Posted on 07/01/2004 9:31:09 PM PDT by CarrotAndStick
We don't need engineers any more then we need manufacturing! /endsarcasm
Here's a little about India's rote-based education.
"Competitive exam mania. It’s the quality of education that suffers," by Pratap Bhanu Mehta
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2003/20031201/edit.htm#5
The tuition issue: Perception and the whole truth, by Bhim S. Dahiya
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2001/20010708/edit.htm#1
What the H*** is this guy talking about? He didn't answer the question.
You two will have good times here.
If anything, the number of engineers graduating in the United States is dropping.
True! Because Americans realize there is no future for Americans in the technical fields.
As (General Electric CEO) Jeff Immelt said, the US graduates more sports therapists than engineers.
Of course. Sports therapists aren't being offshored - yet.
In some sense, the US is filling that gap with imports of people. In other words, people are flowing to where the work is -- immigration.
Not exactly. The large US corporations are forcing domestic wages down by importing foreign workers.
I think that it is perhaps too jaundiced a view to think that the US economy would not generate as many jobs for engineers as there are engineers.
Only if one defines "jobs for engineers" as flipping burgers and stocking shelves at WalMart.
We have got a dropping number of engineers, a growing economy and already the gap is being filled more by immigration than by local demand.
Is it a growing economy? Is it really? The GDP grew less than the rate of inflation - which means that in real terms the US economy is shrinking.
The annualized federal deficit is, as I recall, $466 Billion dollars. We have 130 million jobs. So the annual federal deficit per job is about $3,500 per job. Not the amount of federal spending - this is the amount of new federal debt for every worker in the U.S.
Is this healthy? Is it even sustainable?
Free trade is like gangrene - our economic body dies an inch at a time until our national demise.
My head is spinning. This competitive/comparative advantage is more heady than dialectic materialism.
Isn't it, though?
If all this offshoring is so good...why does India have protective trade tariffs?
Free traitin' - lies hiding lies within lies.
No question that the country can "reinvent itself". The crucial question is, what will that be? An agricultural community that makes its bones selling Pepsi and cancer sticks to the world? A land bursting at the seams with WalMarts and Sonic drivethroughs? Entertainment Nation?
Look at what's happening out there. What is being torn down and/or shutdown? Factories, power plants, steel mills, aircraft assembly lines, national laboratories. What is being built? Lawyer's offices, sports medicine complexes, McDonald's, Walmarts. What is not being built? Oil refineries, baseload power stations, heavy industry, in short anything that makes a world-class industrial, economic, and military power.
Spain did it after the decline of her superpower status. It became a major tourist destination. We should invest more into the national parks. They cannot be outsourced.
Am I to believe this? I don't care about India's economy nearly as much as I am the U.S.'s.
Despite the glowing rhetoric, the fact remains that data shipped out of the country is unsecured and, if India ever gets mad at us and decides to sanction the US, we are SOL for technology and help desk needs. Corporate America won't appreciate that fact until they can't meet a contractual delivery date. Right now, it's all about the "profits" they are supposedly hauling in by the bucket load (which I sincerely doubt).
Tell that to the environmentalists and UN
"We don't need engineers any more then we need manufacturing! /endsarcasm" - Yasotay
Well, we do have a surplus of social engineers :-)
This is yet another weak point in the globalist argument that I have never seen the globalists successfully refute on any of these threads. Referring back to the original article:
That is really befuddling, because the US is only securing its technological competitive advantage. [Look at] patents that have been written by Indian software engineers in Wipro. The individual engineers get the credit; the ownership is the customer's.
The crux of this argument is incredibly weak. It presupposes that those foreign developers will always honor and abide by international patent agreements. There may very well come a time when they do not feel so inclined. Take, for example, the PRC, which has on some occasions made reference to nuking certain West Coast cities in this country. Does anyone really think that a country whose leaders would say such things would feel bound by such quaint notions as abiding by international business law?
I'm sure this is true. Word ripples around: "Don't go into engineering if you want a job."
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