Your Child Must Become a Millionaire

An article in Directory of Madison says Your Child Could Be a Millionaire. I agree and would go a step further and say your child must be a millionaire and must be nearly a $100,000-aire by age 18. $200 a month over a child’s life at an 8.4% return will be $100,000 by age 18. $100,000 is not a lot of money. $100,000 plus continued monthly contributions will pay for a medium-priced undergrad education. If your child doesn’t go to college or gets a scholarship, that money can pay for their first home. Having that will make it easier for an adult child to save for retirement, which will require more than a million dollars.

If you accept that a comfortable retirement costs more than a million dollars, you have to start out saying my child will be a millionaire. The only other option is to teach them to manage the condition of having no money. Knowing how to operate with little or no net worth is a good skill to have. People should never, IMHO, consider living broke to be their primary path. The primary plan has to be having a reasonable net worth available to take advantage of business opportunities, handle emergencies, and help others. The plan should include ways to transfer some of that wealth to children so they don’t have too many opportunities in life to use their skills at living life with no money.

None of this is to say child must become rich. This is saying they must have resources to manage life’s ups and downs, and having a million dollar net worth or more is one part of doing that.

DreamBikes of Madison is Amazing

The winter is very hard on bicycle brakes, harder than I would intuitively expect. I estimate that my brakes wear out about eight times faster in the winter than in other seasons. The salt and sand gum up a bike chain about as much I as I would intuitively expect given that the front tire constantly kicks road dirt up on the chain.

I took my bike in to DreamBikes thie past Friday evening. I hoped I could have it back this weekend, so I would have it for this week. I know DreamBikes is inexpensive, so I figured it would cost about $12 for both sets of pads, another $12 for the labor, and maybe $50 for a cleaning. They had it ready the next morning, and the total cost was $10.55!

I have consistently found DreamBikes to have the friendliest service of the bike shops I have tried in Madison. There are many good bike mechanics working at the the other shops, but it doesn't take too many visits before you encounter someone with an attitude. They want to tune up a bike for someone who gets his bike out two weekends out of the year and has money to burn on the hobby. DreamBikes has a map showing all the places you can get to within two miles. They understand people use bikes for transportation.

Even if you're an occasional bike rider, you simply cannot get a bike fixed up at a shop less expensively or with better service than taking it to DreamBikes.

Fancy Baby Bow Website Was a Hiding Place for a Phising Scam

The other day I got a Phishing scam e-mail. I noticed the link pointed to virginia.edu. When I went to the website, I found a directory full of various html files pointing to another directory buried in a website selling fancy bows and hats for babies.

I wrote the webmaster at virginia.edu and at annebows.com. Virginia.edu webmaseter and annebows.com’s owner wrote back saying they were not behind the scam and they were cleaning the scam pages off their website. I assume annebows.com is not involved with the scam; otherwise they would not have written back apologizing for their site being hacked.

I have never been into babies until my first baby was born in 2008. I have another baby coming in 2010, so I’m sort of glad the scammer led to me a page with cute babies.

If we were into buying cute hats for infants, and neither my wife or I are into baby clothes, I would buy something quality from a small business I felt I could connect to instead of going to a huge chain. There’s nothing wrong with chains. I’m just saying, all things being equal, I would rather deal with a place where the owner writes back personally.

Obama Right on the Money with Spending Freeze

I was happy to read that President Obama is seeking a freeze on government spending, excluding military and entitlement spending.

Enacting this freeze would save $250 billion over the next ten years. That’s a drop in the bucket, but it’s the exact right thing to do at this time. We need some measured deficit spending during a recession to even out the economic cycle. The key is to cut off the deficit spending when the recession ends and, just as the Fed is supposed to do, take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going.

By proposing a modest reduction in projected deficit spending, Obama signals he is concerned about the deficit. He will have to get the government to follow through with serious deficit reduction when the economy begins to expand. For this moment, though, a modest cut in projected spending is exactly what is called for.

Making Things Work for the Poor

From an e-mailing from Mom’s Rising organization supporting healthcare overhaul: (I’m a dad, so I don’t know how I got on their list, but they’ve become the organization I love to hate.)

Healthcare reform is not about Democrats or Republicans, but about the real people who are struggling every day to find or keep health insurance for themselves and their families.
It's about MomsRising member Jamie in Mississippi whose husband struggled to decide whether or not to go to the ER when he thought he was having a heart attack for fear of having to pay their $500 deductible plus co-pay.

I come across comments like this on a daily basis. Are they saying that we need to restructure everything in our society so that people can operate without having even $500 set aside for emergencies? This same family doesn’t have $500 to handle dealing with an ice dam on their roof. They don’t have $500 to deal with car trouble or replace a broken appliance. They wouldn’t have it to deal with an unexpected legal issue either. Following the logic of overhaul supporters we need to overhaul the home maintenance system, the car repair system, the appliance replacement system, and the legal system so people can meet their basic needs without having any money to their name.

I am concerned about the issue of poverty. It’s a huge logical leap, though, to say the answer is to overhaul entire industries. In addition to being unnecessary, it will not work. The only thing that will help Jamie’s husband is having money on hand to pay for the things they need. We can debate how to make that happen. My claim is overhauling an entire industry will have many repercussions without solving the problem in question.

Analog Design Value in Mixed-Signal Design

Dave Van Ess at Cypress Semiconductor likens analog engineers who resist the idea of designing “the crappiest analog you can get away with” and relying on digital algorithms to clean it up to people who worked resisted the transition from mechanical to electronic calculators.

Pushing all design effort to the digital side makes sense for some applications and not others. The question for each application is how crappy are we are comfortable getting away with. It’s nice to have headroom in case signal-to-noise ratio decreases from some unexpected cause. OTOH, spending time designing an analog circuit for low-noise or elegance just for their own sake never made engineering sense even before digital processors became inexpensive.

Earth-Like Exoplanets Could Be Closer Than We Might Think

Today’s AP story on earth-like planets caught my eye in today’s newspaper.

Astronomers found the first planet outside our solar system when I was in high school. Before that, everyone said there probably were exoplanets, but no one could be sure. The first planets found were gas giants, where life as we know it could not exist. Now we have the ability to detect earth-size planets.

This reminds me of something I learned a few months ago when I read Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization by Robert Zubrin. Zubrin says that, although all my life Alpha Centauri has been thought to be the nearest star, there may be many closer starts. Many stars in the sky have not be studied to determine their distance. Most starts are dimmer than our sun. So some apparently distant sun-like stars could actually be dim stars very close to our solar system. There is still question about the number of stars near our solar system. There could be systems with Earth-like planets only a few light years away. We could have probes orbiting such a planet within a few human lifetimes.

I hope many other people besides me are willing to support astronomy research projects. I hope to see some amazing astronomical discoveries in my lifetime.

Madison Listed in Best Places to Launch a Business

Fortune listed Madison, WI as one of the best places to launch a business:

• Highly educated population
• Convenient transportation – Bike lanes on most roads. Bus coverage has been expanded at a time when other cities are having to cut back.
• 250 biotech companies employing 10,000 workers
• Temperate climate? (I think someone made an error with this one.)

It’s funny when ideologues say you can have [insert some progressive policy that Madison, WI implements] without disastrous consequences for the economy. These are usually people who think low taxes are the key to everything. Low taxes are important, but sometimes (not always) you get what you pay for.

I suspect Madison’s success doesn’t have much to do with politics. It’s mostly that we have an educated population, a family-friendly environment, and a Midwestern work ethic.