Hiring off shore

[Steve Litt]

Looks to me like Keith and Tom were saying similar things. But of
course, such is the ambiguousness of top posting.

Regarding this thread's relationship to Linux, it's a stretch, but one
could argue that there's no reason to learn Linux or any other STEM if
one is going to be "outcompeted" (actually, lowballed by someone with a
much lower cost of living) and not be able to get and keep a job for
which he or she is trained.

SteveT


On Sat, 12 Nov 2016 08:31:28 -0700
Alan Pratt <ajpratt at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have to agree with Keith on the highlighted points Tom seems to
> disagree with. And heavily disagree with Tom who has an obvious a
> left-wing view of the world and quite jaded… 
> 
> But what does any of this have to do with Linux?
> 
> On 11/11/16, 2:07 PM, "PLUG-discuss on behalf of Tom Roche"
> <plug-discuss-bounces at lists.phxlinux.org on behalf of
> Tom_Roche at pobox.com> wrote:
> 
>     
>     While I mostly agree with Keith's (and that of most of the other
> folks) larger points on this thread (e.g., 
>     1. US STEM firms (esp in IT) are destroying themselves and US
> STEM infrastructure by offshoring jobs and onshoring cheap young
> labor. 2. US STEM firms benefit tremendously from the investment of
> the US taxpayer and therefore should be forced to hire and train
> citizens first. ), some of his points are too false to ignore:
>     
>     Keith Smith[1] (rearranged, heavily excerpted)
>     > 1) Our country gives money to almost every other country in the
>     > world.  
>     
>     With the exception of Israel, US foreign aid is goods and
> services--not money--and is almost entirely corporate welfare. US
> food aid is the poster child: when people are starving in country X,
> instead of "giving money" to the starving with which to buy food, or
> even buying food where most closely available (sometimes in a
> different part of X), the US buys food from US farmers at subsidized
> prices, then pays US shippers to transport it (typically vast
> distances, and at significant markup from prevailing rates), then
> pays US personnel to distribute it or at least supervise (and pays
> for their travel). Rightwingers should love that, but they're too
> busy hating foreigners (esp dark ones) to notice that--much less that
> US foreign aid is a tiny fraction of the Federal budget, and has been
> for all of US history excepting the Marshall Plan. 
>     > 2) Our men and women die while being the world police.  
>     
>     US military contractors (and their pals in the US
> corporate-funded media) are *demanding* to be the world's police,
> because they get paid to do it! You may also not have noticed the
> distinct *lack* of non-elite people--both Americans and
> foreigners--demanding to have US military forces in the many places
> to which US elites have committed them[2]. And spare me the tired
> bullshit about "it's better to fight them there than to fight them
> here": how many (e.g.) Somalis, Syrians, and Yemenis have *invaded*
> the US recently? And what did the US do to the one nation (Saudi
> Arabia) whose citizens *actually* attacked "the homeland" in 2001? We
> sold them billions of dollars of weapons :-) This "world police"
> shtick is a racket, and has been for over a century[3]. 
>     > As an American I spent 4 years on active duty in the USMC.  I
>     > was part of that global police force  
>     
>     ... for which you got paid, and continue to get paid. Face it:
> the US military is not an "all-volunteer" force, in any usual sense
> of the word--to offer one's services without pay. When one
> "volunteers" to help with some event at a local school, does one
> expect a salary, and education benefits, and healthcare for life, and
> a defined-benefit pension? No, but US veterans do. Another fact
> rightwingers just won't face: the US military is composed of Federal
> employees and (increasingly) contractors, just like the EPA, the IRS,
> and all the other parts of the civil service that rightwingers love
> to hate. 
>     > 3) We have some of the best universities in the world and we
>     > export our knowledge by allowing foreigners to come to our
>     > country to study.  
>     
>     > 4) 17 years ago I learned that the University of Arizona was
>     > charging foreign students 95% of the cost of their education.
>     > The tax payers paid the other 5%.  
>     
>     You may not have noticed, but tuition, esp for foreign students,
> has gone up since 1999 :-) The facts in 2016 are, we have a
> higher-education bubble in the US, brought on by the largely-correct
> belief that one must have a college degree to get a decent-paying
> job. (It does not however follow that there are decent-paying jobs
> for everyone with a college degree.) This bubble is currently being
> sustained only by importing millions of foreign students, whose
> tuition is multiples of that of in-state students. Esp for graduate
> STEM programs: look at any Ass End of Nowhere U. (and even many
> higher-quality and -reputation large public institutions) and you
> will see very few citizen students. This allows PIs and departments
> to fund themselves on the minimal grants available to programs that
> really should have been terminated for lack of quality (esp the
> for-profit ones) long ago. 
>     > It was the American spirit that created all this.  
>     
>     Not quite. Don't forget, e.g., the European spirit--and
> taxpayers--that paid Tim Berners-Lee's tuition and funded his job @
> CERN[4]. (If I was a PHP coder, or anyone else dependent on the Web
> ecosystem, I'd have a shrine to his memory in my home, and genuflect
> in his general direction daily :-) HTH, Tom Roche
> <Tom_Roche at pobox.com> [1]:
> http://lists.phxlinux.org/lurker/message/20161111.173600.4ac7e260.en.html
> [2]: a year old, but still informative:
> https://www.thenation.com/article/how-many-wars-is-the-us-really-fighting/
> [3]: from your fellow Marine Smedley Butler:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket [4]:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web#1980.E2.80.931991:_Invention_and_implementation_of_the_Web
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