Eideard

Think these people are freer without a Federal Aviation Administration?

Thousands of employees have been furloughed and dozens of major projects put on hold after Congress failed to reauthorize funding for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Air traffic controllers will remain on the job, but the furloughs have hit many engineers, scientists, computer specialists, community planners and others. Nearly 4,000 employees in 35 states, Washington and Puerto Rico have been told to stop work, according to the FAA.

Efforts to continue funding hit a stumbling block over House Republican efforts to make it harder for airline and rail workers to unionize and over a move to cut subsidies for air service to rural airports.

Congress adjourned Friday without passing legislation, causing funding to end at midnight that night…

The FAA said contractors have been told to stop work on dozens of projects across the country, including a $43 million project in Las Vegas and a $31 million project in Oakland, California, to build air traffic control towers.

Without new legislation, the government will also not be able to collect about $200 million a week in airline taxes that normally go to the Airport and Airway Trust Fund. A $2.5 billion program providing grants for airport construction projects was similarly forced to shut down.

Ideological elitists are going to have to climb down from their ivory towers sooner or later and understand that people outside of Congress need work, need jobs, need dignity and the right to organize and govern their own lives. Making collective political activity illegal does nothing for liberty. Even if it may optimize profits for corporations, enforcing limits on the lives and livelihoods of ordinary Americans will only fill a reservoir of discontent and ill will – that will eventually spill over onto the political landscape.

American voters are too easy at forgetting who screwed them from election to election. But, it’s easier to remind people nowadays. Cripes, all you need to do is crank up a press conference filled with Republican promises of jobs and match it side-by-side with the ZERO quantity of jobs/infrastructure legislation they have offered up since the last election.

“Money is not the problem,” the union leader tells me brightly — and for a moment I feel far from debt-stricken, austerity-obsessed Europe…

“Women,” says the union leader, Mie Opjordsmoen of the Norwegian Confederation of Trade, a mother of two. “Norwegian women work, pay taxes and have babies. That’s our secret.”

I am touring one of the world’s last functioning welfare states and finding preconceptions shattered one by one. Unions here peg their wage demands to the needs of the export industry. Employers lobby for longer parental leave for fathers. Parties win elections promising not to cut taxes.

And gender equality is treated as a competitive advantage: By law, 40 percent of Norwegian boardroom seats are filled with women. Two male cabinet members, Knut Storberget, the justice minister, and Audun Lysbakken, the minister of equality (yes, this position exists), recently took three and four months off, respectively, to look after their latest offspring. The cost of full-time toddler child care is capped at the equivalent of about two Big Macs a day thanks to state subsidies…

“One Norwegian lesson,” Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said from his modestly sized office one afternoon, “is that if you can raise female participation, it helps the economy, birth rates and the budget…”

All told, family policy, including a system of child care from a guaranteed place for 1-year-olds to after-school and vacation care, costs the Norwegian government 2.8 percent of gross domestic product. “These policies are expensive, but their cost is offset by the return in terms of female labor supply and tax revenues,” says Danielle Venn, a labor economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Even excluding oil, Oslo’s deficit of 5.4 percent of G.D.P. is a percentage point below the E.U. average…

Every two years, her union calculates wage demands by closely examining the cost base and demand situation of Norway’s export industries and then working back from that. “We negotiate for exporters first. No other industry gets more,” she explained…

Economically literate unions and employers may be necessary ingredients of a 21st-century welfare state. But nothing works without an electorate willing to pay taxes, the prime minister notes. Tax revenue accounts for 42 percent of G.D.P. here, compared with a 35 percent O.E.C.D. average.

“Many European countries have been trying to achieve the tax level of the U.S. and the welfare level of Scandinavia. That’s not possible,” said Mr. Stoltenberg. “We won two elections promising not to lower taxes. Voters know: Tax cuts mean welfare cuts.”

Entirely too rational for the average American voter – illiterate in history and economics. And our Congress and the Christian right wing would shriek with claims of the imminent anti-Christ. Collecting taxes from all for the common good, education and opportunity would make our hypocrite puritans hide under the bed.

Massachusetts’ technology sector is fueling strong growth, helping the state’s economy expand more than twice as fast as the nation’s in the first three months of this year, the University of Massachusetts reported yesterday.

Global demand for technology products and increased business spending on software and equipment have provided a strong boost in Massachusetts, which has a high concentration of companies that sell high-tech equipment, components, and services, particularly to other businesses…

“It’s the reason we have a stronger economy than the country as a whole,’’ lan Clayton-Matthews said. “We export a lot of science and technology-based goods and services to other countries around the world, especially developing countries like China and India.’’

The global tech boom helped the Massachusetts economy grow at a 4.2 percent annual rate, accelerating from 3.3 percent in the last quarter of 2010, UMass said. The US economy expanded at a 1.8 percent rate in the first quarter, after growing at a 3.1 percent rate the previous period, the Commerce Department reported yesterday.

In March, the state’s 8 percent unemployment rate, though historically high, remained well below the national rate of 8.8 percent.

Reflecting technology’s strength, some Massachusetts companies are fiercely competing for skilled workers, offering cash bounties to find them…

The same is happening on an even larger scale in Silicon Valley. Growth and expansion there requires another 150,000 staff and local sources can’t provide for the situation.

I note this – as I have been for years – that college-level education in one or another arena of technical prowess is what should be recommended to those with any apparent talent, a bent for geek adventure and economics. Ain’t nothing wrong with being overqualified until the right job happens along.

Abboud al-Zumar went to jail 30 years ago for his role in killing Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Now a free man, he believes democracy will prevent Islamists from ever again taking up the gun against the state.

Zumar was a prisoner for as long as Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, was president.

His release with other leading Islamists jailed for militancy is a sign of dramatic change in Egypt in the five weeks since Mubarak was swept from power by mass protests.

Zumar, 64, was a founding member of the Islamic Jihad group which gunned down Sadat during a military parade in 1981. He was released along with his cousin, Tarek al-Zumar, who had also spent three decades in jail on similar charges.

“The revolution created a new mechanism: the mechanism of strong, peaceful protests,” said Zumar, released on March 12 and one of the political prisoners who owes his freedom to the peaceful revolt against Mubarak.

“Public squares around the Arab world are ready to receive millions who can stop any ruler and expose him,” added Zumar in an interview in his home village of Nahia on the rural outskirts of Cairo.

I hope, I wonder if western governments will have learned the same lesson. Will they continue to support despots in the name of profit and industry – or will they finally admit that a nation with mechanisms in place for all sides of discourse to meet the public, a nation, with an honest chance at success offers a better, safer future for all?

To many Egyptians, Zumar’s name evokes a violent chapter in the history of a country that has been an incubator for Islamist militancy.

His release has alarmed those concerned by the Islamists’ move to the heart of public life in the new Egypt, where groups including the Muslim Brotherhood are making the most of new freedoms to organize and speak out…

“The climate for armed action is finished and the main reason is the atmosphere of freedom we are now establishing,” said Tarek al-Zumar, this week – still a leading figure in the Gama’a al-Islamiya…

“Our concern in this period is to anchor the basis of a just political system which guarantees freedoms and the state of law,” said Tarek al-Zumar, who studied for a law doctorate while in prison.

“The project of establishing the Islamic state as a political model will be determined by the ballot box … and the thing that will determine its continuation in power is the choice of the people,” he said.

RTFA. A piece of history ignored by the West. A product of the time when nothing was more important than protecting the safe flow of oil to American and European industry.

That’s changed. Uh, hasn’t it?

A Pentagon commission on diversity is recommending the U.S. military end its ban on women serving in direct combat roles — a restriction the group says is discriminatory and out of touch with the demands of modern warfare.

In its draft report, the Military Leadership Diversity Commission said the military should gradually eliminate the ban in order to create a “level playing field for all qualified service members…”

The draft report said the military’s “combat exclusion policies” do not reflect the realities of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and create institutional barriers to women, who are prevented from getting key assignments that could lead to career advancement.

“Service policies that bar women from gaining entry to certain combat-related career fields, specialties, units, and assignments are based on standards of conventional warfare, with well-defined, linear battlefields,” the report said. “However, the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have been anything but conventional.”

More than 200,000 women have served in the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since those wars began, 132 female service members have been killed, and 721 have been wounded.

Proponents of the commission’s recommendations agree that technology and circumstance have drastically altered modern warfare. They say it is difficult to distinguish between combat and non-combat roles on the front lines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Fourth and fifth-generation warfare long ago stepped aside from the conventions stuck in muddy brains trying to fight the battles of WW1 and WW2 all over again. Especially from the safe seats in Congress and the fantasy world of punditry.

Why should the United States be among the last to learn from history – and changing times?

Bending Paths

It was an unusual commission, unlike anything that Stuart Silk, a Seattle architect, had been offered in his quarter-century of practice: design three high-end custom homes for clients he would never meet. Although there were some specifications for functions and dimensions — total square feet, for example, and the number of bedrooms and baths — there wasn’t a clue as to style or a construction budget.

The commission came from Shanghai, where a Chinese developer was beginning work on a community of villas bearing stratospheric prices — 50 million to 100 million renminbi, or $7.5 million to $15 million.

How did Mr. Silk get the job? A consultant for the developer had simply seen a Palm Springs, Calif., house that he had designed, liked it, and offered him the project. Before long, the three villas expanded to nine.

Mr. Silk’s 17-person firm is among scores of small to midsize architectural practices across the United States that are enjoying a startling boom in Chinese projects — whether in spec mansions for sudden multimillionaires or quarter-mile-high skyscrapers. Although a handful of big firms, like Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of Chicago and HOK of St. Louis, have extended global tentacles for generations, it has been only in the last half-dozen years that Chinese projects have gushed down to their smaller brethren.

These firms are grateful for the commissions, and not only for the obvious reason — that the Chinese work has helped fill the void left by a listless American economy. More intriguing, the architects say, is that Chinese developers and even government agencies are proving to be better clients than their American counterparts. They say the Chinese are more ambitious, more adventurous and even more willing to spend the money necessary to realize the designs. This thrills the architects, who have artistic undercurrents that often struggle to find an outlet…

Each of Mr. Silk’s nine designs was required to be distinct, but no stylistic guidelines materialized. For the first time in his career, he wasn’t an architect interpreting a client’s tastes and personality, but an artist facing a blank canvas. “It opened up a part of my brain that hadn’t been exercised in a while,” he says…

But over all, he said, “Working in these narratives turned out to be a real win. It’s an opportunity we don’t get in the programs we usually work with here.”

RTFA. Many examples of design I’ve previously discussed in the broader community of home-builders I used to work with.

Now, a wonderful opportunity for American architects.

Shanghai and Beijing are becoming new lands of opportunity for recent American college graduates who face unemployment nearing double digits at home.

Even those with limited or no knowledge of Chinese are heeding the call. They are lured by China’s surging economy, the lower cost of living and a chance to bypass some of the dues-paying that is common to first jobs in the United States.

“I’ve seen a surge of young people coming to work in China over the last few years,” said Jack Perkowski, founder of Asimco Technologies, one of the largest automotive parts companies in China.

“When I came over to China in 1994, that was the first wave of Americans coming to China,” he said. “These young people are part of this big second wave…”

Jonathan Woetzel, a partner with McKinsey & Company in Shanghai who has lived in China since the mid-1980s, says that compared with just a few years ago, he was seeing more young Americans arriving in China to be part of an entrepreneurial boom. “There’s a lot of experimentation going on in China right now, particularly in the energy sphere, and when people are young they are willing to come and try something new,” he said.

And the Chinese economy is more hospitable for both entrepreneurs and job seekers, with a gross domestic product that rose 7.9 percent in the most recent quarter compared with the period a year earlier. Unemployment in urban areas is 4.3 percent, according to government data…

Longish, detailed and probably useful article. Starting out today – one of the few qualitative changes I would consider is making the jump to China.

You don’t need prior language skills – though they are useful. Immersive learning works great when you haven’t an alternative anyway.

The golf course is in Bangalore
Daylife/Getty Images

For decades, the United States beckoned as the land of opportunity for bright, young Indians, lured by the prospect of prestigious university degrees followed by jobs on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley.

Indians have since 2001 been the largest foreign student population on American campuses, comprising around 15 percent of all international students at colleges and universities in the United States, according to the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi.

But now, the economic crisis that has sent the U.S. economy into its worst recession in decades, has tarnished the sheen of the ‘American Dream’ for many Indians who are opting for university studies and career opportunities at home.

America’s loss may be India’s gain, analysts say, pointing to a ‘reverse brain drain’ that may see India reaping benefits for years to come as some of its smartest and most talented people put their energies into India’ economy, Asia’s third-largest.

“The brain drain has already begun to reverse. Now there are many magnets pulling the best talent. Before, the U.S. was where everyone wanted to go,” said Vivek Wadhwa, a U.S.-based Indian academic who has written a paper on the issue. India’s economy has boomed at around 9 percent growth in each of the last three years, lifting millions out of poverty and creating a generation of affluent and ambitious young Indians…

Read the rest of this entry »

Daylife/AP Photo by Haraz N. Ghanbari
Lilly Ledbetter and Barack Obama

The U.S. Senate, with Democrats now in charge, passed an equal pay measure Friday that Republicans blocked last year. The bill now goes back to the House which had passed a similar bill earlier. It is expected to be passed quickly and likely will be the first legislation to go before President Obama, who supports it…

The legislation was named after a woman who worked at a Goodyear tire plant in Gadsden, Ala., and learned after two decades she had been paid at a lower rate than her male co-workers.

Ledbetter sued and won but the U.S. Supreme Court, by one vote, overturned that ruling, finding that such cases must be filed within six months of the first case of discrimination. The new law specifies that each paycheck is a separate case of discrimination.

I’m hard pressed to understand what kind of human beings voted to return the creeps to office who suppressed this bill last time around? Is meanness and discrimination a necessary American trait?

Job seekers with no ties to any particular location often seek jobs in big cities like New York, Chicago, Illinois, Los Angeles, California, or San Francisco, California. But are these the places where they’re most likely to find a job?

Not according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Job seekers are better off looking in such cities as Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Idaho Falls, Idaho; and Rapid City, South Dakota. All of these cities registered the lowest unemployment rates in July 2008.

There are several cities with low unemployment rates and sizeable job growth. Here are 25 cities with the lowest unemployment rates and the job growth they’re experiencing, according to the BLS.

Oh, uh – before you jump in your car ready to move to Midland or Odessa, Texas. Go there for a few days in the middle of a summer week.

They have something there they call the smell of money – that ain’t really a good excuse for air.