Here’s a Gaza Twist

This is interesting:

Jewish settler Avi Farhan, determined not to give up his home overlooking the sea when Israel quits the occupied Gaza Strip, is looking into becoming a Palestinian.

“I have met with Palestinians. I am willing to be a test case for peace and take up Palestinian citizenship,” Farhan told Reuters. “It will hurt me to give up my Israeli citizenship, but I want to remain here.”

[snip]

Farhan, a Libyan-born Jew who left Tripoli for Israel at the age of three in the wake of the 1948 war at Israel’s creation, said seven families were willing to stay in the mostly secular Gaza settlement of Elei Sinai after Israeli troops leave.

Farhan, 59, helped establish Elei Sinai after being forced to leave the Sinai settlement of Yamit in 1982. Like the West Bank and Gaza, Israel captured Sinai in the 1967 war, but returned it to Egypt under a peace deal.

“I fled from Tripoli, endured the displacement camps in Israel, and then I was kicked out of Yamit. Today I won’t be a refugee again. I have no strength,” said Farhan, a restaurant owner. “The Israeli government says it is concerned for my security if I stay here. I will worry about my own safety.”

Maybe there’s more going on than meets the eye in this story, but at least someone’s thinking outside the box here. Kudos to him.

Friday Cat Blogging

Cat and mouse, 21st century version:

Still waiting for a new batch of foster kitties — apparently the SPCA has had a lull in kitten intake this summer.

Sweatshops at Sea

And the race to the bottom continues. One inventive company, recognizing that there are timezone, distance, and cultural difficulties involved in outsourcing programming jobs to Southeast Asia, is coming up with a creative solution:

Take a used cruise ship, fill it with programmers, and park it three miles off the US coast so that it is no longer subject to US laws and regulations (like OSHA rules, overtime pay, etc). Pay the programmers less than $22,000 a year and make then work 10 hours a day. And then say that since the ship is so close to America, that it’s really a way of keeping American jobs at home.

It sounds to me more like indentured servitude than a decent job opportunity.

  • Although the article says that each programmer will have their own room, what about spouses or children? I suspect they won’t be welcome.
  • They say that the pay is $1,800 a month, they don’t mention whether the employees will have to pay for things like laundry service, medical care, entertainment, or other amenities — it could well be that most of their cash will go right back to the employer.
  • The article mentions ‘shore leave’ for employees, but how often, and how much leave? And what happens if an employee decides to quit, or has a family emergency, or has some other reason for needing to get off the boat?

The telling comment, it seems, is this one: “The pay is about three times what they earn in India today.” That will make those jobs highly desirable to Indians if not Americans. And with the ship parked so close to the US/Mexico border, it doesn’t take much imagination to cook up a scenario where you import a boatload of programmers through Mexico, put them on the ship in international waters, and bingo, you have a totally unregulated sweatshop where the inhabitants cannot get away without permission unless they’re willing to risk a three-mile ocean swim.

It’s a situation bursting with the potential for abuse.

Hat tip to Kulam Yachad for the link.

Your Blog and Your Career

Clicking through series of links this morning, I ended up coming across an article in “The Chronicle of Higher Education” regarding applying for jobs in academia and how reading applicants’ weblogs had an impact on the hiring process. I’m not looking to work in academia, but this did hit on an issue I’ve wondered about: could what I’ve written here come back to haunt me professionally down the line?

I’m well aware that what you post to the Internet never really dies. Knowing that, I’ve deliberately avoided some subjects in this weblog and tried to minimize the comments I made on others, including work. But according to this article, even that might not be good enough for some potential employers:

Professor Shrill ran a strictly personal blog, which, to the author’s credit, scrupulously avoided comment about the writer’s current job, coworkers, or place of employment. But it’s best for job seekers to leave their personal lives mostly out of the interview process.

It would never occur to the committee to ask what a candidate thinks about certain people’s choice of fashion or body adornment, which countries we should invade, what should be done to drivers who refuse to get out of the passing lane, what constitutes a real man, or how the recovery process from one’s childhood traumas is going. But since the applicant elaborated on many topics like those, we were all ears. And we were a little concerned.

[snip]

…in truth, we did not disqualify any applicants based purely on their blogs. If the blog was a negative factor, it was one of many that killed a candidate’s chances.

More often that not, however, the blog was a negative, and job seekers need to eliminate as many negatives as possible.

Well, Fiat Lux has been online for almost two years now, and judging on how much of my traffic comes from Google, even taking it down would not prevent people finding what I’ve blogged. If someone reads what I have to say here and decides not to hire me because I’m too opinionated, or because of my particular view on things, or because they think I’m a risk for what I might possibly say in the future …. well, that says more about their own issues than it does about mine.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care whether this blog could affect my job prospects in the future. Of course I care. But since I can’t de-Google myself, I’m damned already in some people’s eyes. I might as well keep going on.