Outcast_Searcher wrote:Doly wrote:At one time there were two basic types of business in the USA, the Mom & Pop type business where you knew your employees and treated them like human beings with a touch of compassion here and there and the Robber Baron sort who sought to squeeze every penny out of every operation to get as rich as possible as quickly as possible.
I once read a book about how Ben & Jerry ice creams grew as a company, and it was very instructive. It started as a mom & pop type of business and ended up a corporation. It was very clear that, at the point that a company grows to the point of going public, it's doomed to lose its soul.
Except, it's utter NONSENSE to act like all large companies bad, all mom and pop outfits good.
I worked for IBM for 26+ years, following my dad, who worked there for 33.
For the first half of my time there (until Lou Gerstner's tenure started in 1993), the company generally treated its employees fairly well. Respect for the Individual was one of their core beliefs (it was number one). Benefits were good, pay was decent, and job security was fantastic if you just showed up and made an effort. And IBM had roughly 400,000 employees by then, so not exactly a mom and pop place, but a huge corporation.
Then suddenly they turned everything into cost cutting, firing people to obtain that, cutting benefits, cutting peoples' retirements, pay, and on and on. Oh, and treating people like crap on the job while they did that (hoping you'd leave voluntarily, I think). Also, many of the former hard workers (including me), eventually stopped doing more than we had to (I did great work WHEN they rewarded me well). It's not like the management in place (from marketing) could tell the difference any more.
It had nothing to do with size. It had to do with financial pressures leading them to think they had to manage another way. Things did change. Almost all the good employees quit or retired. (I did too, but it took me 13 years, as I was reaching when I could retire early by then, I didn't want to move as my parents needed help, etc).
The 90's book "White Collar Sweat Shop" pointed out what happened to 80 million-ish US workers. Not due to just big corporations, but due to financial stress and how the VAST amount of employers, large and small, reacted to those stresses.
There are endless counter-examples to the example that big companies are all bad and small ones are good.
And MANY mom and pop places are TERRIBLE, even for legal things like unemployment benefits, where you have to SUE them to get them to follow the law. Again, it's not about size, it's about financial stress, and thinking doing the wrong thing gives company owners an advantage.
What does making such arbitrary generalizations get you? Instead of hating "the man", why not hate the employers who actually DESERVE it?
This argument, that there may be no correlation between business nature and behavior, is also why I don't like relying upon the "backyard chickens" concept, to fill in economic gaps.
That stuff comes front loaded, with automatic grants that allow a lot of misbehavior. Local politicians don't tend to shy away, that far, from things like conflict of interest. Land developers, mostly, but there could be those who hope to support solar adoption, for instance.
It's quite alright, if your new rules don't make home ownership onerous. Don't force people who are barely making it. That's just being deliberately blind. It's a different thing, though, if you can guarantee a rebate of some kind, or a discount on some other form of tax?
Not fully guarantee enough of a payback to make a homeowner see a return on their investment, but help to guarantee. To push that much further, spending where they can, for an idea, in this case we say solar adoption, that the people at large have deemed is important.
Local politics is a dangerous place, also, to place the fate of things such as alternative energy. The Federal Government should be able to function in a manner that can support that, at the beginning, when it is needed more. Everybody loves the government, when it is spending its money on them!
For some things, there isn't enough money in the world. For a sustainable future, which, as we see in Ukraine, will also be important strategically, there might be. It sort of fits the definition of the mass interest. It might just mean road signs with solar panels. Solar panels on more government buildings. Across the country, that may be "extra push" enough.
But when they can afford to directly incentivize local homeowners, with promises the homeowners can count on, then they will be getting somewhere. That might only be possible when the country at large is doing so well, that region to region there is so little chance of deterioration.
Do Americans simply not talk about their faults so much, that things like addiction problems rampant within the community aren't reflected at all? When every creek is full of homeless people, maybe it's time to admit a homeless problem? I don't mean acknowledgement that passes the problem along, which local governments are much more prone to do.
So it would have to come when local government had some guarantees that the Feds would boost the sector. Because everything they put in requires for it to be that extra push, in addition to the much more effective Federal boost. It's bad if they spend against the wind. Local can't borrow like Federal. They can't just endlessly keep coming back.
Backyard chickens just exposes you to vigilante justice, if you happen to be right, and can't back down, for whatever reason. Then they are just as sincere as any cops, or HOA council, ever were, when they walked away, shaking their heads, wishing that, to them, there had been "another way." Things happen fast, when they happen locally. Sometimes, too fast.
Because what this really is, is a return to the old days of one's reputation going before them. An age of far less anonymity. A place where shame is a more effective deterrent. We see victims elevated every day, but no one wants to be a victim. Who would?
Our problem is we haven't yet questioned why we are asking those types of questions, where we require so many victims? Because our standards create victims. They hold back ordinary people, who would, otherwise, be heroes. No, it isn't wrong to boost the weak. Just don't make being ordinary onerous for the ordinary! We can have policies that keep that victimization to a minimum.
Figure that equation out, how to instill things like solar, or other government programs, in a more coordinated manner, then, as solar adoption begins to take off in earnest, with EV ownership going up, Trumpville may just evaporate away.