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In SIlicon Valley: Profits up. Employment Down.
popo writes "The New York Times (free yada yada) has an interesting report on the changing landscape of Silicon Valley tech companies: Profits are soaring but employment figures are not. This dynamic points to significant future shifts down the road for Silicon Valley companies like Electronic Arts and Cisco. Interestingly, the culprit isn't just outsourcing. Huge leaps in worker productivity and automated processes are also responsible for the decreased need for new labor."
We're talking about Silicon Valley here, isn't that where most of the automation is coming from in the first place?
I for one welcome our new self-automating IT-overlords.
Not to mention the recent trend (last 5 years or so) of mandatory overtime... If everyone works the equivalent of 1.5 people then employment doesn't need to go up. Profits are starting to match effort level, and that effort level will just equal burnout eventually. When that happens, employment will go back up or profits will start to go down.
This sig used to be really funny...
Right Here
Have you Meta Moderated t
Where are those profits going? To the low level workers that actually make it happen, or to the CEO who is already wildy rich? I wouldn't be surprised to see wages not going up for the majority of workers despite increased profits.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
... even more so.
Programming is teh act of automating complexity, typically made up of less complex, but still the same...automations. It is done so that the user of the complexity can use and reuse the complexity thru a simplified (in relationship to the complexity) interface.
With this it is inherent that the field of programming is something of a job intended to work itself out of a job... Otherwise there is a serious problem exposed in the software industry.
There will always be jobs in programming but tasks will change and as programming automates more and more of its own field, simplifying the process, so will it allow more and more to do programming/automating, for themselves, perhaps not strickly as a programmer 9-5 but as a task to do as part of other main duties of onmes position at a company.
Simply understand the inherent objective of progamming and carry it on out in its evolution..
But also the much higher overtime in larger corporations on scales than was traditioally only seen in startups.
And the fact that a lot of the new things are not outsourced as such, but still developped by small companies and then bought by these large ones.
"The prospect of technological leverage will of course raise the specter of unemployment. I'm surprised people still worry about this. After centuries of supposedly job-killing innovations, the number of jobs is within ten percent of the number of people who want them. This can't be a coincidence."
-- Paul Graham (2004-09), What The Bubble Got Right
(If the doom-sayers were right, then there would be a total of ten jobs in the world today.)
In other news, careers as a Lanscaper are way up.
In the last three years, profits at the seven largest companies in Silicon Valley by market value have increased by an average of more than 500 percent while Santa Clara County employment has declined to 767,600, from 787,200. During the previous economic recovery, between 1995 and 1997, the county, which is the heart of Silicon Valley, added more than 82,800 jobs.
And this is happening all over the place, not just in Silicon Valley, and in all industries, not just IT. In other words, folks, whatever you call the current economic situation, it is not a recovery. Traditional aggregate measures like size of GDP, or GDP per capita, or total corporate income -- and the changes in them that have traditionally been used to define words like "depression," "recession," "recovery," and "boom" -- are meaningless if the number and quality of jobs don't keep pace. It really doesn't matter how much the executives and boardmembers are making. If the increased profits don't translate into good jobs at good pay for regular workers, nobody's recovering a damn thing.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
A significant number of tech people were never attracted to the area since the cost of living increase exceeded the salary increase. Companies have moved to spread their tech base outside the main "Silicon Valley" proper. The jobs have spread up the East Bay to Sacramento, while headquarters remained in the Silicon Valley area. Jobs have also spread to other outlying cities. With the advent of cheap broadband in rural areas, software engineers and project managers can live anywhere from Alabama to Oregon and maintain a nice home instead of two bedroom apartment.
Have you Meta Moderated t
Huge leaps in worker productivity and automated processes are also responsible for the decreased need for new labor
Employees are working longer hours and are expected to put in work during the weekends and holidays (yes, I'm bitter because I am putting in hours today)
Yes. Except that it doesn't. Some people get paid for work on open-source software, both in development and support.
My other processor is big-endian.
...choosing a career as a robot assembler.
You're bound to be replaced.
These typoes have to stop.
...largely because of the technology development teams it is building in India and China. Maybe it's possible to do development in languages with Garbage Collection in China, but so long as computers have limited memory and Microsoft, Google and The Party keep censoring certain useful words, C hackers should be ok.
Ga, No Ca P, O K, Mo F O ?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Same thing happenned to machinists.
You start off with a blacksmith. Lots of them are needed to do anything and it costs a lot and they are highly skilled and treasured.
Then the blacksmith learns to build metal bending machines. You take a bar, put it in the machine, pull hard on the lever and it bends.
Thus it makes more complex devices easier to build. The blacksmith becomes more highly educated, more refined. Becomes the inventor.
He uses the metal bending machines to build complex machines. shavers, benders, cutters, drills, and such. Those in turn make making more and more complex machines that are larger, stronger, and at the same time more exact and easier to use.
Then comes interchangable parts. Things that took generations to figure out, years of discipline hard work to learn how to build, can now be built in previously unimaginable large numbers AND be more exact AND be made by semi-skilled labor.
Then they build entire factories. Machines the size of apartment complexes. Things so automated and exact that it boggles the mind.
Were is the place for the original blacksmiths that started all this? No were. All you need is a highly educated guy at the top doing the design, and somebody with a IQ hirer then a 105 to stamp out the molds and feed the machines the raw materal.
Such is the same thing with the programmer.
The original blacksmiths were the guys that took individual transistors and designed thinking machines. They used wires coated in varnish and wrapped around metal pegs to build curcuits.
They developed their own languages to go with the custom machines.
Then along came wide use of intergrated curcuits. Discs and memory to store instructions. Machine language became well understood technology and people built and documented assembly.
Then you had standardizations happenning. Fewer new unique machines were built and ones that were created were built with a eye on backward compatability with previous generations of computers.
Then along came C and Unix to make realy portable programs. Fewer and fewer machine archatectures were built, with standardized abstractions and ISAs for compatability.
All the computers resembled each other in operation and performance. They became faster and faster. Software that was not portable became obsolete as soon as it was finished written.
Now we have a few archatectures. They resemble each other closely in theory and executions. Portable software is the norm. Nobody fucks around in assembly unless they absolutely have to and that's avoided as much as possible.
Nobody is hand-making curcuits. Nobody is building memory from hand or wiring up peg boards. It's all done thru IDE's and thru standardized libraries provided by large monolythic system developers. The computer is disposable and faster then ever, the software can be gotten from the internet in minutes and new programs can be written in weeks that would of taken years to accomplish just a couple decades ago.
That's how technology works. It makes doing complex things very easy.
A person can go into Enlightenment 0.17 or use Python with Gstreamer framework to build a DVD player with fewer then 100 lines of code, and have it run on AIX, PPC, ARM, x86, x86-64, IA64, Sparc and others with almost the same level of effort.
7 it was very expensive just to have a computer that could even play DVDs.
From reading this, and another article by Richtel about US mom and pop businesses outsourcing their manufacturing, it seems that people who run things or design things still have jobs. That's just not many people.
The assembly has moved to China. You probably don't want those jobs anyway -- when they were here they were lousy jobs, but now they are unthinkable (unless you like breathing lead). Design and prototyping still gets done in Silicon Valley.
Even so, actual engineering is moving to Taiwan. Imagine you want to make a board. The assembly guys (Chinese, in Shanghai) need to talk to the engineer and ask some questions about a substitution. Better if he is Chinese in Taiwan, right?
Even more disturbing (as a non-Chinese-speaking American) is that actual innovation (the stuff we are supposed to be good at) is getting done in Taiwan. E.g. stuff that allows a cheapo processor to have 5 fast ethernet interfaces. Your routers were probably designed in Taiwan, and labled "Cisco" or "D-Link". But Cisco didn't design it -- it was probably someone like these guys: Zyxel (Taiwan)
Americans need to lose the laziness and start working harder (if they want to be able to pay for enough gas to fill a SUV). This is inevitable. As long as there was no China, the Taiwanese could make decent money on the bottom. Now that Red China is here, they are getting pushed up; they have to do fancier work, or they will live like the Chicoms.
If the Africans ever get their act together, their wages will be lower than the Chinese, and that will be it for the rag trade. North Carolina will not make any textiles/clothing at that point.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
The trend seems to be get rid of your labor (what good are people except for Soylent Green) and become a pure intellectual property enterprise. The problem, besides only benefiting a relatively small portion of the population, is your stragey is reduced to owning intellectual property and nothing else. What will happen is those other countries will buy all of the US's intellectual property by virtue of their huge trade surplus, leaving the US with nothing. And there won't be a damn thing the US will be able to do at that point, since those intellectual property laws which the US worked so hard to make invincible will work against us.
When we voted, and when we shop, we specifically asked for mandatory overtime, outsourcing, lower pay, and its absolutely silly, if not just plain funny for me to read everyone at slashdot posting and complaining now that its hurting silicon valley. These trends started over 5 years ago, they werent hurting the majority of society so society as a group said "HEY WE WANT CHEAP PRICES! WE WANT OUTSOURCING!" and they continued, as the educated working class thought they'd be immune because they worked in an office in silicon valley, well time went by and soon their turn to face the fire came.
Do I care? Hell no, I lost my job 3 years ago. So learn to survive in the global economy or be homeless, in either situation complaining about something you asked for is just annoying to people who were against outsourcing from the very beginning and who specifically wanted unions and fair trade. If you don't like outsourcing become a CEO or shut up.
If you read TFA carefully, you'll see that employment picked up starting in March.
Leave it to the NY Times to spin the story.
"Profits Up, Productivity WAY Up, Employment Finally Starting to Increase Too" would be a reasonably accruate way to report this. Nevermind that though.
NY Times is the official newspaper of half-truths and selective reporting. It's Micheal Moore without the showmanship.
This is a disturbing trend. Companies become more profitable, but because of the downward pressure on wages, that money goes to the few owners, rather than the people working for the company.
The better we work, the harder we work, the smaller the middle class becomes. Jobs are "de-skilled" so they can be performed for minimum wage or less.
Who are these companies going to sell to when no one can afford their wares?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
This is why unions were invented - to protect the folks in the middle from getting screwed by the fruits of their own labor. Sure, unions cause trouble sometimes - so does anything else , e.g., laissez-faire capitalism results in politicians for sale, Halliburton, and so forth.
In the final analysis, history clearly shows that America, and America's middle class, have done best when unions are strong.
The problem is, most CEOs don't think long term, they think in the short term only. The majority of businesses don't have long term thinking ability, they want to profit right now and get get out of dodge before the business collapses.
The problem is most businesses arent sustainable, most corporations arent operating in a sustainable way, hell the damage we do to our country, our economy, and our enviroment all come second to generating maximum short term profits. Short term profits are more important than long term sustainability.
Look, you choose your CEO, you choose your corporation, you choose your government. If you don't like outsourcing, stop working for corporations which outsource, stop shopping at Walmart, stop supporting corporations that elect politicians you disagree with.
When you support something in your actions but not your words, people arent going to take this seriously. So lets just be honest and say America loves outsourcing because if it didnt then we wouldnt be doing it.
So the only jobs left for a "regular guy" are suck-ass service jobs, which only serve to emphasize how much more some people have and how little you have. (Cue "Bellboy" by the Who). Maybe you'd like to get some education, but since you're poor, you have proved to the Gummint you don't deserve money for that ( WASHINGTON, July 3 - A new analysis of federal money that public schools receive for low-income students shows that a record number of the nation's school districts will receive less in the coming academic year than they did for the one just ended.) Can't go on forever.
Vote Quimby!
...where the introduction of an enterprise portal has put lots of department-level ASP developers and "web designers" out of business. I know lots of portals fail and process maturity affects all aspects of this. But management thinking is that it creates a famework (portals and JSR 168 portlets) that can deliver higher value and improve IT ROI.
In reviewing the 100's of intranet sites we found many implementations of news, calander, security, document storage, and metadata search that will be replaced by a a standard set of portlets. The plan is that this frees up money for other more strategic - and maybe less outsourcable IT activities.
So an ASP developer that has not learned about enterprise development (portal will have over 20,000 employees accessing it) - or a "Web designer for technology companies" that isn't up on "Knowlege Management" concepts would really be feeling it where I work right now.
I want to be alone with the sandwich
People were saying what you were saying back in 1999. In 2001 people kept saying it. It's not a matter of people waking up, people PREFER outsourcing.
Look, you choose your CEO, you choose your corporation, you choose your government. If you don't like outsourcing, stop working for corporations which outsource, stop shopping at Walmart, stop supporting corporations that elect politicians you disagree with.
Most people refuse to do this, most people love their Walmart, they love their jobs, and if they have no job then they love their temp agency and their lower wages. If the majority of people do not like these things they'd stop buying from the same corporations who maintain the working environment they claim to hate. You want to stop supporting outsourcing? Buy American products. Work only at companies which hire American labor, and stop supporting and electing politicians which do not support your interests.
Most people here want to be CEO's so bad they don't even consider the fact that they could be the ones with their jobs outsourced. Everyone wants to be a boss.
"As more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results."
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
I am rolling better cash then I did in the valley elsewhere. From a worker prospective it's no place to be. Too much competition in the valley from experianced people who own houses and have their lives there.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Why does anyone believe Silicon Valley represents the economy as a whole? SV was unbelievably inefficient during the dot bomb era. It's never going to be like it was.
Quick story: I was involved in a company that got $19 million in VC capital. What did they spend it on? Employees. Lots of employees. What were they supposed to do? The idiots in charge didn't care what they did -- they just wanted to grow as fast as possible, and give the illusion of a large company so they could go public. This was the thinking during that period.
You can't use SV to make ANY predictions about the overall economy. That area is too screwed up and too overpopulated.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Anyone remember last week's story on job losses in Europe? Lazy commies, crowed Slashdot. They want to work 35 hour weeks and have union representation? Haha, see where it gets you. Thus the American Slashdotter works like an absolute slave and somehow manages to both put himself (or at least his peers) out of a job and lowers the rate of pay in his profession. Way to go.
Anyhow, I'd write more but I have a long lunch to take. Suckers.
In technology. I don't want to be forever held behind someone less skilled over seniority and office politics. Unions are great in unskilled and semiskilled fields, but not in fast moving ones.
I wouldn't want to be part of a union just to avoid the forced political contributions.
Tech is dead in the US or is in its last spasms. In a few years virtually all system admin jobs will be done remotely in India or China and the only local IT jobs will be minimum wage jobs swapping out failing hardware. I suspect inside of 5 years Dell will move its manufacturing to China and the only thing left here will be Micheal Dell and a few VP's. If you are in the Tech industry, it would be a good idea to start looking for a new career now.
"Huge leaps in worker productivity " So has outsourcing increased the productivity ?
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
With all the software and technology engineering jobs heading off shores - the only "brain trust" remaining in the valley are managers and sales people.
6 days a week, for a dollar or so. Kids to have to work too, in factories and mines.
But your ancestors fought back, and finally won some decent working conditions. Some of them died for our working conditions.
When the investor class gets its way, we Americans will be back to those kinds of conditions. But you don't care, right? As long as YOU can handle it, as long as YOU are OK, then everything is OK, right?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Now, better IT automation/rationalization is doing the same to lesser qualified IT workers: better frameworks, methodologies, freely available codebases, integrated solutions etc. make some brute force, dumb coding useless, ditho for those whose job it was. Just as many operators have been replaced by OCR, electronic form submissions, etc.
Technical progress always means that less qualified people become less useful, economically speaking. If we don't want them to become socially worthless as well, we're going to have to find *social* solutions to it, and free market won't find them spontaneously.
If the increased profits don't translate into good jobs at good pay for regular workers, nobody's recovering a damn thing.
Has it ever occurred to you that maybe the loss in good job opportunities is offset by a gain in good entrepreneurial opportunities?
I.e. instead of waiting around for someone else to provide you with a living, maybe you should become your own boss and hire yourself?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Here is a simple and practical question. My company (3000+ people, one of the best names in semiconductor industry) is hiring. My friend's company (a new startup) is also hiring. I know many others are hiring too.
:(
But...
We can't find decent people to hire. There are simply not enough good resumes to begin with. And, pretty much nobody passes even a simple phone screening. We tried to get away with it. Then nobody passes an interview
I'd assume (even using my own experience in the valley) that if there are fewer jobs and working conditions suck, then people would be out there looking around. But that seems not to be the case.
So, where are the people?
The primacy of seniority in promotion unionized jobs is a fabrication of the Preator Class.
Looks like you've been listening too much right-wing media - try staying away from Limbaugh, Hannity, the NY Times, and so forth.
I agree with AC. From his company size, I can guess which company he works for, and I work for a competitor. We can't find engineers with semiconductor industry background, customer face-to-face skills, decent commercial awareness, and a broad electronic knowledge. Marketing people don't have the last one. Too many engineers are either introverted or too self confident, which comes across as arrogance. Most board level engineers simply aren't nosy enough to have a broad knowledge base (they are just a guru in one area). The last guy that we hired that I was really impressed with is 62 yrs old (welcome, Fred!). What sort of job am I talking about? Mixed signal and analog semiconductor applications and product definition.
As a tail note: having a masters or PhD doesn't help - the knowledge base comes from years of interest in electronics in general, and broad level design practice.
As far as I can tell, your argument basically seems to be "if I do the same job in 2 hours (yes, via scripts or whatever) that a bad worker does in 8, I should get the rest of 6 hours free". Which is a strange request, seein' as it basically asks to set everyone's job requirements to the slowest possible worker.
It's not how any other job works, nor how progress happened. E.g., the reason we have an abbundance of consumer goods today is that, yes, we can produce in 8 hours _more_, say, cloth than a 16'th century weaver could produce by hand. If the line of thinking had been, "yay, I produced 10 ft worth of cloth in 10 minutes, that someone would have needed all day to make by hand, therefore I can go home after 10 minutes" we'd still be living in the 16'th century kind of poverty. We'd have lots of free time, but wouldn't be an inch closer to having today's standard of living.
Anyway, when the rest of us rant about overtime, we don't mean "waah, but they make me work a whole 8 hours a day." What we mean is more along the lines of having to work 12-14 hour days, 7 days a week.
E.g., since Electronic Arts is mentioned, I can't help remember the recent story (you know, the employee's wife's blog) about EA over-working its employees to the maximum. In fact, until some of them couldn't even focus any more. And they were demanding that kind of hours not because the project was desperately over the deadline or over the budget, but from the start. Just because some greedy fuck figured out some version of "muahahaha, so I can get more than twice the work out of them for the same money. And if they burn out afterwards, who the f-word cares about them?"
I find it inherently abhorrent to read about EA bragging about profits and _reducing_ the number of jobs, while demanding that kind of massive overtime.
Now I can see some excuse in asking for short-term _temporary_ over-time to save a project in the final stages, or until more people can be hired to handle the unforeseen load. But actually planning to _fire_ some more, because, hey, you can overwork the rest to make up for it (and then fire them too when they get burned out), has a certain slimeball quality to it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So, that shows there are jobs out there for Silicon Valley expatriates -- if they're 32 year old women -- or 32 year old gays. When they give you the ambiguous "retraining" line -- never telling you what skills you are supposed to learn -- this is what they're really talking about guys.
Seastead this.
Silicon valley produces things where you spend most your time developing them before you sell the first one, then a little time supporting and improving them. Right now they are supporting and improving stuff and selling what they already created long ago. The number of totally new things being developed is lower and thus the lower cost of running the company is lower - pretending this is because of increased productivity is totally bogus. In the long term, companies are trading off "productivity" now for loss of innovation and products in the future. No one is doing cool long term stuff, if an project can't make money in 3 quarters, it's not being done. The VC are investing in things with a short time to return (about 2 years). Start ups are not doing ideas that might take 10 years but could change the world if they worked. And the big companies are doing small incremental changes to existing products.
There are no predator group. There are no secret eleet controlling US nor world. The world, as we know it is much more complex and bigger than can be understood if you use 19th-century logic in it. The fact is, even the welthiest persons in this planet can't dictate markets. Our global markets are the sum of everybodys money. People save money in banks, people invest in stocks, people get insurances and people get pension funds. These tiny money flows make up the market. It's the money of you and me that is running up the globe, going from place to place in search for better return, not the money of eleet.
Sometimes one can question why the money you and me have earned is used to send jobs to China or build factories in other developing countries, the short answer is that it's best for most of us. Yes, some of us may get hit with unemployment or have to take a lower-level job, but that's is the overall price you have to pay for all the development. And what is development? Development is building up our globe. We have now build pretty good infrastructure in Europe and North-America, and now the same build up is happening in Asia. You may ask what do you get from all this build up? Well, in short you have more production in all aspects from physical products to intellectual property,that means more fruits for everybody. Everybody will have more than previusly, some of course will have little less, but not so much less.
You could allways say that "who cares about chinease or indians, i want a new mp3-player etc...", but remember that would be an injustice to deny other working people the fruits they have deserved. And when looking to history, injustice has allways created more harm to all of us. Thanks to global free trade, there hasn't been any clashes between super powers. That's a definitive plus! Or would you want to risk your shiny mp3-player in a possible nuclear war?
The fact is that we can't go back. We have to take the situation as it is and embrace it. If you don't have job as a programmer, consider chainging your profession or starting your own business. If you are a truly good professional, you can allways start your own business, if you feel that you aren't that good, maybe a profession change is in order. In all and all, what that means that you have to be competetive in something to get the prize. If being competetive wouldn't be a prerequisit, then everybody would be millionaires! Fortunately this isn't the case.
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
As a "30-something" myself, and realizing I have practically no savings - I think the problem runs a little bit deeper than "skipping the purchase of that 60" plasma screen".
I know a surprising number of guys like myself, who worked hard in our 20's and started "getting ahead" in I.T. careers, only to start back at the bottom due to divorce. These often lead right into being forced to file for bankruptcy, compounding the problem.
My 401K savings was wiped out with legal fees, and I haven't been able to get another job that even offers one since then.
It's fine to talk about wealth being more "widespread" due to things like 401K's and mutual funds, but those of us who primarily work for smaller businesses don't often get in on any of that. You hear a lot of talk about the small businesses being the "real future" and "cornerstone" of America - but working for them seems to rarely connect someone to any of this wealth that's supposed being "spread around".
Manna
1. The value of a share is decided by how much you wish to pay for it. It's just a piece of paper with very little intrinsic value, or at least typically _much_ less actual value than its price. The actual price is a gambling and hype game that has _nothing_ to do with that real value of the assets behind it, and where if it came to liquidating the company to recover your money from those assets, you'd be looking at a monumental loss.
The question that determines whether, say, MSFT shares are worth 25$ isn't MSFT's income, isn't MSFT's bank account, it's just literally "well, would you buy one for 25$?" That price is just the equilibrium point at which the number of people want to sell that piece of paper equals those wanting to buy.
The stock market as a whole is basically one big pot that people thrown their money in. It goes up as a whole as long as more people stay convinced to keep throwing more and more money into it.
And when you get down to the individual pots of the various companies and corporations, the same holds true: the only money in the pot are those the shareholders themselves threw into that pot. Corporate profits don't go into that pot. They are just hype to convince people to throw money into this pot instead of that other one.
I.e., if your MSFT stock goes up, it's _not_ because some of MS's income goes directly into that. It's because everyone _but_ MSFT, including people like _you_, threw more money into that pot. That's all. The profits just served to generate hype about which pot to throw money in. No more, no less.
2. But here's really what ticks me off about the whole thing: the fact remains that what a lot of this companies do is basically parasitic behaviour.
A long time ago, the economy used to be about creating value for _both_ parties involved. E.g., if I'm a baker and you're hungry, you buying a loaf of bread from me actually creates value for both. For you that loaf is worth more than the money (or you'd keep your money), and for me the money is worth more than one of the loaves I baked. (Or I wouldn't sell it for that price.)
That's the kind of transaction that actually helps society as a whole.
What some of these fucks do is basically more along parasitic behaviour. Their profits come directly by making a loss to someone else. E.g., if company A demands 140% unpaid overtime from employee B, that's a very unilateral transaction. A makes profit at B's expense, while B gives more and gets nothing in return. In the bakery example it's as if every other day I took your money and didn't give you a loaf. Sure, it will increase my profits, but in a parasitic way: without giving anything in return.
And the "but their stock price does go up" is a piss-poor excuse for tolerating that kind of parasitic behaviour. You're allowing someone to rob society of _billions_ because you receive maybe a few dollars in return on your shares. Again, not even directly from those robbed billions, but more like money that changed hands between you shareholders anyway.
It's like cheering that the bandits robbed your village, but you got a few pennies off another villager by betting that they'll loot more stuff today than last year. And hey, you only had to let them loot and plunder a million times more than you won for that bet to come true.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
There are always alternatives to Walmart. If you don't like Walmart, shop at CostCo. If you don't like predators, invest in/shop at/work at responsible businesses. You have the option. There are sites now which index and tell you how responsible and sustainable a business is. You can research and learn who the CEOs are, where they came from, how much they pay workers, you can even learn from workers how those CEOs treat people and what their priorities are. Not all CEOs are out simply to make money, Google is a good example of a corporation which cares about the community. The open source industry is filled with corporations that are community oriented. Starbucks treats its workers well, by supporting these businesses or buying stock in only these businesses you begin to change the power balance.
Except, at a point nobody enjoys their job or they don't have a job. The barrier to innovation or self-employment by the normal individual is very high and you end up with a society of hopeless, dreamless sheep who just live out their days like zombies.
What's so wrong with full employment and preserving meaningful physical labour. It's a conscious choice of choosing less speed, automation and wealth, so that people can be occupied and feel fulfilled with the little jobs they do and do well. That's what utopia is like, not where all our work is done by machines and we relax on the sofa eating chips.
I don't mean to be inflamatory about this, but the way that companies are being run in Silicon Valley just WREAKS of the Harvard MBA way of doing things. Seriously guys and gals, if you ever have the priveledge of running your own company, don't ever ever hire one of these snakes. You'll find yourself drowning in the bad karma that they'll pump into your company/life. 'Nuff said.
heh. that's funnier than mine.
I tried that once, but I had to fire myself, for showing up late, missing deadlines, and just sitting around reading slashdot all day. Luckily the severance package was good. Eventually, I'll go do something else.
A few thoughts about the article:
It compares apples and volcanos: Profit in the top 7 firms versus employment thoughout the county.
Companies with employees are working them overtime because of the regulatory costs of adding new employees - budgeting now for that employee's retirement health care, unemployment insurance, severance package, harrassment litigation costs, etc. In exchange the overtime worker's week looks likes this: 20 hours working. 10 hours meetings. 10 hours coffee breaks. 20 hours slashdot/irc/ebay.
Harry Browne, in how i found freedom in an unfree world, suggested companies that would be networks of subcontractors with no employees as such. The industry has taken him up on that to some extent; we are all consultants now.
The austrian school of economics says that a market economy drives technological change via temporary monopolies. IBM gives way to Microsoft gives way to Google. My dad worked for one firm for 30 years for a paycheck, a profitsharing bonus, and a pension. Most of the places I've worked are now out of business, and i've built and lost a few small (really small) businesses, and don't know in detail what i'll be doing in 5 years.
The dot.com boom was driven by stock options.
Get in on the ground floor, work a few years, IPO, cash out, retire, build reputation capital by working on open source, so you can get in on the ground floor of the next wave.
The japanese are good at this because their culture is used to rebuilding periodicly after an earthquake/tsunami/typhoon/invasion.
The material standard of living is 5 times what it was when I was born. It's not evenly distributed, but today's american poor tend to have hot water, refridgerators, cable tv, dvd player.
People who have lost hi-tech jobs in silicon valley are not mostly standing in soup lines or picking cotton. They've moved on to the next thing, and are probably materially better off than their grandparents. They may feel a loss of social status if they are clerking at 7-11, because they didn't save half their pay when they did have a job, or they saved in their now-worthless company stock. The future is very uncertain. Save like crazy, diversify your portfolio, keep your skill sets current, make 5 good friends, keep a bag packed, have an exit strategy.
Perhaps you're privileged in the job you have and aren't able to sympathize with the tens of millions of unemployed or under employed people. Perhaps your city still has a good mix of industrial, manufacturing and service jobs. Once those switch to primarily service jobs things start to go haywire.
As a case example, I live in Ottawa, Canada which is the capital of the country. Our employment mix is what many want the western world to be: 33% government, 33% high tech and 33% low-end restaurant/service jobs. We also have an ungodly high unemployment rate, something like 10%.
It's probably no surprise that almost everyone hates their job. The best you can hope for is a middle management job with little or no creativity. As most people tend to live in the suburbs, there is also little redistribution of wealth. People go to work and then they go home. It's exceedingly hard to get anybody out to buy anything that isn't the new blockbuster DVD. On top of all that, the cost of living is high which drives out most of the creative people.
Overall, it's a really depressing environment to work and live in.
I personally know hundreds of people (through my record store) that would gladly work in some kind of manufacturing for a basic wage, or on a farm, landscaping, whatever just to keep busy and productive. The general malaise that results from not having a job or having a crappy paper-pushing job where you never accomplish anything, affects the whole city.
By now everyone knows there are predator groups. You can try to deny the fact but hey go to this website and see for yourself who runs America --> http://www.theyrule.net/
The country is run by networks. You are in networks, your peer group, your inner circle, your friends and family, the people you do business with, this is your network, each person may be involved with many networks. The corporate world also has networks. Most of the corporate networks at this time are for outsourcing, and corporate networks are basically CEOs who hop from one corporation to another, or upper level management who hop from one job to the next, this mobile management network is the corporate elite network that the above poster talks about. Some CEOs are in control of 4-5 different corporations on all sorts of boards and with connections into politics.
You are right we can't go back, but we can shape and design the future to our benefit.
This is par for the course for every company i've worked with in the last four years. Hiring a temp employee as permanent is a dirty word, and don't ask for benefits or any kind of fringe. There's some indian willing to do your job for 1/4 your salary. Lame. The article is completely right about this trend, and sadly there's no good that can come of it.
Yes. Except that it doesn't. Some people get paid for work on open-source software, both in development and support.
Whats your malfunction son?
I love the head-in-the-sand attitude of the Open Souce apologist. Some people get paid to work on open-source, but some people don't. If it wasn't open source in the first place everyone involved would be employed, and at a good rate as well. Its as simple as that. Let me spell it out to you: If I can get something free (say, Apache) then thats something I didn't support jobs to produce. If its developers starve to death its neither here nor there to me once I have the source. Perhaps I'll hire someone to modify it a bit. If Apache didn't exist then I'd be buying the alternative (and thus paying salaries, health insurance etc. of people who'd worked on it) and then hiring someone to modify it. There seems to be this myth that OSS leads to more jobs but that notion is under any kind of analysis utterly bogus. Its blatant rot but the proponents with a vested interest will keep spewing spurious nonsense and FUD to perpetuate the kind of argument a small child can see through. Its not free as in speech, its free as in IBM don't have to pay for it and can give more money to their shareholders. You cry freedom but you can't see that the Man has pulled off his ultimate coup; getting mugs to work for free so they can scrape up the profit.
The Open Source software community has absolutely no idea of decency or social responsibility. What is the Apache Foundation doing for unemployed former writers of http server software for example? Where's the FSFs love for the people it chucked onto the scrapheap? A cadre of basement nerds put people out of a job and don't give a flying fuck about it. No wonder social security is creaking with people like that coniving noon and night to put hard working Americans out of a job. I'm hardly surprised apologists like yourself don't want to hear it.
n 1950, the top 10% of people owned more than 90% of listed companies' shares! Insane, but true.
Now, the number is more like 50%
Sure, but what percentage of workers were employed by listed companies in 1950 vs today?
Joe's grandfather owned a hardware store in 1950. He might not have owned any stock but it's didn't matter that much becuase he owned the whole store.
Joe doesn't own a hardware store. He works for Osh. As a corporate employee, he either owns stock or he owns nothing.
Corporate America has expanded a great deal since 1950 at the expense of sole propriterships and partnerships. The rank and file now own more stock then they did in 1950. But do they actually own more of the means of production? That's not clear.
..that as employee productivity skyrocketed, they kept laying them off.
It seems to me that the ability to work extra and produce more would be a valuable trait that companies could sieze upon: think about it for a moment. Companies want to grow bigger and enjoy bigger profits. Therefore it would make more sense to employ more people and accomplish more.
The only reason to lay people off is because they're tightening their belts, so that even though the bottom line is profit profit profit, they're expecting rough times ahead and a huge downturn in sales.
Even with the loss of jobs to overseas, India is currently asking for H1B Visas to be increased back to the Dot.Com boom levels of 195,000 a year. And there still is no cap on L1 visas. Another thing many americans are not aware of is that renewals of visas do not count toward the cap and one estimate I have seen is that only 40% visa applications are new ones. Allowing some foreign workers each year may be necessary if they have special skills that no Americans have, but importing these kinds of numbers is a fraud. Americans will gear up for those high-tech skills if they are attracted by good pay, good benefits, and job satisfaction. Instead, Supply-demand is being short circuited by importing foreign workers to keep the prevailing wages and job security low thus creating a self-sustaining reaction.
You think working 80 hours a week is a good thing. The CEO does not work 80 hours a week so why should you?
India will dominate the Asian continent for 5 years until the India-Pakistan war, which will devastate Bangalore and other Indian city centers. Pakistan will cease to exist as a state; it will become part of India again.
The US will dominate the world for another 200 years at least.
But most importantly, IT in the US will be restored to it's rightful place. Wages will rise sky high because the California coastal cities will have suffered nuclear attack from China (the only cities they could reach with their missiles).
Weather report - for once the same for Bangalore, Beijing and Los Angeles - winds from the city center at about 12,000 kph, a sunny day with temperatures reaching 10,000 degrees centigrade. Step outside and get a little Vitamin D!
What really I find funny about the IT profession, is that all the programming will soon go to outsourcing. Yet Everyone getting Computer Science degrees now, will be waiting in the unemployment line tomorrow. It's really sad, but I'm sure you will all find it true. Why hire someone in the United States for a high salary, when you can just go to another country and hire someone who can do that same amount of work, but for a less salary. The more dangerous thing, is, they can just import code and programming without paying tariffs or shipping. You can simply just transmit it over the internet, because programs are a untangiable object. So think about that, I dropped out of Computer Science, because of the loss of work in the field.
Have you not learned from Star Trek? Remember the episodes of various civilizations that automated everything and ended up being wiped out by invaders...yeah, give it fifty years...
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
I'm taking an Executive MBA (Friday-Sunday, once every six weeks), and in one of my classes last month we had to read an interesting paper which drew lots of parallels to the US IT Industry now, and the US Auto Industry in the 70's.
Of course no predictions are completely accurate, but it's an interesting read nonetheless.
(I posted the Google link so you can dl as pdf or read as html).
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I live in Silicon Valley. It seems like everyone is hiring right now. Startups are springing up like mushrooms and huge companies are funding new efforts. In my recent job search, I got five offers locally. But you have to know your stuff. Most companies grilled me extensively on languages, databases and algorithms. It's fortunate that my ongoing interest in computers led me to keep learning while I was working at my last job.
We are phonescreening a lot of candidates, and almost all are unsatisfactory.
To combine my experience with the idea that "employment is not rising," I guess that the Valley still has many unqualified programmers. As companies get better at screening, these people will be unemployed more often.
If you are a good programmer with the right skills, the Valley is a very exciting place to be right now.
AZspot
" The value of a share is decided by how much you wish to pay for it.
True for any good or service, concrete or ephemeral."
Nope. Not even close.
If a company buys, say, a truck or a machine tool, there's a completely different kind of value that gets into that calculation: how much money you'll make out of using it. You know, since you claim to have some clue of economics, that's what ROI and ammortization calculations are all about. E.g., when Intel wants to build a new 65nm fab, the question is "how many chips we'll produce with it, at what running costs, and how much we can sell those for?"
There's some actual value produced in there, not a guess whether the price of 65nm equipment will go up or down.
By comparison, the _only_ value one share has is what someone else is willing to pay for it. It never produces anything. To get a 1$ profit on your $25 share, you have to find someone else willing to pay $26 for it.
If you can't see any difference between the two, sorry, I'll have to shoot your wisecrack right back at you: "Go take a course in economics."
As for the rest of your troll... ok, then you tell me: where do those money come from? I mean, you claim that my theory about the money coming from the shareholders themselves counts as "crack-brained wacko theories". Well then you multiply the number of MSFT shares by their value, and you tell me _who_ did that money come from. From MSFT? Did any company invest 20 to 40 times their peak yearly earnings into the stock market? (Because that's the range supposed to be "normal" in the stock market.)
No, it seems to me like those money, or at least the part of it representing outstanding shares, came from the shareholders. No more, no less, no corporate profits returning to the community. If your shares jumped up by, say, 1$, that's _not_ because actual money from the corporate income making their way back into your pockets, it's simply because some other shareholder was willing to pay 1$ more.
Again, if you have a better, and presumably less "crack-brained wacko" theory, please kindly actually share that info instead of acting like yet another slashdot troll.
Yes, there are some formulas thrown around as to how much money you should dump into a share. Yes, there was some formula waved before some other Jack Investor and Joe Gullible as to why should they pay $26 for a share now. But nevertheless, at the end of the day, that's where the share value increase really came from: from Jack and Joe's pocket, _not_ from the corporation making a profit. And the _only_ reason why that happened or not, is because Jack Investor or Joe Gullible actually reached for their own wallet and put their money where Merril Lynch's mouth was.
But, again, I'm willing to be enlightened. If you have a better theory as to where that money comes from, please do share it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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That's not the point I was making. First off, regular people who own stock don't have the enormous options and kickbacks that the executive class does. And secondly, real incomes are falling. We make up for this by working more, and working harder, to make the same money we were before. Does that seem right to you?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
If companies can get OSS programmers to work for free, then why not? The more programmers you can get to work for free, the more you can lay off. The highest virtue of a programmer is to be part of the OSS unpayed labor force.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Beautifully put, ABG.
I often get into arguments with a good friend of mine who feels that the GPL and other open source licenses are anathema to capitalism. His argument is that if software is devalued and consumers expect software for free, the worth of software will diminish to zero.
My rebuttal is precisely what you pointed to: It's not as if there is a finite quantity of software that can be created. As sophisticated software becomes a commodity, more sophisticated software gets developed. The average consumer doesn't have to pay for the software that runs home computers, but large organizations have to pay for the effort required to build and support specialized software.
The correlary to that is that no technology stays on top of the heap forever. Many Americans seem to think that binary computer technology is going to reign forever as the engine of economic growth. Instead, we should be paying a lot more attention to biotechnology, quantum computing, green energy, and other technologies that have tremendous growth potential.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Demo your program
Secure a licensing contract
Quit
Profit.
Dang, people don't even recognize jokes anymore. :|
So I guess now is the time to start your own business. After all, if businesses are making more money, and employees are not, and ultimately both capitalize on the employees skills....
Of course, running your own business may not be as entertaining as whining about those damn ayzjuns and those damn corporayshuns.
Contrary to the general theme of this discussion, my recent experience is that there is a bidding war right now in Silicon Valley for experienced software engineers that have deep experience in large system web applications. I have not seen things this hot since early 2000. Google is leading the charge by offering extremely generous stock compensation.
After reading the Wall Street Journal a bit, I have found that they attribute the practice of "stock buyback" to companies who's stock price has seen a significant decline on the market. So they purchase back many millions of shares in order to "bank" their company's stock to control the stock price and effectively prevent further declines in price. This happens all the time. A clear indicator of a company in trouble is when the major owners of the company begin to sell their own company shares. That's when the small investor is signaled to get out himself or else face a loss. Thanks. Crashing in Honolulu.
Don't forget, they also want mandatory vacation. This is because so they don't have to pay you for unused time and when you get back, there is still same amount of work to get done.
...is the name of the game. The dollar buys less and less and in order to stay in the same place, you have to run faster and faster.
If there's no expansion (and hence no new jobs), it is not a real increase in profits. It's an increase in the green paper mass. These papers are being printed in enormous numbers to support the military-industrial complex, and part of them ends up gravitating towards the Bay Area.
Seniority has nothing to do with it, they are just incompetant and lazy and truculent chain smoking lard-asses who plod through projects with sloth-like zest...
...at least that's all the experiences I've had with Unionized IT people (working in Gov't).
I've often wondered what's wrong with them. Perhaps it's the fear of paperwork that slows their pace, 'cause Lord knows they have a lot of it to fill out.
Last I recall the top wealthiest 4% of the US population owns 80% of the stock. Can't find that figure now but I found this which is good.
http://www.endgame.org/primer-wealth.html
Frankly I give this country 50 years. Empires just seem to last a shorter and shorter time.
And a corporate ruled empire is exactly what we've become.
Employment opportunities are created when people have the need and money to request goods in the market. Unfortunately money tends to addict more money (interest) so we will likely end up with enormous financial and material assets with little demands on the one and major demands without money on the other hand. Realize the truth: our economy is just one big game of monopoly, doomed to end in a big collapse like it happened before in World War I and II.
Most "average" people who own a few shares do not really have the time and knowledge to follow the company policy and use their votes accordingly.
As a result, the votes remain unused unless they are delegated to some fonds manager.
I don't know the details about US retirement fonds, but for the companies' shares I bought through my bank (in Germany), I regularly get nice letter that says in effect "Won't you give us authority to vote on the shareholder's meeting for you?"
I don't do that on principle, and on one occasion I have voted myself against overly generous boni for management. But I suspect I am part of a minority there.
C - the footgun of programming languages
... It's about as ironic as a black fly in your chardonnay? That /. is populated with Luddites who decry technology "took yer job"?
Who lives by the tiny little shell script shall die by it, or move "up the value chain" and grow pointy hair. Or come up with a cool hack that changes the world and gets bought off by clueless suits who go on to wreck everything.
The global economy recognizes tariffs and protectionism as damage and routes around them.
your entire life, based on your comments.
Jesus! The holly gray of requirements-in and app-out!
Better techniques?, better methodologies? of course it helps, but unless you have an artificial intelligent machine you won't "automate programming".
"Generally profits end up in the hands of the stockholders in the form of increased dividends or stock value"
And what planet have YOU been living on while my broker and I have been trying for the last few years to find investments that either pay decent dividends or go up in value? I.e., during the time frame under discussion.
In addition to the mandatory login, they're now putting Flash ads before you can get to the article.
Yes, there's a "Skip this ad" link in tiny tiny text in the upper right corner.
But, it's just another example of how annoying it is to get to online news these days.
"Not to mention the recent trend (last 5 years or so) of mandatory overtime"
This has been standard practice for at least 20 years, if not longer.
Question. Do you live here? This place is *empty* on the weekends. People are commuting to jobs here from places like Gilroy & Tracy - definitely *not* in the Silicon Valley.
VC capital also went to splurge items like Aeron chairs in addition to headcount.
A more optimistic term for this would be the 'lottery number'. That is, how many lottery winners could a development team lose before the project fails.
Welcome to the Auto Industry! Its called Flat-Rate!
Let's say a service on a car takes 4 hours to do. You do it in 2 hours. You make $15/hr. You've then effectively made $30/hr. But lets say you take 8 hours to do it, then you've dropped down to $7.50/hr. The customer NO MATTER WHAT gets charged the 4 hours worth of work. (Don't like it? TOUGH SHIT. It ain't changing anytime soon). This is the beauty of working as a technician in the auto industry. I regularly clock in 60-70 hours per week and only actually work around 30. I haven't worked a friday in months! The best part: THEY CAN NOT OUTSOURCE ME and everybody and their brother wants me to work for them (good thing I like my manager, who started out as a tech btw, because I would leave on at the drop of dime otherwise)
What is prescient about this whole discussion should not be "Who got what" but rather.. "Who HAS what". Yes, the companies are making record profits. Yes, economies are consuming at record rates. What I challenge is for someone to figure out the mean spending capability of an individual over time. I dare say that now, people's debt to spending is totally out of whack. You may only consume so much before the process falls in on itself - taxation cannot support the programs; businesses cannot sell their product (See cars selling for Employee cost now); and protectionist measures start to creep in for affected economic home turfs.
We're in for a depression of large proportions. Like a house of cards it will come down. We must seek balance.. and that starts at home. Save your money - invest it wisely or keep it.. cash is king when it comes to the crash. Imagine buying a $200,000 for pennies on the dollar when the home market goes south.
(1st sig) If this were a snappy sig, you'd be reading it right now. (2nd sig) I'm a karma whore. >Insert FUD here
So, is he proposing that the number of jobs offered is a function of the number of people who want one? So if everybody quit their jobs and took a vacation a maximum of 10% of those jobs would be offered because of his 10% rule?
A guy gets rich selling something to Yahoo for an absurd amount of money and he thinks it makes him an expert in labor.
At least in my silicon valley experience, in 2000 it was 5 programmers to every manager and we did real implementation. Today it's 1 programmer to every 5 managers. All the work is in developing specs for products and developing business relations with vendors, but not in implementing any product. The implementation of the products is done by Asian companies who pay fees to use our specs, so it's not officially outsourcing even though it is.
It's efficient allright and writing specs for products is much more politically correct than outsourcing the product development.
Whether you call it improved efficiency or outsourcing, improved efficiency is basically another way of saying outsourcing.
Whats your malfunction son?
Same question I'd ask you. You obviously have no clue what you are talking about. Name one single person who has lost thier job due to OSS. Has Microsoft laid off any developers because of Apache ? You said it yourself, you might hire someone to modify the program, but thats one more person you employed that you would not have employed had you used the MS offering, because modifications not are allowed or even possible, so your own example proves the point.
Small countries are now seriously looking at OSS models to bring thier countries into the 21st century. The reason they are doing this is because of the low entry cost, the software, including the tools to build and modify it are virtually free. Now, all that money they saved can goto local programers instead of into Microsofts pocket. Microsoft has lost nothing, because they never had it to begin with and the people of the small country benefit through lower cost of government, lower cost of technology and new jobs contributing to thier local economies.
And why did you feel it was nessessary to waste space and post this. wait, thats what this post is doing...
13 million whoo!
The problem is that, by and large, the software industry is stupid.
If you work a 9.5hr shift regularly, you are not as productive. If you had just worked 8 hours, you'd notice that you'd do about as much work as in 9.5hr. That extra 1.5hr of labour at the end of the day, a day where you are already tired of work, and likely to make mistakes, is not good. At first you gain a benefit, but then the lack of leisure time cuts into sleep.
At that point, you arrive for work less rested, and productivity keeps declining from there. You can't recover. It's why, over the 17th through early 20th century, labour hours decreased. The most recent being when Henry Ford proclaimed that thereafter the minimum wage in his industries would be five dollars for a day of eight hours.
I don't know why there is this huge cult around working long hours, with no vacations, and killing yourself with overtime in the US and in tech jobs. I don't hear about people dieing from stress in th EU, where they have 6 weeks of vacation a year.
"if I'm smart enough to make the system work for me, I deserve to do less work"
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Water is wet! Film at 11.
...but is it art?
For starters, physical labor sucks. Do you really want to be a coal miner?
Not all physical labor sucks. In fact, a lot of it is rewarding, healthy and *gasp* fun! You just jumped to the worst possible example. A medium amount of physical labor each day, spent working on something you like, or a task which solves a problem is good, even essential to being happy.
It's a conscious choice of choosing less speed, automation and wealth, so that people can be occupied and feel fulfilled with the little jobs they do and do well.
Wow. Please sign me up for the complete opposite of that. If my work isn't useful, I'd much rather be told that so I can find something else to do than be deceived into an inflated sense of self-worth. And I'm curious, at what point do you draw the line at which automation is prohibited? Shall we get rid of computers so we can restore secretarial pools?
Once again you're reacting with some preconceived notion. I never said that people should be doing work that is useless or forced to work. On the contrary, there is a lot of possibility for meaningful work with government or 3rd party assistance. Maybe you like to put computers together, or maybe you like book binding. Is there a use for each beyond economic reasoning? Yes: we need computers and we need books.
Why is it so hard for you to imagine that if the government, or your local union or whatever group wanted to subsidize a local company to hire out of work people or people who would like to switch jobs. Co-ops aren't some kind of radical nazi idea, they exist all over in tons of forms. You can even have very profitable co-ops. Research Mountain Equipment Coop for example. They're huge, responsible, employ a ton of people AND make good products.
No, that's what your idea of utopia is like, and it appears to be a form of Marx's "workers paradise". In my utopia, essential products like food and shelter are virtually free, and people can do what they want to rather than being herded into make-work feel-good "jobs".
Again, I never said anything about forcing anyone to do anything. It's about providing OPPORTUNITY!
Who's utopia is more realistic? Yours relies on inexhaustible natural resources to give you something which appears free, all the while debasing the majority of society. This is delusional. Everything has a cost, whether you can conceive of it as monetary or not. You can't get free food or shelter for free without sacrificing a whole lot more.
interestingly, the culprit isn't just outsourcing. Huge leaps in worker productivity and automated processes
But productivity-increasing tools have always been coming along. I haven't seen any bursts in such tools beyond the typical growth rate. In some ways it went backward. GUI creation used to be pretty simple during the fat-client times. Web-based GUI's are much more tedius and "unnatural", especially if you target cross-vendor-browsing.
Table-ized A.I.
instead of waiting around for someone else to provide you with a living, maybe you should become your own boss and hire yourself?
Yeah yeah, what a nice myth. entrepreneurship is highly risky. You can't raise a family on that kind of risk unless you are the lucky few who make it into brag magazines.
I tried multiple startups without success. It ain't the magic road. It is gambling with odds slightly better than Vegas.
If there's so much dignity and satisfaction in physical labor, why do so many parents who are 'stuck' in it for lack of education push their kids so hard to get the hell out of it?
Look, there's a lot of different forms of labour and a lot of them are helpful, healthy and productive. Many forms are dangerous and difficult, but I'm talking about things that are reasonable, like building things: homes, roads, consumer goods. They don't have to be automated you know. There are plenty of people who are willing to do an honest day's work for even a low wage.
Beyond that, many educated people realise that there is value in not always doing things the easy way. Have you never taken pride after building a dog-house or hanging a basketball net or repainting your living room? There are many jobs which are not stressful and offer the same kind of satisfaction day in and day out. Many of these jobs are being displaced by automation or through cheaper labour overseas, but all it takes is a change of attitude to get a few people together to do it out of desire here.
Your attitude is that of a hardship tourist, and if you were to spout off at someone who didn't have a choice in the matter, they'd be quite justified in punching you in the face. Sorry, are you writing this from jail? You have it deeply wrong: there is no way having a third of your employment being with the government (read: unproductive) is a good thing. It's a stagnating thing, and are you surprised that those jobs are stagnating, with all the union work rules and policies?
Yes, you've just made my point. The very fact that there is no opportunity for any other kind of employment due to economic infeasibility breeds stagnation. If you don't have natural variety, you have to introduce artificially stimulated variety.
As most people tend to live in the suburbs, there is also little redistribution of wealth. People go to work and then they go home. It's exceedingly hard to get anybody out to buy anything that isn't the new blockbuster DVD.
Maybe if the other stuff wasn't overpriced crap?
It's not. You might find it hard to believe but a market which is so heavily segmented cannot support a whole range of goods no matter how much money is available on the whole. If people are unwilling to spend, it is impossible to sell.
And what's with this 'redistribution of wealth' nonsense? Were you born after 1989? Communism has been EOL'd for 15+ years, and was deprecated long before then.
You misunderstand what those words mean in the context of what I said. Because people don't stop at stores on their way from work to home, or don't go to the symphony, or whatever else, all the money stays in their pockets. They hoarde it, or dump it into massive SUVs or monstrous houses. If the money doesn't flow around, you can't have varied businesses and capital tends to only flow between the rich, or down through families through inheritance.
Read P.J. O'Rourke's 'Holidays in Hell' and other works where he visits pre-1989 communist countries and describes just how depressing socialism can be.
Hello, over here... you're just diverting the argument with some expletive about Communism. Since when does giving people the opportunity (through government or 3rd parties) to have a job in a field they like equate to totalitarian Communism? They can choose to be unemployed or to find some service job or whatever. No one's forcing anybody to do anything.
Seriously, given public education (the closest I'll come to supporting government power) and job training, maybe these folks are neither smart nor energetic enough to get training in something useful and rewarding? Or maybe they're just useless goth mopes?
Has it never occurred to you that maybe part of the system we have makes it hard for people to get education, training, loans for business etc. Do you have no sympathy for people who were never taught the basic skills of entrepreneurship or who had poor schooling in inner city schools. They're not all lazy mopes and they could choose to do something more productive given the opportunity. It would help all of society out.
In much of the third world unemployment is massive, in Iraq, it is currently estimated to be around 40%.
It may be that we have simply been living in a historical blip of employment.
American workers are working harder and getting paid less because of the overtime. Anyone who is unwilling to put in the overtime is not considered a team player and laid off. Is another worker hired? NO! That workers duties are given to the remaining workers, who are now more in fear for the security of their position, and are willing to accept the added duties because of this duress. Downsizing shmownsizing! there has been no downturn of the economy, sure there was an enevitable adjustment in stock market values but that is true of any ponzai/pyramid scheme! This is what the stock market has been reduced to, since dividends are no longer paid, it's just a shell game. Corporate America has captolized on the "adjustment" and created an environment where the worker is willing to work harder for less in order to keep his job. What I fear is that a point of diminishing returns is going to change the face of the economy, as we see happening now with the shift overseas. This falls right into the hands of the Asian culture, who have lived in a militant, overcrowded, caste society for many many years. Consumate ass kissers, with the patience to see the long term goal and forgo the short term cost to the family, the environment, the soul, and the quarterly bottom line to preserve and expand the family holdings. The price they pay for failure is to fall on their sword. Instead of Hari-Kari, an American corporate officer who shits on his brain pool, hard workers, and stock holders and created a stort term gain, but has slowly strangled his company's economic future, is rewarded with a fully inflated golden parachute and considered a visionary when he sells the company for a record profit. To compund this blow to the American economy the company that purchases the over-valued company rapes and strips the purchase leaving all but the key components in the dust bin and moves more overseas as it tightens it's reins to adjust for the cost of the purchase. History repeats itself, we all know what happens to an entity who winds up relying too heavily on another entity. The puppeteer becomes the puppet and when the shoe is on the other foot where does that leave the American worker? He has not made enough from his labors to build a moat around his castle, so he is cast out as a slave to whatever means of existance remains. So go ahead and chain your wagon to that horse, but what are YOU going to do when the wagon master has eaten the last carrot and asks you for more cause the horses won't move without a carrot?
I'm not going to give the wagonmaster any more carrots, (cause he keeps eating them instead of using them to keep the team moving) I'm going to put a bullet in his head! That is the way this country was built! What happened to Tarring and Feathering? What happened to accountability? What happened to respect, honor, and loyalty? The poloticians, banks and lawyers have stripped us of those values and made us slaves to their bidding with the promise of "liberty and justice for all" {gee I kinda got off on a tangent there, I think I'll stop now}{note to self - check med levels....)
Rick B.
The areas in which Open Source is most succesful (ie. not the desktop) are nearly all in the areas that once upon a time you'd hire a shop to put together for you and give you the source for or you'd just buy the code and either pay or use your own people to install it (as the terminology had it at the time). For millions of dollars in many cases, the kind of contracts that sustained teams and sometimes whole businesses over multiple years. Look into the history of all the pre-boom valley software players. What was once a custom job for each customer is now reduced to a mere rejigging of a bit of free code. Yes, there was a lot of reinventing the wheel, but in many cases it was proprietry work the vendor had invested large sums in, it was their asset to exploit and business was happy to pay the cost of it. Business procurement 101: business will pay what something is worth to it in terms of the capabilities it affords that business, not what you think that software is worth. When I say "happy to pay" I really do mean happy, cheerful, looking forward to it etc. The computer industry had a captive market, Open Source is killing it stone cold. That money is going out of I.T. and its never coming back. You can't argue it any other way. You seem to have the usual Linuxian hang-up around Windows, I'm talking about the bread and butter work developers in the Unix environment used to do, thats what Open Source has killed. Its telling you don't even consider this sector of the business in your reply to me.
Canada needs public medicare to compete. It's just too decentralized and not rich enough for a private system to be able to serve everyone adequately. If it went private you'd see even more of an exodus of doctors from the rural areas. This is another area where the government has to subsidize in order to provide a basic level of service. Do you think that any doctor could make more money in Canada than the US? We'd have an even bigger problem with people moving south to work.