To do a pre-return check of the bottom of the shuttle- especially given that this would be very easy to do with a small disposable wireless camera bot in zero gravity, or even with longer tethers on space suits in the cargo area. Seems like less than an $800 investment could mean so much....
This is the first case I'll admit to it though....It was a troll- complete and utter- though my trolls I'd like to think make people actually THINK to respond- I've gotten some great responses here. Unlike, say, the Goatse guy. Very entertaining Friday afternoon, and I think this might be my 50th message today.
2nd response- want to buy hosting? I'll sell you the domain name for $20/year + allow you to co-locate a server on my DSL line until you get up and running....http://www.informationr.us/ is the domain of my failed attempt at this. It's got a placeholder page right now that gets me an e-mail for V/SD&E jobs every now and again, but has NEVER fullfilled it's original attempt at farming out laid-off techies to competitors of their previous firms (with all the insider knowledge that includes).
The outsourcers don't hire Indian IT personnel directly, they go through middlemen, so it's not like outsourcing reduces the cost of a project to a 20% of the original cost, it's more like it reduces the cost by 20%. So, a group of talented people, with no big company manager salary overhead, and maybe willing to give up a little on their salaries, should be able to offer competitive pricing for the same project than an Indian firm, remembering also that a very good programmer is more efficient than 10 average programmers.
I thought that at one time- but the original offshore outsourcing model has a life of its own in the bigotry of CIOs. More power to you if you can do it- I was unable to get anybody to give me a chance.
I didn't feel Walmart was overpriced- until I saw what they were doing to American jobs and I finally LOOKED AT what I was buying there. NO quality control at all. I joined the Year of Rollback boycott and haven't been back since (going on three and a half years now- my wife's been back but only to exchange gifts and compare prices).
It's getting harder and harder all the time to buy "Made In America"- and the reason is because Americans can't give a shit about the quality of what they buy OR the employment of their neighbors.
In what time frame? The three month bottom line is all that matters.
It is in the best interests of your corporation's shareholders not to murder the competition because it means that the competition could also murder you.
So? People and shareholders are replaceable to a modern corporation- doesn't matter if the corporation is large enough, they won't get everybody at once.
It is better that your company gets bought out or sold in a fire sale or forced to innovate or expand or offer better services or take smaller margins than to be dead.
Who would buy a company that refuses to do everything possible to compete?
It doesn't have anything to do with morals. Morals are what existed before a logical reason to do what is in your best interests was known.
Your logical reasons so far have nothing to do with short term bottom line stock prices and balance sheets, and are therefore not logical by modern corporate morality.
If you know not to touch a hot stove because it burns you, the best course of action does not change from not to touch a hot stove because your mother tells you not to.
No- but if you're a corporation and the payoff comes before the pain, it becomes good business. If anything, all you've done is identify the big hole in multinational corporations today- the focus on the three-month window. This is well known already. It didn't stop Enron from manipulating market prices, it didn't stop Microsoft from burning down Dr. Dos offices, and it's not reason ENOUGH not to break the law if you can see a reasonable profit margin from breaking the law.
Low wage compared to what? Compared to their previous non-jobs or taxi driving jobs? In reality, Indian tech labour is paid very well in comparison to other jobs in India, so those worker's standard of living is high.
Is it high enough to afford a home network? High enough to study in off hours at home to learn the latest and greatest technologies? High enough to come up with that new algortithim in the shower at 5:00am after thinking about a programming problem all night? If so- their code doesn't show it yet, at least, not on the failed projects that I've gotten as contracts after outsourcing. Maybe in 10 or 20 years they'll be at that stage of the game- but for now the code they put out is distinctly lower quality, coded exactly to their understanding of spec, whether or not that is correct. It's damned expensive to be a GOOD programmer and return high value for the dollar spent by your bosses.
After all, what matters is that you can live well where you're living. Consider this, I make over $100K in my tech job in Boston, that's pretty decent for Boston, but it'd be harder to live on that in New York, and it'd be even harder to live on that in in London or Singapore. That doesn't mean I'm being taken advantage of though.
True enough- but there is a floor below which one cannot do good work, no matter what the standard of living around you is.
Really, how do you know this?
Ever since the layoff that caused what I now call my "great awakening" of 2001, I've kept up on the latest in trade negotiations and disputes. Especially in what the foreign press is saying. The India Economic Times is very worried that rising wages will send jobs elsewhere, starting about a year and a half ago- and since then, we've seen the Rupee revalued with respect to the dollar. The Chinese also manipulate their currency trading in such a way to make their wages appear to be rising when in fact, they are not. Both of these have been complaints raised before WTO arbiters and the World Court- only to be struck down. Of course, they have similar complaints about us- the dumping of subsidized US Agriculture products has created a worldwide depression on food prices, sending many subsidence farmers to bankruptcy or even suicide, for instance. There's also the great disparity in worker visas: A US H-1b can now be had for as little as $500 if you went to an American school or are lucky enough to be in the first 65,000 to file a second after midnight on October 1st. But the Indian equivilant will cost you $3 million in fees, in-country investments, and bribes- and the Chinese equivalent requires that the company hiring you be 51% owned by a Chinese national. Plus, there's the quid pro quo tariffs- there's a reason why Wal*Mart is the only western chain to make inroads in China, because they're China's 2nd biggest trading partner, exporting more goods than every first world nation other than the United States.
And really- I can't blame them. With their poverty rates, who wouldn't do EVERYTHING possible to keep the jobs in country? They have good reason to do so. But it amounts to unfair competition for the American worker. And it's only a short term fix- if they lose control on the wages as you seem to claim that they will, the jobs will leave very quickly and go to some other nation where the living standard is low- leaving behind massive unemployment. After all, what is it to the multinationals if they dump another few million into the world's unemployed? They don't care, at least, not on any scale that they recognize. As long as it is good for the three-month bottom line- I'm surprised they haven't taken up that old idea of putting factories on ships yet, to steam to whatever port is offering the lowest wages this week.
Point taken, but do realize that not everyone can live at our level. There simply aren't enough resources on the earth to sustain 6,000,000,000 power-hungry and wasteful humans.
Unless we get our shit together, we'll all be living at subsistence levels due to peak oil / climate change.
At this point- I think this would be perferable to being the debt slave of multinational corporate lawlessness. I saw an article in the newspaper this morning that puts the upper limit on non-local business interferance at approximately 4 years- the point where we will be entirely dependant on foreign oil.
True enough- I forgot about that. Though, for the most part, if a job can be outsourced then the position is replaceable enough that the value of providing health care to the employee is greatly diminished in relation to it's cost.
Rather I'm adopting, for the sake of argument, the morals of your average corporation. These are not traditional morals. The definition of good is anything that is profitable, the definition of bad is anything that is not profitable. Do a balance sheet on the murder, and remember, we're talking about double-blind contract killing in this case, since that's the intelligent way to keep the corporate name out of it. If the cost of the contract killer is less than the cost of the lost business, then it is a smart business decision to kill the competition.
Really, so half of your friends have no job, half of your neighbors have no job, half of the people you see each day have no job? Unless you live in West Virginia, that sounds a little far-fetched to me. I'm aware that unemployment numbers can be manipulated to sound more favorable, but 50%? Come on, get a grip on reality!
I happen to live next to a "Retirement community" for people between 45 and "not able to live on their own" (oddly enough, even with that last qualification, out of 500 apartments they continually have 5-6 people over the age of 100). According to the BOL, the top reason for not working in this country is not having to. Disability is second. There are plenty of people not gainfully employed once you start down the road of old enough but not offically counted as a part of the workforce by the government.
P.S. And, of course, there's also the point that in the long run, Compaq did not survive- HP made them an offer they couldn't refuse, with the result being lower quality goods offered by both.
WTF? You would seriously murder to eliminate a competitor?
If they were taking food of my table- most certainly. To a major corporation, just substitute profit for food.
This just silly. The number of people who would actually go to that extent is vanishingly small.
Why? Because of some outdated concept that murder is wrong?
"No big business?"
Well, no big business today would hesitate. I hear tell that 35 years ago, before Microsoft, businesses were a bit more moral. But other than examples such as you provide, I'm not sure that I believe it.
How did Compaq manage to take business from IBM?
Either businesses were once more moral- I don't know since I was a child at the time- or they had good security.
Hell, how does ANY small company get big under your theory?
By being more ruthless than the competition- which gives you three ways: 1. By sueing their competitors out of existance. 2. By having good enough security to prevent big businesses from doing this to them. 3. By having enough investment money to survive the cutthroat business practices and by being more innovative than their competitors.
No- because I no longer shop there. Haven't since the Great Awakening of 2001.
I think you're just racist, or at least short sighted, in insisting that something made in India or China means that it must be low quality.
You misundertand- I said anything made at a LOW WAGE is LOW QUALITY. India and China will be producing at the equivalent of Japan the day they treat their workers the same as the Japanese do; just as Japan was low quality until wages rose to first world standards.
The difference being that the WTO and the governments of India and China are working very hard to keep the actual workers in poverty- knowing that the business will quickly go elsewhere if wages rise.
Hmmm - I started a business 2 years ago. This year, our revenue is nearing $2 million.
Net or gross? And forget about revenue- what the big boys care about is market share. In your industry, what is your market share?
We did not have "enough money for complete financial security and independance". My partner and I had enough money for next month's rent.
No "big guys" came and offered to buy us out; neither did any thugs come after us.
You're either not very competitive or not very successfull- regardless of your balance sheet. It could be you're in a low-competition industry that there aren't any major competitors for your business. It could be that you simply aren't taking enough market share YET to get noticed. Either way- it will happen eventually.
We took a huge risk, put our futures at stake and now you are telling me that my employees must make the same money that I'm making?
If you failed- do you really think your employees would have stayed employed? Heck, if you sold out rather than fail, do you really think your employees would stay employed?
The same employees who were working in steady jobs and had fun while we worked our tails out?
You employed people to have fun for you? On company time?
Why would you put up with such lazy employees that made you no money?
Conversely- say your employees make you a lot of money. Say one single employee was completely responsible for half your revenue- would it be fair to keep paying him the same as the rest are getting?
Price is ulitimatly what the consumer is willing to pay for a product. If the hypothetical WalMart you see is selling overpriced crap then they would go out of business or clean up their act when other retailers come to town.
No other retailers are allowed- because nobody can beat Walmart's method of blackmailing suppliers.
That's what I have seen in my town. Walmart almost drove Kmart away. Target has forced Walmart to clean up their stores now.
What I've seen is that Target has accepted Walmart's way of doing business- Walmart has forced Target to sell lower quality items than they were previously. But hey- it's just business right? I force you out of work, but it's not personal...like we believe THAT.
It did. They hid it a little better, but it still existed.
In a guild economy, you pay a Just Wage and you get a Fair Price. Period. The Fair Price is ALWAYS 10% over the Just Wage + the cost of the materials. It's never about supply and demand.
Most people in the US work for a small company.
And most- at some point in their careers- will be laid off when the owner sells out.
A significant number of Americans own their own company.
That number is getting smaller every year, and has been for decades now.
Nobody other than the black helicopter crowd sees mass murder of entrepreneurs as a possibility.
Really? Do you really think anybody would hesitate to use murder to eliminate a competitor?
Once in a while it happens, but not often enough to be concerned.
It doesn't have to happen very often to know that you take the offer before it gets worse.
Most large business sell to and buy from large businesses.
Until a small business threatens their market share- and then the guns come out.
One business might be helped by the murder of a small business, but the others are hurt, and they will take steps to prevent it - if it really happened.
All the other businesses in the controling oligarchy also benefit from the elimination of the competitor- so if done properly (not proveable, no way to walk back up the chain from the contractor) why would anybody take steps to prevent it? When Ford took out Tucker- how was GM harmed?
Take off your tin foil hat, which doesn't do anything. Look at the real world. Your claims to not match up with reality.
I've experienced it- take off your blindfold and look at reality. No big business is ever going to tolerate a little guy taking away their market share- and there is NOTHING preventing it.
Yes, but of course you can't get away with that which is why nobody does it. WallMart appartently does have a good price/value ratio, it's just that the price is low and (sometimes) so is the value.
Everything I've ever bought at a WallMart has been of the lowest possible quality and value for the cost. There's a reason why they're making a 40% profit margin on just about every item.
WallMart sucks, though, because they don't treat their employees like human beings.
Nobody making a profit does. Profit is against treating employees like human beings.
They also don't sell IBM blade servers, so I'm not sure how your original comment relates to this one.
Made in China and India is the hint of the day- it doesn't matter who is doing the outsourcing, outsourcing is always about lowest possible cost and destruction of quality to produce higher profits.
I've been lucky to have decent bosses that know what I do and have the budget to reward it. I'm still waiting for the certificate though.
Better hope the stockholders and stakeholders don't find out- or you'll quickly find that merit, like most other things related to value, is not something people are willing to invest in any more.
Sure, I agree it seems like this effort is in place, but I have a lot of faith in the worker, inevitably, they'll win, although practices like this make things worse.
Not without unions they won't- your example of India (which has strong worker protection laws) is good.
Do you know of any practices specifically that they are using to prevent this? So far they don't seem to be working, I was reading the other day about how the influx of money into India is causing the wages to slowly increase due to capitalist pressures. I'll see if I can dig up the article, I think it was in the Economist.
The two largest ones are the revaluing of currency (so that even though wages appear to rise, inflation always outstrips the wage increase) and using magazines like The Economist to publish propaganda to keep the proles from being too upset about their slavery.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok- that's at least the ability to look at the bottom- I think. Can the canadarm reach that far?
To do a pre-return check of the bottom of the shuttle- especially given that this would be very easy to do with a small disposable wireless camera bot in zero gravity, or even with longer tethers on space suits in the cargo area. Seems like less than an $800 investment could mean so much....
Ah, but far cheaper is simply BigBucks Co buys Upstart Inc. All the employees get the axe, and nobdy had to talk to any suppliers at all!
This is the first case I'll admit to it though....It was a troll- complete and utter- though my trolls I'd like to think make people actually THINK to respond- I've gotten some great responses here. Unlike, say, the Goatse guy. Very entertaining Friday afternoon, and I think this might be my 50th message today.
2nd response- want to buy hosting? I'll sell you the domain name for $20/year + allow you to co-locate a server on my DSL line until you get up and running....http://www.informationr.us/ is the domain of my failed attempt at this. It's got a placeholder page right now that gets me an e-mail for V/SD&E jobs every now and again, but has NEVER fullfilled it's original attempt at farming out laid-off techies to competitors of their previous firms (with all the insider knowledge that includes).
The outsourcers don't hire Indian IT personnel directly, they go through middlemen, so it's not like outsourcing reduces the cost of a project to a 20% of the original cost, it's more like it reduces the cost by 20%. So, a group of talented people, with no big company manager salary overhead, and maybe willing to give up a little on their salaries, should be able to offer competitive pricing for the same project than an Indian firm, remembering also that a very good programmer is more efficient than 10 average programmers.
I thought that at one time- but the original offshore outsourcing model has a life of its own in the bigotry of CIOs. More power to you if you can do it- I was unable to get anybody to give me a chance.
I didn't feel Walmart was overpriced- until I saw what they were doing to American jobs and I finally LOOKED AT what I was buying there. NO quality control at all. I joined the Year of Rollback boycott and haven't been back since (going on three and a half years now- my wife's been back but only to exchange gifts and compare prices).
It's getting harder and harder all the time to buy "Made In America"- and the reason is because Americans can't give a shit about the quality of what they buy OR the employment of their neighbors.
That's been proven bad for business.
In what time frame? The three month bottom line is all that matters.
It is in the best interests of your corporation's shareholders not to murder the competition because it means that the competition could also murder you.
So? People and shareholders are replaceable to a modern corporation- doesn't matter if the corporation is large enough, they won't get everybody at once.
It is better that your company gets bought out or sold in a fire sale or forced to innovate or expand or offer better services or take smaller margins than to be dead.
Who would buy a company that refuses to do everything possible to compete?
It doesn't have anything to do with morals. Morals are what existed before a logical reason to do what is in your best interests was known.
Your logical reasons so far have nothing to do with short term bottom line stock prices and balance sheets, and are therefore not logical by modern corporate morality.
If you know not to touch a hot stove because it burns you, the best course of action does not change from not to touch a hot stove because your mother tells you not to.
No- but if you're a corporation and the payoff comes before the pain, it becomes good business. If anything, all you've done is identify the big hole in multinational corporations today- the focus on the three-month window. This is well known already. It didn't stop Enron from manipulating market prices, it didn't stop Microsoft from burning down Dr. Dos offices, and it's not reason ENOUGH not to break the law if you can see a reasonable profit margin from breaking the law.
Low wage compared to what? Compared to their previous non-jobs or taxi driving jobs? In reality, Indian tech labour is paid very well in comparison to other jobs in India, so those worker's standard of living is high.
Is it high enough to afford a home network? High enough to study in off hours at home to learn the latest and greatest technologies? High enough to come up with that new algortithim in the shower at 5:00am after thinking about a programming problem all night? If so- their code doesn't show it yet, at least, not on the failed projects that I've gotten as contracts after outsourcing. Maybe in 10 or 20 years they'll be at that stage of the game- but for now the code they put out is distinctly lower quality, coded exactly to their understanding of spec, whether or not that is correct. It's damned expensive to be a GOOD programmer and return high value for the dollar spent by your bosses.
After all, what matters is that you can live well where you're living. Consider this, I make over $100K in my tech job in Boston, that's pretty decent for Boston, but it'd be harder to live on that in New York, and it'd be even harder to live on that in in London or Singapore. That doesn't mean I'm being taken advantage of though.
True enough- but there is a floor below which one cannot do good work, no matter what the standard of living around you is.
Really, how do you know this?
Ever since the layoff that caused what I now call my "great awakening" of 2001, I've kept up on the latest in trade negotiations and disputes. Especially in what the foreign press is saying. The India Economic Times is very worried that rising wages will send jobs elsewhere, starting about a year and a half ago- and since then, we've seen the Rupee revalued with respect to the dollar. The Chinese also manipulate their currency trading in such a way to make their wages appear to be rising when in fact, they are not. Both of these have been complaints raised before WTO arbiters and the World Court- only to be struck down. Of course, they have similar complaints about us- the dumping of subsidized US Agriculture products has created a worldwide depression on food prices, sending many subsidence farmers to bankruptcy or even suicide, for instance. There's also the great disparity in worker visas: A US H-1b can now be had for as little as $500 if you went to an American school or are lucky enough to be in the first 65,000 to file a second after midnight on October 1st. But the Indian equivilant will cost you $3 million in fees, in-country investments, and bribes- and the Chinese equivalent requires that the company hiring you be 51% owned by a Chinese national. Plus, there's the quid pro quo tariffs- there's a reason why Wal*Mart is the only western chain to make inroads in China, because they're China's 2nd biggest trading partner, exporting more goods than every first world nation other than the United States.
And really- I can't blame them. With their poverty rates, who wouldn't do EVERYTHING possible to keep the jobs in country? They have good reason to do so. But it amounts to unfair competition for the American worker. And it's only a short term fix- if they lose control on the wages as you seem to claim that they will, the jobs will leave very quickly and go to some other nation where the living standard is low- leaving behind massive unemployment. After all, what is it to the multinationals if they dump another few million into the world's unemployed? They don't care, at least, not on any scale that they recognize. As long as it is good for the three-month bottom line- I'm surprised they haven't taken up that old idea of putting factories on ships yet, to steam to whatever port is offering the lowest wages this week.
Point taken, but do realize that not everyone can live at our level. There simply aren't enough resources on the earth to sustain 6,000,000,000 power-hungry and wasteful humans.
Unless we get our shit together, we'll all be living at subsistence levels due to peak oil / climate change.
At this point- I think this would be perferable to being the debt slave of multinational corporate lawlessness. I saw an article in the newspaper this morning that puts the upper limit on non-local business interferance at approximately 4 years- the point where we will be entirely dependant on foreign oil.
True enough- I forgot about that. Though, for the most part, if a job can be outsourced then the position is replaceable enough that the value of providing health care to the employee is greatly diminished in relation to it's cost.
Rather I'm adopting, for the sake of argument, the morals of your average corporation. These are not traditional morals. The definition of good is anything that is profitable, the definition of bad is anything that is not profitable. Do a balance sheet on the murder, and remember, we're talking about double-blind contract killing in this case, since that's the intelligent way to keep the corporate name out of it. If the cost of the contract killer is less than the cost of the lost business, then it is a smart business decision to kill the competition.
From the point of view of multinational corporations, any ideal that some behavior is "wrong" when it creates profit is outdated. See Enron.
Really, so half of your friends have no job, half of your neighbors have no job, half of the people you see each day have no job? Unless you live in West Virginia, that sounds a little far-fetched to me. I'm aware that unemployment numbers can be manipulated to sound more favorable, but 50%? Come on, get a grip on reality!
I happen to live next to a "Retirement community" for people between 45 and "not able to live on their own" (oddly enough, even with that last qualification, out of 500 apartments they continually have 5-6 people over the age of 100). According to the BOL, the top reason for not working in this country is not having to. Disability is second. There are plenty of people not gainfully employed once you start down the road of old enough but not offically counted as a part of the workforce by the government.
P.S. And, of course, there's also the point that in the long run, Compaq did not survive- HP made them an offer they couldn't refuse, with the result being lower quality goods offered by both.
WTF? You would seriously murder to eliminate a competitor?
If they were taking food of my table- most certainly. To a major corporation, just substitute profit for food.
This just silly. The number of people who would actually go to that extent is vanishingly small.
Why? Because of some outdated concept that murder is wrong?
"No big business?"
Well, no big business today would hesitate. I hear tell that 35 years ago, before Microsoft, businesses were a bit more moral. But other than examples such as you provide, I'm not sure that I believe it.
How did Compaq manage to take business from IBM?
Either businesses were once more moral- I don't know since I was a child at the time- or they had good security.
Hell, how does ANY small company get big under your theory?
By being more ruthless than the competition- which gives you three ways: 1. By sueing their competitors out of existance. 2. By having good enough security to prevent big businesses from doing this to them. 3. By having enough investment money to survive the cutthroat business practices and by being more innovative than their competitors.
Then you're foolish to shop there.
No- because I no longer shop there. Haven't since the Great Awakening of 2001.
I think you're just racist, or at least short sighted, in insisting that something made in India or China means that it must be low quality.
You misundertand- I said anything made at a LOW WAGE is LOW QUALITY. India and China will be producing at the equivalent of Japan the day they treat their workers the same as the Japanese do; just as Japan was low quality until wages rose to first world standards.
The difference being that the WTO and the governments of India and China are working very hard to keep the actual workers in poverty- knowing that the business will quickly go elsewhere if wages rise.
I sincerly hope it isn't a niche case. Anything that is able to make lowest-cost sourcing a stupid decision is a damned good thing in my opinion.
Hmmm - I started a business 2 years ago. This year, our revenue is nearing $2 million.
Net or gross? And forget about revenue- what the big boys care about is market share. In your industry, what is your market share?
We did not have "enough money for complete financial security and independance". My partner and I had enough money for next month's rent. No "big guys" came and offered to buy us out; neither did any thugs come after us.
You're either not very competitive or not very successfull- regardless of your balance sheet. It could be you're in a low-competition industry that there aren't any major competitors for your business. It could be that you simply aren't taking enough market share YET to get noticed. Either way- it will happen eventually.
We took a huge risk, put our futures at stake and now you are telling me that my employees must make the same money that I'm making?
If you failed- do you really think your employees would have stayed employed? Heck, if you sold out rather than fail, do you really think your employees would stay employed?
The same employees who were working in steady jobs and had fun while we worked our tails out?
You employed people to have fun for you? On company time?
Why would you put up with such lazy employees that made you no money?
Conversely- say your employees make you a lot of money. Say one single employee was completely responsible for half your revenue- would it be fair to keep paying him the same as the rest are getting?
Price is ulitimatly what the consumer is willing to pay for a product. If the hypothetical WalMart you see is selling overpriced crap then they would go out of business or clean up their act when other retailers come to town.
No other retailers are allowed- because nobody can beat Walmart's method of blackmailing suppliers.
That's what I have seen in my town. Walmart almost drove Kmart away. Target has forced Walmart to clean up their stores now.
What I've seen is that Target has accepted Walmart's way of doing business- Walmart has forced Target to sell lower quality items than they were previously. But hey- it's just business right? I force you out of work, but it's not personal...like we believe THAT.
It did. They hid it a little better, but it still existed.
In a guild economy, you pay a Just Wage and you get a Fair Price. Period. The Fair Price is ALWAYS 10% over the Just Wage + the cost of the materials. It's never about supply and demand.
Most people in the US work for a small company.
And most- at some point in their careers- will be laid off when the owner sells out.
A significant number of Americans own their own company.
That number is getting smaller every year, and has been for decades now.
Nobody other than the black helicopter crowd sees mass murder of entrepreneurs as a possibility.
Really? Do you really think anybody would hesitate to use murder to eliminate a competitor?
Once in a while it happens, but not often enough to be concerned.
It doesn't have to happen very often to know that you take the offer before it gets worse.
Most large business sell to and buy from large businesses.
Until a small business threatens their market share- and then the guns come out.
One business might be helped by the murder of a small business, but the others are hurt, and they will take steps to prevent it - if it really happened.
All the other businesses in the controling oligarchy also benefit from the elimination of the competitor- so if done properly (not proveable, no way to walk back up the chain from the contractor) why would anybody take steps to prevent it? When Ford took out Tucker- how was GM harmed?
Take off your tin foil hat, which doesn't do anything. Look at the real world. Your claims to not match up with reality.
I've experienced it- take off your blindfold and look at reality. No big business is ever going to tolerate a little guy taking away their market share- and there is NOTHING preventing it.
Yes, but of course you can't get away with that which is why nobody does it. WallMart appartently does have a good price/value ratio, it's just that the price is low and (sometimes) so is the value.
Everything I've ever bought at a WallMart has been of the lowest possible quality and value for the cost. There's a reason why they're making a 40% profit margin on just about every item.
WallMart sucks, though, because they don't treat their employees like human beings.
Nobody making a profit does. Profit is against treating employees like human beings.
They also don't sell IBM blade servers, so I'm not sure how your original comment relates to this one.
Made in China and India is the hint of the day- it doesn't matter who is doing the outsourcing, outsourcing is always about lowest possible cost and destruction of quality to produce higher profits.
I've been lucky to have decent bosses that know what I do and have the budget to reward it. I'm still waiting for the certificate though.
Better hope the stockholders and stakeholders don't find out- or you'll quickly find that merit, like most other things related to value, is not something people are willing to invest in any more.
Sure, I agree it seems like this effort is in place, but I have a lot of faith in the worker, inevitably, they'll win, although practices like this make things worse.
Not without unions they won't- your example of India (which has strong worker protection laws) is good.
Do you know of any practices specifically that they are using to prevent this? So far they don't seem to be working, I was reading the other day about how the influx of money into India is causing the wages to slowly increase due to capitalist pressures. I'll see if I can dig up the article, I think it was in the Economist.
The two largest ones are the revaluing of currency (so that even though wages appear to rise, inflation always outstrips the wage increase) and using magazines like The Economist to publish propaganda to keep the proles from being too upset about their slavery.
Value loses to cost- every time. Any company hiring such IT services would quickly find themselves without investors in the current business climate.