2016 Presidential Election Thread

The problem isn't the peaches, since agricultural land is one of the few things we can't box up and ship. It's the smart phone factory.

Yeah, Americans will love the $1,500 iPhone. Thanks a lot, Trump!

No it's exactly the same concept you idiot. The costs involved in the production and distribution of pretty much everything are astronomically higher in America than in places like China. That's not going to magically change.

There's a real world that actually exists outside of your sad little world that types tens of thousands of words of nonsense a day. Try joining it brah.

That's a Democrat talking point, because the Democrat party exists to kill off any hope of US union jobs. You see, a person on welfare is more loyal to them than a union worker. And besides, workers are deplorable.

The iPhone costs aren't in the labor, which amounts to $4 to $10 according to an MIT study. Assembling them in the US would cost about $30 more. It would up the cost of the phone about 5%. The real cost driver is the enormous profit Apple makes, and of course those profits are kept overseas.

And recall that the cell phone market used to be dominated by Nokia - making phones in Finland. A lot of smart phones are made in Taiwan and Korea. Computers are mostly made in the US. How can we make computers here if our labor costs are astronomically higher? How did Dell beat out so many other computer firms while making computers in Texas?

But unfortunately the Democratic Party has convinced Democrats that it's not even possible to make products in America anymore.

90% of a Dell computer is foreign made parts. All Dell does is final assembly.

The iPhone also relies on a lot of materials that aren't commercially available in the us, but are readily available in China. Yet another strike.

Since when do conservatives give a shit about unions?

Also looks a lot like he wants to interfere with or regulate the profit a business can make.

Ever since Trump decided to take the union vote away from Democrats. It's working pretty darn well.

But back to costs. MIT estimated that using all US parts in an iPhone, in addition to US assembly, would add perhaps $100 to the price. In part that's because we don't manufacture some of the parts domestically, but we easily could. It all depends on where a new fab facility is built. Once production is up it should get back to something like $10 to $20 difference, or perhaps 10 to 15% of the price. A lot of people would pay that much extra to have a US product, but the owners look at that 10 to 15% as potential profit.

Before all the trade deals, it wouldn't have made sense to move the factory overseas to ship here because the increased shipping costs, tariffs, and whatnot would eat up most of the savings. But if the markets are completely open then US workers are essentially competing side by side with Chinese workers. That means they shouldn't expect any more pay than Chinese workers.

Actually, it'd only be about $60 more.

The truth is that automation is killing more jobs than just about anything else. Even in China, where labor costs are tiny, Apple is spending billions of dollars to increase the level of automation of factories. Not even highly skilled professionals are safe from being replaced by automation. A kid has created an app that helps you beat parking tickets. Not satisfied with that, he's expanded the app's capabilities:

There are other things that he's got planned for the app, and he wants to develop a whole slew of similar types of apps. Granted, fighting traffic tickets isn't a large source of income for most lawyers, but I doubt that when the Jacquard loom was developed, anyone had any idea that it would lead to the massive kinds of automated systems we have today, as well as the internet. And technology is advancing so much faster than it did in the 19th Century.

In a decade or so, self-driving vehicles will kill a lot of jobs. Not just things like taxi drivers and truck drivers, but also jobs in container shipping. Why have a crew on a ship, when robots can do the tedious job of taking the cargo across the ocean? The ship's in a storm? Big deal. The cargo's insured if the ship sinks, and you don't have to mount an expensive search and rescue operation to save the crew if it goes down.

Robots are even getting into farming. Check out the brains on that baby

That has a 900 Mhz processor in it. Even cheap ass smartphones are faster than that. That's $60 and has a 1.3 Ghz processor in it. WTF's going to happen in 10 years? If somebody gave you a 10-year-old PC, you'd probably use it as a doorstop, but it's practically a supercomputer compared to what we had when Windows 3.0 was released, and computers began to proliferate. Shit, one guy's using 4 shipping containers to grow and harvest almost 30K heads of lettuce, a month! How long are we going to need massive plots of land for farming and hordes of low-wage labor picking produce?

As a capitalist that exploits cheap labor and makes a very good profit from it I have to say I find gturner quite offensive and no better than a fucking commie.

gturner is a commie, which is why he wants to suck Putin's cock.

If we could provide those to the Third World, a lot of countries could eliminate their farmers. Mugabe and Maduro would love it.

While KPNX still shares a building with the Republic, they are no longer owned by the same company.

In June 2015 the Gannett television stations were split off into a totally different company called TEGNA. The print properties are still Gannett.


Also, the gtard bot is a fuckwit.

Aggressive and angry incoherence is a universal characteristic of the Trump voter.

The other universal characteristic is that they despise corrupt liars who protect serial rapists.

So there's even less of a connection than I thought.

Although I am sort of embarrassed that I forgot about the Gannett split.

I hadn't even considered the KPNX/Republic shared building situation when the split was announced last year and had to check whether they were still "partnered" like they were.

In the late 90s I turned down a job at that station for personal reasons and it was the best move I could've made because right after that they hired a new news director who just ran that place into the ground.

They recovered somewhat when he moved on, but they're still not as good as they used to be.

classic Trump reality-averse moment.

Spends 90 minutes+ on stage with her in which she does not so much as need a glass of water, 2 days later he's bellowing "she can't even make it to her car!"

The contrast completely lost on him
http://sports.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-pneumonia-car-230131260.html

Suuuuuuure he is...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/post...475093016688&tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.9845bf034f81

I sold Trump $100,000 worth of pianos. Then he stiffed me.

"it's always the folks that aren't like me that keep fucking things up! We just need to get rid of everyone who's not like me and things will be GREAT! It'll make your head spin!!"

someone made a good point in an article the other day: Congress has ceded so much power to the executive that they have created the potential that you could have an executive, via EO, do wholly unconstitutional things one hard after the other and those acts would need to be challenged either via act of (Republican controlled) Congress, or via very slow moving court decisions.

The potential exists for a megalomaniac to do real and massive damage while the wheels turned too slowly to keep up with him.

I don't think Trump Casinos paying $70,000 for pianos compares to Hillary selling thousands of tons of weapons to ISIS and al Nusra, which they used to kill tens of thousands of people and sell women as sex slaves, much less Hillary taking millions to protect Boko Haram which went on to kill tens of thousands of blacks.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily...-isnt-his-debating-skills?mbid=social_twitter

laying aside the tinfoil hat claims, that's not germain to the point

YOU say "Trump love the middle class little guy and sticks up for him!"

Middle class little guys who have actually done business with him say "you're full of shit of you think that."

Middle class people don't sell pianos in New Jersey. Those are mobsters.

My next door neighbor ran a music store like that. One day a woman came in wanting to buy a piano. He tried to talk her out of it for two hours but she wouldn't hear of it. So he had to call up another music store and have them paint his store's name on their truck and deliver the piano to her. He didn't actually sell pianos. They were just a cover the all the slot machines in the back. He paid the sheriff off to keep his gambling business going.

He was later shot and killed on the north end of town while running the numbers racket. One of the other women in the neighborhood had a college roommate who was a heroin addict who drove all over town in her VW picking up bags of money for him. She would also have sex with whoever he pointed to. She later ended up being treated for drug and sex addiction by the same psychiatrist who wrote "Sybil".

One of his two sons was later wounded in a mob hit in Vegas, then got married, disappeared, and finally died of liver cancer. The other son stayed in the house next door with his mother and refused to sell as long as his mother was alive. Then one day, out of the blue, he called a guy who owns the neighboring properties and said "I'd like to sell the house." The property mogul said "Oh, I'm sorry." "Sorry about what?" "Your mother must have passed." "Yeah. She died this morning. Now about the house!" He was probably up to his ears in mob gambling debts.

These are typical examples of Italian piano salesmen.

Cool story, crazy guy.

Their last name was Candiotti. They probably worked for the mob "godfather" who lived three doors down on the other side of me", named Zacharelli. He was almost a hundred when he died. I partied on my patio with his great granddaughter, and she remembered playing in his house. One of his sons went into the Air Force in the 1950's and another had some childhood problem that left him in a wheelchair, so the neighborhood kids would carry him around when they played.

What someone needs to develop is an ap called "Google Gossip" where people can enter old stories about each house on Google maps (gossip), and have those scroll as you hold the phone and look at a location. Crazy stories about each house in your neighborhood, some going back a century or more, accumulating little tidbits about the life stories of each resident who'd lived there, along with old photos. It would replace cat pictures as the most popular thing on the web.