People assume that it's all outsourcing that's cutting into their business.
There are frequent specific references to companies outsourcing hundreds or thousands of IT jobs to India in the trade press. We don't need your anecdotal insight as to whether it's true or not. The references are someties leaks, sometime press releases, but they are numerous. This of course is in addition to the dot com bust and a serious recession causing widespread job loss.
which enron "peep" are you referring to? Last I heard was kenny boy selling his 3rd and 4th summer houses, but not one day of jail. If the "peep" is Marcus von Bock und Polach, a nobody lawyer/patsy that is not good enough to be considered justice.
Oklahoma charged kenny boy a couple of days ago. He has a week to voluntarily show up in court.
Funny, I think Socialist and Capitalist are both extremist concepts the way they've been used.. maybe I'm evil but I always think that the only to avoid the evil of either is to balance the two concepts against each other. You don't want the state to control everything.. but if they are collecting tax dollars they may as well make sure you have what it takes to live.
This can be stated in a way that the economic theorist posters can understand. It is in the government's interest, and the country's, to collect income taxes from its citizens versus having to pay for unemployment. Since it is in the government's interest, then it should require that all government contract money spent on labor is spent on labor that pays taxes, especially including subcontracting.
While some products, including software packages, may be purchased from foreign sources, a percentage such as 65% of product purchases for government contracts should be required to be purchased from American coimpanies meeting the same requirements of all American labor, including subcontracted work.
This requirement does not fetter the business decisions of private industry but protects the legitimate interests of the American taxpayer. Of course, some will argue that the government shouldn't be collecting taxes and spending on anything but defense, and to the degree that specifics can be pointed out on what to cut, of course spending should be limited to what we agree to fund in Congress, but this requirement includes privatization efforts where the government outsources the work from government employees to private enterprise.
If it's American tax dollars being spent, the tax dollars must be used to pay American labor and buy American products that meet the 65% guideline of products purchased from companies using American labor. This must be acted upon urgently by Congress and put into effect. There is no trade agreement that can override a country's legitimate interest in being able to meet its own needs. Exemptions will be required due to lack of American sources, but that points out our weaknesses that can be addressed with a guaranteed government contract as a business plan to start up manufacturing.
Hell, a good chuck of the electronics used in our armed forces are made in China! Missle guidance. Lasers. Satellite. We are at the mercy of overseas goverments for replacement parts.
All for $$$$.
An attempt was made recently to require 65% of defense purchases to be products made in the US. The US military threw a hissy fit and the requirement was not passed. Too difficult, they said. I think if anyone is capable of getting a clue, that should be one there. Your point is well taken.
Of course, it requires a lot of time to retrain...
Retrain to what? That's the question. Nursing is the only thing that has been mentioned in these hundreds of posts. Maybe also "opening your own business", or your "get a general education". Maybe you don't see the massive layoff notices every day, but I do.
There's a whole lot of people out of work, and the suggestion from the right is that people will just figure out something to do to make a living and support a family. Adapt or die, one said. You can't just keep shutting down whole industries and shipping them overseas and expect people to invent entirely new industries in which to be productive to replace them. Previous examples, such as manufacturing replacing farming, were transitions within the country. Once exported, entirely new industries must be dreamed up while standing in the unemployment line, apparently...
Think of programmers who create lines of code as just one small part in the whole food chain of software developement. With MODERN software development creating lines of code is actually one of the smallest parts in the whole business.
What a load of crap. Not only are all you worthless overhead types the reason business must cut down IT costs, but now you say your overhead is the importanrt part and the real work of programming is just one small part of your bloated bureaucracy. Well that may be true, but not if programmers had any say in it.
Um hey, it says exactly what qualifies: those in the top 1% of income paid 25-36% of all taxes. It's actually more now, and I'm looking for links to show that. Why is that not already specific enough though?
according to this: http://www.taxfoundation.org/prtopincometab le.html
the top 1% in 2000 made more than $313,000 and paid on average 27.4% Federal income taxes. They made 20.8% of the money and paid 37.4% of taxes.
It looks like the middle class ($27,000 to $92,000 - those 40% of taxpayers between the top 10% and 50%) made 41% of income and paid 29% of total Federal taxes. The top 1% made half that money but paid one and half times the taxes of the middle class. I am middle class myself, but those are the facts.
Your complaint will have much more integrity if you go through your closet and find no clothes made in Thailand, China or Indonesia; if you go into your garage and find a ca not made in Mexico; if you look on your entertainment rack and find goods made in the first world, not in the third.
Otherwise, you're just being a self-serving hypocrite who is happy to enjoy cost savings for jobs exported in every other industry except your own.
Have you ever tried to find something made in the USA? I have. One store thought I was from a union because I was asking for made in US goods. They didn't have any. I bought a US car a few years ago. Opened the hood and it was a Mitsubishi. That's ok. Either the trade deficits or the budget deficits or an oil shock will make us no longer capable of affording to import more than we export, then we'll finally drop back to a WWII manufacturing economy and 40's living standards. I just hope we don't have to go through the 30's depression to get there.
The jobs will shift around, efficiency will increase, and the displaced will bitch for a while, and then either adapt or die. It's the way it's always been.
5. When I was getting my CS degree it was hard, and I knew a lot of smart people who dropped out. I just can't believe they can go into these countries and just higher a 100 cheap programmers. I personally think they are lying about their education.
Remember. in the long run free markets are always the best means of allocating resources.
Just keep telling yourself that when your job disappears and you can't find another one. I suppose you'll actually be pleased that you were efficiently displaced. Your wife and children might not be, though.
This article suggests that the threat may be significant in the short term, but in the longer term, when the baby boomers retire that there's not enough high tech workers in India to cover the gap that's going to be created by that event.
I was able to read a couple of pages through the CNN link. This is deviously sick stuff. These companies are saying they must outsource because a skilled labor shortage is inevitable. Sprint is listed as one of the companies saying this. They just outsourced hundreds of programming jobs to India. There is no current shortage of skilled labor, this is rationalization for what these companies are doing. They are even saying the shortage will occur within a year, so they must act now to outsource skilled jobs overseas.
I have long distance, cell phone, and wireless ISP accounts with Sprint. If I lose my job, it is a certainty that I will not be able to find another. Sprint will lose my $150/mo acounts. Enough of those, and they say no biggie, we'll just cut a few programmers off in Bombay. They think they're being smart. But how many companies can send work overseas and expect to still have American customers? Each thinks they're smart, but collectively it has the effect of biting off the hand that feeds them. We were an agricultural economy until WWII, then a manufacturing economy, and now a so called service economy. The text book economists that post here say that we will naturally gravitate to something that will replace paying people in other countries to work for us, but they know not what. They say it must be so bcause they read it. Welcome to the conservative economic experiment that gave us supply side economics and trillions of dollars of debt. We and our children and our grandchildren will be paying for this arrogance that is so apparent in all their posts for decades to come. With what, I don't know. And neither do they.
You are right on. For quite some time now, the US has actually been benefitting due to Asians buying US company's goods. For example, Intel now sells more chips in Asia than in the US (check the latest financial report on intc.com). Frankly, people and businesses in the US have been benefitting from the global economy (more market) till now. If all Asians stopped buying US products tomorrow, the US economy would drop by ~40%, and that is a BAD Thing.
The current shift of jobs is just a shift to even out the fact that many US company's sales have been largely funded outside the US for quite some time now.
Nevertheless, we have been running record trade deficits month after month, year after year. Record trade deficits, record budget deficits, and record bankruptcies may seem to be academic irrelevancies, but the price is coming due, and boy will we pay. That's the only silver lining I see in this. We will have to make things ourselves again because we won't have the money to pay other people to do our work. Of course, if we made things that other people bought, then we can pay people to do work for us. See record trade deficits again.
No the price is reflected upon the customer when you pay someone $60k vs $10k. Sure you could hire a workforce in this country but it simply costs more and so would your product. Everyone wants things as cheap as possible these days so companies find ways to make the product cheaper (paying less employee salary). Thats why you can buy a dell p4 system box for $400 today.
I think the integration of functionality onto a few chips has more to do with the lower cost of computers than labor putting a motherboard and powersupply into a case. When there was a separate board for every function, then you were talking thousands of dollars for a PC, but it was the hardware, not labor. Even back then the boards were coming from SE Asia however, so I don't agree with your point basing the lower cost on lower employee costs. I do recall some companies like IBM that had to give up making PC's domestically, but that was several years ago.
Well...tell us, then. Did you sympathize with the laid-off factory workers?
We need some reality checks here. Real life memories to defend (or destroy) the article.
Along with those laid off factory workers and closed down plants went our jobs as computer programmers, computer operators, and systems people. For years in the 70's and 80's every company I worked for closed down, earning us here in the midwest the name Rust Belt. Every company that went under quit buying computers and software. Destroying our infrastructure that we built up since WWII is not limited to destroying the jobs of production workers. It destroys whole industries, including all the IT workers that were employed. Yes we sympathized with laid off factory workers, as we stood in line with them in unemployment.
I saw a post earlier that said that anyone who wants to work will be able to find work, implying that those unable to find jobs just aren't trying hard enough or have too high expectations. There is a reluctance for employers to hire overqualified people, so the adage that one only has to set their sights lower to gain employment are clearly not words of experience from the poster. In addition, there is the challenge of finding a cardboard box to live in suitable to your newly adjusted expectations position.
Supply certainly is not under any strain as much more is burned off from oil rigs annually than anybody actually uses in thousands of years.
This was the second time this was stated in this thread, although slightly differently.
"anybody" being what one person would use in thousands of years? The first time this was stated earlier in the thread, I passed off as a troll, but it possibly implied more was burned off than waht "everybody" uses in thousands of years. In either case, this appears to be troll material to me. Canadian natural gas fields are drying up, and prices are rising significantly.
Its called nuclear . Nice , clean [most of the time] . Nuclear truly is the "wave of the future"
We in the US already don't have the intelligence and willpower to deal with all the radioactive waste created since the beginning. It is sitting outside every nuclear plant, dangerously close to rivers. Out of sight, out of mind. Not my problem. yada yada yada. When it gets into a river, those downstream are hosed, or more accurately, can't be hosed from that river water again, ever? Pandora's box will be opened and can never be closed. It is seeping through the groundwater even as we dither the decades away. You ask for more, and we can't even deal with what we have, unfortunately.
I am for building wind farms and solar farms in areas that can support it. I am against these structures in areas where the justification is political and not scientific as well as in areas where the land can be put to better use.
I'd like to see large areas in the US desert southwest covered with solar panel grid arrays to become solar power plants. The insecurity and trade balance deficit costs of being dependent on imported oil needs to be factored into the cost justification for this.
As for windmills, I've read in the past about adding them to transmission lines and having them supplement the power transmission. I have never believed in the concept of randome feeds into the power transmission system, either from windmills added to the lines or from excess home generation. However, I can see a collector transmission grid from homes and private generation enterprises with windmills added to the collector transmission lines which would all be aggregated at utility plants and fed into the system in a controlled manner by the utility.
I also would like to see large quantities of the Mississippi at the Gulf diverted to land in Texas to form swamps to grow biomass and then feed the filtered water into water tables in the southwest. The biomass would then also be used for producing energy.
We will always need all the oil and gas we can produce naturally or from coal, but it is becoming increasingly rare and expensive and if we don't act now, we will go through an energy shock from an unexpected disruption of oil imports that will make the oil embargo of 1974 seem like a picnic.
I'm not sure the decay fits any simple math model. Here's a more practical explanation: It takes about 24 hours for a Slashdot story to scroll off the main page. So for the first day and part of the second you're getting hits from every slashdotter. After that you're only get hits from people who compulsively look through old stories and/or browse Slashdot through RSS feeds and other offline tools. And after that, of course it's old news.
I'll bet if you chart the data hour-by-hour, you'll see a sudden dropoff at the very moment the story scrolls off.
It's just a little worse than that even. All it takes is one or two of the articles pushing it down the page to be controversial (M$ or SCO). Then posts for the first article will stop even before it gets pushed off the page.
Why aren't these replies also simultaneously posted to a forum board like phpBB so a dialogue can develop and be followed longer than an article lasts on the front page?
The way this person writes tells me that he doesn't know much more about computers than his 'clients'.
I don't have to point it out to you that I am indeed technically qualified, but I will. How do you think I've run the tech for entire 65-person offices? My good looks? Do you want references, or what?
If it sounds like I'm writing about people who don't know what they're doing, that's because I'm talking about the beginning stages, where I was about ten years ago. I know plenty now.
Anyone who read your two articles can tell how much you know. The poster couldn't have actually read them. They probably dropped out when they got to the question as to whether the reader has a short attention span.
It may be normal... for flight systems to reboot 'on the fly' but I consider that unacceptable for mission critical systems.
It's the mentality that feels that 'good enough' is good enough that brings us this type of warm and comfy software.
Good enough isn't. Stable code can be written. It merely takes talented engineers, design time to conceptualize and architech the product up front before coding it and giving QA what they need to test and committment to FIXING the issues that QA identifies. It's not the cheapest or fastest way to deliver a product, but if I want cheap and fast I'll go to Taco Bell, not a jet fighter.
Given how expensive these planes are, does it make sense to go cheap on the software and risk crashing not only the software but the multi million/billion dollar plane too?
I'm amazed that this is considered insightful. This is one of the most important DoD software projects. Don't you think there are dozens of people saying exactly what you are saying and trying to do it? Have you ever seen the costs on these development projects? If you had, cheap wouldn't be used to describe it.
You don't think an extraordinary effort was made to architect and design this profuct? That the best QA that money can buy wasn't done? The problem is that it's probably too modular and has too many interfaces and was written by too many teams of people. What it handles is clearly some of the most complex signal processing and decision making in any system developed, and there are probably so many safeguards to keep from making an error potentially fatal to innocent people that the software crashes instead of committing to launching weapons. It shouldn't crash, and I think fewer programmers and a more monolithic program like assembler that we wrote in the old days would be more foolproof.
You have it exactly wrong. Hilary showed the Indians that they should off-shore their own jobs to Buffalo! The departure of Buffalo's manufacturing base did bring wages down to near-Third World levels a couple decades ago, but that can be a competitive advantage for the City of No Illusions. Buffalo may yet become the American Bangalore!
Actually she helped sponsor a bill that required a good percentage of the software work to be performed in the States rather than completely outsourced, and tax incentives to invest in upper NY, hence the US center for the Indian outsourcing company created in Buffalo. She did more for workers in upper NY than any corporate sponsored Republican senator did.
It was in the news today. It's in the actual defense appropriations bill. Believe it or not, Bush will veto the $400 billion defense budget bill if there if buy America is raised from 50% to 65% as the Armed Forces committee chairman put into it. I am not making this up. Here's the leadin:
http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/arti cl e ?AID=/20030723/ZNYT01/307230353
Butting Heads With the Pentagon
By LESLIE WAYNE July 23, 2003
There is no better friend of the Pentagon than Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. A conservative and a hawk on defense, Mr. Hunter has long been someone the military could count on to push its dream projects through Congress.
So there is considerable dismay, and some outright consternation, over sweeping "buy America" provisions that Mr. Hunter inserted into the House version of legislation authorizing the coming year's Pentagon budget. Countries that failed to help the United States in the Iraq war, he argues, should not enjoy the spoils of American military contracts or put the Pentagon in a position of depending on them for critical components.
That view has set Mr. Hunter on a collision course with his many friends at the Pentagon and among American military contractors that buy everything from microprocessors to jet engines and airplane wings overseas. Mr. Hunter's proposal would cut back sharply on the foreign content allowed in American military goods as well as provide a laundry list of items from fuses to machine tools to airplane tires that only American companies could supply.
Opposition to Mr. Hunter's proposal is so fierce that the defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, has said he will recommend that President Bush veto the entire $400 billion 2004 Pentagon budget if Mr. Hunter does not back down. According to a White House statement, Mr. Hunter's proposals are "burdensome, counterproductive and have the potential to degrade U.S. military capabilities."
Slashdot Mirror
People assume that it's all outsourcing that's cutting into their business.
There are frequent specific references to companies outsourcing hundreds or thousands of IT jobs to India in the trade press. We don't need your anecdotal insight as to whether it's true or not. The references are someties leaks, sometime press releases, but they are numerous. This of course is in addition to the dot com bust and a serious recession causing widespread job loss.
rd
which enron "peep" are you referring to? Last I heard was kenny boy selling his 3rd and 4th summer houses, but not one day of jail. If the "peep" is Marcus von Bock und Polach, a nobody lawyer/patsy that is not good enough to be considered justice.
Oklahoma charged kenny boy a couple of days ago. He has a week to voluntarily show up in court.
rd
Funny, I think Socialist and Capitalist are both extremist concepts the way they've been used.. maybe I'm evil but I always think that the only to avoid the evil of either is to balance the two concepts against each other. You don't want the state to control everything.. but if they are collecting tax dollars they may as well make sure you have what it takes to live.
This can be stated in a way that the economic theorist posters can understand. It is in the government's interest, and the country's, to collect income taxes from its citizens versus having to pay for unemployment. Since it is in the government's interest, then it should require that all government contract money spent on labor is spent on labor that pays taxes, especially including subcontracting.
While some products, including software packages, may be purchased from foreign sources, a percentage such as 65% of product purchases for government contracts should be required to be purchased from American coimpanies meeting the same requirements of all American labor, including subcontracted work.
This requirement does not fetter the business decisions of private industry but protects the legitimate interests of the American taxpayer. Of course, some will argue that the government shouldn't be collecting taxes and spending on anything but defense, and to the degree that specifics can be pointed out on what to cut, of course spending should be limited to what we agree to fund in Congress, but this requirement includes privatization efforts where the government outsources the work from government employees to private enterprise.
If it's American tax dollars being spent, the tax dollars must be used to pay American labor and buy American products that meet the 65% guideline of products purchased from companies using American labor. This must be acted upon urgently by Congress and put into effect. There is no trade agreement that can override a country's legitimate interest in being able to meet its own needs. Exemptions will be required due to lack of American sources, but that points out our weaknesses that can be addressed with a guaranteed government contract as a business plan to start up manufacturing.
rd
Hell, a good chuck of the electronics used in our armed forces are made in China! Missle guidance. Lasers. Satellite. We are at the mercy of overseas goverments for replacement parts.
All for $$$$.
An attempt was made recently to require 65% of defense purchases to be products made in the US. The US military threw a hissy fit and the requirement was not passed. Too difficult, they said. I think if anyone is capable of getting a clue, that should be one there. Your point is well taken.
rd
Of course, it requires a lot of time to retrain...
Retrain to what? That's the question. Nursing is the only thing that has been mentioned in these hundreds of posts. Maybe also "opening your own business", or your "get a general education". Maybe you don't see the massive layoff notices every day, but I do.
There's a whole lot of people out of work, and the suggestion from the right is that people will just figure out something to do to make a living and support a family. Adapt or die, one said. You can't just keep shutting down whole industries and shipping them overseas and expect people to invent entirely new industries in which to be productive to replace them. Previous examples, such as manufacturing replacing farming, were transitions within the country. Once exported, entirely new industries must be dreamed up while standing in the unemployment line, apparently...
rd
Think of programmers who create lines of code as just one small part in the whole food chain of software developement. With MODERN software development creating lines of code is actually one of the smallest parts in the whole business.
What a load of crap. Not only are all you worthless overhead types the reason business must cut down IT costs, but now you say your overhead is the importanrt part and the real work of programming is just one small part of your bloated bureaucracy. Well that may be true, but not if programmers had any say in it.
rd
Um hey, it says exactly what qualifies: those in the top 1% of income paid 25-36% of all taxes. It's actually more now, and I'm looking for links to show that. Why is that not already specific enough though?
b le.html
according to this:
http://www.taxfoundation.org/prtopincometa
the top 1% in 2000 made more than $313,000 and paid on average 27.4% Federal income taxes. They made 20.8% of the money and paid 37.4% of taxes.
It looks like the middle class ($27,000 to $92,000 - those 40% of taxpayers between the top 10% and 50%) made 41% of income and paid 29% of total Federal taxes. The top 1% made half that money but paid one and half times the taxes of the middle class. I am middle class myself, but those are the facts.
rd
Your complaint will have much more integrity if you go through your closet and find no clothes made in Thailand, China or Indonesia; if you go into your garage and find a ca not made in Mexico; if you look on your entertainment rack and find goods made in the first world, not in the third.
Otherwise, you're just being a self-serving hypocrite who is happy to enjoy cost savings for jobs exported in every other industry except your own.
Have you ever tried to find something made in the USA? I have. One store thought I was from a union because I was asking for made in US goods. They didn't have any. I bought a US car a few years ago. Opened the hood and it was a Mitsubishi. That's ok. Either the trade deficits or the budget deficits or an oil shock will make us no longer capable of affording to import more than we export, then we'll finally drop back to a WWII manufacturing economy and 40's living standards. I just hope we don't have to go through the 30's depression to get there.
rd
The jobs will shift around, efficiency will increase, and the displaced will bitch for a while, and then either adapt or die. It's the way it's always been.
I hope you can adapt to a cardboard box.
rd
5. When I was getting my CS degree it was hard, and I knew a lot of smart people who dropped out. I just can't believe they can go into these countries and just higher a 100 cheap programmers. I personally think they are lying about their education.
:)
This was not a good place to misspell hire.
rd
Remember. in the long run free markets are always the best means of allocating resources.
Just keep telling yourself that when your job disappears and you can't find another one. I suppose you'll actually be pleased that you were efficiently displaced. Your wife and children might not be, though.
rd
There are many states with thriving IT markets that are below the average cost of living for the US.
Could you name some with thriving IT markets?
rd
This article suggests that the threat may be significant in the short term, but in the longer term, when the baby boomers retire that there's not enough high tech workers in India to cover the gap that's going to be created by that event.
I was able to read a couple of pages through the CNN link. This is deviously sick stuff. These companies are saying they must outsource because a skilled labor shortage is inevitable. Sprint is listed as one of the companies saying this. They just outsourced hundreds of programming jobs to India. There is no current shortage of skilled labor, this is rationalization for what these companies are doing. They are even saying the shortage will occur within a year, so they must act now to outsource skilled jobs overseas.
I have long distance, cell phone, and wireless ISP accounts with Sprint. If I lose my job, it is a certainty that I will not be able to find another. Sprint will lose my $150/mo acounts. Enough of those, and they say no biggie, we'll just cut a few programmers off in Bombay. They think they're being smart. But how many companies can send work overseas and expect to still have American customers? Each thinks they're smart, but collectively it has the effect of biting off the hand that feeds them. We were an agricultural economy until WWII, then a manufacturing economy, and now a so called service economy. The text book economists that post here say that we will naturally gravitate to something that will replace paying people in other countries to work for us, but they know not what. They say it must be so bcause they read it. Welcome to the conservative economic experiment that gave us supply side economics and trillions of dollars of debt. We and our children and our grandchildren will be paying for this arrogance that is so apparent in all their posts for decades to come. With what, I don't know. And neither do they.
rd
You are right on. For quite some time now, the US has actually been benefitting due to Asians buying US company's goods. For example, Intel now sells more chips in Asia than in the US (check the latest financial report on intc.com). Frankly, people and businesses in the US have been benefitting from the global economy (more market) till now. If all Asians stopped buying US products tomorrow, the US economy would drop by ~40%, and that is a BAD Thing.
The current shift of jobs is just a shift to even out the fact that many US company's sales have been largely funded outside the US for quite some time now.
Nevertheless, we have been running record trade deficits month after month, year after year. Record trade deficits, record budget deficits, and record bankruptcies may seem to be academic irrelevancies, but the price is coming due, and boy will we pay. That's the only silver lining I see in this. We will have to make things ourselves again because we won't have the money to pay other people to do our work. Of course, if we made things that other people bought, then we can pay people to do work for us. See record trade deficits again.
rd
No the price is reflected upon the customer when you pay someone $60k vs $10k. Sure you could hire a workforce in this country but it simply costs more and so would your product. Everyone wants things as cheap as possible these days so companies find ways to make the product cheaper (paying less employee salary). Thats why you can buy a dell p4 system box for $400 today.
I think the integration of functionality onto a few chips has more to do with the lower cost of computers than labor putting a motherboard and powersupply into a case. When there was a separate board for every function, then you were talking thousands of dollars for a PC, but it was the hardware, not labor. Even back then the boards were coming from SE Asia however, so I don't agree with your point basing the lower cost on lower employee costs. I do recall some companies like IBM that had to give up making PC's domestically, but that was several years ago.
rd
Well...tell us, then. Did you sympathize with the laid-off factory workers?
We need some reality checks here. Real life memories to defend (or destroy) the article.
Along with those laid off factory workers and closed down plants went our jobs as computer programmers, computer operators, and systems people. For years in the 70's and 80's every company I worked for closed down, earning us here in the midwest the name Rust Belt. Every company that went under quit buying computers and software. Destroying our infrastructure that we built up since WWII is not limited to destroying the jobs of production workers. It destroys whole industries, including all the IT workers that were employed. Yes we sympathized with laid off factory workers, as we stood in line with them in unemployment.
I saw a post earlier that said that anyone who wants to work will be able to find work, implying that those unable to find jobs just aren't trying hard enough or have too high expectations. There is a reluctance for employers to hire overqualified people, so the adage that one only has to set their sights lower to gain employment are clearly not words of experience from the poster. In addition, there is the challenge of finding a cardboard box to live in suitable to your newly adjusted expectations position.
rd
Supply certainly is not under any strain as much more is burned off from oil rigs annually than anybody actually uses in thousands of years.
This was the second time this was stated in this thread, although slightly differently.
"anybody" being what one person would use in thousands of years? The first time this was stated earlier in the thread, I passed off as a troll, but it possibly implied more was burned off than waht "everybody" uses in thousands of years. In either case, this appears to be troll material to me. Canadian natural gas fields are drying up, and prices are rising significantly.
rd
Its called nuclear . Nice , clean [most of the time] . Nuclear truly is the "wave of the future"
We in the US already don't have the intelligence and willpower to deal with all the radioactive waste created since the beginning. It is sitting outside every nuclear plant, dangerously close to rivers. Out of sight, out of mind. Not my problem. yada yada yada. When it gets into a river, those downstream are hosed, or more accurately, can't be hosed from that river water again, ever? Pandora's box will be opened and can never be closed. It is seeping through the groundwater even as we dither the decades away. You ask for more, and we can't even deal with what we have, unfortunately.
rd
I am for building wind farms and solar farms in areas that can support it.
I am against these structures in areas where the justification is political and not scientific as well as in areas where the land can be put to better use.
I'd like to see large areas in the US desert southwest covered with solar panel grid arrays to become solar power plants. The insecurity and trade balance deficit costs of being dependent on imported oil needs to be factored into the cost justification for this.
As for windmills, I've read in the past about adding them to transmission lines and having them supplement the power transmission. I have never believed in the concept of randome feeds into the power transmission system, either from windmills added to the lines or from excess home generation. However, I can see a collector transmission grid from homes and private generation enterprises with windmills added to the collector transmission lines which would all be aggregated at utility plants and fed into the system in a controlled manner by the utility.
I also would like to see large quantities of the Mississippi at the Gulf diverted to land in Texas to form swamps to grow biomass and then feed the filtered water into water tables in the southwest. The biomass would then also be used for producing energy.
We will always need all the oil and gas we can produce naturally or from coal, but it is becoming increasingly rare and expensive and if we don't act now, we will go through an energy shock from an unexpected disruption of oil imports that will make the oil embargo of 1974 seem like a picnic.
rd
I'm not sure the decay fits any simple math model. Here's a more practical explanation: It takes about 24 hours for a Slashdot story to scroll off the main page. So for the first day and part of the second you're getting hits from every slashdotter. After that you're only get hits from people who compulsively look through old stories and/or browse Slashdot through RSS feeds and other offline tools. And after that, of course it's old news.
I'll bet if you chart the data hour-by-hour, you'll see a sudden dropoff at the very moment the story scrolls off.
It's just a little worse than that even. All it takes is one or two of the articles pushing it down the page to be controversial (M$ or SCO). Then posts for the first article will stop even before it gets pushed off the page.
Why aren't these replies also simultaneously posted to a forum board like phpBB so a dialogue can develop and be followed longer than an article lasts on the front page?
rd
The way this person writes tells me that he doesn't know much more about computers than his 'clients'.
I don't have to point it out to you that I am indeed technically qualified, but I will. How do you think I've run the tech for entire 65-person offices? My good looks? Do you want references, or what?
If it sounds like I'm writing about people who don't know what they're doing, that's because I'm talking about the beginning stages, where I was about ten years ago. I know plenty now.
Anyone who read your two articles can tell how much you know. The poster couldn't have actually read them. They probably dropped out when they got to the question as to whether the reader has a short attention span.
rd
It may be normal... for flight systems to reboot 'on the fly' but I consider that unacceptable for mission critical systems.
It's the mentality that feels that 'good enough' is good enough that brings us this type of warm and comfy software.
Good enough isn't. Stable code can be written. It merely takes talented engineers, design time to conceptualize and architech the product up front before coding it and giving QA what they need to test and committment to FIXING the issues that QA identifies. It's not the cheapest or fastest way to deliver a product, but if I want cheap and fast I'll go to Taco Bell, not a jet fighter.
Given how expensive these planes are, does it make sense to go cheap on the software and risk crashing not only the software but the multi million/billion dollar plane too?
I'm amazed that this is considered insightful. This is one of the most important DoD software projects. Don't you think there are dozens of people saying exactly what you are saying and trying to do it? Have you ever seen the costs on these development projects? If you had, cheap wouldn't be used to describe it.
You don't think an extraordinary effort was made to architect and design this profuct? That the best QA that money can buy wasn't done? The problem is that it's probably too modular and has too many interfaces and was written by too many teams of people. What it handles is clearly some of the most complex signal processing and decision making in any system developed, and there are probably so many safeguards to keep from making an error potentially fatal to innocent people that the software crashes instead of committing to launching weapons. It shouldn't crash, and I think fewer programmers and a more monolithic program like assembler that we wrote in the old days would be more foolproof.
rd
You have it exactly wrong. Hilary showed the Indians that they should off-shore their own jobs to Buffalo! The departure of Buffalo's manufacturing base did bring wages down to near-Third World levels a couple decades ago, but that can be a competitive advantage for the City of No Illusions. Buffalo may yet become the American Bangalore!
Actually she helped sponsor a bill that required a good percentage of the software work to be performed in the States rather than completely outsourced, and tax incentives to invest in upper NY, hence the US center for the Indian outsourcing company created in Buffalo. She did more for workers in upper NY than any corporate sponsored Republican senator did.
rd
It was in the news today. It's in the actual defense appropriations bill. Believe it or not, Bush will veto the $400 billion defense budget bill if there if buy America is raised from 50% to 65% as the Armed Forces committee chairman put into it. I am not making this up. Here's the leadin:
http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/art
?AID=/20030723/ZNYT01/307230353
Butting Heads With the Pentagon
By LESLIE WAYNE
July 23, 2003
There is no better friend of the Pentagon than Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. A conservative and a hawk on defense, Mr. Hunter has long been someone the military could count on to push its dream projects through Congress.
So there is considerable dismay, and some outright consternation, over sweeping "buy America" provisions that Mr. Hunter inserted into the House version of legislation authorizing the coming year's Pentagon budget. Countries that failed to help the United States in the Iraq war, he argues, should not enjoy the spoils of American military contracts or put the Pentagon in a position of depending on them for critical components.
That view has set Mr. Hunter on a collision course with his many friends at the Pentagon and among American military contractors that buy everything from microprocessors to jet engines and airplane wings overseas. Mr. Hunter's proposal would cut back sharply on the foreign content allowed in American military goods as well as provide a laundry list of items from fuses to machine tools to airplane tires that only American companies could supply.
Opposition to Mr. Hunter's proposal is so fierce that the defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, has said he will recommend that President Bush veto the entire $400 billion 2004 Pentagon budget if Mr. Hunter does not back down. According to a White House statement, Mr. Hunter's proposals are "burdensome, counterproductive and have the potential to degrade U.S. military capabilities."
(snip)
end quote
rd
thanks for the link. How do you think these two statements from the link reconcile?
the top one percent held 13 percent of the wealth; in 1995 it held 38 percent.
AND
Distribution of U.S. wealth by percentages of the population:
top 5 percent holds 20 percent of the wealth
How can the top one percent hold 38% of the wealth and the top five percent hold only 20% of the wealth?
rd