Of course your assumption is there is a fixed number of jobs and automation and outsourcing will only reduce the number of jobs available.
History has shown otherwise
If the income for a large percentage of the population were to drop, as you predict, this would lead to deflation, which the government desparately wants to avoid. So the government/central bank would take steps to avoid deflation, such as letting the value of the currency slide (which the US is now doing to help stimulate the economy, but won't admit it). This makes foreign workers more expensive comparatively.
The paradox though is offshoring labor to cheaper countries tends to raise your standard of living instead of lowering it, because you end up paying less for those goods and services, and new jobs spring up in new industries to replace the ones lost.
So there's already 3 similar bills on this? that may not be a good thing.
When "Term Limits" was all the rage, there were many term-limits proposals, and most members of Congress came out in support of term-limits of some kinds. The problem was there was no majority that would agree on any specific term-limits proposal, so the issue died without action, yet most congresspeople could tell the voters they supported it.
I'm worried the same thing could happen here. Having many bills gives the chance for these people to show their constituents that they support their rights, without having to worry about actually voting against an industry that's heavily lining their pockets.
I hope that's not what's happening, but we'll have to wait and see.
My town makes its property assessment data available online. This includes not only where the property is located, but also has photos of the properties AND the owners name.
Anybody can access the site.
When I closed on the house, I never signed a consent form or anything. Can I sue for lots of money too?
Sounds like Streisand really shot herself in the foot with this lawsuit. The site with photo is a limited-interest site. Now because of the lawsuit, many more people can see where her house it.
It looks like Clear Channel is upset because the FCC didn't give radio owners what Clear Channel wanted. That's the impression that I get from this blurb from The Motley Fool (www.fool.com):
The FCC did, however, retain ownership limits for radio broadcasters. That drew a sharp response from Clear Channel Communications (NYSE: CCU), which owns over 1,000 stations nationwide -- and which critics accuse of using a bland, cookie-cutter approach that provides less local news and programming. "This FCC action will extinguish the substantial consumer benefits brought on by radio deregulation in 1996," it said in a statement.
Having broadcasters who refuse to accept *payola* means they'll lose control of what gets heard.
Once that happens, the corrupt business model that is the music industry would collapse like the house of cards that it is, since artists might actually *gasp* be able to bypass the industry altogether and still be heard.
Too much diversity means it will be much harder to create the lame mega-acts that the current, top-heavy music industry depends on to thrive.
In my experience, the Yahoo stock boards are filled with pumpers and people with no apparent job or social life, who post dozens of off-topic messages every day at all hours of the day. You can usually find a couple of serious investors on each board, but the signal to noise ratio is very poor.
Microsoft's retarded son SCO, married the offspring of Novell, Caldera, and spawned SCO group. (Since nothing but pure evil could be born of the offspring of the bitter rivals)
SCO group, in a jealous fit of rage killed his mother Caldera, beat up daddy SCO, and took all his assets. SCO group then threatened his half sister Linux (Caldera's other child from a previous Union)
SCO group threatened to find and kill Linux, and everyone she ever slept with, because she was holding the family secrets.
Microsoft had never approved of the marriage between SCO and Caldera, but saw that her new grandchild had inherited MS's best traits and started giving him an allowance because he was such a good kid, and there was nobody to take care of him, now that mommy was dead, and daddy was in a coma.
When I buy a license for a product that I'll be using for a project, I don't put out a press release. I can only assume that Microsoft doesn't either. What are the chances that the MS PR department even knows that there is a SCO project underway, and if they did, why would they think it worthy of telling the world?
The only thing I can conclude is that at the very least, MS is trying give the SCO claim some validity (due to the timing). At worst, they are actively funding this effort.
By the time this 50% or so reduction in graduates hits the market in 2-4 years time, happy days should be back for those who have the skills.
Many economists seem to believe that the US is on the verge of a labor crunch once the economy recovers. Why? Because the Boomers are starting to retire, and there just aren't enough of us to replace them. So the good times for many workers (not just tech) should (hopefully) be back.
and there isn't a boss in the world who will choose to pay $80k a year when he could get the same value for $20k a year.
I disagree, not every boss is an amoral creep who only looks at the bottom line and would gladly fire his workforce (and often cases friends and neighbors) in favor of overseas labor.
Consider this, Silicon Valley, pre-crash, was probably the most expensive place in the world to hire tech workers. Why would companies ever locate there when they could go to say, Austin or Raleigh , NC and pay people less? By your logic, they wouldn't locate to Silicon Valley, yet they did. Also, New York City is a very expensive place to hire people. You can get people doing the same thing almost anywhere in the country, yet all those high-rises continue to be filled with workers.
I don't see the current trend toward off-shoring programming jobs slowing down in the future -- rather, I foresee an acceleration as tools and processes for performing overseas work improve.
Several things:
1. It's not just programming jobs, it's customer service, financial and other back-office work being off-shored too.
2. A funny thing about economics, things never turn out the way you forsee. For instance people tend to think that there are a finite number of tech-related jobs in this world, and if we send them to India, then we won't have them here. But Technology has a funny way of creating new jobs. Cheap, overseas labor may make lower-margin tech products and services possible, while higher-margin work will be done in the US and other. So in other words, the number of tech jobs will likely increase as the available labor pool increases. If you work in a tech-related field, when was the last time you heard people complain that there are too many people in your company and not enough work to do? It's almost always the opposite. Even before all the layoffs
Remember, India may have lots of people, but they all can't be doing technical, out-sourced work for other countries. Many of their technical people will be needed to service their own infrastructure as it grows. Also, the more jobs you send there, the higher the salaries and other perks you'll need to pay them, so their competative edge slowly diminishes.
My company is already having a retention problem in India, and has trouble finding truly qualified people over there.
Consider how poorly the American car, steel and manufacturing industries are doing, and remember that they (unlike software development) are at least protected by tariffs which level the playing field somewhat.
Many Japanese-brand cars are actually assembled in the US today. In the 70's and 80's we never could've fathomed that. (See my point about things not turning out the way you expect). But there is a big difference between Steel/Auto and other manufacturing jobs and software. The former is considered unskilled work, because you can train almost anybody to sit on an assembly line and attach a certain part to a car as it comes by. Software development is still highly-skilled, and it's not easy to find people with the right skills even in the highly populated countries like India and China.
Besides DRM, the other annoyance in TurboTax for me this year was the way they handled the "Free State".
In the past, you would get 1 free TurboTax state product when you purchased the Deluxe version. You could either download it, or pay a couple of bucks for a CD.
This year, they still offered a free state, but you had to pay full retail for it ($29.95) from their web site, and send in a coupon for a rebate for it. Why? My only guess is to artificially boost their revenue figures (Intuit shareholders take note), and maybe hope that some people would forget to send in for the rebate.
I'm with you, I will probably buy TaxCut next year instead. It's cheaper anyway.
Last time I checked, e-file from the IRS wasn't free it was $12 or something. Where's the incentive to use it? Faster refund? Right, I almost always owe them, so I sit on the money until April 15th (to get the extra interest that I'll have to pay them taxes on next year;-) )
Articles like this may seem cutesy, but the sad fact is that corporate leaders see this and assume all IT workers are/can or will do this. This furthers the mistrust some corporate types have of IT managers and workers.
To be fair, the article doesn't single out IT or technology workers. It talks about one guy moving documents and windows around all day remotely, doesn't exactly sound like an IT job. This can apply to anyone who has a job that involves using a PC.
Worse, it'll make it easy for corporate leaders to rationalize moving *YOUR* IT job to India. The article doesn't seem too funny now, does it.
It's even harder to monitor workers half way around the world, that work when you sleep and sleep when you work. We've tried it, we became extremely frustrated with it, and we're likely going to drop our Indian operation soon.
Zentec is dead on here. With all the bitching about moving IT jobs to India, now is not the time to be joking about this stuff. Seriously, the guys in India, Russia, et. al. are working their asses off for far less money than IT professionals make here. Do you think they are spending their time wondering how to goof off?
Linux has half a percent of the desktop market. Apple, with MacOS, has something like 4-5%, I think? Maybe 8% tops? Why exactly -should- Apple give a hoot about Linux? They're not THAT big a company, and they're busy as hell(have you stopped to think about how many software products they now produce? OSX, OSX Server, Quicktime Streaming Server, Quicktime, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie and Final Cut Pro, iDVD and DVD Studio Pro, iCal/iSync...the list is ENORMOUS.) They don't, quite frankly, have the time to screw around with, essentially, something that can't even be called "competition"
Assuming your figures are correct. Linux is much more a competitor to Apple than it is to Microsoft. Linux has achieved 10-15% of the amount of Apple's marketshare with relatively few marketing $$$ spent. Since they have made Mac OS/X BSD based, they have essentially gone into competition with Linux to some degree.
But anyway, as has been shown by Linux Media players, you can make the Windows DLL run unmodified on Linux, you just need to provide the front-end. As the Codeweavers Crossover plugin has shown, you can make the entire Windows Quicktime Application run on Linux unmodified and appear as a native app.
So Apple could produce a Linux Quicktime with little or no money spent. Option 1: use the Windows DLL, and write a front end for it. Option 2: Enter an agreement with Codeweavers to package their technology into a Quicktime for Linux distribution, in exchange for a cut of Quicktime for Linux sales, to make it appear as a native app.
With the second option, Apple would have to do very little and spend very little. But it would give the appearance that you can run Quicktime on Linux with Apple's blessing, instead of always feeling like some kind of rogue for just wanting to watch video streams on Linux. Producing Quicktime for Linux is probably in Apple's best interest because not producing it only encourages the development of players like xine and mplayer, that will figure out how to play your format eventually, and not bother to enforce DRM.
In it's glory days, Atari wasn't afraid to create new game genres. That's something that's sorely missing from the game industry today. Hopefully the new Atari takes on this spirit, but somehow I doubt it.
Not fatally, but it's leaving a mark. Just seems strange when they out of the blue take on the name that's as American as apple pie and blue jeans to most gamers in the States.
The name "Atari" is actually Japanese, I think. It was taken from the game, "Go".
I also recall seeing a Japanese movie on MST3K where one of the characters was "Mr. Atari".
Now, Atari -- I still have my Atari ST downstairs, and from time to time I plug it in, boot it and cry a little over the clean, crisp picture on the screen, the ease of use, and how unfair the world in general is. I could even do uucp with that machine, and if it only had had a MMU...and if only IBM hadn't bought MS DOS...if only pigs could fly...
Ease of use? I always found Atari's GEM implementation hopelessly frustrating, at least if you wanted to do anything more than launch programs.
Still, if you like the ST, you might want to check out the aranym project, which aims to turn your PC into a modern Atari system. Many open source programs have been made to run under aranym, and many old ST programs will also work with it
Midway also recently shut down the "Midway Games West" division, prompting a wave of "Atari goes out of business" articles.
In researching this timeline, I made a truely mind-boggling discovery: Atari was briefly in the engineering/scientific/graphics workstation business [atarimuseum.com]!
Yep, They also made unsuccessful PC clones at one point. Tramiel's Atari tried lots of things that ultimately failed. They didn't have the resources to pull them off.
Also, in the Warner days, Atari was rumored to be developing a system and games that could be controlled by "thought" power. I kid you not. You attached sensors to your forehead, and positive thoughts caused the system to do one thing, and negative thoughts, something else. That was the theory, I guess they weren't successful at it, because I'm sure we would've seen such a system from somebody if it could be done.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course your assumption is there is a fixed number of jobs and automation and outsourcing will only reduce the number of jobs available.
History has shown otherwise
If the income for a large percentage of the population were to drop, as you predict, this would lead to deflation, which the government desparately wants to avoid. So the government/central bank would take steps to avoid deflation, such as letting the value of the currency slide (which the US is now doing to help stimulate the economy, but won't admit it). This makes foreign workers more expensive comparatively.
The paradox though is offshoring labor to cheaper countries tends to raise your standard of living instead of lowering it, because you end up paying less for those goods and services, and new jobs spring up in new industries to replace the ones lost.
So there's already 3 similar bills on this? that may not be a good thing.
When "Term Limits" was all the rage, there were many term-limits proposals, and most members of Congress came out in support of term-limits of some kinds. The problem was there was no majority that would agree on any specific term-limits proposal, so the issue died without action, yet most congresspeople could tell the voters they supported it.
I'm worried the same thing could happen here. Having many bills gives the chance for these people to show their constituents that they support their rights, without having to worry about actually voting against an industry that's heavily lining their pockets.
I hope that's not what's happening, but we'll have to wait and see.
My town makes its property assessment data available online. This includes not only where the property is located, but also has photos of the properties AND the owners name.
Anybody can access the site.
When I closed on the house, I never signed a consent form or anything. Can I sue for lots of money too?
Sounds like Streisand really shot herself in the foot with this lawsuit. The site with photo is a limited-interest site. Now because of the lawsuit, many more people can see where her house it.
It looks like Clear Channel is upset because the FCC didn't give radio owners what Clear Channel wanted. That's the impression that I get from this blurb from The Motley Fool (www.fool.com):
The FCC did, however, retain ownership limits for radio broadcasters. That drew a sharp response from Clear Channel Communications (NYSE: CCU), which owns over 1,000 stations nationwide -- and which critics accuse of using a bland, cookie-cutter approach that provides less local news and programming. "This FCC action will extinguish the substantial consumer benefits brought on by radio deregulation in 1996," it said in a statement.
I guess today's decision only affects TV stations
Absolutely.
Having broadcasters who refuse to accept *payola* means they'll lose control of what gets heard.
Once that happens, the corrupt business model that is the music industry would collapse like the house of cards that it is, since artists might actually *gasp* be able to bypass the industry altogether and still be heard.
Too much diversity means it will be much harder to create the lame mega-acts that the current, top-heavy music industry depends on to thrive.
In my experience, the Yahoo stock boards are filled with pumpers and people with no apparent job or social life, who post dozens of off-topic messages every day at all hours of the day. You can usually find a couple of serious investors on each board, but the signal to noise ratio is very poor.
Or in more detail...
Microsoft's retarded son SCO, married the offspring of Novell, Caldera, and spawned SCO group. (Since nothing but pure evil could be born of the offspring of the bitter rivals)
SCO group, in a jealous fit of rage killed his mother Caldera, beat up daddy SCO, and took all his assets. SCO group then threatened his half sister Linux (Caldera's other child from a previous Union)
SCO group threatened to find and kill Linux, and everyone she ever slept with, because she was holding the family secrets.
Microsoft had never approved of the marriage between SCO and Caldera, but saw that her new grandchild had inherited MS's best traits and started giving him an allowance because he was such a good kid, and there was nobody to take care of him, now that mommy was dead, and daddy was in a coma.
But only if you sign an NDA with them
http://ir.sco.com/conference.cfm
./'d
Because I'm sure the phone will be
...And AT&T Asserts rights over Unix IP claim, claiming they never actually sold them to Novell
When I buy a license for a product that I'll be using for a project, I don't put out a press release. I can only assume that Microsoft doesn't either. What are the chances that the MS PR department even knows that there is a SCO project underway, and if they did, why would they think it worthy of telling the world?
The only thing I can conclude is that at the very least, MS is trying give the SCO claim some validity (due to the timing). At worst, they are actively funding this effort.
"SCO Claims Linux Sales After Suit Irrelevant"
SCO still has customers willing to buy Linux from them?
By the time this 50% or so reduction in graduates hits the market in 2-4 years time, happy days should be back for those who have the skills.
Many economists seem to believe that the US is on the verge of a labor crunch once the economy recovers. Why? Because the Boomers are starting to retire, and there just aren't enough of us to replace them. So the good times for many workers (not just tech) should (hopefully) be back.
and there isn't a boss in the world who will choose to pay $80k a year when he could get the same value for $20k a year.
I disagree, not every boss is an amoral creep who only looks at the bottom line and would gladly fire his workforce (and often cases friends and neighbors) in favor of overseas labor.
Consider this, Silicon Valley, pre-crash, was probably the most expensive place in the world to hire tech workers. Why would companies ever locate there when they could go to say, Austin or Raleigh , NC and pay people less? By your logic, they wouldn't locate to Silicon Valley, yet they did. Also, New York City is a very expensive place to hire people. You can get people doing the same thing almost anywhere in the country, yet all those high-rises continue to be filled with workers.
I don't see the current trend toward off-shoring programming jobs slowing down in the future -- rather, I foresee an acceleration as tools and processes for performing overseas work improve.
Several things: 1. It's not just programming jobs, it's customer service, financial and other back-office work being off-shored too. 2. A funny thing about economics, things never turn out the way you forsee. For instance people tend to think that there are a finite number of tech-related jobs in this world, and if we send them to India, then we won't have them here. But Technology has a funny way of creating new jobs. Cheap, overseas labor may make lower-margin tech products and services possible, while higher-margin work will be done in the US and other. So in other words, the number of tech jobs will likely increase as the available labor pool increases. If you work in a tech-related field, when was the last time you heard people complain that there are too many people in your company and not enough work to do? It's almost always the opposite. Even before all the layoffs Remember, India may have lots of people, but they all can't be doing technical, out-sourced work for other countries. Many of their technical people will be needed to service their own infrastructure as it grows. Also, the more jobs you send there, the higher the salaries and other perks you'll need to pay them, so their competative edge slowly diminishes. My company is already having a retention problem in India, and has trouble finding truly qualified people over there.
Consider how poorly the American car, steel and manufacturing industries are doing, and remember that they (unlike software development) are at least protected by tariffs which level the playing field somewhat.
Many Japanese-brand cars are actually assembled in the US today. In the 70's and 80's we never could've fathomed that. (See my point about things not turning out the way you expect). But there is a big difference between Steel/Auto and other manufacturing jobs and software. The former is considered unskilled work, because you can train almost anybody to sit on an assembly line and attach a certain part to a car as it comes by. Software development is still highly-skilled, and it's not easy to find people with the right skills even in the highly populated countries like India and China.
Besides DRM, the other annoyance in TurboTax for me this year was the way they handled the "Free State".
In the past, you would get 1 free TurboTax state product when you purchased the Deluxe version. You could either download it, or pay a couple of bucks for a CD.
This year, they still offered a free state, but you had to pay full retail for it ($29.95) from their web site, and send in a coupon for a rebate for it. Why? My only guess is to artificially boost their revenue figures (Intuit shareholders take note), and maybe hope that some people would forget to send in for the rebate.
I'm with you, I will probably buy TaxCut next year instead. It's cheaper anyway.
Last time I checked, e-file from the IRS wasn't free it was $12 or something. Where's the incentive to use it? Faster refund? Right, I almost always owe them, so I sit on the money until April 15th (to get the extra interest that I'll have to pay them taxes on next year ;-) )
Articles like this may seem cutesy, but the sad fact is that corporate leaders see this and assume all IT workers are/can or will do this. This furthers the mistrust some corporate types have of IT managers and workers.
To be fair, the article doesn't single out IT or technology workers. It talks about one guy moving documents and windows around all day remotely, doesn't exactly sound like an IT job. This can apply to anyone who has a job that involves using a PC.
Worse, it'll make it easy for corporate leaders to rationalize moving *YOUR* IT job to India. The article doesn't seem too funny now, does it.
It's even harder to monitor workers half way around the world, that work when you sleep and sleep when you work. We've tried it, we became extremely frustrated with it, and we're likely going to drop our Indian operation soon.
Based on our experiences in using them, yes!
Linux has half a percent of the desktop market. Apple, with MacOS, has something like 4-5%, I think? Maybe 8% tops? Why exactly -should- Apple give a hoot about Linux? They're not THAT big a company, and they're busy as hell(have you stopped to think about how many software products they now produce? OSX, OSX Server, Quicktime Streaming Server, Quicktime, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie and Final Cut Pro, iDVD and DVD Studio Pro, iCal/iSync...the list is ENORMOUS.) They don't, quite frankly, have the time to screw around with, essentially, something that can't even be called "competition"
Assuming your figures are correct. Linux is much more a competitor to Apple than it is to Microsoft. Linux has achieved 10-15% of the amount of Apple's marketshare with relatively few marketing $$$ spent. Since they have made Mac OS/X BSD based, they have essentially gone into competition with Linux to some degree.
But anyway, as has been shown by Linux Media players, you can make the Windows DLL run unmodified on Linux, you just need to provide the front-end. As the Codeweavers Crossover plugin has shown, you can make the entire Windows Quicktime Application run on Linux unmodified and appear as a native app.
So Apple could produce a Linux Quicktime with little or no money spent. Option 1: use the Windows DLL, and write a front end for it. Option 2: Enter an agreement with Codeweavers to package their technology into a Quicktime for Linux distribution, in exchange for a cut of Quicktime for Linux sales, to make it appear as a native app.
With the second option, Apple would have to do very little and spend very little. But it would give the appearance that you can run Quicktime on Linux with Apple's blessing, instead of always feeling like some kind of rogue for just wanting to watch video streams on Linux. Producing Quicktime for Linux is probably in Apple's best interest because not producing it only encourages the development of players like xine and mplayer, that will figure out how to play your format eventually, and not bother to enforce DRM.
In it's glory days, Atari wasn't afraid to create new game genres. That's something that's sorely missing from the game industry today. Hopefully the new Atari takes on this spirit, but somehow I doubt it.
The name "Atari" is actually Japanese, I think. It was taken from the game, "Go".
I also recall seeing a Japanese movie on MST3K where one of the characters was "Mr. Atari".
Now, Atari -- I still have my Atari ST downstairs, and from time to time I plug it in, boot it and cry a little over the clean, crisp picture on the screen, the ease of use, and how unfair the world in general is. I could even do uucp with that machine, and if it only had had a MMU...and if only IBM hadn't bought MS DOS...if only pigs could fly...
Ease of use? I always found Atari's GEM implementation hopelessly frustrating, at least if you wanted to do anything more than launch programs.
Still, if you like the ST, you might want to check out the aranym project, which aims to turn your PC into a modern Atari system. Many open source programs have been made to run under aranym, and many old ST programs will also work with it
In researching this timeline, I made a truely mind-boggling discovery: Atari was briefly in the engineering/scientific/graphics workstation business [atarimuseum.com]!
Yep, They also made unsuccessful PC clones at one point. Tramiel's Atari tried lots of things that ultimately failed. They didn't have the resources to pull them off.
Also, in the Warner days, Atari was rumored to be developing a system and games that could be controlled by "thought" power. I kid you not. You attached sensors to your forehead, and positive thoughts caused the system to do one thing, and negative thoughts, something else. That was the theory, I guess they weren't successful at it, because I'm sure we would've seen such a system from somebody if it could be done.