gravenewworld said:
Instead of finance on Wall St., we need more scientists and engineers to take the initiative and start more companies to create more jobs in order to combat the constant off shoring.
The trouble with that is that the most important thing in starting a new company is financing which gets you back into the money thing.
We've been relying on the business types for too long that are running the companies many of us work for.
There's a reason for that.
I can do some sales/marketing/finance stuff. However, I don't particularly *like* to do sales/marketing/finance stuff, and I'm not particularly good at it. If someone *likes* to do that sort of stuff, it's great if they do that work and just let me do the science. If someone wants to do that stuff and ***take most of the money***, I'm cool with that.
The other thing is that you really don't need that many scientists even in a high tech company. One scientist invents something and then you just need to copy it. You need a ton of sales people, because you can't call two people at once. Then you need managers to manage the sales people, and managers to manage the managers.
And then there are the lawyers. In Shenzhen, you have lots of entrepreneurs that open "mom-and-pop" cell phone factories. One curious thing about cell phones is that you don't need a big company to make cell phones, and you really don't need a big company to do something *interesting* with a cell phone (i.e. make it pink with a Hello Kitty bow). You can (and people in Shenzhen do) start their own companies building cell phones.
In the US, you try that and you'll get killed with lawsuits.
It's no surprise many tech companies get driven into the ground when they off shore all of their work (which just trains your competition) and companies invest very little of their funds in R and D (compared to other things like marketing).
On the other hand if you invest most of your funds in R/D, then no one buys your product.
I'm starting to think that it's not economically feasible to have R/D be done in small profit driven companies selling to markets, and that in order to do something like that you need either a large company which can absorb capital costs, a government entity like a national lab, or a company with government funding (i.e. SpaceX or defense contractors).
The other thing to remember is that we live in a global world. One person's offshoring is someone else's onshoring. Something about multinationals is that they are multinational, so when someone talks about moving jobs from the United States to India and China, the Chinese and Indians in the room aren't going to be upset about it.
Then when the pipeline runs dry and the prototypes fail that the company has placed all of their bets on, they wonder why the company has failed.
But that gives a few good years while you milk the cow. If you put your money in R/D, then you run out of money before the product gets to market, and the company fails before it starts.
The point I'm making is that there are systemic reasons why things are what they are, and there is nothing obvious that I can see that one person can do to change things (if there were I'd be doing them).
