me, 2.0: joe louis arena prohibits

me, 2.0: jose nazario beauty and the street

joe louis arena prohibits

http://monkey.org/~jose/figs/IMG_0819.jpg

found in detroit, very space station like ...

i often think about what people describe as the main motivator for anyone "importing" workers from overseas: to do the things that americans don't want to. when phrased like this, it's easy to think about janitorial positions or maid roles, things that are hard work and pay a low, if living, wage. but look at it another way: graduate schools consume an awful lot of overseas students, as noted by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang in a Red Herring blog post. the number of foreign born students in the sciences (life sciences, hard sciences, computer science, etc) is astounding, as anyone who has ever done postgraduate work will tell you. the same goes for high tech jobs, just look at the list of jobs at google and where they are:

We are hiring engineers for Google New York, Google Santa Monica, Google Kirkland, Google India (Bangalore and Hyderabad), Google Europe (Zurich) and Google Japan.

i'm sure you're saying to yourself right now that there are plenty of americans who would want to work at google, but the truth is there aren't many who are capable of it. the same goes for any large research organization, the quantity of american talent which can satisfy these jobs is lower than is needed. suddenly we went from cleaning floors for 12 hours a night at walmart to a good quality job with an excellent pay in cutting edge fields. it's a deeper problem than "americans dont want to do the hard, drudging jobs", it's that they are increasingly uninterested in doing hard work on any level, for any pay. and that hurts the country's future prospects, its economic and total security position, and everything in between. i'm all for other countries getting increasingly sophisticated and larger roles in the world technology realm, so don't get me wrong. i just wonder if americans on average aren't too damned comfortable and go to sleep every night convinced that they're still the best at everything, and don't know what it takes to be the best and maintain that position. have a look at Working abroad, another excllent Red Herring blog entry by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang on the topic.

in other, related news, yet another red herring blog post, this one by mitch radcliffe, has me somewhat upset with my financial advisor and curious about what is the next best thing to do with my investments. my advisor tried to allay my fears about things i heard (from trusted horses' mouths, as it were) about the diversification of cash reserves from dollars to various other currencies. his answer was to not worry about it, it wont happen. yet, what i'm really interested in is advice on where to go next, what we can do to capitalize on this position. i'm increasingly concerned he doesn't get it (and i know i don't have the fully story, either). i'm still convinced i'm on the right track, though, about the dollar's position in the next few years. i just want to be in the right place when it happens.

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