Word: menials
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...language classes. Yet not a single Chinese I spoke to at Ramu or Basamuk said they had ever attended any of these language courses. Furthermore, despite assurances that the Chinese working on-site were only engineers or other specialists, I saw Chinese sweeping up construction debris and doing other menial labor that locals could surely do. (See pictures of the making of modern China...
...difficulty of the feat, and how the aircraft itself made an impact: "Imagine trying to disarm a bomb while also having to deal with menial chores and talk on the phone at the same time. Sullenberger and [co-pilot] Jeffrey Skiles disarmed a bomb on a three-minute fuse. They did it by concentrating on the two really important matters - how to get the engines started, and where to land. They could have done it in a Boeing, too. But it was helpful to their immediate cause that they were working with the product of [Airbus engineer Bernard] Ziegler...
...West, and behind the beeping trucks and fast-rising malls that are so exhilarating to Indians today, everyday souls are sustaining centuries-old ways of bringing gods into their difficult days and homes. In their devotion and humble attentions, Hindu and Muslim and Jain - not to mention menial worker and Brahmin and outlaw - have as much in common as apart. "We may be mortal," as one sculptor of deities (and a Lions Club president) tells William Dalrymple, in his new book Nine Lives, "but our work is immortal...
...Moldova rarely features on the world's radar. There is even a board game called Where is Moldova?, designed to teach geography. Locked between Ukraine and Romania, it has the sad distinction of being Europe's poorest country. About a sixth of its population works abroad, largely in menial jobs on the streets of Western Europe. But it made headlines in April when thousands of Moldovans, mostly young people, took to the street crying fraud after elections that returned the Communist Party to power. Protesters torched buildings and ransacked the presidential palace. (Read: "Ghosts of Kosovo...
...funny thing happened on the way to the knowledge economy, writes Matthew Crawford: we somehow got stupider. Globalization and technology are doing to white collar jobs in the 21st century what the assembly line did to trades in the 20th--turning them into repetitive, menial, dissatisfying tasks. "Wherever the separation of thinking from doing has been achieved," he writes, "it has been responsible for the degradation of work." Crawford, a political-philosophy Ph.D. and motorcycle-shop owner, stresses the importance of the manual trades and the cognitive challenge of working with solid things (preferably grimy, metal ones). He packs plenty...