Friday, September 26, 2003
The United States trade representative, Robert Zoellick, published in the Financial Times an offensive essay ("America will not wait for won't-do countries") where he blames the third world countries for the failure of the WTO meetings. This provoked several angry answers even in the Financial Times itself. Today Argentina replied to that with a new essay called something like "Trade is not so fair as it seems". Meanwhile our president Kirchner in the UN meeting defended the Argentine position. He even dared to say that as long as there are poor countries there will be terrorist danger in the first world. Bold he is.
Regarding the IMF agreement, with the proposal of paying only 25% of the debt, apparently in the long run the IMF and the World Bank won't lose a cent. We will lose our retirement pensions, the common Italian and German creditors will lose their investments, but the big financial companies are safe and sound. That's why Bush and the IMF applauded it.
Regarding the IMF agreement, with the proposal of paying only 25% of the debt, apparently in the long run the IMF and the World Bank won't lose a cent. We will lose our retirement pensions, the common Italian and German creditors will lose their investments, but the big financial companies are safe and sound. That's why Bush and the IMF applauded it.
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
Finally Lula and Kirchner had a meeting today, and they are friends again. Lula congratulated Kirchner because of the IMF proposal, undoing all harm done. He even mentioned the IMF thing when he talked in the UN, so now they're even.
Well, I have decided to blog both in English and Spanish, in different blogs, naturally. Double work, but I think it is worth...
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
Scarcely a month ago, I wrote a small note about "The Google Age", in Spanish, quickly translated to English by request, where I naively pointed out the flaws of the widely applauded search engine. I didn't know about the people of Google Watch by then; I had never heard terms like "Googlewashing" or "Googlelashing" before. So there is more than meet the eye, as it seems. But today I found an interesting article about how blogs (like this one) distort the information provided by Google. Google, as everybody knows, ponders the weight or importance of the sites it lists by how many links are pointing to them. One link, one vote; if the voter is important, the linked site gets more score. Simple, democratic, right? Not so easy:
...the rich get richer, and the poor hardly count at all. This is not "uniquely democratic," but rather it's uniquely tyrannical. It's corporate America's dream machine, a search engine where big business can crush the little guy. This alone makes PageRank more closely related to the "pay for placement" schemes frowned on by the Federal Trade Commission, than it is related to those "impartial and objective ranking criteria" that the FTC exempts from labeling.
says Daniel Brandt, founder and president of Public Information Research. But coming back to the case of the article I just read, bloggers usually write continuously just for the sake of writing in their blogs, pointing out sites and giving unknowingly those sites extra points for the Google vote system. As blogs are interconnected also by links, those pages are important to Google, and make other places important as well. But as most weblogs are garbage, the pointed sites are usually garbage too. A full army of weblogs can distort the information we get through Google. A blogger explained this very well with useful examples. But back to the article again,
...blogs have 'subverted a search engine people liked because it was meritocratic about information, and made it about themselves and their narcissism'
Meanwhile, Doc Searls, perhaps one of the most important bloggers today, writes that it's not because of the profussion of bogus bloggers, but because the real content providers decide that what they have to say should not be freely available in the net:
Maybe this isn't about "gaming" algorithms, but rather about a situation where one particular type of highly numerous journal has entirely exposed archives while less common (though perhaps on the whole more authoritative) others do not.
Google recently bought Blogger, the company that I'm using to blog this page. So where's Google positioned now regarding blog noise? Nobody knows, in fact. But this kind of discussion is refreshing, nevertheless. I'll write more about blogs tomorrow.
...the rich get richer, and the poor hardly count at all. This is not "uniquely democratic," but rather it's uniquely tyrannical. It's corporate America's dream machine, a search engine where big business can crush the little guy. This alone makes PageRank more closely related to the "pay for placement" schemes frowned on by the Federal Trade Commission, than it is related to those "impartial and objective ranking criteria" that the FTC exempts from labeling.
says Daniel Brandt, founder and president of Public Information Research. But coming back to the case of the article I just read, bloggers usually write continuously just for the sake of writing in their blogs, pointing out sites and giving unknowingly those sites extra points for the Google vote system. As blogs are interconnected also by links, those pages are important to Google, and make other places important as well. But as most weblogs are garbage, the pointed sites are usually garbage too. A full army of weblogs can distort the information we get through Google. A blogger explained this very well with useful examples. But back to the article again,
...blogs have 'subverted a search engine people liked because it was meritocratic about information, and made it about themselves and their narcissism'
Meanwhile, Doc Searls, perhaps one of the most important bloggers today, writes that it's not because of the profussion of bogus bloggers, but because the real content providers decide that what they have to say should not be freely available in the net:
Maybe this isn't about "gaming" algorithms, but rather about a situation where one particular type of highly numerous journal has entirely exposed archives while less common (though perhaps on the whole more authoritative) others do not.
Google recently bought Blogger, the company that I'm using to blog this page. So where's Google positioned now regarding blog noise? Nobody knows, in fact. But this kind of discussion is refreshing, nevertheless. I'll write more about blogs tomorrow.
As an update to the comment about Lula and Kirchner I just posted, they both will meet unexpectedly tomorrow to speak and recompose their relationship. But the anger of Kirchner is no fleeting feeling, they say. "Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus..."
A lot of interesting things are happening these days. We have Argentina saying that they can't pay the debt, after all, a thing that everybody knows by now. So they're asking to pay only 25% of the whole debt. That's historical; creditors, very nervous. The IMF, satisfied (?). Also the IMF asked to continue the negotiations between rich and poor about subsidies, the failure of the WTO meeting in Cancún. The United States ask help about Iraq to the United Nations, after all the divergences they had in the past.
But today I will write about a curious fact: Argentina and Brazil are no longer friends, these days. Let me go back to the past history, just a year ago. The time when Lula was a shining star in Latin America. For the first time in many years a person among the common people won the presidence. Lula was a left wing Brazilian immensely popular by then, he was poor and suddenly a president, everybody loved him. He was the hope not only of the Brazilians: he was the hope of the whole Latin American people. In Argentina, we envied the Brazilians: we could never come up with someone like him. He was ready to fight the IMF, to fight the so-called imperialism of the United States, to fight poverty against capitalism. He was something like the Godfather of the Porto Alegre antiglobalization meetings. He would take the Mercosur, the failed free trade area in South America, into a new world of wealth and friendship. We, meanwhile, were still fighting with our known corrupt politicians, we had no possible way out of our vicious circle. At that time, we supposed the evil Menem would win the presidence of Argentina again, and we would all fall again in that mud of corruption, devoid of culture, ethics or national pride. We all saluted Lula the saviour of the South. But then things changed.
Menem lost the presidential elections, and we had an almost surprising new face there: Néstor Kirchner. Unknown to most, he was a peronist after all, and we didn't trust him. Lula was the first to shake his hand when he took the presidential staff. Suddenly, something called "the K style" began to happen. Our new president began to do all the things Lula promised to do. Kirchner went everywhere and scolded every capitalist in town. Fought the IMF, fought the birds of prey of Europe, who made fortunes in Argentina thanks to the politics advised by the IMF and implemented by Menem during the nineties. Didn't surrender to the Iraq pressures of the United States, worked for an understanding in the WTO meeting. Worked for trade treaties with different Latin countries. In less than a year, we had a Lula called Kirchner, and Brazil lost their original one: Lula began to undo all his promises. He claimed not to be left wing, after all. He hobnobbed everyone in the financial world. He interviewed Bush, and came back smiling. History is unpredictable, sometimes.
Now Lula refused to support Argentina in this bold proposal we carry with the IMF about the debt, and Kirchner is furious. Fox (the Mexican president) did; even Bush did. The so-called brotherhood among Latins Lula proposed worked while Lula didn't have to confront diplomatic problems. In the words of the Argentinean government, Lula preferred to escape the inconveniences of being a friend of ours to pose with the G7 in a false picture. On Friday Lula declared his intentions to "insert Brazil in the world as a big and respected country, not as a small third world country that's only useful to play football and celebrate the carnivals". That expression, "small third world country", is not casual. Some time ago he had a quite big diplomatic problem because he used that to refer to Argentina, as opposed to Brazil.
So now the situation is not very clear. When the Mercosur should be the first thing for Kirchner and Lula, now Kirchner is working to have a new trade treaty with Mexico, the "enemy" (if such thing can be said) of Brazil in terms of Latin leadership. Kirchner had previously a plan to organize a massive act in a football stadium, side by side with the Brazilian president. Now he cancelled that too.
All of this is a shame. We always dreamed of that: "Latin America united will never be defeated". We never seem to be united. Not even in front of our common enemies. Probably Lula and Kirchner will switch sides several times during the (at least) four years they will share being presidents. Sometimes one will play the offended friend, and sometimes will play the offending foe. Sometimes they will shake hands and pronounce aloud that dream again: "Latin America united will never be defeated", and we all will believe it, again.
But today I will write about a curious fact: Argentina and Brazil are no longer friends, these days. Let me go back to the past history, just a year ago. The time when Lula was a shining star in Latin America. For the first time in many years a person among the common people won the presidence. Lula was a left wing Brazilian immensely popular by then, he was poor and suddenly a president, everybody loved him. He was the hope not only of the Brazilians: he was the hope of the whole Latin American people. In Argentina, we envied the Brazilians: we could never come up with someone like him. He was ready to fight the IMF, to fight the so-called imperialism of the United States, to fight poverty against capitalism. He was something like the Godfather of the Porto Alegre antiglobalization meetings. He would take the Mercosur, the failed free trade area in South America, into a new world of wealth and friendship. We, meanwhile, were still fighting with our known corrupt politicians, we had no possible way out of our vicious circle. At that time, we supposed the evil Menem would win the presidence of Argentina again, and we would all fall again in that mud of corruption, devoid of culture, ethics or national pride. We all saluted Lula the saviour of the South. But then things changed.
Menem lost the presidential elections, and we had an almost surprising new face there: Néstor Kirchner. Unknown to most, he was a peronist after all, and we didn't trust him. Lula was the first to shake his hand when he took the presidential staff. Suddenly, something called "the K style" began to happen. Our new president began to do all the things Lula promised to do. Kirchner went everywhere and scolded every capitalist in town. Fought the IMF, fought the birds of prey of Europe, who made fortunes in Argentina thanks to the politics advised by the IMF and implemented by Menem during the nineties. Didn't surrender to the Iraq pressures of the United States, worked for an understanding in the WTO meeting. Worked for trade treaties with different Latin countries. In less than a year, we had a Lula called Kirchner, and Brazil lost their original one: Lula began to undo all his promises. He claimed not to be left wing, after all. He hobnobbed everyone in the financial world. He interviewed Bush, and came back smiling. History is unpredictable, sometimes.
Now Lula refused to support Argentina in this bold proposal we carry with the IMF about the debt, and Kirchner is furious. Fox (the Mexican president) did; even Bush did. The so-called brotherhood among Latins Lula proposed worked while Lula didn't have to confront diplomatic problems. In the words of the Argentinean government, Lula preferred to escape the inconveniences of being a friend of ours to pose with the G7 in a false picture. On Friday Lula declared his intentions to "insert Brazil in the world as a big and respected country, not as a small third world country that's only useful to play football and celebrate the carnivals". That expression, "small third world country", is not casual. Some time ago he had a quite big diplomatic problem because he used that to refer to Argentina, as opposed to Brazil.
So now the situation is not very clear. When the Mercosur should be the first thing for Kirchner and Lula, now Kirchner is working to have a new trade treaty with Mexico, the "enemy" (if such thing can be said) of Brazil in terms of Latin leadership. Kirchner had previously a plan to organize a massive act in a football stadium, side by side with the Brazilian president. Now he cancelled that too.
All of this is a shame. We always dreamed of that: "Latin America united will never be defeated". We never seem to be united. Not even in front of our common enemies. Probably Lula and Kirchner will switch sides several times during the (at least) four years they will share being presidents. Sometimes one will play the offended friend, and sometimes will play the offending foe. Sometimes they will shake hands and pronounce aloud that dream again: "Latin America united will never be defeated", and we all will believe it, again.
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