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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.
Yeah, because they are the party that's backing unlimited immigration... Oh wait.
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...
H1-B is a non-immigrant visa .
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
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!
Unlimited immigration would actually be *better* than this. Immigrants would at least keep the money in the country.
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.
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
Unlimited immigration would actually be *better* than this. Immigrants would at least keep the money in the country.
There is truth to that. I know one Indian guy at my company who has said before that he sends most of his salary back to his bank in India and intends to go back home and retire early there.
No, it's the future that both Republicans AND Democrats are going to both claim they don't want, but will give us anyway because they're both addicted to sucking corporate dick now.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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".
Every American IT worker should boycott Hertz in solidarity and trash them online whenever possible.
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."
This is a very common practice. Many have no intention of staying in the US.
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.
It can eventually lead to permanent residency and citizenship. Unlike, for example, TN status.
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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of American IT workers with South Asians IT workers have worked out for the corporations that have done so.
I've had the "pleasure" of having to work with a major American IT vendor who recently outsourced most of their services to Indian subcontractors. The crap the Indian staff tries to slip under our radar is just appalling. They are breaking things that are not broken and are completely incapable of producing any original solutions. All they can do is Google around a bit and copypaste a solution, and if that doesn't work they come back to us, the customer begging for help.
That's not all. When someone from our office gives them a working solution, they come back to us and present it as their own and try to bill us for it. It's just amazing and I've heard countless similar stories so it's not just this particular vendor, it's *everybody* there doing this. All the bright minds in the IT sector in India have long gone abroad, the remaining IT workers are the ones who didn't make it to the top and are left doing the shitty jobs. They got nice titles, though. You could accidentally mistake the local janitor for a CEO if you went solely by the titles.
So yeah, it hasn't worked out that well for pretty much anybody in the IT sector yet everybody still keeps doing it.
-SR
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.
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
I lived in the US for several years under an H1-B. Thanks to a very "corporate controlled" immigration system I hedged myself and sent the bulk of my income back home. Eventually i became tired of "we will move to the next steps in the immigration process next year" line and so i returned home.
I did have to pay a lot of US taxes and so there was some economic benefit to the country.. But my wife, three kids and i wanted to move to the US but eventually gave up.
My family and i are fairly affluent, i was in a higher income percentile, we are well educated, etc and would have been an overall net-gain to the nation. Perhaps at some point the US will release corporate control over the immigration system and return it how it use to be? (hint, not a way to bring down salaries)
You know what would be better still? A balanced policy designed to help all Americans rather than one designed to help the Zuckerbergs and the other rich campaign donors.
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.
So then attach the conditions for that visa that the employees getting it has to be paid at least the same level as domestic employees.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Clinton gets financed by Wall Street, and what they profit from is what she will have as an opinion.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
>Republicans want for us all.
And Democrat presidents passed TPP and NAFTA ... Google outsources and uses contractors that outsource, and Google isn't right wing, not even close.
http://www.alternet.org/labor/...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
How about we stop spreading lies that is a republican issue when both parties are fucking everyone over for profits. Voting for a democrat or republican isn't going to fix the corporate cronies who own both parties. Lets not excuse corruption and bad behavior for whatever party you belong too, because they are your party.
Until we start holding our own accountable, nothing will ever change.
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
Those in your situation generally go for a skilled migrant visa to the large number of commonwealth companies that have them. The US is very hard for an upper midddle or lower upper class person to get in to. The 1% can move anywhere with the "investor" class visas that are nearly universal, and the poor can move anywhere because they have nothing to lose if caught. But the middle can only move if it benefits someone else financially.
The game is rigged.
Learn to love Alaska
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
"There is truth to that. I know one Indian guy at my company who has said before that he sends most of his salary back to his bank in India and intends to go back home and retire early there."
They all say that. After 2 dozen years they can't stand the unpaved roads, the dirt and the rest at their former home and they'll just do a vacation there each year.
Not to mention, their kids don't want to be caught dead at their dad's former homeland.
Many have no intention of staying in the US.
I've heard stories of American men in Silicon Valley who saved up their money after working 20 years to retire in Mexico or Central America, buying a lot to build a mansion by local standards and marrying sweet little nothing from a nearby village. The locals don't mind because the "rich man" will keel over from having too much sex with the sweet little nothing and everything he owns will stay in the village.
I wouldn't call it active encouragement. Only passive encouragement.
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.
Not to mention, their kids don't want to be caught dead at their dad's former homeland.
Or the wife and kids don't want the guy to return home from the US because they're too busy living off the money he sends back home. I knew a guy from the Philippines who got caught in that situation. After working 20 years in the US, he went back home unannounced and told his family that he retired from working. His family hated him and the village vilified him for being a lazy bastard for cutting off the cash flow. Last I heard he got divorced and bought a fishing boat to live on.
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.
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
"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.
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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This following was published January 31, 2013.
"Migrants working in the United States sent a staggering $120 billion back to their families last year, it was revealed today.
The amount of money being sent by migrants across the entire world reached $530 billion last year, making it a larger economy than Iran or Argentina, the data from the World Bank showed.
This worldwide figure has tripled in the last ten years and is now three times bigger than the total aid budgets given by countries around the world. It has sparked debate whether this so-called remittance money could be a viable alternative to relying on help from other governments.
In the United States last year, more than $120 billion was sent by workers to families abroad - making it the largest sender of remittances in the world. More than $23 billion went to Mexico, $13.45 billion to China, $10.84 billion to India and $10 billion to the Philippines, among other recipients."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
Life is not for the lazy.
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
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.
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.
Why isn't Fossil in the news. I had lots of friends lose jobs to Infosys., after training their replacements, etc...
Newspaper article link to a report in a centrist paper, or it didn't happen.
There'll be robots for all of that in a few years.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
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.
My son, he's a smart bastard. He has a trust that doesn't really pay that much. He'd be able to survive and live in the US but he'd not be able to have all the toys a guy might want, he wouldn't live in luxury, and so he'd still be motivated to work and be productive. I thought it was a good idea but the kid's smart. He's been living in Peru for almost a year now. He supports himself, a girlfriend, and helps his girlfriend's family out - and he's still saving money.
It's a managed trust and I don't know exactly how much he gets from it. It's not a whole lot, I think it's about $2800 to $3200 per month. He can live fairly comfortably on 1/10 of that in Peru and could survive on it in the US but not have all the toys and goodies he might want. I've often wondered why more people, specifically in the IT sector, didn't take their salaries and sock away everything they could and just retire after putting in their 20 years. I love going south of the border and there are places in varied climates, across the globe, to pick from that aren't actually all that bad.
He went down to help collect samples of endangered species and do genome sequencing with a few of the other students who major(ed) in biology. He met a sexy native girl and I've seen him twice since. I will, however, be seeing him again soon. He's to buy a small bar/hotel and going to have a go at running a business. I do not want nonproductive children. He's not much of a drinker so a bar's not a terrible idea and he'd be contributing to the local economy. He's a pretty good kid.
"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.
I don't think you understand the rules of the game. See, you point out anything that is contrary and they'll just make an excuse as to why they're not actually Democrats but are actually Republicans. It's a team sport thing and the beautiful part is that it keeps you and your peers distracted and fighting amongst yourselves as opposed to actually working to resolve the issues that you all do agree on. It's kind of funny to watch and the US is not alone in these regards.
Note: The word YOU is a generic YOU and does not apply to YOU specifically, it's used for simplicity and is not intended to reflect anything about you personally.
This is rather pithy but it's true: You are ruled by consent.
So long as they keep you squabbling over chicken-feed and arguing with each other as it if's some sort of team sport they don't have to worry about you pawing around and looking to see who's behind the curtain and pulling the strings. I doubt they even set it up this way, it's just a way humans fall into things. Rather than concentrate on the real issues, the things you all agree on, you're busy fighting with one another and playing fucking semantics games.
Seriously, if they'd bothered to reply (and all evidence points to this if you refresh the thread, load all replies, and read the many, many other comments) then they'd just be pointing out that those people aren't Democrats, aren't the Left, and aren't Progressives. Oh, and for the dear reader, don't be smug... If it were advocating for the Republicans or concerned with dissing the Democrats then you'd be pointing out the same thing. In fact, you guys have a name for it (though, admittedly, I've not heard it in a while) and call it RINO or, more accurately, Republican In Name Only.
If y'all stopped being so hell-bent on being right and just shut the fuck up and listen to each other once in a while then you might realize that you've far more in common then you think. Then, and only then, can you actually go about working as a group to bring about meaningful changes. But no... It's much more fun to engage in idle banter, arguing semantics, and playing politics like it's a fucking team sport. It's fucking retarded.
Seriously, refresh the thread and read the posts since you made your post. You can't point out that it's a bipartisan issue - they'll just happily claim that those aren't real Democrats or that they're working at the behest of a cabal. I swear to fucking Christ this ought to be a sitcom on BBC. It'd be damned funny.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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.
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.
I know you're trolling but I think it's important to counter this with my experiences. I've been south of the border and I've even been in Peru several times. They are not without their issues but, for the most part, they're fine people who just want to be able to survive. In my experience, they are no more or less conniving or evil than any other group of people. I dare say, they've generally got a higher percentage of people who are basically good people than many other areas that I've visited.
I like Peru and Peruvians. They have lots of culture, history, and diversity. It is one of the countries that I've really enjoyed visiting. I'll return to visit again - probably multiple times as my son will perhaps end up staying there for a while. His girlfriend is very beautiful and nice, she's truly charming. I've met her when they came up for the holidays and we've spoken on the phone and via video feed multiple times. As near as I can tell, she has no other boyfriends but that's for them to figure out between themselves if she does. He's a smart kid and generally a nice guy. I'd like to think I did a good job at raising him and that he's reasonably intelligent.
He was working on his Masters but, well... He met her and they've been together ever since. I support his choice, accept his choice, and it is his life to lead. The trust is a gift, I could not take it from him even if I wanted to. He's able to do with it as he wants. He seems genuinely happy and, to be honest, that's probably one of the biggest things to achieve in life. He's not entirely unproductive and he'll be more productive soon. He'll be purchasing the bar and hotel with a loan - and not a gift. He very specifically asked me for a loan and not a gift. He could just take a chunk out of his nest egg but that's a bit of a risk, asking for a loan was a reasonable and responsible thing to do. It's not set in stone but I'll probably be going down to assist him with closing the deal and doing an inspection of the facilities.
I dare say, he's doing okay and that the Peruvians are very good people. Yes, they have some "bad" people there. They have "bad" people everywhere you go. I'm reasonably fluent in Spanish and he's now more adept at it than I. He's enjoying the culture, the people, and the environment. He wants to raise money with his hotel/bar combination and use it to buy up property for the purpose of preservation and allowing access for recreational purposes and seems to think he can someday expand to ecology camps where he'll have guides, tours, and people can stay in traditional housing with traditional amenities. I think it's a good goal but it's not my job to decide if it's good or not. It's my job to give him guidance when asked and to help him achieve his goals where needed. I'll help. I won't give it to him automatically. A meal that is hard-earned is twice as tasty.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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.
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?
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.
Not to mention, their kids don't want to be caught dead at their dad's former homeland.
Or the wife and kids don't want the guy to return home from the US because they're too busy living off the money he sends back home. I knew a guy from the Philippines who got caught in that situation. After working 20 years in the US, he went back home unannounced and told his family that he retired from working. His family hated him and the village vilified him for being a lazy bastard for cutting off the cash flow. Last I heard he got divorced and bought a fishing boat to live on.
Odd, divorces aren't permitted for marriages registered in the Phillippines. You have to get an annulment there.
This is, gentlemen, why if you choose to marry a Filipina you marry in another place (like Hong Kong) which permits divorce and live in the Philippines (Marriages where you bring the girl to your country rarely works for far too many reasons to list here).
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Not to mention, their kids don't want to be caught dead at their dad's former homeland.
I know a few techs who decided, upon living the US a few years, that the arranged marriage waiting for them back home was a crap deal, and made arrangements to stay. In one case, a woman I worked with, her father confiscated her passport and refused to let her return for a month until the arranged wedding collapsed when the groom also declined to marry for someone else's benefit.
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.
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.
screw that, follow the money
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.