[Coronita]

The thing I hate also about Samsung phones, is there UI is so non standard that if you get use to a samsung phone, it’s a little ackward to switch to any other Android phone that follows the same UI conventions, and vice versa. For starters, Samsung has two buttons at the bottom and happen to switch the order of the two buttons from how every other Android device has them.

[Coronita]

[quote=evolusd]I’m eyeing the Nexus 6P to replace my HTC One M9. I’m a big fan of stereo speakers on the front as I watch lots of vids sans headphones.[/quote]

The 6P is ok, not bad, it’s just old. It’s one of the phones i use for testing.it’s wifi/bluetooth works ok. It’s one of Huawei’s first main phones.

Whatever you do, do NOT get the Nexus 5X, it’s a really really shitty phone when it comes to connectivity. When you try to discover WIFI devices or Bluetooth devices, sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t. It’s especially bad if there are lots of devices nearby. You might see nothing, and then if you search and scan again, you see them again.

The Nexus 5 (discontinued) is actually a very reliable phone. Unfortunately, it’s discontinued and it will no longer support any O/S past Marshmallow.

Google is suppose to be coming up with a new set of phones soon running N. I haven’t seen them myself. Most new phones come out during the october-november timeframe, right in time for the holiday sales, along with most other electronic devices. So unless you are in a rush, I would wait until around that time.

[Coronita]

Speaking of which….
China’s Reviving the American Heartland — One Low Wage at a Time
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-08/china-rises-in-the-american-heartland-giving-as-it-takes-away

[Coronita]

[quote=no_such_reality]
flu you’re being very literal.
[/quote]

Well yes, because depending on the occupation, the current level of technology, it dictates how practical work can be outsourced or offshored,

[quote]
not sure what local wages are when the global environment is dictating what wages are. Top talent only justifies local presence if there shortage of that talent outside of the area or you’re required to have local presence for other reasons.
[/quote]

Sure it makes a difference. You don’t think a HVAC guy in Mexico charges $400 to change a capacitor do you? Or a BMW mechanic billing out $150/hr in labor? Or a guy that replaces a faucet that takes about 20 minutes, $100 for the labor alone. There are jobs that can be outsource/offshored, and there are ones that cannot. And some of your desk jobs might not currently be offshored because it’s current or new, but give enough time, it will be, unless you change and do something else that no one else has started working on yet.

Software is a perfect example…When android first came it, it was the latest thing. And to do really easy stuff, most people could probably do it. But short of a simple “hello world” program, people quickly figured out to do anything slightly more complex, nothing existed. So the top architects and designers worked on the stack, worked at the framework, and created a bunch of libraries, toolkits, shared services, so that the not-so-top-talent could more easily build stuff.

And then, you had not-so-top-talent reusing a lot of the libraries/tools/etc to build even more stuff on top of that for the slightly-more-stupid talent to be able to do useful things….

And eventually, given enough time, and enough people working on the same platform, piling things on top of things, you end up with saturation in which your idiot-“programmer” that barely can do anything with threading can finally write a hello world program without even know what threading is, what Binder is, what RPC does, etc….

And for about 70% of work that is left to be done at this stage is pretty much crap work that is copy-cut-paste from some website that someone already wrote about years ago that already solved the problem…So that some guy in some IT shop overseas could write something that worked reasonably well and that solved 70-80% of the problem at 3/10th the cost…Depending on the type of the company, they might only care about 70-80% of the solution and not be willing to pay for the remaining 20-30% of the solution, especially if the company is not really a tech company and just needs some “programmer”.

So yeah, as your american software engineer, you really don’t want to working when just about everyone else in the world can do what you claim is your skill at the current moment. Java J2EE engineers are a perfect example. Dime a dozen. Move on, find something else new, become an expert in that thing, before everyone else is, and milk as much money you can while you are the expert before you and every other expert starts making it easier for everyone else.

[quote]
When today’s local top talent retires who will replace them?
[/quote]

Well, you’ll have a natural death of certain technology. So a lot of people won’t be replaced. And you’ll have a bunch of young people that learned something new that a bunch of old people refused to learn, and those new things will end up being used by the latest tech companies, while things that the old guys learned ends up becoming something like Fortran and Cobol.

And hopefully if you’re one of the old farts that decided to stop learning, you’ve saved enough F.U. money from when you were milking it when your skills were in demand, that you don’t care anymore in your old age. Or you have passive income coming from elsewhere.

[quote]
hint: the guys off shore that already replaced the mid-level talent.[/quote]

Not really

[Coronita]

[quote=zk][quote=flu]God I hate samsung Android phones. Boatload of connectivity issues on Bluetooth BLE and WIFI. The bane of my existence, and they are not simply just issues with Android O/S. It’s issues on top of the already existing issues on Android O/S, that are specific to Samsung.

Then again, since not many people know how to deal with it, it keeps me employed and in demand. Lol.[/quote]

I haven’t had any connectivity problems with my samsungs yet.

That said, I’m open to suggestions. I’ve heard transitioning to apple from droid can be kind of a pain. But I’m not ruling it out. I like a big screen, like the Note 4 I had and the Note 7 I have. I’ve never used the stylus feature, so I don’t care about that.[/quote]

I’m trying to get a hold of the new Moto Z Force for testing. If I get it, I’ll let you know if it’s decent. It’s under Lenovo ownership now, so I don’t know if that makes a different wrto support.

https://www.motorola.com/us/products/moto-z-force-droid-edition

[Coronita]

[quote=no_such_reality]
Skills sets are progressive. You can’t have an economy that just has top level skills and jobs.

Well, you can, but that only works for a generation.
[/quote]

Well, you don’t need everyone to have the top skills. You just need enough people in your country to have the top skill to justify having a presence here at all, so the rest of the people who aren’t top level skills can be supported locally with local wages.

Building a damn is also slightly different. The work literally has to be done here, unlike building a portable product or service. Different set of rules.

[Coronita]

[quote=no_such_reality]The same argument can be made about clean air, clean water and everything else that is an input.

Many countries have lower costs of doing business. From a regulatory environment to labor to actual resource inputs.

Those countries are choosing economic growth over externalized costs.

Kind of like the Hoover Dam, I really doubt we could get it built today. The laws were different then, employment expectations (and employee safety) were different then.

IMHO, the G8 need to do a much better job at pushing the developing world into uplifting it’s standard of living.[/quote]

You wouldn’t need as many people to build hover dam today, because you would have technological advances for which machines did some of the work that labor use to do..

Also, you would have fewer U.S. workers making the components of that dam, because some of those components could be built more efficiently elsewhere since the manufacturing line was already setup elsewhere, when in the U.S. no company invested the time, resources, over decades to create that know-how here (bad analogy, since with damn building, there probably isn’t some special factory line that is needed, but for some industries, technology to be specific, you need Fab, and not many companies have the knowhow. How many companies will be able to Fab at 10nm and 7nm in the U.S? Maybe intel, and that’s big if. Samsung and TSM, are expected to in 2016….Should all chips made in the U.S. be restricted to being only made in the U.S. and not be able to access 10nm and 7nm that will be first available in Korea and Taiwan respectively? If so, wouldn’t this put U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage versus your OEM from China that can use 10nm and 7nm at TSM and Samsung?

I suppose you could mandate that we should use fewer machines and more people, but it would take longer and cost more, which would be something that the taxpayer would end up paying for.

A lot of people think that going overseas is simply about being cost. In many cases, that’s not true. Especially in technology, some of this stuff is no longer done here and to bring it back will take a unsurmountable amount of time and resources, and may not even yield results from companies doing this for some time elsewhere with the expertise. There is a reason why most chip companies are Fab-less and do the bulk of the Fab work to companies like TSM and Samsung. Because they wouldn’t be able to do it better, and they definitely wouldn’t be able to get to the market quicker if they did.

[Coronita]

[quote=Escoguy]Tariffs could be calculated based on differential fringe benefits.
I.e. if a plant in china has 5% direct labor costs but 2% fringe as there is less insurance, social security/medicaid, days off etc, but a US factory has the same direct labor cost and another 5% for fringe as a percentage of the final product price, a tariff could be imposed that offsets that difference.

It would remove the incentive for Chinese employers to screw their employees by making the total compensation comparable even if the absolute level is lower.

I.e. you impose your social policies on your trading partners. not sure if WTO rules allow that.

But if so, it would put pressure on Chinese employers to raise benefits.[/quote]

Those rules would only apply if the company that owns the factory is American. Those rules would not apply to companies that reside outside of the U.S. and given that especially in technology, a bulk of the business is not in the U.S., there’s not much the U.S government could do short of bringing their grievances to the WTO.

That’s why you have a company like Huawei, that does not do a lot a business in the U.S., but pretty much kicking everyone one else’s butt in telecom and networking infrastructure, both U.S. and European companies to the point that they ended up putting most of the European and U.S. companies under (with the exception of Cisco Systems). A customer, like a South American telco company is not going to care the details of “how much better it treats its workers” say Cisco Systems, versus say Huawei (for argument say, let’s assume that’s the case). That south american telco company is only going to care about which system is better an which one is cheaper. (Side note: Huawei has been paying well to poach talent too, also a fair game).

And since most U.S. companies these day derive a significant amount of their business overseas, the rules are often tied to how things are in that country. GM for instance sold more cars in China then they do in the U.S. It’s been like this for some time now.

This is actually one of the problems that companies like Qualcomm has to deal with all the time, though to a lesser extent because of it’s revenue from it’s patent portfolio and licensing. If it were to compete on chip manufacturing itself, it probably wouldn’t last very long without bringing out the cutting edge design, especially since most of the connectivity stuff is quickly getting commoditized.

American companies can afford to pay for a lot more for skills that a lot better than what they can get elsewhere, whether that skill brings in new technology or makes significant improvements over everyone else. But if american companies had to compete on cost and cost alone, they would never win if they could only employ u.s. workers, if the workers have like equal productivity as everyone else in the world.

[Coronita]

[quote=no_such_reality]https://www.hillaryclinton.com/briefing/factsheets/2016/08/01/hillary-clintons-100-day-jobs-plan/

[quote]That’s why, in her first 100 days in office, Hillary will break through Washington gridlock to make the biggest investment in good-paying jobs since World War II, putting us on a path to a stronger future for our children and grandchildren.[/quote]

Bold is their emphasis, not mine.[/quote]

No political candidate is going to “fix” the job loss problem due to being obsolete and outdated skill set. No one can stop progress, and if there is a financial benefit to making something faster, cheaper, it will be done…If not by U.S. companies, by some other company or someone else somewhere else. China’s labor cost are already existing those of other nations in the eastern european block and Vietnam, which is why for some time you see factories and corporations setting up shop there now.

If people in this country do not want to accept the fact that those jobs aren’t coming back and they have no choice but to retrain and retool on the “next thing”, there is no politician that can fix this problem. Anyone who claims they can, is lying and simply underestimates the nature of technological advances.

Just look at your local home depot or ralph’s/vons. Instead of hiring 4 cashiers, you now have 4 self checkout stands and 1 person to manage all 4 machines. And personally, I like the self checkout because I can get out of the store a lot quicker than some cashier that wants to make conversation with their customers while checking out.

[Coronita]

And yet, no one is complaining that they only have to pay $500 for a complete computer system from Walmart, as opposed to $4000-5000, back in 1980’s, which was the cost of my first Mac.

Nor is anyone complaining that they can buy a Samsung 4K TV for $1000 tops, as opposed to the first plasmas that were around $3000-4000.

Also, how do you “bring back manufacturing jobs” that were replaced by automation and robotics, which is a significant chunk of the job losses?

Should we discourage people from using eMail and instead insist people send more snail mail, so that we can increase the volume of snail mail so that we can maintain the level of employment in the USPS as we have in the past?

[Coronita]

God I hate samsung Android phones. Boatload of connectivity issues on Bluetooth BLE and WIFI. The bane of my existence, and they are not simply just issues with Android O/S. It’s issues on top of the already existing issues on Android O/S, that are specific to Samsung.

Then again, since not many people know how to deal with it, it keeps me employed and in demand. Lol.

[Coronita]

Mira Mesa is a great place. Lots of new professionals. There were plenty of homes in the Sorrento Heights Pardee community that sold in the high $7’s and I think a few in the low $8s.

This home might be high given where it’s located, but Mira Mesa itself isn’t cheap anymore either.

I have just tiny rentals in MM, and I’m counting on a continued revitalization to push housing up further. Location-wise, it’s great because it’s so close to tech corridor. I don’t think I would ever sell since the cash flow is ridiculously good given the prices that I bought.

I just wish I picked up SFH’s when prices were still cheap. I’m currently priced out out Mira Mesa SFH. Lol.

Home prices in MM can’t possibly be worse than it is right now in Carmel Valley. I’m seeing 3/3 condos that at peak were in the $600’s now well above peak trying to push into the high $6, low $7s..

[Coronita]

Is this another home brought to you by Courtney Campbell???

Sorry, I couldn’t resist and had to ask….

[Coronita]

Meh, if there’s a voting system, then I’ll be the one trying to get the most negative votes. It means I’m doing a good job pissing people off. heh heh.

[Coronita]

[quote=ucodegen][quote=flu]Track rat miata cost $24 to fill up, getting 18 miles/gallon (lol)..Synthetic motor oil fell from $35 to $20 for 5 quarts.

So much for peak oil…Lol.[/quote]
A little OT.. but why are you getting such bad mileage on the Miata? Different ECU tuning? Running rich? I presume it is not road registered, or you don’t have to smog where you live?[/quote]

Lol, *thread jack*.

CARB legal supercharger on CARB legal piggyback ECU on a stripped interior and a heavy right foot. I think if I tried, I could probably get 25mpg. But currently, my SUV gets better gas mileage. Lol

[Author]

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