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anonymous

"Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?": America's misguided culture of overwork - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

society politics culture

shared by anonymous on 29 Aug 10 - Cached
  • even before the recession, American workers were already clocking in the most hours in the West. Compared to our German cousins across the pond, we work 1,804 hours versus their 1,436 hours – the equivalent of nine extra 40-hour workweeks per year. The Protestant work ethic may have begun in Germany, but it has since evolved to become the American way of life.
  • Aren’t we at least more productive by virtue of the amount of time we’re putting in? No. Look at their productivity rates. They’re like ours.
  • How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place? The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe.
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  • Despite the numbers, social democracy really does work and delivers the goods and it’s the only model that an advanced country can do to be competitive in this world.
  • You know, it’s 50,000 dollars for tuition at NYU and it’s zero at Humboldt University in Berlin. So NYU adds catastrophic amounts of GDP per capita and Humboldt adds nothing.
  • So much of the American economy is based on GDP that comes from waste, environmental pillage, urban sprawl, bad planning, people going farther and farther with no land use planning whatsoever and leading more miserable lives
  • anonymous on 29 Aug 10
     
    "Germany's workers have higher productivity, shorter hours and greater quality of life. How did we get it so wrong?" By Alex Jung at Salon.com on August 25, 2010.
anonymous

"The Coming Population Crash": The overpopulation myth - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

layscience longnow

shared by anonymous on 20 Apr 10 - Cached
  • earce argues that the world’s population is peaking. In the next century, we’re heading not for exponential growth, but a slow, steady decline. This, he claims, has the potential to massively change both our society and our planet: Children will become a rare sight, patriarchal thinking will fall by the wayside, and middle-aged culture will replace our predominant youth culture. Furthermore, Pearce explains, the population bust could be the end of our environmental woes. Fewer people making better choices about consumption could lead to a greener, healthier planet.
  • the carbon emissions of one American is the same as that of 20 Indians, 30 Pakistanis, 40 Nigerians and 250 Ethiopians. If, as economists suggest, the world economy will grow by 400 percent by 2050, then no more than a tenth of that will be a result of population growth. The issue is consumption, and that puts the onus right back on the conspicuous consumers to do something about their economic systems, not least before more developing countries follow the same model.
  • When Paul Ehrlich wrote his famous book ["The Population Bomb"], women were having an average around the world of five or six children; now they’re having an average of 2.6.
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  • Urbanization is a factor. When you’re in the countryside, your kids are an economic resource very early. They can help in the fields, they can look after the animals; there are piles of stuff they can do from the age of 4 or 5. Kids are an economic resource, which is why rural families tend to be larger.
  • thanks to advances in sanitation and medicine, women no longer need to have five or six children to make sure that two of them will live to adulthood.
  • Feminism, I suspect, is as much a consequence of falling fertility as a cause, though I am sure they reinforce each other.
  • But once you’re in cities, kids are an economic drain for much, much longer. They can’t help out in the fields because you haven’t got any fields. If they’re going to get a job, they’ve got to be educated, and in most countries that costs money.
  • see the failure of the Catholic Church: It ends up encouraging patriarchal social norms that push women toward ultra-low fertility, such as in Italy.
  • Much of the reproductive revolution happened by keeping young kids from dying. Now we need another revolution to keep the old fitter for longer.
  • If chaos theory taught us anything, it’s that societies head off in all kinds of directions we couldn’t predict. Fifty years ago, if we had taken a slightly different path in industrial chemistry and used bromine instead of chlorine, we’d have burned out the entire ozone layer before we knew what the hell was going on, and the world would have been very different. There’s always scary stuff out there that we may not know about. You can’t predict the future. You can just try and plan for it.
  • anonymous on 20 Apr 10
     
    "How feminism and pop culture saved Earth from getting too crowded -- and are helping to avert planetary catastrophe" - An interesting article that's buttressed by a wide variety of easily available demographic data.
anonymous

David Sedaris: Chicken toenails, anyone? - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...-chinese-food-chicken-toenails

sedaris nonfiction

shared by anonymous on 01 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Everyone swore that the food in Beijing and Chengdu would be different from what I'd had in the US. "It's more real," they said, meaning, it turned out, that I could dislike it more authentically.
  • I saw wads of phlegm glistening like freshly shucked oysters on staircases and escalators. I saw them frozen into slicks on the sidewalk and oozing down the sides of walls. It often seemed that if people weren't spitting, they were coughing without covering their mouths, or shooting wads of snot out of their noses. This was done by plugging one nostril and using the other as a blowhole. "We Chinese think it's best just to get it out," a woman told me over dinner one night. She said that, in her opinion, it's disgusting that a westerner would use a handkerchief and then put it back into his pocket.
  • "Last month I saw a kid shit in the produce aisle of our Chengdu Walmart," a young woman named Bridget told me.
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  • In the men's room of a Beijing subway station, I watched a man walk past the urinal, lift his three-year-old son into the air and instruct him to pee into the sink – the one we were supposed to wash our hands in.
  • My trip reminded me that we are all just animals, that stuff comes out of every hole we have, no matter where we live or how much money we've got.
  • It was while eating my second duck tongue that the man at the next table hacked up a loud wad of phlegm and spat it on to the floor. "I think I'm done," I said.
  • I remember reading a few years ago about a restaurant in the Guangdong province that was picketed and shut down because it served cat. The place was called The Fangji Cat Meatball Restaurant, which isn't exactly hiding anything.
  • It's like eating poultry but taking a moral stand against those chocolate chicks they sell at Easter. "A sea horse is not related to an actual horse," I said. "They're fish, and you eat fish all the time. Are you objecting to this one because of its shape?"
  • He said he couldn't eat sea horses because they were friendly and never did anyone any harm, this as opposed to those devious, bloodthirsty lambs whose legs we so regularly roast with rosemary and new potatoes.
  • This, for many, is flat-out evil but the rest of the world isn't like America, where it's become virtually impossible to throw a dinner party. One person doesn't eat meat, while another is lactose intolerant, or can't digest wheat. You have vegetarians who eat fish and others who won't touch it. Then there are vegans, macrobiotics and a new group, flexitarians, who eat meat if not too many people are watching.
  • I'll say that for China, though – offer to pay and before you can stab a rooster with a rusty screwdriver someone has taken you up on it. I think they want to catch you before you get sick, but whatever the reason, within minutes you're back on the street, searching the blighted horizon and wondering where your next meal might be coming from.
  • anonymous on 01 Aug 11
     
    "I have to go to China." I told people this in the way I might say, "I need to insulate my crawl space" or, "I've got to get these moles looked at." That's the way it felt, though. Like a chore. What initially put me off was the food. I'll eat it if the alternative means starving, but I've never looked forward to it, not even when it seemed exotic to me. [Read more]
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