Angry young Indians: What a waste
economist.com
economist.com
1) Incredibly, shockingly poor hygiene. Dirty black rags being used repeatedly to dry plates at restaurants. Idlys being cooked on plastic sheets inside hot streamers. Infernoes of uncollected trash burning on streets. Rats and cockroaches everywhere including your toothbrush at night.
2) Utterly horrifying road conditions. Potholes large enough to cause motorcycle crashes every 100 feet. A culture of not giving the other motorist more than 6 inches on any side. Driving on the wrong side of the road, including on highways. It's incredibly stressful to think about your odds when you leave the house.
3) A political system that no-one is optimistic about. Stories are rampant of politicians buying votes by giving free household appliances away to the poor, and then doing nothing in office to help them.
4) An education system that isn't remotely good enough. Miserable professors, antiquated curriculums that churn out the IT coolies we're so famous for.
5) Congestion so bad you hardly ever leave a 5-mile radius. People tend to hang out based on which neighborhood they live in, because a trip to a friend's place more than 5 miles away can turn into an hour-long slog on terrifying roads.
6) A culture of being cheap. If you're only willing to tip your waiter 10 rupees, it may help out your savings rate, but it certainly won't help the waiter buy his kid a computer someday. Same goes for our beloved household servants, who get paid $150 per month at best, $40 at worst to clean our floors.
But to voice a conflict that everyone who lives here talks about, I'm not a pessimist about India by any means, because it's amazing how much the people of this country have achieved through individual hard work in the face of so many poor institutions.
1.) Everyone in the thread is ignoring a huge point raised by the author: this is the last biggest bubble we will ever witness in our lifetime (and possibly for many lifetimes) due to
a.) unpeg of gold standard
b.) shift from farm to factory work
c.) shift from one income to two income household
d.) machine/software advances
and many other factors has produced the greatest economic growth we have ever seen in history. However, due to
a.) unsustainable financial gambling
b.) wealth growth only in top 1%, mostly through rentier effects
c.) robots, automation and artificial intelligence resulting in jobs destruction
d.) population slowdown, shift to older demographics
the second dip in global economic depression is happening. and will induce so much deflation soon that 99% of the world population will be very very poor. for 3-4 generations.
2.) due to the lack of hygiene/lack of transportation/too many people/bad weather/trash everywhere/homeless everywhere/fecal matters on the streets/too many doctors prescribing antibiotics, resulting in super-resistant viruses, there will be a huge epidemic sooner or later that might wipe out millions of people, and nobody will be able to do anything about it because the crash in the economy.
3.) Growth in IT outsourcing is no more. Foreign investments are down big. There are better countries for companies to invest in that have better infrastructure and speaks better english.
You might want to reword that. :)
More seriously, I am optimistic because 1) the older generation will die off and 2) almost 50% of the grad students in any top US university are from India. (This includes programs in AI and Robotics. Count me in that too.)
1.) the young generation is still corrupt and apathetic and spineless 2.) assuming your number is correct (which I doubt), 90% of those students who overpaid for a masters are staying in the US
1) The younger generation is much much less corrupt.
2) Almost nobody pays for a masters in science and engineering. Those who do startup eventually end up doing it in India. I know a bunch of my friends running profitable startups.
Phillipines Malaysia Singapore Argentina Lots of eastern european countries
They all have way better infrastructure than India
Look at those rankings for outsourcing. Also, we should look outside of outsourcing: there is a reason why the top research labs of IBM, MSFT, HP, GE etc have labs in India and not in those countries. More Indians will move out of business process outsourcing and into hard core technology and research outsourcing.
China has been very nervous about the Indian economy for some time now.
lol right. go to shanghai or hong kong, then go to mumbai, and tell me that with a straight face.
STRATFOR:
"Because India's population will surpass that of China in 2030 or so, even as India's population will get gray at a slower rate than that of China, India may in relative terms have a brighter future. As inefficient as India's democratic system is, it does not face a fundamental problem of legitimacy like China's authoritarian system very well might."
-- R. Kaplan
Brazil GDP: 2.5T (2012) Russia GDP: 2.1T (2012)
India GDP: 1.9T (2012)
India isn't even in the same league as China. India has to compete with Russia/Brazil. BRIC is an old grouping from years ago.
Having a huge population and being democratic doesn't automatically give you a bigger economy. Look at South Korea (1.3T) or Japan (6T) comparatively.
Also, read the CIA world fact book pages for China/India.
If such a scenario were to happen... it'd would be pretty catastrophic the world over. GIven how tied the US and China's economies are tied, I don't think the US would allow a USSR style collapse... :\
Haha. No. Lack of hygiene does not actually result in super resistant viruses. If at all, it results in people who a stronger to existing viruses and bacteria since they are able to live in such conditions. We rather see that tourists going to India tend to fall sick very often because they are not used to the viruses and bacteria there.
And lack of hygiene is not something new. We've had lack of hygiene for like millenia in Human Kind history, yet the human race still thrived. I'm not worried about that.
"India has lost the war against the toughest forms of antibiotic resistance, largely because of poor sanitation, unregulated use of antibiotics and an absence of drug resistance monitoring, according to the man who discovered a type of drug resistance in bacteria in New Delhi."
http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2013/04/23/india-has-lost...
No and I thing you've got it wrong.
We are soon hitting a stage where we don't have to depend of foreign investments. Its happening, software is but just one aspect of foreign investments. There is real estate, retail sectors, education, manufacturing, automobile etc. That list can go endless.
Nearly every global company today understands if they don't come to India now, the local companies are going to eat their lunch big time and leaving all doors of making a entry later permanently shut.
Every time I see somebody good leave India I feel bad for them. They have no clue what they will miss over the next decades. With hardly any competition in a country where demands are rising so rapidly, almost anything you make people want will sell. Even if you make it badly.
Consider this with settling down in US, something like next half of your life will simply go in 'getting somewhere'. You will simply going there for your kids. And consider yourself lucky if they value your sacrifices and do something big out of it. Else there will be a situation where post 30 years your kids might want to come to India to settle there kids.
People who opted to stay in India to reap the benefits of the IT boom in the 90's are in something like a million times better conditions than the guys who left to the US in the 90's.
If you want to be super rich, this is the time to be in India. And it will be at least for the next half century, there is too much room to grow and there is far little genuine competition.
Based on my 2 trips to India - Mumbai and Chennai - this is either naive or dishonest.
I'll go further, and say that out of all the roughly 50 countries I visited, which include Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Iran, Iraq, Vietnam, Indonesia, Phillipines and Solomon Islands, conditions in India were The Shittiest. Sorry.
The amount of effort you would expend to take you to 'getting somewhere' in the US, will take you miles ahead in India these days.
As I said the demand is huge, genuine competition is no way existent.
Some of the smartest people I know are from India and Pakistan. Most of the folks I know came from modest backgrounds, and none of them look back at all.
The economic potential in genetics, robotics, nanotechnology, nuclear energy, space exporation, etc. are enormous. We just need to keep moving forward.
I'm not saying that you're wrong about the negative factors; they are all risks to a better future. I'm just saying that they can be overcome; it's been done before.
Well, the Indian people are ultimately responsible for the institutions of India. So why don't the institutions get fixed? Potholes, uncollected trash, rats - these are not particularly hard problems. Plenty of societies have figured it out. Why have these problems persisted for so long in India?
I am not from India, but neighbouring Pakistan. We just had our national elections and the only hope, Imran Khan's PTI lost. Nearly everyone I know in Pakistan has voted for PTI, but through a combination of election rigging and a mass of poverty-stricken people being coerced into voting for the wrong guy resulted in the status quo being maintained.
Britain of 1850 had a deep class divide, but they managed to keep the trash off streets. The rich do not have an interest in sewage running into the rivers or slums that are breeding supergerms. The upper class in England and America drove all the public health measures (such as sewers, clean drinking water, vaccination campaigns, etc.) in the 1800's that made cities livable. What is different about India? Why is this not happening?
To an extent, this is also about the poor man's education, specially about values. Out of planet, people and profit, just profit matters for most. Of course this also leads to corruption. I feel this stems from a general feeling of injustice in the country, where people feel they've been wronged in general, and now doing the wrong thing is the only right thing to do.
If a solution to this problem of values is to be sought, it would lie in the long haul route of educating people. A different type of education where values and morals are asserted more than skills and achievements.
Why the upper class is displaying a complete apathy towards these mass problems is a belief that things are not going to change, no matter what. The class divide plays a role here, a distinct detachment of feelings about the average poor man and their living conditions.
I'm also not inclined to just go fill the potholes myself.
I'm a kid who came over to the US for higher studies. All these problems are deep-rooted in our culture. The culture doesn't encourage innovation and curiosity is shunned in most of the schools. Kids get into this rat race of scoring high grades without even realizing it.
(I'm going to go off on a tangential rant here onward):
Sadly, it looks like most of us are proud of it. And the ones who come over to the US are bringing this culture over with them. I was a TA in a top 10 university for a Compilers course and the number of these purportedly 'smart' kids that you could observe the Dunning-Kruger effect on was laughable. Most of them were frankly deluded into thinking they were these amazing engineers. Their primary goal was to get a job at Microsoft/Google/Amazon. None of them had the curiosity to find out how a compiler actually worked. They just did the bare-minimum necessary to get a good grade. And not surprisingly almost all the students I busted for cheating were Indians.
My plea to the kids coming over to the US at the risk of sounding unpopular: You're culture has failed you. Our culture doesn't encourage scientific thought and reeks ignorance. Please leave that behind with you.
Understand, observe and get inspired by the great scientific culture the Americans have built here. Let's not ruin that.
I'm not trying to take anything from what you're saying, but my experience is that applies just as well to US school (high school, at least.)
We've been 'teaching the test' for decades now. No child left behind has just started for you in comparison.
The Indian education system is busy creating mental athletes who are literate, but incapable of actually working outside of their experience set - essentially training fencers instead of fighters.
Say that in India, and some guys will fly into a rage and say: 1) All the great scientists in America came from other countries, so many are Indians 2) We had levitating Mars-visiting Rushis before Neil Armstrong ever "supposedly" landed on the moon. 3) The Europeans lived in filth while we had an advanced civilization in the middle ages. Therefore we are inherently better.
Of course you WOULD fly into a rage if you could never leave and establish yourself in a more "luxurious" country that "isn't your own". Until then, for the sake of your own sanity, you have to believe there's nothing wrong with your country and that you weren't failed.
On the other hand I've met others who have a much more scientific bent, so I don't think its "Indian culture" that forces people to be anti-innovation.
It's the conservative strain of Indian thought which naturally dominates the brains of people raised in financially insecure conditions. Poverty breeds materialism.
Well we don't have any other options. We need to work, or we will be wiped out. You have no clue, what a person can do- or how hard he can work when he is faced with a such a situation in life. I've personally been there, and I can tell you throughout my teens I've had situations where it was doing good in the next exams or going back to poverty.
When you go through that, you don't complain of lack of sleep or rest, you don't complain you just have a pair or clothes, or that your home is just a room where the whole family sleep packed and you get one small little corner where you need to your studies under a dim bulb to compete with a million people.
You just realize you have no other option, you work, work and work until success becomes inevitable- indifferent to the circumstances. That is something like a small glimpse of what I and some of friends went through to get where we are today.
Not sure if teens in US go through the same thing. But sometimes when I hear about the pain US citizens talk of when IT outsourcing is mentioned, those are not easy chances we are getting. For many of us, those have come after going through toughest situations you can probably can't even imagine.
If you read the history of cities like New York and London a century and a half ago, they had very similar problems to what a city like Chennai is going through.
Now the reason for optimism: the skill level among young Indians is growing rapidly, thanks to the spread of basic education and growing aspiration among all classes of Indians. That is the foundation on which economic growth is built, and economic growth is the only way we are going to solve our other problems.
If your daddy doesn't have money you can't get no education.
If your daddy doesn't have money you can't enough vitamins to get the brain or the proteins to get the muscles to work properly.
If your daddy doesn't have money you can't even shit with dignity.
Without a middle class or a rich daddy, you are basically screwed.
When 37% of Indians live below poverty line. I dunno how you think skill and nutrition levels are increasing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_India#Poverty_estima...
To get India going, we need to do all the the article is saying - spend on food, health and eduction. But I would add the state needs to do that, private sector will just screw the poor further - no deliberately, but shit happens.
Being optimistic is just that, optimistic.
I am not just being optimistic, I am putting my money and my time where my mouth is.
Aside from that wonderful turn of phrase, this may well be the key concept: India has long been run by entrenched interests for their own benefit and the situation shows no signs of abating.
This is definitely true in the directly elected presidential system we have in the states (definitely true post Clinton, even Reagan was an exception). Parliamentary systems are a bit different since the prime minister is elected indirectly, but even there we are seeing some fairly young heads of states in the UK and Germany (Cameron is 40 something, Merkell has been their 7 years and hasn't even hit 60 yet).
I have seen people throw trash on the streets without any regard for others. Same goes for every other resources and issues. Each indian lives in a bubble of their own home, which is perfectly clean but total disregard anything outside the walls.
There are some socially enlightened groups like Ugly Indians (https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Ugly-Indian/1234597910466...) doing great work, which I hope extend to the entire country.
This is great. It means it's a kind of sustainable. 1) In case of a crisis (which will come) It won't be thrown back too much.
1) I think India is anything but sustainable due to their enormous population growth.
Population explosions at the bottom always hurt economies, and you just never see them happen at the top for a plethora of reasons.
Population explosion will be at the bottom in India. Improving healthcare (by charities also) and worsening (or non-existent) education points only in one direction.
There were famines, massive food shortfalls and terrible job opportunities.
But if you look at the power situation, there's still something like 89%+ of power requirements being met, with capacity being added constantly.
It's the southern grid that has the highest levels of supply demand mismatch with Andhra Pradesh having a 16% shortfall.
But that's an opportunity for firms to sell generators, which at least give people a chance to move ahead while the govt gets over being corrupt.
Then, they started getting better. They updated their technology, they had better trained workers to run the new machines. Then bike manufacturers started to see what was going on, and started moving big chunks of their manufacturing over there. Last time I checked, companies like Giant, Trek, and Specialized all have some of their manufacturing over there now. Their factories are some of the most advanced manufacturing plants in the world.
I think India has the same potential, but its still about 3-5 years from realizing its own potential. It will be interesting to see if it can make the jump, or remain a great "what if. . " story line.
1.) large population
2.) squatters rights
3.) apathetic/spineless voters
4.) human fecal matters on the streets
5.) water shortage
6.) religious ferver
7.) entranched corruption
8.)....many more
Today see China, or Singapore if you think maybe the Lee family has a bit too much power than is justified in a real democracy.
India has an English democracy. Everything in India was originally designed to support a wealthy English middle-class (if it was important directly from the UK), or to extract wealth from poor Indians so it could be exported to the UK.
I'm saying, India's institutions are overbuilt. They were originally designed to work in a far richer, and far more orderly country. There are certainly some things which are "one size fits all", but for anything which is only appropriate with a large, law abiding middle class it fails horribly in India.
1) Some countries in other parts of the world developed AS democracies, even earlier than Taiwan.
2) Taiwan has continued to develop and improve most aspects of its living standards since it became a democracy.
Dictatorships miss out on the valuable reality-checks on public policy provided by free and fair election campaigns.
I don't get this point. Sure some countries developed as democracies, but effectiveness is contextual.
> 2) Taiwan has continued to develop and improve most aspects of its living standards since it became a democracy.
No one is arguing here that democracy is not eventually the best form of government, only when democracy is appropriate. Once a country is solidly middle class, I think democracy is a solid win and the people will demand it anyways.
What's the ownership and history of Giant, by the way?
Product Development in short is: Idea --> CAD File -- Prototype
It appears, that most of the prototyping firms, do not pick up from in the middle, i.e, If I had a Idea, no firm was ready to produce a CAD file. Even China based prototyping companies only take CAD files, and do not help you, with the CAD generation.
Meaning, if you don't undergo, a extensive training in software like Solidworks or AutoCAD which is both expensive and time consuming, or not find a engineer already well trained in them, you have no scope of converting your idea into a reality.
This is a bottle neck for entrepreneurs in India.
Idea --> Engineering/Design --> CAD File --> Prototype
And the reason it doesn't get done that well in places like India and China at the moment is that it's not easy or quick to create a sustainable engineering sector that can reliably take ideas to a working prototype stage.
China, and to a lesser extent India, will slowly develop this over the next 10-15 years I think, since Western companies are gifting them a huge amount of engineering knowledge in exchange for cheap engineering, or so-called High Value Engineering (HVE), but there are a few hurdles even so:
1. Education. 2. Cultural issues around problem solving.
My advice to qualified hard-working Indians (or any other qualified and educated people emigrating for a poorer country to a richer one):
1. be PROUD of yourself, don't be willing to work for 2x less just because you've just immigrated to an EU country or to the US (or for 10x less if you're working in your home country for an outsourcer)! you don't deserve less!
2. stop selling yourself with the "I can work really hard" label on your head - every employer and manager will respect you less as a human being if you do so, even if they may value you more (as in "business value", not human value!). (let me tell you something: even if business owners and top managers paint themselves as hard working guys, they just do it to project this image to their employees - 50% didn't get there by working hard, but by working smart an by good delegation and externalizing skills; only 10% probably got there by sheer hard work; and the other 40%... let's just say you don't want them as your role models :) )
3. once you get to a certain skill level, grow a bit of smugness, pride and condescendence for God's sake (it's healthy for you, trust me!), and try to wear the "reluctant genius" hat form time to time instead of the "hard working bee" one, even if it's not who you are - it teaches people the value, scarcity and tricky nature of "high quality wetware", it teaches that they have to pay top dollars for brainpower and accept that it will not always work as they want it and they just have to put up with this!
4. don't be afraid to show Uncle Sam the finger if you get caught in an US VISA trap, like being unable to quit your job because you'll loose your H1B VISA or something - this is demeaning and you shouldn't work in a country that puts you in such a situation, even if you'd earn more and learn more than anywhere else! You shouldn't because you don't have to: the "rich" world is bigger than the US: there's Canada, Europe, Australia, rising economies in South American countries etc.
Be angry, but also be proud and don't sell yourself short even if it hurts you in the short run - by asking for more and doing less you're actually making the world a better place for your children, even if it seems against your intuition and values!
About (4), indeed, having a family to take care of greatly restricts your mobility (and I bet this is what the guys doing US immigration policy bet on!) - but you can avoid the issue before it happens: take a better look at other options besides US as most EU countries have more flexible VISAs and such (yeah, having to speak German - Berlin area seems to be shaping up as Europe's SV nowadays - and French and maybe Spanish or something else fluently on top of English is hard, especially for techies with not so good language and social skills, but it opens up a lot of doors and gives you more bargaining power for yourself).
> But the likes of Bharat Forge and Mahindra & Mahindra prefer to employ sophisticated machinery rather than abundant labour.
Surely, it employs labour. Why does the author claim that machines are preferred over labour? What does he compare it with? Where are the numbers?
> At the other end of the spectrum are innumerable tinpot workshops, employing handfuls of people and outdated methods.
Sure, there are such workshops. Everywhere.
> What India lacks is a Mittelstand of midsized, labour-hungry firms.
Anything to back up this claim? How does India compare to other countries on this front? Where is the data? Where is the analysis?
> These include India’s notorious labour laws which, on paper, prevent factories firing anyone without the state’s permission.
Is this really true? What Act/Article Number should I be looking at?
My impression of the article is that it is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.
I work at a firm that manufacture goods and has a few factories.
Everything mentioned in the article is true, and grossly downplays the gritty reality to make for simple reading.
It is fascinating to me how a functional legal system is like 'software' for a good market economy. I hear in the C.I.S. one can show up to one's business and find the locks have been changed and new tough young men are around to explain you no longer own it.
The article was arguing for "How India is throwing away the world’s biggest economic opportunity". I don't need data to show the arguments were weak. I just need to analyse the arguments presented.
> These are countries with comparable population,
agreed
> demographics
huh?
> history of exploitation by the West
I don't see that coming up in the article
> and they are both in Asia.
How is that relevant?
> Comparison of India and China is a common topic on the Economist (and elsewhere).
My problem is not with the comparison of China and India. My problem is with this comparison of China and India.
> but it does state the numbers behind its assertions.
I mentioned the lack of some specific numbers for some specific assertions. Can you direct me to where they have covered that?
> ... is still journalism ...
If I were interested in labels, I'd call it yellow journalism.
I do: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21577373-india-will-s...
Here is the full briefing: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21577373-india-will-s...
People can't be fired, and as a result few people are technically employees of a firm - they are usually employed with a labor outsourcing firm that moves people out after two years or n-1 years, where n = number of years before automatic entitlement to provident fund/pension plans.
When I last heard it was something like n=3 years.
There is mass absenteeism if there's a festival or someone needs help in the fields, or just if people think that they can't be fired.
Did you know that your cash for payments of salaries of workers has to be within x kilometres of your factory?
It's one of many rules people don't follow, because there is a forest of rules.
Then there's strikes, and corruption.
To provide an idea of what the attitude difference is between people on HN and the people who have so far never really had to think of professional modern commercial systems :
There's a long way to go before the unspoken assumptions on the ground at a labor level closely match anything such as a forum like HN.
A banker went to collect a loan instalment from a farmer. The farmers reaction was "holy hell! Haven't they come up with a debt forgiveness scheme for it already?"
People still think that money can come from thin air, provided you have the connections to protect you or access to votes.
Why work when you can just make sure you won't get fired and are guaranteed an increment because of the union?
And the on the other side you have the firms- hemmed by 100s of laws to,protect labor, they yet find a way to do what they can/want.
The government has created internship program's which can lead to a certification, and I've heard of firms warping the system to convert it into cheap labor.
The article doesn't have numbers because the numbers are a search away and these are a group of known, fundamental facts.
The economist isn't supposed to make every article a phd dissertation or a full fledged wiki on the off chance that someone unfamiliar with the background material is unable to perform a google search themselves.
For what claims of mine?
> People can't be fired
Ha! I have seen people getting fired all the time! Did you mean blue-collar workers can't be fired?
> I can corroborate everything ...
With anecdotal evidence?
> automatic entitlement to provident fund/pension plans
We are entitled to that from the very first day of employment, if the company has more than a certain number of employees. When we quit and go to another company, we are given the option of transferring it to the next employer.
> There is mass absenteeism if there's a festival or someone needs help in the fields
Anecdotal. I have not seen this.
> ... off chance that someone unfamiliar with the background material is unable to perform a google search themselves.
I mentioned specific weaknesses. Show me the relevant Google queries that you would use to get the data. It will be a learning experience for one of us.
On top of that if you get fired after two years, you haven't worked long enough to be counted as an employee of the labor form or as a de facto employee of Mahindra. Hence no PF for you.
This is the scam people are forced to use as common place because of higher and fire laws heavily favouring labor.
Edit: I must add that firms also,actively try to screw labor over. I used the word forced because I was referring to a firm which did not have malicious intent.
As for searching, try Wikipedia. It will get you to the labor laws in question and from there the laws of the land.
Further the issue with anecdote is when they are extrapolated too far from a single incident.
But I am regurgitating the experience of multiple different individuals who have worked in many different firms.
This is the basis upon which the firms expansion plans are made.
Also, after the murder of the manager at the maruti plant, there's is yet another distinct urge to remove labor from the equation and avoid situations where your managers can be killed.
Heck - Labor management firms exist, and are used in every industry in India. You can see references to them in multiple news articles when the issue of labor is discussed.
The level of disintermediation required that makes outsourcing labor viable as a business model is in itself a red flag.
Further this is what HR managers and consultants take for granted - they are the ones who named firms which use interns as cheap throwaway labor, and a plethora of,other practices that horrified me but were treated as commonplace and business-as-usual.
If you haven't seen as absenteeism for festivals and so on, I must ask where your factories are located.
All I see is, "Wikipedia/Google. Therefore, I am right."
I know contract workers are not entitled to pensions from client firms. What relation does that have with the article I was commenting on, or my comments?
Look, your anecdotal evidence does not correlate with mine at all. I will add that the labour/owner dynamics vary a lot from state to state. Tamil Nadu, Kerala, UP, Rajasthan are all vastly different from each other. Absenteeism during festivals? I have heard of that in Kerala. Not in Karnataka, not in UP. Managers getting physically attacked? I have seen that in UP, seen threats in Karnataka, Andhra, not seen in Tamil Nadu. This is exactly why sound analysis based on sound data is important.
The problem with any write up generalizing personal experience up to "India scale" is the same problem we see with "big data". When there is much more information than any single person can actually digest, what ends up happening is people just spot the patterns they are already familiar with...and that is what your post represents.
This is constant through out the nation due to the current stage of political evolution.
Also my background completely fails at preparing me for my current task set, so I come to this with few a neutral slate. I have no urge to see patterns, if anything I'm pro labor and what I saw left me somewhat disappointed.