The Stock Market and Investing

kyfdx

I think you guys are wrong about autonomous driving. It's coming. It will start with rideshare programs (Uber, etc). The tech works, regardless of current news events. Google (waymo) is way out in front of this. The mainstream car companies are also heavily involved.

Elon Musk isn't any different than any other tech entrepreneur, when it comes to the companies they start. They are setting them up to keep control, even while selling off the majority of the equity (Google, Snap, Facebook, Amazon). As long as investors go along with it, there isn't much you can do about that. And, while his irritatingly arrogant, he might be a whole lot smarter than the rest of us. I still wouldn't invest in his company, though.

berri

Autonomous driving - if I live into my 80's maybe I'll be interested

Mr_Shiftright

kyfdx said:

I think you guys are wrong about autonomous driving. It's coming. It will start with rideshare programs (Uber, etc). The tech works, regardless of current news events. Google (waymo) is way out in front of this. The mainstream car companies are also heavily involved.

Elon Musk isn't any different than any other tech entrepreneur, when it comes to the companies they start. They are setting them up to keep control, even while selling off the majority of the equity (Google, Snap, Facebook, Amazon). As long as investors go along with it, there isn't much you can do about that. And, while his irritatingly arrogant, he might be a whole lot smarter than the rest of us. I still wouldn't invest in his company, though.

Sure, it's "coming" but whether anyone will buy into it, is another matter. This could be Google Glass all over again, or the next Betamax (look it up, you young 'uns).

I'm definitely moving my money around and easing out of equity stocks. I'm not selling anything at a loss, either, so it's a caution move, not a panic.

imidazol97

Mr_Shiftright said:

Sure, it's "coming" but whether anyone will buy into it, is another matter. This could be Google Glass all over again, or the next Betamax (look it up, you young 'uns).

The generation gap! LOL
A great example.

Mr_Shiftright

Autonomous driving could end up as a good example of giving consumers what they don't want---as an example in the automotive realm----Stop/Start technology. Utterly useless, totally annoying, but it serves the automaker.

It's interesting that no one in the world of capitalism/big bucks/government seems to be actively discussion the economic effects of autonomous driving on hundreds and thousands of workers.

Or do they even care?

kyfdx

Mr_Shiftright said:

Autonomous driving could end up as a good example of giving consumers what they don't want---as an example in the automotive realm----Stop/Start technology. Utterly useless, totally annoying, but it serves the automaker.

It's interesting that no one in the world of capitalism/big bucks/government seems to be actively discussion the economic effects of autonomous driving on hundreds and thousands of workers.

Or do they even care?

Increased productivity means less employment. Always has, always will. But, without it, no progress. The lack of blue collar, unskilled or semi-skilled employment opportunities is a real problem, from a social perspective, mostly. But, we aren’t going back to the “good old days”.

I don’t pretend to have the answer to that problem, though.

ab348

Mr_Shiftright said:

This could be Google Glass all over again, or the next Betamax (look it up, you young 'uns).

I was an early adopter of the Beta format. Paid $1500 for my Sony machine in 1980. When I finally broke down and got a VHS machine about 10 years later it was soon apparent it was inferior but by then had won the war.

Mr_Shiftright

The corporate system produces what is profitable for them to produce. Consumers don't always get the best choice--they get the most expedient choice. If a smaller competitor has a better product, the larger entity can attempt to crush them, or under-price them (as the Big 3 did to the Little Two in the 1960s).

I think the job dislocation with autonomous technology (should it take hold) would be more jarring than usual though. For instance, blacksmiths and wagon builders had at least 15 years to re-invent themselves, before the automobile became dominant. This disruption, however, could come much faster--cab drivers, taxi drivers, truck drivers, livery drivers, toll-takers ? , bus drivers, subway employees.

Makes you wonder if technology will be implemented so quickly one day that we just can't adapt, and things start to break down.

More on topic, I'm not ready to invest in autonomous driving technology just yet. I'd want to see way more infrastructure.

Pioneers get arrows in their backs; settlers get the land.

laurasdada

One plus of the 401K is that if you leave your job in the year that you turn 55 yo, you can withdraw funds without paying the 10% penalty (it is still taxable income, though). Unlike traditional IRAs. Of course, consult your financial advisor or talk to your company...

I have no issue with the stop/start tech in my XF. As soon as I got used to it, I didn't find it obtrusive, the car doesn't "shudder" at start.

Got the side ding taken care of this am, looks 90% better. Grille next.

isellhondas

kyfdx said:

I think you guys are wrong about autonomous driving. It's coming. It will start with rideshare programs (Uber, etc). The tech works, regardless of current news events. Google (waymo) is way out in front of this. The mainstream car companies are also heavily involved.

Elon Musk isn't any different than any other tech entrepreneur, when it comes to the companies they start. They are setting them up to keep control, even while selling off the majority of the equity (Google, Snap, Facebook, Amazon). As long as investors go along with it, there isn't much you can do about that. And, while his irritatingly arrogant, he might be a whole lot smarter than the rest of us. I still wouldn't invest in his company, though.

I agree that it's coming and hopefully they can iron out the bugs. For the time being I sure wouldn't want to take a ride in one, would you?

imidazol97

When the upgrades were released, Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, said the new Autopilot system was “really going to be beyond what people expect” and would make the Tesla Model S sedan and the Model X sport utility vehicle the safest cars on the road “by far.”

Mr_Shiftright

Well Musk is Musk, but in reality these autonomous cars haven't been tested for anywhere even remotely close to the number of miles driven by regular cars. and their deaths-per-miles-driven ratio does not look promising so far.

Calling these cars safe is pure BS. There's no factual grounds to make such a statement.

I think that if/when Tesla goes down, a lot of the autonomous car market is going down with it.

I think dedicated roadways are the real answer, so that's off in the future. And even then, only in Metro areas.

berri

I still want to know how this autonomous stuff is going to work in heavy, big city rush hour, particularly in bad weather. Scrambling those cars around expressway lanes and exits - and if there are big traffic backups do the cars go into a penalty box somewhere? I'm thinking this whole thing may look good on paper, but as usual, execution may be quite another matter. You won't really have a realistic idea until these test vehicles are out in much larger numbers.

Another unanswered question: these vehicles are going to be expensive given their electronics. That means getting people to share and accept losing their individual car in the garage. I think this may be as big, or bigger an obstacle.

kyfdx

Here you go.... down the rabbit hole.
https://waymo.com/

imidazol97

I wanna see them testing their cars in SW Ohio in winter.
Maybe Cincinnati, Covington, Newport, Dayton, Belleview, Highland Heights, etc..

kyfdx

Just like the "roads" weren't suddenly full of cars in 1904... it will take time. The easiest applications get used first.. Of course, we actually have roads today, so that helps. It may never be used in many cases, and I don't think the individually owned and driven automobile is going away in the next 30 years, but autonomous vehicles will happen. I think mostly for commercial purposes. There are always a few idiots pioneers that want to drive around without holding the steering wheel, but I don't think that is who the technology is for.

As far as the technology displacing jobs? That is continuous, in every industry. Just like the blacksmiths didn't wake up one day to find they were out of business, truck drivers won't either. If autonomous trucking works, truck driving jobs will decrease, over time.

Likely to be a lot slower than taxi drivers losing their jobs to Uber. That is an "industry" that survives due to regulation and government. I'm not ready for a driverless Uber, but I bet my offspring won't have any issues with it. I feel sorry for taxi drivers (sort of?), but they don't work very well in my area (that's Bellevue, by the way.. lol). Uber is a giant improvement. Of course, at some point, they'll have to raise rates to make money, but it's still a lot cheaper than a taxi, and you don't have to have cash on hand.

gagrice

kyfdx said:

Here you go.... down the rabbit hole.
https://waymo.com/

Will this put the skids on Waymo and others? Nothing like a fatal crash to get people's attention.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-27/uber-s-autonomous-cars-suspended-by-arizona-after-fatal-crash

cdnpinhead

Waymo is still running strong here in AZ where they have dozens of vehicles running around. Their cars have lots more sensors on them and have, so far as I know, a perfect safety record.

imidazol97

cdnpinhead said:

Waymo is still running strong here in AZ where they have dozens of vehicles running around. Their cars have lots more sensors on them and have, so far as I know, a perfect safety record.

Are they operating on roads that are heavily marked, center and right side, like appeared in the videos for Waymo?
I wonder how their cars do on streets and roads that don't have stripes on the right side, just centerline striping?

I know my Malibu is good about "seeing" any worn lane marking to warn me if I wander to the right, but will no lane markings such as in many towns and areas work.

imidazol97

I just keep seeing Popular Science 1959 all over again where cars would fly as personal commuter planes and so on. Roads would be like in the Jetsons.

I can't see the benefit of trucks with autonomous driving or autos the same if a driver is still required to be there and alert tot he task at hand.

I know the trucking companies see gold in autonomous trucks that don't require drivers be in them for over-the-road travel. They see the costs go down for the profit line to go up. Ohio has had trucking experiments running the Turnpike.

berri

I just keep seeing Popular Science 1959 all over again where cars would fly as personal commuter planes and so on.
LOL

gagrice

imidazol97 said:

I just keep seeing Popular Science 1959 all over again where cars would fly as personal commuter planes and so on. Roads would be like in the Jetsons.

I can't see the benefit of trucks with autonomous driving or autos the same if a driver is still required to be there and alert tot he task at hand.

I know the trucking companies see gold in autonomous trucks that don't require drivers be in them for over-the-road travel. They see the costs go down for the profit line to go up. Ohio has had trucking experiments running the Turnpike.

That would mean no mandatory stops. That is a killer for critical loads like fresh produce going cross country. Autonomous trucks could go 24/7 with just fuel stops. Though who is going to pump the diesel?

imidazol97

gagrice said:

That would mean no mandatory stops. That is a killer for critical loads like fresh produce going cross country. Autonomous trucks could go 24/7 with just fuel stops. Though who is going to pump the diesel?

The long distance rush loads are driven by teams. One's sleeping, resting in the bunk while the other drives. The truck never has to stop for the 11-hour or 14-hour break requirement for the single driver. I haven't heard it lately but some companies encourage couples to be the team drivers.

One local company recently ran an ad for weeks on the overnight trucker station saying that one of their several teams with 20-years with that company was retiring and they needed to replace them for the California run.

fintail

Firmly in correction territory now. Trade wars, yay!

berri

While Trump and media are focused on Amazon, I'm thinking the overall tech sector was overpriced which is also contributing. The trade war stuff scares me because it doesn't seem focused on the key issue of intellectual property theft and doesn't seem to have a thought out end plan. Strikes me all as throwing Jell-O at the wall and seeing what sticks. I believe we do need to crack down on China, but in a thought out strategic manner.

fintail

Some who claim, or their base claims are businessmen don't seem to have much experience in forethought and strategy. I suspect it will get worse before it gets better. The trade war will hurt more of that base than others, they won't be tired of winning.

Amazon has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with the ego of a showman/promoter vs the ego and clout of a legitimate billionaire.

Those who profit from IP abusers aren't really interested in addressing the problem.

berri

I see there are already metal price increases. I think there is a good chance it will lead to price increases that will reduce demand leading to layoffs instead of job gains down the road. I'm afraid Washington may be living in a world several decades ago. The increasing budget deficit is more than likely going to raise interest rates which is another potential demand killer for bigger ticket items and a cost increase driver for manufacturing and farming. Nafta, well the way it is going will probably move Canada and Mexico to forge tighter ties outside of the US, China has plenty of alternatives for agricultural and other goods we export.

fintail

I suspect we might also be in for oil and gas price increases, which always harm the economy.

One can't be isolationist in this world - they will soon learn that others can get along without them. Maybe a lesson to the denizens of the overflowing swamp.

gagrice

Nationalism vs globalism needs to be addressed. If we continue on the current path of globalism, the US and EU will have to lower our standards of living to meet the rising standards of the third World. That may be inevitable. I don't think the American people will like it.

Mr_Shiftright

berri said:

While Trump and media are focused on Amazon, I'm thinking the overall tech sector was overpriced which is also contributing. The trade war stuff scares me because it doesn't seem focused on the key issue of intellectual property theft and doesn't seem to have a thought out end plan. Strikes me all as throwing Jell-O at the wall and seeing what sticks. I believe we do need to crack down on China, but in a thought out strategic manner.

That's not going to save the system. The place has been looted. All that we're waiting for, I think, is for things to just play out.

Back when, during the Great Depression, people got so desperate for relief that they basically threatened revolution. FDR certainly heard the word and instituted a large number of safety nets and economic stimuli. His basic self-revelation was that the private sector would not, and could not, provide relief and some kind of economic equality, so---the government would have to do it. He got a big assist from labor unions as well, who had more faith in the system than in revolution, it seems.

Ironically, FDR is often cast as the founder of the socialist or welfare state, but in reality he was the savior of capitalism, IMO.

But the Kleptos didn't learn this lesson, and they're at it again! Only this time, I don't see FDR anywhere on the horizon.

Of course, all this could take a few years to spin out, perhaps even a decade. But you'll know when to board the escape pod to Mars when the world stops using the U.S. dollar as benchmark against their own currencies. That presumes, of course, that their own currencies will be worth something more.

berri

Well history reflects trouble when the gap between wealthy and the rest gets very wide. US example - prelude to the Depression. Other parts of the world include collapse or overthrow of the government, although I don't think that will happen in the US because business and their lobbyists essentially run Washington.

Mr_Shiftright

What might happen is a recourse to "grassroots" community and to individual states coming into greater and greater conflict with the Federal government (we already see this happening). The Feds, being financially reckless at this point, are creating vast disturbances in the economy, and some states feel this a lot more than others.

We see, for instance, the possibility of higher income residents of California fleeing to tax free NV or tax liberal AZ, because of the recent radical tax bill. We also see traditionally conservative states like KY and OK rebelling against lousy wages for teachers due to lopsided spending cuts favoring the wealthy.

The stock market does not like disturbances. Some financial pundits say that "oh, fear and sell-offs are great for us--we can hunt for bargains".

Well, yeah, presuming it's a dip and not a crash.

kyfdx

So far... the only rebels in KY are the teachers, themselves. No one else in power seems to care.

One party controls both houses and the governorship. They attached an amendment wrecking the teachers' pension plans to a sewage bill, late at night, at the last minute.

Mr_Shiftright

Pension plans could prove an extreme difficulty for some states.

imidazol97

NC did the same kind of switch bill trick on their teachers on passage of a retirement system ripoff a few years back.
The only retirement plan legislators care for well is their own.

houdini1

Overall, the Chinese economy is smaller than the U.S. economy, yet the tail has been wagging the dog for decades. Someone had to put a stop to it.

Mr_Shiftright

Well yes and no. In terms of retail sales (that is, what stores sell to people) China will exceed the U.S.A. this year. (predicted).

berri

You know, you can fault China for some of its trade actions, but you can also fault business leaders who gave away the family jewels to get in. I think our government, and our business leaders, lacked courage on this from the beginning. Perhaps initially both sides of the US naively (and maybe a bit greedily) thought trade would fundamentally alter a Communist country. After all, the US thought the same of the USSR during the Reagan years, but then came Putin. However, this hacking and stealing business intellectual property and worse really is economic warfare on China's part in my mind.

gagrice

Mr_Shiftright said:

Pension plans could prove an extreme difficulty for some states.

CalPERS and CalSTRs come to mind. How will the states make up for the underfunding of their pension plans. Only one state, Wisconsin is 100% funded. KY, NJ, IL, need to trim some fat, as does CA with over 50,000 retirees knocking down $100k plus a year in pension.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-state-pension-funding-ratios/

It is good to be in THE club.
https://www.100kclub.com/

Mr_Shiftright

Wish I was. But then, as a young man I chose riding motorcycles in far off places to a library career.

Mr_Shiftright

China knows how to fight back in a trade war. For one thing, they are our customers for a monstrous amount of agricultural products. So, say they smack a really big tariff on soybeans, which are grown in....er.....the Midwest...which makes a lot of Red state voters mighty unhappy indeed. Also California almond growers, who are farm folks as well.

This can't end well.

Sometimes you can be right about the problem and absolutely wrong about implementing a solution. Which ends up being just as bad as the original problem.

It's also been interesting to watch all this chatter about Amazon, Google, YouTube, et al.

These really are monopolistic enterprises. What are we going to do about this? Will the Feds just remain ga-ga until we crown our first Trillionaire, or will they start anti-trust action, like they did way back when with Standard Oil.

For some reason, Amazon is allowed to remain a monopoly and destroy its competitors at will, without even making a profit. (except in the cloud services).

ab348

I don't know if I was unique in this respect or if it was shared by many, but when I was looking for a job out of university the main attraction of a government position was job security, i.e. they would not go belly-up on me. I knew that the pay was somewhat less than in a corporate environment (this was late 1970s), that the benefits were competitive (they were actually better than most), and I had no concept of what the work environment was like. The pension was pretty much not something I even considered back then, and I didn't understand it. Even when I finally got such a job I didn't understand the pension other than that it was a deduction on every paycheck that I grumbled about, since the HR people did nothing to explain it to me. It wasn't until I was there 10 years or so that the government decided to send everyone an annual circular showing where you stood, what your earliest retirement date would be, and what you would receive on that date if everything stayed the same. This managed to convince me that the pension was fairly useless because it was based on a salary I was making 20 years before I retired, which was a lot less than what I made when that finally happened. It wasn't until about 10 years before I retired that I began to understand it, and at that point I built a spreadsheet that would let me input retirement dates, theoretical salaries for the last few years, etc, to see what my pension would be.

I'm sure happy I have it now, and that the plan is fully funded and healthy.

berri

Frankly, some of this China stuff, like tech proprietary info requirements, should have been fast tracked to the World Trade Organization, or used to withhold China admittance to WTO, under Bush II and Obama. It slid way too long!

berri

All this Congressional and White House complaining about entitlements like social security is bogus. If they had used the pay-ins from the worker and employer as investments, instead of blowing it all on other stuff, the gov would likely have made a profit on many workers. If a worker retired at 62 after 42 years at an average $50K/yr income, investing the roughly 15% deduction between worker and employer payments would have yielded over $1.3M at a conservative 6% annually. Divide that by a 25 years of retirement time and it would result in better than $52K in annual income vice the top $30K or so it pays out each year to a beneficiary. Further, those worker pay ins that were diverted to other stuff saved the government a bundle in borrowing interest. Personally, I'm sick of hearing this crapload out of Washington.

Mr_Shiftright

I still think China isn't the real problem here.

imidazol97

imidazol97

The market is up 150 for the Dow. If the market closes up or neutral today, watch to see if the hair-on-fire media folks make a huge deal of the upside move like they do the downside moves.

The cheapest thing these days is hot air from the experts.

berri

I don't worry about the media hype near as much as the herd mentality on Wall Street.

Sandman6472

Glad I stayed with the post office for as long as I did. Get a pension check every month which I'm very thankful for. The older guys at work told me, "you'll never get rich, but you'll make a good living". Only when I did retire years later did I finally understand what they meant. So thank you Uncle Sam very much from this happy retiree!!!

The Sandman

Sandman6472

Glad I stayed with the post office for as long as I did. Get a pension check every month which I'm very thankful for. The older guys at work told me, "you'll never get rich, but you'll make a good living". Only when I did retire years later did I finally understand what they meant. So thank you Uncle Sam very much from this happy retiree!!!

The Sandman