Slashdot Mirror
Outsourcing To Rural America
An anonymous reader writes "News.com is running a story about Rural Sourcing, a company attempting to make outsourcing to rural America as cost effective as sending jobs to India."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Treat them like ignorant foreigners, so why not?
The difference between offshoring to India and insourcing to rural areas?
Indians speak better English.
M
So rather than "Tank you vor calling Cisco, dis is Singh, how may I help you?" I'll hear "Thanks fer callin' Cis-coe, this is Billy-Joe Jim-Bob, what's yer malfunction?"
It's a joke, lighten up.
I'll move from Manhattan to somewhere in hicksville for a job in no time. Fresh air, no subways, no bums. I'm down. Where do I sign up?
Hurray! As part of the Bush initiative to grow the job market in America, skilled, college educated professionals can now make as much money as their counterparts in third-world countries!
America - I love this place!
i'd gladly sell my expensive detroit suburb house and move to west virginia for this. in a minute.
...so I can understand them, I'm all for it.
Somewhat appropriate for an article about rural America.
I can stop worrying about my job going to India and start worrying about my job going to Indiana.
South Dakota gladly welcomes it's new in-sourcing overlords!
One hopes this expands my job prospects here... not that it matters too much, I love my job.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
For those of you unfamiliar with America's urban population densities, here's a map of the areas they are discussing. The rural areas are marked in Green and labeled "Jesusland".
it will be good news for American techies-at least the ones in rural communities and those willing to move there
But will they be able to survive without pizza deliveries?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Why contract with South Asians when you can contract with businesses run by good old American Indians? I'm sure somebody on the reservation could help you admin your Apache server.
What I'd like to know is how much money the "inconvenience" factor counts for . . . Sounds like a catch-all category for costs that is used to magiacally make rural sourcing as cheap as outsourcing to India.
The end of the article:
;)
If White is right, it will be good news for American techies-at least the ones in rural communities and those willing to move there.
If White is right? Interesting choice of words for an article about rural sourcing vs india.
Yet another language barrier to surmount.
At least the guys in Mumbai are *trying* to enunciate.
(I grew up somewhere that has a native accent thicker than Brooklyn's, and currently live in North Carolina, so I have a legal right to make these jokes)
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Not according to This. It appears the 'rural' states aren't the sharpest tools in the shed.
this post intended to be humerous and or ironic. please treat as such.
So there is hope for South Carolina!
From the prices I've seen listed, it would be illigal to employ Americans (or even Amerucuns) for anything even close to the same amount.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I landed in the Kansas City area after the bubble burst in Boston. Living costs are quite modest here, and it is a pleasant place to live. The hacking is the same. That does not stop my company from outsourcing to India though. Slavery is very attractive to business.
an ill wind that blows no good
Tech support that doesn't speak English or tech support that doesn't speak English?
Ye'll get a complimentary bottle of genuine moonshine with that new LCD monitor if ye buy it today.
In his trilogy on "the information age", manuel castells looked at the evolving and future structure of current society. One of his suggestions, which I remember clearly, is to forget looking at first, second and third world as being rigidly defined around countries (i.e. the idea that some are "first", others are "second", etc).
He suggests that the world is really becoming a patchwork of first, second and third - so that even so called advanced countries (on average) have third world areas, and even third world countries have first world areas. When you look at it this way, then it shouldn't be surprising about "outsourcing" from advanced economic zones (e.g. SF) to third world zones (e.g. places in the deep south).
Either way, I found this conceptual idea of his to be a very powerful one.
While in a manner of speaking I'm all for this, it's already been done to death.
Throughout the last 100-someodd years, the rest of the US has looked to the South as "cheap labor" -- most of the factories that've closed here paid just at or barely above minimum wage, with no option for any real pay raises, and offer conditions that no state in the North would accept. Perhaps this is just a return to that trend. I can only hope that the trend of severe employee abuse won't carry over.
As a network/security engineer from Arkansas who had to move to get a job, this gives me hope. Not in the immediate, but its good to see things spread out, and some tech hit the rural south. Hopefully better things to come eventually.
Send those jobs to Toledo. Our government is into massive deficit spending.
We need work!!!!!!!!!!
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
It's a well known hoax that started in 2000 with Gore and that was updated in 2004 with Kerry's name. People seem to believe anything they see on the internet.
Anyway, I think this is better than having things outsourced to India. It is governed under American law so I feel more comfortable with them having sensitive data than someone in India, they are fluent in English (well, thats debatable) and American customs and nuances, and keeping those jobs on this side of the pond helps our economy.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
But I live in England you insensitive clod!
Seriously, there will always be less advanced areas of any country where folks will work for less than in the big cities.
The worst part about all this outsourcing, especially for certain things, is that the new lower paid employees do not have the local knowledge required to handle clients. Sure, some things can be handled extremely well, but theres a great swath of things that simply don't work.
I'm not talking specifically about the language barrier, though that obviously is a part of it, I'm talking about people not understanding basic country specific details.
liqbase
No, land of the fundamentalist Christians. They all used to be Democrats!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
But then again, some folks'll
Like Cletus, the slack-jawed yokel
Most folks'll never lose a toe
But then again, some folks'll
Like Cletus, the slack-jawed yokel
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
"...as sending jobs to India."
*smacks head against wall*
Sure. Let's keep ALL work in the US - I mean, if outsourcing IT work is bad, why is outsourcing say banana production good? surely if outsourcing IT work is wrong because "it sends jobs overseas" then ALL work which does this is wrong?
So all the jobs which are more cheaply done overseas would then be done more expensively in the US (and they would be more expensive, because they're *already* done in the cheapest and most efficient locations, which means, when appropriate, overseas), and so everything they make costs more, which means we all have less real wealth, since bananas now cost say a dollar a piece, which means there is, in the larger picture, less money to invest in making more money in the future, so the annual growth rate is lowered, and so we all find our year-in year-out living standards rising more slowly than they otherwise would, and there are that many fewer jobs pretty much everywhere in the economy, since it's growing more slowly, because if you make one sector cost more, all the sectors which depend on it cost more, and all the sectors depending on them cost more, and so on and so on.
But hey, we've got to protect ourselves, right? and that means keeping jobs at home.
--
Toby
a lot of small companies have been doing this for a long time. having lived in the midwest, california and most places in between, i tend to find that both the work ethic and quality of performance is higher in rural areas. of course there are always exception to this rule, such as IT. if you think about it, what else are folks in the midwest going to do during the summer, but go to work. no reason to call in sick to go hang out at the beech or go skiing.
I just saw a lecture about outsourcing in one of my grad courses, and the guest lecturer mentioned farmsourcing as a trend that was thought to be as cost effective as sending it overseas.
Maybe they'll come up with a term for sending your company to Canada too! Northsourcing?
I've sold my company's services simply by pointing out that my rates (in Indiana) are much cheaper than similar firms in New York, California, or even nearby Chicago.
You want to pay $150+ an hour for a Chicago guy to do the same thing that we'll do for $75 an hour?
This can bite you when they find another firm offering $50/hour. At some point, it's just not cost effective to run a business that cheap... not to mention that you'll have a harder time finding qualified employees to work for so little.
If I could make the salary of a comparable California worker, but live in Indiana, I'd be doing very well.
I'd like to see more businesses supporting work-from-home.
Things like, call centers, could easily be distributed. VPN (or Internet)-based helpdesk app for support, paid per call handled. While you're "logged in", calls to the company PBX line for helpdesk are forwarded to a random selection of your phone numbers.
With people being able to do their jobs with lower overhead (transportation costs, etc.) wages can be lower, meaning (1) more profit for corporation and (2) because less of the wage is tied up in overhead, higher useable income for the worker, despite having a lower absolute wage.
Me thinks Wal-Mart has already capitalized on this theory.
Creative Labs, while they have outsourced overseas their development labs, their tech support is in a tiny town called Stillwater, Oklahoma. They pay their employees only slightly above minimum wage. So, rural outsourcing probably saved them quite a bit of money.
Maybe it wasn't a good idea to do this with that ballot-counting contract...
I keed!
&$#%^% NO CARRIER
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
I've considered opening a call center in my hometown in Indiana on a number of occassions. It just makes more sense than sending the jobs to India.
Do you have ESP?
I live in a good-size college town with major growing pains (traffic), I commute OUT of it into the sticks every day. It's the same 45 minutes on the road, but instead of being stuck in a traffic jam 45 minutes to go 8 miles, I drive nonstop on two-lane highways through farm country. I get great bennies and flex, I'm home to see my kids, although the pay isn't great it's been worth it so far.
Vote Quimby!
After getting nailed by a Daisy Cutter, Osama made his way to the pearly gates. There, he is greeted by George Washington. "How dare you attack the nation I helped conceive!" yells Mr. Washington, slapping Osama in the face.
Patrick Henry comes up from behind. "You wanted to end the Americans' liberty, so they gave you death!" Henry punches Osama on the nose.
James Madison comes up next, and says "This is why I allowed the Federal government to provide for the common defense!" He drops a large weight on Osama's knee.
Osama is subject to similar beatings from John Randolph of Roanoke, James Monroe, and 65 other people who have the same love for liberty and America.
As he writhes on the ground, Thomas Jefferson picks him up to hurl him back toward the gate where he is to be judged.
As Osama awaits his journey to his final very hot destination, he screams "This is not what I was promised!"
An angel replies "I told you there would be 72 Virginians waiting for you, idiot. What did you think I said?"
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
They must have rural sourced that website, with its obviously dithered gifs, imagemaps, and lame stock photography.
"You can't outsource to rural areas!! What about the poor urban areas that need the money."
I can see it already...
What would Brian Boitano do?
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
Hasn't this been done for a long time? I used to work for PayPal and they had the majority of their non-technical work done in Omaha.
Silicon Valley or Silicon Alley: Get paid $80K, pay 28% federal tax plus 9-10% state/city tax. House costs $500K-$1M.
East Buttfuck, Wyoming: Get paid $50K. Pay 25% federal tax plus 0.0% state tax. House costs $60K-$100K.
If you've saved enough money for a down payment in the People's Republic of Kalifornia, you can buy a house for cash in rural America. And if you've been there long enough that you actually own your house in the People's Republic of Kalifornia, you can sell it, buy a house and a Ferrari, and have change left over for a fucking Porsche in rural America. That's right.
Wanna visit the opera? Hop in the Ferrari on Friday after work, tear up the asphalt (long live long straight highways featuring speed limits defined only by the words "reasonable and prudent" -- it's like the American Autobahn!), party your ass off all weekend, and come home on Sunday.
One look at the horrible things he's done to a Ferrari should make any self-respecting geek aspire to make John Romero our bitch. The best part about rural America isn't that a middle-class IT geek can enjoy such a lifestyle -- it's that he or she can pay for it on the interest and tax savings alone.
Who is John Galt? When you leave a high-tax state for rural America, you are.
Getting lucky in Kentucky!
Now I know where Timothy gets his text for the posts from! He just copies the ticker on the bottom of CNN headline news!
YeeHaw! I'm going back home to New Mexico.
The Truth About Slashdot
No, land of the fundamentalist Christians. They all used to be Democrats!
Yes, it's true, they used to be democrats, 40 or 50 years ago. But now that the Dems make their left wing social platform such a large part of their platform, they're becoming republicans.
They're tired of hearing that America sucks and that people who still hold onto the idea of morals and values are a bunch of bigoted idiots.
People who mock those in rural areas really need to get an f'en clue. Most of the idiots on the coasts have hardly been outside their metro areas, and when they do leave it's just to go to some other city. The people you mock are the most honest, real, hard working people in this country.
"If a frog had side pockets, he'd carry a hand gun" - Dan Rather
A large multinational law firm has "outsourced" many of its backoffice functions to West Virginia.
0 2004_biz01.asp
http://www.news-register.net/business/story/10202
--Spooky Action At A Distance
Despite being an (East) Indian, I'd welcome this if it helps change the mindsets of the so called 'red states' a bit..
I live in a small town of about 600 people. A small shop like this (even just 10 workers and a single support person) would make a big positive difference in our local economy.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
... "Red State Outsourcing"
1. Do you own a gun?
1a. How many do you own.
2. Do you drive a pick-up truck or a camero?
2a. Is the primary color Bondo?
3. Do you have more than 3 teeth?
3a. In your mouth?
4. Do you recognize the first day of deer-season as a holiday?
4a. And duck-season?
5. Are you married to a close relative?
5a. Do you wish you were married to a close relative?
Yes, I'm from the country. No, not all of these apply to me
I'm not a doctor, but I play one in bed.
Largely agree. I'm in rural Australia, working for a manuf/export agribusiness with $500m ann turnover. Our IT dept is in transition to being outsourced - to a company comprising recent ex-employees. (We get made redundant on the back of a contract to supply..)
:-)
Much of what we do couldn't be sent elsewhere just because you have to know the local situations, and there's not enough work in any single project that offshoring economies would overcome the overheads. That said, we occasionally subcontract devt to people we've previously dealt with, where-ever they are at the time. (one was in England for a while)
In the meantime, my house and yard cost 20% of what it would in the nearest capitol city, I see many trees out my window, and our town does have pizza deliveries
-- All your bass are below two Hz
*looks to the right, sees trees and a two-lane highway*
*looks to the left, sees trees and a creek*
Go ahead, bring the jobs out here!
UpSourcing
But will they be able to survive without pizza deliveries?
If you have a freezer and a standard oven, you can cook a pizzeria-quality pizza in about the same amount of time it takes to get one delivered. It's not delivery; it's Wal-Mart Great Value.
Face the facts. If you say that India is a outsourcing success story, look at the reasons why. On average, goods in India, barring housing and cars, cost only 20% (or less) of what it costs here in USA. On top of it, the standards of a good life and luxury are far lower than in the US.
In California, you call yourself middle-class if you have a 0.5 mil house, a boat, 2 cars etc. In India, most middle class folks consider a car with a boot as a luxury car (i'm not joking, Hyundai Accent, Ford Ikon, Fiat Siena etc. are considered high-end luxury cars). Even a person driving a small hatch-back considers himself/herself as having acheived something. This is why the big multinationals can afford to pay 10% of what they pay in the US, and still manage to retain a happy workforce!
Add to that, an abundance of intelligent, hard-working, English speaking people, extremely willing to slog for 12 hours a day so that they can save enough over 3-5 years to afford a Maruti Suzuki 800 (yes, it's a ~780 cc car), who can compete with that? Yes, there's still issues, such as infrastructure, accents, timezone differences, etc. and lots of bad apples in the workforce too, but it still doesnt overpower the cost advantage.
It's a bit like how the x86 architecture took over the computer world. People assumed initially, and rightly too, that x86 was inefficient and too cheap. What they didn't count on was that as x86 sold more and more, it also innovated and improved, and very soon, offered a double-whammy cost AND performance advantage over the other proprietary systems. Again, people pad up the costs by factoring communication cost, travel cost etc. What they don't realize is that these costs are firstly, marginal, and secondly, reducing over time.
The cost of living in the midwest or in rural America might be somewhat less than the metros or the coasts, but it cannot compete with the cost advantage offered by countries like India, Taiwan, China etc.
IMHO, rural america can compete effectively with other IT companies. Only, they need to sing a different song. They have to be flexible and play on their natural strengths and not on their weaknesses. For example, if a lot of techies in the small towns and villages got together, formed a virtual company or organization, and offered standardized software solutions to local businesses and institutions, there is NO way that the big city businesses or another country could compete with them. Don't compete on cost, compete on value.
In a mini-mall writing code... we just sold the software for a couple million... I guess rural sourcing works
In India, we get that country's best and brightest doing our tech support -- the equivalent of our best universities' students, looking not only for good jobs, but hands-on experience with users for a future career in IT.
But in the US, we wind up with the dregs of society. I'm sorry to say it, but it's true. Our best and brightest do not need to take tech support jobs, nor do they remain in places like rural Mississippi.
So if you're wondering where those errors on your credit report come from, originating from typos and common misspellings...
Setup somewhere with more pleasant weather than the south and you'll get people willing to leave the SF Bay area.
Look into the Seattle Area.
We just want:
I live in the SF Bay area because of the variety of work I get to do. I'm willing to leave and even earn less if I can buy a house and not live paycheck to paycheck.
You mean tech support that speaks broken English with a thick accent, or tech support that talk down right suthurn.
Seriously though, I've met plenty of highly skilled technical people who sound like traditional "rednecks". As strange as that sounds. Television has given everyone the impression that if you have a southern accent, you're the classic redneck hick that prizes his bass boat more than his family and home. "Saw that tornadee' We culd'a been kilt or even worse, lost our satee'lite dish." Every culture and part of the country have them, it's just that the news crews in the southeast love to find these people to interview after a natural disaster. Really, can you hold it against them, they're funny!
I'm from Alabama, don't get offended.
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
Were telling us how wonderful telecommuting would be.
How could the wise futurists fails to see that:
If you can do your job form anywhere, so can anyone else!
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
Sure there will be increase in jobs in those rural areas.. but wouldnt the standard of living drop reasonably too? For businesses to move small jobs to rural areas it has to cost as low as moving them to india or other developing countries. The wages they give against the amount of work is incredibly low. I cant see how this is a positive step for local economy.
Plus I'hd rather have india take all those jobs. Everyone needs a chance to grow and taking away already established jobs from india is a severe backlash to its economy.
[ I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance ] -- Isaac Asimov
Low overhead!
Damn straight.
Hank Williams will kick Fred Durst's, marilyn mansons, eminem's, and tupac's ass any day of the week.
less government, more guns.
doug
-a.thought.crushed.my.mind-
I've lived in rural and I've lived in cities. I prefer cities. Rural people do, indeed, *tend* to be honest and real hard working. There are good reasons for this. They also tend to be bigoted and intolerant of strangers. (And there are good reasons for this.)
City people *tend* to be different along those axii, and there are reasons for that. Good, logical reasons. (Like they encounter new people and ideas more frequently.)
I like and admire honesty. I try to be honest. This doesn't cause me to admire bigotry. And I find bigotry too high a price to pay for achieving honesty. (Also an unnecessary price.)
As for hard working...people who are desperate will work themselves to death. That's no moral good. People who are working for themselves will work quite hard for years on end. That may or may not be a moral good, but it's also enlightened self interest. People who are being taken advantage of will slack off whenever the slave master isn't looking. And I consider THIS to be a moral good.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Thank God you said it!!!!
...Rocks! But it's too intense for me to want to live there 24/7. The crazy cost of living and tiny apartments I can accept, the amazing diversity of arts, entertainment and restaurants I could gush over till the sun goes nova, but the constant noise and adrenalin rush would leave me a grey-haired empty shell of a man within only a few years. I'll take nice slow Boston, thanks. *Phew!* :) --M
to get the democrats in the the white house. Let all the democrats techies move to rural America and watch that map turn Blue.
ballot-COUNTING contract?!? I thought you said a ballot-EATING contract!!
Mmmmm...tastes like Democracy...
Is trying to make it legal to work your employees into the fucking ground, in order to cut down on their breeding (people are less likely to have the energy to breed when they've pulled a 18 hour work day). Give it another 4 years. It'll be better to outsource to Montana, because you can still prosecute them (using American law) for corporate espionage.
On this very same topic, didn't france have some kind of fucking revolution or something, because of this very situation? Best of times, age of reason, or some shit like that...
Lots of companies do this already. They set up large headquarters in some far rural area that is maybe few hours away from the main office and keep all the non-business people there. If need be they can always drive/train to the main office. It makes sense, and many people working for the rural office tend to migrate to rural areas and actually afford buying a house which is really tough if you are in a metropolis or a high density area.
Pay may be less, but so is the cost of living.
the inhabinates in the Red States might not be the brights and easily controlled via fear and religion. But can we really expect them to live on pennies on the dollar? When shopping at WalMart is shopping at the ritzy store I doubt it a community will be built in that cost/price/wage structor.
Rural Sourcing's fees are about the same as the overall cost of using an Indian outsourcer, she said--if you consider factors such as communication costs, travel expenses and inconvenience.
I wonder if that's anything like the inconvenience of being out of a job?
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
This has already been happening for years, the company I work for has customer call centers across the country. Originall they were near their corporate sites, in Chicago & New York. They began opening more to handle the call volume and opened two more in Oklahoma and Nebraska. It did not take too long for upper management to decide to shutdown the Chicago and New York sites when they saw the new sites were cheaper to staff.
Why pay people $12 an hour in Chicago to answer phones when people will do it for $7 an hour elsewhere in the country?
My two passions are literature and IT. I also live in Amarillo, TX. I know it is fun to bash on midwest/southern people for being ignorant, but I feel it is that the south has always been more agriculture based than the North due to the longer growing season etc. When I was growing up I worked on a ranch throwing hay, mucking stalls, branding cattle, and doctoring animals. This obviously put me at a bit of a disadvantage skill wise from kids that worked at their dads office, but I believe I have a better work ethic than most of those folks because I know what I could be doing instead.
I challenge anyone in the country to call Amarillo people and not be able to understand what they are saying. In fact the most annoying thing I have heard about our accents in Texas is that we talk slower. Our tech support department where I work is one of the finest I have ever seen because of this. If you are trying to describe something then speaking slowly (no matter how annoying it is) is better than rattling off something so fast the person on the other end of the phone can't jot it down.
Yes, let's send jobs requiring education and intelligence to the ignorant, selfish, materialistic, bigoted dumbasses to voted for Bush.
I know this might be hard to believe but I live in a town of 2000 people and work as a Sys Admin/DBA for a company here (in Plainville, KS). We aren't a bunch of "hicks"). I don't speak like a readneck like many posts have already implied and I don't feel like I make turd for salary (put cost of living into effect and I make more than YOU!). So, please people don't be idiots and assume we are all what the movies make us out to be.
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
Like, say, San Francisco? Oh, wait...
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
What we need is a Foghorn Leghorn proxy! Too bad there isn't a Google Translator...
Heil Sig! -Rob
So instead of trying to explain your problem to a guy who can't speak or read english, your gonna have to explain your problemto a guy who can't speak or read english?
Hmm, makes no sense. But I see why it would be cost effective.
I'd really prefer they call this "sidesourcing" as it keeps with the theme and has a more general implication.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Being from rural Arkansas originally, I think it is ironic that I intentionally went into a field that I knew would require me to move to a large(r) city, and now....
I just hope I can remember the two or three Brooks and Dunn songs that I learned by heart while there.
I thought it was common knowledge that rural America is the hotbed of education and intellectual acuity needed for today's technology.
Joking aside, if Sun and Microsoft keep up their push for "graphic programmers" (ala the 'visual' stuff), anyone with a brain can draw boxes and connect the dots.
Next up: Medicine.
I thought the reason outsourcing went to India was that they had high educational standards.
For example, they don't get taught that dinosaur fossils are actually demon bones or that the world began about 10,000 years ago (both real beliefs in many fundie communities).
"Yeah, I was surfing and my computer locked up."
"Lemme see. Well, 'cording to our records you are a heathen. The Lord has seized up your browser."
"What?"
"Get down on your knees and beg forgiveness from the Lord and if your heart is true your IP shall be restored! Pray! Pray for all you're worth, boy!"
Actually, I think it's a good idea, if somewhat revealing. Congratulations, parts of America are now ALMOST as low wage as third world countries. Mission Accomplished.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
While waving your position papers and lecturing Americans that they'll just have to accept outsourcing, you Democrats lost Billy Bob.
Better luck next time. Losers.
This is a topic which has been brought up on /. before, however, I think it is important as the US dollar is currently tanking. I always hear about sending jobs to China and India, but really, why not West Virginia.
I am orignially from a medium town in WV. It is rather poor, but there is a University , we have highways and a small airport. Columbus, Cincinatti, Lexington, Pittsburgh, and a number or cities in North Carolina are not that far away.
We have all the same stores in the Mall that bigger cities do, and we can get stuff shipped from newegg.com just as fast as anyone else. There are virtually NO taxes and the air is relatively clean. There is a low crime rate, you can build a mansion for the same price as a shack in larger cities, and you can camp in your back yard (literally depending on where you live). The water tastes good out of the faucet, the education system is decent (low numbers of students per teacher as well). You can even invest your money in the same stock market as people in larger metropolitian areas if you are so inclined.
Sure you will make less money per hour, but who cares....In the end you will have more. I say tax the shit out of companies that outsource to other countries and even better make them pay American minimum wages to workers there. After all they are working for an American company, dont they deserve to make at least an American wage?
Another thing to realize is that there aren't just two choices: Extreme Urban or Hick Town.
I live in Huntsville, Alabama which has a thriving high tech industry and it is a medium sized southern town with lots of suburbs and few big city amenities: nice restaurants, sports (albeit minor league), colleges, a symphony, an opera company, a nice art gallery, a club scene (albeit not a great one), libraries, book stores, etc. We also have very little traffic, nice neighborhoods, good schools, cheap houses, and low property taxes. Broadband internet is available from 2 or 3 different sources anywhere in the city.
If you want to live "in the country", you can buy a 100 acre farm within about a 20 minute commute to any business in the city. Or you can buy a 3000 square foot house on a nice treed lot for around $200K (or less).
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
That said, I do believe they have a difficulty in separating morality from religion. Even atheists can be moral. More importantly, the Goverment is certainly allowed (and required) to legislate morality, but prohibited from legislating religion. For example, the issue of gay marriage is really two issues: "should homosexuals be allowed to marry," which is a religious issue and should be left solely to churches (and other religious institutions), and "should homosexuals be allowed to enter into a civil union," which is a moral issue and relevant to Government regulation (since it concerns filing taxes jointly and such).Number one, I did no such thing! Number two, I don't live in a city. I live in Georgia (in case you didn't know, that qualifies as "Deep South"). I see exactly how honest, real, and hard working rural people are. It's actually no more, and no less, than the people in cities. Incidentally, the Mexican immigrants that Georgia has been inundated with are, in my experience, usually more hard working than either rural or urban white southerners.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Haven't I been talking about this for a long time? This could be a great thing, if it is sustainable. The key is there being enough technically skilled people in middle America. Working with colleges could work. It will be interesting to see. If there is a good enough supply of skilled workers in these areas, then the economics will do the rest. The only problem could be keeping people in these areas. Just as jobs might flow there, the skilled workers might flow to places that pay better. Nonetheless, having more educated, skilled people in middle America could be a really good thing.
Now, I'm not going to put up a big fuss about the advantages and disadvantages of any kind of outsourcing, whether you source jobs from india or Tennessee. But I will take exception to several posts here praising the idea of moving to some rural area and getting away from the city.
I'm not following anyone anywhere damnit. I like where I live. My family likes where they live, and damn a CEO to hell if he doesn't have some small sense of true guilt at the pain he would cause my family if we had to move.
Mothers and fathers don't always work at the same company, so if you move one parent, the other must follow, or the first one must quit and find a new position. And kids establish a lot of bonds in the school they go to, and uprooting most kids like that is emotionally distressful, no matter how trivial such things are to adults.
The problem with "outsourcing" is that it's done for only one reason, to cut costs. Sometimes that's good, and sometimes that's bad. And sometimes it hurts people, and sometime's it doesn't. Change always hurts, but let's get some balance and empathy here in the posts.
Everyone's so excited about this, but this scares me just as much as outsourcing to india. In fact it scares me more, because it's even more tempting and easy for small companies to take advantage of. I don't want to move to the deep south, I hate it there, and I'm presently very pissed at southerners for handing the election to Bush. I'll stay right where I am thank you.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I worked at a development shop in Little Rock, Arkansas for a couple of years before getting married and moving to a very large U.S. city (I think it is #4 currently) when my wife was accepted to medical school here, so I think I'm qualified to do a bit of comparison.
I think that there are a lot of cities in the U.S. in the 100,000 - 200,000 population range that people don't really consider for whatever reason, either as places to live or for corporations. Little Rock, for example, had most of the shopping, dining, etc. of a larger city but without nearly as much pollution and traffic and with a lower cost of living to boot. To respond specifically to some of the comments I've seen in this thread so far: we had Starbucks, pizza delivery, clubs/raves (if that is your thing), a symphony orchestra, and a minor league baseball team (the only thing that I would miss if I moved back would be the professional sports).
I think there is rural, as in one gas station, one stoplight, and a Sonic...and then there is "rural", as in "not one of the 50 largest cities in the US", and I think businesses would do well to look more closely at the latter.
I live in Morland, KS and I will say KC is expensive, not modest. $220 a month fetches a two bedroom house with an office, full kitchen, dining and living room along with a two car garage. Oh yeah, the landlord mows the lawn.
And so everyone knows, they actually send newscasters to Kansas to learn to speak from us, apparently our accent is neutral (some people say "no accent" but that's impossible).
You are completely wrong. I grew up in rural Oklahoma. The second I turned 18, I got the heck out of there. I now live in an urban area on the west coast. The people in my town were not "real, hard working honest people". They were mostly stupid idiots with no ambition and no imagination. And yes, they were all a bunch of bigoted idiots.
Having endured these people for many years, I have earned the right to mock them.
And yes, I am a liberal (especially on social issues) democrat who visits star bucks most every day, an atheist, have an advanced degree, earns a six figure salary as a senior software architect at a high tech company, and I drive a Saab. And I'm a Mac user (and a snob about OS X.)
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Acxiom...one of the largest dealers and maintainers of 'people data' started in Conway, and has expanded into Little Rock. Trans-Union relies on them for data needs...so, they do indeed handle a lot of data.
Alltel is based in Little Rock.
Steven's corporation and many other financial houses are in AR. So...it isn't quite a po-dunk as you might think. Hell, in Little Rock..seems that most people there are Dr.'s or Lawyers...UAMS has one of the leading eye centers and cancer centers in the world.
I did find the IT wages were a little low about 10 years ago...especially compared to TX. I'm wondering what bill rates are there? There is a lot of rural left in AR, but, Little Rock is nicely metropolitan. Not as much to do there as where I live now (New Orleans)....but, people are pretty nice...southern friendly...and a good place to raise a family.
I wonder what their bill rates are there? Cost of living is pretty low...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I've been working with outsourcing for over a year and 1/2 now. We've been talking about how we should move to some rural area with low taxes, property values, and housing costs for a year now. It just makes sense IF you can get quality individuals working for you. And it will happen more frequently as fed up highly talented individuals get tired of the rat race and decide to move somewhere, uh, less rat racy. I know of one person on the team who now works from Idaho after moving from Chicago. Do the math, Idaho cost of living is < Chicago and they experienced no pay decreases! Another person moved from Chicago to rural Wisconsin and kept the same pay. If the company is willing, you'll see a migration from the cities to the small towns over the next few years. I personally think it's great. The 80's and 90's were an era of migration from these rural areas where the jobs had been drying up rapidly (I'm a case in point, couldn't get a job in my hometown doing what I do, still can't). Hopefully that trend will reverse somewhat. America is loosing it's small town / rural heritage and I believe that heritage is part of what made America a great place in the first place.
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
It'd be nice if big-city coastal employers would look even closer to "home" and consider outsourcing to smaller urban areas in the so-called flyover states. Former manufacturing centers in the Midwest (and presumably elsewhere) are full of hard-working, English-speaking, and (yes) highly-qualified potential employees with ready access to broadband connectivity, FedEx offices around the corner, etc. These cities have most of the other benefits of having employees in Silicon Valley or the Big Apple, but at a fraction of the cost of living.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Companies like Stream (one of the big tech support sweat shops) did this before moving stuff to India. They came into a small town in Montana, demanded a TON of CORPORATE WELFARE in the form of tax breaks, etc. Then just a couple of years later they shutdown and moved to India.
...welkum y'all skoal-spittin' code-writin' overlords!
Thanks for the list! Now I know who else to boycott.
Why contract with South Asians when you can contract with businesses run by good old American Indians?
This is not as funny as it seems. I often though Hopi would make excellent computer programmers. People who speak Hopi fluently can you tell you that the language does not support ambiguity.
Navajo is another language that may be good for "thinking like a computer programmer". The language's grammar has something similar to the "type-safety" found in OO languages like C++ and Java. The type-safety comes from the verb-to-noun combinations. This forces speakers to be specific. They can use abstractions, but speaking vaguely is nearly impossible.
I'm sure somebody on the reservation could help you admin your Apache server.
Navajo is similar to the Apache language family. They should be able to talk to the Apache server easily.
to move to DFW area for tech jobs, guess it is time to pack up and move back.
This is exactly what the country needs: "Blue" business/culture centers connecting directly with "Red" labor centers. More intercommunication is the only way to bridge the unsustainably deep divides between Blue/Red communities. American strength in diversity relies also on rural areas, perhaps homogenous internally, but part of the landscape that makes America a microcosm of the world. Why should American globalism rest on a hollow foundation, ignoring the interior solely to harness the exterior?
--
make install -not war
Completely off topic... this is in regards to your sig, "Will slashdot ever drag itself into the year 2004 and provide the ability to edit posts?"
Why would they? There are way too many other issues to sort out first. What happens if I make a post and get modded +5 insightful (Ok, I know it'll never happen, but this is hypothetical), then I decide to edit it into a 5 page GNAA rant? Does it keep the +5 insightful? Does it lose all mod points? Would those mod points go back to the moderator? Way too much stuff to manage for a feature taht will just get abused. Like the box says (paraphrased), if you see a typo, you should have used the preview button!
"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his." - Patton
Um, Indianapolis has broadband. Just because you're working in Indiana, doesn't mean that your customers have to be. This could be a contractors dream. Plus Chicago is a short trip from here. So's Ohio, amoung other cities (Crossroads of America don't you know)
Sincerly: a hoosier.
Bad public schools are a myth. There are, of course, exceptions, but it is not the schools that are bad, but the parents.
Private schools appear to be better than public schools simply because the parents care enough to pay for what they percieve to be better than what they could get for free. These parents that care take part in their child's education to a much greater extent.
In my home town there were 4 large public high schools and 1 large private high school, all 5 about the same size (there were perhaps a half dozen small private high schools as well). The public high school in the nice part of town produced 12 national merit scholars the year I graduated, the private high school only produced 4, the other 3 public high schools combined to produce 6. The funding and administrators were the same for all 4 public schools. What could account for the difference in performance? I submit that it was the families. The well to do are more likely to be well educated, the well educated tend to care more about their kids education, those who care about education tend to have kids that do well in school, because they put an emphasis on it at home, they help their kids with their home work.
Do you honestly think privitization will solve anything?
Do you think kids who don't do their homework in public school will do it in private school?
Do you think parents who don't go to public school PTA meetings, will go to private school ones?
The only thing that will happen when we start sending kids who were failing in public school to private school in large numbers, is that the private schools will suck too.
-Tamman2000, proud product of Peoria public schools, district 150.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Shells made from depleted uranium have more penetration power because they are denser. I've never heard of bullets made from plutonium, however, and doubt they exist.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
to boxes of rocks everywhere:)
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
SAP already does something very similar to this with their headquarters in Germany. I've been there several times. I was a little shocked to see that they are not located in Frankfurt or any other large city, they are located in a small town called Waldorf. As best as I could tell, they were the only thing in town. There really doesn't even seem to be a hotel there as we always stay in Hidelburg, which is just a 10-15 minute drive away.
Pardon me, but check out which corporation owns the most prisons, and you will find friendship links leading to the current administration.
In the meantime, FEMA has all these camps equipped, staffed, and empty.
Logic would indicate, the closest one could come to outsourced jobs on labor competition is in the prision system and that it could be sold to the public as 'paying back society fine' in real time.
...would have a point. Unfortunately for your argument it isn't.
It's true that the US and Canada did conquer many tribes and take away a lot of land, but most of the remaining tribes weren't conquered, rather they tended to settle with the US and agreed to a series of treaties. Eventually the US government decided to settle with the tribes uniformly so they could co-exist with the states, while being bound by federal law.
Now, if I can address you last comment.
Personally, I think the Indians should feel lucky that we gave them anything at all instead of just assimilating them into our society as just one more ethnic group in the already-growing melting pot.
If you were an Indian, that statement would probably sound a lot like: Personally, I think the Jews should feel lucky we didn't gas and incinerate them all.
While saying circumstances could always be worse is technically a valid point, it's appalling and bad form to use it to play down culpability for any atrocity.
You could always outsource your Oracle work to Donald K. Burleson.
There's also good job oportunities there, provided you can follos the dress code. Is it just me, or does this guy have a strange obsession with body hair.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
Sometime in 2001, Dell moved a call center into my hometown of Twin Falls, ID - saves them a gob on wages (Dell techs start @ $9.76 there) and helps the weak economy around these parts to boot....
While I ENTIRELY agree with your opinion on being compensated for past offenses committed by dead people, I have to point out that it had nothing to do with the US or Canada's policies with Native American people or their sovereignty.
Lastly, it also has very little to do with many Native Americans complaints with the US or Canadian governments. However, I'm sure you can cite exceptions.
"Now dont think that I'm one of those people that hate driving. I LOVE to drive, I hate HAVING to drive. Suburbs are evil, I applaud companies that stay in the cities."
m l
http://www.arcosanti.org/theory/arcology/intro.ht
Bet you can't wait for arcologies to come on the scene.
Now, substitue that by income level of families and then we're talking.
My basic point is that less-well-to-do families have a harder time producing children that do well in school. Economic health is a good indicator for many other problems that less able students face. Lack of proper nutrition, lack of proper materials (i.e., paper, pencils, clothes, shoes, coats, etc.), parents that are less able to spend quality time with the kids, kids from families with a poor social life together, stigmatization from their peers, and families that just resent the kid for ever being born.
You can quibble with me on details and specific cases, but I've been there and seen all of it in action throughout my life. I was a poor kid, but my mother was smart and loving enough to do the right things to help me get ahead in life. She's now a teacher, teaching many children from the POOREST parts of southeast Georgia.
Her kids are the poorest economically and educationally. She does her best, but there's no escaping the effects of simply being dirt poor.
So, in a roundabout way, my point is that comparing performance by economic groups is probably a better way to compare school performance in each state. I don't have the data for this, but maybe I'll look into it.
My suspicion (and I've been told by others that there is data to back this up, any pointers are helpful to confirm this), is that middle-class and up kids do quite damn good across the nation. Poor kids don't do so good across the nation. Differences in other states can probably be correlated to distribution of incomes among populations across the nation.
In other words, poor-performing schools and states are more likely to be such because of a larger share of economically poor families (students) to better-off families.
I always get the shakes before a drop.
"A call center could create a lot jobs, plus for those forced to relocate, St. Louis is only a couple hours away, and Chicago is 5 or 6 hours up I-57."
There's another benifit no one's seeing. The incentive to bring broadband to rural areas.
Don't forget that many of these Indian tribes were not conquered and didn't surrender. They signed treaties which were then broken by the white man.
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
Maybe come next election, the people should vote out all the corporate ho's in congress, senate and the white house. It's time the people get represented, instead of getting shafted. Most of the time projects fail because of bad managers. Who are the bad managers? The guys at the top define the culture and it goes down from there. Those people come from rich families with lots of inherited wealth. So while these idiot asswipes fire a bunch of workers for cheaper workers, they double their own salaries.
throughout history, it's always been a struggle between the rich and poor. any pretense otherwise is wishful thinking. The uber rich can get richer by farming out the work to other countries. </rant.
...that gets the work. All that money shouldn't go to just one family.
We also have very little traffic, nice neighborhoods, good schools, cheap houses, and low property taxes.
...for the white people that is. From what I hear, if you're not white and Protestant in Alabama, you get to live in the crappy neighborhoods in the crappy houses, are regarded with disdain and disgust by the locals, and are generally blamed for everything that goes wrong.
At least that's how the stereotype goes here in California. Sometimes I'm skeptical about that, but occasionally someone who lived in the southern states tells me that racism is still fairly overt there. That could be a *huge* disadvantage living in a rural area or anywhere in the South, especially if you don't fit in.
Is there any truth to that?
There are two problems with your Holocaust analogy:
1 - The people who were punished for what happened to the Jews were actually involved with what happened to the Jews. Most Americans had nothing to do with the conquering of the American Indian and neither did their ancestors.
2 - In the last century we started to look down on these things a lot more than throughout history. 200 years ago no one would have cared about Milosevic and the serbs, or the Ugandan refugees.
There seems to be this undisputed fact that people in southern areas are idiots and "taulk like a mo ron! uh huh" But its not true.
...
every hear of
Georgia Tech?
Emory University?
Mercer University?
Auburn University?
University of Georgia?
LSU?
Savannah college of art and design?
When you stereo type all "southeners" as stupid it shows your own ignorance more than anything else.
I know of North Carolina and South Carolina. What's the third one?
of something a friend told me. She's a producer for a series of disaster specials on TV (in syndication). She's hates it whenever the disaster she's doing is in the south because every disaster needs scientific experts to explain it, and as she puts it "it doesn't how many PhDs he has, the minute he starts talking about how it's like a chuckhole full of angry hedgehogs in a tornado, all his credibility goes out the window."
Can you imagine a code review with these people? "Well, this function right here, it's like an Alabama wildcat with big Ns."
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
We should outsource work to only regions or nations that support Western values.
Note that the Chinese routinely rape and kill Tibetans. Both the Chinese and the Indians support targetted abortions killing female fetuses; the ratio of male to female babies in both India and China is 1.20. The normal ratio is 1.05, which exists in both the USA and Japan.
God damn the Chinese and the Indians.
What we have now, rather than a yeoman class, are effectively serfs. The difference between India and the US is that they figured out how to keep most of their serfs within extended families due to the fact that the Hindu religion is a lot less hostile to the blood bonds of clan structures than is Christianity. Christianity has essentially focused on destroying clan identity for the benefit of urban elites for the last 2 thousand years, and when it reached Scotland it set off a profound reaction. The Scotch-Irish cleared from their ancestral lands came flooding into the New World to escape their disposession by clan leaders who had been made to so identify with urban elites, that they despised their rural kin.
Sound familiar?
It should, its happening again.
The result is a monetization of social bonds, requiring people to pay for what once they got from their extended families.
There is no way rural America can compete with India on a cost basis until this fundamental betrayal of the European peoples has been redressed.
Seastead this.
Funny you should mention Appalachia. I've always felt that one could build a modular home factory of some size into the mountain(s). Good roads going in and out, same with communications. Not a big impact on the landscape. Failing that it would make a great place for warehousing (1).
(1) Yes people you can stick businesses in the darndest places. Like an abandoned salt mine.
Well shit. I was born, raised, and went to college in Arkansas, then I moved to Miami so I could find work. Now your telling me my job is going to be outsourced to where I came from? GOD! Life isn't fair. On the upside, I could always move back. I already speak the local language. M R mice. M R not. M R 2! C M E D B D feet? L I B, M R mice.
That said, there is a trend, at least in the Chicago metro area for companies to put offices in suburbs.
They're called edge cities and they're not exactly a new phenomenon.
--probably the only /.er from Westmoreland KS (population 631).
Sleep is just a poor substitute for caffeine, anyway. -Bob Lehmann
Listen to the Savage Nation (a radio program) via the Internet. The audio is streamed. The progran is on now!
Like dotheaded cockroaches to rotten goodness.
There are two problems with your Holocaust analogy:
I wasn't making an analogy. I was emphasizing the point that you wouldn't tell a Jew, "Quit griping about the holocaust, when it could have been a lot worse. It could have been complete genocide."
They were lucky the germans didn't gas them all, but does that mean that they should be grateful? No.
I reckin they pay 'em anuff uv a wage ta whur they kin have musterd 'n biskits three 'r four times a week. mmmmmm hmmmmm
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
I have (from what I am told) a significant enough lineage through a First Nations (Indian) tribe to claim some sort of tribal benefit. To be completely honest, I don't even know what it would be- but I really don't care. I've decided to ignore any sort of claim I might be able to make, for the same reasons mentioned in the parent post. Were the things that were done to the North American Natives terrible? Without a doubt. Was the culture of most of them taken advantage of for the personal gain of settlers at the time? Of course.
Did those actions warrant compensation? At that time, I think so.
However, the Crusades slaughtered who knows how many- should people of Anglo descent compensate current descendents of those who were killed? What about victims of the Romans, or (sound of zipping flame suit) the Palestinians?
How far back in the past do we have to go before people will accept that, at some point, there are terrible, painful, and attrocious things in all of our pasts, and show
some personal responsibility for their own actions now? That'd go a hell of a lot further than arguing over a friggin' casino. Please, to borrow from Jon: Stop hurting America
whew... Sorry for the rant, I feel better, and will now continue my lurking...
This rating is Unfair ( ) ( ) Fair (*) Funny
Sigh... If only. Modding would be so much more fun.
You wrote:
/rant.
Anyone get the feeling the uber rich of the world are majorly screwing the middle-class and trying to make the divide bigger.
Maybe come next election, the people should vote out all the corporate ho's in congress, senate and the white house. It's time the people get represented, instead of getting shafted. Most of the time projects fail because of bad managers. Who are the bad managers? The guys at the top define the culture and it goes down from there. Those people come from rich families with lots of inherited wealth. So while these idiot asswipes fire a bunch of workers for cheaper workers, they double their own salaries.
throughout history, it's always been a struggle between the rich and poor. any pretense otherwise is wishful thinking. The uber rich can get richer by farming out the work to other countries.
I think you have it exactly right. This article no doubt is a product conceived and created in some corporate think tank, designed to be a smoke screen, create some sort of wedge between sets of Americans. Just another foul product of the rightwing propaganda machine, funded by billions of dollars from billionaires and megacorporations. The rightwing propaganda machine consists mainly of think tanks and foundations (Heritage, Cato, American Enterprise Institute, et al.), and has thousands of scholars, writers, media consultants, etc, in its pay.
What is really sad is that you seem to be the only one here who has seen this article for what it is.
See my homepage (via my sig) for more on the rightwing propaganda machine.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
You know in this day and age. You can move so much more away from the cities. About a quarter mile from me is a machine shop. If you look carefully there's other small businesses tucked away. With global communications, and shipping companies like UPS (has a majour hub here), Fedex. I've worked small manufacturing were the building was smaller than a Walmart building, but was quite modern inside. You'd never know just by driving by the building though. Cities are nice, but a bit overrated.
I worked for an Australian company that with a bit of government funding and support from a major university setup a software engineering course in a rural city (100,000 people?), where they would complete their degree part time while working on real contracts.
No where else other than the major cities could they hope to get a degree like that in Australia. And having the work experience behind them would have made them highly employable.
I still believe the idea was good, but starting this just as the bubble burst meant that there was little work and after a couple of years it was closed down.
There was a lot of difficulty in attracting work to the centre since there were always about their ability being junior engineers. So we had to attract some senior engineers there as well to lead the teams. That was harder than attracting contracts, since we were the only employer in the area looking for those skills. But fundamentally the inability of the company to attract work for itself let alone the training center was its downfall.
What happened to the people that were there? Many have now moved to the cities to complete their degrees and get work.
There is folly and foolishness on the one side, and daring and calculation on the other. - Admiral Pellew, Hornblower
I keep joking that if I get several more pre-approved credit cards with 10k limits, I'm going to max them all out for cash and skip the country.
I then fly to some impoverished third world backwater, buy a jeep full of thugs armed with guns, and take over.
I will then rule like any proper bannana rupublic dictator, holding rigged elections and having my opponents dissapear into the jungle. But I would dig a new town well, and teach all the children how to pirate Mp3s.
Foreign policy would be a cinch. I'd ask the US to recognise my newly formed country, and support me in power. I'd offer them an unlimited duration military base and cooperation in hunting down terrorists, provided they wern't me. I'd conduct policy based off of the theory of NOT PISSING OFF THE BIGGEST COUNRTY IN THE WORLD, something that the Taliban couldn't seem to quite grip.
The really spooky thing is, just such a plan might work. The pathetic thing is, the people I would be ruling over actually might be better off under my system of comic tyrany than some of the legitimate governments that exist in the third world.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
SOLD!!!
And now what do we get? We're the fucking Arrogant Northeast Liberal Elite? How about this for arrogant: the South is the Real America? The Authentic America. Really?
Cause we fucking founded this country, assholes. Those Founding Fathers you keep going on and on about? All that bullshit about what you think they meant by the Second Amendment giving you the right to keep your assault weapons in the glove compartment because you didn't bother to read the first half of the fucking sentence? Who do you think those wig-wearing lacy-shirt sporting revolutionaries were? They were fucking blue-staters, dickhead. Boston? Philadelphia? New York? Hello? Think there might be a reason all the fucking monuments are up here in our backyard?
No, No. Get the fuck out. We're not letting you visit the Liberty Bell and fucking Plymouth Rock anymore until you get over your real American selves and start respecting those other nine amendments. Who do you think those fucking stripes on the flag are for? Nine are for fucking blue states. And it would be 10 if those Vermonters had gotten their fucking Subarus together and broken off from New York a little earlier. Get it? We started this shit, so don't get all uppity about how real you are you Johnny-come-lately Oooooh I've been a state for almost a hundred years dickheads. Fuck off.
Arrogant? You wanna talk about us Northeasterners being fucking arrogant? What's more American than arrogance? Hmmm? Maybe horsies? I don't think so. Arrogance is the fucking cornerstone of what it means to be American. And I wouldn't be so fucking arrogant if I wasn't paying for your fucking bridges, bitch.
All those Federal taxes you love to hate? It all comes from us and goes to you, so shut up and enjoy your fucking Tennessee Valley Authority electricity and your fancy highways that we paid for. And the next time Florida gets hit by a hurricane you can come crying to us if you want to, but you're the ones who built on a fucking swamp. Let the Spanish keep it, it's a shithole, we said, but you had to have your fucking orange juice.
The next dickwad who says, It's your money, not the government's money is gonna get their ass kicked. Nine of the ten states that get the most federal fucking dollars and pay the least ... can you guess? Go on, guess. That's right, motherfucker, they're red states. And eight of the ten states that receive the least and pay the most? It's too easy, asshole, they're blue states. It's not your money, assholes, it's fucking our money. What was that Real American Value you were spouting a minute ago? Self reliance? Try this for self reliance: buy your own fucking stop signs, assholes.
Let's talk about those values for a fucking minute. You and your Southern values can bite my ass because the blue states got the values over you fucking Real Americans every day of the goddamn week. Which state do you think has the lowest divorce rate you marriage-hyping dickwads? Well? Can you guess? It's fucking Massachusetts, the fucking center of t
"but, people are pretty nice...southern friendly..."
My experience had been that the niceness of the southern people depends on what you look and sound like. If you look and sound like them then they are nice to you. If not then not so much.
evil is as evil does
Is this an attempt by the Democrats to improve the tech-level of the Red States in the hope that once they actually have somewhat of an economy they will turn blue?
Pro:
Smaller timezone difference
Con:
Larger cultural difference
Hmm...
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
Keeping American dollars inside of America's economy is a very good thing. The next thing we need to do is to overhaul the much abused H1-B Visa program and severely cut back the number of H1-B visa's given out.
A while ago there was a show on PBS that featured the eToys warehouse which was built in Blairs, Virginia (Or is it the one in Danville?).
.com popped, as did the towns economy. The trucks weren't rolling thru the town, which ment the mom and pop diners lost out on much of the business. People got laid off, and depression was high.
These people were totally thrilled. In the interviews you could see how dedicated these people were, it was insane. Then the
I'm not sure which special it was, it might have been the one about Wal-Mart & Ashland Virginia but I'm positive. I just googled and found some references that the warehouse was picked up by K*B Toys, so maybe the people have jobs again. Of course, I think the K&B toys in the local malls are closing, IIRC. Maybe they are going online only. B&M is so 80s.
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
Sorry I was busy surfing the chest high waves over at Zuma and enjoying the 70 degree mid November beach weather.
Wait, why was East Buttfuck, Wyoming better then Southern California again?
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
Now if we can just change a few tax loopholes to make a Government incentive to move to the country instead of over seas? Who knows? We might start another Civil War!
But really, as jobs move to rural areas, housing prices will increase there, and tech jobs will probably wind up moving from town to town, just as textile jobs used to when I was a kid in Alabama. A town would offer little better deal and the company would move a few miles to take advantage of it. I don't think anybody won in that game, except the lawyers of course.
If you're taking less money so you can buy a cheaper house, you're getting screwed. Equity in a coastal house is still equity. You can cash out. The money isn't less real because of the price of houses.
What's more, coastal housing prices are more stable. Losing value is very rare. The farther you go inland, the more volatile the prices. Kinda like the weather. In contrast I know people who have been sitting on houses in rural America for the better part of a decade, unable to sell them. When they move they have to buy a second home on credit.
Its bad enough we have to put up with loud mouthed, opinionated, elitist Northern assholes at all but to have them move next door would be totally unacceptable. It would be carpet bagging all over again. Do us all a favor stay were you are and shut up, we all tired of the wise ass cracks about Southerners.
There's no shame in being a pariah. -Marge Simpson
Ever heard of Sykes (www.sykes.com)...?
The rural American supports Western values: human rights, democracy, equality of women, and compassion
Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!
You should be on television. You are such a whit!
Equality of women. Ha Ha Ha Ha
Compassion. From an American. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha
Human Rights (but not for dirty foreigners). Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha
Democracy. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha
Ignore my last line, it should have said:
Large suburban areas tend to do well also...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Well, except for the Ferrari... kid's college fund(!)
Lived in the Chicago 'burbs, but the career sucked and was expensive so I returned to Michigan, in the weeds; a new home on a 300 acre sandy, all-sports lake. In full disclosure, I bought 120 ft. of frontage for $20k 10 years ago but for retirment or speculation. I now have time to pursue an advanced degree (Mich. State, Grand Valley State, Cornerstone, Calvin, WMU all within commute distance) and hobbies (building the home, local ski resort), my kids are happy here and my wife found the best paying job of her career. Family is not nearby.
I could not have lived here before; I grew up in Michigan and it was desert island, a real backwater. But now it is possible and pleasant because of technology. Kinda weird the first few months; it's so quiet and Dark (I can see the Milky Way and often northern lights very clearly), and the Locals raise quite a ruckus on a Friday night, pissing in the streets after bar closing and pushing stop signs over...
$2800/year taxes on a $235k home, taxes tied to inflation, sales 6%.
The stores don't suck too bad; the locals have built quite a supply system, and Best Buy, WalMart, KMart, Meijer, RadioShack is only 10-45 minutes away. Good Chinese food, Pizza just a hop away. And these guys STILL build high performance cars, mud-boggers, snowmobiles, and motorcycles under the shade tree. This happens to be one of the poorest parts of the nation, and it shows.
Chicago is 3.5 hours away; did the museums this summer. I won't go back there to live, unless there is REAL opportunity, not a 60hr/wk job.
And you have lots of experience to cite? Or are you just referencing what you heard in the discussion boards on DemocraticUnderground?
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
But seriously folks!
The "media standard" for how American is spoken is based off of the educated midwestern accent.
Maybe they would be inclined to learn how to read, OR read something aside from a book of made up fairy tales thousands of years old. With a little luck they might break out of the double digit IQ slump they have always been in.
Thousands years old books of fairy tales is no means of making any resemblence of an intelligent decision considering all factors carefully.
Any grammar nazi with mod points, please step this way.
Somebody mod the parent up, and the grandparent down, because ashot's correct and proverbialcow's not. "Perfectly well english" my ass.
Your mind is squeezed by a blast of pain!
I telecommute for a major tech company. I can work anywhere there's broadband so I decided to move the family to a small town along the Rocky Mountains. I can get anywhere in town within 15 minutes. The snow capped mountains seem so close it's like you could reach out and touch them. I love it. The people are friendly and relaxed. The streets are clean and houses well kept. Way more conservative than attitudes in a metro area, but that suits me fine.
:)
/.ers are, i.e. 'hicks'. Everyone I've talked to in this 'hick' town is reasonably intelligent and articulate. True, the article specifically mentioned the south, but prevailing /. attitude seems to be "rural=trailer trash".
Not all the amenities I'm used to but you can get pretty much anything over the internet - which keeps me from making those impulse purchases at Frys.
I'm surprised at how bigoted
(I take your reference to hicksville in the spirit intended, btw. I'd love to start up a 'recovery center' here in paradise for city-worn geeks.)
When the KKK can sponser highways and people there use the word "nigger" as freely as they quote their book of fairy tales (Bible) you just *might* have reason to suspect that Racism and Bigotry run nearly unchecked and wild in the South. I have lived in states such as MO, TN, AR, AL, and LA...not only are the tales of inbreeding true but the racism is disgusting.
Make no mistake...the South is not all just like "Deliverance," but most of it is not too damn far away.
Yee-Haw!
DALE EARNHARDT!
YA'ALL see tha thar SEXY PIG ovah YONDA?!
If public schools are adequate, then why do public school teachers send THEIR children to private schools at TWICE the rate (25%) as the general US population (12%)? Washington Times: "Public schools no place for teachers' kids"
cpeterso
You voted for Bush who will make sure that investment in America will never happens if it's not oil drilling in a fragile wildlife refuge.
Thanking yourself yet?
Using the key words...holocaust fake
s t+fak e&spell=1
d ay Times_301004.html/ docs/fake/SWCsmokeF ake.html
n g_ trial.html
a s& btnG=Search&hl=en&lr=
Will find you heck of alot of facts that make the story of the holicost not sound as bad as it has been pushed to be. in fact if you look realy close you will be shocked.
It angers me how tv messes peoples minds up.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=holocau
http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/docs/fake/WA_Sun
http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz
http://www.math.metu.edu.tr/~dpierce/texts/irvi
http://www.google.com/search?q=holocaust+fake+g
Look at both sides one is way heavier and its not very heavy on the victims side. None the less this was war.. but why say what they do and teach it to people as the true history..?!
You know they got a Sonic *everywhere*!
But since you're moving, can I have your apartment?
THIS IS MY DREAM. The only thing that has ever made me doubt my career choice has been my perception that I'd have to live in the city to be a software developer. If I could live in small town Alberta/Saskatchewan and write software, I'd be one step closer to living the dream.
On that note, if anyone located in rural western Canada is looking for a developer, PLEASE EMAIL ME. MFJasonB-at-gmail.com
PS - WTF is up with people talking about the suburbs as if they're rural areas?
I have proposed simple solutions to these issues several times. 1. No editing after 10 minutes. 2. If, within that 10- minute period the post is edited, any mod received up to that point points are lost. 3. No need for points to go back to a moderator. Simple stuff.
I am speaking about real life experience. You need me to list the actual things that happened to me?
evil is as evil does
I live in Texas, about as far South as it gets and I see more "reverse" discrimination than anything else. The white boys are the trashy ones that can't handle their money, or alternatively, they are the ones who were born into money and don't know shit. There is no middle ground, but in both cases they are assumed to be lazy.
The only people saying nigger anymore are the wannabe gangstas.
It gets really old hearing those outdated stereotypes about the south.
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
people are pretty nice...southern friendly
People in NYC are just as nice as Atlanta. The southern charm is just a surface thing - there are still snakes that'll rob you blind, they just act nicer.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
For one thing, food. I'm a foodie and I love variety. In addition to burgers and sandwiches, I am walking distance from Philippine, Indian, Mexican, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, and even Armenian food. If I want to cook something, I'm less than 10 minutes from Chinese, Mexican, Korean, and Indian supermarkets, as well as a couple of American ones and a fresh-produce store that acts as kind of a permanent farmer's market. Can I get a reliable supply of sumac or fenugreek, a durian, or fresh kaffir lime leaves in rural America?
When a friend of mine who was going to grad school in Indiana came back here, the first thing she did was force me to take her out to eat because she hadn't been able to find Thai food for six months.
A lot of midsize towns and cities have cineplexes and shopping malls. Catching "Revenge of the Sith" will be no problem anywhere in the country. But I also like to go see more obscure stuff like "Primer" -- hard enough to find even in a big city with lots of art houses. Short of waiting for the DVDs or pirating them over the Internet, I doubt I'd be able to find most of the cult films I've seen in nearby theaters if I lived in a rural area. (One theater in San Jose used to show Hong Kong action films and anime every Tuesday night, though it has since changed owners and now shows Bollywood musicals.)
For exercise and socializing, I enjoy ballroom dance (the competition-style variety, more like figure skating than like Grandma and Grandpa at your sister's wedding). I am walking distance from a giant ballroom studio that gets a crowd of several hundred people four nights a week, and on any given Saturday night I'm twenty minutes' drive from at least four other ballroom venues, not to mention more salsa clubs than I can count.
I like meeting people with all sorts of different backgrounds, and this area gives me that in spades. There is no ethnic majority in San Jose. Three of my last four girlfriends grew up in foreign countries (China, Australia, and Vietnam) which suits me fine -- I like hearing a completely different perspective on things I find familiar and commonplace. There are certainly immigrant communities elsewhere in the US, but only on the coasts, and pretty much only in the major urban areas on the coasts, do you find such a varied mix of people from all over the place, all getting along just fine most of the time.
Yes, the traffic here can be annoying. But that's why we have telecommuting -- I work from home three out of five days most weeks, so my typical commute time is the 10 seconds it takes me to get from my bedroom to my home office.
The economy here would have to get really bad before I'd consider moving back to a rural area. Urban areas with their melting-pot cultures and abundance of activities that are only economically viable with a certain population density suit me much, much better.
A little more about me (there is actually a point to this, please bear with me): I'm 50 now, and I live about 20 miles from a major indian reservation in Montana. In my various travels, I have met many indians (both native Americans and "India"ns), Aussies, English folk, uncounted large numbers of Chinese, ditto South Americans (serious time in Florida, remember), quite a large number of Japanese, and lots of uprooted east coasters on the left coast and vice versa. Southerners up north, and northerners down south. I've been hanging with a girl from Kansas for about ten years.
You know who the least respectable of the bunch are? The ones who never left home. That's right. The (American) indians I've met in the cities and the schools, those people are smart and interesting and looking to do something with themselves. The indians I've met here, however, are a whole 'nuther kettle of fish. They live off the dole, they drink like camels (if camels drank alchohol) and they don't do squat worth anything to either their little microcosm or American society at large (unless you count providing justificaiton for major amounts of employment in the FBI, the BIA, and several other large government operations.)
In sharp contrast, the "furrin" folk I've met have been a delight to interact with, both personally and professionally. They, somehow, managed to drag themselves out of their "own cultures" without complete mental collapse, intolerable levels of angst, or having to scuttle back home to get that welfare/dole/tribal-residency check. I have noticed that in many cases, particularly Japanese and Chinese and Korean folk, they tend to turn their living spaces into little cultural "nodes" in a space made up of American culture. Seems to work very well, too - they have a place to go that is culturally "them", and they don't implode like postal workers.
Now... you seriously think American indians are so involved with their culture, of all things, that they actually are so mentally disabled that they can't get out of an area about the size of a typical large state's county? If that's truly the case, then we should probably just toss the whole rez idea in the trash - because keeping their culture is too expensive for them.
Now me, I don't think it is the culture, that is, the indian-ness of them. I think it is the welfare "we will reward you if you stay here" approach that we do to them. I think it is the "we will give you more for each baby you pop out" that we do to them. I think it is the "you can put casinos here, while folks outside the rez can't because mommy and daddy government say so" that we do to them. That's right. I don't blame them. I blame people like you, who, in their haste to be all touchy-feely, don't give minorities and the disadvantaged room to compete on an even playing field because you smother them with "aw gee, baby got a boo-boo? Lemme give you a check for that."
I say, let them have the land. Let them celebrate whatever they think they have to celebrate. But make them compete on an even playing field with everyone else, and pretty soon, you'll see that they are like everyone else. The potential is there. I've seen it, and I am certain of it. First shoot the social workers. Then shoot the lawyers.
<mutter>freaking psychobabbling social-worker morons...</mutter>
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
As part of a rural IT company that has done very well serving SMBs (think even smaller) for the past 5 years, I'm suprised I havn't seen a story like this sooner. In my opinion, the rural U.S. is also a place that is begging for business solutions using FOSS technology by a community that's organized enough to do it. Judging from the comments, most of you are too busy talking shit to think about the topic or your jobs.
Rural outsourcing would help people living in rural areas get jobs. Because business looks at an areas pay scale before they decide what to offer the tech style jobs will be lower in rural America than in the cities and that will probably be good for business.
The rural techs would "steal" jobs from their urban counterparts and would cheapen the overall value of technical jobs.
The truth is there are already a lot of underpaid technical types in rural areas. Today you can consider mechanics technical types and people with these analytical skills do live in rural areas.
I grew up in a small midwestern town. I left. I left because I like computers and I like being well paid. You don't find many computer jobs in small towns and you don't find hardly any decent paying jobs in small towns.
Still keeping the jobs in the US is a boon to the country and getting rural areas jobs will help with the chronic unemployment in these towns. But there is nothing to stop these folks from gaining experience and moving to the city in search of better pay! If that happens there will be a larger surplus of us tech types in the city and our pay will slide closer to the rural folks. So for me, perhaps it is bad.
I've mostly grown up in the Midwest. I spent a few years in the Mississipi school system, and when we moved to Nebraska, they wanted to move me back a year. And jokes about illiterate farmers just isn't true anymore. They're actually some of the toughest people for education going. As for not a lot of jobs, well it's more that there aren't lots of low-skill jobs like factory work. And yes- illiterates are so rare that we would be shocked to find out somebody couldn't read.
17- back a grade level? 6 years older? Now that's bad. I know I had a tough first year in Nebraska, but how bad was that kid?
I don't read AC A human right
All these jobs going to 19th Century shitholes... and some to India too.
Is it tough seeing through the holes in that pointy white hood?
It sounds like a good deal for outsourcing.
You have workers who are:
A: Educated
B: Available
C: Hard working
D: Not too expensive (ND is near the bottom for living expenses).
E: Safe. One college student went missing. She was on the state news for months.
I don't read AC A human right
I actually read your links, and I was honestly expecting a lot more from you than a few discrepancies that weren't even seriously examined.
It also angers me how TV and any dogmatic source of information can set a lot of preconceived notions into people's heads, but if you're serious about fighting dogma than you have to do a lot better than this.
I want you to start with this and use it as a mantra: "Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence." With that in mind, I think you should get your BEST arguments and BEST evidence that would back up your theory. Summarize them, and then ask yourself, "Is my summary of my BEST arguments and BEST evidence enough to even get people to listen to my supporting arguments?"
If the answer is no, then you better keep looking for better evidence. More importantly, don't rely on your own judgment to answer this question, talk to people and get their feedback, especially those who are most critical because they will teach you the most.
Lastly, try to get them to criticize the logic or the data supporting your argument rather than audacity of your argument. Let them know that audacity and an indignant attitude proves nothing.
Please, don't send me any more links regarding this subject. If you want to change my opinion, I want to hear it from you. I believe it's necessary to give an opportunity to be heard, but it's also the speaker's duty to summarize their most compelling arguments.
My wife and I moved from the beach in San Diego to the mountains of Northern Arizona almost 7 years ago. We find the cost of living to be very much lower here (and with wilderness surrounding us for hiking and picnicking, the standard of living much better).
We both work fewer hours per week and for usually lower pay, and much less stress. Anyway, it works for us.
The internet and cheap flat rate long distance makes telecommuting possible, but still not as effective as being on site. I try to spend time on consulting, writing and developing a few (very much niche) software products.
That's why you should outsource to the Midwest. We're nice and open about things. If we want you dead, you'll be sure of it. You can take us at face value.
That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil
With the dollar getting CLOBBERED against foreign currency, it is less and less cost effective to move jobs overseas. I believe that we are nearing the point where it is cheaper and easier to move jobs to more rural locations within the US, where people tend to be willing to work for less money than in urban and/or unionized locations.
Just a thought...
Though I don't have any inside information, I'd bet the unnamed company is Verizon.
Call up their tech support number and you will hear an American on the other end. Several times, I've talked to someone with a southern accent.
Most of all, it seems the most amaturish support center I've ever called. 9 problems out of 10, I'll get a completely different answer from each support person I talk to. They seem quite determined to pass the buck, giving me any answer they can make up that will require me to call back. You wouldn't believe how many times I've heard some lame answer, that all the problems will be magically fixed "tomorrow", even when they've gone on for weeks. And, of course, they NEVER fail to mark the issue as CLOSED, when they've never solved anything. This screws up the automated phone system, requiring me to call it a "NEW" issue every time I call in about the same thing.
If you're wondering about the 10th time out of 10, I'll get the exact same response from 4 different people, but they'll all be COMPLETELY wrong.
Anyhow, I never understood what was happening there, but this story seems to fit perfectly, and explain the issue.
Of course, I certainly hope I'm wrong, and Verizon support just happens to be terrible. I'm the last person to advocate outsourcing, so I hope REALLY crappy American support isn't the only alternative.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
There is a big difference between breaking treaties and military conquest. The U.S. and Canada stole land by breaking treaties with the Natives because they either weren't strong enough militarily or weren't totally lacking in morals to do the genocide BleckyWelcky seems to advocate.
The basic pattern started with the fledgeling US not recognizing the treaties with the Hurons. They were a huge nation and we made a peace treaty with them and gave them the infamous small pox blankets -- the first use of biological weapons. This travesty let us claim stake to the Ohio Valley and open our way to the Great Lakes and manifest destiny.
In contrast the Vikings came in and generally kicked ass. When a nation can't fully subjegate a people, they go home or make treaties. Just as the English did with the Scots and the US and Canada did with the First Nations people.
The Euros, despite being technologically advanced could not compete with the Natives militarily until fairly late in the struggle. Heck, even the Vikings didn't have the stones to conquor North America and abandoned that plan pretty much right away.
Numerically, it was a different story. The Natives ceded a good deal of their territories to the Europeans at first just to trade. Later, to avoid being wiped out by the sheer number of Europeans flooding into their home. The rub lies in how those treaties were constructed and how they were respected.
If you go over many of the treaties, it becomes fairly obvious that they were a sham. For Example in the Ojibiway's case, the lawyers getting the indians to sign the treaties and deeds claimed to be travelling by canoe hundreds of miles in a day (carrying a buttload of provisions like desks, china and silverware) The distances they documented in these treaties are a big drive to cover in a single day on paved roads. Signatures were blatently forged on deeded sales.
It's some really shady paperwork that ceded Native lands to whites. Legally there is a mounting case that much of this stolen land could be repatriated in a court of law. And it is slowly beginning to happen. Now you might down play these documents as old papers, but nobody dismisses the US constitution, Ammendments or Bill of Rights on these grounds and they are generally older.
You might say this happend a long time ago to people who are dead. Regardless, the descendants of these actions have to live with the consequences and while the whites are living the lush life, Native lives are excluded from this "melting pot" exploited and forced to live in third world poverty. Outcasts in their own native land.
I have spent a bit of time in the North setting up networks for remote fly-in communities. They have some wicked bandwidth and some smart, talented people. Many bands have blatently turned down offers from M$ for free software because they say they don't need Bill Gates.
As far a shrewd traders, the Oji-Cree could teach a Wall Street player a thing or two. Additionally, they have autonomy and could leapfrog the industrial age to be a dominant nation in the information age. Still that is far off. Places like Pikangikum still claim the highest suicide rate in the world and they are ironically only a few miles from the largest gold reserve in the world. It's a long road, but the native people are a strong underdog.
AS i understand it, its very dense, but also when it heats up, it abalates instead of melting. so when the pointy tip of the bullett hits a target, istead of the point getting mushy with heat, the surface aabaltes away and it gets sharper, thus keeping up with the penetrating plans. the fact that its denser than hel helps too.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Do you really think of any of these call centers and server farms are going to stay in the sticks? This has been happening for years. Companies frequently take advantage of tax and free money perks and move on when the new VP or the like convinces enough shareholders or the CEO that slightly more profit could be made elsewhere and then again somewhere and then again somewhere... you get the point. Just ask Kalispell City. Four million in government incentives down the drain, an expensive upgraded infrastructure that no one is going to use, trashed wilderness from the sprawl that popped up and was abandoned, etc.
This is one of the major reasons behind Fairtax
Talk how you will, it'll eliminate the "tax advantage" to outsourcing jobs.
Reducing the regulatory expenses to opening/operating a business would help too. I'm not talking about eliminating OSHA, but there are lots of spots that governmental interferance increases the cost of doing business.
I don't read AC A human right
The governments of small midwestern states have been pimping out their citizens to businesses as people who will work long and hard without complaining for minimum wage and few benefits. They turn around and tell those citizens they are working hard to bring quality, high-paying jobs.
The citizens of these states, especially the "young" people between 18 and 35, have figured this out and are turning their backs on the government of their homes. The past decade has been characterized by a massive outmigration from rural states to Top 50 metropolises. It's a literal brain drain for the communities they leave.
The community in which I live has a special economic development fund that has been an unmitigated disaster, taking tax dollars from our sales tax and giving it to companies who promise to bring in a certain amount of new jobs. There has been, in practice, no accountability and the jobs have sucked. Firms have closed overnight, taking millions of tax dollars with them and leaving hundreds of citizens unemployed with back pay due they'll never see.
The largest employers in this village of ~40,000 people are (besides the air force base, hospital and school district) a technical help desk contractor, a hotel reservation phone pool, a airline reservation phone pool, an insurance agency phone pool, and an adult vocational training center. Despite the "success" of most of these businesses starting within the last 5 years, the median wage has stayed flat at around $25,000.
There are some bright spots. A home that costs ~$150,000 dollars here would set you back ~$2,000,000 in Silicon Valley. Our arts culture here is very strong thanks to the local university, including our excellent volunteer symphony orchestra. I guess that's about it.
Crime isn't low because of the meth epidemic. I have a buddy on the county's drug enforcement squad and the stories he can tell would make for a terrific Al Pacino movie. Except for our housing costs, our cost of living is comparable to the rest of the nation but the fresh produce isn't as fresh nor as diverse.
Now a Super Wal*Mart is scheduled to open next year and our "civic leaders" are touting this as another economic development success. The truth is the citizens are tired of working two or three jobs to get in 40 hours a week and enough of a paycheck to support three kids in their 70's era trailer or trashy $600/month apartment.
I'm lucky to have a great federal government job as a systems administrator. My wife is a dental hygienist with an almost unbelievably fantastic work and pay schedule. We are very lucky.
But to those who would pimp out my neighbors or "outsource" more shitty jobs to communities like this I say go to hell. If the Indians or Chinese or Mexicans will take this shit they are welcome to it. That's not flamebait or nationalism or anything of the sort. It's the truth.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Remember the saying,
;)
The best government is rule by a dictator (when the dictator is good), but is also the worst when corrupt.
Democracy, is merely mediocre. In either case.
And we're not the biggest country. Canada has more land-mass than we do. We're the MOST POWERFUL COUNTRY IN THE WORLD
I don't read AC A human right
...then wouldn't college degrees be a better metric as far as finding employable people?
Here's the top 20 from the latest US census.
1. Washington, D.C. - 44.4%
2. Maryland - 37.6%
3. Colorado - 35.7%
4. Virginia - 34.6%
5. Massachusetts - 34.3%
6. Connecticut - 32.6%
7. New Jersey - 31.4%
8. Vermont - 30.8%
9. Minnesota - 30.5%
10. New Hampshire - 30.1%
11. Rhode Island - 30.1%
12. Delaware - 29.5%
13. Kansas - 29.1%
14. New York - 28.8%
15. Washington - 28.3%
16. California - 27.9%
17. Illinois - 27.3%
18. Nebraska - 27.1%
19. Oregon - 27.1%
20. Utah - 26.8%
I'm also tired of all the rural America mocking the bigoted geekdom here pukes out of their keyboards. As someone who grew up in rural america, where the keys could be left in my car, my house could remain unlocked, where you know and like your neighbors, the list goes on and on,.... And have also lived in the city, where the convenience of transit, shopping, and "culture" is readily available, I can't for the life of me figure out why someone would be so quick to bash his/her fellow American as some out of touch Redneck. Really, this is all so tiring. The whole idea of technology to me is to liberate people from these old worn out ideas of centralization. Cities are great, but I'll take raising my family in rural America any day. Please don't mock me for wanting this. And oh yeah, if Rural Sourcing Takes off, which I think it will, isn't that a good thing for all of us Americans?
You barely listed anything. Is this all you have?
...but serious, I hope you reply with an enchanced list or you conceed that no one is "invading in your lives". Most of all, don't give me any bullshit.
1. Leave our guns alone.
(You mean assault weapons, because I know you're not talking about hunting rifles and hand guns. HOWEVER, I'll give this to you ANYWAY because I support ALL of the constitutional amendments.)
2. Let us buy trucks without airbags.
(I give you that. No arguments here.)
3. Stop destroying our jobs because you want cheaper vacations. I'm thinking of Slick Willie and his war on mining, logging and ranching.
(WHICH is done on FEDERAL LAND. Are you saying Slick Willie was interfering with your right to FEDERAL HANDOUTS??? BTW, We both know the "cheaper vacation" reason is BS.)
4. Stop patronizing us.
(Sure, when you stop painting Californians and New Yorkers what you paint them... )
5. And above all, don't call us a bunch of uneducated bible-thumpers
(Sort of redundant with the last one, eh?)
MY POINT
For a guy who's as well educated and successful as yourself, you make a pretty shitty list as to how Urban Democrats have infiltrated into your lives. Would you like to take some time to rethink your position on the subject, or will you be working on a revised list with a lot more substance?
PS, I'm not a Democrat so don't bother attacking my political affiliation, but I am urbanite/suburbanite so feel free to attack where I live (Northern NJ).
They'll come.. probably moving in between you and work making your commute longer and longer and longer...
Wow. There is some seriously funny stuff on here. Back to topic: 1. Would you move to the boondocks at a pay cut to just have a decent job? 2. What are good jobs to outsource if it were up to you? 3. Crunchy or smooth peanut butter? It seems to me that the internet is helping us all realize an early pipe dream: work anywhere. I know, damn, I didn't mean Bangladesh (that's where my job went and let me move to the BFE). However, I must admit I don't miss rush hour or my kids recitals anymore. I do miss good radio and more than a handful of restaurants. However, I have gotten way better at CS and DoD and Call of Duty. Peace. Out. Gotta go kill some (fill in appropriate group you hate here. I'm with you my brother!)
Yeah, except that water is 55 degs, maybe 58 in the summer, so watch yourself turn blue without a wetsuit. And the locals better know you if you surf or else your car or yourself will not make it out too well. From Zuma to Santa Barbara, there's only two weeks max out of the year where it's warm enough to go to the beach (let alone the water) without a jacket. And the water generally sucks in many places (especially in the winter rains) due to the pollution.
Then, there's "it only takes two hours to go from the beach to the snow". Yeah, two hours one way (half a day on the road both ways at the very least) to go ANYWHERE in the most miserable, congested, God forsaken freeway system on the planet. Can't do anything locally, as it's either nothing but private property (read oceans of housing tracts) or public land that's illegal to do anything but look at it (but now requires a parking placard to stop to look at it for federal forests). I hardly go out of town anymore because as soon as I go onto the 101 parking lot, I can feel my life slip away. To go to more interesting places (Pismo (ATVs), Tahoe, Big Sur, Yosemite, LV), it's a multiday experience.
Also, don't forget this is the People's Republic of Kalifornia, where environmentalists are trying their best to make every human activity illegal except for a few EXTREMELY CROWDED areas (one of a million examples, go to Pismo (Oceano) and fly a kite, see you get fined. Flying parafoils in Oxnard was made illegal, etc.). Never mind the utter hypocracy as they too travel in gas sucking cars and dwell in former wildlife habitat, your ATV is destroying the planet... At any rate, you'll soon have to travel to another state to to actually DO something.
So yeah, come to SoCal if you like surfing, but get to know the locals first. That's ALL you'll be doing so you better like it, or else learn to love the freeway and spend the rest of your life on it. And yes, I've lived in Ventura County 18 years... So why was SoCal better again?
Hey, I think you're the first user on slashdot I've seen that says they're in Montana. I moved to Billings from Seattle two years ago, and it's always refreshing to meet other similary-minded people in this state.
-IOVAR Web Dev Platform
Tulsa, Oklahoma is a call center mecca. There are 80 plus call centers here. Some are small but most employ hundreds. It's about the only thing left after all the other industries imploded (oil, aviation, telecommunications). These jobs typically pay $8-$10/hr which isn't a bad wage for someone with only a high school education. The work itself is another matter.
They are cubicle sweathshops. Poor training coupled with the most micromanaged industry in the known Universe creates a highly stressed work environment where employment is measured in months. Turnover is high but they can always turn around and get a job at another call center for a few more months. With so many people out of work from formerly high paying jobs they have a ready supply of desperate workers.
The best selling point for outsourcing to Oklahoma is that it's like an emerging third world country, but here at home. It's mostly rural with pockets of high technology. The cost of living is low. It's in the central time zone so they only have to get up an hour earlier to take calls from the East coast and stay two hours later to take calls from the West coast. And most people have a high school education. And best of all they speak English even if it has an Okie twang to it.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
People in the south are nice to people...you just have to act like a nice person. They'll be the first to give you the shirt off their back if you're a nice person. If you come and act superior, or act an ass....they'll also be the first to kick your ass.
That's what you get from real people. Sure, I'm talking in generalites....there are jerks all over the world...and it is no different here. But, in general, I've found that compared to the extremes in the country...the NE and the West...people here are generally nicer, polite and more respectful than most others. If not, why is it so many from up north want to move here? It can't just be the warmer weather. The live down here is generally more relaxed...better food...and the zest for life is better. We like to work hard and party hard...and enjoy each other more. I was amazed when I lived in Tucson. Down here...when you walk and catch someone's eyes...you smile and generally say hello...etc. When out there I'd do that...they'd actually sometimes have a scowl on their face and ask "what do you want?" That amazed me. I find you can get further in life it you 'nice' people to death rather than be immediately defensive and spiteful...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
"You know who the least respectable of the bunch are?" ... ...
the people who don't pay rent
so when are you going to start paying up pilgrim
i am sure we start seeing some real potential when they all can afford and ivy league education.
justice isn't something just anyone can afford
- trading crime for crime : ani d.
Here let me convey to you a conversation that happend to me.
"You mexican?"
Nope
"Puerto Rican?"
Nope
"Well what are ye then?"
(Me getting frustrated) "Eskimo!"
"Shit I thought them eskimos was white!"
As for "so many people wanting to move there" unless you live in Florida I'd say not too many. Tell me when your population gets close to NY, NJ, CA, or IL and then I'll believe you.
Look I am not saying you are not nice, maybe you are but my experience has been that people in the south treat you according to how you look and sound espcially in the small towns. I have walked into bars and stopped all conversation. Yes it actually happened.
I don't know where you live but the absolute worst place was Oklahoma. I wouldn't live there again no matter what you offered me. What a shithole, redneck, stifling state that one is.
evil is as evil does
Ain't come one, but many tine tanies
Here is the thing:
If outsourcing costs you a job, you hate it.
If outsourcing means you get a job or you make money off it, you love it.
So it doesn't matter if the outsourcing is to Mumbai or Altus, Arkansas. Any techie-type in Silicon Valley will be pissed if they let go in favor of a guy who can be hired for less money. Period.
That sure seems to be what your post suggests. Short of cloning, I don't see how our people won't be all but extinct in a hundred years or so. And I don't know what languages you speak; I speak English and Spanish. My "ancient tribal languages" exist on reel-to-reel in some anthropologist's office.
Sure there are those of us who are fortunate enough to have gotten off the rez. Hell some of us even work in IT and goody, our company gets kudos for checking off a little box on their diversity paperwork. And your co-workers tell you how much they liked Dances With Wolves or think the rez is some aboreal hippie paradise.
I doubt many companies will be outsourcing their IT work to the rez.
The worst isn't behind us. We're pretty much gone as a people. Want to know something about the Lemhi-Shoshone fifty years from now? Better go web surfing (or the equivalent) or to a museum. There won't be anyone with enough blood quantum to be considered an American Indian.
If you marry someone from another nation, the goverment won't recognize your children as being Native American anymore if their blood quantum isn't high enough, even if 3/4 of their grandparents are full-blooded Indians but from different nations. Why should the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) get to decide who are salmon eaters and who are not? Shouldn't we decide? Shouldn't our children be considered BOTH their parents' people?
Most of us are forgotten, still barely scraping by on the rez. You don't have to travel to the third world to see soul-crushing poverty - just visit a rez without a giant casino. You think the racism is gone? Bullshit. Even shitty jobs are hard to come by - on or off the rez. But there sure are plenty of liquor stores and too many of us are downbeaten drunks.
If you happen to live along a major interstate, then goody for you. Some development company might choose to build a casino. That's if your council isn't greedy and shortsighted enough to string developers along. If the angry infighting doesn't make it impossible to get the project underway. If you grease enough wheels in the state government and get some well-connected lobbyist to bribe enough of your state delegation to help the project along. If some asshat (casino developer, some other paleface carpetbagger, or an Uncle Tom Indian) doesn't rip you off by offering to buy your interest in future casino money for pennies on the dollar while you writhe in poverty.
You're right that the massacres and cultural destruction won't happen to us anymore. Those jobs have been done. There aren't any values and traditions to revive. And I don't know where you're going to find anyone "Indian enough" to repopulate the land area of US of A to the hundred million or so who lived here before Columbus arrived, much less eclipse it. There are only 2.4 million of us left in all the US states and territories, roughly 2.4% of those living 512 years ago.
If you're Native American then you're a naive, naive little urban Indian. If not, then you still don't know what the crap you're talking about.
For the record, there isn't any fucking hospital on my rez. There's a clinic. God help you if you get sick, shot or have a heart attack.
Chanting to the Great Spirit with the Medicine Man? WTF? You've been watching too much Walker: Texas Ranger. Native Americans have an infant mortality rate over twice that of whites.
Even if you have an IHS (Indian Health Service) clinic or hospital nearby, which less than 480,000 of us do, unless your nation is federally recognized you can forget IHS period. 1/3 of Native Americans have no health coverage at all, not even Medicaid. Horses and cattle get better health care than the people on my rez.
It seems that most of the big IT companies (and many smaller ones) like to locate their offices in the burbs. When I moved here almost two decades ago, I found the Annex neighbourhood close to downtown much to my liking. Since my specialty at the time was programming close to the metal (mainly C and assembler, I had experience with half a dozen machine architectures), I kept finding myself being steered towards job openings in the suburbs.
By '98, I had had it with the excruciating loneliness of the long commutes to offices in the middle of nowhere. Quite a few of these places qualified as male ghettoes in which there would always be a few guys who presumed that I would share their sexist attitudes simply because I'm also male. In the late 90's, there were number of outfits designing network gear that were crying out for talent and offering top dollar on tor.jobs from places such as Mississauga, Markham and even Kanata (ex-urb close to Ottawa), and guess who decided that he'd rather try to re-invent himself as a free-lance webmonkey downtown.
I don't have a car. I don't want a car. If the system requires me to make trade-offs over wasting excessive amounts of differing types of non-renewable resources including my time just for a daily commute, then the system is broken.
The largest town in ND is Fargo, populatio of 90k. If you include the whole metro area I think its closer to 160k. But that's why Iowa and ND would struggle retaining younger people. Sure some people enjoy smaller towns and rural areas, but you would loose everyone who wants to live in a big city. Sure Fargo and Cedar Rapids or Ames will grow, but most of the truly small towns keep shrinking.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
It's not that income explains education (if it did, why are the kids of immigrants so successful?), it's that income has a positive correlation with traits that DO lead to better education. Or rather parents with high incomes tend to care about thier kids education, they are both more likely to be involved and they can elect to move if they feel their child's school isn't doing a good job.
It's true that vouchers "take money away from public schools" but they would also be taking away students too. Remember, most states have a funding formula that awards on a per student basis, but all the local funding is usually not distributed that way, it's a simple property tax or sales tax etc. I don't think that private schools should get that money (or have the tax authority to take it) The suggestion AFAIK, is for vouchers to only be a fraction of the "per student" spending. Thus the district is out one student, but only half their funding for that student. How is this bad for the district?
If you wanted to prove of disprove this, try it in the worst district (ie a place with NOTHING to loose and everything to gain).
Bottom line, if the kids don't care and the parents don't care, then no amount of funding is going to result in an educated student. Funding (at least to some extent) is a necessary but not sufficent condition for education. Eventually you reach a point where additional funding hits diminishing returns and eventually near zero returns on the dollar. Why not at least let the poor parents and kids who CARE about their education have a chance at a good school? Are you "leaving kids behind"? Sure, but almost all of them wouldn't have been educated under the current system either.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Actually I live in Arkansas, I have been to New York and, I have to tell you, Your right, New Yorkers are friendly. The ones I have met anyways. The Southern charm that most people think of is really just politeness, it has nothing to do with friendliness as it sometimes gets mistaken. I think the reason is that politeness is just part of the tradition here. Its similar to the Japanese with their politeness if your familiar with that. Its just a defacto standard that people use in their day to day interactions. Of course, in recent years, things are starting to change, especially with the younger generation.
While this is supposed to minimize bloodshed as the last resort in dispute processing, what it actually does is result in, first, bloodfeud and then mass warfare.
Sadam Hussien, for example, challenged George Bush to a duel before Bush committed US troops to Iraq.
Bush of course didn't even have to decline.
I'm sure you, an anymous coward, approve of Bush's course of action, resulting in 100,000 Iraqi deaths and 1000 US deaths for mendacious objectives, regardless of what you will now claim with equal mendacity. I mean after all -- you can say anything and get away with it no matter what you have said elsewhere or will say in the future.
These are the bad old days.
Seastead this.
"And Cali and NY do have pretty high standards, if you stay out of the cities..."
Tam, go out to western new york, just east of buffalo.
You know how we make fun of the rural south for being a bunch of rednecks with sheriffs to hassle people travelling by? Well, that's kind of an old story, and is mostly not truth these days.
However, western new york is actually like that even today. New York, once you get out of the city is as backward a place as you can imagine.
The point of treaties vs. pillaging post is that a big chunk of land was stolen from natives through either broken treaties or largely through fraudulent land deals.
If you had a car that you bought from someone who bought it from someone who stole it and forged a title for it, you would more likely be looking at a charge of possessing stolen goods rather than market value for the car.
I am not claiming that any remaining Huron descendants are going to get back the Ohio Valley, however there are big chunks of Ontario, Minnesota and other places that were stolen through forged deeds. Those should go back to their rightful owners -- the autonomous Nations from whom they were stolen.
I'd take a stereotypical rural American over a stereotypical Slashdotter. I come from a very rural area in the midwest, yet I have an advanced degree in physics and program at a UN organization. So I'd like to extend my middle finger to all you insecure, socially-challenged Slashdot weenies who have nothing better to do than snort at how people talk.
The only fake in the holocaust was that it was just 6 million jews... there were over 12 million people put to death in the Nazi death camps --the other 6 million+ were Slavs, Catholics, homosexuals, capitalists, communists, gypsies....
The number six million is a vast understatement.
As for Kuwaiti and Kurdish leaders being unable to take out Saddam with fair contest between individuals -- of course Saddam invoked single combat when it suited him and abjured it when it didn't. You didn't think I was imply Saddam Hussein was genuinely acting as though he were a pre-Christian northern European as opposed to simply manipulating that mythlogy for political purposes did you?
And you still haven't addressed the fundamental statement -- which still stands -- as to the way clan structures in India enable their programmers to reproduce without anywhere near the costs imposed on US programmers -- even rural US programmers. Every one of the evils of "the bad old days" should be equally applicable to India if your view of clan structures were true across the board. They aren't. There are conditions under which they can be made workable and conditions underwhich they are unworkable.
Seastead this.
Look, anonymous coward, if you think your insult-laden "arguments" can stand up to scrutiny the why don't you stand behind them?
Come out the closet with you libelous characterizations of my statements. Identify yourself.
Seastead this.
I hope that you are able to surmount all of your difficulties.
-------
Incite and flee.
Across the street.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
I moved back to my hometown of Toledo OH in 1997 from Boston MA. It is THE WORST MISTAKE I ever made in my life. Learn from it.
... the owners are getting the hell out since the economy's so shitty, but -- what a shock -- they can't sell their homes in the same economy. Rather than take the loss from such a housing bubble, they elected to convert their homes to rentals and then take off for better fiscal climes.
... primarily revolving around years of un- and under-employment.)
Places like Toledo (which includes anything within a 1hr radius from it) are economic dead zones, stuck inside America like little Third World countries. I never in my life had (and have) seen such an old population of tech workers (what few there are, BTW). There's a reason for that. The reason is that a place like Toledo has permanently underemployed population sectors. Those old folks in "young men's jobs" are clinging to their jobs for dear life. They are clinging so desperately since outside that job, there's almost nothing available for years at a time but manual labor paying $6-$10/hr.
There's a reason housing was (note the past tense) so cheap in places like Toledo. It was cheap since there were no fucking jobs. It was cheap since the people who wanted to sell, really couldn't find qualified buyers.
This housing situation changed in some perverted mirror of the dotcom boom's effects on the coasts (as well as the credit boom that had apparently struck every bank in America as some sort of good idea -- bleah!). Housing has risen appallingly, even while thousands were and are being tossed out of work. It was only this year 2004 that Toledo's average metro housing finally reflected economic reality and fell 5%. But after years of steep rising, 5% is a nothing decrease. Homes in Toledo are still at least 50% overpriced when compared to the economic strength that can be marshalled here to buy them.
What I'm seeing here and now is a "renting adjustment". Houses are sitting on the market so long that many "owners" are making the adjustment of renting out their unsalable homes. Just to go by the small sample of what 2 neighbors have done, I'd wager that many of these are due to relocations
You may be offered a job in one of these areas. You should strongly consider your future if you do so. That job may collapse under you in only a couple of years, and then where will you be? Yes, that's right: stuck in Loserville USA with a whole bunch of losers who will work for far less money than you will. And it will never get better. Not in a place like Toledo. (Case in point: The only McDonald's in downtown Toledo closed about 4 months ago.)
To rant a bit to support my thesis: I lost my home and have otherwise contracted my expenses down in size to what I never considered possible before (and I was a spendthrift before, to give you some idea). All the clothes I wear come from Goodwill or the Salvation Army stores. My shoes are bought used for about $4 each. I do my own maintenance on my vehicle (1988 Dodge Dakota), and bring in a mechanic friend who works cheap (he's essentially homeless himself). I eat out probably 12 times a year and never, ever rent movies (I waited until all 3 Matrix movies hit the library -- now, THERE'S willpower). I buy toilet paper in year lots. Etc.
I'm living such a hand-to-mouth existence (writing this now on a Pentium I, 100MHz, that I obtained in 1995) because I've been saving money. I'm at $18K and still climbing (no mean feat at $14/hr as a field service tech for a bank). (It would be $22K savings, but I've got loans out to friends who have had their own fiscal troubles
The savings are necessary since I'm getting the fuck out of this place and will strike out on my own like I did in my 20s. Moving to Boston in 1990 was the best thing I ever did, and I may return there. I had found that I was undercutting tech workers
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
People in the south are nice to people...you just have to act like a nice person.
BS. I grew up in the south, and people are just as nasty there as anywhere else, and probably more. It's much, much worse, however, if you happen not to be lily-white.
Yeah, if you're white and wear an NRA t-shirt, they might be nice to you.
"Honey, I'm getting a huge paycut, and we have to move to another state!"
"That am wonderful news!"
You're not the first to think that, unfortunately.
Wired magazine carried the "ravings of a lunatic" named Bryna Siegel who claimed that autism results from assortive mating between people who are predisposed to be "geeks" -- and offered her up as authoritative. Maybe you should call up the public health department and recommend the lot of those guys to the local sanitorium. It seems less plausible that assortive mating has increased at the rates presupposed to support the recent increases in autism given the high degree of immigration over the same time period -- particularly among programming professionals.
Moreover, there was another way of interpreting what I was saying, which is closer to my meaning:
A more important metric than cost of living is cost of reproduction. If you measure only cost of living you can end up genociding certain demographies through differential impact of public policies on reproduction. Ignoring these unintended consequences is malign neglect on the part of demographies within the same body politic that benefit from said policies.
Seastead this.
EOM
Of course, this isn't an absolute correlation; Bush also took seven of the twelve states with the lowest rates. I suspect it's mostly due to a regional correlation of both, er, problems. =)
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
We're better off?
That sure seems to be what your post suggests. Short of cloning, I don't see how our people won't be all but extinct in a hundred years or so.
I suspect you won't have any pure races in America in 100 years or so. Why are you concerned about being "Pure blooded" Indians? If a German was concerned with only marrying another "Pure Blooded" German you would likely think he was a Nazi.
And I don't know what languages you speak; I speak English and Spanish. My "ancient tribal languages" exist on reel-to-reel in some anthropologist's office.
Big deal, I live in America, I speak english. My Grandfathers on both sides spoke something different. I really could care less if they spoke a dead language or not.
Sure there are those of us who are fortunate enough to have gotten off the rez. Hell some of us even work in IT and goody, our company gets kudos for checking off a little box on their diversity paperwork.
If the Indians won, do you think they would have given the white man Affermative Action? Is that part of the "Warrior Spirit"?
And your co-workers tell you how much they liked Dances With Wolves or think the rez is some aboreal hippie paradise.
Everyone deals with jokes about their upbringing or their race. Don't get oversensative about it.
I doubt many companies will be outsourcing their IT work to the rez.
I doubt it too, given the low education of most of the people there.
The worst isn't behind us. We're pretty much gone as a people.
And so are white people, but you don't hear them bitching do you? Their reprouction rate is around 1.6 and by 2075 they will be a minority in America. You don't hear that on the news, or anywhere else because if some white dude bitches about that they are then branded a racist.
Want to know something about the Lemhi-Shoshone fifty years from now? Better go web surfing (or the equivalent) or to a museum. There won't be anyone with enough blood quantum [petitiononline.com] to be considered an American Indian.
The same thing will be said about WASP's eventually.
If you marry someone from another nation, the goverment won't recognize your children as being Native American anymore if their blood quantum isn't high enough, even if 3/4 of their grandparents are full-blooded Indians but from different nations. Why should the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) get to decide who are salmon eaters [lemhishoshone.com] and who are not? Shouldn't we decide? Shouldn't our children be considered BOTH their parents' people?
Their decisions only matter for affermative action and such things. Whats wrong, hasn't the government given you enough already?
Most of us are forgotten, still barely scraping by on the rez. You don't have to travel to the third world to see soul-crushing poverty - just visit a rez without a giant casino.
So instead of bitching about it, why don't you go teach some of your IT skills to these people? Or would you rather they suck off the government teat forever?
You think the racism is gone? Bullshit. Even shitty jobs are hard to come by - on or off the rez.
Oh give it the fuck up already. Companies love to hire skilled minorities, they get that little checkbox like you mentioned, plus a skilled worker on top of it. Your SHITTY attitude is why jobs are hard to come by.
But there sure are plenty of liquor stores and too many of us are downbeaten drunks.
Supply and demand.
If you happen to live along a major interstate, then goody for you. Some development company might choose to build a casino. That's if your council isn't greedy and shortsighted enough to string developers along. If the angry infighting doesn't make it impossible to get the project underway. If you grease enough wheels in the state government and get some well-connected lobbyist t
Well this gravy train is fucking over. Take your liberal-bashing, federal-tax-leaching, confederate-flag-waving, holier-than-thou, hypocritical bullshit and shove it up your ass.
I'd hate to break this to you, but the African American vote is what kept your blue states blue. Otherwise the election would have been an electoral landslide. There are plenty more conservatives in the North than there are liberals in the south. You are the minority my friend, move to Canada if you can't deal with it.
You bring up the founding fathers when it's convient for your arguement, but do you think they would have wanted gay marriage, welfare, x-ian bashing schools, or affermative action? If the founding fathers were alive and standing next to me today, they would jump through my monitor and whip your pansy, liberal, give-peace-a-chance ass.
You lost, your party lost, American is a conservative country. Get over it.
"But now that the Dems make their left wing social platform such a large part of their platform, they're becoming republicans."
Huh? I was under the impression that Republicans were supposed to be against social programs.
Yes, they are. My comment makes perfect sense. I wasn't referring to social programs, I was referring to the left's social agenda.
"The people you mock are the most honest, real, hard working people in this country."
Number one, I did no such thing!
My statement was directed to the "idiots on the coasts", not directly to you. I thought I had made this clear, but i guess I didn't. Most of my post was not directed at you.
"If a frog had side pockets, he'd carry a hand gun" - Dan Rather