Adventures in Onionism

Krugman (and Yglesias and Brian Beutler at TPM) are especially on point on this subject. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/31/opinion/bombs-bridges-and-jobs.html

I swear I already sent this. Oh well. Here it is again, from the middle of my 5 hour motorcycle ride on Saturday.

I finally put my bicycle back together. Replaced rear brake and derailleur cables and housings, and everything seems to be OK. All that's left is to buy some wire cutters and snip off the extra cable length, as my big Leatherman only serves to crimp and fray it. Upcoming plans that might interest you: Motorcycle ride to Lake Baringo next weekend, supposedly beautiful and full of crocs and hippos. Then Nov. 19 and 20 there's a mountain bike race at Sipi Falls, a beautiful set of 3 falls on the Ugandan western slopes of Mt. Elgon. Then the weekend of the 26th I'm headed with friends to track gorillas in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda, with a day at Lake Bunyonyi after. And basically a week after that I head back to the US for 3 weeks. Philly for meetings, NYC briefly, a day in Monterey to present a paper, then 10 days or so in Oakland. I'd like to leave the US around the 25th so as to benefit from the foreign earned income tax exclusion (if you live outside the US...

1/4 of Yale grads become consultants or financiers. http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2011/sep/30/even-artichokes-have-doubts/

Now that I warmed your heart with some animal photos, who's up for some good old fashioned cynicism? You know I am. So much so that at lunch I rattled off my favorite talking points: (1) life is meaningless, (2) all organizations are corrupt, (3) even if development worked, higher GDP doesn't make people any happier, so what's the point? To get a little more specific, the government is trying to weaken the FOIA. https://www.propublica.org/article/government-could-hide-existence-of-records-under-foia-rule-proposal And Mississippi wants to send women and doctors to jail for using IUD's. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/us/politics/personhood-amendments-would-ban-nearly-all-abortions.html Oh, and there's this: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/10/25/BAUB1LLTC9.DTL Looking forward to a long motorcycle ride this weekend.

From The New York Times: OPINIONATOR | THE STONE: Rawls on Wall Street If Occupy Wall Street needs a manifesto, they should look to John Rawls and his theory of "justice as fairness." http://nyti.ms/phTDVh I'm a Rawls fan. I just finished a two-night safari in the Masai Mara. I saw everything. Dozens of everything. So awesome. Pics as soon as I get back on Sunday.

You might think that as an economist I would enjoy making financial decisions. But you'd be wrong. Health (three options), dental (two options), life, accidental death and dismemberment, short term disability, long-term disability, long-term care, legal, and 403(b) or 403(b) Roth retirement through three different vendors (TIAA-Cref, Vanguard, Fidelity). Employer contributions don't vest until 3 years of service, so I lose out on that. And how am I supposed to know whether my tax rate will be higher now or when I retire? Aren't old people poor? So I assume my tax rate will be lower when I retire. But hopefully by then we'll be living in a Scandinavian-esque socialist democracy, so maybe my tax rates will be higher. And I might qualify for the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion, so I might be paying zero now, implying the rate will by definition be at least as high during retirement. None of the differences in health insurance really matter because they all suck out-of-netw...

I saw some orphaned Elephants. And a rhino. They were adorable. Then I got some advice from the Nairobi skyline. So 9.5 years after it all began, I went back to the start and did some hiking.

Here's a good Salon piece by Bill McKibben, organizer of the recent XL Pipeline protests, on why Obama's small donors aren't returning. "None of us gave $50 hoping for a favor. Quite the opposite. You gave $50 hoping that, for the first time in a long while in American politics, no one would get a favor." Then it segues to protests planned for November 6: "Our message will be simple: If you didn’t mean it, you shouldn’t have said it. If you did, here’s the chance to prove it. Nix the pipeline. We don’t want dinner. We want action." Speaking of which, does anyone have thoughts on Salon's recent makeover? Several days I've looked, I've thought that their political coverage was significantly reduced and that they ramped up the pop culture, but I looked just now and all the front page articles were serious. In more important news, I replaced my motorcycle horn. Here's the old one that quit working after 2 hours. I also dismantled and cleaned...

I'm at a hotel in Kisumu and it's 3AM. My body of course thinks it's a normal time to be awake. I'd normally solve this with sleeping pills for a couple nights after making the switch, but my luggage decided to hang out in Boston for an extra day. I think my clean underwear and I will be reunited in the morning, and then I'm headed back to Busia. I noticed good news and bad from California today. Governor Brown signed the California Dream Act , but the Feds are prosecuting medical marijuana dispensaries . Oh, and Steve Jobs, I totally hate my new work-provided Windows laptop. Who designed this crap physically? Why does all this software not present itself in a consistent format? Who authorized all these pop-ups? I had a PC in my bedroom in high school, but there's been a Mac in the house since basically forever. Put that down as the one thing my father and I agree on.

It isn't often that I learn about academic econ articles from the Grist blog, but apparently coal generates 0.8 to 5.6 times as much negative externalities as it does actual productive economic activity. http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.101.5.1649 I spent a lot of money on motorcycle safety gear and went to Amicalola Falls State Park to hike the 8-mile long approach to the Appalachian Trail over the weekend. Awesome weekend, and the memories it brought back of the hike (and lifelong trajectory) I started nine and a half years ago were wonderful. Photos soon. I'm now an employee of Emory University, and I'm headed to UNC for a water conference tomorrow. Back to Kenya Thursday.