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2010-07-04 Home Front: Politix

Detroit: The Once Great Shining City Upon a Hill

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Posted by Fred 2010-07-04 00:00|| || Front Page|| [7 views ] Top

#1 Steven Crowder created a Video on Detroit in December '09:

Posted by CrazyFool 2010-07-04 01:04|| 2010-07-04 01:04|| Front Page Top

#2 Whatz the latest on the proposed GREAT LAKES FTA + SEZ-EEZ???

AFAIK POTUS Bammer still hasn't ordered the invasion of GREENLAND + ICELAND yet?

Posted by JosephMendiola 2010-07-04 01:10|| 2010-07-04 01:10|| Front Page Top

#3 Liberal policies, unions, and crappy products driven by consumer-deaf executives since the early 70s. Who could have known?

Posted by gorb 2010-07-04 02:54|| 2010-07-04 02:54|| Front Page Top

#4 I wish Mayor Bing well, but he has only so many chips and so much time to turn around the city and mindset. He is courageous. That said, I hope he is not destined to roll the huge boulder of Detroit govt up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this throughout his term, like the myth of Sisyphus.

Posted by Alaska Paul in NW Iceland 2010-07-04 06:36|| 2010-07-04 06:36|| Front Page Top

#5 as long as someone like the Conyers can get elected I have no hope. The population gets the wreckage they deserve

Posted by Frank G 2010-07-04 10:28|| 2010-07-04 10:28|| Front Page Top

#6 Replace Detroit's motto "Motor City" with the phrase "Abandon all hope ye who enter here"

In Italian Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate

To make Chrysler's new owners feel at home.

And translated into Latin for any priests who remember the language,

-"Omnem dimittite spem, o vos intrantes".

or :

"Omnes relinquite spes, o vos intrantes".

Posted by Goodluck 2010-07-04 11:37|| 2010-07-04 11:37|| Front Page Top

#7 Michigan = California's future.

In Henry Ford Sr's day, Detroit was to be the technology leader, the engine of innovation and economic growth. Wages were far higher than average. Hundreds of startups served an ecosystem characterized by rapid dispersion of new technologies into high value-added products that added enormously to the nation's wealth. Fortunes were made, and workers shared in the prosperity.

Silicon Valley today exhibits many of the same characteristics of Detroit in the latter half of the last century:

-- market consolidation and concentration of revenues into a few industry leaders (Oracle, Intel, Cisco) as former stalwarts fall and/or are swallowed up. Detroit used to have hundreds of auto companies, too.

-- offshoring and outsourcing to lower-cost manufacturing destinations. Today there are ten jobs created in China for every technology job created in Silicon Valley-- and job growth in Silicon Valley is flat, with double-digit unemployment. Andy Grove of Intel calls this a national catastrophe

-- ridiculously heavy tax burdens imposed by a state government in hock to labor unions that squeeze the middle class and force successful companies to look elsewhere.

-- a huge and growing underclass, consciously stoked by a political elite seeking to lock up the fastest-growing electoral bloc.

-- due to the swelling underclass, schools that cannot produce enough qualified engineers and other graduates to supply industry, exacerbating the slide from all of the above.

There's a very good chance that California in 2040 will look like Michigan today. Scary.

Posted by lex 2010-07-04 11:48|| 2010-07-04 11:48|| Front Page Top

#8 "There's a very good chance that California in 2040 will look like Michigan today."

Not until 2040, lex?

Optimistic, aren't you?

Posted by Barbara Skolaut 2010-07-04 13:27|| 2010-07-04 13:27|| Front Page Top

#9 To add to that, in this day and age companies can easily move overseas.

Posted by gorb 2010-07-04 13:54|| 2010-07-04 13:54|| Front Page Top

#10 Former head of Intel, Andy Grove, on the 10x factor

Excerpt:

"The underlying problem isn't simply lower Asian costs. It's our own misplaced faith in the power of startups to create U.S. jobs. Americans love the idea of the guys in the garage inventing something that changes the world. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman recently encapsulated this view in a piece called "Start-Ups, Not Bailouts." His argument: Let tired old companies that do commodity manufacturing die if they have to. If Washington really wants to create jobs, he wrote, it should back startups.

Friedman is wrong. Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment. Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter.

The scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S. And as long as that's the case, plowing capital into young companies that build their factories elsewhere will continue to yield a bad return in terms of American jobs.

What Went Wrong?

Scaling used to work well in Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs came up with an invention. Investors gave them money to build their business. If the founders and their investors were lucky, the company grew and had an initial public offering, which brought in money that financed further growth.

I am fortunate to have lived through one such example. In 1968 two well-known technologists and their investor friends anted up $3 million to start Intel (INTC), making memory chips for the computer industry. From the beginning we had to figure out how to make our chips in volume. We had to build factories, hire, train, and retain employees, establish relationships with suppliers, and sort out a million other things before Intel could become a billion-dollar company. Three years later the company went public and grew to be one of the biggest technology companies in the world. By 1980, 10 years after our IPO, about 13,000 people worked for Intel in the U.S.

Not far from Intel's headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., other companies developed. Tandem Computers went through a similar process, then Sun Microsystems, Cisco (CSCO), Netscape, and on and on. Some companies died along the way or were absorbed by others, but each survivor added to the complex technological ecosystem that came to be called Silicon Valley.

As time passed, wages and health-care costs rose in the U.S. China opened up. American companies discovered that they could have their manufacturing and even their engineering done more cheaply overseas. When they did so, margins improved. Management was happy, and so were stockholders. Growth continued, even more profitably. But the job machine began sputtering.

Today, manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is about 166,000, lower than it was before the first PC, the MITS Altair 2800, was assembled in 1975 (figure-B). Meanwhile, a very effective computer manufacturing industry has emerged in Asia, employing about 1.5 million workersfactory employees, engineers, and managers. The largest of these companies is Hon Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn. The company has grown at an astounding rate, first in Taiwan and later in China. Its revenues last year were $62 billion, larger than Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Dell (DELL), or Intel. Foxconn employs over 800,000 people, more than the combined worldwide head count of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Intel, and Sony

Posted by lex 2010-07-04 15:42|| 2010-07-04 15:42|| Front Page Top

#11 We are becoming another Mexican/Brazilian-style banana republic:

-- a tiny oligarchy at the top;

-- a huge and swelling underclass that has more than doubled since 1986 due to the deliberate importation by corrupt elites of nearly 10 million illiterate or semiliterate campesinos from the south;

-- a rapidly growing, deeply-entrenched public sector union class;

-- and squeezed between all of the above, a shrinking and financially harried middle class.

Why are we doing this to ourselves?

Who will stand up and call BS on Tweedledum and Tweedledee and their fanboys in the media?

Posted by lex 2010-07-04 15:47|| 2010-07-04 15:47|| Front Page Top

#12 -- a huge and swelling underclass that has more than doubled since 1986

And a disappearing middle-class for the reasons you have cited.

-- due to the swelling underclass, schools that cannot produce enough qualified engineers and other graduates to supply industry, exacerbating the slide from all of the above.

The schools are producing engineers but there are no jobs. A call-in on Limbaugh the other day was a electrical engineer who was unemployed. I think he said he had a masters degree in EE and 19 years of experience. He cannot find a job. He received an unemployment check. Listed on the check were his unemployment money, an item listed as stimulus money for $22.00, and an item where he paid $28.00 for income tax. The government giveth and taketh away all on the same check. Increasingly the underclass is being made up of such people who are unemployed or underemployed. Some of our engineering is being farmed out to India. I would expect that before too long quite a bit of our medicine will be farmed out to India also.

Posted by JohnQC 2010-07-04 22:39|| 2010-07-04 22:39|| Front Page Top

23:25 gorb
23:21 gorb
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22:50 Pappy
22:40 Nimble Spemble
22:39 JohnQC
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19:30 crosspatch
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18:30 ed