Wednesday, December 28, 2016

Is the madness beginning to end?

I've been trying to stay out of the news cycle, but I did hear that Sprint is bringing jobs back to the USA. Which I had to laugh about. You see, a few months ago I starting posting about how Trump knew he didn't really have to threaten companies to stay in the US. It was my firm belief that companies were already dieing to come back before Trump was even on the radar.

If an administration stopped being so rough on them they would come back in a heart beat. Trump could act like he was a tough guy, but these guys wanted to come back more than anything in the world anyway. Outsourcing was killing them. Trump would win without having to do almost anything. Can you imagine how bad you have to make conditions that it's less expensive to ship your products from another country into your own country? I was talking to a guy a few months ago who made radio controlled Caterpillar.  You know - the earth movers. Not the tiny bugs. Which I thought was sort of meh at first. But when he started talking to me about all the regulations companies have to go through - it's no wonder why all of a sudden you don't want a guy getting his insides jigged every day. Your going to make it so a guy holds a video game controller instead. He told me that just to turn on one of those machines you need a 10,000 dollar permit for clean air rules. For each machine!

I mean this outsourcing experiment has reached it's natural end. I don't believe outsourcing saved companies that much money. Customer support outsourcing basically killed Dell. They were one of the top computer makers and then they outsourced tech support.  They soon fell of a cliff. They never ever recovered from that and then the recession hit.

For a little while at Comcast the Indian tech support dudes figured out they could just drop calls and their numbers would look good, but I'm sure Comcast call volume went through the roof. I bet there are tons of these stories. I mean, everyone used to have an Indian tech support story. Right? And then on the manufacturing side if you aren't big that is just lunacy. The stories I hear out of startups.

All Trump needed to do was to act sorta tough on a couple of people and all the sheep come prancing home. Google it. It is funny to watch though.

2 comments:

  1. I hope Trump can do something about the regulatory state. Mises.org had a good article last month how the bureaucrats can make up whatever they want and it becomes a 'law' regardless of the cost to the rest of us.

    This past summer the FDA mandated that vape shops need to pay $250k to approve their in house mixes. I don't vape or smoke, but I wonder how many thousands of people will be unemployed from this?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Welcome to the blog A Texan! Love your reading material.

    For real!? That is certainly one of the crazier regulations I've heard. For a small vape shop that has to be crushing. I mean, I go into Home Depot and buy an 8 foot 1x4, and get an 18 cent California lumber fee and I'm pissed about that. That's on top of the 10% ish sales tax. Sure....It's only 18 cents! But IT'S ONLY ONE PIECE OF LUMBER! Imagine if you are building a deck or something. Then people wonder why housing is so expensive to build. But people let this law pass and you just have to wait for the camels back to break. I think we are finally at that stage. So I think Trump has a good chance of changing some of this stuff. But wow, all of this has been super painful. But I guess it has to burn like the surface of the sun before it filters down to everyone and they finally "get it".

    ReplyDelete