In US of Aiiii

I moved to San Francisco at the start of last month which seems a logical point to close this blog out.

I enjoyed blogging while I was in Uganda, even if it was only because it got me into the habit of writing. To keep this going, I decided to start another one: sidinusofaiii.blogspot.com.

See you there.

Few great article from the browser

The Browser is an excellent source of interesting article on the net.

Today there were three pearlers:

1. Sin and virtue through the lens of evolutionary biology

2. Love, relationships and expectations

3. On not keeping religion and politics separate.

Each one I thoroughly enjoyed and I hope you do too.

Stealing

Joyce stole $1800 from our house ($1500 of which belonged to Frankie).

Frankie used to live next door and Joyce had been cleaning his house for around 6 month before he moved in with me. She had actually been cleaning that house for much longer than that. She used to clean for Katrina who lived in the house before Frankie and Shira moved in.

A distraught and desperate sounding Joyce called Frankie couple of weeks back asking for some work. Frankie, and to some extent me, felt some sense of guilt for ending her source of income when he moved in with me and we decided to ask her to come clean the house on Fridays in addition to the regular cleaner who comes on Monday.

Last Friday, she came in at 9AM and left by 10AM with $1800 cash.

Costs of stealing:
1. Reputation (R) - loss of employment with other houses
2. Jail term (J) - incarceration, loss of income, inability to care for family
3. Guilt (G) - She is not a criminal. I assume she feels very guilty about stealing from us.

Benefit of stealing:
1. Money (M)
2. ?? (Q)

So, Joyce will steal if: R + G + J < M + Q

Did Joyce make up her mind that she'd steal from us when she called Frankie? How big was the 'M' that she was hoping for. We know that it was definitely smaller than $1800:

m < M < $1800

We should not have kept that much money around.

Secondly, if she had decided to do the same thing at a few different houses, it can be argued that the R and G (and maybe J) do not increase linearly with each house even though M does:

R + G + sum(Jn) = sum(Mn) + Q.

Therefore, if she was willing to steal from multiple houses even a smaller M would have sufficed. Though having one large M meant that the other Ms do not need to be big. Our $1800 lying around might have triggered a stealing spree.

Did she implicitly make these calculations? Even if she did not quantify them correctly, she would have estimated R and J. Did she forget about G?

What about Q? Were there any extenuating circumstances that made the decision easier? Was someone sick? Was she being harassed? Being always in search of a story, I feel there must be one here that is now most probably lost.

Irrationality

Interesting article: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06/daniel-kahneman-bias-studies.html

Excerpt:

The problem with this introspective approach is that the driving forces behind biases—the root causes of our irrationality—are largely unconscious, which means they remain invisible to self-analysis and impermeable to intelligence. In fact, introspection can actually compound the error, blinding us to those primal processes responsible for many of our everyday failings. We spin eloquent stories, but these stories miss the point. The more we attempt to know ourselves, the less we actually understand.

Mulago walkabout

I walked into an open room with high ceilings and the smell of cardboard. A long bench had a switched off computer missing a keyboard and a mouse. A bunch of twenty-somethings huddled about the bench threw me a cursory glance and went back to their conversation.

I interrupted a short lady with wide hips and a purposeful gait and asked her for Nancy.

"Oh madam Nancy! You follow me".

Nancy was scribbling some notes on a notepad which she handed over to the lady next to her and gave me a welcoming smile. She was to take me to all the clinics at Mulago so I could meet the pharmacists and clinicians and invite them personally to a CME being held the next week.

Nancy walked fast and avoided the stairs. We waited at the lifts and crammed in there with laundry hampers, hospital beds and supply crates to go up one floor. I have trouble summarising Nancy. She was not cold but neither was she generous with her words. She let me do the talking and added her "goodbyes" and "thankyous" at the end.

We jumped drains and squeezed through spaces between buildings. We waded through the PMTCT clinic packed with mothers and infants. The kids seemed to belong to every mother and to none. They flowed in the space between the seated mothers, from one bench to the other, around corners and into rooms. No one seemed to be tracking their movements or maybe they all did.

The TB centre was a breezy building with streak of greys flowing down it's beige walls and a tin roof that crackled as it expanded in the rising heat. It had benches outside with around twenty people in surgical masks. The lady at the desk wore one and so did all the doctors in the room. Three doctors sat on a long table with foot high piles of files and seemed to be interviewing three different patients. In all the clinics, we were asked to barge through closed door to the examination rooms and each time I'd expect a topless lady to scream at me for invading her privacy. Most patients just looked at me with glassy eyes while the physician shifted his attention to me.

We ended back at the main pharmacy and had a customary chat with Nancy's boss. He gave me the once over looking above his glasses instead of through while chewing on his rice and beans. He was skeptical but I'm not entirely sure about what exactly.

I'm going to miss this place

Sorry about the extended absence. Much of significance has happened in the last few months though I haven't come up with words to do justice to them. The only words that I have come up with make it sound quotidian and stale when it is neither. So let us park that for the time being.

I am moving to San Francisco.

I once made a list of things I'd miss about Ghana and have found myself going back and reading over it many times. Though I was unaware of this when I wrote it, each line in the post serves as an index to an array of memories that no amount of looking at photographs or reading any other blogpost can reference.

I would like to try that again and hope that the awareness of its value does not diminish it in any way.

5AM rooster calls
Goat corner
Shulaz, house of freshness
Colour of the wild
The corner shop run by the gujarati family
The massive pothole on the other side of the speedbump
Driving over the footpath at Kampala parents
1000 cups
balcony at CPHL
Milly's espresso
Darts with Steve
Pool with Frankie
Cooking with Mara
KCC
Sneaking into squash
DJ FRANK
Fruit lady
Roast pork
Poker nights
Diablo III with Frankie
Dogs at 1:30AM
Puerto Rico
500
Settlers
Poker Wednesdays
Sunday brunch at La Fointaine
BBQ lounge
Mayfair
Abandoned house
Ggaba Point Fish
Mubiru
Noorin's sneeze sheet
Muzungu house parties
"very ok please"
"thankyou please"
"are you sure?"

The short history of neoliberalism

The section on "Neoliberalism on the International Scene" is especially interesting:
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/a_short_history_of_neoliberalism_and_how_we_can_fix_it