My brother is a lawyer, working in some large corporate contracts mill. Their division just got sold to a huge conglomerate and the labor outsourced overseas. This is happening and it is nothing to cheer. The squeeze will slowly move up the food chain until only the billionaires remain.
No, it certainly isn't something to cheer, sorry if it sounded that way. I just have this general sense that the huge gap in public opinion on outsourcing & similar matters is almost completely aligned with each individuals income or place on the financial hierarchy - while the lower and middle class are raising an alarm, the well compensated professionals generally have a "tsk tsk, should have got a real education" attitude, or at the very least "there has always been new jobs created, and there will this time as well".
I'm fortunate enough (so far) to still have one of those high paying jobs, but I worry a lot about not just myself but for society in general. To me a very likely natural progression is that as the power of technology increases, it will be the well connected monied class who either harness it to make themselves even more wealthy, or at the very least use the courts to protect themselves from harm. So in that sense, while it is unfortunate to read about your brother, at the same time it is encouraging in a strange way that the one profession that you'd think would use the legal system is also being hurt by technology and outsourcing. But it is also discouraging in that it shows once again that those in power (and already have more money than they know how to spend) are willing to even throw "their own" over the side of the ship in the pursuit of even more money to add to their pile.
The world is becoming increasingly bizarre every day from a financial perspective. Yesterday I was reading a community bulletin board and see a handwritten "for sale" ad for some household items (plates, scarves, various knick knacks) for like $2 to $10 per item - the whole lot might be $50. That'll buy you like two days of survival, then what? Of course it's good to recycle, and I'm not saying the seller needs this money, but when you can probably go to the dollar store and buy all of those items brand new for the same or lower price, it's kinda like what's the point. Last night I figured I'll sell my old cell phone that I paid $700 for a few years back, spent over an hour wiping it, etc and then check craigslist for going rates, I'll be lucky if I can get $75 for it.
All these things kind of invoke a feeling of cognitive dissonance in me, know what I mean? To me the world just seems in many ways to be in almost a logically impossible state of equilibrium at the moment. From everyone freaking out about "peak oil" 5 years ago, suddenly we have massive oversupply of oil and commodities, and it seems plausible that it may remain that way for a very long time, if not indefinitely - which again, could be good or bad depending on your lot in life.
