It may turn out that Intuit’s biggest fault was not hiring enough foreign programmers. They didn’t count on needing so many program changes in real time. How much would it have cost, to have more back-up available in Bangalore for a few months? Not as much as it would have in Baltimore.

Of course now the problem is whether those with Intuit experience survive the pandemic. Millions of Americans are safer because of a vaccine invented by a Turkish couple working in Germany, backed by an American company with a Greek CEO. Other countries may have better math teachers than we do (our rank in one survey is #37), but they still don’t have the vaccine access. This may not matter to the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers, who often also share xenophobia, but they’re a dying breed.