From the NYTimes article "Gay Marriage is Ruled Legal in Connecticut":

The ruling was groundbreaking in various respects. In addition to establishing Connecticut as the third state to sanction same-sex marriage, it was the first state high court ruling to hold that civil union statutes specifically violated the equal protection clause of a state constitution. The Massachusetts high court held in 2004 that same-sex marriages were legal, while California’s court decision in May related to domestic partnerships and not the more broadly defined civil unions.

You can choose where to invest and what taxes to change, and see how it affects America's economic future.  For each of the policy choices, you can read details with pros and cons.  It's filled with information about many of the choices for budget changes, and it presents them in a fun way.  You definitely should check it out!

Budget Hero

But no, this post isn't about me. Actually, it's about the interesting things said by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Fed Chairman, Marriner S. Eccles, who served from November 1934 to February 1948.  In his memoirs, Beckoning Frontiers, he described what he believed caused the Great Depression and what he believed could have been done differently.

I think the excerpt is chilling, and I wanted to share it with you.  I think his description of the debt and of the poor distribution of wealth sound eerily familiar.  I wanted to share the excerpt with you, as I think it's a very interesting read (Thanks Wikipedia!):

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery. [Emphasis in original.]

Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants. In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.

That is what happened to us in the twenties. We sustained high levels of employment in that period with the aid of an exceptional expansion of debt outside of the banking system. This debt was provided by the large growth of business savings as well as savings by individuals, particularly in the upper-income groups where taxes were relatively low. Private debt outside of the banking system increased about fifty per cent. This debt, which was at high interest rates, largely took the form of mortgage debt on housing, office, and hotel structures, consumer installment debt, brokers' loans, and foreign debt. The stimulation to spending by debt-creation of this sort was short-lived and could not be counted on to sustain high levels of employment for long periods of time. Had there been a better distribution of the current income from the national product -- in other words, had there been less savings by business and the higher-income groups and more income in the lower groups -- we should have had far greater stability in our economy. Had the six billion dollars, for instance, that were loaned by corporations and wealthy individuals for stock-market speculation been distributed to the public as lower prices or higher wages and with less profits to the corporations and the well-to-do, it would have prevented or greatly moderated the economic collapse that began at the end of 1929.

The time came when there were no more poker chips to be loaned on credit. Debtors thereupon were forced to curtail their consumption in an effort to create a margin that could be applied to the reduction of outstanding debts. This naturally reduced the demand for goods of all kinds and brought on what seemed to be overproduction, but was in reality underconsumption when judged in terms of the real world instead of the money world. This, in turn, brought about a fall in prices and employment.

Unemployment further decreased the consumption of goods, which further increased unemployment, thus closing the circle in a continuing decline of prices. Earnings began to disappear, requiring economies of all kinds in the wages, salaries, and time of those employed. And thus again the vicious circle of deflation was closed until one third of the entire working population was unemployed, with our national income reduced by fifty per cent, and with the aggregate debt burden greater than ever before, not in dollars, but measured by current values and income that represented the ability to pay. Fixed charges, such as taxes, railroad and other utility rates, insurance and interest charges, clung close to the 1929 level and required such a portion of the national income to meet them that the amount left for consumption of goods was not sufficient to support the population.

This then, was my reading of what brought on the depression.

Here's to - as Husband put it - my 25th trip around the sun.

I don't subscribe to any tv service, choosing instead to get my video entertainment on the web through major network's websites and Netflix.  I prefer this, because not only can I watch everything that I care to see, but I can pause them and watch them whenever I want, at a much cheaper price (usually free!) than premium tv service.  We do subscribe to cable internet through our local tv service provider, so I tried typing that in when it asked for provider information, but my local service isn't a partner.  ...so I used the info I had as an undergrad student in the dorms, and that worked fine. Voila! Olympics online tv access.

So, if you want to watch gymnastics video online, go to NBC olympics' gymnastics page.  I just watched the women's team preview, and it got me pretty psyched! They're talking about it being the best team since the Atlanta 1996 team, which I remember well because I was a competitive athlete at the time.  Watching this year's girls talk about the impact of watching Team USA's first ever olympic gold in the gymnastics women's team competition in 1996 really brought back memories.  I can't wait to watch this year's team compete!  Go Team USA!

Fingers crossed that soon...soon, this will be over.  August will end, the hot humid weather will subside, good work on T! will be done, and we will raise our Series A round of funding for the company, which we are currently reincarnating from an LLC to a C-corp (business & tax law - oh so much fun!).  September will bring my 25th birthday, and may it also signal the beginning of Husband and I's lives as salaried employees of our own company. With health and dental, and vacations, and a flexible schedule, and the feeling that our work makes a difference, and is a creative and fun outlet, and the potential for serious $$$ a few years down the road, and the ability to start paying back our debts...

I remember when, in the late eighties after the market crash of '87, a cluster of supercomputers in an isolated house in Santa Fe, New Mexico allowed programmers to use weather forecasting software to discover that traders on the stock market did not behave in a way consistent with the "rules" of economic theory. You know the (July, 1898 !) theory,- the one that "views" people as "lightning calculators of pleasure and pains, who oscillate like homogeneous globules of desire of happiness under the impulse of stimuli that shift them about the area and whose choices are not influenced by the choices of other consumers". (more)

Some economists latched onto this New Mexico research and started to advance a new theory of the market place. To their surprise they were labeled as oddball and flaky and their reputations and careers suffered so much that it has become more and more difficult for any academic wanting to keep their job as a teacher to question the established theory of human behavior in the market place.

Is this all about to change because of a new breed of Gen Xers and Ys, Young and Wealthy but Normal, or YAWNS, arriving in the marketplace? YAWNS are men and women in their 20s, 30s and 40s who want nothing less than to change the world and save the planet, and who might be "sick to death of buying stuff" This declaration of new market place behavior has been made only in newspapers, and, surprise, surprise, has not been endorsed by any economists!. A sociologist at Stanford University, David Grusky, has ventured out on a limb to say that "a cultural and demographic 'perfect storm' " is responsible. Now there's that weather forecasting theory again, and with it the implied hope that it might blow itself out like any other storm.

Hmm. I would bet my bottom dollar that there will be no serious economic study made of YAWNS. No academic will come forward with a model that supports a theory of the market where consumers are capable of saying "Enough already!" to all their buying and acting in a way consistent with a "spiritual/eco-friendly goal". And so the mainstream media, by consigning YAWNS to the same category as hippies and ecofreaks, will deliberately keep us in the dark about these mysterious Yawns and their behavior.

Or will it? We might be ready to discuss self-exclusion from the market place seriously. In my opinion YAWNS are timidly testing their freedom to be free of consumerism. They want their consumerism or lack of it not to affect their ability to function in society. Anyone who wants to 'self-exclude' themselves from consumerism is suggesting an alternative view of the manner in which the provision for basic needs for their existence as a human being might happen. YAWNS are saying that if buying stuff is necessary for identity within a market economy then that's a problem with the market economy, not with those who choose to find their identity elsewhere. Now that's what I call an alternative view!

Home Grown Food Network represents the suggestion of such an alternative view. In its demonstration house project in Desert Hot Springs we seek to emulate a household "self-excluded" from consumerism. The project has been subject to endless legal conflicts on account of its policy of not wanting to use new "bought in the store" methods of creating a sustainable low cost housing unit in a mobile home park. This would suggest that it might be ok for a successful filmmaker and his family (YAWN) living near Berkeley, California to dry their clothes on a line, grow their own vegetables and buy what they need at garage sales and second-hand stores, but if you happen to be a low income person in a mobile home park you better think again!

I welcome YAWNS and support their motivations, but there is work to be done now to boost their stance. And that's why I think we need a serious bout of contagious YAWNING!

Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network.

I wish I had been managing to write more lately, but I'm spending the majority of my awake, focused at-home time working on the company.  It's become apparent that the company might come up again and again now, so I think it needs a fun pseudonym.  Let's call it ... T! Yes, the site is affectionately abbreviated to T!  And I'm off again to keep writing up the T! business plan.

*P.S. Bonus points if you can name the song and artist.

Some of the movies featured the original cast of Star Trek. Speaking of the original cast of Star Trek, George Takei recently got married to his long-time partner due to the new California law. Congratulations, Sulu.

"I'm voting Republican so that my little Caitlin can be in a classroom with at least 30 other children."

Check it out.

Also, Yawns usually make over $100 K/year, but they live in a much smaller fixed income - in a conscious effort to tread lightly on the earth.  The average age of a Yawn is between 20s - 40s, who want nothing than to change the world and save he planet.

The article I read on the Sunday paper reported that, in 2004 a young man moved from Seattle to India to help build the local office of Microsoft Research. Once he saw the young children begging on the streets, he quit Microsoft and launched two networking sites, babajob.com and babalife.com, in an effort to link India's vast pool of potential workers with the people who need labor.

How about this Google software engineer who cashed in his stock options in 2003, and to his surprise he got more money than he could ever burn in his lifetime. So, what did he do? No, he didn't buy an expensive car or a mansion in the Googledom of Silicon Valley, he retired to a four-bedroom house in Stateline, Nevada and started giving money away. So far, he has given $400,000 to a local arts' organization to help build a new art center, $1 million to a bus company to help launch a route to so that casino workers wouldn't have to rely on private transportation... I wonder if he used some of his money to gamble and have some fun in Vegas too... This is what I call a GIVER! I wish we had many more Yawns in life, not just to help our environment but to help so many in need.

You go Yawns !!!

Read more about Yawns at

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1555505/Young-rich-are-more-Yawn-than-yuppie.html 

http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2008/04/30/waking-up-to-the-yawns-young-and-wealthy-but-normal/

"Husband, I need your help!" I call. I find him in the bathroom, struggling to get the plastic seal off of a new bottle of contact lens fluid. We look at each other, exchange an amused expression, and trade bottles.

Seconds later, we both have what we needed and couldn't do ourselves.

A gift, with a nice handwritten note.

Mmmm, fresh teas! And a delicious organic blueberry and walnut chocolate bar...must find a place to get more of those! (And of course, labeled with lab tape. ;-D)

Homemade cookies! I love cookies!

Thanks Jenny! It really did help brighten up my weekend to come home on Saturday and find the package!

Dans un des deux "grands" en ligne ici, ils ne l'ont pas encore. Chez l'autre... il coute cher, pas mal plus cher que si j'allais le chercher en magasin. Tiens donc, je vais aller sur le site de la compagnie de disque directement, et l'acheter de là, le télécharger dans leur boutique en ligne, me dis-je.

C'est pas fait pour des internouilles comme moi cette boutique en ligne ! M'a pris 3 tentatives avant de comprendre éyousse que je devais aller pour créer un compte. M'a ensuite pris un bon 5 minutes pour réaliser que j'avais gelé, parce que j'avais mis une adresse postale bidon et que le système poignait pas le code postal. Je veux pas recevoir de junk mail capitaine, je veux juste télécharger un CD de façon légaleeeeeeeeee ! Me semble que c'est légitime? Je te file une adresse courriel, je te paye par Paypal, tu me files un accès, je télécharge, on en parle plus.  Pourquoi ça peut pas être simple? Pourquoi me compliquer la vie ? Pourquoiiiiiiiii???

Je refuse de donner mon adresse postale à des commerces en ligne. Je veux la saintcrucifix de paix dans ma boite aux lettres.  Je veux pas que tu tues des arbres pour m'envoyer des promotions qui vont juste finir par remplir mon bac de recyclage. Je veux même pas que tu payes pour le timbre qui devrait me les amener pas plus que je ne veux que Poste Canada travaille là dessus, ça finit dans le bac bleu ! Veux-tu que je l'achète la musique de l'artiste dont tu détiens le contrat ou ben donc si tu veux pas? Oui? Ben fais moi ça simpleeeeeeeee SVP !!!! Parce qu'en ce moment, j'ai plutôt l'impression que ce sont mes informations que tu veux, pas me vendre sa musique.

Bon. M'a aller dépomper dans ma cuisine. Dois ben y a voir de quoi à frotter dans ce coin là.

Z'ont jamais entendu parler des Yawns eux autres, c'est clair.  Commencerait à être temps, parce que cette tendance là semble vouloir s'installer.

Fast Forward notes that YAWNS are the new chique. Young adults who have money but are light on consumption and care about the planet are a growing cohort within Gen-X & the early Millennials. This will cause quite a stir for Greed Wall Street.

We've now named the era of life for 18-25. It was bound to happen. Lets look at an updated chain of life:
0-2ish -- Infant
2-5 -- Toddler
5-10 -- Kid
10-12 -- Tween
12-18 -- Teenager
18-25 -- Twixter
25-40 -- ?
40-50 -- Middle Age
50-65 -- ?
65+ -- Old

Twixters are thought to be an in between age where things are really uncertain, life is moving fast, and anything is possible. Twixters progressively don't really want to grow up (thanks Toys 'R Us), don't want responsiblity, and aren't as quick to move out as was once the case.

Time Magazine, the bread and butter of journalism, dropped a cover story on this, but seems to have taken a position that this is a generation that is selfish in not wanting to emerge. Not that I'm too much an expert on this, but I think there are other cultural forces causing this than just selfishness (though it does contribute). American culture does a horrible job of educating its young adults, so it is that either graduation from school or marriage is typically the only way a young person is suddenly old enough to make decisions. Even in high schools, we still treat these like children.