ok, just had dinner with two of the smartest people I know. here's a nudge. WRITE....I'll get you readers.

any chance of reviving this blog? - election comments? with Ashcroft gone are you feeling more secure? martinis anyone? - maybe a KYOO dinner in Silver Spring would be in order?

we need to return to the original plan of a Tuesday morning coffee break discussion.
I believe "The West Wing did a great job last week on the issue of outsourcing. Anyone catch it?

Here's a really interesting website on the offshoring issue: http://offshoreupdate.com/

OK. Everybody else in the world had something to say about Janet, so I passed. But I've been thinking about the high tech job outsourcing issue. Like Janet, it's suddenly everywhere. It's very real for people in the IT and communications industries (where my clients and their customers are concentrated), and it's going to become more pervasive as bandwidth gets cheaper. One of the more interesting takes is by Thomas Friedman of the NY Times (author of "The Lexus and the Olive Tree"), who announced in an article a week or two ago that he had simply missed the size and significance of the trend. Here's his latest:

> The secret of our sauce - New York Times New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman takes a closer look at the culture of innovation within the U.S., arguing that much of the uproar surrounding overseas IT outsourcing may be over-hyped: "America is the
greatest engine of innovation that has ever existed, and it can't be duplicated anytime soon, because it is the product of a multitude of factors: extreme freedom of thought, an emphasis on independent thinking, a steady immigration of new minds, a risk-taking culture with no stigma attached to trying and failing, a noncorrupt bureaucracy, and financial
markets and a venture capital system that are unrivaled at taking new ideas and turning them into global products." As long as companies such as Google and Amazon.com keep "creating leading edge technologies that make their companies more productive," the U.S. may have little to fear from countries such as India or China, says Friedman.
http://www.corante.com/venture/redir/41255.html

I suspect he's correct in the near term, but I am less sure that he is right in the long term. The reason is that I just don't see that our attributes are so unique that they can't be recreated elsewhere. There is a non-partisan American penchant for proselytizing (like the alliteration?) on behalf of democracy, individual rights and free market economies. It seems to me that if we are successful as we hope to be, we will (deliberately?) lose our competitive advantage and bring other countries up to our level. We may be the only civilization in history that, recognizing that the potential worldwide success of its governing ideology contains the seeds of its own decline, nonetheless pushed forward.

We could start our first blog about the Super Bowl half time show--should the FCC be investigating the incident or should Americans just accept the fact that quaint notions like the "family hour" and the "fairness doctrine" are relics of another age? On the other hand, are there still certain lines that should not be crossed on network tv? But given the viewing habits of Americans (more now watch cable tv over "free"tv) isn't the FCC itself becoming an anachronism since it does not regulate cable tv with respect to indecent content? And what about the much-ballyhooed Super Bowl ads? They were, as a group, in such poor taste that the NFL should be fined for allowing the American public to be "exposed" to them. Just a few of my thoughts for the watercooler today.

Welcome