"The merger between Lloyds and HBOS has been described in some quarters as a ‘shotgun wedding’. Lloyds Group Chief Executive Eric Daniels conceded that the merger proceeded swiftly on the basis of relatively little due diligence and that the Government was involved to the extent that it offered to waive the competition rules. We also note that the merger may have prevented the collapse of HBOS with the consequent loss of many thousands of jobs and also avoided the outright nationalisation of the company.
Nevertheless, from the evidence we received, if the merger has had injurious consequences for Lloyds TSB we consider that the responsibility for this lies primarily with the Lloyds Board."
So, Mr. Brown had nothing to do with it then?
The implication here is that the Lloyds board were offered a chance to monopolize the market and ended up handing the bank over the the government. Nevertheless, the greater good was enhanced because HBOS didn't go under. In effect, parliament neatly passes the blame onto a group of greedy banking half-wits. while at the same time, gently acknowledging the inventive way the government contained another banking failure.
However, lets wipe away the whitewash and clarify what really happened. The shareholders of Lloyds, in effect, had their property stolen by a government anxious to avoid a second Northern Rock fiasco. Their private property was used to save the reputations of this government. This merger exemplifies the moral degeneration of this country because parliament claims that a theft as outrageous as this can be passed off as "injurious consequences".
If we let this type of thing go unpunished, if we don't call the guilty to account, then we will slide into a cesspool of venal corruption. The lesson for unscrupulous politicians and businesspeople is simple; if you can get the presentation of a scandal right, then you can get away with anything.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Playing the blame game
"The origins of the banking crisis were many and varied, including low real interest rates, a search for yield, apparent excess liquidity and a misplaced faith in financial innovation. These ingredients combined to create an environment rich in overconfidence, over-optimism and the stifling of contrary opinions.
Notwithstanding this febrile environment, some of the banks have been the principal authors of their own demise. The culture within parts of British banking has increasingly been one of risk taking leading to the meltdown that we have witnessed. Bankers have made an astonishing mess of the financial system. However, this was a failure not only within individual banks but also of the supervisory system designed to protect the public from systemic risk."
UK Treasury committee report on the Banking crisis
It was the bankers wot did it.
The culpability of FSA and the Bank of England is relegated to a single line "this was a failure not only within individual banks but also of the supervisory system designed to protect the public from systemic risk."
I don't buy it. Certainly, the banks were to blame in the same way as a two year old child is at fault when he cuts himself playing with a razor blade. The adults, i.e. the FSA and the BoE, should have been watching out. They weren't and now the UK financial system is a car wreck.
Notwithstanding this febrile environment, some of the banks have been the principal authors of their own demise. The culture within parts of British banking has increasingly been one of risk taking leading to the meltdown that we have witnessed. Bankers have made an astonishing mess of the financial system. However, this was a failure not only within individual banks but also of the supervisory system designed to protect the public from systemic risk."
UK Treasury committee report on the Banking crisis
It was the bankers wot did it.
The culpability of FSA and the Bank of England is relegated to a single line "this was a failure not only within individual banks but also of the supervisory system designed to protect the public from systemic risk."
I don't buy it. Certainly, the banks were to blame in the same way as a two year old child is at fault when he cuts himself playing with a razor blade. The adults, i.e. the FSA and the BoE, should have been watching out. They weren't and now the UK financial system is a car wreck.
Hidden in the promised land
Read this whole story, it tells about the month long, terrifying trek of this man from his home in Guatemala to Ithaca NY. - - Donna Poisl
Migrant workers in Central New York choose lives of loneliness and fear
By Erin Geismar Editor in Chief
Blood mixes with sand, and with every painful step Román takes, it feels like he might as well be taking one back. Ahead of him there is a line of people. In the cold darkness of the desert at night, a group of 15 trudges on diligently, though a few, Román included, are faltering. His shoes are broken, the sand leaks through, weighing his steps. His toes have been rubbing together for hours, and two toenails dig their way into the flesh of other toes. He’s bleeding, he’s hungry, and he’s tired. The food is gone. The water is gone. He can’t keep walking. He stops and puts his hands to his knees; they’re throbbing now. When he walks he feels bowlegged. He hangs his head low.
“If you keep walking like this we’re never going to get there,” the guide yells back from the front of the line. “If you want to make it to the United States you have to be stronger.”
He would keep saying that again and again.
“Think about how much money you’ve already spent,” he continues. Román thinks about money all the time. About how much he’s spent trying to get to America — so far, he was down almost $1,000. But he thought about how much he hoped to make when he got there.
Be sure to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
Migrant workers in Central New York choose lives of loneliness and fear
By Erin Geismar Editor in Chief
Blood mixes with sand, and with every painful step Román takes, it feels like he might as well be taking one back. Ahead of him there is a line of people. In the cold darkness of the desert at night, a group of 15 trudges on diligently, though a few, Román included, are faltering. His shoes are broken, the sand leaks through, weighing his steps. His toes have been rubbing together for hours, and two toenails dig their way into the flesh of other toes. He’s bleeding, he’s hungry, and he’s tired. The food is gone. The water is gone. He can’t keep walking. He stops and puts his hands to his knees; they’re throbbing now. When he walks he feels bowlegged. He hangs his head low.
“If you keep walking like this we’re never going to get there,” the guide yells back from the front of the line. “If you want to make it to the United States you have to be stronger.”
He would keep saying that again and again.
“Think about how much money you’ve already spent,” he continues. Román thinks about money all the time. About how much he’s spent trying to get to America — so far, he was down almost $1,000. But he thought about how much he hoped to make when he got there.
Be sure to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
Orange County's Vietnamese immigrants reflect on historic moment
This photo exhibit is reminding young people of their parents' history and suffering during the war in Vietnam. - - Donna Poisl
Every April, as the anniversary of the communist takeover of their homeland approaches, they look back -- and try to make sure their descendants know and appreciate their history.
By My-Thuan Tran
Thirty-four years after tanks smashed through the gates of Saigon's Presidential Palace, marking a symbolic end to the Vietnam War, the bitter memories still burn among many of the refugees who live in Orange County's Little Saigon.
As decades passed and the memories of war fade with many Americans, community leaders in the largest Vietnamese enclave in the United States want to remind a new generation of the suffering and hardship that took shape on a day they still call "Black Friday."
Some in the community worry that younger Vietnamese -- fully Westernized and many reconciled with the Vietnam of today -- will forget why their parents and grandparents fled their homeland, that the memories of the communist takeover will slowly dissolve.
Be sure to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
Every April, as the anniversary of the communist takeover of their homeland approaches, they look back -- and try to make sure their descendants know and appreciate their history.
By My-Thuan Tran
Thirty-four years after tanks smashed through the gates of Saigon's Presidential Palace, marking a symbolic end to the Vietnam War, the bitter memories still burn among many of the refugees who live in Orange County's Little Saigon.
As decades passed and the memories of war fade with many Americans, community leaders in the largest Vietnamese enclave in the United States want to remind a new generation of the suffering and hardship that took shape on a day they still call "Black Friday."
Some in the community worry that younger Vietnamese -- fully Westernized and many reconciled with the Vietnam of today -- will forget why their parents and grandparents fled their homeland, that the memories of the communist takeover will slowly dissolve.
Be sure to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
Recession hits immigrant workforce harder than native workforce
Immigrant workers, regardless of their legal status or skill level, are more likely to be hard hit by the economic situation than others. - - Donna Poisl
Foreign-born workers -- both skilled and unskilled, legal and illegal -- have endured greater increases in joblessness than their native-born counterparts over the last 18 months, one study shows.
By Teresa Watanabe
Immigrants have been hit harder than native-born Americans by the recession, with larger increases in joblessness among both educated and uneducated workers, according to a study released today.
Immigrants in California -- both legal and illegal -- fared particularly poorly, with jobless rates here nearly tripling to 12.2% in the first quarter of 2009, compared with 4.5% in the third quarter of 2007, according to the report by the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based research group that supports immigration restrictions. The study is based on U.S. Census statistics.
Nationally, the immigrant jobless rate rose to 9.7% from 4.1% during that period, while the rate for native-born workers rose to 8.6% from 4.8%.
The jobless rate for Latino immigrants grew twice as fast as that for non-Latino immigrants, the study showed.
Be sure to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
Foreign-born workers -- both skilled and unskilled, legal and illegal -- have endured greater increases in joblessness than their native-born counterparts over the last 18 months, one study shows.
By Teresa Watanabe
Immigrants have been hit harder than native-born Americans by the recession, with larger increases in joblessness among both educated and uneducated workers, according to a study released today.
Immigrants in California -- both legal and illegal -- fared particularly poorly, with jobless rates here nearly tripling to 12.2% in the first quarter of 2009, compared with 4.5% in the third quarter of 2007, according to the report by the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based research group that supports immigration restrictions. The study is based on U.S. Census statistics.
Nationally, the immigrant jobless rate rose to 9.7% from 4.1% during that period, while the rate for native-born workers rose to 8.6% from 4.8%.
The jobless rate for Latino immigrants grew twice as fast as that for non-Latino immigrants, the study showed.
Be sure to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
Sync Google Apps user accounts with your LDAP system
As part of the team that joined Google when it acquired Postini in 2007, one of my responsibilities has been finding ways to weave Postini's enterprise experience into Google's business offerings. Today, I'm excited to tell you about Google Apps Directory Sync, the latest improvement to Google Apps brought over from Google's Postini security and archiving services.
Google Apps Directory Sync lets businesses and schools with an LDAP user directory system like Microsoft Active Directory or Lotus Domino transition more quickly and smoothly to Google Apps. Instead of manually maintaining a separate user account directory in Google Apps, this utility lets Google Apps tap into an existing repository of user account information.
This new utility is a software component that helps maintain security by running behind the firewall and pushes directory information to Google Apps – including mailing lists, groups and user aliases – to match the organizational schema in the LDAP system.
This is a one-way operation, designed so data on the LDAP server is not updated or altered. The utility offers many of the customization settings, tests and simulations originally developed and refined for the Postini directory sync tool to give complex organizations the controls they need to manage their directories effectively.
Google Apps Directory Sync is now included at no additional cost with Google Apps Premier, Education and Partner Edition customers.
Posted by Navneet Goel, Google Enterprise Product Manager
Google Apps Directory Sync lets businesses and schools with an LDAP user directory system like Microsoft Active Directory or Lotus Domino transition more quickly and smoothly to Google Apps. Instead of manually maintaining a separate user account directory in Google Apps, this utility lets Google Apps tap into an existing repository of user account information.
This new utility is a software component that helps maintain security by running behind the firewall and pushes directory information to Google Apps – including mailing lists, groups and user aliases – to match the organizational schema in the LDAP system.
This is a one-way operation, designed so data on the LDAP server is not updated or altered. The utility offers many of the customization settings, tests and simulations originally developed and refined for the Postini directory sync tool to give complex organizations the controls they need to manage their directories effectively.
Google Apps Directory Sync is now included at no additional cost with Google Apps Premier, Education and Partner Edition customers.
Posted by Navneet Goel, Google Enterprise Product Manager
Reduced Demand = Oil Surplus in Europe
Rotterdam, Europe’s largest port, may be running out of space to store crude as global oil demand posts its first back-to-back annual drop in a quarter-century.
The harbor is Europe’s largest refinery center and a trading hub for refined products such as gasoline and diesel. Some ships have been diverted or are waiting outside the port until space is available, said Jeroen Kortsmit, manager for commercial affairs at Royal Dirkzwager.
“A lot of tanks are fully loaded,” Kortsmit said by phone from Rotterdam April 27. He joined the company, which provides shipping information to terminal operators around the port, 24 years ago and said he has never seen storage this full before.
- Bloomberg
Reduced Demand = Oil Surplus in Europe
Rotterdam, Europe’s largest port, may be running out of space to store crude as global oil demand posts its first back-to-back annual drop in a quarter-century.
The harbor is Europe’s largest refinery center and a trading hub for refined products such as gasoline and diesel. Some ships have been diverted or are waiting outside the port until space is available, said Jeroen Kortsmit, manager for commercial affairs at Royal Dirkzwager.
“A lot of tanks are fully loaded,” Kortsmit said by phone from Rotterdam April 27. He joined the company, which provides shipping information to terminal operators around the port, 24 years ago and said he has never seen storage this full before.
- Bloomberg
UK house prices down 23 percent in real terms
Today, the Nationwide put out their April numbers for house prices. After March's surprise increase, prices are again edging downwards.
This chart, however, looks at UK property prices adjusted for inflation. Since the peak during Autumn 2007, prices in real terms are down 23 percent. The recent crash has wiped out all gains since October 2003.
How much further will prices fall? During the 1990s housing bust, prices fell peak-to-trough by 35 percent. I wouldn't be surprised if we repeat that experience.
A New Labour bubble that has not burst
New Labour are definitely the party of law and order.Over the last 11 years, the prison population has exploded. Between 2008 and 1996 (the last full year of the Major government), the number of convicts under lock and key has increased 50 percent.
In contrast, the Tory record is much more merciful. There was an extended period during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the prison population actually fell.
It all goes to prove a point that I have always believed; socialists love locking people up.
Make money in commercial real estate
Remind me again, what is happening to commercial real estate prices right now?
Spot the flaws in this short youtube clip...
White House Expands Foreclosure Fix
The Obama administration said on April 28 that it is expanding its foreclosure prevention program to cover second mortgages and to direct more troubled borrowers to the Hope for Homeowners program. Announced in mid-February, the president's $75 billion program calls for adjusting eligible borrowers' loans so monthly payments are no more than 31 percent of pre-tax income. The plan is expected to help up to 9 million avoid foreclosure. More at CNNMoney.com
The US auto industry - the endgame
The final chapter of the US auto industry is upon us. It looks increasingly likely that Chrysler will declare bankruptcy. GM is likely to follow it within a few weeks.
Although both companies are in woeful shape, it is hard not to notice the double standards at work here. Both companies probably need a fraction of the money pumped into Wall Street. After all, it would be hard to argue that Citibank is in any better shape than GM.
From the New York Times.....
DETROIT — Last-minute efforts by the Treasury Department to win over recalcitrant Chrysler debtholders failed Wednesday night, setting up a near-certain bankruptcy filing by the American automaker, according to people briefed on the talks. Barring an agreement, which looked increasingly difficult, Chrysler was expected to seek Chapter 11 protection on Thursday, most likely in New York, these people said.
The automaker, which is in talks with the Italian automaker Fiat, would file for bankruptcy first. It subsequently would present an agreement with Fiat to the court for approval, possibly on Monday, these people said. They requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for the government.
Although both companies are in woeful shape, it is hard not to notice the double standards at work here. Both companies probably need a fraction of the money pumped into Wall Street. After all, it would be hard to argue that Citibank is in any better shape than GM.
From the New York Times.....
DETROIT — Last-minute efforts by the Treasury Department to win over recalcitrant Chrysler debtholders failed Wednesday night, setting up a near-certain bankruptcy filing by the American automaker, according to people briefed on the talks. Barring an agreement, which looked increasingly difficult, Chrysler was expected to seek Chapter 11 protection on Thursday, most likely in New York, these people said.
The automaker, which is in talks with the Italian automaker Fiat, would file for bankruptcy first. It subsequently would present an agreement with Fiat to the court for approval, possibly on Monday, these people said. They requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for the government.
What will we do?
...if the UK banking system shrinks? Will we go back to bashing metal and digging coal?
April 30 (Bloomberg) -- Britain’s financial industry will shrink to as little as 7 percent of gross domestic product as the global crisis forces foreign banks to retreat from London, former Bank of England policy maker Willem Buiter said.
“Financial services in the City grew in the U.K. from 5.5 percent of GDP in 1996 to about 10.8 percent in 2007,” Buiter said today at a conference in London on the future of its financial district, known as the City. “It will probably go back in a steady state to something halfway there, to around 7 or 7.5 percent. That’s a big adjustment.”
The British economy contracted the most since 1979 in the first quarter as business services and finance shrank at a record pace. The depth of the global crisis has cast a shadow on the U.K.’s prospects for recovery because of its dependence on banking and financial services as motors of growth.
“We are seeing the repatriation of cross-border banking,” Buiter said. “This is inevitable” and “bad news for London because this is the home of cross-border banking.”
April 30 (Bloomberg) -- Britain’s financial industry will shrink to as little as 7 percent of gross domestic product as the global crisis forces foreign banks to retreat from London, former Bank of England policy maker Willem Buiter said.
“Financial services in the City grew in the U.K. from 5.5 percent of GDP in 1996 to about 10.8 percent in 2007,” Buiter said today at a conference in London on the future of its financial district, known as the City. “It will probably go back in a steady state to something halfway there, to around 7 or 7.5 percent. That’s a big adjustment.”
The British economy contracted the most since 1979 in the first quarter as business services and finance shrank at a record pace. The depth of the global crisis has cast a shadow on the U.K.’s prospects for recovery because of its dependence on banking and financial services as motors of growth.
“We are seeing the repatriation of cross-border banking,” Buiter said. “This is inevitable” and “bad news for London because this is the home of cross-border banking.”
S.U. BEER APPRECIATION CLASS
School is almost out and college students around the country are preparing to take their final exams and pack it up for the year. Students in the Syracuse University Beer and Wine Appreciation Class have a few more lessons to get in before the summer break. That’s right, S.U. offers a Beer and Wine Appreciation Class to students that are age 21 and over. Steve Collins, of Yuengling, and Larry Rothenberg of Onondaga Beverage were invited to attend this class last Monday and present some information about Yuengling’s history and product portfolio. They started out by showing our company video and some of our new commercials to the students. This was followed by a discussion about the history of the brewery. Afterwards, students sampled Lager, Light Lager, Lord Chesterfield Ale, Black & Tan, and Porter. Steve and Larry discussed the unique characteristics of each brew, along with what each brew is best paired with. After the samples were finished, there was a question and answer session and students got some cool Yuengling gear including hats, tee shirts, and a Yuengling flag.
Thank you to Professor Tim Bar for having us. This is a unique class that probably fills up fast when it is time to register at the beginning of the semester. Thank you to Larry Rothenberg for participating as well, we wish you the best in your retirement this summer!
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Benny Morris on 2 states
Iconoclastic Israeli historian Benny Morris has just published a new book advocating what he calls a two-state solution with the Palestinian territories in a federation with Jordan. What is most controversial about his viewpoint is his contention that even the mainstream Fatah leadership of the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas does not believe in "two states for two peoples." Abbas may advocate for two states, according to Morris, but with the expectation that alongside the Palestinian Arab state, Israel will eventually become a majority Arab state because Abbas still insists upon a Palestinian "right of return" to what is now Israel.
The New York Times included a small article that may be read as substantiating this view. Abbas rebuffed Prime Minister Netanyahu’s demand that he recognize Israel as a "Jewish state." "I do not accept it," Abbas said. "It is not my job to give a description of the state. Name yourself the Hebrew Socialist Republic — it is none of my business."
Abbas allows himself wiggle room here. It would have been better for the sake of negotiations if he had endorsed the concept of Israel as the national home of the Jewish people; on the other hand, he is not denying Israel’s right to see itself as a Jewish state. Unfortunately, Netanyahu will undoubtedly use Abbas’s refusal as an argument against renewing negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.
My problem with Benny Morris’s contention that the Palestinians have never ultimately reconciled with living alongside Israel is his level of certainty. There is evidence to support his argument: The Palestinian political elite rejected a two-state solution when first proposed by the British Peel Commission in 1937; they rejected it when advanced by the United Nations in 1947; and, he claims, they rejected it in 2000 when they launched the intifada after the Camp David II Summit.
Yet the case of Camp David II is much more complicated than Morris allows and is open to a variety of interpretations. I share with many the disappointment that Arafat did not either sign on the dotted line at Camp David or that all the parties (Israel, the Clinton administration and the PLO) didn’t find a way to finesse their differences, acknowledge progress regarding some issues and continue a negotiating process that could have culminated in a more fully accepted agreement – as almost occurred at the January 2001 conference at Taba (which was resolving the refugees issue to exclude an unqualified right of return) and was eventually settled on a theoretical level by the Geneva Accord of Dec. 2003.
The New York Times included a small article that may be read as substantiating this view. Abbas rebuffed Prime Minister Netanyahu’s demand that he recognize Israel as a "Jewish state." "I do not accept it," Abbas said. "It is not my job to give a description of the state. Name yourself the Hebrew Socialist Republic — it is none of my business."
Abbas allows himself wiggle room here. It would have been better for the sake of negotiations if he had endorsed the concept of Israel as the national home of the Jewish people; on the other hand, he is not denying Israel’s right to see itself as a Jewish state. Unfortunately, Netanyahu will undoubtedly use Abbas’s refusal as an argument against renewing negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.
My problem with Benny Morris’s contention that the Palestinians have never ultimately reconciled with living alongside Israel is his level of certainty. There is evidence to support his argument: The Palestinian political elite rejected a two-state solution when first proposed by the British Peel Commission in 1937; they rejected it when advanced by the United Nations in 1947; and, he claims, they rejected it in 2000 when they launched the intifada after the Camp David II Summit.
Yet the case of Camp David II is much more complicated than Morris allows and is open to a variety of interpretations. I share with many the disappointment that Arafat did not either sign on the dotted line at Camp David or that all the parties (Israel, the Clinton administration and the PLO) didn’t find a way to finesse their differences, acknowledge progress regarding some issues and continue a negotiating process that could have culminated in a more fully accepted agreement – as almost occurred at the January 2001 conference at Taba (which was resolving the refugees issue to exclude an unqualified right of return) and was eventually settled on a theoretical level by the Geneva Accord of Dec. 2003.
How Chic Was My Progress
When it was hip to be hep, I was hep.
–From “I’m Hip,” by Dave Frishberg and Bob Dorough
At one point in The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz quotes the German philosopher Max Scheler, who asked, “What is progress?” It’s a crucial question, and in the United States there is basically only one answer, involving the visible expression of technological innovation and economic expansion. Paz was not impressed with this notion of progress in 1950, when he wrote his famous essay, and it is a safe bet that he was increasingly disenchanted with the American model as the years wore on. Although he saw the flaws of his own culture quite clearly, he never felt that the American Way of Life was any kind of solution for Mexico or indeed, the rest of the world. Paz was prescient: at a time when everyone was celebrating America as an unrivaled success, he correctly pegged it as a wounded civilization, one that saw the future strictly in terms of novelty and never questioned what it was doing.
This extremely limited notion of the good life, combined with almost total unconsciousness, presents itself as daily reality in the U.S. I recall a friend of mine telling me, a few years ago, about a train trip she took up the California coast, during which she decided to walk through the cars very slowly, from back to front, almost pretending to be an invalid, so that she could eavesdrop on conversations. Every last one of these, she said, was about some gadget, some aspect of consumer technology–software, computer attachments, iPods, cell phone variations, etc. This is where, she concluded, Americans put their attention; it is what really excites them, makes them feel alive. Nor is this limited to Americans, of course. In the mid-eighties, when I was teaching at a Canadian university, my colleagues were literally ecstatic over the introduction of personal computers, firmly believing that these machines would write papers and books for them, perhaps help them get tenure or upgrade their entire careers (promises that failed to materialize, needless to say). As for south of the border, I was recently riding around Mexico City with a colleague of mine when we saw a huge billboard ad for some cell phone, with the caption, in three-foot high block capitals (in English, for some strange reason), KILL SILENCE. “Well,” I remarked to my colleague, “at least they are being honest about it.” “Oh,” he quipped, “you are fixated on cell phones.”
It’s hard to know how to reply to a dismissive remark of this kind, since even the brightest people don’t get it, and usually have no idea what George Steiner meant when he called modernity “the systematic suppression of silence.” Silence, after all, is the source of all self-knowledge, and of much creativity as well. But it is hardly valued by societies that confuse creativity with productivity. What I am fixated on, in fact, is not technology but the fixation on technology, the obsession with it. Unfortunately, it is hard to persuade those caught up in the American model of progress that it is they who are living in an upside-down world, not Octavio Paz.
For it doesn’t have to be this way. Notions of progress might conceivably revolve around how we treat each other in social situations, for example, not around the latest electronic toy. Some years ago I taught in the sociology department of a major American university, and marveled at my colleagues, who were constantly interrupting their conversations with each other to take cell phone calls–as if a conversation with someone who was not physically present were more important than one with someone who was. They had no idea of how rude they were on a daily basis, and regarded my own views on technology as “quaint.” Considering the damage this behavior was doing to human social interaction, and the fact that these folks were sociologists, I was impressed by the irony of it all. It was like being at a convention of nutritionists, each of whom weighed more than 300 pounds. After all, if obesity is the new health, what is there left to say?
This brings to mind the famous phrase coined by the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “defining deviancy down.” Moynihan pointed out that there was a process in American culture by which behavior traditionally regarded as selfish or vulgar–e.g., abruptly breaking off a conversation with one person to initiate one with someone else–rapidly becomes acceptable if enough people start doing it. Deviancy, in short, goes down to the lowest common denominator, finally becoming the norm. Indeed, the vulgarization and “narcissization” of American society had become so widespread by the mid-1990s that books were being written on incivility, and conferences held on the subject as well. But none of this made any difference for actual behavior, as even the most casual observation of contemporary American society reveals.
I remember, some years ago, then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talking about American (non)relations with Cuba, and stating that “we don’t want that model to be able to replicate itself”–the old contagion theory of communism, as it were. Well, I’m not big on dictatorships myself, but what about the danger of the American model replicating itself? When you go to New Zealand and see the Maori people talking on cell phones and watching American sitcoms, you know that Moynihan’s prediction about the world turning into trash is not very far off.
China, which is all set to replace the U.S. as the next hegemonic power, is of course replicating the American model with a vengeance. “To get rich is glorious,” declared Deng Xiaoping, and the 1990s witnessed the stripping away of time-worn (non-Maoist) Chinese models of good citizenship and moral participation in collective goals. The race was on to crank out as many cell phones, DVD players, televisions, shopping malls, and highways as possible. Monthly car production went from 20,000 in 1993 to 250,000 in 2004, and Wal-Mart and McDonald’s have spread through the country like wildfire. In China Pop, Jianying Zha gives us a vivid (read: garish and appalling) portrait of a country wallowing in mass consumerism, from soap operas to pornography and beyond. China is now dotted with privileged consumption zones, theme parks, and beauty pageants. Cosmetic surgery clinics abound, promising to give young women more rounded, Western eyes. In fact, the beauty industry grosses more than $24 billion a year. ”Consumerism became a religion,” writes Rachel Dewoskin in Foreign Babes in Beijing, as “street kiosks made way for sleek boutiques and cafés, where Chinese and foreigners lounged together, drinking lattes and Italian sodas.” Companies arrived like missionaries, she recalls, seducing the average Chinese with products they never knew they needed. In the progressive China of today, everyone, according to the British anthropologist David Harvey, “speculates on the desires of others in the Darwinian struggle for position.”
This is why we have more to fear from the American model of progress, and its replication on a world scale, than from some aged caudillo in Cuba. For what does it consist of, finally, when “freedom” means little more than “free enterprise”? As Harvey tells us in his remarkable study, A Brief History of Neoliberalism,
“that culture, however spectacular, glamorous, and beguiling,
perpetually plays with desires without ever conferring satisfactions
beyond the limited identity of the shopping mall and the anxieties
of status by way of good looks (in the case of women) or of material
possessions. ‘I shop therefore I am’ and possessive individualism
together construct a world of pseudo-satisfactions that is superficially
exciting but hollow at its core.”
This beguiling quality–the notion of culture as chic–is an enormous shell game, as Harvey demonstrates in his summary of what happened to New York City during the 1970s. A fiscal crisis arose, the product of rapid suburbanization that was destroying the tax base of the city. Financial institutions were prepared to bridge the gap between income and expenditure in the city budget, and expansion of public employment via federal funding was also being considered. But in 1975 a powerful group of investment bankers, led by Citibank, refused to roll over the debt and left the city technically bankrupt. Union activity was curtailed; cutbacks took place in education, public health, and transportation; and wealth got redistributed upward, to the rich and super rich. It was, says Harvey, “a coup by the financial institutions against the democratically elected government of New York City.” Both the social and the physical infrastructure of the city deteriorated, and the city government, the municipal labor movement, and working-class New Yorkers were stripped of their power.
That wasn’t the end of it, however. The next step on the part of the business community was to turn New York into a “good investment opportunity.” “Corporate welfare,” writes Harvey, “substituted for people welfare.” The idea was to sell New York as a tourist destination, and “I [Heart] New York” swept through the town as the new logo. As Harvey notes:
“The narcissistic exploration of self, sexuality, and identity became
the leitmotif of bourgeois urban culture. Artistic freedom and artistic
licence, promoted by the city’s powerful cultural institutions, led, in
effect, to the neoliberalization of culture. ‘Delirious New York’...
erased the collective memory of democratic New York....New York
became the epicentre of postmodern cultural and intellectual
experimentation. Meanwhile the investment bankers reconstructed
the city economy around financial activities...and diversified con-
sumerism (gentrification and neighbourhood ‘restoration’ playing a
prominent and profitable role). City government was more and more
construed as an enterpreneurial rather than a social democratic or
even managerial entity.”
Progress (so-called) has to be chic, in other words, and this integrates well with the neoliberal equation of freedom with lifestyle choice; which effectively kills democracy, or renders it irrelevant. Again, it’s a question of how you define it. Home visits by doctors, for example (the norm, when I was a child), have vanished almost completely, and Americans would hardly regard the return of this practice as progress. It may well be a life saver, but it’s not particularly hip. SUV’s that destroy the environment are chic; mass transit is not. Dog-eat-dog competition is chic; a social safety net, or a health system that actually works, is not. Best sellers praising globalization are chic; community and friendship, rather passé. And so on. Children get excited by toys, bright colors, and the latest gimmick; adults, by the prospect of a truly healthy society. As deviancy is defined downward across the planet, whether in New York or Beijing, it leaves very few adults in its wake.
As far as technology goes, the irony is that it seems to be failing in its own terms. The social and psychological damage of “life on the screen” has by now been documented by numerous studies; but when the technology is actually delivering the opposite of what was originally promised, one has to ask what it is all for. The literature on this is fairly large, so all I can do at this point is touch on some of the highlights.*
In Tyranny of the Moment, Norwegian anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen argues that while the period from 1980 saw a rapid expansion in so-called time-saving technologies, the truth is that we have never had so little free time as we do now. The Internet has made possible a huge expansion of available information, and yet all the data show an increasingly ignorant population. Changes that were touted as boosting creativity and efficiency have actually had the opposite effect. Air travel is now so heavily congested that by 2000, fifty percent of the flights connecting major European cities were delayed. In the U.S., road traffic tripled during 1970-2000, and the average speed involved in getting around decreased every year. In fact, the average speed of a car in New York City in 2000 was about seven miles per hour, and we can guess that it is even less today. Etc.
One activity heavily promoted as “progressive” was multitasking, made easy by the use of a variety of compact technologies. Yet a study conducted by the University of London in 2005, according to the journalist Christine Rosen, revealed that workers who are distracted by e-mail and cell phone calls suffer a fall in I.Q. of more than twice that experienced by pot smokers. In 2007, she notes, a major U.S. business analyst (Jonathan Spira, at a research firm called Basex) estimated that multitasking was costing the American economy $650 billion a year in lost productivity, and a University of Michigan study revealed that it causes short-term memory loss. In general, writes Walter Kirn, “Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy.” Specifically, it interferes with areas of the brain related to memory and learning; it actually slows our thinking. The problem seems to be that when you move from one task to another, you have to keep “revving up” to get back to doing what you were doing before. Hence, the quality of work gets compromised due to loss of focus and loss of time. In general, the Net lowers the brain’s capacity for concentration and contemplation; “reading on the Net” is almost a contradiction in terms. “We inevitably begin to take on the quality of those technologies,” writes Nicholas Carr; “our own intelligence...flattens into artificial intelligence.”
All in all, it now appears that endless technological innovation and economic expansion, which have only themselves as their goal, finally undermine social relations, redefine common sense, and interfere with our ability to think. Harvey hits the nail on the head when he argues for the existence of an inner connection between “technological dynamism, instability, dissolution of social solidarities, environmental degradation, deindustrialization, rapid shifts in time-space relations, speculative bubbles, and the general tendency towards crisis formation within capitalism.” We are caught in a contradiction, he says, between “a seductive but alienating possessive individualism on the one hand and the desire for a meaningful collective life on the other.”
Personally, I don’t think there is much doubt as to which of these two options is going to win out. By 2050, the planet is expected to have a population of 10 to 11 billion people. Competition for food and water will be fierce; resources in general will be scarce. The majority of this population will probably be living on less than two dollars a day, and “iron” governments will arise to manage politically unstable situations . And yet, there may be an odd silver lining to this, as Blade Runner descends on us in earnest: clutched in the hand of every man, woman, and child will be a state-of-the-art cell phone, and in front of each individual the hippest of personal computers. Granted, we may be collectively dying, but at least we’ll be chic.
©Morris Berman, 2009
*To mention a few key sources: Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Tyranny of the Moment (London: Pluto Press, 2001); Nicole Aubert, Le culte de l’urgence (Paris: Flammarion, 2003); Christine Rosen, “The Myth of Multitasking,” The New Atlantis, No. 20 (Spring 2008), pp. 105-10; Walter Kirn, “The Autumn of the Multitaskers,” Atlantic Monthly, November 2007; Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2008.
–From “I’m Hip,” by Dave Frishberg and Bob Dorough
At one point in The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz quotes the German philosopher Max Scheler, who asked, “What is progress?” It’s a crucial question, and in the United States there is basically only one answer, involving the visible expression of technological innovation and economic expansion. Paz was not impressed with this notion of progress in 1950, when he wrote his famous essay, and it is a safe bet that he was increasingly disenchanted with the American model as the years wore on. Although he saw the flaws of his own culture quite clearly, he never felt that the American Way of Life was any kind of solution for Mexico or indeed, the rest of the world. Paz was prescient: at a time when everyone was celebrating America as an unrivaled success, he correctly pegged it as a wounded civilization, one that saw the future strictly in terms of novelty and never questioned what it was doing.
This extremely limited notion of the good life, combined with almost total unconsciousness, presents itself as daily reality in the U.S. I recall a friend of mine telling me, a few years ago, about a train trip she took up the California coast, during which she decided to walk through the cars very slowly, from back to front, almost pretending to be an invalid, so that she could eavesdrop on conversations. Every last one of these, she said, was about some gadget, some aspect of consumer technology–software, computer attachments, iPods, cell phone variations, etc. This is where, she concluded, Americans put their attention; it is what really excites them, makes them feel alive. Nor is this limited to Americans, of course. In the mid-eighties, when I was teaching at a Canadian university, my colleagues were literally ecstatic over the introduction of personal computers, firmly believing that these machines would write papers and books for them, perhaps help them get tenure or upgrade their entire careers (promises that failed to materialize, needless to say). As for south of the border, I was recently riding around Mexico City with a colleague of mine when we saw a huge billboard ad for some cell phone, with the caption, in three-foot high block capitals (in English, for some strange reason), KILL SILENCE. “Well,” I remarked to my colleague, “at least they are being honest about it.” “Oh,” he quipped, “you are fixated on cell phones.”
It’s hard to know how to reply to a dismissive remark of this kind, since even the brightest people don’t get it, and usually have no idea what George Steiner meant when he called modernity “the systematic suppression of silence.” Silence, after all, is the source of all self-knowledge, and of much creativity as well. But it is hardly valued by societies that confuse creativity with productivity. What I am fixated on, in fact, is not technology but the fixation on technology, the obsession with it. Unfortunately, it is hard to persuade those caught up in the American model of progress that it is they who are living in an upside-down world, not Octavio Paz.
For it doesn’t have to be this way. Notions of progress might conceivably revolve around how we treat each other in social situations, for example, not around the latest electronic toy. Some years ago I taught in the sociology department of a major American university, and marveled at my colleagues, who were constantly interrupting their conversations with each other to take cell phone calls–as if a conversation with someone who was not physically present were more important than one with someone who was. They had no idea of how rude they were on a daily basis, and regarded my own views on technology as “quaint.” Considering the damage this behavior was doing to human social interaction, and the fact that these folks were sociologists, I was impressed by the irony of it all. It was like being at a convention of nutritionists, each of whom weighed more than 300 pounds. After all, if obesity is the new health, what is there left to say?
This brings to mind the famous phrase coined by the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “defining deviancy down.” Moynihan pointed out that there was a process in American culture by which behavior traditionally regarded as selfish or vulgar–e.g., abruptly breaking off a conversation with one person to initiate one with someone else–rapidly becomes acceptable if enough people start doing it. Deviancy, in short, goes down to the lowest common denominator, finally becoming the norm. Indeed, the vulgarization and “narcissization” of American society had become so widespread by the mid-1990s that books were being written on incivility, and conferences held on the subject as well. But none of this made any difference for actual behavior, as even the most casual observation of contemporary American society reveals.
I remember, some years ago, then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talking about American (non)relations with Cuba, and stating that “we don’t want that model to be able to replicate itself”–the old contagion theory of communism, as it were. Well, I’m not big on dictatorships myself, but what about the danger of the American model replicating itself? When you go to New Zealand and see the Maori people talking on cell phones and watching American sitcoms, you know that Moynihan’s prediction about the world turning into trash is not very far off.
China, which is all set to replace the U.S. as the next hegemonic power, is of course replicating the American model with a vengeance. “To get rich is glorious,” declared Deng Xiaoping, and the 1990s witnessed the stripping away of time-worn (non-Maoist) Chinese models of good citizenship and moral participation in collective goals. The race was on to crank out as many cell phones, DVD players, televisions, shopping malls, and highways as possible. Monthly car production went from 20,000 in 1993 to 250,000 in 2004, and Wal-Mart and McDonald’s have spread through the country like wildfire. In China Pop, Jianying Zha gives us a vivid (read: garish and appalling) portrait of a country wallowing in mass consumerism, from soap operas to pornography and beyond. China is now dotted with privileged consumption zones, theme parks, and beauty pageants. Cosmetic surgery clinics abound, promising to give young women more rounded, Western eyes. In fact, the beauty industry grosses more than $24 billion a year. ”Consumerism became a religion,” writes Rachel Dewoskin in Foreign Babes in Beijing, as “street kiosks made way for sleek boutiques and cafés, where Chinese and foreigners lounged together, drinking lattes and Italian sodas.” Companies arrived like missionaries, she recalls, seducing the average Chinese with products they never knew they needed. In the progressive China of today, everyone, according to the British anthropologist David Harvey, “speculates on the desires of others in the Darwinian struggle for position.”
This is why we have more to fear from the American model of progress, and its replication on a world scale, than from some aged caudillo in Cuba. For what does it consist of, finally, when “freedom” means little more than “free enterprise”? As Harvey tells us in his remarkable study, A Brief History of Neoliberalism,
“that culture, however spectacular, glamorous, and beguiling,
perpetually plays with desires without ever conferring satisfactions
beyond the limited identity of the shopping mall and the anxieties
of status by way of good looks (in the case of women) or of material
possessions. ‘I shop therefore I am’ and possessive individualism
together construct a world of pseudo-satisfactions that is superficially
exciting but hollow at its core.”
This beguiling quality–the notion of culture as chic–is an enormous shell game, as Harvey demonstrates in his summary of what happened to New York City during the 1970s. A fiscal crisis arose, the product of rapid suburbanization that was destroying the tax base of the city. Financial institutions were prepared to bridge the gap between income and expenditure in the city budget, and expansion of public employment via federal funding was also being considered. But in 1975 a powerful group of investment bankers, led by Citibank, refused to roll over the debt and left the city technically bankrupt. Union activity was curtailed; cutbacks took place in education, public health, and transportation; and wealth got redistributed upward, to the rich and super rich. It was, says Harvey, “a coup by the financial institutions against the democratically elected government of New York City.” Both the social and the physical infrastructure of the city deteriorated, and the city government, the municipal labor movement, and working-class New Yorkers were stripped of their power.
That wasn’t the end of it, however. The next step on the part of the business community was to turn New York into a “good investment opportunity.” “Corporate welfare,” writes Harvey, “substituted for people welfare.” The idea was to sell New York as a tourist destination, and “I [Heart] New York” swept through the town as the new logo. As Harvey notes:
“The narcissistic exploration of self, sexuality, and identity became
the leitmotif of bourgeois urban culture. Artistic freedom and artistic
licence, promoted by the city’s powerful cultural institutions, led, in
effect, to the neoliberalization of culture. ‘Delirious New York’...
erased the collective memory of democratic New York....New York
became the epicentre of postmodern cultural and intellectual
experimentation. Meanwhile the investment bankers reconstructed
the city economy around financial activities...and diversified con-
sumerism (gentrification and neighbourhood ‘restoration’ playing a
prominent and profitable role). City government was more and more
construed as an enterpreneurial rather than a social democratic or
even managerial entity.”
Progress (so-called) has to be chic, in other words, and this integrates well with the neoliberal equation of freedom with lifestyle choice; which effectively kills democracy, or renders it irrelevant. Again, it’s a question of how you define it. Home visits by doctors, for example (the norm, when I was a child), have vanished almost completely, and Americans would hardly regard the return of this practice as progress. It may well be a life saver, but it’s not particularly hip. SUV’s that destroy the environment are chic; mass transit is not. Dog-eat-dog competition is chic; a social safety net, or a health system that actually works, is not. Best sellers praising globalization are chic; community and friendship, rather passé. And so on. Children get excited by toys, bright colors, and the latest gimmick; adults, by the prospect of a truly healthy society. As deviancy is defined downward across the planet, whether in New York or Beijing, it leaves very few adults in its wake.
As far as technology goes, the irony is that it seems to be failing in its own terms. The social and psychological damage of “life on the screen” has by now been documented by numerous studies; but when the technology is actually delivering the opposite of what was originally promised, one has to ask what it is all for. The literature on this is fairly large, so all I can do at this point is touch on some of the highlights.*
In Tyranny of the Moment, Norwegian anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen argues that while the period from 1980 saw a rapid expansion in so-called time-saving technologies, the truth is that we have never had so little free time as we do now. The Internet has made possible a huge expansion of available information, and yet all the data show an increasingly ignorant population. Changes that were touted as boosting creativity and efficiency have actually had the opposite effect. Air travel is now so heavily congested that by 2000, fifty percent of the flights connecting major European cities were delayed. In the U.S., road traffic tripled during 1970-2000, and the average speed involved in getting around decreased every year. In fact, the average speed of a car in New York City in 2000 was about seven miles per hour, and we can guess that it is even less today. Etc.
One activity heavily promoted as “progressive” was multitasking, made easy by the use of a variety of compact technologies. Yet a study conducted by the University of London in 2005, according to the journalist Christine Rosen, revealed that workers who are distracted by e-mail and cell phone calls suffer a fall in I.Q. of more than twice that experienced by pot smokers. In 2007, she notes, a major U.S. business analyst (Jonathan Spira, at a research firm called Basex) estimated that multitasking was costing the American economy $650 billion a year in lost productivity, and a University of Michigan study revealed that it causes short-term memory loss. In general, writes Walter Kirn, “Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy.” Specifically, it interferes with areas of the brain related to memory and learning; it actually slows our thinking. The problem seems to be that when you move from one task to another, you have to keep “revving up” to get back to doing what you were doing before. Hence, the quality of work gets compromised due to loss of focus and loss of time. In general, the Net lowers the brain’s capacity for concentration and contemplation; “reading on the Net” is almost a contradiction in terms. “We inevitably begin to take on the quality of those technologies,” writes Nicholas Carr; “our own intelligence...flattens into artificial intelligence.”
All in all, it now appears that endless technological innovation and economic expansion, which have only themselves as their goal, finally undermine social relations, redefine common sense, and interfere with our ability to think. Harvey hits the nail on the head when he argues for the existence of an inner connection between “technological dynamism, instability, dissolution of social solidarities, environmental degradation, deindustrialization, rapid shifts in time-space relations, speculative bubbles, and the general tendency towards crisis formation within capitalism.” We are caught in a contradiction, he says, between “a seductive but alienating possessive individualism on the one hand and the desire for a meaningful collective life on the other.”
Personally, I don’t think there is much doubt as to which of these two options is going to win out. By 2050, the planet is expected to have a population of 10 to 11 billion people. Competition for food and water will be fierce; resources in general will be scarce. The majority of this population will probably be living on less than two dollars a day, and “iron” governments will arise to manage politically unstable situations . And yet, there may be an odd silver lining to this, as Blade Runner descends on us in earnest: clutched in the hand of every man, woman, and child will be a state-of-the-art cell phone, and in front of each individual the hippest of personal computers. Granted, we may be collectively dying, but at least we’ll be chic.
©Morris Berman, 2009
*To mention a few key sources: Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Tyranny of the Moment (London: Pluto Press, 2001); Nicole Aubert, Le culte de l’urgence (Paris: Flammarion, 2003); Christine Rosen, “The Myth of Multitasking,” The New Atlantis, No. 20 (Spring 2008), pp. 105-10; Walter Kirn, “The Autumn of the Multitaskers,” Atlantic Monthly, November 2007; Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2008.
EPA Administrator Jackson and Transportation Secretary LaHood Testify on Recovery Act Implementation
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson and U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood testified before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on April 29 on implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Administrator Jackson and Secretary LaHood discussed how the EPA and DOT are working to get tens of billions of dollars in recovery act funding out the door to create jobs, protect human health and the environment, and boost local economies.
When Administrator Jackson was asked about the Green Project Reserve (GPR), her answer made AAEA staff immediately think about how that component of the ARRA could be combined with our Environmental Justice Allowance Reserve (EJAR). AAEA's EJAR addresses the racial 'Hot Spots' issue in cap-and-trade programs. These allowances would come from a special reserve, similar to the current Acid Rain Program Renewable Energy and Conservation Reserve, when the initial allowance allocation is made under a cap-and-trade program. They would be awarded to utilities, automakers and others that undertake environmental justice practices and programs designed to mitigate or prevent price shocks, increase the installation of pollution control equipment, promote community education and enhance health-related activities. Utilities and automakers could choose to work with organizations and businesses that conduct environmental justice activities related to climate change mitigation and reductions in emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and mercury.
The ARRA requires that at least 20% of each State’s capitalization grant be used to fund projects referred to as the Green Project Reserve. The following is a set of examples for projects EPA believes would be eligible. It should be noted that all project eligibility requirements otherwise applicable to the CWSRF program apply to the Green Project Reserve. Under the Green Project Reserve in the CWSRF both entire projects may be considered for inclusion or appropriate identifiable components of larger projects may be considered for inclusion. Whatever projects or project components are included, such projects or project components must clearly advance the objectives articulated in the specific categories discussed below. (EPA Green Project Reserve)
Join the Virtual March on Washington
Sign up now and send a message to your Representatives in Congress.
On May 1st, thousands will be calling on Congress to do the right thing on immigration—and to improve the treatment of all workers. Whether or not you can go to a march near you, make your voice heard!
We need to show Congress that there is a growing movement for immigration reform that stands with the President.
Participate in our virtual march by sending Washington a message with our easy to use tool. Your letter will go to your Representatives in Congress, and to key leadership in the Senate.
Don’t forget to ask your friends and family to join, too!
On May 1st, thousands will be calling on Congress to do the right thing on immigration—and to improve the treatment of all workers. Whether or not you can go to a march near you, make your voice heard!
We need to show Congress that there is a growing movement for immigration reform that stands with the President.
Participate in our virtual march by sending Washington a message with our easy to use tool. Your letter will go to your Representatives in Congress, and to key leadership in the Senate.
Don’t forget to ask your friends and family to join, too!
African immigrants risk lives on epic trek to U.S.
This is an amazing story about the struggles these immigrants go through to go from Africa to the U.S. The fact they are from war-torn countries gives them special status when they arrive here. - - Donna Poisl
By Mica Rosenberg, Reuters
TAPACHULA, Mexico (Reuters) - Jailed repeatedly for his political views, Ethiopian immigrant Sharew paid smugglers around $10,000 to move him through a dozen countries and leave him a year later in the grubby southern Mexican city of Tapachula.
Once on Mexico's southern border, which has grown into a major stepping-stone for hundreds of migrants fleeing conflicts in the Horn of Africa, he was still 2,000 miles away from his destination: the United States.
The immigrants, mainly from Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea, are increasingly following a new, epic route down the continent to South Africa, across the Atlantic by boat or plane and then a trek overland though South and Central America.
"It is an enormous voyage. They've told us that along the way some lose their lives in Africa because they are attacked, sometimes even by lions," said Jorge Yzar, head of Tapachula's detention center, where dozens of immigrants from all over the world sleep in dormitories before being deported or let go.
Be sure to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
By Mica Rosenberg, Reuters
TAPACHULA, Mexico (Reuters) - Jailed repeatedly for his political views, Ethiopian immigrant Sharew paid smugglers around $10,000 to move him through a dozen countries and leave him a year later in the grubby southern Mexican city of Tapachula.
Once on Mexico's southern border, which has grown into a major stepping-stone for hundreds of migrants fleeing conflicts in the Horn of Africa, he was still 2,000 miles away from his destination: the United States.
The immigrants, mainly from Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea, are increasingly following a new, epic route down the continent to South Africa, across the Atlantic by boat or plane and then a trek overland though South and Central America.
"It is an enormous voyage. They've told us that along the way some lose their lives in Africa because they are attacked, sometimes even by lions," said Jorge Yzar, head of Tapachula's detention center, where dozens of immigrants from all over the world sleep in dormitories before being deported or let go.
Be sure to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
"A shock to the system: Journalism, Government and the FOI Act"
Seminar : Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism : May 20th 2009, 5.00pm
“A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM: Journalism , Government and the Freedom of Information Act 2000”
Jeremy Hayes of BBC Radio 4’s ‘The World Tonight’ presents a progress report on the Freedom of Information Act with Jon Ungoed-Thomas, Chief reporter, The Sunday Times and Steve Wood, Assistant Information Commissioner
Venue : RISJ , 13 Norham Gardens ,Oxford OX2 6PS . Open admission.
“A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM: Journalism , Government and the Freedom of Information Act 2000”
Jeremy Hayes of BBC Radio 4’s ‘The World Tonight’ presents a progress report on the Freedom of Information Act with Jon Ungoed-Thomas, Chief reporter, The Sunday Times and Steve Wood, Assistant Information Commissioner
Venue : RISJ , 13 Norham Gardens ,Oxford OX2 6PS . Open admission.
US GDP down 6.1 percent in the first quarter
No sign of a recovery; no green shoots, only nasty weeds.The big surprise was investment; which fell dramatically in the first quarter. This doesn't auger well for a quick recovery.
As the chart suggests, the US economy has been struggling since the middle of 2007. The high high point was the second quarter of 2008, when the Bush stimulus package injected some cash into the pockets of US consumers.
By the third quarter, the stimulus was played out, offering a warning about the limitations of fiscal policy and Keynesism in general.
The Obama fiscal package, which was about 4 times larger, has done nothing to restore growth.
Politicians never seem to learn.
We need more lending
How can we prop up housing values and keep the economy going with this recent pathetic flow of secured lending. We need to get back to the happy days of 2006, when banks were pumping in ₤30 billion a quarter into the UK economy.How much have taxpayers spent on UK banks? Is this all we get for our money?
UK taxpayer supporting Irish housing market - New Labour Nonsense No.5
The generousity of the UK government is almost limitless. Not content with trying to prop up the UK housing market, state owned banks are now offering cheap credit to support the Irish housing market.
Don't misunderstand me; I like Ireland, and I wish the country well. But they chose to leave the United Kingdom back in 1921. The relationship is over; the UK government should not be supporting the Irish economy. From today's Times....
Banks controlled by British taxpayers are offering mortgages to first-time buyers in the Irish Republic at half the rate that they are available in the UK. Halifax, part of the Lloyds Banking Group, is charging 2.74 per cent for a two-year fixed-rate deal to first-time buyers in Dublin. A five-year fixed-rate deal would cost borrowers in its home town of Edinburgh 6.14 per cent.Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is charging 2.95 per cent for a new mortgage in Ireland; in the UK, it charges 5.99 per cent for a similar product.
Matthew Elliott, chief executive of TaxPayers' Alliance, a lobby group, said: “It seems bizarre and unfair that Halifax and RBS, which have in effect been propped up by British taxpayers, are offering worse deals to British customers than those elsewhere.” British taxpayers have spent more than £60 billion bailing out RBS and Lloyds Banking Group, leaving the Government with a controlling stake in each.
(Thanks to suzukiscooter for the email and the tip)
Don't misunderstand me; I like Ireland, and I wish the country well. But they chose to leave the United Kingdom back in 1921. The relationship is over; the UK government should not be supporting the Irish economy. From today's Times....
Banks controlled by British taxpayers are offering mortgages to first-time buyers in the Irish Republic at half the rate that they are available in the UK. Halifax, part of the Lloyds Banking Group, is charging 2.74 per cent for a two-year fixed-rate deal to first-time buyers in Dublin. A five-year fixed-rate deal would cost borrowers in its home town of Edinburgh 6.14 per cent.Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is charging 2.95 per cent for a new mortgage in Ireland; in the UK, it charges 5.99 per cent for a similar product.
Matthew Elliott, chief executive of TaxPayers' Alliance, a lobby group, said: “It seems bizarre and unfair that Halifax and RBS, which have in effect been propped up by British taxpayers, are offering worse deals to British customers than those elsewhere.” British taxpayers have spent more than £60 billion bailing out RBS and Lloyds Banking Group, leaving the Government with a controlling stake in each.
(Thanks to suzukiscooter for the email and the tip)
WEST POINT BEER DINNER
Yuengling hosted our first ever beer dinner at the West Point Club at the US Military Academy at West Point on Friday April 17th. The crowd of approximately eighty people had the opportunity to enjoy four different products on draught from America's Oldest Brewery’s portfolio. Attendees enjoyed Yuengling Bock to celebrate the start of Spring, followed by three other products paired with various foods along the three course meal.
The first course was a very tasty Potato and Cheddar Soup paired with Light Lager. For the second course, attendees had their choice of entree - Strip Steak, Grilled Chicken, or a Cheese Steak paired with Lord Chesterfield Ale, this was followed by a Date and Nut Porter Cake. Chef John did a great job. The food was delicious and the staff of the West Point Club made sure everyone had a great time.
Drew Byrnes hosted the evening and Bob Seaman, Yuengling plant manager, gave the crowd full background info on the beer styles that were enjoyed with dinner. He also discussed the brewing process and the different taste characteristics of our various beer styles. As always, Bob did a great job and the people enjoyed his presentation immensely! There were a few advanced home brewers in the crowd, so there was some great chatter on the brewing process going on!
The dinner was attended by West Point Club members, Retired Military personnel, West Point staff and cadets. There were numerous Yuengling door prizes raffled off across the evening with the grand prize being a Military Mirror signed by Dick Yuengling. Major Ed Williams, Instructor of American Politics, Policy and Strategy won the grand prize Mirror!
Thanks to everyone who contributed to this successful evening. Go Army!
The first course was a very tasty Potato and Cheddar Soup paired with Light Lager. For the second course, attendees had their choice of entree - Strip Steak, Grilled Chicken, or a Cheese Steak paired with Lord Chesterfield Ale, this was followed by a Date and Nut Porter Cake. Chef John did a great job. The food was delicious and the staff of the West Point Club made sure everyone had a great time.
Drew Byrnes hosted the evening and Bob Seaman, Yuengling plant manager, gave the crowd full background info on the beer styles that were enjoyed with dinner. He also discussed the brewing process and the different taste characteristics of our various beer styles. As always, Bob did a great job and the people enjoyed his presentation immensely! There were a few advanced home brewers in the crowd, so there was some great chatter on the brewing process going on!
The dinner was attended by West Point Club members, Retired Military personnel, West Point staff and cadets. There were numerous Yuengling door prizes raffled off across the evening with the grand prize being a Military Mirror signed by Dick Yuengling. Major Ed Williams, Instructor of American Politics, Policy and Strategy won the grand prize Mirror!
Thanks to everyone who contributed to this successful evening. Go Army!
FOI disclosure stories 20 - 26 April 2009
Commonwealth cousins prop up British Army - The Times 25/04/09
“The British Army’s ‘foreign legion’ of soldiers recruited abroad to fill its ranks has expanded to more than one in 10 of all troops. Non UK nationals now number about 10,430, just less than 11% of the army’s full-time troops, excluding reserves, according to new figures released under the Freedom of Information Act… In all, the figures show that 38 foreign nationalities are represented in the army, nearly all from the Commonwealth. These do not include the 3,600-strong Brigade of Gurkhas, recruited in Nepal.”
2,800 crime gangs ravage UK streets - The Times 24/04/09
“Police have identified 2,800 organised criminal gangs, nearly three times the number previously acknowledged, and admit that British law enforcement is ill-equipped to deal with the threat that they pose. The Times has obtained an official report revealing the finding by intelligence analysts. It was completed six months ago but marked 'restricted' and circulated only to ministers and police chiefs. After a freedom of information request, it was made available this month in edited form. Issued by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary, it is the first time that officials have disclosed the true scale of the gangland threat and made the frank admission that they are struggling to cope with it.”
Taxpayer foots the bill for nuclear bonuses - The Times 21/04/09
“Public servants working in Britain's nuclear industry are being paid millions of pounds of taxpayer-funded bonuses every year, The Times has learnt. The response from the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), the agency responsible for the clean-up of Britain's nuclear sites, shows that the organisation paid nearly £3.8 million in bonuses to its 315 staff last year. The average bonus was £11,954, with some regular, non-director level staff receiving £36,917 - up to 40 per cent of their salary. NDA directors received bonuses as high as £85,000.”
Regional
Infection risk - BBCi 25/04/09
“Two workers at a government laboratory scratched themselves with needles risking contamination with the H5N1 bird flu strain, it has been revealed. Both were treated with anti-viral drugs and subsequently tested negative. The incidents at the Veterinary Laboratories Agency (VLA) at Weybridge in Surrey came to light following a BBC Freedom of Information request. The VLA has reported 80 incidents over five years and continually reviews risk assessments and procedures.”
Most truckers transporting illegals are foreign - Kent News 24/04/09
“The UK Borders Agency admitted that of all the lorry drivers bringing in desperate migrants into the UK, 90 per cent are overseas drivers. The figures, revealed following a Freedom of Information request, showed 1,571 foreign truckers were fined an estimated £2million last year after clandestine migrants were found hiding in the back of their trucks.”
“The British Army’s ‘foreign legion’ of soldiers recruited abroad to fill its ranks has expanded to more than one in 10 of all troops. Non UK nationals now number about 10,430, just less than 11% of the army’s full-time troops, excluding reserves, according to new figures released under the Freedom of Information Act… In all, the figures show that 38 foreign nationalities are represented in the army, nearly all from the Commonwealth. These do not include the 3,600-strong Brigade of Gurkhas, recruited in Nepal.”
2,800 crime gangs ravage UK streets - The Times 24/04/09
“Police have identified 2,800 organised criminal gangs, nearly three times the number previously acknowledged, and admit that British law enforcement is ill-equipped to deal with the threat that they pose. The Times has obtained an official report revealing the finding by intelligence analysts. It was completed six months ago but marked 'restricted' and circulated only to ministers and police chiefs. After a freedom of information request, it was made available this month in edited form. Issued by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary, it is the first time that officials have disclosed the true scale of the gangland threat and made the frank admission that they are struggling to cope with it.”
Taxpayer foots the bill for nuclear bonuses - The Times 21/04/09
“Public servants working in Britain's nuclear industry are being paid millions of pounds of taxpayer-funded bonuses every year, The Times has learnt. The response from the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), the agency responsible for the clean-up of Britain's nuclear sites, shows that the organisation paid nearly £3.8 million in bonuses to its 315 staff last year. The average bonus was £11,954, with some regular, non-director level staff receiving £36,917 - up to 40 per cent of their salary. NDA directors received bonuses as high as £85,000.”
Regional
Infection risk - BBCi 25/04/09
“Two workers at a government laboratory scratched themselves with needles risking contamination with the H5N1 bird flu strain, it has been revealed. Both were treated with anti-viral drugs and subsequently tested negative. The incidents at the Veterinary Laboratories Agency (VLA) at Weybridge in Surrey came to light following a BBC Freedom of Information request. The VLA has reported 80 incidents over five years and continually reviews risk assessments and procedures.”
Most truckers transporting illegals are foreign - Kent News 24/04/09
“The UK Borders Agency admitted that of all the lorry drivers bringing in desperate migrants into the UK, 90 per cent are overseas drivers. The figures, revealed following a Freedom of Information request, showed 1,571 foreign truckers were fined an estimated £2million last year after clandestine migrants were found hiding in the back of their trucks.”
Petanque in Orange County CA
Veronique and her friends of Orange Accueil in Irvine get together with their boules once a month for petanque and hold their annual tournament in June.
I just got the film of last years' event. They're having a blast!
Kudos to Marc, le cinéaste, for the special effects and his choice of music(*).
Video Clip
(*)French folk, playing petanque in S California, on the music of Gloria Gaynor in a Dutch remix by Hermes House. How more cosmopolitan can you get?
I just got the film of last years' event. They're having a blast!
Kudos to Marc, le cinéaste, for the special effects and his choice of music(*).
Video Clip(*)French folk, playing petanque in S California, on the music of Gloria Gaynor in a Dutch remix by Hermes House. How more cosmopolitan can you get?
Petanque in Orange County CA
Veronique and her friends of Orange Accueil in Irvine get together with their boules once a month for petanque and hold their annual tournament in June.
I just got the film of last years' event. They're having a blast!
Kudos to Marc, le cinéaste, for the special effects and his choice of music(*).
Video Clip
(*)French folk, playing petanque in S California, on the music of Gloria Gaynor in a Dutch remix by Hermes House. How more cosmopolitan can you get?
I just got the film of last years' event. They're having a blast!
Kudos to Marc, le cinéaste, for the special effects and his choice of music(*).
Video Clip(*)French folk, playing petanque in S California, on the music of Gloria Gaynor in a Dutch remix by Hermes House. How more cosmopolitan can you get?
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
EJ Conference in America 2009 Is May 27-May 29
The Environmental Justice Conference, Inc. is hosting the 2009 State of Environmental Justice in America Conference, a 3-day assembly of leaders from federal agencies, grassroots organizations and individuals from various sectors and communities. Representatives and participants will engage in discussions on environmental justice legislation and regulation, community planning and development, energy policy and more.
U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, right, is the keynote speaker for the opening day of the conference. Featured interviews include Jeffery M. Allison, Manager of US Department of Energy, Savannah River Operations Office and John C. Cruden, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Environmental and Natural Resource Division, US Department of Justice.
The conference is being co-sponsored by the U. S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Environmental Protection Agency, Howard University School of Law and the National Small Town Alliance.
U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, right, is the keynote speaker for the opening day of the conference. Featured interviews include Jeffery M. Allison, Manager of US Department of Energy, Savannah River Operations Office and John C. Cruden, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Environmental and Natural Resource Division, US Department of Justice.
The conference is being co-sponsored by the U. S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Environmental Protection Agency, Howard University School of Law and the National Small Town Alliance.
The conference is being held at the Doubletree Hotel in Crystal City, 3030 Army Navy Drive, Arlington, Virginia from Wednesday, May 27, 2009 - Friday, May 29, 2009.
Edward J. Young on The Canon of the Old Testament
The following article is now available in both iPaper and PDF:
Edward J. Young, “The Canon of the Old Testament,” Carl F.H. Henry, ed., Revelation and the Bible. Contemporary Evangelical Thought. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1958 / London: The Tyndale Press, 1959. pp.155-168.
Edward J. Young, “The Canon of the Old Testament,” Carl F.H. Henry, ed., Revelation and the Bible. Contemporary Evangelical Thought. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1958 / London: The Tyndale Press, 1959. pp.155-168.
Exciting, useful sessions at Google I/O...be there!
Growing a SaaS-based services business reselling Google Apps
presented by Jeff Ragusa
Traditional value-added resellers are looking for ways to adapt their business for the world of cloud computing and the new Google Apps Authorized Reseller program provides the perfect framework for moving a services business in this direction. This session will focus on revenue opportunities for partners in this area ranging from assisting with SaaS product selection, to guidance on best practices, to custom application development, deployment & integration work, and managed services. Learn how Google's reseller program can enable service providers to take advantage of these opportunities through marketing, sales and technical tools and resources. See Jeff's video invitation to his session here.
Extending the Google Search Appliance to Crawl Valuable Data Behind the Firewell
presented by Nitin Mangtani
The Google Search Appliance is an on-premise hardware and software solution that brings Google search into the enterprise, so users can find content quickly and securely. In this session, learn how partners today are plugging enterprise data sources into the GSA through Connectors and displaying results using OneBox. See Nitin's video invitation to his session here.
OpenSocial in the Enterprise
presented by Chris Schalk, Mark Wentzel, Dave Carroll, Rich Manalang, and Tugdual Grall
With OpenSocial's proven global success in traditional social applications, the enterprise software community has begun to realize its potential and build innovative solutions that cater to the enterprise. Join us for a session centered on how the enterprise software development community is successfully bringing social concepts and technology into the enterprise. Key enterprise players will present and demonstrate how they've successfully used OpenSocial software to build new social solutions.
One last thing to remember: even though Google I/O will be primarily geared around breakout sessions, there will be a ton of other interesting stuff going on, including the Developer Sandbox, Fireside Chats, Tech Talks and After Hours Playground. Click here to register.
Posted by Chris Kelly, Google Apps Partners team
A-Meet Update: CSU
Larry & Sara Mae Berman
Cambridge Sports Union is one of America's oldest orienteering clubs, founded by Larry and Sara Mae Berman in Cambridge, MA in 1962. After hosting its first A-meet in the mid-1980s, the club went through a quiet period before being resurrected with the help of college orienteers in the area in the late 1990's. Now, in 2009, it was time for CSU's second-ever A-meet, held, of course, under the leadership of the youthful Larry and Sara Mae.
The races were held at Pine Hill, part of the Middlesex Fells reservation located very close to the city limits of Boston. The terrain features intricate contour and rock detail, a lot of small and large trails, and a whole lot of green. Throw in unseasonably warm and humid weather, with temperatures reaching 30C on Sunday, and you get one challenging weekend of orienteering.
The M/F21 classes got to race three times over the course of the weekend, as Saturday featured a middle distance prologue and final format, followed by a classic race on Sunday. For the middle distance, the top 10 men and top 8 women advanced to the A final. The prologue and final format allowed for great spectating, with Greg Balter doing live commentary and reporting times from the radio controls. The women's race, both prologue and final, were dominated by Erin Nielsen, who won both races comfortably. The men's race, on the other hand, was a different story. In the prologue, CSU's own Boris Granovskiy (BG) had the fastest time, ahead of clubmate Ken Walker (KW), Jr. The third-best time was posted by DVOA's Clem McGrath (CM), with speedy Jon Torrance (JT) of OOC in 4th and wily veteran Joe Brautigam (JB) of WCOC close behind. These five would battle it out for the win in the sweltering heat in the afternoon's final.
The men's semi-final map (from Peter Gagarin's site)
CSU's Ken Walker Jr. and Boris Granovskiy
Here is a play-by-play reconstructed from the splits from the final. Keep in mind that finalists were started in the reverse order of their placements from the prologue, with two-minute intervals.
The men's final map (from Peter Gagarin's site)
Start-1: Everyone but JT misses right from the start, losing various amounts of time on the vague green hillside, and JT has a 30-second lead over his nearest competitor, though B-finalist Sergei Zhyk (SZ) actually has the fastest split. (Leader: SZ)
1-2: BG is fastest to get down the hill from 1 and then slog back up to 2, but SZ maintains his lead. JT loses about 30 seconds and drops behind BG. (Leader: SZ)
2-3: SZ loses over two minutes and disappears from the picture. JT and BG also lose time, through hesitations and uncertainty in the circle. CM and JB, on the other hand, spike the control, and are back in the mix. (Leader: BG)
3-4: JT and BG continue to lose time, perhaps overconfident from having seen this same control in the prologue. KW wins the split, with CM close behind and taking over the lead. (Leader: CM)
4-5: This tricky leg sees a lot of shuffling in the standings. BG spots KW leaving the control and spikes it, winning the split and regaining the lead. KW, in turn, sees JT and CM ahead of him, as both of them lost a lot of time here, among the cliffs. (Leader: BG)
5-6: Not much happens on this short leg, as all the front-runners are close, though, remarkably, about 15 seconds behind the fastest split, posted by Canadian junior Emily Kemp. (Leader: BG)
6-7: The next leg, coming into the radio control for the first time, involves a long run across an open field. Here, JT shows his speed and wins the split ahead of KW, who runs hard to try to close the gap to JT and CM in front of him and arrives at the radio control with the lead. Meanwhile, BG starts wilting in the heat, and loses nearly two minutes attacking the relatively simple control from below. (Leader: KW)
7-8: The leader carousel continues on this leg, as KW, tired from chasing JT and CM in front of him, gets confused by the out-of-bounds area and loses 2.5 minutes and the lead. As a result, JB, who has been solid so far in the race, takes the lead, and BG catches sight of KW and gets some new energy. (Leader: JB, 6th leader in 8 controls!)
8-9: More of the same. JT pushes hard and wins his third straight split and JB maintains his lead. (Leader: JB)
9-10: Our veteran leader JB, the only one with a relatively clean race so far, finally cracks under pressure and loses his lead. BG picks a good line through the green and wins the split, regaining the lead. He is now together with KW, and they are chasing JT and CM two minutes ahead of them. (Leader: BG)
10-11: Another short leg doesn't really bring any changes. (Leader: BG)
11-12: Back to the radio control. JT wins the split, while CM is second, only three seconds ahead of BG. These three seconds, however, are enough to pull him into a tie for the lead! (Leaders: CM and BG)
12-13: BG pushes hard on the trails, wins the split, and gets sole possession of the lead. (Leader: BG)
13-14: This leg ended up deciding the race. BG, tired from running hard the previous leg, chooses the shortest route, running on the small path that goes along the side of the lake. This path is very rocky and hard to follow, and the steep climb up to the hill the control is on at the end does not help. BG loses 1:30 to CM, who goes around on the left on the larger trails, and CM takes the lead for good. (Leader: CM)
14-15-16-17-F: CM and BG are pretty even through these last few legs, which are similar to the ending of the prologue, and CM extends his lead by 5 more seconds to the finish.
Final results of this exciting and exhausting race in the heat:
1. Clem McGrath 42:34
2. Boris Granovskiy 43:46
3. Jon Torrance 44:25
4. Joe Brautigam 45:09
5. Ken Walker, Jr. 45:34
Sunday's races on the men's side offered no such close battle, as Jon Torrance dominated from started to finish, winning the long course on an even hotter day by nearly 5 minutes over Saturday's course setter Alexei Azarov, with another 3 minutes down to third place. Among the women, Erin Nielsen was the best for the third time in a row, this time having to hold off a challenge from a much-improved Corinne Porter, who finished merely 15 seconds back.
The week-end's top women: Erin Nielsen, Pavlina Brautigam, Kseniya Popova
Overall, it was a very enjoyable weekend of racing, with the middle-middle format on Saturday a deifnite highlight. Pine Hill is not an area one would want to use for training too often, but racing hard and getting bloody once in a while is a whole different story.
Results
Middle Prologue
F21
1 Erin Nielsen 81 UNO 31:16
2 Pavlina Brautigam 61 WCOC 32:15
3 Kseniya Popova 86 HVO 33:49
M21
1 Boris Granovskiy 80 CSU 27:35
2 Ken Walker Jr 78 CSU 29:59
3 Clem McGrath 74 DVOA 30:15
Middle Final
F21
1 Erin Nielsen 81 UNO 41:51
2 Kseniya Popova 86 HVO 43:25
3 Pavlina Brautigam 61 WCOC 45:51
M21
1 Clem McGrath 74 DVOA 42:34
2 Boris Granovskiy 80 CSU 43:46
3 Jon Torrance 71 OOC 44:25
Classic
F21
1 Erin Nielsen 81 UNO 86:03
2 Corinne Porter 84 DVOA 86:18
3 Pavlina Brautigam 61 WCOC 88:48
M21
1 Jon Torrance 71 OOC 84:51
2 Alexei Azarov 73 CSU 90:43
3 Sergey Gnatiouk 67 HVO 94:07
What we talk about when we talk about cloud computing
Recently, McKinsey & Company published a study on cloud computing as part of a symposium for The Uptime Institute, an organization dedicated to supporting the enterprise data center industry. We share McKinsey's interest in helping the IT industry better understand cloud computing, so we'd like to join the conversation Appirio and others have started about the role of cloud computing for large enterprises.
There's quite a bit of talk these days about corporations building a "private cloud" with concepts like virtualization, and there can be significant benefits to this approach. But those advantages are amplified greatly when customers use applications in the scalable datacenters provided by companies like Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com and soon, Microsoft. In this model, customers can leverage hardware infrastructure, distributed software infrastructure, and applications that are built for the cloud, and let us run it for them. This offers them much lower cost applications, and removes the IT maintenance burden that can cripple many organizations today. It also allows customers to deliver innovation to their end users much more rapidly.
We thought we'd provide some insight into what we mean when we say cloud computing, and how its advantages in cost and innovation continue to attract hundreds of thousands of companies of all sizes -- from 2nd Wind Exercise Equipment to Genentech. We created our cloud by building an optimized system from the ground up: starting with low-cost hardware, adding reliable software infrastructure that scales, offering innovative applications, and working every day to improve the whole system. While the McKinsey study only considered the hardware cost savings of the cloud, there is tremendous customer benefit in all of these areas.
Hardware infrastructure
It starts with components. We serve tens of millions of users, so we've had to build infrastructure that scales and can run extremely efficiently to support that load. Consider three areas of data center design: server design, energy efficiency, and scale of operations.
In the virtualization approach of private data centers, a company takes a server and subdivides it into many servers to increase efficiency. We do the opposite by taking a large set of low cost commodity systems and tying them together into one large supercomputer. We strip down our servers to the bare essentials, so that we're not paying for components that we don't need. For example, we produce servers without video graphics chips that aren't needed in this environment.
Additionally, enterprise hardware components are designed to be very reliable, but they can never be 100% reliable, so enterprises spend a lot of time and money on maintenance. In contrast, we expect the hardware to fail, and design for reliability in the software such that, when the hardware does fail, customers are just shifted to another server. This allows us to further lower the cost of our servers by using commodity parts and on-board storage. We also design the systems for easy repair such that, if a part fails, we can quickly bring the server back into service.
Traditionally, companies have focused on using large, highly reliable hardware to run databases and large backend systems, but there is a significant cost impact to that strategy. For example, a 4 CPU quad-core system with 600 GB of high end SCSI storage and 16GB of memory is 8 times more expensive than a system 1/4 its size with less expensive SATA storage. This is because the price of the components increase exponentially as the hardware gets larger and more reliable. By building the reliability into the software, we're able to use a much lower cost hardware platform but still maintain the same reliability to customers.
Beyond server design, we do everything possible to make our servers and data centers as efficient as possible from an energy and cooling perspective. Consider how we designed our data centers for energy efficiency. Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is an industry-standard metric for measuring the efficiency of a data center. We recently shared that the average PUE for our data centers is now better than the state-of-the-art 2011 data center PUE prediction by the EPA. In other words, we beat the EPA's best case estimates three years early, and we achieved this result without the use of exotic infrastructure solutions thought necessary in the EPA report. And we're doing that at every level of the stack: from server utilization to networking.
Finally, we operate at scale, and that drives economies of scale. Just by managing thousands of servers together and making them homogeneous, we're able to cut down on our administrative costs dramatically and pool resources of many types. This benefits end users by enabling us to offer low prices.
But, most importantly for our customers, we manage this entire infrastructure such that they don't have to. According to Gartner, a typical IT department spends 80% of their budget keeping the lights on, and this hampers their ability to drive change and growth in their business. The reality is that most businesses don't gain a competitive advantage from maintaining their own data centers. We take on that burden and make it our core business so that our customers don't have to.
Software Infrastructure
Innovation
While the cost advantages of cloud computing can be great, there's another advantage that in many ways is more important: the rapid pace of innovation. IT systems are typically slow to evolve. In the virtualization model, businesses still need to run packaged software and endure the associated burden. They only receive major feature enhancements every 2-3 years, and in the meantime they have to endure the monthly patch cycle and painful system-wide upgrades. In our model, we can deliver innovation quickly without IT admins needing to manage upgrades themselves. For example, with Google Apps, we delivered more than 60 new features over the last year with only optional admin intervention.
The era of delayed gratification is over – the Internet allows innovations to be delivered as a constant flow that incorporates user needs, offers faster cycles for IT, and enables integration with systems that were not previously possible. This makes major upgrades a thing of the past, and gives the customer greater and greater value for their money.
As companies weigh private data centers vs. scalable clouds, they should ask a simple question: can I find the same economics, ease of maintenance, and pace of innovation that is inherent in the cloud?
Posted by Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps
There's quite a bit of talk these days about corporations building a "private cloud" with concepts like virtualization, and there can be significant benefits to this approach. But those advantages are amplified greatly when customers use applications in the scalable datacenters provided by companies like Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com and soon, Microsoft. In this model, customers can leverage hardware infrastructure, distributed software infrastructure, and applications that are built for the cloud, and let us run it for them. This offers them much lower cost applications, and removes the IT maintenance burden that can cripple many organizations today. It also allows customers to deliver innovation to their end users much more rapidly.
We thought we'd provide some insight into what we mean when we say cloud computing, and how its advantages in cost and innovation continue to attract hundreds of thousands of companies of all sizes -- from 2nd Wind Exercise Equipment to Genentech. We created our cloud by building an optimized system from the ground up: starting with low-cost hardware, adding reliable software infrastructure that scales, offering innovative applications, and working every day to improve the whole system. While the McKinsey study only considered the hardware cost savings of the cloud, there is tremendous customer benefit in all of these areas.
Hardware infrastructure
It starts with components. We serve tens of millions of users, so we've had to build infrastructure that scales and can run extremely efficiently to support that load. Consider three areas of data center design: server design, energy efficiency, and scale of operations.
In the virtualization approach of private data centers, a company takes a server and subdivides it into many servers to increase efficiency. We do the opposite by taking a large set of low cost commodity systems and tying them together into one large supercomputer. We strip down our servers to the bare essentials, so that we're not paying for components that we don't need. For example, we produce servers without video graphics chips that aren't needed in this environment.
Additionally, enterprise hardware components are designed to be very reliable, but they can never be 100% reliable, so enterprises spend a lot of time and money on maintenance. In contrast, we expect the hardware to fail, and design for reliability in the software such that, when the hardware does fail, customers are just shifted to another server. This allows us to further lower the cost of our servers by using commodity parts and on-board storage. We also design the systems for easy repair such that, if a part fails, we can quickly bring the server back into service.
Traditionally, companies have focused on using large, highly reliable hardware to run databases and large backend systems, but there is a significant cost impact to that strategy. For example, a 4 CPU quad-core system with 600 GB of high end SCSI storage and 16GB of memory is 8 times more expensive than a system 1/4 its size with less expensive SATA storage. This is because the price of the components increase exponentially as the hardware gets larger and more reliable. By building the reliability into the software, we're able to use a much lower cost hardware platform but still maintain the same reliability to customers.
Beyond server design, we do everything possible to make our servers and data centers as efficient as possible from an energy and cooling perspective. Consider how we designed our data centers for energy efficiency. Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is an industry-standard metric for measuring the efficiency of a data center. We recently shared that the average PUE for our data centers is now better than the state-of-the-art 2011 data center PUE prediction by the EPA. In other words, we beat the EPA's best case estimates three years early, and we achieved this result without the use of exotic infrastructure solutions thought necessary in the EPA report. And we're doing that at every level of the stack: from server utilization to networking.
Finally, we operate at scale, and that drives economies of scale. Just by managing thousands of servers together and making them homogeneous, we're able to cut down on our administrative costs dramatically and pool resources of many types. This benefits end users by enabling us to offer low prices.
But, most importantly for our customers, we manage this entire infrastructure such that they don't have to. According to Gartner, a typical IT department spends 80% of their budget keeping the lights on, and this hampers their ability to drive change and growth in their business. The reality is that most businesses don't gain a competitive advantage from maintaining their own data centers. We take on that burden and make it our core business so that our customers don't have to.
Software Infrastructure
While most discussions of cloud computing and data center design take place at the hardware level, we offer a set of scalable services that customers would otherwise have to maintain themselves in a virtualization model. For example, if a company wanted to implement a typical three tier system in the cloud using virtualization, they would have to build, install, and maintain software to run the database, app server, and web server. This would require them to spend time and money to acquire the licenses, maintain system uptime, and implement patches.
In contrast, with a service like Google App Engine, customers get access to the same scalable application server and database that Google uses for its own applications. This means customers don't have to worry about purchasing, installing, maintaining, and scaling their own databases and app servers. All a customer has to do is deploy code, and we take care of the rest. You only pay for what you need, and, with App Engine's free quota, you often don't pay anything at all.
A great example of software infrastructure that scales is the recent online town hall meeting held by President Obama. The White House was able to instantly scale its database to support more than 100,000 questions and in excess of 3.5 million votes, without worrying about usage spikes that typically would be tough to manage. Because of the cloud, there was no need to provision extra servers to handle the increased demand or forecast demand ahead of time.
Applications
Beyond the underlying hardware and software design, what attracts many customers to the cloud is application outsourcing.
There is limited value to running an Exchange Server in a virtual machine in the cloud. That server was never designed for the cloud, so you don't get additional scale. You'd also need to continue to maintain and monitor the mail server yourself, so the labor savings are marginal. But with cloud-based applications like Gmail, we take care of all of the hassle for you. We keep the application up and running, and have designed it to scale easily. All of this provides an application that is roughly less than 1/3 the cost of a privately hosted mail system, has 100x the typical storage, and innovates much faster.
In contrast, with a service like Google App Engine, customers get access to the same scalable application server and database that Google uses for its own applications. This means customers don't have to worry about purchasing, installing, maintaining, and scaling their own databases and app servers. All a customer has to do is deploy code, and we take care of the rest. You only pay for what you need, and, with App Engine's free quota, you often don't pay anything at all.
A great example of software infrastructure that scales is the recent online town hall meeting held by President Obama. The White House was able to instantly scale its database to support more than 100,000 questions and in excess of 3.5 million votes, without worrying about usage spikes that typically would be tough to manage. Because of the cloud, there was no need to provision extra servers to handle the increased demand or forecast demand ahead of time.
Applications
Beyond the underlying hardware and software design, what attracts many customers to the cloud is application outsourcing.
There is limited value to running an Exchange Server in a virtual machine in the cloud. That server was never designed for the cloud, so you don't get additional scale. You'd also need to continue to maintain and monitor the mail server yourself, so the labor savings are marginal. But with cloud-based applications like Gmail, we take care of all of the hassle for you. We keep the application up and running, and have designed it to scale easily. All of this provides an application that is roughly less than 1/3 the cost of a privately hosted mail system, has 100x the typical storage, and innovates much faster.
Innovation
While the cost advantages of cloud computing can be great, there's another advantage that in many ways is more important: the rapid pace of innovation. IT systems are typically slow to evolve. In the virtualization model, businesses still need to run packaged software and endure the associated burden. They only receive major feature enhancements every 2-3 years, and in the meantime they have to endure the monthly patch cycle and painful system-wide upgrades. In our model, we can deliver innovation quickly without IT admins needing to manage upgrades themselves. For example, with Google Apps, we delivered more than 60 new features over the last year with only optional admin intervention.
The era of delayed gratification is over – the Internet allows innovations to be delivered as a constant flow that incorporates user needs, offers faster cycles for IT, and enables integration with systems that were not previously possible. This makes major upgrades a thing of the past, and gives the customer greater and greater value for their money.
As companies weigh private data centers vs. scalable clouds, they should ask a simple question: can I find the same economics, ease of maintenance, and pace of innovation that is inherent in the cloud?
Posted by Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps
NeighborWorks America to Distribute $81 Million in Grants to NeighborWorks Network in 2009
At a time when communities need resources most, thousands across the nation will receive a much-needed affordable housing and community development boost as NeighborWorks America distributes more than $81 million in flexible grants to its national network of more than 230 local nonprofit NeighborWorks organizations. The $81 million that will be distributed in 2009 is an increase from the previous year, and reflects the increased need for community development since the financial crisis began to make headlines in 2008. Read the announcement.
NeighborWorks Tackles Growing Foreclosure Crisis in Louisiana
NeighborWorks America’s Southern District office partnered with the Louisiana Foreclosure Prevention and Mitigation Task Force in March to launch a community stabilization road show. These comprehensive meetings were designed to help stabilize communities by ensuring resources are available to homeowners who are behind on their mortgages and in danger of losing their homes. The task force included staff from FDIC, Louisiana Housing Finance Agency, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Fannie Mae. Between March 17-20, the task force engaged more than 110 community leaders in target cities. Read more about this effort.
Israeli Arabs and Jews ‘Face to Face’
Last week, my local synagogue in Manhattan sponsored a very meaningful program in anticipation of Yom HaAtzma’ut, Israel Independence Day (which begins this evening), entitled "Creating A Shared Society." This is how the event was advertised by Congregation Ansche Chesed:
The starting point of the problem is, of course, that Israel is in conflict with Palestinians who are kin to Israel’s Arab population – most of whom identify themselves as Palestinian citizens of Israel. Agbaria has no problem with stating that the Jewish people deserve a country. What he wants for himself and his people is to be treated as an integral part of the same country.
As if this is not complicated enough, Mr. Agbaria observes the irony that Israeli Jews are a majority that does not behave as a majority. By this he means that the Jews continue to see themselves as a vulnerable minority. This complexity is even further exacerbated by the fact that Israel’s Arabs tend not to see themselves as a minority – because in the region as a whole, they are not. If Jews were more secure in their status as a majority, they’d be less defensive and more relaxed in how they interacted with their Arab minority.
The rise of Israel’s new foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, raises once again the problematic status of ethnic minorities – particularly Arabs – in the Jewish state. About 1 in 5 Israelis are Arabs, nearly 1.4 million people in all. Israeli Jews – like those who voted for Lieberman, who won 15 Knesset seats on a platform widely seen as hostile to Arab citizens – tend to suspect the loyalty of the Arabs, who in turn view Jews with suspicion of racism and colonialism. The ethnic groups rarely intersect and rarely get to know each other. How will Jewish and Arab citizens learn to get along?Mr. Yanai and Mr. Agbaria discussed in moving and respectful terms their joint efforts to bridge the national ethnic divide between Jews and Arabs in Israel. The level of separation between the two groups in most parts of Israel (but not all) is nearly total.
Join us in the week before Yom HaAtzma’ut, Israel Independence Day, to meet two activists who work to improve this situation. Farhat Agbaria, an Israeli Arab, and Shachar Yanai, an Israeli Jew, will be with us at Ansche Chesed to discuss their work with Givat Haviva, an organization seeking greater equality and understanding between the population sectors. Agbaria and Yanai direct "Face-to-Face," a Jewish-Arab teen encounter program, winner of the 2001 UNESCO prize for Peace Education. More than 5,000 11th graders participate in Face-to-Face now, and the program hopes to reach tens of thousands more in coming years, to topple some of the barriers of prejudice and fear in Israeli society.
The starting point of the problem is, of course, that Israel is in conflict with Palestinians who are kin to Israel’s Arab population – most of whom identify themselves as Palestinian citizens of Israel. Agbaria has no problem with stating that the Jewish people deserve a country. What he wants for himself and his people is to be treated as an integral part of the same country.
As if this is not complicated enough, Mr. Agbaria observes the irony that Israeli Jews are a majority that does not behave as a majority. By this he means that the Jews continue to see themselves as a vulnerable minority. This complexity is even further exacerbated by the fact that Israel’s Arabs tend not to see themselves as a minority – because in the region as a whole, they are not. If Jews were more secure in their status as a majority, they’d be less defensive and more relaxed in how they interacted with their Arab minority.
Public debt means stealing from future generations
Does it matter that our public debt to GDP ratio is projected to rise to 90 percent? Other countries have even higher ratios, for example, Italy and Japan. After the war, the UK had a ratio in excess of 250 percent, but somehow managed to avoid economic ruin. These cross country and historical comparisons suggest that given time, our current debt problem will sort itself out. So what is wrong with high levels of public debt?
Let's deal with the cross-country issue first. Before the crisis started, the UK had a comparatively low level of public-sector debt, which meant that the government interest rate bill was also comparatively low.
Now, with borrowing exploding, the government will have to find more money to service its debts. This means less money for everything else. For example, if the government today decides to borrow more to spend on schools, it will have less in the future. Schoolchildren today will take resources away from future generations of schoolchildren.
This debt servicing squeeze on public expenditure is something at all heavily indebted countries understand. High levels of public sector debt redistributes income across generations and from taxpayers to bond holders and recipients of public sector extravagance.
The experience of Italy and Japan teaches another lesson. Both countries expanded government borrowing to maintain economic growth. It was a strategy that failed. Japan's sorry experience with Keynesian policies is particularly instructive. Back in the mid-80s, Japan had a very low debt to GDP ratio. It had a banking crisis, the economy crashed, and despite repeated attempts to kick start the economy with government spending, growth remained disappointing, leaving Japan with frightening levels of public indebtedness.
What about our own historical experience? After the war, the UK government had a major problem with debt. By 1970, it had largely resolved the problem. The methods, however, were not pleasant. In order to ensure low interest rates, the financial system was heavily regulated. Banks operated a cartel, keeping rates low. Household credit was difficult to obtain, and mortgages rationed. Exchange controls prevented people from investing their money abroad.
With inflation running higher than the interest rate, the real value of post-war debt was gradually eroded. This strategy of financial repression ensured that bondholders and savers ended up paying for the war.
The UK's post-war debt reduction strategy would not appeal to people today. However, the government and the Bank of England are putting together a very similar approach. One of the explicit objectives of the Bank of England's quantitative easing strategy is to reduce the yield on long term government paper. The monetary policy committee's bank rate is almost zero. The Bank of England and the government are working hard to increase inflation. The results so far have been encouraging. Despite the slowdown in economic growth, inflation remains very much alive.
After the war, most savers, watching their investments evaporate, shrugged their shoulders philosophically and weighed their loss against the greater good. Savers today are unlikely to take such a publicly minded approach. Why should people, who prudently saved and avoided debt, be forced to pay for reckless property speculators? You can be sure that if the government runs a debt to GDP ratio of 90 percent, it will only be reduced by expropriating savers through inflation and negative interest rates.
Let's deal with the cross-country issue first. Before the crisis started, the UK had a comparatively low level of public-sector debt, which meant that the government interest rate bill was also comparatively low.
Now, with borrowing exploding, the government will have to find more money to service its debts. This means less money for everything else. For example, if the government today decides to borrow more to spend on schools, it will have less in the future. Schoolchildren today will take resources away from future generations of schoolchildren.
This debt servicing squeeze on public expenditure is something at all heavily indebted countries understand. High levels of public sector debt redistributes income across generations and from taxpayers to bond holders and recipients of public sector extravagance.
The experience of Italy and Japan teaches another lesson. Both countries expanded government borrowing to maintain economic growth. It was a strategy that failed. Japan's sorry experience with Keynesian policies is particularly instructive. Back in the mid-80s, Japan had a very low debt to GDP ratio. It had a banking crisis, the economy crashed, and despite repeated attempts to kick start the economy with government spending, growth remained disappointing, leaving Japan with frightening levels of public indebtedness.
What about our own historical experience? After the war, the UK government had a major problem with debt. By 1970, it had largely resolved the problem. The methods, however, were not pleasant. In order to ensure low interest rates, the financial system was heavily regulated. Banks operated a cartel, keeping rates low. Household credit was difficult to obtain, and mortgages rationed. Exchange controls prevented people from investing their money abroad.
With inflation running higher than the interest rate, the real value of post-war debt was gradually eroded. This strategy of financial repression ensured that bondholders and savers ended up paying for the war.
The UK's post-war debt reduction strategy would not appeal to people today. However, the government and the Bank of England are putting together a very similar approach. One of the explicit objectives of the Bank of England's quantitative easing strategy is to reduce the yield on long term government paper. The monetary policy committee's bank rate is almost zero. The Bank of England and the government are working hard to increase inflation. The results so far have been encouraging. Despite the slowdown in economic growth, inflation remains very much alive.
After the war, most savers, watching their investments evaporate, shrugged their shoulders philosophically and weighed their loss against the greater good. Savers today are unlikely to take such a publicly minded approach. Why should people, who prudently saved and avoided debt, be forced to pay for reckless property speculators? You can be sure that if the government runs a debt to GDP ratio of 90 percent, it will only be reduced by expropriating savers through inflation and negative interest rates.
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