07.28.08
Posted in pondering, work at 15:59 by swong
Something annoying about web design:
The field has been around for roughly 15 years. It’s displacing the iron pillar of print media. It’s changing the politics and business and culture of the first world. Fortunes have risen and fallen with the emergence of the Web. All of this upheaval has happened at the hands of clever designers and engineers. It’s like owning your own independent printing press in 1730 and being able to publish whatever the hell you want. We hold even more power than that.
So why is it that when I go to indicate my field on a web site, it’s never listed? Accounting gets its own entry. Ok, that’s a big one. Farming gets its own entry. Ok, sure, lots of farmers might be signing up to professional networking sites. Maritime gets its own entry. Uh, ok. Shipbuilding gets its own entry. Tobacco gets its own entry. Railroad manufacture gets its own entry separate from machining.
Seems all of these clever engineers brainstorm comprehensive lists of fields, but they never remember to add their own. Do I go under computer software, or Internet, or networking, or graphic design? Even on monster.com, you know, the big web based career web site apparently written by some clever web people to help match employers to candidates on the web, I had to drill through a couple of layers to find something that vaguely resembled the stuff I work on.
It’s kind of like a college application-
Ethnicity (choose one):
- African American []
- Native American []
- Filipino []
- Mexican []
- Brazilian []
- Ecuadorian []
- Peruvian []
- El Salvadorian []
- Cambodian []
- Laotian []
- Chinese – Mandarin []
- Chinese – Cantonese []
- Taiwanese
- Japanese []
- Korean []
- Mongolian []
- Micronesian []
- Polynesian []
- Haitian []
- Jamaican []
- Cuban []
- Indian []
- Pacific Islander []
- Basque []
- Sicilian []
- White []
- Other []
Yeah.
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07.24.08
Posted in environment, pondering at 12:38 by swong
Many of the arguments I see against cutting domestic fossil fuel emissions are based around a central theme: “China is growing really fast, and their oil and coal consumption will just go up and up regardless of what we do. Therefore, any measures we take here don’t matter.”
A couple of things occur to me:
What is China doing with all of those fossil fuels? Their per-capita energy consumption is still relatively low. I think that they are making stuff to sell, mostly to us. Gigatons of stuff. They’re not tossing up factories and power plants left and right for fun.
More to the point: if we bought less stuff from China, they wouldn’t make so much of it. I don’t think a blanket boycott is the answer to our environmental woes or anything. I just want to point out the direct relationship between Chinese exports and Chinese manufacturing. Besides, if we forced all of the manufacturing to return, we’d just save a little on shipping costs, localize the pollution, pay some more for domestic labor, and everyone would come out a little poorer in the long run.
It’s too facile to think of China as some alien species that’s slowly colonizing the planet. They’re in business. Like any business, they’re going about their business because we’re funding it by buying their goods and services. They’re growing fast because we’re buying more and more of their stuff.
Also, China is in business. If we developed relatively clean, reliable, economically competitive technologies for generating power, they’d implement them. Because it would let them cut costs.
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07.17.08
Posted in coffee at 21:29 by swong
I hit up the burrito shop next to <a href=”http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=89961388″>Barefoot</a> for lunch the other day. Grabbed a barbacoa burrito. Went in to Barefoot to replenish my supply of The Good Stuff. Got a cup of some Kenyan coffee to go with it.
Sat down and thought “wait… burritos don’t go with coffee. Ah nuts, I’ll try it anyway.”
Burritos *do* go with coffee.
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