"your job CAN be sent to the beggars of India"

[oscar111]

good short reply to radio hosts, or for fliers, or bumperstickers.

I just made it up, no copyright, use it freely.

A surgeon in Australia did surgery in the US using an internet camera and robotic hands here, controlled by robotic gloves in Australia.

So ANY job here can be controlled by robotic gloves worn by Indian beggars. Far as i know, India has no minimum wage, so they can hire and pay $1/day.

There, so many poor due to illegal but still existing caste, that many of the poor are talented, i would infer. Talented enough to learn most jobs. Anyone know of the Indian wages? Of talent levels among their beggars?

[BlueEyedSon]

1. An entire country (800 million) of clerks. An educated middle class

of over 200 million (almost the entire population of the US). They could replace a REAL LOT of jobs....

[papau]

2. The group in the US is only 2 million - but they have the highest ave wage

of any group.

[phish_head]

3. avoiding lawsuits

I wonder if they are doing surgery from Australia to avoid medical lawsuits in the US?

[dumpster_baby]

4. I wish they would outsource the corporate media to India

Serve 'em right

[mac56]

5. How about outsourcing the CEOs?

Talk about cost containment! Certainly there are Chinese and Indian people every bit as skilled at corporate governance as our homegrown overpaid CEOs, at a fraction of the cost.

[German-Lefty]

7. That's where crony capitalism kicks in

You can't become a CEO here without a little help from your friends. However some investors do decide to get people from Europe at 1/10th the price. The problem is that they have to fear what the crony network will do to them on the sly.

[German-Lefty]

6. Xenophobic and wrong

The doctors and professionals in India aren't being paid like beggars. They may get half or a third, of what we have here. That means they live like kings over there, because they get the dollar a day types as maids.

The reason why an Indian guy can do the job cheaper, is because India has invested in education (which is also cheaper over there). It's not their fault they're getting our jobs. It's our fault for not staying ahead and wasting all of our energy on some worthless military.

It's also because the cost of living is lower there, because everyone is so god damn poor. The truth is they need that job more than you do. But it's hard hearing that when you lost your job.

Businesses are also finding that outsourcing is not all it's cracked up to be. There is lot of stupid outsourcing. The fad will die down some.

[idlisambar]

8. I don't see how the "fad" is going to die

Businesses are also finding that outsourcing is not all it's cracked up to be. There is lot of stupid outsourcing. The fad will die down some.

It might be soothing to say, but even though the hype and attention around outsourcing "might" go down as we get used to it (or rather the media gets tired of talking about it), the practice will continue and steadily grow in significance. The offshoring trend in manufacturing hasn't gone away by any stretch, what makes the outsourcing of services any different.

[German-Lefty]

9. There are two ways the problem can solve itself

if you don't come in with protective tariffs.

1) China/India will become more like the 1st world. That is labor costs will rise in poor countries as the people work themselves out of poverty over a generation or two. This assumes that their labor market is fair.

2) This doesn't have to be the case. If we/they have bosses that exploit workers and keep them poor and working for peanuts, they might be kept down like a slave colonies.

In this case, our economy will learn to our source everything it can to the colonies. People will find jobs in the remaining areas.

This is the same kind of effect that robotics had on the manufacturing sector. Opening up markets to use cheap labor for 1$/day and inventing robots that cost 1$/day do about the same thing.

In the short term workers here loose their jobs and have to be retrained in the long term productivity will increase.

Here's a theoretical problem in both cases: what happens if we don't have a use for increased productivity? What if we have all we really want?

[oscar111]

10. Ger.Lfty"people will find jobs in remaining areas"--NOT

what remaining areas? Who will have the income to buy from output of those remaining areas you imagine to exist?

Taffifs are the answer, along with long prison.. life.. for those who outsource.

Not being xenophobic, i like all nationalities. "beggars" word was just to point up the low wages over there, and the real fact that many of their beggars are talented and able to do some of our jobs .
The fad has no reason to die.. rather, it will eat up ALL of our jobs.

Our prosperity today will need, to continue, taffifs, and world alliances like a large EU... encompassing US, India, China, Indonesia, and EU.

Elsewise, we will drop into the 3rd world.
OSCAR
PS some good points , GerLefty.. liked them.. are you still in Germany? Why is Prussia so RW, being so close to LW Denmark, Finland, etc.

[Kellanved]

11. Prussia RW?

Explain.

Prussia was one of the most liberal states in Europe (the militarism was pretty omnipresent at the time). Freedom of Religion, education and profession; mandatory schools, Social Security - a very liberal monarchy; at Friedrichs's time the most liberal nation in the World.
In the Weimar republic Prussia had a solid left voting record.

[oscar111]

12. What parts of Germany backed Hitler? + i wrong, prussia

thanks for correcting me about Prussia! I just thought, "extreme stern, harsh military style", meant the whole population there was fascist. Tell us more about how a harsh military lived among a LW people. It is surprising, and i want to learn more . Give us all about fifty lines of type or more.
Please!

Also, curious to learn what parts of Germany supported Hitler. Or could be called RW for other reasons. And, what parts are usually LW? Bavaria, i bet.

Did reunion of E and W raise the risk of another big war from a strong-because-united Germany?
I recall, about 1980, the speaker/leader of the German Parliament made a speech praising Hitler, in Parliament. In our newspapers, big story on that.

PS why is Prussia named so much like russia? Just add a "P" to russia, and you get Prussia. Was it once part of russia?

[Kellanved]

14. Bavaria is the most RW

With one short interlude. Hitler had his strongest supporters in Bavaria, got even almost 17% of the vote there in the mid 20s - in other states he was well under one percent at the time.

Since the war Bavaria never had a left state Government.

Prussia's name goes back to the Lithuanians who lived there originally. It comes indeed from Russian; although the German name is "Preußen".

[idlisambar]

13. Domestic robots have advantages over foreign labor

This is the same kind of effect that robotics had on the manufacturing sector. Opening up markets to use cheap labor for 1$/day and inventing robots that cost 1$/day do about the same thing.

When a robot replaces a worker there is a definite cost, but in a well-organized economy this cost can be mininimized. One reason why Japan has the highest number of robots and the most sophisticated manufacturing automation in the world is that their system of "lifetime employment" allows workers to embrace automation just as much as management. When a task is automated, instead of the worker being laid off the Japanese firm will typically keep him on board until something else is found for him to do (if there is not something already lined up which more often than not is the case). No fear of layoffs means no fear of automation, which means that the productivity-enhancing benefits of automation can be realized virtually without cost.

Even in the United States, which doesn't have "lifetime employment" by any stretch, the country as a whole is still better off going with the domestic robot over foreign labor. The worker may be laid off, a high cost, but again there is the benefit of increased productivity. The same as in outsourcing? not quite.

With outsourcing, not only is the job lost but the dollars. By sending dollars overseas outsourcing firms are increasing our trade deficits which has the effect of devaluing the dollar and thus decreasing purchasing power for the nation's citizens. Given the United State's massive trade deficits this is an even more important concern than it would be otherwise.

That isn't the big loss though, even more importantly the firms are transferring productive capacity (capital and knowhow) to what may well be the seeds of their future competition. In this way, outsourcing seductively strengthens the firm's position short-term but in many cases weakens it long-term (this cost applies particularly when the outsourced task requires skill or expertise -- not so much for call-centers and the like). With the robot there is no such trade-off -- the firms increases their competitiveness in the short-term without the long-term cost.