You've been doing too much high end stuff, which is few and far between. And the high end stuff doesn't stay local for the quality of tech, it's because Americans don't like foreign accents (except Australian, I knew an Australian dude on a sales project and he could sell Ice to Eskimos).

At the mid and low levels of support (which is 80% of the work or more) it's all overseas. What can't be sent to India because of the Accents is going to the Philippines. Their Native Speakers with little or no accent and they live in squalor so their dirt cheap.

but what you just suggested will never happen in a million, trillion years. Americans are too Balkanized. Too many pet issues we care about besides the economy and our pocket books. When we go to the polls we vote for a hundred other things (Abortion, Gay Marriage, Legalized Drugs, Gun Control, etc, etc, etc). You'll never see enough political will to punish a corporation. Hell, BP basically destroyed the Gulf of Mexico and got off with "We're sorry...".

little or no accent. Dirt cheap and native speakers. The only problem is the floods mean you'll have to keep a small group of Indians for backup and put up with their accents every now and then. But they're fine technically and all you really need to do is get a remote desktop session going and then they stop talking.

We're all easily replaced these days. I wish more people realized that and pushed for protectionism. We employees are not global, while our employers _are_. At this rate they're gonna win this fight, and we're gonna lose. We'll be back to the 1800s. Nasty, brutish and short lives.

See my other comments above, and I still wish people would stop repeating this. They're paid more or less the same. It's not about salary, it's about cheaper training. The much, much lower standard of living for most Indians translates into a cheaper standard of living for their middle class and cheaper training costs. An American is carrying around $100k in Student Loan debt, and Indian might have a few grand. It doesn't hurt that an American with a diploma mill degree can't get a job, while an India can get a visa out of it...

and I wish people would stop saying that. It minimizes the threat that the current system presents to the American Working Class. They're not geniuses either. Their the same as you and me, only thanks to India's much lower cost and standard of living they're much, much cheaper to get trained. An American worker has $100k in Student Loan debt, and India has a few grand. That's what you're competing with. Folks with the same skill set as you obtained for a fraction of the price on the bones of their fellow countrymen...

the schools in India churn out pre-trained folks with a very, very specific skill set. They also can train at a fraction of the cost of a US employee since the cost of living in India (thanks to rampant poverty) is much much lower. We Americans just live too well. Now if we can just put half our population in tent cities and take away their access to clean water maybe we can compete...

they know, they choose to ignore it and pretend otherwise. But it's painfully obvious by anyone in the tech industry that the H1-B program exists to replace expensive local talent with cheaper imports. And yes, I've heard from more than one recruiter that they weren't hiring Americans for certain position, and seen posts looking for an H1-B specifically. What am I gonna do? I'm in no position to sue over it...

We've been swinging far right for 30 years. Ever since the right wing figured out the "Southern Strategy". And up until some very liberal reforms mostly put through when a few members of the ruling class turned on each other (FDR mostly) we've had mass starvation and poverty just like everywhere else. We have a lot more farm land and less drought, so we had a little bit less. But we also had slavery until the 1800s.

Also the countries with Starvation aren't even vaguely liberal or socialistic. They just fascist dictatorships that happen to borrow Marx's writing for Rhetoric. Look at real liberal countries. Countries that didn't go the Reagan/Thatcher route. Germany, Netherlands, Canada even France is doing better. Now watch Canada following in America's footsteps and go down the drain for everyone but the top 1% too... :(

it's up to 50 in the United States. Most houses are 2 income and 66% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Real Wages stopped growing in 1979.

Just because something took 20 years longer to happen than we expected doesn't mean it's not going to happen. The one's that are making it happen are the ones with the most to gain, the folks at the top. They take a much, much longer view than you or I. They're not just thinking about leaving the kiddos a house or two, they're thinking about a legacy.

I voted for Skywalker.

created for Saturday Morning Cartoons. Check out the wikipedia page. For a lot of us young'uns they later series aired on Saturday Morning were our first exposure to Fred and the gang.

it's not just that their cute. Their Pack animals, and they integrate into my pack as something useful. Even a cat is useful if it's eating the mice in my barn that would otherwise be chompin' on my grain. Horses can be ridden. Rabbits, otoh, are fair game (pun intended).

Then again I don't rent movies. Still, I'm surprised they couldn't compete with Netflix.

Legacy 9x code doesn't run on Win8 unless you're using the built in VMs from the fancier editions. They took most of the old Win32 stuff out.

is there's often 5 ways to do something. The first works, but will slow your app to a crawl. The next two only work on your test machine. The 4th works, but it has horrible side effects. There's a registry query function that triggers a scan of the registry, which on a broken registry can kill the whole OS. Who the hell thought that was a good idea?

Finally there's the 1 method that works. I find writing Windows apps a bit like playing Russian Roulette...