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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (100672)	1/14/2009 8:17:07 PM
From: forceOfHabit	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 110194

Hawk, The question is what kind of workforce to we require now? If we're going to retrain the American worker into new industrial disciplines that are expected to be leading technologies for decades to come, which will they be? Obviously no one knows the whole answer, but I have one suggestion: product design and reclamation. In the future, in order to maintain a high standard of living with sustainable resource consumption, it will be necessary to redesign and re-engineer virtually every physical product we produce (cars, computers, toasters, dinner forks, shampoo bottles) is not simply buried in a landfill (or at sea) somewhere but is repaired, reconditioned, and re-used, or broken down into its constituent parts and those parts repaired, reconditioned and re-used (all the way down to the recovery and reuse of basic materials like glass and metals). This would necessitate a huge engineering effort, developing techniques to separate out the re-usable bits of, say, the existing fleet of soon to be derelict cars (and dare I say, quit a bit of manual labor). Longer term, it would require and encourage a groundbreaking design industry that created products (and industrial processes to create those products) with this type of end-of-life-cycle reprocessing designed in from the start rather than tacked on at the end. That could become America's competitive edge over the rest of the world as resources become more scarce and their efficient reuse more critical. Heck, the garbage dumps of today could become the gold mines (literally in case they contain lots of electronics) of tomorrow. Got landfills? :) habit