Foxes and field mice

(obligatory picture)

The soundtrack to this blogpost is this song

I read a book recently, it's called The Most Good You Can Do, by Peter Singer, and it inspired me to do (and write) this.

Reading this book didn't so much change my mind as it showed me the way further down a path I am walking. My views on personal relationships (<< future linked post coming) are, one could suggest, somewhat radical. I want to extend this so as to make everything personal. Allow me to explain.

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I recently read another book (bear with me here) called Thing Explainer, by Randall Munroe, which I also very highly recommend. It's all about how to talk about complicated things with simple words (I'll complete this part in this style). But the small piece of smart thinking that I saw that made me go, "ah", was a little thing in this books about the "shape checker" (a padlock).

Bear with me for this part, and if you find it boring or stupid, just skip to the next "--". I will try to say what Randall said with different words, since I don't have his book with me now: The thing that's most interesting about shape checkers is not how they work, but what they mean.

This kind of machine, which include number checkers, other kinds of shape checkers, body-part checkers and talking checkers, try to tell whether a person is part of a group or not. These might be groups like group-that-has-the-right-metal-shape, group-that-knows-the-number, group-whose-body-part-or-talking-sound-the-checker-knows, and so on, and then it allows the person to open it depending on whether they are in the right group. This is something that is very normal for us everyday, but it's only because we got comfortable to the deeper idea of what it means to use a shape checker: if you are not in the group, we don't trust you. Of course, if we did, there would be no reason to have any kind of checker at all. And I don't like this.

As difficult as it sounds (and probably is) I would like to live in a world where there was no need for shape checkers. Where nobody would steal your hand computer or car or food-heating-radio-box, and where there would be no things that are so (valuable) or so (dangerous) that they must be kept away from people by using checkers.

I think the biggest problem that stops this from happening is that some people have a lot of stuff and some people have very little stuff, and they got into groups where the first (small) group is trying to get more stuff while keeping all their stuff, and the other (really big) group is saying "help! we don't have enough stuff." As if that weren't enough injustice, at the same time, all this getting of stuff is making a kind of air that makes our world very hot, which is very bad if we want to live here for a long time, and it's also making a lot of heavy metal and other bad things go to places they are not from (usually where the people that don't have enough stuff live), and making things get sick and die. This happens because we are either: only thinking of a our own small groups, so we can't or don't want to see big problems, or don't think it's our job to fix them, OR (in the case of people with no stuff) we have too many "now" problems to think about the problems of the world.

Sometimes, people teach wrong things to people in their group or the other group to try to make things stay the way they are (which is not good).

I am very lucky that I was born into the group of people with stuff. I have more stuff than I will ever need, and I went to good schools and met good people and did a lot of things that taught me how to be smart, and I will probably continue to make and have more stuff than I can use. So I want to spread the love around a little bit, to make things better for the other group, and also to try to make the world we live on not get very hot and kill us. What I really mean, is that I don't want to think or act like I am in another group. Until the group I am in looks like the group I am not in, I want how I treat people to be the same no matter what group they are or are not in.

It will mean I have less stuff, but I do really believe that I, and most people, can be just as happy with much less stuff than they have now. Peter Singer says something like this in his book, but he says it much better than I do. I found out that it's possible and even easy for me to do this because I know to be happy and in my situation, it's not that hard, at the heart of it. It's not always easy for a lot of people to be happy, but if they learn how, they can do more good and feel more good at the same time.

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To get back to the doing good part, I won't try to explain or summarise the contents of The Most Good, since Peter Singer is a far better writer than I am, but I will refer to it as necessary while I talk about the steps that I will plan and take. If you disagree with or are confused by anything, good job, your brain is working! This should probably happen since I am trying to condense 211 pages of occasionally complicated and unintuitive reasoning into a single blog post. Feel free to write me, or I also encourage you to get the book and read it yourself!

The first thing I want to do is a declaration. After that, I will write a more detailed specification.

I am going to:

1. Tell you how much money people pay or give me
2. Say how much of it I am going to spend on people-that-are-not-me
3. Talk about who is going to get this money (and what they will do with it)
4. Describe how I will implement everything, and,
5. what is my plan for the future

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1. Here is all the money flows that point towards me. I have to focus on the recent times, since I don't have all the data from the past and I also have not been completely financially self-sufficient for very long.

- At my last job, I made €3200 before, equal to €2012.59 after tax, health insurance and social security contributions. This happened for a few months, before immigration issues dictated I stop work. I will probably have another job soon that will pay me a similar amount of money. While it may not seem like a lot, to put this in perspective, that's a few euros ahead of the yearly per-person average (PPP-adjusted) economic productivity of Cambodia.
- I used to make €800 before, equal to €642.38 after, and I will also make donations for this time period
- Every year, there's a little money-swapping ritual in my culture around Chinese New Year. I think I pocket about €1500 each time this happens but I will count it properly next time
- Every time I get a new income stream, I will add it to this list. For example, one day someone might pay me to play my wooden box with six metal lines and make sounds out of my mouth that make people move their body and feel happy (or sad) (or both).

Why did I just do this, since normally people do everything they can not to talk about these sorts of things? Well, simply put, I this we keep this more secret than we have to-- I don't really care or think it should be important, and if it makes someone uncomfortable to talk about it, they're probably doing something of no merit (or even unethical) and getting paid unreasonably much to do it, OR they're a a victim of such people, and doing something really difficult and getting paid unreasonably little to do it.

Also, the reason I am writing this at all is that I want to make it public knowledge, and maybe make you think about considering doing something like this too. Telling you stuff like this lets you know I'm serious.



2. I'm starting small, but plan to increase in the future. I think it's easier to go forward than backward with things like these, and keeping the momentum in one direction is important.

- I am going to donate enough money to get down to 90% of my after-tax income.

Because I might not stay forever in Germany (where I currently am), I am going to write off the health insurance and social security contributions-- that is, not to consider I will ever get any of them back. In the unlikely even that I stay long enough to, I will readjust my numbers to reflect this. In any case, I expect my donation fraction to increase in the future, so this is not a big issue to me.

This means I will keep €578.14 of my low income times and €1811.33 of my higher income times, and give the rest away. While it may not seem like a lot, to put this in perspective, my monthly keep is just a few euros behind the yearly per-person average (PPP-adjusted) economic productivity of Nepal. That's just bananas (bad!). Anyway, what I will implement is effectively a 10% gift, but with a few details:

I'm going to make as much tax-deductible donation (so long as the tax-deductibility does not affect the effectiveness of the donation) as possible to get my after-tax income to the desired level.
Tax systems are basically black boxes, and I am many-parts untrusting of the German government to spend enough on the right or important things, and I am some-parts disapproving of the spending distribution of my taxes paid.

At first, I wrote a very lengthy paragraph here, but let me just cut it down to spending I don't approve of. In principle, I don't believe in regressive spending. This includes infrastructure that disproportionately benefits  higher income people or special interests. Munich, for example, spends a lot on roads and allocates a lot of on-street parking, which are mostly used by car-owners. Public transportation is also too expensive, and does not, I believe, have the social benefits of energy efficiency, air quality, and traffic easing build into the price. I approve of none of this. Also, I don't support any military spending.

I'm basically saying I don't want to give the Germany government more of tax euros than I have to. I want to decide to the furthest extent possible where my tax dollars go. I do use infrastructure, and I think if I work within the tax-deductibility structure, my cost on society will not go unpaid, but really, I don't trust The Man any more with my first single euro cent as I do with my last.

- I am going to donate half of the Chinese New Year money, probably all of it in the near future.



3. The Most Good You Can Do talks a lot about what makes an effective donation. This can be a very difficult question. Let's start with what is good?. I'll go a little fast here if you don't mind.

I think a pretty good answer is, "what increases happiness and what decreases suffering" can be considered to be good. Quite often, these things go together, which I think is very fortunate. The next question is, where can we make the most happiness and get rid of the most suffering? The surprising (or unsurprising) answer is, "it's probably not in a developed country." This begs the clarification, how do I know how much good I'm doing? and the answer to that is that's very difficult to know.

How much happiness to I get from going to a concert? How about to a museum? What if the museum was nicer? How does that compare to how much happiness I get from eating? What if the food is better? What if I'm hungrier? What if the food was really cheap? What if I was blind or had malaria every year?

There are two things at work here. One is that high up the list of needs (where I am) that it becomes very difficult to measure marginal utility. Our options are also much more expensive and complex in their use cases. On the other hand, when we deal with things like life expectancy or health, it's often much more (but not completely) straightforward to measure efficiency. Unfortunately, the problems that you usually fix in these cases exist where healthcare is really, really bad. It is also, as a feature, really really cheap.

Here's a couple of examples:

Aravind
Against Malaria Foundation

The staple of calculating the efficiency of a donation is the Quality-Adjusted-Life-Year (QALY). This is the monetary value of the burden of some kind of condition that affects both quality and length of life, and by that definition also the cost of an intervention that solves the problem. One QALY is equivalent to one year of healthy life.

Now, it starts to get fuzzy when we talk about non-health interventions, since we'll be stabbing at vague and small numbers (how much would I benefit from a free subscription to a magazine? 0.01 QALY per year? you see how it gets weird). But what about education? That's a legitimately effectual but also very difficult to calculate intervention.

I think it's best to start with health and life expectancy. The most efficient work produces 34 QALYs (about the length of healthy adult life in most developing countries-- it should shock you how little that is), for about $3000. If your impact is important to you, and you're looking at less than this, it's probably worth a good long think about.

Now you are probably thinking, but what about the arts? but who will pay for the museums?. Here's what I think.

While there are people suffering in the world, the least fortunate are always the most deserving of help, and I will not donate to any cause that does not help the most of them the most efficiently. I have my after-donation income that completely belongs to me, and I will go to museums and concerts, but I fix my priorities for the amount that I have set aside for the purpose of creating positive change for those who are unable to effect it themselves.

But what about the environment? I think most climate initiatives are fundamentally broken. I like a few of them, but I think the biggest thing they miss is that to fix the atmosphere, the cost of everything MUST INCREASE. Energy is way too cheap and this is the single reason why we use so much of it. Renewables cost more for the moment, and it doesn't work to force divestment from coal and oil while keeping electricity and gasoline prices the same, driving the same amount, traveling as far, etc. Everybody wants the world to be saved but very few people are willing to change their behaviour for it.

I think that by improving life outcomes for the lowest income, least educated, most fertile part of the world, hopefully, we'll have fewer people around and more people making more sensible demands for fixing the planet. Because we'll all be in the same group (see group theory above). For the moment, I'll try to fly as little as I can (I'm already a car-sharing, bike riding hippie so I don't know how much further I can push this other edge of the envelope)


Why isn't this my job? Well it used to be! But here's the rub:

I wasn't very effective. I could have been-- if I'd studied more relevant things, got more relevant degrees, and so on. Coming in inexperienced and unqualified meant that I was kept to the shallow end of tasks I could take on. While I could be quite effective in the right job, the overhead to reach it was big, my chances slim, and I also burned out living in Ghana.

On the other hand, I am reasonably financially productive where I am now, and for the present arrangement of things, I produce much greater impact donating a fraction of my earnings than working in the industry of making impact.



4. I have decided to use Givewell to help me find the most effective initiative to donate to. I really want to get the most good for my euro, so I am going to give to the Against Malaria Foundation. I believe this represents as good as the highest efficiency for lives saved per $/€/£/¢, worldwide.



Each year, I will tally my donation amounts and send them off in the 1st week of January. Taxes happen in April, so I'll have all my receipts by then. After that, I will write a report to this blog.



5. I realise that 10% doesn't sound like a lot, and it's not my final goal. There are of course people who donate much more than that. My number will go up, and here are some considerations:

- I need to know how much I can stably handle. I've been a little bit iterant for the last years of my life, and it's nice to have a little bit of a safety net when moving jobs and countries.
- It's just as important to give as to enjoy it. Making a sacrifice is not the point, and suffering to give is unsustainable and an unrealistic plan to do any kind of good. I'll probe this boundary slowly.

I used 10% as a suggestion from the book, which does a few little income-breakdown exercises. I chose to use the model for someone earning roughly the same amount of money living in the Boston area, and adjust it a little bit, considering that my expenditures and tax rate and welfare allocation are a little different. I will reevaluate this on a regular basis, perhaps at each donation period, and with luck get to a higher number soon.

I realise that 10% doesn't sound like a lot, but so few people in this world are doing even close to this, and so little of this money is actually going to somewhere it will make a difference. Hopefully, by doing what I reason to be effective, and talking about it, I can both do something and convince some people to do something to.


(talk to me, talk to people about this!)
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Well, that's all for now, gentle readers! I'll see you again in the future!

all photos: Laura Stupin

The papoose has landed

Good day gentle reader, it's me, sausage!*
And the news around town is that the times, they are a-changin.

So I've recently been working in a field where it's very important and useful to created complete and detailed document my work and process, since a lot of it isn't as immediately self-evident as in other industries or jobs. I decided that it's well worth my time to apply this principle to the greater scope of life; I don't think we ever overestimate how hard it is to track and measure our own personal development. This will be as much for my own posterity and reference as for your reading pleasure.
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So, as it's been awhile, let me start us off here with a (very condensed version of a) story to fill you in. Barely two years ago, I moved to Munich from Ghana. For some time after that, I was unhappy with this decision. I'd screwed things up with my long time partner and love of my life, moved to be closer to someone who broke up with my very shortly after my arrival, and didn't treat me very well after that.
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Here I was, in the most conservative of the larger German cities, studying a (in the words of a Kommilitonin) hell-boring master program in an education system that astounds me in its conservatism and rigidity, for a nation of such economic power (then again, mostly tech exports rather than culture). I asked myself daily, what the hell am I doing here?
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And then life got weird, life got good. I never imagined I'd feel at home here in the Landeshauptdorf, but here I am.
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I've been spending a lot of time on the excellent people in my life, near and far away, people who I've newly met and people who I've known forever and people I've found again. I put some work into projects and latent and manifest interests, and I started investing more time into figuring out what is important to me, what I want to spend me time on and what I want the future to look like.
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In the coming times, I will muse out loud about topics such as

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Growing up

Work

Practically applied ethics (a la Peter Singer)
Climbing

Personal relationships

The Blues

City and transportation design

Politics?
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And whatever else I might find that I spend a lot of time and fire a lot of neurons on, things that are important to me and things I think are important to the world.
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Along the way, maybe a trick or two that I've learned: tricks for the kitchen, furniture modification engineering, maybe a tip or two for linux and solaris users, and maybe in a few years, for guitar- and bicycle frame- builders?
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I've really enjoyed the beating-heart aspect of the blog to date, and I intend to keep that, but maybe to sneak in an easter egg or two on the side for the interested and concerned reader.

I'm excited, and I hope you are too. Let's see what's to come. In the meantime, I wish you sunny days, good times and wild dreams.

Ride hard, live large, and be dangerous, it's careful out there.

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*this is a corruption of a German Spruch. I promise you many more of these (:

Notorious BRB

There's been a small drought of blog posts out of me lately. I know I promised a blog about work but it's surprisingly hard, after long days in the hot sun followed by reports about what happened on long days in the hot sun, to write blogs about long days in the hot sun. Even though I'm enjoying this job more everyday.

It's hard to take photos that would go well on blogs when I'm focused on taking detail photos of pumps and trying to fit whole gardens into my viewscreen, like in this exciting little number!

I'll try to sneak in some photos of farmers gardening or kids playing or something.

Anyway, more extra exciting things are happening at work and I'm so excited that I just might write about them. So don't worry about the title of this post, it's not that I'm taking a hiatus from writing this, all will come in its own time. Meanwhile, here's a short list of things on my radar:

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In no particular order:

1. Lee Kuan Yew is "officially" out. I think this is a very good public step, albeit after firmly establishing the Lee Dynasty in Singapore government, and it's uncertain what he will do "despite" being out of office.

2. On a related note, Singapore just had its "most upsetting" election recently. I say "bout damn time". Everyone on "both sides of the government" is talking about how the political climate in Singapore is changing and that's a good thing. Singapore has a very uncommon but also quite nuanced political situation, and it's hard to recommend a good source that will describe the whole picture.

I found quite a few neat places to get very sharp, objective opinions and information about it, a couple of articles I really liked are here at molly meek and here at the online citizen. They might be a bit dense if you don't already know some about Singapore politics, but they get my super snobby stamp of approval.

Unfortunately, most Singaporeans would prefer to read utter drivel from Xia Xue (who I only just found out about before the elections). I wrote in a very polite comment to clarify five thousand factual mistakes she made but she predictably wouldn't let it go up, so maybe when it rolls around to "that time of the month" I'll write a heartfelt blog about why Xia Xue is the worst blogger in the entire sphere.

3. Since this has been so many words (and so much about politics!) and I have resolved to give more pictures and fewer words, I'll only add...huh, well maybe that was it. Well, this isn't news, I found out that the King of Thailand is a super amazing awesome jazz musician poet writer olympic sailor and apparently a really great guy to boot. And there's a huge controversy about the death of his brother (originally chosen to be king), and that Thai politics are quite brutal and sad but also very interesting and occasionally inspiring.

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4. I'm also getting pretty decent at the guitar, learning about keys and intervals and chord structures as I learn how to play un-tabbed songs by ear and transpose them around. I think that this extra music knowledge might help me learn the piano again.

Africa is a country

Now here's a sensitive and controversial subject, also the name of a blog I enjoy reading, you might have noticed from my google reader shared feed.

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Here's the issue:

A lot of people (most markedly, in my experience, outspoken white development workers) get upset if you say "Africa" carelessly, as if you were referring to a country ("have you been to Africa?" / "I'm going to Africa") rather than a continent. It's such a geographically and culturally diverse place, and actually has 53 countries (note that there would be MANY many more if Africans had drawn the lines on cultural and ethnic boundaries, rather than colonists on geographic ones).

Note2: saying "Asia" is just as bad --probably worse-- by the same logic, but people are much less bothered by that (I think it's because people 'think "Africa" is poor but "Asia" is not', which is also completely false)

I understand some where the frustration of outspoken white development workers (OWDW) comes from {probably ignorant whitefolk -- I use this carelessly. Here in Ghana, if you ain't black, you white. A fairer-skinned African-American is considered white(!!)}.

(As for OWDWs, perhaps I fit the bill, although I don't consider myself a development worker, don't like the word "development", do not believe in development aid and agencies and most NGOs, and usually outspeak about non-"development" things)

But, consider this:

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There are some powerful trends and similarities across the whole (sub-saharan part, anyway) continent, and on top of that, in my experience black Africans are intensely patriotic about their mother land / continent, and their black skin, and the brother/sister hood they feel it gives them. Black Africans: Ghanaians, Tanzanians, Kenyans in my experience will say "Africa" and "Africans" carelessly, without blinking twice. Perhaps there is an "Africa". Imagine a OWDW trying to lecture them that there isn't.

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Anyway, I usually (and uncharacteristically wimpily) choose an uncommitted and neutral approach to this and always use country names. By following that rule, I can forget about the whole big hoo-hah and focus on more immediately pressing things, like my job.

I wrote about this to a good friend of mine, and here's what she said in reply (which I found fascinating and enlightening, and which made me smile to read):

"...I also learned that almost all Africans (Neil Turok...SA...Cameroonian...Nigerian) *always* talk about Africa. Thinking about regions not in terms of artificially established (colonial) borders is very empowering for the people in my opinion -- the whole radical socialist movement in Latin America always talks about "our fatherland America". Splintering is almost always a means to suppression..."

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So I'll leave you with just that. There's no conclusion to this one.

grim piñata

Just a little something I've been pondering from running around Ghana

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Some folks get rid of trash like this:

(I know it doesn't seem like much, but I took this picture on short notice so I wasn't able to find a good place that had a representative amount of trash. Also, every square inch of the ground here is covered in this thin layer of trash here. real picture from northern Ghana)

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Others get rid of trash like this:

(massive volume, extremely concentrated. stock photo)

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In one case, a few suffer intensely (people who live near landfills). In the other, everyone suffers mildly (people also usually burn their trash, which includes plastic). In one case, the pollution is extremely concentrated, in the other, extremely widespread.

Although it is impossible to control for the sheer volume of waste in the second situation, in order to ask this question, can we still ask: which is worse?

Italian jobs

Hi everyone!

If you like okra and you like risotto, you'll love my world famous original silky-smooth Okrisotto! With all the silky smoothness of okra AND risotto! (if you had as much time on your hands as I do, you'd cook up some pretty interesting food for yourself)

Italians who read this will probably be furious, but then most Europeans I've met are (not uniformly, but) on average too uptight about their "culture". The difference is that the French say "zaat ees not fwwranssaayyy!" and the Italians say "daa ta eee sa nooo ta eetaliaaaaaaaannno!"

Okay, that's enough fun at the expense of the continental folk. I've never had much reverence to culture, especially when it comes to food. Another of my world famous recipes is hommus made with edamame beans and balsamic vinegar. It's really good (all hommus is better with balsamic).

Also, don't let anybody tell you you need special rise to make risotto. Use any old rice you want!

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In fact, I'm so amazing I invented a whole four different functional prefixes that describe a certain kind of risotto that I've recently developed.

Okri-sotto: risotto with okra

Curri-sotto: Curry risotto

Red-sotto: Risotto with whole red rice and beets

Waakye-sotto (waa chee sotto): Risotto and beans (waakye is a ghanaian rice and beans meal)

Combinations are possible: okurri-sotto is risotto with curry and okra.

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Now, after reading this, it is your duty to run out into the world and cook up some crazy stuff. Here's another family of foods that lend itself easily to modification: the pad's.

I think "pad" (the one in "pad Thai") simply means "fried", but since it's most commonly associated with fried noodles, you can go out and make your own pad-anything.

A few of you have eaten (also world famous) pad woon in Cambridge...

In service of the public announcement

Most traditionally long-lived peoples consume some kind of lacto-fermented food, whether it be sauerkraut, yoghurt, miso, or any of the whole world of them out there.

I've been making my own kimchi here, and so can you! It's really simple, just mix salt, sliced cabbage, onions, garlic and chiles in a bowl,

compact the mixture and put a constant pressure on it so it stays submerged in its own brine.

The submergence is important because the salt inhibits the growth of other organisms while allowing the desired lactobacteria to flourish. I like using identical bowls that have sloped flat sides (bell shaped sides make fitting more tricky): because of the way they fit in each other, you can stack two...or five on top of each other, each filled with kimchi.

A word of warning: a diet high in salt might be linked to an increased incidence of stomach cancer, so enjoy in moderation! By my reckoning the health benefits are from these foods replenishing gut flora, so just a little is enough.

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Against all odds, my beets are surviving and thriving. I'm super excited and just built two more beds for more future beets. They're a little small (they are about 2/3 time to harvest now) this round but it's probably just the heat and dryness.

I think the rainy season will be glorious for beet growing. Right now I need to hand-water them all the time so they don't die, but when the rains come I think they'll practically grow themselves.

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In other news, I'm going to Bangladesh on for a week this Saturday. More excitement and adventure!

Now we're cooking with sauce

...or is it fire? I can't figure it out. A couple of friends of mine introduced me to the saying when I was cooking dinner with them once, but they didn't know the full thing either.

As promised (a long while back), this is me cooking in my super amazing kitchen.

It's hot, messy, and more cramped than a submarine, but I'm endlessly thankful for it. It saves me a lot of money from eating out, and I get to manage my own nutrition, which is amazing. I feel even better about my situation right now than my last long term eating arrangement, which was co-op dinners and food shared between thirty people (which I really enjoyed).

These days I eat lots more vegetables than otherwise possible, and the said vegetables aren't cooked by boiling them in oil for three hours, which is the only way people seem to cook them around here.

I buy lots of stuff at local shops and market, so everybody wins. It's actually quite amazing what is locally available here. I don't think any of my food travels more than ten miles to reach me. Except sugar, which is from Burkina (which is remarkably close if you think about it)

A typical scene on market day in Navrongo. Just look at those heaps of beautiful cabbages!

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I was talking to a very smart person the other day, who told me he didn't believe in the local food movement. At first, I was a little bit surprised, but realised that the real problem lay with the words "local food movement".

He was simply telling me that it didn't make sense to always buy everything as locally as possible-- and what does "local food movement" mean anyway? To illustrate the point, there is local production that doesn't make sense (if you tried to grow olives in Boston) and national-or-further production can be much more efficient (growing olives in California).

Now, I hope you're ready for an economics lesson in disguise.

As much as it's a good thing to buy as locally as possible, it's also good to eat what's in season and what makes sense, and also to accept that local might not always be the best option. In competitive industries, price is a pretty good indicator of the inputs to, and thus the efficiency of production of a good. Usually, price also includes all the carbon cost of transporting the food as well, and in a perfect "market scenario", should be taken at face value, and people "should" always buy the cheapest food.

For example, rice from Thailand is price-competitive with rice from Ghana. Depending on seasonal changes, it can even be cheaper. This is true because not only is Thailand a high volume exporter and established, experienced and efficient producer of rice, but the rice industry in Ghana hasn't yet reached a scale where it is very efficient or competitive. Therefore, grain for grain on your plate, Thai rice is probably on par with Ghanaian rice for inputs and environmental impact, etc.

(Unless Thailand has some kind of crazy subsidy for rice production)

Somewhere this rule doesn't work (for reason just mentioned) is in the US, where huge and irrational subsidies skew the price of corn and everything that it is an input to: pretty much everything except for vegetables, and staples that are not corn. The effect is particularly strong for meat.

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Getting back to my locale, it's not a bad thing to buy non-local rice when in Ghana. It could help you keep your teeth longer (most Ghana rice comes with rocks in it).

People still buy and eat local rice here (myself included, I like it because it's unpolished = more nutritious) but as people get richer and generally develop a taste for whiter rice, it might not last against the competition. Then again, the industry might evolve too.

I don't think it'll be a terrible thing either if the rice business in Ghana goes. The market for food here is so huge that farmers could easily grow maize instead (where they have a much greater advantage over other producers than with rice) or vegetables, both of which there is a huge demand for.

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The other thing I've been thinking about lately is how TV gives everyone the wrong idea about cooking. I had a strange mental block and could only think of how a popular show like Iron Chef convinces people to aspire to make, eat, and enjoy impractical, unsustainable, extravagant and unnecessary food. I think this is probably true for the average cookbook too.

It's not that I don't appreciate the artistry on a show like that, it's definitely entertained me before.

What I'm saying is that we need a super supa fly bachelor-cooking TV show, where the competitors are scored on how well they cook but also on how little effort they put in. Also, they're not allowed to use anything that you couldn't find in the average home.

I think it's totally possible to cook awesomely within these bounds, and the common person really needs a show that resonates with them, a show they can dig. To this end, my super supa fly bachelor cooking TV show is designed to reward efficiency and convenience (and accessibility) as well as innovation, striving to produce cutting edge recipes with minimal time, effort, and resources.

I also have a theory on how it will save the world.

sama sama di mana mana

I've finally made it to Accra (after some delays),

and I'm strangely comfortable again. This has happened too frequently over the past two weeks. I left comfort in Oecusse to settle into Dili and feel at home for a day, before a brief stay with similar feelings in Bali, an excellent week in Singapore, a few days in Abu Dhabi and now, Accra.

Accra is big, and my neighbourhood is new to me, but I feel at home already: walking around the dusty streets and buying vegetables from the nice women who own a produce stand down the road.

However, I'm not going to be around here for much longer. I'm discussing my work arrangements with my (super amazing) boss and it looks like I will be sent to the hot, dry and windy Upper East region, where most of the action is right now. It sounds really really exciting. Much more exciting than I make it sound and much more than IDE lets on here.

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This evening, as I wandered around the dusty neighbourhood, I watched huge flocks of bats fly across the sky. I think there could have easily been a few million bats. Looking up, there were thousands of bats in the sky at one go, and they never stopped coming.

I was completely speechless. Then I reached for my camera, and found that like an idiot, I'd left it in my room. I'll have my camera on me next time, and future posts will be full of Ghanaian wonder.

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I need a compass. I'm really surprised I haven't bought one yet. I always navigate using the cardinal directions, and I usually get my bearings from the sun.

It's easiest in the morning and evenings (by finding east and west) but gets really confusing around noon, especially here at the equator. It's hard to tell north and south when the sun is directly overhead, even more so since at noon, shadows don't always point north or south because of the Earth's seasonal tilts.

Therefore, I need a compass. I don't know why I don't own one yet.

body rock

I was going to write this soppy and awestruck blog about how amazing the human body and mind are in their characteristics and abilities.

Instead, I'll just speak briefly about a few hacks and other exercises I've been working on and some other mumble jumble.

As we all know, our minds and bodies are very plastic to the environment. People who live in high altitudes have very high red blood cell counts and forearm blood flow, people who climb from a very young age have wide shoulders and big ape-indexes, people living in highly ethnically diverse places can be native speakers of four or five languages.

Our bodies and minds are also extremely sensitive to our own modification.

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I was reading about free divers (shortly after getting scuba certified) and found their physiology incredible. Huge lung volume, incredible breath volume-flow-rate, extremely low resting heart rate, and of course the ability to hold breath for a long long time. They have everything: strength, endurance and efficiency.

What a wickedly great ability to harvest oxygen and use it effectively, I thought. If I had some of these skills, it would make me better not just at swimming and diving but at everything I do. It would be like a firmware upgrade.

I'm also certain that free divers' abilities are not simply genetically inherited. I think they were cultivated.

Free diver breathing exercises (the ones I found, at least) are interesting, designed to force the body to build better lungs and improve other systems, but also to alter its programming to perform better in low/deprived oxygen environments.

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Needless to say I haven't been keeping up with them very well. Doing a good, effective set of exercises means sitting in one place (sometimes walking) and being very focused for more than half an hour. Doing it more than once a week (or month) is just too much inertia for me to handle. Free divers probably do them for hours every day.

What was shocking was how well I responded despite my lack of commitment. By my second session (a month after the first) I could hold my breath sitting down for two and a half minutes. Pretty shocking, eh?

I haven't done the exercises in about three months now. Hopefully I will get my act together soon.

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Other hacks and exercises on my plate : object manipulation (spinning), dancing (tango etc), martial arts (capoeira etc), free running, coconut tree climbing, language learning, musical instruments (clarinet etc), ambidexterity...

I wonder what I'm actually trying to achieve.

Mystère et boule de gomme

Timor is one of a surprising number of countries that use the US dollar as their currency. I've always found this idea fascinating, and puzzled over the idea quite a bit.

Where do they get their US dollars from? (They obviously don't print it, but they don't get bills by simply pulling paper money out of the US economy either: that would affect the US monetary system, actually causing disinflation)

How does the US feel about this?

Is it safe for (someone like you or me) to use a currency not guaranteed by the government of the country we are in?

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I did some homework on this, and it turns out that it's much less wild and crazy than I thought.

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First of all, the US actually encourages other countries to use its dollar. It helps supply their paper currency. This actually helps stabilise volatile emerging economies by fixing their interest rates and inflation to the (presumably) more stable and conservative US economy and monetary policy.*

*(although it's also criticised for contributing to the attitudes and sentiments that brought about the last economic crisis)

Having other people use their dollars is actually in the US's interest: it makes countries like Ecuador and Panama much more reliable trading partners.

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You don't have to read on:

If you haven't already figured out, I'm a pretty nerdy guy. Secretly, I read four or five different economics blogs. On one of them, I found an interesting bit of theory and speculation:

Gregory Mankiw, a high-profile and extremely influential US economics advisor (whose book on macroeconomics I used in college) famously wants to abolish the penny.

What does this spell for a country like El Salvador, which uses US currency, and which also has such a low price index that many common transactions happen in cents, and where people often need to break dollar bills to get change?

Could a country like that cope with adhering to US policy or would transaction volumes become impractical? What if they kept the penny legal tender and all the pennies from the US flowed there? How much would that be? (Billions?) (Is the size of their economy such that) it would cause catastrophic hyperinflation?

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I find currencies with "outrageous" units endearing, like Indonesian Rupiah, where it's about 10000 to the dollar, and 1 rupiah is meaningless. Ghana used to have a similar currency but they have since issued new currency with 1/10000 of the value.

I know, isn't it a shame?

Some charm remains: people in Ghana still talk in old currency even though they use new paper: they say "thousand" to mean ten cents" and "ten thousand" or sometimes "ten" to mean a dollar.

plasticities

The one line I get most often here is "are you Japanese?" to which I usually answer, "no, I'm Chinese, from Singapore..."

Recently, I've started to answer this question with a hint of sadness in my voice, but it's not why you think I do. Indeed, when people ask me "are you Chinese?" I snap back, "yes, from Singapore!"

I thought at one point I really wanted them to think I was Japanese so I could tell them I was from Singapore instead, but perhaps I just want to be Japanese.

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It's one of those super busy work times, hence the silence. Work blogs up soon.

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Michael is a really difficult name to spell, if you don't already know how to do it. Indeed, the correct spelling of it might be one that makes the least sense of all.

People in Timor struggle with my name, and often come up with creative new ways to spell it. I actually really like it-- I've seen such great inventions as "Maiquel" and "Maycell", all of which are more phonetic than "Michael".

My favourite so far: "Maiko". Maybe I'll change my name to that someday.

zomg!1

Here's a lesson in empathy I didn't plan to learn. Two nights ago, I was walking home from dinner, enjoying the cool night after the evening rains. I had actually turned down the offer of a motorbike ride home.

On the say home, I was bit by a dog. The little son of a bitch ran up from behind me as I was walking away from his house and bit me without warning on the leg. I was surprised and uncommonly upset, and looked back in anger, shouting at the dog as it retreated. Then I took out my phone to shine light on my leg. Although the bite hadn't hurt very much, I was bleeding.

After cursing out loud for a little bit, I stood stunned for a few moments: the reality of being bit by a dog in just about the most remote place possible to be bit by a dog was really ruining my evening.

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I realised in that moment --maybe realised is the wrong word, because I felt and understood and experienced-- what getting bit by a zombie feels like. In all those beautiful, violent, poetic movies that we love so, we feel dread and sympathy for someone after the perhaps get through the zombie attack and realise they are wounded, and have but hours or even seconds before the infection turns them into a zombie themselves.

Still we don't really know what it feels like or what goes through the person's head. Well, I knew right then, as I looked down at my bleeding leg. It didn't help that I'd read up about rabies in the past and knew about how it attacks the nervous system and how the vaccine has to be administered before it becomes too late. This was it. I was going to die from rabies in Oecusse... After an intensely painful corruption of my consciousness as it took over my nervous system.

It's interesting to note that many zombies as portrayed as humans might be if they had rabies: think of 28 Days later or Zombieland (excellent movies by the way).

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The rest of the story is slightly less dramatic, if at times panicked: I came to my senses and went to the hospital, where I found they didn't have any vaccines. I tried the UN mission next but had trouble getting in without ID and without referral. Finally, they let me in and I got a vaccine by an Indonesian doctor and a Zimbabwean nurse, who were just as surprised and taken off guard by my arrival as I was thankful for their help.

I felt relieved, but also sad and guilty, it seemed like a privilege to be treated (I felt) so well (or so fortunately): I don't think every person in Oecusse, if put in my situation, would have had the same luck and the same outcome as I did.

Well. This is a story for the grandkids: how I didn't die from rabies in Oecusse. The excitement isn't over, however: the post-exposure schedule for the vaccine means that I will need an injection five days after I arrive in Ghana.

Stay tuned for more excitement and adventure, here on Monkey Music / Woon's Tunes

Banking on a fact

On an uncharacteristically lavish saturday afternoon, I found myself on a boat eating nice food (I ate an oyster, which I found isn't my favourite food: they had loads of extras and I wanted to see if I liked them or not. I hear they are really nutritious), drinking so-so bottle wine (I've always been more of a box person) and Australian (south of the beer line*) beer, diving in the sea and hanging out with some Dili expats.

*It is not certain where the beer line is exactly is, but some facts about it cannot be disputed: Germany is north of the beer line, Spain is south of the beer line.

I'll spare you the details of the afternoon, but here is an interesting story I picked up. Quinn is English descended, I believe, and grew up in Zimbabwe, doing Safaris first and later becoming a contract pilot (flying in Brazil, South Africa, and Timor among other places). He was adamant that the quality of life and value for money are unparalleled in Zimbabwe and really enjoyed living and growing up there.

This challenges my dystopian picture of the country, and he's not the first person to tell me this. I met another Zimbabwean on a flight to Ghana once who told me the same. Anyway, White Africans are another story for another time and something I don't know much about anyway. On to the story:

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Blown somewhat out of proportion by international news, hyperinflation only lasted a few years in Zimbabwe. Certainly, the inflation was terrible (being able to watch shop employees change the prices of goods in real time) but it isn't as much a key part of history as we might perceive.

An interesting feature of those time was an economy that developed organically in Zimbabwe that is (a little) reminiscent of a movie that some of you might have seen: the gasoline economy.

Because Zim dollars had such an unstable value and were worth less and less every second you held them in your hand, Zimbabweans settled on a different currency. They would buy petrol as quickly as they could spend their money, sometimes storing up hundreds of thousands of litres. Because petrol is relatively durable, held its value (and often appreciated) it was a safe way to store . People would trade a few litres of petrol for services rendered and thousands of litres for big jobs.

I think it's absolutely brilliant that this system evolved on its own without planning or agreement, or government approval. It seems to have spread virally, if you will.

The neatest thing about this is that it is an (possible the one) instance in history that a currency had great practical value. Paper money, other than the numbers printed on them, aren't good for much other than scribbling notes on, wiping up messes or snorting...stuff through. Petrol, on the other hand, is used everyday. Compared to the utility of petrol, coins and bars of gold and silver are but shiny paperweights.

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I'm trained in economics and also an instinctively practical person: I often have a hard time reconciling the need for a quickly, easily portable and tradable currency with the fact that we (today) are, in fact, exchanging bits of paper with ink on them (or worse yet, electronic records of them). That governments "guarantee" their dollars isn't the most reassuring thing for people (such as myself).

Needless to say, I was terribly excited to hear this story. It made the whole day on the boat worthwhile.

High rate of compression

For my next feat, in a single haiku I will summarise the United States of America, Singapore, Timor Leste, and many other countries around the world. Here we go:


Inequitable
Socioeconomic
Stratification


I realise this is a real brain twister, so I will elaborate each word into its own haiku:


Inequitable

Unfair or partial:
Of treatments, situations
In society


Socioeconomic

About matters of
Wealth, income, and resulting
Structure or order


Stratification

I refer here to
The distinct separation
Of social classes

True life

As if to confirm everything I'd learned and wrote about in this previous post, I got to take photos of a bunch of awesome stuff the just the very next day.

I left the house late and the sun was already blazing down. Walking past the nearby swamp, I noticed a few men casting nets. Despite the heat, I decided to turn around and get my camera.

The men were really nice, and were totally okay with me taking photos of them (I asked). After chatting with them about how their day was going and what they'd caught, they carried on fishing and pretty much forgot about me, allowing me to take a whole bunch of photos before I thanked them and left them later.

They're so incredibly skilful at throwing the net. It flares out perfectly with the flick of the...wrist? the arm? I can't even tell how they do it.

The sun was really intense. I was burning up just sitting there taking photos. It must have been tough working under the sun.

untangling a net in deep water

The water looks terribly dirty, but I ate fish caught in that "lake" at a friend's house and they tasted fine (actually great: they were boiled with chiles and Thai basil), I wasn't sick the next day either.

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Pretty soon, my four favourite troublemakers showed up.

The little boy has taken to hugging and hanging on to my leg, and the rest of them are in stitches when I peel him off and hold him upside down. He's always super happy to see me around these days and constantly asks me to take photos of him.

Closer to town, I investigated some music I heard, and found a whole gaggle of kids in a tree, banging on cans and singing. They were shy at first, but after I showed them the first photo I took, they were excited for me to take more. They even let me shoot a video of them.

unfortunately, I'm having a lot of trouble uploading this video. Perhaps I will do it properly at a later date with a back-link to this post.

The fun continued until a grumpy old man showed up and took the lead singer and his sisters home.