A while back I heard this report or something similar about El Paso journalist Diana Washington Valdez’s book claiming that the Juárez killings were being carried out essentially for fun by a group of men from prominent families. But her book seems to be available only in a Spanish edition from a minor publisher. Did she swallow an urban legend or is there some other reason why her theory isn’t in wider circulation? Here’s a review with a slightly different angle from the NPR one two years ago.

I think what Google is doing with books and what Kodak would do with administrative records are related but not identical processes. Scanning books is usually harder than scanning files of individual documents, because books are clumsy and fragile and need to be handled with white gloves; under the right circumstances you can even feed piles of loose documents through a sheet feeder. On the other hand, as far as I know all Google plans to do is offer images and OCR full-text search of the books, whereas with office documents you are likely to want an extraction of more structured data (at a minimum you’d want account or file numbers). Google’s library project is by far the largest digitization project done with books, whereas Nuevo León’s is probably modest in the office-doc world. One of the big engines driving mass digitization of corporate documents is legal discovery: when multibillion-dollar companies get into lawsuits, one of their weapons of choice is to blast each other with cannonades of millions of documents. That used to happen in the form of fleets of trucks carrying dead trees, but now it largely happens digitally.

(I’m studying in a program which teaches both archiving and digital preservation so I ought to really know what I’m talking about here; in fact I haven’t taken those classes so I’m making this up. But I think it’s more or less right anyway.)

Yes, I’ve had GI problems before which sure seemed to coincide with heat. I once cut a trip to India short by four days and missed the Taj Mahal for that very reason. Although if it’s happening to the locals, too, I would wonder whether it’s the heat per se or a heat-induced bloom of some local bug — infectious diseases have their seasonal ebbs and flows, after all. And yeah, those rehydration formulas are nasty. I swear the one I had to drink in India did me more harm than good because it stimulated my nausea so. Surely you can get Gatorade in Monterrey?

Why haven’t the Cubans sold all their collectible cars on the international market yet? Yes, the most obvious customers are here in the US behind the embargo, but still I’ll bet a boatload of cool 50’s cars would fetch a pretty penny in Canada or Europe. Or maybe Japan. God I so want to visit Cuba once before there’s a Hard Rock Cafe Havana.

Crazyhands,

You taught me a lot. I hope you keep checking back in and keep us on our toes. I completely agree with your description of El Norte – pro-business, socially conservative, and I’d even say biasedly pro-catholic. I’m completely used to the first two since my hometown paper is equally so. I’m a big fan of La Jornada and read its online version at least once a week. (unlike El Norte, it’s available free online) Milenio, on the other hand I tend to stay away from since they seem more interested in AMLO’s girlfriend than his policies.

Prentiss,

That was in fact, what I meant to link to. And that was the picture blown up on the front page of El Norte. Which means they printed the wrong link – I can’t imagine they did it on purpose, but it seems like a silly mistake that shouldn’t have got past the copy editors. Either way, the guvna’s wife has some impressive curves.

This sort of corruption amongst Mexican politicians seems run of the mill to me, but I’m glad bloggers are starting to make more noise about it. Last week Ana Maria Salazar dedicated an entire show to combatting corruption and I was disappointed that she spent about 30 minutes talking about the new “don’t buy pirated DVDs” announcements they’re playing before movies and not one second on the Arturo Montiel story.

With regard to the size of the informal economy in different countries: there are at least two alternative measures of the value of an economy’s total output (GDP). One is nominal GDP, and the other is Purchasing-Power-Parity (PPP) GDP. You may want to refer to a macroeconomics text for all the details and intricacies, but, in general, econometrists use PPP to calculate per-capita GDP, thus enabling a comparison of living standards across economies.

On the other hand, nominal GDP, which is calculated using market exchange rates, is the usual measure applied for comparisons of total output across countries. With that in mind, here are the most recent (2003) validated GDP estimates published by the World Bank (2004 will be available this summer):

Nominal GDP

PPP GDP

With regard to the issue of “underground” or informal economy, then, it may well be the case (simply due to the different methods of calculation) that, based on Nominal GDP, Mexico has a larger informal economy, while measured in PPP terms, India would have the larger informal economy.

¡Saludos!

I agree with you, something seems fishy. I was merely quoting from the article, but from my own experiences in both India and Mexico I’d have to give the fake gold trophy to India.

Even books are pirated in India. (which I took fool advantage of – there’s nothing like buying your choice of the NY Times bestseller list for 150 rupees)

I’m not sure how the article measured “informal economy” – it might just be an estimate of businesses without licenses rather than percentage fo GDP from the “black market.”

Anyway, welcome aboard. Your post on sexuality in India – From the Kama Sutra to banning Valentine’s Day – looks way interesting.

Revaz directed me to your blog a few weeks ago. I liked your recent article but I disagreed with your comment that “Mexico competes with Russia and China when it comes to the largest ‘informal economy.’”

Most economists estimate that the Indian economy is 90% “black.” In fact, there have been studies stating that India’s GDP would increase by at least US $500 billion if the black economy was taken into consideration.

Considering that Mexico’s GDP and population is very small compared to India and China’s, I don’t think that you can even compare.

See these links:

http://blog.zmag.org/ttt/archives/000739.html
(second paragraph)

http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2009/stories/20030509000107100.htm