Re:Uh-huh - Ask the Intel employees that lost jobs (Score 1)

You make an excellent point that's almost always lost in these discussions. At the macroeconomoic level there is no closed pool of jobs. As for the anecdotes about getting outsourced, everyone who is unfortunate enough to lose a job loses it for some reason, I'm not sure why one is better than another. Is it somehow more positive that an electronics engineer in 1973 lost their job because their company collapsed as opposed to their job being outsourced? Thats what happened to the American consumer electronics industry back then. Foreign (Japanese) companies were able to produce a cheaper product, so the American companies went under. Today, American companies are trying to avoid that fate and stay competitive by outsourcing certain aspects of design support and production to cheaper labor markets. The main difference is that instead of the American company getting wiped out by the foreign company, the American company stays profitable and pays taxes to the U.S., and keeps its remaining employees employed. Neither scenario is great for the laid off American worker but the latter is more positive from a larger economic perspective. Finally, at least we can take advantage of the fact that the US is one of the easiest places in the world to create your own job. The barriers to entrepreneurship at any scale are lower here than almost anywhere else in the world. Given the training and brain power of the slashdot community, we are better positioned to take advantage of that than most, and probably shouldn't be complaining nearly as much as an out of work steel or textile worker.