sweatshop athletes

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Via CraigBlog (of Craigslist fame):

The theme of the 2004 summer Olympic Games is “celebrate humanity,” yet the workers who make the gear and clothing for the upcoming Olympics suffer terribly inhumane working conditions and have few rights. Workers in official Olympic manufacturer Fila’s factories endure forced overtime, get fined for mistakes they make, and are intimidated out of joining trade unions. This is no way to celebrate humanity!

You can read Oxfam’s view and see how companies took the news, and then sign the petition if you so feel like it.

slum economies

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I read an article in today’s BBC news about a magazine by and for slum dwellers in India. It’s different from the Street Spirit/Spare Change/other publications by the homeless that you see in the states, because the target audience is not the guilt-ridden middle class. It reminds me of a paper I read about “Serving The World’s Poor, Profitably, which made the claim that slums have functional economies on their own and that companies, rather than treating slums as a problem to be solved by the goverment, can instead provide services and goods to slum dwellers, improving their standard of living, while at the same time making (some) profit. When I first read it, it seemed exploitative, but now I’m wondering if market forces really can make substantial differences in the quality of life for the urban poor.

Part of what helped change my mind was hearing a talk about Project Impact, which tries to develop cheaper manufacturing methods for medical technologies and spin those off to companies in India. These things make me wish I did more socially redeeming engineering work.

canonical experiences

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Yesterday I went to have lunch with my friend Brandon, who is now the Technology Director of OJC Technologies. He told me about a piece of software he had been working on called WebEasel, which seemed pretty neat, even if I don’t have an aunt named Millie. We went to the Courier Cafe, where I had a canonical lunch of skinny dippers (the best potato skins, hands down, that I will ever find), soup (gaspacho) and half a turkey club sandwich, and a Green River phosphate. When I visit home I have very little time, so when I go to my old stomping grounds I end up ordering the same thing each time. I wonder if this serves to calcify my memory or something.

I also got to talk to Dave Young, who also works at OJC, but on the Champaign Urbana Community Wireless Network project, which got a grant from the Soros Open Society Foundation to build a free community wireless network. They are sticking wireless radios in streetlamps and on buildings and trying to make some sort of multi-hop network that is free to the community.

Another cool idea Dave was telling me about was using buses to deliver email wirelessly. So that when the bus drives by your house it drops off your email and picks up any email that you have to send. It’s a weird idea, and I’m not sure if it’s much more inexpensive then providing some sort of free low bandwidth internet access, but it’s a fun mental image. It reminds me of old scifi novels which try to high-tech-ify existing technologies.

6 to 8 weeks

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What is up with the ubiquity of “allow 6 to 8 weeks for delivery?” It’s standard on all TV-direct advertising, but also on magazine subscriptions, as I found out recently. Perhaps this is something they cover in marketing classes. The best explanation I can come up with is that it take 6-8 weeks for you to completely forget that you bought something, so that when it finally arrives you are overjoyed at the unexpected blessing of your ginzu knife set/julienne fry maker/Foreman grill/subscription to the New Yorker.

Romanian

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Yesterday I went to my friend Alexandra’s house for lunch with her, her father, and her grandmother, where she cooked up a storm — the heartiest lunch I’ve had in a while. Afterwards her father made some Turkish coffee in an Ibrik, which was quite tasty. He told me that he had some mp3 samples of his music on his homepage, which I’m listening to at the moment. I really need to go to CNMAT more often — I miss the computer and contemporary music scene.

After lunch we helped Alexandra with her Romanian flashcards. Romanian orthography is very complicated — in the 19th century they switched from Cyrillic to Roman letters in an attempt to assert nationalistic pride in their Roman heritage (Romanian is a Romance language). When they were under Soviet influence, the orthography was changed to make it more Slavic, although they stopped short of moving back to Cyrillic. Now that they are out from under the boot, the orthography has switched back to the pre-Soviet spellings. As as result, the contemporary student of Romanian must learn alternate spellings for many words, and many words have interesting stories behind them, like cerneala, which means ink and comes from the Russian word for “black.” Or so I was told.

It’s fun to learn new things, even if they are of dubious use…

safety valve

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I’ve talked to my friend Liz recently about Sex and the City (SATC) and how it it I think it acknowledges its own unrealism while not addressing it. People love that show because they wish their lives would be like that, but the show seems to take pains to remind people that what they see is not real or necessarily feasible. So do we call that kind of art subversive or not? Does it secretly change cultural norms and reshape people’s views of society despite avoiding directly addressing those issues? Or is it merely pap for the masses to keep the subservient to some dominant state interests (to borrow a little radicalization from Boal).

Liz mentioned an interesting theory to me, which I shall call the safety valve theory. She says SATC “provides the public with enough edge and ‘scandal’ to keep them believing that they are still a part of a free society.” It acts a safety valve for society by using humor to defuse tension and dissatisfaction. So they will show women blowing thousands of dollars on shoes in order for her to live her own independent lifestyle. In the world of SATC, merchantile excess is the key to personal independence

I am not a regular watcher of the show, but I have seen a few episodes. I think that although it proposes a liberated sexual identity for women, at the same time it denies its own reality. That, coupled with the money leading to personal independence noted above presents a dangerous message I think. I disagree very much that in order for women to be independent they must be able to buy expensive shoes, and yet that is what SATC would have us believe.

Perhaps I am reaching too far to find a reason for not liking the show. But watching it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I’m trying to figure out why.