Nico Luchsinger

trying to make sense out of stuff

The Soup & Instapaper Clean-Up Day

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After four days of intensive (one might even say excessive) Christmas celebrations with lots of eating, drinking and presents, I was more frugal today. I cleaned the apartment, did my laundry, paid my bills. For dinner, I had a simple soup (it tasted better than the picture above looks), and then I sat on my couch and read the 20 or so unread articles that have accumulated in my Instapaper account over the last two hectic weeks. Here's some of the stuff I read and enjoyed:

- Turkish author Orhan Pamuk worries that the "dream of Europe" that was strong in Turkey until recently is fading away.
- Francis Fukuyama asks an interesting question - why has the rising income inequality in the U.S. not led to more political pressure from the left? -, but fails to provide a convincing answer.
- Fellow Sandboxer Nate Whittemore wrote a short and very to-the-point post on the difference between the "social graph" and the "interest graph".
- Insightful piece from the New York Review of Books on the rising power of Russia's secret service FSB.
- Nice, if not very surprising, article on the "idea industry".
- The NYT Magazine on a physicist who claims to have discovered the "formula" for cities.
- ...and a nice piece by James Surowiecki on procrastination.

 

 

Take our jobs

At a time of high unemployment, many Americans are convinced that these aliens take American jobs. As a test, this summer the United Farm Workers (UFW), the main agricultural union, launched a campaign called “Take Our Jobs”, inviting willing Americans to work in the fields. In the following three months 3m people visited takeourjobs.org, but 40% of the responses were hate mail, says Maria Machuca, UFW’s spokesman. This included e-mails such as one reading: “We’re becoming more aggressive in our methods. Soon it may come to hands on, taping bitches to light posts.”

Only 8,600 people expressed an interest in working in the fields, says Ms Machuca. But they made demands that seem bizarre to farmworkers, such as high pay, health and pension benefits, relocation allowances and other things associated with normal American jobs. In late September only seven American applicants in the “Take our jobs” campaign were actually picking crops.

That was the point, says Arturo Rodriguez, the UFW’s president. America’s farm jobs, which are excluded from almost all federal and state labour regulations, are not normal jobs. Americans refuse to do them. The argument about stolen jobs is “just a façade” for a coarser scapegoating, says Mr Rodriguez, and “we demonstrate the hypocrisy.

From this great article on illegal immigrants in the U.S. from the Christmas issue of the Economist.

The Evolution of a Service

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I very much like the way online information management service Diigo is visualizing its evolution and ultimate goal directly on its homepage. Makes it easy to understand what has happened, what the tool offers at the moment, and what might come in the future. I'm thinking Sandbox - and any service / company that is developing - should have something similar.

I checked out Diigo because of the news this morning that Yahoo is shutting down my beloved Delicious. I guess I will give Diigo a try in the next couple of weeks.