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$4,400/Yr. Coders May Work On Dept. of Labor Project
theodp writes "To power the Tools for America's Job Seekers Challenge, the US Department of Labor tapped IdeaScale, a subsidiary of Survey Analytics, which is headquartered in Seattle with satellite offices in Nasik, India and Auckland, NZ (PDF). According to the Federal Register (PDF), an Emergency OMB Review was requested to launch the joint initiative of the DOL, White House, and IdeaScale to help out unemployed US workers. A cached Monster.com ad seeks candidates to work on the development and maintenance of ideascale.com, but in India at an annual salary of Rs. 200,000 to 300,000 ($4,4000 to $6,600 US). BTW, an earlier White House-sponsored, IdeaScale-powered Open Government Brainstorm identified legalizing marijuana as one of the best ways to 'strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness.'" There's no guarantee that Indian workers recruited by that Monster.com ad would work on US Department of Labor projects.
Sure, it might be driving down wages and benefits for Americans and allowing other nations to leverage our infrastructure for their profit, but isn't that just one of the perks of being a Friedmannite economy?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
We have a marvellous system called Free Trade. You can tell it's good just from it's name. It promotes Freedom! All the nations of the world are joining together as one to allow free movement in goods across borders.
Unfortunately, they are all also being very careful to make sure that their citizens don't have the same freedom of movement as a toaster.
What must it be like, to work all day on an assembly line as a child, producing shoes that have more freedom than you do - they can go to America!!
We can whine for tariffs, and try to tax and regulate foreign trade. This sucks for the economy - incidentally, protectionist policies are said to have contributed to the Great Depression. Double good luck stopping trade in something like software, which can cross a border without even needing to be smuggled in a gas tank.
So many factors go into currency and cost of living differences of the kind between the US, and say, India. So, that's not changing any time soon. Unless the dollar crashes. :)
In fact, the only hope an American laborer really has in the mean time is to open their borders. Allow free movement in people. And hope that people from around the world will want to come to the US to work. While it's cheaper to make things in the 3rd world, no one really wants to live there. It kind of sucks to save money by eliminating working police, courts, fire exits, scholarships, clean streets, environmental regulations, safety rules, torts, and so forth. The current system only soldiers on because, workers just have no choice. If they had one, labor might elect to find a more favorable set of laws to live under, which would somewhat mitigate management's ability to shop for the most cheap-but-labor-unfriendly shit-where-you-sleep laws they can find.
Hardly anything could be a bigger screw than what we have now, which involves H1B programs that bring foreign skilled labor into the US to learn, get experience, and then forces them to take it back home to India, Asia, etc. But this is probably exactly why IBM, Sun, Microsoft, etc. all support H1B programs.
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I was assuming that it continues along the wasteful spending theme. Why would the government spend money to conclude the phenomenally obvious fact that anyone who isn't either uninformed or a moron has known for decades? (answer: you can't finally argue for doing the correct thing after years of active government disinformation campaigns without a goverment study to show to those same wrongly informed sheeple)
;-)
Of course I may have been giving theodp the benefit of the doubt when he actually does think keeping marijuana illegal helps strengthen our democracy. After all, nothing shouts freedom from the rooftops like Uncle Sam telling you what plants you can and cannot grow and consume
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
If I have to complete with $5K/year Indian programmers, I have a right to lower my living costs by outsourcing my yard maintenance to an $3/hour undocumented mexican gardener. Or by outsourcing my software purchases to $0/hour piratebay. I know there are good arguments about both of these pursuits, but then there are similar ones about skirting US labor laws by outsourcing. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Legalization introduces one other aspect that can turn this around. TAXATION
Cigarettes and alcohol are taxed in special ways (sin taxes, essentially). Legalized marijuana can also be taxed, heavily if you want. Make it have a 100% tax if you wish. Or more. You can have the price of marijuana stay the same, except that former profits are now going to the government. And anyone selling untaxed goods can be charged with tax evasion (dealers *and* buyers).
Hell, in this day and age, if there are that many doped up people going around, the government ought to have a nice tidy little revenue stream.
Despite it being illegal there, pot use per capita in the US is higher than in Netherland, where it's (practically) legal.
Our pro-theocracy religionists disapprove of any distraction from suffering for Jesus.
Any pleasure must be rationed by the religionists (sex) or eliminated (pleasurable chemicals) because they are levers of social control and damn (pun intended) the consequences.
The War on Some Drugs is a pure product of US religionist (p)uritanism.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
It was decriminalized (read: effectively legalized by non-enforcement) in Massachusetts last year. As expected, nothing changed.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
I happen to be one of those people who hates to be in debt as a result I own my home. My property taxes on my house are more than $4,400/year. I know, I just wrote the checks for my taxes last year. Rent for a small apartment within 20 miles of here is about twice what I pay in taxes. Even at the $15,000 mentioned as the startingr salary for coders in India I can't pay my taxes, pay for water, gas, and electricity, still be able to eat. I could live here, pay my taxes, and eat if I steal wood and cook over a fire in my back yard. There is no public transport so I would have to walk everywhere until I was able to get a peddle cart. The nearest grocery store is three miles away and other stores are 5 or more miles away. There is a hospital only half a mile away :-)
What I am trying to say is that where I live in central Texas our entire society is designed around the assumption that you own a car and can pay $600++/month for housing. Just to live you need about $30,000/year. Which is about twice what a full time worker makes at minimum wage. That $30,000 doesn't get you much of a life. Central Texas is not expensive compared to a lot of place in the US.
How do we make US workers competitive in a world where there are billions of people who can live on so much less? Seriously, do you have any suggestions? Can we stop bitching dlbout the problem and start solving it? In the past Americans have been pretty good about banding together and solving problems. Where is the spirit that created credit unions as an alternative to corrupt and failed banks? Where the is the spirit that create the labor unions that gave us the standard of living we currently have? Where is the will to just say "NO MORE" and forced a corrupt racist government to end Jim Crowe. (OK, that is still ending, but from my point of view we have come a looooooooong way in the right direction.)
OK, before someone points it out... yes, I guilty of not doing anything too. At least I'm asklng the question.
Stonewolf
P.S.
I don't know how true this is but I'm hearing that families in Mexico have started sending money to their relatives in the US to help them survive the recession.
I'm in a 3rd world country and the top bosses in my ex-company outsourced some work to India.
;) ).
A number of those guys were paid more or about the same as us, but most of them weren't very good at what we required them to do. They might have been much better at "VB/Java business apps".
Our experience with them was they'd say "Yes" but too often it won't be true. Honesty is important when you are trying to get technical things done (diplomacy is important when you are trying to get political things done
FWIW their ex-chairman is now in prison for massive fraud.
Uh, but he's wrong!
I am and I apologize for my haste in looking for an annual income and reporting a monthly income. I had no ill intentions of misrepresentation or denouncing the Taiwanese people. I get five free minutes here and there in my day and just wanted to point out that the memory in all our computers probably come from workers earning less than our minimum wage. That has nothing to do with the rest of my argument.
If the average US person can't figure out the difference between years and months, or have poor reading comprehension, or can't be bothered to check stuff properly, it's no surprise US bosses are outsourcing to other countries.
Please do not attribute my own ignorance to the entire populace of the United States of America.
You've made your point, an ad hominem attack. Fine. But please I do not represent the average American in my posts! They are quick and disposable and if you read my signature, they may even cause death!
I'm saddened that instead of addressing the rest of my argument you began inferring that I meant '3rd world' (a phrase I didn't use) equated to crap. I'm also saddened that you think what you are seeing in that video is quality when it is the horrible product of over worked and underpaid individuals losing a childhood to low wage slavery and never being given a chance at a university like I was fortunate enough to have. So many wasted minds.
[1] FWIW, I'm a cheap worker (relative to the USA) in a 3rd world country. But hey at least I can read, spell and do basic math (with help from Google :) ).
How quick we are to denounce the American superiority only to replace it with our own. Let me know when you're ready to stop trying to take me off my imaginary pedestal and ready to step off of yours. We'll have a nice long chat over a few beers then.
If you thought I meant anything negative about the work in other countries, I did not. In fact, I am saddened they don't make more for their work and hope one day they make as much as I do for equivalent work. I am saddened that we think this 'outsourcing' is a negative thing when it is actually a great equalizer and makes the "fat lazy ill equipped American (me)" work harder and produce better software.
My work here is dung.