Bump to baby on the beaten expat track
I watched Animal Planet while running on the treadmill today. You can’t help but smile when you watch pandas at play. But half the footage consisted of these dopey furballs falling on their heads or being taught to do things normal animals figure out on their own. They refuse to reproduce and then they’ve limited their diet to vegetation they can’t digest. They’re like an evolutionary dead-end. Only their über-cuteness saves them. I agree with the animal critics on NPR and I give them an F too.
As aptly put by the Daily Kos: There goes the neighborhood! Increasing militarisation in the US (for the oil spill, the Mexican border, to quell waves of violent crime); the Arizona immigration law; then undocumented youths are marching on the Hill demanding their rights…
The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World posits just one of the major reasons why smart immigration policy is needed:
…the competition for academic talent has gone global, with universities all over the world chasing the brightest students. Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, and Cambridge are now competing with the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the Indian Institutes of Technology, and even the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, among others…
The international competition for the brightest minds illuminates a major problem with our immigration system: it is sometimes extraordinarily difficult for people we want to attract to work here to get visas. Whether it is a farmer who wants fruit pickers, an engineering firm that wants an engineer, or students who have graduated from U.S. universities with specialized skills, it often takes years to secure the right visa.
By making it difficult for these brilliant students to stay in America, Congress is dissipating the value America receives from taxpayers’ investments in research. For, the fact is that a significant fraction of graduate students in the United States are assisted financially with funds that come from the federal government, especially in science, technology, and engineering.
In 2007, the most recent data available, the federal government spent more than $55 billion on science and engineering research at American universities and research institutions. This funding helps finance PhD programs, which are heavily populated with foreign students.
Almost $29 billion of this research spending is health related. Other funders include the Defense Department, $6.5 billion, and the Department of Energy, $6 billion.
Our universities rely on graduate students for research assistance and technical expertise. Most research does not require security clearances, and little if any research is restricted to American students.
American universities are among the world’s leading research institutions, attracting the top minds, not only those from America but also from many other countries. National Science Foundation data show that 149,233 foreign graduate students studied science and engineering in American universities in 2007, up from the previous peak of 147,464 in 2003. As Wildavsky reports, other countries are trying to catch up.
The number and percentage of PhDs in science and engineering awarded to Americans and permanent residents have declined dramatically over the past decade. Fewer Americans, and more foreigners, are being awarded PhDs in scientific and engineering fields, even as the total number of new doctorates has increased.
In computer science, and engineering, more than half of PhDs are awarded to foreigners. In 1998, 59% of PhDs in physics were awarded to Americans. In 2008, the latest data available, it had fallen to 46%. In 1998, 57% of PhDs in computer sciences went to Americans – in 2008, this had declined to 36%. In 1998, 66% of chemistry PhDs went to Americans, compared to 55% in 2008.
America attracts the cream of international students, trains them at great expense to American taxpayers, and then asks many of them them to leave.
…and the political posturing and spinning begins. The majority of primaries and gubernatorial races are still ahead of us. See the schedule here for each state: http://bit.ly/dy2Avp
For one, I’m disappointed with the administration’s slow response to this crisis. I’m surprised that Obama issued a statement last Friday still supporting the expansion of offshore oil and gas production in US waters, but I agree. I’m not surprised there was not a chorus of Democrats jumping on this statement.
Here’s a nice technical blow-by-blow of the Deepwater Horizon explosion by one of the workers on the rig:
Welcome to the World of Deep-water Risk
As I’ve said before, this accident is Mother Nature’s wake-up call to everyone. Deep-water drilling is a high-stakes game. It’s not exactly a “casino,” in that there’s a heck of a lot of settled science, engineering and technology involved. But we’re sure finding out the hard way what all the risks are. And it’s becoming more and more clear how the totality of risk is a moving target. There’s geologic risk, technical risk, engineering risk, environmental risk, capital risk and market risk.
With each deep well, these risks all come together over one very tiny spot at the bottom of the ocean. So for all the oil that’s out there under deep water — and it’s a lot — the long-term calculus of risk and return is difficult to quantify.
This is big news all through the offshore industry. There are HUGE environmental issues, and certainly big political repercussions.
It’s the biggest ecological catastrophe for the US, with far-reaching ramifications across the entire economy and politics. Energy sustainability is now more than ever a hot-button political topic, and a highly emotional one especially since knowledge of the energy sector is so minimal and greenwashed. Through various energy, social and market policies over the past fifty years the US has built up every aspect of the national infrastructure around oil and solidified our dependence on it. Projections for the most viable alternatives are decades away. And now we’re watching while the rest of the world races each other to implement clean energy industries while we’re mired in bureaucracy and catering to a fickle electorate’s every caprice. Hope this tipping point for energy policy isn’t squandered yet again.
Here’s a GREAT letter to Congress by @nelderini on what our energy policy should aim for, within a global context and in light of our current energy infrastructure. Here’s an excerpt but the entire piece is not long so you should read it:
It’s time to come up with a real plan, an honest plan, to rebuild America under a new energy paradigm. One with serious, achievable 30-year and 50-year milestones that will slash our need for fossil fuels.
A plan based on facts and science, not political expediency. One that will create true, long-term wealth, prosperity, resiliency, and self-sufficiency.
We need a Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security to prepare the country for the decline of oil, not sweet lies from the EIA which completely ignore it. As Lester Brown observed, “only Sweden and Iceland actually have anything that remotely resembles a plan to effectively cope with a shrinking supply of oil.”
We want to stop spending half a trillion dollars a year for imported oil, and develop a defense strategy for the day when our imports dry up.
We need stable, simple feed-in tariffs, which have been proven successes in Germany, Japan and Spain…not complex, corruptible, ineffectual policies like cap-and-trade or cap-and-tax. And we need them for 30 years, not one.
We want solar on every rooftop, a wind turbine in every field and a micro-hydro turbine in every running stream, wherever viable resources exist. Distributed generation is resilient, and brings value to every community. Along with it, we need distributed power storage, and a smart grid with micro-islanding so we can fall back on our own resources if the grid goes down.
We want a plan to manage our resources for the long term health of our society, like Norway and Saudi Arabia have. Instead of planning to use our remaining oil and gas so we can drive in inefficient cars more cheaply, we should be planning to convert it into the renewables and efficiency gains we’ll need in the future.
We want a defensive strategy for our grid with hardening against cyber-attacks.
We need to reverse the long process of globalization and bring manufacturing back home. Instead of a society now dependent on complex, world-spanning, highly optimized supply chains, we need local resiliency, redundancy, and diversity in all the essential sectors: energy, water, food, and security.
Finally, we need energy education at all levels — from the street to the universities, from business to government employees.
H/T Paul Kedrosky!
On the shopping list for my next civilisation run is the latest bestseller “The Ascent of Money: The Financial History of the World” of Niall Ferguson, a Scottish intellectual gifted with breaking down history, finance and politics into simple understandable language. Here he talks about China and Africa in an interview:
Q Is China’s rise to power a bad thing?
A It is not a bad thing that the most populous country in the world is emerging from grinding poverty and hundreds of thousands of people who were in subsistence agriculture now have better paying jobs. That can’t be a bad thing. The problem is that in the realm of politics, China’s [position] is not necessarily benign. They [do not] remotely share our ambitions to improve the quality of governance in Africa. They couldn’t care less. And they have a very different political model, which is neither democratic nor based on law in our sense, and if you want to know what Chinese power is about, ask any Tibetan.
Q How does Africa fit into all this?
A In the eyes of the Chinese, it is a place with a lot of commodities and very poor infrastructure, and the Chinese have figured out they can access the commodities if they provide the infrastructure. So, they have a pretty instrumental view of Africa. Given the West has a sentimental view of Africa, which is they want to [help with] water, give it aid, help Africans by giving them free malaria meds. And China, of course, thinks that’s absurd. They want to come in and buy stuff, give them highways in return. And right now that model is working better.
Q Working better for China or Africa?
A Working better for Africa. Just look at the growth rate. Africa is enjoying … rapid growth, and it is mostly on the back of sales of commodities and the improvement of infrastructure. By comparison, we’ve had 50 years of development aid and achieved less. So [it is] not pretty in the sense that what China does is bolster regimes in Sudan. They aren’t really concerned about people being authoritarian. They are authoritarian, why should they worry about governance in Africa? It is not their vision of what matters, and if they can deliver economic growth and raise African living standards, you can’t really blame the Africans for saying: ‘OK, these people ask less of us [than] the aid agencies of the West and governments in the West.’
Earth Day 2010 ironically kicked off with a blazing bonfire at the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, 66km off the Louisiana coastline. The rig was contracted to a BP plc unit (who faces the brunt of bad PR), but it was owned and operated by Transocean Ltd, the world’s biggest offshore drilling contractor. After the initial explosion the platform burned for two days, then it sank into the Gulf of Mexico. WattsUpWithThat explains the drilling technology and below is a graphic from the Times-Picayune showing how difficult it is to shut off the leak. Images, like the one above, can be found on the boston.com site.
Full-scale investigations are under way to determine the cause of this accident, with all parties using the event to advance their political agendas, particularly with the climate policy negotiations currently raging on the Hill. Notwithstanding repercussions across the entire US ecology and economy, a quick note about the industry and technology:
There are over three thousand oil rigs in the Gulf extracting and moving crude petroleum to production. There has not been (that I’m aware of!) a blowout/spill in 30 years (since Ixtoc I in 1979). These platforms are amazing marvels of technology. Have you seen the National Geographic Megastructures on oil rigs? Their extreme technologies are alternately alarming and awe-inspiring with their attendant high risks and lessons which can only be learned the hard way. That said, accidents are bound to occur. Their use extends beyond extractive industries, and holds a lot of promise for geologic research.
Economically: Louisiana’s only natural defense against Gulf hurricanes (like 2005’s Katrina) is the vast marshlands of the Mississippi Delta. But given the engineering modifications of the Mississippi River and mismanaged agricultural technologies, this rapidly eroding coastal ecosystem today boasts the world’s largest and most notorious dead zone (the geographically larger Baltic Sea area having been a dead zone for millenia, but reversing since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the collapse of demand on expensive fertilisers, among many things). Rapid coastal erosion removes this buffer zone and exposes to the storm surges 1) the city of New Orleans, 2) the state’s vital oil and gas infrastructure, and 3) its energy distribution infrastructure upon which the entire country relies upon. It is the natural nursery ground for 40% of the country’s seafood. It is the natural habitat for over five million waterfowl and migratory birds, which is a significant tourism draw throughout the year. This watershed disaster will be calamitous for an already besieged economy.
Cleanup: Satellite data analysis boosts the initial crude oil leak estimates up (from an initially announced 1000, then 5000 just days ago) to a *whopping* 25,000 barrels a day, putting us less than two weeks away from eclipsing the Exxon Valdez catastrophe which drained 270,000 barrels into Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989. The Sound was a challenge to clean up. How do you correct an environmental disaster of this magnitude in impenetrable swamps?
oh New Orleans… screwed. time and again.
I love how this Hong Kong architect transforms his tiny apartment into a very chic living area. It doesn’t allow you to be too messy though does it?!