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To: RaceBannon
It's over, no matter how you slice it. Our wall street wizards don't care if people are chained to a machine in Bejing, as long as it helps their quarterly statements. That is the truth. It doesn't matter if the people are inefficient, if they get paid squat. There are actually companies that have relocated from the mexican border sweatshops to China because the Mexicans were asking for too much money. Ya know like $1.75 an hour.

Wait until Moore's law keeps actualizing itself in 50 years. Computers/robotics will become so advanced, that manufacturing in the US will cease to exist.

I am pro american business, but alot of "american" businesses are not. Capitalism is about making money, but it's also about being beneficial to the community. What these nimrods on Wall Street don't get, is that it is only profitable in the long run if only a few companies move tech/manufacturing jobs overseas. They benefit because there are still enough americans with money to buy their products, that makes up for the 5,000 they layed off. However, if everybody does it, who are they going to sell to in the end? A nation of telemarketers does not an economic giant make.

18 posted on 07/28/2003 6:59:06 PM PDT by dogbyte12
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To: dogbyte12
Nicely said. You are right on.
20 posted on 07/28/2003 7:02:11 PM PDT by Cacophonous
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To: dogbyte12
Someone posted a great thread the other day about his new job as a project manager for IT work that is outsourced to Russia and Poland. He said something to the effect that outsourcing the work to Eastern Europe has allowed the IT industry to reduce the cost of this particular system from $200,000 to $75,000.

"But look at those American jobs going overseas," someone complained, "That's $200,000 that would have been spent doing the work here in the U.S."

"Wrong," this guy replied, "Because if the work had cost $200,000 to begin with, my client would never have hired us at all. It only made sense for them to upgrade their inventory control system because the cost was $75,000 and not $200,000."

In other words, the net effect on the U.S. labor pool was zero. The client wasn't going to have Americans do the work for $75,000 (because the U.S. market rate for the work was $200,000), he wasn't going to have Americans (or Russians, for that matter) do the work for $200,000 either (because the cost would have been prohibitive).

I don't know what the answer to anyone's long-term employment problem is, but this little exchange was a rare look at exactly how the whole dynamic of "outsourcing" works.

26 posted on 07/28/2003 7:09:43 PM PDT by Alberta's Child
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To: dogbyte12
A nation of telemarketers does not an economic giant make.

Forget being a telemarketer too ---they're being laid off in very high numbers and those strange accents you now hear on your telephone are telemarketers calling you from India which is why you can't understand much of what they're saying.

42 posted on 07/28/2003 7:18:10 PM PDT by FITZ
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