I agree I'm paranoid. If you had your life threatened by these damned WTO and GATT creeps you would be paranoid too. I'm looking at what is actually happening, and I don't like it one bit. We're in a war and idiots like you who are nice and comfortable just don't see it.
No. People who are *compensated less highly* exist. Employing them isn't usually any cheaper. Education and quality are the main barriers, and while there is progress on those, the US is improving as well. I've seen studies on this; it usually is *not* cheaper to outsource engineering labor. This is why most American engineers remain employed.
Education and quality are better ANYWHERE else in the world than America- where all of the kids are just a bunch of druggies. Or at least, that's the argument given in Congress for the need for GATT and other treaties replacing American engineers.
You can't, is the thing, because sooner or later those lower paid engineers are going to want more money.
At which point you fire them and move to the next country down the list- after all who gives a rat's ass whether anybody can actually feed their family or have health insurance? Certainly NOT the business world, which ONLY cares about profit.
We outsource programming to Russians. Think they don't know what we get paid? Think they don't work to get their paycheck up towards our level?
And if they actually succeed, you'll just fire them and outsource to the Philipinos or the Indians or the code monkey in Kenya. Wherever it's cheapest, right?
No one is going to say "Exploit me, exploit me!", at least not in industries that require high amounts of intelligence and training. Except maybe CS majors; you guys seem to like to work for free. See, this is where the control systems thing comes in - the whole process is in a feedback configuration, and it will settle.
It's in a negative feedback configuration- and it will only settle when all of America is dead and the American Dream is long gone.
When trade was local, your competition was local, and the job went to the cheapest person in your town. Eventually, wages across the town more or less stabilized.
Yes- and where did they stabilize? Look at 1934- they stabilized at their lowest possible level. Only with forced government protectionism like minimum wage laws and progressive taxes and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act did we gain a middle class- which is now being actively dismantled for profit.
Then trade became national, and the same thing happened across your country. Finally, trade will become global, and the same thing will happen all across the world. Outsourcing is temporary; it only makes sense when there are large disparities in cost across geographical bounds. Those disparities will be reduced, inexorably. Way of the world.
Ok- so the disparities disappear and we all work for 24 cents an hour just like the Chinese do- what then?
You've succumbed to the American outsourcing paranoia. Look into what's actually happening. Or go to a psychologist and get some lithium, I don't really care.
Yes, I have- because I've seen the truth, and the truth is, this is a NEGATIVE feedback loop, not a postitive one.
There is also the factor of the tax laws which encourage outsourcing, and the lobbyist cabal which curry our legislators, and the legislators themselves... it's all one big circle of money. But I'm more interested in the effect of inhuman pressure on economic engines.
The tax laws, lobbyists, and the legislators themselves are all bought & paid for slaves of the MnCs. Take away the limited liability corporation, and the rest collapses in on itself from a lack of investor money- or better yet, we put the investors in jail for bribery.
The US should be rationing materials right now- we're in both a shooting war (The War on Terror) and an economic war (The Trade Deficit) and we're losing both due to importing more than we export. We need to stop importing- or at least cut it down to the same as we export- or we will lose both wars. Only rationing can accomplish that.
Good idea- but what do you do with the people who won't listen? And what about economic terrorists like Tata, Wipro, and Infosys who prefer to starve their victims rather than blow them up?
Let's see if we can have this discussion without descending to racial stereotyping or xenophobia.
Easy- just blame the people who have REALLY made it happen- the Multinational Corporations that claim to be American but are really just a bunch of pirates and traitors out to make a fast buck.
Because the United States isn't just one country- it's a Bannana Republic made up of plantation owners and slaves. What is good for the plantation owners (" world economy and taking over every 3rd world country out there") is not good for the slaves ("when it starts to happen and our job market spreads out, they cry foul and pump up the patriotism"). In other words, American MnCs are neither patriotic or in fact particularily American- they're traitors.
Is that business and war are not dissimilar- and if I want to compete, I've got to use EVERY resource available to me.
The big corporations don't worry about killing people- neither should I.
India and China have solved their health care problem with socialized medicine- we need to be implementing it to and taking this cost away from businesses and consumers.
If somebody competes with Microsoft, they are either bought out or their offices get hit with incedeary devices, therfore if an H-1b holder competes with me I should kill him.
If anybody threatens your life- destroy theirs in return.
If anybody threatens your livelihood, make sure theirs is equally threatened or totally destroyed.
That's what these 4 years have taught me- what have they taught you?
On transaction costs- the advent of VVOIP and the bandwidth needed for it is removing tranaction costs, slowly but surely. One day, a conference call with everybody working out of their homes will be as good as a face-to-face meeting.
The second, knowledge transfer, is somewhat harder- and as long as we keep the number of allowable H-1bs down it will stay hard. But let corporations bring in unlimited numbers of guest workers, to work in that trusted environment, then when they have soaked up enough of the process, send them home to Bangalore to be a project manager.
So while I'd agree that these barriers are somewhat high, neither is insurmountable. Meat space isn't very important now- and will become less important as time goes on.
1. The only reason automotive is stable is because of government interferance in where cars can be made.
2. The only reason the engine-tranmission development hasn't been outsourced is because there's a quota on importing engines and transmissions from other countries.
3. Most engineers who haven't been protected by the government in some way no longer have any benefits at all, beyond toilet paper that says "stock option" on it.
Outsourcing is a temporary problem; the differentials that make it currently profitable will be reduced eventually.
Yes they will- the falling dollar will take care of them, and then India and China will call in their large amounts of bonds they currently have invested in the United States and will be able to take over completely without firing a shot.
And I'd argue that "unprofitable to hire Americans", anyway. More and more, companies seem to be going to "let's have somebody in every single timezone."
Cheaper people in US Timezones exist in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Chile, not to mention half a dozen other bannana republics. The only think keeping them from going there now is language and education- and Brazil and Mexico are working on that.
If you can have 3 engineers working, one after the other, you can reduce your cycle time, which is often a better way to profit than to outsource everything to one cheap location, even if 2 of the 3 engineers are US/European and highly paid.
And if you can do this WITHOUT the 2 highly paid engineers, doing it all with lower paid engineers? The United States ain't the only thing in this timezone. But of course, we can always do what your industry did and fall back on government protectionism.
Too unbelieveable:-) At least Stewart is more believeable- and he even ADMITS that his news stories are fake (though it took me quite a while to realize what the studio audience of The Daily Show already knew: Whenever somebody is "live on location" it means that they are on the other side of the stage standing in front of a great big TV set showing the "location".)
I'm more of a distributist than a socialist- but I find Pat Buchanon extremely scary. Here's a guy widely known as a fascist- and I even agree with him on his close the borders rhetoric (as a distributist with socialist tendencies, it just makes the resource distribution problems have a lot fewer variables if you limit outside interferance in your economy).
In more ways than one- if Stewart ends up there- who is of an equal stature for Comedy Central to replace their fake news anchor with? Maybe Mo Rocha (sp? Don't remember his last name) or Candice Bergman, but there isn't anybody I can think of that would do as good of a job as Stewart has done with the fake news.
Well if Marxist Hacker is as marxist as his name would indicate, then for ideological reasons he probably believes everything is a commodity... at least my understanding of Marx's reasoning about the fall of the capitalist system is his belief that price competition between competing capitalists would erode profit to the point where profit would no longer exist and there then there would be no capitalists.
I'm not, I'm a distributist more- and I disagree with Marx because I think that we've entered a new phase of capitalism, one where labor costs will be minimized to increase profits and competition will be dealt with not on price to the consumer but on acquisition of one's competitors.
I agree with you - I think that most software development has always been service based rather than product based, and there are always going to be areas where people are going to prefer local developers to foreigners.
It's the saving grace- but to me it's the bazaar vs cathedral again; only a few people can afford cathedrals, therfore the larger market goes to the products that can be sold in the bazaar.
If subsistence-level existence is all you think humanity should aspire to. And does the average North American (or European) really eat ten times the food they require? No.
No, they WASTE 10x the food they require, they only eat a small fraction of that, about 3x the food they require- which is why obesity is epidemic in North America, AND why our supermarkets throw out half of their incoming produce.
Yes, New York and Los Angeles grow a lot of food.
Maybe not now- but the Orange and Lemon groves of the Los Angeles Valley were once downright legendary- and the Hudson River Valley was the breadbasket of the original 13 colonies. Why don't you bother reading some HISTORY sometime?
What are you trying to say with the above statement, other than "I am incapable of composing a coherent thought"?
What I did say- that the apparent overpopulation problem is really an unfair resource distribution problem in disguise. What are you, illiterate?
my personal belief is that software development is moving away from the manufacturing "boxed product" mindset to service provider mindset.
And in so doing, is destroying the basic intent of a Turing Machine. But hey- software should only be for the rich, right?
if you believe that software is a boxed product and a prospective customer can pick any one of a number of nearly identical boxes based purely on price, then i can see why you claim there is no reason those box manufacturers could not all move to a region where making boxes is the cheapest.
However, even as a service product, thanks to the Internet there's no reason whatsoever that the service can't be done halfway around the world.
however, if you believe that software can be provided as a service, and that software providers should be responsive to their customers needs, as i and as the companies i have worked for do, then there are numerous benefits to being located near your customers which outweigh any cost savings that could be gained by moving your company halfway around the globe.
However, there's absolutely no benefit to your customers being located in the United States at all. That's where it all falls down. Companies that are based in the United States pay higher taxes and are getting ripped off for being here- they'd be better off in the Cayman Islands.
i may be wrong on this, but i believe that 30 year loans are a fairly recent phenomenon. the reason that 30 year loans exist is that the sums involved are to high to pay off in a shorter time period, regardless of your job or occupation. it has nothing to do with how long you are expected to work at your current employer. ask any mortgage broker and they will tell you that something like 98% of home buyers will sell or refinance their house within 7 years (hence the surge in popularity in ARMs and interest only mortgages in the last 5-10 years).
I'm talking about the ORIGINAL reason for the 30 year loan- which has been around since the 1890s. Plenty of people took out 30 year loans on houses after WWII and were able to pay them off in that time frame.
:-) I should change that to distributist- since that's the economic system I'm more for- but nobody knows what it is. Marxism, distributism, and capitalism all have their flaws- but you'd think that being nice, smart, and inventive people, we'd find a way to get the best parts of all of those to work and punish people who do the worst parts of all of them.
Either that- or he should forgo the nuke, just get a lot of sticks of dynamite, and plant them under this landslide just to see how fast we can evacuate the Eastern Seaboard.
If all we needed was TIME- then there's no problem as we have some 5 billion potential workers out of the nearly 7 billion on the planet. We've got a surplus of working time- that isn't the problem.
There are three divergent real problems here- #1 is the fact of the aforementioned surplus means purely in supply vs demand terms, the comparative advantage of any given individual is basically $1/day- the wages in most countries in the world. Problem #2 is the fact that some 350 million of us think we deserve to have our luxuries so much that we're eating up the resources that should be feeding 3 billion of us. Problem #3 is that we tend to congregate where we grow our food until we exceed the food supply; we really need to spread out a bit more and get more decentralized. All of these problems make it APPEAR we have a population problem, when in reality all we have is a resource distribution problem.
Heck, you already have that in the 2000, 4000, and 6000 series models. What is 802.11b and Bluetooth if not small scale ham radios sending data in an unlicensed band?
I stand by my opinion that the market will not support the price hikes necessary to go "America Only". The majority of the free world wants the best product for the lowest price. If it turns out that eleven year olds working for one bowl of rice every three days can get America the industrial materials to build new schools or a particular plant for the newest cancer medication, then you can be sure that the whip is going to be cracked harder.
I agree- thus it needs to be forced. The market, left to it's own devices, is an amoral evil beast that needs to be tamed. Even Adam Smith said that the invisibile hand cares NOTHING about the workers or consumers.
It wouldn't be hard to produce everything we need domestically. Coming up with five to ten times our current income to scrape out an existance is another story.
Ah, that part isn't hard- simply revalue the money supply. But it would take an iron fist, lots of guns, and a willingness to let the majority of millionaires be poor to do it.
if this were really true, they'd already all be gone.
Ok- so why do you think a few are staying? Near as I can tell, the only ones that are staying are the ones that have underestimated the ammount of time good software design takes- and those will be going bankrupt long before the two year standard upgrade cycle is complete. Microsoft and the rest go offshore.
there's no such thing as a 30 year job in any field to go with a 30 year mortgage.
The reason there is such a thing as a 30 year loan is that was at one time the expectation- you got out of school at 18 or 26, worked your butt off for the next 30 years at a single company, then retired. Your parents had this opportunity. Our grandparents had this opportunity. We don't- but the question is why?
if you take out a mortgage, or a car loan, or any long term loan, this is a risk you take regardless of preofession.
True enough- but in just about any other profession you can be assured of working for a reasonable period of time before having to look for another job.
will acknowledge that at the moment the risks in my field are higher than the risks in many others,
Now that fits my experience- damned high risk to ask a wage slave to assume.
however, in 3, 5, 10, or 15 years, that may not (and likely will not) be the case.
Since there doesn't seem to be anything stopping the outsourcing trend right now- I'd say in 3 to 5 years there won't be any programmers left in the United States at all.
Uh, everything you mentioned is a luxury. It's a want, not a need. The basic needs of humanity are very simple- food, clothing, shelter, water, medical care. Problem is, of those, only three are still "Assembled in America", and of those, only two come from raw materials found in America. (Some of the rest come from American Raw Materials also- but are assembled elsewhere, like Alabama Cotton being shipped to Bangladesh to make Levis, that sort of thing). Personally, I already purchase Fair Trade coffee, and if Fair Trade Computers were available I'd choose them over the standard Taiwan junk hardware that I have to replace every year. It's possible to make paper and ink from in-country sources (we did it for upwards of a century and a half) and it wouldn't be that hard to actually manufacture AM/FM clock radios here if there was a market for them that the boycott produced.
But like I said- quotas and tarriffs are FAR more effective tools than boycotts for changing this behavior.
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I agree I'm paranoid. If you had your life threatened by these damned WTO and GATT creeps you would be paranoid too. I'm looking at what is actually happening, and I don't like it one bit. We're in a war and idiots like you who are nice and comfortable just don't see it.
No. People who are *compensated less highly* exist. Employing them isn't usually any cheaper. Education and quality are the main barriers, and while there is progress on those, the US is improving as well. I've seen studies on this; it usually is *not* cheaper to outsource engineering labor. This is why most American engineers remain employed.
Education and quality are better ANYWHERE else in the world than America- where all of the kids are just a bunch of druggies. Or at least, that's the argument given in Congress for the need for GATT and other treaties replacing American engineers.
You can't, is the thing, because sooner or later those lower paid engineers are going to want more money.
At which point you fire them and move to the next country down the list- after all who gives a rat's ass whether anybody can actually feed their family or have health insurance? Certainly NOT the business world, which ONLY cares about profit.
We outsource programming to Russians. Think they don't know what we get paid? Think they don't work to get their paycheck up towards our level?
And if they actually succeed, you'll just fire them and outsource to the Philipinos or the Indians or the code monkey in Kenya. Wherever it's cheapest, right?
No one is going to say "Exploit me, exploit me!", at least not in industries that require high amounts of intelligence and training. Except maybe CS majors; you guys seem to like to work for free. See, this is where the control systems thing comes in - the whole process is in a feedback configuration, and it will settle.
It's in a negative feedback configuration- and it will only settle when all of America is dead and the American Dream is long gone.
When trade was local, your competition was local, and the job went to the cheapest person in your town. Eventually, wages across the town more or less stabilized.
Yes- and where did they stabilize? Look at 1934- they stabilized at their lowest possible level. Only with forced government protectionism like minimum wage laws and progressive taxes and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act did we gain a middle class- which is now being actively dismantled for profit.
Then trade became national, and the same thing happened across your country. Finally, trade will become global, and the same thing will happen all across the world. Outsourcing is temporary; it only makes sense when there are large disparities in cost across geographical bounds. Those disparities will be reduced, inexorably. Way of the world.
Ok- so the disparities disappear and we all work for 24 cents an hour just like the Chinese do- what then?
You've succumbed to the American outsourcing paranoia. Look into what's actually happening. Or go to a psychologist and get some lithium, I don't really care.
Yes, I have- because I've seen the truth, and the truth is, this is a NEGATIVE feedback loop, not a postitive one.
There is also the factor of the tax laws which encourage outsourcing, and the lobbyist cabal which curry our legislators, and the legislators themselves... it's all one big circle of money. But I'm more interested in the effect of inhuman pressure on economic engines.
The tax laws, lobbyists, and the legislators themselves are all bought & paid for slaves of the MnCs. Take away the limited liability corporation, and the rest collapses in on itself from a lack of investor money- or better yet, we put the investors in jail for bribery.
The US should be rationing materials right now- we're in both a shooting war (The War on Terror) and an economic war (The Trade Deficit) and we're losing both due to importing more than we export. We need to stop importing- or at least cut it down to the same as we export- or we will lose both wars. Only rationing can accomplish that.
Good idea- but what do you do with the people who won't listen? And what about economic terrorists like Tata, Wipro, and Infosys who prefer to starve their victims rather than blow them up?
Let's see if we can have this discussion without descending to racial stereotyping or xenophobia.
Easy- just blame the people who have REALLY made it happen- the Multinational Corporations that claim to be American but are really just a bunch of pirates and traitors out to make a fast buck.
Because the United States isn't just one country- it's a Bannana Republic made up of plantation owners and slaves. What is good for the plantation owners (" world economy and taking over every 3rd world country out there") is not good for the slaves ("when it starts to happen and our job market spreads out, they cry foul and pump up the patriotism"). In other words, American MnCs are neither patriotic or in fact particularily American- they're traitors.
Is that business and war are not dissimilar- and if I want to compete, I've got to use EVERY resource available to me.
The big corporations don't worry about killing people- neither should I.
India and China have solved their health care problem with socialized medicine- we need to be implementing it to and taking this cost away from businesses and consumers.
If somebody competes with Microsoft, they are either bought out or their offices get hit with incedeary devices, therfore if an H-1b holder competes with me I should kill him.
If anybody threatens your life- destroy theirs in return.
If anybody threatens your livelihood, make sure theirs is equally threatened or totally destroyed.
That's what these 4 years have taught me- what have they taught you?
On transaction costs- the advent of VVOIP and the bandwidth needed for it is removing tranaction costs, slowly but surely. One day, a conference call with everybody working out of their homes will be as good as a face-to-face meeting.
The second, knowledge transfer, is somewhat harder- and as long as we keep the number of allowable H-1bs down it will stay hard. But let corporations bring in unlimited numbers of guest workers, to work in that trusted environment, then when they have soaked up enough of the process, send them home to Bangalore to be a project manager.
So while I'd agree that these barriers are somewhat high, neither is insurmountable. Meat space isn't very important now- and will become less important as time goes on.
1. The only reason automotive is stable is because of government interferance in where cars can be made.
2. The only reason the engine-tranmission development hasn't been outsourced is because there's a quota on importing engines and transmissions from other countries.
3. Most engineers who haven't been protected by the government in some way no longer have any benefits at all, beyond toilet paper that says "stock option" on it.
Outsourcing is a temporary problem; the differentials that make it currently profitable will be reduced eventually.
Yes they will- the falling dollar will take care of them, and then India and China will call in their large amounts of bonds they currently have invested in the United States and will be able to take over completely without firing a shot.
And I'd argue that "unprofitable to hire Americans", anyway. More and more, companies seem to be going to "let's have somebody in every single timezone."
Cheaper people in US Timezones exist in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Chile, not to mention half a dozen other bannana republics. The only think keeping them from going there now is language and education- and Brazil and Mexico are working on that.
If you can have 3 engineers working, one after the other, you can reduce your cycle time, which is often a better way to profit than to outsource everything to one cheap location, even if 2 of the 3 engineers are US/European and highly paid.
And if you can do this WITHOUT the 2 highly paid engineers, doing it all with lower paid engineers? The United States ain't the only thing in this timezone. But of course, we can always do what your industry did and fall back on government protectionism.
Too unbelieveable :-) At least Stewart is more believeable- and he even ADMITS that his news stories are fake (though it took me quite a while to realize what the studio audience of The Daily Show already knew: Whenever somebody is "live on location" it means that they are on the other side of the stage standing in front of a great big TV set showing the "location".)
I'm more of a distributist than a socialist- but I find Pat Buchanon extremely scary. Here's a guy widely known as a fascist- and I even agree with him on his close the borders rhetoric (as a distributist with socialist tendencies, it just makes the resource distribution problems have a lot fewer variables if you limit outside interferance in your economy).
In more ways than one- if Stewart ends up there- who is of an equal stature for Comedy Central to replace their fake news anchor with? Maybe Mo Rocha (sp? Don't remember his last name) or Candice Bergman, but there isn't anybody I can think of that would do as good of a job as Stewart has done with the fake news.
Well if Marxist Hacker is as marxist as his name would indicate, then for ideological reasons he probably believes everything is a commodity... at least my understanding of Marx's reasoning about the fall of the capitalist system is his belief that price competition between competing capitalists would erode profit to the point where profit would no longer exist and there then there would be no capitalists.
I'm not, I'm a distributist more- and I disagree with Marx because I think that we've entered a new phase of capitalism, one where labor costs will be minimized to increase profits and competition will be dealt with not on price to the consumer but on acquisition of one's competitors.
I agree with you - I think that most software development has always been service based rather than product based, and there are always going to be areas where people are going to prefer local developers to foreigners.
It's the saving grace- but to me it's the bazaar vs cathedral again; only a few people can afford cathedrals, therfore the larger market goes to the products that can be sold in the bazaar.
If subsistence-level existence is all you think humanity should aspire to. And does the average North American (or European) really eat ten times the food they require? No.
No, they WASTE 10x the food they require, they only eat a small fraction of that, about 3x the food they require- which is why obesity is epidemic in North America, AND why our supermarkets throw out half of their incoming produce.
Yes, New York and Los Angeles grow a lot of food.
Maybe not now- but the Orange and Lemon groves of the Los Angeles Valley were once downright legendary- and the Hudson River Valley was the breadbasket of the original 13 colonies. Why don't you bother reading some HISTORY sometime?
What are you trying to say with the above statement, other than "I am incapable of composing a coherent thought"?
What I did say- that the apparent overpopulation problem is really an unfair resource distribution problem in disguise. What are you, illiterate?
And guess what- when those old people die off, young people will replace them. The important thing is keeping jobs here.
I think you meant to reply to the grandparent- I actually agree with you.
Ah, yes- I forgot the C-descended unix languages that I don't use. Thank you.
my personal belief is that software development is moving away from the manufacturing "boxed product" mindset to service provider mindset.
And in so doing, is destroying the basic intent of a Turing Machine. But hey- software should only be for the rich, right?
if you believe that software is a boxed product and a prospective customer can pick any one of a number of nearly identical boxes based purely on price, then i can see why you claim there is no reason those box manufacturers could not all move to a region where making boxes is the cheapest.
However, even as a service product, thanks to the Internet there's no reason whatsoever that the service can't be done halfway around the world.
however, if you believe that software can be provided as a service, and that software providers should be responsive to their customers needs, as i and as the companies i have worked for do, then there are numerous benefits to being located near your customers which outweigh any cost savings that could be gained by moving your company halfway around the globe.
However, there's absolutely no benefit to your customers being located in the United States at all. That's where it all falls down. Companies that are based in the United States pay higher taxes and are getting ripped off for being here- they'd be better off in the Cayman Islands.
i may be wrong on this, but i believe that 30 year loans are a fairly recent phenomenon. the reason that 30 year loans exist is that the sums involved are to high to pay off in a shorter time period, regardless of your job or occupation. it has nothing to do with how long you are expected to work at your current employer. ask any mortgage broker and they will tell you that something like 98% of home buyers will sell or refinance their house within 7 years (hence the surge in popularity in ARMs and interest only mortgages in the last 5-10 years).
I'm talking about the ORIGINAL reason for the 30 year loan- which has been around since the 1890s. Plenty of people took out 30 year loans on houses after WWII and were able to pay them off in that time frame.
:-) I should change that to distributist- since that's the economic system I'm more for- but nobody knows what it is. Marxism, distributism, and capitalism all have their flaws- but you'd think that being nice, smart, and inventive people, we'd find a way to get the best parts of all of those to work and punish people who do the worst parts of all of them.
Either that- or he should forgo the nuke, just get a lot of sticks of dynamite, and plant them under this landslide just to see how fast we can evacuate the Eastern Seaboard.
If all we needed was TIME- then there's no problem as we have some 5 billion potential workers out of the nearly 7 billion on the planet. We've got a surplus of working time- that isn't the problem.
There are three divergent real problems here- #1 is the fact of the aforementioned surplus means purely in supply vs demand terms, the comparative advantage of any given individual is basically $1/day- the wages in most countries in the world. Problem #2 is the fact that some 350 million of us think we deserve to have our luxuries so much that we're eating up the resources that should be feeding 3 billion of us. Problem #3 is that we tend to congregate where we grow our food until we exceed the food supply; we really need to spread out a bit more and get more decentralized. All of these problems make it APPEAR we have a population problem, when in reality all we have is a resource distribution problem.
Heck, you already have that in the 2000, 4000, and 6000 series models. What is 802.11b and Bluetooth if not small scale ham radios sending data in an unlicensed band?
Very relevant to those of us who decry the day IBM sold out it's PC Division to Great Wall Computers in China.
I stand by my opinion that the market will not support the price hikes necessary to go "America Only". The majority of the free world wants the best product for the lowest price. If it turns out that eleven year olds working for one bowl of rice every three days can get America the industrial materials to build new schools or a particular plant for the newest cancer medication, then you can be sure that the whip is going to be cracked harder.
I agree- thus it needs to be forced. The market, left to it's own devices, is an amoral evil beast that needs to be tamed. Even Adam Smith said that the invisibile hand cares NOTHING about the workers or consumers.
It wouldn't be hard to produce everything we need domestically. Coming up with five to ten times our current income to scrape out an existance is another story.
Ah, that part isn't hard- simply revalue the money supply. But it would take an iron fist, lots of guns, and a willingness to let the majority of millionaires be poor to do it.
if this were really true, they'd already all be gone.
Ok- so why do you think a few are staying? Near as I can tell, the only ones that are staying are the ones that have underestimated the ammount of time good software design takes- and those will be going bankrupt long before the two year standard upgrade cycle is complete. Microsoft and the rest go offshore.
there's no such thing as a 30 year job in any field to go with a 30 year mortgage.
The reason there is such a thing as a 30 year loan is that was at one time the expectation- you got out of school at 18 or 26, worked your butt off for the next 30 years at a single company, then retired. Your parents had this opportunity. Our grandparents had this opportunity. We don't- but the question is why?
if you take out a mortgage, or a car loan, or any long term loan, this is a risk you take regardless of preofession.
True enough- but in just about any other profession you can be assured of working for a reasonable period of time before having to look for another job.
will acknowledge that at the moment the risks in my field are higher than the risks in many others,
Now that fits my experience- damned high risk to ask a wage slave to assume.
however, in 3, 5, 10, or 15 years, that may not (and likely will not) be the case.
Since there doesn't seem to be anything stopping the outsourcing trend right now- I'd say in 3 to 5 years there won't be any programmers left in the United States at all.
Uh, everything you mentioned is a luxury. It's a want, not a need. The basic needs of humanity are very simple- food, clothing, shelter, water, medical care. Problem is, of those, only three are still "Assembled in America", and of those, only two come from raw materials found in America. (Some of the rest come from American Raw Materials also- but are assembled elsewhere, like Alabama Cotton being shipped to Bangladesh to make Levis, that sort of thing). Personally, I already purchase Fair Trade coffee, and if Fair Trade Computers were available I'd choose them over the standard Taiwan junk hardware that I have to replace every year. It's possible to make paper and ink from in-country sources (we did it for upwards of a century and a half) and it wouldn't be that hard to actually manufacture AM/FM clock radios here if there was a market for them that the boycott produced.
But like I said- quotas and tarriffs are FAR more effective tools than boycotts for changing this behavior.