Abra a boca, coloque o pé, Alanis Morissette. The songstress thanked her crowd of 14000 in Lima, Peru on Sunday night with a hearty, "Thank you, Brazil!" Perhaps a "Thank you, silence!" would have been more appropriate?
She'll be in Brazil this week, including a show here in Rio on Saturday night, so we've been getting more than our usual share of the angsty Canadian on the airwaves. I like that she gets away with this one: " I know you sexualize me like a young thing would and I think I like it."
There's been a lot of hype in Brazil this week about the musical debut of Maria Rita, the daughter of one of Brazil's foremost performers, Elis Regina, a woman so famous here that her first name suffices, and often merits the same "Elis Lives!" treatment usually reserved for Elvis or, say, Sandino.
Having heard a generally positive review from one of Brazil's top music writers, Nelson Motta, I set out to find myself a copy of the CD and hear it for myself. Not hard to find, but I didn't actually manage to stay awake for the whole thing last night - oops! Oh well, it's the weekend.
With her CD, she's done something interesting. She's packaged it as a double-CD set, although there is only one disc in the package. Inside the jewel box are instructions to find a secret website where you can download additional tracks and burn them on a CD, which she has then left a slot for inside the CD. Cool idea. Apparently, you need to have the original CD in order to complete the download. So, at least until the tracks are more widely circulated, it's a pretty neat way to get people to buy the original CD.
Although it remains to be seen whether Maria Rita's star will shine as brightly as her mother's, there's already at least one artist out there who wishes she became a one-name wonder, one Rita Maria, who already has a banner on the above-linked site noting that "Rita Maria nao e Maria Rita". Well, maybe she'll derive some publicity from the similarity...she already had the nous to cybersquat the mariarita domain, even if she didn't bother with the ritamaria one as well.
Via Slashdot I came across a pretty frightening series of articles about IT outsourcing. The Slashdot discussion featured one Daniel Soong, who found himself out of work and his job being outsourced to India.
I wouldn't care to get into the India issue, as so many of the Slashdot respondents were so eager to do (it got pretty ugly at times, actually). Why pick on one country that's doing something well; taking advantage of the opening in the global labour market. If not India, someone else will step into the fray...Russia, Bangladesh, Brazil.
No, rather, I would like to think about what's wrong with this picture from the American establishment's perspective. Companies seem to be in a "Friedman"ing frenzy to outsource jobs in order to improve profitability. In fact, the more I thought about it the more it made my head spin.
A related article has this quote:
"They can't just give all our jobs away and expect this country to survive."
MIKE EMMONS, COMPUTER PROGRAMMER
and the lead article articulates (that's what articles do, no?) "some CIOs and economists prophesy a political storm against offshore outsourcing"
The gist of the articles is that service-sector jobs were the salvation of the US economy after the manufacturing jobs went to lower-cost environments, and that the best-paying jobs - like those in the IT sector - stayed in the US because of a concentration of talent that made it worthwhile to pay the high salaries (so, good productivity). This was great when there was a dot-com boom and a shortage of such talent, but now, in the bust, everyone is looking to cut costs. Some of the base moves offshore; the talent pool thins; more moves; it becomes a race to the bottom - a vicious circle in search of ever-lower
costs. It moves to India, where you have a well-trained, English-speaking work force who are happy to work for a fraction of US salaries.
So far, pretty understandable. And like I said, there's no reason the US should have a monopoly here. I also accept that there's a risk of being branded an alarmist or a protectionist, but what is going to happen to the US economy? Seems to me that the impact is going to be much broader than just a few hundred thousand IT-sector jobs, because the wealth that these jobs create must filter through and support a significant portion of the US's high-wage, high-cost economy.
What's troubling is that there's nothing behind this migration (like the service economy was "looming" behind the manufacturing economy, to catch it when it finally did collapse). At least there's nothing anyone sees on the horizon. Maybe some "creative destruction" will rise from the ashes to save the day. But for now, the article speaks of a structural change in the sector and the economy. One reckons that structural change feels a lot worse in the flesh.
For instance, what about our university system, spilling out so many high-tech graduates? What about the ridiculous run-up in tuition and fees? You could argue, perhaps, that for years they were too low relative to the opportunity they created. But if there are not jobs out there for the people paying these fees, then people aren't going to pay them.
Will universities become irrelevant? Less relevant (go easy on me)? You could argue, of course, that the top flight will not, but what about the hundreds of less well-regarded universities that are cranking out the rank and file of the white-collar workforce? Will we reach a situation like that of, say, href="http://allafrica.com/stories/200308270461.html">Nigeria, where there are too many university graduates for the jobs available? It sounds unthinkable, but what if the workforce as a whole took a giant step backward?
Just skimming the surface, my other concern, and probably I am a very late comer to this area, would be what happens to Social Security if you let your high-paying jobs be outsourced overseas? If the global economy is a great leveler, and if the Social Security system is already teetering on the brink, counting on the next generation to pay for today's higher-earning retirees, and then losing your high-earning income base...wouldn't that necessarily be a bad thing?
Another quote from the article:
"The government is not prepared to deal with the prospect of millions of highly educated, well-paid white-collar workers hitting the unemployment rolls for extended periods of time."
And so on.
I have been growing increasingly worried about what's to come in the US economy. A hollowing out of current government revenues. An erosion of a broad spectrum of services (of course, health, education, welfare). Further massive diversion of spending to the defense establishment; money spent chasing down the "nebulous enemy" bogeyman of terrorism in a war that cannot be won. A huge debt overhang, with no future tax revenues on offer to pay for it. Krugman's fiscal crisis that causes the dismantling of the welfare state?
Of course I don't live in the US these days. So I could stick in a smiley. Only I don't feel much like smiling.
From Transport Blog, a link to a short BBC article about the principal causes of delays on the British rail network (still fascinating despite my living a continent away these days). Patrick Crozier highlights the fact that 61% of the delays are caused by...other delays. The knock-on effect compounds the problem.
The article also highlights the "lack of slack" in the system. All schedule time, manpower and rolling stock resources are under such cost pressure that when something does go wrong, the system has no flexibility to respond. No doubt this leads to that knock-on effect, too. There was a Slashdot review of a book on the subject last year that was interesting enough to get the book onto my "buy" list, although I haven't followed through yet.
I was interested to note that the Liberal Democrats are doing a lot of data compiling these days.
So, I was one of the Blogger Pro subscribers who got the e-mail from Ev about the end of the subscription model. Apparently the Google folks have decided to roll out all of the Pro-level features (or most of them, at least) for free.
I signed up for Pro in, I guess, its earliest days. I think bandiera was about a week old at that point, and I found free Blogger to be painfully slow and unreliable. I signed up more for the promise of reliable service than for its features (although I liked the idea of being able to e-mail post at some point in the future).
Anyway, these days I am pretty geeked by Typepad (although it's costly for what I want it for) and was giving some thought to moving to MT and a new host when my current subs run out. But at least for now my blogging costs are a little lower, and heck, I get a "hoodie" for my troubles.
Obrigado, Blogger Pro.
Yesterday was the first time in my 15-year career where industrial action has kept me from reporting to work. So, we made good use of a day away to visit the spectacular Sitio Burle Marx. Highly recommended!
Burle Marx was a modernist landscape architect and artist, active through much of the 20th century. The Sitio was his home and workshop...he collected many tropical plants from around the world, often raising them at the Sitio for inclusion on later projects.
He gave the Sitio to the government in the mid-1980s, but continued to live there until his death in 1994. Today there are 25 full-time gardeners working to keep up the site and the nurseries, which have continued to expand since Burle Marx's day (Burle Marx reportedly had 50 full-time gardeners, but he had ongoing projects to help pay for them, and presumably he didn't have the same employment overheads that the government does).
After our visit, we carried on down to the beach for a late lunch at Barra de Guaratiba. It's not so far out of Rio, but it feels much smaller and remote. The area is one large mangrove and still supports an active fishing community (so, naturally, we had some fish with our meal). The drive back up to Rio along the deserted beaches(it was a weekday evening, and the weather was so-so) provided some spectacular scenery, with the sun dodging the clouds and mist, until we were swallowed up by the construction and traffic ugliness that is Barra de Tijuca.
Via Robot Wisdom, a fantastic interview with Paul Krugman at Buzzflash.com:
Now if you ask what do the people who keep pushing for one tax cut after another want to accomplish, the answer is they are basically aiming to create a fiscal crisis which will provide the environment in which they can basically eliminate the welfare state.
It is truly staggering to think about a budget deficit of $500bn, or the new Iraq price tag of $87bn.
I have the hardest time...no, I have an almost palpable fear...of trying to imagine what the world economy is going to look like when the defecation hits the ventilation
A reminder (to myself, and to readers) that the Distributed Proofreaders project is still very much alive and well, and now includes content to proof in Portuguese, courtesy of the National Library of Portugal.
It's interesting to see how Portuguese has evolved over the years, and also to note the differences between the Brazilian custom and the Portuguese. I am going to try to pledge to get to the site for my page a day.
If you doubt the power of distributed proofreading, they have already posted 9292 books to Project Gutenberg and are proofreading about 4000 pages per day. Faça parte!
[Update: the number of books published was formerly the PG count; now [December 24th 2003] the count stands at 2882 books actually published by DP to PG]
I note the passing last week of Wilfred Thesiger, one of the 20th Century's great explorers, in the true sense of the word. For me, Thesiger is one of the last in the breed; his writings amongst the last to stand free of the travel writing or adventure literature tags; to stand out as real explorations of the unknown (to the West) world and its people. His work is of particular relevance in these days for his documentation of the now-vanishing marsh Arabs of lowland Iraq. But this was only one of his many explorations.
Like the author of this excellent late-life profile, published last year in the Guardian, I had no idea Thesiger was still alive until I read this piece. He lived out his days in a nursing home in England, remote to his birthplace in imperial Abyssinia. Having lived large through the history of the 20th Century, this was no doubt a bit of an anti-climax. From the Guardian obit:
Thesiger felt least at home in his own culture and with his own kind. He resented the juggernaut of western "civilisation" and its inexorable movement to squash what he believed was the colour and diversity of the earth's peoples.
Anyway, as he passes into the pages of history, I celebrate the life of this great man.