Re:(OT) Outsourcing developer to India and China - As an Oracle developer I am miffed

From: Howard J. Rogers <hjr_at_dizwell.com>
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 02:31:45 +1000
Message-Id: <3f858e00$0$28122$afc38c87@news.optusnet.com.au>

Noons wrote:

>

>> I think you're just getting wildly speculative now, Noons. If I charge
>> $4000 per day for my consultancy services, I have 1 customer. If I charge
>> $400 I have 10. That's supply and demand, just like it is for Mars bars.
>> They didn't have them then, either. But the law still holds true.
>>

>
>
> Unfortunately, that is not how the real world operates.
> The notion that a cheaper product will attract more sales
> is not necessarily true with services. Try to sell your services
> to a company that is outsourcing overseas. Even if you lower
> your rates BELOW the rate they are getting, you STILL will not
> get them to change over. Not without a few other incentives.
> It's not as linear as that.

Since when was supply and demand necessarily linear? Heard of Giffen goods? Luxury items? What you describe is nothing more than boring old price sensitivity. Then there are network effects, fixed costs to recover and so forth... none of this is new, none of it has just been invented, all of it is standard economic theory.

>
>

>> Then you are using the word secular with some strange meaning that I'm
>> not aware of. It means 'non-religious', and has nothing to do with
>> absolutist monarchies, who in any case frequently defended their
>> absolutism on the grounds of *divine* right.

>
> Where I learned, a secular society meant a society where
> the structures of power and decision are held by a rigid,
> non-elected and non-religious hierarchy. Of which most 17th
> century absolutist monarchies were a perfect example. Hence
> the use of the expression. And why economic theories emanating
> from such societies IMO are highly suspect when applied to our
> times. Regardless of whatever the fads may be with modern
> economic theories.

Sorry Noons. That's not what the word means. You can throw in the phrase 'non-religious' to get close, but it has none of the implications of non-elected, rigid or absolutist you wish to imbue it with.

>

>> Come off it. If I offered to shoe your horses, that was a service, of
>> which the cost of the horse-shoe was but a part. Barbers existed back
>> then. Farm labourers had nothing but their labour to offer. Chimney
>> sweeps. Lamp lighters. Piss-pot emptiers. The list goes on and on. Of
>> course they had services back then.

>
> Narh, sorry. The whole reason why there was so much change
> in society since those days is precisely because most of those
> "services" were provided not from a free market available choice
> but from an imposed rigid social structure, mostly comprised of
> "caste" systems.

I don't know where you're getting this stuff from, but it's simply not true (and I have a thesis on economic history of the 18th century you can read if you like). So we aren't going to get anywhere with this.

[snip]
>

>> > Heck. It worked to stop the Nam war, what can you say?
>>
>> Did it really? I suppose that's some new meaning of the word 'worked'.
>> 500,000 troops, countless billions, 40,000 US lives, Vietnam wrecked,
>> Cambodia ruined and heading for a genocide. The US got much the same
>> terms in 73 that they could have had in 69: Nixon fought on, and all the
>> protests on all the campuses did nothing to stop him.

>
> Yes they did. Due to the protests. I didn't say they were
> supposed to win the war.

Neither did I.

>Stop the war was the purpose,

And my point was that they didn't.

> stuff the winning bit. And they succeeded.

Again, define succeeded. The war was going full-pelt by 1965. It ended in 1973. So just how that counts as success, I can't fathom.

>Nixon was just a
> temporary aberration. As was proven by his impeachment.

Noons, you'll have to brush up on your history. Nixon wasn't impeached: he resigned before it got to that point. And in any case, you might recall a certain burglary had rather more to do with the near-impeachment than the Vietnam War (the article of impeachment concerning the illegal bombing of Cambodia was one of the weakest of the proposed articles). And 4 years isn't an 'abberation' in any case (and I have a masters thesis on the Vietnam war, too, if you're interested).

You are welcome to believe all this stuff Noons, but I can't discuss it with you when you invent history, ignore 2 centuries of economic thought, invest words with meanings they never had before and make demonstrably hazy claims like 'they had no services in the 18th century'. We apparently just don't speak the same language about the issue, so we'll have to leave it there.

Regards
HJR

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Received on Thu Oct 09 2003 - 11:31:45 CDT