Importing Labor

How is it that with an unemployment rate of 8.3% some U.S. companies are importing labor?

From CNN Money...

U.S. manufacturers, frustrated by a shortage of skilled American factory workers, are going abroad to find them. 

Business for factories has surged recently, creating a huge demand for machinists, tool and die makers, computer-controlled machine programmers and operators.  "These jobs are the backbone of manufacturing," said Gardner Carrick, senior director with the Manufacturing Institute. "These are good quality middle-class jobs that Americans should be training for." 

The United States is experiencing a shrinking pipeline of manufacturing talent, said James Wall of the National Institute for Metalworking Skills. "It's been in the making for years," he said. Factories didn't feel the labor pinch as much when manufacturing was in a slump. But the latest "Made in USA" resurgence has them scrambling.  Wall said some manufacturers have been relying on foreign workers to fill the gaps through H-1B visas. 

"We can and should develop our own skilled production workforce through career and technical institutes," Carrickn said. "These schools can provide U.S. manufacturers with the reliable supply of skilled production workers that they so desperately need."

And yet, some within the GOP think that the President's call for more people to seek education beyond high school is snobbery.

Must Watch TED

No intro. No summary. Nothing.  Just sit back, watch, and listen to Bryan Stevenson speak the truth. (thx MMN)

Bourbon

A few favorite facts about my current spirit of choice.

From Bon Appetit...

• In 1789, frontier farmers violently rebelled against their new American government for trying to tax their whiskey (which they used as currency and bank for surplus crops. They also drank it, obvs). George Washington rode at the head of an army out west to quash the rebellion. He succeeded (as he was wont to do), and some of the disgruntled distillers fled further west, to Kentucky, where they'd go on to invent the bourbon we know and love.

• Faced with the choice of hauling barrels of whiskey over the Appalachians to sell east, or rafting the suckers down to New Orleans, Kentuckians wisely chose the river route. Still, though, the trip from the still to the city could take up to 9 months, which let the white whiskey sit for a bit. Sophisticated New Orleanians, with a taste already for French brandy, paid more for the mellower booze, so smart Kentuckians started letting it sit before sending it to market.

• Barrels can only be used once for bourbon. After they've worked their magic, some become furniture or firewood. Others are repurposed for aging soy sauce or--most often--all those Scotch whiskies across the pond.

Free Little Libraries

A great idea.

Via Free Little Libraries...

Hmmm, I just might.

Bringing Memories Home

In honor of those who died as well as those who survived the Tōhoku earthquake.

From MSNBC...

In a large, bright room not far from the ocean that raged through this coastal Japanese city nearly a year ago, a handful of people with magnifying glasses pore over boxes of photographs of friends or loved ones. 

The massive March 11 tsunami that leveled buildings and flattened towns along a wide swathe of northern Japan, including Ofunato, also took a more subtle toll, with hundreds of thousands of photographs lost to the churning waters. 

But now these memories are slowly making their way back to their owners, thanks to the painstaking efforts of a team that cleans them of mud, dirt and oil. 

"I got one photo blown up, and I was so thankful for that. I put it in a frame, and it brought tears to my eyes," said 77-year-old resident Yoshiko Jindai, looking through boxes of photographs.

Coke and Coke...Still

Who knew.

From Good.Is...

In fact, the United States (and most other nations) expressly prohibits the sale and trade of coca leaves. In order for Coca-Cola to continue to exist in its current form, the company has a special arrangement with the Drug Enforcement Administration, allowing it to import dried coca leaves from Peru (and to a lesser degree, from Bolivia) in huge quantities. The dried coca leaves make their way to a processing plant in Maywood, New Jersey, operated by the Stepan Corporation, a publicly traded chemicals company. The Stepan factory imports roughly 100 metric tons of the leaves each year, stripping the active ingredient—the cocaine—from them. The cocaine-free leaves are then shipped off to Coke to turn into syrup, and, ultimately, soda. 

What does Stepan do with the cocaine? It goes to the Mallinckrodt Corporation, which creates a legal, topical anesthesia called cocaine hydrochloride. Cocaine hydrochloride is used to numb the lining of the mouth, nose, or throat, and requires a DEA order form to obtain.

The Low Line

A perfect complement to my new favorite park, The High Line.  Hopefully, it'll come to be.

From Kickstarter...

Ever wonder why there's so little green space in New York? There aren’t a lot of empty plots of land just waiting to be turned into new parks. New Yorkers have had to be a little more creative, and must look in unusual places – the High Line, a park built on an old elevated rail trestle, is a great example.

A few years ago, we learned about a massive unused former trolley terminal in our neighborhood, the Lower East Side. We got to thinking: what if we could build a park-- underground-- even if the space lacked natural sunlight? So we explored using fiber optic cables to transfer sunlight below ground-- to support the growth of plants and trees. As we shared this idea with others, people got excited. "An underground High Line for the Lower East Side," they'd say. "Kind of like... a LowLine." The nickname stuck.

Clotheslines

Growing up we had one in our backyard for summer drying and one in our basement for the winter.  These installations surpass anything I saw on our clotheslines.

From My Modern Met...

Finnish artist Kaarina Kaikkonen creates site-specific installations by recycling secondhand clothing. The artist suspends the garments like a line of laundry hanging out to dry.  

In an interview with Liverpool Daily Post, Kaikkonen reveals her personal connection to each of these clothing-based art projects that are, in their simplest forms, artistic coping exercises. Initially, the apparel artist worked with men's jackets, shirts, and ties, finding inspiration from memories of her late father. In recent years, Kaikkonen has turned her attention onto the memory of her late mother, utilizing women's clothing and shoes. Holding on to clothing is a way of holding on to memories of people. In a way, hanging the articles of clothing high above is freeing. 

Keep Calm and Carry On

The story behind...

Black Conservatism

A thought provoking article perfect for a Sunday read.

From Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic...

But Cosby’s rhetoric played well in black barbershops, churches, and backyard barbecues, where a unique brand of conservatism still runs strong. Outsiders may have heard haranguing in Cosby’s language and tone. But much of black America heard instead the possibility of changing their communities without having to wait on the consciences and attention spans of policy makers who might not have their interests at heart. Shortly after Cosby took his Pound Cake message on the road, I wrote an article denouncing him as an elitist. When my father, a former Black Panther, read it, he upbraided me for attacking what he saw as a message of black empowerment. Cosby’s argument has resonated with the black mainstream for just that reason. 

The split between Cosby and critics such as Dyson mirrors not only America’s broader conservative/liberal split but black America’s own historic intellectual divide. 

Capturing Time

A nice concept that we're going to try to replicate at some point.

7 hours in one image from Twisted Sifter...

Several hours is a lot easier than an entire year. A beautiful composite image using 3,888 images of the same spot every day for a year.

From Eirikso...

It shows one whole year. January at the left and December to the right.You can clearly see that we have a pretty long winter and a decent summer here in Oslo, Norway. 

The spring and autumn are both quite short.

Space Shuttle Flies Again

I've got a thing for geeky uses of Lego.  This one tops them all.

Hilarious.

Oreo Art

In honor of the 100th anniversary of the Oreo cookie (today).

I was reprimanded the other day for saying "some people clearly have too much time on their hands" in relation to the art pictured above. I did a 180 (thx MMN) after discussing the judgement in my statement and reading Judith Klausner's description of her work.

From Judith Klausner...

My latest series (now in progress) uses Victorian handicraft processes to transform modern packaged foods, exploring how the intertwined histories of gender and craft have shaped one another and our everyday lives. I hope to change the way people see the small and often disregarded ephemera of life, and question what defines these things as ephemeral at all. What becomes mythologized, and what is discarded as mundane? Can the same set of skills that were once obligatory and unremarkable become valued craft simply based on a shift in cultural perspective? 

In exploring these questions, my work brings to light the beauty (and sometimes humor) in subjects and materials often dismissed or taken for granted. 

I revel in minutiae. I hope to share the joy this brings me.

Lego ISS

Taking meta to a new level.

From Collect Space...

It took more than 200 astronauts from 12 countries more than a dozen years to build the International Space Station (ISS). Satoshi Furukawa, an astronaut from Japan, matched that feat in just about two hours — and he did it all while aboard the orbiting outpost itself. It helped that his space station was made out of LEGO. 

"It was a great opportunity for me to have built the LEGO space station," Furukawa, a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency flight engineer, told collectSPACE.com in an interview after he returned to Earth. "I enjoyed building it."

To keep the bricks contained and to protect against some potentially serious dangers, Furukawa pieced together the model inside a glovebox — a sealed container with gloves built into its sides to allow the contents to be manipulated.  

Drugs and Trees

Damn meth heads!

From Grist...

This is the Senator, the largest pond cypress in the U.S. and, at 3,500 years old, the fifth-oldest individual tree in the world. Or anyway, this was the Senator, because on Jan. 16, the Florida tree burned from the inside out. 

Authorities initially ruled out arson, saying that friction or smoldering lightning damage may have started the fire. But they’ve now ruled it right back in, arresting 26-year-old Sara Barnes for lighting the Senator on fire while sitting inside it doing meth.

Sushi Done Right

Unfortunately, there is a dwindling number of skilled sushi chefs in the U.S., partly because of difficulties getting a visa but also because there's a strong market for them in Japan.

From the NYT...

Inside, standing behind a sushi bar in a 25-seat restaurant with all the linoleum charm of a coffee shop, Kazunori Nozawa was in the zone: hands flying, eyes darting up across the restaurant, sneaking sips of Diet Coke and cutting pieces from the slab of big-eye tuna from Ecuador he’d selected at the fish market when it was still dark that morning. By now, most of the customers who had waited for a seat at his restaurant, Sushi Nozawa — 2 1/2 hours for a meal that would last 45 minutes — knew the rules: no cellphones or texting, no loud talking, no asking other patrons to switch seats, no telling Mr. Nozawa what you wanted. 

The place was hushed; no music, just the click of chopsticks and worshipful conversation about the fish and how to be sure not to offend the diminutive man behind the counter. This was not a day to become the latest customer ejected from Mr. Nozawa’s domain.
Because all too soon, at the close of business on Wednesday, Mr. Nozawa will retire from sushi-making.

The Last Gasp

In a nutshell: because of demographics the future of the current incarnation of the GOP is bleak. They know it all too well and rather than moderate, the path of confrontation was chosen.

An excellent article from NY Magazine...

The modern GOP—the party of Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes—is staring down its own demographic extinction. Right-wing warnings of impending tyranny express, in hyperbolic form, well-grounded dread: that conservative America will soon come to be dominated, in a semi-permanent fashion, by an ascendant Democratic coalition hostile to its outlook and interests. And this impending doom has colored the party’s frantic, fearful response to the Obama presidency.

The GOP has reason to be scared. Obama’s election was the vindication of a prediction made several years before by journalist John Judis and political scientist Ruy Teixeira in their 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. Despite the fact that George W. Bush then occupied the White House, Judis and Teixeira argued that demographic and political trends were converging in such a way as to form a ­natural-majority coalition for Democrats.

The Republican Party had increasingly found itself confined to white voters, especially those lacking a college degree and rural whites who, as Obama awkwardly put it in 2008, tend to “cling to guns or religion.” Meanwhile, the Democrats had ­increased their standing among whites with graduate degrees, particularly the growing share of secular whites, and remained dominant among racial minorities. As a whole, Judis and Teixeira noted, the electorate was growing both somewhat better educated and dramatically less white, making every successive election less favorable for the GOP. 

Germination Time

March came in like a lamb with temps in DC reaching the high-60s today.  Now it's time to gear up for the garden, version 4.0.

The Bell Tolls for Occupy London

 

Sadly, the longest running occupy movement in the world came to a conclusion early in the morning of February 28th. 

From The Guardian (UK)...

As the bells of St Paul's chimed 1am on a mild February morning Giles Fraser, the cathedral's former canon chancellor, could not help but point out an irony to those around. It was John Donne, a former dean of St Paul's, who first cautioned "never to send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee". 

On this particular morning, it tolled for the remaining protesters of the Occupy London Stock Exchange movement, as their tent-poles, canvas and detritus were dragged away by City of London cleaners into waiting rubbish trucks. It was a moment the protesters had been expecting for five days, since the final appeal against eviction from the outside the cathedral was denied at the court of appeal. 

The first signs that the authorities were ready to clear the camp, which had stood in the square in front of St Paul's since 15 October came shortly before midnight, as occupiers noticed an unusually high number of police officers in the streets around the site. "Hearing reports of massed police at St James and London Wall," tweeted Naomi Colvin, a prominent, if unofficial, spokeswoman for Occupy. "Tonight is likely the night."

A look back at a few pics of Occupy London from early and mid-February...

Leap Year

The leap year fully explained...