Category: Society

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rePost::Zero rupee note that Indians can slip to corrupt officials who demand bribes Boing Boing

Maybe someone could do something like this for us Filipino.  I’d definitely buy a reasonably priced note.

An Indian U of Maryland physics prof came up with these zero rupee notes that Indians can slip to officials who demand bribes. They’ve been wildly successful, with a total run over over 1,000,000 notes, and the reports from the field suggest that they shock grafters into honesty. Fifth Pillar is the NGO that produces the notes, and they’re available for download in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.
via Zero rupee note that Indians can slip to corrupt officials who demand bribes Boing Boing.

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rePost:: The final failure of the Meiji right-wing ideology … Japan fades into the future with a walking stick…::Bronte Capital

This is very nice for the Philippines. Filipinos will undoubtedly grab this opportunity if it was presented to them. It is really sad that we may lose more of the cultural diversity in the world. Globalization has almost made sure that there is a world culture developing.  When I think about this more I realize that the Philippines if it doesn’t get it’s act together will surely see a lot of its culture forgotten. In this respect when ( it is not an if, an if means Japanese culture has not died) Japan takes the immigration plunge their great effort in recording and preserving their culture will not go into waste. I hope we are not too poor to not be able to save most of the cultural capital our beautiful country has.

Japan will have a median age of about 55. This means that the vast bulk of the Japanese population (or more precisely Japanese women) will be well beyond child-bearing age and given low fertility rates anyway (below 2.0 per woman) the population will crash. That is more-or-less baked in. Simple equation – most the women past child-bearing age and very low fertility amongst those who bear children anyway.
There is a solution – immigration. There are an endless supply of well educated and skilled young people (mostly) from the subcontinent who would happily move to a developed country. There are more than a few from China too. Australia will import them. Ampontan rhetorically asked where I expected them all to fit into Japan? Well that is easy – with a demographic like that I expect them to fit into the slots left by the dying warriors of Japanese industrialization.
If Japan does not do it then aging and death is inevitable. The working population will be stuck looking after and funding the huge numbers of retired. Japan’s industrial growth – now anemic – will collapse entirely with its population. The great Japanese industrialization experiment will walk slowly into the setting sun aided by a walking stick.
There is of course an alternative which is modest levels of immigration. New immigrants will – like it or not – be Asian – mostly from the subcontinent. Over time they will also include many Muslims. The Japanese will have to accept – as Australians have accepted – that their children will breed with these people. As a white Australian I have fully accepted that it is likely as not that my grandchildren will arrive as little brown babies. I do not have a problem with that.
But Japan is a country where they won’t let their hookers sleep with foreigners because – well they are foreigners. (It was that story in this post that got Ampontan all upset with me.) But it does not have to be that way. There can eventually be an Asian co-prosperity zone in Japan – it will be with Japanese children and other Asian children and eventually their joint grandchildren. The Meiji racist ideology does not have to end with a walking stick – it can end in a truly multicultural society that will lead Japan onto greater things than the original modern revolutionaries of the Meiji era could ever have imagined.
via Bronte Capital: The final failure of the Meiji right-wing ideology … Japan fades into the future with a walking stick….

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Research Of The Day (ROTD):The Only Reason I'd Love To Move Abroad:The Bellows » Paper of the Day the First

Yes, there is a part of me that wants to move abroad. It’s the part that believes Silicon Valley/New York/London is where the tech action is. Where I’d likely find people of like or at least similar aspirations. Take for instance the Philippine Tech Community. Its the same faces, and there is a reason for this, for keeping an 8 hour job and still coding/blogging/learning new programming languages/coding up personal projects is tiring and people who are either not rich/not very very smart/ very very productive/ very very lucky can do it. Life get’s in the way. I consider myself lucky , and this is the only reason why I am at least at the periphery or maybe the first row at the outside of the Philippine Tech Community, not quite there yet but slowly inching inwards. Sometimes it’s not about greener pastures. It’s what a musician and a dancer working in Hong Kong Disneyland says when interviewed by Kara Davin in last weeks episode of OFW Diaries, It’s the opportunity to practice something you love.

And I think that to a certain extent, people make these choices based on conceptions they have about themselves and the people they’d like to be. If you see yourself as someone who is interested in art, you may move to New York, not just because there is a lot of great art there, but also because you’ll meet people there who are themselves interested in art and who will nudge you toward more involvement with art and artists. Or you might move to Denver, because you want to be an outdoorsy person. People you meet there will typically be outdoorsy, and they’ll make it easier for you to become this outdoorsy person that you hope to be. At a more general level, people may simply feel that they’re “destined for bigger things”, or ready for a “simpler life”, and they may choose cities based on these feelings. Not just because they’re going where they want to go, but because they’re committing themselves to a certain lifestyle, and placing themselves in a situation where the people they come to know will act as constraints on them, pushing them to behave in a certain way. After all, you can love art in Denver and be outdoorsy in New York.
It seems to me that people want to be a lot of things that they can’t necessarily become on their own. A move can be a means to commit oneself to a certain course, and to make it harder to back away from a desired goal or style of life.
via The Bellows » Paper of the Day the First.

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rePost::Born Poor? | Santa Fe Reporter

“Inequality,” she says, “really holds us back.”
Bowles offers a key reason why this is so. “Inequality breeds conflict, and conflict breeds wasted resources,” he says.
In short, in a very unequal society, the people at the top have to spend a lot of time and energy keeping the lower classes obedient and productive.
Inequality leads to an excess of what Bowles calls “guard labor.” In a 2007 paper on the subject, he and co-author Arjun Jayadev, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, make an astonishing claim: Roughly 1 in 4 Americans is employed to keep fellow citizens in line and protect private wealth from would-be Robin Hoods.
The job descriptions of guard labor range from “imposing work discipline”—think of the corporate IT spies who keep desk jockeys from slacking off online—to enforcing laws, like the officers in the Santa Fe Police Department paddy wagon parked outside of Walmart.
The greater the inequalities in a society, the more guard labor it requires, Bowles finds. This holds true among US states, with relatively unequal states like New Mexico employing a greater share of guard labor than relatively egalitarian states like Wisconsin.
via Born Poor? | Santa Fe Reporter.

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rePost:Confidence Of Filipino Industrialist:A Damaged Culture: A New Philippines? – James Fallows

The countries that have most successfully rebuilt their economies, including Japan and Korea, went through extremely protectionist infant-industry phases, with America’s blessing; the United States never permitted the Philippines such a period. The Japanese and Koreans now believe they can take on anybody; the confidence of Filipino industrialists seems to have been permanently destroyed.
via A Damaged Culture: A New Philippines? – James Fallows.