Trump

The messed up thing about the polls is that they are taken with an audience that's too broad or too narrow... I really don't follow them. They are VERY easily skewed without "lying" by shifting parameters... The part that always trips me up is how they come up with the "deviation of error"... It's never the same and varies WAY too wildly for me to consider it reliable data.

 

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His actions show that our Economy is his Top Priority, I see it taking off line we all Dream and know it will.

 

Well that depends on the people... He may have cleared a lot of the clutter, but the people haven't taken full advantage of that... yet... Otherwise, the US wouldn't have so many malls closing and companies wouldn't have to do super-gimmicky things to stay competitive...

 

The real drain on the economy hasn't been cleared out yet, though he is certainly working on it. This is the main reason I might actually vote for him this time around.

 

What do you think is the real drain?

 

One of the real problems, imho, is a certain country that refuses to respect intellectual property rights and actively encourages the theft of proprietary information. What is the point of spending money on developing innovative technology when someone else is just going to steal your ideas? It doesn't help when this country has a history of manipulating their currency to make their products more competitive on the international market.

 

aiya...

I understand what you are trying to say, but I think you are looking down the wrong rabbit hole. And an uninformed one at that... IPRs have legal protection in China as part of the membership with WIPO in 1980. There's also the Paris conventions and Madrid agreements (mid 80s), both of which are internationally binding. In the early 1990s China agreed to provide US protections starting with the Memorandum of Understanding that eventually turned into law.

The problem is enforcement. It's hard to police 1/7th of the entire world's population, but there have been several convictions. It's more a matter of educating on these laws/policies at this point. The first school for IPRs could not be established until the mid 90's (95/96?).

Where the Chinese (and several other countries for that matter) has really gotten good at is reverse engineering. This is not protected by IPRs and so long as the resulting product is different enough (10% for design patents; I'm not 100% sure on utility patents, but I think it is 10% as well, maybe 8%) then it no longer is considered the same product.

But where they excel at is in open source manufacturing. There are a LOT of open source products out there and they really know how to push the product. So where many people think there is/was an infringement, it was actually a resulting product derived from an open source and then marketed/patented as the derivative.

Innovations happen all the time... the smart ones typically fold in such countries into the development so as to maximize appeal and exposure and minimize the risk of counterfeits. Minimize, not eliminate. By incorporating the foreign country into such deals, the included company/country will want to better protect their vestment.

The PRC does have Baidu that seems to "promote" counterfeiting (bad when considering it is government-sponsored), but you'll have to keep in mind that it is a search engine software with (relatively speaking) a more basic AI webcrawler that indexes websites for searching later, not a person(s) manually adding entries. Google, Yahoo!, Bing... They do the same thing, but have more advanced AI to help filter that out. The US has already called out on it. It's not exactly an overnight fix. In fact, some areas of the IB are subject to the same thing.

In regards to the money manipulation, if you want to call what China (as declared by President Trump) did as manipulation by US laws, then China did not commit the offence. There are three parts the must be fulfilled:

1. There must be a bi-lateral surplus with the US
2. There must be an overall account surplus
3. There must be a one-sided intervention in the foreign exchange market to suppress the value of their currency.

By US law, only requirement 1 was met. Under these same rules, the US does it constantly and so do many other countries.

But the 1988 Omnibus Foreign Trade and Competiveness Act has a different definition of manipulation, saying it can result either from actions that “[impede] effective balance of payments adjustments” or actions that “[gain an] unfair competitive advantage in international trade.” The US is likely to argue that the recent depreciation was intended to give Chinese exports an edge. China would counter that it has no obligation to resist market pressures pushing the yuan down when the United States implements tariffs that hurt China’s exports.

In both these laws, the Chinese have the right to push the yuan value down to its lowest level in over a decade. It helps stem the hyper-inflation while giving an edge to trade.

What country doesn't want that for its people?

This activity happens at all levels too, not just government and big trade. At the small mom/pop shops in tourist areas in foreign countries, vendors and shop owners will hang on to foreign money/transactions and process them when the market conditions are more favorable to turn it in and get more cash out of it.



With that said, both the US and China (and indeed most of the world now) have a common problem that affects its people: The currency (not money) is based in fiat rather than a standard, so it's susceptible to human emotion. As such it is treated with more perception than weight...

This susceptibility is the cause of inflation/deflation and operations of finances for both good and bad. Unfortunately, deflation is what people need and want, but don't want to take the step to achieve it. They're so focused on this perceived value that most people I talk to do not know what inflation has to do with their bank accounts.

Fiat is the big drain. The "best" way to "regulate" it is to control the emotion that drives it... or better yet, remove fiat all together and restore a unit's weight and measures standard again (gold/silver standard etc)

 

I agree that the issue is one of enforcement and not of legislation. It is the enforcement of these laws that will correct a lot of the imbalance. The problem at least seems to stem from an unwillingness to do so, not a lack of education. I recall reading about one situation where a company tried to sue another company over intellectual property rights violations to only have the court rule on the matter without trial or even hearing arguments from the complaining side. Surely the initial complaint would have referenced the law. When members of the judicial system are willing to ignore the law, there is little hope for a fair hearing on intellectual property rights.

I did not mean to imply that the People's Republic of China was currently engaging in currency manipulation and I disagree with trumps use of the term in this case. If anything, the recent actions by the PRC can be described as intentional non-intervention, as they stopped propping up the yuan and let it fall to levels more in line with market value. What I was trying to point out is a history of unfair economic practices.

I fully agree that fiat currency is a real problem, but even standards like gold and silver are not free from the problems of fluctuation based on perception. I am not sure what a workable solution would be in this case. But frankly, any reasonable solution to this would be like the elimination of the federal reserve, for now at least, just a pipe dream.

 

You can single handedly thank the Internet for that. Nothing more, nothing less.
It's not that people aren't buying things, (in fact we're consuming at the highest rate in our history, coinciding with the highest population in our history) they're just shifting the point of sales away from brick and mortar, in favor of lower overhead online sellers, yielding better pricing.
If places like Sears would have seen the writing on the wall, and stayed ahead of the curve, instead of sticking their head in the sand (not to mention having a leach like Lampert at the helm) they would still be a significant and fiscally viable stronghold in the market.

 

I don't think the internet did that by itself. There's a whole TON of circumstances that created these conditions (see my WB jobs posts)... Yes the internet has a HUGE hold on the market, but there still is a large enough demand that many malls can and are thriving with many successful shops. I'm not saying that they'll be as good as their former glory (unless someone figures out a social disrupter that brings people back) any time soon, but there is still a demand and market for a physical location.

Amazon realized this already and have been opening Amazon stores all over the place with Amazon Books, Amazon 4-star, Amazon GO, and Presented by Amazon stores. There are three of those in my area and a new one opening even closer to me soon (haven't confirmed, but source is reliable).

And it's not just Amazon. JLL Retail (through JLL Research) went through several Online-Only companies and found that many of them were expanding into brick-and-mortar businesses. Big names too, such as Casper, Adore Me, AllBirds, SoHo, etc. In total, they were able to confirm over well 850 stores opening from the once digital-only companies.
The desired result (for most of the retail world) is that they do not want an "online" and "in-store" dichotomy but to just get back to being "retail" once again.

As for Sears, their downfall happened long before the internet hit critical mass. Several poor marketing decisions (in attempt to capitalize on the trend set by Abercrombie & Fitch) resulted in poor control of the controversies and got Sear's name to follow the trend, but for the wrong reasons. They haven't been able to shake the stigma since. The observer's perception would see the symptoms of the stigma and typically make the assumption that something is wrong, but they wouldn't know why. Truth is, Sears is still big enough to anchor a mall. There's one near me and one in my old town that do just fine as anchors.

Sears does have a relatively successful website, but holds a similar market share as their stores. It still makes profit, but nowhere near their glory days.

There are three indoor malls near me. They each represent the different... successes/benefits that results from clearing the way and taking advantage (or not) of the opportunities. One is successful and have opened 2 new stores and a kiosk this year alone. One hasn't opened any new stores/kiosks, but none are closing or are in serious trouble. And the last is having lots of trouble, but still maintaining. From what I gather, it's mostly to blame on poor reputation of management and marketing.

So there is a market with demand if two of three malls are doing at least decently well and traditionally online only companies are opening stores.

-SW

 

he's not good
it's weird when people say "well i like him because we share X values in politics"
he does not hold any of those values, whatever they are, unless it's just not caring about other people

 

I disagree... Unfortunately the news outlets really like to focus on scandals and stupidity, not work... What can I say? everyone watches TV for JackAss, not Care Bears.

However, records of activity ARE available to the public including those with Media Blackout status attached to them. His first act after taking office: removal of the WB8 laws. If you did not live in California, Arizona, New Mexico, or Texas you did not feel the effects TOO much. For those in those states in particular, you saw a MASSIVE swing in job availability. Please see the earlier posts in this thread for many of the details regarding that.

Second, although the media focused HEAVILY on the problems brought about with trade with China, there is a deeper business issue at the heart of it that hurts the American Macroeconomy MUCH more than the social (and potentially military) aspect did. It was something that I only saw in Epoch and similar news agencies (ie. Not Gannett or AP wired) and that was getting China to FINALLY publicly admit that they had been screwing us over since the first official trade agreements were signed in the post Clinton years. Yes, that caused political tension, but with the ability to renegotiate the terms of trade back on the table, America can get an ACTUAL fair treatment of international trade with 1/7 of the world's population. Obviously, the Chinese didn't like that their major margins and bottom line were finally swinging to the US side for a change and we get the whole fiasco that the yellow news outlets conveniently forgot to give ALL the details on. They were too busy trying to get a larger audience for the advertising revenue.

So socially, not much has changed internationally. America is still seen as this war-mongering, weapons-always-at-the-ready, short minded people that happens to fund 40% of the world bank. Domestically, the people are just as much at odds with each other as the past...

However, there are two distinct observations I've seen trending: Society is getting better (generally speaking) but the media coverage of the bad stuff receives 10x more coverage from when I was in college and although the economy is better, the people at the microeconomic level are getting MUCH worse at handling their economics and are blaming the outside more and more. The phrase that I hear that makes me REALLY laugh (sarcastically while I cry in pity for those saying it) is "The rich get richer... the poor get poorer..." The rich get richer because they know what money is and they manage themselves as if they have no money... The poor tend to confuse currency with money and try to live as "a rich person" with little to no understanding of the difference between money and currency (and likewise, wealth vs resources).

Trump brought the opportunity to balance back to America... it's just most Americans do not know how to take advantage of the opportunity.

 

I'll never forget something I witnessed years ago. The 81 year old multi millionaire owner of the company I worked for, struggling to bend over to pick up a penny. When he finally accomplished his goal, he put it in his pocket, smiled and told the person he was walking with "I didn't get rich by passing up free money..."

 

Whenever I hear people talk about trump they either love him or hate him, people are almost never in the fence.

 

I have always been sitting on the fence with Trump , it is unwise not to watch megalomaniacs closely , remember our old good mate Adolf , tis always very wise to keep an eye on them . Trump has the power and the mania to ignite the world , even here in little old Tasmania . Yes we should all be sitting on the fence watching intently .

 

With all respect to the Trump admirers, my feelings are that he is plain nuts.