I'll bet there were a slew of newspaper articles in the 70s and 80s along the lines of "Money isn't everything, only 1 in 20 auto workers are happy anyway. 7 out of 8 computer people have job satisfaction though..."
-->As to the question of why outsource? Well, if you are a CEO and you could reduce your development costs by 50%, you have an obligation to your shareholders to do so as long as the benefits outweigh the consequences.
I am sick of this half-truth. Check out how many companies, ESPECIALLY tech companies, pay a dividend. They are wiping out jobs for the shareholder? Bullshit, they are wiping out jobs for increased stock options and bonuses. The shareholder will see none of the savings except (maybe) some indirect and ephemeral increase in the stock price which will be reversed by some other event three months later anyway. But the jobs are gone forever.
>>I'm missing out on the connection to how Carly Fiorina had the authority to cut AT&T labs.
I'm not sure she technically had anything to do with the Labs but she was at AT&T before leaving to run Lucent into the ground. Her work at HP is just a continuation of her path of destruction. She is kind of a one-woman Sherman March of American engineering.
That's why IT is so great for them --- IT training is cheap.
IT isn't any cheaper than many other professions. It isn't any more expensive to train an accountant or a para-legal or a multitude of other jobs that have already begun to disappear from the US.
In no way do they have the resources to do the same for something expensive like nanotec/biotech.
This argument so completely misses the obvious. Who do you think HAS the money? Venture capitalists have the money. Large corps have the money. Wall Street has the money. And if there was a huge advance in nanotech tomorrow there NO GUARANTEE that they won't say "Hey, let's skip an American facility entirely and set up in India right from the get-go."
There is no law that says that Version 1.0 of everything must be built in the US. Capital goes where ever it damn well feels like.
So they're adding 2000 jobs in India, and 5000 jobs in the US. And we're complaining?
Let's not be too naive.
Over the next 8 months we will be hearing of huge numbers of US jobs that the Fortune 500 will be creating "in the second half". Most of these will turn out to be no more substantial than the press releases that announce them. And don't be too surprised if the few that actually manifest themselves in an American paycheck disappear by the 3rd week in November...
what's going to happen when someone innocent is labeled as the uber-terrorist by this new system...there better be a nice little compensation package for those folks.
How do you collect? They don't need to even tell you why you were flagged. And how exactly does one go about proving that they are NOT a terrorist?
Good point. Sending out resumes has always been the most inefficient way to find a job. Do people really need to be told to use their contacts and network?
But the experience, if not the representation of it on a piece of paper, will be of value to people paying wages.
With $40k you could live like a king for far longer than 2 years in most parts of India. In fact you can live damn well on that $8k salary.
As for coming back in a couple of years, you will have more work experience in your profession combined with multicultural and foreign experience. Very healthy things to have on your resume.
Finally, upon arriving back in the United States you will find that the standard of living will have only dropped further and the cost of living is less than when you left.
Why do you think that only a year ago so many economists - not to mention Federal Reserve Governors - were sitting on a brick about "deflation". Why do you think US interest rates remain so low despite the fact that there is obvious inflation in some of the commodities? Answer: because there is NO bloody inflation in wages, nor has lower rates increased job creation, at least in the US.
Remember, the whole point of this global trade is to even things out. That means the US drops and the developing world rises. Most westerners don't have a clue what is in store for them. They think outsourcing is something that happens to textile and call center workers.
Some conservatives. For every Bob Barr there are several Rush and Hannity apologists. Of course I haven't listened to Rush in quite awhile. Maybe he has changed his tune now that he realizes that obscure laws can actually used against him too.
Except that this has nothing to do with Bush
Right. Look at the things he has done to discourage this kind of activity. For example there was...what? He spends more time defending the Koran than the constitution.
The bad point: China will be going after space in a big way, a potential impediment to making any money if space goes the commercial route because you won't be cost effective to any multinationals.
The good point: China will be going after space in a big way, a potential gold mine if the US Government decides there is no way it can afford to let China become too competitive commercially and (especially) militarily in space.
-->1. In an online school, you could hire/convince someone else to take the tests and the exams for you.
You do appreciate the irony of this remark in a thread initiated by an article on how campus based students are turning in so many stolen papers, right?
-->4. Lack of specialized laboratory facilities for some Sciences.
I think this is the most compelling of the arguments for a campus based education. It is also why, as far as I am aware, no institution offers an online degree in the sciences outside of math and computer science.
It is, oddly enough, an argument that works against most small campus colleges as well. The expense of setting of up state-of-the-art labs and so forth requires a certain economy of scale that they can't achieve. Hence the fact that "small" is almost synonymous with "liberal arts" schools. When was the last time you heard anyone refer to a "small hard sciences" school?
-->5. Lack of prescreening. Anyone can get in. Right, or wrong, people don't value anything anyone can get.
That is a shame, particularly when you look at the luminaries that have graduated from a place like City College in NYC over the years. There is a difference between getting in and graduating.
That said, there isn't any reason online schools can't (or won't in time) become more selective.
-->2. Internet bandwidth + phone bandwidth will never be as good as human face-to-face bandwidth.
-->3. Lack of face-to-face learning from your peers.
You know, I won't claim that there isn't something to these. But I don't think they are enough to justify inflated education costs when an online education can be delivered at a fraction of the cost. I guess we will see what the future brings.
-->Yes, because grading is the only individual attention a student gets.
Brushing pointless sarcasm aside, I would have thought it obvious that I was raising the larger issue of whether the economics of higher education in the US are really working.
People pay tuition because high-quality employers (and graduate schools) prefer candidates who come from prestigious four-year universities
It is interesting that you equate "expensive" and "prestigious". Part of my argument stems from the fact that there is no correlation whatsoever.
Even if we accept the fact that the cost of a MIT education justifies itself, can you really claim that the person who goes 100k in the financial hole at age 22 for a piece of paper from Farleigh Dickinson University (or a thousand others just like it) will get their money's worth? I think the answer to that is decidedly no, certainly compared to times when a college education cost less and provided a much bigger societal step up.
Which brings us back on point: in an age where (a) global competition is likely to contain or erode real earnings and (b) millions more college grads worldwide are available to be tapped for the global work force, can US universities continue to justify and increase their tuition without some kind of economic backlash and educational alternatives arising?
And before you blithely dismiss the question, consider that the president of (I think it was) Georgia Tech has questioned the viability of US engineering schools in the future.
As to your second question, India already has hundreds of campuses with extremely competitive admissions standards; a reason that skilled, educated workers are available in India is that a large number of Indians are highly educated, most in India, not the U.S.
And this has what to do with anything I said?
Is it your claim that Indian entrepreneurs, educational institutions, academics, etc., would therefore be uninterested in making a sizable amount of money educating westerners more economically than they can do in their home countries?
So calculating from the student's point of view they are getting about an aggregate 2.5 hours worth of individual professor and TA attention per year. What a deal at somewhere between $8,000 and $25,000!!!
(1) Explain to me again why an online degree is considered less worthy than paying a boat load of money to get drunk on campus. Wasn't it because of all this "individual attention" students were suppose to get?
(2) At the 10+ percent this industry - and let's not kid ourselves that it isn't an industry - raises prices every year, how long before we see hundreds of campuses spring up in India catoring to consumers looking for a better deal?
I think we are pretty much in agreement. My read on it is that HTML is disjointed not so much that it couldn't (or shouldn't) be a subset of XML but that the real world realities of early web evolution bent it out of shape a bit because some of the browsers were a bit too relaxed and that laxity quickly became standard.
Oh well. Either way I am pretty sure the sun is going to rise tomorrow in the east.
HTML does pre-date XML but time is not the relevant factor here. Both XML and HTML are subsets of SGML. So horse pulled wagons may have pre-dated cars but they are still both subsets of the general category of wheel based transportation.
Really the hierachy is SGML->XML->HTML since HTML is really just a subset of XML, one of many languages that can be written in XML. See XHTML for a more apparent example.
I wonder if anyone has done a statistical analysis of spelling errors in emails by American youth. Talk about undetectable ways to hide a message in plain text!
I'd always seen the hope and potential for VoIP as similar to my hopes and potentials for WiFi
Don't lose hope entirely. There is nothing magical about VoIP that phone companies can do that anyone else couldn't. See Skype. The reason the companies have a market here is that people want to hook up to the half billion US phones that are on the PSTN. Crossing those interfaces is where the expense lies. If you get everyone off the PSTN and onto some addressable IP device your dream is almost realized.
VoIP companies don't pay taxes and rely on people paying their own internet connections.
Yes, but so what? These are legitimate savings. VoIP companies shouldn't have to pay taxes any more than any other service that moves data around since, ultimately, voice is just a form of data. If your justification is bandwith then there are dozens of media services (e.g. music and movie downloads) that suck up bandwidth. If it comes down to it, maybe the internet goes the metered route. Or just builds itself more capacity since there is now a commercial justification.
Much of what ILECs are paying taxes on are for the last mile monopoly: the poles, property, central offices, etc., need to support their infrastructure. If you are getting broadband over cable you are already paying for the connection and associated taxes via the cable bill. What is really going on here is consolodation to one pipe. As consumers we have eliminated the need to pay for that second (expensive) pipe. If you don't need the redundancy, this is a good thing.
apart from the cost of calls, there are precious few technological advantages in placing VoIP calls instead of normal phone calls
No, this is just plain wrong.
You have all the advantages of an intelligent IP network versus a static circuit phone system. These advantages might not be apparent yet but they will come in time.
With IP you have the capability of putting intelligent end devices on the network and pushing things off to the edge. Can your POTS phone call your brother's computer soft phone at college? With IP (and protocols like SIP) VoIP can. And with all the IP addressable devices coming down the road it is not unlikely a little java app in your IP phone can automatically ring up your car and get it warm in the winter.
On the other end, IP makes far more telephony services available to service providers. Standard basic services like caller id will be shown to be the dinosaurs that they are.
In all cases, VoIP companies die.
I see it the other ways around. I think you are correct that the traditional phone companies will whine to the government to bail their asses out with poorly justified regulations and appeal to its greed for lost tax revenue. Maybe that will fly, maybe it won't. My guess is that the outcome will be determined by how loud the VoIP companies can make their cases in the popular press. Since they are starting to get some converage now I think they stand an increasing good chance.
The efficient worker is adaptable and retrains. He doesn't rely on protectionism to keep his job at the expense of the buying power of everyone else in his country.
Should we be brewing up a little nanotech in the garage or biotech in the kitchen? Please do tell ASAP as there are those small matters of the 2-5 years and thousands of dollars in costs for us to "retrain" ourselves.
And you can definitively guarantee that these jobs won't be offshored 2 years after they are created here, right?
Stop fighting the last war again, General. It is fundamentally different this time.
Yes, the crime, extortion, could have just as easily occurred in the US. The difference is that the US would then have the capability of apprehending and punishing the criminal. When the crime occurs in Pakistan or some other country there is not much that can be done if the host country doesn't cooperate. Consider, for instance, how long the US has been twisting China's arm to stop the blatant piracy that goes on there.
It is particularly outrageous that we are doing this kind of business in Pakistan. As you note it is a fundamentalist, militarily ruled country. I will go further: it is the closest thing to a terrorist state that is not OFFICIALLY on the US's list.
How do terrorists get some of their money? Well the US has already broken up credit card rings, cigarette smuggling, diamond and gold trading, etc., which funded terrorist activities.
Now think what you need for identity theft: Name, SSN, DOB. Guess what every single medical record in the US has on them? Do you REALLY think this stuff should be shipped off for processing in Pakistan?
The instructive part of the analogy between taxing for population control and taxing spam is how government intervention always leads to UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES.
For instance, a staggering number of Chinese pregnancies are aborted if they are female. When they can only have one kid they want that kid to be a boy.
Aside from the moral issues here, consider the ramifications of this in 20 years. There are going to be a WHOLE LOT of horny Chinese males looking for mates. Those mates won't be found in China so watch out Korea, Japan, Vietnam, etc.
it is why they have chosen an open source solution. They can author, patch, admin and TRUST their own work, on their own system.
Huh? Did I miss the memo barring IBM from using any of the at least half dozen operating systems they currently market? Are they no longer in control of their own source?
Slashdot Mirror
-->The eighth guy...he's shittin' bricks
Resistance is futile. As the article points out, a harmonious career in flower arrangement awaits him.
As for the bricks, luckily it appears we will soon have the best damn plumbing in the galaxy.
I'll bet there were a slew of newspaper articles in the 70s and 80s along the lines of "Money isn't everything, only 1 in 20 auto workers are happy anyway. 7 out of 8 computer people have job satisfaction though..."
-->As to the question of why outsource? Well, if you are a CEO and you could reduce your development costs by 50%, you have an obligation to your shareholders to do so as long as the benefits outweigh the consequences.
I am sick of this half-truth. Check out how many companies, ESPECIALLY tech companies, pay a dividend. They are wiping out jobs for the shareholder? Bullshit, they are wiping out jobs for increased stock options and bonuses. The shareholder will see none of the savings except (maybe) some indirect and ephemeral increase in the stock price which will be reversed by some other event three months later anyway. But the jobs are gone forever.
>>I'm missing out on the connection to how Carly Fiorina had the authority to cut AT&T labs.
I'm not sure she technically had anything to do with the Labs but she was at AT&T before leaving to run Lucent into the ground. Her work at HP is just a continuation of her path of destruction. She is kind of a one-woman Sherman March of American engineering.
That's why IT is so great for them --- IT training is cheap.
IT isn't any cheaper than many other professions. It isn't any more expensive to train an accountant or a para-legal or a multitude of other jobs that have already begun to disappear from the US.
In no way do they have the resources to do the same for something expensive like nanotec/biotech.
This argument so completely misses the obvious. Who do you think HAS the money? Venture capitalists have the money. Large corps have the money. Wall Street has the money. And if there was a huge advance in nanotech tomorrow there NO GUARANTEE that they won't say "Hey, let's skip an American facility entirely and set up in India right from the get-go."
There is no law that says that Version 1.0 of everything must be built in the US. Capital goes where ever it damn well feels like.
(1) the ignorance of economics among our base really sickens me.
(2) If they can make it cheaper than we can, they should do so.
So "fair trade" is just about price. Phew, I guess I am ignorant.
So they're adding 2000 jobs in India, and 5000 jobs in the US. And we're complaining?
Let's not be too naive.
Over the next 8 months we will be hearing of huge numbers of US jobs that the Fortune 500 will be creating "in the second half". Most of these will turn out to be no more substantial than the press releases that announce them. And don't be too surprised if the few that actually manifest themselves in an American paycheck disappear by the 3rd week in November...
I couldn't agree more. It was so bad that it was almost a parody of the worst book ever written.
what's going to happen when someone innocent is labeled as the uber-terrorist by this new system...there better be a nice little compensation package for those folks.
How do you collect? They don't need to even tell you why you were flagged. And how exactly does one go about proving that they are NOT a terrorist?
Good point. Sending out resumes has always been the most inefficient way to find a job. Do people really need to be told to use their contacts and network?
But the experience, if not the representation of it on a piece of paper, will be of value to people paying wages.
With $40k you could live like a king for far longer than 2 years in most parts of India. In fact you can live damn well on that $8k salary.
As for coming back in a couple of years, you will have more work experience in your profession combined with multicultural and foreign experience. Very healthy things to have on your resume.
Finally, upon arriving back in the United States you will find that the standard of living will have only dropped further and the cost of living is less than when you left.
Why do you think that only a year ago so many economists - not to mention Federal Reserve Governors - were sitting on a brick about "deflation". Why do you think US interest rates remain so low despite the fact that there is obvious inflation in some of the commodities? Answer: because there is NO bloody inflation in wages, nor has lower rates increased job creation, at least in the US.
Remember, the whole point of this global trade is to even things out. That means the US drops and the developing world rises. Most westerners don't have a clue what is in store for them. They think outsourcing is something that happens to textile and call center workers.
it is actually greatly opposed by Conservatives
Some conservatives. For every Bob Barr there are several Rush and Hannity apologists. Of course I haven't listened to Rush in quite awhile. Maybe he has changed his tune now that he realizes that obscure laws can actually used against him too.
Except that this has nothing to do with Bush
Right. Look at the things he has done to discourage this kind of activity. For example there was...what? He spends more time defending the Koran than the constitution.
This is an interesting take on the future.
The bad point: China will be going after space in a big way, a potential impediment to making any money if space goes the commercial route because you won't be cost effective to any multinationals.
The good point: China will be going after space in a big way, a potential gold mine if the US Government decides there is no way it can afford to let China become too competitive commercially and (especially) militarily in space.
Could be interesting.
-->1. In an online school, you could hire/convince someone else to take the tests and the exams for you.
You do appreciate the irony of this remark in a thread initiated by an article on how campus based students are turning in so many stolen papers, right?
-->4. Lack of specialized laboratory facilities for some Sciences.
I think this is the most compelling of the arguments for a campus based education. It is also why, as far as I am aware, no institution offers an online degree in the sciences outside of math and computer science.
It is, oddly enough, an argument that works against most small campus colleges as well. The expense of setting of up state-of-the-art labs and so forth requires a certain economy of scale that they can't achieve. Hence the fact that "small" is almost synonymous with "liberal arts" schools. When was the last time you heard anyone refer to a "small hard sciences" school?
-->5. Lack of prescreening. Anyone can get in. Right, or wrong, people don't value anything anyone can get.
That is a shame, particularly when you look at the luminaries that have graduated from a place like City College in NYC over the years. There is a difference between getting in and graduating.
That said, there isn't any reason online schools can't (or won't in time) become more selective.
-->2. Internet bandwidth + phone bandwidth will never be as good as human face-to-face bandwidth.
-->3. Lack of face-to-face learning from your peers.
You know, I won't claim that there isn't something to these. But I don't think they are enough to justify inflated education costs when an online education can be delivered at a fraction of the cost. I guess we will see what the future brings.
-->Yes, because grading is the only individual attention a student gets.
Brushing pointless sarcasm aside, I would have thought it obvious that I was raising the larger issue of whether the economics of higher education in the US are really working.
People pay tuition because high-quality employers (and graduate schools) prefer candidates who come from prestigious four-year universities
It is interesting that you equate "expensive" and "prestigious". Part of my argument stems from the fact that there is no correlation whatsoever.
Even if we accept the fact that the cost of a MIT education justifies itself, can you really claim that the person who goes 100k in the financial hole at age 22 for a piece of paper from Farleigh Dickinson University (or a thousand others just like it) will get their money's worth? I think the answer to that is decidedly no, certainly compared to times when a college education cost less and provided a much bigger societal step up.
Which brings us back on point: in an age where (a) global competition is likely to contain or erode real earnings and (b) millions more college grads worldwide are available to be tapped for the global work force, can US universities continue to justify and increase their tuition without some kind of economic backlash and educational alternatives arising?
And before you blithely dismiss the question, consider that the president of (I think it was) Georgia Tech has questioned the viability of US engineering schools in the future.
As to your second question, India already has hundreds of campuses with extremely competitive admissions standards; a reason that skilled, educated workers are available in India is that a large number of Indians are highly educated, most in India, not the U.S.
And this has what to do with anything I said?
Is it your claim that Indian entrepreneurs, educational institutions, academics, etc., would therefore be uninterested in making a sizable amount of money educating westerners more economically than they can do in their home countries?
OK lets do some maths here...
So calculating from the student's point of view they are getting about an aggregate 2.5 hours worth of individual professor and TA attention per year. What a deal at somewhere between $8,000 and $25,000!!!
(1) Explain to me again why an online degree is considered less worthy than paying a boat load of money to get drunk on campus. Wasn't it because of all this "individual attention" students were suppose to get?
(2) At the 10+ percent this industry - and let's not kid ourselves that it isn't an industry - raises prices every year, how long before we see hundreds of campuses spring up in India catoring to consumers looking for a better deal?
I think we are pretty much in agreement. My read on it is that HTML is disjointed not so much that it couldn't (or shouldn't) be a subset of XML but that the real world realities of early web evolution bent it out of shape a bit because some of the browsers were a bit too relaxed and that laxity quickly became standard.
Oh well. Either way I am pretty sure the sun is going to rise tomorrow in the east.
HTML does pre-date XML but time is not the relevant factor here. Both XML and HTML are subsets of SGML. So horse pulled wagons may have pre-dated cars but they are still both subsets of the general category of wheel based transportation.
Really the hierachy is SGML->XML->HTML since HTML is really just a subset of XML, one of many languages that can be written in XML. See XHTML for a more apparent example.
I wonder if anyone has done a statistical analysis of spelling errors in emails by American youth. Talk about undetectable ways to hide a message in plain text!
I'd always seen the hope and potential for VoIP as similar to my hopes and potentials for WiFi
Don't lose hope entirely. There is nothing magical about VoIP that phone companies can do that anyone else couldn't. See Skype. The reason the companies have a market here is that people want to hook up to the half billion US phones that are on the PSTN. Crossing those interfaces is where the expense lies. If you get everyone off the PSTN and onto some addressable IP device your dream is almost realized.
VoIP companies don't pay taxes and rely on people paying their own internet connections.
Yes, but so what? These are legitimate savings. VoIP companies shouldn't have to pay taxes any more than any other service that moves data around since, ultimately, voice is just a form of data. If your justification is bandwith then there are dozens of media services (e.g. music and movie downloads) that suck up bandwidth. If it comes down to it, maybe the internet goes the metered route. Or just builds itself more capacity since there is now a commercial justification.
Much of what ILECs are paying taxes on are for the last mile monopoly: the poles, property, central offices, etc., need to support their infrastructure. If you are getting broadband over cable you are already paying for the connection and associated taxes via the cable bill. What is really going on here is consolodation to one pipe. As consumers we have eliminated the need to pay for that second (expensive) pipe. If you don't need the redundancy, this is a good thing.
apart from the cost of calls, there are precious few technological advantages in placing VoIP calls instead of normal phone calls
No, this is just plain wrong.
You have all the advantages of an intelligent IP network versus a static circuit phone system. These advantages might not be apparent yet but they will come in time.
With IP you have the capability of putting intelligent end devices on the network and pushing things off to the edge. Can your POTS phone call your brother's computer soft phone at college? With IP (and protocols like SIP) VoIP can. And with all the IP addressable devices coming down the road it is not unlikely a little java app in your IP phone can automatically ring up your car and get it warm in the winter.
On the other end, IP makes far more telephony services available to service providers. Standard basic services like caller id will be shown to be the dinosaurs that they are.
In all cases, VoIP companies die.
I see it the other ways around. I think you are correct that the traditional phone companies will whine to the government to bail their asses out with poorly justified regulations and appeal to its greed for lost tax revenue. Maybe that will fly, maybe it won't. My guess is that the outcome will be determined by how loud the VoIP companies can make their cases in the popular press. Since they are starting to get some converage now I think they stand an increasing good chance.
The efficient worker is adaptable and retrains. He doesn't rely on protectionism to keep his job at the expense of the buying power of everyone else in his country.
Should we be brewing up a little nanotech in the garage or biotech in the kitchen? Please do tell ASAP as there are those small matters of the 2-5 years and thousands of dollars in costs for us to "retrain" ourselves.
And you can definitively guarantee that these jobs won't be offshored 2 years after they are created here, right?
Stop fighting the last war again, General. It is fundamentally different this time.
That same thing could have happened in the US.
Yes, the crime, extortion, could have just as easily occurred in the US. The difference is that the US would then have the capability of apprehending and punishing the criminal. When the crime occurs in Pakistan or some other country there is not much that can be done if the host country doesn't cooperate. Consider, for instance, how long the US has been twisting China's arm to stop the blatant piracy that goes on there.
It is particularly outrageous that we are doing this kind of business in Pakistan. As you note it is a fundamentalist, militarily ruled country. I will go further: it is the closest thing to a terrorist state that is not OFFICIALLY on the US's list.
How do terrorists get some of their money? Well the US has already broken up credit card rings, cigarette smuggling, diamond and gold trading, etc., which funded terrorist activities.
Now think what you need for identity theft: Name, SSN, DOB. Guess what every single medical record in the US has on them? Do you REALLY think this stuff should be shipped off for processing in Pakistan?
Sort of.
The instructive part of the analogy between taxing for population control and taxing spam is how government intervention always leads to UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES.
For instance, a staggering number of Chinese pregnancies are aborted if they are female. When they can only have one kid they want that kid to be a boy.
Aside from the moral issues here, consider the ramifications of this in 20 years. There are going to be a WHOLE LOT of horny Chinese males looking for mates. Those mates won't be found in China so watch out Korea, Japan, Vietnam, etc.
it is why they have chosen an open source solution. They can author, patch, admin and TRUST their own work, on their own system.
Huh? Did I miss the memo barring IBM from using any of the at least half dozen operating systems they currently market? Are they no longer in control of their own source?