Financial topics

[OLD1953]

Higgs, I say again, we are creating junk jobs that don't affect productivity. (Not that I'm at all sure the same measure of "productivity" is being used all the time, nor that the measure of GDP is accurate.) Suppose we take schools for an example. When I went to elementary school, there was one janitor, one principal/administrator, a couple of ladies in the lunchroom and teachers. That was the total staff at Wayland Alexander Elementary School in 1960. Discipline was strict because it had to be, there were about 40 kids to the class. We did not have a guidance counselor for that school specifically, nor did we have other administrators assigned to only that school. Looking at the list of staff now : http://www.ohio.k12.ky.us/school_staff.aspx?schoolid=5 we can see three jobs I don't recognize, a Lab Tech, an Assistant Principal and an FRC. I believe cleaning and food is now contracted out, and doesn't appear. Assuming this is the case, then apart from more teachers for a larger population in the area, there are three extra jobs created without discussing class size. I doubt any of them provide an actually necessary service that could not be performed as it was in 1960, with a single person for several schools.

Since those jobs get counted in that massive lump of costs vs GDP that most consider total productivity, they drag it down. Business is just as guilty of this as government, and we all know it. US firms of all sorts are top heavy with people whose only contribution to things is to get in the way of people trying to work, I am being annoyed by one of them at this moment because he CAN NOT realize this is Iraq and requires different work rules than you apply to people in the USA. I am not sure where the fear of getting rid of nonproductive people originated, if it's boomer managers making excuses because they just can't bear to give someone a pink slip or what, but I SWEAR the fastest way to promotion in many companies is simply to be the biggest screwup you can possibly be. Automation has indeed increased our productivity on the factory side, but we sopped it all up (on paper) by adding management as fast as mortally possible.

I'll tell you a secret (and I bet John agrees). In every programming shop I"ve ever worked in or around, there was a small minority of people that actually worked at programming and designing programs. The rest have meetings that are ignored (whenever possible) by the worker bees. Very often, major programs are written by a small crew of actual programmer/designers and they usually are not the people who get the credit for it. And that has been universal in my experience. And it also carries over to network design, system administration and every other technical shop I've been in. The nonproductive people always have outnumbered the productive people by at least 2 to 1, usually more. Usually anything that gets done is accomplished because the workers threatened to quit if they weren't allowed to work and fix the issues. The super productive shops you hear about just have one simple rule, you produce USABLE code and you do it to standard, or you leave. The whole ISOXXXX business is a total waste of time and space, it is utterly disconnected from anything but producing a lot of paperwork that gets ignored in the end. If you want to kill trees and make International Paper very happy, start the ISOXXXX processes and watch the printers hum! And it will be a very rare thing indeed for anyone to refer to that pile of garbage. And the same goes double for ITIL - I'm actually certified in that trash, and I tell you three times it's just not ever done correctly, and if it was done correctly it would be too expensive to maintain. Some days I just get disgusted with it all - but then I'm a worker bee, not a paper junkie.

About gold - it was dead easy to find gold price predictions of 3000$ to 5000$ from ten years ago, I read many of them, never bought into it. At that time I warned people on the KITCO forums that it was entirely possible for gold to go into a bubble, and said that any gold I was holding for an investment I would sell if the price rose above 1600 and I didn't see anything new ongoing. And I still don't see anything new, corrupt banks were no surprise to me as I knew the banks were taking the same well paved road the S&L's had trod years before. Gold performance hasn't been better or worse than anything else, I think people don't realize virtually everything of durable value in the USA was in a bubble, and prices still haven't reset to realistic levels.

Addendum: Just happened to look at metals prices this morning, and gold is over the price of platinum, and about 58 times the price of silver. In the world since 1900, those ratios should hold near gold as 1/2 platinum and no more than 25 times silver. This is very clear evidence to me that gold is in a bubble. I know the gold sites like to claim gold as the measure of all things, but really it isn't, it holds those ratios over long periods of times for a reason. If silver and platinum hold (unlikely as they are dropping) then gold should be about 700$ per ounce to hold near the historic norm as I know it. (The norm since the discovery of the Comstock Lode, and it's just amazing how many gold sites talk about the history of gold FOREVER, but never mention why the ratios changed.)

The great reset of a true crisis brings us back to examine the basics, for example take autombiles. The basic purpose of an automobile is to get you from point A to point B without breakdown or breaking your bankbook. We now have autos that perform this function, but also come factory equipped as a mobile office with phones, entertainment systems, guidance systems, collision avoidance systems and more computing power than the original space shuttle. All these are nice, granted, I like them too, but they are not part of the basic purpose of an automobile. We are rapidly approaching a point where we either build cheap cars without these addons, or the greater part of the US public starts walking or riding bicycles. So are we more productive to build five of these little vehicles, or one fully equipped land barge? The five will obviously put more people on the road, thus giving them greater opportunity to make money, shop, etc.

We can raise productivity and will, by firing or retraining nonproductive people and putting them in productive jobs. But it takes a real crisis to make this happen. We're like drunks that haven't hit bottom yet, we are just going to keep grabbing the bottle until we do hit bottom. From there, any direction is up.

[aedens]

Oslo Stock Exchange will issue punitive changes to traders if they send too many orders into the exchange that do not result in deals being done. ht z
About damn time.... Vanilla will wait....

[jcsok]

Addendum: Just happened to look at metals prices this morning, and gold is over the price of platinum, and about 58 times the price of silver. In the world since 1900, those ratios should hold near gold as 1/2 platinum and no more than 25 times silver.

I don't watch the gold/silver ratio often, but please check your charts again. I think since the silver crash in the early 80's that the ratio has been about 50.

[Higgenbotham]

I SWEAR the fastest way to promotion in many companies is simply to be the biggest screwup you can possibly be.

OLD, maybe you've heard some of these kinds of stories because I've heard them more than once.

Now it used to be that the path to promotion was to do your particular job better than anyone else. I too am hearing "no longer". I've heard this most in the area of sales. The best sales people tell me they are passed over for promotions and report to screwups who don't know how to sell (or lead a sales team either). I am told that the reason given is good sales people are very rare and they are needed in sales. I've also heard this to a lesser extent in engineering. I got a call one day from the manager of a large coal plant. He said the control unit had gone down and needed to report they are out of compliance. I asked how many stages were down and he said one. I said you're OK then, you didn't need to call it in. Then I went over to a woman who used to be an engineer in the coal plant and told her what happened and asked her who this idiot is who runs this plant and doesn't know how to figure out whether he is in compliance. She said she knew him and the power company promotes the absolute stupidest people they have.

So you got me. I'm beginning to understand that the only social arrangement I do understand is the circa 1900 small town or village where everyone had a real function to perform and they had to perform it or risk starvation. I simply don't have the mental capacity to understand why incompetents are put in charge of competents and paid more on a regular basis in this society. And from what I've heard and seen it is the rule for this to happen, not the exception.

[John]

It's because Boomers are incompetent managers, and because Gen-Xers
hate Boomers, and base everything they do on hatred of Boomers.

When you start interpreting events in that way, then everything makes sense.

John

[Trevor]

I've known some x-ers who hold no hatred of Boomers. It's very much the exception to the rule, though.

Personally, I'm amazed we're not already in a depression. Despite claims of recovery, things are continuing to fall apart in more and more places around the world, putting more strain on (somewhat) healthy economies.

[Higgenbotham]

It's because Boomers are incompetent managers, and because Gen-Xers
hate Boomers, and base everything they do on hatred of Boomers.

When you start interpreting events in that way, then everything makes sense.

John

In INC magazine a few years ago, the CEO of a rapidly growing business explained the process by which large companies become incompetent and bite the dust. He explained it as the person who starts the successful business is a 10 (on a scale of 1 to 10). He looks for the best people he can find, but can't find any 10s so he hires 9s. The 9s don't want to manage their equals so they hire 7s and 8s. Likewise, the 7s and 8s hire 5s and 6s and the process continues until the management is mediocre. Maybe on average it takes a generational cycle for this process to degrade organizations to the point that they are no longer functional.

But I also think we have a larger problem here. In my opinion, Barack Obama is no George Washington, he is no Abraham Lincoln, and he is no Franklin Delano Roosevelt. An old man from the hero generation told me, "This man is not presidential timber." Jamie Dimon is no JP Morgan, Jeff Immelt is no Thomas Edison, etc. Lee Iococca said, "Where have all the leaders gone?" I don't know if JP Morgan and Thomas Edison were still managing their respective businesses during the last crisis era, but if not whoever was had probably been hand picked by the founders.

[John]

Do you remember the Peter Principle?

Each person keeps getting promoted until he rises to the level
of his own incompetence.

John

[Higgenbotham]

I had heard of the Peter Principle but to me it didn't make sense at the time. However, if we look at it as the skill levels that are required in today's advanced economy have evolved to the point that they are above and beyond the skill levels that most humans naturally possess, then maybe it does make sense. That would mean that it's simply impossible to find the level of competence to perform the existing functions regardless of generational considerations. And we do hear of lots of unfilled jobs that purportedly remain open because the skilled personnel to fill them don't exist.

On that theory. the reasoning would go that the world is so complex that nobody can be as competent as a George Washington or an Abraham Lincoln, or a JP Morgan or a Thomas Edison. Thus, we stall and falter unless the singularity bails us out.

There would be another unpleasant side effect of the above situation. If there is truly a shortage of competent people in most organizations (I believe that is the case), the Boomer managers will lean extra hard on those competent people who do exist, driving them to the breaking point, and forcing many to leave, further exacerbating the situation. I wonder how much of the reduction in workforce participation might be due to this.

[Trevor]

Don't forget about the Dilbert Principle, where companies most their most incompetent people to management to limit the amount of damage that they can do.