The open views of western Texas

I miss the open vistas of western Texas, where I was outside for much of the past six days looking at fossil sites. It's not the same back here in Missouri. You can't allow your eyes to stretch out for 10 miles in every direction, and there aren't many spots where you can look way down and way up at mountain tops from the same spot. I took more than a few handheld HDR series in Texas and crunched them on a program called Photomatix over the past couple of days. They are a pretty good reminder of the types of things I was seeing.

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Senators must raise 10K per day

This is an astounding fact that, in and of itself, shouts for overhaul of the system: "A senator has to raise $10,000 every day that they are in office to make the average amount that's spent today in a Senate race." So who are the Senators going to spend most of their time with? You and me, so that they can raise $50 or $100, or with big corporations and powerful trade organizations? And what type of legislation are they going to tend to support? Senator raising money Here's another example from represent.us:

We decided to target Jim Himes because he’s emblematic of a much larger systemic problem: Our Congress is being corrupted by big money and no longer represents the people. Rep. Himes co-sponsored and helped push a bill called H.R. 992 through the House. 992 would further deregulate derivatives, a financial instrument that played a major role in the 2008 crisis (source). Our organization doesn’t have a position on derivatives trading. What we do have a position is corruption, and this is a textbook case. The New York Times revealed that 992 was written by big bank lobbyists — 70 of the 85 lines in 992 were written by lobbyists for CitiGroup.

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Riding A Hobby Horse

Hobby Lobby is suing to be exempted from certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act.  The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case . . . The question at the heart of this is, should a company be forced to pay for things with which it has a moral objection? [More . . . ]

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7 parenting behaviors that stunt children’s growth

This is a worthy seven-point article from Forbes. The topic is 7 parenting behaviors that stunt their children's growth. Here are the titles to the sections: 1. We don’t let our children experience risk 2. We rescue too quickly 3. We rave too easily 4. We let guilt get in the way of leading well 5. We don’t share our past mistakes 6. We mistake intelligence, giftedness and influence for maturity 7. We don’t practice what we preach. Immediately after reading this Forbes article, I stumbled upon this parenting article from The Atlantic: "How to Land Your Kid in Therapy." Lots of common ground between the two articles.

[U]nderlying all this parental angst is the hopeful belief that if we just make the right choices, that if we just do things a certain way, our kids will turn out to be not just happy adults, but adults that make us happy. This is a misguided notion, because while nurture certainly matters, it doesn’t completely trump nature, and different kinds of nurture work for different kinds of kids (which explains why siblings can have very different experiences of their childhoods under the same roof). We can expose our kids to art, but we can’t teach them creativity. We can try to protect them from nasty classmates and bad grades and all kinds of rejection and their own limitations, but eventually they will bump up against these things anyway. In fact, by trying so hard to provide the perfectly happy childhood, we’re just making it harder for our kids to actually grow up. Maybe we parents are the ones who have some growing up to do—and some letting go.

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What it’s like to never have enough – the story of a Wall Street hedge fund trader

This is what it's like to never have enough. It's the autobiography of a Wall Street hedge fund trader, published in the NYT:

I noticed the vitriol that traders directed at the government for limiting bonuses after the crash. I heard the fury in their voices at the mention of higher taxes. These traders despised anything or anyone that threatened their bonuses. Ever see what a drug addict is like when he’s used up his junk? He’ll do anything — walk 20 miles in the snow, rob a grandma — to get a fix. Wall Street was like that. In the months before bonuses were handed out, the trading floor started to feel like a neighborhood in “The Wire” when the heroin runs out. I’d always looked enviously at the people who earned more than I did; now, for the first time, I was embarrassed for them, and for me. I made in a single year more than my mom made her whole life. I knew that wasn’t fair; that wasn’t right. Yes, I was sharp, good with numbers. I had marketable talents. But in the end I didn’t really do anything. I was a derivatives trader, and it occurred to me the world would hardly change at all if credit derivatives ceased to exist. Not so nurse practitioners. What had seemed normal now seemed deeply distorted.

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