born live love die

Skiing season is on us again.  I took last year off, but I have plans to go skiing with the kids each weekend this year.  JMan is more athletic than Bookzilla, but I hope to work with her this year.  I want her to really get into skiing and learn to enjoy the feeling of control at speed, the benefits of learning to challenge oneself and meet those challenges.  She is more bookish than JMan, but I am hoping that she gets to enjoy it.

Two years ago, they were both in ski classes.  I would ski with one of them for a while between classes and then go off by myself during their classes.  Bookzilla is stronger now than before, and at 5’9″, she needs to add more muscle to own her frame.

Standing at the top of the mountain is a wonderful feeling and I want the kids to learn to expect that from life sometimes.

XKCD comic.

Intel is bring a new fabrication plant on line at 22 nanometers.  Silk fibers are around 15 micrometers, human hairs anywhere from 10 to 80 micrometers.  Consider that the technology would be able to draw 1000 transistors in the width of a human hair.

Intel is pledging to spend between $6 billion and $8 billion to build a new chip manufacturing plant and upgrade its existing fabrication plants in Arizona and Oregon.
The influx of cash will allow Intel’s new and current fab plants to put more muscle behind building the next-generation, 22-nanometer microprocessors, which could eventually power sleeker devices that deliver higher performance and longer battery life at a cheaper cost.
Intel’s first microprocessors built on the 22-nanometer process, codenamed “Ivy Bridge,” will be in production in late 2011, the chipmaker said today.
Besides kicking in money into its U.S. facilities, which account for three-quarters of Intel’s global manufacturing plants, the investment will create 6,000 to 8,000 construction jobs and lead to 800 to 1,000 new permanent high-tech jobs.

This is to support an instruction set architecture that was state of the art in 1979. ARM processors, drawn at 45 nanometer (four times larger) are more power efficient.

I use the term “welfare for white people” to describe the benefits that flow to the middle class and upper middle class in our society and which they have come to think of as the status quo.  At the same time, they think that spending on lower economic classes is welfare and should be curtailed.  Housing patterns show these benefits:

“This happened at the same time as household size declined, so it’s a little bizarre,” says John McIlwain, senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute. “But people seem to have liked the idea of having extra bedrooms and lots of room, big kitchens and big master bedrooms and big master baths. I think it’s just cultural, an expression of wealth.” But it’s not just that — studies have found that lower-class homes in the United States are also much larger than comparable residences in Europe.

“To me, the answer is that we subsidized it massively,” says Christopher B. Leinberger, a housing scholar at the Brookings Institution. “Over the last 30 years, we saw one of the largest social-engineering projects in the nation’s history.” The mortgage tax deduction encouraged a vast expansion of homeownership, while Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac created new pools of capital through securitization. The federal government kept building highways to serve ever-more distant suburbs, where local authorities often mandated large home and lot sizes in the belief that it would encourage the construction of affluent communities. Facing a widespread revolt against property taxes, many of the same municipalities began financing suburban infrastructure — roads, sewers and so on — through “impact fees” levied at the outset of the development process. This and other factors effectively inflated the cost of developable land. The homebuilding industry, which was in the process of consolidating into the hands of a dozen or so publicly traded corporations, passed on the added expense to consumers through higher home prices. But because they enjoyed such economies of scale when it came to construction, the major homebuilders could offer buyers an inducement in return: a lot more room.

Taxes are collected on people at the low end of the economic spectrum and flow upward.

I can’t say that I’m a big fan of musicals, but the cast of Glee on the Emmys was pretty damned good.  This clip is also damned good.

I have long been sensitive to the correlation of family strife and kids living badly. Before getting married, I noted the number of adults I met who had come from broken homes and the tough times they seemed to have as adults. Intact homes are not a guarantee of being able to raise kids who are well adjusted and able to raise children of their own that are well adjusted. But it seemed to me that intact home was a step in the right direction.

I’m now divorced with two kids, Bookzilla and JMan, and I strive everyday to do whatever I need to do to help them not get burdened by the divorce.  It has been eight years.  JMan was three when we split up and has never known a time that he wasn’t shuttling back and forth between houses.  Bookzilla is 14, and she remembers that time, but I wonder what is going on inside her head sometimes.  If she has issues, she doesn’t talk about them (what teenager does?).

I saw an article on The Daily Beast about a woman who had lost her son to the effects of a drug habit.  She is a blogger who writes about attachment parenting.  Reading between the lines, she and the boy’s father are not married.  I wonder how much that had to do with her son’s life and choices?

Katie Granju’s parenting blog was beloved by readers. But when her teenage son died of a drug overdose, many were shocked—and then she chose to grieve online.

Grieving sucks, and if you need to grieve on line, then do it.

There is a movement afoot to normalize divorce.  There is a book, “The Good Divorce”, that preaches it.  Divorce is a state of marriage.  I don’t agree.

We have an idea of romantic marriage and there is a veritable industry that has sprung up around that idea.  But it is the one contract that people enter into without fully considering all of the ramifications of it.  The contract is started without a thought about how to end it.

Our schools should be teaching relationship skills, so that young people have a better sense of who they are and do a better job of picking life partners.