Adventures in Onionism

Eliminate Subsidies for Horrible Things

2012-01-26T23:02:00.000-08:00

"Phasing out fossil fuel subsidies 'could provide half of global carbon target'"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jan/19/fossil-fuel-subsidies-carbon-target

"Dirty Money
The astonishing new data showing that simply eliminating inefficient
fossil fuel subsidies could achieve half the world's carbon reduction
goals."
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/01/fossil_fuel_subsidies_and_global_warming_we_could_cut_the_climate_change_problem_in_half_simply_by_abolishing_inefficient_fossil_fuel_subsidies_.html

Hmmm...Well, now that I've actually read more than the headlines, this
is less exciting/aggravating than when I thought it was all due to US
tax breaks for Exxon instead of consumption subsidies in Saudi Arabia,
Russia, and Iran. But seriously, Exxon should still have to pay taxes
in the US.

Watch in Full Screen

2012-01-25T07:00:00.000-08:00

Yosemite HD from Project Yosemite on Vimeo.

I heart California.

More Bidder 70 Stuff

2012-01-24T11:40:00.000-08:00

A nice music video by Alex Ebert (nom de guerre Edward Sharpe):
Let's Win! from Alexander on Vimeo. [h/t AA]

Also, An article by Tim about how the climate justice movement can succeed, with which I agree. Liberals need longer knives.

Pretty impressed

2012-01-22T02:47:00.000-08:00

you can find these in Kenya.

Dogs

2012-01-20T23:19:00.000-08:00

I could do the circle thing all day long.

I'm experimenting with QuickTime's built-in save-for-web function. Given my limited bandwidth and the compression that happens on facebook and youtube regardless, what's the best setting? Do these videos load, and if so, how grainy are they?

UPDATE: I guess Blogger doesn't recognize .m4v videos when included as attachments in e-mails to post, so I have to do this via the web interface.

My Project is Hiring

2012-01-19T02:00:00.001-08:00

The spacing on the job website may be atrocious, but the job will not be. Tell your Stata-programming whiz-kid do-gooder recent college grad friends.
http://www.poverty-action.org/getinvolved/jobs/Africa/IPAKenya100587

Ellesmere

2012-01-17T11:08:00.001-08:00

These guys paddled around Ellesmere island.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/sports/arctic-adventure-a-1500-mile-trip-by-sea-kayak.html

Sounds pretty cool, but it's still not as awesome as Jennifer Pharr Davis (a woman, if that wasn't obvious) setting the overall Appalachian Trail speed record, and doing it hiking, not running. So click here and vote for her for NatGeo's Adventurer of the Year. The 18th is the last day to vote.

http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/adventurers-of-the-year/2012/

The Poos and Cons

2012-01-15T06:33:00.001-08:00

Greetings from Kakamega, the capital of Kenya's Western province and my new home. On the Kisumu road, south of the prison, the Salvation Army, then the cell tower, go west on the dirt road. Take the third right, then the first left, and my house is the first one on the left.

In the moments when I haven't been cleaning and analyzing pilot data to determine who gets a chlorine dispenser, trying to improve the quality of the fence to keep the dogs inside, reading old New Yorkers, struggling to get anything out of Don DeLillo's Underworld, or vegging out to Seasons 1-4 of Breaking Bad, I've been thinking: "Do I like it here in Kenya?"

Yes and no.

I've been thinking about this because I just got back here after a month in the US and Switzerland--shoot, I never told you about the trip to Switzerland--because interesting and complicated work and career possibilities appeared (and disappeared?), and because I've got a buddy who lives in Uganda who complains a lot about life in Uganda. This buddy who lives in Uganda and complains a lot shall remain nameless, but he's doing pretty similar stuff to what I do, and we both got here last summer, planned on staying two years, but it's likely that we'll now both go home sometime this fall. He hates being like a zoo animal because he's white, he hates breathing the fumes of trash-burning all day, he misses friends back home, and he hasn't made new ones to replace them.

I agree with almost every one of those sentiments. Yet I don't enjoy hearing them from my buddy. Maybe this is hypocritical of me, but I think maybe it's just a big downer to complain about your situation to people in the exact same situation, or maybe if you're going to complain, you should at least try and be funny about it. So here's what I think, for all my readers who aren't my housemates.

I hate being so damn fascinating and/or scary to children and I don't like it when adults want to start up a conversation just because I'm white, and thus people assume I'm made of money (which, lets be honest, in relative terms, I sort of am.) When I go running, or wear shorts, or take not one but two dogs out on a leash (or a combination of all three of these things), the words I hear the most are "Mzungu! How are you? Give me one dog." I hate this.

Now, I use the word "hate" more than most people, but it's usually hyperbole done for comedic effect (although I freely admit comedy usually has some element of truth to it). This time it's sincere. I hate being such a fascination. The only way it's worse is when children use an intentionally hyper-nasal voice to say the annoying phrase--apparently white people sound nasally to them, and they think it's funny to imitate. Admittedly, I am not the best person to disabuse them of the notion of nasally white folks. So I always bring my iPod and blast the Terry Gross to drown it out, and take an "ignore it and it'll go away" approach.

I would honestly say this is the reaction I get from a sizable percentage of strangers, but it's certainly not the reaction I get from coworkers, or thankfully, my new neighbors who rent a house in the same compound, or even their small children. So once we have some reason for repeated interactions, the fascination dies down, and most but not all of the time, so do requests for money. Anyway, the point is, I totally sympathize with my buddy about being a zoo animal. And if I ever in my dumber younger moments asked a black or Jewish friend if I could feel their hair, or gawked at somebody in traditional dress, or something equally dumb, I'm really, really sorry.

I also don't like inhaling the fumes of burning trash. I think engines should be four-stroke, not two-stroke. I prefer it when houses have water faucets, and when you turn the knob water comes out, and when the water coming out doesn't have e. coli in it. I prefer it when marathons or other races stop traffic on the course for the duration of the run. I prefer it when food has flavor. I prefer not to have to haggle over prices. Thermo-regulated buildings are nice. Higher speed Internet is better, and black-outs are also kind of lame. Paved roads are nicer without potholes. Most of the time, if I want to buy something or take a taxi, I prefer it when I go to them, instead of me getting swarmed whether I'm looking to buy or not.

But all that stuff should be taken with a grain of salt. It's kind of impressive how thick the dust is on the road outside my house now that it's the dry season. It's kind of fun to light candles and wear headlamps for dinner. I waste enough time on the Internet as it is, so slower access means more time with my 6-month supply of print copies of the New Yorker. On occasion, when you meet a nice vendor who isn't super aggressive, whose English is very good, and you spend a few minutes with them, it's kind of fun to bargain over touristy presents for friends back home. The taxis though, taxis should just leave me alone and form a line. I'm sticking to that one.

I'm also a firm believer in the idea that whatever doesn't kill me gives me better stories to tell at dinner parties later in life. On my first go-round in Kenya, I didn't have running water, I took cold bucket showers, and I climbed Kilimanjaro in 27 hours. This time, I never have more than about a minute after waking up before I need to drop an urgent liquid deuce, but I'm a vegan runner, so really I've only gone from beyond regular to way beyond regular. Riding in a cramped minivan with 20 other people and no seat-belts in it on crappy roads is horrible in the present, and a cool story as soon as it's over. Type-II fun, baby.

So it's not necessarily the conditions I mind. What I do sometimes mind is third-world conditions combined with first-world work expectations. It can be quite frustrating to try and teach oneself new PhD-level statistics, learn to do constrained optimization in Matlab, or read and understand journal articles when you're the only PhD-holder for miles, and the power goes out, and the Internet is down, and it's 85 degrees in your office.

When I don't have work expectations to deal with (read: weekends), the conditions actually make life more fun. What would be considered mere errands in the US become "cool projects" in Kenya. In the US I find errands tolerable if done on bicycle, and extremely frustrating if done in the car. Here, I bike, sit on the back of a bicycle taxi, walk, ride my motorcycle (frustrating in traffic), or send somebody to do the crappy part for me. Then I plant a garden, build a fence, compost, milk a goat (coming soon, I hope!), commission some handmade furniture, explore town, make new recipes, spray highly toxic pesticides (Pyrinex 48EC) on my chest of drawers to kill the wood weevils, rescue and try and train a dog, or learn to ride a motorcycle. With the exception of gardening and composting, I haven't had the time, space, or money to do these things stateside.

Like my buddy in Uganda, I also clearly miss my stateside friends as well. Some part of me thinks that I'm ready to move on from the East Bay, since many of my friends have graduated, and so have I. But that's still where my girlfriend (!) is, and where my four other friends are, so that's home. Also like my friend, I don't think I've made any close Kenyan friends to replace them. I enjoy my coworkers, and they think the way I call spades spades in meetings is funny, but we're not close enough, nor do we have enough in common that we'd really choose to hang out in our free time. I'm a sarcastic secular educated liberal, and the conversations I enjoy the most are with the same. I'd like to think the being western has little to do with it, but the previous adjectives are probably correlated with the present one, so maybe I'm being too generous about my character.

I have, however, made quite good western friends through work, where pretty much everybody can be described with most of the terms above. My buddy and I work for the same organization, but I have the luxury of working in the org's largest office in the world, meaning the most westerners, the most people who get my sense of humor, and the most people who have what I think are interesting insights about movies, books, vegetarianism, and atheism.

So that's life in Kenya. Other things worth mentioning are that on weekends when I don't try and do cool projects, I can travel and see some amazing waterfalls or animals, and on very rare occasions, mountains. On a regular basis, however, the running here is a lot less fun because I live quite far from any serious hills. I'll spare you (and myself) from lengthy pros and cons about work, but let me just say that it is sometimes fascinating, and sometimes I feel like I'm doing good, but I sometimes feel like I'd be having more fun doing the same amount of good if it involved getting students to laugh at my sarcastic jokes.

Two Thousand Words

2012-01-11T08:58:00.001-08:00

Same scale. Where do you think I like running more?

Two veg articles in the NYT, plus some rambling about my dogs

2012-01-11T06:23:00.001-08:00

Good stuff.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/dining/a-vegetarians-struggle-for-sustenance-in-the-midwest.html

and

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/were-eating-less-meat-why/

You've probably noticed a lot of html-ugly links, or simply URL's, on
my blog in the past months. Blame slow Kenyan Internet speeds. It
takes a lot less bandwidth to paste URL's into gmail and mail it to a
secret address that automatically posts to my blog (but can't handle
any html coding to make it pretty, as far as I know) than to go the
blogger page and post the normal way. Apologies.

I'm getting settled in Kakamega. I haven't found a decent restaurant
yet (read: someplace that adds tomatoes and onions to beans instead of
making them with nothing but water and salt), but the fence is at
least fixed. For the last week Mack and George have been able to crawl
under the fence, so they followed me to work. George liked it because
he hung out by the chain-link office fence with his mouth open and
waited for the baby chickens next door to crawl through the fence and
hop right in. Nobody told me what was going on until he'd apparently
eaten four. Mack liked it at the office too, but he climbed a pile of
bricks and leaped over the 8 foot high barb-wire in order to follow me
home.

Kibera

2012-01-11T00:44:00.001-08:00

From a trip to Kibera, a large slum in Nairobi, last month.

Black Mamba

2012-01-08T23:55:00.001-08:00

Last night on the way home from dinner in flip-flops with beer and not much food in my belly (the restaurant was a failure) I saw a snake in the road a few feet from me. It charged us and some Maasai warriors who happened to be right behind me started throwing rocks and their traditional short club/staff at it, then chopped it to bits with their machete. One of the fastest, most aggressive, and deadly snakes in the world. Good times.

And JS thinks my blog has jumped the shark.

How you true a wheel in Kenya

2012-01-08T00:49:00.000-08:00

Flat

2012-01-08T00:35:00.001-08:00

Picked up my bike in Busia, but it had a puncture near the valve stem so I have to buy a new tube. Hope to be on the road soon.

Kakamega

2012-01-07T10:53:00.001-08:00

I did a little exploring of Kakamega today. At first I was disappointed--it really seemed like more of the same. It's a bigger town than Busia but it seemed like there was no improved quality to any of the shops or roads or whatnot, just an increased number. Then I made it to the big grocery store Nakumatt, and my attitude improved once I reached their liquor section. No bourbon but decent scotch and a better selection of beer. Just a couple imports but the Nairobi-brewed Sierra amber, blonde, and porter that are supposed to be ok. Also, produce! Broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini, cucumbers, pears, apples, and even cherries. I also scored soy milk, which I'll be eating with my swiss granola tomorrow morning before I get a ride with the new taxi driver I met today to Busia. I need to go there for a stupid work errand but mostly to pick up my motorcycle. M & K are getting back tomorrow, so the house will be more inhabited and I won't be the only one to deal with the landlord and all the fundis and stuff to make the place liveable.

My dogs got back yesterday. They like the place fine, but George can crawl under the fence, so if he sees me leaving, well then, he's coming with me. Him and Mack do a little barking with the same-compound neighbor dogs who are only let off leash at night, but it doesn't seem like it's going to be a problem.

The photo is of the nearest restaurant to my house. I hope the food is good so it can become the new Chauma.

Switzerland

2012-01-06T15:13:00.000-08:00

And now, here you are, photos from Switzerland. I'll tell more of a
story in a later post, but it's 2 AM and I've got a headache, so I'm
going to bed.
https://picasaweb.google.com/111307055417777636167/Switzerland

Jump

2012-01-06T15:09:00.000-08:00

Before I post pics from Switzerland, I wanted to add one more photo
from my trip to see Gorillas.

Also, Mac users: thoughts on Picasa vs. iPhoto for photo file
management? I've always been an iPhoto man myself, but only by
default.

Home is where the East Bay is.

2012-01-05T02:17:00.000-08:00

After 30 days on the road, I've now arrived "home" in Kakamega. After nights in Busia, Nairobi, Philadelphia, Oakland, Santa Cruz, Oakland, Riverside, Santa Monica, Geneva, Lausanne, Zermatt, Lauterbrunnen, Geneva, and Nairobi, I'm ready to stop moving for a bit. The Switzerland trip was awesome, and I'll post photos soon, but I should probably stop comparing bits of life there (public transit, mountain views, quality of hotel breakfasts, taxi drivers accosting you at transit stations) to their counterparts in Kenya before I get depressed. I'd also like to congratulate Delta Airlines for royally screwing up plane tickets not even on their airline (they were on KLM); they'll be hearing from me about it. I should get to work, there's a lot to do on the project before the pilot study interventions gets delivered in a couple weeks. I also need to head back to Busia this weekend and pick up my dogs and my motorcycle.

For a quick bit of hiking joy, watch this video on the JMT.

Almost There - The Muir Project from The Muir Project on Vimeo.

Festivus Cheer

2011-12-25T12:26:00.001-08:00

Wolves (OK, wolf, singular) almost back in California.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-wolf-oregon-20111225,0,1431381.story
TTW interviewed Tim DeChristopher.
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6598

Earth: Fun while it lasted

2011-12-19T08:48:00.001-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/17/science/earth/warming-arctic-permafrost-fuels-climate-change-worries.html

Last week I presented research at the Naval Postgraduate school, went
to a Brandi Carlile concert, saw a rough cut of a friend's movie about
the Hiker Trash on the AT, and went for a great run on Mt. Diablo,
which may have been my first real run with actual hills in it since
July.

Me: I'd like to close my account

2011-12-16T14:43:00.000-08:00

WF: I'm sorry to hear that. May I ask why?
Me: Because large banks are evil.
WF: May I ask what makes you think that large banks are evil?
Me: Because I have a PhD in economics and you tanked the world
economy. Not you specifically, but Angelo Mozilo and people like that.
I already zeroed out the account so it should be pretty easy.
WF: Your account has been closed. Thank you for calling.

Letters to Inmates

2011-12-12T09:33:00.000-08:00

Anybody ever written letters to a federal inmate in the US? Did my letter to one bounce because it was coming from Kenya, or because it was greeting card size, not regular letter size?

Stuff

2011-12-04T05:48:00.000-08:00

New post for close friends on the invite-only blog. Thoughts from econs/academics/people who have had a job are encouraged.

My last day in Busia is a boring and rainy one. The highlight so far has been vegan white bean pancakes. It's hard to make progress on my personal research when it takes 45 minutes to run one 600,000 observation Poisson regression. I think the finding is going to be that when I look at US military deaths from 1990-2006, there are no interesting effects on recruitment, while they're there and strong if I only use 2001-2006, so maybe war-time deaths are especially important.

Don't forget me in the next month, OK buddy?

2011-12-03T02:46:00.001-08:00

Garden Fail

2011-12-02T22:10:00.001-08:00

My garden in Busia has been a big failure. Gigantic pumpkin, broccoli, and zucchini plants, but none of the fruiting part. (How are you supposed to describe that since these are all vegetables?) Too much rain? Too hot? Crappy soil plus bugs?