That would be great except for one thing; the employers in this country are just as likely to ship the "advanced machinist" jobs out to another country too. If, given a choice, I buy the foreign low-cost machine tool, somewhere in the US I am getting rid of an entire department full of high-paying jobs, and replacing them with low-paying jobs in another country. Perhaps in the very short term I am gaining...but I don't imagine, as a company producing something in the US, that I will get many orders from India. So the normal cycle of things turns into a one-way street.
Based on experience, those jobs never manifest themselves. The town I am from went from being a "factory town" to a town full of public-assistance recipients and Wal-Mart employees. My point is not that there won't be jobs somewhere...but they are either A.Woefully underpaid and under-benefitted or B.Not available until the next generation comes along.
Economics and Capitalism takes time. In that time, we have laid waste to an entire generation that will never know what it's like to be financially secure or be able to save for their future. If I was making macro-economic decisions, yes, I would turn down India's offer of low-cost machine tools, and I do the equivalent often in picking U.S. producers where I can. But the way the world is going, there won't be any before long. Another thing that I have often noticed is that people are all for outsourcing and "eliminating grunt work"...until it eliminates their job and they are left struggling to survive.
"Your error is one of composition: simply because one programmer in the U.S. is displaced does not mean that there is a net loss in economic welfare in the U.S."
I am speaking of the devastation of an entire generation, the disappearance of an age when a person could complete secular schools and have a chance at a decent job. One programmer may lose his job and not have an effect on economic welfare, but entire segments of the (US) economy have been wiped out by outsourcing.
"The people in the U.S. need to find other ways to employ their labor where the rewards are higher. Just like they went into software because they could get jobs there in the past."
Where are the jobs going to come from? Everything is outsourced as fast as people can discover new ways to produce it now. I am against trade barriers on pricipal; but I have seen firsthand the devastation of an entire community from outsourcing. Perhaps, on a global scale, we are increasing the size of the pie...but at the same time, we are creating an underclass in this country of people identical to those in India; we are lowering our median level of prosperity, while increasing the average level. More people work for $5 per hour while a shrinking percentage are multi-billionaires. It is the Wal-Mart effect and the concentration of wealth...and it is corporate greed driving the entire thing.
Overall, until I see something other than outsourcing un-employing millions of people in this country, my opinion of it will not change.
At least we can have a somewhat civilized discussion of this...
I am talking about tool and die makers, not just machinists...T&D's are the elite of the elite machinists, highly skilled and specialized. The elimination of apprenticeship programs and the exporting of jobs has led to their virtual elimination in this country, and now many companies are hurting for it (Caterpillar Tractor Company for one of them)...but they are much happier sending the jobs elsewhere. That's fine and dandy. I say because of that, we are a weaker country, becoming more dependent on others in the world. We have exported our prosperity, you might say. As this progresses, we will soon be nothing but an administrative shell of a country. We cannot sustain a great nation on politics alone.
Well we can produce less as we ship it all overseas. I have been in the manufacturing industry in the past, and one of the larger problems is becoming finding tool and die makers. After all, it's nice to internet this and program that, but somebody has to make the die that stamps the case out for your computer. In the 80's, apprenticeship programs were eliminated left and right, as we would theoratically never need such "old style" skills anymore. Things were shipped overseas and the entire skill pool in this country evaporated. I can see the same thing happening across the board. Just extract this situation to its logical conclusion; every job here is outsourced to India/China/etc. What is left in the US?
I believe preserving this country's standing as a dominant world power is morality enough...certainly equal to the morality of putting a hard-working American out on the street after 30 years of labor for a company. If it were only a question of morality, we would be dividing up our cumulative wealth and spreading it equally about the earth; but the reality is that is we MUST not do that, lest we be equally divided in national strength.
If people in Massachusetts were trying to maintain their standard of living, and Michigan were a country where major killers were things like starvation and dysentary, I would see no problem with banning car imports from Detroit. All of this outsourcing is serving to do one thing; balance the economies of the U.S. and India/China. They gain, and we lose.
Don't forget the fact that not only will they allow you to watch movies on a tiny screen, they'll cost you $7 a pop, and only be watchable for 48 hours before they evaporate...the real purpose of DRM in this case is not to prevent copying, it is to facilitate per-view fees and the "rental model" for movies.
Then again, an "anti-active" IT director is spending over $150,000 per year on nothing other than Microsoft licenses for things like Terminal Server (that they don't use) and such. The district is in the midst of huge budget reductions, but, of course, we can't touch the IT budget, because so much of it is "mandatory." I think that they've already hit the iceberg and the captain is still screaming "full speed ahead!"
This is a school district, so he didn't start any business...he just took over the reigns and started spending money at an astronomical rate. But I think he should do more for his $90,000 per year than simply call other people in to fix the problem...and get taken advantage of when the next "big upgrade" comes along.
Since I'm always posting about education, I can report that if you go into an education field (ie Technical Director) things are still going like gangbusters. In a town of less than 20,000 people, my former boss is making $90,000 a year doing little more than occupying a chair. He has little computer knowledge and depends on "consultants" for his duties. A good job if you can get it...but seriously, there is a great need for "good" computer people in education. Not ones that can toe the Microsoft line, but ones that can TRULY innovate and turn over the festering pile of compost that educational computing has become.
You're not thinking of the Fiero, you're thinking of the Vega. The Fiero's fuel tank runs down the center of the car, and is probably the most well-protected fuel tank of any production car. The Fiero tended to burn for two reasons; the 2.5-liter four-cylinder "Iron Duke" engine had a bad valve cover gasket problem that leaked onto the exhaust manifold, and also had a tendency to throw rods through the sides of its block. Since the rest of the car was somewhat combustible plastic (except for the steel space frame) when they burned, they burned good. But the Fiero was simply a poorly-marketed and poorly-engineering-supported vehicle that could have been so much more. But in conclusion, the Fiero was not a tap-the-rear-end-and-we-explode car...
That's unfortunately one of the biggest worries that nobody seems to pay attention to. India and Pakistan have huge concentrations of troops on the Kashmir border, and have come minutes from full-scale confrontation dozens of times. I suspect that, while we have armed Pakistan quite well with F-16's, the Indian Air Force will rapidly sweep them aside with nothing more than numbers. Indian ground forces seriously outnumber their Pakistani counterparts as well. The end result will be a route of Pakistani forces on land, perhaps the threatening or encirclement of Karachi. Will Musharraf push the button? Almost certainly. The biggest question would be how long he would wait. Paraphrasing a cold war phrase, would the Pakistanis "prefer red to dead?" Any nuclear exchange will kill millions, and instantly devastate American companies that have disgorged their entire R&D and customer service departments to this region of the world. How well would HP function given the total breakdown of society and basic services in India and Pakistan?
It hasn't been. But it has been well taken care of...and certainly not abused. The Fiero's problem was that the demographic it hit (not the one it was AIMING at) tended to be hard on the cars. One person I know that had another 84 skidded off of a dry curve at nearly 100 mph, flipped end-over-end numerous times, and walked away with nary a scratch. Fieros are much-maligned, but their very advanced semi-space-frame construction will happily sacrifice itself to save its occupants. Did I mention that I now have a V-8 in my Fiero? With the stock transmission, too. The thing drives and handles wonderfully, and will click off low 11-second quarter miles with no sweat. V8 Archie
Not to disparage your Toyota, but my 1984 Fiero (one of the "bad" ones) has 175,000 miles on it...and I love every minute of it. It is a car that could have been so much more, had it been taken in the right direction by people other than Roger Smith and the like...
I can equally see the ability for this to be misused...but by allowing the fine-hair splitting of a law, we are basically subject to the tyranny of those best able to afford a high-priced lawyer. Justice is now given to those with the biggest checkbooks, not those most deserving of it. If your lawyer can split finer than mine, you win! The law is already nothing but a theater for show trials...unless you are broke, in which case it is a theater of injustice. Just watch people like Kenneth Lay get off virtually unfazed...while an ordinary street bum gets put in jail for 5 years for stealing some food.
By the way, I have dealt with a very, very large patent case, the goal of which was to put a tax on any computer-based system using a hierarchal method of selection. The company (which I worked for) had the patent years earlier, and meekly submitted it to a group of high-powered lawyers. It was the lawyers, not the company, that came up with a dozen angles on the initial idea, and eventually decided to sue virtually everybody on the internet (since, after all, directories are hierarchal!) The lawyers were pushing the SUE SUE SUE mentality, and the company simply held on to their tail as they galloped into the legal sunset. Before I left, they had gotten $1,000,000 "introductory" settlements from at least seven MAJOR companies...I don't know where their lawsuits are now.
It all gets back to lawyers...who are bored. Perhaps if we gave them shovels and told them to make a hole, they would have less time to create frivolous lawsuits. Seriously, though, it might be time to expand the definitions of barratry, and start prosecuting people...although then you end up having lawsuits about lawsuits...
I will readily admit that F4 was the deepest sim I've ever used...but then again, the ability to turn everything off, start in the air, and run around blasting everything in sight was still there. But the point of the original poster was that this was a monumental achievement; I can remember playing the first F4 "demo" way back in 1996...it completely swamped my 3D-less Pentium 100, but I knew there was something good there. Today, with my 2200 MHz computer, it is no less enjoyable. Remember what kind of games we were playing back in 1996...Quake I was high techology back then, and Falcon has yet to be equaled.
What's much worse is the Annoyware/Spyware software that is infecting millions of computers. In the school district I am responsible for, dozens of computers are filled with things like SaveNow, GAIN, n-Case, and many other programs that serve little purpose other than to annoy. Some of them are even extortionate; a program spawned itself and informed the user "Would you like to remove popups?" and prompted them to BUY some rediculous software....when their software was causing them in the first place. Programs like Spybot S&D and AdAware are hard-pressed to keep up with this stuff...and some of it, like RapidBlast, for instance, are almost polymorphic in the ways their authors continually change their methods of "infection." One particular method was to spawn two processes of the same thing, and order the second process to respawn the first if it was somehow terminated. Sneaky criminals, is what they are.
I know you're being sarcastic, but I really, really want to see what Carly Fiorina has done that a monkey, a voice-recognition system, and a word processor could not have...
I think has been done deliberately and accidentally already...With the level of supposedly "open" software they are touting for SVR5 or whatever they call it, I can't see "good" Linux code NOT getting into there somewhere.
At the rate we're exporting entire segments of the economy overseas, I wouldn't imagine that we have 30 years left. Not to mention the government is rapidly disintegrating financially. The money of this country is rapidly condensing into a very, very few people, while the majority are like a gas giant orbiting a black hole...slowly being drained.
It's because Intel, and AMD processors too, are getting hotter by the generation. Their heat density is rapidly approaching that of a nuclear reactor, literally! At the rate that Intel says it wants to ramp clock speeds, they will be much, much hotter.
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That would be great except for one thing; the employers in this country are just as likely to ship the "advanced machinist" jobs out to another country too. If, given a choice, I buy the foreign low-cost machine tool, somewhere in the US I am getting rid of an entire department full of high-paying jobs, and replacing them with low-paying jobs in another country. Perhaps in the very short term I am gaining...but I don't imagine, as a company producing something in the US, that I will get many orders from India. So the normal cycle of things turns into a one-way street.
Based on experience, those jobs never manifest themselves. The town I am from went from being a "factory town" to a town full of public-assistance recipients and Wal-Mart employees. My point is not that there won't be jobs somewhere...but they are either A.Woefully underpaid and under-benefitted or B.Not available until the next generation comes along. Economics and Capitalism takes time. In that time, we have laid waste to an entire generation that will never know what it's like to be financially secure or be able to save for their future. If I was making macro-economic decisions, yes, I would turn down India's offer of low-cost machine tools, and I do the equivalent often in picking U.S. producers where I can. But the way the world is going, there won't be any before long. Another thing that I have often noticed is that people are all for outsourcing and "eliminating grunt work"...until it eliminates their job and they are left struggling to survive.
"Your error is one of composition: simply because one programmer in the U.S. is displaced does not mean that there is a net loss in economic welfare in the U.S." I am speaking of the devastation of an entire generation, the disappearance of an age when a person could complete secular schools and have a chance at a decent job. One programmer may lose his job and not have an effect on economic welfare, but entire segments of the (US) economy have been wiped out by outsourcing. "The people in the U.S. need to find other ways to employ their labor where the rewards are higher. Just like they went into software because they could get jobs there in the past." Where are the jobs going to come from? Everything is outsourced as fast as people can discover new ways to produce it now. I am against trade barriers on pricipal; but I have seen firsthand the devastation of an entire community from outsourcing. Perhaps, on a global scale, we are increasing the size of the pie...but at the same time, we are creating an underclass in this country of people identical to those in India; we are lowering our median level of prosperity, while increasing the average level. More people work for $5 per hour while a shrinking percentage are multi-billionaires. It is the Wal-Mart effect and the concentration of wealth...and it is corporate greed driving the entire thing. Overall, until I see something other than outsourcing un-employing millions of people in this country, my opinion of it will not change. At least we can have a somewhat civilized discussion of this...
I as as much of a misanthropist as the next person...but I doubt there's much we can do about overpopulation.
I am talking about tool and die makers, not just machinists...T&D's are the elite of the elite machinists, highly skilled and specialized. The elimination of apprenticeship programs and the exporting of jobs has led to their virtual elimination in this country, and now many companies are hurting for it (Caterpillar Tractor Company for one of them)...but they are much happier sending the jobs elsewhere. That's fine and dandy. I say because of that, we are a weaker country, becoming more dependent on others in the world. We have exported our prosperity, you might say. As this progresses, we will soon be nothing but an administrative shell of a country. We cannot sustain a great nation on politics alone.
Well we can produce less as we ship it all overseas. I have been in the manufacturing industry in the past, and one of the larger problems is becoming finding tool and die makers. After all, it's nice to internet this and program that, but somebody has to make the die that stamps the case out for your computer. In the 80's, apprenticeship programs were eliminated left and right, as we would theoratically never need such "old style" skills anymore. Things were shipped overseas and the entire skill pool in this country evaporated. I can see the same thing happening across the board. Just extract this situation to its logical conclusion; every job here is outsourced to India/China/etc. What is left in the US?
I believe preserving this country's standing as a dominant world power is morality enough...certainly equal to the morality of putting a hard-working American out on the street after 30 years of labor for a company. If it were only a question of morality, we would be dividing up our cumulative wealth and spreading it equally about the earth; but the reality is that is we MUST not do that, lest we be equally divided in national strength.
If people in Massachusetts were trying to maintain their standard of living, and Michigan were a country where major killers were things like starvation and dysentary, I would see no problem with banning car imports from Detroit. All of this outsourcing is serving to do one thing; balance the economies of the U.S. and India/China. They gain, and we lose.
Don't forget the fact that not only will they allow you to watch movies on a tiny screen, they'll cost you $7 a pop, and only be watchable for 48 hours before they evaporate...the real purpose of DRM in this case is not to prevent copying, it is to facilitate per-view fees and the "rental model" for movies.
Then again, an "anti-active" IT director is spending over $150,000 per year on nothing other than Microsoft licenses for things like Terminal Server (that they don't use) and such. The district is in the midst of huge budget reductions, but, of course, we can't touch the IT budget, because so much of it is "mandatory." I think that they've already hit the iceberg and the captain is still screaming "full speed ahead!" This is a school district, so he didn't start any business...he just took over the reigns and started spending money at an astronomical rate. But I think he should do more for his $90,000 per year than simply call other people in to fix the problem...and get taken advantage of when the next "big upgrade" comes along.
Since I'm always posting about education, I can report that if you go into an education field (ie Technical Director) things are still going like gangbusters. In a town of less than 20,000 people, my former boss is making $90,000 a year doing little more than occupying a chair. He has little computer knowledge and depends on "consultants" for his duties. A good job if you can get it...but seriously, there is a great need for "good" computer people in education. Not ones that can toe the Microsoft line, but ones that can TRULY innovate and turn over the festering pile of compost that educational computing has become.
You're not thinking of the Fiero, you're thinking of the Vega. The Fiero's fuel tank runs down the center of the car, and is probably the most well-protected fuel tank of any production car. The Fiero tended to burn for two reasons; the 2.5-liter four-cylinder "Iron Duke" engine had a bad valve cover gasket problem that leaked onto the exhaust manifold, and also had a tendency to throw rods through the sides of its block. Since the rest of the car was somewhat combustible plastic (except for the steel space frame) when they burned, they burned good. But the Fiero was simply a poorly-marketed and poorly-engineering-supported vehicle that could have been so much more. But in conclusion, the Fiero was not a tap-the-rear-end-and-we-explode car...
That's unfortunately one of the biggest worries that nobody seems to pay attention to. India and Pakistan have huge concentrations of troops on the Kashmir border, and have come minutes from full-scale confrontation dozens of times. I suspect that, while we have armed Pakistan quite well with F-16's, the Indian Air Force will rapidly sweep them aside with nothing more than numbers. Indian ground forces seriously outnumber their Pakistani counterparts as well. The end result will be a route of Pakistani forces on land, perhaps the threatening or encirclement of Karachi. Will Musharraf push the button? Almost certainly. The biggest question would be how long he would wait. Paraphrasing a cold war phrase, would the Pakistanis "prefer red to dead?" Any nuclear exchange will kill millions, and instantly devastate American companies that have disgorged their entire R&D and customer service departments to this region of the world. How well would HP function given the total breakdown of society and basic services in India and Pakistan?
It hasn't been. But it has been well taken care of...and certainly not abused. The Fiero's problem was that the demographic it hit (not the one it was AIMING at) tended to be hard on the cars. One person I know that had another 84 skidded off of a dry curve at nearly 100 mph, flipped end-over-end numerous times, and walked away with nary a scratch. Fieros are much-maligned, but their very advanced semi-space-frame construction will happily sacrifice itself to save its occupants. Did I mention that I now have a V-8 in my Fiero? With the stock transmission, too. The thing drives and handles wonderfully, and will click off low 11-second quarter miles with no sweat. V8 Archie
Not to disparage your Toyota, but my 1984 Fiero (one of the "bad" ones) has 175,000 miles on it...and I love every minute of it. It is a car that could have been so much more, had it been taken in the right direction by people other than Roger Smith and the like...
I can equally see the ability for this to be misused...but by allowing the fine-hair splitting of a law, we are basically subject to the tyranny of those best able to afford a high-priced lawyer. Justice is now given to those with the biggest checkbooks, not those most deserving of it. If your lawyer can split finer than mine, you win! The law is already nothing but a theater for show trials...unless you are broke, in which case it is a theater of injustice. Just watch people like Kenneth Lay get off virtually unfazed...while an ordinary street bum gets put in jail for 5 years for stealing some food.
By the way, I have dealt with a very, very large patent case, the goal of which was to put a tax on any computer-based system using a hierarchal method of selection. The company (which I worked for) had the patent years earlier, and meekly submitted it to a group of high-powered lawyers. It was the lawyers, not the company, that came up with a dozen angles on the initial idea, and eventually decided to sue virtually everybody on the internet (since, after all, directories are hierarchal!) The lawyers were pushing the SUE SUE SUE mentality, and the company simply held on to their tail as they galloped into the legal sunset. Before I left, they had gotten $1,000,000 "introductory" settlements from at least seven MAJOR companies...I don't know where their lawsuits are now.
Ok, since you take exception with my post...maybe I should be more specific. PATENT lawyers
It all gets back to lawyers...who are bored. Perhaps if we gave them shovels and told them to make a hole, they would have less time to create frivolous lawsuits. Seriously, though, it might be time to expand the definitions of barratry, and start prosecuting people...although then you end up having lawsuits about lawsuits...
I will readily admit that F4 was the deepest sim I've ever used...but then again, the ability to turn everything off, start in the air, and run around blasting everything in sight was still there. But the point of the original poster was that this was a monumental achievement; I can remember playing the first F4 "demo" way back in 1996...it completely swamped my 3D-less Pentium 100, but I knew there was something good there. Today, with my 2200 MHz computer, it is no less enjoyable. Remember what kind of games we were playing back in 1996...Quake I was high techology back then, and Falcon has yet to be equaled.
What's much worse is the Annoyware/Spyware software that is infecting millions of computers. In the school district I am responsible for, dozens of computers are filled with things like SaveNow, GAIN, n-Case, and many other programs that serve little purpose other than to annoy. Some of them are even extortionate; a program spawned itself and informed the user "Would you like to remove popups?" and prompted them to BUY some rediculous software....when their software was causing them in the first place. Programs like Spybot S&D and AdAware are hard-pressed to keep up with this stuff...and some of it, like RapidBlast, for instance, are almost polymorphic in the ways their authors continually change their methods of "infection." One particular method was to spawn two processes of the same thing, and order the second process to respawn the first if it was somehow terminated. Sneaky criminals, is what they are.
I know you're being sarcastic, but I really, really want to see what Carly Fiorina has done that a monkey, a voice-recognition system, and a word processor could not have...
I think has been done deliberately and accidentally already...With the level of supposedly "open" software they are touting for SVR5 or whatever they call it, I can't see "good" Linux code NOT getting into there somewhere.
At the rate we're exporting entire segments of the economy overseas, I wouldn't imagine that we have 30 years left. Not to mention the government is rapidly disintegrating financially. The money of this country is rapidly condensing into a very, very few people, while the majority are like a gas giant orbiting a black hole...slowly being drained.
It's because Intel, and AMD processors too, are getting hotter by the generation. Their heat density is rapidly approaching that of a nuclear reactor, literally! At the rate that Intel says it wants to ramp clock speeds, they will be much, much hotter.