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NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio

Politicians’ ability to talk a good game is too often inversely proportional to their performance in office. A case in point:

Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City went on Tucker Carlson’s show last night to try to resurrect his presidential campaign by warning of how so many people will be thrown out of work by the growth of automation. Like a typical politician, de Blasio had only tepid suggestions on how to counteract this trope. And he had no real answer when Tucker asked, if so many jobs are soon going to disappear, why we are letting so many low-skilled workers enter our country illegally every year?

Now, calling de Blasio an idiot is easy, but somehow experience tells us that this constructed panic over robots taking our jobs is not the lesson we should be taking from history. Robots have been around for 65 years, yet despite this, we have foolishly exported millions of jobs to Mexico and China. Still, the United States unemployment is near the lowest in history ... 3.7%. And this low rate would be even lower if Trump could persuade US manufacturers to return home.

Precisely what will occur to take up the possible employment slack due to automation I can’t exactly predict. But I am fairly certain that accommodations will occur — work week changes, work day duration reductions, more people working from home, service expectation changes. e.g.s, package delivery services, Uber, better healthcare services, leisure-time services, Grubhub, etc,) ... all of which improve our quality of life ... while providing jobs.

So, Mayor de Blasio, I  doubt that your hail-Mary pass will save your campaign and your attempt to ruin the United States like you are ruining the Big Apple.

A Model Business?

Or an unstoppable "A to Z" business model? Let's tell it like it is ... Amazon is a growing monopoly ... a monopoly that is slowly devouring the entire retail marketplace. This Seattle supercompany is doing this with a business model that exhibits at least one classic trait of a monopoly -- pricing offerings at a loss in order to grab market share away from its competition. It can do this for four main reasons:

1) It has a highly efficient and effective distributed warehouse operation based on automation and tough personnel policies that keep its customers very content.

2) The Internet has provided Amazon a real-time ordering system that is extremely convenient to its customers ... centered around its sophisticated server farms. These server farms are also the basis of Amazon's Cloud Services which generate the bulk of its profits ... which then carry the generally unprofitable much bigger on-line retail operations. There are a few other revenue streams like Kindle and Echo.

3) An extensive and sophisticated American parcel delivery infrastructure headed by the U.S. Postal Service, UPS, FedEx and Amazon's own growing in-house capability. In fact, many analysts believe that Amazon has, in its strategic quiver, designs to eventually vertically integrate to totally control it's own delivery system.

4) Due to these previously mentioned operational advantages ... and solid cash flow due to much depreciation of plant, Amazon enjoys a stratospheric price-earnings ratio (181 at last count vs. a market average of around 18) and an outstanding credit rating. This allows them to cheaply finance its ambitious expansionist plans ... including its recently announced purchase of Whole Foods.

The end result of this superior business model is that Amazon has strategic advantages that seem impossible for classic destination stores to overcome. The question really is: Is this a good monopoly or a bad monopoly? Here is a chart that puts this crushing advantage into perspective:

This chart is from: CNBC Article. Now Jeff Bezos and Company is moving into food. What is next ... Clothing? Shoes? Furniture? Cars? Building materials? Is there nothing  that is sold in stores that cannot be sold online through Amazon?

Already there is talk of shopping malls closing because of the "Amazon effect". And this effect does seem unstoppable ... because of the good parts of this company (#1 and #2 above). But it also requires the bad parts (#3 and #4) to make this all possible. The question then becomes: Should the government step in before there is only one retail stock left to buy -- AMZN?

This is a question for Ayn Rand to answer if she were still alive. I know instinctively that our government won't allow us just one huge retail option ... but to step in and stop the Amazon juggernaut will make millions of their customers unhappy. And it will be turning the term "free market" on its head.

I'm happy that this very tough decision is not up to me ...

Headlines

These headlines are real ... they have all been discovered on Internet news sites.

Roger Goodell was mercilessly booed off the field after Patriots Super Bowl win

Automation: Amazon plans to open store with only two employees ...

Trump is urged to put GPS trackers on refugees until travel ban decided ...

CA State Senate leader: 'Half my family' here illegally

Iran: Only seven minutes needed for missile to hit Tel Aviv ...

Iran-backed rebels launch missile at Saudi capital

Fail: Credit card ID theft rises since security chips ...

McConnell: No federal money for investigating voter fraud

CBS poll: Two-thirds of Democrats say Islam, Christianity equally violent

Drone worth $1.5 million goes missing at Arizona Army base

Kremlin breaks with Trump on Iran ...

Ivanka Trump and Jerad Kushner work to sink LGBT order

Relativity

No, this blog entry has nothing to do with Einstein. It is about comparing our presidential politicians on the important issues. For instance, Donald Trump wants to build a wall on the Mexican border to stop the hoards of illegals from entering the United States ... whereas Hellery Clinton has been advocating for "open borders," with little or no restriction on who, how, when or where immigrants enter the United States. And since a huge proportion of recent immigrants end up receiving public assistance, to me, this is a recipe for "The Decline and Fall of the American Empire." Yes, and a disproportionate percentage of these illegals end up committing other crimes ... please peruse: The Center for Immigration Studies ... another good reason for enforcing current immigration laws.

Like most Americans, both Hellery and The Donald are "free traders", but Trump believes that the devil is in the details. Pacts like TPP and NAFTA give up too much U.S. sovereignty and economic leverage according to Trump and need to be renegotiated. Whereas Hellery thinks that these trade agreements are just fine ... even though the evidence shows that NAFTA has decimated U.S. manufacturing. Yes, the lefties say that automation is the chief reason for the decline in what was once U.S. manufacturing employment levels. If that be the case, why then relocate factories off shore since the labor content is so low anyway? This does nothing but cause our balance of payments to sink further into the red.

The Democrats and Hellery are hell bent, every time there is a terrorist attack at home, in blaming the gun if there is one involved. The terrorist's culpability is somehow secondary. If the weapon of choice is not a gun ... say a pressure cooker or a box cutter ... then lefties bend over backwards to find some other reason for this terror other than the Religion of Peace. Donald Trump however brags that he has a license to carry a firearm and often does. He promises that he will be a staunch defender of the Second Amendment ... whereas Hellery will appoint new justices of the Supreme Court who will surely gut this precious American civil right. Trump also recognizes that Islam is the common denominator in most of this terror and wants stricter vetting of immigrants from Muslim nations where such terror is rampart. Hellery wants to import tens of thousands more of these potential "Allahu Akbar" miscreants.

Dear reader, this is enough relativity for today. Trust me, I will entertain you with more in the not too distant future.

Fast Food

All across the nation (supposed) fast-food workers are agitating for higher wages (to at least $15 per hour) … and to be able to unionize. This is clearly a cooperative strategy between the Obama administration and the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) … see: Associated Press Story for the details.

Without going into all the pros and cons of this dust-up there is, to me, one clear consequence if this union has its way with the fast-food industry. And that is that there will be fewer entry-level jobs for our nation’s youngsters ... and maybe even older employees too. If this industry wants to continue to offer value-based fast food, then it will need to innovate its way out of the box in which it would be placed. It would be forced to automate even faster and further the delivery mechanisms for its product in order to maintain competitive pricing … see the following for one such possibility – burger robots: Business Insider Story.

Basically, increased productivity as a result of automation will be forced on these franchises even quicker than might normally occur. Although I am all for improved productivity, I don’t necessarily believe that the gutting of these entry-level jobs is really going to help things for our inner-city youths. Yes, the SEIU bosses will still be fat and happy … but at a serious cost to our society.