Fair point, actually, in the short term. But from the economic perspective, we really charge on the project - if you can get work done in half as long, you get to charge twice as much per hour.
Of course, as others get access to the same tools, overall productivity will improve, so that instead of making more money, I'm really keeping even. But the price of keeping up is cheap relative to the cost of the software. You don't find many folks doing professional retouching with Photoshop 4, certainly.
Those who think that Adobe software is overpriced clearly are hobbyists, not professionals. If you bill by the hour, this stuff pays for itself in a couple of days.
For example, one single feature of Photoshop CS would make it worth the full purchase price for me, let alone the upgrade price, let alone the other new features:
Native non-square pixel support!
Since video doesn't have square pixels, it's always been something of a pain to author graphics in Photoshop. Getting this to work right will save me 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there. At $300/hour, I only need to use this feature three times for it to pay for the upgrade!
For those who aren't professionals, the cheap Photoshop Elements is a great alternative at fraction of the price.
Well, from a purely technical perspective, 60 fps would be nice, but there are big drawbacks:
2.5x as high film costs
1/2.5 as many minutes of shooting between changing film canisters
2.5x higher light requirements for the same grain, since each exposure would only be 1/120th of a second. High light requirements are quite expensive, because of the additional setup required. The greater light sensitivity of CCD v. film is one of the big reasons behind the misnamed "DV revolution."
Yeah, I don't embed a lot of graphics into my word documents. I'm normally just creating text, and separate graphical files, and the layout person takes it from there.
EndNote is really awesome. Is there any reason people don't get it if they need it? They just don't know it's out there? Really, it was roughly perfect over a decade ago.
I've often heard people complain about Word with long documents, but I've never had any issues with them myself (up to about 120 pages, personally). How long is "long?"
As for footnotes, even back in 1992, Word + EndNote did my thesis in APA style perfectly without breaking a sweat. HUGE time saver compared to what other folks had to go through.
I've never used, or even seen LaTeX? Any good versions for Mac OS X I should check out?
Yeah. I type about ~100 WPM. And I get bad cramps in the hand if I have to write more than about a page at a time - even before I learned to type. The harder I have to press, the worse it is. In high school, my math teacher actually banned me from turning in homework in pencil as it was hard to read since I had to press so lightly. Ballpoint was out for the same reason, so I just did everything with a narrow felt tip, which worked fine. Not being able to erase really upped the challenge!
Later on, I discovered fountain pens, which need basically no pressure at all. My college physics professors were started when I turned in homework in italic calligraphy. Eventually I got them to let me do everything in Excel.
Signing all the thank you cards for wedding gifts was about the most physically unpleasant thing I've had to do in ages, and it took about two weeks.
As dysfunctional as handwriting is for me, my fast typing speed makes IM'ing nearly impossible, since I just can't stand waiting for the other person to type their message back to me. The asynchronous nature of email makes that a lot better.
Okay, I'm at least a semi-pro writer (one published book, contributing editor for DV Magazine). And I think folks are completely missing how to use Word correctly, and its strengths. I'll be talking about Word for Mac v.X here. Even though Office XP is quite capable, I can't stand the way that they put icons in the left of the menus. Plus there's no better to write than with a laptop in the lap, leaning back in the Aeron, feet on the desk keeping the beat with NoFx.
Back around '89 when I first got Word 4.0 on my Mac SE, I did procrastinate by too much formatting. But I got over it! The key is just to define your standard template. Get that template down, and you're writing object-oriented with styles. Understanding how to use styles and tabs is critical to efficient Word use. Instead of doing it spaghetti-code style with formatting applied directly to units of text, build the right design for each style, and religiously only use styles. If you need to change the style later, it's changed in all instances. Much, much easier.
I NEVER mess with formatting when writing articles anymore, since my standard template has my styles all set up the way I want them.
The real strength of Word is that it lets you deal with your content in a variety of modes. I actually write all my first drafts in Outline mode now, so I can see and tweak the overall structure. This means I don't need to write linearly, like a typewriter is required. I can write what I'm inspired to write that moment, skip back to get terms used later defined in the appropriate place, and that kind of thing. And since the outline headings are styles, formatting concerns just disappear into the background. And because, the structure is always visible, it's much easier to remember what you intended to do, and to pick up on structural errors in my original plan for the piece.
When I'm editing, especially someone else's work, I use Normal mode. Thus I'm not distracted by where page breaks are and that kind of thing. Just the text.
Page Layout mode I use rarely. Word isn't designed for any kind of detailed layout. Still, it's nice to see where the page breaks fall before going out to PDF or anything. But I'll just import into InDesign if I need fine control.
So, big picture:
Use Styles to make structure, not formatting, central.
Use the right viewing mode for the stage of your project.
Yeah, it's often much more useful to know what the worst case is rather than the best case (especially if shopping for CD-ROM drives).
Also, HE AAC scales down to lower bitrates better yet. It still sounds great down to 48 Kbps 44.1 stereo, danceable at 32 Kbps, and 44.1 mono is quite listenable at 24 Kbps, even with difficult content like vocal jazz.
Compression limits are like the limit to Moore's law. Everyone always says we'll hit them soon, but we never have.
While individual compression techniques aren't developed THAT often, finding novel ways to tune and enhance them are ongoing. For example, HE AAC is a combination of the "pro" part of MP3 Pro and AAC, but performs a lot better than a linear extrapolation of either would suggest.
One limiting factor is CPU speed. There are lots of techniques that are computationally expensive, and so aren't implemented until Moore's law has made them computationally cheap. This is definitely an issue with video codecs.
It was just a joke, pointing out with irony that the big reason we all updated to wireless phones (you can go anywhere) is dangerous in the hands of small children (they could be anywhere).
1. They weren't the top female hierarchy. There was explicit prejudice against her and her profession. The guild was doing better than the equivalent profession today, but it's not like they were running things.
Ah, but by the time that a technocratic society would exist, what's that 70K would feel like 10K today. Bear in mind that theoretical 10K today, you'd live far better than 90% of humanity 150 years ago in material terms.
Basically, for this plan to work, a substantial number of people are going to have to be willing to live a far poorer lifestyle than average, in order not to have to work. The track record of people shows this isn't a very good assumption to make, especially for the Western cultures that would have to adopt this.
Personally, I can't imagine going this way. I'm a freelancer, and I enjoy what I do, and one of the ways I know I'm doing a good job is making money. In times when I haven't had work to do, all my dreams of writing a novel rapidly disintegrated into playing too much Harpoon and feeling sorry for myself.
If you could opt out of Social Security and Medicare as programs, you'd still wind up paying the same taxes. They're social safety net programs, which keeps poor people from starving in old age or going without medicine. As a society, we're going to pay for those things one way or another. You could certainly argue for more efficient taxation schemes than payroll taxes for them, but we're going to, and should, wind up collectively paying for those kinds of programs anyway.
Let's say society could give someone 10K a year for not working (relative to today's prices). That's it. You can't otherwise have a job.
So, given the choice, would you rather live on 10K a year, or have a job? You, yourself could live on 10K. You're talking a crappy apartment in a crappy place, but you won't have commute costs, you'll have time to cook your own food. Watch the budget, it's possible.
I think most people would still work, both to have a higher standard of living, and to keep busy.
Honestly, I don't see robots as being as big a deal as the transition from an agricultural to an industry society! As the previous poster said, in the last century the jobs that 90% of people had had FOR THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION went away in a couple of generations. Now THAT'S a watershed.
Also, rapid change erodes static classes, it doesn't save them. If what the jobs look like change every generation, you'll have a lot more social mobility between generations. Class is already an extremely fluid thing in America, in a way that they really wouldn't be considered "classes" by a 19th century Brit, and definitely not by an 18th century Javanese.
Ah, yes, I didn't understand that you were making a productivity v. GDP per capital distinction. I don't think that matters much for the USA v. India comparison, but certainly does for USA v. Kuwait.
As far as buying stuff we don't need, yep. We're rich enough that we need to spend money on stuff we don't need. And we're rich because we want to spend money on things we don't need. Which is why we aren't in Zen monasteries in the first place.
Our whole lives and reasons for being left "necessary" a long time ago.
Productivity measures don't count activities directly done in other countries, but does measure the added value added in the US when using those facilities. To take a hometown example, Nike adds more value in the US than its operations in Asia do, so it adds more productivity it the US. So I think productivity as measured is an acceptably good proxy for what we're talking about here.
E.g., If Nike buys some complete shoes from Asia for $10, and sells them for $80 to a wholesaler, they've made $70 in the USA, adding that much productivity. That's spread among longshoreman, shoe designers, marketers, Kobe Bryant, etcetera.
Well, natural resources etcetera are non-people reasons why we have greater productivity per capital, I suppose.
Certainly, the track record of resource-dependent countries, especially oil or diamonds, is rather poor.
I'd argue your point about the economy being "highly artificial" in some kind of meaningful sense. It evolved organically. Just because it doesn't make sense from some higher purpose, well, that's true of all organic things.
As for IT spending, I'm sure much of it is wasted, but I think it certainly helps in a lot of ways. it's just that the gains from it are diffuse. Imagine trying to do your job for a month without email?
There seems to be a knee-jerk reaction that exporting jobs will somehow hurt US productivity in the long run, while in fact it's a reflection of our high productivity. When I'm not a codec nerd, I'm an economics nerd, so let me spread the Ricardian gospel a bit.
Our GDP is hugely higher per capita than India. This is because we are hugely more productive per capita than India overall. Because we are so productive we have a much higher standard of living, and much higher wages. As our economy grows, and our GDP per capita goes up, so do our wages.
Eventually, wages get so high, that it doesn't pay to hire folks in the US to do them. So they get exported. This won't cause a lack of productivity - the only reason we can afford the outsourcing is because of our aggregate productivity in the first place.
Let's imagine the long-term scenario folks here are implying. First, all the high-paying jobs get sent to India, since Indians will work for less. Second, US workers will go broke. Why would it work that way? Obviously, as jobs go to India, wages will go up in the sectors we're looking at. And there is a limited population in India who has the secondary education good enough to go to any kind of engineering school - clearly it's a much smaller pool to draw on than the US has, even though our population is much less. This is because we're very productive, and can afford lots of really school schools, especially at the college level. Over time Indian wages will rise and US wages for those who do thing that could be outsourced to India will fall so that the total cost of each will be roughly equal. The US wages will likely be quite a bit higher still in that case, since having someone local has definite advantages, plus the reduced cultural barrier, etcetera. And the US economy is doing great, since we're able to get our software cheaper, and we've freed up a lot of smart people from having to do something that we can outsource. It's not like all those replaced IT folks go straight into retirement or anything. Lots of them will start new business, get new jobs, and so on. And the folks who keep their jobs are going to be trying like crazy to stay productive in order to justify why they're worth as much as six guys in India. That's great - their productivity is going up, and everyone is happy. These transitions can be painful, but it's not like the US has huge sustained underemployment (although we're in a cyclical slump right now, largely due to an economically incompetent administration).
Now, let's say that India makes so much money on outsourcing (which they won't) that they can really upgrade their schools, and approach the US in productivity. If so, great! We've got a big, rich, friendly democracy in a part of the world where we can use all the help we can get. And as Indian productivity rises, so will their wages, so that's less downward pressure on US wages.
Anyway, the thing to remember is that we're rich because we're productive, which means that those parts of the economy with lower relative productivity compared to the rest of the world are going to get outsourced. This won't make us poor, since the outsourcing is only a reflection of our wealth and productivity in the first place. It's a self-balancing system. So, if the problem in the long term is places like China and India grow productivity faster than we do (which is likely for the next few decades), than the relative gap between their our our wealth will decrease. No problem - I just want to be rich, I don't want India to be poor!
Also, if you look at the history of South Korea, Japan, and other nations that industrialized rapidly on US lines, we're still more productive per capital than they are. They get close, but the US always seems to pull ahead in the end, for a variety of reasons (lots of bright, motivated immigrants, low barriers to start new companies are big ones).
So, folks, don't define what you do so narrowly that the only career you can imagine is something that's outsourced. Programming to a spec? Not a good long term move. Being able to right good, business-driven specs? Good move.
Well, you'd run everything (X11, WINE) that can run in native code in native code. It'd only be the stuff in the.exe itself that would be emulated. For code that mainly makes calls to the WIn API, like your run of the mill VB app, this might wind up being quite a bit faster than VPC, which has a faster emulator, but has to emulate EVERYTHING, even device drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair point, actually, in the short term. But from the economic perspective, we really charge on the project - if you can get work done in half as long, you get to charge twice as much per hour.
Of course, as others get access to the same tools, overall productivity will improve, so that instead of making more money, I'm really keeping even. But the price of keeping up is cheap relative to the cost of the software. You don't find many folks doing professional retouching with Photoshop 4, certainly.
Those who think that Adobe software is overpriced clearly are hobbyists, not professionals. If you bill by the hour, this stuff pays for itself in a couple of days.
For example, one single feature of Photoshop CS would make it worth the full purchase price for me, let alone the upgrade price, let alone the other new features:
Native non-square pixel support!
Since video doesn't have square pixels, it's always been something of a pain to author graphics in Photoshop. Getting this to work right will save me 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there. At $300/hour, I only need to use this feature three times for it to pay for the upgrade!
For those who aren't professionals, the cheap Photoshop Elements is a great alternative at fraction of the price.
Well, from a purely technical perspective, 60 fps would be nice, but there are big drawbacks:
2.5x as high film costs
1/2.5 as many minutes of shooting between changing film canisters
2.5x higher light requirements for the same grain, since each exposure would only be 1/120th of a second. High light requirements are quite expensive, because of the additional setup required. The greater light sensitivity of CCD v. film is one of the big reasons behind the misnamed "DV revolution."
Yeah, I've got FrameMaker as well. It's great for structured layout, but not really well suited for composition in the time I've spent with it.
Yeah, I don't embed a lot of graphics into my word documents. I'm normally just creating text, and separate graphical files, and the layout person takes it from there.
EndNote is really awesome. Is there any reason people don't get it if they need it? They just don't know it's out there? Really, it was roughly perfect over a decade ago.
I like your theory, but in practice I find them very distracting. I feel punished by them, even though I'm sure that wasn't the intent.
I just think Office for Mac is so much cleaner than Office XP - it just fades away, and I just do my work. Much like Mac OS X v. Windows XP, in fact.
Of course, I don't much care for abstract icons anyway. I'm a textual guy.
I've often heard people complain about Word with long documents, but I've never had any issues with them myself (up to about 120 pages, personally). How long is "long?"
As for footnotes, even back in 1992, Word + EndNote did my thesis in APA style perfectly without breaking a sweat. HUGE time saver compared to what other folks had to go through.
I've never used, or even seen LaTeX? Any good versions for Mac OS X I should check out?
Yeah. I type about ~100 WPM. And I get bad cramps in the hand if I have to write more than about a page at a time - even before I learned to type. The harder I have to press, the worse it is. In high school, my math teacher actually banned me from turning in homework in pencil as it was hard to read since I had to press so lightly. Ballpoint was out for the same reason, so I just did everything with a narrow felt tip, which worked fine. Not being able to erase really upped the challenge!
Later on, I discovered fountain pens, which need basically no pressure at all. My college physics professors were started when I turned in homework in italic calligraphy. Eventually I got them to let me do everything in Excel.
Signing all the thank you cards for wedding gifts was about the most physically unpleasant thing I've had to do in ages, and it took about two weeks.
As dysfunctional as handwriting is for me, my fast typing speed makes IM'ing nearly impossible, since I just can't stand waiting for the other person to type their message back to me. The asynchronous nature of email makes that a lot better.
Okay, I'm at least a semi-pro writer (one published book, contributing editor for DV Magazine). And I think folks are completely missing how to use Word correctly, and its strengths. I'll be talking about Word for Mac v.X here. Even though Office XP is quite capable, I can't stand the way that they put icons in the left of the menus. Plus there's no better to write than with a laptop in the lap, leaning back in the Aeron, feet on the desk keeping the beat with NoFx.
Back around '89 when I first got Word 4.0 on my Mac SE, I did procrastinate by too much formatting. But I got over it! The key is just to define your standard template. Get that template down, and you're writing object-oriented with styles. Understanding how to use styles and tabs is critical to efficient Word use. Instead of doing it spaghetti-code style with formatting applied directly to units of text, build the right design for each style, and religiously only use styles. If you need to change the style later, it's changed in all instances. Much, much easier.
I NEVER mess with formatting when writing articles anymore, since my standard template has my styles all set up the way I want them.
The real strength of Word is that it lets you deal with your content in a variety of modes. I actually write all my first drafts in Outline mode now, so I can see and tweak the overall structure. This means I don't need to write linearly, like a typewriter is required. I can write what I'm inspired to write that moment, skip back to get terms used later defined in the appropriate place, and that kind of thing. And since the outline headings are styles, formatting concerns just disappear into the background. And because, the structure is always visible, it's much easier to remember what you intended to do, and to pick up on structural errors in my original plan for the piece.
When I'm editing, especially someone else's work, I use Normal mode. Thus I'm not distracted by where page breaks are and that kind of thing. Just the text.
Page Layout mode I use rarely. Word isn't designed for any kind of detailed layout. Still, it's nice to see where the page breaks fall before going out to PDF or anything. But I'll just import into InDesign if I need fine control.
So, big picture:
Use Styles to make structure, not formatting, central.
Use the right viewing mode for the stage of your project.
Actually, Best is for higher bit depths than 16-bit. Still, picking Best just made the encoder slower - it shouldn't have hurt quality.
Yeah, it's often much more useful to know what the worst case is rather than the best case (especially if shopping for CD-ROM drives).
Also, HE AAC scales down to lower bitrates better yet. It still sounds great down to 48 Kbps 44.1 stereo, danceable at 32 Kbps, and 44.1 mono is quite listenable at 24 Kbps, even with difficult content like vocal jazz.
Compression limits are like the limit to Moore's law. Everyone always says we'll hit them soon, but we never have.
While individual compression techniques aren't developed THAT often, finding novel ways to tune and enhance them are ongoing. For example, HE AAC is a combination of the "pro" part of MP3 Pro and AAC, but performs a lot better than a linear extrapolation of either would suggest.
One limiting factor is CPU speed. There are lots of techniques that are computationally expensive, and so aren't implemented until Moore's law has made them computationally cheap. This is definitely an issue with video codecs.
I live in Portland, Oregon, USA
It was just a joke, pointing out with irony that the big reason we all updated to wireless phones (you can go anywhere) is dangerous in the hands of small children (they could be anywhere).
I'm sure that I could go buy a corded phone.
Forget the batteries, I just don't want to find out where my 18-month old hid the mouse!
I just wish I still had some non-wireless phones!
1. They weren't the top female hierarchy. There was explicit prejudice against her and her profession. The guild was doing better than the equivalent profession today, but it's not like they were running things.
2. They were in disguise.
3. You're posting on Slashdot.
Ah, but by the time that a technocratic society would exist, what's that 70K would feel like 10K today. Bear in mind that theoretical 10K today, you'd live far better than 90% of humanity 150 years ago in material terms.
Basically, for this plan to work, a substantial number of people are going to have to be willing to live a far poorer lifestyle than average, in order not to have to work. The track record of people shows this isn't a very good assumption to make, especially for the Western cultures that would have to adopt this.
Personally, I can't imagine going this way. I'm a freelancer, and I enjoy what I do, and one of the ways I know I'm doing a good job is making money. In times when I haven't had work to do, all my dreams of writing a novel rapidly disintegrated into playing too much Harpoon and feeling sorry for myself.
If you could opt out of Social Security and Medicare as programs, you'd still wind up paying the same taxes. They're social safety net programs, which keeps poor people from starving in old age or going without medicine. As a society, we're going to pay for those things one way or another. You could certainly argue for more efficient taxation schemes than payroll taxes for them, but we're going to, and should, wind up collectively paying for those kinds of programs anyway.
Assume this kind of radical distribution.
Let's say society could give someone 10K a year for not working (relative to today's prices). That's it. You can't otherwise have a job.
So, given the choice, would you rather live on 10K a year, or have a job? You, yourself could live on 10K. You're talking a crappy apartment in a crappy place, but you won't have commute costs, you'll have time to cook your own food. Watch the budget, it's possible.
I think most people would still work, both to have a higher standard of living, and to keep busy.
Honestly, I don't see robots as being as big a deal as the transition from an agricultural to an industry society! As the previous poster said, in the last century the jobs that 90% of people had had FOR THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION went away in a couple of generations. Now THAT'S a watershed.
Also, rapid change erodes static classes, it doesn't save them. If what the jobs look like change every generation, you'll have a lot more social mobility between generations. Class is already an extremely fluid thing in America, in a way that they really wouldn't be considered "classes" by a 19th century Brit, and definitely not by an 18th century Javanese.
Ah, yes, I didn't understand that you were making a productivity v. GDP per capital distinction. I don't think that matters much for the USA v. India comparison, but certainly does for USA v. Kuwait.
As far as buying stuff we don't need, yep. We're rich enough that we need to spend money on stuff we don't need. And we're rich because we want to spend money on things we don't need. Which is why we aren't in Zen monasteries in the first place.
Our whole lives and reasons for being left "necessary" a long time ago.
Productivity measures don't count activities directly done in other countries, but does measure the added value added in the US when using those facilities. To take a hometown example, Nike adds more value in the US than its operations in Asia do, so it adds more productivity it the US. So I think productivity as measured is an acceptably good proxy for what we're talking about here.
E.g., If Nike buys some complete shoes from Asia for $10, and sells them for $80 to a wholesaler, they've made $70 in the USA, adding that much productivity. That's spread among longshoreman, shoe designers, marketers, Kobe Bryant, etcetera.
Well, natural resources etcetera are non-people reasons why we have greater productivity per capital, I suppose.
Certainly, the track record of resource-dependent countries, especially oil or diamonds, is rather poor.
I'd argue your point about the economy being "highly artificial" in some kind of meaningful sense. It evolved organically. Just because it doesn't make sense from some higher purpose, well, that's true of all organic things.
As for IT spending, I'm sure much of it is wasted, but I think it certainly helps in a lot of ways. it's just that the gains from it are diffuse. Imagine trying to do your job for a month without email?
I've always felt that success this century will go to those who can be a nerd about as many things simultaneously as possible :).
There seems to be a knee-jerk reaction that exporting jobs will somehow hurt US productivity in the long run, while in fact it's a reflection of our high productivity. When I'm not a codec nerd, I'm an economics nerd, so let me spread the Ricardian gospel a bit.
Our GDP is hugely higher per capita than India. This is because we are hugely more productive per capita than India overall. Because we are so productive we have a much higher standard of living, and much higher wages. As our economy grows, and our GDP per capita goes up, so do our wages.
Eventually, wages get so high, that it doesn't pay to hire folks in the US to do them. So they get exported. This won't cause a lack of productivity - the only reason we can afford the outsourcing is because of our aggregate productivity in the first place.
Let's imagine the long-term scenario folks here are implying. First, all the high-paying jobs get sent to India, since Indians will work for less. Second, US workers will go broke. Why would it work that way? Obviously, as jobs go to India, wages will go up in the sectors we're looking at. And there is a limited population in India who has the secondary education good enough to go to any kind of engineering school - clearly it's a much smaller pool to draw on than the US has, even though our population is much less. This is because we're very productive, and can afford lots of really school schools, especially at the college level. Over time Indian wages will rise and US wages for those who do thing that could be outsourced to India will fall so that the total cost of each will be roughly equal. The US wages will likely be quite a bit higher still in that case, since having someone local has definite advantages, plus the reduced cultural barrier, etcetera. And the US economy is doing great, since we're able to get our software cheaper, and we've freed up a lot of smart people from having to do something that we can outsource. It's not like all those replaced IT folks go straight into retirement or anything. Lots of them will start new business, get new jobs, and so on. And the folks who keep their jobs are going to be trying like crazy to stay productive in order to justify why they're worth as much as six guys in India. That's great - their productivity is going up, and everyone is happy. These transitions can be painful, but it's not like the US has huge sustained underemployment (although we're in a cyclical slump right now, largely due to an economically incompetent administration).
Now, let's say that India makes so much money on outsourcing (which they won't) that they can really upgrade their schools, and approach the US in productivity. If so, great! We've got a big, rich, friendly democracy in a part of the world where we can use all the help we can get. And as Indian productivity rises, so will their wages, so that's less downward pressure on US wages.
Anyway, the thing to remember is that we're rich because we're productive, which means that those parts of the economy with lower relative productivity compared to the rest of the world are going to get outsourced. This won't make us poor, since the outsourcing is only a reflection of our wealth and productivity in the first place. It's a self-balancing system. So, if the problem in the long term is places like China and India grow productivity faster than we do (which is likely for the next few decades), than the relative gap between their our our wealth will decrease. No problem - I just want to be rich, I don't want India to be poor!
Also, if you look at the history of South Korea, Japan, and other nations that industrialized rapidly on US lines, we're still more productive per capital than they are. They get close, but the US always seems to pull ahead in the end, for a variety of reasons (lots of bright, motivated immigrants, low barriers to start new companies are big ones).
So, folks, don't define what you do so narrowly that the only career you can imagine is something that's outsourced. Programming to a spec? Not a good long term move. Being able to right good, business-driven specs? Good move.
Well, you'd run everything (X11, WINE) that can run in native code in native code. It'd only be the stuff in the .exe itself that would be emulated. For code that mainly makes calls to the WIn API, like your run of the mill VB app, this might wind up being quite a bit faster than VPC, which has a faster emulator, but has to emulate EVERYTHING, even device drivers.