Posted on 11/22/2016 2:55:00 AM PST by expat_panama
If you’re confident in your judgment and that the economy will reemerge stronger than before, buy low which means now or in the not too distant future.
Shortages? Genius creates it’s own opportunity. The other day I was at Best Buy. Have you seen these new VR setups?
Think Mustang. Created it’s own market. Sure, in the sense of conventional economics all the things you know are true but the exceptions are what make things, well, exceptional! MAGA is nothing else if it ain’t that. Unleash the creativity of Americans and we will shock the world, again. No one works harder than Americans. No one. Ask any foreigner who visits. Sure, Zero was trying to globalize us to death but WE ARE AMERICANS.
I’m serious. I was shooting the breeze with a Neurologist I know a few years back. The guy is from Spain, educated there and here. Has traveled all over Europe and Latin America. The one thing he said repeatedly that stunned him most about Americans compared to literally everyone else in the world. We work harder than anyone. What’s more he knew why. We have a tradition of being able to keep more of what we produce than anyone else. That’s what American Exceptionalism is about.
Ah, you’re changing the subject from markets and emotions over to questions about me and my finances. I’ll take to mean we agree that when people enter the market that they either trade as adults or they go broke and quit trading. Also, fact that markets have existed continuously for tens of thousands of years means a lot of adults work there.
Not impressed at all by the “new” VR setups, which are really the same as the old VR setups only now you clip your cellphone into it instead of having their own screen. Goggles is goofy.
But my point stands. If there are no shortages then there’s no reason for productivity to grow. The goal of business is to sell everything they make (don’t leave stock in the warehouse), but also to make everything they can sell (don’t leave money on the table). If that balance has been achieved then productivity is exactly where it should be and growing it would be a mistake.
No, I’m not trying to be derogatory or anything. Maybe it’s because the wife and I just started reading Heinlien’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.”
He talks about AI decision making and points out that humans do about as well or better than machines at making decisions with limited information. Rational thought is how we make decisions with ALL or most of the information relevant but sometimes circumstances require a decision before all the relevant facts are known or can be. Emotion is what we use then and machines just can’t do it. We conservatives belittle emotional thinking because we see the pitfalls libtards fall prey to but I would assert that “rational” use of emotion is something we all do and the successful just are better at it.
Check the Occulus.
I’ve seen it. More pixels, same goggles, just don’t care.
What I am trying, I guess poorly, to get at I suppose could be illustrated by a decade or so in my own life. I was a serious computer video gaming nerd in the 90s. Quake, Counter Strike. To be competitive you had to have the latest gear. The best video card, the fastest processor, etc. Every 18 months you had to drop another $2,500 if you wanted to stay in the game. We had computers everywhere around here. 286, 386, 486, Dual Core. Upgraded Orchid and Voodoo video cards.
I don’t think a “conventional” economist would see that coming. In fact, I would suggest they did not and that was why the dot on thing caught them flat footed. How many households does it take pumping a thousand bucks or more a year into a segment of the economy for that activity to really light a fire for the rest of the economy.
I am just saying we are now on the verge of another such time. I don’t know what “the next big thing” is but I assure you it is coming.
I took programming in Fortran 4 in 1971 so I have been fiddling with computers for a long time. I have known there would someday be a VR and have been waiting for it for a long time.
Is it just that you don’t care for the concept of VR or the technology is just too immature to do it right? Would the Occulus be successful if there were just good games to play on it?
Sure they would. It’s just supply and demand, it’s not terribly complicated. Even when it’s a “disruptive” technology where demand hits very hard within a couple of months you’ve got a graph of demand and can supply accordingly. Even outlier people whose demand exceeds the norm are worked into the graph, a certain percentage upgrade every time something new is available, they’re identifiable, and predictable.
The dot com boom and bust was nearly 20 years ago (I know right, we’re getting old) big data has gotten much better at understanding itself since then. Just look at smartphones and tablets. They were just as disruptive, but much smoother. Nobody was caught flat footed, businesses adjusted, graphs were made, money was made. The streaming video revolution was really dot com all over again, again pretty smooth.
We’re always on the verge of another such time. But that new thing, whatever it is, will settle quickly into a predictable demand chart, and productivity will match it.
Goggles are a toy. No VR experience that requires goggles will be a success in the market place. Much like how no home 3D system that requires glasses will succeed. In the home market people don’t want their entertainment to be so immersive it isolates them. They want to play a video game, but they still want to be able to watch TV, talk to their spouse, pet their pet, eat their food and do the rest of their life. Once you have to put on goggles you can’t do that.
Most people say they'd like more money then they have, and they think they should get mor
e pay.
The thing is that 15 years ago the amount of stuff everyone made grew every year by about 4% so pay went up the same.
Only problem is that since 2002 production growth's been falling down to about one percent per year but even tho pay growth dipped in '08 it's bounced and pay's been growing at twice what production growth has been.
This means we're about to get hit w/ layoffs, inflation, or both.
But the computers have gotten cheaper and cheaper. I was pricing a new IPad the other day, $400-500. But if you want to run Occulus you have to drop a couple grand. I’m not saying VR is the next big thing but it could be.
I know, I am being “emotional” but it just seems to me things are “ripe for a change”. Like I say, we are right in between “you didn’t build that” and MAGA.
Just bot mine a couple weeks ago --I love it!!! It's fabulous w/ Elite Dangerous; so many toys, so little time...
We’ve been getting hit with layoffs and inflation for basically the entire 21st century. As automation continues to grow productivity and jobs are no longer as coupled as they once were. Which is part of why pay can go up without productivity going up, if I only need half as many people to meet a demand that hasn’t shrunk I can pay them more. Of course all these laid off people keep demand from going up, which is why productivity isn’t going up. But we’re profitable.
That’s what happens to commoditized appliances. They get cheaper as they get less cutting edge.
VR will not be the next big thing as long as it requires goggles. As long as it remains a hitech version of the Holmes stereoscope (precursor to the Viewmaster I’m sure we both had growing up) it will be a toy.
I remember the line from the movie, “Plastics”. The first big use of plastics, IIRC, was toys.
And then they learned that with plastic they can make durable goods less durable so people have to replace their stuff more often.
I used to joke with my wife back when the kids were little that one year it was He Man and then Transformers and then whatever that we were just buying the same plastic over and over again it was just turned into this year’s stuff. But there is just no question that you can make more stuff faster out of plastic than you can out of wood and steel.
I love wood and make all kinds of stuff like chairs and tables from oak and cherry and what have you. I was a machinist for years and know all about metals and appreciate things made beautifully from metal. That said, these things take more labor. With toys for those big and small what you are buying is the dream.
It ain’t the Mustang you are buying but the girl... It ain’t the rifle I bought but the buck I am gonna one day bag...it ain’t the steak, it’s the sizzle. Those cheap plastic toys bought more dreams than the metal and wood ones.
This is the kind of thing I am talking about when I say the “expectation of the Trump economy. We are no longer gonna be a bunch of people “hunkering down” and prepping. We are expecting great things.
Interesting comment about fat clients. I feel the same way about over-proliferation of smartphone apps that could be well designed mobile-device-specific web pages accessed via the smartphone browser.
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