08 Jan 2004
Your Brain on Acid

I found this link over at Secular Blasphemy: fascinating look at how hallucinogens efffect the mind.

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Tech Chiefs Defend Overseas Jobs

I referred to this study yesterday, but the article linked below from Wired has so many more outrageous quotes from the report (and the folks responsible for it) that I had to post this item as well. Here we go:

"There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore," Carly Fiorina, chief executive for Hewlett-Packard, said Wednesday. "We have to compete for jobs."

Gee, Carly - I wonder if we could find a newly minted MBA in Madras to replace you for a fraction of your salary?

Really going over the edge is Intel's Craig Barrett. I can hear him now, being confronted by the unemployed American engineers whose jobs he's just shipped to Malaysia: "Let them eat silicon!"

[Intel's Craig] Barrett complained about federal agriculture subsidies he said were worth tens of billions of dollars, while government investment in physical sciences was a relatively low $5 billion. "I can't understand why we continue to pour resources into the industries of the 19th century," Barrett said.

I hope you weren't speaking at a luncheon engagement with this one, buddy. People who complain about farmers really shouldn't do it with their mouths full!

Generally, I'd say that all subsidies from government to business are a bad idea, but characterizing agriculture as "so 19th century" kinda misses the point. Humans can't subsist on silicon alone!

And finally, someone who gets it:

A vocal critic of moving jobs overseas, Marcus Courtney of Seattle, dismissed the latest report. "This is not a recipe for job creation in this country," said Courtney, president of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers. "This is a recipe for corporate greed. They're lining up at the public trough to slash their labor costs."

The heads of several leading technology companies, worried that lawmakers may clamp down on 'offshoring' of U.S. jobs, urge Congress to reject new restrictions on moving jobs overseas.

(link) [Wired News]

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Successful catalog sales rep, or 'shopaholic' enabler?
Subtitle it 'The Moral Dimensions of Capitalism' ...

In her new temp job, the writer discovers her chronic shopping customers need a 'just say no' lecture.

(link) [csmonitor.com | Moral Dilemmas]

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Never Lost, but Found Daily: Japanese Honesty

Honor is still a watchword in Japan ...

At Tokyo's lost-and-found center, lost objects, meticulously catalogued, have a very good chance of finding their way back to their rightful owner.

(link) [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

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Group warns of outsourcing backlash
Gee, do ya think?

There is going to be a backlash. I guarantee it. I'm part of it. I listened to the same pundits in the late 70's and early 80's, telling me that manufacturing was dead here, and that to stay competative I'd have to get educated and get into the "information economy". I followed their advice and prospered ...

Where do I go now that the IT jobs are moving to India? What kind of additional skills and training are they suggesting this time? Law school? Is that all that's gonna be left here? Lawyers?

I'm not necessarily wanting "special" treatment here: fair treatment would be good enough for me. Forcing companies to pay the Social Insecurity tax on all workers would be a good start. Mandating equal treatment in working conditions, hours and benefits would be another.

The Computer Systems Policy Project complains

"A growing number of workers in these foreign countries and companies are highly educated, skilled and talented--a competitive challenge in their own right," the report said. "Americans who think that foreign workers are no match for U.S. workers in knowledge, skills and creativity are mistaken."

The problem is not the skills of the foreign workers: the problem is that we are no match for them in wages. The average engineer in Bangalore makes $6000 a year, which puts him (or her) firmly in the Indian upper middle class. That salary here would mandate a move into a homeless shelter.

In case the corporations have forgotten their history, this exact thing was one cause of the rise in unionism in the early part of the 2oth century: companies moving operations to take advantage of cheap labor. The solution imposed then, after a long and bitter struggle, was the union wage scale.

Business today has pretty much successfully eliminated unions as a major force, by treating their employtees better and better, making unions irrelevent at best and obstructionist at worst. With the move to offshoring jobs, that trend is reversing itself. Perhaps it's time for the unions to make a comeback as well.

Feeling pressure over the loss of U.S. tech jobs to offshore workers, the Computer Systems Policy Project releases a report stressing the need to keep international doors open.

(link) [CNET News.com - Front Door]

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What is OS X?
A link to a fascinating article ...

(link) [Slashdot]

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More Changes to MacRaven

Well, back on pico direct to the local blog... I've been in a terminal window all night, so leaving it just to post an update didn't seem quite right.

You'll notice that I've eliminate the background image from the story window(s)- it was just oo tough for this old fart and his bifocals to read. I also blocked in the comments (and editing, locally) forms with a grey to make them stand out a bit more.

I moved the <hr> tags above the title of the post - this should make it a bit more readable. I've also sorta settled into a convention for aggregator posts, where the blurb from the news source will appear last in the post, italicized.

I also have email notification (to me, of course) working for comments, and I should be pinging weblogs.com - we'll see after this post.

Behind the scenes I had to hack some more on Blagg - seems as though some news feeds output their XML in a slightly different order, so the regexp in Blagg (it doesn't use an XML parser) would barf every once in a while - putting the comments in the link tag and vice-versa. I just duped the loop where the regexp was executing and added another little field in my rss.dat file to hand the different orders. Clumsy and kludgy, but it works, and I'd still like to get a better aggregator going at some point: the problem is finding one.

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