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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
Busy Body
Published Letters: 253 Editor's Choice: 23
The young woman who is in a hurry to get married and have children sounds so much like my mother. There is a better than even chance that she will end up on the same "junk heap" because the divorce rate is still over 50%.
The feminist movement of the 1970's began with daughters who saw their mothers thrown away by guys like Mr. Ross. This generation of women lived for their families and when their kids grew up and their husbands left them for younger women, they had nothing to fall back on. The "old man" was gone. Their job skills were totally stale and not marketable. Their sense of purpose was gone. The daughters vowed that they would never let that happen to them.
And now, their daughters want to go back to that time. I am incredulous.
Advanced degrees won't account for anything if the person holding them has had no significant work experience in the past year, much less the past 5 or 10 years.
I am now at an age of self-reflection. I am comfortable with most of the decisions that I made and my goal for what time I have left is to try to make the world a better place. Everything else is just so much BS.
This morning I was listening to a discussion of Bush's speech on NPR. I could not believe that one topic of discussion was whether Bush is more like Truman or Wilson. Both of these presidents have got to be rolling in their graves at 3600 rpm's at any comparison of them to Bush.
In light of this article about Frist, maybe reporters have become a bunch of tools because they are afraid of being beaten up.
Speak for yourself. I have been a lawyer in private practice for almost twenty years and have found it to be exciting, rewarding and fulfilling. I have had the opportunity to make a positive difference in the lives of many small and mid-size business people. Additionally, I founded a software company in my spare time with the managing partner of the law firm. We recently sold this company for a sum which allows me to pick and choose what I want to do for the rest of my life. I am also an "old maid" and have always felt that I can make a more positive mark on the world helping grown-ups than raising children. That said, God bless the moms of the world. As these postings indicate, they are taking a hellofa risk.
Globilization is a complicated picture.
I am a co-founder of a company that outsources legal support work to workers in India. Our experience is that although the Indian Institute of Technology is a pre-emminent institution, the average Indian university "pumps out" a lot of folks who are utterly lacking in "common sense." The Indian workers have done quite a good job on tasks that do not require independent thought. When we tried to use the Indian workers to do higher end tasks, they failed miserably, despite a lot of one-on-one training.
The work that the Indian workers perform is work that is not done by law firms or corporations now because they cannot do it in a cost effective manner. The Indian workers also perform tasks in processes that create new legal products and services that have not been previously offered. I do not believe that there have been any lay-offs of US workers as a result of this company. To the contrary, the new products and services offered require new types of analysts and legal assistants in the US.
Our future plans are to automate a lot of the work that is now being sent to India and keep the higher end work in the United States.
I saw the other side of the globilization spectrum during a recent trip to Shanghai. While there, I visited the research lab of a Fortune 100 company. This laboratory employed thousands of scientists and engineers in China to invent for the world. There were at least two other similarly sized research campuses in the same neighborhood, also owned by Fortune 100 companies. These facilities probably are taking US jobs. The Chinese scientists and engineers are living a solid middle class lifestyle at a lower compensation than in the US because of government subsidies of housing, transportation and food.
I am heartened to read that others think that the timing and substance is just a little too convenient. I think the tape is a fake, prepared and released to keep the public scared and in line.
U.S. companies that complain about intellectual property theft in China should file patent applications in China. In the early 1990's, the Chinese government overhauled its intellectual property laws to harmonize with the United States and European Patent Office. Patent infringement enforcement is getting better in China and will continue to get better as Chinese companies mature. In order to make a case of patent infringement, however, companies have to have patents in China.
U.S. companies also have to be more diligent in checking translations of their patent claims into Chinese. One case that has been touted as being as example of the Chinese government "ripping off" technology is the Chinese Viagra patent case. The owner of the Viagra patent in the US filed in China and obtained allowable claims in China. These claims were challenged by a third party before the Chinese patent office. The challenge, which was a prior art challenge, was successful and the claims were invalidated. The outcome would perhaps have been different if the patent claims had been properly translated from English into Chinese. Instead of claiming a cure for impotence, the Chinese claims read as a prevention of impotence.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The Maine fight was supposed to be the dress rehearsal for repealing California's Prop. 8 -- but gay marriage lost
Once one obtains Seriousness credentials in the Washington media, they are irrevocable no matter one's conduct.
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