Cambry will be 5 and 1/2 months old this Friday.  I think her intelligence has tripled in the last week.  She just noticed that she can move her fingers independently.  Sometimes she'll just stare at them and touch her thumb to each of her fingers.  She has also learned to play with toys.  Somebody I work with gave us a little piano and Cambry will just sit there and push the ubttons to hear the noises.  I used to think she was left hand dominant because she would only suck her left thumb, but she seems to favor her right slightly hand when playing with her toys.  This sometimes causes her to roll over accidentally as she pushes too hard with her right hand.  But, she can now roll from her back to her stomach easily.

 Babies are interesting.  Cambry is a good baby.

I'm a proponent of a regulated free market.  But in general, I think the government thinks it should be in charge of making economic decisions for the people it governs instead of letting people decide for themselves.  John McCain has said that part of his platform will be to help protect home prices.   Hmm.  He's going to use the government to protect prices.  It's that what Venezuela is doing?  I.e. the government thinks that something is not being sold on the market for the right price, so they nationalize it and try to set the price themselves?  Hugo Chavez is proud to call that socialism.  I don't think we're close to what Venezuela is doing, but there are similarities.

But I don't think Barak Obama has anything on McCain.  He recently said that he wants to redistribute wealth.  The words actually came out of his mouth.  I know most Democrats believe in this to some degree, but it's rare that they'll come out and say it so directly.

So, both John McCain and Barak Obama are trying to win votes by appealing to the masses.  That's understandable.  There are more middle and lower class voters than rich upper class voters.  I just worry that they're basing their policy on what souns good, rather than what is economically sound.

I still like Ron Paul.  He tells it straight.  I'm not sure why his straightforward message didn't catch on more.

Today is Marissa's birthday.  I wanted to write and let her know that I love her and think that she's the best. She's the best wife and the best mom, and I don't know what I'd do without her. 

Marissa has a lot of strenths that I don't have.  I think we make a pretty good team.  (It will be interesting to see whose personality Cambry takes on the most.)

So, Marissa, I love you!  You will be my pretty girl forever!

-Jim

My friend Peter asked me what I thought about the [taxpayer] bailout of the financial institutions, so I thought I'd write my opinions here.

• Some smart people think that a bailout is necessary, which I tend to agree with.  I think most people are opposed to the bailout in principle because they see it simply as a way to help rich people keep their money.  But the rich people aren't the ones who would suffer if we went into a recession.
• In the past few years, there has been an increasing number of shareholder proposals to try to regulate the pay of CEOs.  I think this is going to lead to some of those proposals actually passing in the next go-round.
• Business and politicians are too focused on the next quarter and posting big headlines than long term growth.  This is probably the worst time for a bailout plan because it is happening around an election.  There's no doubt in my mind that congress will include billions in perks for their respective states along with a huge bailout.  I fully expect part of my taxes to go to buying junk mortgages, subsidies for rich farmers, a celery museum somewhere, an education on the proper use of sporks in somebody's district, and an educational grant to a community college to determine if vitamin B12 can help albino mice metabolize glucose.
• People don't trust big businesses, and I think the anger level is rising.  I don't like this because the only other place people can look to put their trust is the government through regulation and beaurocracy.
• The government doesn't know what to do to fix the problem.
• The entire world economy depends on the US economy succeeding.  Stocks crashed in Asia earlier today because they feared that the US wouldn't pass legislation to fix our own economy.  When we suffer, everybody suffers.  I don't like the rampant hyper-consumerism attitude in the US, but it does keep hundreds of millions of people employed around the world.
• Democrats' stock would rise in my opinion if they would accept some responsiblity for any negative thing that has happened in the past 8 years.  They continue to blame President Bush every single ill in the country.  President Bush is not my favorite politician, but to continually hear the democrats whine and complain incessently is just disgusting.

 Those a few of my thoughts.  I've avoided reading too many articles about the bailout because it's frustrating.

We had some good news yesterday.  The power came back.  We were finally able to start getting back to normal life.  A big thanks goes out to our friends Marshall and Christina for letting us crash at their place and cool off over the past several days.  We were without power almost 12 full days.  That's no fun at all.  It could be worse, though, because .5 million people in Houston still don't have power.

There's lots to tell about Hawaii, the hurricane, and everything, so I'll try to post a bunch over the next few days.

I'm glad BYU won the football game versus UW today, but the victory wasn't totally satisfying because of the way it ended.  It appeared that the celebration by the UW quarterback wasn't really out of line, so the 15 yard penalty he incurred seemed harsh.  BYU ended up blocking the extra long PAT to win the game.  I decided to look up the rules and see if the ref was right to flag the quarterback for celebration.

Well, in Rule 9, Section 2, Article 1, a2, it states the following:

After a score or any other play, the player in possession immediately must return the ball to an official or leave it near the dead-ball spot.
This prohibits:
(a) Kicking, throwing, spinning or carrying (including off of the
field) the ball any distance that requires an official to retrieve it.
(b) Spiking the ball to the ground [Exception: A forward pass to
conserve time (Rule 7-3-2-d)].
(c) Throwing the ball high into the air.
(d) Any other unsportsmanlike act or actions that delay the game.
PENALTY—Dead-ball foul. 15 yards [S7, S27] from the succeeding
spot. Flagrant offenders, if players or substitutes, shall ...

Clearly, the UW quaterback violated the rule as listed in the official rules.  The official made the right call.  If people aren't happy with the refs decision, they need to petition the NCAA to changes the rules.  They are very specific.

Anyway, the cougs deserved to win.

People complain a lot about health care costs.  I don't really blame them, costs are high.  If Marissa and I didn't have good medical insurance we wouldn't be living in a house right now.  But there seems to be some sort of idea that health care costs are "broken," and that they can somehow be "fixed."  For some reason, people think that having the government (through taxpayers) pay for health care, that costs will go down.  I don't understand that.  A trip to the doctor is going to cost the same no matter who pays it.  That is, unless you want the government to act like a gigantic HMO and negotiate lower costs with doctors, hospitals, and drug makers.

One problem with lowering health care costs is that so much of health care requires personal attention.

For example, common drugs in hospitals can be expensive.  A single Aspirin from a bottle in your home costs maybe a few cents.  But in a hospital, that same Aspirin might cost $10.  That is because the costs of the hospital's service are built into the price.  A doctor had to prescribe the medicine and record the prescription.  A nurse had to monitor the patients schedule, get the medicine at the appropriate time and bring it to the patient.  It it takes a nurse 10 minutes to complete those tasks, and her internal hospital bill rate is $60 and hour, it actually costs $10 in labor alone just to deliver an Aspirin.  (Nurses probably don't get paid that much, but that might be how much it costs the hospital to have a nurse on staff.)

In other industries, companies must cut costs to stay competitive.  Often, this is done by automating tasks and getting rid of people.  For example, ExxonMobil has a refinery in Beaumont.  Twenty years ago, they had close to 10,000 employees working at the refinery.  Today, they refine 4 times as much gas.  How many people does it take to work the refinery with the increased production?  About 2,500.  ExxonMobil was able to use technology to improve operations and reduce the need for people to be part of the process.  Imagine what energy costs would be like if 40,000 people were needed for instead of the 2,500.

The moral: people are expensive.  Remove people, and costs go down (or at least rise less quickly).
The problem: people can't be separated from health care. 
The solution: ???.  I don't know what the solution is, really.  I just wonder how it is that some people think that health care costs can be "fixed."

So, Marissa and I are doing a littl experiment.  I added all of her feeds from Google Reader to my Google Reader account, and she added mine to hers.  So, this entire week, we are going to read the blogs that each other finds interesting.  I'm not sure Marissa is going to make it.  But by the end of the week, she should know a little more about object relational mapping, data forensics, and test driven development.  I'm not really sure what's in store for me, but Marissa did mention something about "crafts."  I'm a little worried.

We have a lot of the same friends, so we were already subscribed to a lot of the same blogs, so there was some overlap.  But, this week'd experiment should be interesitng.

We live in interesting times.  People in the United States are upset about rising fuel costs.  I can't say that I'm happy about my last electric bill, but I think things could be worse.  In the U.S., high energy costs means that we have to learn to live with less "stuff."  We can't buy as many "things" at Walmart, eat out as much, or live in the way we feel entitled to live.  People are angry that the mythical "they" don't come up with a way to create new every and make prices cheaper.

The problem in developing worlds is when energy prices rise, many have to make huge sacrifices.  If bus fare goes up, they may have to choose between food or medicince because they can't afford both.  I've seen this happen firsthand (because of general poverty, not directly due to energy prices), and it's hard to watch.

So, I've been trying to be more happy about the many things I've been blessed with, and try not to worry about the material things we don't have.  Unfortunately, I have yet to reach the state of materialistic nirvana--I love high tech stuff too much.  But I've noticed lately that I don't want any more "things."  When we go to the mall (maybe a monthly occurrence), I can easily walk by every store without being enticed to buy anything.  Every "thing" at a minimum has to be stored somewhere (making it harder to organize the stuff we already own), and reduces my freedom to choose to do something else with my money.  In addition, some "things" are of dubious quality, too confusing, or are too rarely useful to justify buying. For something to overcome those hurdles, the "thing" has to be good.

So, Marissa accidentally deleted a video of Cambry smiling off of the camera's flash card.  Fortunately, I was able to use my mad data forensics skills and I recovered the video...after a few hours.  After all that work, I thought I'd share it.  Here's the Youtube link. Cambry is smiling more often now, but for some reason when we try to take a picture or record video, she gets camera shy.  So, the video we got was lucky