The Kids are All Right?

I am not a big FaceBook user, but our company has a marketing campaign on-going, so we are suppose to be hip and cool and monitor our company page. Because of the mental lapse, signing up for a class reunion,  I get a lot of FB posts from people in my High School graduation class. Make a note- no web crawling after a glass of Scotch. Anyway, there has been an ongoing dialog from my peers about the world in the early 70s.  One thread was about dress codes.  The schools expected us to show up each morning with short hair or a long skirt - but not both.  One day the world changed for us, schools simply dropped dress codes.  Suddenly, you realized that girls actually had legs, and some guy could grow enough hair to need a pony tail.  Amazing!

And, we were thrown into a world of controversy. What now? Last week we worried about the condition of our face, now we are having to talk about Vietnam, race politics, and women's rights. Huh? Most 17 year olds then either thought what their parents thought, or the exact opposite.  What does this mean? Do I join the Kiwanis Club or become a Dead Head?

Many in my generation showed there feelings about war, oil, and race by taking to the street and marching with protest signs.  Very little was accomplished, as we were too stoned to remember why they were walking in the first place.  Today, young people are walking to actually change things... by not driving cars. And, that change for society is more radical than any SDS manifesto.

While sitting though yet another VC panel, one speaker said something remarkable. "What investments do you have in all the cool automotive technology being developed?" was the question from the floor.  'We have none" was the answer. "Young people are not buying cars, the median age of a car buyer in 2012 was over 50. Kids in general, do not care about cars. They buy one only as a form of transportation, and then powered by electricity if possible. In major metro areas, they can rent, share, or simple borrow cars for the rare time they really need one. That is a major change, and we are negative on anything in the automotive space!" A lady next to me with GM on her name tag later confirmed what the VC was saying. "Young people are increasingly ambivalent about cars, many only care about the Bluetooth integration or the size of the subwoofers".

Think about that.  Nearly every major country lists auto manufacturing as a key industry. Tens of millions of jobs, billions in campaign contributions, and much national self-worth is wrapped up in cars and related industries. What is Italy without Ferraris? US without pickups?

Cars were the center of a young man's world in Southern California in the 70s. Now, they are just expensive pollution machines that sit idle 22 hours a day. Oil politics, pollution, traffic... all results of a society that puts a lot of cache on the automobile. Hard to admit for Ol' Si, a car guy who not only knows the words of the song 'Little Deuce Coupe', but knows what the words 'ported and relieved flathead mill' mean.

If, indeed, cars are no long something that people care about, will they be sold like everything else on Amazon? "Send me something red with the iPad connector" will be the order.  With little differentiation, gross margins in the car industry will collapse, and with it a lot of industrial capacity. And, where will that spending go, if not for car payments? Will it go into savings? What will young people do for jobs? Maybe a small business will provide the job, and use the unneeded car payment.

In ol' Si's neighborhood, there are many small businesses being started by young people.  Once you get past the pierced everything and neck tattoos, you see hard working business owners. One couple, who run a bakery near me, say they neither need nor want a car. They bake stuff, sell stuff, and are happy. They pay people to do deliveries, outsourcing the need for a car.

Maybe in a few years, your high end bagel fryer will have the same cache as a big-block Chevy did in my generation. Sitting on his Grandpa's lap, a young boy in 2047 may hear.  'My Hobart 503CV was the hot ticket then, son. I cranked out the best onion bagels in town and had all the girls chasing me!"

Given the state of the world, maybe the kids ARE alright.

ThanksLiving

Ol' Si survived another holiday.  For you outside the US, that would be the feast of Thanksgiving. Actually, for this grizzled old veteran of Silicon Valley, it is the only US holiday that I actually enjoy. Around my family, significant other, and good friends.  Lots of good food, decent TraderJoe's bargain wines, and a no -guilt run at the dessert line. There is none of the religious garbage or phony nationalism that surrounds most holiday here. Christmas is a consumer spending orgy, Easter has no meaning to most of us, other than the snow has melted.  I appreciate Veterans Day. But, it is not holiday, it is a memorial. Thanksgiving is a holiday.

Celebrating freedom, celebrating life. Living in The Valley, you need to stop and remember where you are and what you are doing every day. While we think we are marketing IP, developing codecs,  or spec' ing out switching power supplies, we are actually creating world peace.

The seeming mundane tasks done in Silicon Valley mean that Vietnam can employ millions of MOOC -educated young people in software testing,  Eastern Europe can keep it's brilliant, but unemployed physics PhDs creating/preventing computer viruses, and India has a place for IIT grads that doesn't involve pushcarts.  Total social meltdown in failed Socialist societies has been averted, because people are writing apps, bidding for work on Freelancer.com, or getting into US grad schools.  Consider the world if we could have vectored all the smart people in Germany to jobs after WWI.

OK, OK, I know-- we are are under the gun now. Code drop is late, quota is too high, vendors are not paying in even 90 days.  We all have underfunded 401Ks, overfunded teenagers, and leaky roofs.  But, we are free and everyone around me seems to be eating well. World is a bit unstable, not in places we need to care about anymore.

Ayn Rand may have a correct view of the future in her book 'Atlas Shrugged', but no one I know has moved to the hills in Colorado yet and the trains still run on time.  I see very few John Galt bumper stickers, so things appear somewhat stable.  Speeches from Washington, DC are ominous and following the script, but the storm seems some time away.

Finish your turkey, top off the Scotch sniffer and toast Thanksgiving. A holiday that still means something.