Fading magazine empire Time Inc. is currently trying to negotiate a new contract with the Newspaper Guild, a union that represents several hundred of the company's editorial employees. Time Inc. would like the right to eliminate most of their jobs.

Outsourcing is a time-honored American tradition. First, you had a job. Then your job was given to someone, somewhere else, who could do it cheaper. But what if instead of a low-wage worker in China, you were replaced by a low-wage worker in Florida, who was sitting at a desk, staring into a camera and doing your old…

By now you may have heard the story of an American software developer who scammed several companies by forwarding a fraction of his six-figure salary to a Chinese company that was doing his work for him while he sat in his office surfing Reddit and watching cat videos.

Amine Derkaoui, a 21-year-old Moroccan man, is pissed at Facebook. Last year he spent a few weeks training to screen illicit Facebook content through an outsourcing firm, for which he was paid a measly $1 an hour. He's still fuming over it.

Kids these days: are they monsters who grew up on Mars and you shouldn't even bother trying to communicate with them, because they're monsters from Mars? As their parent, you know the answer to this is "Yes sir." That's why you are "outsourcing" the teaching of basic social skills to your own children. Who has the…

Chin up, poor lawyers! The humble American attorney has had a hard go of it lately—it officially sucks to be a law student, a young lawyer, or, really, any lawyer, except for the super rich ones.

American corporations have made untold millions by shipping all their call centers and tech support jobs out to India, where you can get nice, educated workers at a fraction of the cost. Or can you?

It's great that Google has contests awarding money and computers to schoolchildren. Less great: It gives the victor in India 1/20th of what an American kid gets for winning the same contest.

In your woebegone Wednesday media column: Richard Branson's allegedly stalking Playboy, dead mag foto fun, more ominous signs on the NYT's Social Media Editor, and gag outsourcing is the new "let's hope it doesn't turn into real outsourcing":

Odyssey Moon is an international partnership of guys with space cred on their resumes. They've hacked Google's $30 million Lunar X Prize contest brilliantly: Instead of hiring private contractors to build a lunar rover better and faster than Nasa's risk-averse bureaucracy, Odyssey Moon has hired Nasa to do the job as…

A recent WSJ article and countless horror stories chart the tricky waters that outsourcers must navigate to move jobs outside throat-choking range. Although nervous-nelly IT workers take comfort in these tales, don't forget the basic math of outsourcing: A job that can be done remotely by you from home for $X can…

Blogging used to be fun, and now it's just work. Remember when the Times wrote about hiring your own virtual personal assistant from India to do crap on the 'net for you? Or when Timothy Ferris wrote The Four-Hour Workweek, suggesting we outsource everything we don't want to do? (This caused tech-people like Jakob…

In Bangalore, India's high-tech capital, two people have been killed and at least nine injured in sychronized bomb blasts. A police commissioner told the AP that the seven grenade-like blasts occurred within minutes of each other across the city. Bangalore is home to several U.S. tech companies' Indian offices, as…

When online shoe retailer Zappos isn't paying newly trained employees to leave the company, it's replacing them entirely. Robots developed by Kiva Systems zip around a Zappos warehouse picking up items and deliver them to their meatbag underlings for packing, and then move the packages to another small group of…

Further cause for existential despair in journalism: the (Pulitzer-Prize winning!) OC Register is going to outsource some of its copy editing and layout work to a company in India. But uh, don't worry staffers, it's only a test! A test which will inevitably lead to foreigners taking good old American journalism…

This seems like a turning point of some sort. A tipster says the McCatchy-owned Kansas City Star just laid off the entire ad services department. And outsourced the jobs to India! Even more fun: before everyone's last day this summer, their Indian replacements will be flown in so the outgoing ad team can train them.…

Overseas outsourcing of newspaper jobs started years ago as a slow trickle, mostly from IT departments and the like. As the financial prospects of the newspaper industry have declined, outsourcing has come to be viewed as more of a necessity. Even news jobs have been sent to India, although that is still a relative…

Mountain View-based Internet phone company Jajah will soon provide the technology, billing and customer care for phone features in Yahoo's instant-messaging service Yahoo Messenger, the AP reports. The deal is part of Yahoo management's cost-cutting plans to turn much of its feature development over to third…