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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bentway who wrote (15453)	12/13/2003 2:33:37 PM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

Well you are right in that the future is extremely difficult to predict. They were predicting flying cars but they missed the magic inherent in a simple laser printer. As for robots, look at the auto industry and the semi industry and tell me they don't exist. They have toy robot dogs and robot vacuum cleaners. I use a form of primitive robot to clean the bottom of my pool (as I lay on the lounge). We tooled around on the surface of Mars in a robot. My brother-in-law works on flying drones that the military uses for surveillance. The fact that people are still working instead of living a life of leisure doesn't change the fact that the cost of making basic stuff that people use every day is approaching zero. In the Colonial days, Americans would burn down unused buildings to retrieve the nails so they could be used again because they were so difficult to make. It's hard to imagine in a world where a nail is one of the easiest things to obtain. The cost to manufacture a single nail or even a pound of nails is almost zero. This doesn't mean people are now free to sit around, it means that they are freed up to do some other work besides cutting nails. But it doesn't work when the only ones getting paid are the investor class, something Popular Science didn't address. Want fries with that? I make stuff and I'm well paid to make it. I also manage money. Frankly, I find making stuff more satisfying then watching numbers change on a screen and it pays about the same. There is something very nice about making something you can hold in your hands but increasingly even the "stuff" I make is becoming less tangible. I get paid to turn a digital file from one form into another and it doesn't become something physical until the end product comes off the press in some other part of the universe and sometimes it never becomes physical. If you spent your time, like I do, looking for US companies to invest in or have spent time, like I have, in various factories and industrial settings you'd see a lot of stuff being made here. Just look at something ubiquitous like the plastics industry. Type in something like "polycarbonate manufacture" into Google and see what you get. Of the various companies that I've done work for or invested in over the years the greatest majority have a tangible product, something you can hold in your hands. Another large percentage has a less than tangible product like software or patents or copyrighted information. You can't hold it in your hands but it produces revenues because it's what is used to produce a tangible product. Most US companies are a combination of the two, companies that add value to a tangible product which is frequently manufactured by their overseas subsidiary or contract manufacturer. Then the smallest percentage of companies I deal with operate in financial services which of course allow all the rest of the universe to operate on a larger scale than Mom & Pop operations. Financial services can't exist without the other side which makes stuff, tangible and intangible. To those who think we're doomed to low level service jobs or white collar asset shuffling jobs, that's total BS. There are a lot of blue collar jobs still out there and they aren't all changing oil or flipping burgers. Meanwhile we've become a little like the UK in the 60s and 70s whereas the young person in school doesn't want a dirty blue collar job actually making things, they all want some sort of white collar job. My husband has to hire Mexicans because Americans would rather work in a low paying clean service job than in a much higher paying construction job that involves physical labor as well as noisy dirty working conditions, not to mention getting up at 5am in the morning. My husband OTOH would be bored out of his mind in an office job no matter how much it paid. I remember a dinner over at a friend's house a while back. There was a married couple there, the guy was a lawyer who worked for a real estate division of a local investment bank and she was a corporate lawyer. They got to asking John what line of work he was in and he said commercial construction. Later John told a story about something funny that happened on the job that he was working on. The lawyer turns to him and says, "So you are actually on the site where they do the work?" I burst out laughing because of the surprised look on the guy's face. It was as if it was a shock to him that he could be sitting at dinner with someone who actually put on tools every day to go to work. The great thing about working in photography was that it allowed me to visit a lot of different working environments from posh corporate board rooms in large corporations to loud machine shops and rolling mills, cube farms where they shuffle information to huge chemical plants (both places where you are just as likely to suffer environmental disorders), trading floors to hospital ERs (both have a similar degree of stress). In the US people are working doing all kinds of things that no one could have predicted 20 years ago and they just keep inventing new ways to work. If that wasn't true than the IRS wouldn't have to keep adding so many new job descriptions every single year.