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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (138467)	1/22/2018 9:52:20 PM
From: TobagoJack	1 Recommendation Recommended By Arran Yuan Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 220242

re <<China has natural economies of scale giving a huge advantage. A single language for a start [more or less]. But there's a risk that they end up as a cul de sac as Japan did. The rest of the world uses the lingua franca aka english. That's not changing any time soon. >> it turns out china shall soon have more folks conversant in reading / writing english than america, and certainly than brazil, and china is at forefront of real-time machine-translation by software and by gadget ai is just getting started

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (138467)	1/22/2018 10:57:07 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 220242

Calculations of sales or profit per "employee" often doesn't take into account all of the workers who are not employees. The sales and profits per worker are still impressive, just not as impressive as sales and profits per employee. As with Apple whose calculation does not include the "not employees" who assemble the phones and make the parts and do much of the design and distribution, the calculations per employee were similarly very impressive for major oil companies because Chevron really had roughly twice as many people working for them than they have employees that are used in the calculations. The maintenance workers who annually rebuild each refinery over a three or four week period of time far outnumber the total number of full-time employees at each refinery - but they're considered "a service". Likewise the many "not employees" employed by service companies who actually drill each oil and gas well. When we needed oil and gas leases signed in an urban area I was the face of Chevron on the local television and with major land owners but I hired a "leasing company" which employed 50 or so hard-living 20 somethings dressed up in suits to go door to door and their employer paid them a commission on each signed lease. George W. Bush worked for an oil and gas "leasing company" when he was a young 20 something alcoholic. Same deal with an Environmental Impact Statement for an oil and gas project or a real estate development. I suppose there's no reason I couldn't have written them myself, but I could hire it out to a consulting firm which did nothing but that for $37,000. That's the magic of economic specialization, but those "not our employee" days need to be included to arrive at the real sales or profit per worker. A company like Walmart has horrifically low sales and profit per employee because everyone who works for Walmart is actually and employee. Amazon is using automation to improve those figures significantly for retail business, but per employee numbers are still going to be lower than for a capital intensive business like Apple or Chevron. When I worked for one of the largest home builders in the US we only had about 120 employees and I knew them all - but while that number included the construction superintendents, it didn't include all of the construction workers who actually built the homes none of whom were "employees" of the home builder.