Found a Perch

As I packed the final boxes and moved them into the truck, Dad and Zon bid me farewell and left for their walk.  Hah, I bet you thought I was the one leaving!

No, no, it seems i have overleft my welcome.  Now it is just assumed that I’ll be moving somewhere else again in the next month and trying to use it as leverage to get hugs and cookies.  What’s wrong with goodbye hugs!? 

It was probably in the inchoate stages of my travels that i began forming this delusion.  I assumed that no matter how far I was going that when I got to the kitchen I would be bombarded with love.  Furthermore, i assumed that upon arrival to my destination, no matter how precisely i packed my bags, there would always be a treat Mom managed to sneak into one of my boxes. (I wonder what the airlines would say about this…).

But it wasn’t the love that was missing, Dad and Zon both yelled ‘see ya dude’ over their shoulder as they took off.  And though there was no See’s Milk Chocolate with Marshmallow at the bottom of my guitar case, i found a gift card surreptitiously waiting in my wallet to treat me at Trader Joe’s.

All that I’m trying to say is that if you travel a lot, there comes a time when a trip to the airport gets treated like a night at the movies. 

My new perch is downtown Palo Alto.  I live in the cottage (garage) of a Shingle Style house with Carpenter Gothic interiors (i’ll work on figuring out what this means too) in Professorville (though I am only a lecturer).  Close enough to home that I don’t feel like i’ve left, close enough to work that I don’t feel like i’m there,  and close enough to Stanford that i can still feel like i’m climbing the ladders of academia.

Here’s Someone to Watch

Well, don’t say it wasn’t expected.  Hugo Chavez is heading forward with his plans of land reform in Venezuela.  Apparently, Chavez has promised to put an end to ‘idle’ latifundios.  That is, estates of 5000 hectares (12,350 acres) that aren’t being used efficiently.  You can take your guess at what efficiently may mean.  Especially when the land in question is 6.6 million acres of private holdings.

The claim is that there is too much land in the hands of too few people.  As the government hasn’t enforced property rights in the past, there should be low expectations to see a drastic change in the future.  In one case, where the government ignored demands to remove a few squatters from private land, the number of squatters grew to several hundreds, now equipped with housing settlements and yucca crops.

The wisdom behind these acts is best summed up by Chavez’s motives to "tax farms into productivity."  Unfortunately, such wisdom is having a hard time being implemented since the government doesn’t even have a registry of land ownership.  Hey, there’s a policy that might work for a start—respect of ownership!

China Outsourcing to US

Go figure, China looking to outsource to the US and several municipalities trying to woo in their investment.  I wonder if the University students in China will stand up for this abuse of foreign labor.

It is likely that the US could benefit a great deal from Chinese foreign direct investment.  If more Chinese companies were investing in the US there would become more reason for Chinese firms to respect the property rights and contracts of US firms invested in their country.