The good news is that Trinidad and Tobago is no longer on the list for the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP). Really. Even the oddly spoken Trinidad and Tobago Finance Minister, Karen Nunez-Tesheria, got that right. She's probably right to say that the macroeconomic indicators all support it. But she's wrong to use the GSP as an indicator of economic strength - that's a circular argument¹ and one that I am pleased that I didn't have to listen to in Parliament. Dog chases tail, tail chases dog, Finance Minister speaks. Half empty, half full, Finance Minister speaks. Film at Eleven.

Being on the GSP is an exemption from Most favoured nation status requirements of the WTO - but that doesn't really say much in English. What it really means is that a nation is considered to be one of the least developing nations and is being given a chance to compete with more developed economies. It's one of the checks and balances that arguably works for less developed nations. That Trinidad and Tobago was removed from GSP status by someone with the economic experience of George W. Bush is, indeed, a dubious (dubyas?) honor.

Admittedly, I'm not a big fan of the Olympic Games. It isn't that I don't appreciate the effort that the athletes put into their successes and, yes, failures. It is simply that I have always viewed what the athletes do on the periphery of my own life - much as I expect they do with my own life. They probably don't read what I write - they are busy training.

In essence, I'm a poor spectator. Except when it comes to FIFA World Cup Football. Then I lose my mind.

Even so, I have friends who appreciate the Olympic Games. In discussing with a friend who actually made it to the 1996 Olympics as a spectator, he pointed out a few interesting things to me. With the Beijing Olympics 2008 around the corner, the general public of Trinidad and Tobago probably knows more about the Olympics thanks to the branding of Coca Cola... yet does anyone in the country know who will be representing Trinidad and Tobago, much less the region? Unlike when the World Cup happened, there's really no paraphernalia for supporting the Trinidad and Tobago Olympic team. For people around the world, the Olympics are a big deal.

The Trinidad and Tobago Olympic Committee website doesn't have much - but it may have a piece of the puzzle here:

Let's say that you have a tenant who is occupying a lot of land and some agricultural land as well. Let us then say that the tenant flies back and forth to New York from Trinidad all the time, and has recently upgraded a house on your land from a wooden structure to a concrete mansion.

Let's say that the rent for the house lot is $532 TT per year - roughly $88 US dollars/year. Pretty good, huh? And let's say that the rent is controlled by an assessment board that doesn't deal with the value of the land itself but rather with the amount of money a tenant claims in taxes. Suddenly, being in agriculture is an outstanding benefit.

So here's the problem: To get the water connection through WASA to their new structure, they need to show that they've paid a house tax to the government - a real pittance, but something that requires an assessment number which would... come with the land. Since they haven't actually paid taxes on the land (since they don't own it), they come to the person who owns the land - you - to write a letter that you have paid the taxes.

If you give them the letter, they might still pay rent or might not. Evicting someone with a concrete house on one's land is not something that can be easily done in Trinidad and Tobago, especially if they're a tenant. And people have a tendency to not pay rent for years, instead flying back and forth to the United States while reporting no taxes in Trinidad and Tobago and perhaps even no taxes in the United States - working under the table or what have you.

While leeching internet access at a friend's place (jm), I ended up passively watching reruns of Trinidad and Tobago parliamentary debates while checking email. My friend came out, and we discussed the Caroni 1975 shenanigans which I'll write of another time. But we also discussed, quite briefly and poignantly, what a major problem related to the environment of Trinidad and Tobago actually is.

It is, quite simply, a nuance in language which demonstrates the problem. An 'Environmental Management Agency' manages the environment in the context of what the government wants to do. As my friend rightly pointed out, an 'Environment Protection Agency' is what is needed - not some group of people that attempt to mitigate risk to the environment by softening the blow of whatever it is the government, or any other group, wants to do. The aluminium smelter is a brilliant example of this. Instead of saying that it should not be done, they simply said that it would be relocated elsewhere... and there's really been no word as to what is going on with that.

In a more simple context, an Environmental Management Agency says where you can dump things that can damage the environment. An Environmental Protection Agency would say, "You cannot dump here."

Clowns to the left of me
Jokers to the right
Here I am
Stuck in the middle with you...

-- Steve Miller Band Stealers Wheel

These days, time is a precious commodity and I quite simply don't have as much time to spend dealing with social networking... networks. Facebook is one thing which is an enormous time sink and becomes more so because most people get a new toy and, like most people when using something that dumbs down the Internet enough for them to use, go a bit nuts.

It's ok. I understand. I don't necessarily like it, but I understand. And as someone who does understand, it is my responsibility to enlighten. After all, I've been around long enough to remember when the phrase 'asbestos underwear' was new. I remember when email addresses were strings of numbers and dots. For that matter, I remember when pornography was hard to come by (no pun intended).

Here's a short list of what not to do with Facebook if you don't run into the dark side of this techno-dinosaur - and what would be considered inappropriate etiquette by anyone who doesn't view the Internet as a toy built for someone else's recreation... at that someone else's expense of time and energy.

• Poking someone who is already your friend is annoying. 'Poking' seems to have been designed to allow people who are not your friend to see your profile. If you want to say something, then bloody well say it or be advised that I have another idea of where you can stick your digit. And it typically doesn't smell nice, unless you're into that sort of thing... at which point I'll have to pick a new place for your finger. Like in your eye.

Unbeknown to anyone other than people in the real world, I'm in the middle of a move to a new place. Actually, I'm at the tail end of the middle of the move - the first night spent in the new digs was uneventful aside from the cramping of my legs at night - up and down stairs all day and no longer being 16 does have an effect, in case you were wondering. Still, the majority of the work is done in the actual moving and the unpacking continues.

Why did I move? Well, I had intended to move onto the land, but my timetable for leaving the old place was artificially advanced by someone who likes to exert control - so rather than fight, as my late father and his late sibling would have expected of me, I simply rolled with the punch. Let it be known that the water surrounding me is typically thicker than any corpuscle laden fluid known to traverse a network for the purposes of nutrition and excretion.

All people who are close to me need to know at this point is that I am smiling, and that I will write of the details at a later date - perhaps not here, but on a book I've been working on. Everything is connected.

I must note that, for the most part, I do not miss the Internet as much as I would have expected with all the turns in events of my life recently. It isn't that I think you are no longer special, dear reader, but that my priorities are shifted - at least temporarily. And all that I observe are fodder for more writing. Such characters, such circumstances. I may actually be able to break out of non-fiction writing...

Because I'm still waiting to get a bunch of mail due to this year's strike, I ended up in local bookstores looking for something to read. As it happened, I came across Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, which I picked up at Ishmael M. Khan in Gulf City while looking for a stapler that I still need. I'd glimpsed it here and there on the web, and thought the premise was interesting. It seemed to fit the recent subgenre along the lines of Gladwell's Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference, by Malcolm Gladwell, which I found to be an outstanding book that bordered on simplification of chaos theory on 'open' systems. There seem to be a lot of books these days based on the 'butterfly on the other side of the world' phenomenon, which stands to reason since 10 years ago the butterflies were all the rage in mathematics. So it is with exciting new theories. The acid test, though, is in the reality.

In reading Freakonomics so far - and this I have done between bouts of sweat on the land - I've been full of smiles. My own philosophy on looking at issues seems to be similar to that of Levitt, where the easiest answer with the data available isn't always the right answer. Digging deeper brings up all manner of gems, be it in looking at a software problem or when dealing with tenants on land. There are so many ways to look at the same thing, so many issues that are related and yet are ignored because of the blinders associated with unique perspectives. As Chief Seattle once wrote:

Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

With that in mind, I found it intriguing that early in the book that the authors brought up crime in the 1990s in the United States. It was, as I recall, pretty bad - I was there for some snapshots of it in the late 80s and during the 90s. Suddenly, crime fell in the United States and many things were seen as contributing factors to all of this. However, the authors point out something interesting and thought provoking about the fall of crime in the 1990s within the introduction of the book:

Yesterday, while having some bush cleared, I ended up having an interesting conversation with someone on my land in the presence of two police constables from the South Oropouche Police Station. They've got cows eating the grass, and I'm trying to get the area cleared up so I asked them to move the cows - they agreed. I then told them that once the ponds are excavated - repaired - that they wouldn't be allowed to tether their animals there. The cows destroy the ponds, and after all - they aren't my cows. But cows eating grass are not a major concern for me, so I let it lay - and the ponds need to be excavated, so after excavation they will need to be maintained. Believe it or not, there is a pond lurking in the picture to the left.

This created a bit of a conversation that... seems a bit ludicrous on first pass. This is all paraphrased from memory.

'That is not your pond'
'Yes it is. I have a deed.'
'You haven't shown me your deed'
'Come up, I have it with me.'

He comes up the hill. I show him the deed.

'This is a temporary deed!'
'No, it is an official deed registered at the Red House.'
'No, this is a temporary deed.'
'Ok, so you say it is a temporary deed. But whether you believe it is temporary or not, it is still a deed.'
'Yes.'
'Good, so this is my land.'
'Yes.'
'So the ponds are mine.'
'No. Did you dig the pond?'
'No, did you?'
'No, my father dug that pond.' (points at a pond)
'But the pond is on my land. So the pond is mine.'
'No, it is not your pond. You didn't dig it.'
'Fair enough. When I excavate it, it will be my pond. Right?'
Silence.