Will Write COBOL For Food

There are numerous drawings and staged (I hope) photos of bums/hobos/street people holding up signs saying, "will write COBOL for food".  They were rife after Y2K ran its course, and the dot com bubble deflated.  One of the results of pernicious tech outsourcing, to India in particular (I speak from direct experience in a Fortune 100 software vendor), is that "freshers" from India have largely taken over the maintenance of decades old COBOL applications.

I wonder what it's like, just having spent four years at an IIT campus learning the ins and outs of modern software building, to be facing all that American COBOL, doing nothing to build an infrastructure for your country?  Can't be comfortable.

Those who follow this endeavour are aware of my Malthusian view, and my view that avoiding its consequences gets to be a lousier bet as time goes by.  The reasons why Malthus was "wrong" for so long after he wrote have been chronicalled here and elsewhere many times.  But more data emerges that the days of reckoning (and I don't mean the Mayan calendar nonsense) approach. 

Yesterday's NY Times carries an article on the Indian situation.  Beyond the facts on display, one can perform certain thought experiments; connecting dots, so to speak.  That the Powers That Be in India would happily destroy most of its population to make a tiny minority absurdly comfortable is evil.  The question becomes:  how soon will India become Egypt?

To maintain law and order, which is to say, keeping the poor and starving from getting too rambunctious, a police state is required.  We see said police states in any country which is short of natural resources.  As I have said many times before, what passes for Democracy here in the USofA, was fueled by such an excess of resources that even with the top 1% taking 10% or 15% of national income left a decent existence for the remaining 99%.  With the 1% now up to 24% (or 25%, depending on the data source), we'll see what happens.  I'll note in passing that Egyptians had a simple situation:  Mubarak took the money, and Mubarak was the government. 

Here, the situation is different.  Here we have classic fascism, where the government simply enables corporations to take the wealth.  The stupid people, Tea Baggers as an example, see their enemy as the poor.  As if the poor were the ones sucking up national income.  Hardly, but stupid people are easily swayed by propaganda.  Goebbels was very good at it; Murdoch follows his game plan.  In passing, Steve Jobs has made a pact with Murdoch to provide "news" on iStuff.  The sooner Steve is gone, the better.

So, back to India; what's likely to happen?  I'd bet on complete collapse in the near term.  The telling data in the article is the graph of wheat production, comparing India to China.  Now, China is not a fledgling democracy, but they've managed to increase production of this staple.  India hasn't.  The situation isn't quite so simple, though.  In American history, corporate farming simply discarded farmers without recompense.  And the Green Revolution is about machines and synthetic fertilizer, despite what "Green" connotates today.  Pushing farm labor into cities is what American capitalists did in the 19th and 20th centuries, and what China is doing now.

As this endeavor says, "It's the Distribution, Stupid".