I mentioned this in another comment but i'll repeat it.
Due to the complexities of Puerto Rico's status as a commonwealth (i.e. not a State) the island is unable to declare bankruptcy. If they could then this issue could easily be solved and would give the government some leverage as is the case in most cases involving financial institutions taking advantage of these loans like was the case in Detroit and NYC.
To quote the wikipedia article on the topic [1]:
"Puerto Rico or any of its political subdivisions and agencies cannot file for debt relief under Chapter 9, Title 11, United States Code because it applies only to municipalities on the mainland.[55"]
Having lived in PR my most of life and most of my family being lawyers in both the Federal and the local Supreme Court the insight I get from the situation is that unless the White House gets involved or Congress simply amends that single line in the bankruptcy law then the government has really no leverage and these financial institutions (not lenders, but banks who bought the debt from lenders) will get mostly what they want and cripple the island.
> Due to the complexities of Puerto Rico's status as a commonwealth (i.e. not a State) the island is unable to declare bankruptcy. If they could then this issue could easily be solved and would give the government some leverage as is the case in most cases involving financial institutions taking advantage of these loans like was the case in Detroit and NYC.
Was Puerto Rico unaware of this when they took out the loans? Was the law changed out from under them after they had made these deals?
>Was Puerto Rico unaware of this when they took out the loans?
The fact that it went to the Supreme Court of the US [1] means that it is unprecedented and required the highest court in the land to interpret the law means that no parties were fully aware of how Bankruptcy would hold.
I mean, sure, they tried to wriggle out of it any way they could, but the law was clear. And they had every reason to believe that this was a very likely outcome.
They have no need to. They can simply repudiate their debts, as numerous states have done in the 1840s, 1868, and 1870s.
Puerto Rico's problem is that it is neither fish nor fowl, neither a city which has a legal escape route through bankruptcy nor a state which has a sovereign escape route.
The problem lies in the fact that Puerto Rico (unlike States and other municipalities in the United States) is unable to declare bankruptcy due to being a commonwealth.
If they could then these financial institutions would be unable to raid the island's coffers.
Okay, so PR isn't obliged to run a balanced budget, and they sold bonds that were beyond their ability to repay, and so the people asking for the bonds to be repaid are the bad guys here?
I think the issue is that a lot of people already live in Major metros where commute time is inversely proportional to rent and just accept it as a fact of life. This is why I refuse to move to LA, SF, NYC, Seattle, etc.
I currently live 15 min away from my job in Miami and pay less than $1k in rent. It is amazing being able to wake up at 8:30, dress and pack lunch and still get to work before 9am.
Most people here who have longer commutes are because they own homes and don't have the luxury of moving around like me, but then again, the own homes which is pretty hard in the cities I mentioned.
Honestly my first filter when job hunting is commute times and the price of rent within a 10 mile radius of the office.
Having had a 90 min commute at one point I realized that it just wasn't worth it unless you could have flexible hours to avoid rush hour and even then it's almost 900 minutes a week lost to "just" driving.
The issue is that Amazon and other 3rd party vendors actually offer deals.
I was in the market for some headphones and had a specific brand and make in mind and when I looked in their site they were more than $100 more than Amazon. This has held true for me for a lot of items and even when using price tracker it is pretty much no contest to just buy off any reputable vendor most of the time.
I think it's just that the people who make the goods often have no market sense and rely on outsourcing it for 90% of their sales.
What are the chances that the deal you found on Amazon involved counterfeit goods? That’s been a big problem with audio and electronics on Amazon recently.
People say it's a big problem but to date, having bought in the low five digits of audio and video hardware mostly from Amazon, I've had zero (obvious) counterfeits and very little defective gear generally, all of which was manufacturer sourced.
I'm sure that counterfeiting is a real problem, but I don't know how pervasive it actually is.
The way Amazon works, it's very possible that the version you found on Amazon for significantly less was counterfeit, being sold by an unknown third-party.
> I think it's just that the people who make the goods often have no market sense and rely on outsourcing it for 90% of their sales.
I've worked on a few client projects that involved large, successful, but traditional consumer goods companies try their hand at a direct to consumer (D2C) model.
As other comments have alluded to, there's tension involved when a manufacturer starts to be seen as a direct competitor by their distributors. Shopper marketing teams can quickly shift from having incredibly collaborative relationships and partnerships with their retailers to adversarial relationships with cutbacks on shelf space and promotional support. Some manufacturers are more risk tolerant than others on the impact that a D2C channel will create, and that may be reflected in the pricing for their D2C channel.
But that's only one side of the picture. Even at clients that don't care at all about the risk to existing distributor relations, they can rarely make their D2C channel profitable, let alone cost-competitive with retail channels. At manufacturers: marketing teams are competent in mass market campaigns and retailer-driven promotions, designed and measured using approximations and proxy metrics (due to having limited if any access to consumer level information), digital teams are competent in creating promo microsites and brochure sites, and operations teams are competent in efficiently moving goods at pallet and truckload scales. And all of the vendor and agency relationships are also around those competencies.
All of that tends to work against the D2C model. Direct response, performance marketing campaigns tend to require a completely different skillset than your marketing team currently has (and the agencies they use have). Your creative, UX, and development teams and processes are likely not the best fit for the needs of ecommerce and conversion rate optimization. And you'll either need to outsource order fulfillment to a third party or be very disruptive to your logistics org when they have to mix in packing and shipping $50 orders with 10+ SKUs to consumers along with their usual duties of shipping $5,000+ orders of 1 SKU to a retailer. Plus your shipping costs will be incredibly painful, as consumers have come to expect shipping to be quick and cheap/free, but you'll need to use new shipping vendors for retail package delivery and likely won't have the volume to get all that great of prices.
Add up the inefficiencies at each stage, and even with pricing that isn't competitive with retail distributors, many manufacturers operate their D2C channel at a loss. They're happy if their loss is low enough to write off the D2C channel as a marketing expense and strategically important enough to subsidize. Breaking even and being self-sufficient is seen as a success, and profit (and growth) is only ever talked about when you need to pitch executives internally for a cash infusion every couple of years.
Hear hear, I'm under 30 but because the industry I work in isn't really as sexy or brand new as some more CS focused ones I tend to work with people who are older and were raised with the type of expectation that the workplace is a place for working and carry themselves more or less restrained in this regard.
I have friends who work in LA and in SF and they constantly bombard me with stories of how employees of all levels (even recent hires) just spew the most extremist political diatribes at all times and some just do it to troll other employees of the different faction. It has gotten so bad that there are several "secret" slack channels for these cliques dedicated to continue gossiping and sharing memes that are pretty distasteful.
Whenever I ask about them reporting it to HR they just tell me that HR doesn't really exist and they pretty much exist just to make sure payroll is distributed.
Just my 2 cents but I prefer just clocking in and talking about the weather than have to put up with that kind of toxicity.
Some unions requires all employees to become members and charge a fee.
Some unions abuse their power to negotiate with the employer to make union leaders wealthy instead of granting benefits to the employees.
Some unions work alongside gangs to rake in illegal profit.
Some unions force all employees to take the same position of the union on certain issues meaning that people who oppose the measure may be blacklisted and pretty much terminated if the union uses its muscle.
Again these are just some unions and YMMV, the history of unions has many pros and cons with some being notorious and others being very much necessary in this day and age.
A few years ago me and my parents wanted to take a cruise in the Baltic making several 1-2 day stops and I have to say I felt the same way.
The ship was massive and had pools, a restaurant, live entertainment but it was obvious that all the people who were employed were semi indentured servants.
Most were from southeast asia and worked 6-8 months away from their families. What broke my heart is that only a small portion could leave the ship whenever we docked and most didn't seem to have passports that allowed entry to European countries without visa so they would just wait in the dock and use up the wifi to face time their spouses and children. Except the wife was really bad and the bandwidth quickly peaked and most were left just being miserable.
It was nice being able to visit all these countries that would otherwise have cost a fortune but man the pure human suffering really broke me.
Don't use a delivery service that isn't actually performed by the restaurant.
Every one of these services pays below minimum wage to their drivers and will use every trick in the book to make sure that any cost saving measures goes downstream to lower the amount paid to the drivers.
