Ariana Christine

Our daughter turns 8 weeks old today. With all the negative things I see around the world today, it is a wonderful feeling to be able to look at her and think about all the good things in life. I am probably biased, but I think she's a pretty cute baby.

She likes to look at the ceiling fans. She likes to look at the wooden slats on our headboard. She sometimes sticks her tounge out a little when she's concentrating (just like her Dad). She laughs in her sleep, and sometimes wakes herself up doing so.

Family is the most amazing, uplifting, and supportive thing in the world if we allow it to be. Families are like small, independent support systems. They are the building block of a good society when they are whole and functional. Prophets and Apostles of the Lord Jesus Christ have stated unequivocally that, “The family is ordained of God. Marriage between man and woman is essential to His eternal plan. Children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity. Happiness in family life is most likely to be achieved when founded upon the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ. Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities. By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners. Disability, death, or other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation. Extended families should lend support when needed.”

Backpack harnesses pedestrian power

(CNN) -- Mobile phone users or iPod addicts could soon be spared the hassle of having to recharge batteries by a backpack that converts energy from walking into electricity.

By harnessing the backpack's up-and-down motion, researchers say the device is capable of generating more than seven watts -- more than enough energy to power several portable devices at once.

Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania devised the technology after being asked by the U.S. military to come up with a light rechargeable battery that could be used by troops one the battlefield.

Soldiers currently carry up to 20 lbs in spare batteries to power high-tech equipment such as global positioning systems and night vision goggles.

But Professor Larry Rome, who led the research, said the technology could benefit anyone who needed "power on the go."
Details of the "Suspended-load Backpack" are revealed in the latest edition of the journal Science.

"As efficient as batteries have gotten, they still tend to be heavy. Field researchers, for example, have to carry many replacement batteries to power their equipment, which take up a lot of weight and space in the pack," said Rome.

"The Suspended-load Backpack could help anyone with a need for power on the go, including researchers, soldiers, disaster relief-workers or someone just looking to keep a mobile phone charged during a long trek."

The backpack consists of bag suspended from a fixed frame by vertical springs. As the bag is moved up and down by the wearer's walking motion it creates enough mechanical energy to drive a generator mounted on the frame.

Portable devices such as mobile phones typically require less than one watt, but by carrying loads of 40-80 lbs, the research team were able to generate more than seven times as much power.

Instead of carrying extra batteries, Rome said wearers could compensate for carrying a heavier load by packing high-energy snacks.

"Metabolically speaking, we've found this to be much cheaper than we anticipated. The energy you exert could be offset by carrying an extra snack, which is nothing compared to weight of extra batteries," said Rome said.

"Pound for pound, food contains about 100-fold more energy than batteries."

Education Part 1: The "Traditional" School Year

This is the first in a series of several written opinions addressing the subject of education in America.

While I am a HUGE believer in a private system of education as opposed to a socialized (public) system, I also realize that there is too much ignorance and greed in America for such a system to ever be put into place. Most people are unaware that one of the main tenets of the communist system was to have a public school system. As such, the government can to some degree have control over what is being taught and what the children are being brainwashed into. But today I don't want to talk about why a private system would be better. I want to talk about practical solutions that could be applied to improve today's socialized American school system.

One of the main obstacles to learning is the "traditional" school year that gives kids and teachers a 3-month summer holiday. Children in most industrialized countries go to school more days per year and more hours per day than those in America. Most American children are required to go to school 180 days a year, and spend about 5 hours a day in an actual classroom. And we wonder why the rest of the world is catching or passing us in education.

First, the problems with this system. Out of about 250 business days per year, only 180 at most are days that kids are in school. That's about 72% of possible business days. What a waste of taxpayer money to let school buildings go to waste for more than a quarter of the year. But more importantly, what a waste of time for kids. We've all seen how happy kids are to get out for summer break. But within a few weeks, most are fairly bored most of the time, and are inventing ways to spend their time, which sometimes gets them into trouble. Then, come fall, teachers spend weeks reminding the kids of the information they forgot over the summer. It takes the average child until the age of 18 to learn very little, where it could all be taught to the child by age 16 if so much time were not wasted.

Some easy solutions come to mind. Unfortunately, most of these would be outright rejected by teachers and their unions, because it takes away their precious summer break and makes them work more. Don't get me wrong. I feel that teachers are woefully underpaid to do an immensely important job (teaching the adults and leaders of tomorrow). So I sympathize with them. But in my plan (which will be discussed at a later time), teachers get paid a lot more than they do now.

My solution is to have children attend school for 210 days a year (as opposed to 180), and for 6.5 to 7 hours of classroom time per day (say 8 to 3:30 with a lunch and 5 minute breaks between classes). This would give a child an extra 465 to 570 hours in the classroom each year. Currently there are 900 hours a year of classroom time, and this plan would increase that dramatically by more than 50% to about 1400 hours a year. Imagine what a child could learn with almost 50% more hours in a good classroom environment. To graduate from HS (grades 1-12) it currently takes 10,800 hours in a classroom. If we divide that by 1400 hours a year instead of 900 hours a year we get 7.7 years. So by the end of the 8th grade a child could have just as many hours under this system as a HS graduate does now.

Of course, everyone needs a break from time to time. This 210 day system would consist of 4 11-week terms and would include a full 3 weeks off around Christmastime (the last 2 weeks of December and the first week of January), 3 weeks off around the 4th of July (last 2 weeks in June and first full week in July), and 1 week off between the first two terms and the last two terms (roughly last week of March and last week of September, respectively). The school year would start in January, and end in December.

This would still give families plenty of time for a long summer vacation (as long as most parents' work schedules will provide), but also give families more time off around the end of the year and a week for mini vacations each spring and fall. But it saves parents from having to find day care for their kids all summer long. Too many parents can't even afford that, and end up leaving kids at home alone, or with just an older sibling all day. Rather than learning from Mr. Smith or Mrs. Jones in school, as they could be, the kids are learning from Mr. TV and Mrs. X-box at home.

So rather than letting our kids waste too much of their childhood, or worse, let's increase learning and extend the school year to something more intelligent than the 100+ year-old "traditional" system.

Huge highway bill full of pork

President Bush today signed a $286.4 billion transportation bill into law. Incidentally, that comes out to about $1000 for every man, woman, and child in the US today. That seems a bit stiff to me. Of all that money, about $24 billion (which is about $81 for every man, woman and child in this country) went to the 6,371 "special projects" that legislators got for their states.

Now, I have a family of 3, and I don't know about you, but don't really like the idea of paying $3000 in taxes for road work when the bill is so long (1,000 pages) that I will never read it or know anything that is contained in it. And I like the idea of paying $243 for some legislators' pet projects even less.

One of the reasons this particular issue irks me so much is that I use roads very little. I telecommute, and my wife is at home with our baby, which means that our road use is pretty light. On the other hand, someone who drives on the roads for hours a day still has the same amount of taxes going towards the roads that I do. And what about all those trucks? They take up lots of room on the roads, cause more pollution, and cause much greater wear and tear on the roads than a passenger car or even an SUV. Most of the time, a road or freeway must be built much tougher because of the weight of trucks.

I have a solution. Not everybody will like this solution, but that will be mostly the people who currently use the road system on the backs of others who pay for it. The solution consists of two parts: The use of toll roads, and the use of a vehicle's weight in determining its rate of payment. It makes sense to me that a person who uses a road more than another should pay more. And it makes sense to me that someone who drives a heavier vehicle (or a semi) should have to pay more than someone who drives on that road with a geo metro (because heavier vehicles force the roads to be constructed thicker, which costs more, and causes the roads to deteriorate faster, costing more in rebuilding and maintenence).

The practical application is that freeways and other long roads are paid for by tolls, and shorter and local roads are paid for by registration fees and gas taxes. Tolls for freeways are more than viable, and with today's technology they can be cheaper to run than ever before. A car could register to pay automatically and would then be tracked electronically as it entered and exited the toll area to determine the price, which is either billed to the owner, or payed for in advance. Registration fees can be adjusted based on a vehicle's weight to account for the damage of heavier vehicles, and gas taxes typically already tax heavier vehicles more than light vehicles.

We need to move more to a society where you pay for what you use, rather than one where everyone pays for everything (otherwise known as socialism), and this would just be one small step in that direction.

Study: Uninsured cost insured $900 more

Its about time that someone actually wrote the facts on this matter. To put it simply, "Socialism doesn't work, it just creates a vicious cycle during which members of society are trained to become lazy, stupid, and worthless."

Every time someone who is uninsured gets medical care they can't pay for a third gets picked up by the government (ie, you and me, in the form of taxes), and the rest by insurance companies (ie, you and me, in the form of higher insurance premiums). The end result: People who don't want to get insurance or don't work hard enough to get it basically get a free pass and force you and me to pay for all their medical care.

Now, until my recent graduation I was working 40-50 hours a week, carrying a very heavy full-time senior classload, performing 5 to 8 hours of service for my church each week, filling a volunteer position in my HOA, and spending some time with my pregnant wife, who was also working 40 hours a week, taking some classes, and giving 5 to 8 hours of church service a week. But because we both worked our tails off and didn't go waste all our money or spend it on things we didn't absolutely need, we didn't qualify for any socialist programs that so many others our age benefit from.

So, let's see, the government is basically trying to teach us that working hard doesn't get you anything, because you get all the same stuff if you're lazy and get the government (ie, you and me) to pay for it. This is called socialism, and communism is just a form of socialism. We, as a country, have slowly been heading towards it for the last 100 years, and if we don't realize it and do something about it soon, our country will start to crumble just as surely as the Soviet Union did.

Real Estate Speculation and Interest-Only Mortgages

I firmly believe that some people will bite the big one in some areas when home prices level off or start to decline. Most people don't realize that buying properties as investments can be much more risky than investing in the stock market.

Take for example a family that stretches their income to buy a $500,000 home today with the expectation that next year it will have appreciated to $600,000. Let's assume they got an interest-only mortgage (all the rage these days) at a variable rate of 6%, which gives them a minumum payment of $2500 a month on the house. Then by year's end the interest rate has moved up to 7%, making their payment now over $2900 a month. Let's then say that the housing market has cooled off and has started slowly declining, due to oversupply and the increase in interest rates. So now they can't sell their house for more than $475,000, a $25,000 difference from what they owe, and are saddled with $2900 monthly payments which could continue to increase. They can't sell the house because they'll still owe $25,000 on it and will just have to buy another house, but with home prices sliding who wants to buy a home that will devalue? They could end up losing the property completely and then be out a lot of money and time and have to find a new place to live.

These interest-only mortgages are big-time traps. It is no better, in my opinion, than renting. None of the money you pay each month will be yours in the form of equity. The rates are usually variable and will only go up. They are very much a true gamble, like something you'd find at Vegas. The gamble is that the price of the home will increase at a greater rate than their interest rates and all their home maintenence and insurance expenses. In essense, it is like buying all the risk without buying any of the property. If you wanted to do that in a stock, it would be like you borrowing all the money to buy a stock and then hoping it moves up so you can make some kind of profit, and if it doesn't then you could lose all the money you borrowed and walk away with nothing, as well as owing someone money. Brokers can't let you do that because it is way too risky. If you want a margin account (the ability to buy securities with borrowed money) they require certain minimum amounts of actual cash in your account so that if things go south for you and they have to sell all your stock, they still have enough to pay for everything, leaving you broke. But regardless, you walk away at worst having lost all the money you started with, compared to losing money you don't even have in the real estate scenario.

The Golden Parachute at United Air

This cartoon pretty much sums it up for the poor employees of United Airlines.

However, for the rest of us, we shouldn't think we're safe from all this. That unfunded pension money isn't just going to be forgiven, it is going to be given over to the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation. In the end, all taxpayers may end up paying to bail out the PBGC. A rough translation goes like this: United has dumped its obligation to pay pensions to its workers directly into the lap of all taxpayers. So next time you see a retired United Airlines worker you can take pride in knowing that you paid for their retirement and they won't be around to pay yours. So who will?

Study: Nation's traffic jams worsening

Well, people still don't get it. They got used to it, but they don't get it. How much of life is wasted in a car, specifically in a commute? Well, in 2003 the average daily commute was almost 25 minutes. Let's assume then that the average person spends 50 minutes commuting each day to work and back. There are typically about 250 business days a year, multiplied by 50 minutes equals 12500 minutes a year, or just over 208 hours a year of commute time. That's like working an extra 5.2 weeks a year for free!

In addition, there are the costs of running a vehicle. An average car costs 33 cents a mile to operate, including all costs (probably more so now with the higher gas prices). If they average 30 MPH while driving for those 50 minutes then they drive 25 miles a day to work, costing themselves about $8.25 a day. Over the course of a year that comes to $2,062! And if you make $40,000 a year then your time is worth $20 an hour, so that 50 minutes a day becomes another $16.75 or so. Add that to the $8.25 and you get $25 a day or $525 a month or $6250 a year just to commute for the average american! Is there anything we can do?

First of all, some employers can begin moving some of their operations away from central offices and into people's own homes. One example of this is JetBlue Airlines. I believe most of their reservation agents and customer service people work out of their own homes, telecommuting. This is a big long-term cost savings to the company, and actually increases their worker's productivity in many cases. I also telecommute, although I don't work for JetBlue. I work as the operations manager for a financial management firm, and everyone in my company telecommutes. It is great! It saves us all a great deal of time, keeps our stress down, and allows us to be happier while we are more productive. I have never missed a full day of work at this job due to illness, it is great! While this isn't practical for many employers, for some it would be a good option, but they need to be open-minded enough to do it.

Secondly, more efficient and intelligent roads need to be constructed. More input devices near intersections need to be developed and deployed so that one car doesn't wait for 2 minutes with no cross-traffic only to then trip the light while 30 others quickly stop and then have to accelerate again. Also, barriers between oposing freeway lanes should be much taller, so tall that the other side of the freeway can't be seen. There are WAY too many delays and additional crashes just from people rubbernecking. And how about inexpensive large tarps or other coverings that can be set up immediately on an accident scene so that passing motorists can't see anything? If people know they can't see anything, they won't try to look and traffic will flow better while reducing secondary accidents. Lastly, on major non-freeway roads we could eliminate some stoplights by raising the roadbed for one direction and lowering it in the other, in essence creating mini freeway like interchanges. By dropping one roadbed 9 feet and raising the other 9 feet and allowing for 3 feet of support for the top deck, that leaves us 15 feet of clearance, which can be handled with a 10% grade going 50 feet in each direction of the intersection. This will reduce the number of businesses which may be affected.

Lastly, we need to come up with better forms of transportation. We've been doing the car thing in one form or another since the late 1700s, and it is time for us to stop thinking about just improving what we already have and to start thinking of making something altogether new. Enter the proverbial "flying car" idea. This has of course been a dream of many for a long time. However, I believe we are at a point in time where true VTOL cars are technologically possible and feasable for everyday americans. Take Moller International, a company in California developing such a vehicle. If such a vehicle could be refined and mass produced as a luxury vehicle, many thousands would surely sell each year to those who could afford it. They could practically fly themselves and whisk people around at 200 MPH very quickly and without stopping. No more building huge roads, which wastes so much land and space. Commutes could be cut down by a factor as high as 10. One of the big auto makers is going to eventually decide to take this idea and run, and the faster the better.

If we ever hope to get out of our gridlock and stop wasting our lives behind the wheel of a car, we're going to have to start thinking outside of the box.

Mind Over Matter

This is some pretty amazing stuff. Being able to implant electrodes into the brain to allow someone to think about moving a mouse on a screen or change a TV channel and it actually happening is just an amazing possibility. Imagine the serious increase in quality of life for anyone who has lost movement.

On a side note, if this really takes off, it could be a great sector to invest in. The first company that starts making these devices commercially should deserve a real good look from any investor.

Bush presses argument for Social Security overhaul - Apr 30, 2005

All this talk of social security reform... and yet there is no real reform here, simply an attempt at slight restructuring, as I see it.

Social Security started because the government felt that people needed to be protected from their own lack of foresight in saving for the future. For some reason, since most people were too weak-willed to save and put away money for the future, the government felt the need to force everyone to save through Social Security, whether they wanted to or not.

Changing where you put the money that you are forced to give to the program isn't a reform, it is just a change. And making it so people who work harder have to put in more to the system and get out less is just wrong, and just teaches people to be lazy so they can get more "free" stuff. I have a better idea...

The name of this idea is Personal Responsability. It goes something like this: The government pays out all benefits currently required as one lump sum, getting into a large amount of debt obviously to do so. The pain of doing that is unfortunate but must happen, and will only happen once. Long before this happens, and once such a move is announced, many private firms will begin plans to offer serivces to americans to make up for it. Some of that money will undoubtedly go into people's existing retirement and personal accounts. Other people won't know what to do with the money and won't have existing accounts, which is where new and existing firms will pick up the baton. Now people are responsible for their own destiny, and nobody is taking their freedoms away by forcing them to pay into a retirement program.

Actually, I also envision a move away from the Welfare program to be simultaneous. Rather than forcing people to pay out more money in their income taxes, that money goes right to people, who then must decide how responsible they will be with that money. Private firms will come into existence with something akin to auto insurance now, but it will be unemployment/underemployment insurance. To apply for it, you'll have to give a lot of information, much like auto companies now look at your age, driving record, claims history, dedcutible, coverage amounts, etc. Some information that would probably be required for the company to know would include: age, employment history, education, skills, monthly payout amount that would be needed, maximum number of months that benefits would be received, etc. Although people wouldn't be forced to have nemployment/underemployment insurance, if they became unemployed or underemployed, they would be on their own, which some people may choose to do and just put money away.

The point is that it is not the goverment's job to force us to give up what we earn (in effect legalizing stealing and taking away our freedoms) so that it can "protect us" from ourselves. As long as the government sees fit to let us get away with as little personal responsability as possible, society will continue to deteriorate into a litigious, self-centered, "me-me-me", "I deserve this" society.