If they move plants worth a few billions to save a few hundred thousand dollars (the way Airbus does, from France and Germany to US, or Nokia, from Germany to Rumania etc.), they must be either insane, or better informed than you are.
Dell et comp. did not move to India because they were greedy, but because:
- rents went up for offices due to the housing boom (blame the zoning regulations for this; if you don't believe, try to plot the US cities with strict zoning rules and where new construction permits are difficult to obtain, and you'll see that in those areas the prices and the rents went up with about 130% compared with 1995, while in the cities with lax zoning rules and easy to obtain construction licenses the prices went up only about 30%)
- expensive housing means less labour mobility
- decreased labour mobility means employers cannot be choosy as to whom they employ, and have to pay more.
- if you need to increase your tech support team, you cannot move only the new 10 jobs in another location: it will cost more, and be much more difficult to manage; you move the whole operation.
From 2004 to 2006 I worked for an US company that moved it's development division from US in 1999 because they could not find people in... (I forgot the name of the city) in California, not even for shares in the company. If you run a business and you need a _team_ of 20 you cannot have 10 in one place, 5 in another etc. You need them all in one place, and if you can find only 15 in your home town, you will move to where you can find 30, so you can choose the best 20. Offshoring began when US economic growth outstripped the population growth.
If they laid you off from Dell tech support, I guess they did you a favor... don't know your circumstances, so I might be way off and very unfunny, but sitting in a cubicle and talking over the phone to morons that forgot to plug in their monitor seems like a good thing.
I know what being laid off means. I am from behind the former Iron Curtain, currently the Visa Curtain. In my area there was a drop of employment from 95% to 50% in the early '90s, but it happened because some [expletive deleted] Greenies managed to close down a chemical plant worth some 3 billions USD, on the pretext that it produced, besides artificial silk, some kind of CFC, which then caused the other plants to shut down, which caused shops and pubs to shut down etc. I am not old enough to have been among those to be laid off at that time, but apart from that I was in the middle of the commotion in all the other ways you can imagine. Still, in our case the plant could have been saved if the said Greenies (and their sponsors, the CEE (now EU) competition in artificial silk) would have compromised and accepted that buying a 49 mil. USD (1991 value) filter was a good solution. In your case, probably relaxing the building regulations and increasing the number of Green Cards would have saved your job and helped Dell preserve its profit margin (yeah, I know it's not very intuitive... immigrants creating jobs etc. hard to believe indeed, but if you think about it a little... ).
Hate to blow a hole in your argument, but it's about labour availability, not about labour price. I am sure there might be 100000 competent and unemployed developers and 500000 unemployed blue collar workers in US, but if Cisco would want to build a factory in [insert random US location here] he won't find the 2000 employees needed to get things started.
The cause of offshoring/outsourcing is not labour cost, but labour mobility: the price of labour in electronics is very low, around 5%, but you cannot do without people. Giving better salaries is not a solution. It was tried during the IT bubble but it did not work: the companies got more expensive workers but not in greater numbers, since all competed over the same number of workers, and due to the limitations on immigration the game was a zero sum game. This problem is much more grave in EU than in US (imagine needing a Green Card in order to leave California and find work in Florida) so factories are moved not only to China or Eastern Europe, but even to US.
Of course in the long run it gets you into trouble, but in order to have a "long run", the companies that moved their operations in other countries attempted to have a "short run" first: they would be already dead without the ability to expand.
I still believe if we had extended full trade relations towards Cuba as soon as they revolted, their communism would have quickly changed into something more balanced.
Some guy, called J. William Fulbright, said the same here. Other said the same about the Bolsheviks.
I do, if they transfer the ownership of the "nuclear waste" you talk about to me. When the whole "nuclear" hysteria will be over, it will be worth good money for reprocessing into fuel, and until then it would be quite safe if properly shielded.
BTW, "nuclear waste" is pretty much everything you can think of, waste or not, since all atoms have one nucleus. You were writing about "radioactive waste", I suppose ?
If you want to worry, please do worry about the great nuclear plant up in the sky bombarding us every day with lethal radiation. True, it takes some 50 to 90 years to die because of it, but we can't be too careful, can we ?
In other words, "Math is hard, let's go shopping."
How about: "These particular results of the use of Math do not really make sense, and we cannot really verify/falsify them. It's fun, but right now I have to do some shopping, so I'll go build a bridge or do something for which I can get paid, and with the money I get I'll buy that second-hand Cray you saw yesterday and we'll be back in the business of discovering particles that are so small that, if Heisenberg was right, we can't know much about them but a product of their speed and of their mass, or back in the business of counting the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin, if you fancy that more."
And yes, silver has pretty much the same properties as gold making it a good holder of value.
That's why the price of silver bounces up and down all the time, I suppose.
Money are valuable because governments say so. When your government will ask you to pay the taxes in gold, corn or goats, only then will money be worthless.
"Embattled Unix vendor SCO may get a new lease on life"
"The company said its board of directors unanimously approved the deal"
It's just talk about how SCO might get some money. Nothing official happened. No official papers were submitted anywhere.
I could not find any announcement by "Stephen Norris Capital Partners". Maybe my google-fu is lacking, or maybe "Stephen Norris Capital Partners" found out they will save SCO by reading the morning paper.
How about all those songwriters from 50 years ago nobody hears about ? I bet having the copyright extended for another 20 years (from 75 to 95) would help them tremendously, especially when it would cost more to hire lawyers to draft new distribution contracts than they would ever get for under those contracts.
These taxes EU proposes would help only the bureaucracy that would manage the money.
I bought my music from CDBaby and Magnatune. Right now I pay for each DVD I buy, even if I use them only for backups. If the "storage-media" tax is legitimate, then I should be allowed to copy whatever I want.
haven't you seen the statistics ? The areas with lots of shiny lights visible from IIS get rated as "urban". Would you choose to live in a "village" instead of living in a "suburb" ?
Access to energy and raw materials is slowly becoming an issue for certain large (would-be) superpowers
Are you sure ? Russia certainly does not lack resources. As for China, a few years ago there was talk of a spike in the price of copper caused by increased demand in China, while this last month there was talk about a spike in the price of copper caused by harsh weather interrupting production of copper in China and diminishing the amount available for export. I doubt any of the major players has any trouble with the supply of energy or raw materials.
a financial crisis is still looming around the corner
... a home-grown Marxist, are you ?:-) let's count the major "financial crises" that happened during the last 18 years... I counted four, including the one in Russia. Now let's attempt to correlate the occurrence of major world conflicts with "financial crises"... as far as I can tell, none during the last 200 years, unless you include the world wide recession caused by the slaughter that happened during WWI.
a renewed arms race is in the making
The arms race never stopped. Maybe Russia did not build up stocks of fighter jets and atomic submarines between 1991 and 2007, but research went on. The "unemployed Russian scientist that took a job with a gang of terrorists" and "the atomic warheads sold on the black market" happened only in Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.
I do remember some history lessons about empires falling apart after having spent too much money on occupations
Would you care to give some examples ?
IMHO, the United States cannot lose its strategic and technological advantage because they never had it. The US did have some advantages in some areas, such as being separated by oceans from their challengers, but that did not matter much in the era of intercontinental ballistic missiles, and might have had some fancy tech but of no much consequence in the age of "assured mutual destruction". What advantage the US always had and still have resides in being less feared and less hated than any other possible challenger to the position of "overlord", since at least they have the habit of paying for the accommodations instead of making their subjects pay for the occupation, as was done by all the other world powers that took a shot at "global domination". As an added benefit, I think that the perpetual spectacle of hand-wriggling and hair-pulling and self-doubt that a nation that legitimizes itself with a narrative involving "freedom fighters" performs for the benefit and amusement of us all while playing the "global policeman" and half-heartedly dealing with the inane squabbles between us, the others, more than compensates for the discomfort caused by staying on the side, making snide remarks, and taking none of the responsibility for whatever happens around.
I want to be able to simply tell a computer what to do. I want a way of operating the computer that is completely natural. "Hey computer, send that video over to my brother"
You don't want a computer, you want a secretary. And a very intelligent one, too.
one reason would be that for a long time there were no network games running on Windows, I suppose:-P . Or other usable network applications that would not bog down your antiquated DOS/Windows 3.* desktop. And because the applications they needed were running on a Unix server. Or, my favorite reason for liking the antiquated Unix workstation and the reason I installed Linux first chance I got: when Netscape froze on SunOs/Solaris and blocked your X, you could ask the admin to kill it, and you did not lose the other work.
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If they move plants worth a few billions to save a few hundred thousand dollars (the way Airbus does, from France and Germany to US, or Nokia, from Germany to Rumania etc.), they must be either insane, or better informed than you are.
... (I forgot the name of the city) in California, not even for shares in the company. If you run a business and you need a _team_ of 20 you cannot have 10 in one place, 5 in another etc. You need them all in one place, and if you can find only 15 in your home town, you will move to where you can find 30, so you can choose the best 20. Offshoring began when US economic growth outstripped the population growth.
... don't know your circumstances, so I might be way off and very unfunny, but sitting in a cubicle and talking over the phone to morons that forgot to plug in their monitor seems like a good thing.
... immigrants creating jobs etc. hard to believe indeed, but if you think about it a little ... ).
Dell et comp. did not move to India because they were greedy, but because:
- rents went up for offices due to the housing boom (blame the zoning regulations for this; if you don't believe, try to plot the US cities with strict zoning rules and where new construction permits are difficult to obtain, and you'll see that in those areas the prices and the rents went up with about 130% compared with 1995, while in the cities with lax zoning rules and easy to obtain construction licenses the prices went up only about 30%)
- expensive housing means less labour mobility
- decreased labour mobility means employers cannot be choosy as to whom they employ, and have to pay more.
- if you need to increase your tech support team, you cannot move only the new 10 jobs in another location: it will cost more, and be much more difficult to manage; you move the whole operation.
From 2004 to 2006 I worked for an US company that moved it's development division from US in 1999 because they could not find people in
If they laid you off from Dell tech support, I guess they did you a favor
I know what being laid off means. I am from behind the former Iron Curtain, currently the Visa Curtain. In my area there was a drop of employment from 95% to 50% in the early '90s, but it happened because some [expletive deleted] Greenies managed to close down a chemical plant worth some 3 billions USD, on the pretext that it produced, besides artificial silk, some kind of CFC, which then caused the other plants to shut down, which caused shops and pubs to shut down etc. I am not old enough to have been among those to be laid off at that time, but apart from that I was in the middle of the commotion in all the other ways you can imagine. Still, in our case the plant could have been saved if the said Greenies (and their sponsors, the CEE (now EU) competition in artificial silk) would have compromised and accepted that buying a 49 mil. USD (1991 value) filter was a good solution. In your case, probably relaxing the building regulations and increasing the number of Green Cards would have saved your job and helped Dell preserve its profit margin (yeah, I know it's not very intuitive
Hate to blow a hole in your argument, but it's about labour availability, not about labour price. I am sure there might be 100000 competent and unemployed developers and 500000 unemployed blue collar workers in US, but if Cisco would want to build a factory in [insert random US location here] he won't find the 2000 employees needed to get things started.
The cause of offshoring/outsourcing is not labour cost, but labour mobility: the price of labour in electronics is very low, around 5%, but you cannot do without people. Giving better salaries is not a solution. It was tried during the IT bubble but it did not work: the companies got more expensive workers but not in greater numbers, since all competed over the same number of workers, and due to the limitations on immigration the game was a zero sum game. This problem is much more grave in EU than in US (imagine needing a Green Card in order to leave California and find work in Florida) so factories are moved not only to China or Eastern Europe, but even to US.
Of course in the long run it gets you into trouble, but in order to have a "long run", the companies that moved their operations in other countries attempted to have a "short run" first: they would be already dead without the ability to expand.
Some guy, called J. William Fulbright, said the same here. Other said the same about the Bolsheviks.
funny
"Runs like a champ in..." means "Runs like a champion"
Considering that most of the attacks on my net come from IPs from US, could you cut the Easter Europe cables too, please ? :-P
I do, if they transfer the ownership of the "nuclear waste" you talk about to me. When the whole "nuclear" hysteria will be over, it will be worth good money for reprocessing into fuel, and until then it would be quite safe if properly shielded. BTW, "nuclear waste" is pretty much everything you can think of, waste or not, since all atoms have one nucleus. You were writing about "radioactive waste", I suppose ? If you want to worry, please do worry about the great nuclear plant up in the sky bombarding us every day with lethal radiation. True, it takes some 50 to 90 years to die because of it, but we can't be too careful, can we ?
I'll consider believing this sort of rumors when Microsoft will have usable auto completion in cmd.exe.
...
Until their command tool gets closer in usability to xterm, and their GUI gets close to GNOME, I'll stick to Solaris if I want proprietary Unix.
I suppose they could hijack one of the BSDs
I choose "overrated".
they are just attempting to reinvent the torrent tracker.
... and don't you dare mod this funny :-|
Unfortunately for me, I am paying for it
great ... I want to download the Debian CDs, can I route the traffic through your laptop, please ? :-P
My guess is Gates has not read "The Mythical Man-Month".
great :-( ... thanks for attracting their attention ... now they're going to send the flying polyps after me.
How about: "These particular results of the use of Math do not really make sense, and we cannot really verify/falsify them. It's fun, but right now I have to do some shopping, so I'll go build a bridge or do something for which I can get paid, and with the money I get I'll buy that second-hand Cray you saw yesterday and we'll be back in the business of discovering particles that are so small that, if Heisenberg was right, we can't know much about them but a product of their speed and of their mass, or back in the business of counting the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin, if you fancy that more."
no, it's a sect, a split from the Church of "Astounding Stories".
That's why the price of silver bounces up and down all the time, I suppose.
Money are valuable because governments say so. When your government will ask you to pay the taxes in gold, corn or goats, only then will money be worthless.
nope, just Soylent Green(back).
Nobody reads the FA ?
[emphasis mine]
"Embattled Unix vendor SCO may get a new lease on life"
"The company said its board of directors unanimously approved the deal"
It's just talk about how SCO might get some money. Nothing official happened. No official papers were submitted anywhere.
I could not find any announcement by "Stephen Norris Capital Partners". Maybe my google-fu is lacking, or maybe "Stephen Norris Capital Partners" found out they will save SCO by reading the morning paper.
How about all those songwriters from 50 years ago nobody hears about ? I bet having the copyright extended for another 20 years (from 75 to 95) would help them tremendously, especially when it would cost more to hire lawyers to draft new distribution contracts than they would ever get for under those contracts.
These taxes EU proposes would help only the bureaucracy that would manage the money.
I bought my music from CDBaby and Magnatune. Right now I pay for each DVD I buy, even if I use them only for backups. If the "storage-media" tax is legitimate, then I should be allowed to copy whatever I want.
haven't you seen the statistics ? The areas with lots of shiny lights visible from IIS get rated as "urban". Would you choose to live in a "village" instead of living in a "suburb" ?
Are you sure ? Russia certainly does not lack resources. As for China, a few years ago there was talk of a spike in the price of copper caused by increased demand in China, while this last month there was talk about a spike in the price of copper caused by harsh weather interrupting production of copper in China and diminishing the amount available for export. I doubt any of the major players has any trouble with the supply of energy or raw materials.
a financial crisis is still looming around the corner ... a home-grown Marxist, are you ? :-) let's count the major "financial crises" that happened during the last 18 years ... I counted four, including the one in Russia. Now let's attempt to correlate the occurrence of major world conflicts with "financial crises" ... as far as I can tell, none during the last 200 years, unless you include the world wide recession caused by the slaughter that happened during WWI.
a renewed arms race is in the makingThe arms race never stopped. Maybe Russia did not build up stocks of fighter jets and atomic submarines between 1991 and 2007, but research went on. The "unemployed Russian scientist that took a job with a gang of terrorists" and "the atomic warheads sold on the black market" happened only in Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.
I do remember some history lessons about empires falling apart after having spent too much money on occupationsWould you care to give some examples ?
IMHO, the United States cannot lose its strategic and technological advantage because they never had it. The US did have some advantages in some areas, such as being separated by oceans from their challengers, but that did not matter much in the era of intercontinental ballistic missiles, and might have had some fancy tech but of no much consequence in the age of "assured mutual destruction". What advantage the US always had and still have resides in being less feared and less hated than any other possible challenger to the position of "overlord", since at least they have the habit of paying for the accommodations instead of making their subjects pay for the occupation, as was done by all the other world powers that took a shot at "global domination". As an added benefit, I think that the perpetual spectacle of hand-wriggling and hair-pulling and self-doubt that a nation that legitimizes itself with a narrative involving "freedom fighters" performs for the benefit and amusement of us all while playing the "global policeman" and half-heartedly dealing with the inane squabbles between us, the others, more than compensates for the discomfort caused by staying on the side, making snide remarks, and taking none of the responsibility for whatever happens around.
You don't want a computer, you want a secretary. And a very intelligent one, too.
one reason would be that for a long time there were no network games running on Windows, I suppose :-P . Or other usable network applications that would not bog down your antiquated DOS/Windows 3.* desktop. And because the applications they needed were running on a Unix server. Or, my favorite reason for liking the antiquated Unix workstation and the reason I installed Linux first chance I got: when Netscape froze on SunOs/Solaris and blocked your X, you could ask the admin to kill it, and you did not lose the other work.