My Kids Are Learning to be Keepers of Their Own Lives

From I Am the Keeper by Cameron Reeves Poynter, former lawyer, a rabid sports fan and a wife and mother of two boys.

I am the keeper of rituals and memories. Of pumpkin patches and Easter egg hunts. I am the taker of pictures, the collector of special ornaments, and the writer of letters.
I am the keeper of emotional security. The repository of comfort, the navigator of bad moods, the holder of secrets and the soother of fears.
I am the keeper of the peace. The mediator of fights, the arbiter of disputes, the facilitator of language, the handler of differing personalities. 

My two kids have no keeper.  We all, including the 7- and 9-y/o kids, step up when we see someone in need.  There's no dedicated keeper, so sometimes we have to figure out our own bandaids.  I'm really proud at how even the kids mostly look out for one another and even the parents.  There's no grandparent help.  It's just us.

I am an electronics engineer, and my wife is a lawyer.  I cannot imagine one of us becoming a former engineer or former lawyer.  Pumpkin patches and Easter egg hunts are for off time.  I do wish we had more things like that, and that we were less tired.  But it's beyond my imagination to give up electronics or my wife to stop being an attorney.

I am very confident that my kids are learning a kind of emotional security from our encouraging them to go out and find people to play with.  We love playing with them some, but we live in the adult world.  The world of making mobile phones work better and helping people have their final wishes respected.  The kids' is the world of play.  I tell them try not to forget how to play as you grow older.  The kids world is also kids resolving some disputes on their own, learning to handle different personalities on their own, getting confidence slowly to handle the world's problems and eventually take their place as adults, like their parents.  They have a comfortable place to come home to when they're upset, but they do not have an ever-present keeper of emotional security.  They go out on their own on their bikes, and they don't know exactly what they'll find.

I can't imagine becoming a former-engineer to manage the kids world.  Maybe the “keepers” of the world can't imagine practicing law.  Keepers, we don't have to understand one another.  My 7-y/o daughter picks herself up after a minor scrape, but if you ever see her hurt worse, out there really crying, I would appreciate if you call me.  It's never happened, but I shudder to think of one of them really hurt.  If you're really exhausted, as I sometimes am, my kids will show yours how to resolve problems on their own.  I want to know if you ever see them resolving problems unfairly or ever hitting or stealing.  So far they always step up and act responsibly.  Be sensitive, keepers, if you ever ask us to work at a bake sale or fund raiser.  Instead ask if our businesses could make a donation at this time or if any of the organizations we work on have a budget for donations.  Sometimes they do.

I truly envy part of the keepers’ world.  My wife and I have lost something of the kid world.  We only see it when we watch the kids.  I humbly apologize to the keepers if I ever look at you some weird female Peter Pan for managing the world of Easter egg hunts and kids' games.  I tell my kids never to be disrespectful like that.  The world needs all kinds.  Maybe you could do something fun with our kids when they play with yours, way more fun than their stodgy old parents.  Maybe my kids can show you a secret place only kids know about and how to climb a tree so high it would give any parent pause.  I’d love to think of our kids becoming friends for life, looking out over the park from high in a tree in a place parents don’t know about.  

Christ Almighty is a Valid Curse Word

Yesterday I was talking to a friend who is very proficient in English and is a native speaker of Spanish. I admitted that once, in exasperation at my four-year-old wanting to go outside but resisting me helping him put on his winter clothes, I blurted out in front of the kids, "Oh Christ Almighty, just put on your coat!"

My friend thought it was the goofiest curse he had ever heard.  He told me that was not a real curse, and he was going to ask other native English speakers if it was a joke.  "All I know is that Craystamaiatin is no curse!"  He said it sounded at best like a minced oath.  Even if someone used it in anger, esp with crisp and nasal Midwestern accent, he'd have a hard time not laughing aloud.  

This is a common curse.  It's interesting how words are perceived so differently based on our background.

La Leche Pamphlets Have No Place in Clinics and Hospitals

I took my son to a pediatrician appointment for an ear infection today.  While we waited for the doctor, I grabbed some pamphlets to try to entertain myself and my son.  One of them was from La Leche League.  This is an organization that ostensibly supports breastfeeding, but ends up supporting the philosophy "a woman's place is in the home."  Amazingly, many Madison progressives think La Leche stands for supporting women's rights.

It's unfortunate that an organization promoting any political agenda is able to get its materials into so many clinics and hospitals.  It would be like the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) made pamphlet's about drug abuse for clinics.  I agree with reforming drug prohibition, but that political discussion shouldn't find its way into doctor's offices.

If you read La Leche's materials, you'll read about how breastfeeding is one of the most important things you can do for the health of a baby.  When you look at the scientific papers on the topic, you find there is some evidence that breast-feeding is linked to slight reductions in the probability of various health problems, but we do not yet know if that correlation is causal.

I'd love to know how to get La Leche materials out of clinics and hospitals.  Those materials feed a political agenda misrepresented as science to people who are at time in their lives when they need good medical advice. 

WI DoR - Friendly and Easy-to-Work-With?

A bill from the WI Department of Revenue (DoR) arrived yesterday for estimated employee withholding taxes for a company I own, which has never had employees.  I thought they must be confusing the tax ID for my wife's business or the ID for our domestic employees with my company's ID.  I steeled myself for a long wait to talk to some languid bureaucrat.  If it got too annoying, I could just have our accountant deal with it.

After a three minute wait on hold, a friendly and knowledgeable person was helping me.  He explained that it was because I failed to file a zero-dollar withholding report form.  There was no fee or hard feelings.  He showed me how to add this company to my account on the DoR's website, so I can report this online.

Governor Walker keeps saying Wisconsin must be cheap on taxes to bring jobs.  It's far more important, though, for Wisconsin to be easy.  The company for which they helped me resolve the tax issue just so happens to be hiring someone in the next six weeks.  Having a user-friendly DoR website and a supportive staff there makes me sanguine about the process.

Maybe Governor Walker is doing something right behind the scenes to have such helpful people answering the phones, but his public rhetoric borders on demonizing the state's employees.  We need to be inspiring to these people and look for ways to retain the really good people who help small businesses rather than looking for a way to cut their pay or benefits.

I'm not sure who's responsible for the quick service I received today, but I say thank you to the WI DoR.  User-friendliness, a positive attitude, and a Wisconsin work ethic are important things to have on the front lines of a government agency that directly deals with job creation.

Personal Finance Concerns Go Beyond Politics

NYT says Americans' wariness about their economic circumstances may allow Romney to convince them he could fix their problems.  Polling numbers apparently show many people not having their act together financially.

• 67% - Worried about paying for their housing
• 20% - Owe more on their house than it's worth
• 40% - Will have trouble paying for their kids' eduction
• 33% - High gasoline prices ($200/mo per car roughly on average) are causing problems

These are amazing statistics.  Are houses' valuation is based on what the market will bear, and apparently that means prices that people can't afford.  Most people bought or rented a house they can't afford?  That seems hard to believe.

The next most shocking statistic is about fuel prices.  If the average car is driven 1000 miles/mo and gets 20 miles/gallon, that's 50 gallons/mo.  At $4/gallon, that's $200/mo.  $200/mo can make or break someone's financial world?  If a family with two cars received $400 more per month, i.e. free gasoline, it would change their financial circumstances?  Maybe this refers to people who use their cars way more than average for business or a special circumstance.  I wish the NYT probed further.

I also wish they had probed why 40% of Americans have had to alter expectations for the type of college they can afford for their children.  What changed between their old expectations and today's?  The stock market has recovered from the crisis three years ago.  Contributions to a typical college fund made during the crisis have nearly doubled. 

I am not trying to make light of the suffering behind these numbers.  They point to a problem bigger than what all the branches of all levels of government combined could do.

Issue of Public Unions is Complicated for Madison

Last February I got a couple of anonymous comments asking why I didn't address the labor protests in Madison at that time.

The main reason is that the Madison vs the rest of the state conflict is not just ideological. Everyone in the state pays taxes, but Wisconsin spends and inordinate amount of that money here in Madison. So all of Madison gets an economic boost at the expense of the rest of the state. Madison is economically successful because of all the knowledgeable people from the university and because of the Wisconsin work ethic. All the government money spent here helps too. Although no one in my immediate family works for the government, many of our clients work for the government. The tide of government money indirectly lifts all boats in Madison. This is not fair to the rest of the state. It would be nice to see government offices spread around the state and linked using IT.

Then there is the issue of the merits of labor unions. I completely rejected Governor Walker's argument that weakening the unions would save money for the state to help balance the budget. The unions were already agreeing to the pay cuts, so it wasn't necessary to dismantle them. My main criticism of unions is that they stifle innovation. They discourage giving people wide authority over a cost center and ability to innovate even if involves hiring and firing people or giving large bonuses based on managers' personal judgment. I am hoping future politicians use the weakened state of unions to shake things up and give great pay for great results, not to nickle-and-dime money out of employees.

It's easy for people to claim critics of unions don't care about helping the poor. Unions can help the poor, but they can also encourage mediocrity. We need to find ways to help the needy without the negative side effects of unions.

Taxes and Jobs

I heard a piece on Marketplace this evening about small business owner's reaction to the "Buffet Rule" increasing taxes on families earning more than a million dollars per year.

The question is whether a tax change would affect hiring and other investment behavior.

Within reasonable tax rates, it's absurd to say tax rates affect hiring and investment. The only reason for business expenses is they earn money. People are taxed on what they earn after expesnes.

You could use the same logical error to say increasing taxes causes hiring and investment since the value of the write-offs increase with tax rate.

This is all absurd. Between state and federal taxes even people with modest earnings set aside a third of what they earn. It's legitimate to ask if we want to take any more. It's legitimate to ask if social services and a military larger that most other militaries combined are worth the cost. If every one, not just business owners, had to write checks for a third of their income people would reevaluate the size of government. But let's not pretend like the issue of taxes is about "jobs".

Fuel Prices Grab Inordinate Attention

I caught a great interview on Marketplace with President Obama today. Ryssdal asked good questions and followed up on the answers.

One thing that stood out is that we're still carrying on about fuel prices. I know this is just something politicians must talk about, but why?

President Obama mentioned someone who has to commute 50 miles per day being severely affected by fuel prices. Let's do the arithmetic.

50 miles/trip * 2 trips/day * 20 days/ month = 2000 miles/month. That twice the typical 1000 miles per month. This person puts almost 100,000 miles on the car in four years, causing it to depreciate faster than average.

If they get 25 miles/gallon, that's 2000 miles/month / 25 miles/gallon = 80 gallons per month. So if fuel prices go from $4/gallon to $2/gallon, that's $160/mo savings. That's nothing compared to the maintenance, insurance, and depreciation on a car being driven 2,000 miles/mo.

Critics will say, "yeah, but what about the poor and near poor? What about people living so close to the edge that the $160 really affects their life?" Poverty is a problem. People spending over an hour each way in a car every day is another problem. Trying to find a way to keep to squeeze $160 out of fuel cost is an unreasonable approach to these real problems. People need to find ways to earn more money, reduce their commute, and use an inexpensive car for long commutes (to minimize depreciation).

I suspect the reason we focus on fuel, is we sit and watch the meter tick off gallons with nothing else to do. The same people who unnerved by this completely ignore that a reasonably late-model car losses >$160/mo in depreciation. They also may being paying interest on the car and hardly think about that.

A politician can't be expected to be the one to do it, but someone needs to show people worried about fuel costs that fuel costs aren't that big of a problem.

An Illinois and Wisconsin Politicians

I wonder if the juxtaposition in this e-mailing I received is intentional.
It looks like a stereotype of an Illinois politician and a Wisconsin politician, from a Wisconsin point of view. The Wisconsin guy is down to earth and friendly. He saying, "This weather feels like June, hey." The Illinois politician is containing his laughter at Wisconsin naivety about crooked politics. It's unfortunate Barrett's picture didn't get the top location.

Victorian Vestiges Presist in Dane County

Madison.com reports that a 29 year-old (at time of arrest) coach, Jason Hairston, at East High was sentenced to seven years in prison for having a sexual relationship with a student. It goes without saying that it's unacceptable to have a sexual relationship with a student or subordinate at work. Our response to this unacceptable behavior is ill-conceived and extremely expensive. It's expensive in terms the cost of locking someone up for seven years but also in the lost productivity and the lost respect for the law. If the young woman had been two years older, this would have been a civil and employment issue. Making this case a criminal issue on par with armed robbery undermines respect for the law.

I condemn the way Dane County and District Attorney Shelly Rusch's handled this. In 100 years historians going over our records will struggle to understand what we were thinking.

I can't imagine how hard it must be for Mr. Hairston's family to have his worst mistakes made public and to have him jailed for something that's easy for people to be sanctimonious about. To those people I say let the one who's never in his life made a mistake that really hurt someone cast the first stone at Jason.

"Encouraging News"

My Representative in Congress, Tammy Baldwin, is running for Senate. She is doing a great job, and I support her for Senate.

She sent out an e-mail today that listed some problems for the middle class and some approaches Congress has taken, which she calls "encouraging news".

Stated Problems:

• People's jobs have been "shipped overseas".
  
• Financial companies' abuses have caused middle-class people to lose money.
• Powerful interests manipulate "the system" to their benefit.
  

Stated Solutions:

• Gov't worked out a settlement with banks regarding a technicality that will result in about 1% of their customers receiving about $20,000 in loan forgiveness of some sort.
  
• Make sure the rich are playing as much in taxes as the middle class.
• Make Congressmen disclose if they're going to trade stocks they have inside info on.
• Help people winterize people's homes.

I cannot understand this approach. Suppose you're someone who believes in the stated problems. Your job is being "shipped overseas", and financial institutions are hitting you while you're down. Congress will winterize your home.

My point is not whether I agree with the problems and solutions. I agree with some and not others. I don't get this marketing approach though. If you start out with these large problems, it seems lame to say the actions Congress has taken are things like loan forgiveness (perhaps for people who couldn't pay anyway) and winterizing homes.

It seems to me that Republicans have a clearer marketing strategy: Evildoers are threatening you. We'll lock them up or kill them (without regard for the cost). That makes logical sense. I don't get this Democratic argument: Structural problems in the economy prevent you from succeeding. We'll winterize your home.

If you must pick a simple threat and solution to be elected, it seems like Democrats should work out a better narrative.

WI Should Have Accepted Federal Healthcare Money

It's unfortunate to read that Governor Walker turned down $37 million in federal money to help create healthcare exchanges. I'm unclear whether this means we don't have to implement the exchanges as fast or if this is pure politics.

Governor Walker says he wants to wait until the US Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of the healthcare reform law. This seems like a bogus argument because they won't rule he exchanges illegal and the very argument that it's unconstitutional is flawed. I say it is flawed because before any of the reforms went into effect, paying customers subsidized those who couldn't pay and did not have insurance that would pay. The law says people need to buy insurance, pushing those costs from other paying customers to the people actually using the healthcare services. The only reason I can see it being unconstitutional, in my non-attorney opinion, is because the federal government is involved in it. That's a mere technicality since the condition existed prior to the health reform law.

I opposed the healthcare law in the form it passed. It would be a good idea to change it. It has done some good, but it risks creating problems when the rest of it is implemented.

Wisconsin rejecting the federal money, though, is foolish. We should try to make it work and try to pressure Washington to give us more autonomy and let us have a more privatized system. Governor Walker's rejection of the money is wrong and alienates pragmatists and moderates.

Madison Real Estate Assessments Decreased 3% last year

The headline story in the Wisconsin State Journal today is an article saying real estate prices in Madison declined 3% last year. It’s good that they’re reporting this in a city where the some bubble-clouded thinking persists. There are few points, though, where the article is could have investigated deeper.

1. The article attributes the decline to the recession. It does not address whether the national bubble could be playing a role.
2. The article accepts property assessment values as accurate (at revealing price fluctuations of neighborhoods) without giving any justification.
3. The headline says this is the first decline in 35 years, but it does not look at inflation-adjusted numbers. I suspect that adjusted for inflation there was at was other decrease in the past 35 years.
4. The article accepts the assumption that it’s good for houses to be expensive.

My impression is that the bubble is still present in Madison and just starting to deflate. Most residential properties on the market are priced such that they would not cash flow at today’s interest rates unless they were purchased with a down payment significantly greater than 20%, which to me is the hallmark of an RE bubble.

Assessed prices appear to lag actual prices, so I suspect the decline we have had so far is well over 3%.

If mortgage interest rates rise significantly, it will push prices lower. Since rates are expected to rise, I’m surprised this risk isn’t priced into the market.

All of this means Madison will be experiencing price declines similar to what Minneapolis experienced in a few years ago.

Daycare Subsidy Issues Runs Into Larger Societal Questions

My least favorite leftwing advocacy group sent me an e-mail about why it’s so important that the government fund childcare and preschool.

My husband and I have to work opposite shifts because child care is unaffordable. He works from 6am to 2:30pm, and I have to meet my husband at his job to drop off our son so that I can be to work by 3:00pm. I miss out on putting my son to bed.

It goes on to say they support subsidize that would allow both parents to work at the same time and the kid to spend all day in daycare.

This two-sentence anecdote really got my attention because childcare is something my family struggles with. We have no struggles in paying for it, fortunately, but we struggle with how much childcare we want to use and how to structure it. I leave for work at 7:30am. Early in the afternoon, our babysitter arrives and my wife goes to work. I arrive home before 7pm and relieve the babysitter. I put our baby to bed around 8pm. My wife gets home at various times, usually a little after 8pm.

We are fortunate to be able to afford any amount of daycare we want, but we specifically structured this so we would both get a good amount of time with our baby. I do not claim this is the best way to do it. It’s a system that works for our family at this time.

The e-mail calling for spending tax dollars to help move a kid who spends all day with his parents to a system where he spends most of the day away from them really catches my eye. The e-mail supposes that if this family had just a more money, they would use it to see their kids only briefly in the morning and briefly before bed. There may be many advantages to doing it this way, but we should think it through carefully before we subsidize it.

We also need to look at who is getting the subsidy. If one member of this family earns a solid living wage but their lifestyle requires two incomes and subsidized daycare, in my mind we’re subsidizing the fancy lifestyle as much as the daycare b/c the family could simply give up the lifestyle and pay for daycare themselves.

The funny thing is I support the key initiatives this e-mail is calling for: childcare funding for the poor, increased funding for preschool for the poor, and nutrition programs. In their call for more subsidies for the poor, though, they run into these hard questions about who should take care of our children. I imagine that most societies throughout human history have had a cultural model dictating who is responsible for taking care of the children. The US culture isn’t about dictating anything, so it’s up to the individual to work it out. Individuals need to take note and start working it out for themselves early. Otherwise you end up like the people quoted above who had kids, wanted someone else to take care of them, and didn’t realize they didn’t earn enough money to pay someone to care for their kids.

Crosstalk Due to Ground Plane Interruptions

The Mar 2010 issue of Printed Circuit Design Magazine has a nice article called Accurate Impedance Control. This is one my mind because I’m currently dealing with a board that has crosstalk due to interruptions in the ground plane. I love the succinct way it the diagram in the article illustrates the problem.

Just Shop It!

An excerpt from another message from my favorite organization for sending e-mails supporting policies I disagree with:

We're outraged that in the last year health insurance companies earned 56% more in profits and covered 2.7 million fewer people. And, healthcare insurance rate hikes of up to 39 percent are now happening across the country!

Why don't they stop being outraged for a moment and shop their policies? If their current vendor is such a rip-off, it sounds like a great opportunity for another insurance vendor to get its foot in the door. I cannot understand the mindset of just sitting and stewing about what your vendors are doing. It seems simple just to shop the quote to keep them honest and spend most of your effort finding ways to create value for your customers or employers.

I say this because I don't think the outrage is going to do anything. Even if the outrage make politicians carry out some very specific policy, it's not going to make people provide a service for free. Even if the government makes health insurance as we know it illegal, so the risk is sensibly spread among the entire population instead of being spread among those who bought insurance prior to be coming sick, we will still be paying the same amount overall for the same services.

What's "Good" for the Real Estate Market?

My broker’s newsletter today had an article called From Rescue to Recovery on the US housing market. USAA follows the same assumptions that all financial articles on real estate accept: Good = people moving house often and spending a lot of their money on housing. I suppose that is true from the real estate industry point of view, just as it’s may be good for refineries if people burn gasoline often and spend a lot of their money on gasoline. But we never hear this view in a financial article.

I believe in capitalism. I want people to create value that makes people spend their money on goods and services. If people aren’t buying your product, it feels bad for the person marketing the product, but it’s really just feedback from the market. Sometimes people don't want what you're selling.

Writers of articles on real estate should stop and ask themselves what are the virtues of people moving a lot and paying a lot for space.

It’s true that if a lot of good economic activity is going on in an area, it will make space there more expensive. But the cost of space is not a perfect barometer of the desirability of a particular area because we are coming out of a huge real estate bubble. It’s possible in the next few decades people will choose to spend more of their money on vacations instead of residential space. That doesn’t mean things are bad. It’s just changing preferences over time.

Crosstalk on a Reset Line Strikes Again

I have been working on an XScale board that has been giving me trouble for the month. Every time the software attempted to configure something on the mPCI slot, the system hung. Even though the problem only appeared after a spin of the board with the XScale processor, the software vendor (Team F1) worked assiduously on the problem refusing to blame the hardware.

It turns out the problem was a 1.3V core reset line going to the XScale processor was picking up crosstalk from the PCI bus because of a layout issue. The white line is the victim trace, which runs parallel to PCI lines. I do not have access to all artwork layers, but I think these traces run over a break in a split power plane.

The board designer didn’t think of a reset line as a critical trace because it doesn’t transition frequently. That keeps it from being an aggressor trace, but it’s very easy for a core reset line to be a victim of crosstalk. To be deasserted, this reset line must be greater than 1.0V. It doesn’t take much noise to pull it down into its indeterminate range (<1.0v) . I would have probably done the exact same thing because it's an easy mistake to make.

When I probed the line near the reset input, the 12pF capacitance of my scope probe was enough to prevent the problem. Tacking a 10pF cap to via going to that ball of the BGA made the problem go away altogether! Higher values worked just the same. At least this problem was easy to solve.

This is the second time in the past 14 months I’ve encountered a reset line being asserted due to noise or crosstalk. Reset lines must be treated as critical traces, especially if they’re low voltage and especially if their driven high only by weak pullup resistors.

The Basics of PCB Component Placement

There is a nice beginner's overview of component placement in the Feb 2010 edition of Printed Circuit Design and Fab magazing: Component Layout in Placement Process

Some interesting points:

• 75% of soldering defects are related to paste dispensing
• To deposit solderpaste on a large area it is better to use multiple smaller slots than one large slot.
• BGAs near a board’s edge are hard to rework because the thermal mass will be different on the side nearest the edge.

One thing missing from this overview: Even low-speed digital traces can be susceptible to noise from the outside world. It is not only important to keep clock lines clear of sensitive analog lines. It is important to keep digital lines, even “non-critical” ones with low edge rates and clock speeds, clear of places where noise from induced currents outside the board could corrupt the digital lines. A low-speed digital trace that veers across a mote and travels over a chassis ground plane is at risk of picking up noise from the outside world.

Rising Interest Rates Will Supress Real Estate Prices

My brokerage seems to agree with my notion that bond yields are poised to rise. Their bond fund manager says they're holding more cash than usual anticipating a drop in prices.

USAA: Have you taken some risk out of the portfolios you manage?

Espe: Yes. We think interest rates are going higher across the yield curve, and we've begun to prepare for it. Rates will probably go higher if the government stops buying Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities in March as planned. If they extend quantitative easing, it could be later, when the Fed raises rates as the economy recovers. But given the low current rates, the big budget deficit that has to be financed and the potential for the market to get spooked by any signs of inflation, we think higher rates are a question of when, not if.

The way we're managing risk is, first, by taking profits as bonds we own get back to normal valuations. Next, we have lowered exposure to rising rates by cutting back our duration, buying shorter-term securities and floating-rate securities. We're holding more cash than usual so that we are ready to deploy assets when rates rise. We have a big yield advantage over the peer group average, which will help in the event of defaults. We're also minimizing our holdings of U.S. Treasuries at these low interest rate levels, although we may increase our position if there's a spike in rates.

If interest rates rise, it's hard for me to see real estate prices increasing. I am baffled by people who have houses they want to sell but are holding on to them expecting real estate prices to increase.