On the business of life

[drwex]

I'm mostly dumping this here so I can reference it later, but commentary is welcome. This came out of a discussion of the relationship of WiiTID to the profitability of the enterprises that employ people like me:

Profit is like health, to a corporation. You have to have it, and more is good. But it's not the reason for existence.

Comments

[marmota.livejournal.com]

Sure, it's incoherent on a number of levels, particular the way it focuses entirely on supply cost and ignores demand. If anything, though, it's kinder to labor than most models in that it at least acknowledges labor as part of the cost of producing something, or at least leaves very little room for ripping off a worker to make the inefficiencies even more obvious by enlarging the profit noise. Viewing a production cycle from a resource efficiency perspective goes well with mrf_arch's architect example; not only is the goal to produce a house, the goal is to do it while paying the true cost of everything that went into it, and getting paid it all back when you're done. The differnce between the two is profit or loss. In reality (such as it is) though, you get weird things like developers getting paid a million dollars to go build somewhere else (or not at all), and everyone walks away happy even though nothing got produced, let alone had any value added. And I just realized I need a *shrug* icon.

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

it at least acknowledges labor as part of the cost of producing something, or at least leaves very little room for ripping off a worker to make the inefficiencies even more obvious by enlarging the profit noise.

I'm less than convinced. Let's say that there are several parts of construction which require skilled labor (which shouldn't be a stretch). Let's further suppose that the supply of skilled labor is shorter than the supply of unskilled labor.

From an engineering perspective, changes which allow more of the construction to be performed by cheaper unskilled labor will increase profits; how is this "a sign of waste"?