Crackdown on Science!
 

...Sort of...Well we just ran out of high-tech worker visas for 2007. Yes, 2007, the year that hasn't even started yet. That'll boost the ol' economy, huh?

...No problem, though, we have plenty of nice Americans who need jobs. Nevermind that they were trained at religious colleges that don't acknowledge evolution :::snicker::

...I'm sure that hasn't impacted their critical thinking skills. After all, how could they do good science without God on their side to cast the secular/pagans into fiery pits of torment?

...I have to laugh at the disasterous direction we are heading in as a society. Yes, I'm rambling. So sue me. I have to laugh because, what else can I do? Vote? I got that covered: I only vote third party. Any third party.

...But say what you will about the Bush Administration, they are only a symptom of the times. Bush is the perfect President for this nation of lazy bufoons, we deserve him.

Hoisted by Our Own Petards (or not?)
 

Indeed. All one needs to do is get sick, stay home from work, and make the mistake of watching some daytime TV, and then get REALLY sick when you see what constitutes American "culture."

I too blame the hoi polloi, but that last election may not have been as much about "values voters" as the press made out. Listen, I'm not big on conspiracies, but after reading the below Rolling Stone article, I had to wonder.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/sto...lection_stolen

Nonsense. Tech companies will do what they've done every year that work visas have run out: they'll outsource the jobs overseas.

:::gasp::: I thought that was only jobs "Americans don't want" !!!

Heh. Well, if you like working a job that usually fetches $40,000 but only get paid $5,000, you'd probably not want it.

Right, nice Americans who all have liberal arts degrees. Good for producing the 235,626,737,827,305,0173th dissertation on Chauser, but absolutly no help to tech companies. :headshake

Citizen 9th Engineer: you have been found guilty of hating freedom.

Er... actually, it's spelled Chaucer.

What's worse, being a liberal arts major practicing your enunciation skills on "Ya want fries with that?" or being an engineering major watching the H1B visa folks and the constant flow of jobs being internationally outsourced until entry-level tech jobs are as rewarding as working a fry-o-lator, pay less, and are much harder to find?

Blaming people for not being engineers seems kind of strange to me. The reality of the situation is that foreign-educated engineers come with lower pricetags due to lower cost of education in their countries. We can't compete with them. Why would we want to try?

No one wants to be an engineer, anymore. The big one avoided right now may not ever recover from its tarnished reputation. Really, why would anyone even think of stepping into a major like computer science after what has happened in the previous years? 9 out of 10 developers that work for the company I do have been offshored. I know I wouldn't return to the major I originally started in because of what I've seen.

It doesn't help when the media pulls crap like this, either:

More and more of our newer engineering grads are being lured away by the promise of a respectible paycheck and the chance to do some real work without being suppressed by the anti-science nutjobs in this country. Even though I won't be that position for at least another 6-8 years (we bioengineers basically have a manditory masters degree) I'm going to need to become familiar with at least one or two extra languages in the meantime. :thepain3:

What is evrybody doing these days? Doctors are fleeing th medical field because of low insurance reimbursements and high malpractice fees, students are not even considering engineering. Is everybody becoming a lawyer or middle manager?

Or an entrepeneur. :rolleyes:

I hear opticians are in demand...

Personally, after over a decade as a computer tech, I'm back in college studying to teach English as a second language. It's interesting, I think I'll enjoy it, and it can be practiced both here and in other countries.

You've really hit the nail solidly, though. There really aren't any good jobs left in the US anymore.

Partly it's outsourcing, and globalization averaging all the first, second and third world countries to the second world level. But mostly it's a hundred years' worth of the Industrial Revolution coming home to roost.

The population of the US has grown from about 80 million in 1900 to almost 300 million today. Meanwhile, we've been assiduously creating new and better ways to do everything needed to support society using fewer workers to do so. The more we automate, the less people we need.

Computer usage has accelerated the process in the past couple of decades. As things were, every middle manager needed a secretary to manage their correspondence, type up reports, keep their schedule, and do basic bookkeeping. Now a thousand dollar box on their desk does all that, and lets them watch their favorite porn too.

Any fan of old movies remembers black and white scenes of dozens of workers in insurance companies and banks, sitting in huge rooms in neat rows of desks, punching numbers into adding machines. Now, it's a database on a mainframe. Even the little bookkeeping firm that used to do the paperwork for small businesses has been nudged out by Peachtree and Quickbooks.

We're a lot more efficient at doing most anything these days, and efficient means that one person can now do the work of three, or five, or ten from just a decade ago. It's no surprise that there are no decent jobs left; we've been working our butts off trying to get rid of them.

Remember all the movies from the 1950-1980s that depicted a relaxed society thanks to atuomation? While we no longer depict robots doing our work, we still have those lofty, false dreams. Ever see the IBM/HP commercials where they show the system admin relaxing at his desk, content that he has no work to do because his attention is no longer needed? His job is easy and he can thank technology!

They don't show the part where they fire the other shifts of admins that were once needed to fix problems, slap a pager on the day guy's belt, and tell him he can't take vacations "very far from town", anymore, "just in case he's needed". With intelligent hardware and software, they only need one guy, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

A recent Xerox commercial goes something like this:

"How can we save money?"
"What about all this? All these reports, all this paper? How much money did this take? It probably took a dozen of people and thousands of dollars."

The head guy smiles as they realize they can buy an intelligent office document management system and get rid of the paper waste. I always saw a bit of cruelty in the smile, knowing that they're happy that they get to save a buck by laying off those 12 people.

Eh, I'm not arguing how they do it, I just find it really ironic that automation was supposed to free humans from work when, instead, it drives many into the poor house.

Why be a liberal arts major? They are the ones who get top jobs - who are now being rewarded with bonuses in excess of what is authorized by the Boards - a recent news story. Let look at what engineers deal with. This from "End of the Line" written by Leslie Cauley: For the want of someone in management with minimal technical grasp - remember engineers are rarely promoted in a MBA dominated company - engineers suffer under incompetence.

Let's look at who ran some of AT&T's hope for the future. AT&T Broadband was run by the Chief Financial Officer - an accountant. AT&T Wireless was run by the General Consul - a lawyer. As a result, both divisions vastly underperformed while engineers were stifled - and not promoted.

Why do so many companies outsource overseas? MBAs don't have a clue who is and who is not a good engineer. Instead they cut costs - innovation be damned. AT&T MBAs could not even correct software so that AT&T could double the size of its fiber network - this being too complex to explain to people without technical grasp. Same type people murdered seven astronauts on Challenger. Why would anyone want to be an engineer? Let immigrants do it. We blame them for everything else.