Munene, the journey...

I recently completed an assignment for an International Economics Policy class which entailed designing a carry trade. A carry trade is a financial transaction that involves borrowing (short) in a low interest currency, and lending (go long) in a high interest (yield) currency. For instance from Bloomberg 's rates for bonds, this would involve borrowing in Swiss francs (rate is -0.15 percent) and lend in New Zealand dollars (rate is 2.83 percent). All else remaining equal, the carry trade would yield a rate differential of 2.83+0.15 = 2.98 percent. Note: this is an unusual case where the interest rate we are borrowing from is negative; usually, this would involve subtracting the first interest rate from the second. For instance, borrowing in Japanese yen (0.04 percent) and lending in Kiwi dollars (at 2.83 percent) would yield 2.79 percent as profit. My carry trade in this case involves borrowing in USD at a rate of 2.33 percent, and buying bitcoins. But, what, you may ask, is the...

Never underestimate your opponent. It's better to be overprepared than underprepared. Therefore, prepare, learn your competitor's tricks, weaknesses and tactics and use them against them. It is highly likely that the Jubilee side leaked to the NASA side about the hacking of the IEBC servers knowing full well that NASA would lap it up. NASA presented "evidence" based on MSSQL architecture, while the IEBC says that its database runs on Oracle. Whatever the case, the NASA side presented a weak case that has not convinced many stakeholders. Invest in your team and FULLY prepare your agents. Perform your trainings thoroughly. Run a tight ship. Have no room for leakages or moles or people who are easily bought. It is said that a lot of NASA's agents at the various polling stations were bought and did not protect RAO's votes. Ensure that you pay your agents well, and let them know that there's more rewards for their loyalty. Have no time for infighting, let you...

Star-born and born of star light Born, yet unborn Living, yet not living Dying, yet infinite Seeing, yet unseen The subject and the object as ONE A soul, indescribable and indestructible A spark and ray of eternal consciousness The night and day as ONE The past and future as NOW Part human and part ALL A spark of infinity light Risen and rising still Knowing and yet unknown Been and being still A beginning without an end Transcending us while being us The master and the pupil, yet ONE The story, telling itself The drum, beating itself The wind, blowing itself The human soul

In 2016, Kenyans in the diaspora sent home USD $1.6 billion (about KSh. 160 billion). In 2013, Raila Odinga and Uhuru Kenyatta each spent an equivalent of about USD $100 million (KSh. 10 billion) vying for the presidency. This year, numbers are projected to rise beyond USD $200 million (KSh. 20 billion) in a "rematch" of the 2013 contest. And just as in the past, most Kenyans in the diaspora will be unable to cast absentee votes, even though the law says that every eligible Kenyan should be availed to vote. And that is where I think the diasporans [sic] should agitate for greater representation. Kenyans in the diaspora control enough remittances to be one of Kenya's top foreign exchange earners. If they wanted, they could form a movement to pool funds and finances a political party (KSh. 15 billion spending cap), presidential (KSh. 5.25 billion spending cap), and other county-level representatives (KSh. 433 million spending cap). In politics, in Kenya and beyond, mon...

It is that time of the semester when all the decisions of the last 3 months come to bear on a graduate student. 4 papers are due, exams are in 3 weeks, there's internships and jobs to find. It seems as if everything decided to become due at the same time. But that's not quite the case. For me, even getting to write this blog post took a lot of, well, procrastinating. Being in graduate school requires a great deal of what I call sensible procrastination. I am not advocating for leaving only 30 minutes to complete an assignment that requires 10hours, that's stupid. In fact there are things that we cannot procrastinate for too long without seeing some negative side effects. Doctors and other personnel who deal with matters of life and death also, may not have the luxury of procrastination in saving lives. However, even in these extreme scenarios, I think that we might have more leeway on some other matters than we let on. Another thing to consider is that eventually all ...

The premise of this book is that love is not a sentiment, but a productive process that requires effort and other qualities in the loving individual such as true humility, courage, faith and discipline. As Fromm puts it, "Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Or is it a pleasant sensation … something which one 'falls into' if one is lucky?" Fromm then describes the problem of our society as an endeavor to being loved and to be lovable, rather than that of loving others. And so, we toil to make ourselves successful, powerful and rich, to be attractive, with pleasant manners, inoffensive and so on in order to experience being loved . The second problem is the attitude that, "… to love is simple , but to find the right object to love is difficult i.e. it's not that we lack the capacity or ability or faculty to love, but that we have not found the 'right' person to love." Thus, the goal is to find the 'best'...

I do not particularly like networking events. Formal ones such as those organized by schools and are termed "career networking night" or "spring prom", are particularly abhorrent to me. The reason is that the end of the night is supposed to bring us closer to gaining employment, making connections to interesting things happening in our fields and so on. If we are lucky, all we end up with is a bunch of fancy business cards that we dump at the bottom of our drawers, never to see the light of day again, and of course a bloated stomach from all those nachos and chicken wings we consumed. image courtesy of goldenkeyhq.files.wordpress.com My main problem with these events however, is the premise for the event: highly intelligent people, who know themselves to a certain degree, are going to share some close quarters with strangers, in order to knock around ideas, connect and possibly plan some future engagements. What ends up happening, however, is that highly anxio...