I'd missed Matt Taibbi's genius Friedman takedown--a must read--That's a Flattener...

"The baseline argument begins with a lengthy description of the 'ten great flatteners,' which is basically a highlight reel of globalization tomahawk dunks from the past two decades: the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Netscape IPO, the pre-Y2K outsourcing craze, and so on. Everything that would give an IBM human resources director a boner, that's a flattener. The catch here is that Flattener #10 is new communications technology: 'Digital, Mobile, Personal, and Virtual.' These technologies Friedman calls 'steroids,' because they are 'amplifying and turbocharging all the other flatteners.' According to the mathematics of the book, if you add an IPac to your offshoring, you go from running to sprinting with gazelles and from eating with lions to devouring with them..."