Libertarian ping! Click here to get added or here to be removed or post a message here!
View past Libertarian pings here
Posted on 05/20/2010 8:24:56 AM PDT by altair
To me the most interesting thing about Spurlock’s show were the familiar issues. Things like the destruction of the family were concerns because Indian families were working different shifts and no longer dined or prayed together.
Another issue was religion. Indians are increasingly tied to the west through work which means their time off was often tied to Christian and other western holidays. I’m not going to get into a religious argument but its an issue where I can see their concern.
I hope you mean giving them a pass on the inspections that should have been made but were not. I've lived in the 3rd world too long to be a "pure libertarian". Government and government regulation is required, it just needs to be sensible.
But not for long. This is the problem...when you instruct someone "how" to build your product, they learn idiosyncracies of the product that the "innovators" no longer have access to because they outsourced it to Asia. Actual manufacturing and innovation is a two way street. US companies assume that they hold onto the intellectual property of their products, but in reality they don't. The manufacturing company learns more about improving and innovation by the act of manufacturing than the original innovator, resulting in a complete transfer of intellectual property to the foreign company.
Very interesting point. I could understand a lot of those concerns, when I think about how much different my work schedule was when I was living just two times zones away from New York City and had to account for the time difference in the hours of the New York Stock Exchange.
Morgan Spurlock produces a show called “30 days” where he attempts to put the viewer into the perspective of the other side. Sometimes he puts an illegal immigrant in the home of a border control proponent or a PETA freak in the home of a farmer.
Much of it is crap but he occasionally hits on something interesting like the show about the California IT worker following his job to India.
>> Off-shoring redundant technology and business processes is NOT innovation, it’s simply getting easy work done cheap.
That’s true, of course. However, believe at your own peril that Chinese and Indian and Eastern European and Russian folks can’t learn and think and design and innovate for themselves.
Europeans and Americans have no monopoly on brains. And they are already way behind in the perseverance and elbow-grease department.
We have been too busy eating up the fruits of past accomplishments — but not working nearly as hard as we should to grow new fruits. Therefore, if we don’t start “getting it” right away, and reversing the process, the rest of the world will soon be eating our lunch.
(Thanks for your clarification)
Don't forget corporate income taxes. One of the most evil inventions.
The hell of all this is is that if we eliminated corporate taxes and capital gains taxes without even touching personal income taxes, we could probably pay for enough of Obama's communist welfare state to survive for quite a long time without any particular new misery.
That's not exactly what I was focusing on, but ...
That’s true, of course. However, believe at your own peril that Chinese and Indian and Eastern European and Russian folks can’t learn and think and design and innovate for themselves.
Correct. Knowledge (as opposed to a formal US college education) is cheap now-a-days with easy internet access. Obama and all his communist university buddies ought to discredit huge portions of the US educational system for a long time. I'm not going to hold my breath, but it should happen.
At least where I work, the work is not easy and requires real skills. I have not met a single peer coworker whom I would not consider bright. Rough on the edges, needs more training - sometimes yes, but not bright enough to do it, no. Be careful dissing that which you do not know.
Hmmm.....Not sure what you mean by “be careful dissing what you do not know”.
I am here in the valley and have been for twenty years. I run an ISP, a hosted telephony business, a construction company and am starting another company next week.
What Might I not know about business and the current climate?
Two thumbs up on the vanity!!
Sure, Indian programmers are cheaper, but when it takes 10 to 20 "programmers" to equal one of our guys here, the payoff just isn't there. Overall, I haven't been impressed with offshoring.
On a personal level, if I call a company for something and get routed to India, I'm a hell of a lot less likely to continue to do business with them.
I've discovered you always have to get them to say what you want them to do in their own words, when they start with "yeah, yeah, yeah" routine. It's obviously a cultural thing. Many just plain will not admit that they don't understand what is being discussed.
It varies by individual.
If you're outsourcing by collaboration, then you also have to take into the time zone differences. Most business people cannot deal with that. Email is the killer app in that case, not Skype, IRC, WebEx, etc. that requires synchronization at both ends.
I don't particularly want to assist in outsourcing, so I'll stop here. My only intent was to explain what is going on.
With anyone actually. Mrs. Altair is a Filipina and I've learned from her that I can usually never trust a "yeah, yeah, yeah" response. India and Philippines have English as an official language, that doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot day-to-day.
The US manufacturing industry has destroyed itself by outsourcing manufacturing to realize short-term profits
Although the U.S. manufacturing industry has outsourced many products, the manufacturing sector in our country still produces a very large amount of products. We employ far fewer people than years ago but productivity and output remain fairly stable.
it depends on who you outsource to and whether it’s outsourcing or offshoring. If you have your own firm set up in India then you pay for the best guys. If you outsource for lower bucks, you get code monkeys
Eh. The PHBs don't really understand what's the cheap part.
I work in telecomm R&D and the current effort has about 10 long term USA engineers being thrown into a late project being worked by a group of Indian contractors. A couple are good, but most are DeVry Institute quality coders.
The PHBs believed the contracting house's siren song of quality, but it was a mirage. And they've already lost any price advantage they might have had as the total staff is more than I think needed if they'd staffed initially with USA employees who know the industry and the kind of quality and robustness the company expects, and how to get there. These guys were trained to Microsoft levels of quality ... just reboot once a day.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.