Carly Fiorina cries for govt bailout

[harebrain]

From the washingtonpost.com:

An organization of high-technology executives yesterday renewed industry calls for government spending and tax cuts to spur research, improved mathematics and science education and policies that make building technology infrastructure a national priority.

Read the article at

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63380-2004Jan7.html

 

[DrJavaJoe]

If we want to spur research, improve mathematics and science education then we need to aggressively pursue putting a man on Mars and a space station on the moon etc. We could double every teacher's salary, double government grants to the Universities and get nothing in return, but put a man on mars and technology will prosper.

I read articles like this one and it gives me a since of how egotistical we are as technologically advanced countries, 'I dare these third world nation go out and educate their children and try to compete with us, don't they know they are third world'. We just need to stay ahead of the curve.

 

[rosieb]

I don't know about the US, but I do know about the UK (admittedly mainly from anecdotal research).

There is a dearth of competent teachers (ie those who can spell) even at primary level. Above that, how do you train people in science and technology when there are not suitably qualifed teachers? Hence the move to the softer subjects. Major science faculties in UK universities are closing because of the lack of students.

Somehow competent people need to be recruited to teach, teachers are not valued, so why would any competent person go into teaching (I know a number who have left the profession, citing the inability to spend their time actually teaching, rather than completing paperwork).

It's in the less technologically advanced countries that education, particularly in science and technology, is really valued. Is it any wonder that they are starting to compete seriously?

Putting a man on Mars might, at least, stimulate some interest in the harder subjects. But staying ahead of the curve could prove difficult.

 

[lionelhill]

Agree, Rosieb.
Meanwhile it's so hard to get any sort of reliable career in research that I can think of a fair few people who've abandoned it and gone into teaching; but is it really good for research if our science teachers are fed-up scientists who gave up on research?
The real trouble is it's just not cool to know anything technical any more. It's not just the so-called "yob culture". The far more insidious problem is the highly educated decision makers who have a still worse attitude: to many of them an MBA is vital but a degree in a science subject shows that the second-rate holder just didn't have the business acumen or drive to get themselves a first-rate management qualification/law degree/whatever. How many technical people have managers who pride themselves on having no clue whatsoever about what goes on underneath them ("don't let myself get caught up in day-to-day trivialities&quot?

And have you noticed how people in "soft" areas can bore you to tears at parties (how much do you really want to know about the rise of homeoastrology, or the role of gender-chalenging literature in the diversification of English poetry?), and they're regarded as cultured. But if you start waxing lyrical about a thing of beauty like Bressenham's line algorithm you're (rightly?) regarded as a boring geek of the worst possible kind. Oh, and obviously computer people only read Terry Pratchett.
(rant over, sorry everyone)

 

[jrbarnett]

My experiences are similar. My mum's cousin is an engineering lecturer at a university in the northern part of England, and he has said that they just don't get the students now, the vast majority of students go for the Media Studies and Journalism type courses.

Lionelhill: Parties - I haven't been invited to one for years.

John

 

[rosieb]

lionelhill
The real trouble is it's just not cool to know anything technical any more.
That hits the nail on the head. Frightening when all companies rely so much on information technology but "leave it to the IT dept" becomes a mantra.

The problem with MBAs is that many take the qualification too early, without being to apply any real-world experience and thus real criticism to the theory. It also depends on the school, all MBAs are not equal. I took mine after significant work experience (and a science degree). It's useful, but not a short-cut to management excellence (it does allow me to trade references, throw me Handy, I can trump it with Ohmae, silly but often effective).

Too many organizations focus on the financials seeing IT and people simply as part of the "overheads".

You're right, mention IT at a party and people's eyes glaze over (or they assume you do data input) give me something like Bressenham's line algorithm anytime (I'm not familiar with it but I'm sure it would be much more interesting than the normal rubbish).

 

[dyarwood]

On the subject of education I have recently graduated in a Masters of Mathematics degree. This is a graded masters degree and as a result when I apply for jobs people only look at the grade and not the fact that it is a masters. The degree is MMath. I have only seen one employer who knows what that is. Becasue few people know what it is was it even worth it me spending a 4th year doing very specialist maths if it won't help me in my future? Also who has heard of this degree?

 

[dogbert2]

According to a professor friend of mine, a lot of students make the mistake of trying to achieve a masters degree within a year of getting their bachelor's. It used to be that students would get a bachelors, work for 2-5 years for some real-world experience, then perhaps return to work on a master's degree.

The reason why there are dropoffs in I.T. enrollment is the lack of applicable work for most students graduating with a degree in IS/IT/CS, etc. Also, a lot of graduates (or cert. holders) don't seem to understand you will spend some time working on getting your first job (usually on the help or support desk), and then shedding the entry level label after about 3 years of work experience. The end result is that at the moment, we simply have too many IT/IS/CS types for the number of jobs which are actually available, and it doesn't help matters that companies simply aren't hiring (rather they are getting by with less staff, more automation, etc).

Carly Fiorina (while a decent CEO) doesn't seem to understand that government bailouts are only short term solutions to perhaps a very LONG term problem.

 

[chiph]

Lionelhill -

It's not just the so-called "yob culture".

I think "yob" and "culture" cancel each other out. ;-)

Have you read "Clockwork Orange" lately?


But if you start waxing lyrical about a thing of beauty like Bressenham's line algorithm you're (rightly?) regarded as a boring geek of the worst possible kind.

It's "Bresenham", and he was my graphics professor. While students at other universities were doing cool stuff like image analysis & 3D animation, we spent the semester drawing lines and circles. :-(

Chip H.


If you want to get the best response to a question, please check out FAQ222-2244 first

 

[lionelhill]

(1) Sorry I misspelt the name. I'm not the world's best typist. He was just the first thing that came to mind that I thought most people would have heard of. And much as it's neat, I don't think I'd have enjoyed a whole semester of it either. I'm afraid I've never even seen the circle version.
(2) The "yob culture" thing, I agree entirely. It is a phrase much used in english politics at the moment. I've seen the film of clockwork orange and it's scary.
My point was that the "we don't need no edjukashun" people aren't half so dangerous as the slick and talented decision-makers and polititions who take the attitude that knowing how something works is somehow below their level.

The other UK problem (and I'm not the only one who thinks this - it gets written by grumpy characters in Newspapers quite a lot) is that nothing is allowed to be difficult any more. Most of us don't find technical maths very easy to understand. That doesn't mean we should trim it out of all possible education so we don't upset people by presenting them with something that's hard.

 

[dyarwood]

dogbert2

My degree was a Masters degree straight from the start. I don't have a BSc just an MMath.

lionelhill

My degree had a lot of technical maths in it, Chaos theory, quantum mechanics and such like. As you say it is difficult to learn so when someone can learn it what are they faced with. Doing another 3 - 4 years PHd with the remote chance of getting a research topic or go into employment where in 3 - 4 years it is possible to earn a lot more than research would give. What is the answer?

BSc course costing about £10000 - 15000
MSc course costing about £10000 - 15000
PHD course earning £9000 pa possibly and with fees paid. So faced with debts of nearly £30000+ by the time a phd is achieved what are the chances of getting a research job?

 

[harebrain]

At the end of the article:

Among the CSPP proposals is an Infrastructure Investment Act of 2004, which would provide more favorable tax and regulatory rules to encourage building more broadband networks.

Why do Fiorina, Dell, et al. want this super infrastructure? Perhaps to create an even better environment for offshoring--to export even more jobs? Why should taxpayers foot this cost--isn't it those CEOs and their businesses that stand to gain?

When the jobs go offshore, where will innovation come from? Aren't these businesses sowing the seeds of their own stagnation?

Primary, secondary, and university education isn't the only education issue. What about job training? Does your employer provide you with the training that would help you do your job better, or advance your skills for the company's benefit? (Mine doesn't. The previous one didn't either. That's eighteen years combined.)

Do American and UK businesses value their respective labor force at all?

 

[lionelhill]

.. it's a simple cycle. Of course industry would like the tax payer to pay for all the teaching/training so that there's a steady supply of extremely capable people to employ. But it's actually in everyone's interest to go that way. If you don't, then industry does badly, produces little revenue, and you can't tax it much (and it doesn't pay well, so you can't tax the employee much either) so there's no national revenue and you can't afford to build hospitals. Or is this too over simplistic?

 

[harebrain]

Simplistic or not, it's not true. Henry Ford proved the opposite: train your workers, pay them well, they'll buy your products, your business profits, and the government gets revenue.

But that takes time and commitment--and vision.

 

[lionelhill]

No, that's not the opposite. It's the same thing. If you train people well, they work well, earn well, buy well, and both society and economy benefit. It doesn't matter in the faintest who does the training, industry or public funded education. All I'm saying is that many companies would prefer it if their staff were trained at someone else's expense. Life has changed: people move around between jobs more now than in the days of 19thC/early 20thC benevolent industrialists who built villages and schools for the workers, and loaded them into charabangs for a yearly seaside trip. It's a bit sad if every time you get someone trained up, they use your expensive training to get themselves a better job with your competitor.

 

[harebrain]

Ok, I see you're right: it is the same except for who picks up the tab for the training. But this:

It's a bit sad if every time you get someone trained up, they use your expensive training to get themselves a better job with your competitor.

is a self-inflicted wound. It shows the inability of business, with a penny-wise, pound-foolish mentality, to follow the Ford model I outlined. The second point is pay them well. If a business creates a more valuable worker by training him, then refuses to recognize the new value with greater compensation, whose fault is it when the employee leaves? The employee? The competitor? Or the business that failed to protect its training investment?

Thus we have the call for the government to pay for training. It removes the incentive of fair pay for work performed, as skilled labor and intellectual labor become commodities subsidized by the government, whether that government is in the US or in China.

That puts downward pressure on wages, which business loves in the short term. In the end, though, the consumer/taxpayer class becomes impoverished. That's doom for business.

For a concrete example, I'll make a prediction: there's a big bust coming for wireless communications. Not because it's a particularly bad industry, but because the consumer customer base can't afford it and doesn't need it.

 

[dilettante]

I had the idea that a lot of these things (wireless for example) were either pyramid schemes of a sort or maybe they're better characterized by the idea that they can lose a little on each unit and make it up through volume.

Either way I have to agree that there is a rude awakening coming. Here in the U.S. I suspect that the only thing propping up the consumption/service economy is credit. Directly as people rack up the debt, and indirectly through cash recently freed up through mortgage refinancing under recent historically low rates.

The latter (rates) makes me wonder how they ever justified holding the rates high in the first place. Seems like they just were robbing the people and subsidizing the financial industry.

The former (debt) makes me worry about what might happen to trigger all of those debts being called suddenly in a domino effect. And of course what the overall impact of all those debts being called in would have.

In any case there is a limit to all of this.

I don't see national, multipartner, or even global economies as a zero-sum game. There really don't have to be limits to growth per se. But the "wealth concentration" activity going on seems to have moved well beyond taking a reasonable profit. Not only is the profit being taken, current extreme pushes for "worker productivity" which are really "doing more for less" represent dipping for cash out of the expenses drawer too.

Good compensation packages clearly represent indirect investment in the sense of providing the return path for the production/consumption cycle. What I think we're seeing is Reagan/Bush style "voo-doo economics" (supply side) running rampant at least over here. All of the focus is on production and seemingly little concern exists for fostering markets. Maybe I have a distorted perspective though.

I wish I knew what "they" (whoever "they" are) are really thinking. Sometimes I almost think they look at Western economies and say "we've pulled all of the fertility out of that field, time to leave it fallow while we plow up the Eastern field and plant/harvest over there for awhile."

 

[lionelhill]

Harebrain, I agree entirely. It is foolish not to train ones employees. Not only does it help in the long run, but it has the bonuses that you get to influence what they train in, and they probably feel greater company loyalty (or at least they're more content), because they know you care.

Dilettante, yes, I agree too. UK seems to be living on credit at the moment, quite a bit of it justified by silly house price increases. But this can't go on for ever. Increased house value isn't real income, and it's not real money, because unless you go and live in a cardboard box, you can't get your hands on it.

 

[harebrain]

dilettante wrote:

The former (debt) makes me worry about what might happen to trigger all of those debts being called suddenly in a domino effect. And of course what the overall impact of all those debts being called in would have.

This has already happened in the US more than once, most recently in the 1980's. The result: a federal government bailout of the lending industries, which are considered "too big to fail." IOW, you and I, the taxpayer, picked up the tab. And we'll do it again.

lionelhill,
I think we (US) wrote that book: living on credit, borrowing against inflated home values. In the 1960s, the bigger problem with that was that the government (here in California) taxed us on those inflated property values. People (mostly senior citizens) were being forced out of their homes because they didn't have sufficient means to pay those spiraling taxes. A taxpayer revolt in the late 1960s (68?) led to passage of a referendum (direct democracy in action, bypassing the legislature and executive) that basically pegged the value of property to the price paid for it until resold. Politicians have been trying unsuccessfully to repeal/amend that measure ever since.

Still, personal debt in the US is perhaps the highest in the world. Wait til we all declare bankruptcy. (Which, as I understand it, is easier in the US than almost anywhere else.)

 

[lionelhill]

Thanks for telling me that. We're busy reinventing the wheel here, much the same is being discussed in the UK as a replacement for the spiraling council tax.