Did you ever wonder how legal immigration into the U.S. actually works? Take a look at this wonderful illustration in Reason Magazine October edition.
What Part of Legal Immigration Don't You Understand?
It’s so simple, right? Just pick one of the paths that fits you best and you are almost in… 
Yesterday on my way home I listened to the NPR radio show “fresh air” hosted by Terry Gross. Financial reporter and New York Times columnist Gretchen Morgenson was there for an interview about the current financial crisis on Wall Street and why it happened, who did it, what happened, where the impact can be seen and felt, how it came to where we are and how it might be solved, and whether that could be real relieve or not.
I have to say, after watching Cramer for a few days in a row now, reading the WSJ, and digging through various sites on the Internet, I thought this was probably the best summary I have heard so far. I highly encourage you to spend the 40 minutes and listen to the interview, as the $700 billion bailout come out of your pocket if you are here in the U.S. and the crisis has most likely affected you already, no matter where you are.
Part of this blog is about how to live and survive here, and hopefully I can even provide the “born and raised” U.S. reader the occasional nugget that might enhance their living experience. One of the annoyances when you live here is that you realize the level of junk mail is tremendously higher than what I experienced in Europe before. About a year ago, there wasn’t a day when we did not get about 10 pieces of mail from unwanted senders. Once my wife was in the database, Victoria’s Secret sent us a catalog almost every day. According to some sources on the web, they mail out over a million catalogs per day.
While we shredded (to prevent identity theft) and recycled all this junk, there had to be a better way. Thankfully, soon afterwards a friend send us a link to greendimes.org. We immediately signed up for the premium package ($20 and they plant some trees as well) to reduce the junk. Now, I want to stress that they do have a basic package for free. There are also other options, such as catalogchoice.org. You could simply do most of these items yourself, such us getting your name on the “Do not mail list” of the direct marketing association (DMA).
In any case, ease of use for us was compelling with greendimes, and after a year, I can only state that we are really happy with the results. Their premium offering includes the following:
Hi there, it’s been some time since I posted, somehow got too busy with the daily life. But I collected a bunch of interesting topics I want to post about, so there will be new content very soon. Also, the weather was just too nice here in San Francisco, I am waiting for a rainy weekend now to pimp up the blog a bit more and work on the design etc. Anyway, more to come.
My friend Sanaa recently sent me a an interesting link for a video series, The Story Of Stuff. You should check out the whole series on Youtube. Parts of America are waking up that this level of consumption and waste production cannot go on endlessly, so there is hope. But then again, if I look at how many of my neighbors are actually properly recycling, I guess we still have a long way to go. And that’s in SF, where people are already considered pretty “green”.
Check out the rest of the series, it’s well done.
I love the Internet. All the things you can find here. And now there might be a case where an Internet investigator finds compelling evidence that there is a mismatch between the official age of Chinese Olympic Gold medal winner He Kexin (何可欣) as reported by the Chinese government to the Olympic committee and as documented in here passport, and an official document published by the Chinese Sports Authorities 2 years ago (http://www.sport.gov.cn/files/jts/reg2006/zctc.xls), that now have largely been removed and disappeared from the Internet.
As the WSJ reported, among others, Mike Walkers did some Internet research on his own to see if there was evidence that the age might have been misreported. According to her passport her age is Jan 1, 1992, while in the official sports document from 2 years ago her birthday is stated as Jan 1, 1994. The difference is that with the stated passport age she passes the Olympic age limit of 16 years in 2008, while at her potentially different real age she would not have been eligible to participate and win the gold medal.
To see the evidence yourself, follow Mike’s instructions: start by searching Google for all Chinese web sites for Excel spreadsheets containing He Kexin’s name and the word 1994 (site:cn 何可欣 filetype:xls 1994).
You will get one single result, and when you click on it, it’s not even there any longer. You can try the cached version from Google then. However, even though the Google search results indicate that He Kexin is listed in the spreadsheet, when you view Google’s cached version, her name no longer appears. Strange…
Do the same on the Chinese search engine site Baidu.com, and you will get TWO (2) results (spreadsheets at sport.gov.cn with Kexin’s name). Not surprisingly, the new one discovered by Baidu has been been deleted as well. Strange…
If you click on the “HTML” link next to these XLS documents on Baidu (do it yourself!) you can access a cached copy of the document. This means that it was fully available… until recently. Strange…
So, does what does the cached version (copies of these documents) on Baidu have to say about Ms. He? Well, in the Baidu cache, which as of now still contains these document (two spreadsheets published by the Chinese government on sport.gov.cn) both list He Kexin’s birthday as 01-01-1994, making her 14 years old.
You can access the documents directly yourself, either by using the directions above or by clicking these links: cache1 cache2 These documents were issued by the General Administration of Sport of China and you can draw your own conclusions of what is going on here.
I don’t even want to get into the discussion of who might have cheated or not and who would be responsible, I leave this to others. But I think there are 2 important things to consider here for the future. If, at least for the time being, the Chinese authorities have not been able to remove all of this content (or evidence) of the Internet, and it is now being replicated all across the Internet in blogs like this, I guess it is just another indication of how powerful the Internet has become. Be careful with putting stuff out there on the net. Whether MySpace, FaceBook, or any other site, it’s less about the end user license agreement that might give you a fake illusion of feeling secure. You have to be prepared that whatever is out there once, even for seconds, will be out there forever, and probably more often than in just one place.
The other item for food for thought seems to be Google. Google has been critizised in the past for being too cooperative with Chinese authorities regarding data and search restrictions and the privacy of its user data. Seems like in this case they are not sticking out as the keeper of the original version for the longest time, either. And if you continue to follow the story about Google.cn, it gets even more interesting.