Tales from Rohan

Someone from the Petionville Mairie (roughly, the office of the mayor) shot and killed a merchant on Rue Geffrard about 3 blocks from my apartment this morning. This section of street is usually completely blocked with small merchants (mostly women) who come every morning and sell their stuff in the middle of the street. This is technically illegal, but most of the merchants have been coming to the same square of pavement in this informal market for years, and the Mairie comes at most every few months to make them move for a few days and then normalcy resumes.

This morning, apparently a stubborn merchant held her ground, got into an argument with whoever was working for the Mairie and was shot dead. This is exactly the kind of arbitrary violence that human-rights activists are worried about. Haiti could use a bit more order, but not at the expense of rule-of-law.

About an hour later, some merchants came back and started a small fire and started protesting her death. The UDMO (Departmental Unit for the Maintenance of Order) came and shot off some tear gas canisters and then left. The photos don’t really do it justice. I was trying to get the police shooting off some canisters, but I also wanted to stay safely away from them too.

The rule of law is fresh in my mind this week. Only a few days ago Martelly (the president) ordered a député (comparable to a member of the House of Representatives in the US) arrested. According to Article 115 of the constitution, it is illegal to arrest a sitting député or sénateur. They have to be censured by a majority of the senate first. The story gets even more bizarre. The député was arrested for breaking out of jail immediately after the earthquake. The guy then went about his business for several months and ran for député of Delmas and Tabarre (a huge district that makes up the bulk of the population of Port-au-Prince arrondissement) and won. Apparently the député was in jail while waiting for a verdict. He was cleared of whatever he was originally charged with. So, his arrest is for being out of prison for a crime he was found innocent of committing. The prison itself was destroyed in the earthquake, so it is hard to imagine him standing around outside the prison asking to be taken to another prison. He was eventually released after a resolution from the senate condemning the arrest and protests outside the (same, now rebuilt) prison by loyal constituents.

Today is the first anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti. A lot of organizations are going to use this opportunity to talk about their projects and what progress they made over the last year. I think this is at best insensitive and inappropriate.

Today is a national day of memorial. Today should be a day to reflect, to remember those who died, and to be thankful for what we still have. I admire the courage and perseverance of the Haitian people. Please think about them today with honor, empathy, and dignity.

In Europe, the US, Canada and probably several other places, there is plenty of infrastructure, and we often disrupt some of our commerce and leisure travel for both “fun” purposes (fairs, parades, festivals, and sporting events) as well as to allow for peaceful protests. Peaceful protests and demonstrations there “work” in that they strike a balance. They draw enough attention to be worth the time of the demonstrators but their overall negative impact on productivity is fairly minor.

In Benin, there are occasional demonstrations by locals or political rallys which might block the National Highway for most of a day, but frankly there is so little traffic and commerce to begin with that blocking the main North-South road for half a day has very little effect on the average Beninese and basically no impact on say annual GNP.

In Haiti, however, there is enough traffic and commerce and already such bad roads and so much traffic congestion that demonstrations can cripple commerce for weeks. As well, often they are so disorganized, the participants don’t even agree on the purpose or motivation of the demonstration.

The Haitian constitution allows peaceful demonstrations provided that the organizers inform the police of the starting time and route of the demonstration. It is hilarious for an anglophone to read one of these letters. “The organizers send their congratulation on your work and their sincere greetings, and would like to use this opportunity to inform you that we will have a demonstration at …. Warmest regards, etc..”.

In practice the organized protests are mostly pretty peaceful and can have an almost carnival atmosphere, but you get spontaneous groups of as few as 10 people who just barricade a road for some possibly imagined injustice. The big unorganized protests seem more like an outlet for anger and frustration and recently can result in throwing rocks, burning tires, or even setting cars on fire (empty). Well, I’d be angry and frustrated too if I had no job, no reasonable prospect of one, had people in my neighborhood dying of cholera, and was still living in a tent, earthquake damaged building, or other makeshift structure almost a year after the earthquake.

While there is very little progress for the average Haitian in PaP who doesn’t have a permanent house, it is also hard to imagine what any of the NGOs could have realistically done differently to make things much better. The UN, government donors like USAID and the EU, and all the largest NGOs (e.g. Red Cross, Save The Children, WorldVision) are bound by the Sphere guidelines. (A notable exception is MSF.) The short version of Sphere is that you can only implement a program if the government agrees. (The UN strongly believes in the principle of national sovereignty.) However the government in this case is usually a substantial part of the problem and is actively getting in the way of what needs to be done to clear rubble, build schools, build temporary or permanent shelters, fix hospitals, improve sanitation, have a reasonable election, or prevent cholera.

The protests themselves are often not in the direct interest of the people demonstrating. A very common complaint is that MINUSTAH should leave the country because they brought cholera to Haiti. These battalions have been shot at, had stones thrown at them, had their stuff set on fire, etc. While it is quite likely that cholera came to Haiti from someone in the Nepalese UN battalion, the UN hired a local company to pump their sewage and dispose of it properly. The local company dumped the sewage directly into the Artibonite River (it’s on video). Nobody is protesting against them. Second, the epidemic was an accident. The protestors are acting as if all of MINUSTAH (from 30+ different countries) brought cholera to Haiti intentionally, as if they were protesting the actions of some dictator. Finally, the protestors are directly preventing anyone from actually doing anything about the cholera. The UN alone is delivering tons of clean water, soap, etc. The government isn’t going to do anything. Even when the government gets grants for programs the money usually just disappears.

However, perhaps more important is the sense that the people are deeply unhappy. Unhappy with the slow progress, with the apparent excesses of the international community, with the elections, with cholera coming to Haiti. For right or wrong, saying that you are unhappy probably rates as more important than letting someone try to do something about it.

The election results are officially supposed to be released on Tuesday, but there is a rumor that they will be released today instead. MINUSTAH is preparing for an unpleasant couple of days.

Du courage Haïti!

Monday it was already six months since the earthquake. Still in Port-au-Prince, fewer than 5% of the condemned buildings have been demolished and cleared. Unfortunately there are some perverse incentives that help keep it that way. Most people in P-au-P rent their home. The convention for rentals here is that you pay in advance for a year or two. (Apparently is also very hard to evict someone squatting on your land, so the landowners counter by insisting on a year in advance). Even if your house is destroyed, you’ve already paid the rent and apparently the owner is under no obligation to fix the house you rented if it is destroyed. So now there are two perverse incentives. Owners don’t need to bother rebuilding because their renters have already paid anyway and if the renters get fed up and rebuild for them, they get someone to do their work for free. Renters don’t want to spend money to fix a house that isn’t theirs, and if they hold out, there is the chance that some NGO will show up and build them a new house.

To make matters worse land title is very unclear in Haiti. In some cases there are two different people with official deeds to the same land granted under different presidents. Meanwhile there are probably one or more families that actually live there.

Then there is the issue of ownership of the rubble. Rubble contains broken cement, wire, and metal which can have commercial value (at least theoretically). The rubble of a building is the property of the building owner, but rubble from a multi-unit building can also contain personal effects, appliances, and even human bodies from several different families. Often buildings in the hilly neighborhoods that were especially badly hit fall over into neighboring property. Any of these potential owners (any of the tenants, the owner of the building, and of the putative owners of the land where the rubble is sitting) can then object to removing the rubble (their property).

With this legal quagmire, you can imagine that even clearing rubble is taking forever. It looks like we will need another place to stay for people who lost their homes for a long time to come.

I promise to write more later about “temporary” housing…

Below is a photo taken a few weeks ago inside the main office of the (fixed line) telephone company in Leogane. Note the date on the calendar. There are roughly 60,000 land lines for a country of almost 10 million people. No wonder everyone has a cell phone.

Here is Africa, as in many parts of the world, most trash is just thrown out onto the road, the street, or wherever. My neighborhood is no exception, but most people here actually carry their garbage around the block and dump it in the ditch in front of a vacant lot (conveniently located across from a primary school). There are a lot of animals wandering around, so goats, chickens, dogs, cats, pigs, guinea fowl, and all manner of lizards and insects eat the organic material. However, the rest of the garbage either gets burned periodically or just sits there. Paper and metal will decompose within a few years here, but plastics last a long time.

Fortunately, people here are big on reusing things. For example, yesterday I bought baking soda packaged in cardboard boxes originally used to sell lantern wicks. So the relatively few glass and plastic bottles tend to get reused over and over. Of course you still have to be careful that you are not buying cooking supplies out of a container recently used to hold insecticide or drain cleaner. Beer and soda in bottles are much cheaper, because the bottles are used over and over. For example, the contents of a glass bottle of soda is 250F, but a smaller plastic bottle is 450F.

Unfortunately, one of the most ubiquitous and obnoxious forms of trash here is the black plastic sachet (bag). Everyone uses these, and it is hard to go the market without using at least half a dozen of them (I bring mine with me to reuse, but most people do not). The owner will then (usually the same day) jeter the sachet which will be blown away, dumped in a ditch, filled with something gross, or swept into a pile of other trash. There may be many kinds of trash in the trash pile, but the things that accumulate are plastic bags.

As I puttered around this morning, I wondered what will happen to all this material as it eventually photo-degrades. Plastic bags exposed to sun and wind will eventually turn into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic. In many respects this stuff resembles some perverse kind of man-made sand—another ubiquitous biologically inert material.

What would an alien geologist think of the current period of Earth history in a few million years? Maybe the geologist will treat the disposable use of plastics over 100 years or 500 years as a pseudo-geologic event, like a volcanic eruption or a tsunami. It distributes a layer of this stuff all over the world, much like a layer of ash, but more permanently.

For a long time I thought the solution is not to legislate marriage but to remove marriage from the domain of the state. Likewise, household rights and things like taxes are hopelessly entwined with parentage laws. I think this is also a mistake. I would like to see no mention of marriage in any law.

Instead I want a civil union (”civil pact” sounds even better) which deals with household property rights, taxation, immigration, and who is authorized to make decisions on behalf of a sick or unconscious person. My proposed restrictions are very simple. Each person must be legally an adult by federal standards (18 years old) or an emancipated minor; and neither person can be in a civil pact with anyone else. Civil pacts or the closest legal equivalent from other countries are likewise recognized for temporary immigration and medical decision purposes. Note that this means that when married persons from other countries become become permanent residents of the US, they would need to establish a civil pact to have the rights of a civil pact. One side effect of this (good or bad) is that polygamous civil pacts would not exist and that polygamous marriages could not be considered justification for immigration the the US.

As for parentage rights, I do not want these rights in any way related to the existence or non-existence of a civil pact. Anyone who is biologically a parent or who carried a fetus to the age of viability has the right to be aware of their parentage and to participate in parenting of the resulting child(ren) unless they are unfit to do so (a danger to children or themselves) or expressly waive their rights of contact (as is often the case for sperm donors, egg donors, and surrogate mothers). Up to two legal adults can legally represent that they are the primary caretakers of a child. Neither of these adults need to have a biological connection with the child.

Veering back to reality for the moment though, the reason for all the hubbub about Proposition 8 is that the California Supreme Court ruled that a) California currently has a definition of “marriage” and bestows certain rights on individuals who are “married”, and b) the state cannot bestow that right on one individual and restrict that right from another. Since it is very difficult to take rights away (the right of marriage), the solution for equality advocates is to expressly legalize gay marriage.

While I do not think that gay marriage advocates should stop what they are doing, I think they should try to get the government out of our intimate relationships as a parallel effort.

Marriage and parentage laws have created a lot of misery for both straight and gay people. One of my cousins has lived with her boyfriend for over 20 years. They own a house together and they have raised their two teenage sons together. They have a small mountain of legal paperwork they have to deal with to get most of the rights of married couples. My friends L and K were married by a minister in Santa Cruz and have two boys with the help of a sperm donor. While they have most of the rights of a “legally” married couple in California, they don’t have all of these rights. In K’s native Kentucky they would have even fewer of those rights. Finally I got caught in a legal loophole where I was not allowed to get the address of my son because I had no established parental rights, even though I was named as his father on the birth certificate and lived continuously with him for the first 7 months.

Let’s get these laws fixed properly please.

About once every three months I go through medical bills and figure out who did what wrong. Often the insurance company screws something up and even more often the provider does not dot an “i” or cross a “t” and the claim gets denied. Even more often, the provider forgets to adjust down their price to the insurance company negotiated price. So I decided to keep track of how much I was overbilled this cycle.

Since August, I accumulated bills for which I owed $483.26 after my insurance company paid, and I was over-billed by an additional $172.79. That’s a 36% overage. It took me about 2 hours with all the information in front of me to slog through these bills and write little notes to each provider. This is an enormous waste of time and money.

For a long time I thought that the insurance companies negotiating a lower price than private pay customers is exactly backwards. The insurance companies require the providers to spend a ridiculous amount of time doing things they don’t get paid for. AFAIK, a private pay person who pays as they leave should pay less than someone paying with insurance, because there is less overhead.

When you discover that something has gone badly wrong I think it is nice to see if you can easily prevent the same thing from happening again. I noticed that all the banks in Lebanon are flourishing now. Come to find out that they had a rather more minor financial crisis a few years back and the government banned derivatives. Consequently, their banks are rock solid and turning a profit. Digging a little deeper past the knee-jerk reaction “just ban derivatives”, I ask why did banks get in such trouble with derivatives?  Because they didn’t know what they were really worth. There is no standardized accounting method for the derivatives that got all these banks into trouble. Banks get a bunch of special privileges and are regulated at minimum because ordinary deposits in banks are usually government insured. As a trade-off for the special benefit of receiving deposit insurance from the government I think it would be fair to say that banks cannot own or trade in any form of security for which there is a not an industry-wide accounting practice. You could even go so far as to restrict banks trading in securities which have an accounting method approved by a neutral-ish government agency like the very well-respected Government Accountability Office (GAO) in the US.

I am personally very curious what the balance sheet of every US bank would look like if the government just declared that the value of all “toxic securities” was officially zero until further notice and nobody was allowed to trade in them. Would any of the banks look OK if they didn’t have the liability of some of these derivatives? Would some banks look even worse? If there is nominal value still in these securities, the government could declare their ownership illegal, make loans based on the nominal value, and then forgive part of the repayment of these loans in exchange for the nominal value of the seized assets.

I want to shift gears and talk briefly about bankruptcy. The idea of bankruptcy is that it protects someone from their creditors. However this means that if those creditors traded fairly, they get screwed.  Perhaps a useful place for the government to step in and offer money is to offer *creditors* of bankrupt companies a grant or loan (free insurance perhaps) to cover their costs. My idea is that when the economy goes in the crapper, we should reward companies that were still in business doing something useful first. They should not be penalized for selling something to a deadbeat company. I would much rather see my taxpayer dollars go to this kind of creditor payment insurance than to a big bank that did something really dumb, or a big dumb reinsurance company….

I heard today that AIG executives were caught on camera having their second luxury retreat since after they received taxpayer bailout money to the tune of $150 Billion. The previous retreat, just days after the bailout and estimated to cost about half a million, was reported by NPR and ABC among others. Note that AIG currently has a market capitalization under $10 billion, but it needs a $85 billion bailout.

The Fed also said today that they would not use any of the $700 Billion bailout money approved by Congress to buy illiquid derivatives, “toxic” securities allegedly poisoning the financial system (which was the original motivation given for requesting the money). Not a single dollar of this money has been spent buying these “toxic securities”.

Since this brilliant bailout plan is working so well, I am not keen on bailing out US auto makers either. I would love to make sure that the employees still have a good job, but I don’t think these companies are going to do anything with the money other than throw good money after bad.

I have a Volkswagen because when I bought it, it was the only brand of newish small diesel car available for sale in California. VW loves to use a lot of cheap plastic parts where a small piece of metal, a rubber hose, or even a sturdier piece of plastic would be much more appropriate. Here are just a few examples:

1) About two years ago, I managed to snap a little plastic piece called the “anti-shudder valve rod” when cleaning my EGR valve which was very, very gunked up. I called the dealer hoping to buy a new one. No you can’t buy this part, you have to replace the entire EGR valve for about $250.

This happens so often to mechanics and hobbyists that there are numerous solutions on the TDI Forum about how to repair this part. This example used superglue, a piece of aluminum from a soda can, and some shrink tubing.

2) On my roadtrip this summer, I started loosing brake boost because VW used this piece of crap plastic pipe (which cracked) instead of a traditional piece of rubber hose that I bought for $2 retail.

3) Yesterday, changing an air filter, I found this foam gasket which was disintegrating and causing a vacuum leak. Of course this part cannot be purchased sepately. You need to buy the whole air cleaner assembly. Alex came up with the brilliant solution of making a new one with duct tape and cardboard (works great!).

And don’t get me started talking about how much I hate spring clamps!