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Hertz Is Pulling a Disney
New submitter wcrowe writes: Hertz is laying off over 200 IT employees, outsourcing the work to IBM India Private Limited, which has filed paperwork for H1-B visas to bring in replacements from overseas. This sounds pretty similar to what Disney did a year ago.
Republicans want for us all.
It's already too late: the class struggle is over. The One Percenters won. From now on it's a long slide towards misery and, ultimately, elimination for us the dispossessed masses.
I thought the whole point of H1-Bs was to fill jobs that they couldn't find qualified applicants for? But now they are firing (excuse me, 'laying off') the workers, then turning around and claiming they need to import people? If this doesn't get rid of the excuses for the H1-B program, NOTHING will...
Yeah, just look at how awesome the Soviet Union is..... Oh, wait.
This H1-B visa is being vastly abused by big companies. Time for congress to step back and rethink.
This sort of thing is happening at too high a frequency.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
They'll just import their foreign slaves, and we're doomed!
How is this even legal? Is there not a requirement to prove that the required skilled labour cannot be sourced locally? The race to the bottom how really moved into the final stretch!
And the Democrats as well....
All of those assholes in washington keep allowing this to happen. Until we get representation for the people and not the corporations, it will only get worse.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
to empty foreign countries of skilled, qualified, tech-savvy people, is well underway. Why should they use their skills and knowledge to contribute and build up their own countries, if the U.S government can do something about it? Expect the H1B cap to be raised further.
If you think "all companies that do this are run by Republicans," you really need to think "the few Republican-run companies that do this are joining the long list of Democrat-run ones."
Silicon Valley has the highest H-1B use in the US, and they're primarily left-wingers out there.
There are also a lot of H-1B recipients at colleges and universities, which are by no means right-wing enclaves.
How about a few hundred mil in "campaign contributions"?
Or for Republicans, for that matter.
It does not matter how you vote, but every time elected are the clowns who promise free stuff (be it Obamacare, free education, free phones, free house, free security), that free stuff needs to be taken in the form of taxes, fees or higher fees from artificial monopolies, from somebody.
Sooner or later those evil entrepreneurs will re-run the numbers and will pluck the plug.
The cries of dissatisfaction for migrating the jobs are only from the ignorant ones. All large corporations have outsourced a lot of jobs to India already. Have you heard of Accenture? Many of the jobs were migrated a decade ago. Hertz is merely
There are entire industries of IT support, customer support, bank representing and accounting services in India and Phillipines serving Fortune 500 companies.
Haven't you noticed that when you call Citi, Microsoft, or HP, for support, your representative "Jessica" after some questions tells about nice weather in Jaipur, and lovely "Ben" is from Bangalore working his first hour on his shift.
Sanders wants to raise the salaries of H1B workers. Which would lessen stories like these, and reduce them to situations in which you truly can only find the person you want overseas (and make sure they get paid a fair rate).
Clinton wants to raise the cap and allow more stories like this to happen.
This isn't just a Republican/Democrat debate, it's a more complex split.
They way this usually works, a detail many don't mention is..
If a 200 member team is outsourced, the company just asks for 10-20 H1-Bs in replacement - rest of them are in India, etc.
Even that is bad... But the number should be mentioned for the complete picture.
Even regular (non Outsourcing company) H1-B employees are afraid when one of these vultures swoop in.
The current workers won't take a 50% pay cut and we can't find qualified workers for what we are now offering so we need to fill the positions with H1-B visa holding workers.
Please do the needful.
I work in a Java development shop which is predominantly about 80% either India offshore or H1B onshore. Now my employer is building a development center in India. While I cannot blame Indian workers for the opportunities given to them, we are handing over high paying jobs to other countries. It is hard to recommend this type of work to young people as the jobs will not be there for them in the future. This certainly generates a perceived 'need' for HB1 workers. #dyingbreed #americantechnologyworkers
"Silicon Valley has the highest H-1B use in the US, and they're primarily left-wingers out there."
Got any proof to support that assertion?
California (and SiValley) companies are generally quite right-wing - the MBAs have a pretty firm foothold there.
It's because of the entertainment industry that people think that the state is very socialist/left wing.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
It would be cool if people annoyed by this behavior had a central web site to get together.
Then maybe we could dictate to corporations how they should behave, under the threat of consumers no longer using their products.
So if this web site did exist, and enough people joined it, then perhaps email campaigns refusing to use hertz rentals until they reverse this decision might have an impact.
If enough indicate they will refuse to use hertz, then hertz would comply with the demands or go out of business.
IMO this is exactly how corporations should be treated, the very second they cross the line stop using their products (I've been doing this for years).
Don't worry about jobs lost, because someone else will fill the spot and comply.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
That movie comes to mind. Soon these CIOs, CEOs, etc will be targeted directly themselves by angry workers. They will have a whole new concept to the idea of "getting fired".
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/07/02/how-silicon-valleys-10-biggest.html
Vote trump as the other gop want more h1b and no more aca so pre ex can come back
I know the guy who rose through the ranks at TD Bank and who flew to India with the president of TD Bank for two months to work with IBM India. They outsourced much of their IT to India.
Or maybe the fact the governor, lieutenant governor, both senators and most of the house reps are all democrats?
Every American IT worker should boycott Hertz in solidarity and trash them online whenever possible.
On their way out the door.
of American IT workers with South Asians IT workers have worked out for the corporations that have done so.
The article has some small, honest mistakes. The paragraphs:
Hertz is trying to improve its IT operations. It hired a new CIO last year with experience in the car rental industry, Tyler Best.
The firm seeks a "transformative IT agenda," said Hertz CEO John Tague, in a conference call with analysts last year, according to a transcript at Seeking Alpha.
Tom Kennedy, Hertz CFO, told analysts in an earning call last year that "we have 1,500 people in the back office, which is quite double what it should be. Our call centers are probably double what they should be," according to the Seeking Alpha transcript. He said the firm's IT spend is over $400 million a year.
should actually read
Hertz is sacrificing customer service for short-term profits. It hired a new CIO last year with experience in the car rental industry, Tyler Best.
The firm seeks a "seppuku IT agenda," said Hertz CEO John Tague, in a conference call with analysts last year, according to a transcript at Seeking Alpha.
Tom Kennedy, Hertz CFO, told analysts in an earning call last year that "we have 1,500 people in the back office. We can reduce that by 750 people by eliminating time spent actually doing things. We need to completely change that to people filling out forms to get IBM to do things for us vastly slower and for vastly higher costs. Ideally, once this is done, our change control costs will drop because nothing will ever get done. Our call centers are probably double what they should be -- having enough staff to serve customers is so 1990," according to the Seeking Alpha transcript. He said the firm's IT spend is over $400 million a year. "Tyler and I should be able to get at least a few million of that as a kickback from IBM, once we're parachuted out for destroying the company."
Besides drug money, the #1 source of capital in Mexico is from wire transfers from the USA. They send a lot of it back home.
Nobody's suggesting communism, which like pure capitalism just doesn't scale well. This is proof of the latter--capitalist companies scale very well indeed, but the benefits of capitalism for the average person go down as the average company size goes up. One huge national company in any industry simply needs fewer support people, customer service people, lawyers, accountants, custodial workers, etc. than the same geographic footprint served by multiple smaller businesses. This is the still heart and black dead soul of the mergers and acquisitions game. It's why small businesses owned by people relatively local to the area(s) served are good for communities and why huge corporations tend to be parasitic instead. First, small businesses employ actual people and second, small business owners are to a much larger extent than corporate shareholders socially accountable to the communities they live in. Offshoring is simply not in the small business playbook.
I'm not a fan of the communist ideal either, but let's face some uncomfortable facts: the Soviet Union suffered near its start from a paranoid dictator (Stalin) who didn't give a crap about communism or any other kind of -ism other than his own power, it was devastated in a war in which it sustained vastly more casualties than we did and which in the US did not touch our industrial infrastructure, plus after that war it had to endure literally decades of economic warfare from the west. If there's one thing western countries, governments, and companies know how to do it's wage economic warfare. In that narrow regard, there is a similarity: people who work for a living have endured economic warfare levied against them since Reagan and Thatcher's times and yes, it's time to change the economic rules to no longer literally favor the outsourcing and offshoring of jobs.
It's funny--what the Nazi regime and the Japanese military dictatorship could not destroy we've allowed our own capitalists to dismantle and we've not fought them with even a fraction of the vigor we prosecuted World War II with. That needs to change.
The owner class is hard, hard right. Like Robber baron grade hard right. The workers are left on social issues, but a lot are still hard right on the economy.
That's sort of the problem. There are lots of folks who are left wing socially (pro-gun control, pro-gay rights, pro-choice, etc) but get real right wing real fast when they think they're taxes are going up. Our Media is left wing on social issues but hard right on economics. Free Trade, Trickle Down economics and Austerity are practically gospel in American media.
Part of the problem is folks look at just about every expense that isn't food as taxes. I've caught lots of folks doing it. Insurance? Tax. Phone Bill? Tax. etc, etc. The other problem is that after the Iraqi War Americans aren't seeing good returns on their taxes. Literally Trillions of wealth was just handed to a lucky few in exchange for nothing. We've let large scale corruption slide for so long that folks have lost confidence in the gov't. They've also forgotten what America was like before the Feds stepped in and started preventing super fund sites from happening (Flint Michigan Water Supply anyone?).
The other problem is Bill Clinton. He moved the country hard right so he could forge an alliance to get into the prez office. Again, left on social issues hard right on the economy. Trump brought up Tariffs but made it a point not to use the "T" word. What's funny is watching all the folks out there who know something is wrong but can't figure out what to do about it pushing Trump and Sanders up in the polls. It's gonna be funnier when Rubio or Bush gets the election despite popular vote thanks to hard right stuff like Citizens United.
Oh, and the colleges have been moving hard right too. Where do you think those $10,000/semester tuition bills came from?
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I realize this is a News for Nerds site, and many nerds fear losing their jobs in the short term to places like India. But 15 years ago /. used to have a lot more vocal free trade thinkers. The concept is that India gets richer, China gets richer, and that leads to peace and more net jobs (for example, Hollywood movies earn much higher international sales, USA chicken and corn exports go through the roof, Buick triples its exports). If this makes Hertz rentals cheaper, that income goes to something else in the USA, probably.
I explain it to my kids this way. Your cell phone was assembled by Taiwanese owned companies in China. That alone 1) reduces chance of war between China and Taiwan, and 2) reduces the cost of your cell phone by 400%, so 3) Chinese people can now afford to buy the cell phones, and 4) the cost of the cell phone falls another 400% because of scale of manufacture (as Chinese can now afford them). Would you rather live in a USA where the cell phones are assembled in California and cost $8000 and the Chinese are working in rice fields? Sacrificing the 1000 California assembly line jobs creates about 10,000 Chinese jobs (from the increased production due to cheaper phones) and creates programming jobs for cell phones - in California.
The same people who got alarmed by outsourced phone assembly jobs now express alarm about the programming jobs. And they sound like the same people who were alarmed in the 1970s when Hertz started buying more Japanese cars, so the cost of cars went down and the quality came up and Japan became wealthy and peaceful and eventually opened Toyota and Honda factories in the USA.
Trump says China and Mexico stole your jobs, Bernie says corporations sent your jobs to China and Mexico. They are both old enough to remember how utterly stupid the anti-Japanese-car kerfluffle turned out to be, shame on both.
Gently reply
it might give us a few years of relief, but it won't work in the long run. You could make the base pay 8x the going rate for a tech and it wouldn't help because sooner or later Sanders will be out of office and the "going rate" will be defined as whatever it takes to get around the rules. It's like Wargames. The only way to win is not to play.
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who doesn't think H1-B hurts them? Oh, and doesn't have a sweet gov't job (either directly or because they served in the Military & work for a defense contractor now).
/.).
/. crowd has finally realized their in real trouble here. We're all in the same stop the blue collar guys were in the 80s when manufacturing went overseas. What I'm wondering is if we're gonna do anything about it? Or are we gonna roll over and play dead like the blues did.
I'm curious. Not too long ago when a story like this hit all the posts chimed in about how they'd just leave and go to another better paying company that doesn't do this stuff. Nobody thought it would even catch up with them and they all thought they were irreplaceable. Me being me I knew sooner or later they'd get around to everybody except a few MIT geniuses (who have better things to do than bitch on
Basically, I think the
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Those are state level offices. California is a big state. San Jose is tiny compared to LA.
CIO: "I want to add shell control for puppet to http so that our remote admins will be able to administer the system."
IT reports: "Hell no! That opens up a million security holes!"
CIO: "Waah!! You're all fired and I hire people overseas who allow business to function right!"
I thought it was illegal to replace workers for a specified period of time after a layoff. For example, If I lay off Joan the Accountant, I can't hire another accountant to take her place for a fixed period unless I specifically offer the job back to Joan first.
Is my understanding of labor law incorrect?
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Well, they beat you into space, so obviously they had all these spinoffs and seven Rubles back for every Ruble spent... oh wait.
PS: "Soviet Union *is*"???
I've been out in industry for exactly a decade. I know who they are laying off. I would bet heavily that these are the guys that like doing things the way they have always done things and are content on not improving it. They're the drafters that refused to learn "that CAD thing". You see it all over Slashdot. You guys sure like things the way you used to do them. "Why kids these days don't need to learn Assembly".
I spent a recent layoff learning Python 3.4. It's near impossible to get people off of 2.7 at work or Matlab. Why? Because that's what they learned during undegrad and grad school and that's where everything is written. And they do have a small point, I'm don't have time to go back and re-write 50 years of working software. Once we as a society figured out Linear Algebra in Fortran we stopped messing with it. Numpy, Matlab, et al are just pretty BLAS wrappers.
However at impedes a lot of progress. At this point I feel like I'm in Office Space half the time:
1st Bob: What you do at Initech is you take the specifications from the software engineer and bring them down to the hardware engineers?
Tom: Yes, yes that's right.
2nd Bob: Well then I just have to ask why can't the software engineers use the hardware engineer's API?
Tom: Well, I'll tell you why... because... software engineers are not good at dealing with APIs...
1st Bob: So you physically take the flash files from the software engineer?
Tom: Well... No. The project lead does that... or they're e-mailed....
If you're doing things the same way you did them even a year ago, then some lazier person that does your job is currently writing a script to do it that way. So in 50 years we can all look back and laugh at "Those idiots used to do it by hand". If you write a script to save you 1 minute a day, that's 4 hours a business year. If you write a script to save you and all of your co-workers 1 minute a day. That's an additional 4 hours per head per year. Start adding that up over a decade or two.
It's entertaining to watch you guys not wanting to use new tools, I just started writing new tools to use the old tools I wrote. I could reduce my manager's headcount by 3-4 and keep the same work level output with an improvement in quality. Software engineers have already done that, it's what continuous integration is for. Then they got tired of dealing with merges, so they wrote tools to automatically do merges if everything tests out.
CGP Grey's "Humans Need Not Apply" is a good video on the current state of automation. While I don't share quite his outlook his statements about what is going on right now is dead on. (Humans' will just start building warp drives instead of dicking around with what we do now). If TensorFlow can pick those images out that accurately they sure as heck can read the graphs I used to have to read much, much better. Give me the picture of a tachometer trace and I could tell you what's wrong it your car. I don't need to hear it, see it or know what's going on.
Last night on SharkTank there was a guy that had a mobile app that could take your measurements 20% better than a professional tailor, just by taking some photos and doing some math. If you were hoping to be a tailor and spend time measuring people, I have bad news.
Engineers these days use Simulink. Finding Engineers that can Code is hard. So we taught the en
It's already too late: the class struggle is over. The One Percenters won. From now on it's a long slide towards misery and, ultimately, elimination for us the dispossessed masses.
Buy an unregistered handgun and shot a One Percenter. Drain their blood and pour it onto the floor of whatever corporation strikes your fancy. Bonus points for killing a One Percenter of East Indian ancestry not dedicated to doing a public good for society.
Brief history of 'global economics':
1. Move the means of production overseas where regulations and labor costs are significantly lower. Think steel and many manufacturing plants.
2. Outsource technical support when a reliable global communication infrastructure is in place. Think any customer service.
3. Import foreign workers for any jobs that don't fit into #1 or #2. Think everything else.
This is the logical conclusion of free-market, free-trade capitalism: labor is another commodity that follows supply and demand; hence, your job can easily be done by someone in a third world country for a fraction of the cost,
The only real problem is that this system will eventually collapse in upon itself; if you keep putting the consumers of your products out of work in favor of extremely low cost workers, who is going to buy your product?
While Henry Ford's reasoning for raising his worker's wages is debatable, the principle is sound - if your consumers cannot afford your product, you will quickly go out of business.
video
You mean Hillary Clinton is a Republican? Her own words supporting increasing H1-B visas.
story
Or how she helped her husband make millions in speeches from companies wanting to increase H-1B visas. She even asked the Obama administration to remove H-1B caps while she was Secretary of State.
So, sure, other than your facts being wrong, you are completely right.
Even better in the usa the prison dr us free and you get room and board
Waited 35 years for trickle down 150 million still waiting.
Then what few jobs there are you give to others.
Then Democrats hope turned to the only ind of hope I have ever know in my 55 years of life hopes dashed.
They failed just as spectacularly.
Cant you please just this once before I die not vote for either of these losers.
People are arguing this as if it's a political football and furcrissakes turning it into capitalism-vs-communism.
It's about trade vs profession.
This isn't a serious problem with doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants, or teachers. Why? They're real professions, licensed by the local state. This isn't an inherent barrier to foreigners - if they meet the qualifications, it's a fraction of a year's effort and pay to get certified - but it's a huge barrier to the underqualified.
The hirers here are hoping that (a) the new-hires can pick it up well enough that with a few extra staff (and still cheaper) they can keep up production and (b) that the cracks won't show until they're on to their next promotion.
IT needs to be a Real Profession for about six reasons, but as a side-effect, it would end this continual pressure downward on the salaries of everybody in the industry by various efforts to dilute the talent pool with poorly-qualified competitors. Hiring kids away from college is another.
Just about anybody used to be able to hang out a shingle and be a dentist or doctor; engineering was a trade you picked up on the job working under a builder. Anybody want to go back to that? If not, support professionalising IT.
The concept is that India gets richer, China gets richer, and that leads to peace and more net jobs (for example, Hollywood movies earn much higher international sales
Okay, I'll bite.
Economists tout free trade as benefiting everyone because of rationalizations and predictions. There's no strict math involved, and it is based on flawed assumptions.
In the case of recent outsourcing, two decades ago the populists pointed out that domestic salaries would stay flat or go down.
Economists agreed, but pointed out that because the imported goods would be much cheaper, your purchasing power would actually go up.
And now we see that this actually happened: salaries have largely stagnated over the last two decades, and there are Chinese dollar stores everywhere.
Are we better off from free trade?
This is how rationalizations get sold as science in the economic community.
The flawed assumption is infinite consumption: there will be an ever-expanding need for more goods, which will provide an ever-expanding need for more workers. You'll never run out of jobs, you'll never run out of places to sell your goods.
(Example: Common economic theory states that if you double your sales outlets, you double your income. This is true for small stores, but once you sell through WalMart, you're done. The theory doesn't account for the finite extent of the world.)
We see now that if *every* job gets outsourced, there are no jobs domestically and the economy falters.
But the economists will rationalize it away, saying that this is somehow better for everyone.
I always find it amusing how both communists and libertarians fall back to the "no true Scotsman" argument when you point out how equally idiotic their ideologies are.
Merkins proudly exporting Free Trade at the barrel of a gun for years until it effects themselves!
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/eb/20/e3/eb20e3369cdd65c9bf54736294b98fc2.jpg
(Uranus-Hertz)
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Economists tout free trade as benefiting everyone because of rationalizations and predictions. There's no strict math involved, and it is based on flawed assumptions.
I predict that economists will get their dander up and respond with "Nuh-uh!", so here's a challenge.
Without appealing to the argument of "current school of thought holds that...", answer the following questions:
1) What is the right formula for calculating inflation?
2) What's the right value of inflation to have?
3) How important is it to hit this value exactly (ie - is it catastrophic or minor to be off by a percent?)
If you say you can't give a numerical value because "it depends", or "it's complicated", then what is the formula to calculate the value based on the dependencies?
Inflation is a simple concept and there *is* a right/best value to have, but economists are so entangled in "schools of thought" that they don't bother to think things through critically or rationally.
Also, note that inflation dipped negative for a couple of months last year.
Did we just come through another recession?
Prison is better almost anywhere other than the US. The US is one of the few places that effectively encourages regular rape of inmates as a means to increase punishment without having the government have to get its hands dirty.
Learn to love Alaska
I resigned yesterday but am glad to help out however I can.
There is a small bias in donations to Democrats. But all the left-wingers in Texas are registered Republicans because that's the only way to select local politicians, as many run unopposed in the general election.
When you don't know the difference between party and beliefs, you'll get confused.
Learn to love Alaska
Federal prison is not like that, just the State draconian zoos.
Though club fed has its own corruption issues, the rape problem is rare now.
There is a huge bias in donations to Democrats: Democrats are the darlings of doctors, lawyers, unions, journalists, educators, green companies, public sector employees, and Wall Street. That is, most of the people who are looking for crony capitalist support from the government. And the Democrats deliver.
I wouldn't call it active encouragement. Only passive encouragement.
Southern California, the LA area in general has a huge population when compared to the rest of the state, and whiles SF and Bezerkely are hubs of true strangeness. The rest of the state is a totally different place not truly represented by either of those groups. Northern Californians generally despise the LA/Hollywood set, and Hollywood is so self absorbed they hardly even acknowledge the rest of the world exists.
There is strong support to break CA into at least 2 states but SoCal holds the hammer in votes and generally dictates the way California swings much to the rest of our dismay.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Microsoft has laid off US workers by the thousands, while simultaneous sitting before congress and insisting more offshore visa workers were needed to make up for "sever shortages" of US workers. Microsoft probably has tens of thousands of visa workers in the US, and it's been going on for decades.
The number of US workers hired by IBM fell every years. Finally the number of US workers at IBM dropped below 25%, and IBM stopped publishing the numbers.
Many other US tech companies have been replacing US workers by the thousands, and have been doing so for decades.
But when some non-tech company replaces a few US workers, all the sudden it's a BFD. Why is that?
Repubs, and dems, alike take big $$ from corporations, and help those corporations bash US workers. It has been going on for decades, at least.
Making this a partisan issue insures no progress will be made. We will just keep blaming the other party - when it is plainly obvious that both parties have sold out the US worker.
US tech companies, like Microsoft, having been doing far worse for decades.
US IT workers bitch endlessly about the visa situation. But all they do is send articles back and forth to one another.
Change is not going to happen unless US IT start showing some backbone.
Or maybe the fact the governor, lieutenant governor, both senators and most of the house reps are all democrats?
The Republican Party in California has more in common with the endangered spotted owl than 1/10th of the U.S. population.
You cannot eliminate this problem by constantly whining, and passing articles back and forth either.
As another poster here pointed, we need to make IT a true profession. We need to organize, raise money, lobby congress, that sort of thing.
Nobody cares if something is unjust, or not. It's all about money, and votes.
"... the rape problem is rare now."
Not every night.
Don't step on the baby.
My company is doing this %H!T too! There are more people from India in our IT department then there was 1 year ago. They are taking up more and more space. Frankly I treat them with content. I refuse to answer their questions, I ignore them when they walk up to my cube, I don't give them the time of day. But since they don't know our systems and no IT worker will tell them. It's rather fun to give them miss-information and watch them F* up things. Then you complain they are LESS qualified than an American because the don't communicate well in English and miss-understand what you are telling them. More people should do this. Basically TORPEDO the whole outsource thing from the trenches. I'm sorry but replacing Americans with H1B's cr@p has to STOP! As people retire or leave my company an Indian is hired in their place. Because you know they couldn't find a qualified AMERICAN to do it. I find this UTTER BULL $H!t!
Uhh dumb ass, capitalism has scaled to most of the god damn planet and made all of those places it touched better off than before. I'm not saying it is the perfect end result, but it did scale quite well. The world was a serious shithole before that.
Free and Fair Trade is an OXYMORON!
Free and Fair Trade = LESS JOBS for Americans especially the high paying ones. First it was the Manufacturing jobs now it's the IT jobs. You don't see Wall Street jobs or Executive jobs being outsourced do you?
When you outsource, the outsource company's primary goal is to extract money from you. Secondary is to make you like it (or do what you want them to do, however you like to word it). When you hire, the employees should want to do the best for the company, as that keeps them employed longer and better.
The "next quarter" CEOs don't seem to understand the difference.
Learn to love Alaska
Says ad hominem attacker ironically.
"If they have money and want to keep it, they can't really be Democrats or leftists, so I'm going to redefine people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet as Republicans because, um, whatever."
Too many people make the mistake in believing that 'the free market' was a modern or even American invention. In truth it's a least as old as human beings if not older. It's regulations which as created modern society by reiging in 'the free market' with stability and a measure of fairness to both workers (who create a larger middle class) and businesses.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
scaled to what from what? Most of the world was an unfettered capitalist shit hole taken to its natural conclusion 1%'ers on steroids!
It's hard to swallow the safety net. You have it banged into your head while you're a kid that you shouldn't need help, and if you do it's because of your poor character and life choices. Over and over again I hear the phrase "There's always a choice". I hate to keep harping on this but tell that to the kids with permanent brain damage from lead in Flint, Mi...
None of this is by accident. This is how the ruling class stay in power. It's part of what keeps the pitch forks at bay. When FDR & Co pushed through Social Security so we wouldn't have legions of homeless starving old people they pretended it was a pension program because those people wouldn't take the help. Ayn Rand nearly died homeless late in life before one of her close friends talked her into taking the help she needed (her books didn't do so well when there weren't billionaire asshats pushing the Austerity agenda).
There are other factors at play. For one thing people measure their quality of life relatively, not objectively. This is why it's important to have an underclass (blacks in the south, the bottom caste in India, etc, etc). It's the whole "Starving kids in China" syndrome. As long as someone has it worse people don't demand better. Part of that's fear of losing what little they have (aka Conservatism) and part of that is just how people measure things when they're not used to Math and Science. Again, there's a reason why the ruling class is fighting against public education these days...
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I'm not quite sure why you're brining up the soviet union's problems, but I (perhaps incorrectly) get the sense that you're brining it up to suggest that external factors--rather than internal economic policy--were the major causes (or even the root cause) of economic problems in the soviet union. I'm only responding to that point.
the Soviet Union suffered near its start from a paranoid dictator (Stalin) who didn't give a crap about communism or any other kind of -ism other than his own power, it was devastated in a war in which it sustained vastly more casualties than we did and which in the US did not touch our industrial infrastructure, plus after that war it had to endure literally decades of economic warfare from the west. If there's one thing western countries, governments, and companies know how to do it's wage economic warfare.
These things sure hurt, but it doesn't fully explain the soviet union's economic problems or why the soviet union was unable to overcome them.
The fundamental problem with the soviet union is that the state owned enterprises and collective farms were incredibly inefficient both in terms of their production and what they produced. I'm not from the former soviet union, but I have many friends who are, and I hear lots of stories about how the collective farms would harvest crops so inefficiently that people in a town could basically subsist off everything they left on the ground. Many got most of their food from personal garden plots, which produced much better quality food. Of course, since production quotas were set by some central office, they didn't respond to which (inefficiently produced) goods were in demand.
None of this proves that "pure capitalism" (whatever that means) is better, but don't misrepresent the causes of the soviet union's economic woes in terms of these "uncomfortable facts".
Given the number of guards directly implicated in rape rings, I'm not so sure I'd consider it "passive". And agents of the government encourage the discussion of the practice to further scare people into plea bargains. That's actively promoting the idea, if not the act.
Learn to love Alaska
there are many more options to fix this than just communism - an ideology invented in London.
One huge national company in any industry simply needs fewer support people, customer service people, lawyers, accountants, custodial workers, etc. than the same geographic footprint served by multiple smaller businesses.
That's fundamentally a good thing - less labor is required in order to create the same product, so the world is richer.
The problem is that the resulting wealth is more unevenly distributed. But inequality can be fixed by using a more progressive tax system and providing a social safety net. That is a much more productive approach than trying to preserve redundant jobs.
Why isn't Fossil in the news. I had lots of friends lose jobs to Infosys., after training their replacements, etc...
Yeah, watching Locked Up Abroad, I was surprised that almost every other country (including the Middle East) had better prisons than the USA. Only Latin America was typically worse.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Are you joking? NoCal votes 90% Democrat regardless if the candidate already bankrupted the state twice (Jerry Brown) or if they are the worst Senators in the entire Senate (Feinstein and Boxer). SoCal (much closer to 50/50 down here) couldn't make a difference if they wanted to.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
It's regulations which as created modern society by reiging in 'the free market' with stability and a measure of fairness to both workers (who create a larger middle class) and businesses.
True. There is no "free" in free markets, more of a marketing lie. The "free market" is where things are owned and controlled. Those that own more have more control over those that have it the least.
mfwright@batnet.com
Microsoft has laid off US workers by the thousands, while simultaneous sitting before congress and insisting more offshore visa workers were needed to make up for "sever shortages" of QUALIFIED US workers.
FTFY. The workers they laid off were not qualified. The positions they were hiring for required different qualifications than those they laid off.
Not elimination... they need you to keep their lawn mowed and toilets cleaned.
Did we watch the same show? Have you really seen a prison in the US? Or are you just regurgitating fun sounding things you read online? Those overseas prisons where fucked up. US prisons have problems for sure, but it ain't that bad man.
There'll be robots for all of that in a few years.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
It's already too late: the class struggle is over. The One Percenters won. From now on it's a long slide towards misery and, ultimately, elimination for us the dispossessed masses.
How much a year do you make? If it's more than $US 32,400 then you are part of the 1%. Oh, you meant the other one percent. Typical. I can hear you now: Everyone else is a blood sucking parasite, but *I* earn my money.
capitalism is the continuous cycle of optimization resulting in a survival of the fittest situation for businesses with the most fit being fully automated. outsourcing to a country with lower wages is simply an optimization. the question is how long we can sustain an economy by using such practices before it either collapses or a secondary post-scarcity economy springs up.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
No, that would be "modern technology", and science and weird things like indoor plumbing and germ theory...
Mostly random stuff.
I would have gone with Avis or Enterprise if I knew they were doing this.
"made all of those places it touched better off than before"
You mean it made it better for the top of the chain. Everyone underneath is still a slave. The actual improvement in quality of life is due more to -people- improving due to education.
It's a popular myth/legend/stereotype, but there is absolutely ZERO factual basis to back it up:
http://blog.case.edu/case-news...
http://www.newmaterials.com/Ne...
Come again?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_election_in_California,_2010
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_election_in_California,_2012
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_gubernatorial_election,_2014
The coast, I'll grant you, but not the inland.
They won't listen. In fact, they'll repeat the same damned thing in the next thread. What's awesome is when they throw in a comment about bigotry or prejudice along with those statements. I had a bit written up and someone asked me to publish it online somewhere but, alas, somehow I managed to delete *all* my topic replies and I've not yet dug through the history to find it again. Basically, it said I didn't kick the dog, lie, cheat, or steal - I just worked hard, had good people to help me, and got damned lucky. Yet, I'm told I'm evil... Even though I've got it set up so that I'll be giving in perpetuity, long after my death and as long as the US economy is still viable, I'm told I'm evil. *sighs*
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
"1%" was always a shorthand for "investor class", high-incomes that come more from investment than work. Really, less than 0.1% qualify, but that looks dumb on a sign.
Mighty dishonest of you to change the set to include the entire world, which completely skews the value of the dollar earned in comparison to the market.
In other words, if someone makes $20k but has to pay $4 for a gallon of milk, you can't say they're 8 times better off than someone making $2500 a year and paying $0.50/gallon.
https://www.google.com/search?...
A quick glance finds massive factual basis for that "myth".
Learn to love Alaska
_American business tax laws actually encourage this type of activity_.
Why do you think Ford and just recently Carrier decided to move thousands of jobs to Mexico? Or the fact here in the USA, the states with the lowest tax burden are attracting many thousands of jobs? Or why in their (in my humble opinion) insanity in raising business income taxes, the state of Connecticut is losing thousands of jobs (GE just announced they're moving a lot of their operations out of the state)? Or why Apple has 70% of its $218 billion liquid asset hoard sitting in non-US banks? Or why American tech companies engage in that highly complex "Double Irish with Dutch Sandwich" accounting scheme to substantially lower their tax burden for European operations?
That's why I strongly support radical tax reform in the USA _so it encourages savings and capital formation staying in the country_. Business income should be taxed at a no-loophole flat rate of around 12%, which would make it among the lowest business tax rates on Earth and because the taxation is simple, save hundreds of billions per year in compliance costs, which could encourage businesses to far less likely export jobs for tax reasons.
A well known car racing personality, who I won't name, told me how he used to rent Hertz cars while on the road in the racing circuit. He said he drove their cars in L1 (1st gear) everywhere, around town, on the freeway, etc. He said one time he was on the freeway in 1st gear, and put it in reverse... He said the engine/trans broke loose and fell on the road. This was in the 60s-70s.
Mighty dishonest of you to change the set to include the entire world, which completely skews the value of the dollar earned in comparison to the market.
Actually, it's pretty dishonest of you to not include the entire world. The entire world looks at the excesses that you own, that you consume and are disgusted. But, of course, in typical self-centered fashion, you point to someone else and say but look, they're worse!
Go ahead, live in your cocoon, isolated from 99% -- just like the 1% that you despise.
Whats the quality, level, and consistancy of an engagement like tthis?
sare the results the same, have the language barriers dropped? Whats the Burn-out level of these offshore individuals? Are you "really" getting what ur paying for?
or are you paying for a poor babysitter just to be there, as a false sense of security?
What happens when the "shit really hits the fan" will the tallent be there to pick up the peices?
The old addage is true,,
No one gives a shit untill it's all fucked up, then all the guys at the top with their golden parachutes wonder what happened, and those under them feel the burn in the un-employment lines.
Good for you, not being evil.
Now tell us about the rest of the people with money. Look at them, nice and deep, and find out what skeletons lurk in their closets.
Unregulated capitalism not only doesn't scale, it is destructive.
There is no such thing as an ad hominem attack.
It is a fallacy.
Calling someone an idiot is not a fallacy, it is name-calling.
You are one fucking retarded piece of shit.
Amazingly enough, I have. No, they're not all evil either. Some are. I don't think they're any more evil than someone with less money, they're just more able to act on that evil and that evil has a greater impact. But, no... They're not all evil. If you think so then that's kind of disappointing. It says more about you than it says about them.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Outsourcing your job to foreigners right here at home should be illegal.
Time to join a union, people. Your turn next.
I totally agree. Unfortunately, political structures in the US are almost purpose-built to allow a small number of very wealthy to buy off everyone else. Europe is better protected against these abuses by having multi-party legislatures elected by proportional voting systems that prevent a couple of corrupt old parties from squatting on the chest of a nation and feeding on its carcass....as is now the case in the US.
So you are claiming that Indians are all H1B's and not, you know actual US citizens?
Correcting an accidental selection. Sorry!
It's the posters/users job to be funny, cute or downright irrelevant. But here we have another headline that means nothing or everything. Do a Disney? You mean, make cartoons, sue file sharers to oblivion, etc?
Amazingly enough, I have. No, they're not all evil either. Some are. I don't think they're any more evil than someone with less money, they're just more able to act on that evil and that evil has a greater impact. But, no... They're not all evil. If you think so then that's kind of disappointing. It says more about you than it says about them.
Except that says nothing about me, because I notice how what you're saying is more concerned with chastising me for believing they're all evil, but that's coming from your own fears.
That's your imagination talking, you bewail the howling mob rending the rich limb from limb, in a paroxysm of misguided rage, as it exercises its animal lusts.
I already know that's what you fear, and I won't even speculate about why you hold that fear, because it is of no particular importance to me, I asked you to look for skeletons in the closets of the rich, not to examine your own thoughts.
I want you to look at them, and find out about their skeletons, and tell us about them.
Or don't, and say more about yourself again.
How the hell did you even manage to type with your safety mittens on?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
This is why almost all successful economies are mixed economies.
Running a pure capitalist economy is doomed to failure for the same reasons running a pure socialist state. People have different wants and needs, pure capitalist/socialist philosophies are too rigid and because of this, need to be enforced by violence. Without Stalin's iron fisted rule the Soviet union would have fallen in a heap much, much earlier than it did. Successful economies allow a mix of socialist and capitalist policies to be applied where appropriate and generally do not go too far towards either extreme.
Although it should be noted, whilst communism has been tried and failed, a pure capitalist state has never gotten off the ground. The closest we've had is Fascism and even that didn't last.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Having been subject to the same thing last year as a subsidiary of Hertz and being let go.
They are also dirty. They dont wash their hands even after doing a shit !
It got so bad in one place I worked, all the white guys refused to use phones or laptops that Indians had touched. Omg....and the smell from the lunch areas ! Disgusting curry shit.....and they only bathe once a week !
None of this is racism....its just observation of a more primitive culture.
Ah, choosing to say reveal more of your own self it is.
Not unexpected, do you wish to continue down that path?
You're dribbling again...
"No! Those people who have more than me must have cheated, they're evil, the whole lot of 'em! They didn't just get lucky, they're cheating and have skeletons in their closets!"
You're not gonna rend shit. You're gonna sit there like a good lap dog begging for scraps like you're told. You're a ranting, pathetic, mouse of a man who's inferiority complex has asserted that another's success is only because they're "bad" people with skeletons in their closet and you keep your pathetic ego alive by envisioning a day of retribution.
Ask your mom to change you diaper 'cause you're starting to stink like shit.
Oh! Look in their closets!!!
Seriously, you're dismissed. I'm not even going to waste a post-count on you any more. If you reach the point where you're sane and stable enough to have a real conversation, you know where to find me. There's no day or reckoning coming, the people who have been lucky to accumulate a few bucks aren't evil, there's no cabal planning against you, and your dreams of violence are delusions. If I had to make a hip-shot diagnosis, I'd go with paranoid schizophrenic. Take your fucking meds, you're drooling on yourself and speckling your keyboard and monitor with spittle. Seriously, you're dismissed. You can type away all the replies you want and get the last word in and feel like you've won something. Maybe it'll do you some good. Seek help, you poor demented soul.
That I never met an Indian IT guy who actually knew what he was doing.
They work by a set of keywords if the problem description has some specific trigger words they follow a specific per-determined set of instructions. They don't even try to understand the problem, just look at the words. So be aware not to try to explain the problem to them, because if you include a trigger word that may result in unexpected and undesired consequences.
I work on a major US company as a contractor on a different timezone (currently 4 hours ahead of CST). Looks like they couldn't find enough people to come early to work on the US and created a Business Support Center in here.
So this means I am on a branch office, working as a third-party contractor, which is basically eliminating US jobs. We already cost around 60% of the US average worker.
And, surprise surprise, we're being outsourced. They will have people in here and people in India as well. They are so cheap that it is possible to replace us with 3 of them for each position, and still be at around 20% of the cost of an american worker.
So this means that nobody is free of this: even if they stop using H1-Bs they will find a way to outsource it; it is so cheap they can basically brute-force the tasks with all that available manpower.
So, two possible outcomes: US tech workers start to accept WAY lower wages or to change the game so that they are not able to compete because of geography. The rules can't help here since as stated by several different commenters, big companies have a lot of influence and lobby on rulemakers.
More importantly do I want to use a car rental company that entrusts my data to its it located in places outside my country?
I have to laugh because IBM India is a joke. They hire kids out of high school with no experience and pay them crap. When they finally do learn something they leave immediately. Not to mention the absolute junk that IBM software and systems are.
Disclaimer: I work for IBM so I have first hand knowledge of their sucki-ness..
I work in I.T. and I'm worried. But seriously, I can email the CEO / Executive staff threatening to boycott Hertz, but in all reality, this won't stop other companies from doing the same thing.
Not sure where you got ANY party distinction from my response. Based upon your response I'd guess you are sitting in SoCal in the F'n desert, drinking water that was piped down a canal that everyone in Norcal hates and voted against. Here's to giving LA back to Mexico :)
Go get some more plastic surgery and maybe another Botox shot or 3...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
They won't listen. In fact, they'll repeat the same damned thing in the next thread.
Sadly, you're correct.
One of them got mod points. I don't mind (I'll always have excellent karma) because it only proves you (and I) are correct.
If you point out that they're in the 1% *and* they happen to listen *and* they happen to finally agree then they'll (at best) change it to be the 0.1% or 0.2%. Oddly, these are often the same people who say that people shouldn't be prejudiced, should base arguments on facts, and things like that.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
H1B visa minimum pay is roughly $68k/yr. What companies like Accenture do is pay the employee roughly $55k/yr and give a "bonus" to bring them to minimum pay. Plus other incentives like a "free" flight back to India every year or two. So the employee thinks they're getting a huge bargain. Then each year Accenture will give the standard 3-4% pay raise and a smaller bonus, which essentially does nothing for the employee but works wonders for the company. Then when the Indian employee gets to the 5 year mark, they're either sent back to India, or have a green card/family and can officially quit. This impacts America in productivity. Often the Indians travel back home for 3-6 weeks and perform sketchy services during that time, due to unreliable Internet and local issues. The issue is just compounded because you can't keep the good workers for long because a good portion of their (bi)yearly time is consumed with Visa renewal. While the company pays, they still have to do all the paperwork, which most Indians just copy each other's paperwork anyway. But it still takes considerable time getting all the forms, interviews, and other crap done. During which their focus is not on the company they are working for. During the renewal process they also need to formulate a contingency plan if their visa is rejected. So in all reality, this outsourcing looks great on the bottom line in cost savings, but is considerably more costly in the long term due to the inefficient processes, questionable skill level employees and a slew of other factors that all come together. Plus without long term employees, the company is in a constant state of catching up, learning process, rewriting process and training replacements.