Salocin

The Terminal is a wonderful movie that has Spielberg and Hanks telling a charming parable while weaving in lots of emotional messages about the values that make us who we are, or what makes America America. But this time it's done with the degree of tact that indicates at least a modicum of respect for the intelligence of the audience, and so we watch with benign amusement as the unfortunate Viktor Navorski is bruised and battered by the INS. Those of us who have also been victimised by these all-powerful individuals will sympathise, and Americans too will walk away smiling as their country provides - despite a couple of unsavoury authority figures - a powerful attraction and a slew of redeeming qualities that Navorski encounters along the way.

Viktor Navorski comes from Krakozhia, a country that suffered a coup while he was in the air, and he finds himself in JFK with a recently-invalidated passport, that contains a recently-withdrawn visa. Unusupecting of the trouble this entails, and not understanding the security guards, it takes quite some time for him to realize that this means he may not enter the United States. But worse than this, he may not leave it either. This condemns him to a protracted stay in the international transfer lounge.

His willingness to find solutions to his problems and to make the best of a bad situation result in his making many friends, and building himself somewhat of a home among the transience of the airport. His creative solutions to problems and honest (and perhaps a little naive) emotional responses to the machinations of those around him confound the expectations of his tormentors, leading to a humorous stand-off that costs them more that it costs him.

With Catherine Zeta-Jones in an unusual role as a vulnerable romantic interest, and a slew of characters that provide a rich backdrop to the terminal itself, this film will leave you with a sense that there really is strength in diversity, and that we could do with a little of Mr. Navorski's character in us all.

You can view the trailer at apple.com

You can read all about it at the Internet Movie Database.

So after the abject failure of my last attempt, GMail have seen fit to send me a new set of invites - I have 4 more to give. I will give away up to 3 in this thread, to the posters that submit the best joke(s).

Given the turnout for the last thread, either nobody's here (my Apache logs deny this), you all already have GMail accounts, you all don't want GMail accounts, or you're all too shy to speak.

Jokes have to be original - no points for jokes I've heard before.

So I've been using GMail to manage some aspects of email - especially the stuff I can auto-file as it arrives. It's pretty neat. I have a spare invitation to give to someone else, and in a bid to find out who the silent viewers of my webpage are, I'm offering it to a random person who posts in reply to this article. I'll figure out who in a week or so. My guess is that I won't get that many responses, but given that I feel bad swapping it for something a la GMail Swap, I figured I might as well perform a fun experiment here and then give it away for nothing. I guess I should give people something to post about, so ... Why do you want a GMail account, what's cool about it, wouldn't you rather use Outlook or some personal client to run email? Who needs yet another email address anyway? - That should get things started, assuming anyone posts at all. And if you feel like being helpful, then you might explain to me why on IE, my bloody comments page never seems to display properly. Something to do with DIV tags, I'm sure.

I lament of the fact that this stupid discussion still refuses to give up the ghost. The level of naivety and selfishness demonstrated and encouraged by the Presidential Elections is truly staggering.

There's this equation that relates the movement of factors of production to the economic well-being of a country. This functions has short-term and long-term consequences, and benefits and drawbacks. By focusing solely on one part of the equation, and then narrowing down the definitions until every positive aspect is ignored, this debate has been turned into a political point-scoring match that completely ignores the economic realities of the situation.

Offshore outsourcing is the acquisition of factors of production from abroad. It is not the exportation of jobs. It is the importation of a factor of production, labour output, at a cost low enough to compete with over-priced domestic labour. It is a consequence of an imbalance in world prosperity. Before, the cost of doing business this way was high because of transport costs and because information could not move freely - this drag or additional cost made it more expensive to do business abroad. Now that this anomaly is being eroded by the advance of technology, the cost of doing information-based work abroad is dropping, and economies are having to face off against each other in a way that was never possible before.

The detractors of this will say things like, "it's a sweatshop labour effect", implying that we must absolutely force countries like India to pay their workers more, or raise their costs in whatever way possible. This is basically cloaked protectionism: force their prices up by forcing standards upon them that they (as nation states) do not deem necessary, so as to make them less competitive in the export of the products of their information workers to the US.

But backing up from the argument of whether it's right or not to allow this to happen, let's measure the extent of the problem for a moment. In the latest edition of Foreign Affairs, Daniel W. Drezner, an assistant professor of political science at Chicago University writes the following :

Even if the most dire-sounding forecasts come true, the impact on the economy will be negligible. The Forrester prediction of 3.3 million lost jobs, for example, is spread across 15 years. That would mean 220,000 jobs displaced per year by offshore outsourcing - a number that sounds impressive until one considers that total employment in the United States is roughly 130 million, and that about 22 million new jobs are expected to be added between now and 2010. Annually, outsourcing would affect less than 0.2 percent of employed Americans.

So back the hell off your political bandwagons and find some other accusation to throw about.

I'm well aware that it's been a while since I wrote something, but I've been busy. Quite a few things have happened since last I wrote - graduation from the Wharton School being the first, the achievement of my fourth qualification and final ascension to the ranks of professional student. That, however, was just the first step.

I then found myself looking for a job. This is something most MBAs manage to do well before they graduate, but the kinds of things I was looking for didn't really come up until later, and anyway, it took me that long to figure out what I wanted to do that I needed the time. This is also a nice way of saying that European-style cover letters and modesty don't work so well in the US job market, and that the Fulbright 212-e two-year rule has a way of getting in the way of looking for a job in the US. Don't let me get started on that, although it looks like - at least in my case - I might be able to demonstrate that I'm not subject to it. Now I just have to wait 90 days for the Department of State to process my application for an advisory opinion.

So then I went to the movies, usually with people I care about. The problem with going to the movies with people that you care about is that it always results in your either being happy about the fact that you saw the movie together, so that you can talk about it, or it results in a sense of deep embarassment that you went to see so terrible a movie together. I'm not in the mood to write movie reviews these days, so I'll summarise them quickly for you here.

- Van Helsing : Oh my God so bad I could cry.
- Shrek II : Fun and funny, good for a laugh - lots of jokes for the adults
- The Day After Tomorrow : Fun action film, not badly executed.

On the subject of The Day After Tomorrow : For those imbeciles who can't seem to help themselves, it's a movie. Movies use this thing called "artistic license". This leads to a phenomenon known as "Willing suspension of disbelief". In other words, if they were to make an action film about climate change and keep it realistic, we'd be watching the screen for a century before there was any noticeable action, and all the characters would be dead by the time the temperature had dropped 1 degree. It's not a documentary, that's why the movie doesn't conform to every scientific theory ever seen. If you have problems with the realism of The Day After Tomorrow, then you must hate the likes of Mary Shelley and her ilk, who wrote Frankenstein's Monster, the original Dracula, or Dr. Jekylle and Mr. Hyde. Get over yourselves, science fiction and horror have long been staples of the literary and performance arts, and have been accepted as classics (Star Wars, Gattaca, The Shining, for example).

I prefer to think of films like The Day After Tomorrow as the modern jesters. They say what the leaders do not wish to hear, and they exaggerate their message to the point of the ridiculous because that gets them an audience by depoliticising the message itself.

Anyway, so that was good, and I'm still looking for a job, and fighting a war to prevent myself from sliding into the Odd Todd lifestyle. Although there's not much risk of that. I do, however, get the same strange sense that every time I send a resume to an automated system of some kind, it disappears into a form of black hole designed specifically for the purpose of absorbing online applications.

I think the monster.coms of this world have a system that doesn't necessarily make it easy to either search for jobs to apply to, or search through the qualifications of those who are searching for jobs in a meaningful way. I think this is intentional, because if we could do this, we'd quickly see that there's a real lack of mid-level and more senior jobs. There's this gap between "Administrative Assistant, must know how to type and spell" and "Senior Derivatives and Rates Trader, must have 17 years experience in a top investment bank's derivatives desk" in which the other 99% of the world resides, and which somehow doesn't seem to match any point on the employment demand curve.