Posts from — February 2004

NYTimes columnist, Thomas L. Friedman, currently in India joins the outsourcing debate with a sensible argument backed with facts.

“What goes around…” [NYTimes registration required] argues why it is good for the Westerns countries to outsource jobs to India…

“How can it be good for America to have all these Indians doing our white-collar jobs?” I asked 24/7’s founder, S. Nagarajan.

Well, he answered patiently, “look around this office.” All the computers are from Compaq. The basic software is from Microsoft. The phones are from Lucent. The air-conditioning is by Carrier, and even the bottled water is by Coke, because when it comes to drinking water in India, people want a trusted brand. On top of all this, says Mr. Nagarajan, 90 percent of the shares in 24/7 are owned by U.S. investors. This explains why, although the U.S. has lost some service jobs to India, total exports from U.S. companies to India have grown from $2.5 billion in 1990 to $4.1 billion in 2002. What goes around comes around, and also benefits Americans.

…

“It’s unfair that you want all your products marketed globally,” argues Mr. Kulkarni, “but you don’t want any jobs to go.”

He’s right. Which is why we must design the right public policies to keep America competitive in an increasingly networked world, where every company — Indian or American — will seek to assemble the best skills from around the globe. And we must cushion those Americans hurt by the outsourcing of their jobs. But let’s not be stupid and just start throwing up protectionist walls, in reaction to what seems to be happening on the surface. Because beneath the surface, what’s going around is also coming around. Even an Indian cartoon company isn’t just taking American jobs, it’s also making them.

Now if only the demagogues who see things in black and white would stop to consider that outsourcing has many shades to it!!

Past words can come back to haunt you. Sometimes they get you into serious trouble while at other times, they make you seem like a fool!! (even after granting some leeway for hindsight!)

In 1979, Shyam Bhatia and Colin Smith authored an article on the nuclear espionage perpetrated by Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan (father of Pakistan’s nukes) in Holland, a charge that has since been established as being true.

Incensed at this article, AQ Khan shot off a handwritten letter condemning it. While a letter of condemnation is not out of place, the coarse language used in it certainly stood out like a sore thumb. Shyam Bhatia has published the contents of that letter in an article on Rediff.com today.

Have a look at the abusive language of Dr. AQ Khan who was furious at the charge of being labelled as a nuclear thief…

‘The article on Pakistan in the issue of 9.12.1979 by Colin Smith and Shyam Bhatia was so vulgar and low that I considered it an insult to reflect on it.

It was in short words a bull-shit, full of lies, insinuations and cheap journalism for money and cheap publicity.

Shyam Bhatia, a Hindu bastard, could not write anything objective about Pakistan. Both insinuated as if Holland is an atomic bomb manufacturing factory where, instead of cheese balls, you could pick up “triggering mechanisms.” Have you for a moment thought of the meaning of this word?

Of course not because you could not differentiate between the mouth and the back hole of a donkey. I do not owe an explanation to anybody, but I did owe an explanation to the Dutch government, which I did with all the documents.

Not the language that would befit a national hero, is it?! But the language is not really the point here. The point is… now that the man in question, himself, has admitted to being a global nuclear black-marketeer, this letter makes him look like a bloody fool, doesn’t it?! ;-)

By the way, the New York Times has an in-depth story (NYTimes registration required) on how Dr. AQ Khan built up his global network of illicit nuclear trade …

The scope and audacity of the illicit network are still not fully known. Nor is it known whether the Pakistani military or government, which had supported Dr. Khan’s research, were complicit in his activities.

But what has become clear in recent days is that Dr. Khan, a Pakistani national hero who began his rise 30 years ago by importing nuclear equipment to secretly build his country’s atom bomb, gradually transformed himself into the largest and most sophisticated exporter in the nuclear black market.

“It was an astounding transformation when you think about it, something we’ve never seen before,” said a senior American official who has reviewed the intelligence. “First, he exploits a fragmented market and develops a quite advanced nuclear arsenal. Then he throws the switch, reverses the flow and figures out how to sell the whole kit, right down to the bomb designs, to some of the world’s worst governments.”

One particular paragraph from Chapter 12 of the Economic Report of the President, for the year 2004, reads,

One facet of increased services trade is the increased use of offshore outsourcing in which a company relocates labor-intensive service industry functions to another country. For example, a U.S. firm might use a call-center in India to handle customer service-related questions. The principal novelty of outsourcing services is the means by which foreign purchases are delivered. Whereas imported goods might arrive by ship, outsourced services are often delivered using telephone lines or the Internet. The basic economic forces behind the transactions are the same, however. When a good or service is produced more cheaply abroad, it makes more sense to import it than to make or provide it domestically.

[emphasis mine]

This report was presented by President Bush to the Congress on Monday 9^th February.

This is good news for India because it means that the US administration has thrown its weight behind the concept of offshore outsourcing, something that has been vilified in recent times by most of the sections of the media and the Democrats looking for popular support.

But it remains to be seen how this would affect Bush’s ratings with the election approaching because this is clearly a decision that would not go down well with the multitudes of people in the US who have lost their jobs due to outsourcing!

Pakistan, according to USA’s latest position on it, is clean and is not involved in nuclear proliferation.

This is just days after Dr. AQ Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb admitted to selling nuclear secrets to countries like Iran, Libya and North Korea. With at least four other scientists involved with him in this sharing of nuclear technology to known rogue nations, it is difficult to believe that they all acted on their own without some sort of collusion with the government or its agencies. Its difficult to believe this because…

No questions were asked about Khan’s lifestyle, his frequent trips abroad — always first class — and his lengthy periods of residence under an assumed name at some of the world’s most expensive hotels.

Successive heads of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence ignored allegations of financial impropriety until 1990, when Lieutenant General Shamshur Rahman Kallu prepared a report for the attention of the then prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

The report gathered dust until fresh investigations were ordered on the instructions of ISI chief Lieutenant General Mahmoud Ahmad, who handed his findings over to Musharraf in 2001.

[taken from a Rediff report]

Moreover, with General Aslam Beg alleging that Pervez Musharraf has been actively involved in nuclear proliferation and with Benazir Bhutto and Shehbaz Sharif (Nawaz Sharif’s brother) planning to send a joint application to the International Court of Justice to try Musharraf for spreading nuclear weapons, it’s too damned difficult to digest this latest US posture!

Ohh… but I’m sure that it has got absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the US is planning an anti-Osama offensive inside Pakistan which would entail getting in the good books of Pakistan (which would, otherwise, never allow an US action on Pakistani soil)

Chessbrain.net has set the Guiness World Record by holding a chess match between a Danish GM Peter Heine Nielsen on one side and a massive power of 2070 distributed computers on the other!!… Yup! you heard that right… 2070!!!

While Nielsen played white, the computer program Beowulf, harnessing the combined power of 2070 distributed computers from 56 countries, played black.

The game, which lasted several hours, ended in a draw. But GM Peter Nielsen commented that he had set several traps for ChessBrain which computers normally fall for… but was surprised that ChessBrain refused them!

Results of the match can also be found here.

God!!… and I have trouble playing against one opponent!!

[link via Slashdot]