If you save 58 cents by outsourcing to India, hey, great, that's 58 cents more for the American economy. If you just spend the whole dollar on American labor, that's a whole dollar spent in the American economy.
The interesting thing is that when someone saves that 58 cents, but it puts people out of work in the US, the government steps in and provides services to those out-of-work people and then charges you taxes in far excess of the 58 cents. And they raise taxes on you to get it.
Of course, the person pocketing the other 42 cents is incorporated elsewhere, so he escapes the tax bite.
The government is solidifying its monopoly here. Take away the jobs, then support the jobless.
Problem is, you'll need to raise the threshold above their profit. I doubt these people are wasting all this time because they make $500 per mailing. I bet they make tens of thousands per mailing. And once you bring the charges to that level, you affect ordinary senders.
This could be worked around. I would be amenable to allowing someone access to my site for a day if they came via google for less than 5 cents. Even 1/2 of a cent, for example.
How many times do you search through all 500 matches from Google? Aren't the top 20 usually the most relevant? Aren't many of that 500 completely irrelevant?
The key is being able to charge someone a very small amount of money to view a very small amount of content. Since people are hostile towards ads, and since subscription effectively locks most of the internet up behind plastic wrap, and free doesn't effectively encourage the creation of new content (things have gotten a lot worse since the internet "bust" -- many topics can not be found on the web anymore), something has to give.
Imagine if a system could be worked up so that you pay just 5 cents to a website to access its content for a month.
I run a website that gets about 200,000 monthly unique visitors. I'd gladly take 5 cents per unique; I'd be able to work on the site full time.
A site like Yahoo gets hundreds of millions of uniques per month. They would be able to make millions per month from this deal.
And the best part is that no one would care about paying the 5 cents. How many sites do you visit in a month? A hundred? That's just $5 extra dollars out of your wallet -- less than a cup of coffee at Starbucks. You wouldn't even think twice about paying a nickel to get permission to use a site for a month.
When someone can figure out how to do this, we'll all be rich. Until then I need to figure out how to keep motivated with 1/10 that amount.
In theory, it sounds great that the people in the US should increase their skills and take on better work. Leave the grunt work for the other countries, right?
Well, that presumes that everyone in this country is actually capable of being a rocket scientist. That just isn't true, either because of genetic or social reasons.
So what has happened is that the better paying low-skilled jobs are gone, and the jobs that remain available to those people don't pay them enough to live. Hence the rest of us have to pay higher taxes to support these people -- because after all, if we stopped supporting everyone not capable of getting a job that pays enough to live, we'd all have to sleep with guns under our pillows.
Now consider this; intensely productive and specialized jobs require intense specialized education. Someone can spend $100k to be trained for a specific career. That's fine until that career disappears and you have to go back to square 1. Then what do you do?
If you're 50-55 years old and your career disappears, what do you do? Go back to college so you can be in debt until the day you die? Or just move into a small shack because that's all you can afford on your Walmart greeter salary?
If you're 40-45 years old and your career disappears, what do you do? Bunk with your kid at the local college -- assuming you can in fact afford to simultaneously send yourself and your kid to college with no job?
If you're 30-35 years old and your career disappears, what do you do? Tell your wife and newborn to rough it for four years while you all move to Iowa to attend a university?
The whole thing is unsustainable. While job destruction may have positive economic benefits, it causes intense social damage. Yet that somehow escapes most economists, since apparently capitalism is the only language they speak.
The US doesn't need to trade in order to survive. Proof? Well, the entire planet isn't trading in the interstellar economy, and we're still doing just fine.
The US has always competed with foreign countries. Until recently, we have often won the fight.
Why is this? Well, an example of the old competition used to be GM against Toyota. This was good for everyone, because both companies had to innovate, both had to cut costs, both had to improve their product to survive. The world was a better place due to this competition, even though some US jobs were lost.
GM was always on the side of the US, and Toyota was always on the side of Japan, and vice-versa.
This same scenario took place in many industries, century upon century. In a limited sense, the world marketplace has always been global. Goods were shipped from England to the US colonies, and goods were shipped from the US colonies to England.
But the battle has now changed. It is no longer the US vs. another country. It is now a US corporation vs. the worker.
If someone in the US figures out a great way to make a car that is 90% cheaper, and we can finally compete with those guys in China, do you think the coropration says "great, you guys can now keep your jobs"? No. Do you know what the corporation does?
It moves that exact process to China, and saves even more money. And it makes you train the Chinese workers to boot.
We are in an unwinnable game. This isn't about the education system in the US, and this isn't about US workers being bad. This is about making the most money possible, even if it decimates society and wipes out the USA.
The enemy isn't the guy in the other country, nor is the enemy a foreign government. The enemy is now the corporation.
I was lucky, I found a new job with a company that paid the exact same salary to every person in the same 'rank' in the company (it was consulting). If you were a consultant, you got $x, if you were a 'senior consultant', you got $y, if you were a 'advanced consultant', you got $z. This boosted my salary about 25% in one year.
I later found, via the interview process, that employers make you an offer based on what you tell them you are currently making. If you say you make $50k, they'll offer you $55k, but if you say you make $60k they may offer you $62. The trick is to figure out what they're willing to pay, and tell them you make about 5-10% less than that. They offer you a small raise, and everyone's happy.
One way around it is to exaggerate your prior salary. I don't think that they can legally call your company to verify it.
You don't have to lie. If you get a bonus, include it in your base. If you get some kind of 401k match, include that. If they pay for college education for you, add some of that benefit into your salary.
If you by some weird chance get called on it, tell them that you normalized your salary to the marketplace because you got a lot of benefits that other companies don't traditionally offer.
Another approach is to not tell them your current salary, but instead tell them what you're looking for. That way the question never really comes up. This is harder to do, however, with larger companies that more rigidly follow their "salary markup" gimick.
What's the difference between you blocking popups, and you substituting "local" advertisements for all banner ads?
In both cases, you can make the argument that you're making things better for your customers. Instead of showing them popups, or lousy ads that they don't care about, you can put your own ads in there which are probably more relevant. After all, isn't it better to see an ad for the local car dealership than one for Gator?
Of course, no matter how noble your intentions, you're still committing copyright infringement. You're changing the content of websites without their permission. That's a no-no. Especially when you're profiting from it, either via the new ads sold, or the lack of ads.
You'd be a lot easier to prosecute than 1 million individual users with popup blockers too.
You save up. A VCR used to cost $500. I saved my money for a couple of months and then bought one. And when it broke, I got it fixed. That employed someone in the VCR repair business.
Now, I pay $50 for a VCR, I have 4 of them (how many do I really need?), and if it breaks, I toss it into the landfill.
I think that things will really change when:
1) The price of oil goes up, making the cost of shipping goods halfway around the world tremendously more expensive, to the point where the shipping will represent over 80% of the product's cost.
2) The price of throwing away garbage goes up, to the point that it will cost you $100 to throw away your $50 VCR. People will then be willing to spend more on a product that is made well, and the US will have more of a chance of competing to make these expensive products.
We are all being played for suckers. In the 20th century, the fight was generally US corporations vs. foreign corporations. Our corporations were strong, smart, and we could be more innovative than a factory in Japan and win the fight.
Now our corporations are selling us out. If a factory in the US comes up with a revolutionary new way to do something, resulting in a 50% drop in costs, the global corporation says "Great! We'll implement that in China and save 90%!"
The battle is now the corporation vs. the workers.
As a worker, it's pretty hard to win when no one is on your side.
Sure, it happened in textiles a while ago. The big difference is that it doesn't take much skill to operate a textile loom. The people displaced back then moved somewhere else, and got a job for similar pay in another industry with about 2 weeks of training. Sucked to be them, but it didn't suck too much.
Imagine that you get laid off, and there is no possible job left in your profession. You want to switch to another profession, but every other profession requires you to go back to school for 2-4 years, and when you get out, you'll have to start at the bottom of the ladder and work yourself back up.
Easy, you say. Sure, if you're not 40 with a family. But how would you like to pay $80k for another degree, plus years of work at the lowest pay grade? And the threat of that new profession moving overseas is right around the corner.
And even that assumes that you'll even get hired at 45 -- but who wants a 45-year old entry level employee when there are 20-year olds out there willing to put in 80 hour weeks for next to nothing?
Regarding the movement of jobs, I think it will be very different on a national scale.
If Rubbermaid closes up shop in Wooster, OH, the unemployed people of Wooster eventually move elsewhere, to where the jobs are.
If India's IT sector is booming, and the programmers there are enjoying as nice a lifestyle as programmers in the US, due to a difference in economic scales, it doesn't mean jack to a US programmer -- we can't move to India to take advantage of the jobs.
If the entire country gets "offshored" in some way, shape, or form, it's not like we'll roll up the sidewalks and move on. It's probably going to be a prolonged depression/deflation, and I bet it will even include violent revolution if it drags out for more than a couple of years.
Think of all the people that just refinanced their houses, only to be told that not only will they have to take a job for minimum wage in the service sector (because all high-priced labor goes overseas), but that $200k mortgage they have is now more like $2 million because the value of a dollar has just been cut by 90%.
Great. I'm a person who played by the rules that the networks laid down. Watch our commercials and we'll let you watch our show for free.
If between-show commercials can no longer be used to pay for programming, I will now be forced to either pay to view each show, or I will have to put up with incredibly intrusive advertising woven into the programming -- something that can't be skipped.
That's just great. Pay more or be annoyed more. And just how is everyone better off because of this?
Talk about killing the goose that lays golden eggs.
Easy. Morality and ethics are societal standards. They're almost always tied to laws. You can certainly believe that an action is moral and/or ethical, but you can only perform that action if society doesn't disagree with you.
I may think it's neither immoral nor unethical to slip into your house at night and off whiny little pukes like you, but society has a different opinion, and that's what I have to live under if I'm going to be allowed to continue to play in society. You have to live under those very same laws.
Right now, the laws say that downloading MP3s of songs that you never bought is illegal. It doesn't matter if hundreds of thousands of people are doing it, large-scale civil disobedience doesn't change the law any more than it has forced pot to be legalized.
Plus, your arguments are specious, narrowly tailored to suit your MP3 habits. You don't make any sense -- you're arguing that if an artist's catalog is made available to anyone for free, that the artist can make that up in volume? Sure, someone may get turned on to an artist by downloading a song for free, but how is that going to translate to sales if the product is available FOR FREE?
I can take each of your arguments and apply it to me stealing and distributing your identity, another "virtual" creation.
Your identity isn't a physical thing, and if I steal it from you, you still have it. I can only devalue it, just as you devalue an artist's catalog by giving his songs away for free. But that's your fucking problem, perhaps you should stop relying on your identity for so many things. You should get a better business model.
If I steal it, and sell it to 500 illegal immigrants who don't have the credit rating that you once did, too fucking bad for you -- you should have figured out a better way to protect it. That's not my problem either.
And if you want to sue me, well, I think that the laws should be set up so that my identity is protected. Verizon shouldn't be able to tie the IP I used to get your identity to me -- my privacy is much more important than your pathetic identity that you should have guarded more closely.
And since I'm not actually stealing anything physical from you, then the total lost from you is ZERO. Sure, maybe your future earning potential might be damaged because a lot of crap is going to show up on your credit report, and maybe you'll never be able to rent an apartment or buy a house, but we'll never really know if you would have done those things, just as we'll never really know if the artist lost money becaue you would have bought that CD instead of downloading it.
Either way, nothing physical has been taken from you, so using your arguments, stealing and selling your identity is OK too.
Of course, there's not much of a market for foul-mouthed, little pukey bastards, so you don't really have anything to worry about.
It doesn't matter -- that's not your decision to make.
That's like justifying stealing Star Wars action figures by saying "I saw the movie 25 times, so I've given George Lucas enough money to compensate for it".
You can't make that call -- not legally, morally, or ethically.
Bottom line is that you're preventing people from making money the way they are choosing to make it by taking their service but not paying for it. That's wrong, and you know it, no matter how much you choose to justify it.
Your argument is flawed. Yes, all those things you allude to are true -- the RIAA sells CD's for a lot more than they give the artist, they control the distribution methods, etc.
But so-called "file-sharing" eliminates all other alternatives for an artist to make money by selling his music. If an artist put out a CD for $10, managed to control his own distribution, and wound up making $5 per CD, you'd still download it. You have no idea how much money each artist makes from their CD sales.
You're a hypocrite. You justify your theft because you're taking money from a large corporation, yet you have no problem taking money from artists too.
When's the last time you mailed a band $1 because you liked their CD, you downloaded it from the internet, and you want to compensate them. Never? I thought so.
Interesting that the people who accept Global Warming based on a consensus of scientists are the same people who required infallible proof that Iraq had biological/chemical weapons, and would settle for nothing short of that.
Here's a quote from the an article previously referenced on SlashDot:
IDC warns that Bangalore, India's primary IT hub, may no longer offer the world's best IT outsourcing value; that the infrastructure there is saturated; and wages for skilled workers are being bid up, with many new grads demanding annual salaries of $4,000 (USD) or more -- not only in Bangalore but all over India.
Oh my God. The nerve of those Indian developers demanding more than $4k/year. No wonder companies are turning to Romania and China. They're obviously less greedy in those countries.
Can you cut your salary demands from $75k to $4k, probably with no health, pension/401k benefits? If you can't, then the argument for telecommuting is moot because someone else will do your job for a hell of a lot less than you will.
I know a lot of Slashdot readers are in favor of globalism, but I don't think they're prepared for the effects of it. Unless you're a plumber or electrician, you better get used to a wildly lower salary and standard of living, because if your job can be sent overseas, it will be, due to this type of astromonical savings.
Not just IT -- engineers, benefits administrators, architects, analysts, animators, call centers, they're even shipping radiologist work overseas because someone in India can read X-rays just as well as someone in NYC.
We won't see the alleged benefits of globalism for decades, so there is probably a long stretch of very rough waters in our future, where entire industries will be eliminated almost overnight by offshoring, and the economic balance of many regions of the US will be ripped to shreds.
The problem is that the change is just too fast to react to. IT is still a relatively new field; when I attended RPI 10-12 years ago there were really no IT courses being taught, it was all CompSci -- data structures, etc. The IT industry as a career has ramped up and burned out in a span of about 10-15 years. That's about 1/5 the length of a person's working years.
How can someone completely retrain themselves every 10 years, when retraining means starting from the ground floor both salarywise and knowledgewise? I'm not talking about evolving, like moving from mainframes to PC's. I'm talking about moving from being a programmer to being a lawyer or an accountant.
How can anyone prepare for a career when there's a significant chance that the career could be totally obliterated in as short a period as 5 years.
It's really depressing, I've been using Internet and it's precursors since 1985 for a variety of reasons, and I remember a time when it was all open and free for use. No pop-ups, no spam, no discussions about how to charge people money for everything they click on.
And in 1985, all you had was Usenet, perhaps some FTP sites, and maybe Archie. Do you really want to go back to that?
Or perhaps go back in time to 1994. You had a lot of 2-3 page personal pages, never updated, on a variety of inane topics (many were entertaining, but few were truly useful). True, new pages were added frequently because it was the new, novel thing to do back then.
A lot of the sites were hosted by educational institutions, meaning that those schools subsidized them. Try explaining that to a parent who wants to know why tuition went up by 7% this year when unemployment is so high.
Look at how many entertaining "personal" pages there are now. Not as many as in 1993. People lost interest in publishing them. I think that if you remove all the commercial sites (defined as having ads on them), you'll have 1/100th the information on the internet than there was in 1994. I don't think that many people would rush in with personal pages to fill the void, especially when a moderately successful site can rack up hundreds of dollars per month in hosting fees.
Do you think that you can operate Slashdot in a noncommercial way, purely as an open, free, no-advertising site?
I don't think that people really realize how much better the internet could be if people could make money by publishing content. I know I'd spend 60-100 hours a week adding to my site if I was able to be paid for my work. But because I need to spend 40-50 hours a week at my primary job, those are hours I can't spend making my site better.
Multiply my scenario by the thousands upon thousands of sites out there and try and envision how much is not being published due to lack of renumeration.
The internet was never this wild font of endlessly free information with absolutely no commercial aspects. Prior to commercialization here were niche sites catering mostly to a techincal audience; you didn't have sites like thisoldhouse.com giving you a variety of free information on any topic you chose.
but nobody's going to make money on a penny a page, no matter what "they" say; that only works on click-rates the size of CNN, MSNBC, Slashdot, source-forge, etc.
I've posted earlier that if I could make $0.05 per unique visitor per month to my site, I could quit my day job. If I had $0.01 for each page viewed on my site (I get about 4 million per month), I would definitely be rich.
Regardless, I have no way of charging people just a little bit of money to use my site. That's a problem for me. I can either go subscription-only, and limit the number of people who can view my content, or make just pennies on advertising.
Eventually either I will get bored with running my site, or my costs will exceed my revenues. Right now the only thing keeping me going, besides my passion for my site, is the hope that someone will come up with a way for content sites to make money.
If someone told me right now that I would just continue to eke out enough to cover my costs for the rest of my life, I'd probably let it peter out over the next year or two.
You're right -- not every site would charge the same, and premium sites would try to charge more, but at that point market forces could take over, and if a site charged too much, a competing site could form and the prices would drop.
I have no real control over market forces right now because browsing content is a very different exercise than purchasing items. In fact, they're opposite of each other. If you're enjoying a popular website's content, you are less likely to want to leave that site to buy something.
There are sites out there the same size as mine that make tens of thousands of dollars per month. How? Because they tailor their content to selling products. Problem is, that biases their content.
I'd love to be in control of a situation where, if I make my site better and better, and it becomes more and more popular, I would get paid more and more money.
Right now increasing my popularity just increases my site's hosting expenses, it increases the volume of e-mails that I get, but it does not proportionally increase my revenue.
I used to work for a dollar-store. Not as a cashier -- I ran the IT systems.
We found that the beauty of a dollar store is that the decision-making threshold is so low. If something is $1, you don't really have to decide if you really want it, and if it's worth $1 to you. After all, it's just a dollar, if you don't want the item you can just throw it away later.
The store relied on impulse buyers.
When we tried to introduce higher-priced merchandise, it was a complete failure. People just didn't buy the stuff, even though the deals were amazingly good. The people had to think too much, and the price being higher than $1 killed the impulse. Even $2 items didn't sell that well, even though those same items sold for $5+ in traditional stores.
If micropayments are very small -- either 1/10 of a cent per page, or 5-10 cents per site -- there will be very little decision making. The amount of damage you can do in a browsing session will be less than the cost of a cup of coffee, or a newspaper -- both things that people buy, use a little of, and then discard.
I run a medium-sized content website. I get between 4 and 5 million pageviews per month, about 10,000 unique visitors per day, and about 180,000 unique visitors per month.
I've figured out that if I could get each unique visitor to pay me just a nickel -- 5 cents -- per month, I could take down the banner advertising, quit my day job, and work on my site full time (and therefore make it that much better with more information).
Think about it. What if you had to pay content sites just $0.05 per month to access the content? Most internet users visit perhaps at most 100-200 different content sites per month. That would add just $10 to your monthly bill, and all advertising could be eliminated.
I would think that sites that are successful in selling you things -- like Amazon -- wouldn't charge you to enter, so that may even cut down on the number of sites you have to pay for each month.
With a price point of just $0.05, you wouldn't have to think to yourself, "gee, should I click on this link, do I really want to spend the money"?
I've tried various forms of banner advertising, sponsorships, commission links, etc., but I still can't earn close to $0.05 (on average) from each visitor (I'm at about $0.003 per unique).
I don't want to make my site into subcription-based, I'd rather keep it free, or free enough so that people could still easily view it.
Face it, the content on the internet has slowed down a lot since the dot-bomb. That's a direct result of there being no money in content publishing. It's closing up even further; one by one sites are becoming subscription-only. Pretty soon the internet is going to be one big magazine rack with the magazines all shrink-wrapped, and just a few free-zines in the corner.
Simply giving web publishers a few table scraps each month would dramatically revitalize what was once a very promising source of content and entertainment. Micropayemnts are one of the few ways that this can happen.
When CDs came out (mid 1980's) they were about $10, and the should have gone down.
When CDs first came out, they were $20+. The first CD I ever bought was in 1986, it was "The Monkees Greatest Hits". The CD was 66+ minutes, and cost $24 because it was "double length".
This was at a time when cassette tapes were in the $7-11 range ($11 for "longer" tapes). Remember in the music stores, where the cassettes weren't actually priced with prices, they had codes like "AA -- $11, BB -- $9, CC -- $8"? You had to look at a chart on the wall to figure out the price of the day.
After a while CD street prices settled in the $15 range, with occassional sales of $11-12. The official MSRP of most CDs was still $16-19.
Since CDs are more or less the same price or cheaper than they were back in 1988 (15 years ago), I don't think people can really complain too much here.
The distribution of the wealth began moving to a smaller percentage of people, namely the factory owners.
Wouldn't this unequal distribution of wealth be the most "efficient" result?
If there are thousands of companies making textiles, then the wealth is spread among those thousands of companies. But an industry with thousands of companies is viewed as inefficient. Several larger companies could do the job for less. That's why industries devolve into "bigger is better" mentalities -- not just textiles, but retaillers, banks, accounting firms, etc.
So then, by definition, isn't a handful of hugely rich companies, and everyone else deathly poor, the most "efficient" solution that the markets are rushing towards?
Is that something that we should be embracing? And isn't this at odds with the globalist claims, that globalization will make everyone richer?
Instead, it seems to be reducing innovation (fewer companies means less chance for new ideas), creating social discord (when industries and careers are wiped out), and causing massive shifts to ways of life (cities and towns that don't "get bigger" wind up in a death spiral, where lack of jobs prevents employable people from settling there, so all that's left are unemployable people and the social ills they bring with them).
Slashdot Mirror
If you save 58 cents by outsourcing to India, hey, great, that's 58 cents more for the American economy. If you just spend the whole dollar on American labor, that's a whole dollar spent in the American economy.
The interesting thing is that when someone saves that 58 cents, but it puts people out of work in the US, the government steps in and provides services to those out-of-work people and then charges you taxes in far excess of the 58 cents. And they raise taxes on you to get it.
Of course, the person pocketing the other 42 cents is incorporated elsewhere, so he escapes the tax bite.
The government is solidifying its monopoly here. Take away the jobs, then support the jobless.
Problem is, you'll need to raise the threshold above their profit. I doubt these people are wasting all this time because they make $500 per mailing. I bet they make tens of thousands per mailing. And once you bring the charges to that level, you affect ordinary senders.
Ralph
This could be worked around. I would be amenable to allowing someone access to my site for a day if they came via google for less than 5 cents. Even 1/2 of a cent, for example.
How many times do you search through all 500 matches from Google? Aren't the top 20 usually the most relevant? Aren't many of that 500 completely irrelevant?
The key is being able to charge someone a very small amount of money to view a very small amount of content. Since people are hostile towards ads, and since subscription effectively locks most of the internet up behind plastic wrap, and free doesn't effectively encourage the creation of new content (things have gotten a lot worse since the internet "bust" -- many topics can not be found on the web anymore), something has to give.
Ralph
Imagine if a system could be worked up so that you pay just 5 cents to a website to access its content for a month.
I run a website that gets about 200,000 monthly unique visitors. I'd gladly take 5 cents per unique; I'd be able to work on the site full time.
A site like Yahoo gets hundreds of millions of uniques per month. They would be able to make millions per month from this deal.
And the best part is that no one would care about paying the 5 cents. How many sites do you visit in a month? A hundred? That's just $5 extra dollars out of your wallet -- less than a cup of coffee at Starbucks. You wouldn't even think twice about paying a nickel to get permission to use a site for a month.
When someone can figure out how to do this, we'll all be rich. Until then I need to figure out how to keep motivated with 1/10 that amount.
Ralph Slate
http://www.hockeydb.com
Not really.
In theory, it sounds great that the people in the US should increase their skills and take on better work. Leave the grunt work for the other countries, right?
Well, that presumes that everyone in this country is actually capable of being a rocket scientist. That just isn't true, either because of genetic or social reasons.
So what has happened is that the better paying low-skilled jobs are gone, and the jobs that remain available to those people don't pay them enough to live. Hence the rest of us have to pay higher taxes to support these people -- because after all, if we stopped supporting everyone not capable of getting a job that pays enough to live, we'd all have to sleep with guns under our pillows.
Now consider this; intensely productive and specialized jobs require intense specialized education. Someone can spend $100k to be trained for a specific career. That's fine until that career disappears and you have to go back to square 1. Then what do you do?
If you're 50-55 years old and your career disappears, what do you do? Go back to college so you can be in debt until the day you die? Or just move into a small shack because that's all you can afford on your Walmart greeter salary?
If you're 40-45 years old and your career disappears, what do you do? Bunk with your kid at the local college -- assuming you can in fact afford to simultaneously send yourself and your kid to college with no job?
If you're 30-35 years old and your career disappears, what do you do? Tell your wife and newborn to rough it for four years while you all move to Iowa to attend a university?
The whole thing is unsustainable. While job destruction may have positive economic benefits, it causes intense social damage. Yet that somehow escapes most economists, since apparently capitalism is the only language they speak.
The US doesn't need to trade in order to survive. Proof? Well, the entire planet isn't trading in the interstellar economy, and we're still doing just fine.
The US has always competed with foreign countries. Until recently, we have often won the fight.
Why is this? Well, an example of the old competition used to be GM against Toyota. This was good for everyone, because both companies had to innovate, both had to cut costs, both had to improve their product to survive. The world was a better place due to this competition, even though some US jobs were lost.
GM was always on the side of the US, and Toyota was always on the side of Japan, and vice-versa.
This same scenario took place in many industries, century upon century. In a limited sense, the world marketplace has always been global. Goods were shipped from England to the US colonies, and goods were shipped from the US colonies to England.
But the battle has now changed. It is no longer the US vs. another country. It is now a US corporation vs. the worker.
If someone in the US figures out a great way to make a car that is 90% cheaper, and we can finally compete with those guys in China, do you think the coropration says "great, you guys can now keep your jobs"? No. Do you know what the corporation does?
It moves that exact process to China, and saves even more money. And it makes you train the Chinese workers to boot.
We are in an unwinnable game. This isn't about the education system in the US, and this isn't about US workers being bad. This is about making the most money possible, even if it decimates society and wipes out the USA.
The enemy isn't the guy in the other country, nor is the enemy a foreign government. The enemy is now the corporation.
I was once faced with the same problem.
I was lucky, I found a new job with a company that paid the exact same salary to every person in the same 'rank' in the company (it was consulting). If you were a consultant, you got $x, if you were a 'senior consultant', you got $y, if you were a 'advanced consultant', you got $z. This boosted my salary about 25% in one year.
I later found, via the interview process, that employers make you an offer based on what you tell them you are currently making. If you say you make $50k, they'll offer you $55k, but if you say you make $60k they may offer you $62. The trick is to figure out what they're willing to pay, and tell them you make about 5-10% less than that. They offer you a small raise, and everyone's happy.
One way around it is to exaggerate your prior salary. I don't think that they can legally call your company to verify it.
You don't have to lie. If you get a bonus, include it in your base. If you get some kind of 401k match, include that. If they pay for college education for you, add some of that benefit into your salary.
If you by some weird chance get called on it, tell them that you normalized your salary to the marketplace because you got a lot of benefits that other companies don't traditionally offer.
Another approach is to not tell them your current salary, but instead tell them what you're looking for. That way the question never really comes up. This is harder to do, however, with larger companies that more rigidly follow their "salary markup" gimick.
What's the difference between you blocking popups, and you substituting "local" advertisements for all banner ads?
In both cases, you can make the argument that you're making things better for your customers. Instead of showing them popups, or lousy ads that they don't care about, you can put your own ads in there which are probably more relevant. After all, isn't it better to see an ad for the local car dealership than one for Gator?
Of course, no matter how noble your intentions, you're still committing copyright infringement. You're changing the content of websites without their permission. That's a no-no. Especially when you're profiting from it, either via the new ads sold, or the lack of ads.
You'd be a lot easier to prosecute than 1 million individual users with popup blockers too.
Ralph
Easy. You don't buy as much.
You save up. A VCR used to cost $500. I saved my money for a couple of months and then bought one. And when it broke, I got it fixed. That employed someone in the VCR repair business.
Now, I pay $50 for a VCR, I have 4 of them (how many do I really need?), and if it breaks, I toss it into the landfill.
I think that things will really change when:
1) The price of oil goes up, making the cost of shipping goods halfway around the world tremendously more expensive, to the point where the shipping will represent over 80% of the product's cost.
2) The price of throwing away garbage goes up, to the point that it will cost you $100 to throw away your $50 VCR. People will then be willing to spend more on a product that is made well, and the US will have more of a chance of competing to make these expensive products.
We are all being played for suckers. In the 20th century, the fight was generally US corporations vs. foreign corporations. Our corporations were strong, smart, and we could be more innovative than a factory in Japan and win the fight.
Now our corporations are selling us out. If a factory in the US comes up with a revolutionary new way to do something, resulting in a 50% drop in costs, the global corporation says "Great! We'll implement that in China and save 90%!"
The battle is now the corporation vs. the workers.
As a worker, it's pretty hard to win when no one is on your side.
Sure, it happened in textiles a while ago. The big difference is that it doesn't take much skill to operate a textile loom. The people displaced back then moved somewhere else, and got a job for similar pay in another industry with about 2 weeks of training. Sucked to be them, but it didn't suck too much.
Imagine that you get laid off, and there is no possible job left in your profession. You want to switch to another profession, but every other profession requires you to go back to school for 2-4 years, and when you get out, you'll have to start at the bottom of the ladder and work yourself back up.
Easy, you say. Sure, if you're not 40 with a family. But how would you like to pay $80k for another degree, plus years of work at the lowest pay grade? And the threat of that new profession moving overseas is right around the corner.
And even that assumes that you'll even get hired at 45 -- but who wants a 45-year old entry level employee when there are 20-year olds out there willing to put in 80 hour weeks for next to nothing?
Regarding the movement of jobs, I think it will be very different on a national scale.
If Rubbermaid closes up shop in Wooster, OH, the unemployed people of Wooster eventually move elsewhere, to where the jobs are.
If India's IT sector is booming, and the programmers there are enjoying as nice a lifestyle as programmers in the US, due to a difference in economic scales, it doesn't mean jack to a US programmer -- we can't move to India to take advantage of the jobs.
If the entire country gets "offshored" in some way, shape, or form, it's not like we'll roll up the sidewalks and move on. It's probably going to be a prolonged depression/deflation, and I bet it will even include violent revolution if it drags out for more than a couple of years.
Think of all the people that just refinanced their houses, only to be told that not only will they have to take a job for minimum wage in the service sector (because all high-priced labor goes overseas), but that $200k mortgage they have is now more like $2 million because the value of a dollar has just been cut by 90%.
Not a pretty sight.
Great. I'm a person who played by the rules that the networks laid down. Watch our commercials and we'll let you watch our show for free.
If between-show commercials can no longer be used to pay for programming, I will now be forced to either pay to view each show, or I will have to put up with incredibly intrusive advertising woven into the programming -- something that can't be skipped.
That's just great. Pay more or be annoyed more. And just how is everyone better off because of this?
Talk about killing the goose that lays golden eggs.
Easy. Morality and ethics are societal standards. They're almost always tied to laws. You can certainly believe that an action is moral and/or ethical, but you can only perform that action if society doesn't disagree with you.
I may think it's neither immoral nor unethical to slip into your house at night and off whiny little pukes like you, but society has a different opinion, and that's what I have to live under if I'm going to be allowed to continue to play in society. You have to live under those very same laws.
Right now, the laws say that downloading MP3s of songs that you never bought is illegal. It doesn't matter if hundreds of thousands of people are doing it, large-scale civil disobedience doesn't change the law any more than it has forced pot to be legalized.
Plus, your arguments are specious, narrowly tailored to suit your MP3 habits. You don't make any sense -- you're arguing that if an artist's catalog is made available to anyone for free, that the artist can make that up in volume? Sure, someone may get turned on to an artist by downloading a song for free, but how is that going to translate to sales if the product is available FOR FREE?
I can take each of your arguments and apply it to me stealing and distributing your identity, another "virtual" creation.
Your identity isn't a physical thing, and if I steal it from you, you still have it. I can only devalue it, just as you devalue an artist's catalog by giving his songs away for free. But that's your fucking problem, perhaps you should stop relying on your identity for so many things. You should get a better business model.
If I steal it, and sell it to 500 illegal immigrants who don't have the credit rating that you once did, too fucking bad for you -- you should have figured out a better way to protect it. That's not my problem either.
And if you want to sue me, well, I think that the laws should be set up so that my identity is protected. Verizon shouldn't be able to tie the IP I used to get your identity to me -- my privacy is much more important than your pathetic identity that you should have guarded more closely.
And since I'm not actually stealing anything physical from you, then the total lost from you is ZERO. Sure, maybe your future earning potential might be damaged because a lot of crap is going to show up on your credit report, and maybe you'll never be able to rent an apartment or buy a house, but we'll never really know if you would have done those things, just as we'll never really know if the artist lost money becaue you would have bought that CD instead of downloading it.
Either way, nothing physical has been taken from you, so using your arguments, stealing and selling your identity is OK too.
Of course, there's not much of a market for foul-mouthed, little pukey bastards, so you don't really have anything to worry about.
It doesn't matter -- that's not your decision to make.
That's like justifying stealing Star Wars action figures by saying "I saw the movie 25 times, so I've given George Lucas enough money to compensate for it".
You can't make that call -- not legally, morally, or ethically.
Bottom line is that you're preventing people from making money the way they are choosing to make it by taking their service but not paying for it. That's wrong, and you know it, no matter how much you choose to justify it.
Your argument is flawed. Yes, all those things you allude to are true -- the RIAA sells CD's for a lot more than they give the artist, they control the distribution methods, etc.
But so-called "file-sharing" eliminates all other alternatives for an artist to make money by selling his music. If an artist put out a CD for $10, managed to control his own distribution, and wound up making $5 per CD, you'd still download it. You have no idea how much money each artist makes from their CD sales.
You're a hypocrite. You justify your theft because you're taking money from a large corporation, yet you have no problem taking money from artists too.
When's the last time you mailed a band $1 because you liked their CD, you downloaded it from the internet, and you want to compensate them. Never? I thought so.
Interesting that the people who accept Global Warming based on a consensus of scientists are the same people who required infallible proof that Iraq had biological/chemical weapons, and would settle for nothing short of that.
And vice-versa.
I guess everyone is a hypocrite, huh?
Ralph
Here's a quote from the an article previously referenced on SlashDot:
IDC warns that Bangalore, India's primary IT hub, may no longer offer the world's best IT outsourcing value; that the infrastructure there is saturated; and wages for skilled workers are being bid up, with many new grads demanding annual salaries of $4,000 (USD) or more -- not only in Bangalore but all over India.
Oh my God. The nerve of those Indian developers demanding more than $4k/year. No wonder companies are turning to Romania and China. They're obviously less greedy in those countries.
Can you cut your salary demands from $75k to $4k, probably with no health, pension/401k benefits? If you can't, then the argument for telecommuting is moot because someone else will do your job for a hell of a lot less than you will.
I know a lot of Slashdot readers are in favor of globalism, but I don't think they're prepared for the effects of it. Unless you're a plumber or electrician, you better get used to a wildly lower salary and standard of living, because if your job can be sent overseas, it will be, due to this type of astromonical savings.
Not just IT -- engineers, benefits administrators, architects, analysts, animators, call centers, they're even shipping radiologist work overseas because someone in India can read X-rays just as well as someone in NYC.
We won't see the alleged benefits of globalism for decades, so there is probably a long stretch of very rough waters in our future, where entire industries will be eliminated almost overnight by offshoring, and the economic balance of many regions of the US will be ripped to shreds.
The problem is that the change is just too fast to react to. IT is still a relatively new field; when I attended RPI 10-12 years ago there were really no IT courses being taught, it was all CompSci -- data structures, etc. The IT industry as a career has ramped up and burned out in a span of about 10-15 years. That's about 1/5 the length of a person's working years.
How can someone completely retrain themselves every 10 years, when retraining means starting from the ground floor both salarywise and knowledgewise? I'm not talking about evolving, like moving from mainframes to PC's. I'm talking about moving from being a programmer to being a lawyer or an accountant.
How can anyone prepare for a career when there's a significant chance that the career could be totally obliterated in as short a period as 5 years.
Ralph
It's really depressing, I've been using Internet and it's precursors since 1985 for a variety of reasons, and I remember a time when it was all open and free for use. No pop-ups, no spam, no discussions about how to charge people money for everything they click on.
And in 1985, all you had was Usenet, perhaps some FTP sites, and maybe Archie. Do you really want to go back to that?
Or perhaps go back in time to 1994. You had a lot of 2-3 page personal pages, never updated, on a variety of inane topics (many were entertaining, but few were truly useful). True, new pages were added frequently because it was the new, novel thing to do back then.
A lot of the sites were hosted by educational institutions, meaning that those schools subsidized them. Try explaining that to a parent who wants to know why tuition went up by 7% this year when unemployment is so high.
Look at how many entertaining "personal" pages there are now. Not as many as in 1993. People lost interest in publishing them. I think that if you remove all the commercial sites (defined as having ads on them), you'll have 1/100th the information on the internet than there was in 1994. I don't think that many people would rush in with personal pages to fill the void, especially when a moderately successful site can rack up hundreds of dollars per month in hosting fees.
Do you think that you can operate Slashdot in a noncommercial way, purely as an open, free, no-advertising site?
I don't think that people really realize how much better the internet could be if people could make money by publishing content. I know I'd spend 60-100 hours a week adding to my site if I was able to be paid for my work. But because I need to spend 40-50 hours a week at my primary job, those are hours I can't spend making my site better.
Multiply my scenario by the thousands upon thousands of sites out there and try and envision how much is not being published due to lack of renumeration.
The internet was never this wild font of endlessly free information with absolutely no commercial aspects. Prior to commercialization here were niche sites catering mostly to a techincal audience; you didn't have sites like thisoldhouse.com giving you a variety of free information on any topic you chose.
Ralph
You say:
but nobody's going to make money on a penny a page, no matter what "they" say; that only works on click-rates the size of CNN, MSNBC, Slashdot, source-forge, etc.
I've posted earlier that if I could make $0.05 per unique visitor per month to my site, I could quit my day job. If I had $0.01 for each page viewed on my site (I get about 4 million per month), I would definitely be rich.
Regardless, I have no way of charging people just a little bit of money to use my site. That's a problem for me. I can either go subscription-only, and limit the number of people who can view my content, or make just pennies on advertising.
Eventually either I will get bored with running my site, or my costs will exceed my revenues. Right now the only thing keeping me going, besides my passion for my site, is the hope that someone will come up with a way for content sites to make money.
If someone told me right now that I would just continue to eke out enough to cover my costs for the rest of my life, I'd probably let it peter out over the next year or two.
You're right -- not every site would charge the same, and premium sites would try to charge more, but at that point market forces could take over, and if a site charged too much, a competing site could form and the prices would drop.
I have no real control over market forces right now because browsing content is a very different exercise than purchasing items. In fact, they're opposite of each other. If you're enjoying a popular website's content, you are less likely to want to leave that site to buy something.
There are sites out there the same size as mine that make tens of thousands of dollars per month. How? Because they tailor their content to selling products. Problem is, that biases their content.
I'd love to be in control of a situation where, if I make my site better and better, and it becomes more and more popular, I would get paid more and more money.
Right now increasing my popularity just increases my site's hosting expenses, it increases the volume of e-mails that I get, but it does not proportionally increase my revenue.
Ralph
That article uses a flawed argument.
I used to work for a dollar-store. Not as a cashier -- I ran the IT systems.
We found that the beauty of a dollar store is that the decision-making threshold is so low. If something is $1, you don't really have to decide if you really want it, and if it's worth $1 to you. After all, it's just a dollar, if you don't want the item you can just throw it away later.
The store relied on impulse buyers.
When we tried to introduce higher-priced merchandise, it was a complete failure. People just didn't buy the stuff, even though the deals were amazingly good. The people had to think too much, and the price being higher than $1 killed the impulse. Even $2 items didn't sell that well, even though those same items sold for $5+ in traditional stores.
If micropayments are very small -- either 1/10 of a cent per page, or 5-10 cents per site -- there will be very little decision making. The amount of damage you can do in a browsing session will be less than the cost of a cup of coffee, or a newspaper -- both things that people buy, use a little of, and then discard.
I run a medium-sized content website. I get between 4 and 5 million pageviews per month, about 10,000 unique visitors per day, and about 180,000 unique visitors per month.
I've figured out that if I could get each unique visitor to pay me just a nickel -- 5 cents -- per month, I could take down the banner advertising, quit my day job, and work on my site full time (and therefore make it that much better with more information).
Think about it. What if you had to pay content sites just $0.05 per month to access the content? Most internet users visit perhaps at most 100-200 different content sites per month. That would add just $10 to your monthly bill, and all advertising could be eliminated.
I would think that sites that are successful in selling you things -- like Amazon -- wouldn't charge you to enter, so that may even cut down on the number of sites you have to pay for each month.
With a price point of just $0.05, you wouldn't have to think to yourself, "gee, should I click on this link, do I really want to spend the money"?
I've tried various forms of banner advertising, sponsorships, commission links, etc., but I still can't earn close to $0.05 (on average) from each visitor (I'm at about $0.003 per unique).
I don't want to make my site into subcription-based, I'd rather keep it free, or free enough so that people could still easily view it.
Face it, the content on the internet has slowed down a lot since the dot-bomb. That's a direct result of there being no money in content publishing. It's closing up even further; one by one sites are becoming subscription-only. Pretty soon the internet is going to be one big magazine rack with the magazines all shrink-wrapped, and just a few free-zines in the corner.
Simply giving web publishers a few table scraps each month would dramatically revitalize what was once a very promising source of content and entertainment. Micropayemnts are one of the few ways that this can happen.
When CDs came out (mid 1980's) they were about $10, and the should have gone down.
When CDs first came out, they were $20+. The first CD I ever bought was in 1986, it was "The Monkees Greatest Hits". The CD was 66+ minutes, and cost $24 because it was "double length".
This was at a time when cassette tapes were in the $7-11 range ($11 for "longer" tapes). Remember in the music stores, where the cassettes weren't actually priced with prices, they had codes like "AA -- $11, BB -- $9, CC -- $8"? You had to look at a chart on the wall to figure out the price of the day.
After a while CD street prices settled in the $15 range, with occassional sales of $11-12. The official MSRP of most CDs was still $16-19.
Since CDs are more or less the same price or cheaper than they were back in 1988 (15 years ago), I don't think people can really complain too much here.
Ralph
The distribution of the wealth began moving to a smaller percentage of people, namely the factory owners.
Wouldn't this unequal distribution of wealth be the most "efficient" result?
If there are thousands of companies making textiles, then the wealth is spread among those thousands of companies. But an industry with thousands of companies is viewed as inefficient. Several larger companies could do the job for less. That's why industries devolve into "bigger is better" mentalities -- not just textiles, but retaillers, banks, accounting firms, etc.
So then, by definition, isn't a handful of hugely rich companies, and everyone else deathly poor, the most "efficient" solution that the markets are rushing towards?
Is that something that we should be embracing? And isn't this at odds with the globalist claims, that globalization will make everyone richer?
Instead, it seems to be reducing innovation (fewer companies means less chance for new ideas), creating social discord (when industries and careers are wiped out), and causing massive shifts to ways of life (cities and towns that don't "get bigger" wind up in a death spiral, where lack of jobs prevents employable people from settling there, so all that's left are unemployable people and the social ills they bring with them).
Ralph