IWETHEY v. 0.3.0 | TODO
1,095 registered users | 0 active users | 0 LpH | Statistics
Login | Create New User
IWETHEY Banner

Welcome to IWETHEY!

New Pancake Time - How Flat does it get?
I've seen this coming for a while, it's basically the statement that we're going to assume the standard of living of Asia. I need to understand what this means, to deal with it.

I'm still down 20% from what I was making in 2001. I'm happy to be making what I am right now. My wife started working in a "serious job" this year. I can't live on $5 an hour, which is what programmers make in India. Hopefully, that's the "entry level" wage. I can only hope that their wages are going up.

From what I've seen, we've pretty much given away all of our competitive advantage to other countries.

Our consumer-oriented culture has put most families deeply in debt. It's just lucky we don't have the "slavery debt" laws of Middle Eastern and African countries.

Our education system is in shambles.

What I want to know is that I can make "some kind of living" in this country. I want to know that I can "make it" at some level. I don't need a 3000sq. ft. home, but I would like to know that I'm not going to end up sharing a 900sq. ft. apartment with 1 other family and work 7 days a week 16 hours a day.

The other concerns I have deal with who decides what "humane" treatment is in the world. I'm just hoping the next "World Leading Nation" does a decent job. China scares me in that respect. Conformity is far more important than individuality.

Maybe that's the only real value America has. Creativity, the freedom to try and do many things. And some of them, well

Glen Austin
New Pancakes indeed, no syrup
We aren't "fancy" people. We live rather modestly and aren't into conspicuous consumption.

What gets my goat, though, is that the Big Spenders will probably have some type of Federal assistance because the banks can't afford to say goodbye to all those Jumbo loans, etc., and the current admin is so Pro-Rich-People. What are we, the simple folk, left with?

There is no doubt in my mind that we are heading for an economic cataclysm. Don't be surprised if we will be standing in line for toilet paper in the next 20 years. The only comforting thought is the knowledge that our house will be paid for by 2017. The question will be: Can we afford to heat and cool it?

The Simplify People have it right...pare down to those things that are essential to life, jettison the rest. Don't be swayed by impulse buying. Live below your means. It is hard to get the ball rolling. I spent the entire weekend cleaning out my "junk room". I know it will take me several more weekends to finally let go of any extraneous flotsam. Simplicity is a process, not a product. So, as I embark on a totally new way of life (possible employment, paring down the possessions) it still boils down to a relevant clich\ufffd: one day at a time.

Peace,
Amy

Oh Freddled Gruntbuggly!
New Congrats
Ma ch\ufffdre - I think you've Got It. The rain in Spain Indeed! falls mainly on the plain.

May you find the 'paring down' as comfy and satisfying as have I.
Starting Now ... sounds like what shall later be called, Prescience - for the few who heed the unravelling; those accreting details we're daily reading about.

I left a satisfying 1:10000 career (compared with the sum-impressions of every Office-story I'd yet heard), mainly with the aim to be truly Rich: ie to Own My Own Time. (The conventional-minded $$-rich have less and less of that priceless Time in which to spend the More + endlessly-More:) than do those who managed to opt out of the tradmill, as I had observed often enough, earlier.

It was tough in several senses, at the point of decision - my work was both interesting and 'did no harm': there was no Profit demanding of me that daily lying of the mercantile pursuit. But, Time was passing.

Of course, such a plan would have been unthinkable in US, in one's mid-40s - with children, other dependents. Still, even much of that anticipated burden, on into each's 20s? (say, the Disneyland Dream of an MBA from an Ivy League preppie school at half a Mil or so) can be evaded for a mere liberal education in a Great but unheralded small college. This, providing one's POV about ~conspicuous consumption and its folly -- has taken within the tykes' psyches, too.

[???] - so Many animated, shrieked Inducements! to begin the hoarding-Stuff at age 5 or so: it takes a kid with nascent Character to resist the din of the finer&finer psych-tuned Corporate Ad-heroin, screaming: BUY! (or be: One-Down, Sucker!)


Anyway.. welcome to The Club. It really does become (almost smugly ..Easy) to eschew the color glossies and to derive personal satisfaction (as opposed to all that Satisfiction) in buying Used, originally well-designed things of all kinds, maintain them and Never-ever - "go shopping for recreation". :-0
(I was luckier there too. I've always Hated 'shopping'; the process and the word-massaging -- the web makes research now ever so easy; no need ever to parse a salesperson's spiel, again.)

And besides.. IF.. Magically, the rest of the world continues financing the Gargantuan US debt [??], forgives US for the Neoconman little-Jesus Catastrophe.. and sometime next, the Econ paper-profits seem to suggest that we Can? Grow --> with More/More a tad longer, in this Ponzi Scheme of 5% using 30-40% of the totality: those same habits can let you win That Game, too!

Hey..! wouldn't the hip-Suits call that, Win-Win?


Cheers,

lo-income / a sneakier caste of the idle-Rich

New Pretty flat
but, don't forget, that as things flatten some things will get cheaper here. However, life will become a lot more concentrated on local concerns, as travel will become more expensive.

For example, no matter how flat it gets, food will be cheaper here than most other parts of the world for a very long time to come. Of course, in the transition, there will be winners and losers... and the losers could make life very uncomfortable for a while, because most of the losers will be the people with the paper wealth.
--\n-------------------------------------------------------------------\n* Jack Troughton                            jake at consultron.ca *\n* [link|http://consultron.ca|http://consultron.ca]                   [link|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca] *\n* Kingston Ontario Canada               [link|news://news.consultron.ca|news://news.consultron.ca] *\n-------------------------------------------------------------------
New Which "here" is that?
California almost literally manufactures food. No gas = no food.

It would not be hard to make food more expensive here than it is in most of the rest of the world.

Cheers,
Ben
I have come to believe that idealism without discipline is a quick road to disaster, while discipline without idealism is pointless. -- Aaron Ward (my brother)
New Hm, good point
OTOH, if gas goes away, so do our big sprawling cities, which can help a lot of the petroleum requirement for food go away too.

Of course, an unstated given in that is that I won't be eating California strawberries anymore. Then again, Prince Edward County strawberries are pretty damn good, if only available for a couple of months a year. Eating will become much more seansonal in nature, and people will eat from close by instead of across the continent. This is not necessarily a bad thing.


The "here" that I meant was North America. Given equivalent techs, food here will be cheaper than in Europe, Africa, and Asia thanks to our low populations and comparatively unspoiled land.

Of course, here in Canada, we've got it in spades, and global warming will probably improve that situation for us (though of course that's far from certain).
--\n-------------------------------------------------------------------\n* Jack Troughton                            jake at consultron.ca *\n* [link|http://consultron.ca|http://consultron.ca]                   [link|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca] *\n* Kingston Ontario Canada               [link|news://news.consultron.ca|news://news.consultron.ca] *\n-------------------------------------------------------------------
New There will always be disparities.
I understand your concern and feel it as well. But what we're going through really isn't new. It's just at a faster pace than before.

There will always be differences in the cost of personnel. Someone in an overcrowded city in a developing country will always be willing to work for less than someone with similar skills in Manhattan or D.C. or San Francisco. The costs of living will differ greatly, but so will the non-personnel costs.

Some things cannot be offshored: Auto repair, roofer, plumber, dentist, FBI agent, retail sales, IT installation, road construction, etc. If a local person needs to be there, that job will stay local. If not, and if there's compelling value in reducing the personnel cost and accepting all the downsides (not understanding the local culture, lack of control of information and business processes, etc.), then the job may go overseas. All of IT can't be farmed out to Bangalore and Shanghai either.

Prices are rising in Bangalore for IT people. The city is going through tremendous growing pains as well.

From the April 21, 2005 issue of the Economist - "The Bangalore Paradox":

[...]

Elections last May in the state of Karnataka, of which Bangalore is the capital, were taken as a rebuff for the urban elite from the poor rural majority. After a series of failed monsoons, farmers were suffering. Driven into the grip of usurious money-lenders, more than 700 had killed themselves in the year before the elections. So the new administration, under its chief minister, Dharam Singh, a portly grass-roots politician who prides himself on his common touch, forswore the \ufffdurban bias\ufffd of its predecessor.

The city soon felt the pain of the government's inattention. \ufffdAs companies we have scaled up,\ufffd says Bob Hoekstra, boss of a big Bangalore software centre for Philips, a Dutch consumer-electronics giant. \ufffdBut the government has scaled down.\ufffd Bangalore's infrastructure was already creaking after years of breakneck expansion. Yet foreign firms were continuing to pour in at the rate of three a week. Newly prosperous residents have kept buying motorcycles and cars, adding, say officials, 900 vehicles a day to the already overloaded streets.

[...]


Mr Spohr says that in financial services it will in a few years be nothing unusual for big multinationals to have 20-25% of their staff in India. Already many big banks have moved large parts of their back offices here. Most have done so through \ufffdcaptive\ufffd operations, offering large one-off savings. The trend is likely to be towards outsourcing to \ufffdthird-party\ufffd BPO [business process outsourcing] firms. Deutsche Bank, for example, uses HCL Technologies in Bangalore, with which it used to have a joint-venture, to process many \ufffdlive\ufffd trading transactions as well as perform some research and analysis. Similarly, General Electric last year sold 60% of its back-office services arm, GE Capital International Services, an India-based outsourcing giant and pioneer.

External constraints seem less likely than they did a year ago to stem the growth of outsourcing. As a political issue, the alleged job losses it brings have less prominence in America and Britain than they did last year. That may change, in the event of a sharp downturn in the global economy. But a more immediate risk is an increasing concern about data security. One or two minor lapses aside, the Indian BPO industry had until recently been remarkably immune from scandal. But in early April, a fraud was uncovered at the Pune office of the outsourcing arm of MphasiS, a big IT-services firm. Present and former MphasiS employees had used information acquired at work to hack into American bank accounts and steal some $350,000.

Forrester, a research outfit, forecast that the incident, combined with the high rates of staff attrition in Indian call-centres, would dent call-centre expansion by as much as 30%. That seems too gloomy. Such crimes can happen anywhere. India's record is still a good one, and the thieves in Pune were detected and caught. Security at the best Indian call-centres is tight. Computers have no disk drives; hardly any data are downloaded; mobile phones and cameras are banned.

Ironically, MphasiS's boss, Jerry Rao, chairs NASSCOM's security forum, and has campaigned for standards to be raised higher than those prevailing in Britain and America, in order to make data protection a selling-point for India. Protectionist scares aside, the commercial logic behind the outsourcing trend is such that it seems more likely to accelerate than hit a speed-bump. India remains well placed to win a big share of the business. Its biggest regional competitors are China and, for English-language voice work, the Philippines. Both compete with India on price, but neither can match its annual supply of more than 2m English-speaking graduates.
Higher degrees

The qualities of those graduates give India its biggest competitive advantage and, in the long run, the one that gives most cause for concern. Partha Iyengar of Gartner forecasts that in 5-7 years' time, many of the software processes at present performed manually in offices in Bangalore will be automated. India will have to move upmarket and \ufffdwho is going to convert the army of programmers into businessmen?\ufffd

The biggest constraint on the growth of India's service industries may be the available talent pool. Nevertheless, the bullish projections for Indian IT and \ufffdIT-enabled services\ufffd produced in 2002 by NASSCOM and McKinsey seem within reach. They forecast that the combined industries would, by 2008, employ 4m people (up from fewer than 900,000 in 2004), earn $57 billion-65 billion from exports (compared with $17 billion in 2004), and account for 7% of GDP (compared with 4%).

The challenge this poses for the firms leading the boom is how to expand fast enough to meet demand without jeopardising quality. For quality, as much as cost, is what is driving the demand. It is in this context that Bangalore's troubles have to be seen: as the acute growing pains of a still-infant industry. It is a worry not because the difficulties are insuperable, but because some can be solved only by the government. India's IT industry has thrived in part because, unlike most other sectors of the economy, it has largely kept the government out of its business. That period is coming to an end. Neglect, the industry is learning, is not always benign.


Eventually computers will be fast and cheap enough and business processes will be regulated so much that the armies of people who do business IT (data entry, etc.) won't be needed. Businesses in the developing will continue to move up-market, putting more pressure on 1st world businesses who haven't created new products and services. India's looking good in many respects, but it's still fragile. China looks like a behemoth now, but it's very fragile as well. A serious recession in either country could quickly reverse the offshoring trend.

Keep an eye on things, but don't think it's a lost cause. There are always niches that do well when the ecosystem changes.

If you're convinced that IT or similar jobs are doomed in the US, then consider working in some national security field. Those won't be going overseas any time soon.

Cheers,
Scott.
New Don't look to Asia . . .
. . look to South and Central America. We'll have the same economy they have now with a very few very, very rich, a huge number of poor and a very small middle class. That's been the primary objective of every Republican administration in recent decades and the current one is making excellent progress. Economics will do the rest.

Of course without a huge middle class buying huge amounts of consumer goods the economy will collapse in a positive feedback mode so this transition will happen very rapidly.

Look for food to become your major budget item, with meat unaffordably expensive - but Kobe grade beef will, of course, be in plentiful supply for the very rich, though you won't be allowed into the places that sell it.

The economies of Asia will also collapse because they'll be so thoroughly adicted to draining wealth from the American middle class. All those low cost but marginally profitable manufacturing complexes will close with a bang. The rising expectations of their people will not be met and there will be social turmoil.

Expect wars, lots of wars and even more wars.
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
New Good morning, Sunshine
Who shit in your Wheatiestm today?
===

Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link|http://DocHope.com|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats].
[link|http://DocHope.com|http://DocHope.com]
New Timestamp - no Wheaties involved.
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
New YM "shat", didn't you? HTH!
New Read
[link|http://www.wealthanddemocracy.com/|the Book].

He's giving the cheery version of it.
When somebody asks you to trade your freedom for security, it isn't your security they're talking about.
New I see it the same way
just cause your worldview is negative doesn't mean its inaccurate.



"Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect"   --Mark Twain

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."   --Albert Einstein

"This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses."   --George W. Bush
New two words narco-trafficant, new career path
"the reason people don't buy conspiracy theories is that they think conspiracy means everyone is on the same program. Thats not how it works. Everybody has a different program. They just all want the same guy dead. Socrates was a gadfly, but I bet he took time out to screw somebodies wife" Gus Vitelli

Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free american and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 49 years. meep
questions, help? [link|mailto:pappas@catholic.org|email pappas at catholic.org]
New ...what a Pakistani bricklayer calls "prosperity"...
     Kids dial India for online tutoring - (lincoln) - (16)
         The great flattening is beginning - (jake123) - (15)
             Pancake Time - How Flat does it get? - (gdaustin) - (14)
                 Pancakes indeed, no syrup - (imqwerky) - (1)
                     Congrats - (Ashton)
                 Pretty flat - (jake123) - (2)
                     Which "here" is that? - (ben_tilly) - (1)
                         Hm, good point - (jake123)
                 There will always be disparities. - (Another Scott)
                 Don't look to Asia . . . - (Andrew Grygus) - (6)
                     Good morning, Sunshine - (drewk) - (4)
                         Timestamp - no Wheaties involved. -NT - (Andrew Grygus)
                         YM "shat", didn't you? HTH! -NT - (CRConrad)
                         Read - (inthane-chan)
                         I see it the same way - (tuberculosis)
                     two words narco-trafficant, new career path -NT - (boxley)
                 ...what a Pakistani bricklayer calls "prosperity"... -NT - (inthane-chan)

On trumpet: Peter O'Toole!
127 ms