It's much tougher to collect user requirements and understand business processes from a foreign country. You are right in that it isn't impossible, and will become easier over time.
True, but they also have free health care, education, retirement, child care, and parental leave.
"Free" means a tax rate of about 50% of GDP, including a VAT of 25% on all goods and services, as well as income taxes of 29%-34% for most people, and 40% social insurance tax on income. Sweden even taxes pensions and sickness benefits as income.
So imagine putting aside 25% of everything you spend, and 60-70% of everything you earn...
BTW, 46 million low-income Americans receive health benefits from Medicare, so we are on the way to socialized health care in the US already. Plus I think you will see that the U.S. was a more violent country than anywhere in Scandanavia way before their move to greater socialism.
But hey, don't let me stop you from moving to Sweden or Denmark if you prefer! Norway would be better, they've got the oil money.
Sweden has a lot of immigration. 12% of residents are immigrants
Yeah, but most are of the "Polish plumber" new EU country variety and have some skills. That said, I'm proud of Sweden for keeping the doors open to immigration, unlike Denmark.
Your point is correct, you have to point your Optical SETI instruments (both the RX and the TX) to get the advantages of Optical SETI.
But within reasonable spheres of communication (10-1,000 light years), there is a whole lot more empty space than planetary systems, so all those radio waves going into empty space are wasted anyway.
So get a bunch of lasers and start pointing them at a bunch of stars, and get your telescopes (and they don't need to be very big) and start looking for the lasers pointing back at you that outshine their star within the small bandwidth of their laser line.
On the other hand, I was involved in an offshoring project that worked fine and reduced cost and freed up engineers from having to do CAD all day to actually doing engineering, enhancing their value added.
a company I worked for a few years ago, produced widgets for elelctronic factories in china, because the increase in minumum wage we were forced to move the company out side the US.
So you are saying that increasing the minimum wage cost US jobs? Gee, who could have predicted that?!
In a country that can't stop millions of low-wage immigrants from coming in (not like any other country can, except North Korea), raising the minimum wage means more unemployment immigrants or immigrants working in the illegal informal sector. Oh wait, they are already working in the illegal informal sector if they can't steal someone's Social Security number.
Perhaps more labor regulation is what we need, yeah, that'll do it for sure this time, like the war on drugs!
In December 2005, about 6.5 million disabled workers received Social Security disability benefits. The U.S. labor force is about 150 million, so assuming all 6.5 million disabled workers would/could be part of the labor force, the rate of disabled workers is about 4%.
In 2006 Q4, the long-term (greater than 15 weeks) unemployment rate in the US is only 1.4%. 69% of unemployed Americans have been unemployed fewer than 15 weeks.
Foriegn workers may decrease the income of US workers only if their skills are interachangable and equivalent.
It is actually very likely that many US workers have skills that extend beyond those of the foreign workers (such as system analysis skills), and that if the US workers can trade the lower-value part of their jobs to foreign workers and then concentrate on their higher-valued skills that the US workers can make more.
How productive would a US IT worker be if he or she had to build the computer they work on by soldering each chip onto a motherboard? Sure, they probably could do it, but it would be a better use of their time programming. Luckilly, we've already offshored building motherboards.
This is called "division of labor", and it benefits both parties involved.
The Ethiopian government owns all the land in Ethiopia. Private land ownership is illegal. Also from http://tinyurl.com/yzs4hk :
Nearly 200 state-owned enterprises have yet to be privatized, corruption is widespread, bureaucracy is burdensome, and much economic activity occurs in the informal sector. In addition, taxation is unevenly enforced, the judiciary is overwhelmed, and key sectors of the economy remain closed to foreign investment...The judicial system does not offer a high level of property protection....Ethiopia's cumbersome bureaucracy deters investment...corruption imposes a serious burden on economic activity.
Oxfam argues that royalty fees from the trademark, estimated to be over $80 million per year, would go to the coffee bean growers -- the poor farmers of Ethiopia.
This is far from the truth. Most of the money would siphoned off and goes to foreign bank accounts belonging to close family members of Meles Zenawi and Sheik Al Amoudi who control much of the country's agricultural, mining, transportation and other industries. The rest would go to the Federal Police and the Agazi death squads, the regime's instruments of repression.
Oxfam cannot claim to be ignorant of the fact that the Ethiopian dictatorship of Meles Zenawi is one of the most corrupt and murderous governments in the world.
what, if anything, will the US do if it successfully outsources all of its IT functions?
The US hasn't even been able to outsource all of its manufacturing jobs.
What will happen (what is happening) is that there will continue to be a need for some level of IT functions in the US, especially of the "rapid response" variety, but perhaps at a slightly lower employment level or pay level (look at automobile manufacturing in the US, where even foreign companies are building new plants here, but they don't have union contracts that pay people not to work).
There will be an increase in US "value added" IT work such as business case development, systems analysis, requirements gathering, project management, and test development. Actual coding and testing is the easiest thing to outsource.
Mind you, there are also other fields opening up, such as biotech and quantum computing. Plus when all the cheap labor of the world is fully employed, robotics.
Yes, it is a race to the bottom...of poverty. Eventually, there won't be any more cheap labor left, and global poverty will be abolished. Sounds just horrible!:)
Between 1990 and 2002 more than 174 million people escaped poverty in China, about 1.2 million per month.
Re:We have a bigger problem...
on
Saving U.S. Science
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Highly educated Indians no longer want to move to the USA because they like India just fine
US Immigrants from India... 1990: 448,6088 2000: 1,018,393
If you have little or no manufacturing, you won't need much engineering to support the manufacturing. The less engineering we have, the less need for science to drive that engineering.
First of all, US manufacturing output has been increasing up until 1999, and has only stagnated since then. It doesn't appear to be decreasing. However US total goods output is at an all-time high:
US manufacturing has been increasing its productivity per worker through the use of capital (both technological and human skills). The technological capital came from science & engineering, the skills have come from education. We've seen the same thing happen with farming, the US now produces far more food with just a few percent of the population, compared to 1900 when half the population farmed and we produced less food.
Imagine if we develop robots that can do everything a person can in manufacturing today. Manufacturing employment would drop to zero, but total manufacturing output would go, meanwhile lots of science and technology would still be needed to develop the products being made.
Replace robots with Chinese workers, and the results are the same.
The US is moving into an intellectual property oriented economy. We think up things, and get people in other countries (or robots) to build them.
Would you prefer to still be part of the "Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia" under "President for Life" Tito, or was it better that the country was split up despite the "Yugoslav Wars" from 1991 and 2001 with 100,000 killed and 1.8 million displaced?
The Iraqi military and especially the Iraqi police are full of supporters of Shi'ite militias and death squads, who are ethnically cleansing Shi'ite areas of Sunnis. Hard to blame them with the continuing Sunni Iraqi "insurgent" and Al Quaeda terrorist attacks. Not pretty though because of the large number of innocent Sunnis killed in the attempt to root out all "non-innocent" Sunnis.
I believe that the key to multi-ethnic cooperation in the modern era is recognizing that modern economies are not zero-sum games. If a Sunni does well economically (say is a well-paid professional), he creates wealth that will be passed on to others (a Shi'ite or Kurd, for example). In this fashion, people of different ethnicities and in-groups would be willing to cooperate to form a stable country to allow for economic growth.
The biggest problem in poor states that have large mineral wealth (such as oil) is determining how to slice up the profits among in-groups.
In truth, most poor states would be better off if the wealth was simply extracted by developed countries, and the economies of the poor states allowed to evolve in a sustainable way through manufacturing and offshoring services.
The alternative is to have mineral wealths owned by the state and cash transferred equally to every citizen for their own spending (like Alaska, or Venezuela's Rosales' "Mi Negra" card).
Otherwise, if the mineral wealth is owned by the state and spent by the state, ethnic and in-group control of the government becomes important in how that wealth is unequally distributed in the country. Which is the status of Iraq currently, and the cause of most of the strife.
I think it may be related to the rise in natural gas prices, and the natural urge for gas producers to go plug up leaks at those prices.
Natural gas production is the leading source of Russian methane emissions, for instance. And in 1990, Russia leaked as much as 26 million tons of methane. It was probably worth their while to plug some of these leaks at current prices.
Actually none of those 15% of NYC households were starving, they were all fed through charities and food stamps. There is no evidence that large amounts of people in NYC are facing extreme malnutrition outside of the fashion model industry.
On the other hand, each week 3,500 Zimbabweans actually die from malnutrition. Life expectancy in Zimbabwe at 34 for women and 37 for men, thanks mainly to a government that does not protect private property, but takes it whenever it wants.
Boron has already been made superconducting five years ago. It becomes superconducting when squeezed with a pressure of 160 gigapascals at a transition temperature of 6K.
Slashdot Mirror
It's much tougher to collect user requirements and understand business processes from a foreign country. You are right in that it isn't impossible, and will become easier over time.
True, but they also have free health care, education, retirement, child care, and parental leave.
0 c9781.pdf
"Free" means a tax rate of about 50% of GDP, including a VAT of 25% on all goods and services, as well as income taxes of 29%-34% for most people, and 40% social insurance tax on income. Sweden even taxes pensions and sickness benefits as income.
So imagine putting aside 25% of everything you spend, and 60-70% of everything you earn...
http://www.sweden.gov.se/content/1/c6/03/02/15/74
BTW, 46 million low-income Americans receive health benefits from Medicare, so we are on the way to socialized health care in the US already. Plus I think you will see that the U.S. was a more violent country than anywhere in Scandanavia way before their move to greater socialism.
But hey, don't let me stop you from moving to Sweden or Denmark if you prefer! Norway would be better, they've got the oil money.
Here is an article on Danish taxes:
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=011107A
Sweden has a lot of immigration. 12% of residents are immigrants
Yeah, but most are of the "Polish plumber" new EU country variety and have some skills. That said, I'm proud of Sweden for keeping the doors open to immigration, unlike Denmark.
The poorest 10% in Sweden have incomes the same as the poorest 10% in the US (even after Swedish income transfers):
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=082806E
That's without Sweden having to deal with 20 million low-skill immigrants operating in the informal labor market.
So what about Linux and the time change?
Your point is correct, you have to point your Optical SETI instruments (both the RX and the TX) to get the advantages of Optical SETI.
But within reasonable spheres of communication (10-1,000 light years), there is a whole lot more empty space than planetary systems, so all those radio waves going into empty space are wasted anyway.
So get a bunch of lasers and start pointing them at a bunch of stars, and get your telescopes (and they don't need to be very big) and start looking for the lasers pointing back at you that outshine their star within the small bandwidth of their laser line.
Americans are uneducated, political, and no matter how long they work, they can never become wealthy or own houses.
i c/histt14.html
n t_in_the_United_States
US home ownership rates are about at record highs (69%). Compare with 63% in 1965.
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/hvs/histor
Moreover, home ownership rates of those 65 and over is 80%.
http://www.danter.com/STATISTICS/homeown.htm
27.2% of Americans have graduated by college, an all-time high:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainme
On the other hand, I was involved in an offshoring project that worked fine and reduced cost and freed up engineers from having to do CAD all day to actually doing engineering, enhancing their value added.
a company I worked for a few years ago, produced widgets for elelctronic factories in china, because the increase in minumum wage we were forced to move the company out side the US.
So you are saying that increasing the minimum wage cost US jobs? Gee, who could have predicted that?!
In a country that can't stop millions of low-wage immigrants from coming in (not like any other country can, except North Korea), raising the minimum wage means more unemployment immigrants or immigrants working in the illegal informal sector. Oh wait, they are already working in the illegal informal sector if they can't steal someone's Social Security number.
Perhaps more labor regulation is what we need, yeah, that'll do it for sure this time, like the war on drugs!
In December 2005, about 6.5 million disabled workers received Social Security disability benefits. The U.S. labor force is about 150 million, so assuming all 6.5 million disabled workers would/could be part of the labor force, the rate of disabled workers is about 4%.
0 05/sect01.html#chart1
http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/statcomps/di_asr/2
In 2006 Q4, the long-term (greater than 15 weeks) unemployment rate in the US is only 1.4%. 69% of unemployed Americans have been unemployed fewer than 15 weeks.
http://www.bls.gov/web/cpseed10.pdf
So do you have a job now? Do you make more or less now?
Foriegn workers may decrease the income of US workers only if their skills are interachangable and equivalent.
It is actually very likely that many US workers have skills that extend beyond those of the foreign workers (such as system analysis skills), and that if the US workers can trade the lower-value part of their jobs to foreign workers and then concentrate on their higher-valued skills that the US workers can make more.
How productive would a US IT worker be if he or she had to build the computer they work on by soldering each chip onto a motherboard? Sure, they probably could do it, but it would be a better use of their time programming. Luckilly, we've already offshored building motherboards.
This is called "division of labor", and it benefits both parties involved.
Optical SETI with intense nanosecond light pulses is the way to go, forget radio!
1. Visible light-emitting and detecting devices are smaller and lighter than microwave or radio-emitting devices.
2. Visible light-emitting devices produce higher bandwidths and can consequently send information much faster.
3. Interference from natural sources of microwaves is more common than from visible sources.
4. Naturally occurring nanosecond pulses of light are mostly likely nonexistent.
5. Existing lasers can produce nanosecond pulses that can outshine a star by 30 times.
http://observatory.princeton.edu/oseti/oseti.html
Stop Hatin' on Loonette! Chick clowns on couches rock!
Also from http://tinyurl.com/yzs4hk :
And...
http://www.ethrev.com/2006/nov/11212006_oxfam_vs_
what, if anything, will the US do if it successfully outsources all of its IT functions?
The US hasn't even been able to outsource all of its manufacturing jobs.
What will happen (what is happening) is that there will continue to be a need for some level of IT functions in the US, especially of the "rapid response" variety, but perhaps at a slightly lower employment level or pay level (look at automobile manufacturing in the US, where even foreign companies are building new plants here, but they don't have union contracts that pay people not to work).
There will be an increase in US "value added" IT work such as business case development, systems analysis, requirements gathering, project management, and test development. Actual coding and testing is the easiest thing to outsource.
Mind you, there are also other fields opening up, such as biotech and quantum computing. Plus when all the cheap labor of the world is fully employed, robotics.
Yes, it is a race to the bottom...of poverty. Eventually, there won't be any more cheap labor left, and global poverty will be abolished. Sounds just horrible! :)
Between 1990 and 2002 more than 174 million people escaped poverty in China, about 1.2 million per month.
Highly educated Indians no longer want to move to the USA because they like India just fine
b le3
US Immigrants from India...
1990: 448,6088
2000: 1,018,393
http://www.cis.org/articles/2003/back1203.html#ta
If you have little or no manufacturing, you won't need much engineering to support the manufacturing. The less engineering we have, the less need for science to drive that engineering.
2 006/03/the_relationshi_1.html
t ions/1102_UsMfg0104.pdf
First of all, US manufacturing output has been increasing up until 1999, and has only stagnated since then. It doesn't appear to be decreasing. However US total goods output is at an all-time high:
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/
US manufacturing jobs have been between about 15 and 20 million since the 1950s:
http://www.workforce.az.gov/admin/uploadedPublica
US manufacturing has been increasing its productivity per worker through the use of capital (both technological and human skills). The technological capital came from science & engineering, the skills have come from education. We've seen the same thing happen with farming, the US now produces far more food with just a few percent of the population, compared to 1900 when half the population farmed and we produced less food.
Imagine if we develop robots that can do everything a person can in manufacturing today. Manufacturing employment would drop to zero, but total manufacturing output would go, meanwhile lots of science and technology would still be needed to develop the products being made.
Replace robots with Chinese workers, and the results are the same.
The US is moving into an intellectual property oriented economy. We think up things, and get people in other countries (or robots) to build them.
I've heard Iraqis say that they didn't mind Saddam until the war with Iran, and it was all downhill from there...
Are there any former Yugoslavs on Slashdot?
Would you prefer to still be part of the "Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia" under "President for Life" Tito, or was it better that the country was split up despite the "Yugoslav Wars" from 1991 and 2001 with 100,000 killed and 1.8 million displaced?
Serious question...
The Iraqi military and especially the Iraqi police are full of supporters of Shi'ite militias and death squads, who are ethnically cleansing Shi'ite areas of Sunnis. Hard to blame them with the continuing Sunni Iraqi "insurgent" and Al Quaeda terrorist attacks. Not pretty though because of the large number of innocent Sunnis killed in the attempt to root out all "non-innocent" Sunnis.
I believe that the key to multi-ethnic cooperation in the modern era is recognizing that modern economies are not zero-sum games. If a Sunni does well economically (say is a well-paid professional), he creates wealth that will be passed on to others (a Shi'ite or Kurd, for example). In this fashion, people of different ethnicities and in-groups would be willing to cooperate to form a stable country to allow for economic growth.
The biggest problem in poor states that have large mineral wealth (such as oil) is determining how to slice up the profits among in-groups.
In truth, most poor states would be better off if the wealth was simply extracted by developed countries, and the economies of the poor states allowed to evolve in a sustainable way through manufacturing and offshoring services.
The alternative is to have mineral wealths owned by the state and cash transferred equally to every citizen for their own spending (like Alaska, or Venezuela's Rosales' "Mi Negra" card).
Otherwise, if the mineral wealth is owned by the state and spent by the state, ethnic and in-group control of the government becomes important in how that wealth is unequally distributed in the country. Which is the status of Iraq currently, and the cause of most of the strife.
I think it may be related to the rise in natural gas prices, and the natural urge for gas producers to go plug up leaks at those prices.
Natural gas production is the leading source of Russian methane emissions, for instance. And in 1990, Russia leaked as much as 26 million tons of methane. It was probably worth their while to plug some of these leaks at current prices.
Actually none of those 15% of NYC households were starving, they were all fed through charities and food stamps. There is no evidence that large amounts of people in NYC are facing extreme malnutrition outside of the fashion model industry.
On the other hand, each week 3,500 Zimbabweans actually die from malnutrition. Life expectancy in Zimbabwe at 34 for women and 37 for men, thanks mainly to a government that does not protect private property, but takes it whenever it wants.
Boron has already been made superconducting five years ago. It becomes superconducting when squeezed with a pressure of 160 gigapascals at a transition temperature of 6K.