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IBM, Other Multinationals "Detaching" From the US
theodp writes "If you're brilliant, work really hard, and earn a world-class doctorate from a US university, IBM has a job for you at one of its US research sites — as a 'complementary worker' (as this 1996 piece defined the then-emerging term). But be prepared to ship out to India or China after you've soaked up knowledge for 13 months as a 'long-term supplemental worker.' Newsweek sketches some of the bigger picture, reporting that IBM, HP, Accenture, and others are finding it profitable to detach from the United States (even patenting the process). 'IBM is one of the multinationals that propelled America to the apex of its power, and it is now emblematic of the process of creative destruction pushing America to a new, less dominant, and less comfortable position.'"
Instead of blaming them for leaving, why don't we stop chasing them away?
Entrepreneurship is what is cause of success in US. That made all big companies work in first place. As long as there are smart people in US and smart people with ideas and execution to create companies, we're fine.
We have the lowest effective corporate tax rates in the world for a developed nation. That still isn't enough I guess. American justice, American greed. Maybe if we stopped doing stupid shit like invading Iraq and keepng bases all over the world we could reduce that tax rate even further! But they'd still leave for a cheaper place.
And your point is? Maybe we should prohibit these businesses from operating in the states. Oh wait, that's why they're leaving. . . And that's the problem.
Patriotism is a highly overrated trait in anything/anybody. If it's better to leave, why stay?
They are multinational corporations... what kind of national loyalty are we expecting from them?
They behave exactly as legislation allows them to behave. If you don't like it, change the legislation.
Reduce the tax rate but eliminate loopholes.
Or, we could close up all those expensive shit-stirring military bases, stop the failed wars (oh Korea and Vietnam, I wish we had learned from you..) and cancel social security, medicare and medicaid.
Blar.
Large corporations are not good citizens and care little about the welfare of the nations that created them. I've heard them described as sociopathic is nature, which is probably quite an accurate description. They rarely have any long term vision in most cases and only seem to look a quarter or two ahead to make investors happy. Limiting their greed just slightly compared to their competitors might earn some good will in the future, but even that seems to be beyond most corporations.
Stop running trade deficits. Tariffs against lopsided trade are not the big evil that right-wing economists say they are. If other countries stopped running trade surpluses with us, they'd have to create a stronger local consumer class, which would start to even out monetary differences and even out imports. Balance balance balance.
Table-ized A.I.
The Egyptians complained about the English "stealing" their cotton spinning and weaving business. The English complained about the Yankee New Englanders, who complained about the Southerners, who complained about the Mexicans, who complained about the Malaysians who are complaining about the Chinese and Indians.
When I say "complained", I mean passed laws and regulations, imposed sanctions, taxes and duties, fought wars, battled smuggling, and whined.
In the long run, the laws of econonics ALWAYS win. The US should fix the causes, not the symptoms.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
I recommend reading a book called "IBM and the Holocaust" (http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com).
This is a company that happily accepted huge sums of money from the Germans during WWII to computerize the process of hunting down and exterminating Jews, and even "hardened" several of their facilities so they'd survive Allied bombings. All the while, they claimed to be an American business.
It's arguable that in a sense, they "left" the United States back then, even if they still retained a big physical presence here. Despite the law preventing IBM from being able to move their profits out of German banks during the war, they STILL happily worked on their projects for them, knowing full-well they couldn't even touch the money for years.
that any factory or venture in China must be at least 51% domestically owned, such that they always will have the power?
Can't help but think that all these companies are building up their own competition... when China decides the dollar isn't that great anymore and that they've sucked out all the knowledge needed of the US and other 1st world countries to be on par with them.
Not that US companies alone can be blamed, the US consumer, with their rush to the cheapest priced options, by and large, contributed to this cycle.
The fact is that Obama is a redistributionist who claims that jobs are owed and not earned. Sorry, but that kind of attitude is what's driving employers away from the USA. You wish you had a girlfriend/boyfriend? Then make yourself appealing, so that someone will want to hook up with you. Don't go talking about how having a significant other is your inalienable right, somehow owed to you by society or other unspecified parties. You wish you had a job? Then make yourself appealing and more competent, so that someone will want to hire you. Don't go talking about how somebody else is "stealing" "your" job, as if a job is somehow owed to you, regardless of how incompetent you are.
Obama is consistently talking about "American jobs" as if the jobs are rightfully American. His political stance is well known to be re-distributionist. Start earning, and stop whining for a handout.
The best thing we could do if we don't want IBM and other companies going abroad is what John Doerr and Thomas Friedman have suggested:
Because it's often difficult or impossible to import international engineers and scientists with valuable or unusual skills to the United States, the logical alternative is to go to where they are. Want this kind of behavior on the part of IBM and others to, if not stop altogether, then at least to slow? Implement Friedman's suggestion. Otherwise, don't implicitly (or, in the case of many commenters on this thread, explicitly) complain when companies react to the conditions that politicians, and by extension voters, have placed on them.
In 1965 Canada brought into law the "Auto Pact" ahref=http://www.canadianeconomy.gc.ca/english/economy/1965canada_us_auto_pact.htmlrel=url2html-14781http://www.canadianeconomy.gc.ca/english/economy/1965canada_us_auto_pact.html>
It basically states that for every car bought in Canada, one car must be built in Canada.
(In 2001 it was abolished because it infringed on NAFTA.)
This policy works for everybody except the greedy CEO's. Any manufacturing industry could be converted to this setup.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
This is what our factories have to compete with. Plants which poison children.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090820/ap_on_re_as/as_china_lead_poisoning
Laws that protect us from this kind of behavior add costs that push companies to these countries.
Democracy isn't cheap.
Because the stuff that's "chasing them away" is the same stuff that still nominally keeps the American people from being totally subjugated and destitute like the Chinese and Indians are.
What makes you think that's achievable? Americans are competing with Chinese and Indians. What possible reason would there be for anybody to pay more to an American worker than to a Chinese or Indian worker?
Companies aren't going to stop leaving the US until we are so broken by their flight that we are forced to become fascist.
Companies don't care about fascism. We just need to become cheaper, or we need to help Chinese and Indians become rich.
Isn't the real fix that we improve the countries they are outsourcing to until the economy there demands the same as US salaries? At that point geography becomes the benefit instead of dollars and they want to hire the guy closer to "home."
-Xen
To be fair, Bush pissed off the whole world and destroyed the US budget. Both will take years to repair. No other US president can come close to that.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
So after they move out what will keep them doing to the US what they do to other countries - exploit countries resources for profit. As we were the home to these greedy groups we have been pretty much insulated as they didn't rock their own boat. But if they are based outside of the US, kinda cleans off that slate and opens us up as a whole new market to exploit, don't you think?
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Well, let them all move to India/China/etc, then.
Let them move to countries that rely more on rote memorization of facts, and little in the way of independent thinking. Let them move to countries where the employees could feed themselves for a year by stealing a few pieces of their product. Let them move to countries where the government could very well decide that the company isn't pious or nationalistic enough, and take over their assets.
America has many great and successful companies for a reason.
It's hard to put a dollar amount on how much money will be lost by them moving overseas, but I guarantee it'll be a net loss. I look forward to hearing some CEO's say, "Well, we had record profits this year, but no one can seem to actually find any of this money, and we can't even pay rent on some of our offices anymore!" Metrics aren't perfect, and no one with a marketing degree or above the level of middle management seems to know that.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I find the fact that corporations such as this, especially in a time of economic hardship, are basically harming american workers and showing such contempt for the USA, to be greatly offensive and angers me to no end. i think its time that we detach from china and india which has basically decimated Americas economy and who have stolen our jobs. I think its clearly time that we need to stop allowing these companies to abuse the USA looking at it as only a market to sell their overpriced chinese crap, and start creating jobs here again. Globalisation is such a big scam its ridiculous, its destroying this countyr and allows these greedy companies to basically exploit slave labor in china. The US should and can, and must for its survival, implement a tariff on imports of cars, textiles, furniture, IT services, customer service calls to India and China, etc, and so on. When we have 15% unemployment in reality and people struggling to find work the notion of any company moving jobs somewhere else really should cause a revolt from americans and demands to implement tariffs. Its time to get past this irrational hysteria about tariffs. Tariffs are good and can help this countries economy rebound. There is nothing wrong with it since it simply allows americans to make products for other americans. Think about it, why cant the chinese make things for other chinese, and americans make things for other americans. it would be better for the chinese of the products that chinese workers stayed in china to benefit to the people there. It would be better for americans to create more jobs in the US making products for use by americans. The only people that globalisation benefits is the wealthy rich elite corporations who important products made by employees in slave labor camps in china making a few cents an hour, living in filthy dormitories, who are treated in the most inhumane way, beaten, and even not allowed to use the restroom, with litany of human rights abuses, the products these slaves make are then sold off at a 100% markup in the US and the wealthy elite take the profit. Both the american and the chinese worker are the losers. Globalisation is what has allowed as well corporations to basically dictate to countries basically how they will treat workers and the environment and rewards countries which allow their environment and workers to be ruthlessly exploited by massive global corporations. This is a system where massive global corporations get their way and make the laws through making countries compete against each other to see who can allow their employees to be treated in the most inhumane way. Through the global consolidation and globalisation the corporations are able to control markets resources, jobs, and so on in many different countries and operate as sort of transnational governments. Through this we are seeing a new world order emerge where the governments of countries are simply puppets of a powerful fascist global corporate order who controls wealth, resources, jobs, markets, capital, etc.
If we value our freedom, we need to implement tariffs which would give our own worker welfare laws, our own democratic state, some force and allow us to implement unions without the corporations threatening to move jobs to other countries. If you want to be treated like a decently like a human being, to have a good life and to be paid decently for decent work, we desperately need to implement broader democratic unions which allow employees a democratic vioce where they can act as a safeguard against mistreatment and slave wages. Unions are essential to our economic recovery and for stopping the destruction of the middle class. The unions built the middle class in the USA and ironically created a middle class that had the spending power which made companies like IBM so successful. Unions are essential for workers to have decent wage since it more often than not is the tendancy of corporations to pay workers as little as they can, leading to a vast impoverished state in the economy. Its just shocking and disgusting tha
Look I am an Indian, and I think that there are a few things all of you need to know.
America is not going anywhere for now. The fundamentals of your future lie in the hands of your people, especially the select few who have a vision and can buck the status quo. As long as you have plenty of such individuals you are going to weather any geo-political storm.
Whereas in my nation life is so linear that it is a goddamn joke.
Almost every kid is expected to be an engineer and most of these engineers hardly even know what the hell they are talking about. As Feynman would say their knowledge is fragile.
Our educational system itself is a joke. Trust me on this.
At the same time entrepeneurs are discouraged and looked down upon. They are sorta treated with ice, as everyone wants a *son* in an MNC with a prestigous MBA. So, basically our society is choking itself. Sure, these people are awesome paper pushers, but despite the fact that some of them do have a decent brain they all seem to fail to do anything different.
No revolutions are put into motion. No brilliant new synthesis are formulated. No groundbreaking patents are filed. In short, the truly important stuff is in stasis.
Your society whereas pushes its outliers and that is why, as Kay once put it, most software is written on one side of the atlantic. I think that you should stop looking at IBM and start looking at MIT. That is where your future lies.
And seriously drop all of that economics mumbo-jumbo. As the foundations of society are the ability to create things, transport those things and dessiminate them. I think that those earning a living by making a killing in stocks are living a sham.
Oh and Thomas Jefferson would kill himself if he saw Bush in action. Despite his failings Obama is, at least, a breath of fresh air. So, value him for that. At least he had the courage (unlike me) to step up to the plate.
P.S. - /.s javascript is screwed, haven't they heard of simplicity?
You've heard of offshoring labor to a foreign nation for a lower cost in labor?
International Corporate Evolution is the new trend. When in a nation with a bad economy offshore the entire company to a richer nation like in the EU that has a lower corporation tax and a lower tax on the wealthy.
You see labor needs to be offshored to the lowest cost third world nation like China, India, Thailand, Russia, where the cost of labor is low. That is the first step in International Corporate Evolution.
The second step is to expand your business to a foreign nation to compete with other corporations in foreign nations. If a company does not do that, foreign companies might move to their nation and buy them out (ala Anhiesier Busch Beer) or expand and build a company right next to yours and try to shut yours down. It is like a game of corporate chess, you need to move a piece to their location before they move a piece to your location and checkmate you.
The third step is to offshore highly talented employees (like with PHDs and tons of experience) and management to a nation that is wealthy and has a good economy but has lower corporation taxes and lower wealthy taxes. Move the bulk of your local company to that nation and downsize any employees that aren't as valuable.
The fourth step is closing down buildings in the local nation that has the bad economy and high taxes.
The fifth step is moving back to that nation after the bad economy has recovered and tax rates have been cut again and bringing the talent back with you. But if the economy does not recover and the tax rates are not cut, this is like a strike against the government to offshore the entire company to punish them for higher taxes and ruining the economy.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Bush Jr watched his dad get crucified in an election against Clinton. His father had raised taxes (as did Reagan) to keep the budget balanced (ish). Clinton also did that. It is speculated that Bush Jr's experience of his fathers election loss jaded him over treating the budget responsibly - afterall, the voters panned his father.
Bush Jr ruined the budget as follows:
So Obama (the bad guy =) inherited a financial crisis whose complex antecedents go back at least 20 years. Just when the US needs to spend big, Bush had already bankrupted the budget.
Obama has already spent more money then Bush has in his entire 8 years in office.
So myopic.
For the record, Reagan, Bush and Bush were huge spenders, but Reagan and Bush Senior had the wisdom to also raise taxes. The Republicans are all about huge government, and are the ones who tax and spend - by their actions. Except Bush Jr just who spent, so that future presidents can deal with the tax part.
Obama's spending is about averting a depression.
...is falling apart, daily. Entire states are broke, even our richest state California is broke. They are having to close down a lot of infrastructure, give public employees furloughs, dump prisoners, consolidate prisons, etc, and it keeps getting worse. Local hospitals and local school systems are broke all over the nation *now* and it is getting worse. Thousands of local governments are broke or near broke. Millions of people are facing foreclosure and one estimate is half of all homes will be "underwater" in terms of what they owe as opposed to what they will really be worth within a few years now. Daily we hear about more and more jobs going poof, just like in this article. States and local governments get taxes to pay for your civilized infrastructure, and we have half a million jobs a month going poof. People who can't afford their house note are not going to be paying local property tax, and if they lose their job, not be paying any state or federal tax either.
Your quote, then, in my opinion, "We are never going to drop to their level of poverty because we have things like running water, a strong infrastructure, and plentiful high quality housing. These are things that won't go away, just because of outsourcing."..is *wishful thinking* to the extreme, because there's nothing whatsoever stopping all this civilization we have developed for generations now here from further deteriorating as long as we are losing 100 jobs to one gained, whatever the lopsided figure is, and government tax payer jobs are not the answer there either.
Government jobs cost the nation wealth, they don't create wealth. We need real civilian sector middle class wealth creation jobs, not mc jobs or telephone sanitizing "service" jobs or government busywork bureaucracy jobs (or all those ludicrous "homeland insecurity" paramilitary jobs), and those are the type of jobs we have been losing, the wealth creation jobs. You have to have wealth creation jobs, period. Lose them, your civilization will collapse.
And it can and most likely will get a lot worse here than it is now, and it is precisely from the last couple of decades of heavy offshoring for fast cheap labor arbitrage designed to make wall street richer and everyone else poorer (in this nation).
Your attitude (anyone you) changes fast once you lose your home and job, etc. It stops being theory.
Not sure how far you are willing to drop down in lifestyle, but to match a lot of the developing world, you should be using a privy out back, be walking a few miles to the town well and carrying the water back, raising a lot of your own food immediately around your house, etc. Plus working 16 hour shifts in some dismal and highly dangerous factory for a few bucks a day..but still be forced to pay all US costs.
That's what you are saying, so I'll counter it and say it can't be done in the US, hence why I said wishful thinking.
I know I live as cheap and mean as possible here, probably a lot closer to developing world status that most people on this board, my income is slightly less than ten grand a *year*, and I couldn't live on 5 bucks a day, it just isn't possible unless you are out living totally wild and scrounging your food mostly. Any sort of shelter with electricity and running water, etc costs a lot more than that. I think I am at the bare minimum now, and we grow a lot of our own food, drive ancient vehicles and those only once a week, spend zip money on entertainment or restaurants, etc. Cheap, not third world, but second world status and you STILL need to have some decent cash coming in to exist here.
No job..then what, what do you tell people who just lost their middle class job to offshoring? "Tough crap, sucks to be you friend, just magically exist somehow...just think how cheap the goods at walmart are though!!"
Really, what are you willing to say to someone *in person*, face to face, who lost their job to offshoring, haven't found another job
Don't know anything about Taft, but crucifying Carter for the Islamic revolution is revisionist. The antecedents for the revolution are complex, and much to do with the actions of the British empire. Jimmy Carter did not create the whole middle-east hatey thing. Not by a long shot.
Although I do *not* support the Iranian revolutionaries, the Shah was one of those nasty idiot dictators that was a puppet of Western powers. So the revolutionaries had it in for western imperial powers, and for good reason. It would have been better for everyone if a bunch of moderates took over, but that is history.
Carter angered Iranian revolutionaries by toasting the Shah just before the revolution. Carter tried to work with the new regime after the take-over, however, he really pissed them off again by allowing the Shah to receive medical treatment in the US. Note that Carter only granted the request to the Shah because of pressure from Rockefeller and Kissinger.
The paranoid revolutionaries in Iran thought that the USA was plotting a "counter" coup, but they never were. To consolidate power, the revolutionaries started the hostage crisis. There was probably nothing that could have been done to militate the course of events. Dealing with hostile paranoid revolutionaries is hard - esp. when they already hate you and blame you for all of their problems.
Carter attempted to negotiate, and then there was the ill-fated rescue mission. Perhaps you think Carter should have let the US embassy staff rot in hell? They were just doing their jobs, and the US administration was doing nothing wrong at the time.
The talks that successfully negotiated the release of the hostages were initiated by Carter two months before the election. The release occurred shortly after Reagan was sworn in as president.
THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THEIR RELEASE, but in a twist of irony, they got the entire political capital for it - essentially because of the campaign. The Republican administration did nothing to set the history straight in the publics mind, by giving credit where it was due.
You can read all about it on the internet. It might open your eyes.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
These companies never 'detach' from the capital and credit markets that they need to stay in business. They enjoy access to free and fair markets supported by the U. S. Constitution. Investors and lenders to such companies depend on financial and accounting standards along with required public disclosures of financial information. When someone threatens to steal their IP or violate a contract they are a party to, they expect access to a fair and impartial court system backed by a stable political system. Let's see them 'detach' from those things...not likely. Being located in the United States is an enormous advantage for these companies and they know it. They just don't want us to know it.
In particular, India and China having their money fixed to ours. If not, then why not Europe or Russia? The simple fact is that IBM, GE, and others are exploiting the fixed money difference and the west is allowing itself to be destroyed. Unless the WEST decides to work together to stop these nations from having an unfair advantage, then there will NOT be a fair competitive market. And without that, more and more IP will simply flow to these nations. Keep in mind that BOTH china and India are pushing to obtain all of our IP related to tech (such as nukes or military or tech or pollution control, etc) and are simply stealing it if they do not feel like paying for it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
All wealth stems from theft either now or in earlier eras.
I see, so when I am the best at building widgets, and you buy one of my widgets because
it is good quality and worth the price to you, this is theft?
Oh, I get it, I should *give* you the widget just because I have many and you have none. Even If I had
to buy materials and spend time to make the widget, I am evil, mean and nasty to not just give you one.
Regarding your example, England and the US South wanted free trade with each other, with the backwards South supplying raw cotton material to industrialized England for processing, while the US North wanted "laws and regulations, imposed sanctions, taxes and duties" to protect its growing industrial base. The result of this was a civil war in which the industrialized north beat the rural south (a south which couldn't trust a quarter of its population). Afterward, the sanctions and duties only increased. What was the result of this? Today the GDP of the US is five times that of the UK.
Palestine was under British control,
Just about the entire middle east was under British control. Oh and "palestine" meant the Roman Province called "philistine", meaning Israel, Lebanon, most of Syria, and sizeable parts of Iraq, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
And IBM may have helped with the holocaust, but the project they signed on for was the administration of the national health care system of Nazi Germany. Of course that was the project that turned into the holocaust later. I know it's important for "tolerant socialists" to believe that Hitler was conceived in a black mass by 2 goats fucking eachother in hellfire, but in reality this was an unremarkable guy, who started out working hard and trying to help his country. Later he went into politics and pushed a form of centralized economy that used to be called "socialism" (as opposed to (bolsjevik) communism) and is today known as "fascism". The component of the ideology that lead to supremacism and the holocaust, eugenics, can be found in any history book under socialism.
Until late 1941, Hitler was known as the man who made socialism acceptable and possible in America, or more affectionately the "Champion of the poor". He was nominated for the Nobel peace prize, and was the recipient of numerous press prizes on promoting peace, fairness and, especially, equality.
Following the Great Depression and World War II, the leaders of our society decided to start taxing the wealthy more and more, while using that money for the betterment of society as a whole. It was called the New Deal. And this policy worked quite well, propelling America into a period of rapid economic growth, while at the same time creating a profound sense of economic security for the middle class. Vacation pay became the norm (it largely didn't exist before the Great Depression), and middle class Americans had enough disposable income to spend on luxuries like vacations.
This system was made possible by several other policies that prevented the rich from quickly withdrawing their money from the country. If you were wealthy in the UK in the 1950's, it was extremely difficult to get your money out of the country. It became common in this period for rich British citizens to build huge sailing yachts, which they sailed to other countries and then sold. They used their boats as a store of their wealth (read Myles Smeeton's Once is Enough for a story of one such couple).
Then came the right wing "neo-liberal/neo-conservative" politicians. When they got into power, one of the first things they did was to remove the barriers to capital mobility. Money was able to flow almost completely freely across national borders. This has brought economic growth for some, especially in countries like China. But it has also ensured that the countries that originally used taxes on the wealthy to ensure a healthy middle class were at a huge disadvantage. Rich individuals have withdrawn their money from America, and invested it in countries like China.
What many of us don't realize is that the complete and free mobility of capital will lead to the virtual disappearance of the American middle class as we have seen it over the past four decades, because it will ensure that money will flow away from countries with high taxes towards productive countries with low taxes. The country will increasingly look like Britain in the 1800's during the beginning of the industrial revolution (i.e. the world of Oliver Twist). There will be a very wealthy class. And there will be a worker class, which will comprise the vast majority of the population. Things like vacation pay, comfortable pensions, affordable quality health care, and disposable income will slowly but surely disappear for the vast majority of the former middle class. I am not prophesizing this; I am watching it happen before my eyes. IT IS ALREADY HAPPENING! Take an honest look at America right now, and tell me that our standard of living isn't slipping. And this at a time when we have never been able to make products more efficiently!
And to those of you who reflexively demonize those like me as "liberals", ask yourself this question? Are you a Billionaire? If not, then why are you thinking like a billionaire? Why do you think that lower wages for most of society is in your interest? Why do you think that taxing billionaires and spending that money to build roads isn't in your interest?
Do you think that the $20000 you have invested in stocks will pay for your comfortable retirement? What you seem to forget is that the billionaire who owns $200 million of those same stocks will make slightly more than you. And he will use the money he makes to buy even more stocks. Meanwhile, you, with your ever decreasing salary will have less and less disposable money to invest.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
End free trade with non-free countries, or try communism! buy Chinese!
-edfardos
This has nothing to do with socialism, tax structure, or unregulated capitalism. IBM has stopped to innovate, the only way they can show any profits is by screwing over its employees with no long term strategy in place. They want to look good next quarter, and that is all they care about. The only way they can show any profits is by shifting their work force to cheaper labor markets. They have nothing new to sell, just have to maintain existing crap.
I gave it a read. It's well researched, but repetitive and sensational.
The system worked like this. One punchcard per person. Take the census data, find out a person's ethnicity, parent's ethnicity, religion, occupation, education etc. Now if you need to find the Jewish people, all you do is run a sort based on ethnicity. They were able to use the census data and the card sorters to find people with as little as 1/16 Jewish ancestry.
Now you have a stack of cards for each concentration camp. If you need a thousand people to build a railway, sort on profession, age, etc. Done. Distribute the cards to the guards and find people to find the prisioners with the right numbers tattooed on their armptis.
It's no surprise that the German subsidary did this work though. It was a German company. The surprise was how Watson was able to keep his hands in the cookie jar from over a wartime border.
As a fellow economic genius I have a few thoughts:
1.) Buying cheaper is more expensive.
We the consumers are as much to blame as the large corporations. The point is we are willing to buy the cheaper product to save ourselves money. There's nothing inherently wrong with this however we are thinking in the individual sense and not looking beyond the purchase and asking questions such as "How can they make this so much cheaper?" We just want cheap crap we can throw away later so we can buy more cheap crap (repeat over and over) which actually costs us more in the long run and fills those companies pockets.
2.) You need a babysitter?
We want the Uncle Sam to totally control how these companies operate however we fail to realize that we have the purchasing power. You don't need to be protected from buying from China or elsewhere. Make the decision on what to buy from where and whom. If nothing fits what your looking for then here's a thought: Stop buying shit. What could take months to years in the political arena can be accomplished instantly by you making a decision while your in the store. What happened to personal responsibility?
3.) The Chinese work hard.
Yea, I said it. The average Lee over there is no different than over here. He or she is just trying to support their family and put some food on the table. Would you let your family go hungry for someone else in another country? Deep down I doubt it because I know I wouldn't. Thus I can't fault them for it. If you want to turn your anger somewhere turn it at the guys lining their pockets with fat bonuses and those employees putting in the bare minimum and expecting premium wage.
4.) Our students need to not be stoopid.
I work and attend a college (no, I'm not the janitor). Everyday I hear students complain about how hard they have to study or how they can't wait to get shit faced. Yea, that's the way to go. Go ahead and burn some brain cells that won't come back.
They study to pass tests but not to learn the material. They complain about teachers trying to "over teach" them. We're so obsessed with having a society with individuals that have degrees that the quality of the person (by quality I mean someone who actually is willing to work hard to learn the material) getting it reduces its true significance. And a degree is only a meaning. That piece of paper doesn't make you more intelligent, it just means you know how to study for a test and do homework. Anyone can memorize things. What matters is your passion for learning, and your ability to take those memorized facts and use them in an abstract manner to solve problems that don't have answers yet. Your goal shouldn't be graduation but graduation as an effect of you mastering the material.
Why the rant? Because these same students who hate to learn and don't have a passion for knowledge take this same approach in the work field but have some sense of entitlement about them. When they can't do the job and get fired they blame the gov, the minimum wage guy from China, and everyone's momma. I would think our present situation would make students want to buckle down and give China something to be envious of but I still see students complain about how long their class was. Maybe China does deserve it more...
At my work we have a Chinese production facility. They do molding design as well. Molding design and Manufacturing are just as expensive. So skilled labour is just as expensive here as it is over there. Only thing is assembly is cheaper. But I can already see prices starting to rise. It's cheap but not that cheap. And then you have to send your stuff all across the world, this takes 3 months. Transportation is not free as well. So in all it's better now in China but when wages increase all this work will be coming back. And we will have a large Chinese middle class ready to spend some of their cash over here.
Oh please, economics is NOT is science in the same way as physics and chemistry. It does not have hard and testable hypotheses. Its predictions are always approximate, and are seemingly rarely falsified, largely due to their vagueness. Most economic theories are inwards looking and self-referential. The theories are logical based on a certain set of assumptions, but those base assumptions are mere speculation.
I like to look at economics as a useful tool. It may have some preductive utility, not unlike technical stock analysis. But it certainly shouldn't be used as the main guiding force by which to operate a society. I believe that the fundamental flaw of economics is that it seeks to make predictions about phenomenon that are largely psychological. In the end, market behavior is based on psychology, on desires, on fears, on needs. To assume that we can reduce such a massively complicated thing as fear to a simple set of equations is ludicrous.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
..just realistic. I saw the crash coming a long time ago and set out to become as independent as possible, including dropping demand for having to have so much of my life connected through the federal reserve note. I think I was accurate in the face of events over the last ten years. Way more than the bulk of wall street economists (the shills I mean) and especially the government who have lowballed the effects near constantly. Even with cooking the books, changing the way they count unemployment, changing how they create what it costs to live (dropping food and energy prices from their calculations) etc, it has still been worse than what they predicted. Near every quarter they have to readjust this or that. (I have a lot of journal entries on economics if you want to look, under "the almighty buck" but most of my other writings on the subject are gone now because they were on sites that are defunct)
Now not all big name economists got it wrong, the ones who also predicted it correctly are still saying that we haven't hit bottom yet, so I'll tend to believe those guys.
The biggest clue that the Feds were getting concerned that they had screwed up was when they stopped releasing all the money stats, the M3, which helped them push massive inflation easier.
As to living cheap, well one, I just am not doing apartments and random roomates, I am near retirement age and.well, just ain't gonna. My apartment days are long over. My GF and I share a small cabin and live on a farm. We3 have dogs and cats anf chickens and cows and a large garden, and that's jibe with apartment and roomate living. No mastter how cheap you get in an apartment, you are still 100% dependent on the whole system staying intact, which is a risk I simply will not take at this time..because I think it's near nuts to do that. If you do that you are relying on the biggest crooks and conmen in the world to have your best interests at heart..I just can't buy that being a smooth move.
I determined that moving to the the semi stix and being directly involved with food production and also we get a lot of our normal energy here directly onsite using firewood and having our own well, etc would be the best future proofing method. To get independent. Trying to eliminate the middleman as much as possible, we even have a modest solar array now and so on. We have little to no debt as well, a big help. Yes we buy in bulk and also grow in bulk ourselves, example we have enough stored food to last well over an entire year, even without having our garden, etc. Took awhile but I got there. I believe in wealth creation, just not filtering it through what I see as the dropping in value fed reserve note, so I switched to dealing in tangibles as much as possible..
We'll see what happens, but my prediction is it will get a lot worse here in the US and might take generations to recover, not just years or even decades.
The dominance of the fed reserve note as the international reserve currency is clearly in peril now, which is by far and away the big kahuna when it comes to quality of life in the US since we have offshored the bulk of wealth creation manufacturing. We need to import manufactured stuff now, and have been doing it with printed up pieces of paper. IOUs in other words (a "note" is a legal term for a debt instrument), and we we try to get them back to finance government, we just issue another form of IOU to these foreigners who hold our debt and they are getting *antsy* over that now and are slowing this effect and practice. It's slow, but the trend is steady and what you can read about it is it is a clear pattern and will continue. The fed note is medium term doomed right now, and as it goes, bye bye middle class USA.
We started out having our own manufactured items being exchangeable for imported oil (the petrodollar rise and the dominace of the fed reserve note after Nixon's move), but seeing as how that is not so much the case anymore, all these various outside nations now are questionin
Back when I first read Gibsons novels I realized that his vision of multinationals running the world is essentially correct. Made me kind of sad too. Since being laid in the financial services meltdown I am now working for an offshore outsourcing firm with the client being a Fortune 10 company. These days I can relate more to Tom Joad than Adam Smith...
We can and freeze a lot here. We grow our own beef and chickens and get some eggs, plus there's a big pond to fish from and we get bass from it. It's so close and easy to get fish from I don't bother with trying to can it, we eat it fresh when we want to or throw a few fillets in the freezer. But I hear ya, I could do that, should try it just for garnering another thing to learn to can I guess. And can't hardly keep up with the garden now, we've be canning and freezing a lot of the surplus. Running two stand alone chest freezers and the side freezer on a two door big freezer/fridge combo. Modest increase in electric bill for a huge decrease in grocery store bill, it is a good trade. Shelves full of home canned stuff, plus we store our own dried beans and so on. Here's a cool one, we have propane heat plus wood heat, but the last two winters we didn't use any propane at all, zilch. I just cut and split some extra wood, done. That saves a lot of cash right there, but the propane in the tank is still good for decades if we really need it for emergency use, and it is paid off.
The whole deal is to try and get what you would normally spend cash on, without needing the cash, and eliminating the middleman suckage. I haven't found replacements for every bill yet, like this internet connection, but we have done a lot so far. By going directly to the tangibles, it saves bunches and your hourly "pay" goes up in a sense. It is a way to "insure" both future availability of something you need, plus lock in a price better when you do all or most of it yourself. Independence rather than dependence.
Here's a direct figure for you: by growing our own beef, we pay moderately more for hamburger than you can get it at the store on sale..but all the other cuts of beef are the same "price" to us, so we save a ton. We eat ribeyes for barely hamburger price, and that is organic grass fed to boot. Price that in the store, heh. Same with our organic garden produce.
I don't do my own butchering on a whole beef, just too big and no walk in fridge/cooler for the required hanging and aging, so that's the biggest expense, just the slaughterhouse fee, which isn't that bad overall. I find someone to take one half, we take the other half. Chickens I do myself, I can knock one out pretty fast now. In a pinch though I can butcher a whole beef, I mean if I *really* have to, I have done it before twice, but I will admit I am not as good or fast as a pro butcher who does it all day long as a biz and is set up for it with huge meat saws and electric grinders, etc.
And then there's the normal thrifty action, hit the thrift stores/ yard sales for good used clothing, all that stuff you can imagine. I try to avoid buying anything brand new unless necessary. Even my tools, if there is something I need that I don't already have, I'll hit the pawnshops first before shelling out the full price scratch. My computer desk here is just an old platform bed I built and used for years, no longer needed, so now it sets across a bureau for my precious gadget junk (has to go someplace..I am a nerd, can't throw out old gadgets;) ) and my file cabinets. Done, "free" executive sized desk. My computer is built from cheap parts mailorder from tiger, then recycled hard drives and optical drives, and I only did that because the last one was broken, physically broken, stopped booting and it was an old 200 mghz pentium pro! I was using that until two years ago or so (I think around fedora core 8 maybe? Don't remember, around then). We don't do cable TV(not even available here) or satellite, but get by with an old regular TV and one of the perverter boxes and over the air signals. Movies we buy used tapes or disks or I download free to copy documentaries and so forth (I don't peg leg anything, but am in favor of serious copyright law reform there). Books I buy used and ye aulde ladee hits the library. We have some *really* nice and expensive carpeting here, I got it for free for tearing it out at some rich folks house, they didn't