US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4801

On February 25 2025 12:16 baal wrote:


wich other Trump's agency heads have instructed their workers to ignore the email besides Kash and Tulsi?

The directive sparked confusion, and several agencies told workers to ignore the request, including the Justice Department, the FBI, the State Department, the Pentagon, the Department of Energy, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

On February 25 2025 12:18 KwarK wrote:

The argument was over whether inefficiency exists in private enterprise and whether the shareholders are equipped to address misuse of their resources. The DMV is inefficient, but so is every business I’ve ever worked for.

My last company was getting a product supplied by a competitor at below cost, both their cost and the competitor’s cost (we knew this to be true because it was literally below material cost). Someone had the bright idea that we shouldn’t be supporting a competitor by forcing them to take losses on a bad contract supplying us product we then resold for high margin. They pushed us to in-house that business and so we invested millions in tooling to do that. We then lost millions more taking over the part of the business that we knew for a fact was unprofitable for our competitor. The resold product margin was enough that the entire supply chain could, in theory be described as profitable, which is what they then insisted. But far less profitable than before. Before the competitor would lose $5/unit supplying the precursor and the plant would then make $20/processing it for a total profit to us of $20. We spent $5/unit investment in stealing the -$5/unit precursor business, lost $10/unit on precursor, made $20/unit processing, and fudged the numbers until nobody could tell what made what but the whole thing clearly made $10/unit which was defined as good.

My specialty is manufacturing cost accounting and I can assure you that in private enterprise nobody has any fucking clue where the profits come from, how much it costs to make anything, and why they succeed or fail. None. They can’t even understand the data.

On February 25 2025 13:35 baal wrote:


The premise of the discussion is wrong, shareholders and administators try to steer towards efficiency but the mechanism that selects towards effiency is the market itself.

Taking your example, administrators made a bad decision and increased inefficiency and halved the profits, that company went down a few steps while others making good decisions went up, that is the efficiency mechanism of the market working.

If it were a public company there are no profits or competitors, the mistake has no impact whatsoever ergo you have these mistakes much more often.


Inefficiencies grow with scale, mega-corps are much more inefficient than startups for have other benefits due to its size, this coorelation of size and inefficiency is the main anti-monpoly mechanism and there isn't a business as big as government ones.


I own a marble factory and I don't know wtf you are talking about, I know exactly how much the things we make cost and where our profits come from.

Health officials in two US states are tracking measles outbreaks as cases rise to nearly 100 people.

The Texas Department of State Health Services reported on Friday that it was aware of 90 cases diagnosed in the last month in the South Plains area, in the north-west part of the state. At least 77 of them were reported in children and teens under 17.

In New Mexico, officials said nine people had become sick in Lea County, along the state's eastern border with Texas.

Measles is highly contagious and can be deadly. The outbreaks come amid a rise in US anti-vaccine sentiment, including towards the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) jab that is typically given during childhood.

Health officials in Texas say their figures are likely to be an underestimate, as some parents may not report infections or may not realise their child has the disease.

"It is troubling, because this was completely preventable," Dr Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins University, told CBS News, the BBC's US news partner.

"It's the most contagious infectious disease known to humans," he added.

On February 24 2025 22:58 Uldridge wrote:
What? Demand is by definition elastic for health sector and extremely difficult to have a set supply-demand set up for.

Seasonality, pan/epi/demics, etc. Your comment confuses me, maybe I'm stupid.

On February 25 2025 14:05 KwarK wrote:

The company learned nothing from the experience. It has a local monopoly on distribution and so continued to make money.

I really doubt that you truly understand your costs, unless it’s a case of a trivially simple model. Cost allocation models are complicated and unless you’re a specialist you’re unlikely to get it. Most labour and overhead can’t be directly allocated to a finished product, there’s other complexities involved. Even something as simple as, for example, a lumber mill is far more complex than a layman would think. For example different cuts from the trunk sell for different amounts and so if you were to just allocate out the cost of the tree across the cut wood by weight you’d have some selling for a loss. But you can’t cut a trunk into only the highest value planks because it’s not possible. And so you have to assign more cost to some cuts than others, some are byproduct cuts, some are core business cuts etc. It’s as much art as science, you create and customize the model to reflect the aims of the management trying to use it. A bad model could lead management to erroneously believe that they were losing money on some cuts of wood when their profitability would be decreased without those costs. Absorption and marginal cost add make things weird.

Edit: Milk is another good example of things being more complicated than you'd expect. You buy your raw milk paying the farmer by weight on milk solids and butterfat solids. But when you're selling it you're splitting it into 1% milk for school kids and heavy cream for Starbucks. Let's make this super simple and say you have just 2 customers, a school and Starbucks, and they buy things in the exact ratio required to use all of the raw milk required. Based on the full costing of the product the heavy cream to Starbucks is $10/unit and you're selling 100 units for $20/each, 50 in region A and 50 in region B.

The region B sales manager comes to you and says he thinks he can get them to take another 20 units. But the problem is that'll upset your perfect ratio, you'll have to buy those in from another plant at $15/unit. Still, they're willing to pay $20 so it's a good deal. 20 units * $5 profit/each = $100.

But now you're producing 100 units at a cost of $10/each and buying 20 units at a cost of $15/each. So logically there are 120 units with a combined cost of $1300 = $10.83/each.

So how much are we making on that new business, $100 or $183? You figure $183, the product is all basically fungible, right? It's not like the 20 units you're buying are specifically segregated for the new customer so why would you care?

But then the sale manager from region A comes in and asks why his costs have gone up to $10.83 on his customers and why his numbers are down from the prior month. You explain that region B sales manager broke the ratio and so now everyone is making less money per unit. He wants to know why you're not making region B pay for region B's extra sales and complains to the GM. The GM thinks that's reasonable because he used to be a regional sales manager and so he makes you segregate the product in the model and fully allocate the extra cost to B. So now you have two classes of the exact same product to the same customer in the same region, the original core business and the ratio disrupting new business.

Sometime later region A picks up another school and can sell more 1% which means that we can all buy more raw milk which means no more buying cream at $15/unit on the market. Yay, the cost is back down to $10/unit. So we're back to a sensible model with no carveouts at this point now, right?

Wrong. A points out that not only did he get the new school business which is making $30, he also unfucked the ratio which means that the 20 units that B was selling for $5/unit profit are now back at $10/unit profit. So really he made $130 on the new business. So once we incorporate that into the model then that class of school milk to that specific new customer actually has negative cost to the business, the cost of the skim milk is actually less than the savings realized elsewhere. Now we have a second layer of carveouts.

Meanwhile it turns out that one of A's Starbucks that takes 20 units is only paying $14/unit for their cream which is fine for A because they always had a standard cost of $10/unit. But hold on, if we're buying 20 units/month for $15/unit and selling 20/month for $14/unit isn't that bad? Eh? Probably not. After all our average cost is $10.83/unit but our average region A cost is $10/unit maybe, region B is doing it's own thing and in region B sure they're buying 20 units/month at $15/unit but that marginal business is bringing in $20/unit in sales so that's profitable.

Later on when their contract comes up for bid the region A sales guy comes to you and asks how to price it and you're like "idk man, super low because we want it to fix B I guess?" but then the GM comes in and goes "why is A selling milk below cost" and you go "what even is cost man". And it's not like you specifically need that one school's business, you just need a school's business. If another school were to go to a different supplier then you'd lose just as much as if the extra second level carveout school switched. So really any/all of them should be eligible for the special pricing, but only one of the group.

Some time later a different school in region A tries to leave and you have to explain to the GM that while we're only making $50 on them if we lose their business it'll cost us $100 in profits and so logically we should actually pay them $50 to keep buying from us. Or we should find a Starbucks and see if we can lose their business around the same time. idk.

Many years later most of the customers in region A pay roughly the same price for 1% but a few pay a fraction of the normal price and nobody has any idea why but it's always been that way.

On February 25 2025 19:02 Uldridge wrote:
Waste is one of the n components that you can have to drive 'success'. I was going to start listing things where companies can have an edge over each other but like why even bother.
Success is relative when your a big player anyway. It's all about how lofty a goals you can present the management board and then pigeon hole yourselves to make it work - like patching shit base code - and then kinda deliver but not quite and get another decade of not being divested but having that hang over your head as you scramble and don't really understand anymore what you can do to actually deliver on promises.

I think large companies are all "grown out" in a sense. We're saturated and now is the time to become specialists/net zero sum kinda players because this growth shit makes no sense. So keep promising shiny new things to management boards is just a pipe dream.

On February 25 2025 18:18 Acrofales wrote:
Where does this unshakeable belief in the invisible hand of the market come from? No economist believes that shit anymore. They gave Kahneman a novel prize years ago for his work showing that it's a fun idea but with no basis in reality. And behavioral economics is a mainstay of every undergraduate program in economy. So why the fuck are people still attached to this idea that perfectly informed rational actors are setting the correct price for everything in the free market of capitalism, and if they aren't then it's because they aren't free enough, not because *shudder* they aren't rational nor informed. It's insanity to still believe that shit today.