Back in the USA

Well, now I am back in the USA...back in my hometown of Austin, Texas. I am enjoying the cool sunny Texas spring weather, and the laid back Austin lifestyle. The job market isn't too bad, and I have been interviewing for positions involving law.

I bought a bicycle, and am living a low budget lifestyle while I get settled in. I hope to get a temporary job, take the patent bar, get a job as a patent agent, take the Texas state bar, and then either move up or get a better paying job as an attorney. This will all take some time, so I am practicing patience.

I am also practicing Yoga, Ashtanga Yoga, every morning at around 6 am, with my father. I recommend Yoga to anyone who wants to feel more vital during the day, and sleep better at night. You can view my resume at www.bpanahij.com, if you want to check out my qualifications.

A pic of me from 1989.

Chinese Driving Etiquete and the Law of the Road

From Day Eleven China

Chinese roadways follow a single rule of driving, as far as I can tell, and it works very efficiently. The rule is: look where you want to go, and then go. There are traffic lights, and lanes, and center lines, but all of that is just a courtesy of the public infrastructure. I have seen a lot of traffic quickly routed in various directions more quickly than I recall seeing in the past.

The experience is somewhat like trusting that others headed your direction will be looking at you and will not hit you. In fact, it is the best idea for driving I have seen.

There is some amount of caution, as a courtesy demands. For instance, you might look both ways, left and right, before proceeding into an intersection through a red light. However, on a green light, it is best to look in the direction you wish to proceed. You will see what is before you, and others will see what is before them. It's really quite simple and en-genius.

It is getting colder....

The Yantai air is thick with cold moisture. It sits on the concrete and pavement surrounding my fourth story apartment. The sky is white, and the trees are turning brown or golden, holding onto green between the sunny days. The day is quiet, and at night a stray kitty whines into the north. I sleep in my living room to get some peace. I, drinking green tea, and eating Oreo cookies, smoking Yuxi cigarettes, and playing the blues, installing applications, and my absentee ballot, China tea cups, and class websites, American music and picking up new Chinese words. One year contracts, visions of American lanscapes and buildings. I dream of Whole Foods and a tasty hamburger, and the economy worries me, and then I sit up and keep going.

October in Yantai ...and the air is getting colder

Last week I took some time to go eat some sushi and see the coast from a different angle. I also took a trip around some parts of town I haven't visited or photographed yet. The coastline here is very photogenic, as is much of the newer and more developed parts of Yantai. The developing parts are less so.

I have so many pictures I don't know how to post them all. These are representative of what I have seen lately. The "wedding area of the beach," some new buildings downtown: apartments and offices, and an old fashioned gate to the park.

Real estate in China is privately owned, and can be purchased by foreigners after living in China for over a year. There is no property tax, but there is a purchase fee to the government, which is a very small percentage : 1% or less.

Perspective on the Financial Bomb from Where I Sit

Unions in the United States

Unions are the groups of people whom collectively bargain with employers to achieve the benefits they want. In the United States unions are achieving power by performing walk out strikes of specific employees and groups of employees. The United States law regarding labor is historically favoring the freedom of consent and the right to labor. Current laws have denoted the presence of unfair bargaining positions in employment relationships. Labor laws present a set of minimum standards for employment, such as minimum wage, minimum health care, and minimum post employment benefits.

While I was working as an engineer, my employers offered health care and dental plans, as well as significant retirement benefits. These plans are not required by law. The state wide minimum wage rates are required by law. Benefit plans going beyond minimum wage are promoted through employer incentives, granted by the federal and some state governments, such as tax breaks on the dividends of health care and retirement plans.

Some US citizens deny these benefits in favor of more tangible immediate benefits, such as higher pay, or future stock options. Federal corporate and securities laws require companies offering these alternate benefits structures to make them publicly available when the corporation is publicly owned and operated.

Unions in the United States are based on a theory of free consent. Like China, the government adopts some minimum employment terms and benefits, but in the United States, the employers often choose to elect certain tax deductible benefit plans. Plans such as these offer a win-win situation for employers and employees alike; What about investors? Recently Warren Buffet wrote that dividends are the financial weapons of mass destruction. -Wall Street Journal

Dividend Plans are essentially insurance on a failure of an underlying term of a contract. In the case of labor unions these dividends are neither negotiated nor required under the terms of the contracts between individual employers and individual employees. These entities have zero negotiating power over the terms of collectively bargained contracts, and also have no privity of contract with the employee for the negotiated benefits.

For instance, if an employee falls ill and is unable to work as negotiated in the employment contract, the employer must abide by the terms of a separate contract with a labor union, guaranteeing that the employee receives a set of boilerplate benefits under a prior negotiation. These negotiations often take place without the consent or presence of any employees whom become ill. The result is as Warren Buffet, so brazenly stated, that these insurance plans are weapons of mass destruction; in my words, they are ticking time bombs waiting to go poof like a balloon. The fundamental flaw in these collectively bargained contracts, under the current US theory of free consent to contract, is they are legally unenforceable. These contracts, when enforced by law create a case precedent, which favors enforcing non-negotiated contracts.

The current economic emergency is double-fold, one one hand the law is being challenged and maneuvered through, and on the other hand the employees are seeing little to no benefits within the time when benefits might actually do what they should. Essentially Warren Buffett is walking away from this disaster before the American Juries catch up to his financial master plan: Sell empty promises and close the buffet before Americans get their just deserts.

Labor Unions in China

Chinese government institutions operate under the theory of compulsory unionization, where the government requires employees to receive benefits under a collectively bargained negotiation. Unlike free market unions in the U.S. and elsewhere, Chinese unions punish employers for denying benefits and correct the situations through proportional measures.

The use of the strike by US labor unions is often a non-proportional response to individual labor groups concerns, and even at times the result of ambitious salary goals in the labor class. Under the compulsory theory, there is no independent class of laborers. An admonition by a government official and a nurturing hand in correcting and alleviating the real concerns of employees creates a set of laws designed on the whole to elevate the working class, while limiting institutional leaders ability to act irresponsibly.

Non-government companies may not have labor unions, and employee-employer disputes are handled privately or in the court systems.

So

me in America.

Installing Flash on Ubuntu Intrepid 64 with 64 Bit Firefox

sudo apt-get install nspluginwrapper
sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

It works!

The Chinese Network

Chinese Universities, private companies, and the government created networked connections between all of the major cities in China. These connections currently offer extraordinarily high speed connections between Chinese Universities. They also offer around 3 to 64 K-Bytes per second across the globe, to the United States. I was using my internet connection a few weeks ago to download an upgrade from the Chinese Ubuntu mirror, and as I watched, the speeds reached up to 900 K-Bytes a second. That is fairly fast. I was and am still impressed by the quality of my network connection; It costs me around 1.5 Yuan per day.

The Bonds of Brotherhood

Brotherhood is a bond in likeness. A brother is as similar a man as can be.