Remittances Around the World
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The Weekly Data:
Remittances play a key part in many nations economies. All across the world, it is a common tendency for migrants to send much of their earnings back
The World Bank collects data in Remittance data on a yearly basis since the 1950’s, but only around the 2000’s does data appear for a majority of countries, as prior to the 2000’s there were far much unfilled sections due to a countries inability to collect this information. State capacity is required to collect information like this, unless you wanted to end of like the Ukraine where they have been unable to collect census and other information due to a lack of state capacity. It is a serious problem if one is unable to keep track about statistics regarding remittances, as many nations like the Philippines or India depend on remittances back to strengthen welfare systems and bring dollars into their economies.
Conveniently, the World Bank provides the regions per country, so by creating a average per region & year, it is possible to visualize the average percentage of how much remittances take up as a part of GDP for a given country.
The countries in Latin America that have the highest % of remittances as a part of GDP tend to be the poorer countries, like Honduras, Nicaragua, or Haiti. Unsurprisingly, given that these are some of the poor countries in the Caribbean/Latin America, remittances make a good portion of their GDP, and shocks such as recessions have large effects on these countries as suddenly a good portion of income is gone.
Another major region for migrant workers is the United Arab Emirates. Workers from across the Middle East and South/ South East Asia come and labor in a variety of professions, from working in construction to working as domestic labor for the wealthier portions of the UAE.
Unfortunately, the UAE has a history of not treating it’s migrant laborers very well, ranging from house-workers being subject to abuse by the families they work for, to the laborers on the many construction sites across the UAE being forced to work in horrible conditions and housed poorly. It is even common for their passports to be taken from them, so it becomes impossible for the poorly treated workers to try to flee the country.
There a two books on the subject of UAE guest worker relations that for me have proven quite helpful. Temporary People is a book on short fictional stories regarding the working conditions that the guest laborers work in. Building Nations with Nonnationals provides a good explanation of the tiered system of labor in the UAE, with South Asian workers being given the worst jobs and treated the worst, and a gradual shift until one reaches Western expats who work in the UAE.
Now, some links…
Tom Kizza (CJR): What’s Become of the Arctic
Over the past two summers, Bjørn Olson rode a fat-tire bike seven hundred miles along the shoreline of the Chukchi Sea, from the small city of Kotzebue, on the Arctic Circle, to Utqiagvik, the northernmost settlement in the United States. He pedaled the beaches, mostly, along with his partner, Kim McNett, and a couple of friends who joined for part of the way. Where old snowdrifts blocked their way, they pushed their bikes over a mountain pass. Nobody had ever made that trip before. Nobody had ever contemplated making it.
McMansion Hell: Coronagrifting: A Design Phenomenon
This morning, the design website Dezeen tweeted a link to one of its articles, depicting a plexiglass coronavirus shield that could be suspended above dining areas, with the caption “Reader comment: ‘Dezeen, please stop promoting this stupidity.’”
This, of course, filled many design people, including myself, with a kind of malicious glee. The tweet seemed to show that the website’s editorial (or at least social media) staff retained within themselves a scintilla of self-awareness regarding the spread a new kind of virus in its own right: cheap mockups of COVID-related design “solutions” filling the endlessly scrollable feeds of PR-beholden design websites such as Dezeen, ArchDaily, and designboom. I call this phenomenon: Coronagrifting.
I’ll go into detail about what I mean by this, but first, I would like to presenet some (highly condensed) history.
Jacob Siegel (Tablet): Ben Katchor’s Dairy Restaurant
In early March, I took the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan to meet Ben Katchor, who at 68 is as great an artist as America can claim today. Katchor’s new book, The Dairy Restaurant, was about to come out. What an achievement, I thought, this testament he’d created to a lost New York City world.
That The Dairy Restaurant (published by Tablet’s sister press, Nextbook) is not a standard comic book would come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Katchor’s unique body of work. But Katchor’s history of kosher dairy eateries is a departure even from his earlier work, which has occupied a space between early American newspaper comic strips and the comic art of “serious person” graphic novels. The Dairy Restaurant is in fact an encyclopedic history of the world comparable in its scope, though not its style, to other singular works of obsessive documentary art like James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—a studiously constructed compendium of narrative history, sentimental fragment, artifact, restaurant memorabilia, art, and recorded fact that Katchor compares to the Yellow Pages.
Brian Callaci (Phenomenal World): Digital Scab, Digital Snitch
Before Covid-19 hit, we'd become used to reports about Amazon's robotics innovations and the impending large-scale automation of warehouse jobs. But recent strikes and protests by Amazon's very human workers have exposed how far we are from robotic warehouses. In fact, as part of its effort to keep its warehouses fully staffed during the crisis, Amazon recently announced that it is ending its recently-instituted sick leave and base pay expansions, replacing both with increased overtime pay. While higher pay encourages more workers to apply for jobs, overtime incentivizes existing workers to work longer hours. Amazon’s strategy for increasing output in the pandemic seems to be getting its human employees to work harder.
Rich Hickey: A History of Clojure
The objective for Clojure can be summarized most succinctly as: I wanted a language as acceptable as Java or C#, but supporting a much simpler programming model, to use for the kinds of information system development I had been doing professionally. I started working on Clojure in 2005, during a sabbatical I funded out of retirement savings. The purpose of the sabbatical was to give myself the opportunity to work on whatever I found interesting, without regard to outcome, commercial viability or the opinions of others. One might say these are prerequisites for working on Lisps or functional languages. I budgeted for two years of self-directed work, and Clojure was one of two projects I pursued. After about a year I decided the other project (a cochlear modeling and machine listening problem) was more of a research endeavor that might require two to five more years, so I dedicated myself at that point to getting Clojure to a useful state. I announced and released the first version of Clojure, as an open source project, in the fall of 2007. I did 100% of the implementation work during this time, and more than 90% through the 1.2 release in 2010. Subsequent to release Clojure benefited greatly from the feedback, suggestions and effort of its community. I am accepted by the community as “benevolent dictator for life” (BDFL) and continue to make all decisions relating to its evolution. Clojure is full of the great ideas of others, but I alone take responsibility for its faults.
Miscellany:
I found this introductory textbook on logistics. Someone should find it helpful.
Thanks!
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