Eideard

So here we are — the last day of 2011 and the end of the first year of me writing my occasional newsletter, Om Says. Being on a break, I decided to not read the web and instead go analog and read a lot of books to nourish my mind. For me, it was an enjoyable year of writing these newsletters and I have picked out 12 stories from the archives that I feel are something you might want to revisit during the New Year’s weekend. Happy 2012, everyone.

The top story of 2011 that impacted me personally:

Steve Jobs and the sound of silence

Steve Jobs left a big hole not only for his company, but also for the tech industry. In a time when so many companies focus on short-term decisions, Jobs taught us that real success is in taking the long view…

I’d already ordered Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs before it became clear he was dying. That didn’t change the experience of the read – though the book arrived after his death.

Read the rest of this entry »

Same as it ever was…

This weekend’s Labor Day celebrations in America mark a difficult time for workers. Having experienced a multi-year decline in their share of national income, they are now suffering the brunt of the current economic malaise; and there is little to suggest that the situation will improve any time soon. As a result, the country’s economic hardships risk morphing from pressuring specific segments of the population to undermining more general aspects of social justice.

The numbers are striking — and worrisome. Over the last 30 years, labor’s share of the national pie has declined to 44 percent from 52 percent, with profits growing at twice the annual rate for average wages.

This…monthly employment report adds to the concerns. Unemployment remains very high, whether measured by the most-quoted unemployment rate (9.1 percent), the less partial under- and un-employment rate, (16.2 percent) or, most comprehensively, the proportion of total adults who are not working (42 percent compared to 35 percent 10 years ago).

The duration and composition of joblessness is very troubling. The average unemployed American has been without a job for 40 weeks, a record level, and 44 percent of the unemployed have been out of a job for more than 26 weeks. The incidence of joblessness is severe among those lacking a college degree (11 percent compared to 4 percent for college graduates). For 16-19 year olds the unemployment rate is a horrible 25 percent.

Whichever number you look at, America’s labor market problems constitute a full-blown crisis with far reaching economic, social and political consequences. If current trends continue, joblessness will become stubbornly embedded in the system and, distressingly, some of the unemployed will become unemployable…

Read the rest of this entry »

The Rev Klaas Hendrikse can offer his congregation little hope of life after death, and he’s not the sort of man to sugar the pill.

An imposing figure in black robes and white clerical collar, Mr Hendrikse presides over the Sunday service at the Exodus Church in Gorinchem, central Holland.

It is part of the mainstream Protestant Church in the Netherlands (PKN), and the service is conventional enough, with hymns, readings from the Bible, and the Lord’s Prayer. But the message from Mr Hendrikse’s sermon seems bleak – “Make the most of life on earth, because it will probably be the only one you get”.

“Personally I have no talent for believing in life after death,” Mr Hendrikse says. “No, for me our life, our task, is before death.”

Nor does Klaas Hendrikse believe that God exists at all as a supernatural thing…

Mr Hendrikse describes the Bible’s account of Jesus’s life as a mythological story about a man who may never have existed, even if it is a valuable source of wisdom about how to lead a good life.

His book Believing in a Non-Existent God led to calls from more traditionalist Christians for him to be removed. However, a special church meeting decided his views were too widely shared among church thinkers for him to be singled out.

A study by the Free University of Amsterdam found that one-in-six clergy in the PKN and six other smaller denominations was either agnostic or atheist.

The Rev Kirsten Slattenaar, Exodus Church’s regular priest, also rejects the idea – widely considered central to Christianity – that Jesus was divine as well as human.

“I think ‘Son of God’ is a kind of title,” she says. “I don’t think he was a god or a half god. I think he was a man, but he was a special man because he was very good in living from out of love, from out of the spirit of God he found inside himself…”

Professor Hijme Stoeffels of the Free University in Amsterdam says it is in such concepts as love that people base their diffuse ideas of religion.

RTFA. Long, detailed, interesting to anyone who cares about an ethical, growing society.

Of course, being about open-minded Christians, I imagine the response in our own bible belt will be the calling down of fire and brimstone upon the heads of these Christians who dare to differ with the past.

China still has “a long way to go” before its citizens can enjoy full human rights, a senior Chinese official said in a rare admission of the challenges ahead, pointing to social conflict and even rising house prices as stumbling blocks.

Wang Chen, head of the State Council Information Office, said in a speech published in the English-language China Daily Wednesday that while China had made remarkable developments on this front, the way forward would be hard.

“Affected and restricted by natural, historical and cultural factors, and economic and social development levels, the cause of human rights in China is still facing many difficulties and challenges, and there is still a long way to go before achieving the lofty goal of the Chinese citizens fully enjoying human rights,” Wang said.

“Our national development remains significantly unbalanced and uncoordinated because of … wide gaps in income distribution, increasing pressures on prices, soaring housing prices in some cities, food safety problems, insufficient and unevenly distributed educational and medical resources, unbalanced urban and rural development, and increasing social conflicts caused by illegal land requisitioning,” he said.

China has long rejected criticism of its human rights’ record, saying providing food, clothing, housing and economic growth are far more relevant for developing countries like it, pointing to success at lifting millions out of poverty…

Read the rest of this entry »

Ravindra Misal

I came to Umred to write about a riot. A few months earlier, power blackouts that rural Indians always suffered silently triggered a violent reaction. Why? Umred was just another small town in the middle of nowhere, dusty and underwhelming. But Umred had begun to dream, townspeople told me, because of television, because of cousins with tales of call-center jobs and freedom in the city. Once Umred contracted ambition, blackouts became intolerable. A psychological revolution, a revolution in expectations, had taken place.

“Electricity is essential to ambition,” an energetic young man named Ravindra Misal explained to me, “because I need it to do my homework, I need it to listen to music if I am a dancer, I need it to listen to tapes of great speakers, I need it to surf the Internet. But I cannot, so people get angry.” Over plates of mutton and chicken, Misal and his friend Abhay offered examples of the little things that were changing in Umred: young men hunting online for wives, farmers’ sons deserting the farms to work at a bank in a nearby town, a deluge of students signing up for English classes. And beauty pageants. “I see Fashion TV on television, Miss India contests in the big cities,” Misal said. “So I thought, Why can’t we have that also?” And so he organized the first Mr. and Miss Umred Personality Contest, which seemed to be half about physical appearance and half about the communication skills that are all the rage in small-town India.

Misal embodies the type of person who will truly transform India: not an engineer or a financier, but an average person who refuses to be satisfied with the status he was born to. Umred rioted because its people had somehow acquired the courage of their own dissatisfaction. But what kind of India will they build?

And that’s what the several pages of this article examine.

An interesting read. Questions that had better be answered equitably and quickly if India is to realize the potential the moneyboys think is there.

Perhaps TSA will be a thing of the past by then – and I’ll resume flying.

National Library of France

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has outlined a $51.5 billion “grand loan” France will take out to invest in universities and fields such as renewable energy and the digital economy.

Mr Sarkozy said financing was needed to prepare France’s long-term future but he denied it was a stimulus package, saying the investments it will support “would be necessary even without the crisis…”

In a rare press conference at the Elysée, Mr Sarkozy said: “Today we must prepare our country for the challenges of the future, so that France can fully profit from the recovery, so that it is stronger, more competitive and that it creates more jobs…”

France’s universities are to receive the lion’s share, with $16 billion used to build between five and 10 world-class campuses. A further $11.7 billion will go to France’s research institutes – in particular biotechnology and health care. Mr Sarkozy also pledged $7.3 billion for renewable energy and $6.6 billion to develop France’s digital economy. Budget cuts would match the interest on the extra spending, he insisted.

The authors of the loan say it will boost France’s long-term growth.

France’s opposition parties, Left and Right, are as opportunist as our own. You will wade through rivers of crocodile tears over deficit spending, taxes, priorities – though not as much whining about aid to the young and underprivileged. In that sense, France is less of a class-based nation than the U.S..

The model is nothing new. I’m a bit surprised to see a French conservative advance the proposal. The Gallic breed must not share the shortsighted-gene characteristics of America’s country club set.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Japan’s new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, faces his first diplomatic test this week when he meets President Barack Obama in New York as the two allies grapple with disagreements that investors fear could damage ties.

The only investors I can think of the meeting might upset are those heavily into war toys.

Hatoyama will also seek a high profile for Japan at a U.N. climate change conference by pledging ambitious targets for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and offering more environmental help to developing nations.

Hatoyama’s Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which trounced its long-dominant conservative rival in an August election, has vowed to forge a more equal partnership with Washington, setting goals such as revising deals on U.S. forces based in Japan…

Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada said last week he wanted to resolve a row over how to ease the burden of U.S. military bases on Japan’s southern island of Okinawa within the first 100 days of the new administration.

“Ease the burden”? What a polite way to say “time to shove off, sailor”.

It is disagreements such as those that concern investors. A Reuters survey of 33 financial market traders and analysts last month showed a third saw strained ties with Washington as one of the key risks for Japan.

I love analysts who believe Asia still revolves around a United States fixed in the time of the Korean War. There really are good reasons why companies like Toyota have major commercial centers in Germany and China. It ain’t just the food. These are centers of economic growth that have been surpassing the guesses of “analysts” for a spell.

As the only nation to have suffered nuclear attacks, Hatoyama has said it is Japan’s “moral mission” to strive for a nuclear-free world. At the same time, Japan relies on the U.S. arsenal to protect it from regional threats such as unpredictable neighbor North Korea..

That last sentence must be leftover from a speechwriter for Chiang Kai-Shek around, say, 1954. And just as out of touch with the real world.

The questions are real. And there are many more. Most stem from protocols designed in the era of McArthur and our occupation forces. The Japanese are overdue at shrugging off conforming to rules delivered from the White House.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The news on Aug. 3 that Google CEO Eric Schmidt was resigning from the board of Apple took many by surprise. For others in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, the question wasn’t why—but why it took so long…Schmidt was unavailable to talk about his decision, but extensive and previously unpublished discussions we had last month illuminate where Google is going and why it is headed in some of the same directions as Apple.

MARIA BARTIROMO: Where is the growth coming from in the next 5 or 10 years for Google? Is it more search opportunities? Is it mobility?

ERIC E. SCHMIDT: Probably a combination. It’s obvious that the highest growth is in our core business as we get better and better at targeted ads, and those ads become more valuable. Our whole theory about advertising is that an advertisement that’s not targeted—just a random ad that you just walk by—is a waste of somebody’s money because you’re not going to buy. It wasn’t relevant to you.

MB: Aren’t there three times as many phones out there as there are PCs now?

ES: More than that. The rough number of PCs is around 800 million; the rough number of mobile phones is on the order of 3 billion. Even more important, the growth rate of mobile phones is quite a bit higher than that of personal computers…

MB: Google is now the subject of intense government scrutiny, just as Microsoft once was. Can you tell us where those investigations stand?

ES: As far as the investigations I’m aware of, we have very good answers. And what’s happening is people are comparing us to other companies, in particular Microsoft, even though our behavior, our principles, our practices are quite different…

MB: How about Android? What’s the strategy going forward?

ES: Android is many things. First, it’s an operating system for a mobile phone. It’s particularly powerful because of the way it was built. The software is free, you can extend it, you’re not locked into any applications vendor or any network. What we like about Android is its perfect expression of openness.

These folks don’t need any “good luck” from me or anyone else.

Those are enough trite expressions for this morning.

Electronic voting machines being checked at a distribution center
Daylife/Reuters Pictures

As voters in parts of central and eastern India go to the polls it will mark the start of the largest democratic ballot in history, a rolling wave of voting in five phases that will stretch over a month and demand formidable security measures, given the twin threats posed by Maoist rebels and jihadi terrorists.

More than a million electronic voting machines are to be deployed at 828,000 polling stations. No voter will be more than 2km from a ballot box.

Elections can be violent. In the first phase of polls five years ago more than 20 people died. Although the central government has a million-man army, most election security is handled by a 250,000-strong paramilitary force…

Ever since the Congress party and the Gandhi family lost their grip on power in 1989 no single party has been able to run India. At the last election the Congress party took only 145 seats out of 543, with 26% of the vote. It took office by sharing power with partners.

Despite the arrival of coalition politics, turnout has remained stable at around 60% and poor minorities are more likely to vote than anyone else…

The Congress party, say pundits, is the favourite because it is in power and can point to tangible achievements.

RTFA. Lots of detail, lots of complexity. I know who I would be voting for were I an Indian citizen – but, I’m not. An opinion formed by a view from afar. Not really as important as being on the ground in a nation with such a dynamic history.