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IBM Shifts 14,000 Jobs to India
Omar Khan writes "The New York Times reports, 'Even as it lays off up to 13,000 workers in Europe and the U.S., IBM plans to increase its payroll in India this year by more than 14,000 workers.' Slashdot previously covered the black-and-blue strike, in which the union wondered, 'if other cost cutting mechanisms could achieve the same effect without cutting so may jobs.'"
I'm sorry but IBM is speaking to European workers very clearly here, however I'm not sure they're listening. The constant strikes, the 5+ weeks of vacation, the voting down of the EU constitution to avoid US-style capitalism. These jobs are vanishing into India because of the cost and headache of dealing with European unions, workers, culture, and bureaucracy. Frankly it's a pain in the ass, and for a market that often has little growth potential. Asia isn't just where the cheap labour is, it's also where the growth is, and the governments eager to work with you, and the best bang-for-the-buck for companies seeking to invest. Until European workers learn to compete aggressively we'll keep on hearing stories like this of companies that just shrug and say "fine, have it your way." Apologies, but something's gotta give.
> 'if other cost cutting mechanisms could achieve the same effect without cutting
> so may jobs.'"
They'll just do that too!
And this happens just when I was starting to think of IBM as the good guys...
Have you ever wondered How to Take Over
Really shameful... first post too, also shameful
Here is the IBM Union website, if anyone is interested.
don't worry, you are not alone. accounting, HR, legal, even biotech and practically everything else you can think of is subject to offshoring. guess who's in the best position now? carpenters. plumbers. electricians. whoops, get ready for people to re-evaluate college and knowledge work on a grand scale.
That's just the free market at work. If the price of labor is cheaper there, then that is where labor will be purchased. It's just as simple as that.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Does IBM now stand for "Indian Business Machines"? If they're scaling back so much on the two most developed continents, they don't seem so "international" anymore... what dinosaurs.
It must be Windows. It needs half a gig of RAM and a hardware-accelerated graphics card just to run Solitaire.
I guess a programming major insn't enough. Now I need to learn Indian as well.
lol: You see no door there!
The problem with outsourcing is that eventually the cheap work gets more expensive, then it becomes too much of a burden and things have to shift again ...
So, gradually, the corporations will pick random underdeveloped countries and beef them up to a point where the workers are too expensive, then they'll move on - until there are no underdeveloped countries left, just bloated overdeveloped cesspools full of unemployed engineers and white collars.
IBM may hire over 14,000 in India
http://us.rediff.com/money/2005/jun/24ibm.htm
labor arbitrage is not why they are doing it, you can be damn sure that's the primary reason they are doing it.
I am not sure many people realy believe the hype about a lack of availability of skilled labor in the US (and now maybe even Europe).
BP http://www.card-central.com
How is adding 1,000 jobs cutting jobs?
Do the Indians not count because they are brown?
IBM is adding to its workforce and yet is still critisized.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
'if other cost cutting mechanisms could achieve the same effect without cutting so may jobs.'"
Probably not. For someone like IBM, labour is undoubtedly their biggest cost. If they can get equally good work from Indian programmers for a third of the cost, then I see every reason for them to do that.
Of course it is hard on the staff, but this is only going to happen more and more as time goes on, and increased union activity is only going to encourage large firms to outsource work.
The only way for IT workers in western countries to survive is to gain additional skills which workers in other countries lack.
[I am not saying anything either way.]
1) Outsource everything except the board members to India
2) ?
3) Profit!
...and then adding them back that is the problem.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Individual companies can't get away with shipping jobs to India due to the offshoring stigma, so what do they do? They hire consulting firms like IBM who basically do the dirty work for them. Problem solved; good cheap labor at a fraction of the cost without it being a PR nightmare because technically the company isn't offshoring. I've seen this happening more and more. Kind of scary.
Top 10 Reasons To Procrastinate
10.
My job at Ford just got sent to India as well. I know it is easier said than done, but I think the thing to try to do nowadays is to steer away from jobs at large corporations. Maybe I am wrong, but I haven't heard of many small companies sending their jobs to India.
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. -Theodor Adorno
By STEVE LOHR
Published: June 24, 2005
Even as it proceeds with layoffs of up to 13,000 workers in Europe and the United States, I.B.M. plans to increase its payroll in India this year by more than 14,000 workers, according to an internal company document.
Those numbers are telling evidence of the continuing globalization of work and the migration of some skilled jobs to low-wage countries like India. And I.B.M., the world's largest information technology company, is something of a corporate laboratory that highlights the trend. Its actions inform the worries and policy debate that surround the rise of a global labor force in science, engineering and other fields that require advanced education.
Skip to next paragraph Multimedia
Graphic
I.B.M. Employees
To critics, I.B.M. is a leading example of the corporate strategy of shopping the globe for the cheapest labor in a single-minded pursuit of profits, to the detriment of wages, benefits and job security here and in other developed countries. The company announced last month that it would cut 10,000 to 13,000 jobs, about a quarter of them in the United States and the bulk of the rest in Western Europe.
"I.B.M. is really pushing this offshore outsourcing to relentlessly cut costs and to export skilled jobs abroad," said Marcus Courtney, president of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, or WashTech, a group that seeks to unionize such workers. "The winners are the richest corporations in the world, and American workers lose."
WashTech, based in Washington State, gave the I.B.M. document on Indian employment to The New York Times. It is labeled "I.B.M. Confidential" and dated April 2005. An I.B.M. employee concerned about the shifting of jobs abroad provided the document to WashTech.
I.B.M. declined to comment on the document or the numbers in it, other than to say that there are many documents, charts and projections generated within the company.
But in an interview, Robert W. Moffat, an I.B.M. senior vice president, explained that the buildup in India was attributable to surging demand for technology services in the thriving Indian economy and the opportunity to tap the many skilled Indian software engineers to work on projects around the world.
Lower trade barriers and cheaper telecommunications and computing ability help allow a distant labor force to work on technology projects, he said.
Mr. Moffat said I.B.M. was making the shift from a classic multinational corporation with separate businesses in many different countries to a truly worldwide company whose work can be divided and parceled out to the most efficient locations.
Cost is part of the calculation, Mr. Moffat noted, but typically not the most important consideration. "People who say this is simply labor arbitrage don't get it," he said. "It's mostly about skills."
And Mr. Moffat said that I.B.M. was hiring people around the world, including many in the United States, in new businesses that the company has marked for growth, even as it trims elsewhere. The company's overall employment in the United States has held steady for the last few years, at about 130,000.
To foster growth, I.B.M. is increasingly trying to help its client companies use information technology rather than just selling them the hardware and software. So I.B.M. researchers and programmers are more and more being put to work for customers, redesigning and automating tasks like procurement, accounting and customer service.
Yet those advanced services projects will be broken into pieces, with different experts in different countries handling a slice. This emerging globalization of operations, Mr. Moffat noted, does lead to a global labor market in certain fields. "You are no longer competing just with the guy down the street, but also with people around the world," he said.
Such competition, however, can become particularly harsh for workers in the West when they are competing against well-educated workers in low-
I once had IBM e-Services come out for a visit. They were deploying some test equipment (RS/6000) servers and WebSphere for us.
They had a guy that did nothing but open boxes. There were four training staff persons for all two of us that needed training. We had three account reps.
IBM has some talented workers, but simply too many. I applaud their staff cuts... I disapprove of replacing talented staff with cheaper labor.
Hell, dropping OS/2 legacy support could probably save them a few million... or any of the other several hundred divisions operating at a loss.
Does such a change pose a risk to the security of the United States and Europe? Indeed, the government and military have always been a large consumer of IBM's products. That is understandable, of course, considering the extreme reliability, durability, stability and ultimate engineering that IBM systems represent. But with the design and implementation of these systems being sent over to non-Western countries, there are always security fears. Will backdoors be inserted into IBM's software that will then be sold to Western powers? It's a very real possibility.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
But IBM is the good guy, it supports open source... Or is it just using open source as a marketing tool? Who cares, as long as it gives the open source people some purpose in life...
The PS3 and Xbox 360 are going to sell in droves worldwide. That's a lot of PowerPC chipsets that need to be manufactured cheaply, quickly, and consistently by IBM.
While I don't agree with off-shoring, consider that many of the jobs that get off-shored are jobs that Americans either want too much pay/benefits for, or are jobs that are "below" them due to the scheduled_hours/tasks.
Foreign nationals in developing countries can easily snatch these jobs up for much less pay/benefits and are actually happy/proud to have the job.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
Sweet, it's nice to know that the US is not the only country to fall victim to off-whoring(tm)!!
ACHTUNG! Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.
I see that you're claiming that Indians are unable to produce quality software and hardware designs. Can you please give some tangible examples/proof of this, and the resulting failures? Indeed, what makes an Indian any less of a programmer than an American or a European?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Really, this just means 14,000 more EU and US programmers can now work on IBM's Open Source initiatives without having to be on payroll. Don't programmers seem to prefer that anyway?
putfwd.com - 1GB Free file storage with a twist
Lowering cost itself is not immoral or wrong, but sometimes the means used to achieve the goal is immoral, or wrong.
-Reid
New Hire: "$4 a square foot is why I dragged you out here."
Suit: "Sure, it's $4 a square foot, we're in the middle of nowhere."
New Hire: "We're not in the middle of nowhere. How'd you get here?"
Suit: "Airport."
New Hire: "Yeah, airport, highway, telephone."
Suit: "Internet."
New Hire: "Internet."
Suit: "Genius. $4 a square foot, and $4 an hour. You're fired!"
IBM. Solutions for a small planet. :)
Indeed. Supply and demand. I'm sure IBM will *try* to hire 14,000 employees.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9589_22-5730972.html
Guess what this means, Indian workers are going to be able to demand higher wages, so they will.
Deleted
Our small (under 10 employee) company just offshored a job for one of our clients. All of our clients had been beating us up over offshoring work, because it is fashionable. So we spent more time specking the work and administering it than if we did the work ourselves. But we had to offshore the work because offshoring is this decade's fashion, our generations bell-bottom jeans.
I agree with the person. This is especially true with headaches with dealing with EU. There is an article detailing speech from Tony Blair on this.4 9376&headline=Tony~Blair~spooks~Europe~over~India
http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=
Just so long as they understand they're going to be selling their services and products at the lowest cost as well.
This whole thing is just the money sloshing around the planet to reach economic equilibrium. Soon enough wages will rise in India and the dollar and Euro will drop, and the pressures will relent somewhat.
I do wonder about the canonical science fiction question. It's already far more productive to have cheap computers do the work rather than expensive humans for a range of services. What happens over the next few hundred years as the collection of services done by computers grows ever-larger?
What good is capitalism for workers when there's absolutely no scarcity of labor? Money is just a measurement of scarcity, after all, and if there's no scarcity in labor, there's no money.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
14,000 users of IBMs services had acount their details sold by employees of an Indian call center.
.cig
I don't think it's true to say that IBM "can get equally good work from Indian programmers." I don't think lack of quality American employees is what has caused them to switch, at all.[1] This is the part that is responsible: "for a third of the cost."
In fact, economically, it is quite viable for any company to at least test the waters with offshoring. Every single company. The simple reason is that if it doesn't work out, they can always rehire back in the United States. So, for the companies who offshore, it's a win-win. That's what you call business logic.
Businesses know that there is a good chance the Indian workers will actually be much worse than the United States workers. However, they know that at 1/3rd the cost, they are willing to take their chances with it for a year, just in case they are actually able to get 14,000 good employees.
[1] Similarly, when H1B's were coming to the US, the reason again was solely for the cost savings--not because there weren't equally good employees available in the United States.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
Similar arguments apply to illegal aliens from Mexico. Under the aegis of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), illegal aliens flood into the USA and have essentially destroyed the wages in the market for unskilled labor. The normal market forces in the USA are now influenced/destroyed by Mexican government policies that have obliterated the economic opportunities and standard of living in Mexico. Without illegal aliens, the Americans working as unskilled labor would enjoy a sudden and dramatic boost in their wages, enabling them to actually buy medical insurance.
When American politicians tout free trade and claim that the American market remains a free market, they completely ignore the non-free market which is interacting with our free market and which is destroying the normal market forces in a (our) free market. The rub is that no one seems to care.
Free trade advances free markets in only one scenario: (relatively) free markets like the USA interact with other (relatively) free markets like Eastern/Western Europe, Canada, and Japan. To maintain genuine free trade, we should close our markets (including the market for services like labor) to India, China, and their ilk until those nations establish free markets. We lose nothing by championing genuine free trade.
To the USA and EU. The jobs disappearing from EU were preceeded by US layoffs some time ago. And it is not just IBM, but I think that many here know that already.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Companies don't give a damn about the people. No matter how evil and wretched is what you're doing, just make sure it's not illegal, and you're fine.
(Only in America!)
so you think that it is wrong for IBM to layoff in USA/EU. What do you suggest to lower Labor costs for IBM? Would you be willing to accept a pay and benefit cut to what IBM is paying in India?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I just want to say that I agree with you. I'd also like to say that it's nice to meet a person with a decent I.Q. and clue. No, I'm not coming on to you(I'm a guy). I'm being sincere. Good post.
I don't see how that was funny, more an interesting or insightful.
Say what you want but this is continued evidence of us decline. Why don't people get the concept that just because wages go up in the rest of the world, they will in the US also. It is clearly not happening. The world economy will "average" out. This process means an inevitable fall in standard of living in the US, Europe and probably Japan also.
In about a generation or so, things will _probably_ even out, but in the meantime the US if f*cked. In fact, in the long term the US may be f*cked also. The US as a market will be much smaller than India-Asia, and so employment and mfg will be centered there. It will be interesting watching the US devolve into a 3rd world economic classification.
There is no such thing as free trade.
Absolute statements are never true
A corporation can go "Listen, we can't change over to GNU/Linux, what with the cost of retraining, are you crazy?!" and most people would agree. At the same time many many turn around and go "And oh yeah, we're going to lay everyone off and move the whole company to India". Not much talking about "retraining" costs then.
I guess it's going to come as a huge surprise in a few years when their standard of living has equalized and the ask for more money to continue slaving away...
(though China will probably be good for a long long time, because they've got a nice little regime to make sure the people doesn't get to enjoy the full effect of a rise in standard of living. A vote for the corps is a vote for continued repression of the people of China, but hey, at least we get cheap clothes to buy for our tax-free dole-check.)
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Here in Denver, CO, I mostly hear Bengali and Gujurati spoken among Indians. I don't think the original poster, nor most Americans, can conceive of a nation where more than one language is spoken (except to mock Quebec).
Vizzini: INCONCEIVABLE!
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
What is not talked about which is obvious is mechanization. It has not been talked about for centuries, really. When workers in England began to lose their jobs due to looms replacing them, Ned Ludd went into his workplace and smashed up his machine, and others followed them. Nowadays, those who own the machines we workers work on say that Ned Ludd was apocryphal, and say the people who smashed up those machines were Luddites, which means people who have an irrational fear of technology. But was it irrational? They lost their jobs after all, although that is never brought up, that aspect of the word Luddite has gone down the memory hole and the word is remembered from a boss's point of view now only, Luddites are crazy workers who have an irrational fear of machines for some reason.
Doug Henwood wrote a good (and short) article on this not long ago. With all those manufacturing jobs moving to China, there must be a lot more manufacturing jobs in China now, right? Henwood notes that actually, according to a study of twenty major economies done last fall by Joseph Carson, the chief economist at Alliance Capital, between 1995 and 2002 China lost 15 percent of it's manufacturing jobs.
Of course, if workers owned and had control over the machines they work with, mechanization would be a great thing, it would mean a choice of either shorter hours or a higher standard of living. But four out of five workers do not own or control the machines they work with, thus mechanization means higher unemployment, lower wages and so forth. Mechanization is only harmful due to the current socio-economic environment.
Well, no I guess not, but...
Executives are paid by the board of a company, not by the employees. There are many ways to manipulate a company so that the shareholders can make money from it.
Actually making a good product or providing a wanted service are not even very high on that list anymore.
I don't think keeping people employed actually appears anywhere on that list at all.
You'd be hard pressed to find another 'cost-cutting' measure that's as good and also has the fringe benefits of freeing up the assets of the equipment they work on and building they work in for 'liquidation.'
more's the pity...
I think in general that privately held companies can and will do the same thing, but often (not always,) privately held companies tend to think of the employees.
Has anyone else ever noticed that people who own a lot of stock tend to forget that at the other end of that certificate, there are a lot of people and not just an abstraction. Due to my recent employment experience, I know some of the lengths that people (in the military say,) will go to dehumanize other people so that when the moment comes, you can act without a thought towards the person you are acting against. Does anyone know if this is true in business school as well?
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
Sure, sometimes the means is, but this time? Those 16000 jobs still exist, they'll just be held by different people. Presumably those in India need to feed their families as much as those in the EU - seems morally neutral to me.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I agree. Unions have outlived their usefulness in the USA and probably Europe. Protecting workers from unsafe conditions, slave wages, unlawful termination and other things are now roles filled by the government.
Well, the same forces that make hidebound, bureaucratic economies make hidebound, bureaucratic customers. IBM used to cater to them, but they figured this out a few years ago. Vast parts of IBM still cater to those customers, but the company is leaner and meaner than a lot of people recognize.
However, as far as bureaucracies go, I still think India can give France and Gernmany a run for their money. But India seems to be in a mind to fix things these days.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Anyone who thinks there is a point where a company decides it has cut costs 'enough' hasn't been paying attention.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Last I checked, chips like that were mostly made in Southeast Asia. Has that changed?
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
Hence all the offshoring.
There are about a dozen native languages. India wasn't a single country till the Brits came along.
Deleted
Nope, I am not a corporate slave precisely because I think of my job as a privilege.
If one thinks of a job as a privilege then one will logically assume that the said privilege can be revoked at any time.
Therefore, one will not harbor corporate loyalty of any form due to the risk of said privilege being revoked.
Ergo, one will prepare oneself continuously for job cuts, firings, etc. by doing at least one of the following:
1) Improve professional skills
2) Gaining additional education (grad school)
3) Becoming more creative
4) Starting a small business on the side
Your jobs are belong to us!
insert inflammatory anti-microsoft comment here
It's not just manufacturing... Development jobs have been slashed. I don't buy that the IBM VP's claim that they're trying to get more skilled workers and not just pay less in wages. Almost everyone that I know that have been laid off have had to train their replacements or forefit their separation package. So, at least some knowledge transfer needs to happen from these supposedly unskilled workers...
If the union had all these great ideas for cost cutting, why didn't they suggest them earlier, at some point before the axe was in it's downward swing?
I understand why sometimes the labour and capital components of business have to have an adversarial relationship, but I also know that they need to have a co-operative relationship as well.
It's as if the union had these great ideas for saving IBM money, but kept them quiet until IBM started to cut jobs, and they said, "Wait wait wait...".
In the original black-and-blue article, the union made the point that IBM's "first quarter profit for 2005 was $1.4 billion, and $9 billion for the whole of 2004". Unfortunately, a corporation has a legal imperitive to make as much money as possible for the shareholders. The problem is not IBM, but rather corporations in general.
Some of the more interesting books on the subject are,
Myth of the Good Corporate Citizen
The Corporation (the book that the documentary was based on)
Confessions Of an Economic Hit Man
LOL! Stop it IBM! You're killin me! It wasn't too long ago that IBM was complaining about the decline in the number of students pursuing CS degrees in the U.S.. I guess another 14000 need not bother! Way to go Big Blue!
Of course this is good for India, but I wish these companies would quit complaining about the unwillingness of American students to pursue careers that have no future in the U.S.. They should be honest, education was never the real issue, it's always been wages and benefits.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
The solution for us is Here
Seems like everytime there's a shift in labor focus, everyone starts whinging about the "death of the North American worker," which is just crap.
Auto manufacturers may have destroyed the livery business, but in the process they created thousands of jobs in other sectors - many of which never existed before.
Will the outsourcing movement create new positions here in North America? Absolutely. The geographical distance will be a huge boon to infrastructure companies, video-conferencing, wi-fi, and probably entire new industries that don't even exist yet - but will.
You have to continually adapt and learn to remain a valuable employee and contributor to society.
A pet peeve in my own industry, are all those so-called "designers" who are miffed that Flash is becoming more of a code-based app - good for more that cheesy drag-and-drop animations and spinning logos. Time after time on the forums everyone whines about how its too complicated.
Knowledge isn't static, neither are jobs, and no company should be forced to retain employees just because "they live here" if better and more economical work can be found elsewhere.
We should embrace progress, not retard it because of some vague doomsday prediction of the death of IT.
The concepts of sovereignty and captialism are incompatible, and can't coexist in a free market.
Learn. Learn. And then learn some more.
Or else the tarpits avait.
Single? Canadian? We can help. Visit http://www.l
It strikes me that this is possibly linked to the high barriers to immigration into the United States.
A lot of skilled foreign workers have tried to enter the US. There has been great resistance to this, mostly on the part of US workers who fear that a great influx of labor would drive down wages.
But if these workers stay in their own countries it probably ends up driving down wages even more.
If the US allowed skilled laborers to enter the US they would be constrained on how little they are willing to work for. The cost of living in the US is much higher than it is in India and this would create a lower boundary for wages demanded.
If these workers where allowed into the country as permanet residents or even as citizens rather than on H1-B visas they would also have more bargaining power with their employers and demand even higher wages. This would also rais the lower limit of wages.
Furthermore, these workers would pay taxes in the US and this money could be used to further aid US workers.
Please excuse the somewhat simplified economic model.
14,000? The OP itself says 13,000 jobs, the NY times article says 10,000 t 13,000 jobs, AND the article on an indian website says IBM may hire upto 13,000 workers..
What gives?
http://efil.blogspot.com/
When India becomes expensive they'll (by definition) have money and want to buy stuff too. Perhaps we should be thinking about what they might want to buy.
e ws/2005/02/12/wind12.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/02/12/i xworld.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n
Deleted
That isn't all true.
I am a union steward for a manufacturing plant in Jackson, Michigan and we do not focus on things like "job creation and preservation".
We focus on ensuring that our work place is safe (we have never even seen an OSHA inspector in the plant, they make it up to the front office but mysteriously never beyond there).
We also focus on fairness and equality. My main concern is to make sure that some one is not getting a benefit that the rest of us aren't and conversely that some one isn't getting treated unfairly.
Unions still have a valid position to hold in our society as long as companies are willing to screw people in any way possible to increase the bottom line. We constantly work with the company to help them increase product quality and profitability, we only ask them that they work with us to ensure we have enough money to live decently and enough insurance to ensure we can afford health care.
The government won't do those things for us, and I don't want them to.
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
What's going on is systematic disabling of the north american ability to manufacture and support goods and services. These guys think real long term.
Look at what's going on - things are so much cheaper overseas that it makes economic sense to make and support everything over there. One of our products would be $6 cheaper to make made than our cost on parts alone. In a sense, they would pay us $6 for each board they made. You can't beat that.
As more manufacturing / tech jobs leave the country, the number of laid off employees mean that nobody else is going to take up those trades. "It's impossible to get a job making products or working as a tech, so why would I take the training?" As workers retire / die / commit suicide, the number of people capable of doing any real work dwindle. Soon, we won't understand our own technology since nobody here l earned about it.
Eventually, nobody will be available to make the goods or support them, except those who undercut the prices so severely in the first place. They are then free to set the prices at whatever levels they want, since they have exclusive ability. At that point, there is no national security since we don't have a choice but to do exactly what they want. If they want more money, we have to give it to them or we stop getting stoves, microwaves, cars, etc. If we don't ignore the seizure of Kasmir by force, then the Interac network goes down.
As for backdoors, there's no cause for alarm. The products received will be so bad and bug-filled that there's no need for them.
I'm not saying that all Chinese made goods are crap; I'm saying that all the Chinese-made goods that I've seen are crap. I'm not saying that all Indians give lousy support; I'm saying that all the support I've had from India has been lousy.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Society and consumers benefit very little from companies offshoring and using other methods to cut costs. They don't reduce the price of their goods when they do this, they just pocket more profits. Shareholders and executives of huge multinational corporations benefit from offshoring, the countries getting the work benefit, but don't try to pretend the people losing their jobs and being forced into lower paying unskilled jobs are benefitting from this.
I personally find it reprehensible and short sighted. But to each his own.
-Reid
Another score for capitalism!!!! If you want Socialism, go move to North Korea or China where the government thinks it knows best.
...And is what's pulling India out of third-world status. But fuck them. They're brown and their food smells funny. Your CSCI degree means IBM owes you a lifetime position with benefits.
Capitalism is what made the USA the most powerful and free nation in the world....
Dey took ar jerrrrbs!!!1
IBM could easily keep workers where they are. But multinational corporations are designed to maximize profit at the expense of everyone else.
India's poor majority had their land and water stolen, by international big business. So they're starving, but the corporate-ruled Indian government is closing its eyes to the trend. They happily give government resources to the technology elite, and pass new laws to benefit monopoly capital.
The worst example recently, was their recognition of international patent law on medicine. This was a horrible triumph of profit over people, and is the moral equivalent of slaughtering sick people.
This is all unsustainable. But multinationals don't care. They're interested in short-term profit. Tech workers are just the latest members in the club of commodity labor.
"if other cost cutting mechanisms could achieve the same effect without cutting so may jobs.'"
You mean cut CEO's millions of dollars in bonuses? I've only seen those increase, not decrease.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Following the specs to the letter without discussion is a sign of either poor pay or poor management. A poor manager is one who gives out specs and expects them to be followed without question. That's not what a (good) developer (or development team) would ever do.. that's what a "programmer" would do. If you're being poorly managed or not paid enough, why argue with the manager.. it's a lot easier just to follow the bad specs and render yourself blameless even if the job turns out bad. Indeed, I'd say at least 50% of development budgets are spent on projects which never see the light of day due to this problem.
I don't want business to make the decisions about what is moral or immoral. I want government to regulate to a certain degree when necessary to enforce what society thinks mandatory, acceptable and unacceptable.
When each business makes their own decision, you have chaos. Should Microsoft decide they don't have to obey a country's laws and say... evade China's censoring of the net. Some would say yes... But if you do, then should they forget about Germany's censorship of certain Nazi lovers? Or Frances censorship of things that "threaten their culture". Or the U.S. Censorship of nude 17-year-olds?
Each culture has an idea of what is right and what is wrong. IBM and others should not make the call. Each culture should make those demands on those businesses as they see fit. Those cultures must also understand that each requirement makes it a bit tougher to do business profitably. And that is the ONLY reason for business to exist.
Society then has to decide... how do we balance our needs/wants/desires with business' only goal: profit.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
IBM was founded, built, financed, and supported by Western countries, principally the US, UK, Japan, and Germany. The US, especially, protects IBM's intellectual property, provides a secure environment for business, and enormous amounts of government contracts. The great bulk of IBM's customers are in the West.
I honestly believe that IBM - and all of the firms so happily laying off their employees in order to find cheaper labour - are acting in an immoral manner. Outsourcing is destroying lives, destroying economies, for the sole point of increasing corporate profits - profits that go, essentially, to a very small percentage of the population. For goodness sake, having a 401k growing at 4% doesn't really matter that much when you're laid off.
IBM is not trying to help Indian workers - IBM is simply trying to cut it's labor costs. Globalization has accomplished the dream of so many capitalists - labor is now a commodity, and labor is powerless.
The American - and Western European - middle class is evaporating before our eyes. When the middle class jobs are sent overseas, the entire structure of our society is in danger. We'll became lands where the few with massive wealth dominate the increasingly poor masses. Democracy depends on a healthy middle class. Destroying that democracy is indeed immoral.
/* Dang, I can't type that well. */
Those in the US are not entitled to jobs at the expense of everyone else. I am glad to see developing nations get an opportunity to enjoy some economic prosperity. This is not the first time jobs have shifted due to technological advancements, nor will it be the last. There are many career frontiers for US workers to explore and even prosper in. Stop yo' whining.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
Geez, with all of the sympathy around here for our 'overburdened' corporations, I'm not very optomistic about the future of the western worker. Yes, we're all appauled at those lazy Europeans, with their 5 weeks of vacation time, but CEO's pulling a cool hundred million a year while they tour the world's golf courses on their private jets don't seem to arouse much outrage around here.
As an American worker, I had always hoped that someday we in the U.S. could have a more "European" approach to how the average middle-class worker is treated, but apparently my future model lies in India. And free-market evangalists are going to tell me this is a good thing: "I'm sorry you're working long hours for low wages, but look at all of those cheap consumer products you can buy!"
Welcome to the Brave New World.
-G
www.pixelstatic.com
Indians are humans, too. Like the article says, they'll want the same goods and services that Americans and Europeans want: food, clothes, cars, jewelery, computers and other luxury items.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
what insight! India truly is known as a bastion of free commerce and governmental non-intervention. wherever you look, the License-Raj is a shining example of what capitalism should be.
IBM is leaving its development team to other countries due to the way Copyright protection laws are being developed in USA and Europe.
Laws like DMCA, and ancient CBDTPA, dead, thanks god, only onerates the development of new technolgies. Software patents are also another cause of cost increase.
While USA and Europe are too busy worrying about copyright protection, developing countries like China, India and Brazil are more worry about creating conditions to receive the development departments of huge companies like IBM.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Gartner just released a study of the top five reasons offshore deals go bust. I hope IBM was paying attention. It sounds like a lot of companies jump into these deals because of the labor differential and then find out later it wasn't such a good deal after all. There are a lot more factors to consider than just free trade, losing American jobs, and profit. Long-term viability has got to be high on the list of things to consider, right? (My blog on this)
Maybe 'Economics 101' boils down to:
(1) Look for ways to reduce costs
(2) Move jobs overseas to exploit cheap 3rd-world labor
(3) Profit!
but 'Economics 102' adds:
(1) Cheap 3rd-world workers spend new pay on basics like decent food, shelter, and medical care, thus greatly improving their lives, but have nothing left over to purchase still relatively expensive luxury goods and services provided by their American or European employer
(2) Unemployed or now-underemployed former American or European employees now can't afford expensive luxury goods and services provided by former employer, either
(3) Profits evaporate as sales plummet
Henry Ford understood this basic economic principle, and made sure his employees could afford to purchase the Model T's they built.
'Econ 103' goes on to explain how companies that move their labor and infrastructure costs overseas still get to deduct those expenses when it comes time to pay their US taxes, but none of that money stays here to generate income tax, sales tax, and other tax revenue, so government services must shrink. And every dollar moved offshore also costs many, many more dollars lost in other goods and services that lost employees can no longer purchase, resulting in additional jobs and tax revenues lost, etc.
It's never as simple as it first seems.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
Um -- you're not paid based on how much money you generate for a company, you're paid based on how replaceable your job is. Guess what? If the janitor stops taking out the trash, eventually the company stops making money. Are the janitors worth a billion dollars a year? No -- because they're paid based on the value of the work they do. They are easily replaceable.
Same for engineers. You are paid based on how unique your work is. If your work can be easily replaced by another engineer, you're low paid. If it is sufficiently unique, then you are higher paid. Supply and demand, man. Supply and demand.
Want to be the one who collects the money at the top? Easy. Start your own company and create some jobs of your own.
Unions can create temporary bubbles where you get higher pay than you deserve, but ultimately it hurts you. Would you rather have a 20% more pay temporarily, but then no job at all when it's outsourced, or would you rather have more stability, just at a market wage?
Europe is choosing "no job" every day.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
And I mean all the way up to the top.
Even if you assume that U. S. managers are currently more effective because of experience, training, etc. it is hard to believe a high-speed communications line and a culture gap won't be a counteracting handicap.
When all of the low- and midlevel tasks are being performed in [insert country here], the workers there will quickly learn whatever is needed to manage and then will have an advantage due to their understanding of local conditions.
There's no reason for this process not to continue up to the very top. It's hard to believe that someone can keep the corporate headquarters and all the money here indefinitely when all the work is being done somewhere else.
IBM treated India rather poorly a few decades ago, using it as a cash cow and a market for technology that was considered obsolete in the U. S. A few years from now I expect the CEO of IBM will be Indian, and the U. S. will be a backwater and treated rather poorly.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Unions are still needed to protect blue collar jobs. The problem with IT is that it is a white collar job and unions don't traditionally have role with that type of job. A national health care system would help the country more since that would aleviate the cost of health care on all these companies effectively reducing the cost of labor.
What this guy said. Absolutely.
I don't respond to AC's.
The part that 'outsourcing supporters' fail to understand/accept is that if all these high paying jobs are lost in the name of ' lower cost of goods', how do you propose that these people afford all this wonderful low cost stuff?
If they arent working, it doesnt matter much that the nice new shiny IBM costs 1/2 what it did when they were working for IBM..
Now, i dont have the final answer as this is also a trap if left unchecked.., but i do know outsourcing overseas is NOT tit..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Many of the more educated Indians (ie. engineers, programmers, etc.) have an excellent grasp of English. Remember, India was a British colony for decades, much like the US, Australia, Canada, and many other English-speaking countries. Indeed, many do speak English with an accent that differs from that in places like Britain or the US, but they still comprehend English perfectly.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
People whine about offshoring like it's a one way street, as if India and China are black holes into which their jobs and money are disappearing.
As the Indians and Chinese get money, they buy stuff. They buy American stuff, European stuff, Indian stuff and Chinese stuff.
Trade is two way street.
Deleted
And the response of these workers and others in Europe is that they don't want to be chattel/wage slaves. Shocking isn't it? It seems like people in Europe can somehow envision a world where there is such a thing as enough profit, and that at the end of the day corporations exist for the betterment of all of society - not vice versa.
One of my old bosses had a great expression - "Trees don't grow to the sky." It was in relation to commodity trading, but it's applicable in many areas of life. Growth can not be infinite - it's simply not sustainable. At some point you need to be satisfied that you're running a profitable business, creating valued products.
Causing unemployment in Europe and the U.S. to save a couple sheckles on the front end will ultimately result in less wealth and less growth in the long run. You need someone to buy your products, and as others have already pointed out, the unemployed and minimum wage workers of the world aren't going to be able to do so. All the arm chair "free marketers" need to dig a little deeper with their analysis than parroting "corporations are in business to make money" and thereby whatever they do in that line makes sense - that may be a primary goal, but it certainly doesn't valildate or justify every decision corporations make.
Greed is good only works up to a point - after which you start eating your own young.
While I don't agree with off-shoring, consider that many of the jobs that get off-shored are jobs that Americans either want too much pay/benefits for, or are jobs that are "below" them due to the scheduled_hours/tasks.
No matter how many times this gets repeated, it's not going to come true.
All you have to do is look at EA to see how low people will go to work in their field.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Your argument is based on the peole being able to buy goods and services. If they are laid off they won't be buying any IBM products will they? When you slash the work force in the name of profits the ONLY people who benefit are the shareholders and corporate management. The common man gets NOTHING of value out of it.
People, if you want to see the future of the IT field in a world market look at manufacturing. How many products are made in the USA anymore? It does not bode well.
There are plenty of skilled people here in the USA. We have the best colleges, and some of the brightest people. If it is about saving money then why not set up operations in the midwest where housing and the cost of living are low? That would keep the jobs in American hands as well as re-vitalize the economies of the poorest states and counties in America.
Now THAT would benefit the workers.
Slashdot previously covered the black-and-blue strike
That has got to be the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Over unionization, law suits, and labor laws which serve no purpose but to make law suits more effective are the reasons they are moving out of the US.
Canada is particularly popular, though the wages there are often higher. Does anyone actually think they treat their canadian employees worse?
Latewire
Well, they are packaged there, but the actual "guts" of the chips are usually made in the USA, as that is where most of the PhDs currently reside(not to mention export problems with China) but that may very well change. However, packaging is the most labor intensive part of creating processors, while the fab plants are the most intellectually intensive process.
Monstar L
I'm not disputing that there will always be a need for someone to fix plumbing problems, build or repair homes, fix cars, and all those other things.
But at the same time, those tasks rely on someone using their hands and doing work that they might not otherwise prefer to do.
The "knowledge" fields require exactly that.... detailed and complex knowledge of the area, in order to perform the work satisfactorily.
If I'm an intelligent person with no major physical disabilities, I can fix my own house - even if it means buying a couple books and a lot of trial and error. Heck, a while ago, my wife put up bathroom tile in our bathroom we remodeled, and she'd never done it before in her life. Looks completely professional and it's been up there for about 3 years now.
Same goes for cars, really. It might require a lot of tools and a lot of time tinkering around with things, but most people coming from these other "tech" fields could do it if they set their mind to it.
On ther other hand, even the smartest, most talented carpenter is not going to be equipped to do biotech work or even H.R. without paying for some formal training/schooling first.
Therefore, people practicing trades will always be in demand, but won't get the kind of pay they once got, if the other people are out of work and deciding they have to "do it themselves" rather than pay someone else.
Companies are out for profit. It is not immoral or wrong for them to seek service and products at the lowest cost.
Which is why I say it's immoral and wrong for companies to be only about profit to begin with. Lowest cost=lower quality=that nice new IBM blade server blowing up the first time it gets slashdotted.
More profit for the company ALWAYS means less value for the consumer and lower wages. And that- is immoral.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
There are plenty of skilled people here in the USA. We have the best colleges, and some of the brightest people. If it is about saving money then why not set up operations in the midwest where housing and the cost of living are low? That would keep the jobs in American hands as well as re-vitalize the economies of the poorest states and
Because there are lots of people in the USA who are "too good" to live in those places. A lot of them want to live in a 'cool' place and, while much of the MidWest is quite chilly in the winter, it is a different kind of 'cool' they are talking about. It isn't 'cool' to live in a MidWestern town, much less what is considered a city there.
Me? I've always moved to where the work was and I've lived/worked in a fairly small town or two (~20k people sometimes).
Said another way:
It is easy to have lofty principles such as helping the developing world until such time as it actually starts to cost us something.
Outsourcing is a sign. It is a sign that we're not doing the right things in the (more fully) developed world. If a programmer in India can do my job for half the wage and still look good (relative to his cost of living), then I'd better either learn Gujurati, Hindi, or one of the many other tongues and move to compete with him, or else I'd better be thinking of doing something else.
Does it shock anyone that at the same time as the US and the EU are bleeding skilled jobs to new centers of skill (India is developing quite a few of technical skill centers!) elsewhere in the world, that we're busy arguing about cutting back to a 35 hour work week (bits of the EU) or about making Intelligent Design the latest 'education' in our schools?
This is the 21st century. If you trained as a computer geek, realize computers are commoditizing and start looking at an exit strategy. Software is busy doing this now too. No one anymore says "I want to manufacture machine screws by hand!". We know this process is automated and you can now have them for a very low price. Similarly, software will go that route over time.
So, if you want to remain a highly educated worker at the cutting edge of the newest field, realize that computer software isn't going to be it. It was in the 1980s and 1990s. By 2120, I don't imagine it will be. So what are you doing to start sorting out 'the next area of innovation' and to prepare yourself to work in that field? Or are you buying a $400K+ house, driving a $40K+ car, and spending all your money on toys?
If you aren't saving up for your next stage of education and you aren't thinking about what it is and investing in continuing education steadily (and that may well mean 'into another area of study'), then you are essentially the woolen worker put out of work when the mills closed, or the hatpin maker who found out the machine could do a better and faster and cheaper job.... and you weren't looking ahead to see it coming.
So, you've got a warning. The trend is clear. Stop cringing and whinging and get out there and do! Plan, act, educate yourself, and move on to 'the next new thing'. If you have the brains to make sense out of assembly code, if you can write multi-threaded client server apps, if you can make a database sing... then surely you can use that brainpower in some other endeavour to equal effect, given some investment in training.
Ultimately, we're still stuck in the old model of 'go to school, get an education, carry on with life after education'. We should realize the new model is 'get a part of an education, work for a while, see the changes coming, re-educate, get a new job, work for a while, rinse, repeat.' That's living on globalized internet time. It might not be all that palatable if you feel like saying 'my brain is full' or 'but I've spent my time in school' but it is what the new world's rate of change will require. Be agile or be roadkill....
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
Um -- you're not paid based on how much money you generate for a company, you're paid based on how replaceable your job is.
True- but the question isn't what is currently true, but is what is currently true JUSTICE? I say it isn't- and the fact that this is true is proof that the higher ups are nothing but a bunch of crooks.
Want to be the one who collects the money at the top? Easy. Start your own company and create some jobs of your own.
Too bad if you try to do this in the United States without enough money for complete financial security and independance, one of the bigger guys will come and offer to buy out your company. If you refuse, your safe full of company secrets will myseriously disappear to a fire. If you persist in continuing to threaten the big guy's business, his thugs will come and offer to blow out your brains. And NOTHING can be done to stop them- because they've already bought the politicians, lawyers, and judges.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
There's another side to that coin. The companies paid those people before they made money off the product. Anyone with a good idea can be their own company and reap all the rewards or suffer the losses. While the IT people who helped generate that revenue only get a small piece of the money, they didn't have any of the risk if the product didn't sell. Most products are failures. Most work people do doesn't generate any money for the company. If each IT worker who generated disproportionately more income got more of it, there would be nothing left for the dead weight.
Once you've done something that made a lot of money for the company, if you expect to rest on your laurels, you'll be doing it unemployed. If you don't continue to demonstrate the value you bring to the company, don't expect them to care about you.
Unions don't solve any problems, they just change the kinds of problems you have. Unless everyone is in the union, there are plenty of people to fill the jobs, making the union a liability. Unions always increase employee costs. Employers given the chance will avoid the union employees. Those not given a chance will hire in countries without unions.
IT workers deserve exactly the paycheck they agree to. Nothing more. If you are valuable to the company, they will pay. However, you have to negotiate for the pay. Nobody will give you a big raise for doing a really good job. You have to play the same game as everyone else. The company will always pay you as little as they can get away with.
Each and every one of us is an expendable resource. If we can be replaced at a lower cost, we will be. That's the way the world works. If you want to earn more, you have to demonstrate value to those who have the money and convince them that you deserve a larger share. Those who have the money didn't get in that position by being nice and treating everyone fairly. If you want the rewards, you have to be willing to take risks to get them.
is to ensure that we drop prices so low, that by the time we have to go on public assistance we'll still be able to afford that $2 plasma TV.
For IBM, the manufacture of chips for consoles is just a drop in the bucket of their gross income. I would be cautious to say that this was a major reason for moving the 14,000 jobs to India.
We can now all work for IBM for free.
Uhmm...wait is IBM the good guy now or not? I need slashdork groupthink to tell me.
In case you missed it, the current administration has made the US national debt explode like never before. The country is billions in the red, and a sizeable portion of that debt is owned by--you guessed it--China.
Furthermore, the financial security of practically every US firm that does anything involving electronics, is dictated by China. Apple computers are built in Taiwan and shipped straight from there to the purchaser. Even companies that don't go that far, depend utterly on a steady supply of "just-in-time" electronic components.
Any time China wanted to, they could call in the debts, blockade Taiwan, and destroy the US economy in the space of a week or so. Sure, we'd send the Navy out, but it'd be hard to keep a war running with an economy that looked like the Great Depression Mark 2.
Of course, China has no real interest in destroying the US economy. Much better for them to use their influence to control the people who count, and make sure that nothing stops the flow of wealth from us to them.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Okay, but *which* society gets to decide? I'm sure that an Indian society would feel very different on this issue from a U.S. or European society. A multinational company like IBM spans too many societies to make it accountable to just one. And today even small companies can easily be multi-national.
It just doesn't work that way. Fact is companies are under enormous stress (from shareholders) to increase profits year by year.
You can do this 1 of 2 ways, either increase revenue or decrease costs.
So the cost saving is *never* passed on to the consumer, it's passed on to the shareholder, via a larger reported profit and an increase in the share price.
If I had created the world I wouldn't have messed about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers
The position that outsourcing is just good business and benefits the consumer may be true in the short term but has dire implications further down the road. By outsourcing these middle class jobs you are in effect removing the purchasing power of the former employees. The majority do find new jobs, but with lower salaries or with fewer benefits (forcing them to pay the cost). This is coupled with the fact that the US is importing more products than it exports. Which means that jobs that should involve Americans working to manufacture products for other Americans to purchase are becoming scarce as well. This leaves only the services industry which tends to pay bottom dollar salaries and provide few benefits (if any). My question is that what good are lower priced consumer goods if there is no middle class to purchase them and what economy can rely on a service based model if the service cannot be afforded?
[I am not saying anything either way.]
Way to straddle the fence at the end there. Did you put that there because you actually have no opinion or were you afraid of the random Slashdot mods?
You probably would have gotten -1 Heartless Capitalist if you'd said that the Indians should have the jobs.
And you probably would have gotten -1 Economics 101 if you'd said the jobs should stay in the US.
I salute your ability to attain a +4 Insightful (as of the time of this writing) without actually saying anything at all.
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This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along.
...is some propaganda. Get a bunch of people from the US/Europe to India and start spreading around "rumours" that people like themselves earn $75,000/yr - heck even $45,000/yr would do - in "civilized" countries. Next thing you know everyone in India will want to be treated equally and *bang* jobs will be homing back to where they were taken away from. Simple! M.
(Surely it should be the motto of every worker)
Acting stupid isn't much fun when there's someone around who knows better
"Money is just a measurement of scarcity, after all, and if there's no scarcity in labor, there's no money."
:)
That's an extremely absurd view of the accounting capabilities of money. Neither the presence of money, nor the absence of money, can objectively account for scarcity. Reality is ultimately more accurate than money, as a measuring tool.
What is money? It's a paper contract to facilitate trade. Observing ebbs and flows in money, you can make some observations about the transaction of goods and services.
Money exists without scarcity of labor; this is called unemployment. The existence of unemployed persons does not mean money is scarce; it means that there is an imbalance in supplies and demands (persons wanting goods and services but not having the ability or supply to trade for it). Scarcity of money is not the problem; a paucity of goods and services (or labor) to trade in exchange for needed or wanted goods and services, is the fundamental problem.
All of this can be poked, prodded, and manipulated by genius economists who yet can't predict next quarter's results any better than your local weatherman (discounting obvious inertia, which comprises the bulk of economic movement).
The message I heard was speaking to the United States, it spoke very clearly, and it said "you can give us all the concessions we could possibly ask for, you can let the be balance of power be tipped as far toward the corporations and as far away from the workers as it can realistically go, and we'll still drop your jobs and ship them to developing Asian countries, the exact same way we do to noncompliant, socialist Europe".
Hmm.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
You must be from Europe. Corporate thuggery does not exist in the United States to any meaningful degree. A huge portion of the US economy is just regular people who started their own companies. Just because we have more guns per capita than Europeans doesn't mean that business is conducted by the bullet.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
More profit for the company ALWAYS means less value for the consumer and lower wages. And that- is immoral.
That's absurd. It doesn't make any sense to conclude that that the profit motive has an inverse effect on value. Companies profit by providing the most value for the cost. Value != cheap.
IBMers'll have to say a home. (Then you'll see a BIG increase in telecommunications.)
Sadly, the hand writing is on the wall for EVERYBODY who works with their head.
Its one thing if you hoist boxes for a retail store, its quite another if you've got to compete with someone who's living in 'po'nuff' Braziania who's just underbid you for your job in the 'developped world'.
If you're working for dirt now, you're going to be indispensable (but competing with everybody else 'cause anybody can hoist a hundred weight of finished goods,) and that will be you saving grace.
Wall*Mart is the future of America. Isn't that aweful?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
> Want to be the one who collects the money at the top? Easy. Start your own company and create some jobs of your own.
There, in a nutshell, is the problem. The system we have now is designed to funnel the profits into the hands of a few people, and after multiple decades of this, you end up with a situation like we have now - professionals who used to be able to raise a family in a nice home on a single income now barely scrape by with two incomes.
This is a cycle of free-market capitalism, it's inherent in the structure of business. As the money gets concentrated at the top, there's less to go around. That's why you see small businesses closing left and right, while Starbucks and Wal-Mart open yet another store in your area. Even if you have an employee-owned company with profit sharing, it will eventually get swallowed up or plowed over by a larger company whose owners screwed people over so they could gain obscene wealth.
What's the answer? I don't know. Some say eat the rich. I say form cooperatives. The solution is probably somewhere in between.
That's like saying "True, gravity is the law NOW, but I say that it shouldn't be!" Supply and demand isn't something artificially imposed on society.
If you refuse, your safe full of company secrets will myseriously disappear to a fire. If you persist in continuing to threaten the big guy's business, his thugs will come and offer to blow out your brains. And NOTHING can be done to stop them- because they've already bought the politicians, lawyers, and judges.
Dude, put down the Chomsky, go outside, and breathe the air. We don't have mass murder of entrepreneurs going on.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Where do you think the money goes? Into mattresses? No -- it goes into investment, which creates more jobs. professionals who used to be able to raise a family in a nice home on a single income now barely scrape by with two incomes.
The world you think used to exist never existed. The reason people need two incomes now is because they SPEND MORE MONEY. It is entirely possible to live on one income, if you don't live luxuriously. The last generation simply accepted living on fewer luxuries.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The Indian worker will not accept that they have to charge American wages. It works like this.
You have two people, one in India, one local. They both cost the same ( fallout from your concept ), they are roughly equivilent in terms of productivity. Which one will you chose? I cant help but think you will chose the local person. You can set up face to face meetings anytime you want, and it will, by and large, work out. No locality issues, no time zone issues.
emt 377 emt 4
That's absurd. It doesn't make any sense to conclude that that the profit motive has an inverse effect on value. Companies profit by providing the most value for the cost. Value != cheap.
Companies have not profited by providing the most value for the cost since Wal*Mart created their second store. Look at Wal*Mart- cheap up front prices for crap that falls apart three times as fast as the other guy. Companies profit by having the highest prices the market will bear for the lowest production cost. If they can get away with selling something that is worthless and cost $.01 to make for $5000, they will profit MORE than the guy selling something of great worth that cost him $1 to make but he can only sell for $1.01.
Profit is Market Price - Cost, value has NOTHING to do with it.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
People in IBM obviously think differently and they are entitled to their opinions as well.
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It is actually funny that everyone talks of wages rising in India, but one thing that people never consider is the dollar - rupee conversion. It hovers around Rs.45 to a dollar and Rs.52 to a Euro. Even if the wages do rise the net effect in terms of dollar would be far less, while the equivalent rise in wages in the West would be far more. So overall the benefit still stays. Also India is producing scores of IT professionals and this is not going to change anytime soon as the viewpoint is that a career in engineering is far better than anything else. To be frank art(read humanities, languages and stuff) and commerce are looked down upon in India.
That's like saying "True, gravity is the law NOW, but I say that it shouldn't be!" Supply and demand isn't something artificially imposed on society.
Really? Then why for 1000 years did it not exist in a Guild economy with price controls? The economy is engineered whether you like it or not: supply and demand is just an excuse for cheating your employees on one side and your customers on the other.
Dude, put down the Chomsky, go outside, and breathe the air. We don't have mass murder of entrepreneurs going on.
No- because most entrepreneurs KNOW this is what will happen and sell out at the first sign of such trouble.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Since 86% of stock is owned by the wealthiest 10%, money speny buying stock (or stock-price appreciation caused by businesses) goes pretty much to the rich, accelerating the concentration of wealth.
I have trouble imagining what kind of economic efficiency, or society, we will have when a (relative) handful of people own everything, and the rest of us are serfs.
IBM is now on my bad-guys list. They've sold out the US worker, and the European one as well. There should be strikes called by the unions. This globalization is getting out of hand. We need to stop it before it's too late.
That's when slashdot mod points will be the next currency :)
Got news for you- the story I just related happened in Seattle in 1970. The only company involved that survived is quite well known today- it's called Microsoft. The entreprenuer's estate sold the company, it's still around too but in a much smaller form and owned by a totally different group of people- Caldera.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
>> The system we have now is designed to funnel the profits into the hands of a few people
> Where do you think the money goes? Into mattresses? No -- it goes into investment, which creates more jobs.
*Some* of it does, but a lot of it gets invested in ventures that *lose* money, or into foreign companies which doesn't benefit American workers. A lot of it is tied up in assets and real estate that are essentially Golden Mattresses.
> The world you think used to exist never existed. The reason people need two incomes now is because they SPEND MORE MONEY. It is entirely possible to live on one income, if you don't live luxuriously.
I call bullshit on that one. The average middle-class professional has less buying power *per dollar* than he or she did in 1960, and that is a fact. I earn $30,000 a year, which is a reasonable salary but it doesn't go far in San Diego. I don't live a luxurious lifestyle, I have a modest 1BR apartment and I still can't afford a car, let alone a family. I'm sinking in debt. The simple truth is that salaries have not risen anywhere near in proportion to the cost of living.
What good is capitalism for workers when there's absolutely no scarcity of labor
Hmm, see Kurt Vonnegut's "Piano Player" for some interesting sci-fi, humor and insight here.
If they can get away with selling something that is worthless and cost $.01 to make for $5000, they will profit MORE than the guy selling something of great worth that cost him $1
Yes, but of course you can't get away with that which is why nobody does it. WallMart appartently does have a good price/value ratio, it's just that the price is low and (sometimes) so is the value. WallMart sucks, though, because they don't treat their employees like human beings. They also don't sell IBM blade servers, so I'm not sure how your original comment relates to this one.
Or better yet "Player Piano" which is the correct name of the book :)
Then why for 1000 years did it not exist in a Guild economy with price controls?
It did. They hid it a little better, but it still existed.
No- because most entrepreneurs KNOW this is what will happen and sell out at the first sign of such trouble.
Most people in the US work for a small company. A significant number of Americans own their own company. Nobody other than the black helicopter crowd sees mass murder of entrepreneurs as a possibility. Once in a while it happens, but not often enough to be concerned. Most large business sell to and buy from large businesses. One business might be helped by the murder of a small business, but the others are hurt, and they will take steps to prevent it - if it really happened.
Take off your tin foil hat, which doesn't do anything. Look at the real world. Your claims to not match up with reality.
Work hard, Love Jesus, be loyal -- It is all a sham. In the end we will all get cancer. And since, we lost our jobs and can't afford medical insurance, we will just suffer and die.
I say Fuck the Church, Fuck the American way of Life, Fuck the Man. Who really needs a big screen TV and all the other crap the world wants the American consumer to buy. Sorry for the rant. I feel like America treats its citizens like ATM machines and I find it annoying. Why is it after the world trade center was destroyed, Bush said [paraphrase] we can't let the terrorist win, go out an buy stuff? freedom is not consumption. I support an open-source world where all contribute to the collective intellectual expansion.
The US does, foe the US.This is called tariffs and protectionism, and I think it has its place. Many of these low-wage countries don't have nearly adequate protection of human rights or the environment. India is one of these, China another. I am not suggesting that all laws have to be uniform, but rather there is a minimum standard that those which trade with the first world (to use an ugly marxist term) should have to abide by.
Yes, I am speaking from a euro-american perspective. Yes, I realize that other cultures in the world have different ideas of what is right. I am not saying that they should be forced to change. But I believe in doing business only with civilized people.
Apparently the indian workers make at at most 93% less than us for this to have been an improvement. Great.
Question everything
I'm sorry, but you're wrong on that front.
A For Profit organization is allowed to take the money and dump it into the pockets of a few wealthy people.
A Not For Profit has to spend its money that way, but IBM isn't one, neither is Microsoft.
They have the option to reinvest the money in R&D, and indeed, MS and IBM both have wonderful R&D departments, funded off of this money. They are, however, not legally obligated to spend the money this way.
One of the very positive effects of outsourcing is that it actually rasies people out of poverty. And poverty in India or China can be a lot worse than poverty in the U.S. Additionally, it seems morally wrong for very bright, well educated people in India to be driving taxis because they can't find a more challanging and rewarding job.
This fact is that it's easy to ignore the positive net effects of outsourcing in the U.S. and other developed countries, especially for people like myself who's job is threatened.
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
" don't want business to make the decisions about what is moral or immoral."
No? So if you ran, say, Lockheed Martin, you'd be selling weapons to, say, North Korea? Or you'd have provided banking services to the Third Reich, as Bush's family did?
A corporation is a fictitious concept. People make decisions, and people's decisions are inherently moral.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
Price is ulitimatly what the consumer is willing to pay for a product. If the hypothetical WalMart you see is selling overpriced crap then they would go out of business or clean up their act when other retailers come to town. That's what I have seen in my town. Walmart almost drove Kmart away. Target has forced Walmart to clean up their stores now.
No matter where you go, there you are.
Yes, but of course you can't get away with that which is why nobody does it. WallMart appartently does have a good price/value ratio, it's just that the price is low and (sometimes) so is the value.
Everything I've ever bought at a WallMart has been of the lowest possible quality and value for the cost. There's a reason why they're making a 40% profit margin on just about every item.
WallMart sucks, though, because they don't treat their employees like human beings.
Nobody making a profit does. Profit is against treating employees like human beings.
They also don't sell IBM blade servers, so I'm not sure how your original comment relates to this one.
Made in China and India is the hint of the day- it doesn't matter who is doing the outsourcing, outsourcing is always about lowest possible cost and destruction of quality to produce higher profits.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I got tired of repeating what I say below, I actually put it on my web page here:
e w=5
http://www.windbag.us/index.php?module=article&vi
1. Outsourcing equals Importation
There is no economic difference between outsourcing a job and importing a good. If company A outsources its customer services calls to India, and company B imports a bunch of computer hardware from Taiwan, then both companies impact the US economy in the same way. The only difference is in the particular sector impacted (hardware manufacturing jobs vs. customer service jobs). If you prefer, you can think of outsourcing a job as importing a service.
2. Importation equals Technological Innovation
There is no economic difference between importing a cheaper good and implementing a labor-saving technology to produce that good for less. If company X imports cheaper computer (or potato) chips from China, and company Y reduces production costs by substituting robots for humans on a chip assembly line, then both companies impact the US economy in the same way. The sectoral employment disruptions and the effect on consumer prices are identical. If you prefer, you can think of the discovery that goods can be shipped from overseas as a labor-saving technological innovation.
3. Conclusion
Whenever you're tempted to cheer Lou Dobbs on when he blathers about 'Exporting America' on CNN, consider whether you'd be willing to send your PC back to Taiwan and insist on more expensive (and now non-existent!) US-made computer hardware. And anytime you feel the urge to insist on US-made goods, ask yourself whether you'd support outlawing the automobile so that buggy-whip makers can get their jobs back. This may seem rhetorically outlandish, but these are the types of equivalences the two propositions above force you into.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
But it's short-sighted. Who's going to buy IBM products and services as unemployment grows and wages shrink?
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
Thanks for explaining the solution to the offshoring "problem".
Really these are just temporary adjustments due to the current market conditions.
You tell 'em, brother! Bring us back to the 7 hour work week! The minimum wage is a curse straight from the mouth of Stalin! It's not "child labor," it's "child labor freedom of choice!" Fire codes are socialism! (So what if a few proles burn up because we chose to save money by omitting some windows and exit doors from the factory floor plan.) I think those crippled beggars, missing eyes and hands and legs on the side of the road are truly the sign of a healthy economy! And who dares force anyone to put a coin in their cup. We already bought and paid for their $12.98 acid-wash denim jeans on sale, the transaction ends there, buddy! One day, when the EPA is gone and we handle our environment Russian-style, maybe then, America will be great again!
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Well the usual trend is, the richer the family, the fewer the kids...
This kind of quickie-mart reduction of economic reasoning is why the Average American in trouble.
C ourses/so11/stratification/income&wealth.htm
Autos/livery business.
The reasonable livery worker said, "This automobile industry uses like skills, so I'll try to get a job there."
In 2005, can the IBM worker move in a similar way? Not likely because he's competing with similar workers who are being paid 1/5 less.
Outsourcing Creates New Opportunities.
Economic thought says the most likely answer is the place that maximizes profit. And that place is NOT the U.S. because our wages and living standards are so high relative to other places.
Progress
Ah, the cult of progress:
What goods/services will Americans sell to other global that they can't get anywhere else? They can get your precious Flash programming lots of other places for a lot less. Then what will you do? Likely sponge off your wealthy parents until you find something else you can feel superior in.
Sovereignty & Free Markets
The U.S. is an economic sovereignty with the top-10% of its citizens owning 72% of everything. That's using data from 1983! They got it using a heavily modified set of free market tools. http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/faculty/hodgson/
Live and Learn a little about America before you put your foot in your mouth again.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
We simply can't compete with people who only need $150 a month to live on.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
That's why you see small businesses closing left and right, while Starbucks and Wal-Mart open yet another store in your area.
They only have power if people give it to them. Don't like Wal-mart, Starbucks, and the latest TGI McPickleshitter's family restaurant? Shop local.
I do it. It costs more. It's worth it.
--saint
"Fact is companies are under enormous stress (from shareholders) to increase profits year by year."
Well fuck shareholders. It's not their livelihood that's at stake. You know, if you're running a small shop and employ local workers, you'll at least have to look them in the face when you fire them. You will realize exactly how your business decisions impact the society you live in. Shareholders don't care, don't know and don't see the results of their wants. They share profits but they do not share responsibility. There's this huge disconnect between owners (shareholders) and their property. Shareholders don't give a fuck about any particular company, they just push money as it suits them. They do none of the work and have no involvement in the reality of the companies they own.
Whoever came up with the idea of publicly-traded companies was seriously fucked up.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
Wow, I see that at least one Slashdot moderator considers me a troll for thinking critically about this issue rather than taking a dogmatic stance.
Too bad if you try to do this in the United States without enough money for complete financial security and independance, one of the bigger guys will come and offer to buy out your company. If you refuse, your safe full of company secrets will myseriously disappear to a fire. If you persist in continuing to threaten the big guy's business, his thugs will come and offer to blow out your brains. And NOTHING can be done to stop them- because they've already bought the politicians, lawyers, and judges.
Hmmm - I started a business 2 years ago. This year, our revenue is nearing $2 million. We did not have "enough money for complete financial security and independance". My partner and I had enough money for next month's rent.
No "big guys" came and offered to buy us out; neither did any thugs come after us.
We took a huge risk, put our futures at stake and now you are telling me that my employees must make the same money that I'm making? The same employees who were working in steady jobs and had fun while we worked our tails out?
This is what sickens me about unions.
Losing ventures are a sign of a healthy economy -- it means people are taking risks.
A lot of it is tied up in assets and real estate that are essentially Golden Mattresses.
Assets that need maintenance. I recall in the 80s they instituted a Luxury Tax on yaughts, etc. Guess what happened? The people punished weren't the rich -- it was the people who worked on yaughts! Wood crafters, upholsterers, mechanics, etc. The lesson is that the rich don't hire the rich to maintain their assets.
I earn $30,000 a year, which is a reasonable salary but it doesn't go far in San Diego. I don't live a luxurious lifestyle, I have a modest 1BR apartment and I still can't afford a car, let alone a family. I'm sinking in debt. The simple truth is that salaries have not risen anywhere near in proportion to the cost of living.
Dude, you live in freaking San Diego, and if you're sinking in debt on $2000/month, then you're living in one of the nicer areas. What do you expect? You ARE living a luxurious lifestyle. Do you think you should have the right to live anywhere you want?
That's what I'm talking about -- you're SPOILED. The previous generation didn't expect to live in areas of luxury, they lived in middle-class areas and saved their money.
Not that Southern California real estate isn't expensive -- it is, in a lot of cases (I know, I live here). But if you can't afford it, don't live here.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The corporation will make decisions based upon profit. I don't care how moral the individuals are... If there is enogh profit, the business will find a way to take advantage of it.
So this is where gov't comes in. If the U.S. says, I won't allow you to do business in our country if you do business in N. Korea. Then Lockheed makes a balance sheet analysis. If it is profitable enough to do anyway, they will do it. If not, they won't.
You may WANT business to act ethically without outseide pressure, but history shows it doesn't happen (as a whole).
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
This has been going for years and is the part of globalization that can benefit other countries not just India; for instance Latin America has been buying IBM products for along time, same as Europe and US, but opening jobs in these other countries gives some of the money paid up back in the means of jobs; I would like to see more of these companies placing jobs overseas in Latin America and other parts of the world.
I don't see the point of keeping a company exclusively on US or Europe if it sells its products worldwide; they just want other countries to buy form them, without collaborating in their progress otherwise than selling products.
Here is an eye-opening article about India/China and western countries. http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,15 18,358800,00.html
To quote Thomas Friedman "It is interesting because French voters are trying to preserve a 35-hour work week in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day. Good luck. Voters in "old Europe" - France, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy - seem to be saying to their leaders: stop the world, we want to get off; while voters in India have been telling their leaders: stop the world and build us a stepstool, we want to get on.
I feel sorry for Western European blue collar workers. A world of benefits they have known for 50 years is coming apart, and their governments don't seem to have a strategy for coping. "
- Sh!t
It did. They hid it a little better, but it still existed.
In a guild economy, you pay a Just Wage and you get a Fair Price. Period. The Fair Price is ALWAYS 10% over the Just Wage + the cost of the materials. It's never about supply and demand.
Most people in the US work for a small company.
And most- at some point in their careers- will be laid off when the owner sells out.
A significant number of Americans own their own company.
That number is getting smaller every year, and has been for decades now.
Nobody other than the black helicopter crowd sees mass murder of entrepreneurs as a possibility.
Really? Do you really think anybody would hesitate to use murder to eliminate a competitor?
Once in a while it happens, but not often enough to be concerned.
It doesn't have to happen very often to know that you take the offer before it gets worse.
Most large business sell to and buy from large businesses.
Until a small business threatens their market share- and then the guns come out.
One business might be helped by the murder of a small business, but the others are hurt, and they will take steps to prevent it - if it really happened.
All the other businesses in the controling oligarchy also benefit from the elimination of the competitor- so if done properly (not proveable, no way to walk back up the chain from the contractor) why would anybody take steps to prevent it? When Ford took out Tucker- how was GM harmed?
Take off your tin foil hat, which doesn't do anything. Look at the real world. Your claims to not match up with reality.
I've experienced it- take off your blindfold and look at reality. No big business is ever going to tolerate a little guy taking away their market share- and there is NOTHING preventing it.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
if the message they got was, end free trade?
:)
Horrors! That would be an "economic catastrophe," you say. I want to try it and see. Or rather, go _back_ to doing it. Weren't we protectionist throughout most of the "good" years in the USA, for instance?
What would _really_ happen if we just let the countries that practice slave labor (i.e. China) do business with themselves, instead of letting the American and European labor markets be affected by slavery?
I know the canned answer by heart! Spare me! My cup of coffee will cost $100. You know what? I _want_ to see what the world looks like when nobody gets exploited anywhere in the labor market.
If first-world labor conditions are not economically sustainable for all, I want to say we tried and failed. I actually got the impression, from the supposed "good years" of American history, that we tried and had a rousing success!
Free trade, as far as I can tell, is nothing more than crypto laissez-faire capitalism. Plutocrats can undo all of the pro-labor laws in nation X by skipping across the border to nation Y or Z. Yes, it's cheaper to pick cotton with slaves than uppity high-school educated first-worlders. Wow, Adam Smith is a genius. Then a little while later the job market delivers the bad news to the benighted proletariat.
The punch line? The companies just lost to the prisoner's dillemma. They saved a bit of money and (if they needed it) had price leverage to beat their competitors in the marketplace. It takes a while before the macroeconomic reprecussions blow back, and you realize that big economies are driven by "consumers," not aristocrats, only now your consumers aren't so healthy anymore. Welcome back to the 3rd world.
In a global economy, the labor fleet only travels as fast as its slowest national ship.
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http://zazona.com/ShameH1B/JobDestructionNews.htm
In a recent newsletter I wrote about a new corporate plan by Honeywell that some of their executives called a "Census Adjustment". Their cutsie corporate terminology is just another way of describing their new policy of replacing U.S. labor with cheaper foreign labor. I equated Honeywell's "census adjustment" to a corporate policy of "ethnic cleansing".
Since that newsletter was published I have received credible
information about several of the specifics of the Honeywell plan. The following information may seem like a spoof, but I assure you that it's no joke and nobody at Honeywell will be laughing as of July 1st.
DISCLAIMER: Although this information contained in this newsletter is from a credible source, there may be some factual errors. I have no way of independently verifying any of these factoids below.
***** Dictionary of terms used by Honeywell corporate executives
*****
Learning the dialects used by the corporatists can help us understand how they view the world. These are a few terms that I learned by studying information from Honeywell.
Census Adjustment: mass replacement of higher priced American employees with lower cost foreign employees. They don't make a distinction between foreign workers that come to the U.S. on H-1B/L-1 visas and workers that are in offshore positions. In most cases the foreign workers are high-tech workers from India or Eastern Europe. This term
is going out-of-favor among Honeywell executives because so many employees made derisive comments and jokes about it.
Globalization: the use of workers as a global commodity to lower cost. This term can be used interchangeably with "census adjustment".
Globalized engineers: usually used when referring to foreign engineers
that come to the U.S. by using H-1B and L-1 visas, but it can also be
used to describe overseas engineers that work for Honeywell (the exact
meaning depends on the context). The phrase is a clever code-word that
corporate execs and HR lap-dogs use for "Cheap engineers".
Infill - the process of filling job positions with workers. There is no
distinction made between the hiring of new workers or the transferring
of workers from one Honeywell location to another. "Infill" is a trendy
term that is very popular with borks and HR departments.
----- Honeywell's Plan for Census Adjustment by Globalization -----
Honeywell executives have decided that revenue spent for engineering
must go below 15% of their total expenditures. In order to cut costs
they will "globalize" their engineering departments. This globalization
process will focus on cutting the cost of labor by using the following
methods:
* Replacing current Honeywell workers with L-1 visa holders. These L-1
visa holders will come mostly from Russia, Czech Republic, and India.
* Whenever possible all positions in engineering and its support
functions will be outsourced to overseas locations.
* All new IT jobs will be required to be outsourced offshore.
* No external hiring will be allowed, and transfers of employees within
Honeywell will be discouraged until the job terminations are complete.
* Open job positions will be "backfilled with globalized engineers at a
lower cost." Managers that refuse to go along with this process will be
replaced with more cooperative ones.
* American subcontractors are currently being eliminated and replaced
with foreign companies.
The following factoids pertain specifically about Honeywell's Component
Engineering in their Commercial Electronic Systems (CES) on Deer Valley
Road in Phoenix, Arizona and Aerospace (AES). Similar tactics will be
used at other Honeywell locations.
>> Honeywell CEO, Dave Cote, has ordered Roman Jamragowiecz, VP of
Engineering, to globalize 25% of AES engineering. It is generall
AZspot
I don't normally reply to Cowards, but...
The result, without illegal aliens, is called "allowing the genuine free market to reallocate resources".
Since when is arbitrarily disallowing wage competition a "genuine free market" ? Tarrifs, import taxes, minimum wage and many other factors prevent this from being a "genuine free market". If you really want a free market, there would be no taxes on imported goods from anywhere.
A consequence (and a good one at that) is that people in the unskilled labor market earn a decent wage allowing them to live livable lives.
You don't seem to get it. If the labor costs more, the product costs more, which costs people more to get it, which makes the increased wages not mean anything. This is called "inflation" as one other poster so astutely pointed out. Thus, your "decent wage" is actually the same amount as it used to be when adjusted for inflation.
The free market does indeed work and enables people (including those at the "bottom") to live acceptably -- as long as you ensure (by banning illegal aliens) that market forces are allowed to operate normally and freely (i.e. free of obliteration by Mexican-government policies).
And this is your definition of a "free market"? Maybe you should write for The Economist.
Genuine free trade, not fake free trade, works.
In theory, yes, but in practice, true free trade would result in a normalization of living standards across the globe, thus completely destroying the American way of life. Eventually, as the world recovers, things would progress back upwards, but we would he in for a very rough ride.
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
It was called feudalism, and we're getting there fast. Then the tide is going to turn again, the question is how many generations it'll take.
Poeple keep repeating this "investment" mantra like they never had a thought of their own. Pushing money (stocks) around is not investment, it's speculation and it generates as much value as betting on horse races, which is zero.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
I think what the GP was trying to say was that the particular cost of an item in dollars at any given time is generated directly by it's scarcity. The more scarce the item, the higher it's dollar ammount.
Money itself is indeed a paper contract to facilitate trade, but the actual dollar ammount of an item is in fact, by definition of economics, it's relative scarcity to the next best thing.
Dastardly IBM had been producing nefarious devices which think. Each of these devices, which are called 'computers', can replace a dozen typesetters, clerks, accountants and secretaries.
If this 'comp-sourcing' continues at the present rate then by 1970, 99% of America will be unemployed and society will be run large
thinking robots controlled by fat cat IBM executives.
Price is ulitimatly what the consumer is willing to pay for a product. If the hypothetical WalMart you see is selling overpriced crap then they would go out of business or clean up their act when other retailers come to town.
No other retailers are allowed- because nobody can beat Walmart's method of blackmailing suppliers.
That's what I have seen in my town. Walmart almost drove Kmart away. Target has forced Walmart to clean up their stores now.
What I've seen is that Target has accepted Walmart's way of doing business- Walmart has forced Target to sell lower quality items than they were previously. But hey- it's just business right? I force you out of work, but it's not personal...like we believe THAT.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Thank you for reiterating the obvious.
-Reid
Everything I've ever bought at a WallMart has been of the lowest possible quality and value for the cost.
Then you're foolish to shop there. I think you're just racist, or at least short sighted, in insisting that something made in India or China means that it must be low quality. Many years ago, people equated Japanese products with low quality too.
WTF? You would seriously murder to eliminate a competitor? This just silly. The number of people who would actually go to that extent is vanishingly small.
No big business is ever going to tolerate a little guy taking away their market share- and there is NOTHING preventing it.
"No big business?" History proves you wrong, over and over. How did Compaq manage to take business from IBM? Hell, how does ANY small company get big under your theory?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Shareholders are the owners of the company. Companies borrow money from Shareholders, and shareholders share all the risk if that company goes under. Shareholders can easily lose all their money if they buy into a bad company. This is a share in the company, so obviously they have say. If you have voting shares you even get to vote on issues, and depending how many shares you own (How much of the company you own) you have more say. I don't think you fully understand what a shareholder is. Many companies would not be where they are today if they could not get large sums of money from Shareholders, and why shouldn't someone who has risked their own money to own part of a company have a say?
www.ianhoar.com My blog about geeking out.
Hmmm - I started a business 2 years ago. This year, our revenue is nearing $2 million.
Net or gross? And forget about revenue- what the big boys care about is market share. In your industry, what is your market share?
We did not have "enough money for complete financial security and independance". My partner and I had enough money for next month's rent. No "big guys" came and offered to buy us out; neither did any thugs come after us.
You're either not very competitive or not very successfull- regardless of your balance sheet. It could be you're in a low-competition industry that there aren't any major competitors for your business. It could be that you simply aren't taking enough market share YET to get noticed. Either way- it will happen eventually.
We took a huge risk, put our futures at stake and now you are telling me that my employees must make the same money that I'm making?
If you failed- do you really think your employees would have stayed employed? Heck, if you sold out rather than fail, do you really think your employees would stay employed?
The same employees who were working in steady jobs and had fun while we worked our tails out?
You employed people to have fun for you? On company time?
Why would you put up with such lazy employees that made you no money?
Conversely- say your employees make you a lot of money. Say one single employee was completely responsible for half your revenue- would it be fair to keep paying him the same as the rest are getting?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
"IBM uses what I like to call the 'hole-in-the-ground technique' to destroy the competition..... IBM digs a big HOLE in the ground and covers it with leaves. It then puts a big POT OF GOLD nearby. Then it gives the call, 'Hey, look at all this gold, get over here fast.' As soon as the competitor approaches the pot, he falls into the pit" - John C. Dvorak
Sorry I don't have any moderator points, or I'd "mod" you up. You are exactly right. Without disposable income there is no one to buy all the stuff that the factories all over the world are churning out. Currently purchasing power is supported by credit. Money taken out of home equity, credit cards and the massive trade deficit. This will not continue forever (or even for that much longer).
I finished a essay on this in 2004 titled An Economics Question, which includes an extensive set of annotated, largely web accessible, references.
I would rather pay a few dollars more for something made in the US that provides US jobs that pay rock bottom prices and hollow out our economy. This would still allow competition within the US (and kill off the buggywhip makers) but would still provide a healthy local economy. People forget that the free trade religion in the US is certainly not shared by countries like China and Japan.
But only if you hold onto the stocks and the stocks pay dividends.
Otherwise, you're 100% accurate. The "buy low, sell high" stock market mantra is pure speculation and speculation just moves the existing money around without creating anything of value.
http://www.bell.lib.umn.edu/Products/tulips.html
What happens is lots of money goes to a few people who spend lavishly on extravagent luxuries. That money comes from the many losers in that game.
And that is the problem with the current "investments" in the stock market. It's great when you're the winner, but there are far more losers than winners. No one likes to look at what happens if you aren't one of the winners.
Then you're foolish to shop there.
No- because I no longer shop there. Haven't since the Great Awakening of 2001.
I think you're just racist, or at least short sighted, in insisting that something made in India or China means that it must be low quality.
You misundertand- I said anything made at a LOW WAGE is LOW QUALITY. India and China will be producing at the equivalent of Japan the day they treat their workers the same as the Japanese do; just as Japan was low quality until wages rose to first world standards.
The difference being that the WTO and the governments of India and China are working very hard to keep the actual workers in poverty- knowing that the business will quickly go elsewhere if wages rise.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Not to mention, who's going to buy IBM anything when the quality is in the toilet? /gam/
"In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they are not."
Um -- you're not paid based on how much money you generate for a company, you're paid based on how replaceable your job is.
No, you're paid based on the money you generate for a company. It's easy to show this to be true. If you cost more money than you generated, the company will fire you (companies are not welfare organizations). If you cost $1 and generate $100 in revenue, then someone else will offer you $2 and pocket $98 profit. Someone else will offer $3 to get $97 in profit. This continues until an equilibrium is reached that is around 15% or so.
Of course, this will vary because it is often hard to calculate how much revenue a person will bring in, but if a company strays too far from this in either direction it is unstable and will likely fail.
that's where the shareholders see all the profit being drained off to - and that's why this is happening.
Not the owners (shareholders) - the execs (elitists).
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Ugh, bad move. You spent a few paragraphs doing a decent analytical description of how wages are set, then you get down to unions and start using a word like "deserve."
There's no "deserve" about it, unions are an economic force which can effect wages and growth.
You must know that's an oversimplification.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
WTF? You would seriously murder to eliminate a competitor?
If they were taking food of my table- most certainly. To a major corporation, just substitute profit for food.
This just silly. The number of people who would actually go to that extent is vanishingly small.
Why? Because of some outdated concept that murder is wrong?
"No big business?"
Well, no big business today would hesitate. I hear tell that 35 years ago, before Microsoft, businesses were a bit more moral. But other than examples such as you provide, I'm not sure that I believe it.
How did Compaq manage to take business from IBM?
Either businesses were once more moral- I don't know since I was a child at the time- or they had good security.
Hell, how does ANY small company get big under your theory?
By being more ruthless than the competition- which gives you three ways: 1. By sueing their competitors out of existance. 2. By having good enough security to prevent big businesses from doing this to them. 3. By having enough investment money to survive the cutthroat business practices and by being more innovative than their competitors.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
From the news.com version of this:
"Maybe the shareholders should look offshore for competitive executives who would collect less pay and fewer benefits," said Lee Conrad, national coordinator of the Alliance@IBM, a union-affiliated group that has 6,500 dues-paying members at IBM
...when we invent replicators and then we reach the state where the ammasing of wealth is no more the driving force. Everyone will work to better themselves and mankind... :D
and then we will go where no one has gone before
(sorry i thot everyone could use a little star trek)
P.S. And, of course, there's also the point that in the long run, Compaq did not survive- HP made them an offer they couldn't refuse, with the result being lower quality goods offered by both.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Got news for you - it's 2005, and 1970 was 35 years ago. Not to mention that you are giving one anecdotal example with no references, and that you have in no way at all supported the claim that this is the general business climate in the United States.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
It hovers around Rs.45 to a dollar and Rs.52 to a Euro. Even if the wages do rise the net effect in terms of dollar would be far less
How do you figure that? What does the exchange rate have to do with anything? You could say the same thing about Australian or Canadian dollars to US dollars or US dollars to Pounds Sterling. Exchange rates are meaningless in this context. And it's not just currency. Ten miles is a larger distance than ten kilometers, but the distance between two points doesn't change just because you change units.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Firing people to shift jobs overseas is not morally equivalent to doing new hires overseas.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
They just don't get it. The winners are the consumer who gets to pay lower prices for the products and services.
Yeah, I just can't wait! I'm sure my electric bill will be going down soon and so will the price of gasoline. How about health insurance? I'm sure that it's about to plunge too. Food? No problem it'll be practically free soon. Housing? Yeah, we'll offshore that and it'll be cheap soon too... All this stuff has just been getting cheaper the last few years what with all the offshoring going on... Uhhh... Oh, wait...
Nice fairy tale you've got there.
No- because I no longer shop there. Good for you. That's the point. If I felt that I was getting bad service from a company or that the product was inferior, I would shop elsewhere. I never felt that walmart was overpriced for what you got as much as the stores were clutterd and dirty.
No matter where you go, there you are.
I think you might want to do a little more homework. I work for a company that is right now transferring certain tasks "offshore" to India. The price for the services rose in between the time the verbal agreement was made and the contract was signed. Private conversations I've had with colleagues from India indicate that the salaries for IT (in dollars) is rising by more than 20% annually. There is already a scarcity of skilled IT resources in some areas, and therefore the salary increases are expected to accelerate. Current estimates indicate that within three to five years there will no longer be a cost benefit to offshoring the services we need to India. However, our company has chosen to proceed with the plan because the exercise of commodotizing the needed services will allow us to move that portion of our workforce relatively quickly to whatever place is cost effective. In a few years, that will probably be either Malaysia or China.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
JUSTICE
If you want justice, then stop paying starting engineers straight out of junior college three times the salary of teachers with thirty or more years of experience. Stop demanding it for yourself.
Too bad if you try to do this in the United States without enough money for complete financial security and independance, one of the bigger guys will come and offer to buy out your company. If you refuse, your safe full of company secrets will myseriously disappear to a fire. If you persist in continuing to threaten the big guy's business, his thugs will come and offer to blow out your brains.
What a shitty fantasy world you live in. Fortunately this does NOT happen in the United States. Sometimes there are legal pressures, but no ones brains have been blown out. Sleepycat Software is still in business despite the billions that Larry Ellison has in his wallet. My brother works for a startup company with fifty employees that directly competes with my company employing over 100,000. Yet no one there worries about their brains being blown out. That little lady with her boutique on the corner is still in business despite the billions in the Walmart coffers. And only a nutjob like yourself would tell Linus Torvalds to get more life insurance because someone from Redmond is coming to blow his brains out.
Get a clue!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
You're either not very competitive or not very successfull- regardless of your balance sheet. It could be you're in a low-competition industry that there aren't any major competitors for your business. It could be that you simply aren't taking enough market share YET to get noticed. Either way- it will happen eventually.
Wow. That is amazing. Without knowing what business we are in, what our margins are, you can pass judgement that we are not successfull or competitive. Amazing!
If you failed- do you really think your employees would have stayed employed? Heck, if you sold out rather than fail, do you really think your employees would stay employed?
I do not understand this statement and what is has to do with my point. My point was that we (my partner and I) should make more money than my current employees, simply because we took the risk and we should be rewarded for that risk. Otherwise, why would we have bothered to start a business that provides employement to ~ 7 people?
You employed people to have fun for you? On company time?
Maybe I was not clear enough. I meant that while we started out (no employees), we put in 15-20 hours days. At that time, most of my current employees, were gainfully employed in other companies, got married, bought houses, etc.
Now, you are telling me that I should share my company's profits equally with my employees? Then what is my reward for putting in the long hours?
Conversely- say your employees make you a lot of money. Say one single employee was completely responsible for half your revenue- would it be fair to keep paying him the same as the rest are getting?
Depends - if the fictional employee (who makes half the revenue of the company) is able to do it because of his unique talent, yes, he/she will get paid a lot. If the employee is able to make that money simply because of my organization (he goes to a client, says I'm from XYZ corp and the client gives the order because he is from XYZ corp), he will get paid the market salary. If he quits, I will just replace him.
If I remember correctly, that would be the European monarchies. Corporations came into being for the purpose of colonizing (or eliminating) and exploiting "inferior" cultures. Merchantilism was one of the things the U.S. was fighting during the Revolutionary War, since the British Crown used the joint-stock companies to dump goods on the colonies, along with a bunch of other annoying nastiness.
Basic capitalism is fine for the time being, but corporate capitalism is really just a throw-back to the time of kings and emporers.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Not necessarily. Stock is bought "used" unless it's from an IPO.
...money speny buying stock (or stock-price appreciation caused by businesses) goes pretty much to the rich, accelerating the concentration of wealth.
Where did he say "stock"? He said "investment."
- It means investing money in banks: giving everyone else a better chance for a loan at a lower rate.
- It means investing in new companies: giving people jobs, new/better goods and services, and opening up potential for others to invest (shareholders).
- It means starting your own company, that's an investment, too.
- And yes, it means investing in the stock market. And while you may think they are buying the stock "used," if no one buys the stock, the price of the stock goes down because there are more sellers than buyers, and that affects the underlying company in many different ways.
When I buy IBM stock, IBM doesn't see a penny of that money; some goes to middlemen, and the rest goes to a former IBM stockholder.
Uh huh... right. And what happens when IBM pays you a dividend on your shares? And what happens when you sell those shares for a profit somewhere down the road? And what happens when IBM has more power to leverage it's higher share prices.
It's not like you're just paying someone for a piece of worthless paper.
Since 86% of stock is owned by the wealthiest 10%...
Source of this statistic?
Wow. You are stunningly ignorant about the stock market. How does purchasing equity concentrate wealth elsewhere? You have purchased SOMETHING. You can earn profit on it (indicated above). You are investing in the economy.
I have trouble imagining what kind of economic efficiency, or society, we will have when a (relative) handful of people own everything, and the rest of us are serfs.
The reason you may have trouble imagining this is because it is ludicrous. The economy is a pie. The richer among us have a large share of the pie. When the economy grows, the pie gets bigger. Their piece of pie grows, yes -- but so does everyone else's.
It's not a zero sum game. That's just something those interest in class warfare like to put out there for scaremongering.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
"Unions can create temporary bubbles"
The future does not exist.
For sufficiently large values of temporary, good things temporarily are still good.
As to "stability", that certainly does not exist in the IT professional market. So it's not worth chasing after. You go after what you can get and if unions and legislation can get you what you need, you do it. It would be insane not to get what you can.
Being in Michigan you are probaly familiar with a certain union that is a little less flexible.
I think you must realize that unions which demand too much are going to run themselves right out of ajob.
What things does your union do to ensure it remains flexible and efficient.
How do you handle the lazy employees or those that excel?
Any hints on how others can help ensure interaction with union workers is productive and beneficial, rather than confrontational?
"Shareholders are the owners of the company. Companies borrow money from Shareholders"
Only at the IPO. After that, shareholders play among themselves and generate no investment, no value whatsoever. And as they sell and buy shares (influenced by media and analysts whoe serve their own interests), shareholders make and break companies in ways that are in no way related to the companies' actual viability, financial standing, product quality and so on.
I have only one thing to say about shareholders: fuck them. If they want profits, they should try some real work - exactly what you're advocating for us lazy Europeans. This is what capitlaism is all about, no?
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
While I see where you are going with this, keep in mind that the "people in IBM" making this decision not only still have their jobs, they have higher profits now. The real cut in costs lies in common sense spending. The larger a company gets the more waste they have in spending. Joe Blow who was making $25,000/yr doesn't come close to the budget decision to spend $10/ream of print paper along with the banner page enforced on every print job. Long distance calls, international flights, training, new facilities, shipping EVERYTHING, etc all add up too.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
Thank you. I knew it was wrong, but was too lazy to figure out the right spelling. :)
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I don't know where you are getting your data but Mexico has benefitted tremendously in trade with the US. According to our own government, there has been ZERO reciprocal trade with Mexico. It is nearly 100% flowing from them to us and they are the number 3 deficit trading partner with us.
. html
http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c0005
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
I think you have it a little backwards.
If something can be done cheaper it is a more efficient use of resources. This allows a given company to produce MORE for less.
Look at cars, computers, air conditioning, microwaves, cell phones. All these things started out as expensive toys for the rich, but through cost reductions have become available to the population at large.
I'm in my 20's and I remember watching people use manual washing machines on their clothes, now most people I know not only have washers and dryers, but dishwashers too.
Why does democracy require a healthy middle class, I know that money is power in the US, but unless I'm mistaken the rich get the same vote that the poor get.
If they own the politicians, lawyers and judges, why would they bother with arson and murder?
Why not just sue the people instead?
And that is what we actually see happening.
Arson and murder would rile up the citizens and many people won't be paid (or require way too much bribing) to allow it to occur.
Allowing someone to get burned and killed with lawsuits is much more practical.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Sure enough, but back then corporations were strictly limited in what they could do. They were set up for a limited time and only to fulfil a particular goal, like building a railway, because such enterprises were too costly to be financed by a single person. Originally corporations were not allowed to own other corpoations, for example. It should have stayed that way.
Today a corporation can dump toxic waste in your backyard and shareholders applaud because it's cheaper than disposing of the pollutants safely. Profit motive at work.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
So the cost saving is *never* passed on to the consumer, it's passed on to the shareholder,
Really? Now what happens when company B is charging less money for the same product? Are you saying your mythical company will be happy keeping its prices high, making less money, giving less to their shareholders.
Oh, right, you simply overlooked the concept of "competition," which is what makes capitalism work.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
We're all sort of shareholders in something, since we all contribute to 401(k) plans or IRA's (I assume).
What I find intriguing about all of this is that programmer nerds on Slashdot are starting to question the foundations of our economic system as unjust. Five years ago, we were proof that you can buckle down, study harder, and make something of yourself... now we're feeling like steel workers from the 80's. And if we're this upset, I can't imagine what the less-educated, "real" workers (who work harder than we do, for a lot less money) feel like.
Fact is, once a critical enough mass is reached and enough people beleive (fair or not) that the reason their kids are starving is because they're being "oppressed" by the super-rich one percent, they'll just form angry lynch mobs and hang their perceived oppressors from the nearest lamppost. They'll do this even if the "oppressors" were acting like reasonable, rational, caring human beings under the "old regime". And right now, they don't seem all that reasonable or caring. (Coldly, calculatingly, rational - but not reasonable or caring).
Of course, the Polyanna crowd could be right, and there may end up being a place in the world of tomorrow for all of those displaced programmers - as for me, I'll hang around and keep doing what I think is an honest day's work for an honest day's pay and see what happens.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
"Unions can create temporary bubbles where you get higher pay than you deserve, but ultimately it hurts you."
Oh, wait, that's the same as intellectual property.
"Europe is choosing "no job" every day."
Seems like pretty much everyone does that. Nobody wants to play by free market rules, neither the unions, nor investors nor the corporations.
Competition is such a bitch, and everyone tries to get the politicians to protect them from it.
"if there's no scarcity in labor, there's no money."
p ower.htm
Horsepower, kiloWatts both measure how quickly work can be done.
e.g.
http://www.school-for-champions.com/science/elect
Same thing. Machines do things faster because they consume energy faster. We'll move to an economy based on energy consumption rather than labour.
Deleted
Only at the IPO. After that, shareholders play among themselves and generate no investment, no value whatsoever.
Ever hear of buying a company with stock? Think you can do that if your stock price is in the toilet? Ever hear of a secondary public offering, where the company sells more shares to bring in more capital?
I have only one thing to say about shareholders: fuck them.
So, let me get this straight. Either you are not investing in a retirement plan of any kind, or you just told yourself to fuck off.
If they want profits, they should try some real work - exactly what you're advocating for us lazy Europeans. This is what capitlaism is all about, no?
I'm afraid you have a lot to learn about capitalism. Apparantly it will be the hard way, too.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
http://management.silicon.com/itdirector/0,3902467 3,39117645,00.htm
This is not unique to India, several countires (including the US) do this in other areas (agriculture is a big one).
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Why not move the entire company over there? They'd be doing us all a favor.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.
Thank you for refuting your own point for me. :)
It's just "often hard", it's "almost always impossible" to calculate the revenue value of a worker. The exception would be people like sales people, where you can tie their salary directly to performance. But in most other things, it doesn't work that way. How much revenue does an accountant bring in? How much revenue does the guy who designs the rivet pattern for an airplane at Boeing bring in?
You simply can't calculate worth that way. The only way to do it is to roughly estimate someone's experience and value, and compare it to what other's with roughly equivalent experience and value make. So if I have a competent Java engineer with 10 years of experience that I'm paying $70,000, and I notice that the most others with that experience are being paid $50,000, then I can draw a conclusion that the engineer is costing more than he/she has to.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Another oversight is that this "competition" is only valid for very large established companies that have the capital to start such a venture. Ma and Pop shops just trying to make a decent living have no chance vs the conglomerate using the equivalent of legal slave labor overseas. I miss the days when we bashed Iomega for using overseas sweat shops.
Citizens lucky enough to still have a job and enough $$ to buy a product will send the $$ to a conglomerate and in turn that $$ will be used in part to feed a family overseas and will not go into national taxes. This is like a hole in a bucket slowly leaking and it is only leaking from the consumers in the countries shipping out jobs. Once that bucket runs dry...well...that is how a 3rd world country is created. The only "leak" in the opposite direction is right back into the large corporations selling overseas. It never makes it back down to the end-user who started the circulation in the first place.
Another problem with the shareholder argument. Many people, including myself, used to invest in the stock market. I no longer have the means to do this. Will these companies become owned by majority overseas shareholders and themselves be ousted by the board when they decide he doesn't need to be sitting here in the U.S. with his corporate jet any more?
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
Well, I'm using "deserve" to mean "fair market value", which is all anyone "deserves". :)
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
--
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD FIX THE WAIT 2 MINS PROBLEM! It has been 9 hours 13 minutes - wait 2.
Perhaps Slashdot is using outsourced workers to maintain Slashcode?
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
This may seem far fetched but using that same logic, imagine now what happens to the large companies with an investment in the overseas market they just helped bring the economy up in while the dollar dropped. The difference between the US dollar they spent while it was worth more stayed the same overseas and will be worth even more if they sell because of the increased economy there. Count that along with tax breaks and I can guarantee you that most of the arguments listed above about feeding families over there were not even remotely near the top of their list of reasons to outsource.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
10% increase in wages is 10% no matter the currency conversion. Add to that the fact that the dollar is dropping in value. That drop is going to continue until the Americans start making and exporting stuff instead of importing.
Deleted
You still don't get it. If it costs that much to live there, it doesn't matter what your general evaluation of the area is -- it's by definition luxury. I don't care if the place has rats.
San Diego property values are waaay overpriced for what you get.
What you "get" is to live in one of the nicest areas in the world.
You have *no* idea, you're fucking clueless. Call me spoiled? I've sacrificed a lot. I've paid my dues, and got basically nothing, so go to hell.
Hey, welcome to life. Sometimes it sucks, and things don't pay off right away. But sheesh, take some responsibility for your own life.
I shouldn't have to leave town when I'm an experienced professional who just wants to earn a decent living!
You know, I think I should be able to live in Brentwood or Beverly Hills or Eastside Manhattan on $30K/year. Shouldn't I be able to live when I just want to earn a decent living?
The answer, of course, is N-O. Don't cry to me that you can't afford to live there. Yes, the answer is MOVE. Previous generations have moved plenty of times, because they knew they weren't owed anything. Times change -- adapt or perish. Most areas of San Diego are freaking expensive.
Move, get roommates, save your money. Maybe you can afford to move back someday.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
"This kind of quickie-mart reduction of economic reasoning is why the Average American in trouble...Then what will you do? Likely sponge off your wealthy parents until you find something else you can feel superior in."
As opposed to your "quickie-mart reduction" of the speaker of an argument you happen to disagree with to mere tired stereotypes - he's a Flash developer, so he must be 19 years old and living in his mom's basement right? Wrong.
Enjoy your own "Pied Panini".
Single? Canadian? We can help. Visit http://www.l
"Why? Because of some outdated concept that murder is wrong?"
Your a crackpot. Proof being your nutjob statement above.
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
Another oversight is that this "competition" is only valid for very large established companies that have the capital to start such a venture. Ma and Pop shops just trying to make a decent living have no chance vs the conglomerate using the equivalent of legal slave labor overseas. I miss the days when we bashed Iomega for using overseas sweat shops.
What on Earth are you talking about?
How did Google come to rule the Internet? Did they start out as a huge corporation? How did Yahoo do the same before Google? How did eBay become huge? How did Microsoft? How did Apple? How did the company I work for?
Most successful companies started very small and grew.
Any tiny company can compete against any large company by introducing a better product, service, or price point. It has happened millions of times in history.
Citizens lucky enough to still have a job
The fact that you think having a job is linked to "luck" really explains a lot about your mentality towards capitalism.
The rest of your post I will ignore as it is based on complete ignorance of how capitalism and the economy works.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Ok it was bad enough it was sleazy advertising to trick people into thinking they were buying American but when he opened it, it had plastic gears, a plastic cover that was so thin you could tear it with your fingers, and lasted an entire 15 minutes before the magic smoke got out. This is not an isolated incident. About the only thing I will buy from overseas is electronics from a previously established name that has already proved itself. They had a special on Christmas light last year on one of those hour long news specials. They grabbed 50 strings made in China and were reporting on how a string of house fires had been caused by the gauge of wiring being half of what is required to be manufactured in the U.S. During the report over 10 of them started smoking or outright burst into flames. I could go on all day about this but it is useless since I will be modded down by those who believe in outsourcing and wish to use mod points to squelch freedom of speech. Rather than mod me down I challenge someone to prove me wrong. Search for faulty chinese products on google and find proof otherwise. Here I'll help get the skeptics started here
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
The insightful mod was made for this.
Open Source Sushi
When they came and got some legislation to prevent any copy of copyrighted work, I didn't protest, 'cause after all I was buying my CDs.
When they came and pushed software patents in Europe, I didn't protest, 'cause I didn't care about patent as I'll never develop software by myself.
And when they came and took my job to India, I didn't protest, 'cause after all people in India have to feed their family too.
And now, would you want fries with that?
N.B.: I'm a fscking IT conslutant, the evilest race to roam this earth, and certainly one with the lawyers that will be taken last to India. But believe me: one day it will happen, as this trade, and more and more trades with it are only dealt with an eye on money, not on customer satisfaction.
One last thing: before doing some consulting by myself, I was an employee of a little company making software. The package was sold for around US$200,000, and my mere presence in the customer premises was billed a whole US$1,200 a day (which is my any mean quite cheap for an IT company). And my salary at the end of the month was a huge US$2000 excluding taxes!
Now, I'm billing US$700 to my customers, and I get around US$6000 per month.
The difference? The villa of my ex-boss.
The day we'll pay people for what they're worth, instead of trying to screw them at any cost, everything will be far better.
--
Arkan
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I know that's what you're doing. It'd be interesting to see you defend it without tautlology. I think it's pretty important to remember that none of the tools involved in economics are inherently good or bad, and we're mostly just worried about their effects.
In other words, if we could all just join unions in order to make more money, have more free time, and grow the economy toward society's long term interests, it'd be great and we all ought to do it - even if the economy were less free and more regulated. The problem isn't that regulation is inherently bad or we don't deserve this kind of prosperity (why the heck not?) - the problem is that it almost certainly won't work very well.
As with engineering, it seems to be mostly about tradeoffs. Assigning emotional value to certain analytical things is good politics, here in the US anyway, but it's mostly crap. I think one of the decent ideas Ross Perot had during his presidential run was to just chart out visually what was happening with the economy and how to tweak things to achieve a given result. It didn't work because he was a freak and people weren't used to this, but still.
(hope that's not too critical, I responded to your post because it was actually worth engaging, even though I doubt I agree)
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why? Because of some outdated concept that murder is wrong?
So you're saying it's right? I see where you're coming from now, you're extrapolating your insanity onto other people.
Considering MSFT was founded in 1975, I have to call bullshit.
Actually, it is -- all of your evidence is anecdotal. Because things suck for you, then it must suck for everyone. Well, got news for you -- it DOESN'T suck for everyone. In fact, it sucks a helleva lot less today than it did in previous generations. You just have this rosy colored view of 50 years ago that never existed. People considered television a luxury! People didn't buy books, they went to the library. And people saved for a damn long time to be able to afford a house. Vacations were driving to see Aunt Marge in Iowa.
when in fact the economic environment has changed *radically*.
Indeed. We have more mobility, more communication, more opportunity, more education, more nearly everything. Ironically, we also have far more whining. You're miserable because you have unrealistic expectations of things that are supposed to be handed to you.
I have a friend. Dude is about 42-43, works as a parts export manager at Honda. Dunno what he makes, but probably, eh, $60-70K. He is a millionaire -- from nothing. How did he do it? HE SAVED. He lived very modestly. He invested it. He has a wife and kids, but he still lives relatively modestly. You would never suspect he has that much money.
So did he steal the money? Did his ill-gotten gains come from the backs of the poor?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
No, you still don't get it.
There are plenty of places in US where you can live a relatively "comfortable" life with 30K/year. It just ain't going to be anywhere that has nice weather and ocean close by.
The housing market is all about supply and demand. Obviously there are PLENTY of people who can afford to pay a lot more than what you are willing/able to pay for those houses. It is not like few rich guys are buying up all the houses in SD area.
Just give it up, don't blame others for your choices. Sure life isn't fair and rich people are always going to make more than you and get more than what they deserve, but hey, that's life. Nobody said it is fair.
You are living in one of the richest area in the world. Either adapt to it or move.
I still have a hard time figuring out how buying IBM stock (and therefore increasing IBM's stock price) benefits IBM (the company, not its individual execs) or creates jobs, though. Maybe IBM speculates in its own stock, that would do it.
Or maybe it's all indirect; Pfizer invests its spare cash in IBM stock, so my propping up of IBM's stock price makes money for Pfizer, who can then spend it on factories or something.
My point is that most stock is owned by rich people (I think the source was concentrationofwealth.blogspot.com, hardly unbiased, of course), and our economic system is pretty much set up to keep stock prices driving up at the expense of all else. This means transfer of wealth from the working class (in the form of offshored industries, consumer-unfriendly terms and conditions (like banks, cell phones and credit cards)), to shareholders (mostly rich).
Even though the economy isn't a zero-sum game, neither is it infinite-sum. I also don't see what prevents massive concentration of wealth, if anything. Perhaps I can be enlightened. Since, barring some major shifts that would eliminate economics as we know it, we'll always have scarcity, that means (by definition) there won't be enough for everybody. Since I'll never be rich, I'd rather not live in a society where the only options are filthy rich or dirt poor. Unfortunately I also don't see any factors working against that. I can certainly attempt to participate by buying stock, and have done so to a small extent. Most people can't afford that, and I'll never be able to afford to speculate in the stock market enough to make a living.
"So, let me get this straight. Either you are not investing in a retirement plan of any kind, or you just told yourself to fuck off."
I'm not a USian. And I would never have a stockmarket-based retirement plan. I'd sooner bet on horse races.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
"The fact that you think having a job is linked to "luck" really explains a lot about your mentality towards capitalism"
So you're saying these 14000 IBM employees, to the last one, have only themselves to blame for getting fired? And those whose retirement plans depended on Enron stocks, too, I guess?
You may not call it luck if you wish. But please realize that your hard work, your skills, loyalty and whatnot mean exactly zilch when shareholders decide they want more or a CEO decides to screw the company.
Capitalists believe in self-reliance. Communists believe in being conditioned by society. The truth, as always, is pretty much in-between.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
Wow, you really have no clue about how markets work. As someone already mentioned to you, the shares are used all the time and are a reflection of the companies success. The company usually owns a huge share in itself, often over 50%, if the shares tank the company tanks. If the shares go up the company uses this money to grow and make new jobs or offer benefits to its employees (Share option plans), or buy other smaller companies etc. Growth is a good thing! Its what gives you the computer you are using right now. The US is hugely in debt, sometimes governments, companies and people need to borrow, and when people lend money they usually expect profit in return, that's a no brainer. There is tremendous risk in investing, as the .com boom showed. Many people lost millions of dollars, for some stocks you need nerves of steal.
If you have a credit card, a mortgage, or any loan you are borrowing money from a company. This is capitalism, get over it or move to a country with a system that pleases you more. Everyone always wants to simplify things and have someone or something to blame.
www.ianhoar.com My blog about geeking out.
1. repeal all tariffs
2. repeal all taxes that raise the cost of business or investment
3. open the borders
4. ???
5. profit
(the ??? is the sound that the world makes when investing in the United States)
MORTAR COMBAT!
From the point of view of multinational corporations, any ideal that some behavior is "wrong" when it creates profit is outdated. See Enron.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Rather I'm adopting, for the sake of argument, the morals of your average corporation. These are not traditional morals. The definition of good is anything that is profitable, the definition of bad is anything that is not profitable. Do a balance sheet on the murder, and remember, we're talking about double-blind contract killing in this case, since that's the intelligent way to keep the corporate name out of it. If the cost of the contract killer is less than the cost of the lost business, then it is a smart business decision to kill the competition.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Perhaps you should look at the number of jobs enabled by free software such as Apache, gcc, and Perl, and reconsider your statement. In the meantime please stop making conservatives look like idiots. We already have Santorum for that.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Way to botch the Ghandi quote. "I think it WOULD be a good idea"
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
It's even easier than starting your own company... Just find some runaway girls and pimp them. They're easily replacable and therefore you get to keep 80% of the money they bring in. When a girl starts to complain you just ask her "Would you rather be back on the street with no job?"
I used to be a coder until I realized working is for suckers... Making money of the work of others is the REAL American way.
--
This is great news. My grandmother was feeling a little left out, being the *only* person on the face of the planet not have their opinions published for the "real" reason Apple switched to Intel.
/. for posting notes for my grammy).
Spin away grammy! There's a hungry RSS feed propagation system just waiting to hear from you...No, you don't need to know what in the sam hell I'm talking about.
(I apologize for using
No need to imagine, just read history. The society as you and I know it today only came in existence the last 250 years or so - most of europe had slaves less than 150 years ago !
It wil simply revert back to that.
Yes motherfuckers. Yes.
1. Find a rich girl.
2. Knock her up.
3. Shotgun wedding to get promoted to the family.
4...
5.Profit!
Life is not for the lazy.
How did he do it? HE SAVED.
No, more likely he invested and got lucky. Not exactly a stellar example to cite when you're talking about "unrealistic expectations of things that are supposed to be handed to you."
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
There is tremendous risk in investing, as the .com boom showed. Many people lost millions of dollars, for some stocks you need nerves of steal."
I'm so awed at those investors with nerves of steel! - not. How about you ask why they lost those millions? Surely not due to an unforeseen natural disaster? What you sing praises of is the core of the problem - investing on stock market is much like gambling, but other people bear the consequences besides the investor. The stock market is a destabilizing agent. It introduces chaos, unpredictability and irrationality into processes that peoples' livelihoods depend on, and those people - not investors - have no influence on those processes.
"If you have a credit card, a mortgage, or any loan you are borrowing money from a company"
I don't, actually. I only have a debit card and I never spend what I don't have. I think it's only rational. I didn't have an apartment of my own until I could afford it, and I still don't have a car, because where I live I can do just fine with a bike. I don't gamble, either.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
No, he didn't make it all in the dot-com boom, if that's what you're implying. This guy is incredibly conservative with his money. He's just smart -- he made solid investments.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
This IBM incident is just an example of a much larger problem which crosses industry boundries.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You seem to be ignoring a couple of little facts which is the real problem here: money value and standard of living.
The conversion rate favors Indian workers. $20 will go much farther in India than it will in the US. Not only will $20 buy more goods in India than it would in the US, the people in India aren't used to having all these goods, while an American/European worker expects it. The standard of living is much lower over there. While we're here in the US worrying about having a nice new car like the neighbor's, they'd be lucky if they had any car at all. It costs less money to keep them happy. At $10 an hour they're making quite a nice jump in salary and standard of living, while a US or European worker will be taking a pay cut.
I'm afraid that the real issue here isn't one that's easy to solve. When you have a population of people who are used to living with less, they'll be willing to work for a wage that a country of rich people would scoff at.
There is another side of the story, even when you're not very replacable. You're also paid what you're willing to accept than rather die instead when your arms are twisted, and when they smell talent, they will push you pretty fast to that limit, because this stockholder machinery is pretty refined, all they do is sit in board meetings, coming up with better ways to milk profit, inlcluding milking profit out of you, or to use a bad word, "exploiting you," but it's only exploiting when it's "unfair". And in these how-to-squeeze-more-profit-brainstormings they consider not only what they can lose, but what you can lose too, if they tighten the belt just a tad bit more, risking it to be the drop to overflow the cup.
So, there are two equilibriums, one on their side of the fence, the other on your side of the fence. One is how replacable you are, how much you can hurt them by leaving, the other is how much are you willing to lose, how much will they hurt you if they leave you. In the ideal case, cooperation should precipitate somehow, but sometimes the buyers are unwilling to pay, and sellers are unwilling to go low enough, and there is no deal at all in the end.
Got anything to lose? You're then cheap my friend, it doesn't matter what your worth is by your above reasoning, because you can easily be persuaded, having a chain around your neck that can be yanked at pleasure.
Of course in this IBM moving jobs to cheaper places the replacability effect is the major one, I just want to call attention to the other side, something you need to realize, even if you are irreplacable. If you never ever make a stand like Europe does, the belt will always get tighter and tighter, and tighter...
You misundertand- I said anything made at a LOW WAGE is LOW QUALITY
Low wage compared to what? Compared to their previous non-jobs or taxi driving jobs? In reality, Indian tech labour is paid very well in comparison to other jobs in India, so those worker's standard of living is high. After all, what matters is that you can live well where you're living. Consider this, I make over $100K in my tech job in Boston, that's pretty decent for Boston, but it'd be harder to live on that in New York, and it'd be even harder to live on that in in London or Singapore. That doesn't mean I'm being taken advantage of though.
The difference being that the WTO and the governments of India and China are working very hard to keep the actual workers in poverty- knowing that the business will quickly go elsewhere if wages rise.
Really, how do you know this?
"Want to be the one who collects the money at the top? Easy. Start your own company and create some jobs of your own."
You glossed over a key point. IBM's CEO Sam Palmisano like many CxO's, had absolutely zip to do with founding IBM though to his credit he worked at IBM or a subsidiary most of his life. since 1973. But I wager he's invested very little of his personal wealth in IBM equity other than maybe through the employee stock purchase plan, which is more of a benefit than a case of gambling your personal wealth on the success of the company.
One bit from his IBM bio:
"Mr. Palmisano has served as senior vice president and group executive for IBM's Personal Systems Group; led IBM's strategic outsourcing business;"
Apparently outsourcing is a key feather in his resume cap.
Ya know, I have no problem with CxO's who put all their personal assets on the line, and risk everything, to start a company and invest most of their waking hours for years in making it a success. God damn they deserve to reap huge rewards if and when they succeed.
On the other end of the scale I do have a big problem with the the rock start CEO's like Carly Fiorina, who invest absolutely none of their own wealth in an equity stake when they take the helm of a company. Instead they demand and are handed huge cash and equity stakes for just walking in the door and for being adept at social networking, crafting their image, political manuevering and climbing over the top of their teammates to get to the top.
When you have CxO's who have no real stake in the company they run is it any wonder many of them crater the company. Even if they fail completely their signing package up front and their golden parachute at the end insure they will have more wealth then most of us can dream off, even if they are a complete screw up.
They rock star CEO's also seem real short on investing in R&D and developing innovative products. More often than not their stewardship of the company consists of laying off or outsourcing enough people each year to maintain the companies profitability, and their grand plan is merger and acquisition which is a lot easier than invention and product development.
@de_machina
keep in mind that the "people in IBM" making this decision not only still have their jobs, they have higher profits now.
So this is actually morally good then. Either way there are 16000 employees feeding their families, and now there are 16000 stockholders with larger retirement checks.
Sucks to be the guy laid off, but that doesn't mean it's bad for the larger community.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
So it's right to take away someone's ability to provide for their family in India, so long as someone in the USA/EA can gain that ability?
Whereever you put the job, someone is happy and the rest are sad. Same moral value whereever you put the job (assuming you don't want to insist that some people are morally more valuable than others, which is a whole discussion on its own.).
Life is change. No job is forever. No life is forever. Losing your job isn't - in and of itself - evil, it's merely inevitable.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
> ...all of your evidence is anecdotal. Because things suck for you, then it must suck for everyone.
No, it doesn't suck for everyone - it just sucks more than it used to for the average person.
This is not anecdotal.
> People considered television a luxury!
In 1955, about 64% of households had one. A color set was about $800, which would be about $5500 today. That's about the price of a nice big plasma TV, and guess what? It's a luxury item. No suprise there. People bought what they could afford, just like today. If cheap TVs and cell phones were available then, they would have bought them.
Yes, you can get ahead by living modestly, and kudos to those who do (I've been there). But the reality is that it's much harder for the average middle-class worker to save now than it used to be. Energy, housing, and health care have all gone up disproportionately. Disposable income is down and continuing to drop. We still have a high standard of living, but personal debt has had to skyrocket to maintain it. Why is that? We're working harder than ever before - is it "whining" to point out that we're getting the shaft?
I still have a hard time figuring out how buying IBM stock (and therefore increasing IBM's stock price) benefits IBM (the company, not its individual execs) or creates jobs, though.
First, let me ask what is so wrong with the stock price increase benefiting the shareholders? You like to negate the good here by implying only "IBM execs" benefit from stock price escalation, but are you really so caught up in class warfare that you don't understand how many regular people own IBM stock, both directly, and indirectly through pensions and mutual funds? Everyone can be a shareholder and profit from stock, not just your hated "execs."
Second, to answer your question, the stock price going up increases the company's market capitalization, which can give the company the power to buy other companies, pay high-end employees with stock instead of liquid assets (re: Steve Jobs earning $1 but making money off the stock instead), getting approval for more direct financing (loans) based on their stock strength.
But the stock market is not specifically designed to indefinitely help a company. Those benefits are largely indirect after the actual sale of stock is complete. The reason companies sell stock is to raise capital and share the risk of operating the company. The reason people buy and sell stock varies, from wanting to earn dividend profit, to wanting to re-sell the stock later at a profit if the company's value increases (i.e. by selling more widgets this year than last year and making more money).
My point is that most stock is owned by rich people
Even if that were actually true, so what?
our economic system is pretty much set up to keep stock prices driving up at the expense of all else
I have yet to hear what you are using to try and prove this point? Our economy is not setup to drive stock prices up OR down. It is what it is, they operate on their own. And I especially don't take you meaning of "at the expense of all else."
This means transfer of wealth from the working class (in the form of offshored industries, consumer-unfriendly terms and conditions (like banks, cell phones and credit cards)), to shareholders (mostly rich).
Transfer of wealth? You mean like when the government raises my taxes so that they can create a new spending program to give money to pork barrel spending, or programs designed to help "working poor" but is instead mismanaged and wasteful?
No, you meant the kind of transfer of wealth that happens in a free market, where "working poor" invest their money into a proven system (the stock market) in exchange for the chance to earn a profit at a later date.
You're right, this is a terribly unfair system.
Even though the economy isn't a zero-sum game, neither is it infinite-sum.
Actually, it is. Up until such time as the population starts to decline, anyway.
I also don't see what prevents massive concentration of wealth, if anything.
Why are you so preoccupied with who has more money than you do? If you instead applied yourself, maybe you'd be making more money. But I guess it's easier to blame the evil rich for you not being so rich. Why not create a reason to explain this trend, let's call it "concentration of wealth."
Since I'll never be rich
With that attitude, and your lack of education in the world of capitalism, I fear this may indeed be true. But for those reasons only.
I'd rather not live in a society where the only options are filthy rich or dirt poor
And why do you think these are the only options. I am neither. Oh, I forgot, you're still convinced that when a rich person makes more money, it is actually being taken out of the pocket of a poor person. I'm sorry you believe that, it is wrong.
Most people can't afford that
This is flat out wrong. Most people can afford it. However, you may be right in saying more people are too stupid to invest in their o
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Low wage compared to what? Compared to their previous non-jobs or taxi driving jobs? In reality, Indian tech labour is paid very well in comparison to other jobs in India, so those worker's standard of living is high.
Is it high enough to afford a home network? High enough to study in off hours at home to learn the latest and greatest technologies? High enough to come up with that new algortithim in the shower at 5:00am after thinking about a programming problem all night? If so- their code doesn't show it yet, at least, not on the failed projects that I've gotten as contracts after outsourcing. Maybe in 10 or 20 years they'll be at that stage of the game- but for now the code they put out is distinctly lower quality, coded exactly to their understanding of spec, whether or not that is correct. It's damned expensive to be a GOOD programmer and return high value for the dollar spent by your bosses.
After all, what matters is that you can live well where you're living. Consider this, I make over $100K in my tech job in Boston, that's pretty decent for Boston, but it'd be harder to live on that in New York, and it'd be even harder to live on that in in London or Singapore. That doesn't mean I'm being taken advantage of though.
True enough- but there is a floor below which one cannot do good work, no matter what the standard of living around you is.
Really, how do you know this?
Ever since the layoff that caused what I now call my "great awakening" of 2001, I've kept up on the latest in trade negotiations and disputes. Especially in what the foreign press is saying. The India Economic Times is very worried that rising wages will send jobs elsewhere, starting about a year and a half ago- and since then, we've seen the Rupee revalued with respect to the dollar. The Chinese also manipulate their currency trading in such a way to make their wages appear to be rising when in fact, they are not. Both of these have been complaints raised before WTO arbiters and the World Court- only to be struck down. Of course, they have similar complaints about us- the dumping of subsidized US Agriculture products has created a worldwide depression on food prices, sending many subsidence farmers to bankruptcy or even suicide, for instance. There's also the great disparity in worker visas: A US H-1b can now be had for as little as $500 if you went to an American school or are lucky enough to be in the first 65,000 to file a second after midnight on October 1st. But the Indian equivilant will cost you $3 million in fees, in-country investments, and bribes- and the Chinese equivalent requires that the company hiring you be 51% owned by a Chinese national. Plus, there's the quid pro quo tariffs- there's a reason why Wal*Mart is the only western chain to make inroads in China, because they're China's 2nd biggest trading partner, exporting more goods than every first world nation other than the United States.
And really- I can't blame them. With their poverty rates, who wouldn't do EVERYTHING possible to keep the jobs in country? They have good reason to do so. But it amounts to unfair competition for the American worker. And it's only a short term fix- if they lose control on the wages as you seem to claim that they will, the jobs will leave very quickly and go to some other nation where the living standard is low- leaving behind massive unemployment. After all, what is it to the multinationals if they dump another few million into the world's unemployed? They don't care, at least, not on any scale that they recognize. As long as it is good for the three-month bottom line- I'm surprised they haven't taken up that old idea of putting factories on ships yet, to steam to whatever port is offering the lowest wages this week.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
no Wal-mart to speak of here in Oregon -- Fred Meyer whups its... anyway.
:~(. I like coops though.
Starbucks actually increases local coffee stores' business. Hard to belive, but true. No linky, sorry.
As to the 'concentrated at top, less to go around': What do you think rich people do with their money? Stuff it under the bed? I know this next sentence is basically screaming 'trickle down economics!, but rich people invest their money. Many rich people invest in startups. Others put money in the stock market or real estate. Etc. Nobody puts it under their mattress. The money stays out in the system.
But yeah -- pure capitalism is NOT the answer. What is even worse is our own form of government/economics where the regulations are quickly becoming the OPPOSITE(!) of government regulated capitalism: the govenernment is supposed to regulate the companies for the benifit of the people, not the other way around!
I don't know the answer either
It's not a zero sum game. If you bought some stock, you'd also benefit as the total pie gets larger.
In fact, many middle class people have stock in retirement accounts. Wealth is created through accumulation of income-producing-assets and the compounding of growth of those assets.
A share of stock entitles you to a share of all future earnings. Increased earnings implies increased shareholder value.
Also, I don't know where you get your 86% number. Most stock is owned by mutual funds (just look up the "major holders" of any stock on yahoo finance - Fidelity and Vanguard usually top most lists). Mutual funds manage money for the middle class.
Rich people use hedge funds.
What about the coming oil crisis? Is this gonna have an effect on oursourcing? Considering the price of oil is gonna rise to unacceptable levels, there is no way anybody is going to afford a plane ticket to/from India. .. let alone to build and power computers...
OK, now look at the average size of a house now, and in 1970. I don't feel like looking for the reference, but houses are much larger now than they were in the 1970s, and especially the 1950s. Why is that?
Just because people spend more on "fixed" expenses doesn't mean that they *have* to spend more, and that's my point. People have unrealistic expectations about their lifestyle.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
That's been proven bad for business.
In what time frame? The three month bottom line is all that matters.
It is in the best interests of your corporation's shareholders not to murder the competition because it means that the competition could also murder you.
So? People and shareholders are replaceable to a modern corporation- doesn't matter if the corporation is large enough, they won't get everybody at once.
It is better that your company gets bought out or sold in a fire sale or forced to innovate or expand or offer better services or take smaller margins than to be dead.
Who would buy a company that refuses to do everything possible to compete?
It doesn't have anything to do with morals. Morals are what existed before a logical reason to do what is in your best interests was known.
Your logical reasons so far have nothing to do with short term bottom line stock prices and balance sheets, and are therefore not logical by modern corporate morality.
If you know not to touch a hot stove because it burns you, the best course of action does not change from not to touch a hot stove because your mother tells you not to.
No- but if you're a corporation and the payoff comes before the pain, it becomes good business. If anything, all you've done is identify the big hole in multinational corporations today- the focus on the three-month window. This is well known already. It didn't stop Enron from manipulating market prices, it didn't stop Microsoft from burning down Dr. Dos offices, and it's not reason ENOUGH not to break the law if you can see a reasonable profit margin from breaking the law.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
" That's why you see small businesses closing left and right, while Starbucks and Wal-Mart open yet another store in your area."
I wont win any mod points for this but ya know bashing Wal-Mart is easy but the fact is that company is successful because they play by the rules of the game and they play really well.
You should watch the bio on Sam Walton on Biography channel. I despise rock star CEO's that walk in to multibillion dollar companies and run them in to the ground. That is not Sam or the Walton family. He and his family started with next to nothing and a tiny five and dime retail store in a small town in Arkansas. They succeeded because:
- They worked really hard, and I mean really worked as in they all stocked shelves and drove around finding products to sell at good prices
- They gambled everything they had on their business multiple times and they could have easily lost it all numerous times
- They were ruthlessly efficient, it can be cruel especially to workers and suppliers but if you are not you dont succeed in retail.
- They gave people what they want, they sold the products people wanted at the best price in town. That is the classic definition of competition in retail. They did't win through bombing their competitors, or cheating or anything else. They competed, the competed well and they won.
Yea it sucks that they stock their shelves with Chinese goods but the fact is if they didn't someone else would and they would go under. Fact is Chinese goods are way cheaper than American made goods and you can't change that now unless we start restoring trade barriers or push American worker's wages down to 30 cents an hour.
Yea it sucks that they dont pay their employees very well. But you know what, running a cash register and stocking shelves are some of the lowest skill jobs around, especially in the era of bar codes and RFID. Fact is if I dont go to Wal-Mart I go to a grocery story with do it yourself checkout. You see even I can scan bar codes, feed money in to a cash register and put my groceries in to a sack, so I dont see the value in subsidizing a unionized grocery worker to do something that requires no skill. You do have to kind of wonder about the sanity of unionized grocery store workers commanding some of the best wages and benefits in many small towns. They are people with no actual skills and in free markets people are supposed to get paid based on what their worth. Grocery store workers are not worth a lot.
The other thing you need to appreciate about Wal-Mart is they have probably the most sophisticated and efficient computerized supply chain on the planet. They have giant computers in Arkansas that track every transaction in every store and make sure the right goods arrive at the right place at the right time. Your mom and pop store cant compete against that, in retail, inventory management determines the winners and losers, not sentimentality. Wal-Mart now has economy of scale almost no one else can match but the fact is they Walton's still beat their competition when they were in one five and dime in Arkansas because they worked really hard and they played to win.
All in all the Walton family are an American success story. If you are going to ridicule and crucify them for succeeding you are basicly ridiculing every aspect of Capitalism. Its is a deeply flawed system in a lot of ways, but so are all the others. The Walton's are just grand masters of the system they live under.
@de_machina
I didn't feel Walmart was overpriced- until I saw what they were doing to American jobs and I finally LOOKED AT what I was buying there. NO quality control at all. I joined the Year of Rollback boycott and haven't been back since (going on three and a half years now- my wife's been back but only to exchange gifts and compare prices).
It's getting harder and harder all the time to buy "Made In America"- and the reason is because Americans can't give a shit about the quality of what they buy OR the employment of their neighbors.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I just want a sense of the number of IIT grads who post here. The McKinsey people I know are Srikanth, Shajii, and Priya. If I were an Indian working in the west I'd be happy to see my friends back home get a good job with an American company. Why not go home and work in India someday? It will be where the jobs are anyway :).
Note: Marxist Hacker is a long-term troll, he makes sport of winding people up, and you've all taken the bait.
This is the first case I'll admit to it though....It was a troll- complete and utter- though my trolls I'd like to think make people actually THINK to respond- I've gotten some great responses here. Unlike, say, the Goatse guy. Very entertaining Friday afternoon, and I think this might be my 50th message today.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The system we have now is designed to funnel the profits into the hands of a few people
Always has been like that, always will be. The Romans used slaves to build marble villas for the governers. Medieval knights had serfs working the fields to put food on the banquet tables in their castles. Peasants worked in cotton mills to keep the industrialists in mansions. Now office drones sit in cubicles to help chief executives pay for their privates jets. This isn't a new thing, I don't know why you're surprised.
In fact now the gap between the rich and poor is smaller than ever. In the 14th century if you worked picking potatoes, that was your lot, you'd never be anything else. You worked all the daylight hours and lived in a mudhut, most of your children died of disease and you ate stale vegetables and drank filthy water. Nowadays, even the poor have great opportunity. A man with no money living in a box can drag himself up and start a business and become a billionaire. Even the poor live in relative luxury, with housing, food, education and healthcare paid for by the government.
professionals who used to be able to raise a family in a nice home on a single income now barely scrape by with two incomes.
Of course, in the 'good' old days, poor families didn't spend their money on televisions, computers, fridges, microwaves, indoor toilets, supermarket meals, fizzy drinks, new clothes, cars, holidays abroad, central heating, air conditioning, mobile phones, hot water, leather furniture, detached house with four bedrooms, garage and big garden, not to mention thousands of other luxuries which weren't available when only the man of the house went to work. All these things COST MONEY. You want today's luxuries whilst living yesterday's lifestyle. Well unless you're rich you can't have it. I'm sure if you cut out all the expenses, you could live like they did in the 1950s, with the wife staying at home, and everyone shitting outside in a shed.
Feudalism?
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
Well I have no debt or car either J but most people have both of those, and for most people debt is a fact of life, and sometimes un-avoidable. I needed my line of credit once. Anyway, the .com boom was an exception and probably a bad example of risk, more like stupidity, for the most part good stable companies have rational trading for the most part, and as the .com boom showed, they will all correct themselves eventually if they are out of line. The more volatile stocks have a higher possibility of return. If it was not for investors some companies would never get off the ground. Think of diamond mines in Canada (most un-proven), deep sea oil drilling, untested products, big pharma, all are a gamble, but without the gamble you would never get the diamonds/oil/product. Sharing the gamble is better, if you lose, everyone loses, not just you, if you win you share the wealth. Simplistic view I know.
Anyway, your blaming all the problems on investors, and I think the problems stem a lot deeper than that. Even without investors companies would want to make money, its human nature to grow. We all scream for cheaper/faster/better products. This would not happen if companies just sat on there ass and thought, gee, I better not upset anyone, we have to adapt. I think this is good for the world, eventually the rest of the world is going to have to catch up with the first world whether you like it or not, and it will us a bit in the short term, but we will adapt.
www.ianhoar.com My blog about geeking out.
MOD PARENT UP
I get the idea that you don't work in IT, and don't know what it really takes.
A BSCS is about as difficult to get as an engineering degree. That, a load of certs, constant study, many years of experience, and a lot of luck, might get you a decent salary.
I know of lot of people in IT, they aren't expecting six figure incomes for nothing.
Right - and then you wake up and that darn CEO has still shipped your job out of the country. What a dreamer you are, dude!
Well... Slashdot needs an extra moderation item - -1 [misinformed, misguided and never been outside South Carolina].
Did you really need to put that troll in? Cheap shots are well and good, but I think you could've done without.
1) Get out of IT if you possibly can. It's a crappy field, and it won't get better any time soon.
2) Gear yourself for something that's difficult to export.
3) Discourage others from the entering the field.
4) The future is obvious: soon all wealth in the USA will produced by people suing each other. If it's not too late for law school, you ought to think about it.
5) Medicine and bio-tech might be worthwhile.
They apply the same model (also known as the GE/Jack Welch lemming model) to their next company and their next company and their next company.... Guest what finally happens. The enlightened will have figured this out already.
I'm a genius (by Mensa's standard, anyway), but a technical one. I can fix pretty much any embedded C bug that's fixable. However, I don't have any natural aptitude for management, or being a "shark".
Tell me how applying myself will make me rich. Go ahead. It must be laziness if I'm not independently wealthy, after all, or the world might not be fair.
Programming has no future, of course (I'm in the U.S. - bringing this back on-topic). There's a whole bunch of things I could do - I could learn accounting, market analysis, I have some aptitude for construction and auto mechanicry, etc.
However, you can't get a job in something you're self-taught in (in fact, it's pretty tough to get a job at all in anything you haven't worked in before). So I'd need to go to school for a few years, and hope the industry I choose doesn't go away in the interim (or that there won't be such a surplus of new grads that I can't get noticed).
I've got a positive savings rate, but not a large one. It's probably possible for me to save more (I could live in a trailer rather than a 1300 square foot ranch, for example). I could put off replacing the '98 Cavalier for a few more years. I could go trying to seduce a rich woman, and dump the wife I've got (as another poster has suggested).
I could start a business (which would eliminate the job-getting hurdle). I'd, again, have to dump the wife in favor of one who doesn't want kids, so that I don't have anyone to support in those lean years until the business is profitable. Hopefully it is profitable, but of course if it fails that's because I didn't apply myself enough.
Of course, the world doesn't owe me a living, or even basic survival; Darwin (actually the "invisible hand") will eliminate me without a backward glance if I can't compete. I'm just not prepared to like that yet.
The concentration of wealth and power since the inception of public corporations has seen trully unremarkable individuals profit from the work of wage slaves and karoshi scientists. I think that so long as a society we have more executives than engineers we will suffer. Look how pathetic we look when we compare our scientist and engineer population with Japan. I have become bitter from living in America and do not consider myself an American because of the general decreptitude of Society here. Being almost done with a Robotics degree I have many nations willing to take me as a citizen. If you are in the field you know one of the major projects will be the research and development leading up to the fielding of a robotic military force from ground to air to space. I will not give my talent to such an ethically perverse nation as the "USA".
The prototypical consumer that was created through advertising and apathy is a monster we as engineers, designers and programmers cannot hide from at the liability of our professional status. Our job is to make life easier through intellectual and imho ethical rigor. The only solutions is to be found through the ability within our expertise to sate the most abject desires without engaging in any form of dehumanization like slavery or war. The responsibility for world peace is not a political or social question but very much a technological one. The world needs a 'New Deal'.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Sure you make guesses at it. But on average, a company had better be right at these guesses or else it will go out of business.
What worries me is the trend. The nature of stock is such that, for its price to increase, the company's profit must be growing at a faster rate than before.
Combine this with (all?) companies managing themselves so that stock price continually increases (because execs are paid mostly in stock, and won't stay more than a few years, so they don't care about the company's long-term success), and you have a situation where every publically-traded company must try to continually increase their profit growth rate, forever.
Of course, no company can grow its profits forever by simply becoming more efficient or improving its products. This results in more morally questionable tactics. What worries me are two things:
Unions can create temporary bubbles where you get higher pay than you deserve, but ultimately it hurts you.
Being overpaid doesn't seem to be hurting CEOs. It's so hypocritical for CEOs and other executives to complain about how unions hurt competitiveness, when in reality CEOs have the best union in the world. Corporate boards are so willing to overpay CEOs, even when they could obviously get other good talent for less, because the boards are made up of, surprise, other CEOs. All of these incestuous boards, who should be looking out for shareholders, are really looking out to keep the price of CEOs artificially inflated, because it's in their own best interest.
Ok. I'll live here in the US and compete for pennies on the dollar, just like your aforementioned corporations. I don't think I'll be able to purchase very much at that rate tho. Disclaimer: to this day I think that Nixon fucked up by letting the dollar float vs. gold. Otherwise he was tolerable.
C|N>K
Are we talking about the skills that it takes to head the entire information industry off in bogus directions like putting the presentation layer of web applications on the server where it doesn't belong just so you can continue hiring more programmers trained in Java by third-world diploma mills?
It shouldn't have taken GoogleMaps to shake the industry out of its worship of zombie legions trained in the latest Java library.
No, Mr. Moffat, what is going on is wealth centralization pure and simple. India is better adapted to play this game than the US because the US is, well, was a country that hadn't gotten around to making its middle class subsist outside the cash economy. Or perhaps I should say India hadn't gotten around to making its agrarian clan-based society give up its subsistence culture for grocery-stores and mortgage debt as prerequisite to reproduction if not bare survival.
Seastead this.
I'm a genius
No one that is truly a genius ever thinks they are a genius.
Tell me how applying myself will make me rich.
When did I say simply applying yourself will make you rich?
However, you can't get a job in something you're self-taught in
I have a great job as a programmer/sysadmin/consultant and am self-taught in all those fields.
Programming has no future, of course
This is bullshit, of course.
Darwin (actually the "invisible hand") will eliminate me without a backward glance if I can't compete
No, that is how the left would like to paint capitalism in general. But the reality is if you need help from others you will really find it... with or without government intervention.
I can't tell you how to be successful. There are plenty of books out there you may want to read if you are looking for inspiration.
I can tell you if you are smart and you have some skills, you will find ways to make money as long as you're doing something you really like.
Not everyone is cut out to be rich. It takes a certain type of person (or luck) to achieve that goal.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Those 16000 jobs still exist, they'll just be held by different people. Presumably those in India need to feed their families as much as those in the EU - seems morally neutral to me.
The problem is that the 16000 workers (wherever) helped build the company to what it is. A "company" used to encompass the workers who built the company as well as the investors and executives. In this brave new world, it seems the "company" only includes the executives and investors, while the workers who built the business and were promised things like pensions for decades of work are now expendable widgets. The executives get bonuses. The current employees lose their pensions, jobs, and otherwise get screwed. Does it still seem "morally neutral"?
A most excellent point.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
India only has to be more expensive than their competition for US companies to switch. That will happen long before India becomes wealthy.
So in other words, the ratio of the wealth of the richest people to the poorest people remains a constant. Strange, that does not seem to be what is happening...
If you are at the bottom end of the earning ladder, you might just about make enough money to survive. There is nothing left over to buy shares after you have paid your rent, groceries, etc.
If you are in the middle end (lets say like an IT professional) then you will have a bit left over after paying your living costs. You might have enough left over to invest in a few shares, especially if you curtail spending on life's little luxuries. The dividends and capital appreciation you will earn will eventually build up, towards the end of your life, into something that will either make your retirement pleasant, or if you hoard it, give your children a better chance at building up wealth
If you are really rich (worth say 10s of millions or more) then it is ludicrously easy to build wealth. You don't even need to work, and even if you spend money at what seems to us middle earners an obscene rate, you will still have plenty left over to re-invest, continuing the cycle.
Meanwhile, many that were on the middle rung of this ladder are getting their salaries squeezed by the action of the system, as companies scramble to move their operations to the cheapest possible labour market. This benefits the very wealthy by increasing dividends but moves some from the middle of the ladder down to the bottom where they will not be able to invest in anything at all.
my piece keeps getting smaller. Really, it does. My raises at my current job aren't keeping place with inflation. Meanwhile, I'm more productive then ever without a coresponding increase in wealth (google for the phrase "productivity up real wages down"). That productivity is going somewhere you know. Some of it's the global market leveling out, but a _lot_ of it is getting into the hands to the rich. This isn't something to be surprised about. Throughout human history most of society's wealth was in the hands of a lucky few. What's surprising was the idea that the trend might reverse permanently after WWII. Welp, so much for that.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
A lot of stocks are now owned by super funds (or whatever the equivalent term is in other countries). Call your super fund and tell them you want them to ask company boards to keep jobs in your country and you are prepared to take a smaller return.
Clearly unionized grocery store workers are worth more than non-unionized ones, since they are paid more. In a free market system, the "worth" of someone is exclusively determined by the wage they can command. Workers who unionize follow precisely the correct strategy in a free capitalist market system: maximize your return with all means available. In other words: Wal-Mart's strategy. Why do question these worker's sanity, but not Wal-Mart's?
Workers banding together in unions to maximize returns is exactly equivalent to capitalists banding together in corporations to maximize returns.
West need to wake up, start thinking more innovatively, and compete with our best tools: our creativity, education, and tremendous freedom to explore new business opportunities.
Entrapenurship is NOT for people with families. It is high risk and long hours except for the few lucky. Been there done that.
Further, education is not a comparative advantage anymore for US citizens. Think about it. The total lifetime wages of the people taking our tech jobs is probably less than US tuition in many cases. How the hell can education be our comparative advantage?
Table-ized A.I.
I for one am glad: the third world needs well-paying jobs much more than the first world. Hopefully we will finally start to slowly move away from the terrible inequity in living conditions in today's world.
A race to the bottom is on and the slashdot crowd will cheer at this.
...
USA/Europe to India to Ethiopia to Uganda to
And the wages are lowered each step of the way....
To all the mindless people parroting useless corporate cliches, think about what you are saying, because you may be selling your and your family's future short.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
Trust me, it is as bad as you'd feared.
Chart of incomes from lowest to highest in the US
Also has a section lower down that says the top 1% own more than the bottom 95% combined.
...plowed over by a larger company whose owners screwed people over so they could gain obscene wealth.
You'll be surprised, my friend, but those "large companies" are mostly owned by pension funds.
Now, here is a question for you.
Should a pension fund support the decision to send 1000 jobs to India if this would increase shareholders' value?
Suppose your future pension is in that fund. How would you feel if the fund manager took money from your pocket and gave it to those poor underpaid US workers?
--
People who don't think companies have a moral duty have been brainwashed by those very same companies. This amoral corporation hogwash is a recent, self-serving invention by those companies who do things like changing their names from WorldCom to MCI to try to escape their immorality.
No, thats not true. Theres a book out recently called "The Corporation". I suggest you read it. Early on the author establishes precisely where companies stand on morality; they are LEGALLY OBLIGED to have nothing to do with it. If it can be shown a company made any form of decision for moral rather than financial reasons, its an offense and the directors of the company can be sued by its shareholders. This was established in the Ford vs. Dodge (1917) case. Ford had some moral theories about business and thought he should pay his people more and charge customers less. The Dodges (then shareholders) saw the issue somewhat differently. They won. And so was the modern corporation defined.
For this reason even Noam Chomsky is on the record as saying that for corporations to take a moral action is in itself immoral. See, the board's duty is to look after someone else's money, not express their moral and ethical personalities. That they can do on their own time and with their own money, not someone else's. Thats how it works.
I share your sentiment on a personal basis but its in the very nature of the corporation, not in any decision anyone makes. The real brain washing is that people could think something other than that was even legally possible, much less practically possible.
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
And when that gap between the poor and the rich is eliminated; the poor,throughout history,have devoured the rich. Poor stupid humans. Too dumb to learn any lessons at all. This species deserves whatever happens to it.
Assuming you can go by with 10000 a year you either are dreaming schemes in which you get outlandish interest rates or you are planing to jump from a bridge aged 43.
No wait, you are jumping from that bridge tomorrow and paying your only son's college education in advance.
You would have to be living in a cardboard house eating boiled rice only for the rest of your life for that money to provide as much as you claim. Even in a poor country.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
What a load of tosh.
Honestly, if you are going to argument about something at least have the good maners to check for consistency.
Unemployment in India and China is vastly greater than in the US and Western Europe. Heck, there are people dying of prventable deceases in India and China, so jump off that bandwagon, The situation is so bad that Western companies can pay peanuts highly trained professionals over there because there are many willing to earn peanuts (by western standards) to do a highly qualified job.
SO let that one rest, people in Inida and China are not better of tha USians or Western Europeans. To even pretend that is a vulgar lie.
Your view of shareholders is cavalier to say the least, specially for somebody that seemed so worried about employment just a few paragraphs before.
Shareholders bet, with their money, in the success of a company. That money is what allows people to take a wage back home. Without shareholders there would not be jobs. It is that simple.
If you prefer to abolish or curtail shareholders then you would be better off advocating for other economic systems. After seeing the results of other economic experiments last century you better come with something very original, otherwise you and your marxist (ingorant marxist mind you) ilk will be sent back to where they belong: the scrapheap of failed ideas.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If IBM is saving money, that money gets reallocated somewhere.
That may be more investment, better dividends, savings, or a combination of all.
All these generate jobs. All of them.
The money that was being wasted paying overpriced technicians will be reallocated increasing the eficiency of the economy where IBM is based (last time I checked that is the US).
I am tired of people whinning when companies do what they do best: allocating efficently resources.
US people have one of the higest standard of living in the world (even the poor people, that live immensily better than poor people in poor countries) but keep whining about "their" jobs.
Jobs are like air or sunlight: they are avialable in nature but are not the birtright of anybody in particular.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... of laptops and other computer goods.
Beccaus markets become more efficient. And Indians that may have never dreamt about buying such things may now aspire to buy them.
But lets not reality intrude in your protectionist dream....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
What made China and India poor, their enormous populations, is now an asset.
What made ths US desirable for so many people, its better level of life, is not a competitive disavantage.
The circumstances change, the ones that use them better thrive, but those same people may miss the next big thing.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Europeans are as productive as USians, there are many looking forward companies (Nokia, Siemens, Vodafone, Ferrari) and guess what, they are not killing themselves to achieve it.
When people in Europe hear about people in the US putting weeks of 70,80 or more hours a week understandably they roll their eyes and pity the poor sods.
ANd don't bring the startup excuse, very often used by "capitalists". If a startup does not have enough resoruces to do its work without enslaving people then not enough capital was raised, the business model and working practices were not planned properly, or the product or service was not great after all.
There is no excuse to demand from people to throw their life away for the very dubious honour of being in the edge.
Albert Einstein was on the edge and he was a very laid back person. WOrk intelligenlty, not hard.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... don't expect an answer.
Not everyone is going to be unemployed or "barely making a living" in the US.
Many people in the US will benefit from lower prices and thus money will be freed to spend in other things creating new industries (all the programming jobs, SAs, DBAs, software Engineeres, etc. were created from the ashes of the ld manufacturing industry, and thos in turn were bron from the demise of agriculture).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
And is a complete disgrace that it gets rated up.
Compaines in Europe can cover 24x7 *every day* if necessary simply by using shifts, incentives and compensations. Oh yea, being light years ahead of the US in broadband and cheap public transportation also helps.
I have never worked more than 40 hours in a week for 6 years but I am part of a team that provides 24x7 coverage.
And my 5 weeks of holiday per year have never been denied to me.
Maybe, just maybe, EU companies have one or two tricks that US companies could learn in regards to organization?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If you really believe that, you have no redemption of any kind.
For goodness sakes, lets ask IBM to give people IBM's money and get done with it then.
What a dumbo.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
.... speak more than una language and have travelled to other countries. They did not murdered Sikhs thinking that they were associates to OSama bin Laden because they knew the difference.
Many have worked abroad.
I think they are a multinational human beings.
While Europe and East Asia look for better ways to organize themselves the US can't sign a free trade agreement with the mighty powers of Central America and has many common traits with parngons of decendy and democracy like Saudi Arabia when it comes to human rights.
Guys, if you don't have it in you to take advantage at a personal level of globalization then move aside and let the ones of us who know how to do it become prosperous.
Keep electing religious nuts that happen to be oil barons and you may miss this trend, which if you are unlucky may signal the end of your era.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Nope! Because the risks outweight the benefits. Here's a more likely scenario: UpStart Inc starts taking business from BigBucks Co. Suddenly several companies selling supplies to both companies have to raise their prices. UpStart hasn't build a huge amount of $,$$$,$$$ yet and goes out of business. The suppliers gradually lower their prices.
There's no murder neccesary. There's not even any crime! Well, maybe that guy who talked with all 3 suppliers just before they raised prices, but he didn't even work for BigBucks anymore. Honest!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
If those West/East coast yuppies are too good for the MidWest, that's their problem. The companies should move to the MidWest so the "uncool" people who live here can get jobs. BTW, I live in the MidWest, and I don't give a damn that it ain't "cool". I think it's cool to laugh at the fools paying $,$$$ per month for housing while I pay $200/month for my 100 year old house in a 100 year old "bad" neighborhood, and despite common opinion, I've lived here 40+ years without getting shot.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Who CARES where it is NOW? That's what makes no sense. Is it some moral crime if I give $16000 to charity A this year, then give $16000 to Charity B next year? Did I somehow take money away from Charity A?
And losing *any* job is inevitable. It's not a lifetime deal! Well, unless you clean toilets for a living, that's pretty much a lock-in, but any skilled job will *eventually* become an unskilled job, or done by robots, or a very small shell script, or whatever. Technology always wins in the end.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm pretty sure IMB was a huge company before any of the people being laid off were born. Perhaps your argument makes sense in some cases, but not in this one. Did IBM every promise lifetime employment? If they did, that was clearly wrong.
If you think a company give too much money to it's stockholders, buy its stock! Anyone can buy stock, it's no like it's a priveledge legally reserved for some elite. If you see that stockholders get a better deal than employees, become a stockholder. This is not complicated. People convince themselves they're not in the class of people who benefit from investment, and screw themselves to no end.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
A-fucking-greed.
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Not sure you actually read that review but a lot of it is a kind of glowing statement about how great a company Wal-mart is which is why they are so successful. Most of the compliments are backhanded and reulctant but the author/reviewer apparently couldn't deny even to themselves that Walmart is a really well run company, if they weren't they wouldn't be so successful.
Crucifying Wal-mart based on "gender discrimination" is pretty weak. In a company that big are there local managers discriminating against women, almost inevitably and I doubt Walmart headquarters can stop it, no company can. Is Walmart discriminating as a matter of policy, I doubt it and its hard to prove without smoking gun tapes or memos.
Any big company people want to target can be accussed of gender discrimination unless they are introducing quotas to insure precisely 51% of their management are women and that all women's salaries are identical to their male counterparts. Or maybe if their workforce is %70 women maybe they have to have 70% of their management women, and all CEO's must be women because they are the majority of the population?
Fact is women make an average of 76% of what men make in this country, therefor the entire country is guilty of gender discrimination. Only way you are going to change it is to institute quota systems and wage regulation. Then instead of gender discrimination your discriminating against people who are more qualified but are of the wrong gender to get a quota slot.
Fact is Walmart hires pretty vast pools of unskilled women to run cash registers and stock shelves. I'm pretty sure they hire a lote more unskilled women than men. Most are probably not management material. I wager, though I don't know for sure it would totally mess up their company if they were compelled to promote women who are unqualified in order to avoid being labeled gender biased.
@de_machina
If you are refering to my post, I don't think I was saying the rules of the game are "wrong". I'm just saying with the rules we have you are going to get some results that some people aren't going to like. With the rules we have Sam Walton is going to be able to create Walmart from a five and dime in Arkansas, and he can bankrupt pretty much every other mom and pop five and dime near one of his stores. He will also most probably put under every supermarket with unionized workers and drive down wages and benefits for retail workers.
You could change to another system but I doubt you are going to find one that is "right". Maybe you can find one you like better, but chances are its going to make winners and losers too, different winners and losers but there will still be people getting screwed and bad things happening. Unfortunately economical and political systems create winners and losers. The only constant is the people who are best at playing the game the given system creates are more likely to be winners. The people who pretend the rules don't matter and can be ignored are likely to be losers.
@de_machina
Oops, forgot to hit this one:
"and the fact that more than 40 per cent of their employees can't afford the cheapest health insurance program they offer to their employees."
I really don't think you can blame Walmart for this one either. Most companies can't afford full health insurance for their employees anymore either. The ones that are providing it are taking a huge and exploding hit to their bottomline, and they are at a competitive disadvantage to companies in the U.S. or abroad who dont pay those costs. If you recall GM's unions are probably going to voluntarily give up health benefits to try to minimize massive layoffs because health insurance costs are spiraling out of control.
Rather than blame Walmart for not providing gold plated and expensive health insurance maye we should study why insurance costs are spiraling out of control in the U.S. Not sure anyone knows but I'm willing to bet some factors are:
- Health care and drug companies are on one of the few industries left in the U.S. where you can make a killing in the U.S. and I suspect they have drawn every greedy businessman left in the country. Drug companies consistently carry some of the biggest profit margins in the economy. Why? Because American's have to pay whatever prices they feel like charging for their products and services. They have defacto monopolies especially when the collude with each other to inflate prices.
- Drug and health care companies are among the best and most astute lobbiest and campaign contributors and use every other trick in the book to completely exploit government corruption, so they have a government that is giving them a blank check to inflate prices unchecked. The so called "Medicare Reform" bill and drug benefit was in fact a case of our government being totally corrupted by big corporations and handing them billion and billions of tax dollars for a worthless sham.
- America is doing a great job of buying really neat technology like MRI and cat scans but they are also exorbinantly expensive. End result if you are wealthy or insured you can get really good health care in this country. If you are not you cant get any or if you do it will bankrupt you.
- The healthcare and drug system is really corrupt. Fraud reigns supreme and it costs everyone a lot. There was a heart surgeon in David CA who was a superstar until everyone realized he was performing open heart surgery on people with no heart disease to improve his profitability, and there are people like Scrushy and Healthsouth, also financial superstars but apparently a complete fraud.
- Incompetent doctors result in lots of malpractice suits and people who want to commit fraud lead to lots of malpractice, comp and disability suits that drive up costs for everyone.
- I have step grandmother who is 80. She is old and not in very good shape. Nearly as we can tell there isn't really anything wrong with here but she goes to the doctor on a weekly basis and demands the run and rerun test in a vain attempt to find whats wrong with here. She is on Medicare with supplemental so it costs here next to nothing. She can therefor bleed the system white looking for a cause that is really simply that she is old and her body isn't in great shape but its not something you are going to find and cure. Listen to a police scanner sometime and listen to all the ambulance calls and emergency room calls for seniors who are just sick. It doesn't cost them anything, it costs society a fortune when mostly they just need a doctor that will take walkins and someone to drive them there. Instead everyone goes to the emergency room at thousands of dollars a pop.
@de_machina
"This still doesn't necessarily make them "bad" in terms of Capitalism. Just let's not act all starry eyed about succussful businessmen."
On the flip side I dont think you can dismiss all successful businessmen as greedy, worthless bastards and crooks. I think its really important to give some deference to people who start from zero, using their personal capital, and create successful companies. Without them we would have no companies, no jobs, no nothing unless you want to live under Socialism where government creates all the jobs.
That said, Sam is dead now, and I don't even know who took his place at Walmart's helm. I have very little respect for the stuffed shirts that step in to companies that are already successful and run them. Some of them are probably great but it proves nothing to me if all you do is refrain from screwing up a succesful company someone else built, especially the ones who succeed by just outsourcing and slashing labor costs, or playing the merger and acquisition game.
@de_machina
I'm pretty sure IMB was a huge company before any of the people being laid off were born. Perhaps your argument makes sense in some cases, but not in this one. Did IBM every promise lifetime employment? If they did, that was clearly wrong.
Well, IBM wasn't "huge" until the 60's, so you're wrong. Before Gerstner took over, IBM employees were considered "lifers". IBM did not lay off people because of work fluctuations before Gerstner, and yes, the policy was stated and well-known. Until very recently, most Japanese companies followed the same policy. Who are you to say it is wrong for a company to respect the contributions of the people who built the company? What kind of nonsense is that?
If you see that stockholders get a better deal than employees, become a stockholder.
You appear to be clueless. Most of us who work for large companies are stockholders. Unless you have enough money to live off dividends, that won't replace your job. Do you run any of this ideal capitalist fantasy through a reality filter before you post it?
People convince themselves they're not in the class of people who benefit from investment, and screw themselves to no end.
The last figures I saw stated that half of the people in the country were stockholders, typically through 401-Ks and IRAs. They still have to work for a living, which means they need a job. Try selling your hogwash to the old Enron employees, who were major stockholders thanks to company policy.
Ah, but far cheaper is simply BigBucks Co buys Upstart Inc. All the employees get the axe, and nobdy had to talk to any suppliers at all!
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The only problem is you didn't have 6 billion people and giant cities when we were hunters and gatherers. I really doubt you could jump back to a barter economy without economic devestation and mass starvation. Communes work great on a small scale. They would be a bloody bitch to make work on the scale they would have work to support the Earth's current massive population. Of course maybe a mass die off of surplus humans might not be a bad thing.
I am confident people who live on farms would do OK if the economy disappeared over night, as long as they are well armed. Not having fuel for the farm equipment would be a bitch but they could survive on gardening and a lot of back breaking work. All the people in the cities would be screwed, which is why all the farmers would need to be well armed, to drive off all the starving city dwellers trying to steal food.
Hate to break it to you but all the people bartering goods in your economy would end up doing pretty much the same thing Sam Walton did when he owned his first five and dime, collecting all the things people need in once place so they dont have to wander from place to place searching for someone who had what they needed to barter with.
@de_machina
Bullshit called, they want 1980 back
IBM did not lay off people because of work fluctuations before Gerstner, and yes, the policy was stated and well-known. Until very recently, most Japanese companies followed the same policy. Who are you to say it is wrong for a company to respect the contributions of the people who built the company?
The company should provide you with charity in the form of paying you more than the job's worth on the market, just because you used to work for market rates once? That's a pretty stupid way to do charity. I'm all in favor of charity, but don't confuse receiving charity with earning your way.
Unless you have enough money to live off dividends, that won't replace your job.
You mean *until* you have enough stock to live off of dividends, it won't replace your job. Anyone working professionally makes enough to retire into this circumstance, with a significant portion of their life left to live. Then you get to pick 1 heir to put in this situation earlier. It's just a matter of priorities.
This isn't the middle ages. You can join the "wealthy elite" with the work of less than one lifetime, if that's what's important to you. You don't have to be born into the elite, fight a war for the king, then marry your children off to maximum personal advantage, all for a small chance of improving your lot - you just have to be willing to save.
Or you can spend your money on toys instead of wealth and forever be a wage slave, whatever works for you.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I have a little idea for a startup. How hard would it be for accountants in india to learn US and European tax laws, and then add numbers ?
Or that house renovation, lets send the plans to an idian firm. Fixed price. Have cheap "sales" guy that collects requirements, and feedback. $200-$5000 dollars fix'd price house planes for your renovation. And not just 1 plan, how about 3 alternatives. All engineering done (its just math right ?)
Need a new will - send the dollars to a inda firm. How hard is it to write a document to laws ?
Doing conveyencing (purchasing property). With electronic records exchange, banks online etc. lets off fixed price - $50 + fee's. It's just writing a few letters, easily trained.
so lets see... if we can outsource software development, which is actually a very hard thing todo, then the other industries which have very well developed procedures (unlike the IT industry) should be easy. We can remove most middle class jobs easy. ie. accounting, architecture, civil engineering (you can do maths just as well in india as in the usa, better if the latest stats are to be believed).
think i am kidding ?
None of these have assembly lines and such to outsource. A skeleton crew of programmers can maintain a
Any tiny company can compete against any large company by introducing a better product, service, or price point. It has happened millions of times in history.
Yes but this is a new time in history where the jobs are sent overseas and the consumer/original worker who helped get it there is left with no job.
The fact that you think having a job is linked to "luck" really explains a lot about your mentality towards capitalism.
It ahs nothing to do with capitalism. It has everything to do with shareholder and CEO greed. To make the bottom line look better they just ripped away the job, retirements, insurance, pension, and many other forms of retirement from the laboror who helped get them there.
The rest of your post I will ignore as it is based on complete ignorance of how capitalism and the economy works.
Thanks for playing (see above comments). The economy is driven by the consumers who spend their $$ on goods using the $$ they earned from their job. How can you claim you know how the economy works when you don't take into account the source of the income for capitalistic companies? That is the source of everything in capitalism. Without a consumer there is no company. Without a job there is no consumer.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
The way you state it makes it seem good...however...these are the well-off up to rich that we are talking about. Feeding their families isn't an issue in contrast to the thousands laid off who have zero income now to feed their families. I really don't get a "feel-good" attitude about someone bringing in an extra 10 grand to pay for their Porsche insurance at the sacrifice of thousands of blue/white collar workers who are left with nothing.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
Slavery on the European mainland was pretty rare, since there were sufficent peasants available to do that work for subsistence wages. They didn't have voting rights, but in theory they had been freed from surfdom across most of Europe during the middle ages.
It was the plantation system in the "New World" that drove the trading in African slaves, after most of the native Americans had been destroyed by "Old World" diseases.
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
"There would be no starvation or stealing of food as long as production sufficient for the population is maintained."
Production isn't the problem so much as distribution. Though production is the problem too for anything non trivial to make, and that needs to be made on a large scale to satisfy the demand from hundreds of millions to billions of people.
"Where is it written that this production must controlled by a select few?"
The problem is without an economy people are probably not going to build the rather expensive infrastructure needed for things like oil refining, automobile manufacturing or developing all these wonderful CPU's we run now which cost billions to develop and fab. You are unlikely to get any new advanced products or infrastructure in a world without an economy. I imagine people could hand build cars and computers but they would be few in number, expensive and highly variable in quality and performance.
"The problem is when the system permits them to go WAY beyond what they need. Nobody in the U.S. today needs a billion dollars."
You miss the point that greed is the main motivator for people to do anything beyond susbsistence living. Is it a corrosive and destructive force, sure, but without it you wouldn't have most of the non trivial things you take for granted today.
I really think you should be teleported into the utopia you are seeking so we could see how long you would last. The first most obvious thing you would be missing is your computer, and the telecom infrastructure that connects you to the Internet, allowing us to have this discussion.
A lot of people long for the simple life our forefathers led. My family is not far removed from it, my grandparents were pioneers in a remote part of the West. My dad can tell you stories about what life was like in the 1930's in the middle of no where. It wasn't a bad life, it had a lot of really positive qualities, but it was a really hard life, as in it was really easy to be on the edge of starvation if you didn't work really hard or misfortune struck, as in crop failure, the weather was bad, or the economy collapsed in the depression.
Most spoiled urban and suburban dwellers would crater if they had to go back to it. I've seen a few who move out here in order to go back to the simple subsistence life, some make it, most dont, the ones who make it usually cheat and indulge liberally in the modern economy, including working for a wage to make ends meet.
@de_machina
My problem with sending so many jobs to India has been trying to communicate with them. Yes, they have a good grasp of the English language. When it comes to understanding English that's a different story. One of the reasons I have stayed true BLUE is that IBM's customer service has been execelent for the over 20 years I've been in the industry. But, all it took was one phone call last week to change my outlook of the once awsome company. Here's how the phone conversation went. IBM: "Hello, my name is Ann, how may I assist you." ME: "Hi Ann, I need help in verifing an extended warranty." IBM: "I'm sorry sir, I can not sell you an extended warranty." ME: "No, I don't need to buy a warranty, I need to make sure of what my server has." IBM: "Like i said sir, you will have to contact your sales respresentative for purchasing an extended warranty." Ok, the conversation continued like that for 10 minutes until I gave up, frustrated.... Speaking English doesn't mean understanding English!
Should a pension fund support the decision to send 1000 jobs to India if this would increase shareholders' value?
Suppose your future pension is in that fund. How would you feel if the fund manager took money from your pocket and gave it to those poor underpaid US workers?
What if one of those out-sourced jobs was your childs? Or your own?
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
The company should provide you with charity in the form of paying you more than the job's worth on the market, just because you used to work for market rates once? That's a pretty stupid way to do charity. I'm all in favor of charity, but don't confuse receiving charity with earning your way.
So you believe that successful companies somehow spring full-blown from a shareholder's portfolio? It takes dedicated employees to build a successful company. With an attitude like yours, I can see how a company would readily view you as disposable, but valuable employees contain the institutional memory and experience that well-run companies need. It's even more unfortunate that a lot of easily led young people have accepted the idea that companies owe nothing to the people who built them. We can see the result as companies race to dump pension plans, which is tantamount to lying to employees and the government for decades.
You mean *until* you have enough stock to live off of dividends, it won't replace your job. Anyone working professionally makes enough to retire into this circumstance
Excuse me. Did you say "retire"? That would assume one works until retirement and that requires a job. Anyway your statement is bullshit for the vast majority, even professionals. Even those with stocks and pensions are typically dependent on Social Security to stay alive after retirement. If you doubt that, I suggest you go hang out with some retired folks for a while.
This isn't the middle ages. You can join the "wealthy elite" with the work of less than one lifetime, if that's what's important to you. You don't have to be born into the elite, fight a war for the king, then marry your children off to maximum personal advantage, all for a small chance of improving your lot - you just have to be willing to save
That's a load of bafflegas, and what does it have to do with some corporate raider coming in and sending your job to another country to bolster his bonus? It's tough to save when your source of income is exported. It's tough to get another job in an industry like IT where age discrimination is rampant and unemployment is high.
Or you can spend your money on toys instead of wealth and forever be a wage slave, whatever works for you.
Or you can spend your money on family, children, their education - unimportant things like that. What's it like to be completely self-centered? Do you have any real experience? I'm finding it hard to believe that anyone could really believe fantasies like yours or completely dismiss the largest part of the middle class.
Ok first of all I've worked at Wally World for 3 years and the biggest thing I must say about your comment is this part...
The other thing you need to appreciate about Wal-Mart is they have probably the most sophisticated and efficient computerized supply chain on the planet. They have giant computers in Arkansas that track every transaction in every store and make sure the right goods arrive at the right place at the right time.
You have no freaken clue...not one about what really goes on in a real Wally world store. That "most sophisticated and efficient computerized supply chain on the planet" does nothing more but cram as much freight as humanly possible in the smallest areas as possible...in the entire year most stores that are busy barely ever reach their bins. They are so busy shoveling freight from the truck...to the pallets..and straight to the floor while the majority of it stays stuck on a shelf somewhere never even touched. They use dumb terminals from like the early 90's for christ sakes. There is nothing SMART about a system that orders something when the database tells it to. There is nothing SMART about a system that isn't maintained because the employee's are to busy helping the gagillion customers and stocking the new freight.
And you know what they will be doing next that they are doing a trial run in Florida? Every truck will be palletized...in about a year. That means my job along with an average of 5-20 people in every store accross the nation will now require only about 1-3 people.
That check yourself out register you where talking about...one person does the task of what used to take 4. Those are there to help the customers get used to the next big thing RFID tags where bar codes are a distant memmory. You wont even have to remove the products from the cart if you don't want to. The largest employer in the nation is replacing its workers using technology as the usual way things go.
I'm also a computer science major and I've run into several managers at Wally World that used to work in the field during the '90s. Wal-Mart might be a great thing and something to look at as a symbol of how America allows you to creat something from nothing...but I can asure you any Wal-Mart employee that you ask that has been working for the company longer than 7 years will tell you that the company has changed drastically since good ol Sam has died.
Wal-Mart, Microsoft, IBM, and blah blah blah are stabbing the middle class in the back. Have you looked at CEO's incomes in relation to their employee's vs from the 70's to 80's? I read one figure that put them about 500% higher. The greed in todays corps and stock holders looking for higher profits...that has corrupted our goverment is getting way out of hand.
I am not talking about some revolution or something...but Unions are dying...large companies are taking over...middle income workers are being replaced by outsourcing so they can go work at Wal-Mart as a manager where they don't use an ounce of the skills they learned. Inovation no longer can happen in a country where white color jobs that created that inovation is shipped overseas.
Some economists see it as the World market just balancing things out...like it's unstoppable....and the funny one is they even view it as natural. I don't have the answer to the problem but I can asure you it is a problem and the company you have chosen to trump up as been deformed since its early days into part of the problem. Technology removing unnecessary jobs from the work force is one thing...but using technology to remove unnecessary skills and people from jobs that are still needed to be filled is another. If these are no longer American companies, than we need to consider who we as consumers do business with....because the rich getting richer off of this will only be laughing as they get to buy another trip that is now only a dream to the middle class.
To many this will only be a problem when their job is threatoned. America's streng
I'm impressed you can stand up and argue your point of view - critical thought seems to be hard to come by these days! Your arguments would be more convincing with less emotional baggage and personal attacks, however.
So you believe that successful companies somehow spring full-blown from a shareholder's portfolio? It takes dedicated employees to build a successful company. With an attitude like yours, I can see how a company would readily view you as disposable, but valuable employees contain the institutional memory and experience that well-run companies need.
There are two seperate issues here.
Compensation: sure, employees are what makes a company successful, but that's what you get paid for! If you want compensation in the form of lifetime employment, try to negotiate that into your contract. I'd rather have stock options. The cost to a company of lifetime employment is so high, you'd have to give up a *lot* in terms of current compensation to make that even out. Heck, if you were willing to work for what they'd pay in India, you might get agreement to that lifetime employment clause!
Control: you have a strong opinion on how a company should be run, and what's best for a company. Great! Start a company and run it that way! I think you're quite right that retaining technical employees is valuable, so I chose to work for a company with that value, and I like to invest in such companies. If we're right about that being good for companies, I'll have control of more capital over time, and will help enable more companies to act that way. If I'm wrong, I'll have less control. That's the secret that makes capitalism work! The more you're right, the more control you have, but you have to be proven right. You can't just tell other people how to run their companies: liberty applies to owners as well as workers (plus, people are wrong so often, you *need* a feedback mechanism in the control of capital).
Even those with stocks and pensions are typically dependent on Social Security to stay alive after retirement. If you doubt that, I suggest you go hang out with some retired folks for a while.
It's the difference between "can save" and "does save". I should be able to retire comfortably (not rich, but comforable) after 25 or so years of professional work. This is because, growing up quite poor, I learned the value of savings. If you spend all your money on toys and keeping up appearances, of course you'll be dependent on Social Security! 40 years of compound interest is a wonderful thing, however, and you don't really have to make much money to retire with a million or so (in today's dollars), especially with the tax-free investment vehicles available today.
Most people just don't have the financial responsibility to save ~$500 a month and not touch it, however. They'd rather buy stuff they can't afford on credit cards. And then, of course, blame someone else when they get laid off and don't have a year's expenses in a disaster fund to handle it. Bad shit happens in life - layoffs, cancer, kids get accepted to an Ivy League school - it's *your* responsibility to be ready for it. (Not that I'm perfect at this, by any means, but you dan't have to be perfect to win.)
That's a load of bafflegas, and what does it have to do with some corporate raider coming in and sending your job to another country to bolster his bonus? It's tough to save when your source of income is exported. It's tough to get another job in an industry like IT where age discrimination is rampant and unemployment is high.
My point was: *all* you have to do these days to join the "wealthy elite" is to be financially successful. It used to be *much* harder. Heck, you don't even have to kill anyone these days!
Getting a job in the field you love can be hard, as you've decided up front not to optimize for employment prospects. Fortunately for IT (or at least programming), the population of CS majors has taken a huge dive, and supply wil
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
is when the people realize that they can vote to confiscate the wealth of some in order to enrich themselves. Hence Fabian Socialism; use taxation to ease the burden of paverty on the most vulnerable of society in order to maintain a stable democracy that respects property rights. Now that communism has supposedly 'fallen', (yeah, right, tell it to the North Koreans, Chicoms and Vietnamese) the corporate mogules are dismantling the middle class one job/indujstry at a time and auctioning it off to enrich themslves.
the rich will always be rich
Immobile Factors of Production are things like weather/climate, natural resources, soil conditions, etc. In actual free trade theory, nations trade their excess products that they can manufacture at better quality and less cost, but that is NOT what todays so-called Free Trade is doing as there is no natural obstacle to the moving of jobs to overseas nations that have free schooling, free medical care, strong extended family networks, little to no worker safety/environmental protection, etc. Also the cost of labor is a small factor in al this. Nike for example is paying Vietnamese workers pennies per pair of shoes and would end up paying American workers probably a few dollars per pair instead. But when Nike charges US$60+ for those shoes, it is plainly not going to increase their costs appreciably to emply Americans instead of Vietneamese, or to start paying a competitive salary to its Vietnamese work force. The way to even the playing field is to also move our political leaders to: 1) compel plants overseas to meet US labor and environmental laws, 2) compel foreign exporters to America to allow for an equal import of American goods which is not the case across the globe except for Europe. 3) end the tax subsidies to American businesses that reloacate overseas. There is no reason to continue to provide the tax breaks these manufactures get for abandoning American labor.
Your arguments would be more convincing with less emotional baggage and personal attacks, however.
The emotional baggage is actually expensive luggage purchased with a lifetime's hard work. When one offers airy platitudes and infers the respondent is an idiot, one should expect the same in return.
Compensation: sure, employees are what makes a company successful, but that's what you get paid for! If you want compensation in the form of lifetime employment, try to negotiate that into your contract.
As far as I'm concerned this argument doesn't have much to do with compensation; it's about contracts and ethics. IBM made implied, if not written, contracts with employees about length of service, which IBM has reneged on by terminating the employees and shipping their jobs to another country. United Airlines has reneged on promises made to thousands of workers and the government for forty years by not funding their pension plan and dropping it in the taxpayers' lap. It's quite apparent that contracts with American companies mean nothing for the employees.
That's the secret that makes capitalism work!
What country do you live in? In the US, capitalism doesn't work because it's not been tried (at least in the past 200 years). What we have is a Corpocracy, which is a bastardized combination of plutocracy and oligarchy.
You can't just tell other people how to run their companies: liberty applies to owners as well as workers (plus, people are wrong so often, you *need* a feedback mechanism in the control of capital).
That feedback mechanism is long broken now that corporations can be assured of bailouts using taxpayer money (Chrysler, the airlines, etc.), the ability to drop their obligations like pensions, and the right to disolve their debts through bankruptcy, while individuals are denied those rights.
It's the difference between "can save" and "does save". I should be able to retire comfortably (not rich, but comforable) after 25 or so years of professional work. This is because, growing up quite poor, I learned the value of savings. If you spend all your money on toys and keeping up appearances, of course you'll be dependent on Social Security! 40 years of compound interest is a wonderful thing, however, and you don't really have to make much money to retire with a million or so (in today's dollars), especially with the tax-free investment vehicles available today.
I wonder if you really know what being "poor" really is, but if you do, then we have one thing in common. I suggest you rethink your expenses 25 years from now. Look at health insurance premiums today for senior citizens and multiply that by 10 at the current rate of increase. A nursing home in a less expensive part of the country runs over a hundred dollars per day. 25 years? Multiply that by four or five. So a million dollars might get you five years of managed care before they turn you into Soylent Green. You might want to consider what happened to one retired person I know who recently had her life savings reduced by 50% during the recent stock market "correction", even though it was supposedly diversified by a reputable investment company. Yes, I know you'll say she was stupid - go ahead.
My point was: *all* you have to do these days to join the "wealthy elite" is to be financially successful. It used to be *much* harder. Heck, you don't even have to kill anyone these days!
In order to be financially successful, one needs a job or to be born wealthy. It doesn't help when productive workers have their jobs sent to another country in order to boost Carly Fiorina's bye-bye gift of $40 million for ruining the company. Thank heaven that Paris Hilton doesn't have to worry about her job being outsourced. It has been on hold all this time, just waiting for her to realize her potential and accept her place in the company.
Getting a job in the field you love can be hard, as you've decided up front not to optim
When one offers airy platitudes and infers the respondent is an idiot, one should expect the same in return.
You know, one can be insulting yet still be polite. The key is indirectness. It makes a huge difference to the opinions of bystanders as to who the asshole is. There's really no excuse for being impolite, even though it's become bascially a sport online.
As far as I'm concerned this argument doesn't have much to do with compensation; it's about contracts and ethics.
The two are inextricably linked. IBM didn't offer a lifetime contract to its employees, and implied promises are worth the paper they're printed on. In the short term, you can pick a company that genuinely values its employees over one that doesn't. In the long term *things change*. I've had to change jobs more than once because my company lost that value. It's not the end of the world. It helps if you keep an eye on your company's culture and leave before the shit hits the fan, however. IBM's hasn't had that "lifetime employment" value for around 20 years.
United Airlines has reneged on promises made to thousands of workers and the government for forty years by not funding their pension plan and dropping it in the taxpayers' lap.
True enough. Defined benefit plans (like Social Security) are just stupid, because you can't seriously depend on the money being there for you. The UA pilots got particularly screwed because of the details of the pension insurance program - all pilots *must* retire early by law, but the federal insurace doesn't account for that.
While it doesn't excude UA being bastards, anyone with there eyes open saw this coming. You can't paint IBM with the UA brush, however - UA doesn't operate in any sort of free market, and is no better or worse morally than the unions it fights with (at least, according to my brother, who is a pilot).
> You can't just tell other people how to run their companies: liberty applies to owners as well as workers (plus, people are wrong so often, you *need* a feedback mechanism in the control of capital).
That feedback mechanism is long broken now that corporations can be assured of bailouts using taxpayer money (Chrysler, the airlines, etc.), the ability to drop their obligations like pensions, and the right to disolve their debts through bankruptcy, while individuals are denied those rights.
The feedback mechanism worked for Chrysler eventually, as the people who could run a company lost control of that company.
This brings us back to the original point: forcing a company to pay its employees more than they're worth is just a bad way to do charity, and never works out in the long run. Sure, if IBM in Europe made specific committments of lifetime employment to those employees then IBM is being a bastard here, no question (IBM America hasn't had that culture now for quite some time, don't know about Europe). But it's the breaking of an *explicit* promise that's would make them evil, not the general principle of moving jobs to lower cost of production.
I wonder if you really know what being "poor" really is,
As a kid: did you know that if you live in a trailer where it snows, it's critical that you shovel snow off the roof if it's really coming down, because the flat roof will eventually collapse under the weight? The aluminum/vinyl/whatever it was roofing material is unbelieveably slippery with just a little ice! It's a long way down, but the upside of having to do this in heavy snows is that the ground is probably soft.
As a young adult, just starting out: you know, you can learn to sleep through the gunshots pretty easily, but wow, the lights on police helicoptors are like the Light of God when they hit your window at 3AM, no sleeping through that!
but if you do, then we have one thing in common. I suggest you rethink your expenses 25 years from now.
Well, no one can predict the future, but based on history I'm op
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The feedback mechanism worked for Chrysler eventually, as the people who could run a company lost control of that company.
Err - couldn't run a company. And, No doubt, a bit further down. Damn preview button.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You know, one can be insulting yet still be polite. The key is indirectness. It makes a huge difference to the opinions of bystanders as to who the asshole is. There's really no excuse for being impolite, even though it's become bascially a sport online.
Being insulting is impolite, no matter how it's done, and one of knows how to use dirty words in public. Your apology is accepted.
IBM didn't offer a lifetime contract to its employees, and implied promises are worth the paper they're printed on.
IBM did make verbal contracts. It was part of the "IBM culture" and widely publicized as a recruiting incentive (otherwise I'd never have known about it). Any ethical company would live up to the terms of any contract, written or verbal. Anything less is unethical. If I give you my word on something, it's my bond. After reading your arguments I wouldn't trust you as far as I could throw you.
Defined benefit plans (like Social Security) are just stupid, because you can't seriously depend on the money being there for you.
I believe you missed the point. The company gets certain tax considerations for their pension plan, not to mention that it is a benefit spelled out in the employment contract. There is supposed to be funding for these plans because the alternative is the federal (partial) guarantee. UA did not fund the plan despite claiming that it had, it declared bankruptcy, dumped the pension on the taxpayers, and the government agreed. If you can't see the problem, I'll explain it in fine detail.
You can't paint IBM with the UA brush, however - UA doesn't operate in any sort of free market, and is no better or worse morally than the unions it fights with (at least, according to my brother, who is a pilot).
Again, what country do you live in? There is no "free market" in the US. UA had written contracts with employees for 40 years, which it didn't keep. Given your metrics, I would think that would make UA more unethical than IBM, but, AFAIAC, they are both unethical since I consider a promise to be the same as a contract.
The feedback mechanism worked for Chrysler eventually, as the people who could[n't] run a company lost control of that company.
Lost control? I'd laugh if it weren't so sad. The taxpayers (including Chrysler employees) paid billions so that the people who couldn't run Chrysler, especially Iococca, were highly rewarded. The net effect was to use US taxpayer money to transfer the company and its assets to (a foreign owner) Daimler. With feedback like that, we should be out of business in no time.
But it's the breaking of an *explicit* promise that's would make them evil, not the general principle of moving jobs to lower cost of production.
You and IBM lost this argument some years ago. They were pilloried in the press for firing a large number of employees who were very close to retirement. They lost their "goodwill", and their image was forever tarnished. I suggest you look closely at any Slashdot thread where IBM is getting praised as an OS saviour. IBM has lots of baggage - well earned and emotional.
As a kid: did you know that if you live in a trailer where it snows, it's critical that you shovel snow off the roof if it's really coming down, because the flat roof will eventually collapse under the weight?
No, I didn't know that as a kid. We lived in a rented room, so the owners of the house had to worry about shoveling snow, although my vague memories of them indicate they were nice people. Until my mother got married and we "moved up", I didn't really have any clothes suitable for dealing with snow and was encouraged to stay out of it. Now, I get plenty of snow to play in every winter, and I wish there was someone else to do the shoveling.
Well, no one can predict the future, but based on history I'm optimistic. History is chock full of people with doom-and-gloom scenarios, but the advance of technology
Is IBM a nice company? Probably not - especially since they decided they were a service company and didn't really need engineering. But that has little bearing on moving 16000 jobs to India. If IBM did actually make promises to those employees that their jobs would be forever, then sure, that's evil, but I suspect IBM has been out of that habit for longer than most of those 16000 have been employed. That IBM was over in the 80s (at least here).
On the more intersting question of whether it's evil for a modern company - with no real loyalty to or from employees - to shift jobs to where they're cheaper: I just don't see the problem. Yes, it sucks to be layed off, but it's also unfair to expect someone to pay you more than your job is worth. Like anyone else I just want a fair day's work for a fair week's pay, but I get what I can negotiate instead. I've changed jobs many times and worked in several fields, and it's not like being downsized means you can never work again. Heck, we're even hiring at my shop, though only senior people in America.
More and more companies are getting burned by pointless offshoring, with projects costing more than they would have to keep at home in the final analysis. It looks to me like the peak has passed (thought it will of course never be like it was in the dot-com days, when reality could be ignored). I have an old stock portfolio that proves that companies that don't know what they're doing eventually disappear, and take their fads with them.
As far as Universities go, where's your ire for them? Sure companies act in their own self interest, as ever, but you'd hope the nation's scholars would know better (yes, that's a joke).
As far as my optimism being reduced to cynicism - you're supposed to grow out of cynicism, you know? My father never did, and he's a broken man today as a result - cynicism can ruin you. If you ignore every opportunity just because you can't be sure how it will work out, life never improves.
First, technology doesn't have anything to do with the subject. We've been through the same thing with steel, textiles, autos, apparel, electronics, appliances, etc. The jobs go away, and they don't come back. What happens when US kids no longer go into CS because there are no jobs, so there are no longer any new managers with CS knowledge in the next generation? CS work will be a commodity that the US has to purchase. We were told to move from manufacturing to IT (knowledge) work. What comes after knowledge work? We need to know the answer, mighty one.
This bit is important, because technological progress is at the heart of IT offshoring. Many many kinds of jobs have gone away in the past 150 years never to return, and yet it hasn't been a downward spiral of employment for 150 years! Heck, real unemployment now is better than the worst times of the 80s, or of the 70s. There's always some new kind of work being invented, even if it's not obvious at first what it is.
The idea that all knowledge work is leaving is a myth that Slashdot buys because our work is particularly vulnerable to the current progress in technology. But from what I've seen firsthand, it's not even all IT jobs going overseas, it's unskilled and semi-skilled IT jobs (at least, adjusting for the dot-bust: jobs from 99 are never coming back because they were never sustainable). There was a *huge* supply problem with even the least skilled IT jobs a decade ago because access to computers in the decade before that was so extremely limited. Now there are 3 big technological factors working against low-skill IT jobs:
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Is IBM a nice company? . . . That IBM was over in the 80s (at least here).
Wrong again. IBM didn't start doing layoffs until Gerstner, which begs the point: why did IBM go from being a "good" company to a "not nice" company? It is because the company's leadership forgot about morals and ethics in the pursuit of personal wealth (greed)?
On the more intersting question of whether it's evil for a modern company - with no real loyalty to or from employees - to shift jobs to where they're cheaper: I just don't see the problem.
No kidding? That's what started this argument. You think companies in this brave new world should have no loyalty to the people who built them. You see the non-executive employees as disposable widgets. I see those employees as repositories of institutional memory, knowledge, and experience, who are valuable to the company.
More and more companies are getting burned by pointless offshoring, with projects costing more than they would have to keep at home in the final analysis. It looks to me like the peak has passed (thought it will of course never be like it was in the dot-com days, when reality could be ignored). I have an old stock portfolio that proves that companies that don't know what they're doing eventually disappear, and take their fads with them.
So the employees the company most needs have lost their livelihoods, the shareholders have been burned, but it's okay because top management made millions by making bad decisions that hurt the company?
As far as Universities go, where's your ire for them? Sure companies act in their own self interest, as ever, but you'd hope the nation's scholars would know better (yes, that's a joke).
Sorry, I don't find that funny. My ire is not with the universities but for the industry representatives who claim to want certain graduates but are only lying to promote various legislation. These are the same people who are claiming that our universities don't produce enough IT graduates. Are you seriously claiming that higher education should ignore the needs of industry and that industry liars are behaving properly?
As far as my optimism being reduced to cynicism - you're supposed to grow out of cynicism, you know?
Then you have a lot of growing to do. Your view that companies should pursue money in lieu of all else has a hard core of cynicism. Personally, in light of our current Corpocracy and their proclamation of amorality, I think cynicism is a rite of passage.
This bit is important, because technological progress is at the heart of IT offshoring. Many many kinds of jobs have gone away in the past 150 years never to return, and yet it hasn't been a downward spiral of employment for 150 years! Heck, real unemployment now is better than the worst times of the 80s, or of the 70s. There's always some new kind of work being invented, even if it's not obvious at first what it is.
We have also lost our independence in the industries we have exported. We can no longer produce our own textiles, garments, steel, machined goods, consumer electronics, and soon - IT workers. I suggest you look at the numbers for real income over the last decade. In every previous jobs exodus, we were told to move on to (whatever) new thing there was. You still have not answered the question: What comes after knowledge work? Don't tell me that something will come up, because before there was already an upward path. What can be abstracted after knowledge? You didn't anwser the question - you fail it.
With all this, why am I not worried? Because this happens to every industry, eventually, and yet the economy goes on. You just can't overlook the huge benefit of increased effeciency, not just to the stockholder, but to the consumer.
I feel like I'm in a channelled discussion with Neville Chamberlain. What "efficiency", since you already mentioned companies getting burned? The tiny benefit to the average stock
No kidding? That's what started this argument. You think companies in this brave new world should have no loyalty to the people who built them. You see the non-executive employees as disposable widgets. I see those employees as repositories of institutional memory, knowledge, and experience, who are valuable to the company
Well, we're going in circles here. I *do* think companies should have *some* loyalty to their employees, I don't think they should be *compelled* to act that way, and I think the difference is what we're really arguing about. Also, I don't think that's an absolute: I have no loyalty to the people who built my house, they have no continuing rights to it. Those who own companies have substantial rights over the culture of those companies - not absolute, but certainly the right to hire and fire who they like (and to face the consequences of that choice) when that's driven by legitimate business interest.
So the employees the company most needs have lost their livelihoods, the shareholders have been burned, but it's okay because top management made millions by making bad decisions that hurt the company?
All in your opinion. Perhaps IBM did right by their stockholders, got rid of employees that weren't doing anything unique, and made a good decisionthat helped the company. The thing is: it's not your call. It's the call of those who own the company, made by the management they designated. If they screw it up too badly, IBM will go the way of AT&T, and someone more competant will control those assets.
It's not like IBM killed these people and ate their children. Jobs were lost in one place and created in another. The folks in India will have a huge change in standard of living, bringing several families out of abject poverty for each job. The folks losing jobs in Europe will fall back on the world's best social programs (unsustainably good, but that's a different thread). The change means a substantial net reduction in the world's poverty. That's good, right?
My ire is not with the universities but for the industry representatives who claim to want certain graduates but are only lying to promote various legislation.
All of my ire in this situation is directed at the universities. To expect the companies to be altruistic is just silly. The universities are supposed to be the smart ones here - if they aren't, why the Hell do we give them all these tax dollars? If the universities are so easily fooled, they're useless in the first place. The truth, however, is that the universities are just another kind of big company, but one that offensively pretends to be altruistic, as if their motivation were imparting knowledge instead of growing their own interests. The univerities were willing conspirators here, not hardly fooled by "evil business", but instead recognizing a marketable product when they saw one, with no regard to the future of the students.
We have also lost our independence in the industries we have exported. We can no longer produce our own textiles, garments, steel, machined goods, consumer electronics, and soon - IT workers.
I should be worried about that? I can't possibly grow my own food! I lack both the knowledge and the land. I couldn't provide my own safe drinking water and would be dead in a few weeks, one way or another, without the community I'm dependent on for basic services. Dependence on your neighbors tends to work out well in the long run, as long as you're willing to contribute in return (which is the next point).
The industries we prop up because we need them here are the examples you cite - the airlines not allowed to go under, Bush's absurd steel tariffs, and Chrysler a while back - are *not* shining example of Things Going Right. *That* would be worse than jobs going overseas.
I suggest you look at the numbers for real income over the last decade. In every previous jobs exodus, we were told to move on to (whatever) new thing there was. Y
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Well, we're going in circles here. I *do* think companies should have *some* loyalty to their employees, I don't think they should be *compelled* to act that way, and I think the difference is what we're really arguing about. Also, I don't think that's an absolute: I have no loyalty to the people who built my house, they have no continuing rights to it. Those who own companies have substantial rights over the culture of those companies - not absolute, but certainly the right to hire and fire who they like (and to face the consequences of that choice) when that's driven by legitimate business interest.
Some loyalty? Like a mild pregnancy? And I never said that companies should be (legally) compelled to act that way - they should be compelled by their leadership and internal standards to act that way, since it is in the best interests of the company. However, thanks to constant repetition, they have convinced the younger generation that corporations have no obligations other than generating money. Your house analogy lacks a foundation; you don't need a constant crew of builders to keep it standing. A corporation does, and the most useful crew is the one that built it. It is not the people who "own" the companies that are doing the firing - it is top management. Since when is it a "legitimate business interest" to use outsourcing to bolster the CEO's bonus?
All in your opinion. Perhaps IBM did right by their stockholders, got rid of employees that weren't doing anything unique, and made a good decisionthat helped the company. The thing is: it's not your call. It's the call of those who own the company, made by the management they designated.
My opinion? You were the one talking about defunct companies in old portfolios. Management is not chosen by the stockholders. It is usually chosen by the board of directors, which is generally composed of CEOs of other companies, which is the only reason such morons can get multi-million dollar "compensation" while the "owners" and employees get screwed.
It's not like IBM killed these people and ate their children. Jobs were lost in one place and created in another. The folks in India will have a huge change in standard of living, bringing several families out of abject poverty for each job. The folks losing jobs in Europe will fall back on the world's best social programs (unsustainably good, but that's a different thread). The change means a substantial net reduction in the world's poverty. That's good, right?
Ah, yes, the matter-of-degree argument. The employees weren't shot, they'll just starve to death normally. Raising poverty in one part of the world while reducing it another does not result in a net reduction in poverty.
All of my ire in this situation is directed at the universities. To expect the companies to be altruistic is just silly. The universities are supposed to be the smart ones here - if they aren't, why the Hell do we give them all these tax dollars? If the universities are so easily fooled, they're useless in the first place.
You have got to be doing this just to push my buttons. Since when does honesty equal altruism? Do you really believe that corporations should lie to the educators of this country about what skills are needed in the workforce? That is insane.
I should be worried about that? I can't possibly grow my own food! I lack both the knowledge and the land. I couldn't provide my own safe drinking water and would be dead in a few weeks, one way or another, without the community I'm dependent on for basic services. Dependence on your neighbors tends to work out well in the long run, as long as you're willing to contribute in return (which is the next point).
I hate to break this to you, but our neighbors aren't "willing to contribute in return". China is currently taking us to the cleaners with their pegged currency and trade barriers. They've also just renewed an old alliance with Russia and warned the US to watch it. Wha
Well, there are 2 issues here: is moving jobs to lower-paying parts of the world immoral, and are knowledge work jobs here at risk?
For the first part, you've yet to present an argument that it's immoral. Sure, it's a potential betrayal of trust, if employees were made a false promise of lifetime employment, but that's a sperate issue. Sure, it *might* be bad for the company, but unless behind your Slashdot pseudonym you're a successful CEO of a large company, your opinion and my opposing opinion don't carry much expertise. The fundamental point is that one guy in Europe lost his job, and probably won't miss any meals as a result, and another in India gained a job making 30 times what he could otherwise make - so much in fact that it will provide not just for his extended family, but for the families of several others as he has a new house built, hires staff to clean his house and take care of his children, and so on. In the big picture, I don't see the moral issue, and in fact it looks good to me.
In the small picture, working for a company doesn't give you some moral right to continue doing so. It gives you the moral right to compensation at the time. Sure, sometimes it's in the company's interest to pay people more than the going rate because of what those people already know, but not always! Especially if the employee is just following a simple flowchart that anyone could learn in a few weeks training, as is so often the case. I have no moral right to be paid more than anyone else of the same skill level to do a given job, no matter what I might have been paid in the past.
Aside from the moral argument, it's just you telling a manager at IBM what decision would be best for IBM. You can argue that management hurts the stockholders in order to pad their bonuses, but the stockholders have to approve the board, and the board has to approve the bonus plan, so it's not like the stockholders aren't involved. In fact, there has been a near-revolution by stockholders against excessive executive compensation in recent years, and I've seen heads of companies get the axe more than once when they abused stockholders. It was too late for Compaq, but Disney and HP both have a fighting chance after throwing the bums out. If the management of IBM is actually incompetant, one way or another they'll be out of a job themselves eventually. But I at least admit the possibility they did the right thing, since neither of us actually know the details of IBM's business in that area.
As far as knowledge work disappearing - this can only happen if our educational system becomes such a failure that we're no longer leading the way in research (and, of course, that *is* possible, but we're not there yet!).
Sure, any job that "anyone can do" and that doesn't require a physical presence (you had a good long list of clerical jobs) will move to the cheapest labor market this decade, but there's no use complaining about that, as those jobs will all be elimated completely by computers next decade! Just as any simple repetitive mechanical task is only done by people when those people can work cheaper than robots. That's what technology does - it eliminates jobs that don't require original thought. Oddly enough despite 150 or so years of technology eliminating jobs, there are more jobs than ever, despite 150 years or so of predictions to the contrary.
Currently high skilled work can't really be remoted, because it requires mentoring from those who are tops in the field to become highly skilled. Eventually even that mentoring process will be remotable, I'm sure, but with the technology I expect to see in the next couple of decades that's strictly a face-to-face process, usually happening in an informal way alongside actual on-project work. Every high skilled job eventually becomes a low skilled job, but so long as we're the ones with the basic research leading to the next hot field, we'll be the place where the next kind of high-skilled job grows up.
You ask what happens if *all* IT
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Well, there are 2 issues here: is moving jobs to lower-paying parts of the world immoral, and are knowledge work jobs here at risk?
If the management of a profitable company displaces workers in order to increase personal wealth, then I consider that unethical and immoral. If you go read something like the Computerworld executive surveys on offshoring, then it's quite obvious that knowledge workers' jobs are being exported to low-wage countries. So the answers are yes and yes.
For the first part, you've yet to present an argument that it's immoral. Sure, it's a potential betrayal of trust, if employees were made a false promise of lifetime employment, but that's a sperate issue.
I just did, and I did so before. If you don't consider betrayal of promises and trust immoral, I can't help that. Greed is considered immoral, so any decision made for that reason would be immoral. The feds made a huge mistake some years ago when they passed "reforms" that tried to link executive compensation to stock performance. The only result was to ensure that executives work to make stock prices volatile in a cycle that matches their options grants and vestings.
The fundamental point is that one guy in Europe lost his job, and probably won't miss any meals as a result, and another in India gained a job making 30 times what he could otherwise make - so much in fact that it will provide not just for his extended family, but for the families of several others as he has a new house built, hires staff to clean his house and take care of his children, and so on. In the big picture, I don't see the moral issue, and in fact it looks good to me.
So stealing from the middle class to give to another middle class in order to increase the wealth of corporate executives is ethical in your book, Robin Hood?
In the small picture, working for a company doesn't give you some moral right to continue doing so.
I didn't say it did. I'm saying some corporate raider shouldn't have the right to fire productive workers in order to line his/her pockets, which is what is currently happening.
I have no moral right to be paid more than anyone else of the same skill level to do a given job, no matter what I might have been paid in the past.
Your experience and hard-earned knowledge are worthless? Besides, I've said before it's not about salary, it's about jobs. Teachers in the US make more than teachers in India. Truck drivers in the US make more than truck drivers in India.
Aside from the moral argument, it's just you telling a manager at IBM what decision would be best for IBM. You can argue that management hurts the stockholders in order to pad their bonuses, but the stockholders have to approve the board, and the board has to approve the bonus plan, so it's not like the stockholders aren't involved.
Heh. That's like saying we all voted to go to war in Iraq. Stockholders have a yes/no vote on directors. If one is denied, another one just like him and the CEO will take his place. The real problem in our system is that we have an exclusive club of corporate directors and CEOs. They are a class unto themselves - an aristocracy. I'm not saying anything new - there have been books written about the situation. The Europeans don't have similar problems or insane management compensation.
In fact, there has been a near-revolution by stockholders against excessive executive compensation in recent years, and I've seen heads of companies get the axe more than once when they abused stockholders.
A revolution? Do tell. After Carly got finished screwing HP and its employees and demolishing what was once a good corporate culture, the board gave her $40 million, outplacement services, and a company-paid secretary to get rid of her. Darned right, those directors showed her! Julian Day got $12 million in severance after making K-Mart's stock worthless - the stockholders really won there. Gary Drook got million