15 posts tagged “globalization”

Here’s an interview for the new ABC show, Flash Forward (yes, not being silly this time) with two of the leads, Sonya Walger and Joseph Fiennes. They, and Jack Davenport, are all Brits. While Davenport plays a Brit in the show, Walger and Fiennes play Americans and adopt pretty convincing American accents (Walger in particular, sounds “more American” to me). But here they are speaking in their normal voices.

I now know of one colleague who is cancelling her plans to visit the United States because of the Obama administration’s changes to travel requirements.
   While I am unsure whether these are a hangover from the Bush days or not, they are fatal to US tourism, and disconnect the country from the rest of the world in terms of international travel.
   As mentioned, people from countries which were once eligible to visit the US for 90 days under the visa waiver programme (this includes close allies such as the UK—excepting British overseas nationals, as the USA now practises apartheid against British subjects) now have to fill out a form with the Department of Homeland Security 72 hours before travel.
   And although the US Government claims this takes seconds, the reality is that it takes 20 minutes per person—far longer than the old system which took mere minutes per traveller. If you are the person applying on behalf of your family to travel, be prepared to be by your computer for over an hour.
   The form applies even for people transiting who have not entered the US through Immigration—which suggests to me that whomever dreamt up this policy actually has no understanding of where US sovereignty begins.
   Americans already have a stereotype of being ignorant of overseas affairs. While untrue for the most part, policies like this do not help.
   Secondly, the US Government has the right now to charge travellers not holding a passport with a chip US$545, even if they have filled out the Homeland Security forms.
   This is despite the passport being valid. Apparently, for the United States, passports valid anywhere else in the world are not good enough for Americans.
   While the charge is at the airport’s discretion, who can tell when one would get stung?
   Americans already have a stereotype of being arrogant. While untrue for the most part, policies like this do not help.
   Hang on, there’s déjà vu there.
   The US Government, even under President Obama, is as detached from everyday Americans and the citizens of the world than ever.
   I can only hope these are things that the President has not got around to sorting out. For they sound just like Patriot Act-inspired policies that restrict freedom. Or, as the President himself once put it, ‘the failed policies of George W. Bush’.

This had me captured for a while today:

Letter from Sun Yat-sen to Henry Ford, 1924

With India being such a cosmopolitan country, it was no surprise to find so many things there that were from abroad. At the Sarovar Portico Hotel in Indore, one notices that those Gideons sure get around:

Those Gideons got to India

Cookie Man, Australian cookies

[Cross-posted] Remember Xanadu? It’s become somewhat of a cult hit even though in 1980 it was considered Olivia Newton-John’s mega-turkey. Stylistically, it sits uncomfortably between the 1970s and 1980s, as though there was a vacuum in between the decades. In one scene, Michael Beck insists to Gene Kelly that ‘It’s the ’80s’, but you know that it must have been shot in 1979 and people had not rebelled against disco at the time.
   Of course, reality tells us that you can’t mark off decades so clearly: elements of the 1970s necessarily continue into the 1980s, and some of what we regard as 1980s style had their roots in the decade before.
   But by 1982 there’s no doubt that one was in the 1980s: Rick Dees poked fun at ‘Disco Duck’ on Solid Gold and even ABBA no longer could do number-one hits.
   While there aren’t clear decade-dividers, there is a sense among us, as people, to want to bring new things into each era. Who can forget the sense of optimism we all faced as January 1, 2000 came around, even though it wasn’t technically the new millennium yet? We saw the year number beginning with 2 and it was a big deal. All those science-fiction films predicting a new era in the twenty-first century brought with them a sense of anticipation—and those that didn’t forecast the end of mankind in 1999 suggested that we might be a nicer bunch in the 2000s than we were in human history’s most violent, murderous 100 years.
   Here we are in 2008 and not that much has changed. We definitely aren’t nicer; in western countries we might well be more paranoid. But these are, in my reckoning, not twenty-first-century issues. This is leftover business from the twentieth century that we have not sufficiently dealt with, and we still have the opportunity to do something about it.
   Terrorism and nutty red brigades were with us through much of my childhood but various western democracies thought they could turn their backs on them. Arafat’s PLO came to the fore in the 1970s, not the 1990s. The negative effects of globalization have been with us since the postwar period. As has communism in Red China, which has brought us the censorship that western media are only now, with days to go before the Beijing Olympics, making a song and dance about.
   Just as a new decade does not begin to be “felt” till two years in, a new century won’t be felt till, I reckon, its second decade begins.
   The twentieth might well have been marked by our arrogance and over-dependence on technology as the Titanic set sail. And as that century dawned, indeed we were bullish about globalization brought about by shipping routes and the British Empire. As the Titanic sank, we were reminded that we could never be over-confident about technology. We might have said a few years before that we had too much to lose from going to war, with the expansion of global trade, but humankind sank into the Great War with new innovations of aeroplanes and machine-guns.
   Yet humans remain optimistic as we head into the 2010s. I would say there are more Americans hopeful about Sen. Obama’s race toward the White House than Sen. McCain’s at this stage, regardless of the latter’s attack advertising—because Obama has not defined things well. There is a sense of casting off the twentieth century. You see the same in so many areas as people question the economic system, politics, and how we are exposed to global disasters through the media. You also see questioning of the media. All of this inquisitiveness seems to be happening on a wider scale, maybe sparked off by authors and thinkers writing in the last part of the twentieth century trying to lay some useful groundwork for the rest of us as their ideas got out.
   What sort of century is emerging? We would like to think that we can solve all the world’s problems because we are blessed with the ability and desire; yet institutions seem to constantly thwart our collective wills. Various individuals take matters into their own hands, be they international philanthropists setting up funds for poorer countries or bloggers trying to break the mainstream media’s deadlock on what we are allowed to know.
   Meanwhile, corporations try to feed consumers products as a substitute for Orwellian soma—not necessities which we should look at having, but unnecessary items that take us away from being true to ourselves.
   I don’t have the answers to what sort of century we will face. I know what sort of century I would like to face. One where people from all walks of life can realize their dreams, where people can receive the education they want, and where deceit and avarice are shown to be harmful to the collective good. One where imagination and innovation drive forward human progress, rather than impeded by society or corporations because they view them as threats.
   The answer might lie in examining the changes in style between decades. Were they the result of companies dictating fashion or some deeper change in the Zeitgeist, driven by many individuals?
   I like to think it was the latter. When the end of 1999 came about, I certainly was not told to head into town to see how crowded or fun Wellington city was. I just went. Something drew me to it.
   There is something to be said about people driving the mood of the planet, and how we still have a chance to shape the twenty-first century’s destiny as we cast off the negative effects of the previous one.
   We know where we goofed. We have seen it in the destruction of freedom or the greed of certain parties; we have seen it through a failure to understand other cultures or how institutions block aid from getting to the people. We know there must be solutions, and we now have a twentieth-century invention—the internet—where we can band together, make some noise and maybe generate real progress. We just need to wake up, realize what is useless in our lives, what we can do for ourselves and others, and get back to first principles. Technology, for instance, is here to serve us, rather than direct us into buying the next little toy to waste away whatever precious seconds we have each day.
   We might define the new century through new energies (hybrid cars are so last century—we can do better), through new ways of reaching people in need (which we are already doing through unprecedented dialogue), and through redefining institutions to turn them into agents of change rather than stiflng collectives of people.
   It’s through simplifying our lives and our directions that we can sense what we might want in the twenty-first century. Have a think—and maybe we can just put something out there into that Zeitgeist as this century really begins unfolding.

The below is from an entry I made at my main blog, based on some very basic maths after reposting a graph from the Historian’s blog.

Just last week I was listening to the radio—one of the foreign-owned stations that seem to populate the FM airwaves (probably Coast)—and the DJ gave one of the less intelligent commentaries about oil prices I had heard. He also referred to ‘gas prices,’ which of course is the incorrect term here where gas refers to gas, not petrol or gasoline.
   Petrol prices in New Zealand rise and fall based on American news—something that is not that relevant when it comes to how much we pay for oil. When there is a rise in the US dollar oil price, but the New Zealand dollar has strengthened over the same period, then that rise should not be felt at the pump as greatly.
   Let’s assume oil prices are at US$120 a barrel and there is no inflation between 2000 and 2008. (Of course, it was less than $120 in 2000 and more than $120 now.)
   In 2000, with the New Zealand dollar at an all-time low against the greenback, we would have had to fork out NZ$300 to get that barrel.
   In 2008, with the New Zealand dollar having gone back to around 1982 levels against the greenback, the equivalent is NZ$154.
   So for a New Zealand company buying oil, it actually costs less.
   However, I am ashamed to note that once you factor in the real prices, we are looking at these figures:

2000 price of crude, US$27·39 (real, not adjusted), equalling NZ$68·48
2008 price of crude, US$134, equalling NZ$171·79

Pump prices—and I know I am ignoring refining costs and a whole bunch of other stuff—are:

2000: NZ$0·97 per litre
2008: NZ$2·14 per litre

This actually means the rate of increase New Zealanders are experiencing is not as bad as the oil prices offshore based on New Zealand dollars, even if our prices are rising more quickly than Europe’s.
   While the Americans, relative to their dollar, are paying four times more, we are paying just under three times.
   Whatever the case, I think it’s worth informing the public—especially on whom we might be able to blame these price rises. And that demand and supply have nothing to do with these high prices, because demand is actually dropping—so we can stop blaming the Americans for their big SUVs and the Red Chinese for buying new cars.
   The targets are most likely the speculators, institutional investors, price fixers, the corporations and the cartels.
   And it seems to lend some weight to isolating a small country from these threats, globalizing where it makes sense—and in other areas, developing a better model in isolation to show the world how things might be done.

The Guardian makes it sound like Ashes to Ashes’ second episode was a ratings’ disaster. The headline: ‘Almost 1m viewers desert Ashes to Ashes’.
   That makes 6·1 million viewers in the UK, which admittedly makes the headline true, but it was obviously written by a glass-half-empty type.
   A positive headline would have been ‘Six million watch Ashes to Ashes’ because, when you think about it, six million is still a lot of people.
   In fact, six million is more than what the series première of Life on Mars managed in 2007.
   The desired effect may be to get more viewers deserting the new series if they feel things are looking down. And that will be a sad indictment on us as gullible people, watching what we are told is popular.
   On Friday, at lunch at the Villa Margarita, I asked a young Briton from Leeds what was popular in her home country.
   She replied that Heroes, Lost, Desperate Housewives and other American shows were the must-sees in the UK, just as they are here thanks to heavy promotion and good timeslots. New Zealand programmers will follow their American network counterparts, too, scheduling without regard to local tastes. There are exceptions, such as TV3 with Outrageous Fortune, but a visiting American would feel quite at home here (providing one waits several weeks to numerous months for the episodes to catch up to where the US is). The best American (or British or domestic) shows that have found limited audiences do not make it, or get stuck in bad timeslots. Americans themselves are annoyed at the dumbing-down of their networks, so what they are being fed is hardly something they have asked for.
   Does this suggest a willing globalization in television programming, shutting down local industry in favour of a commoditized broadcast? Will we have more singing and dancing competition shows and reality crap shoved down our throats?
   Few want more reality junk but it is cheap to make. Ashes to Ashes isn’t cheap, with all of its sets, photography and music usage. When in doubt about a bad decision, just follow the money.
   As if to show the power of a headline, Ashes to Ashes may still lose viewers for episode three, thanks to a weak outing last week. Life on Mars wasn’t always perfect, either, and had some off-weeks. But the producers of the new show know what our expectations are like, and I had hoped that things would remain or build on the high that Matthew Graham gave us in the pilot. Last week, things had settled too much and Ashes to Ashes felt uncomfortable in its own skin, with Gene Hunt having fewer great lines.
   Six million one hundred thousand still means that enough Britons think that Ashes to Ashes is among the best shows in the UK, and let’s hope the third episode gets us back to the high of the first, or even that of Life on Mars. I’d hate for the newspapers to think their headlines actually affect us when in reality their circulations are dropping, and for the producers pushing cheap reality and quiz fare to think they can win against properly scripted shows.

New Zealanders and Americans are divided by a common language, it seems.
   All the reports I read about the US election said that the economy is the number one issue on Americans’ minds. Why, then, did Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton do so well in the Super Tuesday primaries for her party? She has just taken California, I see.
   As a Wal-mart board member, Mrs Clinton was quite happy to be anti-union and see jobs outsourced to Red China. That was her position from 1986 to 1992.
   By the time she was First Lady, her husband presided over an administration that saw this trend continue in full force, satisfying the technocrats. That was her position from 1993 to 2000.
   Today, while Sen. Clinton says Wal-mart no longer represents her beliefs and that she respects the right of workers to unionize, she still took $20,000 in campaign contributions from Wal-mart. That is her position in 2008.
   Add the 2004 joke she made about Mahatma Gandhi being some guy who pumps gas in St Louis, and it’s plain to see that Sen. Clinton is no friend of the American worker. She spent only a year working with a non-profit—certainly her record is not as grand as she would like voters to think.
   Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton thinks along élitist lines and that is the one consistent position she has had throughout her life. Watch any speech she gives: she thinks she’s better than you.
   If it’s about the economy, stupid, to borrow a 1990s phrase, then she would be the last person whom I would associate as being a friend of the American worker.
   Or of any worker.
   Sorry, Democrats, this guy sitting in New Zealand just doesn’t get it.
   Mind you, if she gets her party’s nomination, this sure is ammo for the Republicans to use.