Outsourcing 548

+--------------- "Outsourcing" - which has become synonymous with sending American jobs to India or China ... +---------------

(*sigh*) Yes, sadly, it has -- a terrible case of vocabulary drift.

"Outsourcing" *used* to mean simply farming out some of the work, like getting your bank to cut your payroll checks for you, or getting a job shop to do some of your prototyping work, etc. Subcontracting on steroids. Oops. Can't use that phrase any more, I guess...

The word for sending jobs to a foreign country was-is "offshoring". And, yes, "offshoring" included Mexico & Canada, so it wasn't the perfect term either.

But by politicians using the term "outsourcing" over & over when describing what was really "offshoring", it became easy to conveniently gloss over the fact that the vast majority of "outsourcing" was actually domestic, *not* offshore! So rather than blame our own American workers in a neighboring city or state for "taking away our jobs" we could blame "them furriners"... (*sigh*)

+--------------- ...could soon mean foreign workers sleeping in ships just a few miles off America's coasts. +---------------

Yes, *truly* "offshoring"!! ;-} ;-}

-Rob

p.s. Remember the aircraft carriers in Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age"?

----- San Mateo, CA 94403 (650)572-2607