At 08:15 AM 8/10/96 -0400, Scottauge@aol.com wrote:

I was watched CBS reports a couple nights ago about how all these blue collar and now white collar jobs are going across seas.

How programmers in India are taking jobs away from us, programmers and engineerss, the people pioneering them.

Indian engineers typically get one tenth or less of what European programmers get. Many companies, for example Informix, have campuses here and there across the USA, a campus in India, and several campuses in Europe. These campuses are linked by private televideo connections, private voice mail systems, and the internet. So theoretically a programmer in India should be much the same to them as a programmer anywhere else. Why should they care where he lives. Yet these companies continually spend vast sums of money on politicians, lawyers, and perhaps bureaucrats, in order to get their engineers out of India, so that they can pay them more than ten times as much in some foreign country. Informix has facilities in the US that are staffed mostly by Indians. Why did it not leave these teams in India, where they would cost less than a tenth as much? Clearly therefore, the same man is more than ten times as valuable to them when he is not in India. Since the communications are pretty much the same wherever he is located, what makes the difference? The power of the Indian government over that man and his work makes the difference. That man is poor because he is more subject to the power of the state, which values him no more than any other expendable slave, than he is contractually subject to those who value what he can do. Crypto relevance? When the crypto economy gets going, and government interference in the exchange of specialized labor becomes less effective, we can expect to see a radical rise in the standard of living. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd@echeque.com