Stimulating the economy

Last week, President Obama signed the much-debated economic stimulus package into law. There's little I need to write about the specifics of it, because it's pretty likely you're all totally bored with the details you've been bombarded with over the last several months. Nevertheless, let's quickly summarise that the aim of this $787 billion deal is to get the economy going again: to encourage lending, to start and/or keep jobs, to get people to spend. (Notice 787 billion is more than three quarters of a trillion. Scientifically, it is 0.787x10¹² - that's right: ten to the twelfth power)

Anyway, now that we've spent a second in shock, let me declare that (although I'm a big fan of the New Deal and this even Newer Deal) I won't - make that I can't - participate.

There are a couple of reasons for my seemingly blatant lack of interest in the American economy but I plead innocent to all charges: as I hope you'll see, it's not my fault I'm not spending my money.

First of all, there's the West Virginia state's habit of the delayed payroll. I'm not quite sure who it applies to, though it seems to be pretty widespread amongst state-employees (possibly affecting all of them). The principle is as follows: you work two weeks, then you wait two weeks, then you get paid. I'm not quite sure where the idea originated and why on Earth people would put up with it, but hey, it's how it's done, so we roll with it.
It does mean, though, that for no less than 31 days, I had to get by on whatever I took from home - and whatever I could get off my Belgian credit card. The consequence is, of course, that I'm living cheaply. Very cheaply. No economic recovery will result from my migrating, that's for sure.

Next, there's the pension fund. This one is a bit tricky because in itself it doesn't sound bad. 6% of my wage gets placed in a fund which I cannot access until I retire (the good news is the university will double that up, effectively giving me a pension-bonus of 6%). However, I won't retire in the States - or at least, I don't think I will. So instead of staying there for the coming few decades, I'll get the accumulated funds when I leave America next year - together with the last month of (delayed) pay. In other words, the day I finish my job - the day I leave the US and go back to Europe, I'll get just about 20% of the yearly salary I signed up for - don't spend that here, go spend it in Europe.

Thirdly and finally, after living cheaply for a month, there's really no point to getting a car: I've found my way on foot, I can continue like that. Besides, if I'm only here for a relatively short while, there's really no point in getting a car once you've settled down and furnished a room and the like. Not getting a car doesn't stimulate the economy, of course: I don't pay money for a car or fuel or registration or maintentance. But there's another catch to this: without a car, I cannot reach the big shops. I've tried walking to the mall, because it's really not that far: when I walk home in the evening, I can see the lit parkings on the next hilltop. The problem, though, is that there simply isn't a sidewalk to get there - not even half a metre of dirt to separate me from the crazed stream of traffic. There is a bus, but that takes a huge detour and gets me there in an hour - no less; and there's only one bus per hour, so you end up stuck there on the freezing parking lot in the cold, wanting to go home.

The consequence is that the only good bookshop I can easily access is Amazon.com. I wouldn't have a clue where to buy CDs or shoes - or a good rain jacket by the way; luckily I did find a great umbrella. Long story short: I'm not complaining - hell no, I'll be rich by the time I leave here - but I don't get it either. I would think an obvious thing to stimulate the economy would be to make sure people can get to the shops - and to make sure they have the money they've worked for, so they can spend it. I would think it would be a lot easier to get the money where it is (or should be) than to dig astronomical holes in the federal budget. (By the way - the distance to PSR J0437-4715 is just about 5x10¹⁵ km - which is only a factor of fifty larger than the rounded-up stimulus cost in cents. So these truly are astronomical numbers.)


On the bright side, I have managed to find a copy of the New York Times. It wasn't displayed at the entrance next to all the other papers, but was standing on its own on the other side of the aisle - at the end of it, turned around the corner so no one but very attentive shoppers who happen to leave through that particular exit would notice it. Sadly for the American economy, though, I had already subscribed to the British Guardian Weekly by then.

Addiction

Now that all the official administrative stuff is organised and I have a bank account, home and an emerging daily routine, I thought the dust would settle down and I would settle in. Mostly this turned out to be correct, except for a daily uneasiness that starts to itch around 10am and reaches a climax at 11am when I simply cannot sit still anymore. First I thought it was because it was Monday, then I thought I was just getting annoyed by colleagues sending repetitive e-mails. Finally I realised what was wrong. During my last months - maybe even for close to a year - in Swinburne, sometime between 10 and 11am I would get my daily oxygen-fix by taking a little walk to get the Age - the Melbourne newspaper that is. Needless to say, in Morgantown there is no Age - but somehow the force of habit has persisted.

So I do end up going for a little walk, giving in to the cravings in search of a good-quality newspaper or an equally high-standard cup of coffee. So far, these walks haven't resulted in anything but the good old O₂ fix. The problem is not that there is no (good) coffee on campus - there's plenty of places to go - Starbucks or otherwise. The problem is that there are just way too many students - and much too few of them are in class between 10 and 11am. I honestly start to get the impression that studying in the US comes down to queueing (sorry, lining up) for a cup of coffee. However, I haven't seen many people walk around while sipping their cups (not too surprising since the latte-sipping-liberals are all supposedly in New York and Washington) so maybe it's not the student's fault, maybe it's simply that the coffee shops work too slowly. I'll let you know when I find out.

Another side to my quandary is the fact that I have trouble to find a good newspaper around. So far, I've ran all over town to find a copy of the New York Times (I've tried the Wall Street Journal on the plane - which was probably the last time I'll try that one) and I've only succeeded to locate a few vending machines - none of which are on campus. the few shops that do sell newspapers either have national papers hidden or only sell local papers. Now I'm not saying these local papers are bad - in fact the university-ran "Daily Athenaeum" is pretty good - but I'd actually prefer to know what's going on in the World - not just in Morgantown.

Granted: USA Today you can find just about anywhere. I am, however, in search of a good newspaper.

"Wild" West

Some time ago, I had the chance to wonder at the wide landscapes of grass-covered hilltops that seem to stretch out past the town and into the great beyond. The sight instilled me with the wonder and excitement of discovery that must have captured the heart and soul of every settler that ever moved West - the great feeling of discovering something new, making a new start - the great feeling of boundless possibilities. Then suddenly, the prairies I beheld were filled with a Native American hunting party, chasing down bisons with bows, arrows and spears, expertly catapulted from the backs of their dust-obscured, galloping mustangs...

Snapping back to reality, I felt de concrete beneath my feet and became aware of the vast tarmac of parking lots bordered by the most humungous stores one ever comes across. The Indians have long gone, as have the buffalos. The thrill of discovery has made room for the ease of a car-driven, laid-back society of concrete. In fact, upon closer inspection of Wikipedia, West Virginia isn't the far West, nor has it ever been. The bison-chasing Americans were never even part of West Virginia - before the Europeans came over, this land was covered in thick native forest, inhabited by turkeys and rattle snakes. The fact that Pocahontas county (where the Green Bank Telescope is) is so nearby, should have given me a hint on what to expect. Anyway. The forest has long gone, farming and coal mining have taken over. That doesn't mean the landscape isn't beautiful anymore - there still are forests and even when they're gone, the hills still roll through the country, towards the horizon. Western civilisation has made its impact - it has tar-covered some of the hills, but it hasn't defeated the beauty of the country. If only I could see more of it without requiring a car.

Bushfires

And of course it is with sadness that I've been following the news on the recent bushfires in Victoria and other parts of Australia. As of now, 181 people are confirmed dead and the toll is expected to rise above 200 as the catastrophe is being cleaned up.

It's very sad and disheartening to hear that entire communities have litterally been swept away and that the beautiful forests where we went out camping exactly a year ago (17 Feb 2008, I believe), turned into furnaces this year.

And then to say that at least some - if not many - of these fires were caused by ignorant people lighting them.

Preparation

As much as Fosters and Ten Canoes turned out to be not quite representative of what I would find in Australia, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid has a bit more to say about the present-day U.S. of A.

Surprisingly, I'm not referring to the gun-slinging, trigger happy cowboy Western-type culture - what I'm referring to is the banking world. Indeed, in the country that has lead the capitalist part of the World for the best part of a century, not much seems to have changed during that time. Walking in to a bank, you still have the steel-framed tellers (not even necessarily with bullet-proof glass), the massive wooden desks, the low-luminosity, green-capped light bulbs on all the white-chalked pylons as well as on aforementioned desks, the proud American flag in the back of the room, next to a bunker-type passage that probably leads to the vault. I agree that the fluorescent lamps on the ceiling and the computers on the desks were probably put in place long after the days of Butch Cassidy, but probably not too long after that. (I didn't manage to get a glance on the screen, but judging by the speed of the computer, it wouldn't totally surprise me if they were still running some DOS version or worse. Is it possible to connect a newish Dell-screen to a Commodore 64?)

On the outside my bank looks pretty much like any bank in Europe, but there are banks (a bit further out of town), which have a porch like in the good old days, or - even better - a tower with a clock, as you wouldn't expect them outside of (New) Mexico and Hollywood.

As far as functioning, the same thing seems to apply: chips in bank cards are unheard of - though bank cards (and even some form of internet banking) have been invented. This does not remove the importance of checks, though. Maybe this is because I am and always have been a self-confessed ignorant in banking matters, but I honestly thought checks were something of the past - I had never seen one before last week. Nevertheless, my present means of paying rent is to send a check by mail. That's right: I'm not supposed to just transfer the money onto another account - I _send_a_check_by_mail_. (I'd try to claim this is just WV, but my landlady lives in Pennsylvania, so it must be more widespread than this.)

Surprisingly, my pay does get transferred directly into my account - though that seems to be a recent change, because I've received multiple pamphlets explaining why this is a better way of doing things that to get a check in the mail and then cash it at the bank (as they apparently used to do before too long).

Finally, a quote from Wikipedia to keep you all entertained. After listing how countries as varied as Tunesia and Saudi Arabia (and, of course, the entire EU) deal with international banking codes, it says this:

"Hence payments to U.S. bank accounts from outside the U.S. are prone to errors of routing."

Technological progress

Some have worried about my recent bout of technical innovation - getting a mobile phone and a blog in the same month just isn't what you're used to from me, I know.

But don't worry: things could be worse because apparently, blogging is all dated. According to wired magazine, that is, blogging has long been surpassed by twitter, flickr and facebook - none of which I frequent as yet, as you well know.

So all's still good in technologically backward Joris-land :-)

On that same topic, I had to ask my housemate how to turn the television on, because after a few minutes of trying, I hadn't figured it out yet. That was exactly a day after I spent three minutes looking at the remote in order to figure out how to turn the thing off. Sigh. Luckily my alarm clock only has one button.

Public Transport

Not having bought a bike yet and starting to lose the Australian heat I had stored deep inside, I decided to break with another tradition and attempt to take a bus instead of trekking half an hour through the snow on a twice daily basis. Initial frustration about the incompleteness of the online timetables (surely these things stop more often than that) and my seeming inability to positively identify a single bus stop anywhere in town, were instantly resolved when it was made clear that the busses don't have stops: they'll stop wherever you wave them down. In fact, for half a dollar more, they'll pick you up at home - how about that?

So that's all good: the only thing I would have to do is walk along the bus's route and wave it down as soon as it catches up on me - instead of freezing to the ground in some wind-infested bus shelter or missing the bus entirely because you happen to be standing in the wrong place. Notwithstanding those good intentions, I haven't managed to find my bus (the red line) in either of the two days that I've tried. Sure, I did see a bus or two, but they were all green and were ever so slightly off the track where I expected them...

Finally, I have done what I should've done at once: I've checked the route of the green line... which doesn't come anywhere near where I saw it. Consequently, I take it the red line is currently being serviced by a bus with a green line along its side.


If only I were colourblind, I wouldn't have walked right pass my bus, two days in a row.

WV week one

Exactly a week ago, I was somewhere high up above the Atlantic, hoping my plane would make up for enough of the 1.5 hour delay so I wouldn't end up stranded in New York. As it turned out, we got stranded above New York - Long Island to be precise. The fierce winter weather had battered the area badly, so air traffic was in a mess and we were made to fly loops (in heaps of turbulence - my stomach may tell you; but I'll keep things civilised) for another hour-and-a-half. "Luckily", the flight to Pittsburgh was delay just as much and immigration was as easy as a walk in the park. (I guess that's the advantage of not being allowed to land: there are no queues on the ground - everyone's still in the air.) Add in another hour's delay for the luggage which did miss the plane and my ETA in Morgantown quickly turned from Wednesday 6pm into Thursday 1am.

In the seven days since then, I have mainly been exercising my patience and doing my best not to get too upset about just how insular the world still is, 66 years after the founding of the UN (and 90 after the founding of the largely irrelevant League of Nations). Amongst the things which I reckon some internationalism might do a lot of good to, are fun exercises like getting a national identification number (why does that need to take a month? Why do I need three? (luckily I didn't need one in Australia) - and why can't I do _anything_ without one? I do have a passport so they know who I am, right?), figuring out how taxes work (I seem to be exempt in the US, they tell me. Whether that means that I should pay them in Belgium instead, no one knows), opening up a bank account (and figuring out how this bank is different from all the banks you've known before: all banks have largely the same yet different things, but they all name them by different names), figuring out what you must, could and should do and in what order - and getting sent back a lot because you needed to get B done before A, which in turn should be done before C, G, F and J, of which you don't know the desirable order yet. Also, you'll have to do all of this in as little time as possible, but before anyone else does anything, you'll have to wait a long while. The trick seems to either be an expert at international justice, international and national finance and tax policies and international relations or to love walking, not to mind anything and to take _everything_ _everywhere_ _all_the_time_, whether they say you need it or not.


I guess I've spewed enough frustration both in the previous post and paragraph, so I'll leave the whining at that. Now for some happy information. I've got a mobile phone (cell phone?!) and I even figured out how it works. I've got a desk (which is temporary, since it's actually Paulo's desk and he'll be back from Arecibo in April) and I've got a place to live. Since there's nothing quite as enjoyable as a socially functional shared house - and because I imagine it might do me well to have some people guide me into American (and West Virginian) culture, I decided to try and find a shared house - in which I succeeded in no time. So since last Sunday, I've been living in a home inhabited (besides me) by three undergrads from the Pittsburgh region (which is fairly close by). I can hear the surprise, wonder and worries about "undergrads", but so far I'm astonished at both the cleanliness and lack of noise in this place - I've known undergraduate housing where you'd fear for the health of the rats that might live there; these guys (well, two guys and a girl, actually) seem calm, relaxed and pretty clean. There hasn't been too much social interaction yet (well, I've hardly been there myself yet), but I imagine I'll have more to say on this topic sometime soon.

Two great assets of the house are provided by its location: it's in Star City. Now which astronomer wouldn't love to live in a place with that name? Also, it's located right on (well, right next to), the trail - I could throw a rock from my bedroom window and hit a jogger. That trail brings me to another fact that might interest (some of) you: I live about an hour's walk away from uni - that means that the same time it took me to bike into Swinburne, can now be walked. I'd call that progress, especially if I tell you that Morgantown is the best walking city in West Virginia. However, don't get carried away about that: if any of the cities I've lived in before were in the running, I know who would have won easily...

For those who are still thinking about that hour's walk: it's really not that bad: the trail also passes right next to uni, so I could just get a bike and ride for 20 minutes or less - it's really quite close. At present, though, the trail is covered in a dangerously unpredictable combination of snow and ice, so biking isn't really an option - and neither is running, sadly. So for the time being - while the surrounding hills are being covered in the refreshening blanket of Appalachian snow, I walk about 25-30 minutes and catch the PRT.

Transparency

You know those papers whose titles make you think Hey - that's right up my alley; should be a good thing to read, but after a paragraph you discover your thoughts have wandered to a parallel universe and you actually don't remember what the paper is about.

So you start reading again. And again. Eventually I come to think that surely it cannot be that bad. If only I take it slow, I'll understand. So I start reading again, paying particular attention to every word, one word at a time. Then you figure out that even the first sentence is totally incomprehensible; not because of the language, mind you: whether it were written in English, Flemish or Japanese - it would be just as easy to understand.

After digging through things for a while longer, fear and a faint feeling of sickness and disgust then either make that I ask someone else to translate some things to normal language, or make me decide I've had enough of it - and leave it be.


The reason I'm writing this at present, is because I've just been registered as an employee of West Virginia University (WVU). As part of that, I got myself some homework: a pile of paper (trust me, it's heavy) on "Employee benefits". Because, as the accompanying letter explains it: "The Employee Benefit program at the University is a significant portion of your overall compensation, and we urge you to review it carefully." That's the last thing I understood. I think the documents talk about retirement funds, health care, life and other insurances and quite possibly some more things, but often I don't even understand the meaning of the full title of the documents provided. This, somehow, reminds me of Mozart.

As many of you may know, for all his genius and employment, Mozart died a poor man - beautifully portrayed in the movie Amadeus. (Those who haven't seen that movie, should. I'm far from a Mozart fan, but that movie _is_ good.) The reason Mozart died a poor man, I couldn't ever really grasp, until maybe today: he didn't know how to handle his money. Browsing through the brochures and papers, I get the urge to treat it as a paper: to hell with it - what bad could come of it if I just ignored all this? I'm not retiring - I don't need insurance, I won't get ill and if I did, do you really think I'd take the time to figure out how to get things properly reimbursed?

Now I guess Mozart's problem was a bit different: I'm not about to lose my money in throwing more parties than I can financially bear (you all know me far too well in that respect), but I guess neglecting things like retirement and health cover might come back to bite you when you least need it.


To be fair, I should mention we're not left to our own devices: there'll be a meeting (class?) in a week or so, where all will be explained. All? Let's hope so. Thinking about that meeting, I know one question I'll ask: Could you please explain this to me - like I was a five year old. If they ask what to explain; what exactly it is that I don't understand, I might just reply what we used to reply in our Latin classes of high school: I don't understand any of it.