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Outsourcing: Will the Internet Eat Itself?By Robin Sharp
The Vacuum Cleaner Monster As a kid, I remember watching "Yellow Submarine", a psychedelic full-length cartoon featuring the Fab Four. The film was full of many strange creatures. One particular creature has always stuck in my mind. Let me allow George Martin (the Beatles manager) to describe it:
The reason the Vacuum Cleaner Monster stuck in my mind was the unintentional self-cannibalism. The Vacuum Cleaner Monster offers a prophesy of self-destruction based on intentional short-term consequences and unintentional long-term consequences. In the short term the Vacuum Cleaner Monster gorges itself on the characters on the page, whilst in the long-term it eats the page, then finally eats itself. For the Beatles, the Vacuum Cleaner Monster is supposed to represent corporate greed and mismanagement. It drew the parallel between corporates and the Easter Islanders' mismanagement of resources. When Captain Cook arrived at Easter Island, he found that the islanders had chopped down all the trees. This had the effect of allowing all the top soil to be washed away so there was very little food, as well as not allowing them a means of building boats to escape from the island. When the resources had been exhausted, they turned in on each other to fight for resources. The Internet Many years after seeing "Yellow Submarine", I was also struck when I first used the Internet. Once I could navigate around a few websites and understood the power of URLs, the short-term potential seemed very good. In fact it has proved so. We have all made a good living off the back of the Internet boom, and the majority of software written today is Internet-enabled. If the Vacuum Cleaner Monster was supposed to illustrate resource exhaustion, it is not analogous to the Internet. In fact, the Internet does not make resources more scarce, but more freely available. However, the Vacuum Cleaner Monster has a strong analogy with the Internet at a deeper and more abstract level, as I will go on to explain. The Internet originally came from the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) who came up with TCP/IP back in the mid-70's. In the mid-80's the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) initiated the development of the NSFNET which, today, provides a major backbone communication service for the Internet. In the mid-90's the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded, which created the web we know today. Since the mid-90's almost all commercial organisations have developed a web presence. This presence is location transparent. In other words we have no idea where the server is running. Cannibalism The original intention (as far as I understand it) of the Internet was to allow services to be projected from source. The concept of location transparency was to allow servers to be relocated in the event of network or hardware failover. It has been an unintentional consequence that location transparency allows services to be projected from an undisclosed location. Further, several vendors have complained that while they get a proportinal number of requests for demo software from outsourcing nations, the proportion of sales is very much smaller. This ties in with the observation that foreign software products are not taking off - which could be due to the lack of willingness to pay for licences in their own market. The alternative interpretations that outsourcing countries are either not enterpeneural or do not have skilled developers are not true. This may have the effect that new Internet products will not be developed at such a fast pace. As jobs go abroad so do tax dollars. According to Gartner, about 0.65% of jobs have been outsourced to date (500K of 129M in the US), and up to 15% of the work force in the next 20 years. If outsourcing employment costs 50% of 'insourcing' then this is (at least) 50% less tax being paid, and remembering these are net tax contributing jobs: it may mean tax revenues could fall by over 10%. Given the tax differences between center-right and center-left governments is only about 5%, outsourcing will mean center-left governments will be forced to make cutbacks and tax rises regarded as unacceptable by center-right governments. This is where the Vacuum Cleaner Monster analogy shows a closer fit with the Internet than corporate greed. With corporate greed, the Vacuum Cleaner Monster would have JUST eaten the other creatures on the page and died of hunger; the self-cannibalism was just there as a punchline to a psychedelic joke. With the Internet it is capable of causing its creators (the US and EU software industry), or rather their services, to reduce. Despite this bleak prospect, there are natural barriers to outsourcing. Time zone differences, the need to write detailed specs, cultural differences, pay inflation, lack of long term business or technical experience, visas creating migration issues, and political issues. Today the Internet is just nibbling at the corner of its own web-page. Just a taster. But what is to stop the Vacuum Cleaner Monster from sucking up more and more resources? Will the Vacuum Cleaner Monster devour just the page, the chapter or the whole book? The great irony is that most of the programmers who have lost their jobs to outsourcing have done so as a direct result of the Internet. If the significant changes in product development and taxation happen, this will probably mean cutbacks in the very agencies (e.g. DARPA, NSF, W3C) that created the Internet. The Vacuum Cleaner Monster will have finally started to eat itself.
Talkback: Have Your Say Message Index:
The Messages: Oh puh-lease...First of all, a lot of those jobs were created _because_ of the Internet, to start with. A lot of those tech support jobs and whatnot, which are now being moved off-shore, wouldn't even have existed at all in a non-Internet world. Second, every bitch-and-moan rant about off-shoring starts from a very screwed-up reference state. Namely from "but look how much better it was during the dot-com boom." Well, guess what? The dot-com bubble was the real Sucky Monster. It sucked other people's money. Not only the VC's money. Most of those sites were also _based_ on the idea of screwing the ad providers, and raking in money they didn't deserve. Ad rates which had been calculated for sites with _one_ ad for the whole site, were now sucked into sites which had wall-to-wall advertising on every single page. And this Sucky Monster also created highly artifficial jobs. Dot-com CEO's were just as happily offering 150k for an beginner coder job, as they happily wasted money on everything else. It just wasn't their money. They loved wasting it. Luxurious company headquarters, over-priced sports cars, ludicrious server farms to serve some "cat lovers" site with 5 active members, and armies of over-paid coders, it was all the same. It was just the fun of spending other people's money. Just about every drooling burger-flipper could quit their MacDonald's job and get hired as a programmer. It didn't matter if they could program. It didn't matter if they even had even the mental capacity to understand elementary boolean logic. It didn't matter if they even planned to ever learn to program. (Most didn't.) Some clueless dot-com CEO would hire them anyway. And, yes, that Sucky Monster eventually cannibalized itself. And guess what? In the fallout of it all, we _still_ have more IT jobs than before. Go figure. And I'm going to be mean and say something else: the worst doom-and-gloom statistics I've seen about the loss of programming jobs, were still saying that less than 8% of the coding jobs were lost since the peak of the dot-bomb. That's all. Less than 8%. So here's the mean part: anyone who positively can't find a job any more (as opposed to "I can find one, but it doesn't pay 200k any more") is just an incompetent. They're in the 8% most worthless programmers ever hired. The far left edge of the bell curve. They shouldn't have been hired to start with. Here's another idea for you: forget offshoring. Most companies could just fire about 50% of the coders (the lowest performing 50%), and actually see an _increase_ in productivity. The reduced overhead will more than compensate for whatever piss-poor quality work those were doing. And most of those would fall squarely in the "can't program at all" category. People who kept their job purely by brown-nosing the boss, office backstabbing games, and/or by piggy-backing on the work of a real programmer. Moraelin Mon Jan 12 11:28:37 GMT 2004 the Internet is fine! The internet is fine! We are people too. Just because you invented the net and then outsourced it doesn't make it less yours. It's just that other people are working it, people who can do it cheaper, and supposedly considerably simillar in quality. If you imagine you'd be able to live an american lifestyle, with SUVs and 3 bedroom houses of writting JSPs you were very wrong. Those tasks are better outsources to someone like me you gets 300-500$/month and does all the same stuff, perhaps better. Gabriel Mihalache gabriel@individualism.ro Bucharest, Romania Tue Jan 13 06:27:43 GMT 2004 Easter Island and Deforestation The deforestation of Easter Island is often cited as an instance of a civilization destroying itself through resource consumption. Of interest is that of the 10,000 Pacific Islands, only 12 (including Easter Island) have suffered declines or crashes - most of the islands have flourished. Modeling suggests that Easter Island suffered a different fate because the reliance was upon a particularly slow growing Palm tree, the Chilean Wine Palm, which takes 40 to 60 years to mature. Most of the other Pacific Islands have fast growing coconut and Fiji fan palms. Just thought you might be interested. My source is "The skeptical environmentalist", by Bjorn Lomborg. Mr Ed (www.hacknot.info) editor@hacknot.info Tue Jan 13 08:22:33 GMT 2004 Well, that's the other Sucky Monster Other than the aforementioned dot-bombs, noone _needed_ a couple of JSP or ASP pages that badly. The costs to make even the simplest application had become just insane, and simply not justifiable. Here's an idea: if to save the work of two secretaries, you end up paying 500k per year to three programmers, then you're obviously better off not using a computer. That's simple economics. Before the dot-com bust, it used to be than an _experienced_ _assembly_ programmer would make maybe 100k a year. That was the ultra-high end of coding jobs. And even that was too much for most companies. But then the dot-coms turned it into a madness where every single moron doing a cut-and-paste buggy spaghetti code job in VB, without even understanding what he's doing, was paid 150k or more. And, sorry, to most companies that work just isn't worth that much. So here's an idea: while I'm all for having a comfortable life, there's a fine border between comfort and just plain old waste. You don't _need_ a luxurious villa. You don't _need_ huge plasma TV's in every room, including the kitchen. You don't _need_ a 50k LED lighting system. And there are cars which will get you to work just as quickly and more comfortably, without being the most expensive sports contraption. Etc. (Speaking of which, Gabriel, forget SUVs. We're not talking soccer moms here. We're more like talking top of the line Mercedes or Porsche as the baseline.) Basically all of a sudden everyone wanted to show the neighbours that he can spend more money than the CEO in the next villa. In many cases they actually were better paid than the CEO. Unfortunately, that money had to come from somewhere. That "somewhere" being the rest of society. Every company which ended up paying millions per year on shoddy coding jobs, ultimately passed the price on to the consumers of its products. Every Tom, Dick and Harry were the ones who really paid up for those luxurious villas and sports cars and whatnot. A whole "caste" had been created, which basically acted like the Sucky Monster. It sucked the living blood out of the rest of the economy, and turned it into crap. And yep, that Sucky Monster is just busy cannibalizing itself. So if we're talking "most of the programmers who have lost their jobs to outsourcing", they didn't really lose those jobs to the Internet, they lost it to their own greed and wasteful lifestyle. Even without the Internet, a simple modem and a phone line would have been enough to offshore most of the burger-flipper jobs of the IT industry. (In the case of tech support jobs, not even the modem is necessary.) And if even those never existed, people would have carried the disks by plane instead. The insane explosion of IT prices at home sure was becoming motivation enough even for that. Moraelin Tue Jan 13 08:25:08 GMT 2004 Waste As someone who lives in an ex-colonial country, where jobs have been outsourced for *centuries*, it makes me Laugh Out Loud when I hear people wingeing about offshoring. But I'd like to pick up on one point - the principle that "offshoring means reduced tax revenues". Offshoring, by definition, will increase the net profits of the companies that practice it, therefore increasing their tax bills in turn. Given, that is, a government that understands the need to tax companies as well as individuals. I'm not sure the Bush administration understands this. (But their successor government will have to.) Paradoxically there's an interesting consequence to offshoring, which is that all of a sudden there's a strong middle class in India and one developing in China, too. That means less poverty. Call me old-fashioned, but surely that's a good thing for everyone? Perhaps the US might end up selling something to them -- for instance, mobile phone companes seem to be quite keen on selling cellphones there. Finally, it's been a while since the Internet had much investment from research bodies like DARPA. Actually, through the increases in productivity that it has delivered I'd say that it's paid back the initial research investment. Unlike most other things that DARPA and CERN and the rest of them have done. RichTeaBiscuit nospam@example.org Tue Jan 13 10:58:31 GMT 2004 Alea jacta sunt "...Offshoring, by definition, will increase the net profits of the companies that practice it, ..." You must have meant: "...Offshoring is *hoped* to increase, etc. etc." My grandfather was VP of Operations for a medium-size American manufacturer of consumer durables from 1965 to 1974. They began outsourcing manufacturing to Japan in 1971. The motivation was only secondarily to reduce labor costs, and primarily to export product-liability exposure. The strategy availed them nothing. In 1974 they were acquired by a much larger firm (in an unrelated industry) that immediately killed the brand. Frank Wilhoit fw@broadheath.com USA Thu Jan 15 17:18:27 GMT 2004 article made about as much sense as my post Yip, Yip, Yip , Yip ,Yip yip, Yippy jeff Wed Jan 21 16:59:12 GMT 2004 outsourcing lowering tax revenues Outsourcing may increase tax revenues for product sold but the money that the company would normally pay to local citizens (and which would then be paid as income taxes) is also shifted off-shore and lost to the host country. That's the penality paid for off-shore resourcing - besides the loss of local jobs. For example Levi's are no longer manufactured in the US so prices will be controlled (don't expect them to drop) and profitibility should increase for Levi. The money paid to ex-US employees (and US taxes) is gone and goes into inproving the bottom line. More taxes may be paid per volume of product sold but unless the corporation gives raises to all the remaining employees that money will never be taxed at nearly the same rate as if it were being siphoned off against the ex-employees as income taxes. Even at the highest tax brackets there are limits to the percentage they can take. And corporate Levi will no doubt find a way to shelter excess or "bonus" income to preserve their investment in off-shore employees. steve russest@ampexdata.com california, usa Wed Jan 21 22:24:05 GMT 2004 Profits don't actually go up Except that Levis have gone down: - in cost - in quality (you don't get something for nothing) - in sales (who wants to buy them if they are cheaply made) ...and Levi Strauss is now on the verge of bankruptcy. When one manufacturer reduces costs, competitors do as well. Profits don't really increase. You get more profits by increasing sales and by introducing new products. Dennis Atkins datkins@niblerod.com US Fri Jan 23 10:30:24 GMT 2004 What is happening benefits everyone in the long run It's kind of funny. USA (and the West in general) have been very pro-free trade and free economics, so that they can sell their products and services in other countries, thereby competing with the local companies in those countries. However, when now these other countries (be them Japan, China, India, or whatever) competes successfully against the USA, then the voices of protectionism raise. Because then, it's not "the others" that suffer the consequences of free competition, it's themselves. It's just like companies: Small companies want free competition, so they have a chance to enter the market of the big ones. However, once they get big, they'd rather not have competition, as they in that position only stands to loose from it. Those whining about outsourcing (and there's a lot of you, given all the articles about this) should take a good, hard look at how you used to preach free trade and free competition: This is the result. You're not immune to it. It goes both ways. The arguments against protectionism that you used to use, can just as well be used against you now: It won't work. Protectionism is not the answer. Just like Japan ate much of the US's and Europe's lunch, with their cars, electronics, etc., in the long run, it lead to increased quality, lower cost, and more job opportunities. Rather that looking at outsourcing as a threat, how about learning from it? Why do they move other places? What do they do better? A study like that could reveal a lot, just like studies of Japanese manufacturing, etc. gave the rest of the world a lot of new ideas and ways of improving things. Ironically, decades ago, the Japanese were studying the West's technology, and copying it, only cheaper. _Now_ the West is studying Japan in the same way, to learn how _they_ do things. :) The circle is complete. So stop whining, and start looking beyond your own nose tip. What is happening is the best for the world as a whole. It raises the standards of living for those who most need it: the developing countries, and the countries with a lot of potential, like China and India. When their standards of living raises, so does the wages, and it becomes less lucurative to outsource in that country. The end result is that the country has been raised from poverty, and the world has become richer. With richer countries also comes possibilities for trade with them. When they have high enough vages, they are able to buy products and services from other countries, such as USA and Europe, increasing the income in those countries. So, no, the Internet won't eat itself. Instead, it provides opportunities for everyone - not just the already rich countries - to become prosperous, which is a win for everyone in the big perspective. In short, it won't eat itself (or its creators). Instead, it helps to ensure a more fair distribution of wealth on this planet, that not at least in the long run benefits everyone, including its creators. Terje tslettebo@hotmail.com Norway Tue Jan 27 18:15:41 GMT 2004 Funny skewed view It's funny how whenever it comes to off-shoring, people just have to come with some funny truism. Except, as usually is the case with truisms, it's either not true, or not half as much of a universal axiom as it sounds. Point in case, Dennis Atkins: "who wants to buy them if they are cheaply made" Right. So I don't doubt that you'd prefer your clothes made of hand-woven cloth, like in 1400. Surely noone would want something that came out of a power loom. Presumably sewn by hand too, none of this cheap-ass using a sewing machine ;) Why, blimey, all those mechanized cloth and clothes factories must be losing business fast to shops that weave their own cloth and use a needle to sew ;) Or let's talk about cars. What's with this cheap-ass using industrial robots and machine tools? They're even cheaper than off-shoring, since you don't pay wages to robots. Let's get back to using an army of smiths with hammers. Yeah, that'll definitely make everyone want one of those cars. It's most definitely _not_ cheaply made. Or programs. What's with this cheap-ass using computers, instead of hordes of accountants with pencils. Do you have any idea how many of those your software has put out of business? Don't even give them an abacus, I say. That ought to suitably raise prices for everything that that company makes. Make sure it's _not_ cheaply made. "in quality (you don't get something for nothing)" Speaking of which, let's throw away all these CAD and simulation programs too. Surely returning to the good old days of drawing everything on paper, and calculating it by hand, will increase quality. It's more expensive, so it must be higher quality. No, sorry old chap. It just doesn't work that way. The whole point of the industrial revolution in the 19'th century was precisely to produce stuff cheaper. That's been the whole drive. And if today a worker can afford a wardrobe full of clothes, and a car, and more bread and meat than they can possibly eat, that's precisely because your country learned to produce stuff cheaply. Two centuries ago, a worker would have maybe one or two sets of clothes total, and they patched them by hand when they broke. None of this throwing it away and and buying new stuff. They most certainly did _not_ have their own horse and carriage, either. And their food, well, let's just say they didn't need diet and medicine to stay thin. That's what life was, when everything was produced locally, and definitely _not_ cheaply. Moraelin Wed Jan 28 07:51:57 GMT 2004 Outsourcing is natural I could not agree with you more, Morealin, your comments are extremely good read. The outsourcing itself is a natural state, because of the imbalance and differences in wealth distribution. I'm from a developing country myself and have been at the receiving end for quite some time, and I can say it's not all roses and good stuff. One of the problems is the innovation and legal rights, as the outsourcer (main contractor) normally takes what it can, because he has the original idea and the plans. The quality here is good and most of the time exceeds the expectations of main contractor and it is certainly much better than what the overpaid JSP writers did. When people are poor they are rather innovative and tend to think more. vahur Estonia Fri Mar 05 10:13:27 GMT 2004 It's just the first wave I used to wonder what would happen if everyone had cheap video phone service. My prediction was that there would be hardly any barriers to telecommuting long distances remaining for any kind of information worker, even for meetings, and even for non-technical workers. This would result in a drop in upward pressure on real estate prices for metropolitan areas. The advantage for the worker is lower living expenses too. But things I had not thought about are: 1. Downward pressure on salaries. 2. More competition (especially in the sense of "easy to replace" that results in lower leverage on the worker side and the difficulty of standing out from the crowd when trying to get hired). 3. The hiring of people living in other countries where the cost of living is very much lower. The kind of work least likely to be outsourced would be manual jobs like a plumber, electrician, carpenter, or masseuse. So far, I have not heard of any efforts to do that kind of work remotely. However the highly skilled manual labor of a surgeon can already been done via teleoperation/virtual reality based on at least one research project (the initial purpose is to allow valuable surgeons to operate on the battlefield without being present and for reducing the number of minutes from injury to treatment). Eventually, a general humanoid robotic body could be teleoperated to fix drains, lay wires, hammer nails, and massage muscles. One factor against teleoperation is the speed of light delay, but that should not be much of a problem when distances are under a thousand miles which is a large enough radius to enable all metropolitan areas on Earth to be affected by workers from a lower cost locale. I don't expect teleoperated plumbers to be economical for a few decades, and there might even be a close race between teleoperation and AI+robotics for some kinds of work. But the main things preventing millions of white collar jobs being redistributed across the Earth is education, language, lack of paperless workflow, current salary levels, and inertia. If local salary levels are sufficiently high for a particular kind of job, it only takes 5 years or so to get past any education gap and 1-2 years to set up the paperless workflow. If cheap, fast, good-quality automatic language translation ever appears, then the language barrier drops quickly. If the IT economy picks up enough, the outsourcing might slow down when non-outsourcing companies can deliver better products faster. However, competitive pressure will continue, especially when the final product price is the major factor in buying decisions. Note: I enjoy working with competent people from anywhere on the planet and at one point I even started a non-dot-com company that hired technical people in 5 countries. So if one accepts the eventual global equalization/adjustment of salaries, the essence of the outsourcing problem for US techinical workers is the cost of living differential between countries. Xeno xenophundibulum.SpamBump@yahoo.com SF Bay Area, US Tue Mar 23 04:38:52 GMT 2004 What a fabuous world - iI wish I'd been there! "But then the dot-coms turned it into a madness where every single moron doing a cut-and-paste buggy spaghetti code job in VB, without even understanding what he's doing, was paid 150k or more. And, sorry, to most companies that work just isn't worth that much. (...) Basically all of a sudden everyone wanted to show the neighbours that he can spend more money than the CEO in the next villa. In many cases they actually were better paid than the CEO." piglet Tue Aug 24 03:17:49 BST 2004 RE: not losing jobs This comment is in direct response to those who claim a low amount of jobs are being lost to outsourcing. Although it's true that only 8% of all "technical" jobs have been outsourced since the dot net boom, there is a deception in the statistics. As having done many statistical analysis on numerous topics ranging from a reconstructed census to analyzing game data, i closely look into what considerations a company or analytical independent makes when constructing an analysis. Though they say IT, they do tend to include jobs that barely relate, such as in-store technical assistance. This being geek-squad at best buy as well as all personnel there assigned to help you make purchasing decisions. Jobs in sales such as these have risen dramatically and make up for some of the dramatic decreases in jobs in intensive programming. My dad works as a "computer programmer" and i will leave his title to that rather than try to specify exactly what his title is. He creates networks, software, internet protocols, operating systems, and whatever else his company might be looking for. He is very well at programming in somewhere around 15 Programming languages (some of which are obscure languages specifically created for some of his jobs) including Assembly, Mainframe, C++, Basic, Java, HTML, and others. About 10 years ago the company he worked for shut down, (Fingerhut) and although he had 20 years of experience with (at the time) 12 different programming languages, he couldn't find a job, and was actively searching for nearly a year before he found a job that fit even with a 50% paycut. I will not pretend to make the statement that unemployment is an issue, but skilled workers are in unskilled jobs. The unemployment rate is at an all time low: 4%, and it would seem we have a booming economy... a booming economy that is overinflated, and turning back to remedial jobs moving away from technological advances, and moving toward a larger difference in our economic standpoints, as well as following the principal of the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer. The few company heads and family friends are growing rich while they dilute our economy. One prime example of this is Wal-Mart. Though this example is overused, i am sure the public is unaware the deficit it causes our countrys economy. Walmart exports approximately 200billion dollars of natural resources each year. They export the resources to countries like Japan and China that have a surplus of workers and too few jobs. There workers are hired at a low rate and given few or no benefits, as well as having union restrictions and restraints by their governments. Walmart then buys back the resources in the form of finished products, generally electronics. They pay 800 billion dollars anually for these product. This is a difference of 600 billion dollars in a very exclusive market. Therefor any other trades with these countries are irrelevant we lose 600 billion dollars yearly from our economy just for the profit of a greedy CEO who batters our own manufacturers as well as foreign ones, inflating our economy. Now some would say a booming economy such as the current state of our economy would represent a healthy one. Normally i would agree, but the only representation the boom has is over-inflation, a balloon, that when popped will act like hindenberg. The federal reserve constantly pushes more notes into our economy to keep the economy with a constant amount of US dollars. But it doesnt account for that 600b. annually or the export import difference for any other company. Right after WWII Germany was forced to pay off all of its war debts immediately. Rather than take money from its capital, they produced massive amounts of new German marks just to pay off the debts. Now since the marks represented a hold in the German reserve, their value went down. It was said at one point a wheelbarrow of German marks could hardly buy a loaf of bread, and although this is an exaggeration it represents a truth. We aren't pushing in trillions of dollars annually into our economy, it can be measured in billions, but we are pushing in a substantial amount, and we could be looking at more than just a skilled job shortage. This job/worker shortage could very well represent more than just this vacuum monster representation the original author bestowed upon us, but a wider view, one where this book, this chapter, and page are our economy, companies, and individual jobs, each which will be burned by our ignorance at four hundred and fifty one degrees. This however is inevitable, and although i would like to cause an effect in our economic situation, it is beyond any single person. The general selfish nature of our society would need to be changed, and we would have to unerringly defeat human nature, which is perfectly represented by this vacuum monster.. we destroy what we create, and although it's the view of a cynic we will inevitably all die, and this is only a monetary issue. As survival is our first instinct it is what we will preserve, and as long as we preserve ourselves we will be happy (not that we can have any emotions if we dont preserve ourselves) but our race is doomed, and no matter what we do in our pittiful meaningless lives, we are only delaying the same fate, death, and reconstruction into something else, where our parts will become everything, and be destroyed by anything, but nonetheless we will always be doomed, and we will always exist, the nature of the universe cant be changed, nor can the nature of our time-limited society. Steven Friends9022@yahoo.com Rogers, MN, USA Tue Jul 24 07:26:36 BST 2007 |
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The Internet could be affected by a negative feedback loop involving outsourcing. Outsourcing is a significant reality involving software professionals. If all this sounds too abstract, I'll
analogise the Internet with a strange creature from the Beatles film "Yellow Submarine".
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