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Mvrnn
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Name: Michael
Country: United States
State: Illinois
Metro: Champaign-Urbana
Birthday: 2/8/1982
Gender: Male
Interests: Michigan football, golf, Illini sports, badminton, video games
Expertise: Electrical engineering, economics, develoment
Occupation: Student
Industry: Education/Research
Message: message me
Member Since:
5/8/2003
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| Hey so Sarah and I made a weblog for us as a married couple: http://sarahandmichaelbloem.blogspot.com/
Sarah actually took the picture of the coast at the top with her old-school camera. Respect.
Anyhow, goodbye xanga! Goodbye mvrnn and pretentious tagline about truth! It was fun while it lasted...
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| The wedding is coming up in just a few weeks, so I suspect that this will be my last post as a bachelor. I've got a few things I've been meaning to put up here, but first, some news...
Sarah and my new home:
After a four week battle with the silicon valley apartment market I finally put down a deposit on a place for Sarah and I to live after we get married. I was getting pretty anxious about the whole thing - I had two nightmares about it the night before I finally put down some money. Anyhow, thank God for providing what should be a great place to start out married life!
You can look at some pictures and a video of the place on my picasa site. The main reason that this should be a great place to live is the location. We're about 2 miles from my office so I can bike to work, it is about half a mile from the Mt View CalTrain station, about a mile from a nice park, less than half a mile from the Stevens Creek Trail, which we can take 4 miles or so to a massive park on the bay, and about half a mile from Castro Street, a very quaint street in downtown Mt View with a bunch of unique ethnic restaurants and seating on the sidewalk. The rent was also in our price range, the inside of the apartment was reasonably nice, we get at least a bit of storage, and there's a pool too.
Many thanks to Yvonne from Palo Alto CRC for taking on our apartment hunt and helping out so much!
Oh yeah and if you want our new address send me an email or something - I decided it wouldn't be wise to post it for all to see on the internet.
Life in California:
So I don't have any profound thoughts on living in California, at least not yet. A few observations:
- The weather is fantastic. So perfect that you don't even need air conditioning (lots of places don't).
- Apartment and house prices are very expensive. About 3-4x midwest prices. I don't know that Sarah and I would ever be able to really afford a house here...
- The traffic is not as bad as I thought it would be.
- There are a lot more vibrant churches than I expected.
- People do seem to be more liberal and environmentally conscious here. Even NPR seems more liberal and there are so many hybrids on the road.
- In & Out Burger is delicious. Love how they have a person stand outside to take your order at the drive through.
- Trader Joe's is over-rated. Way too expensive. Especially if you aren't convinced of the merits of the organic food movement, like me. They do have a great selection of micro-brew beer at very reasonable prices though.
Okay so that is a pretty pathetic list... sorry about that.
Work at NASA:
So far work has been excellent. I spent the first few weeks reading a document laying out the objectives and milestones for the project I'm working on (next generation air traffic control system) and also reading some academic papers about air traffic control. In general, the project and research that has been done on it is fascinating, and much of it directly applies what I learned in grad school.
Eventually, however, just reading got old. Thankfully, I was given a couple of more short-term, applied things to be doing while I also will be continuing reading papers and soon writing a paper about applying control theory to air traffic control. The more practical things involve dynamic airspace configuration: how to decide what airspace gets to be used for what and when. The more fundamental research stuff I'm doing relates to traffic flow management: how to control speed, routing, and take-offs so that everything runs smoothly.
Last week I got to attend a very cool meeting where I listened to some actual air traffic controllers, a guy from the FAA, and some NASA researchers debate some air traffic control issues. It was particularly fun to listen to the stories of the controllers and to hear what they see as problems and work-able solutions.
I might be just seeing what I want to see, but working for the federal government has confirmed several of my suspicions about the inefficiency of the government. A few examples:
1) It took them a week to get my computer, 2 weeks to get me an internet connection, and 3 weeks to get me a phone and voicemail. These are things that happen on day one of internships I've had with private companies.
2) At a meeting about the employee evaluation system, my boss' boss explained how the training budget for the division works. Every year the division starts out with whatever it had last year. If any unexpected good training opportunities come up, which they usually seem to do, the division head asks for and typically gets more money. Then next year he starts with even more money (last year's budgeted amount plus the unexpected things from last year). He implored us to do training so that he would spend the division's training budget and not have to see the budget cut. So basically the incentive is not for the division to be efficient and plan well with the training money, but rather to be wasteful and to plan poorly so as to get more next year. Perhaps this doesn't generalize to other parts of the government, but I suspect that in other parts of the government this sad incentive structure also dominates. Without some purposeful action, government budgets will tend to perpetually grow. I suppose the good side of this is that they have so much money that they'll pay for me to get a PhD at Stanford if I want to...
3) My office-mate PK was explaining to me how it is very clear that which research centers get which projects is dependent on which congresspeople are in power in DC. For example, back when DeLay from TX was the house majority leader, many projects started going to the research centers in TX. Now that Democrats have more power he has noticed more projects coming out to California, the home state for many democrats.
Folks at NASA don't like it, but NASA has started farming out some of its research using grants - similar to what DARPA does when it solicits research. This is probably good in that if we get a bit of competition regarding who does the research then I bet the research will be better and done more efficiently. I'm currently the technical liaison for one of NASA's research contracts with a private company. We'll see if they put out some good research. I suppose the danger of doing this is that you could end up with a space-industrial complex like the military-industrial complex: a group of powerful companies who influence politicians to give them more contracts. I don't think this would be quite as dangerous as the military-industrial complex, but I don't think it would be good either. At this point we're a long ways from that though.
Prong 3 of a 3 Pronged Attack on My Conservativism: "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" by John Perkins
So if anyone is still reading at this point, here is the third of my three pronged attack on my conservative worldview. I read a book called "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man"; unfortunately I read it so long ago that I don't remember that many details... let's see what I remember. I read it to confront my conservative view that in general the efforts of organizations like the World Bank and also American corporations abroad were helpful to the developing world. Turns out that it isn't quite that simple.
Essentially the book is written by a guy who worked for a consulting firm that advised organizations like the World Bank as well as foreign governments. This company would go into a country like Indonesia or Suadi Arabia and do initial designs and estimates for massive infrastructure projects like dams or power plants. They would estimate how much these projects would help the country in question (in terms of additional growth in GDP or other measures), and then show these estimates to the government of that nation and to the World Bank or a similar organization. These (often overly optimistic) estimates would convince these countries to take out loans from the World Bank or whoever to take on these development projects. If these estimates weren't enough to convince the leaders of these countries to take out the loans, then the author's consulting firm would do other shady stuff (incite political change, give the leaders women, etc.) to get them to agree or get them out of the way. Then, American companies would come in to do the work - build the power plant or drill the oil wells or whatever. This channeled a ton of money to certain American engineering and construction firms. At the end of the day, the results would be:
- the developing country did get a pretty sweet new piece of infrastructure, but it typically didn't deliver nearly the development results that it was supposed to.
- American firms got a ton of business doing the infrastructure development work. Companies like Enron, Halliburton, GE, Boeing, Raytheon, etc. profited quite a bit.
- The developing country was now deeply in debt and therefore sort of beholden to do whatever the West wanted.
He covers many examples, such as Panama, Iran, Columbia, Equador, Saudi Arabia (very interesting chapter), Iraq, and Venezuela. He talks from his own experience, and sometimes the stuff he and his company did was so corrupt that it is really sad and even hard to believe.
Basically, the author sees this whole set up as a sneaky way for the US to gain more power an influence in the world. After reading the book, I'd agree that the consulting company he worked for was totally unethical and manipulative. They did what the US government and large US corporations wanted, not what was best for developing countries. The companies that came in and took the contracts to do the work are less guilty - mainly their guilt lies in any efforts they made to encourage the World Bank and companies like the one the author worked for to keep lining up new projects even when they realized how they didn't help with development.
So how does this change my conservative worldview? I suppose that I shouldn't be surprised that as companies get more powerful and more intertwined with the government, the fallen nature of those at the top (of government and the companies) mixes with their power to lead to some very corrupt actions. However, I was surprised at how corrupt things are. I grew up seeing how the work of US companies abroad can actually be really helpful to a nation's development, as I think it continues to be particularly in the Asian countries I grew up in. The intervention of US companies described in this book is more like a quiet imperialism based on lies. I suppose the main change in my worldview that this book brought about was that now I am more concerned about the power of corporations, particularly when they have too much influence on the government. I can't say I'm more opposed to free-market capitalism itself, but I see that even though it provides better checks and balances on our fallen human nature than the alternatives, it can't stop that nature altogether.
Ron Paul Rally in Mountain View, CA:
I suppose my conservative worldview must still be pretty strong, because as I've mentioned before I'm excitedly supporting Ron Paul's run for the Republican nomination in 2008. Last weekend there was a Ron Paul rally here in the bay area, just a mile or so from my work, so I decided to check it out.
Going to the rally itself was a fun and exciting experience. I'd recommend that all of you get more into politics - this is a great freedom we have and a great way to hopefully influence the country for God's glory. I too should get more into politics. Anyhow, there was quite a variety of people there - I hung out with some young professional single white guys like me (one who worked on Google's new street view on google maps, the other who worked for a hedge fund in SF), but there were some younger families, older couples, a guy dressed up like he was in the revolutionary war, a guy with a slain "the state" bear stuffed animal over his shoulder, and others. Overwhelmingly white and biased towards young people, but quite a variety. A few folks spoke before Ron did, but they were terrible speakers and didn't have much that was very impressive to say. In general they seemed to have not really thought through what they had to say, or they seemed like out-there conspiracy theorists. In general I was somewhat weirded out by the conspiracy theorists talking about things like the Council on Foreign Relations. Maybe there is something to these conspiracies, but it is all too hard to believe to make it the platform for a presidential campaign.
Thankfully Ron's talk was excellent. I didn't take notes and don't remember much, but if you look at any of his videos on youtube he says a lot of the same stuff. The connected core beliefs underlying Ron's perspectives on most issues seem to be
- we should run the government like the constitution suggests
- people and society thrive when people are given liberty
I agree strongly with these principles, and Ron has supported them in a very passionate and principled way throughout his career, which is why I support Ron. Of course these are not the fundamental beliefs I start with, but I think that these could be derived from a Reformed Christian worldview. After all, I understand that Calvin was somewhat of a libertarian in his political perspectives  . I hope to think this through more carefully and someday write about it or a related topic on a great blog that Janine started.
Ron's talk wasn't perfect. He supports letting people have guns, and had some dumb comment about how if we allowed more guns on planes then maybe 9/11 wouldn't have happened. Right... He mentioned his belief in a creator and that being why he supports liberty and life, particularly for the unborn, but when that message fell flat with the Californian crowd he quickly moved on. I would've liked to see some more perseverance on that topic.
For now, a quick run-down of Ron's policies (the one he picked as important on his website anyhow) and what I think of them:
- Debt and taxes: "Lower taxes benefit all of us,
creating jobs and allowing us to make more decisions for ourselves about our lives." I agree wholeheartedly. Individuals will generally do a better job at managing their own income than the government will do for them, essentially because they care more about it than the government. A smaller government goes along with lower taxes. I think that the government does far too much and does it poorly, creating dependency among citizens and putting the government further into debt. This is a dangerous situation.
- American Independence and Sovereignty: Ron is convinced that free-trade deals compromise America's sovereignty and so should be avoided. This is true to an extent, but I'm not convinced that it is so much of a problem that we should eliminate free trade deals. Trade is good for everyone involved and we should do what we can to support it, even if it means some sacrifices of American sovereignty.
- War and Foreign Policy: Ron is very opposed to the war in Iraq and would support a much less interventionist foreign policy. Iraq is definitely a tough call - they're going to be in pretty bad shape after we leave and sometimes I think the best thing to do is to stick around and help them get things straightened out. In general, however, I'm in support of a less interventionist foreign policy. Ron is fond of pointing out that the way to foster freedom and democracy and capitalism abroad is not with guns, rather it is by setting a good example. I think there is a lot of truth to this. Moreover, many of our interventions abroad since WWII have not gone well, and have actually made American values less popular. I support a less interventionist approach. However, Ron doesn't support isolation: "Let us have a strong America, conducting open trade, travel, communication, and diplomacy with other nations."
- Life and Liberty: Ron is pro-life. This seems like a no-brainer for a Christian if you ask me. I like this quote from Ron: "In 40 years of medical practice, I never once considered performing an
abortion, nor did I ever find abortion necessary to save the life of a
pregnant woman."
- Border Security and Immigration Reform: Ron takes a tough stance about securing our borders and not providing any sort of amnesty to illegal immigrants. This make sense in a way - illegal immigrants are illegal. But these folks in general came here to work hard and do a lot of the grunt work that other Americans don't want to do. America has always seemed to struggle with immigrants, but in general I think immigrants have helped America tremendously and that we as a nation should do what we can to care for the poor sojourners in our land.
- Privacy and Personal Liberty: Ron is all about protecting personal liberty: "We must drastically limit the
ability of government to collect and store data regarding citizens’ personal matters." While I support some sacrifice of liberty and privacy to fight terrorism, I think the government has gone too far in the Patriot Act, and I think Ron would change that.
- Property Rights and Eminent Domain: Ron doesn't want the government to take our property for its use. Sounds good to me, although I can't say I'm passionate about this one.
All in all an exciting candidate that I strongly recommend. Ron Paul in 2008!
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| Ron Paul has me totally geeked. Seems like a very principled and thoughtful guy, and I agree with a ton of what he has to say. Watch him on the Daily Show here.
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| I made a personal website! It is not very good at all, but check it out anyhow: http://decision.csl.uiuc.edu/~mbloem2/
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