In part, the offshoring (and all outsourcing) trend is driven by the fact that it is difficult in the US, and other developed countries, to decrease nominal wages.
A firm may have to cut the price of its goods by 10% in order to compete.
But if the firm's workers have not become more productive, so that the value of their labor has decreased by 10%, it is quite difficult IN PRACTICE to cut their wages.
In general, the only way to do so is to lay off the existing workers and hire new ones at a lower wage rate.
Doing this effectively, at least in the US, tends to put the firm in violation of age discrimination laws, as the highest-paid workers are generally the oldest ones.
Outsourcing an entire department avoids that particular problem.
And as long as you're outsourcing, you might as well look for the cheapest alternate source that you think can do the job.
Several of the comments above have been from consultants who say that the rate that they can successfully charge for their services has decreased sharply.
What the firm pays a consultant is determined for each project;
changes in the supply of and demand for consultants comes into play each time, as does the firm's view of the value of the project.
The same is not usually true for an employee.
Last year we had a hot project in a new, highly profitable area;
this year we're doing maintenance on older, less profitable products;
but the firm will have difficulty changing the wage rate every time they move someone to a different project.
One area where this plays out in a particularly frustrating fashion is with teachers.
My kids' high-school teachers are no more productive than my own teachers were 30 years ago.
The classes are just about the same size and the material they teach is roughly the same.
Pundits point at standardized test scores and assert that the quality of the product has declined in the last 30 years.
That's true in another sense as well -- I am almost sure that the average real wages earned by people whose education stops at high school (real wages being a measure of the value of their contribution to the economy) have decreased over that period.
Simple economics would suggest that real wages for teachers should have declined
(which may, or may not, have occurred).
Given that the value of many of the benefits that teachers receive as employees (health care, pensions) have increased sharply over time, the real salary rate should have gone down a LOT.
I have an acquaintance who is blue-eyed, red-haired, is married to a Japanese woman and speaks fluent Japanese.
He tells the following story about visiting in Japan.
He was standing in line to buy train tickets.
When he got to the head of the line, he asked for two tickets to Tokyo, in Japanese.
The woman behind the window replied, in broken English, "No speak English."
He answered, still in Japanese, "I'm not speaking English, I'm speaking Japanese, two tickets to Tokyo, please."
Again, "No speak English," and the woman left the window.
My acquaintance was rather embarrased by all this, since it is considered quite rude to hold up the line.
After a bit, an elderly man came to the window and asked, in English, if he could help.
My acquaintance, still in Japanese, asked for the two tickets.
The old man responded, in English, "Oh, you speak very good Japanese," but would not conduct the transaction in Japanese.
My acquaintance said that he encounters this situation, where people refuse to acknowledge that an obvious foreigner can speak the language, regularly in Japan.
Ask the Steel Workers Union how well being the Union worked for them.
Well, you can make the case that for at least 50 years or so it worked out darned well for them.
They got enormously safer working conditions.
They got a living wage.
They got company-funded health care and a pension for their old age.
Many of those benefits were also extended to the company managers, who didn't have a union.
Many companies that weren't unionized extended those benefits to their workers in order to compete for scarce labor resources.
One way of looking at the offshoring problem is simply that cheap transport, cheap telecommunications, and greatly improved productivity have created a world-wide glut of labor.
We have more people than are needed to produce the goods and services that are demanded.
The usual laws of supply and demand would suggest that in such a situation, the price of labor must fall.
Unions (or anyone else) who fails to recognize that reality will have problems.
Corporate taxation in America is complecated -- we like to have taxes and then lots of loopholes, because the complecated system gives politicans finer controll over the businesses
Excellent point.
A simple and straightforward tax code is not in the interests of politicians (as much as it might be in the interests of everyone else).
"I voted for an exception (loophole is such a nasty term:^)) that lowered the tax rate in YOUR industry," is a wonderful thing to be able to say to a potential campaign contributor.
"I voted to reduce taxes for left-handed people with red-headed children," in an ad will get some number of people to vote for you.
I guess a simple tax code is not in the interests of companies like H&R Block either.
If you look closely, I think you'll find that the US is not subsidizing gasoline, it simply does not tax it as heavily as, say, Western Europe. IIRC, here in Colorado, about 25% of what I pay for a gallon of gas is state and federal taxes. I believe that in Europe, about 75% of what they pay is taxes. As many people have pointed out in the past, "You want the US to conserve gasoline like the Europeans? A nice $3/gallon tax will do the job." Of course, any politician silly enough to vote for such a tax would have zero chance of reelection:^)
Why doesn't freetrade work for the consumer? After all my goverment wants to make it illegal/claims it is currently illegal for consumers to import drugs from canada.
In many cases it does.
Relatively free trade is why you can buy a DVD player for $40.
It's why you can buy a variety of relatively fresh produce from Chile at the grocery in January.
It's why the Big Three US auto makers had to improve the quality of their products when people discovered that Japanese cars didn't start falling apart after three years.
If the US government removed sugar supports and import restrictions, the consumer would be able to buy sugar at half the price they pay today.
Prescription drugs are an interesting situation.
In many cases, the drugs sold in Canada are actually manufactured in the US, or in Canada by US companies using the same processes and quality control they use in the US.
But in Canada, prices are capped by the government.
Much like trade arguments over steel in the past, the drug companies are opposed to anyone, including the end user, being allowed to import a competing good from a country where it is priced below cost.
I'm not an advocate of the drug companies, just pointing out that they have an argument of sorts.
Of course, the health care system in the US has far too many aspects that tend to drive up drug prices.
Enough people are in the situation where (a) their health care is paid for by someone else (employer insurance, government, etc) and (b) they have the freedom to "shop around" for doctors.
Enough people that it is profitable for the drug companies to advertise directly to the consumer: "Is Lipitor right for you? Ask your doctor!"
And in too many cases the doctor will prescribe the drug because they know that if they don't, the patient will "take their business" somewhere else.
Collectively, US drug companies now spend more on advertising than they do on research.
It is an interesting mental exercise in economics to think about what might happen to drug prices if consumers paid their own bills. If the answer to the question "Is Lipitor right for you?" was, except for the wealthy, answered with "No, it's too bloody expensive, I'll take this cheaper drug that has 80% of the same benefits," would prices go up or down? Keep in mind that in many cases elasticities are non-linear, and total profit can be maximized by selling less at a higher price. Major league baseball discovered this years ago -- total ticket revenue is maximized at prices that leave about 15% of the seats at the ballpark empty.
Considering today's technology, photographs should never be admissable as evidence unless the source can verified and possibility of tampering is eliminated...
Indeed.
Normal rules of evidence have for years required the authorities to establish a complete chain of evidence before photographs can be introduced into the record.
A competent defense attorney will generally force the prosecutor to go through a sequence like the following before the phtotgraphs are admissable:
Photographer testifies as to where and when they took pictures, and how film canister was marked.
Someone from the development lab testifies that they developed film from said canister and made prints, and how prints were marked.
Someone testifies that they received prints with said marks at the lab and brought them to court.
Finally, photos with matching marks are introduced.
Paper records supporting the testimony may also be required.
The defense will have them go through all of these steps at least once on the off chance that the paperwork got screwed up or went missing and the photos are inadmissable.
I see little chance that the police will be allowed to actually use the photos as evidence in this case:
"Your honor, please allow these prints downloaded from the Web which appear to show that at some unknown point in the past, the accused appeared naked in a location which strongly resembles a particular downtown bar."
As for Melissa and her Web site, all publicity is good publicity.
Whether they make $8/hour, or $15/hour, or are all $300/hour consultants is immaterial.
The assertion up there is that they can impose a lifetime ban from commercial air travel on an individual.
I counter that a federal court would have difficulty imposing such a ban and making it stand up, and that I find it unlikely in the extreme that a screener can do so.
Again, cite any single case where such a ban has been attempted, and has withstood any legal scrutiny in court.
I intended no disrespect towards the screeners in general.
They have a job that requires that they do things that inconvenience people, and that some people will resent -- it's a tough position to be in.
UNIX evolved over time. almost no attention was paid to security initially - was it even multi-user initially?!
I believe that the answer to this is, yes, it was multi-user from the beginning.
Remember, UNIX was initially developed in an era when computers were physically large and so expensive that it was a basic assumption that more than one person would use the machine.
It was also intended to be a time-sharing system, so was designed with the idea that more than one person would be using it at the same time.
Certainly by the time that UNIX came out of the research groups and into more common usage at Bell Labs, there were security features.
There were security bugs, too.
As is the case today, some of those involved the default configurations.
At some point, the default when you logged in was that your tty device was writeable by the world.
On at least one occasion, this led to a spate of problems where one user, pissed off at something another user had done, would run a command like
$ cat/bin/* >/dev/tty3 &
where the offending user was logged in on tty3.
Binary,
interleaved with the output you expected to get,
dumped to your terminal at 300 cps,
was annoying.
Users learned quickly to build a variety of checks and corrections into their.profile file.
That's supposed to be a joke, right?
A federal court would have an extremely difficult time imposing a lifetime ban on commercial flying on anyone.
And you want me to believe that an $8/hour screener has such authority?
Granted, you probably want to be nice to them, they can ruin your day merely by detaining you long enough to miss your flight, but a lifetime ban?
Show me any sample case where such a ban was attempted and has stood up to court scrutiny.
I love it... 9 million to lawyers, -1.6 to report to it's investors and they are no where. If they win I imagine they stand to make 10x whatever they pay for lawyers but how much do they have to put out before it is not longer worth the risk?
The investors must be getting worried.
There are multiple reasons why you might purchase a particular stock.
Sometimes it's because you believe it's a good company with great products.
Sometimes it's because you're willing to risk some money speculating on a low-probability high-return outcome.
If you bought SCO recently for the first reason, well, you're an idiot.
If you bought it for the second reason, you don't really care what the share price or the operating results are -- you care what the judge in the case has said recently.
If SCO were to eventually win $1B from IBM, the bulk of what remains after the legal fees will almost certainly be distributed as a special one-time dividend, enriching the insiders, the Canary Group, and some gamblers who were willing to hold on through all of the legal proceedings and appeals.
Roughly 75% of SCOX is held by insiders and institutions.
For the right kind of fund, buying 50,000 shares back when it was selling for $3 might have been a very reasonable gamble.
Suppose the dividend is $100 per share -- that's a 33-to-1 payoff and might justify "backing" a legal case with 20-to-1 odds.
At today's price of about $18, the potential return would only be 5.5-to-1, no longer worth the gamble.
You don't sound like a capitalist to me. You seem more like someone who supports mixed economies (probably a social democrat (if left leaning) or paleoconservative (if right leaning), or something similar to those).
Put me down as a believer in market economies in general, but I am almost certainly not a pure capitalist.
Feel free to try to convince me.
I may have opinions, but I'm always willing to listen to a well-reasoned argument.
Two comments and I'll shut up.
Assume a market situation where there is a fairly large capital requirement for entry.
Assume further that three firms dominate the market, and that every time a new firm tries to enter, they take turns underbidding the new guy until he's driven out of business.
When there are no additional entrants, the three firms agree to all charge the same rate, and that rate is cost plus 100%.
You'll have a heck of a time convincing me that society is benefiting from extending the other protections that we agreed on to this group.
Such situations arise regularly without intervention; often enough that all countries with some form of market economy have laws forbidding such behavior.
I tried to choose my example industries somewhat carefully. Chinese firms have significant advantages over the US in making DVD players; US firms have a lot of advantages in providing financial services.
Get back to me when China allows Bank of America or Wells Fargo the same access to China that the US gives to the Chinese companies building DVD players.
Or that the US allows to Credit Suisse.
If you don't support free markets, you are not a capitalist. Free markets are a key ideal for capitalism, just like private property is.
Yes, free markets, private property, and the rule of law, the latter being quite important and one of the hardest for developing countries to provide.
However, I'm not sure that there are any cases of totally unconstrained markets working out well for society at large -- capitalists do seem to show a tendancy to cheat if they can.
So we end up with relatively free markets.
Reasonable people can agree on the broad outlines while disagreeing over some of the details.
Some people believe that individuals negotiating salaries and working conditions with a big company are at an insurmountable disadvantage -- hence rules allowing labor to organize and requiring the company to negotiate in good faith.
Some people believe that big companies will form cartels, fix prices, and block new competition -- hence antitrust laws and enforcement.
Some people believe that a company operating in a country that provides the aforementioned benefits has an obligation to provide employment -- hence a variety of laws in France and Germany about hiring and firing.
I actually read the grandparent comment to mean that the author looked at places like India and China and did not see free markets -- US companies did not have the same access to those markets that India and China have to the US.
You're forgetting why they outsourced in the first place. When products are made abroad they can be made for cheaper, thus lowering their prices here.
In the long run, consumption of goods and services in the US must equal the production of goods and services.
Trade allows us to exploit relative advantages between countries -- China has a relative advantage in DVD player production, we have one in providing certain kinds of financial services.
If we were to abruptly put 10% of our workers on the shelf permenantly, our output of goods and services would decrease.
In fairly short order, our consumption would also have to decrease by a similar amount.
Even if foreign suppliers showed up with goods and services equalling what we had quit producing, we would not have the wherewithall to pay for them.
In order to realize the trade benefit mentioned above, it is an unstated assumption that we will move workers from DVD players to financial services (or something similarly productive).
If they are permenantly unemployed instead, you may or may not have a net benefit, and the unemployed certainly have a net loss.
Many of those who responded to my comment seem to think that I'm painting an ugly, dark picture as the only possible outcome.
Productivity increases have eliminated more jobs in the US than offshoring ever has.
Those same productivity gains are what increases the standard of living, as well.
In the past we have always found new, valuable things for our workers to do.
This question nicely illustrates what I have sometimes called "the Bill Gates advantage" relative to open source in some fields.
For the most part, an open source solution requires that there be people with the knowledge of the specialized field where an application is used, the programming skills to build the tool, and the willingness to do so without financial reward.
Most open source applications depend on the generousity of volunteers for their expertise.
There are exceptions, where companies that sell services based on open source code can afford to pay a relatively small number of developers to work on the code itself.
Even in those cases, the initial version of the application is often done on a volunteer basis.
A firm selling an application can use that cash to hire both kinds of experts.
Please note that this is not a comment about the relative quality of code or support.
Just that the commercial software model does address the issue of acquiring and directing needed resources directly.
I'm staying in IT, because as an academic sysadmin with a Unix specialty, my job can only be done by someone in the building. I can manipulate my servers and some of the workstations from home -- but that's only about 1/4 of the job. The rest involves face-to-face support of the users, which cannot be done by someone who doesn't show up. The last guy who had my position didn't bother to show up, and so I now have what I think is my idea job.
A year ago I got laid off from my high-tech job -- not because it got outsourced, but due to industry consolidation.
Many of the headquarters strategy jobs ARE redundent when two large companies merge.
Fortunately, I was in a position to retire and am back in graduate school, studying economics this time.
There's a fascinating long-term economic question implicit in your situation, and mine.
Your job, you say, can't be offshored because you have to be present to do it.
However, the students that are the root source for your job have to have enough money that they can afford to be there (your description is almost certainly college of some sort, not K-12).
In many cases Mom and Dad are paying some or all of the tuition bills.
If Mom's high-paying research job goes to India, they will have a harder time paying those bills.
Fewer students at school, fewer sysadmin jobs.
Presumably the Indian researcher can now afford to send their kids to college (in India, they're not being paid enough to send them to the US), where there will be increased demand for your type of sysadmin.
Indirectly, your job can be sent offshore.
When a big multinational corporation moves jobs from one location to another, the demand for goods and services at the first location must decrease.
We have seen this operate on a small scale -- the big factory that employed many of the townsfolk closes, and soon after that other businesses start to close or scale back because demand decreased.
Now we get to see if it is possible for it to happen on a national scale -- if enough companies send enough jobs to India and China, can they cause significant decreases in demand for goods and services in the US?
I think it was Keynes who first described "the corporate paradox of thrift."
While a move that lowers costs may be good for an individual firm, if all firms make similar moves it may be bad for all the firms collectively IF the cost savings is translated into decreased demand for goods and services.
TTBOMK, this has never actually happened.
Improved productivity eliminated an enormous number of farm jobs 100 years ago -- they were replaced by manufacturing (and yes, I'm sure there were people who really wanted to be farmers who permenantly lost that type of job).
Cheap overseas labor and improved technology eliminated a lot of manufacturing jobs -- they were replaced by jobs in growth fields such as IT.
Will there be new growth areas this time, or will we see permenantly higher unemployment and lower incomes?
Luckily soon after that I came across Sony's Grand Wega LCD projection sets. These are beautiful and worth checking out if you want a TV now. I got the 50" one and am extremely happy with it.
A couple of years ago we tried one of the Samsung "tabletop" rear-projection LCD sets.
It suffered from only one serious defect -- when you moved off-axis vertically, there was a pronounced shift in the color values towards blue and drop-off in brightness.
For example, if you laid on the floor in front of the couch instead of sitting on the couch, the picture was dim and blue.
At the time, I believed that it was probably due to the rear-projection screen itself, which is basically a zillion nearly microscopic spherical lenses embedded in some sort of plastic sheet.
Does your Sony suffer from any similar problems?
Later windows versions always had a handicap of having all this legacy to support, and many design decisions were influenced by this. It's definately a step in the needed direction for them, to find out how to make the system flexible enough for new stuff while keeping the core relatively consistent.
And at least according to folklore, some of those legacy decisions were really bad ones from a long-term perspective.
One of my favorite involved multimedia and went like this.
Some non-preemptable kernel routines could take very long periods to run (up to a couple of seconds).
This played hell with smooth playback of audio or video.
So the long-running routines were modified to add callouts to the audio and video routines to service buffers, update frames, etc.
Of course, now the long-running routines took even longer to complete, as well as introducing the possibility that interactions between the routines could screw up kernel data structures.
One hopes that most or all of that kind of nonsense disappeared in the NT-based versions of Windows, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Given the legacy issues, I've always regarded Windows as a dancing bear of an OS: it's not amazing that the bear dances gracefully, it's amazing that the bear dances at all.
Although, they do actually have people help them understand the processes described, they do no research on prior art what so ever. Apparrently there is not time.
It is my understanding that the PTO is quite good at identifying prior art when it takes the form of previously granted patents.
Unfortunately, when they started granting patents for software and business practices, which had not previously been patentable, all of the prior art was documented outside of the patent system.
At a previous job, we got a software patent application back with some of the claims disallowed due to prior patents, so that much of the system seems to work.
I'm not surprised that the PTO can't deal with the outside documentation of prior art; imagine the size of the job to catalog (as a start) all of the ACM journals, the IEEE computer journals, and the software textbooks that have been published since the 1960s so that you can tell if a particular algorithm used for a particular application has already appeared.
The reason is the "tails" on your trip. Airports are usually further out from the core city than train depots so you might have an extra 10-15 minutes of travel time on each tail just to get to/from the airport. Then there's delays while the plane taxis to/from one of the few operating runways instead of navigating through the switchyard - add another 10 minutes. And the time to get through security. And an extra 30 minutes (minimum) you want in case there's a backup in security, or the train to/from the concourses is running slow, etc.
Interesting point.
Another one about the tails of trips -- once you get off the train, how well can you get to where you really want to be?
In many places in the US, mass transit isn't an option for getting to where you need to be.
For example, if you land at 9:30 at night, will you be able to get to the hotel 20 miles away? Will you be able to get a ride from the hotel to the office where your meeting is?
So you end up needing a rental car, and the central location of the train station often doesn't lend itself to the fleet parking lots.
And not just because they know what the options are and can design and install the system properly.
They'll know what building codes apply, what permits you need, what inspections the various governments will require, etc.
At least here in the US, failure to do things properly can lead to nasty consequences: fines if the local fire marshall finds out you haven't done things right, or your insurance company failing to pay if the non-code work contributes to a fire.
The latter is a lose-the-business kind of risk that you don't want to mess with.
Hire the pro.
Paper ballots, or hanging chads either can be disputed and either can cause the problems again.
What we need is an auditable system of balloting that will beep at us if our choices aren't clear. Perhaps Windows would be good for this! Are you sure? OK Are you really sure? OK Please review your choices and press SUBMIT.
Agree strongly.
I don't get a receipt to take with me now.
Can't we have a system that
(a) gives us a better user interface than most of those damn punch-card systems and
(b) prints or otherwise marks a paper ballot in such a way that it can be counted with essentially no errors?
All of the complaints in Florida involve either a ballot that was hard to understand or ballots that were ambiguous when counted.
At least partially true.
Rather than describing the ITU themselves as being technically competent, I might be inclined to say that many of the large companies where the technical work is actually done are quite competent.
The official US representative to the ITU is from the State Department.
Much (most?) of the technical work that they take to the ITU is done by large corporations -- in the telephony field, companies like Lucent and AT&T.
OTOH, the ITU took their best shot at establishing a data communications network standard: X.25.
They lost.
IP won.
Now they want to be put in charge?
I've watched both the ITU and the IETF process for technical standards, and will take the IETF hands-down.
Almost anyone can propose something, which is damned hard to get done in the ITU.
And the IETF requires that two independent implementations successfully interoperate before a protocol reaches the "standard" level -- I've seen ITU stuff become a blessed standard even though no one has ever done an actual implementation.
So, according to US copyright law, even if Linux is an "unauthorized derivative" of UNIX, SCO still doesn't own the copyright!
Despite Darl running his mouth in public on assorted topics, the foundation of SCO's original suit against IBM still comes down to a contract in which IBM purportedly signed away many of the rights that they hold under copyright.
If I understand correctly, in the original suit, SCO did not assert that they "owned" the copyright on IBM's work, but that they did have the right to control whether and when that work could be revealed to third parties -- because IBM had signed over that right in order to gain access to the original UNIX source code.
Hence the legal theory (emphasis on theory) that IBM revealed certain things, without permission, that made Linux more competitive with SCO's product, and thereby damaged SCO.
It's a matter of contract law.
Issues such as the GPL came up when IBM countersued and Red Hat sued.
That said, I still think SCO will eventually get their head handed to them on a platter: (1) IBM has a separate document in which AT&T appears to have waived some of the terms of the original contract, (2) there's a lot of question about whether current AIX may still be regarded as being "derived from" the original UNIX, (3) some of the technology in question (such as JFS) may have been developed in a non-AIX context, and (4) SCO's distribution of Linux could be interepreted as a waiver of their rights under the contract.
I think the judge is starting to get irritated.
The latest ruling seems to have the flavor of "IBM has given you a lot of material, now it's time for you to point at specific chunks of code where you think you can prove your rights were violated."
Don't know the situation in Australia WRT satellite services (number of slots, existing birds, total market size, etc) so this may or may not be relevant.
The data capabilities that can be provided by the new Ka-band satellites sounds like an excellent match to this situation.
The climate and geography seem ideal -- dry and mostly flat.
Of course, the technology is expensive in initial investment, but then it's easy to add individual users.
I'm used to thinking in terms of service for the US and/or Europe, where there are a LOT more people than in Australia.
Is Australia big enough, population-wise, to make a go of satellite-based service?
Could they share a satellite with other countries in the region?
Slashdot Mirror
In part, the offshoring (and all outsourcing) trend is driven by the fact that it is difficult in the US, and other developed countries, to decrease nominal wages. A firm may have to cut the price of its goods by 10% in order to compete. But if the firm's workers have not become more productive, so that the value of their labor has decreased by 10%, it is quite difficult IN PRACTICE to cut their wages. In general, the only way to do so is to lay off the existing workers and hire new ones at a lower wage rate. Doing this effectively, at least in the US, tends to put the firm in violation of age discrimination laws, as the highest-paid workers are generally the oldest ones. Outsourcing an entire department avoids that particular problem. And as long as you're outsourcing, you might as well look for the cheapest alternate source that you think can do the job.
Several of the comments above have been from consultants who say that the rate that they can successfully charge for their services has decreased sharply. What the firm pays a consultant is determined for each project; changes in the supply of and demand for consultants comes into play each time, as does the firm's view of the value of the project. The same is not usually true for an employee. Last year we had a hot project in a new, highly profitable area; this year we're doing maintenance on older, less profitable products; but the firm will have difficulty changing the wage rate every time they move someone to a different project.
One area where this plays out in a particularly frustrating fashion is with teachers. My kids' high-school teachers are no more productive than my own teachers were 30 years ago. The classes are just about the same size and the material they teach is roughly the same. Pundits point at standardized test scores and assert that the quality of the product has declined in the last 30 years. That's true in another sense as well -- I am almost sure that the average real wages earned by people whose education stops at high school (real wages being a measure of the value of their contribution to the economy) have decreased over that period. Simple economics would suggest that real wages for teachers should have declined (which may, or may not, have occurred). Given that the value of many of the benefits that teachers receive as employees (health care, pensions) have increased sharply over time, the real salary rate should have gone down a LOT.
He was standing in line to buy train tickets. When he got to the head of the line, he asked for two tickets to Tokyo, in Japanese. The woman behind the window replied, in broken English, "No speak English." He answered, still in Japanese, "I'm not speaking English, I'm speaking Japanese, two tickets to Tokyo, please." Again, "No speak English," and the woman left the window. My acquaintance was rather embarrased by all this, since it is considered quite rude to hold up the line. After a bit, an elderly man came to the window and asked, in English, if he could help. My acquaintance, still in Japanese, asked for the two tickets. The old man responded, in English, "Oh, you speak very good Japanese," but would not conduct the transaction in Japanese.
My acquaintance said that he encounters this situation, where people refuse to acknowledge that an obvious foreigner can speak the language, regularly in Japan.
Well, you can make the case that for at least 50 years or so it worked out darned well for them. They got enormously safer working conditions. They got a living wage. They got company-funded health care and a pension for their old age. Many of those benefits were also extended to the company managers, who didn't have a union. Many companies that weren't unionized extended those benefits to their workers in order to compete for scarce labor resources.
One way of looking at the offshoring problem is simply that cheap transport, cheap telecommunications, and greatly improved productivity have created a world-wide glut of labor. We have more people than are needed to produce the goods and services that are demanded. The usual laws of supply and demand would suggest that in such a situation, the price of labor must fall. Unions (or anyone else) who fails to recognize that reality will have problems.
Excellent point. A simple and straightforward tax code is not in the interests of politicians (as much as it might be in the interests of everyone else). "I voted for an exception (loophole is such a nasty term :^)) that lowered the tax rate in YOUR industry," is a wonderful thing to be able to say to a potential campaign contributor.
"I voted to reduce taxes for left-handed people with red-headed children," in an ad will get some number of people to vote for you.
I guess a simple tax code is not in the interests of companies like H&R Block either.
If you look closely, I think you'll find that the US is not subsidizing gasoline, it simply does not tax it as heavily as, say, Western Europe. IIRC, here in Colorado, about 25% of what I pay for a gallon of gas is state and federal taxes. I believe that in Europe, about 75% of what they pay is taxes. As many people have pointed out in the past, "You want the US to conserve gasoline like the Europeans? A nice $3/gallon tax will do the job." Of course, any politician silly enough to vote for such a tax would have zero chance of reelection :^)
In many cases it does. Relatively free trade is why you can buy a DVD player for $40. It's why you can buy a variety of relatively fresh produce from Chile at the grocery in January. It's why the Big Three US auto makers had to improve the quality of their products when people discovered that Japanese cars didn't start falling apart after three years. If the US government removed sugar supports and import restrictions, the consumer would be able to buy sugar at half the price they pay today.
Prescription drugs are an interesting situation. In many cases, the drugs sold in Canada are actually manufactured in the US, or in Canada by US companies using the same processes and quality control they use in the US. But in Canada, prices are capped by the government. Much like trade arguments over steel in the past, the drug companies are opposed to anyone, including the end user, being allowed to import a competing good from a country where it is priced below cost. I'm not an advocate of the drug companies, just pointing out that they have an argument of sorts.
Of course, the health care system in the US has far too many aspects that tend to drive up drug prices. Enough people are in the situation where (a) their health care is paid for by someone else (employer insurance, government, etc) and (b) they have the freedom to "shop around" for doctors. Enough people that it is profitable for the drug companies to advertise directly to the consumer: "Is Lipitor right for you? Ask your doctor!" And in too many cases the doctor will prescribe the drug because they know that if they don't, the patient will "take their business" somewhere else. Collectively, US drug companies now spend more on advertising than they do on research.
It is an interesting mental exercise in economics to think about what might happen to drug prices if consumers paid their own bills. If the answer to the question "Is Lipitor right for you?" was, except for the wealthy, answered with "No, it's too bloody expensive, I'll take this cheaper drug that has 80% of the same benefits," would prices go up or down? Keep in mind that in many cases elasticities are non-linear, and total profit can be maximized by selling less at a higher price. Major league baseball discovered this years ago -- total ticket revenue is maximized at prices that leave about 15% of the seats at the ballpark empty.
Indeed. Normal rules of evidence have for years required the authorities to establish a complete chain of evidence before photographs can be introduced into the record. A competent defense attorney will generally force the prosecutor to go through a sequence like the following before the phtotgraphs are admissable:
Paper records supporting the testimony may also be required. The defense will have them go through all of these steps at least once on the off chance that the paperwork got screwed up or went missing and the photos are inadmissable. I see little chance that the police will be allowed to actually use the photos as evidence in this case: "Your honor, please allow these prints downloaded from the Web which appear to show that at some unknown point in the past, the accused appeared naked in a location which strongly resembles a particular downtown bar." As for Melissa and her Web site, all publicity is good publicity.
Whether they make $8/hour, or $15/hour, or are all $300/hour consultants is immaterial. The assertion up there is that they can impose a lifetime ban from commercial air travel on an individual. I counter that a federal court would have difficulty imposing such a ban and making it stand up, and that I find it unlikely in the extreme that a screener can do so. Again, cite any single case where such a ban has been attempted, and has withstood any legal scrutiny in court.
I intended no disrespect towards the screeners in general. They have a job that requires that they do things that inconvenience people, and that some people will resent -- it's a tough position to be in.
I believe that the answer to this is, yes, it was multi-user from the beginning. Remember, UNIX was initially developed in an era when computers were physically large and so expensive that it was a basic assumption that more than one person would use the machine. It was also intended to be a time-sharing system, so was designed with the idea that more than one person would be using it at the same time. Certainly by the time that UNIX came out of the research groups and into more common usage at Bell Labs, there were security features.
There were security bugs, too. As is the case today, some of those involved the default configurations. At some point, the default when you logged in was that your tty device was writeable by the world. On at least one occasion, this led to a spate of problems where one user, pissed off at something another user had done, would run a command like
$ cat /bin/* >/dev/tty3 &
where the offending user was logged in on tty3. Binary, interleaved with the output you expected to get, dumped to your terminal at 300 cps, was annoying. Users learned quickly to build a variety of checks and corrections into their .profile file.
Geez, knowing that makes me feel OLD.
That's supposed to be a joke, right? A federal court would have an extremely difficult time imposing a lifetime ban on commercial flying on anyone. And you want me to believe that an $8/hour screener has such authority? Granted, you probably want to be nice to them, they can ruin your day merely by detaining you long enough to miss your flight, but a lifetime ban? Show me any sample case where such a ban was attempted and has stood up to court scrutiny.
There are multiple reasons why you might purchase a particular stock. Sometimes it's because you believe it's a good company with great products. Sometimes it's because you're willing to risk some money speculating on a low-probability high-return outcome. If you bought SCO recently for the first reason, well, you're an idiot. If you bought it for the second reason, you don't really care what the share price or the operating results are -- you care what the judge in the case has said recently. If SCO were to eventually win $1B from IBM, the bulk of what remains after the legal fees will almost certainly be distributed as a special one-time dividend, enriching the insiders, the Canary Group, and some gamblers who were willing to hold on through all of the legal proceedings and appeals. Roughly 75% of SCOX is held by insiders and institutions.
For the right kind of fund, buying 50,000 shares back when it was selling for $3 might have been a very reasonable gamble. Suppose the dividend is $100 per share -- that's a 33-to-1 payoff and might justify "backing" a legal case with 20-to-1 odds. At today's price of about $18, the potential return would only be 5.5-to-1, no longer worth the gamble.
Put me down as a believer in market economies in general, but I am almost certainly not a pure capitalist. Feel free to try to convince me. I may have opinions, but I'm always willing to listen to a well-reasoned argument. Two comments and I'll shut up.
Assume a market situation where there is a fairly large capital requirement for entry. Assume further that three firms dominate the market, and that every time a new firm tries to enter, they take turns underbidding the new guy until he's driven out of business. When there are no additional entrants, the three firms agree to all charge the same rate, and that rate is cost plus 100%. You'll have a heck of a time convincing me that society is benefiting from extending the other protections that we agreed on to this group. Such situations arise regularly without intervention; often enough that all countries with some form of market economy have laws forbidding such behavior.
I tried to choose my example industries somewhat carefully. Chinese firms have significant advantages over the US in making DVD players; US firms have a lot of advantages in providing financial services. Get back to me when China allows Bank of America or Wells Fargo the same access to China that the US gives to the Chinese companies building DVD players. Or that the US allows to Credit Suisse.
Yes, free markets, private property, and the rule of law, the latter being quite important and one of the hardest for developing countries to provide. However, I'm not sure that there are any cases of totally unconstrained markets working out well for society at large -- capitalists do seem to show a tendancy to cheat if they can. So we end up with relatively free markets. Reasonable people can agree on the broad outlines while disagreeing over some of the details. Some people believe that individuals negotiating salaries and working conditions with a big company are at an insurmountable disadvantage -- hence rules allowing labor to organize and requiring the company to negotiate in good faith. Some people believe that big companies will form cartels, fix prices, and block new competition -- hence antitrust laws and enforcement. Some people believe that a company operating in a country that provides the aforementioned benefits has an obligation to provide employment -- hence a variety of laws in France and Germany about hiring and firing.
I actually read the grandparent comment to mean that the author looked at places like India and China and did not see free markets -- US companies did not have the same access to those markets that India and China have to the US.
In the long run, consumption of goods and services in the US must equal the production of goods and services. Trade allows us to exploit relative advantages between countries -- China has a relative advantage in DVD player production, we have one in providing certain kinds of financial services. If we were to abruptly put 10% of our workers on the shelf permenantly, our output of goods and services would decrease. In fairly short order, our consumption would also have to decrease by a similar amount. Even if foreign suppliers showed up with goods and services equalling what we had quit producing, we would not have the wherewithall to pay for them. In order to realize the trade benefit mentioned above, it is an unstated assumption that we will move workers from DVD players to financial services (or something similarly productive). If they are permenantly unemployed instead, you may or may not have a net benefit, and the unemployed certainly have a net loss.
Many of those who responded to my comment seem to think that I'm painting an ugly, dark picture as the only possible outcome. Productivity increases have eliminated more jobs in the US than offshoring ever has. Those same productivity gains are what increases the standard of living, as well. In the past we have always found new, valuable things for our workers to do.
This question nicely illustrates what I have sometimes called "the Bill Gates advantage" relative to open source in some fields. For the most part, an open source solution requires that there be people with the knowledge of the specialized field where an application is used, the programming skills to build the tool, and the willingness to do so without financial reward. Most open source applications depend on the generousity of volunteers for their expertise. There are exceptions, where companies that sell services based on open source code can afford to pay a relatively small number of developers to work on the code itself. Even in those cases, the initial version of the application is often done on a volunteer basis. A firm selling an application can use that cash to hire both kinds of experts.
Please note that this is not a comment about the relative quality of code or support. Just that the commercial software model does address the issue of acquiring and directing needed resources directly.
A year ago I got laid off from my high-tech job -- not because it got outsourced, but due to industry consolidation. Many of the headquarters strategy jobs ARE redundent when two large companies merge. Fortunately, I was in a position to retire and am back in graduate school, studying economics this time. There's a fascinating long-term economic question implicit in your situation, and mine.
Your job, you say, can't be offshored because you have to be present to do it. However, the students that are the root source for your job have to have enough money that they can afford to be there (your description is almost certainly college of some sort, not K-12). In many cases Mom and Dad are paying some or all of the tuition bills. If Mom's high-paying research job goes to India, they will have a harder time paying those bills. Fewer students at school, fewer sysadmin jobs. Presumably the Indian researcher can now afford to send their kids to college (in India, they're not being paid enough to send them to the US), where there will be increased demand for your type of sysadmin. Indirectly, your job can be sent offshore.
When a big multinational corporation moves jobs from one location to another, the demand for goods and services at the first location must decrease. We have seen this operate on a small scale -- the big factory that employed many of the townsfolk closes, and soon after that other businesses start to close or scale back because demand decreased. Now we get to see if it is possible for it to happen on a national scale -- if enough companies send enough jobs to India and China, can they cause significant decreases in demand for goods and services in the US?
I think it was Keynes who first described "the corporate paradox of thrift." While a move that lowers costs may be good for an individual firm, if all firms make similar moves it may be bad for all the firms collectively IF the cost savings is translated into decreased demand for goods and services. TTBOMK, this has never actually happened. Improved productivity eliminated an enormous number of farm jobs 100 years ago -- they were replaced by manufacturing (and yes, I'm sure there were people who really wanted to be farmers who permenantly lost that type of job). Cheap overseas labor and improved technology eliminated a lot of manufacturing jobs -- they were replaced by jobs in growth fields such as IT. Will there be new growth areas this time, or will we see permenantly higher unemployment and lower incomes?
A couple of years ago we tried one of the Samsung "tabletop" rear-projection LCD sets. It suffered from only one serious defect -- when you moved off-axis vertically, there was a pronounced shift in the color values towards blue and drop-off in brightness. For example, if you laid on the floor in front of the couch instead of sitting on the couch, the picture was dim and blue. At the time, I believed that it was probably due to the rear-projection screen itself, which is basically a zillion nearly microscopic spherical lenses embedded in some sort of plastic sheet. Does your Sony suffer from any similar problems?
And at least according to folklore, some of those legacy decisions were really bad ones from a long-term perspective. One of my favorite involved multimedia and went like this. Some non-preemptable kernel routines could take very long periods to run (up to a couple of seconds). This played hell with smooth playback of audio or video. So the long-running routines were modified to add callouts to the audio and video routines to service buffers, update frames, etc. Of course, now the long-running routines took even longer to complete, as well as introducing the possibility that interactions between the routines could screw up kernel data structures. One hopes that most or all of that kind of nonsense disappeared in the NT-based versions of Windows, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Given the legacy issues, I've always regarded Windows as a dancing bear of an OS: it's not amazing that the bear dances gracefully, it's amazing that the bear dances at all.
It is my understanding that the PTO is quite good at identifying prior art when it takes the form of previously granted patents. Unfortunately, when they started granting patents for software and business practices, which had not previously been patentable, all of the prior art was documented outside of the patent system. At a previous job, we got a software patent application back with some of the claims disallowed due to prior patents, so that much of the system seems to work. I'm not surprised that the PTO can't deal with the outside documentation of prior art; imagine the size of the job to catalog (as a start) all of the ACM journals, the IEEE computer journals, and the software textbooks that have been published since the 1960s so that you can tell if a particular algorithm used for a particular application has already appeared.
Interesting point. Another one about the tails of trips -- once you get off the train, how well can you get to where you really want to be? In many places in the US, mass transit isn't an option for getting to where you need to be. For example, if you land at 9:30 at night, will you be able to get to the hotel 20 miles away? Will you be able to get a ride from the hotel to the office where your meeting is? So you end up needing a rental car, and the central location of the train station often doesn't lend itself to the fleet parking lots.
At least partially true. Rather than describing the ITU themselves as being technically competent, I might be inclined to say that many of the large companies where the technical work is actually done are quite competent. The official US representative to the ITU is from the State Department. Much (most?) of the technical work that they take to the ITU is done by large corporations -- in the telephony field, companies like Lucent and AT&T.
OTOH, the ITU took their best shot at establishing a data communications network standard: X.25. They lost. IP won. Now they want to be put in charge? I've watched both the ITU and the IETF process for technical standards, and will take the IETF hands-down. Almost anyone can propose something, which is damned hard to get done in the ITU. And the IETF requires that two independent implementations successfully interoperate before a protocol reaches the "standard" level -- I've seen ITU stuff become a blessed standard even though no one has ever done an actual implementation.
Despite Darl running his mouth in public on assorted topics, the foundation of SCO's original suit against IBM still comes down to a contract in which IBM purportedly signed away many of the rights that they hold under copyright. If I understand correctly, in the original suit, SCO did not assert that they "owned" the copyright on IBM's work, but that they did have the right to control whether and when that work could be revealed to third parties -- because IBM had signed over that right in order to gain access to the original UNIX source code. Hence the legal theory (emphasis on theory) that IBM revealed certain things, without permission, that made Linux more competitive with SCO's product, and thereby damaged SCO. It's a matter of contract law. Issues such as the GPL came up when IBM countersued and Red Hat sued.
That said, I still think SCO will eventually get their head handed to them on a platter: (1) IBM has a separate document in which AT&T appears to have waived some of the terms of the original contract, (2) there's a lot of question about whether current AIX may still be regarded as being "derived from" the original UNIX, (3) some of the technology in question (such as JFS) may have been developed in a non-AIX context, and (4) SCO's distribution of Linux could be interepreted as a waiver of their rights under the contract.
I think the judge is starting to get irritated. The latest ruling seems to have the flavor of "IBM has given you a lot of material, now it's time for you to point at specific chunks of code where you think you can prove your rights were violated."
Don't know the situation in Australia WRT satellite services (number of slots, existing birds, total market size, etc) so this may or may not be relevant. The data capabilities that can be provided by the new Ka-band satellites sounds like an excellent match to this situation. The climate and geography seem ideal -- dry and mostly flat. Of course, the technology is expensive in initial investment, but then it's easy to add individual users. I'm used to thinking in terms of service for the US and/or Europe, where there are a LOT more people than in Australia. Is Australia big enough, population-wise, to make a go of satellite-based service? Could they share a satellite with other countries in the region?