Best hummus in Cincinnati

Is the one we make at home with our new food processor!!!!!

Good Things, Bad Things: Privacy

This post is part of the "Good Things, Bad Things" series.

In general, the right for privacy in our world is diminishing. Some proof for that are: the ever growing number of CCTV cameras in city centers (especially in the UK, where this thing has almost gotten to the point of being a public Big Brother), Google's Street View and its privacy infractions, online mail applications that use key words to put contextual ads, and electronic data everyone leaves behind him just to prove he or she is still alive, e.g. on Facebook, Twitter, cellular networks, blogs, etc. To this one can add the debate over biometric database, especially the one lobbied for and promoted by MK Sheetrit in Israel.

Photo: Hustvedt for Wikipedia. Photo location: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Three_Surveillance_cameras.jpg#file.

However, things really are nauseating when they come closer to oneself. One aspect of our lost privacy is the fact that the U.S. government requires every international student and international worker to report about his or her moves. We are already in the biometric database of the federal government as it is. And, lately, we discovered the that the University of Cincinnati, specifically one person in it is an avid reader of this very blog. This caused D and me to consider how much of what we experience in life should be made public through Facebook and blogging.

I have to say that although I hate having my rights being restricted by little people in dark suits, I support what the government is doing in attempt to prevent atrocities such as 9-11 from happening again. However, Sheetrit, this does not say that I support the biometric database promoted in Israel, there are other ways to have smart ID cards, and there are many nations that don't have ID cards at all, and biometric databases will not prevent terrorism or crime as you claim.

What I do hate, and I think there is no excuse for it, is having my freedom of speech trampled by little men that don't wear suits or badges. This is absolutely wrong.

Good Things, Bad Things: Infrastructures

This post is part of the "Good Things, Bad Things" series.

In order to discuss the infrastructure in the US, let me first define what I mean by the term. For me infrastructures is everything that pertains to your ability to conduct your life. Good infrastructures are the ones that you don't have to think about: they are there, they are reliable, and they deliver everything you need when you need it.

In general I can say that the infrastructures in the USA are better than the ones in Israel. However, there are several exceptions to that rule. The infrastructures that are better than Israel are: broadband internet connection (we have 30Mbit/s fiber optics, at a cost that is lower than the cost in Israel for a tenth of that), roads (there are far less traffic jams here than in Israel), and the postal service, which is absolutely excellent, fast, efficient, and cheap. Service providers, and infrastructures providers among them, are usually more polite and don't require endless conversations to get rid of, but they are still inefficient just as their Israeli counterparts are. I really enjoy the banks here. We have an account with a major bank, and we pay absolutely no fees and get excellent service online and in the branch. It's a real pleasure that is in complete contrast to the appalling way Israeli banks work.

The infrastructures that are not as good as the ones in Israel are: buildings, that are built from IKEA style wooden plates and are just as strong as them, electricity, which has the tendency of failing every time there is a storm, public transportation, which is virtually non-existent in Cincinnati, and plumbing, which is a major problem in the building we live in, probably because of poor maintenance by the company that manages the property. The latter two are probably local problems, as public transportation in NYC, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco is supposed to be better, and the property management company is just one company and others may be better.

Though infrastructures in the US are better than in Israel, I feel that they may be deteriorating due to the economic problems. For example, the roads in Cincinnati have a lot of holes in them, and in the winter the city didn't plow the snow from the smaller streets or had money for salt to prevent the roads from freezing. Hopefully this is a temporary thing, that will pass when the economy improves.

Good Things, Bad Things: Weather

This post is part of the "Good Things, Bad Things" series.

Weather in Israel can be described as having four seasons: December, January, February, and Summer. The former three are generally called winter, but are quite warm, but the latter ranges between hot and dry to blistering and humid.
After moving here I have finally realized that there are real differences between summer, fall, spring and winter. In the summer it's hot, muggy and rainy. In the fall the trees turn to all shades and colors. In the winter it's cold and sometimes snows. I really enjoyed the snow. Then, spring brings everything back to life, and the trees grow leaves in all different colors once more.

However, this wide range of temperatures and weather phenomena have a price: the weather here is very unstable. One day it's hot, the next it's soaking wet. Electricity lines were knocked out for several days twice since we came here. There are tornado alarms and flood alerts every now and then.

Still, I like the weather in Cincinnati, especially when it's not too hot or rainy.

Good Things, Bad Things: Health

This post is part of the "Good Things, Bad Things" series.

Before we got here I thought that the Israeli healthcare system is not a good healthcare system. My mother had just died a month before we moved here, and I was angry with the way her treatment had been administered. It seemed to me that the healthcare system in Israel was too slow on one hand, yet too expensive on the other hand. This may still be true, but I have no doubt in my mind that when it comes to healthcare, the Israeli way is far better than the American way.

I use a report by the World Health Organization (WHO) to compare healthcare systems in the world. According to this report, though the Health Adjusted Life Expectancy (HALE) is high in the US (about 70+ years), it is not significantly higher than other countries, or perhaps even less than some. On the other hand the Total Health Expenditure in the US is one of the highest in the world, with Sweden and Germany (See figure 1.6 in that report). In fact the expenditure for healthcare in the US is so high, at about 15% of the GDP, that it is described as "singular" by the WHO (see page 106), compared even with other "high-income" (or developed) countries, which spend less than 10% of their GDP on healthcare. It is also singular in the fact that only 6.9% of the GDP is invested by the government, whereas the rest of the expenditures (almost 9% of GDP) comes from the private market. Although 6.9% of GDP government intervention is by no means low, the fact that so much more money is invested by the private sector contributes to high inequalities in the American healthcare system. This was not overlooked by the WHO: when it comes to universal coverage, the WHO has a lot to say about the inequalities in the American healthcare system, citing a decline of up to 5 years in the life expectancy of women in more than a thousand counties in the nation, where hazardous material are being disposed of (page 56), and the lack of care for uninsured elderly people (page 57).

In overall, it is thus not surprising that the United States of America is ranked number 37 in the world according to a WHO report that assesses the healthcare systems of countries in the world. What may be more surprising is that among the countries that have a better healthcare system than the USA we can find not-so-developed countries, such as Oman, Colombia, the United Arab Emirates, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Morocco, or even Israel (ranked 28). On the other hand, the United Kingdom is ranked number 18, with an expenditure which is only about 6% of its GDP, compare to the 15% in the USA. The highest ranking country is France. Obviously money isn't everything, contrary to common American belief. So, what is important in achieving a capable healthcare system?

The first thing that I can think of is mentioned in the WHO report: universal care. In American lingo this translates to Socialism, however, this is not what the WHO says. One should understand that to be healthy, it is not enough just to pay your ever-growing health insurance policy. It is also important that your neighbor, who may not be as lucky in securing a good healthcare plan as you are, is healthy. For some odd reasons, bacteria and viruses tend to ignore the sum of money you have in the bank, or the type of insurance card you have from your healthcare provider. If your neighbor becomes sick, chances are that you will fall ill as well. Especially if this neighbor is unable to pay for a visit to the doctor, or for the pills prescribed to him. And with 16.6% of Americans uninsured (as of 2007, I believe this percentage will be much higher, as unemployment has risen from about 4% or 5% at that time to about 9.5% today), that means that one of every 6 households are not insured. So, if you live at a house and you have neighbors on all your sides, at least one house around you is uninsured, won't go to the doctor, and there is a high chance you will contract his flu. A proof of that can be seen by the number of H1N1 (swine flu) victims in the USA, which is the highest in the world, 436 confirmed deaths, and it's not even fall or winter here. Yet.

However, it is not enough to make insurance accessible to the lower classes of the population. President Obama suggested a reform that will add a government option for Americans in addition to the private plans. I can't see how this is much different than the existing Medicaid program, but that is only me - I am not a recondite of the American healthcare system. It seems to me that a government run plan as an option is too little too late. Naturally asking for more from the American people, who genuinely believes that it has the best healthcare system in the world, is too much so the president has to settle for this little. Yet, even this is too much for the Americans, and the republican party fights it in every way it can, including scare and slur tactics.

In addition to that, there is a growing anxiety here about president Obama's alleged plans to "socialize" the country. Stemming from the stimulus plans (the first one, which bailed out the banks was actually passed in the term of the Bush administration, but don't confuse the GOP with facts), there were growing concerns about the growing intervention of the administration in the economy and now with the healthcare reform - in the healthcare system. As I wrote in the previous paragraph, I think that the healthcare reform is not enough, but even if President Obama's plans were to socialize the healthcare system completely (as per the GOP's scare tactics), what evil could come from this "socialization"? The worst that can happen, with these kind of expenditures spent on health as they are now, is that the American system will be similar to, and probably exceed, the ones in Germany (ranked 25 in the world), Sweden (23), Norway (11) or France (1). What's wrong with that?

Good Things, Bad Things: Economy

This post is part of the "Good Things, Bad Things" series.

I am no economist. I do not know how to make good investments, never have known and probably will never know. I know one thing about economy: you have to spend less than what you earn. Otherwise, the expenses overcome the income and you go bankrupt. Simple as that. This is the number one rule of home economics. So, how did we get to the current mess?

We got there by simply not following the rules. I'm sorry, not rules - a rule. There isn't much really to it. But why didn't we follow one simple, 6-words rule? I think that the reason is quite simple: we, the people, wanted to have more, better, and fancier stuff. Somehow during the last 50 years the US-led Western economy has shifted from manufacturing based to consumer based. Instead of a positive influx of money into the US (and Germany, Japan, and other Western countries) we now spend much more than what we get. To get them, we shifted the plants that manufacture them to areas of the world that do not observe the same workers rights that we do in the west. It can be merely not paying the same salaries, but often it also involves longer working hours with little rest or no weekends, under-aged workers (not to say child slavery in the extreme cases), and so on. The average price of a T-Shirt has been dropping for ages at a rate of several percents, mainly because it is cheaper to manufacture them in places like China, Indonesia, or the Philippines, while Western textile factories have shut down. As another example think about the demise of the shoe-repair shops. Until 20-30 years ago when a shoe was torn, people went to repair them, now we buy a new pair of shoes. There is no incentive to keep shoe-repairing shops anymore and they shut down. This is one part of the equation - buy more products with the less money spent per each product. This not necessarily reduces the amount of money we spend on consumer products, and surely enough - we as a civilization have been spending more and more.

At the same time, the same factories and manufacturing that were shifting to the undeveloped world caused the Western civilization to have ever bigger gaps in the balance of trade between the West and the 3rd world. For example, the American balance of trade with China and Japan has been in a great deficit over the last 25 years (since 1985), causing an ever growing debt to these countries, as can be seen in the figure below, which is the work of Alex1011 and is taken from Wikipedia.


If the same debt had been accumulated by a single person, or a single company, they would have had to pay it or go bankrupt. When it comes to countries, things are more complex. However, I think that it can be safe to assume that such great deficits are not healthy to any economy.

But it gets even worse, I'm afraid. At first, manufacturing was out-sourced to economies with cheaper, but less proficient, work-force. However, two parallel processes have been developing over time based on this move: 1) the work force in those 3rd world countries has become more and more proficient, and 2) as they become more proficient the West have shifted the manufacturing of more complex goods to these countries. Let's take Brazil for example. Cars have been manufactured in Brazil since the late 1950s, starting with Toyota and Volkswagen, and in the last 50 years this industry have evolved with almost all modern car manufacturers working there (see link above). Brazil manufactures about 3 million cars and has passed France as of 2008, with high end models like Volkswagen Beetle as an example. However, if one can manufacture cars in Brazil, why not progress to the aerospace industry? Embraer is Brazil's most important aerospace manufacturer, and one of the four major manufacturers of commerce airplanes in the world (in the same league with Boeing, Airbus). Its major growth started in the 1970s. Nowadays, many commuter airlines in the US use Embraer models, especially the smaller ones that carry about 50-100 passengers.

There is nothing wrong with having 3rd world countries developing. On the contrary: when they develop there is a growing market for products that they could not afford earlier. However, as the manufacturing of more and more products is shifted, the local workers in the West lose their ability to manufacture complex products. In the last decade things have deteriorated to the point that Asian companies also design many of the "American" products. The Harvard Business Review writes that American companies have lost their ability to manufacture and design many of the small and simple things they used to be able to manufacture in the past. They even lost their ability to manufacture cutting-edge technology stuff, like the Kindle or the Boeing 787's carbon-fiber components.

Trade balance is just one angle. There is another one: government deficit, which also has been rising constantly. American administrations have always had problems with balancing their sheet, but since Clinton's administration the situation has been going from bad to worse. The 2009 deficit is projected to be more than 1 trillion dollars, some say even 1.8 trillion dollars.

On the lower end of the scale one can look at the consumers. Until the burst of the credit bubble Americans just spent without any second thought, or so it appears. That's why more and more people have huge debts and they turn to defaults and bankruptcies. This in turn is just a symptom of the illness I tried to present earlier: if manufacturing is low, as a whole, then each worker should have less money to earn. Less money to earn - and increased consumerism - must boil down to debt, that's simple math.

So, what is the correct way? How do you fix it? If I had the answer to that, I would probably win the Noble prize. However, it seems to me that the government has to reign in the uncontrollable masses. How? First, levee much higher taxes. This will also improve the government deficit. For example, if each American paid additional $1000 a year in taxes, the deficit would decrease by 350 Billion dollars. $5000 more a year, and the deficit is gone! Tax rates in America are low, compared to the rest of the Western world, however, Americans are not likely to allow this tax raise, and the administration will not be able to do it until the crunch gets much worse. One may argue that higher taxes will result in lower growth rates, which is the last thing desired during an economic crisis. That is true, but high deficit also boils down to more expensive debt for anyone, and higher credit costs, which in turn hinders long-lasting and healthy growth. So, which problem is bigger? Higher rates or higher taxes? Interesting. If I were the president I would increase taxes significantly and try to eliminate the deficit or at least reduce it almost to zero, even at the cost of immediate, short-lived, growth. He has 4 years in office and can afford it. Short-lived "bubble" growth that stems from the stimulus plan will likely to evaporate faster than we think - perhaps before the next presidential elections.

Another thing to consider is investment in bringing back the industry and science to the US. This should be done cleverly, as not all fields will yield the same desired results. However, science, engineering and information technology should come back to the US. Perhaps a new race to the moon is in order? On the other hand, the US has nothing to gain from its failing auto industry until this industry sheds all the excess and starts to make small, fuel efficient and cheap cars. In any case many Americans buy smaller cars from Japanese manufacturers that produce in America, so why support GM or Chrysler?!

Economy: hard to grasp. Let's stick to the basics: spend less than what you earn.