Politics

Engineers rarely engage in politics especially when they have a single boss.

Copyright© Miklos Szegedi, 2023.

This is why I thought it is time to write down some opinions before I engage in more social business. People should be thoughtful, still many are emotional.

I would probably be fired from most world-class Big Tech teams after publishing this article. Articles on this site were meant to be general business founder & citizen’s opinion on economics rather than financial advice for a reason.

I am independent. This means that I see that left- and right-wing beliefs are built due to gains and losses in business and society due to different policies. Somebody who loses out in a leftish policy will become rightish and vice versa. This is why I chose to apply for the US Citizenship in 2019. It makes it so easy to protect my rights here. I am independent, and I vote only based on my own experience of the past four years regardless of press coverage.

China. Now that is expensive. Huge bags of quantitative easing dollars ended up there. It is not necessarily bad, if it stays or comes back for products that provide good value to their Chinese owners. My suggestion was to build vacation housing that is liquid and lucrative to US locals and create jobs. There are probably other ideas.

Affordable, good quality labor attracts investment. However, me as an MBA thinks that concentrating the trade decisions and supply chains is what reduces supply. It makes products more expensive. This builds a trade deficit.

Chips. I was wondering as a LSUS MBA whether it is a good idea to withhold chip technology from Chinese companies. It would increase prices, and GPUs are already a concentrated market. Prices become higher. It is almost impossible to buy Nvidia or AMD chips for self-designed devices already. Trade wars affect small businesses disproportionately.

I realized that a hard ban on chip exports would mean a new semiconductor industry is built up in China. This may help us to get more competition later. We can buy cheaper and reliable chips from China, when the diplomatic tensions ease in a few years. It probably does not matter as much as attention the case gets.

Embargo. There is an unfortunate war in Ukraine and Russia. This is even more painful me remembering the life exporting buses and bauxite to the Soviet Union meant to my family when I grew up in Hungary. A full day of freight train radius is a significant trade area of any country due to quicker supply chains. Any reasonable economist would say that eliminating this trade opportunity will reduce the GDP of Eastern EU members for a long time. It will probably make any Silk Road initiatives postponed for decades.

I also think that Viktor Orban, and Hungary are oftentimes presented as scapegoats in the press. I hold this opinion despite my differences. I am more liberal and social-democrat than them in business, and more conservative than them in family. My wife is Asian, a rare attribute in Hungary. Division between nations is 20th century.

I was also surprised that Japan initiated an embargo of chips to Russia. Japan is the country that started WWII in the Eastern Pacific due to a new oil embargo by the US in Pearl Harbor according to some historians. Trade should never be used as a weapon. Such precedent increases yields, risks, and it causes higher rates, inflation, and currency devaluation compared to free trade countries.

I made three oaths in my life, one as a husband, one as an engineer, the third as a US citizen. Civilians die in Ukraine, and I intend to vote for politicians, who will enact laws that keep NATO politicians criminally accountable, if they unnecessarily lengthen or fuel foreign wars. Such behavior risks escalation, the lives of civilians, NATO military personnel. A prolonged war weakens common NATO defense of sovereignty and rule of law within NATO borders. Individual Ukrainian and Russian people should be welcome as refugees and immigrants.

I was also a minority in Hungary I chose to have a house in another country. I live a happy life. I think it was the right decision to withdraw NATO from Afghanistan saving the lives of so many so far and counting. I do not accept any reasoning to divide people and lift the salaries to some dropping the jobs and salaries to others due to nationalist reasons.

I think gender equality will be very important in the future especially since I have three daughters. However, gender equality must not mean that anybody needs to face harassment at work because of their gender, ethnicity, race, or disability status or to enforce quotas.

I also believe that marriage is between two people. I liked that the Biden administration helped mixed race families with laws. I also think that divorces should be primarily prevented by equal treatment favoring co-parenting which eliminates the risk of cash payments.

I do not think that Obamacare was properly finished, there are many things in healthcare that I miss. I still think that education would allow to make it more affordable and create career opportunities for many. I think on the other side that the quantitative easing policy of the Obama administration helped us a lot to have meaningful work in the early 2010s.

Downgrading Federal Debt during the Biden administration showed that tribalism, opaque job decisions, and non-common monetary policies have transparent effects for a long time.

Jobs. I had a good start in job opportunities early in the Trump administration. I think there are flaws in the employment policies in the Biden administration. Any job policies should target the individual and not families or groups. Nobody should lose their jobs because databases or artificial intelligence see they have income from spouse’s employment.

Real-estate. I do not see it would be easy for me to find a new job unless I pay a years’ worth of income to sell my house to move to another state. It just not worth it. I see lots of cases when expensive coaches are required to secure a basic engineering job, while somehow USCIS rules on employing US locals first can be circumvented so many ways. Such policies hinder US productivity and increase trade deficit.