Jason’s Random Thoughts

The use of foreign workers in any nation is often a touchy subject, eliciting a population’s fear of losing jobs to people who will often work for much less money than a regular citizen. However, using foreign workers to the nation’s best interests is an important task and should be handled properly by any government who is seeking to sustain growth and vitality amid declining birth-rates, a shrinking labour force, and ageing society.

Prime Minister Fukuda established yet another panel last month in an effort to study how Japan can accept more foreign workers with specialized skills and knowledge. Reporting to the chief cabinet secretary, these experts are expected to find ways the country can make itself more appealing to the better educated. Whether this exercise will bear any fruit, however, is yet to be seen.

For the moment, Japan does not technically allow the entry of unskilled foreign labourers, but has a very streamlined (a.k.a. Requiring less than 8 kanji-heavy documents to complete) process for accepting highly skilled people. That said, despite this paperwork concession, it’s often difficult to draw the world’s best and brightest to a nation that is known to treat its foreign workers very differently than the citizenry.

As of January 2008, there were 2,152,973 foreigners registered in Japan. While many seem to be here on a spousal or educational visa, about 158,000 were given resident status as researchers, engineers, teachers (language instructors not included) and other professionals. However, only half of these people are employed with 30 or more hours per week, and a piddly 5% are employed at one of Japan’s major organizations.

Non-Japanese people tend to have difficulties in getting promoted at Japanese corporations and research institutes. This isn’t due to language barriers, either. Many people who have invested years studying proper use of Japanese often find themselves looked over when it comes time to move up a rank. This glass ceiling is often a huge problem for highly motivated and driven individuals with great educations and ambition. It’s no wonder that after a few years of working in Japan, many transfer or move to Europe and North America to earn more respect and responsibility.

To solidify the country’s international competitiveness, the government panel must establish a functional, two-way, collaborative relationship with both industry and academia to attract people to the nation. On top of this, implementation of measures to help foreign students find work in this nation should be made a priority. For these reasons, Tokyo should consider expanding the list of conditions where foreigners can be granted residence in the country.

Paper vs. Sweat

I’ve discussed some of the reasons Japan should accept more skilled workers to the nation, but it’s also important to examine some of the problems with accepting too many unskilled workers. Contrary to popular belief (and government policy), a large number of non-Japanese are working in the agricultural, manufacturing and construction industries. These are often foreign nationals with Japanese ancestry and trainees who come under the guise of the “foreign trainee system,” which was created to foster international co-operation.

The foreign trainee system has been little more than a loophole for many employers who wish to bring in lots of labourers who will work ridiculous hours for illegally-low wages. Naturally, this needs to be stopped and should be followed up with measures to reform the system.

Marketing Meets Muddled Mindsets

Very few highly skilled foreign nationals will come to Japan if companies continue to follow the status quo. They will never consider Japan to be an option if their perceived careers entail working on a minimal salary like a pyramid-building slave, only to be discarded at will.

Japan imports thousands of care workers from Indonesia and the Philippines under bilateral economic partnership agreements. And, considering the aging population, these people should be nurtured carefully as they will be the ones to provide the vital medical and welfare services this nation needs.

That said, there are some people who are pushing to establish a system to accept unskilled foreign workers in an effort to ramp up production at factories and processing plants. Hidenao Nakagawa, the former Secretary General, is just one example.

Of course, like we see in other nations with high immigration numbers, the population is expressing some concerns with the number of foreigners coming in to the nation. They argue this measure will reduce the employment opportunities for Japanese citizens, which could instill some “social discontent.”

Suffice to say, the topic is only lightly discussed in the halls of power. The Prime Minister should aim to encourage deeper discussion on the matter and provide a clear direction on how the country should handle its worker shortage, as well as how Japan should attract intelligent foreign workers.

What’s your take on the foreign situation in this country? Should Japan just follow the same route until there aren’t enough Japanese people left to do the work? Is it a good idea to change the corporate culture to help reduce or eliminate the glass ceiling?

Over the last several months I’ve been noticing a growing trend where people are not receiving my emails in a timely fashion, if at all, when the destination is a Hotmail, GMail or Yahoo mail account. At first I had thought this might have just been a case of quick fingers, where someone accidentally deleted my email while cleaning their inbox of spam. Lord knows I’ve done this a few times and had to retrieve a message from the garbage bin, but how often can this really happen? However, yesterday I received a happy little email from Hotmail telling me that my messages were no longer welcome so long as they came from my j2fi.net or TheCarbonBlog.com domains.

Here is the main body of the message I received:

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

xxxxxxxx-at-hotmail.com
SMTP error from remote mail server after MAIL FROM:<jason-at-j2fi.net> SIZE=25553:
host mx2.hotmail.com [65.54.xxx.xxx]: 550 OU-001 Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons. Reasons for rejection may be related to content with spam-like characteristics or IP/domain reputation problems. If you are not an email/network admin please contact your E-mail/Internet Service Provider for help. Email/network admins, please visit http://postmaster.live.com for email delivery information and support

—— This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ——

What? Me? Spam?

Suffice to say, I wasn’t too impressed with the message, but I was happy to see something come back from Hotmail that tells me what I need to do. There’s nothing worse than sending an email only to have it completely disappear in the ether that is the internet.

So What Can We Do?

There seems to be two primary options for resolving this matter. One is to create a SenderID and associate it with the DNS entry of your mail server, and the other is to get on an email White Listing service such as Sender Score. Since email plays a critical role in my online communication, but I can’t justify a huge cash outlay, I decided to initially go with a Sender ID. Although I would love to set up an account with Sender Score, the $400 application fee is just a bit more than I can realistically afford to spend for the sake of a dozen emails to the major web-based email providers every month.

To that end, I’ve included the step-by-step of the procedures I followed, as well as the amount of time that passed before my site was accepted by SenderID and updated accordingly.

What Is Sender ID

According to the Microsoft website, Sender ID is an email authentication protocol that helps address the problem of spoofing and phishing by verifying the domain name and IP addresses of the email server sending the messages. Apparently, this has already been adopted by over ten million domains and is proving to be quite useful.

In their framework paper, they advise us to make an SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record and attach it to the DNS text file on our mail server. Since this is all Greek to me, I was happy to see that Microsoft does offer a SPF Creation Wizard that will guide us through the process and provide the relevant information that we need to paste into the text file.

All in all, the questionnaire took less than five minutes to complete and at the end we’re given the necessary text that should be added to our DNS records. For anyone that is using shared hosting with an email package, you will likely need to create a support ticket that includes the information supplied by the SPF wizard. If you’re running your own server, then I hope you know how to modify your DNS file, as this is different for almost every Operating System (but I can help out if you’ve never done it).

The Waiting Game

After making the changes to your DNS record, you will need to wait anywhere between two hours and a day for the new information to propagate through the web. Once this is done, any web server that is configured to check for a Sender ID will query the SPF record on your email server and compare it to the record found on the Sender ID servers. So long as they both match, your email will be considered authenticated and the message will arrive in the destination inbox without a problem. That said, there are still opportunities for your domain to be removed from the Sender ID program if too many people mark your messages as being spam.

I had the changes made to my email server before leaving for work this morning and, after coming home, I was pleased to discover that Hotmail, GMail and Yahoo Mail were all accepting my messages once again. Hopefully I will not need to invest a huge sum of money to get on some of the better-regarded email White Lists but, if I do, then I’ll be sure to fight it tooth and nail.

Have you had problems sending emails from your own server in the past? How have you corrected the problem?

Ever since the Human Genome Project mapped their first human genome, people have wondered what they could find out about their own genetic history.  Unfortunately, it’s been rather expensive, and most of us really don’t worry enough about inherited conditions until our body starts to have some rather serious problems.  But there is a company out there that’s trying to change this.

I first read about 23andMe in a daily paper here in Japan and, after reading the article, I was a little concerned about one of the statements I had read:  “… funded by Google.”

Looking at this from a business perspective, it makes sense for Google to diversify their incredible net worth into other companies in an effort to foster information and innovation in a series of important industries, but the ever vigilant buzz-killer inside me asked “People already give their email, website stats, business data and online marketing to Google, why would anyone want to give them our genetic code, too?”

Let this be a warning to anyone that wants to be a programmer that has to test and debug all their own software.  Some of us can be very negative and see the worst in everything, even if the scenario we imagine is nowhere near the truth.  This “skill” alone has let me see through a few other business practises performed by banks, energy companies and even some of the oh-so-perfect localized environmental protection agencies that are really little more than domestic terrorists using the cloak of citizenship and student-status as a shield against aknowledging their own ignorance of the world.  But sometimes, we can be way off the mark. </rant>
Back on topic, though, I’m quite tempted to save up the $1998 USD required to have both Reiko and my genomes sequenced.  I’d really like to know if there are any hidden conditions we should keep an eye on in the next half-century, and it would be nice to know that there’s nothing severely limiting in our quest to have children.  While 23andMe can’t tell us whether we’re genetically compatible with our chosen mates, they can tell us about inherited genetic defects and potential complications.  Of course, the info that I would be most interested in is the tracing of ancestry.

I’ve been able to trace my ancestors back almost 450 years to Ireland, England and France, but have been at a loss to find the exact migration pattern of relatives before the 1600s.  Naturally, many of the historical records from before 1700 have been lost or destroyed, but it would be nice to know when my ancestors started settling in these nations and where they may have come from before.  For the moment, such a detailed genetic history is just a pipe dream, but if there are enough people having their genomes sequenced and stored in some centralized database, then it should be possible to determine how many years have passed since Reiko and my ancestors left Africa.  I would be very interested to find out if we are somehow related.

I say this just out of curiosity, of course.  Considering how Reiko and I are from two very different parts of the world there is very little chance that our families were even remotely geographically close since the end of the last major ice age, there is no chance that we would be committing some weird act of incest.

According to some studies, every human on this planet shares a common female ancestor.  The early human died about 175,000 years ago, and that’s probably where most of our genetic ties end.  But this well known scientific theory isn’t going to quench my curiosity.

The history of human development has always fascinated me, as has our migration patterns across this unique world.  Science believes that we all came from Africa, and I’ve heard several different theories about the plight of early Homo Sapiens through National Geographic magazines, NOVA documentaries, and several well-respected historical and biology publications over the years.  We have accomplished so much as a species in such a short amount of time, and we seem to accomplish more and more all the time.  Looking at human progress often reminds me of the Fibonacci Sequence, as we tend to move forward in leaps and bounds.

But it’s always wise to stop and look back at where we came from.  We can learn from past mistakes, and we can appreciate the incredible struggles faced by those before us.  Sometimes it’s easy to forget just how hard our ancestors worked to make the world that we live in today.  Looking back through time with our genetic code is just one way to appreciate just how far we’ve come.

If you have an extra $999 USD lying around, you might want to give 23andMe a try.  You never know what strange things you might find out about yourself.

Note:  This post was not sponsored in any way.  It’s just something I read in the Daily Yomiuri and wanted to share

By now, everyone will have heard about Google’s plans to lay a nice fat multi-terabit optical cable across the Pacific Ocean.  Personally, I think this is great for both Google and their target market:  us.  But rather than discuss Google’s plan to take over the world while making it look like their really our friend (I’ll leave that to expert haters and people with more research time and resources on their hands), I’d rather talk about what this means for the future of Google’s target market … again, us.

Twenty years ago people looked at Microsoft the same way they do Google today.  Lots of companies and technologically savvy people were afraid of what this budding company of incredibly intelligent programmers with their strong-minded leaders would do to their perception of the world and, despite crying foul every time Microsoft did something right, these people would instead focus on the few mistakes made or put a bad spin on anything that they were jealous for not thinking of first.

That said, before the flames and hate mail starts pouring in, I’m not defending Microsoft, here.  I’m merely pointing out some similarities in the two companies when they reached 10 years in age.

Microsoft started out by offering an operating system they bought for next to nothing, and then went around to vendors telling them that they wanted MS-DOS.  Application developers learned how to program against this DOS platform and made quite a bit of money, while Microsoft made money right along with them.  Google has done the same with their incredible services and API.  We’ve learned how to program with the Google API, and some people have earned a nice chunk of change over the years.

Microsoft didn’t stop with operating systems, though.  They branched off into Operating Environments (Windows 1.0 through to WinME), other Operating Systems (WindowsNT to the current Vista), productivity software (Office, Money, etc.), games, development platforms, database engines … the list goes on and on, but it didn’t happen all overnight.  Instead, we had a love-hate relationship with Microsoft while wishing there were other options that were just as versatile.

The same can be said about Google.  They didn’t stop with their search engine.  They branched off into streaming video, satellite imagery, navigation systems, newsgroups, blog hosting, desktop applications, translation services … the list is just as extensive as Microsoft’s.  The biggest difference, though, is that most tech people love Google.

The two companies share many similarities, and the one I can appreciate the most is the opportunities they give to people who mistrust their services.

Microsoft haters flocked to the Mac or Linux in droves, allowing some incredible development and enhancements to blossom from both.  Where would Linux be today if it wasn’t for people mistrusting Microsoft so much in the last 15 years?  I’ll admit that Linux’s popularity and innovations are not 100% thanks to people who dislike Microsoft, but it’s certainly helped Linux claim a few percentage points of the OS market.

Now the same is being said about the all powerful Google.  They’ve ventured into so many areas that there are more people turning their backs on the G and working with lesser-known platforms, adding innovations and word-of-mouth to these services.  Several months ago there was a post in Wired about how the search engine market was fracturing (I wish I could find it again), and that these engines had to find new ways of attracting hits and gaining market share while fighting off newer engines such as ChaCha, KartOO, Quintura and Zuula.

Massive companies that dominate several markets aren’t always things to be feared.  They often breed misguided contempt, greed, jealousy and ego just enough that people start building newer solutions that meet or exceed the needs of people.  Heck, this is how Google got their start.  How many of us were exclusively using Yahoo search or Altavista in 1998?  How many of us still use those engines?  The same is said about operating systems.  How many of us were using Microsoft solutions in 1998, and how many of us now use other platforms?

Personally, I’m glad to hear that Google is buying up so many companies, laying so much cable, and venturing into markets such as wireless internet and cell phones with free services.  Eventually, this will piss off enough people in companies and online communities to come up with something even better and, at the end of the day, there will only be one real winner.

Us.

For the last few years, credit has been pretty cheap.  Most people can get that home improvement loan for well under ten percent, or the half-million dollar mortgage for a few points above prime.  However, for those that are looking for a few more numbers in their loan agreements, Gary Coleman promotes an option.

Apparently, cashcall.com is offering loans from $1000 to $5000 with an interest rate of 99.25%, and Gary Coleman is their spokesperson.

Yes … 99.25%  Oddly enough, I think it’s cheaper to borrow money from loan sharks and mobsters.  I’m sure the local pimp would even hook you up with a little cash for less.

The scariest loan I’ve ever taken out was for 17.25%, and that was for a notebook computer back in 1999 when I was just establishing my credit.  After paying off the computer in 12 months, the total amount charged in interest and finance fees came out to just over $700.  At that point I vowed never to pay such a stupid amount of money on a $3000 loan ever again.

Personally, if I was desperate enough for money to warrant a 99.25% interest rate, I’d rather write the letters I-O-U on a napkin and deposit it into my bank’s ATM as though it was a real cheque.  I could do this and then draw $5000 (in 20’s, of course) faster than I could ever apply for a loan.  I bet the bank would even be nicer about the repayment schedule, too.  They’d only demand blood
Have you seen other loan companies offer something this ridiculous?  Have you ever heard of people being desperate enough to use them?