Sambal

Wife woke up about 4:00 AM with mild contractions. I woke up around 6:30 because she was sitting up in bed and eating Corn Nuts, and everybody knows there’s no way to eat corn nuts quietly.

We got up and I tidied the house while she did the dishes and made pancakes. We watched the sun rise, and then we walked to the store (about a mile round trip) to get a pumpkin. Then she had a hot shower while I inflated the pool. Now she’s trying to nap a bit.

Throughout this, her contractions have been about 30 seconds long and between 3 and 7 minutes apart. Sometimes she gets short ones which start, but don’t progress all the way down.

Sometimes this sort of early labor stops; then it’s called “false labor”. Our midwife prefers “practice labor”. But of course all true labor starts with early labor signs, so this could be the real thing. This morning as we were cleaning up I felt that the day was marked, somehow. Even if this isn’t the day our child is born, I’ll remember it for a long time.

20mg of hydrocodone and nine and a half hours later, I am stone-free. Probably.

Normally when you “pass a kidney stone”, what really happens is a part of the stone breaks off and passes through your urinary system. Sometimes you pass the whole damn thing, though. See:

I’m reasonably sure that it’s the whole thing because a) it hurt like hell coming through, and b) the ultrasound sized it as 4-5mm, and this stone is about 3mm x 4mm (stone with ruler (87k)).

Next step is to get it analyzed for content.

Well, not for long.

A couple of weeks ago I went to see a specialist about my kidney stone, and we all agreed to leave it alone, since I hadn’t had an attack in two years. The alternative is breaking up the stone (I prefer to say “blowing it up”) with sound waves in a process called Extracorporeal Shockwave Lithotripsy. The downside to this process is that the fragments of the stone pass out in the usual way, and as any kidney stone sufferer can tell you, it’s the transition from kidney to bladder which is painful. One stone in the kidney is better than 500 in the ureter.

So went my thinking.

This morning I woke up at about 6:00 AM with a minor back pain. Well, stabbing back pain but minor compared to what I have now. I tried changing position or massaging it, but it didn’t go away. That was, I guess, the first indication of a kidney stone attack.

About half an hour later I decided, to hell with pain coping, I’m getting some drugs. So I took two tylenol + codeine pills. That worked for another hour. Ten minutes ago I took two tylenol + hyrdocodone pills given to me by the good Dr. Schumb back in 1999 when I had my first attack. I will probably be unconscious for the rest of the day. Cheers!

And yes, it still hurts like hell. In fact, it hurts more now, through the building fog of painkillers, than it has at any time in the past. Thank God there’s no memory of pain.

And my wife has promised not to go into labor until I wake up, which is awfully sporting of her.

Good night.

Eugene Volokh writes (but see UPDATE below):

The second half of my prediction was that the Court will reverse, and I would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for that darned Justice Scalia and his dog.

Although I am aware that he is merely making an ironic cultural reference to Scooby-Doo here, please note that some confused people will probably misunderstand this to be a denigrating reference to Justice Thomas. And that makes it an irony “two-fer”:

1. any reference to Scooby-Doo is ipso facto irony;

2. Thomas as Scooby-Doo draws ironic attention to the claim that Scalia is leading Thomas around by the nose, a claim which Volokh has refuted in the past

I still fear that confused people will misunderstand Eugene’s point, but to be honest my imagination is now captured by a different question: if Thomas is Scooby-Doo, then obviously Scalia is Shaggy. So which of Ginsburg and O’Connor is Velma and which is Daphne? And does that make Rhenquist Fred? What about the other four?

UPDATE: The “and his dog” is now off the Volokh Conspiracy. Probably wise, since it wasn’t what E.V. intended, but a bummer for me, because this was one of my better jokes.

I had a dream last night. I went to the grocery store and bought some good beer.

Then I woke up.

In California, they sell alcohol of all types in regular grocery stores, liquor stores, and convenience stores. In college we would go to the VONS for well alcohol, because it was cheaper there, and then go to Liquorama for high-quality stuff, because the selection was better. Then of course there were the corner liquor stores (converted from corner groceries) in easy walking distance from our place in Oakland. The same in Santa Monica.

In Alberta you still have to go to a liquor store to buy alcohol-containing drinks. Before 1993, there was a state-owned liquor monopoly. In 1993 the liquor industry was privatized, and the province says encouraging things like:

Canadian tax law includes a concept known as “arm’s length”. It is intended to make cheating or gaming the tax system more difficult.

The tax laws of this great country assume that two people who are not dealing at arm’s length have coaligned interests. This presumably increases the possiblility that these people will try to take inappropriate advantage of some feature of the tax system, and therefore transactions between non-arm’s-length actors are more carefully scrutinized by the tireless public servants at the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency (CCRA).

The definition of arm’s length is stupid. Two persons are not at arm’s length if they are related, or if there is a chain of related persons. What’s related? A parent and child are related. Siblings are related. Spouses are related. A corporation is related to its controlling owners.

The upshot? Our company is related through a chain including blood and control to another company, which buys some of our time. Therefore we’re not at arm’s length with them.

The work we do is eligible for a special refundable credit under Canada’s bizarre research & development tax rules. But since we are a non-arm’s-length actor, the amount that is eligible for this refundable credit is less than the amount that they pay us — significantly less, actually. The approximate equation as set out in Canada’s charming tax law is A = B * C * D where A is the eligible amount, B is the amount paid, C is the fraction of our revenue that came from them, and D is the ratio of expenses to revenue. Expenses in this case includes regular salary (up to a cap) but not bonuses dependent on profit.

So in order to maximize their credits under this rule, they would like us to make C and D be as close to 1 as possible. That is, that we do all of our work for them (and thus derive all of our revenue from them, so C is 1). And that all of our revenue is expensed, which in our case means paid out as regular salary: no retained earnings, and no year-end bonus payments.

Both of these are against our interests, of course. It’s nice to have a steady client, but if they need to cut someone from the payroll, contractors are always first in line — blood relation or no blood relation. The standard contractor defense for this is to always have something else going, even if it’s just a small side project.

Similarly with the salaries. We set our salary low deliberately, so that we only pay payroll and income taxes on the money we need to pay the mortgage, eat, and have a little fun. We try to retain money in the company (now that we’re exempt from evil foreign investor tax) both so we can pay salaries even if there’s a dry spell in revenue, and because we have this crazy idea of saving some money and investing it, y’know, maybe creating some jobs in the Canadian economy, creating some more value, building a business. Call me a foolish idealist.

So basically we have a situation where, because we are deemed to be not-at-arm’s-length, our client suddenly cares deeply about how we run our company. Because small changes in our behavior can mean that they lose real money, they put pressure on us to behave in a particular way. Since we want to behave in a different way, we have arguments where we and they try to make some compromies between our competing interests. In summary: the tax code says our interests are coaligned so therefore we must be treated in this way; and the difference between our and our client’s responses to this treatment shows very clearly that our interests are at odds.

The correct answer, in my opinion, is to eliminate the R&D tax credit. If this boondoggle of a credit is so widely abused that people who file for it must be presumptively treated like tax cheaters, get rid of it!

Oh yes — there’s another solution. Payments to employees up to 2.5 times the maximum pensionable salary are fully eligible for the credit. But we don’t want to be employees.

And a double bonus: 2.5 times the 2003 maximum pensionable salary is about $300,000 CAD per year, or about $200,000 USD per year. So any company with a “key employee” who is worth more than that is not able to take the credit on the employee’s full salary. The net effect will be to tend to encourage businesses to keep salaries for research personnel at or below that number. And the people who are worth more can go south — brain drain, anyone?

Just had a whole week of nasty downtime, coming from a variety of directions.

It was mostly my fault: I hadn’t been keeping the name servers in my whois records up-to-date when my own IP addresses changed. Tuesday, when a client’s server (which just happened to be hosting my backup DNS) had its IP address changed by their upstream provider, that was the end — because it wasn’t just my backup DNS, it was all my DNS, as far as the whois database was concerned.

It took some hassle to fix that — finding my whois password, reconfiguring the name servers on my current IP addresses. I had to get a new IP address for one of my upstreams too. Then I had to wait two days while the name server changes propagated through the top-level DNS system.

Finally mail works again, and I’m hit with a metric shitstorm of bounced spam messages forged from our work domain. Great. Then, as that subsides, I start getting postmaster messages — double bounces — from the client’s machine. Apparently they’re receiving — more to the point, they’re accepting — e-mails from some site in Korea.

At least I have someone to complain to.

We had our last prenatal class today, which included a sort of a graduation ceremony. All the expectant moms got a little bit of face paint, which I thought was cool but my wife thought was hokey.

I really need to get better about not guessing people’s politics from their political positions. Not too long ago at Sunday dinner with my in-laws, we were all talking about Alberta’s position in the confederation. As usual, the conversation degenerated into griping about how Alberta would be better off financially if the Federal government went away and Alberta paid for its own health care and social services. Then my mother-in-law, who I had thought was a Federalist Liberal, said (without cracking a smile) “Don’t forget that the Federal government funds our national airline… and defense!” at which point the conversation ended, since everyone was laughing.

(I can’t give the whole history of my wife’s family’s troubles with Air Canada here — for both space and privacy reasons — but it’s a good tale. But anyone who lives in the prairie provinces can pour you out a tale of woe regarding Air Canada’s crappy schedules, lack of customer service and outright hostility to Western Canada. The Canadian military, of course, is a joke that needs no explanation.)