Okay, Jesse, so you contest the assertion that Chinese labor is exploited. I'd like to see some supporting documentation for your position. I find it frankly rather dubious on its face. I also find your comparisons to the situations in the U.S. to be rather disingenuous - corruption is a problem everywhere, but there are real issues of scale.

When a totalitarian government has to turn on itself because the corruption is crippling, that says something.

" They would not be buying up so many bonds if the US government was not running such a huge FISCAL deficit. So they inflate the dollar...by paying for our war in Iraq."

And your point here would be what, exactly?

" In any case, its obvious that if the currency was to float freely, it would just hurt the US more."

I disagree entirely. That's certainly not "obvious", and I really don't think it's even true. The excessive value of the dollar gives us more buying power - which is nice - but less selling power - which is terrible. If this trend in the long run outruns the growth of the economy, we'll inevitably collapse under debt. That's not a good thing.

The 30k estimate is a lowest possible, not an actual likely total by any stretch of the imagination.

As long as we're nitpicking, isn't Germany normally referred to as the Fatherland?

Sure, it's not just the cheaper wages. It's also the lack of regulations on how poorly you can treat people, how little benefits they get, how badly you can abuse the environment, etc., etc.. Sure, they look at finding a relatively skilled workforce - relatively, i.e., per dollar spent.

" ...Nebraska's Chuck Hagel and Maine's Olympia Snowe, who received a visit Tuesday from the vice president himself."

While he probably didn't have his shotgun with him, I'm sure the imagery wasn't lost on them.

The person who posted as a Harvard Student failed to use basic grammar, most notably capitalization.

Are the numbers even population adjusted? Sure, it's only been a few years, but still.

So, programmers down, other IT jobs up? I think the other jobs are harder to outsource. You can't outsource the guy who actually plugs in your computer to another continent. You don't want to outsource the guy who helps you out with your e-mail to another language. You might consider outsourcing the guy who decides what programs your company is going to run, and oversees installing them, but you'll think twice about it.

I.e., many companies want their direct support close at hand. And when you take out programmers and developers, that's basically what's left, in most cases - IT administrators.

And yes, that's a undertone of contempt you detect in my writing. We're highly trained professionals, etc., who'll tell you to reboot your computer if anything is wrong (good luck to you if that doesn't solve everything), but produce little to nothing. IT Administration is rarely creative, never interesting, and frankly if Microsoft ever gets their ducks in a row we'll mostly be out of a job (perhaps thankfully, there's not even a hint of that on the horizon).

I do both development and administration - I'm a developer (translation: programmer) by choice and trade, and an administrator because I have to be. It's development that designs software, and makes things work better or easier. And I think it's a real shame that we're letting that slip away from us.

Wouldn't that be amazing to see "uneven, dimpled flesh" as just "uneven, dimpled flesh" -- not value-laden "cellulite?"

"Cellulite", of itself, is less value laden than "uneven, dimpled flesh". It's purely a cultural annotation. As such, I don't see this as having any long term value - "uneven, dimpled flesh" can very quickly become as value laden as any other synonym.

Honestly, I find it hard to imagine that people can fool themselves so easily.

And remember there is NO PROVEN CORRELATION between that quart of Ben & Jerry's you just scarfed down, all while complaining (and not exercising) about the above-mentioned items and those dimply thighs you've got- none.

Right. The fundamental laws of thermodynamics, defeated by Ben&Jerry's.

Martin Luther King Jr. got a relatively large amount of respect from white people by basically saying racism was bad. Those days have passed (some argue that they never really existed, I don't know, I wasn't born yet). Now, we have a very vocal group of black activists who tell us, with straight faces, that white racism is bad but black racism is just fine, indeed necessary or even good. (And they tend to conveniently ignore asians, hispanics, and so on.)

You're never going to get anywhere with that. No matter how right you may be, or how compelling your arguments, that idea will never take root. It's a doomed idea that has brought you no gains so far and will bring you no gains in the future. If you can't treat your fellow humans with some modicum of decency, none will be returned, and though you think it's because of your race, the color of your skin, it's actually the content of your character.

There's a huge unit discrepancy between megawatts and gigawatts. The percentage, per the numbers given, would be 0.0015%.