* Two offers of employment stolen (FedEX said they were signed for yet I didn't get the actual offers - somebody knows how much I make, my address, my occupation etc)
* Silly little amazon.com thank you gift stolen (the box was found in the women's restroom)
This is what I know of and it happened within 2 years.
OK, great, but what does that have to do with shredding your documents? NOTHING, because neither of those things were ever in your posession to begin with, and document shredding would not have prevented their theft.
If you're going to offer examples, you could at least come up with some that are actually relevant to the discussion.
There was a report on the local radio new this morning about some 19-year old doing just that at the car rental agency he worked at. Scammed at least two people for hundreds of dollars of merchandise before he got caught.
And owning a paper shredder would have prevented that how?
I had a similar growing up experience, except I was in a mountainous area, so being able to see the horizon actually makes me a little uncomfortable. I've also been losing my directional sense as I've spent more time in urban areas. What I really miss, though, is the time sense I used to have. I used to be able to tell the time within 10 minutes, even at night, and I haven't worn a watch since I was 10.
I was thinking rubbing alcohol, too. I don't know how effective it actually is as a disinfectant, but every place I've worked as an electronic technician has used rubbing alcohol to clean the boards.
Another response mentioned that it's probably some sort of automated process. I would say that as long as the devices are easily de-powered (removable batteries and such), a soak in a tub of isopropal would probably do the trick. I doubt they'd have to do much more scrubbing than they'd have to do otherwise. My stepmom is an RN, and based on what I've heard there's no way scrubbing could be completely avoided, but top priority is probably making sure whatever's on there is dead before the scrubbing takes place.
..."forced upgrades", which SuSe will most certainly start doing eventually when they come to their senses, just like RH did.
I'm really not sure where you're getting the idea that RH is forcing upgrades in any way. Yeah, they might want a little extra money for their premium support system, but it's not as if those patches aren't freely available from just about anywhere.
Maybe you're refering to the short amount of time each release is officially maintained. In that sense, SuSE and RH are pretty much equal already (don't know about RH, but SuSE releases are officially maintained for 2 years, and unofficially for longer as long as you know what ftp directory to look in). To a large extent that's not much of an issue, though. It's not as if all the patches aren't available muliple other places. I mean, the 2.0 kernel is still actively maintained at kernel.org, and it's 7 years old. 2 years is a short time, but it's more than enough for a reasonably intelligent person to not only become a competent Linux admin (it took me about 2 years, and that was just in what little spare time a married-with-children guy has), but also to discover that once you get past the distro-specific admin GUI, Linux is Linux is Linux, and support from a specific vendor is irrelevant. Try that with Windows!
Really though, I doubt a customer like Munich is going to be cut off after 2 years. Even if they are, their stuff will still be supported, just not by the people they bought it from.
People have no business owning soldering irons, an electrical engineer has a good reason to own one, but anyone else caught with one has a germane bit of explaining to do.
This flies in the face of the point I was trying to make. The reason a crowbar is a bad metaphor is that it's got many legitimate purposes. So does a soldering iron.... What the hell are you doing that's not theft with a goddamn DirecTV-specific decoder box?
The thing is, smart cards have plenty of legitimate uses beyond DTV boxes, and DTV is using an industry standard smart card format. If they were using a proprietary format, and these smart card programmers had to be specifically designed for DTV smart cards, I would agree with you. Since they're using an industry standard format, however, it's really no different than going after everyone who owns a crowbar or a soldering iron.
This strikes me as a watered down version of the sarcastic response gun control advocates make to the suggestion that the average citizen has a right to own an assault rifle.
According to the Bill of Rights, and the intentions of those who wrote it, the average citizen DOES have the right to own an assault rifle, even if assault rifles aren't mentioned directly. The purpose of the Right to Bear Arms is not for hunting, or even to protect oneself from criminals; it is to protect oneself from an abusive or overbearing government.
I should probably mention that I'm not a member of the NRA, nor do I even own so much as a squirtgun, but I am a firm beleiver in the founding principles of this nation.
OT, but something you should think about.
I mean, christ's sake, you can't even have some simple martial weapons, like nunchaku, which are important for spiritual practices for a good many people.
Completely OT now, but now that I've actually had some training with nunchaku (or jul bong, if you're Korean) I think that law is pretty funny. You're allowed to have them for martial arts practice or demonstration, or on your way to or from practice or demonstration, or if you are a martial arts instructor, or in the privacy of your own home. What it boils down to is that you're only allowed to have them if you know how to use them. The really funny part of that is, as is obvious to anyone who has used them, if you don't know what you're doing you're really only dangerous to yourself.
If we agree that you can run each system for as long as you run, using whatever software you want, how are you "subserviant" to a vendor?
Support.
Linux kernel 2.0, released in June 1996, is still actively supported at kernel.org, and will continue to be as long as people continue to use it.
How many 7 year old MS products can you name that are still actively maintained? If you can name any, how many of them will STILL be maintained a year from now? How will any of them be maintained once the plug is pulled on official support?
All those questions are easily answerable with Linux, and that's what "not being subservient to a vendor" means.
In unix, when you upgrade one part of the system, you've got to update the converter program to take in the new data, then you've got to update the program it sends that data to to take advantage of the new feature that you upgraded the first program for... etc etc etc.
It seems that you are suffering from a fundamental misunderstanding of the *nix way. I don't know where you're coming up with these alledged "converter programs", since everything in *nix is done in plain text. That makes it neither fragile, nor hard to maintain.
The only convertor programs I know of are the ones required to deal with the closed file formats of proprietary vendors like MS. Of course, that's a specific, generally user level, application issue imposed on the computing world as a whole by those proprietary vendors, not an issue with *nix itself.
Terminals went out of favor because it was cheaper to buy seperate systems than it was to maintain a large centralized server. Back in those days, liscenses were per seat, not per computer. Net change between then and now, zero.
Wrong! Net change: Linux has no per seat licensing, so costs now favor Linux terminals over seperate systems.
If you are arguing that Linux doesn't cost anything, sure, why not... but in that case, why would you want to go the more expensive route (and central point of failure) of having a big expensive machine hosting other not-so-expensive machines?
To reduce admin costs, since it is MUCH simpler to maintain a single machine, or a handful of machines (redundancy is good).
I should also point out that the city of Largo is serving all of its terminals with not particularly expensive machines.They're dual P3s, basically just high-end workstations without the beefy graphics card. And that's a full KDE desktop being served to several hundred terminals with just a couple of those "servers".
No, the assumption he's making is that their admin will have a clue and set up YOU (That's Yast Online Update, if you aren't a SuSE user) to download the FREE upgrade and push it to the clients during off hours. In fact, it's quite simple to do.
Yes, I know you can do something similar with Windows, but a Windows version upgrade is not just a free download away (which SuSE makes especially scriptable, BTW, by alway putting the current version in ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/[arch]/current and having a reliable and consistent release cycle. You could even run it as a simple cron job if you wanted to.
Hmmm, almost no employee time taken up to do the upgrade, plus savings of $100-200 per machine in licensing fees and such... Sure sounds cheaper to me! Of course, if you're boneheaded enough to just transfer your Windows processes directly to Linux and make no effort to take advantage of the fundamental differences then, yeah, you won't save any money.
Of course, with Linux one could also go with a thin client architecture and only have a handful of machines to upgrade. Or mix the two approaches for fun and profit!
Sorry, but you're wrong. Oh, you're right about what the law says, but you are very wrong about how it actually plays out in the real world. I strongly suggest that you do a little reading.
Congratulations, though, on apparently finding one of the few honest companies to sponsor you. Still, I couldn't help but notice:
That is exactly the way it works, judging by the raise I was given to bring my salary up to fair market level when my Green Card application was in progress...
How do you think they manage to maintain their non-union status? By treating their employees well, which while it might save them some headaches, probably doesn't save them money.
This isn't meant to justify outsourcing, but I can understand why comapnies don't give a crap about employees anymore. It does them no good when employess don't give a crap about companies, either. The feeling is mutual.
Guess what, when you take it the other direction, the feeling is still mutual.
As I recall, it was in the 80's that companies decided it was no longer worthwhile to show their employees any loyalty, but it wasn't until the mid 90's that the employees stopped showing loyalty to the company. Whenever I hear a manager whining about how there's no employee loyalty anymore it makes me want to grab them by the lapels and scream in their face, "You made your bed, now lay in it!"
In my experience, when a company shows loyalty to their employees, the employees are loyal to the company. Shocking, isn't it!
If it gets this far, take it to the UN as such treatment is certainly a human rights violation. Even if the women themselves could not do so, there are many, many others who would gladly do it on their behalf.
IF it gets that far? It already has, that's my point. The example I gave is one from the real world, and Nike profited greatly from it. Nike was a very highly valued stock while they were doing this.
And take it to the UN? Right! Sorry, but the UN has proven by it's (in)actions that, despite the rhetoric, it really doesn't care that much about human rights violations.
Here's a question for you: If the UN and its member nations actually care about human rights, why does China still enjoy Most Favored Nation trading status with the US despite proof of continuing blatant human rights violations?
I doubt very much that the CEOs or managers are telling the foreman of these factories to behave in such a manner.
You're probably right, but that isn't the problem. The problem is that they aren't telling them NOT to, and are in fact aiding and abbeting by making it profitable to treat the employees this way.
Likely, this sort of treatement is common to all women in said country and so it seems silly to believe that this behaviour would suddenly disappear once an American company sets foot in the land.
Again, you're probably right, but is it unreasonable to expect American companies to refuse to do business with a company that allows it's forement to rape their employees at gunpoint? Perhaps I'm living in fantasy land here, but I really don't see that as being an unreasonable expectation.
You imply that setting foot there would be condoning this behaviour.
I don't imply anything, I directly state that by doing business with these companies, and thereby making their behavior profitable, we condone it.
As for the rest of your comment, try this on for size: "Here's a multimillion dollar manufacturing contract, one of the conditions you must agree to is to treat your employees humanely."
No military action involved, yet still providing a chance at economic prosperity. The choice of whether they want to benefit from it is theirs. It's not going to the government and saying "enact human rights laws or else", it's going to the businessmen and saying "we will do business with you if you can assure us that your employees are not being beaten and raped by your foremen". It's a totally different kind of pressure, and one that is quite effective. It generally works quite well with my 3-year-old, and I would expect similar results with a third world sweatshop owner.
No bullying, no loss of lives, just simple negotiation with an obvious reward for doing the right thing.
You might argue that it would cost the sweatshop owner more to treat his employees better, but I doubt that. Once word got around that at this place the employees don't get beaten and raped, I would expect that a lot of people would want to work there. Simple supply and demand would keep his labour costs down. (Note that I said nothing about a minimum wage, just that the employees don't get mistreated)
Other sectors, like the embedded market, industrial controls, specialized welding, manufacturing automation and more all have jobs available, but require more learning and experience than your average network installation does. These are also jobs that by their nature cannot be outsourced.
You obviously don't know much about those sectors.
I used to work for a company that designed and built custom automated manufacturing systems. Big companies, like Boston Scientific for example, outsourced that work to us. I got laid off a year and a half ago because the market for it collapsed, and they just had another lay-off about 6 months ago.
We didn't do much specialized welding, but when we did, we outsourced it. All it takes is good drawings, a welder smart enough to read them, and the ability to get the material to him and back. We didn't outsource it overseas, but we probably would have if it made economic sense to do so (shipping costs and lead time).
We also didn't design our own industrial controls, we bought COTS boxes and programmed them to meet our needs (though it wasn't at a level where I would call it embedded programming, it was just basic ladder logic). Those boxes came from either Omron (Japan) or more likely Automation Direct (Australia, IIRC).
Sorry, but the grass is NOT greener on the other side of the fence.
There are plenty of developers having a hard time finding work nowadays without us bringing in third-world workers who think that driving a 1981 Civic is a wonderful privelege!
Didn't you pay attention in your drivers ed class? Driving ANYTHING is a privelege.
Harm to workers: they treat their workers worse than here, but undoubtedly the work is to their advantage otherwise they would not be doing it. If the programmers were really worse off being "exploited" than they were before the jobs came to their countries, do you really think they would keep working in these jobs?
Interesting point, but it's fatally flawed. The flaw is that you assume these workers have a choice. In the case of programmers, you're probably right. I'm sure they are much better off, even if they are being "exploited" (at least from an American point of view).
But lets look at a more common situation, such as the ever-popular Nike factory in Vietnam. The women who work there are forced to work long hours while being mentally, physically, and sexually abused, at gunpoint! Are they really better off than they would be working in the rice patties? That's a good question, and it's easy to say "yes" as long as you assume it's a choice they're willingly making. I very much doubt that's the case.
Yes, American workers were treated badly during the American Industrial Revolution, but I've never heard any stories like that. But, hey, IANAHistorian. That said, by continuing to outsource to countries where this kind of treatment is acceptable (and that is hardly an isolated case) we are not only condoning it, but encouraging it. Are you honestly willing to defend that?
it is almost as if someone who loves prostitution goes to a poor country because the cost is lower and the regulations are almost non-existent
That's really putting a pretty face on it. Let's get a little more real here:
It's as if someone who loves prostitution goes to a poor country because they can get the prostitutes there to subject themselves to the worst forms of degradation for only a few dollars, and they can beat the living shit out of them any time they want and nobody cares.
Oh, wait! People actually do that, often in some of the same countries that are now also being exploited by corporations. Don't believe me? Go find a marine or a sailor (ex is fine) and ask them about southeast asian hookers. Even if they didn't do it themselves, they knew someone that did.
Imagine having to go back to school at 47 with 4 kids and 2 cars and whatever else and looking at paying all the bills and tuition making 4.75 when last year you were making 30-50,000 a year is a pretty steep challenge - to anyone. call them whiners all you like, but try living through it just once. Not that I have, but I can imagine this creates a loss that a simple service industry job won't replace.
Well put. I was recently put in a similar situation (though not nearly that extreme). I went from making $12.50 an hour plus benefits to making $8 an hour with no benefits. I found that at that level I made just enough to cover expenses, nothing extra for going out to dinner, buying a new DVD or CD, or even building up a savings. I don't live like a high-roller by any means, I have a cheap appartment in the bad part of town and I don't go out much. My wife and I each have newer cars which we still owe money on, but they aren't expensive ones (a Saturn and a Subaru, if anyone cares, and yes we do actually have a need for 4-wheel drive). The loss of benefits means that when I got strep throat it cost me $250 instead of a $50 co-pay, and that came directly out of what savings I had from before with no way to replace it (and that's not including the week of work I lost, without any sick time or vacation time to cover for it).
I was fortunate in that I managed to recover fairly quickly (up to $12 in 3 months, $16 in 6 months), but then I was 27, not afraid to work as a temp, had only 1 kid, no mortgage, and didn't have to go back to school. It still sucked mightily, though, and the older you are the more it sucks. It sucks even more that my present position is so precarious (still a temp) and I might have to go through all that again at the drop of a hat.
Sounds like a bunch of fear mongering to me, but lets look at the numbers, shall we:
The National Science Foundation reports that China graduated nearly 200,000 engineers in 1999 from good universities that get better by the year. By comparison, American Universities graduate a mere 60,000 undergraduate engineers annually.
Since the population of America is about 300 million, that would mean about 0.02 percent of the population graduate as engineers each year. China's population is about 1.3 billion, which means about 0.015 percent graduate as engineers each year. I think we're doing pretty well, all things considered.
Honestly, if we were graduating 200,000 engineers a year we'd have a serious shortage of doctors, scientists, lawyers, etc.
Combined, India and China produced nearly 26 percent of the world's newly minted engineers in 1999.
Combined, India and China have nearly 33% of the world's population. If they were producing fewer engineers than they are, it would be an indication of something being seriously wrong.
I don't doubt the validity of these numbers, but presented this way they're nothing more than FUD. There's simply no way we can compete in a straight numbers game with either China or India, let alone both combined. OK, so the whole of Asia (excluding Japan) produces 320,000 engineers a year. Well, they have roughly 10 times the population of the US, and only managed to produce 5 times as many engineers. I think that says something.
As for the quality of these engineers, well, I have my doubts. I don't deal with many foriegn engineers, but I can say that my company has had nothing but problems with the software work we've outsourced to India. That hasn't stopped upper management from dictating that it must be done, of course, even though it actually costs us more, but that's a whole different rant. I would not expect any better results from non-software engineering endeavors, since they all require that same peculiar combination of knowledge and creativity which simply isn't a part of most of those cultures.
To be fair, some of the best engineers I've met have been Chinese, Indian, even Iranian, but every single one of them was educated at an American university and working for an American company, in America, for American wages. I'm not saying that Asians are incapable of creative thought, far from it, I'm just saying that the institutions in their native lands don't encourage it like American institutions do, and that's an essential part of training good engineers.
I don't think Capitalism would collapse, not in America anyway. It's too much a part of the American identity. I could certainly see a strong nationalist movement, though.
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I've had:
* Two offers of employment stolen (FedEX said they were signed for yet I didn't get the actual offers - somebody knows how much I make, my address, my occupation etc)
* Silly little amazon.com thank you gift stolen (the box was found in the women's restroom)
This is what I know of and it happened within 2 years.
OK, great, but what does that have to do with shredding your documents? NOTHING, because neither of those things were ever in your posession to begin with, and document shredding would not have prevented their theft.
If you're going to offer examples, you could at least come up with some that are actually relevant to the discussion.
There was a report on the local radio new this morning about some 19-year old doing just that at the car rental agency he worked at. Scammed at least two people for hundreds of dollars of merchandise before he got caught.
And owning a paper shredder would have prevented that how?
I had a similar growing up experience, except I was in a mountainous area, so being able to see the horizon actually makes me a little uncomfortable. I've also been losing my directional sense as I've spent more time in urban areas. What I really miss, though, is the time sense I used to have. I used to be able to tell the time within 10 minutes, even at night, and I haven't worn a watch since I was 10.
Tip on sniping: Breathing matters!
Squeeze off your shot during the pauses between inhaling and exhaling. Oh, and I mean your character's breathing, not you physically breathing.
Ok, you have to boot from the CD for it, but it still runs off of Linux.
Or you could just download it from icculus.org and install it like any other professionally produced Linux game.
I was thinking rubbing alcohol, too. I don't know how effective it actually is as a disinfectant, but every place I've worked as an electronic technician has used rubbing alcohol to clean the boards.
Another response mentioned that it's probably some sort of automated process. I would say that as long as the devices are easily de-powered (removable batteries and such), a soak in a tub of isopropal would probably do the trick. I doubt they'd have to do much more scrubbing than they'd have to do otherwise. My stepmom is an RN, and based on what I've heard there's no way scrubbing could be completely avoided, but top priority is probably making sure whatever's on there is dead before the scrubbing takes place.
..."forced upgrades", which SuSe will most certainly start doing eventually when they come to their senses, just like RH did.
I'm really not sure where you're getting the idea that RH is forcing upgrades in any way. Yeah, they might want a little extra money for their premium support system, but it's not as if those patches aren't freely available from just about anywhere.
Maybe you're refering to the short amount of time each release is officially maintained. In that sense, SuSE and RH are pretty much equal already (don't know about RH, but SuSE releases are officially maintained for 2 years, and unofficially for longer as long as you know what ftp directory to look in). To a large extent that's not much of an issue, though. It's not as if all the patches aren't available muliple other places. I mean, the 2.0 kernel is still actively maintained at kernel.org, and it's 7 years old. 2 years is a short time, but it's more than enough for a reasonably intelligent person to not only become a competent Linux admin (it took me about 2 years, and that was just in what little spare time a married-with-children guy has), but also to discover that once you get past the distro-specific admin GUI, Linux is Linux is Linux, and support from a specific vendor is irrelevant. Try that with Windows!
Really though, I doubt a customer like Munich is going to be cut off after 2 years. Even if they are, their stuff will still be supported, just not by the people they bought it from.
People have no business owning soldering irons, an electrical engineer has a good reason to own one, but anyone else caught with one has a germane bit of explaining to do.
...
This flies in the face of the point I was trying to make. The reason a crowbar is a bad metaphor is that it's got many legitimate purposes. So does a soldering iron.
What the hell are you doing that's not theft with a goddamn DirecTV-specific decoder box?
The thing is, smart cards have plenty of legitimate uses beyond DTV boxes, and DTV is using an industry standard smart card format. If they were using a proprietary format, and these smart card programmers had to be specifically designed for DTV smart cards, I would agree with you. Since they're using an industry standard format, however, it's really no different than going after everyone who owns a crowbar or a soldering iron.
This strikes me as a watered down version of the sarcastic response gun control advocates make to the suggestion that the average citizen has a right to own an assault rifle.
According to the Bill of Rights, and the intentions of those who wrote it, the average citizen DOES have the right to own an assault rifle, even if assault rifles aren't mentioned directly. The purpose of the Right to Bear Arms is not for hunting, or even to protect oneself from criminals; it is to protect oneself from an abusive or overbearing government.
I should probably mention that I'm not a member of the NRA, nor do I even own so much as a squirtgun, but I am a firm beleiver in the founding principles of this nation.
OT, but something you should think about.
I mean, christ's sake, you can't even have some simple martial weapons, like nunchaku, which are important for spiritual practices for a good many people.
Completely OT now, but now that I've actually had some training with nunchaku (or jul bong, if you're Korean) I think that law is pretty funny. You're allowed to have them for martial arts practice or demonstration, or on your way to or from practice or demonstration, or if you are a martial arts instructor, or in the privacy of your own home. What it boils down to is that you're only allowed to have them if you know how to use them. The really funny part of that is, as is obvious to anyone who has used them, if you don't know what you're doing you're really only dangerous to yourself.
aren't there far less linux compitent IT guys available then there are MCSE drones?
Good chance. But then again you don't NEED as many Linux guys as MCSEs, so it's probably a wash.
FWIW, according to the info I've seen, 1 $80k Unix admin is equivalent to 3 or 4 $45k MCSEs. No, I have no links to back that up, and YMMV.
If we agree that you can run each system for as long as you run, using whatever software you want, how are you "subserviant" to a vendor?
Support.
Linux kernel 2.0, released in June 1996, is still actively supported at kernel.org, and will continue to be as long as people continue to use it.
How many 7 year old MS products can you name that are still actively maintained? If you can name any, how many of them will STILL be maintained a year from now? How will any of them be maintained once the plug is pulled on official support?
All those questions are easily answerable with Linux, and that's what "not being subservient to a vendor" means.
In unix, when you upgrade one part of the system, you've got to update the converter program to take in the new data, then you've got to update the program it sends that data to to take advantage of the new feature that you upgraded the first program for ... etc etc etc.
... but in that case, why would you want to go the more expensive route (and central point of failure) of having a big expensive machine hosting other not-so-expensive machines?
It seems that you are suffering from a fundamental misunderstanding of the *nix way. I don't know where you're coming up with these alledged "converter programs", since everything in *nix is done in plain text. That makes it neither fragile, nor hard to maintain.
The only convertor programs I know of are the ones required to deal with the closed file formats of proprietary vendors like MS. Of course, that's a specific, generally user level, application issue imposed on the computing world as a whole by those proprietary vendors, not an issue with *nix itself.
Terminals went out of favor because it was cheaper to buy seperate systems than it was to maintain a large centralized server. Back in those days, liscenses were per seat, not per computer. Net change between then and now, zero.
Wrong! Net change: Linux has no per seat licensing, so costs now favor Linux terminals over seperate systems.
If you are arguing that Linux doesn't cost anything, sure, why not
To reduce admin costs, since it is MUCH simpler to maintain a single machine, or a handful of machines (redundancy is good).
I should also point out that the city of Largo is serving all of its terminals with not particularly expensive machines.They're dual P3s, basically just high-end workstations without the beefy graphics card. And that's a full KDE desktop being served to several hundred terminals with just a couple of those "servers".
You are making the assumption that time is free.
No, the assumption he's making is that their admin will have a clue and set up YOU (That's Yast Online Update, if you aren't a SuSE user) to download the FREE upgrade and push it to the clients during off hours. In fact, it's quite simple to do.
Yes, I know you can do something similar with Windows, but a Windows version upgrade is not just a free download away (which SuSE makes especially scriptable, BTW, by alway putting the current version in ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/[arch]/current and having a reliable and consistent release cycle. You could even run it as a simple cron job if you wanted to.
Hmmm, almost no employee time taken up to do the upgrade, plus savings of $100-200 per machine in licensing fees and such... Sure sounds cheaper to me! Of course, if you're boneheaded enough to just transfer your Windows processes directly to Linux and make no effort to take advantage of the fundamental differences then, yeah, you won't save any money.
Of course, with Linux one could also go with a thin client architecture and only have a handful of machines to upgrade. Or mix the two approaches for fun and profit!
The tech worker shortage was all bullshit to begin with. Look here.
Sorry, but you're wrong. Oh, you're right about what the law says, but you are very wrong about how it actually plays out in the real world. I strongly suggest that you do a little reading.
Congratulations, though, on apparently finding one of the few honest companies to sponsor you. Still, I couldn't help but notice:
That is exactly the way it works, judging by the raise I was given to bring my salary up to fair market level when my Green Card application was in progress...
How do you think they manage to maintain their non-union status? By treating their employees well, which while it might save them some headaches, probably doesn't save them money.
This isn't meant to justify outsourcing, but I can understand why comapnies don't give a crap about employees anymore. It does them no good when employess don't give a crap about companies, either. The feeling is mutual.
Guess what, when you take it the other direction, the feeling is still mutual.
As I recall, it was in the 80's that companies decided it was no longer worthwhile to show their employees any loyalty, but it wasn't until the mid 90's that the employees stopped showing loyalty to the company. Whenever I hear a manager whining about how there's no employee loyalty anymore it makes me want to grab them by the lapels and scream in their face, "You made your bed, now lay in it!"
In my experience, when a company shows loyalty to their employees, the employees are loyal to the company. Shocking, isn't it!
If it gets this far, take it to the UN as such treatment is certainly a human rights violation. Even if the women themselves could not do so, there are many, many others who would gladly do it on their behalf.
IF it gets that far? It already has, that's my point. The example I gave is one from the real world, and Nike profited greatly from it. Nike was a very highly valued stock while they were doing this.
And take it to the UN? Right! Sorry, but the UN has proven by it's (in)actions that, despite the rhetoric, it really doesn't care that much about human rights violations.
Here's a question for you: If the UN and its member nations actually care about human rights, why does China still enjoy Most Favored Nation trading status with the US despite proof of continuing blatant human rights violations?
I doubt very much that the CEOs or managers are telling the foreman of these factories to behave in such a manner.
You're probably right, but that isn't the problem. The problem is that they aren't telling them NOT to, and are in fact aiding and abbeting by making it profitable to treat the employees this way.
Likely, this sort of treatement is common to all women in said country and so it seems silly to believe that this behaviour would suddenly disappear once an American company sets foot in the land.
Again, you're probably right, but is it unreasonable to expect American companies to refuse to do business with a company that allows it's forement to rape their employees at gunpoint? Perhaps I'm living in fantasy land here, but I really don't see that as being an unreasonable expectation.
You imply that setting foot there would be condoning this behaviour.
I don't imply anything, I directly state that by doing business with these companies, and thereby making their behavior profitable, we condone it.
As for the rest of your comment, try this on for size: "Here's a multimillion dollar manufacturing contract, one of the conditions you must agree to is to treat your employees humanely."
No military action involved, yet still providing a chance at economic prosperity. The choice of whether they want to benefit from it is theirs. It's not going to the government and saying "enact human rights laws or else", it's going to the businessmen and saying "we will do business with you if you can assure us that your employees are not being beaten and raped by your foremen". It's a totally different kind of pressure, and one that is quite effective. It generally works quite well with my 3-year-old, and I would expect similar results with a third world sweatshop owner.
No bullying, no loss of lives, just simple negotiation with an obvious reward for doing the right thing.
You might argue that it would cost the sweatshop owner more to treat his employees better, but I doubt that. Once word got around that at this place the employees don't get beaten and raped, I would expect that a lot of people would want to work there. Simple supply and demand would keep his labour costs down. (Note that I said nothing about a minimum wage, just that the employees don't get mistreated)
Other sectors, like the embedded market, industrial controls, specialized welding, manufacturing automation and more all have jobs available, but require more learning and experience than your average network installation does. These are also jobs that by their nature cannot be outsourced.
You obviously don't know much about those sectors.
I used to work for a company that designed and built custom automated manufacturing systems. Big companies, like Boston Scientific for example, outsourced that work to us. I got laid off a year and a half ago because the market for it collapsed, and they just had another lay-off about 6 months ago.
We didn't do much specialized welding, but when we did, we outsourced it. All it takes is good drawings, a welder smart enough to read them, and the ability to get the material to him and back. We didn't outsource it overseas, but we probably would have if it made economic sense to do so (shipping costs and lead time).
We also didn't design our own industrial controls, we bought COTS boxes and programmed them to meet our needs (though it wasn't at a level where I would call it embedded programming, it was just basic ladder logic). Those boxes came from either Omron (Japan) or more likely Automation Direct (Australia, IIRC).
Sorry, but the grass is NOT greener on the other side of the fence.
There are plenty of developers having a hard time finding work nowadays without us bringing in third-world workers who think that driving a 1981 Civic is a wonderful privelege!
Didn't you pay attention in your drivers ed class? Driving ANYTHING is a privelege.
Harm to workers: they treat their workers worse than here, but undoubtedly the work is to their advantage otherwise they would not be doing it. If the programmers were really worse off being "exploited" than they were before the jobs came to their countries, do you really think they would keep working in these jobs?
Interesting point, but it's fatally flawed. The flaw is that you assume these workers have a choice. In the case of programmers, you're probably right. I'm sure they are much better off, even if they are being "exploited" (at least from an American point of view).
But lets look at a more common situation, such as the ever-popular Nike factory in Vietnam. The women who work there are forced to work long hours while being mentally, physically, and sexually abused, at gunpoint! Are they really better off than they would be working in the rice patties? That's a good question, and it's easy to say "yes" as long as you assume it's a choice they're willingly making. I very much doubt that's the case.
Yes, American workers were treated badly during the American Industrial Revolution, but I've never heard any stories like that. But, hey, IANAHistorian. That said, by continuing to outsource to countries where this kind of treatment is acceptable (and that is hardly an isolated case) we are not only condoning it, but encouraging it. Are you honestly willing to defend that?
it is almost as if someone who loves prostitution goes to a poor country because the cost is lower and the regulations are almost non-existent
That's really putting a pretty face on it. Let's get a little more real here:
It's as if someone who loves prostitution goes to a poor country because they can get the prostitutes there to subject themselves to the worst forms of degradation for only a few dollars, and they can beat the living shit out of them any time they want and nobody cares.
Oh, wait! People actually do that, often in some of the same countries that are now also being exploited by corporations. Don't believe me? Go find a marine or a sailor (ex is fine) and ask them about southeast asian hookers. Even if they didn't do it themselves, they knew someone that did.
Imagine having to go back to school at 47 with 4 kids and 2 cars and whatever else and looking at paying all the bills and tuition making 4.75 when last year you were making 30-50,000 a year is a pretty steep challenge - to anyone. call them whiners all you like, but try living through it just once. Not that I have, but I can imagine this creates a loss that a simple service industry job won't replace.
Well put. I was recently put in a similar situation (though not nearly that extreme). I went from making $12.50 an hour plus benefits to making $8 an hour with no benefits. I found that at that level I made just enough to cover expenses, nothing extra for going out to dinner, buying a new DVD or CD, or even building up a savings. I don't live like a high-roller by any means, I have a cheap appartment in the bad part of town and I don't go out much. My wife and I each have newer cars which we still owe money on, but they aren't expensive ones (a Saturn and a Subaru, if anyone cares, and yes we do actually have a need for 4-wheel drive). The loss of benefits means that when I got strep throat it cost me $250 instead of a $50 co-pay, and that came directly out of what savings I had from before with no way to replace it (and that's not including the week of work I lost, without any sick time or vacation time to cover for it).
I was fortunate in that I managed to recover fairly quickly (up to $12 in 3 months, $16 in 6 months), but then I was 27, not afraid to work as a temp, had only 1 kid, no mortgage, and didn't have to go back to school. It still sucked mightily, though, and the older you are the more it sucks. It sucks even more that my present position is so precarious (still a temp) and I might have to go through all that again at the drop of a hat.
You mean like that kind "socialism" ruined our economy?
Jackass.
Sounds like a bunch of fear mongering to me, but lets look at the numbers, shall we:
The National Science Foundation reports that China graduated nearly 200,000 engineers in 1999 from good universities that get better by the year. By comparison, American Universities graduate a mere 60,000 undergraduate engineers annually.
Since the population of America is about 300 million, that would mean about 0.02 percent of the population graduate as engineers each year. China's population is about 1.3 billion, which means about 0.015 percent graduate as engineers each year. I think we're doing pretty well, all things considered.
Honestly, if we were graduating 200,000 engineers a year we'd have a serious shortage of doctors, scientists, lawyers, etc.
Combined, India and China produced nearly 26 percent of the world's newly minted engineers in 1999.
Combined, India and China have nearly 33% of the world's population. If they were producing fewer engineers than they are, it would be an indication of something being seriously wrong.
I don't doubt the validity of these numbers, but presented this way they're nothing more than FUD. There's simply no way we can compete in a straight numbers game with either China or India, let alone both combined. OK, so the whole of Asia (excluding Japan) produces 320,000 engineers a year. Well, they have roughly 10 times the population of the US, and only managed to produce 5 times as many engineers. I think that says something.
As for the quality of these engineers, well, I have my doubts. I don't deal with many foriegn engineers, but I can say that my company has had nothing but problems with the software work we've outsourced to India. That hasn't stopped upper management from dictating that it must be done, of course, even though it actually costs us more, but that's a whole different rant. I would not expect any better results from non-software engineering endeavors, since they all require that same peculiar combination of knowledge and creativity which simply isn't a part of most of those cultures.
To be fair, some of the best engineers I've met have been Chinese, Indian, even Iranian, but every single one of them was educated at an American university and working for an American company, in America, for American wages. I'm not saying that Asians are incapable of creative thought, far from it, I'm just saying that the institutions in their native lands don't encourage it like American institutions do, and that's an essential part of training good engineers.
I don't think Capitalism would collapse, not in America anyway. It's too much a part of the American identity. I could certainly see a strong nationalist movement, though.