From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com>
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 1996 04:11:16 +0800
To: Arun Mehta <cypherpunks@toad.com>
Subject: re: National Socio-Economic Security Need for Encryption   Technology
Message-ID: <199608141547.IAA25312@dns1.noc.best.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 08:33 13/08/96 -0700, James A. Donald wrote:
> > the fact that an engineer who is subject to the power of the Indian
> > government is not worth very much, as is demonstrated by the fact
> > that companies with Indian engineering teams often spend a lot of money
> > to get their employees out of India.
> > 
> > Demand for Indian programmers is less than supply not because capital
> > has somehow failed to flow to India, but because an engineer in India
> > is not free to produce the value that engineers elsewhere are free
> > to produce.

At 07:00 PM 8/14/96 +0600, Arun Mehta wrote:
> Whoa! In economies that are highly de-coupled, incomes and prices
> can easily find quite different equilibria.

So?  What does this have to do with the price of fish?

Are Informix campuses "highly decoupled economies".

The fact is a company like Informix has a campus in India, and
it has campuses in the US that are largely staffed by Indian teams,
and it will pay big bucks to get its people out of India, even
though it has to pay them more than ten times as much in the US.

An Indian programmer doing the same job for the same company is
more than ten times as valuable to that company if he is not 
subject to the power of the Indian government, as proven by that
companies actions.

Plainly Informix does not like the power of the Indian government,
which is no surprise as a few years ago just about every company on
earth utterly detested the power of the Indian government and would
not touch the place with a ten foot pole.

> India has its faults,
> but it still is a relatively democratic and free country.

Under democracy, people get the government they deserve and 
get it good and hard.
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