Month: December 2010

Here’s another argument for No Borders. Not sure if it’s a socialist or a neolib one. Work-migration is the most effective form of international aid:

Is there a Secret Weapon for Fighting Poverty? | UN Dispatch

Granted, this then brings us straight into the global outsourcing debate. If somebody cleaning floors in Sydney is bringing money to Indonesia, wouldn’t an exploitative factory in Jakarta be even more effective?And it’s worth remembering that life for gastarbeiter can be pretty shit — see the recent outrage in the Philippines about torture of Filipino nurses in Saudi Arabia.

But…facts, facts, facts.

Over-educated Chinese?

There a glut of Chinese university graduates without meaningful employment in their fields, and these educations were funded by parents who sacrificed their own lives to send those kids to college. Unless that graduate is from a high-ranking school and has family connections, it’s seldom worth the cost these days.

In desperation, Chinese families are now sending their kids to school in the USA, the UK or Europe, in hopes their kids will master Western attitudes and form alliances beyond China. But even those children return home to face the same stigma: the little no-name school they attended in the West is ridiculed as a Wild Grass College. All this was seen in Japan two decades ago.

Tim Worstall has a point on education:

It’s not all that long ago (certainly within my adult lifetime) that no degree was required to qualify as either an accountant or solicitor (all a degree did give you, other than that mind widening etc, was a free pass through some of the professional courses/exams), you could go off to work as a trainee and take your professional exams while working (articles in the law, might be the same word in accounting).

I’m slightly biased, in that my ‘profession’ (programming) is one where not having a degree can still be a point of pride.

Not sure about the CT article itself, though. I’m all for utopianism, but I don’t see this variant ever making it anywhere.

Here’s another argument for No Borders. Not sure if it’s a socialist or a neolib one. Work-migration is the most effective form of international aid:

Is there a Secret Weapon for Fighting Poverty? | UN Dispatch

Granted, this then brings us straight into the global outsourcing debate. If somebody cleaning floors in Sydney is bringing money to Indonesia, wouldn’t an exploitative factory in Jakarta be even more effective?And it’s worth remembering that life for gastarbeiter can be pretty shit — see the recent outrage in the Philippines about torture of Filipino nurses in Saudi Arabia.

But…facts, facts, facts.

There are a few reasons why I’ve not seen much German television. One is that I’ve avoided TV since childhood. Another is that, until the past 6 months, I’ve not lived anywhere with a shared television. A third is that in-person recommendations of what to watch in Germany have never been able to keep up with the deluge of English-languag recommendations constantly coming in through livejournal, facebook and the like.

So, when I do encounter German TV, there’s space for me to be pleasantly surprised. So it was with the satire programme Xtra3. Came across it because Chris was channel-hopping, then quickly realised it’s top-notch satire with a political edge I can sympathise with. This snippet (via karohemd) is particularly great, following up on the ludicrous terror alerts and so on:

Henry Farrell on two semi-academic books on the history of anarchism:

the “Wrong Address” theory of nationalism, under which History was supposed to confer group consciousness and solidarity upon Class, yet somehow ended up delivering it to Nationality instead

…

This loose network Anderson describes was genuinely global. Its participants were comfortable speaking several different languages. Indeed (and this is Anderson’s key argument), both 19th-century anarchists and nationalists always spoke to a world audience. They were caught within a world system that had been created by corrupt European powers that were now losing influence and control. Both anarchists and nationalists sought to break this system up. When they acted, they were acutely aware that they were being observed by audiences both foreign and domestic. They acted precisely so that the whole world would take note.

…

The Art of Not Being Governed

fits together nicely with its predecessor,

Seeing Like a State

, as a landmark work of early 21st-century social science. The two books have complementary arguments;

The Art of Not Being Governed

might equally well have been titled

The People States Can’t See

. It is, first and foremost, a history of escape from the state, chronicling the stories of the various peoples who have fled to highlands, swamps and archipelagos where the state cannot easily reach them. Scott’s particular object of study is “Zomia”, the mountain marches of Southeast Asia that stretch from southern China down to Laos and northern Thailand, taking in parts of Burma and eastern India. Scott calls Zomia a “shatter zone” that has actively resisted incorporation into the various states around it and served as a refuge for peoples fleeing those states.

This post may be on the David Icke forums (!), but it’s a surprisingly good take on meditation:

The main thing you’ve got to ask yourself is

“What happens when I concentrate and how do I set about the conditions to concentrate on concentration.”

When shooting a gun, you concentrate naturally for 5 seconds or so but you need to learn the process which you can do this for much longer. Still…People good at aiming a gun might have better concentration skills than those who meditate simply because they need to concentrate to hit their target. A person meditating doesn’t have that kind of target so they never build up a high degree of meditation in any of their meditations even if they do it 3 hours a day.

Alexander Shulgin has had a stroke. Shulgin introduced ecstacy to the world, discovered hundreds of psychedelic and other drugs. i.e. he massively improved the world, but in a way that he couldn’t easily monetize without winding up in jail. He’s poor, ill and in the US — thus having trouble paying his medical bill. Donations accepted here, Erowid also has a collection for archiving his papers.

—

Fantastic tombstone (warning: may contain communism)

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Vodafone choose the wrong moment to play with twitter. Makes me wonder: what is the sensible thing for an unpopular company to do with an online public? Just hide?

At some level many companies have to make a choice: try to be popular, or just hunker down and rake in the cash. If the rich-but-repulsive strategy now has the added cost of being laughed off the internet, that’s probably a good thing. I guess.

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Old, but I missed it first time round: the EU told the Netherlands it had too much public housing, and had to get rid of it.

70% of French believe the worst of the crisis is yet to come:

Lorsque l’institut Ipsos leur demande s’ils pensent

“que le gros de la crise est derrière nous”

, ils sont ainsi 70 % à répondre au contraire que

“le gros de la crise reste encore à venir”

.

This despite recent business figures which are positive, if not quite so good as in Germany. What’s going on?

• Everybody believes governments are making up the figures, even when they aren’t
• It’s going well for business, but not for people — the crisis has become a concentration/acceleration of the existing patterns of inequality.
• ‘man in the street’ experiences of recession — unemployment in particular — lag behind the state of business, which in turn lags behind financial markets. This is why the crisis began as a financial crisis: at first it seemed phony-war-like, something happening only in meaningless figures
• People are using optimism/pessimism to make a political point. e.g. the left are exaggerating the crisis, as a means to criticize Sarkozy

How did I miss this? Oh, right, because our eyes collectively glaze over at the mention of anything from Brussels, regardless of how much it affects our world.

Thirty three per cent of housing stock in the Netherlands is owned by bodies that receive state funding. In 2005, the commission – the executive body of the EU – argued having more than 30 per cent of homes belonging to the social housing sector seemed ‘disproportionate’.

It expressed doubt about the compatibility of the Dutch social housing support systems with the European competition rules, and suggested that it could be a possible ‘manifest error’.