I agree that the entitlement system is unsustainable in the long-term. I’m reading a book right now called The Forgotten Man about the Great Depression that strongly argues against the New Deal, which was basically the start of the system we have today. The author argues that FDR’s heavy-handed, government oriented approach, which was partially inspired by observations of socialist policies in England, and to a lesser extent those of soviet Russia, stifled private sector innovation. She instead thinks Wendell Wilkie would have done a better job as president. On the other hand, according to this article, the historical origin of the entitlements was not out of the beneficence of the elite but rather a concession to avert European-style class warfare which could have led to an even more radical outcome (revolution), like it did in Russia and China.
“The Gilded Age plutocrats who first acceded to a social welfare system and state regulations did not do so from the goodness of their hearts. They did so because the alternatives seemed so much more terrifying.”
So as far as I can tell we are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Keeping entitlements undermines the strength of the national economy due to excessive tax burden on workers and investors, but eliminating them could lead to violent unrest among those who cannot make ends meet. I have no idea what the right solution is, but it seems likely it would have to involve some way of improving peoples’ training and education levels so that they can have the skills that are needed to survive. Here’s one social-entrepreneurial example along those lines that I admire: http://www.khanacademy.org/about . Another interesting, related question is, to what extent does technological change affect unemployment?

• I had no trouble parking on Water Street near Jack’s Boathouse even though there were a ton of other people out shopping in Georgetown.If coming across the Key Bridge turn on M Street going east then right on Wisconsin Ave.
• From there I rode down the street to the Rock Creek trail which basically runs parallel to Rock Creek Parkway. It was narrow and crowded with pedestrians at first but after ~2 miles there wasn’t any problem.
• Beach Drive through the park is closed on Sundays to cars, so it’s ideal for biking. I followed it all the way to Maryland.
• Beach Dr turns into Jones Mill Rd. after crossing East West Hwy. I followed it to the intersection with Jones Bridge Rd. and turned left (South/West) onto Georgetown Branch Trail/ Capital Crescent Trail. Up to this point, the trail was paved and relatively flat with a slight uphill trend.
• The first couple of miles on the Georgetown Branch trial were gravel but posed no threat to my very narrow road bike tires
• After going through a giant tunnel, it empties out right in the middle of Bethesda row. You have to go across a tricky intersection but then the trail starts up again with pavement and is basically downhill the whole rest of the way.
• You can then follow the Capital Crescent all the way back to Georgetown. It runs parallel to the C&O for the last several miles.
• I think the total distance is a little less than 20 miles and it took me about 1.5 hours.
• You could also do the loop in reverse, in which case it would be a long gradual uphill for the first half and then a slightly hilly flat/downhill the second half.

1. Set up a free Yahoo Mail account.
2. Select the “Contacts” tab and click “Import Contacts”
3. Select “Facebook” and sign in with Facebook credentials.
4. Yahoo imports the email addresses of all your Facebook friends automatically.
5. Again on the “Contacts” tab, select “Actions” and click “Export All”
6. Select “Export All” as Yahoo CSV (comma separated values list).
7. Save this backup file to your local computer. You can open it in Excel or any text editor.
8. Now sign into Google+. If you don’t have Google+ yet, sign up for a free Gmail account and skip to step 12.
9. In Google+, select “Circles” and then “Find and Invite”.
10. Select Yahoo and sign in with your Yahoo credentials.
11. Google+ automatically imports all of your friends. If they are already on Google+ you can now add them to a circle. If they are not on Google+, you can send them an email invitation.
12. If you don’t have Google+ you can also just import your friends into Gmail contacts and they will then appear in Google+ if/when you do sign up. To do this, log into Gmail and select Contacts, then Import Contacts. Gmail will ask you where your CSV file is stored (from step 7). Once it has uploaded, all of your Facebook friends’ email addresses will be in your Gmail contacts.
13. Note that you can also use the Yahoo contact exporter to transfer Facebook friends’ emails into Microsoft Outlook or any other email/ address book (you might have to export as Vcard or some other format if the CSV option doesn’t work).

And that’s it! I look forward to seeing all of you on Google+.

[En Espanol] Ayer fue mi cumpleanos, y fue un dia fantastico con mucho felicidades, que me lleno con gusto. No fue porque yo recibi muchos regalos, ni pastel, ni algo asi (aunque la fin de semana pasada me diverti mucho celebrando con ellas cosas con mi familia en Carolina del Norte). En serio, yo pasaba la mayoria del dia trabajando en la oficina. El razon que estoy tan feliz es porque tantos amigos y familia me mandaron saludos desde muchos paises y lugares diversos del mundo! Se que parece una cosa de poca importancia poner algo en el “muro” del facebook o mandar un mensaje por text, pero esas cosas pequenitas significan mucho a mi. Quiero decir GRACIAS a todos Uds. cerca y lejos por ser mis amigos. Si te conoci solo por una fin de semana cuando viajando, o si te he conocido desde cuando eramos ninos, tu amabilidad, inspiracion, y las vistas nuevas Uds. me han ofrecidos son los que me dan feliz vivir. Si un amigo verdadero o amiga verdadera vale mas que oro, entonces hoy me siento como el hombre mas rico del mundo.

[Em Portugues] Ontem foi o meu aniversario, e foi um dia fantastico com muitos felicidades que me cheio com gosto. Nao foi porque eu recebi muitos regalos, nem bolo, nem algo assim (ainda que a fim de semana passada me divirti muito celebrando de tal forma com minha familha em Carolina do Norte). Em realidade, eu passava a maioria do dia trabalhando no escritorio. O razao que estou tao feliz e porque tantos amigos e familha me mandaram saudacoes desde muitos paizes e lugares diversos do mundo! Sei que parece uma coisa de pequena importancia colocar algo no “muro” do facebook ou mandar um mensagem de text, mas essas coisas pequenas significam muito pra mi. Quero dizer OBRIGADO a todos voces perto e longe por ser meus amigos. Se eu te conheci so por uma fim de semana quando viajando, ou se eu te tenho conhecido desde quando eramos criancas, teu amabilidade, inspiracao, e as vistas novas voces me tem ofrecidos sao os que me dar feliz viver. Se um amigo verdadeiro ou amiga verdadeira vale mais que ouro, entao hoje me sinto como o homem mais rico do mundo.

[Sa Tagalog] Kahapon ay ang aking kaarawan, at ito ay isang mabuting, masayang araw na napuno ako sa tuwa. Ito ay hindi dahil ibigay ng mga regalo o cake o anumang bagay tulad na (bagaman katapusan ng linggo ko ay may isang mahusay na oras pakikisalu-salo sa tulad ng paraan kasama ang aking pamilya sa North Carolina pa rin). Sa katunayan, nagtrabaho lang ako sa opisina. Ang dahilan ako kaya masaya ay na kaya marami sa aking mga kaibigan at pamilya na ipinadala sa akin na pagbati ng kaarawan mula sa buong mundo! Alam ko ito tila tulad ng isang maliit na bagay lang sa post sa facebook wall ng isang tao o ipadala ang isang text na mensahe, ngunit ang mga maliliit na gestures ibig sabihin ng marami sa akin. Gusto kong sabihin SALAMAT sa lahat ng kayo malapit at malayo para sa pagiging mga kaibigan ko. Kung makilala kita lamang para sa isang katapusan ng linggo habang naglalakbay o may kilala kita mula sa kailan ako ay isang maliit na bata, ang inyong kabaitan, inspirasyon, at ang mga bagong perspectives sa iyo ay may ibinigay sa akin ay kung ano gumawa ako masaya mabuhay. Kung ang isang mabuting kaibigan ay mas mahalaga kaysa sa ginto, tapos ngayon pakiramdam ko ang pinakamayamang tao sa mundo.

1. Build up “emergency savings” cash in a regular savings account, enough to pay all bills for 3-6 months. Bankrate is a good tool to compare offerings by online banks.
2. Pay off debt, especially student loans since they are the only ones that can’t be discharged by personal bankruptcy.
3. Put some of each paycheck into a roth IRA (can fund it up to $5000 per year of earned income)
4. Within the roth IRA, buy index funds once every 2-3 months (and almost never sell, to avoid commission fees) to maintain asset allocation based roughly on the following formula:

• 30% domestic (US) stocks, such as SPY
• 15% real estate investment trusts, such as VNQ
• 15% international developed market stocks (Europe, Japan), such as VEA
• 12.5% government bonds, such as TLT
• 12.5% inflation protected government bonds, such as TIP
• 10% emerging market stocks (Brazil, China, etc), such as VWO
• 5% commodities/ individual stocks, such as POT

Any dividends/interest/tax refund/etc gets reinvested in roth as well. I use Scottrade as broker but there are a bunch of other cheap ones too.

The reason I prefer index funds over individual stocks is because the risk is associated with the whole economy, rather than an individual company, and I don’t have the skill to predict which company will go up or down in the future (on the other hand, because the variation in returns is smaller, the potential for large gains is also less). Mutual funds have the same features of diversification, but the reason I don’t like them is because they often have high “management fees”. In the 401(k) you have almost no choice but to put up with such fees, which is why I like the roth IRA better. Here are some more articles that explain the pros and cons of index funds:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/your-money/stocks-and-bonds/22stra.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/06/your-money/stocks-and-bonds/06wealth.html

Vanguard is a company that is well-known for its low-fee funds (example: VWO tracks emerging market equities)

Another example of an exchange-traded index fund (ETF) that tracks the S&P 500 index is SPY.

I also like the “motley fool” site for general personal finance advice.

Finally, here are a couple of counter-perspectives:

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2010/12/08/does-warren-buffett-really-think-index-funds-are-b.aspx

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/09/reasons-to-avoid-index-funds.asp

…If I can risk a broad generalization, most of the people who go to Disney World have zero interest in absorbing new ideas from books. Which sounds snide, but listen: they have no qualms about being presented with ideas in other forms. Disney World is stuffed with environmental messages now, and the guides at Animal Kingdom can talk your ear off about biology. If you followed those tourists home, you might find art, but it would be the sort of unsigned folk art that’s for sale in Disney World’s African- and Asian-themed stores. In general they only seem comfortable with media that have been ratified by great age, massive popular acceptance, or both.

In this world, artists are like the anonymous, illiterate stone carvers who built the great cathedrals of Europe and then faded away into unmarked graves in the churchyard. The cathedral as a whole is awesome and stirring in spite, and possibly because, of the fact that we have no idea who built it. When we walk through it we are communing not with individual stone carvers but with an entire culture.

Disney World works the same way. If you are an intellectual type, a reader or writer of books, the nicest thing you can say about this is that the execution is superb. But it’s easy to find the whole environment a little creepy, because something is missing: the translation of all its content into clear explicit written words, the attribution of the ideas to specific people. You can’t argue with it. It seems as if a hell of a lot might be being glossed over, as if Disney World might be putting one over on us, and possibly getting away with all kinds of buried assumptions and muddled thinking.

But this is precisely the same as what is lost in the transition from the command-line interface to the GUI.

Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself–and more than just graphical. Let’s call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.

Why are we rejecting explicit word-based interfaces, and embracing graphical or sensorial ones–a trend that accounts for the success of both Microsoft and Disney?

Part of it is simply that the world is very complicated now–much more complicated than the hunter-gatherer world that our brains evolved to cope with–and we simply can’t handle all of the details. We have to delegate. We have no choice but to trust some nameless artist at Disney or programmer at Apple or Microsoft to make a few choices for us, close off some options, and give us a conveniently packaged executive summary.

But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.

We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it’s explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.

A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Bill of Rights. Unless the messages conveyed by our media are somehow pegged to a fixed, written set of precepts, they can wander all over the place and possibly dump loads of crap into people’s minds.

Orlando used to have a military installation called McCoy Air Force Base, with long runways from which B-52s could take off and reach Cuba, or just about anywhere else, with loads of nukes. But now McCoy has been scrapped and repurposed. It has been absorbed into Orlando’s civilian airport. The long runways are being used to land 747-loads of tourists from Brazil, Italy, Russia and Japan, so that they can come to Disney World and steep in our media for a while.

To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam, this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were. It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or “honoring diversity” or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities.

The lesson most people are taking home from the Twentieth Century is that, in order for a large number of different cultures to coexist peacefully on the globe (or even in a neighborhood) it is necessary for people to suspend judgment in this way. Hence (I would argue) our suspicion of, and hostility towards, all authority figures in modern culture. As David Foster Wallace has explained in his essay “E Unibus Pluram,” this is the fundamental message of television; it is the message that people take home, anyway, after they have steeped in our media long enough. It’s not expressed in these highfalutin terms, of course. It comes through as the presumption that all authority figures–teachers, generals, cops, ministers, politicians–are hypocritical buffoons, and that hip jaded coolness is the only way to be.

The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there’s no real culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macrame. The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire it point of having a culture. I think this is why guys with machine guns sometimes pop up in places like Luxor, and begin pumping bullets into Westerners. They perfectly understand the lesson of McCoy Air Force Base. When their sons come home wearing Chicago Bulls caps with the bills turned sideways, the dads go out of their minds.

The global anti-culture that has been conveyed into every cranny of the world by television is a culture unto itself, and by the standards of great and ancient cultures like Islam and France, it seems grossly inferior, at least at first. The only good thing you can say about it is that it makes world wars and Holocausts less likely–and that is actually a pretty good thing!

The only real problem is that anyone who has no culture, other than this global monoculture, is completely screwed. Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless human being. And–again–perhaps the goal of all this is to make us feckless so we won’t nuke each other.

On the other hand, if you are raised within some specific culture, you end up with a basic set of tools that you can use to think about and understand the world. You might use those tools to reject the culture you were raised in, but at least you’ve got some tools.

In this country, the people who run things–who populate major law firms and corporate boards–understand all of this at some level. They pay lip service to multiculturalism and diversity and non-judgmentalness, but they don’t raise their own children that way. I have highly educated, technically sophisticated friends who have moved to small towns in Iowa to live and raise their children, and there are Hasidic Jewish enclaves in New York where large numbers of kids are being brought up according to traditional beliefs. Any suburban community might be thought of as a place where people who hold certain (mostly implicit) beliefs go to live among others who think the same way.

And not only do these people feel some responsibility to their own children, but to the country as a whole. Some of the upper class are vile and cynical, of course, but many spend at least part of their time fretting about what direction the country is going in, and what responsibilities they have. And so issues that are important to book-reading intellectuals, such as global environmental collapse, eventually percolate through the porous buffer of mass culture and show up as ancient Hindu ruins in Orlando.

That said, I do have a few more stories I’d like to share from my time in Brazil. When I left off last time, I was in the Amazon. From Manaus, I took a plane to Rio de Janeiro. While there I stayed with my friend Leo’s family in a neighborhood called Humaitá. Leo, who once lived in Charlottesville and has a PhD in Philosophy, shared many fascinating insights into Brazilian history and architecture as we wandered around the Rodrigo de Freitas Lake, the Botanical Gardens, and of course the famous Ipanema and Copacabana beaches. Rio reminded me of Hong Kong in many ways. Both are cosmopolitan, semitropical coastal cities where steep, lushly forested mountains form a backdrop to skyscrapers and crowded beaches. One afternoon, Leo and I hiked up to a cable car station to watch the sunset from the top of the Pão de Açúcar (Sugarloaf), a giant vertical granite pillar jutting out of the shallow bay near the financial center. After stumbling back down the trail in the dark, we joined Nicole, an American W&L alumna who now lives in Brazil, and her husband Amod in the Lapa neighborhood to experience Rio’s legendary nightlife. It was just as impressive as one might imagine, with hundreds of people dancing in the streets (and it wasn’t even Carnival). On another occasion, Nicole and Amod took me to a street party in a favela near their home in the fast-growing suburb of Recreio dos Bandeirantes. While it is true that many favelas are basically slums and can be dangerous due to drug gangs, this one was relatively safe, and the people were quite friendly. It was amazing to see not only 20-somethings, but also older married couples and children dancing until late at night. While I admire the Carioca spirit of conviviality, I’m not sure I could survive trying to live there, because the constant excitement can be exhausting at times. So, when Leo needed to fly to Canada for academic business, I decided to explore some of the surrounding countryside on my own. Having the opportunity to visit a place as unique as Rio de Janeiro was certainly a dream come true for me, but Brazil is huge and diverse, and I am also glad I had the chance to see other aspects of the country, about which I will write soon.