A Good Day

I spent a few moments with Nate this morning. He woke up as I was passing by his room, and just wanted me to hold him. I picked him up, after retrieving his pacifier which had fallen, and held him in the rocking chair in his room. He just snuggled in and went back to sleep. It must have only been five minutes, but it felt longer. Just rocking. Those are the moments we live for. When we're just there for someone else, no matter how small. Someone we love.

How much time do we spend thinking about things that aren't in the present? How to make more money? What to do tomorrow? What needs to be done? How we're going to do something? What to do about something that's already happened? What if we did something different instead?

We'd all be a happier if we lived a little bit more in the here and now. That's the only time we ever really have where we can make a difference.

Running

So, I've completed my first week of running as a hobby. This is something I've tried on and off for a decade or so (mostly off), but always found an excuse to avoid it. Well, I'm out of excuses, and here's why. Those of you who have been around me for the past few months might have known I've lost a few extra pounds.

Alexis joined WeightWatchers awhile back to help lose some of the baby weight, and I felt the need to join her on this path. We officially started out on this path on April 1st. One thing they encourage is walking... it starts off nice and easy. In fact, it was easy to slip in a 20-30 minute walk on my lunch break that I started doing that pretty regularly. Not bad. It worked quite well. Then, the weather got really hot down here in Texas... 66+ days over 100 so far these season. Noon didn't seem like such a good time to walk anymore, so I started getting up early to walk -- that's where things started getting interesting, because I kept walking further and further... until I was up to 1.5 hours without feeling like I got much out of it.

So, for awhile I hopped back on my bike and did that for a few weeks, getting my normal 5-6 mile circuit time down from 45 minutes to 25... but it didn't provide much of a challenge, and looping that circuit was a bit boring. So, I decided to try mixing some running into the morning walk. I started off slow, a count of thirty in my head to run for a stint, and then walk until I caught my breath again. Amazingly, I was able to do that -- I never had much confidence in my running ability. So I tried it the next day... and the day after that, my knee started throbbing. Aw -- I knew there would be something.

After a couple of weeks, and a vacation, I decided that I should give it a proper go. So, on the advice of other friends that are runners, I went to RunTex to get 'fitted' for a shoe. Now, I'm the kind of guy who buys $30 sneakers, so I was not looking forward to this. My experience at the store was less than desirable, mostly because I felt the salesperson seemed to think I was an inconvenience and I had to ask explictly for everything... not exactly good for a beginner. He did watch my gait and recommended a 'motion control' shoe, which at least let me look up on the Internet what the heck that meant later. After a couple more visits, I ended up with a pair of Adidas Foundation 8s.

So, I was finally ready to run. I picked some random training program off of the Internet (I'm not sure I could find it again if I tried) that looked as easy as I could. Basically, it's an 8 week plan to be able to run for 2 miles (this plays into that confidence thing). I'm still a little nervous I'm going to blow out a knee or something crazy, so this looked good to me at the time. The first week of the plan starts off with running for one minute, walking for 2 minutes, and repeat that ten times.

I managed to figure out how to program my watch to beep at the appropriate times for this plan, so I didn't have to pay attention to what I was doing... I just have to hit a button when I switched from walking to running and vice versa -- nice. I found that a minute of running was roughly equivalent to my count of thirty in my head, so I was already a bit prepared for this training.

I've now completed the first week of my training, which amounts to 4 runs in 7 days, plus a couple of days of just walking. Next week, I'll be programming the watch every day as the training steps up the time running from here on out, but I'm encouraged. My one knee aches a bit today, so I'll be taking tomorrow off, but this is nowhere near the pain I had when I first started. I'm also feeling quite a bit more accomplished, so I decided to write this blog post as a pat on the back for myself. ;-)

Independence Day

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

On this day, we celebrate the forging of a great nation. A nation conceived to secure the blessings of liberty for all it's citizens. There is much opportunity left in this land, if we dare achieve it. We need not look to the government to provide for us, but to use our freedom to seek it out and keep fostering our more perfect union to provide for the generations to come.

God Bless the USA.

8 Hours on Saturday

See: texas twosome plus one.

Regenerate = Derma-Full

This is just creepy.

Avon is selling a new facial cream, and they have been airing this ad for it.

Flash back to a certain video-game-become-movie trailer, which had an injection known as Regenerate that happened to unleash a zombie plague on the world.

The similarities are just too creepy for me. Wouldn't you go out of your way to avoid coincidences like this?

The History of Monopoly

To settle an argument while on vacation, we had to look up the history of the board game Monopoly. This is quite a fascinating history, dating back to the early 1900's. The game was designed to illustrate the negative effects of rent and taxation, specifically to promote Georgism. I'm not sure it had much effect on public opinion, but it makes me want to create a game to highlight the benefits of the FairTax. ;-)

The Creator's Culture

I ran across a very insightful blog posting today that I have to share.

In this community, production is valued. Members celebrate other individual’s hard work, congratulating them when they release their new products.
...
Hard work, creativity, passion, production — that is what is rewarded and celebrated.

This is what our country (heck -- the world!) needs more of.

As we celebrate the those that do not produce, we ourselves question the value of hard work, and it leads to nasty things like dependency on government and apathy for our purpose in life. If we're not careful, we'll end up like the humans in Wall-E.

So, without further ado, go out there and make something!

FairTax Special Order

This is long (an hour), but goes over most of the arguments for FairTax.

http://www.fairtaxnation.com/.

Rah! Rah! Rah!

Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

- Yoda

It's time to stop fearing "the economy".

I Love Cartoons

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Well Played

Bit of a Slump

I just haven't been in the mood lately to post. It seems to me that my government has gone insane, spending away our (great?) grandchildren's tax money. There's all this talk about stimulating the economy, but it is just politics as usual.

Nothing in the "stimulus" bill is really meant to get things moving. The President is relying on fear to bully his agenda through Congress. He learned very well from the previous administration how to do that. There is just a token amount in the bill to create jobs, most of it is long-term. Congress sailed it through because there are enough hands in the till these days, no one notices what is really happening. This is all about government control. Federal control. Bringing more power to the federal government, because who isn't getting money from this?

Never mind that most of our representatives couldn't even read the final text of the 1000-page bill because it hasn't been posted long enough. So much for transparency.

Let's do some math for fun. I heard this on Dave Ramsey, but I wanted to see it in print:

	$787,000,000,000.00
divided by	3,500,000.00	jobs
equals	$224,857.14	per job

How's that for government efficiency on creating or saving jobs? And every time I hear that number from our representatives it gets smaller or just downplayed as an estimate.

According to the IRS, there are about 138 million taxpayers in the U.S. If we take that same number above, that would come out to about $5700/taxpayer. Add in last years $800 billion bank welfare program, and we're talking about $11,500 per taxpayer in the United States.

$11,500 per taxpayer. That represents the tax on a single person in the US making about $60,600 per year in taxed income. I want you to think of this not as money being paid to you, but money being taken from you. Just let that soak in.

Who do you think is going to pay for this, if the government is already spending more than it takes in? Yep: our children, grandchildren, and their children. You would think that people would learn from Madoff that this is just a Ponzi scheme played out at a whole new level.

The real catch is, this little scheme isn't going to do anything for the economy. We are the economy. The economy will recover when we all stop feeling scared about losing our jobs and start buying things again. How do you really do that? Well, how about offering companies a $20,000 tax credit for every employee that they hire this year (net gain in employment)? Let's see how that math looks:

	$20,000	per job
multiplied by	3,500,000	jobs
equals	$70,000,000,000	total

Hmmm... Dave's plan cost's 10x less than then one that just sailed through Congress. It's almost a rounding error -- heck, they've knocked that much out of the plan that just went through over the course of the last couple of weeks.

This plan stops the hemorrhaging in jobs, brings confidence back to the American consumer, and starts immediately.

It's just too bad no one in Washington will listen to this plan, since it doesn't offer any more power for them.

He Who Has the Gold, Rules

Ah, it's nice to see that some people are paying attention out there.

Do you wonder why Obama is letting the Republicans and Democrats do whatever they want with the stimulus package? The answer to me is quite obvious - he doesn’t care about it and what it does. Look through it - it is chump change for everyone. $1,000 tax break per couple, some money for states and cities, money for the road builders, some for solar energy, some for university students, but all of it chump change. The simple reason is that he doesn’t care about the stimulus because it doesn’t matter.

The big prize is what his funders in the financial sector want and that is the bad bank where they can pour the multi-trillions of dollars of bad loans onto the taxpayer without losing their jobs, their stockholders being wiped out, and some of them having to do the perp walk. It is the next banking bailout where the massive transfer from the taxpayers to the wealthy is going to occur. Watch the ball. Don’t listen to the words, believe the “shocked” indignation, or accept that Obama and the Congressional Democrats do not know what is going on.

http://www.creativeclass.com/creative_class/2009/01/31/understanding-the-obama-stimulus/

About this Recession...

So, remember back in April, when I stated that we weren't in a recession? Apparently, I don't know what I'm talking about, as the NBER issued a statement last month that yes indeed we have been in a recession since November of 2007.

To be fair to me, they did correct the data, and the recession started in the last quarter that I had data for. Here's an updated chart:

Now the chart does indeed dip below zero a couple of times. This alone isn't enough to warrant a recession, though... so what else was happening?

Well, there were a couple of things. First, NBER looks at factors other than GDP, "The committee believes that domestic production and employment are the primary conceptual measures of economic activity." So, they're looking at employment as well as production, and employment "reached a peak in December 2007 and has declined every month since then."

Second, since I was just looking at the GDP data, I missed an important point about the variance of that data against the Gross Domestic Income data.

The committee believes that the two most reliable comprehensive estimates of aggregate domestic production are normally the quarterly estimate of real Gross Domestic Product and the quarterly estimate of real Gross Domestic Income, both produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In concept, the two should be the same, because sales of products generate income for producers and workers equal to the value of the sales. However, because the measurement on the product and income sides proceeds somewhat independently, the two actual measures differ by a statistical discrepancy. ... [T]he currently available estimates of quarterly aggregate real domestic production do not speak clearly about the date of a peak in activity.

So, clearly they're looking a little deeper than I did. I'll make another post when I get that data tabulated and charted so we can examine it closer. For now, let's look at the employment data. This comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I can only see monthly data there that preceeds the current recession by a month (ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/suppl/empsit.ceseeb1.txt).

So, there is other data to cull through, but for now, I've at least pointed out why my previous post was inaccurate.

Removing the Link Between Money and Laws in Congress

I have to admit, that I wasn't a fan of this plan at first. Lessig has made a compelling case that the most important problem we need to solve with our Congress is their need to perpetually raise money to be re-elected. This need keeps them from focusing on the real problems we face.