This style is All-Bear Freestyle. (He asked for the music to be put on, so his choice there.)

He’s doing *very* well in his intro to ballroom class, but we haven’t yet convinced him to get one of the older girls/women at the social dances to actually do cha cha, samba, or waltz with him. In his class for little kids, though, the girls are actually fighting over him–one grabs one arm, another the other. Many days, he’s the ONLY boy any of the girls will dance with! I think this has mostly to do with the fact that he’s also the only boy who can stay on rhythm–and the only one who knows who to invite a girl to dance rather than, well, basically grab her and shove her around. So sometimes, the Bear partners with a girl, and the rest of the girls dance with girls and the boys with the boys. I use the term “dance” pretty loosely. Sometimes the boys look more like they’re wrestling than dancing…. The little girls would be a lot more willing to dance with them if only they’d be *gentler!*

I am the only non-Russian-speaking parent in the entire dance class, and I’m a good ten years younger than the next youngest parent, too! (Fortunately for the Bear, the classes are in English–*almost* all the other kids speak Russian at home, but they’re all fluent in English. The teachers, of course, are Russian/former Soviet Bloc.) Most of the women just have an only child (in one case twins), as well, which also makes me odd. And I’m the only active dancer, as well.

But I don’t mind! As soon as the other women realized that my kid wasn’t going to be a brat and that, yep, I knew something about dance, they unfroze. *g*

The Bear has been wholly responsible for keeping his toys picked up since he was three. But he’s five now, and I’ve decided that he needs more chores. I’ve always felt that even if I raise happy, healthy children, if they are unable to keep their house in good shape, I’ve failed.

So, new responsibilities! Theoretically, the Bear is putting up his dirty clothes, but I’m going to enforce this now. He also has to put his dishes up in the dishwasher and make his bed. Very realistic for a 5-y-o.

In a couple of years, I’ll add more–rotate him through the usual household chores. Right now, it’s REALLY unrealistic to ask him to put up clean dishes from the dishwasher since *I* need a stepstool to reach many of the shelves in the current kitchen! But there will be other things.

There are two kinds of grocery stores in the grocery industry: HILO and EDLP. HILO means grocery stores that normally have high prices (HI) that run rotating super-cheap loss-leaders (LO). The EDLP stores specialize in Everyday Low Prices–so their sales are rarely as good, but their standard prices are considerably lower.

There are three kinds of typical shopper. Some are store-faithful. The amount that they buy in a particular week depends heavily upon the sales offered. Others choose the store by the sale. The amount they buy is fairly consistent, but where they spend it varies. The third type is very rare–people who go to multiple stores every week. There’s a reason for this. Unless you have a VERY large family and far more time than money, it’s really not worth it to do this.

So the grocery industry depends on types 1 and 2 to maximize their profits. There’s another option that even fewer people take, though–and it can save you a bundle without killing your time.

1) Identify the cheapest EDLP grocery store. Buy weekly perishables there, varying purchases by what’s on sale.

2) Keep tabs on sales at the HILO stores. Whenever they have a great sale on something that is freezable (like meat) or imperishable, stock up–but still do your regular shopping at your regular store. Make sure it’s labeled and accessible in its storage location. DON’T forget to date it!

I just about dropped a litter of kittens when I first came to MD and saw the meat prices. $6-8 a lb for decent beef? Insane! Since then, though, I’ve learned the grocery stores and have learned what the low prices are. Now I buy my boneless, skinless chicken breasts for under $2/lb, my briskets, pot roasts, stirfry meat, and soup meat for about the same, my ground beef for $1-2/lb, and my pork for $1.25-1.75/lb. (DH doesn’t do steak or “big hunks of meat.”) For nearly a year, while we were stuck with two houses, I fed my family of three for $45 a week without spending all weekend running around to different stores. (We didn’t eat out then.) Now I’m at a non-self-denying $60/wk (plus occasional eating-out meals)–we can eat just about anything we care to. I’m just careful about how things are prepared and how much waste I make.

There are ways of reducing energy usage that do not harm quality of life. Low-flow faucets and low-water toilets (assuming the toilet technologies work, which they do now!), switching from incandescent lighting to fluorescent and/or LED, increasing insulation of houses, increasing the efficiency of cars and appliances–all of these things have a very minimal step-wise cost and can produce far-reaching benefits. In addition, there is every reason to research alternative fuels and to eventually bring them into play in our larger energy equation.

What is not good for the economy or society, though, is a broad effort to turn back the clock an to live, as much as possible, a pre-industrial life. Industrialization is the process of moving from man- and animal-power to (fossil) fuels, and its contribution to the worth of a human being can scarcely be overestimated.

Why is this?

1. When people are the primary source of power, most people MUST be used as physical labor.

2. The economic worth of a human being is equivalent to what that person can produce.

3. Direct physical labor produces very little.

4. The worth of most people becomes very small. Meanwhile, the worth of goods rises sharply relative to the worth of each person.

5. As most people’s worth is degraded, it becomes easier for the remaining elite to own and/or control them.

6. When human being become a unit of capital, it becomes very desirable to own and/or control them.

We are used to the middle class consisting of about 83% of the population, the lower class consisting of about 15%, and the upper class consisting of about 2%.

In pre-industrial countries *that are doing well*, the LOWER class is about 90% of the population, the middle class about 9.5%, and the upper class about .5%. And the lower class isn’t comparable to our lower class, either–it is far poorer than most people in the United States can even imagine. Almost all our “just plain poor” (that is, removing crippled addicts and the crippled mentally ill) have TVs, stoves, running hot and cold water, heat that’s on most of the winter, electric lights, phones, bikes if not cars, microwaves, refrigerators, and they don’t suffer from food shortages, even if they can’t buy everything they want–all these things would place them in the middle class of a pre-industrial society living at the fringes of industrial societies. Of that list, my husband didn’t have, as a child: TV, hot water, heat, microwave, or a refrigerator. Food was also very rationed. And my husband was the son of a MS mechanical engineer!

I found an estimate that in a modern factory, eight T-shirts are produced per hour for each worker there. Now, the cotton must be planted, harvested, cleaned, combed, woven, etc. first, so I’m going to more than half that–which is certainly excessive–and say that from planting to harvesting, it takes 0:15 man-hours to make a T-shirt. In a year of (Western) fulltime employment, that works out to a worth of 5,000 T-shirts per worker. Let’s say the average consumer, in terms of total clothes per year, consumes an average of the equivalent in labor of 50 T-shirts. (That’s an insanely high number, but bear with me here….) This means that one garment worker clothes 1,000 people per year at the very least. His economic worth, then, is equivalent to all the clothes that more than 1,000 people get in a year.

In preindustrial times, about 10% of the population was directly employed in the fabric industry. This doesn’t include much of the spinning, which was done by farmwives in their spare time for spare money–it mostly means the weavers, dyers, fullers, tailors, etc. But let’s ignore these women. I am also ignoring the many people employed as shepherds and shearers and wool transporters–pretending they just don’t exist. That’s probably at least another 5% of the population. But ignoring all these people and pretending that wool magically appeared, already spun into thread for the use of the weavers, etc., it took one person to supply the clothing needs for about 10 people. His economic worth, then, is at most equivalent to all the clothes that 10 people got in a year.

AND THAT’S NOT THE END OF IT. Not only is the preindustrial worker worth less in terms of how many clothed-people he produces, but the total number of finished pieces of clothing that is produced is far, far fewer. Most people in preindustrial times could not afford a whole new-to-them outfit every year. Many never saw NEW clothes in their lives. So his production may work out to maybe 6 changes of clothes and a few linens, all of which is consumed by the middle classes and the rich. Meanwhile, the industrial worker produces a veritable mountain of goods, which are, understandably, much, much less expensive so that people of all ranks of life can afford them. The industrial worker is worth MORE, and his goods (and the goods of all other industrial workers) are worth LESS, allowing him to leverage his greater worth to get more goods than any preindustrial worker in the same circumstances can imagine.

It is popular to call up the image of a sweat-shop in China or India where T-shirts are being produced by laborers–many underage–working 10-12-hour shifts under conditions Westerners wouldn’t accept. This is true. There are even some places where, because of the low worth of certain segments of society, it is possible to buy people (particularly children) or to exploit outcasts (such as illegal immigrants) and make them into slave labor. But what isn’t covered is the flip side. Most of the workers in most factories are working in better conditions and at far better wages than those which their largely preindustrial origins have to offer. Yes, 12-hour shifts are hard. But they have an apartment of their own, plenty of food, likely even a TV–because their work, even at $.35-1.25 an hour (India/China) is worth much much more than that of their neighbors. They choose the life because it offers the best standard of living–and, often enough, the safest working conditions!–of all the options available to them. And this begins a process that drives the value of humans up as a whole in the region.

What will eventually happen in the current havens of cheap labor, barring gross government corruption, is that industrialization will catch up across the economy, and labor will grow more expensive–and things like environmental protections and safety regulations will creep in out of sheer economic common sense. As those economies make the inevitable service-industry revolution, they and we will look elsewhere for cheaper labor. (This is, I’ve believed for a long time, Africa’s best hope at the moment.) If and when cheap labor runs out globally, then automatization will slowly take over, to keep down the price of good and to keep up the worth of labor in the post-industrial country. (Many Americans believe that they are competing for manufacturing jobs with cheap labor from China and India. That’s only partly true. They are completing for manufacturing jobs with cheap labor plus excise tax plus shipping plus the cost of doing business across the ocean in China and India AND with the cost of mechanization. Right now, China and India are cheaper than mechanization and unskilled American labor. This won’t necessarily stay true. Once further mechanization becomes the most attractive choice, it will only grow cheaper–something often overlooked–from which there really isn’t–and shouldn’t be–a return.)

Another way of looking at it is that humans can have value because of the force their muscles can exert or because of what is in their brains. Muscles have a low, finite, non-improvable strength. We’re not going to be worth more as laborers 200 years from now than we are now because we aren’t going to be able to lift more, haul more, etc. Our brains, however, are very malleable in the kinds of information they can hold and the kinds of tasks that they can do. So we can do things with our minds that are worth many times what our lifting ability would make us worth compared to, say, a horse.

In a preindustrial society, most people are reduced to the worth of their bodies, and the economy contracts accordingly. When we rely on other sources of power, we’re worth what’s in our heads. We want the second. All of us do.

We must have either cheap energy or cheap people. I vote for keeping energy cheap–and plentiful.

I had a bit of a scare on Sunday night. Stinkerbell turned herself head down, descended WAY down and decided to hang out there. I was afraid that she was engaging, which usually doesn’t happen with higher order pregnancies until right before birth.

The Bear was early, so I’m at high risk for a second premature birth. To complicate matters, the total amount of time that active labor to baby-in-my-arms took was 2.5 hours with him. And nearly 45 minutes of that was blowing, waiting for my loser of an OB/GYN to show up. So that means that I could have as little as 30 minutes, total, of active-to-3rd-stage labor with this one. NOT enough time to stop anything!

So needless to say, I was concerned. By this time, my OB/GYN didn’t really care–I was nearly at 29 weeks, so the baby has a greater than 90% chance of survival if born then, which makes her pretty happy.

Needless to say, it being MY BABY, it is not at all acceptable that the baby has a 10% chance of dying (and a greater than 30% of serious developmental delays and/or mental retardation).

So I went in, and everything looked good, but I bullied her into a test for fetal fibronectin. This is a text for protein that’s in what attaches the amniotic sac to the uterus. It’s released when the connections begin to degrade. If there is no fFN, you have a greater than 90% chance of not going into labor over the next 2 weeks. If the test is positive, you have about a 60% chance. So it’s more helpful in determining that there’s nothing to worry about than that there is. (Mine was negative, BTW!)

Plenty of OB/GYNs do this routinely for anyone considered high risk. (Like, oh, ME.) If it is positive, then I browbeat my OB/GYN into giving me progesterone shots. They’ve been shown to improve a number of labor outcomes in high-risk situations while carrying minimal risks themselves. I also know to call 911 for premature labor the first time I have a contraction rather than waiting to see if they’re close enough together to officially qualify–with me, it would probably be way too late by then to stop it!

Anyhow, my attitude with this pregnancy is basically, “It’s my baby, not yours. You really don’t give a damn what happens to my child as long as it isn’t dead and doesn’t suffer from some obvious birth injury, which is why US statistics for premature birth and cesareans are so shitty in the first place. So freaking pardon me if I don’t want to be another of your ‘oopses’–and deal with it. Because if you won’t, I’ll find someone else who will.”

I’ve also let the entire practice know, under no uncertain terms, that if I’m due, I’m having the baby wherever it wants to come. If that means in the triage of labor & delivery, so be it. There’s no way in hell that I’m waiting for my OB/GYN to show up, so if they don’t make it when I call, someone else is getting to charge my insurance for the delivery, not them. I said it much more nicely, of course. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t mean it.

It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement if you have an offer for your book. You want to believe SO HARD that you are on the Road To Success that it’s easy to shut your eyes and ears to big, fat warning signs along the way. Before you sign any agreement, please, keep these points in mind.

THERE ARE NO EXCUSES OR EXCEPTIONS FOR THE FOLLOWING.

If your print publisher isn’t a traditional publisher, you need to think long and hard about whether you want to choose them. They’d better have a really innovative way of publishing to make it worth your while–and most of those kinds of “oddball” publishing methods are in areas like comics, not novel-length fiction.

1) Traditional print publishers pay advances.

2) Traditional print publishers have print runs.

3) Traditional print publishers have marketing and distribution networks–being in a catalog and on Amazon.com isn’t enough.

4) Traditional print publishers pay royalties at a market-competitive rate.

5) Traditional print publishers pay out royalties at least twice a year.

6) Traditional print publishers never ask you to sign over the copyright to your work.

7) Traditional print publishers have a means by which your book can go out of print and revert to you.

8 ) Traditional print publishers edit and proof your work.

9) Traditional print publishers provide the cover art.

10) Traditional print publishers don’t rely on you to sell the book.

11) Traditional print publishers don’t require you to buy any of your books.

Note that epublishers have a different model! It can be very successful, too.

From the blog I’ve been picking through recently.

“Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education. Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.” — Abraham Flexner

I’ve recently run across this quote at several blogs, and from a historical perspective, I find it more than a little incoherent.

There are lots of reasons to dislike war. Obviously, of course, it kill people–not just soldiers but civilians. There’s no war that’s ever been conducted without *significant* civilian deaths. Our modern ideal of fights being only between fighters is all very nice, but it’s never happened and never will happen. It can be a tool of oppression (as well as of resistance and of liberty!). It is expensive. It causes long-term economic damage.

But the quote above? None of it hangs together for an instant.

First, it starts with a weird parallel–comparing a short-term emergency measure to longterm growth measures. It makes as much sense for a nation to borrow for education as it does for a nation to borrow for building roads. War has often historically been financed by short-term measures–taxes, “making” more money, and borrowing have been the favorites since recorded history. This has been successful as a strategy for over 2,500 years because of what war is and what it means.

The best part of the quote, though, is the second part, which is a brilliant display of throwing away some 5,000 years of evidence. I cannot come up with a single great civilization that was not also preeminent militarily. Rather than civilization an war being mutually exclusive, I’d argue, instead, that without supremacy in war, civilization cannot exist. Ancient civilizations were boosted by influxes of gold and slaves from their conquests–many could not, in fact, be maintained without such injections of wealth. In more recent times, a strong military is necessary to ensure the security of trade, respect for borders and self-rule, and maintain an equal footing with other nations in the international market and in diplomacy.

If someone declared that this state of things is unfortunate, I wouldn’t disagree. But the quote above is purely ludicrous.

One of the “side-effects” to homeschooling that I didn’t expect was number of irrelevant trivia that I’d find out.

For example, today I learned that my DH’s birthday is the same date as the ancient Greek festival of Dionysus, the god of wine.

Also, I’ve decided that DH should have a blog name. It’s Secret Asian Man, or SAM for short. Why? Well, one day, we were going down the highway, listening to the radio when this song came on. I looked as SAM and said, “You know, it doesn’t sound like he’s saying ‘agent.’” SAM said, “I know–it sounds more like Asian!” And then he proceeded to invent entirely new lyrics to suit.

Apparently,we’re not the only ones this occurred to.

I’ve found a new economist blog that’s interesting to read here. It’s a great deal more thoughtful–and seems to be a lot less politicized, never mind less silly–than the Freakonomics blog.

I don’t agree at all with the article quoted here, but it’s interesting reading, nevertheless!