Seriously, this isn’t funny:

I don’t understand how commodity (or currency) traders can possibly figure out the direction of their holdings.

Actually… I don’t think they do.

(See also)

“Nothing you have ever experienced can prepare you for the unbridled carnage you’re about to witness.”

- Louis Winthorp III (Dan Aykroyd), on the way to the NYSE stock market trading floor, Trading Places (1983)

Dear robber baron executives,

All that offshoring to India really turned out to be a great idea, huh?

Hey EMI:

Ever heard of EMusic?

I mean, you guys practically have the same name.

I suppose that with major label DRM-free files now available on iTunes, it wouldn’t be a total sin to get an iTMS account. Even though $1.29/song is pretty steep compared to the ~ $0.33 I pay now for indie and DTD (direct to digital) tracks at EMusic… although I don’t usually use my month’s worth, so that’s a misleading price (EMusic is a flat per-month fee for X number of tracks in a month).

Honestly, the winner here will be Apple, with DRM foes (like me) now considering signing up with iTMS and buying some tracks. The loser will probably be EMI, but… will they? At $1.29 a track, a CD’s worth is anywhere from $13 to $20. That’s with no label art, no cover and sleeve art, no plastic case, no printed track listing. Maybe EMI will find out that DRM-free doesn’t cause a surge in losses (any more than a regular CD ever did!) and you get to skimp on the perks.

Also, being first out the door among major labels, they will benefit the most from DRM foes hopping on board. Everyone else will be chasing a longer tail.

We live in an age where the dominant paradigms are to treat people like machines… and to treat machines like people.

There seems to be two prevailing mentalities on the use of a Wiki to store information:

• Community - The wide majority of online Wikis follow the community model, where no one is nailed down but free to add value to the entire project. Forming a semantic web is a big part of the goal, where usability and ease of finding information is equally or more important than ease of contribution.
• Dominions - This is where most mature companies using Wiki seem to drift. The primary emphasis is on control and limitation, with “walled gardens” of content and access, with a secondary goal of ease of contribution, but nearly no focus on ease of finding information, or even on organization or style. Semantic web? What’s that? Call it a classic case of the corporate world simply not able to comprehend the value-add of openness and community collaboration.

A few random links dug up for a search on offshoring this morning reveals some new beachheads for the offshorers:

• Phillippines
• Africa
• Egypt
• Amerikka

Stories like this make me smile inside a little. Basically, Indian call center contract houses are turning down contracts from big Western corporations who got way too used to paying fractional labor costs for essential B2C services. Plus, the fact that offshored call centers are basically powerless to actually help any but the most casual customers raises the stress and load on the operation, making the workers and shops less able to get the work done for the same money.

Not only is this a case of Western corporate psychosis biting it in the ass, but it’s also good for the people in the onshored nations, as they are now demanding higher prices to keep up with demand. I presume the workers of these operations are also starting to get competitive with their shops, for whatever reason (like the physical needs from the stress of having to deal with angry, underserved, Western customers).

This may or may not mean an improvement for Western workers, although the offshoring trend has already shown signs of cooling. At very least, wholesale slicing-and-dicing of local operations and dropping offshored labor in their places is coming out of vogue; the new CW is only using offshored labor to augment, not replace, local operations. The incredible hidden onshore costs of offshoring, which workers were immediately aware of, but managers not aware of until workers started dropping off, are being noticed.

However, the fact of the matter is, there are still plenty of countries that, with a few good OC lines and computer trainers, could start being the new cheap labor havens.

[From Slashdot]