mccMay 27, 2025

Airlines are like "instead of all those agents, we'll make a sort of assembly line manned by customers. Check in with one machine, drop your baggage off with another."

Then literally anything happens with the computer network requiring an elevated number of customers to need manual intervention, and suddenly you have an enormous immobile line while every single customer lines up before the two (2) remaining agents.

Corporations don't care about "efficiency" they just wanna fire people

Show threadmccMay 27, 2025
I really believe this. We were told capitalist entities will act to minimize costs and maximize profit. But what corporations actually seek to do, for whatever reason, is minimize *labor* cost. They prefer to bear any other kind of cost. They will minimize labor costs even if it increases overall costs and/or hurts profits
Show threadAsta [AMP]May 27, 2025
@mcc my personal pet theory as to the "why" of this is because fees paid for "technological" solutions go to their friends and friends' companies and stocks, whereas wages are just "lost".

I have no evidence to back this up, but it does feel like they explicitly are attempting to block class mobility and that's certainly one way to do it.
Show threadcthos 🐱May 27, 2025
@aud @mcc Corporate finance gets real wonky when you start digging into it. Capital expenditure vs Operational Expenditure. Those have to be reported different ways on earnings reports and wages typically fall under the latter (though there are some exceptions).
Show threadcthos 🐱May 27, 2025
@aud @mcc There's also something tax-related on CapEx (because it relates to an investment into the business, theoretically). But I'm not an accountant and I can't rattle off the differences.
Show threadSerenusMay 27, 2025
@cthos The main thing, and apologies if you know this, is that capex gets treated as an asset initially and then expensed over the expected life of whatever you bought (since the assumption’s that you’ll be benefiting for years), versus opex gets realized as an expense immediately. That means $1M of spend on tech is only going to reduce your net income by a fraction of that $1M in the year you spend it (and every year after), but $1M of spend on labour hits your bottom line immediately.
Show threadSerenus

@cthos So barring specific tax incentives to invest in capital improvements (which I vaguely remember exist in certain cases, tax is very much not my field), opex is generally preferable strictly from a tax perspective since you’re getting the deduction right away, but if you’re trying to maximize net income in the short term, capital expenditures have an advantage in that regard assuming similar ROI.

I’m speaking very, very broadly, but should be accurate in a general sense.

May 27, 2025 at 9:52pmWeb