Outsourcing: Oursourcing is over represented as a bogeyman for programmers. There is not an infinite supply of people who can do things like program and even do customer support in India. Indeed, the Indian middle class is pretty small. Wages are rising at 20-30 percent per year in Indian IT firms according to my Indian friends who moved back to India from the US. That means there will only be a few more years before the prices hit close Western rates. At one tenth of the price Indian coders are fantastic. But at seventy five percent of the cost of Westerners, as is going to be the case fairly soon, the risk of going to India is huge.
There is also a huge group of people who talk up outsourcing, the IT consultancy firms that are pushing it. No one ever asks what the the success rate is with outsourced systems.
The other thing about outsourcing is that it increases global demand, which is a good thing. It also expands the pie.
With certain forms of factory work it looks like it is a done deal. But many countries that have taken on this kind of work, particularly East Asian ones, have grown their own economies greatly.
You\'re right about Australian foreign policy. It\'s sad that Australia just agrees with the US. It would have been easy to sit out Iraq. But we got something out of it and engaged cleverly with very few troops on the ground now.
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