globalization

Global warming campaign and festival for high school students worldwide. Student rock concerts aroud the world on Earth Day 2008 (April 19) to be webcast on this site. Get your city's student bands involved. Make music and make cooling.
- cburell on 2007-06-19

An Interview with Thomas L. Friedman

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Friedman: It was interesting, Nayan. I was at Nascom, the Indian
high-tech association's annual meeting, and full of some of the
brainiest and most innovative people in India, but the buzz, the
subterranean buzz that I found there was all about, "woe is me,"
basically. We're now doing a lot of BPO, that's India' specialty,
business process outsourcing. That's everything from answering your
phone, to writing your software, to running your back room, your human
resources department. A good business, but India's getting competition
in that field now. Vietnam will come in there, Eastern Europe. They've
got to move, they know, to KPO, knowledge process outsourcing, where you
don't just tell me – I don't just do the "how," I do the "what." I
actually conceive of the project, the idea, and then I execute and
implement it. To do that, though, you need a different type of mindset.
You need a mindset that's questioning, that's innovative, that's
synthesizing. And Indian education has been very good for pounding in
those fundamentals. We know that, and nobody does it better. It's been
great at getting people who know how to do the "how." But it has not
been great for creating people to know to ask the "what." And – or the
"why." And, of course, that's the strength of the United States. We need
more people with good fundamentals, they need more people who are
creative, and that's where you're getting this kind of grand
convergence. So I think you're going to see, over time, a loosening up
of the rigid Indian education system, and introducing a lot more "what"
and "why" into the classroom, because the talent is there, we know. It's
just really how you shape it and reshape it.
I know that I've caught a wave, Nayan, and so...

Chanda: What was that wave?

Friedman: What was that wave? And I guess that the best way I could
summarize it is that it's a wave of anxiety, it's a wave that basically
I would describe like this: Our parents were sure that they were going
to live better than their parents, and they were just as sure that we,
their children, were going to live better than them. Our generation is
now coming to retirement worried that we may not retire as well as our
parents. And you know what, our kids may not live as well as we do. And
I think that anxiety, that anxiety that we are now being touched by
people who have never touched us before, we're competing with people who
we've never competed with before, and, fortunately, we're collaborating
with people we've never been able to collaborate with before. But for
all those reasons, there is a wave of anxiety out there, that there's a
lot of things changing; a lot of traditional boundaries are being
eliminated, competition is much more intense. And, gosh, I wonder if my
kids are going to live as well as me.

Chanda: So the fear of the unknown, of what is ahead. Things are
changing so fast.

Friedman: It's the fear of the unknown, Nayan, and I would say the
known, because it's the fear of what people see as real competition now,
coming from corners that they've never seen it before, coming in the
white-collar realm, not just the blue-collar realm where we've become
used to it, and not knowing where it stops. OK, the call-center
operator, well that's not important, but my radiologist, you know, is
now using outsourcing to have X-rays read somewhere. My accountant, you
know, can now draw on someone in India to do accounting. So now so many
more things now seem able to be digitized, automated or outsourced.
Where that starts or stops is I think what has a lot of people concerned.

Chanda: Judging by the reaction you have got in Silicon Valley, you have
been almost made into a prophet there. Now how do you see the US high
tech companies adjusting to this flat world?

Friedman: Now, you know, the good news is everything I learned about the
flat world, I learned from companies. I learned from CEO's, CIO's and
CTO's, who were doing it. Two things were happening. One thing is, they
were doing it, but they weren't talking about it. Because no one – who
wanted to talk about outsourcing?

Chanda: Right.

Friedman: And it's one of the kind of reasons that I walked into a
vacuum on this book, an intellectual vacuum, is that the people who are
doing it, and boy they're doing it, they are doing it at the cutting
edge, and thank goodness because they're really driving American
competitiveness and companies forward. But they didn't want to talk
about it. Nobody wanted to talk about it.
1 more annotations...
- Chanda: The other group of people I think who have been very troubled by
  your book is the education circle in the United States, I've been
  hearing from people who are extremely worried as to what this flat world
  means for you as an educated system. What do you think is going to
  happen there?
  
  Friedman: Well, you know, if I've gotten feedback from any group, any
  single group, more than any other, it's from American educators, school
  superintendents, teachers and whatnot. All of whom, you know, sense that
  we're not really staying at the cutting edge, that we're not getting
  this competition, and we're not strategizing enough about it. And it's
  actually quite exciting, there's an incredible amount of experimentation
  going on in education in America today. I'm actually an optimist. I'm
  actually much more optimistic today than when you and I talked about the
  book a year ago. Because I see the reaction not just to the book but to
  the moment that the book describes. It's not one of triumphalism, not
  "We'll be OK, we'll all be fine." No, no, it's "Whoa, the sky is
  falling! Good, that's good." The sky actually isn't falling, you know,
  it's not that bad. But that's good, the reaction has been immediate,
  it's been energetic and it's been mobilized. And so what I've seen in
  going out to schools is a tremendous amount of experimentation about
  what is the right approach to improve our math, science fundamentals, to
  get more young men and women into math and science. And so what I've
  done, is I'm now updating the book, there'll be a new 2.0 version,
  there'll be a new version of the book out in mid-April. It's just
  expanded and updated, basically. And I've focused a lot, in this book,
  this new version, on education, on what I call "the new middle." We knew
  what the old middle-class jobs were. Well I would argue that in the flat
  world, with certain things being outsourced and digitized, we now really
  ought to think about what are the new middle jobs, because there's, we
  need a middle class. So what will be the jobs? What I really did last
  year, Nayan, was go around to American companies and say, "Who works
  here? Him over there, what does he do? She looks like she's got an
  interesting job, what's she up to?" And after enough of this, I
  basically distilled, down to eight categories, what I called the
  categories of the new middle. And these aren't specific jobs, you know,
  widget operator here, you know. It's sort of broad categories, and these
  will be the new categories of the new middle. I'll go through them very
  quickly for you. One is great collaborators. When so many more things
  are going to be made in global supply chains, the ability to be a great
  collaborator, to be able to work cross-culturally and multinationally,
  there's going to be a huge number of jobs around managing and
  coordinating these global supply chains. Second are great leveragers,
  people who can leverage technology, so one person can do the job of
  twenty. Rather than competing with India or China, where twenty people
  might do the job of one, you make up for the labor cost by leveraging
  technology. Third are great explainers. Boy, there's going to be a whole
  industry in explaining. Because there's enormous complexity out there,
  so whether you're a teacher, a manager, a journalist, the ability to
  explain this complexity is going be in huge demand. Fourth, I would call
  great localizers. Great localizers are people who can localize the
  global. What does that mean? They can take the power of this global
  platform and turn it into a local business. Now that's everything from
  the eBay entrepreneur, Mom and Pop who have now started a business on
  eBbay, to the garage owner in New Haven, who goes online one day and
  says to his partner, "Hey Bill, did you see this? We can get out hubcaps
  for half-price from Romania at half the cost that it would take us to
  get them from Rochester." So they're leveraging the global platform, by
  localizing the global. There'll be a huge industry in that, Nayan.
  Fifth, I'd say, are gonna be people who are great adapters. People who
  can stay one step ahead of the forces of digitization and automation.
  And that's going to apply to a lot of people in a lot of industries.
  Sixth would be what I would call people who are passionate
  personalizers. If you can bring real passion and a personal touch to any
  vanilla task, there's going to be a job for you in the flat world.
  Seventh I would call anything green. Nayan, anything green, and there is
  a job for you in the twenty-first century. Because green technology is
  going to be the industry of the 21st century. So those are some of the
  categories that I'm looking at.

15 Jun 07

Beyond School: The Best Idea I've Ever Had: A Cool Way to Fight Warming and Create Global Citizens

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activism education global_warming globalization

This is my idea, but it's one that will help education high school students that they can have power to create the changes needed to ameliorate global warming. It's a global rock concert charity idea, student-promoted and -managed, all through web 2.0.
- cburell on 2007-06-15

28 Mar 07

Climate-change report expected to project rising temperatures and sea levels - International Herald Tribune

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economics global_warming globalization politics science usa

In a new report issued on Monday, the United Nations Environment Program said that the most recent evidence from mountain glaciers showed they were melting faster than before, or 1.6 times the average of the 1990s and three times the loss rate of the 1980s. The agency warned that the trend was likely to continue because 2006 was one of the warmest years on record in many parts of the world.

Also Monday, there were new concerns about climate change from low- lying parts of the world. Indonesia could lose about 2,000 islands by 2030 because of warming, Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar said.

Over the past year, international concern over what to do about global warming has grown along with concrete signs of climate change in developing regions like Africa, where water is running low, and in developed regions, like Europe, where there was a marked lack of snow at Alpine ski resorts in early January.

Even so, political leaders are groping for ways to tackle the problem. Europe has adopted a program that caps the amount of emissions from industrial producers.

But the world's largest emitter, the United States, is still debating whether to adopt a similar policy and developing countries like China are resisting caps on the grounds that the industrialized world contributed about 75 percent of the current volume of greenhouse gases and should make the deepest cuts.

That situation has hampered the chances of an effective solution, which experts say will require all countries to cut emissions or become more energy efficient.

A more democratic world rejects Bush's globalism - The Boston Globe

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democracy globalization latinamerica mideast usa

When democracy opposes capitalism and globalization.... - cburell on 2006-10-03

Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him - New York Times

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environment globalization usa whitewashing

Let's whitewash science! - cburell on 2006-10-03

The Left Needs More Socialism - Yahoo! News

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communism democracy globalization usa

Latin America Nationalizing Resources: US Experts "Worried"...

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globalization imperialism latinamerica oil usa

Smells like corporate propaganda. You could write a small book on the techniques of this article to justify US intervention in these countries, - cburell on 2006-10-03