In this Wired article Jim Harper takes John Glimore’s challenge to see what it’s like to travel on a plane cross-country without identification. One funny byproduct of his experiment is that you can get through the security checks faster without ID than with ID, assuming you dress well and act nice. Interesting read.
Well, for this week at least. We had a spare week of timeshare time that was going to expire so we booked a semi-vacation in Newport Coast. I work on the balcony with their in-room Wi-Fi. This will be my 20 all this week.
I’m not sure if this is real or a joke, but a guy got a copy of a priated version of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith in Chinese, which was subtitled back into English. The translations are so bad, it only confirms what we already knew: movie pirates don’t know English very well. It’s like something you’d see from the writers at mXc.
(F-bomb warning…)
http://winterson.com/2005/06/episode-iii-backstroke-of-west.html
OK, today is July 11th (7/11). The convenience store 7-11 is giving away free Slurpees to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Slurpee. Good enough, however I failed to take advantage of that. I think the nearest 7-11 is about 5 miles from here anyways. Then things got stranger. As I was driving around today I looked at my odomoeter and I had just passed 117,777 miles on the Avalon.
Much has been made about recent musings of China (hardware) and India (software) teaming up to dominate the techinology world. I’m not sure what to think of this. Maybe this will be the USA’s 21st century version of “Sputnik”, the clarion call that awakens the imagination of youth everywhere to take interest in science, math, and technology, if we can just get them away from the game consoles and reality TV for a few minutes.
But I’m not so optimistic. We are successful and powerful. Success breeds obesity and SUVs (guilty on both counts). Too many American kids are not as interested in science as they used to be, not sure why. That was OK when we importing lots of Chinese, Indians, Eastern Europeans, etc. to enter our country to pursue graduate studies in science and work in our top research labs. But 9/11 and the liberalization of China and India’s economies have changed all of that.
With 9/11 our visa process for importing intellectuals has backed up, many applicants told they have to wait more than 1 year to get into the country, too long to wait because class starts in less than 1 year! Also, with the Chinese and Indian economies growing and expanding so rapidly, economic progress can be found at home, not only in America, so many are opting to stay at home and pursue their research in their homeland.
This has left the USA with a deficit in the numbers of gradutes entering science and technology studies. So who will employers hire if there aren’t enough local talent to fill their jobs? You got it, overseas, and it will become not just about saving labor costs, but it’s about tapping into a supply of available talent no longer found in the USA.
But who are we to blame but ourselves? We are just not as hungry for science as we used to be, so we shall reap what we (don’t) sow. And remember, India and China combined are 10x our population, so even if 10% of their population become as educated as we are and the remaining 90% are dirt-poor and impoverished, we’re still screwed.
I am not anti-globalization or anti-oursourcing, in fact I have worked with and hired programmers in India and Pakistan to work with me. But if we agree to compete globally we have to be ready to compete, and we are not acting or thinking like a player in an international game, into which 2+ billion new participants are slowly entering the playing field. I don’t see our national leaders really addressing this issue, it’s business as usual, worrying about fighting culture wars and entitlements, and spend-spend-spend ourselves into foreign-financed debt.
Nevertheless, I am optimistic once we wake up from our slumber we can rise to the challenge, sacrifices will have to be made, and we have, in the past, made the necessary sacrifices to get where we are now. I just hope we all have the hindsight to remember what it took to get where we are.
Well, after several requests and embarrassing “dude, you don’t have a blog?” comments, and finally getting PHP5 and IIS6 to work properly together, I have decided to start blogging.
My main reluctance before has always been what to blog. I figured I won’t have any central theme and will just blog whatever’s on my mind or whatever others might want to read about.
So, here I go, and we’ll see where it goes.
Powered by WordPress
