Lesson for the day:
I make my paycheck coding in the Linux kernel, working with others from China, India, Australia, Russia, France, Israel, Eastern Europe, South America, and heaven knows where else. I compete by being better; but as I prepare to live on less, my colleagues from poorer countries are looking forward to earning more. We both see an inevitable equalization in progress, of equal pay for equal value. I'm not complaining; actually, I'm having a blast working with some of the finest coders on the planet. But a business model that pays me five or ten times another coder of equal value cannot be sustained.
My services, coding, can be provided by anyone with the right skills, an Internet connection, and the ability to compose a broken-English email message (the "lingua Franca" of this line of work.) It is extremely independent of geography. But with the increasingly huge shipping tankers and ships, most manufactured or mined industrial goods are becoming almost as independent of geography.
There is an inevitable globalization in process.
This is the same sort of inevitability that my teenage son sees in the pricing of music, where the huge production costs of the business models of RIAA members just can't compete with the distributed pennies per song costs of peer-to-peer sharing of music.
Regulation is needed. But sometimes regulation is a rear guard action to protect business models being made obsolete by increasingly rapid changes in our business and technology.
Lesson #2 for the day:
Lesson #3: Democrats will win elections because Democrats are falsely seen as sticking up for the small guy.
Globalization is as “inevitable” as orthodox slavery. Either stop it now, or fight a global war in the future.