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High-Tech Research Moving From US To China
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that American companies like Applied Materials are moving their research facilities and engineers to China as the country develops a high-tech economy that increasingly competes directly with the United States. Applied Materials set up its latest solar research labs in China after estimating that China would be producing two-thirds of the world's solar panels by the end of this year and their chief technology officer, Mark R. Pinto, is the first CTO of a major American tech company to move to China. 'We're obviously not giving up on the US,' says Pinto. 'China needs more electricity. It's as simple as that.' Western companies are also attracted to China's huge reservoirs of cheap, highly skilled engineers and the subsidies offered by many Chinese cities and regions, particularly for green energy companies. Applied Materials decided to build their new $250 million research facility in Xi'an after the city government sold them a 75-year land lease at a deep discount and is reimbursing the company for roughly a quarter of the lab complex's operating costs for five years."
you fucked our country over good.
Are you sure what your outsourcing is really research?
Call me jaded, but I have a feeling this "research" is going to produce nothing but substandard digital video recorders.
You know what I'm taking about - an interface so ugly it must have been outsouced. Controls so laggy, you have to wonder how indifferent the developers could have been about their product..
China produces lead tainted toothpaste, and fail tainted DVRs.
The fact of the matter is that US based engineers are simply overpaid and receive too many benefits. I myself am an engineering manager at a small startup and we are looking to move work to China simply because the people there are willing to do the same job as our US employees for a fraction of the cost in both pay and regulatory overhead. If the USA wants to compete in the free market then we need to start lowering our expectations of what kind of pay and benefits we should expect from our employers. In addition, we need to fight for lower government regulation of private enterprise. We need to remove environmental and labor restrictions, rules about the number of hours people can work, and the endless safety regulations they work under, etc. If the government sees jobs moving overseas, it will need to adapt to prevent it, and in the end the FREE MARKET wins, which I think everyone here will agree is a great thing.
But fortunately for the rest of the world, they can laugh at our silly statements of what they "owe" us and get on with their lives. Oh, wait? What's that you say? We spend more on our military than every other nation on earth put together? Oh, well, I'm sure they'll pay up then.
Come on --- what's left for the US other than the formation of a military-enforced trade hegemony?
Saying no to H1Bs etc. does not necessarily get americans hired - it just forces complete departments to be outsourced.Why keep IT here - when you can have the whole thing in Mumbai or Bangalore ?
I much prefer offshoring to bringing them here. 1)They have terrifyingly bad social skills. 2) Without them coming over here and getting trained in American schools and by American engineers, they barely have the skills to find the men's room.
The Chinese engineers I've worked with have been top notch, however. Any company dumb enough to move R&D to India deserves what they get.
You know, a mainstream economist would say that having companies like Applied Materials in the U.S.A doesn't matter because consumer spending is 70% of the economy and Applied Materials does not produce anything that consumers buy directly! That's the problem with Keynesian economics. We think we can get ahead by stimulus and just consuming things and not producing things. People who have read and understood Friedrich Hayek's works know that the producers of goods further back in the chain of production are out competed for resources of all kinds by the consumption sectors when consumer credit is stimulated through cheap consumer credit as it has been in the USA over the previous 30 years. These firms that produce goods further from direct consumption by the consumer have to move to a less consumer oriented economy, like China to have better access to land, labor and capital.
I've had similar experiences with Indians. Speaking of the men's room, this reminds me of some incidents I witnessed involving some programmers who'd come straight from India.
One of the incidents involved a fellow during his first week of work. It turns out he had never used a western-style toilet before. Not knowing how to use them, he had been defecating into the tank. This was getting the janitor really pissed off, having to scoop shit out of the toilet tank each day. The janitor thought somebody was trying to get revenge on him. Finally, one of the managers walked in on the Indian fellow and caught him in the act.
The other incidents involved an Indian fellow whose name was "Poopinshunduhmar" or something like that. He would sign all of his emails with the name "Poop", apparently not understanding that "poop" is an English word for shit. He ended up sending some emails to an external customer who was not impressed. There were threats of important contracts being lost.
It's not just cheaper labor. It's that they are doing what we did over a hundred years ago when we decided to just ignore the rest of the world's rights and patents and do our own thing. So we built and invented and took all of the credit where we could for ourselves. And it worked fine in the early days. Then lawyers and the courts got involved. And now, it's so cumbersome to even invent or create anything here in the U.S. that the only real option if you want rapid change and to stay ahead is to once again go to where there is no such idiocy.
And just like there was a giant brain-drain from Europe to the U.S. in the last century or so, there also will be once from elsewhere to China.
I know that if I wanted to start a new company, for instance, California would be the last place I'd want to start it. Or well, pretty much anyplace in the U.S., as just fighting and dealing with legal issues alone would take years and enormous amounts of money before even one item hit the shelves.
I go to china 3-4 times a year on business. I started learning chinese before my first trip but it's not necessary. Anybody you're likely to deal with already knows english. They learn to read and write it at least, not necessarily speak or hear it. There's also a lot of hot chinese pussy that loves western dick and wants to get the fuck out of the country.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
They paid off the loans by borrowing more money at zero from the fed, then bought bonds paying a few percent, among other schemes, that the tax payers get to pay off in the future!
THAT is supposed to be success? It's a pure 100% ripoff con job, hiding behind arcane book keeping stuff that if you aren't paying attention you'll get sucked into believing. It's an ongoing economic coup, completely crooked and corrupt, and has been since long ago. How much more crap you want to believe in? That net loss of jobs and net loss of actual and real productivity means less than some phony bid up wall street averages? You REALLY think the economy is better off with a 40% rise in stocks, but only with some extreme fudging and outright lying a 1.6% alleged rise in productivity, combined with MILLIONS of lost good paying jobs?? That taking money from one side of the till and shuffling it to the other and charging everyone else interest on that for the next few decades is a *good thing*?? Mind boggling..
Egads no wonder they keep getting away with these ripoffs. Look, they are LIARS get it? Just let that sink it. Big..fat..liars. Crooks and thieves as well, bunco artists, just for real high stakes. Just..believe that OK, because that's reality. Stop being dumbed down, stop falling for their media shills propaganda.
There's NO SUCH THING as a "jobless recovery", it's all ****ing snakeoil, designed to keep people from marching on DC and Wall Street with pitchforks and torches. This is the mother of all grand thefts. No, it isn't over, you didn't dodge any depression, it is barely started yet and it is going to get a LOT worse.
Those people are outright criminals, and they have transitioned right through the so called "change" in politics in the US, showing who really has the power and calls the shots. Big hint, it isn't those hand picked for you because they know you are dumb enough to keep falling for that dodge political actors 99% of the peeps vote for. Why the living &*&^^% people can't see this is crazy, it is as blatantly obvious as dogcrap on the sidewalk.
And what is worse is that so many people keep ARGUING that their pile of steaming dogcrap "party" is just so much better and more honest and competent than those other people's pile of steaming dogcrap.
It's two criminal gangs that both take orders from the FED and the big wall street banks and a few more selected corporate cartels. And that's it. The criminal gangs are the proxy fronts for the real crooks, they are the low level public tards that can take a little heat and keep attention diverted. That is their only purpose now, those two gangs exist to keep the people faked out.