united states

Outsourcing Drive Thru Jobs

3 Comments

Photo: LWY

Here’s something may be a shock to you: when you pull up to a fast food, you might be talking someone in a call center thousands of miles away! It turns out numerous fast food chains have been experimenting with this over the last five years. If you are at a Wendy’s you might be talking to someone in Delaware, Jack in the Box to the Phillippines or Texas, or McDonald’s to India.

These companies claim the benefits are shorter wait times and less mistakes due to a further division of labor where each person can focus on one menial task. Well, maybe they don’t say it quite like that. It is hard to tell the extent to which this system is currently deployed in the United States – after a flurry of news stories about this experiment 4-5 years ago, the fast food companies have not informed the public how it has gone. My suspicion is that they strategically expanded the program nationwide to select franchises, specifically ones with multiple drive thru lines or notoriously hard to understand operators.

The New Bay Bridge

2 Comments

Engineers love bridges. I think it is because they appear so simple, but engineers appreciate how much thought and calculation are required.

Living in the Bay Area, we have two of the most impressive bridges in the country. It’s a great time to be here because they are currently rebuilding the Bay Bridge, designed to last 150 years and withstand a whopping 8.5 earthquake. Check out this short video showing how awesome it will be:

And for those of you that haven’t seen this famous video of how not to build a bridge:

Nerd note: In engineering classes we were taught that the reason the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed was because the wind provided a periodic frequency that matched the natural frequency of the bridge. (Non-nerd note: think of a parent pushing a child on a swing – the parent (the wind) is providing a periodic push of the child (the bridge), who is moving back and forth at a frequency. If those frequencies match the kid will swing higher and higher.) The real cause was aeroelastic flutter – aerodynamic forces, not periodic wind gusts, that matched the natural frequency of the bridge. There is a startup that created a tiny wind powered generator using this principle.

Open Source Development for Creating Laws – Introducing Wikilaw

Leave a comment

Photo: Brian Turner

A couple days ago I posted about the intriguing notion that anyone can write bills, which with a little hard work and a lot of luck can become a law.

Open Source Movement
I just started reading the book “Drive” which examines the motivation for human beings to behave the way we do. The hypothesis is that a simple cost benefit analysis is not enough to explain human behavior – there are other factors that must come into play because we do not always act in our own best interest.

An obvious example of this is the current trend of open source software. Why would anyone spend 20+ hours a week of their free time to work on open source programs? THEY AREN’T PAID FOR IT! But they do feel challenged, get the feeling of contributing to something larger than themselves, and develop their programming skills. Sometimes this is enough to convince a software developer to contribute.

A Wiki For Writing Bills
Let’s take the whole concept of Wikipedia and apply it to laws. Anyone can contribute to bills on the Wiki and therefore the whole responsibility does not rest on any one person. A mother in Ohio may work on one section, a farmer in California another, and a retired lawyer in Florida can make sure the wording is correct. By combining our efforts we can accomplish much more than individually and hopefully patch up the holes in our legal system.

This is inherently more difficult than Wikipedia – whereas Wikipedia is based on facts, Wikilaw is based on opinion. But this could be the best part about it! Your goal should be to produce bills which both Republicans and Democrats support. This can best be achieved with a bipartisan effort working together online on the same bill. Once the bill is complete, the community can vote on it – if it passes it is time to find a sponsor, if not it is back to the drawing board. Continue reading →

You Can Write Laws for the United States of America – How to Propose Bills in Congress

Leave a comment

Photo: Hobvias Sudoneighm

Out of all the repetitive junk we were taught in school as kids, it is pretty interesting what actually stuck in my brain. One of the things I remember learning back in the day is that anyone can write a bill for Congress. This means you, despite never running for a political office in your life, have the opportunity to write laws for the United States of America.

Writing the Bill
Once you know the law you want to impose upon your fellow Americans, you have to put it down in writing. This is the easiest part of the process, and it isn’t exactly straightforward. Bills can contain hundreds of pages of lawyer language, making them very hard to understand for those who are not well versed in it. I don’t blame the members of Congress for not reading every single bill that comes to vote.

So the first step is familiarizing yourself with how similar bills are formatted and the language they use. Take a look at OpenCongress.org and imitate what you see – don’t worry, it’s not plagiarism. It is probably a good idea to have a lawyer take a look to change wording as necessary.

Introduction to Congress
This is where it starts to get difficult. Even though you wrote the bill, it must be formally introduced by a member of Congress. So the first step after writing the bill is to convince a Congressman to propose it.

Keep reading…

Is Outsourcing Jobs Overseas Really a Problem? Depends Who You Ask

Leave a comment

Photo: Till Krech

Thousands, if not millions of Americans have lost their job overseas. Due to the recently flattened world, companies are now able to find workers in remote countries eager to work longer hours for significantly less pay.

Why do companies outsource jobs?
It’s simple – money. Companies have the goal of making money, not employing the most Americans as possible. Sometimes these conflict. If the business can make more money by laying off unnecessary workers or outsourcing jobs overseas, we have seen time and time again that they will.

Is this wrong?
No, it is not wrong. The company is simply responding to incentives – specifically, the management of the company is responding to incentives. The more money the company makes, the more money the executives make. These executives are often extremely removed from the lowest paid individuals who see their jobs outsourced – the management sees the pros but not the cons.

What is the result?
A report by McKinsey showed for every $1 of labor outsourced overseas, the United States receives $1.12 back (in addition to 33 cents retained by the country that does the work). So by outsourcing we are able to boost our production 12% without actually working!

Overall this sounds like a win for the United States, but in reality maybe it’s not – those simple numbers do not tell the whole story. Instead of $1 being dispersed amongst the poorest, $1.12 goes into the pockets of the richest! Outsourcing is a very efficient way of redistributing wealth – the poor in the US lose $1, the poor outside the US gain 33 cents, while the rich in the US gain $1.12!

Why outsourcing will not be stopped
Corporate executives are the ones who make the decisions for the business. They are also the ones who benefit the most from outsourcing jobs. If we expect outsourcing to stop, we have to change the incentives so that the negativities of outsourcing are felt.

Of course, the people who have the ability to change economic incentives are politicians – politicians that are buddy-buddy with the corporate big wigs and the associated lobbyists. Thus, until outsourcing becomes a compelling issue, nothing will change.

American vs. British English – Two Versions of the Same Language

Leave a comment

Photo: Maurice

I considered writing a post on the differences between American English and British English, but then I realized I am not particularly qualified considering I have lived in California my whole life. Instead, here is a funny rant by a British man telling us how we are misusing the language:

Mentioned in the video – American vs. British (links go to audio):

Keep reading …