I try to avoid politics.  It generally causes conflict.  Hah!  First.  History lesson.

Conservative = staying the course, reticent to change, stable

Liberal = embraces change, risky, fast paced

Historically, it’s been in many people’s best interests to be conservative.  This has allowed people to grow within confines, reduce environmental variables and generally assist in the growth of population.  ie: make more people, grow stronger.

Liberal movements come into play when you have a sound foundation.  You have surpluses of food and money.  Lots of people.  Lots of ideas.  Liberal thoughts allow a culture to grow.  ie: allows innovation, grow smarter.

The first web browser was made available in 1991.  So if you think about it, people born from 1980+ are initimitely familiar with the internet.  Younger you get, the more so.  The speed and information on the net is inherently liberal.  Everything has to be new.  It gives everyone a soap box.  People born before 1980 or people who can’t afford a computer and internet access are traditionally conservative.  They were brought up during recessions, hard times, wars.  They require stability.  These are simply generalizations, there are definitely exceptions.

What am I getting at you ask?  Simple.  Where tradition states the older you get the more conservative you become, this is become less and less so with the advent of mass communication.  40 year olds are adapting to new ideas and structures at a pace never seen before.  People are getting used to constant change and flux.  The Canadian election is proof of this.  The same old same old pushed away 40% of all voters.  There’s no change, therefore, no interest.  The US elections are similar.  Obama’s line is all about change and he’s pulling out people left right and center to vote for it.  This, in the middle of the worst economic recession in 80 years, the perfect time to BE conservative.

I find this all very fascinating.

I’ll start off by saying, I’m not an investor.  I don’t pretend to know the complexities but I have read enough and taken courses to have some slight idea in the matter.

Over the past 12 months, the Dow Jones index fell from a high of 14,000 to less than 8,000.  More specifically, in the last month alone, 3,000 points were lost.  People who are selling now are losing their shirts.

Quick backstory, the US economy has been in an upswing for 15 years.  This is unnatural, especially after the IT bubble burst in 2000.  The economy should have corrected itself but the government propped it up to avoid a mini-recession.  It’s like supporting a house with a crumbling foundation with sand.  Holds for a bit but if it gets wet, everything goes.  Well, I’ve been saying for 2 years now that the housing/mortgage issue is going to destroy the US, here we are…

The silver lining in all of this is such.  When it finishes tanking (6 months or so) there will be huge opportunities for long term investments in sound businesses.  Renewable fuels?  Yessir.  Grains?  You betcha.  Bio research?  Nothing but the best.  Intangible, insoluable items?  Hell’s no!

When everything is scraping the bottom, that’s the time to find the diamonds in the rough.

Link

Since I used to work for HP (through Sitel), I have some familiarity with outsourcing.  First off, no one wants to talk to someone with an accent so thick you can’t tell the difference between on and off.  Be it Indian or someone from Newfounland.   Clear communication is key in any client service centre.  Fine, out of the way.

Back when outsourcing was the “in” thing, companies just shut down local business and shipped it out overseas (or to Canada for a while).  Made sense, it cost 50-80% less to host it elsewhere.  Of course, the main problem is that you’re now “exporting” money into another country, reducing the amount of cash available in yours, which is where your product is sold.  Moving on…

Outsourcing is bad for a few reasons.  First, technical expertise != client skills.  You have your engineers working for the company and you have to hire people off the street with no knowledge of your products or client needs.  All of the people with those skill sets are in another country, working for another company.  You’re fine for about 5 years but when people start retiring or finding another job, you have no one to replace them and become “top heavy” due to the sheer amount of managers you have compared to regular workers.

Second, there are haves and have-nots.  Think of it this way, every country is a cup.  The americas are a full cup, India (for example) is 10% full.  India will do a lot of work in order to fill their cup.  Eventually however, their cup fills up and the benefits diminish.  People have higher education, more expesive lifestyles and therefore require more money.  As long as the money out is less than the money in, you win.  This range is shrinking daily.

Third, expectations.  We live a life of first world luxury.  I mean it, even the poorest Canadian is 1000x richer than most other people on the planet.  A panhandler makes more money than a doctor in Africa.  As we outsoruce money, we are in fact increasing the third world expectation to live in first world luxury.  Plain and simple, the world cannot handle that.  We don’t have enough resources.  I’m not saying we need to keep other countries down, what I am saying is that it took us 400 years to reach this point.  You can’t expect an entire country of near billion people to do that 400 years in 15 and NOT have huge consequences.

What I’m really trying to get at is that it’s a very complicated system.  Companies do not excel at quality, they excel at quantity.  If their products were more reliable and intuitive (Apple support is local for example) they would need 50-75% less staff for support and be able to keep the local economy strong.  Outsourcing is at best, a temporary solution and one that in the long run, hurts everyone in a company.

This story is amazing.

To the left, a burger preserved since 1996, to the right a burger from 2008.  Spot the difference: