Why is the US government letting them get away with it?

According to the research firm Gartner, in the next 15 years, more than 3 million US white-collar jobs, representing $136 billion in wages, will depart to places like India.  The IT industry will be the biggest loser of jobs, according to Forrester Research. American programmers are collecting unemployment, declaring bankruptcy, even contemplating suicide, because they can’t compete with people willing to work for one-sixth of their wages.

The US rich are getting richer and the US poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. In the golden age of this country, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world.  Now, US big businesses are cutting out middle class earnings at a horrifying rate.

Globalism and the “free trade” that our politicians and big business leaders insisted would be so good for us have not been so good for the middle class. What the “global economy” really means is that middle class American workers have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations (especially environmental rules.) The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough, many out of work, and those lucky enough to keep jobs keep seeing their wages diminishing.

No matter how smart, how educated, how certified, or how hard working American technology worker are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world.

Free trade creates jobs in other countries.

Trade implies reciprocity. It is a two-way street. There is NO reciprocity in outsourcing, only the export of domestic jobs.  Business know-how, capital and technology are more globally mobile than labor.  The advantage lies with countries with untapped pools of educated and skilled low-wage labor. The advantage increases with the absence of regulations and environmental rules.  There is no IRS, no EPA, no OSHA, or other regulatory agencies.  There is no cost to these sweat shops to pour their pollution into the world climate.

But these big piggy US business leaders may have outsmarted themselves.  The sudden increase in outsourcing high technology and professional jobs over seas may be sending something else abroad: our technology, our money and our position in the world as the lead economic power.  In the long run, everyone in America loses, even the super rich.

Unrestrained outsourcing may be especially detrimental in an information-based economy, where cooperative relationships and exchange of ideas between workers are needed for long-term success. Competition is most destructive when we are competing in creativity or sophisticated thinking and problem solving.  Why do we give away our technology to other countries, especially potential enemies, like China?

Does this person have your job?

American programmers being forced to train their Indian replacements.  They are passing along their competence, their professionalism, and they will never be repaid for providing these skills to our economic competitors.

See our previous post at:  http://www.johnbrianfastcpa.com/1795/american-information-technology-professionals-continue-to-lose-jobs/

Just look at what has happened in the federal government. 

When social media began making inroads in the federal government in the past few years, most federal officials saw it as either irrelevant to agency operations or, at best, a peripheral function of public affairs. Many agencies, including the military services, debated the idea of blocking access to commercial social media sites.  For example, the Small Business Administration blocks access to all social media and web sites except for its own sites.

But a few agency officials think otherwise. They share concerns about the security and privacy of commercial sites, but they also realize that social media can play a valuable role in their daily operations, making it possible for employees to collaborate in new and unimagined ways.

MySpace never got a Spacebook page.

NASA developed a system called Spacebook, which enables agency employees to network in a secure environment. The Defense Department is following suit with Milbook and the State Department with Statebook.  The IRS should start TaxBook.  Later this summer, the General Services Administration plans to launch a secure social networking system for agencies that do not wish to build their own.

For federal officials who had hoped that social networking was a fad that would fade away or, at most, just another collaboration tool, the news keeps getting worse.  By making it so easy for information to flow across an organization, social media is changing how decisions get made.

Using social media leads to distributed decision making in that it pushes decisions away from the hgih-center, where decisions used to be made, to more relevant centers, closer to the customer or client. Once decisions are made closer to the edge, a bigger buy-in from all stake holders is achieved.  Decision-making inside of distributed models may look confusing and chaotic, but it is just the opposite.  There is a tremendous amount of discipline and planning needed to get everyone working in the same direction.  Social media provides the tools for that type of discipline and planning.  They don’t call it “social” media for nothin’.

The Air Force has affairs???

As a sign of the times, the Air Force Public Affairs Agency is published its first guidebook to using social media for airmen.  Soar like eagles, gentlepersons. 

In memory of "Do no evil."

It turns out that “Do no evil” means “Do just enough evil to get by.”

The name “Google” originated from a misspelling of “googol,” which refers to the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros.  In a binary googol world, 1 is the distinct minority. 

In a world dominated by one-party states and huge global-national corporations, it is important to protect the minorities.  In “Our Philosophy” Google lists as one of its ten points, “Democracy on the web works.”  And I think that one of the Google founders, Sergey Brin, meant this in just more than an AdSales sense, but that also more information should mean more democracy.

That is why we applauded Google’s announcement that the company would pull out of China after discovering attacks seeking e-mails from human rights activists and the company’s source code.  It seemed Google was putting principle over profits.

However, Google anouunced July 8, through a Google blog post, that China had renewed its internet content provider licence, suggesting that its previous confrontation confrontation with Red Chaina has been followed by compromise.

People close to Google denied the company had offered fresh concessions other than its announcement last week that it would now send Chinese users to a limited website that gives them the option of being redirected to Hong Kong, ending the direct link.  However, through its internet filtering systems, known as the “Great Firewall”, the Chinese authorities will be able to limit access to information, or even disrupt Google’s service entirely.

Google caves in to the Red Menace.

The renewed licence from Red China suggests that both sides have found a face-saving way to step back from the brink and that Google has given in to the Red Menace.

For Google, such a compromise would suggests that the company took a second look and decided it wanted to have some sort of presence in China, whatever the distaste of its founder Sergey Brin about the country’s censorship regime.  Champagne revenues will wash a lot of bad tastes our of your mouth.

China has the largest number of internet users, 400,000,000, and the number of new users is growing exponentially.  Perhaps more importatatn, Google wants to push its new initiatives such as the Android operating system for mobile phones.  With 800,000,000 subscribers, China is also the world’s largest mobile phone market.

No matter what face it puts on it, Google gave in.

Google reveals its true character.

In “Our Philosophy” Google says, “We continue to push the limits of existing technology to provide a fast, accurate and easy-to-use service that anyone seeking information can access, whether they’re at a desk in Boston or on a phone in Bangkok.”  Just not Beijing.

Notice Steve is avoiding the antenna.

You would think that Apple would be sensitive to connectivity issues.  Apparently not.

Since the iPhone 4 went on sale Thursday, June 24, numerous angry reports have begun to appear online about consumers having strange issues with the antenna.  Namely, that if a user puts his or her hand over the new steel band that encases the iPhone, he or she will lose reception.

The first response from Steve Jobs was, “You’re holding it wrong.”

Apple has responded with a more corporate-ese worded statement:

Apparently Apple engineers have small hands (and everything else.)

“Gripping any mobile phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone. If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases.”

Not-so-rugged baby buggy bumpers.  Experts have found that yes, indeed, that when you put your hand on the bottom of the iPhone (something most people tend to do) to hold it while chatting, reception does take a nosedive.  If you put on one of Apple’s new “Bumper” products, similar to a case, over the phone, reception does improve. The bumpers come in several colors, and sell for a suspiciously high $29.99 each.  All the “Bumper” is is a plastic strip that goes around the iPhone.  However, if it lets you hold the phone while speaking, some frustrated consumers may consider it a good investment.  I believe that some entrepreneur will come up with a much nicer solution at a much lower price.

Trade-offs.  In many smartphones today, the antenna is built into the bottom of the phone. That’s for two reasons: (1,) To meet FCC requirements regarding the specific absorption rate, or SAR (how much radiation is allowed to enter the human body), and (2,) the extending antenna went out of style several years ago.  Smartphone makers are placing more constraints on themselves to make increasingly smaller phones with increasingly sophisticated features and design. They’re trying to fit larger batteries and more powerful processors into smaller packages, along with flashy materials, and a specific aesthetic.  Those companies, like Apple with its iPhone 4, have to begin making certain choices and priorities.  Jobs did not think the extended antenna would be that cool.

Cheaper than a "Bumper."

One early user had a simple answer: Just tape a popcycle stick to the iPhone for a handle.  Problem solved.

The iPhone 4 has been a great commercial success for Apple.  Here is what the experts think:

Kent German:  The latest handset from Apple features a high-resolution display, a faster processor, and video calling, but it also sports unexpected additions like a new antenna and a gyroscope.  The price with service is fair, $199 for the 16GB phone or $299 for the 32GB device.  Both models come in white and black versions

Even from the outside, you’ll see that the iPhone 4 marks the biggest upgrade since the iPhone 3G (the 3GS didn’t add much beyond a compass). The profile is thinner and you’ll notice a new front-facing camera.  The iPhone 4 also serves as the debut device for the newly named iOS 4 operating system, which brings such much-needed features as multitasking, a unified e-mail in-box, and app folders for the home screen.

On the whole, this iPhone 4 has us more excited than we were last year when the 3GS was born. The new features, particularly those in the new operating system, are long overdue and we welcome any efforts to improve call quality (remember that it is a phone, after all).

MG Siegler:  The biggest thing that stands out in my mind one day later is that immediately after I put down the iPhone 4 and went back to my iPhone 3GS, the latter felt kind of like a toy in comparison. Now, I’ve always been a fan of the design of the first iPhone over the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3GS.  I liked the aluminum flat back of the first one more than the plastic backs of the second two. The iPhone 4 is a return to form.  The aluminum has been replaced by glass (in either black or white).

The device feels rock solid in your hand. It is without a doubt the most impressive piece of mobile hardware I’ve ever held. There’s nothing on the device that feels janky.  Aside from the backside upgrade, all the external buttons on the device are now improved as well. The iPhone 4 is pretty much identical in weight to the iPhone 3GS, but it’s significantly thinner.  This may be a bit hard to notice in your hand as the iPhone 3G/3Gs has the curved back (so you mostly handle the thinner edges), but I have no doubt it will be noticeable in your pocket.

When the iPhone 3GS first launched, I wasn’t sure that the boost in speed would be enough to make an upgrade worth it. I was wrong. Once I had an iPhone 3GS and went back to using an iPhone 3G, the latter almost seemed unusable to me. Thanks to the screen on the iPhone 4, this seems likely to be the case as well.

Terry White:  The killer app on the iPhone has to be the phone. At the end of the day, it has to make and receive calls. It has to be loud enough and easy enough to use as a phone. One of the first things besides reception quality that is important to me is call volume. My cell phone has to be loud enough so that I can hear it in busy airports, walking down the street, etc. The Treo 650 was NOT loud enough which meant that I had to buy special software for the phone (Volume Care) just to boost the volume. So how does the iPhone stack up in this important area? So far so good. I’ve been making calls most of the day from the iPhone and the clarity and quality have exceeded my expectations. It’s loud enough, thank you Apple. I can navigate to my favorites and place a call with one hand. It still takes more taps than it should. You should be able to hold down the Home button to get to the Favorites screen (are you listening Apple, that was a great idea I just thought of?). The iPhone comes with a set of white stereo earbuds with an integrated mic. The mic also serves as a button to answer calls, end the current call, decline and incoming call, and do the hold features of call waiting. It also allows you to advance to the next song that’s playing and pause playback of audio from songs or movies. I don’t like earbuds for extended use.

I find it odd that the iPhone doesn’t have a copy paste feature or the ability to add your own auto complete words. For example, I would like to type mgd and have it automatically put in MacGroup-Detroit, Inc. This is the kind of functionality I would like to see very soon in an update. There should also be some standard replies for email and SMS messaging. At first glance the keyboard didn’t seem to have a Caps Lock feature. However, thanks to blog reader Rich, he pointed it out to me in the Settings->General->Keyboard that you have to TURN IT ON! Not sure why you wouldn’t want that turned on by default, but at least it’s there. Lastly what I found a little disorienting was the fact that the virtual keyboard always displays as CAPS even though you’re typing in lower case (when the Shift or Caps Lock is not engaged). Since it’s a virtual keyboard, why not display lower case letters when typing in lower case and upper case letters when typing in upper case? This is especially important when typing passwords and you can’t see what you’re typing because it’s displayed as dots.

Scorecard:  My totals show two positive reviews and one negative.  Potential customers are very excited.

Your browser may disclosure more about you than you want.

Think you are anonymous on the web?  Think again.  Your browser may give more clues to the world about your ID than you might think.

Browsers have many characteristics, which means that Web sites could be able to identify and track visitors even without the use of cookies or super cookies.  In a recent test of 470,161 subjects, 83.6 percent of the browsers had a unique fingerprint.  94.2 percent of the browsers with Flash or Java installed were identified as unique.

The test collected information on the subject browsers, such as type of browser, operating system, screen resolution, browser plug-ins and system fonts, and compared them to an extensive list of configurations.  Browsers with Java installed make it easier to identify such things as screen resolutions and Flash (perhaps Steve Jobs is right about Flash security) can give up the system fonts, which is why those browsers were easier to identify. Taken together, the configurations often add up to a unique fingerprint that could identify the browser when it visits another site.

One good part of JavaScript is that it has less identifying clues.

The browsers that were the least unique, and therefore the most difficult to identify, were those with JavaScript disabled, those using TorButton (an add-on that protects privacy), and iPhone and Android browsers.  These tools make the subject browser more uniform than other browsers. However, before you iPhone users feel too comfortable, remember iPhone and Android browsers don’t have good cookie control, so those users are subject to tracking anyway.

The idea of browser fingerprints isn’t new, but the test puts a number on what percentage of browsers could be tracked without cookies. And although it’s uncertain whether any Web sites are using fingerprinting to track visitors, some banking, e-commerce and social Web sites have been using this kind of tracking in incidents of suspected fraud.  They have been remarkably successful in tracking down the suspects.

Homeland Security may know more about your home computer than you think.

Between Homeland Security, NSA, motor vehicle departments, real estate and court document public records, department stores, Facebook and Amazon, and the hundreds of thousands of vendors advertizing on The Net, there must be many terabytes of detailed information about almost everyone in the world that has used the internet. And Big Brother can find you, too.  A major feature of the expanded IP Address Space is the ability to track GPS Locations.

The test shows that users are not as anonymous as they might have thought, even if they’re careful about blocking cookies.  Your browser may be more unique than your fingerprints.  It does have many more points of reference.

There are plenty of new features in Office 2010.  Here are some of them:  Social Connector, the People Pane, Clean Up, Ignore, the Navigation Pane, Sparklines and the Broadcast Slide Show.

Outlook makes a serious attempt to turn e-mail into the center of your social networking world.  Using the Outlook Social Connector, Outlook will integrate your e-mail with favorite social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

The Outlook Social Connector appears as a horizontal pane, called the People Pane, at the bottom of each of your e-mail messages. The People Pane does more than just connect you to social networking sites; it also does serves as a command center for your communications with your friends and business associates who use Outlook.  The People Pane shows you all of the most recent communications you have had with the sender or receiver of an e-mail, including e-mails, attachments, meetings, RSS feeds and updates on social networking sites.

Two new features in Microsoft Office are called “Clean Up” and “Ignore.”

“Clean Up” performs wonderful edits by sweeping through a conversation and deleting any messages within messages that are redundant (for example, when someone in a long e-mail conversation clicks Reply without realizing that they’ve just sent copies of the last 25 messages within that message).  Having fewer messages per conversation, with every message relevant, is another huge time and resource saver.

“Ignore” should not be ignored.  When you click the Ignore button, all future messages from that conversation will automatically be routed to the Deleted Items folder.  Caution: Of course you only want to do this when you really do not care about this conversation.

In Word there is one very useful addition, the Navigation Pane, formerly called the Document Map in Office 2007.  The Navigation Pane is composed of three parts.   Pane One displays the organization of a document by headings and lets you quickly jump to any section.  Pane Two shows thumbnails of each page. And in the Pane Three, the search pane, there is a powered-up search tool, showing your search results in context. You can also search through tables, charts and other material.

The newest useful functions in Excel are what are called Sparklines, cell-sized charts that can be embedded in worksheets to give visual representations of data.  For example, if you are creating a stock-tracking spreadsheet, you could create a Sparkline for each stock to graph its individual performance over a time period and display it in a clear, simple-to-digest optic presentation.

The new Broadcast Slide Show tool will likely be the most-used new feature of the generally new and improved PowerPoint.  Broadcast offers a simple way to share a presentation over the Web on an ad hoc basis with as many people as you would like.  Create your presentation as you would as normal, then select Broadcast Slide Show from the Slide Show Ribbon menu.  PowerPoint then uses Microsoft’s free PowerPoint Broadcast Service to let you play your presentation over the Web.  A Web link is created that you can send to one or many recipients.  The receiving persons can then watch the presentation by going to the displayed URL. You can also send out invitations to the broadcast from within PowerPoint.

I generally resist going to new versions of Office until they have been out awhile.  I say, “Pioneers are the ones with the arrows in their backsides.”   However, these new features of the new Office are very tempting to me.  I may have to put on my arrow-proof vest and ride out to the newest Microsoft frontier.

It is easy to gettng carried away on Facebook.  It is very user friendly and it is designed for you to open up about yourself.  Be careful, though.  There are some actions that are dangerous.

Do not post the year of your actual birthday.  It’s an ideal target for identity thieves, who could use it to obtain more information about you and potentially gain access to your bank or credit card account. If you’ve already entered a birth date, go to your profile page and click on the Info tab, then on Edit Information. Under the Basic Information section, choose to show only the month and day or no birthday at all.

Do not advertise your vacation on Facebook in advance.

Do not say when you are going to be away from your home.  Do not let others know when no one will be there. It is not good to state your regular work hours. Do not say when you are going to be on vacation.  Wait until you get home to tell everyone how awesome your vacation was and where you were.

Review your Facebook privacy settings.

Do not overlook your Privacy Controls.  For almost everything in your Facebook profile, you can limit access to only your friends, friends of friends, or yourself.  Restrict access to photos, birth date, religious views, and family information, among other things. You can give only certain people or groups access to items such as photos, or block particular people from seeing them. Consider leaving out contact info, such as phone number and address, since you probably don’t want anyone to have access to that information anyway.

Do not post your child’s name in a caption.  If someone else does, delete it by clicking on Remove Tag.  If your child is not on Facebook and someone includes his or her name in a caption, ask that person to remove the picture or at least the name.  The safest course is not even to allow your child’s photo on Facebook.  There are a lot of bad people out there.  Some may be looking at pictures of your children for the wrong reasons.

Do not post trivial or obvious statements.  I love my kids. I love my wife. I love my dog.  I do not need to post this as my status update every day so that everyone else can see this.  And to be frank, I do not care when you get up, when you eat breakfast, and generally what you are going to do today.

Do not join a group just because of its name.  It may not be an accurate statement of the group’s true intent.  At best you are allowing spammers to find your name on the list of “fans” for the group.  At worst, it may be the first step of a real fraudster to find out more about you.

You probably do not leave your door open at home so just any one who wants to can just walk in.  Be careful on Facebook as well.

The US technology industry lost about 250,000 jobs last year, about 4 percent of its total workforce.  These losses could and should have been prevented.

Where was your job outsourced?

Huge global corporations are encouraging the outsourcing of innovation to other countries around the world.  We are exporting our computer technology to our potential enemy, Red China.  This is a serious national security issue.

We should be nurturing our technology professionals.  We should be offering tax credits to keep our proprietary technology in this country.  A number of other countries, including Canada, have very generous provisions in their research and development tax credits.

In addition, we should be encouraging the Veterans Administration and the US Department of Health and Human Services to move ahead on expanding their health information technology programs.  (See our post at    http://www.johnbrianfastcpa.com/1766/our-veterans-deserve-better-it-systems/     that shows our American veterans desperately need improvements to their claims system.)  Health technologies require tens of thousands of new highly skilled workers.  These are jobs that should not be outsourced overseas.

John Brian Fast, an Army vet, strongly supports improvements to the veterans claim systems.

Re-employed engineers, scientists and other technology professionals will help create more jobs and move the economy forward.

One continuing threat to American tech workers is the H1-B visas given by the huge global corporations to bring in foreign workers to compete with Americans.

Microsoft was granted 1,037 H-1B visas in 2008 and had sought permanent residency for 703 H-1B holders that year.  Intel Corp. received 351 H-1B visas in 2008. A year earlier, Intel’s permanent residence applications amounted to 42% of the 369 H-1B visas it received.  Google received approval for 207 H-1B visas in 2008 and sought permanent residency for 108 visa holders. And now notorious Goldman Sachs was granted 211 H-1B visas in 2008.

Greedy corporations want immigrants, legal or otherwise.

Various estimates put the overall number of technical visa holders in the range of 600,000 H-1B workers.  A decade-old study by Georgetown University estimated that about 50% of H-1B visa holders become permanent residents of the United States.

One study found that visa rules put most of the power to control H-1B workers in the hands of employers.  Visa workers can “switch jobs in very limited circumstances, and their employer can revoke the visa at any time by terminating their employment, forcing the worker out of status with immigration authorities. If employment is terminated, the worker must leave the country immediately,” the study said.  This gives employers the controls they want over the foreign workers.

There is an alphabet soup of visa categories which allow the holder to work here such as H1-B, L-1, and H2-B.  Last year we added 400,000 H1-B’s; 900,000 other work visa holders; and 455,000 temporary workers.   This makes a total of 1,755,000 imported legal workers.   A very conservative estimate is that there are 4 million illegal aliens entering this country annually.

Many of these people take good paying jobs that American informational technology professionals should have.

John Brian Fast is a US Army vet and strongly supports providing more resources for our veterans.

A dramatic spike in disability claims during the last seven years has overwhelmed the Department of Veterans Affairs systems.  Our veterans deserve IT systems that can provide the needed help to those who gave so much.

The VA’s antiquated compensation system, which hasn’t been overhauled since 1945, is cumbersome and heavily bureaucratic.  The system requires a mountain of paperwork, is based on diagnoses that lag far behind current medical advances, and runs on a computer system that is so outdated it can’t accurately verify where veterans were deployed or their current status.

There is a backlog at of least 500,000 claims, perhaps 1 million.  Nearly half of the claims take longer than 120 days to process and thousands of claims are not addressed for two years or more.  Many claims have been misplaced.  Some claims have been accidentally (or otherwise) shredded by employees.  The backlog of claims is expected to grow before it shrinks. The VA says the backlog won’t be eliminated until 2015.

Instead of working toward building a new system, Congress has approved hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years to hire thousands of new employees to process claims, a temporary fix that’s added more overhead to what is already one of the largest bureaucracies in the federal government.

The backlog of claims is expected to grow before it shrinks, however, as experienced employees are pulled off the line to train new ones. The VA says the backlog won’t be eliminated until 2015.

The psychological toll of war now accounts for more than a third of the $24 billion spent last year compensating veterans from the Vietnam, Persian Gulf and “global war on terror” eras, more than any other category. However the current system is not designed to handle claims related for post-traumatic stress disorder and other Gulf environmental conditions, adding to delays and forcing veterans into very lengthy appeals process.

The quality of care we provide to our disabled veterans is a national disgrace.

Since 2001, Congress has approved $944 billion to fund the global war on terror, but has provided less than 1 percent of that amount was set aside to care for veterans who are actually fighting the battle, according to the Congressional Research Service.  The volume and complexity of claims flowing into the VA’s antiquated system has left thousands of veterans stranded; and, in some cases, the mindless and frustrating system is driving away veterans who need help.

The very sad result is that some who have severely injured in service to our country die before their claims are processed.

Throughout our nation’s history, service men and women have gone bravely into battle, risking their lives and livelihoods, sacrificing their safety to defend America.  There are over 3 million veterans who were seriously injured in the line of duty.  America’s disabled veterans have honored us with their service and selfless duty. It is now our turn to honor them.   At the very least, we should provide them a decent computer system that processes their claims promptly and effectively.