Offshoring obsessions miss the point

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You don't get it. It's not an IT issue.

Every job that involves thinking and solving a problem (Radiologists, Actuarials, Stock Analysts, Paralegals, etc., etc. and yes finally IT people too) will be shipped overseas.

The business shills say it is about education but who is insane enough to invest fifty thousand dollars in unforgivable government loans (even bankruptcy won't do it) in any field that you are competing against people who can work for under ten thousand dollars a year?

The service sector is all about work that can be outsourced. That's almost a third of our economy.

The underlying issue is that it is desirable to live in the united states. So the cost of living is bid up here. Previously, it was difficult for people living in other countries to do the work here so it didn't matter. But now we have a high cost of living here combined with very rapidly transferring up to a third of our jobs to other nations.

You see this same factor in america with regard to california. People want to live there so they have bid up the cost of property to 300% higher than the rest of the country. Rents are easily 200% higher. They even have mortgages now where you never pay principle. In fact, you are more in debt every year until you sell the house. You have to make a very good income just to live there.

The jobs being transferred require years of expensive training invested or they are bottom rung jobs where people start getting work experience.

There is no job involving thinking and analysis that we can train for fast enough to recoup training costs before those jobs are offshored.

On top of this, the cost of the training in these countries is a fraction of what it is here. And they are hungrier and willing to focus on learning so hard that thousands of their high school age children commit suicide each year. And they do not have the social benefits that we do- you fail- you starve. In a few cases (China comes to mind) slave labor might be involved (we really need to crack down on that).

You say to penalize the companies here that offshore- but that won't help. Then they will just have to compete at a disadvantage against foreign companies. On the other hand, we should not be actively transferring our knowledge with the visa programs as we are.

I believe with our standard of living and relatively low population to land area, living in america will continue to cost a premium and that is going to be a problem until wages rise in other countries to the point that they are not as competitive with us. But that may take a decade and people live in terms of months, not decades.

And we are all ignoring or not even thinking about the 800 pound gorilla waiting in the wings. The thing that could make life a utopian paradise but which will probably make it a hellish distopia instead.

You hint at it when you speak of automatic coding. Computers are getting faster and smarter every year. They will not be as smart as a human until the end of our lifetimes but once the vision problem is solved, they -will- be smart enough to do any simple manual labor and probably even moderately complex manual labor. Yes- I'm talking about robots. Robotic lawn care and housecare is starting now. Within the next ten years, I can see many jobs which highschool grads take now disappearing as robot grocery store stockers and robotic building cleaners replace them. Robots don't get tired, they don't get sick, they don't sue if they are "hurt" on the job. Business is going to love them.

As one site says, it changes the model from this:

Bosses
Shareholders --- 1000 Employees --- 1000 Customers.

to this

Bosses
Shareholders --- 3 Employees --- 1000 Customers.

.

We can see that customers = employees and we can see the basic problem here. The degradation to this:

Bosses
Shareholders --- 3 Employees --- 3 Customers.

The problem is that this only happens AFTER all companies convert. At the start, you have a few companies with robotic or offshored labor making very high profits. At the end, you have 997 people with no job who are ready to steal food and kill rich people.

The problem is, with good robotics we will not need peoples labor any more.

With good offshoring, we do not need educated but non-entrepenureal people any more.

And once the offshore managers learn how to be entrepenures, we don't need onshore managers either. At that point, we lose the next war because the other countries finally get ahead of us technologically and we look like those one million poor iraqi soldiers being killed over the horizon by weapons they can't even comprehend.

At that point, there isn't a "heroic" country left to prevent tyranny. As bad as Americans can be morally, they have done more to save the rest of the world than anyone appreciates.

Man. I had a bit of wind in the sails there! Ah well, get it off my chest before the weekend.

Posted by: maxo_z   Posted on: 06/04/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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