Economic downturn in the "Last Mile"

[tw]

Warning: a long and rambling overview of the current economic expectations-

Ten years ago, there appeared to be no end to the growth of a computer industry. First (pre-IBM) PCs liberated computers from the big, centralized, 'we know what you need' MBA like bureaucracies. Then came graphical interfaces, a free-market attitude change where competitors cooperated as well as competed, where cloning was encouraged, where upstarts could thrive, where standardized foundations permitted the many to concentrate and learn on optimized platforms - hardware and software, then local networking quickly followed by the Internet, and open access all driven by new advertising based business models.

Things have sharply changed. Like the VCR market that saturated, so has the computer industry. Five years ago, the Internet was just the latest in new hot products. Computers were replaced in the home because they obsoleted before they required replacement. The current market growth can only be maintained if the next new technology arrives. So what is it?

The industry knew what came next. Five years ago, the next step was clearly identified as multi-media. Massive bandwidth, computing power, upgraded architectures and busses, simplified peripherals all would be required for this next step, and Gighertz CPUs. We have seen it all either in progress or currently existing. So where is the next wave in computing?

As part of the program, fiber optic giants installed massive networks - over $60 billion of fiber optic backbone carries new technologies such as ATM. IP Version 6 was established. Northern Telecom even changed to Nortel Networks. At any time at least 6 new fiber optics were being strung throughout the Pacific. IP telephone, video and audio conferencing standards were created. The PC architecture by Intel was optimized for multitasking multimedia - only to have AMD take market share by selling legacy optimized hardware. Why did the future not happen?

Everyone assumed their future strategic partners would also be ready for the next wave. Early to see the problem were Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, and Compaq who all but sued the one industry that feared innovation. It's called the 'last mile' now for a new reason. All but the last mile was installed. We are still stuck with a 56K world.

So much fiber optic were installed for this new wave that Merril Lynch estimates only 2.6 percent of the network is actually being used. Much is now estimated to never be used. In one completed Level 3 line, only 2 of 96 fibers is actually light. So much fiber was installed in the US that fiber would probably encircle the world 1700 times. And yet we are still stuck with POTS.

Qwest saw the problem and tried to address it. Qwest purchased US West and will now try to integrate all this capacity into supplying the last mile. AT&T so mismanaged their business that they will abandon long distance (already a big loser for them even though they can charge over $.10 per minute on calls that should only cost them about $0.002 per minute). But AT&T discovered they had bought into a disaster - the cable industry. AT&T is living a Reagonomics sort of existance having incurred $80billion debt alone!

That last mile is not available either from the Baby Bells or from the cable companies and will not be ubiquitous for at least another 5 years. In short, the computer industry has saturated current markets and cannot cash in on the next wave - multimedia.

The Economist noted that only 7% of companies are responsible for the past decade boom. If one industry stumbles, then where is the next innovation to pick up the pieces - to continue the economic run?

Cell phones: Nokia has annual sales of 100 million, followed by 180 million, then 250 million, then 400 million - followed by a prediction of only 400 million. Another market saturated since third generation phones are just not happening.

TVs: DTV would have been a boom buisness had the industry developed a better standard. Instead it costs too much, is not easy to receive, and does not have a killer application or market champ (as NBC did for color TV).

Let's see. Chrysler has been decimated by Daimler. Ford under Jacque Nasser has seen productivity fall to GM's levels - some of the industries lowest. Forget the auto industry.

USX and Bethlehem Steel are leading a continued downsizing is basic industrial materials.

Having consolidated much of the aerospace industry, Boeing is learning how unproductive companies such as MacDonald Douglas was. The US leader in rocket launchers has completed new rockets that, we know discover, still are not competitive to the world - especially against the French Arianne. The MacDonald Douglas commerical planes are basically a total loss. Their Apache contracts should have been suspended until this chopper can fly in combat. The next wave in satellite communications - sat phones and Internet access - has completely dissolved. In short the American aerospace business has major problems.

Environmental industries had been a plus for America when America was lead by people with appreciation of science. But when Reagan stopped such progress, then the Germans became world leaders in environmental control equipment. American again had oppurtunity for a new boom industry - except our genius President, without even one science advisor, decided that global warming would only cost America jobs. Of course he would think that. Our genius president is an MBA and therefore does not realize that jobs are only created by innovation. Forget a booom in environmental controls and staggering innovations in energy efficiency. The genius has pretty much suspemded an economic boom in energy and environmental development industries.

Products from advanced physics - forget it. Any new and major research tool is dead under the Republicans and an MBA president who sees short term glory in a useless space station but nothing is particle physics. A president who will waste massive capital on short term nuclear projects without considering long term costs (ie a nuclear power plants costs about as much to decommission as it does to commission - but power companies don't have to put up a bond to guarantee the decommissioning will be accomplished without government funds) (ie. Yucca Flats and waster fuel storage).

Home appliances - nothing but a steady demand since no breakthrough innovation is in the innovation pipeline.

Superconductors - after a major breakthrough in high temperature devices, little else to make it any different from the late 1950 semiconductor industry - with growth rates about equal to that 1950 industry.

Genetics, especially farming, is a possible new growth area except that heretics - poeple who talk like the pope that censured Galileo - are trying to stifle that business. See Europe as example.

The American economy is solid. There is continuing demand for many of the benchmarks of increased standards of living. Many overseas countries are still slowly picking up the pieces of their economy. But as in the Japanese economy, the American economy is also beginning to show signs of a shortage of innovation.

Massive money was wasted in so many ventures (possibly approaching one $trillion) from fiber optics to new satellite networks (Irridium and at least two others), the dot coms, and numerous corporate mergers. This is all money that will suddenly appear missing in the future when profits should have been realized. This is not rationalization for a recession. We should just realize that so many technologies stifled by MBAs of the 1970 and 1980 have finally been recovered, developed, marketed, and ubiquitously available. The resulting boom is over because so many stifled technologies have finally been released to markets. Welcome back to realty. Even gasoline prices are finally rising back to normal levels.

IOW, what promised to be the driving economic force of 2000s will not happen even though almost everything is there - except the last mile. There is little demand for all those new servers, all that fiber optic switching equipment, conferencing hardware and software, networked appliances, or even the 1.3 Gigahetz processor - when the last mile does not exist to justify all this equipment.

How can the computer industry growth continue when a 486-66 Mhz processor is still sufficient for almost all current Internet activity? That last mile has stifled new demands in so many industries.

[Dagnabit]

As far as GM foods go, put me in with the heretics. It's an ecological fuck-over.

Maybe we would be a little more inclined to care about food safety - like the Europeans - if we had an inexplicable outbreak of a hard-to-understand brain disease crush one of our most basic agricultural industries.

GM potatoes were designed to grow their own pesticide A bacterial toxin was widely used to kill pests that eat potatoes. So they engineered a plant that could produce and release this toxin itself. A classified pesticide, which farmers would use very carefully and make sure was gone at harvest time, is now produced by the plant itself; it will never be gone at harvest time. (Some of those potatoes made it into McDonald's fries, by the way.)

Guaranteed, these potatoes will kill every one of the pests it has been engineered to wage war against. But the story won't end there. The pests, following laws of nature, will re-engineer themselves. So the same GM potatoes grown in 2000 won't work in 2005.

This is only an advantage to the agribusiness companies, who will just be able to charge more for another set of GM potatoes. Its effect on the rest of the ecosystem simply isn't a part of the equation.

Maybe we would be more concerned about this if we had experienced a famine where a blight killed almost every potato as happened in Ireland. Or every wine grape rootstock as happened in France and Spain. The Europeans understand agricultural paranoia... from experience.

[tw]

Originally posted by Dagnabit
As far as GM foods go, put me in with the heretics. It's an ecological fuck-over.

We do know that if food production productivity increases only come from using current genetically engineering technologies of the past 40 years, then many world countries will return to severe food shortages. Yes GM foods have really been with us for most of the 1900s.

One genetic engineering method was called hybrid. Buty many foods are full of chemical designed just to kill. Why does your bread not turn moldy within two days? Preservatives. Why are all those dead insects in your cereal grains? Phosgene gas, extremely dangerous, saturates food during bulk delivery.

To think that a chemical that resists certain insects would automatically poison humans is rediculous. If true, then we would be dead long ago from the hybrids of oranges and apples - not to mention the protective chemicals sprayed on their skins.

I once read an article in the Daily News. Then read about the same thing in the Inky. Having read the Inky, I then realized how little I understood from the Daily News. The result was a complete reversal of opinion.

That is the story with GM foods. So much half truths is created because the information disseminated is Daily News quality. GM foods have dangers - as does electricity. If we ban GM foods, then we should have also banned electricity in the 1910s. Welcome to the real world. All innovation involves risk. But most of the worry over GM foods sound just like an H G Wells radio reports in "War of the Worlds". Somehow people seem to have trouble differentiating reality from fiction when talking about GM foods.

Hell. Where are those Martians who were going to destroy humanity. They should have existed. Just look in any telescope to see the canals.

[Dagnabit]

Originally posted by tw
To think that a chemical that resists certain insects would automatically poison humans is rediculous. If true, then we would be dead long ago from the hybrids of oranges and apples - not to mention the protective chemicals sprayed on their skins.

We think that the chemical is harmless, but to think we know how it will affect the ecosystem is folly. We don't know everything. That's why DDT was a problem. DDT wasn't harmful to humans if I recall, but when insects ate it, and birds ate the insects, their eggshells became weak and bird populations plummetted. Nobody knew DDT would have an impact on the strength of eggshells. Nobody would have studied the chemical that far along the food chain.

Hybrids are much more likely to happen in nature. GM puts the genes of flounder into tomatoes, the genes of frogs into lettuce. I'm not one of the wackos who points to that and says we've got mutant vegetables. GM is capable of some wonderful things, including solving a lot of malnutrition.

The whole thing comes down to, who do you trust?

Monsanto (that agent orange producing drug war profiteer I mentioned in another thread) GM's the potato with this Bacillus thuringiensis. It's a natural pesticide and even used in organic farming, but you know, when you use it on a farm, you wash it off or you wait the days or weeks for it to break down before harvest. There are federal laws about how these things are to be used by humans, including when to apply and when to harvest, etc. but no laws about how a potato is to use it.

Now the insects will develop a resistance to it so in five years it won't be a useful pesticide for organic farmers. Not a concern for Monsanto of course!

But do you trust Monsanto? Are they one of those companies you like, or one that you hate?

Tell you what, if you had two potatoes in front of you, one of which was GM and the other which wasn't, which one would you eat?

[jaguar]

Few points i just *have* to add.
GM is different form any other form of plant or product modification because it modifies the plant at a fundamental level, and is different form hybrids of species coz u you can import genes from totally alien life forms (such as front resistance from cod to potatoes)

Second point is that while most mistakes, such as spraying poisons can be easily stopped GM modifications of crops are far harder, and there is some proof that it can 'jump' to wild species, super weeds are born.

There is also the issue of control, with Monsanto's patenting of a 'terminator' gene that stop another generation, it forces farmers to buy grain every year, making them totally reliant and chained to these companies to keep their yields.

Great things can be done with GM but for gods sake, lets not have another DDT and toughly test this stuff first, which Europe is doing, blocking some of the dodgiest trials while the us blithely lets everything though.

GM is like sex, one mistake and you might have to deal with it for a bloody long time.

[Griff]

The terminater gene is the one part of the gm story which I don't worry too much about. It has the potential of acting as a barrier to the wider world so we don't end up perpetuating mistakes. I'd like to see it incorporated into all gm seeds. Most American farmers buy hybrid seed every year anyway since saving hybrid seed is hit or miss. The plants from the next generation of seed are not always true to type and farmers don't generally have much room for error. Saving seed fom open-pollinated (traditional) varieties is still common in the third world and among organic farmers world wide and a terminator gene would protect their crops from accidental cross-pollonation.

A disturbing part of this story is that the Canadian courts have given Monsanto property rights over all seed which contains "its" genes. A farmer up north planted regular soybeans across the road from a Monsanto gm crop, with the intent of cross-pollinating his crop and saving the Round Up ready seed to plant. He was forced to hand over the seed. So the farmer who had no agreement with Monsanto (farmers often have to sign agreements to handle planting in particular ways and only dispose of the seed in an approved manner) lost his crop to them since they were unable to control their pollen. The organic community considers this genetic pollution and their open pollinated varieties can be altered by inadvertant gm pollination. This is a truly complicated issue.

[tw]

Originally posted by jaguar
GM is different form any other form of plant or product modification because it modifies the plant at a fundamental level, ...

Second point is that while most mistakes, such as spraying poisons can be easily stopped GM modifications of crops are far harder, and there is some proof that it can 'jump' to wild species, super weeds are born.

There is also the issue of control, with Monsanto's patenting of a 'terminator' gene that stop another generation, it forces farmers to buy grain every year, making them totally reliant and chained to these companies to keep their yields.

These are the half truths currently used to hype the masses. Point one alone is a classic example of logic only based upon fear. We have everything to fear from fear itself - because the technology is so revolutionary?

As noted previously, seeds from crops degenerate quickly even in the second generation. Hybrids lose their potency. Insect resistance crops lose their genetic advantage in the second generation. Farmers always purchase seeds from the seed providers because even with older gentic crops - the second generation loses genetic information. The second generation of a genetically modified crop loses to much of its unique abilities - which is why those genetic variations don't already exist naturally.

But if we use hype, then we claim this is a ploy to force farmers to always buy Monstanto seed - forgetting that farmers must purchase seed anyway to get the positive effects of current hybrids. It is a classic example of lying by half truths. For example that farmers will be forced to buy commercial seed - forgetting they already have to do just that.

Then there is the 'jumping' to other species - a caution expressed inside the industry but never seen in any genetic research. Yes- microwaves do kill - so why are they now so ubiquitious? Just another hype and fear from half truths that never happened.

We must not use electricity because magnetic fields will create cancer. IOW we must not ever risk innovation? So far, I only read half truth based fears (none supported by factual evidence - only speculation) as reason to eliminate innovation - especially point one. Fears of electricity were as widely touted in the 1910s. Its just that every 30+ years, a whole new crop of humans has to fear rather than think all over again.

Why are we all not dead of aids as so strongly predicted in the mid 1980s by statistical evidence? Why have giant ants not taken over the world having been created by radioactivity? There was good reason to question them both. BUT when the fears are hyped by gross half truths, then reasonable worries are simply lost in the noise and nonsense. There are some parts of GM to be concerned about. But none is accurately posted above. Therefore the real concerns about GM remain ignored.

People were so busy campaigning against the technology called nuclear power with hype and fear that they forgot to address the real issues of nuclear power. Ergo 3 Mile Island and a management that knew nothing about nuclear power, electric generation, reliability, or the fundamentals of quality. They only understood buisness school concepts. So much hype was addressed against the technology that the 'purveyors of fear' forgot to look at the real threat created by nuclear power - cost control mentalities.

It is rarely the technology that is the danger. The danger, such as Bhopal, India was not the chemical methyl isocyanate. Those who promote fear would ban methyl isocyanate and other similar chemicals - eliminate the necessary pesticides. Therefore they have again failed to identify the reason for failure - the same reason why seven astronauts were murdered on Challenger.

Ironically, I don't hear the same half truths being expressed about Space Shuttles even though the same problems were common to both murders. That is the problem with hype generated fear. It is so full of half truths as to cause the real problems to be ignored.

The above fears of GM crops are full of half truths - just enough to create fear and grossly insufficient to learn facts. The topmost reasoning is exactly why I kringe everytime I see someone only read the Daily News or watch Liza Thomas Laurie and the local gossip. Too much half truths create nothing but lies.


[Edited by tw on 06-22-2001 at 02:47 PM]

[elSicomoro]

Originally posted by tw
The above fears of GM crops are full of half truths - just enough to create fear and grossly insufficient to learn facts. The topmost reasoning is exactly why I kringe everytime I see someone only read the Daily News or watch Liza Thomas Laurie and the local gossip. Too much half truths create nothing but lies.

Even I've learned in 9 months here in Philadelphia--the Daily News is entertainment to a fair degree. You get some good news, but you also get the hard-left edge and humor (which I dig, quite frankly).

But even I would never take the Daily News that seriously on news. ;-)

[Dagnabit]

Answer the question! If you had two potatoes in front of you, one of which was GM and the other which wasn't, which one would you eat?

[tw]

Originally posted by Dagnabit
If you had two potatoes in front of you, one of which was GM and the other which wasn't, which one would you eat?

Either because I could not tell the difference and the difference would be irrelevant. The greater risk would be which restaurant cooked the potatoe. Risk from hepatitis is probably greater as one friends demonstrated in her part time job.

[elSicomoro]

Originally posted by Dagnabit
Answer the question! If you had two potatoes in front of you, one of which was GM and the other which wasn't, which one would you eat?

tw said it best--How would I know which is which? And until those opposed come up with strong support against genetically-engineered food, then I don't understand what the real problem is. We genetically modify animals and humans (to a degree)...what's the big deal with food? In a sense, many foods are genetically modified, as they have evolved over the years, hence modifying themselves.

There would also be no loganberries without hybriding...sorry, random thought.

[jaguar]

THere have been at least 2 example of cross polination from GM to non-gm in the field.
And hundreds of example of technology being rapidly deployed without thought or through research and it causing great harm.

Nuclear power has benproven to be innifeciant and expensive, anotehr example, look at the western world, no more nuclear reactors are being built becuase they are simply to expensive, even the private power ones in the US only make money after huge government substadies.

I'm al lfor innovation, but also for thogh testing before deployment.