I’VE WRITTEN BEFORE that I think that outsourcing, etc., will be an election issue. Armed Liberal pulls a lot of threads together in this post, along with a cool Neal Stephenson quotation.

UPDATE: Matt Bruce is speaking up for Pakistani brickmakers.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s an interesting development — Dell is moving jobs back from India to the United States in response to customer complaints about the quality of support from Bangalore. When I talked about this issue with my students (a Dell-heavy group) I heard a lot of those complaints. I guess that Dell did, too.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Katherine Snyder emails:

I was one of the many customers that was Very Unhappy with Dell’s tech “customer service”, and I basically told them flat out after 5 multiple hour, very frustrating and rudely handled calls over the course of a week to get a broken hard drive replaced that I would *never* buy a Dell product again. I have, as the Alpha Female, the purchasing yea or nay in my household. Every large purchase goes through me. If I feel that a company does not respect me, then they do not get my hard earned money, period. (Just to put it into perspective, I have purchased 4 Dell desktops, a Dell laptop, and a Dell Pocket PC in the past, they were losing a very loyal customer.)

This is another way in which the “cost savings” from outsourcing can be illusory.