Is Off-Shoring a National Security Threat?

An anonymous reader writes "Should the U.S. government hold developers more responsible for the quality of their code? One top cyber security analyst says more regulations would be a mistake. 'Any attempt to regulate software quality and security simply drives the software industry off-shore for good,' he says. 'Similarly, requiring trusted on-shore production ensures two things: (1) falling behind world progress as we aren't the only smart people and we are a minority, and (2) costs rise in a way that makes on-shore-mandated software cost-uncompetitive on the world market.'"

Comments

Nah

[SleazyRidr]

It's fine. As long as there are enough smart people here we can deal with it. If we can get foreigners to do our dirty work for us, then we can focus on the important stuff. We don't need the monopoly on smart people, just enough to keep up.

Re:Nah

[sourcerror]

Like playing WoW and posting on Slashdot. Oh no, the foreigners play WoW too, and post on Slashdot as well! They're taking our jerbs!

Re:Nah

[1s44c]

The dirty work IS the important stuff.

Re:Nah

[tech4]

so you wouldn't mind outsourcing your girlfriend to me for a warmup, as long as you get her back wet and ready for you to focus on important stuff?

Sure, you can take her shopping.

Re:Nah

[sbrown123]

Your job is to play WoW and post on Slashdot? Yeah, anyone can have your jerbal.

Re:Nah

[johnjaydk]

>> so you wouldn't mind outsourcing your girlfriend to me for a warmup, as long as you get her back wet and ready for you to focus on important stuff?

>Sure, you can take her shopping.

Funny as hell. Wish I had mods but the truth really isn't that far away and isn't that funny. The words are "Retail Happiness" and it makes us all wet and ready for another round.

That shit has to go.

Re:Nah

[KingBenny]

US does not have the patent on smart people yet ? steve jobs must have overlooked something then ...

Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[MrSavage]

We should regulate off-shore produced code and push jobs back to the U.S. the same way we should apply tariffs to products made in China.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[tripleevenfall]

Making everyone pay more for everything doesn't seem like the greatest recessionary policy.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Tariffs are bad mojo. Trade restrictions make it harder for us to compete in the global economy.

Suppose for example that we raise tariffs on steel to keep a steel mill in PA from going under. Now everybody in the US pays more for steel, and any goods that use steel cost more. Cars use steel. Now that our cars are more expensive, other countries won't import them because they can get cheaper cars elsewhere.

So, you see, now not only does the rest of the world not want our steel because it's too expensive, but they also don't want any products we produce that are made with steel because now they are too expensive.

Sure that tariff might save a thousand steel mill jobs, but it's going to cost many times that number of jobs in other areas of the economy.

Tariffs are only pushed for two reasons:

1) People have a very simplistic view of the economy and don't understand that domestic production and imports rise and fall with one another, and so wrongly believe that tariffs will reduce our net imports as a percentage of GDP. Tariffs never have this effect.

2) Corporations and labor unions who don't want to compete with the foreign market, so they lobby the government to labor trade in their favor, all at the expense of everybody else.

Tariffs are knee jerk reactions that ultimately have negative effects on the economy. In fact, if it weren't for tariffs, there wouldn't have been a great depression:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQQon4tjlSA

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[korean.ian]

Subsidize the steel industry!
Oh wait, that already happens

I know your point wasn't to focus on the steel industry and rather the ill-effects of tariffs on trade. The wonders of history. It's just ridiculous to me that free-market advocates quote the period pre-WW1 as some golden era of free-trade. Also, isolating Smoot-Hawley as the cause of the Great Depression is an exercise in futility. There were many factors involved in that spectacular mess.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[Duhavid]

If people have jobs and can afford to buy things, then maybe it is.
If everything costs twice as much, but you make twice as much, it is level.
And really, have prices fallen that much with outsourcing? Not for the items that are essential.

The problem we have right now is that not enough people have jobs here in the US paying enough to afford the amounts required to live here.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[tripleevenfall]

If I pay twice as much for something, and the additional half is going to the government, how am I going to "make twice as much"?

The government has spent zillions to create 0 jobs. That money isn't going to help me. It's going to guarantee loans for politically connected companies, it might bail out politically connected banks, it may be spent on some war we don't even have the guts to finish, but it isn't going to help me.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[Jawnn]

Actually it is exactly that.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[thomasw_lrd]

Tariffs are bad mojo. Trade restrictions make it harder for us to compete in the global economy.

Suppose for example that we raise tariffs on steel to keep a steel mill in PA from going under. Now everybody in the US pays more for steel, and any goods that use steel cost more. Cars use steel. Now that our cars are more expensive, other countries won't import them because they can get cheaper cars elsewhere.

So, you see, now not only does the rest of the world not want our steel because it's too expensive, but they also don't want any products we produce that are made with steel because now they are too expensive.

Sure that tariff might save a thousand steel mill jobs, but it's going to cost many times that number of jobs in other areas of the economy.

Tariffs are only pushed for two reasons:

1) People have a very simplistic view of the economy and don't understand that domestic production and imports rise and fall with one another, and so wrongly believe that tariffs will reduce our net imports as a percentage of GDP. Tariffs never have this effect.

2) Corporations and labor unions who don't want to compete with the foreign market, so they lobby the government to labor trade in their favor, all at the expense of everybody else.

That's not exactly true. If we add a tariff to steel, it only affects steel we buy from other countrires. It doesn't make our cars more expensive. You're actually discussing a "trade war". We raise tariffs, piss off the Chinese and they raise tariffs on our steal. So the Chinese don't buy as much US steel.

You are essentially correct in your thinking, but you oversimplified it too much.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[Duhavid]

I never said anything about anything going to the government. I wasn't speaking about government at all.
I was talking about the off shoring phenomena.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[robthebloke]

I'm from the UK, and I produce software used by US companies to provide services for their customers. Now, you can go ahead and apply tariffs to the work that I do, and that is fine with me. It's not like those US customers of ours have alternatives to choose from (we're highly specialised). All you are proposing is a tax to ensure that our US customers become less competitive than companies from Asia and Europe. If a company is no longer competitive, it quickly ceases to be viable. I'd imagine most, if not all of our US clients, would either relocate outside the US, or they'd simply cut their losses and close up shop. Either way, it won't actually affect the company I work for that much - apart from removing the need to deal with US patents of course!

On a more practical note, where would you plan to draw a line with this tariff? If producing code cheaply outside the US is to be restricted (but please do remember that outsourcing is also done for reasons of expertise), how would you apply this tariff to work done for free? (eg OSS?). Would you *really* want to be the only economy in the world where you HAD to actually pay for using linux? An economy where using MS access becomes cheaper than using SQL? An economy where installing firefox becomes more expensive than using IE? I suspect the answer might be 'no'.....

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[tbannist]

That's funny, because U.S. governments (federal, state and local) employ about 3,809,697 full time and 1,521,698 part time people according to the census.

If you're talking about the "stimulus" packages they've been somewhat undersized for the U.S. economy (on the order of 1-2% of GDP). They haven't net created job but have assuredly reduced job losses. The best estimate, is I understand around 1-2 million fewer jobs lost from the parts that actually involved stimulus. On the other hand, the part of the package which consisted of roughly the same amount of lost revenue in tax give aways has had no measurable impact at all on job creation or stopping job losses.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[MrSavage]

1) So you've monopolized the market? Good for you. Hang on to it while you can until something better (cheaper) comes along and you're out of a job. I see that you didn't say what product you have that is the only thing out there for your customers. I'm sure that there are many unemployed coders here salivating to find out just what it is that you have a monopoly on. 2) Let's say we put a 1% tariff on all software produced by companies outside the U.S. for example. 1% of nothing is nothing which solves the OSS question.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[robthebloke]

It doesn't make our cars more expensive

Correct. It just prevents them being made cheaper, and denies US car companies the same level of competitiveness as non-US companies in the global marketplace.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[CrimsonAvenger]

They haven't net created job but have assuredly reduced job losses. The best estimate, is

If they've "assuredly" reduced job losses, perhaps we wouldn't have to "estimate" how many were so saved.

Alas, we can't do reproducable science here to find out - there's no way to "stimulate" the economy and "not stimulate" the same economy to see what really happens.

That said, last I looked at the estimates for "jobs saved", almost all of them were state government jobs that wouldn't have been downsized anyway - the States would have just raised taxes or borrowed more to pay for them.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[Vancorps]

0 jobs? Really? You should perhaps realize that echoing Perry is not the best of ideas as it is factually incorrect information. Also worth noting that most of the stimulus came in the form of extending Bush tax cuts which we couldn't afford to begin with.

The government isn't the perfect place to throw money when it comes to these problems but when large corporations are holding on to billions of dollars in reserve rather than reinvesting, hiring more workers, or heaven forbid giving people raises then that leaves you needing to look elsewhere for support.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[Q-Hack!]

That's not exactly true. If we add a tariff to steel, it only affects steel we buy from other countrires. It doesn't make our cars more expensive. You're actually discussing a "trade war". We raise tariffs, piss off the Chinese and they raise tariffs on our steal. So the Chinese don't buy as much US steel.

You are essentially correct in your thinking, but you oversimplified it too much.

Your point would be valid if our consumption of steel in the US was equal or less than the amount we can produce. Unfortunately, we have closed most of our steel plants here and thus our consumption levels exceed what we produce. That means that we have to purchase from oversees and it will affect the economy as GP mentioned. Also, adding a tariff would not guarantee the reopening of steel plants, nice as that would be for our economy.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[tbannist]

Really, if I were to pour some water in a glass, could you tell me how many molecules were in water in the glass? Does the fact that you couldn't mean there are no molecules of H20 in the glass?

The CBO’s estimate that there were 1.3 million to 3.5 million people employed in the fourth quarter of 2010 who would not have been were it not for the stimulus represents a decline from the 1.4 million to 3.6 million people CBO estimated were employed as a result the stimulus during the third quarter of 2010.

So, no that's between 1.3 million and 3.5 million jobs that would have been lost. One of the reasons the numbers are difficult to estimate is because of network effects. If you keep one person employed their additional spending may keep another person employed as well.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[couchslug]

We should fucking COMPETE. We EXPORT commodities and manufactured goods which would make us vulnerable in a trade war.

GERMANY is the fucking size of TEXAS, is the second-largest exporter in the world and has strong unions. It has "socialized medicine", a high standard of living, an excellent education system, and person-for-person is superior to most cultures on the planet.

What's the US excuse for failure? "We need tariffs because we suck"?

If secure code is worth having then the market will deliver it. Those who deserve secure code will PAY for it. Why should the government burden ALL of us with another UNFUNDED MANDATE?

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[Anonymous Coward]

You're pro-tariffs and you got a +5 insightful? Why would you want to pay more for Wal-Mart purchases simply so that the dumbest kid you went to high school with can have a manufacturing job?

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[Talderas]

Taxes need not be a percentage.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[rgviza]

-On a more practical note, where would you plan to draw a line with this tariff?
Simple, tariff any wages paid to offshore developers doing work for US companies. These are already documented by export compliance procedure. Make the corporations pay a 700% tax on foreign wages they pay out. Then all of a sudden US workers start to look attractive again. Prevent the companies from moving out by charging them a 700% tax on goods and services they sell to US citizens.

- If producing code cheaply outside the US is to be restricted (but please do remember that outsourcing is also done for reasons of expertise), how would you apply this tariff to work done for free?
Since no price is paid for FOSS software, it's not subject to tariff. A 700%(or whatever) tariff applied to free is still free.

- Would you *really* want to be the only economy in the world where you HAD to actually pay for using linux?
see above.

-An economy where using MS access becomes cheaper than using SQL?
Last i checked SQL server, PostGreSQL, Oracle, MySQL, Ingres and DB2 are open source or produced by US companies. If you up the cost of offshoring via tariff to match what US developers make, then the products are priced at what they are worth, and not artificially deflated. More developers are employed, leading to more money spent in economy and putting further downward pressure on foreign developer salaries.

You can pretty much apply this to all industries that have been decimated by offshoring (manufacturing, engineering, customer service, etc etc etc)

Of course we'll never need to worry about this because the people running the country are bought and paid for by corporations. Our government won't realize the shortsightedness of their policy until it's too late. On the flip side, ever try to import anything to, say, India, Asia or Europe? Vat tax for the win. I don't understand why Europeans and Asians think it's ok for them to tariff the shit out of US goods but it's not ok for the US to do the same. Oh that's right, there are no US goods because just about everything has been outsourced. I'll save you the trouble. China imports to the US duty free except LCD TVs. We tariff those 5%. China tariffs US goods at 40%. It's not hard to figure out why all the manufacturing jobs are in China. Combined with the terrible standard of living (and correspondingly terrible wages) there's no way the US can compete.

It's a simple fact that unchecked globalization eventually equalizes economies on the world stage. Standard of living in places like Europe and the US will drop to match our third world trading partners, whose SoL will rise to meet the drop. The current near-depression level unemployment in the US is the canary in the coal mine so to speak. By the time it's over, people in the US will be begging to make the salaries that people make in third world countries. Good bye cars.

Unchecked globalization, long term, for the US and other countries with a similar standard of living, is essentially putting a gun to the temple of middle class prosperity (everyone's long term) for the benefit of third world countries and big corporations (short term anyway, long term it will be a disaster). It's great for the wealthy, corporations and countries with cheap labor, for now, but it's decimating the middle class, whose jobs are rapidly evaporating. As well there's a dismal outlook for workers in these countries. The middle class consumer is what keeps everyone's economy afloat. Make them disappear, and your economy goes with it. This is largely responsible for the mortgage crisis. People's jobs get outsourced, unemployment rises, and people can no longer pay their mortgages.

You can use the tired old "well go back to school and retool your career to do something else" argument, but that takes time. In the mean time the poor bastard that got laid off is living in his car. It's hard to focus on retooling your career if you are fighting day to day to get something to eat and dodging repo men trying t

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[shutdown -p now]

The whole idea that chasing that elusive "global marketplace" is the good thing regardless of how it's done is the root of this problem. It results in a race to the bottom, to join countries like China with no environmental and labor protections, because such protections make you "less competitive".

The ultimate problem with "global market", if you consider countries as separate entities, is that it doesn't have any regulation. Thus, it gets all the same problems unregulated markets normally do. It's "efficient", but this efficiency is about lining pockets of a few people with money, not about what's good for societies.

Note: this doesn't mean that international trade is bad. It's not, it just has to be regulated. For example, Western countries could gang together and have their own "global market", but one where you know that stuff you buy is not made in sweatshops by borderline slave labor, nor on factories which burn coal without any filters.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[Xaedalus]

The problem with your logic is that someone's going to try and subvert it in the name of profit. And they're going to succeed. Then others are going to follow. And before you know it, protectionism and reshoring has failed, and we're right back where we started.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[Anonymous Coward]

This goes back to something I've been thinking about with US debt & taxes in general. In a nutshell:

1. Flat tax. Everybody contributes the same percentage.
2. No deductions. You pay X%, end of story.
3. Assign that same flat tax rate to both corporations *and* individuals. Investment income is also taxed at this same rate.
4. Apply that same rate to incoming goods *and* services.

The lowest income brackets will probably end up paying more than they do now. The middle class will pay less. The rich (and corporations) will end up paying more, since there won't be any deductions to allow them to weasel out of paying their fair share.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[Anonymous Coward]

Try they've subsidised companies, who took the money and outsourced jobs, and the government had already earmarked the money the taxes those jobs were going to bring...

The government is trying to clean up its own mess... badly..

The better way would be to clear out some of the government, but governments only shrink during extreme times of hardship, like world wars and the american one grew during the last one, so hopes that anything will shrink it are fading...

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[Duhavid]

Yes, because that is exactly how we got here to begin with.

What happens in the mean time? People trying to reduce their expenses*, businesses/wealthy trying not to get stuck with it all.

*walking away from mortgages,
bankruptcy
suicide,
disappearing

If we have to adjust to a global wage scale, I would say lets do that, now, and try to make it as painless as we can for as many as we can.
Right now, it is a game of musical chairs, and the "chair owners" want to profit off the arbitrage while it goes on, then sit on the few remaining chairs at the end, devil take the hindmost ( but leave the bank account for them ).
It seems to me that it is a painful time. Why those profiting from the madness should get to drink champagne at the after party while others are in pain is quite beyond me.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[Kobun]

Correction: Germany is much closer to the size of Montana, than it is to Texas. Germany has 82 million people, versus roughly 1 million for Montana and 26 million for Texas.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[Anonymous Coward]

its not that black and white. china is already manipulating currency to essentially
apply their own tariff

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[Anonymous Coward]

If they've "assuredly" reduced job losses, perhaps we wouldn't have to "estimate" how many were so saved.

There is no central database of jobs that can be used to determine such information, sorry. Estimates based on what information sources are around will be your best option.

Alas, we can't do reproducable science here to find out - there's no way to "stimulate" the economy and "not stimulate" the same economy to see what really happens.

Yeah, too bad we don't have Hari Seldon.

That said, last I looked at the estimates for "jobs saved", almost all of them were state government jobs that wouldn't have been downsized anyway - the States would have just raised taxes or borrowed more to pay for them.

Maybe, maybe not. Some states are even more paralyzed by gridlock.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[Xaedalus]

Because it has always been that way, it will always be that way, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. It is human nature. No matter how fool-proof of a system you build, someone will try and succeed to subvert it for their own gain, or that of the ideology they follow. You can try to crusade against it, and I'd encourage you to, but be aware that you will never actually solve the problem. For every "Chair Owner" you displace, another will take its place. If you're truly successful, then one of those chairs you take will be for you, and then YOU will be the enemy you rail against. The only way to fight it is to go with it, make the differences that you can, and hope for the best.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[bubbha]

Dude...Google "germany" "tariff"

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[Anonymous Coward]

Current unemployment rate in Germany as of July 2011: 6.1%

Yes, We the People of the United States of America need tariffs because we suck.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you should take a look on how the german government does regulate things a _lot_?

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[Grishnakh]

So you want to tax poor people even more, even though they're already struggling to get enough money to pay their rent and buy food? Great idea!

Expect crime to increase greatly under such a plan.

There's a reason every civilized country on Earth practices progressive taxation.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[Anonymous Coward]

the problem with US code is that we pay people to much. If we find some way to cut people's salaries by half or even two thirds, we could be competitive with the rest of the world.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the US excuse for failure?

Well from the outside looking in, as a whole, you guys are degenerating. Reverting to some kind of weird self righteous, ass backward shadow of your former selves.

I think it is happening in many other countries too, but not as fast or to the same extent. Perhaps it is because you are a young nation without the weight of history to temper your actions. You grew too fast, reached too high to quickly, used your resources without regard to their scarcity and are now becoming insular and lashing out at everyone else.

I still don't understand the reluctance to accept things like universal health care. Painting it as socialism and seemingly by association, communism which I understand you (as a nation) seem to think is the work of the devil. Universal health care, done well is the most wonderful of things.

You teach creationism in schools? Really? That's not going to help future generations much is it?

You seem hell bent on imposing your fading importance on every other nation. Stop it. Bad America... bad...

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[SimFlyer]

GERMANY is the fucking size of TEXAS, is the second-largest exporter in the world and has strong unions. It has "socialized medicine", a high standard of living, an excellent education system, and person-for-person is superior to most cultures on the planet.

That's what the Nazi's thought...

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[evilviper]

And really, have prices fallen that much with outsourcing? Not for the items that are essential.

When was the last time you saw a US-made cheap white T-shirt? They make them, they're just $15 a piece. Similar imported T-shirts are less than $2.

7X price reduction is pretty significant.

How about Jeans? I used-to buy Levi's when they were US-made and $50/each. Now, after years of inflation, I can buy imported generics for $8.

It's not so easy to see because companies extract as much profit as they can, and imports arriving on the scene are priced just a bit lower, until competition slowly drives down those massive margins.

You say you're still paying $30 for a bag of socks? It's not the fault of the imports, it's Wal-mart taking MASSIVE profits on a few of their products, kinda giving away the pretzels and charging $10 for a bottle of water, hoping people aren't smart enough to shop-around and beat this strategy...

And that's certainly not all. Buying direct from Chinese factories on eBay often halves the price of most products compared to buying them from US retailers, even with the high cost of parcel shipping.

And at least some foods benefit from this as well. Those tomatoes from South America, lots of processed foods from Mexico, plenty of imports from Europe. Etc. And even domestic products are produced by under-paid illegal imigrants, so don't get too high and mighty.

You assume prices wouldn't be much higher, but reality is quite different.

Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the US excuse for failure? "We need tariffs because we suck"?

Dumbing down the education system for the last 30+ in the name of "equality" and other feel good nonsense.

I guess this means

[ackthpt]

Outsourcing the CIA to China isn't a go?

Re:I guess this means

[Anonymous Coward]

We already outsourced the Presidency, and that seems to be working well.

Re:I guess this means

[ackthpt]

We already outsourced the Presidency, and that seems to be working well.

As well as the economy. China defends it with far more energy than either side of the aisle in Washington DC

Re:I guess this means

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because the Republicans want it to crash and because the Democrats are fooled by such fervent ideology as the Republicans pretend to espouse, so they're afraid to fight back because that just wouldn't be responsible.

definitely

[roman_mir]

Of-course it is.

--

Of-course there is nothing positive that government can do to fix it by any more regulations, laws or government spending and offices. What it can do is what it should do and what it won't do, because the last time it did something like that was 1921, and cutting 70% of itself is sort of like committing harakiri and admitting that gov't has only one role in economy - which is destruction. They won't fire themselves..... all those protests at Wall Street, they should really try and figure out what the real problem is and go protest at their closest Federal reserve banks.

Re:definitely

[Anonymous Coward]

The real problem is greed. Get rid of a company's responsibility to shareholders, make them responsible to their customers and employees, and the shareholders will be rewarded. Current system of short haul profiteering is killing the economy plain and simple.

Also, with regards to buying and selling of commodities. Turn it into real purchases only - no speculation, no futures, you buy it, you take ownership of it, pay transportation costs, storage costs, resell costs.

Do away with speculation altogether and our economy would skyrocket.

Re:definitely

[Fallingcow]

gov't has only one role in economy - which is destruction

Looks like someone hasn't read up on the economic history of post-war Japan.

Or, say, Norway.

Or Germany.

Or... etc. etc.

It's easy to say government is never the answer--simple, clean, fits on a bumper sticker. It's also wrong.

Re:definitely

[roman_mir]

Nope. The problem is described in my journal, it's simple, it's gov't destroying productivity of Americans by destroying the capital savings, which is also the reason that the market now is a casino with people not investing but gambling.

Greed is the only incentive that is real that moves progress forward. The real problem is greed in government, which grows government at the expense of the real economy.

Re:definitely

[roman_mir]

Norway? The economy that is slowly moving away from being government mandated and towards capitalism? Economy that is based on energy export?

Japan and Germany? Economies that could be doing so much BETTER if it was NOT for their stupid, worthless governments? Economies that are destroyed by governments on every day basis?

Yeah, somebody does need to learn something about history.

Re:definitely

[ultranova]

Japan and Germany? Economies that could be doing so much BETTER if it was NOT for their stupid, worthless governments?

I guess Germans and Japanese really are a master races then, doing better than Americans even with more government. Because, after all, you asserting that they would do even better with less government is all that's needed prove it.

Economies that are destroyed by governments on every day basis?

Yes, but you see, that's the genius of strong government: government is worse than private industry at everything, so it logically follows that it's worse than Wall Street at destroying economy too.

Re:definitely

[Fallingcow]

Is sometimes better than the alternatives does not mean is always the greatest thing ever and is always perfect.

Also, protip: history is more than the last 10-20 years.

Re:definitely

[roman_mir]

I guess Germans and Japanese really are a master races then, doing better than Americans even with more government. Because, after all, you asserting that they would do even better with less government is all that's needed prove it.

- I am going to abstain from 'master-race' comments.

Yes, but you see, that's the genius of strong government: government is worse than private industry at everything, so it logically follows that it's worse than Wall Street at destroying economy too.

- USA has the strongest government regulations and highest taxes of them all. USA's only export is fiat currency, which is why it is in the predicament that it is at this point (well, some weapons, some entertainment and certain food products, but mostly USD and debt.)

USA is not 'suffering' from from too much private business, it has very little productive business left that is private, it's easy to see with the 53Billion USD/month trade deficit.

The outsourcing is a good thing in this case, it saves the ability of certain businesses to produce without paying the artificially high costs imposed by US gov't regulations and taxation and subsidies to monopolies. It's good that they can run away from that failing system, some of their products are going to be used across the world, regardless of US failing economy.

I am discouraged by your thoughtless comments.

Re:definitely

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah, Lord of the Flies had it all figured out. No government worked out really well on that island didn't it you little Piggy.

Re:definitely

[0123456]

I guess Germans and Japanese really are a master races then, doing better than Americans even with more government.

You are aware that:

1. Japan is in the middle of a demographic decline and few Americans would want to live the way the average Japanese citizen does? That's not even taking into account the high level of homelessness last time I was there.
2. The Germans, thanks to their wonderful big government, are facing a choice between massively increasing taxes to bail out the rest of the Euro zone or seeing the Euro and probably the EU collapse around them?

The current crisis was caused by big government and looks increasingly likely to take down big government throughout the West. Yet the solution is apparently more and bigger government?

Re:definitely

[roman_mir]

I agree. History is much more than last 10-20 years. So for example when people compare US of today to US of the past in terms of economics, they like to look at the time, that was unusual in terms of the global conditions (like post war times, when other productive nations were destroyed).

A much better time to compare to is time when USA had real growth in economy past the Civil war and before destruction of free market (1913 - Federal reserve and income taxes, which became the instrument of government growth and destruction). 0% income taxes. Prices going down. Real innovation, inventions, real growth of economic wealth due to real growth of production, shift from being a debtor to being largest creditor nation, producer of cheap, high quality consumer goods.

Re:definitely

[Fallingcow]

The late 19th century as America's golden age, even in a strictly economic sense? Well, at least now I know you're trolling. Have fun with the rest of the fish.

Re:definitely

[roman_mir]

The 19th century. The time they invented the sewing machine, made a useful steam engine, refrigeration and using large refrigerators to move food around in train cars, the rail road was used everywhere (which was destroyed by public road projects, prolonging the depression). The car, the airplane, the electrical light bulb, the phonograph, the telegraph, the telephone, the bicycle, the radio, metal ships, indoor plumbing, electrical motors, food, which became safe due to improved efficiencies of the market, having people work for limited days in a week and hours in a day (see Henry Ford), while getting paid enough for a man to support a family, with a stay at home wife, some kids, all private health care and insurance and education. The cheap clothing, cheap food, cheap energy. Yes, it must have been awful, the transition from agricultural economy to industrial, even with all the faults, but increase of the efficiencies due to capital, which paid for the tools.

The time that made it possible for children to stay home, not due to any regulations, but because one man became efficient enough (due to all of the capital), to provide for a family with a bunch of kids. Yes, there were problems, obviously many problems. No, you can't have a transition without many problems. Yes, it was a much more important time in history in terms of wealth creation than anything past it so far.

Re:definitely

[Duhavid]

"The outsourcing is a good thing in this case, it saves the ability of certain businesses to produce without paying the artificially high costs imposed by US gov't regulations and taxation and subsidies to monopolies"

Except that 70% of the us economy is Americans buying things. How can they do that when the jobs have been exported?
For a while, it might seem good, but who here are they going to sell to when enough us consumers lose their jobs?

It isnt the regulations and taxations that are killing the US economy, it is the lack of decent jobs.

Re:definitely

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet the solution is apparently more and bigger government?

China seems to be doing fine so more and bigger government may work.

I guess one big government isn't the other big government, but that may be too many shades of gray for the small vs big government discussion.

Re:definitely

[Anonymous Coward]

I stopped reading your list of inventions after sewing machine, which was invented in 1790 by English inventor Thomas Saint. A lot of the other items are probably also not invented in 19th century USA.

Re:definitely

[0123456]

China seems to be doing fine so more and bigger government may work.

China is a basket case whose primary selling point is that it doesn't have the kind of obstructive government regulations that every Western nation does; or, at least, where it does have those regulations they can simply be ignored. Where it's been successful it's because the government has kept out of the way, and right now it's heavily reliant on US consumers, wages are rising enough that manufacturers are moving production to cheaper nations and much of the money they've made has gone into what is probably the world's largest housing bubble.

Re:definitely

[0123456]

It isnt the regulations and taxations that are killing the US economy, it is the lack of decent jobs.

Which is due to regulation and taxation. Who'd want to set up a new business in a high-tax, high-regulation nation? Who'd want to expand their business if most of the extra income would just go to the government in new taxes?

Re:definitely

[roman_mir]

I am in a violent AGREEMENT with your point.

Completely agree.

No disagreement.

What Americans need is a jobs - productive jobs to reduce that trade deficit and to start paying off some of that debt and to rebuild savings and to re-invest.

Agree 100%.

---

This will not happen. Look at the market - it's falling. Look a the Fed - it's printing. Look at the government - it's spending. Until the Fed stops printing and government stops spending there will be no jobs in USA, that's because any gov't spending mis-allocates resources that otherwise would go into private investment savings and spending, which is where it needs to be. Also all the money that gov't receives is the money that allows gov't to operate and to prevent businesses from wanting to hire and to do anything in the country.

Re:definitely

[daem0n1x]

The Germans, thanks to their wonderful big government, are facing a choice between massively increasing taxes to bail out the rest of the Euro zone or seeing the Euro and probably the EU collapse around them?

The current crisis was caused by big government and looks increasingly likely to take down big government throughout the West. Yet the solution is apparently more and bigger government?

The Euro zone is struggling, not because of fat governments, but because of pampered, bloated, useless and parasitical banks that suck dry everything they touch.

The European Central Bank (your Fed) loans money at 1,75% interest rate and then the banks loan it to countries at whatever tax rate is the ultimate fashion at the moment: 5%, 7%, 20%, it even reached 100% for Greece some time ago. The biggest problem with governments is that they aren't big enough to crush these parasites against the ground.

Let's face it, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy could stop this nonsense in a few days, if they wanted to. But they don't work for their citizens, they work for the banks. And don't even try to hide it.

Re:definitely

[Duhavid]

I cant speak to regulation per se, but taxes have been higher and businesses have been created here.
Businesses currently enjoy even lower tax rates in effect with all the loopholes they have managed to buy themselves.

The "extra income would just go to the government in new taxes" seems hyperbole to me. Taxes are quite low now, and are only supposed to be going back to levels where they were a bit ago. It is not going to go to the hyper taxation that Britain had back in the days after WWII ( which you would be right to condemn ). And the wealthy "job creators" are not creating jobs here. Note the unemployment figures. But they have plenty of money to do it with.

So, I stand on my statement, The economy is bad because the people who would buy things aren't, because they don't have jobs and because those that do fear losing them.

Re:definitely

[daem0n1x]

The current crisis was caused by big government and looks increasingly likely to take down big government throughout the West. Yet the solution is apparently more and bigger government?

Dude, how can you free-market right-wingers spin everything around so much that you dare to make these claims, contradicting the most blatant reality? Do you take courses on bullshit?

Re:definitely

[Nadaka]

You lie so hard it is ridiculous. The US has a higher tax rate than Norway or Germany? Both nations have far higher tax rates.

Re:definitely

[roman_mir]

US has HIGHER taxes than Norway and Germany.

While people will say: those are 'marginal' taxes, well you know what, with the inflation being what it is, many of the people who actually are in any position to create jobs are paying most of their income taxes in their marginal rate. 35% federal, x% state (depends where you are, can be 0 for Texas, can be 7% for some other places, Illinois, Connecticut come to mind). SS and Medicare, one is 12% on first hundred K, but the other is 3% on the ENTIRE earning. Why should somebody even pay SS or Medicare if they can just afford the fucking treatment and pension out of pocket? Of-course it's because it's a giant ponzi scheme that had to have more heroin shot into it and benefits cut.

If you pay yourself dividends, (like Buffet), then your income tax is your corporate tax (whatever he pays, but it's 35%), and then 15% dividend on top of that, so that's 44.5%.

Germany only wants 40% total even for top hedge fund managers. Norway wants maybe 42-43%. As to USA there are also all these other taxes that don't even exit in many other places, like property taxes. There are still hidden excise and import and sales and fuel and municipal taxes, there are all sorts of user fees on different gov't levels, licenses, etc.

USA is heavily taxed, much more than most countries. In Canada corporate taxes are around 20%, so there are many people with their own 'corporations' for obvious reasons. USA - land of the free, where people ran to, to escape the terrible 'high' tax of King Roger. A 3% tax. Ha. The serfs had to pay 25% of their income to their masters. HA.

When you have conversations with Americans today, you'd think the best things in life are taxes. Well, that's because 50% of them don't actually pay income taxes. There are all other types of taxes as well, but income taxes? 50% don't pay them.

Anyway, the point is that people shouldn't HAVE to pay ANY income taxes. They should FIGHT for their RIGHT NOT to pay that.

Or do they want to remain slaves of the system? Well, the top richest people in USA are using the middle, who pay most of the taxes to be used as scape goats, so the bottom, who benefit from the taxes that the middle pays, will direct their anger at those people. Class warfare 101.

Re:definitely

[roman_mir]

Who gives a shit where something was invented precisely, if it was made CHEAP and USEFUL and MARKETABLE and it was SOLD by a US company?

Whoever you are - you don't have a fucking idea about what production actually means.

Re:definitely

[Duhavid]

Printing and spending have been happening for a long time now, and while I can appreciate that there is a debate to be had on it's positive or negative effects, I think the notion that government is completely and only the thing that is holding back business overstates the case to a large degree. Your statement seems to be arguing for no government at all, which leads me to suspect that you might be being dramatic in your presentation.

Re:definitely

[roman_mir]

Bubbles, it's all about inflating bubbles.

You know, they sold worthless Internet company stocks in 90s for a long time as well, they sold mortgages and inflated housing bubbles for a long time as well.

They've been printing lots of fiat since 1913, but especially since the fifties. It takes a while for a problem to rump up. The fall is not going to take a long time, it's going to be dramatic and quick. It takes nothing at all to cross the edge - here USD is still worth 1% of its 1913 value. Here it crosses that boundary of the last percent and nobody wants it anymore.

It's not going to happen right now. Right now, once the DOW 10,000 rubicon is passed, Bernanke will come out with something. Maybe 3-5 Trillion QE3? If not, then he'll have to do TARP2 soon after (TWIST put the previously failed/bailed out banks in the red).

I don't know if it's this year (likely not) or next year (more likely) or the year after (very likely) that USD will become trash, but unless they actually stop and reverse course, it will become trash. Do you think if they follow the same thought process as you (that it's being going on for a long time, can't hurt now), that it won't happen within the next 1-2 years? Hmm. I think it will.

Re:definitely

[Nadaka]

They subscribe to basic satanic religious principals. If they believe it hard enough and say it often enough, it becomes true, at least for them and anyone stupid enough to listen to them.

Re:definitely

[Nadaka]

You have to understand, he is in favor of the abuse of indentured servants. It is part of his right wing feudalist agenda.

Re:definitely

[Nadaka]

Food became safe after food safety regulation, not efficiencies in production. Sausage was traditionally rotten meat and offal cut with borax cleaning agent to mask the smell and it killed thousands until the sanitary movement cleaned up shop.

Re:definitely

[roman_mir]

Food became safe as efficiencies in production and storage kicked in, due to economy of scale, not for any gov't related reasons. Gov't can surely collect its license fees, but it can't make the food any safer, on the other hand refrigeration and packaging with vacuum etc. can.

Re:definitely

[Duhavid]

There has been discussion in the news of the USD being replaced as a "reserve currency" for a bit now.

Is that what you are speaking of? If so, shouldn't the fundamentals stay the same? I.E., what knock on effect are you saying this will have?

Re:definitely

[mrchaotica]

China has entire cities that got built speculatively that none of their citizens can afford to live in. You think the US housing bubble was bad? Wait till China's bubble bursts!

Re:definitely

[0123456]

I cant speak to regulation per se, but taxes have been higher and businesses have been created here.

When taxes were higher they were higher in most countries where a business could be viable. Today anyone thinking of starting a business which doesn't require a physical presence in America can also look at dozens of other countries offering them better deals.

And the wealthy "job creators" are not creating jobs here.

Exactly, they're creating jobs in other countries which consider them to be something more than cash cows to be milked for taxes. So you agree that jobs aren't being created yet deny the very reasons why they're not being created.

Re:definitely

[0123456]

Dude, how can you free-market right-wingers spin everything around so much that you dare to make these claims, contradicting the most blatant reality?

Weird. Government sucks up 30-50% of the national income in Western nations, governments centralised banking and then set interest rates artificially low so that banks were lending money to people who couldn't possibly pay it back, governments bailed out the banks rather than let them go bust so the banks had no incentive not to loan out that money.

And the problem is the 'free market'?

I can only only wonder what planet you're living on. Not that it matters, because big governments are bankrupt and singing happy hippy songs isn't going to bring them back.

Re:definitely

[Nadaka]

It can send people to jail for cutting rotten food with a caustic cleaning agent, mixing baby formula with poison, or selling meat from animals that died of prion diseases. It can ensure that foods temperature is controlled in transit and must be prepared in sanitary conditions. So yes, government regulation surely can and is almost solely responsible for food safety over the last hundred years.

Re:definitely

[roman_mir]

The point is that US, as a collective, owes hundreds of trillions in various debts that need to be written off/restructured somehow.

Iceland did the right thing, let the bond holders take a haircut, restructured debt, it's getting better now. Greece and Europe are doing the wrong thing, will likely 'bail' entire countries out, put them into IMF slavery, will destroy their standard of living, it'll be horrible for the Greeks (and eventually the Portuguese and likely some other people.) But it also will be bad for Germans and Swiss - who'll have to pay for this with lower purchasing power and higher taxes.

Over 2 years ago I was in a train from Belgium to Germany, talked to a couple of guys, they were 'government workers'. Asked them: when is Germany getting out of Euro and back to DM? They said: no way, it's better to pay than to fight.

That was what government workers said. Today half of German population believes Germany needs to get out of Euro and back into DM.

There is no other currency today that is worth being a 'reserve' and there is no such thing as 'reserve' currency anyway. Whoever 'owns' it, will abuse that power and destroy it, like USA is doing.

It must be gold. Nobody can abuse it this way.

-

The point is that USA needs a major restructuring - huge chunk of gov't must be cut, I'd cut 90% across the board, and would shut down all departments and would repeal all business regulations, shut down IRS, CIA, FBI, etc., repeal income taxes, stop all wars and bring all troops home. Stop all subsidies to everybody, companies, people, whatever. Revoke all 'franchise' statuses, no more gov't monopolies.

This is the only way to fix the incoming problem.
It will not be done. People can't handle the truth that they are in a mouse trap they got into by themselves and that the cheese is a lie.

Re:definitely

[roman_mir]

Nope. All that's needed is upholding criminal and contract law.

Micromanaging business shouldn't be one of government's authorizations, it's impossible in every way, including cost and corruption.

Re:definitely

[Duhavid]

"...can also look at dozens of other countries offering them better deals"

Sounds like a race to the bottom. When does it stop?

"Exactly, they're creating jobs in other countries which consider them to be something more than cash cows to be milked for taxes'

They are creating them there because of the difference in wages. Taxes might be a part of that, but costs more directly related to living expenses ( rent/mortgate/food/etc ) are a big part of that difference.

Re:definitely

[Nadaka]

The actual history of food safety regulation proves you to be completely wrong and full of shit.

Food safety was abysmal in the 1800's and it was only regulation with mandates, punishments and fines that saved thousands (by now, it is up to millions of lives saved).

Re:definitely

[roman_mir]

Except it's you, who are full of shit. Before industry figured out how to transport large amounts of food refrigerated and built refrigerated ships and train cars, before it figured out how to use the pasteurization process and dehydration and canning and vacuum packing nothing could be DONE about safety more than they knew - sugars, salts, spices. Without industrial involvement the people would be dying today left right and center regardless of all of your favorite gov't regulations, which can do jack shit without private industry inventing and using everything that it did. So you can apply all of your colorful epithets right back at yourself, since I don't even give a shit.

Re:definitely

[Duhavid]

Hmm.

The US needs a major restructure. Yes. I think there are a few govt departments that are useful, and some regulations that are required, but there are many we could do better without. The govt monopolies and the tendency for businesses to legislate to protect their garden of profits / cripple opponents is absolutely wrong.

I agree fully that what needs to be done wont be done, and that we are in a mouse trap of our own design.
Shame.

Thanks for an enlightening exchange.

Re:definitely

[Nadaka]

You are making things up again. The US does not owe "hundreds of trillions", it is tens of trillions, and rather low tens of trillions at that.

Re:definitely

[roman_mir]

Hundreds of trillions.

The SS and Medicare obligations that are in bonds, about 30% of all mortgages in USA that were 'guaranteed' by FHA, Freddie/Fannie and that were bought out as derivatives (most of this is garbage, once they mark it to market, it's probably not worth more than 25% of what they want for it). This is on Treasury books. I am not even talking about things that nobody knows about, which can't be talked about, which require a complete Fed review.

But just the social obligations and the mortgages are over 100 Trillion by themselves.

Re:definitely

[daem0n1x]

So, the big governments failed because they gave the banks what they wanted to screw us over? If the governments were any strong they would stand up to the banks, wouldn't they? And your solution is even less government?

Don't you get it? In spite what all the free-market looneys have been preaching for decades, a weak State does not spend less money. Precisely the opposite. A weak State falls easy prey to the big economic powers, and these use it to funnel more money from the people into their pockets. Meanwhile, they get tax cuts and deregulation so they can make even more money.

All these problems started when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher instituted the "small government is good government" bullshit as the new mantra for economic policy.

Re:definitely

[Grishnakh]

No, the US needs to be broken apart into a handful of separate countries. It's just too big and too corrupt now, and nothing can fix it at this point. No one can agree on anything, as there's no cohesion between Americans in different parts of the country any more. We'd all be better off if we split the country up, and that way we wouldn't constantly be fighting over the same issues of abortion, gay marriage, religion, etc.

Re:definitely

[Grishnakh]

Depends on if you're talking corporate taxes or individual income taxes. The US has some of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. Of course, the big corporations don't pay them because of all their loopholes and accounting tricks, but the small guys do.

Re:definitely

[Duhavid]

Maybe if we had a group of sovereign states put together, we could have the advantages without having to take it all apart. Hmm.

Re:definitely

[Grishnakh]

They tried that with the Articles of Confederation, but it didn't work out too well. Then they adopted the Constitution, which threw out the entire concept of sovereign states.

Re:definitely

[Grishnakh]

Don't be ridiculous. We have at least one real-world example of a nation where there's no real government, and it's a great place to live: Somalia! Much of Mexico is pretty similar, and you can read about all the happiness and prosperity there on this blog.

Re:definitely

[Duhavid]

There you go, injecting facts into my jokes. :-)

Re:definitely

[Anonymous Coward]

You got the years wrong. Remember, the 19th century = 1801 to 1900. 1901 to 2000 was the 20th century.

The 19th century; the time before worker safety laws, before the normal working length day, before restrictions against child labor. The time when the robber barons became Richer Than God controlling the railroads, banks, and oil.

The car, the plane, Ford's Model T and factory model... those were in the 20th century. The middle class boom, cheap food, and cheap energy wer after World War 2 and were indeed things that were able to happen due to regulations that hadn't existed in the 19th century.

Basically you're doing a great job of demonstrating the earlier poster's point about people not knowing history.

Re:definitely

[Kagetsuki]

I'm in Japan, and an overly large government was precisely an issue here. However, there has been a constant push to streamline it and reduce government size and spending. In the process that has brought "corrupt" government officials to the surface and many have been ejected. It's still not perfect but I do feel like things are generally getting better.

Re:definitely

[roman_mir]

I always say: 19 century and before 1913. The important thing is after 1800 and before 1913.

Not sustainable

[Anonymous Coward]

So we should keep building core code on the backs of under payed over worked Indians who don't give a shit if there code is secure.

There is a critical outsourcing limit that we keep hitting where the actual people doing the work just don't care.

Re:Not sustainable

[Jaysyn]

This.

One of the largest cable companies in the US used to offshore their network design. They ended up paying "us" (as in my employer & other companies that work in the same field) to redo all of it & they no longer outsource design.

Re:Not sustainable

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not think the problem is if the indian people do or not give a shit about secure coding, the problem is that most of the time the people that contracts them (or us in the other side of the world) do not care or know enough of security as to impose that into their products.

Re:Not sustainable

[evilviper]

I've seen the same thing... We've got offices on several continents, with many more foreign employees than domestic across most departments. Yet, when there are technical issues, the admins over there show that they really aren't even Jr. level, and I end up getting a lot of late night calls, where they pay me more than any 10 guys over there, to fix sometimes rather simple issues.

Overwhelmingly, anybody who is good at what they do, relocates to the US directly, and has to compete with the rest of us. The salary difference is that large that nothing else makes sense.

Secrecy is not safety

[captainpanic]

Why would off-shoring increase the risk? It would perhaps be of importance if the risk is related to the secrecy around the development. But if you make your code safe by secrecy, then it is not safe anyway, whether you develop it on-shope or anywhere else in the world. You should always assume that secrets are leaked... Always.

Re:Secrecy is not safety

[Arlet]

You should always assume that secrets are leaked... Always.

No, you should always factor in the risk that secrets are leaked. It would be silly to assume that risk is 100%, because it isn't. Many successful closed-source projects prove that.

Re:Secrecy is not safety

[Kupfernigk]

Iran "offshored" the control software of the centrifuges on their uranium enrichment program (i.e. bought it in). Google for what happened next.

Re:Secrecy is not safety

[Nadaka]

It isn't just secrecy. It is quality. In india, being a good programmer means getting promoted to management immediately. The only people left to code are those who are failures or newbies. As a result, the quality of code coming from overseas is crap and often broken. They often deliver completely broken code, or code that only works for a small subset of valid inputs, or that has terrible maintainability and performance. Every bit of that code you get back has to be thoroughly vetted and usually scrapped and rewritten from the ground up.

So yes, it definitely increases risk.

Re:Secrecy is not safety

[NevarMore]

So how is it the "good" programmers in management don't review and stop this broken code?

Re:Secrecy is not safety

[Anonymous Coward]

So how is it the "good" programmers in management don't review and stop this broken code?

I don't know, but my anecdotal evidence (experience) concurs with Nadaka's statement.

Re:Secrecy is not safety

[Anonymous Coward]

So how is it the "good" programmers in management don't review and stop this broken code?

Because they are managers now and managers don't mess with code. Geeze!

Re:Secrecy is not safety

[darronb]

There's too much of it. They can't do all the work, and they have to let the crappy programmers learn. Trial by fire.

I know a really excellent Indian programmer that's a project coordinator now over several projects. He works like a madman trying to correct and teach people, but the results are still pretty crappy because he's just one guy. Eventually, he'll burn out.

I'd hire that single guy in a heartbeat. There might also be another one in the dozen or so on the project that doesn't do more harm than good.

However, they produce so many document artifacts it looks much more professional to management. Even if some of the documents are verging on criminal negligence. Who in the world thinks a flow chart built by omitting structural constructs (like all the conditional statements, say) makes valid documentation? Someone who thinks nobody will check it, that's who. The docs look awesome, but everyone's worse off having them.

Re:Secrecy is not safety

[Anonymous Coward]

That would mean actually doing something

Re:Secrecy is not safety

[Anonymous Coward]

So how is it the "good" programmers in management don't review and stop this broken code?

Because they're not good managers

Re:Secrecy is not safety

[mikael]

Does anyone still use flowcharts? Gantt charts? Jackson diagrams?

Looking back, those flowcharts seem so low-level, does any project have the time to produce two pages of documentation for every half-page of code?

Re:Secrecy is not safety

[MrBoring]

I think the biggest business risk for outsourcing isn't always secrecy, with the notable exception being China. There are examples of corporate secrets not being widely divulged, such as the recipe for Coca Cola; available in India and China, but exact ingredients are still a mystery. Also, somehow IBM manages to keep its z/OS operating system away from software pirates even though there's emulators to run it on an Intel platform.

A bigger risk not much talked about here is the issue of enforcement of contracts. I'm sure there's some degree of enforcement abilities within the Indian legal system, there's arguably less in China. It just makes life more difficult if you're attempting to manage a long term engagement of resources with a defined outcome if your system for contract enforcement is nebulous, weak or non-existent. Note that this is an argument against offshoring unless you have significant resources to manage it, like say IBM.

I worked for a company which does a lot of in-house software development. They constantly had problems with the project management side of their off shore resources, mostly due to inexperience, time zones and communication abilities. The market for Indian off shore developers was so hot that they had a hard time hiring experienced developers because they kept leaving for more money. On the other hand, they had as much control as they could muster over their local resources, ensuring a level of quality, and ease of communication. It was quicker to get things done on site than offshore, despite having an offshore liaison. They also didn't pay exorbitant contractor rates or over pay for some commercial framework that could have been written locally cheaper.

Re:Secrecy is not safety

[blueg3]

Well, assume for now you're just talking about code -- offshoring does, after all, happen with other things, too.

First, you need to maintain the capacity to modify and build the software. That means people familiar with the code, a complete copy of the build system and dependencies, and of course a complete copy of the code. That needs to be tested to make sure it works. This is because conflict could cause you to lose access to your offshore group with no notice. Second, you have to do quality and security reviews, because your offshore group can be subverted. You especially need security reviews, because a single security vulnerability is a serious problem if someone knows about it. So your security review needs to be able to catch every single vulnerability in a product that's often produced cheaply. Tough, considering catching security vulnerabilities is challenging and can be incredibly subtle.

Both of those are expensive to do. Generally you offshore to reduce your costs, so often you end up also skipping those steps, or at least not doing them as thoroughly.

Re:Secrecy is not safety

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh my experiance is that when you bring those developers on site they magically become experts who are better than the other people on the team. I think what is going on has more to do with "Quick, Cheap, Good: Pick two" than the talent. When you pick offshore your picking by default "Quick, Cheap." When you bring someone over on a visa your picking "Cheap, Good".

Re:Secrecy is not safety

[mi2old2code]

I work with programmers in India who are effective, intelligent, productive, and highly motivated. And I have worked with programmers from the U.S. who are, shall we say, less so. Yes, I have also worked with U.S. programmers who are effective, intelligent, productive, and highly motivated. It is just that I would prefer not to make any major government policies based on an anecdote or two.

Re:Secrecy is not safety

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen. A couple of years ago my company outsourced its web development to a large Indian company, and I have since discovered that - in this instance at least - the horror stories are all firmly grounded in reality. Much of the code delivered from offshore is late, and most of it has to go through either a complete rewrite by the few remaining internal staff or an agonising process of review, rewrite, review, rewrite, review....

Judging by results alone, the development approach can best be characterised as "trial and error". Something is delivered which may or may not fulfil some of the functional criteria; the next iteration will fill some other set which may or may not coincide with the first set. The mindset is not "I will implement code which meets these specifications"'; it appears rather to be "I will implement code which might coincidentally meet some of these specifications".

It is truly horrifying. We have conducted repeated handovers, both face-to-face and via videoconference/teleconference/email; we have held their hands at every step, and they still don't understand what makes decent code (I have set the bar to 'decent' rather than 'good', but I have aimed far too high). They have in theory adopted the practice of commenting code, commenting check-ins and using formatting conventions, but they consistently fail to do those things in a manner which makes sense, to a degree that in my darker moments I entertain the notion that they are doing so on purpose to fuck with me.

There is nothing more that I can do. In the course of my career I've helped poor programmers to become adequate or even good, but these people are beyond help. With the best will in the world it is not possible to get good results from someone people who are inexperienced, poorly trained and simply lack the sort of mental configuration that you need to be a half-decent programmer. It's not their fault. They're not being deliberately crap, they've just been employed by an organisation that has no hiring standards. I am convinced (and this was tacitly acknowledged by one of their managers who recently quit his job) that the recruiting approach is effectively to hire people who can read and write to some extent, give them a couple of weeks training and say "congratulations, you're a Java developer! You start working for this client on Monday". Sadly, I am not exaggerating for comic effect; I genuinely believe that to be true.

Can development be outsourced successfully? I expect that it can, if you exercise a degree of control over offshore staffing practices which far exceeds our wretched set-up, and if you're willing to pay more than peanuts (which may at least partially negate the reason for outsourcing in the first place), and if you're willing to put an awful lot of effort in specifying everything to a microscopic level. Perhaps if you're in a position to do those things it can work, but I'm not convinced that it would end up being any more cost-effective than building an efficient on-shore team. All I can say for sure is that I've worked for several companies (large, medium and small) over the years and this is by far the most painful, shambolic, ineffective and ultimately dysfunctional set-up that I have ever had the misfortune of experiencing. Having got a couple of years out of it to put on my CV I'm now looking for another job, and if anyone still reading this rant is expecting to have to look after any off-shore development in the near future I strongly recommend that you start dusting off yours.

Re:Secrecy is not safety

[Anonymous Coward]

Generally the appearance of being a hard worker is more valued than actually being productive. The expectation is that if you stick it out for a few years you'll get a promotion to management. It doesn't matter if the whole time spent coding you produced absolutely nothing of value, so long as you come in and act like you're working hard. So for the most part, the ones that end up as lower and mid level managers aren't really less incompetent than the others, they just have some perseverance.

Re:Secrecy is not safety

[Anonymous Coward]

In India, Manager knows shit about programming just as in other countries. Good programmers don't become managers. People with people abilities become managers. Good programmers are good programmers for a long time. But, they don't have any incentives for writing good programs. They don't get promoted, etc. They move along the rung slow. Or they move to the US and start coordinating between the offshore and the US.

off-shore code is not that good as it is any ways

[Joe_Dragon]

and some times it ends up costing more due to delays, poor code, coding to spec only and so on.

also with outsourcing they just get the job done and move on makeing you find some one to fix the code.

Regulate how, morons ....

[unity100]

There are software patents in us of a. Inevitably any regulation you put forth for ensuring quality of code in software will be hampered by privately owned patents taken related to whatever practice/format you were requiring. You cant talk about any kind of regulation for quality of anything or good practices in such an environment.

Re:Regulate how, morons ....

[Verdatum]

They can conceivably regulate in manners that force industries to pay off these ridiculous patent holders. However, more often, government software regulations force developers to pay off entities that evaluate your code and verify it conforms to published standards. If government wants to do this for code it commissions/uses, that's fine, but enforcing this for private sector code is just silly.

Quite right. And the corollary applies

[Kupfernigk]

Outsource the armed forces (worked for the Romans - for a while.) And stop requiring the use of licensed and regulated doctors, civil engineers, aircraft designers and the like. Because those professions started off unregulated.

On the other hand, serious attention to regulating software design and deployment might eventually reduce the need for security analysts...

Re:Quite right. And the corollary applies

[MemoryDragon]

Actually outsourcing their own forces brought the romans to their downfall both the western and eastern empire.

Re:Quite right. And the corollary applies

[Oswald McWeany]

It was somewhat necessary though- as their borders grew- they had to rely on soldiers who were from the territories to man their borders. There were simply not enough people in Rome- or the home nations to man an army large enough to defend such a large territory. There were even a number of Emperors from the provinces eventually.

It did make the army somewhat weaker- but it was the invention of the stirrup that allowed horseback armies to be surpreme over the more foot-based armies- the invasion of horse back riders from the East displaced tribes that started the Barbarian invasions that brought down Rome.

Re:Quite right. And the corollary applies

[Sir_Eptishous]

Incorrect in the eastern empire. Actually, internal strife, constant infighting and bloated bureaucracy had more to do with it than using Gothic "Roman" troops.

Re:Quite right. And the corollary applies

[vlm]

Actually outsourcing their own forces brought the romans to their downfall both the western and eastern empire.

Naah, study your history. That was an effect along the way, but hardly the cause.

The cause was the rich people had all the money land and power. Read your Gibbon, near the end all the land in the empire was owned by only a thousand landlords and everyone else was dirt poor. Kind of like where the USA is headed. When Rome was more egalitarian, Rome the city produced 25K fighting men, which means a total army size in those days of about 75K. Back then individuals paid for their own gear when they volunteered for service...

Once only the rich had money, the poor couldn't even volunteer to be the equivalent of cannon fodder, and the rich had to hire foreign mercenaries, at ripoff prices. Toward the end, the average Roman was so poor that the empire could barely raise 100K fighting men. You'd think an empire could raise more than 4x just one city, but they had economically destroyed themselves, so...

The Real Question

[Anonymous Coward]

The real question is: do the mega corporations care?

Translation

[anyGould]

People aren't willing to pay extra for code that's actually secure so we can't pass along our costs, and you can kiss our ass if you think we're taking a pay cut just because our software killed a few hundred people.

Re:Translation

[couchslug]

"People aren't willing to pay extra for code that's actually secure so we can't pass along our costs, and you can kiss our ass if you think we're taking a pay cut just because our software killed a few hundred people."

Software for critical applications such as aircraft flight controls can be appropriately regulated and audited.

Software for trifling bullshit need not be so regulated.

Re:Translation

[Tomato42]

So, you're suggesting that systems in medicine (monitors, MRI) or banking (ATMs) are "trifling bullshit"...

And those are the systems in which I see regular off-the-shelf software used...

The argument is stupid ...

[tomhudson]

First, we already have a market framework that works - people don't buy or use the crappiest code when given a choice.

Second, you know that "disclaim all warranties" bit? If you paid for the product, the vendor cannot disclaim warranties - so you have more incentive to deal with someone local so you can sue their *** off a lot easier. Given enough lawsuits, all bugs are shallow.

Third - the government is unable to ensure the quality of the code it already buys - how is it going to do that for everyone?

The whole concept is dumb, the article is just troll bait - which explains why it was posted on Troll Tuesday [tt]

Re:The argument is stupid ...

[Phreakiture]

First, we already have a market framework that works - people don't buy or use the crappiest code when given a choice.

<div class="sarcasm">Well, that explains Windows' success in the presence of alternatives perfectly.</div>

Re:The argument is stupid ...

[Spiflicator]

people don't buy or use the crappiest code when given a choice.

People won't sign up to knowingly buy the crappiest code, but unless they are capable of measuring the quality of code, they will hire the cheapest developers, and be blissfully(?) ignorant. ( I assume most management is blissfully ignorant ) It seems to me that most companies think developers are interchangeable and of equivalent quality and capability. With that mindset, why wouldn't you simply hire the cheapest option.

Re:The argument is stupid ...

[scamper_22]

I'm sometimes amused.

We'll probably see a lot of this kind of proposal. Ultimately, it has to do with jobs. Why not bypass all the bullshit and just admit we're not willing to deal with globalization?

Say what you want about the 'market', most of the economy is government run today... either directly or heavily regulated to the point of being government run. healthcare, education, military, law, financial...

So why do people like yourself sit there pretending like we have a free market and ultimately hurting yourself as an engineer/computer scientists (yes I am assuming you work in the field).

Don't be a martyr for efficiency. Me, I'll gladly take regulation in software so you need the credentials and residency experience of a lawyer/doctor to write software, especially mission critical or networking software. That's just how the world is right now.

When we live in a libertarian paradise, I'll gladly compete with anyone. Until that time, don't be a martyr. Fight for your industry and protection.

Re:The argument is stupid ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows won because it was absolutelly best product at the time. Why would people buy expensive software when there were cheaper alternatives? - Because cheaper alternatives were unusable pieces of shit (read linux in 1995).
I'm die hard linux fan - I don't imagine paying for windows now, when they are better alternatives for free (read linux ad 2011).
But Windows won for a reason, it was best operating system at the time. Same goes IE6 - it was best cutting edge browser at the time - Imagine it as Chrome right now, they do crazy shit not bothering with "standards".

Back to the point, lack of responsibility produces shitty code. Same way lack of regulations produces shitty enginering. That's why every sane goverment introduced regulations. That's why architects stand under the bridge when it's stress tested.
Because there's no responsibility for writting shitty code, people do it becouse it's easier. I've worked as IT for a construction company. It was common for architect to say to his boss o go shit himself, and there would be no way he would sign of on botched construction. Why? becouse if he did he'd face 20 years in jail.
Now how many times did You hear about heart monitoring software failing becouse it was deployed on Amazon, and guess what - it failed! How many head rolled?
Lack of regulation and responsibility in IT is starting to cause loss of life, and someone dares to argue that nothing should be done about it becouse it might cause job loss of incompetent fucktards?

Fuck that.

Re:The argument is stupid ...

[0123456]

Windows won because it was absolutelly best product at the time.

Uh, no. Windows won because it was the cheapest product that got the job done. Windows was a toy compared to Unix and pretty poor compared to MacOS, but it worked and it was a fraction of the price.

Oh, and I was running Linux on my laptop in 1996 developing my web site while I traveled; Windows 95 wouldn't even boot on such a low-end system, let alone run a web server and web browser and CGI scripts.

Re:The argument is stupid ...

[tomhudson]

First, we already have a market framework that works - people don't buy or use the crappiest code when given a choice.

<div class="sarcasm">Well, that explains Windows' success in the presence of alternatives perfectly.</div>

People have always had alternatives ... they make the choice based on several things, including price. Back when others were running MS/DOS or PC/DOS on a 8086/8088 I was running Microware OS9. Others were running something from some company called Apple.

Today, if you want to compare, the reason Microsoft is moving to their whole MetroUI/html5+css+javascript thing is because they got around to actually fixing IE in version 9. I write my code under linux, test under Firefox, Opera and Chrome, then boot into windows and test under IE, Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari. The webkit-based browsers don't support zoom/transform or transform-origin properly for values less than 1 (not even -webkit-transform/-webkit-transform-origin or -o-transform/-o-transform-origin), which means that the only two browsers that actually work properly for my own html5 code are Firefox and IE9 (and chrome is the sorriest of the bunch).

Re:The argument is stupid ...

[CAIMLAS]

First, we already have a market framework that works - people don't buy or use the crappiest code when given a choice.

But it doesn't work, because we have a LOT of companies which go around selling shit Indian-developed projects/products. You don't know this until you're balls deep into the product, of course, because everything from pre-sales to final implementation and maintenance is highly controlled by marketing bullshit. The 'developers' are gone, but the product remains and needs support. It becomes a massive money sink and a few select 'vendors' become massively rich. There are entire companies of just sales and marketing people who do this, taking advantage of smaller (and often larger) organizations who don't know better.

Sometimes, they don't know any better themselves. But that's rare. I'm sure that in most cases, they know they're fucking the customers, because they're able to sell the company and/or retire in a couple years...

Re:The argument is stupid ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Which alternatives, exactly? The ludicrously expensive but easy-to-use Mac OS and the horribly unfriendly (but getting slightly better) albeit free Linux distros?

Windows runs on just about everything, is easier to maintain for the end-user, and isn't terribly expensive. Mac might be better for the "experience", but you pay for what you get there. Linux is horrible to maintain unless you know or can learn what you're doing - I'd venture a guess that half the population using a computer doesn't, can't, and/or won't.

At the moment... Windows is really the only option for people with limited budgets and limited tech experience. With a bit of money, you could get a Mac (unless you want games or some specific hardware). With a bit of experience, you could get Linux and be able to fix some of the problems you'll run into (unless you want some specific hardware that doesn't have a driver for Linux).

Re:The argument is stupid ...

[Billly Gates]

They may not buy the crapiest software, but I bet you they sure buy the cheapest.

That is true even if it is the crapiest. Why would I pay an American $30,000 to build a website when I can get it done for $200 in India? Will it be as high quality? Maybe not. I will pay $200 and then pay $5,000 for a consultant to review the work, and simply over work my I.T. staff 70 hours a week for free to debug it. Since the I.T. staff know their jobs can go to India they will be more than happy to work extra for free in this economy. Net savings is $29,000 and a nice bonus to buy a new car from upper management for being so smart :-)

I also ate McDonalds last night. Crappiest? Better than Taco Bell, but it was sure the cheapest. Same concept.

In a deflationary economy you need to focus on costs and not quality or volume. 10 years ago CIOs cared about these things but Wall Street owns the companies and it is essential to think only in 6-10 week quarters. Paying upper middle class salaries is simply not an option anymore for hiring.They wont hire period unless required by a big customer and then will need to get it done as cheap as possible to not offset the share price or sadly make books look good to obtain another month of line of credit from the bank. That is what is happening now as it is the lifeblood of any private business

Re:The argument is stupid ...

[shutdown -p now]

the reason Microsoft is moving to their whole MetroUI/html5+css+javascript thing is because they got around to actually fixing IE

Metro is not just about HTML/CSS/JS. Metro C++ and .NET apps don't use HTML for their UI.

Re:The argument is stupid ...

[Tomato42]

Big pharma, run by governemnt

The last time I checked, it was the other way round...

Re:Secrecy is not safety - your not even on topic

[haus]

It is not about secrecy it is about quality.

The VP at SAIC is saying that if the government demands that the software they purchase actually meets some minimum standard of quality then everyone will throw up their hands and quit. Which he feels will cause more software to be handed off to overseas developers who will do even a worse job than has already been done.

This smells very much like GM & Ford complaining that new fuel standards will be a technical impossibility to reach just moments before one of their competitors roll out models to the showroom floor that make the grade.

Yes.

[sgt scrub]

Enforcing high quality secure software written in the U.S. would be bad for the U.S. Quality and security have always been bad for a company. eg. DEC and SUN It stands to reason it would be bad for the U.S.

Priorities please?

[netwarerip]

"...costs rise in a way that makes on-shore-mandated software cost-uncompetitive on the world market.'" Is it just me, or does that not really matter when talking about code created for the gov't, especially code that has a significant security impact? There are tons of places less important than this where the budget can be cut. As far as the US developers falling behind world progress, we can do what Robin Williams has always done and steal the good stuff.

Paying our enemies

[Aqualung812]

-Note, I live in the USA, I get that you might not. Ignore the "we" in those cases.

Off-shoring becomes a bit of a problem if you decide you want to fight a war with one of the countries you offshore to.

For example, if we would start a war with India, one of the first things that would happen is the loss of all communication with that country. How many businesses would fail since they wouldn't be able to replace that infrastructure quickly.

How about if we go to war with China? Can we produce all of the parts we currently use in our weapons systems here, quickly?

Yes, in both examples, the USA would be able to eventually produce everything it might need, but it would take years to regain the infrastructure that currently isn't located here.

Where things get really complex is when you consider the off-shoring of natural resources, such are rare metals or oil. If the USA pissed everyone off, it wouldn't have enough resources to maintain current standards of living & fight a war, even with all of the imaginary money it can print.

All of the above could be seen as a positive, though. Maybe if the idea of killing others isn't enough to stop war, the cold facts of logistical interdependence might.

Re:Paying our enemies

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you think that the more we intertwine our economies, the less likely a war becomes? We go to war with China, both our and China's economies are fucked. Same goes for India. Thus, war won't happen

Re:Paying our enemies

[1s44c]

So your argument is that given enough time you are going to start a war with every other country. Not just have a war but start a war with every single other country.

You have bigger problems than offshoring.

Re:Paying our enemies

[GameboyRMH]

Isn't that why GM was bailed out, to keep the industrial capacity in the US?

Re:Paying our enemies

[ArhcAngel]

Killing might not happen but war will never end. It will be a trade war or a technology war or power struggle. Man has a biologically induced need to compete. Sports are an outlet to keep us from killing each other. During prohibition moonshiners who got bored ended up racing their cars and now we have NASCAR. On Wall Street everybody is always looking to "win" by spotting a trend before everybody else.

Re:Paying our enemies

[fnj]

Don't be any stupider than you have to be. Wars happen. You don't have to start a war to be in one.

Wars may become less likely because economies become interdependent. But they may not. If someone decides they can get even more favorable situations by defeating their rivals and wringing concessions out of them, that someone may still start a war.

Re:Paying our enemies

[0123456]

Isn't that why GM was bailed out, to keep the industrial capacity in the US?

You think that if GM had been broken up the Chinese would have packed up the factories and shipped them to China?

GM was bailed out because Obama needs those union votes.

Re:Paying our enemies

[0123456]

So your argument is that given enough time you are going to start a war with every other country.

Looking at recent history, the answer would appear to be a solid 'yes'.

Re:Paying our enemies

[ShavedOrangutan]

Or to keep UAW basically in charge. 99% of their campaign contributions go to democrats. Pretty good return on their investment.

Re:Paying our enemies

[Anonymous Coward]

That's probably one of the best reasons for outsourcing. It is also the main rationale behind the EU.

Re:Paying our enemies

[mikael]

That's why international investors wanted open borders and the elimination of trade barriers - it's well known that countries with strong trade links are far less likely to go to war with each other over resources. California hasn't gone to war with New York or Texas, and UK hasn't gone to war with Germany for over 65 years now.

Now when some countries start putting restrictions on the export of rare metals used for dual-purpose technology, then you have to wonder...

Re:Paying our enemies

[Anonymous Coward]

China's leadership has shown they're not interested in "intertwined economies"; it's
a means to their end but they have not been forth coming about their real intentions...

Re:Paying our enemies

[GameboyRMH]

I wasn't talking about the last time specifically, I meant in general, why GM gets bailed out when they're building a labor-intensive product in the country with the most expensive labor.

Re:Paying our enemies

[Anonymous Coward]

During prohibition moonshiners who got bored ended up racing their cars and now we have NASCAR.

Close but incorrect. Moonshiners hopped up their cars to escape law enforcement, not out of boredom. You are correct in that moonshiners became race car drivers - NASCAR being the end result.

Re:Paying our enemies

[SlippyToad]

For example, if we would start a war with India, one of the first things that would happen is the loss of all communication with that country. How many businesses would fail since they wouldn't be able to replace that infrastructure quickly.

War is basically a dressed-up excuse for one nation to steal wholesale from another anyway. I can't see the downside.

But what I can see a downside to is the hollowing-out of economies based on wage disparity. That will even out eventually. After that, offshoring will probably decline as employers find new and more creative ways to steal their employees' wages.

Re:Paying our enemies

[cobrausn]

So, taken in that light, is it a good idea because it reduces our inclination to wage war with our international market partners? Outsource for peace?

Re:Paying our enemies

[Man Eating Duck]

Don't be any stupider than you have to be. Wars happen. You don't have to start a war to be in one.

Wars may become less likely because economies become interdependent. But they may not. If someone decides they can get even more favorable situations by defeating their rivals and wringing concessions out of them, that someone may still start a war.

In civilised parts of the world that is generally not true. Instead of going in with guns blazing we negotiate and trade.

Re:Paying our enemies

[w_dragon]

That was one of the main points of the GATT after WWII. The more trade you have the less of a chance that some country feels so screwed by everyone else that they start a war.

Re:Paying our enemies

[bsDaemon]

The reason that Germany and Japan didn't win WW2, other than having Italy drag them down and open up another front of attack, is US industrial production. Before we entered the war, we were able to supply Britain and Russia. When we entered the war, we could out-produce everyone. Imagine if we were heavily dependent on China, Taiwan, etc for production of good back then? We'd be stuck -- not because we were at war with them, but because Japan was and had them cut off. You have to think about that, too. Anything that threatens your supply chain threatens you and will, eventually, lead to loss of life. That's just how it works,

Re:Paying our enemies

[0123456]

The more trade you have the less of a chance that some country feels so screwed by everyone else that they start a war.

That was also the plan before WWI, wasn't it?

Re:Paying our enemies

[bberens]

Umm, we've been involved in a cold war with China for decades. Their currency manipulation is nothing short than a trade war with the United States and other western countries. So no, going to war with them will not necessarily destroy businesses.

Re:Paying our enemies

[cdrguru]

War as we know it with bombs and bullets might not happen, but the alternative for the US is total domination by China. China today has pretty much all the tools it needs to turn the US into a colony. We owe China more than we can ever pay back, and with their trade policies it isn't ever going to get any better. The US has no way out of this subordinate position other than to repudiate the debt.

Sure, if the US were to tell China there will be no more payments, no more trade, no more nothing things would be "interesting" for a while. What ever would WalMart do? But the result would likely be that factories making consumer products would spring up in the US and after a year or two the US economy would be pretty darn healthy again. Unfortunately, no leader in the US would ever consider doing something like that.

The end game then is some kind of long drawn out stalemate where China keeps their demands very limited and we sit by and watch China manipulate their currency such that trade with the US is always a one-sided game. The US isn't obviously relegated to colony status, but should anyone try to break free of China the threat is made apparent.

This is also why you will never see the tax code changed to favor US based production of goods and services. Such a thing would be an immediate slap in the face of the Chinese masters who would not take long to make the US government understand that they are simply not permitted to do any such thing.

The really interesting part comes if China decides to annex Taiwan. Sure, the US has pledged its military to Taiwan should something like that happen, but how much you want to bet that never happens?

Re:Paying our enemies

[Anonymous Coward]

US Weapon parts are almost exclusively made in the USA. Almost all our personal gear (clothing, pouches, ect) are made in the USA also. Federal law sort of requires it. Now some stuff is made in China but it's mostly items that are easily tooled and can be set up here in the USA in a week or so.

As for communications you're confusing call centers and out sourcing for actually infrastructure.

Re:Paying our enemies

[JoeMerchant]

Thus, war won't happen without a lot of suffering,

There, fixed that for ya, and when has war ever been without suffering?

Re:Paying our enemies

[Sperbels]

such are rare metals or oil. If the USA pissed everyone off, it wouldn't have enough resources to maintain current standards of living & fight a war

Yeah. We might have to starting living within our means. Repairing things instead of discarding them for new stuff. Not buying gigantic cars. Taking public transportation.

Re:Paying our enemies

[Kaenneth]

Many years ago, I read that there has never been a war between two countries with McDonalds resturants... still true?

Re:Paying our enemies

[shutdown -p now]

In this case, the "intertwining" seems to be rather one-way.

Re:Paying our enemies

[Nadaka]

The thing is, we can pay china back. We need to spend our budget more effectively and raise taxes to do it though.

Re:Paying our enemies

[Reservoir Penguin]

I think you overestimate contribution of lend lease to Soviet victory in ww2 a bit. The war was won by the Russians using Russian made weapons for the most part.

Re:Paying our enemies

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, let's see, 100% of their interests are served by the Democrats, while -20% are served by Republicans.

Go figure. Next you'll tell me that Fundamentalist Christian churches who oppose abortion and homosexuality suddenly start funding the Log Cabin Republicans and Planned Parenthood's PAC.

Re:Paying our enemies

[wanax]

And how did the Soviet weapons get deployed to the front? Using 2000 Lend-Lease locomotives, 11,000 Lend-Lease rail cars, and 70%+ Lend-Lease truck strength, and about 18,700 aircraft, about 80% of which were transport aircraft. It may not be glamorous, but that's what allowed the USSR to counter-attack.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease

Re:Paying our enemies

[gtall]

"Maybe if the idea of killing others isn't enough to stop war, the cold facts of logistical interdependence might." Hey, what a great idea, let's ask Al Qaeda what they want to trade with us. Or maybe N. Korea, surely they must make something we want. How about Iran? We can make an end run around the oil market 'cause they'd really like to trade with the U.S. directly.

Re:Paying our enemies

[readin]

Actually we were at war with Taiwan. Taiwan stopped being part of the Chinese Empire a long time ago - back while Spain controlled Cuba and the Chicago Cubs still had a World Series victory in their future.

Re:Paying our enemies

[thePuck77]

Humans also have a biologically induced need to cooperate and be social creatures. Hence all the collective accomplishments of civilization...all of which required collective, cooperative effort. The modern picture of competition is not biologically induced, it is politically and socially induced.

We could just as easily focus on cooperative efforts and minimize competitive efforts, but that wouldn't be as convenient for the sociopaths among us.

Re:Paying our enemies

[Kittenman]

War of 1812. Oh, wait ...

Re:Paying our enemies

[ArhcAngel]

Humans also have a biologically induced need to cooperate and be social creatures.

Yes hence team sports and armies. A large group will band together and form a society and then seek out any who are different and challenge them. Man cannot feed one part of his psyche and neglect the other. If you try to suppress one it will find a way to manifest. Suppress it long enough and it will violently erupt .This is the mistake man has made repeatedly throughout history.

Re:Paying our enemies

[mirix]

NATO bombing Serbia ruined that, if you count NATO as a 'country'.
The last Russia-Georgia bit did also, if you don't count the first case.

Probably more, but I can't think of them.

Re:Paying our enemies

[Anonymous Coward]

Chinese masters? Are you serious? They own ~16% of our debt. They may be the largest single-holder but we have worse things to worry about (like paying the 50+ percent of debt owned by the US public) if we can't pay down 16%.

Re:Paying our enemies

[bsDaemon]

You were at war with the nationalist government of China, which fled to Taiwan in exile after Mao and the Communist Party won their guerrilla insurrection and took over the mainland. Taiwan was known as Formosa and was definitely part of China. I only split Taiwan out in my original comment because it exists, more or less, as an independent state today, and also because until Nixon wanted to attempt to isolate the Soviet Union, we recognized Taiwan as "China" and they held the seat on the UN Security Council. But hey, your story is good, too.

Re:Paying our enemies

[readin]

Where are you getting this from?

In WWII, the US was at war with Japan, and Taiwan was part of Japan. The Qing Empire had given Taiwan to Japan back in 1895 (a few years before he Spanish Empire lost Cuba). Since Taiwan was part of Japan, America was at war with Taiwan. Americans fought Taiwanese in the Pacific and Americans conducted bombing raids in Taiwan.

America was allied with the Republic of China which is why when the war ended the Republica of China was able to occupy Taiwan. The Republic of China immediately began trying to erase Japanese history (for example, most major and minor streets had their Japanese and Taiwanese names removed; in most cities you'll find street names like Chungshan, Nanjing, Mingchuan...either named after places in China or named to reflect Republic of China propaganda). But despite Republic of China efforts to erase the past, the past is what it is (er, was).

As for Nixon, he did the exact opposite of what you describe. Prior to Nixon America and the UN recognized the government of Taiwan as "China". However, to get the real China on our side to isolate the USSR, Nixon negotiated with China and America stopped recognizing the Republic of China (which governed Taiwan) and began to recognize the People's Republic of China (which governed China) as "China".

In recent years Taiwan has become a democracy and its identity (is it part of "China"?) has been a subject of much debate. The international political situation has it largely locked into a position of officially claiming to be part of "China" even those many or even most of its people do not believe it to be so.

Re:Paying our enemies

[Reservoir Penguin]

The Soviet counter-attack that pushed Hitler's armies hundreds of kilometers away from Moscow and basically ruined the Barbarossa blitzkrieg plan happened in December '41 long before the bulk of supplies was delivered. The Lend Lease program and American military involvement late in the war when Nazis were already in full retreat on the eastern Front general surely quickened Hitler's demises but did not change the outcome of the War which was clear after the defeat at Stalingrad, followed by the Tehran conference.

Re:Paying our enemies

[wanax]

Looking at the following source: http://www.sturmvogel.orbat.com/SovLendLease.html which may or may not be accurate, but does jive with my memory (the most recent essay I've written about a related topic was about 12 years ago and I no longer have the library books), about 75% of the (total) rail stock was delivered pre-December 1941, as well as with a big chunk, 60% or so of the (available) aviation fuel.. which would have been vital to sustaining defensive supply lines. The best thing I found on trucks is http://www.armchairgeneral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=74473 which, if true, would indicate that lend-lease trucks were vital to sustaining the Soviet advances in 1943 and 1944.

In both WWI and WWII the German army managed to critically damage Russia's railstock at the outset of the conflict (albeit, for different reasons), to say that several hundred locomotives weren't vital to sustaining the Soviet defensive positions in late 1941 requires affirming evidence.

Re:Paying our enemies

[Reservoir Penguin]

Thanks for reminding of this important fact. The main tank producing company which makes T-90 MBT is still called Uralvagonzavod (the rail car factory) which stands to show how American supplies allowed USSR to refocus on producing war machines.

I still think it's a near miracle that Soviet regime did not collapse in the first six months of war after suffering truly horrific losses in manpower and equipment.

ITAR

[PPH]

ITAR is perhaps one of the biggest hidden costs in domestic software development. Investments in s/w products that cannot realize the maximum ROI due to market restrictions force quite a bit of development overseas. If my subsidiary in India can sell my app or service anywhere in the world, but I can't do so with a domestic version, guess where I'll send the work?

Its like when Obama was elected and all the gun nuts got paranoid about possible forthcoming regulations. Everyone ran out and stocked up on guns and ammo. Mention national security and software in the same article and more development work will get pushed overseas in a panic.

Re:ITAR

[couchslug]

"Its like when Obama was elected and all the gun nuts got paranoid about possible forthcoming regulations."

They had reasonable cause to be worried based on the real-world Dem track record.

Fun fact:
Beijing doesn't object to Americans being armed and will cheerfully sell us weapons/ammo/parts. They support the Second Amendment, while the Dems do not. (Tactical retreat to get elected /= "support". See Operation Fast and Furious for their latest plot which blew up in their faces.)

Re:ITAR

[Anonymous Coward]

"Its like when Obama was elected and all the gun nuts got paranoid about possible forthcoming regulations."

They had reasonable cause to be worried based on the real-world Dem track record.

Like Reagan's "military-style" weapons ban? Damn those left wing commie pinko Democrats!

Re:ITAR

[couchslug]

The Reagan ban was not the CLINTON ban.

http://mdwguns.com/NFA_Items.html

I don't support the Reagan ban, but do consider the near-universal and bitter Democrat determination to destroy the Second Amendment when comparing records.

Offshoring IS a threat

[WCMI92]

It's a threat that will eventually bring down every company that does it. It is a cheat, a dodge used to avoid paying market rate for wages while still depending on the market you are taking the jobs away from to remain strong enough to buy your product (which is likely too expensive to sell in the off shore market where you are underpaying for labor).

Ergo: Every company that uses offshoring depends on EVERYONE ELSE to not do the same so that there is still a market for their product. Eventually everyone will offshore in order to not get undercut in price, to the point where Americans no longer make a wage sufficient to keep the economy afloat so that there is sufficient money in the economy to allow the purchase of the offshored product.

In other words, it's ultimately a self-destructive strategy that will end in dragging down first world markets to third world economic levels. We may already be past that critical point, looking at the perpetual recession we are in.

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[Arlet]

Not off-shoring is also a self-destructive strategy. It's just a matter of time before foreign companies can compete on complete products.

In the end, the only way to survive is to remain competitive with foreign workers.

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[Anonymous Coward]

Get rid of H1B visas, if you want to work in America, become a citizen.
Ban off-shoring for any kind of Financial, Medical, Personally identifiable information. Fines in excess of a billion dollars per violation ought to cover it.
Ban off-shoring management of systems that are used for above data. This includes employees of companies that are not located within the physical United States.
Ban off-shoring of offices for companies that are only used for tax evasion. All domestic sales routed through domestic offices.

Most big corporations specify in their contracts with service providers that all people who work on their systems are domestic employees. Ever wonder why?

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[0123456]

Get rid of H1B visas, if you want to work in America, become a citizen.

So the people who would have moved to America to work for US Software, Inc and paid US taxes instead stay in their country and start up Cheaper Than US Software, Inc and the jobs move abroad.

I read an interesting book a couple of years back which argued that empires grew large by being open and allowing the 'best and brightest' from around the world to move to the imperial hub where they provided the most benefit to the empire. Then at some point they closed the doors and soon after the empire collapsed. I'm not entirely convinced that it's true, but it makes sense and seems to fit with current US government behaviour.

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[WCMI92]

The biggest reform we need (besides the slave wage H1B) is that we need to start considering the labor and environmental regulations of countries that products are imported from and labor is offshore to.

It is unfair for American business and industry to have the competitive DISADVANTAGE of our environmental and labor laws while products and services produced in places where producers can belch black smoke at will and pay far below American market rates for labor can be freely imported. There should be tariffs imposed that balance the playing field, so that American based companies have a level playing field... IN OUR OWN MARKET.
 

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[chihowa]

So the people who would have moved to America to work for US Software, Inc and paid US taxes instead stay in their country and start up Cheaper Than US Software, Inc and the jobs move abroad.

H1B isn't a path to US citizenship. It's a means for undercutting the domestic wages while holding the foreign worker in a position where displeasing their employer can lead to being deported. We want the best and brightest of the world to become US citizens, not indentured servants.

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[WCMI92]

Not to mention the fraud and abuse involved with H1B would put Solyndra and "Fast and Furious" to shame. I once worked at a company that started bringing in H1B's.

They are required to CLAIM that they are paying prevailing market wages to the H1B employee. They never do. One guy they brought in, they claimed was being paid $50K/year. He was actually making less than half that.

Who could he complain to? He'd be deported if he did. This paperwork is NEVER audited by government either.

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[0123456]

We want the best and brightest of the world to become US citizens, not indentured servants.

So how does someone become a US Citizen in a few months?

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[drinkypoo]

There's no clear formula. Russia pumped education so now they have a bunch of massively educated people working mundane jobs. We crapped on education and now we have way too many people for some tech jobs and not enough for others. Who can say what the actual answer is?

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[Anonymous Coward]

Not entirely true. Foreign companies will eventually strive to compete anyway whether you off-shore or not. Since when is competition a bad thing? As mentioned in previous comments and articles the issue of quality does come to the forefront of why not to off-shore. While more expensive doesn't always = better, under a properly managed roof, it does allow for better quality control and ultimately a more stable product.

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[Duhavid]

How can that happen?

Will BOA reduce my mortgage to numbers similar to China/India/? Will the grocery store reduce their prices? And the other stores I have to buy things from to keep alive? I can do things to reduce how much I need to live on to some degree, but there is a bottom to it all. And their bottom is lower than ours.

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you missed the point.

When everyone off shores, there is no longer any income available to the ex-workers and non-existent companies to buy the products produced by the off shoring company.

They will have to sell them to another market, as there will be no market here, as there will be no jobs, as they all moved to find cheaper labor.

You could argue that costs will equalize over time, as prices will rise for off shore labor, and prices will drop for on shore expenses, allowing employees to sell their labor for less, but the argument that you made is talking past the original point, and your conclusion doesn't have anything to do with the "end", unless it is the end of a viable US market.

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[Anonymous Coward]

So American should work for $2 a DAY?

Ok fine, I can do that. But don't expect me to "stimulate" the economy beyond buying milk, bread and potatoes. Ford, Microsoft, Exxon, GE and all the other mega-corporations can die in a fire for all I care because I'm too broke to buy their products.

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[Anonymous Coward]

It's great, it levels the field among countries.

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[Arlet]

And their bottom is lower than ours.

In that case, you'll have to provide more value in return for the higher price you are asking.

If you can't do that, you'll lose. It's as simple as that.

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[Kjella]

In other words, it's ultimately a self-destructive strategy that will end in dragging down first world markets to third world economic levels. We may already be past that critical point, looking at the perpetual recession we are in.

It's what most of that first world is built on, getting ridiculously cheap labor intensive imports from abroad while exporting expensive high tech and processed products back. Except the world isn't stupid and the world isn't standing still. As the rest of the world gets civilized, they do get educated. They too understand high tech. Americans aren't magical just because they're born in the US, the rest of the world is catching up. You can close off the borders, but that market isn't coming back. Then it'd just be the US economy, no almighty dollar which is worth so much around the world. That dollar was - is - worth so much because there's valuable things to be bought for dollars. Close off trade, take that away and you might find yourself with a third world currency bringing US wages down to match the rest of the world all the same. Either way they're starting to match the US and you can't just stick your head in the sand about that.

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[Duhavid]

And the corollary to that is?

Because as an individual, there is nothing special about being "American" that provides a lot of additional value.
There are a few minor things, location ( nearness ), language, timezone, etc.

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[Arlet]

Better education for instance. As an individual it is important to keep investing in improving yourself.

Of course, none of these things are permanent. It's a constant race, and you can't get out. It's also easier to catch up than it is to stay ahead. It is important to realize that attempts to stop the process by artificial means such as anti-outsourcing legislation or trade barriers aren't going to help if you aren't competitive enough.

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[Anonymous Coward]

The race to the bottom is much quicker when you transfer skills and technology to your offshored workers. I would rather bet on maintaining technolgical leadership rather than exploiting wage arbitrage.

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[shutdown -p now]

H1B isn't a path to US citizenship.

It is when it's not abused. Coincidentally, more than a dozen of my acquaintances have gotten their green cards or citizenship that way, and a few more are anxiously waiting for the same.

But, yes, it's not particularly well-designed towards that end. Too easy to abuse, and too unclear on when or if you're actually getting anything.

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[shutdown -p now]

So how does someone become a US Citizen in a few months?

I'm not aware of any first world country where you can become a citizen in a few months.

That said, it's not the main problem with H1-B as it stands. The problem is that it ties the visa to the job, and leaving the job means visa is invalidated - immediately. Compare to e.g. Canada, where you can stay in the country until your work visa expires even if you leave or get fired. You can't actually work during that period, but you can look for a different job, and as soon as you find one and apply for a new work visa, the existing one is extended for the duration of your application. So you can afford to walk out on bad deals or other workplace abuse, and don't need to fire sale any property you have in the country and pack the bags.

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[shutdown -p now]

Russia pumped education so now they have a bunch of massively educated people working mundane jobs.

There's more to it than that, really. The model did work pretty well in Soviet Union, largely because tertiary education was hard back then - sure, it was free, but you had to pass entry exams, which was never easy, and even then there would be considerable competition. And the state didn't have any qualms about sending those that didn't succeed to technical schools. In that environment, education was very much respected and highly sought after, but it was not for everyone, and people understood that.

After USSR disintegrated, we were left with the culture where university education was strongly correlated with success, and so everyone wanted to get their kids in. But now they didn't actually have to work hard to get there - you just had to pay enough and/or have sufficiently high connections (the latter problem did exist in USSR for high-ranking Party members and such, but the scale was much smaller). At the same time, education standards dropped. So now you have a horde of people with diplomas which they've essentially bought, not earned - but every one of them thinks that they're entitled to a good job by the virtue of having that piece of paper. What's worse is that it completely devalued diplomas and degrees as a way to prefilter candidates.

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[drinkypoo]

So now you have a horde of people with diplomas which they've essentially bought, not earned - but every one of them thinks that they're entitled to a good job by the virtue of having that piece of paper. What's worse is that it completely devalued diplomas and degrees as a way to prefilter candidates.

So, just like here. I've heard it said that Americans and Russians are more similar than they know, and this is a great example that ought to bring us closer together.

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[shutdown -p now]

Well, one difference between us is that in Russia, "bought" usually means going to a more prestigious institution (though that obviously depends on what one can afford) and paying off the examiners. Whereas in US it seems to be more about going to some place where the education is not taxing, and legitimately paying for the privilege of staying there for a few years until you get the degree. They both cause problems, but the former also breeds corruption.

On the other hand, at least in Russia kids who are smart and willing can still get good education for free - or rather, today, effectively sponsored by the rest of the bunch. Though competition is more fierce than ever, since most "free" places are also auctioned off in backroom deals in practice (i.e. you pay a bribe to get your kid in for "free" - it just costs cheaper...).

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[drinkypoo]

They both cause problems, but the former also breeds corruption.

We have loads of corruption here. For example, even small community colleges regularly strain under the burden of executive salaries.

On the other hand, at least in Russia kids who are smart and willing can still get good education for free - or rather, today, effectively sponsored by the rest of the bunch.

Yeah, here we can go into debt to get a crappy education.

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[sjames]

By the time they get there, they'll be priced a lot like U.S. products because they'll have to carry the same infrastructure and salaries.

Americans can't be competitive with foreign workers unless/until someone is willing to let us pay $50/month for rent and buy groceries for our families for $20/week. The businesses that are getting their labor for 1/10th the price of U.S. workers will have to start charging 1/10th their current prices to make it work.

Of course, deflation by an order of magnitude carries it's own issues.

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[Anonymous Coward]

And that my friend is the whole point of the exercise.

America nearly succeeded in creating a free republic where an individual citizen really was practically free and sovereign. The global elite did not like that one bit. You have been destroyed from within. Intentionally.

Now go back to watching American Idol whilst the process is completed.

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[Anonymous Coward]

Its taught to be "compete" when main advantage is hourly rate an cost of life. So to be marketable (comparable to workers ovesees) I need to slash my wage. As soon a I am cheap - I more attractive for the business.

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree completely.

I also use a visual model to represent the effects of this crap.

It's called the water-drop effect. When you displace something by adding something new (explosive market), the center mass (foreign control) gets pushed outward. The middle portion's (market's) displacement has a massive center growth (money gets funneled up into the wealthy / corps) with the areas around it remaining somewhat static but stable (middle class). When gravity (market collapse after time and self-sustenance is overcome) pulls the center mass back in (company / wealthy person value declines), the mass gets displaced outward (offshored). The water droplet collapses back into the water with a reverse effect (companies and wealthy hoard their money and remove it from the market by collapse or withdrawal). The outside matter that was displaced (foreign control) now slams back in on the center, compressing the area in between and pushing themselves upward, effectively establishing new reverse force. I don't need to put the parenthetical version of the last sentence in. If you get the picture, you get it. If not, you're a rat fink.

Conflict of interest?

[r2rknot]

A security firm is saying regulations requiring code be secure would be bad? I'd say that too if it was my entire companies business.

It definitely is, but so is outsourcing

[gweihir]

An not only "national security" (never understood that particular US fetish), but a threat to data and software security in any environment. But so is outsourcing in the first place. Off-Shoring just makes the connection between customer and service-provider even more remote. The more remote this connection is, the less loyalty and less perception (and often reality) of the risk of repercussions. Add a cultural gap to make matters worse. And an often high fluctuation.

Incidentally, from what I have seen, Outsourcing/Off-Shoring is often pretty expensive. I have seen projects where 100 developers in India did a project that could have been done with 4-6 really competent domestic people. Not that I assume the 100 developers were on this full-time, I assume just a really bad development model, were everybody does a tiny bit of coding on his/her layer. Consequentially, 90% of the code was unwrapping and re-wrapping of parameters. But for any kind of security critical problem, you can do background-checks on the 4-6 developers. You may even know some of them personally and you can make sure they are happy with the conditions they are working under and grievances are addressed promptly. That is the way to get loyalty. Of course, this is impossible for the 100 anonymous Indian developers.

In addition, finding, e.g., back-doors in code is typically significantly more expensive than a re-implementation with trusted personnel.

Re:It definitely is, but so is outsourcing

[vlm]

Not that I assume the 100 developers were on this full-time

Unless you had your own guys looking over their shoulder, how do you know that? Look up "overbilling fraud".

So.. we'll work for 1/20 their wages... We could bill honestly and make 1/20th their profits, a nice honest sum. But... what if we billed them ten times over? Faked the whole thing? We'll make 10 times 1/20th equals half their profit, much better. Whoo hoo! We can't get caught because we're private contractors and you shouldn't be directly supervising us and we're on the other side of the planet in a wildly different timezone in a field where its pretty hard to monitor piecework... IF anyone catches us, point out they're getting the product for 1/2 price and everyone over here cheats this way anyway, and they fired all their developers so they can't move back, so they can just STFU with their complaints. Said in an Indian accent of course. Not that I'm publicly admitting I've heard this conversation from a friend...

Re:It definitely is, but so is outsourcing

[gweihir]

Indeed. And when the mindset is already criminal, why not leave a few neat back-doors in the code to discreetly (or not) exploit later.

Economics would say no, but...

[Subratik]

Your country as a whole will have a heavier emphasis on foreign policy which can lead to bad situations like China or any other country getting into a war, which inevitably makes their problems ours.

So then we have a bunch of smart people trying to manage something we don't have and our economy tanks until we can find someone who can sustain our demand.

Pros/Cons with either situation, but that's politics

Re:Economics would say no, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Economics are definitely saying yes. A big percentage of our economic problems are due to off-shoring and out-sourcing.
I personally believe that congress has out-sourced their brains, and got a really bad deal on used Abby-normal ones.

Wrong order

[Anonymous Coward]

Offshoring is a National Security threat.

There, fixed that for you.

What will drive US companies out of the US?

[DickBreath]

The US Patent system will already drive companies off shore for good.

Wrong approach, where it's used not made.

[plopez]

If it is used in the US, a US dipomatic site (which is technically US soil), or a US military base (also technically US soil) mandate software quality. No matter where it is made. The US is such a large market it would force other countries to do this.

This next paragraph sort of expands on the Subratik's post.

And has anyone considered that competing with countries with cheap labor and resources, e.g. China, is a recipe for disaster for the US? There are two approaches, go cheap like China because you can or compete on quality like the Germans and the Japanese who do not have cheap resources and can never compete strictly on price. "Made in Germany" and "Made in Japan" have become synonymous with high quality engineering and manufacturing. If the US were to produce very high quality software It would be able to compete quite well. How to get there is a tough question, but the right question must first be asked.

Re:Wrong approach, where it's used not made.

[Tailhook]

or [the US could] compete on quality like the Germans

Does that mean the US will get to impose hundreds of anti-dumping duties on Chinese imports like Germany?

EU extends China anti-dumping duty for barium carbonate
EU levies stiff anti-dumping tariffs [on ceramic tiles]
Chinese exporters regret EU anti-dumping duties on Chinese-made screws, bolts
Germany's SolarWorld expects anti-dumping complaints vs China
EU Hits China with Anti-Dumping Duties on Paper
EU greenlights anti-dumping duties on Chinese light bulbs
EU Extended Anti-Dumping Duties on Chinese Bicycle Imports

You see, while German manufacturers and workers are busy competing 'on quality', as you say, the German government is actively protecting domestic industry from competition with China throughout the EU. German manufacturers and German workers do not have to compete with disposable Asian workers and indifferent health/safety/labor/environmental regulation.

The 'oh-noes trade war' sentiment that we get from pro-business types and Chinese ministers is a farce. We're in a trade war. We're getting our clocks cleaned. That is the real reason we have thousands of 'business' degree graduates in their late 20s shuffling around trying to 'occupy' Wall Street. The US no longer provides the real growth necessary to accommodate them. They are surplus people; their futures went to China.

Re:Wrong approach, where it's used not made.

[plopez]

Well, the Chinese are dumping. They are manipulating their currency. The US better wake up. And it's not just business majors in the Wall Street demonstrations. Unions, human rights activists, environmental activists etc. are also involved. This cuts across all social, political and economic lines.

congressmen

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't hold congress accountable, why should we hold anyone?

Can we 'win on quality'?

[david.emery]

Well, it seems that a lot of corporate managers have bought into the notion that software inherently sucks. But it doesn't have to be that way. What if the US were to establish itself as the place to go for -quality software-, software that worked and that US companies stood behind? There are probably many comparisons with other industries; the auto industry comes to mind with German and Swedish cars recognized for higher quality engineering at a higher price. (That's not to denigrate the substantial quality that comes from either Japanese or Korean automakers!)

How many people have ever delivered a software product with a genuine warranty, "Find a bug and it will be fixed for free." (see http://212.113.201.96/services/software/approach.asp for an example.)

Well...

[Kupfernigk]

One of my kids is a lawyer specialising in IT cases, so this is cutting off nose to spite face time...but you cannot sue people for doing bad work without an agreed concept of what constitutes good work. Some very successful parts of the world (Switzerland, Germany, Northern Italy) have traditionally relied on the concept of overseeing work by properly educated, trained and qualified people. I personally think it is better to pay them than to rely on paying lawyers.

Professionalism & lack of standards vs Get it

[ErichTheRed]

During the banking crisis, people in the US and the UK heard this a lot about the financial sector -- if you regulate them too much, they'll just move somewhere without regulations. I think there's some truth to that, but I can't imagine every company loves the idea of operating in a completely unregulated environment.

One of the things I'm all for is professionalism in the IT world. Computers have been around for a long time, and now they're 100% vital to peoples' daily lives. It's time to start thinking about a couple of things:

- Separating the design and deployment portions of the IT landscape

- Making the design part a real branch of the engineering profession, with a set of educational standards

- Making the deployment part a skilled trade, with the necessary apprenticeships and career progression to attract new hires

Having a professional body would allow us to stand up to employers who demand that the schedule be crunched once again to meet an arbitrary date. No one tells a licensed PE who is liable for work they sign off on that they just lost a week of design time because someone said so...PEs are aware that they could lose their license or be sued out of existence. Currently, software isn't considered infrastructure, and so projects aren't run like bridge construction...they're arbitrary, and not grounded in reality.

The problem is that the field of IT is very broad. You have systems guys like me, network guys, software developers, deployment experts, hardware engineers -- it's all over the map. One thing I don't like about the current state of our profession is a lack of training standards. We leave a lot of training up to vendors like Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, IBM, etc. who have a vested interest in selling product and training a generation of newbies to use their technology. You also have a lot of independent IT people who have no desire to associate with a larger body of professionals, and wouldn't want the responsibility that professional status gives them. Even with the liability, I would be happy to be the equivalent of a PE because (a) I do good work, and (b) I'm well aware of what I don't know, and ask other professionals for help when needed. Other people in our field want nothing to do with this...they like the idea of being a cowboy coder or cowboy sysadmin and flying by the seat of their pants. Professionalism would also mean slowing down, realizing what works in terms of systems design, not trying to reinvent things every 6 months, etc. The laws of physics and properties of fluid dynamics don't change much -- techniques are introduced gradually in other branches of engineering. In our world, it's "new programming language", "new design pattern", "new OS", "new hardware design" every few years, and often it's just a rehash of what's come before.

The other problem, and the one that this article addresses, is that other countries are probably not willing to commit to playing by the same rules if we adopted them. In fact, there would be a huge uptick in business at "Joe's Code Shack" because they would promise unreasonably short turnaround times and just throw labor at the problem. It's not really a national security issue -- the root cause is that no one is willing to pay for proper engineering work and they just want things faster and faster for less money.

I think that a lot of specialized industries are starting to figure out what they can offshore and what just doesn't work when it comes back. I do systems integration work, and I have seen first-hand the disasters that come back from the "code monkeys" when there are no specs and bad oversight. It's not a cost savings if you have to hire a US contractor at 4x the rate of an FTE to wade through the mess and make it maintainable. One problem is that a lot of industries see IT is "grunt work" coding that people don't necessarily notice when it's done poorly. Anyone working for a large multinational who offshores development is probably well versed in things like internal web applications that crash

Regs for federal jobs...but not private sector.

[cayenne8]

Well, I'd say the answer is "it depends".

No, there shouldn't be any requirements for private businesses....let them do as best as they can in the market.

To encourage jobs IN the US, however, I'd say the Feds could lower taxes to corporations, for every documented US citizen they hire to give incentive and make it easier to hire US citizens.

However, for Federal contracts, ESPECIALLY those coding for DoD, NASA, etc...they should be mandated to use ONLY US citizens...which they generally do anyway since most of those jobs require some level of security clearance, and you pretty much gotta be a US citizen to get one.

I don't see any problem at all, with jobs like this that are funded with US taxpayer money, to be mandated to go ONLY to US citizens. Both for fiscal reasons, as well as for security ones.

But for the private sectore...no, don't legislate or regulate it for US jobs...but give highly fiscal incentive to do it, through tax cuts, etc.

All private industry cares about is cost/profit, so make it easy to do business here in the US through less regulations/red tape, and less tax for hiring US.

Re:Regs for federal jobs...but not private sector.

[pixelpusher220]

No, there shouldn't be any requirements for private businesses

Yes we should let them utilize child labor because, hey, the market *knows* best.

Tax Cuts for staying on shore are *exactly* the same as penalties for going offshore. Seriously, how is it any different? The latter means you have more revenue available. The former means you have less revenue available. That's not a plan forward that's a plan to spiral downward.

the last decade has clearly shown that tax cuts do *not* stimulate the economy. If they did, why are we still in a recession? Why did we have the lowest job growth period in the last few decades during the time taxes were the lowest in 50 years?

Corporate Tax cuts do *not* work. Stimulus on the other hand actively puts money into the economy. Tax cuts just put it in companies pockets and then you *hope* they spend it. We've seen they aren't spending it, so why give them more?

Nobody is going to hire new workers until there is enough demand. It doesn't matter what the tax rate is. If there isn't enough demand, they'll just pocket that tax cut which doesn't help anyone and only adds to the deficit. Better to spend money on stimulus and get money circulating through the economy and creating demand.

Re:Regs for federal jobs...but not private sector.

[luis_a_espinal]

Well, I'd say the answer is "it depends".

No, there shouldn't be any requirements for private businesses....let them do as best as they can in the market.

To encourage jobs IN the US, however, I'd say the Feds could lower taxes to corporations, for every documented US citizen and legal resident they hire to give incentive and make it easier to hire US citizens and legal residents

There, fixed for you. The problem is not US citizens hiring vs offshore hiring, but one of

1. hiring numbers - within US soil- of people already (and legally) in US soil vs

2. hiring numbers outside US soil (or worse, the premeditate and systematic preference of H1 visas over US workers, for US jobs, in US soil!).

We do not want to put artificial burdens on private businesses. After all, what is a manufacturer to do? Hire an assembly line worker that puts a head on a doll for $0.50/hr in China vs the same worker at $10/hr? But as you said quite correctly, the Feds can provide tax incentives as a function on the ratio of hiring in US soil...

... with the correction that it should not, it cannot be just US citizens. Any tax-paying legal resident (most likely a candidate for citizenship) that is capable of doing the job should also be counted for. An unemployed legal resident is equally a burden to society as an unemployed citizen (not to mention that such a situation creates additional barriers towards citizenship, which is what everyone should want with its legal, tax-paying residents.)

Re:Regs for federal jobs...but not private sector.

[flaming error]

Yes we should let them utilize child labor because, hey, the market *knows* best.

-1 Out of context/straw man

Better to spend money on stimulus and get money circulating through the economy and creating demand.

+1 insightful

Except that we're not really spending money anymore, we're so ridiculously far in debt we're spending our own and our kids' future/freedom.

Something's gotta give.

Re:Regs for federal jobs...but not private sector.

[Nadaka]

Taxes are at their lowest, so is job creation.

And yet, somehow corporate profit margins and the growth of the wealth of billionaires are simultaneously at their highest.

This is what class warfare looks like, and it looks like the winners are sitting on their yachts and private jets and laughing their way to the bank while everyone else suffers and have to tighten our belts.

Re:Regs for federal jobs...but not private sector.

[pixelpusher220]

Yes we should let them utilize child labor because, hey, the market *knows* best.
-1 Out of context/straw man

If he gets to say 'no restrictions on corporations' which is itself a straw man, we get to point out how stupid that idea is if taken literally.

Better to spend money on stimulus and get money circulating through the economy and creating demand.
+1 insightful
Except that we're not really spending money anymore, we're so ridiculously far in debt we're spending our own and our kids' future/freedom.

If we *don't* start spending, we will spiral down hill and realize the debt onto our children. If we cut a trillion dollars out of the economy, that's actual money that isn't in the economy. Sure it isn't on the 'credit card', but when the tax revenues drop because you spent a trillion dollars less, you're still going to owe *more* than if you'd spent money on stimulus. Stimulus and growth are the only way out of this, cutting only deepens the debt (which is more than spending would deepen it since spending gives you return, but cutting does not).

It simply is not possible to cut spending as the GOP (and the sheeple) say AND keep the programs that the vast bulk of Americans also say they want and need. So yes something has to give, and if it's the programs like SocSec and Medicare that get axed, there will be serious economic ramifications down the road...decades down the road when it's far too late to fix with any reasonable cost.

Re:Regs for federal jobs...but not private sector.

[Synerg1y]

I think baby steps are in order first..

How about laying out what securing an application looks like by government standard, some coders might magically use the spec already improving the state of things. Seriously though, if the government tells me how to code, I will be the one going off shore. I've had to create compliance reports for the government and the main motivation there is if we didn't do it, we got the shit fined out of us.

Them interface with our system and pull our data to audit? Yea right...

Any mistakes I made by not fully reading their 200 page doc? Undocumented.

In my experience, they are so far behind the curve, their security is more fear of consequences from the legal system, than actual technical safeguards. Quite useless against foreign hackers no?

Re:Regs for federal jobs...but not private sector.

[flaming error]

> If we cut a trillion dollars out of the economy, that's
> actual money that isn't in the economy.

That's Monopoly money (largely unprinted) that isn't in the economy, Mr. Keynes.

Conjure up as much as you'd like, but you'll only postpone and increase the pain. Exponential functions (like our national debt) go on forever in pure mathematics, but not so much in the finite physical world.

We can choose from two kinds of pain; the pain of discipline, or the pain of regret. We (and our predecessors) have chosen the latter.

Now is the reckoning.

Re:Regs for federal jobs...but not private sector.

[Nadaka]

You are absolutely right. And that means that it is time to choose discipline and raise taxes.

Re:Regs for federal jobs...but not private sector.

[pixelpusher220]

If you want to argue economic theory, explain how taking a trillion dollars OUT of the economy by cutting spending increases revenues?

The only concrete change is slightly less interest due on the not quite as big debt. That isn't an increase in revenue.

Without being expertly versed, yes I do believe Keynesian theory works. You can't cut your way out of recession. You can, however, grow your way out. And nobody is saying just spend with wild abandon. You target your spending on things that return you more money than you spent originally. Like unemployment insurance, food stamps and infrastructure. Some low to mid income tax cuts can play a roll (payroll for instance) as well. But corporate tax rates don't affect things on the grand scale until you're well outside of anything being discussed today. Obama is pushing a roughly 4% increase on high earners. Not exactly the end of the world...

Cutting will bring both types of pain. The type from discipline and the type from regret as the economy stays in the pits and our debt grows anyway.

Since we absolutely *have* to rebuild our infrastructure in the next 20-30 years AND we have a major need for economic growth...deficit spending on something we have to do anyway is how you get yourself a win-win situation. Infrastructure spending is a very good way to boost the economy last I checked.

Of course if you think we can let the infrastructure just continue to degrade without significant...well, enjoy your 2nd world status.

Re:Regs for federal jobs...but not private sector.

[pixelpusher220]

One more thing. You are correct that we can't maintain deficits forever. No argument there.

However, we have at least a decade or more before the rest of the world stops clamoring hand over fist to buy our issuances of debt. Take the recent, credit downgrade...the result? People FLOCKING to US Treasuries....the very thing that was downgraded.

Why? because we still the best game in town and we got that way by investing in our country's infrastructure so corporations can cheaply transport goods and do business.

We have time to do this, not unlimited time, but time enough.

Re:Regs for federal jobs...but not private sector.

[flaming error]

explain how taking a trillion dollars OUT of the economy by cutting spending increases revenues

I don't believe I ever said it would.

You target your spending on things that return you more money than you spent originally.

I won't argue with that.

Re:Regs for federal jobs...but not private sector.

[flaming error]

I can't see the future, but I believe our deadline has passed for that. The fiat economy is crumbling, all over the world.

Now comes the time of regret.

And rebuilding. Sustainably this time, I hope.

Re:Regs for federal jobs...but not private sector.

[Nadaka]

It isn't too late, We could do it now if we had the will.

The problem is not in being able unable to do it, it is in finding the will and strength to overcome those who are obstructing the ability to do it.
1: the tea party want America to fall into ruin.
2: the republican party are myopic will never accept that taxes must be raised to save future generations.
3: the democratic party are weak and will never be willing to push hard enough for taxes to be raised, and instead flounder helplessly for compromise.

We can have discipline, we can raise taxes, we can trim spending, we can pay our bills. America can be saved, it can be made prosperous, it can be made free, it can be made just. We need to counter its enemies, overcome the roadblocks, it can be done if people are willing to fight for it. America has been bloodied and staggered, but we have not been defeated yet.

Re:Regs for federal jobs...but not private sector.

[Grishnakh]

Taxes are at their lowest, so is job creation.

Not true. US corporate taxes are among the very highest in the world at 35%. So most larger companies get around them by locating their headquarters in a post office in some small town in Switzerland or similar. So only the smaller companies end up getting hurt.

I think we should lower the corporate taxes, maybe make them progressive (i.e. smaller companies pay lower taxes than larger companies), and then step up enforcement and prevent them from locating in the Bahamas and other such tricks to get around them. It's small businesses that create new jobs, not big businesses, and high corporate taxes only serve to discourage creating new businesses.

Of course, it'd also help if we stopped giving corporate welfare (tax breaks) to select corporations like the oil companies.

Re:Regs for federal jobs...but not private sector.

[pixelpusher220]

US corporate taxes are among the very highest in the world at 35%

This is complete and utter bullshit. The 'technical' rate might be 35% but *nobody* pays that rate in reality after deductions.

Heck, General Electric, you know that multi-billion dollar company, paid ZERO in taxes last year. They deducted their way out of paying a single cent to the government. So no, taxes are *not* too high, they are too low at this point in time.

You likely didn't pay the standard tax rate yourself because of the basic deduction given to all tax filers, even more if you deduct mortgage interest. My rate ends up being about 15% or so even though I'm in the 33-38% bracket.

Re:Regs for federal jobs...but not private sector.

[cayenne8]

That's one of the answers that one one will seem to look at.

Let's throw out the old tax code.....all of it.

Start with setting rates (even if you want to keep a progressive scale and not go flat tax, which I do favor in form of doing only a national sales tax, but I digress)....and remove ALL deductions. None for expenses for businesses, none for having kids in the house, none for mortgages...none for anything.

That way, you can set the rates, and know exactly what you owe, and the US can know exactly what is coming in.

Heck, with that...everyone could save money for tax filing as that it would be so simple, anyone can fill out the forms and pay.

It would also take the govt. out of the business of trying to alter behavior by tax....which I don't think the govt. should be in the business of doing to begin with.

But say for corporations. Take away all deductions and have a corp tax of 15% or so maybe...no more, no less....

Re:Regs for federal jobs...but not private sector.

[Grishnakh]

This is complete and utter bullshit. The 'technical' rate might be 35% but *nobody* pays that rate in reality after deductions.

Bullshit yourself. Look it up. The rate is 35%. The existence of deductions is beside the fact.

I guess your solution is to raise the taxes even higher, but leave all the deductions in place? That sounds like a winning plan.

How about removing the deductions, eliminating the ability to incorporate offshore (so you have liabilities in the US and profits in some other country or some BS like that), and making the corporations actually pay the taxes at the full normal rate, whatever it may be? But at that point, yes, 35% is definitely too high, especially for small companies.

You likely didn't pay the standard tax rate yourself because of the basic deduction given to all tax filers, even more if you deduct mortgage interest. My rate ends up being about 15% or so even though I'm in the 33-38% bracket.

That needs to be eliminated too. If your bracket is 33-38%, you should be paying 33-38%. There shouldn't be any deductions; the tax rate should be what you pay, so if 15% is a good rate for someone in your income bracket, then the rate should be set to 15%. The way it is now is stupid; it's like some store where all the prices are sky-high, but there's always some coupon or promotion so you end up "saving" 50%, to make you think you're getting a good deal.

Re:Regs for federal jobs...but not private sector.

[pixelpusher220]

Bullshit yourself. Look it up. The rate is 35%. The existence of deductions is beside the fact.

If 'reality' is besides the fact, it's rather hard to have a substantive discussion.

Your other points are reasonable positions. Governments exist to change people's behavior, to deter stuff we don't like and by converse encourage stuff we don't. The tax code is but one way to do that. Deductions will always exist.

But a flatter slightly progressive tax code is certainly in everyone's interest (regardless of what that actual flat 'rate' is).

China-Style: Sex, Cash and Stolen Technology

[StankyG]

Clean Energy, China-Style: Sex, Cash and Stolen Technology http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2011/09/23/clean-energy-china-style-sex-cash-and-stolen-technology/ The article is just a little to the left of the topic, but does show how we spend the money on R&D and others reverse engineer it / steal it / acquire the knowledge in many other ways. Can we count on our 'partners' to share with us as we share with them? I am skeptical...

yes

[unity100]

, government software regulations force developers to pay off entities that evaluate your code and verify it conforms to published standards

that worked very well with the rating agencies in finance ....

IS A WORKING LABOUR FORCE

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

National security?

What do you need to secure? What is the threat?

"Were safe! No food, no jobs, no shelter, but we CANNOT be attacked!"

Re:IS A WORKING LABOUR FORCE

[Q-Hack!]

National security?

What do you need to secure? What is the threat?

"Were safe! No food, no jobs, no shelter, but we CANNOT be attacked!"

Can't tell if a lost attempt at humor, or just stupid.

Re:IS A WORKING LABOUR FORCE

[thePuck77]

It was an honest question. Being king of a pile of shit still means you have to live in a pile of shit.

Yes . . .

[MSesow]

For a sufficiently broad definition of "National Security Threat".

Why the developers?

[will_die]

The companies selling the product should be responsible, not some unknown worker. If they are not in the USA then they have some other company that imported the product to make it available for sale and they are responsible.
After all with the recent cases of tainted products coming from China no-one worried about the person making the item it was the fault of the company importing it that had legal problems.

Off shoring shouldn't be an issue.

[Karmashock]

If companies are off shoring things there is an economic reason for it. No amount of regulation is going to stop that short of tariffs and that will start a trade war that at this point we might lose.

Instead, the government should look to see if it's doing anything that is encouraging the off shoring rather then looking for ways to stop it through increasing regulation.

As to the strategic and tactical importance of keeping certain code projects domestic. Of course. If all the programmers that made your banking system for example or your missile guidance system are Chinese then that's a problem.

Off shoring grunt work that isn't strategic is fine but if you do it for the core work then you're asking for trouble.

Some companies have outsourced/off shored core business services and so far as I know they've always paid a stiff price. Typically what happens is that they effectively teach a competitor how to compete and rather then cut costs they pay for the education of their competitors who then release competing products at a reduced price point.

It's something of a hopeless situation so long as people think we can maintain American competitiveness through anti trade practices.

Re:Off shoring shouldn't be an issue.

[vlm]

No amount of regulation is going to stop that short of tariffs and that will start a trade war that at this point we might lose.

If we've already lost our economy, what have we got to lose in a trade war?

Seriously... Think about it. Compare and contrast a deep permanent depression vs losing a nice short little trade war. Do not look at the effect on the rich, they'll always be OK anyway. Look at the effect on the median citizen.

So in a trade war, our military would have to go to the middle east to seize oil producing assets... oh wait we're already doing that, not gonna run out of oil. In a trade war, our factories exports would decline so they would all close ... oh wait been there done that they're already closed. Well in a trade war the over 50% who are not employed by private industry would ... oh wait yeah just go on like every other day guess it wouldn't really matter.

The thing to do is not compare losing a trade war vs the economy of the 60s, but compare losing a trade war to the economy of the 2010s. I think we're better off with the trade war.

Re:Off shoring shouldn't be an issue.

[Karmashock]

We haven't lost our economy its just that business isn't localized anymore. They can move in a way that they previously couldn't.

So if you put a gun to the head of business and say "do this or else"... they'll laugh and walk away.

That isn't losing the economy. It simply means you can't dictate policy without acknowledging the need to present a competitive business environment.

If you set things up in such a way that business is unhappy you're going to suffer for it. And you'll keep suffering.

Alternatively, if you double down and decide to enact strong tariffs it will mean a complete collapse of US exports. What you'll really be doing there is taking control of US consumers less then taking control of US companies. The US companies even with tarrifs can leave. But the US consumer is trapped.

Your law will basically tell people on the street what they can and cannot buy and at what price.

I admit there are trade offs on both sides. But the best case is simply making peace with business and offering a competitive business environment. That means reasonable taxes. Reasonable regulation. Reasonable Labor policy. reasonable environmental policy. Screw with people FOR ANY REASON in such a way that it makes US markets uncompetitive and you're going to lose investment.

Why doesn't matter. It doesn't mater. It doesn't matter. This an adult issue. Either we step up to the plate and get serious or we're going to lose and no one will shed a tear for us.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?!

[LifesABeach]

It is more than software, it is everything that is traded. It makes the landscape of Mad Max look pleasantly tranquil.

I really question the motives that allow America's wealth to be drained in one way or another to the amount of a Billion dollars a week to other countries. I question the motive of the statement, "Manufacture or Service it in <country />, to maintain an competitive Edge." The wealthy are not investing in America. They then should have no tax breaks. And their parent companies costing issues should be ignored at tax time. <humor>And their access to the beach should be from 2:00am to 4:00am on odd numbered Blue Moons.<humor/>

To be blunt.

[Anonymous Coward]

'falling behind world progress ...'

That ship has sailed, man.

Maybe right, tiring hoplessness

[nine-times]

I know that often these kinds of analyses can be right: imposing too many restrictions can hurt an industry.

However, sometimes these things just turn into hopeless naysaying. The government can't create any law or regulation without someone complaining that it will destroy the economy. Yes, having laws against lead-based paint in children's toys probably hurts some profits, causes some economic efficiency and "hurts the economy" in some ways. Sometimes that kind of economic efficiency isn't the most important thing.

Also, sometimes these analyses miss important things: the loss in economic efficiency due to banning lead-based paint is offset by having fewer healthcare costs due to lead poisoning, and also having a more efficient workforce in 20 years because of all the children who weren't sickened or killed by lead poisoning.

Management review code?

[msobkow]

You're kidding, right? Management review code?

Even if the manager is technically astute, their job is the manage, not review code. There should be senior developers doing the reviews, but they're too busy writing code. So the sloppy mess produced by the juniors never gets reviewed.

But even without reviews, testing should be revealing the problems caused by that sloppiness. Unfortunately, I've never heard of an offshore coding company that actually does the testing -- that's usually done in-house by the company who hired them. Which only makes sense -- it's the last line of defense against the code that's coming in.

What really doesn't make sense is that these offshore companies keep getting more business even after they develop a reputation for producing shit code, because they're "cheap."

Funny thing is, although the offshore coders get paid dirt wages, the fees charged by their companies aren't usually that much of a discount compared to on-shore or near-shore coding. It completely baffles me the North American businesses still haven't realized that.

Bottom line: You get what you pay for. If you want quality, it's gonna cost you. Shop for the lowest bidder, and you're going to get the lowest quality, too.

But it doesn't matter. Tools like mine will soon make the junior programmer the does nothing but copy-paste-edit code obsolete anyhow.

Re:Management review code?

[GlennC]

+10...If I had mod points, I'd put them all on this comment.

Re:Management review code?

[poofmeisterp]

Exactly.

Buy cheap crap, you'll have to throw it out and buy a replacement faster. Buy expensive stuff and you'll more likely have a better end product, but the nervousness level increases in the buyer's mind. They don't want that expensive thing that they spend money on to fail.

My opinion (and yes, it's OPINION) is with self-image of buyers. This goes for the corporations being discussed as well as individual people. Very few people are willing to commit to a risky situation unless they can a.) blame failure on someone else easily or b.) use every success point to their advantage, thereby making any failures look completely negligible. Of course there is a c.) have both 'a' and 'b' simultaneously. That's what everyone wants.

Self-image is lowered if one believes they are only getting something they can blame someone else for, as well as buying something that they have to rely on success points for (there are magic Human artifacts called 'guilt' and 'fear').

What we have now is a situation where people can come up with the best thing they can by having cheap stuff written quickly by someone else, spending time massaging it in-house, and coming up with an end product that they say "WE made this", while at the same time having an entity to blame if something fails.

The above statement is key. It's the fastest, easiest, cheapest route to a high self-image combined with lowered responsibility over failure.

Doh!

[lotho brandybuck]

after the last 30 years here in this country (US) let me be the first to say... Doh!

Quality is not the issue - its risk

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at what happened in Iran - "somehow" a virus (Stuxnet) got into the Siemens' systems (a German-built system) and destroyed much of their Uranium enrichment processing capability. Huh. What a surprise.

The requirements from the US Government (and others) that product, including code, not be developed by overseas companies/people, is a valid response to a very real risk scenario. This has nothing to do with quality. It has everything to do with the cost/risk of hostile code getting into sensitive deployments.

In terms of quality, have you ever tried to outsource any sort of even moderately complex software project to, say, India, and actually get back what you wanted? It is a huge effort and quality is very hard to maintain. The problem is how to communicate/monitor a very large number of complex, interwoven requirements, constraints and interoperability issues with a team that is not familiar with the rest of your stack, not in the same area/timezone (which significantly degrades cross communication) and may not even speak the same language. For small, isolated, stand-alone projects which can be neatly wrapped up in a bubble and rigorously tested (meaning, there are a small enough set of possible inputs and outputs that you can realistically test all of them) then maybe you can outsource the project. For anything more complex you really want it done by an internal team who knows the rest of your stack and communicates quickly and spontaneously with the rest of your company in order to ensure that what is built actually does what people want and fits into everything else being built.

Actually

[TheCarp]

Going around asking "Is X a National Security Threat" is the biggest security threat of them all. In fact, the very concept of National Security is a security threat.

What's with this love of "Engineer"?

[msobkow]

Making the design part a real branch of the engineering profession,...

There is nothing special about engineering education that makes it "better" than a computer science degree from another department at a university. In fact, if you shift the courses to engineering, students will end up wasting their time on a lot of physics and math classes required for basic engineering that are completely useless for programming.

The other problem is that engineering is standardized. There are "rules" for how to construct buildings, build in safety tolerances, etc. There are no such rules for programming.

In the segments of computer code that do have "rules" and "templates", the whole process of writing the code can be automated, completely eliminating the human errors that copy-paste-edit coding causes. That's exactly what MSS Code Factory does -- build a rule base for translating application data models to text-based code. It automates the grunt work. Who needs a horde of offshore programmers if a machine can do their job?

Sloppy

[rabenja]

One of the sloppiest, non-informative articles that I have recently read. Coding is the last part of any automation development. What about bad analysis, bad design, poor tool/OS/infrastructure/integration choices? What about the problem of being forced back to the Waterfall development methodology to be able to offshore development? What level of coding are we talking about: embedded systems, business architecture, tools, OS, (etc)? Any security expert would know that code security is the least of the problems regarding overall automation security.

no equivocating

[jafac]

Yes. This is a national security threat. By definition. You can't have it both ways. Sorry globalists. You can't bully and exploit third-world labor, and then trust them with your proprietary industrial secrets. They will steal them from you, and turn around and use them against you. Period.

The only exception - I guess, is that muslims probably will not use complex interest-derived financial instruments to enslave you, since usury is against islamic law. Straight-up slavery, is not though. So keep on bleeding your own economy until they come over here and take-over. They will be happy to enslave your sons and daughters.

Re:no equivocating

[Anonymous Coward]

Stating the honest accurate truth will NOT be tolerated here on Slashdot!

Your common sense must leave immediately.

World Trade Organization issue

[It doesn't come easy]

The fix is to require that all businesses that are global to meet the requirements for ALL countries that are impacted by the business. For example, if software development is moved to India then the business must comply with the regulations for BOTH countries. And for the chain of businesses involved, each would have to comply. Example, if Company A in the US hires Company B in England, who hires Company C in India, to do the work then all three companies must comply with the regulations in the US, England, and India for the product involved. A requirement like this would help countries like India raise their standards of living and reduce shifting of jobs from rich countries to poor countries simply for the sake of profit. The same should apply to all products (example, electronics produced in China), not just software.

No, but it's....

[cellocgw]

...an awful example of gerundification. "Off-shoring" ? What a horrible word. It probably shouldn't have a hyphen, either, as that could lead to even more confusion over its intended meaning.

opt-in

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not make it some sort of opt-in program?

Design some set of regulations which are verifiable by an auditor and specify minimal conditions for passing software at some level of the program.

Companies could charge more for the software which could be held liable to meet standard level 1, 2, 3, ...

Provide tax incentives based on sales at particular levels.

If some piece of software says it is at level 3, then the copyright holders behind it can be held liable for the terms of level 3.

What goes around...

[whitelabrat]

We have regulations because of abusive and unethical behavior. If industries have no other motive than to profit then we see all sorts of trash and burn tactics that may get some folks a bonus, but at some point someone is going to pay. Yes regulations hurt businesses. My point is that businesses shouldn't behave in a manner that will result in the need for regulations. We're lucky that the US is still willing to try to keep things in balance.

To quote Publius Cornelius Tacitus “The more corrupt the state, the more laws.” Nuff said.

Regarding offshoring, I don't really have a problem with it as long as it's intent is to supplement a businesses workforce. I do have a problem with replacing workforce with foreign nationals. At some point if everything is outsourced, we'll see our middle class collapse, and thus businesses won't have customer base anymore.

Re:Professionalism & lack of standards vs Get

[vlm]

I can't imagine every company loves the idea of operating in a completely unregulated environment

One of the most important features of regulation is to keep the big corps big and grind the small ones out of profitability... I can't see a big slow lumbering dilbertian horror of a company loving the idea of not having regulation expenses to crush their smaller competitors.

Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

If US programmers can't compete in the global market, then that's their fault. The new world is all about openness and cross-border employment. Limiting or taxing work done "offshore" is an old-world fix for fat lazy US workers.

Hell Yeah!

[hesaigo999ca]

Hell Yeah!
When you go over seas, there are no rules like ours when it comes to copyright infringement....so when the Indian or Chinese support markets get a hold of sensitive company data, they can easily call the competition up and offer them this info, to make extra profits.. There is no world police when it comes to these things...
If you are here and notice that your info is now in someone else's hands, you have to travel over there to then go through THEIR court system, with very little hope of getting retribution , instead you get a lot of lawyer fees just to find out there was never any hope in the first place.

This is evident in many fields not just IT. The problem is accountability, their courts do not follow our rules, so why would we think we are safe giving away our source code to maintain, by some supposedly proper development companies who could be also trading secrets or even letting the government in on what they find....aka China....

Anyone going over seas, deserves what they get. If you have legitimate reason to be using external help, you bring them into your country, not go over there.
This way the courst can follow the laws of YOUR land, and prosecute based on those rules, should they need.

Re:Professionalism & lack of standards vs Get

[Anonymous Coward]

During the banking crisis, people in the US and the UK heard this a lot about the financial sector -- if you regulate them too much, they'll just move somewhere without regulations.

So we have a solution for dealing with these bozos. Excellent.

Re:Professionalism & lack of standards vs Get

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm really quite sick of the "Software development should be like building a bridge" argument. I've been a software developer for 20 years now. Do you know why it will never be like building a bridge? Because bridges do *nothing* new. They connect point A to point B. And more often than not, if point A and point B don't exactly fit the design of the bridge, they change point A and/or B so that it does more closely match.

Almost every software application written is unique. They may use elements of previous applications, much like artists use elements of previous works. You can't engineer discovery and invention. Those that try are doomed to write horrible inefficient applications which have innumerable layers, perform horribly, and don't really do what the customer wanted.

Writing software is craftsmanship and artistry. Those who write software are craftsmen/women, those that write software and believe they are engineers invariably produce horrible clunky and inelegant code.

I'm not saying that writing software shouldn't be a discipline... It is, an exacting one... But it is *not* engineering. "The laws of physics and properties of fluid dynamics don't change much"... When you have these things, you can do engineering. Writing software does not have these things, everything changes, constantly, and probably always will. Or are you saying we should forgo all the advances which occur every day in the computing field? Give up little things like smartphones, multi-core CPUs, ever increasing memory and CPU?

Do we pick this point in time, draw the line, and say HERE is where computing stops... HERE we will make it engineering. What if that point in time was 20 years ago? What if it was 40 years ago? Engineering takes decades/generations to mature. We don't have decades... We barely have time to orient ourselves to a new platform when the next is already here. And you know what? It's better this way. Everyone benefits.

You want stability/engineering? Go back to time slicing on a hard-wired mainframe terminal. You can have it. For most of the rest of the world, we recognize the value of new technology. And yes, sometimes the bleeding edge is too raw, but usually just a few steps back is "good enough". And that is the space that most *real* software development gets done.

Sorry 'bout the rant, but I'm not an engineer.

some parts of IT needs apprenticeships not CS

[Joe_Dragon]

some parts of IT needs apprenticeships and or tech school not CS.

Now CS is good for high level design or maybe being a developer on some thing big like a OS.

But at the on the ground level you need different skills and experience that is better then siting in a theory based class room. Now tech school and apprenticeships fit that bill well.

What does a 4 year engineering degree help a construction guy in running a back loader, construction crane, or other construction equipment? When the theory on how it should work and how it works on the work site are not the same.

For makeing IT a profession alot of work needs to be done on the training side.

Now for IT managers they should have some tech skills / ideas how how long things take to get done. Now just think what can happen in construction when a manger sets a dead line that is not safe to hit.

Now professional rules for IT can help as working 80 hour weeks lead to poor bug filled code.

Re:some parts of IT needs apprenticeships not CS

[poofmeisterp]

...What does a 4 year engineering degree help a construction guy in running a back loader, construction crane, or other construction equipment? When the theory on how it should work and how it works on the work site are not the same....

Fully agreed. This is one of my major concerns, actually. The other end of the issue is the lack of understanding affecting other parts of the schemata.

I have seen and heard the below many times, and THIS IS NOT A JOKE.

e.g. (and Boss below is an IT manager with a degree)

Boss: We need to make some quick changes on the web site so we can get a new customer on board in less than a week.
Developer: I'll need about three days to get an answer for you. Consider it done.
Boss: We don't have time for that. I need an answer from you two right away. Like, now. That's why I called this meeting.
Systems Engineer: Okay, well, um, systems can handle that load, no problem. The code, on the other hand.....
Developer: Wow.. Umm... We can't make those changes in a week's time. That is going to require a LOT, and I mean a LOT of rewriting.
Boss: All you have to do is add a dashboard. Why is that so hard?
Developer: I have to change the entire set of code that affects the login process. Then, in order to get the data that I need for population of the session-based dashboard conten.......
Boss: GAHH, blah blah blah... I don't understand what the issue is. You're speaking Greek alien talk. WHAT IS THE PROBLEM???
Systems Engineer: If I may.... Thank you. What [Developer] is saying is that when this system was designed, it was not designed in a way to allow fast code changes. It was rushed, so there are now problems with......
Boss: It was NOT rushed, and I am highly disappointed in you for giving up on a solution so quickly. If [Developer] can't do it and YOU can't learn how to help him fix this, I'll have to find someone who can.
Developer: I didn't write half of this code, and the parts that I didn't are unintelligible. [System Engineer] even looked at the code with me a couple of times and was disgusted by the methodologies they instituted to.........
Boss: BLAH BLAH BLAH you're not helping again. You're just complaining.....
Developer: I'm trying to tell you that bringing in outside help doesn't make this easier, it was bad code and it's going to take more than a week to interpret what was written AND make changes. It's just NOT THAT EASY.
System Engineer: Fully agreed. You can't have this in a week. Just because you believe it should be that easy doesn't make it that easy. It will be a minimum of, what do you say [Developer], three weeks MINIMUM, and that's without any debugging or quality assurance, effectively making more slime on top of slime that already exists?
Developer: Three weeks is conservative.
Boss: Slime has NOTHING TO DO WITH COMPUTERS or how code works. Why are you comparing the two? We're talking about a web change for our biggest customer!
Developer: *head on table*
System Engineer: *gouging own eyeball out with pen*

Advocating Regulation in Tech Infrastructure ..

[GeekMarine72]

As principal architect behind an online trading firm, I brought it to the attention of a contact with the NSA that code inspected only by Chinese national managers and developed by a Chinese development organization at abnormally low rates was being connected directly into the US trading infrastructure with direct access to more than $2B in assets under management and nearly unrestricted buying power.

As a consultant and principal architect at a smart grid meter manufacturing company, I shared with my NSA contact that the core chipset handling crypto resolution, wireless uplink, and zigbee for both residential and commercial meters was being designed and manufactured in China with little US oversight.

Regardless of whether you are speaking of department of defense or other public sector technology projects or private sector technology projects which tie to critical strategic infrastructure, security is and has been compromised by outsourcing.

Further, even the most base logic demonstrates that it is futile to expect your enemies to provide for your security. We've compromised our independence and autonomy, lost the competitive edge in any meaningful way, and seem to be under the mistaken impression that China is anything other than an opportunistic hegemony. The security of any nation which allows for lowest cost bidders using external third parties for development, implementation, or administration without regulation, inspection, or validation will be compromised.

Strawman?

[publiclurker]

You apparently haven't been listening to the current crop of republican presidential candidates.

Off-shoring has is working as intended

[Sleepy]

US businesses can make an argument that the US can not be competitive with China until the US:
* permits industrial pollution on a large scale
* has no workman's compensation law for on-job injuries
* has no mandatory overtime-pay laws
* Shrugs when notified of sexual harassment
* turns a blind eye when a company roughs up "agitators"
* participates in state sanctioned murder of dissidents and union activists

We used to have tarrifs on countries with poor environmental and labor policies.
When we lifted those barriers, we basically PUNISHED companies for not outsourcing. ... and then comes Bush's post 9/11 tax break that's only available for creation of offshore jobs.

Strategists call this "cutting off the oxygen supply". The liberal wing of the Republican party died decades ago, and on the Democratic party it went out with Carter.

Conservative business elites want our elections to be very expensive and privately funded.. why?
The less money the middle class and unemployed have, the more responsive politicians will be to those who DO attend those $1,000/plate dinners.

This is why conservatives are OK with funding unemployment benefits (for now), because of the insecurity, and because it's not going to affect their investment profile (ie, Chinese investments)... in fact it'll just drive up the debt (but in a way that many middle class Americans do not view as a government benefit). The old "drown the baby" strategy conservatives talked about, decades ago..

So we should...?

[poofmeisterp]

'Any attempt to regulate software quality and security simply drives the software industry off-shore for good,' he says. 'Similarly, requiring trusted on-shore production ensures two things: (1) falling behind world progress as we aren't the only smart people and we are a minority, and (2) costs rise in a way that makes on-shore-mandated software cost-uncompetitive on the world market.'

So we should... keep companies onshore, but have workers that are offshore provide information and services to try and keep us in the running?

Sounds like a cool new ideer.
:->

Re:Professionalism & lack of standards vs Get

[ErichTheRed]

Engineering doesn't have to be frozen in time. You're right, bridges do one thing (connecting points) and that never changes. Suspension bridges are all similar from a physics point of view, but the Brooklyn Bridge is way different from the Golden Gate in terms of materials, construction and so on. Good ideas are tried and picked up over time. Sometimes a completely new method is devised for situations where the old methods don't make sense. If it turns out to be better, the old methods are replaced or reserved for special cases. If it fails, it's usually spectacularly obvious if it makes it to the real world, or it dies in the lab.

I would argue that most of the security issues with code now stem from two places -- closed-source software whose owner doesn't proactively hunt out bugs, and applications of any kind that are churned out on an insane schedule with no time for testing. Part of that insane schedule stems from the "We need to build this in YetAnotherKewlPHPFramework 0.0.9alpha1 to be on the bleeding edge." mandates. A developer has to learn YAKPHPF, and might only have time to learn enough to get the application just working. Then the boss comes in a day after release and says "Hey, StillAnotherRubyOnRailsFramework 1.0 is out! We'll be behind the competition if we don't change RIGHT NOW." Developer learns SARORF, again, just enough to get the app running. Repeat over and over again, regardless of language, regardless of platform choice, every 6-12 months. In my field (systems,) it's "We changed the platform just enough so you have to go back and relearn everything." For someone with a good grasp of the fundamentals, that's no problem. But the constantly shifting trends make it hard to stop and build up anything resembling design standards.

I'm not advocating that time should stop. There should be controlled entrance of new standards though. In traditional engineering, scientists discover the cool new stuff, engineers take the practical bits that help them to build their toolkit, and the cycle repeats. In software development, brand new cool stuff is great, but systems that run the core things we depend on should be built on stable foundations. The projects I've worked on with the best outcomes have been, like you said, a few steps back from the bleeding edge. Problem is that there are fewer and fewer projects like that.

And if you don't like the engineering analogy, we can change that too. In my mind, it's a good starting point because licensed professional engineers are actually liable for what they design or sign off on. This is in sharp contrast to the typical software developer who has very little incentive to do anything beyond getting their creation to compile. Good "craftspeople" are out there, but without some standard training, there's very little differentiation between a true master and a hack. People just don't see the difference until problems appear.

Yes - both ECONOMICALLY, & SECURITY-WISE

[Anonymous Coward]

No questions asked You send jobs offshore, you make America WEAKER both ways!

First: By removing a good paying job that creates a taxpayer (& most likely a larger paying one with properties because of a good job) & also a someone with not only "disposable income" to help other businesses with, keeping an "economy" moving by money changing hands, via spending!

(Simply because they're not stuck in a "hand-to-mouth/check-to-paycheck" minimum wage lifestyle & can afford to go out etc. beyond paying rent/mortgage, food, & utilities only (IF THAT on that payscale))

You hurt the USA that way... both economically, and, security-wise (this is widely acknowledged in programming as being an OBVIOUS risk factor)...

APK

P.S.=> Any questions? Because "Trickle-Down" bullshit economic theories have resulted in the economic depression of today people - argue with the results/numbers!

Man... so all that bullshit of "trickle-down" & "service-based economy" here in the USA?? Was just that - pure bullshit (told my prof.'s in economics that in college back as far as 1984 in fact, when they said "we're moving to a service based economy")...

... apk

Something about that abstract confuses me

[k6mfw]

What's wrong with demanding quality software particularly code that deals with encrypted information (i.e. purchasing with credit card)? I don't mind paying extra to someone in my own country instead of someone thousands of miles away. Dammit, what about security clearances database by NASA and military? These are done by private companies (no longer done by govt agencies such as FBI), they better not offshore this stuff simply based on costs and crap statements like, "we aren't the only smart people and we are a minority..."

No, the problem is people!

[Xaedalus]

Get rid of all those people, and the system will fix itself!

Re:Professionalism & lack of standards vs Get

[FoolishOwl]

Indeed.

At some point, we really should start calling the bluff of businesses that claim they'll go away if we regulate them. I expect that we're better off without the few that actually will go away.

Re: America had a free ride for centuries

[Billly Gates]

America had an unfair free ride too. It became the richest country on Earth before it even seperated from England due to huge abundant natural resources while Europe used all of theirs. A shitload of land to sell crops back to Europe at inflated prices. Free timber, coal, iron ore, you name it. All you had to do was work and you got rich. I read somewhere that the average salary in the 1700s was $200,000 in todays prices. That is insane!

Now, that game is over. Resources are more depleted and newer technology means to do more with less land, and also do more with less thanks to the internet and computers.

Today, it is about the demand side of the economic equation of supply and demand. Countries with the lowest prices get the highest demand. Free trade does work for corporations. Just not us out of work if we do not want to be considered losers by society because we serve coffee or mow lawns to pay off our nice college degrees. Coke makes 80% of their profit in these markets. China buys more computers now than the US making Dell and Intel rich. If you put in Tarifs today these companies would simply relocate to Asia refuse to sell back to us and only focus on Asia and South America as they are growth markets.

The biggest economic burden is not free trade destroying jobs. It is the financial crises as Americans overbought when they realized owning that nice 3,5000 square foot home that the Jones had was becoming out of reach. They just borrowed more instead of realizing rather than facing they are not as wealthy as our parents had it. Today banks are scarcely lending lines of credit to business. That is your lifeline and as a result businesses are under extreme pressure not to hire because bad books means no loan = your done.

What we need is for people to pay off their debt and for the goverments to stop spending and raise their interest rates. Then small businesses can hire again. Like I said that is the problem more than outsourcing.With stock prices going down banks are going to force more small to large businesses to go belly up or lay off. All business done today is 80-90% financed through monthly lines of credit. Pretty wacky hu?

We all know the treat is there

[Anonymous Coward]

How many times do we purchase products that have virus and other bad acting software installed right from the factory? Toothpaste, dog treats and children's toys made with poisons.

How many years did we have to put up with code that was left insecure on purpose by microsoft?

Who knows for sure how much code is written with back doors for use by foreign parties?

Protectionism and nationalism and all the straw man arguments aside. We should have a reasonable expectation to secure code and products. No matter where they are made.

Can we all say, "Duh!"

[gestalt_n_pepper]

If *anyone* in government is so stupid that they haven't figured out the potential threat of outsourcing as an attack vector, just take their two hands, flashlight and map and fire them now.

Economic Empiricism

[Tablizer]

Germany had a down cycle roughly around 2006 (IIRC). They even had a "self esteem" program to make them all feel better. Similar with Canada. Recessions don't all happen at the same time such that we have to be careful about such comparisons.

We should try tariffs and see what the result is. Everybody has their own Grand Theory about trade and tariffs. But there are too many variables for theory alone to tell us the right path. Thus, let's try an empirical experiment. Better than keep doing the same thing forever and hope it's right.

Note that some cite increased tariffs after the Great Crash of 1929 as "evidence" that tariffs cause stagnation. However, we had a trade surplus back then, and I also propose doing it gradually. Adding tariffs while having a trade surplus is definitely a no-no.

Trinkets Vs. Jobs

[Tablizer]

Japan has a fairly high amount of protectionism, yet has a relatively low unemployment rate. They tend to protect mom-and-pop shops against big-box stores, for example.

Perhaps trinkets are more expensive there, but what's more important: cheaper trinkets, or jobs?

I would say jobs, because idle people tend to get into trouble and are not very happy. Sometimes you just can't optimize all variables at the same time. We may have to start making some difficult tradeoff choices as the pressure of globalization increases.

Typical Big Government Thinking

[Anarchduke]

National security related regulations requiring that code written for the government meet quality and security guidelines?

What a horrible thought. What could possibly have given them the idea that unregulated code written in foreign countries could contain security vulnerabilities?

Re:Secrecy is not safety - your not even on topic

[sjames]

Not really, no. It's more like a new standard is applied only to cars assembled in the U.S. and everyone starts assembling in Mexico. Not because they can't meet the new standard, but because cars won't sell if they double in price.

If bridges and buildings were expected to be designed first and then built on a site to be determined later, no PE would ever sign off again. You can't guarantee the behavior of a design if you can't know where it will be used. Same deal with software.

Consider, what if the system's stdlibs are swapped out with alternates that are supposed to be "faster", "better" or more "virus proof". Suddenly the behavior of something as simple as open can change and all bets are off. Now figure out how to codify that into tort law so judges and juries can grasp it.

No dude no...

[Anonymous Coward]

Impose tariffs. As we cannot be competitive we impose tariffs. Short-term solution.

"We are not the only smart people..." - Sorry, but the reality is that we are not smart. Besides the fact that many Americans still put Spain somewhere in South America (it is in Europe and EU member...) in the tech field we are not the smartest either. Maybe the off-shored code is not as good sometimes. But we have to realize that a great deal of the code made-in-USA is made-in-USA-by-someone-not-made-in-USA, either nationalized, green card holder or in H1-B. Maybe students in other countries study more tech careers than "what we do here"... let's leave it like that.

American society is on a freefall descent to hell. Medical care is a question of luck, you can only get covered if you are totally healthy, else you are screwed. more people slum into poverty each year. We cannot have a successful economy while we fail as a society. Yes China does it, you can see the richest in one side and young boys working in mines on the north-west but we do not want that, do we? So we need to class up our act first, become competitive, maybe giving up some stuff, holding job pay increase a bit and then go back to being #1

Modfied flat tax.

[ResidentSourcerer]

Modified flat tax.
There is ONE deduction: A warm body deduction. The basic exemption. It applies to ALL people. So a family of 4 gets 4 deductions if the parents file jointly. Kid deductions are the same size as adult ones.

The basic deduction is equal to 1000 hours a year of minimum wage. Two parents, two kids both parents working 40 hours/week (2000 hours/year) of minimum wage pay NO tax.

FLAT rate for everything above that. This gives the working poor a break.

Corporations don't pay income tax. Corporations pay tax on gross sales.. Flat rate on total sales, probably fairly small. No deductions for the cost of production. If sales tax is 10% and it costs you $901 to produce a $1000 widget, you just lost money.

The huge simplification of tax law puts hundreds of thousands of our best minds to work doing something productive.

Responsibility.

[ResidentSourcerer]

The problem isn't greed as much as it is short sightedness

    Executives are paid in dividends off a block of stock for 20 years for each year of work. Now they have an incentive to make the company profitable for the long term.

E.g. I get a salary equivalent to a good engineer, plus dividends off of 100,000 shares for 20 years.

Next year, I get my salary, dividends off the first block, and dividends off a second block.

After 20 years, I'm getting my salary, plus dividends off of 20 blocks of stock.

After 25 years, I'm still getting dividends off of 15 blocks of stock...

***
If you accept a directorship in a company then ALL of your personal assets are available for reparations if you screw up.

A director may not sell stock he holds in a company while serving nor for a period of a decade after he stops serving. It's to his advantage to make sure the company is well run.
***

Speculation is hard to regulate.

The only way I can see to limit speculation is to tax assets as opposed to taxing income. Thus, if you aren't using something, you are still going to pay tax on it. And this is only partially successful. Real Estate is taxed already, (property taxes) and it doesn't stop people buying land and sitting on it.

Then hold offshore suppliers responsible as well!!

[lpq]

This isn't rocket science. If you hold offshore companies to the same quality standards and liability standards as US companies, then we'd be on equal footing. Too often, people go offshore to escape the burden of regulation, then we buy from places that have low quality and are stuck with inferior products.

If the law was constructed in a way to require the same level of quality, and, perhaps, even similar quality of working conditions -- wouldn't we be alot more on the same footing?

The only reason the corporate-pork is getting fat off these moves is that they can *exploit* places where they don't have workplace safety and health laws and use that to get cheaper products at the expense of human life. How many deaths were there at Foxconn due to working conditions? Weren't they rather harsh by US standards?

People poopoo Europe's "socialist ways", in having 2x the holidays and 2-3x the paid vacation/years (often) that we get.

But do you think you'll get the same quality of materials and production if you require 12-14 hour days, and 6 days/week as a 5day/40 hour week here? *cough*...what am I talking about...I'm in the SW industry...that doesn't apply to us...

But hey, the Foxconn folk were in manufacturing where that would apply -- don't people tire out and get burnt out and doesn't quality suffer as a result?

The argument could easily be made that we didn't or wouldn't want to accept products made under exploitative conditions.

Yeah...that could happen...** hey, me -- wake up! not in your lifetime! **...

*sigh*...

Re:Secrecy is not safety - your not even on topic

[poofmeisterp]

The VP at SAIC is saying that if the government demands that the software they purchase actually meets some minimum standard of quality then everyone will throw up their hands and quit. Which he feels will cause more software to be handed off to overseas developers who will do even a worse job than has already been done.

This smells very much like GM & Ford complaining that new fuel standards will be a technical impossibility to reach just moments before one of their competitors roll out models to the showroom floor that make the grade.

So if I'm reading this correctly, the logic at the bottom layer of SAIC's complaint is, translated from what the VP said, "We don't have the resources to do this. It's unfair that you're demanding a provider that does have these services. I call UNFAIR!"

We always complain about a customer (or gov't) mandating requirements that we can't provide, yet another company can. We call it favoritism, but the gov't didn't change the requirements in order to HELP those companies; the requirements are changed because they are the REQUIREMENTS. If there is only one or two providers of service/software/hardware/food/etc that can provide it, then they win the "contract" or, in this case, future success.