Chief

Man, I haven't been to Fragfest for like 7 years. That really would be awesome to reconnect with old friends. I remember the first time the voices behind team speak became faces, and it was well worth it.

In the meantime, it's probably about time to look at building a new machine.

It's been forever since I've even gotten online and gamed with you folks! Browsing around at all of the new members and really happy to see the community still thriving after all of these years.

Full disclosure: I drive an '09 Passat after owning in order 2000 Toyota Solara, 1996 Chevy s10, 1985 Camaro IROC Z-28, 1988 Toyota MR2, 1984 Audio 4000 S. I am not pro-union, but acknowledge they have had their place in history and can still be important partners and they aren't all evil.

Bottom line, the $70+ per hour is a number the auto companies manufacture. It is not a true number - it is an aggregated cost. The foreign manufacturers don't have legacy costs because they haven't employed Americans long enough to have retirees like the domestics.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/business...onhardt.html?em

Let’s start with the numbers. The $73-an-hour figure comes from the car companies themselves. As part of their public relations strategy during labor negotiations, the companies put out various charts and reports explaining what they paid their workers. Wall Street analysts have done similar calculations.

 

The calculations show, accurately enough, that for every hour a unionized worker puts in, one of the Big Three really does spend about $73 on compensation. So the number isn’t made up. But it is the combination of three very different categories.

 

The first category is simply cash payments, which is what many people imagine when they hear the word “compensation.†It includes wages, overtime and vacation pay, and comes to about $40 an hour. (The numbers vary a bit by company and year. That’s why $73 is sometimes $70 or $77.)

 

The second category is fringe benefits, like health insurance and pensions. These benefits have real value, even if they don’t show up on a weekly paycheck. At the Big Three, the benefits amount to $15 an hour or so.

 

Add the two together, and you get the true hourly compensation of Detroit’s unionized work force: roughly $55 an hour. It’s a little more than twice as much as the typical American worker makes, benefits included. The more relevant comparison, though, is probably to Honda’s or Toyota’s (nonunionized) workers. They make in the neighborhood of $45 an hour, and most of the gap stems from their less generous benefits.

 

The third category is the cost of benefits for retirees. These are essentially fixed costs that have no relation to how many vehicles the companies make. But they are a real cost, so the companies add them into the mix  dividing those costs by the total hours of the current work force, to get a figure of $15 or so  and end up at roughly $70 an hour.

 

The crucial point, though, is this $15 isn’t mainly a reflection of how generous the retiree benefits are. It’s a reflection of how many retirees there are. The Big Three built up a huge pool of retirees long before Honda and Toyota opened plants in this country. You’d never know this by looking at the graphic behind Wolf Blitzer on CNN last week, contrasting the “$73/hour†pay of Detroit’s workers with the “up to $48/hour†pay of workers at the Japanese companies.

 

These retirees make up arguably Detroit’s best case for a bailout. The Big Three and the U.A.W. had the bad luck of helping to create the middle class in a country where individual companies  as opposed to all of society  must shoulder much of the burden of paying for retirement.

\Sorry I'll edit in a second my computer is giving me an internal clipboard error when I try to copy.

\\I had to reboot

Greetings gamers, just wanted to stop by and say hello even though I haven't been around for close to a YEAR!

Greetings gamers, hope all is well. Don't forget to vote!

I don't own a house, haven't paid off my car, owe $60,000 in student loans, have no savings, have only about 4 or 5 grand left in 401k. I'll be paying off my debt for a decade. Or more. Sometimes I can't sleep because I'm so stressed out about my debt and how bad my finances are. I'm still getting things showing up on my credit report from the time I was home taking care of my mom.

But the decision to quit work and go take care of her - that makes me feel rich. I have a new perspective on a lot of things. And someday I'll be back to square with my finances. But I'd pay every penny of the financial chaos again to make the same decision.

Now, I'm going to oversimplify and say rich is not having debt. This is an interesting thread because it's making me think about the stuff going on in the election and to go back to the original intent of the question - if you make six figures (100,000+) you should be able to do alright...but RICH =/= SMART.

I was just checking my Hotmail (which has been upgraded) and was clicking on folders. Now, when I send an email I rarely save drafts. But today I clicked on the drafts folder and there were 4. The one that caught my eye was dated 8/25/01.

It was a draft of an email I was sending out to some friends to tell them I was joining =TM=

For those of you that don't know, The Militia was one of the guilds that used to pub & compete with Mmmm back in the old days when DOH & Mmmm people were either Mmmm, BlackOps, or TM or a couple of others. Years before this awesome project GC has become.

So over 6 years later, I've met a lot of you in person, become friends with a few, and benefitted greatly from your moral support and prayers as my mom passed away from cancer.

Checking through my "drafts" folder reminded me of a few people to come and say hello to, as well as to begin the sentiments of thanks that come with Thanksgiving.

Happy holidays & best wishes to you all.

Is it deer sausage? When you said, "my sausage" I had memories of being a kid and putting dear through the mincer and making venison sausage. Mmmm home made sausage in queso!

wth is this jeremy?

Our company is haveing a Halloween contest and the winner gets a day of paid time off. All 250+ of us from the 5 offices are broken up into teams to do skits. We have some YouTube parodies as part of ours and I was made to be the dorky kid from the famous YouTube clip "Star Wars Kid." Just a little Chief being a dork!

Here's an outtake from a skit I'm in for work, it's a parody of the Star Wars Kid YouTube clip. The last 20 seconds are my favorite!

Not positive on how this works, but maybe it would count towards the "fair play" broadcasting rules and then they would be responsible for giving equal consideration to other candidates?

Or they just don't want to politicize baseball.

haha! That's great!

One month and 3 days.

Randy Couture for the win! Please please please please! And I hope that GSP - Koscheck ends up being a good fight!

See you in a month, moss.

I was thinking (after I stopped chuckling) the bottom right post was photochopped because it doesn't follow the diagonal of the curb on the bottom left.

chief is actually an indian, chief tekwantembo of the niketacka tribe is actually his full name in the sacred land.. he also lives in a teepee

<haha good one>

Fairweather is the name of our family goat--she makes great cheese.

And our fiberline tops 40 gb/s (but only on late night weekdays)

Wow! They're really growing up, you have a beautiful family.

Burried to spec, a thread must be dead approximately 4 years to be classified as a RDG (really deep grave) by a rabbit.

Well yeah, they would say that. They are a socialist run organization. Singapore is ranked higher than the US? rofl. Anyone been to Singapore and actually believes that.

 

Well two of my co-workers here have both traveled to Singapore within the past year. Briefly speaking with them and seeing the pictures... Singapore is a very rich country and people are well off there. They mentioned they had two types of health care systems. Government run and state run, so you have a choice between the two. Obviously government run is cheaper.

 

Norway is 11. From talking to the people when I traveled over there. Their health care system is great. No long lines, its not hard to see a doctor, etc. But of course they seem to be um... more intelligent than your average american though...they wouldn't waste their time going to see a doctor when they have a scratch or a cough. They are grateful for the system and wouldn't take advantage of it.

 

 

Singapore is basically one giant city on an island.

 

here are some statistics.

4.4 Million people.

2.9% unemployment rate

land area: 272 square miles. (just to put it in perspective, rhode island is about 1,200 square miles)

I've been to Singapore and most of what NOFX said is true. They do a very good job of hiding the poverty that they do have. Their public housing is quite nice and tucked away. You can see it along the freeways and would assume that it's all hotels or old apartments. Everything in Singapore is a well oiled machine for the most part. One of the most impressive countries I've been to. I lost my wallet in the airport--it had a grand in cash, my passport, travellers checks, etc. It was returned over an hour later without a dollar missing. The guy wouldn't take a reward either. He said it was a matter of honor in Singapore and that was how Singaporeans are. He welcomed me to the country and thanked me for visiting. The rest of my stay was like that over and over.

When I was 18 I had a summer crush that was 24. That's the only girl I've ever dated older than me. Other than that I've dated girls that ranged from 0 to 8 years younger. The last was 8 years younger the current is 1 year younger. She's also the first girl I've dated over 26 (31).

ZD is having a BBQ with French wine & cheeses to celebrate Bastille Day!

- Marquardt (submission)

- KenFlo (submission)

- Tito (TKO)

- Sherk (TKO)

- Nogueira (submission)

- Bonnar (decision)

Let's hope for some great fights and great hook-ups afterwards. Worst case, we're going to have a blast any way.

Man, I'm glad we had this thread. My hard drive died, and now I have the budget worksheet to use still!

Someone needs to serve her an all you can eat buffet of knuckle sandwiches.

No matter how much the demand, there is absolutely NO way that a $.30 fluctuation in a 12 hr period can be justified. Here's an example:

I get your point and agree with the spirit, but the problem is that it's a free market. It's an economic principle at work here called elasticity of demand. For example, change the price of something by x percent or reach some threshold of pricing and you get a certain response.

Change milk prices a few cents here or there and sales might change a little, but mom's still send their kids to school with cereal for breakfast. Change the price by more than a couple of cents (which happened in 2002 - 2003 when I was working for Kraft) and demand will fall off. Lots of food, especially consumer packaged goods (CPGs) have a low elasticity of demand--change the price more than a little and people stop using it.

Cigarettes have a high elasticity. You can raise prices & taxes and people still buy the product and demand might have a small bumb but not really. Ah, the luxury of selling an addictive product!

So imagine a rubber band with a pin tacked to the average price of any given product. Different products have rubber bands that stretch easier and break sooner than others.

Gasoline is not considered by Americans as a whole as a luxury. Americans need their cars, especially if you don't live in a big city with mass transit or a smaller more rural place where you can walk or ride your bike. So it takes big swings in prices to control demand. Gasoline has a big, stretchy rubber band. If the bottom fell out on gas prices tomorrow, everyone would go fill up and there would be a short term spike in demand, but if the low prices stuck around people wouldn't start driving more (they would go back to wanting big unefficient vehicles).

The elasticity of demand for gasoline is teh suxor. But it's not the oil companies' fault--but that's why there are windfall taxes in principle, and why this situation merits a windfall tax on the excess profits created by regulating demand with high prices.

Not to make this too complex, but elasticity of supply comes into play, too. But summer driving season is what we're talking about now rather than the Hurricane season or wars affecting supply.

Oh, awesome! That's hilarious. What a great pick me up after a long day at work!