First Round Take Me Now, Lord I Bin 151 Lie Danube Creperie Omer Gustoso Trattoria Lee's Villa ors 1:Youvres & Wirie-frbm the awa Street partttipants. Mr. Shish Kebab Per Bacco Riviera Pizza Tony Macaroni's Tres Bean Cafe With your made.go-measure Suit or Sport Coat purchase, receive a gift certificate to any one of the participating Ottawa Street restaurants. "Off the Rack?' doesn't cjuiet fit? et something Made-to-Measure! 1526 Ottawa Street, Windsor, OKM-8-52G5 1-877-5FREEDS • 519-258-6532 www.freeds.com 8 April 6 • 2006 Jig n my role as col- umnist, my job is to keep you, the reader, informed of cer- tain current events and calamities. And the news I have been following is filled with doom, and I'm not talking about Osama bin Laden and the War on Terror, Barry Bonds and steroid abuse, or even Paris Hilton and a lip-gloss mishap. It's serious. After reading halfway through Tom Friedman's new book The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, I discovered that, contrary to . the author's belief, computer technol- ogy's effect on leveling the workforce playing field — hence flattening the world — might not be a good thing. When companies like Reuter's can cheaply hire a very eager and moti- vated person in Bangalore, India, to enter data like earnings report announcements, so a "real journalist" in America can take the time to do the analysis story, it means one less way for one of our slackers to break into the business. To become a commodity trader in Chicago a few decades ago, I learned the ropes by starting as a runner —, the equivalent of a job in the mail- room — on the trading floor. After a few years of working on the floor, I didn't need a finance degree; I had learned enough of the business to take a chance and lose money in my own trading account. Now the trading floor is virtually non-existent. Computers have taken over, creating an electronic trading floor, and you can be a trader by click- ing on a screen with your mouse. You can't get from runner to trader anymore, because the floor doesn't exist. And you can't get from the mail- room to the executive's desk if the mailroom's in India. Friedman writes that although the United States will lose some service jobs to India, "total exports from American-based companies to India have grown from $2.5 billion in 1990 to $5 billion in 2003. India's grow- ing economy is creating a demand for many more American goods and services." It's also drawing away our talent. The flattening world also includes China. China is to Japan what India is to the United States. The same rules apply: Chinese graduate stu- dents are doing the grunt work for Japanese companies. I've read as many stories about China and India becom- ing the industrial leaders of the world as I have about global warming, and linking the two is unsettling. In a recent 60 Minutes segment, James Hansen, the world's leading global warming researcher and head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that if greenhouse gas emissions are not reversed within the next 10 years, global. warming will reach an irreversible "tipping point:' and the planet will not recover. Although he chided the Bush administration for editing his dire warnings, America isn't the sole prob- lem here. We could practically stop using our cars and return to riding in a horse and buggy, and it wouldn't matter. China is becoming a formi- dable manufacturing center for the world with cheap labor and not much in the way of emissions regulation. Whatever we reduce, they'll make up for it, and then some. I was going to come up with a smarmy bird-flu-wiping-out-half-the- world-to-save-the-planet solution to end this column, but I was scooped. According to a story I saw on the Drudge Report Web page, Eric Pianka, a University of Texas professor, said, "Earth would be better off with 90 per- cent of the human population dead." "Civilization is on the brink of its downfall," he said, according to a Seguin Gazette story from Texas,"like- ly at the hand of widespread disease." And the disease he's thinking of isn't a mutated avian flu virus with its lousy 50 percent mortality rate. It's a similar mutation to the Ebola virus, which kills 90 percent of those infected. So take your pick for the near future: drown when the polar ice caps melt, die of acute respiratory distress from avian flu, bleed to death inter- nally and externally from Ebola, or apply for a job in Bangalore. Harry Kirsbaum's e-mail address is hkirsbaum@thejewishnews.com .