Wth??

[MoeMoe]

http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/2010/08/06/us-to-train-3000-offshore-it-workers/

[LFE]

Its sort of hard to imagine an "Agency for International Development" would be training domestically.
- Clearly reading about free training offers in the USA would be better.. however had to point out the name of the org.

[Kensey]

Its sort of hard to imagine an "Agency for International Development" would be training domestically.
- Clearly reading about free training offers in the USA would be better.. however had to point out the name of the org.

I think the issue is more that they appear to be training these workers to take jobs away from Americans via outsourcing.

[derricksonb]

I think the issue is more that they appear to be training these workers to take jobs away from Americans via outsourcing.

That's exactly the way it sounded to me as well.

[Chutney Daftcraft]

They say that automation and outsourcing will be the next big industry in the US.

Which to me is ironic, because if you outsource all the jobs, there won't be anyone here who can afford to buy anything.

[Kensey]

They say that automation and outsourcing will be the next big industry in the US.

Which to me is ironic, because if you outsource all the jobs, there won't be anyone here who can afford to buy anything.

There's a growing amount of talk about how we're close to hitting the point where we literally cannot progress economically without beginning the transition to what's called a "post-scarcity economy" in which automation makes the basic needs of humanity so cheap to produce that it's easier to just give them away as a public service than to try to sell them (which sounds vaguely Marxist, but isn't necessarily so as there can always be "premium" goods that can be artificially scarce and drive a capitalist economy). Alternately, maybe the US leaves manufacturing behind completely and becomes a pure self-contained service economy, producing only media and other intangible goods for export. Or we could intentionally regress technologically to a point where things are made by manual labor that don't have to be so as to fully employ the population.

The canonical examples of each outcome in fiction are Star Trek's post-scarcity Federation and the novels of Neal Stephenson (the former-US economy in Snow Crash and the community of Dovetail in The Diamond Age).

Of course back in the 50s, Reddy Kilowatt told us all that nuclear power would give us electricity "too cheap to meter".