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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: arun gera who wrote (79756)	9/17/2011 11:33:34 AM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 218909

Okay, so now, like the old joke, we are just haggling over the price. We do agree that GDP per capita is the main basis of valuation [and of course the expectation that there won't be a nasty change any time soon]. You are right that companies don't value whizz kids particularly highly, but they do put a decent price on their heads. John Hood was a classmate of mine [in civil engineering] and I thought he did it right. He got a salary from Fletcher Holdings [a major NZ company] to attend university while I worked day and night to pay for my existence. He had a car and I had a motorcycle. There were not many like him. 25 years ago I used to seriously argue to BP [my employer] that they should establish education and hiring in China to help supersonically smart underemployed children to work for the Made in China BP Research Centre. BP was paying 50 pounds per hour for Sunbury research centre and 60 for the German research centre. That was what our part of it was charged to get stuff done. Those prices seemed absurdly high to me. I hired a South African university to do a literature survey and saved 70%. In China, we could have got highly intelligent people for absurdly cheap prices and they would be thrilled to get into the BP realm. BP might have had more talented people running the Macondo well and would not now be down about $50 billlion in market capitalisation. BP could have hired a lot of talent for many years for only $20 billion and got a lot of great stuff done as well as not having big accidents. BP could buy a bunch of citizenships and move thousands in on rent to buy schemes. It would be like having stock options which increase in value. Of course countries wouldn't undercut selling such citizenships by continuing to offer silly H1 schemes. The USA is big enough that it could offer 1,000,000 new citizenships a year without undue dilution. Johns Hopkins used to run a global talent search in the 1980s. BP could have done similarly - build a school in China for children aged 12 and up, conduct a talent search, and away they go. I see Johns Hopkins is still doing it: cty.jhu.edu Mqurice