a Modest Proposal for child care

I've heard that bringing two problems together can sometimes create a solution. Let's test that.

Here in California, two industries are going gangbusters - housing and childcare. Housing because despite economic slowdown there remains a good deal of pent-up demand, so new developments are still going in on the outskirts of the large cities. This has become so bad that migrant farm laborers are switching to construction in the Central Valley bcause it pays better. Plus, aging homes in termite-infested areas means a lot of renovations and repairs. Put the two together and it becomes very hard to find contractors to work on ones home. Anyone with a positive reputation is booked over a year in advance.

Only quality childcare is harder to come by. Waiting lists are the norm. In fact, if you don't get on a waiting list when the child is one or so, it'll be hard to get into a quality preschool before the child goes on to kindergarten.

The solution is obvious: "Bob the Builder(tm) Preschool".

"Bob the Builder Preschool prepares children for life by building their self-confidence in performance of useful and lucrative home maintenance and construction skills. Your child will experience real job sites and and benefit from quality instruction delivered by professional builders and fore(wo)men. Attendees develop skills with a wide variety of hand and power tools, as well as gain teamwork and language skills. Projects include basic carpentry, drywall, electrical and plumbing. Projects in the final year include abatement of hazardous compounds such as asbestos and molds."

:)

"Bob the Builder" is a trademark or registered trademark of someone else.

[Comments from my previous blog]

1. Mother of your children left...

Wednesday, 5 July 2006 6:19 am

I cannot wait to see what *Language skills* the children develop. I still prefer the name "Camp Glen" to "Bob the Builder Preschool". Makes it sound like the kids have a chance of having some fun. I can just see the curriculum "Trench Making for the Energetic", "The Art of Pouring Beer", and "How to walk the dog up really big hills".

Glen responds:  Just pouring? Our local microbrewer-run preschool program is teaching kids to brew beer ... never mind. Yes, dear.

2. ms. L left...

Wednesday, 17 January 2007 3:10 pm

This would be perfect for the Montessori minded parents. "Practical Life" skills gone wild!

3. ＮＡＴＳＵＭＩ　ＫＡＳＵＹＡ left...

Sunday, 6 July 2008 3:19 pm :: <link deleted>

I write the diary of the child care. It is daily life being nice, a pleasant thing, a serious thing, surprising continuation. Please link this site.

4. Shazia left...

Thursday, 22 January 2009 6:11 am :: <link deleted>

Nice article. This article is provide useful and importnat information. These information is very workable.

5. careprovider left...

Wednesday, 3 June 2009 3:43 am :: <link deleted>

My child went there and it's a great pre-school. Feel free and trustful to take your children there!

Blogs again, and frequency

Yesterday I attacked a blogging 'rule' I'd been flogged with, and then I was thinking about it a bit more and realized I'd been flogged (or at least gently castigated) with another: how often one blogs.  A while back there was a survey of blogging by folks productizing open source, and it was noted that while I have a blog (true), I hadn't posted since November (at that time, true).  The implication being that this is bad.

While infrequency is no doubt bad for my Google ranking, I have to relate this back to my post yesterday, that, for me, blogging is about advancing an idea or discourse.

Have you ever been in a meeting, to hear a comment afterwards that the meeting took so long because we needed to give everyone a chance to say the same thing?  I have, once or twice.  It is one of those wry-giggle sorts of moments.

If posts are to advance an argument or carry on a discourse, then they probably should be infrequent.  Or at least, they should probably only be as frequent as one has something useful to say. Or at least, that seems useful to the one saying.

Anything more is probably blog-spam, flooding our aggregators with an equal measure of things found by roadside and dead-cat posts.

Dang, this is probably my shortest post ever.

[Comments from my previous blog]

1. Bill left...

Tuesday, 28 March 2006 11:21 am

No comment. 8-)

Rules about what goes in a blog?

First a disclaimer: blogs can no doubt be whatever you want them to be.
Now a recant: my disclaimer is actually my point.

From time to time I've wanted to create a communication channel at my work that would let me dig in and chew on a topic, or invite a guest writer to do so, but in a more colloquial way than in a paper or presentation or "standard" corporate sort of piece.  Something like a blog. Text. Long or short as it needs to be to make and defend a point. Relatively unedited - certainly no magazine-editorial-staff, but really edited only as much as the writer needs to self-edit for his own comfort.

But whenever I've tried to do this (and it has been 3 or 4 times over the past year or so), I get these blank looks.  I keep hearing "But, a blog is a diary, not a magazine."  The latest expression of this is within an email newsletter I read from time to time. Amy Wohl said [ed: not available online any more]:

I’d also be breaking a blog rule.  Sometimes I write at some length and blog pieces are usually pretty short.  I could write a summary paragraph up front when I’m going to do that.  That would break yet another rule – or maybe invent something new.

*sigh*

So, sticking my head in the lion's jaws: this diary notion ...does it make any sense at all?

No.

A diary is something I write for myself, not for others.  When I write for myself, I write in my own shorthand, something that will remind me of a state of mind or a thought process I'm going through.  I skip steps. Skip letters. Hell, skip whole words or even sentences. I flit around from point to point. I jot in the margin in a stream-of-conciousness sort of way.  And this works because I know sorta how my brain parses information.

And even more, all my diary need do is remind me - it doesn't need to convince me, or even explain to me.
I joke about my handwriting: it is so bad that even I can't read it, but that is ok because as soon as I see it I can remember what I wrote. Those who know me or my handwriting personally will probably agree.

Can I do the same thing in a blog? I don't think so. Even if I accept the 'short quip' sort of blog style that many bloggers use, what I would write *for myself* in such a quip is rather different than what I would write for others. What others would get from what I write for myself is an odd thing to think about.

So I think 'diary' is pretty nonsensical.

Some use blogs fire off more rapid notes. And that is ok.  Though personally I see the mini-postings descend into a sort of glorified bookmarks page, comprised of links and no especialy added value. It winds up looking like little blocks, each comprised of a phrase or sentence or two, and a link. Not always, but surely a good deal of the time. 

Frankly, that sort of thing isn't really blogging for me because it doesn't contain any or enough of *me* - that's the one bit of the 'diary' concept that works for me, that my blog reflects me, not others. My thoughts. Not just semi-mechanical mention of things found at the roadside.

And for me, at least, reflecting me means that it is a mini-article, or mini-essay, and that is states a problem, describes a thought, appears at least sometimes thoughtful and hopefully from time to time is a little thought-provoking.

I don't know. It seems to me that a blog is a tool, not a product. The tool is about lightweight publishing process, not about the shape of the finished product. You can use it for a diary if you really want, and you can use it for glorified bookmarks too. Or you can use it to advance a discourse or promote a point of view. And it is about the feed, not what is fed.

But the point is that you just do it.

[Comments from my previous blog]

1. Knowledge Process Outsourcing left...

Monday, 22 February 2010 12:35 am :: http://www.kpo.com/

Thanks for sharing this very inspiring post. Even if you don't think so, I think it is relevant for a blogger to be able to express herself to his ideas.

2. glen martin left...

Saturday, 24 April 2010 6:25 am :: http://blog.glen-martin.com/

I think that was my point ... a blog is about expressing ideas to others. Key words here being 'expressing' and 'others'.

Link blogs don't fit for me because they don't express your ideas, they're just bookmarks.
Saying blogs are like a diary doesn't fit for me because diaries aren't for others, they are for yourself. And then having said it is a diary, one can make up all sorts of rules about what belongs in a blog, as to how diary-like that would seem.

No, my whole point is that a blog isn't like a diary at all, it is really a tool for self-publishing, and there are as many kinds of content as there are bloggers.

And that's ok. Just do it.

Thanks for reading.

Phishing with integrity

Sometimes it is possible to find humour in tedium. Phish attempts rank up there in plain unadulterated tedium for me. But check this out:

To take an advantages of current updrade (sic) you should login your account by using CitiBusiness^® Online application. For the purpose please follow the reference:
<bogus URL removed>
Please note that changes in security system will be effective immediately after relogin.

Oh, I dare say.  I have to respect truth in advertising.

:)

Traffic Jams

<snip>
Have you ever done the courteous thing when crossing an intersection, and waited back at your stop line because the lane opposite was backed up?  Have you ever had someone making a right turn slip in while you were going out of your way to not block the intersection?
<snip>
As Silicon Valley grew, people started moving into cities farther afield (indeed, they used to be fields), and commute in.  The local city into which they move charges developers for extension of local infrastructure like water, sewer, roads, but there is no model to share that revenue with cities through which the new residents will drive to get to work. So the roads in the middle aren't expanded, and commute times for those who live nearer the jobs go as distant commuters clog the highways.
<snip>
If I could construct cars for free, gas was free, and I had an infinitely large parking lot at my house, I could push cars out my driveway in a steady stream. Where would they go? And why should I not to this? After all, I've paid real estate taxes for my driveway.
</snip>

There's been a fair amount of tearing-out-of-hair lately over the desire of BellSouth et al to create a throttling mechanism for the internet, in essence, to charge for bandwidth based on quality of service (QoS) metrics.

I frankly think that tiering only makes sense.

First, it closely models the real world.  In the real world, I can choose between a free road which may be congested, and a turnpike which may get me to my desitnation faster.  There are toll booths on the turnpike to both encourage the quality difference, and to charge me for the privilege.  Similarly, there are car pool lanes, and fastpass lanes, all rewarding drivers who contribute some (arguable) value to the system with shorter wait times.

Second, much more than in the real world. traffic generation is very very inexpensive in the electronic. If all the T1s to all the content providers were saturated, the trunks would need to be much  much much bigger, as would the switches that route between the trunks and access lines. Some might argue that the content generators already pay for their content to get onto the highway, but like me with my driveway, the physical limits of the driveway permit far more traffic than the system can accept in aggregate.

Now we might argue that this implies a massive increase of scale is necessary for the central infrastructure of the net. Probably so.  But until this the scale is increased there will be those who take advantage of the current system and inject more traffic than their share, like the friendly gent who cut me off by making a right turn on red yesterday while I was waiting for traffic to clear.  And the folks who run the roads will try to find ways (like "no turn on red" signs) to penalize that gent.

In the physical world, the different QoS metrics that exist for physical delivery of envelopes has led to a two-tier system of the government post office and private couriers.  In fact it is multi-tier, as the couriers and post office eash have multiple levels of service at different price points.  So my letter than absolutely must be received by tomorrow, will be received by tomorrow, for a premium carriage fee. Any amount of bulk mail can be pushed into the system by advertisers and not impact my letter at all.

What is so wrong about a tiered approach to net traffic?  Don't we want content we've purchased to arrive faster than spam?

401Ks and other registered plans are not always the best retirement savings vehicles

Disclaimer: I am neither an economist, nor a registered financial planner.  This is not investment advice.

The 401K and other registered vehicles operate under the assumption that future tax rates will be much lower than current. For many, especially comparing income while working to that during retirement, this may be a reasonable assumption.

But consider relatively younger or middle-aged folks with long investment horizons. With a very large federal deficit, underinvested social welfare, and baby boomers leaving the workforce, we seem aimed at a time in which overall tax rates must increase, possibly a lot, in order for the government to continue to deliver social services. If my retirement horizon were 5 years or so this will probably not make much of a difference. In that it is around 20 years, I’m not so comfortable that my marginal tax rate will actually decrease in retirement.

Another factor is deductible mortgage interest. Living on the San Francisco peninsula I have a rather high mortgage (for a modest house, thank you). Itemizing my deductions against income and working through my return, my marginal tax rate drops pretty dramatically despite having a pretty decent income. In retirement I hope I won’t have this high mortgage, but that really means that I won’t have artifically depressed tax rates either.

Add it up. The assumption underlying registered plans such as a 401K are not guarateed to hold. In fact, I'd say they are unlikely to hold for many who are currently working.

In fact, were the US federal government to show any signs of thoughfulness, I might imagine they designed 401Ks with these issues firmly in mind, and that they consider 401Ks an annuity they've purchased in today's dollars to help fund social services in the future.

It may still make sense to invest in a 401K, especially if your employer matches your contributions. But I’ve been directing a good portion of my long-term savings to non-registered plans. YMMV

[Comments from my previous blog]

1. Ralph Galantine left...

Monday, 30 October 2006 8:55 pm :: http://blog.quantmarkresearch.com

The usual advice now is to max out your Roth IRA contribution (contribute after tax dollars, returns and withdrawals are tax free) before you make any contribution to your 401K that isn't matched by your employer. You should also consider maxing out other tax favored accounts, like the education accounts, before contributing to 401K's or traditional IRA's. Regular IRA's and 401K's suffer from the tax issues you mentioned.
Roth IRA's are a good deal unless your income is too high to contribute. Also, if you have a low income year, you can convert some of your traditional IRA to a Roth IRA. The amount you convert is "income" so you have to pay taxes on it, but I don't think there is any other penalty although you will hit an income limit. Your retirement advisor can give details.
On a couple of your other points:
-In retirement, you may not have a big mortgage interest deduction but if you own your home clear you get your "rent" tax free. It is a benefit or "income" to you but it doesn't show up as monetary income so it doesn't get taxed.
-The idea that the 401K's could have been created to generate a tax annuity from the retired living off their pre-tax savings and interest is amusing and might actually help tax revenues as boomers retire. However, it would be a mistake to design that kind of program. 401K holders are also voters and clever people. Account holders may succeed in sheltering their accounts through various devices.

2. Jonathan Bruce left...

Wednesday, 6 December 2006 12:48 pm :: http://jonathanbruceconnects.com/jonatha

So what do mean by non-registered plans? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this...

Options backdating is not always unreasonable

Stock options as a component of employee compensation are intended to serve a simple purpose: tie the employee's future to the value of the company, so he is rewarded for any increase in value that he contributes to. Motivated thus, an employee frequently chooses behaviors favouring company performance. "Do the right thing."

The challenge is, how do we figure how much the company increased in value? For that matter, what is a company worth?

The easy measure is the current capitalisation of the company. To wit: multiply stock price by the number of outstanding shares. Very simple.

And being simple, arguably wrong, or perhaps more accurately, sometimes wrong. Notably in cases of speculation.   Create a bunch of buzz around future products and the stock price can run up a lot. Stock prices are benchmarked in terms of company earnings, but Price/Earnings (P/E) ratios can vary wildly depending on speculation on future company growth.  And this is only speculation - the company has no new products or technology (yet), no new revenue (yet), and so is at least arguably not worth any more than it was yesterday or last month.

So in compensating an employee to help build the products the industry is speculating on, what is reasonable as the basis for a grant? To value the company for purpose of that grant in terms of the inflated stock price, where the growth in value driven by the new product is already factored? Or the pre-speculation price so he can benefit from the value of the product he builds?  The pre-speculation price seems to me to be more consistent with the rationale behind granting options in the first place. So one might reasonably back-date the options grant (or perhaps more precisely, the grant price) to the stock price several weeks or months ago, when rumour and news started driving the price up.

None of this is to say that there hasn't, isn't and won't be abuse and fraud in the granting of stock options, but that is being covered pretty thoroughly elsewhere. Use your favourite search engine and you'll find as much as you care to read.

Disclaimer: Working in the tech industry, stock options have been a feature of my comp plans for years. None, however, have ever been backdated.