Categories
ranting

long time no updateness

Due to the yummy downtime I did not get to post several things I wanted to post before I departed S’pore. Too bad. So sad. And since I have been back in los Estados Unidos I have been the posting slack master. I have several half completed posts I would like to finish and get up here for your viewing pleasure but, alas I have not. My current list of reasons why I have not feed the masses any new verbage include: sinus infection, working strange hours, jet laaaaag, pool, foosball, ping-ping, playstation, x-box and general back-in-the-states malasie. So to sum it up, I am failing to appologize for the lack of updates and stating that I’ll get to it when I get to it. Thank you for your support.

Categories
ranting

Umm… Yummy down time

Confused last time you tried to access confusion and it was not here? What’s that Well we (and I use the royal ‘we’ here,) had a little interruption in our (not so) regularly scheduled programming. Some nasty person or peoples out there launched a DDoS [wikipedia.org] against confusion. Actually, against a domain that was, a long time ago, hosted on the same box as confusion. The IP was never removed. All is better now—as you see. My ISP NULLed out the old IP and configured all new IPs on the box. Then because the box was still being choked by established connections I issued a reboot command but the box didn’t come back online. Don’t understand that, I mean, re-boot, go down, come back up. Not go down stay down: that’s halt. A quick call to the service provider fixed that after it became apparent that it wasn’t going to fix itself. Anyway I was going to post some stuff this week, but as I am flying off to Virginia tomorrow—YEA!—it’ll have to wait. Ciao…

Categories
ranting

15 minuets + SGD26 = more drugs than I need.

You gotta love socialist health care. I went to the ‘clinic’ here this morning: Walk in. Say “I think I have a sinus infection.” Give her my resident ID. Doctor shines a flashlight in my mouth and up my nose (hardware store standard issue black rubber model, not fancy doctors issues shiny thingy.) Doctor—well, I think so…—scribbles something illegible. “hand this to the nurse outside.” Hand the *perscription* to the *nurse*. “Take one of these once a day, one of these and these twice daily and two of these once a day. These three as needed and you must finish the treatment for this one. That’ll be 26 dollars.” I think I’m gonna take the antibiotics and stow the rest of this for sale in Virginia when I back next week. Socialist health care… I feel dirty!

Categories
ranting

toys

I wasn’t like Linus [wikipedia.org] when I was a kid. I never really carried my blanket around with me. And it was a good blanket, soft, quilted, hand made by my great grandmother. I still have it, probably because I did not carry it everywhere. I just chewed on the corners while I slept.

What I did carry around as a kid was a stuffed kangaroo—called Kabby, that my mother got with Betty Crocker [wikipedia.org] points. I carried that thing everywhere. I left it out in the rain on night and was totally distraught because I didn’t know where Kabby was. I still have Kabby, missing one eye and there is a hole in the tail where the stuffing is coming out, but I still have it.

Kabby was the last toy I got that has not been subsequently and quickly supplanted by the next, newer, toy. Growing up a geek enshrined this as I am always on the lookout for newer and better toys. A new computer, new video games, new stereo, PDA, cell phone.

Cell phones are particularly bad. My first phone, after moving up from a pager, was the Motorola MicroTAC 550, of which I can’t even find a decent picture. I then got a Nokia 252n which I used and loved for several years. When I was in Europe I got a Nokia 3300—which I still think was the best 2G phone ever and possibly the best mobile phone ever. When I returned to the US I got a 3395 specifically because it had the same interface. My cell phone revolving door really got going after I started working for a company in the mobile services space several years ago. Since then I have had a Samsung 715e, a Sony Ericsson T610 (which is the best 2.5G phone I have ever used), a Trio 650, a Nokia N-Gage, LG 6000, a Motorola v600 and lately a Sony Ericsson k700i.

Last night I feed the need to have the latest and greatest by spending an inordinate amount of money on a new toy: the Sony Ericsson z800i [sonyericsson.com]. Oh, behold! Shiney!

Categories
books

Globalization and Its Discontents

Author
Joseph E. Stiglitz

Globalization and its Discontents

I picked up Joseph Stiglitz book in the same purchase I got Naomi Klien’s No Logo and Peter Singer’s One World. Obviously there is an interest in globalization in that recipe. I’ve been reading The Economist [economist.com] for some years and been mildly informed on globalization and the backlash against it evident in the protests against the IMF, World Bank, G7/G8, WTO and other multinational bodies associated with it. I didn’t really develop an interest in globalization until I read The Best Democracy Money can Buy by Greg Palast.

Palast’s book wet my appetite but Stiglitz, who was President Clinton’s economic adviser before joining the World Bank, really lays on the blame. He places most of the blame for the Asian Financial Crisis, the Russian collapse, and Argentina’s Defaulting, on the IMF. More specifically he claims that a shift away from the Keynesian ideas that the IMF and World Bank were founded on is to blame. What caused the shift? The introduction of Thatcherism and Ragantonian ideals, the ousting of experienced economist and the promotion of free market fundamentalist at the IMF.

To support his accusations Stiglitz roams around the globe from one crisis to another pointing out the faults in the blind, ideological, one-size-fits-all prescriptions the IMF doled out to country after country in the past 25 years. Time and again the IMF’s blind belief in the Market becomes a vehicle for greed and capitalist hegemony. To back up the point that the IMF refused to learn from it’s mistakes and the experience of others Stiglitz points out several countries that refused to follow the IMF plan, and shows that while their development has not been as smooth as could be desired and they have not developed as fast as the IMF says they could, they have avoided the painful problems of many of the IMFs poster child countries: Thailand, Argentina, Russia. And stand better today than many of the countries who followed the IMF plans.

I found the section of the Asian Financial Crisis the most poignant because shortly after I finished the book I traveled to Bangkok, the epicenter of the crisis. The problems that began in Bangkok when Thailand opened it’s market to ‘hot money‘ [wikipedia.org] are always recalled as something that happened ‘over night.’ How true those statements are really became apparent when I was in Bangkok. The skyline is filled with half completed skyscrapers and rusting cranes that have sat empty since 1997. Many construction sights literal closed the doors one night and never opened them again, putting hundreds of workers on the street over night.

After nearly a decade Bangkok is just beginning to recover from it’s nightmare. If Stiglitz is to be believed the IMF leadership, which shares a large part of the blame because it pushed questionable policies faster than was advisable and without tailoring them for local conditions, has not learned its lesson. Stiglitz acknowledges that the goals of the IMF, the goals of Globalization, are not inherently bad, and need not lead to the problems that we have seen. Rather it is the way the IMF uses it’s political power and money to force these ideas on countries that are not ready for them that has lead to so much suffering and poverty.

Globalization is not a new movement, it is the as old as civilization. It is the force that sent caravans down the Silk Road and the wind that launched the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria across the Atlantic. The goal now should be to move forward in a way that does not destroy entire societies so that a few rich people can get richer. Modern globalization was sold to the world as a way to bring the worlds poor into a better world. It has, to a large extent, made many of their lives worse while being hijacked to make the rich richer.

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