A Washing Machine that tells the Future


Forum Topics & Rules Manuals & Literature	New users Click-here to sign-up

Thread Number: 72886 / Tag: Other Home Products or Autos
A Washing Machine that tells the Future

[Down to Last]

Post# 963021 10/17/2017 at 14:42 (2,381 days old) by bajaespuma (Connecticut)
Checkrate/Likes 1 An interesting article that's "up our alley" from The New Yorker" CLICK HERE TO GO TO bajaespuma's LINK

Post# 963052 , Reply# 1 10/17/2017 at 18:04 (2,381 days old) by earthling177 (Boston, MA)
Checkrate/Likes As they say in the article, �Douglas Irwin, an economist at Dartmouth and the author of �Peddling Protectionism,� a book about Smoot-Hawley, told me, �Whirlpool is putting their resources into stopping competition. Maybe they should put their resources into serving their consumers better. This may just delay the reckoning.�� I does seem to me that there are specific manufacturers that never learned from the cautionary tales or even from Saturday morning cartoons -- they probably never thought about the fact that while Dick Dastardly or Wile E. Coyote were busily trying to sabotage their competitors, their competitors were busy winning the races. In this particular case, it looks pretty bad -- gone are the days when an electronics control panel were "deluxe" or more expensive to make. Nowadays you can buy a complete computer, display and all (for example, tablets) that are cheaper than a timer used to cost in 1997. There was a time when companies could accuse Asian manufacturers of "dumping" appliances here. But now things are reversed, so many things are made there in the first place by American manufacturers, and it's time to move on. For example, if growing and selling pineapples or bananas needed a greenhouse and expensive fuel, then companies here would ordinarily be advised to either find a way to grow those fruits in warm places to begin with or drop out of that business and find something else to concentrate on. I doubt that manufacturers like Whirlpool can't make the products either as cheaply as Samsung or LG, given the prices of the components, or that they can't raise the quality to match the prices they want to sell the products for -- the difference in quality from some manufacturers here and similar priced products from Bosch/Siemens, Miele etc is very visible even to the average customer. The worst part about tariffs is that once you start down that road, other countries can put tariffs on our products too, which just makes the economy go from bad to worse. A much better way to fix this, from my perspective, would be to switch the law back to what it used to be, namely, shares/stocks are to be used for retirement, thus need to keep their value for the investor, and fluctuations in the dividends are to be expected. The way it currently is (from 1970/80's to now) makes the manufacturers liable to lawsuits if the investors claim there's been "mismanagement" because they did not receive the highest dividends possible every quarter, which is precisely what destroyed Maytag among others, in an effort to provide the highest profits/dividends, the quality went down the drain and they ran out of customers. Other (possibly much) worse suggestions have been made. Some people, for example, have suggested that if a company, say, Walmart, has any employees on assistance, say, food stamps, then the company would be either charged or charged and fined by the government, given that those companies make billions of dollars in profit and they can certainly afford to pay the millions of dollars that the government has to disburse and then charge us taxes to cover. Others have suggested something a bit more "elegant" in that it points out the hypocrisy in the situation: they said that no dividends can be paid until all the employees have been paid a living wage and gotten all the "benefits" like health insurance, vacations etc. In this case, the number of employees doing "part time" is limited to a small percentage and even then their wages (dollars/hour) and benefits have to match or closely match the full time employees to avoid situations like Papa John's where they double the number of employees but they are all "part time" so they don't have to be paid as much. The idea, of course, is that if you are "so poor" that you "can't pay" your employees a living wage and end up costing the government (and, by extension, us), then you are too poor to pay dividends period end of sentence. If that happens to all companies, instead of just the ones in a state or another, the investors would have to change tunes and support living wages and a better country. Because, face it, it's not that companies as large as the ones we are talking about can't afford to make the right products and do the right things to support their employees and their customers -- that can certainly be hard for small companies, but not for large corporations. I forgot which company we heard about in the last couple of months that cost something like 20 million dollars in food stamps -- meanwhile, the CEO was making 40 million dollars, the board of directors 20 million each, the management layer under them 10 million dollars each etc. You don't have to put all of those bloodsuckers in jail. You don't even have to lower their salaries to the 150 thousand dollars/year, which is what they deserve. Just by halving their salaries, they will still be making way too much and more than they deserve, and we would have enough money to pay their employees better, lower the taxes that go to social services, and the kicker would be that employees that make enough money can buy more stuff which is good for the economy. Even Henry Ford, which was a nasty person who lived a century ago, knew of that. It can't be news to the current managers and investors. Cheers, ��-- Paulo.

Forum Index:

Other Forums:

Comes to the Rescue!

The Discuss-o-Mat has stopped, buzzer is sounding!!!
If you would like to reply to this thread please log-in...
Discuss-O-MAT Log-In

New Members Click Here To Sign Up.

automaticwasher.org home
Discuss-o-Mat Forums
Vintage Brochures, Service and Owners Manuals
Fun Vintage Washer Ephemera
See It Wash!
Video Downloads
Audio Downloads
Picture of the Day
Patent of the Day
Photos of our Collections
The Old Aberdeen Farm
Vintage Service Manuals Vintage washer/dryer/dishwasher to sell?
Technical/service questions?
Looking for Parts?
Website related questions?
Digital Millennium Copyright Act Policy
Our Privacy Policy