This version will have the ability to shop at on-line stores like the one MS plans to launch later this year. It's their move to 'outflank Apple'.
This is seriously screwed up. If this isn't a blatant anti-trust violation, I don't know what is. Didn't the EU just assess a 1/2 billion dollar fine over this very behavior?
I can't understand how this doesn't enrage anyone who believes in capitalism. What's to stop Microsoft from integrating an Amazon.com, paypal and Ebay feature into their software and MSN stuff as well? How many markets will they be able to dominate through their desktop OS monopoly?
Can any investor look at the tech world and invest in something that isn't in danger of being killed off by a Microsoft action? It seems that entering into any online service or consumer software is a matter of picking up dimes before steamrollers.
Without proper anti-trust enforcement, innovation and investment opportunities will dwindle. Maybe some of our politicians should get their heads out of the sand. The market doesn't solve all problems, that's why we have anti-trust laws in place.
Seriously though, isn't anyone else just amazed by Microsoft's gall?
Obviously these are doves with little dove space suits or dove like Metroids that feed by sucking the life out of statues in abandoned space cathedrals. Maybe the dove like Metroids move using a gas bladder that creates the same sounds (remember... movie vaccum) as doves flapping their wings.
The real question is whether or not Samus gets two arm-gun thingies to do the famous Woo "diving with two guns blazing" shot.
Some small to midsized business owner who was trying to keep his company out of court and the expenses involved should now take up your pet cause and risk the jobs of his employees as well as the future of his company?
As much as I dislike SCO and their actions, I don't expect this much dedication out of someone who is essentially collateral damage. Leave the poor guy alone.
Seeing someone post this anonymously and complaining that this guy, who publicly apologized, doesn't have balls is a bit hypocritical.
Open Source is nice, for example, but does that mean proprietary software is "unfair?"
False dichotomy. Monopolies are unfair, proprietary or otherwise. If RedHat had taken over the market for PC Operating Systems and had been convicted of using it artifically (hence, illegally) restrict compitetion, they'd get their asses hauled into court too.
I realize we can go around in circles about what consumers are "forced" to buy when they buy a new computer, but the fact is that now, more than there has been in the past 20 years, there is a choice. So we can rag on all the losers that don't know a bit from a byte or what an OS even is, but if they are the majority and they want their "free" media player/browser/whatever installed when they buy the computer, is it "fair" to tell them they can't have that? Isn't this just making things difficult for the vast majority of the people involved?
I suppose we can look at future rewards from current hardships, but we have to ask if it's really necessary.
If it adds value, competitors will pick up the slack. This idea that we should look the other way because of difficulties caused by remedying a crime is in direct opposition to the idea that we are all equal under the law. It seems to me, that you have a problem with anti-trust law in general, that's understandable, a lot of people do. The legal reasoning behind anti-trust regulations is that a monopoly inflicts greater harm than good through hidden costs to the consumer and causes stagnation in markets, since there is little incentive to innovate in the market it dominates. Windows is still an insecure POS at it's core, but MS is now trying to do consumer electronics and internet services rather than pushing innovation in their existing products. When a monopoly illegally leverages it's position in one market to move into others, we must stop it in order to keep the markets healthy. MS is currently capable of scaring away investors from a new market by making noise about entering it. Quit thinking about it from a purely technical point of view.
How many times to we have to repeat this? It wasn't the majority of consumers making independent decisions that gave MS this power or market share. It has been proven in court, several times, that they abused their dominance in the x86 world to squeeze out competition. When there were viable competitors (OS2,BeOS,Novell), MS illegally made it unprofitable for vendors to carry both Microsoft products and Microsoft's competitors products, cutting products off from the markets. If you already have a monopoly, this is where the anti-trust legislation that has worked so well for the past hundred years comes into play.
The 1995 DOJ agreement was supposed to stop this behavior, the anti-trust case here in the US was brought about by MS violating that agreement. In other words, they got busted, Uncle Sam slapped them on the hand and said no, then they did it again, so Uncle Sam took them to court. They were convicted in court, these are convicted monopolists. The case fell apart during the punishment phase, MS dragged it out long enough and the Bushies didn't want to be bad to business so they dropped the whole thing.
Now the EU has convicted them of being a monopoly as well and is actually going to punish them.
Now back to MacroEcon 101, Monopolies are bad. They are a natural by-product of free markets, but they then stifle free-markets. We accept that successful people may find themselves in control of a monopoly through their own hard work and competitiveness, and the law does not begrudge them that. If they abuse that position, to the detriment of our free market as a whole, then we haul them into court and start handicapping them until there is viable compitition.
Business leaders know these rules, it is the duty of the citizenry to enforce it. Business leaders will flagrently violate them if allowed, just as Bill and Co. are doing. There is nothing unfair in handicapping Microsoft to help their competitors. T
I was wondering when someone was going to catch that. I think the first 50 guesses on this thread could be modded off-topic.
My personal guess is SGI and HP. Sun already bought a license and SCO is already suing Novell and IBM. I doubt they would go after a university, they want a quick settlement to fuel their pump and dump scheme and a university might fight longer.
Unfortunately, that tack doesn't seem to win much support. It's kind of like a story on NPR I heard yesterday. No one pays attention when educated environmentalists warn about the disaster Bush's logging and natural resource policies have been, but when the Hunting and Fishing clubs start complaining, everyone actually takes them as credible.
You would not believe the amount of ignorance the average voter has. Even educated , professional people tend to pay very little attention to political discourse and policy making in this country. I have always been pretty frank about my political views and have never backed away from a debate (except online where I don't want to write a dissertation to refute a troll). I have always had a line of reasoning I was willing to back up with evidence and willing to change when confronted with countering facts and patterns.
There are a lot of nuances surrounding these issues and a great deal of momentum to fight against, given the stranglehold of American Mythology on the populace. We are looking at a situation where the very tenents of capitalism and free trade are being validly questioned as to their effectiveness to maintain a stable society during a turbulent time for the global economy.
There was a very interesting couple of articles I stumbled across last week or so about the role of cultural hemogeny in the effectiveness of a welfare state. It essentially argued that Europe's relative cultural homogeney within member states (relative to the US) makes welfare state policies a less contentious issue. I wouldn't doubt it, they gutted welfare and the war on poverty here because it was some ignorant, coniving welfare mom stealing your hard earned tax dollars. Then they gutted cultural funding because it was some child molesting pornographer who was stealing your tax dollars.
Still, no one seems to suspect the white guy, who went to school to learn how to legally steal your money, who then tells you something that isn't true (Pets.com is a great stock!) and your shocked that they did it out of greed?
Confrontation won't work because I can find a reason to blame every single person in this country for the mess we're in. From the liberals who tried to force change down people's throats, to conservative ideologues who want to run faith-based governments. I blame every citizen who doesn't pay attention to political policy or think about the good of the country. The evangelicals are to blame for trying to turn this country into a theocracy, while the secularists refuse to accept that religion is an important cultural factor in the US.
Meanwhile, business is doing what business is supposed to do: make money. They will do it anyway they can, I'm not suprised by these moves or the indifference that accompanies the anouncements.
I fear that we may be headed towards a point of no return. It takes a lot of energy to keep up with political stuff on a local, state and federal level. Someones always trying to screw you, and there are more interested parties that you can shake a stick at for each issue. Without the leisure time to investigate this stuff or the funding to research it professionally, no one will have any clue what the truth about our actions as a country are. This assault on the middle class will leave us with no one to watch those with power. The middle class has always been the balance in a capitalist democracy.
I'm trying to find a comprimise that provides fairness and justice peacefully. Becoming confrontational simply gives the other side something to turn against you, and when your in a David and Goliath situation, that's not so good.
Let me sum it up like this, the protesters at the WTO meetings have pretty much always just managed to preach to the choir, but Lou Dobbs championing the loss of jobs in the US has really started to pick up steam politically. It doesn't matter that those who seems to be effecting change are the Johnny-come-latelies to the party. They're the ones getting some success. I'm trying to
No ones complaining about having to fight or work hard. We're just asking for a fighting chance. The problem is that I've been looking for solutions. Scanned every place I can, read papers and commentary from every source I can. Looked for margins in any industry, looked for new oppurtunities. Quite frankly, the only things I'm finding don't have much insurance against compitetion killing your margins quickly. Given the material I've looked through, I'm seriously starting to wonder if we've just tweaked the engine of our economy so much that it's running really hot and there's not much more that can be done for a while.
There's nothing that will make me competitive with Indian wages slinging code. There's also no new industries emerging to jump to, software has achieved the majority of productivity gains in the past 10 years, we've just innovated ourselves out of jobs.
I don't even mind that fact, but I do mind not having a new industry to innovate myself out of, and being treated as a disposable cog in the machine. US tech workers should be given a parade on Main St. for their innovations, not a pink slip. The same management shipping our jobs overseas depends on the innovations and infrastructure we built to do so.
Actually, my current employment has nothing to do with that address. If you'd dug a little further you'd see that the content you're refering to hasn't been touched in at least 2 years.
I won't claim that I'm on top of the world in any area, but I have been doing it professionally for 10 years and am a more productive software developer in my sleep than any of the Indian developers I've worked with that are replacing my co-workers. I'm not saying there aren't good Indian devs or that these horrific ones won't get better, but the thought that using these people who couldn't Hello World themselves out of a brown paper bag and continuously cause product to be delayed instead of proven, productive US workers (and many foriegn-born who are now citizens), makes me sick. There is no improvement we can make, no metric we can show management that will keep our jobs here. This is pure and simple wage reduction.
We've spent the past 6 months documenting our value to management and documenting the horrible mistakes of our Indian counterparts. It doesn't matter, we still have to fight tooth and nail to keep the Architecture and Design bits onshore. The market is remaining irrational longer than we can remain solvent.
The patents they have deal with workflow and rules engines. A couple are related to domain specific XML stuff. These guys have spoken at a number of national software conferences, been published, etc. I like working with them because we bounce a hell of a lot of ideas off each other. I don't think they're interested in moving to the Bay Area, but I'll ask. I don't want to say where those of us still employed are working, etc. publicly, cause that seems a bit crass. Not to mention, a little against my self-interested in that it does my employer no good to say we're having this much trouble.
At any rate, my arguments still stand. This isn't a correction of History majors who are learned HTML. These are professionals losing their livlihood while Greenspan throws out this red-herring of better education.
1) Lower your standard of living. Continue to do what you're doing, and get paid less. Or switch to a different career if that's all you can find work in.
I'd love to if I could. My standard of living just isn't that high and the cost of living isn't going down for any of my expenses. In fact they seem to go up every year (telecom, energy, insurance). Food and housing are the only things that have stayed contstant.
2) Follow the jobs. My parents moved to this country to pursue opportunity. Labor mobility means you may have to move to another state or another country to find work. People are moving from Michigan to North Carolina; it might be time to start some Mandarin classes.
And never move back. If I start working for an Indian or Chinese workers wage, I couldn't even come back to the US to visit my family due to cost. I couldn't come back and retire. Besides we can't all "follow the jobs", immigration laws won't allow it. Not to begin counting the detriment to socities forced to be this mobile. Opportunity to be mobile is one thing, people who are forced to be mobile are typically called REFUGEES. Should we all become economic refugees?
3) Climb to higher ground. This means finding "high-value" work. The U.S. has the greatest post-secondary education system in the world -- lots of non-citizens come to our universities to get their PhDs. Our financial markets are also world class. Think of creative work, design work, marketing work. Write something. Invent something. Sell something.
Funny thing, all my recently laid off co-workers with Master's degrees always talked about how the market wouldn't bear a PhD and how everytime they've looked at it, it decreased their employment chances. These highly educated workers are getting laid off. These are the people that are supposed to get more education? There are 11 million Master degree's in a population of 210 million. Those numbers are both sexes and all races over 15 years old from the 2000 census at census.gov.
If we need better trained workers, then why doesn't the government offer free education to anyone without a Masters? We've got almost 200 million people domestically that need them to compete. Maybe if the Air Force had to hold a bake sale for a bomber like the educational system does in this country everytime it needs pencils and paper, we'd have a well-enough educated population that you couldn't pull out this red herring.
Not to mention none of your solutions involve adding wealth to the GDP. Lawyers are getting offshored for most of the entry level work (where do new US lawyers get trained now?), a PhD is only good for teaching and that's a seriously crap market these days, Nursing is a good move personally but it doesn't produce anything and will dry up when the Baby Boomers all die.
People with your attitude seem to believe that ultimately you control your destiny in a very absolute sense. I think this is a bunch of baloney. As Keynes said, "The market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent." Since re-education and training won't help you, there's nothing you can do, even if you manage to find a niche for yourself, can you build an industry around it?
New small niche business won't get us out of this, we need new industries to absorb these displaced workers. Where is this new industry that will employ the nearly 200 million people in this country who have yet to get laid off with a Masters degree under their belt.
Let's not forget that jobs are being created for this recession, but in India and Asia, rather than the US. EDS announced it was hiring 11,000 tech workers in India this year and 3Com is hiring 1000 in China. Read it here.
This is nothing more than a desperate attempt to find growth in mature industries. They are doing this simply in order to drive labor costs down. There is no innovation happening here. In fact, this whole fiasco will likely result in slowing innovation since it needs margins to happen. When this country has no margins or middle class left we'll see innovation taken over by India or China who have worried more about the welfare of their citizens than adherence to free market ideology.
"Are you going to bellyache about it and hope your low-grade tech skills will somehow merit $80k again? Or are you going to find those spaces where outsourcing won't or can't go and pursue ruthlessly?"
Could you please repeat that about low-grade tech skills to all of my recently laid-off friends with Masters of CompSci degrees and patents pending? The statistics have shown for years that a PhD would price you out of the market. These people are as highly educated as the market will bear.
My team has to fight every week from getting Architecture and System Design from going to India. We're the cream of the crop on this project and management will only pay lip service about how some customers will want Architecture and Design to stay onshore. The reality is that every project where the customer does not make this demand, everything but QA and Business Analysis (both entry level jobs) will be offshored. Quality be damned. You can afford mistakes when they cost 20% as much. Expect another Dot Boom-Bust cycle in India due to the capital flowing in at such a high-rate.
I'm seeing this now. It is fact, there is no part of IT that is safe. There is no white collar job that is safe. No level of education or productivity is going to save your job. As for persuing these new growth markets, where the fuck are they? There are no margins anywhere anymore. The international free trade has made the system way too efficient. We've tweaked the engine as much as we can and it's running pretty hot.
If there were areas that needed efficiency added, those areas would have good margins. Where are the good margins? If you own a patent (pharmi, software, chemical) you can make good margins on your patent. If you have a copyright on popular work (TW, RIAA members, Disney, Fox, Viacom) you can make a margin on that. If you have a government mandated industry (auto/home/health insurance) you can make a margin. If you do gov contracting (esp Defense) you can make a 20% margin.
Retail electronics (consumer audio/video) are losing margins b/c of convergence and compitition from PC makers. The Economist had an article about Retail Banks overextending their risk in order to get better returns and worrying a lot of analyists in the meantime. Financial services in general are getting squeezed due to the Internet, now everyone has near-perfect information in real-time. I could go on all day listing industries whose margins have dried up in the past 15 years. Due to the lack of standardized environmental and labor regulations in most of the world, it's a free for all race to the bottom. World standards of living will not rise fast enough for this to stabilize for at least another 100 years. The US is only trying to employ about 210 million people out of 300 mil. The world needs to educate and employ about 3.5 billion people out of 6 billion.
The only solution is a legal structure that promotes fair trade so that societies can adjust to the new circumstances brought about by increased trade. This includes the US. The main street of the American economy has gone from a dirt road to an 8 lane highway, we need some traffic lights.
Those that decry regulation talk about how everything will equal out in the long run and that the opposition are just chiken littles have their head in the sand. My favorite quote from Keynes is "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". We need the middle class to remain solvent long enough, so we can capitalize most efficiently on the new economic structure that will come out of this new trade.
We are not going to be able to magically create growth and innovation by handing the rich bigger bags of money. They'll invest it in what is safe, we should be subsidizing minimum amounts of manufacturing and tech work for national security reasons, while also creating a more progressive income and capital gains tax system. Bush's tax cuts, due to lack of Fed funding have caused sales tax to go up 30%, on average, nationally. Sales tax is regressive,
"you need the "10x factor" to force a switch from an established product: your alternative must provide 10x the perceived benefits, or be 1/10 the price"
Since it would be difficult to build a spreadsheet that has 10x the features of Excel and still call it a spreadsheet, obviously Gnome should start charging $10 a copy for Gnumeric if they want to increase their marketshare.
Quite frankly, I'm more inclined to say that Gnumeric doesn't have the feature matching needed to get most users to switch. The charting and VBA macro stuff really is important. I remember Miguel stating back in 1999 that Gnumeric was supposed to be bug for bug compatible with Excel. Until I can slap any old Excel spreadsheet into Gnumeric (or OOo for that matter), and that version has been certified by a vendor (like Dell, IBM or RedHat) as compatible I don't see a rush to switch.
Given Disney's trackrecord of turning every DRM solution they touch into a consumer backlash, we should be able to watch the market failure of MS's DRM product.
Remember, these are the guys that have watched DivX and disposable DVDs flop in the market. Maybe third times a charm, but it'll be more fun to watch MS get sucked into Disney's inability to squeeze more money from the pre-school crowd who watch those movies till the VHS tapes are worn thin.
I say, let the games begin.;-)
Re:Your job shouldn't be your life.
on
Dream Jobs of 2004
·
· Score: 2, Informative
" Which is great. But by raising overhead rates to pay for the extra vacation time, the overall effect is to make German industry less cost effective than a less enlightened country (all other factors being equal).
Not that there's anything wrong with that."
What a boneheaded thing to say. There's no logic to it. Perhaps German cultural factors make Germans more productive with a mandatory 6 weeks paid vacation. Personally, I'm a lot more productive when I know I'm going to get breaks to enjoy other aspects of life. As a software developer, my job requires mental focus. If 6 weeks of mandatory paid vacation allowed me to be more productive during the time I was there, the overall net benefit is to my employer and the GNP.
All your analysis shows is that you can do a quick back of the hand calculation given some data points. Your analysis lacks any understanding of the data points and does not look at results. Germany happens to have productivity rates near the US depending on how you count software in the numbers. Also you equate attendence with productivity, while productivity only has sustainable gains when you get more done in less time, not simply work more to get more done.
This assumption treats humans like machinery, which every totalitarian regime has shown, doesn't work. Humans tend to be far more productive when all of their needs are met. Expecting humans to act like machines is operating them out of spec. It's just like overclocking, sometimes you can get away with it, but in the long run, you'll have problems (over numerous chips) like stability or lifespan.
Take the US growth numbers from 4Q03. They were huge, but with no job growth. That meant that a lot of these productivity gains were made through working people harder and finding cheaper labor. If it had been through honest to god productivity gains they would be listed in SEC filings, like supply chains, software and the internet were in the last decade. These things would then be "hot" markets.
One can't simply look at dollar amounts involved with labor. They have TOC and ROI values much like any other component of an organization, it's just that it varies from "unit" to "unit". Most bosses I've known would have shot the employee that suggested paying $50k a license then skimp on the $10k support contract for production software. You simply have to look at the TOC for an employee and factor in things like downtime and maintenance.
"Our open source SwingSet toolkit for making the Swing components database-enabled/aware will now be much easier to install/distribute. Hooray!"
My immediate reaction is... DO NOT DO THIS!!!!
I've worked on a number of distributed N-tier apps. One of the problems I've seen is having people caught up in an object oriented design that surrounds their application's business data structures. This usually comes about in the "thin" client-side GUI which has had every widget inherit it's network or database access from some other abstract class or interface.
The problem with this approach is that each widget starts doing it's own network communication and what not. While most client-server apps that hit a database will use a common connection pool for database connections, developers seem to forget to apply this inversion of control pattern to network using widgets.
So what's the problem with this? One project I worked on needed to add SSL to the network traffic for security requirements (HIPA). This was nearly impossible without massive rewriting because the expensive part of SSL is the session creation. With each widget trying to create it's own SSL session, the app's performance quickly became unusable, especially on slightly old hardware.
Another project was using SOAP and making a ton of unnecessary or redundent requests because the widgets were "smart". SOAP is freaking expensive in memory and CPU to serialize and deserialize. Not to mention the amount of traffic those verbose ass SOAP packets generated.
If you want to make your widgets aware of shared resources, apply an Inversion of Control pattern and build a framework that the components use to access these resources. Don't "inherit" these features into your widgets. It looks nice in an object design, but reality will kill you.
If I'm completely off base with my assumption of what you mean, sorry.... otherwise, take a look at how your widgets will be used and think about the hidden costs of what seem like elegant designs.
"All I need now to move from Python to Java is just same small size of memory footprint and ability to interprete the source code."
Can't help too much with the memory footprint unless you want to look at J2ME, but you can configure a J2SE vm to run with a smaller footprint than the default settings.
Interpreting source I can help you with: http://www.beanshell.org/
So we're down to one reason you need to switch and that needs a clearer definition.
That doesn't make sense. Yellow Dog is an Apple Authorized Reseller who will ship you a brand-spankin new G5 or XServe with Yellow Dog Linux running on it and under warranty from Apple.
They really should have used a Yellow Dog box or named it an x86 shootout.
It's a bit more like Debian than RedHat's model I think. The Community release will be functionally complete, but has bugs.. i.e Beta. The Official release will be the Community Release put through a QA process which seems to depend heavily on feedback from Community users. This is pretty much how I've seen Debian handle it's stable/unstable branches, although I'll admit I pay less attention to the Debian dev process than RedHat's.
Personally, I think it's not a bad model for getting higher quality on a shoestring. I don't think Mandrake is out of the deep water yet, so I definately commend their ability to find innovative solutions to providing higher quality in their products.
Fedora seems to be a sort of less public version of this policy. Fedora (Community) users add features and test the Beta quality software. The cream is incorporated into RH products and put through traditional QA testing, which is probably a much larger operation than what Mandrake can muster.
I think this thing should consume more power. At 1 watt, you're not going to get enough heat dissapation for it to double as a heat pad on the back of your neck.
And let's face it, that's really what we want, a heat pad that does Seti@Home calculations while releaving our sore muscles. Props to the first person who writes the intelligence for our new heatpads to crawl across our backs and hooks up sensors that find knots to be worked out.
It's the year 2004, where are my robotic masseuses?
Can't remember the reference, it was on one of the tech sites, appearently the Vulture Capitalists in Silly Valley won't even look at your business plan if it involves using US engineering talent for the bulk of the development. They want offshoring in the plan to begin with before they dish out any money.
Has anyone else heard of this practice?
That being said, you're probably better off writing some development tools and selling support contracts to your old buddies who still have jobs. Software dev houses still like to buy stuff rather than developing it in house. If you've been unemployed for a while, I'm pretty sure you can deal with crap margins at first just to get some cash in.
I think that a good model, probably larger in scope than what I'm suggesting is Out of the Box by EJB Solutions. Check out what they're doing for some ideas.
DeBeers, which technically does not do business in the US due to anti-trust laws. Yet, they manage to maintain their monopoloy and sure advertise it a lot in the US. But DeBeers itself sells no diamonds in the US.
Hell, Americans would have turned the diamond industry on it's head by now if it wasn't for DeBeers. Maybe the various manufactured diamond attempts will be successful. Otherwise, I agree with your post though.
Why won't the majority of technical jobs be packed off to developing countries with similarly educated workforces that cost 1/6th of US wages? If you're a businessperson, making decisions about performance for stock holders, wouldn't you see that as a great way to boost efficiency?
That's what business people do. That's why we had record growth last quarter but no jobs.
While there has been some racist undertones are the part of the unintelligent who have heard of this issue, no one with half a clue would blame India for this. Indians are simply doing what we've suggested and hoped they would for years.
The problem is that over the next few years, anything technical, from research to implementation is up for grabs in the global marketplace. A worker in those fields in the US is 7x more expensive. If the work can be done offshore, it will be. The only jobs left in the US will belong to companies who require onsite teams and jobs that require interfacing with customers. And health care, cause there are a lot of baby boomers who will need their asses wiped, real soon now.
Due to our lax immigration policies and foriegn investment, we don't have the labor shortage that Japan is facing due to an aging population. This country needs to create 120,000 jobs a month to absorb new entrants to the labor market.
I don't think people are whining cause they can't get a history degree then start making US$65K a year writing HTML. People with 8+ years of experience are worried about finishing their careers in this profession. And even if the labor market for tech workers shrinks so much to make it desirable to switch careers, where would one go?
The Dept of Labor still thinks 8 of the top 10 growth jobs are in IT and tech. Recent trends show this isn't happening. Newsweek (or Time?) last Nov. had an article that talked about how everyone still seems to think the job growth is in IT and tech. None of these reports take into account the recent offshoring trends.
The problem is the fact that IBM is hiring Indian lawyers to do US legal work, Indian CPAs are being trained in the US tax code. GE opened a pure research facility in India. Every technical job that can be offshored will be.
So what is the average US citizen supposed to train themselves in? What industry is left? Business administration? Nursing? What will the country actually produce? Talk about trade deficit.... If everything we consume or every service we use is created overseas, what will Americans do?
The only other areas of job growth, in the reports I mentioned, other than IT and tech were food service and other blue collar, low wage positions. This is a serious problem for the middle class.
Even if we manage not to export all the white collar jobs in this country, there will be less oppurtunity for those who want to achieve the middle class dream. Also, every historian and political analyst will tell you that democracy and capitalism seem to work best with a strong middle class.
That's what I'm concerned about. I want to know what I can do that will earn me enough to raise kids, provide them with a good education, save for retirement and not have to worry that my family's security rests on a house of cards.
I'm not even worried about getting any potential offspring all the oppurtunities in the world. Just at least the same ones I had and that most middle class kids in this country have had.
I don't see a "market solution" to this problem. We aren't on the verge of any tech revolution. There's no amount of productivity gains I will be able to capitalize on, that my Indian counterpart won't, that will make me 7x more efficient. This isn't like losing manufacturing. We're losing jobs that took members of our population 4-6 years to train in. Retraining these people in comparable fields is going to be a drain on the national output.
I personally think we need to rethink letting capital flow so much more freely than labor and goods internationally. I also think we nee
Slashdot Mirror
This version will have the ability to shop at on-line stores like the one MS plans to launch later this year. It's their move to 'outflank Apple'.
This is seriously screwed up. If this isn't a blatant anti-trust violation, I don't know what is. Didn't the EU just assess a 1/2 billion dollar fine over this very behavior?
I can't understand how this doesn't enrage anyone who believes in capitalism. What's to stop Microsoft from integrating an Amazon.com, paypal and Ebay feature into their software and MSN stuff as well? How many markets will they be able to dominate through their desktop OS monopoly?
Can any investor look at the tech world and invest in something that isn't in danger of being killed off by a Microsoft action? It seems that entering into any online service or consumer software is a matter of picking up dimes before steamrollers.
Without proper anti-trust enforcement, innovation and investment opportunities will dwindle. Maybe some of our politicians should get their heads out of the sand. The market doesn't solve all problems, that's why we have anti-trust laws in place.
Seriously though, isn't anyone else just amazed by Microsoft's gall?
Obviously these are doves with little dove space suits or dove like Metroids that feed by sucking the life out of statues in abandoned space cathedrals. Maybe the dove like Metroids move using a gas bladder that creates the same sounds (remember... movie vaccum) as doves flapping their wings.
The real question is whether or not Samus gets two arm-gun thingies to do the famous Woo "diving with two guns blazing" shot.
How is this insightful?
Some small to midsized business owner who was trying to keep his company out of court and the expenses involved should now take up your pet cause and risk the jobs of his employees as well as the future of his company?
As much as I dislike SCO and their actions, I don't expect this much dedication out of someone who is essentially collateral damage. Leave the poor guy alone.
Seeing someone post this anonymously and complaining that this guy, who publicly apologized, doesn't have balls is a bit hypocritical.
Open Source is nice, for example, but does that mean proprietary software is "unfair?"
False dichotomy. Monopolies are unfair, proprietary or otherwise. If RedHat had taken over the market for PC Operating Systems and had been convicted of using it artifically (hence, illegally) restrict compitetion, they'd get their asses hauled into court too.
I realize we can go around in circles about what consumers are "forced" to buy when they buy a new computer, but the fact is that now, more than there has been in the past 20 years, there is a choice. So we can rag on all the losers that don't know a bit from a byte or what an OS even is, but if they are the majority and they want their "free" media player/browser/whatever installed when they buy the computer, is it "fair" to tell them they can't have that? Isn't this just making things difficult for the vast majority of the people involved?
I suppose we can look at future rewards from current hardships, but we have to ask if it's really necessary.
If it adds value, competitors will pick up the slack. This idea that we should look the other way because of difficulties caused by remedying a crime is in direct opposition to the idea that we are all equal under the law. It seems to me, that you have a problem with anti-trust law in general, that's understandable, a lot of people do. The legal reasoning behind anti-trust regulations is that a monopoly inflicts greater harm than good through hidden costs to the consumer and causes stagnation in markets, since there is little incentive to innovate in the market it dominates. Windows is still an insecure POS at it's core, but MS is now trying to do consumer electronics and internet services rather than pushing innovation in their existing products. When a monopoly illegally leverages it's position in one market to move into others, we must stop it in order to keep the markets healthy. MS is currently capable of scaring away investors from a new market by making noise about entering it. Quit thinking about it from a purely technical point of view.
How many times to we have to repeat this? It wasn't the majority of consumers making independent decisions that gave MS this power or market share. It has been proven in court, several times, that they abused their dominance in the x86 world to squeeze out competition. When there were viable competitors (OS2,BeOS,Novell), MS illegally made it unprofitable for vendors to carry both Microsoft products and Microsoft's competitors products, cutting products off from the markets. If you already have a monopoly, this is where the anti-trust legislation that has worked so well for the past hundred years comes into play.
The 1995 DOJ agreement was supposed to stop this behavior, the anti-trust case here in the US was brought about by MS violating that agreement. In other words, they got busted, Uncle Sam slapped them on the hand and said no, then they did it again, so Uncle Sam took them to court. They were convicted in court, these are convicted monopolists. The case fell apart during the punishment phase, MS dragged it out long enough and the Bushies didn't want to be bad to business so they dropped the whole thing.
Now the EU has convicted them of being a monopoly as well and is actually going to punish them.
Now back to MacroEcon 101, Monopolies are bad. They are a natural by-product of free markets, but they then stifle free-markets. We accept that successful people may find themselves in control of a monopoly through their own hard work and competitiveness, and the law does not begrudge them that. If they abuse that position, to the detriment of our free market as a whole, then we haul them into court and start handicapping them until there is viable compitition.
Business leaders know these rules, it is the duty of the citizenry to enforce it. Business leaders will flagrently violate them if allowed, just as Bill and Co. are doing. There is nothing unfair in handicapping Microsoft to help their competitors. T
I was wondering when someone was going to catch that. I think the first 50 guesses on this thread could be modded off-topic.
My personal guess is SGI and HP. Sun already bought a license and SCO is already suing Novell and IBM. I doubt they would go after a university, they want a quick settlement to fuel their pump and dump scheme and a university might fight longer.
Anyone got odds?
According to this article, you'd get such a Fabreze headache that the boil-off of your bodily fluids via rapid decompression would seem like relief.
really big bags of venture capital, a sock-puppet mascot and some future felons currently employed as stock analysts.
When they outsource it to India, will it spin-off a Cowster.com?
Unfortunately, that tack doesn't seem to win much support. It's kind of like a story on NPR I heard yesterday. No one pays attention when educated environmentalists warn about the disaster Bush's logging and natural resource policies have been, but when the Hunting and Fishing clubs start complaining, everyone actually takes them as credible.
You would not believe the amount of ignorance the average voter has. Even educated , professional people tend to pay very little attention to political discourse and policy making in this country. I have always been pretty frank about my political views and have never backed away from a debate (except online where I don't want to write a dissertation to refute a troll). I have always had a line of reasoning I was willing to back up with evidence and willing to change when confronted with countering facts and patterns.
There are a lot of nuances surrounding these issues and a great deal of momentum to fight against, given the stranglehold of American Mythology on the populace. We are looking at a situation where the very tenents of capitalism and free trade are being validly questioned as to their effectiveness to maintain a stable society during a turbulent time for the global economy.
There was a very interesting couple of articles I stumbled across last week or so about the role of cultural hemogeny in the effectiveness of a welfare state. It essentially argued that Europe's relative cultural homogeney within member states (relative to the US) makes welfare state policies a less contentious issue. I wouldn't doubt it, they gutted welfare and the war on poverty here because it was some ignorant, coniving welfare mom stealing your hard earned tax dollars. Then they gutted cultural funding because it was some child molesting pornographer who was stealing your tax dollars.
Still, no one seems to suspect the white guy, who went to school to learn how to legally steal your money, who then tells you something that isn't true (Pets.com is a great stock!) and your shocked that they did it out of greed?
Confrontation won't work because I can find a reason to blame every single person in this country for the mess we're in. From the liberals who tried to force change down people's throats, to conservative ideologues who want to run faith-based governments. I blame every citizen who doesn't pay attention to political policy or think about the good of the country. The evangelicals are to blame for trying to turn this country into a theocracy, while the secularists refuse to accept that religion is an important cultural factor in the US.
Meanwhile, business is doing what business is supposed to do: make money. They will do it anyway they can, I'm not suprised by these moves or the indifference that accompanies the anouncements.
I fear that we may be headed towards a point of no return. It takes a lot of energy to keep up with political stuff on a local, state and federal level. Someones always trying to screw you, and there are more interested parties that you can shake a stick at for each issue. Without the leisure time to investigate this stuff or the funding to research it professionally, no one will have any clue what the truth about our actions as a country are. This assault on the middle class will leave us with no one to watch those with power. The middle class has always been the balance in a capitalist democracy.
I'm trying to find a comprimise that provides fairness and justice peacefully. Becoming confrontational simply gives the other side something to turn against you, and when your in a David and Goliath situation, that's not so good.
Let me sum it up like this, the protesters at the WTO meetings have pretty much always just managed to preach to the choir, but Lou Dobbs championing the loss of jobs in the US has really started to pick up steam politically. It doesn't matter that those who seems to be effecting change are the Johnny-come-latelies to the party. They're the ones getting some success. I'm trying to
No ones complaining about having to fight or work hard. We're just asking for a fighting chance. The problem is that I've been looking for solutions. Scanned every place I can, read papers and commentary from every source I can. Looked for margins in any industry, looked for new oppurtunities. Quite frankly, the only things I'm finding don't have much insurance against compitetion killing your margins quickly. Given the material I've looked through, I'm seriously starting to wonder if we've just tweaked the engine of our economy so much that it's running really hot and there's not much more that can be done for a while.
There's nothing that will make me competitive with Indian wages slinging code. There's also no new industries emerging to jump to, software has achieved the majority of productivity gains in the past 10 years, we've just innovated ourselves out of jobs.
I don't even mind that fact, but I do mind not having a new industry to innovate myself out of, and being treated as a disposable cog in the machine. US tech workers should be given a parade on Main St. for their innovations, not a pink slip. The same management shipping our jobs overseas depends on the innovations and infrastructure we built to do so.
Actually, my current employment has nothing to do with that address. If you'd dug a little further you'd see that the content you're refering to hasn't been touched in at least 2 years.
I won't claim that I'm on top of the world in any area, but I have been doing it professionally for 10 years and am a more productive software developer in my sleep than any of the Indian developers I've worked with that are replacing my co-workers. I'm not saying there aren't good Indian devs or that these horrific ones won't get better, but the thought that using these people who couldn't Hello World themselves out of a brown paper bag and continuously cause product to be delayed instead of proven, productive US workers (and many foriegn-born who are now citizens), makes me sick. There is no improvement we can make, no metric we can show management that will keep our jobs here. This is pure and simple wage reduction.
We've spent the past 6 months documenting our value to management and documenting the horrible mistakes of our Indian counterparts. It doesn't matter, we still have to fight tooth and nail to keep the Architecture and Design bits onshore. The market is remaining irrational longer than we can remain solvent.
The patents they have deal with workflow and rules engines. A couple are related to domain specific XML stuff. These guys have spoken at a number of national software conferences, been published, etc. I like working with them because we bounce a hell of a lot of ideas off each other. I don't think they're interested in moving to the Bay Area, but I'll ask. I don't want to say where those of us still employed are working, etc. publicly, cause that seems a bit crass. Not to mention, a little against my self-interested in that it does my employer no good to say we're having this much trouble.
At any rate, my arguments still stand. This isn't a correction of History majors who are learned HTML. These are professionals losing their livlihood while Greenspan throws out this red-herring of better education.
1) Lower your standard of living. Continue to do what you're doing, and get paid less. Or switch to a different career if that's all you can find work in.
I'd love to if I could. My standard of living just isn't that high and the cost of living isn't going down for any of my expenses. In fact they seem to go up every year (telecom, energy, insurance). Food and housing are the only things that have stayed contstant.
2) Follow the jobs. My parents moved to this country to pursue opportunity. Labor mobility means you may have to move to another state or another country to find work. People are moving from Michigan to North Carolina; it might be time to start some Mandarin classes.
And never move back. If I start working for an Indian or Chinese workers wage, I couldn't even come back to the US to visit my family due to cost. I couldn't come back and retire. Besides we can't all "follow the jobs", immigration laws won't allow it. Not to begin counting the detriment to socities forced to be this mobile. Opportunity to be mobile is one thing, people who are forced to be mobile are typically called REFUGEES. Should we all become economic refugees?
3) Climb to higher ground. This means finding "high-value" work. The U.S. has the greatest post-secondary education system in the world -- lots of non-citizens come to our universities to get their PhDs. Our financial markets are also world class. Think of creative work, design work, marketing work. Write something. Invent something. Sell something.
Funny thing, all my recently laid off co-workers with Master's degrees always talked about how the market wouldn't bear a PhD and how everytime they've looked at it, it decreased their employment chances. These highly educated workers are getting laid off. These are the people that are supposed to get more education? There are 11 million Master degree's in a population of 210 million. Those numbers are both sexes and all races over 15 years old from the 2000 census at census.gov.
If we need better trained workers, then why doesn't the government offer free education to anyone without a Masters? We've got almost 200 million people domestically that need them to compete. Maybe if the Air Force had to hold a bake sale for a bomber like the educational system does in this country everytime it needs pencils and paper, we'd have a well-enough educated population that you couldn't pull out this red herring.
Not to mention none of your solutions involve adding wealth to the GDP. Lawyers are getting offshored for most of the entry level work (where do new US lawyers get trained now?), a PhD is only good for teaching and that's a seriously crap market these days, Nursing is a good move personally but it doesn't produce anything and will dry up when the Baby Boomers all die.
People with your attitude seem to believe that ultimately you control your destiny in a very absolute sense. I think this is a bunch of baloney. As Keynes said, "The market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent." Since re-education and training won't help you, there's nothing you can do, even if you manage to find a niche for yourself, can you build an industry around it?
New small niche business won't get us out of this, we need new industries to absorb these displaced workers. Where is this new industry that will employ the nearly 200 million people in this country who have yet to get laid off with a Masters degree under their belt.
Let's not forget that jobs are being created for this recession, but in India and Asia, rather than the US. EDS announced it was hiring 11,000 tech workers in India this year and 3Com is hiring 1000 in China. Read it here.
This is nothing more than a desperate attempt to find growth in mature industries. They are doing this simply in order to drive labor costs down. There is no innovation happening here. In fact, this whole fiasco will likely result in slowing innovation since it needs margins to happen. When this country has no margins or middle class left we'll see innovation taken over by India or China who have worried more about the welfare of their citizens than adherence to free market ideology.
"Are you going to bellyache about it and hope your low-grade tech skills will somehow merit $80k again? Or are you going to find those spaces where outsourcing won't or can't go and pursue ruthlessly?"
Could you please repeat that about low-grade tech skills to all of my recently laid-off friends with Masters of CompSci degrees and patents pending? The statistics have shown for years that a PhD would price you out of the market. These people are as highly educated as the market will bear.
My team has to fight every week from getting Architecture and System Design from going to India. We're the cream of the crop on this project and management will only pay lip service about how some customers will want Architecture and Design to stay onshore. The reality is that every project where the customer does not make this demand, everything but QA and Business Analysis (both entry level jobs) will be offshored. Quality be damned. You can afford mistakes when they cost 20% as much. Expect another Dot Boom-Bust cycle in India due to the capital flowing in at such a high-rate.
I'm seeing this now. It is fact, there is no part of IT that is safe. There is no white collar job that is safe. No level of education or productivity is going to save your job. As for persuing these new growth markets, where the fuck are they? There are no margins anywhere anymore. The international free trade has made the system way too efficient. We've tweaked the engine as much as we can and it's running pretty hot.
If there were areas that needed efficiency added, those areas would have good margins. Where are the good margins? If you own a patent (pharmi, software, chemical) you can make good margins on your patent. If you have a copyright on popular work (TW, RIAA members, Disney, Fox, Viacom) you can make a margin on that. If you have a government mandated industry (auto/home/health insurance) you can make a margin. If you do gov contracting (esp Defense) you can make a 20% margin.
Retail electronics (consumer audio/video) are losing margins b/c of convergence and compitition from PC makers. The Economist had an article about Retail Banks overextending their risk in order to get better returns and worrying a lot of analyists in the meantime. Financial services in general are getting squeezed due to the Internet, now everyone has near-perfect information in real-time. I could go on all day listing industries whose margins have dried up in the past 15 years. Due to the lack of standardized environmental and labor regulations in most of the world, it's a free for all race to the bottom. World standards of living will not rise fast enough for this to stabilize for at least another 100 years. The US is only trying to employ about 210 million people out of 300 mil. The world needs to educate and employ about 3.5 billion people out of 6 billion.
The only solution is a legal structure that promotes fair trade so that societies can adjust to the new circumstances brought about by increased trade. This includes the US. The main street of the American economy has gone from a dirt road to an 8 lane highway, we need some traffic lights.
Those that decry regulation talk about how everything will equal out in the long run and that the opposition are just chiken littles have their head in the sand. My favorite quote from Keynes is "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". We need the middle class to remain solvent long enough, so we can capitalize most efficiently on the new economic structure that will come out of this new trade.
We are not going to be able to magically create growth and innovation by handing the rich bigger bags of money. They'll invest it in what is safe, we should be subsidizing minimum amounts of manufacturing and tech work for national security reasons, while also creating a more progressive income and capital gains tax system. Bush's tax cuts, due to lack of Fed funding have caused sales tax to go up 30%, on average, nationally. Sales tax is regressive,
"you need the "10x factor" to force a switch from an established product: your alternative must provide 10x the perceived benefits, or be 1/10 the price"
Since it would be difficult to build a spreadsheet that has 10x the features of Excel and still call it a spreadsheet, obviously Gnome should start charging $10 a copy for Gnumeric if they want to increase their marketshare.
Quite frankly, I'm more inclined to say that Gnumeric doesn't have the feature matching needed to get most users to switch. The charting and VBA macro stuff really is important. I remember Miguel stating back in 1999 that Gnumeric was supposed to be bug for bug compatible with Excel. Until I can slap any old Excel spreadsheet into Gnumeric (or OOo for that matter), and that version has been certified by a vendor (like Dell, IBM or RedHat) as compatible I don't see a rush to switch.
Given Disney's trackrecord of turning every DRM solution they touch into a consumer backlash, we should be able to watch the market failure of MS's DRM product.
;-)
Remember, these are the guys that have watched DivX and disposable DVDs flop in the market. Maybe third times a charm, but it'll be more fun to watch MS get sucked into Disney's inability to squeeze more money from the pre-school crowd who watch those movies till the VHS tapes are worn thin.
I say, let the games begin.
" Which is great. But by raising overhead rates to pay for the extra vacation time, the overall effect is to make German industry less cost effective than a less enlightened country (all other factors being equal).
Not that there's anything wrong with that."
What a boneheaded thing to say. There's no logic to it. Perhaps German cultural factors make Germans more productive with a mandatory 6 weeks paid vacation. Personally, I'm a lot more productive when I know I'm going to get breaks to enjoy other aspects of life. As a software developer, my job requires mental focus. If 6 weeks of mandatory paid vacation allowed me to be more productive during the time I was there, the overall net benefit is to my employer and the GNP.
All your analysis shows is that you can do a quick back of the hand calculation given some data points. Your analysis lacks any understanding of the data points and does not look at results. Germany happens to have productivity rates near the US depending on how you count software in the numbers. Also you equate attendence with productivity, while productivity only has sustainable gains when you get more done in less time, not simply work more to get more done.
This assumption treats humans like machinery, which every totalitarian regime has shown, doesn't work. Humans tend to be far more productive when all of their needs are met. Expecting humans to act like machines is operating them out of spec. It's just like overclocking, sometimes you can get away with it, but in the long run, you'll have problems (over numerous chips) like stability or lifespan.
Take the US growth numbers from 4Q03. They were huge, but with no job growth. That meant that a lot of these productivity gains were made through working people harder and finding cheaper labor. If it had been through honest to god productivity gains they would be listed in SEC filings, like supply chains, software and the internet were in the last decade. These things would then be "hot" markets.
One can't simply look at dollar amounts involved with labor. They have TOC and ROI values much like any other component of an organization, it's just that it varies from "unit" to "unit". Most bosses I've known would have shot the employee that suggested paying $50k a license then skimp on the $10k support contract for production software. You simply have to look at the TOC for an employee and factor in things like downtime and maintenance.
"Our open source SwingSet toolkit for making the Swing components database-enabled/aware will now be much easier to install/distribute. Hooray!"
My immediate reaction is... DO NOT DO THIS!!!!
I've worked on a number of distributed N-tier apps. One of the problems I've seen is having people caught up in an object oriented design that surrounds their application's business data structures. This usually comes about in the "thin" client-side GUI which has had every widget inherit it's network or database access from some other abstract class or interface.
The problem with this approach is that each widget starts doing it's own network communication and what not. While most client-server apps that hit a database will use a common connection pool for database connections, developers seem to forget to apply this inversion of control pattern to network using widgets.
So what's the problem with this? One project I worked on needed to add SSL to the network traffic for security requirements (HIPA). This was nearly impossible without massive rewriting because the expensive part of SSL is the session creation. With each widget trying to create it's own SSL session, the app's performance quickly became unusable, especially on slightly old hardware.
Another project was using SOAP and making a ton of unnecessary or redundent requests because the widgets were "smart". SOAP is freaking expensive in memory and CPU to serialize and deserialize. Not to mention the amount of traffic those verbose ass SOAP packets generated.
If you want to make your widgets aware of shared resources, apply an Inversion of Control pattern and build a framework that the components use to access these resources. Don't "inherit" these features into your widgets. It looks nice in an object design, but reality will kill you.
If I'm completely off base with my assumption of what you mean, sorry.... otherwise, take a look at how your widgets will be used and think about the hidden costs of what seem like elegant designs.
"All I need now to move from Python to Java is just same small size of memory footprint and ability to interprete the source code."
Can't help too much with the memory footprint unless you want to look at J2ME, but you can configure a J2SE vm to run with a smaller footprint than the default settings.
Interpreting source I can help you with: http://www.beanshell.org/
So we're down to one reason you need to switch and that needs a clearer definition.
Have fun!
That doesn't make sense. Yellow Dog is an Apple Authorized Reseller who will ship you a brand-spankin new G5 or XServe with Yellow Dog Linux running on it and under warranty from Apple.
They really should have used a Yellow Dog box or named it an x86 shootout.
My brain is overloaded.... hard to resist the many many bad jokes.
Must hit submit quick!
It's a bit more like Debian than RedHat's model I think. The Community release will be functionally complete, but has bugs.. i.e Beta. The Official release will be the Community Release put through a QA process which seems to depend heavily on feedback from Community users. This is pretty much how I've seen Debian handle it's stable/unstable branches, although I'll admit I pay less attention to the Debian dev process than RedHat's.
Personally, I think it's not a bad model for getting higher quality on a shoestring. I don't think Mandrake is out of the deep water yet, so I definately commend their ability to find innovative solutions to providing higher quality in their products.
Fedora seems to be a sort of less public version of this policy. Fedora (Community) users add features and test the Beta quality software. The cream is incorporated into RH products and put through traditional QA testing, which is probably a much larger operation than what Mandrake can muster.
Just my 0.0160900 EUR on the announcement.
I think this thing should consume more power. At 1 watt, you're not going to get enough heat dissapation for it to double as a heat pad on the back of your neck.
And let's face it, that's really what we want, a heat pad that does Seti@Home calculations while releaving our sore muscles. Props to the first person who writes the intelligence for our new heatpads to crawl across our backs and hooks up sensors that find knots to be worked out.
It's the year 2004, where are my robotic masseuses?
Can't remember the reference, it was on one of the tech sites, appearently the Vulture Capitalists in Silly Valley won't even look at your business plan if it involves using US engineering talent for the bulk of the development. They want offshoring in the plan to begin with before they dish out any money.
Has anyone else heard of this practice?
That being said, you're probably better off writing some development tools and selling support contracts to your old buddies who still have jobs. Software dev houses still like to buy stuff rather than developing it in house. If you've been unemployed for a while, I'm pretty sure you can deal with crap margins at first just to get some cash in.
I think that a good model, probably larger in scope than what I'm suggesting is Out of the Box by EJB Solutions. Check out what they're doing for some ideas.
Good Luck.
DeBeers, which technically does not do business in the US due to anti-trust laws.
Yet, they manage to maintain their monopoloy and sure advertise it a lot in the US. But DeBeers itself sells no diamonds in the US.
Hell, Americans would have turned the diamond industry on it's head by now if it wasn't for DeBeers. Maybe the various manufactured diamond attempts will be successful. Otherwise, I agree with your post though.
Why won't the majority of technical jobs be packed off to developing countries with similarly educated workforces that cost 1/6th of US wages? If you're a businessperson, making decisions about performance for stock holders, wouldn't you see that as a great way to boost efficiency?
That's what business people do. That's why we had record growth last quarter but no jobs.
While there has been some racist undertones are the part of the unintelligent who have heard of this issue, no one with half a clue would blame India for this. Indians are simply doing what we've suggested and hoped they would for years.
The problem is that over the next few years, anything technical, from research to implementation is up for grabs in the global marketplace. A worker in those fields in the US is 7x more expensive. If the work can be done offshore, it will be. The only jobs left in the US will belong to companies who require onsite teams and jobs that require interfacing with customers. And health care, cause there are a lot of baby boomers who will need their asses wiped, real soon now.
Due to our lax immigration policies and foriegn investment, we don't have the labor shortage that Japan is facing due to an aging population. This country needs to create 120,000 jobs a month to absorb new entrants to the labor market.
I don't think people are whining cause they can't get a history degree then start making US$65K a year writing HTML. People with 8+ years of experience are worried about finishing their careers in this profession. And even if the labor market for tech workers shrinks so much to make it desirable to switch careers, where would one go?
The Dept of Labor still thinks 8 of the top 10 growth jobs are in IT and tech. Recent trends show this isn't happening. Newsweek (or Time?) last Nov. had an article that talked about how everyone still seems to think the job growth is in IT and tech. None of these reports take into account the recent offshoring trends.
The problem is the fact that IBM is hiring Indian lawyers to do US legal work, Indian CPAs are being trained in the US tax code. GE opened a pure research facility in India. Every technical job that can be offshored will be.
So what is the average US citizen supposed to train themselves in? What industry is left? Business administration? Nursing? What will the country actually produce? Talk about trade deficit.... If everything we consume or every service we use is created overseas, what will Americans do?
The only other areas of job growth, in the reports I mentioned, other than IT and tech were food service and other blue collar, low wage positions. This is a serious problem for the middle class.
Even if we manage not to export all the white collar jobs in this country, there will be less oppurtunity for those who want to achieve the middle class dream. Also, every historian and political analyst will tell you that democracy and capitalism seem to work best with a strong middle class.
That's what I'm concerned about. I want to know what I can do that will earn me enough to raise kids, provide them with a good education, save for retirement and not have to worry that my family's security rests on a house of cards.
I'm not even worried about getting any potential offspring all the oppurtunities in the world. Just at least the same ones I had and that most middle class kids in this country have had.
I don't see a "market solution" to this problem. We aren't on the verge of any tech revolution. There's no amount of productivity gains I will be able to capitalize on, that my Indian counterpart won't, that will make me 7x more efficient. This isn't like losing manufacturing. We're losing jobs that took members of our population 4-6 years to train in. Retraining these people in comparable fields is going to be a drain on the national output.
I personally think we need to rethink letting capital flow so much more freely than labor and goods internationally. I also think we nee