Just thought I'd weigh in here. I am in the I.T. industry. Although my current job is not in danger of being off-shored, the type of job I do certainly can be. It is up to me to make sure that I stay current and fresh so that I can change jobs if necessary to something that isn't being off-shored. Not that long ago, people were shouting about the end of the United States because all of the agriculture jobs were disappearing. Some of them were going overseas, but mostly a lot of them were being lost do to large company conglomerations. Well, people realized agriculture was shrinking and they innovated and we became a manufacturing society. We became the best manufacturers in the world. After a while, other countries started copying the US and we started losing some manufacturing jobs. People shouted that it was the end of the US because we were losing all of our manufacturing jobs. We innovated, we re-trained, and we started working with technology. For a while there, people said that computers would destroy the US workforce because computers were replacing the work that people had been doing. How could the average guy compete against the speed and efficiency of a computer. Well, we innovated, we learned, we retrained, and now a lot of people are making a living by working with computers. We are just in the next phase of this whole deal. It is part of the evolution of our economy and of the human race in general. The US is excellent at innovation and exploration. Our lower tech IT jobs are being off-shored, so we will move on to whatever the next innovation is. Please don't ask me what that is. If I knew that, I'd be heavily invested in it. Face it, compare the number of agricultural jobs in the US today to that of 80 years ago. We've adapted. Compare the number of manufacturing jobs in the US today to just 40 years ago. We've adapted. If low-end IT jobs are leaving the country, than maybe getting into that kind of work here now isn't the best plan. If you are in that line, like myself, adapt or make yourself very indispensable in your current place of employment. Things change, that is nothing new. It has been happening throughout our history. Later. -- Blue skies. Dan Rossi Carnegie Mellon University. E-Mail: [log in to unmask] Tel: (412) 268-9081 VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List. To join or leave the list, send a message to [log in to unmask] In the body of the message, simply type "subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations. VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html