Sydney, Australia, darkened -- kind of -- for Earth Hour 2007.
Twenty-six major cities around the world are expected to turn off the lights at 8 p.m. tonight on major landmarks, plunging millions of people into darkness to raise awareness about global warming, organizers said.
Anybody who lives in Sydney knows that Earth Hour was a monumental flop. Sydney did not plunge into darkness. It was a little bleaker than normal but still not quite as bleak as living in, say, Melbourne. In parks around Sydney, children could be heard chanting: “Turn them off!” long after the Great Switch Off had apparently begun. In the CBD, lights dimmed a little when the logos on the buildings went out. Most companies were too terrified to keep their logos burning during Earth Hour but what are the chances that Coca Cola will permanently give up its billboards? It’s absurd.
Earth Hour won't suffer for a lack of gimmicks. Servers wearing glow-in-the-dark necklaces will sell eco-tinis at bars and restaurants in Phoenix. A local yoga house in Michigan will offer sessions by lamplight, and the Sheraton Hotel in Chicago will have check-in by candlelight. Watching the lights wink off in major metropolitan areas might look impressive, but it's worth asking: What's the point? As Roberts himself notes, the energy saved by turning off your lights for an hour "won't make an enormous difference." So, if it won't cut carbon emissions, why bother then with Earth Hour, or Earth Day or Earth Live, last year's daylong concert for the environment?
Because climate change is essentially a political problem, and the language of politics is symbolism. Just because an act is symbolic doesn't mean it empty.
Which one will say "uncle?"
Ultimate fighting was once the sole domain of burly men who beat each other bloody in anything-goes brawls on pay-per-view TV. But the sport often derided as "human cockfighting" is branching out. The bare-knuckle fights are now attracting competitors as young as six-years-old whose parents treat the sport as casually as wrestling, Little League or soccer. Is this a good thing? And what does our love of violent entertainment say about us?
A decade ago, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and other legislative strongmen had choked the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) into near-submission. Nearly 40 states banned mixed martial arts events. The cable industry, over which McCain exercised considerable influence as the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, took note too. In 1997 TCI and Time Warner stopped carrying UFC pay-per-view events on their systems. Semaphore Entertainment Group, the company that produced UFC, nearly went bankrupt.
When he attacked the UFC, McCain never pushed for reform; he wanted to eliminate it entirely. But despite its initial image of lawless, bone-crunching mayhem, the UFC ultimately proved quite capable of policing itself. Apparently, the public’s interest in the fights was not as base as McCain had perhaps imagined. Today, the UFC is a sanitized, bureaucratized, more genteelly marketed version of its former self, yet it’s also more popular than ever. As much as we like violence, we apparently like it even more when it’s tempered by a senseof order.
I appreciate the rules that have taken mixed martial arts fights from pure brutality to true sport. The rules are fairly straightforward -- no gouging, attacking the groin, manipulating small joints, kicking an opponent when down, that sort of thing -- and don't get in the way of good action, as overly aggressive rules in amateur boxing and other combat sports sometimes do.
As a lapsed boxing fan, tired of the talent drain, corruption and long-term health effects for the fighters in that sport, I'd welcome a sport that provides that same pure one-on-one competition without the problems that have all but killed boxing. I'm still not sold. The legality of hitting -- though not kicking -- a man when he's down still makes it look a little back alley for my tastes.
Is she trying to send a message?
In the last few days, all three remaining major presidential candidates have described their plans to help a faltering economy.
This week John McCain and Hillary Clinton both used the housing-market upheaval to offer a window on what their presidencies would look like. The contrast in philosophy and program is something voters should pay attention to.
Mrs. Clinton proposes a curious triumvirate of grey eminences -- Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin -- to sit down and in three weeks come up with a more comprehensive rescue plan. Yes, this is the same Mr. Rubin who, as chairman of Citigroup's executive committee, oversaw the bank's reckless plunge into mortgage risk. And it is the same Mr. Greenspan who opened the liquidity floodgates as Fed Chairman and so helped to inflate the credit bubble. She got it right in choosing Mr. Volcker, but he's endorsed Mr. Obama.
Mr. McCain can be a little too righteous when he claims he would "not play election-year politics with the housing crisis." What he does seem to understand, however, is that most Americans are responsible borrowers who don't want to underwrite the losses of those who aren't. In that, he is politically smarter than Senators Clinton and Obama.
In the past quarter-century, there has probably never been a better time for a presidential candidate to charge into downtown Manhattan and make a speech arguing for more regulation of the financial industry. The moral authority of market fundamentalism (if such a thing ever existed) is in tatters, and even Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, the former CEO of Wall Street's crown jewel, Goldman-Sachs, is acknowledging that new rules are necessary to clean up the current mess.
Back in 1980, Ronald Reagan announced a series of broad, vague principles, and then proceeded to drastically change the direction of American politics and economics. If we take both Clinton and Obama at their word, we have Clinton promising a boatload of quick fixes, and Obama promising a profound change of course. What unites them, in opposition to McCain, is that both understand that the U.S. is facing a real problem.
U.S. firms employ more than 1.6 million call center operators in places like Bangalore, India.
Outsourcing U.S. jobs is a hot-button political issue, along with the economy and unemployment, this election year. But what happens if there aren't enough Americans qualified to do the jobs U.S. firms would otherwise outsource? The head AT&T said on Wednesday that the phone company was having trouble finding enough skilled workers to fill all the 5,000 customer service jobs it promised to return to the United States from India.
Why are our international peers outperforming us? There are clear, common threads between the education systems of the highest-performing nations. These countries have established uniform, rigorous standards, invested in their teachers and given more time and support to their students.
We need greater expectations and higher education standards. The reliance on computer technology has made math and science more important than ever. Yet by the end of 8th grade, what passes for the U.S. math curriculum is two years behind the math being learned by students in foreign countries. We need modern academic standards that will ensure kids are better prepared for today's workplace demands.
Another area that merits closer inspection is school calendars. Our current academic years continue to be scheduled as if they are straight out of the 19th-century agrarian model, when kids were needed during the afternoons and summers to help perform work around the home or farm. As a result, American children spend less time learning than their foreign peers. If we expect American students to be competitive, then we must find ways to get them more effective classroom time.
The technology industry claims the United States doesn't produce enough technologists. This claim is specious at best. Wages for information technology workers have been relatively flat while the career risks for the profession have skyrocketed. The industry's track record of attracting female and underrepresented minorities to technical professions has been woeful. By giving the industry a steady diet of cheap labor, there is no reason for companies to expand the domestic talent pool they draw from and invest in American workers to fill these jobs. And it also gives the companies ample opportunities to replace older workers with younger ones, fueling age discrimination.
A more sensible set of solutions would be twofold. First, significantly increase investments in U.S. students and underemployed workers so they can fill these job openings. Second, let the market work. If technology workers are as scarce as companies claim, then wages would be bid up and talented workers would choose engineering instead of more lucrative and safe fields in finance, medicine or law.
