Picky Picky!
For years, many people have wondered why they can't buy T.V. channels one-by-one instead of a single big package of channels, 90% of which are shitty ones they'll never watch. Now someone has
filed a suit against the major cable and satellite companies demanding that they offer their channels on a piecemeal basis. Finally!
The cable industry always protests vehemently, spouting the same stuff: "We can't do this, it'll be too expensive!" Bullshit. They also say that if we could order only the channels we want, certain niche channels that have smaller viewer-ship would be dropped altogether because they're typically packaged with the large-viewer-ship channels. But why should I have to pay for crap I'll never watch, like religious programming, MTV, the Nashville Network, and all sports channels? It's not fair, dammit.
Here's what I'd like to see: letting us go online and change our billing & channel selection at will. Imagine logging into your account, and it displays a list of channels you're currently subscribed to. There's also a list of unsubscribed channels you can pick from, so you put a check-mark next to each new channel you want. Maybe you want to drop the Give Jesus Money channel, so you un-check that one. Frankly, I don't blame you. Then you click Update Subscription, and once the request is processed on their systems (in a few minutes, hopefully), suddenly your cable box is picking up the channels you picked. Wouldn't that be cool? I don't watch cable because I detest the advertising and 95% of the programming, but I'd consider getting a cable package if I had this kind of choice. Having to download torrents of the shows I do watch is kind of a pain, y'know?
So what about pricing? Well, how about charging a flat rate of $1/channel monthly or something? If you honestly watch 100+ channels, then pay for it rather than making the rest of us pay for dozens of channels we don't want. And if there's truth to the argument about lower-viewer-ship channels (subsidized by more popular ones) being in danger of being dropped, they can either 1) drop the channels and piss people off, or 2) have subscribers pay a premium price for them. Use the viewer-ship numbers (based on how many subscribe using the web-based idea above) and determine a suitable price. If you must have the Underwater Basket-weaving Channel or the Extreme Antiques Channel, you should be willing to pay more for it. And hey, if those channels get more popular, then your fees go down. Yay!
See, it's not that big of a deal. You cable companies need to stop being such whiny infants and start giving your clients a little more choice and control, even if it costs you some money up front. And look, I just threw in two ideas for free! :)
India... Outsourcing?!
Outsourcing Works, So India Is Exporting Jobs
Check out this post in today's local paper. [India-708517.jpg]By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
Published: September 25, 2007
MYSORE, India — Thousands of Indians report to Infosys Technologies’ campus here to learn the finer points of programming. Lately, though, packs of foreigners have been roaming the manicured lawns, too.
Pavel Horesji for The New York Times
Infosys employs workers in Brno, Czech Republic.
Many of them are recent American college graduates, and some have even turned down job offers from coveted employers like Google. Instead, they accepted a novel assignment from Infosys, the Indian technology giant: fly here for six months of training, then return home to work in the company’s American back offices.
India is outsourcing outsourcing.
One of the constants of the global economy has been companies moving their tasks — and jobs — to India. But rising wages and a stronger currency here, demands for workers who speak languages other than English, and competition from countries looking to emulate India’s success as a back office — including China, Morocco and Mexico — are challenging that model.
Many executives here acknowledge that outsourcing, having rained most heavily on India, will increasingly sprinkle tasks around the globe. Or, as Ashok Vemuri, an Infosys senior vice president, put it, the future of outsourcing is “to take the work from any part of the world and do it in any part of the world.”
To fight on the shifting terrain, and to beat back emerging rivals, Indian companies are hiring workers and opening offices in developing countries themselves, before their clients do.
In May, Tata Consultancy Service, Infosys’s Indian rival, announced a new back office in Guadalajara, Mexico; Tata already has 5,000 workers in Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. Cognizant Technology Solutions, with most of its operations in India, has now opened back offices in Phoenix and Shanghai.
Wipro, another Indian technology services company, has outsourcing offices in Canada, China, Portugal, Romania and Saudi Arabia, among other locations.
And last month, Wipro said it was opening a software development center in Atlanta that would hire 500 programmers in three years.
In a poetic reflection of outsourcing’s new face, Wipro’s chairman, Azim Premji, told Wall Street analysts this year that he was considering hubs in Idaho and Virginia, in addition to Georgia, to take advantage of American “states which are less developed.” (India’s per capita income is less than $1,000 a year.)
For its part, Infosys is building a whole archipelago of back offices — in Mexico, the Czech Republic, Thailand and China, as well as low-cost regions of the United States.
The company seeks to become a global matchmaker for outsourcing: any time a company wants work done somewhere else, even just down the street, Infosys wants to get the call.
It is a peculiar ambition for a company that symbolizes the flow of tasks from the West to India.
Most of Infosys’s 75,000 employees are Indians, in India. They account for most of the company’s $3.1 billion in sales in the year that ended March 31, from work for clients like Bank of America and Goldman Sachs.
“India continues to be the No. 1 location for outsourcing,” S. Gopalakrishnan, the company’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview.
And yet the company opened a Philippines office in August and, a month earlier, bought back offices in Thailand and Poland from Royal Philips Electronics, the Dutch company. In each outsourcing hub, local employees work with little help from Indian managers.
Infosys says its outsourcing experience in India has taught it to carve up a project, apportion each slice to suitable workers, double-check quality and then export a final, reassembled product to clients. The company argues it can clone its Indian back offices in other nations and groom Chinese, Mexican or Czech employees to be more productive than local outsourcing companies could make them.
“We have pioneered this movement of work,” Mr. Gopalakrishnan said. “These new countries don’t have experience and maturity in doing that, and that’s what we’re taking to these countries.”
Some analysts compare the strategy to Japanese penetration of auto manufacturing in the United States in the 1970s. Just as the Japanese learned to make cars in America without Japanese workers, Indian vendors are learning to outsource without Indians, said Dennis McGuire, chairman of TPI, a Texas-based outsourcing consultancy.
Though work that bypasses India remains a small part of the Infosys business, it is growing. The company can be highly secretive, but executives agreed to describe some of the new projects on the condition that clients not be identified.
In one project, an American bank wanted a computer system to handle a loan program for Hispanic customers. The system had to work in Spanish. It also had to take into account variables particular to Hispanic clients: many, for instance, remit money to families abroad, which can affect their bank balances. The bank thought a Mexican team would have the right language skills and grasp of cultural nuances.
But instead of going to a Mexican vendor, or to an American vendor with Mexican operations, the bank retained three dozen engineers at Infosys, which had recently opened shop in Monterrey, Mexico.
Such is the new outsourcing: A company in the United States pays an Indian vendor 7,000 miles away to supply it with Mexican engineers working 150 miles south of the United States border.
In Europe, too, companies now hire Infosys to manage back offices in their own backyards. When an American manufacturer, for instance, needed a system to handle bills from multiple vendors supplying its factories in different European countries, it turned to the Indian company. The manufacturer’s different locations scan the invoices and send them to an office of Infosys, where each bill is passed to the right language team. The teams verify the orders and send the payment to the suppliers while logged in to the client’s computer system.
More than a dozen languages are spoken at the Infosys office, which is in Brno, Czech Republic.
The American program here in Mysore is meant to keep open that pipeline of diversity.
Most trainees here have no software knowledge. By teaching novices, Infosys saves money and hopes to attract workers who will turn down better-known companies for the chance to learn a new skill.
“It’s the equivalent of a bachelor’s in computer science in six months,” said Melissa Adams, a 22-year-old trainee. Ms. Adams graduated last spring from the University of Washington with a business degree, and rejected Google for Infosys.
And yet, even as outsourcing takes on new directions, old perceptions linger.
For instance, when Jeff Rand, a 23-year-old American trainee, told his grandmother he was moving to India to work as a software engineer for six months, “she said, ‘Maybe I’ll get to talk to you when I have a problem with my credit card.’ ”
Said Mr. Rand with a rueful chuckle, “It took me about two or three weeks to explain to my grandma that I was not going to be working in a call center.”
Are you a tool?!
So, up until yesterday, the term and idealism of fascism really escaped me. I never really cared or thought much about it. Then I went to class yesterday. Little did I know that this particular day in class would be the biggest eye opener I've had in several years.
[For those of you who may not know Fascism is an authoritarian political ideology (generally tied to a mass movement) that considers individual and other societal interests subordinate (secondary) to the needs of the state. Fascists seek to forge a type of national unity, usually based on ethnic, cultural, or racial attributes. Various scholars attribute different characteristics to fascism, but the following elements are usually seen as its integral parts: nationalism, authoritarianism, statism, militarism, totalitarianism, anti-communism, corporatism, populism, and opposition to economic and political liberalism.]
Wow... that definition is off the hook, but now that it’s out of the way, let’s just move on. I remember reading stories of Nazi Germany when (and maybe it's still like this, I don't know) police literally patrolled the streets and enforced a curfew, even for adults. When the government is run by big business and the people of a once sovereign nation are now captives of the same, I will no longer tolerate the societal enfeeblement. It is disheartening to think that our great nation could possibly fall to fascism. It's a very disturbing thought. If you would like a little more background please watch
America: Freedom to Fascism. It's free on Google.com. I would strongly advise you to research for yourself and do not blindly accept everything you hear.
Life is about critical thinking. Think critically about everything and pose questions of things that are normally taken for granted. Blindly accept nothing. Don't be a tool!
Side Effects
Please read this website with caution! I bet you didn't know that reading a website could have dramatic effects on your health... well it's true... and here is the warning label for this website... Side effects may include, but are not limited to: a sudden craving to sniff your carpet, Abdominal pain, acne, agitation, AIDS, an addiction to cocaine, a nice vacation in Fiji, an urge to stab your spouse, anxiety, bodily fluid ingestion, bone weakening, brain tumors, breast infections, carpet burns, chafing, claustrophobia, coma, constipation, cracked and bleeding nipples, deafness, death, decreased appetite, decreased sex drive, dementia, diabetes, diarrhea, difficulty with ejaculation, dizziness, dry mouth, evolution, explosive diarrhea, fatigue, frequent intense orgasms, gas, gas with oily discharge, hair loss, halitosis, hallucination, headache, heart attack, heartburn, homosexuality, inability to breathe oxygen, indigestion, insomnia, internal bleeding, internal combustion, irregular PMS cycles that last several months, loss of inhibitions, lung cancer, making Jesus cry, mental retardation, migraines, nausea, nervousness, obsessive compulsive disorder, painful rectal itch, paralyzation, PCP cravings, perverted thoughts, psychosis, random pain, rash, reliance on breast pumps, shrinking testicles, sleep loss, sleepiness, sore throat, stroke, sudden heroin cravings, sudden urge to spray Windex on your genitalia, sweating, the inability to speak properly, the inability to use proper English in an online environment, tingling or pins and needles, torn clothing, tremor, urge to watch the Chinese version of Friends, urges to play Everquest II, vision problems, vomiting and water retention. You have been warned!
What Really Matters... FREEDOM!!
The ultimate "dude that sucks" moment... Six years ago today, America
experienced a tragedy of unfathomable proportions: a vicious attack on
our own soil that cost us thousands of innocent lives. As Americans, we
grappled with the horror and senselessness. In the days and weeks that
passed, we wrapped ourselves in the comfort of Old Glory and allowed our
unbridled patriotism to comfort us during such a difficult time.
We said we would always remember and we will. Please take a moment to
think of those who died on September 11, 2001, and remember the freedoms
we hold so dear in this country. On that horrific day six years ago, we
learned that we can no longer take our freedom for granted.
IN GOD WE STILL TRUST!! May freedom reign supreme and may your actions
be guided by your heart, always.
Love, Yoshi
![Check out this post in today's local paper. [India-708517.jpg]](http://www.dudethatsucks.com/uploaded_images/India-708517.jpg){kind=link}