It looks like the The Indiana Law Blog is back up and running since the end of July. Welcome back to the land of the blogging Marcia. For those of you who may be unfamiliar, Marcia Oddi tends to cover Indiana judicial opinions, environmental developments, and state government.
Toyota prefers Canadian workforce to American
While Governor Daniels is headed to Japan and Taiwan in an effort to attract jobs, this story discussing Toyota’s decision to build a new plant in Woodstock, Ontario instead of in the U.S. has disturbing implications if Toyota’s views of the American workforce are accurate and/or widespread. Basically, Toyota’s spokesman said that Canadians were easier to train than Americans and the presence of Canada’s national healthcare system added additional savings not to be found in the U.S.:
Industry experts say Ontarians are easier and cheaper to train – helping make it more cost-efficient to train workers when the new Woodstock plant opens in 2008, 40 kilometres away from its skilled workforce in Cambridge.
“The level of the workforce in general is so high that the training program you need for people, even for people who have not worked in a Toyota plant before, is minimal compared to what you have to go through in the southeastern United States,” said Gerry Fedchun, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, whose members will see increased business with the new plant.
. . .
The factory will cost $800 million to build, with the federal and provincial governments kicking in $125 million of that to help cover research, training and infrastructure costs.
Several U.S. states were reportedly prepared to offer more than double that amount of subsidy. But Fedchun said much of that extra money would have been eaten away by higher training costs than are necessary for the Woodstock project.
He said Nissan and Honda have encountered difficulties getting new plants up to full production in recent years in Mississippi and Alabama due to an untrained – and often illiterate – workforce. In Alabama, trainers had to use “pictorials” to teach some illiterate workers how to use high-tech plant equipment.
“The educational level and the skill level of the people down there is so much lower than it is in Ontario,” Fedchun said.
In addition to lower training costs, Canadian workers are also $4 to $5 cheaper to employ partly thanks to the taxpayer-funded health-care system in Canada, said federal Industry Minister David Emmerson.
“Most people don’t think of our health-care system as being a competitive advantage,” he said.
Lazy Hoosiers
Wow, this from a Ft. Wayne Journal Gazette editorial:
JEERS to lazy Hoosier workers. The results of a survey conducted by America Online and Salary.com show that Hoosiers waste an average of 2.8 hours a day at work. According to the survey, only Missouri workers wasted more time at work. The top time-wasters at work: Internet surfing and socializing with co-workers. Hoosiers have already suffered accusations that we are fat and dumb. It would be a shame to add lazy to Indiana’s reputation.
Sounds to me like a recommendation for a shorter work day. If the amount of work that Employee X is getting done in a day is worth, say, $80 to you, and if the employee can get a work day’s amount of work done in 5 hours, seems like there ought to be a way to pay folks $80 to get the work done in 5 hours and then let them go, then you’ve effectively raised their wage from $10/hour to $16/hour, gotten the same amount of work accomplished, and given the worker 3 hours of their life back.
(Incidentally, I see a lot of holes in that theory, but it’s something to think about, I suppose.)
Internet Panopticon
TorporIndy has a post entitled “Dog Poop Girl.” Torpor links to this story and describes it as follows:
Subway Fracas Escalates Into Test Of the Internet’s Power to Shame
If you no longer marvel at the Internet’s power to connect and transform the world, you need to hear the story of a woman known to many around the globe as, loosely translated, Dog Poop Girl.
Recently, the woman was on the subway in her native South Korea when her dog decided that this was a good place to do its business.
The woman made no move to clean up the mess, and several fellow travelers got agitated. The woman allegedly grew belligerent in response.
What happened next was a remarkable show of Internet force, and a peek into an unsettling corner of the future.
One of the train riders took pictures of the incident with a camera phone and posted them on a popular Web site. Net dwellers soon began to call her by the unflattering nickname, and issued a call to arms for more information about her.
So now, we’re pretty much in the Panopticon.
Back in the late 18th century, Jeremy Bentham was trying to devise a prison that would ensure the maximum degree of order among its inmates. He suggested that the most order could be had if the inmates were under constant surveillance. That not being especially practical, second best would be when the inmates thought they were under surveillance at all times or at least they might be. So, he proposed an architectural solution he called the Panopticon. It was essentially a doughnut where the inmates were all in backlit cells with big windows facing the center. In the center was an observation tower where the guard could see into the cells but the inmate couldn’t tell whether he was being observed at a given time.
With present technology, we all pretty much have to assume that there is a chance we’re being observed and/or recorded at any given moment. I suspect that will have the effect of 1) creeping us out; 2) improving our behavior somewhat; and 3) lowering expectations of appropriate behavior to more accurately reflect the actual norm rather than some fictitious idealized norm.
On the other hand, Bentham’s Panopticon also made provision for the inmates to be unable to see or communicate with other inmates. But, I’d argue that’s somewhat immaterial. If you are potentially being monitored at any given time, that might tend to make your comments more circumspect.
Michael Focault summarized the principles of the Panopticon:
Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so.
Enough situations like Dog Poop Girl and the inmates, that is to say all of us, will be on notice of the unverifiable potential of being observed. But, I suppose we are missing the element of visibility. There is no visible, central authority. Just the potential of a howling mob. I’m honestly not sure which is more frightening.
Update Turns out, I’m not even the only one to make the Panopticon association with the Dog Poop Girl. Via Technorati I found this post which states:
I think that what [Foucault] meant by this is that however dangerous the idea of a Panopticon may be, with a minority controlling a majority, how much more dangerous would it be for the majority (or what passes for the majority) to compel conformity and neutralize independent thinking.
The minority of today was the girl with poor community spirit, but tomorrow it could be anyone or anything. Appearances are everything, like in this other “example of dungâ€: an old friend of mine went to work in Holland for a few months and rented a cottage in the country. One Monday he discovered his car covered with excrement. Someone from the village, far from liberal Amsterdam, suggested to him that this might have happened because he had washed his car (and so performed manual labor) on a Sunday. The pretty twitching Dutch curtains at the windows of his neighbors are today the cameras in the mobile phones of the travelers on the subway.
. . .
On the same topic, I believe that the debate about privacy is important. Not so much for the observed as for the observer and commentator. It has been proved that the larger the tribe and the greater the anonymity, the more frequent and cruel are the ‘lynchings’. The Internet is so large and so anonymous… As regards the observed, taking away privacy results in conformity. This is not only a theory but put into practice in politics and demonstrated by social psychology.
In addition to the Dog Poop Girl, the author mentions street security cameras and the Star Wars Kid.
Movable Type trouble
Just running a test. I’ve been having some issues with Movable Type that I’m trying to resolve. If this actually posts, then just take it as fair warning that posts may be sporadic until I get my technical issues resolved.
Scientist says innovation is slowing
According to an article in the New Scientist, physicist Jonathan Huebner, a physicist at the Pentagon’s Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California, says “the rate of technological innovation reached a peak a century ago and has been declining ever since. And like the lookout on the Titanic who spotted the fateful iceberg, Huebner sees the end of innovation looming dead ahead.”
he plotted major innovations and scientific advances over time compared to world population, using the 7200 key innovations listed in a recently published book, The History of Science and Technology (Houghton Mifflin, 2004). The results surprised him.
Rather than growing exponentially, or even keeping pace with population growth, they peaked in 1873 and have been declining ever since (see Graphs). Next, he examined the number of patents granted in the US from 1790 to the present. When he plotted the number of US patents granted per decade divided by the country’s population, he found the graph peaked in 1915.
. . .
He likens the way technologies develop to a tree. “You have the trunk and major branches, covering major fields like transportation or the generation of energy,” he says. “Right now we are filling out the minor branches and twigs and leaves. The major question is, are there any major branches left to discover? My feeling is we’ve discovered most of the major branches on the tree of technology.”
I have major reservations with this theory. First is the connection between population and technological advance. I’m not sure the two are related. We could plot technological advances against number of Star Wars DVD sales per year and, clearly, the year 1900 would have a much better ratio than today. The second is that time and time again over the course of history, we’ve heard people suggest we’ve “discovered it all.” That’s usually right before a major technological explosion takes place. (Kind of like you should stuff your money under the mattress when you hear someone talking about how we’ve tamed the cyclical market.)
I Get Letters
From time to time, I get letters. By way of full disclosure, this wasn’t directly in response to one of my blog entries but rather this was an e-mail sent to me in response to one of my comments to a post at the blog, In The Agora:
You’re a fucking idiot. What makes you so fucking smart? I hope someone
murders you.
I’ve said some inflammatory things in my time, but I tend to keep my discourse civil at In the Agora since it’s a forum that leans pretty well to the right, but is generally a good place for more or less rational discussions. So, I have absolutely no idea what sent this yahoo off his rocker.
GM to cut 1/4 of its US workforce
Jeeze, hard times ahead. GM chairman: Automaker to cut 25,000 jobs. That’s out of a total of 110,000 hourly workers. He cites the insane cost of healthcare. Our failure to control healthcare costs is now very visibly cutting into our bread and butter economy.
Just a thought I had a few weeks ago. But, as I recall my WWII history lessons, part of our success in that war was our ability to convert domestic manufacturing capacity into military manufacturing capacity. If another war comes along where we need to be able to build a lot of hardware, we might just have a hard time doing it with our ever diminishing domestic manufacturing capacity.
Carnies!
The Terre Haute Tribstar finally addresses the important issue of carnies! Unfortunately, they don’t talk about bearded ladies or game-operating grifters. Just the hard working operators of Luehrs’ Ideal Rides Inc. of Belleville, Ill. – a traveling carnival.
“You can’t out-smart carnival folk. They’re the cleverest folk in the world. Just look at the way they sucker regular folk with those crooked games.”
—Home Simpson.
Evansville Courier Press on Low Power Radio
The Evansville Courier Press has an article on low power radio stations entitled Low Power, Higher Calling. Back in 2000 the FCC passed rules that allowed for low power radio stations. Seems like they got hung up back in ’96 or ’98 or so, and I stopped paying attention. I remember having been annoyed because I had visions of garage-based operations playing obscure music, discussing things of local interest, and generally providing an alternative to the same-old thing.
Turns out about half of these licenses have been snatched up by Christian groups. According to the article, there isn’t much local involvement in programming the station. The folks they interviewed basically plug in network offerings out of Nashville and let it go. That’s disappointing to me. Already, if you listen to shortwave, most of the English speaking offerings seem to be the BBC, Voice of America, maybe the CBC if you’re lucky, and wave after wave of Christian broadcasting. More power to them if they have the will and the ability to fill up the spectrum. I’d just like to listen to something else. As it is, I went to XM — at least they provide musical offerings that isn’t the same old thing. But, for obvious reasons, they don’t have any particular local offerings.
The FCC has a Low Power FM Radio Service at: http://www.fcc.gov/mb/audio/lpfm/
You can search that site for offerings in your area. For example, I see that in my area there is: