An international consulting firm determined that the average labor productivity in the modern sectors in India is 15 percent of labor productivity in the United States.
In other words, if you hired an average Indian worker and paid him one-fifth of what you paid an average American worker, it would cost you more to get a given amount of work done in India than in the United States. Paying 20 percent of what an American worker makes to someone who produces only 15 percent of what an American worker produces would increase your labor costs.
The struggle against Islamic-based terrorism will be not simply a military campaign but a battle for public opinion in the Islamic world, among our allies, and in the United States. Osama bin Laden understands that he cannot defeat or even incapacitate the United States in a conventional war.
What he and his allies can do is inflict enough pain to provoke a reaction of the sort we’ve seen in Iraq—a botched and ill-advised U.S. military incursion into a Muslim country, which in turn spurs on insurgencies based on religious sentiment and nationalist pride, which in turn leads to an escalating death toll on the part of U.S. troops and the local civilian population. All of this fans anti-American sentiment among Muslims, increases the pool of potential terrorist recruits, and prompts the American public to question not only the war but also those policies that project us into the Islamic world in the first place.
That’s the plan for winning a war from a cave, and so far, at least, we are playing to script.
If you master the tools of the trade – the fundamentals of interviewing and of orderly construction – and if you bring to the assignment your general intelligence and your humanity, you can write about any subject. That’s your ticket to an interesting life.
Now do this is the simplest task site I’ve ever seen, but extremely useful for a today list. I normally use Things for my general task management and a sheet of paper for my daily list, but I really like the idea of Nowdothis.com…
In one of this famous experiments, Asch assembled a dozen or so Swarthmore students and announced that they were taking part in an experiment on visual perception. He showed them three line segments, and asked each one in turn which line was the longest. It was an easy task—the correct answer was obvious.
However, Asch had secretly instructed all but the last person, who was the real result of the subject of the experiment, to say that the medium-length line was the longest. The aim was to see whether the subject would rely on his or her own judgment, or go along with the group.
As it turns out, 70 percent of the subjects caved in to group pressure and said that the medium-length line was the longest. The conclusion was that most human beings, under conditions that are hardly severe, will follow the crowd, even when the crowd is clearly wrong.
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