Pleasure reading

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I read a good article recently about Walmart and their part in the shift to offshoring US jobs.

The article is skewed since the author seems to take the side of companies that went bust because of Walmart. And current Walmart vendors don’t want to talk about it understandably. The article has some good insights nonetheless.

There was another good one about Wipro and offshoring white collar jobs.

One underlying concern I have with wholesale shift of manufacturing offshore is that R&D usually follows manufacturing. You start with manufacturing, move to refining designs, and ultimately to complete R&D. Look at Japan and VCR’s. The national security implications have been debated endlessly so I won’t go into it unless someone wants to.

Net net, there’s really no easy answer to the question since price is such a key determinant in the equation.

Sarbox

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Don pointed to a good article about Sarbanes-Oxley.

Like the Securities Act of 1933, I call Sarbox the “Accountants full employment act.”

Being intimately familiar with the Big 4 (or Final 4 as I like to call it) since I work for one, I can shed some light on the smoke and mirrors. Audit is extremely short handed right now, meaning it’s a boon for anyone looking for a job in accounting. During the boom, the hot professiobal sectors out of college were consulting and i-banking. The result is a lack of students wanting to study accounting. With the new CPA guidelines upping the education requirements, it’s also harder to qualify to be an accountant. So the pipeline for the meat grinder is getting pretty lean. It should change due to supply and demand (money), but on the immediate horizon, implementation of Sarbox is akin to the Final 4 hitting the lottery. Revenge of the nerds if you will…

If you have 24 accounting class units, need a job, and are not a complete tool, you should call your local Final 4 recruiter… Well, even if you are a complete tool, they’ll probably still take you…

“Cheap Foreign Labor” and Prison Reform

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Over at The Corner, Mark Krikorian suggested spending funds Bush earmarked for job training on “immigration enforcement” at work sites. The idea is to make cheap immigrant labor less available, and thereby to make domestic ex-convicts more attractive to employers.

But how about streamlining immigration procedures instead? If immigrants will work for lower wages than ex-convicts, artificially restricting the labor market to benefit ex-cons amounts to an indirect and inefficient subsidy. Krikorian ignores the costs to business, and hence consumers, of immigration restrictions that drive up labor costs.

He also ignores the possibility that employers prefer immigrants for many jobs at a given wage level. In that case the better course of action might be to eliminate, or at least lower, minimum wage rates that price less-productive and higher-risk workers out of jobs.

It’s obvious that most immigrants come to this country because they want to work, but we shouldn’t forget that American employers want to hire them. It should be easier for hard-working immigrants to come here without first spending years jumping through bureaucratic hoops.

Prison reform is a separate issue. Ex-convicts may be made employable via training programs (as Bush proposes), by lowering the minimum wage, or even by directly subsidizing employers who hire them. Attempting to increase demand for ex-con labor by driving illegal immigrants — many of whom are illegal mainly because it’s prohibitively difficult and time consuming to become legal — out of the labor market, is a poor alternative.

New Blog Crawler

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Gabe Rivera has a new blog-quoting robot that looks interesting. I’m not sure whether it’s actually updating yet, but it’s a good start. Headline placement is determined by blog linkage ratings.

This kind of news aggregator can be useful if well done (I think this means: specialized, thoughtfully opinionated, and not a Google-style attempt to copy mainstream-journo “headline news” style). Gabe’s site seems to be Anglospheric in orientation. I wish him well.

How I’d Go To Mars

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Over on Arcturus, I rashly promised to post something about how I’d do the whole Moon-Mars thing. And so I shall, but with no pretense of technological or future-historical accuracy, though I’ll mention some technologies and dates; instead, I’ll be building a strawman proposal, with attention to its project-management aspects (in what follows, all definitions are taken from A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge [PMBOK® Guide], 2000 Edition; Project Management Institute).
The first of those being assumptions, whose formal definition is “factors that, for planning purposes, are considered to be true, real, or certain.” In particular, I’ll assume that stakeholder (“individuals and organizations that are actively involved in the project, or whose interests may be positively or negatively affected as a result of project execution or project completion; they may also exert influence over the project and its results”) interests have already been balanced.
They haven’t, of course, and the game-theoretic aspects of a program slated to stretch through as many as seven future Administrations, twice that number of Congresses, and nearly thirty Federal budgets, render the prospects for the new space policy rather bleak, I’m afraid. So let’s pretend that isn’t true. The American public is united in its support (or perhaps cowed into submission, or merely indifferent enough to raise no objection): we’re going to Mars! How do we get there?

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