scientific establishment is an irrelevant phrase. Science isn't determined by committee or popularity - its based in fact. Hypothesis, testing and experimentation. Concensus can be overruled by a single person with the truth on his side.
In science there is no such thing as trusting the guy that you think knows the most.
Something is either right or its wrong and only study and experimentation can answer that question.
And you are wrong - what you are describing is absolutely reference to authority and its a logical fallacy.
The bottom line is we aren't getting what we paid for. You are getting exactly what you paid for - its not like you didn't konw that there were going to be DRM components in Vista - if you don't like it, don't buy Vista.
And besides, it isn't Microsoft thats pushing DRM, its the content owners. Microsoft really had little choice but to meet their requirements - just like all the set-top boxes and TVs have to meet the requirements.
Then don't expect me to beggar myself for your well being. After all, that's what you're asking of your neighbor. And price != efficiency, in many cases the American is far more productive than the foreign supplier, the difference in price is due to bankers not efficiency. You need to study up on comparative advantage. If you do things X (+1), Y(+2) and Z(+3) better than person A, you should only concentrate on doing the thing that you are MOST better than them (in this case Z). Doing so makes everyone better off.
The nation that figured out you don't need a military to take over the world, when you can just rent the military of a superpower. Nice theory - actually have any evidence to back it up?
Yes, but the engine in a Model N bears less resemblence to a modern car than the engine in a Sherman does. Progress comes from the military. The model N wasn't the car that was in existence in WWII.
It's true- IBM's biggest customer in 1930 was Nazi Germany. Even the internet was created by DARPA, to create a communications system that wasn't vunerable to nuclear war. There is no real private sector since WWII- all businesses exist to serve the military in the end result, the military-industrial complex is alive and well. Thats not even remotely true. The internet today barely resembles the network that DARPA put together. The computer of the 1930s is less powerful than most watches. Sure, the military can push some innovation - but only at immense cost with little practical use. It takes competition to truly deliver innovation.
It's the reason we're in Iraq today. What possible purpose could Iraq have to do with the private sector? The only possible outcome is increasing the oil supply - something that drives oil prices down, something that the oil companies don't generally want.
Please show me these jobs. I oversee HR (and everyone else here) and we watch Monster, Dice, Hotjobs, etc. to see what our competition is offering to compete against us for talent. Few people, if anyone out there, are looking for entry level work at any wage, and I will go to work tomorrow and walk past a persistent 20 person line standing out in 30 degree weather (absolutely antarctic by California standards) - people armed with resumes with 5+ years of experience offering to be paid minimum wage for software testing. Maybe your search skills need an upgrading - a simple Monster search for 'IT entry level' returned over 7000 hits.
My employer is also hiring a score of college interns - want me to send you a job application?
Again, I have to stress that the job market in California does not - and should not - reflect the state of the rest of the nation.
As far as I am concerned California's anti-market practices scare away business and they deserve anything they get.
Buying from the closest supplier returns $8 for every dollar spent to you and your neighbors (because money spent locally, gets spent locally again- that $1 will be passed 8 times before disappering into taxes).
Buying from a supplier further away means only $.08 will come back to your local economy. Which would you rather do? Give your friends and neighbors $8 or give some billionaire in Alabama $.92? That's the difference between your farmer's market and WalMart>
Made up statistics without any practical meaning.
I would rather buy from the most efficient supplier so that the local inefficient supplier can find something more productive to do with their time. I'm not going to beggar myself for the well being of others.
Actually, Americn and Japan use military pressure to bully everybody else- which is why the people we trade with have standards of living far below ours, and why our standard of living is basically spending beyond our means. Japan!?! The nation without a military?
Cars are just civilian models of tanks. The care was invented before the tank.
The just in time supply chain was invented during WWII in Japan to keep their supply chain going.
Just in time was first used by Ford in the 1920s, abondoned and picked up again by Toyota in the 50s - no military connection there.
Entertainment grew out of wartime propaganda methods. You really can't be serious can you? Entertainment has been evolving independently of miliray and propoganda uses for milenia.
Computers are just civilian models of the very machines the Nazis used to keep track of Jewish prisoners. Even if true (its not) computer and the advances have all taken place outside the military sphere. Perhaps (just perhaps) the military kicked them off (but they didn't) the true innovations that have made our lives better have been done in the private sector without any involvement of the military.
Yet, amazingly, corporate profits have been steady throughout this period. No windfalls - some of the largest call center outsourcers have been in the PC and software biz and prices have been freefalling. Looks like savings to customers to me.
"There is nothing wrong with debt"...you lost it right there. If you don't get it, why it is better to have produced wealth than debt...nothing much more to say. If you don't understand how debt can create wealth then you don't understand basic economics.
And if you haven't read article after volume about all the warning buzzers going off over the here and now and upcoming serious debt problems..I mean..sheesh..what financials are you reading? Some alternate internet? Of course there are alarmist articles about the coming doom - I don't find them particularly pursuasive.
And which consumers trust it will be paid off? All the ones projected to lose their homes now when they got ARMs based on some inflated wage projections they picked out of the air? Highly unlikely. Yes, some people picked up mortgages that they couldn't afford because they assumed that low interest rates and double digit increases in home appreciation would continue forever. They made poor choices, but most won't lose their homes, they will just refinance at less attractive terms than they could have had originally. Some will have to sell their homes, but I doubt many will have to foreclose.
And you ainb't noticed folks talking about huge companies going bankrupt? Miss the news with the airlines and the big car companies and so forth? Pensions? Social security? Huh - you mention heavily regulated companies, companies controlled by restrictive trade unions and government programs. I don't see why I should look at them and assume that the rest of the economy will follow suit.
nd one of the main reasons the head of the main chinese central bank said that his nation had enough dollars now-and that was his quote, "enough dollars", and why they are going into other currencies and PMs and tradeable tangibles like buying up long term resources either by contract or outright purchase like mines, etc in foreign nations, to them, was *precisely* because they have no way of knowing how much the inflated pool of dollars is. Or, a more likely answer, is that any good investor will diversify their investments. They aren't dumping dollars, they are simply picking up other currency to make sure that they don't sink their economy if the US were to have troubles. If they didn't have confidence then they would start getting rid of dollar investments.
There has never been an audit of the FED, never, and even so, they have the ability to print up boatloads and you wouldn't know about it. That is patently untrue - you can't hide the inflationary affects of monetary expansion. Period. Printing more money causes higher inflation which will appear in prices. This is basic economics.
And they stopped reporting the most important indicator last march, and started seriously lying about it. They stopped reporting a minor indicator - nothing more, nothing less.
You don't get the comptroller of the US going out on dog and pony shows every day sounding the alarm over the looming debt and entititlement crisis. In fact, I think, as far as I can remember going back to the 60's when I started paying more attention, this might be only the second time, the first was immediately after the opec embargo and uberhigh interest rates, around that era. There is an entitlement problem - but it has nothing to do with inflation. Inflation, in fact, would eliminate the entitlement problem. There is a problem because government has over-promised and under funded Social Security and Medicare.
Two thoughts:
1st - Sounds like a perfect opportunity to make a ton of money by selling short if it is a public firm.
2nd - you are telling me that the market is working. Bad ideas and poor management are pushing a company out of business. If this is truly what is happening then outsourcing will be eliminated. Investors don't like failing businesses.
The loss of jobs isn't irrelevant when it's your job. That a very narrow view. Of course losing your job sucks.
And the current trend is offshoring is moving up from blue collar jobs to white collar jobs. I dare you to tell any paralegal that their job - which is also moving offshore - is low skilled. In comparative terms - yes it is low skilled. It requires only minimal education and not specific skills.
Tele surgery, when it matures, will really ram the point home. I look forward to it - providing cheaper surgury will make it easier for more people to get life saving surgery. How is this a bad thing? Sure some doctors will suffer - but everyone else benefits, thats the nature of innovation and progress.
And the lower costs don't help Americans who lose their jobs - where do you get the job experience to qualify for the "jobs that are replacing them"?
How do you become a higher end anything when you can't get the lower end job experience? There are still plenty of entry level jobs at high end firms. Microsoft, Intel, Google, Apple, Amazon, etc, etc, etc still hire thousands of people straight out of college. I have never worked for a company that didn't have entry level positions - and we are only talking about high tech. The outsourcing is primarily happening at large firms (which are a small percentage of total jobs). Smaller firms still have plenty of jobs in house where it is possible to learn and aquire skills in order to get ahead.
There is nothing wrong with debt - the fact that credit is available speaks more about the health of the US economy than anything. The fact that consumers and businesses both feel that the debt will be paid off is very optimistic.
Your assertions about inflation are also way off - government can't hide expanding monetary supply - it shows up in prices and prices are not rising. There are some very smart economists that say that inflation numbers are biased upward because they do not take into account increasing quality and features.
You have taken a very Malthusian view of the world - which is certainly your right - but without espousing conspiracy theories it just doesn't hold up.
The one I just left had a goal to outsource 40-50% of all the parts made in the product, but still kept increasing prices several times a year. Unless they are a monopoly supplier, that doesn't sound like a successful business plan. My suggestion? Invest heavily in that company because their profits will be through the roof.
Or if everything is as bad as you say - then they are going out of business, so poor decisions will be punished. Sounds like the market is working, I don't see your beef.
The big company says they'll ship the job to where they can save on the labor, to increase their bottom line and some CEO salary by a few million, because it's insanely cheaper there, yet they want the same loot for the product.
That profit just doesn't go into someone's pocket - its reinvested, mostly in more R&D type jobs to expand the business. By taking some aspect of the business and making it cheaper to operate there is an opportunity to do something that would have been too expensive to do otherwise.
Take the thousands and thousands of jobs that secretary pools used to do. They all disappeared and have been replaced by thousands and thousands of IT jobs. Companies have been able to invest in this type of expansion because they are no longer having to pay all of those secretary jobs. Some (or maybe even most) of those secretaries were hurt in the short run, but the economy and people overall have benefited.
Yet, I am not seeing any big push by the capitalists or their stooges in government to drop rentals or mortgages or real estate property prices, or even freeze rates by law,nor utility bills, nor cost of transportation, nor local property taxes to pay for the illegals invasion, etc, none of that.
Government has tried to do similar things in the past and it was disastrous. I don't even see why it would be necessary. Median wages and total compensation have both been growing steadily for quite some time.
You can go to the poorest cheapest cost of living place in the US and you still couldn't live on a buck an hour, even if your house was completely paid off and your car was completely paid off and you never needed new clothes.
I don't see any evidence that living off a buck an hour is even a remote risk. I'm not sure why you are concerned about it.
You lose it as a worker in the middle of paying off a house and car and etc you can go down the tubes fairly readily now, and you do it in some area where the bulk of the adults are all in the same industry and all of a sudden everyone is laid off you can't even hardly sell your house.
Trade can hurt some people in the short term - but as a whole trade makes the average person better off. By eliminating all risk, you destroy growth and innovation. Change can be hard, but it is important for society to progress. After all, it was very hard for blacksmiths and grooms when everyone stopped riding horses.
They have to cook the books on the economy to make it look good, use every possible word parsing tactic to call credit "wealth" and get people to believe that fairy tale, they dropped some of the FED reporting on cash in circulation to coverup the on purpose credit expansion by running the presses and just adding zeroes to the data entries,
If money supply were expanding like you claim then inflation would be soaring - the fact that inflation is still quite low gives lie to your assertions.
they adjusted cost of living and took out critical necessities to make it look good,
Which critical necessities did they take out?
they reclassified jobs, and we are now
Which jobs did they reclassify?
without any shadow of a doubt and this is not debateable, just accept it the most in the red any nation has ever been, all within the last 20 years of this big globalism push.
so I'm just supposed to accept your assertion without any evidence? It just so happens that the US deficit is less, as a percentage of GDP, than most of Europe and Japan. But don't take my word on it - look at the numbers from OECD (summary here) Of course that has almost nothing to do with how the economies perform, but the fiscal restraint of their governments.
If globalism worked, we'd see some results other than cheap crap at walmart.
How about the fact that more people own homes now t
Try moving to India some time. I'd rather not - standard of living is quite a bit higher here in the US.
Offshored jobs aren't replaced by better ones - they're replaced by low paying service jobs. Then explain to me why median wages and total compensation keep rising? If you were correct you would expect the opposite to be true.
There are a flood of high end jobs that no applicant in America is qualified to fill: you can't get those jobs without lower end job experience and you can't get lower end job experience anymore because it has all gone overseas. Do you have any evidence for this assertion? My experience and observations just don't support this view.
Outsourcing looks great on paper for the bottom line. It seems to be failing for customer support, helpdesks, and call centers because even if you get a hold of a person that speaks good english and can help you with your problem, at least here in the USA, I still feel cheated for some reason, and the liklihood that you get a person that can speak good english and help you with your problem is unlikely at best.
So would you be willing to pay more for better support? Its fine to complain that quality has declined - but you must acknowledge the trade offs that take place.
There are some companies that have suffered because of that loss of quality and some of them are pulling call centers out of India. This will cause Indians to correct those issues which is causing them to lose business.
I'm more "competitive" when I demand lower wages, lower my standard of living, lower my need for healthcare, lower my need for a clean environment, lower my expectations to talk with someone who actually knows english, etc, etc.
I don't understand this at all - wages, standards of living, benefits have all improved for American workers steadily throughout the century. The only possible complaint is that higher costs of benefits are buying less, but that can mostly be blamed on government interference.
Companies are competing for high quality workers - labor is a commodity and you can see that in the high percentage of voluntary churn.
In general they are lower skilled than the jobs that are replacing them.
Most of the jobs that relocating to India are call-center jobs, which are very low skill.
Point out some anecdotal evidence that non-low skill jobs are moving doesn't change the overall trend.
The accounting and legal jobs are mostly busy work type stuff - not the heavy lifting that are expanding in the US. Radiology is moving mostly because the market is so restrictive in the US that it is impossible to lower costs.
Either way these lower costs help Americans on the whole - the loss of some jobs is irrevelent.
With lower standard of living.
Foreigners have a lower standard of living yet you think its fair to prevent them from improving themselves. Seems fair.
No, that means that American firms should make 100% of their "Made in America" items in America, down to the last magnet or capacitor.
Why is Made in America important? Are people in your city worse off because nearly everything that you buy is made elsewhere? Shouldn't everyone in Illinois only buy items in Illinois? Why import from California?
smilerz: Competition makes everyone better off
That's completely unproven and only a statement of faith.
Patently untrue - who in the world trades with more people? Europeans and Americans and Japanese. Who in the world has the highest standard of living? Those same people.
If you collapse trade to its most basic elements you can see clearly that it makes both parties better off. If I'm a candlemaker and you are a butcher and we trade candles for beef are we both worse off because we now have things that we didn't make? Of course not, we are better off because we now have things that we couldn't make, or at least make as well.
The progress of the last century was about warfare, not competition, and the largest leaps in progress were all standardized government programs under the Department of Defense.
Cars, manufacturing, just in time supply chain, entertainment, computers, internet and on and on and on are developments of the private sector - not government.
Another completely unproven statement. For instance, if we treated the competition with the seriousness it deserves, then we'd simply nuke India- a few hundred million dead and the business would come back to the United States where it belongs.
Speaking of unfounded claims.
Silicon Valley is also one of the most expensive places in the country to hire people. Just because the jobs didn't get replaced there doesn't mean that they didn't get created in the US.
You can look at any anecdote and find evidence to support your position. The fact is that outsourcing happens everywhere and by everyone. It's called competitive advantage and it helps drive innovation and wealth.
As a simple example America is a net-exporter of services (the largest in the world in fact) - should the rest of the world stop outsourcing those services to create more jobs? Of course not - the US is the best in the world at those particular services. By not outsourcing the buyers would be getting inferior product.
Americans can move to India to get these jobs probably easier than Indians can come to the US to get jobs.
Just because a job is relocated to another country does not mean (and in fact does not mean) that that job isn't replaced with another comparable or even better job.
Offshoring does not mean that its more virtuous to fire a foreigner - it means that it is more productive. Every seems to forget that reducing costs means that products are provided at a reduced cost as well - which benefits us all.
"a Wal Mart job, for the most part."
That's patently and empirically false. Most of the jobs that are going overseas are low skill jobs. Those jobs are replaced by higher skilled jobs in the US.
Job growth in IT is still outstripping every other sector.
Exactly how are they competing unfairly? And why do they need to "create they our industry"? Does that mean that American firms shouldn't be making anything that was invented somewhere else?
Competition makes everyone better off - just look at the progress for the last century and it becomes abundantly clear. The only argument that opponents of outsourcing have is good old protectionism which does nothing but make everyone poorer. Everyone outsources - its only when outsourcing can be colored with xenophobia that it gains any traction at all.
That is plausible - but I think that adoption is going to be much faster. I just found out today that our CEO wants to be fully deployed by October (I work for a Fortune 500).
I (and several others) will be talking him out of such an aggressive schedule, but I don't think my experience is going to be unique.
Yes and no. As anyone working in a larger environment knows, it can be a nightmare to support multiple versions of the OS over a long period of time.
As someone that works in a large environment and that has spent time consulting for several large environments - I can tell you that most of the people that I have been around are already looking into upgrading. It will start with the next batch of hardware refreshes (no earlier than Q3 though) and probably accelerate from there.
Why? What would be the justification? From an enterprise standpoint, there are is nothing really compelling about Vista, and a lot to be concerned about.
EA has a lot to do with it - they already bought it and they want to get the return on that particular investment. They are also trusting MS in delivering on the 'more secure' promise. There are a ton of little reasons to upgrade to Vista - no one thing does it on its own. Then the single biggest factor - IT departments are run by IT people - they love technology and don't need a ton of compelling reasons to upgrade.
I'm not exactly sure what is concerning about upgrading to Vista though.
You would think so, but Vista is far more different from XP than XP was to 2000. XP is mostly just GUI changes. Vista changed a lot in the core. My guess is that it will be more difficult.
But there is less different than there was between NT and 2000. There are more tools and Microsoft has paid more attention to the upgrade path. There is some work that will need to be done by vendors to make their apps compatible, but I don't think it will be all that bad. Maybe more difficult than 2000->XP, but not by much and certainly easier than NT->2000(or XP)
That simply isn't true. Companies will upgrade, roughly, with their hardware refreshes - there isn't going to be a rush, but they will upgrade much faster than "having" to have Vista. Most businesses didn't really have to upgrade past NT and 2000, yet they did.
Companies have also learned a TON about OS deployments since 2000 -> XP, so I would imagine the upgrade path will be a bit quicker and easier.
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scientific establishment is an irrelevant phrase. Science isn't determined by committee or popularity - its based in fact. Hypothesis, testing and experimentation. Concensus can be overruled by a single person with the truth on his side.
In science there is no such thing as trusting the guy that you think knows the most. Something is either right or its wrong and only study and experimentation can answer that question. And you are wrong - what you are describing is absolutely reference to authority and its a logical fallacy.
Yet, amazingly, corporate profits have been steady throughout this period. No windfalls - some of the largest call center outsourcers have been in the PC and software biz and prices have been freefalling. Looks like savings to customers to me.
Two thoughts: 1st - Sounds like a perfect opportunity to make a ton of money by selling short if it is a public firm. 2nd - you are telling me that the market is working. Bad ideas and poor management are pushing a company out of business. If this is truly what is happening then outsourcing will be eliminated. Investors don't like failing businesses.
How do you become a higher end anything when you can't get the lower end job experience? There are still plenty of entry level jobs at high end firms. Microsoft, Intel, Google, Apple, Amazon, etc, etc, etc still hire thousands of people straight out of college. I have never worked for a company that didn't have entry level positions - and we are only talking about high tech. The outsourcing is primarily happening at large firms (which are a small percentage of total jobs). Smaller firms still have plenty of jobs in house where it is possible to learn and aquire skills in order to get ahead.
There is nothing wrong with debt - the fact that credit is available speaks more about the health of the US economy than anything. The fact that consumers and businesses both feel that the debt will be paid off is very optimistic. Your assertions about inflation are also way off - government can't hide expanding monetary supply - it shows up in prices and prices are not rising. There are some very smart economists that say that inflation numbers are biased upward because they do not take into account increasing quality and features. You have taken a very Malthusian view of the world - which is certainly your right - but without espousing conspiracy theories it just doesn't hold up.
The big company says they'll ship the job to where they can save on the labor, to increase their bottom line and some CEO salary by a few million, because it's insanely cheaper there, yet they want the same loot for the product.
That profit just doesn't go into someone's pocket - its reinvested, mostly in more R&D type jobs to expand the business. By taking some aspect of the business and making it cheaper to operate there is an opportunity to do something that would have been too expensive to do otherwise. Take the thousands and thousands of jobs that secretary pools used to do. They all disappeared and have been replaced by thousands and thousands of IT jobs. Companies have been able to invest in this type of expansion because they are no longer having to pay all of those secretary jobs. Some (or maybe even most) of those secretaries were hurt in the short run, but the economy and people overall have benefited.
Yet, I am not seeing any big push by the capitalists or their stooges in government to drop rentals or mortgages or real estate property prices, or even freeze rates by law,nor utility bills, nor cost of transportation, nor local property taxes to pay for the illegals invasion, etc, none of that.
Government has tried to do similar things in the past and it was disastrous. I don't even see why it would be necessary. Median wages and total compensation have both been growing steadily for quite some time.
You can go to the poorest cheapest cost of living place in the US and you still couldn't live on a buck an hour, even if your house was completely paid off and your car was completely paid off and you never needed new clothes.
I don't see any evidence that living off a buck an hour is even a remote risk. I'm not sure why you are concerned about it.
You lose it as a worker in the middle of paying off a house and car and etc you can go down the tubes fairly readily now, and you do it in some area where the bulk of the adults are all in the same industry and all of a sudden everyone is laid off you can't even hardly sell your house.
Trade can hurt some people in the short term - but as a whole trade makes the average person better off. By eliminating all risk, you destroy growth and innovation. Change can be hard, but it is important for society to progress. After all, it was very hard for blacksmiths and grooms when everyone stopped riding horses.
They have to cook the books on the economy to make it look good, use every possible word parsing tactic to call credit "wealth" and get people to believe that fairy tale, they dropped some of the FED reporting on cash in circulation to coverup the on purpose credit expansion by running the presses and just adding zeroes to the data entries,
If money supply were expanding like you claim then inflation would be soaring - the fact that inflation is still quite low gives lie to your assertions.
they adjusted cost of living and took out critical necessities to make it look good,
Which critical necessities did they take out?
they reclassified jobs, and we are now
Which jobs did they reclassify?
without any shadow of a doubt and this is not debateable, just accept it the most in the red any nation has ever been, all within the last 20 years of this big globalism push.
so I'm just supposed to accept your assertion without any evidence? It just so happens that the US deficit is less, as a percentage of GDP, than most of Europe and Japan. But don't take my word on it - look at the numbers from OECD (summary here) Of course that has almost nothing to do with how the economies perform, but the fiscal restraint of their governments.
If globalism worked, we'd see some results other than cheap crap at walmart.
How about the fact that more people own homes now t
Outsourcing looks great on paper for the bottom line. It seems to be failing for customer support, helpdesks, and call centers because even if you get a hold of a person that speaks good english and can help you with your problem, at least here in the USA, I still feel cheated for some reason, and the liklihood that you get a person that can speak good english and help you with your problem is unlikely at best. So would you be willing to pay more for better support? Its fine to complain that quality has declined - but you must acknowledge the trade offs that take place. There are some companies that have suffered because of that loss of quality and some of them are pulling call centers out of India. This will cause Indians to correct those issues which is causing them to lose business. I'm more "competitive" when I demand lower wages, lower my standard of living, lower my need for healthcare, lower my need for a clean environment, lower my expectations to talk with someone who actually knows english, etc, etc. I don't understand this at all - wages, standards of living, benefits have all improved for American workers steadily throughout the century. The only possible complaint is that higher costs of benefits are buying less, but that can mostly be blamed on government interference. Companies are competing for high quality workers - labor is a commodity and you can see that in the high percentage of voluntary churn.
In general they are lower skilled than the jobs that are replacing them. Most of the jobs that relocating to India are call-center jobs, which are very low skill. Point out some anecdotal evidence that non-low skill jobs are moving doesn't change the overall trend. The accounting and legal jobs are mostly busy work type stuff - not the heavy lifting that are expanding in the US. Radiology is moving mostly because the market is so restrictive in the US that it is impossible to lower costs. Either way these lower costs help Americans on the whole - the loss of some jobs is irrevelent.
With lower standard of living. Foreigners have a lower standard of living yet you think its fair to prevent them from improving themselves. Seems fair. No, that means that American firms should make 100% of their "Made in America" items in America, down to the last magnet or capacitor. Why is Made in America important? Are people in your city worse off because nearly everything that you buy is made elsewhere? Shouldn't everyone in Illinois only buy items in Illinois? Why import from California? smilerz: Competition makes everyone better off That's completely unproven and only a statement of faith. Patently untrue - who in the world trades with more people? Europeans and Americans and Japanese. Who in the world has the highest standard of living? Those same people. If you collapse trade to its most basic elements you can see clearly that it makes both parties better off. If I'm a candlemaker and you are a butcher and we trade candles for beef are we both worse off because we now have things that we didn't make? Of course not, we are better off because we now have things that we couldn't make, or at least make as well. The progress of the last century was about warfare, not competition, and the largest leaps in progress were all standardized government programs under the Department of Defense. Cars, manufacturing, just in time supply chain, entertainment, computers, internet and on and on and on are developments of the private sector - not government. Another completely unproven statement. For instance, if we treated the competition with the seriousness it deserves, then we'd simply nuke India- a few hundred million dead and the business would come back to the United States where it belongs. Speaking of unfounded claims.
Silicon Valley is also one of the most expensive places in the country to hire people. Just because the jobs didn't get replaced there doesn't mean that they didn't get created in the US. You can look at any anecdote and find evidence to support your position. The fact is that outsourcing happens everywhere and by everyone. It's called competitive advantage and it helps drive innovation and wealth. As a simple example America is a net-exporter of services (the largest in the world in fact) - should the rest of the world stop outsourcing those services to create more jobs? Of course not - the US is the best in the world at those particular services. By not outsourcing the buyers would be getting inferior product.
Americans can move to India to get these jobs probably easier than Indians can come to the US to get jobs. Just because a job is relocated to another country does not mean (and in fact does not mean) that that job isn't replaced with another comparable or even better job. Offshoring does not mean that its more virtuous to fire a foreigner - it means that it is more productive. Every seems to forget that reducing costs means that products are provided at a reduced cost as well - which benefits us all.
"a Wal Mart job, for the most part." That's patently and empirically false. Most of the jobs that are going overseas are low skill jobs. Those jobs are replaced by higher skilled jobs in the US. Job growth in IT is still outstripping every other sector.
Exactly how are they competing unfairly? And why do they need to "create they our industry"? Does that mean that American firms shouldn't be making anything that was invented somewhere else? Competition makes everyone better off - just look at the progress for the last century and it becomes abundantly clear. The only argument that opponents of outsourcing have is good old protectionism which does nothing but make everyone poorer. Everyone outsources - its only when outsourcing can be colored with xenophobia that it gains any traction at all.
That is plausible - but I think that adoption is going to be much faster. I just found out today that our CEO wants to be fully deployed by October (I work for a Fortune 500). I (and several others) will be talking him out of such an aggressive schedule, but I don't think my experience is going to be unique.
Yes and no. As anyone working in a larger environment knows, it can be a nightmare to support multiple versions of the OS over a long period of time. As someone that works in a large environment and that has spent time consulting for several large environments - I can tell you that most of the people that I have been around are already looking into upgrading. It will start with the next batch of hardware refreshes (no earlier than Q3 though) and probably accelerate from there. Why? What would be the justification? From an enterprise standpoint, there are is nothing really compelling about Vista, and a lot to be concerned about. EA has a lot to do with it - they already bought it and they want to get the return on that particular investment. They are also trusting MS in delivering on the 'more secure' promise. There are a ton of little reasons to upgrade to Vista - no one thing does it on its own. Then the single biggest factor - IT departments are run by IT people - they love technology and don't need a ton of compelling reasons to upgrade. I'm not exactly sure what is concerning about upgrading to Vista though. You would think so, but Vista is far more different from XP than XP was to 2000. XP is mostly just GUI changes. Vista changed a lot in the core. My guess is that it will be more difficult. But there is less different than there was between NT and 2000. There are more tools and Microsoft has paid more attention to the upgrade path. There is some work that will need to be done by vendors to make their apps compatible, but I don't think it will be all that bad. Maybe more difficult than 2000->XP, but not by much and certainly easier than NT->2000(or XP)
That simply isn't true. Companies will upgrade, roughly, with their hardware refreshes - there isn't going to be a rush, but they will upgrade much faster than "having" to have Vista. Most businesses didn't really have to upgrade past NT and 2000, yet they did. Companies have also learned a TON about OS deployments since 2000 -> XP, so I would imagine the upgrade path will be a bit quicker and easier.
Talk about misrepresenting what Bruce said! He was comparing password use over time (1989 to today) not comparing MySpace to corporate users.