The Economy

People LIKE work. It does provide meaning, as Alma says, and as we've all learned the last two months, it's way less boring than sitting at home. I'm retired and I love it, but I loved journalism and at least liked parts of my other jobs.

 

I like my job, but I'm missing by far my favorite part of it -- being out at events, shooting photos, interviewing, writing, interacting. Just sitting at home doing the mundane parts of the job is getting old, fast. But at least there seems to be something to look forward to now. Just gotta grind through it for a few more weeks.

 

This. It's why high school and college students are going to suffer however they end up handling this in the fall.

 

In my pre-pandemic job, I worked for a manufacturer of outdoor goods. They ran in the $5.99 to $7.99 range.

Every few days, we’d get a post on social media telling us our products were crap because they were made in either China or Central America and how this person only buys Made in the USA (usually posted from an iPhone, ironically). To keep the same profit margin, those same items would run double their current MSRP if made here. Of course, you’d lose X amount of sales by doing that. So your bottom line still might take a hit.

 

True.

But if we make it through the next 12 or 18 or 24 months, develop a vaccine and a testing and tracking protocol and return to a state of safe semi-normal, one way to mitigate these academic interruptions might be to offer vouchers for eventual in-person attendance.

 

Not that I'm a huge Yang Gang guy or anything, but - I kind of assume that in my lifetime, we get toward some form of Universal Basic Income. Like in my lifetime, it seems like we've lost way more "old" jobs than we've created with new industries. I don't see that trend reversing as things like automated / self-driving cars are completed. (I doubt that happens 5 years from now, but I can see it happening X years from now, in my lifetime.) At a certain point, there isn't going to be enough jobs for "skilled" workers, never mind "unskilled" workers. We might have already reached that point.

 

What's wild is he might be the thing holding back the real China hawks.
Trump on China: "We could cut off the whole relationship"

 

I think that events like this accelerate technological change. I think that, for example, this crisis will greatly speed up the move to electronic invoicing and records (it was happening anyway). And electronic record keeping is actually far more efficient because you can use a search function instead of digging through a file.

 

The Mexicans thought that NAFTA would be a huge economic boom. While it has been a net positive for the Mexicans it has not really been a boom. The reason is that Mexico had a higher wage structure than China and a lot of the factories the Mexicans thought they could get instead went to China.

If we somehow eliminated all trade with China those jobs will go to Mexico or Honduras or another low wage country. If a company tried, for example, to move the production of plastic gloves to the United States how does he compete with a factory in Malaysia?

 

Proof: Paycom is one of the trendiest stocks to ride these days...its software tracks WFH efforts.

 

Right. In a perfect world, we have leadership the allows us to put into place a sort of revenue bank where a portion of money saved/earned by AI and robotics goes into a national fund, from which a cash stipend is paid out to all Americans...sort of a 21st Century version of the Exxon checks Alaskans get.