... since that defense corporation is majority owned by the Bush family and James Baker.

... after having saved this law firm in Seattle, Bogle and Gates, some bucks when I was an IT contractor there, I applied for a position which opened in their tech support department. For some peculiar reason, instead of hiring me, a tried and true quantity, they opted to instead hire a woman who had been fired from two previous jobs in San Francisco --- for embezzling.

One day the partners arrived at work to find all their operating funds had disappeared, and today Bogle and Gates is no more since they dissolved the firm without any operating funds to continue on. (Maybe crooks hire crooks, after all, considering who that Gates was the grandfather to?)

...for purchasing vibrators in six or seven states?

... at either JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup or Morgan Stanley. If they aren't too bright, they try the TSA, which has a track record of hiring felons, although they tend to bust them frequently for pilfering luggage. (If you think I jest, look it up!)

Wall Street, responsible for the global economic meltdown (JPMorgan CHASE, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, etc., etc.), is in Cyrus Vance Jr.'s district, and it was Vance Junior who went after some tiny little Chinese immigrant bank, Abacus Bank, instead of going after a single one of the major players.

I call bullcrap on this!

Plus, Gladwell took that contract to spew out propaganda against WikiLeaks and Assange!

You are so bloody ignorant your mental instability is really besides the point! What an effing idiot!!!

This is the royal jackhole who took a contract to put out propaganda about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange? Screw him to hell and beyond.

Back when I was really, really at the top of my game, when I was really an experienced and skilled coder, I couldn't find squart, or was considered a hardcore unemployable for some unfathomable reason. You make a few valid points, but overall I have to disagree with the thrust of your thesis. Fundamentally, those doing the hiring are clueless, which is why so many frauds get hired, and the real programming talent is filtered out.

Recently, the local news wondered if the Seattle area would have more tech startups with ensuing local Microsoft layoffs, but with their established pattern, it is far more likely that the market of patent trolls will grow.

It used to be that the hotshots would leave a well-established startup to begin their own startup, but they aren't hiring the real talent anymore, just offshoring jobs and importing foreign visa scab workers. They have destroyed the pattern of amortization at the cognitive level.

The very first time that happened to me was waaaay back in the 1970s, when as a contract programmer with IBM I was on one of their developer teams, and several years later, replied to an ad for that same software, but they were requiring 10 years experience, and I explained that I had more experience then anyone else, as I had been on the development team. They never got back to me?

Well stated, Greyfox, well stated!

. . . shitting me? Why not the Liberty Lobby, Ken Rogoff or Martin Feldstein, they all share equal "validity" and "credibility."

. . . those of us who aren't arithmetically-challenged have noticed that this official fourth jobless recovery (although really the fifth or sixth, and we are now told that all the jobs lost have been created again, at least in numerical quantity), that with each and every one of those four downturns, meltdowns, etc., that exactly one-fifth of the US workforce was laid off --- now, to have precisely the same portion of the workforce laid off each and every effing time is just a little bit too mind boggling to be taken as accidental --- throw into the equation all those jobs now being offshored, or created offshore, and more and more foreign visa scab workers imported by the corporations (remember, please, that the NYC Times Square attempted car bomber had been sponsored to this country from Pakistan, by a hedge fund based in Connecticut).

So, you are telling me that all those engineers, programmers and research scientists I have known, and many others I have read about and corresponded with, who have had their jobs offshored, don't exist? You really have an imaginary mindset. Things are far bleaker than you can imagine, bubba!

Take a close look at the GDP, then come back and dare tell me we have an economy any longer in Amerika!