OT:Favor needed

[Bill Vermillion]

It was Fri, Jan 21 20:17  when Fairlight said "Mia kusenveturilo estas
plena da angiloj. And continued:

> Confusious (J. P. Radley) say:
>
> > Mark Luljak propounded (on Fri, Jan 21, 2005 at 06:40:14PM
> > -0500): | I wonder how much of that support is actually
> > -routed- overseas, and how | many are immigrants
> > working domestically. Personally, I'd like to see a |
> > www.stopoutsourcingnow.org take the topic straight to the
> > government via | petitions, requesting stiff penalties and
> > disincentives for companies that | do outsource abroad. It's
> > killing our economy--and not just in IT.

> > We've already outsourced the manufacture of socks and bras, TVs and
> > cell phones, and we still have the largest economy in the world.  So
> > why not outsource other things, too?

> We used to make things ourselves, as an industrialised nation.
> We also used to be far ahead of the curve.

One of the reasons that has changed is the style of management has
changed where top-level managers use a job as a stepping stone to
the next job up the ladder and have no long term commitment.

More than one industry fell apart in the US when the local
companies found it was cheaper at that time to push their
technology to the limit instead of investigating new methods of
doing things.   The magnetic media industry - including the data
tapes/disks - decided not to leave the metal technology to the
Japanese and just dope the ferric/ferrous oxides they had been
using for years.  It took Japan Inc [led by Sony and Fujifilm]
a while to get the bugs out - and when they did and industry
disappeared in the US.

It happened with motorcycles too.  Then there was a flurry of small
cars being imported to the US and instead of making better cars
the US auto industry got congress to limit the number of small
cars imported each year.

But the foreign businessmen realized that if the could sell only
NN hundred thousand cars each year they would make more money
if they stopped making $5000 auto and built $30,000 autos.
More profit per car to boot.  And then the luxury auto industry in
the US started a decline. 

You either innovate and progress or wake up one day and find that
someone has found a way to do something better and cheaper.

> Then they discovered it was cheaper to get it done overseas. It
> started with shoes, shower curtains, things like that. Then,
> as you cite, we've got all the electronics and such, and then
> there's the automotive arena.

You missed a few thing that cost far more than shoes and shower
rings.  The optical industry went abroad and left only one
high-quality optic company in the US - that at one time was the
best in the world. [The name is close to Ioptech - but that's not
right as I just searched].   And they build [or did build]
optics for spy satellites - but that's a narrow market while Nikon,
Cannon, et al, killed the US manufacturers of optics such as Kodak,
B&H, et al.

> Which point basically takes us to what Bill Vermillion has
> been telling me for years--we're now mostly a service-oriented
> economy.

A lot of people have been saying that.

And we aren't educating as many technical people that stay in the
US as we used to.  Many come from overseas and take the technology
back to their native countries.   In the US you can make much
more money if you become a lawyer.

> But if you start outsourcing -service- in a service economy,
> what the hell do you have left--and how do you pay the bills,
> both individually and nationally?

> THAT'S why.

Some services you can't outsource.  Those are the ones that require
labor - such as those in the hotel industry [and locally
conventions ] and those employees often have to take public
transportation as they don't get paid well enough to buy their own.

Part of it is attitude.  Part is education.  Part is the attitude
that many have toward technically oriented people.  

The local TV faces have done a lot to make people think they don't
have the ability to do anything slightly technical.  The talked
about not being able to set the time on their VCRs.   The used
to talk about how hard computers were and how only the young kids
could understand them.  We seem to have a phobia against anything
that is harder to operate than a toaster, or a microwave oven
where the times are preset so you only have to press 'popcorn'
'reheat', instead of figuring out how many seconds something would
take.

People are much smarter than they are led to believe they are.


-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com