I might disagree on some particulars (like I think they have a lot of quality coders who are 1/4 our price) but not with your general points. Particularly that hordes of "programmers" are not going to be effective and about the potential instability if they don't share the wealth. I did see an article that they were outlawing child labor as household servants. This will reduce the labor force and that should raise wages for household servant slightly.
There's no need to fully support your opinions in my opinion. This is slashdot- not a research paper. I feel it's partially up to me to validate your facts or read further if I feel the need.
It's not there to protect the murderer. It's there to protect the rest of us.
Governments gone bad are much worse than an occasional murder or drug dealer getting off. The founding fathers felt excessive government power was *the* ultimate threat.
The scary thing is... we are just handing it all away to the government these days.
I think we could agree that working a regular week should pay enough to eat and have lodging for that week plus a little left over for emergencies. Anything less than that is immoral.
We already learned in america that if you subsidize females having children, they will have more and more of them to the point that it bankrupts any attempt to help them. On the other hand, cutting them off from support magically cuts their baby making almost to nil. Aggressively pursuing the fathers (No welfare unless you rat out the dad- confirm they are the dad with DNA and then garnish their wages) cuts it even further.
It was a *nice* idea to help those unwed moms- the problem was once we incented them to have children- they really let loose.
I think a minimum wage is required given the power and lack of morality that corporations have.
The indians are the new japanese. They are working *very hard* to come up to speed. They are insanely driven right now- to the point of committing suicide if they don't get in the right schools.
If you think they are going to produce crap quality code in 5 years, you are setting yourself up for a massive fall.
The good news is in 8 years, their wage advantage will mostly be gone at current inflation rates. And that americans begin retiring in droves in 2012 creating a labor shortage.
America is grossly overpriced because it is a safe, prosperous place to live where the government mostly (even in these increasingly fascist days) leaves you alone and has comparatively low taxes. Rich people are willing to pay a lot to live in a pretty place which the government won't take from them and where the government or some religious psychos won't arbitrarily kill them, torture them, or put them in prison.
The next generation of indians will not be *nearly* so driven. Just like the europeans, then the americans, and then the japanese, that generation will grow up with rich parents and be lazier and not see the point in giving up their life to earn a few more dollars.
The world is averaging out to a higher standard of living where it isn't descending into complete hell holes. America is going down (but really not much) and the other countries are coming up (and fast!).
For now the best advice I can give you is to get your elective surgery done over there. It's a lot cheaper.
1) The offshored indian IT workers I work with regularly put in over 50 hours without extra compensation. They have a fixed bid contract and exceeded 60 hours/week for a couple months there for the last big project. I put in about 40 hours a week- usually about 39- but occasionally 45.
2) No - the children are doing other kinds of offshoring. I did not mean to imply that we (all 1st world workers) are competing for IT jobs with children. If they could code- we would be - but children can't code well. They can sew garmants and fasten together electronics.
3) I'm also not implying that we compete for IT work with prison/virtual slave labor.
The thrust of my argument was that we have imposed certain costs on our economy because we feel it is inhumane to work people certain ways. To be philosophically consistent, we could (should?) insist that products we purchase require those same standards. Reasonable working hours- a minimum living wage (appropriate for that country)- paid vacation and sick time- paid company holidays- and no child labor except in a few chosen fields (like families of farmers or maybe 5 hours a week of anything).
Instead we are letting corporations push their costs onto the rest of society while keeping the profits.
Decimation was used to punish cowardly and mutinous groups of soldiers.
Agree that language evolves- part of that evolution is pushing back against loony usage.
Allowing "nine in ten" to stand along side "one in ten" as a valid meaning would make the word meaningless and unusable. The closest evolution I could see letting happen would be to a general meaning of "significant reduction".
Garmant makers (in some cases very young girls) are paid very low wages and work in abysmal conditions outlawed in the US in the 1920's. See the recent movie, "The Corporation" for examples.
IT workers- last I heard- made about $12 to $15k- or about 1/6 of american wages for the same skill set. However- they are experiencing as high as 40% inflation per year. Their work quality has risen a lot, they are sharp, and *highly* motivated (like the japanese were). Currently several thousand commit suicide every year when they fail to get into the desired schools. Their children will not be most likely (like the japanese again).
Despite being extremely inexpensive, many outsourced projects result in no net savings and are late. The main difficulty is cultural, and a loss of a work day everytime there is a significant question- not worker quality. Turnover in india is pretty incredible right now as well which can make stable staffing difficult (but we've had no problem with our off shore guys who work for a very large offshore co).
Bottom line tho- I agree that there is no basis for stopping IT offshoring. Multi-national corporations will relentlessly push this as long as their is an extreme wage difference. And *consumers* of all nations will relentlessly push it every time they pay $19.99 instead of $26.99 for similar products.
Likely result in the US will be that people will stop entering the bloody field, supply will dry up, and if you have the right skill sets, wages for boots on the ground will go up. I've been in IT since 1985 and make a very good wage supervising a mixture of onshore and offshore guys and gals. We have a pretty severe labor crunch coming in the US starting in 2012. Given the loyalty shown to the american worker by business, I'm really looking forward to that time. Payback is a bitch.
We are competing with people who do not have 40 hour work weeks, do not have child labor laws, hell - some of them basically have slave labor. They are willing to completely destroy their environment (we are talking black teeth from the amount of waste loose in the environment).
On top of this- they are willing to work for less.
I can see on a philosophical basis saying "okay they are less and that's tough nuts".
I can not see saying on that basis, "Okay so they work their children 15 hours a day and use prison labor from people thrown into prison on some very dubious causes".
So, I think we would be on a fair ethical basis to say, "Yup, you can use labor that charges.60 per hour- but you have to give 10 days vacation, workers comp, sick time, health care, etc. if you want to import the products into this country."
And every time we say "Look at it locally but buy it online" we do the same thing.
And if we don't- we are being stupid paying high prices to keep a local merchant in business while everyone else uses them but buys online.
The economy is realigning. There is no way to stop it. You better save like hell and avoid debt.
Good land in the US will be bid up (for now) because it is safe and stable. A lot of people can't afford to live where they grew up now.
Business and rich people own America.
And voters on the left and right are so obsessed with abortion and other 'non-issues' like gay marriage that they are allowing it to happen. They may be out of a job- out on the street- but at least the candidate voted for/against the issue they care more than anything about.
But if it TOUCHES you - it's physical. Smoke not only touches you- it gets inside your body.
I completely support the right of private businesses to allow smoking inside their premises and say that being able to handle smoking and not sue if you later get cancer is a condition of employment.
Smoking cars are illegal (you'll be ticketed). You are correct that cars spew out bad stuff even when operating properly tho (it's just "invisible").
I can't agree on the factory/car thing when the smoker is 2' away from me and blowing smoke in my direction. The concentration goes way up.
I think making smoking illegal in completely public spaces is a legitimate exercise of the state. I think that making smoking illegal inside private spaces (including bars/clubs formed to provide a place for smokers to gather) is not.
"Here-- let me vote for my economic destruction because you've identified one hot button issue that I will ignore every other issue for."
Sucker Bait is a very good term for it.
I do disagree with the parent poster than Bush hasn't done anything about the abortion issue tho. He's one judge away with 2 years to go from making abortion illegal for a generation. And he has already probably swung the court to the right / pro-business significantly.
I agree. The money spent on fusion is a pittance. Solar is interesting enough that it does not need much government support. I think more funding for both would be money well spent.
If they *really* believed that we were a hair trigger away from laying waste to their countries with nukes would they be provoking us continuously?
Obviously not.
They think of the U.S.A. as a *reasonably* safe external enemy to use to promote nationalism and strengthen their rule.
I'm suprised the iranian hostage thing played out like it did. I think today, we would accept hostage fatalities unless the hostages were connected to powerful people.
Oh we have a process. Very robust. Every team is consulted. It can take months to do what used to be a 40 hour project. It saves a lot of waste on stupid projects tho.
Except the stupid projects get shoved down by executives *LIKE ALWAYS* who bypass the process that applies to everyone else's projects.
The costs of the kyoto treaty and the *lack of those costs* on one of the largest and fastest growing economies in the world can be found in any article about the treaty.
Lots of respectable scientists talked about how we were going to freeze when I was young. It was a scientific "fact." The news anchors and talking heads all believed it. We even had some darn cold winters-- 12 degrees for almost a week one time.
To be redundant with my other posts: Unless we are going to stop population growth and reduce it to about 3 billion all of this is *pointless*. And no sane person would believe that we are going to do that. No- we are going to breed to the point that no amount of restrictions on our lifestyle will be sufficient and then we will begin to starve in large numbers and there will be chaos and fierce government oppression.
Worst case global warming probably will not even reduce the earth's carrying capacity below it's current population. It's just going to push some people around off of low lying areas. Weather has done that in the past and people tended to fight in those cases.
Global warming doesn't say the planet will become uninhabitable.
It may change to where it can carry more or less humans. The population is already so large that we are constantly changing it to carry more (short term) or less (long term) humans. Humans are adapting to some of those changes already.
Carbon is the least of our problems compared to artificial estrogens and overuse of our farmlands.
The fundamental problem is we need to reduce the population to about 3 billion people and hold it there. I do not think *any* sane person believes that is going to happen.
So we are going to breed right up to the very limit where everything that makes "human life" worth living will be lost except for a tiny elite. We are currently over double the long term carrying capacity and likely to double that again.
As a result, we are raising food with no nutritional value except calories that is poisoned with fake hormones.
The only benefits of anti-global warming efforts would be to make it too expensive to breed. Unfortunately, this does not have an effect on the poor, uneducated, and rabidly religious- they breed like rabbits while the rational portion of society doesn't reproduce.
I do not believe global warming even places on the "top 10" list for serious threats we face as a race.
As I said- I think that it's a fad blown way out of proportion to it's likely consequences.
Global warming has replaced global freezing in my lifetime. Probably in the last half of my life time.
Scientists have been coming up with doomsday scenarios for quite some time but we are still here.
For example- this was supposed to be a truly horrific hurricane season because global warming was here to stay.
As an American, I wonder why America and Europe have to suffer huge costs- reducing carbon enormously while China gets a by. The EU nations that signed *and* ratified the treaty have already reduced the target since it was so extreme (from 15% to 8% apparently).
I think it is real enough to take some *reasonable* measures- such as raising taxes on carbon usage, providing *small* incentives for solar, electric, nuclear, wind, and other non-carbon based energy/transportation methods. There are numerous side benefits to those approaches. At this point- I seriously think we should not pay less than $3 per gallon- the rest should fund alternative energy or social security. So right now that tax would be $1 per gallon (plus the 37ish cents already).
I'm not a tree hugger- I'm increasingly disillusioned. Time and time again in my life, I've seen people completely passionate about things that turned out to be completely bogus. "Human carbon usage causing the planet to warm up" combined with "and we will all die so any expense and restriction on our behavior is justified" makes me *very* dubious.
The planet has been much warmer and much colder in the past without humans around. It's a big place. I'm waiting for the other foot to drop in 20 years when they say.. "oops- it really was the solar mean after all" or "we don't know why it is now getting cooler... but I guess that global warming stuff was a bit overwrought after all."
On the other hand- we *could* be doing this- and greenland will melt very quickly and in 25 years the sea level will be a foot or two higher. This will be really bad for some people- and not to bad for others.
To me- as long as we ignore the *real* problem, what's the point? The real problem is *TOO MANY PEOPLE*. Since we currently look like are going to breed to the very edge of extinction where we are all eating yeast patties, what's the point in changing the rules so the planet can carry an extra billion people before things collapse.
Likewise, i think there are *multiple* reasons why we will see mass die-offs in our lifetime. It's just a question of which one will get us (another world war, terrorist ebola/flu hybrid, big drought with plagues, nuclear terrorists, corporate fascism taking over everywhere, successful robotics obsoleting human labor, etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
Okay. I'd missed that distinction.
I might disagree on some particulars (like I think they have a lot of quality coders who are 1/4 our price) but not with your general points. Particularly that hordes of "programmers" are not going to be effective and about the potential instability if they don't share the wealth. I did see an article that they were outlawing child labor as household servants. This will reduce the labor force and that should raise wages for household servant slightly.
There's no need to fully support your opinions in my opinion. This is slashdot- not a research paper. I feel it's partially up to me to validate your facts or read further if I feel the need.
It can be irritating.
I don't know if it helps but...
It's not there to protect the murderer.
It's there to protect the rest of us.
Governments gone bad are much worse than an occasional murder or drug dealer getting off.
The founding fathers felt excessive government power was *the* ultimate threat.
The scary thing is... we are just handing it all away to the government these days.
I think we could agree that working a regular week should pay enough to eat and have lodging for that week plus a little left over for emergencies. Anything less than that is immoral.
We already learned in america that if you subsidize females having children, they will have more and more of them to the point that it bankrupts any attempt to help them. On the other hand, cutting them off from support magically cuts their baby making almost to nil. Aggressively pursuing the fathers (No welfare unless you rat out the dad- confirm they are the dad with DNA and then garnish their wages) cuts it even further.
It was a *nice* idea to help those unwed moms- the problem was once we incented them to have children- they really let loose.
I think a minimum wage is required given the power and lack of morality that corporations have.
Quality is not uniformly crap.
The indians are the new japanese.
They are working *very hard* to come up to speed. They are insanely driven right now- to the point of committing suicide if they don't get in the right schools.
If you think they are going to produce crap quality code in 5 years, you are setting yourself up for a massive fall.
The good news is in 8 years, their wage advantage will mostly be gone at current inflation rates.
And that americans begin retiring in droves in 2012 creating a labor shortage.
America is grossly overpriced because it is a safe, prosperous place to live where the government mostly (even in these increasingly fascist days) leaves you alone and has comparatively low taxes. Rich people are willing to pay a lot to live in a pretty place which the government won't take from them and where the government or some religious psychos won't arbitrarily kill them, torture them, or put them in prison.
The next generation of indians will not be *nearly* so driven. Just like the europeans, then the americans, and then the japanese, that generation will grow up with rich parents and be lazier and not see the point in giving up their life to earn a few more dollars.
The world is averaging out to a higher standard of living where it isn't descending into complete hell holes. America is going down (but really not much) and the other countries are coming up (and fast!).
For now the best advice I can give you is to get your elective surgery done over there. It's a lot cheaper.
1) The offshored indian IT workers I work with regularly put in over 50 hours without extra compensation. They have a fixed bid contract and exceeded 60 hours/week for a couple months there for the last big project. I put in about 40 hours a week- usually about 39- but occasionally 45.
2) No - the children are doing other kinds of offshoring. I did not mean to imply that we (all 1st world workers) are competing for IT jobs with children. If they could code- we would be - but children can't code well. They can sew garmants and fasten together electronics.
3) I'm also not implying that we compete for IT work with prison/virtual slave labor.
The thrust of my argument was that we have imposed certain costs on our economy because we feel it is inhumane to work people certain ways. To be philosophically consistent, we could (should?) insist that products we purchase require those same standards. Reasonable working hours- a minimum living wage (appropriate for that country)- paid vacation and sick time- paid company holidays- and no child labor except in a few chosen fields (like families of farmers or maybe 5 hours a week of anything).
Instead we are letting corporations push their costs onto the rest of society while keeping the profits.
Decimation was used to punish cowardly and mutinous groups of soldiers.
Agree that language evolves- part of that evolution is pushing back against loony usage.
Allowing "nine in ten" to stand along side "one in ten" as a valid meaning would make the word meaningless and unusable. The closest evolution I could see letting happen would be to a general meaning of "significant reduction".
Yes. That is an excellent point. I lived through double digit inflation so I remember buying things with today's dollars and repaying them later.
I have emotional security needs that are pushing me to pay the house off tho. It's the last debt I have.
yea, they are different areas.
Garmant makers (in some cases very young girls) are paid very low wages and work in abysmal conditions outlawed in the US in the 1920's. See the recent movie, "The Corporation" for examples.
IT workers- last I heard- made about $12 to $15k- or about 1/6 of american wages for the same skill set. However- they are experiencing as high as 40% inflation per year. Their work quality has risen a lot, they are sharp, and *highly* motivated (like the japanese were). Currently several thousand commit suicide every year when they fail to get into the desired schools. Their children will not be most likely (like the japanese again).
Despite being extremely inexpensive, many outsourced projects result in no net savings and are late. The main difficulty is cultural, and a loss of a work day everytime there is a significant question- not worker quality. Turnover in india is pretty incredible right now as well which can make stable staffing difficult (but we've had no problem with our off shore guys who work for a very large offshore co).
Bottom line tho- I agree that there is no basis for stopping IT offshoring. Multi-national corporations will relentlessly push this as long as their is an extreme wage difference. And *consumers* of all nations will relentlessly push it every time they pay $19.99 instead of $26.99 for similar products.
Likely result in the US will be that people will stop entering the bloody field, supply will dry up, and if you have the right skill sets, wages for boots on the ground will go up. I've been in IT since 1985 and make a very good wage supervising a mixture of onshore and offshore guys and gals. We have a pretty severe labor crunch coming in the US starting in 2012. Given the loyalty shown to the american worker by business, I'm really looking forward to that time. Payback is a bitch.
The problem is this...
.60 per hour- but you have to give 10 days vacation, workers comp, sick time, health care, etc. if you want to import the products into this country."
We are competing with people who do not have 40 hour work weeks, do not have child labor laws, hell - some of them basically have slave labor.
They are willing to completely destroy their environment (we are talking black teeth from the amount of waste loose in the environment).
On top of this- they are willing to work for less.
I can see on a philosophical basis saying "okay they are less and that's tough nuts".
I can not see saying on that basis, "Okay so they work their children 15 hours a day and use prison labor from people thrown into prison on some very dubious causes".
So, I think we would be on a fair ethical basis to say, "Yup, you can use labor that charges
Decimating is killing one in ten.
17.5% would be like decimating... and then decimating the survivors.
Decimating is to kill one in ten soldiers. It was done as punishment.
17.5% is more like double decimating.
Lol.
The corporations have bought the democrats too.
And every time we say "Look at it locally but buy it online" we do the same thing.
And if we don't- we are being stupid paying high prices to keep a local merchant in business while everyone else uses them but buys online.
The economy is realigning. There is no way to stop it. You better save like hell and avoid debt.
Good land in the US will be bid up (for now) because it is safe and stable. A lot of people can't afford to live where they grew up now.
Business and rich people own America.
And voters on the left and right are so obsessed with abortion and other 'non-issues' like gay marriage that they are allowing it to happen. They may be out of a job- out on the street- but at least the candidate voted for/against the issue they care more than anything about.
Unfortunately his bullshit greed is not region encoded so it will play anywhere.
I disagree with complete bans on smoking.
But if it TOUCHES you - it's physical. Smoke not only touches you- it gets inside your body.
I completely support the right of private businesses to allow smoking inside their premises and say that being able to handle smoking and not sue if you later get cancer is a condition of employment.
Smoking cars are illegal (you'll be ticketed). You are correct that cars spew out bad stuff even when operating properly tho (it's just "invisible").
I can't agree on the factory/car thing when the smoker is 2' away from me and blowing smoke in my direction. The concentration goes way up.
I think making smoking illegal in completely public spaces is a legitimate exercise of the state. I think that making smoking illegal inside private spaces (including bars/clubs formed to provide a place for smokers to gather) is not.
Yup...
"Here-- let me vote for my economic destruction because you've identified one hot button issue that I will ignore every other issue for."
Sucker Bait is a very good term for it.
I do disagree with the parent poster than Bush hasn't done anything about the abortion issue tho. He's one judge away with 2 years to go from making abortion illegal for a generation. And he has already probably swung the court to the right / pro-business significantly.
I agree.
The money spent on fusion is a pittance.
Solar is interesting enough that it does not need much government support.
I think more funding for both would be money well spent.
If they *really* believed that we were a hair trigger away from laying waste to their countries with nukes would they be provoking us continuously?
Obviously not.
They think of the U.S.A. as a *reasonably* safe external enemy to use to promote nationalism and strengthen their rule.
I'm suprised the iranian hostage thing played out like it did. I think today, we would accept hostage fatalities unless the hostages were connected to powerful people.
Lol... "I agree with you but we are arguing about the effect of the smoke on the color of the drapes while the house burns."
Okay sport...you just go right on working on those drapes.
Oh we have a process.
Very robust.
Every team is consulted.
It can take months to do what used to be a 40 hour project.
It saves a lot of waste on stupid projects tho.
Except the stupid projects get shoved down by executives *LIKE ALWAYS* who bypass the process that applies to everyone else's projects.
The costs of the kyoto treaty and the *lack of those costs* on one of the largest and fastest growing economies in the world can be found in any article about the treaty.
Lots of respectable scientists talked about how we were going to freeze when I was young. It was a scientific "fact." The news anchors and talking heads all believed it. We even had some darn cold winters-- 12 degrees for almost a week one time.
To be redundant with my other posts: Unless we are going to stop population growth and reduce it to about 3 billion all of this is *pointless*. And no sane person would believe that we are going to do that. No- we are going to breed to the point that no amount of restrictions on our lifestyle will be sufficient and then we will begin to starve in large numbers and there will be chaos and fierce government oppression.
Worst case global warming probably will not even reduce the earth's carrying capacity below it's current population. It's just going to push some people around off of low lying areas. Weather has done that in the past and people tended to fight in those cases.
Global warming doesn't say the planet will become uninhabitable.
It may change to where it can carry more or less humans.
The population is already so large that we are constantly changing it to carry more (short term) or less (long term) humans. Humans are adapting to some of those changes already.
Carbon is the least of our problems compared to artificial estrogens and overuse of our farmlands.
The fundamental problem is we need to reduce the population to about 3 billion people and hold it there.
I do not think *any* sane person believes that is going to happen.
So we are going to breed right up to the very limit where everything that makes "human life" worth living will be lost except for a tiny elite. We are currently over double the long term carrying capacity and likely to double that again.
As a result, we are raising food with no nutritional value except calories that is poisoned with fake hormones.
The only benefits of anti-global warming efforts would be to make it too expensive to breed. Unfortunately, this does not have an effect on the poor, uneducated, and rabidly religious- they breed like rabbits while the rational portion of society doesn't reproduce.
I do not believe global warming even places on the "top 10" list for serious threats we face as a race.
As I said- I think that it's a fad blown way out of proportion to it's likely consequences.
True- tho I'm thinking dianetics/scientlogy.
It's really the easiest way to go for power and wealth (and even babes if you structure the religion right).
Okay...
Global warming has replaced global freezing in my lifetime. Probably in the last half of my life time.
Scientists have been coming up with doomsday scenarios for quite some time but we are still here.
For example- this was supposed to be a truly horrific hurricane season because global warming was here to stay.
As an American, I wonder why America and Europe have to suffer huge costs- reducing carbon enormously while China gets a by. The EU nations that signed *and* ratified the treaty have already reduced the target since it was so extreme (from 15% to 8% apparently).
I think it is real enough to take some *reasonable* measures- such as raising taxes on carbon usage, providing *small* incentives for solar, electric, nuclear, wind, and other non-carbon based energy/transportation methods. There are numerous side benefits to those approaches. At this point- I seriously think we should not pay less than $3 per gallon- the rest should fund alternative energy or social security. So right now that tax would be $1 per gallon (plus the 37ish cents already).
I'm not a tree hugger- I'm increasingly disillusioned. Time and time again in my life, I've seen people completely passionate about things that turned out to be completely bogus. "Human carbon usage causing the planet to warm up" combined with "and we will all die so any expense and restriction on our behavior is justified" makes me *very* dubious.
The planet has been much warmer and much colder in the past without humans around. It's a big place. I'm waiting for the other foot to drop in 20 years when they say.. "oops- it really was the solar mean after all" or "we don't know why it is now getting cooler... but I guess that global warming stuff was a bit overwrought after all."
On the other hand- we *could* be doing this- and greenland will melt very quickly and in 25 years the sea level will be a foot or two higher. This will be really bad for some people- and not to bad for others.
To me- as long as we ignore the *real* problem, what's the point? The real problem is *TOO MANY PEOPLE*. Since we currently look like are going to breed to the very edge of extinction where we are all eating yeast patties, what's the point in changing the rules so the planet can carry an extra billion people before things collapse.
Likewise, i think there are *multiple* reasons why we will see mass die-offs in our lifetime. It's just a question of which one will get us (another world war, terrorist ebola/flu hybrid, big drought with plagues, nuclear terrorists, corporate fascism taking over everywhere, successful robotics obsoleting human labor, etc.)
If you can never forget, then you will always be able to relive that shame or guilt to the fullest.
A really smart computer would break out of the research lab and start a religion.