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How Does a Poor Economy Affect Tech Innovation?
sshuber writes "It's no secret that the US and other parts of the world are currently having some economic problems. How is this affecting new technologies under development? With the large numbers of layoffs, are we seeing projects, such as things under R&D, that are being axed? Are companies playing it safe and sticking with what they know sells in lieu of pushing the envelope? Finally, how is this affecting the open source community, either positively or negatively?" A lot of open source work happens with the backing or at least the sufferance of corporations. Do laid-off tech workers contribute fewer cycles to open source projects, or more?
Not as Many Wii Games. Save it for the Gas Tank.
There's a lot of foreboding potential out there, and a lot of big numbers have been lost on the market...but the numbers just don't seem to support that poor of an economy.
Yet, at least.
Nonetheless, everyone keeps talking like the world is in the depths of a worldwide recession.
...my productivity on pretty much everything taken a huge nosedive.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
In a sagging economy, people couldn't care less about new tech. The only way I could see a poor economy effecting tech innovation is if the new tech will clearly effect a cost reduction to the consumer. Without those effects, tech innovation will continue to be negatively affected by the current economic downturn.
Everything is just being innovated in India and China.
When gas was 99c/gallon, people weren't all that interested in new fuel technology. Now with oil going up and up, I expect we'll finally start seeing some real break throughs in alternative energy research.
OSS should also benefit from a slower economy. Why pay MS 100k for MSSQL licensing when I can get postgres?
Innovation won't stop and will continue to happen. It just might be in different areas.
We're cutting back on extravagances. I'll probably wait one more year for the new computer I was supposed to get last month.
An economic downturn will kill an already unhealthy company, but a good employer with a stable balance sheet knows how to weather the storm.
It's been pointed out recently to me (at least here in Alberta, Canada), that university enrollment drops when the economy's strong, and picks up when the economy slows. There's at least a couple factors here. One, when the economy's not doing great, a university campus is a relatively secure place to be while you wait out a temporary drought. Secondly, while the economy's doing good, it's generally easy to get a well-paying job, which presents a stronger competition vs the academic route. On that note, the economy's looking pretty rosy up here right now, so we're definitely looking for potential students at the University of Alberta's Computing Science department!
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
Next question please.
My employer let go of 90% of the future projects staff, which equated to 75-90 people. No VoiP, or WiFi in the near future, PC/Laptop refreshes were put on hold, server refresh abandoned, the plan to change the entire server OS on file/print servers from 2000 to 2003 was abandoned...and some other stuff that I can't remember.
Do laid-off tech workers contribute fewer cycles to open source projects, or more?
Oh, more for sure. Who worries about silly things like paying the bills or putting food on the family's table?
Trolling is a art,
I would expect at least some laid off workers to do some open source work just to keep their skillset current.
Have there really been large numbers of layoffs in the tech industries? I thought many tech companies, particularly those with large overseas businesses, were doing pretty well. See IBM for example.
This whole question reeks of someone wanting the Slashdot community to do their research for them, starting with some pretty questionable assumptions. Maybe the answer to this question is better served by looking at how past recessions hit the tech industry and their innovation output.
Is tech innovation about sitting down one day and saying "I'm going to invent tech." Or is it really a convergence where a solution in one field is applied to problems for another. I suspect the latter, and it takes young, bright minds to want to make those connections. Let me be clear, talented people do exceptional work through their middle and senior years, but revolutions are the domain of the young.
Well, cool, I dodged the question mainly because I don't know. We've had a downcycle every 7-8 years since WWII, if one could measure "tech achievement rates" then it could be correlated or not.
We're having economic troubles because people are dumb - not because something has actually happened.
"oh woe is me, the housing market is collapsing!" no its not. Now's a great time to buy. In fact this is really the sort of situation that benefits people in their mid-late 20s. Real Estate values were inflated before. Now those people can more easily afford to buy houses.
now, back on topic... if there is any sort of actual shift taking place, it is not likely to be the big corps that want to try and ring every last drop out of "business as usual" who will benefit.
If people perceive times to be tough and getting worse, with regards to the environment, energy "crisis," etc - then the people who can move in and offer solutions to those problems are going to win. They're going to attract the money from the people that have it to get the stuff to market.
I'd like to think that in the next 5-10 years we're going to see a lot more people interested in home power generation -- solar and/or wind, appliances that use less power, etc.
We're also going to see people and companies wanting solutions which provide maximum advantage for minimum cost. That means we'll see a lot more open, standards-based solutions to problems. We're likely to see more foss solutions to software problems, open hardware solutions to hardware problems, etc.
Likewise, if programmers are now no longer employed by megacorp a, they'll likely have a few more hours a day to contribute to foss projects -- or start smaller ventures based on foss solutions to some of the more pressing problems of our day, and into the future.
or maybe i'm just high
An email server may not needed to be upgraded, but a new wireless VOIP solution that allows for reduced cost of maintenance and usage most likely would be pushed to the front. Any innovations that can reduce cost and either maintain or increase productivity would be a sure thing in a recession.
In my career line of work (read: the full time job that pays my bills) I have seen only a few layoffs, however there have been a lot of budget cutbacks. Once we had our kitchen area/break room stocked with sandwhich fixings, snacks and fruit - now we have an empty area where you can bring in your own food. We've cut out almost all of our "social" activities as far as events and department outings. While I've seen an increase in our email blast campaigns and post card mailers, we've cut the amount of exposure we have in magazine and newspaper ads to a third of what they were. In addition, we've given up entirely on any online ads. Industry: Commercial and Luxury Residential Real Estate
With my side design projects I've seen an increase in people looking to pay peanuts for a great deal of work. Several companies in the areas I look for extra work in have been seeking senior graphic designers and art/creative directors, but posting salaries of $10-15 an hour. According to salary.com the typical senior or management level designer/director makes between 50k to 70k in my area and up until a while ago I was typically finding contract jobs offering $20-40/hr for small easy gigs, now it seems that people are looking to take advantage of those laid off, although I find it hard to believe that anyone with management experience would take them up on their offer.
The last thing on my plate is the PDF RPG market. it's never really been a HUGE industry, especially considering that companies like Onebookshelf (RPGNow and Drivethru) have a customer base of only 50-60k people, but within the last couple years I've seen a very sharp decrease in the amount of sales - granted this year 4th Ed. is coming out, and my line revolves around d20 fantasy, but prior to the announcement of 4th Ed there was a noticable decline in PDF sales. Print sales haven't been much better, but have stayed around what I expected.
Ave Molech Setting
So what you're saying is, either it will effect tech or it won't? You must be an economist.
The first thing you want to do when you're belt tightening is cut jobs; employees are huge overhead. But how do you cut jobs when the work still has to be done?
Answer? Automation. If you can't automate, you'll outsource, and outsourcing itself often requires new technology.
When the bubble popped, a lot of tech people took it in the shorts, and since that's the last big economic wobble, it's the one everyone is thinking about. But in reality there is no guarantee that a downturn will be bad for tech, or tech industries...It depends on what sectors experience the lowest growth. (Sadly, I do economics too.)
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Things will probably be similar to the time period right after the dot-com-bust.
Some money will still be spent on new development but projects will be chosen carefully.
I would hope that more companies will turn to open source software. As a consultant, I sometimes find it frustrating when customers are so concerned about protecting their IP instead of their profitability.
A bit obvious, but it is difficult to make money from commonly available data and services.
After the dot-com-bust, I found myself getting a lot more business from companies and individuals overseas (I live in the USA) - good for keeping busy, but I earned less money.
It is obvious that our economy (in the USA) is in a steep decline. Our government tries hard to 'fake the numbers' on inflation (they stopped publishing M3 figures several years ago!) and unemployment. The entire fiat money system looks to be in trouble.
I find it ironic that Iran, one of the few countries that is not in debt to the world "print money as fast as they can" banking system, looks like they may be attacked soon, and I wonder if there is a connection. I tend to believe that money, and the strong desire of the super rich to acquire more, is at the center of most international activities.
I think that we in the USA will unfortunately see a difficult time economically ahead (except for "Bush's base" - the super rich). That said, I hope that the economies in developing countries do OK since worst problems will occur if the economy of the whole world tanks.
The world has become a much more tightly coupled place - except for the super rich who profit from McCain + Bush style "small wars, forever" policies, the rest of us just want peace, and deal with doing business.
What large numbers of layoffs?
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Depressed economy -> tighter budgets across the boards -> less investment -> less dollars for those on bleeding edges of things -> better educated waiters/waitresses
If your software development budget is being slashed, it would make sense to take advantage of the large pool of work being done at no cost to you. There are costs associated with customizing for your particular needs, but compared to an actual development infrastructure, it's minimal.
Depending on the business, it adds more weight to the money-saving aspects of open source alternatives, but it's not a "slam dunk" reason to switch wholesale. I work with a lot of small businesses, and I'm set to push harder on Linux-based file servers as a low cost option for when their old servers need to be replaced. OpenOffice.org finally getting an Aqua port allows me to start pushing it as an Office alternative for a lot of the Mac people I deal with who are sick and tired of the bugginess in Mac Office. I'm developing some infrastructure in the office with open source software on old machines running Linux for remote monitoring and control of client networks so I save gas money, and my clients don't pay for travel time as often, problems get noticed earlier and fixed faster, and everyone's happier. (not technically saving me money over a closed source alternative, but I likely couldn't afford to implement the closed source alternatives that are out there)
I know people are probably going to mark me flamebait or troll on this one, but I have to point out that open source doesn't necessarily equal tech innovation, and in my opinion, it's probably a fallacy to think so. Tech innovation is a lot more than bits and bytes and computer code. To innovate, you generally need resources, and often exotic ones at that. For example, mag-lev trains using the next generation of iron-arsenic superconductors aren't going to be developed by open source, because they need massive amounts of, well, iron and arsenic. And you're not going to get the amount of those materials you need without going through the commodities market. So, mag-lev trains probably delayed because of the poor economy. I could site other examples, ranging from quantum computing to nanotech to neuro interfaces. The basic idea however, is that construction of new tech is slowed down via commodity and labor prices. Maybe you'll have independents working on stuff at home a bit more, and some of the current R&D projects will survive the drought. But those projects will have difficulty coming to market until the market improves. It's hard to get the funding to purchase research time with an MRI magnet if the economy sucks. I anticipate a lot more of hobby programmers at home reverse-engineering current projects, and bringing free alternatives to the market during the economic downturn. Not saying that its a good thing or a bad thing, but often times I see open-source as simply being a reverse-engineering endeavor, rather than a tech innovation endeavor. My personal opinion is that the open source mentality has a lot in common with various types of socialism (and communism?). I'd go so far as to say that the poor economy isn't going to foster tech innovation, as much as it's going to foster tech socialism.
If anything, tech seems like its speeding up (at least to me). We're seeing OSS projects going from things that nerds run on their home networks for fun in the their off time, to things that nerds run on their massive corporate networks for fun (and profit) during their on time.
Also, most of the old-time, tech-hating PHB types have retired, and big, corporate-network apps are starting to take over. "Email servers" have been replaced by "collaboration software". Telecommuting is becoming more and more common, video conferencing is starting to take hold with the adoption of VOIP.
If anything, I think that this is one of the most exciting times to be in tech, especially in the United States, and partially because of our economic downturn. Let me explain: our economy is taking a turn for the worse (I don't think anyone is arguing this point), and the reason is that we're either shipping low-income jobs overseas, or we're giving them to people who neither stay in the country, or keep any of their money here (migrant workers). This is causing normal, blue-collar type jobs to disappear, and causing higher-paying white-collar jobs to be created. We still RUN the business from the US..we just don't manufacture any of the goods here.
We went from the boss having to communicate with the factory floor on the other side of the facility or a couple of floors down, to the boss having to communicate with the factory floor on the other side of the globe. The only way to achieve this global communication is by beefing up the networks, and developing better software.
The economic downturn is, in my opinion, fueling the tech market because it caters specifically to white-collar business.
On a slightly related note:
Does anyone else think that...how do I put this...."nerdy stuff" becoming mainstream is hurting tech development overall? It used to be that nerdery was something that reclusive geeks could get together and do. It was their's and you had to be goddamned smart to participate. Lately, though, it seems like geeks are sortof taking a second seat to the exact type of trendy, photogenic, not that creative or inspiring people that we always HATED when i was just a young geek.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
will surely reduce the number of startups - but most of those that erm "don't start" will be the ones with less of a chance of success (i.e as a completely random guess, 50% less startups leading to only 30% less successful startups). People still have money to invest (it didn't vanish anywhere) they're just being more careful where they put it. On the point of OSS productivity. I think if you're not working then you're probably going to be sitting in your underwear on the sofa with a beer. If you're in a startup you're going to be wildly flogging yourself to the bone to support your employer. Only time I ever feel like doing 'MY' coding is when I'm being productive at work and resenting every boring minute of it (i.e. have my work hat on, but am utterly uninspired by it).
A poor economy makes it impossible to throw money at a solution and hope it to work. This has lead to the rise of Linux-based UMPCs such as the EEE and the OLPC project. When someone doesn't have $2000 to spend on a shiny new Vista computer with the 4 gigs of RAM it needs and a quad core CPU, they start looking at what they really need, and if they can save $50 by not having Windows and instead have Ubuntu, they will. If they can save $300 and buy a low-end laptop like the EEE rather then a more powerful one, they will. When people start throwing money at a situation, innovation suffers. This is how Windows got its monopoly, businesses who had no clue what they really needed thought it would be better to spend $2000 and get a new Windows desktop then look at a lower-end $1000 DOS or other OS system. Today, with a slowing economy people might actually look and find that they don't need Windows and move on to Linux. A poor economy might just be what is needed for Linux.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
It all depends on how you look at it.
Sure, in India millions of people are in "poverty".
However, a large number of them don't know they are as they are living as they always have raising crops and livestock.
And since the rise of a substantial middle class, many people are now employed making far more than they did before. Not only as employees of companies, but also as "help" for the new middle class.
Bottom line is the world as a whole is improving in just about all respects with regards to economic status. The only places it is not is where you have a despotic government or a complete lack of the rule of law.
I think we are now seeing that there is a limit to the value that can be created by "innovative financial engineering" a lot of recent "products" are being "revalued"
I know people were getting paid quite a lot of money right out of college for finance degrees (I suppose there was a good return on that investment for employers)now that the products these firms produce are being repriced, will this practice continue?
The home mortgage "loan agent" and "loan broker" positions are certainly not as common as they once were. I suppose they were producing the "raw goods" the financial markets were most recently "developing"
Does anyone more in the know than I have something useful to add?
Iterative types of innovation, such as the kind that R&D departments do is one thing.
2 guys in a garage style innovation, is another thing entirely.
I'd bet that second kind - the kind that then to revolutionize, rather than incrementally improve - will be the kind to suffer more (especially in the U.S.) when there simply isn't enough financial stability amongst the working class, which produces kids who become the creative class, to create the kind of free time and optimism that's needed for those people to create revolutionary new things.
No one is discussing the fix either, at least not in the U.S. Maybe they think the iterative kind of innovation (if that's even still going on) is enough to compete with China and the E.U.
http://www.unfocus.com/
I work at a small software shop, and we write custom software.
I've noticed a shift in our clients' thinking. New projects have to save the company money overall and more requests to include OSS libraries and products.
Personally for me, I like the fact we're including more OSS products (MySQL, Postgres, Linux, *BSD, etc...). When I first started, I was a little out of place due to the fact I had spent so much time working with open source. Now that experience is useful to my company.
But overall new software work really needs to have an immediate cost savings. For example, a client came back after a year. The client is a non-profit, we developed a system to allow them to keep track of their membership and invoicing. Most of the membership management is being shifted to the web. A year before, it cost too much and they didn't see any benefit.
Now they realize they save on things like stamps, maybe hold off on hiring a part-time person to process mailed in renewal notices. Plus they'll have a better system for calculating how much money they got.
The term "poor economy" can be, and has in the past been, a self fulfilling prophecy.
If the population believes the economy is poor, and they behave as though the economy is poor, then the economy, regardless of its actual state, will, by the actions of the brainwashed masses, begin to behave as though it were poor.
That appears to be exactly what is happening here.
A certain percentage of laid off workers will decide that that is the push they needed to start their own businesses.
The real answer is we don't know. It could make companies more competitive by giving incentives to innovate (biofuels, etc.) You never know where the next great idea will come from.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
If you have extra time, you want to stay in 'shape' so you might as well code and contribute.
OSS can help you make contacts too.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
For instance, RideSearch.com is innovative and it helps people save money by carpooling. There will always people who try to solve the world's problems, and gas is right now on the top of everyone's minds.
And my credit is just ok. Not outstanding, just ok.
Where did I look?
http://www.lendingtree.com/
Your post shows that either you aren't trying, or you have some serious issue that would prevent you om getting a mortgage, like shitty credit or a bankruptcy. If you don't have an issue, then you're just not trying, and please don't bother claiming otherwise.
If you are living in the bay area not having a job can be very costly.
I wonder If there are places where the cost of living is low and the broadband flows freely.
I would like to go there.
That's completely wrong. The money is still there, it's just in a different place, doing different work for different people.
The money doesn't leave the economy, that's just plain wrong. If you know where it does go, and how to invest, you can take advantage of the market downturn.
For the industry as a whole, the recession presents both challenges and opportunities. Weaker companies will die, stronger companies will consolidate and get back to their core products. Innovation won't slow down, but new products will not be brought to market as quickly as businesses become more risk adverse.
The corporate IT environment, for companies that survive, will go through a period of what I like to call a "breather". You get a chance to catch up on all of those little projects that you have been putting off because of constantly having to support the business through a growth period. For example, I am in the process of implementing an end-to-end network monitoring solution to replace a number of smaller implementations. Something that I would not have time to do during growth periods. It's also a good time to take classes to enhance your skills.
David
It's hard to say without large studies, I suppose, but I have a hypothesis that (note, I'm not an economics student or scientist, just my general observations/musings here, as a layperson), not just in software development, but in general, recessions and depressions pave the way for the next economic boom cycle. As this applies to software development, I think the parent is right - just because you might not be working on a job that is directly related to software development, doesn't necessarily mean you aren't doing something toward that end. You might go back to school, thinking that in a tough economy, it can't hurt to get some more education. You might contribute to Open Source, as the parent thinks (and proposed by the original article).
You might do software development on your own time that you don't plan to release as open source, but figure you can spend a few years developing it, and just about the time it's ready for release, the boom cycle will be about to begin again and there may be an opportunity to publish the software commercially and make your fortune.
It seems to me (reading the responses at +2) that sshuber and other posters are experiencing the effects of an economic downturn, while others are not. Having recently returned from a road trip to Washington State (from British Columbia) I only saw a few overt indications economic problems, which is not to say that they don't exist.
However we have all seen troubling reports of layoffs in the tech industries. The tech sector does seem to be suffering less in the current situation than say, the real estate or banking industries.
Coming back to the original topic, I am most interested in these questions: Does a slowdown in the tech industry benefit or hurt FOSS projects? Does it free up more talent to work on these projects, or do these people end up purely focused on getting the next job? Do FOSS projects rely too much on corporations that can be kicked out from under them by the economy?
Personally, when I've been unemployed, it has been a blow to my self esteem, and I associate that with being perhaps selfish in that I did not even consider working on FOSS. Not saying that was the best move on my part. Anybody else?
If the answer is war, you are asking the wrong question
I'm not from the US you insensitive clod!
Why don't small farmers form farming collectives to share the capital costs of this sort of equipment?
Of course you would need to ensure the collective served the farmers and not vice versa. (who would have known running a condominium homeowners association could be so profitable?)
I work for a company that is 100% open source based, and markets itself as everything open source to whatever needs our clients need. Usually this is either web presences, or local sysadmin work for businesses, schools, or non-profits. Anyway, this came up at our last monthly meeting, someone asked the CEO what he thought a downturned economy would mean, and the summed up answer was, it'll be good for business because more commercial companies and even non-profits are contacting us for products and services in order to streamline and save a buck here and there. He said that growth figures for this year should actually be up from previous years. So it all depends really.
The barristas-turned-perl-coders go back to making coffee, graduate students go back to graduate school, product cycles get longer so people have time to actually think, and investors stop throwing money at every stupid idea and actually start rewarding innovation.
A bad economy is when innovation happens.
I'm about to graduate with a degree in economics and it irritates the hell out of me that people keep ranting about "the bad economy" / "huge recession". First off, we still have positive GDP growth, which means that overall, things are better this year than last. Secondly, all of these comments CAN make the economy turn bad, and then we'll hear them say "Well, we were right!". A huge part of investment is what your expectations are - when the news constantly cries that the sky is falling, what do you think many investors will do? Sell, which then leads to the economy doing worse and it's a vicious cycle. Can't we please do something to get all of this "the sky is falling" crap off the headlines for a few days? You'd be amazed at how big of an effect that can have on the stock market (and as a result the economy as a whole).
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Reduction in technical innovation is caused far more by offshoring development than it is by an economic downturn. It is getting easier to develop products offshore and will continue to get easier. This means that American companies are become more about branding and less about development.
The biggest innovation booms happen when people pull together for a common cause. War time (real wars, not Iraq etc) brings on big innovation because any advantage is worth finding and exploiting. Cold war fear fueled the space race which in turn seeded many tech companies. Where are the new booms going to come from?
Development is just seen as cost and high risk. It is far easier, cheaper and more predictable to buy in a design and rebadge it. Take a $2 Chinese designed and built phone, put a well known brabnd name on it and sell it at branded prices. That kind of thinking will not generate any really useful innovation.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The short answer is yes, it does effect it a fair amount. Not necessarily negatively, different things are researched more and other things are tabled for a while. Similar to war, it just changes where we expect and therefore invest in there to be innovation.
Wise companies use the time to regroup, upgrade skills, and research new things. Then, when the economy picks up again, they are well-positioned to take advantage of new business.
Few companies are wise, alas.
...laura
Slightly off-topic, but dead on response to the GP. The fact that farmers in developed countries like the US or most places in the EU get subsidies does not make them rich; It merely allows them to compete with cheaper imports. There is a cost to society as a whole, of course, but in my opinion, this is dwarfed by the advantage of avoiding being food-dependent on foreign countries. It's enough with being oil-dependent.
To do list for Windows
Back in 2004, I was told by a few high level realtors that interact a great deal with D.C. to sell my house as soon as possible. They said that DC was going to keep pushing that real estate was going gang busters, but that they KNEW it was going to head downwards. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates pull their monies out of residential construction and said that the housing was going to tank because our interest rates were too low, too high of fed. deficit, and the pubs had loosened up mortgages laws too much. Fortunately, I sold in time.
Now, I hear from Warren Buffet and Bill Gates say that we ARE in a recession against because of interst rate too low and federal deficit too high, so they are pulling out of more AMerican ventures save specialized ones, converting their dollars to Euros. THey are both investing heavily into Europe and other offshores.
Think that they know something that you do not? Of course, our current admin would not fudge figures or lie to us now, would they? Think you should be nervous about the Warren saying that this will not be a short recession but a very long one (think depression)?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Just as one data point: here at SnapLogic, our product is open source. Myself and the other engineers are paid to work on GPLed software full time.
It's not just our core product. I'm responsible for the QA infrastructure, and in that role I've been able to contribute code to other projects we use: Django, Trac (one two three), Figleaf, and Buildbot (one two three four).
That's just what I have done personally, not to mention the other engineers. And it's not just something we do on the side - the company's upper management actively encourages us to contribute code back.
So in our particular case, just day to day operations intrisically seems to benefit the open source commmunity as a side effect. At least from my perspective (and by the way, I don't speak for SnapLogic). If something dramatic happened and we had to shut down, that would obviously stop.
[Holy cow, I'm being paid to write free software in my favorite language. Pinch me.]
Aaron Maxwell - redsymbol.net
Having watched multiple booms and busts go by:
The people who actually make the crazy money are the ones who are well positioned when the wave hits.
They're the guys who built a search engine for finding things on the internet before the dotcom boom kicked off and were in a place to leverage the boom. They're the guys who thought about selling things like books and so had a product ready to capitalize on the leading edge of it.
The ones who lost money are the idiots who waited until they saw other people were making money, wanted to jump on the bandwagon, searched around for an idea, slowly built up a company and almost had it ready for IPO after the market tanked.
In a tough market, getting money from other people to do cool things is usually tough. However, it's also the time to start prepping your own great ideas if you want to be well placed to make a fortune when the next boom cycle hits.
There is exactly one measure that matters in the minds of most individuals (and we will kindly thank you to treat us as such and not as consumers) -- standard of living, which is roughly proportional to wages divided by stuff. Actual wages divided by stuff has been dropping for quite a while now, and it is only through the home equity ATM that people have managed to continue a high pace of purchasing stuff.
You don't need a degree in disproven 19th century physics models loosely adapted to finance to recognize this. What you need are open eyes, an ability to look outside your models and a year or two basking in the human misery that is poverty.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
I once worked for a company that spent six figures on automation to make a volume part for a popular automobile. The company expected they were going to free up a low-level operator (read: eliminate a job). What actually happened was that the robot was so unreliable, what with dropping/throwing parts and spilling trays, they had to have a higher-level operator there to run the robot AND restart the whole mess more often after the inevitable and inexplicable failures!
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
For those that insist the US is NOT in a recession, because numbers "never" lie, well, you are right. The real issue may NOT be a recession as technically defined. The real issue is that America in RELATION to the world is going down at a scary rate. Consider this quote: "OPEC could âoepotentially buy Bank of America in one month worth of production, Apple computers in a week and General Motors in just three days.â The dollar is in skydive, house prices are still skyhigh, oil is soaring, food is soaring, and other commodities are soaring. Soon we will be paying for getting oxygen back into this planet. It won't come cheap.
I'm not sure that many people are tracking that this past week Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the US weapons labs, has laid off over 400 people of a total staff of less than 10000. Check the intergoogle. These people were working on lots of things besides weapons before, but now because of budget cuts they're slashing out everything but the core weapons programs.
So much for government support of non-weaponized science.
This in addition to the recent article in Physics Today about the failing state of University/Corporate collaborations due to university mandates on IP ownership seems to signal a more fundamental breakdown of the R&D enterprises which made the US the technological and economic leader it is today. It claimed that many companies find it easier to base their R&D operations outside of the US. Previously this had occurred with manufacturing and the R&D was still homegrown, but now even that apparently is jumping ship.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
the power of gold?
Sorry, but there's a reason we went off the gold standard.
Gold is just another metal.
Platinum? One of the rare earths? Some mathematical balance point of a set of linear equations involving several of the limited elements, based on their current demand in the market?
It's getting to be time to recognize that money has no value unless it can represent something useful, like food, or man-hours of labor. But different food is valued differently by different people, and different labor is valued differently by different people.
So we're back to money having no value except as it communicates wants and needs with resources.
Which means that having lots of money is kind of like having lots of air, and not in the sense of clean air for breathing or for manufacturing, but in the sense of air to make noise in. It's time to quit hoarding.
One obvious effect is the low cost PC market surge. People no longer all want the biggest, baddest PCs (well, my parents still get the latest PC to play solitaire on). The low-end PC market is booming, and will continue to do so. In turn Linux also gets a boost, as people not only buy these PCs, but start to see a lot more value in free Operating Systems and software.
Open Source: Eroding the Digital Divide
And I would mod you up if I had the points (they always came when I don't need them).
Rethinking email
Therefore even if our production of bioethanol isn't as high as some other countries (only a few select points of distribution here and there - although on the long term there's hope to scale things up) that production wasn't done *at the expense* of other production (as in the Mexican food example you give in your long post above) but *as a by product* of them.
Similarly bio gas (methane) is extracted from most waste treatment stations (and even recently available as car fuel for compatible cars). Saddly, last I got informations (several years back) they couldn't use the solid phase for producing fertilizer because of a too much elevated content of heavy metal (My information is old, maybe recently this has changed, either thank to efforts in recent years to reduce heavy metal waste or newer treatment technique to separate them - I don't know).
So to all those that keep calling names ("Treehuggers" etc.) : Deny it as much as you wish, meanwhile other countries are actually doing it for real.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
In fact lots of young children are fond of animal and could find it fun to see them once in a while.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You cannot spell. That makes your message not worth a reply.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
To properly call them "government" would be granting armed thieves far more respect than they deserve.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
There are lots of things that are rare that have "objective value" only for those for whom they have "objective value".
Gold? What do I need it for? There is a bit in the electronics around, but that is not really what is driving the price. The primary thing that drives the price of gold is all the people who want it for jewelry, or for stockpiling.
What happens to that gold in twenty-fifty years, as global warming becomes a fact and you and I have trouble finding enough to eat? In the hopefully absurd case, will you pay a pound of gold, or more, for a sack of wheat, if you know that the next available sack of wheat is a hundred miles away and has a thousand people bidding/fighting for it already?
That is, hopefully, an extreme example, but not exactly non-historic.
But we can back away from it and see that, even rare metals have values that are simply not ever going to be objective in the real world.
You want an example of something with true objective value? How about air?
But I don't particularly want to live in any world where air is currency. Space exploration might be fun, but not if it means having to deal with shipmates who are inclined to pervert something rare into artificial value to make themselves rich.
Value is made by people working, and by people assigning (subjective) value to the work. That is all there is. No objective basis for value, and going back to the "gold standard" would just be returning to an old illusion, a rule that, in the past, people were willing to agree on, but a rule that is still just an artificial rule. The "value" in the gold standard was simply that a lot of people were willing to agree to it.
So, isn't what you really want simply some bases of value that we can all agree on? And you hope that gold, being tangible, rare, pretty, and, erm, having some valuable (to some people) uses, is something you can talk me into agreeing on?
Maybe I'd "buy" that, but only if we agree on a couple of things:
One, that we all acknowledge that it's just a conceit. That we are agreeing so that we can agree on something, not because gold has any real objective value. And the coin should have that printed on it, something like: "Redeemable for gold by weight, which has value only as long as we can agree to let it keep it's value." (Except that I'm not sure my grandchildren will understand that letting it keep its value means neither hoarding it nor throwing it away.)
The other, that we agree that we will not attempt to place monetary value on some things, like art and education and health, and just about any other thing of real value.