Chip industry rivals Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are facing off on a major new battleground: India.
Intel (INTC) said Monday it plans to spend more than $1 billion in that country over the next five years. The effort will add to the $700 million that Intel has already pumped into India.
AMD, (AMD) Intel's biggest competitor in personal computer chips, also has deepened its ties to India. Last week the company signed an agreement with the SemIndia consortium. AMD is licensing its flagship chip design to SemIndia, a group of Indian chipmakers that plans to build a $3 billion factory.
The lure for both Intel and AMD is clear, analysts say. India has emerged as both a supplier and consumer of chips. And its workers offer top-notch technical skills and English proficiency — at relatively low wages.
Both Intel and AMD already get most of their revenue from outside the U.S. Future growth for the two companies will mainly come from overseas, analysts say.
There are serious medical practitioners who believe that we will be able to radically slow the aging process within 15 years. Within 10 years, a lot of the diseases that kill us today will no longer be the threat that they are. It is very likely that Alzheimer's, if not cured, will at least be controllable. Certain cancers and some types of heart disease may finally be cured.
Pension plans are simply not prepared for their "younger" retirees to live an extra 10 or 15 years. While they will be healthier, so that medical costs will be somewhat more controlled, retirement benefit assumptions get blown to Hades with an extra 5 or 10 years of life. My research suggests that 5 or 10 years is not just possible, but is likely!
That means many of us will live a lot longer than we planned! While that is good news, it also creates problems for pension funds, especially in the early 2020s when we will see the benefits of the biotech revolution really begin to take shape.
In the mid-80's, there were 112,000 defined benefit plans. Today there are just over 31,000. As more and more executives realize that making commitments for 40 to 50 years into the future is fiscal insanity in a world of accelerating change, we will see the number of defined benefit pension plans drop even more.
But it is not just the fiscal insanity that should lead executives to abandon defined benefit plans. Let's assume you have an employee that is 50 years old and has been working for you for 25 years. It is highly likely that he is going to live to at least 90 if not 100 years old. He is planning on retiring in 10 to 15 years with that nice retirement you promised, indexed to inflation of course.
But the reality is that few companies will be able to fund that plan 30 years from now, let alone 40 or 50. The world is going to be so completely different from what it is today that no 30 year plan will survive intact. We are no longer living in the 1950s or 60s when such long-term planning made sense. It borders on the immoral to allow a worker to retire, thinking they are set for life, when those promises are going to go up in smoke. Or they will be handed over to the PBGC where taxpayers will get the privilege of making those payments.
So, am I slitting my wrist over this? No. Because these nightmare scenarios will ultimately not play out. Corporations will either abandon their defined benefit plans, or at the very least change the nature of the contract. Governments will be forced to change their plans. Things are going to change, because they will have to.
In an age of global water scarcity, with governments scrambling to create new water systems or repair deteriorating ones, there is money in water. Already a big business attracting major corporate players such as General Electric, Siemens, ITT, Suez, and Tyco, water is a $400 billion global industry. While just 15 percent of U.S. drinking water is delivered by for-profit, or "investor-owned," entities, with the remaining 85 percent operated by municipalities themselves, the Environmental Protection Agency says that the U.S. water industry needs $500 billion of infrastructure investment over the next twenty years. All this portends opportunity for private companies and for investors, who've sent water-related stocks soaring 113 percent over the last five years. As replacement costs for old facilities and equipment combine with increasingly stringent and expensive regulations, more and more communities are also contending with municipal budget squeezes and tax-averse citizens. Turning over water operations to private companies that can offer economies of scale, financial resources, expertise, and efficiency is an attractive option.
Privatization, however, troubles some consumer advocates and other activists. Critics argue that water is an essential human need and should not be subject to the vagaries of profit-driven management or the potential manipulation of markets. But it is these same market forces that could well drive crucial changes in water use. In theory, when water becomes expensive, it will be used more efficiently.
With the deluge of baby boomers turning away from conventional medicine -- promising potentially toxic cures in the form of a pill -- I was pleased but not so surprised to learn training in alternative treatments is finding its way into traditional medical schools.
In fact, the University of Pennsylvania is collaborating with the Tai Sophia Institute, an alternative medical school in suburban Washington D.C., to develop a curriculum to teach medical students about a wide range of natural treatments, some of which I've written about here, including herbal therapies, acupuncture and meditation.
As a result, Tai Sophia will offer a master's degree program in complementary and alternative medicine starting in August, and both schools will share faculty members and students.
Penn isn't the only university teaching alternatives to conventional medicine. More than 75 percent of America's 125 medical schools require some kind of complementary and alternative medicine coursework, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.
A quote from a doctor and coordinator of this new program really warmed my heart: If you had raised this 10 years ago everyone would have sneered at it. Today, we're moving away from being completely focused on preventing disease and toward looking at what it takes to (achieve and maintain) wellness. I think patient care will improve enormously.
As best as can be determined, the world is now warmer than it has been at any point in the last two millennia, and, if current trends continue, by the end of the century it will likely be hotter than at any point in the last two million years. In the same way that global warming has gradually ceased to be merely a theory, so, too, its impacts are no longer just hypothetical. Nearly every major glacier in the world is shrinking; those in Glacier National Park are retreating so quickly it has been estimated that they will vanish entirely by 2030. The oceans are becoming not just warmer but more acidic; the difference between day and nighttime temperatures is diminishing; animals are shifting their ranges poleward; and plants are blooming days, and in some cases weeks, earlier than they used to.
Unable to put the environment at the top of the nation's agenda, the modern green movement has come to a point of reckoning. And as a conservative counterrevolution makes sweeping policy changes, traditional environmentalists are wondering what went wrong.
Right now, we have three great crises facing the human family, and they're all connected to oil. The first is global warming, the second is the increasing debt in the third world, and the third is the potential for more wars in the Middle East.
The United States is faced with a huge budget deficit that makes foreign investors nervous about holding dollars. But as a percentage of GDP, that deficit isn't that much worse than those in Europe and better than the one in Japan, the homes of the two major competing global currencies. In addition, the U.S. economy is growing faster than those of Europe and Japan, and our budget-busting demographic burden isn’t as serious as those faced by the Europeans and the Japanese.
Everyone assumes that if they work hard and save they will be able to retire. While a sad number of people do not plan for retirement, those who do make assumptions about what type of retirement they will be able to afford with their savings, pensions and Social Security based upon historical performance of the markets.
The boomer generation will demand goods and services, and because there are not enough workers, the economy will not be able to supply enough goods and services, and workers will demand more of the saved assets of retirees for what they produce. This can come as increased prices for the production, as a drop in the value of the saved assets, or both. That means either an inflation in prices or a deflation in wealth or a combination of the two.
