When I saw that they're labeling it "the quest for Ken", I had a flashback to 9th grade (1987) when a girl in my English class wrote a skit titled, "Barbies in Turmoil: The Quest for Ken".
Three girls playing with Barbies argue over who Ken would prefer: the prettiest Barbie, the richest Barbie, or the smartest Barbie. When the skit was performed for some other English classes, instead of choosing, I delivered the skit's punchline -- "I hate to tell you this, girls, but Ken... is a fag. He's going out with GI Joe later tonight."
Brought the house down. Juvenile humor works. (At least on 9th graders.)
Immigration laws, environmental impact, etc. are drags on the model, but they do not invalidate it. They only reduce the amount of benefits that we should expect to see from outsourcing. Also, outsourcing of intangible goods and services is a relatively new phenomenon -- with practice, I think we can expect to see better gains when the circumstances are right.
Listen, I'm pro-outsourcing, pro-globalization, and very anti-Bush. Why? Here's a quote from the article:
... Mr. Samuelson and Mr. Bhagwati agree that the way to buffer the adjustment for the workers who lose in the global competition is with wage insurance programs. "You need more temporary protection for the losers," Mr. Samuelson said. "My belief is that every good cause is worth some inefficiency."
The role of government is to address market failures and balance efficiency with fairness. The role of the market is to provide goods and services with ruthless efficiency. Too much government and we're wasting resources that could have been put to better use. Too much market and we're sacrificing the poor and disadvantaged for the benefit of all. I want free markets tempered by a government that knows enough about capitalism to rein in its worst effects without heading too far down the socialist path. I'm not sure we'll get the right balance from Kerry, but I know for sure we haven't gotten it from Bush.
Because voters need to weigh the amount of lying done by both sides. To say both sides lie, and then imply equivalency between the two sides, is disingenuous.
There are lies that hide assumptions or omit extenuating circumstances. Then there are lies that are directly contradicted by documented evidence. They're not the same.
More like 'what goes around, comes around.' I think Kerry's campaign was getting "Texans for Truth" ready in response to the Swifties and Bush's campaign got wind of it and thought, "Whoa. Let's call a truce on the 572s."
Picture this: Two guys have a contest to kick each other in the balls until one guy can't get up anymore. The first guy has a turn, the second one rolls around in agony for a while, the second guy gets up, and the first guy says, "Okay. You win. It's a stupid game anyway."
"Where, pray tell, do qualified IT "engineers" earn the experience and prove their mettle?
I had a recent grad ask me this one time. My answer then and now is the same.
For one thing, don't spend a lot of time writing low-level code. Spend time using other people's frameworks to build solutions to problems. Even better if those frameworks are open source so that you can read the code, perhaps step through it if there's some odd bug or integration issue. The solutions an entry-level software engineer can competently tackle may be small scale at first (systems for smaller companies, or a component of a larger system at a larger company), but they provide problem-solving and design experience by building off of the work of others.
And *that's* what future U.S. employers are going to need -- someone who can take what others have done, map appropriate components to business problems, and integrate them into a workable, usable whole.
When I started in software out of college, I didn't have to write assembler or anything truly bottom-up, but I had to write dumb little string routines and basic object classes, and I thought, "What a waste. Hasn't someone, somewhere done this already? Why am I reinventing the wheel?" Now we've got STL, Java libraries, XML, etc. which solve a lot of problems for you, and now there are repetitive, wasteful reimplementations at a higher level.
The path from entry-level up is to take the available tools, which hide some of the lower-level complexity, and use those tools to solve higher-level problems, first on a small scale, and then on larger systems. Yes, an entry-level software engineer now competes against a global market, but only for companies/customers that can take the time and effort to buy services from the global market. Small and medium enterprises, as noted in the article, have not used IT aggressively in the past and are less likely to go through the language barrier, lack of client meetings, time zones, etc. to find a solution to their problems.
is that economics is a zero-sum game. Lower costs supposedly means more profit to executives, but no increase in jobs. Higher overall demand supposedly means higher demand for outsourced workers.
What the author is trying to point out is that whole new markets of opportunity will open once the cost of basic programming activities is low enough. One of the benefits of open source software is that poorer countries can now obtain technology that before was out of their reach (or they can at least extract higher discounts from proprietary vendors).
I have a friend who works as a software consultant customizing proprietary accounting software for small/medium enterprises like those described by the author. That's the basic outline of the future -- smaller companies could benefit from technology that goes beyond office applications, but to more backroom ops, or e-commerce opportunities, or whatever. You won't get paid based on your ability to write something that can be written cheaply overseas to target a generic problem -- you'll be paid to tweak that piece into something that gives a competitive advantage to your customer... or you'll be paid to integrate that piece with other pieces that can be picked up cheap as open source software or as cheaply developed components.
Many industries assemble cheaper components into an overall design that delivers a value greater than the cost of the parts. Software, as an intangible good, provides some interesting (perhaps worrying?) differences that make economic analogies a little tricker to apply.
But I think while some components are open to a research/science approach (algorithms, maybe frameworks) I think the majority of software is close to manufactured goods in that customer requirements drive a solution that isn't generically applicable or saleable (a problem for Microsoft-ish companies that try to sell the same thing to everybody). The world of de facto standard products gets a lot of press because it's typically winner-take-all (google, MS Office, MS IE), but the growth in demand and in jobs will be in the world of tweaked software.
This probably comes too late to the discussion, but I haven't seen anyone mention the analysis from the econ blog Marginal Revolution.
Why are consumers forced to buy a bundle? Cable companies claim that choice would require expensive boxes, but few observers believe this claim.
More plausibly, price discrimination is at work. Consider a simple example with two individuals. John values Disney at $100 a year and FoxNews at $10 a year; Sally has the reverse valuations. Without bundling, the cable company will offer each channel for about $99, and sell a channel to each consumer, reaping $198 in revenue (N.B.: I am assuming that the cable company has a good idea of demand in general, although it cannot identify which consumer is willing to pay how much for what.)
In lieu of this set up, sell the bundle for $109 to each consumer, reaping a greater revenue of $218. The company makes greater profit.
More importantly, aggregate welfare is higher. In this case each consumer receives two channels instead of one.
Monopolies, regulated or otherwise, tend to bundle commodities when demands are scattered and the marginal cost of additional service is low. In this context, once the program is made, you can sell it cheaply to additional customers. So why not try to get the entire package into everyone's hands?
You can spin your own numbers, with varying results, but the overall lesson is clear. While there is a general problem with monopoly in the cable market, bundling can make that problem better rather than worse. So don't complain next time you have to "click-remote" through those Farsi and exercise channels.
Outsourcing does not lend itself well to oversimplification. That said, there are some assertions here that I have to disagree with:
We have no comparative advantage or superiority in innovation.
The US 'melting pot' has a unique blend of population size and diversity. Some countries are larger, a few may arguably be more diverse, but none can claim both. The different viewpoints and backgrounds represented in the US, combined with a general bias toward individualism, are the wellspring of innovation. A PhD does not automatically grant a license to innovate.
Americans do need to protect this advantage, by investing in education and allowing more immigration.
A company that decides to move its production overseas cuts its costs in many ways Some of these don't really apply: Avoidance of labor unions has nothing to do with the outsourcing of "our best, high-paying jobs" -- they're not unionized. They're not being done by children either. In fact, in emerging economies, child labor drops as trade increases. (Because countries start to realize that investing in the education of children is better for child welfare and long-term economic growth.) Finally, the shift of responsibility for retirement from employers to employees has been occurring for a long time now -- it's independent of the outsourcing trend.
Besides cutting costs, there are other benefits to exporting jobs The same incentives that lead to outsourcing also lead to insourcing from other countries -- look at BMW / Mercedes / Toyota plants that have opened in the US.
The costs of the decision to outsource are not borne by the decision maker. Not all the benefits accrue to the decision maker, either. The receiving country gets more jobs, economic growth, less reliance on foreign aid. The country's purchasing power increases, making it a target market for US firms, who can now compete effectively against other international firms because they have lower cost structures. Domestic US consumers benefit from lower prices. The leftover money can be used to buy additional goods, boosting demand and increasing growth.
Jobs are destroyed all the time -- there's always a better, faster, cheaper way of doing something (innovation is the process of discovering/inventing that new way). Stopping job destruction is like stopping the tide. The real, and still unsolved problem, is how to increase job creation. There are some interesting ideas floating around:
1) Nationalize health care so that employers are no longer responsible for funding it, reducing the cost to hire a new employee. 2) Retarget tax cuts to boost demand growth instead of supply growth (put more money in the hands of poor people who will spend it) 3) Cut the payroll tax to make it cheaper to hire new employees.
The best response to jobs lost to outsourcing is creating new jobs at a faster rate. In other words... "the best defense is a good offense. You know who said that? Mel, the cook on 'Alice'!"
US GDP Per Capita grew 56% from 1960 to 1980. It then grew 55% from 1980 to 2000.
The history seems to be this: we are always buffeted by economic, technological, and social upheaval, but our best and brightest manage to lead us to ever loftier levels of economic output.
Our goal should be to nurture the current and next generation's best and brightest so that we can figure out what can drive economic growth for the next few decades.
Your question assumes that the work of the mind is a uniform task. There are easy works of the mind, and hard works of the mind. As the tide of outsourcing rises (and the extent to which outsourcing is increasing is certainly up for debate), you have a variety of choices:
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. 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. 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.
Comparative advantage will grow more intangible over time, but it will not go away. The comparative advantage will come from what collections of people can achieve. Los Angeles for entertainment, Austin (or Research Triangle) (or Silicon Valley) for tech, Chicago for commodities trading, New York for the financial industry - those are the large, obvious examples. Smaller cities with a good university within or nearby can be research havens. Large-scale manufacturing will give way to smaller-scale just-in-time flexible manufacturing. (Don't make commodities, make value-added custom items that can demand a market premium!)
One problem I have with the question is that the real, honest answer is, "I don't know. But someone will find the answer." If we all knew what the next big thing was, we would already be doing it. But historically, technological innovations have always been shrinking the world - ships, railroads, cars, planes, telephones, next-day delivery, same-day delivery. Historically, technological innovations have replaced labor with capitol: domesticated animals, tools, machinery, robotics, AI. I have to admit that there has to be a smidgen of faith to claim that as a civilization we'll be fine with this, too. But every time, there have been people who have said, "This time it's different. This time the rules have changed forever." Maybe - who can say for sure? But I don't think that's the way to bet.
I cannot deny that there will be a lot of pain involved. One of the things a good government should do is provide a safety net for those who are adversely affected by a market economy. But if we're so against outsourcing, we should tell Toyota and BMW to close down their plants in the U.S. We should demand that LOTR be re-shot in Oregon. We should pay surcharges on our laptops and cellphones so that they can made in the U.S.
My personal response to the threat of outsourcing? Short-term: Do more internal IS/IT work. Long-term: Get a PhD and start teaching. Other people's responses: Become a lawyer. Become a nurse (huge shortage!). Move back in with your parents. (Can't say I'm a big fan of that last one.)
Behold the power of google... This article describes a specific study about restaurants in central Ohio, but has a quick blurb about businesses overall:
"(H.G. Parsa, the report's author) reviewed other published studies that also suggest failure rates of restaurants to be closer to 60 percent or less after three years to five years."
This is compared to the oft-cited conventional wisdom of a 90% failure rate in restaurants, and 70-80% for other businesses. An early-90s Inc. article says failure rates are inflated because researchers didn't account for changes in ownership -- in other words, just because a business comes under new management doesn't mean that the business has failed:
"after eight years, 54% of start-ups still survive in some form: 28% have the original owners, and another 26% survive with new owners"
Now, that Inc. article may be a little dated post-boom, but the basic concept still holds: *you* may have a great product or idea, and a business you launch has perhaps an even-money chance of surviving... but you probably don't have the skills to make your product/idea stick in the marketplace.
(I'm wondering what Alan Cox will come up with after he finishes his MBA.)
[excerpted from today's Wall Street Journal, which has even more access restrictions than the New York Times. Paul Kedrosky, the author of the commentary, teaches business at the University of California, San Diego.]
Incumbent telecoms are tying themselves in knots over all this. They generally think that the current wave of upstart VOIP providers are getting a free ride given that they currently don't pay the same regulator-decreed access fees and subsidies. But incumbents are also smart enough to implicitly threaten to cut and run to VOIP themselves if the FCC gives competitors free rein in profitable voice markets.
But providers of VOIP service are only slightly less cynical. While they are getting scads of fawning press now, it is hard to imagine a future that includes most of them. Because six years or so from now we will almost certainly be calling from dedicated voice devices that plug directly into your high-speed Internet connection. You are no more likely to be billed for future phone calls than you are for current e-mails.
Call it the Napsterization of the phone business, where paying VOIP companies $35 a month for the privilege of connecting you via the Internet with the spendthrift sorts on the old telecommunications network will seem silly and unnecessary. The smartest thing most VOIP vendors could do now is quickly exploit VOIP-phoria to go public or get bought. Wait, that's what they are doing.
There is work left for regulators, like ironing out 911 and 411 access, as well as how law enforcement will tap Internet phone calls. But 911 issues didn't stop cell phones, and the arrival of e-mail that police could no longer steam open rightly didn't cause e-mail to be outlawed.
I love this guy's approach. Standard Slashdot posting technique (for karma in spite of going against the grain): say that you know something's great, and you know you'll probably get flamed for saying it, BUT...
Then you have a middle section that leaves out just enough information to make your troll seem passable...
Then you wrap up with "but I still think the original thing's great."
Best flame: "Of course, if you don't care about low battery life, aren't fond of jogging, have ample disposable income, don't need to record/encode music portably, and want to purchase music downloads only from the iTunes Music Store, then the iPod is the best the way to go."
I mean, let's go point by point on this: 1) 6 hours of battery life on a long airplane flight --> low battery life 2) Jogging --> "Some experts say that it's impossible to damage the drive in this way, but I'm not buying that" 3) Ample disposable income --> well, actually, yes Apple's picking a high price point for its product, but it's a trade-off. 4) Record music portably --> If you really need this, I wouldn't recommend an iPod either. 5) iTMS --> "I don't like feeling hemmed in... other MP3 players let you choose between (services) all of which use Microsoft's secure WMA files." Great.
And he's joining all these reasons together to say, "well, you can *settle* for an iPod." (Dreaded use of 'and' instead of 'or' -- *None* of the MP3 players he's hawking resolves all 5 points... product designers are paid to make trade-offs.)
But he's sandwiched it all between praise of the iPod, so I guess it's ok. Or something.
When I was taking the required Technical Communication course in college to finish my engineering degree, a major theme of the class was incidents such as Three Mile Island and the Challenger disaster. The professor said that while the public perception was that management had f***ed up, the engineers had to bear some responsibility because they were unable to adequately communicate the necessary conclusions in a manner that decision makers could understand. And we would look at copies of the memos, and think that, yeah, if the engineers had written more effectively, things may have been different.
In some ways, even though I don't enjoy writing specs and design documents for software (I don't work on mission-critical or life-critical systems), I try to write well, because I figure, "I'm an engineer, and I have a responsibility to do my job as a professional."
And then I read this article, and I think that maybe, after all, it doesn't matter what a competent, professional engineer says or does. I'm just saddened that NASA, an institution I loved growing up, did not change at all after Challenger. I wish I knew the answer.
The AC is right. Choosing from three doors in the first situation and then choosing from two doors after Monty shows you the empty door are dependent events. If they were independent (the prize gets assigned to one of the doors after you chose), then your analysis would be correct.
You talk about 1000 doors, but take it to the extreme. Pick a set of lottery numbers (1 in X million), then have someone listen to the drawing and then offer you two sets: your set and another set, one of which is the winning combination. Are you honestly saying that it's a 50/50 chance?
There are goods and services provided by the government and there are public goods. There's some overlap between the two, but in terms of market-based economics, there's a limited definition of a public good (from http://www.bized.ac.uk/stafsup/exams/revec_mfail.h tm)
A pure public good is a good or service which is consumed by everyone and from which no-one can be excluded, defence is a good example. It has two characteristics, non-rivalry i.e. one person's consumption of the good does not reduce the amount available for someone else and non-excludability i.e. no-one can be excluded from consumption of the good.
This brings in the problem of free riders, which is someone who consumes a good or service without paying for it. This problem arises with public goods because why should one person pay when everybody else will contribute to the cost. If everyone took this attitude the good would not be provided hence the need for government intervention.
Software certainly meets the non-rivalry requirement, but non-excludability is not met given the current legal atmosphere concerning the concept of intellectual property.
That said, there are cases where introducing excludability means that what used to be public goods can now be provided through market mechanisms: toll roads are not public goods, but universally accessible roads are. Government intervention is required to provide the latter, but (ideally) not the former. The same can be said for private security forces as a replacement for police. You could even slap gates around libraries so that only those who pay can gain access. The debate then turns to what resources *should* have non-excludability -- what goods and services should any person be able to expect from their government?
Outside that debate, you cannot eliminate non-excludability from certain items: national defense and global climate quality come to mind.
1. Political cover (hypothetical) There's the possibility that when the US promises to veto something, other members can go along with the vote safely, thus avoiding political problems dealing with those countries that have sided strongly with the Palestinians, which has had the unfortunate result that Israel now only trusts (barely) the US to be a fair arbiter in the Israel/Palestine dispute.
2. I googled for the quote, and I saw this text attached in an MSNBC story: "in remarks aimed at Iraq's neighbours and suspected foreign fighters who may have arrived in the country." Specifically, a Baathist-style Syria and a theocratic Iran. Granted, the news story and media coverage may be biased (I'm sure that's your point), but I think you're overextending its coverage to suppressing free speech from other democratic countries.
3. Should the US not have participated in operations in Bosnia and Kosovo? Russia and China both threatened to veto the Kosovo UN resolution. Eventually, the UN blessed both operations. What weakened the UN was that Chirac fell in love with his own media coverage and tried to use the UN as a lever against the US.
I'm not going to defend US support for dictators. I will say that diplomacy should always be the first method when working to stop human rights abuses. If there are no prospects that diplomacy can eventually succeed (as hawks argued was the case in Iraq), then force may need to be applied. Diplomacy has a tough time working where the rule of law has broken down or when non-democratic governments ignore their commitments.
4. What applies to one does not apply to all. When there is a humanitarian disaster, the US is always mentioned as needing to take the lead in blood and treasure. As a superpower, the US has a responsibility to be a positive force in the world, not an isolationist. Bush can be held accountable in elections next year -- many governments who work against the US have no such limitations.
In the end, the mini stock market (we can try to be on-topic, right?) is going to be shut down. It was interesting creative thinking about applying market principles to intelligence gathering, but it was indeed too "grotesque, tasteless and tacky" to survive.
Thank you for giving us four strawmen. Bonus mod points for neatly formatting them in bold.
1. When France or Russia want to use their UN Security Council veto then it's treasonous. When the US uses its veto then it's OK. When France or Russia wanted to veto the UN Security Council resolution on Iraq, they were protecting their investments made with the Saddam government. When the United States vetoes resolutions against Israel, it is trying to counterbalance European anti-semitism. That doesn't make it right, or even good policy, but you cannot declare the motives identical.
2. When the US interferes in Iraq it's OK, when anyone else does the it's not. When the US interfered in Iraq, Iraq was led by Saddam Hussein. When foreigners enter Iraq to engage coalition forces in guerilla warfare, they are working to prevent the emergence of a democratic Iraq.
3. When an Arab TV stations shows pictures of dead US and British troops it's disgusting. When pictures of Saddam Hussein's two sons are plastered all over the world's press, then it's perfectly fine. Iraqis were asking for proof -- these were two men capable of inflicting great harm on any around them. There were no great clamors (and no emotional need) to see dead soldiers who did nothing except try to live up to the oaths they gave.
4. Whatever the opponents of the war say is just a pack of lies, whatever the US/UK says is 100 percent honest. There are well-meaning people on both sides of the argument, and plenty of spinning bastards, too. Was the war the right thing to do? Maybe. Should Bush et al be held accountable for the process that led us to the war (given the new doctrine of preemptive defense)? Definitely. Should we work for the restoration of the Saddam government? Uh, no.
I'm a billionaire - hey, I've got a programme to become a billionaire and it's the same thing right? Side note: if you had $500 million and planned to invest it in government bonds, at some point you're going to be a billionaire. If the Saddam government, with access to oil revenues that neatly bypassed sanctions (letting the brunt of them fall on the civilian population), planned to obtain WMD, it's not too much of a stretch to say at some point he would get them. (Enough of a threat to justify war? You could make a good argument there. I'm just saying it would be more constructive to talk about what needs to be done instead of ranting about perceived evils.)
"So - all the Simpson women turn out okay?" "That's right, sweetie. The defective 'Simpson Gene' is on the Y chromosome, so only men are affected." "So I'm not doomed! Oh, Dad, I've never been so glad to be your daughter!"
This analogy doesn't wash. You're comparing events with exclusive one-time attendance (concert/sporting event) with a commodity that has a free alternative (the slower lanes).
Plus, speculation implies risk... just because someone pays a huge price for the stickers doesn't necessarily mean they can resell them at a profit. Any motorist who can get to eBay can bid just like a speculator can. The only people who might turn to a third-party for HOV stickers are those without access to eBay but who have enough disposable income to compensate for their lack of patience with traffic.
1) Who defines which standards are open? (And will governments agree on what that means, or will a software company have to internationalize their interfaces to support one standard in one country and another standard in another?) 2) Isn't this already happening in a less official way? If you're a non-US government, just mention Linux and you too can get a huge price break from Microsoft (probably even bigger than the 5-10% proposed non-compliance fee).
It would be nice if governments that wrestle such price breaks from Microsoft turned around and used those funds to generate additional open source tools, but governments have a lot of competing needs to deal with, and the freed up funds are more likely to go to any underfunded services (and any government service is going to have defenders that say that their particular niche is underfunded).
I think the assertion is that if innovators are not rewarded with patents, there is less incentive to innovate, which in turn reduces the ability of follow-on innovators to build upon it. (You can't improve something that isn't there.)
But if patents run too long, follow-on innovations are delayed until the expiration of the patent. So how do you reward people who come up with new ideas without making the exclusive period too long or too short?
The core assumption of the assertion is that economic reward is an effective driving force of innovation. That's certainly true in some, but not all, cases.
Slashdot Mirror
When I saw that they're labeling it "the quest for Ken", I had a flashback to 9th grade (1987) when a girl in my English class wrote a skit titled, "Barbies in Turmoil: The Quest for Ken".
... is a fag. He's going out with GI Joe later tonight."
Three girls playing with Barbies argue over who Ken would prefer: the prettiest Barbie, the richest Barbie, or the smartest Barbie. When the skit was performed for some other English classes, instead of choosing, I delivered the skit's punchline -- "I hate to tell you this, girls, but Ken
Brought the house down. Juvenile humor works. (At least on 9th graders.)
Immigration laws, environmental impact, etc. are drags on the model, but they do not invalidate it. They only reduce the amount of benefits that we should expect to see from outsourcing. Also, outsourcing of intangible goods and services is a relatively new phenomenon -- with practice, I think we can expect to see better gains when the circumstances are right.
... Mr. Samuelson and Mr. Bhagwati agree that the way to buffer the adjustment for the workers who lose in the global competition is with wage insurance programs. "You need more temporary protection for the losers," Mr. Samuelson said. "My belief is that every good cause is worth some inefficiency."
Listen, I'm pro-outsourcing, pro-globalization, and very anti-Bush. Why? Here's a quote from the article:
The role of government is to address market failures and balance efficiency with fairness. The role of the market is to provide goods and services with ruthless efficiency. Too much government and we're wasting resources that could have been put to better use. Too much market and we're sacrificing the poor and disadvantaged for the benefit of all. I want free markets tempered by a government that knows enough about capitalism to rein in its worst effects without heading too far down the socialist path. I'm not sure we'll get the right balance from Kerry, but I know for sure we haven't gotten it from Bush.
Because voters need to weigh the amount of lying done by both sides. To say both sides lie, and then imply equivalency between the two sides, is disingenuous.
There are lies that hide assumptions or omit extenuating circumstances. Then there are lies that are directly contradicted by documented evidence. They're not the same.
More like 'what goes around, comes around.' I think Kerry's campaign was getting "Texans for Truth" ready in response to the Swifties and Bush's campaign got wind of it and thought, "Whoa. Let's call a truce on the 572s."
Picture this: Two guys have a contest to kick each other in the balls until one guy can't get up anymore. The first guy has a turn, the second one rolls around in agony for a while, the second guy gets up, and the first guy says, "Okay. You win. It's a stupid game anyway."
"Where, pray tell, do qualified IT "engineers" earn the experience and prove their mettle?
I had a recent grad ask me this one time. My answer then and now is the same.
For one thing, don't spend a lot of time writing low-level code. Spend time using other people's frameworks to build solutions to problems. Even better if those frameworks are open source so that you can read the code, perhaps step through it if there's some odd bug or integration issue. The solutions an entry-level software engineer can competently tackle may be small scale at first (systems for smaller companies, or a component of a larger system at a larger company), but they provide problem-solving and design experience by building off of the work of others.
And *that's* what future U.S. employers are going to need -- someone who can take what others have done, map appropriate components to business problems, and integrate them into a workable, usable whole.
When I started in software out of college, I didn't have to write assembler or anything truly bottom-up, but I had to write dumb little string routines and basic object classes, and I thought, "What a waste. Hasn't someone, somewhere done this already? Why am I reinventing the wheel?" Now we've got STL, Java libraries, XML, etc. which solve a lot of problems for you, and now there are repetitive, wasteful reimplementations at a higher level.
The path from entry-level up is to take the available tools, which hide some of the lower-level complexity, and use those tools to solve higher-level problems, first on a small scale, and then on larger systems. Yes, an entry-level software engineer now competes against a global market, but only for companies/customers that can take the time and effort to buy services from the global market. Small and medium enterprises, as noted in the article, have not used IT aggressively in the past and are less likely to go through the language barrier, lack of client meetings, time zones, etc. to find a solution to their problems.
is that economics is a zero-sum game. Lower costs supposedly means more profit to executives, but no increase in jobs. Higher overall demand supposedly means higher demand for outsourced workers.
... or you'll be paid to integrate that piece with other pieces that can be picked up cheap as open source software or as cheaply developed components.
What the author is trying to point out is that whole new markets of opportunity will open once the cost of basic programming activities is low enough. One of the benefits of open source software is that poorer countries can now obtain technology that before was out of their reach (or they can at least extract higher discounts from proprietary vendors).
I have a friend who works as a software consultant customizing proprietary accounting software for small/medium enterprises like those described by the author. That's the basic outline of the future -- smaller companies could benefit from technology that goes beyond office applications, but to more backroom ops, or e-commerce opportunities, or whatever. You won't get paid based on your ability to write something that can be written cheaply overseas to target a generic problem -- you'll be paid to tweak that piece into something that gives a competitive advantage to your customer
Many industries assemble cheaper components into an overall design that delivers a value greater than the cost of the parts. Software, as an intangible good, provides some interesting (perhaps worrying?) differences that make economic analogies a little tricker to apply.
But I think while some components are open to a research/science approach (algorithms, maybe frameworks) I think the majority of software is close to manufactured goods in that customer requirements drive a solution that isn't generically applicable or saleable (a problem for Microsoft-ish companies that try to sell the same thing to everybody). The world of de facto standard products gets a lot of press because it's typically winner-take-all (google, MS Office, MS IE), but the growth in demand and in jobs will be in the world of tweaked software.
Outsourcing does not lend itself well to oversimplification. That said, there are some assertions here that I have to disagree with:
... "the best defense is a good offense. You know who said that? Mel, the cook on 'Alice'!"
We have no comparative advantage or superiority in innovation.
The US 'melting pot' has a unique blend of population size and diversity. Some countries are larger, a few may arguably be more diverse, but none can claim both. The different viewpoints and backgrounds represented in the US, combined with a general bias toward individualism, are the wellspring of innovation. A PhD does not automatically grant a license to innovate.
Americans do need to protect this advantage, by investing in education and allowing more immigration.
A company that decides to move its production overseas cuts its costs in many ways
Some of these don't really apply:
Avoidance of labor unions has nothing to do with the outsourcing of "our best, high-paying jobs" -- they're not unionized. They're not being done by children either. In fact, in emerging economies, child labor drops as trade increases. (Because countries start to realize that investing in the education of children is better for child welfare and long-term economic growth.) Finally, the shift of responsibility for retirement from employers to employees has been occurring for a long time now -- it's independent of the outsourcing trend.
Besides cutting costs, there are other benefits to exporting jobs
The same incentives that lead to outsourcing also lead to insourcing from other countries -- look at BMW / Mercedes / Toyota plants that have opened in the US.
The costs of the decision to outsource are not borne by the decision maker.
Not all the benefits accrue to the decision maker, either. The receiving country gets more jobs, economic growth, less reliance on foreign aid. The country's purchasing power increases, making it a target market for US firms, who can now compete effectively against other international firms because they have lower cost structures. Domestic US consumers benefit from lower prices. The leftover money can be used to buy additional goods, boosting demand and increasing growth.
Jobs are destroyed all the time -- there's always a better, faster, cheaper way of doing something (innovation is the process of discovering/inventing that new way). Stopping job destruction is like stopping the tide. The real, and still unsolved problem, is how to increase job creation. There are some interesting ideas floating around:
1) Nationalize health care so that employers are no longer responsible for funding it, reducing the cost to hire a new employee.
2) Retarget tax cuts to boost demand growth instead of supply growth (put more money in the hands of poor people who will spend it)
3) Cut the payroll tax to make it cheaper to hire new employees.
The best response to jobs lost to outsourcing is creating new jobs at a faster rate. In other words
Check this table. (Per Capita GDP Growth)
US GDP Per Capita grew 56% from 1960 to 1980. It then grew 55% from 1980 to 2000.
The history seems to be this: we are always buffeted by economic, technological, and social upheaval, but our best and brightest manage to lead us to ever loftier levels of economic output.
Our goal should be to nurture the current and next generation's best and brightest so that we can figure out what can drive economic growth for the next few decades.
Your question assumes that the work of the mind is a uniform task. There are easy works of the mind, and hard works of the mind. As the tide of outsourcing rises (and the extent to which outsourcing is increasing is certainly up for debate), you have a variety of choices:
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.
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.
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.
Comparative advantage will grow more intangible over time, but it will not go away. The comparative advantage will come from what collections of people can achieve. Los Angeles for entertainment, Austin (or Research Triangle) (or Silicon Valley) for tech, Chicago for commodities trading, New York for the financial industry - those are the large, obvious examples. Smaller cities with a good university within or nearby can be research havens. Large-scale manufacturing will give way to smaller-scale just-in-time flexible manufacturing. (Don't make commodities, make value-added custom items that can demand a market premium!)
One problem I have with the question is that the real, honest answer is, "I don't know. But someone will find the answer." If we all knew what the next big thing was, we would already be doing it. But historically, technological innovations have always been shrinking the world - ships, railroads, cars, planes, telephones, next-day delivery, same-day delivery. Historically, technological innovations have replaced labor with capitol: domesticated animals, tools, machinery, robotics, AI. I have to admit that there has to be a smidgen of faith to claim that as a civilization we'll be fine with this, too. But every time, there have been people who have said, "This time it's different. This time the rules have changed forever." Maybe - who can say for sure? But I don't think that's the way to bet.
I cannot deny that there will be a lot of pain involved. One of the things a good government should do is provide a safety net for those who are adversely affected by a market economy. But if we're so against outsourcing, we should tell Toyota and BMW to close down their plants in the U.S. We should demand that LOTR be re-shot in Oregon. We should pay surcharges on our laptops and cellphones so that they can made in the U.S.
My personal response to the threat of outsourcing? Short-term: Do more internal IS/IT work. Long-term: Get a PhD and start teaching. Other people's responses: Become a lawyer. Become a nurse (huge shortage!). Move back in with your parents. (Can't say I'm a big fan of that last one.)
Behold the power of google ... This article describes a specific study about restaurants in central Ohio, but has a quick blurb about businesses overall:
... but you probably don't have the skills to make your product/idea stick in the marketplace.
"(H.G. Parsa, the report's author) reviewed other published studies that also suggest failure rates of restaurants to be closer to 60 percent or less after three years to five years."
This is compared to the oft-cited conventional wisdom of a 90% failure rate in restaurants, and 70-80% for other businesses. An early-90s Inc. article says failure rates are inflated because researchers didn't account for changes in ownership -- in other words, just because a business comes under new management doesn't mean that the business has failed:
"after eight years, 54% of start-ups still survive in some form: 28% have the original owners, and another 26% survive with new owners"
Now, that Inc. article may be a little dated post-boom, but the basic concept still holds: *you* may have a great product or idea, and a business you launch has perhaps an even-money chance of surviving
(I'm wondering what Alan Cox will come up with after he finishes his MBA.)
I love this guy's approach. Standard Slashdot posting technique (for karma in spite of going against the grain): say that you know something's great, and you know you'll probably get flamed for saying it, BUT ...
...
... other MP3 players let you choose between (services) all of which use Microsoft's secure WMA files." Great.
... product designers are paid to make trade-offs.)
Then you have a middle section that leaves out just enough information to make your troll seem passable
Then you wrap up with "but I still think the original thing's great."
Best flame: "Of course, if you don't care about low battery life, aren't fond of jogging, have ample disposable income, don't need to record/encode music portably, and want to purchase music downloads only from the iTunes Music Store, then the iPod is the best the way to go."
I mean, let's go point by point on this:
1) 6 hours of battery life on a long airplane flight --> low battery life
2) Jogging --> "Some experts say that it's impossible to damage the drive in this way, but I'm not buying that"
3) Ample disposable income --> well, actually, yes Apple's picking a high price point for its product, but it's a trade-off.
4) Record music portably --> If you really need this, I wouldn't recommend an iPod either.
5) iTMS --> "I don't like feeling hemmed in
And he's joining all these reasons together to say, "well, you can *settle* for an iPod." (Dreaded use of 'and' instead of 'or' -- *None* of the MP3 players he's hawking resolves all 5 points
But he's sandwiched it all between praise of the iPod, so I guess it's ok. Or something.
When I was taking the required Technical Communication course in college to finish my engineering degree, a major theme of the class was incidents such as Three Mile Island and the Challenger disaster. The professor said that while the public perception was that management had f***ed up, the engineers had to bear some responsibility because they were unable to adequately communicate the necessary conclusions in a manner that decision makers could understand. And we would look at copies of the memos, and think that, yeah, if the engineers had written more effectively, things may have been different.
In some ways, even though I don't enjoy writing specs and design documents for software (I don't work on mission-critical or life-critical systems), I try to write well, because I figure, "I'm an engineer, and I have a responsibility to do my job as a professional."
And then I read this article, and I think that maybe, after all, it doesn't matter what a competent, professional engineer says or does. I'm just saddened that NASA, an institution I loved growing up, did not change at all after Challenger. I wish I knew the answer.
The AC is right. Choosing from three doors in the first situation and then choosing from two doors after Monty shows you the empty door are dependent events. If they were independent (the prize gets assigned to one of the doors after you chose), then your analysis would be correct.
You talk about 1000 doors, but take it to the extreme. Pick a set of lottery numbers (1 in X million), then have someone listen to the drawing and then offer you two sets: your set and another set, one of which is the winning combination. Are you honestly saying that it's a 50/50 chance?
Software certainly meets the non-rivalry requirement, but non-excludability is not met given the current legal atmosphere concerning the concept of intellectual property.
That said, there are cases where introducing excludability means that what used to be public goods can now be provided through market mechanisms: toll roads are not public goods, but universally accessible roads are. Government intervention is required to provide the latter, but (ideally) not the former. The same can be said for private security forces as a replacement for police. You could even slap gates around libraries so that only those who pay can gain access. The debate then turns to what resources *should* have non-excludability -- what goods and services should any person be able to expect from their government?
Outside that debate, you cannot eliminate non-excludability from certain items: national defense and global climate quality come to mind.
1. Political cover (hypothetical)
There's the possibility that when the US promises to veto something, other members can go along with the vote safely, thus avoiding political problems dealing with those countries that have sided strongly with the Palestinians, which has had the unfortunate result that Israel now only trusts (barely) the US to be a fair arbiter in the Israel/Palestine dispute.
2. I googled for the quote, and I saw this text attached in an MSNBC story: "in remarks aimed at Iraq's neighbours and suspected foreign fighters who may have arrived in the country." Specifically, a Baathist-style Syria and a theocratic Iran. Granted, the news story and media coverage may be biased (I'm sure that's your point), but I think you're overextending its coverage to suppressing free speech from other democratic countries.
3. Should the US not have participated in operations in Bosnia and Kosovo? Russia and China both threatened to veto the Kosovo UN resolution. Eventually, the UN blessed both operations. What weakened the UN was that Chirac fell in love with his own media coverage and tried to use the UN as a lever against the US.
I'm not going to defend US support for dictators. I will say that diplomacy should always be the first method when working to stop human rights abuses. If there are no prospects that diplomacy can eventually succeed (as hawks argued was the case in Iraq), then force may need to be applied. Diplomacy has a tough time working where the rule of law has broken down or when non-democratic governments ignore their commitments.
4. What applies to one does not apply to all. When there is a humanitarian disaster, the US is always mentioned as needing to take the lead in blood and treasure. As a superpower, the US has a responsibility to be a positive force in the world, not an isolationist. Bush can be held accountable in elections next year -- many governments who work against the US have no such limitations.
In the end, the mini stock market (we can try to be on-topic, right?) is going to be shut down. It was interesting creative thinking about applying market principles to intelligence gathering, but it was indeed too "grotesque, tasteless and tacky" to survive.
Thank you for giving us four strawmen. Bonus mod points for neatly formatting them in bold.
1. When France or Russia want to use their UN Security Council veto then it's treasonous. When the US uses its veto then it's OK.
When France or Russia wanted to veto the UN Security Council resolution on Iraq, they were protecting their investments made with the Saddam government. When the United States vetoes resolutions against Israel, it is trying to counterbalance European anti-semitism. That doesn't make it right, or even good policy, but you cannot declare the motives identical.
2. When the US interferes in Iraq it's OK, when anyone else does the it's not.
When the US interfered in Iraq, Iraq was led by Saddam Hussein. When foreigners enter Iraq to engage coalition forces in guerilla warfare, they are working to prevent the emergence of a democratic Iraq.
3. When an Arab TV stations shows pictures of dead US and British troops it's disgusting. When pictures of Saddam Hussein's two sons are plastered all over the world's press, then it's perfectly fine.
Iraqis were asking for proof -- these were two men capable of inflicting great harm on any around them. There were no great clamors (and no emotional need) to see dead soldiers who did nothing except try to live up to the oaths they gave.
4. Whatever the opponents of the war say is just a pack of lies, whatever the US/UK says is 100 percent honest.
There are well-meaning people on both sides of the argument, and plenty of spinning bastards, too. Was the war the right thing to do? Maybe. Should Bush et al be held accountable for the process that led us to the war (given the new doctrine of preemptive defense)? Definitely. Should we work for the restoration of the Saddam government? Uh, no.
I'm a billionaire - hey, I've got a programme to become a billionaire and it's the same thing right?
Side note: if you had $500 million and planned to invest it in government bonds, at some point you're going to be a billionaire. If the Saddam government, with access to oil revenues that neatly bypassed sanctions (letting the brunt of them fall on the civilian population), planned to obtain WMD, it's not too much of a stretch to say at some point he would get them. (Enough of a threat to justify war? You could make a good argument there. I'm just saying it would be more constructive to talk about what needs to be done instead of ranting about perceived evils.)
Bring Nader back.
Uh, no. Don't. http://repentantnadervoter.org/
And don't go with Dean either. Help convince Wesley Clark to enter the race: http://www.draftwesleyclark.com/
"So - all the Simpson women turn out okay?"
"That's right, sweetie. The defective 'Simpson Gene' is on the Y chromosome, so only men are affected."
"So I'm not doomed! Oh, Dad, I've never been so glad to be your daughter!"
All Indy needs to do is hire Johnny Cochrane and call for a favor from an old friend (in another genre) ...
..."
"Ladies and gentleman, this is Chewbacca
This analogy doesn't wash. You're comparing events with exclusive one-time attendance (concert/sporting event) with a commodity that has a free alternative (the slower lanes).
... just because someone pays a huge price for the stickers doesn't necessarily mean they can resell them at a profit. Any motorist who can get to eBay can bid just like a speculator can. The only people who might turn to a third-party for HOV stickers are those without access to eBay but who have enough disposable income to compensate for their lack of patience with traffic.
Plus, speculation implies risk
1) Who defines which standards are open? (And will governments agree on what that means, or will a software company have to internationalize their interfaces to support one standard in one country and another standard in another?)
2) Isn't this already happening in a less official way? If you're a non-US government, just mention Linux and you too can get a huge price break from Microsoft (probably even bigger than the 5-10% proposed non-compliance fee).
It would be nice if governments that wrestle such price breaks from Microsoft turned around and used those funds to generate additional open source tools, but governments have a lot of competing needs to deal with, and the freed up funds are more likely to go to any underfunded services (and any government service is going to have defenders that say that their particular niche is underfunded).
I think the assertion is that if innovators are not rewarded with patents, there is less incentive to innovate, which in turn reduces the ability of follow-on innovators to build upon it. (You can't improve something that isn't there.)
But if patents run too long, follow-on innovations are delayed until the expiration of the patent. So how do you reward people who come up with new ideas without making the exclusive period too long or too short?
The core assumption of the assertion is that economic reward is an effective driving force of innovation. That's certainly true in some, but not all, cases.
You mean "emacs".