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America's Future Is In Software, Not Hardware
New submitter tcjr2006 writes "Obama's State of the Union focused on the return of manufacturing jobs to America. This New Yorker story makes the case that the manufacturing jobs aren't going to come back, and he should be focusing on software. Quoting: 'Yes, there are industries where manufacturing jobs can be brought back to America through proper tax incentives and training programs. But maybe he should have talked more about the things that he could do to keep software jobs here. He spoke of federal funding for university and scientific research. But a real pro-software agenda would also include reforming patent law to stop trolling (and perhaps eliminating software patents altogether); increasing H-1B visas for highly skilled coders; stopping Congress from defunding DARPA, whose research helped create Siri, the iPhone’s talking assistant; and opening up the unused, federally owned wireless spectrum. That agenda wouldn’t bring Apple’s manufacturing jobs back, but it would help to keep the company’s coding jobs here. And it would certainly help develop "an economy that’s built to last."'"
We can eat it, wear it, breathe it... What the hell kind of society will this be if everyone just writes software all day?
increasing H-1B visas for highly skilled coders
How is increasing the number of workers supposed to decrease the unemployment rate?
America future have already happen. Article like this ignore the fact that we are all trapped in space and time. Reality is that the World future is many different future that already exist at different positions on probability axis. Future is hardware, future is software, future is both, future is nothing haha.
I dedicate this post to my mama and to God.
Less military research, more research that we actually benefit from.
visas for highly skilled coders
What would the criteria be?
There really aren't enough sensible ways of doing anything for this to work well.
We're already farming out software.
It's not as if anyone with the means, i.e., money, is trying to reverse the trend.
This doesn't even pass the bellylaugh test.
--
BMO
Software, especially the proprietary kind they want to make money on, goes poof. The only way to make big money on software is dishonestly, like Microsoft who has gamed the system to have a captive audience.
People pirate software (and you can't stop them) and people use free alternatives (and you can't stop them)
I think America had better plan on basing their economy on something real, not imaginary property, for the rest of the world doesn't share their vision.
"increasing H-1B visas for highly skilled coders"
No thanks, companies are already using H-1B workers to fill their positions, cutting out jobs for us American programmers and lowering wages. I keep hearing that companies are desperate for tech workers and there are not enough people to fill positions. Yet my resume gets tossed half the time, and the companies I interview at are very arrogant, acting more like you need them and should feel grateful they are even considering hiring you.
It is far less expensive to have a group overseas develop software. Not better, just cheaper. The same economics apply, but unlike hardware there are zero tariffs or import taxes to pay (not that there are many for hardware).
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
... if we don't seriously fund education for the next generation, and stop thinking we can skimp on that commitment to pay for tax breaks for the rich and extended wars of choice.
Check your premises.
I guess that shows how out of touch he is with the state of the IT industry. Software is being shipped abroad at breakneck pace. The nature of the medium means that the only disincentive to ship overseas is talent or support. Either of those can and will come up to standard very quickly. Manufacturing physical items that require shipping of raw and refined materials, and then shipping of the finished product is an easy to argue win. He would have pissed off his Chinese overlords, but he should have said, "We intend to bring manufacturing home by carbin taxing shipping methods, and instituting tariffs to balance the worker well-being in China."
This program takes away US jobs and keeps wages down by flooding the market with cheap disposable labor. It only benefits the top 1%
Although Apple didnt invent this category of devices, they figured out how to make and sell tons of them in the last five years. Hardware innovation is very much alive in the USA.
Paul Krugman correctly points out in today NY Times column that Apple has 45,000 high compensated US employees and 700,000 poorly compensated Asian sub-contractors. Apple does create lots of jobs, with mixed results.
Some good, some bad.
Increasing H1B? They should be decreasing H1B workers for more local long term employment.
Software patent reform/elimination: good++11
Dont defund DARPA: good
Release wireless spectrum: how does that affect software?
Supporting the software industry does not mean we don't need manufacturing. Not everyone can or wants to work in a creative field. Manufacturing is as important to national and economic security as software.
Seems that the future of USA is in trivial patents, copyrighting culture, making that lasting forever and pushing that to the rest of the world. Why develop if you already get paid if someone anywhere tries to use common sense to solve a problem in the only possible way?
I agree that software needs more focus, though it's harder to paint a quick picture in people's minds unless you say something like "make more apps."
I was actually very pleased that he used the example of firefighters downloading building plans on their way to a fire on their "PDA", since that's an app I actually built a few years ago (and current client ... http://getblazemark.com/
Focus depends on ease and effectiveness of narrative. If you can't get a hit in 10 seconds, it won't give the punch.
Manufacturing jobs do well over seas because companies can pay people 12 cents an hour with no bathroom breaks and the people will do the work.
Software jobs do well in the US because the people who have the skill sets want to(and can) come to America to pursue that life and job.
Well that and this country has coders and a large population who won't take manufacturing jobs. If anyone is serious about bringing jobs back to certain industries, vocational schools need to be supported and talked about again. I went to high school in the 90's and they were nothing but the punchline of a joke. I think Mike Rowe has a good TED talk about this.
Software patents you!
Software is one of the products most amenable to offshoring. Cost savings of manufacturing in China has to be balanced against logistic and shipping costs that fluctuate over time, but software has no such factor to offset. It's also a market rife with potential IP controversy (with patents, it's hard to get started before getting smacked by a big player with tons of patents, without patents it may still be hard to get started as a big player rips off your work, copyright can get messy regardless of patent situation).
We don't need more work visas, good local developers are in no short supply.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
We just need to do away with old labor intensive methods of manufacturing.
If we mechanize enough then the labor costs become irrelevant and we can bring the manufacturing home.
To that end, we should invest heavily in additive manufacturing and other technologies that will let us leap frog the competition while rendering their cheap labor irrelevant.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Just look up my success story and how I turned around HP away from hardware and towards software! --Léo Apotheker
Manufacturing jobs are going to naturally come back to the US.
As our failed K-12 education system finally reaches up and erodes the quality of US universities, we'll become the 3rd world sweatshop to europe and asia.
Problem solved!
Here's my problem with this logic. There is an advantage to having near-full employment. Not everybody is born with the gray matter to make his or her living doing things that require a certain level of intellect. Even if they were, some people will underperform due to environmental reasons and not be in a position to do that sort of work. There needs to be something for them to do. I'm not sure the consumer driven service-economy is big enough to accommodate them.
Note: nothing in the above should be taken as my denigrating folks who aren't cut out for software development. My point is only that there's always going to be a wide spectrum of ability, and that to the extent we muck with our economy we should do so with that fact in mind.
There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode
high-speed pizza delivery
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
[Jobs insisted to Obama] that the administration needed to be more business-friendly. As an example, Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where "regulations and unnecessary costs" make it difficult for them.
Presumably his point was that he wanted to build factories in the US, but regulations and unnecessary costs prevented him. I don't know what regulations those were, but certainly not all regulations are good.
Obviously we won't move all manufacturing back to the US, we'll never compete with Vietnam at textile manufacturing, but it seems reasonable that we can do a lot of manufacturing here.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
No, the Chinese assembly jobs aren't coming back, and if they do, they'd be done by machine. Even if they did come back for actual people, the only people who would want them would be immigrants. They aren't coming back and we don't want them. They're low paying crap jobs for unskilled workers. What we should be looking at are the more highly skilled jobs making the components that go to the assembling plant. Why are we focused on jobs going to China when Taiwan makes as much as they do and South Korea makes three and a half times what China does off the iPad according to The Economist?
And not just in terms of hiring low-wage people in 3rd world countries. Ultimately there is no magical American advantage in smarts and intelligence that says we're going to have an advantage in inventing stuff.
Starting a manufacturing plant requires a huge investment, cooperation of the local government, etc., etc., but the next big thing in software can still come out of someone's garage, and that garage can be anywhere, even some "backwater" country where they don't even have garages. A couple motivated developers and a couple mangy PCs are all you need, and that's rapidly becoming available to a large percentage of our 7,000,000,000 people.
As an example of the internationalization of creative talent, take a look at CGSociety's GCChoice gallery on the front page at:
http://www.cgsociety.org/
which shows the latest images voted to be some of the best submitted by artists using computer graphics software. Just like software development, the tools to produce these images are available to anyone in the world with a computer, and that is reflected by the international nature of these images. Just a quick look today shows the most recent top images coming from: Slovakia, the UK, Sweden (x2), Mexico, Iran, China (x3), the USA (x3), Turkey, Korea, and Singapore.
Maybe we can use our big money to quickly buy up the talent when it appears, but the "next big sotware things" are ultimately going to come from all over the world.
G.
Honestly, that's about all we're good at - people in the rest of the world want some ephemeral connection to Hollywood, Disneyland, Motown, New York City, etc., so they buy some brand, watch some movies or listen to some music. Give the impression you can't be a hip, cool & happening fool without an iDoodad and they'll gobble it up.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If you have a traditional (with only a certain amount of the work done by robots) manufacturing base then the number of widgets you ship depends on the number of people you employ. One person makes X widgets per hour. That's great for mass employment, so long as the demand for widgets keeps up and nobody can produce X+1 widgets per employee per hour somewhere cheaper.
For software that model doesn't work. You still need designers, testers, sales people and all the traditional "overhead" people you had in order to get a manufacturing operation up and running. But once the software goes into production, the link between the number of units and the number of employees fails. That is very nice for customers (and for the bottom line), but it's not so great for the proportion of the population who are better at doing things manually than mentally.
If America's software "future" does come to pass - rather than come to pass it by - what is the future for all the ex-manufacturers who are now surplus to requirements? Or the next generation of non-softies for whom there are no prospects? You can't just ignore them and you can't just support them on the taxes from the people who do work in the software "future" - as those people can just up sticks and go somewhere with a lower tax regime.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
And, most of all, bring back the culture of creativity, of healthy achievement. Yesterday I watched a B&W movie about the round-the-world flight of the Graf Zeppelin, "from New York to New York", in 1929. Man, the interesting times those people lived in! The spirit of adventure, of risk taking (20 people flying in a hidrogen-filled airship over Siberia, Stalin, and 6000 feet high mountains that were not even on the map? Over the Pacific Ocean, in a storm with no working radio?) Yes, those magnificent men in their flying machines. There was also a woman on board the Graf Zeppelin, Lady Hay Drummond-Hay. These days people only try to get rich quick by trading stocks or developing puny apps for the iPhone. Everybody wants to be a manager; nobody really wants to build anything anymore.
Is it because workers are treated better or is it because they are cheaper?
How is it that The Netherlands is the world's 2nd. largest exporter of agricultural products in value after the US, is it because the country is so blessed with it's climate and available space?
I'm convinced the USofA can be a profitable exporter of manufactered goods and produce providing their managers start looking at the long term instead of just this quarters profits.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Why?
Just curious, with thousands of computer programmers out of work. Why import people to take jobs.
Oh wait, that's right. So big mega-companies working for Federal and state governments can received $150,000 for an H1B worker who will only receive $50,000.
Best of all, it'll drive the salary prices down. And ordinary American computer programmers who were making $70K-$100K are now forced to take jobs at $40K-$60K with less benefits.
But I'm happy, I now have a 100+ mile commute to make $15K less than I did 3 years ago.
This is the wrong mindset to have. Realistically, copyright is an imaginary thing that people are realizing has no basis in reality for restricting. Only law keeps people from trading it, and people won't accept that over the long term. They accepted it with books for so long because there was still a real cost associated with the printing and production of them, but in this day and age that's no longer the case for digital goods.
The only way to keep a strong economy is to go back to things where the physical world enforces the duplication cost - not artificial laws. We have to make THINGS, not "IP", if we want to stay afloat.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
You don't need to rob Peter to incentivise Paul - all that means is that Pat at the IRS takes a cut too. Just cut the red tape that binds us, cut the number of government parasites that feed off of the body corporate, and we'll take care of the rest.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I understand the dream is that Americans can be more innovative, landscape-altering dreamers than their foreign competition. But this software argument largely ignores the ease with which software can be copied and distributed. Timely reverse-engineering or, worse, intellectual property theft could ruin swaths of this industry overnight.
...if you can't trust the hardware that it's running on. I know not every device coming from overseas is bad, but there's a lot of cheap low quality or even deliberately subverted hardware out there that we should be leery of. Keeping some electronics manufacturing in the US helps keep others honest.
It's important to retain all skilled industries, not just software. And there is plenty of hardware innovation left in America, just visit a Maker Faire sometime and see for yourself. With the new technologies like 3D printing, biohacking, flexible electronics, tattooed circuits, spintronics, and materials advances with graphene and carbon nanotubes, we are about to see an explosive return of manufacturing in this country unlike anything the world has ever seen before. It just won't be the mass-produced, Fordist kind we had before. Rather, it will more resemble the just-in-time model taken to an extreme.
It's going to be a very topsy-turvy, exciting time and unprecedented prosperity and freedom lie on the other side if we can avoid the violent reaction from the current powers-that-be.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
because after the Singularity we will have machines do the programming (which probably also will be too difficult a task for the human mind)
The economies of scale favor the software industry more
For manufacturing, if you want to double your production, you will have to hire more people to work in factories. For software, if you can double your sales without hiring much additional help.
Not to mention that software requires highly skilled workers which not everyone has the capability to achieve. Software can also eliminate the jobs of unskilled and semi skill workers, which makes income inequality even wost.
Manufacturing helps bring jobs to unskilled and semi skilled workers which will benefit the working class along with white collared jobs.
Why bother with software, we can all become lawyers, for the RIAA MPAA or Apple, think of it a nation of lawyers suing people over copy right infringement, or patent violations!
Currently millions of people are unemployed. Are we really going to give them all jobs as developers?
Consider Zynga. You can't open Facebook or be slapped in the face with Farmville, Cityville, Suckville or Mafiawars. Apparently it's one of the largest companies (revenue-wise) in what is one of the largest segments (gaming) of software development. In other words, this is one of those 800 pound gorilla's in the industry.
Total number of jobs: 1,200 and I bet a large part of that is in India and China. The toilet paper factory in my town employs half of that (and likely more if we're looking at USA jobs only) and that's only a small regional player. How can software development replace millions of low-schooled manufacturing jobs, especially with education in the USA going down the crapper?
If the economy collapsed tomorrow, people would still need bridges, roads, plumbing, and power. They could live without software. It sounds like New Yorker is being deliberately contradictory for lulz.
Software patents and fewer H1B actually help the software industry. Our patents are the only thing keeping the chinese from entirely ripping us off, we're still in the money making part of the business equation regarding the manufacturing as long as we keep generating patents that hold value. And, there are plenty of American programmers having a tough time finding jobs without bringing in more foreign programmers to fill their jobs at lower salaries we can't possibly match. Almost everything this guy says would hurt our economy, except opening the wireless spectrum. But, I bet he's a commie and wants to open it to non-profits or something weird instead of businesses. Also, DARPA gets plenty of money, war is always profitable even in peacetime. Don't cry for them. Their budget will go from gazillions to gazillions, you won't even notice the difference.
The US is what, 2nd or 3rd highest in the world, let alone taxing profits made over seas? Top it off with a capital gains tax on those profits for investors increases the true tax on profit to 52%. Why would you want to expand your business here?
Yes the news is replete with stories about how certain corporations manage to work down to a tax bill of zero (hint, look who they know in Washington, who their boards have lunch with) but in the end we have begun to punish if not vilify success.
There is nothing in the tax code to benefit businesses to ship jobs overseas, out source, or the like. In fact the only benefit to corporation about "going overseas" is if the relocate themselves there.
We have taxed,regulated, and demonized ourselves out of competitiveness. The last part is the constant railing from certain politicians against success, success they preserve for themselves and their cronies but do their damn best to exclude us from. (insider trading, special home loans, election laws permitting their own super pacs, etc).
Get the corporate tax rate down, remove the special exceptions many of them employ (looking at Google/GE and others), end the taxing of overseas profits, and reign in the regulators.
You want people to invest here, then fine, make it worth their while. Artificially propping up numbers with tax dollars has no return on investment, not taking those dollars and letting people decide to spend them does.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
In our case, my company used one of the open source hospital management systems available. We had a group of four foreigners come over to familiarize themselves with our operations and business logic.
They then returned home after setting up a skeletal system onto which they would [remotely] add functionality. Turnaround was about 8 weeks. The web based front end was done in PHP while the DB was PostgreSQL.
They still maintain our system by adding a few features from time to time. Those that are not needed are simply disabled and do not appear on users' screens. I must say though, that it was not a complex system as most of potential input errors were caught by scripts on the pages themselves.
We have saved about $237,000 dollars and we still have the entire source code. Best of all, the system has never broken down in the over 6 years it's been running. Problems we have encountered have to do with the help system. These folks are yet to understand that in may organizations (mine inclusive), there are folks who are not that computer savvy.
I think to help the software industry grow, these comments are indeed valid. However, being that the software industry is the only one that is growing leaps and bounds above the rate of inflation. Further more, most people don't work in the software industry, and most people never will.
Rather than spending more time and energy on something that is doing okay, spending more resources on things that are not ensures that less people are excluded from drinking off the same well. The government should not focus on the welfare of 1% of the working populace, may it be for bankers or for software engineers.
But a real pro-software agenda would also include reforming patent law to stop trolling (and perhaps eliminating software patents altogether)...
Why in god's name do people on the internet keep insisting on politicians doing things that work, or make sense or benefit the people?
I just don't get it...
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Does your retirement plan put all of your investment in one stock? You have to diversify. You need manufacturing hardware and writing software to succeed. We should fight hard to bring the jobs back and reasonable costs. This will likely mean de-unionizing a wee bit, which likely means it'll never succeed.
This guy wants to trade all of manufacturing for a few software jobs? I don't know what koolaid he is drinking but it must a good one.
Software has the same problem as that other US product, entertainment content, it can be easily duplicated. 1 car designer == 100 factory workers making 101 jobs.
1 software developer == 1 job. Sure, that salary of that software developer might fund a hotdog stand but if you think that a pyramid with software developers at the top if going to have base of 360.000.000.000 people... you obviously haven't got a proper grasp of how much a software developer makes. MS is NOT going to safe the economy.
It ain't sex, in an Officer and a Gentleman, the steady (used to be) reliable job in a carton making factory is looked down upon, a place to escape through a husband with a dream job... BUT in reality THIS is what a NORMAL country economy runs on. Yes there are exceptions, oil nations can do quite well without any real economy. Not just the Arab nations, Scotland is doing very well for itself now it can keep the proceeds from its oil and gas industry and not fund the entire UK with it. Scotland would be in the drain IF it wasn't for oil and gas.
But the US isn't an oil or any other resource rich country, it like my own country Holland NEEDS a solid, boring, unsexy production base. England pre-WW2 thought it could shift farming away from its own land and outsource it completely. It worked... except it didn't. Many thought that it was the u-boats that stopped it but the basic economy also took a nosedive and it started the recession in England that has simply never stopped since, the country is a shadow of its former self with massive un-employment. The only reason figures aren't higher is because non-jobs such as burger flipper are used to keep people out of the official stats. There are entire cities where the norm has been for generations to not have a job.
Replace all of manufacturing with mere software developement? Software development that can be done anywhere and where 1 persons labour can be infinitely distributed?
It is as sane as basing the entire US economy on content production like movies and music... oh wait, some people actually suggest this is a good idea.
Don't get me wrong, a lot of money is made in these industries but the way the pyramid of supply and demand is structured simply means that it doesn't provide a pay check for an entire country.
Idiots that come up with ideas like this probably look at the food chain and think that if only lions learned to eat plants you can cut out the middle man... NOT HOW IT FUCKING WORKS.
Even the Nazi Ford understood that if you want the people to buy your cars they need to earn salaries that allow them to buy cars. It is not that complex. Who is going to buy all that software? Chinese workers working for slave wages? The box shifters at Walmart?
But iPads sell like hot cakes... no. they don't. iPads sell incredibly badly... gaming software is even worse... "what" you say?
Apple sold 14 million iPads during 2010, WORLD WIDE... that is a market of 6 billion. That isn't a very good market penetration at all compared to something as simple as carton boxes. How many boxes did you buy yourself? If you bought your iPad online, 2 at least. Of course the profit on that box was far lower but the number of US households fed through simple boxes is far far higher then that iPad that came in a box from china and was only handled for seconds at time by minimum wage box-shifters.
That is part of the problem, it ain't just the production of iPads that has gone to China, it is the box making, the plastic bag making, the packing into shipping containers... it doesn't leave much of the price of a iPad to be earned by US hands. When a factory for making carton boxes shift shores, the machine making jobs, the wood cutting jobs, that cafeteria fan in the parking lot, they all go to.
This ain't fantasy, Manchester has experienced what Detroit is going through now for decades AND NOTHI
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Competing with the massed ranks of Indian Coders.
you don't stand a chance.
I'm just glad that I'm retiring next year. I really feel sorry for young people trying to get into coding.
You just need to visit places like Chennai, Bangalore etc and see them at work.
I've seen one 'office' where at least 10,000 coders work in a double shift arrangmemt.
The code for all manner of western companies.
Just look at the operations of companies like Wipro, Tata etc.
They are going after ALL OUR JOBS on a massive scale.
Most of them are what I call 'rote coders'. Tell them in detail to do something and they will do it.
At the moment, they don't have a critical level of Architects and Designers. What do you think all those Indian Students attending Western Universities doing? They are training to be the Architects and Designers of the future.
Because they will work at rates half ours then Coders in the West are IMHO an endangered species.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Beginning with the alternative hypothesis that America has a future.
The notion is fantastical.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
American's don't make or program anything because we've become to lazy and dependant on Government to feed us. Put an end to Welfare, cut back on Unemployment benefits, and do away with Minimum wage!
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
I've seen no evidence that software is immune from the same cheap-labor-globalization forces that stagnated our hardware industries. If anything it's even more prone because it doesn't take huge capital expenditures for plants and equipment. A software sweatshop can be set up in a 50-year-old Timbuktu shack.
Table-ized A.I.
There is a lot stuff there you can only pick up on the Job and other stuff that tech / vocational techs you that you don't get in CS.
I have read some insane posts on the internet before, people totally disconnected from reality but this one is so far beyond insanity that it requires the invention of new words.
You think that a simple device that can spray ONE sort of plastic is going to change into a device that can make complex multi-compound materials EVEN FOOD in twenty years?
In twenty years we barely gone from spraying ink to spraying plastic. Or the other way around from devices cutting solid blocks into shapes to spraying materials into solid blocks.
And you think this is going to compete anytime soon with mass production? These maker bots are nice for some form of prototyping. Mass production turns out such plastic forms in mili-seconds, not hours.
If you wanted to make even a small lego set out of this you need days. And you want to use it for the production of a TV or even a car? What about clothes?
And even then, IF makers bots were being used, why would the location of these production machines needing an army of operators NOT be outsourced to china just as maker bots are right now?
Seriously kid, get medical help.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"increasing H-1B visas for highly skilled coders;"
That's good for software companies bottom lines, not American Jobs.
So it looks like America has just embraced the fact that it no longer produces any worthwhile physical products, and that its only hope for future industry is to monetize ideas and concepts, further contributing to Imaginary Property(IP) and all of the social and technological ills that come with it!
We can leave all of those 'hardware' goods up to those lesser countries, like China and Japan, right? I'm sure we can come up with enough ideas and prevent them from being copied long enough to profit so much more than the hardware guys, right? /s
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
opening up the unused, federally owned wireless spectrum
Spectrum in the US is allocated through an arcane, bureaucratic process that takes years to balance the needs of the government (NTIA) and the needs of individuals and businesses (FCC). Broadband For America, which aims to reallocate 500 MHz of "wireless" spectrum for commercial use will likely cost the DoD alone high tens to hundreds of billions of our tax dollars to implement. It will also take several years, due to the necessity of re-engineering of fielded equipment and software.
That spectrum which appears to be "unused" may be reserved for equipment in development, experimentation, or wartime uses. It may also be reserved for scenarios where all hell breaks loose here at home (e.g., 9-11) and the goverment can't afford to be competing with Twitter and Facebook for bandwidth.
Invenio via vel creo
Those who do not believe in the future must not be aware of the past. Were you born yesterday?
The United States is the world's leading producer of manufactured goods. Standing alone, the U.S. manufacturing sector would represent the fifth-largest economy in the world -- look it up.
Producing tangible goods from raw materials is the only way to generate wealth. Everything else is just trading margins.
car analogy: It's better to base your economy on the manufacture of cars rather than the selling and trading of gas to put in the car.
When the U.S. starts rewarding companies that operate in the U.S. Apple and others will play along.
This premise is a crock. Software is pretty easy to steal, and w/ all those FOSS licenses, freeware, shareware and similar models running around, it's pretty difficult for any company, except a few like Microsoft or Google, to make money of software. As a result, all the money made from software ain't gonna be enough to purchase the hardware needed to run it. Besides, the expertise for making hardware is still w/ Western companies: while the Chinese & Taiwanese companies may be good @ duping hardware and making it cheap, so far, they're not going to come up w/ hardware solutions that are needed going forward. Don't think that just b'cos China has produced the Loongson - that too a MIPS license - that it is suddenly innovative and capable of inventing anything. And sooner or later, the American work force has to come to terms w/ the reality that while $0.40/hr is unworkable, so is $5.00/hr if things are to be mass produced. Some manufacturing has to be shifted back to countries like America, European countries and so on.
Fact is that China's labor force can't keep sustaining the production demands on its economy @ current wage levels, and sooner or later, while some of it may be further outsourced to Africa, a lot of it will rise to levels which, while not @ par w/ the US, will still make it a lot less lucrative for manufacturing to be sent there. Also, a lot of contract manufacturers very often find themselves overloaded by demand, and are generally in a feast or famine mode. It's nothing sort of suicidal for US companies to have all their manufacturing concentrated in just one place. Good example was the recent floods in Bangkok, which caused a temporary shortage of hard drives. It makes more sense for companies to have a certain amount of in-house manufacturing to support the minimum quantities they must sell in a quarter, and then have any excess demand offloaded to contract manufacturers both in the US & abroad. They can definitely weight the distribution according to the cost differentials, but still, it makes sense not to be sole sourced.
Also, it's not in the best interests of countries like China, India, Philippines, Thailand, et al to be totally dependent on sales to the US - that way, when the US economy sinks, they too feel the heat. It makes more sense for them to support domestic demand. In fact, the US too could target some overseas markets and get exports moving.
Microcode and high-speed pizza delivery.
1 ) require that any product SOLD in the united states be made under the same EPA and environmental laws we expect from our own manufactures.
2) require that any produce SOLD in the united states be made under similar OSHA and worker safety constraints, including a 40 h work week, medical benefits, unemployment benefits , and minimum wage adjusted by cost of living in that country.
3) if a countries laws do not ensure 2. The the company should bind itself to deliver those benefits to it's employees, using applicable contract law in the country it is in , or it will not be issued an import license.
Here is the reality check, we passed laws about worker safety and pay etc, because it is WRONG to treat your workers like slaves. Why should we permit the sale of things in this country that don't meet that standard.
We passed EPA and environmental laws in this country because it is WRONG to destroy the earth for future generations for nothing other then temporary profit. If it is wrong in the United states is it any less wrong in China ?
Either are laws are good laws because they are morally 'the right thing to do' in which case we have not excuse for buying things from people who do otherwise OR we should repeal those laws in this country.
Either way , if the playing field was equal on labor and cost of production due to regulation , the added shipping cost from a foreign country should make it necessarily to produce many commodity items here. Which would create massive numbers of U.S. jobs.
( it is also likely to have the bad effect in the short term of causing serious price inflation ,because all the cheap overseas products will be gone .. so you would have to phase this in slowly enough to allow everyone to adapt.)
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Patent trolls get their initial funding by going after the small fry that can't afford a lengthy court battle and so instead they buy a license for a "reasonable" fee and these fees are then used to fund the battle again the big companies.
This has been shown so many times, you would have to blind, stupid and... oh wait. I see... I am so sorry.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'll tell you...
It's time to jump ship and get out of IT. It's about to crash. No, I don't mean .com style. I mean industry/career-wise.
I'll explain...throughout modern history, there is a tendency to tout a career choice or field as a long-term career. The truth is, it almost always fails to be and is usually done at the peak of that career's value.
There was a time that being a butcher was an excllent local career choice. Until suddenly, no one went to the local butcher as the big grocery store became the supplier (this mainly due to the advent of the automobile which made such travel inconsequential).
In the 70's there was talk of electrical engineering being the field to be. Manufacturing of electronics. In fact, IBM let Microsoft own DOS because HARDWARE was the place to be. Then that all became automated and outsourced, suddenly you can buy an entire computer for less than the operating system. How things have changed.
The two big ones mentioned now is healthcare (in particular, nursing) and software.
Let's look at nursing as I believe it's ahead of the IT curve right now. I have been amazed by how many friends I have who are back in school pursuing nursing degrees. At least 6, and I don't have that many friends. LOL
My wife is a nurse. Let me give you some insights on that career path. Her hospital won't hire any nurse without prior experience. Is this unusual? Nope, come to find out that few are. I've met a number or recently graduated nurses. They've done their four years. Made the grade. Taken on the debt with the thought that they were entering a field in which they'd be guaranteed a job and not have to worry about unemployment. It wasn't a glamorous career, it's dirty, messy and hard work. But at least they'd always have a job, right?
Well, every nurse I've met who has graduated in the past year is still trying to find a job. That's right, they've sent out resumes to dozens of hospitals. No job. As I said, my wife's hospital will only hire you if you've got a number of years of experience. Right now there are enough nursese floating around many regions that hospitals don't want to hire and train a new nurse.
Oh and yes, there are many nurse positions in certain cities and regions. Where they hired highly-paid travel nurses.
But that's changing, and it's also largely because of seasonal clientelle numbers. They don't want to add full time permanent staff. So they bring in an expensive travel nurses to cover 2-3 months when they're more likely to have higher number of patients (summer for accidents) and (holidays for heart attacks).
http://nursinglink.monster.com/benefits/articles/193-why-cant-new-nurses-find-jobs
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-07-09-1Anurses09_ST_N.htm
I expect the IT industry to soon follow the same slope...
Because 97% of the people of the world do not have an iPad...
In 2010, Apple sold 14 million iPad's. To an audience of 6+ billion.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
More skilled workers means that
- some of them will eventually be enterpreneurs
Not in the USA, and not if they're H-1Bs.
H-1B aliens may only work for the petitioning U.S. employer and only in the H-1B activities described in the petition.
No, he's got a much coveted three digit user ID. So he's been on Slashdot for awhile. He's probably just blissfully ignorant, or one of those cynical Republicans that would destroy America again, rather than see it prosper. Very sad indeed.
I just quote 2 things from this great book: 23 things they don't you about capitalism, from Ha-Joon Chang, (from Wikipedia) he was a consultant to the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the European Investment Bank as well as to Oxfam and various United Nations agencies. He is also a fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C.
Thing 4. The washing machine has changed the world more than the internet has
Recent progress in telecommunications technologies is not as revolutionary as what happened in the late 19th century, in relative terms. The internet revolution has (at least as yet) not been as important as the washing machine and other household appliances, which allowed woman to enter the labour market and virtually abolished professions like domestic service.
Thing 9. We do not live in a post-industrial age
Most of the shrinkage in the share of manufacturing in total output is not due to the fall in the absolute quantity of manufactured goods produced but due to the fall in their prices, which is caused by their faster growth in productivity (output per unit of input).
The USA (and the European countries that follow sadly the USA) will slip further down as an economy if their leaders believe they can ignore the manufacturing sector and leave it to China, India or other developing countries. With the export of the manufactoring industry, you also lose expertice and know-how. Soon the developing countries will have more manufacturing power than the USA, which means they will not need the USA anymore for anything, other than dumping their cheap stuff in Walmark and Bestbuy. The service industry is nothing, if you don't have the manufacturing (aka the industry that makes real things) industry, because the manufacturing industry will create the service industry in the country where it is.
Why can't China and India, Brazil and others just create or import the banking sector, the software industry, fashion, etc. in their own country? If they already have a mature manufacturing industry, they can export the producs and get more money for the service industry. Income will only rise with the maturity of the manufacturing industry in the developing countries.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
We are on the verge of a material printing revolution. Sure, we'll need software, but the machines that make the machines will be everything.
In the 1800s, Great Britain was awash in capital that they invested in US hardware. Thank you , Great Britain! If we now throw out hardware development capital at foreign countries, we will benefit them far more than us. We get paper; they get powerful stuff. Not a good long term strategy. And any idea that Americans are going to be better coders than foreigners in the long run is profoundly stupid.
Foreigners will write the code for the hardware that they design and make, Wall Streeters will get rich on the transactions (just like the happy dudes on the London Exchange in the 1800s), and the Country will wither.
We've got to be at the forefront of designing the machines that make the machines.
I.in my experience, H1B's are not highly skilled. They're cheap and can be billed out at high rates. It's just a way for employers to further leverage themselves against employees. And we all know that employees have all the power in the relationship. Good for business, bad for Americans. Same shit, different party. This is my surprised face.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
We have a pretty terrible level of unemployment and underemployment in this country and yet, many employers claim to have difficulty finding workers.
Why??? There's such a thing as supply and demand and at a high enough price, you can find someone. Employers may not agree, but that just means that they can't wrap their head around what they actually have to pay. And of course perish the thought of hiring someone who hasn't already done the job either. There's a shift of mindset that has to occur here about the pay those who can do deserve, and the opportunities those who might be able to should be afforded.
I have really mixed feelings here because I know a lot of good people here on H1-Bs. Here's the thing, in the short term people do compete for a fixed pie, and once you're out of this business for more than 9 months it's next to impossible to re-enter... I know a lot of people who found themselves in that situation, too. So, it's hard to make the argument that H1-Bs visas increase the demand in a way that's broadly helpful to the locally resident software grunts.
Of course, that's not the whole point... we are also, with competition trying to reduce costs and create positive ripple effects that increase competitiveness and aid hiring in other industries, too. And I do understand targeting... the "give me your poor" line on lady liberty is a beautiful sentiment but not sane U.S. domestic policy so you have to be a little choosy. So why not software?
If we are trying to do targeting based on a perceived shortage, let's go back to the laws of supply and demand and figure out what they're telling us. The most objective way to measure a shortage is not based on the amount of whining, but based on prices. Most of the highest paid professions in this country are in the medical field. I'm not saying that high pay isn't deserved, I'm just saying that the eye popping character of it all should command our attention and make us think about what it's doing to say, anyone who's sick without insurance and to our deficit. Rather unlike software, we have a compelling national interest in trying to supplement this labor market.
because we would never outsource software jobs to any other country. I mean, that never happens, right?
Or rather I have experience with cleaning up afterwards.
I seen it all and NEVER in a good way.
One project saw the creation of a game platform completly outsourced to India with just the content created locally. Delays ran into a year and a half (and in the online game industry that is roughly a century) and when it was done there were HUGE mistakes that took ages to fix. The code was piss poor with gigantic performance issues and a setup requirement that consisted of very specific product versions often not available anymore for download.
The "problem" was simple, the Indian developers could code but had absolutely no eye for quality beyond making it work for a single scripted demo.
I have gotten finished web projects from China with chinese comments in the code and every page of a website being its own page, so the menu code was copy pasted in every single page rather then an include. And the menu code had evolved over time so even search and replace couldn't fix it. Spend more on fixing that then it would have cost to develop it from scratch. But hey! Cheap chinese coders!
As for QA itself... I have seen tests being done by Russians where they completely failed to catch obvious bugs making you wonder what the fuck they tested. Well, the answer became clear, they tested they could run it and labelled anything that didn't work as "oh that probably wasn't finished yet so lets not do it"...
Are Russians, Indians and Chinese incompetetent and stupid?
YES, those that work in those kind of firms are. You see, why would ANY competent person work in one of these places? Russia, China, India, they got their own software industry, only the rejects from their own industry would work for foreigners for minimum wages. The idea that you can get the elilte of developing countries working in sweat shops is beyond insane.
The simple fact is that software development is something you buy around the world so WHY would a company that can deliver quality charge a far lower price just because it is located somewhere else? Since when is capatilism about charging the lowest price you can rather then charging as much as market is willing to bear?
If someone sells you software development at dump prices, that is probably a good indication of what you should do with the resulting code.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I mean, really, how much software is the world going to need - we're going to have 50M programmers (last I heard, employed is about 130M-140M?
Is that so the 10% of us that are actually good at it will spend all our time fixing the stuff written by the bottom half of the class?
In the late seventies, as they started mechanizing, and shipping manufacturing jobs first to the South, then overseas, there was a *lot* of talk about the "information economy", and how it would more than pick up the slack from lost manufacturing jobs.
Today, there's *NOTHING* that's being talked about to employ tens of millions of people.
On top of which, there was an article in both the Atlantic and on NPR last week, about SC, and how manufacturing jobs are being completely automated.
But no one wants to talk about what 90% of the population is to do, when there are no more jobs, when everything from sports reporting to building houses are done mostly by automated systems, and a few highly-trained people to run them.
Does anyone here think that everyone they know is suitable to go to college, and get an education our of it for a high-tech future? All the folks who don't understand it anyway? (Done any tech support for your folks or relatives lately?)
The real conversation is how society will *HAVE* to change... unless what used to be called the Third World, with its 55%-80% unemployment rate, is a model for what we will have. But no one wants to consider that - what do we do with our lives, also - hang out and look cool and/or tough?
mark
My team works like this, and it is very effective. You get bug reports while the code is still very fresh in your mind. So I agree that there are significant productivity benefits to having a QA team 12 hours or so out of sync with your developers.
But it in the area of development things are a bit more mixed. My team has a number of developers in the far east, and a few in Europe too. They are all outstanding engineers. But the costs of the pure labor are equalizing fast. There is little and diminishing cost advantages to off-shoring development. In a few more years there will likely be no place left where there is a significant talent pool of skilled and educated software engineers that are appreciably cheaper than they are in North America or Europe.
Ian Ameline
If that is the case, and it may well be, we need to just hang it up. Because we have too large a population to do nothing but produce software and services to support software production. We are screwed.
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
If the US want a healthy economy they need to transform production to a sustainable production system (economically, ecologically and socially). Software development will not help to save the country. First, other people in other countries are also intelligent and able to write good software (BTW model based software development is more intensivley used in Europe than the US). For example, China and India have large software developer workforces. While software development requires designers and architects to be close to the customer, these jobs are still very stable in the US as long as software is developed for people present in the US. But that might change too. Put the development offshore is difficult, but when the customer is also offshore than the developers and customers maybe on the same shore, leading to better software development as they better understand each other.
Beside that. Software development can easily be moved from one contruny to another. So focusing on it might not help. Furthermore, not all US citizens could become software developers.
The MPAA/RIAA will fuck this up. They will force more draconian crap down everyones throats, and software developers will move offshore to avoid all the crap that is in the US. I have finally begun to realize several things (beyond that their business model is flawed): 1) they have set it upon themselves to get the US government to believe that they are the only future and the only source of income for the US and as such must be protected like sources of oil and (this is the big new one) 2) They are working hard to be the *exclusive* source of foreign trade. Given half a chance, they would kill automobile exports, aircraft exports, and anything else they perceive to be a threat. There is also the problem of large American companies that have extensive (software) patent portfolios, a highly bribable US legislature, the lobby industry, and teams of hundreds of millions of lawyers who see patent litigation as an easier path to fortune than chasing ambulances. These groups love software patents. Who cares if it pushes the software industry offshore, the official line is this: "That's someone else's problem".
Increasing H-1B visas increases jobs in the US, true. Increases jobs for US citizens? More people working at Starbucks to supply the H1-B workers with coffee?
I can mend the break of day, heal a broken heart, and provide temporary relief to nymphomaniacs.
Intel still fabs a lot of chips here. Not many jobs relative to revenue, but that's the winning equation. Caterpillar also manages, though our Federal goverment is hell-bent on regulating them into offshoring all of it.
Making toaster ovens, DVD players, and basketball sneakers are not high enough value to warrant plants in the U.S. unless you're basing some of that value on 'Made in the USA'. So we should be prepared to give up those industries forever, or at least a very long time.
The next battle is when China starts in on the high-value segments, and outsources their lower value stuff futher down the food chain. Africa is maybe the next low-end manufacturing hub. Maybe South America.
So teach your kids software, EE, design, and media. Creative pursuits are still potentially high-value, and easily exported - at least for now. And at least encourage your representatives to stop killing manufacturing here. Just stop making it worse, please.
ps - Space is a growth industry, and we have a marginal lead in some aspects. worth a try, though Moonshot Gingrich is just pandering to the Space Coast. He'll become Cornshot in the Midwest, Carshot in Michigan, and Solarshot in California. No worse than any other candidate of any affiliation.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
If they are so highly skilled and have so much experience, why don't they start new companies ...
How does being a skilled, experienced computer scientist suddenly make me a good entrepreneurial business manager?
And where will all these unemployed software engineers get their start-up money?
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
He will hire software developers back from home, or even back in China.
I fail to see how software will be a pillar that will change the economy of the US for the better. Everything that happened in manufacturing will happen in software as well, except probably 3 times faster, since it is already happening.
The article assumes more jobs are a good thing. That is a last century concept. How many people actually want to work all day? Most people do it to get the things they really want: food, a decent home, etc. The job itself is a necessary evil, and if they could get the things they wanted without it, they would. We should aim for productivity so insanely high that people don't *have* to work for a living, just like the rich do now. Then the people who actually enjoy doing whatever it takes can take care of the remaining work.
This is the direction society has been heading in since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and obviously still has a way to go to reach that goal. Once places like India and China get developed enough, corporations will inevitably look for cheap labor elsewhere. These days that is mostly Africa, and a few other spots. Once *those* get developed, there will be no cheap labor left, and corporations will inevitably pursue automation. Who will buy their stuff then, when people get put out of work by automation? Either prices will fall due to competition, or governments will tax the remaining workers and businesses enough to pay basic subsistence for everyone else.
The alternate route is "home fabrication". Your robot gardener grows the food, the garage machine shop builds "stuff" based on downloaded plans. You still have to do a little work that can't be automated, but can otherwise goof off. It beats commuting and sitting in an office for 10 hours a day. I hope one of the above futures arrives sooner rather than later.
When I worked at Apple there was a lot of discussion about whether the company should divest itself of hardware, or at least open up the clone business. The best argument against it was to look at the market cap of Microsoft at the time, which was obviously very high, but not as much larger than Apple than it would have seemed at the time. The prevailing wisdom was that if that cap was the best Microsoft could do, and it was hard to imagine anyone with a higher success than Microsoft, then Apple would be foolish to throw all its eggs into the s/w basket. Since then Apple has succeeded making great s/w that runs on great h/w and now in fact is larger than Microsoft.
I guess for some of the same reasons I'm concerned with the suggestion that the US should emphasize s/w only and give up on the h/w market.
http://rk11924649.blog.fc2.com/
Looking at this from the "what industry can we make $$$ from" lens is the wrong viewpoint. Yes, the USA is pretty good at software. We are still pretty good at making cars, too. But really it comes down to our ability to innovate and create anything at all. Innovation happens at all levels. It can optimize something, giving us that 1% edge that makes all the difference, or can create a completely new industry. That's why deep capital investment in startups and academic institutions is so fundamental to our future success. We can't predict how our car, software, manufacture, agriculture, and other industries will fare in the next 50 years, but we can maximize our chances of success by being first and best at new things.
Maybe US software will collapse. Maybe Microsoft and Google will get bought by some Chinese company one day at firesale prices. If so, we need to ensure that we have new things to replace and surpass US software rather than instituting things that superficially protect it.
15 year S/W guy here. S/W is a great field and it's been good to me. Let me say this though - there will come a time in the next 50 years where we see peak S/W employment.
It is only a matter of time before automation, abstraction, artificial intelligence, code reuse and standardization reduce the need for humans to employ specialized or arcane knowledge to instruct computers.
My advice to young S/W guys(or anyone young for that matter): Assume you'll be switching to a lower paying job in 20 years. Save your money, invest it wisely, don't buy the latest thing, etc.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
The guy in the vid said there was a shortage of US welders. It's a chicken-and-egg problem. After 30 years of destroying US heavy industry, fewer people want to become welders. It takes time to become a skilled welder. That problem won't get solved overnight. It could take another 30 years to unwind what we did, even if we start right now.
This is short term thinking at it's worst. This is a symptom of an unlevel playing field. The solution is to level the playing field, not to try and figure out a short term strategy to cash in on the fouled up situation.
What if one day, Burger King decided to drastically undercut McDonalds by doing something shady. Let's say they found a way to make hamburgers and french fries out of dog food, and they bought enough politicians to make that legal. Burger King doesn't make McNuggets, so McDonald's decided to completely abandon every other thing on their menu. McDonalds now ONLY makes McNuggets. They are lauded as geniuses of the new post-BurgerKing era. This is the future. If you're not in McNuggets you're a dumbass.
Except they forgot one thing. Burger King could make McNuggets if they wanted to. It's not really all that hard.
So it is with software. Everyone here knows it ... it really *isn't* all that hard. I mean sure, there's some geniuses out there making really groudbreaking shit, but that's not MOST software jobs. Most software jobs involve cramming strings into and getting them back out of databases, and making it look pretty (or some slight variation thereof). It's not that hard, and China could put you out in a heartbeat if they decided that's what they were gonna focus on.
I've heard this line a few times. I remember when Bill Clinton was running for office and he gave up that famous "I feel your pain" line ... He was there to talk about how manufacturing was old and busted and how the "knowledge economy" was the new hotness and all these assembly line workers needed to start over and go to community college.
The future is in leveling the playing field.
Not in exploiting the imbalance.
My biggest problem with focusing on software as a focus for employment is that software requires only a few people to provide products for a great many customers. Write once, copy many. When making actual things, you have long term employment. You also increase the demands for engineers, since engineering is going to want to be local to the manufacturing. Then you have all the additional support positions that surround those engineering and manufacturing jobs. All long term processes.
Software can be written by a team of twenty and maintained by a team of two or three. So you hire seventeen people short term. Eventually you have a bunch of unemployed or unemployable software developers, eager to be replaced by younger, cheaper software developers. Not a good long term view.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
Fact is, physical products are just as important now as they have ever been. Demand for boring necessities such as Cars, Housing, Food, Clothing, and the raw materials required to make them is still growing, and will continue to grow with a population. They are more important than software because, we do and will continue to buy more of all of the above than we buy of software
Don't forget that software is rapidly becoming a free commodity, meaning it will draw less and less product revenue. Who willingly pays for an operating system, word processor, or spreadsheet nowadays? Those used to be hundreds of dollars, now there's fantastic ones for free. All the while we still have to buy computer hardware, which requires requires raw materials, factories, mass labor employment, all of which comes with R&D and engineering skills.
The U.S. has lost much of that skill by contracting with foreign companies to produce them. At the end of the day, a country like China will not only own the manufacturing of computers but will put free software on them, and what differentiator is the U.S. is left with in the world economy?
The solution is really quite complex, and both ideas are correct and both are wrong.
The crux of it is, IMHO, that to have a strong economy, there needs to be a COMPLETE MIX of jobs, both skilled and unskilled. Some people just don't have the genetic predisposition to write software, and excel at more physical tasks and vice versa.
The future of the US economy depends on a job market that allows as many Americans that wish to work, be employed at a liveable wage. How can we reach that goal? Well, that's where everybody knows the answer and in reality nobody really does. :-O
Beginning with the alternative hypothesis that America has a future.
So if you're going to die eventually, why are you still bothering to breathe now? Why not die now?
As for the topic, in order for Software to save the USA, the US education system has to improve.
There were 14 million manufacturing jobs in the USA in 2004.
1) How many of those 14 million would be to work in the software industry?
2) How many of them would be cheaper and/or better than people elsewhere in the world? A lot of software stuff is not constrained by location so can be done by someone else, sure many Indian programmers might be crap, but not all programmers in the rest of the world would be crappier than those 14 million...
From what I see the current US education system might not leave people behind on grades, but definitely leaves many people behind on quality. So how are the millions of those left behind going to compete in the software world? A crap programmer can be replaced by a small script. So the education system has to improve so that even the average US citizen is better educated compared to the competition.
BUT even if the education system improves, that just buys maybe a few decades of time. Humans are still very remarkable and competitive from a tech perspective- they consume about 100W (assuming 2000 kcal diet) for computing tasks, and can do many things easily that computers can't for the same power consumption. The disadvantage is it takes about 16 or more years to get a "release ready" human - making the upfront costs rather high. Humans start to become less competitive if computers and robots start being able to do more and more human things; faster, better and cheaper.
So if a few humans augmented by computers and robots start outcompeting millions of humans, it can get ugly in a winner takes all freemarket capitalist world.
In a more socialist world with safety nets, it may not matter so much that most people don't have "real jobs", the productivity of the actual producers will be high enough so that from the taxes everyone can still be fed, clothed, sheltered, entertained, even if all they produce are FB posts and youtube videos (they might be cool, interesting or amusing ones though - e.g. crazy people in wingsuits jumping off mountains).
As for Science Fiction, if the AIs ever get smarter and more powerful than us, there might still be hope - they might keep us around as pets- hopefully by that time we would have established a pervasive culture where the strong take care of the weak and enjoy doing so, and the AIs adopt it too... Otherwise we'd all be considered redundant and a waste of resources.
This is not about 'highly skilled coders' it is about coders who will work for peanuts. The H-1B program is designed to lower labor costs for the big tech employers. There are plenty of coders already in the US, but corps don't want to pay the legitimate going rate. It's like free enterprise and capitalism is great until it works for the labor markets.
What a load of crap!
If you Need to import millions of Programmers from the Third World what is the point? Does in matter to an unemployed Americans where the imported programmer does his job? He might as well do it at home. If you want more Americans Programming then then someone tax Payer or Business will need need to create them. Lowering the Pay by mass importing of H1B's will create less not more.
why do you douche bags allow anon posts if you simply delete them immediately?
You assume much about password security.
You can't make a mouse-trap that the mice will not avoid.
And a mechanical cat would get it's knee replaced if ever it was broke, only that knee doesn't need as much preparation and monitoring to replace as an organic knee would have as much psychological trauma as well as self-healing complications.
Mend the organic broken-knee of working cat, nao, or Caturday will be worse.
Politicians are such idiots and most of the population is no better. It's not about "jobs" - it's about education. High tech jobs went to India, China, etc because those countries put a long-term emphasis on educating a large percentage of their school-age population in high-tech subject areas - and the population responded by actually becoming educated in those subjects. It's too late for this generation - we should be focusing on our children so that there is a future for them to live in that is not dominated by greedy senior citizens, greedy executives, greedy politicians and an uneducated workforce that wants someone else to think for them so they can buy a new flat screen and a season pass to WWE.
Also, saying "buy American" is not a solution - that ship sailed decades ago. Let's not forget that it is the same population screaming about the jobs going offshore that are willing to buy the cheap imported cars, electronics and other consumer goods from Walmart, Costco, Amazon & eBay. When the money is coming out of *your* wallet, the vast majority of people will buy the product that gives them what they want for the least amount of money. We need to re-insert ourselves into the world economy, not try to put the genie back into the bottle and become islolationists. That would simply turn the entire USA into the equivalent of an Amish community.
Someone's got to pay for the home first. With no jobs, how will the masses buy these wondrous homes you lust after?
Or should we simply cull the masses so the need for jobs does not result in the inevitable peasant uprising?
As great as the software industry is doing in the US right now. Much of that is due to the recent surge in mobile apps development. The trouble is, many of these companies looking for Android and IOS programmers, are startups and don't have a product yet. Does this sound familiar? (hint: see subject)
... he means "writing software" (1), as opposed to "selling copies of software". (2)
1. ...which has intrinsic value, and simultaneously compatible with internetworked computer systems and basic human liberty.
2. ...which have no intrinsic value, and is a business model that forces you to choose whether you want internetworked computer systems OR basic human liberty.
... yep, software is a commodity, too. If I can split an iOS app into work packages I can send the tickets to Poland, India, China, Boston, wherever. The Agile process is the New Assembly Line of the technology world.
go read Patent Failure by James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer. the state of software patents is abysmal. Why would anyone want to get into an industry dominated by the best lawyers not the best ideas and implementations? Serious software patent reform is needed if the software industry is going to lift the U.S. out of this manufacturing mire.
In China you can't sell anything except raw materials unless you: 1., Partner with one of their companies and 2., Build 50% or more of it there. On top of that they have high import and export tariffs. America has no such rules. This benefits mainly assholes like Steve Jobs. America should do the same. We could start with requiring everything purchased by the Federal Gov to be 75% made in America, except for things like oil. Not rocket. Saying we should do away with environmental regulations and such is simply just buying into the absurd Republican meme. Jobs are going to China and India because the pay is so pathetically low, and because of their trade policies. Hell Walmart can't even open a store in India.
I read all these utopian comments and 2 things come to mind. When (not if, I use history as a guide) war comes, I can't wait to see us blast the enemy with all our software. We will fall fast when we run out of all those guns, ammo and bombs we have in warehouses, since we won't make them anymore. Already when I look at the war rooms etc I look at the innumerable laptops and think we are screwed. We don't make any of them. The second problem with this utopia is energy. While we may get robots to do everything for us, imagine the amount of energy that will be required to keep us leisurely occupied and the robots running.
Yeah that will help create jobs, bringing indentured servants here. Nice...
So, in your utopia, one percent of the population will be enormous blobs of immobile suet permanently tapped into the virtual world's version of gcc, and another four percent will be directly or indirectly employed as meatnurses, and the other ninety-five percent will be... what? Sitting patiently at home coloring with crayons? That's not a goal to seek, it's a fucking nightmare dystopia. It's just substituting yourself for the banksters... don't you have any imagination?
We've known since the 1930s that everybody needs a job, everybody needs a hobby, and everybody needs a lover to be reasonably physically and mentally healthy.
Bril troll. Bravo!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The author starts by insisting that the "real" future is in software, but then goes on to say "so, we'll need this or that pie-in-the-sky plan to drastically change literally everything about the software market as it currently exists". Get real; which is it? Sheesh! What a silly argument to try and make.
I think hardware simply intimidates people. For starters, it's a bachelor's degree. Second, you'll be expected to learn calculus and understand how electricity works. That's simply too much for Americans, these days. But look around you: every body, down the last autistic, is "good with code".
Anybody can code and it doesn't require learning anything more than the language itself. You can teach yourself languages in your spare time. You can become a language-obsessed language convention debater and not even earn a degree. But so can anybody in the world.
My point is that it doesn't matter who codes, because it's so easy to do and anybody can do it, and because error checking and bug fixing is a rote thing. It's either done or it isn't, and that's the final measure of the quality of the code.
With outsourcing hardware, though, comes shitty problems like Chinese work where they just often totally forgo solder and stick everything together with hot glue, who knowingly ship flawed and unsafe products, and where the important components like ICs and boards resemble the state of technology from ten to twenty years ago.
But I don't have to drag on and on about it. There's just one way to say it: being more concerned with writing software than producing hardware, is putting the cart before the horse. *Prioritizing* software over hardware is flat-out, head-up-the-ass stupid.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
seriously
That agenda wouldn’t bring Apple’s manufacturing jobs back, but it would help to keep the company’s coding jobs here.
Since when did Apple actually MANUFACTURE hardware in the US (aside from their wire wrapped prototypes)? Even my Apple IIe was "Designed in Cupertino, CA. Made in Singapore."
when you are selling a product software is a fixed cost. it gets written once and that is it.
this is why manufacturers dont like to upgrade/change software in products. they have
to buy the raw materials for each new unit but they already have the software once purchased.
the best we could do would be to sell licenses but that wouldnt be handled by the software
writers.
you cant make an economy out of fixed cost items.
And everything else is just 2nd class.
"Your error is called the lump of labour fallacy"
That fallacy label is itself a fallacy. It assumes infinite demand for good and services to keep up with exponential productivity growth (in contrast to Malsow's Hierarchy of Need in healthy humans), as well as no existing unemployment (which shows demand has already been saturated to excess). How many goods and services does one person really need to be happy and healthy? At some point there is a law of diminishing or even negative returns.
Existing unemployment also invalidates the law of "comparative advantage" too, by the way.
There is a law of diminishing returns on more stuff and services, but no reason productivity should not continue to grow exponentially for quite a while longer through robotics and other automation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy#Criticism
Related:
http://www.responsiblefinance.ch/appeal/
"The authors of this appeal are deeply concerned that more than three years since the outbreak of the financial and macroeconomic crisis that highlighted the pitfalls, limitations, dangers and responsibilities of main-stream thought in economics, finance and management, the quasi-monopolistic position of such thought within the academic world nevertheless remains largely unchallenged."
We should actually be rejoicing so many are going away through increased productivity. But to move forward we need a mix of a basic income, a gift economy, improved subsistence, and better participatory government planning.
And we also need to rethink jobs so they are more playful and enjoyable. Why suffer eight hours to then vegetate another eight hours? Why not have more meaningful experiences all the time, integrating joy and useful production?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The "manufacturing" problem is only a symptom of what is wrong with America. So what's wrong with America? A lot. The tax structure, the rule of law, or lack thereof. Institutionalized corruption.
How to fix?
Legalize prostitution.
Some other ideas include:
1) Eliminate the income tax. The elimination of the income tax also eliminates the need for the government to track each and every person.
2) Institute a consumption tax (GST) of about 10%.
3) Fund the government by printing money, not by selling bonds. Printing money is less inflationary than selling bonds. The printing of money to fund the government becomes an indirect tax.
4) Maximum of 1 term of 1 year in government. A person should not be able to make a career as a politician. Hopefully this reduces corruption and brings back the rule of law.
5) Prostitution should be legal.
As you can write software once, and sell usage rights to it an unlimited number of times. So in effect an unlimited amount of money is spent on a limited amount of work. I wonder how someone can think that's sustainable.
I don't see why the US couldn't do hardware. Labor costs are near negligible on devices like computers, particularly if you optimize the design to be easy to manufacture. And Labor costs are also quite low in the US compared to other countries manufacturing hardware like Germany for example.
The problem is that local manufacturing clashes with the idea of large companies controlling the market. If everybody builds locally, it's trivial to do some last-minute changes.
This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
It's a false dichotomy. We can both encourage hardware manufacturing and assembly, while also stimulating software creation and development.
Besides, I'd argue that the two industries are complimentary and will grow from being in close proximity. To me it's just plain common sense.
The speed of light is considerably lower in certain media...it's lower in water, although not by that much.
Of course none of that has to do with Einstein's equation.
> Your robot gardener grows the food
Soylent green, maybe.
I am a software programer and can tell you Software can't run without hardware (eg. processors, adurino, picaxe)
Haven't recent troubles with energy dependence shown us the dangers of relying on foreign nations for critical materials? If we are to become a nation based on software development, how do we ensure fluctuations in hardware availability aren't as damaging as current fluctuations in oil? Is it possible to craft our future in such a way the next generation will not go to war over ICs?
Reason why US has software design / implementation advantage is because more grew up with computers. US grew up with computers because they were designed here. Computers are designed here because they were made here, and young designers learned with prototypes and readily available parts from the extra production.
The current crop of designers came from US advantage in past half century in electronics. Notice how digital cameras are not designed in US anymore? Computers (other than apple) are not designed in US anymore? Best selling cars not designed in US anymore? These are all industries where we exported the manufacturing. Without manufacturing, you lose design, after you lose design, you lose software. So, the key is to actually get sustainable manufacturing back in US.