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Friday, February 24, 2006

Farmshoring 
This is terrific news:

The farmshoring phenomenon, in which high-tech companies choose to open offices in rural America as opposed to India, China, or Mexico, is coming to this mid-Appalachian plateau.

Late last year, two major IT firms, CGI-AMS and Northrop-Grumman, announced they were bringing more than 700 technology jobs to Lebanon that pay around $50,000 a year. These positions are in the same class as the 112,000 IT jobs nationwide that were lost to overseas outsourcing in 2003, according to Global Insight in Boston.

In a town where the average salary is around $27,000, many residents welcome the arrival of the IT revolution. It's also a subtle promise that the region's talented young people may stay where horses and mules graze behind rickety fences on sloping hillsides.

Other technology companies are also putting high-level programming and data- crunching jobs in rural America locales with less traffic and lower rents to cut costs and remove the legal entanglements, cross-cultural differences, and time-zone hassles that come with overseas outsourcing.

"When you look at [farmshore] communities that are becoming successful, they're saying, 'Yes, we can compete with offshore, and we add value to these companies,'" says John Allen, director of the Western Rural Development Center at Utah State University.


Too bad the reporter had to have an attack of journitis:

Critics, meanwhile, worry that these jobs, which are often temporary, could give false hope to desperate communities.


Only some fuckwit who lives and works in NYC, San Francisco, Seattle, or Boston could write that. Those are the only cities where anyone could possibly find any American who's a "critic" of farmshoring. The alternative, my subway-riding drone, is to send these jobs to India.

But this reporter (who also contributes to the left wing website AlterNet) doesn't even bother to find a critic. Instead, the article mentions that sometimes a former call center sits on a rural road. Yes, sometimes call centers go out of business. That is not in ANY way indicative of a downside to farmshoring. That's just sloppy thinking.

These ass clowns would click their tongues and call Swiss cheese "incomplete" because of the holes.

Splash, out

Jason

Comments:
Let's see, we lost 112,000 jobs and gained 700, so we only need to gain another 11,300 in flyover country to break even...
 
Dear Anonymous, please check your math.
 
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