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Journal (The Ember Update)

Thursday, January 23

I attended my second drum jam on Sunday at the New Deal Cafe in Greenbelt and had great fun (Kevin and Michelle came along, and Ginohn and other familiar faces were there too). I've also started taking belly-dancing classes at Joy of Motion in Dupont Circle. AND I'm thinking about buying a house.

Broken

Have you had poor customer experience? Got a gripe about the stupid design of something you've purchased or seen? Is it difficult to work or just plain unusable? Encourage or shame companies into designing better products by submitting your complaint to ThisIsBroken.com.

Offshore Labor

Last week on the Diane Rehm show (10:06: Global Outsourcing) there was talk about the high-tech industry and how jobs at the lowest tier of the Tech pyramid (support at the bottom, programmers and engineers in the middle, management at the top) have already been sent overseas. All you folks out there getting your MIS and hoping to go into tech support upon graduation … well, GOOD LUCK. I know someone who graduated last year with an MIS and is now working at Kinkos.

I guess the best advice is to go beyond your MIS and get trained as a programmer or engineer. But that's the middle tier, and according to this press release at the ITAA.:

Sixty-seven percent of respondents already outsourcing IT work overseas say that jobs most likely to be moved offshore are programming or software engineering positions, followed by 37% moving network design, and 30% moving web development jobs.

As companies worry about their bottom lines, more of those jobs could disappear in America. Even the management level could be threatened. What's to stop businesses from exporting most labor and management needs, if it makes them more competitive? Government regulation, I guess. But the ITAA advised congress last October that,

"The U.S. cannot legislate or regulate its way out of this perplexing situation. […] Running faster and jumping higher is the path to success, not trying to throw artificial obstacles in the [way of] overseas competitors[.] Industry, academia, government, and IT workers need to collaborate on a New Competitive Reality Program to identify and implement the best programs and policies to meet the global challenge of making US companies and workers more competitive."

In other words, our tech force needs to be more highly educated to remain competitive. And with education institutions seriously struggling in today's economy, that means more expensive barriers to higher education.

On the other hand, we could go the way of cMarket, a Boston start-up which hired US IT workers at overseas salaries (an $80k job in the US is $40k overseas). Also, if you're an entrepreneur thinking about outsourcing IT work overseas, you might want to read this recent Business Week article on The Changing Face of Offshore Programming.

This brings me to my final point: that my dream of things evening out might actually be happening. I don't understand why we, in this country, have the right to live better than folks in other countries. Call me crazy to think it possible, but I'd like to see a much more even living standard globally. So I guess if the option is to outsource work overseas, or pay workers less here, then the even-out process is underway.

Wednesday, January 7

What I did on my Winter Vacation

For National Play Week (Boxing Day through New Years) Kevin and I drove down to Florida to visit with Russell and Shelly. We had a really fabulous time … thanks guys!

Our activities included kayaking, crystal singing bowls, yoga, three beaches, two walks and swinging in Rowlett Park, a daytime visit to Ybor City, various hippie stores, delicious vegan meals (home-made and Trang Viet Cuisine), peanut brittle, a drive by the H.B. Plant Museum, and almost non-stop discussion about politics and social issues. We had numerous other things we wanted to do, but only had three days. Maybe next time we'll get to the Dali Museum. On the way back to Maryland Kevin and I also stopped at Tybee Island in Georgia for our last chance at a beach this winter.

Here are some pics from National Play Week. Click to enlarge any of the photos, or see the rest at my Winter Vacation Travelogue:

What's Your Beef?

Alison eats only grass fed beef and has for a couple of years (she was a vegetarian prior). With the recent announcement of the first verified case of "Mad Cow" disease in the U.S. I'm thinking about following in her footsteps with regards to all of my meat consumption. So while I've had beef once so far this year (in a gyro mixed with lamb), I'm going to be trying to stick to vegetarian dishes or organic meats.

I think the organic meat industry should start up an ad campaign with the slogan "What's Your Beef?"

Did you know cows can be fed chicken poop? That chickens can be fed ground up cows? That calves can be fed dried cows' blood instead of milk (it's more profitable to sell the milk to humans)? That gelatin (used in Jello, etc.) is made from cattle hoofs? Cattle blood and gelatin can carry the disease. Also, tallow (rendered animal fat) is found in soap, candles, and lubricants. Etc.

Russell sent along a Reuters article, "Consumer groups point to holes in US cattle feed rules." Some excerpts:

…Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine, said that 99 percent of U.S. feed mills were in compliance with the 1997 regulation prohibiting the use of most cattle remains from cattle rations.

[Ronnie] Cummins [director of the Organic Consumers Association] said loopholes in the livestock feed ban end up letting other cattle parts to be fed back to cattle.

For example, he noted that all cattle remains can legally be used to feed chickens, and that poultry excrement swept out of chickenhouses can be fed back to cattle. As much as 30 percent of such sweepings contain uneaten poultry food that chickens have scattered about the floor, Cummins said. […]

The current FDA regulations allow cattle brains, spinal cords and other potentially risky material to be ground up and used in feed for poultry, pigs and household pets.

Also worth reading is this long but very informative article: "Could Mad Cow Disease Already be Killing Thousands of Americans Every Year?" It throws U.S. non-organic meat from cows, sheep, pigs, venison, and even chicken and turkey (as silent carriers of the disease) into serious question. The consumption of infected meat appears to be linked with some forms of CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease). From the article:

Hundreds of "mad sheep" [a.k.a. scrapie infected] were found in the U.S. in 2003. […]

Sporadic CJD has also been associated with weekly beef consumption, as well as the consumption of roast lamb, veal, venison, brains in general, and, in North America, seafood. The development of CJD has also, surprisingly, been significantly linked to exposure to animal products in fertilizer, sport fishing and deer hunting in the U.S., and frequent exposure to leather products. […]

Dateline NBC quoted D. Carleton Gajdusek, the first to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on prion diseases, as saying, "it's got to be in the pigs as well as the cattle. It's got to be passing through the chickens." Dr. Paul Brown, medical director for the US Public Health Service, believes that pigs and poultry could indeed be harboring Mad Cow disease and passing it on to humans, adding that pigs are especially sensitive to the disease. "It's speculation," he says, "but I am perfectly serious." […]

The animal agriculture industries continue to risk public safety, and the government seems to protect the industries' narrow business interests more than it protects its own citizens. Internal USDA documents retrieved through the Freedom of Information Act show that our government did indeed consider a number of precautionary measures as far back as 1991 to protect the American public from Mad Cow disease. According to one such document, however, the USDA explained that the "disadvantage" of these measures was that "the cost to the livestock and rendering industries would be substantial."

Why do we so fervently worship the interests of big business over citizen well being in this country? I see this occurring over and over and over again.

Finally, you can currently download the complete text of the book Mad Cow USA, which is recommended by Jim Hightower among others.

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