Sorry to hear that. I'd like to chime in on this one.

I have 3 lovely, well adjusted, funny, principled, intelligent daughters. I do not deserve them.

All 3 were valedictorians of their HS, without pushing by us.

Anecdotal? Perhaps, but harder to argue with results * 3.

I've never before shared this much info about what we did. FWIW, YMMV, etc.

1) Give them the gift of self esteem. Demonstrate your believe in their intrinsic worth, and act out of love only. This does not mean giving them every toy they want, but it does mean make sacrifices when you can for the best aspirations of your kids, and constantly showing them how much you appreciate them. Be sentimental and approachable. I think my kids knew I would have been no less their fan if they were D students.

2) They need you, give them all of you. Don't hold back and don't ever fake it with them. They know you; no double standards! If that movie is bad for your kids, parents can do without watching it. Schedule regular whole-family time and 1:1 time. Family dinners together are important.

3) Humor and curiosity are some of the best tools. Demonstrate them. Memorize funny poems, make music together, show how to take things apart, and keep it all upbeat, even crazy.

4) Don't let anyone else raise your kids. That includes daycare and school systems. I lean toward public school system over homeschooling, and it worked out for us, but that depended on what the system had to work with. Social development and problem solving is important. So are friends. Be involved parents, room mothers, etc. Know the kids in their K-6 classes; they end up on your doorstep asking for dates. Here's the tough part, but it proved extremely important: I barely made a living wage and my wife made more than me when we decided one would stay home. It was her call who would. I don't know if I would be able to look my kids in the eyes if we hadn't sacrificed.

5) Money incentives? Oh ya. Make cash match effort was my philosophy. They got a pittance for base allowances but kept job-journals as they learned to write and were richly rewarded for finding new ways to help. In school, the first A is the easiest, even hard not to get. That last A is a bear, it's the subject they don't like. My kids got $1 for the first A, and the pay doubled for each additional A. They nearly bankrupted me. Long term, the investment works out. The youngest just took her MCAT.

Since I see little evidence that timothy or Mr. Chapman read the article, I'll do them a favor so they don't have to click:

< article paycheck="undeserved" >

Hi I'm Agam Shah and I'm writing an article about multicore processors, but these concepts are so new to me that I'm putting quotees around "race conditions" like it's frickin' sharks with lasers.

So then I did a Google search on "parallel programming tools" and it help me get another paragraph out of the way.

Oh, and I quote some lamer analyst who has never heard of NUMA or libhoard, so I'll try to fabricate some crisis that the problems they address might never be solved.

Parallel programming is hard, WAH! WAH!

Oh, except when it's not, as in that trivial application named Photoshop. I'll write one of those next weekend.

It seems the article and the report casts the net too wide.

Some mega-corps (like Coca-Cola and Cisco) actually do business everywhere, and even though they show considerable numbers of businesses in tax havens, those are a small fraction (10%) of the total number of countries in which they have offices. For companies like that, I'd be surprised to find a country where they are *not* operating.

Others, like Chevron and Goldman Sachs, show over half of their foreign operations in tax-haven locales. To me, that sounds very slimy.

Others are somewhere in between, probably representing a somewhat disproportionate presence in tax havens.

What else would you expect? Corporations do behave like psychopaths.