Some encouraging news on the homefront

What Really Happened has a list of links today involving the outlook for 2004 tech jobs here in the States.

Silicon Valley falls to Bangalore
Bangalore, which commenced its R&D activities in 1986 when Texas Instruments set up its product engineering centre here, is currently home to the who's who of the global tech fraternity.

The recent recession in the US also forced most corporates there to move thousands of jobs to India in addition to tech giants such as Cisco, Intel , IBM, Oracle and i2 relocating some of their Indian-origin employees from the US centres to Bangalore.

6,500 tech firms among 'walking dead'
[Liquidator Martin] Pichinson became a familiar face in Silicon Valley and other high-tech hubs, largely because so many venture capitalists summoned him and his firm, Sherwood Partners, to help clear the debris left by the dot-com implosion.

"Sadly, it looks like 2004 is going to be another busy year for me...There's still another 6,500 to 7,500 companies out there who are among the walking dead."

White-collar jobs leaving U.S.
Two new words, "outsourcing" and "off-shoring," have entered the American corporate vocabulary.

For quite a few years now, the U.S. has been unsettled by the "giant sucking sound" of blue-collar manufacturing jobs going south of the Rio Grande, and, in fact, much more often these days, going west to China and elsewhere to the far side of the Pacific.

...Where blue-collar jobs once went, first, outside the parent corporation to smaller non-unionized companies, or "out-sourcing" and, later, often entirely outside the country itself, or "off-shoring" — white-collar jobs are now beginning to go.

Under threat, therefore, is the stability and sense of security of the white-collar middle class that is the social and political foundation of every industrial nation.

..As the McKinsey Global Institute has pointed out, American consumers would benefit from lower prices for goods and services and the incomes being generated overseas would create new markets for American products.

Stop. Right there. WTF? How can you benefit from lower prices if you don't have a job providing you an income? What American products? The manufacturers have jumped ship.

Whatever. Okay. Sure. It's good for us that jobs are going overseas.

The military needs to ship some of that Iraqi sand back home here so we can all bury our heads.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.