Slashdot Mirror
China PM Wants to Rule Global Tech With India
GrumpyDeveloper writes "As reported in this Wired story, China's prime minister said Sunday that China and India should work together to dominate the world's tech industry, bringing together Chinese hardware with Indian software.
If American tech workers can't compete at the pennies-per-hour salary range, then they deserve to lose their jobs to the superior foreign technological forces. And stop whining about "oh, but I need to buy groceries" and "I need to save up for my child's college fund and my retirement".
At least, this is what I've heard.
I, for one, welcome our new high-school management retail wage-slave jobs of the future.
Is outsourcing to North America part of their plan :)
Makes sense.
India has gained global repute as a hub of software professionals while China is strong on computer hardware. Both countries' cheap and plentiful labor has undercut the tech industry in America and other Western countries through outsourcing.
Seems as if they're trading on the principle of 'comparative' advantage, something that makes perfect sense. Software in India, hardware in China. Now, I understand that we're going to see some misguided anti-Globalisation backlash on this site. Overall, firms will then get lower prices for their tech products. Everybody will win from this.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
My substandard chinese parts can be serviced by substandard indian technicians!
here's the quote that's got me scratching my head:
" it will signify the coming of the asian century of the IT industry."
isn't it already?
ed
With Walmart getting into the computer business, and all..
I am the maverick of Slashdot
Having read the article thoroughly, this startling news shows the flaws in the brewing Open Source Zeitgeist that is gripping the software community. Have you considered that providing software for free to countries such as China is essentially tacit support for oppressive regimes?
Far-fetched? Think about it: With MySQL, the People's Army will now be able to do multiple queries on their tables of democratic activists in Olog(n) time instead of lengthy searches in card catalogs. The bureaucratic overhead previously allowed activists enough time to flee the country. How about building cheap firewalls so the people can't get the unbiased reporting that CNN provides? Or using Apache to publish lists of Falun Gong people to their police forces instantly? I doubt that never crossed your minds when you were coding away in your parents' basements. Consider putting that little thought in your mental resolv.conf file.
If that does not concern you ( which it probably doesn't, since the slashdot.org paradigm is publishing articles about how not to pay for things ), consider something else. When China eventually goes to war with Taiwan, we want to be able turn their command and control facilities into the computing equivalent of a train-wreck. One of the advantages of Windows never mentioned in the article is the ability of Microsoft to remotely deactivate Windows XP in the case of a national emergency. Thanks to GNU/Lunix, Taiwan will be on a collision course with the mainland in the near future.
Which throws into question Mr. Stallman's motives. A known proponent of socialism, the Chinese government and RMS are natural allies. Could it be a back door to Stallman's dream of an über-Socialist United States? We may never know for sure. Next time you consider contributing to an open source project, ask yourself this question: don't you want to make sure your work isn't used for nefarious purposes? Will you risk having blood on your hands?
Great! Now we won't be able to understand in two different languages!
That said, the border agreement India and China announced today seems like a terrific step forward. I'm surprised it's not getting more attention. The two biggest countries in the world have been banging heads over that border for decades.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Cooperation between India and China is inevitable. Their feud stems from a small war and dispute over small threads of land. The benefits of their cooperation is far greater than the benefits of a rift, and both sides have seen this. Add this to a burgeoning ASEAN, and you have a truly global economic power.
Whether or not they succeed at dominating the tech industry is redundant. If they cooperate, even economically, they'd have a lot more say in the world than the either the US or the EU, over time.
Isn't this where Peter Wiggin joins with the Thai army and defeats the Indo-Chinese alliance?
Raging in an online forum won't do anything for the world around you. To see change, you must take action.
You're not looking at the bigger picture. For the consumers it will become a better deal. With much lower software/hardware development costs, these savings can inevitably be passed on to the customers. The only way China and India can establish themselves into the market is to undercut the prices of existing products and technologies. This should (fingers crossed) jump start an agressive price war -> cheap products of equal or better quality!!
"China has a large manufacturing sector and India has a large software industry. China may become India's major manufacturer while India will be China's office" - BBC World (OR words to that effect)
I, for one, welcome our new Chindian Oveerrrr...oh wait...no I don't.
Why would indians want to get mixed up with the Chinese? Seems like this would jeopordize their lucrative Casino businesses.
Top 10 Reasons To Procrastinate
10.
Despite China's usage of FOSS, they're the only people I trust less than MS. Today's software overlords, the US + EU, is bad enough with managing things like privacy and fair use.
China's management of the internet ought to give us some idea of what they would do with a monopoly on internet tech.
China and India are historical enemies for literally thousands of years. Sure, they might be able to bury the hatchet. But I think it will take a while....
In a century or two, perhaps they will taunt each other like the U.S. and Canada.
Assembly Instruction of Very Fine Device.
Step 1: You should be opening the box now.
Step 2: Complete assembly is easy for you.
Step C: Begin use Very Fine Device.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Between the combined political oppression and instability of the two countries they won't get terribly far if they attempt this sort of alliance.
China's setting itself up for a gigantic market crash anyway (which in turn will mess up the rest of the world). What SHOULD concern us is what's going to happen to China when it eventually collapses in on itself.
I can't help but think that it is no coincidence that this is going on at the same time as anti-japanese riots in Japan. Seems like China is pulling out the stops to truly become the dominant Asian power.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
I guess Taiwan's wonderful software engineers just have to feel left out of this new wonderful Asian century - but seriously.. India before the rest of South East Asia ? Can we hear [why yes - Singapore,Malaysia,Japan,Korea (both of them) - they are our misguided children .. and we will get them back.. oh yes.. we will.. *maniacal laughter*]
that China can compete with the U.S. Tech when we have the best Math and Science schools on the planet. I mean, there is so much interest within the U.S. to keep up innovation and not just be technology whores. Besides, we've patented everything anyway.
A related story I caught via Google News:
f m
http://www.voanews.com/english/2005-04-11-voa11.c
I think that it's fair to say that this is the first time in history that people everywhere else see America whining about its inability to compete.
In times past, the American workforce was something to admire. I don't think that's the case any longer.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
(replying here due to vast wave of trolls and little else worthy of my time)
Any Indian software industry will almost certainly build its foundations on Linux rather than licence a proprietary OS.
I suspect certain parties *coughRedmondcough* may use this as an ideological reason to support Windows - "Running / Developing Linux is spporting our nation's strategic competitors - run an American OS !" etc.
Software and politics don't mix easily.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
India already dominates the outsourced help desk market. Cheap crappy Chinese hardware and sub-par Indian tech support should work well together to dominate the global market. :-/
The same thing we do every night, India...
Because like everywhere in the world, front line tech support is a low paying job. You don't put your best people on phone support.
Yes, and the fact that China does not give a hoot regarding Intellectual Property and Copyright should not concern India in the least.
Somewhere, there's a joke begging to be told.
Let's see if we're all still laughing in 18 months.
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
The gov of China knows that India is supposed to surpass them in population relatively soon. According to the CIA, by 2020 (15 years, folks...) a China/India duo would account for 36% of the global population. Western Europe plus the United States will only be 9% of the global population. With emerging economies, it is forecasted that we westerners are supposed to become quite obsolete.
China, knowing that by 2030 india is predicted to pass them in population, knows they have to act. Most of China's land mass is worthless, after all (why do you think Tiawan is so important to them?) so they have to position themselves as a solid consumer front.
The problem India/China will face: they'll be *consumers*. Being the biggest consumers has been a major harm to the US economy (trade deficits, etc). For our substantially smaller work force (1/5th-ish), we still produce twice as much as China does (see above CIA link). They need to seriously work on their production per-capita. That, and feeding those folks is already a serious problem. Production, on their end, is not just an industrial issue - its a natural resource issue.
The Western Hemisphere controls the food, and with it...we'll still control the wealth. If the US made some strong ties with South America, we'd retain power with even just 2% of the global population...put 3 billion people in an area that can only make food for 1 billion, and what does supply/demand dictate? It dictates that food prices will skyrocket, and non-food goods will plummet. Watches and games will become trivial, throw-away items (already are), but an apple...an apple will be valuable.
In the short term, this much is true. In the long run, China and India would gain a monopoly, get greedy, raise their prices, and the balance would swing back to the West.
The only company that wouldn't survive this, as far as I can see, would be Microsoft, as they wouldn't be willing to acknowledge the threat and accordingly cut THEIR prices to compete.
Shame.
My other processor is big-endian.
Welcome to a Brave New World of Tech Support Hell.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
Heck, we're sending so much R&D that way anyway, it was just a matter of time before this happened.
PHBs on the quest for low low prices will love this, too. They'll save the company money and come out with a huge bonus.
Simple:
;)
be glad it is not the other way around.
Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai
This might be a good thing. Do you think harware manufacturers in China are going to give a rat's ass about 'Trusted Computing' and harware-level DRM that media cartels want? Funny how we may have to look to China to preserve freedom over our own computing property.
So will the tech support be outsourced to the US?
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
Is what is good for the USA also good for Microsoft? is what is good for Microsoft good for the USA? Is Microsoft the last great hope for Planet Earth?
;-)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
...we buy cruddy unsupported hardware from China, we run horrendously unsupported software from India, and we have it fall prey to Russian hackers.
Am I the only one finding this to be a problem?
You know, there was once an old joke on a comparison of Heaven and Hell based on which nationality did your food, car, laws, lovers, etc. I think we're headed towards the same in IT.
I wonder what the South American FOSS contingent will have to say as time goes by or what influence the hacker high thing will have.
Probably just nationalistic chest beating but it is weird news.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
...that the Indian Prime Minister replies that India will be much better served in partnering with a real hardware leader: Taiwan.
I think the point is that 5 years into this century, we can't tell a whole heck of a lot about what the rest of the century will hold. Right now, the center of software IT power is squarely seated in the US and western Europe. Think Microsoft (one of the primary targets of eastern Asian countries). Even the majority of the Free software movement has taken place in US (esp academic strongholds as in California, and Massachusetts) and Europe. This is apparently what China wants India to help change. It's very possible that cooperation of this kind would result in a major shift in IT, just as it is suggested that it could.
Considering most of the current hardware is already made in China (ever look at a Dell computer and all those white stickers with MADE IN CHINA clearly printed) and so many jobs are being shipped across sees, I am surprised you even say 18 months.
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
Premiere of China and the President of India are Scientists, one a down to earth Geologist and the other a rocket shooting Space scientist!
...
About the topic
Could Chinese Hardware & Indian Software be married to produce the World dominating Tech Industry? Is it a mere whimsical dream of the Chinese Premiere or is it a real workable proposition to tilt the balance of the World's technological power base? As the wise sage said "Time will tell"!
Curretly though, the traditional rivals are ready to bury the hatchet over the common border they share and also have set a target to raise the bilateral trade to $30bn by 2010 from the $13.6bn in the last fiscal. The two countried have signed a dozen agreements today, ranging from phytosanitary protocols to more open skies, and China is backing India's bid to the UN Security Council.
So for the time being, they do seem to be working together to the mutual benefit of the two Asian behemoths. Also, if the friction is diffused the world has one pair of nuclear neighbours to worry about!
-- Prem
Aiming to tweet on a rice
But how long will that last ? Once their workforces see the wealth that they are generating they are going to want a share of it, that is going to lead to demands for higher wages. This has happened before (see Eastern Europe).
Part of the West's wealth relies on an imbalance of income -- ie the West relies on low wages in Africa/Asia to supply them with cheap food/goods/holidays/... This is not to say that things won't change: they will -- there will be an averaging of standards of living; we in the West are going to have to accept a reduction in our standards of living or work much harder for it. This is good in global terms.
Where will the world's workhouse be ? Africa ?
BTW: Anyone remember 20-30 years ago the golden future that was painted for us -- that automation would mean that no one would have to work more than one day a week (or something like that). Whatever happened to that dream ?
Am I the only one bothered by the fact India is keeping the pro-Tibetan protestors out of the picture?
Seems money is all that matters in the world. So much for the hindus living up to the Srimad-Bhagavad Ghita. =\
Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai
Cheap f'ing hardware running cheap f'ing software. I'm not interested, but most of the world should love it.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
China stands to become the next superpower through stealing technology and what are we going to do about it. We have already sold ourselves to the devil with all this debt so if we complain China has the power to sink our economy into the ground and they can walk away laughing.
"Quality?" Over 90% of the world's desktops runs Microsoft Windows as their OS, and you seriously think most people give two hoots about quality?!?
Regards;
Much of the outsourcing that used to go to India has now moved to the even cheaper land of China. China knows that a strategic alliance with India will only mean that India will further indebt itself into China. This alliance clearly reminds me of the alliance the World Trade Organization made with China during the Clinton Administration. China is opening its vast market to the United States. Yeah, accept only its job market and virtually no consumerism. What is more disturbing is China gets all the benefits of a trading nation in the WTO by being a "most favored nation" but still meets very few requirements that the WTO forces member nations to follow. As long as the yuan continues to be pegged against the dollar and artificially inflated and China is a controlled economy, the only nation which will win by trading with China is China. Unfortunately, for any free nation, Walmart's business strategy will continue to hurt most of the free worlds economy, by benefiting the upperclass and further eroding middle class work. my 2cents
Math
As far as the current wages for "IT" professionals in India go, they are among the top paid people in the white-collar industry. They can afford to live a lifestyle that may be at the very least considered as upper middle class in most societies.
When most Americans hear about "pennies-per-hour" salaries (which in itself is an exaggeration), software professionals are being exploited as "slave labor" in "sweat shops". This view couldn't be further from the truth.
The truth is that "IT" professionals are being paid princely salaries by Indian standards (similar to how it was during the boom in the Silicon Valley). The cost of living in India is *way* low compared to the US. For comparison, a loaf of bread costs about 10 Indian Rupees or about 25 US cents. A large pizza at Pizza Hut/Dominos would cost about 100-300 INR, which is about 2.00 to 6.00 US Dollars. A low-cost meal in an average fast-food type restaurant would run you about 25 INR or less than 1.00 USD.
That's about all I have to say in this rant. Comparing wages without taking in the cost of living into account is crazy, but I guess it's convenient to ignore making misinformed arguments against "outsourcing" (which the corporations are responsible for, btw and not Indians who're "stealing our jaabs") and dissing Indians for being ready to work at lower wages.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Volume.
Hollywood used to make pretty good movies now they churn out crap, in two weeks people catch on but by then new stuff is out. Same goes for the Indian software industry I'd say.
I can't wait to read the manuals!
Get your Unix fortune now!
It started when Nixon first rolled out the red carpet to China's dictators and promtly dumped support for the occupied Tibetans' struggle to regain independence.
The only answer I have so far is greed. It seems that the formerly rather benevolently socialistic India now wants piece of the action, principles and ideals be damned. But hey, if the US and Europe can lick Chinese Communist Party's bottom, why can't the newly-assertive India? This corporate-lead foreign policy must be quite lucrative for the policy-makers too. And the Chinese Party cadres are masters in playing parties against each other.
Why else would the occupied Tibetans and Uighurs be so goddamn dispensable?
Next time you buy a Dell or visit Walmart (or other financiers of the Chinese Communist Party rule), remember that you aren't financing Hitler's autobahn network in the 1930s, but nevertheless something eerily similar.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
Let's see if we're all still laughing in 18 months.
Meanwhile, the US has spent itself into such a massive hole that it can't keep up spending for education. Even colleges have had to turn away students because they've laid off so many staff.
An economy isn't so much based upon money, but on ideas and when there's poor education then the flow of ideas is stunted.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Join me. Let's rule together, like father and son.
I actuelly read the title first:
"China PM Wants to Rule Global Tech OF India"
I'm not being argumentative; I am potentially underinformed and have just missed the pundits/economists that have written articles or made statements regarding this.
Could you cite a source (or three) that can indicate that this market crash is looming on the horizon?
Is it simply the idea of Communism + semi free market gumming up the works, or is there a "bubble" of some sort that is artificially inflating earnings?
There's also the potentially dangerous scenario Bruce Sterling outlines in Distration where they Chinese gov't decides IP is a bunch of hooey and releases code of anything and everything American, crashing the Information Market in America. Which could dodge the market crash in China, though the fallout would certainly affect them to some degree. (after all, a world economic power suddenly becoming close to zero value will affect the global scene)
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Given the current trend of American industry towards creating an overload of patents and then going sue-crazy with them, I think that it's not too far a stretch to imagine the domestic tech market taking a dive. So far as I know, China wouldn't have any qualms with violating American crap-patents in order to create cheaper, better software.
Heck, China probably doesn't even have to do anything to bring it about. It's a simple strategy: Let the Americans kill their own industry, then come in and clean house.
While he was inside the building, a Tibetan youth climbed up a tower and remained perched above Wen's car, throwing flyers and waving the Tibetan flag. He shouted "Free Tibet! Wen Jiabao, you cannot suppress the truth!" Five officers climbed up and arrested him.
On Saturday, police detained two Tibetan leaders to prevent them from organizing demonstrations and prevented 50 Tibetan students from leaving their college hostels to protest, a police officer said.
Please feel free to generate profits and bring tax funds back to the state, but do not believe this entitles you to the ability to speak your mind.
We are truly lucky in the western world to have the ability to move up the wealth ladder and speak out against our government's practices as well.
If capital is free to move about the globe but labor isn't, then all that the owning class has to do to keep control is to keep moving from the rich, expensive countries to the poor, cheap countries. They let the rich countries become poor again, and then move back.
It's all about cheap labor, and if you think it's "Us" (the US and the West) vs. "Them" (China, India, etc.) then you have bought into the lie that the ruling class uses to keep control.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
With the relatively high fixed costs of chip fabs and the low start-ups for software India will lose out as Chinese appropriate software know-how and the Indians will not have quite the same capability to take hardware knowledge. If this deal actually happens, 15 years from now India will get the shaft as Chinese programmers replace them and India will lack the hardware infrastructure to compete.
I'm sure there are a variety of jokes in various flavours that will come out of this one, but here's what I had in mind:
Great, just what we need. A combination that's even more mediocre than Intel and Microsoft!
Or perhaps you were thinking along these lines:
And I'm sure we'll see:
In Soviet Russia, Chinese hardware and Indian software run YOU!
I haven't figured out how to work the Breast option in here, but someone will, no doubt.
It's nice that China and India are settling their differences, but I don't really think that workers in the U.S. have much to worry about in the long run. Why? Because I think that if the slide in quality that I've been seeing continues, the pendulum of outsourcing will swing back to the U.S.. I don't want to be mean, but frankly the cheap hardware coming out of China has been pretty low in quality. In my own experiences, I'm seeing a greater incidence of dead on arrival electronics, enough that I've begun to actively avoid electronics that say anything on them about being made in China. As for India, who hasn't seen the increasing numbers of stories regarding software and desk support outsourcing nightmares?
Now in all fairness, there are Chinese and Indian companies producing high quality products, but these are not cheap and those companies are the leading tail of the bell shaped curve. If quality continues to be a problem for companies in the bump and the trailing edge, then U.S. workers will get another chance. Of course this all assumes that consumers actually care about quality...
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Bah you know what let them "lead" the tech industry. Because the only thing that will happen is their wages will go up. When their wages equal somthing close to ours then they loose their edge.
Frankly the only thing I want to see is USA being self sufficient. With that who cares whats going on.
Also although we are getting screwed by wages I think the next gold rush will be space and we are ahead of everyone else in that area. Although we aren't ahead by as much anymore I think we still will be a leader in this area.
just because your a schizophrenic doesn't mean people arn't really out to get you
Don't get me wrong: I actually think that globalization is not such a bad thing (assuming some semblance of fair market practices - but then again, read Arundhati Roy for the dark side of the World Bank, globalization, etc.) I live in the US and because I live in a remote area I only telecommute so I both compete with foreign workers and also receive a fair amount of work from companies in India and Europe. It is all a matter of trying to stay competitive in the amount of work done per $$.
Where I think we really have problems is in our educational system. In the 1970s, most articles in ACM journals were written by Americans. Now relatively few articles are. In the US, we have the top end of the IT food chain covered - by this I mean super creativity, capital for investments, etc. Anyway, it bothers me how few young people that I talk with have any desire what so ever to pursue careers in science and engineering.
-Mark
This is a nice case of feed the monkey watch him sh!t. Outsourcing for cheaper rates _is_ training those we outsource to better themselves and eventually compete with us in international markets.
Did anyone not see this coming?
Those blaming the open source community for all or any evils of the world are fools. A knife has multiple purposes just as computer software has many uses. You can shave your beard or kill a man. You can store a database on your cd collection or the number of people you've killed. It's the use of the product not the product itself that makes it evil.
Do you honestly think some corporate schmuck can sit behind a computer and stop windows from working?! If such a mechanism exists why hasn't some hacker found out how to do it and shut us all down?!
"Hey Bill, This is G.W. I need you to shut down every version of windows within the geographic location of China."
"Sure G.W. hold on a tick. Ok, you may commence in your search for WoMD."
I say 18 months because considering the in-roads that both China and India have made into the Western markets in the last five years with just their current 'business as usual' business plans, I'd hate to see what they'll be capable of with a new aggressive partnership!
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
China has a long way to go towards enabling personal freedoms before this will work. China may have the high tech labor force but the specifications are still being written in the United States. This will not change until the centralized Chinese communist system allows decentralized freedom and entreprenuership. The Chinese system of a huge labor force and relatively few real leaders will not scale to the level of decision making and innovation that a system based on respect for dissent and personal freedom will. China needs more leaders to make this work and their current system fears that level of power sharing.
This is how prejudices starts. Did you ever realize that the level 1 tech support is always not that great? We always used to have this problem. But we never said the american don't understand technology. Now we get few bad services, and we label indian support as people who do not understand technology and can't speak proper english. This is similar to how when they show one black killer, and we get the preception that whole black community is bunch of killers!
"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."--Howard Zinn
Embrace and extend.
In the very short term it's great for consumers because prices are low. However, in the medium term, a slew of jobs will be deprecated in non-Indo-Chinese nations as the industries relocate. This will cause all sorts of economic and political headache as people will fight the change with tariffs, stressing the system which will then snap nastily when all local demand will vanish and companies go belly-up. Those folks who have enough foresight will work to develop new industries that provide the higher value required to support "western" wages. So, eventually things will shift again.
This is simply the economic cycle on a global scale instead of many small local ones; when any area gets an advantage, wealth shifts there for a while, but it will eventually shift somewhere else again (maybe South America? who knows...)
Savings are only great, also, if people use those savings to save and hedge against disruptions, not if they use it to buy more expensive luxury items and to improve education to better cope with change.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Since India is hosting the nation of Tibet (in exile), teaming with China would be a complete slap in the face to their Tibetan guests. Not that the US really cares since Tibet holds nothing of interest to us. (like oil or strategic bits of land)
If the US supports this partnership, then it confirms the fact that it's okay for the US to oppose dictatorships in all other countries, but China's Communist dictatorship is perfectly acceptable.
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
As a graduate of Humanities (MA Philosophy), I've grown accustomed to the "would you like fries with that" routine. While I lament the loss of tech jobs, I'm not overly concerned with my job prospects. As a technical instructor, within a local college, I've adapted my skills to fit the current market, and will continue to do so.
To those who are worried about future prospects, show a little courage in your abilities. Maybe even take the time to appreciate how most of the world feels about their own prospects.
I can't wait to read the manuals!
Like you would read them anyway.
I loved that joke! Shortly after returning home from two years living in France I saw the following printed on a t-shirt:
Heaven is where:
- The police are British
- The mechanics are German
- The chefs are French
- The lovers are Italian
- And it is all run by the Swiss
Hell is where
- The police are German
- The mechanics are French
- The chefs are British
- The lovers are Swiss
- And it is all run by the Italians
I was in Hyderabad in India last month and the amount of development ongoing was amazing. The government gives IT multi-nationals tax incentives to locate their business in India. In Hyderabad, they also give them land to build their businesses. Microsoft had recently opened a 28-acre campus there. There is a huge pool of talent in India -- consider that their population is over 1 billion, more than 3 times that of the US.
I agree that call centers based in India are not great -- the Indian accent can be very strong and difficult to understand for non-Indians. I think that their strength lies in other kinds of IT services, like software development.
LOL, that was good, very good. I wish I could have been the person who modded this on up for humor. It also give us guys a reason to start reading the manual, after we've assembled the product.
But this brings up a point; although I bet that useful products would result from this collaboration, I don't thing those products will be targeted at our markets. In the first place, we're too small a market for them to want to bother with. But the point is that we have expectations of quality that they might not want to cater to. They've got both India and China to sell to and the expectation of quality will be lower there. We may lose a small amount of market, but the margins for those markets are so small, it won't matter much.
So, in the immortal words of our President, 'bring 'em on'.
Best regards.
Unfortunately, Trusted Computing is far more insidious than this. Most likely, it will be enforced at the level of ISPs, who will simply not allow you access to the Internet unless you are running a Trusted OS (something that is impossible to fake) - google for "remote attestation". So you can eschew Trusted Hardware all you want, but then you will be cut off and isolated. A poor existence, if you ask me.
Free trade economics does NOT guarentee:
* Good jobs for those displaced by cheaper nations
* Vibrant middle class
If it by chance worked out that way in the PAST, we were lucky. But the theory does not mathematically guarentee the above. If you say otherwise, please show me the study.
It may mean better averages, but averages don't mean much for those stepped on. Do we cut the legs off of one in ten so that nine can have bigger cars? That seems to be what we are doing, figuratively.
Table-ized A.I.
for bad software running on bad hardware?
... Its time to take them down any way possible and ensure that the west maintains a grip on the economy.
Unless of course they can make cheap iPods - then im all theirs!
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
You're right. The benefit of some high-profile foreigners should outweigh the benefit to a billion locals.
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
I have no problems competing with industries half way around the world if its fair. IMHO tariffs should be place on any goods coming in from other countries that don't meet our same standards. If at the end their products are still cheaper then i'll agree we have to revise our business practices.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
Somewhere, there's a joke begging to be told.
Yes there is: in 2010...
Chinese businessman: I'll never buy from Ching Computers again!
Indian businessman: Why not?
Chinese: I called their customer support yesterday, and some guy with a heavy accent starts saying: "Howdy y'all, wassssuuup?"
Indian: No way! They're outsourcing to Americans?? Wow, how low can you go?
Your point is well taken, but much like an all in bet in poker, it works every time but the last time. And I'd personally like to see the next frontier horizon first.
I'd hate to be stuck living in a free country, where I have to work 6 weeks less per year to have a higher standard of living. That would really suck.
incomprehensible manuals backed by unintelligable help desk support.
You're not looking at the bigger picture. With all a countries manufacturing and service industries outsourced, who will be the consumers?
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
Incoming: 300 alarmist responses about how India and China and the rest of the Asian Tigers are going to own everything / run everything in 10 or 50 years, because they work so much harder than us.
Funny thing. 20 years ago it was the Japanese who were going to "own everything". It's actually funny (in a tragic sort of way) to watch movies from the 80's and early 90's, with their dire predictions of our impending Japanese Overlords. For a good laugh, go rent "Rising Sun" or even the Micheal Keaton comedy "Gung Ho".
In reality, Japan is slowly dragging itself out of a recession which has spanned decades due to the inept bungling of the bureaucratic masterminds who were supposedly going to guide Japan to a peaceful takeover of the world's economy. Heck, I even drive a Honda: it was made in Kentucky.
If you honestly think that China and India are going to surpass the West through the magical power of Central Planning, you haven't been paid much attention for the past 100 years or so.
Incoming: Hundreds of slashdotters raving about how hard Indians and Chinese work in school (quietly ignoring the vast majority who live in rural areas). Big deal. It didn't help the Soviets, did it?
China isn't going to be a frist-world country as long as their central government insists on tightly controlling the most important aspects of their economy. India is better off in this regard, but as an imperfect democracy I see them as a potential ally, not a rival. Indeed, the Bush administration is cozying up to democratic India specifically as a foil to totalitarian China. Smart move.
Most people even on slashdot are profoundly igrnorant of economics. For example, they routinely assume that economics is a zero-sum game. If that were true, we'd still be living in caves.
China may have the best shot at keeping the hardware side, but I can easily see Eastern Europe and especially the Ukraine being in a position to quickly and easily outclass India in the software development area. Many of the former Soviet republics don't have problems with very high taxes (China's tax structure is as bad as the US's, dont' know about India) and once the mafia elements are neutralized in Ukraine their economy will explode.
Problem wiht eastern europe is that they are landlocked and unable to get goods and products out easily.
I wouldn't even mind living in the Ukraine now. Currently they have far more religious freedom than the US has, possibly more than any other country in the world.
Yes, it is flawed. You do not have a right to a job. The job is not yours. The job has a certain value to the company and they state what that value is. You make the decision to take that job or take your job skills and experience somewhere else. If you do not have skills that will allow you to get another job then it is your fault. Why should I be forced to subsidize your lifestyle when you are directly responsible for your situation. You are the sum total of thousands of decisions you have made in your life. Some are good, some are bad. Deal with it.
1) China, a communist country not known for it's humanity. 2) China can always beat the US in the wage per hour market for multiple reasons... A) Forced Labor B) They will never provide good benefits to their employees. (Like Health Care, Retirement, Etc...) C) They treat their employees as a "Throw away Commodity(sp)" 3) India should watch out as they will end up getting quite a backlash from Buddhists. 4) India Software, hmmm, I have dealt with them before, they have some issues also... A) Not know for their ability to produce on time or with all the features required. B) Known to cut corners and produce products that have more issues than other countries. C) Unstable development environment, when I have dealt with companies from India in the past there seemed to be a problem keeping employees at one company. 5)Wasn't Nigeria and Africa supposed to be undermining India in the IT Department. 6) It looks to me like China just wants to use India and still want's to keep it's trade with enemies of India, which could backlash in India.
Kosh: "Understanding is a 3 edged sword, your side, their side, the Truth."
When I posted it there were no other posts. Didn't realize how quick they fill up. No need to get offended.
The only solution is to drive developement where they can't go yet. Biotech/nanotech. We have to pour money and employ all our resources into developing those two technologies.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I suggest we indict, try, convict and sentence to death by hanging all the CEOs and politicians who took part in this outsourcing/free trade scam.
Sentence 'em all to death by hanging, and then eat their bodies. That way we can all be "consumers" again!
Of course, they would have to be tried in a court of law before being tried. And we may have to change a couple of laws to let us do this.
But it is gonna be SO MUCH FUN to...EAT THE RICH!
eat shiat and bark at the moon
So wait, you mean Cal-tech's full name is the California Baptist Technical Institute? MIT is actually the Methodist Institute of Technology?
God doesn't look too fondly upon liars like you.
Last quarter (February, IIRC), the San Jose Mercury News had an article in their Business section on the top 3 Indian Outsourcing firms' gross revenues. (Tata, et. al.). It came in with an underwhelming $1.5 Billion.
If you assume all of that is from outsourcing, and they charge $10,000 per engineer, that gives a grand total of 150,000 Indian Engineers. And these folks are all tied up with Western Outsourcing efforts. That's not a lot of Software people. A subset of Silicon Valley alone has 800,000 jobs in it and I'm guessing 5%, or 40,000 are Software. The entire U.S. certainly has a much bigger pool, dwarfing what it has taken India over 10 years to achieve.
So, yes, India and China have the motivation to join forces. But they don't have a pool of skilled people which begins to dwarf the U.S.. They also don't have a Venture funding pool with even approaches the U.S.. Nor due they have an adequate legal system to protect businesses when there are contract disputes. And both countries have a huge amount of corruption.
The only thing both do have is cheap Engineering talent.
And to top it off, many people are looking at China's balooning financial structure to "pop" over the next few years.
This is not a good base from which "to dominate the world's tech industry". To be a player, perhaps. But the U.S. can get cheap manufacturing anywhere, if it really needs to.
I'm sure we'll see a bunch of cheap products which don't work too well. But forgive me if I have doubts about their ability to dominate.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
Why are the supposedly free and democratic nations bending over backwards to strike deals with a dictatorship which not only oppresses its own people but also holds its neighbouring peoples under brutal occupation? ... The only answer I have so far is greed.
"Greed" is the typical response of college students who think that all of "society's" problems can be boiled down to 1) people not getting what they "need" which is caused by 2) people "exploiting" other people because of their "greed." It's as simplistic as it is stupid, and I wish that this dogma would finally fall in the same way that so many of the wicked commist regimes that it spawned have fallen.
Indeed, it is a valuable question to wonder why the United States, rhetorically a country that supports "freedom," would view freedom-crushing, wicked regimes such as China and Saudi Arabia as "strategic partners." The answer can be summed up in one concept: interests.
It has been said before, "In diplomocy, there are no friends. Only interests." Why is it that some countries of negligable threat (Iraq) get flattened by our military while others that wholesale export America-hating terror (Saudi Arabia) get a pass? Because some key players in our country's power structure decided that it was in our country's (or in some certain individuals') interests to do so. For instance, should the United States, on the matter of principle (pick your favorite: women's rights, religious freedom, not-chopping-hands-off-of-petty-thieves, whatever) boycott Saudi Arabian oil? Well, what would be the consequence of such a thing? Is it in our interest to do so? Should the fact that oil is the backbone of the American economy take precendence over standing up for (fill in the matter of principle here)? It all depends on what the consequences for not standing up for "what is right" might be at the time, and that usually comes down to key players taking political hits in the domestic or international community.
As everyone can see, maintaining the oil has, for whatever reason, trumped standing up for human rights in Saudi Arabia. This type of duplicity can be managed through media spin. How often do we hear of the human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia compared to those that happen in Guantanamo Bay? (Well, I'm conflating two different political factions there, but I think you get the idea.)
And don't get me started on China. Will the USA honor its treaty to Taiwan if China invades? The answer to that question will be framed in terms of, "Is it in our interests to do so?" If the government is so willing to defecate with reckless abandon on liberty, then don't think that for a moment it's going to treat Taiwan with any higher degree of respect.
The idea that the USA stands up for freedom is naive. Those who run the USA will act in their interests, which they try (or, at least, pretend to try) to make the same as the interests of the USA. All other countries follow the same path: they fight for their interests.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
With this supposed flood of work for India if they do join forces with China, will they be outsourcing all their work back to the US?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
This little cartoon will be amusing to ANYONE working in IT in the western world. http://www.flickr.com/photos/barbarac/2478825/
Rob Barac
www.intersplice.com.au/blog
www.cafegeek.com
www.marketingroots.net
China and India are one of the oldest enemies, both insecure about the others rising global presence.This is just a statement by the visiting chinese PM to try and be friendly to the indian government. :-)
I live in india and i have yet to see india and china collaberate on anything except avoiding war on the borders.
Its just one of those those kinda statements like, Bush telling the Jap pm.."Lets go grab some sushi". But who know maybe one day, it comes true
Lord of the Binges.
Seems money is all that matters in the world.
Money buys food for starving people.
Money buys medicine for sick people.
Money buys housing for people with none.
Money buys education for the ignorant.
Money buys entertainment people who want to enjoy life instead of doing nothing but work.
Money buys all sorts of things that make our (meaning, us humans') short lives happier.
The fact that all property (excepting sentimental values) can be abstracted into a value in terms of "money" in the marketplace of free exhange is both the killer app of money and also its greatest weakness, as it spawns people who will inevitably say, "All they care about is money!" ignoring that money is the means of a better life for so many people many steps removed along the chain of free exchange.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
From the tech perspective -- Japan and Germany have tried this before, and I don't mean back in the 40s, but as recent as the 70s, we heard talks about the "domination" of Japan and Germany in the car industry. Flash forward 30 years, I don't think anyone can claim that Japanese and German cars are the only ones people buy now.
The political dimension -- true, Tibet is the clear victim of this unholy alliance. India should be thanked for hosting Tibetans who had to flee China because of the genocidal and religious persecution, but it is puzzling that the Indian leadership now thinks it needs the cheap labor in China to augment its burgeoning software industry. I mean, there is already a vast pool of qualified, and inexpensive to be sure, workers dying for manufacturing jobs within India's own borders, isn't it?
A side note: I wrote a novel, titled "Slipping into Madness", which deals with the suffering of Tibetan exiles; if anyone is interested, it is posted online in its entirety at: http://losangelesnow.blogspot.com/.
Sun and Fun
What are you calling a recovery? The northeastern United States is still poverty-stricken (and I'm not talking about the Coastal areas). Infrastructure is decaying. Many of the region's lesser cities have become the worst minority ghettos in the country. The tech industry never came to the 'Rust Belt,' and it never will.
"America" as a whole will continue to prosper, yes. But each time a Big Change occurs entire regions become scar tissue, forever useless. It is a bit arrogant to consider this model of economics to be superior to any other.
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
... nothing is.
Most of China's land mass is worthless
Really? Says who? Worthless in terms of natural resources, food production, climate, tourism? Nonsense. The truth is that China is as big as the US and has all the natural resources a country would want.
we still produce twice as much as China does (see above CIA link). They need to seriously work on their production per-capita.
They've been doing just that for the past 10 years and show no sign of stopping soon.
That, and feeding those folks is already a serious problem
On which planet have you been for the last 50 years? Food was a major problem for China and India before the 50's. It has been solved since. OK, there are still (lots of) people starving in China/India but it's a problem of distribution, not production.
Actually, this is probably the single most impressive economic feat of the past 5 decades. China and India have moved from NOT feeding 1.6Bn people in the 50s to feeding 2.4Bn today. And they still don't reach half the land efficiency of western Europe. Nobody doubts they will be able to feed their population in the foreseeable future.
Being the biggest consumers has been a major harm to the US economy (trade deficits, etc)
Being the biggest customer is the best thing that ever happened to the US. The world is so dependant on US internal consumption that it's been financing their deficits forever. And now that the budget deficit is spiralling out of control, US debtors (especially Japan) are so much invested in T-bonds that they can't pull the plug.
The rise of India and China is a real threat for US/EU. I don't think that apples are the answer.
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
I'd rather see the Chinese do the software instead. Because Indians (many of whom sincerely think Indian programmers are the best in the world) are nowhere to be found on the list of winners, year after year. Russia and China pretty much dominate everything. Say what you will, but this is very telling about the quality of education.
As to the hardware, the Japanese, Taiwanese or Koreans should be making hardware instead. Cheap chinese hardware sucks real bad.
Someone please mod Mr Ghost's post up, sheesh.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Some reasonable, some not so good. If the economy went to hell because we stood on principle, how many voters would care about principles? I'm guessing about 5-10%. So greed it may be. But blaming politicians may not be the appropriate target. In the end of the day, they'll give you what you want.
There are other situations, like supporting Stalin over Hitler, that are just the best of a lot of bad choices.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Send lots of exchange students to Cal Tech, MIT, and other fine American universities.
"Cooperation is just like two pagodas, one hardware and one software," Wen said. "Combined, we can take the leadership position in the world.
A laudable goal for China, but they don't make any computer hardware except for some skank PC's (Lenovo) and some motherboards outsourced from Taiwan. Fact is is that China and India will be competing for the same capital and resources in the coming decades and are natural rivals.
an ill wind that blows no good
one, the protestors are tibetian and indian goverment is not their government. so you comment "speak out against our government's practices" is not valid.
two, try climbing state capitol or announce the plan to when a foreign disnitary is coming to US and *then* tell me if you will be arrested or not!
where did my sig go? where's my sig at?
Of course we could put a stop to this by not investing in their world domination scheme.
Oops too late. Corperate America already sold us out.
The're going to have to beat the US, which currently dominates global tech with Chinese hardware and Indian software.
--
make install -not war
No fair! American companies pioneered incomprehensible manuals backed by unintelligable help desk support. They're just ripping off our designs and business processes again!
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
You know, they're pretty overt about their intentions.
This is largely what the RIAA/MPAA do!
While they don't directly use guns, they indirectly do by manipulating the laws and the legal system to obtain proxy use of the government's legally sanctioned use of violence.
Good point. Most of us here seem to be focusing what happens within national boundaries, but those have become invisible to capital. You could almost say that their only important economic function is to immobilize labor. The principal players on this stage, the multinational corporations, are no longer allegiant to any particular nation, regardless of where they make their headquarters. They are free to pit each country - and its workforce - against the others in much the same way that local governments are forced to yield tax breaks (and worse) to businesses promising jobs. National sovereignty is increasingly irrelevant as governments become little more than levers through which the multinationals exercise control.
It takes a lot more than having cheap coders (that code to US spec), and cheap hardware (manufactured, or trying to copy, US spec) to become a dominant force in IT.
This is something that China's Premier does not grasp - in fact, it is something that China's entire manufacturing industry doesn't grasp (so, this is no surprise).
What it takes is the ability to innovate, create, and be creative - all abilities that the Chinese state/culture neither supports, nor encourages.
What both countries have, is cheap labor, and lots of it - India leads somewhat, because they stress education of their population (and they have some of the best educated folks out there), something which China does not do (though, undoubtedly, will do in the future). Nevertheless, neither culture stresses a culture of individuality, creativity, and innovation - not much 'out of the box' thinking going on there.
So, that IT hegemony ain't gonna happen soon - just consider, if they hope to lead the world, why is all their internal techn ology (space program, weapons, etc...) all 50 years old Soviet era technology....hmmm?)
"they all drive in BMW's, live in huge country houses with a swimming pool and have their nights and weekends free."
So, are you seriously suggesting that this is the lifestyle of the typical US tech worker (or tech workers anywhere in the West)?
Not these days I'm afraid!
I wouldnt sweat too much over this statement. It is a government offical saying "we have lots of resources in this area, let's use them to dominate the market". Government officials make these kinds of statements all the time. Sometimes, they even come true.
Can they make an impact, probably, there are two billion people between those countries, or darn near. Will they? Dunno. Reality is the rest of the world will catch up with north america in terms of tech and ultimately standard of living, the fallacy is that north america will blow away because of it.
I call BS on the lack of educational funding. The problem isn't that students don't have the opportunity due to lack of funding, that instead it has to due to lack fo motivation and drive thanks to our MTV overlords and lazy parents willing to stand up for morals and values. But then again, you can't teach what you don't know yourself as a parent. Hence, a self fulfilling prophecy.
Point being, you can never throw money at a problem that is a social issue in society. It's like mixing oil and water.
Life is not for the lazy.
Bite my wax tadpole!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I thought the world was low on oil? How fast will China/India/US run it down to 0?
Is when they start innovating themselves as opposed to competing on price.
There's always going to be people who won't want to buy cheap knock offs - for example, when wrenching on the (old) Harley (the one made in the USA) I want tools that are well made, not some Harbor Freight well at least they're cheap things.
But when Ling Liong Wen Hung Flung Wuong Chang Inc. comes up with the next killer app in conjunction with RamaChandraChakraGuru Enterprises, that's when to upgrade to brown alert.
We may not be cheap, but we are usually the engines of creation. Asia does it cheap, Europe does it with style (or at least with government subsidy) - we tend to do it first and forge ahead...
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Stealing as in "if there was no patent system and everything was open source" they would simply be extending the functionality of "our" products?
Funny how things work when you apply reality to it.
Karma: 2.71828182846 (Mostly due to small, fun pills)
There is such a thing as American or Japaneese hardware bootlegged by the Chineese.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
And be a nuclerar power and threathen everybody on earth.
Now Bill gates sounds pretty harmless when i read an article like that.
China once turned inward and lost their clear military and technological lead in the world. Now, the US has turned isolationist in the 'post 911'/Bush II regime, and its going to experience the same thing. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
As for Dell or Walmart, they are no different than Ford or IBM who made good money off Hitler's Germany, or GM's and ITT's profiteering off deathsquads and dictatorship in Latin America in the 1970s. Maybe you should think about the nature of industrial capitalism as a whole?
It's not racism to make fun of someone who thinks they can write documents in a language they aren't fluent in without getting someone fluent (native, preferably) in that language to proofread them.
This is no more racist than a Chinese person making fun of some document written buy an American with two years of Mandarin. I bet there are some real gems there.
If you're too cheap to hire someone to make your documents not sound idiotic, you deserve to be made fun of. If you really can't afford to hire someone, then that sucks for you, but you have to accept sounding idiotic as the cost.
The enemies of Democracy are
the only reason the chinese economy has been flourishing is that, because their labor force is so cheap, they can under-bid anyone in any industry. as soon as they develop a middle-class, things will balance out.
So how many Americans are ready to pay 2-3 times more for the same DELL to get 'fabulous' manuals and tech-support ?
Its *always* about the bling-bling, Everywhere.
The reality is that the bulk of the consumers will be in China and India and the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia. That is where the people are and where most consumers still have a lot of buying to do to catch up or where the oil money eventually gets deposited.
Western influence will continue to wane and we are seeing the begining of end game strategy play out now, where a few well placed governmental trade hacks and their cronies have a sustainable long term evolutionary strategy. Only they are well positioned to accept bribes (or excuse me, campaign contributions) or receive sweetheart deals as the result of "free" trade agreement. They get a free lunch while you and your family eats sh@t and falls sucker to their PR team who makes you feel like "you are a winner" or better yet "about to be rewarded in the afterlife for good behavior".
China and Saudi Arabia already their man in Washington (Bush), who, surprise, surprise, has neither an energy policy (other than buy more oil from Saudi Arabia), a fiscal policy (other than more borrowing money from the Chinese, Japanese, and Saudis), nor a program to maintain leadership in high tech (other than weaponry, and Oh Yea a trip to Mars). Last week the US pulled out of high energy physics and is busy dismantling long standing governmental funding programs for other high tech university research for short term tax cuts for their friends (excuse me, campaign contributors) and to appease the right wing of his party who want to see an end of the biomedical/biotech industry in the US for religious reasons.
Money will increasingly flow to Chinese/Indian/Saudi markets, until they no longer have any use for our IOU's. This will occur once their technical advances elsewhere make US military hardware obsolete or largely dependent on overseas suppliers of electronic subcomponents.
The solution is obviously to elect Jeb Bush president so he can pass a constitutional amendment permitting his brother to run for president again. Most Americans are just a few short steps from being in a vegetative state anyway. I can hear the campaign promises now, "400 shopping only channels, a feeding tube, and a TV monitor in the security of your bedroom".
Praise the Lord. I can't wait to be saved. Where do I stand in line to get my social security benefits cut by 40%?
Why do I drive a japanese car? My honda CRX lasted 300 k miles and is still running strong. A Shadow I drove with similar zeal broke down completely (chasis first, part by part) at 170 k.
The problem is not whether we buy american products or foreign. The problem is, why are many american products poorer in quality? Look deeper: many products we use in daily life need specially trained workers to build. We need good engineers to build good cars, good engineers to build good computers, and good engineers for software. American education is reputed as among the best in the world, yet where are all these highly educated graduates? To study engineering in a school like Columbia or MIT, a middle class student has to be prepared for a loan of over 100k. Does he now want to spend the rest of his life designing really good products for GM or Ford with a starting salary of 60k? No, he follows the money, goes into medical and starts sucking blood out of his fellow americans as 150k per year. The society does not treat students well in this country, and when they graduate, they don't feel like paying back.
In India, education in even the best schools is very affordable by even lower class families. These students pursue what they want, and perform well as workers. Its a completely different culture out there and before you make claims that buying american products will improve the economy you have to look at other factors that have contributed to our downfall (one of them was the 'selection' of W by our SC...)
Not sure who the Indian government is trying to please, with the probablilty of war still looming. The former Indian Defense Minister has gone on record saying that China is potential enemy number one. China already controls US economy due to it's mammoth firepower in manufacturing. Their next target software and services.
Posting this as Anonymous Coward -- All my component suppliers are from China, and I have happy customers
...where everything depends on who it is being owned.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
The same things were said when Japan made a move to dominate the car industry, so what happened?
The US manufacturers have steadily lost market share. Toyota passed Ford to become the #2 automaker (based on worldwide sales) and is steadily gaining on GM for #1. Further Toyota is about to pass Chrysler in the US market (~11% vs ~12% market share respectively) Chrysler nearly went bankrupt and was eventually bought by Daimler-Benz. Lexus (Toyota again) passed Cadillac and Lincoln to become the #1 selling luxury car brand in the US. US automakers sell nearly every small/compact car for a loss because of inefficient manufacuturing and high labor/pension costs. Toyota and Honda are leading the charge into hybrid automobiles, well ahead of US auto firms. Hybrids are very likely to be the next dominant technology in autos. The light auto segment the US manufacturers have held onto is pickups/SUVs that have accounted for the majority of their profits in recent years, and they are starting to lose their death grip on that segment too. Recent gas prices won't help SUV sales either.
While I'm painting a bit more bleak picture than it actually is for Ford and GM but if you think nothing happened in the industry due to the Japanese, you simply don't understand the industry. I wouldn't say the Japanese or US manufacturers dominate (no one does) but I can say that Japanese automakers have had a HUGE impact on the industry, largely at the expense of the US manufacturers. Most of the recent innovations in manufacturing processes (Just-in-time, lean manufacuturing, etc) were pioneered by Japanese manufacturers. I'm a manufacturing operations engineer and I've been to and conducted statstical analysis of plants for most of the big auto companies and the Japanese simply are better manufacturers overall. You don't even have to take my word for it, there is plenty of evidence out there to support me. But I've been there and I can tell you that Ford & GM are playing catch up. The reason they haven't lost (read gone-bankrupt/aquired) is that auto manufacuturing isn't strictly a price game. Styling, dealer/sales networks, and historical buying preferences matter. And the US manufacturers aren't complete incompetents. But if it were strictly a matter of price/performance GM and Ford would already be gone.
Pakistan fundmentalist dictatorship?
Dictatorship? yes.
But the dictatorship is more secular than fundamentalist. The fundamentalists are in
the opposition.
Don't blame Pakistan and let India slide on the fundamentalist epithet, either.
..or even better. I'm sure there are plenty of people who are dedicated to their jobs, and want to do well, but if you draw some correlation between the attitudes of those in college toward their education (largely pathetic), and the kind of employee that emerges as a result, it seems that it's more about being "entitled" to a paycheck than it is about engaging in something with passion. I realize that there are a number of contributing factors (like the havoc that inept management can cause), but the attitude and motivation of employees can't help matters.
True, according to this report China is slated to be the biggest economy by 2005 (less than 10 years away) with the United States and India in second and third places respectively. If China and India join hands, there are bound to be some changes in how the world economy works.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
the link
Apparently you did not live through the 80's and Apartheid in South Africa. There were many protests here in the US over a policy for a nation across the world that we were having dealings with as a country.
Peaceful protestors (not the ones who like to throw trash cans through McDonald's) at the G8 summit.
In actuality whenever one of the foreign dignitaries shows up in Washington you will have a group gathering to protest against them.
This is a flat out untrue statement.
Dell does manufacture computers overseas yes, but currently ALL computers sold by Dell in the US are manufactured in the US.
Foriegn factories are for foriegn markets. Tech support, is completely different. As you already know.
Now the actual PARTS used for these computers are built overseas, but find a computer part that isn't.
The brands with the highest customer satisfaction in, of all places, Germany? Toyota and Honda.
In the rest of the planet, it is Japanese model cars almost everywhere, with a few rich potentates owning Benzes.
Here in California, practically the only American cars (not trucks) are rentals.
Now with oil and gasoline getting expensive to match geophysical truth, people aren't buying the idiot trucks for city commuting. And who's way ahead in hybrids and efficiency? Toyota and Honda.
Here in SoCal, I practically see as many new Priuses (a single model in short supply) as all new american passenger cars which aren't rentals.
Japan dominates the global car industry in power, efficiency, execution and innovation and the gap continues to grow.
but large scale societal policies, attitudes and investment to enable people who tugged on their footwear to get good jobs which contributed to a fundmentally higher standard of living for all.
There is no evidence that people now work less hard or are any less smart.
Despite the propaganda, there is no evidence there is any shortage of US scientists and engineers. There is a shortage of US science and engineering *careers*.
funded by a screamingly massive debt bubble.
They will be very comprehensible and intelligible; you'll only have to learn chinese and indu.
I did. And I am sorry I did it. I thought it was the toilet.
My mistake.
emt 377 emt 4
If I am going to be assimilated by India I should probably pick a Hindi god to worship. I am not sure which god to worshop though. There are so many interesting ones to choose from.
"you'll only have to learn chinese and indu" What on earth is "indu"?
Thats the problem with the Patriotic Americans. While they can spend 15 minutes bashing other countries, they cannot make themselves spend 5 minutes to google the national language of india... jeez.... make some effort guys !
Nonsense. The same things were said when Japan made a move to dominate the car industry, so what happened?
Whew! We have nothing to worry about! The Chinese-Indian challenge to the American-dominated computer industry will be as innefectual and short-lived as the Japanese challenge to American auto-makers.
Tweet, tweet.
The real danger comes from the fact that it is not an organized conspiracy. If it were, the valuable rich consumers you speak of would be kept rich so they can keep consuming. As it is, the owners of the companies (or more specifically, the stockholders) are only interested in short term gains. Often the controlling stockholders have no real interest in the long-term viability of the company, and absolutely no loyalty to it.
In this case, the aim is not to control a vast conspiracy that feeds like a parasite from a preserved host, but a predator that converts the entire host (local economy) to food (profit). This short-sightedness (which I believe is the result of only greed) does all of the damage.
The conspiracy you refer to wouldn't really be so bad, because at least the host would be kept alive. Kinda like the parasites that Fry got in Futurama.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
US employees are also consumers who already HAVE benefited from cheaper goods imported from other countries: clothing, steel, electronics, food, petroleum, etc.
Where you are unable to benefits from outsourced goods/services is where the higher level of US wages make the real impact: Real Estate, transportation, personal services (education, health care, etc.) (Check out the Paul Krugman column in the NYT on how the rising costs of health care impact both companies and individuals. Always an insightful read.) The US businesses are subject to most of these same costs unless they can PHSICALLY locate their operations offshore.
Thus, it is very interesting how the current political Powers that Be is refusing to remove tax BENEFITS to company with oversea operations. For ideological reasons, they refuse to enact changes that might somewhat recover these savings when US companies relocate offshore.
People work hard for their money - do don't undermine us American workers like that. Got it?
No.
Some people work hard for their money, some don't. I was describing what I see as a common case among many Americans. Here are some case examples for you. I know a biochemistry researcher working on curing a disease. She works about 4 hours in an average day because she does not have the authority to spend any more money on experiments. Her boss shows up once a week or so. The research will probably never result in anything and she is looking for a new career. She went into the field want to help people and cure diseases, now she realizes that a combination of all the federal funding cuts and the huge amount of bureaucracy basically makes it impossible to make any sort of progress. She is not lazy, just completely disheartened. She does not work hard, nor is she motivated.
I have a friend who works at a major automotive manufacturer. He gets paid 20% less than he should and that money goes to the contract company he works for. That is because it is a policy to never hire any direct employees to avoid union problems. Until recently he worked long hours and developed a software system that would have made him a lot of money had he done it on his own. He can't even get a cost of living raise after several years of employment. He's much less motivated now.
I used to work at a successful software company. We were profitable during the .com crash and beyond. They our investors mandated a management change. With our new CEO and his cronies we went from profitable to unprofitable, even after they laid off a significant number of the engineers. Those engineers worked hard and were dedicated. They were sacked to make room for friends of the new CEO. Needless to say neither they nor the remaining engineers were very motivated for long.
Hard work and dedication can be a very admirable thing. It can also be foolish if all your work is going to enrich the pocketbooks of stuffed shirts who are just there to exploit you. I like my job and work hard at it. I enjoy what I do. I am, however the exception among people I know. How many people do I know with undergraduate or graduate degrees in the sciences with tens of thousands of dollars in loans who make less money than fast-food jockeys? Too damn many. Corporate America treats workers like shit, because jobs are hard to come by, especially here. I don't blame people for not working hard at pointless and thankless tasks, especially when it does not benefit them in any way.
In the movie office space the protagonist tells the consultants that his only motivation for doing work is to not get fired and hassled, which is only enough motivation to make him work just hard enough to not get fired. Welcome to the U.S.A. in a nutshell.
The link doesn't mean anything. I was not saying that there is absolutely no basis for Tibet's independence, just that it's contrived and absolutely irrelevant today. A few centuries ago Italy was a bunch of intependent states. So was Germany. That doesn't mean that today there would be any basis for Florence or Bavaria claim to independence.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
So much for my being able to read the manuals.
All your base....
"Few countries have remained within their
respective ecological capacities--let alone
within the global average--and many have far
exceeded them. The United States, for instance,
used up 9.7 hectares worth of resources per
person in 1999--45 percent more than the 5.3
hectares available to each citizen. Even without
continued population growth, if the world
were to consume as much meat and use as
much fossil fuels as Americans do, it would
need the resources of five Earths."
Vital Sign 2003 World Watch Institute
I'm not saying that nothing can be done to manage the changing global economy. But we shouldn't assume that we're entitled to a particular standard of living just because we're 'used' to it. This is especially true when that lifestyle is unsustainable.
Yeah but who's interests? Corporate America's? The Republican Parties? Who's interests are being helped by the USA trade inbalance with China?
I answered that question in the post I made. Did you not read it? Here, I'll quote what I wrote:
Because some key players in our country's power structure decided that it was in our country's (or in some certain individuals') interests to do so.
The answer is "key players." The USA is ruled by powerful people in powerful positions. Not all of them are on the same team (otherwise, why would the NY Times be so critical of the president?). I know that you really hate Corporate America and the Republican Party and think they're the root of all evil. Believe me, though I might agree with you in many ways that they may be evil, they are but two of many parties with some degree of overlap. The game of control and power is more complicated than you're willing to entertain. It's not just about "good guys" verses "bad guys."
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Hey, they'll be running open source Linux. Our worries are over....
Get paid nothing... slave away all day... take over the world....
Communism didn't die, it just got a nose job.
--
That you need money in this day to apparently have to accomplish these items is a failure of our own human kind to strive towards working for the common good of the entire race.
I repeat: money is merely property abstracted. It makes "giving" food to hungry people orders of magnitude more convenient. Instead of having to barter every single time or waste time finding someone with the commodity that we may desire at the time, we have a single unit of currency that everyone values because it can be traded for any other item (barring sentimental value). Is this fact lost on you? Why is this "killer app" of money seen as a "failure of our own human kind"? Please explain becuase your words seem illogical to me.
On a side note, there is no "common good." Do you disagree? Then what is the common good for the Israelis *and* the Palestinians, given that what they both desire is mutually exclusive? Is the common good for both of them just to accept *your* view of morality?
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
I'm actually more concerned that China's industrialization will ratchet them up to per capita oil consumption rates that match the US, Europe, or Japan. Their cost structure will shift from labor-cheap to petro-expensive. While they have made an incredible investment in hydro, the trucks, buses, cars, and planes still need oil-derived fuel, and the more their economy grows, the more oil they'll need.
Their industrial growth, and the resultant need for oil, is occuring just as the price and supply of oil have re-asserted themselves as global issues. It would be foolish to guess at the eventual impact, but the bottom line is that China will not have the same 100-years-of-cheap-energy growth period that the US and Europe had.
The US is actually working their consumption down (per capita, and per GDP, if not overall) and if I may say so has quite a lot of wiggle room in the form of a fleet of millions of SUVs and hundreds of oil-fired power plants that can gradually be de-commissioned as oil prices rise and make them uneconomical.
China has the advantage that they can use the latest, most efficient technology. However, the up-front costs of using for example hybrid vehicles or installing systems to recapture waste heat from industrual processes may simply be too high for now.
...religious fundamentalist society...
India is a democracy. Sure they have their issues, but 50 years ago a black man in the US couldn't use certain water fountains.
Not all brown people are religious fanatics.
or the Marcos of Philllines, Shah of Iran ... the list is just too long to enter here...
Study a little history please.
I really fail to see how you can protest the use of "greed" as an answer, yet not see the connection between greed
Let me put it this way. I reject outright any argument based on "greed." Why? Well, what is the definition of "greed"?
"An excessive desire for wealth."
Well, what is "excessive"? Ask 1,000,000 people and you'll get 1,000,000 different answers. The concept is completely subjective and therefore it is useless in terms of making moral decisions.
putting aside issues of right and wrong for one country or individual's own benefit.
What if benefiting one's own country is part of what you define as "right"? It seems like you define anything that you might see as "patriotic" or "nationalistic" as "wrong," but that's *your* ethics, and it isn't necesssarily shared by others.
For example, should we end trade with China because we don't want to reward their human rights abuses? What would be the consequences? What if it cost the USA 200,000 jobs? Would it be worth it if 200,000 low-to-middle-class Americans lost their jobs and were plunged into poverty and crime because the government protested China's human rights record? Would a politician make that decision knowing that the backlash could cause him to be voted out of office and his competitor would replace him and immediately restore trade relations with China? What if the political fallout included giving power to your rival party? What would become of all the good you would accomplish if, over this issue, you could lose everything?
I know that politicians like to speak to you as if everything is "black verses white," "good guys verses bad guys," and "us verses them." It makes it simple for voters to not have to make complex decisions. But diplomacy is an extremely complex game of competing interests, and no one really has a clear idea of what "right" and "wrong" are in many cases. It's very frequently a game of many shades of gray.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Yes, I think that DRM in the BIOS is something the Chinese security aparatus would like to give everyone. Consider that the Chinese government regulates all aspects of its society including speech and religion. They would see this as natural extension of the state's right to control every ounce of your life. The media companies would find that the DRM shoe was not very comfortable, especially when it was purchased for them by the Chinese government.
Creative Spelling Copyright (2002). May use without Persimmons
"Not because I hate Americans, but I hate the way the majority of them mistreat our people."
Yea keep telling yourself that... It seems that you have been brainwashed along with the rest of your "people" You honestly think a *MAJORITY* of us are the ones that make decisions that ipacts people dyeing in your part of the world? You think that joe blow farmer flicks a switch and a middle eastern kid dies? We may seem like a democracy, but other than getting people elected we really dont have much say as to what goes on after. Think for yourself and your gov is just as bad as ours if you really believe the words you typed.
Good thing that the cheap labor overseas will never realize they're doing all the work and we're getting all the money for it (for doing, and contributing, nothing), or we'd be in trouble... especially if, after a few years of this regime, they realize that we've been doing nothing for so many generations, none of us remember how to do anything.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
The tarifs had something to do with it, but there are other important factors for why the car was made in the US not Japan.
Japan is a tiny country with a lot of people. Auto plants are large, and don't scale too well by going up. Japan doesn't have a lot of land, while the US does have a lot.
The US is a long distance from Japan. Cars are big, so it is fairly expensive to put them on a ship and send them to the US. Japan lacks natural resources, so they have to pay those shipping charges both ways, to get the raw materials in, and again to get them out. The US has raw materials (though argument this fails, it is currently cheaper to ship third world iron to the US than to mine it, even though the ore from US mines is better) When building cars for the US in the US you don't have to do all that shipping.
Related to both the above, there is a lot of land in the US: the US is the largest market for cars in the world. Public transportation works well in Japan because there is not a lot of land to cover. More people in Japan can get by without a car. Europe likewise. (Though I don't know how Europe as a whole compares to North America - I suspect North America is bigger but I'm not sure.)
In Kentucky energy is cheap. The US government built dams on all the rivers in the 30s, so plants in those areas get power for transport and maintenance costs. (see above, Japan doesn't have natural resources) Combine this with all the automation Japan uses, and the low wages in Kentucky, and plants in the US are cheaper than Japan, so long as you maintain your quality.
I have not covered all the issues. I don't even know them all. However tarifs are not the only important consideration, though they may have been the straw that broke the camel's back.
I absolutely agree, but it may take many years before a middle-class is created which rivals that in this country. During those years immense damage (or, depending on your point of view, immense change) will be done to the competing Western economies.
These things tend to have cycles measured in decades. I'm confident that it will have all re-balanced by the time my children enter the workforce, but I'm not so sure about OUR rosy future.
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
Did anybody consider that people in India are really doing jobs that are intended improve the quality of life of people in the states.
For example, when an Indian company writes a software for a US bank, it will help people in the US do business better. It will lead to lesser ATM not available or "out of cash" signs.
The vast majority of Indians continue to live without deriving real benefit from IT. True, they might have somewho who earns money because he writes s/w for citibank, but think of how much better it would have been had he instead written a software to help the poor farmer where to go to get the best market prices.
Sorry, just had to say it... Kind of a joke, kind of not.
But, on a good note... I have yet to see anything really creative or technologically advanced to come out of these countries. Did they invent the Mac or the PC industry? Don't think so. How much music from these countries do Americans listen to? Thought so. Yeah, the 3 Chinese movies and, well, the zero Indian movies I've seen won't end that. So, there is still a lot of creativity to be had. Let's just get out of the code-monkey, factory-rat mentality and become what we were set out to be: An inventive, creative, motivated, insightful society. C'mon if all this stuff can be done on a made-to-order/factory line basis, don't you think it's time we advance to the next level? Are JSPs, EJBs, Python scripts, simple SQL queries something to raise your head above the crowd and say "I rule"? Didn't think so.
Oh well, let this unemployed JSP/EJB/Python script/simple query guy sulk for a while.
"key players" is not an answer. Name them.
I'm sorry, were you asking me to name the key players in terms of whose interests are served in the trade imbalance with China? And were you gearing up to stating, "See, it *is* greed!" if I couldn't name them off-hand?
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Obligatory tech support joke...
The fact that Microsoft is financially successfull does not mean that they are the best at programming. It does mean that it is generally "good enough", but that is not the same as "excellent quality".
Having had the ability to read some MS code ( MFC, the code is provided, and you can step thru it, and I have had occasion to do so... ), what I have read was not excellent. It was OK, but not excellent. An example. There was a UI related function I needed to step thru. The function wrapped a win32 UI call. There was some setup code, then the win32 call. The win32 function returned a success indicator. *That* return code should have been returned by the wrapping function. The wrapping function returned TRUE, instead, leaving any callers with no way to know if the underlying task had been accomplished. It got the job done ( good enough ) for the billions of programmers out there that dont check return codes, or care if things have gone to heck, but it was not good form.
emt 377 emt 4
I am not trolling.
And you must learn that not everything is black and white. But if Austria was a backwards country with most of the people involved in subsistence agriculture, if Hitler wasn't a genocidal maniac and if he wasn't planning on escalating the conflict into a World War, I would probably be able to justify the Anschluss to some extent.
And I don't understand what "people" you are talking about. The aggressive minority in exile? Or the Llama and his cronies? The attitude of the majority of Tibetians was nicely described as being "between ignorance and indifference". For the vast majority of the people the problem is not "brutal oppression" of Chinese authorities, but simple and boring poverty. They do not want independence, they want economic development.
As for that pseudo-enlightened bastard Dalai Llama, I say "Fuck the Llama!".
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
"Chinese people and Indian people cannot do business together. Because Indians cannot live without a bargain and Chinese people cannot give you a bargain. Their objective is to get every penny from you, and ours is to keep every penny."
taken from http://www.abcdlady.com/2005-01/art1.php
HD Trailers
They were safe right up until they walked into a bar...
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Basically, I add people to my foe list if their arguments are consistently, factually wrong. I love debating with people that have different opinions, but when someone continues to misrepresent facts, it's a waste of my time.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
there is a big difference between manufacturing the hardware in china, and them designing it. sorry folks but that made in china sticker doesn't mean jack shit. it was designed and the plans sent to china from the usa most likely. the fact is, i luagh in the face of the idea of india and china doing all this. can you imagine the shody hardware and software? hahahha
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Anon, grandparent was replicating the same tired old racist meme of "they don't even speak good english" that has been prevalent ever since "all your base" became part of geek folklore.
Why not add in a few "so solly cholly!'s" and "flied lice" comments? After all, they are referring to genuine language problems when ordering goods from the east, too.
Jesus, when will you realise that the popular meme of "engrish" on products has nothing to do with low intelligence, lazy translators or inferior education, understanding and prounciation, and more to do with the fact that english words and phrases are used as style icons rather than rigid grammatical meanings as we use them everyday. Just like a few pictograms are thrown together completely nonsensically on Western products, english words are added to things in the far East as an exotic touch for fashions. It might blow your tiny racist mind to realise it, but there are millions of highly educated and talented guys from "the east" out there, probably better educated and fluent in more languages than you are, writing docs that you completely overlook to focus on only those that conform to your own prejudice. I won't apologise for calling that racist and shame on the mods and shame on Slashdot for promoting your racist post to greater visibility.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
It's not racism to make fun of someone who thinks they can write documents in a language they aren't fluent in without getting someone fluent (native, preferably) in that language to proofread them.
But is it racist to assume from the off that the documentation from a particular country will be inferior and poorly translated, or that there exists no-one who can adequately create proper documentation in the whole country? I don't have a problem with painting with a broad brush where a company has built up a poor reputation, but when it applies to a whole country of individuals based on nothing more than their appearance or ancestry, that is clearly racism.
If it had been expressed as "LOL, Chinks can't write good engrish!!", as is the basic fact the poster is trying to suggest, you would have no problem declaring it as racist. So how can the basic thesis NOT be racist, merely with a nice and seemingly humorous expression papering over the sentiment??
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
Today, after lots of plant closings, the UAW has realized that they need to work together with the company to find solutions that build the business as a whole while maintaining a fair cut for them.
Try telling that to General Motors, which is required by its UAW contracts to pay employees for NOT working [hence GM is forced to sell cars at a loss, under "Zero Percent Financing" schemes, just to keep their assembly lines running - i.e. they would lose even more money if the assembly lines were idle, because they would still be responsible for paying the same wages as if the assembly lines were running].
To see what this has done to GM, search the recent news headlines for general+motors+junk.
That doesn't mean organized labor is inherently bad.
Au contraire, organized ANYTHING is bad, and organized labor is particularly bad.
C'mon, tell me you are deliberately lying or being obtuse: you aint THAT fucking stupid, are you? THe business lobbies PAY OFF the politicians to LET THEM go overseas and still sell here in America. The politicians take their money and do their bidding.
I say "Hang 'em all". I will GLADLY vote for death for every free trade politician who comes before me if I am on the jury.
You ignorant slashdot fucks are so amusing. You spout all this propaganda they feed you. You don't even know that America only came into being because the founding fathers (founding monsters I call them) pandered to the middle class to get them to support the Revolution and the heinous constitution by promising to protect them from British trade. When they did that, the revolution/constitution was on. So, America was BORN of protectionism for the middle class. Now you jerk off to your Ayn Rand poster....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Oh, we have all kinds of creative measures to move people out of the labour force here in Europe. There are such things as early retirement, retraining schemes, conscription, years and years of higher education or technical training, etc. It is standard economics to exclude from the number of unemployed those who are not actively looking for work: it's not unique to you, we all do that.
The most recent comparison I've seen suggested that, today, official unemployment rates in the industrialised countries are broadly comparable. There used to be big differences, but not so much any more. Unemployment in the UK and USA really is a lot lower than in France and Germany (this does not apply to all of the EU!), but social inequality and levels of severe poverty are much higher in the UK/USA.
As a note, for all the talk bout how many jobs US manufacuring has lost to offshore outsourcing, its importance is highly inflated.
1) Technological change has obviated orders of magnitude more US manufacturing jobs than offshoring. Of course, this saved the remaining jobs from outsourcing, because the remaining jobs were less labor intensive, and thus less likely to be profitable to outsource.
1) Total US manufacuring jobs have actually grown over the last few decades, just not as quickly as other fields. The growth has come mainly from new companies and products, and the layoffs from primarily established. (For every 10,000 worker layoff by GM there were thousands of small companies hiring hundreds of workers. Ten Nucors for every US Steel if you will..)
The bottom line is this, the immediate results of trade are extremely painful for subset of people, but the results make each trading group better off as a whole. This effect compounds over time.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Actually trade does guarantee that the US WILL improve in terms of absolute wealth. You are correct that it doesn't imply that the wealth improvements in the US will be evenly distributed (or within any currency union for that matter). Trade involves both redistribution effect of existing jobs, income, and resources, as well as an income (or efficiency) effect. The redistribution effect tends to fall heavily on a smaller group of people, benefitting indian IT workers, business, and consumers at the expense of the former US employees for example (This is the zero sum game part) But the income effect is a small positive for everyone(positive sum game). Thus certain people benefit more than others from a particular trade, some even lose in particular cases. But it is positive TAKEN AS A WHOLE,
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Most millionaires in the US are in fact first generation. This certainly isn't true everywhere. And it is certainly true that it is harder to become rich than to say rich, but if the US is anything, it is highly mobile (poor to rich and rich to poor)
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Heh, ironic that the majority of those hard workers you described are generally migrant workers.
the time frame you mention has a pretty serious economic indicator for the US you might have missed. We have gone from being the worlds largest creditor nation to now we are the worlds largest debtor nation, with your mentioned country Japan holding a decent chunk of that IOU. And lately, they are getting a little uneasy about holding even that, because they realise we are close to being forced to just defaulting on these debts, most likely through the time honored fiat currency method called "cranking up the printing presses". I mean right now we are being funded by selling IOUs (federalgovernment paper) backed by other IOUs (FRNs backed by future promises to pay, ie, your kids and grandkids labor in jobs that may or may not exist, and our actual tangible real estate in the form of outsourced mortgages).
This is unsustainable for any length of time beyond historically "short"
Now, we haven't sunk completely yet, but to insist we haven't hit the iceberg and don't have major leaks and haven't taken on a considerable amount of water is not being realistic either. all is not rosy, and *this time* it looks to be unfixable in the short and medium term (one to three generations). The violin players eventually stopped playing.
And if the planet doesn't come up with some unusually cheap and abundant energy source, and soon, we might all be sunk, the US, Europe, China, India, Japan, you name it.
All this growth in the 20th century has been based on almost ridiculously cheap energy, notable petroleum.
That is just not a fact anymore. Demand is exploding, supplies are peaking and will dwindle fast after peaking. Two lines, one graph, results should be easy to see.
My best SWAG is a lot of wars over dwindling resources. Some folks say that has started already. These various economic wars are just the warmup, the prelude to what is really coming.
It's their right to come up with strategies and plans for succeeding economically. Neither the US nor Europe have a god-given entitlement to economic dominance, nor does the rest of the world owe us any particular standard of living or minimum wage. Either we figure out how to compete at our current standard of living, or we will have to accept getting poorer.
Having said that, I'm not worried: I don't see China or India achieving the level of innovation that the US and Europe continue to achieve until they are achieving a comparable level of leisure, economic security, and prosperity.
Fair point. I think I'll file this whole article in my "We're all boned!" folder.
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
Me? I can't wait to see another one of those powerful microprocessor designs come out of China....er, wait....I mean another super computing cluster....nope,hmm......another cool usb-drive for my keychain, yeah!
-- Posted from my parent's basement
When you hire someone for a minimum wage job, you are likely if he/she will show up on time, has an Ok attitude and will not commit any crimes at work. Who cares about math knowledge that is only useful rarely?
Besides, many girls ask a guy for help as soon as something requires the slightest effort, so she might not be actually as clueless as she appears. Didn't you ever get "interesting" computer questions from people with a CS degree?
I read an article about the costs of employing skilled production line workers.
/.'s who work in electronics or computer manufacturing ask for a payrise, remind yourself you're already being paid as much as TWENTY TIMES MORE than your Chinese competitor's employees.
In USA, over US$3000 per month
In Europe, over US$2500 per month
In China, far less than US$300 per month, often as little as $150
So, the next time anyone
Have any figures to back this up? Most millionaires I've ever heard of came from money, and I've never heard of a millionaire losing all their money. When a rich person goes bankrupt, they don't actually become poor. The laws are set up in such a way that even without secret offshore accounts, they won't ever lose everything.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
that is my point, this protestor was not "speaking" out but was climbing top of a building! there is a HUGE difference.
where did my sig go? where's my sig at?
Like the Chinese scholar Cao Chang Qing himself said: "Chinese are a nation of intellectual 8-year olds."
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
The government can greatly reduce the pain by letting such occupations bleed offshore gradually. For example, disuade newbies from entering programming while helping out existing unemployed programmers. Over time as programmers retire the total programmers in the US would decrease because there are few or no newbies to replace them here. Thus, the profession fades off into the free-trade sunset without the blunt pain. This would be a nicer compromise.
Table-ized A.I.
Nah in the long run all the US currency that China is buying would eventually overwhelm China's own currency resulting in economic collapse.
See this article.
http://www.techcentralstation.com/041205A.html
You think a troll has that many fans? I got more education in my pinky finger than your entire extended family will ever have....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
... have you looked at your fingers lately ...
... it goes like 1-2-3----up-to-10 ...
... and if you add toes too ... right there is the co-processor ...
You are in your 20's. Read up on why the Unions rose in the first place. Then go read what it is like to be an EA games programmer these days - hell just search Slashdot, you will find many references. See any parallels? Long work hours for low pay, and if you want to work less? Out the door you go.
Look at CEO vs worker pay - now look at that over time, does it make any sense at all? The GM contract is extreme and you very well know it - but it sure does stop the EA Games of this world from treating thier employees like crap doesn't it? In this, the time of Mega-Corps, Unions are needed now more than ever - hell I personally think that *consumers* should unionize and get Corps to behave like good citizens. Reply to this when you are 50, with carpal tunnel and a bad back, and getting "let go" because you don't meet the company minimums of production that are set on the behavior of 16 cup a day 21 year olds who turn out 10,000 lines of code 99% of which is crap because they have no experience at all while you turn out code whose every line is magic, but only a few hundred lines a week. Unions protect workers plain and simple. Executives protect the company. They are opposites in a mirror IMHO. Sorry about the rant - but Unions do some good as well.
Organized Government, organized military, organized schools, organized employers, I can think of many more organized things that are good....Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.