This is the second time around so by now this story deserves a post. I have 4 children. The two eldest are girls. They are 16 and 14. They go to a British School in Madrid. First my 16 year old faced this problem. Now my 14 year old. I call it the 14 year old fascist problem. Because as you will see it is a problem that seems to start and end during the grade at which they are 14 years old. What is the problem? Fascism.

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I built two companies who competed with Telefonica in the DSL business.  Jazztel and Ya.com.  In both companies we had a very hard time competing with Telefonica because Telefonica owns media and in general favors whatever government runs Spain so governments ally with the former monopoly and not the consumer.  But the European Commission finally listened to us and gave Telefónica a 150 million euro fine.  Let´s see what happens though.  My fear is that Telefonica will find a way to use its local influence not to pay it.  The proof is that this bad news has not had any effect on its stock price.

Shaping concrete the way it was needed for Casavars to be ready (Casavars is our new Madrid home) was extremely hard. As a result this 2 year construction project turned out to be a 4 year ordeal. But all is well when it ends well, and now the family is in. We are 4 kids, 2 grown ups. They say that molecules in gases adapt to the volume of the container. So does my family. Friends keep coming by. Here are more pictures.

In 2005 around 2000 different people per day read my blogs in Spanish and English.  Now around 15000 people do.  In 2005 everyone who read my blog, actually read my blog.  Now around 5000 really read my blog, around 10,000 get the feeds of different kind that I supply and I don´t really know if they read my blog.  Also my new blog design and all the new features I have are lost to all on RSS readers.  These visitors probably only read a portion of what I write highlighting it in their Netvibes or iGoogle.  Now how can I complain if I do the same with other blogs in my favorite RSS reader?

In the future, should us bloggers just write feeds, forget about design and not even bother writing beyond the portion of the article that normally gets highlighted by a cursor?  Is our attention span going down to that?  I know mine is, and I am worried.

Here´s the latest Pew Institute global poll on what people think about USA.

Many paradoxes come out of it. Here´s a few that stand out.

People like USA more in Lebanon and Pakistan than in Germany or Spain.

People like USA more in Russia than in France.

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The Israelis and the Americans have women soldiers fighting their wars. They fight against men. What I wonder is this. If men beat women on the average at any sport including cycling, tennis, football, basketball, golf, rugby, boxing, karate, foil, and others. Is it fair to send women to fight men in the close combat type of warfare that goes on in the Middle East?

Two days ago 6 Spanish soldiers were attacked and killed in Lebanon. This is an excerpt from the Spanish newspaper El Pais that shows that half of them were Colombians fighting in the Spanish Army.

Los fallecidos son: Jefferson Vargas Moya, de 21 años; Jeyson Alejandro Castaño Abadía, de 20; y Yhon Edisson Posada Valencia, de 20; todos de nacionalidad colombiana; y Jonathan Galea García, de 18 años, de Madrid; Juan Carlos Villora Díaz, de 20, de Ávila; y Manuel David Portas Ruiz, de 20, de Sevilla.

Joining the Spanish army is a way to immigrate to Spain. Foreigners can join the Spanish Army and after serving for a certain number of years they can gain Spanish citizenship. The Spanish Army did this because Spain has a very difficult time convincing Spaniards born in a now very successful consumer society to die trying to promote peace in the Middle East. I am not surprised that very few Spaniards would want to enlist. Personally I am troubled by this recruiting practice. I am a Latin American myself (Argentine) and I don´t see why Latin Americans should die fighting in the Middle East.

Some people say that Fon´s 15 minute free surfing is easy to hack by using fake e mails, validating fake e mails, spoofing macs.  Well a lot of systems on the internet are easy to hack in that way.  Facebook for example removes thousands of people per week who sign up with fake identities.  But why would an “evil” person do all this and in any case watch a wifiad every 15 minutes when there´s so many open wifi hotspots in the world?  Why bother realy.  The 15 minutes generate money for bills, and it makes everyone aware of Fon.  Before we introduced the free 15 minutes very few people knew about Fon and this is a way to at least test the community.  Foneros want more coverage and the 15 minutes trial is increasing registrations and coverage.  And on top of this we are monitoring closely for this type of abuse and we have not seen it.  Plus all foneros are protected cause they enter Fon through a WPA key and the public Fon network is monitored as used by others.

I am staying at the very fashionable Clift Hotel in San Francisco. But as I come out of this hotel I find hundreds of homeless people, many of them begging and I have a hard time enjoying my walks. I lived in NYC for many years and there were as many beggars in NYC as they are here or more but now that I have spent 12 years in Madrid where I am hardly every approached by a beggar I cannot but wonder why begging is so common in the large cities of America. Think of it. This is a country who spent half a trillion dollars invading Iraq, some say with the best of intentions, others are not so sure. But even if the intentions were good I find it very hard to understand how the people who run this country do not see more fit spending half a trillion dollars providing health care and in general treating the bottom 20% of the population better.  To me the richest countries in the world are not the countries in which the rich live better but the countries in which the bottom 20% lives better as if the botton 20% is not doing that badly then everyone else is doing very well.  Many people in America and some in Europe criticize taxation in Europe but taxation in Spain is similar to that of USA and because we don´t spend so much money in the military we have so much more to spend in more reasonable endeavors.