Nogo In India
Statesman – Software provider Pervasive is moving back to Austin after a failed attempt to outsource a majority of its developers – this article nails whats wrong with India’s potential for future outsourcing –
“We have found that the complexity of managing such an operation and the increasing costs of labor, employee turnover, training and facilities in a hot market such as Bangalore make it challenging to realize those savings,” he said.
“…delivering savings is often far more difficult than small companies imagine,” said Robert Kennedy, professor of business administration at the University of Michigan.
“Moving offshore involves a trade-off. Typically you save a lot on labor and you incur additional costs related to administration and other issues,” Kennedy said. “For big corporations, the economics still work. But for midsized ones, it’s easy to overestimate how much you’re going to save.”
MyRichUncle
Love to see this stuff – MyRichUncle is a disruptive innovator taking the student loan market by storm. And its doing more for students and their parents than Congress has in the last decade. This article sheds some light on the matter –
Federal Student Loans, the most widely utilized and cost-effective loans for education will move to a higher fixed rate structure on July 1, 2006. However, by securing their Federal Loans through MyRichUncle, students and parents will realize sizeable cost savings at repayment on Stafford (5.8 percent), PLUS (6.75 percent) and GradPLUS (6.75 percent) loans, versus other lenders offering industry-standard rates of 6.8, 8.5 and 8.5 percent, respectively.
Great stuff.
Ineffective ER’s
KC Star – Our emergency rooms are not evolving.
American emergency rooms are stretched to the breaking point and are “ill-prepared to handle large-scale emergencies,” the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine reported Wednesday.
“You’ve got to ask yourself: If our 911 services are struggling to handle our daily and nightly 911 calls, how in the world are they going to handle a mass-casualty event, a terrorist strike, an outbreak of infectious disease or a natural disaster?” asked Arthur Kellermann, chairman of emergency medicine at Emory University.
As they list some of the factors contributing to this fiasco we can see some core faults – namely too much overhead stemming from too much bureaucracy –
The problems, it said, grow out of the need for emergency rooms to provide routine care for millions of uninsured patients, a shortage of nurses and medical specialists, and failure to use modern methods to manage the flow of patients.
Coming from a very half-full perspective there’s a major market here. From the half-empty perspective: we really are on our own. I’ve been doing some thinking on individual/primary resiliency, will be posting some of that soon.
Interrogation Transparency
AP – Military moves a tiny bit towards transparency –
Two senior officials said there will not be a classified section in the long-awaited revision of the Army Field Manual. One of the officials said descriptions of interrogation techniques initially planned for the classified section are either being made public or are being eliminated as tactics that can be used against prisoners.
Open Source In America
Snippets from a great Reuters article –
U.S. intelligence and law enforcement authorities are discovering new home-grown cells of Islamist radicals in the United States that draw inspiration and moral support from al Qaeda, officials said on Tuesday.
…Like local terrorism cells that have recently come to light in Canada and Europe, officials said the groups are comprised of disaffected young men in their teens and 20s who rely on the Internet to try to organize and plan potential attacks on the U.S. homeland…
…”We are grappling with a whole new set of questions: what forces give rise to this violent ideology in immigrant communities that may appear otherwise to be quite well assimilated? … What signs should we be looking for to try to draw early warning of potential problems?” the statement said…
…In later oral testimony, Redd said home-grown cells were a new domestic phenomenon for which the FBI and law enforcement agencies had no “baseline” for measuring the scale of the problem…
Preventing attacks is quickly becoming a nogo. Sustaining them is infinitely more important.