The Hoboken Cafe 

What can you buy for 11 thousand dollars?

You can rent a $916/mo apartment for one year.

You could purchase a pretty good used car.

You could employ a 300/dollar an hour lawyer for almost 37 hours.

You could employ, for a year at full time
(40/H a week, 52 weeks/yr),a worker at the federal minimum wage of 5.15

Or

You could employ for a year an Indian with a degree in engineering as a technology project manager.

Anyone in a technical field, be it trading, accounting, law, or computers should be very concerned about the outsourcing that's going on right now.

Check out this article:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.02/india.html

It's an election year and as a town that is for a large part founded on some of the afore mentioned fields perhaps we need to voice any concerns we may have.

Maybe the techie is going the way of the buggy-whip maker.

The Washington Post puts things in a different perspective...

This is not the first jobless recovery. In 1991-92 the economy grew steadily, but job growth was almost nil. The reason for such recoveries, as a study by the New York Fed argues, is that the structure of the economy is changing faster than previously. In the 1970s and '80s, unemployment was roughly 50 percent "cyclical": Recessions drove firms to lay off workers and recoveries drove them to hire workers back into the same jobs. Now, by contrast, the "structural" component of unemployment accounts for most job losses: Technological and organizational shifts are driving firms to close jobs down permanently, and laid-off workers are having to look for entirely new work. That takes time. Firms have to create jobs they never had before, which takes longer than re-creating old ones. As a result, the new structural nature of unemployment means that job creation lags in the early stages of a recovery.

Read the whole thing...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50822-2004Jan...