ideometric

Interesting NYT magazine article about datacenters and the infrastructure that runs the internet.

Tukwila is less a building than a machine for computing. “You look at a typical building,” Manos explained, “and the mechanical and electrical infrastructure is probably below 10 percent of the upfront costs. Whereas here it’s 82 percent of the costs.” Little thought is given to exterior appearances; even the word “architecture” in the context of a data center can be confusing: it could refer to the building, the network or the software running on the servers.

There’s an article in the Korea Times detailing some of the current issues in Korean internet policy. The government is expanding its regulation of internet use, mandating the collection of personal data (equivalent of social security ID) for sites with over 100,000 visitors and increasing the powers of law enforcement to intercept data and invade privacy. This is coming up against companies like Google that refuse to comply with demands for personal information gathering (actually the article states that Google is the only major site that refused…interesting). The end result being a counter-productive incentive to ditch restrictive native web services in favor of foreign competition. Good job.

I’m curious how this is being sold to the public. What rhetoric is being used? Or is it just unashamedly clamping down on political freedom of speech vis-a-vis anonymity online?

A couple months ago I lent $25 to a woman in Peru who wanted to buy more beans to sell at her local farmers’ market.

It’s not charity; she bought the beans for her business and has been slowly paying me back from the profit she makes on that investment – I’ve gotten $12.50 back so far. Lenders like me make no profit, but the organizations managing the loans charge interest to cover operating costs.

Kiva is the microlending site that makes this possible. Microlending is when you make small loans to people, often in developing countries where small amounts go a long way towards providing opportunities to escape poverty. These people are generally trying to start, maintain, or expand a business but lack the funds or availability of credit.

Kiva connects you to in-country organizations that screen applicants and disburse the money. This is different from charity because it provides the means to self-sufficiency and development. I think it also respects the dignity of people that are trying to make it in adverse conditions.

I think Kiva is still relatively young, but this kind of grass-roots, networked style of economic development has a lot of promise. It’s the sort of thing that Obama’s team picked up on with their fundraising tactics, drawing in millions of small donors to raise more than any previous campaign.

An interesting little article in NYT about the experience of Indian Americans turning back to India for work.

I found this idea intriguing.

If there is a creative class, in Richard Florida’s phrase, there is also emerging what might be called a fusion class: people positioned to mediate among the multiple societies that claim them.

Cultural education is key in a globalized world. Learning how to negotiate cultures – a skill children of immigrants build by tough necessity – is a definitely a competitive advantage in the global marketplace. However, I think its value outside the market is ultimately much greater. The culture wars, ethnic conflicts, tensions caused by immigration, conflicting religious beliefs, etc. all require us to find a way to relate to each other civilly (lest the clash of civilizations thesis prove accurate), which I think means learning how to replicate the kind of “in-betweenness” that immigrants and especially children of immigrants are forced to negotiate.

Good article by Hua Hsu in the Atlantic on the changing dynamic of race and culture in America. Especially good treatment of what “whiteness” means in America’s changing demographic makeup.

As a purely demographic matter, then, the “white America” that Lothrop Stoddard believed in so fervently may cease to exist in 2040, 2050, or 2060, or later still. But where the culture is concerned, it’s already all but finished. Instead of the long-standing model of assimilation toward a common center, the culture is being remade in the image of white America’s multiethnic, multicolored heirs.

The article is good in that it doesn’t lose sight of entrenched inequalities, and sees the variety of “white” responses to demographic shift (and power shift, as “white” people come to terms with it), from self-denial and identity crisis to defensive withdrawal into identity groups. But it’s ultimately optimistic, as am I, about the potential for a new era of respect for individuals as individuals, and the democratization of American culture.

But maybe this is merely how it used to be—maybe this is already an outdated way of looking at things. “You have a lot of young adults going into a more diverse world,” Carter remarks. For the young Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s, culture is something to be taken apart and remade in their own image. “We came along in a generation that didn’t have to follow that path of race,” he goes on. “We saw something different.” This moment was not the end of white America; it was not the end of anything. It was a bridge, and we crossed it.

I just used VOIP (skype) to call an Indian call center, from Korea, to activate my American debit card.

On why “no one” saw the financial meltdown coming:

One answer to these questions is that nobody likes a party pooper. While the housing bubble was still inflating, lenders were making lots of money issuing mortgages to anyone who walked in the door; investment banks were making even more money repackaging those mortgages into shiny new securities; and money managers who booked big paper profits by buying those securities with borrowed funds looked like geniuses, and were paid accordingly. Who wanted to hear from dismal economists warning that the whole thing was, in effect, a giant Ponzi scheme?

NYT

“Brown clouds” made up of toxic chemicals are blotting out the sun in large parts of Asia, a U.N. report said.

Awesome! 

Picture above I found online, it’s Korea when the yellow dust & pollution from China blows in.

I just finished Robert Reich’s Supercapitalism. The most valuable take-away was his constant refrain that deregulation and increased global competition has simultaneously empowered consumers and investors by aggregating and enhancing their collective power, while shafting workers and average people.

Increased competition has lead to a race to the bottom to maintain competitive advantages predicated on cutting labor costs, and indeed any cost that might reduce shareholder profits. This negatively impacts wages, job security, working conditions, retirement plans, union participation, health care, the environment, and society as a whole.

Profits for corporations and their shareholders have gone way up, but they have not been shared with society or with workers. Instead, the rich have gotten far richer, and the rest have done merely okay, benefiting from lower cost goods but losing stability and income growth. This is in contrast to the post-WWII social contract (see Fordism) that emerged between unions and large oligopolies sharing profits with labor, ballooning America’s middle class, providing social mobility, and fueling American economic growth and the mass-consumption/mass-production economy. For a variety of reasons, that arrangement broke down and we can’t turn back the clock, nor should we try. But that doesn’t mean the current system is good or that it can’t be changed for the better.

Reich’s aim is to encourage political engagement. The problem is not greed or corporations in and of themselves; these are distractions. The underlying problem is that the current way of doing things perversely incentivizes myopic self-interest, speculation, short term investment and profit maximization, rather than sustainability and public good. That we let our consumer-selves get the better of our citizen-selves, and that this shows in our tacit acceptance of the status quo where profit is the sole concern and social well-being is completely missing from the equation.

The problem is finding a balance between the good and the bad. Increased choice, lower costs, more competition, greater economic dynamism, efficiency and innovation are all good things. But they need to be accompanied by policies that mitigate the negative impacts on labor, inequality, quality of life, environmental degradation, the exploitation of labor abroad, the blind eye turned towards oppresive regimes we trade with and invest in, etc.

His conclusion was a bit sparse, but I think the point was that the solution is necessarily political and democratic, requiring the force of legislation, and that we can’t let the monied interests and corporate lobbies continue to define the rules of the game, on either side of the political spectrum…

Walking around one of my classes today, a girl stopped me to say that she visited her uncle in New York last winter break. Then, in broken English, “We are all neighbors, everyone in the world.”

12 year olds randomly dropping wisdom on you, gives you hope. If only they’d pay attention in class haha.

Korean fashion is full of nonsensical English and references to Western culture. One particular strain is the Hitler/Nazi reference. I’ve seen some guys with full on Third Reich eagles and Swastikas on their t-shirts (no, not the Buddhist symbol). The other morning I was walking to work and saw a girl wearing a tote-bag with “Eva Braun” in big block letters on the side.

People here have no clue of the significance. Talk about lost in translation.  There’s even a Wikipedia article on “Nazi Chic in Asia.“

concern has grown as countries like Iceland and Ukraine have begun asking for emergency financing from the International Monetary Fund, and as South Korea, the fourth-largest Asian economy, has begun to look vulnerable to the credit crisis. Its currency, the won, has lost 30 percent of its value against the dollar this year. With borrowing costs soaring, South Korean banks have scrambled to secure the dollars needed to repay maturing foreign-currency loans. Its benchmark stock index, the Kospi, has fallen 38 percent so far this year.

Great.

NYT

I’m not too savvy on economics, but I wonder to what extent this current crisis might lead to a referendum on the past decades of deregulation, trickle-down economics, and the rise of finance capitalism?

From a policy perspective, how would a shift in the US play out on the nature of globalization? It seems like this could be a catalyst for change, depending on who wins the US election and the degree of freedom they have to act. In progressive hands, the Federal takeover of such large financial institutions and the mandate to enact reforms and take bold steps seems like an apt time to reverse many of the dominant policies that favor the interests of the richest few.

What exactly is the historical relationship between the current crisis, and the overall chronology of US economic policy since the shifts in the 1970s? Specifically, I’m wondering how directly it is tied to the end of Fordism, the generally conservative political climate since then, and the dominance of neoliberalism as the guiding economic and political ideology.

I’m currently reading former labor secretary Robert Reich’s Supercapitalism to try to get a better grasp on that history…

UPDATE: By way of Matt Yglesias, an article by Fareed Zakaria that hints atleast in part at what I was thinking.

 This crisis has—dramatically, vengefully—forced the United States to confront the bad habits it has developed over the past few decades. If we can kick those habits, today’s pain will translate into gains in the long run.

And over at John Robb’s blog, doom and gloom about ‘hollow states.’ I agree with a lot of what he says, but I think his take is much more pessimistic. What of the alternative to a hollowing out, worst case scenario?

John Robb @ Global Guerrillas:

Google has filed patents to create deep sea floating platforms to house its massive data centers. Not only would these “barges” be economical (lower cooling and energy costs), they would be outside tax and enforcement jurisdictions of all nation-states. If this effort is successful, it could result in an effort to rapidly construct offshore facilities (spread out for robustness and built by a multitude of companies). Interestingly, since the core of most multinationals is now software (people are replaceable and/or interchangeable via outsourcing), the shift to offshore locations would make companies nearly invulnerable to state coercion.

Assuming feasibility, in some ways it could be a good thing, if it means avoiding stupid laws like the DMCA. But what about non-stupid, beneficial laws & regulations? How far does a “do no evil” motto go to curb potential abuses of monopoly power or legal invulnerability?

NYT article on higher oil prices un-doing, or at least threatening, the globalization of production and trade.

The cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Shanghai to the United States has risen to $8,000, compared with $3,000 early in the decade, according to a recent study of transportation costs. Big container ships, the pack mules of the 21st-century economy, have shaved their top speed by nearly 20 percent to save on fuel costs, substantially slowing shipping times.

The study, published in May by the Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets, calculates that the recent surge in shipping costs is on average the equivalent of a 9 percent tariff on trade. “The cost of moving goods, not the cost of tariffs, is the largest barrier to global trade today,” the report concluded, and as a result “has effectively offset all the trade liberalization efforts of the last three decades.”

NYT

Obama had an 11 page essay in Foreign Affairs’ July/Aug 2007 issue. Dig the cosmopolitan, democratic emphasis. (Here, behind pay-wall).

America cannot meet the threats of this century alone, and the world cannot meet them without America. We can neither retreat from the world nor try to bully it into submission. We must lead the world, by deed and by example.

Such leadership demands that we retrieve a fundamental insight of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy — one that is truer now than ever before: the security and well-being of each and every American depend on the security and well-being of those who live beyond our borders. The mission of the United States is to provide global leadership grounded in the understanding that the world shares a common security and a common humanity.

Some massive protests happening over attempts to end ban on US beef imports, which, in part, is seen as a concession in the negotiation of a free trade agreement between the US and Korea. More info. And another article here.

Apparently one of my videos from Korea on Youtube is being used for some Japanese/Korean bashing over on this bulletin board. Something about height / legs? I’d love a translation.

NYT Magazine is featuring an article on Jan Chipchase, who has my dream job and whose “Future Perfect” blog is always worth a visit. He’s an anthropologist of sorts, a “human-behavior researcher” or “user anthropologist” employed by Nokia to roam the globe in order to identify how people, especially in emerging markets (i.e. developing countries), are actually using technologies; their social and environmental improvisations (sharing a phone with several people or dealing with lack of electricity), unique needs and wants, etc., in order to design new/better products and services.

The NYT article uses his job to highlight the wider role and potential of the cellphone in globalization and economic growth in the developing world.

“A 2005 London Business School study extrapolated [...] that for every additional 10 mobile phones per 100 people, a country’s G.D.P. rises 0.5 percent.”

“A cellphone in the hands of an Indian fisherman who uses it to grow his business — which presumably gives him more resources to feed, clothe, educate and safeguard his family — represents a textbook case of bottom-up economic development, a way of empowering individuals by encouraging entrepreneurship as opposed to more traditional top-down approaches in which aid money must filter through a bureaucratic chain before reaching its beneficiaries, who by virtue of the process are rendered passive recipients.”

This Ugandan improvisation for sending remittances through cellphones shows how people improvise with technology, and illustrates the need/market for virtual banking infrastructure in the developing world:

Someone working in Kampala, for instance, who wishes to send the equivalent of $5 back to his mother in a village will buy a $5 prepaid airtime card, but rather than entering the code into his own phone, he will call the village phone operator (“phone ladies” often run their businesses from small kiosks) and read the code to her. She then uses the airtime for her phone and completes the transaction by giving the man’s mother the money, minus a small commission.

Good read.

CNN running a story on consumer electronics infected with viruses from the factory…

In most cases, Chinese factories — where many companies have turned to keep prices low — are the source.

So far, the virus problem appears to come from lax quality control, perhaps a careless worker plugging an infected music player into a factory computer used for testing, rather than organized sabotage by hackers or the Chinese factories.

Apparently the net is a boon to Arab metalheads…

• CNN has a video report about blackmetal/deathmetal bands in the middle east using Youtube and Myspace to get their music out in countries where public performances are illegal.

• Another article mentions mp3s, online stores, and album trading coordinated through web communities as factors sustaining the metal subcultures in these countries.

“In the previous article I had discussed that since there are no record labels in Iran, the people here have to ask their friends and relatives who live in the other countries to bring them the albums they want. However as Internet has become wide-spread in the recent years in Iran, Iranian metallers have found a better way to get the metal albums. There are some sites that sell these albums in very cheap price and one can download the albums that he wants from them in MP3 format. [...] Trading is one of the other ways that metaller can get the albums they have been searching for.“

All of the links above are from an unlikely post @ samefacts.com

The Arabic logo above (awesome) belongs to the first band that came up on myspace, called Narjahanam. From Bahrain, not bad either.

A new study is out measuring global purchasing power parity, revising old numbers used for economic comparison.

“The new numbers show global inequality to be significantly greater than even the most pessimistic authors had thought”

Link

Funny that Naver, a huge Yahoo style portal site in Korea, has a new “Simple Experience” that mimics Googles pared-down aesthetic.

Google, on the other hand, is using Flash buttons on their localized Google.co.kr site – the only Google country site that differs in style from their main US design.

Andrew Huang aka Bunnie has a lot of interesting posts chronicling the production of something called ‘chumby’ in China. It’s always interesting to see what globalization looks like on the ground, and this series of posts has video and interesting little bits of anecdotal experience and information. Check them out here, under the ‘Made in China’ category tag.

“One interesting fact is that every facility I went to had separate utensils and plates for guests. You can see in the above photo how my food is on a styrofoam plate with disposable chopsticks, where as the factory worker’s food is served on a steel plate with steel chopsticks. This is because I haven’t passed the factory’s physical examination. They do this to prevent me from contaminating the factory with potential foreign diseases.

[...] the scale of some food operations is pretty impressive. I heard that Foxconn–the place that makes the iPods and iPhones–consumes 3,000 pigs a day.”
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“Foxconn is where all of the iPods and iPhones are made. It’s a huge facility, apparently with over 250,000 employees, and it has its own special free trade status. The entire facility is walled off and you apparently need to have your passport and clear customs to get into the facility…just short of the nuclear-powered robotic dogs from the nation-corporation franchulates of Snowcrash.”
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“I asked her if she knew what the internet was. She said no. I was stunned. Here is a girl who is an expert in building and testing computers–I mean, on some projects she has probably built PCs and booted Windows XP a hundred thousand times over and over again [...] yet she didn’t know what the internet was.”
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“Shenzhen’s skyline is growing at a frenetic pace, and it’s a very planned city, as evidenced by the regularly arrayed skyscrapers–it’s almost as if the city planners played way too much Sim City in a previous life. ”
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