Tunisia : Where do you belong? [Part 2]

A couple of months back, I asked myself this very same question in this post. I happened to discuss this topic again with a friend last week end and we explored some interesting new ideas.

Media is a big part of what shapes a country's identity. Most people would just reflect back what they see, read or hear about any topic. This is even more true when it comes to identity.

However, there isn't one identity but many identities within any group. In addition, identity is an elusive concept, it's dynamic and changes happen at different paces across society: Older folks adjust slower than younger ones (that's why older people are considered conservative, as in "attached to identity characteristics such as values").

When media allows people to express themselves and debate issues, people tend to more or less agree on many fundamental issues and that is then considered the "Mainstream". If you strip people of the ability to control what defines the mainstream, identity problems arise.

Case in point, the tunisian society is not characterized by the availability of free media or the ability to freely debate social issues in an open manner. Media, for the last 20 years, pictured tunisia as a moderate society where everybody enjoys a good quality of life. The identity projected by the media started to get disconnected from the day-to-day life when fundamental issues such as human rights, corruption, social and religious values or the high cost of living for the middle class went missing from the public media scene. Any event that disturbed that picture perfect story was omitted by the media whether that's a terrorist attack in Djerba, a recent plot to attack american military training in Tunisia or this unbelievable yacht-gate story [French]. The result of all of this is that people feel alienated from any "government-sponsored" identity and therefore, they try to find refuge in what they feel most comfortable in which is usually a mix of conservative values and religious fervor. There's no risk the government would interject or try to influence an identity that is dominated by spiritual beliefs.

Political and Media freedom, or lack thereof, can lead to side effects that can have long lasting consequences. Tunisian identity is the last 20 years has been shaped by clear economic success (albeit wealth distribution hasn't been ideal), lack of political freedom and the fragmentation of society into western-leaning and eastern-leaning progressive groups on one end and a much more conservative group on the other end of the spectrum. Moderates are lost in the middle with fingers pointed at them from all sides. The country needs more openness and more communication among these groups or risk a lebanon-style fragmented society (but hopefully a democratic one...).

Real long-term Healthcare Reform: make people pay for their healthcare upfront!

Healthcare is the hottest issue these days. President Obama is making it the focus of his political agenda and is even forcing the legislative branch to act fast, something they've never been famous for. But what's the rush?

Cost of healthcare has ballooned in recent times and the share of healthcare costs in businesses operating expenses is preventing them from distributing more profits to their workers, therefore keeping the economy in check since it's main engine is Consumer spending.

But why are these costs skyrocketing all of a sudden? Various reasons, among them: over reliance on individual motorized transport vehicles, bad diet, serious lack of exercise, healthcare system that is run with a focus on profits not on the population's well-being, lack of IT systems integration between healthcare providers leading to inefficient processes and more.

The economist published an article this week about this issue with an interesting twist. The hypothesis is that people's behavior only adjusts to the cost of their lifestyle. To force people to eat healthier, you gotta make the bad stuff (i.e. junk food) more expensive than the good stuff (i.e. greens and low calories meals). The conclusions of the article are that the effect of such an approach would be gradual at best (think 10-15 years) and that the most "addicted" people are either not price sensitive or can't afford anything else and would therefore see their real income fall.

The parallel that is drawn here is with alcohol and tobacco consumption. The die-hard smokers don't care if a pack of cigarettes costs 20$, they'll keep smoking no matter what, despite the risk to their health. That being said, this doesn't mean that we can't implement such an approach that puts the burden on every person to make the right choices for themselves knowing what they're paying for.

I believe that people are free to disregard the warning about the impact of their diet or smoking/drinking habits on their health. The issue is that the healthcare system should not make me pay for their poor choices. How can the system reconcile one's personal choices (say to smoke for years) with an efficient system to provide well being for society as a whole? Is it a good allocation of healthcare $$ to pay for a heavy smoker's heart bypass surgery instead of treating somebody for a cancer they had a genetic predisposition for?

In some way, this is the same debate with respect to a flat sales tax vs a geographically uniform tax bracket where everybody pays based on their base income, not their "real" income. What you buy is a better measure of your wealth. Someone who makes 100K$/year in indiana is MUCH richer than somebody who earns the same amount in california but they do pay the same federal income tax at the end of the day (and medicare and social security for that matter). So make people pay for what they consume healthcare-wise, the system gains in the long run, despite the persistent outliers who will never change their ways.

Maybe somebody from the Obama administration read this very same article and is considering such reform. One can only hope ...

Update 8/4/09 : It occurred to me that another theoretical idea that could be considered at is a "cap and trade" system for healthcare credits! There is a fixed allocation of credits you get at the beginning of every year, you can increase your credits with exercise, walk to work, etc and you lose credits for eating junk food for example. Credits are transferrable to other people on an online market place so people who exercise a lot or don't get sick, can pass credits to others. The point of all of this is that lazy people or people who just can't pass on junk food end up paying a much higher price to access healthcare services. The healthcare costs for the whole society can stay constant or just grow at the same rate as the population grows, not 5 times faster! Now good luck explaining this approach and implementing it :)

Islam in the US victim of common fear tactics

Sitting through the atrocious exercise of reviewing the videos my friends share everyday on Facebook, I stumbled upon one that caught my attention.

The story here is that a couple of guys showed up with cameras to a Muslim Community Festival in Dearborn, Mi (which happens to be the city in the US with the highest ratio of muslims in the population) to ask questions about islam and more specifically about a pamphlet entitled : "What does Islam say about Terrorism?". Check out what happens.

The last 10 seconds of the clip are choking to me. How can somebody conclude from an encounter with some idiots who are not thinking straight that a religion that has a Billion followers, mostly peaceful, with some bad apples (many of them as of late, granted), is a threat to the United States?

These are right-wing style tactics used to inject fear. The intentions may be noble, asking questions is anybody's right, but the conclusions make me question the motives.

I decided to track the group of people who made the first video and it turns out that they posted another video later that explains what the issue was with the pamphlet (which wasn't clear to me in the first video). Here,they get into some kind of a rational dissection of the verse of the Koran that is quoted in the pamphlet. Watch on ...

I started thinking, who is actually this Nabeel Qureshi? Turns out the guy is a Christian convert who was formally Muslim. He started a group named Acts17 with this mission statement :

The mission of Acts 17 Apologetics Ministries is to glorify God by defending the Gospel of Jesus Christ from the ground up. We present evidence for the existence and attributes of God, the inspiration and historical reliability of the Scriptures, and the death, resurrection, and deity of Jesus Christ. We also refute the arguments of those who oppose the True Gospel, most commonly the arguments of Muslims and atheists.

When somebody clearly states that their mission is to refute arguments, you can consider that they may not be the most impartial individual to draw conclusions from the questions asked.

I see two issues with these videos :

• Somehow a large part of the muslim community just doesn't know how to dialogue. The first video shows people preventing the Act17 guys from doing what they planned to do peacefully. No harm intended but still the security guards are just stupid to mess with their equipment and harass them physically. Is this cultural? related to the average education-level? lack of freedom of speech in home countries? Probably a combination of the above.
• On the other side, it seems so easy to draw grandiose conclusions from incidents that happen all the time in public events like the one in Dearborn. When somebody comes up with an all encompassing conclusion like: "What's the US going to be like if the muslim population keeps growing? No FREEDOM of speech!". This is shaky at best and ridiculous in my opinion.

That being said, I don't get why nobody is presenting the counter-point to the statement Mr Qureshi is making. He's done his job to attract attention to his point of view, the muslim community should pay attention and use the proper tools to answer back.

Impact of RealTime communication and the Iranian crisis on the Arab World

The iranian crisis must be causing massive headaches to most Arab regimes these days. The fundamental dislocation in the iranian situation is that the state can't control communication anymore. Expelling foreign journalists and blaming them for depicting the situation under a biased light, cutting "wired and wireless" telephone lines, stopping txt messaging in the country's capital doesn't help anymore!

People are using 21st century technology to work around these restrictions : Twitter and Facebook! The key to these services is that they don't have a single point of entry like traditional web services used to have. You don't have to go facebook.com or twitter.com to access, share, comment on information or upload pictures and videos. A whole list of desktop applications like tweetdeck [6/28/09 - Fixed Link] or seesmic use web APIs (Application Programming Interface) to interact with facebook or twitter. These innovations in the web delivered services make controlling access much harder than it used to be. Multiple arab countries today still ban youtube and dailymotion as they are considered subversive. Some banned Yahoo!Mail and Google Mail for years.

So, what if a similar situation, like the latest iranian events, happened at home? How does the regime cope with people using non-traditional communication mediums to coordinate action, rally support and ultimately allow the world to have a direct view of what's happening on the ground?

It's safe to assume that governments in charge must be looking at emergency plans in case some level of unrest threatens the regime itself. I think two camps will clearly separate themselves : Those who understand what the technology is about and those who don't.

Let's start with those who don't. The old guard's reflex (as it's happening in Iran) will try to disrupt the "enemy"'s operational structure by cutting off these communication channels at all costs. This is the wrong answer by all means.

First, one has to contemplate what the economical cost of stopping Txt messaging service in the country's capital must be. Besides, a large number of Wireless operators in the region are backed by western companies which invested massive amounts of money to buy licenses to operate. These companies will let these government hear it if they lose millions of dollars because of a mandated ban and may even decide not to comply if it's not explicitly written in the license agreement. Give the region's reliance on Foreign Direct Investments, this could cause a backlash from investors that is damageable to its development.

Second, by banning something, you clearly give people the perception that it's more important than it actually is! The clear proof of this is the explosion of Facebook and Twitter accounts in Iran during the crisis because everybody rushed to get access to information that the government was trying to sensor. This pushed Facebook to rush out a Persian version.

On the other side, those who understand the dynamic behind the current RealTime communication revolution are aware that there is more disinformation than actual reliable information on these channels. Totally decentralized information channels (think ham radio since that's really the way I see Twitter for example) are open to anybody and therefore, are a mix of mediocre as well as extremely valuable data. How to discern fact from fabulation is up to the reader/listener... People tend to agree with others who think alike so there is bias.

It would be easy to marginalize informal media like Twitter or Facebook by letting more formal (state-controller or private) news sources report with a relatively fair stand. Only a handful of diehards would still be attracted to the chaos that decentralized information brings. So the best way to counter this potential disruption is to convince people that traditional media is balanced, not by saying but by proving that everyday!

Freedom of speech is a non questionable right and we definitely have a serious lack of it in our Arab societies. However, if we want a more transitional (aka peaceful) evolution toward regimes which are more representative of their constituents, we have to avoid the total chaos that revolution initiates and RealTime media fuels.

Outsiders to the iranian situation tend to forget that Moussavi was the Prime minister under khomeini during the Iran-Iraq war for 6 years and he's not a western-leaning politician by any stretch. If the Khatami days are any reference, moderate politicians in Iran may have the people's backing but their hands are still tied by the conservatives. For Moussavi to get to be president, a revolution (albeit of the minor kind) would have to happen with all the uncertainties that comes with it. There is no guarantee that this would result in a true positive step toward Iran standing as a peaceful regional power.

Transparency helps everybody act rationally during a crisis and that's the type of thinking everyone should rely on when the country's future is at stake.

Lessons from Obama's handling of the hot abortion "issue"

Today, President Barak Obama addressed the graduating class at Notre Dame University in Indiana. He gave what is called the "Commencement" speech. This tradition is common in all large US universities and the pick for this speech is usually loaded with significance. Notre Dame, for those who don't know, is the largest, most representative catholic university in the US. Catholics are at the forefront of the abortion debate and are clearly in the Pro-Life camp. So, given the public stance of president Obama on the subject (being openly Pro-Choice), this choice can be percieved as provocative to say the least. During the week before the speech, campus life was marked by protests and people opposing vehemently to the president's presence. This didn't the president from going to Indiana and delivering another master piece.

Obama entered the arena to cheer applause and a couple of protesters.

Lesson 1 : The majority of people are pragmatic and not dogmatic even though the latter ones are the ones who get their voices heard the most.

The speech in itself was typical Barak Obama : empathy and pragmatism at the same time. He advocates doing everything possible to lower the number of unintended pregnancies while increasing access to abortion clinics across the country and making services targeted at accompanying women after they get an abortion ever more effective given the terrible impact such a procedure has.

Lesson 2 : When you address people as adults and you show them that you understand their point of view and there common ground to both sides of an issue, they start listening.

He acknowledges that it's a difficult issue and that people are emotionally super-charged around it. He then states that people should be comfortable discussing difficult subjects and that it's the only way to move forward, all together.

Lesson 3 : Never position people against each other (us vs them), always be a Uniter

This leads me to think, why can't we have similar debates in our cherished country, Tunisia? There are so many "hot issues" starting with "Women wearing the veil" - This is a social issue that the legislator felt compelled to tackle but people still debate whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. There is a Laic camp and a tradionalist camp. People on both ends of the spectrum vilify the opposite side but there are a lot of moderates. All we need is a leader who can stand up and show people that the government understands everybody's concerns but that the law is intended to protect the majority. When you explain to people the decision process, they feel more comfortable with the outcome even if it's not what they expected in the first place.

We're still looking for a proper place to hold public debate since the traditional media by at large is not adventurous enough to explore these risky terrotories and the internet is such a chaos that only the extreme ends of the spectrum can scream loud enough to make a voice for themselves. We desperately need obama-style leadership.

Tunisia : Where do you belong?

I grew up in Tunisia in the 80's and 90's in a small-sized town, middle-class family to western educated parents. My parents lived in europe for almost a decade before moving back to Tunisia and settling down close to their parents. As far back as I can remember, we always had our eyes turned toward europe and the western world in general (Thanks to the parents) while being at the same time very deeply rooted in Tunisian traditions (Thanks to the grandparents). This double identity of some sorts manifests itself at various levels in Tunisian society starting with the school environment.

The educational system at that time taught people Arabic and French concurrently starting in 4th grade and through senior year in high school. French was considered as necessary for scientific education. Throughout high school, all science classes are taught in French (Math, Biology, Physics, Chemistry, etc). Arguably, some people never catch the French-speaking train and end up falling behind whether by dropping out of school or by pursuing art&litterature majors in High School where most classes are taught in arabic. This dual system ended up producing a small number (10%) of perfectly bi-lingual high school graduates, a significant proportion of people who were only fluent in one language (arabic or french) and sadly a large percentage of people who were capable of communicating fluently in neither languages. To make matters worse in certain cases, English is taught starting in 10th grade. Other languages like Italian, German or Spanish are available for people who want to pursue them for extra credit in their high school diploma.

To accentuate this, the arabic dialect spoken at home and on the streets is a mix of Arabic, French and other imported words from Italian and Spanish. For exmaple, the word "kitchen" in Tunisian is "koujina" which is an arabisation of the italian word "Cuccina". This mix of origins for the day-to-day spoken language reinforces the sense of Melting Pot and reflects the migratory influxes which are at the heart of tunisian history (from Carthage to the Muslim wave in the 7th century and then later the Vikings and the Spanish inquisition exodus and finally, french and italian settlers in the 19th century). At the same time, this makes people notice that their daily language is not arabic as perceived by the rest of the world. Pick an average person from the middle east and they can't undertand two tunisians discussing a casual topic.

So as a summary, we have a population that does not belong neither in the european sphere because of language barriers (but also, and perhaps more importantly, cultural barriers, we'll explore that another time) nor in the Middle East or african spheres for the same reasons.

This dichotomy exposes some of the schizophrenia and identity confusion that is inherent in tunisian society: Are tunisians "arabs" in the middle eastern sense? Clearly not. Are they africans in the subsaharian sense? Are they european? Certainly not. Are tunisians "mediterraneans"? euh, I guess so!

That's the best affiliation that I can find for tunisians in general. The tunisian way of life is so much closer to the way people live in Beyrout, Palermo or Malaga than it is to Amman or Kuwait city.

I was so hopeful about the so-called "Barcelona process" back in 1995 which was supposed to bring peace to the region by addressing the delicate issues of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (I hate it when people call this conflict the Arab-Israeli conflict because it is in reality not ...) and create a space where populations on both sides of the mediterranean could live together peacefully, coorperate and share the benefits of prosperity. This didn't happen and a new initiative was launched again last year by the President Sarkozy to little enthusiasm from all the involved parties. There is so much at stake in anchroing the maghreb (Tunisia+Algeria+Morocoo and someday Libya) to the mediterranean sphere instead of putting it in an inadequate box either with the rest of the african continent or the middle east at large.

This identity vaccum in the region is being filled today by imported identities from the middle east which do not correspond to historical values that tunisian society has. And the battle for our own identity is being lost everyday, satellite TV has too much impact on the population when no alternative solution is available ...

Silicon Valley is such a unique place - Part 1

I have been thinking lately about the opportunity cost of leaving Silicon Valley (as I mentioned in my previous post) so I started contemplating the last 9 years that I have been here in the "Valley", as the locals call it.

I finished school in 2001 and started looking for a job right when the internet bubble bursted. It was a very tough environment especially for people without real practical skills (as was my case at the time, we'll get to why that was the case in a later Post). I landed two job interviews which resulted in one job offer which I accepted happily. I was about to design my own Printed Circuit Boards to be used to test Networking gear. A significantly complex project for a guy out of school. Good times for a couple of months as I learned a lot on the job.

Given that this job was at a networking company, the bubble burst did eventually hit the company's finances and layoffs ensued - a round every quarter with 10-20% of the people laid off. After 18 months of stressful times (still with a job though) and a couple of cancelled projects, I decided to start hedging against this uncertain situation. So I contacted some of the people I worked with who have been either laid off at previous rounds and joined other companies or who moved on deliberately. The engineer who was sitting in the cube next to me and with whom I interacted at times (but not that much), passed my resume to the HR person at the company where he was working. Turns out he was an engineer at a well known graphics processors (GPU) company. I had no idea how transferable my newly acquired skills would be but I thought that I had little choice but to give it a shot. There I went and I interviewed with a team of engineers who was looking for somebody who could build a whole environment to help them test their new Chip design. I eventually convinced them that I was a good bet and they hired me. I was lucky enough to get the offer letter a couple of days before I finally got laid off from my first job...

let's take a look at the underlying threads here :

• Hire "smart" people, that's the only way to success : Even though I didn't have practical skills coming out of school, somebody was willing to take a chance on an energetic well-educated guy. (no pretentiousness here ...)
• Empower yourself, you're in charge you're not a victim : I took my fate in my own hands and I looked for another job instead of having to do it after losing my source of income. This is a common theme in how people behave around here.
• Hire "smart" people - take 2 : Even though I had experience in one field, somebody was willing to take a chance on me in a completely different field with a clear 3 months ramp-up time.
• Prioritize hiring people who are recommended by people you already know : peer validation is a very powerful selection tool. When people have their reputation on the line, they won't forward you a bogus resume. That was the case when my old colleague recommended me to get in.
• Recessions don't last forever and there is always somebody thriving in a recession : I didn't feel discouraged by the fact the internet bubble burst was pretty significant historically, I looked around to find out where the opportunities are ...

The combination of people's spirit and business' willingness to value human capital makes Silicon Valley a pretty special place.

Part-2 of this series will show how the concentration of talent and professional networking can be a key part of ones Valley experience.