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ColoradoCleric posted:In some of the articles there was a throw away quote of someone saying they could produce for $2 a barrel but another one said the north dakota region's break even is $27 You might be confusing cost per gallon of gas with cost per barrel of oil.
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Fasdar posted:I mean for gently caress's sake the problem isn't capitalism, it's this fantasy football version of reality that venture capitalists and shareholders live in. Capitalism is great for moving money and goods around with minimal ritualism and institutionalization, and a fantastic game for encouraging novel approaches to old problems. But when you get shareholders involved it strips every shred of humanity from the system, negates truly creative impulses, and reduces everything to some min/maxed version of a once useful system. LOL if you don't think violence is required to fix this.
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Aug 2, 2016 04:31
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mrwuss posted:They put in (or attempted to? who knows anymore) new regulations for pay day loans in the states. The borrower now has to be able to prove they can reasonably pay back the loan without the requirement of opening a new one right away. Or some such poo poo That's why the scam artists that ran those things in a bunch of states then moved their hqs to Indian reservations that weren't effected by that ruling. But then they started advertising on TV and they were still using federal banks for wire transfers and other poo poo , so they got hosed anyway, but since they had to have the companies 51 prevent owned by the reservation to run them out of there, it also got some seriously heavy fines dropped on to the natives who agreed to go in business with therm
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Aug 2, 2016 04:32
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Krispy Kareem posted:Isn't oil already crashing again? I think it's back down to the low 40's. All the Suadis seem to be doing is forcing consolidation of US O&G assets. Which means companies can afford to create more externalities in their cost structure through concessions from local governments and broader litigative fiat as they get bigger. So... everybody loses, but the process of negotiating the new normal would seem to get more straight forward?
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Aug 2, 2016 04:51
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Krispy Kareem posted:Isn't oil already crashing again? I think it's back down to the low 40's. The trajectory of oil and oil stocks over the last year is proof that the financial world is staffed by retards. WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THESE PRICE MOVEMENTS COMING?? Oh... 
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Aug 2, 2016 04:58
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I can't remember what thread it was in, but some goon wanted to use all his money and I think borrow more to buy into oil at something like 60 bucks a barrel while it was tanking and his wife was desperately trying to talk him out of it.
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Aug 2, 2016 05:01
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Professor Shark posted:I've heard the same thing, it's pretty incredible that shareholders might have actual proof of an investment making steady money but think "If only they did the opposite of what is apparently making this investment profitable, profits will go through the roof! I think it's as simple as some rear end in a top hat shareholder going: "Wait. We pay $12.50 Minimum? The federal minimum is only $7.25! We have 135,000 American employees, so we would save $708,750 per working hour by slashing their wages to the minimum allowed by law. People will work it, people are lining up to work at mcdonalds and wal mart! Once we cut benefits and fire all the entrenched employees making $14-$18 think of the hundreds of millions we will save" Lowe's hired me for $9.55, the 2008 financial crisis happened and our store immediately went to federal minimum and I was in a long line of people that were at $9-$12 that were marched out the door and replaced with whoever would work for $7.25. Not sure if it was company wide but my store had almost 100% turnover, suspiciously of all the employees that hired in and helped assemble the store that were making decent wages. When I started at Wal-Mart you would have the odd cashier hired in the 90s or early 2000s making $12-$15 an hour and anyone from 2010 on was making $7.25. I had three years shipping & receiving and I got a .10 for each year, so I was hired at $7.55 for the hardest job I had ever done. Fat Shat Sings has a new favorite as of 05:27 on Aug 2, 2016 |
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Aug 2, 2016 05:23
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Fat Shat Sings posted:Lowe's hired me for $9.55, the 2008 financial crisis happened and our store immediately went to federal minimum and I was in a long line of people that were at $9-$12 that were marched out the door and replaced with whoever would work for $7.25. Not sure if it was company wide but my store had almost 100% turnover, suspiciously of all the employees that hired in and helped assemble the store that were making decent wages. Did they flat out fire you for making too much, cook up a reason, or just cut your hours until you had to find another job? It seems odd that a company can just say "We're getting rid of these people in exchange for cheaper labor" and not get in legal trouble or at the very least have to pay unemployment.
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Aug 2, 2016 05:33
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SickZip posted:The trajectory of oil and oil stocks over the last year is proof that the financial world is staffed by retards. so basically according to this I need to buy a bunch of oil right now because it's going to jump up $10 very soon so I can sell it for a profit
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Aug 2, 2016 05:41
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PallasAthene posted:Did they flat out fire you for making too much, cook up a reason, or just cut your hours until you had to find another job? It seems odd that a company can just say "We're getting rid of these people in exchange for cheaper labor" and not get in legal trouble or at the very least have to pay unemployment. Obviously they didn't say "Alright everyone, We need to be paying less money!" It was probably a decision by some of our "Career Retail" managers to try and cut costs, but we had 110 people go through all of the training classes at other stores and help build our Lowe's when it opened, and we had almost everyone after a year, with only a few new cashiers. Once they started slashing wages for new hires, and not giving any existing people wages the turnover rate skyrocketed. I was fired for bullshit reasons and had my unemployement denied by a manager that I didn't get along with. We started losing someone weekly or more. Commisions were no longer going through so we had salesmen quit. Department manager wages got locked, so some people were actually not taking any increase in pay to become department managers so a lot of them quit. All the cashiers were cut to like 8-10 hours a week, sometimes 0. They also quit working with peoples schedules, so I had them scheduling me during my college classes I had been attending for a year, and we ended up losing a bunch of parents due to their schedules switching from days to nights. What had been 110 people working for a year straight with almost zero turnover turned into me being one of about 8 of the original employees left over the next six months, with all new employees making drastically reduced wages.
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Aug 2, 2016 05:41
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PallasAthene posted:Did they flat out fire you for making too much, cook up a reason, or just cut your hours until you had to find another job? It seems odd that a company can just say "We're getting rid of these people in exchange for cheaper labor" and not get in legal trouble or at the very least have to pay unemployment. hi welcome to America
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Aug 2, 2016 06:37
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Fat Shat Sings posted:Obviously they didn't say "Alright everyone, We need to be paying less money!" sounds exactly like what's happening at the sears I just quit working at today. They upped everyone's pay to $8.50/hr and then slashed hours so technically you made less than before. I don't know about the new hires but they barely last a week for the most part because they're only getting a handful of hours. It's terrible and I'm glad I finally left that drat place because it's collapsing hard and fast.
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Aug 2, 2016 06:58
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Fat Shat Sings posted:I think it's as simple as some rear end in a top hat shareholder going: This makes perfect sense to anyone who doesn't think about it for more than three seconds. Rational well-informed actors 
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Aug 2, 2016 08:48
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Fat Shat Sings posted:I think it's as simple as some rear end in a top hat shareholder going: it is kind of amazing moving into office life after retail where i make three times as much for like 1/10 the work. gently caress everyone who says the working poor are lazy they work harder and have more stressful lives than anyone. when the financial crisis hit i was the receiving manager at a barnes and noble. despite it not really affecting our business, they froze all manager raises that year. our raises were fifty cents an hour.
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Aug 2, 2016 10:54
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PallasAthene posted:Did they flat out fire you for making too much, cook up a reason, or just cut your hours until you had to find another job? It seems odd that a company can just say "We're getting rid of these people in exchange for cheaper labor" and not get in legal trouble or at the very least have to pay unemployment. lol buddo that's not illegal, 
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Aug 2, 2016 11:43
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Fat Shat Sings posted:I think it's as simple as some rear end in a top hat shareholder going: One of my mother's friend's daughters is extremely wealthy and she would get me to stack wood and do odd jobs for her when I was a teenager. The neighborhood she lives in is filled with huge, expensive houses with well manicured lawns, to the point that people walk around and take pictures of themselves in front of them  Anyway, one day I was telling her how nice the area was and she told me that every single person living on her block was up to their eyeballs in debt and most of them were only a paycheque or two away from losing their cars and houses, and that people were constantly moving in/out of the neighborhood. I imagine that most shareholders are like those people- drowning in payments, always needing to squeeze a little bit more to pay for their new whatever. It's the only way I can imagine demanding thousands of people have a shittier life.
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Aug 2, 2016 12:21
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lol no shareholders of big companies are banks, pension funds, insurance companies and investment funds
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Aug 2, 2016 12:27
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Oh, well gently caress them then
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Aug 2, 2016 12:32
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theacox posted:Can you post a link? I find that impossible to believe. Here's the article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/07/31/texas-shale-oil-has-fought-saudi-arabia-to-a-standstill/ And the quote: someone is probably exaggerating posted:Scott Sheffield, the outgoing chief of Pioneer Natural Resources, threw down the gauntlet last week - with some poetic licence - claiming that his pre-tax production costs in the Permian Basin of West Texas have fallen to $2.25 a barrel. There are a lot of caveats. The Permian Basin is a very good spot for shale, so most operations can't produce at that level. Also, he's probably exaggerating, although Pioneer Natural Resources is a publicly traded company so if he's saying untrue poo poo that positively impacts his stock, then that's risky from a federal prison standpoint (i.e. Enron). Still, for some providers in some areas fracking costs have plummeted. Krispy Wafer has a new favorite as of 13:33 on Aug 2, 2016 |
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Aug 2, 2016 13:30
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Fat Shat Sings posted:I think it's as simple as some rear end in a top hat shareholder going: This kind of reminds me of chain restaurants that fill cups to the brim with ice to save 5 cents per glass because someone with Excel figured out "well times that by 30,000,000 drinks a year and that's an extra 1.5M per year!!!! Ignoring the fact that it pisses people off and makes them not want to go back as often. PallasAthene posted:Did they flat out fire you for making too much, cook up a reason, or just cut your hours until you had to find another job? It seems odd that a company can just say "We're getting rid of these people in exchange for cheaper labor" and not get in legal trouble or at the very least have to pay unemployment. This is definitely legal. I worked at Circuit City when they laid off their best salespeople (it was a company-wide thing). I wasn't on commission because I wasn't a salesman, so I have no horse in this race and I'm not bitter. Anyway, they laid off their best salespeople when they decided to stop commission sales because it was "costing them too much money" (somehow ignoring the fact that the employee was only making that much because they generated that much more in sales for the company). Anyway, they flat-out told anyone who averaged over $20 an hour that they were terminated (so if as a commissioned employee, you made $41,000 @ 40 hr a week that year, you were gone). Anyone who averaged less than $20 an hour were allowed to stay, and they would be paid their previous average as their hourly pay. Now keep in mind that at the time, you could work at Circuit City and raise a family (yes, in early 2000s this was real). I knew people there making $75,000 a year. These people had kids and were older and could sell a ketchup popsicle to a woman in white gloves. They also were constantly reading up on the latest tech news and they would extensively learn about any of the products they sold. They would go to a Pioneer, Panasonic, Bose, etc. showcase in different states to learn about the new products coming out. People would come back and spend thousands of dollars numerous times, each time requesting specific salesmen because they were so great. Anyway, they told anyone who averaged over $20 an hour they were fired. If you averaged $19.00 an hour, you now made $19.00 an hour no matter how you sold. So you could literally hide in the breakroom all day and you'd make the same amount of money as if you sold twelve flat-screen TVs. You can see why Circuit City is no longer in business. Anyway the point of the story was that employees absolutely were told "you are being fired because you make too much money". There was even a cutoff dollar amount. Eventually Circuit City got rid of anyone making more than $8-9 an hour a year or two later, which means there were literally zero good salespeople left. I had already left there long before that, but my friends who still worked there told me almost all employees were now 18-19 years old, stunk of weed, looked like they just rolled out of bed that morning, and knew nothing about anything sold in the store. This was a place where you used to get in trouble if you didn't wear clean dress shoes and a pressed dress shirt. So essentially, zero incentive to buy from them instead of Wal-Mart, but at least at Wal-Mart you kind of expect no one to be able to help you. tl;dr: firing employees for making too much money is entirely legal, and we were even told that's why you were being fired (or  laid off )
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Aug 2, 2016 13:47
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So they fired their best salespeople and kept their worst? Genius
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Aug 2, 2016 13:51
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Jumpingmanjim posted:So they fired their best salespeople and kept their worst? Yep. I was there for the termination meeting (even though I wasn't a salesperson). It was ridiculous. It was a big meeting in the car audio garage and they had tissue boxes everywhere (seriously) and everyone knew some poo poo was going down. "You performed to well last year, and you are being fired for it. Terrible to OK salespeople will remain". Then a year or two later they fired the remaining OK salespeople. If you want the way it was described verbatim, they basically just stated that anyone who averaged $20+ an hour due to commission, you are terminated immediately. I remember this one guy begging to keep his job, saying he would work for minimum wage, because his wife was 7 months pregnant and he was going to be completely hosed with her giving birth without health insurance. They were sympathetic (honestly the supervisors and managers there were cool people and were genuinely in tears), but they said they couldn't even pay him minimum wage because it had something to do with corporate assuming anyone taking that much of a paycut is going to be spiteful or vengeful. I really am not making any of this up. So yeah, oddly enough if you averaged $19.50 an hour, you got to stay, but if you averaged $20.01 and even offered to take a cut to $19.50 (or even $7) you could not stay. It was really weird.
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Aug 2, 2016 14:07
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drat. When I was in the Air Force, I heard so many bitter people bitching about how the military treats you like just a number and how they couldn't wait to get out and work in the civilian world. Apparently it's the other way around, at least in retail. Can skilled salesmen unionize to prevent stuff like that? In the Puget Sound area, there was a union for grocery cashiers, and they used to threaten to strike right before Thanksgiving and Safeway would poo poo bricks.
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Aug 2, 2016 14:33
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PallasAthene posted:drat. When I was in the Air Force, I heard so many bitter people bitching about how the military treats you like just a number and how they couldn't wait to get out and work in the civilian world. Apparently it's the other way around, at least in retail. What most large retail operations will do is close a store if it votes to be unionized so they don't have to play fair. When I worked for Staples we would have a yearly video shown to us explaining that if we were to ever be approached by a union rep of any sort to report it to a manager and refuse all contact. My GM said he was at a CVS that had voted to go union; CVS closed the store and opened one a block down the road with an entirely new (non-union) staff.
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Aug 2, 2016 14:39
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PallasAthene posted:drat. When I was in the Air Force, I heard so many bitter people bitching about how the military treats you like just a number and how they couldn't wait to get out and work in the civilian world. Apparently it's the other way around, at least in retail. Anyone can unionize, but corporations don't have to recognize the union. If you're a skilled laborer or have some kind of leverage it's easier, but that can backfire badly. In California workers in a couple of Wal-Marts striked and Wal-Mart closed the store for "remodeling" - laying off all the workers. Retail workers just don't have that kind of leverage. The Circuit City situation sucks, but I'm not sure an electronics retailer paying commission salespeople over 40k a year would have survived anyway. Maybe they drove the company into the dirt faster than they otherwise would have, but Amazon was still going to appear and eat everyone's lunch.
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Aug 2, 2016 14:39
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GameStop does that every six years or so. Whenever a new piece of hardware comes out they make a ton of $$$ and then a month after Christmas fire all their highest paid store managers (i.e. their most knowedgeable sales people/trainers), then for the next five years wonder why their sales are slowly declining and their employees are so unmotivated and why they steal so much. The obvious dots are never connected between stuff like "the senior game advisor position is statistically the one almost all internal theft comes from" and "because we're cheap we have the same availability, performance and workload expectations from a senior game advisor that we do from a salaried store manager except they're a student we pay $10 an hour and have them work alone in the store for six hours a day." Where I live right now, the average salary for a store manager in a retail place in general isn't terrible. But the person that took over the store I was in quit soon after because they didn't give him a raise a few months later at his review (this was one of the few people in the company that was almost as good at running a GameStop as me, had an incrediblely profitable previous year so that's total bullshit). Then the woman they wanted to promote to replace him, great employee, just as deep into games as we were and just as good at training and selling stuff, they offered her ***HALF*** what we were being paid. So like not much more than what she was making as an assistant manager to be a salaried 24/7 devotee to the company. Anyway I'm glad I work in an office now because compared to retail holy poo poo basically every day is a vacation.
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Aug 2, 2016 15:00
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Martinpale posted:I've read a lot about how, behind the scenes, the amount of fighting that the Costco leadership has to do with it's shareholders is insane - it's nearly constant open warfare between the 'you're being stupid, the company is perfectly fine doing it this way' leadership and the 'pay employees less! Don't give them health insurance! More profits! etc.' shareholders. It helps, i'm sure, that the company founders are still actively engaged in the business, but you have to believe that the shareholders are salivating at the chance to gently caress things up once they retire/die. There are a few good books that go into this, but the overriding mindset of corporate heads in America from like the '40s-'70s was that they had to act in the interests of shareholders, labor (unions helped with this), local communities in which they operated, etc. as far as was possible. In the late '70s and through the '80s and '90s you had the corporate raider types for whom the shareholders were their biggest priority by far. So you had CEOs like "Neutron" Jack Welch and "Chainsaw" Albert Dunlap who were only too happy to announce mass layoffs, pay cuts, and benefit reductions if it meant great quarterly performance for shareholders. As is the case with many "Why is x so lovely in America now?" type questions. You can find the answers in the Carter, Reagan, and Clinton administrations.
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Aug 2, 2016 15:05
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Just give anyone who applies to an MBA-program a savage beating.
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Aug 2, 2016 15:16
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MeatwadIsGod posted:There are a few good books that go into this, but the overriding mindset of corporate heads in America from like the '40s-'70s was that they had to act in the interests of shareholders, labor (unions helped with this), local communities in which they operated, etc. as far as was possible. In the late '70s and through the '80s and '90s you had the corporate raider types for whom the shareholders were their biggest priority by far. So you had CEOs like "Neutron" Jack Welch and "Chainsaw" Albert Dunlap who were only too happy to announce mass layoffs, pay cuts, and benefit reductions if it meant great quarterly performance for shareholders. "Let's return to the Good Ol Days! Only without anything expensive that made them good! Vote Conservative!"
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Aug 2, 2016 16:17
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Pondex posted:Just give anyone who applies to an MBA-program a savage beating. Pondex posted:Just give anyone who applies to an MBA-program a savage beating. I know a guy who took business and thought he was some sort of Gordon Gecko Business God, and he openly mocked people taking BA's for being idiots without any useful skills. He got a job right away after graduating but he hated working for his father because he didn't like being told what to do so he quit, moved in with his teacher girlfriend, and decided he wanted to become a photographer. His girlfriend had to buy all his equipment for him and from what I've heard he's nit all that great, so he just hangs around the house playing videogames while she works. I guess gently caress that guy, or whatever
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Aug 2, 2016 16:25
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Right to Work rules
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Aug 2, 2016 16:35
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PallasAthene posted:Can skilled salesmen unionize to prevent stuff like that? In the Puget Sound area, there was a union for grocery cashiers, and they used to threaten to strike right before Thanksgiving and Safeway would poo poo bricks. The key word there is "skilled." Retail work, generally speaking, is unskilled. And workers can be found easily and cheaply. Salespeople are incredibly skilled, the good ones are, at least. But they also often come with a lot of ego and that A-type "gently caress you got mine" competitive attitude that makes a union seem undesirable. After all, if you're the top salesman in your department or company, you really don't have much to gain by joining a union.
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Aug 2, 2016 16:54
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There's an adage among tradespeople, skilled labor isn't cheap and cheap labor isn't skilled. Obsession with shareholders is so strange. 40 years ago, when The Company went public, some investors took a chance on them and provided the cash required that The Company needed to grow. Because The Company has been very successful, all those original investors were made very wealthy. They have probably divested and moved on. Today we owe a duty to the banks, pensions, high frequency traders, and institutional investors to eke out an extra cent or two of earnings per share, every time.
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Aug 2, 2016 17:19
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MeatwadIsGod posted:There are a few good books that go into this, but the overriding mindset of corporate heads in America from like the '40s-'70s was that they had to act in the interests of shareholders, labor (unions helped with this), local communities in which they operated, etc. as far as was possible. In the late '70s and through the '80s and '90s you had the corporate raider types for whom the shareholders were their biggest priority by far. So you had CEOs like "Neutron" Jack Welch and "Chainsaw" Albert Dunlap who were only too happy to announce mass layoffs, pay cuts, and benefit reductions if it meant great quarterly performance for shareholders. You can pretty much blame everything wrong in society on this shift towards jacking off shareholders.
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Aug 2, 2016 17:27
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simple solution is to raise short term capital gains taxes on the higher brackets imo, maybe even extend the short term period to 2 years on larger positions
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Aug 2, 2016 18:01
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Apparently HPE is being shopped for 40 billion dollars
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Aug 2, 2016 18:03
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Or just eat the rich when there's no more cake left or ehatever I misspelled "whatever" because I'm terrible typing on my phone, but I've decided that "eh-atever" is a good word
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Aug 2, 2016 18:04
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Uncle at Nintendo posted:This kind of reminds me of chain restaurants that fill cups to the brim with ice to save 5 cents per glass because someone with Excel figured out "well times that by 30,000,000 drinks a year and that's an extra 1.5M per year!!!! Ignoring the fact that it pisses people off and makes them not want to go back as often. I've had a Chic Flia try and give me a small cup since I ordered a medium with no ice.
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Aug 2, 2016 18:10
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Professor Shark posted:Or just eat the rich when there's no more cake left or ehatever Ehat?? This happens to me all the gosh danged time
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Aug 2, 2016 18:13
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blugu64 posted:I've had a Chic Flia try and give me a small cup since I ordered a medium with no ice. But they do free refills there I don't understand??
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Aug 2, 2016 18:21
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