Thought of the day
It is "a penny for your thoughts", but it is "put your two cents in". It costs more to voice your opinion when no one asked. That sounds about right.

Mobile
So, Nat was teasing me about my phone. I forget what the wording was. It was innocent enough, but I got burned out on being teased when I was a kid. I just can't take it. She said she would stop calling me and I threw my phone across the apartment and it shattered against a far wall. I managed to salvage the SIM card so I am using an old phone that still kind of works until my new one gets in. T-Mobile, of course, did not have the cheap phone in stock. Since I have a temporary, I told them I would just wait. The phones on sale are always on back order. Bastards.

Globalization

Even as it proceeds with layoffs of up to 13,000 workers in Europe and the United States, I.B.M. plans to increase its payroll in India this year by more than 14,000 workers, according to an internal company document. Those numbers are telling evidence of the continuing globalization of work and the migration of some skilled jobs to low-wage countries like India. And I.B.M., the world's largest information technology company, is something of a corporate laboratory that highlights the trend. Its actions inform the worries and policy debate that surround the rise of a global labor force in science, engineering and other fields that require advanced education. To critics, I.B.M. is a leading example of the corporate strategy of shopping the globe for the cheapest labor in a single-minded pursuit of profits, to the detriment of wages, benefits and job security here and in other developed countries. The company announced last month that it would cut 10,000 to 13,000 jobs, about a quarter of them in the United States and the bulk of the rest in Western Europe. ... By one calculation, the cost of softening the blow might not be all that high. For every dollar invested offshore, American companies save 58 cents, McKinsey estimates. And 4 or 5 percent of those savings could pay for a theoretical wage insurance program that would cover 70 percent of the income lost between an old job and a new one, as well as subsidized health care coverage, McKinsey said. New York Times

I wonder if I will live long enough to hear "What happened?" from all those CEO types who are suddenly out of a job because no one actually works for them and the Chinese and Indians figured out they don't need Americans to do the work any more.