Hacktivate

Yesterday, the Cato Institute was hosting an event on the Welfare State, so Claudia and I thought it would be a good opportunity to hear some alternative viewpoints to what we have been learning in our "History of an Injustice" class.

James Bartholomew who wrote a book called, "The Welfare State We're In", was speaking. Michael Tanner from the Cato Institute (== Libertarian) was moderating and Dr. Wendell Primus, the Senior Policy Advisor on Budget and Health Issues to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (== Democrat) was there to provide an alternative view.

In many ways this was my first exposure to DC politics (even though the author was British and the book is about the UK) and really my first exposure to non-liberal thinkers in person since I started caring about social justice.

It was pretty shocking and disappointing all around.

Bartholomew struck me as a too absurd for reality cartoon character. His talk was all disjointed anecdotes about how things were better 100 years ago, and his solution is to figure out how to go back to those times. This was the killer quote from his talk:

"At the lower class level, there used to be a large number of really decent, honorable, admirable, low paid people in Britain. I don't think you would stand up in England and say that was the case now, that would be absurd." (@9:25 in the talk)

Not only does he want to eliminate any kind of unemployment and housing assistance, but he also thinks publicly funded education needs to be eliminated. His main argument for eliminating public schools was a story about a poor Welsh boy from 100 years ago who was educated by a local church charity school, read classical literature and went on to become Prime Minister. He claimed that if this boy had been bussed off to the school of today he probably wouldn't have learned how to read.

As he was saying all of this stuff I was shocked. I was disappointed in myself for not being able to remember some key statistics from my class. Bartholomew spoke about welfare as a trap that lures in the poor and they can never emerge from it, yet I recently learned that 75% of all Americans will live below the poverty line during the course of their adult lives. In other words poverty is cyclical, it is often the result of a short term circumstance (health problem, recession, divorce, etc) and it will hit most of us at some point in our lives, but we will probably emerge from it. Unfortunately I could barely remember the 75% number, and I was sadly realizing that my grasp of the class's material was less than what I needed for it to be functionally useful.

Luckily, Dr. Primus (who also worked in Clinton's administration) was speaking. I expected someone like Josh Lyman from the West Wing to passionately tear Bartholomew to pieces with rational arguments and hard data.

I was greatly disappointed. He certainly didn't agree with Bartholomew, and he wanted to talk about health care companies, but beyond that I didn't really follow much. He also used anecdotes. His were mostly about how poor people "make mistakes" and need things like health insurance.

Certainly the most intelligent speaker was Michael Tanner from Cato. Intelligent but totally out of touch. He kept speaking about how much money was spent on welfare related activities. He used real numbers, which was good, but the crux of his argument seemed to be, golly gee those numbers are high, shouldn't we care that we are spending so much money on these government programs? He didn't mention caring about the poor.

One thing was mentioned that all speakers seemed to agree on. They all had a great appreciation for the challenge of getting things done in a democracy. With these sorts of old white men standing at the front of the room I also had a great appreciation of just how hard it must be.

A few weeks ago I attended a technology salon here in DC. "The Technology Salon is an intimate, informal, and in person, discussion between information and communication technology experts and international development professionals."

Sounds cool, right? And it was. A Vodafone Foundation board member was there to talk about what Vodafone is up to in developing countries. There were a lot of smart people working in international development in DC and we had some good discussions.

The presentation from Vodafone was interesting, and it was great to see that they are aggressively building markets in developing countries. There were a few things from the presentation and discussion that I found strange, and suggested to me that service providers like Vodafone have a lot to gain from listening to international development and technology geeks. Indeed, the m-pesa idea (cellphone banking in Africa), one of Vodafone's big success stories, came from organizations working in finance in Africa.

The vast majority of projects that were discussed around the table leveraged SMS, which is not surprising since virtally all of the world's five billion cellphones can send SMS (and not MMS or email or internet). These five billion phones are an opportunity for service providers like Vodafone to grab tremendous amounts of market share. Many of the five billion phones owners have very little disposable income, but would quickly spend it on communication activities. Unfortunately, it sounds like the Vodafone strategy is to try and increase the amount of money spent by the average customer per month (currently about $5), which will translate into immediate profit, as opposed to reduce prices for SMS services which would lead to more demand, more customers, more communication and eventually more profit. Given that developing countries have by far the fastest economic growth rates, I would be establishing long term customer loyalty, so that five years from now my phone company is best positioned to take advantage of a more developed economy. Cheap SMS can do that.

Examining the cost of SMS pricing a little closer shows that it is probably the most expensive form of communication in the world, despite the cost to the service provider being almost nothing. SMS messages are attached to existing voice packets (this is where the 160 character limit comes from) and hence consume no additional bandwidth. In other words the bandwidth cost to the provider for sending SMS is zero (minus some capital costs). Why then does it cost 10 cents to send 160 characters? Sending $1 worth of data via your broadband internet connection would cost $61 million dollars to send over SMS.

Contrasting this SMS situation is Vodafone's problem with data services. They are struggling to figure out how to handle people that use their phones to download movies. Vodafone offers a fixed price for unlimited data, but a few users are spoiling the party by downloading gigabytes of data on their phones every month and squeezing the network capacity for the rest of the users.

Okay, so let's check the score. College kids are paying $50 a month for a firehose of wireless multimedia bandwidth which they use so much it is actually crippling the network. Poor farmers in Africa who need to know the price of tomatoes in the market are paying 10% of their daily earnings to send a 160 character message that costs the service provider nothing.

This is all very broken. But this is also a big opportunity for both Vodafone and people in developing countries.

The Vodafone Foundation's strategy for developed countries focuses on sports and music, while their strategy for developing countries is all about health. Setting aside the sports and music focus, I suggest that Vodafone should enable ultra low cost communication via SMS in developing countries. Maybe 1/2 a cent per SMS?

Not only would this build gigantic market share for the first cellphone provider to do it, but it would enable all sorts of value added services and projects to rise out of the villages that are in most need of new livelihoods that will lift them out of poverty and into the 21st century (and make them bigger consumers of cellphone services).

There are already a bunch of mediocre SMS based projects created and subsidized by people in places like Washington DC that are poised to do some good. What happens when we give people in developing countries the tools (and appropriate pricing) they need to solve their own problems? You get solutions. Solutions that are relevant, sustainable, innovative and worldchanging.

Imagine the future. Supertunnels through the earth's core for quick travel. Subvocal communication. 1000 year lifespans.

I feel like it has been the future this week. Some people got sick and died in Mexico and the whole world is holding its breath in trepidation. It's like everyone forgot that we were mortal and will die. I know that flu isn't supposed to kill strapping youngsters, and that we are overdue for a pandemic. And don't get me wrong I am as addicted to disaster news as the next guy, so I'm not complaining.

I'm just saying that in the future somebody getting sick and dying probably will be a major news event.

(Image by Jösé@flickr)

I am taking a course called "History of an Injustice" at the Servant Leadership School here in DC.

From the course overview:

The segregation and poverty of the American inner-city ghetto is no accident but the inevitable product of the racism of our history. From the Sundown Towns that forcibly evicted their black (and sometimes Chinese or even Jewish) residents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to the increasing apartheid of the twenty-first century American public school system, structural injustice has created the ghetto. In this class we'll study that history, look at some other kinds of poverty, and begin to develop a vision for a more inclusive community that might emerge from the current global economic crisis.

I have only been to one class, but so far it has been fascinating. I am really looking forward to learning about the untold stories of injustice in America.

The first assignment was to read selections from a book about Sundown Towns. Imagine Clint Eastwood telling a no good cattle rustler to get out by sundown...or else. In fact it wasn't criminals that were told to get out but minorities. And it wasn't in the gold rush days it was in the 20th century. It was shockingly common and is not particularly difficult to document, yet entirely left out of our history books.

Reno, Nevada where I grew is not listed on the author's site as a sundown town but many nearby towns are:

"A local resident who lived in Gardnerville in the 1950s describes [it]. He thought the same whistle or siren served both Minden and Gardnerville; it was probably near the border. Indians ... worked in Gardnerville, were maids, etc., but had to be out by sundown. He heard the 6PM whistle; everyone knew, white and Indian, what it was for. "Indians made themselves scarce" at 6PM. Nobody enforced it rigidly, doing anything to anyone still in town at 6:30PM. Still, "I never heard of anybody violating it." ... Gardnerville had a Chinese-run Joy Land Cafe. The Chinese didn't have to leave. No blacks in Gardnerville to his knowledge. The Chinese were friendly with the Indians, but the Indians had to eat in the back room."

(In other words in the 1950s a whistle blew every day in Minden/Gardnerville that told all of the Indians to get out of town)

"Truckee locals attempted to start a boycott against Chinese goods and laborers in their town. When many merchants continued to employ Chinese Americans, some locals turned to more direct means, such as cutting off Chinese men's braids and hanging the braids outside their houses. In June 1886, after many Chinese Americans had already left Truckee, the city fathers burned the Chinatown to the ground. Women were invited to witness the event, and fire wagons surrounded Chinatown to prevent the fire spreading to the rest of Truckee."

(Granola munching folks from Truckee of today inherit a town that was cleansed by force and fire of Chinese merchants)

I had never heard about the concept of sundown towns before reading this book. At first, I was a bit skeptical of some of his more extreme claims that so many towns across America were actually forced African Americans out. I thought perhaps he was stretching his own definition, indeed his own term, so that he could lump in more towns with the more radical ones.

My own experience told me that it was quite natural that some towns are more white that others, and it therefore followed that some towns might be entirely white. But this seeminly rational thought gets blown apart when the author shows data from 39 states showing how blacks routinely left county after county during the 20th century. In other words, the United States was more integrated in 1900 than in 2000 - the author was not stretching the truth - its my own history that is flawed.

Why isn't this commonly known? Why has history squelched this? Why are we raised to feel comfortable about the fact that our neighborhoods and schools are almost entirely monoracial (aka segregated)? Is there some kind of white person mythology that is being passed off as truth, as history?

I am reminded of a TED talk by Nate Silver that investigates racism and voting.

It seems obvious, but people who live in racial segregation are racist. Perhaps if we want to fight racism we need to take conscious steps to live in more diverse neighborhoods.

More information about Sundown towns can be found on the wikipedia page about Sundown Towns. Also don't miss this trailer for a video about ethnic cleansing in the US.

So a week ago, I received an email from Tom Reilly, TEDmeister that went something like this:

This is Willa Wonka...your Golden Ticket awaits!!!

And just like that, I dropped everything and went to my first TED conference. It probably sort of goes like what these people are saying: TED bloggers.

The thing is - my being here is an anomaly. A gift bestowed by a benefactor, with my responsibility to enjoy, absorb, learn and share.

Let's call the day, the greatest show I have every encountered. My brain is expanded and my vision challenged.

Claudia is leaving Malawi in four days. Me just a few weeks later. We decided that Thanksgiving was not a priority - perhaps last night's leftover chimichalupawangas would do the trick.

So it was Thanksgiving. I was working. I had meetings. I was handing over. I decided to head home for lunch, because Claudia and I had precious few days left together in Malawi. On the way home I saw two guys walking along the side of the road. They had turkeys. I thought - cool - nice to see some turkeys on Thanksgiving. Then it hit me. How many Thanksgivings in my life will I have the opportunity to impulse buy my very own live turkey. So I hit the brakes, turned around and beckoned the turkey dudes over.

Could I really just buy a gigantic turkey and put it in my car? Would it crap all over the back seat? Fly at my head while I am driving? Looking at the turkeys splayed before me, and I considered slaughtering a baby turkey - it was smaller, but I realized the fallacy of this approach and negotiated my way to a full on gigantic turkey.

[caption id="attachment_229" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Turkey market"][/caption]

Its legs were tied and my turkey trader laid him across the floor in the back seat, and the turkey seemed pretty happy. So I headed home. Arriving home I yelled to Claudia to hold the dog - she had no clue why. I approached grinning holding my turkey. Claudia was not pleased. She wanted nothing to do with killing an animal and eating it. As for me, I just couldn't help grinning - I had a real live turkey!

[caption id="attachment_230" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Me and my turkey"][/caption]

I was going to ask George, our gardener to kill it, and then have Alice our housekeeper de-feather it and prepare it for cooking. But then I realized, that was not the real experience. It was time for me to face up to life as a carnivore and kill an animal with my bare hands.

George showed me how to put one foot on its legs, the other on its wings and then grasp its neck with my left hand. I stared down the turkey for a long time. I tried to consider all of the chickens I have eaten, the hamburgers I was raised on, and to realize that my sustenance has come at the price of many, many lives. The turkey didn't seem to care too much. It was calm in my grip. Didn't it sense that I was about to end its entire consciousness permanently? I guess hundreds (thousands, millions?) of years of breeding had broken the turkeys resistance to its place in the foodchain. I picked up sharpened garden clippers that George assured me were the right tool for the job. I wasn't sure I was going to be able to do it. But I wanted to do it well - I didn't want to make the turkey suffer - it should be fast. With my resolve set I went for it - and planned to cut the neck in a few strokes. But it wasn't easy. My strokes weren't cutting the red loose neck skin. I had to push harder, and grip the neck tighter. Then I pierced the skin, the blood splurted and I pushed with all my might until the neck snapped and I was left with the turkeys face free from its body, opening and closing its mouth in my hand, while its dismembered body quivered and tried to get up and run. George held the body down - it took what seemed like forever - probably 3 minutes or so - for it to calm itself.



I put the face down on the palm fronds that George had arranged as the place of slaughter, and we plunged the turkey body into hot water. We then plucked the feathers easily, and I tried to memorize all of the steps George did next. We pierced the fatty tail, removed the stomach, pulled out the entrails, the gall bladder (George emphasized the importance of the gall bladder) - the heart, etc etc. It started to look like pretty much any other supermarket turkey.

With the man's work done, George passed it to Alice our housekeeper who cleaned it a bit. I rubbed it down with spices and put into the oven.

Less than 3 hours after I had taken the turkey's life, Claudia and I were eating it.

(More photos here)