Friday, January 16, 2009

Ravi Batra on the 2008 Financial Crisis

Economist Dr Ravi Batra's essay breaks down the 2008 Financial Crisis like an organic compound, no Keith Murray. Batra's website here, unfortunately he doesn't update it much, but will drop some essays periodically.

Batra is mad nice, too bad Obama overlooked "economists who called it correctly" like Batra & Dean Baker, in favor of 90s Clinton retreads who got it wrong like Larry Summers.

Carbonomics


free ebook Carbonomics by Steven Stoft on energy/economics issues. You can download the free pdf here or cop a printed book at that same site or at Amazon.

I dig the tagline "How to fix the climate & charge it to OPEC". Word?! I love the sound of that solution! "Fock it, do it live", no Bile O'Really.

Ron Paul kicks the truth on the Gaza massacre

Ron Paul quickly in 3 mins drops some intellectual ether on Israeli's Gaza massacre, & hypocrisy in US foreign policy since the 80s to now.

Monday, January 12, 2009

Even offshore outsourced at enterprise software oligopolists getting ethered

Even the enterprise software oligopolists SAP & Oracle are laying off workers at their offshore outsourced Indian offices.

Supposedly some of this is India-specific sales, which I could understand more.

But the majority of these Indian offices are working on offshored work in product dev, consulting, internal G&A tasks such as Finance/Accounting, etc, for a rich country end customer, especially the US.

Either overall global employment in enterprise application software is in a bubble, or SAP or Oracle are just too damn greedy. Perhaps the CXOs feel that to maintain their multimillion pay packages, they need to eliminate even those "greedy" $10-25K (not sure on actual amount, just know it's much lower than the US which motivated the offshoring) salaried Indian employees doing real customer work.

If the oligopolist offshored knowledge workers getting eliminated like this, what does this say for US workers at non-oligopolist vendors? "Shhhhiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiid" (c) The Wire's MD State Senator Clay Davis.

I hope open source takes over the enterprise app software business, indy or small business software engineers, project consultants, etc have a chance at decent careers, or even self-employment.

Those that don't actually help the end customer, brutal arrogant oligopolist, parasite CXOs like Larry Ellison or Safra Catz can eat an infinite johns sandwich. I'm sure the Bangalore staff are saying similar things in Hindi right about now.

CNN profiles the underemployed

Case studies on how several workers have seen their careers ethered, going from 110K to 33K for instance.

Keep in mind these "underemployed" don't show up in the U3 reported unemployment figures. They sometimes show up in the U6 figures.

Expect to see more college degreed "knowledge workers" driving trucks, taxis, waiters, etc. Nothing wrong with those jobs, but it shows the social contract in the US is broken. Workers take time, & often debt, to become a knowledge worker.

Apparently in the US now, it's a luxury to work a knowledge worker job until retirement.

Unions & pro-employee government policies are needed ASAP. Let's see if Obama & the Dems do a little something for us wage slaves & unemployed wage slaves, or they bitch out as Corporate Whore DINOs ala Bill Clinton did on NAFTA in the 90s.