CheetahhhhhhhBlog Mark III

The electronic edition of the Wall Street Journal has as its headline a study about the personal data collection industry on the web. This should not be a surprise to most people, though I was surprised that Dictionary.com places the most tracking cookies on your computer. Why Dictionary.com? I’m not so concerned about data collection, actually, it’s just marketing data really. However I am a bit of a freak about speed on my computer. I want my computer clipping along fast. So I regularly delete all cookies and other crap.

I am a bit of a freak about privacy and I’ll tell you what you do. First, mail. Subscribe to Swiss Post Box or to Earth Class Mail. I subscribe to both actually. With these services you have a street address. Have all your mail delivered there. This is the primary way you are tracked by people, and just about everybody thinks I live in Beaverton, Oregon. With these postal services you can have many addresses. I have a New York address for mail I actually want to read, and an Oregon address for everything else.

Second, subscribe to a telephone number with Skype, Google Voice, or Phone Booth. They all work well. I’m pretty much invested in Skype. Get numbers for states that match your post boxes. I have an Oregon and a New York number. Again, I filter them. People I don’t actually want to talk to get the Oregon number, which is a Google Voice voicemail.

Third, bank offshore. I bank with Lloyd’s on the Isle of Man. Your cards and your bank are monitored for data in the States. When You bank offshore, you pull yourself off the grid.

A lot of my business is done in England actually, for example my insurance, and this is for the same reason.

Fourth, incorporate. Form a holding company in Delaware and conduct most of your business through the company. This creates a corporate veil.

If you follow these four steps to personal privacy, you’ll discover that tracking cookies on the web aren’t actually all that disturbing. Not disturbing because if you follow these simple steps, you’re suddenly like a ghost, floating about the personal data ether. Indeed I don’t really worry about pretty privacy issues like Facebook and website tracking cookies, the real privacy issues are outlined above. I’m sure for most people I just took the concept of privacy to a whole new level. There’s actually more you can do, too. I think it’s good that the WSJ points out privacy problems, it’s one of the big issues of our day and age.

Bug and Vanessa have recovered but Yit-yit and me are still under the weather. We’re going out tomorrow to belatedly celebrate Vanessa’s birthday. Yit-yit’s party is on Sunday.

I read in the Wall Street Journal that the economic slowdown was the worst since the 1930s. I don’t know what they base this statement on and I haven’t been to the USA, so I can’t speak about the effects there. In this blog I talked a bit about how the financial crisis hit Dubai, and how the construction cranes around the city suddenly stopped moving. The employment environment in Dubai suddenly became unstable, as I personally experienced. This was a big surprise for me because generally a university is a bit insulated from the economic winds. Not this time though.

There was an economist fellow at George Mason who had the office next to mine. I once asked him if there was any way he could have predicted the economic disaster. He said no. Now me as an investor, I did predict the collapse of the housing market, but I never really saw such far-reaching implications.

The thing that bothers me about Obama has been the lack of attention to jobs creation. I’ve discussed this before and you’d expect with a Democrat in the Oval Office, there would be some emphasis on creating jobs. We’ve seen just about everything except. Indeed, there’s been a somewhat Republican-esque emphasis on bailing out huge conglomerates, rather than attention to the little guy. That may however be partly because of the world we live in. The age of populism and unions and worker’s rights died with the Soviet Union, if you think about it. It is no mistake that American leftists had Red sympathies, back in the day. Anyway I’ve said several times in this blog that what America needs is a New Deal style jobs creation program, and if I were in charge, to be frank, I would undo a lot of the globalism and free trade nonsense which is destroying the American middle class. I would also withdraw our armed forces from expensive conflicts in remote locations, and save a buck or two.

It’s anniversary #1 today, our church wedding anniversary. As I have remarked previously, we are a bit unusual, in that we technically have 3 wedding anniversaries. #2 is Nov 8 when it happened in Manila city hall. #3 is Nov 9 when it is legally recorded as happening (I paid a clerk 30,000 pesos to make it happen on the 8th). So anyway it’s anniversary #1, three years of marriage in the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. God bless. Unfortunately the whole family is sick so we’re not going out and celebrating. I went to the drugstore for cold medication and got Van some Toblerone to cheer her up. That’s about as good as you can do at Evergotesco mall.

Tomorrow is Van and Yit-yit’s birthday. Hope to God we’re feeling a bit better so we can go out. Can’t believe Yit is a year old. Time really flies.

He’s sick as a dog incidentally, I feel bad for the little guy.

Business Insider presents 22 statistics that prove that the US middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence. Disturbing, but not actually a surprise to anybody who reads the paper. I have not actually ever been a fan of globalization and free trade agreements, for my own political reasons primarily, but now we see that globalization has forced the American middle class worker to compete with 3rd world workers who are delighted to put in 14 hour shifts for $1 with no benefits. And obviously it’s impossible for an American worker to compete with this.

WikiLeaks has leaked some info about the Afghan war which shows how the Pakistanis, ostensibly our allies, are actually working with the Taliban against us. This is also not news to anybody who reads the New York Times but now we have a lot more data. There are a couple of countries which purport to be our allies but are actually actively working toward our destruction. The two most blatant examples are Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. It is no fluke that most of Al Queda comes from Saudi, and it is no fluke that the Taliban still exist today because the Pakistanis gave them shelter. I hope that Obama has the stones to deal with this properly because the current situation is unsustainable; the Afghan and American public are growing tired of the war, and it’s also bleeding our coffers dry. What is particularly grating about Pakistan is that they take over a billion dollars a year from us in aid money to help them combat terrorism. Which is a joke. However, we might surmise that these revelations, which have come out over the last 2 weeks or so, are actually an orchestrated propaganda move by Obama. This coincidentally coincides with General Petreus taking command in Afghanistan; I would guess that the first thing he said to Obama was “we’ve got to do something about the Pakistanis.”

There’s been some talk in Lifehacker and the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times for that matter, about perceived problems with Facebook security and privacy. Lifehacker ran an article about how Facebook is just a big pain in the arse which complicates your life. Now I don’t pay too much attention to Facebook, and one of the first things I did when I opened my Facebook account was tweak the privacy settings, but this is because I’m very privacy conscious. And my wife is a little Veronica Mars with Google searches, so just learning from her, I limit the info available about me on the net. I think if you write about smoking marijuana (for example) on Facebook, like one of my old high school friends, you’re just asking for trouble, and shouldn’t complain when you don’t get a job because they read your Facebook. Furthermore I don’t put anything actually personal on the net anyway, just because my students will always investigate me. I don’t know why they bother or care, but they do. I always have students walking into class and making remarks about what I said on this blog, or what my wife did on Facebook. This limits your possibilities of expression. There are a lot of opinions I wouldn’t mind voicing. You might be surprised about a few of the things I think. Don’t put them on the web however.

It’s fondue night. We found real cheese in Rustan’s and a bottle of Heinekin. This will be a tremendous improvement after fondue with NA San Miguel and processed cheese. I’m really excited because fondue is my favorite food. I have a drop of Swiss blood, you know.

Yit-yit (Tristan) is at 12 months even more rascally than the Bug is now. That takes some doing, too. He’s really a handfull. If there’s trouble, he’ll find it. I think he might be the black sheep of the family. For example he opened the door of a moving taxi. And that’s just one example.

When Van got her purse stolen a few weeks ago, we recently discovered that her passport was in the purse. This is a small disaster because she had her US visa, and getting a new one may prove difficult. I don’t know because the frakking frackers at the US embassy don’t feel the need to answer their phones. I have wasted several hundred pesos trying to get through to a living human being over there. I was completely livid this afternoon. If God is good, then we won’t have to go through complicated nonsense again to get her US visa re-issued. But at the moment who knows.

Yit-yit is having a birthday party at McDonald’s. Reference my previous comments about Filipino parties. Yit-yit likes the Grimmace so he will enjoy it I suppose.

Yit-yit also likes to be included in everything. If you don’t pay attention to him, he will bite you, as Van and I have learned.

I have applied for kidnapping insurance for my children, which is a little fracked up but necessary.

That’s what’s going on in the Cheetahhhhhhh’s lair.

So this BP disaster in the Gulf appears to be capped, which is a relief, though I shudder to think about the long-term environmental damage.

I don’t see what all the hoop-la is about the iPhone 4’s antenna. The iPhone G also has poor reception. I remarked about this a long time ago. It’s not actually a big deal. I remember when cell phones were the size of a brick and they had really crappy reception 97.3% of the time.

The Philippines is on the equator and has odd seasons. The North American spring is actually summer here. The North American summer is the rainy season and cools off a bit. Our air conditioner now actually makes the house cool. A month ago it was struggling just to get the temperature down to tepid.

Sometimes I miss Dubai, though then I remind myself how I wanted to get out of the Middle East, for example violent children running around all night long destroying things. (That would be Saudi but is emblematic about why I don’t plan to return to the Middle East.) When I miss Dubai it’s for fairly superficial reasons like the big aquarium at the Dubai Mall. Which I did really like. Sometimes I miss RAK for the golf club, and for Spinney’s, and for our big apartment, but that’s about it. I certainly don’t miss Middle Eastern students, I can assure you. And when you leave a place you remember the good things, and you tend to forget about the bad things. For example there was literally no life in RAK. Partly this was because it was too hot to go outside and get to know your neighbors, partly because of the cultural emphasis on keeping your household behind a wall. But Bug has lots of friends in Manila, and had only one in RAK. This tells you something.

A typhoon skidded past Luzon island yesterday. Didn’t directly hit Manila but winds were high. In the afternoon, Bug and I went swimming in the pool with the rain and wind blowing around. It was fun. Now, east Asians tend to think that rain will make you sick. They really strongly believe this. So from the clubhouse we had kids and mothers yelling out to us that it was raining. “It’s raining, it’s raining!” they were yelling. They wouldn’t stop, it’s like we were running in front of speeding cars. Anyway we were aware that it was raining and just ignored them. After about an hour, when the people in the clubhouse saw we weren’t dead, they all decided to jump in the pool also. First a brave mother went in. After a few minutes she called to her kids. Then the whole clubhouse jumped in.

The winds picked up at night and about midnight there was a power and water blackout. This went on for 24 hours. The longest 24 hours of my life. I can deal with a power outage. It’s unpleasant in the tropics but I can deal with it. The boys however had a lot of trouble getting to sleep, rolling around and around. The double-whammy was the water was out also. This made life very unpleasant. For example you can’t use your toilet. Very unpleasant indeed.

I’m going to talk about my new employer. I’m not going to say their name in order to evade a Google search. Anyway, for one thing, I’m being paid right now, which is one of the things that sealed the deal.

Anyway I’m packing real light, in case the Talaban somehow get past the American army and march on Kabul. Considering Vietnam, I’m not taking the American army for granted. Things happen.

I’m taking this thing one semester at a time. We’ll see what happens. As it stands, I will return on Dec 18th and we’ll go to Boracay and relax on the best beach in the Pacific. What happens after that… we’ll see. I think this is the only reasonable and rational approach to the situation.

The American and British intervention in Afghanistan is, as far as I can see, a complete disaster. Perhaps General Petreus can shape things up. I doubt it, given that historically the Afghans have never been very receptive to foreign invaders. The thing many people don’t realize about foreign invasions is that an army can’t actually occupy a country unless the population agrees to it. Anybody in foreign affairs knows this but it’s not general knowledge otherwise. But for example, think of Vietnam. Now, Afghanistan. Don’t actually think we’re going to win this one. Afghans are spunky. They wore out the Imperial British army in the 1800s, the Soviets in the 80s, and seem to be on the verge with the Americans. Don’t have high hopes for this endeavor. Perhaps I’ll be surprised but I don’t think so.

So you may ask, what am I doing? Well, for one thing, as a bona fide adventurer, I’m going to get a little bit of a moment in history. Like the fall of Saigon. There’s a story to tell, the fall of Saigon. Something to amuse the grandkids with. For another thing, I’m putting something really amazing on my resume. I have a really good resume actually. Now it’s going to be golden. People will read my resume and stop and say, “Wow.” Finally, money. They pay well. Not as well as you might imagine, but well enough.

I lost a bunch of data back when I was in the UAE. Lost all my dissertation research, and the curriculum I wrote for Saudi community colleges. These are a bad data loss. Bad indeed. I had backed up on a hard drive but this failed. So anyway I subscribed to MozzyHome which backs you up on the internet.