The whole stinking thing is mental. Banks are afraid to give loans, businesses are afraid to buy, people are afraid to buy stocks...it's all mental but it is one BIG mental machine that is very difficult to influence with anything.

Bailouts and buyouts are like mental drugs. They can't eradicate the problem but they hope they can keep the lows from being AS low.

Jeremy, i take it sales have dropped off since earlier this year when gas prices were through the roof (and we "officially" recognized our recession?

I agree that confidence is what is needed here ro fix the markets.. the cure is mental (confidence) but the causes were not... that is from a culmination of poor business choices and bank practices

A lot of the big banks (City Group) are actually insolvent because of their (stupid) derivitive investing schemes, trying to make the big-bucks. That is why even with all the bailout money they have been given, they won't lend it out, they know they are insolvent and keeping the money (our Tax Dollars) to try to clean up their mess before they implode completely.

But underneath it all, is what really causing the "Mental" part, and that is lost jobs. 8 years of Bush and the R's saying (and doing) "Outsourcing is Good for America" is finally catching up. Our politicians are paid by foreign lobbiest to make it happen.

All that growth in India and China over the last 8 years is actually jobs that have been shifted from the West. Until the manufacturing jobs come back (not any time soon) it's only going to get worse. Watch this series and see what you think.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwyPi9hbN0I

Welcome to our new "Service Economy" minimum wages, no benefits.

You want fries with that?

I was wondering how long it was going to take until someone blamed Bush for them losing their job....

My industry tried outsourcing to India. It didn't work - its in the process of bringing those jobs back to the US and European offices.

That being said, I still have a team of Indian programmers that I manage - and I spend more time babysitting the work they do than I would have spent coding the work myself.

Nah, I was just commiserating with Karl.

Actually we had an extraordinary year. Way above my projections. The summer was good for Kayaks and people rehabbing older boats. The trend that I saw, mid summer when gas was out of control, was that people were selling power boats and getting sailboats and kayaks. I can't tell you how many fisherman went from powerboat to kayak. I had no idea it would be so popular.
We had a late season Tiger sales, and a few new 16's so that's always good. Christmas was good so far. Some cat sailors are going to get some nice stocking stuffers.

We had a lot of great events on the West Coast this sailing season. The 40th was awesome. That always helps dealers out.

I designed my business to have extremely low overhead and to be able to adapt to trends extremely fast if need be. I attribute our success to the fact that my family, Sarah and Jaylen (2.5) are extremely flexible in the summer. We take family trips with the parts trailer to many events during the sailing season--14 hour days are not uncommon. Also, I view my customers as friends and try to treat the m as such.

The yacht brokerage is taking off. Man, if you want to buy a big boat and have cash on hand, wait 3 months, right before people realize it's summer, there will be some deals to be had!

I have no used boats in stock right now. Usually I store up over winter and sell in spring. Things seem to be changing hands quickly these days. Desperate sellers and bargain hunting buyers with cash.

But in the Wintertime it's chill and I get to talk smack with you guys.

Still though with all the talk of doom and gloom, I've shelved a few projects and stashed away a bit more dough than usual. I have 5 customers that have lost jobs and are in dire straights, and 3 more that are about to lose their house. So blaming the media or whoever doesn't change the fact that there are some people in dire straights right now.

The future is going to be interesting to say the least.

J

Well in truth the outsourcing has been going on for what, about 20+ years? So I'm not putting all the blame on Bush, but he did spew a lot of "Outsorcing is Good for America". Here is part 2 of the above, you might want to watch it and then decide. I think this was made back in about 2003-4?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAVoVTQRrsM&NR=1

From your post above: That being said, I still have a team of Indian programmers that I manage - and I spend more time babysitting the work they do than I would have spent coding the work myself.

So, who used to do those jobs? Americans?


BTW, I fly full airplanes to India and China, and guess where is next? Africa. The Chinees are now outsourcing to Africa! Why? Because those upity Chinees workers want too much and they can get Africans to do it cheaper.

The whole stock market is a mental game where real value is not that important. What matters is making more money, fast (sounds familiar from all the spam, dont it).
Becouse the financial institutions now are clinging to what money they have out of fear of loosing it all, the rest of the economy is now hurting.

USA have gone from being a producer to being a consumer. That is not sustainable over time, so things will have to change sooner or later. I do prefer the USA to be a strong economic power compared to China or India, so I hope you are able to restructure and get moving again fast (which will be good for our economy as well).

At my company at least, Americans still do that job. Nobody was "let go" because we openned up shop over in India. Reference my previous comment about working 16 hour days. That kind of workload isn't sustainable - and I wasn't the only teammember sufferring from long nights in the office.

Fact of the matter is that we couldn't find any more qualified people to hire at the rate at which we needed to hire them when we got a huge bolus of work. India was the logical solution from a resource management perspective. However, as our competitors have found out, it costs more overall to hire over there since its requires more domestic human resources to effectively manager and quality check what comes out of there.

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Fact of the matter is that we couldn't find any more qualified people to hire at the rate at which we needed to hire them when we got a huge bolus of work.
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So... if you had paid more ... you would have found the workers?

Funny how they always leave that part out of the conversation. Like when Bush said, "The jobs Americans don't want to do." What he left off was, "...for those wages."

Or are you telling us there are no unemployed American Tech workers that would not have taken the jobs?

$5,000 a year in India (or China, or Africa) is a huge amount of money for them. Any wonder our own minimum wage didn't go up for 10 years?

Catch Lou Dobbs any night on CNN.

Outsourcing is a fact in a global economy. yes we have problems and pitfalls but we will prevail.

The % of income people had to pay for food and clothing (and furniture and transportation) was significantly higher 50 years ago. we may need a "paradigm" shift back to actual value of products, not discount to restore the good old USA as a producer (sorry wal-mart).

I think there is some irony (and perhaps a metaphor) in the fact if you want to eat natural food, without chemical and synthetic additives, it costs 25% more (organic).

Jeramy, i am glad to hear you are still doing well. Perhaps
your shop needs some new cabinets that Karl can build out of ROMIN Noodles for cheap?


PS i would hate to see the person whose stockings a Hobie would fit in

I used to eat a lot of Top Ramen, but I've been trying to go easy on it lately. It's true you can get a 48-pack from Costco, and it's filling and cheap, but it's really high in Sodium. Since high blood pressure runs in my family, I gotta go easy on it.

DHo
TheMightyHobie18 1067

Has anyone seen those anti Wal Mart ads lately? The 'paid for by' goes by so fast I can't ever catch it. It's crazy those ads are hitting the mainstream these days.

There was a news article in the SJ Merc News about the local KFC using a call center to take their drive through orders. Anyone catch that? You order and it goes to India, then they email it to the cashier. That's really crazy!

If Karl gets out here, he'd better bring his boat!

Hey DHO, come visit sometime!

PAID FOR BY K-MART!



PS i am not a wal-mart basher.. i shop there from time to time.. I have friends that boycot them... and purchase their "Made in China" goods from Sears



Theres the entrapanural spirit!!!

We could probably pay whatever it would take to get more people in our US-based offices. However, we cannot do that and remain competitive as a business when our competition can cut costs more effectively that we can.

And when my company stops winning contracts because we aren't competitive, then we're all out of a job over there.

Believe me, I was LIVID when my VP of my business unit told me, to my face, when I got my last raise that "[he] isn't going to get in a bidding war for programmers when [he] can pay $10k/year to get the same Human Resource over in India"

I wanted to punch the guy, I really did. However, since then I found that my job has gone from being technical to being the liason between the technical human resource units to the non-technical client representatives. I spend most of my days on presentation teleconferences instead of actually programming much.

Just for the sake of my own blood pressure keep the political stuff out. You got your golden boy, shut up. I'm tired of it.

Jeremy- I'll make it out there sometime, but I doubt it'll be next year. It'll take a year of having lots of work for me to get caught back up again.

Top Ramen is crap, the Ichiban ramen noodles are awesome, a bit more money at $.40 a pack, but when you eat it, you'll know the extra $.15 was well worth the expense.

Karl, remember Forrest Gump. His shrimp business sucked until the hurricane wiped out all the other boats. If the heavily leveraged shops go under you become the only game in town.

There are no problems, just opportunities.

The two major industries here in my town are gone now. We lost the pulp mill, The ice and cold storage, lumber mill and no salmon fishing and a shortened crab season. People here are working at fast food with college degrees, (if you know someone to get you in). I'm unemployed for a while now, with no prospects of employment.

Just curious, but what did you do before?