Dying for crisp thinking

Are media correspondents idiots?

A report in the San Francisco Chronicle talks about the rate of homeless deaths in San Francisco and elsewhere.

Now I want to be absolutely clear: this blog isn't about the homeless. I have nothing but sympathy for the plight of many of them. Can't say all, because I don't think there is any group that is homogenous enough to make a blanket claim about. But many. Most.

This blog is about the media, who can't seem to figure out what the news is.

This article says there are 169 homeless deaths a year. How newsworthy is this? I don't know if this is a 50%, 5% .5% or what mortality rate. Ok, buried in the article is a broad estimate of the population, 8,000 - 15,000. So 169 is between 1.1 and 2.2%. Hmmm. That doesn't sound so bad. I mean, no I wouldn't want them to die per se, but everyone does, and dying at the rate of <2% of a population per year doesn't sound out of line.

The article also mentions that there are far fewer homeless deaths elsewhere, eg. 37 in Boston. But again, how many homeless are in Boston, where it is bloody cold for a good part of the year? Previous articles have discussed a migration of homeless to SF due to weather and liberal policies. I have no idea what the relative number of homeless are between SF and Boston.

That's the point of my rant. I don't know, and the article singularly failed to tell me.

The headline for this article should have been "Homeless die at 4 times the rate of the larger population" if they wanted it to be truly useful. Or whatever the real number is.

The peak of insanity here is mention of 8,000 deaths a year total in SF. Wow! There are fewer homeless deaths than non-homeless? I knew home ownership was stressful, but hadn't realised it increases mortality rate. Streets, here I come!

Flipping idiots.

Offshore and education funding

I've tried to stay away from the offshore issue since my Aug 4 blog, but this article asks:

Dammit, weren't our kids supposed to bring home the bacon? ... expensively educated middle-class kids learn that their investment (and, in the US, this can be upwards of $120,000 per child) has gone offshore.

Um, no. Higher education costs a fortune, yes, but that is more about the higher cost structure in the US (real estate, health care, litigation, etc) than about any extra value returned. And kids enter university here in much worse shape than those from other countries because of chronic underfunding of grade and high school. Folks, the US is being outinvested in $ adjusted to local economic conditions. Why would anyone think the knowledge (read: IT or programming) jobs should stay here?

The article goes on to wonder if this will be a political issue. No doubt it will, but I have no faith that the public and politicians will attack the problem at its root (funding and cost structure) when it will be easier to stump about protectionism and big bad corporations. Somehow I think adding value is a better product strategy than increasing cost.

IBM shedding PWC?

The Register reports that in the last quarter IBM has quietly shed half as many global services folk as it acquired through the PWC acquisition. No mention of other quarters. So, was the acquisition only about killing a competitor?

Does open source drive IT offshore?

Since I wrote on remoteness a few days ago, new articles and blogs keep popping up.

Chad Dickerson has just linked the moving of IT offshore with open source, in the August 4 issue of Infoworld. To hear him tell it, a pro-open-source IT fellow was bemoaning the move of IT jobs offshore, and wondered at where he could find a competitive US-staffed supplier.


This ties into Alan Williamson's well-read blog on the economics of open source, and the thread over at Simon Phipps' blog.


Chad  ends up wondering to what extent IT's pursuit of overhead in decisions to use open source (eg. Linux) instead of a commercial server operating system is driving all the margin out of software, and driving our suppliers (or their employees) offshore.

"IT managers make these kinds of decisions every day to save money, but it’s the same basic line of reasoning that drives American IT jobs offshore. The cost of running a business should be as low as possible, and any reduction in IT costs (including labor) helps the bottom line."

Difficult questions. Open source solves some problems really well (read: development process), but in relying on open source for deployments do we run the risk of becoming {fishery,steel,...} workers?

And eventually, per the Dilbert cartoon, there is no place 'offshore' enough. I mean, what happens when you keep squeezing margin out? Where does the continuous search for cheaper cost structure drive you?

[Comments from my previous blog]

1. a reader left...

Tuesday, 5 August 2003 6:26 am

 

Well, the flaw in the logic is: Why should IT companies not move offshore? If no open source competitors exist, they can reduce their costs anyway and become more competitve against their commercial non-OS competitors. Either way IT jobs are moved offshore.

Stephan Schmidt

2. a reader left...

Tuesday, 5 August 2003 8:34 am

 

The majority of IT staff do not do software product development. Therefore, the deflationary effects of open source do not affect them. For the minority of software developers working in the software industry, its added pressure however the benefits of reuse allow for higher level of products to be develop faster.
Furthermore, software development is not analagous to marketing. Microsoft w/c makes over 32B a year only hires 50,000 employees worldwide. That's a drop in the bucket in the overall picture of employment.
At best Open source destroys markets, but in now way does it push a move to go offshore. If you don't have a market, doesn't matter how low cost your labor is.

Carlos E. Perez

3. a reader left...

Tuesday, 5 August 2003 8:38 am

 

Sorry about the typos... should have read:

The majority of IT staff do not do software product development. Therefore, the deflationary effects of open source do not affect them. For the minority of software developers working in the software industry, its added pressure however the benefits of reuse allow for higher level of products to be develop faster.
Furthermore, software development is not analagous to MANUFACTURING. Microsoft w/c makes over 32B a year only hires 50,000 employees worldwide. That's a drop in the bucket in the overall picture of employment.

At best Open source destroys markets, but in NO way does it push a move to go offshore. If you don't have a market, doesn't matter how low cost your labor is.

Carlos