On Feb 23, 2005, at 4:52 AM, Sanjay Laturkar wrote:
> The good and above-average do not have their livelihood affected
> anywhere. It is mostly the low-tech or labour intensive jobs that took
> flight.
Not entirely true, since there's some fairly fancy FEA and programming
tasks that are moved overseas, judging from what I see on a couple of
other lists and from some personal contacts. Quality seems to vary
widely based on what I've seen, particularly where performance depends
on a sound grasp of engineering design and the ability to pose and
solve problems which involve ambiguity. Where academic training depends
on rote learning and independent thinking in not actively encouraged,
the number crunching comes out OK but problem approach and methodology
suffer. That's a cultural thing, and can happen anywhere.
When I worked at NASA-Marshall in the 60's you could see a huge difference in the older German engineers who worked at Peenemunde and the postwar crop who were educated after the war. The Peenemunde engineers were incredibly well versed, but tended to be authoritarian (I hadn't worked for anyone with duelling scars before…); their kids and the post-war crowd didn't. We can't let cultural differences make us insular, but we can't ignore them either.
> Plain and simple eonomics at work here, rather than anything else.
Actually this is our problem. I think corporate America has been
concentrating on short-term cost-cutting to increase share prices, and
if we keep doing that it's going to destroy us. Manufacturing used to
be a matter of national pride, but it's very unfashionable these days.
We don't manufacture much in the way of consumer goods, a decline which
started with the departure of our consumer electronics manufacturing.
The same thing happened to steel production and transportation
equipment. We used to have a half dozen major commercial airframe
manufacturers, now there's only one. Japanese-designed cars are the
flat-out best sellers. The Saturn I drive was designed and built
separately because the existing GM infrastructure couldn't build cars
to compete with Honda and Toyota. Offshoring works when you can afford
to be dependent of trade policies of other nations. But if the dollar
keeps falling, we're going to be in deep doo-doo. Imports will cost
more and other nations may decide that getting paid in dollars just
isn't good thinking. So we'll see. Tigers and eagles and dragons can
co-exist as long as there's food and space for all; when water gets
scarce, co-existence takes a backseat to control of the waterholes.
On that cheerful note, I'll get back to some billable work for a change. ;->
Christopher Wright P.E. |"They couldn't hit an elephant at <a href="/group/PipingDesign/post?postID=mfhakREJ9XbU4b92DJFEiAnr9JGRu_vjwKRdJotEPA5B2TEp9I3u_ELZ38BqXroQP-eqHFU1AW99lQ">chrisw@skypoint.com</a> | this distance" (last words of Gen.
.......................................| John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania1864)
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