…that weren’t mandatory a decade ago:

1. Spanish
   Sure, you can get a job at McDonalds without speaking Spanish— so long as you aren’t competing against a Spanish speaker. But how are you going to move up into management, if you can’t communicate with your Spanish-speaking employees and customers?
2. Web design
   When was the last time you saw a business that didn’t have a website? Even if you only know enough to update a Drupal site with current photos, you can quickly make yourself invaluable to an employer who doesn’t have these skills. Plus you can navigate the modern world much more easily if you can tell the difference between a web browser and a website. (It’s important to know, for example, that not everything you type into a computer is seen by Google.)
3. Computer programming
   At a minimum, if you can think like a computer, you can make sense of the world better than most. With all the predictions that computer programmers would be outsourced to India, it turns out there’s still a lot of demand here in the US— while young lawyers are getting outsourced to India. Indeed, the more we use computers, the more demand there is for someone local who can automate this and customize that. And most companies with a website could use a little JavaScript tweak here or a slight bit of custom PHP there— or at least a bit of guidance as to what’s easy to do and what’s hard.

   But it’s not not just about being a professional programmer; knowing how computers work makes you a better doctor, lawyer, salesperson, manager, artist, or independent business owner. Because in all those cases you’re going to be working with computers. Just like Spanish, you can add computer programming to any resume and possibilities open up.

Most people don’t form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.

This NY Times commentary struck a chord with me. I was always told to follow my dreams, but my dreams tend to either be pure science fiction or things that wouldn’t really make me happier if I achieved them.

Between golf ball sized and baseball sized. Kept the kids up late to hide in the tornado shelter. Came up to see the hail when it sounded like people were stomping around upstairs.

This nails it.

“The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” —Ladies Home Journal, June 1918.

That’s from Smithsonian Magazine. Another interesting factoid: kids don’t realize gender is permanent until about age 6 or 7. So it’s perfectly normal that Ian likes to dress up like a princess from time to time. (Not that I ever thought his gender identity is unusual; he’s far more likely to dress as a firefighter.)

Here’s an hour long video about the neurological basis for the mind from the Google Tech Talk series. I won’t say any more about it except that after watching it, I showed it to Jordan, and it inspired us to meditate every evening.

I have other thoughts on the subject, but I’ll save those for a later post.

Diego and the Wonder Pets, move over. Just like those Nickelodeon characters, my wife has rescued baby animals twice this year. This summer it was a baby squirrel in our yard. This week it was a kitten that our neighbor found frozen to the stucco on another neighbor’s garage. Nobody along our alley claimed the kitten, and so despite Jordan and the kids having fallen in love with him, he’s now at the Humane Society. I have no doubt that with his good looks and winning personality, he won’t stay there for long.

"Smoky"

You hear a lot about how your Christmas shopping will help to save the economy. I’m not so sure; we got into this mess by overspending, after all. But let’s face it: buying trinkets that were made in China from a low-overhead retailer isn’t going to create many American jobs. If you want to help, give gifts of services this year. Massages, theater tickets, nights out, dance lessons, even babysitting. For the more practical and less romantic, how about gifts of oil changes, or legal or tax advice (to someone who grumbles that they need it). Anything that puts cash in the hands of someone local, who can then spend it again locally.

My good friend Seebs just wrote an excellent blog entry about autism. I should add that although he shares many quirks with Sheldon from Big Bang Theory, Seebs is by no means annoying or unsympathetic. Quite the opposite. He just doesn’t pick up on emotional cues easily, so you have to be direct with him. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. He’s also absolutely, completely non-judgmental, which makes it easy to be yourself around him. He’ll never consider you a bad person; there’s no such thing in his world. Though he’s discovered the hard way that there are people who shouldn’t be trusted to not steal, or who can’t be expected to be honest, or who otherwise aren’t good to have around for a particular activity for whatever reason. But he never holds a grudge or takes things personally.

One of the leading candidates in the upcoming gubernatorial election has a simple message for fixing Minnesota’s budget woes: tax the rich more. Specifically, raise the income tax for those with the highest incomes. That’s not exactly the same as taxing the rich, and therein lies the problem.

When I was little, rich people (measured in income, not wealth) tended to get a lot of perks. The corporate car, the corporate golf club membership, three-martini lunches, and so on. Back then, income taxes were very high for the wealthy, so the wealthy avoided high incomes. Why buy your own car when it was much cheaper to convince your employer (who might be yourself) to lend you a car? Once Reaganomics caught on, it became more efficient to give people cash, so incomes rose as perks disappeared. The point is, incomes at the high end are fungible. It’s easy to trade cash for perks, and those who give high salaries have a great deal of incentive to find creative ways to be tax efficient. So if you tax perks, incomes rise, but if you tax incomes, perks rise. Tax rates going up next year? Lower the 401k deduction this year, then raise it next year to compensate.

The second problem with raising income tax as a tax-the-rich strategy is that it only affects the high-income wealthy. People like the aforementioned candidate are wealthy, but it’s all wealth, no income. The money’s already in the bank, so any income tax was long since paid. Only if that money makes more money is it taxable, and then it’s even more fungible. Interest and dividends are taxable as regular income, but capital gains (increase in stock price) only become income when the stock is sold. So you sell stocks only when the tax rates are particularly favorable or when you really need the cash. It’s a cat-and-mouse game that the government can never win, in part because the super-wealthy can save money by spending big bucks to avoid taxes, and in part because the super-wealthy are themselves voters who can save money by making campaign donations to create loopholes.

One of the big problems in the financial meltdown was that home prices dropped dramatically, and the revenue for most municipalities is based in property taxes. When you tie the government’s income to one part of the economy, a crash in that sector leaves the government empty handed, which causes government layoffs as well as fewer government services when people need them the most. That’s why most economists favor a value added tax (VAT), like in the EU: it taxes nearly every financial transaction, so government coffers rely on no single part of the economy. Relying on a tax-the-rich strategy is perhaps the worst of all: not only isn’t it economically diverse, it relies on an absence of loopholes for those best suited to create and exploit loopholes.

On Tuesday I’ll be voting for Tom Horner, whose strategy is neither to tax the rich (exclusively) nor to decimate governmental services. Rather he plans to lower the sales tax rate but broaden the number of goods taxed, making it ever so slightly more like a VAT. It’s a pragmatic, rather than a feel-good strategy.