Asian Call Center Workers Trained With U.S. Tax Dollars
April 19th, 2012Would you like some free course ware with that?
Via: Information Week:
Despite President Obama’s recent call for companies to “insource” jobs sent overseas, it turns out that the federal government itself is spending millions of dollars to train foreign students for employment in some booming career fields–including working in offshore call centers that serve U.S. businesses.
The program is called JEEP, which stands for Job Enabling English Proficiency. It’s available to college students in the Philippines through USAID. That’s the same agency that until a couple of years ago was spending millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money to train offshore IT workers in Sri Lanka–until I reported that inconvenient truth in this story. The ensuing uproar led to the Sri Lanka initiative’s termination.
A JEEP document published by USAID notes that the program “is classroom based, and focuses on the specialized English skills required by employers in areas such as: nursing and allied healthcare; maritime services; travel and tourism services; business process outsourcing (BPO), and other areas of international employment.” Students–there are about 23,000 in the Philippines currently enrolled–commit to undertake 400 hours of training during two years of study.
It’s the BPO (another name for call center operations) part of the curriculum that’s troubling for U.S. offshoring opponents. When I informed Congressman Tim Bishop (D-New York) about the program on Tuesday, he called it “surprising and distressing.” Bishop, who was instrumental in getting USAID to end its Sri Lanka program, recently introduced a bill that would make companies that outsource call centers ineligible for government contracts.
The U.S. “has lost five hundred thousand call center jobs in the last five years,” Bishop noted during a phone interview.
Homeland Security’s ‘Pre-Crime’ Screening Will Never Work
April 18th, 2012Via: The Atlantic:
Chances are, you’ll snag the wrong people, and when you do, how can you tell? How do you clear suspects of crimes that haven’t happened?
Pre-crime prevention is a terrible idea.
Here is a quiz for you. Is predicting crime before it happens: (a) something out of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report; (b) the subject of of a Department of Homeland Security research project that has recently entered testing; (c) a terrible and dangerous idea which will inevitably be counter-productive and which will levy a high price in terms of civil liberties while providing little to no marginal security; or (d) all of the above.
If you picked (d) you are a winner!
The U.S. Department of Homeland security is working on a project called FAST, the Future Attribute Screening Technology, which is some crazy straight-out-of-sci-fi pre-crime detection and prevention software which may come to an airport security screening checkpoint near you someday soon. Yet again the threat of terrorism is being used to justify the introduction of super-creepy invasions of privacy, and lead us one step closer to a turn-key totalitarian state. This may sound alarmist, but in cases like this a little alarm is warranted. FAST will remotely monitor physiological and behavioral cues, like elevated heart rate, eye movement, body temperature, facial patterns, and body language, and analyze these cues algorithmically for statistical aberrance in an attempt to identify people with nefarious intentions. There are several major flaws with a program like this, any one of which should be enough to condemn attempts of this kind to the dustbin. Lets look at them in turn.
Research Credit: noncompliant
Top U.S. Colleges to Offer Free Classes Online
April 18th, 2012Since MIT did it with Open Courseware years ago, I suspected that the point of the “free education” offerings was to create a pool of relatively skilled workers in some of the poorest countries in the world. You know, places with open sewers where people sleep on dirt floors… and where lots of these people have Internet access! (The way things are headed, this might refer to parts of the U.S. soon.)
Now that there’s talk about these other schools offering certificates, and, “connecting employers with students,” I think my suspicions are being confirmed.
So, companies will still be hiring people from slums and paying next to nothing for the labor, but, maybe a person who got a certificate in the free computer science curriculum from the College of Knowledge will be selected for a job over someone who doesn’t have a certificate.
In ten or twenty years, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the majority of paid work in companies, that is, work that isn’t done by machines, being done by these “certificate” holders. They’ll live in ever expanding slums, autonomously policed by RoboCops and drones. They’ll have fast Internet and there will be Superbowl commercials about how great all of it is.
I suppose that positive wildcard outcomes are possible from this. Some people will figure out how to start their own businesses with the knowledge they gain from the free online classes. Most, though, will just feel lucky to be able to show up for any paid work at all.
I have no idea what’s going to happen to people who are still attending classes on campus and buying those $200 textbooks. Sure, there will be a few slots somewhere up in the skyscrapers for engineers and managers, but the machine will always, and I mean, ALWAYS, be gunning for them. For most, it’s going to be like the house flippers who couldn’t find a greater fool that one last time as the Ponzi scheme came down. There are millions of people out there with $20K, $50K, $100K or more sunk into worthless degrees… How is that situation going to unwind?
Get busy, boys and girls. Your new career in a building with a suicide net awaits. If you’re lucky.
I don’t offer a lot of advice on here, but I’ll tell you what I’m going to tell my sons. It’s what my dad told me and it has held pretty true:
“If you’re working for someone else, chances are, you’re fucked.”
That said, free products and services usually exist to monetize, in some way, the people who use them. In this case, the goal of the free courses is to create a larger pool of qualified workers to fill a dwindling number of positions, driving labor costs down.
So, if you want to take free courses, go for it. But if you’re thinking that it’s going to give you an edge in the market, remember that the thronging, jobless hordes have the same idea.
I’m not saying to not do it, but through it all, try to think about how you can use what you’re learning to avoid having to show up somewhere to make someone else (or a bunch of stockholders) rich.
Via: Reuters:
Five prestigious U.S. universities will create free online courses for students worldwide through a new, interactive education platform dubbed Coursera, the founders announced Wednesday.
The two founders, both professors of computer science at Stanford University, also announced that they had received $16 million in financing from two Silicon Valley venture capital firms.
Coursera will offer more than three dozen college courses in the coming year through its website at coursera.org, on subjects ranging from Greek mythology to neurology, from calculus to contemporary American poetry. The classes are designed and taught by professors at Stanford, Princeton, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan.
Coursera joins a raft of ambitious online projects aimed at making higher education more accessible and affordable. Many of these ventures, however, simply post entire lectures on the web, with no interactive component. Others strive to create brand-new universities from scratch.
Founders Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng say Coursera will be different because professors from top schools will teach under their university’s name and will adapt their most popular courses for the web, embedding assignments and exams into video lectures, answering questions from students on online forums — even, perhaps, hosting office hours via videoconference.
Multiple-choice and short-answer tests will be computer scored. Coursera will soon unveil a system of peer grading to assess more complex work, such as essays or algorithms.
Students will not get college credit. But Coursera may offer “certificates of completion” or transcripts for a fee. The company may also seek to turn a profit by connecting employers with students who have shown aptitude in a particular field, a spokeswoman said.
‘Factor in taxes, transportation costs, clothing and lunch — what is the true net that you bring home after salary?”
April 18th, 2012Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture by Shannon Hayes
Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World by Kelly Coyne
“What if the millions of so-called dropouts are onto something?”
Via: CNN:
After factoring in the rising cost of child care, the daily commute and other work-related expenses, a growing number of mothers are figuring out that having a job just doesn’t pay.
“It comes down to a cost analysis and I have several clients that have taken the route of quitting,” said Anna Behnam, a financial advisor at Ameriprise Financial in Rockville, Md. “Factor in taxes, transportation costs, clothing and lunch — what is the true net that you bring home after salary?”
Over the past few years, the debate over which lifestyle is more financially feasible — working and paying for child care versus staying at home — has come up more often among Behnam’s clients than ever before.
For most working parents, child care is by far the greatest expense.
3D Printer Creates Drugs to Order
April 18th, 2012I can see it now: The Pirate Bay: Better Living Through Chemistry.
Via: University of Glasgow:
A new 3D printing process developed at the University of Glasgow could revolutionise the way scientists, doctors and even the general public create chemical products.
Professor Lee Cronin, Gardiner Chair of Chemistry at the University, believes his research could lead to the development of home chemical fabricators which consumers could use to design and create medicine at home.
Human-Made Earthquakes Reported in Central U.S.
April 18th, 2012Via: Reuters:
The number of earthquakes in the central United States rose “spectacularly” near where oil and gas drillers disposed of wastewater underground, a process that may have caused geologic faults to slip, U.S. government geologists report.
The average number of earthquakes of magnitude 3 or greater in the U.S. midcontinent – an area that includes Arkansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas – increased to six times the 20th century average last year, scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey said in an abstract of their research.
The abstract does not explicitly link rising earthquake activity to fracking – known formally as hydraulic fracturing – that involves pumping water and chemicals into underground rock formations to extract natural gas and oil.
But the wastewater generated by fracking and other extraction processes may play a role in causing geologic faults to slip, causing earthquakes, the report suggests.
“A remarkable increase in the rate of (magnitude 3) and greater earthquakes is currently in progress,” the authors wrote in a brief work summary to be discussed Wednesday at a San Diego meeting of the Seismological Society of America.
“While the seismicity rate changes described here are almost certainly manmade, it remains to be determined how they are related to either changes in extraction methodologies or the rate of oil and gas production,” the abstract said.
Record Number of Americans Renounce Citizenship
April 17th, 2012Via: Reuters:
Last year, almost 1,800 people followed Superman’s lead, renouncing their U.S. citizenship or handing in their Green Cards. That’s a record number since the Internal Revenue Service began publishing a list of those who renounced in 1998. It’s also almost eight times more than the number of citizens who renounced in 2008, and more than the total for 2007, 2008 and 2009 combined.
But not everyone’s motivations are as lofty as Superman’s. Many say they parted ways with America for tax reasons.
The United States is one of the only countries to tax its citizens on income earned while they’re living abroad. And just as Americans stateside must file tax returns each April – this year, the deadline is Tuesday – an estimated 6.3 million U.S. citizens living abroad brace for what they describe as an even tougher process of reporting their income and foreign accounts to the IRS. For them, the deadline is June.
The National Taxpayer Advocate’s Office, part of the IRS, released a report in December that details the difficulties of filing taxes from overseas. It cites heavy paperwork, a lack of online filing options and a dearth of local and foreign-language resources.
For those wishing to legally escape the filing requirements, the only way is to formally renounce their U.S. citizenship. Last year, IRS records show that at least 1,788 people did, and that’s likely an underestimate. The IRS publishes in the Federal Register the names of those who give up their citizenship, and some who renounced say they haven’t seen their name on the list yet.
Related:
Surreal Situation in U.S. Post Office
For Many Immigrants’ Children, American Dream Lies Abroad [h/t KL]
Blackhawk Choppers Buzz Chicago Skyscrapers
April 17th, 2012Via: NBC:
Workers in Chicago’s Loop business district were distracted from their work as Blackhawk helicopters rattled windows as they flew among the city’s skyscrapers.
The city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications on Monday announced that Chicago is the site of a military training exercise this week involving personnel and at least three helicopters.
Calling it routine training, city officials say in a statement such exercises are conducted by military personnel in various cities around the country. They say the exercises are designed to improve the military’s ability to operate in urban environments.
Related: ‘If you notice a heavy military presence around downtown Los Angeles this week, don’t be alarmed’
Photos of Daily Life in the U.S. Government’s Secret Atomic City
April 17th, 2012What does this sign mean?
Security, That's All
Via: io9:
In 1942, the US government acquired the town of Oak Ridge in eastern Tennessee. From then on, Oak Ridge was just like any other town — except for the fences, the guards, and the top-secret uranium separating facility.
Related: DOE-Oakridge’s Photostream
Flashback: The U.S. Nuclear Weapons Cost Study Project
Michigan Government Unleashes Armed Raids on Small Pig Farmers; Traditional Livestock Declared ‘Invasive Species’
April 17th, 2012Why does the state respond to people who sell homekilled meat in the same way that it responds to people who violently attack the state? … It’s because ubiquitous, small scale agriculture represents a greater threat to state power than armed resistance.
—“What if the millions of so-called dropouts are onto something?”
Via: Natural News:
NaturalNews can now confirm that the Michigan Department of Natural Resources has, in total violation of the Fourth Amendment, conducted two armed raids on pig farmers in that state, one in Kalkaska County at Fife Lake and another in Cheboygan County. Staging raids involving six vehicles and ten armed men, DNA conducted unconstitutional, illegal and arguably criminal armed raids on these two farms with the intent of shooting all the farmers’ pigs under a bizarre new “Invasive Species Order” (ISO) that has suddenly declared traditional livestock to be an invasive species.
