Another thing northerners don’t know is that even when there are no hurricanes, we still get violent rainstorms in Florida. That being most of this afternoon, I took a stroll through the Sears place, bringing back memories of travel to the city when I was a kid. We never lived in a city, and to this day, you know how I still love small town people. Say what you want, some of the most comfortable semi-formal clothes I’ve ever worn were off the rack at Sears. I don’t get much call to dress up any more although Bingo could change all that.The Sears appliance section (huge) grabbed my attention. So did the price tags (also huge). The really nice refrigerators are $1,600 and the stoves are $1,000. Pausing to imagine what the kitchen here would look like if I had my druthers, I was reminded how often I’ve wanted to take a baking course. The Kenmore stoves have two ovens, one is for buns in a small area under the element cavity. To make way for it, there is no tray at the bottom of the stove for pans. Anyway, what would I do with two ovens?
Did you know Fred originally apprenticed as a commercial baker? I’m not crazy about the going to work at 5:00 AM part. Baking bread is fun, but the yeast rising times make it, shall we say, completely incompatible with my lifestyle. Like working for the phone company, it seems custom designed to make sure you can’t do anything else meaningful once you start, but sure enough somebody will come along and check if you are busy.
There was a Borders Express [in the mall], a mini-version of the bookstore, so it took me an hour to get out of there. I noted that the mall was 90% small trendy clothing stores, in real contrast to what people actually wear. How much longer will Americans be paying $65 for a polo shirt? My costing formula shows that shirt was made for $2.41 and that says these shops are doomed. The economy here is vastly more vulnerable than it seems, due to our credit-based business system. Remember the credit-based Kuwaiti stock exchange scandal? How it collapsed when one barber finally demanded cash money for his share certificates?
It is not just our consumers, but also our factories that operate on borrowed money. No real cash reserves anywhere. Contrast this to Asia, where you need money up front. This means, sooner or later, Asia will realize they can dump the shirt for one hell of a lot less than $65 and still make a killing. The earliest example I can find of this theory is the Mountain Pass Mine, CA. It supplied the so-called rare earth elements. There is nothing rare about them except places where they can be mined cheaply. One such place is China. When the Chinese began selling said metals to the world in 1984, Mountain Pass went bankrupt 96 hours later. Mark my words, America, you are borrowing your ante from the people you are betting against.
What? You like these mini-lectures? Okay. Who remembers the charts that used to show America leading the world in production figures in almost every major category, usually followed a distant second by Russia? Neither of these two countries was ever self-sufficient in resources (called “autarky”), in fact, the rest of the world completely swamps America and Russia combined. All we had was the majority of the planet’s production capacity. The others have the resources and the manpower, something like eight times as much. You weren’t actually supposed to believe that part about competing for their hearts and minds.
We squandered the lead. After borrowing all the money we could from each other, we started borrowing overseas—by management, not the workers. You can see, while American production capacity remains high, the quality of management keeps digging deeper holes to hit newer lows. I have little good to say about American middle-managers, the ones who “manage people instead of production”. The stereotype nauseates me, those grinning dolts with the “people are our greatest resource” crap.
Another myth about to be extinguished is “Yankee know-how”, although it will produce a few supernovas yet. Most breakthroughs in the past were accomplished by people away from management teams and focus groups. If it is true, as I believe, that environment spawns innovation, America does not really have that much to brag about. Considering the excellent exposure everyone receives, we should have an avalanche of breakthroughs, instead of roughly one every fifty years. What is to become of us when other countries begin to develop a production-based environment? They won’t have the dead weight of middle-management whose primary concern is to preserve the status quo. End of lesson.
Last, I am still testing the Deskshare software, “WebCam Monitor” and I am very, very impressed. They must have some real programmers over there, probably with mainframe experience. What a pity for the world that the last of the real programmers are nearing retirement age. The bigger pity is what is going to replace them. The “OnErr GoTo” crowd. Bypass the error, don’t fix it.
