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Job Loss and Mutually Assured Destruction

© Kirk Lindstrom

I'm rather tired of this boring partisan bickering we are constantly bombarded with by the media.

Will job loss in the US and elsewhere lead to another World War?

I saw an old colleague today at the market buying fresh vegetables. He's 88, worked at HP well into his mid 80's and is now supporting his daughter who was laid off 2 yrs ago from HP and can't find a decent job. Her job and thousands of others were outsourced to India and Asia.

When I left HP (now Agilent Technologies) back in 1998, part of my job at the time was to train Singapore engineers to do analog IC design which used to be a highly paid American job. When I started HP in 1978 as a summer intern, engineers with 20 years experience were assigned to train us new engineers. What a change to go from training people that would pay our Social Security when we retired to training those offshore who would never pay a dime to support us in our old age.

My friend and I talked about this continuing and inevitable trend of jobs to India and China and what the future holds for his grandkids. He made an interesting comment that the US is so good at making food to feed the World that the poor in China, Africa, India, etc. can't grow food as a crop and compete so they are forced to work for slave wages in factories. It was a very astute comment. Study history and you find the first born sons usually inherit land and the others have to strike out and fend for themselves. If they can't find work, then they usually sign on as mercenaries or other "trouble makers." When the farms are not profitable, such as in our own Great Depression, people leave the farms and head to cities to find work.

My friend's prediction was there would be massive wars and nukes launched due to this world unrest. I told him he sounded like the bad news bears but his reply was history says we always have wars. It seems the 1990's were no exception, we just forget that there was war elsewhere, not on our soil. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 brought this home.

So, how do we prevent a major war?

Do we let terrorists continue to dictate policy or do we hunt them down and destroy them as President Bush's administration is doing?

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