The flip side of technology’s bountiful impact
on rigged-market Nepotism is the destruction that modernization leaves in its historical
wake. From the automobile blindsiding a proud
and long established buggy whip industry, the neoclassical example, to today’s
high-frequency trading algorithms chopping stock quotes off at the knees for absolutely
no humanity-related reason whatsoever, the collateral damage caused by progress
has, at times, been extreme.
Enter robotics. We’ve bemoaned job outsourcing since Day One, but always with an unwritten disclaimer in mind. If the powers that be 1) had seen that a new
generation of automatons and whatever were about to replace workers anyway, and
2) couldn’t fire everybody without getting labor union cretins off their backs
first, then someday history will rewrite pretty much everything we blogged you
on the subject, and rightfully so.
Paramount still, however, is how to
restore the demand side of our economy, providing the displaced working force with
enough income to buy stuff again. Lots
of stuff. The way they used to. But the real onus here may not have been on
outsourcing at all, but on productivity, and nobody wanted to talk to us about the
permanence involved with that one.
Progress may have reached the point where
something outrageous had to be done, and shipping transitional blue collar jobs
to China and them certainly qualifies as outrageous.
We’ve seen video of the modern factory floor that tends to bear this theory out. In
some areas there are no people at all, just scary mechanical devices. Big scary mechanical devices. The media released a story along these lines
once, and then the talking heads dropped it, which also lends credibility to
our conclusion that some kind of structural economic deterioration has taken
place here that would freak people out were somebody to acknowledge what’s actually
been going on.
Which brings us to the 3D printer, a kind
of Xerox machine that copies a real thing and makes you another one just like
it out of powdered something or other. Real
thing like a handgun, which enthusiasts are already printing out at home through
some website that gun control crazies are trying to shut down - even though the
printed guns don’t even work yet. Anyway,
there’s a guy who thinks that 3D printing technology, like automation, will wreak further job loss, the kind of damage that, coming on top of all the outsourcing, could finally crush rigged-market Nepotism entirely, and soon. Like within 5 years, which just happens to
sit on the outer rim of the boiler plate Wall Street 3 to 5 year long-term
projection.
Anything within that window is supposed to
impact stock market prices in the here and now.
More and more we find ourselves turning to
the ancients and their “all roads lead to Rome” metaphor. To this antediluvian blogger, 2013 is the
scariest year yet, and now a guy shows up trumpeting the fall of jobs as we
know them, and there’s already been a $#&%ing precedent.
Valued subscribers, whatever comes along
these days, including this 3D thing, the answer always seems to be the same:
hold gilt-edge blue chips at this moment in time, and nothing else. Nothing.
All roads lead to the highest quality portfolio in town. Everything you read should be telling you that
such stocks will be the only investments standing amidst brutally gory rubble if
western civilization actually does come down, and it might. Given the bought and paid-for leadership running
Washington today, it just might.
Anyway, the 3D printing guy’s time frame
is more than a little suspect, and there’s no hard evidence yet that the new technology
will ever actually, well, work at all really, so don’t go getting your panties all
bunched up in a knot. We’re simply writing
this piece because it sheds rare light on the mystical side of investing -
trying to position yourself for a future we’ve no way of divining based on a
present the rich and powerful keep us in the dark about through lies,
disinformation, deceit, and….
Silence, the most effective propaganda
weapon of them all.
Here’s the 3D printing guy’s piece; enjoy:
