In your original question you implied that software development is mainly a US industry
No, he didn't. He was asking specifically about the health of the US software industry, of which Dan Gilmour is a pundit.
But how is this different than the situation of the workers...
It's not--and he never said it was. I'm sure many/. readers would agree that there are equally unfair working conditions for exported steel jobs, car jobs, and hardware manufacturing. But again, the topic stated in the article focuses on a journalist who covers the US software industry. No one's trying to be short-sighted about globalism.
This is like saying back in the 70s that "US car workers see themselves as professionals, yet those who do it in the cheap in Japan don't
This is totally wrong and irrelevant. Japanese line workers during the 70s and 80s enjoyed a very similar lifestyle to UAW members. Japan was not and is not a third-world country. Cheap cars != cheap employment. The poster's talking about Indian workers who are the IT industry's equivalent of sweat-shop workers. And no, no one's saying that ALL or MOST of India's IT people are on the cheap.
Well, for starters, Fortran 2000 is different than Ada and PL/I in that it will be backwards compatible with F90, allowing the MILLIONS of lines of F90 code in production to move forward.
Secondly, in FEA and CAD there are always big pushes to migrate to C++ or another 'modern' language, only to be rejected because standard C/C++ math libraries aren't fast enough for high-end sci apps (HUGE matrix operations, millions+ DOF models, weather prediction, etc.), or, at least the performance/efficiency gains aren't good enough to warrant migration. Not to mention there are a scary number of MechE's and other scientists out there who think that FORTRAN is the only extant language.;-)
Checked your website--dearly, DEARLY love that car. Boxster's the ultimate evolution of the roadster, in my opin. Great color, too--roadster's should be flashy, methinks. Cheers!
they would need...even a Miata Hey now! Don't casually lump in the car that reintroduced the roadster as a viable car again in the 90's.
Seriously, the Miata is generally considered a classic, C&D consistently puts it in their top 10, and I believe one of the car rags just put it into the top 10 cars of all time list, a weighted list that included value in its measures, putting the car right next to such lofty craft as the Ferrari Modena. And despite not having the supercar-horsepower of the other vehicles you mentioned, it is an incredibly performing roadster. For some reason, too, much of the public perceives it to be a cheap car, but mind that it tops out at ~$27k now. IMHO, it's the car that Austin Healey wishes they could've engineered (used to drive a 3000).
Of course, if you can afford German, by all means....I'd highly recommend it;-).
Yeah, maybe my initial assumptions were poor (specific to the Quadroo/PC performance). I was trying to make some points about the importance of I/O performance to the original poster, and perhaps got a little out of my element in discussing state-o-the-art PC equipment. I confess I just got the system last Thursday, and haven't tweeked it or ran any 'formal' comparisons yet, it's just an overall feel. Unfortunately, we have a TechOps group that gives us these machines, and if you check MCAD company stock prices, you'll see that our managers are in no mood to spend extra money on replacement equipment. I agree that nVidia should supply a fix pretty quickly, given that this is software and not hardware related.
I hope that Hammer/Opteron kills Intel in this market Me too. Better yet, I wish that more CAD companies in general would get a clue and port to Linux; PTC is too little too late. I'll whisper to you that at least one of the big MCAD companies experimented with a Linux port, but abandoned it for shortsighted management reasons. A Opteron/Linux/(Catia/I-deas/Unigraphics) combi would be pretty suhweet.
Anyway, thanks for pointing these things out, and thanks for not flaming me to death a-la the typical Slashbot;-).P>
Well, that is pretty funny. But I wasn't whining about the system (I get paid for foot tapping) as much as I was trying to say to the parent that in many ways there is more to system performance than clock cycles/sec.
A better analogy, anyway, would be that someone took my pneumatic hammer away and gave me a hammer. THAT's how I feel.
It's a 2GB machine. HP Cad workstation, HP factory memory. Quadro Pro card, very similar specs to the 4, someone down the hall _has_ a Quadro4, they don't touch the Visualize cards.
Admittedly, I might have been wrong about the price of the card--I think still that the Quadro4s top out at ~$1k, which is still pretty low in the card arena. It's crap in any case, IMHO. nVidia needs to stick to Quake.
Incidentally, there are gigantic known field problems with the whole Quadro line. There's a problem with memory access (>1 GB models) that causes huge problems in high end CAD packages. Most people don't really get it when I say "high end mcad". We're talking Ford engine blocks, Toyota trannies, etc. BFMs. This isn't designing little floor plans with AutoCAD 2000.
My HP CAD Workstation has the Quadro Pro. Similar perf as the lower end Quadro4. 2GB of Ram. It does not TOUCH the Visualize cards in terms of tris/sec, real world. If Intel owns the market in workstations, why does automotive still overwhelmingly use Sun, HP, and IBM?
2GB of main memory. The nVidia card is a quadroo Pro (supposed high end cad, but much cheaper than Visualize).
This is still a prepackaged HP CAD workstation, albeit a much cheaper one than my old one. I don't have any choice, the thing is given to me. As for 'slating the processor', I'm not! If you read my post, I'm actually disagreeing with the parent who says that the graphics and HD subsystems don't equate to much. I'm sure that if you put the same subsystems in the new system as the old, it would be MUCH faster, but still wouldn't touch a 1 Ghz Blade in FP performance.
Both the old and new PCs have 2GB ram, and ~40GB scratch space. The new PC is basically the same as my old system, same manufacturer, same specs, except for IDE vs. SCSI and a far inferior video card (with the same amount of memory as the old one). I wouldn't have made the comparison if I had apples and oranges.
you should mention the "Put him back on his 667. 9 times out of 10 he'll be on the phone to Dell to upgrade his PC" comment. I work in high-end CAD (actually CAE) and commonly work with multi-gigabyte faceted models. My main PC until last week was a 550Mhz P3 Xeon, with a SCSI subsystem and a Visualize FX graphics card. Now, the lease being up on my old system, I have a 2 Ghz P4 with an IDE drive and a $300 nVidia card. GIVE ME BACK MY OLD PC. Disk swapping alone is killing me; with the disk work shifted to the processor, I'm doing so much foot tapping it's just silly. Don't get me started on the video card. Even regular GUI rendering is slower, much less 20k surface geometry.
I also work on single processor Sun, SGI, and IBMs, all of which at lower Mhz are MUCH faster than my PC (except maybe the slower SGIs, like the Indigo R10000s; at 150Mhz, they're showing their age but STILL keep up with the PC in rendering speed). Sun's problem is not technology, it's sales. IBM is just killing them in marketing. I talked to a guy the other day that's getting ready to begin replacing their 1800 Sun servers with AIX boxes. He concedes the Suns are superior, but they have been convinced from the confidence bestowed by IBM's superior marketing skills. It's widely known that Sun has superior tech, inferior business sense.
I totally agree with you that it's BS the people that say 'current CPU speed is all we'll ever need', but it's equally BS to assume that the 'faster' Intel chips are actually the 'fastest' chips out there because of some marketing-driven clockrates. Superior architecture trumps clockrates any day of the week, and Intel is still lacking in the former. Incidentally, I'd take a single processor Ultra Sparc III box at 1.05 Ghz over a 2.0Ghz PC, even running *nix, any day of the week. As a matter of fact, I usually do.
Could you be more specific?? Seriously? I do a fair amount of Win32 development, and I saw his points as being spot-on. He's obviously not too familiar with the nice list of 3rd party dev tools, but his comments about the API and compilers were 5x5 and showed, IMHO, that he has some experience with these tools. What, specifically, do you disagree with? Or were you joking and I don't get it? (always possible;-))
Well, firstly, I don't work in IT (engineering research), I used to, and again, my post didn't specify IT (although the comment about MCSE's and such did).
And absolutely, overwhelmingly, diplomas, certs, and overpuffed resumes are overrated. I know people that have a fairly miserable looking resume that could out-think/out-work me in many areas. No argument.
Unfortunately, though, there is NO way for an employer to know this unless the candidate has years of experience. Even with 2-3 years experience, I've seen many project managers get burned bringing on horribly overrated consultants and full-timers.
And it has absolutely nothing to do with prejudice that we have a _big_ shortage of hi-tech help in the US. Again, not 'just' IT, but engineers, chemists, research medical workers, etc. If you can't work in IT, and you can comprehend mid-level college math classes, go back to school! The big aerospace/gov't contractors would love to hire more help, particularly for projects that _require_ American citizens to work on. There are significant numbers of unfilled positions in these kinds of areas (no, probably not enough to cover the # of out of work IT workers, but you catch my drift).
There are admittedly some _damn_ fine IT workers out there, and yes, paper CVs don't often alone prove it. I'm not the average slashbot who scorns all of the dot-bomb workers, but I would be *very* suspicious if I were an IT manager, and had a resume in front of me with an MCSE with 2 years of IIS experience at a dot-bomb. There are LOTS of wannabees out there, and they're unfortunately tainting the real talent. No offense meant to the latter--particularly the brilliant guys that are taking care of my network;-)
Okay, I'm confused. The parent of my original post is this one by "Frank T. Lofaro Jr."--not you. I pretty much completely agree with your comment, including to a degree the immigrant worker part. The 'Lofaro' comment made some direct statements that H-1Bs are 100 hr/week slaves, which in my experience is indeed BS.
Yeah, I particularly enjoyed this line: the report by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which found that the computer-related H-1Bs were paid a median of $53,000 per year, far below the national median of $66,000 for this field I had to laugh at this. Do you *really* believe that a corporation is going to bring on the baggage and risk of an immigrant worker, not to mention the legal costs, for a $13k savings? $53k a year is a WAGE SLAVE?! This is silly. But okay, let's assume the 'IT Shortage' is bunk. If you'll read my original post, you'll see that I was talking about tech positions is general. There is a world outside of IT, some if it that requires _very_ high-end skills. Again, the out of work American IT guy/gal needs to take a good, cold, hard look at their resume and interviewing skills, broaden his horizons, and realize the world isn't always such a fair place.
Before you heroically post AC again and start slewing crap around, why don't you post some E-V-I-D-E-N-C-E. Just because you WANT the system to be WIDELY abused, doesn't mean it is. Again, I've worked several jobs with H-1Bs, and they were, on average, extremely qualified. Were there bad apples? Yes. But no more than the US workers. There's no free lunch.
That's Old Wive's Tale BS. I work with H-1Bs, and most of them make MORE money than I do.
H-1B is meant to backfill the LACK of American tech talent, not replace it. Simply put, there aren't enough QUALIFIED US workers to satisfy demand. Notice I say qualified. Not 'History Teacher turned MCSE' or 'Accountant turned Flash "Programmer"'. Qualified Software Engineers, Ph.D MEs, Chem-Es, etc. There just aren't enough.
One of the stipulations of H-1B is that there must not exist an equally qualified US candidate, and the H-1B MUST be paid at least 95% of the average wage for the given job in the given market. There won't be any senior design engineers working for 20k in Boston. People can dick around with this policy by making the qualifications too high, but it usually gets caught.
These visas are a serious pain for employers to obtain and administrate. In all the places I've worked that employ H-1Bs, they'd MUCH rather hire and pay for qualified American workers. No worries about the 6 year limit, no time in legal. Unfortuanately, they just don't exist in great numbers. Americans that bemoan this need to, for the most part, just go back to school. Knowing SQL server just isn't enough anymore.
What do you think a law stating "two people in the same firm cannot be paid more than 3x wage difference" would accomplish It would accomplish something, but nothing in the realm of what you wish. Part of our (US/Europe/most of the 1st World) economy depends on free ownership of business. Ellison's/Gate's/Perot's extreme wealth does not come from his salary, but from his founder's share of the business. Most of Gate's wealth is not liquid, but depends on his trusting investment in the stock market. If Microsoft crashes tomorrow, Bill goes down the drain with it. If he tries to liquify his holdings, Microsoft goes down the tubes before he completes a quarter of his trades.
These kinds of guys would freely sacrifice their incomes in lieu of stock ownership. In fact, the ability for someone to create a business, assume financial risk, and either sink or swim (reaping the bene's if you swim) is one of the reasons that our system works so well. If you limit *this*, you destroy people's creative, entrepreneural tendencies and tank the Western world's economy as we know it. Simply put, there is no correlation between the highest wage earners and highest net worth; on the contrary, the highest wage earners would tend NOT to have the kind of money saved up to spend on the America's Cup.
Now, let's take your wage-limiting scenario; we still have the extreme rich that own the businesses, but now we have a working class that is totally unmotivated to reach for the top. I'll never make 3 times more than the janitor, so why should I go to med school? Why should I fight to improve this process? Why should I assume the responsibility of tech lead on this project? Our system thrives on people's willingness to assume *risk* and reap the rewards. Like it or not, you will not get enough people to perform the high performance/high stress jobs if you take away the lofty benefits. You want fries with that? Wealth will *always* be distributed on a bell curve, regardless the system. Get over it.
Yes, I've forgotten what the car industry is for. I'm so stupid I can't help but slobber on this keyboard.
This is an extremely naive view of how our economy works. Do you think that the market is completely practicle minded? Even if equivalently strong businesses replaced the big 3, do you think that market perception of American car manufacturers' demise would be positive? I think, regardless of how _practically_ positive a shift like this is, the market would not forgive it. Do you really think that if Microsoft, IBM, or some other giant like that went bankrupt, the market wouldn't decline significantly? Go take a look at market trends when any business like this is perceived as being in trouble.
Again, I never claimed this was a real problem that will come to fruition, I was just defending the original poster's right to explore this (unpopular w/ avg slashdot reader) idea without getting flamed into nothingness.
only americans (like you probably are) would find this at all a problem
I don't think it's out of line, or uniquely American, to fear the government entering into direct competition with known economic paradigms--and that's what we're talking about. When the US subsidizes a company, its intention is not to displace an entire sector with whatever it's ordered, ie. we take a bid for a jet, which is a standard product that can be produced by a number of US companies. The production of the jet hurts no other sector of industry.
On the other hand, with this paradigm, there is the *risk* that the government starts displacing companies by releasing a free product. On a bigger scale, it would be like the US paying a lump sum for a technology that creates free cars for everyone--sure, this would be pretty cool, until the big 3 go out of business and the economy crashes down behind it. This might not (probably not?) happen, but it's worth thinking about--even if you're Canadian.
I'm sure the original poster, despite being _such_ a _typical_ ignorant American, is aware that the US subsidizes private industry. I just think the original poster was just exploring an idea--you don't have to get all offensive and anti-American about it.
Irma Rombauer, the author of JOC, is another disjoint piece of Cincinnati's strong cooking tradition.
Cincinnati is not only a relatively small 'major' city, but has strong and pervasive German heritage. And despite the fact that (IMHO) German food is not the best of culinary delights, Cincinnati continues to be a significant culinary player in the States. Maisonette is the longest-running 5-star in the US, at one time there were actually at least 3 5-stars there, Sturkey's (modern American fare) received 'Best Dessert in the Nation' from USA Today, there are actually a few decent Sushi bars despite the inland location, and there are a myriad of good (consumer) cooking schools and shops here (anyone out there know Jungle Jim's;-)). Rombauer, BTW, has a strong German geneology.
I've always found this a strange phenomenon. The art community there is also very strong, despite the rest of the city being a boring/backwards midwest ultra-conservative city. Anyone care to hazard a theory?
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No, he didn't. He was asking specifically about the health of the US software industry, of which Dan Gilmour is a pundit.
But how is this different than the situation of the workers...
It's not--and he never said it was. I'm sure many /. readers would agree that there are equally unfair working conditions for exported steel jobs, car jobs, and hardware manufacturing. But again, the topic stated in the article focuses on a journalist who covers the US software industry. No one's trying to be short-sighted about globalism.
This is like saying back in the 70s that "US car workers see themselves as professionals, yet those who do it in the cheap in Japan don't
This is totally wrong and irrelevant. Japanese line workers during the 70s and 80s enjoyed a very similar lifestyle to UAW members. Japan was not and is not a third-world country. Cheap cars != cheap employment. The poster's talking about Indian workers who are the IT industry's equivalent of sweat-shop workers. And no, no one's saying that ALL or MOST of India's IT people are on the cheap.
Secondly, in FEA and CAD there are always big pushes to migrate to C++ or another 'modern' language, only to be rejected because standard C/C++ math libraries aren't fast enough for high-end sci apps (HUGE matrix operations, millions+ DOF models, weather prediction, etc.), or, at least the performance/efficiency gains aren't good enough to warrant migration. Not to mention there are a scary number of MechE's and other scientists out there who think that FORTRAN is the only extant language. ;-)
George Bernard Shaw, and I don't think he had turning all of your Mac icons into pictures of Ellen Feiss in mind.
It's ad nauseam, but you probably already knew that? ;-)
Hey now! Don't casually lump in the car that reintroduced the roadster as a viable car again in the 90's.
Seriously, the Miata is generally considered a classic, C&D consistently puts it in their top 10, and I believe one of the car rags just put it into the top 10 cars of all time list, a weighted list that included value in its measures, putting the car right next to such lofty craft as the Ferrari Modena. And despite not having the supercar-horsepower of the other vehicles you mentioned, it is an incredibly performing roadster. For some reason, too, much of the public perceives it to be a cheap car, but mind that it tops out at ~$27k now. IMHO, it's the car that Austin Healey wishes they could've engineered (used to drive a 3000).
Of course, if you can afford German, by all means....I'd highly recommend it ;-).
DP -- former Miata driver
I hope that Hammer/Opteron kills Intel in this market
Me too. Better yet, I wish that more CAD companies in general would get a clue and port to Linux; PTC is too little too late. I'll whisper to you that at least one of the big MCAD companies experimented with a Linux port, but abandoned it for shortsighted management reasons. A Opteron/Linux/(Catia/I-deas/Unigraphics) combi would be pretty suhweet.
Anyway, thanks for pointing these things out, and thanks for not flaming me to death a-la the typical Slashbot ;-).P>
A better analogy, anyway, would be that someone took my pneumatic hammer away and gave me a hammer. THAT's how I feel.
Admittedly, I might have been wrong about the price of the card--I think still that the Quadro4s top out at ~$1k, which is still pretty low in the card arena. It's crap in any case, IMHO. nVidia needs to stick to Quake.
Incidentally, there are gigantic known field problems with the whole Quadro line. There's a problem with memory access (>1 GB models) that causes huge problems in high end CAD packages. Most people don't really get it when I say "high end mcad". We're talking Ford engine blocks, Toyota trannies, etc. BFMs. This isn't designing little floor plans with AutoCAD 2000.
This is still a prepackaged HP CAD workstation, albeit a much cheaper one than my old one. I don't have any choice, the thing is given to me. As for 'slating the processor', I'm not! If you read my post, I'm actually disagreeing with the parent who says that the graphics and HD subsystems don't equate to much. I'm sure that if you put the same subsystems in the new system as the old, it would be MUCH faster, but still wouldn't touch a 1 Ghz Blade in FP performance.
I also work on single processor Sun, SGI, and IBMs, all of which at lower Mhz are MUCH faster than my PC (except maybe the slower SGIs, like the Indigo R10000s; at 150Mhz, they're showing their age but STILL keep up with the PC in rendering speed). Sun's problem is not technology, it's sales. IBM is just killing them in marketing. I talked to a guy the other day that's getting ready to begin replacing their 1800 Sun servers with AIX boxes. He concedes the Suns are superior, but they have been convinced from the confidence bestowed by IBM's superior marketing skills. It's widely known that Sun has superior tech, inferior business sense.
I totally agree with you that it's BS the people that say 'current CPU speed is all we'll ever need', but it's equally BS to assume that the 'faster' Intel chips are actually the 'fastest' chips out there because of some marketing-driven clockrates. Superior architecture trumps clockrates any day of the week, and Intel is still lacking in the former. Incidentally, I'd take a single processor Ultra Sparc III box at 1.05 Ghz over a 2.0Ghz PC, even running *nix, any day of the week. As a matter of fact, I usually do.
And absolutely, overwhelmingly, diplomas, certs, and overpuffed resumes are overrated. I know people that have a fairly miserable looking resume that could out-think/out-work me in many areas. No argument.
Unfortunately, though, there is NO way for an employer to know this unless the candidate has years of experience. Even with 2-3 years experience, I've seen many project managers get burned bringing on horribly overrated consultants and full-timers.
And it has absolutely nothing to do with prejudice that we have a _big_ shortage of hi-tech help in the US. Again, not 'just' IT, but engineers, chemists, research medical workers, etc. If you can't work in IT, and you can comprehend mid-level college math classes, go back to school! The big aerospace/gov't contractors would love to hire more help, particularly for projects that _require_ American citizens to work on. There are significant numbers of unfilled positions in these kinds of areas (no, probably not enough to cover the # of out of work IT workers, but you catch my drift).
There are admittedly some _damn_ fine IT workers out there, and yes, paper CVs don't often alone prove it. I'm not the average slashbot who scorns all of the dot-bomb workers, but I would be *very* suspicious if I were an IT manager, and had a resume in front of me with an MCSE with 2 years of IIS experience at a dot-bomb. There are LOTS of wannabees out there, and they're unfortunately tainting the real talent. No offense meant to the latter--particularly the brilliant guys that are taking care of my network ;-)
the report by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which found that the computer-related H-1Bs were paid a median of $53,000 per year, far below the national median of $66,000 for this field
I had to laugh at this. Do you *really* believe that a corporation is going to bring on the baggage and risk of an immigrant worker, not to mention the legal costs, for a $13k savings? $53k a year is a WAGE SLAVE?! This is silly. But okay, let's assume the 'IT Shortage' is bunk. If you'll read my original post, you'll see that I was talking about tech positions is general. There is a world outside of IT, some if it that requires _very_ high-end skills. Again, the out of work American IT guy/gal needs to take a good, cold, hard look at their resume and interviewing skills, broaden his horizons, and realize the world isn't always such a fair place.
H-1B is meant to backfill the LACK of American tech talent, not replace it. Simply put, there aren't enough QUALIFIED US workers to satisfy demand. Notice I say qualified. Not 'History Teacher turned MCSE' or 'Accountant turned Flash "Programmer"'. Qualified Software Engineers, Ph.D MEs, Chem-Es, etc. There just aren't enough.
One of the stipulations of H-1B is that there must not exist an equally qualified US candidate, and the H-1B MUST be paid at least 95% of the average wage for the given job in the given market. There won't be any senior design engineers working for 20k in Boston. People can dick around with this policy by making the qualifications too high, but it usually gets caught.
These visas are a serious pain for employers to obtain and administrate. In all the places I've worked that employ H-1Bs, they'd MUCH rather hire and pay for qualified American workers. No worries about the 6 year limit, no time in legal. Unfortuanately, they just don't exist in great numbers. Americans that bemoan this need to, for the most part, just go back to school. Knowing SQL server just isn't enough anymore.
It would accomplish something, but nothing in the realm of what you wish. Part of our (US/Europe/most of the 1st World) economy depends on free ownership of business. Ellison's/Gate's/Perot's extreme wealth does not come from his salary, but from his founder's share of the business. Most of Gate's wealth is not liquid, but depends on his trusting investment in the stock market. If Microsoft crashes tomorrow, Bill goes down the drain with it. If he tries to liquify his holdings, Microsoft goes down the tubes before he completes a quarter of his trades.
These kinds of guys would freely sacrifice their incomes in lieu of stock ownership. In fact, the ability for someone to create a business, assume financial risk, and either sink or swim (reaping the bene's if you swim) is one of the reasons that our system works so well. If you limit *this*, you destroy people's creative, entrepreneural tendencies and tank the Western world's economy as we know it. Simply put, there is no correlation between the highest wage earners and highest net worth; on the contrary, the highest wage earners would tend NOT to have the kind of money saved up to spend on the America's Cup.
Now, let's take your wage-limiting scenario; we still have the extreme rich that own the businesses, but now we have a working class that is totally unmotivated to reach for the top. I'll never make 3 times more than the janitor, so why should I go to med school? Why should I fight to improve this process? Why should I assume the responsibility of tech lead on this project? Our system thrives on people's willingness to assume *risk* and reap the rewards. Like it or not, you will not get enough people to perform the high performance/high stress jobs if you take away the lofty benefits. You want fries with that? Wealth will *always* be distributed on a bell curve, regardless the system. Get over it.
Yes, I've forgotten what the car industry is for. I'm so stupid I can't help but slobber on this keyboard.
This is an extremely naive view of how our economy works. Do you think that the market is completely practicle minded? Even if equivalently strong businesses replaced the big 3, do you think that market perception of American car manufacturers' demise would be positive? I think, regardless of how _practically_ positive a shift like this is, the market would not forgive it. Do you really think that if Microsoft, IBM, or some other giant like that went bankrupt, the market wouldn't decline significantly? Go take a look at market trends when any business like this is perceived as being in trouble.
Again, I never claimed this was a real problem that will come to fruition, I was just defending the original poster's right to explore this (unpopular w/ avg slashdot reader) idea without getting flamed into nothingness.
I don't think it's out of line, or uniquely American, to fear the government entering into direct competition with known economic paradigms--and that's what we're talking about. When the US subsidizes a company, its intention is not to displace an entire sector with whatever it's ordered, ie. we take a bid for a jet, which is a standard product that can be produced by a number of US companies. The production of the jet hurts no other sector of industry.
On the other hand, with this paradigm, there is the *risk* that the government starts displacing companies by releasing a free product. On a bigger scale, it would be like the US paying a lump sum for a technology that creates free cars for everyone--sure, this would be pretty cool, until the big 3 go out of business and the economy crashes down behind it. This might not (probably not?) happen, but it's worth thinking about--even if you're Canadian.
I'm sure the original poster, despite being _such_ a _typical_ ignorant American, is aware that the US subsidizes private industry. I just think the original poster was just exploring an idea--you don't have to get all offensive and anti-American about it.
Cincinnati is not only a relatively small 'major' city, but has strong and pervasive German heritage. And despite the fact that (IMHO) German food is not the best of culinary delights, Cincinnati continues to be a significant culinary player in the States. Maisonette is the longest-running 5-star in the US, at one time there were actually at least 3 5-stars there, Sturkey's (modern American fare) received 'Best Dessert in the Nation' from USA Today, there are actually a few decent Sushi bars despite the inland location, and there are a myriad of good (consumer) cooking schools and shops here (anyone out there know Jungle Jim's ;-)). Rombauer, BTW, has a strong German geneology.
I've always found this a strange phenomenon. The art community there is also very strong, despite the rest of the city being a boring/backwards midwest ultra-conservative city. Anyone care to hazard a theory?