On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 9:46 AM, Björn Helgason <[email protected]> wrote: > Companies are shifting to all kinds of low costs. > > The companies selling services and/or hardware are hard hit.
Yes, I think this is a direct consequence of child labor laws, and the shift away from both farming and industrial economies. People have tried to solve these issues by enforced destruction of things of value (to drive up demand), but I think that that's the wrong approach. > It is very difficult managing a company with a shrinking market. Absolutely. That's the downside of sharing economies, for companies that do not get it. > When people are let go the most productive go first. Not always, some will stay out of a sense of dedication. But yes, and this has always been an issue. It's just becoming more obvious. > The company keeps on going with ever higher percentage of fat. Thus the phrase "corporate welfare". But it's not actually as bad as it might first seem. > We are seeing a major change and many giants are suffering. Of course. ... (some quoted text deleted here) ... > In music etc the middlemen are feeling the heat but the musicians are > better off and in more and better contact with their audience. > > Adverticing seems to be giving money in various ways but it is an difficult > market. > > You do not want spam. I do not want too much, but we've developed pretty good immunities to it. I expect this process to continue. > The social medias are in a strange situation. > > I am personally in favor of communication but hate spam and intrusive > manners as many of them present. Most of it is very low quality, yes. But imagine if spam actually contained useful information. It would still be annoying but ... not all that different from past government efforts, at least in general terms. > Games seem to be growing but it is ever harder to make money out of it. This has always been the way with entertainment industries. Anything that focuses exclusively on popularity is going to have a lot of people wanting to "make it big", trying and failing. Popularity can be important, and you need people who are interested in being popular, but they need people to back them up. Meanwhile, if you want money you have to be willing to provide the things that the people with money want. Similarly, if you want food you have to be willing to provide the things that the people with food want. Similarly for construction and plumbing and so on. Meanwhile... there's huge untapped productivity in the poverty-stricken regions of the world. Many of those people are smarter and more capable than many of those in the rich parts of the world. So self-interested companies find themselves forced to tap into that potential and at the same time struggle to maintain a "competitive advantage", basically riding on the intersection of a wide variety of problems. But what is wealth? You can sometimes approximate wealth by looking at currency (or maybe cash flow) but it's actually quite a bit more complicated than that. My favorite illustration of this issue is http://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.2284.pdf - the presentation there is fairly straightforward. But, restated: from a mathematical point of view, high velocity markets are tremendously inefficient. I expect that this means they tend to decouple value from currency. The result being that successful companies need to provide value in other ways. You still need currency - you can't avoid that - but it's by no means the only way of judging wealth. (And it never has been.) What it is, though, is incredibly convenient. > I have been making money out of working with tourism and it seems to be > growing like many entertainment industries. > > Fluctuates quite a bit. The best answer to fluctuations is probably diversification. Savings helps also, of course. Here in the States, housing developments which offer sustainable gardening are becoming more and more popular, especially with the rich. There are a variety of reasons behind this. One of them is that fresh food tastes good. But there's a lot of other reasons also. Still, having backup systems is important, and even our economies and our politics need backup systems. But you need a certain level of failures before most people appreciate those systems. "Fortunately", there's never a shortage of people willing to break things and to fail. That's something we have always had a huge surplus of. The trick is learning from your mistakes and turning them into something better. (Other tricks include making sure you are attempting things you want to accomplish, and that you are willing to live with the results of your attempts.) Thanks, -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
