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having to raise their prices, but we also know their prices went up, regardless.

We're stuck getting stuff made in the third world with third world standard quality control (meaning very poor to none) sold to us at first world prices. Guess who pockets the difference--and it's not the shareholders.

wages would increase to cover the cost of living increases. What happened to that particular school of thought?

Wages have never kept pace with inflation and in the double digit OPEC inflation of the late 70s and early 80s, were allowed to fall far behind the inflation rate. They have never recovered.

Rich men thought that if they didn't have to pay the workers, they would be able to keep inflation near zero. Because of the structure of fiat money, that has never been possible, even with the Fed giving it away to banks. Unfortunately, their fear is that if wages are allowed to rise with inflation, they'll always make inflation worse, something that has never happened.

Since that is the case, don't look for any improvement until something terrifies them or makes them desperate.

Using people who were new to the systems meant it cost more to code and maintain the systems. The company I worked for at the time and was high enough to see the machinations and to be cut down for objecting. anyway.

The company ended up hiring H1B visa consultants and outsourcing more programming to India for the coding. at that point I was doing the "numbers" managing the costs of multimillion dollar projects and could see the costs rise - so why did the company do this?

First understand about stock options, the way most of the money was made in upper management. a base employee would pay the insider price of $40 dollars for a piece of stock, very close to the market price no deal at all - it never paid for them to cash in on that stock. Middle management like me paid $20 per stock, I profited nicely from the stock, but those in the upper upper reaches, they paid $6 per share. So by announcing the offshoring of programming, they stock took a tick up and the top level all profited nicely from that.

Then consider tax breaks. the company falsely defined all work off shored as new work, it was really maintenance, but why quibble, because they were creating new job (not in the US, but new jobs) they got a great tax break from the government. Now they were all discarding jobs of Americans but why quibble when the government is paying you for creating jobs in India.

Of course the whole thing was kind of a scam where they sold off the entire division to the company in India, and now all our clients were suddenly working with an Indian company working in India. When they sold this not profitable division, they got a tick up on stock prices again.
Here is the thing, they bought a profitable company, turned it into a non-profitable company by breaking all goo computer standards (testing? why test? put it in and fix it if a problem comes up - I really hated these people)

They also ignored what I believe was a law at the time of not sharing social security numbers over seas, it was definitely in the client contracts anyways, but company lied. I confess, against the rules, I clued in one client and they screamed blue murder - so the company had to keep a staff in the US for a while to convert names and SS numbers before sending live data to be tested in India.

thread as it's quite the eye opener.


Finances are not my forte however outsourcing call centers seems like a much different scenario than what you describe. For instance when call centers were initially outsourced to Canada would there not have been immediate and substantial savings given the lower Canada $ and no healthcare costs?

this was the same company that had frozen our salaries and decided that when people left they would just give the work to the remaining employees without a raise, I went home one day with 18 programmers I was managing and when I came in the next morning, I had 118 people including two call centers and people in 5 states (long Island, South Carolina (call center) , Hawaii, Chicago and I don't even remember, it was 12 years ago, and 3 countries - Canada, and Ireland as well as the US. That didn't last to long, I just could not do it, about 1 year. I spent a lot of time encouraging them to quit and find a job that would be there in the future. Then I just physically collapsed, when I came back the call centers were closed while I was on disability, so I missed all the drama and what ever else happened.

Having something written or edited overseas means that someone here has to rewrite it. The designs are frequently done with knowledge but no wisdom; the templates are a mess and take a lot of unraveling, or just a lot of time to use.

In coding, at first there was a lot of puffery about how overseas firms were working at "Level 5," highly competent and all that. Our executives seemed to feel that just being overseas meant "highly competent," which, to put it mildly, is not the case.

And then you get into what people don't seem to understand about privatization: somebody's got to oversee the work, unless you just don't care how it's done.

I could go on.

but in truth they were not even level 2. I would ask then for documentations and they had, it, yes indeed they had it but somehow I never got a copy. The code was done ungracefully, you could tell they had no plan behind it. and test, OMG the lack of testing was horrible, Before we were bought by this large company, we were level 3/4 compliant and In my department I had set up electronic documentation and testing standards that were testing that proved things worked, not that they couldn't find a bug. We kept and build up test data bases that we used to track what changed in programs/systems when ever things were changed, based on what we had when we originally tested, If you keep and maintain that, testing is a breeze. But thses peopel over seas wanted to test only with live data. Ugh, not compliant even level 1.

Now that the price of gasoline has "normalized" the prices remain at their increased levels.

when call centers were outsourced, so it was prices increases with loss of jobs.

I think we have to remember that businesses will charge a price to make a profit, but they will charge whatever the market will bear. Apple and Samsung charge $700 for the newest phones, because people will pay it.

People's cable bill goes up and they grumble and pay it. Or they downgrade or cut cable altogther. It's those cable cutters or cable nevers that keep the price of cable in check. As younger generations enter the cable market, fewer are signing up. Ultimately, the price of cable will have to be low enough to keep their subscription rate up.

There is no particular advantage to a company cutting the prices of their services/goods if it doesn't increase sales. That's just a fact of life

benefit from lower prices for the consumer. This was only a very temporary phenomenon. The quality of the products is down and the price is up.

There is no advantage to the American citizen none, absolutely none.

Why has the president betrayed us?