NAFTA – North American Free Technology Act
I was parking on the freeway during the rainstorm that blew in from nowhere last night and just happened to actually pay attention to the news playing from NPR. I normally have my tunes plugged in but forgot the unit at home and usually it’s just background noise while I’m driving. An interesting discussion about NAFTA and its anniversary. The usual banter about left wing – right wing politics and then they went on to describe the phylosophy… 10 million jobs would open up, individuals that lost jobs in this sector would be retrained for higher technology jobs, et. al. Well, what about these so called high tech jobs… poof. They’re gone. Seems like it’s scattershot across the board. Industrial, textile and now technology – at least we still have biotech and cloned pigs.
As in industry and the textiles there have been glorious engines of mass production aka sweat shops. This appears to have bled into new technology. Now we have overseas codeshops cranking out zillions of lines of code for nickels and dimes. Add a dash of mass media designer frenzy and you have template shops for the multimedia masses. It’s going to be interesting to see how ‘garage’ graphic designers, contract coders and small new media and software development shops are going to be able to survive this ubiquitous market.
Side note: done with finals exams, projects and papers. yay me.
This post is tagged: business, innovation