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Dell Abandons Its Customization Roots
LiveFreeOrDieInTheGo writes "Dell intends to scale back its build-to-order service model, while increasing sales of prepackaged systems. The goal: $3B USD savings by 2011. The downside: customers expect Dell to build-to-order. The deeper downside: Dell will outsource more production and assembly."
Dell changes its name to "Dull"
Will this affect their offering of pre-loaded Ubuntu systems? There isn't a huge market for them, unfortunately. But I remember all the old Dell commercials - the main thing they had going for them was customization. I guess they're just becoming an entrenched monopoly like IBM or Microsoft, now.
I'm a fan of Dell kit, but when HP hae beaten you in sales for 6 successive quarters - as stated in the article - limiting the amount of customizing may save you cash, but it isn't going to get more people buying your kit is it?
The 'fix' doesn't seem to be the solution to the highlighted problem... sure it'll save you money in the short term, but no gains in share there at all. Less customization is never going to make a punter go "oh, I'll buy that because it's not as customizable".
Add to that the outsourcing of manufacture and it all looks like a world of hurt waiting to happen.
*baffled*
When companies seek to recover these kinds of profits, they cut something more important.
Their reputation.
Most likely, they will move their call centers out of India and into a lower paying 3rd world country. The lower techs will be given even less latitude to help fix problems. Along with that, they will reduce access (and numbers) of higher up support, along with "new policies" of the 'not our fault' game.
They will obviously cut their unprofitable programs, such as their IdeaStorms website, all Linux support for low and middle tiers, along with the cheaper customizable options. They will leave customizing available for the higher packages, as all businesses cater to the big spenders.
Yes, our system is based upon a race to the bottom, but depending how you get there means if you survive or not. That really depends on how their deals with Microsoft go, as they are parasites upon MS.
I think I may be looking to move to HP or IBM. While the last time I ordered HP, it was a room full of boxes for five servers and some drive shelves, I do believe they went into the custom built model in the last few years.... Hmmm..
Ubuntu is just another disk image like windows xp, or vista.
Are you high?
Dell already outsources just about all their manufacturing. All that will happen here is that now they can streamline the supply pipeline because they only ship x different configs instead of 100x. Less work at the (already) outsourced supplier/contract manufacturer, less work on the order fulfillment side.
How it's going to save 3 billion, I don't know. I think they're aiming a little high. Expect support to be outsourced to even crappier Indian call centers....
Be thankful there isn't a deeper deeper downside!
I work for a small (about 100 person) company with a heterogeneous environment (Linux, OS X, Windows). In the past few years the IT team has settled on Dell for quick turnaround of ordering customized systems and consistency (the devil you know). They order Dell laptops, desktops and servers. It has pretty much turned into a "Dell house." The quick turnaround on customized orders is extremely important to meet developer needs. If Dell makes custom ordering take longer or involves increased hassle, I would bet that our IT management would start looking into other vendors.
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
Outsourcing lowers the GDP of our country, reducing our buying power. What logically happens is jobs are removed from our country.
Now, tell me how people can afford to buy stuff if they have no job, or one that pays 1/2 as much?
I just bought a Dell, specifily because I could customize it. I needed a high end video card on a 15' platform and suspect most computer professionals have specific hardware requirements. Without the option to build the system ( which all ready has pretty limited customization options and 80% is up sell pitching anyway ) they would be removing something that gives them an advantage in a crowded commodity market. On the other hand, it creates opportunity for new manufacturers
e.g.
1. We will cease customizations through our "Dell Home" program but will continue with it in our "Dell Large Business" program.
2. We will cease customizations for our "Dimension" line but continue customizations for our "Optiplex" and "PowerEdge" lines.
2. We will continue supporting some customizations (e.g. RAM and HD) but cease support for other customizations (e.g. anti-virus software).
3. We will increase the price on customized models and decrease the price on prepackaged models in order to reshape demand.
Ahh...but you see that's 5-15 years down the road. The shareholders (e.g. uber-rich trading firms) all want to meet this years or this QUARTER's financial targets.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Ahem.
"Why can't everyone just be straight with me?"
"Because we live in a bendy world, dear."
So, remind me again what I can now get from Dell that I couldn't get from any other manufacturer? Nothing? Oh well then I might just take my business elsewhere. Hrmph!
A friend of mine just bought a Dell XPS laptop because he loved how configurable it was. I bet there are plenty more people who agree. It would make sense for them to cut customization on the more basic models (Inspiron, Dimension) but keep it for the gaming models. As for outsourcing, I just hope their quality doesn't degrade. Right now I'm using a 9 year old Dell desktop that has been chugging along just fine the whole time.
"The deeper downside: Dell will outsource more production and assembly."
Which will result in lower prices which is good for consumers. How is this the deeper downside? Why are Americans, which have one of the highest standards of living in the world, more deserving of these jobs than people in other countries?
Creative Demolition
Well, if you want to talk about 15 years down the road you might as well mention that in 15 years all the demand from our outsourcing will make the Chinese as well off as us, forcing them to charge as much, cancelling out any benefit of outsourcing there.
You're a little capitalist, and you don't even realize it. Want all the jobs to stay in our country? That's greed; the same thing driving those shareholders to make more money. Unfortunately, whining doesn't get much done, so we'll all have to work really hard and offer some kind of advantage to keep the jobs. It's called "competing".
Our system isn't a race to the bottom. It is a race to what people want. People want computers at the cheapest possible price and they do not care about tech centers or even support.
Outsourcing is a good thing for the economy, not a bad thing. If Ford did not outsource, for example, it would have to make everything from the drills for the oil, the refineries for the gasoline, the machines to make the steel and the chips and the plastic, really, recreate the entire economy and in doing so lose the efficiencies that come with shared costs. We can lament outsourcing of some function at a company, to make ourselves feel good, but, if there were no outsourcing, there would be no cars, no tvs, computers, or any of the millions of products, in all their choice and complexity, because those products would not exist without outsourcing.
We ourselves, each and everyone one of us, outsource all of the time. Go ahead can say Dell is terrible because they outsourced a call center to India or the Philippines, but we outsource every time we use a stapler or a printer, or for that matter, even a computer. How many developers recommend using MySql or Postgres or even Linux over some solution developed in-house. That is outsourcing too, and without that outsourcing, it is very likely that there would be less jobs and more economic stagnation. Few products have the margin or merit to justify the creation of a custom database server or operating system solely for them.
In that vein, outsourcing a call center might actually result in -better- customer service. If a place in India has 200,000 people answering the phones, they are going to get the economies of scale that even Dell could not possibly get.
Outsourcing actually -creates- opportunity. Any time you see more than one company engaged in a similar practice, that is an opportunity for a product or a service than can be outsourced to someone else, and that person might as well be you. If outsourcing did not exist, then, there would be no opportunity, the companies that could have benefited from outsourcing would stagnate, and products would remain more expensive, rather than less.
Bottom line is, outsourcing is a good deal, rather than a bad once, and the dramatic increase in the standard of living in much of the world - from the skyscrapers in China, the surge of wealth in India, to the internet of south korea and the massive works in Dubai, the world is getting richer and better off for it. Even in the USA, where outsourcing has been the subject of much debate, everyone has benefited from outsourcing.
This is my sig.
I'll see your megalopolis with one divorce lawyer, and raise you a demand for alimony.
Ah yes, but you see, working for your living instead of getting the money by playing the stock market or owning Dell is so Middle-ages, and people who depend on it should really move on or die off. By removing menial jobs from the country the Big Boys are actually helping people to transition to pure royalties-based industry, and get the money the way it's meant to be had - by sitting in leather armchairs and smoking Cuban cigars while reading the stock market reports, not something as vulgar as working in an office.
(If you don't see Alien-grade sarcasm dripping from the above words, get yourself new glasses.)
-- Sig down
Thats exactly it: nobody with power cares for the long term maluses by strongly pushing outsourcing.
As long as the quarter looks good, its golden. Another question would be this: Why do the uber rich trading firms want to only see short term gains, and not longer term ones?
What financial disadvantage would there be if companies developed new things and technology, and continued further research going ahead up to 30-100 years? Ma Bell did that and we ended up with the transistor, lasers, Unix, C...
not everybody buying a PC is a first time buyer, take me & lots of others, i recently bought a new LCD monitor (wide screen) that can do 1680x1050 and i don't need another monitor, i already have a decent keyboard & mouse, if anything all i want is a new motherboard & CPU combo, but sometimes i dont want to build my own but a new tower with a great motherboard & CPU sounds great providing the motherboard has a Linux compatible chipset (especially ethernet and audio) and upgradeable - PCIe is a must nowadays, i search around at newegg & tigerdirect but i dont always want to build another = Hey Dell! show me something that makes buying a pre-assembled system from you just as good (maybe better) that what i can get from newegg or tigerdirect, if Dell can do that then they would have captured a chunk of the market share that made newegg & tigerdirect successful...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
They can't. In the words of Marriner Eccles: Guess where we are right now?
We are all just people.
Until a year ago, the workstations everyone of my agency's employees used
came from Dell.
Before Dell (in the early 1990's), we had problems with companies like Micron and Compaq.
Now, for a couple years, we have had problems with Dell; eg,
my computer is on its fourth motherboard in as many years,
and I know if I leave my computer on 24 hours a day
that its motherboard will burnout.
Dell has replaced every one of our agencies motherboards on our Dell computers,
but they keep burning out.
For our 1000 personnel, over the last year,
we no longer buy Dell, but buy HP workstations.
My experience is that customizing a Dell always costs an arm and three legs. Upgrading RAM costs twice what it would to buy retail, and please don't tell me that a 320 GB hard drive costs $100 more than a lowly $160 GB model. They make money hand over fist when small/medium business purchase customized machines (I've seen co-workers add on $1000 in not-so-necessary option), but the company has a much harder time with price-sensitive customers. I've purchased three Dells for home use over the past six years, and in each case I waited until they offered an extremely good deal and bought a minimally configured system and added my own memory, second hard drive and video card.
Dell has been losing ground against other manufacturers, and one often sees off-the-shelf machines at Best Buy that offer better value and immediate availability. Part of the reason is that more and more buyers are opting for notebook PCs that are made in China alongside machines from HP, Acer and countless other competitors. In essence, Dell adds an extra layer of complexity to their manufacturing process by allowing customization of these laptops to occur once they arrive in North America. In the meantime, Acer is able to ship preconfigured systems directly to retail outlets without additional expense. The days of the big beige box are coming to an end, and much of Dell's business advantage centered on getting people to buy overpriced (and often unnecessary) upgrades that simply aren't feasible in a notebook form factor.
Outsourcing lowers the GDP of our country
Can you please explain how that is so? Reading countless economics text books about the benefits of division of labor have confused me.
I've bought several Dell's in the past, and been happy with the driver support and things
My latest purchase is about a year-old Inspiron E1705 with a GeForce 7900GS, C2D, 2GB RAM.
Every Single pre-selected system I've ever seen of theirs doesn't work for me. I have strange needs - I don't need a 600GB hard-drive, that's what my GigE is for. I don't need a whopping-huge screen because I need a faster processor. I don't need 3GB ram installed because I need a faster processor.
Basically, I order a system built for what I need it for. I don't want to (and haven't had to) pay for things I don't use. If they change that, I guess I'll need to go HP... anybody else have suggestions?
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Not a chance; not with the population they have. Maybe in a century, but fifteen years? That's ridiculous. There are millions upon millions of people in China (and India, and quite a few other places) who have grown up and are used to far cheaper standards of living than the average person in the U.S. That translates into dramatically lower labor costs for the foreseeable future, since they're going to be willing to work for less. Someone who remembers life in a mud-and-thatch hut on a rice paddy is probably going to have a markedly different bar for 'success' than someone who grew up in the U.S.'s heyday and expects to be able to do better than that.Well, if you want to talk about 15 years down the road you might as well mention that in 15 years all the demand from our outsourcing will make the Chinese as well off as us, forcing them to charge as much, canceling out any benefit of outsourcing there.
That's a great thought but it's a little lacking in substance. What do you propose the U.S. ought to specialize in? I'm quite honestly interested, and I've asked this question over and over to a lot of fairly intelligent people and have yet to get a satisfactory answer back. I'm not sure there is one. Do we try to go the Neal Stephenson route? Music, movies, microcode, and pizza? Other parts of the world are chipping into 'software' already, and there's no reason to think that we have some kind of automatic, natural, competitive advantage in any of those.You're a little capitalist, and you don't even realize it. Want all the jobs to stay in our country? That's greed; the same thing driving those shareholders to make more money. Unfortunately, whining doesn't get much done, so we'll all have to work really hard and offer some kind of advantage to keep the jobs. It's called "competing".
About the only thing we do have here in the U.S., at least at the moment, is a hell of a consumer market. Until we figure out exactly how we're going to keep ourselves going, I don't think it's necessarily illogical to want to carefully manage access to the one thing of value we have left. I'm not proposing or advocating for complete isolationism, just a careful analysis of exactly who we're allowing access, and to which markets, and what the effects are.
More bluntly, I don't see any reason why the U.S. ought to open any market to foreign competition unless there's a clear indication that opening it results in a net benefit to the United States. Now, it may be that fully-open markets are the best (or least-worst) policy for Americans in general, but I haven't seen any of the politicians pushing for open markets really going out of their way to demonstrate this. And from where I'm sitting, it looks a lot like we're just letting ourselves go bankrupt on imports without much of a thought towards the long-term sustainability of this situation.
Even if by restricting imports it increased the cost of non-essential goods to consumers, but in doing so bought us a few more years or decades of solvency in which to work on our comparative advantage (or for the Chinese and other developing markets to bring their labor force's standards of living, and thus costs, closer to par), I can't see why that would necessarily be bad.
National governments have a mandate to serve the best interests of the people they represent. If free trade and open borders are demonstrably the best path, I'd be more supportive, but right now they look suspiciously like a path that leads off a cliff.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
One of my first computers was a Dell. A 4MHz PC-AT that had a turbo button that could send it to a blazing 8MHz! It was a fine machine, and I never had a single problem with it for several years. Of course Dell was one of the most expensive PC's you could buy, second only to an "original" IBM machine. However since the mid 90's I have heard nothing but complaints from Dell owners - apparently they sacrificed quality when they decided to drop the price. There's no reason at all for an electronic device to fail for YEARS after the initial burn in period, unless it's poorly designed or made with dodgy components (or your electric company sucks or you get a lightning strike). Yet most Dell owners I know, including the computer lab at my alma mater - regretted their choice.
Meh, I wish them luck redesigning their business, but the only people who buy "Dell" nowadays are the ones swayed by the media hype.
I still build my own PC's, ever since the day of the 386, and have never had ANY problems.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Many former and current Motorolans will wonder if this has anything to do with Ron Garriques joining Dell. Maybe he'll run Dell into the ground just like he did at Motorola.
the USA has consistently signed trade agreements then procceded to break them and refuse to stick to what it's signed.
While i'm all for open trade, because it brings wealth to everyone, I would be super careful of signing anything with the USA if i was in charge.
Oh and can we please drop the retarded myth that when a job is sourced over seas that persons buying power vapourises. it's just not the case, and has been proven many times over since the industrial revolution.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I have 3 Dells in my household, as well as a couple at work. I pretty much run on Dell everywhere. I am writing this on a Ubuntu Dell. I mean, their support is craptastic, like everyone elses. But I have been running Dell for 5 years and never had any failur#64vg
******** NO_CARRIER *******
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
---Maybe you're not seeing the long term gains of outsourcing.
I understand all right. It raises the whole world out of poverty by spreading the money where labor is cheap until they're equal with everybody else. That that means for me, my generation, and my children is that it effectively lowers our wages. I dont like that, and I think its fairly easy to see why.
Selling out our ability to create is just a bad idea altogether. It weakens our military and our ability to protect us.
---Maybe you failed to consider all the new factories that the outsourcing companies will have to build to handle the increased load? And what about all the people who will get new, higher paying jobs in those factories? And what about the the standard of living increase those people and their families get because of this? Oh wait, all those people will live in a different country. Racist much?
Smart much? Cause you aren't showing it. It's called nationalism, and yes. I have it. Since our world has no real idea of free travel and migrating citizenship (what Adam Smith believed), we are bound to our country. Because of that, I will attempt to make this country good to live in, and that means having jobs and money abound.
---In that case, maybe you're forgetting the poor people in our country that will be able to afford new computers now? And what about all the money that will be saved by people/companies who buy Dells?
If the poor people worked HERE instead of over there out of our territories, they could afford to buy them now. And pray tell, dont we see what the quality is when we seek the bottom? Or do you think lead is safe for children?
---If nothing else, look at it this way: Now that Dell has fewer employees doing manual labor, they'll be able to hire more people to design new, better machines.
In actuality, they will spend more on advertising, along with paying more to their top execs. The stock prices might go up some.
consider "GDP of our country" vs "total global GDP". That's how.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Does anyone here get the same feeling that the submission is flamebait? Why is outsourcing production and assembly a necessarily bad thing, again?
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
I still don't get it.
When I, as an individual, outsource graphic design to my friend, the both of us benefit and both our 'GDPs' increase. I can focus on programming and she can focus on graphics.
If I stopped 'outsourcing' this to my friend, I'd have to learn both, spend more hours doing both pieces of work. And she'd have nothing.
Why would it be different for countries/cities/states/companies?
Hypothetical: If EVERYTHING were designed and built overseas and then brought back here and sold, who here would have enough money to buy it?
GDP = gross domestic product. Less producing = less GDP. It's an interesting conundrum. Companies think they can save money by building stuff in China. That was ALWAYS debatable but the beancounters made it look good. Now, I would wager that the cost of shipping it all back is edging up.
Let's hear it for the beancounters! Making questionable managerial decision look good through moving beans strategically from one bucket to another!
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
Those people in a different country chose a communist government that shot their economy to hell, not to mention killing millions of their best citizens in progress. Why should I prop their economy at the cost of my salary and job security when they still didn't admit any mistakes? If they don't like their standard of living, let them put their current government in jail and develop economy that allows ordinary citizens to afford locally made products rather than relying exclusively on exports. Which country is going to bail USA out of recession by outsourcing jobs to here?
See the previous AC. If you've read the BOFH stories, you know that "kit" is .uk English for "equipment".
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Can you please explain how that is so? Reading countless economics text books about the benefits of division of labor have confused me. Try at least a little harder than that.
Imagine a widget factory. The factory takes in raw materials, and produces finished widgets. The widgets are sold on the market for some price that exceeds costs, resulting in profit. The workers are paid a salary, which they can use to buy widgets. With the exception of possibly exhausting whatever raw materials are used to create the widgets, you can repeat this wealth-generating cycle forever. (I.e. it's not some sort of closed system, and it's not zero-sum; you're creating wealth by adding value via the raw-materials-to-finished-products process. There are other processes that create wealth, this is just the most obvious.)
Now, we outsource that factory to Somewhere Else, but continue to import the widgets to satisfy domestic demand, perhaps at a lower price. Now, consumers buy their widgets from Somewhere Else, meaning that wealth flows over there. At the same time, all the people who work at the widget factory are unemployed.
Do you start to see a problem here? If you can't find something else for your former widgetmakers to do, you end up just draining money out of your economy. If you have modern finance at your disposal, you can conveniently spend more wealth than you actually have, issuing debt and importing stuff; at least you can until people stop wanting to buy your debt. This isn't sustainable. Eventually you either literally run out of hard currency (the case if you use gold or something else that can't be created), or people decide to stop buying your debt. And then you have a bunch of angry, unemployed ex-widgetmakers who can't afford to buy widgets anymore. Problem.
Of course, there are cute responses to this. You could argue that this is just the way things are supposed to work -- if the widgetmakers couldn't compete, they deserved to go out of business. Fair enough, and that actually makes a certain amount of sense.
But suppose you have an entire nation of widgetmakers? An entire nation of people who have built themselves a nice lifestyle (oh, and by the way, a huge fucking quantity of nuclear weapons) for themselves, making widgets, and suddenly end up unemployed? What do you expect them to do, calmly and rationally reduce their standard of living so that they can compete better on price? I don't think so; not when they have the ability to go and take a lot of wealth via brute force.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
And that is why everything will not be designed and built overseas. The Chinese would want to sell you stuff only if they know you can pay.
What *will* be designed and built overseas is whatever that can be done cheaper.
If it costs Americans $1 to make a plastic spoon and if the Chinese can sell it for $0.98, then that will be outsourced.
The Chinese know you can pay for it (since you were spending $1 for it until now) and the Americans are better off by $0.02.
The guy who loses is the guy who actually makes the spoon for $1. He can either go do something more productive that people would willingly pay for, or he could gather a bunch of economic ignoramuses and try to force people to buy his stuff.
all you have done is grossly over simplified the whole process and picked out the little bits that suit you. the money doesn't just flow in one direction to the widget makers, the widget makers need people from widget land to show them how to build the factories and train them, they need someone to design and market the widgets for them in the first place. In short the clever widget makers who started the whole industry get to specialise at a different part of the supply chain, and don't have to spend all their time subsidising work that can be done better/cheaper else where.
if your idea's really did work, why does communism and protectionism fail?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
never seen it put so well. Oh and i'm in software developement, you know one of those key area's that's supposedly being raped by outsourcing.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Huh?
Two of my four current computers are Dell (they'd all four be except for I have one current and one retired work computer that I was required to buy from IBM) and what I loved from Dell was the ability to customize. I never see a standard configuration with the video card and RAM that I need (yet I don't want to spend a premium on Alienware with that funky desktop grill which has the added ability to give my two kids nightmares).
I can understand the economizing aspects, but I really think that Dell's going down the wrong road, abandoning what made it stand out from competitors and, instead, trying to beat HP and others by adopting their selling strategies.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
Off topic: Racism and Nationalism (and many such "isms") are the same exact idea working in the same exact manner, the only difference is the object of discrimination. So while gramatically AC's point is true, I believe the "spirit" of GP's comment stands.
On topic (hopefully!): Commercial entities' raison d'etere is to make money. If Dell is shifting from it's previous business model towards a different one, chances are that they had some financial bigwigs and tech people looking through a bunch of numbers (statistics, trends, historic behavior, etc) to make the decision. Not all decisions that we dislike or can't understand are wrong.
If they saw any money in the future for that market I'm pretty sure they would keep a brach dedicated to custom-built H/W. The fact that Dell doesn't do this tells me that it doesn't fit into the way they wish to conduct business. After all, that kind of market is comprised mostly of whiners like us slashdotters, and we (in a broad generalization) never seemed to like their offerings much.
+Raider of the lost BBS
Outsourcing also enable you to have that (relatively) cheap computer you're typing that comment on. Outsourcing also enables many small business owners that otherwise wouldn't have the capital to set up their own factories to develop and sell their own products. And outsourcing also raises wages abroad which helps create a new class of consumers that American companies can sell to if that's what you're worried about. America still has a far lower unemployment rate then many other first world countries (France, Germany, UK). You have very little to worry about.
Why exactly is that assumption false? We are creating a country of ownership of ideas and not of production. That in of itself is a loss of power if we ever have a military action against those countries of of an ally of them.
This is the time you're supposed to prove me wrong... not show me maps of "not accounting for inflation" pretty graphs. Didn't you even read the comments below the graph, or did you just go "goo goo gaga pretty"? Erik Koht poignantly said that if we were to apply EU standards of living to the USA, 40% are in poverty level.. But even that tells not the whole story.
What I would venture is happening in our country is a ever-widening gulf between those who get paid to do and those who get paid to think. Our idea is we can just outsource it and sweep it under the rig, so to say. We have jobs that routinely get paid 100k+, and then we have 35k jobs. Those are the 2 working parent family households.. Manufacturing traditionally held that role of between intellectual and manual labor that a family could progress to higher socioeconomic ladders if they so chose.
I also have been told stories by the older generation that college could be paid off each year by working 40 hr/wk on summers. No more. Instead, we have corporations that demand we all have college, even traditionally they did not require it. Now, college has turned into a sorts of a new high school in which we pay to learn what once they would train on the job.
Unless we rebuild our nation, starting with our currency, then to manufacturing, and on, I can see us economically dying to countries like China and India that have almost 2 billion between them. Even during the Cold War, the USSR only had 200m civilians. That's a drop in the bucket compared to what China and India can do.. I wonder how high the Chinese could push oil? 200$ a barrel? 300$ a barrel? Or even our worst nightmare of switching OPEC to the Euro?
Not in 15 years? You underestimate the mobility of multi national corporations, they're already complaining about wage raises in the coastal areas of China - and due to that are moving into less developed interior provinces.
Many companies now talk about a China +1 strategy, they also invest in another south-east Asian country such as Vietnam in order to hedge their bets regarding China's viability
And if you don't see why the US should open itself to foreign markets, then just maybe the fact that the US has been the one bashing free trade down everyone's throat for the last decade is reason enough.
To run away from that now you're seeing the other side of the sword is pure hypocritical bullshit.
Forgive my niavety (and spelling), but does the raise in wages you point to keep in proportion to the raise in the cost of living? because if not, you are just stacking your numbers to look good without showing the entire picture. If increase in wages DOES NOT match (proportionatly) the increase in the cost of living, it MAY be due to the reason you are disputing.
Just a late-night thought for you to consider. Also, I am not an economist and am just throwing opposing views for you to chew on.
BTW, your link is dead, perhaps slashdotted already.
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
Ok - I'll bite.
Now, we outsource that factory to Somewhere Else, but continue to import the widgets to satisfy domestic demand, perhaps at a lower price.
Good - the lower price tells you that it is more efficient to buy than to make. Or that the other guy is dumb and will go out of business soon.
Now, consumers buy their widgets from Somewhere Else, meaning that wealth flows over there.
Ah, I wasn't aware that each time I buy an apple my wealth is being transferred to the grocery store. I always thought that I got something in exchange for what I gave them. Silly me.
At the same time, all the people who work at the widget factory are unemployed.
So now, not only does the community get widgets for cheaper, they also have all these man-hours to design & build other things.
Wealth is not 'all the people working all the time'. If wealth meant that everyone always had work, then the middle ages would be the wealthiest period in the world and Africa would be the wealthiest place in the world now.
This is what's wrong with America. Instead of wondering how you can beat the Chinese, you're whining that you should get the job for no other reason than you live in America.
Hey, at least outsourcing to China will avoid asbestos, amirite?
Maybe not
That assumes that the people down the supply chain don't decide to take your knowledge and compete with you.
I read an interesting story awhile back about Schwinn bicycles. From what I read, Schwinn had various techniques that they used in assembling their bicycles that made them more reliable. But they were losing sales to cheaper foreign-made bicycles which weren't as reliable but were considerably cheaper.
Well, they moved their assembly to China. They went over and taught Chinese workers their techniques for making making a reliable bicycle. So now they had less expensive bicycles which were just as reliable.
Until the bicycle factory took these techniques and started producing their own bicycles using those techniques and competing against Schwinn.
So even if you "specialize at a different part of the supply chain," the stuff still has to be assembled and whatever unique knowledge you have brought to the product will be taken by your competitors.
This is why some people (not me though) think PC gaming is dead. Let's see some random PCs from Dell:
Dell Inspiron 530:
Video Cards:
Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3100 (Can't run shit)
Dell XPS 210 (so-called "Performance PCs")
Video Cards:
Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 3000 (Yet again, horrible shitty integrated cards that CANT RUN SHIT)
Dell XPS 630 (finally!)
Video Cards:
nVidia GeForce 8800 GT 512MB (finally, something that can RUN GAMES!)
So 2/3 of the desktops Dell sells will NOT run any games, but the ones that cost over $1,100 dollars will? And you HAVE to buy that? Wow, I wouldn't be suprised if newegg saw profits rise over this!
So that's why PC gaming is "dying", most average PCs use those fucking cheap integrated "graphics" cards that can't run anything!
Remember a story a few years ago where Dell basically threatened some city/county in the states that they won't build a plant there unless the government help pay for it. And now they're dumping off those workers that they used as an excuse to get corporate welfare ("we create jobs").
The only thing companies like Dell knows is how to do is play with margins, skim quality, cut worker cost to create a business all for the bottom line for the short term. Their problem is that there are a 1000 other companies around the world now that can put commodity parts together better than they can and for less cost.
Dell and companies like it are nothing special. They create nothing of real value in the long run. They invent nothing. They innovate nothing. They can't even provide basic service when service industry and not manufacturing is about the biggest thing left. It's no wonder their boom and bust follow the same trend and short life span as the dot-com and housing meltdown.
Ah yes, the slashmyth that shareholders aren't US! People who bought stock, or have a mutual fund. People who have a pension or other retirement plan. How many here have even read the prospectus they send out to shareholders, or voted in a meeting? It's easy to have a scapegoat. If it can work for third world countries like North Korea and Iran, then it can work for slashdot? Yeah! It's all the rich folks fault that you're apathetic.
It is amazing to me how a lot of our current economic theory is built on "wishful thinking. It is pretty simple to see what will happen with globalization. There are Billions of cheap laborers in the world labor pool. Economic theory would simply indicate that will lower wages dramatically. You need $15 an hour to live, 5000 others in the world will do your job for $2 an hour. Eventually wages will go up. But we are much more likely to end up with lots of losers and $4 an average hour wages. If we place our country against 2cd world labor we simply end up with second world conditions in much of our country. Ultimately.
Ever heard of comparative and absolute advantage? Oh, and another thing, we don't really lose the jobs, people just retrain, or move elsewhere where they are useful in the workplace with their current education/experience. Free trade based upon comparative and absolute advantage is what advances our economy, and the economy of others. Why spend our resources on something that costs us more than for someone else to make/do when we could be using them more efficiently? If you want to reach absolute efficiency, you have to participate in free trade, including the job market.
The problem is unions and government regulations. Try firing someone. You have a union to deal with. Try building something really innovative, say a nice new nuclear power plant. Your kids will be grown before you get a single hole dug; you'll still be waiting for the next mountain of papers to be filled out and processed.
The Canadian automotive industry died because it has even more regulations and unions than the US. China kills US manufacturing because it has less regulation than the US plants. Can you believe that a US plant has to not only pay property tax but a tool tax on the machines? Ol' Patrick Henry would roll over in his grave.
There are two solutions to this problem:
1. Protective tariffs: historically a bad idea (recall the Civil War).
2. Deregulate and deunionize: historically a good idea (think the Iron Lady salvaging Britain).
Unfortunately, the US is rapidly adopting Hillary's favorite idea: the government can save you! Guess how?
But then, I don't know of any candidates who don't subscribe to that idea. Republicans just aren't what they used to be. It seems the only differences are on social issues. Economically, all the big candidates look the same. It's so frustrating to talk to people who like what Ron Paul says but dismiss him offhand with a sickly smile and say "But he's not electable."
The only way to save our economy is to somehow break through people's thick heads. Unfortunately, we are living a generation that thinks in a herd mentality, usually delivered by rich morons like Oprah.
I only hope the generation now at college (that like Paul so well) will learn something from the current disaster and do something about it.
(Wow, I this post is all over the map. I feel better after just saying it all though.)
The government can't save you.
Alienware is owned by Dell, but that doesn't mean that they act like Dell.
My wife recently bought a nice (though low-end, by Alienware standards) desktop computer from them. Though the ordering screens are similar (as well they should be - Dell's web-based ordering is rather slick), and credit for both companies is through Dell Financial Services, the similarities ends there.
The Alienware case is a regular ATX case, with a regular ATX backplate and regular ATX mounting holes, and is large enough to accept bloody any motherboard, whereas Dell uses a strange-ish quasi-Micro ATX design without a removable backplate. The motherboard itself is an off-the-shelf model (Foxconn, in this case), not some weird Dell special. The front panel connectors (including those for the large number of fancy LEDs) are compatible with regular ATX boards, instead of Dell's non-standard monolithic connector. There's a plethora of drive bays, with all of the hardware needed to use them included, whereas Dell seems to take great joy in including only as much hardware as is needed to assemble that particular system (on the low end of things, at least - Dimension 2350 and 2400 machines have provision to hold a number of 3.5" hard drives, but there's only enough hardware included to mount exactly one. The other bays are physically absent.). The price was very reasonable - about $100 more than equivalent parts from Newegg.
We had weird issues with the Alienware's extra LEDs on day 1. Called tech support, and without waiting in queue got a real human (in America!), who spoke real American English, had a real name, and who actually had at least half a clue. They sent a new part, which didn't fix the problem. Called back, again immediately got a real human, who dispatched both more parts and a warm body to install them. Problem solved.
And, sure, it'd have been better if the system didn't need any service, but I did feel pretty good about the whole process. It seemed that Alienware wanted to solve my problem, instead of just force me to jump through hoops.
Meanwhile, I loathe to call Dell support. One of the hinges on my laptop broke (which was reasonable enough after 2 years of hard use), and I had to wait for 20 minutes before some girl in Bangalore came on the line who only wanted to talk to me about reinstalling Windows XP. I had to fight with her for about 15 more minutes in order to get transferred to someone with enough clue to understand the simple problem and dispatch parts. And this with their premium support package!
So, yeah: They're the same company in that they're owned by the same people. But that heterogeneous ownership doesn't mean that they're at all similar in operation or quality.
Kid-proof tablet..
Anyone have any insight regarding the impact on North Carolinians who are still forking over incentive $$ to this very wonderful company? Last April, we were assured our Winston Salem plant would not be impacted. Dell is allowed 40% job cuts to still qualify for our outrageous incentive programs. With no new hiring in the past 7 months and these drastic changes being made, job cuts at the North Carolina plant seem inevitable.
unions are a good idea in theory. but in real life they end up corrupt and strike happy, blissfuly unaware that if they make it impossible to do business, there won't be anything to return to after the strike.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
No son, this is where YOU are supposed to pull out some proof of your own and prove ME wrong. I've given you some data to back up my point, if you have a graph from a credible source that can shoot me down, i've already challenged you to do so.
trade creates wealth because it divides the amount of work needed to produce an item, and does it in the most efficent way possible.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
All great companies ever created were created by engineers and run by engineers.
Many great companies have been driven to destruction by control freak managers with zero ability to know technology.
Not to say that there arent control freak engineers out there making mistakes, but they at least create something aswell, not just create lies.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I'm missing the part here where it's bad for consumers? consumers drive the economy not any specific group of workers.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Alimony, for when, she doesn't love you, but she does love your money.
I'm sure it's probably repulsive to you, but does the law allow you to get anything in return for that dough? I mean, you should be able to claim that you got used to the lifestyle of having someone cook and clean* for you, and of course, "maritals."
*assuming she did those things. But regardless, whatever she did do (and it had to be something, or your marriage was pretty lopsided), you'd grown accustomed to, right? I mean, if you're going to send money as if you were still married, then she should do some things for you as if you were still married, too, right?
It seems weird to me that a person can have a claim on another person's money just based on the fact that other person used to give them money.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
People don't need a valid reason to sue nowadays ... the level of sense of "entitlement" is obscene. Of course, it's always fun to have someone end up spending $15,000.00 suing you and losing ...
Yeah, but where does all the food end up. And what's your friend going to spend all that money on, anyway? not food from you, that's for sure, because your friend's cheap food resulted in you abandoning your food-growing efforts.
People forget that money and wealth are not the same thing. This is one of the things that makes economics harder than it looks. You have to take a holistic approach to understanding, and it's extremely easy to get caught up in one aspect and misunderstand its overall effects on public welfare.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Is dell really that much faster than walking in a large shop supplier, making your order, paying and getting a box in 15mins?
Maybe its because its lazy and easy to get hardware from one supplier, but then again the contracts state that ram+hd upgrades also be done by DELL, at 3x the retail price
of those parts ofcourse.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Let's say your value as a programmer is $50 an hour. Your value as a graphic designer is $25 an hour. You work 40 hours a week doing a mixture of both.
Outsourcing graphic design work would be a good thing for your GDP. Outsourcing both graphic design and programming would be a bad thing for your GDP (Your value as a waiter is only $5 an hour.)
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
That's just what most people were saying in this country right before the US passed the Smoot-Hawley Tarrif Act. I think the Wikipedia article does a good job describing the horrendous results of that act of protectionism.
If it wasn't for free trade you would only be able to drive cars made by Ford, GM, or Chrysler, you wouldn't have cheap Taiwanese semiconductors powering your PC, you wouldn't have $5 dollar t-shirts at Wal-Mart, and you're only choice of video game consoles would be the XBox360.
I agree, there are plenty of short term downsides to free trade. People lose their jobs and have to adapt as industries shift offshore, but other jobs and industries inevitably take their place. People were complaining just as much in the 1970s and 1980s when all of are manufacturing moved overseas.
What are people going to do for a living when we no longer manufacture anything? No one, but the brilliant few saw services and technology as the future of the economy. It's the same situation now, only people are wondering what will happen when all low level tech jobs are outsourced. Do most of us know what's next? No, but I bet a few people do and their going to the billionaires of tomorrow. That's just how the world works.
The sun beams down on a brand new day, No more welfare tax to pay, Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light...
Outsourcing both graphic design and programming ......
And when would I do that? Only when I have an opportunity to earn $100 as a project manager.
Or when I make enough on the margin from outsourcing that it is a net win for me - i.e., I make $49+$24+$5 by outsourcing programming+ outsourcing graphic design+waiting tables.
Of course, if I'm making $73 from outsourcing, I'd spend my free time learning a new skill to be more productive.
And this is exactly how division of labour frees up time to become more productive.
The simple fact is we have a black hole in this country, and it is only getting wider. Our money is being bleed to other countries while we make nothing but imaginary property which can be easily copied. I personally believe we'll end up in a ten year+ depression while will sadly in all likelihood be followed by a xenophobic fascist police state, circa Germany in the 30's. And the governments current folly of bailing out the investment bankers by printing more money is simply going to make the problem worse. And most sadly I don't see any way out of it, as it would require REAL long term planning and possibly even WPA style public works to rebuild our aging infrastructure and all of the corporations and public officials seem to be of the "damn everything but the quarterly report" types.
I only hope that when my teenage nephews get out of college this mess will have gone through the worst of it and we will be headed for recovery. I personally am going back to school in the fall because it is just getting to hard for me to make a living in IT. Maybe in 8-10 years when I have run out of things to get a degree in there will actually be plenty of jobs to choose from that will actually pay enough for me to work down my student loans. But I'm not going to hold my breath. But of course this is my 02c, and I personally hope to every deity I don't believe in that I am wrong.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I have seen this out sourcing cutting back to basics method of compensating for lack lustre management from so many US based companies now that Im surprised companies still do it. GM and Ford both did exactly the same as Dell while Toyota who now totally thrashing them built more factories and became bigger and better. Dell should stop thinking of cutting back and saving costs but look at ways of becoming more inventive and increase your size thus restricting your competitors ability to strike at you. When you down size your company you do to some degree become more competitive but you also lose the ability to increase your market share and if your competition is clever they should attack this weakness.
The Chinese know you can pay for it (since you were spending $1 for it until now) and the Americans are better off by $0.02. Logical fallacy: if you outsource, the $1 income permitting Americans to spend $1 is gone.
have you been defaced today?
Profit, remaining the difference between income and costs however, isn't as simple as "reduce costs, increase profit"... you stop selling things, you stop getting the income too.
Speaking as a manager who purchases regularly... Dell's god awful love of non standard components to try and drive customers back to them for upgrades is next to inexcusable. I tolerate it because office machines can be bought to the spec I need without cracking the case. To now be told, "Oh? You need a high end processor and ram but don't care about the rest of the system? Sorry, that only comes in our high end system and you now have to pay for media burners, graphics cards, hard drives and Vista Ultimate that you don't want."... Especially when I can't buy a lower end system and swap out the processor because the old motherboard won't support it and can't swap out the motherboard because the case uses non standard connectors and fan mounts... I'm going to be going straight to the competition.
So, yes, Dell will cut $3B in costs. Part of that will be the costs of all the systems they used to sell to me. Along with the profits on those systems too. Assuming the same holds true for others, they successfully cut off their $4-5B nose to spite their $3B face.
So the money to buy the spoon is obtained by profit from making the spoon?
John used to buy the spoon from Mr.Smith for $1. Mr. Smith buys bread from John for $1. No outsourcing and Lou Dobbs is happy and unemployed.
John now buys the spoon from Mr.Chang for $0.98. Mr. Smith is broke and cannot buy bread from Mr. Smith.
But Mr. Chang buys bread from John. (Or more likely, Mr.Chang buys F16s from Peter who buys more bread from John.)
John is better off by $0.02 & whatever extra he gets from the bread. Mr. Chang is better off because he gets cheaper bread and was able to make a profit from the spoon.
Smith is unemployed and:
1. Realizes that he has to do something else to add value to society. --or--
2. Points a gun at John and forces him to buy spoons from him. --or--
3. Gets the govt. to do (2) for him and calls himself a patriot.
For example, I finally went with Dell because it was the only one that offered, in Italy, the option to buy a laptop with an American keyboard instead of an Italian keyboard, with an English version of the O/S instead of the localized one, and with a European electrical plug instead of the Italian one.
My laptop has served me rather well in these 6 years, despite my very rought handling, and requiring a bare minimum of upgrades and replacements (new cooling fans, more RAM, a new hard disk).
Now I'm starting to look around for a new system, and I found out that Dell doesn't offer any of the customization options I chose Dell for in the first place. When I bought my mom's laptop, it was extremely difficult to find a system that offered XP instead o Vista, now they are completely gone. I can't choose the O/S language, I can't choose the keyboard layout, and I can't choose the plugs. I'm going to look elsewhere, most definitely. A Lenovo, probably.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
http://slashdot.org/~smitty_one_each/journal/196922
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
It seems you're advocating deunionization without knowing what it actually means.
Deunionization as an economic measure means that you plan to solve fundamental problems in the economy by worsening the bargaining power of the lower and middle class, in effect worsening their conditions. Instead of outsourcing, this is bringing conditions from China to the developed world. Newsflash: if an industry fails because it cannot survive unless it has unacceptable working conditions, then that is a good thing.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
It was a pleasure to read your post, sir or madam*. Thank you for making this blog worth visiting today!
/.
*Just kidding, I know there are no women on
Outsourcing lowers the GDP of our country, reducing our buying power. What logically happens is jobs are removed from our country.
Not necessarily. GDP is total value of goods and services produced domestically - i.e basically total consumer, investment and government spending, plus the value of exports, minus the value of imports.
Given that most of the components in a Dell are non-us made, labor is probably the largest part of the input to US GDP. For sake of argument, let's say a Dell costs $3. Of that, $2 is the cost of the parts, $.5 labor, and $.3 G&A costs. In that scenario, about $1 is added to the US GDP.
Now let's outsource production. No, let's assume Dell pays 1/2 as much for labor. If they can shave $.25 off of the cost of parts then they've saved $.5 - which can be added to the bottom line, resulting in the same $1 addition to GDP.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
[quote]
.Unfortunately US forgot this.
That's a great thought but it's a little lacking in substance. What do you propose the U.S. ought to specialize in? I'm quite honestly interested, and I've asked this question over and over to a lot of fairly intelligent people and have yet to get a satisfactory answer back. I'm not sure there is one. Do we try to go the Neal Stephenson route? Music, movies, microcode, and pizza? Other parts of the world are chipping into 'software' already, and there's no reason to think that we have some kind of automatic, natural, competitive advantage in any of those.
[/quote]
US could specialize in power and tech. It was first nation to build nuclear weapon and nuclear power plant, cradle of microelectronics . US has a lot of brain power (a lot of them are immigrants but nevertheless).
Unfortunately I don't see it happening - nuclear power is unsupported and is regulated to strangulation. Biotech and pharma faces many regulations(I mean bad ones -like excessively long FDA approval process) . Mainstream public is generally unsupportive of those areas and media even more so.
In an area of power production you have coal and oil industries helding any possible alternatives in check. Biotech is used as spare change in political games ( stem cells anyone?) and so forth. America needs to wake up and put its priorities in order- like it did during Manhattan project and space race. Power and tech is the future - not consumer junk
Oh, and all our companies are close to bankruptcy, and no executives and shareholders ever manage to take out huge bonuses and dividends..
Seriously, unions are why you don't still have 12+ hour working days in the US and most of the rest of the world. It took decades of campaigning, strikes that often were illegal and bloodshed when police struck down on strikers for the US unions to get employers to accept the 8 hour working day.
It's a paradox that the rest of the world can thank US unions for the 8 hour day, when your unions have been reduced to festering corpses, and that May Day was established as an international day for the working class to demonstrate directly in response and support of the US unions, while the US working class was quickly subverted into accepting the watered down Labor day.
A huge part of the improvements in working conditions in the latter half of the 1800's and well into the 1900's were a direct result of strong unions in the US.
"Other parts of the world are chipping into 'software' already, and there's no reason to think that we have some kind of automatic, natural, competitive advantage in any of those."
Yes, you have. The English language is one for instance. And then there is the economy of scale. Any really interesting conference on Java and Security is in the old US of A, and it is a pretty big drawback if you're thousands of miles from the city it is held in.
Even books on all the subjects are a lot more expensive than in the US, and don't forget the higher living conditions (it's easier to do your job properly if you don't have to put in so much energy in the rest of your life).
Of course, some of these advantages are declining a bit, but I don't think they will disappear completely. So now it is up to you to compete. Somehow I am pretty sure that if I'd apply for a job over there, it would be easy as pie.
Mortgages have gone up in length because people are prepared to commit longer to get better properties, or to stay in more desirable locations. For what I'm paying to own a house in central London I could buy a house that would be many times the size of what a typical two income family could afford a few decades ago.
As for cars, you don't have to go very far back before most people couldn't afford even a single car. Now many households have two, three or even more. That, and the fact most people don't pick the cheap low end cars that would be comparable to what they would've been able to buy decades ago, is why the length of car loans have gone up.
The fact that people are willing and ABLE to take on increasing loan burdens is generally an indication of wealth, when subtracting blips like the incompetent banks going into the sub-prime market.
I, because of the salary I'm on, could if I wanted to get a mortgage over 32 years at about 5 times salary. When I grew up, my parents weren't doing badly, but banks in Norway at the time would never grant loans to "normal people" at over 2-2.5 times salary of the main income earner + maybe half of the second earner, and rarely more than 20 (apart from a government backed one that offered 30, which was considered exceptional).
Despite that, I'll end up paying substantially less in terms of percent of my income in mortgage payments over my lifetime than my parents did, for properties that are larger and better standards. When they were 30, they bought a small 2-bed flat in the suburbs of Oslo. When I was 30 I bought a large 3 bedroom house with a garden i London in the middle of a property boom.
I see this argument a lot - "we need to work out what we are best at in the long term". I don't understand it - there's a pre-supposition there that such an advantage exists. As far as I can see, advantages from nation to nation come about from two sources: geographical location (rich mineral deposits, large-scale renewable natural resources compared to population size etc.) or culture (education, work ethics, technical expertise). Neither of these two last "long term".
Natural resources run out, or population increases to diminish any advantage. Cultural advantages also dissipate in the long term - the next generation of top-class engineers, scientists and business-men could come from North America, or Europe. Or Japan. Or India, or China. The next-next gen may come from any of the above, or Bangladesh, or somewhere in Africa maybe. The "Western world" will compete with, but not dominate, these guys. The only long-term advantage you can obtain is to expand, artificially limit your population or deliberately use your current advantage to permanently disable your "competitors".
Since the last two are morally dubious, the first is pretty much your only option. And since no-one is keen on invading a country, slaughtering the natives and re-settling it, the only place to go is off-world. If the States and Europe were to race out to the moon right now, they may be able to keep an advantage for the next few hundred years, getting themselves a monopoly on off-world exploration. That would diminish after a while too, but it would last until there was no such thing as nations, maybe. But in "the long term", we're all just people.
Dell shares fell 38 cents to $19.95. ... as I said, In the end. This change doesn't sit well with investors it seems. And in the end, nor will Dell's customers. I just hope it doesn't kill Dell.com/open sells.
\
You're assuming there that people don't get other jobs. In the UK in the 70s and 80s we outsourced all our coal mining. It hurt in the short term but in the long term now we have better, easier jobs.
If people like you had your way, America would just be full of people working shifts in filthy mines and factories. In fact there'd be nothing to produce because anyone capable of inventing anything would be stuck doing manual labour.
"We are creating a country of ownership of ideas and not of production. That in of itself is a loss of power if we ever have a military action against those countries of of an ally of them."
There's also a fundamental economic problem with basing everything on IP: it assumes that the countries who are being outsourced to will continue to be IP consumers rather than IP producers. We had the same ideas about Japan in the 1950s and 1960s, when we were telling ourselves that they could only make cheap rip-offs of Western products because they weren't capable of inventing things for themselves, and we all know how accurate that prediction-born-of-arrogance ended up being.
"Unless we rebuild our nation, starting with our currency, then to manufacturing, and on, I can see us economically dying to countries like China and India that have almost 2 billion between them."
By 2007 estimates, they have considerably more than 2 billion people between them (around 1.3 billion each), which means that either of them has about the same population as the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Europe put together.
"I wonder how high the Chinese could push oil? 200$ a barrel? 300$ a barrel? Or even our worst nightmare of switching OPEC to the Euro?"
China isn't pushing oil prices up except indirectly by competing for supplies. Oil producers and petrochemical commodities traders dictate the price it sells at, and oil producers will be also the ones who decide what currency they want in exchange for it. China is as much a victim here as we are, possibly more so, because their low labour costs mean that raw materials (many of which are directly or indirectly derived from petrochemicals) and transport are a much bigger part of their overall production costs than is the case with products made in Western countries.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
"Those people in a different country chose a communist government that shot their economy to hell, not to mention killing millions of their best citizens in progress. Why should I prop their economy at the cost of my salary and job security when they still didn't admit any mistakes?"
Because the government _you chose_ to run your country (which also refuses to admit it's made any mistakes) has said that you're going to, and there's nothing you can do about it because you have a two party system, and both of them are paid by big business to do what's best for big business, i.e. increase profits by paying cheap foreign labour to do the same jobs that they used to give to expensive American labour.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
Another logical fallacy.
For that to work you imply the Chinese are wanting to buy something that the US has. There isn't. They're amassing huge currency reserves instead.
More and more virus are showing up in computers and parts coming from China. This includes hard disks, bios, and even in chips (including several ASICs, which indicates a more systemic approach is happening; i.e. it is not just a single hired contractor that was able to slip it in). Somebody who creates a manufacturing line that does not utilize these infected parts would go far with western govs. And if done in an automated fashion, it could be much lower cost than what is coming from China.
I suspect that said company could even take over companies like HP and Dell by focusing on Customer Service, in addition, to having lower costs and a SECURED system.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
As long as its black.
Well, lack of choice does decrease manufacturing costs.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Was selling poor quality white box clones that they stuck their name on.
Really bad stuff. But it worked out for them as all the other companies buying the same garbage to 'rebrand' back then are long gone..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The biggest problem with pretty much ANY of these thoughts either way is that the proponents thereof seem to think that they're
such great ideas that're workable that they do them to the exclusion of everything else- including outsourcing. Never mind the
consequences.
Just as Communism and Protectionism failed- so will this other stupid idea we keep seeming to have.
We're not outsourcing to "make new opportunities" or that it does this when you do it- that's really analogous to breaking all
the windows in a business district because it'll "make new opportunities" for the glass makers. When you outsource, that job
is gone. If you don't make another job somehow (and the people that're outsourcing AREN'T- they're just pocketing the short
term gains they got by cheapening things...) then the money that you spent there went elsewhere- wherever you outsourced it to.
When you outsource it doesn't magically mean that you're going to be in a position to keep supplying ideas to the outsource
places. They take your ideas and run with them for themselves- eventually they don't need you for ideas because you've given
them all to the other people. Where are you when that happens? Outsourcing and a whole host of other things that're in vogue
are no different than Communism or Protectionism when they're practiced the way they've been done for the last 10-20 years.
In the end, they're no more sustainable than the others. And, we're in an economic recession, almost depression, right now
largely as a result of all this unsustainable activities.
What everyone that's a proponent of outsourcing keeps missing are questions like this:
What good does it do to make a product for less money, when nobody wants it?
What good does it do to outsource something for less money, when nobody can buy it?
What good does it do to outsource something for less money, when the people you outsourced it to took your ideas and no longer need you?
There's tons more unasked (but SHOULD be so...) questions like this.
All of this is now ongoing and we're beginning to see the signs of the damage from the real start of this madness some 15-20 years ago.
Is the answer Protectionism?
No. But a little less "openness", considering that most of the people we're outsourcing to are very much Protectionist, will go a long way.
Is the answer Communism?
No. But I think some accountability to the populace, and not just Shareholders, would go a lot longer way on things.
We certainly can't keep going the way we are- we're going to see the collapse of this country because of the short-term thinking on things
that's driven by the current business thinkings.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
It is amazing to me how a lot of our current economic theory is built on "wishful thinking
No, its based on really proven fact. Outsourcing is really nothing more than specialization of labor. Originally, the manufacturing unit was the family. Then, some of those functions were outsourced to other families and thus villages and then cities were born. Eventually cities outsourced to other cities and thus states and then nations were born.
Along the way, somebody got screwed because of outsourcing, someone always does. But, last time I checked, we all have computers, in fact, we're building computers for third world countries. We all have cars, bikes, broadband, and the radio that seemed almost magical a scant generation or two ago is now pervasive as another feature of everything we own. Thus, in terms of sheer wealth, in terms of sheer things owned, we have way more than we had even ten years ago.
You can't go back on outsourcing without the wealth it brings, so, the question really has to be asked? What level of outsourcing do you want to dial back to? Do you want to go back to the 1960s, the 1970s? The Amish people in Lancaster PA do their best to maintain manufacturing at the village unit, and they have horse and buggies and still must buy reflectors from outside the village. Do you want horse and buggies?
Really, the thing is, when people condemn outsourcing, they never really are specific as to what they think should or should not be outsourced. I buy American cars and American products, but, what's an American car these days? I would be willing to bet that the memory for the onboard computers are made in taiwan, probably using machines designed and built by Siemens in Germany, possibly using an embedded system designed by the British and integrated in design by American engineers, and yeah, probably containing a fair number of parts manufactured in China.
There's nothing national anymore, and even if there could be that way again, how fair would that be for countries that do not have various resources in either raw materials or population on their country. Last time we tried national manufacturing, the economic system completely and repeatedly collapsed, and instead of peaceful oceans we had oceans stuffed with massive battlefleets as various countries tried to grab the best access to raw materials and talent as it could.
Viewed from a distance, the world wars and then the cold war can really be viewed as the consequence of a national manufacturing. We Americans had the insight to use our successful in those wars to more or less impose a free trade regime on the world, with the idea that if trade were unhindered, there would be no more major wars.
-THIS POLICY HAS WORKED-.
Sure, there are plenty of little wars, and even though what's happening in Iraq is costly and unfortunate, overall, there have not been cities being firebombed and 100,000 people being killed in a single night. You don't see armies of 20,000,000 or men mobilized to duke it out. I mean, even now, the US Army of 2008 is -SMALLER- in manpower than the British Army of 1916.
So yeah, it sucks that we might lose our jobs to some muk muk that can do it cheaper, but it beats the shit out of doing what previous generations did - world wide panics, a world war, millions killed, global economic meltdown, then, ANOTHER world war.
It is so historically evident that war is an inevitable consequence of the restraint of trade, that, I should think it madness to seriously contemplate a significant restraint of trade at all.
This is my sig.
Maybe Dell changing their policies to a lesser number of configuration options will end up hurting them even more. I really couldn't care who makes a computer, as long as it's quality and I can configure it the way I want to. My last two notebook computers have been Dell's - only becuase Dell enables me to get almost exactly what I was looking for (and with a serial port too!). If they gave me less options, I might buy a ThinkPad or an HP - or the way things are going, maybe even a MacBook pro. That new 1920 x 1600 LCD Backlit screen looks nice.
The economics textbooks expound an UNPROVEN theory that is actually being misapplied.
You want division of labor, yes, but the economics books are applying a mathematical model to a real-world thing. Math is a wonderful tool, but it doesn't make for rules of how the world works (opposite thinking...) nor does those numbers force things to be something other than they're not.
It looks good on paper to outsource to another country- for a couple of years, if that. In many cases, the outsource partner looks good on paper- but the reality of all the work you end up doing re-working their work (And, I know this from professional experience...) and all the lost reputation of your company because your product has vastly more defects when delivered (again...) ends up more often than not washing out any gains you might have gotten from the process. Add on to this that you're moving that money from your own country to another that only gives a damn about their own country (which is highly understandable, really...) and doesn't reinvest resources here- meaning that the money sunk in offshore outsourcing just went bye-bye... The math doesn't add up to what is going on right now. When the math doesn't add up; when the theories don't match up to what you're seeing- it's time to come up with new math and theories.
The people keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting the results the theories tell them should be happening and all we're doing is spiraling back down into a Great Depression.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The stupid problem with that thinking is that the consumers are disconnected from the other.
The consumers are the people doing the work in this country. They're the people working here.
Outsource their work and they don't have money to buy your stuff at some point.
Everybody foolishly thinks that they're enriching the lives of the people over here when they make stuff cheaper. Short term, perhaps a bit. Long term, not so.
If you do it in one place, it might not be a bad idea. If you do it everywhere (which is what is getting done here...) it's not just a specific group of workers getting impacted, it's a lot of them, which then causes the consumers to have less or no money to buy things.
It's the simplistic thinking that you can simply envision a single aspect of a business and modify it without understanding the whole that keeps getting everyone into trouble. It gets worse when you start trying to apply that same simplistic thinking to what is effectively an ecosystem.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
And all that currency is good where?
(Hint: there is only one country in the world where the U.S dollar is guaranteed to be honored. Guess which one.)
man your grasp of the motivations of outsourcing is staggeringly bad...
Business does not move jobs to an area to save labor..... just to spend that saved money on 'sales and marketing'. And, they already had that before they outsource. They had people design them, they had people market them. They aren't going to specialize 'at a different part of the supply chain'. They are going to put that extra cash into shareholders/owners pockets.
Protectionism isn't the answer. But when capitol and business has the rules skewed toward their benefit then 'the free market' isn't at work is it?
Besides, you're the incredibly stupid person who thinks outsourcing bad == communism.
I guess it is. Obviously noone would use sarcasm on slashdot, it is completely unimaginable.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
If you misspell something or misuse the apostrophe while making a serious comment, many readers will not take your comment seriously because it looks like an illiterate yahoo made it. In this case, you have failed to communicate your idea. Your opinion on whether Dell rules or sucks is rendered irrelevant.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
Those consumers used to be employed at Schwinn, and now they've starved to death in the gutter. They're not consumers anymore!
Instead, the new consumers are the Chinese working at the outsourced Schwinn factory. They're doing just fine on their shiny new bicycles.
It's a great deal for the people the work gets outsourced to, but not so great a deal for the corpse in the gutter the work got outsourced from. Do you get it now?!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The problem is unions and government regulations. Try firing someone. You have a union to deal with.
Both unions and government regulations are an attempt at leveling the playing field between big business and the little guy working his or her heart out, obeying the rules and paying most of the taxes. When big corporations feel like they're paying too much in property taxes, they threaten a locality or state that they'll move and take their jobs with them. States and localities immediately pony up tax abatements. If you try this, your state congressman will tell you, "You're free to move wherever you wish."
In non-union shops, corporations must go through their own red tape to fire someone. Presently, that takes a number of weeks because corporations don't want to be sued. I suppose, were I to use your argument, corporations ought to be able to fire women who become pregnant while on the job (the sheer effrontery of them!) because the amount of time they'll be away having a child and initially bonding with their child will reduce corporate profits. Because that will affect the bottom line, corporations should be able to find that, since there is birth control and these foolish women have chosen -- of their own free will -- to harm the corporate interest by getting pregnant, they have cause to fire with impunity.
Unfortunately for these corporations, federal law seems to differ.
You're decrying unions for having made it nigh impossible to fire workers, including workers who may be discriminated against and saying the unions are to blame for this and all the while you are ignoring the fact that the corporations willingly (and with a battery of corporate attorneys present) signed these agreements with their eyes open and with full knowledge of what these contracts mean. Unions usually don't write these contracts. Corporations do. Unions negotiate with these corporations and try to derive solutions that work best for their membership. And it's a losing game, as you will note that -- over time -- the number of union-represented workers has steadily diminished in the US
Do you know that ERISA law is superseded by a collective bargaining agreement? In other words, federal law allows for these agreements to create "perma-temp" workers who have none of the job protections in typical union contracts. Unions have been coaxed by corporations into signing collective bargaining agreements that create a "second tier" to workers with fewer benefits and rights in the workplace? Did you know that the most recent UAW contract with the automotive manufacturers creates a "two tier" workplace with the new hires getting considerably fewer benefits for their union membership than people they're working alongside who were hired a number of months earlier?
China kills US manufacturing because it has less regulation than the US plants. Can you believe that a US plant has to not only pay property tax but a tool tax on the machines? Ol' Patrick Henry would roll over in his grave.
China has many of the same laws you decry on the books. China just chooses to not enforce their own laws where party officials are the owners of the businesses being regulated. This is very similar to the US EPA refusing to regulate greenhouse gases because cronies of the current administration own coal-fired power plants.
Patrick Henry's main issue in his "...give me liberty or give me death" speech was one of representation. He was speaking before the Second Virginia Convention at St. John's Church in Richmond, Virginia (which was not then the capitol) in favor of raising a local militia to oppose the Royal Marine regiment under the orders of Lieutenant-Governor Dunmore in Williamsburg (the capitol). The Lieutenant-Governor was working to prevent the colonists from rising up in defense of their right of self-government.
But I note you're a supporter of Ron Paul. I t
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
In the end, the strength of an economy depends on supply and demand, if the US wants plenty from China but China wants nothing from the US the economy will falter. Imagine as an extreme example that the US was full of hairdressers and China was full of widget makers. The borders are closed so no tourism or working abroad. Selling off ptoperty would be a short-term solution and so ignored. The hairdressers can cut each other's hair creating value internally, but if they want widgets from China they have nothing to offer. There's no supply chain because there's no incentive to supply in the first place. If there were a flow, part of the value would remain in the country but it'd still be a net transfer of value out. The whole theory of comparative advantage assumes there's something both parties want in infinite amount. If China were to say "US goods/services/whatever? Well, actually we're covering domestic demand already so there's nothing we need really..." the US is screwed. Or it can take on debt, which means it's screwed somewhat later.
I see it in my own country, we have oil and so our economy is strong because the world wants oil. Everything else has problems because the input costs are so high, it's difficult to be competitive at anything. In the real-world economy with uncertainty it'll easily happen that in the market you think you'd make money there's overproduction and so your head is first on the block because your costs are the highest. If you do find stable demand, there's always someone out there with an eye to undercut you. In practise, it doesn't work nearly as nicely as in theory.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Dell makes this all quite clear when buying their stuff. Indeed, I think for servers, they select the mid-level contract by default, so you actually had to go out of your way to downgrade the level of service you were choosing.
You got what you asked for, and now you complain.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
"the widget makers need people from widget land to show them how to build the factories and train them, they need someone to design and market the widgets for them in the first place."
True, but we still have a numbers mismatch. Take a factory with 1000 workers. Outsource the work. It takes about 100 of the original thousand to build the factories and train the new workers. And you only need to do that once. So instead of 1000 people employed for decades, you have 100 employed for the three years it takes to build a new factory. So what do the other 900 do now? And what do the 100 factory builders do later? When the next factory needs to be built, the people from the outsourced location will be able to build it; you won't need the original 100 any more even then.
The designers are about 10 out of the 1000. They might be able to keep their jobs for longer, but eventually they will be replaced by the overseas designers too, who will have learned how to do that task. So unless you are truly of the Steve Jobs and Jon Ives caliber, you will be outsourced to in turn.
I used to be a big believer in free trade. Not so much any more. We may be returning to the early 1900's with a few ultra-rich tycoons/robber-barons, a small professional class, and 20% of the population being servants to those groups.
As the grandparent post put it well, current consumer consumption was powered by home equity loans. With that shut down, the "wealth" in real estate declining, and unemployment going up, and jobs still departing (Lazy-Boy furniture's departure was on on NPR this morning) what will hold up the economy? More exactly, what will hold up the middle class? Or was a large middle class a temporary aberration caused by a shortage of labor in the same locations that had excess capital to invest?
On the other hand, the Pacific Northwest is purring along wondering what all the fuss is about Back East. (Back East is east of Idaho, by the way.) The oil patch is doing very well, thank you. And farmers might actually make some money for the next few years, much to the annoyance of those city dwellers who think the countryside owes them cheap food no matter what. And since farmers spend money like mad when they have it, that will support other parts of the economy. So it's not all doom and gloom.
The next decade will be way too interesting. I actually expect who ever wins the White House will be a one termer reviled even more than Jimmy Carter was as he/she gets dumped in a landslide. And said President will find they have almost no freedom of action once they are in the Oval office. You'd have to be either completely power-mad or totally naive to want that job just now.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
You do not have to be in charge of the design center. All you really need is the manufacturing line and control of the equipment that is used to build it with.
As to open chips, well, hummmm... First things first. Set up a profitable line that will sell to feds, as well as companies. It should have a motherboard, built with chips from a secured company/location. Once that is done, then you can point out what is used and what is not. From there, you can move into open chips as well.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Most of the employment that the UK and Germany still has, came from the loss of shipbuilding and manufacturing jobs to the Far East, and the closure of coal mines.
At least if you have an education, you can probably get a public sector job, which is fair compensation for having your job outsourced in the first place.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Please go read about comparative advantage, which is the core of why trade works. Do some math; build some simulations. Then you can come back and make new and different errors, rather than the basic, obvious ones.
As an incentive, here's a thought experiment. If moving manufacturing jobs from Alabama to Mexico is bad, then wouldn't moving jobs from California to Alabama also be bad? And ditto for moving a job from downtown to a suburb?
Please don't answer right away. Go study comparative advantage and come back with some actual math.
Outsource their work and they don't have money to buy your stuff at some point.
This is plausible, but wrong. If you took a little time to look historically, you'd see that.
Over the last few decades, our trade is up dramatically, 10x or more. Everybody's is. But is there drastically more unemployment? Or drastically more poverty? No, just the opposite. The only big difference in the US is increased inequality, but that has nothing to do with trade and everything to do with ideology.
It gets worse when you start trying to apply that same simplistic thinking to what is effectively an ecosystem.
Funny you should say that, because that's where you're going wrong. Systemically, trade produces measurable net benefits, proven both in theory and in practice.
If my employer finds somebody to do my job for cheaper, whether they do that in my city, elsewher in my country, or a different one, then I personally lose, while my employer and my employer's customers win. Then I get a new job, and things carry on. On average, though, they win more than I lose; we are collectively richer.
Because trade is not a huge cause of lost jobs compared to normal market flux, the solution to this problem is relatively easy. Because we are collectively richer, we can use some of that extra wealth to retrain people who lose jobs due to trade.
But it turns out that unemployment is not massively high. Trade has gone up substantially in the post-NAFTA era, but unemployment has gone down. We are seeing a little bump right now, but that has nothing to do with trade, and everything to do with idiocy in the Bush administration.
Thanks America, for saving us all yet again.
Whatever would we do without you?
On the contrary, "unemployment" only counts those people who are still "actively looking" for jobs.
It doesn't count people like my father, who got laid off in February 2007, gave up looking last Fall, and now calls himself "retired" even though he hadn't intended to retire yet and doesn't have as much money as he wanted saved up.
It also doesn't count people who are underemployed -- people who used to be making $75K/year as white-collar workers, and now flip burgers at Mickey D's. And that particular statistic, I believe, has gone way up.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
It doesn't count people like my father, who got laid off in February 2007, gave up looking last Fall, and now calls himself "retired" even though he hadn't intended to retire yet and doesn't have as much money as he wanted saved up.
I don't know anything about your father's situation, but the general problem faced by older workers has little to do with trade. The main issue there is that they grew up in a time when you got a job early and expected to stay in that company for life, getting paid a little bit more each year until you retired. When your father started work, an employer was a community as much as a business.
Now that has changed. These days, you're employable as long as you have beneficial skills at a good price. If the performance of older workers is lower than younger ones (either due to aging or the whippersnappers having more relevant training), then a lot of companies expect to pay them less. A lot of older workers don't like the idea, and prefer to take early retirement than to get paid less than somebody younger.
According to Krugman, this started to change with the corporate raiders in the 80s, who could restructure a company and fire all those people they saw as overpaid, and not worry about keeping people on to 65. A number of other factors have reinforced that change, so that any younger person I know would laugh if you suggested they find a life-long employer. They expect to be changing jobs with some frequency up until they retire.
people who used to be making $75K/year as white-collar workers, and now flip burgers at Mickey D's. And that particular statistic, I believe, has gone way up.
I'd love to see a reliable statistic for that. If you find one, let me know.
---The economics textbooks expound an UNPROVEN theory that is actually being misapplied.
Too true. I'm being inundated with conjectures from economic theory and pretty graphs that obviously account for diddly. After all this conjecture the basic question lies: How does one pay for goods when one does not have a job?
Or perhaps better yet, where are the foreign businesses outsourcing TO the USA? If their statements are true, we should see an influx roughly equal to what we ship out. We dont.
---You want division of labor, yes, but the economics books are applying a mathematical model to a real-world thing. Math is a wonderful tool, but it doesn't make for rules of how the world works (opposite thinking...) nor does those numbers force things to be something other than they're not.
I've read the theories. They have so many holes and assumptions and restrictions how they work, so I cant even figure WHY they can even use them in the cases they do. Comparative advantage is exactly that: assumes that production is stationary. We see exactly the opposite of this, by our manufacturing leap-frogging around the globe for the absolute cheapest prices. Something tells me that we seek the lowest prices (race to the bottom), but do not account for people to buy that very stuff. We saw this same behavior once before: The Great Depression. I guess that's the bad side effects of a surplus economy (or whatever they call it now).
---It looks good on paper to outsource to another country- for a couple of years, if that. In many cases, the outsource partner looks good on paper- but the reality of all the work you end up doing re-working their work (And, I know this from professional experience...) and all the lost reputation of your company because your product has vastly more defects when delivered (again...) ends up more often than not washing out any gains you might have gotten from the process. Add on to this that you're moving that money from your own country to another that only gives a damn about their own country (which is highly understandable, really...) and doesn't reinvest resources here- meaning that the money sunk in offshore outsourcing just went bye-bye... The math doesn't add up to what is going on right now. When the math doesn't add up; when the theories don't match up to what you're seeing- it's time to come up with new math and theories.
Yeah, the key word is "right now". Look at Japan. We thought nothing of them around the 50's and 60's, as they created cheap knock-offs of our superior goods. Now, we've slacked off and they create the goods we drool over.
This is happening in India, China, and everywhere else our influence exerts itself. While they may be inferior to us now, they will not be later one. After all, those two countries can literally brute force problems in ways we cannot imagine (something has to be said for 1.3B people each).
---The people keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting the results the theories tell them should be happening and all we're doing is spiraling back down into a Great Depression.
That would be my guess, considering how our money is constantly being devalued. Another of my worries was brought to my attention by a statistician: China is one of the biggest US Treasury Bond holders. What would happen if they were to play "hot potato" with them, and dump them on the international market? From all of her calculations, she is now investing IN China.
If workers are given the funding, time and education to retrain and relocate, that isn't a problem. But the closure off the dominant employers in some areas, meant there is no-one to sell services to.
I agree with that.
The other problem, too, is that the USA seems to be the only nation that really doesn't have nationalistic consumer shoppers. Japan comes to mind as the biggest offender. Everyone has a hard time making it in Japan largely because Japanese consumers are outrageously nationalistic when it comes to shopping. There's not some law that the government could pass that would open things up... it's that the people there will only buy Japanese stuff.
Europeans, too are the same way. For decades, Europeans often have been saying that American stuff is crap, and yet, if you look at any honest study of defects per item made, European stuff is surprisingly laggard when it comes to quality. Jaguar is legend for it, but, BMW owners too often have a ritual of taking the car to the shop for teething problems. I know two guys with M3s, and they both went to the shop for this, that and the other.
SO, with that in mind, despite my idealistic and strident defense of the theory of free trade, and, being enormously mindful of the heavy price paid by American manufacturers for it, I do often ask - is the USA the only country that actually tries to trade fairly, and if so, then, really what's the point of free trade? Maybe it would be better to carve the world up into manufacturing zones - like Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
This is my sig.
---Even better question: what are they going to do with all the factory workers that simply CAN'T get an education? My ex brother in law has an IQ of maybe 105, and I know a LOT of guys like him. In my parents generation those with a strong back could afford to feed a family and buy a little home. Now the factories are nothing but decaying hulks, and what little work is left is being snapped up by illegal aliens that will work for a pittance while living ten to a rathole so they can take their money back home where they can live well.
After reading John Taylor Gatto's book, Undreground History of American Education. It's free to read on his website (he published 1 chapter per month free). Back in the 1800's, coal miners complained they had to work too hard and long that they couldnt inform themselves of happenings in government, along with enjoying of the Classics. That is a marked departure from today where they seek to watch the latest yuck on tv: complete and utter apathy.
I would never tell, myself included, that someone is not cut out on getting an education. Yes, some things are difficult, but all things are understandable. They may take time, but really, what are we going to do in the meanwhile?
---The simple fact is we have a black hole in this country, and it is only getting wider. Our money is being bleed to other countries while we make nothing but imaginary property which can be easily copied. I personally believe we'll end up in a ten year+ depression while will sadly in all likelihood be followed by a xenophobic fascist police state, circa Germany in the 30's. And the governments current folly of bailing out the investment bankers by printing more money is simply going to make the problem worse. And most sadly I don't see any way out of it, as it would require REAL long term planning and possibly even WPA style public works to rebuild our aging infrastructure and all of the corporations and public officials seem to be of the "damn everything but the quarterly report" types.
Do you know what saved our butts in the last Great Depression? Excessive government spending and coming up to a World War. We dont have the manufacturing base we once had, nor are we solvent as a country. Though a theory states that extreme interdependence on trade reduces warlike aggression, it does not eliminate it. I wonder what would happen if the USA found itself in a corner.
He got in trouble with the law a few years ago for having some weed on him and got sent to jail for a six month stretch. Somebody thought it would be a good idea that all prisoners should have at least a GED as a condition for release. So they passed their little rule and brought in teachers and literacy experts and all on the public dime, which I don't mind if it helps them get a job. So six months passed and I'm sitting in the courtroom to see if the guy needs a lift, as I feel sorry for the way his folks just abandoned him when he turned 18. Him and about 30 other prisoners are brought before the judge and when the judge asks if they got their GED, the literacy expert says no, and they aren't going to be able to either. The judge wants to know why not. The literacy experts says that even though most standing there had made it through 6-10 grade before dropping out the average reading and comprehension skill in the group was less than 2nd grade, and that was with 12 hour days of instruction for 6 months. The expert said that if they stick with the GED rule they will be looking at an average of 3-5 YEARS per inmate to get them their GED and thus their release from custody. Needless to say they soon dropped the GED rule.
I was lucky-most of my teenage years I was homeschooled by a full time mother who loved Asimov and Heinlein and had a large library full of great horror and sci-fi to stimulate my mind when I wasn't doing the three R's. But more and more I am seeing folks like my ex brother in law who was just passed without caring if he could read by the school system, and whose parents simply sat them down in front of the idiot box(perfect name for it) until time for bed. In the old days they could have at least worked factory or construction or one of the many other blue collar jobs. But now those days are going and we are having an ever growing underclass that simply will not be able to compete in an educational setting, period.
And while I agree that government spending could help like in the depression, the whole "cut the checks for the bankers" bit isn't going to help anyone but the rich who'll be taking their money offshore as the dollar tanks. What we need is a WPA style program to fix our failing bridges and crumbling infrastructure and to wire the country with the national high speed networks we will need to compete. And I apologize for the length, and I am sure that you believe what you say. But after spending nearly a year trying to educate some of these guys I can tell you this-if they have reached 20 without any real kind of intellectual stimulation you can pretty much give it up. Their minds have been dulled to the point that with years of work you MIGHT get him to 6th grade, but he and his buddies will never be college material. Sadly in most of these little rural towns all the money is spent on the sports teams while the education is pisspoor at best. Which is why places like India and China are going to be kicking our ass in the number of PHDs if they aren't already. But this is my 02c on the subject, and I sincerely hope that we get some leadership after the shrub that will actually DO something besides pander to his rich buddies.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
that I bought a Dell a couple years back when I just didn't want to put in the effort of selecting, shipping, and assembling a bunch of parts. The thing "just works". Of course, I was persuaded by a $315 savings e-coupon. :-)
---The guy tries to work a pc by tapping the little icons on the screen with his finger, I swear to god. Let me give you a little true story about him and, as I later found out, a bunch from his twenty something generation around here (rural south).
I do computer consulting around these areas (linux fileservers for the companies with DRBD if requested), and I've seen such activity from people who were about ready to get their doctorate. I used to be computer-elitist but I grew out of that phase. Everybody has their own forte which can be brought out by proper experience and training.
Even though, I am not a professor, I called out an anthropology prof because he thought the same way I think you do: that there are people who can never learn, even when poked and prodded. I do not accept that, thought many do.
I snipped the story about your ex-brother-in-law, but I think that would have been an extraordinary opportunity for the court to issue probation to get his GED. Since we're at it, we could even offer free college (even though many would not take it). However, I believe this offer must be made to show we care about those who have little and are left to the legal system to take care of. At least, this would provide a route to those who recognize the merits of higher education and absolve monetary reasons for them.
---I was lucky-most of my teenage years I was homeschooled by a full time mother who loved Asimov and Heinlein and had a large library full of great horror and sci-fi to stimulate my mind when I wasn't doing the three R's. But more and more I am seeing folks like my ex brother in law who was just passed without caring if he could read by the school system, and whose parents simply sat them down in front of the idiot box(perfect name for it) until time for bed. In the old days they could have at least worked factory or construction or one of the many other blue collar jobs. But now those days are going and we are having an ever growing underclass that simply will not be able to compete in an educational setting, period.
That you were lucky. I graduated in 2000 and were subject to the public education system. So to say, it put me back about 3 years as I was not even remotely prepared for the university. After 2 years, I tried to go, and failed miserably. Not to promote myself, but I thought I was better than those that had to be taught concepts, rather people like me who taught themselves. I failed by the simple rote homework that many professors require, as I am used to learning something for a term (2-5 months) and then do something tremendous with it.
As my experience showed, I do best with classes that focus on learning the whole time, with a major project/paper near the end. Quizzes scattered about are nice to show comprehension.
---And while I agree that government spending could help like in the depression, the whole "cut the checks for the bankers" bit isn't going to help anyone but the rich who'll be taking their money offshore as the dollar tanks. What we need is a WPA style program to fix our failing bridges and crumbling infrastructure and to wire the country with the national high speed networks we will need to compete. And I apologize for the length, and I am sure that you believe what you say. But after spending nearly a year trying to educate some of these guys I can tell you this-if they have reached 20 without any real kind of intellectual stimulation you can pretty much give it up. Their minds have been dulled to the point that with years of work you MIGHT get him to 6th grade, but he and his buddies will never be college material. Sadly in most of these little rural towns all the money is spent on the sports teams while the education is pisspoor at best. Which is why places like India and China are going to be kicking our ass in the number of PHDs if they aren't already. But this is my 02c on the subject, and I sincerely hope that we get some leadership after the shrub that will actually DO something besides pander to his rich buddies.
Unions were good, but now they seem soured. Two recent examples: the US automotive industry and Utah's failure to pass voucher-based education (the teachers unions worked extremely hard to defeat it).
The government can't save you.
And I know EXACTLY how you felt when going back to college. Due to my father being injured on the job my mom had to go back to work for the last two years of my high school. Here is what I did for 2 YEARS of my final education: Go to class at 8:30-teach jocks how to spell things like "flour" and "stood" until lunch at 11:30 when I would have lunch in the teachers lounge.11:30-3:30 teach jocks other basic skills, just enough so they could pass the test and play on the team. They scheduled the jocks so they would have study hall in groups of 10 so I would have smaller sizes to work with.
I had already given up on learning anything there as I kept getting sent to the coach's study hall when I would point out that the math teacher was giving the wrong answer to a basic math problem(if the book got it wrong,so did the teacher) and while sitting their in my "punishment" study hall reading "an old friend of the family"(great classic horror novel, I'm afraid I can't remember the author") and was "called before the coach" because he was sure I was hiding dirty mags behind my book. When he saw that not only didn't it have any pictures, but I could discuss at length subjects like vampire mythology and how the vampire metaphor was often used for subjects that we find uncomfortable he demanded I show up there before first class. Figuring I was going to get YET another study hall, I show up only to be escorted from class to class by the coach who explains to me that if I take this new "assignment" that'll I'll get all A's in all my classes without actually going to them.
I paid for my two years of being free when a decade and a half later I had to spend 6 months learning math that was "supposed" to be taught in high school. The only thing that kept me from feeling stupid is that there were many there that had just graduated from the high school I attended the normal way, and they were all worse off than me. Apparently if you can balance your checkbook that is "good enough" for them. And we were actually in one of the wealthier districts. The southern half of the state has such pisspoor education that the feds are constantly threatening to take them over, due to the fact that most of the buildings should be condemned. While we always had new buildings and books, the jocks got million dollar gyms while we got 3 pcs in our entire science lab and had to get on a waiting list to use one. That is why places like India, China, and Japan are all going to kick our ass. They emphasize education, while our public schools (at least the ones I have seen here in the rural south, don't know about everywhere else) spend all the big bucks on sports. It is just sad.
Well, I believe we could afford a "wpa 2.0"(nice title,btw) if we weren't spending billions in aid propping up foreign dictatorships, pull out of at least 1 of the 2 unpopular war fronts, quit spending billions on defense contractor handouts like a missile defense shield that doesn't work, etc. Unfortunately items such
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
So we know that we have new types of jobs that needs new types of people, these people get paid MORE not less. So GDP is increasing. (as long pay from new jobs is greater than jobs lost, which I will conveniently gloss over in any great detail).
Well, just as the buggy whip manufacturers lost their jobs, and people in the 80s lost their jobs to machines, your ex-bro in law will lose his job.
Are you suggesting that we should keep jobs just for people like this??
I guess he could join the army?? They always need people, i think the term is cannonfodder.
timmarhy said
While i'm all for open trade, because it brings wealth to everyone, I would be super careful of signing anything with the USA if i was in charge.
Oh and can we please drop the retarded myth that when a job is sourced over seas that persons buying power vapourises. it's just not the case, and has been proven many times over since the industrial revolution.
Holy Crap!
Can we get some reference to back this up?!
The parents posters aren't talking immediate losses. This is down the road when all the US just becomes a blob of service industry employees and bloated corporate consumers.
We still have direct manufacturing in the US, but how can a US manufacturer compete with someone who's willing to live one step above a mud hut?!
You ever been in manufacturing? Ever see entire plants and towns go under? People in lines looking for jobs and having to
move out of their homes and live out of their cars or backwoods trailers?!
And we're not talking Appalachia here. These are not lazy people either. They paid their taxes, held their mortgages and tried
looking for other jobs until the money ran out.
It's one thing if a business goes bust. That's another issue to resolve.
When a corporation moves overseas because they have to make shareholders happy even if it burns people. That's bad.
It's hard to see this thing through the veil when everyone uses mutual funds investments through a brokerage company.
To individual American investors. Take a look at your investments. Do they burn their people like firewood to make profit?
*cough*France*cough*
The most highly regulated employment markets in Europe are a really poor example for you to be holding up here. If you count just the Euro zone, unemployment is double what it is in the US.
The problem with unions isn't that they exist. It's that they continue to exist after they've solved the problem they were organized to create. Inevitably, corruption overtakes the primary objectives of the union and they move beyond "fair labor practices" to racketeering and protectionism. There's an easy fix, of course. Allow unions, but also allow replacement of union employees that strike. If the union has fair and reasonable demands, the copmany won't be able to hire replacements for the long term anyway.
Additionally, people in the US generally get 15 days vacation as a minimum. With exceptions of course.
You are the type that gives us a bad name globally. /. that the term 'kit' used in this context translates to 'equipment', or 'gear', or even 'toolkit'(eh:toolkit could be a dead giveaway here!). *says under breath* Stupid git! (my apologies to Monty Python)
Your mistake is in assuming that the American version of the English language is the only one in use, or existence.
I thought that it was common knowledge here on
Remember where our English language came from. Not only that, but it is currently spoken over most of the globe, and I can assure you that outside of the USA, the version is most likely based on the current UK version.
Open your eyes and mind, quit limiting yourself and those you may influence. Get informed.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Voucher based education is a tax break for the wealthy. Good thing it was defeated.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say