Income

This week I earned my first income for my new business, and in fact, "the check's in the mail" as of this moment!

Which is not to say that the business is profitable, since I haven't yet covered the start-up costs for hiring a lawyer, filing the paperwork with the state, or buying a laptop, but it's certainly a step in the right direction!

I am going to be partnering with an engineering software company to provide customer training and consulting services, and this week I traveled up to Detroit to help with an on-site training class for the first time. They're expecting to have 8-12 training sessions coming up in 2008, so I'm hoping that this will become a regular source of income!

Don't be a BLY

A busy day... I spent a few hours meeting with three of my friends to discuss stuff related to their jobs/businesses. During yoga, a guy in my class appeared to have suffered a heart attack, and I helped convince him that his symptoms were serious and that he needed to go see a doctor immediately. I also had to go get blood drawn for one more test. (Let's see, this makes the 4th time I've gotten stuck in the arm in just 4 weeks. I'm not really enjoying this mutant thing, and neither is my insurance company.)

I arrived at the testing lab at 3:30, and sat in the unattended waiting room for 15 minutes before someone came out to see why I was there. I presented my script for the testing, and she immediately starting looking for reasons why she couldn't draw my blood, mostly because she said that the office closes at 4pm. (Nevermind that the company's brochures and the signs in the waiting room all state that the office hours are 7:30 - 4:30.) First of all, she looked in a reference manual and found that one version of the test required fasting for 12 hours. I told her that my doctor's office hadn't mentioned anything about that. She double-checked the book and found out that there was an alternate version of the test which didn't require fasting. She called my doctor's office, probably hoping that they wouldn't answer, but they did. They said that I didn't need to do the fasting version of the test. Finally, she settled on the idea that the sample would require "immediate" processing, and the next courier pick-up wouldn't be until 7pm, so she said I'd have to go to a different office to have the blood drawn and collected in a timely fashion. It didn't seem worth having a debate about the definition of "immediate" processing, so I got directions to the other office and went on my merry way.

Things got even more aggravating on my way out of the parking lot. When I came to the end of my row of parking spaces, I was preparing to turn right, into the exit lane for the parking lot. As I was glancing over my left shoulder, checking for cars moving toward the exit, I heard a car horn and instinctively slammed on my brakes to avoid hitting a very expensive Mega-SUV, driven by a woman with an attitude as big as her vehicle. (She had just turned right into the parking lot from the street.) She was actually in MY lane, but apparently it's MY fault that her Land Yacht is way too big to navigate a normal turning radius. Obviously, I must be the idiot in this situation, because she actually rolled down her window to scream obscenities at me.

So the moral of the story for today is: Don't be a Bitch in a Land Yacht.

(Thanks for letting me vent.)

It's Official: I'm a Mutant.

More specifically, I found out yesterday that I have compound heterozygous (C667T and A1298C) mutations for the MTHFR gene. These mutations cause a thrombophilia (blood clotting) disorder. So now I've got follow-up appointments with a whole host of doctors, including a hemotologist and an endocrinologist.

There are a couple of reasons why finding out that I have this mutation is actually good news:

• It explains the significant medical issues that I've had this year, which have caused anxiety, depression, and grief for both me and my husband. So as weird as this may sound, it actually comes as a huge relief to have some sort of definitive diagnosis, because now we have hope that things can be better in the future.


• The condition is treatable, and the treatment is pretty simple and very effective-- I'll just have to take baby aspirin and extra supplements of folic acid, B6, and B12 for the rest of my life. (I may also need heparin injections, but not all the time.)


• By finding this out now, I can significantly reduce my risk of having a thrombosis, stroke, or heart attack later on in life.


• Since it's an inherited condition, my family can be tested for it as well. And if turns out that some of them are "mutants" too, then they can also reduce their risk of having thromboses, strokes, or heart attacks.

Smart

SmartCars are coming to the USA!

I've been fascinated with SmartCars since I saw them in Italy a couple of years ago. When I first saw them zipping around the streets of Rome, they reminded me of the Friends episode where Rachel adopts a hairless cat, and Joey just keeps saying, "It's not a CAT!" Because, really, a SmartCar is not a CAR. It's more like a Vespa built for two, or a golf cart on steroids.

I think a big part of their appeal is that they're just so darn happy...



Obviously, SmartCars are meant for urban life. Since they're only as long as a normal car is wide, they can park in a parallel parking space with their nose against the curb. To really appreciate their size, you have to see them in context. This SmartCar is parked next to a Nissan Micra, a sub-compact economy car:



But don't underestimate their ability to get-up-and-go! We were doing 145 kph (90 mph) on the Autostrada when a SmartCar strolled past us. (I suspect that many Italians have found ways to circumvent the speed-limiting controller.) SmartCar convertibles are also available, and they also make a snazzy little Roadster.

I've been rabidly anti-SUV for more than 10 years now. (There are so many good reasons why I hate SUVs that I'm not even going to begin to list them here.) So I'm not even upset about gas prices jumping above $3/gallon. I'm just glad that people may finally be thinking more seriously about buying smaller cars! Happy day!

Lunacy & Conspiracy

So the question is: How on Earth did a raving lunatic wind up in charge of an entire country? (Show of hands: Who thinks it's a good idea to change a country's time zone by 30 minutes with only a week's advance notice? I don't see any supporters...)

A few weeks ago at my church, I met a woman from Venezuela. She loves her country, but she doesn't believe that she'll ever be able to go back there, because Chavez is dangerous, and the destruction and chaos that he is creating will probably last for decades. I have to admit that I had a little trouble understanding her heavily-accented English, so I'm a little sketchy on all of the details, but apparently, she believes that the reason that Chavez is still in power is because he gives huge "donations" to Jimmy Carter's charity, which co-incidentally is also responsible for certifying the election results in Venezuela.

According to the Hugo Chavez article in Wikipedia, the Carter Center continues to validate all election results, despite recurring evidence of fraud:

• General elections were held on July 30, 2000. Chávez's coalition garnered two-thirds of seats in the National Assembly while Chávez was reelected with 60% of the votes. The Carter Center monitored the election; their report stated that, due to lack of transparency, Consejo Nacional Electoral (CNE; "National Electoral Council") partiality, and political pressure from the Chávez government that resulted in early elections, it was unable to validate the official CNE results. However, they concluded that the presidential election legitimately expressed the will of the people.


• Finally, after opposition leaders submitted to the CNE a valid petition with 2,436,830 signatures that requested a presidential recall referendum, a recall referendum was announced on June 8, 2004 by the CNE. Chávez and his political allies responded to this by mobilising supporters to encourage rejection of the recall with a "no" vote.
  
  The recall vote itself was held on August 15, 2004. A record number of voters turned out to defeat the recall attempt with a 59% "no" vote. The election was overseen by the Carter Center and the Organization of American States, and was certified by them as fair and open. European Union observers did not attend, saying too many restrictions had been placed on their participation by the government.
  
  Other critics, including economists Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard and Roberto Rigobon of MIT, called the results fraudulent, alleging there were "very clear trails of fraud in the statistical record" and alleged electronic voting machines had been reconfigured to allow results to be altered remotely. In response, the Carter Center consulted with Professor Jonathan Taylor, an independent statistician from Stanford University and Professor Aviel Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University computer scientist who both initially concluded that the actual results are within the predicted range and do not of themselves prove fraud. Subsequently, however, the Carter Center admitted Taylor had "found a mistake in one of the models of his analysis which lowered the predicted number of tied machines, but which still found the actual result to lie within statistical possibility."
  
  The opposition also cited an exit poll which implied the actual results were the opposite of those reported. "Massive fraud" was alleged and the conclusions of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter were questioned.


• Chávez again won the OAS and Carter Center certification of the national election on December 3, 2006 with 63 percent of the vote, beating his closest challenger Manuel Rosales who conceded his loss on December 4, 2006. After his victory, Chávez promised a more radical turn towards socialism.

Here are some other interesting quotes from the Wikipedia article on the Carter Center, criticizing its involvement in the Venezuela elections:

• Carter's "continued international work certifying election results has provided essential political cover to anti-democratic forces in the region. Indeed, it might be said that over the past four years, Jimmy Carter has been the most visible and arguably most influential U.S. leader in Latin America."


• "The [Hugo Chávez] regime delayed and obstructed the recall referendum process at every turn. Once the regime was forced to submit to such a referendum, moreover, it used a fraud-filled voting process to ensure victory. The government did everything—including granting citizenship to half a million illegal aliens in a crude vote-buying scheme and 'migrating' existing voters away from their local election office—to fix the results in its favor. The outcome was then affirmed and legitimated by ex-President Jimmy Carter’s near-unconditional support."


• "Jimmy Carter ignored pleas from the opposition and publicly endorsed the results, despite the fact that the government reneged on its agreement to carry out an audit of the results. Carter’s actions not only gave the Venezuelan regime the legitimacy it craved, but also destroyed the public’s confidence in the voting process and in the effectiveness of international observers."

So I guess the reason why Chavez is still creating havoc in Venezuela all comes back home to roost. I'm not much into conspiracy theories, but I'm certainly not going to donate any more money to the Carter Center. It's a shame that a noble charity that could potentially help thousands (if not millions) of people from around the world would stoop to participating in such a blatent corruption.

(The woman from church also alleged that the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton have accepted "campaign contributions" from Chavez, but I'm not sure how to determine if that's true or not. I wasn't planning to donate any money to them anyway!)

Do-voila!

Last week, I filed the paperwork with the IRS and the State of Ohio, and my new company officially exists now.

Yesterday, I registered my domain name and a friend of mine coached me through getting the domain and email services set up on his server. (Thanks Bakaitis!) I don't have a website yet, but at least I'm heading in that direction.

Today, I made my first sales call, to set up a demonstration of the software for a potential new client on Monday, October 1st.

One of my husband's friends is working on developing a logo, and I'm looking forward to seeing his concepts tomorrow night. Once that's done, I'll be having some business cards printed right away!

Next week, I'm going to be attending a conference with the software company that I'm partnering with. They'll be using the conference to introduce my company as their "Sales and Implementation Partner" for the United States. (They're based in Switzerland, so I'll be responsible for helping them develop a client-base here.)

After several weeks of waiting, I'm excited that things are starting to move!

Negation & Aggravation

The short-sighted managers, directors, and lawyers at The Company (name has been withheld to protect the ignorant) have decided that my husband (S) and his friend (M) cannot take part in our new business venture. To make matters worse, they sat on their conflict-of-interest disclosures for 8 weeks before coming to this decision.

Apparently, The Company feels that the best way to ensure company loyalty is to prevent their employees from participating in any outside work activities, which is a completely asinine conclusion. According to them, M and S are critical to the success of their current project, and they're afraid that this business opportunity might be a "golden parachute" that would provide them with a means of escaping from their current positions.

M and S never intended for this to be an either/or situation. They thought that they'd be able to use their experience and knowledge to do some consulting work, while continuing to work full-time in their current jobs. They both enjoy their work, and they're earning a lot of recognition for their efforts. But by preventing them from participating in our new business in their free time, The Company is forcing them to choose between their current jobs and a potentially even better opportunity.

When my husband received the bad news today, he was almost angry enough to quit on the spot. Unfortunately, that isn't a possibility, simply because we need the practical benefits of a stable salary and affordable health insurance-- the "golden handcuffs" of Corporate America.

But M's wife has a successful career of her own, so they have the financial flexibility for him to work for a start-up company. Added to that, The Company's HR department has been unhappy with his telecommuting status, and they've been telling him that he needs to move back to Cincinnati (which isn't possible because of his wife's work) or face complete derailment of his career. So now he has plenty of incentive to leave his current job ASAP, and I predict that our new company will pick up enough business to make it possible within the next 6-12 months.

What The Company doesn't realize is that they have effectively eliminated all of the influence that they would have otherwise had over what my new company can do. In their conflict-of-interest disclosures, M and S had voluntarily proposed that our new company would not do business with any of The Company's competitors, which basically would have eliminated the entire consumer products industry in one fell swoop. They also specified that our new company would not earn a commission from any sales that we might coordinate between our software partners and The Company.

As an independent entity, I am free from those restrictions-- I can work with any company in any industry, AND I'll collect my standard commission for any new software that The Company purchases.

Home Economics

Every day it seems that there's a new story about how home foreclosures are increasing, resulting in widespread implosions of real estate "bubbles" and threatening the overall health of the American economy. Earlier this year, there were Congressional Hearings on the business practices of "payday loan" and credit card companies.

It starts to sound like the downfall of the American economy will ultimately come about simply because the majority of Americans are bad at math.

Before I start down that path, let me just say that, in my opinion, most credit card companies are sharks and many of their "business practices" are nothing more than heinous usury. (And the payday loan companies are at least ten times worse.) I also know that many home mortgage refinancing companies are doing some pretty shady things. Agents will promise certain terms over the phone, but then at closing, the paperwork will show a different interest rate or hide a boatload of closing costs that are being rolled into the loan, and desperate people will go ahead and sign on the dotted line.

Maybe these things should be illegal, but ultimately, I believe that educating consumers about their tricks and traps is probably a better solution than passing more federal regulations. If people would recognize how they're getting ripped off and start talking about it, then these companies would gain or lose business based on their reputations. Right now, no one is willing to step up and announce that, "My credit card payment was due on a Sunday. I mailed it on a Tuesday, it arrived on Friday or Saturday, but the credit card company didn't apply the payment until Monday. They charged me a $39 late fee and raised my interest rate by 5% just because they don't process payments on weekends." Or "Company A pulled a bait-and-switch on my refinance deal, and I wound up paying $5000 in closing costs."

The bigger problem is that most people don't even know it's happening. They don't understand how to calculate compound interest, and they're too intimidated to ask questions about the paperwork at closings. As my friend Tracie says, "Life's hard[er] for stupid people." She used to work in the mortgage industry, so she knows exactly how people get ripped off by hidden closing costs and the sky-high interest rates that are charged for having bad credit.

Exhibit A: When my brother-in-law got divorced, he agreed to buy a house in certain neighborhood so that his son could go to that school system. My ex-sister-in-law couldn't figure out why he couldn't afford to buy a house worth more than $125,000, because she thought that house payments were basically just the value of the house divided by the number of payments, plus maybe a hundred dollars to cover the taxes and 6% [simple] interest.

She's never learned anything about mortgages because her parents actually bought her a huge house and put into a trust fund for her. The problem is that she and her brother are eventually going to inherit a multi-million-dollar company from their parents. When they inevitably run it into the ground, dozens of their employees will lose their jobs, and the economy will bleed from one more small cut.

Most college students wind up buying a new car within a year or two of graduating. But I wonder how many of them actually understand what it means to be "upside down" on a car loan? Every year, credit card companies send dozens of pre-approved applications to every college freshman. Their goal is to make sure that they all walk of of school with $5,000 - $10,000 of credit card debt. Students might be somewhat troubled by the fact that they're so far in debt when they're not earning anything, but the credit card companies hope they they'll build up a tolerance to it until they reach the point where they're comfortable carrying $20,000, $30,000, or $40,000 worth of debt for decades. They might look around and see that all their friends have roughly the same income and debts, so they think they're doing OK, but actually they're just all broke together.

Exhibit B: I had a credit card in college, and initially I paid it off every month, but in grad school, my rent was actually more than my income. (No one told me that I would be taxed on the total value of my research grant. The majority of stipend wound up being withheld in order to cover the taxes from my tuition reimbursement. That's not meant to be an excuse-- It's just an example of a lesson learned the hard way.) So I wound up charging my groceries and living expenses on my credit card, and when I graduated, I had $5,000 in credit card debt on top of my $20k in student loans. I wasn't terribly worried about paying it off, because I was making more money than most of my friends from college. After I bought my house, I slid much further into credit card debt, and I started to lay awake at night, wondering how I would ever pay it all off. I didn't get out of credit card debt until I had been out of school for 5 years. (I'm still working on the student loans, but the end is in sight!)

My parents never talked to me much about budgets, credit cards, or mortgages. I remember my mom briefly listing all of our monthly expenses once, when my sister was complaining about why she couldn't buy all of the stuff that her friends had. When I graduated from college, my dad put $1,000 into an IRA for me, and he walked me through the calculations on how much it could grow by the time I wanted to retire. When I started working, he encouraged me to put 6% of my salary into my 401k, because he knew the company was doing a 75% match. But my dad learned a lot about investing from his dad, and I suspect that most parents never take the time to explain these things to their kids.

Maybe parents don't teach their kids about budgeting and investing because they feel like they're not practicing what they preach, or maybe it's because they simply don't understand the principles well enough to explain it.

Kids (and adults) can't see the value of Algebra or Geometry, let alone a reason to learn exponentials or compound interest. But no one can truly avoid learning about "the most powerful force in the Universe." If kids don't learn how to do the math while they're young, they wind up figuring it out in the school of hard knocks.

I tell the little girls that I tutor, "It's really, really important to be good at math, because otherwise, for your entire life, people will cheat you and take advantage of you. And you won't even know that they're doing it. You'll just know that you're always broke and you always will be."

I think it's time to start requiring a home economics class as a requirement for graduating high school. Obviously, it shouldn't be the traditional Home Ec of sewing, cooking, and all that antiquated stuff. Instead it should cover things like:

• Monthly Budgets - How much do utilities cost? How much does a typical car cost, including the loan payment, insurance, and repairs? How much do people pay for childcare? What about groceries and eating out at restaurants?


• Credit Cards - Suppose you buy a computer for $1000, and you start making payments of $100 each month. For a given interest rate, how long will it take before it's paid off? What will happen if you're late? How much will you wind up paying for the computer? Repeat the same calculations for rent-to-own furniture.


• Mortgages - If you buy a house for $200,000, how much will it wind up costing every month? How much will you pay over 30 years? What happens if you make an extra payment every year?


• Investments - The company you work has a 50% match, and the average rate of return is 7%. If your salary is $50,000, and you invest 5% of your income, how much will you wind up with when you retire?


• Taxes - Given a W-2 form and a couple of 1099's, fill out a 1040-EZ tax return. (This skill is important so that people don't fall prey to tax refund loan companies, which are just as bad as the payday loan companies, IMHO.)

So here's my final thought for today:

What do you think?

More Malcolm Gladwell

I was going to include this list as part of my last post, but it started to get kind of lengthy, so I decided it deserved its own posting. Here are a couple more New Yorker articles from Malcolm Gladwell that I found interesting:

• Big and Bad - How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety.
  This should be required reading for anyone who currently owns or is thinking about buying an SUV. And when you're done reading that, you also need to see this for further proof that bigger is not better. (Did I mention that I drive an Integra?)



• The Risk Pool - What's behind Ireland's economic miracle—and G.M.'s financial crisis?
  Gladwell uses the sociological concept of "dependancy ratios" to talk about the rise and fall of national economies and why GM is bankrupt while Toyota is thriving. (Here's another interesting article by Herbert Meyer that also talks about demographics and population distributions and why they're really important.)



• The Talent Myth - Are smart people overrated?
  This article talks about the "rank and yank" system that McKinsey put into place at Enron, where employees were ranked into three categories: "The A's must be challenged and disproportionately rewarded. The B's need to be encouraged and affirmed. The C's need to shape up or be shipped out."
  

  An employer really wants to assess not potential but performance. Yet that’s just as tricky... Studies show that there is very little correlation between how someone’s peers rate him and how his boss rates him... You can grade someone’s performance only if you know their performance. And, in the freewheeling culture of Enron, this was all but impossible. People deemed “talented” were constantly being pushed into new jobs and given new challenges. Annual turnover from promotions was close to twenty per cent... How do you evaluate someone’s performance in a system where no one is in a job long enough to allow such evaluation? The answer is that you end up doing performance evaluations that aren’t based on performance.

  
  Enron may be dead now, but that performance rating system is still alive and well at many other corporations-- GE, J&J, and P&G are just some of the examples that I can name off the top of my head. And other companies continue implement these systems, despite the fact that they have caused many lawsuits and have been widely criticized by business experts.
  
  Gladwell specifically mentions P&G as an example of a company that doesn't have a "star system," but I disagree with that statement. P&G believes in hiring smart, talented people from some of the best schools in the country and assimilating them into the P&G culture. (They even administer personality tests as part of the hiring process.) And P&G's philosophy of "Up or Out" is well known around Cincinnati. It's especially emphasized in their Marketing division, which is viewed as the most important branch of the company. But even in Engineering, employees are expected to be constantly striving toward an ultimate goal of moving into upper management, and their loyalty to the company will be questioned if they say that they'd prefer to stay in a technical role. P&G may not technically use an "A-B-C" system, but that's only because they prefer to use "1-2-3" instead!

Malcolm Gladwell and Cesar Milan

Malcolm Gladwell wrote an interesting article about Cesar Milan, aka The Dog Whisperer.

What I like about Gladwell's writing is the way that he synthesizes information from many different fields. For this article, he brings in an anthropologist, an ethologist, an expert who studies dance and movement patterns, and a psychotherapist who works with autistic children to help explain why Cesar is so good at working with "bad" dogs. Here's a section of the article that I found especially interesting:

...Before [the dog] fought, he sniffed and explored and watched Cesar—the last of which is most important, because everything we know about dogs suggests that, in a way that is true of almost no other animals, dogs are students of human movement.

The anthropologist Brian Hare has done experiments with dogs, for example, where he puts a piece of food under one of two cups, placed several feet apart. The dog knows that there is food to be had, but has no idea which of the cups holds the prize. Then Hare points at the right cup, taps on it, looks directly at it. What happens? The dog goes to the right cup virtually every time. Yet when Hare did the same experiment with chimpanzees—an animal that shares 98.6 per cent of our genes—the chimps couldn't get it right. A dog will look at you for help, and a chimp won't.

"Primates are very good at using the cues of the same species," Hare explained. "So if we were able to do a similar game, and it was a chimp or another primate giving a social cue, they might do better. But they are not good at using human cues when you are trying to coöperate with them. They don't get it: 'Why would you ever tell me where the food is?' The key specialization of dogs, though, is that dogs pay attention to humans, when humans are doing something very human, which is sharing information about something that someone else might actually want. "Dogs aren't smarter than chimps; they just have a different attitude toward people. "Dogs are really interested in humans," Hare went on. " Interested to the point of obsession. To a dog, you are a giant walking tennis ball."

A dog cares, deeply, which way your body is leaning. Forward or backward? Forward can be seen as aggressive; backward—even a quarter of an inch—means nonthreatening. It means you've relinquished what ethologists call an "intention movement" to proceed forward. Cock your head, even slightly, to the side, and a dog is disarmed. Look at him straight on and he'll read it like a red flag. Standing straight, with your shoulders squared, rather than slumped, can mean the difference between whether your dog obeys a command or ignores it. Breathing even and deeply—rather than holding your breath—can mean the difference between defusing a tense situation and igniting it. "I think they are looking at our eyes and where our eyes are looking, and what our eyes look like," the ethologist Patricia McConnell, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, says. "A rounded eye with a dilated pupil is a sign of high arousal and aggression in a dog. I believe they pay a tremendous amount of attention to how relaxed our face is and how relaxed our facial muscles are, because that's a big cue for them with each other. Is the jaw relaxed? Is the mouth slightly open? And then the arms. They pay a tremendous amount of attention to where our arms go."

Gladwell also wrote a follow-up posting in his blog about the New Yorker article, to address some of the criticism that Cesar receives from other animal behaviorists.

And despite all his talk about dominance and being a pack leader, what is striking about Cesar viewed in full context (and this is one of the major themes of my article) is how paradoxically gentle he is. That's why, in the piece, I compare the way he relates to troubled dogs with the way movement therapists work with autistic children.