Going over the cliff...

Merry non-denominational celebration of the winter solstice! Have a picture of congress, where a third of the US government lives, namely the House of Representatives and the Senate. I took this a couple of days ago, but alas I missed the small window where we actually had some snow. Oh well. Today I want to moan a little bit about how the US government manages to not function.

Time for a quick compare and contrast: in the UK, there are two houses of parliament, the Lords and the Commons and, while the Queen is technically head of state, all decisions are taken in the commons, with the Lords serving purely as a revision chamber. The Lords can slow down, but not block, legislation coming from the commons.

By contrast, the US government has three branches: the Presidency, Congress and the Judiciary, with each supposedly having equal power. Congress is split into two: the House of Representatives and the Senate. While the senate is more prestigious, having fewer members (two per state, with none for DC) who serve six-year terms, the House has equal legislative powers, with the number of members per state being proportional to that state's population and each Representative serving two-year terms. I think the House has 435 members, but I'm not sure and it's not important for this moan.

The constitution of the US means that Congress and the President both have powers that can be blocked by the other, so passing something like a budget requires unanimous agreement between the President, the House and the Senate. This is supposed to prevent any branch of government from getting above itself but, as can clearly be seen by the current "crisis", it can also cause government to grind to a complete halt when you have different parties controlling different branches of government.

I'm sure you're all aware of the fiscal cliff? Basically, the two parties, Democrats and Republicans, couldn't agree on a budget just over a year ago when they had to agree to raise the the debt ceiling (a legal limit on government borrowing). After much haggling and silliness, and after causing the US government's credit rating to be downgraded, both sides agreed a temporary budget settlement by writing in automatic spending cuts and tax rises (that no one wanted), which would apply if the parties couldn't reach an agreement by the end of 2012. This agreement was supposed to buy time to sort out negotiations, because it includes blanket cuts to all federal agencies as well as cuts to welfare spending (to upset Democrats) and to defence spending (to upset Republicans), providing a mutually-assured-destruction form of motivation to sort things out.

So, as we approach the end of 2012, it's safe to assume that both parties put aside their idealistic differences in support of the greater good of the country? Aye, right.

We did a tour of Congress yesterday as we had a couple of friends visiting from back home (woot!) and, 48 hours before everything supposedly goes to shit, there was a surprising lack of politicians around the Capitol, with neither house sitting. So what will happen immediately if no agreement is reached? Lots of things, perhaps the most striking being the immediate cessation of unemployment benefits (around $290 a week) for about 2 million USians. Not a nice way for the very poorest in this country to start the New Year, especially given the current lack of jobs. I guess certain USians believe that the poor are only poor because they haven't worked hard enough, so it's their own fault, so don't see this as a bad thing. Just ask Mitt Romney.

Another Bad Thing will be increases in the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), which I only learned about today when I was working out my tax return (even more fun than it sounds). Basically, in the late 1960s, Congress noticed that 155 very wealthy households in the US were not paying a single penny in income tax due to various loopholes and exemptions, so they created the AMT to ensure that they at least pay something. It's effectively another tax form where you do your taxes again, but it has less exemptions for things like business expenses. This seems like an unusually socialist policy for the US (i.e., a good idea).

The problem with this tax is that they didn't index-link the threshold income for paying AMT, so the number of people paying the tax would increase every year. What normally happens is that congress "patches" the threshold for the AMT every year and a patch hasn't been applied for 2012. As far as I understand it, if an agreement isn't reached soon, folks will be liable to pay 26% of anything they earn over $22,500 (in addition to other federal taxes). Given that the median household income in the US is about $48,000, you can imagine how that will hit quite a few people.

(As an aside, I noticed that, even with 2011 levels, the AMT seems to punish those who are married as a married person has an exemption threshold of $10,000 less than for a single person. As I have no child care or mortgage payments to deduct against the AMT, I would have to pay an extra $800 in tax this year just for being married to Dom, if I wasn't a dirty foreigner who has slightly different tax rules. However, we'd better pop a sprog before next year's tax return is due, or skip the country...)

I have read some interesting view points suggesting that the US should accept the same austerity as Europeans and actually deal with their deficit. Others suggest that going "over the cliff" may not be a bad thing at all. Most commentators, however, seem to agree that the sky will fall, rivers will run red and the global economy will crumble massively. Who knows? What seems obvious is that, whatever happens, it'll be poorest in society who pay the biggest price for political and financial uncertainty. In that respect, our cousins in the US are no different from us Europeans.

Scottish independence: doing the sums

I'm again breaking from my usual theme today, and again because of political reasons. The last time I did this was when I published a letter that I sent to the then Home Secretary (posted here). Unsurprisingly, she never replied to me but at least the income thresholds have dropped enough that I could probably afford to come back if we didn't have too many kids.

Anyway, today I want to talk about independence. Most of you have probably got at least a vague sense that Scotland will be having a referendum soon to decide whether or not she says cheerio to her southern neighbours and becomes a proper, grown-up country like wot the other kids have done. I guess that my host country, the US, got its independence from the UK a wee while ago now, so there is some relevance to my blog post. After more than a year of petty squabbling and positioning, the UK and Scottish governments finally got it together to agree a legally-binding referendum in the autumn of 2014.

Now that we've got a date for the referendum, you would expect that everyone is getting down to the serious business of having a fact-based, rational discussion on the most important decision facing our country since 1707, right? We can balance on one side all the good things the union has done for Scotland, and weigh it against how standing on our own two feet will bring about a fairer, more prosperous Scotland? Not bloody likely. In the absence of a common foe, us Scots have always revelled in fighting amongst ourselves. The pretty squabbling between Labour & SNP is a case in point: how can two supposedly left-of-centre parties who share so many common goals have such an acrimonious relationship?

I'm going to do something unusual today and I'm going to bring some actual facts to this debate, even though they don't necessarily support my position. I was prompted to write this by an article in today's Sunday Herald, where Prof Hugh Pennington came out in favour of keeping the union because it allowed bi-directional flow of collaboration between Scotland & the rest of the UK, and because us Scots do rather well out of research funding, considered on a per capita basis. Prof Pennington is entitled to his opinion, but what really got me going were the arguments in the comments section.

Firstly, Prof Pennginton said:  "Key to the success of British science has been the unimpeded two-way traffic of ideas, money and people across the Border. So, I believe that if Scotland leaves the UK, its science will take a knock.".  I disagree on this point: science is already an international affair and I'm currently working on collaborations between labs in the UK, Switzerland and the US. These collaborations already happen across international borders, so adding another one between Scotland and England will not make any real difference here.

However, his point about the funding coming to Scotland via research councils does merit further attention. When the SNP won their landslide victory last year and separation became a real possibility, I put together the figures for research council spending over the last few years and calculated how much Scotland gets from the union. I couldn't easily get any figures for the MRC, so gave up at the time. I managed to find some this morning so added them to my spreadsheet. You can see my raw data here - the take home message is that Scotland does a little bit better out of research funding than could be expected from our per capita share. For the funding period I considered, total research spending in the UK was £7,192,911,049.01 of which Scotland received £909,115,907 (or 12.6% of the total).

Here, I'm considering grants made by MRC (Medical Research Council), BBSRC (Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council), EPSRC (Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council), AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council), NERC (Natural Environment Research Council), ESRC (Economic and Social Research council) and STFC (Science and Technology Facilities Council). I don't include any funding that comes from non-Government sources such as the EU, the Wellcome Trust or the other charities in the UK.

Some caveats have to go with these figures: different councils report funding in different ways, so my figures only include MRC grants made in 2010/11 (not including funding for specific MRC research units), currently active grants as reported in summer 2011 for NERC, STFC, EPSRC & BBSRC, and total spending between 2005 and 2010 for the others. It's all in my raw data. It should also be noted that these figures only cover money paid to do academic research, and not the money used to cover teaching undergraduate degrees. While teaching is an important part of universities, research strength is what determines an institution's reputation and the quality of academic that it can attract.

What does this mean? That Scotland is being disproportionately well funded by UK research councils and that going it alone would spell disaster? Not necessarily - research funding applications are made to councils on a UK-wide level and are generally awarded on merit and not in a geographical basis. That Scotland does well may be a reflection on the strength or competitiveness of our universities. What it does mean, though, is that an independent Scotland would have to find a bit more money as a percentage of the budget to pay for academic research. But this funding isn't currently decided in Scotland anyway, so we can't really extrapolate from the current situation.

One thing that I haven't considered is funding that comes from the EU. The EU funds a huge chunk of scientific research across all member states. I find it hilarious that the unionist press threatens that Scotland may be kicked out of the EU after independence to scare us into sticking with the UK with one breath, but then talks about how Cameron could pull us out of the EU with the next. Ironically, it could be that the best way that Scotland could maintain access to EU research funding is by leaving the UK, which seems to be distancing itself as much as possible from our European neighbours.

The thing that most annoys me about the independence referendum debate is how the unionist side is demanding minutiae on every level of how an independent Scotland would be run and what our spending priorities would be. If Scotland does decide to become independent, these details would be decided by whatever party or parties form the first government of an independent Scotland. Promising lower corporate tax rates, or higher social spending is daft because we don't know who would form that first government. We should look, in detail, at what our current position is and then talk about what we would do differently if we were independent. I guess we could save a fortune by not paying for WMDs on the Clyde. But would the loss of a permanent seat in the UN security council reduce world-wide influence both for Scotland and the rUK?

Incidentally, I waver between supporting full independence and federalism. My current thinking is that I would like a fully Federal Republic of Great Britain & Northern Ireland, where Scotland raises all of its own revenue (including geographic share of oil, etc) and then pays some money back to the UK for foreign policy, defence and currency (but not Queenie or her awful progeny). But this would involve the rest of the UK consenting to mixing things up just to keep their plucky northern neighbours happy, and it might be easier to achieve independence. Greater fiscal responsibility for Holyrood is key though: whether you believe Scotland is a net contributor to the UK or subsidised, she should still be responsible for raising the money she spends. That would shut up the vile Daily Torygraph's lazy anti-Scottishness and also make Scotland stand up for herself and stop blaming Westminster for all her woes.

P.S. For the record: I can vote in the referendum because I'm still on a postal ballot at home, but I'll choose not to as I don't know if or when I'll be living back in Scotland, so I may not live with the consequence of that decision. But I still feel entitled to have my tuppance in the debate that shapes my country!

Suffering suffrage

Even the most socially-isolated, reclusive hermit has probably worked out by now that there's an election going on here in the Land of the Free-to-Buy-Whatever-You-Want. It's even managed to knock Jimmy Saville off the headlines on the BBC news, which I guess is a welcome relief. I thought that by being in Washington around election time, I would gain some understanding of US politics and it wouldn't seem as crazy and weird. That hasn't happened. Politics here actually get more outlandish as you delve deeper.

First, it should be pointed out that even the US Democratic party is so far to the right of UK politics that Obama makes Cameron & Osbourne look positively Marxist. Well, almost. And the Republican party is actually completely insane. Especially the Tea Party folk, who manage to make the UKIP party seem like a bunch of reasonable, well-meaning folks. To an outsider, it seems that the Republican party hates women.
Republicans in some states are busily repelling equal pay legislation, because obviously all these modern ideas of equality are unnecessary.

And, believe it or not, some (Republican) states have actually tried to pass laws where women who want an abortion first have to endure a transvaginal ultrasound in case seeing the sonogram makes them change their mind. Even in cases of rape, because being violated once obviously wasn't enough. They've tried to do this in Virginia, and in Pennyslvania, Mississippi, Nebraska and Kansas. I'm not sure if any have actually passed the laws yet because I've only recently started taking an interest in US politics.

Of course, these are all state legislatures, so have no bearing on the election, yeah? The Republican Vice-Presidential Nominee has also expressed extreme anti-abortion views, although they've been keeping him quieter of late. A bunch of Republican candidates for congress have recently said some pretty insane things about rape, such as saying that women's bodies have ways of avoiding pregnancy in cases of "legitimate rape" or that any pregnancies resulting from rape are God's will. Seriously. You couldn't make this stuff up.

So, back to the election. As I recently learned from Wikipedia, the president is actually elected by something called the Electoral College, a group of people who get together to elect the President and Vice-President. Voters in each state actually elect representatives to the electoral college, who have pledged to vote for whichever party they represent. There are 568 members of the electoral college, allocated to states on a population basis. Most states have a winner-takes-all rule so that whichever party wins the state gets all of the electoral college from that state. This New York Times Blog has really helped me make sense of it all.

Most states are either true-blue Democrat or deep red Republican (opposite colours from the UK, which I still find confusing) so the outcome from those are pretty certain. That means that almost all campaigning occurs only in those few swing states (10 this year) and the vote of those who live in other states effectively means nothing. This year, Ohio and the 18 electoral college votes it has are seen as critical to both sides winning the campaign, so the poor folks are battered by more than 300 political ads a day. The Daily Show did a fantastically amusing piece on it a couple of days ago, hopefully this link well let you folk back in Europe watch it. If it doesn't, type "Daily Show swing state hell" into Youtube, it's worth watching.

The electoral college system seems weird, especially as someone can win the popular vote and still not be President (think George Bush losing by more than 500,000 votes in 2000 and still being inflicted on the US and the rest of the world). But the weirdest thing about US politics is that candidates can actually lie during a campaign, both about their policies and each other. The most recent (striking) example was Romney running a series of ads saying in Ohio saying that Chrysler is moving production of Jeeps to China, all because of Obama's policies. This was such a whopper that the CEO of Chrysler came out and said, translated into Weegie, "haul, big man, that's pure shite, by the way". Compare this with the UK system where ex-Labour minister Phil Woolas was booted out of parliament for knowingly making false statements about his Lib Dem opponent during the last election campaign. They could do with a dose of that here.

Another insane thing about US politics is the money. Each candidate has nearly $1 billion during this campaign. Which is quite a lot of money. Just think how many packets of chocolate Hob Nobs I could buy with that. The combinted total money rasied by both parties combined so far is $1.85 billion (source), which is approximately 352,305,901 packets of Hob Nobs at today's exchange rate. And that doesn't include all the spending by independent Super PACs and such like.

While the candidates can say pretty much anything they want about each other, Federal Employees are allowed to say precisely nothing that can be seen as supporting one candidate or the other during working hours, or on Federal property, all thanks to the Hatch Act, and cannot solicit funds for elections at any time. Even clicking "like" on a Facebook page of a candidate from your personal mobile phone is a violation of the Act, if you do it on Government property. Similarly, even re-tweeting a partisan statement from a government-issued computer whilst working at home is a violation. Which is why I'm writing this on my old desktop computer. Incidentally, I should probably state that all views expressed in this blog post are entirely my own and in no way reflect those of my employer, whoever that may happen to be.

The funny thing is that, while it's clear that one party in this country is actually insane, many people here in the US are just as flabbergasted as me and are all preparing to move to Canada in the unthinkable happens on Tuesday and Romney actually wins. I'm sure that won't happen though. One good thing about the election is that I've started reading US newspapers, instead of relying on the BBC all my information. Of course, I'm only reading the Washington Post and New York Times as they are openly pro-Obama and right now, I need as much confirmation bias as I can muster to sleep well at night.

Fingers crossed that I won't have to join the exodus to Canada on Wednesday as I'm just starting to enjoy myself here.

Bumper stickers

One thing that USians seem very big on is bumper stickers. They love to plaster their opinions all across the back of their car to let everyone know which tribe they associate themselves with. It doesn't seem to be restricted to any sort of demographic - in the last couple of days, I've noticed everything from a bumper plastered with all sorts of band names (Radiohead, etc) through those proudly declaring their support for Obama, to those expressing their right to be a gun-totting believer in Jesus and Romney. Not that I'm  implying that support for guns necessarily correlates with religion or support for Republicans, but I've not yet seen a car that has both Democrat and NRA (National Rifle Association) stickers on it. Here's an example, taken from our local shopping mall:

I guess if you combine the facts that USians are somewhat outspoken, and in love with their cars, then you get the bumper sticker phenomenon. It's quite striking just how prevalent it is though, in stark contrast to Europe. And the bumper stickers are not just political or religious - you see everything from "Proud parent of student from High School X" through to support for football teams or declaring that the driver is an alumni of whatever Ivy League college they happen to be proud of. Actually, some states give out a learner's permit as young as 15 so it's not uncommon to see stickers saying "honours student at high school X", which is pretty weird. Surely 15 or 16 is too young to drive a car? I know I was a dick-head at that age..!

Maybe we should get some bumper stickers for our bikes? "My other bike is a cannondale" or "At least I'm not killing the planet, you SUV-driving arsehole"? Maybe not then.

Moon-lighting

Hello. Just a quickie today as I've been moonlighting and writing for a friend's blog where I've been writing on my usual theme of food, talking about what irks me about the paleo diet.

Recently, we experienced something that highlights a subtle difference between the US and the UK. Dom and I bought a digital piano, something we've always wanted, at a music store about 1.5 miles from our house. As we'd gone out grocery shopping and also refuse to own a car here, we were ill-prepared for this spur-of-the-moment shopping trip, and found ourselves having to carry a very large, heavy box back home. Fair enough, as our friend Ian has been using CrossFit to make us mightier over the last few months, so moving a big object was a good work-out.

Twice on our journey home though, we were pleasantly surprised by warmth of human kindness. The first time was when we had to get our piano down a big flight of steps on the way home: a car drove past as we were resting at the top of the stairs. The car stopped suddenly, reversed back and illegally parked near us. A random guy jumped out and told Dom that there was no way he'd let her struggle with the weight, so helped me down the stairs with the box and then went on his merry way.

A little bit further, an SUV drove past us, double-backed and a lovely lady insisted that she drove us and the piano the rest of the way home. Having two random strangers giving that kind of assistance highlights the more positive aspects of the USian psyche.

I'm fairly sure that wouldn't have happened back in the UK. Not because people are less kind or warm, but probably due to hesitation due to social anxiety of having to talk to a stranger / worrying about being patronising by offering to help / worrying that the people you're offering help to think you're trying to mug them / etc, etc. It's a social anxiety that I've often had myself ("if I offer help to this random woman, will she think I'm being creepy..?") and I don't consider myself to be particularly reserved.

Americans generally are a bit more socially confident: I've seen guys asking girls on a date without getting blind-drunk first!!! While this forwardness can be quite disconcerting at first ("Why is this person talking to me? We're on the metro! Don't they know the rules!?!?"), it eventually stops feeling weird or even unpleasant...

Weathering the weather

As you know, I'm a Scot with one red-haired allele (thanks, mum), so my melanocortin-1 receptors function poorly compared to wildtypes (biology-speak for normal people). This means that going out in the sun comes with a moderate risk of exploding into flames - I think the official term for us half-gingers is Daywalkers. Dom hails from Eastern Canada and inherited pasty Irish skin from her mother, so perhaps moving to a city known for really hot, humid summers was bad planning.

Still, we knew to expect this before we moved out here so are content to spend our summers scurrying from shadow to shadow, desperately seeking out somewhere that sells factor 250 sunblock. I did have visions of spending the summer lounging around in the sun, having barbeques and drinking fine USian beers. This was the case for April & May, but the daytime temperatures are now regularly hitting 35C and above - it got to 40C yesterday, setting a record for the warmest weather I've ever experienced.

One thing that is quite striking about weather forecasts in the US is that they tend towards the hysterical, so we tend to get warnings about tornados, wild fires, torrential flooding, snowmageddon, baking sun and rains-of-frogs on pretty much a daily basis. A consequence of this is that one begins to ignore the weather warnings and have a little smug giggle about how much more hysterical the US media is than back home (unless you read the Daily Mail or any of the Murdoch rags, of course...)

So, we took yesterday's weather warning about the incoming storm with the usual pinch of salt. Then the storm came - I've never seen so much lightning before: there were a few flashes every 1 or 2 seconds, and this went on for a few hours. I tried standing outside when the storm first hit, but with all the bits of trees flying around at face-height and the driving rain soaking me to the skin, I decided that it was best to retreat indoors lest I turn my wife into a widow.

It was breath-taking to be out in though, truly exciting to witness such an impressive weather phenomenon first-hand. Although it was easy to enjoy it with the privilege of having an nice, dry house and air-conditioning to retreat too. I can't even imagine how much it would suck to be homeless in that storm. For us, it seemed pretty impressive and our electricity went down for about an hour but then came back, so we didn't think the storm was that bad.

And then we had a walk around our neighbourhood this morning. As I'm not the most articulate fella in the world, I'll give you some photos to give an idea of the carnage that was around. Click on the photos for the full-sized images.

Most of the houses on our street (actually, I think all of them except for our block) are still without power, as is most of the local neighbourhood. Our local pub was on of the few places open, so we were able to grab a lunch, a pint and Wimbledon before giving up on our shopping tasks for today. According to the Washington Post, 1.3 million homes are still without power, and regional "cooling centres" have been opened so that people without power, and therefore air conditioning, can go somewhere to hide from the heat. Today was a bit milder, at a mere 36C. More storms are forecast for tonight, so I might take the weather warning a little bit more seriously this time.

I'll leave you with a wee ditty that I learned at primary school:

Whether the weather be fine,

Or whether the weather be not.

Whether the weather be cold,

Or whether the weather be hot.

We'll weather the weather,

Whatever the weather, 

Whether we like it or not!

A letter to the Home Secretary

Hey folks, this post will be in a slightly different style to my usual ramblings, because I have something to moan about that does not revolve around food, too many cars on the road or people spelling words like "colour" badly. In fact, my post has nothing directly to do with the US, other than to highlight one area where the US fares much better than the path currently being chosen by the UK Coalition government.

For those who haven't heard, Theresa May (the Home Secretary) would like to limit immigration to satisfy the xenophobic leaning of many on the right of her party and to try and stop Tory voters from drifting to UKIP*. The majority of UK immigration comes from the EU, but obviously the Home Secretary cannot do anything about that. So her latest plan, as detailed by the Guardian on Friday is to prevent UK citizens from bringing their foreign born wife to the UK if the UK citizen earns below £25700 (with no children) and up to £46000 or more if they have children.

While Dom and I are obviously not impoverished, if these rules were enacted then they would prevent us from coming back to the UK in a few years if we happen to pop a sprog or two while we're over here. So, as you can imagine, I believe this proposal to be somewhat stupid, given how much the UK taxpayer has invested in training Dom and I. As much as I'm enjoying living in the US at the moment, I'd rather not have the Tories turn me from a legal nonresident alien into a nomadic alien, exiled to the frozen wastelands of Canada for all time. Or at least, I'd like to choose to head to the frozen wastelands of Canada instead of being driven there by badly thought-out immigration laws.

One thing that the US does very well is that it welcomes (for a few years anyway) those of a foreign persuasion who want to work here, as long as they know they are expected to leave eventually. Which is fair enough - I'm grateful that US taxpayers are paying me to do my hobby, although I suppose they get a good deal out of it as well.

Anyway, when someone from my country gets pissed off, we don't riot in the streets like the French, or aggressively have a cup of tea like the English. In Scotland, we either hit the person who annoyed us, get outrageously drunk, or write an angry letter. I chose the latter option so below is a letter I wrote to Theresa May explaining why I think her immigration plans are a bit daft.

As an aside, I would like to say that, were Scotland independent, we would head down a different path and welcome immigrants with open arms. But Alex Salmond is being rather coy in explaining what independence would actually mean and my sources on the ground say that the natives are starting to get rather restless. So come on Alex, man-up and spell it out, we might say even say yes... (well, not me personally as Theresa May won't let me bring my wife back home!)

* To my non-UK readers, UKIP is a right-wing party in the UK who want, along with the usual  conservative agenda, to remove the UK from the EU. UKIP is basically a home for the rabid right of the Tory party who consider themselves too respectable / not racist enough to support the BNP.
 
-----------------------------

Dear Ms May,

I have been reading in the media about plans that you have to limit immigration such that UK nationals who marry non-EU partners will need to demonstrate a substantial income (more than £27,000 with no children) if they would like to bring their partner back to the UK. I am writing to let you know that I believe this  plan to be deeply short-sighted and detrimental to the UK as a whole.

I am a neuroscientist, having finished my doctorate at the University of Oxford last year. Whilst studying at Oxford, I met and married the woman who is now my wife, a Canadian microbiologist who also completed her masters & doctorate at Oxford. We are currently working in the US, where we have both obtained postdoctoral fellowships at fairly prestigious institutions. I'm not sure if you are aware, but early-career academic researchers earn a relatively low salary, especially compared to other professionals such as lawyers, medical doctors and Members of Parliament.

The general career path for a researcher (in the life sciences, at least) is to spend at least 5 or 6 years in junior research positions at different institutions before trying to obtain an academic position such as a lectureship. Given the reproductive window of our species, our early research careers also come at a time when we would be starting a family, so it is not unlikely that we will have 1 or 2 children within the next few years. As well as starting a family, we will also need to decide which country to settle in, which would either be Canada, where my wife is from, or the UK.

If you proceed with your seriously ill-conceived plans to limit immigration, it is likely that the rules would prevent me being able to return to the UK with my wife. As well as grossly abusing my rights to family as a UK and EU citizen (my wife and I have both paid not insignificant sums to the exchequer whilst living in the UK), you would also be ensuring that the investment made by the UK taxpayer in educating both myself and my wife would be well and truly wasted. Although that cost may be insignificant compared to, say, mothballing an aircraft carrier before it enters service, it is still squandering taxpayers' money, which I suspect is not why we elected you.

Kind regards,
Dr Michael T. Craig

Gie us a break!

Hello, regular readers*, and sorry for the long silence. I've been busy with work, which seems rather appropriate given what I'm going to talk about today: it turns out that having a grown-up job can be somewhat time-consuming. But that's fine because the American dream is that you can get anything you want as long as you work hard enough. Unless, of course, the thing that you want happens to be time off work.

It's pretty well known around the world that holiday time in the US is fairly abysmal, so I won't dwell too much on that other than to say that 10 days plus public holidays is, quite frankly, appalling. I'm used to 5 weeks, and the UK does less well than its continental neighbours. Although the European economy is crumbling at the moment, I'm sure it's nothing to do with holiday time. Not even in Greece. It's mostly because we gave all our money to the banks so they could, dunno, make confetti with it or something. Sorry, getting side-tracked. Back to holidays.

People generally argue that the US has more public holidays than the UK, so it balances out. Well, there are 10 Federal holidays (plus inauguration day, which comes round every 4 years when a new president gets sworn in). That's only 2 more than England & Wales and 1 more than us Scots and the (Northern) Irish (us Scots need 2 days to recover from New Year and you couldn't pay me enough to make any comment about the Battle of Boyne). Plus any extra days given whenever the institutional parasites royal family has something to celebrate and lets the serfs doff their collective caps in appreciation shares with the nation.

Maybe USians are harder working than their cousins across the Atlantic. Perhaps Europeans work more effectively in their shorter working year? Who knows. I'm not going to get into that. I won't moan about holiday time because we knew what it was like before we came. What I didn't know about, though, was what happens when you need to take non-holiday leave.

There is no legal requirement in the US, at the Federal level, for employers to give employees any paid time off for illness, no matter how serious it is. Four states (well, three because DC isn't a state) have passed local laws mandating some form of sick leave. The only legal protection for most workers is the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). The FMLA states that any company that employs more than 50 people has to give their employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for family or medical reasons. In these 12 weeks, the employer cannot fire the employee or cut off health insurance.

This law was only passed in 1993 and is all good and well, if you can afford to take unpaid leave. I guess if you're working a minimum wage job with crap (if any) health insurance, you're pretty screwed. And I don't want to think what happens if you have a long-term (and expensive) illness once those 12 weeks are up and your employer no longer has to pay health insurance. Yikes.

Of course, many employers have their own provisions. My wife's contract officially allows her to take 15 days per year combined sick and holiday time. So if she has a flu, she has to drag her sorry arse to work and infect all her colleagues if we want a summer vacation. And this is her with an academic job! Larger employers, including Federal employers, sometimes allow workers to donate unused holiday time to colleagues who are seriously ill. Which is heart-warming, if surprising that people actually have unused leave from those 10 to 15 days. Of course, me being a European socialist, I would think that a basic duty of employers would be to provide some sort of cover for their employees and that the government's job should be to legislate for that. But hey, what do I know!?

Another, even more surprising bit of information concerns maternity (or parental) leave. Yes, when you get to my age, you start to consider these things. The USA is one of only four countries in the whole world that has no statutory maternity leave, with the other members of this exclusive club being Liberia, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland. Compare this to the UK's LEGAL MINIMUM six weeks at full pay plus another 33 at £128.73 per week, or to Norway's 56 weeks at 80% pay or 46 weeks at 100% pay, to be split between both parents.

Of course, while the US is almost medieval in its legal provision for parental leave, many employers are much more progressive. We can, after all, take up to 12 weeks unpaid leave under FMLA. I think most women take around 4 weeks off, at which point they have to pass their newborn baby on to a stranger to raise for them. That seems very weird to me. And, given the cost of child care, if you had twins it's not worth working because one salary would go entirely to those costs. Yikes. Give me European socialism any day of the week.

Since I usually have photos on the blog these days which are loosely thematic, have a picture of us on a frantic three-day holiday in Canada last week:

(*) According to Google, I do have regular readers. I assume it's only friends who actually know Dom and I so... who is in Belize!?

Reason Rally

I am an atheist. Just four little words that, back home in Europe, are not that big a deal. Things are quite different in the USA - atheists are mistrusted more here than any other "minority' group, including muslims, lesbian/gay/bisexuals or recent immigrants, according to a 2006 study from the Univeristy of Minnesota (see here for a summary of the data or read on Wikipedia). Indeed, given the choice for president, the US would choose to elect a gay Muslim communist over an atheist.

Atheism in the US is almost like voting Tory in Scotland - something that people only admit to in the privacy of their own homes. I hadn't really noticed though: a figure often quoted is that 90% of scientists working in research are atheists, so most people I encounter are generally left-leaning secularists. But I was aware that most USians take their God rather seriously, which means that if Dom and I ever visit the bible belt, I'm not allowed to even open my mouth without permission from my wife.

But today was something different. Today, in the US, atheists and agnostics decided to come out as a movement, and I have to say that they did it in style. For those who don't know, the Mall is the big grassy bit in the middle of DC where Congress, the museums and all the monuments live. It's also the place where all the big political rallies are held, so it was a good venue for the Reason Rally today.

We arrived just as Tim Minchin was doing his thing, including this song, the Pope song. Watching shocked parents desperately trying to cover the ears of their children was particularly hilarious: I'd be surprised if the Mall has ever heard the words "mother fucker" spoken so many times at such a high density - respect to the women doing sign language on the side of the stage!

Other highlights were Nate Phelps, son of the leader of the Westboro Baptist Church, a bunch of absolute mentalists who do lots of nasty things including picketing funerals with placards. If you've never heard of these nutters, check out the Wikipedia page. Given that the URL of their website is "www.godhatesfags.com", you can imagine what kind of unpleasant people they are. Anyway, I'll stop giving them more publicity and go back to the Reason Rally.

Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers both gave pretty good talks and Eddie Izzard was simply hilarious. Dawkins pulled what was probably the biggest crowd of the day which was a surprise, but I guess Eddie Izzard probably isn't so big on this side of the Atlantic. The main aim of today was to try and get "social and legislative equality" for atheists. It was a good outing and I was glad to see that it didn't turn into just an excuse to bash religion, which would only ever be counterproductive and also miss the point.

A few religious types did turn up to explain to all us godless atheists that we were scum and due to burn in hell for all eternity (see above photo). I would have felt sorry for them, but they seemed to be quite happy. They were all concentrated in one area but mingling with the heathens, and people were queuing up to get a chance to debate with them. Think Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park on a Sunday, but with the American tendency to not hold back and you're half-way there. I've stick more photos on this page because some of the banners were truly hilarious.

Overall, I think the Rally got its point across. It included a video address from Representative Pete Stark, the first congressman to officially come out as atheist, and another video message from Senator Tom Harkin who, whilst a believer himself, was happy to see a group that represents around 15% of USians finally make their voice heard. Such a contrast to the UK, where we had Alistair Campbell stop Tony Blair from discussing faith with his now famous words "We don't do God".

One thing that we can learn from our cousins across the Atlantic is activism and personal involvement in politics. Back home, the political class have sort of budded off from reality and most people are apathetic. Here in the US, it's a lot more grassroots and a lot more people get involved in the full range of the political spectrum from campaigning on local single issues to being involved in caucuses and selecting the presidential candidate. That's something that has to be admired, even if it means that entities like the Tea Party can come to prominence. But I'll save talking about politics for another day.

Eatin' oot!

Regular readers of this blog (I know they exist, Google told me so) may be forgiven for believing that I think everything in the US is terrible, apart from their beer. I suppose this is because I'm a grumpy old man who likes to rant, and the things that I think the US does badly (healthcare, driving, bread, etc) are far more striking than the things which the US does well. Apart from the beer, which I noticed very quickly. Another thing that regular readers will notice about this blog is that many of my ramblings are focused on food and drink. Being a fatty takes effort, so food and drink are a big part of my life. From a culinary perspective, my wife and I are basically hobbits. So, this is another blog post about food.

One striking difference between the US and the UK is that the standard of restaurant food is generally quite a bit higher here. There are bad places here too, but the baseline is somewhat higher, which goes part of the way towards explaining why USians complain when they get to the UK. One thing I like is that most places will give you a couple of different types of veg on the side, and even pub-grub comes with crispy, steamed veg and not stuff that has come out of a freezer and been boiled to death. So, well done to the USA.

There are a few differences, though. Although pub-grub and restaurants tend to be better here in the US when compared to the UK, USian fast food is that bit saltier, fattier and generally nastier than its UK equivalent, even when coming from the same multinational. Dominos pizza in the UK isn't great, but much better than from Dominos in the US: we phoned in a Dominos when we first arrived here, and we were left feeling dehydrated all of the next day, presumably because EVERYTHING is much saltier here. Everywhere. I got a Subway a couple of weeks ago and even if left me feeling parched for quite a while.

Mexican-style fast food is becoming quite popular in the south east of England. The Mission burrito place in Oxford is a blatant rip-off of the USian company Chipotle (right down to the colour scheme and fonts on their menu!), but the Mission does the burrito so much better. And I've still not come across anything in the US that rivals Chilango, another burrito place which we only discovered in London the month before we left. I'm talking about fast-food Mexican though, we've been to one or two cracking Mexican restaurants here which have been pretty damned good.

Anyway, back to the positive. Restaurants are generally better and we've found a new Favourite Place. Well, we were taken there back in September by a couple of good friends, and we've spent a lot of time there in the last week or so. It's called Silver Diner, and there are a few of them dotted around Maryland and Virginia. They're laid out like a classical 60s diner (complete with matching music, dodgy colour scheme and silly juke boxes), but all of the food is locally-sourced, often organic and just bloody delicious. Mmmmm, bison. The photos in the this post were taken there in the last week or so, with Alyssa poisoning herself with milkshake (she's a lactard) and myself, below, enjoying a nice local craft beer. Mmmm, IPA.

There are a few things about the restaurant experience which are a little bit different from the UK, some of which are good, some of which are bad. The friendly customer service is good, but odd, and mostly because the waiting staff are paid less than minimum wage so need tips in order to eat. Which leads me on to the bad thing: the price in the menu is not what you get charged. You need to add on sales tax and a tip of around 20% (or you're a bad person, apparently), so this was confusing to begin with.

If you happen to clear your plate during the meal, it'll be quickly taken away even if other people in your party are still eating. This was really annoying to begin with, and seemed very rude, but it just seems to be how things are done in this country. Quite often, as soon as you say "no" to dessert, the bill will be brought to you unless you explicitly say "don't bring the cheque, we haven't finished drinking yet." Again, this seemed rude at first but most USians are busy and active, so I guess they like a fast turn-around at meal-time. One more thing: the portions are epic, truly epic. Even as an accomplished fatty, I often struggle to finish. But that's standard here and most places will offer you a doggy bag unprompted.

For a country where one fifth of all meals are eaten in a car, the quality of restaurant food in this country is pretty spectacular. The only thing missing is great Indian food. You can get decent stuff here, but it's not a patch on that to be found in Glasgow / Manchester / Birmingham / London. In fact, we're heading to Edinburgh on Sunday just to get a curry from Kismot, which is easily the best Indian restaurant we've been to. Mmmmm, curry....

Cheque it oot, man!

People in the US like to personalise things because your average USian is very exacting and has very specific needs. For instance, in Starbucks or similar such purveyors of coffee, it's not uncommon to hear something like "I want a tall double skinny cinnamon soy latte with extra foam and served at 170F, and only Bob the Barista can make my coffee because only he knows how I like it". 

When we first got here, we had a man in a mobile phone shop tell us that it's not uncommon to ask for your favourite server (apparently, waiter is too egalitarian a term) because "he knows how I like to order my food so I ask for him as he's someone I can work with". Seriously, I'm not shitting you here.

In some ways it's a good thing, because the customer service here is generally phenomenal. It's actually quite disconcerting at first, when you have staff in shops or bars actually pretending to take an interest in you and being all friendly and shit. In the UK, I've gone into an empty bar and still had to struggle to make the barman become terribly inconvenienced and interrupt scratching his balls to do something as futile as actually serving me a beer. So, in that respect, I can enjoy the US customer service even if it is kind of weird.

But sometimes, it's just plain weird. We ran out of cheques today so we thought it would be a simple task of contacting our bank and ordering some more. Of course, that's obviously a silly idea. Why would a bank actually make chequebooks? Banks only deal with forms of currency, after all. And what is a cheque? Oh, actually, it's a paper promise to pay money, sort of like cash but less useful.

Instead, our bank links to this website where you give them your routing number (equivalent of your sorting code) and your account number, and then you can personalise your cheques so that you can 'Find designs that express your personal style!". For instance, those of an infantile persuasion can get Disney characters on their cheques:

 

The more fundamentalist Christian, Tea Party supporting types have several options:

 

 (note the quote "He who believes in the Son has everlasting life. John 3:36")

 

(subtitle: "America, Fuck Yeah!")

If you believe in the rights of cute, fluffy animals:

For an extra 5 dollars, you can add your own little logo (they had examples like the Jesus fish) and add inspirational little saying as well. Amazing. You really can't make this stuff up. What you can't do is just click on a button to say "I bank with Wells Fargo. Give me some cheques from my bank like what I can use in lieu of money please." Except you'd have to call them checks and not cheques. This also highlights the fact that USian banks rip you off so badly that, not only do you have to pay for your own cheque books, but you have to use a 3rd party to get them made.

Dom spent some time trying to put together the most vomit-inducing, tacky cheque book that she could manage. But it all got a bit overwhelming, so she gave up and is now nursing a gin and tonic. I think I may join her.

 

Guid health tae ye

I've been meaning to write about healthcare in the US for a while now. I'm not going to talk about why the European model is far superior and that governments should be responsible for the well-being of their people. Nor shall I mention that the US government spends $2051 per capita on health when the UK government spends $1429, but US citizens pay through the nose for healthcare (source). While these things may be true, I don't want to have my visa revoked for attempting to subvert the American way of life with my socialist views, and I'm certainly not going to argue about public spending during an election year!

I want to focus on the actual experience of the American health care system because, after experiencing the NHS, the system here is bloody weird. We're lucky because my employer pays for our health insurance and the plan would cost us almost $1000 per month if we had to pay for it ourselves. After signing up for our health insurance, we got provided with a list of GPs (family doctors in this country) who our health insurance will cover. It's then down to you to choose your family doctor. This sounds fairly straightforward, but this is where things start to get weird.

There is a website called HealthGrades which allows you to search for medical doctors in your area. We went down the list of medics provided by our insurance company and started searching through this website. It's basically Amazon for doctors, right down to having star ratings and patient reviews! The website also has the professional record of the doctors available for all to see.

The first doctor that we liked the look of turned out to have been through disciplinary action twice for failing her cocaine test - we could actually read PDFs of the transcripts from the disciplinary hearing. In the second practice that we liked the look of, the doctor who ran it had been censured for fraudulently signing her employees signatures to fake records. Yikes! (I'm not linking to actual pages here because I don't want to get sued by disgruntled GPs, who are obviously used to lawyering up..!)

The other thing which is different is that you get family doctor practices which are similar to those in the UK, with a health centre which hosts several doctors. But you also get practices here which are in residential areas and are just people working from a room in their house. While I'm sure they are excellent doctors, it just seems like a really odd way of running medicine.

After we had actually chosen a clinic which looked good and didn't seem to be run by the criminally-minded, we had to get a medical, etc. Actually, mine is next week, so I'm basing this on Dom's experience. As well as a physical, they also top up vaccines which are out of date and test our blood for absolutely everything (cholesterol, kidney function, etc etc). At every step of the way, you have to sign a bit of paper saying that you authorise the procedure to be carried out and will accept financial liability in the event that your insurance company chooses not to pay for that procedure.

(As an aside: Dom's brother got faced with a bill for several thousand dollars when his insurance company decided that a test to look for a blood clot was not an essential procedure. Yikes!)

A wee while after you have been tested for everything (with doctors horrified that you had never been tested before by the barbaric and backward practices in the UK), a letter from your insurance company comes through the post telling you every procedure that had been carried out on you and how much they would cost. It's REALLY detailed: consultation, $400. Several lab tests individually priced at $18, $15.25, $10.94, $9.94, etc etc.

The form also shows that haggling which has occurred between your insurance company and the provider. For example, the consultation was billed at $400 from our provider, but our insurance company paid $206.55 in the end. Therefore, it seems, if you're poor and can't afford health insurance then you actually pay more the treatment than someone who can afford the insurance... perhaps it's the European in me who find this kind of appalling.

In the UK, your GP acts as the first point of call for all NHS services, so if you need to see a consultant neurologist / physiotherapist / etc, then you go via your GP first. While this can delay treatment, it also acts as a buffer to stop cardiologists being hassled by someone with indigestion or a neurologist being called about a headache. In the US, however, you contact the consultant directly because the consultant is happy to bill your insurance company for the time. I now understand why, in Oxford, newly-arrived Americans would often whine about not being able to see a physio / etc.

Another thing which I'm still not used to is billboard adverts for hospitals in places like the metro stations. You can see posters saying things like "What if your headache is more than just a headache? Come to hospital X for the best stroke treatment in Montgomery County". Seriously, I'm not exaggerating here.

I understand the principle of having a market in the health care system: competition should drive up standards because it people can take their business anywhere they want. However, if I'm sick, I would much rather know that every hospital had the same baseline level of excellence. If my leg is hanging off, or I'm shitting blood, the last thing I want to think about is choosing which hospital to treat me. I think that people in England and Wales should be very cautious about the Tories trying to bring more of a market into the NHS - what I see in the USA is the logical extension of what happens when you let the market get involved. And I won't even talk about the madness of paying hundreds of thousands of insurance salesmen and other bureaucrats...

This post is turning into a long one, so I'll stop soon. Take home message: the US healthcare system is very, very different to what we have in the UK. It feels very alien. On the plus side: because we have good health insurance, this is probably the best health care that we'll ever have, so we're very lucky to have that privilege here. On the down side: I don't like the idea of paying medics for each procedure that they do. Imagine paying Fire Fighters on the basis of how many fires they extinguish? You wouldn't want to live in a wooden house when it was time for the Christmas bonus...

(nb I've used "doctor" here as short hand for medical doctors because that's the common usage. We all know that medics are not proper doctors; proper doctors have PhDs...)

Guilty Pleasures

Alright, folks! Happy new year. That is new YEAR, as in singular. Americans and Canadians both have this annoying habit of saying "New Years" when, as far as I can tell, we only get one new year per year. Every time I got asked "What are you doing for New Years?" back in December, my eye twitched a little as I had to contain my anger before replying "I have no firm plans for Hogmanay yet, but it'll probably involve drinking too much and vomiting in the Canadian snow."

Anyway, that's not what I wanted to talk about today. I was going to talk about health care, but then I had to buy gin (as you do), so was going to talk about booze. But as you can only buy booze from a liquor store, I had to go elsewhere to get tonic and that inspired me to talk to you about food.

As you all know, I take my food very seriously. Although beer did contribute to my belly, it's hard to cycle to work every day and still be a fatty unless you have a serious love-affair with food. Which I do. As does my wife: we're basically tall hobbits with less-hairy feet. Hell, we even live in a basement apartment with a low roof, making it the quintessential modern-day hobbit-hole!

When we first arrived in this great country of the free (so they tell me), one of the first things we had to do was (obviously) a food-shop. If you ever visit a USian supermarket for the first time, what will become immediately obvious is that either Americans LOVE processed food, or the supermarkets force it upon them. The initial supermarket visits were actually great contributors to our culture-shock.

Making real food at home is actually a life-style choice and not a way of saving money. Little jars of spices and herbs such as oregano or cumin are RIDICULOUSLY expensive. Even buying the cheap brands, a jar of oregano that costs around £1 back home will easily set you back $6 to $8 (£4 to £5.50) - I calculated that, to make a curry properly, it would have cost me over $70 in spices alone.

Vegetables can also be appalling over-priced. In September, when they were still in season, a pack of 3 bell peppers cost $4.99, more than twice the price in the UK. Compare this to processed food, where you can buy 10 microwaveable dinners for $10. Processed food is much cheaper, and even foods that should be natural have all sorts of crap added to them.

Trying to buy flour to make bread? Just simple, whole milled wheat can't be bought from the supermarket. What you can buy is a super-enriched ultramegacrappy flour, made to look like bleached white flour, or made to look like wholewheat flour. I guess it is the whole of the wheat grain. Want to buy a tin of tomatoes? You have to look long and hard to find one that's not had stuff added to it (especially salt!).

The meat can make me quite sad too - you should not be able to buy 0.5kg of beef for around £1. I'm guessing that the cow didn't have a particularly happy life. Battery chickens is bad, but the industial scale feedlots in this country have battery cows and pigs! Places like Whole-foods, the expensive organic hippy middle-class supermarket has a rating system where they tell you about the meat. They do quite well with selling grass-fed beef, but the best their chickens generally do is have the label that effectively says "we didn't keep it in a cage the WHOLE of its life...". This contrasts with Europe, which, on the 1st of January, finally enacted the law banning battery chickens. (Actually, Peter Singer wrote an interesting opinion piece about this for Al Jazeera.

Ah, how I miss Waitrose.

Of course, with all things in America, there's always a "but". Farmers' Markets can be pretty awesome - most weeks, Dom and I now chat with the man who raises the cows (mmm, Angus) and chickens that provide us with all the eggs and beef that we need. The animals have had a happy life, the meat isn't that expensive and, perhaps most importantly, the beef is bloody good and the eggs may well be the tastiest we've had. Yay for Walnut farm! And I found a company online that sells what are easily the highest-quality spices I've ever used, for less than we paid in the UK.

Ethnic shops are also a very good way of getting decent ingredients at reasonable prices - it is possible to eat very well / ethically, as long as you're prepared to do a bit of leg-work. The two things that I've still not found are easy supplies of "exotic" meat like lamb or any sort of game animal. The supermarkets have effectively won the battle against localism to the extent that there are no butchers within a 12 mile radius of our home and, I suspect, much further. Your choices are evil supermarket or buy straight from the farmer.

The other thing I can't find yet is a decent supplier of flour that is nearby. There are some suppliers around, but generally in far away states where the shipping would cost more than the flour itself - definitely nothing like Doves who would deliver 25kg sacks of flour direct to our door.

Hopefully I've firmly nailed my foodie credentials to the wall. Now for my confession. What got me thinking about writing this post was where I went after buying gin. We needed some tonic water, so I stopped at the 7-11 to get some.

What I also bought was a trashy hot-dog, which pretty much embodies the antithesis of everything I've been writing about. It was terrible: fluffy white bun with ground parts of animal best labelled as "miscellanous". It was terrible, yet strangely satisfying, maybe even because it was naughty. It kept me warm in our first proper snow-fall. Perhaps processed food and cheap calories do serve some purpose?