PC shipments for the major countries were estimated
from proprietary and confidential data supplied by
BSA member companies.The data was compared and
combined to form a consensus estimate,which bene-
fited from the detailed market research available to
these member companies.
To analyze demand,PC shipments were studied in
two dimensions:(1)home vs.non-home segments,
and (2)replacement PCs vs.new units.Specifically,
PC shipments in both home and non-home segments
were compared to the change in the installed base of
existing PCs.The portion of PC shipments represent-
ing growth in the installed base are called "new ship-
ments ";replacement shipments represent new PCs
that are replacing older PCs.New shipments plus
replacement shipments equals total shipments.
IPR also developed a measure of the installed base
of PCs by country compared to the number of white-
collar workers.PC penetration statistics are a general
measure of the level of technological acceptance
within a country.The level of penetration,for a
variety of reasons,varies widely from country to
country.This level was then ranked and each country
was assigned to one of five maturity classes.
To estimate software demand,IPR developed ratios for
the amount of software installed on each PC.This was
developed from market research on the U.S.market.
From the Technology User Profile market research of
Metafacts Inc.,IPR determined the number of software
applications installed per PC shipment and developed
these ratios for the four shipment groups:
Home - New Shipments
Non-Home - New Shipments
Home - Replacement Shipments
Non-Home - Replacement Shipments
For each shipment group,ratios were developed for
each of the five maturity classes.U.S.historical
trends were used to estimate the effects of earlier
technological development by maturity class.
Piracy rates can vary among applications.Grouping
the software applications into three tiers and using
specific ratios for each tier further refined the
ratios.The tiers used were General Productivity
Applications,Professional Applications,and
Utilities.These were chosen because they represent
different target markets and price levels,and it is
believed,different piracy rates.
As part of this study,software applications installed
per PC shipped have been researched and estimated
using these dimensions:
Home vs.Non-Home
New PCs vs.Replacement PCs
Level of Technological Development
Software Application Tier
From this work,an estimate of total installed soft-
ware applications was calculated by country for
each software tier.This produced a figure for total
worldwide software installed in 2002,both legal
and illegal.
Best line in the review: "Despite--or maybe because of--the OrbitTouch's similarity to the female anatomy, it's very comfortable to use. Your hands rest very naturally on the twin domes."
Innovative group
on
Mastering Light
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Joannopolous was also involved in the development of the "perfect" dielectric mirror, which was mentioned here before.
To me, it just seems to be an argument debating the differences between genotype and phenotype.
As an argument in favor of classifying by phenotype, consider that sometimes single (cancerous) cells of an animal can escape
and survive independently, essentially becoming a separate species. This happened in the laboratory with (originally human) HeLa cells and in the wild with (originally dog) Transmissible Venereal Tumors. A TVT is genetically closer to a dog than a cat is, but the phenotype...
If the sites are taken down, then the copyright holders still aren't getting any money. Where are they losing out here?
Nobody will pay for the lyrics, apart from serious musicians who want to do a cover. If they don't want to pay, they'll just listen to the song, and copy the lyrics out.
Mostly true, but there are a few exceptions. Most notably, Bob Dylan has a book of lyrics that is always in print. A new edition is coming out this year.
This is hardly new that lyrics sites are infringing on copyright. See this story from four years ago.
OK, how is this different from the scripts in/etc/rc.d that can start, stop, or restart all my system services? Any daemon process needs this feature, right? It doesn't help if the machine has locked up entirely.
Re:Does SCI AM review articles properly nowadays?
on
Self-Repairing Computers
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The authors either don't seem to know much about the current state of the art or are just ignoring it.
I have to say that I am just shocked at the inane reactions on slashdot to this interesting article. Here we have a joint project of two of the most advanced CS departments in the world. David Patterson's name, at least, should be familiar to anyone who has studied computer science in the last two decades since he is co-author of the pre-eminent textbook on computer architecture.
Yet most of the comments (+5 Insightful) are (1) this is pie in the sky, (2) they must just know Windows, har-de-har-har, (3) Undo is for wimps, that is what backups are for, (4) this is just "managerspeak".
Grow up people. They are not just talking about operating systems, they do know what they are talking about. Some of their research involved hugely complex J2EE systems that run on, yes, Unix systems. Some of their work involves designing custom hardware--"ROC-1 hardware prototype, a 64-node cluster with special hardware features for isolation, redundancy, monitoring, and diagnosis."
Perhaps you should just pause for a few minutes to think about their research instead of trying to score Karma points.
There are already memory-resident databases in use. For example, Lucent uses them for creating products which process cell-phone transactions. See http://www.bell-labs.com/project/dali/.
There are some cool ideas there. They use two copies on disk for backup in case of system failure. Because of this they don't have to do page-latching.
In some configurations, though, this is irrelevant, because write transactions lock the whole database! Because they know all transactions will be extremely short, this is faster than locking at page or row level.
Though I have to wonder about the way they're going about doing all this. Windows already has a whole security infrastructure around the concept of desktops as securable objects, why not just use the existing Trusted Path keystroke (Ctrl-Alt-Del) to offer an option to switch to a "secure" desktop where only secure applications can be run?
Because Ctrl-Alt-Del can be intercepted if the operating system has been compromised. The idea behind this window displaying a secret password to you is that it proves that the program is communicating directly with the "Palladium chip"--the chip and the program have to authenticate each other, so you know you are communicating with a trusted program. The window displays a password to you before you, e.g., type a password to it.
You may be familiar with another trusted path mechanism in windows, the log in screen. It requires you to hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE to login, this is done to prevent fake login programs from fooling users.
If you live under the delusion that DOS is the only diskette-bootable OS that could host a fake login program, then you should certainly place your full trust in this Alt+Ctl+Delete feature.
If you don't live under such a delusion, then the main effecto of this feature is to make it harder to log in while you're trying to eat a sandwich
Without this feature any program could fake a login box; with this feature, a program has to have "root" access (or the Windows NT equivalent). That is more secure and it was the best that any operating system could offer--until the advent of Trusted Computing or Palladium, which can offer security even if the server is compromised.
If the machine is compromised it could fake the dogs names too. Even if they are encrypted the key will be on your system. Obviously, if they have access via a trojan or something along those lines, than they could use the same code IE does to display the window.
Wrong. Part of Palladium/NGSCB, as well as Trusted Computing, is having a special chip to hold encryption/decryption keys. The whole point of this idea is to have information on this secure window that is only available via the keys in the chip. Any static icon (like a lock) can be faked. Showing your choice of data (like pet names) that indicate a trusted window is proof that the program is connected to the trusted chip.
the window borders thing isn't a bad idea, but as for making content disappear in the background... "hullooo, earth to microsoft"
The reason for that is so that a malicious program cannot pop up a borderless window in the middle of the trusted window and fool you into thinking it is part of the trusted window.
I think what needs to happen to kill spam is this:
Some group of ISPs implement a TDMA-like system.
An ISP or other mail server can have mail from its users automatically approved (not go through the hassle of responding to a challenge) if it signs a contract that binds it to certain anti-spam rules.
Outgoing mail from these ISPs (or even individual users) is cryptographically signed so that it can be recognized as non-spam and any violations traced.
It is still SMTP, so these messages can go to non-participating mail servers and vice versa.
Users of non-participating mail servers will have to respond to a challenge. This annoyance will encourage them to get their ISP to change (or move to another ISP).
The certificates to sign a mail as non-span cannot be given out completely free and in bulk, otherwise spammers will just acquire thousands of them.
But he attempted to fetch it using the old sendmail DEBUG hole. (This is
not to be confused with new sendmail holes, which are legion.)
...
He knew obscure sendmail parameters and used them well. (Yes, some
sendmails have security holes for logged-in users, too. Why is such a
large and complex program allowed to run as root?)
Sendmail bugs, anyone?
Say, have I ever told you about the time I hacked Steve Bellovin? I did? Oh, well, never mind.
Pournelle was definitely involved in promoting SDI and had earlier co-authored a book The Strategy of Technology. I haven't heard about Niven being involved, though
The most ambitious feature is called musicmix, an online equivalent of a pajama party where people take turns playing deejay. Each group member contributes favorite tunes into a shared playlist, displayed on a dashboard with a customized "skin," and everyone listens together. A click from any participant can choose a new song. Then everyone chats about the tunes.
Does this mean that everyone must already have the tunes licenced on their computer? The following quote suggests otherwise:
Interestingly, men and women use this feature differently: guys will see it as a contest--who's brought the coolest tunes?
Sounds a bit like P2P on a tiny scale to me. I wonder how this fits in with Microsoft's DRM schemes...
If you view the demo that's linked from the MSNBC article, it says:
Just like at a party, if you leave, your music leaves too. And you can only be at one party at a time.
So the 3degrees software doesn't by itself allow file swapping, just limited sharing.
Microsoft is also attempting to lock down the computer so it is no longer a general computing device. The are attempting to turn it into a black box that you can't fiddle with.
If they are successful, where are all of the U.S.'s future programmers going to come from? They won't be allowed to tinker with computers in any way not sanctioned by MS, enforced by U.S. law, so either the pool of programmers will shrink to the point of disappearing, or they will come from outside the U.S.
Which planet are you living on? On my planet there are more programmers for Windows than for all other platforms combined. Microsoft makes available huge quantities of technical information for free. Their compilers have always been reasonably prices (you can even download.Net for free).
Secondly, they have 40 billion tied up in defensive investments and cash - thats dead money in the US economy.
Well, if they put that money in Bill's mattress, it would be dead money. Actually it's kept in banks, money market funds, etc., so it's very much part of the economy.
Way back in 1981-82, Steve Bellovin was a grad student at UNC working on his dissertation on verifying compilers. He was also a part-time sys-admin for their VAX systems, which were running 4.1 BSD.
I had hacked into the system using the most boring schemes (dictionary attack on/etc/passwd while I had a temporary access), but was just hanging around playing rogue most of the time. I happened to notice the cool way that the mail program made the headers editable, by making it seem like you just typed them in. I though, hmmm, I bet there's a security flaw here.
Sure enough, it turned out that it was relatively easy to use this feature (TIOCSTI) to "take over" somebody else's terminal. (Granted, you did have to have write permission on their terminal device, but everybody left those on for chat-type programs.) There was a bug in 4.1BSD that made it easy to make somebody else's terminal the "control terminal" for your process.
I happened to send an email to Bellovin mentioning there was a security flaw and was he interested in hearing it. He said "do tell!" in what seemed like a snide way (although it's hard to tell in an email). So I took over his terminal and emailed him a few of his private files. Heh, heh, heh.
It only occurred to me a couple of years ago that this was ironic since he became a big security guru in the mean time. I wonder if I had anything to do with that?
Relax, there is oversupply in the steel industry and it's having a
shakeout.
This oversupply is caused by the devaluation of the Yen and other Asian
currencies. The next oversupply might be caused by economic problems in
South America or Africa. We cannot sit idly by while one U.S. steel
plant after another closes due to the economic crisis du jour in some
other part of the world.
This kind of overshooting of production happens all the time. It is
even worse in telecommunications and fiber optics, industries that are
completely dominated by the U.S.
In the worst month of the recent recession (December 2001), 10,000
people an hour were hired. The economy is a lot bigger than you might
think.
10,000 people or 10,000 steel workers? How many lost their jobs during
that same hour? The size of the economy is of little consolation when
your job is going away.
Most of the countries in Europe feel that way. They passed laws to make it
difficult to fire people. The result: in the last twenty years, the
U.S. added 35 million net new jobs. In Europe, total employment
actually fell. Unemployment in Europe has been consistently been double
the rate of the U.S. See, for example, Figure 1-2 in this.
I don't get upset about "some production" being contracted abroad. What
I get upset about is the mass export of desirable American jobs to
low-paid workers in developing nations.
We are rapidly becoming a nation comprised of a tiny fraction of a
percentage of wealthy people with ever greater percentages of the
workforce employed in menial, low-paid, service sector jobs. You say
"specialization is the key to efficiency." Just what will our specialty
be? Operating french fry machines at McDonalds and making sure that the
hangers are all pointed the same direction at The Gap?
Oh, if I only had a dollar for all the times I have heard about the vast
employment prospects fry cooks and retail clerks. But repetition of a
falsehood doesn't make it true. These are obviously the kinds of jobs
that grow only in proportion to the population, which is exactly what
has happened. Food preparation and service workers made up 4.7% of the
workforce in 1983 and 4.8% in 2000. The entire retail sector accounted
for 16.4% of the workforce in 1980 and 16.6% in 2000. Trivial changes,
and how could it be otherwise (Tables 593 and 596 of the Statistical
Abstract of the US 2001).
The truth is that the United States is the
biggest
manufacturer in the world and the biggest exporter. People get
fooled by the trade deficits and don't realize that the manufacturing
output is growing, not shrinking. Exports are growing, too.
Want an example? We have already ceded almost all consumer electronics
manufacturing to other countries. That was an area where we were once
the 'specialists' and we've lost that.
Yes, fifty years ago we were the leaders in essentially every category.
It is inevitable that we will have to specialize. That is a good thing,
not a bad thing. Countries have tried many times to seal themselves off
and become the master of all industries. They end up having 100% of a
much smaller economy.
While you or I might not want to assemble TVs for a living, most of the people working the counter at Burger King or mopping the floors at the mall would kill for a job like that. But, like many decent jobs for people of average skill and
intelligence, those jobs don't exist here any longer.
And now that we've eliminated most of the good middle-class jobs, we are
chipping away at professional positions in the tech sector. Software
engineering, tech support, and web development are being outsourced to
developing nations at an alarming rate.
Sorry, this idea that there are no middle class jobs is just an urban
legend. While there has been some growth in income inequality in the
last thirty years (especially 1979-1986), the idea that there are no
middle class jobs is just hooey. Take a look at Table 593 in the
Statistical Abstract and see where the jobs are and where job growth
is. I've already dealt with the fry cook myth. Now the janitor myth.
"Cleaning and building service occupations" declined from 2.7% of
jobs in 1983 to only 2.3% in 2000. It is a tiny and shrinking part of
our economy. Yet these myths persist. Take a look at the reality:
From Table 593 of Statistical Abstract of the U.S. 2001
Percent of Jobs in 2000
16% Professional specialty
(Doctors, engineers, teachers, scientists, etc.)
15% Executive, administrative, and managerial
14% Administrative support, including clerical
14% Service Occupations
14% Operators, fabricators, and laborers
12% Sales Occupations
11% Precision production, craft, and repair
4% Technicians and related support
Percent of net new jobs in 1983-2000
26% Executive, administrative, and managerial
24% Professional specialty
13% Service Occupations
13% Sales Occupations
7% Administrative support, including clerical
7% Operators, fabricators, and laborers
7% Precision production, craft, and repair
4% Technicians and related support
After NAFTA passed, there was low unemployment, median wages rose,
average wages rose, poverty levels fell--in fact wages rose for each
quintile that is measured. For example, after adjusting for inflation,
the mean income for the lowest fifth of households rose 10% from 1990 to
2000. The others break down like this:
Lowestfifth:up10%
2ndfifth:up9%
3rdfifth:up11%
4thfifth:up14%
Highestfifth:up27%.
(http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/histinc/h03.htm l)
Lots more information at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income.html
You seem to be advocating that we do nothing to financially
disincentivize outsourcing desirable jobs to foreign countries. Yet we
have erected numerous hurdles that make it more costly to hire American
workers. When a company hires an American worker, they have to comply
with U.S. laws regarding work safety, pollution, anti-discrimination,
and so forth. They face overhead costs that dwarf those in many other
countries. Then there is the cost of living issue. Workers in many
developing nations could live like kings for less money than the average
receptionist gets in the U.S. How can American workers compete with
their counterparts in, say, India or Pakistan when everything from a
loaf of bread to the janitorial service to empty the office wastebaskets
costs orders of magnitude more in the U.S.?
What will happen, what is happening in India and Pakistan, is
exactly what happened in Japan and Korea and Taiwan and Singapore. As
more and more of the population get good jobs, the wages rise. Wages are
high in the United States because we are more productive.
Just look at pollution regulation. It costs money to reduce pollution.
But we, as a people, feel that it is a good and laudible goal and worth
the investment. So what happens? A U.S. firm closes a plant in the
states and opens one in Mexico where it is not subject to those laws.
And both the manufactured goods and the pollution make their way back
into the U.S. That is just one example of a financial incentive to
"outsource" that is bad for the U.S.
Pollution control is actually a rather small cost and not a major factor
in foreign trade, but I'm touched by your concern for third-world
pollution. When we got to the stage where we felt we could afford it
(around 1970), we decided to reduce pollution. Other countries make
their own choices. As they get richer, they will choose to buy a cleaner
environment.
You point to your experience in the wafer fabs and say 'see, it will all
be okay.' Yet we have laws that prevent us from exporting much of the
sub-micron chip fab technology to China and other potential competitors.
That kept many of those jobs in the U.S. Gee, I guess that protectionism
is working to save some tech sector jobs.
Those regulations are meant to block exports of militarily sensitive
technology to our (potential) enemies. They don't block the sales to
Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, etc.
You (and the Census Department) are confusing imported goods with outsourced labor.
But I laugh when I note your about-face when it comes to the steel industry. You started out complaining that the production was being done overseas with all the profits going to the owners. But with the steel industry, production is increasing but profits are slim--and now you claim that's the real problem! Relax, there is oversupply in the steel industry and it's having a shakeout. Guess what, K-Mart is in bankruptcy, too.
7,500 steel workers lost their jobs at LTV Steel alone.
Bwaahaahaa. In the worst month of the recent recession (December 2001), 10,000 people an hour were hired. The economy is a lot bigger than you might think.
About IC fabs, I don't know the exact numbers.
Apparently not since all that you quoted had little to do with IC fabs. In fact, many of the companies in the U.S. have chips fabricated at USMC and TMC in Taiwan. Basically, all of those numbers you dredged up were meaningless. It's like citing how many people work in U.S. automotive manufacturing when someone asks what percentage of tire manufacture has gone overseas.
No, the category is pretty specific, just chips and wafers. There is a more specific category, 3314413A000 which is just wafers, but they don't have complete statistics for such a specific category. They do note that production increased from $6 billion in 1992 to $11 billion in 1997, but that's all the information they have.
If I really wanted to, I could have used category 334, all semiconductor and electronic components. That has 567,000 employees and 124 billion dollars worth of shipments. Or category 334, Computer & electronic product mfg, with 1.6 million employees and $429 billion.
My knowledge of the industry is not purely academic. I worked in a wafer fab back in the mid-1980s when people were really worried that it was all going overseas. It never happened. My sister works in a large Atmel wafer fab. I don't quite get why you're upset that some production is subcontracted abroad. That's exactly how trade is supposed to work. Specialization is the key to efficiency. It is a fool's errand to try to be the master of everything.
Oh, hell, the shuttle just crashed, I don't have time for this nonsense.
The truth is we import 68% more from Canada than from Mexico. What a spectacular failure for your theory.
Mexico has a largely unskilled, undercapitalized workforce while Canada's more closely resembles our own. I would not expect tech sector jobs to go to Mexico. Nor would I expect us to import much from Mexico other than, perhaps, agricultural products.
How odd, aren't you the same person who said in this post "If some smoke-belching plant across a border can pay people $10/day and work them for 12 hour shifts, then the company using that workforce can realize lower operating costs and, hence, higher profits.
Folks, this isn't rocket science. All other things being equal, businesses will go with the cheaper source every time." I guess you've realized that not all workers are equal.
But you're wrong again. 60% of our imports from Mexico are "Machinery
and Transport Equipment", 15% are "Miscellaneous Manufactured Articles",
8% are "Mineral Fuels, Lubricants and Related Materials" (oil and
natural gas), and less that 5% are agricultural-related ( http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/sitc1/2001/c20 10.html#13)
Just look at the jobs we've already lost to outsourcing.
How many IC fabs do we have in the U.S.? What percentage of consumer
electronics is manufactured in the U.S.? How many steel industry jobs
have we lost? How are U.S. firms supposed to compete when China's
government invested $6 billion in their steel industry in
2002?
Hmmm, how do U.S. firms compete in steel? Quite
well, actually. During the tough time of the 1990s when those mean
foreigners were dumping steel on our shores, domestic production of
steel rose from 95.5 Million Tons per year to 127.9 Million Tons per
year (Table 994 of 2001 Statistical Abstract). It is true that imports
grew faster than domestic production, but once again it is not
true that our industry is in decline.
About IC fabs, I don't know
the exact numbers. In 1997, there were 980 companies employing 198,000
employees. They produced $75 billion dollars worth of good, up sharply
from $29 billion in 1992. (http://www.census.gov/prod/ec97/97m3344c.pdf,
NAICS product code 334413)
That rose to 230,000 employees producing
$91 billion dollars worth of good in 2000, before it fell sharply in
2001 (you may have heard of the tech recession). Of course there were
still 216,000 employees in 2001.
(http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/m01as-1.pdf)
Apparently you're
wrong about that, too. So if you have some statitistics to share, go ahead. Otherwise I can only assume that you have no idea what you're talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
BSA GLOBAL SOFTWARE PIRACY STUDY METHODOLOGY
Best line in the review: "Despite--or maybe because of--the OrbitTouch's similarity to the female anatomy, it's very comfortable to use. Your hands rest very naturally on the twin domes."
Joannopolous was also involved in the development of the "perfect" dielectric mirror, which was mentioned here before.
This is hardly new that lyrics sites are infringing on copyright. See this story from four years ago.
I have to say that I am just shocked at the inane reactions on slashdot to this interesting article. Here we have a joint project of two of the most advanced CS departments in the world. David Patterson's name, at least, should be familiar to anyone who has studied computer science in the last two decades since he is co-author of the pre-eminent textbook on computer architecture.
Yet most of the comments (+5 Insightful) are (1) this is pie in the sky, (2) they must just know Windows, har-de-har-har, (3) Undo is for wimps, that is what backups are for, (4) this is just "managerspeak".
Grow up people. They are not just talking about operating systems, they do know what they are talking about. Some of their research involved hugely complex J2EE systems that run on, yes, Unix systems. Some of their work involves designing custom hardware--"ROC-1 hardware prototype, a 64-node cluster with special hardware features for isolation, redundancy, monitoring, and diagnosis."
Perhaps you should just pause for a few minutes to think about their research instead of trying to score Karma points.
There are some cool ideas there. They use two copies on disk for backup in case of system failure. Because of this they don't have to do page-latching.
In some configurations, though, this is irrelevant, because write transactions lock the whole database! Because they know all transactions will be extremely short, this is faster than locking at page or row level.
Because Ctrl-Alt-Del can be intercepted if the operating system has been compromised. The idea behind this window displaying a secret password to you is that it proves that the program is communicating directly with the "Palladium chip"--the chip and the program have to authenticate each other, so you know you are communicating with a trusted program. The window displays a password to you before you, e.g., type a password to it.
Without this feature any program could fake a login box; with this feature, a program has to have "root" access (or the Windows NT equivalent). That is more secure and it was the best that any operating system could offer--until the advent of Trusted Computing or Palladium, which can offer security even if the server is compromised.
Wrong. Part of Palladium/NGSCB, as well as Trusted Computing, is having a special chip to hold encryption/decryption keys. The whole point of this idea is to have information on this secure window that is only available via the keys in the chip. Any static icon (like a lock) can be faked. Showing your choice of data (like pet names) that indicate a trusted window is proof that the program is connected to the trusted chip.
The reason for that is so that a malicious program cannot pop up a borderless window in the middle of the trusted window and fool you into thinking it is part of the trusted window.
Explosions are not a danger but beware The Horror of Blimps
Say, have I ever told you about the time I hacked Steve Bellovin? I did? Oh, well, never mind.
Btw, his father is Secretary of State.
Pournelle was definitely involved in promoting SDI and had earlier co-authored a book The Strategy of Technology. I haven't heard about Niven being involved, though
No doubt.
I had hacked into the system using the most boring schemes (dictionary attack on /etc/passwd while I had a temporary access), but was just hanging around playing rogue most of the time. I happened to notice the cool way that the mail program made the headers editable, by making it seem like you just typed them in. I though, hmmm, I bet there's a security flaw here.
Sure enough, it turned out that it was relatively easy to use this feature (TIOCSTI) to "take over" somebody else's terminal. (Granted, you did have to have write permission on their terminal device, but everybody left those on for chat-type programs.) There was a bug in 4.1BSD that made it easy to make somebody else's terminal the "control terminal" for your process.
I happened to send an email to Bellovin mentioning there was a security flaw and was he interested in hearing it. He said "do tell!" in what seemed like a snide way (although it's hard to tell in an email). So I took over his terminal and emailed him a few of his private files. Heh, heh, heh.
It only occurred to me a couple of years ago that this was ironic since he became a big security guru in the mean time. I wonder if I had anything to do with that?
The truth is that the United States is the biggest manufacturer in the world and the biggest exporter . People get fooled by the trade deficits and don't realize that the manufacturing output is growing, not shrinking. Exports are growing, too.
Yes, fifty years ago we were the leaders in essentially every category. It is inevitable that we will have to specialize. That is a good thing, not a bad thing. Countries have tried many times to seal themselves off and become the master of all industries. They end up having 100% of a much smaller economy. Sorry, this idea that there are no middle class jobs is just an urban legend. While there has been some growth in income inequality in the last thirty years (especially 1979-1986), the idea that there are no middle class jobs is just hooey. Take a look at Table 593 in the Statistical Abstract and see where the jobs are and where job growth is. I've already dealt with the fry cook myth. Now the janitor myth. "Cleaning and building service occupations" declined from 2.7% of jobs in 1983 to only 2.3% in 2000. It is a tiny and shrinking part of our economy. Yet these myths persist. Take a look at the reality:From Table 593 of Statistical Abstract of the U.S. 2001
Percent of Jobs in 2000
16% Professional specialty
(Doctors, engineers, teachers, scientists, etc.)
15% Executive, administrative, and managerial
14% Administrative support, including clerical
14% Service Occupations
14% Operators, fabricators, and laborers
12% Sales Occupations
11% Precision production, craft, and repair
4% Technicians and related support
Percent of net new jobs in 1983-2000
26% Executive, administrative, and managerial
24% Professional specialty
13% Service Occupations
13% Sales Occupations
7% Administrative support, including clerical
7% Operators, fabricators, and laborers
7% Precision production, craft, and repair
4% Technicians and related support
After NAFTA passed, there was low unemployment, median wages rose, average wages rose, poverty levels fell--in fact wages rose for each quintile that is measured. For example, after adjusting for inflation, the mean income for the lowest fifth of households rose 10% from 1990 to 2000. The others break down like this:
Lowestfifth:up10%
2ndfifth:up9%
3rdfifth:up11%
4thfifth:up14%
Highestfifth:up27%.
(http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/histinc/h03.ht
Lots more information at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income.html
What will happen, what is happening in India and Pakistan, is exactly what happened in Japan and Korea and Taiwan and Singapore. As more and more of the population get good jobs, the wages rise. Wages are high in the United States because we are more productive. Pollution control is actually a rather small cost and not a major factor in foreign trade, but I'm touched by your concern for third-world pollution. When we got to the stage where we felt we could afford it (around 1970), we decided to reduce pollution. Other countries make their own choices. As they get richer, they will choose to buy a cleaner environment. Those regulations are meant to block exports of militarily sensitive technology to our (potential) enemies. They don't block the sales to Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, etc.
If I really wanted to, I could have used category 334, all semiconductor and electronic components. That has 567,000 employees and 124 billion dollars worth of shipments. Or category 334, Computer & electronic product mfg, with 1.6 million employees and $429 billion.
My knowledge of the industry is not purely academic. I worked in a wafer fab back in the mid-1980s when people were really worried that it was all going overseas. It never happened. My sister works in a large Atmel wafer fab. I don't quite get why you're upset that some production is subcontracted abroad. That's exactly how trade is supposed to work. Specialization is the key to efficiency. It is a fool's errand to try to be the master of everything.
Oh, hell, the shuttle just crashed, I don't have time for this nonsense.
But you're wrong again. 60% of our imports from Mexico are "Machinery and Transport Equipment", 15% are "Miscellaneous Manufactured Articles", 8% are "Mineral Fuels, Lubricants and Related Materials" (oil and natural gas), and less that 5% are agricultural-related ( http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/sitc1/2001/c20 10.html#13)
Hmmm, how do U.S. firms compete in steel? Quite well, actually. During the tough time of the 1990s when those mean foreigners were dumping steel on our shores, domestic production of steel rose from 95.5 Million Tons per year to 127.9 Million Tons per year (Table 994 of 2001 Statistical Abstract). It is true that imports grew faster than domestic production, but once again it is not true that our industry is in decline.About IC fabs, I don't know the exact numbers. In 1997, there were 980 companies employing 198,000 employees. They produced $75 billion dollars worth of good, up sharply from $29 billion in 1992. (http://www.census.gov/prod/ec97/97m3344c.pdf, NAICS product code 334413)
That rose to 230,000 employees producing $91 billion dollars worth of good in 2000, before it fell sharply in 2001 (you may have heard of the tech recession). Of course there were still 216,000 employees in 2001. (http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/m01as-1.pdf)
Apparently you're wrong about that, too. So if you have some statitistics to share, go ahead. Otherwise I can only assume that you have no idea what you're talking about.