“If I hire a secretary, that gives me two extra hours a day to write rather than answer fan mail. This increases the amount of books I produce, increasing my yearly income to $1,200,000 per year.”

You aren’t responsible for making that 20% though. You offloaded 20% of your necessary, but non-writing work, onto another…

My god...we’re becoming The Jetsons. Smart watches, moving sidewalks at the airport, Amazon even made a “dress selector”, and now we’re talking about robot arms coming out of appliances. It’s only a matter of time before Musk figures out how to cram a Tesla into a suitcase and global warming makes us have to build…

If you make all of the money, then you’d have zero need to hire anyone since you’re the sole person necessary to make that money. The entire point of hiring anyone is that your revenue stream (and therefore workload to generate that stream) has grown to the point that you can no longer grow your revenue by yourself.…

It definitely wasn’t an efficiency problem in 2010. It was actually the opposite. We ended up giving back $1.6 billion then. I know that I gave back $3 million of my own $10 million budget when I ran operations for my district.

I’m in retail management now, and we’re far more inefficient, despite being the top store…

I thought about a track system. It’s doable in a controlled environment (like a kitchen where equipment stays in the same place), but it would probably be expensive to add since the weight might require some sort of structural reinforcement in the ceiling. It would certainly make the arms easier to power though.

I was…

Yes, and not at all. If you need a secretary badly enough that you’d pay half of your operating profit, then they must be that essential to your operation to bring on as a co-owner. If they’re not worth that amount, then you’ll strive to increase efficiency within your own business until you no longer have a choice…

“Yet.”

“Okay, sure, “high demand” was imprecise language on my part. What I meant was “switch to a job that has higher wages and more stability.””

Much easier said than done in a market where the best-paying job you can get before college is waiting tables and where college is getting so expensive that you can’t cover the…

That’s the misconception, that everyone is always paid the exact same, be you an accountant at bread factory or a person that makes sure bumpers don’t fall off of cars.

That’s the issue with retail and food service. There are a ton of physical activities involved along with some level of critical-thinking skills (despite popular belief) that are either not cost-effective to automate, too large to implement, or require a level of technology that would replace the vast majority of…

“switch to a job that is in higher demand”

Have you ever looked for a menial job? They have the highest demand on any job search board. However, the supply of workers is high as well. It’s just extremely fluid (ie, high turnover). Despite demand, low-skill labor prices are very sticky since companies would rather pay…

Pretty much. Even many newpaper outlets have resorted to only stocking their Sunday paper inside convenience stores since couponers steal them from the boxes.

You would think these guys would have spent some of that VC money visiting Taipei or Tokyo to see that this idea might prove to be supplementary to convenience stores, but will not replace them.

Indeed. I even gave an example of two similar employment sectors where incentive to work hard has been utterly destroyed.

Try retail management sometime, then tell someone that makes $9/hr part-time to give you more than they feel like giving. They’ll tell you to kiss their ass and have a job working for your…

This is where people get confused about Socialism. Everyone thinks it’s a system where everyone just sits around and gets a check in the mail from the government. That’s Communism. In Socialism, the workers own their workplace, and get to keep the operating profit rather than it getting handed to a shareholder or…

I don’t know. I can think of more teppanyaki places in Charlotte than barbecue places, and NC is the barbecue capital. What would likely separate Seattle apart is how long teriyaki has been a staple trend.

I live in NC, and vote Democrat (if there’s one worth voting for), and I’ve never seen an issue with that. My access in district 12 (Charlotte, very Democrat) was even more convenient than in district 9 (the rural district east of Charlotte, very red district). I could walk to my voting booth in 12, but in 9 the…

I wouldn’t say that the general election is too terrible thanks to early voting and no restrictions on party affiliation effecting your vote. It’s the ridiculous primary system that is the problem. Granted, it’s going to be a problem as long as a party can state in a court of law that it’s allowed to break its own…

That’s usually because the person actually handling your script is a tech. Depending on your state, techs can be about as well-trained as your average McDonald’s cashier, and usually make about the same wage.

You’re welcome. You definitely did your homework on the kit, so don’t let anyone knock it. An e-tool is a bit overkill for just hiking. Even in the Corps, we rarely used ours and would probably ditch it for a hump if we could get away with it. One suggestion to refine your kit is to grab a larger drybag to act as a…