Financial topics

[OLD1953]

Apple products are showing weakness compared to Android devices - and now the tech press is taking notice. That Android is now 75% of the smartphone market worldwide can no longer be ignored in Apple stock prices. Apple has driven the market up, so will Apple now drive the market down?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57563 ... -category/

And there is no argument about the echo chamber from me, the valley tech writers are living in a world of their own. What's the idea of "latest" meaning "a few months after Android gets it"? Apple will be the one to watch this year, because if Apple drops to sane pricing levels, the market measures it has kept up are going to drop with it. (I do resent the crack about older users though, my wife has a Droid X and absolutely loves it. She's 61. Where I work, there's no point in a cell device.)

[OLD1953]

Apple has been dropping, and given that Android has simply passed up the Apple OS is unlikely to recover. Apple has been propping up the market as has been noted here multiple times, will they drag the entire market down with them as they drop? It seems very possible to me. I haven't seen much from CES about how great APPLE is this year.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57563 ... -category/

I'll agree with him totally about the Apple echo chamber on the coast, though not so much about the older folks being the Apple fans.

Apple peaked at a touch over 700 in late September. It's now down in the lower 500's range.

[John]

Just saw a good segment on 60 Minutes explaining why manufacturing is
returning to the United States. There's an avalanche of automation,
and a robot can do a job for $3.50 per hour - the same as a Chinese
worker -- so the manufacturing comes back here.

However the jobs don't come back.

[Marc]

Just saw a good segment on 60 Minutes explaining why manufacturing is
returning to the United States. There's an avalanche of automation,
and a robot can do a job for $3.50 per hour - the same as a Chinese
worker -- so the manufacturing comes back here.

However the jobs don't come back.

I also just saw that 60 Minutes segment on automation and artificial intelligence. Thanks, John, for mentioning it, and yes, it does make you think where we will be in 20 or 30 years with AI, automation, and...jobs. While a few of the jobs come back, most indeed don't.

Yet, I feel that there is reason to be an optimist here. While much of the work we do has been, and will continue to become, automated, I still feel that there will be significant work for people to do. We will, however, need to re-think our educational system (yes, I know that many others have said that!), but do a much better job
of coming up with, for example, novel academic degrees/credentials — aided of course by state-of-the-art computer learning — which make skills training of a higher order much more accessible to many more people. I feel that the replacement of many automatable tasks with computers/robots will allow, for example, opportunities for many more personnel to assist with things ranging from elementary education to correctional rehabilitation to elder and youth mentoring. There will also be many more opportunities, I feel, for "design associates" in areas such as architecture, engineering, and advertising. This can lead to much more "custom attention" given to society at a level that simply wasn't possible before — and helping to solve problems and pathologies that were deemed intractable in the past.

Thus, while I don't claim a utopian future several decades down the road, I don't think that it will be a nightmare, either — and all in all, I don't think that it will look really anything at all like The Jetsons

Thanks for sharing! —Regards, Marc

[Higgenbotham]

About 25 years ago I took an evening course in programmable logic controllers at a local technical college. The instructor was an engineer at Gilman Engineering in Janesville, WI. He took us to their facility to show us the robot they had just finished building. The robot was able to take all the parts for a Delta faucet sprayer, automatically assemble them, and put the assembled sprayer into a plastic bag.

I can't figure out what happened to Gilman Engineering. My thought has always been that when a robot can be built that can scan and bag groceries cheaper than a checkout, then the age of robotics will have arrived for real. But progress is being made, as I've noticed a technical problem that engineers struggled with in manufacturing, that of packing flexible bags like potato chips into boxes, was solved about 8 years ago. There's a small picture with this caption on the left hand side of the article.

Mark Duran Sr. is the only operator for nine SunChips packaging lines on his shift. The high-speed lines feature robotic case packers and palletizers. Source: Reed Rahn.

http://www.foodengineeringmag.com/artic ... r-net-zero

I can state one thing for sure because I worked in one of those plants. Those 9 lines that now employ 1 worker used to employ 11 workers, there were 40 lines in the plant I worked in, and the company had 40 plants nationwide.

[John]

I just heard an interview on the BBC where some college professor can
predict the direction of the DOW three days in advance, with 87%
success, by analyzing millions of tweets in real time. That's really
scary. Unfortunately, I wasn't listening closely enough to get names.

[Higgenbotham]

I wouldn't be scared if the success rate was 60-70% but 87% is indeed scary.

[Marc]

If that 87% success rate in predicting the direction of the Dow (going three days forward, based upon tweets) is valid, this gives pretty strong evidence that securities-market direction is heavily determined by human sentiment. True, much of that sentiment is intelligent sentiment, but it really shows how the herd drives the contour of the farm, so to speak. Thanks again, John and Higgs, for sharing. —Regards, Marc

[Higgenbotham]

Regarding the robotic case packers, I did some looking to see what kind of headcount reduction there has been at the plant I worked in. It turns out there hasn't been any because they are still hand packing the boxes. Then I looked further to see if the other plants are still hand packing and there are hand packers at other plants who have written recent reviews of the company on Glassdoor. If I had to hazard a guess as to the reason for this, it's because the company thought the robotic case packers would be economic but they turned out not to be. Reason I say that is because, when I worked there, if something was tried in one plant and it worked well, it was rolled out company wide quickly, usually within a couple years.

[aedens]

http://www.examiner.com/article/two-gun ... no-answers

"The Angel of the Odd" was first published in Columbian Magazine in April 1844