Darpa: U.S. Geek Shortage Is National Security Risk

[roo_ster]

Well, if we want more geeks, make geekery more remunerative.  The first thing they can do is revoke all tech indentured servitude H1B visas to reduce the pool of foreign geeks competing for American geek jobs.

Here you go:


http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/01/darpa-us-geek-shortage-is-a-national-security-risk/

Sure, we’re all plugged in and online 24/7. But fewer American kids are growing up to be bona fide computer geeks. And that poses a serious security risk for the country, according to the Defense Department.

The Pentagon’s far-out research arm Darpa is soliciting proposals for initiatives that would attract teens to careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), with an emphasis on computing. According to the Computer Research Association, computer science enrollment dropped 43 percent between 2003 and 2006.

Darpa’s worried that America’s “ability to compete in the increasingly internationalized stage will be hindered without college graduates with the ability to understand and innovate cutting edge technologies in the decades to come…. Finding the right people with increasingly specialized talent is becoming more difficult and will continue to add risk to a wide range of DoD [Department of Defense] systems that include software development.”

The agency doesn’t offer specifics on what kinds of activities might boost computing’s appeal to teens, but they want programs to include career days, mentoring, lab tours and counseling.

Of course, Darpa’s launched student-oriented publicity stunts before. But events like last year’s red balloon hunt were directed at pre-existing geeks — the balloon-finders were a team of MIT aces.

Now, Darpa’s now hoping someone, somewhere, can come up with a way to make future philosophy majors change course. And they want to get ‘em while they’re young: Darpa insists that programs be “targeted to middle and high school students, and include methods “to maintain a positive, long-term presence in a student’s education.”

A long-term presence that includes evenings and weekends. Rather than incorporate computer-based activities into academics, Darpa wants the programs to be extracurricular, “perhaps as an after school activity, weekend, or summer event.” Tween girls and minorities take note, because Darpa’s especially got it out for you:

    Finally, the decline in degrees in CS [computer science] is particularly pronounced for women and minorities…. Proposals that have plans that specifically increase the number of women or minorities in their activities are encouraged.

[RevDisk]

Well, if we want more geeks, make geekery more remunerative.  The first thing they can do is revoke all tech indentured servitude H1B visas to reduce the pool of foreign geeks competing for American geek jobs.

I tell folks wanting to get into IT, don't.  Not unless you're really good at it, really want to work insanely hard for medium rewards, or have no other skillset.  The wages have been driven down from their 90's bubble.  Yea, H1B's don't help.  But even without H1B, as an industry, it's not good times. 

I've never seen any other industry with nearly as many certs.  Every company sees it as virtually a license to print money, so every company creates its own cert process with nothing in common with any other cert.  Most of them are geared at one specific version, so you have to restart every X months or couple years.  More are looking to add "continuing education" requirements.  Usually trying to scam yearly fees.

The industry is stereotyped as long hours, rapid response, etc.  Dunno about other folks, but that's the case for me.  Back at DISA I regularly did 12-14 hour shifts.  We were a 24/7/365 shop.  I don't recall a holiday I didn't work.  Left partly because months of never seeing daylight for more than a few minutes at a time was less than pleasant.  Went to work in the aerospace industry.  My personal records were 26 hours straight and going 3 months with a single day off.

Sure, it paid off.  My current job is a heck of a lot stressful and pays decently.  But I'm a tad more resourceful and vicious than the average geek.  Most geeks have to put in insane dues to make decent bucks these days.  To be a decent geek, you have to be knowledgeable in so many areas.  There are plenty of other industries that have equal pay, more standard hours, less of a required knowledge pool, less crises, etc. 


My advice to DARPA?   Good luck with that.  You'll need it. 

[Monkeyleg]

I was a geek in high school, but didn't follow through on going into engineering.

My advice would be to recruit attractive geek-ettes.

[Hawkmoon]

Fixing it (the shortage) is going to require a sea change. First, they need to do away with the H1B visa serfs. Then they need to persuade big (did I say BIG?) American companies to stop outsourcing tech support to places like India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, where they staff the phone lines with people who have phony American names, obvious Indian/Pakistani accents, limited ability to speak English, and no computing skills other than being able to read a cue card and regurgitate the canned "fixes" that you've already tried (with no success) before giving up and calling tech support.

Kids aren't stupid. They see from the first time they try to get some tech support that the name of the game is to farm out the work to people who know nothing and aren't even on the same continent. Why would anyone in their right mind choose a career that's guaranteed to have you competing for work against someone whose monthly pay is probably about what a lower-middle income American earns in an hour? Why?

[RevDisk]

My advice would be to recruit attractive geek-ettes.

Heh.  Won't happen in large numbers.

Don't get me wrong, I <3 geek chix.  Lady Ada (open source hardware), Jennifer Granick (best lawyer on the planet), Hedy Lamarr (invented frequency hopping), Admiral Hopper etc have done incomparable work.  Admiral Hopper being possibly the most hardcore geek the Navy ever had.  Aptly, her legend lives on in every piece of electronics on the planet operated by code designed in a modern language...   Plus there's the whole "guided missile destroyer with her name on it" thing.

But they are the overwhelming minority when it comes to geekery.  Plenty of folks have theories.  If any moron thinks "chicks can't do math/code/engineering/etc", kindly remind them that they don't have THEIR name on the side of a destroyer to honour their geek status.  My thoughts on the matter is very simple.  They can do geek, but rarely wish to do so.   Why?  Borked if I know, I will never deign to pretend to understand women.

[MicroBalrog]

Clearly it is time for Summon 2Swap, again. Hand me the spell components, boys...

[mtnbkr]

I've never seen any other industry with nearly as many certs.  Every company sees it as virtually a license to print money, so every company creates its own cert process with nothing in common with any other cert.  Most of them are geared at one specific version, so you have to restart every X months or couple years.  More are looking to add "continuing education" requirements.  Usually trying to scam yearly fees.

Certs are a joke and a curse.  They never end.  Your personal experience actually matters less than having 1 or more certs when applying to a given job.  Even worse, the certs listed on a given job description don't necessarily match the job function (advanced Cisco certs for tech support roles or positions that don't work directly with Cisco gear?).  Then you have to maintain the damn things.  It's not like a college degree where you earn it and you're done.  Sad thing is, everybody knows certs don't mean anything and that the more certs a person has, the likelyhood of them being useless goes up, but they're still a big requirement to many recruiters.

I was in the job market late last year.  I have 13 years in IT, some of it managing an IT project, so I thought Project Management might be an interesting career change.  I also have an MBA.  Big deal.  My experience and college degrees are worthless because I don't have a PMP.

The govt is also at fault here.  They won't consider you for anything security related unless you have a CISSP or can get one in 6 months.  Experience be damned.  They're also getting tough about degree requirements.  I didn't get a 2nd interview for one position because I didn't have a BS in Computer Science.  This wasn't a hardcore engineering job, just a security management gig that I already had experience with.  That interview went well until that point came up.  Let's see...13 years experience, security clearance, industry certs, Master's degree.  No BS in CompSci?  Next!

My current job, though, is different.  I'm no longer a fulltime IT engineer.  I do as much customer related work and business process re-engineering as I do straight up IT.  I'm hoping to ride this job out of the IT field and into something more related to my schooling. 

Chris

[2swap]

Clearly it is time for Summon 2Swap, again. Hand me the spell components, boys...

Wha--- Where am I? Oh.

I notice the lack of geeks at the uni I am in as well. Despite studying in a related area only few people there can qualify as real geeks. And most of these are from .de even though I study in .uk. It is a sad thing and I think the only way to make the geeks return is to ban resolutions past EGA. That way, only geeks would use computers. 

[sanglant]

it would be easier just to ban gui installers. you want to play quake, go into the console and type your way past the install(configure;make;make install heh ). might bring back some real jobs to.

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

The reason there are less geeky women is because women have less interest in this stuff.  Heck, most guys aren't even all that interested in this stuff.  It just doesn't interest most people.  And you have to be really interested in geekery it if you want to be good at it.

More money won't help.  This isn't the kind of work you'll excel at if all you're interested in is a paycheck.

And I do find it discouraging haw often nominal liberty-minded folks seek to restrict freedom of the markets when it suits them.  Be it illegal immigration or the borrowing of intelligent foreigners, it's often the same.  Rather than compete, they seek to bar competition and stack the deck in their favor.

If your job can be outsourced to a semi-literate poser in Hindustan who can't pronounce his fake English name correctly, then you need to up your game, your geek-fu sucks.  If your geek-fu is strong and the foreigner can still do it better, then we want both of you here.  

There are too few geeks here.  The knee-jerk solution is to reduce the number of geeks here.  How on earth does that make any sense?

I work for a high tech semiconductor company founded on research performed by a Frenchman and an Indian citizen (Indiaman?).  There are about 30 top-notch geeks employed here, plus another 10 non-geek administrative types.  This is possible solely because the US was wise enough to allow two brilliant foreigners into the country to do their work.

[mtnbkr]

And I do find it discouraging haw often nominal liberty-minded folks seek to restrict freedom of the markets when it suits them.  Be it illegal immigration or the borrowing of intelligent foreigners, it's often the same.  Rather than compete, they seek to bar competition and stack the deck in their favor.

If your job can be outsourced to a semi-literate poser in Hindustan who can't pronounce his fake English name correctly, then you need to up your game, your geek-fu sucks.  If your geek-fu is strong and the foreigner can still do it better, then we want both of you here. 

The problem isn't the geek-fu, it's money.  Apu from Hindustan will do the job for much less money because they're accustomed to it and willing to live 5+ to an apartment while doing it (kind of like Hispanic immigrants and manual labor).  On top of that, they frequently aren't any better technically than their American counterparts.  Corporate bean counters go for the cheaper employee (in terms of salary and benefits) without considering the performance.  I saw this firsthand on a development project I was part of in the late 90s. 

The problem with IT is that it's frequently "overhead", so companies don't want to pay for it. But the skills required to be good at doing the work require a significant investment in time and money and demand those salaries.  Some of the better engineers I know have test networks at their homes that would rival production networks at smaller companies.  That sort of hardware isn't cheap, even when purchased on the used market. 

Chris

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

If Apu from India can get the job done much cheaper, then let him.  That frees up American geeks to do more sophisticated work that Apu and his ilk can't do.

I see no wisdom in wasting our own domestic geek potential on menial work like tech support call centers and simple IT support.  We're Americans.  We can do better.

Now if companies don't want to spend on IT, that's their decision to make.  If they're right about not needing to spend on IT, then they'll be rewarded for scrimping on it.  If they're wrong, then they'll suffer, and the other company down the street who did spend on IT will gain the advantage.  This is the way things should be.

This is actually no different from any other element in the economy.  Some services are needed, some aren't, and identifying which are needed and paying for them appropriately is the nature of the game.

[mtnbkr]

If Apu from India can get the job done much cheaper, then let him.  That frees up American geeks to do more sophisticated work that Apu and his ilk can't do.

I see no wisdom in wasting our own domestic geek potential on menial work like tech support call centers and simple IT support.  We're Americans.  We can do better.

Unfortunately, that isn't how it has played out in practice.  Apu and his ilk aren't hired for tech support, they're being brought in as bulk labor for programming and such.  This isn't something I read about, this is what I saw on a project I worked on from 1997-2000.  I've since learned that H1Bs aren't quite the bargain they were originally supposed to be.  They're cheaper on the salary side, but cost more in terms of reduced productivity due to cultural issues, language, and other factors.  But that low salary sure looks nice to the accountants... 

At the end of the day, it doesn't affect me.  My particular niches have never been under pressure from H1Bs either due to security requirements or skill sets.  I have been amused by companies and managers complaining about the quality of the work received while talking up the reduced cost though.

Chris

[Marnoot]

I see both sides of the coin HTG and mtnbkr are discussing where I work.

My office employs a large number (compared to other employees) of Indian H1B contractors (via Wipro); both software engineers and software testers. They're generally fresh from India when they start working here. The majority are quite good at what they do (we've only gotten a couple duds so far, thankfully). Part of my office is doing a lot of R&D work that needs high head-count at first, then will need much less later.

They definitely make less than regular employees, but still make a decent wage, I believe. The benefit to my employer is that when they're no longer needed (which is inevitable), they can be let go without any trouble. So long as they're competent, it's smart business, whether I personally like the decision or not.

The detriment is that, in total, fewer "locals" are employed by the company. But, as HTG is saying, having the imports do all the grunt coding frees the rest of us up to work on the stuff that needs much deeper domain knowledge.

On the other side is an engineering group we have in Cordoba, Argentina. They more reflect mtnbkr's arguments. My employer maintains the group because they can pay them peanuts (even less than Indian workers), and really for no other reason. We're forced to send them work to do, and inevitably it ends up taking at least twice as long as it would take us to do it locally. Often we end up having to completely re-do their work after they've "completed" it.

My boss has compiled the hard numbers to show that the group is actually more expensive than regular local employees would be due to the communications barriers and high cost of poor-quality. Unfortunately that continues to fall on deaf ears in the bean countery.

[mtnbkr]

That frees up American geeks to do more sophisticated work that Apu and his ilk can't do.

I have a problem with this.  Much of these "lower" jobs, the ones Apu is doing so Americans can be free to do "better" things are the entry level jobs (bulk coding, tech support) that were the entry points to a career in IT.  I know more than one high school dropout or the like who got their start that way and are now earning high 5 figure or 6 figure salaries.  Without that entry point (3rd shift at a NOC, rote programming, Level 1 tech support, etc), they likely wouldn't have gotten into the industry.  Every industry needs entry level jobs and I don't think we should be so quick to hand those jobs to non-Americans because it saves a few bucks.  Today's entry level folks are the graybeards of the future. 

We can't free American geeks to do more advanced work before they've gained the skills.  They can't gain the skills without the entry level jobs.  IT skills aren't easily gained from books alone, nor would anyone with sense hire an advanced engineer who doesn't have real experience.  That experience has to come from somewhere.

Chris

[RocketMan]

A big part of the problem is that we let bean counters make operational decisions.  They often decide how a company is going to be run, what projects will be taken on, how much will be spent on those projects, etc.  
Your average bean counter believes the best way to profitability is to not spend money.  That can result in a lot of work going off-shore where labor costs less.  Rarely do they look more deeply into that decision than how much expense will saved up front.
Bean counters should be confined to their cubby holes and told to count the beans.  They can then inform real operational types, folks with meaningful experience at the pointy end of managing an organization, how many beans they have available for a given project.  That is all bean counters should be doing.
Can you tell I don't like bean counters much?

edited for clarity

[roo_ster]

Others have covered the obvious, easy answers:
1.If there are no domestic entry-level IT jobs, eventually you'll have no one to do IT jobs, because advanced IT folk don't just leap from the womb into their tech guru shoes.
2. Reducing the total supply by limiting access to foreigners will generally drive up the pay of domestic IT folks or allow them to start at entry-level IT jobs.

As far as market economics, I am a supporter.  I am just not on board with the open market fetishists as I already have one religion and don't need another.

There are things more important than a 100% free market.  The ability to produce the materials used to defend this nation and the COTUS is just one.  Controlling the border is another and the bare minimum requisite for a country to be a country.  Maintaining a population of folks who have some love of country and value our culture and the COTUS.

It is also funny how the "free market, let the illegal aliens come on in" folks are no where to be found when the time comes to pay for the health care / education / etc of ignorant 18th-century peasants when they get chewed up by a 21st century economy.  "Privatize the profits, socialize the costs."

That sort of free market fetishism makes a prophet out of Lenin:
"The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

Wow.  I don't know where to begin trying to untangle that mess of twisted reasoning, fallacies, and outright foolishness.

We'll start with the strawman, that's the easiest.  Tell me, which of us "free market fetishists" are in favor of socialized health care and education?  Answer: none of us.

Second, this notion that there are no entry level tech jobs thanks to outsourcing and H1Bs just doesn't square with reality.  The one company I worked for that tried H1B programmers would have killed for a handful of American kids who could do the same work as the Indian grunts, by the time the H1B project was over.  There are gobs of entry level IT jobs out there.  I hear ads on the radio for them all the time.  I also hear adds for entry-level IT training schools, all the time.  It just happens that those entry level positions are paid commensurate with the skill they require, with isn't all that much.

Artificially raising prices doesn't create more demand, it creates less.  Higher entry level IT wages will mean less entry level job positions for noobs to fill, not more.

And I'm still baffled by the notion that you can increase the quantity of geeks by reducing the quantity of geeks.  That doesn't compute.  The best way to get more skilled geeks is to welcome in as many as you can, not to send half of your existing geeks packing while telling half of your growth pool that you aren't interested.

Do you have any conception of just how critical foreign geeks are to our technical workforce?  I can't count the number of foreigners that have contributed to my technical know-how, to the projects I've been a part of, and to the pool of technical capabilities our economy boasts.  More than half of my college profs were non-citizens.  The top-tier engineers at my office are as likely to be foreign as American, and we flat-out couldn't do our research and development without the foreigners.  The best mentor and on-the-job teacher I've had was Israeli.  Some of the coolest tech innovations I've made use of came from foreigners.

Do you really want to wipe all that off the map, just to promote your phony sense of free market principles?  This notion that we're better off without them makes no sense whatsoever.  None.  Zero.  Zilch.  Nada.

Protectionism is always bad in the long run (and often in the short run, as in this case).  Protectionism is shooting yourself in the foot.  This is true whether you're a genuine real free market supporter, or merely someone who wants to pretend he's a free market guy.  The results of protectionism are the same either way, whether you like it or not.

[roo_ster]

HTG:

It is pretty obvious you didn't read the article.  You might want to read it to understand DARPA's worries and the points other posters are making.

[Hawkmoon]

And I do find it discouraging haw often nominal liberty-minded folks seek to restrict freedom of the markets when it suits them.  Be it illegal immigration or the borrowing of intelligent foreigners, it's often the same.  Rather than compete, they seek to bar competition and stack the deck in their favor.

If your job can be outsourced to a semi-literate poser in Hindustan who can't pronounce his fake English name correctly, then you need to up your game, your geek-fu sucks.  If your geek-fu is strong and the foreigner can still do it better, then we want both of you here. 

There are too few geeks here.  The knee-jerk solution is to reduce the number of geeks here.  How on earth does that make any sense?

It isn't MY job, Mate. I'm an end user. And if you think those poseurs in India and Pakistan can do the job as well as or better than a good old American geek, then you haven't had to call tech support for a long time.

My most recent incident was when my AT&T DSL connection went AWOL. The modem had all the lights, I just wasn't connected. Tech support calls (three) to people with phony names in Pakistan all led nowhere. Interestingly, all three had a different notion of what the problem MUST be ... and they were all wrong. When the third one had me change a bunch of configuration stuff and then couldn't walk me back to the original configuration after the changes didn't work, I blew my top and demanded to speak with her supervisor.

I was on hold for a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time. When the phone was finally picked up, I was talking to Dave in St. Louis, MO. Dave was American, this wasn't an impostor. You can't fake a middle-America accent. It took Dave less than 5 minutes to diagnose that I needed a new power supply (the transformer "brick"). Of course, the AT&T storefronts don't sell that, so I bought a complete modem kit, verified that the problem was indeed the power supply, ordered a replacement on-line, then returned the modem to the AT&T storefront.

I don't think anyone seriously believes those twits "over there" do the job anywhere nearly as well as genuine American geeks. But ... the twits are CHEAP. And, just as we describe the TSA and its ilk as "security theater," I think it is equally valid to describe offshore tech support as "tech support theater." And a majority of end users are so clueless that they accept that abysmal level of (alleged) service, and when none of the canned "solutions" work they accept the twit's pronouncement that "your computer has failed, you need to buy a new system."

But you seem to be missing the point of the original post. The security threat can't be met by importing any number of geeks from elsewhere, because ... they are from elsewhere. The United States is losing its edge AND its security because in search of lower cost we are increasingly (a) relying on people whose loyalty to the United States is non-existent, and (b) giving our technology to people from countries who are in competition with us economically, and who don't necessarily have OUR best interests at heart.

Dumb.

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

HTG:

It is pretty obvious you didn't read the article.  You might want to read it to understand DARPA's worries and the points other posters are making.

Excuse me?  I haven't read the article?  The article says nothing about H1Bs or outsourcing or pay rates for tech work any of the other nonsense you've spouted off on.

But whatevs.  If you want to believe those dastardly foreigners are the cause of too few geeks in America, then I'll leave you to it.  It'd take a lesson in basic economics to straighten out your nonsense, and I'm too tired for that tonight.

[roo_ster]

Excuse me?  I haven't read the article?  The article says nothing about H1Bs or outsourcing or pay rates for tech work any of the other nonsense you've spouted off on.

But whatevs.  If you want to believe those dastardly foreigners are the cause of too few geeks in America, then I'll leave you to it.  It'd take a lesson in basic economics to straighten out your nonsense, and I'm too tired for that tonight.

Maybe you read it, but you did not understand it.

Also, the problem has economic components, but is not in and of itself an economic question.

Hawkmoon has read and understood the article:

But you seem to be missing the point of the original post. The security threat can't be met by importing any number of geeks from elsewhere, because ... they are from elsewhere. The United States is losing its edge AND its security because in search of lower cost we are increasingly (a) relying on people whose loyalty to the United States is non-existent, and (b) giving our technology to people from countries who are in competition with us economically, and who don't necessarily have OUR best interests at heart.

Here is the first line of the article:

Sure, we’re all plugged in and online 24/7. But fewer American kids are growing up to be bona fide computer geeks. And that poses a serious security risk for the country, according to the Defense Department.

Note, it specifically mentions "American kids."  Foreign geeks (green card or H1b) are worthless to DOD in general and DARPA in particular.  I will also add they are worthless to those in the defense sector of industry.  Because of their great security risk, they can not  get a clearance.  Add to this, IT service companies that hire the foreign-born and give them access to their IT infrastructure are also worthless to most of .gov, all of .mil, and all of the defense sector.

[I have seen foreigners with DOD clearances, but they are foreigners either in an allied foreign gov't with a clearance from the allied gov't or in a foreign company in an allied country, again, already with a clearance from the foreign allied gov't.  And they are working with the US on a joint project.]

The bottom line, security-wise, is that the foreign-born are more a risk than native-born.  All the H1Bs, foreign-born profs, and such slathered with praise above are more likely to commit espionage (national or industrial).

Lastly, the companies hiring lower-cost foreign IT folk are fools afflicted with bean-counter myopia.  They are allowing these folks access to their networks and competitive business data while paying them less than other employees.  Not only is the H1B/green card crowd a greater security risk in and of themselves, these companies are paying them less and generating resentment among them by paying them less...giving them another reason for them to cash in on their access to the company's proprietary data.

So, not all is explained by free market economics, a major pitfall of folks who quote Adam Smith but have not read him or have not read beyond Wealth of Nations on to the foundational work for WoN, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.  (In which he writes on several topics to include duty in general and specifically WRT his fellow countrymen in some instances.) 

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

Think it through, jfruser.  When you send the foreign non-clearable geeks back home, you will have less clearable American geeks available to work those secret national security DoD projects.  Tech companies that might have been satisfied by non-clearable geeks before will now be bidding against the DoD contractors for the clearable geeks, drawing them away from those DoD projects because they're all that's left in the country to do the work.  

Shortages are not solved by exacerbating the shortage.  Allowing foreigners to work alleviates the shortage, even if they can't work directly on secret projects themselves.

This really isn't a difficult concept.  Why are you fighting it so hard?

[Hawkmoon]

Think it through, jfruser.  When you send the foreign non-clearable geeks back home, you will have less clearable American geeks available to work those secret national security DoD projects.  Tech companies that might have been satisfied by non-clearable geeks before will now be bidding against the DoD contractors for the clearable geeks, drawing them away from those DoD projects because they're all that's left in the country to do the work. 

Shortages are not solved by exacerbating the shortage.  Allowing foreigners to work alleviates the shortage, even if they can't work directly on secret projects themselves.

This really isn't a difficult concept.  Why are you fighting it so hard?

It is axiomatic that nature abhors a vacuum. If there are JOBS in the U.S. for geeks -- jobs that pay a living wage and for which said geeks DON'T have to compete against people with phony "American" names from Pakistan -- the shortage will be filled rather quickly. But if an American geek needs to earn $5,000 a month to live, and AT&T can hire "Samantha" in Pakistan for $5,000 a year ... well, that's the problem. The multi-national corporations are putting short term economics ahead of national security. They don't care, because they no longer think of themselves as "American" corporations.

[Bigjake]

They don't care, because they no longer think of themselves as "American" corporations.

There's your biggest problem. 

Sometimes I think it's inevitable that we devolve into some crappy one world dystopian one world goverment..