wage. All you'd have to do is make a handful of executives very disappointed when they open the letter containing their tax bill - or when a federal law enforcement agent knocks on their door.
I think we're more likely to see AI-based automation further take humans out of the loop at chicken factories.
That being said: I personally think it makes more sense to lower the cost of plant-based proteins. It's always going to be cheaper when we eat the plants directly instead of having an animal convert the plant to protein.
For protein. That doesn't account for micronutrients. For better or worse, humans are omnivores. We might be able to live on less meat. (Collectively-speaking; this individual weightlifts and accumulates injuries like crazy if he doesn't eat enough meat, sorry.)
There's also an issue of lower fat/connective tissue content in plant-based meats (again, necessary to support joint and muscle recovery). Also, IIRC, the fats and oils in meat hold up better to high-temperature cooking than the ones in meat analogues. Best I can do is go pescatarian (which has its own issues at-scale).
If it needs fixing in law, let's do that... not this weird system we have now of turning our head the other way and waving it off as necessary while ignoring any criticism of said crazy system.
> it surprises me that nobody in the US seems to even mention the idea of punishing the employer for employing illegal workers.
The anti-immigrant politicians can't punish the employers because they would be punishing their own donors.
If that sounds like a contradiction, consider that undocumented/illegal immigrants are effectively pawns who have no political power in the system, and the contradiction disappears entirely.
How does that make the contradiction disappear? It doesn't.
The resolution to the contradiction is that few candidates to Federal office are opposed to illegal immigration, and those that have opposed illegal immigration have mostly gotten away with merely saying they are opposed while not doing very much to stop illegal immigration.
Because it makes them look like they care for the people who elected them ("the imigrants make crimes/are taking jobs" narative). In reality the politicians only care about the biggest bider.
In some states it is, but state-level elected officials have only weak levers with which to influence the rate of illegal immigration.
I don't know much about the topic, but conservative commentator Ann Coulter complained that although he certain got votes by talking about it, Trump didn't do much against illegal immigration and probably doesn't really want to do much about it.
Because they never actually intend to, in any meaningful way. Trump is the wildcard; he was the first to actually do it, and the result was a lot of people complaining about rising construction costs and a shrinking labor pool. The actual goal for these donors and politicians is to keep a steady influx of exploitable labor to serve as the poorly-compensated, mistreated underclass that most Americans would riot rather than let themselves become; enough so that they always have something to run on, but not so many that they actually have to take action (e.g., when even liberals or progressives start having an issue with it). Same thing with Democrats and abortion.
The "interesting" (in Chinese proverbial terms) part is that we're living in times where a certain charlatan's actions have lead to the big red button actually being pushed on both matters. Whoever wins tonight, it certainly looks like we're about to test if each respective development has any bearing on polls, or if parties can just run on anti-immigration/pro-choice vibes ad nauseum, regardless of what's actually happened wrt each policy over the past (few) decade(s).
> it surprises me that nobody in the US seems to even mention the idea of punishing the employer for employing illegal workers
This has been my proposed solution to the immigration problem in the US. Stop attempting to corral the people coming over, and shift 100% of your resources toward punishing those who employ them. How many people will attempt to sneak into the US when no one is willing to hire them?
I also view this as a "put your money where your mouth is" stance. It changes it from a political issue into one with a practical solution, and the people benefiting from cheap labor would have to be very creative to find fault with it.
> punishing the employer for employing an illegal worker
It's already the law.
This is why employers mandate I-9 forms as part of employment.
This is part of the larger indictment against Christine Chapman by the DoJ, who found she was falsifying employment verification documents and giving access to North Koreans in return for a portion of the embezzled sums.
Stories like this are also why there has been a major push for RTO.
There is practically zero enforcement. Criminalise hiring illegal workers while stepping up enforcement and you dramatically reduce the value of illegal migration while shutting down large sections of the economy, thereby prompting supply-side inflation.
We don’t do it because this is a politically convenient middle ground that keeps illegal labor in the system while segregating it from competing with most of us. (Put another way: we have a regulated and an unregulated labor market. We like the fruits from the latter.)
This is the next key talking point for a winning candidate, and may be the ultimate solution to US immigration. It can and will gain popular support, but it will take someone sneaky enough to gain their party's support on other matters first; either after becoming the party's nominee or after being elected. Either one.
(If you propose this after being elected you might only last one term though; it's a bit of a rug pull. Better to pull the rug out from under your party rather than the voters.)
It's about investment funds and shareholders owning commercial property who push for RTO out of fear of their portfolio going down in value if people are not using the offices.
To be fair I think the only reason the conspiracy even exists is because, apparently, nobody knows what RTO is really about. IMO it's mostly just a power play and insecure executives, but they won't come out and say that of course. We're left to speculate, and naturally conspiracies thrive.
Legislation is frequently proposed to do just this: require all employers to use E-Verify to ensure they don't hire illegal workers. The same people who are constantly firing up voters about immigration are opposed to this. The political issue is valuable to them, as is cheap, cowed, disposable labor. And they know if they succeeded in shipping their workers back over the border there would be economic and political mayhem.
I expect endless demagoguery about immigration and performative cruelty, but nothing that will challenge the bottom line.
The current Republican nominee ran his entire campaign on hating immigrants and has been known to hire illegal immigrants. They don't actually want to crackdown on it they just want to campaign on it.
Legislation is meaningless if it is not going to be enforced or if it will be used to destroy competition. As in law enforcement cannot deal with all cases, but they certainly can be nudged to deal with businesses that corrupt government doesn't want operating.
I don't know that they will. For example, 90% of Trump's previous platform was the wall. That's all he could talk about. No wall to be found, and he doesn't even mention it anymore. Things change from campaign to office.
It’s a playbook as old as time. “At least we’re not <the other guy>”
When slavery was a thing, white southern workers made a lot less than northern workers. Racial superiority pumped the suckers up. Johnny Reb volunteered to be slaughtered so some aristocrat could own people.
Most of the illegal immigrant hoopla has been performative bullshit to make to easier to control employees. If you’re in the chicken processing business or need casual labor, it’s a hell of alot cheaper to avoid paying for social security, worker’s compensation, etc by hiring people whom you can easily exploit by dangling the sword of ICE over their heads.
The US governance model segments immigration and work regulation - the former is a federal matter, the latter is almost exclusively regulated by the states (including enforced of federal rules).
In recent years as conservatives have veered into a more overtly racist and reactionary movement that’s shifted a bit.
Disruption at work. Ford can't make money on selling EV's, their overall margin suffers with every EV they sell. They have large existing investments in factories, processes and people that produce combustion engines. They can't lower prices and sell enough of them for economies of scale to start working.
Tesla is the new Ford. Ford (and most other car manufacturers) will have a difficult time, most manufacturers are probably doomed. After the current hesitation phase, when the economics are there (very soon), customers will almost all go electric.
What investors (and their "agents" CEOs) want is ROI, which depends on not only total profit, but also total amount invested and how long it has to stay invested. Hence the relevance when GP says that "They have large existing investments in factories, processes and people that produce combustion engines".
Margin is profit over total revenue, not profit over Capital invested
When someone buys stock on the market, they are giving money to another trader. They are not giving money to the company to invest in production capacity.
Shareholder profit tracks net corporate profit, not profit margin. It's better to hold a stock that makes a 1% margin on a billion dollars revenue, then one that has a 90% margin on $10 of revenue
>When you buy ford stock, none of that money goes to the company for capital investment
Companies regularly sell their own stock and use it for capital investment. It is an important way that large capital projects are funded in capitalistic countries.
Federal Express is a great example: as a start-up, it could not become profitable till it had a big network (planes, airport landing rights, a huge sorting facility) so the cost of the network had to be paid for by selling stock or by borrowing, and corporations at least in the US raise more money from stock sales than they do from borrowing.
Another example is training AI models: most of the tens of billions of dollars in GPUs and electricity that has been used or will soon be used to train AI models comes from the sale of stock.
You are talking about IPOs and other secondary stock offers.
During secondary stock offers, Investors will care about how much value the addition funds will create relative to cash put in.
Still, this is different than a percent profit margin on sales. Investors care about the total profit, not the percent margin.
going back to the actual situation, EV's lowering the percent profit margin doesnt matter as long as they are increating the total profit.
If you sell 1 million gas cars at 20% profit, and can sell 1 million EVs at 10% margin, you are still better off selling the EVs and taking the 15% margin on 2 million cars.
The idea that ford is dialing back production because it lowers their percent margin isnt a realistic justification. especially after the funds have been sunk in manufacturing.
> the bus is a strictly worse version of the car in these kinds of cities
You can change that by giving them their own lane so they don't get stuck in traffic with the cars, let them go where cars may not go, give priority at traffic lights etc. That is what they do where I live.
A city next to me (L.A. area) has some dedicated bus lanes and bike lanes. Unfortunately, they dont have one of the other benefits that you mention, like banning cars in some areas. There are also connections to the train to go farther, but the buses are still mostly empty except for students and laborers who live outside the city. The buses themselves are typically faster and decent, as I ride them a lot. Meanwhile, the other traffic lanes are jam packed during rush hours. It is the L.A. area, so there's just a ton of people/drivers anyway.
The last time I went through there driving, it took almost 20 mins to go 2-3 miles due to traffic (and stop lights), obviously during rush hour. The buses were still nearly empty (I wished I didnt have to drive that day). At a non-rush hour time, it takes me maybe 20 mins for my whole trip home which is about 9 miles.
My point, I guess, is it's not always just having a free bus lane. There are a lot of people that need convincing to take buses and alternative transportation. A few of my coworkers wish they could take the bus/train, but having kids in school and other things make it a bit harder for them.
You are not wrong - this is where personal, private, transportation excels. And why Culver city desperately needs a quality network of safe, protected, bike infrastructure. Cars don't scale, but bikes do.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. If there was safe and protected infrastructure, I feel a lot more people, including myself, would bike, especially with all the new e-bikes available. I will give Culver City some credit because they do have some dedicated bike lanes but they're not really protected.
> but the buses are still mostly empty except for students and laborers who live outside the city.
You take the bus so this goes without saying but, let's say a bus is mostly empty and has 8 people inside. If you were to put those 8 people into individual cars, you'd make the road a lot more crowded. I think a lot of folks look at these mostly-empty buses and don't realize that most cars are mostly-empty also (average 1.5 occupants / car in most of the US, honestly probably lower in the LA area due to its sheer car centricity.) But of course if you're in a car you're more likely to view another driver as "someone like you" while you look at the bus and think of it as a waste of space and taxpayer money.
Yes, exactly! Lol I take it you've been or live there? Afternoon traffic is ridiculous and even in surrounding areas like Palms and Mar Vista, which I think are people avoiding Culver City. Just way too many drivers here in general.
It will change the habits of some but it’s not enough. We should continue to build out bus infrastructure and enhance bus rapid transit especially in the ways you mention, but those efforts won’t result in the large change we need to shift away from vehicle-based infrastructure.
> their own lane so they don't get stuck in traffic with the cars, let them go where cars may not go, give priority at traffic lights etc
I feel like we are in agreement. It might not be enough but it is necessary. Problem is we don't even have enough political capital to enforce this. Bill deBalsio the ex mayor of New York came on a radio show and said (paraphrasing) he can't order cops to ticket cars and trucks that are loading or unloading in the bus lane. The bus lane is NOT a business' property for loading and unloading, especially not at busy hours. I'd you must do so, do it when there is no traffic in the middle of the night.
How can we do more when we can't even do the bare minimum?
> Problem is we don't even have enough political capital to enforce this.
The problem is that you're proposing a new problem rather than a solution.
Suppose there are two car lanes and they're somewhat congested. You suggest converting one to a bus lane to encourage people to take the bus. The result is to make the remaining car lane disproportionately more congested, because the bus lane gets 10% of people to take the bus and the other car lane is now 105% over capacity instead of 15% over capacity.
Your theory is that this will cause enough people to take the bus to make this problem go away, but that theory only works if it doesn't. If people taking the bus relieves the congestion then the car lane is uncongested and there is no more reason to take the bus.
So let the car lane be interminably congested, you say. Force people to take the bus. Only the bus doesn't service all destinations, or doesn't run there often enough (because if it did it would be empty), so the bus is no option for those people no matter how bad the car traffic gets. At which point they're prepared to boil you alive for making the traffic worse without giving them any viable alternative to it.
You need to make their lives better, not worse, or you can't win.
Come to Edinburgh and the Lothians, it's not perfect but it's better than you might think.
A couple of important aspects:
Once buses are frequent enough, people don't need to worry about the timetable and will just get the next one. Edinburgh's main arterial routes have frequent enough buses to achieve this, even if not every bus goes to the same ultimate destination. Some of the busier bus lines have frequent enough buses all by themselves.
This does mean that there are lots of empty buses off-peak, this may seam wasteful but it's a necessary component of a functional transit system.
We also have a number of "bus gates", as well as bus lanes, with cameras to prevent other vehicles from using bus-only lanes. This lets buses go through residential areas without making them rat runs for car drivers.
Buses and trams (especially trams!) can take a lot more people than cars. If everyone who gets the bus tried to take a car instead then no-one would get anywhere.
And we also give free bus travel to young people, old people, and anyone with a medical condition that means they can't drive.
A combination of a smartphone and free bus travel gives my disabled daughter a lot more freedom than she'd otherwise be able to enjoy.
You’re telling us that buses must be empty, because people won’t take buses, because there aren’t enough buses, because buses would be empty if there are enough buses. Can you spot where the logic breaks down?
I'm telling you that buses must be empty because if they only go along the busiest roads then nobody takes them because their route is sleepy road -> busy road -> sleepy road, and a bus that only travels along the busy road can't pick them up or drop them off. Whereas a bus that travels along the sleepy road will be empty, because it's a sleepy road which only gets one car an hour as it is. These can both be true at once because the sleepy roads outnumber the busy roads in regions where most of the land area is the suburbs.
I agree, but want to add that part of the problem here and why this can occur is because of easy and cheap parking. It’s not strictly the induced demand phenomenon but I think your point is the major factor.
From what I’ve seen in my own reading and world travels is that you have to just stop expanding the roads or working on them outside of necessary maintenance and such. Add bike and bus lanes, make the car lanes smaller (safely) and then let people sort out whether it’s worth it to drive. Finding ways to tax the ever living hell out of or zone away surface parking lots should help too.
Whenever a department of “transportation” or city/regional officials get together in a room to discuss these topics, there should be very little if any discussion about how changes affect drivers.
this entire monologue boils down to “people want cars and public transit is bad, so don’t improve it and prioritise access” which sounds a lot like you work for ford
It's not that public transit is bad, it's that if you try to make car travel worse without providing people with a viable alternative to it, you will lose at politics. And just sticking a bus lane in there doesn't provide an alternative unless the bus comes at short intervals to the places where people actually travel, which isn't compatible with the geography of most American cities, because at least one of the endpoints will be in the suburbs which lacks the density for viable mass transit.
Unfortunately we built those suburbs without factoring in the real cost of transporting people to and from them. Now those homeowners are real used to that transportation subsidy and are not happy when it is threatened to be taken away. Something is going to give, cities can’t afford it any more.
Plenty of suburban homeowners like myself are happy to never have to go into the city and have been granted this due to work from home. I personally haven’t been downtown in like 6 months. A large percentage of the population who commute to city centers from the suburbs for jobs are probably working office jobs that could be done remotely. The ulterior motives I’ve heard for RTO are that commercial real estate prices are plummeting and city revenues are plummeting because of lack of workers. If that is the case then aren’t the suburbs subsidizing the city?
That only makes the bus beat the car if theres traffic on the roads. Cities like columbus don’t gridlock outside osu football games. Highways flow full speed even during rush hour which is actually less than an hour. Its a different planet than socal traffic where both sides of a highway are moving 20mph between 3-7pm
It's hard to educate the next generation when everyone of all ages is exposed to relentless propaganda (also known as marketing, in all forms including the fully legalized corruption of US politics) at the same time.
Oil and car companies' futures depend on continued public support for free parking, more lanes and housing far away from destinations. It's in their interest to manipulate people into opinions that are beneficial to their bottom line, and they will continue to do so.
Here is one. Njb is another one of these strong towns esque orgs that parrots the usual points to people who get their text based content through a talking head speaking it to them.
> Tax haul for 10 houses are better than a 10 unit complex.
I thought is is pretty well established that in US cities, poorer and denser neighborhoods are subsidizing the richer suburbs, tax-wise.
Because 10 houses need 10 of everything, paid for by taxes: street pavement, sewer, water, electricity, internet, etc. A 10 unit complex needs only one. It all needs maintenance too, starting some 25 years after being built. Most US suburbs can't pay for their own maintenance from taxes.
Sewer, water, and electricity hookups are cheap to maintain and are on the burden of the home owner to repair. The initial hookups and construction are absolutely not covered by taxes (this is one of the significant costs you will find out when you build on a plot).
Street pavement is the only thing you mentioned that does cost the tax base, but how much the poor dense area subsidizes the suburbs is completely dependent on the split of funds. In many of the suburban sprawl regions of the western US, the dense urban city (e.g. San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, LA) has a small jurisdiction and the suburbs are in completely different legal cities with their own road budgets.
>cities, poorer and denser neighborhoods are subsidizing the richer suburbs, tax-wise.
Definitely not well established. What you might be thinking of is poor dense neighborhoods subsidizing rural areas that depend heavily on federal or state grants for pretty much all of their infrastructure.
