Via a reader tip comes news that Jesse Jackson is bringing his race hustling enterprise to Silicon Valley:
Civil rights advocate Jesse Jackson brought his campaign for more diversity in Silicon Valley workforces to The Chronicle Editorial Board Wednesday, noting that the racial separation of 50 years ago wasn’t as great as the inequality today. First Google, and then other Silicon Valley firms, released numbers depicting shockingly low racial and gender diversity in their workplaces, stories routinely reported in The Chronicle.
The Rev. Jackson said Silicon Valley companies are operating outside the equal opportunity employment and anti-discrimination laws and should know better. These companies have been created long since those laws were passed, and well after cultural expectations of equal access to jobs had taken root. The most frequent defense from the companies is that these jobs are technically demanding and that there are few blacks or Latinos with the needed skills. “Then why not invest in a plan to produce the engineers you need?” Jackson asks.
Jackson is promoting the idea that Silicon Valley firms, who have billions of dollars in offshore bank accounts that bypass U.S. taxes, could invest some of those funds in education and scholarships to train people of color as programmers and engineers. “Grow your own food, so to speak,” he said.
From Jackson’s view, the workforce should represent the marketplace. If 12 to 20 percent of the technology marketplace is black or brown, then shouldn’t 12 to 20 percent of the technology workforce be black or brown? The companies’ bottom line would benefit from the added value of inclusion, he said. (SF Gate)
You can read more at the link, but I eagerly await Jackson to start a campaign to get more whites and Asians into the NBA to better reflect the population like he wants Silicon Valley to do.
It has been a rough week for commercial space companies:
MOJAVE, Calif. — A winged spaceship designed to take tourists on excursions beyond Earth’s atmosphere exploded during a test flight Friday over the Mojave Desert, killing a pilot in the second fiery setback for commercial space travel in less than a week.
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo blew apart after being released from a carrier aircraft at high altitude, according to Ken Brown, a photographer who witnessed the explosion.
One pilot was found dead inside the spacecraft, which fell from the sky about 120 miles north of downtown Los Angeles. Another pilot parachuted out and was flown by helicopter to a hospital, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood. Their names were not released.
The crash area is in the desert north of Mojave Air and Space Port, where the test flight originated. (Associated Press)
You can read more at the link, but this will probably set back commercial space tourism by at least a decade. As we have seen in the development of any space program it is hard to do with many failures. It will be interesting to see if Virgin Galactic can keep getting investment money to support their company after this.
I have been dubious of the whole ALS ice bucket challenge and this is why:
Two-time Grammy award winning rapper and a founding member of the Fugees, Pras Michel, gets doused by his friends for the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, Sunday, Aug. 31, 2014 in Pyongyang, North Korea. [TIME Magazine]On Friday morning, the ALS Association announced that donations related to the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge had surpassed $100 million in only a month. To put that number into perspective, that is a 3,500 percent increase from the $2.8 million that the ALS Association raised during the same time period last year. More than 3 million people have donated, the association says.
From a marketing standpoint, the ice bucket challenge is pure genius. The marketing campaign has eclipsed everything else in the charitable fundraising industry, according to experts. It’s fun to do, fun to watch and easy to nominate someone else to participate.
But critics are now saying only a fraction of the money raised is actually going toward ALS research.
According to charitable watchdog groups like the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA), over 73 percent of all donations raised are going to fundraising, overhead, executive salaries, and external donations. The ECFA won’t deem a nonprofit as a reliable charity unless at least 80 percent of donations make it to their intended projects.
Other charitable watchdogs are citing a pie chart on the ALS Association’s own website that breaks down how it spends the money it receives. According to the chart, 28 percent is spent on research. [The MIssourian]
The ice bucket challenge has been so pervasive that as the above picture shows it has even been done in North Korea. By the way for those who are interested in giving to a charity I highly recommend the Fisher House Foundation which Charity Navigator has listed as putting 94.7% of their donations towards their programs. You can go to just about any major military base and see the impact of a Fisher House.
I have been waiting for some time to pass before posting about this, but felt a month after his death was an appropriate time to remember Kalani. Many ROK Drop readers may remember Kalani as a guest contributor on this site that provided great historical postings about Kunsan and Osan Air Force Bases. Kalani also maintained his fantastic site Kanaka in Korea that is filled with great Korea related information. Much of the information Kalani used for his postings was gathered from talking to both US veterans and Korean business owners over the years. The insights from his interviews along with Kalani’s own personal knowledge from living for many years in Korea always made for interesting reading. Fortunately his daughter plans on keeping the webpage up in memory of her father, which I was glad to hear.
I first met up with Kalani a year and half ago and took a walking tour with him of Songtan. His knowledge of all the changes in Songtan over the years was truly impressive and really caused me to look at Songtan in a different way. I also found him to be a very kind man that loved his wife and daughter very much. Kalani will surely be missed by all who knew him and I wish his family well as they go through this difficult time. Rest in Peace Kalani.
