The Blog of Harald

My RSS feed aggregator had two similarly themed articles side by side today. The first was “Economist NewSpeak”:http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2003/11/02.html#a502 from “Dave Pollard”:http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/, in which he says:

bq. The newspapers were full of ‘joyous’ and ‘encouraging’ news about the economy this past week, and there was little mention of the fact that, on the heels of this ‘good news’, several businesses announced another round of layoffs.

Followed by an interesting “What they said / what they meant” analysis that boils down to a simple truth: the current economic good news is only good news for _businesses_, not _people_ (at least, not North American people :-). Go read it, it’s short but sweet.

This was followed by “Halley Suitt”:http://halleyscomment.blogspot.com/’s “Neutron Bomb Economy”:http://halleyscomment.blogspot.com/archives/2003_11_02_halleyscomment_archive.html#106776771491216947 which says (in part):

bq. This is a the neutron bomb economy — easy to look profitable when your building is still standing but you’ve nuked your entire workforce. Soon we’ll be forced to hail the new worker-less enterprise, it’s sure to be the Next Big Thing.

This reminded me of a certain CEO’s response to an outsourcing question. So far Canada is a net _receiver_ of outsourcing jobs. I wonder how long that is going to last, especially now that our dollar has skyrocketed (compared to the US dollar)…

I’m not really sure what to think or say or do about the whole situation. Both of us make our living in highly skilled positions, so in theory we’ll be able to ride out the continuing global restructuring. We all know the difference between theory and practice, though.