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Globalization Decimating US I.T. Jobs
mrraven writes, "According to Ronald Reagan's former deputy secretary of the treasury in this
article in Counterpunch, globalization is destroying US I.T. jobs. From the article: 'During the past five years (January 01 – January 06), the information sector of the US economy lost 644,000 jobs, or 17.4 per cent of its work force. Computer systems design and related work lost 105,000 jobs, or 8.5 per cent of its work force. Clearly, jobs offshoring is not creating jobs in computers and information technology.'" Paul Craig Roberts quotes a number of formerly pro-globalization economists who are now seeing the light of the harrowing of the US middle class. It's not limited to I.T. Roberts quotes one recanting economist, Alan Blinder, as saying that 42–56 million American service-sector jobs are susceptible to offshoring.
Of course most folks who are actually working in IT could have told you this. I know a number of folks at companies who experienced several rounds of layoffs. They have survived the layoffs, but they are also currently doing the job of two to three employees now versus prior to the layoffs. Morale is low, pay has not kept up with the cost of living increases, the cost of health care or inflation. Productivity is still there, but burnout is likely in these individuals. Other people I know that did lose their jobs ended up going back to school and getting out of IT entirely which I suspect is not an isolated situation and would lead to skewed unemployment statistics.
The thing that worries me is that this is not an isolated employment sector, and I predict that we are in more trouble than we might know. Historically we have relied on our research and development to keep this country on top technologically, but over the last five years or so, we have been reducing the amount of funding we spend on research and development, particularly in the biosciences. For example, if you were to look at NIH grant paylines, five years ago the payline was around 33%. Next year it is predicted to be anywhere from 10-14% meaning the likelihood that a researcher will obtain funding has been cut by more than half. In fact, research and education spending on the whole is down under the current White House administration. So, if we are supposed to rely on education, technology and research and development to keep our edge as a country, we are already in trouble, especially when one considers that even if we were to turn things around tomorrow, we have likely done enough damage that it will take a decade to recover.
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You all said that globalism was a good thing, but now you can't take it?
Look at me! I'm white and American -- I shouldn't have to compete for my job!
If you find yourself sliding out of the job market, then get some more skills.
If only there were CDROM's available with fully-featured unix systems, complete with source code, that one could use to learn operating systems, compiler design, networking, graphics, and databases! If we had that, then unemployed American computer folk would have a shot at competing internationally!
No one is entitled to a job, even if you are white, American and whiny.
The FN neo-con penny sniffing, greedy, profiteering republicans are the ones decimating this country.
They should all be arrested and tried for treason.
They've sold out our country. They are criminals.
They've damaged this country beyond repair.
Now I wonder if slashdot has become byproduct of media propoganda machine. CNN seems to blast current administration now, I don't make connection between the two, but number of political stories has risen on each, including this one, dramatically, especially relating to current administration. Am only one noticing this? Are we being manipulated? If so by who...
If the US government were to make it more difficult for companies to offshore, would the situation be any better?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Could this just be a reversal of what happened during the tech boom, where:
I'm curious if many of the competent, professional I.T. people are really losing their jobs.
http://outcampaign.org/
You can blame repubs, dems, the evolutionists, creationists, etc... But our own individual greed have all contributed to this problem. When was the last time anyone cared about looking for anything "made in the USA"? If we as individuals don't feel compelled to buy products from our own nation, on what grounds do we expect corporations to hire more expensive US labor? Especially when doing so, would put them at a price disadvantage when selling to us US consumers, who, surprise surprise, pay more attention to price than anything else? If they did that, they'd go under, thanks to us.
Something of a conundrum.
"Our morality is good, theirs is repressive."- Partisanship Rule #3
The entire movement of "globalization" is advocated solely by huge corporate interests who are seeking ways to circumvent national sovreignty, specifically the imposition of wage and labor standards.
They realize that by doing this they will be able to squeeze more profit from the exploitable masses.
Their proponents spew forth on theories of national "specialization".. which is completely specious, as illustrated by our interactions with china. We are being bled dry of our money and at the same time china is being bled dry of their labor... and who wins.. corporate owners, execs, their families, and the political elite who help them perpetrate it.
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I can't help but think of all of those poor buggy whip manufacturers who had their jobs eliminated when the automobile was first introduced. We should ban it .. oh wait ...
People preach free software and wonder where the jobs go?
Eventually, perfect capitalism (aided by globalization) will cut out those who make money without adding commensurate value. It's gonna happen. Figure out how to add actual value.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/06/09/28/21523 1.shtml
Contrast the attitudes demonstrated in the above to the one's displayed here. Not so much fun when the "SOL" is on your foot.
Saying that outsourcing eliminates jobs because they eliminate jobs in IT is like saying evolution is impossible because of the second law of thermodynamics. A global relation (entropy increases or jobs increase), doesn't necessarily hold locally (entropy may decrease in one system, and jobs may decrease in one sector).
Economics doesn't saw anything about whether globalization will preserve jobs in a specific sector. What it does say is that it will tend to create jobs in the economy (both economies involved) as a whole. There isn't a lot of evidence to counter this claim.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I had my job outsourced 2 years ago, and I'm still looking. The Neocons are idiots, and not really conservatives. What we really
need to do is to outsource all government economists. They aren't worth $0.02 a year in my opinion...
Teddy Roosevelt - a Republican for the middle class.
The IT sector hired far more people than normal as a result of the dot com boom. The IT market adjusted after the boom ended. The period they study includes the dot com crash. These jobs may simply have vanished along with the dot coms, rather than being outsourced.
Globalization is not "decimating" US I.T. jobs. Decimating means destroying nine out of ten ("decimate" like in the decimal system). Losing 17.4% is a far cry from losing 90%. Let's try to restrain the hyperbole.
How about all those Intel, AMD, Dell etc etc in Malaysia, Taiwan and around the world.
Didn't the lower cost of building all the components there help to decrease the prices of computing, encouraging demand. And wasn't the continuosly lowered cost of infrastructure/equipment an integral part of the computing/technological/information/internet revolution. Which incredibly benefited the US economically. Which provided jobs and increased jobs and increased pay scale during the late 90's and early 2000's.
So in other words:
globalization benificial to us: good
globalization detrimental to us: bad
news for ya: globalization works both fucking ways. You think jobs weren't decimated in third world/developing countries when they opened up their markets and have to compete with cheaper US products.
You benefited from it, now its someone else turns.
Or you can ask the US goverment to broke its own agreements and words, and strongarm it way to makes sure the deal is one sided. But don't put your hopes up. God knows it has never done that. And never will. well except maybe for that renmibi thing.. and that textilke subsidy thing..and...
waiting for Flamebait+7 and Troll+7
Timang tinggi tinggi
parang sudah asah
alang alang mandi
biar sampai basah
American unemployment peaked during the Great Depression at about 25%. 17.4% certainly sounds like decimation to me.
I thought we were in the middle of an IT growth trend? Some of the projections that I've seen from the U.S. Department of Labor and other sources say the growth is ongoing for at least the 6 years from now to a decade. Job growth and demand for IT is second only to those of Nurses, CNAs, and similiar medical fields.
Hell, check it for yourself at:
http://www.bls.gov/oco/oco2003.htm
I'd say that there's a "ripple effect" and that the money is going towards more deserving industries.
Are his numbers accurate? This guy is obviously biased judging from his extreme attacks on the bush adminstration (it's also helpful to notice that this was published on an extreme left-wing site). But more importantly, i thought i'd go check out the Bureau of Labor Statistics site at www.bls.gov. In May 2001 there were 2,825,820 jobs classified as Computer and Mathematical. In may 2005, there were 2,952,740 jobs, an increase of 4.49%.
He even cites the company I work for as an example, saying Oracle has dumped thousands of jobs recently. What he doesn't mention is that most of these layoffs were due to acquisitions, where you have to eliminate duplicate jobs (and most of the pink slips were not in engineering). From what i can see, today Oracle employs more American-based engineers than ever before.
I work as a software engineer and the idea of losing my job to someone in who lives in India or some other place where the average salary couldnt cover the cost of rent in the worst of slums in America scares me a lot. But whenever I read an article (like this one) claiming that its already happened I feel a lot better because it makes me think that its just fearmongering.
I recently did a job search and had potential employers beating down my door, within a week of sending my resume out I had a half a dozen interviews lined up with well known companies that pay nicely. I know of noone in a different field who has been in a situation as good as that. The company I work for now is desperate to get more software engineers and cant find enough qualified people to fill even half of the open positions. So whenever I read an article like this about how "all the programmers are losing their jobs to the developing world" I cant help but think its just some journalists trying to scare people.
Maybe I'll be eating my words 10 years from now, but right now I am calling BS.
I'm Canadian and from my perspective, outsourcing is a good thing for Americans. Americans have long complained about the loss of jobs to foreign countries where wages are lower (such as Canada). The truth is that, despite this outsourcing, Americans are still far better off than workers in other countries. Americans earn more, have more time off, and have greater choice of employers than the workers in any other country in the world. Just ask any Canadian what the number one reason to move to the States is and he'll answer: it's the salary, stupid.
So what is the average geek to do about this outsourcing problem? Retire to India. For the amount your Prius will fetch on Craigslist, you can live like a king for many years in India.
What a lying sack of shit the parent post is, it's all about reducing labor costs so a thin layer of owners and managers can make hundreds of millions if not billions a year while BOTH Americans and people in the third world suffer terribly. Hint .001% of Indians will become coders and engineers and even that elite they will be paid probably a quarter of what an American would make at the same job and the rest of India, Vietnam, China, etc will work sweatshop jobs for pennies an hour. Globalization is a bad deal for BOTH Americans and people in the third word. As corporations scour the world for the lowest wages possible it creates downward pressure on wages for all of us. Unless we wake up to this fact and reign in the corporations they will continue to bend us over and have their way with us.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
The gains from doing this are large, but very spread out. The losses are small, but concentrated. As a result, those who lose out have a big incentive to try and stop this from happening - more so than those who would gain from it. They may attempt to have the government regulate the practice. This is known to economists as rent seeking, when one group seeks the uncompensated transfer of wealth from others (people who buy IT) to themselves through government intervention. These Other People have to expend more resources to get the same things done. This is not a spectacularly noble cause, though it often is hailed in the name of "saving jobs".
But then, if our first concern should be about saving jobs, we ought to do away with computers entirely so there is more work to be done for paper-shufflers in offices. We can save the jobs of hundreds of thousands of office secretaries! Indeed, we could get rid of machines entirely and go back to simple hand tools for everything. Except, well, not.
Of course, that doesn't stop it all from happening. Take textiles. The average US family spends $160 more a year on textiles because of import quotas. Each job saved costs $221,000 a year. This is paid for by other people. Yay.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I have no problem with "globalism" PROVIDED that the country getting the jobs has the same level of regulations and protections that we have (or higher).
The problems I have with "globalism" is when companies off-shore because the other country has FEWER worker protections or environmental regulations than we do. Yeah, it's great for your CEO's bonus if you can work 10 year old kids for 12 hours a day at $5 a week making tennis shoes. But this isn't about your CEO's bonus.
We should be bringing everyone else UP to our standards rather than racing to the lowest level out there. But we are racing to the bottom. That is the problem.
Outsourcing is like a motel en route to automation.
Most of the low tech jobs will eventually get replaced by computing anyway.
Call Centres:
Either with users being provided better do-it-urself tools (Like Interactive telephone based services), and websites. The population is getting more tech, savvy.
Programming:
Evolve better tools, languages. There is no need to implement a requirement, when the requirement definition itself could be an implementation. It is usually the architecting and coding that gets outsourced; redundant i'd say. [While I agree Ruby is a really inadequete example, atleast things dont get repeated out there.]
And finally, don't ban outsourcing in the meantime. Because America has benefitted from its own exports. Services are just another commodity, saying that it is not is akin to saying 'Services are the ONLY commodity' that should be exported.
Life is just a conviction.
People can buy Brand new desktop computers for as little as 300 dollars. Companies can afford more computing power for less than ever. The internet has the concentrated media networks scrambling for ways to cope with the flood of new distribution methods and authoring tools that slowly edge them out. Can we really sit here and criticize another industry for clinging to a system beneficial to themselves more than society as a whole, while carving out some sense of entitlment of our own?
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
I'm no economist, but the following seems to make sense to me:
.. there is a glut of overpaid, underskilled IT workers and they are losing their jobs to a more motivated, cheaper foreign workforce. How is this a surprise? This does not neccesarily mean that the same is happening to smart, driven individuals who make themselves valuable to their company.
1. Many college-bound students went into CS/IT because it was heavily advertised as being lucrative, but not all of these people neccesarily have the skills or drive to become competent CS/IT professionals. The field is very dynamic, in that if you studied everything you know out of a book 5 years ago, most of that is useless now - if you can't keep up you're out. Introduce outsourcing into the equation
2. The number of people going to college is continually growing larger. It is basically expected that most kids will go to college when they graduate high school, and so the prestige of a bachelors degree declines. College is today's high school and graduate school is today's college.
Moral of the story? Do your undergraduate work at a good school, then get a Master's. And don't go into IT just because it pays well and you "like computers".
Does it really matter if jobs go from LA to Las Vegas or from LA to Toronto or from LA to India? Either way, unless you are willing to follow the job and take the prevailing wage, you are still out of work.
It's a fact of life, almost any job that doesn't require your physical presence is relocateable. If the cost of moving raw materials abroad and the finished product back is low enough, and the difference in the cost of doing business is high enough, then everything else being equal you will see job migration.
If you want security from relocation, be a computer-equipment-installation technician. If you want security from offshoring, find a job that is "outsource-proof" such as certain defense-industry jobs.
The biggest issue in my mind isn't offshoring because overseas engineers work for half of what Americans charge, but offshoring of any type because costs imposed by the "American standard of living" are significantly greater than the equivalent costs in countries with a much lower standard of living. As long as we insist on things like clean air, good police protection, something approaching a "living wage" for our lowest-paid workers, good health care, safe cars, good infrastructure, etc. etc. etc., then we will have higher costs to do business here than in countries whose citizens don't demand these things. In a country or region without such costs, the cost of living will be much lower and wages can be lower while still having employees feel well-compensated.
There are parts of America with a relatively low payroll burden on companies and with relatively low costs-of-living. If your big-city job were suddenly transferred to some rural area 2000 miles away where 2/3 of your salary could let you live in a house twice the size of your existing one, but with the nearest big city 3 hours away, would you take the transfer or would you start sending out your resume? How about if it was transferred 10,000 miles away and the salary was 1/3, but even after paying for a flat the same size as the one you have now, you'd still be able to bank a huge amount each month?
Look on the bright side - the world and it's nearby neighbors are a closed system as far as the job market is concerned - no jobs are going to Alpha Centauri Prime any time soon.
I am not a troll. Just a realist.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Offshore Information Technology Outsourcing.
I propose the PATRIOOITO Act.
Sorry to say, but this is how the free market works. To keep your job, you'll have to ensure that you can offer something those off-shore workers can't and that you are offering it for a reasonable price (so that your employers prefers hiring you to them). While globalization sucks for the particular individuals who are temporarily losing their jobs and being forced to work more for less or change line of work, to the *consumer* it is a great thing because it lowers prices, and we are all consumers first and foremost. For each of those 600,000 people who lost their jobs, there are 500 Americans who are benefitting from freer trade.
This article, like many others of it's ilk, is against the H-1b visa program. I understand the criticism, and don't really deny it. However, one has to look at the positives that the program brings. As an immigration policy, the H-1b program is brilliant. Think about it, you bring in the rest of the world's best and brightest. Certainly the few thousand that come in via this program are preferable to the millions of poor and destitute that come across illegally? I think that the H-1b and student visa programs are essential to keeping the US at the forefront of the tech world.
PLEASE understand that I am not disparaging the Mexican immigrants... they tend to be hard workers, and they fill a vital role in our economy, even if we won't admit it. I'm simply arguing that it is good for the US to have as many of the world's best-and-brightest as possible. I'm arguing that allowing these people to come in and work actually benefits the economy enough to offset the jobs that they might displace.
One personal observation... It is very difficult to find US native candidates in engineering that are as qualified as many of these H-1b candidates. Filling a job vacancy can take a very long time, especially when our co-op/internship pipeline runs dry. We end up hiring foreigners as often as not. Their pay is lower, but only because their "foreign" degree is not really considered. All that I have had experience with received a bachelor's degree in their home country and then received a masters in the US. They are paid at the same level as a US bachelor's degree in many cases. I don't know if this is fair or not, but that seems to be the norm and it doesn't seem to affect the salaries of the native Americans that we hire. Actually, I think I stated that poorly. We seek an H-1b candidate with a US masters to fill the same position that we would staff with a native candidate who only has a bachelor's degree. The salaries would be the same for the same position. I know that one's personal experience is not statistically valid, but I do think that others share this experience.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Under the ideal scenario it works as you stated:
china produces at cheaper costs.. and though wages drop for those jobs in the US because of labor competition, the prices will drop at the same rate resulting in equalization of the two living standards with no real change in ours..
in reality it's quite different:
Companies see profit potential here..
china produces at cheaper costs, and wages drop for those jobs in the US because of labor competition, but because the companies are sucking up profits by not lowering prices to the marginal cost of production (like they would with US produced goods), the real cost of products rises for americans, and the standard of living goes down.
Some people will make the argument that this offshoring represents structural unemployment.. like mechanization.. but there is a huge difference here:
with previous structural shifts which caused unemployment.. the shifts were isolated, allowing the middle class worker to learn a new trade and advance back to the point where their wage is sufficient to keep their family fed.
Now different jobs are being offshored in quick succession.. the middle class worker moves from one profession to the next, but because theyre offshored so quickly theyre never able to advance beyond entry level.. their income is permanently suppressed.
This is not good.. it's very threatening to the concept of a stable middle class.
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I worked for several years on salary for a big-name employer.
I routinely worked a lot more than 40 hours a week and I'm sure most IT workers making more than $40,000/year do too.
Yes, I did rake in more than $5.25/hour even with the longest weeks, but anyone who thinks IT jobs are all 40-hour workweeks has another think coming.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
From the perspective of someone who is not American, this is a good thing. It means that unions in rich countries are no longer able to keep the rest of the world poor. Poor people in Romania who have excellent IT skills have the freedom and opportunity to enter the capitalist system and compete on the global market.
The Americans spent 50 years trying to win the cold war so the guy in Romania would have this opportunity. Would you now turn around and say "Sorry, we're going to be implementing some socialist protectionist measures.... we didn't expect American workers to have to compete with you".
Looking at the IT landscape, it seems clear to me that the American IT industry is the most vibrant and resilient in the world. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, HP, Wikipedia, Myspace, Youtube, etc. are organisations which saw the light of day in America. Please don't react in a spastic way when the rest of the world looks at what you're doing and tries to do something similar.
The American president keeps talking about "freedom". For me, freedom includes the freedom to compete with American workers.
Walk the walk....
How do you feel if your employer shuts down your worksite and opens up a new worksite in another state that has fewer worker protections or environmental regulations? Maybe from a strong-labor state to a state with virtually no organized labor in your field, or from a state which greatly restricts youth labor to one that follows minimum federal guidelines, or one with a high minimum wage to one that uses the lower federal minimum? Maybe from one with good workers compensation insurance to one with very poor insurance?
You get the idea.
Don't laugh, such things happen all the time.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Rads? So I see that the "rads" are merely disguised racists, who criticize the USA's foreign policy unless it benefits only white people. Little brown and yellow paupers in Asia and the Middle East are of no concern. Just keep sending food and money to them, and let it rot on docks or be stolen by warlords and despots, rather than invest in improving their self-government and infrastructure.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
He're another eye opener: U.S. homework outsourced as "e-tutoring" grows
This is embarrassing. Not only are jobs being outsourced, but now we're asking people in foreign countries to help train our children.
At this rate, in twenty years, the US will be the China of the 60's, and China/India will be outsourcing manufacturing to the US while they develop the next generation of technology (fusion, electronics, space tech, etc).
But hey, look on the bright side. 1% of the population of the US will control 95 percent of the wealth.
We have several issues. The bigger one is that we have wrapped IT in a very expensive set-up. Windows is dollar for work about the most expensive approach that you can take. Worse, our gov. has been pushing Windows over the last 6 years, even when organizations such as NSA, CIA, and even now DOD push mainframes earlier, followed by POSIX, and now OSS (specifically Linux). Companies and gov. are going down a path that is horribly expensive. Interestingly, there are companies/gov that are moving to much lower costs software. THey are being done outside of the USA and will do for our software industry exactly what Toyota/honda/nission/kia/etc have done to Detroit.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Are we being manipulated? If so by who...
You have to be freakin kidd'n me. Saddam has WMD, Saddam has direct ties Al Qieda... US invades.. no WMD, neither the 9/11 taskforce, not the senate report, nor any combination of the CIA/NSA/DIA/FBI can find any substantial link between Saddam and OBL... Yet we invaded and are now occupying another country.
The rethuglicans got into office on a platform of terror mongering and Gay bashing..
well guess what it's 2years later and both Osama and the Gays are still here, while
america's middle class is vanishing faster than bag of pork rinds at Ramadan.
We need tax cuts to fix the economy... So tax cuts went mostly to the top 3% , in terms of income, and corporations got a 25% tax cut. Oh yeah and the oil companies got billions in tax credits... All in the name of jobs.. well look at the numbers... there aren't more jobs... We just have more debt..
W's tax cuts created millions of new jobs, unfortunately they were all in India and China.
JUST WHO THE HELL DO YOU THING IS MANIPULATING US, I'll give you a hint it ain't Lou Dobbs and CNN
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
In my opinion, one of the worst things to happen to the anti-globalization movement, and whole argument in general, in the past several years is its association with leftist fringe groups and sometimes-violent street protests. The first thing that many people think of today when they hear the words "anti-globalization" is a rioter, and this doesn't do very much to help it be taken seriously. Those protests, at least in the U.S., ended much real discussion about globalization by turning the whole thing into a farce. All people had to do was look on the news and see that it was the forces of rationality and authority versus the lunatic fringe, and that was it. (Granted, a lot of media outlets were only happy enough to portray it this way, with various levels of subtlety, but this should be expected.) Whatever salient points the argument might have had, evaporate when you're perceived as being mainly supported by bored college students with nothing better to do than go protest something.
If you want to garner support from blue-collar, red-state America now, you can't say "globalization," you have to say "outsourcing" or "offshoring." That's because the g-word has a strong association with protesters and radical fringe groups; no sane middle-class gainfully-employed person wants to associate themselves with anything "anti-globalization" anymore, lest they end up on some sort of FBI watch list. It's that 'blue collar' crowd who should really be the major backers of anti-globalization, but to date they have been notably absent; I think this is because of a large reluctance on many people's part to do anything that reeks of "dirty hippies." And it's tough to get deeper in hippie territory right now than "anti-globalization."
Violent protests may have been effective in the 60s but today they're cliche; I can't think of a faster way to let your opponents marginalize and demonize you in the press, and frankly to have the general public revel in watching you get tear gassed on TV. Average people don't have much tolerance or sympathy for rioters, regardless of the motivation or politics; it's no longer an acceptable mode of political discourse. This situation may be different in other countries -- it seems like riots and mass demonstrations are accepted by the public rather differently in some European countries. But here in the U.S., riots don't play in Peoria. They're counterproductive.
I tried to explain the anti-globalization position to too many people over the last few years to and have had more people pipe up "hey, aren't those the folks who were causing riots down in New York?" to think that those protests can possibly be constructive. It doesn't matter whether it's the protesters or the cops who start the escalation; if you have a protest and it turns into chaos -- particularly televised chaos -- then you and any arguments or positions that you might be associated with lose a lot of credibility.
The "rads" might think that they've won now, but really, I think that the logic that globalization might not be such a hot thing, has finally come into the light despite the efforts of fringe groups, certainly not because of them.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
lol
So are you a bridge troll or a Forest Troll??
Answering your question about the salary.. the US did fine for almost 200 years using a system of tariffs.... It worked go read a freakin history book. The one world neocons got into office everything went crap.
You figure it out.....
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
looks like us rads were right about globalization...
And just who are you are to say who is "right" in this matter? "Right" (for you) is in terms of U.S. success. Internationally, the shift to globalization is balancing the enonomies of rich and poor states in such matters, specifically, IT.
The United States is a major 'rich' country, but the dozens of 'developing poor' countries out there are more than willing to take wage cuts (vs. US wages) if it means jobs and income for more growth. To me, the closest anyone will be coming to saying who is 'right' will be the Indians, the Chinese, the South Asians, and the rest of the "developing" nations. Not sure how the IT field is going? Just ask Samhir from Bombay how your old job is going these days, chances are he is pretty satisfied with his (50%-of-your-old-wage) income, which, in places such as India, can make a hell of a difference- not just for his life, but for more jobs, industry, and, in turn, national economy.
To say that globalization is (anything) completely depends on where you're standing, and what you are/are not willing to give up in terms of standards of living and income.
Seems that this time, the U.S. is getting undercut and losing jobs-- problem is, there is no choice in the matter for the Americans unless we are willing to compromise. That... or our economy will have to pull through with lower costs of living as a result.
Perhaps it's simply our time.
It's always confirmation bias!
What makes their patriotic self-interest in keeping jobs in their own American economy instead of overseas where workers unfairly compete without labor, environmental, political or economic protections into "racism"? The "radicals" who protest the WTO are more diverse ethnicly than either the foreign countries or America as a whole.
What kind of racism haunts your mind that you project it onto people who aren't racists?
--
make install -not war
It's the high-cost of life in the US.
Speculators have worked very hard to keep land and house prices beyond the reasonable capacity of people to pay for them, hence overreliance on credit which increases the prices of the goods often by 100% (20 years at 5%).
In addition, the sprawling lifestyle puts an extra burden on governments who have to maintain an extensive networks of roads, in addition to the people who have to pay a fortune to acquire (also on credit) automobiles and run them.
It's not for nothing that third-worlders can live for a king for $10 per day; over there, people are not burdened by the expensive western lifestyle.
Automobiles are particularly to blame, because this is one expense that can be done without. When people will spend a third of their income to support their automobile, this means that with a proper public transportation system that allows ordinary people to live decently without a car, salaries could be cut by 25% without any diminished quality of life.
When this little fact will be understood by the thousands chambers of commerce, there will be serious moves toward better transit. In addition of lowering the expenses of employers, it will free the roads from millions of otherwise useless vehicles, leaving a free way for what cannot be transacted without a truck, thus cutting down on the time lost in traffic, furthering even more the savings.
Plus, when there are sufficient people using a transit system, they can be self-sufficient or even turn a profit and thus not be an eternal drain on public ressources like roads are (no right-wing wacko is talking about privatizing roads). 100 years ago, transit systems were big business, and railroads were the high-technology.
The strict definition of decimate is to reduce by one tenth. In other words 10% loss. The latin root "decimare", which means "to take or destroy one tenth", is quite litterally the proper translation one would use if translating from the modern english word "decimate" to latin (assuming verb tenses and subject persona).
How did this word come to be? Well, it originally was the word used by the Roman army to punish a legion or or other sized force of their army for mutiny or disobeying orders. You see, the Roman army was partly a forced labor army. The officers were typically members of families of distinction, but the regular soldiers were simply members of the populus, sometimes slaves, sometimes people from cities/lands that Rome conquered. By being in the army, they had the chance to earn citizenship if they proved themselves. But because of this, there was always the increased chance that a group would try to mutiny... If this occured, the rest of the legion or company was expected to put down that mutiny and kill/capture the ones responsible, or face the punishment, which was the killing of every tenth person in the ranks... Rome was smart to not kill everyone since it would seriously hurt their ability to wage war and protect their lands, but killing every tenth arbitrarily was enough of a threat to keep most mutinies from occuring since it was in the best interests of the members of the legion to inform on anyone thinking of starting a mutiny.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Nice try at creating a false wedge that doesn't exist. This isn't a Republican v.s. Dem thing Paul Craig Roberts who wrote this article that I submitted was deputy secretary of the treasury under REAGAN. Meanwhile Bill Clinton pushed all the alphabet soup of trade agreements like WIPO (World intellectual property organization DRM and patent law ring a bell), the WTO, and NAFTA ALL happened under Clinton. Pat Buchanan a conservative is very against globalization. So this isn't a "liberal" CNN v.s. conservative thing, but a populist grass roots on both the right and left concerned with the fate of workers and global downward pressure on wages v.s. a greedy corporate and government elite lining their pockets at the expense of quite literally 90+% of the people of the world. The greedy ownership, management and government elite may kill the goose that is laying their golden egg though there is only so much crap people will take before they put a Chavez or a Pat Buchanan in power who will put a halt to this shit.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
That you are trying to convince people that various companies decided in favor of offshoring so that they could make better lives for those "little brown and yellow paupers in Asia and the Middle East...is laughable if not patently absurd. They don't give one rat's about these people - their only concern is a way to make the company's short-term balance sheet look good.
I'm sure all of these people losing their jobs will be so happy to work at Wal-Mart or McDonalds. What? No? But why are they going to these places to shop and eat then?
If good people in other countries can do certain things better than Americans, they ought to get the work. It's up to us to compete with them (and each other) instead of whining about the competition. Globalization is helping everyone in the long run. Competition can always be painted as nasty and brutish, but it's the way we get progress. Everyone benefits from it, even if it causes job changes in the short run.
When the Japanese auto manufacturers started sending their vehicles to the United States, nobody took them seriously at first. Then American consumers realized that the Japanese were making better cars, so they started buying them in increasing numbers. The U.S. carmakers (and their unions) simply whined about the competition instead of DOING enough about it. If they had actually competed by producing products that were better than the Japanese products (in reliability, styling and a whole range of issues), they could have fought off the competition. Instead, the unions demanded that they keep their arcane work rules that saved useless jobs in the short run, but which lost a LOT more jobs in the long run. The managements remained in denial that they were that much worse than the Japanese. Even when they DID start improving, it was too little, too late. The culture in Detroit couldn't compete with the rate of change (and improvement) given to us by Honda and Toyota. American consumers benefitted from this competition. The stockholders and employees of the U.S. companies COULD have benefitted, too, but they were both too shortsighted to learn and compete.
U.S. IT is in the position that the U.S. auto industry about 30 years ago. It leads the world, so it doesn't see the need to innovate as much as it did even 10 or 20 years ago. They're arrogant and fat and happy, it seems. Now the rest of the world is starting to catch up to us. Foreigners are learning to do the same things we've been doing, but less expensively. So what's the response? The companies and the employees whine about competition. If you can't see the continued pattern (and what to do about it), you're going to have no one to blame but yourselves.
David
And to protect our standard of living, we should automate or offshore any job we can.
Labor is expensive. The more jobs we can eliminate doing manufacturing and service with automation, and the more jobs we can give to people who are otherwise idly starving abroad, the more people we will have available at home to become nurses and provide all that healthcare people seem to want for free.
The middle class isn't getting poorer. The middle class is just demanding that more and more of their income is spent on healthcare. We'd all make a lot more money if we were willing to settle for the same drugs and treatments available to us in 1960.
paintball
Exactly mod parent up. Fortunately I think people are getting pretty sick of getting neo-coned
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
That was a very poorly written article. Granted, it was an editorial, but a little more in the way of rational argument would've been nice. Instead of presenting opposing points and showing their weaknesses, the author simply writes off opposing arguments as ridiculous and baseless. How about actually showing why they are wrong.
For example, he writes this in the beginning:
Unless he is countering a specific argument made against him in the past (which I doubt, based on the language he uses) this is as far as he goes as presenting the opposition argument he is so adamantly against. This is a straw man. He uses the blanket term "economists", as if all economists believe this. As anyone who has spent any time with economists knows, it is rare to find two economists who agree exactly on a given issue. Even if they agree generally, they may dispute endlessly about small details. To claim that offshoring is a practice that all economists consider useful is just wrong. Also, notice his choice of words. "Offshoring...can only have positive benefits overall for Americans." This is very obviously an over-simplification of the argument.
Other great fallacies include the numerous ad hominem attacks (mixed well with the aforementioned straw man). Here are a few:
He also does a very good job of making himself look like an ass by making claims without any explanation or reasoning to support these claims. Here are a few examples:
I could take the time to refute these one by one, but I re
We may think we're getting "more stuff for our money", but it's simply not true. The product quality is almost always grossly inferior to domestic-made products. It used to be you had to avoid buying "American"; now it's the other way around, and American businesses and consumers are slowly figuring it out.
This subject came up on a car-related mailing list I'm on; one lister had worked for a hand tool company. They outsourced their production to a chinese firm, and the "bin" rate went from about 20% to over 70%. Yep, that's right- they were throwing away 70% of the product before it even left the warehouse. Why? Cheap Chinese steel that was so bad, stuff would practically crumble, and they lost money hand over fist. They pulled production back.
The Japanese tried using Chinese labor for electronics/IC fabs in China. Bin rates skyrocketed, and the Japanese firms pulled out, at great expense, and went back to Japan.
Please help metamoderate.
I find this article to be ironic, because I am seeing an opposite trend now.
h ifts_1.html
Seems that the overseas outsourcing is hit or miss and does not work for everyone. I have seen some companies get amazing results at a much more affordable rate than they would in the US, but I have also seen some companies have so many issues with commuication/language/cultural barriers and oversight that they ended up spending more money.
Here is an article that is a few years old, but is interesting nonetheless:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/11/24/HNdells
Basically Dell ended up moving some of their tech support back to the US because customers were not happy with the quality of service they received.
In the end, it is up to each business to do their risk assesments and determine what works well for them.
good lol
This article is absurdly biased and miopic in terms of comprehending the forces at play in macro econmics, however it does raise some good questions.
Having emerging modern econimies to sale our high tech goods to is necessary for our domestic growth.
However The number of visas granted is too high. I attended many CS classes as the only white guy.
We should only bring over top of the line people, mediocre talent (such as myself) is widely available Everywhere and only serves to reduce wages.
If the situation were fair I could get a working visa to india and make a decent living, but somehow I think this would not be allowed. The people in India would be violently outraged if the situation were reveresed.
A government encourages populist revolt if it favors coorporations too heavily over people.
The neo-cons don't speak in a tone of populism, their language is entirely defensive and apolgetic to their masters, global coorporations.
Their is deffinately balance that should be maintained here, middle class jobs need to stay abundant or people will become infuriated by their lack of self worth.
Hello Cruel World
Indeed. Jan 01 was about the height of the dot-com boom. The crash came right after. Blaming those job losses on globalization is completely bogus.
Without their self-righteous self-appointed position as the guardians of all things outside the mainstream, they are nothing.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
America... just a nation of [three] hundred million [unemployed software engineers] with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. -Hunter S. Thompson
Look at how much IT services are being exported to the US (I don't know exaclty but must be arround 20B at least. That's 60B at least in terms of US labour. That's about 1 million jobs (ok, give a range for gross errors...may be 0.5 million vs 1.5 million jobs). That's exactly the jobs you lost. Also there are no signs of really slowing down, and people from _abroad_ are getting really experienced and are starting to manage things instead of just doing the work.
On the other hand, most firms benefiting from these outosuourced jobs are American (Microsoft, IBM, Accenture, etc). Then again, it's not their fault, and Indians and labour exporting countries must do this, because USA doesn't want people to be able to move to the US...in order to protect the very workers that are now finding the Indians do not have to move to the US, they can sell much chepear and eat dinner with they grandparents. So you only chance is to prevent offshoring of labour (very difficult)...and if you are sucessfull, you'll find that the rich guys will find it more interesting to invest directly in other countries than in the languishing USA. Do don't manufacture most of the things you need for a living, and most countries will not pay for your dubious patents. And what good will the dollar be if you economy sinks? I am playing devils advocate....but you get the picture.
unfinished: (adj.)
This is finally getting attention because upper management is being "outsourced". First the manufacturing moves offshore. Then the engineering. Then the marketing operation becomes a small unit in Bentonville to interface with WalMart. Financing starts to come from Hong Kong and Dubai instead of New York.
At that point, there's no reason for expensive upper management in the US.
The IBM PC saga is instructive. It's Lenovo now. Principal operations are in Beijing. There's an "executive headquarters" in Raleigh, NC. They're hiring; they have about 250 openings. One is high-level technical (wireless networking interoperability). Five are low-level technical. The others are all sales-related, except for some people in "accounts receivable" doing collections.
Lenovo started out with more ex-IBM execs, but they're gradually disappearing.
I work at a Fortune 500 and sit next to an HR guy because of cubicle issues. From what I overhear there have constantly been 20-some openings in IT. Which is to say, in the last year, at least, openings get filled at a rate slow enough that we always have at least 20. It sounds like everyone thinks it takes too long to find someone qualified and overall this level of unfilled positions just too high.
We do use some off-shoring, and I've seen this increase lately, but I've also seen that number of openings jump up from 20-something to 40-something. So, right now our IT department has a hole in it 40+ persons large. I oeverhear a lot of people paying more for staff than they had originally budgeted and I hear a lot of people making offers to the first qualified person they can find.
So, from what I'm hearing the American IT labor market is tight. Even if the number of jobs is decreasing, it sounds like the Boomers are retiring faster than we're creating qualified workers. The fact that most Americans are qualified for engineering jobs is a different problem.
Perhaps it's wrong to call it 'racism,' but then what is it? Campaigning to prevent jobs from going to those who arguable need them more may not be racism, but it is certainly something.
As for the lack of labor, environmental, political, or economic protections, are they better off with no job, or with a job, even without all those restrictions. Perhaps that's what Manuel can tell his children at night: "It's okay, mijito, you're hungry because the poor guy in El Norte with the job at least has his labor, environmental, political, and economic protections. It's better that way." There must be labor for there to be protections, no?
I guess that all I'm trying to say is that those who oppose globalization because they're 'looking out for the little guys' have some explaining to do on how exactly this works.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
So, if we are supposed to rely on education, technology and research and development to keep our edge as a country, we are already in trouble, especially when one considers that even if we were to turn things around tomorrow, we have likely done enough damage that it will take a decade to recover.
Industrial recovery is not possible while we trade with non free China and your government/corporate masters have you screwed out for RD too.
GE, Microsoft and others have already started moving their research offshore. I'm talking about basic industrial research, like turbine design. "First World" Physics, no longer viable, so forget it. Brains are cheaper, and theoretically free, in Russia and India. The situation is worse in China, where people really are not free.
Our trade was supposed to set the Chinese free, but it's working the other way around. It's just business, right?, and China is just another big company. Not quite. Our big dumb companies might have you by the balls, read your email, and sell it all to big brother, but they can't put you in jail yet. That will take another dissaster like NorthWoods so that everyone is really paranoid and ready for rationing and a WW2 style command economy.
The only way out is lots of wealth creation to raise everyone's standard of living, but it's not happening. With all the mergers, wealth will continue to move to the already very rich owners of those companies. The mergers are the ultimate result of government favoritism of large companies. IT was supposed to be the poster child of new competition and robust US Performance. It has not happened because incumbent companies were allowed to crush new comers, so that "just enough" competition would be left. Now, we all sit under the M$ monopoly, two big media companies, two "broadband" companies, one electric company and a merged OPEC/ExxonMobileRoyalDoubleDutchFuck and wonder where the jobs are and why service sucks. If we can't help ourselves, we will never be able to help anyone else.
Eventually, this will get the rich too. A real depression is no fun for anyone, but those happen when wealth concentration reaches a critical level. When power is concentrated enough, the American Empire will go to war with China, kind of like the great Royal Fuck Festival that was the first World War.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Running huge trade deficits will fairly likely lead to a nasty bubbles. Even if you are pro-free-trade, you have to agree that there is a problem with giant deficits.
We shouldn't give a free-ride to 3rd-world countries. If they want access to US consumers, they should find a way to balance the trade, or take their goods somewhere else. We have a big negotiating prize: access to our consumers. We should use this carrot to get more balanced trade rather than give it away without say. No other country would do so.
Table-ized A.I.
You've never actually listened to Democracy Now have you? Amy Goodman has broken a lot of stories with serious investigative journalism like following the deposed president of Haiti Aristide to Jamaica after he was ousted in U.S. backed coup. Or being the first to report on the use of white phosphorus as a chemical weapon against the Iraqi people which was latter admitted by the U.S. government:
5 16227
1 7/1515223
See: http://democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/08/1
followed by: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/
As for Noam Chomsky he has been documenting U.S. war crimes in places from Nicaragua to Vietnam for 40 years now. He is an American hero and if the MSM dared to give him a voice and people were made aware of the level of violence the U.S.government has committed against the world we might see new leadership in the U.S. and live in a much more ethical country. Of course we will never see that because it would threaten the corporate bottom line.
If you were to listen to Democracy Now and read a Chomsky book you might actually learn something. Of course it's much easier to not to read or listen and just smear with a cheap ad hominem attack, right?
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
But beyond the punditry, the big problem is that the US is losing manufacturing jobs. Most productivity growth is in manufacturing; productivity in services increases very slowly. Janitors and sales reps are barely more productive than they were decades ago.
The US is losing in high-tech products, too. For decades, the US exported far more high-tech products than it imported. That ended in 2002. Since then, imports have exceeded exports. And that's in high-tech; it's far, far worse in steel, textiles, general manufactured goods...
What's striking is how fast this has happened. There's been a huge change in the US economy since 2000. It's not a recession; it's a fundamental loss of productive capacity. Entire industries have disappeared in the US; textiles, paper, machine tools ... computers. Very few computers are actually made in the US.
if you have fixed-rate debt at, say, $100,000, and there is a massive round of inflation, isn't this helpful in effectively reducing your debt? because you can just re-sell your old shoes for a wheelbarrowful of 100 dollar bills and use that to pay off your mortgage.
MORTAR COMBAT!
And I don't mean our made for TV wars where we just fly over and drop some bombs, I mean an all out war.
...And we would be in a lot better position in a major war if we had trained IT people in the US than to have all of those people working at Wal-Mart.
In past world wars, we converted private industry over to making supplies for the war. We converted car plants into plants for making tanks, etc.
But if an all out war ever comes again, we will have to outsource all of that, too, because all of the real industries have left the US. And what if the countries where those industries went...are the countries we are at war with?
Personally, I think there have been a lot of wars we shouldn't have been involved in...including the one we are in now. But I, in theory, favor a strong defense, and part of that defense should include not shipping all of our jobs off to other countries and leaving us with nothing but fast food and Wal-Marts here. It would be a lot easier to convert a car plant into making tanks than it would be a McDonalds.
Yeah, I know, we have to keep the stock holders happy...but isn't it possible for anyone to look above the bottom line anymore and think about something beyond the next quarter profit report?
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Here's the proper response if your in US IT: "Lets get to it and totally pwn the rest of the world with superior skills and superior work." We need to outdo or be outdone. We can't cheat the game, but that doesn't mean we can't still win - lets go for it!
Here's a list of offshore legal services. Now you can have your legal work done in Bangalore. Pass a copy of this to your corporate counsel.
Fact # 1: If you want more of something, either:
A) Subsidise it;
B) Deregulate it;
C) Tax its alternatives;
and/or D) Regulate its alternatives.
Fact # 2: If you want less of something either:
A) Tax it;
B) Regulate it;
C) Subsidise its alternatives;
and/or D) Deregulate its alternatives.
In this country we currently:
a) Tax those who get paid for working (income tax, FICA)
b) Tax those who employ people (unemployment tax, FICA, workman's comp, etc.)
c) Regulate those who work (OSHA, labor laws, overtime regs, etc.)
d) Regulate those who employ (OSHA, labor laws, overtime regs. etc.)
e) Subsidise those who outsource jobs (A. I. D., tax breaks, etc.)
not to mention those who bring in cheap foreign labor as (for all intents and purposes) indentured servants.
Is it any wonder then that our effective employment rates, living standard, and real incomes are falling?
I was in IT for over 35 years, but ever since the dot-com crash, I've been doing other (much more unskilled and lower paying) work.
As an economics major/DP minor in college, and given this country's policies, I'm not surprised.
There is no balancing involved whatsoever. BOTH American and third world I.T. workers make LESS as companies scour the world for the cheapest wages they can find. And the I.T. work only benefits a tiny sliver of the billion + people in both China and India something like quite literally .001%. How can you honestly call something that benefits .001& in the third world a little bit while the rest of the world is suffering a setback a balancing? It's a disingenuous use of that word i.e. a lie. What's more I think you people who peddle these falsehoods are engaging in deliberate mendacities i.e. you are shilling to cover some ones ass in the elite. Shame on you I hope you sleep very poorly at night.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
They push it, because the math works out
Bullshit! Maximizing total GNP does *not* necessarily maximize other important factors, such as stability and equal distribution. Free trade has killed stability, and most of the benefits flow to the wealthy, NOT the middle class.
Investors are told to diversify to increase stability and reduce risk, NOT chase the single greatest return. Yet, pure free trade does just this. It is like buying junk bonds because they have the highest return. Nevermind that you may loose your shirt in the process. Free trade is pushed by high rollers who find clever ways to stick regular joe's with the downsides of high rolling.
Pure free trade makes the optimization fallacy of maximizing a single factor at the expense of other factors of "well being" and stability.
Thus, they may have got the math right, but they didn't get the right math.
Table-ized A.I.
All these discussions are based on the incorrect assumption that these jobs are US jobs in the first place; they are not. IT companies are doing business globally, and it's only logical and fair that the jobs are distributed globally as well.
Globalization is working exactly as it should. Yes, globalization means more competition and potentially less wealth for the average American. It also means greater wealth for a small group of global companies and investors. But what's the alternative? Do you think that protectionist policies by the US government would stop or even slow globalization?
What the US government can do is try to adopt policies that raise the standard of living around the world, and that will mean that when globalization happens and salaries and working conditions average out across the globe, US workers will not be losing too much. Also, the more skilled foreign workers the US lets immigrate, the less foreign competition the US will have.
Unrestrictive skilled immigration and free trade are still the best policies for the US.
There was indeed a blip during the dot-com boom, but the long-term tech trends appear to show a general flattening of technology employment and wages, similar to what happened with manufacturing employment.
Table-ized A.I.
yeah, well, I guess you'll have to throw away your luzr ipod now ;^)
./-ers don't remember the japanese car "issue". Instead of competing, the USA decided to just "bravado" ourselves into thinking japanese cars were junk quality. Yes, initially they were compared to US autos, but you know what, they have some smart folks there and eventually, those junk cars were beating the pants off of US engineered/manufactured cars.
I think the real problem is not that we aren't buying locally designed/manufactured stuff, but that we don't respect foriegn innovation until it bites us in the ass. I'm guessing that many
In a competition, the fatal mistake is often to underestimate your counterpart. The problem isn't that the stuff they do is of bad quality today, the problem is that they are improving at a rate (which if we don't get off of our asses), will eventually pass the quality of things that are locally made. Perpetuating the myth that forigners can't do the job only serves to delay any reponse until it might be too late.
As you said there is always a market for cheap stuff made cheaply. US corporations don't see much profit to even attack that market (making 2cent plastic widgets, etc). The real issue is the new innovative stuff at the top of the market. If we lose that, then we will have a much bigger problem which could take a generation or more to recover from.
If I had to speculate, the middle-east has the real jump on the next "industrial revolution". The "internet revolution" is like the printing press. Basically it's the information equalizer of our age, however, the economy of that age was transportation (for trade). Today, now that the economy is globalized, the power brokers (like they were in the 16th century) were the people that controlled the trade. Can you say Dubai Ports World? What shaped the world and the economy more in the last millenium the printing press or the merchant marines? I'm not saying it will happen, but it's some food for thought...
What about free software, which is written mostly by volunteers on their own time? Linux and BSD have almost taken over the Unix sector. HP-UX is dead. Irix is dead. AIX is looking pretty marginal. Solaris is still alive, but has an ever-shrinking piece of the pie.
It's weird that this website celebrates cities and governments switching to open source operating systems and applications, while at the same time it bemoans the loss of software jobs.
Im not one of the guys that are anti WTO not even sure where exactly I stand on it. It couldnt help the "little guys" by allowing them to build up their own business without having some foreign super powerhouse of a corp roll in and just set their work standards? That country might not be same off at first but it would most likely have a better finish. As I see it if a big corp rolls in sets up shop the government will then of course try to get more money from them. Then big corp rolls on to a dif country and cripples the first countries economy. Im just throwing stuff out tho who knows?
I live in argentina, and belong to the "middel class". I'm having a training course in UNIX basics so I can start working with an "american" (I fscking hate when people refer to the united states of (north) america as "america") corporation; a big one in IT. when I finish the course, I'll start working as a UNIX sysadmin trainee for US$500 (1500 pesos, that's a great salary for a 19 year old starter here. I could live on my own in a nice neighbourhood). There are a couple of other people in the course who actually understand what we are learning and have some experience in unix-like systems, the other will likely be "three month trained unix sysadmins", the crappy type. Too bad for the underqualified white northamericans who think that they should have "my" future job no matter what: this white qualified southamerican will get the job.
oviously, my country sucks in ways that america sucks less: there is no civic conciense among consumers, unions tend to be driven by political currents, and tech costs 50% more than in the "first world" because of ridiculous taxes. not to count that because our coin is around 3,14 pesos a dolar, tech costs something like 4 times that you pay (relatively speaking). you get a US$70 video card for US$170 here, for example.
I'm not trying to make a point here, that has been done. Just explainig a bit of how are thing in the "underdeveloped poor third world countries", which is not so mucho underdeveloped: we could use a nice IT infrastructure with one loaptop per child and free gov-sustained wifi and stuff like that, but it would give the people more knowledge (hence power) and the politicians less control over people (especially if people learn that they can cypher their data, for example). politicians here behave (and I suspect they also think) like if this were the country it was a century ago: an undeveloped third world country who's only ability was to produce food. Today we are developing and not all of the populations needs just food (only some 30 percent, because -again- our politicians are assholes as yours are).
just my two cents (this would be six cents here, that buys me a candy ^_^)
~ Kant
p.s.: I apologize for my crappy english, as you may have guessed it's not my mother language.
p.s. 2: I know the text is not properly written and doesn't seem to follow a line, but it's 3 AM here and I'm tired. anyway, someone will answer this saying that it's over the regular USA internetuser or something like that.
p.s. 3: I know that canada is also northamerica, sorry for putting you with the USA
Rather than wining that you've lost **your** job to some offshore operation, perhaps you should consider yourself lucky that with your crappy sklillset you were able to hold on to is for so long.
And, while you're considering that, you might also consider other things too. You don't seem to mind wearing those shoes made in Phillipeans, listening to that ipod made in China, or those computer chips made in Korea etc with no caring for the fact that Americans could have made these items (but you were not prepared to pay for them).
While your contribution is measured as a cost, it is open to global commoditisation.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Dumb and hardworking workers are far far cheaper elsewhere.
And in GW Bush's reign the US people in general have proven themselves to not be particularly bright.
It's ugly but it's the truth.
Maybe your only hope is to make yourselves endearing so those sociopathic CEOs/politicians keep you around as pets or for amusement.
for I know for a fact i'm a patented "remote control human".
I am howard dean's toy I tell you... he controls me with his RC controller...
you know.. the wheel for forward and back.. trigger for accelaration, red button for bashing republicans ; )
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Isn't globalization really a natural re-distribution of labour and wealth to the parts of the world where it is truly needed? Perhaps the fact that jobs are lost is merely a sign that somehting was wrong in th first place, not that there is anything wrong with globalization itself.
When they go to india or god forbid china, they don't anymore.
Not to mention that in china you have no rights at all..
let's see.. have your education completely nullified by the fact you can't speak one word of hindi or mandarin?.. that's a bit unfair I dare say.
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The NYT business section recently noted that "...wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation's gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960's. UBS, the investment bank, recently described the current period as "the golden era of profitability"
So it certainly looks like the current setup is rigged against workers. No doubt there are a lot of explanations, but certainly globablization seems to put most of the cards in the hands of big money.
Continuing to vote in favor of more of it doesn't seem very smart unless you're in the 1% who own the country (to a first approximation.)
According to Businessweek, most private sector jobs created in the 21st century have been in health care.
What's Really Propping Up The Economy
This is a remarkable trend. I don't know about the rest of you but I ain't none too excited about the prospects of a career in health care.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Wait, wasn't the dot com crash in Feburary 2001 - i.e. just after the reporting started? Wouldn't it stand to reason, then, that all of the useless dot com monkeys who did nothing but read VC monthly and talk about how they were going to make millions in stock options not selling things, they'd be included in this statistic, right?
I only ask because I'm not exactly upset to be rid of them...
Commodore 64, Loading up the dance floor!
Welcome to the Information age, the US' future potential is not in grunt labor but rather the creation, marketing, and refinement of information. You'll charge good money for it too. Now get back to work on the spread of WIPO type treaties to cement the foundations. ;)
Or not.
Shh.
You said a mouthful there and wise. I hope people are listening.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
You're a stupid piece of shit. Worse, you've been duped by all the corporations who have interests in promoting an anti-"MSM" image—but I suppose it's no surprise a sheep like you would fall for it. Ba-a-a-a!
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
Well nowadays, it appears being against freedom, liberty etc. is seen as patriotic because it "ain't safe no more".
From what I know of US history, anyone who's against liberty, opposed to the concept that all people are created equal, flagrantly against concepts in the bill of rights etc. is being a cowardly false patriot.
Kinda sad, really.
Why is it the winners always seem to be those who control the wealth?
A global marketplace is not a true free market unless those taking place within it are free to move from one location to another as befits their part of the economy. Otherwise companies which transcend those boundaries and by extension those individuals who own and control those companies can take advantage of regional anomalies in the labor market to their advantage. For example, as has been pointed out, labor costs in China are artificially low due to the years of state-run economy and high birth rates. If those people were free to enter and compete in another economic zone, labor prices would return to equitable levels. As is, the specific economic conditions in that region of the world help depress labor prices everywhere.
If skilled Indian IT laborers were free to move to the US, rates would not be plunging nearly as quickly as they are.
The ______ Agenda
so you are also wrong. to reduce by 10% is to decimate, not by 90%. btw, this comes from the practice of having soldiers line up randomly and then having every 10th member step forward to be shot for whatever violation the group as a whole was responsible for. not much of a morale booster, i suspect, but it did happen.
-david
Some of you have pointed out that one reason for the disparity in pay which makes outsourcing attractive is the disparity in living standards. I agree. As more and more high paying jobs leave the US for lower cost regions of the world, Americans will have less disposable income. They are already deep in debt. At some point, consumption must fall.
I don't think many Americans understand the extent of the wrenching adjustments that lie ahead. It will not be pleasant.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Over time jobs have continuously moved abroad.
Back in the good old days (you know, when the western world had it's colonizing hat on), we decided it was far cheaper to source raw materials abroad - so we'd say grow cotton in India and import the raw product back to the UK to be refined.
Then we twigged we might as well weave it into cloth abroad (and fired a load of mill workers). Then, realizing we might as well make something out of the cloth abroad before importing it we fired a load of the cloth workers.
Now - at the time there was lots of personal pain for some people - but the benefit was two-fold. The vast majority of people got a far cheaper product and we were forced to up-skill. Do you honestly think we'd be in a better position today if we'd spent a fortune protecting those lost industries?
Same thing is just still happening and will continue to happen - whether you like it or not. You've just got the simple choice whether you want to stand there trying to hold back the sea, or whether you should take a few steps up the beach to get out of the way.
You might get the odd law/import quota protecting your own job, but that's just at the expense of everybody else around you - The USA can't afford to buy everything 'Made in the USA' and expect to keep the same standard of living.
"So goods are produced at lower cost" - true. But guy correctly notes, that decision about price for these goods is not that much based on cost, especially with players merging and growing global (less competition): greed and profit sucking goes beyond countries and destroys former meaning of country boundaries, leading to experimental state of global system. Middle class as we know it? Being washed out, head over heels to survive - will it succeed?
"and labor quality goes up" - no. Price wins, not the competence of better labor nor quality of product.
"But because of this increase in quality, fewer workers are needed internationally" - because of automation of cheap replication, yes.
Craftsmanship? Unneeded. Research and development? Military and governmental or under hood of profit making superpowers, as long as they need yet to compete.
"But all poor people can buy more than they ever have before" - buy what product? Electronics with failing capacitors or exploding batteries? Pressure of cost on quality is at highest.
"So in a sense we're getting what we always wanted" - not so sure of that sudden happiness.
Servant of karma
America has become a sad place when speaking the truth plainly without some sort of "moderate" nicey, nicey nodding in the direction of the Fox corporate blow hards is considered "lunatic fringe." Remember it was people protesting and striking that brought us the 40 hour work, that got black people the votes, that got women the vote, that helped end the Vietnam war, earth day that brought us NEPA, getting the picture? If you think the regressive forces of the world will give up their ill gotten privileges without loud protest you are kidding yourself. Moderates never got shit in history except some Uncle Tom pats on the back, it's radicals that got the goods time after time. From the founding fathers who used gasp violence against the "legitimate" British government to the current radicals like ACT UP who brought gay rights into the forefront in the late 80s the powers that be have to be pushed against if you want to gain any ground, count on it.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Look. You're both right and you're both wrong. And you should be smart enough to realize that. It's nice to see some honest dissent, but you both should learn to tone it down about four notches before you consider conversing. Fearmongering is a short-term tool. It doesn't work forever. Reality is slowly catching up to the political / economic system, and there are a lot of factors in it. All that really needs to happen at this point is a fair playing ground, so off to Black Box Voting for both of you.
Oh, and if you didn't shoot spittle at every conservative you spoke to, you would have a better chance of convincing them. I know I do.
My little site.
Nice ad hominem attack do you have any substantive facts to back up your little snit? I had two cites from the source I was defending proving that Democracy Now actually broke stories using serious investigative reporting. Do you have anything similar or just empty rhetoric. I'm waiting...
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Offshoring does not apply to IT. No doubt geeks want their overpayed jobs, yet still want cheap labor to supply their clothing, shoes, ipods, RAM etc. Why should the IT industry get any preferential treatment?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
That is a shit website with a politically biased agenda.
2 13/13tech_nemko.htm2 26/archive_005064.htms /frameset.exclude.html
Here are some reputable sources:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/articles/060
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/articles/010
http://money.cnn.com/popups/2006/moneymag/bestjob
Especially check out that last website. Top Job: Software Engineer.
"Software engineers are needed in virtually every part of the economy, making this one of the fastest-growing job titles in the U.S"
twitter, please read this carefully. Following this advice will make Slashdot a better place for everyone, including yourself.
From http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/HOWTO/Advoca cy
Ah, Slashdot. I find it so ironic that the same people who are for "free software" and "free information" are also against free trade.
The idea of a nation having a comparative advantage (if you're going to talk about globalization, you might as well use the lingo) in certain markets is what this all boils down to.
Let's say you're French. The French enjoy an enormous comparative advantage in producing fine wine. The climate is right, they have the wineries already in place, they are well-known as wine producers and so on. If you own a winery in France, or work at a winery in France, or ship French wines, or even just occasionally mash grapes with your feet, you've got it made it in the shade. Your goods will find plenty of willing buyers in the global marketplace.
But here's the problem. What if you live in France and don't want to have anything to do with the wine making business? You don't know anything about wine, grapes disgust you--whatever. In fact, what if you want to just design and make automobiles? Whoops! You will have a hard time competing against the vast hordes of foreign auto makers. Your French workers will require higher wages and better benefits than their foreign counterparts. Much of the steel you need has to be imported from Germany. Your engine blocks have to come from Japan, but only after they're assembled in Canada. You're really having a hard time keeping your costs down.
Your business is going to fail, and the French government will have little choice but to see your company fall by the wayside, or else pass laws to create subsidies that explicitly favor your goods over their foreign counterparts, which is prohibited by GATT and can only be done under very specific circumstances. The French could still tax foreign goods with tariffs, but even then those are highly regulated by international authorities. No, your auto business will soon be out of business.
Globalization's answer to that French auto maker is "well, you could always make wine" and its answer to the unemployed people who worked for that auto maker is "well that's a shame, go work at a winery." Now that's pretty harsh. How do you respond to something like that? You either go work at a winery or you go riot in the streets. When companies and egghead economists alike are so gung-ho about pushing globalization, the human element seems to get lost in the shuffle.
The best argument for globalization has always been "okay then, suggest a better way." It's impossible because the alternative to the free trade system is pretty horrible: Entire industries that create goods with no useful purpose that cannot be sold overseas; a limited selection of goods for consumers; huge increases in the costs of goods for consumers due to reduced competition, and so on. If the WTO allowed for any more artificial barriers to free trade than tariffs, that is exactly what would happen. And even then, eventually getting rid of tariffs anyway, and removing the last barrier to free trade is the stated goal of WTO/GATT.
Those who embrace the trendy new rhetoric that decries our current free trade system either know nothing about it or refuse to acknowledge how much we truly benefit from it. It is far easier, I suppose, to shill the globalization issue to promote another political motive. Don't be used.
Really? Where do you get your definitions from? Because a "depression" or even a recession (a long term recession constitutes a depression) are not caused by anything like that. Oh wait, you're quoting John Maynard Keynes. Riiiight, I see. Is that what they're teaching in school now? That "hoarding" causes recessions? Good heavens.
When power is concentrated enough, the American Empire will go to war with China
Will it now. Just a quick exercise for you - try to calculate how much of the US economy depends on the Chinese economy. Then do the same calculation backwards. Now tell us about this "war". What are the justifications for it again? Why does it happen? When? How exactly? Please do elaborate. Unless you're just jumbling together "hot topic" words to get some karma like you always do...
M$ monopoly
Good old twitter. China is evil, "big dumb companies" are evil, "M$" is evil, Kermit the frog is evil and everything should be free. Same broken record but with impressive-sounding words and lotsa links. Karma every time.
For anyone that has forgotten, you could get an IT job during dot.com if you could just spell cumputer^Wcomputer. For a more realistic point of reference, choose a point before dot.com, say Jan 1999. Do that and you;ll probably notice some growth.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The article compares 2001 to 2005? Other than globalization, there were two minor events that could have a small influence the job count:
1. In 2001 the dot-com-bubble burst
2. In 2001 9/11 happened, bringing with it 2 wars
Where these events so minor that they aren't even worth mentioning in the article?
What? I didn't think Manuel was still in Mexico this late in the century. He's probably already living in Tejas or California or pretty much anywhere there's a Tyson Food plant nearby, feeding his wife and 6 children, blaring oompa loompa music from his big truck with tiny tires as he rolls down the street in his barrio.
You will know Manuel when you spot him driving. He'll have a chrome sticker of the city he lives in's skyline on the back window along with his last name in giant gothic letters. Rodriguez! Espinoza! Nike symbol!
I'm going to get flamed for this for being a foreigner poking their nose in - but I get the impression from the behaviour of some US companies in my country that there are still some evil bastards there that never really got the idea that slavery is a bad idea and would like to see it again. Even your systems of large numbers of illegal immigrants on illegally low wages and of paying waiting staff a tiny wage and making them live off tips makes me sick. In my country (Australia) we get a lot of short lived US subsiduaries setting up - working people around the clock on a low salary, and then imploding due to high staff turnover and management incompetance. Ones that last tend to act very differently.
I (try) to be consistent in the things I do or think in life.
I'm sure there are other people in the world too that sticks to an idea or action, when its beneficial to them and when it's not. When that idea goes to their liking or when it does not go to their liking.
It's call having a fucking principle.
but i also have another principle. freedom of speech. as much as I'm annoyed at you for calling me a prick, when all I'm trying to do is contribute to the thread with a point I honestly believe is credible.. I can't say you can't or don't have a right to call me a prick. However in trying to be consistent.. I'll deem you a gutless imperialist.
And don't you dare fucking invoke adam smith. if you've read the wealth of nation, free trade(the basic principle of globalization) is about bringing trade that is beneficial to both/all sides of the trade. not one sided(in other words consistency in an idea). adam smith oft quoted maxim.. promotion of rational self interest comes with a modifier, while not doing any harm to another. he also forewarned about a party having so much power that the trade becomes one sided.
and if you cant get your head out of your ass, nobody in the world is asking the us for a higher standards. they're asking the us to follow it's own often preached standard. im sure you have heard of google, try using it to read on the renmibi issue, bechtel,subsidies, steel tariffs, canada lumber agreements.
and maybe "reread" adam smith.
Timang tinggi tinggi
parang sudah asah
alang alang mandi
biar sampai basah
Buggy whips were going to be no longer being made as of the rise of the automobile.
Offshoring concerns products that are still being made, and which will continue to be made.
Your analogy is utterly idiotic.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
1. Outsource to India to reduce costs 2. Indian wages are forced up 3. Outsourcing becomes less advantageous 4. Remaining IT workers accept lower wages because they would rather have their pay cut than be fired 5. The threat of getting outsourced makes wages level with Indian levels 6. Profit! ...lowering wages seems to be the fad in American politics nowdays anyway.
And here I was thinking that the old blue collar jobs my dad had, then I in turn for years before factories kept closing (two of them on me, closed and went overseas) made me middle class.
For the record, I have been speaking out against what is now called globalization since the late 60s, because it is an obvious conjob. Everything I said back then has come true. So, want to know what's coming from someone with a fair track record in this?
Collapse of the (petro)dollar, and resultant social strife. That's the easiest, they are offshoring their internal *customers*. Every time they knock off a job or make someone switch to a lesser paying job, they lose x-amount of potential customer base. The only time it will stop is very close to the total collapse point. This is just simple math and basic economics. As in the roberts article, as soon as you negate manufacturing, that's it, party is over, you have lost sight of where wealth comes from. Manufacturing, agriculture and mining/energy extraction is where the wealth comes from , all the other is "service" which only dilutes the wealth, and government jobs dilute it further. It's an unsustainable economy except for the ultra rich who can bank enough and stock pile enough. for the day to day worker, even if you have an entire year put aside in extra capital, which most people don't,it is closer to two months on average, it won't last *past one year*, and especially with rising prices for most stuff.
Massive martial law. A general labor draft, not just military although they will do that too, but for all labor, with local political appointee overlords, working about as good as the katrina dry run. they are only inteested in giving orders and you following them. That's it. masters and slaves in the 21st century.. That's what all these various anti terror laws are for, the terrorism stuff is about pure nonsense, it's a purposeful misdirect to institute enabling "laws", which they have done, along with "adjusting" bankruptcy laws simultaneously with extending massive credit. I hope people don't honestly think that was some sort of coincidence. Anyone think that they DON'T know what that will cause? They are counting on it, it is how they will pull off a real wealth transfer for ten cents on the dollar upstream into the hands of the top 1%. And it will all be "legal". More or less the scam they pulled in the Great Depression, just with new shiney on it.
After that comes the resource wars with china and friends. Once the dollar collapses there is only one paper fix they can do-default and trun the printing presses more than they do now, which is obscene any way, leaving some very pissed off foreign "investors" who will then retaliate, first with trade cutoffs, then with actual threats to butt out of most of the planet "or else". It might even come quciker if the neozionconscam artists hit iran, then all bets are off.
You can see the opening moves now, look up the OTHER SCO, not the linux bashing one, the shanghai cooperative, and follow what is happening there.
Anyway, we are being lead and run by political and economic grifters. The blue colars have known about it a long time now, but it's way too late for the white collars, because they are even stupider about organizing than the blue collars are, they will ride their pride right into living on the street in their not paid off yet car before they will admit that the bosses/ownership classes have their own "unions" to use against them, it is called bought off government and trade associations.
So all the outsourced work is first translated to Hindi/Mandarin and handed over to people in India/China.
They work on it and people translate it back to 'English' (which only the US understands btw. I mean they invented it, right?).
Sent from my desktop computer
I'm an american who would really like to go abroad, as it turns out. I have a wide variety of IT and programming skills, but no management experience. I'm very close to quitting IT and teaching english or something else to achieve this goal, but I'm pretty good at all this computer crap. I hate to ditch what I'm good at.
But guess what? Although I speak fluent german, I can't work in Germany or Austria. A company has to advertise for 3 months for an EU resident to fill a slot before they can sponsor a visa for me. And I'm not even picky--I can't find an IT/programming job for an american anywhere outside of the US from Cape Town to Kabul.
Want to bitch about globalization? Bitch about the last trade barrier: Labor. Globalization currently benefits CEO's because the resource they have to start the game, money, is now easily transfered. But labor isn't allowed to be transfered--labor might as well be opium for all the free trade associated with it, but with more positions available. I, for one, can't fucking wait until that shit ends, and I can whore myself out to whomever I please, wherever I please.
1. Outsource to India to reduce costs
...lowering wages seems to be the one of the quieter fads in American politics these days.
2. Indian wages are forced up
3. Outsourcing becomes less advantageous
4. Remaining IT workers accept lower wages because they would rather have their pay cut than be fired
5. The threat of getting outsourced makes wages level with Indian levels
6. Profit!
Professor Chomsky was busy documenting American war crimes while writing books glossing over the butchery of two million cambodian civilians: http://www.amazon.com/After-Cataclysm-Indo-China-N oam-Chomsky/dp/0896081001
Professor Chomsky used the following argument to discount testimony by refugees that a slaughter was in progress, saying we should be wary of "the extreme unreliability of refugee reports": "Refugees are frightened and defenseless, at the mercy of alien forces. They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocutors wish to hear. While these reports must be considered seriously, care and caution are necessary. Specifically, refugees questioned by Westerners or Thais have a vested interest in reporting atrocities on the part of Cambodian revolutionaries, an obvious fact that no serious reporter will fail to take into account"
He has never apologised for his stance on Cambodia.
The cost of reproduction has risen by a factor of nearly 4 since I was born in 1954, fertilizing the portfolios of landlords, or more properly, land barons, with the decomposing marriages, fetuses and sometimes bodies of the bulk of the baby boom generation, leaving a demographic hole being filled with imported slaves* by those same landlords.
The baronage calls this "progress", even as as the price of homes was removed from the consumer price index while introducing CPI factors like "hedonic value" and "imputed rent" to make it appear "real" earnings have increased over the time period of demographic collapse and loss of ethnic enfranchisement to imported laborers for the baronage.
I call it genocide.
*It is really being too kind to the baronage to call the imported laborers "slaves" since the baronage doesn't have to pay for their human capital upkeep--the rest of us do via social programs. Southern Plantation owners were far more moral than these sorry excuses for human beings.
Figures from my insurance agent sent to me on my birthday:
The two big ticket necessities:
3 bedroom house price increase: 22 times
1954 $ 10,250
2006 $219,375
car price increase: 18 times
1954 $ 1,567
2006 $28,000
Even if we grant that the quality/cost ratio of manufactured goods has gone up so much during the last 52 years that $1,567 for a used car in 2006 is as good as a new car was in 1954, it doesn't bring down the sum of the 2 major debt-service items much:
house+car increase: 19 times
1954 $ 11,817 =$1,567+$10,250
2006 $220942 =$1,567+$219,375
So the debt-service load in a family household has gone up nearly a factor of 20 in the last 52 years.
And don't kid yourself that it didn't hit hardest at the peak child-bearing potential of the mid-to-late boomers who were paying 20% mortgage rates when they were trying to form families in the early 1980s.
Look at these foreclosure rates peaking within the first 10 years of boomer's trying to form families:
Year $ value of mortgage loans foreclosed (in millions)
1965 944
1966 1,034
1967 957
1968 865
1969 364
1970 321
1971 438
1972 478
1973 577
1974 715
1975 1,086
1976 1,129
1977 868
1978 723
1979 683
1980 917
1981 1,563
1982 3,282
1983 4,240
1984 6,163
1985 8,675
1986 13,942
1987 18,373
1988 18,859
1989 18,189
1990 22,862
1991 17,105
1992 12,408
1993 6,852
1994 3,422
1995 2,506
1996 2,138
1997 1,805
1998 1,470
1999 1,022
2000 900
Has household income kept up? Hardly...
average household income increase: 13 times
1954 $ 4,137 (one wage earner)
2006 $54,000 (two wage earners)
So household income has gone up only about 70% as much as the essential household debt service in the last 52 years.
Oh, but wait--that "household" in 1954 was one income and the income was relatively stable--the woman stayed at home and raised the kids.
How can we factor not only that both parents must work in 2006 and not only are each of their jobs less secure, but the effective income of the household, adjusting for risk of not being able to meet debt payments for a substantial period of time?
Here's a realistic option: We can reasonably say that the odds of both parents being out of work at any given point of time in 2006 is comparable to the odds of the father being out of work in 1954. Hence the reliable household income--the income stream that can service debt without foreclosure--is approximately 1/2 of the household income. Certainly we can say that there w
Seastead this.
Then my job got offshored. The person now doing my job got a huge promotion and now has a higher manday rate than me despite being offshore. probably makes sense to someone, somewhere.
On the plus side, my firm is switched on enough to ensure that despite my original job going, I am getting new opportunities and training rather than being let go. Guess I'm lucky so far.
On the downside, I now get rated on how much I grow skill wise and what extra curicular activities I get involved with rather than my day to day job. I get top marks from everyone I work for but because I don't get involved much in training other staff etc., I've had one (1.5%) pay rise in 5 years. Before anyone else points out the obvious, my location is somewhat remote compared to the rest of the team so most things I could get involved with are precluded.
Still got a job though..
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I guess that is why GE and Microsoft recruit so much at the University of Miami: Our student body is one of the most diverse in the nation, meaning that our students might just be able to work well with and accept the diversity of foreigners when they graduate.
You need to ask why free trade and open markets used to be good for the US middle classes, and now seem to be bad.
Its not due to the 'assault' on them alleged in the article. Its down to two things the article does not talk about. Its a combination of two massively expensive wars happening at the same time as the largest credit bubble in history. Its not outsourcing either. The pressures which result in outsourcing would just result in layoffs were outsourcing not available.
The only coherent account of the enviroment in which we find ourselves, its consequences and likely end game, is by the Austrian school economists, and it makes depressing reading, because we have probably passed the point of no return, bad debt and malinvestment now being so huge that it cannot be liquidated without extreme pain. Pain so considerable that the loss of IT jobs will seem like a pinprick.
The authors spend a lot of time blaming companies. The Austrians point out that you have to ask yourself when you hear this what changed? Why do the same managers at different points in the cycle suddenly lose their ability to forecast and invest reasonably? Why do the same managers who previously hired locally suddenly find it to their advantage to outsource?
It is not open markets that have changed. Its the world in which they operate and the country we live in that's changed.
US Codemonkey; 100-250$/h
Other Codemonkey; 5$/h
Not even the stupidest American can fail to comprehend where this is going. And don't give me a troll flag because you think "American coders are best". They're not. They're horrendously overpaid, fairly ignorant -and still have managers that tell them how to code.
The US is headed toward 3d world salaries quick. It's what happens in a Theocracy, when people do not receive proper education and still believe we're built out of clay.
:)
Way to go!
This "strange language thing" about big companies amazemes me too. But it's also same with my "native" field which is IT: it too is quite often full of buzzwords, but I suspect it is mainly just the "import" forced upon us by Sales&Management(R)(TM)(whatever).
hany
...in a Polish branch of big American holding, I can safely say that I like this trend.
I would be curious to know how many jobs were created in the same span. Stories like this tend to misstate the case. Every time say, Boeing lays off 10,000 people, or Ford, or (insert company here), or there is an uptick in offshoring, the press goes nuts.
./-ers out there have seen this kind of thing before.
i tts%20-%20Kansas1.pdf#search=%22Information%20tech nology%20earnings%20site%3A.edu%22
Unemployment was at 4.7% in August, per the US Dept. of Labor. Offshoring is hardly new, so one would expect it to skew the percentages over time - yet, 3-6% unemployment has been pretty much the trend every year since WWII, witha few notable spikes (oil shock in the 1970's).
Yes, morale may suck, yes, there might be overwork - welcome to white-collar work. If you came into IT in the 90s', it's probably a nasty shock. I suspect that the older
When I see geeks working in Burger King, I'll worry. Now, off to finish my grad degree in IS since IT is still a great place to earn above-average wages...
Google Is Your Friend. Try Googling "Information technology earnings site:.edu" - you'll get lots of the following:
http://www2.ku.edu/~econsem/Friday/papers(0506)/P
True enough, 90% would be a massacre.
I'd say that mostly you are right, but 'Adapt to survive and thrive.' is easy to say but for a lot of people it is hard to put into practice. Personally I don't have any trouble being a IT employment-nomad and moving every so often to follow the jobs since I am not married and have no kids. I'd even move to India if I had to even if I hate the climate (as in: weather) down there. Unfortunately not everybody is as willing or as able as we are to uproot their wife and kids every 2-3 years pack their belongings into a 20ft container and travel around the world with a big smile on their face in a cheerful quest to adapt to the latest fashion trend in the fabulous outsourcing biz. Unfortunately it looks as if this lifestyle will become a necessity for a lot of people unless they are willing to settle for a relatively menial job back home.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
but I for one welcome our new globalizing over... Holy Crap! These guys are real!
Is this a step back or a step forward? Become an entrepreneur and offshore today! (it's where the real money is)
``Is that what they're teaching in school now? That "hoarding" causes recessions?''
Well, doesn't it? Hoarding causes that money not to participate in the economy. At the same time, the money is still there, so the value of the money that does circulate stays the same. So, in effect, less value is participating in the economy. Isn't that a recession? I'm just asking; I'm not an economist.
``Will it now. Just a quick exercise for you - try to calculate how much of the US economy depends on the Chinese economy. Then do the same calculation backwards. Now tell us about this "war". What are the justifications for it again?''
I agree that it doesn't seem either side will gain from such a war, so the claim that "the US and China _will_ go to war" is far out, but I would like to point out that wars _do_ happen, even when it's easily predictable that both sides will lose immensely.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
If the numbers are so compelling and obvious, could we see the numbers starting from January 1999 rather than January 2001 please?
I flicked through the article and though seemingly thorough it doesn't really advocate a solution to what 'might' be a problem. So one can only assume that what is being advocated is protectionism.
Lots of statements can be made about the benefits or not of offshoring, but protectionism is usually pretty damaging for a number of reasons that many economists will agree on. The number one reason is that protectionism is almost always badly implemented, look at the many military acquisition purchases which have been for pseudo-politcal/protectionist reasons.
A famous story here in Europe is the Eurofighter project, a project which has cost billions over many year. For political and protectionist reasons the plane parts got carved up so they would be designed in different countries so as to create local jobs. The result? A 5 year late project wasting massive amounts of money recreating a clone of an existing American combat fighter. That's protectionism in action.
There was a war in Iraq, which exports oil, one of the major (if not the single most) important parts of the US economy. Just saying it's not as black and white as that.
Jobs are going to highly qualified and motivated staff abroad. Obvious solution - provide incentives for those qualified and motivated staff to come to the US and keep the work here.
Yet the same article bitches about all these qualified and motivated foreigners coming over on H-1b visas and taking all the jobs. So guess what ? Instead of emigrating, working in the US, supporting the US economy and paying US taxes. They stay at home, take the US jobs anyway, dont pay US tax and dont spend their pay in US shops.
The work will go to the best trained who provide the best value for money. Train up the local workforce and drop their pay, or entice those pesky foreigners to the US, or watch those high tech jobs sail eastwards.
Imagine a company with zero engineers, and 100% managers, it cannot survive.
Now imagine a company with 100% engineers, which spend 5% of their time doing 'management' , it would
still work and turn out a product, see google and apple.
A smart engineer can learn in 6months how to be a manager, a manager though would take 10 years to be as good as an engineer.
After all there are no management 5 year degrees at unis are there.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Jobs will go to India or wherever it is cheaper to do them. No need to argue about this.
;(
However, it's mostly production and operational support jobs that shift. Jobs that require communication with actual humans and jobs that need higher levels of skills will not disappear so quickly.
That means coding, application/system administration are candidates for departure. Consultancy, analysis and design most likely will remain.
Then you realize that coding accounts for about 10-20% of the costs of application development. Assuming outsourcing is free as in beer, 10-20% cost savings is done. That's still a lot of money.
But the outsourcing will demand higher quality standards of an organization. That is, the task division has to be documented and managed and that costs money.
Then, the Indian firm will actually charge. Maybe a mere 10% of what a local would charge but they will charge.
Then comes laziness and more people are hired. At 10% one can afford stuff.
And the whole process transforms into one large management problem and actually costing more.
The other alternative is to outsource everything and to buy a solution service for cheap. And to give your strategic operation away. As soon as the lock-in took place you're forked.
Costs will go down?! Don't make me laugh. We're in the hype phase of outsourcing. We'll realize and come to our senses in 1-3 years and an adjustment will be seen. Outsourcing will be a part of our lives but not as big as some hot shot managers wants us to believe.
having said that, I'll start taking courses in juggling or in playing the jester. Always keep your job-options open
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Seriously, if business in american is costing > 100k per person, then move to china.
Pay for all moving costs and setup shop in Shanghai.
1) rent is 5x cheaper
2) taxes 10% max
3) everything is cheap
4) you can be paid $15000USD salary and live real well there.
5) profit.
Buy an apartment for peanuts in brand new towers, and enjoy. Its not like the sovient union, you can
still pretty much do anything as long as you dont piss of the govt.
There are plenty of english and americans and australians in Shanghai, its not totally like 99% chineese people, its very singapore style.
In many ways, Shanghai is as modern and as good as New York, just as cheap as Ohio.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
May the Maths Be with you!
Not correct. White Phosphorus, although a chemical, is not a chemical weapon within the meaning the the Chemical Weapons Convention:
White phosphorous is no more of a "chemical weapon", as normally understood, than napalm. Or course, flame weapons have been subject to controversy of their own.
As for Noam Chomsky he has been documenting U.S. war crimes in places from Nicaragua to Vietnam for 40 years now. He is an American hero and if the MSM dared to give him a voice and people were made aware of the level of violence the U.S.government has committed against the world we might see new leadership in the U.S. and live in a much more ethical country. Of course we will never see that because it would threaten the corporate bottom line.
There are other views about Chomsky. And it isn't the corporate bottom line I would worry so much about....
Left-Wing Monster: Pol Pot
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Why do you think the two goals are incompatible?
I have that attributed to George Bernard Shaw, but in this day and age of the Internet, who knows whether that is correct or not.
I hear job growth in the military is huge.
I often feel that those who say that globalization is bad for third world countries because their workers work in sweatshops for almost nothing, while the western companies get rich, are either jealous that their potential jobs are being shipped off, or just naive.
In very simple economic terms its all about supply and demand. Agreed workers in China or India or elsewhere might be paid $1 a day or whatever terrible wage you might come up with... but they still work for it? Why? They don't have much alternative and the alternative might be worse.
I'd much rather work for $1 a day than beg for than labour around all day to collect food for myself (and none for outside sale). This $1 can now buy my food for me and possibly have a little more for savings.
Yes on the outside globalization might look bad - western companies and countries are getting richer off the hard work of foreign nationals - but they don't mind so why should you?
Perhaps those of you complaining should stop being lazy oafs, thinking it is your god given right to a job and learn some new skills. The workers in India and China and elsewhere are not only cheaper but they're slowly becoming smarter and better educated. When they are able to match their skills in higher level jobs in any industry and be cheaper that is when you have to really start worrying and I expect that to happen within the next 5-10 years. Good luck!
There is a definite attitude I see in a lot of workplaces. The attitude is predominantly "I may not do your job, but I know it better than you" among managers.
I am a CAD Drafter and at my old job our IT manager had it in his head that we would be faster with AutoCAD LT than regular AutoCAD. For those of you not familiar with Autocad, LT is an extremely crippled version of the software. There's no command line, no expandability with LISP routines, and no 3D. We kept telling him that switching to LT was going to increase lead time from engineering due to the cut in productivity (we literally had hundreds of LISP routines we relied on). He arrogantly refused to listen, as if we didn't know sh*t about the tasks and software that we used every single day.
Analysts and CEOs sit in an Ivory Tower, practicing what I like to call "theoretical business." They are so far removed from "the trenches" (i.e. the real world) that they actually think they have a clue what it's like to do your job. We have the John Stossels of the world telling us "outsourcing is GOOD thing!"
It reminds me of 1984: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength
Actually, Jan 2001 was both the last vestiges of the bubble AND before the WTC Attack.
So scroll AHEAD 3 months, and use Jan *2002* vs Jan 2007.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Here's a simple equation. What do you need in a consumer driven economy? Yup, consumers. What slows down if you throw someone on the street? Whaddayaknow, consumption.
It's really as simple as that..
A 2003 article on CTHEORY.NET, "The Digital Death Rattle of the American Middle Class" ties many of these themes together: Outsourcing, neo-liberalism, the reconceptualization of education as a private good, rather than a public good, with the decline of the American Middle Class.
Here's the beginning of that article http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=402 >
On the WASHTECH website, there's a reposting of a PowerPoint presentation given by Brian Valentine, a senior Microsoft VP. Valentine has a pronounced and unabashed penchant for dressing up his exhortations in banal mixed metaphors. Announcing that he's "Thinking About India ... Touchdown India," he asks microserfs one and all to note that "competitors already have this [outsourcing] religion." Therefore, it's high time for "Microsoft to join the party." Extolling the virtues of "2 heads for the price of 1," he presses middle manager microserfs to "leverage the Indian economy's lower cost structure," and to "pick something to move offshore today," as a tangible sign of their heartfelt personal and institutional fealty. [1]
It's a big moving party, indeed. Over the next decade, several million white-collar jobs, from financial services to hardware and software computer design, will be permanently exported to East Asia and other points in the developing world [2]. Inexpensive global communication networks, combined with a younger, talented and low-cost global workforce will reduce the demand for native U.S. intellectual labor. It's a well-documented phenomenon and perhaps the needed irritant for an incipient social movement here in the U.S. But the sheer plethora of young and talented workers (the Philippines alone produces 380,000 college graduates each year) in East Asia, willing to work for a fifth to a tenth of U.S. wages, may well render U.S. intellectual labor not economically viable, on the global stage, over this emergent present and well into the future. By the end of 2003, more than half of the Fortune 500 have shipped a significant fraction of their intellectual labor jobs offshore. And the exodus is accelerating. [3]
Concurrently, another trend may well be defining the future of U.S. intellectual labor. As U.S. states suffer from revenue shortfalls, and burgeoning college and university enrollments, large tuition increases are often bundled with escalations in class size, reduced course availability, and shrinking financial and infrastructural resources. [4] Combined with the concurrent neo-liberal political redefinition of higher education as a private rather than a public good, "sticker shock" one-year increases (of up to thirty-nine percent at the three public universities in Arizona, forty percent in the California State System, and thirty-two percent in the University of Texas System) [5] may well signify that elites are no longer willing to subsidize American public higher education, once they have gained global access, via digital communication networks, to cheap and competent intellectual labor. This essay explores the links between these two defining moments of early twenty-first Century America, with an eye on the possibility that affordable public higher education, and its attendant importance as a vehicle of social mobility, may soon be thought of as an artifact of the Twentieth Century. If so, we are witnessing the digital death rattle of the American middle class, and an escalating and intensive restratification of the American class system.
Wait . . . I'm confused. Are we being told that sending IT jobs overseas somehow means less jobs for us in the US? I call shenanegins! Clearly this is not true. Sending jobs overseas makes more jobs in hte US in the same way that taking out huge loans from China is good for our economy. Seriously. Haven't you ever loaned a neigbor your last 2 eggs only to turn around and find that your fridge is stuffed full of eggs? No? Huh. I could have sworn . . .
lost their (textile, electronic mfd, glass products, appliance, toy mfd, auto assembly, ,,,,,) job? We don't need IT jobs for empty buildings.
I see an article every other week how US IT jobs are expected to be among the fastest growing of all jobs. So last week they were growing at 15% annually, now we are losing them left and right. I call shenanigans.
Yes.
Now an Iowa local computer store is able to sell to finland, morocco or egypt, via an e-store.
Scratch that, even local KILT producers are able to take work orders from all over the world.
This is globalization. As in a free market, it comes with its own challenges. You cant expect a rose be free of its thorns.
Read radical news here
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/nextjobbo om/
The 10 fastest-growing jobs
We identify ten occupations that are projected to see double digit growth between now and 2014. (more)
1. Network systems and data communications analyst
2. Physician assistant
3. Computer software engineer, applications
4. Computer software engineer, systems software
5. Network and computer systems administrator
6. Database administrator
7. Physical therapist
8. Medical scientist
9. Occupational therapist
10. College instructor
PANIC OVER.
Hey, you're the first to mention the concept for which I was looking, so you get the reply:
This is correct, in my opinion. The big myth - which was not cited in the article - is that you can actually maintain an economy with high standard of living based on "high value" services alone. The key to an economy is really its ability to produce wealth - hard, physical, tangible goods that, as you said, actually raise the standard of living of that society's citizens. All the dentists and doctors in the world cannot help you if you don't have good tools, good infrastructure, or even good food.
I remember from one of my early economics classes that the only wealth-producing endeavours known are agriculture and manufacturing - the rest of economic activity just shuffles that wealth around.
If the economy of a country switches to being service-based, it is then a slave to the actual wealth-producing nations, because if the nations that have the wealth no longer need or want the services, with what is the service-based economy left? The reason the US economy used to be so robust is it had a good balance between service and wealth production. The shift away from producing wealth locally (I don't mean by ownership, I mean physically) is probably a greater risk than most are able to recognize.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Before taking everything in the article as fact, take a glance at the rest of the stories on the site. You will definitely see a pattern. And NO..I'm not going to suggest what that pattern is.
Is that while a lot of these jobs are lost - and people are complaining about not having a job -
there are a lot of idiots who went into IT in the first place, who should NEVER have gone into
IT to begin with.
I don't know how many idiots I've met in the IT industry that have ZERO business being in
there. They don't have a clue as to how logic works. Can't be bothered to read a frickin'
manual or just use references to figure things out.
It's sad that a lot of these people are whining and complaining, instead of realizing that
they didn't belong there in the first place!!
Move over execs cause I'm taking your job!!! There are plenty of them, aren't there? No?
Yep. I was one of those, scorned by the left, middlemen who made a living by buying stuff low and selling it high. With ebay, my specialized knowledge of product and market is no longer needed. Any dumbshit can steal a shiny geegaw from his employer, put it on ebay and realize MARKET PRICE! He doesn't have to know what he stole, the end users will compete for it anyway. Lb of Plutonium(Hey Archie!), Plubium centric marzipan, it's all gonna move for him/her now. Before ebay, the poor crackhead employee would have to sell shit to me for a pittance. No more jet, no more Ceylonese whores, no more diamond studded cock rings. Man this sux.
But you know. It was a PITA anyway. Paying all the tax, fillng out all the forms. Kissing low level govt. employee ass to keep out of undeserved jail. It's tough making a lot of $. I no longer pity those who sleep in the park and drink lanolin laced peach wine. I am now one of them. No responsibility, no hassle from the man, other than an occasional poke in the ribs from the man in blue. Plenty of bleeding hearts giving me clothes and food. Hell, I don't have to do laundry or go to the grocery store. Hell the store uused to drive me crazy. All those choices that really weren't.
Best of all, I don't have to worry about getting fucked by the man over such bullshit as 'identity theft'. It's not friggin identity theft, it's credit fraud. If the fucking bank gives your money to someone who pretends to be you, WTF is your part in the process? You're the fucking bystander. The fraudster fucks the BANK, not you. If your bank disagrees, FIRE THEM...."He/she is raving", you say. NOT SO. This is my NEW JOB. Banking. Honest banking that does not try to dump it's seurity budget by fucking it's customers. Sure, you'll only get 3% interest when others pay 6% and you'll pay 9% on your loan while others charge 6.5% but hey. If we lose some fucking money, it will be OUR PROBLEM, not yours.
I'm lining up investors now. If you have $1-$5 million and wish to become a part of this financial revolution, please respond. DOn't let the humorless and those too timid to invest mod this post down. It's seriously serious. F'REEL!
Article in NY Times from 2004: US Is Losing Its Dominance in the Sciences , or directly from NY Times. Also Tracking Achivement
While this article is dead on as far as politics are concerned, Americans are somewhat to blame for our own predicament. The problem is one of both politicians and citizens. We want our prices so ridiculously low that if many of our goods are manufactured here, companies would be unable to turn a profit. Let's look at an example, Walmart; everyone's favorite target. Walmart, being either the nation's largest or second largest retail store chain (depending upon its current market position,) has exerted tremendous economic pressure on offshoring by feeding the American appetite for goods at the lowest common denominator. Many companies seeking to sell goods through Walmart must offshore their operation in order to meet Walmart's pricing demands. Now, let's look at an example for the technology industry, Dell. Dell must offshore its technical support operations in order to prevent loss. The PC and server industry is so competitive due to pricing pressure exerted by consumers that Dell would have no hope of staying financially solvent if the company did not offshore at least a portion of its operations. Despite much causation attributed to consumer pricing pressure, politicians do have their share of the blame in the form of incentives to kill off American jobs. This is unconcionable; no matter which angle one approaches the issue from. There should be no corporate tax breaks or incentives for offshoring at all! Believe you me, why should a corporation get additional benefits when it is already realising a higher profit margin as a result of offshoring? Finally, and this author hates to say this, but we as Americans are greedy and this is no more evident then in our consumption and spending habits. In order to bring back American manufacturing and technology sector jobs, a major attitude shift would need to occur and this author does not foresee this as happening. Meyer Lansky (despite being a horrible individual) had one saying that holds true, especially for these times, "The fish stinks from the head." When our country's leadership is the embodiment of greed and utter stupidity, change will not happen because attitudes trickle down from leadership. As long as we have incompetent, greed-ridden leadership, Americans will continue to suffer.
Correct. Hell, my boss has a Master in software engineering, and blinks at me totally confused if I ever mention something as "complicated" as a primary key in a database, or a design pattern.
There are some exceptions, and it really sucks for those people, but usualy, the jobs being offshored are jobs any self respecting IT guy (unless they have kids, a wife, a morgage, a house to pay, etc, and are really desperate) wouldn't want in the first place. Sitting in a cubicle coding mindlessly without even having to use your brain, tech support, debugging, etc. MOST (not all, unfortunately) of the real IT jobs, the ones we went to college for, the dynamic ones where you get involved in a projects, analysis, design, and so on, -usualy- stay. Actualy, I ditched my current job on my own right now, because there are so many opportunities, I know it won't be more than 2 weeks before I get snatched. And I do not live anywhere close to an area with a "lot" of IT jobs... such areas will have it even easier.
I'm sorry for the bunch who lost "real" jobs because their bosses were retarded, but in general, its not the kind of jobs that are being offshored.
The largest exports of the USA are based on Intellectual Property. Given that the OSS movement (as well as others) have goals of the freedom of IP from protection and the active export of IP to anyone/everyone, OSS is one of the most rapid methods of teaching/training your replacement overseas.
See here for example.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
It always amazes me that the same advocates who think we should program for 'free' are the same ones who complain about cheaper IT workers taking their jobs away here.
If you program for free, you have the most competitive price.
Of course, your family will be asking about food etc...
" the information sector of the US economy lost 644,000 jobs, or 17.4 per cent of its work force. Computer systems design and related work lost 105,000 jobs, or 8.5 per cent of its work force."
Yeah, but there's good news: Walmart is hiring.
RTFM; please, I beg you.
This is absolute nonsense. Germany, Japan, and many countries in Europe rose to first world status through international trade *after being ravaged by a world war*. Japan is especially great: one day you were nuking them, the next day you were buying their cars. It's quite simple, if more money is flowing into a country, it's people will be able to buy more stuff. So what if they buy it from Americans? The point is that at the end of the day they *have* more stuff. Most nations don't have the breadth of natural resources that the US has because they have a much smaller landmass (take a look at a map), so trying to "focus inwards" achieves nothing. Notice that even the US is nowhere near self-sufficient, relying on oil and manufacturing from abroad.
Question that relates tho this subject.
How many of you are getting calls from Robert or Eric from India who want to know what your rate is?
These are companies are getting resumes, rates then using that information to undercut home grown developers.
I have actually taken to asking these companies how many U.S. developers do they have on payroll.
Not a one will answer.
So yes we are loosing our jobs to other countries.
As a DBA I have seen many a database designed, developed, and pre loaded by offshore companies.
I have to tell you, I am tired of it.
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
lol wtf is your problem
As for me I am probably dying. The Elite Chinese and Indian programmers are way much better than me. And I was good !
First, we hang all economists.
If those folks were using CAPM, they were miss using it for it's intended purpose. Or, myabe they were somehow basing a project's value by how it would affect the stock price?
Definition of CAPM
They may have used IRR, ROI, ROA, .... I know, a lot of accronyms.
Well, doesn't it? Hoarding causes that money not to participate in the economy. At the same time, the money is still there, so the value of the money that does circulate stays the same. So, in effect, less value is participating in the economy. Isn't that a recession? I'm just asking; I'm not an economist.
:)
If someone hoards a huge amount of money and keeps it out of circulation, then the market adjusts and starts to behave as if the money no longer exists, causing deflation, which is an increase in an individual dollar's purchasing power. Now, inflation and deflation are the opposite of each other, and both have their pros and cons.
Inflation is good at fighting unemployment, as the continual decrease in purchasing power is an effective way of circumventing minimum wage laws. E.g. if the minimum wage is 5 dollars per hour, and there was an inflation of 5% during the following year, then the real wage, i.e. the purchasing power of the 5 dollars have decreased by 5%. Thus employers are now effectively paying 5% less to their employees, even though the amount of dollars paid is the same, and this means that it now becomes profitable to employ people for less productive work, resulting in an decrease of unemployment.
The downside of inflation is the reduction in PP, and the higher demands on ROI. If inflation is 5% a particular year, and a company's profits grow only 3% that year, then the real profit of the company has decreased. This also works on a individual level, i.e. I have 5000$ today, wait a year, and then I have lost 5% of my wealth, even though the amount of dollars I have is unchanged. What this results in is that any investment that has a ROI that is less than inflation, is actually making you poorer. No need to wonder why stockholders/owners/investors demand ever-increasing profits from corporations, inflation is the culprit.
Deflation is pretty much the exact opposite. If there's a deflation of 5%, then even investments with a negative ROI are profitable as long as deflation is higher. This makes having money lying on a bank account a good investment, as you'll be able to buy more stuff with that money after a year.
Of course this also increases unemployment, at least unless the minimum wages are decreased at the same rate as deflation.
Another bad/good side of inflation/deflation (depending on if you have debt or have borrowed money to others) is that as the PP of a dollar increases, the real size of a debt also increases, which is bad for those who have debt. Again the opposite is true.
IANA(K)E, which could be seen as a good thing, depending on which school you follow.
The one thing that I learned in College in my Population Problems class is that there is
no technology solution for the problems that our world is facing. It is a competition
for dwindling resources among an increasing population. China awaking is just speeding
the process up.
No matter what happens during the interm the final result is the same. We all lose.
I agree that a lot of jobs are disappearing in the I.T. industry however I have also noticed a huge shift from the late 90's .com bust.
Now Civil Service jobs are paying higher then a lot of private sector jobs. Also the Civil Service Jobs offer almost always better health care plans then the private sector. Unfortunately everything in the U.S. gets outsourced.
First it was steel manufacturing Followed by assembly and manufacturing in general Later on places like Kodak, Xerox, Bauch and Lomb all of which either currently have or had their headquaters in NY started hiring people through temp agencies throughout the 90's as a way to offset retirement, health care, and other benefits they pay full time employees.
However the idea of temp agencies was just that to be a temporary method on employment so an employer could test you out before they commited to more expensive training and paying benefits. It is very costly for an employer to get rid of any employee.
The temp agencies became a way to cut costs though and many people would have the prospect of becomming a permanent employee for one these companies dangled out there like a carrot. However the companies abused this. If you were a long term temp worker and dared to ask about becomming a regular employee it would be a long list of excuses and if the issue was pressed you were considered "insubordinate" and terminated. Many of these companies have now burned their bridges in town and very few people even want to work for them. Most employees of these companies are temp workers or family members of previous employees. So their is very little new blood or innovation comming into them. This is also because all the temp workers realize they are just that "Temp" so they are very expendable so they go in do the bare minimum and get paid end of story. This is why these companies are having a hard time turning a profit.
Alot of companies also tried going to other countries which also hurt them. Xerox had major accounting isssues several years back. Kodak had major manufacturing problems with quality control.. In the meantime they got a lot of unhappy customers.
Civil service is now where the money is at.
Private Sector is dying and it is because you have management teams hellbent on cutting costs. If they cut some of these CEO's 10 million dollar a year + salaries maybe they wouldn't have to worry about cutting costs. Just like School budgets suffering... well stop paying the superintendent 1 milion dollars+ per year. Also stop giving severance packagaes to CEO's and the like why should they get a special package for running a company into the ground ? Richard Thoman cost Xerox a stock crash plus $58 million dollars between benefits, stock options, and severance pay.
The final thing is that the wrong people are in the wrong positions. Most of your I.T. managers have little to no actual I.T. experience or a heavily lacking in areas that ther employees know. We won't even get into the security implications of that one but the point is how can someone who does not have the same skill set, training or area of expertise properly compensate an employee for their skills.
Example I get paid say $31,000 per year or $15.00 per hour approximately
My Boss brings in an outside 3rd party support vendor at $150.00 per hour
I have to fix the 3rd party support vendors short commings...
Boss doesn't understand that THEY are not doing things properly...
Get the idea ?
Another example Boss wants VPN setup between two locations. Security at the one location is minimal at best. You advise that you think their should be a penetration test on the two locations prior to this VPN being consistently utilized. Boss says "Whats a Penetration Test?" you get the idea scary he runs the joint but has no clue what computer security is....in addition when I got there all the systems were 3 - 6 months behind with Windows Server and client updates and security patches.
Get some people wi
Yes of course 42-56 million American service job are susceptible to offshoring! I'm glad they finally realize it! Actually all of our jobs are susceptible! They will all go oversea and ALL Americans will be out of a job! 300 Million Americans will be sitting around doing nothing and when ever they try to start working an foreigner will run up and take their job!
Sorry guys it doesn't work that way. All this means is that the IT sector is overpaid and too big, just like the manufacturing in the 80s and 90s. It's backlash from the 90s glut in IT, the IT sector is growing up so don't worry we are not going to loose 50 Million jobs overseas.
Basically you either believe in the free market or you don't. You can't believe in the free market in 1998 when you're getting paid twice the salary + stock options of people in other fields (who may have similar levels of experience and education) and then 'get religion' once outsourcing hits your field.
If outsourcing comes to my field I will be scared and worried about it, I don't want my job outsourced however I also realize that it isn't something the government needs to protect me from. Transitions in the economy happen and trying to stop it is foolish, we can however do our best to make transitions less painful.
Anyway programming ability is starting to be like knowing another language. There are extremely few jobs you can get based solely on knowing how to speak Spanish and English, however there are a lot of jobs where it's a bonus. This is how programming is now IMO. You must be a knowledge worker in a specific field and then programming is your secondary ability which allows you to distinguish yourself.
I am one of those people that the article refers to. There is an old urban legend that says, "talk is cheap." What do you need? What do you offer in return?
Dig a well, Plant a Tree, Have a Son
Outsourcing is a business model intended to reduce costs, and increase profits. It works best if only one or a few do it, but not if it becomes univeral. Think taxes. If a few people cheat they benefit and life goes on for the rest of us. If everybody cheats, then nobody pays for roads, police, schools, etc. Soon your living in a third world country. Does that mean they will start outsourcing to us?
I have liberal arts degrees anyway and only got into IT in the go-go '90s so maybe it's time to look elsewhere.
I've been taking unemployment office job-hunting classes offered in our "heart-of-the-midwest" state the last couple weeks where they make you get chummy and identify yourself, and I have run into no fewer than FOUR people who had been teaching English in Beijing, Taiwan, or Japan. They were back wondering whether there _still_ aren't any jobs in the U.S. and judging from the general pessimism I suspect they will be back in Beijing shortly.
Maybe the global economy means everybody hops one continent to the left. Ted Turner already owned a land mass the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. If enough of us leave, maybe he can be the first American to own a state outright and the U.S. can divide itself up into little fiefdoms of the super rich.
True, but most people fail to realize that it was with direct political/electoral action. I know I'm a broken record on this one, but if you can't get off your butt vote in the local school board election, forget about changin the tide of globalization. If you don't vote (God forbid start shooting politicians and CEOs) power brokers don't care. For example, if the LGBT community mobilized and took a few good chunks out the Dems in NY and CA, I guarantee the Don't Ask Don't Tell Crap wouldn't have passed in the 90's.
It also came with unflinching so-called 'yellow' journalism that went out of its way to show the nastiness of those struggles. Do you honestly you'd hear about AZT medications being tested on foster children anywhere other than some unwashed incoherent tinfoiled hat hippy on Pacifica?
It also comes from coalition building on all sides. As long as the "dirty hippies" in the anti-globalization movement stick their noses up the Pat Buchannans and Alan Keyes of the world, they going to continue to get steamrolled and mocked in the media. And if the red-stater Joe Six pack listens to Lou Dobbs and only worries more about some brown person stealing his job, he'll keep missing the fact that it's the corporations giving his job away for short gains.
Of course it's "something" - it's self defense. It's competition. Most of the Americans against "globalization" are against unfair labor competition that hurts American labor, either themselves directly or others in their domestic economy on which they depend. They're against Slovaks getting the jobs as much as against Chinese, when that does happen due to unfair competition. Unfair because they compete without labor, environmental, political, economic protections. Which makes American labor cost more in the short term, but has longterm hidden costs overseas.
Of course, antiglobalization, even in America, is so popular that of course there are racists who oppose sending jobs to people who aren't from their ethnicity. That's a reflection of the popularity of racism in America, and its common acceptance of many contradictions. It's nothing to do with the economics or real politics of the opposition. The domestic labor they protect is populated by people of all races. Since it's more manual labor, it in fact has much less White representation than society at large. The racism is in fact on the part of those shipping the jobs overseas, the mainly White men who don't care about destroying American labor rights now that they're not mostly White men laboring, and the overseas laborers working without protections aren't White men, either.
Your example is an excellent one. Manuel isn't telling his kids that. Manuel is telling his kids "when I cross the border for a few months, I miss you, but I work for more money, at a safe job, in a clean valley, without fear of the secret police". If our labor protections were stronger, Manuel would more often tell his kids "I'll be back next week from working with your uncles to open a union like the one in the US, pray for me to return safe so I can make your life like the ones I saw up North".
America's labor protections were bought with blood. Saying the people elsewhere should get the jobs we created in the society we created without living up to that blood debt is certainly "something". It's "Communism", the rhetoric of greedy tyrants telling workers of the world they all lived in a "worker's paradise" while forcing them to work in prisons without rights. In the biggest labor market, China, this is still literally true, though it's merely an equivalence elsewhere.
Racism and Communism.
--
make install -not war
You're dead right! Barriers to employment and trade should be removed in both directions.
that previous slashdot article on What's Really Propping Up The Economy (anwer: health care services) pointed out
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Yes, you are the "bad guy", although ultimately, the blame can probably be at least equally placed on the owners of whatever company you work for, as well as any superiors you report to other than the owners.
Of course outsourcing/offshoring is not "new", and of course you can point to as many failures as successes with it. All of this completely dodges the point. As the original article clearly stated, the problem is, for every I.T. position that is sent overseas, we get nothing in return from the nation we awarded the job to. (Where's the "equality"? How is India, for example, going to provide our now unemployed I.T. worker with an equivalent new job to perform?)
The only benefit a "successful" offshoring or outsourcing project gives us is cheaper labor for the company doing it. That doesn't do a thing for the unemployed American worker, who now has to compete for a dwindling number of remaining jobs paying anywhere near the salary range he/she expects to earn.
When industries like "garments/textiles" and steel were outsourced, it caused economic havock in the U.S. - but the damage was considered "acceptable" by many, because those were industries where the workers could arguably learn new skills and "move up" to a *better paying* job. But now, we're dumping those "better paying" jobs requiring more education too.
At least in the UK, a masters in CS means nothing. Back in the dotcom days, people with degrees in stuff like history of art were doing 9 month courses to get a masters in CS, then acting like they were the big cheese. Unfortunately most personnel departments didn`t know any better and hired them. ````` Thankfully the industry has got a lot wiser to these people, but now its agents we have to work on. I`m a very experienced C++ programmer and was told I can`t apply for a C job baceuse I don`t have any experience in that language!.
If you actually read it (I know, it was longer then a digg blurb, so you probably didn't) you'd have seen that he used many dates, but the fact that many of his comparisons STARTED with 2001 (which you yourself said was a shitty time for IT workers) and compare them with TODAY (or close as he could get with the data) while showing NO growth or negative growth is scary. In other words, since the shittiest time after the .com blowout, there's been hardly any tangable IT growth.
He blames it on offshoring in general, and I agree with him. Off-shoring IT is a direct IT-job losing situation, but all off-shoring has a serious impact on our economy in general. It's the huge companies getting bigger, and being as greedy as possible while doing it.
So, imagine if he compared things to the year 2000 or 1999? It would look *completely* bleak.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Ooops, sorry! Guess we were wrong. Hope that makes you feel better.
I agree with most of what you're saying, but I don't agree that the "lack of national pride" in the U.S. is the "biggest problem" we're facing.
The problem with that line of thought is, people run around trying to drum up support for things made in the U.S.A. with "peer pressure" vs. trying to ask the tough questions. (EG. WHY do people not particularly care if the Made in the U.S.A. tag is on their product or not?)
I saw this clearly with cars and trucks throughout the 80's and into the 90's. You had your union workers proudly driving around their Chevy, Ford or Dodge trucks with big bumper stickers slapped on them telling you to only buy U.S. made vehicles. Yet, most of the general public was reading publications like "Consumer Reports" before making such a big purchase, where they learned that every year, the most-reliable and best made vehicles were coming from Japan instead. So what do you do? Buy U.S.A. anyway and receive an inferior product (and by extension, continue to vote for inferior products with your dollars)?
I think "pride" in U.S. made products will only really come when we've earned it. This isn't going to happen as long as we're only concerned with selling "as cheap as China" either. We need to quit dumping our skilled jobs on other countries to save a buck in the short-term, and then wondering why people don't really like our products better than foreign ones!
Before taking everything in the article as fact, take a glance at the rest of the stories on the site. You will definitely see a pattern. And NO..I'm not going to suggest what that pattern is.
Clearly this so-called article is a work of the vast right wing conspiracy to keep them uppity commu.. er uhliberals, yeah liberals in their place. The middle class ins't shrinking. We are winning the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. And soon there will be victory in Iran. Heil Halliburton and their Offshoring Allies.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Someone from the administration that started the process of devaluing the US working class is now bitching?!? If that isn't enough irony then think about this.
People with high paying white collar jobs, IT et al, voted for these people. The Reagan administration destroyed the Unions, dismantled Federal Aid, devalued the automobile industry workers, devalued the textile workers, devalued the steel workers, spit in the face of the airline workers, shit on the air traffic control workers, and helped the republican party make God NOT County the focus of the government. What did the people with high paying white collar jobs do? They voted for him again. Then they voted for Bush. Then Bush didn't give them a tax cut. Then they bitched about Monica getting cum stains on her dress. Then they voted for the biggest pieces of shit to ever walk the face of the earth.
Now white collar workers are finding out what it is like to have someone taking their jobs away. Now they feel the "fuck you I don't give a rats ass about you life is about me bitch" mentality of the republican party.
Here is the REALLY funny part. The blue collar workers LOVE dubya. They know he is ass fucking them. But hey they are used to it! And! He is ass fucking white collar workers too! hahahahahaa!
Welcome to the boat Mr. Roberts. There is an ore right over there. Try not to lean too far over the edge. The shit is extra stinky today.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Almost like clockwork, every couple of weeks we get another article about outsourcing (or global warming, or voting systems), and everyone wrings their hands about it. "The rich are seeking slavery" versus "you can't ignore the free market."
What I find most disconcerting among the con camp is the tired sense of entitlement. It is believed that corporations should pay a premium to a given employee because "it's fair". Americans fret about losing any percentage of the well-beyond survival level of wealth we enjoy. It's not that we worry about living in huts and going hungry, but that we'll have to buy a Hyundai instead of a Toyota, or maybe a smaller house, eat out less, etc. Our expectations are very high.
That's fine, as long as we're willing to do what it takes to generate that wealth. If you believe that you're so talented, but your employer doesn't appreciate it, start your own company. IT is one of the few fields with minimal startup costs. Our country was founded upon the idea of entrepreneurship, and it was those original risk-takers that lead our nation to greatness. People weren't as locked into the cycle of college > corporation meritocracy as we seem to be today. We play it safe, and have the inviolate expectation that we deserve a given salary by law because we've done what was rewarded in the past. This isn't a socialist country, though. Companies are free to pay market wages, and the market keeps getting bigger. We can either accept this, and take personal responsibility for our own success, or continue to complain that things are changing, and try to manipulate the system to mitigate the change.
I'm not arguing that we shouldn't have some measures to protect workers, and as a country we do, but we have to recognize that there is a cost for having such protections, and that is the economic disadvantage it puts us in relative to those in developing economies. We can't have the best of both worlds.
Let's face it, by 2015, everybody in the USA will make their living by suing everybody else. Law is one job you can not export. Nobody outside the USA (or inside the USA?) understands the USA legal system, and besides, lawyers won't allow their jobs to be exported - and lawyers make up the entire power structure in the USA: politicians and judges are essentially lawyers.
Nobody will ever beat the USA when it comes to insane litigation.
Why struggle in IT for $18/hour, when a lawyer with his feet on his desk makes $180/hour?
Some background info first - I currently work in one of the biggest BPO companies in the world, based in the Philippines. I didn't grow up here, as most of my education was done in the West and I've only been back to the 3rd world for a few years. Landing a job in an outsourcing company is the surest way to get a (relatively) high paying job - especially without a college degree.
To put things into perspective, the average starting salary for a non-BPO job here is roughly US $160 a month. Starting salary for a BPO is slightly under $300. That extra $100 counts for a ton here, taking you from 'just-surviving-middle-class' to upper middle class. Heck, I earned a lot more working part-time back in the States than I do full-time plus overtime here and I'm already paid more than twice than my co-workers.
To put things into perspective, the catchline for one of the training centers here goes:
"You don't have to be a doctor to get a high paying job..."
What are they training people for? Medical transcription. Yep, even doctors and registered nurses are *training* to go into medical transcription - well the ones not going abroad. Even doctors here are taking up nursing by the thousands so they can practise overseas.
Anyway, from what I've noticed, most of the outsourced jobs are ones that people in the developed world would *NOT* want.
Unless you want to slave 8+ hours a day doing (mindless) pure coding, data abstraction, transcription, data entry or answering the phones/email/chat for more than minimum wage.
These kind of work make up a bulk of outsourced jobs. Tasks that are repetitive, easy to relay, mostly monotonous, and oftentimes high-pressure. These usually have a high-attrition rate in the first world because of the low pay.
You have to realize that for most people working here, they work best doing what they are told - no more, no less.
As a few other people have mentioned before, the dynamic jobs that deal with analysis, design and those that need a little more thought than basic monkey coding will and *should* stay and not get off-shored. Some companies try to outsource these and end up failing more often than not.
It's probably slightly different with India as they're more tech-savvy. Thing is tho, the jobs outsourced are most likely the ones you wouldn't want to do for more than a year or two anyway.
The boom was already in full swing in 99. Even in 1998 you already had companies like @Home with share prices quintupling in the span of a year, due primarily to dotcom speculation. The last year I remember where hiring practices and payouts were still what I would call "normal" was 1997. If you'd really like to use 1998, I'd perhaps suggest averaging it against 2003, which fell between the aftermath of the dotcom crash and the notable recovery of 2004.
Yup, get these all the time. "Lucrative Opportunity in ..." What are your skills? What is your rate?
An ingenous way of getting the going rate. After which the job can be low-balled.
I have NEVER been contracted by any org. in India, where these seem to originate. Nor has anyone I know.
I have taken to simply forwarding the name of a local agency to them.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
"Outsourcing is certainly not new, however one could argue that massive outsourcing is new for white color jobs that require a significant level of very specific education. Traditional manufacturing jobs do not necessarily require a university degree."
So are you saying non-whites are incapable of reaching that significant level of education, and should therefore seek traidtional manufacturing jobs?
I know it's a typo. I just find it hilarious. Thanks - you made my day.
Just wait 'til Microsloth collapses. The rest of the world has been hedging with Linux but not the good ole US/A. Clinton & Bush are both on MS's payola roll and made sure that windows was used on the Fed's machines (of course not those machines that are doing something important.) That "great big sucking sound" is about to become a super-massive black hole.
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
All I know is that wages in IT are high and getting higher. If this article had the slightest bit of truth to it, wages would be plumeting as the number a jobs shrank compared to the available workforce.
I personally would find figures from either the pre .com boom or post .com boom more enlightening. Taking numbers from just off the peak of one of the most overblown frenzies since the tulip craze is of course going to result in "OMG!!! The sky is falling!" type figures. A lot of those lost jobs were people who had no business being in the industry to begin with, armed with little more than an MCSE and a dream of being a .com millionaire. 1998, or 2003 would be a better point of comparison.
What exactly is so greedy about a corporation paying someone less to do the same job you do? I call that you being overpaid, not a corporation being greedy. Its not like these guys are starving over there, they are living comfortable lifestyles. So yeah, we have 2-3 well fed happy Indians for the price of one fat diabetic American. Globalization is working, we just have to find a way to make ourselves more competitive.
I am equally affected by outsourcing. However, I choose not to just sit around and get upset that my cheese is being moved. I don't think the impact is that bad or will get much worse. In either case, I am hedging my bets and building up a savings base in case things do go bad. I suggest you do the same.
I've said this before but....
It never ceases to amaze me the lengths governments will go to in order to protect the profits of companies threatened by cheaper foreign imports. They even go so far as violating WTO rules and getting into trouble over it. Yet, when workers complain that they cannot compete with cheaper foreign labour, they are told that it is an unfortunate reality and that they have to adapt. The reason for this disparity is that the workforce does not fund the political parties, but big business does. Political parties serve their paymasters, not the public.
According to the April 24, 2006 issue of InformationWeek:
"IT employment in the United States has reached a record high of 3.472 million in the 12 months ended March 31,
surpassing the 3.455 million IT workers employed the previous quarter and at the end of the third quarter of 2001, the height
of the dot-com employment boom, according to InformationWeek's analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data."
This also jibes with what I heard when I had lunch with my recruiter last week; he says the market is very strong at the
moment. The automated query emails I get from dice.com and monster.com also show a decent job market, at least in the
RTP area of NC.
Has globalisation affected jobs in the US? Possibly, but is the sky falling like these people are making out? No, not even close.
And if it was, the answer isn't more protectionistic polices and government meddling, it's making the "free market" more free
so more people have a chance to try and create wealth for themselves.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Can you imagine a football team with your attitude? The team walks out on the field, gets the ball, then just wanders around stupidly saying stupid things like "It will make the other team happy if we just give them the ball", "They have a right to our points since we already had some last year", "Sure is cost efficient to just give our jobs to the other team", "Go ! Yay!"
Regardless of how advanced our society is, it's still sink or swim, do or die, us against them. How many millions of good-hearted Americans need to die on this altar before you see the error of your ways?
Whose team are you on, anyway?
I think people are overestimating the quantity of intelligent workers. Are there great Indian and Chinese engineers? Of course. Are they enough to do all the major design work in the world? Nope. Furthermore, the very factors that makes China or India great for manufacturing, work against it for high quality engineering jobs. With such high rates of poverty and 'IT' seen as a way to make money, you get a lot of poor quality people graduating through the system. Some get by through cheating (see article about Chinese student getting surgical implants to cheat on tests...), others just lack the passion to do good work, and some just get by via the corruption. Imagine being a manager and trying to hire a good engineer in India or China. I really don't know how they'd do it on a large scale given the sheer number of applicants. As far as I'm concerned these countries are just now starting to get their fair share of high end design work. For such large countries, they deserve their fair share of highend work. But its not going to be the death of our economy. A better way to look at it is the US IT industry has been far too large. Other countries have good engineers too and they are resources to be tapped. Good engineers are too hard to find for any country to have a monopoly.
....means what you think it means.
Decimate: the removal or destruction of one-tenth.
So US IT jobs are more than being Decimated.
</Word Nerd^WNazi>
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
Sorry, what was that? Between the incredible sound proofing and 27 speaker stereo system of my Bently, and the roar of my personal jet warming up, I couldn't hear you...
...people who say global warming stopped in 1998, 'cause mean temperature has been basically steady since then.
(1998 was the hottest year in the 140-record. The fact that mean temperature has been steady since then is terrifying)
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Capitalism at the expense of American workers is just plain wrong. It serves only a few and hurts many, and in the end this could very well lead to the destruction of what was once a great society. And all for short-term economic growth.
Ask yourselves which is better: a slow growing company that employs 10K Americans, or a fast growing company that employs 5K Americans and 5K Indians? If you're an American worker the answer is obvious and shows where Capitalism fails our own citizens.
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
Bah, Slashdot really knows how to stoke the IT flames with an article like this. But maybe its time to stop thinking its "us vs. them" in regards to off-shoring. Perhaps we are seeing the opening stages of, what I like to call, "the grand unification" of the world. Yes, someone can do your job for less! Move on. Is it the end of the world? Are Americans all of a sudden living in slums and standing on soup lines? Hardly.
"the US did fine for almost 200 years using a system of tariffs.... It worked go read a freakin history book"
During these 200 years, we had a lot of other bad idea that we've gotten rid of. It's more than past time to get rid of tariffs (in which government punishes people for making their own personal economic decisions).
"The one world neocons got into office everything went crap"
Crack open your history book again. The push for free-and-fair trade predates the creation of the "neocon" movement by many years. This reform idea can be at least traced back to 1948 (GATT), and it has continued and progressed through Republicans and Democrats alike.
Where were you when the voynix came?
At Welchs, home of the grape juice.. the CIO started an Outsourcing Study. In order to get my yearly bonus I had to participate in that study, and also help train a "test" outsource company. Well it was a smack in the face for us. After all, who does firmware upgrades at 3:30am? Me, and my coworkers there. Well, I refused to train the outsourcing team, I always found an excuse and put it off for a year. I put my resume out on Monster.com. I never trained the outsourced company. I'd rather take them and float them down the Ganges (I think that's where Indians send thier dead in a procession or something.). I have been known to voice my opinion about outsourcing at Welchs. During a meeting I mentioned that the CIO was no better than a drug dealer since he was willing to sell out his fellow man to make a buck. Hey that didn't buy me any brownie points but damn, that's the way I feel. Sure we need to be competive but as it turns out it took 5 outsourced indians to do my job, and they still could not keep up.
Now I have a slightly easier commute, much less traffic. better laxed dress code, You can wear jeans, sneakers, shorts.. no problem. Welchs it was Business casual. So I am much more comfortable where I am now.
If this practice continues, then I imagine the future is going to look a lot like the old Sci-Fi techwars.
The rest of your post is equally moronic?
I refuse to go to Wallmart. No way. The buildings are too big, i figured if less people shop there then they would go away. So it starts with me. I refuce to go there.
"The FN neo-con penny sniffing..."
The push for free-and-fair trade (which includes the ability to outsource work to workers who *GASP* happen to be better at the job) goes back at least as far as 1948. It includes regular ol' liberals and regular ol' conservatives long before the neocons ever exited. They haven't "sold our our country". Rather, they are relenquishing a power to make decisions that really should have been left to the people in the first place.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Its silly for anyone to suggest that allowing a corporation to use labor which is not in the country of operation is in any way a benefit to that country. Complex reasoning of how the growth actually enables more jobs is a fallacy. Its actually just a portal for money to be cyphered out of the economy and into another economy of a foreign country. You pay for services from the Corporation as a resident of your country, but they keep the profits for their rich shareholders and continue to invest in the off-shore resources.
Its not so much the offshoring that causes a problem as it is the dirt cheap prices. If we had the same thing going on with imports, congress would places taxes on the incoming products to level the playing field. Why would they do that? Because the taxes would benefit the rich shareholders of the companies in the US.
But when you look at labor, there is no benefit to the rich shareholders of a company. Republicans would never tax labor because there is no benefit to the rich.
Its all very sad, but frankly this is the government we've ALLOWED to take control of our country over the past 50 years. Its our own fault for numbing ourselves with television while letting our country be run by a bunch of millionaire lawyers. Think about that one...
i did my research when I bought my new vehicle. It's the first brand new vehicle I bought ever. My Element was build in East Liberty, Ohio. Not in Mexico or Ontario Canada.. It was built here in the USA. The vehicle has a high dependability rating and made here in the US, so I bought it.
"We are competing with people who do not have 40 hour work weeks, do not have child labor laws"
1) How many hours do these IT workers work? How many do American IT workers work? Do you have any idea? Let me know whether or not either group works more than 40 hours a week or less.
2) Do you have any links or other support about children doing IT work?
Where were you when the voynix came?
Is it now? I was going to suggest that the color pattern of the background of most of the stories is white.....
When Welchs even stated to entertain the idea of outsourcing, I bailed! It takes one american outsourced guy and 5 indians to do
my job and they still can't keep up! Where's the money saved in that????????
I apoligize if I misread your post, but please define "hoarding". Anyone with any significant amount of money keeps it in investments or in a bank who loans it out on the margin on their behalf; the money is not kept out of circulation in a matress.
f someone hoards a huge amount of money and keeps it out of circulation, then the market adjusts and starts to behave as if the money no longer exists,
While this is nice theory, it's a junk science theory you're giving credence to. We're talking the World economy, which is made up of heterogeneous markets, but capitalistic overall. Money makes money as described. When you have a large amount of money, you USUALLY earn with it or are losing the value. "effectively removing from circulation" tends to never happen unless someone has a huge 100$ bill fire which is improbable. Commodities like oil and salt are manipulated with artificial shortages, so I'm not saying it doesnt happen as a strategy...but that it can never happen as inflation control where we're talking about influencing the World by taking an arbitrary amount of money (that's slowly losing value) "out of circulation". How much money does it take to influence the world economy enough to cause DEFLATION worldwide? Um, I'd venture it's more than a couple billion (which is probably the amount of money that IS out of circulation due to natural and human accounting errors, like the change in my couch) but is not a feasible mechanic to convince the major players to simply hoard toward long-term prosperity. It's much easier to get guaranteed returns and the rest dumped in hedge funds....which is what is done. Microeconomics don't always apply, so I don't know if the response treating hoarding as an effective way of influencing the world economy is responsible. Then again, I'm just a guy who's interested in making money...so maybe I'm trying to play you to my benefit?
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.
We only have ourselves to blame for that.
... housing. If teh government hadn't already screwed the economy up, stimulus would've fincanced new production lines & the like. Now the media is finally picking up on the fact that there is a problem with housing bubbles, but they're a little late to realize such, and they still don't realize that the inflation in prices was directly caused by
I don't agree. IMHO, the government was used to rig the economic playing field. See 1970's, redux. Summary: federal reserve has been inflating the money supply since 1995. First came the dot com bubble, then the dot com crash. Recession! Then there came a "terrorist" attack, and Alan Greenspan and his merry band of fools cut interest rates to next-to-nothing. Because production had already been moving offshore (fleeing teh inflation), this new injection of money flowed into
I agree but it isn't just about cost. 30+ years ago "Made in the USA" meant quality. Does anyone see it that way today? Often people are willing to pay more for things produced overseas because of higher quality.
It's not that they have higher quality in Japan/China/Germany/etc, but that they've been getting all the investment for new equipment. New equipment and production processes result in higher quality.
As an interesting aside, note those three countries' position on the CIA's ranked order of Current account balance. Then read the list until you find the United States. Is it any wonder that companies try to move as much as possible offshore? (Link courtesy of the latest What We Now Know).
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
I've done enterprise-grade checkpoint firewall installs by configuring the equipment ahead of time and mailing it out there. If you document well and are careful about what you do, its entirely doable.
If I can mail a firewall across the states, someone in India could mail one from there. Likewise with a router.
Is it nicer to have someone on-site? You betcha. But its cheaper to have an on-site guy who is just competant enough to plug in the port marked "WAN" and outsource the harder configuration to someone else who costs more per hour, but doesn't need to be salaried.
once you go slack, you never go back
You've chosen a bad example. The French wine industry has been in a depression for years. They dump wine into the rivers! What happens when you have a long-term investment in your field and it's comparative advantage disappears? I guess this is "creative destruction" (such a handy phrase for an economist).
Those years of huge foreclosure are the years in which people were abandoning their Upper Midwest homes and heading to Texas and Southern states. They couldn't sell them because the housing market was flooded so they just let the bank take them back. I remember the phenomenon clearly. I wonder if it's possible to remove that and just look at people who didn't relocate, leaving their homes behind?
I find it interesting that in inflation adjusted dollars, the foreclosure rate was much lower in the 90s than in the 50s. And then if you adjust for population growth too, it's way way down.
I'm surprised that the peak didn't come earlier, because as you say, the interest rates were huge in the late 70s to early, early 80s.
You do have to admit the spec on a house is much higher now. Sizes have doubled, and houses had linoleum on the floor and Formica on the counters, now they are tile on the floor and granite or other solid surface on the counters.
And the house I grew up it didn't even have a master bath! Nor the house my father grew up in.
Nowadays there is a master bath with two sinks, wall separating the vanities from the toilet, and sometimes they even have a tub and a shower in the same bathroom!
House spec is way up. That accounts for part of that increase. People want to live in larger houses, they could buy the smaller and cheaper ones but aren't.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
the government's central bank.
Had a recent post on the banker/populace tension, might want to check it out...
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
...I know my IT job is safe..
hey wtf!! where are you going with my keyb..
The problem with WTO and various free-trade agreements is that it's not free trade. The various "free-trade" agreements are often little more than licenses for large companies with massive resources to go into resource-rich areas, drive out the local businesses, exploit those resources, decimate the local economy, and leave. There is no "free trade," unless you mean that large international companies are free to do what they want.
The essence of Free software is this: everyone is equal. Large corporations have the advantage of greater resources, truly, but that is all. They are not able to exploit the resource (source code & programmers) any more than a small company. It puts everyone on equal footing, as individuals.
Free trade is designed to do exactly the opposite. It is a misnomer intended to make the raping of a local economy by huge multinationals acceptable, even appealing.
There's no irony at all, except the name "Free Trade."
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
...who thinks that (at least in IT), the job market is booming?
I live in the Boston area, and noticed that in the last two years, we went from a period where posting a job opening on Monster would result in a flood of resumes, to a situation where I get 3-5 calls from recruiters a week. I switched jobs recently, and had multiple offers in the six digits (which to be fair is necessary in greater Boston). Just a couple of weeks ago, I went to a career fair at my alma mater, and they had more companies on site then they have ever had in history. In fact, there were more companies presenting then there were graduates in computer science.
Every time I hear about how horrible the job market is doing in the mainstream media, I find it hard to reconcile that with my personal observations. The best conclusion I can come to is that it is a great market, but only if you are an engineer of reasonable caliber. I do feel sorry for people that lack college educations, who are clearly getting screwed. But still, I don't see any outlet spouting good news.
It feels like 1999 all over again, except without the stupid business models, which frankly I do not miss.
...as I happily continue to design medical devices and their associated systems, like I've done for many, many years.
BWilde.
...when you say "increased by 22 times".
Inflation has been 7.58x since 1954 (http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl)
Yeah, yeah, your ratios still work out... *IF* you think you can apply inflation numbers to "out-of-basket" items like housing.
BWilde.
I think this is all a good thing.
Why should we hoard all the good stuff for ourselves? I think it will be worth having the rest of the world slowly move to a higher standard of living, even if our standard falls somewhat.
The problem is, the people with real power (leaders of multinational corporations, for instance) will exploit much of the resources for their own gain, while leaving the poor to suffer. That's the real issue, not offshoring.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
...like Mexico (winter) and Wyoming (summer).
Obvious. No point in throwing your hard-earned money away in urban hell-holes. Works for me.
BWilde.
damaged by dogma
Globalasation has been a total disaster for all industrialised economies. Ever since the laws on capital flight were changed by economic morons like Reagan/Bush, Western economies have been under attack from within by their own greedy corporations.
The only way to redress this balance is either to revert to more successful forms of Capitalism (ie. pre-globalisation), or to harmonise costs worldwide by heavily taxing corporations for exploiting cheap foreign labour. The current form of capitalism amounts to little more than redistribution of wealth to the richest for short-term profit at the expensive of the competitiveness of our own economies.
Over 60% of the US population is employed by the state, either directly, or indirectly. When the US economy collapses under its astronomical debts, it will no longer be able to pay these people, and 60% will immediately become unemployed. Of course, there will be consequences for the rest of the economy to, in that 60% of the consumers will no longer have any money to spend, and most have large debts of their own, on which they will default. The US is relying on the goodwill of the rest of the world to prop up its ideologically bankrupt (and financially bankrupt) system. It will not be good for any of us when the nasty regime in Washington finally collapses.
It would be wise for the rest of the world to insist on disarmament of the United States, and ban the United States from retaining an offensive military capability, as was done following the collapse of Nazi Germany. A bankrupt United States, swimming with religious idealogues, zealots, nutters, fascists, and high technology armaments is not a good thing for the survival of the rest of the world. Who knows what the regime will do?
See for example:
.htm
"WAL-MART'S DIRTY SECRET
Millions of young Chinese men can find neither money nor love because many of the relatively few available single women are being beaten and raped while producing products for the USA, Canada and other world markets in death camps called laogai.
chinese sweat shops
Or they "voluntarily" work backbreaking hours in what amount to slave labor camps, where the National Labor Committee for Human Rights has documented 98-hour workweeks in factories over 100F, a ban on talking during work hours, 24-hour surveillance, and compulsory unpaid overtime.
Top wages are 10 cents an hour.
Average pay in China's "Special Economic Zones" is three cents an hour.
Other workers are paid just 36 cents for more than a month's work--making just 8/100th of a cent an hour.
At the Qin Shi factory, thousands of women work 98 hours a week making Kathie Lee handbags that retail for $8.76 at Wal-Mart. They are paid less than $22 a week. In air thick with dust and chemical solvents, workers handle toxic glues without gloves alongside machines that roar like express trains. The whole production line must often remain at work unpaid for an extra three to four hours, until the inhuman daily quotas are met."
http://www.willthomas.net/Convergence/Weekly/China
See also:
"Free and Endless Supply of Workers
China's booming economy continues to increase through its use of slave labor or Laogai camps. Laogai means "reform through labor." It's a system of prison factories and detention centers set up by former Chinese leader Mao Zedong during the 1950's as a means to re-educate through labor and increase economic gain for the People's Republic of China. As of 1979, there were apparently only several thousand people being forced to work in the Laogai system. Today it has become an enormous source of free labor and financial profit for the Chinese government. According to estimates from the Laogai Research Foundation, there are 6.8 million people incarcerated in China's 1,100 labor institutions.
For those incarcerated in these facilities, the reality they face is long hours of brutal treatment with little sleep or food to sustain themselves. Reports of 20-hour work days and violent oppression force some detainees to choose suicide instead of being beaten, starved, or worked to death according to a paper by Stephen D. Marshall, "Chinese Laogai: a hidden role in 'Developing Tibet." Others mutilate or injure themselves in an effort to avoid the work. Inmates who fall behind or refuse to work are shocked with electric batons, beaten, sexually assaulted, or thrown into solitary confinement. Among those that make up the population in these labor camps are criminals, political prisoners, and practitioners of the spiritual practice Falun Gong, who reportedly now make up to half of those detained in the Laogai labor system.
Who Uses Slave Labor?
Forced labor has become both a form a torture and a source of great profit for China. With the enormous amount of free labor that comes from Laogai, China has lured many overseas businesses into its profit-through-slave-labor system. With ridiculously cheap wholesale labor costs many cannot resist the bait and unknowingly come to support this illegal practice.
Common everyday products ranging from artificial Christmas trees, Christmas tree lights, bracelets, tools and foodstuffs, et cetera are among some of the products manufactured and exported from these facilities. According to a 1998 House Committee on International Relations report, companies who reportedly have or had products made in China's Laogai are Midas, Staples, Chrysler, and Nestle. A recent report from one detainee in the Changji Labor Camp in Xinjiang states the Tianshan Wooltex Stock Corporation Ltd., a contractor to Changji Labor Camp, makes products for overseas companies such as Banana Republic, Neiman Marcus, Bon Genie, Holt
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
The same IT that gave us all jobs has evolved and has knocked down barriers such that some of us will no longer have jobs. I'm not afraid!
Yeah, many of the slower "Johnny Come Latelies" with their "certs d'jour" will be sent packing, but "good" people with "strong backgrounds" in computer sci fundamentals that treat their field of study like the science that it is will always be in demand.
The rest are simply janitorial IT staff. Good riddance.
Look what happened with Europe. At a certain point each individual coutry didn't have enough population to compete with the US, so for a while they became quiet little countries with a reputation for excellence in a certain niche. When even that was in danger their only way out was to merge, become a single country, no borders, same currency, same laws, etc. Eventually the US will have to do the same. 300 million people won't be able to compete forever against 1,300 million. The US will have to merge. With whom? With Latinamerica.
good points, good points. :)
A real depression is no fun for anyone, but those happen when wealth concentration reaches a critical level.
I think a good old-fashioned econmic collapse is in our future. Mandeville wrote his book in 2003, and says the 2006 collapse is right on track (housing market, for example). This will be a good thing, as it will re-level the economic playing field. Not exactly fun, of course, but very necessary.
Read something a while back: countries that don't produce goods don't need engineers to design them. Hence the movement of R&D offshore, of which you speak.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Seriously? It's what the article is all about! Did you even read it?
FTA:
And it goes on. It's not a very good article, so I can't blame you for choosing not to read it before you posted.
The reason Bush and friends are sending our economy to the middle ages is so the jobs will come back.
Voting, what good will that do? 90+% of the time the choice is between a Republican and DLC Clinton "triangulating" Democrat who represents the EXACT same policies at least on important macro scale issues like global economic policy and the environment. While dumbasses argue over flag burning, gay marriage, and the ten commandments on buildings the economic elite laughs their way to the bank regardless of whether a Rep. or De. wins. In 90+% of U.S. elections saying "go vote" has about as much meaning here in the U.S. as it does in Cuba, or the old Soviet Union. Why vote when we are in essence in a one party system that has a virtual consensus on policy issues like war, the global economy and the environment? All voting does is legitimize a corrupt system where BOTH electable parties are in the pocket of Abramoff like corporate lobbyists. Maybe there is a Green here in Michigan running for dog catcher or drain commissioner unopposed and I'll go vote for him or or her, otherwise piss on the "mainstream" parties.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
What's good for the world doesn't agree with what the US wants, and must be stopped at all costs!
Western developped countries and a few others have the higest standards of living in the world.
When I read these discussions it would seem like if people are now starving on the streets of Houston, NY anD la because jobs have been moved elsewhere.
A sense of proportion would be very welcome.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
.... once you are employed.
Internships give you a taste of how things are in the real world, but if you think that is the real thing you'll be sorely doissapointed.
I would not surprise me if in a few years you are foced to do less than stelar code once you are under the real pressures of a real job.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There are companies that produce sterling quality work in India, Eastern Europe and other places.
Blanket statements like yours normally are unfair and innacurate.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I do not think they are incompatible. What I do think is that what you see happening, and the motivation behind it have nothing to do with the kind hearts of US, Inc. Why, for example, should I believe that there's this sudden upswelling of concern for the welfare of societies with less opportunity for wealth, when CEO pay at American companies continues to relentlessly spiral out of control? An American CEO makes 450-500 times that of the average US worker, and even if he fails miserably, while most of us are simply fired, he's still quite often rewarded handsomely for his effort. And amid allt his, I'm supposed to believe that they care about "paupers" in other countries. Sorry, but the notion of generocity and the reality just don't add up- they're not even in the same ballpark.
... is because the economy in the UK has gone quite well for most people.
Unemployment in the UK is almost nonexistent, and very often when you need a qualified person the only option is to hire abroad (often by means of outsourcing and offshoring).
So this gloom abot everybody going to the dole in the UK is frankly childish nonsense.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Decimation means reduce by one tenth. This is how the Roman Legions (the generals, anyway) kept the army motivated. If it was perceived that an army unit was dragging their heels, every tenth man was put to the sword.
People nowadays use "decimation" incorrectly, usually promoting it to "just short of annihilation".
However, Everything is hyped to the max (/irony) so I'll get over it.
My Mom told me forty billion times not to exaggerate, so I'll leave it there.
I think another factor to consider is the investment effect of deflation vs. inflation. Inflation encourages investment and creation of value in the economy (if you don't do anything with your money, it loses value), while deflation discourages investment (the real value increases with nothing done on your part - you can stuff it in a mattress).
I think that's why deflation scares a lot of economists...you could reach a point in a deflationary economy where people start saving/not investing too much and your economy starts a downward slide.
Several guys in this thread (obviously USian or Westerners of other various denominations) decry the quality of the work produced elsewhere.
This is unsurprising, and I am sure mostly unfair.
But accepting without conceding this point, obviously the code is good enough.
You guys are failing to see this and it was time that you woked up and smelled the coffee.
People in other countries may not code to your high standards (ha, ha, ha!) but frankly you should stop beating that horse and look at the real reasons for your current troubles.
Lifestyles in Western countries are wasteful (consumerism for you), your only hope is for you to re-arrange peiorities or sit and wait that other people commit the same mistakes.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Lets spread some white phosphorus on your ass that burns to the bone. Then I suspect you won't be parsing legal documents in a way that would embarrass Bill Clinton* trying to figure out what the meaning of is, is, no you would want the torturous burning pain to stop. That's what I'm talking about stopping the torturous burning pain gas from being spewed from air planes paid for with my tax dollars. Anything else is just shilling for evil. I'm also talking about stopping Chinese slave labor and people being paid pennies an hour. I'm also talking about stopping the gutting of the American middle class for the short term profit of corporations. Are these things really so hard to understand? Have Americans become so fundamentally morally corrupt that we are willing to accept immense suffering to support our way of life? If so deep shame on us, the same shame that was felt by good Germans, or those who passively accepted Stalin.
*For stupid ass Fox watchers note that I hate Bill Clinton possibly more than even Bush for condemning hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to brutal deaths through starvation and disease with the sanctions he imposed on Iraq year after year. The corrupt Democrats don't impress me even one bit more than the corrupt Republicans.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Although still booming at the start of 2001, a turn-down in the economy was evident prior to wtc. Sure wtc accelerated the turn down, but it did not cause it. WTC was a useful scapegoat for many CEOs because it was an external and exceptional event that they could peg blame on.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I'm not saying it's impossible - anything is possible. I just wanted good old twitter to explain his rationalization for it. Because I have a feeling he'd probably blame it on Microsoft.
"Outsourcing is usually (always?) undertaken as a cost-saving exercise. "
Is it? How about because of deficiencies in the current US system?
Parent actually has good points. You just insulted him "in style", but the "in style" part is of course debatable.
Wealth is always relative, and never absolute.
Thus, it's impossible for wealth to be created or for it to disappear in absolute terms. But what IS possible for a relative quantity? Aha, that's right -- concentration. Yes, in relative terms, wealth can concentrate. That's all it ever does. It either concentrates or diffuses, and it's never created or destroyed.
I'd maybe go deeper into it and explain why wealth is relative, but you're a dipshit who is not worth my time. I'm writing this for other people, not for you.
I must conclude that you've never ever been to the UK. There are people there who've never worked, never will work and are quite happy that way. Usually they breed like rabbits, thus pissing in the gene pool even more.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Spare me your straw man arguments about communism I'm an anarchist at heart and hate the state as much as you do if not more. What I'm talking about is restoring strong labor unions (a private organization) so American workers are decently compensated for their labor like they were in the 50s and 60s. America was FAR more livable then, there was virtually no homeless problem, fewer ghettos, etc. America is really a pretty rotten place to live in the 21st century and the poverty caused by outsourcing bears a large part of the blame. Do you think people were afraid to walk a couple of blocks to the store to get milk in the 50s and 60s? Why is that? Because basic common labor assured a livelihood including the ability to purchase a home in the 50s & 60s. People who are comfortably housed have no reason to resort to crime. Now you can even work 40+ hours a week and be condemned to living in a car because wages have not kept up an inflated housing market. Is it any wonder that people resort to selling drugs and other crimes that bring quick easy money but lower our quality of life when honest work for many is a suckers game of desperate poverty? I'd take life in 50s or 60s U.S. or in current Europe any day of the week over the shithole of paranoid authoritarian gated communities and ghettos that America has become in the 21st century.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
I hope you're putting your savings into something other than the $.
Then again, I'm just a guy who's interested in making money...so maybe I'm trying to play you to my benefit?
I think that pretty much describes the entire US economy right now- there are those who are interested in making money, and those who just want enough security to achieve the "American Dream" and have a family. Unfortuneately, right now, the first group is in charge- and they're so interested in making money they fail to realize that they're stealing the "American Dream" from their neighbors in their greed.
This will continue until the second group wakes up and realizes that for the good of the species, and for reasons of evolution, the first group must die.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Right "now" people are being hurt by globalization but what I think a point that a lot of people are missing is that in the "loooong" term... it won't matter. The pain is part of the global rebalancing that in the end should leave everyone on a level playing field.
Currently jobs are being lost because of the wage disparity between here and the places where jobs are being offshored to. But as more employment moves to these other countries the standard of living will rise, so will the demands for better working conditions. Wages will increase. Consumption will increase. It happend in the western industrialized democracies...why would it NOT happen elsewhere?
Today there's not much of an economic advantage to having your IT in Germany, versus France, versus Canada, versus the US... so too in the near future when everything evens out, will it not be any advantage to having services outsourced to India or China or Tuvalu versus here at home (wherever home may be). We'll all be on a level playing field and we'll all be better off for it. Or do you believe the west is entitled to a better level prosperity than anyone else?
To say that globalization is (anything) completely depends on where you're standing, and what you are/are not willing to give up in terms of standards of living and income.
You're completely correct- thus I prefer to look at it this way: Economics is national warfare, free traitors need to be executed, and free trade is a WMD attacking me and my way of life personally. We should respond with nukes.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The problem is that money is not truly wealth. Wealth is social position and property.
When more and more property is taken out of circulation and when social positions at the middle layer of society become less influential, the market cannot simply "adjust".
The reason you fell into a hole is that you have a very naive understand of wealth.
What you talk about is true about money as a unit in and of itself, but it's not true in terms of real wealth. I won't even go into the intangible aspects of real wealth, such as happiness, fulfillment and so on, which people cannot easily maintain in a socially unbalanced atmosphere. This is not merely a case of unfounded and superficial envy, because there are real and tangible effects caused by concentration of power. Those effects determine the types of decisions that can still fly. In an extreme case, if all property is owned by a single person, you cannot just "decide" to start your own business of selling donuts on street corner. You have to be "allowed". Of course this is an extreme I use to illustrate a point, and the scale is pretty wide and gray, but it is a real scale in a sense that it has tangible and very well defined effects.
Wealth is about the power to make decisions without much opposition. If I am wealthy, I can decide nearly anything and get very little push back. If I am not, then I have to fight a big bureaucratic battle uphill even to open a little donut stand. Again extreme examples are used for clarity.
This is both accurate and inaccurate. Yes, housing has gone "upscale" to where everything is advertised as LUXURY. However, consider that in many markets, there is nothing *but* "luxury" housing available. One simply cannot purchase a new home in many markets that does not have the upscale, allegedly price-increasing amenities. The baseline has changed, but it is still the baseline, and one must compare baseline to baseline.
Another comment: my father was a custom spec home/townhome builder until I was in my early 20s, and I was involved with many facets of the process, from helping him with making blueprints, to clearing the plot, to framing, to planting flowers and watering the lawn while the house was for sale. My father sold homes that were moderately priced. He didn't make a huge profit margin. But he did employ good trim carpenters (one of my primary indicators of quality) and other good subcontractors. Looking at new homes today, very expensive homes, is sobering. The quality is simply not there in the way that it was, and builder profit margins are higher. To get reasonable quality today, you have to pay through the nose. Or, buy an older home. Which is what I'm doing.
Oh, another comment: our home was burglarized recently, and among a few other things they stole my old Nikon digicam and my old Sony miniDV camcorder. At first I wasn't so pissed, as my insurance will buy me a new one, not just pay me $150 in depreciated value. But I've been looking at new camcorders, and they are CRAP. Even the $1500 ones are CRAP compared to my stolen ($1500 in 1999) camcorder. They may have higher specs internally, but the user interface, the external features, so on -- CRAP. I'm going to buy my old camcorder again, on ebay. Probably the same for the digicam -- all the modern Coolpix cameras are now amateur point and shoot crap.
Larry
Economy is not a zero sum game.
I can't think of a game in which people compete against each other but all win.
Very postmodern and PC, but that would be the correct analogy.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
We are reaching the point whne pehaps our societies have to decide what is better overall. I am putting my money on cooperation and fair competition.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I used to be in the IT industry, but was laid off. I ended up going back to school, getting my Linguistics degree, learning Spanish, and am now working in Mexico as an English teacher. I don't have working papers yet, but should be able to have them by the end of the year. I'm not yet making enough money to break even (pay all my expenses), but I'm getting experience on my resume and it looks like I'm out of the computer industry for good. Good riddance, I say.
Another option for English teachers is anything in the far east: China, Japan, and Korea, for starters. If you're willing to teach in, say, Korea, there are programs out there where they will pay for your airplane ticket and all expenses.
It's basically impossible to get a work permit in Europe, but the world is a bigger place than that.
Check out David's ESL cafe at http://www.eslcafe.com for more information if you're serious about being an English teacher abroad.
Another option is the US Peace Corps.
That's right - outsourcing is not creating jobs at companies like Intel, Motorola, IBM.. The only jobs outsourcing creates are at McDonald's, Taco Bell, Wal-Mart...
The whining of some of you is frankly pathetic.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Something rarely mentioned here in the USA is the impact of these measures on foreign workers. Obviously foreigners have some claim to a higher standard of living. Obviously a wage increase to people in sub-saharan Africa would benefit them.
Thus far, globalization has been a tremendous boon to foreigners. Since the mid-1990s, when globalization began picking up the pace, the world has had an economic growth rate of over 5% annually--more than in any prior time in history. As a result, wages in some very populous places (Coastal China, for example) have quadrupled. That increase in wages has had a dramatic and positive effect on poverty in countries that were previously extremely impoverished. Bear in mind that in the early 1970's China had a per-capita GDP that was scarcely higher than sub-saharan Africa.
I believe that capitalism and rising prosperity in those places will also greatly benefit world stability to the benefit of America. Obviously there will still be sources of instability (religious extremism and territorial disputes are two examples that may not be mitigated by prosperity) but we will no longer face violent confrontations over imagined "exploitation" or competing economic systems.
The American IT industry is doing fine. I work in it and I can say with confidence that demand for programmers is about as brisk as it has ever been, except during the anomalous dot com boom.
It's strange when American IT workers (a few of them, at least) react angrily to Indians and others who are trying to do the same things we do. It's the height of hypocrisy. We should never fault anyone for just trying to participate in the global economy.
The vision which America has exported in recent years is that capitalism benefits everyone, and furthermore, that freedom includes economic freedom. So far, that policy has worked extremely well in the short time it has been given, in most places at least, contrary to what detractors claim. Even in the few places it has not worked well (like Russia), people still have regained most of what was lost during the messy transition from Communism.
...Right now the world is undergoing rapid economic growth similar to that experienced by Western Europe and America during the late 19th century and early 20th. It is quite feasible that in a few decades most people in the world will enjoy a standard of living approaching 1st-world standards. A world like that would benefit of everyone, including Americans, and it would be unbelievably stupid and cruel of us to prevent it.
... allows companies in many other sectors to invest in innovation instead of overpriced software.
The guys in India and China may not making great breakthroughs, but they are contributing to make the economic landscape elsewhere more efficient.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
280+ million people cannot all up-skill.
280+ million people cannot all be MBA's or managers. Once managers are outsourced, what is left, CEO's?
You cannot repeat this process over and over again to infinity; it only widens the gap between the rich and the poor setting bar ever higher and higher and higher; the middle will drop out over time.
The sea will flood you whether you up-skill or not and guess what happens then? Everyone's standard of living will go down -- drastically. I'd take a small hit now rather than turning into a 3rd world country after we produce nothing of value.
You being unemployed has little to do with illegal Mexicans, who most likely are not doing the same jobs you would normally do.
Your situation is anecdotal, overall most people benefit by buying cheap stuff and services.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Look, I'm an IT worker at a financial institution. Financial institutions, by and large, are fairly large outsourcers of IT labor. And I think you guys need to quit your crying. Just because our salaries are not growing by 25% a year, it seems as though you think the sky is falling. If you've looked around the job market recently, and you're a halfway talented IT person, I'd say it hasn't been better since '99-'00. Also, it should be worth noting that skilled IT labor wages will eventually reach a parity across the world (though the US will probably still be higher), since it is such a specialized skill set and has ever growing demand from employers. Like previous posters have alluded to, wages in India are skyrocketing, and in about a decade or so, chances are they'll reach similar levels to the US... unless they suck. Then they'll be cheaper, just like suck companies in the US. Globalization puts the most efficient workers on the task, lets the owners make money, and the consumers get cheap goods. When the workers get too expensive, they find other workers. If you think you are entitled to your job, I'd suggest you are making a big mistake. For those of you that complain about the low working standards, I happen to agree with that somewhat, but I do think you're ignoring the fact that these jobs are actually RAISING living standards in most cases. I personally believe the best action to take in this case is to require some type of training for employers that choose to employ ultra low-skilled and ultra low-paid workers, so they have a way to improve their lot in life. But I think that by suggesting you take people's jobs away because they are being "taken advantage of" you are being intellectually dishonest with yourself - to the detriment of those unskilled workers. If you want to blame this outsourcing on something, I'd suggest you look at the crappy "education" system we have in the States.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
"The Health Costs of Wealth Inequality
.01% of the population can live in obscene opulence. And if you can continue to justify such obscenities don't be surprised if the black block trashes your yuppie downtown or people put their foot down in the third world and say enough imperialism and exploitation and elect more Chvezs. You can't fuck people forever and expect no reaction, sooner or later the looting of the world will garner a reaction and you are smug about your globalist looting expect it to be an ugly one.
by John Robbins
Not that long ago in this country, you could raise a family on a single paycheck. If you were working, you didn't have to worry about an unexpected medical bill making you homeless. If you were disabled, your basic needs were taken care of, and if you were elderly, you could count on benefits that made your final years restful and safe.
But real wages have been declining since the 1970s, and benefits have been deteriorating. Every year, more working people are losing their pensions and their health insurance.
Meanwhile, our wealth distribution has been becoming increasingly disparate. Today, many corporate executives earn more money in a couple of hours than the average factory worker makes in a year. The wealthiest 1 percent of America's population owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. And the minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, has fallen by 37 percent since 1968, and become the lowest of any industrialized nation.
What impact is this having on the health of our people?
With 5 percent of the world's population, the United States accounts for nearly 50 percent of the world's healthcare spending, yet ranks only 26th in life expectancy, and 28th in infant mortality. Is it a coincidence that not a single one of the 25 countries that have longer life expectancies than the United States, nor a single one of the 27 countries that have better infant mortality rates, has as wide a wealth gap between its richest and poorest citizens?"
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1001-29.htm
Our middle class is being gutted so our jobs can be replaced by wages so low in the third world that people have to live in bunk houses. I was arguing with an asshole up thread who said those bunk houses were a good thing. You you know what I say, I say screw that, screw bringing all people BOTH here and in the third world down to a subsistence level of living so
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
America is still a place where you can be a self-made man. That's not true in much of the world. You do need to know what you are doing and how to work within the culture. Read Upton Sinclair's "The Junge" for a look at what happens when industry is forced to stay in one place.
Cheap storage VM.
The dastardly liberals are giving jobs to BROWN PEOPLE IN FOREIGN LANDS!!!
Yeah, I know, I'm going to be modded into oblivion. But really, the whole "Indians taking our jobs" meme is so tiresome.
Which is why Detroit is busting so bad. Our free-market healthcare system (which is anything but free) is a large part of what's killing our labor market and causing jobs to flee overseas . . . and even if they come back they come back at Wal-Mart.
My book, podcast
Fear is the theme, and it's time to lay it on thick. Blow press blow. Of course, after early November, those screaming loudest about this will try to act like it never happened, but that's politics in the USA.
Real shifts are happening, but the core of the problem is the short time frame planning now in vogue. The company doesn't care if everybody burns out NEXT QUARTER, only what this quarter's numbers look like. After all, the management will bail before then anyway.
IT is not magical, the same thing is happening everywhere. The protectionists will call for isolating us from the rest of the world, like Ross Perot did in the 90's, like Ross, they are 20 years too late. Real long term investment, the kind that will keep a company going for years is only happening in Europe right now. (Not much, but some.)
What many people don't seem to understand is that's the whole point. The idea is to give nations the ability to leverage their strengths in the global marketplace. Of course those strengths are the result of different cultures, geography, language, religion or whatever else you can imagine. That's a really good thing. Hey, maybe a nation has huge natural reserves of oil or coal? Maybe it has a large, disciplined work force that can manufacture cheap goods? It doesn't really matter what a nation is best at--the idea behind GATT and the WTO is to allow every member nation the chance to capitalize on those strengths.
After that, you seem to have sandwiched an anti-immigration argument into a discussion about free trade. You are probably one of those people who misunderstands what free trade actually entails under international treaties, but that's okay, because it's an easy mistake to make. There is so much bad information and rhetoric out there by people who claim that "free trade is this" or "free trade is that." Their goal is to confuse you and make you think that the world is changing around you for all the wrong reasons, instead of just as a result of market principles. I view the writer of the original Slashdot article as just such an alarmist.
The truth is that free trade really just boils down to preventing governments from artifically propping up their own domestic producers (and by proxy, their domestic labor force) by granting subsidies to those producers. If you believe in free competition in the marketplace, in no monopolies or cartels, and that consumers should be able to pay low prices for quality goods, then it's a very easy concept to embrace. The alternative is that you believe that governments should be able to screw around with the global economy by giving billions to dying industries, tax breaks to big businesses, and so on--you know, the exact things that the GATT and the WTO try to prevent.
There's so much irony there when Mr. Slashdot Poster X says something sanctimonious like he's against big, corrupt businesses taking his tax money and then proceeds to adopt the anti-globalization position that supports exactly that. The ignorance is astounding.
Then you go on to pick on tariffs:
Unlimited tariffs would topple entire nations, mostly the undeveloped ones you probably are trying to protect. So no, sorry, that's just a ridiculous thing to claim. I can tell you're maybe not really up on this, or you might be aware that an accountability process already exists.
There's more, but I'm just feeling like a broken record player. There's a lot of information out there, in books and even just on Wikipedia. You could start by reading about what comparative advantage means, what it entails, and why it's controversial to some people. Then you could read about GATT. It's going to
nm
Engineering and management require different skills sets.
Sometimes the same person have them both, but on many others it just does not happen.
The best way to create a bad manager is to force a good Engineer without the necessary skills to become one.
The assumption, very common around here, that Engineers are some kind of uber human that can learn anything thrown at them is laughable, to say the least (disclaimer: I am an Engineer and at time I have had managerial responsibilities)
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Nice try dumbass. You totally didn't read the article n he busted you.
Then vote third party and organize in your local community. Build your party from ground up. Would honestly trust some Green party hippy w/ no political experience or feasible platform in Congress? You're better off with the criminals and cowards that are in right now. The problem w/ most 3rd candidates is that they suck.
Because labor laws, other human rights laws, and environmental conservation laws vary from nation to nation much more than they vary within a nation.
Trade is freeing Chinese people. Today they can own property, they can travel abroad, they can set up bussinesses.
This in the short span on 20 something years.
Patience.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The sky is falling! No, no it isn't.
It was a year ago when the job market really picked up in my area. I watched a whole team at a corporate IT department pick up and all get new jobs at different companies in the span of a month. In the meantime, I see the quality of the work coming out of India and just don't worry about it.
They need a major slowdown in their growth before they'll establish reasonable quality over there aside from a handful of exceptions. In the meantime, they're lacking technically enough that an Indian IT group outsources to my company to get guidance on the harder parts of what they do. Even then, they lack the productivity of a strong team stateside.
When I go to the local Java user's group meetings, there are a stack of recruiters out there trying to get people for jobs. If the job market sucked they wouldn't be there. They'd let the desperate come to them.
In the IT world, cost of labor is just not the key ingredient. It's oppurtunity cost and the value lost by having a cheaper team take longer is just not worth it.
Unfortunately, the vote of the ordinary person does not really count; in fact, in most states (IIRC), the people could all vote for one candidate and the electoral college folks could swing the other way. This completely disempowers the average voter. Add to that the [justifiable] uncertainty over the security of the voting machines, and the multitude of reports of election fraud in hotly contested areas, and there really is alot of evidence indicating voter disenfranchisement.
That being said, I still vote. Even though I feel as though it doesn't really count, I do want to show that there are some people in the US who are paying attention.
Your point about the lame/crappy candidates from both major parties is a good one. Just look at the Allen/Webb race here in Virginia. Allen is a racist, has voted many times in direct contravention of the wishes of his constituents, and continues to support and rubber-stamp absolutely every thing that the Bush admin wants to do. On the other hand, Webb is a "former" republican, has issues with women, doesn't really have a decent platform, and strikes me as being just as much a scumbag as Allen. What freakin choices we Virginians have! Fascist asshole #1 or fascist asshole #2.
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
Sure I would the Greens are doing a fine job in Germany. BTW You wingers really need a new insult calling people dirty hippies is soooo 1969. It's the 21st century, hellllo.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
You've described the common fear fairly well, but that's not how things would actually work out. For one thing, inflation does encourage investment: malinvestment, investment in unprofitable lines of production. The extra money creates a boom economy in the short term by distorting the normal market signals that would reflect the social rate of time preference. Later, when the inflation slows or ends, as it eventually must, at risk of sparking hyperinflation, the malinvestment is revealed: the increased demand for capital goods (projected on the basis of the lowered interest rates) simply doesn't exist. Too much has been invested in the earlier stages of the production process (capital good production) and nothing remains for the later stages (as prices have risen to offset the artificially low interest rates). The resulting readjustment can be short and sharp (a depression) or long and slow (a recession), depending on whether the inflationary policies are abandoned or simply reduced. The shortest and least painful way through the readjustment period is to end the inflation, accept the falling prices (including falling wages), and move on. Trying to cushion the blow with additional inflation (or, worse, minimum prices/wages) can only drag things out and add to the overall cost of recovery.
As for deflation inhibiting investment: yes, deflation means you don't have to invest money to gain value over time. Your savings are safe, you don't have to risk your retirement money on the stock market to avoid devaluation. On the other hand, the return from investment is even better in a deflationary economy; you can put your money in a mattress at +2% adjusted returns, or you can invest it for +7% adjusted returns (assuming a 5% increase in quantity). In a 2% inflationary economy the same investment would give you between +3% and +5% adjusted returns, depending on how well the company shields itself from the inflation, compared to a -2% adjusted return on cash holdings. The inflation does give up to 2% extra incentive to invest (just as widespread theft creates an incentive to store money in a bank), but even a deflationary economy will pay better returns for investment than for "hoarding". In fact, a deflationary economy would make investment in low-yield ventures reasonable, whereas inflationary policies makes any investment paying less than the going inflation rate an economic loss.
In the end, of course, the balance of consumption vs. investment vs. cash holdings is a matter of time preferences and demand for money, and fooling people through money manipulation into investing (or consuming, or "hoarding") more or less than they wish to is not a viable long-term strategy.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
I wish I had mod points - this guy is spot-on.
People complaining about globalization/offshoring "stealing" their jobs is just plain odd to me. I assume what you want is for your job to be protected by law, so that those dirty foreigners can't take it - right? If so, you subscribe to one of two philosohies:
1. You believe that Americans are in some way more worthwhile as human beings, and thus deserve any given job more than someone of equal qualifications who lives in another country.
or
2. You believe that Americans are in some way lazier, dumber, or otherwise more incompetent than someone living in another country. Thus they cannot be expect to compete fairly for employment.
It can only reasonably be one of the two. So tell me, which is it?
Then why countries producing raw goods are the wealthy ones?
For bunnies sakes, manufactured goods have been going down for ages. There is very little wealth created making tangible goods nowadays because machines and mass production are making them tremendooulsy cheap.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
People protesting against the mad adventurism in Iraq were rigth. Congrats, you got that one all right.
Oposing globalization is the dumbest idea in the world.
It is like oposing bird migration or the Gulf stream.
Globalization can be steered but can't be stopped.
As long as there are disparities in wealth (and there always be, Communist countries showed us that), there will be forces tending to globalize good and services.
Idiotic disparate protests without an especific agenda are complete useless.
Several of your anarchist buddies have made of protests violent affairs. Say what you may, but many other protest in many of the different countries where antiglobalization rallies have happened, have passed peacefully.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You are not setting the political agenda.
Look what you got us: right wing politicians in most democratic countries, from the US to Mexico, Japan and even the old good UK.
Perception is all, the antiglobalization movement (what do they wnat? Blissful isolationism?) painted itself in a tight corner firstly because their message is incoherent and secondly because it is not based in any real solutions to economic disparities.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Seems to me that this is the logical conclusion to the great Capitalist experiment. Welcome to the world of competition folks, want to keep your jobs? Do it cheaper, better, smarter or occupy a niche market that cannot be offshored.
God was my co-pilot, but then we crashed and I was forced to eat him.
And I am sure it gives a warm fuzzt feeling, but the matter of fact is that most people do not like extremists (if the perception is fair or not is another matter).
Judging by your postings you are figthing a lost battle. Other more pragmatic people will advance the cause of fairness, toughtless radicals are a hindrance we could live without.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There is always a choice, we could tariff goods produced in abusive countries right out of our markets. Perhaps we can't stop globalization in other parts of the world but we could absolutely refuse to be complicit in it here. What's more that type of tariff would have broad popular support bother from isolationist paleo-cons and the radical left. It would lead to increase to workers wages and a revitalization of American research and American industry. It would also send a strong message to the rest of the world that abusive labor practices and short sighted destruction of the environment is not acceptable to Americans and that in turn would put pressure on those countries to clean up there acts by increasing wages, etc, to regain American markets.
When you say there is no choice you sound like a Marxist talking about the "inevitable" triumph of the dictatorship of the proletariat or a Nazi talking about the "1000 year reich." Whenever someone pulls inevitable out of there hat beware, it means they are afraid you ARE going to make a choice that is threatening to their abusive practices.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
...on the front page of slashdot. The end times are near.
Those poor kids coding all day for such paltry pay can't surely produce any good C++ classes.
Honestly guys, the level of debate sometimes rises to level of ridiculousness that is difficulot not to mock.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
In my grad program, I had an econ professor who came in one day and wrote out a "proof" that lawyers were 100% non-value added to the economy as a whole.
And it was VERY detailed.
I think he was on to something there....
Not wanting to nit-pick, but my elementary school history and wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_XIV seem to remember that during Louis XIV's reign import tariffs were raised. Wikipedia states of Colbert, Louis XIV's finance minister: "He ranks as one of the fathers of the school of thought regarding trade and economics known as mercantilism -- in fact, France calls "mercantilism" Colbertisme.". Of the main point, that the globalization helps everyone in the end, I agree with reservations.
"Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so you apologize for truth." -Benjamin Disraeli
Merely if this issue is worrying you, get to a place where your job is safe. Just to take an example, the guy who delivers your pizza is probably not too worried about his job being outsourced - he knows he is needed outside your house in 30 minutes. Now he probably has other problems, but *waves hands to indicate 'other problems'*
If you make money entirely by having a decent brain and a PC, then you're not exactly making yourself essential - the world's full of people like you, most quite happily exisiting on a lower wage than you - somebody with a chequebook will notice this
Get a role that requires you to be onsite in your local office, something that means customers have to see you. Why not go the whole hog? If there's a hundred guys on the other side of the planet, use them yourself. If you have understanding of a particular field and are next to the guy with a problem, design him a solution and get somebody else to do the work *shrugs*
Maybe rather than thinking of suddenly competing with people able to work for less, you could look at it as a rather good opportunity to build a company under you? (just remember not to out-source yourself).
Guys in the US have to get out of this mindset about jobs.
They are not yours, they were not created with your name written all over them.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Good luck with that, seriously, it's nice to know there are a few optimists left. Personally I'm putting my money on the tried-and-true Darwinesque "survival of the fittest" existence to continue. People, societies, companies and humanity in general will only cooperate/compete fairly when (a) it is beneficial for everyone to do so (which almost never happens), and/or (b) there is no other option but to cooperate/compete fairly. Life has evolved that way for millions of years, why expect it to change in your lifetime?
So what you are saying in essence is might equals right that those who can't make it in the global market place should be left to suffer at the side of the road? Whatever happened to compassion? It fascinates that so many who claim to be "Christians" are also social Darwanists which is about as far opposite from Christianity as you can get. Now I happen to be secular but I sure wouldn't mind seeing a little more Christian compassion and little less kill em all and let the market sort it out in the U.S. In the long run I think history will judge us rather harshly if as the richest nation in the world we end up giving our poor and downtrodden a great big backhand. Rome comes to mind...
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
There are two important differences here I am trying to highlight. First it's not a mater of being beneficial to all of humanity, because if there is a way for people to benefit themselves more than those around them they will. The whole judgment of quality of life is how we compare ourselves to our neighbors. Secondly it doesn't mater what people want unless they are the ones in power. I'm not saying that if you are currently in power you should sit on you hands and wait for the end to come, but I am saying that if "the people" want what is beneficial to them they would need to seize power.
I could argue the benefits cooperative societal structures but this doesn't seem the right place.
While it was indeed a cheap attack, and deserved a troll-mod, I actually have watched Democracy Now (I'm watching it right now), and I have actually read Chomsky. I am convinced that Goodman really does thrive on her image of an outspoken revolutionary. If she became the mainstream, she wouldn't be able to revolt against anything. Chomsky really knows what he's talking about within the sphere of his expertise: linguistics. Everything else he has written is worth about as much as Rush Limbaugh, probably even less than that.
No, the fact is that Amy Goodman and Noam Chomsky thrive on their anti-establishment status. I have no doubt that they have performed remarkable feats of investigative journalism. I would be very surprised to find a single report they have done in the past 4 years or so about anything besides how much Bush and the Republicans suck.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Wealth is never created or destroyed? I thought you had a point for a second, but it turns out you're just a statist who doesn't understand where wealth comes from. When a cookie gets created from Milk, butter and flour, wealth is created. When a building burns down to its ashes, wealth gets destroyed.
There is more to debate, but you're a fool who is not worth my time.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
For a short time, you profited from it. Your stocks did well in the 90s. Your house price did well in the 00s. Then the stock bubble burst and now the housing bubble's bursting, too.
Suddenly you aren't so sure about your job or your kids' future. You know people it's already happened to. You've heard the predictions out of NYU: job losses to range from 50k to 100,000 per month in the coming recessionary post-bubble economy...
Or maybe you're already one of the hundreds of thousands gutted from your job so that CEOs and shareholders could profit more. Maybe you're wondering when you'll see the "creative" side of all that creative destruction they preach at you from Fox and the WSJ.
The crime: it doesn't have to be like this. But as long as you take no stand, our plutocrats are more than happy to fuck you.
The rest of the world benefits from lower IT costs. Same as they benefit from lower manufacturing costs, lower food costs, lower service costs, etc.. And yes, capitalism is about getting the most cost efficient producers. You have been exporting that for decades, don't cry now it comes back to bite you.
Nothing wrong with being critical when a situation deserves criticism. If you really have read Chomsky you'd know he thinks Clinton sucks as well for bombing Serbia and for the sanctions against Iraq. I'm pretty sure Amy Goodman thinks the same. The Republican Democrat dichotomy is really a false one. When looked at from a geopolitical perspective there is hardly an angstrom of difference between them and in fact Clinton killed ten times as may Iraqis with the cruel sanctions as Bush killed in his pointless war. Further I'd vote for an isolationist like Pat Buchanan before I voted for a war monger like Hilary Clinton. While it's easy to smear people along the Dem Repig lines so favored by our vacuous MSM, the real world is more complicated than that.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
You make some grand assumptions here.
.com boom or post .com boom more enlightening."
.com era was filled with overblown everything-IT, as you admit. How would comparing today's market with a "bubble" market be an indication of anything? We already know the market today is a lot less then it was in 1999. I believe what's enlightening is the fact that five years after the big downward spiral, we're still not any better then when the IT market "crashed." While companies and the stock market is doing pretty darned well, IT salaries and job openings are stagnating. What does that tell you?
"I personally would find figures from either the pre
I don't understand. The
"A lot of those lost jobs were people who had no business being in the industry to begin with"
Unlike you, I don't think anyone "deserves" to be here anymore then you or I. If they studied up and got a job, more power to them. It's true that there was a lot of low-talent people in high paying positions, but those people are filtering out of the system, for the simple fact that there's no jobs. Unfortunately, it's not just affecting these people, it's affecting everyone.
"I call that you being overpaid, not a corporation being greedy."
That's a spin. So, you think that my college education, a decade in the field, countless projects completed and heavy experience shouldn't mean I should command a decent salary? I ain't making no $100k a year, and I consider myself very good at what I do. And, there's not all that many people at my experience level. I am comfortable with my salary at this stage in my life - but why should I accept a big pay cut because there's talent-less workers in India that will work for peanuts because it's better then starving? Real competitive..
The Dells and Microsofts of the world have enough money to keep those jobs in the good old US of A. Or the UK or other european countries for that matter (Outsourcing isn't just a USA problem, but many other countries aren't just rolling over for big business ot make more money.)
You're saying I should take a paycut so that the CEO's and board members can make an extra million bucks this year.
"So yeah, we have 2-3 well fed happy Indians for the price of one fat diabetic American."
You should try to get a reporter position with Fox News. Here's a newsflash: Not all IT workers are fat and diabetic! Are you?
"Globalization is working, we just have to find a way to make ourselves more competitive"
Tell unto us this wisdom you share, because nobody else knows what the hell to do about it. Besides, of course, putting measures in place to stop the rapid outsourcing that we're experiencing.
"I choose not to just sit around and get upset that my cheese is being moved."
So, what are you doing about it? Nothing, because you think it's going to be just fine, apparently. Well, I choose not to accept the fact that too many American jobs are being outsourced to keep big business big business.
"I don't think the impact is that bad or will get much worse."
You haven't lost your job, or had to take a $20k paycut then. We'll see how you opinion changes when you realize that all the IT jobs are gone, and you have to mop floors because you've invested your career in IT so much that you don't have too many other skills.
Like the poster replied to you, if things DO get worse, your savings might not amount to much.
Did you even read this article?
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
You gave me two new vocabulary words in "wage arbitrage" a very succinct formulation for what I've been trying to say for years.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
I actually have less problems with trade with Japan than I have with most globalization. Here is why, Japan DOES pay their workers a fair wage, and thus they don't exert nearly as much downward pressure on U.S. wages as trade with India or China does. My problem isn't with trade per sae it's with large corporations using wage arbitrage to drive wages down leading to suffering everywhere while they pocket the tremendous profits from this suffering and then once the bonanza is over they move into the next country without regulations to protect their workers, rinse, repeat. It's quite literally a process of looting the world. Trade with Japan leads to less of this arbitrage pressure on U.S. wages and environmental regulations. That's why one of the sayings of the anti-globalization movement is fair trade, not free trade. Fair trade is pretty much possible with Japan (though they ought to stop whaling), not with China, India, Vietnam, Thailand, etc.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
I don't agree at all. The Labour party is in power still due to the charisma of their current leader and the incompetence of the Tories and the Liberals. As for the economy going well, the jury is still out. Massive public spending pledges, record levels of personal debt, stratospheric house prices and interest rates creeping up are not a good mix.
Offshoring: Carried out mainly for cost savings. Usually the qualified UK staff are made redundant first. Won't name names.
BTW the dole thing was a joke, but it may not be in a few years time...
ROFL!
Wealth is always relative, and never absolute.
Wow, that's deep.
Thus, it's impossible for wealth to be created or for it to disappear in absolute terms
Good lord, you have this all figured out, don't you?
I'd maybe go deeper into it and explain why wealth is relative
Awww, do you mean I'm going to have to do without your explanation? That's entirely too bad. I was actually looking forward to explain to me how wealth is like water, but I guess I'll have to forgo that piece of wisdom. Hey, at least someone modded you up!
but you're a dipshit who is not worth my time
Wow, them's some mighty big words there chump. Tell you what - when you grow up I promise we'll talk about macroeconomic theory all day long. In the meantime, do us all a favor and FOAD. Thanks!
Indeed. Many US professions and industries erect artificial barriers. Drug companies and the medical field is natorious. Maybe we could compete with the 3rd world if we didn't have to pay 1st world medical bills. If other groups can have some protection, why can't we get some? Why should IT be the odd man out in the US?
Table-ized A.I.
I was a little unsure what exactly you were advocating in the original post, and now I know. While your arguments highlight the theoretical positive effects of deflation, the empirical evidence of the negative effects of deflation on an economy tends to sway me towards the side of inflationary policies. Most notably, Japan's ~15 years of deflation, during which their economy has not done terribly well.
f _deflation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation#Examples_o
If you have one, I'd love to see any examples of deflation working to boost a country's economy.
Decimate means to reduce by a tenth. Does that mean globalization is reducing US IT jobs by a tenth?
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
>>I remember from one of my early economics classes that the only wealth-producing endeavours known are agriculture and >>manufacturing - the rest of economic activity just shuffles that wealth around. AMEN, brother. Many people think wealth == money. Not true. Money is simply a claim to the acquisition of wealth. Wealth is *stuff*. Most people do not understand this. And having a service performed for you does not give you more wealth, because that service is consumed instantaneously whilst being rendered. Service is simply the manipulation, use, and transfer of wealth (again, i.e., STUFF). Keynes and his lackeys had it all wrong. The symbol economy is not the real economy.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Which brings me back to my earlier point, which was that Goodman and Chomsky are anti-establishment. I geuss it comforts me to know that they are not just anti-conservative (though with conservative being relative, Clinton and Bush are both conservative compared to Goodman and Chomsky).
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
And what's wrong with being anti-establishment if the establishment makes errors and commits crimes they ought to be called on it right? The whole purpose of the media or 4th estate is to be a check on government power, i.e. the establishment:
... does not... the parliamentary debate go on... in a far more comprehensive way, out of Parliament altogether? Edmund Burke said that there were three Estates in Parliament, but in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a fourth Estate more important than they all." [1]
"Thomas Carlyle in in On Heroes and Hero Worship (1841) writes,
This was not Carlyle's first use of the term. If, indeed, Burke did make the statement Carlyle attributes to him, Burke's remark may have been in the back of Carlyle's mind when he wrote in his French Revolution (1837), "A Fourth Estate, of Able Editors, springs up." [2] In this context, the other three estates are those of the French States-General; the church, the nobility and the commoners, although in practice the latter were usually represented by the middle class bourgeoisie."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_estate
A pro establishment media is not doing job in a democracy. Sadly most of our media from "liberal" CNN/NYTs/PBS to the right Rush Limbaugh/Fox is not doing it's job.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Why not tariff goods from China? Are you in favor of buying goods made by unpaid slaves in Chinese prisons? This use of slave labor drives down wages and ethical standards in the whole market as everyone has to compete against a country that has "free" (as in beer) labor. This creates terrible incentives to drive down out standard of living here in an effort to make our products competitive with those produced by slaves. Is that really the way we want to go, abrogating all morality in favor of the market? Why not tell the Chinese to piss off and find our own new market equilibrium outside the corrupting influence of having to compete against goods made by people earning slave wages? Or are we willing to sacrifice ALL of our ethics to the great god of the market? If we are really so corrupt as to sacrifice all our values to the market why did we bother to end slavery here, work for a 40 hour work week, etc? Globalization is forcing us to chose which of our values is most important, treating people in a humane fashion and working withing a sustainable environment, or raw productivity. Thus far we have chosen raw productivity which IMO is an immoral choice. How dare the right talk about "moral clarity" when it endorses buying slave produced goods?
One final question for the pro globalists why is the market exempt from the moral strictures that bind us in all other actions from such things human bondage?
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Little correction here: I'm not christian nor any other believer of any god. For Darwinists ... well, such label maybe may be applied to me.
But back to the point which you brought to our attention which I did not address in the original post:
Well, yes, I prety much support such idea.
But with "little" addition: Such people should get help. And they should get it from those who are successfull (and willing to help).
I'm against any "help" which is forced upon people under the threat of police and jail (a.k.a. you do not pay taxes, you go to jail).
People should be able to choose whom and how they help. Because one can not help everybody. And everyone has different idea about what a good help is. ... well, they'll be remembered and helped accordingly when they'll be in need - i.e. maybe they'll be helped anyway, but that may change their attitude even if their upbringing did not.)
(And those who can help but do not
IMO, one should first help his family. When there are still some resources left, one should choose on whom else and how it is spent.
I'm totaly against my taxes being used to help people I know nothing about in a ways I do not approve of. If I want to help, I help either directly the people who need it or I find (or in extreme cases found) a charity, which will help others in a way I prefer.
Why such attitude? Well, it has roots in what we call "unemployment insurance" in my country: if you're employed, you must pay it. If you're unemployed, you are eligible to receive some money from state for a while - supposedly to bridge the time 'till you find a new job. Problem is, a lot of people clearly do not want to work and I think they are not eligible to get such money. But they are getting them. Same with "social insurance" (in rougth terms same as "unemployment i." but you get less money but the period of time is not limited). 1)
So, if I advance my "proposition" from the "local" to the "global", then IMO those unsuccessfull in the global market will have some family or friends or neighbours or in worst case some charity, who will be able and willing to help them to survive. And problem solved.
side note 1) :
Anonymous and state sanctioned help plus big taxes spent on who knows what are IMO the reason why a lot of people do not actively help others by themselves - they either a) think they alredy helped by paying taxes, or b) do not have enough resources left to help, or something like that. Then, at best, they drop few cents onto some massive charity or into the hat of some beggar. (of course I wrote "a lot of people are ..." which can also be understood by some as "I am ..." :)
So if I'm right about that state sanctioned help, than a lot of people are in reality libertarians, at least in this special case, according to article by Harry Browne:
(except of course in reality it may be other way around: you do not want others to point a gun at you if you do not contribute "enough" - that's the more selfish and "darwinian?" point of view :) .
hany
You do have a point.
I compared wealth to water and stated, that it has a natural tendency to level even.
I still think it is quite appropriate analogy but I have to clarify:
There is a perception problem and/or problem of physics on small scales.
Perception problem:
A lot of people in poor countries know, that ... say ... USA is a rich country (with all the cars, TVs, DVDs, fat food, ...).
So they try to participate (in some cases even exploit) that wealth thus distributing this wealth more broadly thus leveling it.
But in case of rich people it is harder to properly assess their wealth thus they are better able to hide it thus this welth is not distributed that much.
So it may be something like Matrix: there is no wealth (no spoon) so rich people can partialy use that to lure away potential candidates for redistribution. :)
Or from other angle, problem of physics at small scales:
There is this surface tension of the water which at small scales produces some quite strange effects.
So same with wealth owned by individuals (as opposed to countries). Individuals may be much better at keeping their wealth together.
hany
I have a sincere request for moderators to mod the AC up at least to +1.
I may not agree with him (not implying I do not :) but certainly one does not see clear but not straight abusive comment from AC too often.
Thank you in advance.
hany
you make an untenable assumptions:
untalented programmers in India willing to work for peanuts: they pay for a good broadband link a lot more in "India/other outsourcing destinations" than you do in US, gasoline is more expensive AFAIK, office space is at about the same price or more expensive, computer gear is more expensive there (in some places much more expensive due to taxation, unless you bring it from US of A hidden in your luggage -- and let me see how are you going to bring a SAN in your luggage), shuttling management from mainland USA to "generic outsourcing destination" on a regular basis offsets a lot of the gains you make by hiring less expensive techs etc. When you compute in the extra costs added by outsourcing, you might get to a greater number than what you would pay for a local tech.
Outsourcing did not begin after 2001: it began in 1998, when the pool of H*** visas could not cover the deficit of local techs. Outsourcing happens not because the prices are smaller some place else: outsourcing happens because, while there might be a few unemployed techs in each of the US towns (making the total sum reach tens of thousands or more), they are not willing to relocate there where the jobs are available. As an antrepreneur, you cannot move just one job there where you can hire people: you either the team for an entire project, or you kill the project and fire the extra techs anyway.
You lose jobs not because the companies are greedy, but because of HR issues. You want to stop losing jobs ? Remove the limits on immigration.
So then global warming is a problem caused by too little freedom of individuals? What an utter nonsense.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the dot.com bubble burst start around March/April 2000? I distinctly remember being in college at the time, which narrows down the timeframe considerably since I dropped out at the end of the Spring 2000 semester. Jan 2001 sounds like the right timeframe that the dot.com burst started bleeding over into telecom stocks. YHOO (Yahoo!), for instance, lost about 85% of its value over the course of 2000, and Lucent was down about 75% from its peak by Oct 2000.
So, given that, is Jan 2001 really such a bad time to use as a comparison point?
Range Voting: preference intensity matters
Offshoring has problems in a lot of cases.
However, if you can carve yourself out a productive niche you are very good at, you can make a good living. I relocated to a fairly inexpensive part of North America (Atlantic Canada) with good airline access. My house cost $50k USD for a 2500sq. ft space. I set up a very nice lab, and have two employees.
Because of my near-nonexistant overhead, I bid on small embedded control and embedded linux development jobs. Being in Canada eases a lot of problems, and we're only a few hours away by plane in most cases if the situtation calls for a site visit.
Most interesting of all is we have actually been involved in reverse-outsourcing; companies in India have come to us for help.
The US is supposed to be the most free market in the world; use that advantage to carve out a niche.
..don't panic
How about the United States? The second example on your source links to "The Great Deflation":
I'd say that counts as "deflation working to boost a country's economy." The "negative effect" in Great Britain was probably the result of a less downwardly-flexible price structure, resulting from merchantilist policies and stubborn labor unions.[1] Also, as it's described in the linked Wikipedia page, I'd say that the falling price levels in Japan were the result of (prior) inflationary policies (leading to the equity and real-estate bubbles) and centralized fractional-reserve banking. In fact, this case sounds a lot like the Great Depression: it followed an inflationary boom, which the government and central bank attempted (and failed) to prolong by further inflating the money supply and cutting interest rates. There were two opposing forces active simultaneously: the deflationary correction to the prior inflationary boom economy, and the attempts if their government and central bank to counter the deflation through further inflation. You are blaming the former influence for their economic troubles; I would blame the latter.
Hong Kong appears to have been very similar, with deflation following extensive prior inflationary policies: "In October 1997, the Hong Kong dollar, which was pegged at 7.8 to the US dollar, came under speculative pressure since Hong Kong's inflation rate was significantly higher than that of the US for years" (emphasis added). Whenever any commodity or currency becomes overvalued (through inflation, for example) the eventual result is a downward correction in its price (i.e. deflation). The downward price correction is the cure, not the disease. Furthermore, the effects of falling prices in an undistorted economy, in which there is no overvaluation, cannot be directly compared with the effects of corrective deflation. The former need not have any ill effect, real or perceived, whereas the latter inevitably exposes the malinvestments made during the inflationary boom.
Further reading:
[1] Downwardly-inflexible wage rates were also the reason given to justify later inflation in the United States. It was thought that inflation would fool the labor union into accepting falling real wages as long as monetary wages did not decrease. It didn't take long, however, for the unions to notice the discrepency and institute inflation-indexed wages, thus nullifying any advantage this approach may have offered.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
I think this qeustion has finally come to it end.
It really more of looking around and realizing "What IS made in the U.S.A. anymore?"
At which point you begin the realize the true horrors of the situation. For years while textiles and manufacturing floated overseas we were constantly told to educate to get nice white collor IT type brainiac job. NOW those jobs go overseas even easier than manufacturing did. There precious few of anything actually made here anymore.
So now kids have to choose between 6-12 years of college because only an advanced degree will get you one of the few high paying jobs left. It simply NOT economically viable to PAY for that much school anymore. My kids will be better served to start their own lawncare business.
So whats left? Government support jobs? The Military? Hi tech? Lawncare? Hollywood?
Hey AweSomeO, give us another movie plot!
They Live, We Sleep
I'm not sure I completely agree -- at least not with the idea that being a "self-made man" isn't possible in many places besides the U.S.
In the past, I would have agreed.
But considering the increasing loss of our individual rights and freedoms while other countries experiment more with the idea of a "free market", I'm not sure anymore. The successful entrepreneur type can thrive anywhere, really. Even if the country he/she lives in is dirt poor, technologies like the Internet enable sales and marketing world-wide for minimal cost.
Ten years from now, major software companies will be getting big handouts to train people to become SWEs because there will be a lack of qualified individuals and we need to stay a world class competitor in computers. The other day, I went to an interview at a major computer corporation. During the interview, the company told me that they (the company) gets (from the government) $15K/year/employee to stay competative. When this is done in the Soviet Union or Japan, our elected officials would be raising hell. Well, this all stinks of state sponced capitalism. Think of the imminent domain laws passed in NYC. Basically if a quasi govt corp (e.g. Trump) wants to expand its large facility and your own the property adjacent, they can buy you out for peanuts. Simiarly, note that the NY Stock Exchange pays no taxes to NYC because it creates "jobs". Why should I pay taxes; I create jobs for the subway system, the construction industry, the food service industry. This reminds me of NYC and how Julieanni's NYC redevelopment program was going to save NYC. In 2002, there was a lot of legistation about the commuter tax. Basically, for the privilage of working, I was going to be taxed 10%, which would be given to my employer to keep jobs in NYC. Well, at the same time, I was reading an article in the NYT about how a worker in communist China would have to bribe is local boss with a 10% kickback. Well, it seems that we have beat them at their own game. We all believe in laisse affair economics, expect when it comes to having the gov't bail out big business. If NYC is ecomomically unviable, then we should let the NYC ecomony fail. Wasn't this the advice Bush Sr. had for Eastern Europe. I think it should go for the US as well. The point of this discuess is that whenever our jobs are being outsourced to China or India, our gov't is quick to enact legistation to facilitate it because it is good for business. However when big business is in trouble, the taxpayer get footed with the bill. Remember the big bail out in 1992 of investors in Mexico. Half a trillion dollars of our money to fund this bad investment. When the hell am I going to get money for the lose of my job due to outsourcing?
I'd like to see all the loudmouths try to compete with cheap currency citizens on rentacoder.com with the Chinese buying dollars year after year.
http://economist.com/ talked against this practice (altho with some progress they wrote about the other side) for some time.
If you need text styles to communicate then you don't have a message.
random src.
If you need text styles to communicate then you don't have a message.
Well..
When a study funded by IBM reports "increased need for Software Engineers" and the next page over you read that IBM is laying of 7,000 american SE's and hiring 7,000 foreign SE's, you have to wonder.
IT is *hard*. IT requires *constant* retraining.
Why should a person do that when they can get an easier degree that pays the same money (and has the potential to pay lots more) and has more stability?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I didn't say it's not possible anywhere else, just that it is still possible hear, and widely acknowledged as the place to be for it to happen.
Cheap storage VM.
On the positive side, we've managed to totally hose up India's economy by sending work over there. Housing prices are quickly outpacing wages over there, granted, ~$6.00 American per hour is the going rate for (good)software engineers. An apartment in Mumbai can go for $1,200 American or more. Yay economically driven assimilation!
Recently the Economist did a large report on Globalization and the effects on economies. They reached several of the same conclusions, but had differing reasons for them. Across the board they see that Globalization has improved many significant economic factors in both the 1st world and developing world. However, those increases are NOT being passed on to the middle class - there is no appreciable increase in real wages nor increase in jobs.
So where is the money going? In short, to the top 1%. In the last 10 years the revolution in worker efficiency brought about by computers and technoloy in general has resulted in little to no increase in wages for the middle class but HUGE leaps in profits for those at the top.
Bottom line, globalization isn't the problem. It is proven that implemented correctly, it can lift both economies. The problem has been with that implementation. As usual, those with the money and the power use their influence to tap it before it gets to us working slobs and thus grow richer.
"Trying is only the first step towards failure." - Homer
The difference is that the Greens in Germany took the time to establish themselves as more than the hippies who used to lie across railroad tracks Blocking Nuclear waste. They did the grunt work and are now taken seriously. Germans trust that the Greens are serious progressive and just loudmouth radicals with no real plans. American Greens haven't grasped this reality yet.
BTW, I'm a right winger, but I tried and true progressive and former Green Party member. I know of what I speak.
Are the Greens disorganized? Yep, and it's sad. But what other alternative do we have if we want to see sustainable decentralist humanist policies that aren't in the old left big government mold? When push comes to shove I don't trust Libertarians on economic issues even though I respect their anti-state, anti empire, pro freedom positions.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?