Kirk's Market Thoughts Message Board

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Non-Tech : Kirk's Market Thoughts

COHR 191.04

-2.5%

Jan 16 9:30 AM EST

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To: rdkflorida2 who wrote (3798)	2/8/2016 1:14:29 PM
From: Kirk ©	1 Recommendation Recommended By kinkblot Read Replies (2) of 27067

I think history shows that tariffs and anything to block free trade may feel good for awhile and get populist politicians elected, but they usually, in the long term, hurt the countries that have them. That is because the great minds that come up with new ideas go where conditions are best for them... right now it is mostly in the Silicon Valley where we have great weather and universities plus a concentration of well educated, highly intelligent people to draw from. What most don't see (or don't talk about other than me) is that most of what has been invented the past 30 years or so is DESIGNED to eliminate labor. It speeds up the process of globalization. Uber and Google are obvious for this but.... I was a maverick at HP and got huge pats on the back for using FORTRAN in the late 1970s to do a cost model and ELIMINATED a several week cycle for a cost accounting team member to do an analysis of any design changes to new designs. I later switched to Lotus 123 and Excel... and was one of the first on any R&D team to do my own cost accounting for new product development. Some of my "competing" engineers with similar or better mental horse power wondered why I was so successful picking projects to work on that were successful reaching customers rather than getting canceled. Well, doing your own cost accounting to see if they will pass muster was a big part of it.... design from the get go to be cost competitive. Anyway, I started to use email and word processing software to run projects I led rather than giving notes to secretaries, etc... all this stuff saves time. I remember when I left in 1998 that one of the biggest jobs for ad mins was to organize meetings between many people with diverse schedules. I believe this task is all done with calendar programs now.... We used to train students from MIT, Cal and Stanford to be chip designers but when I left we were training experience engineers from Singapore to do these jobs as we transferred more and more overseas for the tax breaks. I expect soon Watson and Da Vinci will do many if not most EXPENSIVE medical tasks and we'll see much cheaper health care as it won't take so much training to diagnose or treat expensive ailments. About the only "safe" jobs that pay well will probably be fixing cars and other tech gadgets that fail, servicing our overly tech loaded homes and plumbing.

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