By reporting internally:

• The secrets stay secret. Congress, the Courts, and especially the American public will never know.
• The problem can be "addressed" without doing anything.
• The malcontent identifies him or herself to the higher-ups, who can decide how to handle him or her from there and most especially prevent them from doing more damage.
• If the malcontent is not satisfied with the result and later leaks for real, he or she will be first on the list of people to look at to identify the leak.
• If there is some shady practice that's becoming too well-known within the agency, it can be quieted down so fewer employees know about it.
• Maybe, occasionally, there really is some wrongdoing they would like to know about and stop, limit, moderate, or otherwise actually address. (Har har, I know right? lol, rofl, lmao, etc.) More likely just legalize and legitimize.

In theory, but most of the people from those states don't really know anything about their state government's problems. And they seem to be happy to let the federal government grab every bit of power and money from the states, until suddenly they wake up wondering why their state government is so useless and on the brink of collapse, and the federal government is such an all-powerful bully.

Manufacturing may be, but what about manufacturing EMPLOYMENT? When you use robots and automation, there aren't so many employees.

And it may look large because US manufacturing is focused on large-ticket items, like aircraft and rockets and tanks. It's still the case that 99% of the routine goods that you buy (whether clothes or household items or toys or electronics) are made in China.

I should also say that, predictably, the Indian workers for the contract companies tended to rarely stay in their jobs longer than a year, so quality tended to be poor and training was a constant battle. And with a 15%+ pay increase every year (vs 2-3% in the US, in the few years they actually gave any pay increases at all), they were going to catch up eventually. But even at the time, other managers admitted privately that management and other costs ate up the difference and they weren't actually saving any money...

...which made me wonder why they continued to do it. Some kind of corruption?I always thought that after the initial wave of super-cut-rate offshore work, that I had to be missing something, not seeing something, to explain why it continued when it decreased quality and didn't save on net costs.

How do you know the managers aren't ALREADY from India? That was the case a couple of jobs ago for me, it was not exactly reassuring to hear from the high-level manager who was pushing for and managing the outsourcing, who happened to be Indian, that "these (offshore) people are not replacing any jobs in the US". It was completely false, of course, unless he meant that the six-month gap between each round of mass company-wide layoffs and adding more staffing to the offshore/outsource location were somehow disconnected. It really meant that each year they laid people off in the US when business slowed down, then added Indians a few months later when business picked up again. Since business was cyclical on an annual basis, it was a pretty predictable way to shift work offshore more and more each year.

Because then companies would have to pay for employees' training and education instead of letting people pay for it themselves. Didn't get overqualified enough for that internship or gain enough relevant skills on your own time and dime? No job for you, we'll just find somebody from India who did.

And the 17th Amendment didn't help either, now that there's no representation of state government interests in Congress.

Why wait for the second offense?

A Burger King near me has had one of these ordering kiosks for several years. I always use it, I see some other people use it, but overall it's probably faster to let the human cashier handle the order, and most people don't bother with it. (It's got too many "newbie-friendly" voice prompts and delays and swooshing animations and whatnot, not to mention the frequent prompts of "would you like to add [X] to your order?".)

You're mostly correct, except that, relative to cost of living, quite possibly a majority of the population has been getting POORER when it comes to hourly earnings.

This is usually covered up by using mean income instead of median, by using household income (not taking into account the number of hours worked by a "household") instead of income per hour worked, etc.

OK, got it. And I totally agree. Exactly right that while software engineers may be the upper-middle of the income spectrum among ordinary wage earners, they're still closer to the bottom compared to the actual high end of the spectrum. But they're a convenient target for those wishing to deflect attention from the real problem.

Pushing down engineering wages is certainly not pushing down the TOP, it's just pushing down one of the lower layers even lower.

(Greenaspan that is, Gates is probably right though.)

No, he's not right. The income inequality problem is not between engineers and common workers, it's between CEOs and common workers.

Except that it is a problem. Soon, the only "skilled job" left that robots won't easily be able to replace (or will they?) will be as a prostitute. I sure hope you can "adapt your skills" adequately.