From The Lansing State Journal:
Harold Dunn, the Corunna man whose cell phone donation landed him on the hook for a $1,200 phone bill, will remain on the hook.
Obviously no good deed goes unpunished.
Lansing State Journal:Schneider: Verizon won’t forgive man’s debt on donated cell phone
On many cases I do not agree with John C. Dvorak, a contributing editor of PC Magazine.
However this article (Scams, Lies, Deceit, and Offshoring) gets all my respect!
FULL TEXT
Someone has to take the jobs that, as President Bush and others say, “Americans don’t want.” There appear to be a large number of these jobs. In fact, it seems that our fastest-growing business segment is the creation of more and more jobs that Americans don’t want. Often, American companies will lay people off, only to train newcomers to replace them.
Here is how the real scam works. You are a programmer at one of the big IT or computer companies. You’re 55 and nearing a retirement plateau; in fact, you’re a liability. You’re making, say, $80,000 as a program designer. You have various responsibilities. The company eliminates your position in the process of downsizing.
To be fair to you, it creates a new position, Associate Program Designer, that pays $35,000 a year. Its responsibilities coincidentally match those of your old job. You can take this job, doing what you did before but at a huge cut in pay, or look elsewhere. If the latter, it’s apparent that this new job is one that “Americans don’t want.” The company can then hire a “body shop” to drop in a foreign H-1B or L1 visa holder, who will not be quite as good but will work for a lot less.
This is a bait-and-switch scheme that is designed to screw older and more experienced workers out of their retirement benefits, plain and simple. This sort of thing, unfortunately, is nothing new to corporate America: Every time I write about it, I get hundreds of e-mails from people who have been abused by such practices.
More horrendous still is the sudden emergence of offshoring, whereby we send the money as well as the jobs overseas, mostly to India, where labor is even cheaper. The proponents of offshoring have a rumored $100 million PR budget; anyone who speaks out against this trend is bombarded by hate mail. Just mentioning the problem here will result in numerous requests to my editors that I be fired. Few of the senders will be traceable.
The sinister nature of offshoring jobs has corrupted the highest levels of our nation. Hillary Rodham Clinton, for example, is directly involved with one of the big body shops, Mumbai-based Tata Consultancy Services. Bush is actively promoting the replacement of American workers. Colin Powell recently promised India that the administration would continue to promote offshoring. Which country does he represent, anyway?
In an economic argument that is floating around, people cook numbers to show that every job lost to offshoring is a ridiculously large net benefit to the U.S. economy; we are making money on the deal. One math genius claimed that although we export around $10 billion in outsourcing fees, the economy somehow recovers over $300 billion in savings. It’s a bonanza. Taking this logic to an extreme, if we offshored all American jobs and nobody here worked, we’d be filthy rich. Let’s just do that! Where do I get my check?
I hear all the time that coders in India are cheaper and better. What makes them better? Have there been some blockbuster Indian software programs that I somehow missed? Maybe they are good at patching spaghetti code or doing well-defined C++ modules, but who knows? You’d think that some killer apps would have come out of India by now, as they have from Europe, the U.S., Japan, and even Russia.
Even more irksome than this notion of “better” is the fact that companies are trying to hide their offshoring operations, a deceptive practice at best. Help desks, bill collectors, and telemarketers are in India. All the AT&T staffers I have talked to seem to be in India, but ask them where they are and they won’t say. They are trained to fake American accents. They say their name is Bill or Dave or Patty; it is clearly not. They never tell you where they are, because Americans don’t like having their American Express records (yes, AmEx uses India) in Bangalore, where our privacy laws aren’t in force.
One company told my wife that its reps don’t say where they are from because of terrorism. Terrorism? My wife is going to fly to Bangalore? We are lied to by the companies we do business with; plain dishonesty is at work here.
Although I appreciate some aspects of globalization, I can’t excuse the cavalier attitude toward fellow Americans that we see among large corporations who benefit from the free-enterprise system and American infrastructure. It will come back to haunt them all.
From /.
Another reason to stick it to the labels!
Slashdot | Cell Phone Ringtones Give Music Industry Another Headache
From the kind folks at Engadget:
We gotta say that the Japanese Parliament sounds a lot more fun than our Congress. Apparently things got so raucous at one point that the Japanese Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi had to ask legislators to stop reading comic books and sending text messages on their cellphones and pay attention.
Read the full article here.
From the New York Daily News:
Will your ‘Idol’ phone vote really count?
With all the problems in the world…NOW THIS!
From Slashdot:
The L.A. Daily News has an article about Cell phone jamming to prevent terrorists from detonating bombs remotely. Jamming technology is already being used “to protect President Bush.” An interesting quote from the article: “Public safety is more important than public convenience.
Great idea! Get a lot of people in a crowed place, knock out their cellphones, then they can’t call for help if anything bad happens – Though it will make my movie watching experiences better :-)
