Shipping work overseas saves money that drops to the bottom line as profit.  Stock prices are today keyed to earnings-per-share as is, to a certain extent, executive compensation.  Now look at the average time that an institutional investor actually holds a given stock.  This can be measured in months, sometimes in weeks, but hardly ever in years.  So the investor timeline is short and the CEO timeline -- with average tenancies in those positions at less than five years -- is not much longer.  So offshoring works great for these two groups.  The stock goes up and along with it, the CEO's bonus and stock options.  By the time the long-term effects of this policy are felt, both the investors and the CEO are long gone.  And even if the CEO is still around, it is with a golden parachute negotiated long before that often pays him more to go away than he might have got to stay.

PBS Cringely on IT Outsourcing

Instead, it was a lesser-known HBO program, Da Ali G. Show, that infiltrated a black-tie Nashville Opera fund-raiser last week at Loews Vanderbilt Hotel. In the show, British actor Sacha Baron Cohen adopts several different personas to goof on people. To target the opera fund-raiser, Cohen turned into the character of Borat, a naive TV reporter from Kazakhstan.

British actor Sacha Baron Cohen in Nashville

] Some bright bulbs over at Microsoft Research (MSR) have
] organized a Symposium on Social Computing on March 29th
] and 30th at the Columbia Winery north of Redmond.  Mark
] your calendars!  Word is, the talks will be streamed to
] the Web.  Stay tuned for details.

Social Computing Symposium at Microsoft

] Thomas Thurman has developed Joule, a nice application
] that tracks 'friend-of'? relationships over time on
] LiveJournal and displays a user's friendships over time
] in either tabular or graph format. Note that LiveJournal
] features an integrated aggregator; friendship there is
] roughly equivalent to subscription in the weblog world.

Many-to-Many: Visualizing Friendship Dynamics

Is the American middle class in jeopardy because modern communications technology enables U.S. firms to use workers in India for tasks such as call-center staffing and software development? Pundits appear to be divided on this issue.

I recommend this article because it is wrong. As someone eloquently stated in the threads attached to it, equilibrium conditions are states you reach in physical systems only when things stop changing, which only happens in idealistic models. Understanding whats wrong with this picture and you understand why you can't rely on the "everything is going to be fine in the long run" arguements from arm chair free market economists. The long run they are talking about could take generations... This article also links to a number of articles that this author disagrees with. The enemy of my enemy?

Taking Advantage

Europe's Mars orbiter has detected evidence of water on the planet.

Scientists Say They Have Discovered Ice on Mars

] Doyle Rodgers, the white-haired, full-bearded furniture
] salesman better known to Atlanta television audiences as
] the "Wolfman," died Wednesday. He was 67.

Atlanta's Wolfman passes

... Until the president is willing to employ carrots as well as sticks, he will make little headway in changing Iranian or Syrian behavior. The president's lack of initiative on this point is especially disappointing.

... and now you know the rest of the story.

Why Libya Gave Up on the Bomb

] Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary
] Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a
] year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically
] passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The
] Globe.
]
] From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003,
] members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer
] glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic
] communications without a password. Trolling through
] hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points
] and accounts of private meetings discussing which
] judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what
] tactics.

Boston.com / News / Nation / Infiltration of files seen as extensive

] The Economist magazine, hardly an anti-American
] newsweekly, called Rumsfeld's remarks "unworthy of a
] nation which has cherished the rule of law from its very
] birth."

Want a real reason to be pissed off at the U.S. Government? Finally you can put your head where your heart is. :)

News round up on Cuba detainees