2013 has been a year fraught with many challenges for democracy. One could circle the globe and find democratic struggles in every corner of it- from Maldives to Thailand, in Egypt and Iran, Venezuela to Burma, and of course the United States (I still shudder when thinking about the October government shutdown). Many of these […]
Comparison to Turkey is a bit of stretch: to the extent that the protestors in Brazil have expressed clear objectives, the authoritarianism of their president isn’t one of them. More importantly, the regional context is different. When it comes to Turkey there is at least some reason to associate protests with the Arab Spring, a […]
If you have not seen it, you ought to check out the new Chilean movie NO. A fictionalized account of the campaign to remove Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet through a plebiscite, it was one of this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Foreign Language Film. You should be aware, however, that it does not tell the […]
Recently I had a conversation with a civil engineer from Greece. He asked me directly if my country accepts economic migrants. As someone who has worked in the immigration system and has followed recent changes to the system here, I had found it odd that people who apply to immigrate would use the term economic […]
In recent weeks, two southern cone neighbors, Argentina and Chile, have demonstrated radically different youth voting tendencies. Culturally, economically and politically, Chile and Argentina’s approaches toward just about everything are famously different; to say the two countries have a rivalry would be an understatement. Yet, as I sit on the Santiagan side of the Andes, I cannot help […]
In 1971 Stafford Beer, a renowned British academic, proposed to make Chile the world’s first cybernetic country. In essence, this meant that Chile’s entire economy would be run by a centralized computer network; real time data from hundreds of public utilities, banks, and industrial manufacturers would be rendered into optimal allocations of electricity, automatically set […]
A small domestic market and stiff bankruptcy penalties make Chile an unlikely hotspot for aspiring entrepreneurs. Yet “Chilicon Valley” has swelled to more than 500 tech start-ups since 2010, including Kwelia.com, which makes software for landlords, and Kedzoh, which allows employers to send out instructional videos to workers via mobile phones. Two factors are behind […]
As the move toward energy conservation takes hold, lithium for use in ion batteries is destined to play a significant role in the energy equation of the next generation. From 2003-2007, global demand for lithium carbonate doubled, and realizing current hybrid car technologies will require access to massive stocks of lithium, which is largely harvested […]
Overview 2009 was all about China. Early in the year, when energy prices crashed due to disappearing demand, oil sank to slightly more than $30 barrel from its mid-2008 high of $147 and natural gas from $14 to around $3 per thousand cubic feet. China, flush with cash, for all practical purposes stabilized the market […]
Remember the fable of the grasshopper and the ant? The ant toils away storing grain for winter, while the grasshopper parties through the summer and dies of starvation in the winter. Something like that is happening in Chile. Chile is the world’s largest copper producer. Like several resource-rich countries — especially those with oil like […]
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