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Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Bill Gates Road Show
Posted by Citizen Carrie | 12:22 PM
Is Microsoft's Bill Gates even relevant anymore? He just finished up a 6-university tour where he's still trying to browbeat students into majoring in information technology. It remains to be seen whether his speeches will inspire anyone to change their career field.

The first paragraph of this article from eSchool News was enough to make me puke:

A widespread shortage of information technology (IT) graduates across North America is forcing Microsoft Corp. and other software companies to look to developing countries such as China to meet their needs, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates says.

“When we want to hire lots of software engineers, there is a shortage in North America—a pretty significant shortage,” Gates said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We have this tough problem: If you can’t get the engineers, then you have to have those other jobs be [relocated to] where the engineers are.”

Trust Gates to try to blame the American public for causing this "problem". According to Bill Gates and his Strong American Schools and Skills Commission cohorts, we are a nation of drooling idiots who weren't smart enough to keep our jobs during the dot-com bust, and aren't able to handle anything much above simple arithmetic when we graduate from high school. In reality, the only "problem" was the public relations fiasco suffered by Gates and other tech company CEO's when forced to confront the fact that the disappearance of IT workers and graduates was part of an elaborate plan to drastically lower labor costs. If you can downsize an entire generation of IT workers and scare their kids from any sort of technical career fields, it will be easier to contract the work out to lower-paid H-1B or L-1 visa workers, or offshore the jobs to lower cost overseas labor markets altogether. From Gates' point of view, things probably couldn't be better.

Could Bill Gates and others hire older workers who are still roaming our streets since the dot-com bust? Hmmh. It doesn't seem possible. According to David Vaskevitch, Microsoft's Senior Vice-President and Chief Technical Officer,
....younger workers have more energy and are sometimes more creative. But he adds there is a lot they don't know and can't know until they gain experience. So he says his company recruits aggressively for fresh talent on university campuses and for highly experienced engineers from within the industry. One is not at the expense of the other, he insists. For him, it is all about hiring the best and brightest—age and nationality are not important. He acknowledges that the vast majority of Microsoft hires are young, but that is because older workers tend to go into more senior jobs and there are fewer of those positions to begin with.
In other words, Microsoft needs an almost endless supply of college graduates, and needs a black hole to shovel the older workers into when they start demanding pay raises.

Why bother touring the universities and telling kids to major in IT fields? It's probably just an elaborate dog and pony show set up to convince us that Microsoft products should be appearing in every facet of our lives, and we need to be educated to use these products. As long as we keep up with our skills, and as long as he keeps nagging us that we're falling behind if we're not using all of his software, we'll keep buying his products. He can then devote his philanthropic life to destroying public schools and giving millions of dollars to private schools to make sure there are enough children who know enough about Microsoft products to keep his company afloat.

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Monday, September 24, 2007

Serving your corporate masters, or What Price Freedom?
Posted by Jill | 5:37 AM
A new internet phone service will make this scene from Minority Report a reality -- in your own home:





As if it weren't bad enough that Google puts ads on your Gmail page based on the kind of mail you receive, now a new internet phone service wants to eavesdrop on your phone conversations so that it can play ads to you to defray the cost of the service:

Pudding Media, a start-up based in San Jose, Calif., is introducing an Internet phone service today that will be supported by advertising related to what people are talking about in their calls. The Web-based phone service is similar to Skype’s online service — consumers plug a headset and a microphone into their computers, dial any phone number and chat away. But unlike Internet phone services that charge by the length of the calls, Pudding Media offers calling without any toll charges.

The trade-off is that Pudding Media is eavesdropping on phone calls in order to display ads on the screen that are related to the conversation. Voice recognition software monitors the calls, selects ads based on what it hears and pushes the ads to the subscriber’s computer screen while he or she is still talking.

[snip]

Mr. Maislos said that Pudding Media had considered the privacy question carefully. The company is not keeping recordings or logs of the content of any phone calls, he said, so advertisements only relate to current calls, not past ones, and will only arrive during the call itself.

Besides, Mr. Maislos said, he thought that young people, the group his company is focusing on with the call service, are less concerned with maintaining privacy than older people are.

“The trade-off of getting personalized content versus privacy is a concept that is accepted in the world,” he said.

Mr. Maislos founded Pudding Media with his brother, Ruben. Each had spent several years doing intelligence work for the Israeli military. Before Pudding Media, Ariel Maislos ran a broadband company called Passave, which he sold in May 2006 to PMC-Sierra, a maker of computer chips for telecommunications equipment, for $300 million. Richard Purcell, a former chief privacy officer at Microsoft, is an adviser to Pudding Media, Ariel Maislos said.


Uh...okay. So while you have Dick Cheney asking Israel to attack Iran's nuclear facilities JUST to provoke the kind of response that would justify an AMERICAN attack in return, now you want me to let a couple of Israeli military intelligence veterans to listen to my phone calls "so they can sell me ads"? You expect me to eagerly sign up for a service whose founder says this:

Mr. Maislos said that during tests he noticed that the content had a tendency to determine conversations.

“The conversation was actually changing based on what was on the screen,” he said. “Our ability to influence the conversation was remarkable.”


Imagine the potential for getting people on internet calls to give incriminating information based on the ads that a consortium of Microsoft and two Israeli intelligence workers put togethr. The mind reels....

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Thursday, September 20, 2007

Stealthy Little Piggies on the Senate Floor
Posted by Citizen Carrie | 8:10 PM
I don’t normally like to write alarming articles about bills that are being considered in either the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives, particularly during the early stages of negotiations. As my dad once said, he used to constantly get these email alerts begging him to call or fax his senator or representative right away about some huge issue before the world collapsed. My dad would usually do nothing, and Congress would usually vote the right way.

As early as today or tonight, our U.S. Senators could be voting on various proposals that would, in the words of NumbersUSA, "….when taken together, would grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens and dramatically increase the importation of foreign workers at a time 10 million Americans are looking for jobs and can't find employment." Naturally, since similar proposals were overwhelmingly rejected in June of this year, these proposals are in danger of being piggy-backed onto H.R. 1585, the Defense Authorization bill for fiscal year 2008.

I took notice after seeing how grass-root activism helped the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 go up in flames on the Senate floor on June 28, 2007. Among other measures, the Act would have raised the annual H-1B visa limits for "highly-skilled" workers from 65,000 to 115,000 per year. I knew that business oligarchs led by Bill Gates at Microsoft would not go away quietly. I also knew that these business leaders would use every means necessary, from soft-sell tactics to playing hardball, to get the visa limits raised this year. Knowing that stealth would be their weapon of choice, I resolved to keep my ears open for any new developments. I also resolved to get off my butt recently and start following this story a little bit more closely.

Here’s a little background on the whole saga. In 1990, thanks in part to my U.S. Senator at the time, Spencer Abraham (R-MI), Congress enacted the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1990, which established the H-1B category of "highly skilled" guest workers who were brought in to fill open positions due to a perceived shortage of qualified American candidates. The number of H-1B visas allowed per year fluctuated at various times between 65,000 per year to a peak of 195,000 per year. (Rob Sanchez has a nice history at his Job Destruction website.) From that point on, employers have been falling over themselves to slash as many American information technology and engineering workers as possible from their payrolls and give the jobs to lower paid and (often lower qualified) foreign guest workers, mostly from India.

When the Senate failed to approve the bill raising the H-1B limits to 115,000 in June as mentioned above, the assault began.

On July 5, 2007, Microsoft announced they were forced to open up a new software development office in Vancouver, British Columbia in order to get around the current visa limitation of 65,000 per year.

On July 10, 2007, Hillary Clinton made a video-conference speech to the Indian Institute of Technology 2007 Global Alumni Conference in Santa Clara, California, and affirmed her support for expanding the H-1B visa program.

On July 16, 2007, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce sent a letter to the U.S. Senate supporting measures for the "….temporary relief for companies in need of highly skilled workers."

On August 23, 2007, Microsoft filed a lobby registration form with the US Senate showing they were hiring the firm of SC Partners LLC for purposes of lobbying on issues surrounding H-1B visas and Green Cards for tech workers.

On September 11, 2007 (talk about horrible timing!), a bipartisan group of 13 governors sent a joint letter to the US House of Representatives and the US Senate urging our lawmakers to pass legislation to raise the H-1B limit to 115,000 visas.

On September 18, 2007, about 1,000 "highly skilled" legal immigrants rallied at the US Capitol in Washington, D.C. to "…protest long delays and vast bureaucratic backlogs in the immigration system." Paul Donnelly, one of the godfathers of the current H-1B system and now a consultant for American Families United, was quoted by the New York Times as saying. "It is a significant thing to have foreign-born people, who are notoriously hard to organize, organizing themselves." Oh, so this was a grassroots, spontaneous assembly, huh?

Not to mention various well-placed articles appearing here and there talking about the difficulties in hiring qualified people for tech positions, how the public school system contributes to our country’s failure to compete with foreign workers, and the benefits of free trade.

I’ve been vaguely disgusted with the U.S. visa policies for a number of years as I’ve seen high tech workers laid-off, forced to train their lower cost replacements, told their skills were irrelevant, told they lacked work experience after spending time and money to update their skills, and told they were overqualified on the rare occasion the potential employer could find nothing wrong with their work history. I’ve become a very recent convert in the drive against amnesty for illegal aliens when I started witnessing something I thought I would never see – highly educated American workers competing directly against illegal aliens for jobs in the building trades. Big government and businesses have been able to push around American workers for far too long now, and it’s time for all of us to put a stop to it.

Please don’t be afraid to contact your Senators and urge them to vote against any measure that would take away jobs from American citizens.

(Cross-posted at Carrie's Nation.)

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Sunday, August 26, 2007

Microsoft's Never-Ending Quest for the Best of the Best of the Best
Posted by Citizen Carrie | 9:16 AM
We all knew Microsoft would not play dead after the U.S. Senate defeated a measure on June 28, 2007 raising the H-1B visa cap (for high-tech workers) from 65,000 per year to 115,000 per year as part of the comprehensive immigration bill. On July 5, 2007, Microsoft announced that they were forced to open a new software development center in Vancouver, British Columbia in order to circumvent the "low" visa cap. (Although John Miano from the Programmers Guild has an interesting theory that the reasons for the Vancouver office may be a bit more mundane.)

Now we learn that Microsoft has hired SC Partners LLC to lobby the federal government on issues regarding workers on temporary visas and for those applying for green cards. You can find a link showing the Lobbying Registration disclosure form filed with the U.S. Senate on August 23, 2007 by going to the United States Office of Public Records website, clicking on the "Date Posted" button, and filling in "08/23/2007". Note the amusing faux pas at item #9 on page 1 of the report showing that Microsoft is a Prepaid Wireless Company, an obvious carryover from a report filed the same day by SC Partners for Tracfone.

Expect a lot more stories to come out on how Microsoft, who routinely rejects the vast majority of American-born job applicants, cannot find enough qualified Americans to fill their open positions, and how the United States educational system is in shambles because there are not enough automatons graduating from our schools and making a direct beeline to Redmond, Washington.

(Thank you, Jill, for inviting me to cross-post to your website. You can find my original post at Carrie's Nation)

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