Reducing costs is part of the story for outsourcing, but it is not always the entire story. It consumes capital and intellectual capital to manage as much as 15% of your business. Maybe the company is better off to invest elsewhere.
Many companies do not manage their own payroll. It is not immediately apparent they do this to reduce costs. However, relieving staff of figuring out how to garnish wages, pay all the separate taxing bodies,.... We might spend too much time on something that is not essential to the business process.
For outsourcing IT, you should look at the application space. If all the services provided are accounting and payroll, then you can run for the door. These things can always be outsourced and costs are the primary factor.
If the applications work really enables the business to serve its customers, then the company may be experiencing many problems with the manner in which development is performed and is throwing in the towel.
Whatever, if you decide to follow HP, you should look at its reputation. Look in Fortune Magazine and look at HP's track record on both its business and its ranking as a place to work. If you would buy HP's stock and you believe it serves its employees well, I would fight for a job at HP.
In any case, dust off the CV. The new company is going to interview you regardless.
The thread about whose phone is open and whose is not has no effect on the point of the article. The impact of the iPhone was that the phone maker got to set the rules instead of the service provider. This is a major change in the behavior of the service provider.
Verizon, conversely, expects that everything you would do with your phone should include a network service function. They own services for pictures, video, music, even your calendar and address book. As a result, they have disabled many of the features provided by phone equipment providers. Furthermore, you cannot buy a phone from an equipment provider and then sign up for Verizon service. This is a really terrible situation for the customer and not likely to last once the market starts to gravitate to separate smart phones and configurable services.
Lastly, don't assume that GSM is the solution to all phone service problems. The sim card is a good idea so that phone service is portable. It is a difficult standard to adjust to higher data rates where CDMA is easier. I suspect the GSM folks will get it figured out, but the phone you have today might not be the one you need in a few years. The battle is not yet fully played.
My question is how Voyager 2 can stand the thermal shock. The article reports that the temperature is something around 200,000 degrees. They are actually talking about the temperature of the "ions" but I would think that would damage the probe?
I know we are not talking ambient temperature which would vaporize the probe. How dense is the matter and how do you measure this kind of energy?
Believe it or not, there are some large groups that are adopting the SEI's PSP (personal software process) and TSP (team software process). Such groups have a clear understanding of how individuals and teams contribute to potential defects and have taken a lot of trouble to eliminate the problems.
Such groups see significantly higher productivity and quality. It is painful to start this process but it does provide the results advertised.
I'd say the difficulty is in keeping the humor of the story. Gaiman's work has a couple of layers of subtext where he hides both serious stuff and humor. Humor that is not visible and not physical always has a problem with movie audiences. I mean, there are even people who don't know "Boston Legal" is funny.
Standards for weights, mass, distance or any other measure, are critical in the calibration of instruments. This calibration provide the means that to compare product specifications and research results.
This particular effort is a very interesting set of challenges. It requires the use of single isotope of silicon; calibrations for distance and roundness, and a sophisticated means to to count the atoms. This last step requires the silicon to be perfectly crystalline.
Measurement is itself a very interesting study bordering on metaphysics and philosophy. The desire to measure things has been at the heart of a lot of scientific investigation, economics and other areas of study. Ref "Abstract Measurement Theory" by Louis Narens https://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp? ttype=2&tid=6345/
I see no evidence that the "American people" make smart decisions in choosing their leaders when there are many choices. There is little if any thought given to making a selection among 5 or more candidates. Very early in the process, they winnow their choice to 1 or, alternatively, they wait and make the selection with the last good word they hear.
When the party politicians select their candidate, they have at least some sensible criteria. You may not agree with the criteria, but it is present. "W" could not have been elected if we disbanded the national primary system. He simply was not qualified by any reasonable standard.
The primary system is only suitable for deciding that someone is "electable" and not for deciding the candidate is a suitable choice.
The same situation does not hold for the election. Given a clear, distinct choice between exactly 2 alternatives, the people electorate attempts to make a sensible choice. I do not always agree with the result, but the reasons for the choice are generally clear.
I have to answer with a question -- by benchmark, do you mean 1) comparing yourself to other IT departments or 2) developing a system of measurement that proves you are effective and getting better.
I prefer the second approach -- develop an internal system of performance measurement. This is not a trivial exercise but it has been done. I suggest your get you CIO a copy of Martin Curley's book, "Managing Information Technology for Business Value." Here is a link to Intel Press http://www.intel.com/intelpress/offers/bundle5.htm /
Sandia is government owned/contractor operated facility. The contractor is Lockheed-Martin. The relationship between defense contractors and the government is an odd one that goes back a long way in our history. Eisenhower (33rd President) bemoaned it and coined the term "military industrial complex".
You can think of it as a "closed economy" rather than a "market economy". The defense contractors operate on very low profit margins in exchange for a guarantee of income. It's not quite that simple but not far from the actuality.
The newspaper article hardly tells the story. Here is the abstract from Science
The conventional view holds that girih (geometric star-and-polygon, or strapwork) patterns in
medieval Islamic architecture were conceived by their designers as a network of zigzagging lines,
where the lines were drafted directly with a straightedge and a compass. We show that by 1200
C.E. a conceptual breakthrough occurred in which girih patterns were reconceived as tessellations
of a special set of equilateral polygons ("girih tiles") decorated with lines. These tiles enabled
the creation of increasingly complex periodic girih patterns, and by the 15th century, the
tessellation approach was combined with self-similar transformations to construct nearly perfect
quasi-crystalline Penrose patterns, five centuries before their discovery in the West.
If you care to look at the article, it has some very interesting pictures and explanations in the "supplement". Peter Lu, et.al. Science 315, 1106 (2007)
Probably most of the actual battle is about how much (extra-legal) authority is required to protect us from terrorism. BUT suppose we want to think about the question of bloggers getting 1st Ammendment protection....
The legal system is heavily weighted to protect attorneys and their economic status. That situation is impossible to change. Recognizing the situation seems to suggest that bloggers needing some 1st Ammendment protection need to form a cooperative whereby legal fees can be shared across a larger base in the interest of protecting everyone (think insurance).
The press has the strength of a corporate structure to handle the legal fees. That does not necessarily protect the individual from jail time (Judith Miller), but it handles the cost of arguing in front of a judge.
Remember too, nothing is going to protect you from charges of libel. I suspect the cooperative would not protect you either. If you are going to write an opinion, then you need to state it as an opinion. You need to identify your supporting evidence. If you are providing evidence and not issuing an opinion (rather leaving conclusions to others) then you are at risk for providing the source.
It's better protection to separate the two. Provide the evidence and describe the situation that produced the evidence. In a separate blog, interpret it and offer your opinion.
We have all gotten used to TV where the lowest possible common denominator usurps all intelligence. On TV News, we get this combined evidence, interpretation and opinion all mushed together. It's bad practice and bad for your mental health.
Sony has clearly not learned a lesson from the early 80's. TI produced a console called a TI99 that was based on a pretty good TI 9900 microprocessor. In many ways the microprocessor and its supporting chips were superior to the technology and chip used by Apple and the Commodore 64.
Both Commodore and Apple made their platforms very open and allowed many 3rd parties to develop hardware and software with virtually no licensing restrictions and very modest fees if any. TI on the other hand, made its development kit proprietary and required use of a cartridge with a TI-only chip. Thereby, TI could control development for its platform in great detail. The license fees were significant so few small companies participated.
TI never did achieve the kind of market share they needed for the product. Eventually, a console that initially cost $500 was dumped onto the market at $99 to unload the inventory.
The situation is a bit different today. There are a number of large game companies that can afford to deal with Sony. That will keep the Sony product alive with a decent market share. However, we can expect that the most innovative products will come on other platforms where entrepreneurs are encouraged to participate.
Sony appears to be locked into the Betamax mentality. Try for price leverage by creating barriers that prevent new players from entering the market. Use every possible mechanism for generating revenue, even if it slows market penetration.
While it is true that architecture has a great deal to do with security and that architecture still poses a problem for Microsoft, it is also still true that over 80% of security problems are a direct result of bad coding practices dealing with input data. Stuff that we learned how to do 30 years ago is still the bane of our existence. (Ref. CERT ).
There are many examples of proprietary technologies with similar history and there are some where the proprietary issue is not the reason for failure.
IBM PC won out in the PC wars in part because it depended on an "industry standard" (ISD). Among the losers were TI, HP, DEC and a list of others that made an attempt to define a niche where proprietary would work.
If you do want a proprietary technology, then you have to make the production costs of using your technology very low. If blu-ray discs cost a significant premium, that will be a barrier to market entry for companies that provide complementary products and services. If Sony charges a lot of money to include blu-ray capability in complementary devices, that will be a barrier.
Sony has to decide what partners it must have in order to achieve success. These partnerships cannot be exclusively the larger brands. Smaller players tend to be more agile and more likely to define the need for a new market.
Market barriers are a two-edged sword. Sometimes they work and sometimes not.
The challenge for both SAP and Oracle seems to be that the current market is basically saturated. How do these companies move down to smaller customers and up to bigger customers? Both products were built on a classic client-server model. A single central server supplies data and function. In a really large institution (think Army, VA, etc.) the central server cannot provide the performance needed. Both Oracle and SAP are going after this type customer now and that is driving some of the changes.
Smaller customers need a lower-cost engine and have much less to invest in supporting costs. It is unlikely that the same architecture is going to suit both ends of the spectrum.
You say that your applications can pass audit criteria and that's a start. Create some measurement data that proves to the company:
- Your applications contribute measurably to the business
- You have high and improving productivity in development
- You handle product release and configuration control better than IT
- Your products have high customer satisfaction
- Your customers like working with you
If you don't have measurement data, it will be "he said - she said" and then the biggest pot of money wins. Read "Managing Information Technology for Business Value" by Martin Curley.
There are lots of reasons for the decline. I would not be surprised to learn that the decline in the US is greater than the decline in the UK. I would cite as reasons.
Types of play: video games vs. constructive toys such as sets for chemistry, electronics, construction. Closest we have today are games like "Sims."
Government funding for science: during the 60's and 70's the National Science Foundation had a considerable amount to spend on high school education.
I could easily go on a long discussion of things I don't like about how businesses are managed and the de-emphasis of engineering.
On the other hand, we have smart scientists and engineers who are doing remarkable things. The problem is that they somehow represent an elite group and the pool of potential talent may be getting smaller. If you examine the national origin makeup of engineering schools, it appears the % of the population of Asian students is growing. The % of US students is declining. The % of black US students is practically non-existent.
Is the pool of US students actually diminishing?
The fact that one can spoof a biometric with some ease, is not particularly novel nor should we expect that a single biometric is the solution to authenticating identity. A very simple combination of a biometric and an active input such as a password or pin, even spoken, provides a very strong solution to authentication. If the combination is used, I hardly even need strong passwords.
The other factor to remember is that security, of whatever form, is only a temporary lock-out mechanism. In order to be robust to several decimal places, we have to force some regular change mechanism in password or pin as well.
The possibility of a semi-transparent wearable LCD give all new meaning to the old classic fairy tale. Imagine buying a designer dress and experiencing a power failure!
There are some select firms that are able to quote a fixed price development. One I know is Integrated Software Specialists but they are not the only one http://www.issintl.com/ . Boutique firms, if you pick the right one, are always cheaper, faster and better than the big guys. Cheaper doesn't mean cheap, however. It just means they will do the job.
Picking the right one means they have done similar work (same basic platform, etc.) and you will get their experienced team. When you hire the really big guys, you get their stars to sell you the business, but you get their new hires to deliver.
Finding the right boutique firm means some work on your part.
Too many people here are willing to make inane useless comments about honest work efforts. If you have a better way, offer it. If you merely want to say something nasty about someone else's work, save it for the coffee house.
The iPod shuttle looks neat and I notice that you can add a battery pack with 2 AAA batteries. I wonder if the rechargeable battery can be replaced. Otherwise this device will probably have to be replaced in 12-20 months.
The author's comparison of Congressional inaction vis a vis the US dependence on oil to outsourcing jobs is an interesting one. It's quite clear that the reason for the US dependence on oil is so great is that the price of oil is so low. In fact, for most of the time since the Carter administration, it has been so low that it was too expensive to take it out of the ground in the US.
The analogy, then should not be Congressional inaction, but rather what are the economics to the owners and what are US workers trying to sell? Not every decision that company executives make is based on price. Some are actually based on value.
This is not to say that companies always operate in an ethical manner. For example, many companies accept TIF and other tax incentives to establish a local business. They really ought to be accountable for direct losses to the economy when they terminate the agreement before the local investment pays off. The owners should not escape with their shirts in these circumstances.
Let's not forget. The reason the "state" provides limited liability to corporations is because there is a complex 3-way contract involved between consumer, employee and owner. Such a contract is too complex to be managed fully by common law. At the moment, laws and courts do seem to favor the owner. It will change again.
Slashdot Mirror
See, Maxwell was right. Space contains ether. We just never figured out how to measure it. :)
Reducing costs is part of the story for outsourcing, but it is not always the entire story. It consumes capital and intellectual capital to manage as much as 15% of your business. Maybe the company is better off to invest elsewhere.
.... We might spend too much time on something that is not essential to the business process.
Many companies do not manage their own payroll. It is not immediately apparent they do this to reduce costs. However, relieving staff of figuring out how to garnish wages, pay all the separate taxing bodies,
For outsourcing IT, you should look at the application space. If all the services provided are accounting and payroll, then you can run for the door. These things can always be outsourced and costs are the primary factor.
If the applications work really enables the business to serve its customers, then the company may be experiencing many problems with the manner in which development is performed and is throwing in the towel.
Whatever, if you decide to follow HP, you should look at its reputation. Look in Fortune Magazine and look at HP's track record on both its business and its ranking as a place to work. If you would buy HP's stock and you believe it serves its employees well, I would fight for a job at HP. In any case, dust off the CV. The new company is going to interview you regardless.
The thread about whose phone is open and whose is not has no effect on the point of the article. The impact of the iPhone was that the phone maker got to set the rules instead of the service provider. This is a major change in the behavior of the service provider.
Verizon, conversely, expects that everything you would do with your phone should include a network service function. They own services for pictures, video, music, even your calendar and address book. As a result, they have disabled many of the features provided by phone equipment providers. Furthermore, you cannot buy a phone from an equipment provider and then sign up for Verizon service. This is a really terrible situation for the customer and not likely to last once the market starts to gravitate to separate smart phones and configurable services.
Lastly, don't assume that GSM is the solution to all phone service problems. The sim card is a good idea so that phone service is portable. It is a difficult standard to adjust to higher data rates where CDMA is easier. I suspect the GSM folks will get it figured out, but the phone you have today might not be the one you need in a few years. The battle is not yet fully played.
My question is how Voyager 2 can stand the thermal shock. The article reports that the temperature is something around 200,000 degrees. They are actually talking about the temperature of the "ions" but I would think that would damage the probe?
I know we are not talking ambient temperature which would vaporize the probe. How dense is the matter and how do you measure this kind of energy?
Believe it or not, there are some large groups that are adopting the SEI's PSP (personal software process) and TSP (team software process). Such groups have a clear understanding of how individuals and teams contribute to potential defects and have taken a lot of trouble to eliminate the problems.
Such groups see significantly higher productivity and quality. It is painful to start this process but it does provide the results advertised.
I'd say the difficulty is in keeping the humor of the story. Gaiman's work has a couple of layers of subtext where he hides both serious stuff and humor. Humor that is not visible and not physical always has a problem with movie audiences. I mean, there are even people who don't know "Boston Legal" is funny.
Standards for weights, mass, distance or any other measure, are critical in the calibration of instruments. This calibration provide the means that to compare product specifications and research results.
? ttype=2&tid=6345/
This particular effort is a very interesting set of challenges. It requires the use of single isotope of silicon; calibrations for distance and roundness, and a sophisticated means to to count the atoms. This last step requires the silicon to be perfectly crystalline.
Measurement is itself a very interesting study bordering on metaphysics and philosophy. The desire to measure things has been at the heart of a lot of scientific investigation, economics and other areas of study. Ref "Abstract Measurement Theory" by Louis Narens https://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp
I see no evidence that the "American people" make smart decisions in choosing their leaders when there are many choices. There is little if any thought given to making a selection among 5 or more candidates. Very early in the process, they winnow their choice to 1 or, alternatively, they wait and make the selection with the last good word they hear. When the party politicians select their candidate, they have at least some sensible criteria. You may not agree with the criteria, but it is present. "W" could not have been elected if we disbanded the national primary system. He simply was not qualified by any reasonable standard.
The primary system is only suitable for deciding that someone is "electable" and not for deciding the candidate is a suitable choice.
The same situation does not hold for the election. Given a clear, distinct choice between exactly 2 alternatives, the people electorate attempts to make a sensible choice. I do not always agree with the result, but the reasons for the choice are generally clear.
I have to answer with a question -- by benchmark, do you mean 1) comparing yourself to other IT departments or 2) developing a system of measurement that proves you are effective and getting better.
m /
I prefer the second approach -- develop an internal system of performance measurement. This is not a trivial exercise but it has been done. I suggest your get you CIO a copy of Martin Curley's book, "Managing Information Technology for Business Value." Here is a link to Intel Press http://www.intel.com/intelpress/offers/bundle5.ht
Sandia is government owned/contractor operated facility. The contractor is Lockheed-Martin. The relationship between defense contractors and the government is an odd one that goes back a long way in our history. Eisenhower (33rd President) bemoaned it and coined the term "military industrial complex".
You can think of it as a "closed economy" rather than a "market economy". The defense contractors operate on very low profit margins in exchange for a guarantee of income. It's not quite that simple but not far from the actuality.
The newspaper article hardly tells the story. Here is the abstract from Science
The conventional view holds that girih (geometric star-and-polygon, or strapwork) patterns in medieval Islamic architecture were conceived by their designers as a network of zigzagging lines, where the lines were drafted directly with a straightedge and a compass. We show that by 1200 C.E. a conceptual breakthrough occurred in which girih patterns were reconceived as tessellations of a special set of equilateral polygons ("girih tiles") decorated with lines. These tiles enabled the creation of increasingly complex periodic girih patterns, and by the 15th century, the tessellation approach was combined with self-similar transformations to construct nearly perfect quasi-crystalline Penrose patterns, five centuries before their discovery in the West.
If you care to look at the article, it has some very interesting pictures and explanations in the "supplement". Peter Lu, et.al. Science 315, 1106 (2007)
Probably most of the actual battle is about how much (extra-legal) authority is required to protect us from terrorism. BUT suppose we want to think about the question of bloggers getting 1st Ammendment protection.... The legal system is heavily weighted to protect attorneys and their economic status. That situation is impossible to change. Recognizing the situation seems to suggest that bloggers needing some 1st Ammendment protection need to form a cooperative whereby legal fees can be shared across a larger base in the interest of protecting everyone (think insurance). The press has the strength of a corporate structure to handle the legal fees. That does not necessarily protect the individual from jail time (Judith Miller), but it handles the cost of arguing in front of a judge. Remember too, nothing is going to protect you from charges of libel. I suspect the cooperative would not protect you either. If you are going to write an opinion, then you need to state it as an opinion. You need to identify your supporting evidence. If you are providing evidence and not issuing an opinion (rather leaving conclusions to others) then you are at risk for providing the source. It's better protection to separate the two. Provide the evidence and describe the situation that produced the evidence. In a separate blog, interpret it and offer your opinion. We have all gotten used to TV where the lowest possible common denominator usurps all intelligence. On TV News, we get this combined evidence, interpretation and opinion all mushed together. It's bad practice and bad for your mental health.
Sony has clearly not learned a lesson from the early 80's. TI produced a console called a TI99 that was based on a pretty good TI 9900 microprocessor. In many ways the microprocessor and its supporting chips were superior to the technology and chip used by Apple and the Commodore 64.
Both Commodore and Apple made their platforms very open and allowed many 3rd parties to develop hardware and software with virtually no licensing restrictions and very modest fees if any. TI on the other hand, made its development kit proprietary and required use of a cartridge with a TI-only chip. Thereby, TI could control development for its platform in great detail. The license fees were significant so few small companies participated.
TI never did achieve the kind of market share they needed for the product. Eventually, a console that initially cost $500 was dumped onto the market at $99 to unload the inventory.
The situation is a bit different today. There are a number of large game companies that can afford to deal with Sony. That will keep the Sony product alive with a decent market share. However, we can expect that the most innovative products will come on other platforms where entrepreneurs are encouraged to participate.
Sony appears to be locked into the Betamax mentality. Try for price leverage by creating barriers that prevent new players from entering the market. Use every possible mechanism for generating revenue, even if it slows market penetration.
I don't see the strategy working now either.
Tzinger
While it is true that architecture has a great deal to do with security and that architecture still poses a problem for Microsoft, it is also still true that over 80% of security problems are a direct result of bad coding practices dealing with input data. Stuff that we learned how to do 30 years ago is still the bane of our existence. (Ref. CERT ).
There are many examples of proprietary technologies with similar history and there are some where the proprietary issue is not the reason for failure.
IBM PC won out in the PC wars in part because it depended on an "industry standard" (ISD). Among the losers were TI, HP, DEC and a list of others that made an attempt to define a niche where proprietary would work.
If you do want a proprietary technology, then you have to make the production costs of using your technology very low. If blu-ray discs cost a significant premium, that will be a barrier to market entry for companies that provide complementary products and services. If Sony charges a lot of money to include blu-ray capability in complementary devices, that will be a barrier.
Sony has to decide what partners it must have in order to achieve success. These partnerships cannot be exclusively the larger brands. Smaller players tend to be more agile and more likely to define the need for a new market.
Market barriers are a two-edged sword. Sometimes they work and sometimes not.
Some barriers will
The challenge for both SAP and Oracle seems to be that the current market is basically saturated. How do these companies move down to smaller customers and up to bigger customers?
Both products were built on a classic client-server model. A single central server supplies data and function. In a really large institution (think Army, VA, etc.) the central server cannot provide the performance needed.
Both Oracle and SAP are going after this type customer now and that is driving some of the changes.
Smaller customers need a lower-cost engine and have much less to invest in supporting costs. It is unlikely that the same architecture is going to suit both ends of the spectrum.
It happens often that someone gets confused about where "Marie Lindor" lives. Now if I could only make a joke out of this, I could get modded higher.
You say that your applications can pass audit criteria and that's a start. Create some measurement data that proves to the company:
- Your applications contribute measurably to the business
- You have high and improving productivity in development
- You handle product release and configuration control better than IT
- Your products have high customer satisfaction
- Your customers like working with you
If you don't have measurement data, it will be "he said - she said" and then the biggest pot of money wins.
Read "Managing Information Technology for Business Value" by Martin Curley.
There are lots of reasons for the decline. I would not be surprised to learn that the decline in the US is greater than the decline in the UK. I would cite as reasons. Types of play: video games vs. constructive toys such as sets for chemistry, electronics, construction. Closest we have today are games like "Sims." Government funding for science: during the 60's and 70's the National Science Foundation had a considerable amount to spend on high school education. I could easily go on a long discussion of things I don't like about how businesses are managed and the de-emphasis of engineering. On the other hand, we have smart scientists and engineers who are doing remarkable things. The problem is that they somehow represent an elite group and the pool of potential talent may be getting smaller. If you examine the national origin makeup of engineering schools, it appears the % of the population of Asian students is growing. The % of US students is declining. The % of black US students is practically non-existent. Is the pool of US students actually diminishing?
The fact that one can spoof a biometric with some ease, is not particularly novel nor should we expect that a single biometric is the solution to authenticating identity. A very simple combination of a biometric and an active input such as a password or pin, even spoken, provides a very strong solution to authentication. If the combination is used, I hardly even need strong passwords. The other factor to remember is that security, of whatever form, is only a temporary lock-out mechanism. In order to be robust to several decimal places, we have to force some regular change mechanism in password or pin as well.
The possibility of a semi-transparent wearable LCD give all new meaning to the old classic fairy tale. Imagine buying a designer dress and experiencing a power failure!
There are some select firms that are able to quote a fixed price development. One I know is Integrated Software Specialists but they are not the only one http://www.issintl.com/ . Boutique firms, if you pick the right one, are always cheaper, faster and better than the big guys. Cheaper doesn't mean cheap, however. It just means they will do the job. Picking the right one means they have done similar work (same basic platform, etc.) and you will get their experienced team. When you hire the really big guys, you get their stars to sell you the business, but you get their new hires to deliver. Finding the right boutique firm means some work on your part.
Too many people here are willing to make inane useless comments about honest work efforts. If you have a better way, offer it. If you merely want to say something nasty about someone else's work, save it for the coffee house.
The iPod shuttle looks neat and I notice that you can add a battery pack with 2 AAA batteries. I wonder if the rechargeable battery can be replaced. Otherwise this device will probably have to be replaced in 12-20 months.
The author's comparison of Congressional inaction vis a vis the US dependence on oil to outsourcing jobs is an interesting one. It's quite clear that the reason for the US dependence on oil is so great is that the price of oil is so low. In fact, for most of the time since the Carter administration, it has been so low that it was too expensive to take it out of the ground in the US. The analogy, then should not be Congressional inaction, but rather what are the economics to the owners and what are US workers trying to sell? Not every decision that company executives make is based on price. Some are actually based on value. This is not to say that companies always operate in an ethical manner. For example, many companies accept TIF and other tax incentives to establish a local business. They really ought to be accountable for direct losses to the economy when they terminate the agreement before the local investment pays off. The owners should not escape with their shirts in these circumstances. Let's not forget. The reason the "state" provides limited liability to corporations is because there is a complex 3-way contract involved between consumer, employee and owner. Such a contract is too complex to be managed fully by common law. At the moment, laws and courts do seem to favor the owner. It will change again.