Category Archives: Globalization

Joe Duck – Chinese Edition

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Click HERE for my Chinese Edition.    Cool?

Actually, any web page can be auto-translated in this fashion by Google.  It’s a really cool feature though I’m guessing the translations must leave something to be desired.    My understanding is that you still need humans to pull quality meaning from one language to another.    Still, this is a huge step forward and the advent of hand held translation units, online translation, and a lot more global travel is breaking down one of the barriers to international understanding – language.

China is expected to be the world’s top travel destination by 2020 and I don’t doubt that estimate.  It is one of the reasons I’m anxious to get over there to SES China in Xiamen, the Xianglu Grand Hotel (though I’m not clear if this is the SES China venue or not), The Great Wall of China, Beijing and the Forbidden City, Hong Kong Harbor, Hong Kong, Kowloon, and much more of the amazing China Travel landscape. I want to start exploring and understanding the nation and culture that may eventually eclipse the USA in terms of global influence  (I’m not predicting that – just noting it is a possibility.  What is a certainty is that China will continue to be one of the most influential nations for some time to come).      One of the most interesting graphs I have ever seen showed the global GDP of about 1850, noting that India+China were over half the global totals, and the USA was not even in the same league.    The USA’s remarkable industrial rise since that time led us to the global economic dominance we now enjoy, but things could change … again.   I don’t see this shift in Economic dominance as a negative, rather more an inevitable balancing and levelling of an increasingly globalized playing field – the world Tom Friedman has described so well in his book “The World is Flat”. 

Will work for free WIFI: The New Journalism?

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Scott Karp has a nice post today about the intersection of journalism and blogging.    I’m glad he notes the weakness of the argument that bloggers cannot be journalists.   Suggesting mainstream journalism is on firm and high ground is especially absurd in this world where yellow journalism generally trumps quality, superficial treatments cripple even the few fine writers at major newspapers, and Fox and CNN TV news parade AnchorModels chosen primarily for looks (women) or bombastic nonsense (men) or both (Anne Coulter).

I’d suggest that a key challenge to conventional journalism is not so much one of quality writing as it is *scalability*. Bloggers work for nothing or peanuts, and there are many more coming in the wings.  Most blogs will continue to suck, but some will be great and this number will increase as more writers get comfortable with the medium.

It will be increasingly difficult for publishers – even cutting edge, well funded ones like Nick at Gawker who is hiring a “journalist” –  to justify paying much for content. I don’t think Gawker’s decision to hire a legacy media journalist reflects a new trend, rather it reflects a fairly atypical reversion to old trends during this transition period.   

Contrast Gawker’s success with the demise of Blognation, which was not even paying people.  Would they have succeeded with a bunch of “real” journalists? No, of course not.    Good writing is cheap and getting cheaper.   That’s not necessarily a good thing, but it’s certainly an inevitable thing.

Make Ads, Not War

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As I’ve noted many times here I believe that our massive US defense spend is unwise, returning a fraction of the return we’d get by putting most of the annual approximately $500.000.000.000 spend into high ROI global and national development projects, pro USA marketing campaigns, and other infrastructure improvements.

Interesting to me was the number just cited for the 2008 global advertising spend –
486 billion, just shy of what we’ll probably spend on US military.   Global military is about 2x the US number, or approximately one … trillion … annually.   

For you  bogus-fiscal-conservatives-who-call-themselves-conservatives-but-believe-in-huge-military-spending you owe the world at least a 250 billion per year apology, because this military spend is so ineffective at obtaining the desired objectives that no business would ever tolerate it going into the future.  It’s tolerated out of ignorance and mathematical stupidity – the same foolishness that drives huge social spending.  I think the flawed logic generally spawns from the assumption that projects that *might* work to bring stability (e.g. war) actually will work.    Since many such projects often bring a negative or low return rather than the desired one, the ROI on our military spend is spectacularly low.   Vietnam, for example, was left in worse shape than if we had spent zero on that war, and it now appears that Iraq may wind up suffering the same fate.

So, I propose this:   Let’s try to corner the advertising market for a year with out half-trillion.   Instead of weapons, lets see how effectively a global advertising campaign  would sway global public opinion in our favor.    Think about it.   Every TV, every billboard, every radio, and all online ads are featuring themes favorable to the USA.   For every propaganda piece against us, our almost Orwellian media dominance would counter with wine and roses and happiness in the USA.   Maybe we could just corner half the global ad market but reserve a hundred billion to include lots of giveaways and promotions to butter folks up.   Free turkies, cheeseburgers, and flat screen TVs …

Oh, and then that last hundred billion would come close to solving all the major pressing infrastructure problems on earth.

A disclaimer –  I guess I’m only partly serious here.  We need to maintain an adequate defense, but current pork barrelling, inefficiency, and bad strategy have bloated the defense budget out of proportion with its return on the huge investment.   I’d guess we could cut it by at least 60% with no appreciable dilution of our US security, and we could *certainly* do this for a limited time with very little dilution in security but a huge benefit to infrastructure projects all over the world, which would create incalculable good will.   No, this would not solve all our problems.   My point is that it would solve more problems than our current use of the funds.  

China redirects searches to Baidu? OR NOT!

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TechCrunch is reporting today that China is redirecting internet searches from Google, Yahoo, and MSN and I assume all other engines – to Chinese search engine Baidu.   However I can’t find anything but little anecdotal posts to support this.   Looks to me like some videos and blogs have been affected, but that the big search engine issues may have related to a temporarily problem or testing of DNS stuff.

They suggest this may relate to the recent award given to the Dalai Lama I’d guess China is spending a lot of time thinking and experimenting with ways to maximize their search revenues, and this redirection, if it really did happen as dramatically as some suggest, would probably be testing ways to gather data on how well Baidu monetizes search compared to the agreements they have with other players.

Wait – here’s a blogger in Beijing, China saying that he’s getting to places TechCrunch says have been sent to Baidu, like Google.   Not sure what’s up …

Is this a false alarm?   I think so, though it might be another example of how China’s centralized socialist economy can create power and monopoly conditions the most ruthless old style US capitalists could only dream about.    Increasingly control of the online landscape is control of the business landscape, and as China’s massive economic expansion continues it will be very interesting to see how the China wields her power.

Note – I just edited this post quite a bit thanks to the new info.  Still dunno what’s going on.

Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and IPCC

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Congratulations – sort of – to Al Gore and the IPCC for the Nobel Peace Prize.   I’m somewhat confused because it seems to me their efforts would not fall under the general category of promoting “Peace”.    AP story about Al Gore and IPCC Peace Prize is here.  More importantly people should be concerned that our new global focus on very expensive and problematic climate change science will distract us from more pressing problems.   Here’s what I just wrote to the Nobel Prize Committee – their website even promises I’ll get a response. 

As much as I respect Al Gore and the IPCC I worry that our new global focus on Climate Change will distract us from the more pressing problems of poverty, health, and violent conflict.   Was this possibility considered by the awards committee?

Climate change is the best current example of how humans process information, problems, and solutions in irrational ways.    Generally people note that global warming is happening (true) and that warming is likely the result of human activity (probably true – IPCC concludes over 90% likely).    It’s also reasonable to assume that warming will lead to mostly undesirable changes.   HOWEVER, it does not follow from these truths that we should make Global Warming the top priority.  In fact due to the expense and difficulties involved a clear mind will conclude that we should implement cheap changes but forego the expensive changes in favor of devoting those resources to *current* catastrophic global conditions – generally these relate to poverty and health conditions in the developing world, but would also probably include work to alleviate the appalling conditions found in many American and European big city neighborhoods.

Below is a link to a video of Bjorn Lomborg at TED Conference on Global Solution Priorities.   In my opinion he’s the clearest thinker out there – a contrast to people who are so poisoned by “political thinking” and “advocacy thinking” that they can’t see the facts from their causes.    I think a good test of whether you are clear thinking about a topic is to make the opposition case effectively enough that people can’t tell your bias.    Most topics have complex sets of facts and no easy answers – everybody should keep that in mind.   
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dtbn9zBfJSs

Hey – Al Gore’s office looks a lot like mine, but with bigger monitors.    I like him, but don’t agree with him that GW is the big problem facing us.

There’s a LOT MORE about this over at Max’s blog.

Bill Gates finally graduates from college

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Harvard has awarded Bill Gates his degree – just a few decades since he dropped out – and he even got to deliver the commencement address this year.   An address that was brilliant and timely.

Gates called on the historic challenge to Harvard students of General Marshall who inspired students to help rebuild Europe after WWII.   Gates ambitions are even bigger – getting the best and brightest to take on the world’s most pressing challenges of poverty and health.

There is no more important message in the world today, especially as the deadly combination (literally deadly for millions of the world’s poor)  of commercial media and human superficial interests have effectively made intelligent and provocative discussion of these broad global issues rare and difficult.    Gates correctly points to the key challenge in solving global poverty – how to make fighting poverty and disease in the third world as interesting to people as innovations in technology or new provocative content in the entertainment industry.

American Express Members Project – finding and funding a good idea

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IMPORTANT:  This blog is NOT  The Members Project Website.   Go HERE for the official site.

The American Express Members Project is a really neat idea – members will submit and review “good deed” types of projects and American Express will fund the winning project up to 5 million. It’s so great to see that the new corporate standard is to step UP to the plate and do really good, really big things. It’s also (finally) considered very hip and cool to do good things, and that’s …. cool.

Global Warming – less hype, more science please.

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Yahoo’s got a noble initiative going to “fight” climate change but as with most of these efforts I’m very skeptical this is where so much of the smart thinking, time, and money should go.

I wrote them:   With all due respect to the noble intentions I think I’d rather see Yahoo work on … profitability and web innovations. Warming is so *incredibly* expensive to try to fix it’s better to spend our treasure and time on the low hanging fruit problems of the world: microloans, malaria, aids prevention, etc, and focus on conservation and alternative energy. With China as the leading producing of CO2 I can’t help but think our many noble high tech solutions are just jousting at the energy windmill.

I’m not nearly as skeptical about human induced climate change as my friend Glenn,  but I share his concern about the alarmism and “groupthink” that is now pervasive in the Climate Change community.     Recent IPCC reports have been

My big concern remains that we can’t do much about this and therefore we should tackle the catastophic things we *can* easily fix.  Those are disease and poverty, water, etc.    Incredibly people seem to ignore these basic human health and poverty problems as “insurmountable” when in fact  they are relatively easy to solve with modest allocations of time and money, while people focus on problems like Global Warming and longstanding religious conflicts that likely have *no* realistic solutions for decades, centuries, or even millenia.   Also important is that feeding people and raising standards of health and living leads to much, much smaller populations (this “prosperity leads to lower population” effect is very well documented but I can’t believe how many people think that helping the poor leads to more poor people (the “feed and breed” ideas of Malthus).  This is a very dangerous and wrong assumption and not backed by any research with which I’m familiar).

I propose that well intentioned, rational folks should use a ‘triage’ system where we take major global problems and the cost of their proposed solutions and prioritize these actions on the basis of where we can do the most good for the least money.

But as my friend Linda pointed out wisely last year during our hike in the incomparable Trinity Alps, it’s possible that at least with warming people are inspired to act, and in general these actions are leading to more energy conservation and innovations.    Better *something* good than nothing good, but I’m still going to advocate for a rational, not emotional, approach to all this.

Make that TWO laptops per child?

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I’m not sure what to make of Intel’s decision to enter the “market” for laptops to the developing world, though I am frustrated by Negroponte’s quick dismissal of this as Intel being evil rather than noting that this could be a fantastic opportunity to realize his (wonderful) vision of internet computers for all.

Intel’s machines now cost $200 and the One Laptop machines are now $175. Both think pricing should fall as production ramps up.

This reminds me a bit of our local internet broadband fiber network conflict between the city of Ashland, Oregon and Charter Communications.

Several years ago Ashland developed a great fiber network concept that would be run by the city via the public electrical utility. Charter initially tried to get Ashland to work on a project together, partly using strongarm and legal challenge tactics. When that failed and Ashland started competing with Charter for cable and broadband services, Charter countered the city by offering lower rates for cable and internet to their Ashland subscribers. This split up the customer base and created revenue shortfalls for the city project (and probably for Charter as well – my theory is that they wanted to fight this trend in other cities and were willing to take a loss in Ashland to make that happen) . So, the end result now appears to be a lose-lose deal where taxpayers in Ashland have to make up shortfalls, and Charter also probably lost money.

Perspectives vary on motivations and such, but for me the moral of the story (then and now) was that it’s better for non-profit entities to cooperate than to compete. There was a win-win in Ashland when the city could hold out the *threat* of doing their own thing, forcing Charter to lower rates and offer great services. But they foolishly chose to fight, leading to the predictable lose-lose situation.

Extending this to the One Laptop project I’d sure like to see Negroponte at least *carefully examine* all the possibilities of working with or next to Intel. If profit-hungry Intel can produce these for $200 where heavily subsidized One Laptop is at $175 there may be some room here to cooperate in an effort to get the job done.

Negroponte’s motivations in my opinion are virtuous and his integrity in this is almost unimpeachable, but that does not mean he’ll make the best decisions under the changing sets of circumstances. I’d like to see more of an open mind about this one.

Happy Easter. Let’s solve some problems.

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As well-fed comfortable primates our interests tend to turn to the superficial, but wouldn’t it be interesting if we could focus our great resources and enthusiasm on the real problems of the world, and focus attention in proportion to their impact on the globe?

This list of Global problems and potential solutions from the Copenhagen Consensus:

Challenge   |   Opportunity

Communicable Diseases   |     Scaled-up basic health services
Sanitation and Water        |    Community-managed water supply and sanitation
Education                            |    Physical expansion
Malnutrition and Hunger  |   Improving infant and child nutrition
Malnutrition and Hunger  |   Investment in technology in developing country agriculture
Communicable Diseases    |   Control of HIV/AIDS
Communicable Diseases    |   Control of malaria
Malnutrition and Hunger  |   Reducing micro nutrient deficiencies
Subsidies and Trade Barriers | Optimistic Doha: 50% liberalization