Current programmers won't work on Evil Cobol... especially because the CS aficionados had warned everyone it was obsolete... wait for it... 40 years ago when the doofuses (& their predecessors) decided to use it, and kept putting off upgrades. And then they bent that pretext to demand millions of cheap, pliant, low-skilled, H-1Bs with flexible ethics. But now they want to burden software developers with the bureaubums' errors. Harrrrrumph!

It still fits the economic model. All products are ultimately intangible. That's one of the points I was trying to make when consulting (being unscrupulously crowd-sourced) on "Jerry Maguire". There's undefined "stuff" before value creation, then valuable berry patches, farm-land, lumber for building, sand for concrete, ore for steel, sand for micro-chips... is recognized by some individual (or via a series of communicated realizations by individuals) and afterwards, everyone says, "but of course. That's no big deal." One science/tech book I read recently commented that middle schooler science projects, if they'd had to come up with the methods, processes, equipment on their own, wouls a mere 20-30 years ago gotten them a Nobel prize. It is that intellectual creation of value that is the key. As to mass production, there was block printing back before 1400. Lots if work to create the block(s). Not so much work to turn out hundreds or thousands of copies. Still within the economic model. You might have 3 or 6 or 200 or 5,000 individuals developing a piece of software in the 2000s, 1990s, 1980s, 1970s, 1960s, (churning out straight-forward code, experimenting repeatedly and consulting with each other, brain-storming, to develop more difficult ground-breaking portions), but only a few techs (albeit skilled to avoid wastage), using tools to make/ distribute copies. None of this is new. He just wants more cheap, young, pliant bodies with flexible ethics to aid in more privacy violation schemes, and scrape out disproportionate gains for himself. The tech execs talk about library and training grants, but we see less on the ground in UK, USA, & Europe.

At least 50 years...I had elder relatives who worked health care. But then it did not allow for as much privacy violation as the government and the guilds and the protection rackets desired. I like the concept of there having been an "industrious revolution", though. The economists I've worked with directly assign various dates in the 1700s as the start of the "Industrial Revolution". One comparative, before vs. after study I recall crunching statistics for put it at 1760. Others might just as arbitrarily cite Roman times and the massive water-mill driven grain mill/ bread baking factory, or the Halstatt culture manufacturing centers' production lines, or the first steam locomotive, or Rumsey's steam-boat in the 1780s, or Uncle Nick's improved internal combustion engine in 1867. But the primary employment problem, today, are the dishonest bodyshoppers.

Right. Not enough guns in the hands of trained citizenry. Not enough knowledge of religion. Not enough honest, capitalism free of force-and-fraud initiation (including those force and fraud initiating bodyshoppers and privacy attackers & violators in the Seattle, NY, & Sili Valley & academia executive suites). Too much crony socialism. Too many people defenseless people. Too many force and fraud initiating collectivists like this "anti-Trumper".

The gamer videos testify he was a "serious professional". Operating in a "gun-free zone". That always prevents mayhem....not.

"Of course they do. "Profit above all else"." Ahh, but, as the author of one of the previous loop-hole riddled privacy acts (Samuel Ervin) noted, the government (neither most congress-critters nor bureaubums nor oath-breaking jusges) does not like privacy, and it would be very difficult to write legislation that they could not and would not quickly nullify... or, as others realize, turn it inside out, by defining public info - including info about visa applicants and illegal alien invaders - to be private, and personal private info about citizens to be public. Now, where are those pitch-forks and feathers my umpty-great grand-parents had during their sojourn in western Pennsylvania?...oh, and be sure to support light-rail transit... of politicians & bureaubums!

Yes, it might explain Los Angeles, Sili Valley, Sacramento, San Fran, NY, DC, Boston, Chicagoland, Miami, Sydney, London... but fortunately, we can hope that global warming, by flooding them out, might cull the herd, so to speak...or not.

They already gave them their source code. Ill-Begotten Monstrosities already sold them Lenovo. This could drag down the Chinese economy for decades, while the USA is freed of kludgey baggage to advance the state of the art. Way to Win!

âoeIn the US there is a shortage of talent, an awful lot. And in any other country at a given time. The question is whether you stop everything until that local talent...â You should give the âoedon your wadersâ warning. There has never been any actual evidence of a STEM talent shortage published. Yah, sure, every few months a few STEM executives get together at the country club or congress, but I repeat myself... and whine that they want cheaper, more pliant, low-skilled laborers with ever more spurious non-merit-based credentials & âoequalificationsâ, with ever more flexibility in ethics, to implement their latest privacy violation, barriers to entry schemes. That is NOT evidence of shortage. They still refuse to relocate talent, still refuse to fly talented USA citizens/ UK citizens/ German/ Scandinavian... citizens for interviews, still refuse to invest in training (or at least not anywhere near as much as they did in the decades before H-1B was hatched), still refuse to purchase print ads, still refuse to do their recruiting in such a way that illegal discrimination in hiring can be caught and prosecuted, still retain sheisters to fabricate phony/spurious pretexts on which to reject able and willing USA...citizen job applicants. IOW, their behavior is evidence that there is plenty of talent. Every year for several decades, tens of thousands of USA citizens have been getting degrees (plus more who attain other academic & non-academic credentials) in STEM fields... only for one-third to two-thirds to be rejected for STEM employment. One could understand if they rejected the lowest 1%, 5%, maybe even 10%. But, of course, if there were actually a severe talent shortage, the execs would be rushing to grab even those up and bring them up to speed through customized training... Only they donâ(TM)t.

Agreed...but there are different schools of thought on what constitute "best practices". Brilliant, experienced software developer A's elegant best is an incomprehensible and un-maintainable to brilliant, experienced SW dev B. I've seen several people I consider to be in the world's top 1K go at it for several days at a clash over such professional differences before a manager became aware enough to break the log-jam.

The trouble with the H-1B visa program is that it is dishonest. They *claim* it is a means to get the "best and brightest" but that is not who they hire through it. As a matter of fact, they oppose any sort of quality standards. They refuse to interview able and willing USA citizen professionals, but claim they just cannot find any *qualified* (wink wink nudge nudge) applicants. They won't say exactly what "qualified" means, but it certainly does not mean "able and willing to do the job". But, if you are from the 3rd world and you once did something via the web which triggered a data-base look-up you must be a genius, must be both best and brightest, even if you don't know object->relation migration from object-relationship modeling language, or 3rd normal form relational from hierarchical. Whereas the USA candidate who redesigned and implemented a massive logistics system couldn't possibly do a job using a toy rdbms that any half-bright HS student could figure out with a couple hours of effort, because only if he'd used that exact brand and version on the job for 2-3 years could he possibly manage to make mods or create new reports. IOW it is all DC lobbyist malarkey. There never was a skills shortage or "gap", just a tissue of lies to fool the willing media and the gullible coasters -- East and West -- and give the pols and executives a bit of cover for the cuts in training, relocation, and churn of noobs.

So, what's your point? None of the last few president regimes, nor the last 10 or more congresses have any respect for the USA constitution, the citizenry, nor the culture. They don't care about worsening over-population, over-crowding, the virtually non-existent borders and ports, the worsening dysfunctionality of job markets, the waste of bright USA citizens' lives. Heck, they can't even differentiate between different skill-sets and different levels of skills... Nor can the media. None of this "touches them where they live".

That's about 1.4M legal immigrants (legal permanent residents = green card grantees) per year, over 580K on H+L and about 635K with E guest-work visas. 70K "refugees", 25K "asylees" per year, including about 1,520 known Muslim terrorists whom cousin Obummer and Jeh Johnson assure us will never misbehave ever in the USA.

Given the comments and practices of the employer/sponsors, immigration lawyers, lobbyists for guest-work visa programs, and, yes, many of the visa grantees, there seems to be quite a bit of evidence of belief in guest-worker privilege.

"So what exactly is the difference between a shirt made from quality cotton with $15 an hour labor that costs $25 and a shirt made from quality cotton with $1 a day labor that costs $5?"
...

That price would much more likely be $45 or more for the shirt that cost $15 at the factory, and $20-$30 for the cheap one. The next step from manufacturer typically doubles the price, the next step in international transactions typically is a multiplier of 3 to 5 on top of that, and then there's yet another mark-up or two after it gets to the USA or UK or Europe where it will be sold retail, according to the books on India and Red China and Malaysia that I've read (and an econ professor of my acquaintance who was in VietNam doing research).

You're leaving out variables. Price also depends on the label (both highly-promoted "designers" and due to product differentiation), on how much it's been down-engineered (lower-quality design of the stitching pattern, for example), thread-count, weave- or knit-pattern, shipping and other mark-ups along the supply chain.

In your hypothetical example, you're artificially and arbitrarily holding "quality cotton" (i.e. "quality materials") as a constant, and it is a variable. We've seen CNBC video of retail chains arguing to product-inventors and -makers that they should substitute less durable, lower-quality materials, making design changes which would make the product less comfortable, less durable/shorten it's useful life... I.e. to make it cheaper rather than to hold the quality constant and make it more efficiently and less expensively.

You can see it with shirts, shoes, cars, hand-tools, power-tools, machine-tools, sewing machines, sticky notes... just about anything. We've seen a lot of reduction in quality of materials and workmanship as manufacture was moved off-shore while retail prices were held constant or increased, profit rates increased, and compensation packages of many executives soared, while compensation of many (not all) worker-bees was stagnant or fell. We've also seen quality and prices vary with the prices of natural gas and other feed-stocks, cotton, and resulting shifting blends.

It would be different if all the quality options were constantly available in the retail stores, but that's not how it works. They completely remove one set of goods and only offer the new set, so the market is impaired; you don't have the option to merely pick a different item off of the next shelf or buy it at the store next-door. For many many goods the markets have been bifurcated: cheap trash at low prices (but still too expensive for the quality), and hideously expensive retail goods of only moderate quality in many cases. For many goods they don't offer (in some cases even allow) honest country-of-origin labeling (COOL) so that you can choose on that basis if you wish, so that's a throw-back to the old evil pre-market, mercantilist, and hyper-regulated feudal guild and crown-granted monopoly days.

It's all been covered over the last 15 years and more in the media that cover economics and finance and such, a little here and a little there. Once every several years, I run across an article or a bit of coverage on the tube that brings most of the elements together.

"What is the difference between a standard business program (nothing super advanced- a well recognized pattern) turned out by a $9,000 a year programmer in india vs the same program turned out by a $90,000 a year programmer in a 1st world country?"

I try to avoid "standard bidness programs", but many software products (and hardware designed or manufactured using that software) take a dive when they're off-shored. Some US and UK programmers have eked out a living by repairing the software botched by guest-workers or over-seas, but few have the contacts to make a go of it that way. But I know that not every non-USA, non-UK, non-German programmer is incompetent; a very few are quite good. And that's what all the studies tell us to expect; about 1 out of 12 can do the work of the rest of that 12... if he has the time and resources. That's 1 of 12 in the USA, and probably 1 of 12 in Hyderabad or Prague or Kiev. But they often plan to throw 5 less competent, cheaper programmers at a piece of work that 1 good programmer could do better and faster (see, e.g. ye ancient Ill-Begotten Monstrosities tome about _The Mythical Man-Month_).

I've worked with some Germans, Japanese, Polish, Koreans, Chinese, Israelis... who were very good and some who were not.