Commentary

What caused Silicon Valley companies to outsource jobs?

3 Comments

Article from the center-right Manhattan Institute.  (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Silicon Valley faces a serious threat, however: the fiscal and regulatory earthquakes rocking California, which verges on becoming a failed state. Measured by per-household state and local government spending, California ranks third-highest in the nation, behind Alaska and New York. The state government is trying desperately to squeeze money out of any profitable activity to meet the crippling costs. Further, California continues to impose onerous regulations on the private sector. High taxes and stifling regulations give companies a strong incentive to move elsewhere. In this increasingly business-hostile environment, will Silicon Valley’s unique entrepreneurial spirit survive?

[…]California has piled every imaginable burden on businesses. Minimum-wage laws are among the highest in the country, and health and safety regulations are among the strictest; cities like San Francisco and San Jose require businesses to offer employees health insurance; labor laws are extremely union-friendly; environmental policies drive up energy costs—and on and on. Small firms have the toughest time in this business-toxic climate. A recent study by Sanjay Varshney, dean of the College of Business Administration at California State University in Sacramento, estimates that the cost of state regulations in 2007 reached an average of $134,122 per small business—the equivalent of one job lost per company. And it’s not just the small guys: Google, which uses colossal amounts of electricity, is building its data centers in other states or abroad, where energy is much cheaper.

Hank Nothhaft is the CEO of Tessera, a firm in the field of semiconductor miniaturization. He shows me the vacant office parks and empty lots around his company’s San Jose factory. Silicon Valley, he observes, lost more than a quarter of its computer, microchip, and communications-equipment manufacturing jobs from 2001 to 2008, and Tessera proved no exception. The company has kept some of its assembly lines and industrial operations going here, but it now produces two-thirds of its nanotechnology chips in less expensive North Carolina and in various countries overseas, with China becoming the latest contender for a production facility. Just back from a trip there, Nothhaft says that he has been offered terms he “cannot decently refuse.” Using the Internet and videoconferencing, he can manage Tessera factories around the globe without leaving his San Jose office. “The business environment is becoming awful in California,” Nothhaft complains—just by moving his headquarters to Nevada, he’d save $5 million a year in taxes.

I quoted the interesting part of the article above, the rest is just more details about the past, present and future of Silicon Valley.

News

Now even the Miss USA pageant is decided by political correctness

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Michelle Malkin lists the errors made by the winner of the pageant.

Excerpt:

She nearly tripped over her gown.

She called birth control a “controlled substance.”

She argued that contraceptives should be covered by health insurers because they are “expensive” — and then said you could get them for “free” from your OB/GYN’s office.

But she is a Muslim, and an Arab-American, and she expressed support for taxpayer-funded birth control, so she won.

More from Michelle:

Does she even comprehend the concept of insurance? The purpose of insurance isn’t to cover every last medical expense. It’s supposed to cover events that are beyond your control. Should auto insurers now cover oil changes and satellite radio installations? I mean, hey, they’re “expensive,” too!

Yes, if something is totally optional, based on individual priorities and choices, but it is “expensive”, then people should not have to pay for it themselves. Someone else should pay, because it’s expensive. Perhaps a working husband, who doesn’t really need the money he earns anyway, should have to pay for it. After all, he needs to help people who freely choose to engage in risky behaviors. Especially if he is pro-life, because then he can pay for abortions that sometimes result from using birth control pills.

UPDATE: In 2007, she won a pole-dancing contest. There she is, your ideal…

UPDATE: Her family is Linked to the terrorist group Hezbollah???

Who should have won?

So who should have won, if politics were set aside?

Miss Oklahoma Morgan Elizabeth Woolard finished first runner-up to winner Rima Fakih of Michigan, and conspiracy theorists are grumbling that her support of SB 1070 may have cost her the crown in a repeat of last year’s Carrie Prejean controversy.

When “The Office” star Cesar Nunez posed Miss Oklahoma a question about where she stood on Arizona’s SB 1070 Sunday night, the crowd erupted in boos over the intrusion of politics, Fox News reported.

“I’m a huge believer in states’ rights. I think that’s what’s so wonderful about America,” Woolard answered of the law which requires state police to stop and question possible undocumented immigrants. “So I think it’s perfectly fine for Arizona to create that law.”

Woolard added that she is against racial profiling.

There’s your winner: Miss Oklahoma.

After last year, you’d think they would have got some judges who could actually judge the merits of the argument instead of whether the conclusion is politically correct. But you’d be wrong. This is just more of the fascists on the secular left sending a clear message to conservatives – agree with us or we will destroy your career. It’s “Expelled” all over again. When the left is in control, there is no diversity of thought.

Secular leftists cannot handle disagreement and debate, so they silence and suppress those who disagree with them. They don’t want to discuss the merits. They just want to feel good and to be perceived as being good, regardless of the effects of the policies that they advocate. Secular leftists are the only ones who care about race, because they are racists. They are the only ones who care about sex, because they are sexist.

By the way, I have no television, so I did not watch this travesty. If I want to admire a woman, I listen to Jennifer Roback Morse lectures, or watch Michele Bachmann speeches, or read Ann Coulter columns.

Commentary

MUST-READ: Who is to blame for the hook-up culture?

4 Comments

I found this post over at Stuart Schneiderman’s blog.

What’s the problem anyway?

If girls are induced to make hooking up their most predominant mode of relating to boys, then they will be giving their sexual favors to a certain type of guy, one who is called a pick up artist.But what happens to another young man, the one who works hard at his studies, who is preparing himself for success in the world, who does not spend his weekend taking a course on how to pick up girls? Isn’t he going to be overlooked, and thus, devalued, by young women who are settling for hookups.

The hookup culture thus undermines a work ethic.

And if the model of the modern relationship is something called friends with benefits, what does that say about the values of commitment, loyalty, and fidelity.

Clearly, many young people have been induced to act as though these values do not matter, because they have learned the amoral lesson that it is alright for two people to exploit each other if they have agreed that they are not exploiting each other.

So how is to blame?

Meantime, Flanagan offers a useful analysis of how the hookup culture started, and how it took hold with the unintended connivance of mothers.

It began in the late 1970s with a generation of feminist mothers who had decided, quite consciously, to bring up their daughters differently.

In Flanagan’s words: “… a large number of modern mothers were committed to helping their daughters incorporate sexual lives within a normal teenage girlhood, one in which sex did not instantly and permanently cleave a girl from her home and her family.”

It might seem dated by now, but these mothers took it for granted that their daughters would experience their sexual awakening within the context of a relationship, with a boyfriend.

In her words: “This set wasn’t in the business of providing girls and young women the necessary information and services to allow boys and men to discard them sexually. Their reaction to the kinds of sexual experiences that so many American girls are now having would have been horror and indignation.”

What started out as a permission slip for teenage girls to have sex with their boyfriends morphed into the hookup culture.

Unintentionally, so.

We are dealing with unintended consequences. Feminists decided that the double standard was unjust. Mothers everywhere bought this idea and taught their daughters that they had as much of a right to sexual pleasure as any boy did. If the unintended result was the hookup culture, then surely they bear some responsibility.

It may well be that they have now learned why there is a double standard and why feminine sexuality should never be confused with masculine sexuality.

Read the whole thing. This is a must-read. I want everyone to click though and print it and read it. Please.

UPDATE: Kelli sends this link to a recent CNN column by Racquel Welch in which she attacks the birth control pill as one of the reasons for the over-sexed culture that is harming young women today. The pill is considered to be a cornerstone of feminism because it divorces sex from procreation and allows women to have sex without having to form relationships with reliable men and vulnerable children.