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Four Outrages Techies Need To Know About the State of the Union
Mr.Intel writes "Last night's State of the Union Address contained ten things (and four outrages) technical professionals need to know about the President's plans, and how his policies might affect you, your employer, and your family well into the future."
The same old tired promises we've been hearing since 2007. Where's the beef?
I read the article, I don't see anything specific to techies. Actually that whole article headline sounds like an article out of People magazine. What's going on here?
tldr
How can we out innovate when large corporations are selling technology to foreign countries? Think GE selling jet engine designs to China so they can get some short term profit. True, that's stuff that's already been "innovated", but unless you can know and sustain your rate of innovation you should not help the competition.
Outrage 8: I was outraged at Outrage 2 (and some other stuff!)? Is this guy serious? The whole article just seems to be some incoherent and ill-constructed rant. As a Non-US citizen, is there some deep and meaningful message in the drivel that I'm not understanding?
Sorry, but why should I care so much about David Gewirtz's take on the state of the union? But thanks for that deep insight on Boehner's choice of color for his tie.
I must be blind b/c I couldn't find the link to the article. I googled the post's title and found this article: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/government/10-things-and-4-outrages-techies-need-to-know-about-president-obamas-state-of-the-union-address/9930 In case someone is equally blind as me, I hope that helps.
...was the President's jest that a benefit of high speed rail was the absence of a pat down. If he realizes this bothers people... why not actually address privacy rights and the out-of-control TSA in his SOTU speech instead of bringing it up and throwing it aside?
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I am troubled by the wording of the headline. Am I alone in this regard?
Self awareness - try it!
The speech was fine I guess. Nothing that made me want to vote for him in 2012.
3d printers and open source hardware designs will make cheap labor irrelevant.
Why do we care what David Gewirtz thinks?
His big ideas seem to be "smart" power (or smartness in general) and clean energy. In other words, the same nonsense fluff you've heard 10000 times.
We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world
Can't we just try to work with the rest of the world to try to make things better for everyone? I don't care if America is #1 in x y or z if the world as a whole is not advancing.
Your outrage should come from the fact that this is lame ass blog spam.
That article is an opinion piece. Just because that crap is on ZDnet doesn't make it news of nerds.
Our nation's colors are red, white, and blue. So what's with Boehner's tie?
I agree! It really clashed with his orange face.
That is all.
I don't agree with his politics and absolutely none of his "outrages" were that outrageous. The speech is long and boring as it is, to include enough info so the author wouldn't be "outraged", it would be a month long speech. I hope he at least has some broken pieces of furniture or hole sin his walls where he can point to as evidence the he's really outraged. Otherwise it sounds like he's mad a s hell and not going to do anything about it except write about how mad as hell he is.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
At 27, I'm a "millennial." My generation and Generation X are looking at a bleak future because of what is being done by the Boomers.
I have a simple solution: take away the Boomers' Social Security and Medicare. All of it. Keep the Boomers' parents on it. They paid in and didn't give us this situation. They passed on the baton of leadership to the Boomers around Bush Sr. and the Boomers hit prime time in the Clinton and Bush years.
I say "f#$%" them, as a generation. They want to be able to default $500k mortgages and enjoy generous pensions and Social Security when they won't even let my generation discharge a few 10s of thousands of dollars in student loans **in bankruptcy court**. They want to turn Generation X into beasts of burden to fund their benefits while my generation wallows in disproportionate unemployment?
Screw them. The revenues from taking them off the potential Social Security and Medicare rosters would more than pay off our debt in under a decade.
and now he’s going after big oil.??
Oh puleeeze! Pull the other one.
So much bullshit... And the zombies nod their heads... *GAG!*
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Yeah that reminded me why I dont pay attention to anything published by ZD or "tech republic" anymore. 0% content and 20% opinion that is designed to get ad clicks.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The author of this is an idiot. He may have said something reasonable in the rest of the article but:
"First, if Americans are traveling in volume via high-speed rail, then those systems will need as much security as air travel."
Anyone who thinks this is a fucking idiot and needs a strong dose of Bruce Schneier.
Education has two functions:
(1) Give children sufficient information to make them better (as people and citizens of communities, cities, states, nations, and the world) than the prior generation.
(2) Give children the information required to enter the job market.
Education, and the children and teachers within, are not nor have they ever been tasked with shouldering the burden of the most in-debt and luxury-addicted nation in the world. They way education is being sold today, and now solidified by a president who's desperate to get support from the money-minded, is that we can create a Uber-WorkForce by hyper-educating, hyper-tracking, and hyper-testing our children.
"Invest in the most profitable areas of education now and we'll be rich in the future! MONEY!!!! LUXURY!!!"
This is genuinely impossible. Education cannot be treated as a competition ("Race to the Top", "Pay According to Results") and be expected to stay honest. Without honesty, we can't tell if new ideas are working. Moreover, children will eventually become normal, ordinary people with interests in love, humor, entertainment, politics, history, music, and so on... their K-12 over-education in science, technology, engineering, and math will not change them into a new generation of work-slaves.
Putting the pressure, money, and focus on such a goal will be a complete waste. Focus on making them good *people* first and foremost (education in *real* history, philosophy [including religion], sociology) while also educating them in the various ways they can earn sufficient money to live their happy lives and the rest takes care of itself.
And for the sake of cutting off some argument at the pass, I'm not advocating the cutting of STEM funding-- I'm saying that STEM subjects should not be over-invested... particularly at the cost of the education that is there to create a better society. Maybe one that doesn't allow itself to get into the mess we're in right now.
The goal of education is make good people who can be productive in the job market, not workers who are passable human beings.
the fact that you don't think it's a loose-loose situation makes it win-win for me.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Looser, said the Loser.
OMG, you mean a politician might not be living up to his promises?!?!! Holy shit!
When will people learn to stop believing politicians from the beginning instead of pretending like it is some sort of surprise that they let you down after you bend over and vote for them?
There is exactly one qualification for becoming an elected politician: a deep, all-consuming lust for power. That's it.
Politicians (of any party or none, it makes absolutely no difference) make promises for exactly one reason: to help them get into and maintain power. The only incentive they ever have to keep a promise is if for some reason their propaganda machine isn't working properly and they feel a need to impress a few voters.
If you want a politician that isn't going to fail you, then the only recourse is open source governance. Your other alternative is to keep voting for politicians and wondering why they keep screwing you over.
Mod parent up. I'm glad my fellow /.ers recognize him as a nutjob.
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
Yeah, read it an concluded WTF? I am traumatized by this outrageous title!
I RTFA and apart from the fact that it was pretty much a waste of time, I urge Mr. Gewirtz to consult a thesaurus and find some other words to use in place of 'outrage'.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Now exactly why much of that matters to most "techies" is beyond me. Really most of it doesn't mattter to most techies.
However it does draw eyes to the website. And I noticed there was a Michele Bachmann ad here on slashdot last night, and this seems to go well with her sales pitch as well. Since president lawnchair has already caved to everything that the GOP has asked for to date, they need to find something to get excited about for the future.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
You have an awfully low opinion of assembly line workers. I would encourage you to meet one. Then you'd appreciate the physical effort required to meet an extremely strict work schedule, and maintain attention and energy for an entire work day in less than comfortable conditions.
Sure, it's not an intellectually demanding field, and we suffer an intelligence deficit as a result of most jobs not stimulating intellect, but these people worked hard for their meager pay.
The real issue with manufacturing jobs is labor rights -- in other countries. By allowing manufacturing to go overseas we lose control over employers and they are free to create sweatshop conditions. There have been some good signs in that this issue is becoming an item often addressed in trade agreements, but keeping a manufacturing base here in this country is important so that we can continue to be good example of how to employ physical/dexterity labor without abusing workers.
If we just let other countries with low standards completely take over manufacturing, there will be no progress towards more complex automation. Slaves are still cheaper for most tasks than either autonomous or piloted robot labor -- automation itself has not reached the economy of scale needed to truly end the need for "industrial revolution" style jobs. And AI will take longer than scaling up robot production, so there will be a need for piloting, and the world won't starve for lack of a few good "button pushers."
Someone had to do it.
Thanks for telling me how I should feel about political issues, but go fuck yourself.
So far I've thought Obama has been a tool for most things, but useful for some. The irony of it all is, theres always someone telling me he's a bad guy for it, the only factor that determines which things are bad is the political orientation of the source.
I, nor does anyone else, need zdnet to tell me what to get pissed off about. If you weren't already upset about this things, don't be. You were ignorant before a zdnet manipulated you by carefully feeding you portions of a speech in order to promote their view point, you should stay that way. Get the truth if you can find it, but that often means you have to keep an open mind and carefully consider the source and their political agenda, but we'll all end up a whole lot better off if we start voting for politicians who actually DO what we WANT them to do, rather than telling us they'll do one thing or someone else telling us they'll be the right guy for the job.
If you want to be pissed off about what you think he's doing, fine, listen to the address and make your own decisions, but for the love of god don't go read some manipulative spew from some (especially in this case) opinion article publication presented as if its a public service announcement for the dangers coming at us from the president.
I'm not saying he didn't make some douchebag statements, but you need to make the determination about what makes him a good guy or a douche bag yourself, not because ZDNet told you too. People voting because of what someone else told us to do because of a newspaper, magazine, or TV endorsement because they are lazy and ignorant are part of the problem that put us in the mess to begin with.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Sadly it this is not confined to only politicians and news services. I come across fact benders too often in both my professional and personal life. But I think it has always been the sad state of the world, just nowadays it is easier to catch people lying - and - now they don't care if they are caught. There has been an erosion of that old fashioned concept of the conscience. Meh indeed!
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Here are my thoughts on the matter.
First off, the biggest obstacle to American success is China and their unfair trade practices. By keeping their currency pegged to the US dollar at artificially low rate they are creating trade barriers to real free trade. One argument to let them get away with it is that they are a developing nation. This is false, even before they opened up to western trade China had a huge infrastructure developed. They had railroads, canals, heavy industry, chemical plants, and universities producing large numbers of well trained engineers and scientists. They had advantages many nations in Africa would envy. They need to be treated as a first rate economic nation. Another side effect that China's policies have is that it can drive down wages and development in true developing countries by under bidding them on products. I don't think this is what anyone intends. China must be forced to change.
Another obstacle is NAFTA. The theory behind NAFTA was that Mexico would provide low end goods to the US and Canada at wages better than the Mexicans had had before NAFTA. The US and Canada would sell expertise and high end manufacturing equipment to help US manufacturing. One provision Mexico had to meet before signing NAFTA was "land reform". This land reform threw some 1/3 of the Mexican farm labor force off the land, who then headed to the border cities such as Juarez to work in the factories or the US as illegal immigrants. The brutally drove down the cost of labor in MEXICO and the US. Mexican factories merely substituted cheap labor for more efficient manufacturing. And since this "land reform" occurred before NAFTA was signed the disingenuous argument is that NAFTA had nothing to do with this effect. NAFTA must go, all it did was enrich corporations and not people. NAFTA is a poster child for globalization's failure.
I have been questioning now is the conventional economic wisdom that the tight coupling of economies since this latest financial crisis. We are in a situation now where a crisis in one country can affect a host of others. Much like mountain climbers roped together, if one climber falls the entire string of climbers may plunge to their deaths. There needs to be "firewalls" between nations to prevent, slow, or buffer the effects of a crisis. Some may argue that this may be inefficient, I will argue that destroying the global economy is even worse.
Overall I think that Capitalism and conventional economic theory has failed. We need to revisit the basic assumptions of how economies must be run. Two things I think we should do are
1) have economies and financial systems that serve people, not vice versa
2) With my respects to Mr. Dubcek, develop Capitalism with a human face. Corporations are not people and should not be treated as such, and the people running the corporations should not be allowed to hide behind the corporation. There must be accountability.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Can't read this story due to problems with the new layout, I wonder if this will even post?
"...it feels like we’re conceding manufacturing prowess to other nations. Since manufacturing fuels jobs, that’s a serious problem."
I disagree, the old manufacturing jobs were people manually assemble things just aren't going to be worth what the US expects as a good salary nowadays. We need high value jobs like engineering, IT, and medicine where training and education can shine through.
of joblessness. The only way we can compete for manufacturing jobs that currently go to other countries is to do them more efficiently by automating them. In other words productivity must increase by an appropriate amount or we aren't going to win the job. So a job that at one time required 1000 people in the US is now being done by 1000 people in China for 50% of the cost to do it in the US. In order to win it back we're going to have to do the job with 100 people. That's still a net loss of 900 but it's better than nothing. We are going to have to create brand-new highly profitable work-intensive industries in which the US has a competitive advantage (education, infrastructure, etc) in order to get the jobless rates down.
You need to realize that grouping all people of a certain age into a "generation", and accusing all of them is silly.
I have disagreed with a lot of the stuff done by the government for over 40 years. It's not my fault.
Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
government agencies that actually provide a service/product
lol
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
All I am hearing is my butt hurts.
"The laws of science be a harsh mistress." --Bender
Why is this listed as news? This is entertainment at best, and pretty poor entertainment at that. If I wanted useless drivle like this, I would be watching any of the major TV channel tabloidainment shows instead of reading slashdot.
Cmdr Taco owes me 10 minutes.
If you haven't read the prince, you're missing out. People who have read it are manipulating you.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Completely agreed. This shouldn't be on Slashdot. This shouldn't even be on ZDNet.
<Insert comment about shoddy state of journalism here.>
We are already on the road to de-criminalization, but you will never see the Amsterdam-style coffeeshop widespread in the US. At lest not until Pfizer and Starbucks merge and you really do have medical records available from any terminal on Earth.
No one cares about your lousy opinions, especially about politics.
This isn't news, it is blogspam.
If you take away medicare and SS, what do you expect will happen to us? If you don't care, then I sure as hell don't care what you think.
No one EVER reads TFA anyway. The new layout and changes simply filters the links to TFA out to allow for more white space.
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
Also, that one minute could be just enough to make it before the red light that will add more time - possibly in a cascading manner if other hazards/blockades occur between the two times (like semis backing into driveways in front of you).
DAMNIT DON'T YOU GET IT!!!!!!!!! EVEEEL REPUBLICAN WAS WEARING THAT TIE BECAUSE HE WAS A RACIST HOMOPHONE HELLBENT ON TAKING YOUR HEALTHCARE AND INTERNETS!
Geez, the guy is partisan hack (The article author) who had nothing to write about other than slamming a Tea Party member and a the Republican House leader while tossing odd softballs across Obama's lap.
Really, the tie was probably the only interesting thing about his article.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
All I heard was "salmon". :P
I like how the European Union is handling bringing in employees from outside the EU. I recently applied for a position with a company in the EU and was denied due to the fact that they would have had to submit a nearly 800 page brief explaining why they were hiring an American instead of an EU citizen. In addition to some countries slapping some serious taxes on companies that are outsourcing labor. Tax it till they cant afford to hire outside labor anymore and it will either end, or they will leave that country which will make room for someone to take their place.
The green boxes are a bit too large and the thread boarders are too thin, but as far as I can tell the site is a lot more responsive so I'm loving it.
The vast majority of the generation I know nothing about insists on taxing me and taking my money to pay for their own retirement. Is it American to force people to pay for the welfare of strangers? Is it capitalism? Is it liberty?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Why does everyone love to quote The Prince, a book about running a tyranny, but no one quotes Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy, an equally insightful book about running a Republic?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You need to do some research. The only high speed rail the USA has is the Acela line, which is run by Amtrak. It brings in an absolute *ton* of money. It is full all the time, self sustaining, and brings major profits to the states it runs through. The cost of getting this type of line through the entire USA is negligible for the amount of money (and jobs) it would bring to each of the states. While not as fast as those in Europe and Japan, it is being upgraded to those speeds and will allow for more passengers (and profit). There is zero credibility to any claims made that high speed rail in the USA would be unprofitable, rarely used, and a money drain. The only example we have is the Amtrak Acela line, and it is huge success in every aspect.
What's the alternative to competing? Hiding? Fortress America? Invade and force your personal preferences on them? Protectionism that forces your neighbors to give up on cheaper goods and services? Pretending there's a secret Star-Trek-like utopian answer that's one more law or one more billion dollars in government grants away? Humanity all at once deciding to give up on our nature and act the way that fits your emotional needs?
It's not "logic" that causes the need to compete. We need to compete to survive and prosper. Denial is a coping mechanism, but when you're done coping, you still have the same problems to solve.
C'mon boys you can do better than that.
The Social Security Trust fund has a balance of 2.5 Trillion dollars. [i.e. debt that the federal goverment ows]
That bieng said, the Federal Goverment does not count that 2.5tn as part of the 14tn debt owed.... Have to love national accounting.
Because most of us spend our daily lives working in a tyranny, not a republic.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Please do not demean the suffering of those who live under real tyranny by comparing what we've got to what they've got. It makes you appear as though you have no empathy or understanding of the suffering of others. You do not live under a tyranny. The very fact that you can freely post "Because most of us spend our daily lives working in a tyranny, not a republic." without consequences is proof you do not live under a tyranny. I know things are bad, but seriously, get a grip, you aren't helping make your case when you use such over the top hyperbole.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
another speech where Obama tosses around more lies. sorry he got his 4 years of running the country into the ground and making healthcare worse. time to let someone else do it wrong. i dont care who you vote for as long as there in some corps back pocket things will never change. at least tea party got it right for a change and the fact manufacturing needs to be restored in the usa. same thing for oil we have plenty of are own we can get heck we do in some parts but what do we do ship it overseas to be refined. will it happen probably not at least not until the corps milk the economy dry and we go into a depression. ideas are not jobs companys like google dont employ millions. tell oboma what if ideas are jobs send me a check for a million dollers for every idea i come up with good or bad,
It is my belief that you could tax Marijuana at as much as $10 a gram successfully. If an oz of good pot costs $400 bucks right now and people buy it and the cost of producing that oz is mere dollars (even with grow lights and hydroponics its not that expensive, most of the cost goes into the black market, smuggling costs, security ect...) then you could likely tax the hell out of it and still have a thriving industry because people would pay that.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
"You have an awfully low opinion of assembly line workers. I would encourage you to meet one. Then you'd appreciate the physical effort required to meet an extremely strict work schedule, and maintain attention and energy for an entire work day in less than comfortable conditions. Sure, it's not an intellectually demanding field, and we suffer an intelligence deficit as a result of most jobs not stimulating intellect, but these people worked hard for their meager pay."
The pay wasn't always meager.
"In 1914, believing that well-paid laborers are the best consumers, Henry Foird hiked his employees' wages from $2.34 for a nine-hour day to $5.00 for an eight-hour day. The move proved to be highly profitable. Instead of constant employee turnover, the most expert mechanics flocked to the company, raising productivity and reducing training costs. Ford called it the "wage motive." By 1916, as the price of the Model T fell to $360, sales reached 472,000
By 1918, half of all the cars in America were Model Ts. By 1924, 15 million had been sold, Ford had become a multimillionaire, and Detroit was the auto-manufacturing capital of the United States. In 1928, Ford created the Model A to replace the Model T, and four years later introduced the V-8 engine. By 1932, Ford was producing one-third of all the automobiles in the world."
You owe a lot to the assembly line worker:
Shorter hours, the four and five day work week, paid vacations, health care and other employee benefits.
There can be "intellectual stimulation" beyond work --- particularly when you aren't working yourself to physical and mental exhaustion.
Ford's workers owned homes. Raised families. Played ball. Went fishing.
Off the line they could be hobbyists or craftsmen. Who do you think built all those projects published in century-old magazines like "Popular Mechanics?"
The Ford worker could afford a Ford of his own. With all the new-won independence that implies.
...knowing won't change the outcome. They're going to do it with, or without your consent.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
How can we out innovate when large corporations are selling technology to foreign countries? Think GE selling jet engine designs to China so they can get some short term profit.
Let me start by saying that I am naturally skeptical of this sort of deal. However let me offer the logic that may be behind this decision ...
Basically GE has competition and believes that if they decline the offer then a competitor may accept it. In this scenario they lose in both the short term and the long term. To prevent the tech transfer GE and its competitors must essentially establish a cartel and coordinate their actions. The problem is that cartels almost always fail, some member almost always cheats. The "cheating" may not even be greed based, one member may be losing in the market and about to fail so it sells off its tech (or itself) to avoid going out of business. The cartel not only has to coordinate to prevent tech transfer but it would also have to coordinate to keep all members at some minimal level of health. So it is highly likely that someone is going to transfer the tech. GE's logic may be that since someone will most likely do it, they might as well be that someone.
Essentially they may believe that the long term is already lost and that the short term is the only potential win.
Personally I agree with the philosophy that decision makers should be thinking long term except when short term survival is in question. However what does one do when the long term options seem to all be bad? Emotionally I want to say that GE is being dumb or greedy but I can't honestly say that this is the case, a lot more info is needed.
Easy. Reduce patents and copyrights to 5 years or less. You'll then see an increase in innovation like you've never seen before, guaranteed.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
It doesn't work that way. This is a civil society. You pay for things from which you don't immediately benefit. I pay property taxes to support a public school system I neither support or want. Should I "get my money back" as well?
Of course not. Even though my leanings are distinctly conservative-libertarian on most issues, I recognize a higher duty to my society here to not exact my last pound of "what's owed to me."
Here's a simple fact. Your "entitlements" are not sustainable. They're just not. No right-thinking person who actually looks at the numbers believes they are. It sucks to know you paid into a system which needs to go away to save our economy and government. It sucks even worse being forced to pay in and become indebted for that system now that you know it is impossible for it to survive.
You used tyranny first. I was just replying. The prince is about running a principality. An authoritarian regime where ultimate power resides in one individual over all others, the same mechanism used in most corporate offices today.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
"sorry he got his 4 years of running the country into the ground and making healthcare worse. time to let someone else do it wrong."
Obama has only been in office two years (and a week).
Oh, I get you. I thought you were saying America is a tyranny, a surprisingly popular opinion amongst the less intelligent these days. Sorry. Yes, corporations are tyrannies and I'm guessing everyone who is anyone in management has read The Prince.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Ah, yes, sorry, I was not talking about America. I can see how it would be read that way.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
You've answered the question yourself - it's out of control. It would take somebody very brave and very well prepared to get off that homeland security tiger and put it down. There are tens of thousands of jobs that just should not exist in that organisation but condemning that many people to sudden unemployment is a hard decision to make. There is a lot of corruption and a lot of powerful people making a lot of money for effectively nothing who will make a lot of noise if there is any chance to flow of cash will be cut. Then there's the angle that anyone that attempts any form of direct control or cuts will be labelled a terrorist, unamerican, and a pile of McCarthy era insults.
If you think the health care fuss got people angry then consider it would be nothing compared with an attempt to cut back any little corner of Homeland Security - even the TSA. There is so much money being drained from the economy to feed that beast that there will be such a huge outcry from everywhere when the money flow is cut off - jobs will be lost everywhere and people will not understand that many of those jobs are purely parasitic.
I don't think a first term President is going to go after such a beast. They will not be ready and they will destroy their chance at a second term. Meanwhile the TSA and similar will push the envelope to see how much they can get away with before a President is prepared to destroy their career to stop them. I expect things will get worse for a long time. It's possible that after a few decades large numbers people from that uncontrolled department will be running the country in a kleptocracy similar to what you see with Russia now.
The truth that China's dictatorship and America's multinational corporations don't want you to know
The overall PISA scores of American students are lowered by the poor results for blacks and Latinos, who make up 35 percent of America’s K-12 student population. Asian-American students have an average score of 541, similar to those of Shanghai, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea. The non-Hispanic white American student average of 525 is comparable to the averages of Canada (524), New Zealand (521), and Australia (515). In contrast, the average PISA readings score of Latino students is 446 and black students is 441.
As for college, the claim that Americans must catch up with the more advanced Chinese is absurd. Chinese students yearn to study in American universities -- not vice versa. Twenty-five percent of Americans graduate from college, compared to only 5 percent of Chinese. Yes, that’s a large number in absolute terms, given China’s population. But American CEOs who offshore production have no right to complain that too few Americans are going into science and engineering. Why should young Americans commit career suicide by entering occupations that are going to be offshored?
http://mobile.salon.com/politics/war_room/2011/01/25/lind_myth_china/index.html
That item in bold right there is a fallacy. If you enter in science and/or engineering and remain with baseline, comoditizable (sp) skills, then yeah, you will be offshored. If you have talent and become specialized, you will not. Period.
As it stands, we do have a saturation of software developers (not so much with other engineering and science fields.) We have been having it (as well as a lowering of CS standards) since the dot-com guacamole. So it is natural with declining standards and saturation that software developers will feel the brunt of offshoring more than other engineering and science disciplines.
The risk of offshoring is permanent, but not so necessarily real if you work your skills. If you don't enter a career because you fear the Chinese or Indians will take yar jab, then you probably weren't a good candidate for that career anyways. If you are a good candidate, you'll go for it, you'll make it work for you, and you'll develop your skills into specific technical, hard-to-offshore niches... and those niches do not have to involve RF circuit design or rocket science.
I've yet to see engineers that work for the DoD, DoE being offshored. No way no how. Same with health care. I'd like to see HIPAA-regulated jobs (including software) being offshored.
Besides, what would the option be for science and engineering? Management? Incidentally, the number of MBA graduates from a local university was like three times more than all the graduate level science and engineering graduates combined two years ago. That's a localized picture of what's wrong with this offshore-boogie-man fearmongering. We are not going to MBA it out.
There are other careers that are hard to offshore: medical, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, agriculture, energy. Of course, none of those will be options for the majority who are too concerned with being offshored if they go into science or engineering. Being offshored is not a strong fear for people who really, really want to get into engineering and sciences (which is the type of people we want in those fields.)
The article does have a point in saying that American CEO's don't have a right to complain for a lack of scientists and engineers... but it points it out for the wrong reasons. There is no shortage (at least quantitatively speaking.)
Hollywood isn't paying tax and service industries don't bring in any money from overseas. Engineers are there to design new stuff to build - if nothing new is built the engineers are laid off, and if nothing much is being built anyway they change careers completely. Medical tourists are not going to bring in anything because they can go to Asia and see US trained doctors there for a lower price. Some people think the US economy can be built on "IP", but the rest of the world is not buying that unless their arms are twisted very hard. The USA just is not selling much that the world wants anymore. iPads and similar are irrelevant because very little of that money actually gets into the US economy - it just vanishes into a very small number of bank accounts and the Chinese government probably gets more of it to spend on infrastructure than the US government. Without somewhere to get money for to maintain infrastructure it will be just circling the drain with increasing costs to do anything at all.
You're talking out of your ass.
David Gewirtz has called out Democrats time and again for their failures (and he's done the same with Republicans).
Obviously you feel qualified to spout your uneducated opinion of the author, but if you don't know *who* the author of a piece is, it's generally not a good idea to make assumptions without verifying them first.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The conditions of workers in sweatshops are not significantly different from the conditions in English and American factories at the beginning of industrialization. To get from those conditions to the ones we have now, the workers had to stand up for themselves against the bosses and the government. It was bloody business.
I think it is important that the workers empower themselves, not have their workplace conditions dictated by government, their bosses, or, worst, a foreign government. Where you get the revolution part of the industrial revolution is when the workers realize that each of them have goals that may not be the same as their society's goals, and that their own goals matter.
The only way someone can improve their life and work conditions is by seizing the power to make changes themselves, not by having change dictated. Only people who have taken power are people who are able to rule themselves. People who accept conditions given them, no matter how sweet those conditions are, are still working for the man and not living their own lives.
People should not fear their government. Governments should fear their people.
Have you seen what the those chaps in Jipang are doing with trains of late?
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luser, a noun
FTFY. Please remember where you are posting. Someone my have a lart.
The reason we subjugate ourselves to law is to better procure justice. If law does not accomplish this purpose then it m
I found nothing of value in the article and can't imagine any other reason for writing it but to grab eyeballs with a catchy headline. Rob
Here are my thoughts on the matter.
First off, the biggest obstacle to American success is China and their unfair trade practices. By keeping their currency pegged to the US dollar at artificially low rate they are creating trade barriers to real free trade.
Try thinking about this situation in real terms, i.e. comparing the resources available to a country vs. the resources it is able to consume. Because the Chinese government keeps buying US$, the US is able to import cheap goods from China, which means that the US, as a nation, is able to consume more resources than it normally would be able to. If I were the US government, I would be happy about the Chinese policy!
It is true that this competition causes US manufacturing jobs to disappear. However, that's not a bad thing at all, because it means that those workers are freed up for other, more advanced and useful tasks. They can help raise the living standards for US citizens even beyond what they are used to today.
Of course, actually making use of this opportunity would require a government that isn't stuck in neo-liberal economic thinking. For example, it would require a government that realizes that idle resources can simply be employed via higher deficit spending in programs that advance public purpose. In other words, it would require a government that understands Modern Monetary Theory.
In the meantime, those of us who do have an unobstructed view on the fundamentals on how monetary systems and the economy function are keeping up the facepalming in light of the supreme idiocy that comes out of our politicians on both sides of the Atlantic.
My generation and Generation X are looking at a bleak future because of what is being done by the Boomers.
I have a simple solution: take away the Boomers' Social Security and Medicare. All of it.
OK. We'll be taking away your computer, iPod, iPhone and the Internet, since we created those things as well.
All jesting aside, I think you are a bit short sighted. Every generation has to clean up the sins of the previous generation, but benefits from the advancements of the previous. Believe it or not - your generation will create quite a mess for your children and be surprised when they complain about how stupid and horrible your generation is for doing that to them.
Place nail here >+
The USA had no net new jobs during the past decade, but the GDP grew 40%. What is the country going to be like after another decade of that? That's what being "competitive" has brought us already.
How is the average worker going to compere with tireless robots with artificial retinas balancing pencils all day, or IBM supercomputers that can play Jeopardy, or voluntary social networks ont he internet, or just better design and better materials for longer lasting products that are easier to assemble? And compete at that all while demand is limited by Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and by an emerging environmental ethic of Reduce, Resuse, Recycle? And still hope to have adequate wages with 10% or more unemployment for years leaving people desperate to take jobs that pay anything at all, even without benefits?
In short, they can't. Obama's economic advisors are fighting the economic battles of the 1930s, but in the early part of the 21st century. His speech just completely ignores the current unique situation. To survive as a democratic society, we need a mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democtratic resource-based planning, and improved local subsistence production.
See my post here for a summary of alternatives: http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=360&cpage=6#comment-20270
Or see this knol I put together for more on that theme at length: http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/38e2u3s23jer/2
Or see Marshall Brain's story "Manna".
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Yes, so everyone seizes power, and then what? Bunches of uncoordinated individuals with power realize there's a better way to go about things than constantly stepping on each other's toes all day, decide to standardize things a bit, and suddenly -- government and/or union policies are born.
Either that means we just cycle back to where we started, or you have an overly cynical view of the role of government.
Just like the "bloodless revolution" we as a society should be growing out of the need to entirely destroy our own workplace protections and build them back from the ground up after we realize what we have done. I'm sure the more exploitative "business leaders" would love us all to throw off the "tyranny of the unions" so that they can have a monopoly on tyranny for however many years they get before the house of cards falls down.
It's nice to go around idolizing rugged individualism, but the true heroes are the ones that can heal a sick system, not just wipe it out to start anew.
Someone had to do it.
I agree that innovation is not a sustainable strategy. So given that as a strategy, you must not help the competition. Once they catch up it's an even race. GE is selling engine tech to China because China does not yet have it. However they're obtaining it by making the big players compete for some short-term business. We're teaching them to fish rather than selling them a fish because we're too greedy. We're focused on tactical deals in an economic game of strategy.