In LA

The US Census bureau¹ has come out with a report which states that ethnic and racial minorities will outnumber the majority by the year 2042². I don’t know if the Census bureau uses the word “whites” because I can’t find their report online, but the Associated Press promptly wrote a headline declaring,”White Americans no longer a majority by 2042“, and the Detroit Free Press declared,”Whites will be US minority group by 2042, Census predicts“.

But “White” and “minority” are surprisingly mutable social constructs in the USA. History tells me that in the U.S., whoever is considered to be on top of the socioeconomic ladder at a given period of time automatically becomes part of the “White” blob. At one point, all those Italian immigrants to the US were not considered to be White, and the Whiteness of Irish and European Jewish immigrants was also in doubt.

I bet there were similar if more clearly alarmist headlines back in the early 1900s, shouting to anyone who would listen that in a few decades Whites would be outnumbered by these non-Anglo immigrant masses. In 2042, when the ethnic and racial groups included under the White banner include Latinos, Hispanics, and East Asians³ , I fully expect to see identical headlines to those of today about how “Whites will lose their majority status by 2076″.

America has always bubbled with immigration, cultural exchange and conflict, opportunity and oppression, and demographic shifts. My rational mind suspects there’s little new about this latest batch of news, though I am planning to hurry up and learn some Español, Italian, and Yiddish just in case.

Technorati Tags: race, whitey

1. Motto: “Page Last Modified: May 20, 2004″ [↩]
2. Perhaps not coincidentally, 2042 is also the year in which a computer-generated Charles Grodin will replace Chris Tucker as Jackie Chan’s co-star in the ever-popular Rush Hour franchise. [↩]
3. If that assumption sounds improbable to your 2008 racial spidey-sense, please reevaluate my argument in 2038. [↩]

From saveourtacotrucks.org:

Led by District 1 County Supervisor Gloria Molina, the L.A. Board of Supervisors has passed new restrictions that will effectively eliminate taco trucks from our streets. Under Supervisor Molina’s new rules, taco trucks will have to change location every hour, or face a misdemeanor charge carrying a $1000 fine and/or jail. Yes, jail.

Taco Trucks are a special facet of Los Angeles, and something we don’t want to lose. Though this ordinance currently affects just unincorporated parts of L.A., that’s 65% of the County. And of course it opens up the doors for legislation closer to home too.

I happen to think taco trucks are cuter than the average brick and mortar restaurant, and always like seeing them parked around the city, serving their wares. If you also think taco trucks are charming or useful, and don’t want to see them disappear from Los Angeles, you could do worse than spend a few minutes visiting the saveourtacotrucks.org website. There you can download printable posters, sign petitions, that sort of thing. If you’re wondering what a taco truck is, there are plenty of photos of taco trucks on flickr for you to peruse.

Technorati Tags: food, hollywood, los angeles, mexican food, politics, taco, taco truck

A busy intersection in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. 5/2006

Yesterday I walked to lunch along a busy street in Hollywood, having a very difficult time hearing my friend on my cell phone as busses and trucks rattled past. I marveled at the amazing amount of noise I encounter on a daily basis, and thought of how peaceful the aural landscape of the future city will be if one day all internal combustion engines are replaced by electric equivalents.

There are a ton of Toyota Prios¹ zooming around the streets of LA fairly quietly using their electric motors, the first wave of the new sound of transportation. Sounds like progress to me.

So I’m hoping that a new piece of legislation introduced in the US House of Representatives, the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act of 2008, doesn’t result in a mandatory minimum noise level for all vehicles. Here are the details on the Act, courtesy of its supporters at the National Federation of the Blind (NFB):

The bill requires the Secretary of Transportation, within ninety days of its enactment, to commence a two-year study to determine the best means to provide the blind and other pedestrians with information about the location, motion, speed, and direction of vehicles. Upon completion of the study, the Secretary will report the findings of the study to Congress and, within ninety days, establish a minimum vehicle safety standard for all new vehicles sold in the United States. Automobile manufacturers will have two years to comply with the vehicle safety standard.

Some folk over at treehugger.com wonder if such concern is overkill, asking How Many Blind People Have Been Hit By A Prius? One answer can be found in an LA times article on the bill, “While the organization is not aware of people being struck by cars they couldn’t hear, NFB President Marc Maurer has said he fears it’s only a matter of time.”

I’d like to think that the desire for a quiet environment and the desire for blind people to be able to freely and safely navigate the streets don’t have to be at odds. Hopefully if the bill passes, the required study will show that tire and electric engine noise alone will suffice to warn pedestrians (especially given that as more and more hybrids take to the streets the total level of road noise will go down, so that the sound of approaching electric vehicles will be less masked by the din). Or maybe someone can develop a wristwatch for the vision-impaired which would use sonar or transponders built into every car to notify them of approaching traffic?

I’d prefer any solution to one that results in a future of roads filled with chirping, whistling, or beeping cars.

Technorati Tags: accessibility, ambient sound, Legislature, safety, sound pollution

1. the plural of Prius if treated as a 2nd declension Latin noun [↩]

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, “the most powerful investigative panel in Congress” according to the Gray Lady¹ is spending time investigating whether baseball pitching great Roger Clemens used steroids back in 1998.

If my understanding is correct, this means that my taxes are funding an investigation into whether a ball player took pills and injections with the goal of making him throw a round white object a little faster. While I will grant that one of our government’s core functions is to make sure that the scourge known as the designated hitter rule doesn’t spread beyond the American league…

–but seriously, what an incredible waste of time, resources, and priorities. Let Major League Baseball and the World Anti-Doping Agency deal with the case. If the league, a private enterprise, wants to ban the use of such substances, let them spend their own money policing it themselves. It’s bad enough that public money goes to fund sports stadiums for the use of private businesses.

At this rate, the government will soon be holding congressional hearings into whether the gladiators on American Gladiators are juiced, whether Tyra Banks’ breasts are real, or whether members of the Grateful Dead (or their fans) used a lot of LSD.

Should I care more about this? Am I just becoming a cranky old man?

1. the most powerful newspaper in the land, after USA Today and The Onion [↩]

This is a pretty amazing story about a soldier who was hit by an RPG (rocket propelled grenade) that did not detonate and instead remained stuck in his body, and the extraordinary efforts and risks taken by his fellow soldiers to save his life:

Military Medical Team Makes the ‘Toughest Call’; Unexploded Rocket-Propelled Grenade Impales Army Private in Afghanistan

Regardless how I feel about war, I always find the sacrifices that soldiers are willing to make for each other to be extremely admirable and inspiring. Many of us might be willing to risk our own lives to save others, but some face this test day in and day out as part of their job. Much respect.

(post has been edited because I initially assumed the article was about events in Iraq and missed the fact that even the headline said “Afghanistan”. Doh.)

In response to a question from the Associated Press, Yahoo said:

Yahoo is dismayed that citizens in China have been imprisoned for expressing their political views on the Internet.

The Chinese government thought about replying,”We just love it when foreigners try to tell us how to run our country.” But they came to one of two realizations:

1. that the anti-cultural-imperialism dodge only works when the cultural imperialists are in the wrong.
2. that as soon as a local company (perhaps one of Yahoo’s business partners) completely replicates all of Yahoo’s functionality they can cut the unruly foreign company loose and promote a local company who plays by party rules.

Shi Tao, the Chinese reporter Yahoo helped put behind bars, is due to be released from prison in 2015. I wrote about him in this earlier, related post.

It feels like the world is going crazy, with the locus of craziness currently hovering over the East coast of the U.S.A.

1. Virginia Tech killing spree –good god! Hopefully the fact that the killer is getting more than his 15 minutes of fame by sending out a press packet in between killings won’t encourage other publicity-hungry violently-disturbed individuals to follow suit.
2. Congress and Justice Department in standoff –the Justice Department appears to just be ignoring a subpoena for missing and redacted portions of documents issued by the House Judiciary Committee. I tend to think that a lack of accountability at high levels within the government is a bad thing.
3. Supreme Court upholds Federal ban on an abortion procedure. A procedure that, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists includes no exceptions for the physical or mental health of the mother. According to the vast but fumbling-towards-accuracy online encyclopedia Wikipedia: “The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that bans must include exception for threats to the woman’s life, physical health, and mental health”. Guess it’s time to revise that entry.
4. Chocolate under attack! This is an order of magnitude less crazy than the other items, but it bugs me nonetheless, and I need something of less earth-shattering important than the first 3 items to think about as a cool-down exercise: Hershey and other big choco manufacturers are asking the U.S. Food an Drug Administration to “permit them to replace cocoa butter, chocolate’s key ingredient, with vegetable oils and, in the case of milk chocolate, replace whole milk with milk protein concentrates“. If these companies are not going to continue to make chocolate out of the ingredients that define the essence of chocolate, they should come up with a new name and not try to legally redefine the word “chocolate” to mean any sweet bar of saturated fat that happens to be brown. One chocolatier has posted a more nuanced take on the issue.

I would love to see this new 4-hour documentary about China made for Granada-KQED-PBS-BBC entitled China From the Inside.

From the article:

The footage is vast. Cameras traveled to Tibet; Xinjiang, home to many Muslims; the Kazakhstan border; the Gobi Desert; and the Yangtze River. There are interviews with women activists trying to instill self-confidence among rural women (to try to help stave off a high suicide rate); a National People’s Congress delegate comparing communism with U.S. democracy; a Catholic priest practicing religion in an atheist country; and residents who’ve been displaced by the gargantuan construction of the Three Gorges Dam. …an environmental activist talks about the polluted Huai River, its cancer-inducing contaminants ravaging the lives of villagers whose photos he displays. In the segment about women, a factory worker in Guangdong Province talking about her day-to-day life: Working the assembly line and prohibited from talking between 6:08 a.m. and 6:08 p.m.

It’s no surprise that the Chinese government was a little concerned about the making of this documentary, but it sounds as though the government minders assigned to this project deserve much respect for making excuses and leaving the set when sensitive topics were being covered. The fact that the documentary’s director had previously made a 4-part documentary entitled “Hell in the Pacific” about the Nanjing massacre by the Japanese probably helped him get reasonably free access to cover sensitive locations, people, and topics.

Thanks to <shamus> for the link.

Could whoever was updating the great firewall of China about 24 hours ago please double-check your work? The entire internet outside of China, or at least the portion of the net that includes all web traffic (port 80), has been completely inaccessible for the past day. Websites originating outside of China take about 10 minutes to load, if at all. I know you need to occasionally update the great firewall in order to better block any websites that contain unhealthy thoughts or statements critical of the Chinese government that might lead to instability, yadda yadda yadda, but when updating the firewall’s rules it’s important to take care that you not block simply everything. Argh.

Update: It would appear that the net in China is down due to an earthquake in Taiwan. I still blame the firewall, partly because it’s annoying and I like to blame it for things, mostly because if it weren’t for this country’s need to filter the net they’d have more than one point of connection to the outside world –we could all get to yahoo.com just as easily through Russia or Japan as Taiwan if such connections existed. In any case, I hope all the people in Taiwan are OK, I’d know more about this quake if I could get to an English language news website.

Citing political and ethical considerations, Google hasn’t yet launched its free email service, Gmail, in China. But why is this Gmail China login screen online?

Google, in order to comply with Chinese government policy, censors the search results it displays to users who access its www.google.com.cn site (that ‘cn’ at the end of the name indicates a Chinese website). This was big news a little while back, as it marked the moment that the company which proudly cites “Do No Evil” as one of its guiding principles made compromises for the sake of reach and profit that many outside China found distasteful. Google is in good company, Microsoft’s MSN Spaces blocks Chinese users from posting articles that include words like “democracy” and “freedom”, Skype’s text chat here censors certain words, and Yahoo has gone even further in its compliance with Chinese government censorship policies –I’ll return to this topic in a bit. All of these companies justify their actions by saying that they must comply with local regulations when they operate in other countries.Users in China who can read English (such as myself) can still search the web using the good ‘ol www.google.com URL, and get uncensored search results. It’s a pyrrhic victory — you can see the unfiltered results but the sites are generally blocked by the Great Firewall of China, so it feels as if Google is just returning many dead links. For an amusing visual look at how the censorship affects Google image results, see this great side-by-side comparison of a politically sensitive google image search.

Back when Google’s compliance with the Chinese government was a big news item, articles often contained statements such as the following:

Neither Google’s e-mail nor blogging services will be offered in China because the company doesn’t want to risk being ordered by the government to turn over anyone’s personal information.

This is because any company that plants its servers on Chinese soil will place information on those servers within reach of the Chinese government. If Google were to store user’s personal information on servers within China, the Chinese government could request for this information, and Google would have to comply or risk the consequences.

Yahoo found itself in exactly such a sticky situation last year. The Chinese government decided that information posted to the web by a user with an anonymous Yahoo email address was a state secret and asked Yahoo’s Hong Kong office to provide them with the user’s personal information. Yahoo complied, and former Yahoo user Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years in prison. News of Yahoo’s disclosure of the anonymous user’s identity, and a recently discovered case of another unmasked Yahoo user who received an 8 year prison term for discussing pro-democracy issues in a web forum, has caused some people in Western countries to criticize, boycott, and perhaps even advocate divesting from Yahoo and other U.S. internet firms operating in China.

Which brings us back to Google and this post’s title. Google may not be ready yet, politically, to roll-out their anonymous gmail service to Chinese users, but they do appear to have some Gmail China functionality online, ready and waiting for the green light. I know this because out of simple curiousity I added a “.cn” to the “gmail.com” URL in my browser, and lo and behold I reached this Gmail China login screen. Attempts to login fail with a “can’t find the server at mail.google.com.cn” error. This suggests that the login screen is programmed to eventually bring registered users to their mail on servers in China.

I wonder when Gmail China will launch and what criteria Google, the “Don’t Be Evil” company, will use to decide when the time is right.