to earn 10x more than someone in a 3rd world country you are soon going to have to be able to DO 10x more [...] give it 20-30 years and it will start to even out
This is something I wonder about a lot.
Certainly, with Free Trade going on long enough, all standards of living will even out. (There's no good reason for the U.S.'s standard of living to be so much higher than elsewhere).
Why wouldn't this result in all the standards of living racing to the bottom? Picture if you will, a world with perfect frictionless capital mobility, and standards of living are all equal. Country X reduces its standard of living, and therefore its wages. All the jobs/capital go there pretty quickly. Therefore, everyplace will have to keep its standard of living as low as possible. If a country rises a bit, *whoosh* all the jobs leave, resulting in the SOL coming back down to equilibrium.
For an example, look to offshored industries. Wages and working conditions in the textile industry didn't meet somewhere between "U.S." and "Chinese sweatshop"; you just can't do textiles other than at Chinese sweatshop wages. If China were to have a communist revolution or something tomorrow, and raise their workers' wages, then certainly all the textile manufacturing would move somewhere else that could keep the prices at current low levels, right?
I know people like to handwave about "rising tides lifting all boats" and such, but I just don't buy it. I certainly don't personally know anyone who's better off than they were in 1998. Theoretically the U.S. economy has grown quite a bit since then. Where did it go?
We have to stamp out entertainment piracy, for the good of the U.S. economy.
Think about it. In a few years, what other wealth-generating industry will be left in the U.S.? We can run our economy entirely on exporting entertainment to the rest of the world, and paying one another for service-industry stuff that requires physical presence. Everything else is leaving the country.
I support Asterisk systems, so there's someone to call when it breaks, or to get bugs fixed. For example, a client of mine was using the "email voicemails as a WAV file" feature, but the message it constructed was not being recognized properly by Outlook. In about 1 billable hour, I was able to fix the bug.
Check the voip-info.org Wiki for a listing of Asterisk consultants in your area.
This has a Categorical Imperative (i.e. "what if everybody did that?") problem though.
Suppose you have bad credit, and let's suppose it's from some other cause than basic irresponsiblity. (Medical bills, divorce, that sort of thing). Now nobody will hire you because your credit score is low. (I assume most employers looking at credit reports are simply sorting by score, rather than carefully examining the details). You can't get a job because you have bad credit, and you can't catch up on bills because that typically requires some income. Subsequently, your credit gets worse, and this looks like irresponsibility even to those examining the details ("why did he buy a house he couldn't afford?" not knowing inability to get a job, because of bad credit, is why you got foreclosed upon).
You might be surprised. I've heard about some law work (contract reviews, etc.) going to India. Ditto low-level doctoring (reading X-rays). Do a little Googling. Maybe law is primed for the same trouble IT has: All the entry-level stuff goes offshore, then after 5 years companies are shocked, shocked to find nobody local has only 5 years' experience, they start lobbying for guest workers, collapse.
That's the part that makes this different than buggy whips: To what industry am I to move, even assuming I am infinitely intelligent and flexible, so I can learn to do anything well?
I can't see any way that any job which does not have a strong requirement for physical presence (law does not) can keep any instances onshore. I also don't see any reason for manufacturing to have any presence onshore (how much is there today?) I have trouble seeing how a country can run an economy entirely on services, maybe you can help clarify that. (I've heard "foreign investment"; what foreign investor would invest in a 100%-services economy?)
It's obvious that frictionless free trade would bring the entire world's standard of living to the same level (eventually, once an equilibrium is reached). Figure out the population-weighted average standard of living of the world. It's probably close to that of some of the poorer African nations. Let's assume that economic efficiencies freed up by frictionless free trade quadruple this standard of living. We're likely to still be at a level less than the poorest slums in the current U.S.
Now we're at the real heart of the problem. The U.S. has such a higher standard of living than the rest of the world that the difference is unsustainable. As the world gets better-connected, the U.S. loses its comparative advantage, exerting a downward pressure. I personally think that surrent trends will lead to SOL's all squashed down to the absolute bottom (equivalent to the very poorest people in the world today), with a very small amount of super-rich. Your economic theories may vary, though.
It might be a good and moral thing that we in the U.S. get whacked down to a SOL commensurate with the rest of the world, or even that 99% of the world lives in squalor while 1% live in luxury. I still have trouble liking it though. Call me selfish.
Great. Bread will cost 15% less because the baking company and grocery store is spending less on IT. Meanwhile, all of us programmers will have gone from upper-middle-class salaries to scraping by on whatever we can find. Sounds wonderful. (Exactly what jobs that pay more than minimum wage will be left?)
My day job has an India office (of course), and it's autonomous, HR-wise.
Neither the sysadmins nor the US HR knows when people leave in India. We always find out when they hire on, because we get account creation requests. There was exactly one time I (as Clearcase/Clearquest admin) found out someone in India left - because he left holding checkouts, and someone complained.
Hmmm. Until now nobody with enough juice to fix things ever cared. Maybe I can forward this article to some directors, who might see the analogy to our problem.
In fact, the summary link (to Seth Finkelstein's blog) says exactly that. Their net-nanny software spotted a Google link with SafeSearch turned off (i.e. "safe=off" in the query-string). This caused the blocking software to kick in.
The real problem is that people think that this type of blocking software is anything but a blunt instrument. It'll always have lots of false positives and false negatives. I also doubt the people responsible for deploying the filtering software have thought through the constitutional implications.
You probably don't want people able to report a suspected missing child too casually.
The base rate fallacy guarantees most reports of missing children are going to be false alarms. (Look at the number of children, vs. the number of missing children). If you make this reporting too easy, then the authorities can get swamped chasing down the false leads.
On the other hand, if several different people (known to not be sock-puppets of one another, or closely related) were to report a suspected missing child through this interface, the central collection of the data could flag that. That set of reports would be significantly less likely to be false alarms.
How many people here have checked in buggy code that neither management nor QA knew was buggy? (crickets)
How many people here have been on projects where management shoved the code out the door despite major bugs that they knew about? (thunderous applause)
How many people here have tried to get time on The Schedule to do something The Right Way, only to be told by management to do it half-assed, because that's all there's time/resources for? (applause, hooting)
Conspiracy theories. I think I'm anti-business and cynical enough to see it:
RIM sending a message to the SEC: "Enough of the government and business is dependent on us that, if you take us down, you both make a big hit to the economy, and piss off your own bosses, who probably use our product."
However, due to the same information asymmetry that the article mentions, companies whose salespeople sell not-yet-existent products will beat those who don't in the marketplace. There's no way for the customer to tell the salesperson is lying or not, or, if they're cynical like me, they assume all the salespeople are lying, so they ignore that whole factor.
Management with a clue can't save you. We're all just getting swept up in a race to the bottom; opting out of that race is not an option.
This profit is not necessarily the government's fault.
The way red-light cameras are typically deployed, a private, for-profit company installs, maintains and runs them. This company does all of the ticket issuance. They get the fine payments, keep most of it, and forward a buck or two to the city for each.
One of the commenters to that post says that the regulators did not blindly require two-factor authentication, though that's how a lot of folks interpreted it (including, I bet, some banks). However, it seems like they can implement "security questions" or somesuch and say "look, we're compliant with these new regulations."
Legally, this is true, but MS can kill that by turning off the servers XP uses for activation. Then it doesn't matter whether you can legally install it or not, it stops working.
That's true. Technically, if you have a check from someone, you could clean out their account through electronic transfer. Heck, that's similar to what big credit card companies do now - when you send them a check in the mail, they EFT the money from your account, then destroy the paper check, so it must be possible.
If I were to ever pay for stuff with checks in person (I usually just use plastic), I wouldn't mind giving it to the cashier, for the same reason I don't mind giving them the plastic: the paper trail.
You know who you write checks to; it's in your checkbook, and the bank knows, by means of who cashes them. That will create instant suspicion of anyone who handles your checks when your money goes missing; if it goes missing from several people who all visited the same store recently, that will be noticed.
All of my financial websites (bank, credit cards, etc.) have all gone to "two-factor" authentication.
Most often, the second factor is "security questions", like "what city were you born in?" and "what's your favorite restaurant?" I always answer these with random passwords, which I put in my password safe along with the real password. Unless you do that, these are actually less secure than just having a secondary password, because others can find out that stuff.
I know every business wants to do this cheaply and half-assed; it's the American Business Way. To do it "right" would probably take SecurID's or somesuch other token, which would get ugly for the customer after accumulating a couple of dozen different ones.
I've heard in comments here about banks that send you a list of code numbers, one-time-use, in the postal mail, and you use them up as you log in. That would be a good, cheap way to do two-factor that actually increases security.
Happened with a lame spam filter my company used to have. This was a year or so ago.
I emailed my wife "can you stop by and pick up the Strattera and Effexor from the pharmacy?" once. Her reply, containing my message, got plonked by the filters.
What's the realistic likelihood we will ever see carbon emissions mitigation?
There are too many moneyed interests who would be hurt by mitigation measures; they'll make sure we can't take any action.
There are also plenty of people convinced we'll ruin the economy by mitigating, despite the report from a former head of the World Bank (hardly a bastion of "liberal" ideology) showing the costs to the economy of global warming will be much greater than the costs of mitigation plus the costs of mitigated global warming.
Before I started therapy (for the usual bitterness / depression that afflicts folks like us), my wife actually said "I hope this doesn't change your personality." I reminded her "that's kind of the whole point."
Drugs (for ADD and depression) and therapy have in fact altered my personality. Most importantly, into an employable one. It's now been over 2 years since I berated anyone at work for being dedicated ("dude, do you really think doing the deathmarch thing to get this out on time is going to save your job from going to India when the time comes?"). When managers utter their usual inanities, I smile and nod instead of publically calling bullshit. I was able to have a child after losing some of my (religiously unshakable) faith that, in my lifetime, I and everyone else who wasn't already rich would be living in the streets fighting over scraps of food.
My point (if I had one) is that sometimes a different personality is for the better.
Slashdot Mirror
This is something I wonder about a lot.
Certainly, with Free Trade going on long enough, all standards of living will even out. (There's no good reason for the U.S.'s standard of living to be so much higher than elsewhere).
Why wouldn't this result in all the standards of living racing to the bottom? Picture if you will, a world with perfect frictionless capital mobility, and standards of living are all equal. Country X reduces its standard of living, and therefore its wages. All the jobs/capital go there pretty quickly. Therefore, everyplace will have to keep its standard of living as low as possible. If a country rises a bit, *whoosh* all the jobs leave, resulting in the SOL coming back down to equilibrium.
For an example, look to offshored industries. Wages and working conditions in the textile industry didn't meet somewhere between "U.S." and "Chinese sweatshop"; you just can't do textiles other than at Chinese sweatshop wages. If China were to have a communist revolution or something tomorrow, and raise their workers' wages, then certainly all the textile manufacturing would move somewhere else that could keep the prices at current low levels, right?
I know people like to handwave about "rising tides lifting all boats" and such, but I just don't buy it. I certainly don't personally know anyone who's better off than they were in 1998. Theoretically the U.S. economy has grown quite a bit since then. Where did it go?
What's the point of polling North American developers?
The 11% decrease in Windows targeting could be because one of the 9 still working here switched to Linux.
We have to stamp out entertainment piracy, for the good of the U.S. economy.
Think about it. In a few years, what other wealth-generating industry will be left in the U.S.? We can run our economy entirely on exporting entertainment to the rest of the world, and paying one another for service-industry stuff that requires physical presence. Everything else is leaving the country.
I support Asterisk systems, so there's someone to call when it breaks, or to get bugs fixed. For example, a client of mine was using the "email voicemails as a WAV file" feature, but the message it constructed was not being recognized properly by Outlook. In about 1 billable hour, I was able to fix the bug.
Check the voip-info.org Wiki for a listing of Asterisk consultants in your area.
You're right! If I don't like my cable company's broadband service, I could just switch to...
... er, um, ...
This has a Categorical Imperative (i.e. "what if everybody did that?") problem though.
Suppose you have bad credit, and let's suppose it's from some other cause than basic irresponsiblity. (Medical bills, divorce, that sort of thing). Now nobody will hire you because your credit score is low. (I assume most employers looking at credit reports are simply sorting by score, rather than carefully examining the details). You can't get a job because you have bad credit, and you can't catch up on bills because that typically requires some income. Subsequently, your credit gets worse, and this looks like irresponsibility even to those examining the details ("why did he buy a house he couldn't afford?" not knowing inability to get a job, because of bad credit, is why you got foreclosed upon).
Welcome to inescapable poverty.
You might be surprised. I've heard about some law work (contract reviews, etc.) going to India. Ditto low-level doctoring (reading X-rays). Do a little Googling. Maybe law is primed for the same trouble IT has: All the entry-level stuff goes offshore, then after 5 years companies are shocked, shocked to find nobody local has only 5 years' experience, they start lobbying for guest workers, collapse.
That's the part that makes this different than buggy whips: To what industry am I to move, even assuming I am infinitely intelligent and flexible, so I can learn to do anything well?
I can't see any way that any job which does not have a strong requirement for physical presence (law does not) can keep any instances onshore. I also don't see any reason for manufacturing to have any presence onshore (how much is there today?) I have trouble seeing how a country can run an economy entirely on services, maybe you can help clarify that. (I've heard "foreign investment"; what foreign investor would invest in a 100%-services economy?)
It's obvious that frictionless free trade would bring the entire world's standard of living to the same level (eventually, once an equilibrium is reached). Figure out the population-weighted average standard of living of the world. It's probably close to that of some of the poorer African nations. Let's assume that economic efficiencies freed up by frictionless free trade quadruple this standard of living. We're likely to still be at a level less than the poorest slums in the current U.S.
Now we're at the real heart of the problem. The U.S. has such a higher standard of living than the rest of the world that the difference is unsustainable. As the world gets better-connected, the U.S. loses its comparative advantage, exerting a downward pressure. I personally think that surrent trends will lead to SOL's all squashed down to the absolute bottom (equivalent to the very poorest people in the world today), with a very small amount of super-rich. Your economic theories may vary, though.
It might be a good and moral thing that we in the U.S. get whacked down to a SOL commensurate with the rest of the world, or even that 99% of the world lives in squalor while 1% live in luxury. I still have trouble liking it though. Call me selfish.
Great. Bread will cost 15% less because the baking company and grocery store is spending less on IT. Meanwhile, all of us programmers will have gone from upper-middle-class salaries to scraping by on whatever we can find. Sounds wonderful. (Exactly what jobs that pay more than minimum wage will be left?)
Sometimes it's political issues as well.
My day job has an India office (of course), and it's autonomous, HR-wise.
Neither the sysadmins nor the US HR knows when people leave in India. We always find out when they hire on, because we get account creation requests. There was exactly one time I (as Clearcase/Clearquest admin) found out someone in India left - because he left holding checkouts, and someone complained.
Hmmm. Until now nobody with enough juice to fix things ever cared. Maybe I can forward this article to some directors, who might see the analogy to our problem.
In fact, the summary link (to Seth Finkelstein's blog) says exactly that. Their net-nanny software spotted a Google link with SafeSearch turned off (i.e. "safe=off" in the query-string). This caused the blocking software to kick in.
The real problem is that people think that this type of blocking software is anything but a blunt instrument. It'll always have lots of false positives and false negatives. I also doubt the people responsible for deploying the filtering software have thought through the constitutional implications.
You probably don't want people able to report a suspected missing child too casually.
The base rate fallacy guarantees most reports of missing children are going to be false alarms. (Look at the number of children, vs. the number of missing children). If you make this reporting too easy, then the authorities can get swamped chasing down the false leads.
On the other hand, if several different people (known to not be sock-puppets of one another, or closely related) were to report a suspected missing child through this interface, the central collection of the data could flag that. That set of reports would be significantly less likely to be false alarms.
How many people here have checked in buggy code that neither management nor QA knew was buggy? (crickets)
How many people here have been on projects where management shoved the code out the door despite major bugs that they knew about? (thunderous applause)
How many people here have tried to get time on The Schedule to do something The Right Way, only to be told by management to do it half-assed, because that's all there's time/resources for? (applause, hooting)
There you go.
Conspiracy theories. I think I'm anti-business and cynical enough to see it:
RIM sending a message to the SEC: "Enough of the government and business is dependent on us that, if you take us down, you both make a big hit to the economy, and piss off your own bosses, who probably use our product."
I used to think the same thing.
However, due to the same information asymmetry that the article mentions, companies whose salespeople sell not-yet-existent products will beat those who don't in the marketplace. There's no way for the customer to tell the salesperson is lying or not, or, if they're cynical like me, they assume all the salespeople are lying, so they ignore that whole factor.
Management with a clue can't save you. We're all just getting swept up in a race to the bottom; opting out of that race is not an option.
One needn't wait... one can spec on one's tax forms a date to direct-debit the amount owed, anytime up to 4/15.
This profit is not necessarily the government's fault.
The way red-light cameras are typically deployed, a private, for-profit company installs, maintains and runs them. This company does all of the ticket issuance. They get the fine payments, keep most of it, and forward a buck or two to the city for each.
I won't be old enough to run in the 2008 election, so we'll have to wait for the 2012 one. Sorry.
I have a dim memory of seeing that in the geek news somewhere a while back. I assumed that's why the financial corps were implementing these measures.
[/me digs...] Here we go: U.S. Regulators Require Two-Factor Authentication for Banks
One of the commenters to that post says that the regulators did not blindly require two-factor authentication, though that's how a lot of folks interpreted it (including, I bet, some banks). However, it seems like they can implement "security questions" or somesuch and say "look, we're compliant with these new regulations."
Legally, this is true, but MS can kill that by turning off the servers XP uses for activation. Then it doesn't matter whether you can legally install it or not, it stops working.
That's true. Technically, if you have a check from someone, you could clean out their account through electronic transfer. Heck, that's similar to what big credit card companies do now - when you send them a check in the mail, they EFT the money from your account, then destroy the paper check, so it must be possible.
If I were to ever pay for stuff with checks in person (I usually just use plastic), I wouldn't mind giving it to the cashier, for the same reason I don't mind giving them the plastic: the paper trail.
You know who you write checks to; it's in your checkbook, and the bank knows, by means of who cashes them. That will create instant suspicion of anyone who handles your checks when your money goes missing; if it goes missing from several people who all visited the same store recently, that will be noticed.
All of my financial websites (bank, credit cards, etc.) have all gone to "two-factor" authentication.
Most often, the second factor is "security questions", like "what city were you born in?" and "what's your favorite restaurant?" I always answer these with random passwords, which I put in my password safe along with the real password. Unless you do that, these are actually less secure than just having a secondary password, because others can find out that stuff.
I know every business wants to do this cheaply and half-assed; it's the American Business Way. To do it "right" would probably take SecurID's or somesuch other token, which would get ugly for the customer after accumulating a couple of dozen different ones.
I've heard in comments here about banks that send you a list of code numbers, one-time-use, in the postal mail, and you use them up as you log in. That would be a good, cheap way to do two-factor that actually increases security.
Happened with a lame spam filter my company used to have. This was a year or so ago.
I emailed my wife "can you stop by and pick up the Strattera and Effexor from the pharmacy?" once. Her reply, containing my message, got plonked by the filters.
What's the realistic likelihood we will ever see carbon emissions mitigation?
There are too many moneyed interests who would be hurt by mitigation measures; they'll make sure we can't take any action.
There are also plenty of people convinced we'll ruin the economy by mitigating, despite the report from a former head of the World Bank (hardly a bastion of "liberal" ideology) showing the costs to the economy of global warming will be much greater than the costs of mitigation plus the costs of mitigated global warming.
... but the last time I checked, they were out of space and weren't selling any more virtual servers.
Before I started therapy (for the usual bitterness / depression that afflicts folks like us), my wife actually said "I hope this doesn't change your personality." I reminded her "that's kind of the whole point."
Drugs (for ADD and depression) and therapy have in fact altered my personality. Most importantly, into an employable one. It's now been over 2 years since I berated anyone at work for being dedicated ("dude, do you really think doing the deathmarch thing to get this out on time is going to save your job from going to India when the time comes?"). When managers utter their usual inanities, I smile and nod instead of publically calling bullshit. I was able to have a child after losing some of my (religiously unshakable) faith that, in my lifetime, I and everyone else who wasn't already rich would be living in the streets fighting over scraps of food.
My point (if I had one) is that sometimes a different personality is for the better.