12:00 – I’m still cranking away on the final lab session, which I should finish up today or tomorrow.
Barbara disassembled 600 15 mL dropper bottles yesterday, which means unscrewing and removing the cap and then pulling the dropper tip plug. That’s a lot of work that wouldn’t be necessary if our supplier shipped those bottles already disassembled. These are Chinese-made bottles, and the supplier says they’re shipped that way to save shipping costs. I suggested that since bottles must be disassembled to fill them, they might want to package the bottles, caps, and dropper tips separately, even if that raised the price a bit.
Before I ordered these bottles, I seriously considered buying the equivalent bottles from one of my other suppliers. Those bottles are US-made and cost about 25% more than the Chinese bottles. Although the cost of bottles is not an insignificant percentage of component costs, the extra cost of the US-made bottles wasn’t really the deciding factor. Other than having to disassemble them, I actually prefer the Chinese bottles. The body of their dropper tips is about two or three times longer than the body of the US-made dropper tips. The Chinese tips are a tight friction fit in the mouth of the bottle, while the much shorter US tips are a snap fit. To me, the Chinese tips seem more secure. I’m afraid that if I use the US bottles someone will squeeze a bottle too enthusiastically and pop out the dropper tip. That wouldn’t be good, particularly if the bottle contained a concentrated acid, strong ammonia, or a similar chemical. So for now I’m sticking with the Chinese bottles and hoping I can convince my supplier to package the bottles, caps, and tips separately.
History of Linux distributions:
http://futurist.se/gldt/wp-content/uploads/12.01/gldt1201.png
This is a politically-inspired and -funded documentary, but it pretty graphically tells the tale of how good profitable American manufacturing companies were the easy target for large corporate ‘raiders’ to buy, then go out and get loans while transferring the assets of that loan money to the parent corporation, then sell the company with the debt while keeping the loan assets, which debt the new owner would never be able to manage — or else, as was done in a case or two mentioned: just watch the company go into bankruptcy and close, while still owning it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLWnB9FGmWE
I suspect there is a big documentary series chronicling this aspect of American history, which has been a part of the dismantling of the American middle-class. But you would never get funding for it, because neither major party wants this story told, — even though we all know it is true — and they would fight to keep it from seeing the light of day.
It would take a lot of research, but I am sure it would be possible to document how many jobs Bain created, as opposed to eliminating.
Hope that video gives Ron Paul a boost.
That sounds similar to the Bottom of the Harbour tax avoidance schemes in the Seventies in Australia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottom_of_the_harbour_tax_avoidance
Companies were stripped of assets then transferred to some impecunious person, who couldn’t pay the taxes and other debts, while the former owners, lawyers and accountants got rich. This rort was fixed by retrospective legislation in the early Eighties. Boy, did the criminals involved whine…
Oh, this has been standard procedure for decades here. They are not about to legislate any changes, because the legislators get huge campaign funds from the people who do this. It is just one of the several ways the US has lost most of its manufacturing jobs.
As you can see from the video, the people holding these jobs were never going to score high on the SAT — if they even took it. But they need productive jobs to support themselves. They had them until guys like Icahn and Romney came along.
Take a moderately profitable company with no debt, buy it, load it up with debt (most likely lying in the process about what you are going to do with those funds, because who would loan you the money if they really knew?), transfer all the cash from those loans to the parent company (that documentary never mentioned less than $100 million), then eject that company into outer space and damn the people and jobs who go down with it.
Europe may be having its problems, but at least I can tell you from personal experience that they value jobs WAAAY more than the US does. Screw jobs for the less well-educated. They can live off welfare.
And they do.
Chuck wrote:
“As you can see from the video, the people holding these jobs were never going to score high on the SAT…”
Hey! I resemble that…
The government that introduced the Bottom of the Harbour legislation in the early Eighties, a Liberal (capital “L”) Party – National Party (agrarian socialists) coalition sure got in to trouble with their supporter base for that. The true, small “l” liberals didn’t like the retrospective part but the corporate spivs, lawyers, dodgy accountants and the white shoes brigade made a hell of a lot of noise. Bet it cost the Libs some big campaign donations. At the next election, in 1983, they went down in flames, richly deserved IMHO. Not because of the retrospective legislation, but because they embraced the most absurd populist policies.