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Politics : High Tolerance Plasticity -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bull_derrick who wrote (22543)	12/4/2004 11:48:54 AM
From: chowder	Respond to of 23153

That was a damn good message! I'm saving that one! Thank you. dabum

To: bull_derrick who wrote (22543)	12/4/2004 4:16:03 PM
From: energyplay	Respond to of 23153

I am going to agree with about 90% of what you said, and a dd a few comments. Part of the 'manufacturing' side is construction of buildings - residences, commercial buildings etc. This part has been doing pretty well. The US has better housing stock than 20 years ago. New materials like Tyvek vapor barriers, insulation, better wood treatments, and better building codes (especially for hurricane and earthquake areas) mean the buildings will last much, much longer -100 years or so. The commercial side has been a roller coaster over overbuilding and underbuilding. Quality and quantity has generally increasedd for office buildings, shopping malls, and hotels. Another part is the construction of infrastruture and public works. This has really been a problem. There has been ONE new major airport built in 20 years -Denver. Not many new bridges or highways, espeically compared to the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Water infrastructure ? Not much, and already strained in many places. A few new canals, a few aquatduct extensions. No new nuclear power plants, and inadequate electricity transmission. I'm in California, and we had a power crisis 3 years ago. Power out, businesses shut down, employees sent home on three different occasions in the summer. Some of those jobs went to India - the power outages helped push that. Infrastructure is an area that goverment can act or influence. Mostly, local governments have built ballparks and football stadiums for privately owned sports teams. ****** One play on more infrasturcture building is Fluor Corporation, a large construction company with an interesting chart for the past year. NYSE : FLR

To: bull_derrick who wrote (22543)	12/4/2004 4:32:37 PM
From: energyplay	Respond to of 23153

American business selling overseas - this really depends on the industry. Boeing, Coca-cola, Kodak, Intel, and others have done well. I don't think we should give up on this, and we need the Federal government to push down trade barriers, and insist on a quid pro quo. Part of the shift of US industry to Japan and Europe was facilitated by our government to fight the Cold War. Now that that is over, and those countires are rich, we can get some of that industry back. I will be trying to run a screen to find small US companies with high exports.

To: bull_derrick who wrote (22543)	12/6/2004 10:58:48 AM
From: kodiak_bull	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 23153

Derrick, I will take issue with your few paragraphs here, because I think history has shown this thrust of thinking to be wrong, and extremely wrong in the last 50 years: "I heard an economist once say that there are only three ways that wealth is created in any society and those are farming, mining and manufacturing. He went on to say in those three situation, the value of the output is greater than the sum of the inputs. Having thought about this at length, I believe the economist was right. In manufacturing, one can add a dollar of material and a dollar of labor and hopefully have three dollars of finished goods to sell. That value added difference is new wealth created for that society. Selling insurance, or even stock trading, does not generate wealth for a society even though it may generate money and allow someone to raise a family, etc. If I sold you insurance and you sold me insurance, the society as a whole would see a net sum gain of zero in terms of its wealth. Only those three activities produce wealth." Old style thinking says this is true. But if this were true, then how did Bill Gates get to be the richest man in the world? How did Warren Buffet? How did Nike? 10,000 years ago a man's wealth was determined by the location of his cave, the patterns of animal migration across his "territory" and his ability to fend off, or visit and pillage, his neighbors. 1,000 years ago a man's wealth was determined by the hundreds or thousands of acres he held under his control, and the number of tenants or serfs or slaves (not a ton of difference between those terms back then) who could work the land and provide the master with wool and corn and scullery maids for his appetite and pleasure. 100 years ago a man's wealth was determined by the amount of industrial productive power or transportation capacity under his control. If you owned a few mighty steel mills or a railroad or a textile factory in New England, then you could own a "cottage" in Rhode Island or summer in Maine when you weren't a captain of industry in Manhattan. 50 years ago we began the swing into pure information (although information has always been a key, if not THE key element to wealth throughout the ages: good cave location, good animal migration, good serf-uprising control, good commodity information, cutting edge transportation or industrialization ideas . . .) as the means to create real wealth. Every single industry today, whether it's a yogurt producer, a maker or seller of appliances or a chip manufacturer is competing in one industry alone: information. Those who can access and utilize information better than their competitors will win. I read an article a few years ago where a Scandinavian kitchen appliance manufacturer said, "we are not in the manufacturing business, that's no business to be in. We are in the information business; the minute we forget that we are finished." Bill Gates doesn't really manufacture a product, he masters the information that controls (for now) the future of desktop computing. Michael Dell doesn't manufacture a thing (that's all done by other companies); he gathers and controls information from various parties and gets his money off the spread of capital between the players in his industry. Warren Buffett doesn't make a thing, really; he just gathers information and puts it to use in arbitraging the difference between poorly utilized assets (his current and potential acquisitions) and well utilized assets (presumably those acquisitions that have been in his portfolio long enough to generate profits). Nike isn't a manufacturer, it's the owner of an idea ("just do it") and a manipulator of ideas and information. Walmart isn't a traditional business, it's a huge information processor; it processes not only its own sales and inventory information, but processes on a moment by moment basis its economic clout as it bends its vendors to its will. Pure farming, mining and manufacturing are probably the worst industries to be in, at least as we conceive of them from our school days. A farmer who isn't spending 90% of his time working through information (they can now do this in very sophisticated ways with the GPS system) will be out of business within a decade or so. There's an excellent book called The Age of Access, where the author (I'm working from memory) says more and more we don't want to own anything, not even intangible property such as copyrights, trademarks, brands. amazon.com We are evolving toward a system where true wealth will be created most purely by those who can "access" property for the moment or moments they need it and nothing more. This is the "just in time" model taken to its logical extreme. Kb