Posted on 06/27/2004 4:52:11 AM PDT by neutrino
PS, thanks for the update on your/EDS status in your earlier post. Very interesting. Screw them, and the customer too.
The whole "H1B" madness is a travesty that should be stopped, abandoned, and fled like the plague that it is. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.
When we're forced to "compete" with third world foreigners for third world wages, we will end up a third world nation.
I have no doubt that we're headed down that path. Some of the "leaders" [spit] who are driving us in that direction are doing so out of greed, some out of stupidity, and some -- the most dangerous, IMO -- are doing so because that's the goal -- the "third-world-ization" of the United States.
The sick mix of Lenin's rope-merchants, Stalin's useful idiots, and our contemporary social engineers, will bring this nation to its knees, and then stand around pissing on the not-quite-dead body as it -- as WE -- lay writhing in the dust.
Apples and oranges. Buggywhips were no longer needed. Their use no longer existed. No on uses buggywhips anymore
The output of these outsourced jobs is still VERY MUCH a part of the economy.
Bingo.
That should be carved in stone and placed in a monument in DC, alongside the Vietnam and WWII monuments. A monument to the economic war LOST to foreign employment.
You've cut right to the heart of the matter. The "buggywhip" BS is exactly that -- bulls#!+. This is not some "paradigm shift" (how I despise that buzzphrase!) in which one type of industry is eclipsed by another. This is nothing less than the wholesale destruction of the human infrastructure of this country.
For the buggywhip-ranters consideration, let's say that you're right -- the technical industry has been eclipsed (yes, yes, I know, it's madness, but humor me for a moment as I humor them). It's over, it's done, it's gone, *poof*, it's time to move on.
So, what do we move on to? Hell, it doesn't matter. So let's make something up. We "move on" to an industry based on the design, manufacture, and maintenance of framjumustorian mafulasticoid consorbite lutonics.
Great, ain't it? Hell, we corner the market on those... things.
Oops, guess what just happened?
Right. You got it in one.
We hired in a bunch of Chinese and Indians to take over all the key jobs in the framjumustorian mafulasticoid consorbite lutonics industry -- and, "offshored" the rest of the jobs -- to China and India.
What we have here is a situation in which we're not "the world leaders", we're just a crop -- to be harvested when ripe.
The rest of the world can just sit back, watching and waiting, as we expend all the R&D money to create new industries and new markets -- seeing which ones fly, and which die on the vine -- and then, once we've done the dirty work, they can just swoop down, pick the fruit, and leave us with the weeds.
Beautiful system "our" legislators have given us.
The "H1B" nonsense, and everything along those lines, needs to be recognized for the treachery it is, and stopped.
I don't see that happening, though.
I don't see much of a future for us. I'm not gonna pull a rose-colored-glassed job you anyone. I'm just gonna call it as I see it. And that's what I've just done.
Go ahead, flame me (not you, TB, I know you've got your head on straight). I dont' give a rat's ass. I'm old enough to have the bulk of my life behind me, and the taunts of those who can't see the forest for the trees is just so much noise so far as I'm concerned. I tune it out the same way I tuned out the sound of "the el" every few minutes back when I was growing up in the low-rent part of the Bronx.
But it's our children, and our children's children that I fear for. I don't know what kind of world they're going to have to face.
Oh, damn. I just lied to you. I know full well what kind of a world they'll have to face. It's just that I don't want to have to face the fact that we've damned them to a future that's so bleak as to defy description.
Oh, well. I'll be dead long before it comes to that. For those of you who're young enough to have to explain to them why you left them that kind of world, well... go rent a copy of Soylent Green or something like that. Maybe it'll give you something to tell them.
I'd wager they aren't selling too many copies of that title in India or China.
Nice of "our" legislators to go out of their way to ensure that we kill two birds with one stone: We not only make sure that "Life is difficult" becomes The Way It Is for us, but, they also ensure that our pockets are emptied to make sure that it's less and less of a truism in a handful of other countries.
But hey, I guess after everything that China and India have done for us over the centuries, we owe them everything we can do to smooth the path to prosperity for them -- even as we smooth the path to poverty for ourselves.
The founders of this nation would be so proud of us, wouldn't they.
Or how about, "Sanjay and Wong discover that the United States does owe them a living"
Suggested reading: "Unrestricted Warfare", by a couple of bigwigs at the People's Revolutionary Army, translated by the CIA, available for free download at a variety of sites. Google is your friend. Here's the first match it turned up:
Hint: Those Chinese were not "businessmen", they were warriors. And that money was actually a munition.
Sounds like they're making a lot of direct hits on their target.
Ah, I misread your last post -- I thought it was Chinese that were bringing satchels of money to meetings with local Americah officials.
But you know something? I'd wager that's going on, right here in this country. And I do recommend taking a look at "Unrestricted Warfare". China has a plan, and they're are not shy about telling us. They are that confident in our will to be blind to it. Our faith in "it can't happen here" must bring many a chuckle to Peking.
And not the government either. It's too busy greasing the skids, looking the other way as foreign workers come here "for jobs no American will take", and creating incentives like "MFN" for an avowed enemy.
I don't give this country another 25 years.
A quarter century from now, the "management class" and "technical class" will be filled with people who were trained in damn little more than "Feeling Good About Myself", and they'll be sitting there feeling like a train hit 'em as it all collapses around them.
Krushchev is getting the last laugh. He can finally put that shoe back on.
It is not unreasonable to expect our leaders to look out for our interests including those as related to employment. After all, they expect us to die on the battlefield at their command. When does the loyalty get reciprocated?
Excellent point.
A corporate entity is a recipient of privilege, and it owes something back to those it takes from.
As it stands now, there is a one-way transfer of wealth from the USA to a few select other nations, one of which has vowed our destruction.
In the Fortune 500 I worked for, we used to take the ones that were dangerously inept in the lab and promote them to middle managers, paying them off to stay away. Then they could sit there like a potted plant, issuing the occasional disruptive and disasterous decree, and collecting their bonuses.
I feel badly when a contributing technical person who generates products, profits, or value-added gets the ax.
When a middle manager, who just juggles numbers to make the current Quarter look artificially better at the expense of the future gets it, I find it difficult to be as sympathetic.
No, I'll be eligible to retire in only two years. Ain't gonna get canned.
"Just wait a few more years. They have spent your pension fund already, and it is going to be worth zilch shortly, when they devalue the currency. Timeframe - 2008-12."
LOL! My pension's fully funded, as well as my government 401K. The federal government matches my 401K contributions 1-for-1 up to 5% of my salary. I'm currently contributing 11%, and the 401K is doing VERY well, invested in a variety of investment vehicles. As for "devaluing the currency," since the dollar floats, anything can happen, but whatever happens to me is also going to happen to EVERYONE WHO HOLDS DOLLARS. Like, duh!
There's a big part of me that just wants to call you a cynical old codger. Unfortunately, I agree with all of your posts. This nation is being sold out at record rates. I hope it lasts more than 25 years but I am not going to count on it.
Teach 'germ theory' and suddenly no one wants to be around anyone who is at high risk for AIDS..Teach someone how to analyze data and the nonsense numbers on the nightly news are shown as being as meaningless and/or deceptive as they are. The whole 'global warming' furor would cool off quickly.
The education industry is not willing to give (or, in some cases, capable of giving) students the skills necessary to critically assess and debunk their own pet truisms.
Until we get past the social agendae driving the education industry, we will continue to fall further behind other countries where people manufacture pins instead of debating the number of angels who can dance on the head thereof, or write rules limiting the angelic capacity for safety purposes.
I am reminded of my favorite news story.
How do we communicate with our elite class of leaders? We can learn from the elders of the "Greatest Generation."
In the summer of 1989, Mr. Rostenkowski, then a congressman from Illinois and the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, was besieged by a crowd of 50 senior citizens in Chicago . . . the protesters -- shouting "coward," "recall" and "impeach" -- forced him to sprint through a gas station to his car. . .[car? it sure looked like a government limo to me]
The protesters were angry about [a new Medicare law] . . .That law was soon repealed. But the television images of Mr. Rostenkowski under assault struck fear in the hearts of politicians . . .
"Politicians were traumatized by the Rostenkowski episode," said Henry J. Aaron, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
"Assault" is too strong of word but the seniors made sure Rostenkowski knew that they did not come there to praise him.
Original thought is rare in any generation. From what my engineer husband has observed, though, engineers used for outsourcing aren't that creative, either. In fact, they usually *can't* be, because the job has to be clearly laid out for them. They have to treat it like an "assembly line" process. The advantage they bring to the equation is that they're "cheap."
Here in the US, we do have serious social issues that result in the killing of original thought. We don't buy kids chemistry sets - if you can even *find* a real chemistry set anymore. We don't leave kids alone with power tools or rocket kits. Kids aren't free to wander up to the library when the thought strikes them. When I was growing up, it was not rare for kids to visit older adults in the neighborhood, to help them with chores or just talk. Today we'd all be terrified that those adults would be child molesters.
In short, our kids' lives are so scheduled, subscribed, and physically limited that any natural creativity is often crushed. Outsourcing is an immediate & serious problem, but the crushing of native creativity will bite us hard in the long-term.
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