The San Francisco Bay Bridge: Made in China

By now outsourcing is something we are all pretty familiar with. We are not surprised when we call a customer service center and end up speaking to someone in India. But in the ensuing years, we will being seeing how far globalization can go. What things can effectively be done overseas? What things can't? We may be surprised at what can be done overseas. One somewhat surprising thing that was recently done overseas was large components of the San Francisco Bay Bridge. It was fabricated in China in sections, and then has been shipped across the Pacific. This is surprising in two ways: first, the sheer size of the bridge, but perhaps more surprising is that a government public works project like this would be so readily given to foreign workers. It used to be that projects funded by tax dollars would be done in the US as a matter of course. It is a sign of the financial pressure that governments at all levels are under that they were willing to have this job done in China. The New York Times cited estimates that the state of California saved $400 million by doing so. An article in the London Telegraph noted that one advantage Chinese construction companies have in getting big projects is that they have access to funding through the government of China, and can help provide financing that other construction companies can't.

Globalization: Where Computers Go to Die

We think of globalization usually in terms of production--cars made in Japan or Korea, everything made in China. But there is a disposal side of globalization as well. The short useable life of electronics technology means that there are a lot of computers and other things that we are getting rid of all the time. (You can see this at the Wake County landfills.) We think of Silicon Valley USA as the exemplary place where electronics technology is developed; perhaps we should think of Agbogbloshie, Ghana as the worst-case example of how electronics are disposed of. Photographer Pieter Hugo has a series of photographs of this computer graveyard. He says that inhabitants of this area call this place Sodom and Gomorrah. Well meaning people from Europe and America donate old computers to Africa, thinking they will be used. But many of them end up in this graveyard, where people, working in unsafe conditions, strip them for their precious metals. Hugo provides some commentary on the situation, noting that the world generates 50 million tons of digital waste every year, only a quarter of which is properly disposed of.

Connecting New York and Chicago

One of the major themes in history over the last 500 years has been the increasing interconnection of the world. What has driven this? One thing certainly has been capitalism. This story describes how last year, Spread Networks, opened up a special fiber optic line connecting trading centers in New York and Chicago. There are already links between New York and Chicago, but what made this link special was that it was designed to follow the absolute shortest route between New York and Chicago. It was 100 miles shorter than the previous route. Why was this important? Because signals traveling on this route at the speed of light take 3 milliseconds less to get between New York and Chicago than signals traveling on the previous fiber optic cable. Why is this important? Because traders trying to take advantage of transient price differences between the New York and Chicago stock/commodity markets will be able to use this line to beat traders using conventional lines. While the investors didn't say how much they paid to build the line, some estimates were that it cost $300 million. In 1830 it took roughly three weeks to get a message from New York to Chicago. Now we are at a point where it takes 13.3 milliseconds to get a message from New York to Chicago and some people see an advantage of 3 milliseconds as a huge competitive advantage.

Buying/Selling Used Books--A Job for the Digital Age

The online journal Slate recently had an article by a man describing his job buying and selling used books. The guy has a scanner and software linked to Amazon.com's book marketplace. He goes to thrift shops and library book sales and scans the barcodes of nearly every book there. After scanning the barcode, the software will tell him how much the book sells for used on Amazon, as well as how popular the book is. Based on these numbers, the man will then make a decision as to whether to buy the book or pass on it. He then offers the books for sale on Amazon. People make a living doing this work--he describes some people making $1,000 a week. (Although the author describes how the job can be humiliating.) This is a low stakes version of arbitrage going on throughout the world with the development of the Internet and high-speed communications technologies.

Social Activism and Social Media

In STS302H we will be talking about Wendell Berry's vision of community today. This week in the New Yorker, there is a related article by Malcolm Gladwell. A lot of people have hyped the possibilities of social media to affect social change, and some people have claimed that technologies like Twitter empowered people in Iran to protest the massive election fraud in that country. Gladwell is skeptical. He gives as a counter-example the story of the lunch counter boycotts in North Carolina and notes these were launched by people who had "strong ties" to each other--they were good friends and were committed to each other. Gladwell claims that Twitter and Facebook promote "weak-ties,"--people you are happy to know, but whom you won't risk your life for. Gladwell claims that connections with weak-ties can be very helpful in some situations--finding a job, finding a possible blood marrow donor, but not in others, such as agitating for serious social change. Wendell Berry would translate this into the need to have strong communities where one has strong face-t0-face relations with people.

Big News: No Need to Change Your Oil Every 3,000 Miles

Much of life consists of routine: get your teeth cleaned every six months, go for an annual physical at the doctors', get your car's oil changed every 3,000 miles. These are what we do. The New York Times recently had an article asserting that there is no need to change a car's oil every 3,000 miles. It asserted that changes in car engine and oil technology meant that most cars of recent vintage could go 7,500-10,000 miles between oil changes. We can see several themes in the history of technology in this. One is that while we often concentrate on big changes in technology, often there are smaller ones, like the aforementioned changes in oil and engine technology that can be significant as well. Another point the article made is that now, due to environmental concerns, California has run campaigns urging drivers not to get their oil changed every 3,000 miles. Some people say that doing so only increases the waste oil that needs to be recycled or reprocessed. I sometimes think of technology as a game where the rules are always changing.

The US versus China: Too Many Hamburgers

Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has been one of the leading voices crying out that America is in danger of losing the economic/technological race to China. Today he has a piece that repeats many themes he has been harping on. He notes how the Chinese see Americans as a people who always expect that they will be first, but have "eaten too many hamburgers." He also suggests that the "can do" attitude that surrounded the Apollo program is gone in America, but is present in China. China has many problems and their authoritarian structure is certainly one that we wouldn't want to copy. But it will be interesting to see how the United States responds over the next years to the challenge of the rise of China.