Social Change

It's official

Okay. Now it’s official. WIRED magazine’s cover story for February is about offshoring, so it must be for real. The article, “The New Face of the Silicon Age,” is pretty interesting with interviews of IT types in both India and the US. But the author, Daniel Pink, emphasizes this is about the global economy, not just IT. Eventually Pink gets ...

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Middle class NDE (part 2)

So what’s this global sourcing of knowledge worders (see part 1) mean for ACS? Well, my experience is that the ACS is pretty much a middle class institution, so the closer the death-of-the-middle-class scenario plays out the more significant the impact. Our income and our volunteer resource comes from discretionary time and money. If sustaining a middle class lifestyle is ...

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Middle class near death experience?

The article circulated last week, “The Digital Death Rattle of the American Middle Class: A Cautionary Tale,” really cranked-up the alarm about the possibility of the economic underpinnings of US society being knocked out by low cost information labor in countries around the world. I mean, death of the middle class? That’s the most dire and dour interpretation I’ve seen ...

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Anti-smoking gains are hazy after 40 years

This appeared over the weekend in my local paper. Suggests that the effort to reduce smoking has plateaued and that the money from the tobacco settlement has been squandered by governments.

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