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Brett's on a business trip to Norway this week, turning up his nose at rheindeer meat and getting rained on. He'll be back Sunday, but I have him booked for Monday (it's our anniversary), so you'll have to live without him for a few days.
Happy Memorial Day, and best wishes for a sunny start to your summer.
-Anne
Mr. “irrational exuberance” himself – Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan – admits there are housing bubbles in some local markets, reports the Los Angeles Times. Greenspan’s comments make clear that booming home sales threaten the national economy and families living in overheated markets.
“Without calling the overall national issue a bubble, it’s pretty clear that it’s an unsustainable underlying pattern,” Greenspan told the Economic Club of New York, according to Bloomberg and The New York Times. “People are reaching to be able to pay the prices to be able to move into a home. There are a few things that suggest, at a minimum, there’s a little froth in this market.”
Hmm. I never thought of my inability to buy a house closer to my work as “froth.” I see it more as major pain-in-the ass.
Accelerated turnover rates, purchases of second homes and risky finance methods seem to worry Greenspan the most. As promised in an earlier post that reported 60 percent of Americans own second homes, here is more information about second homes:
More than 445,000 second homes were purchased in 2003, according to Real Estate Journal. As of 2001, Americans owned 3.5 million second homes, reports National Geographic, though numbers vary depending on accounting methods. So it sounds more like 6 percent rather than 60 percent of Americans own second homes. Still, with so many second homes out there, expect some of these properties to flow into the market and further depress prices during a slump.
The housing bubble of course creates a huge obstacle for families trying to buy their first home or to move up: “Affordability is a serious issue,” Esmael Adibi, director of the A. Gary Anderson Center for Economic Research at Chapman University in Orange, tells the Los Angeles Times. “The fact is that more people are trying to buy more housing than their incomes can justify.”
But the Fed probably cares less about the fate of American families and more about the overall economy, which is based on consumer consumption. If housing values fall, Americans will be less able to tap equity, spending will drop and the economy will most likely falter.
Despite Greenspan’s hinting at the truth, he downplays the possible impact of a housing bust. “Even if there are declines in prices, the significant run-up to date has so increased equity in homes that only those who have purchased very recently, purchased before prices actually literally go down, are going to have problems,” he says. Sorry Alan, you forgot all those Americans who have refinanced their homes to buy cars, food and health care. They’re just as vulnerable as those who bought homes with bad credit terms and at inflated values. Doth protests too little, which reveals just how much the Fed must fear the bubble exploding all at once.
A couple years ago I bought a shredder to grind up all those #$@&!! “checks” our credit card companies like to send us. After all, the biggest criminal threat to Americans nowadays is identity theft.
Now all those mailings I grind up are piling up in my office because the shredder jammed. I’m thinking of upgrading to an industrial-strength model, but I wonder if I should even bother since my identity was one of those possibly stolen during a breach of the LexisNexis database earlier this year. The company offered me free Equifax credit protection for one year, which I snapped up, but what happens after that? Why should I have to pay for that company’s mistake for the rest of my life?
At least government investigators just arrested a group of young hackers who may be linked to the case, reports The Washington Post. These are the same hackers who apparently stole Paris Hilton’s cell phone contacts. Oh great: putting THAT name in my blog should get my hits up, both from Google and my wife.
To make matters worse, these hackers may have been using child pornography e-mails “to fool people into downloading software capable of capturing passwords and other information needed to infiltrate LexisNexis’s computers,” writes the Post. OK, now I have child porn and Paris Hilton in the same post, so my hits should really soar.
But the situation is anything put humorous. These #$@&!! hackers are responsible for wasting a couple hours of my time on the phone with Equifax to establish my new “free” protection service. I tried setting it up on the web, but the LexisNexis interface didn’t work. That inspires confidence.
Here’s the Post on how the hackers’ scam worked:
According to an account provided by the member of the hacker group – and confirmed by the law enforcement source familiar with the case – the LexisNexis break-in was set in motion by a blast of junk e-mail. Sometime in February a small group of hackers, many of whom knew each other only through online communications, sent out hundreds of e-mails with a message urging recipients to open an attached file to view pornographic images of children. The attachments had nothing to do with child porn; rather, the files contained a program that allowed the group’s members to record anything a recipient typed on his or her computer keyboard.
According to the hacker, a police officer in Florida was among those who opened the infected e-mail message. Not long after his computer was infected with the keystroke-capturing program, the officer logged on to his police department’s account at Accurint, a LexisNexis service provided by Florida-based subsidiary Seisint Inc., which sells access to consumer data. Other officers’ log-in information may have been similarly stolen, the law enforcement source said.
The young hacker said the group members then created a series of sub-accounts using the police department’s name and billing information. Over several days, the hacker said the group looked up thousands of names in the database, including friends and celebrities. The law enforcement source said members of the group eventually began selling Social Security numbers and other sensitive consumer information to a ring of identity thieves in California. Washingtonpost.com has not been able to reach the young hacker to seek comment about the sale of personal information.
In a one year period, as many as 7 million people have become victims of identity theft, reports the Identity Theft Resource Center. That means 799 identities are stolen every hour, 19,178 every day.
“Victims now spend an average of 600 hours recovering from this crime, often over a period of years,” the Resource Center site explains. The average victim spends $1,400 to resolve identity theft problems.
Most of those problems involve the victims’ credit ratings. They must track down creditors to clean up their records, face higher credit card fees and higher insurance costs. In 1987, a mom I know had her assets seized by the IRS because she was suddenly making too much income. Someone was using her social security number in another state but the IRS didn’t care. Problems like this can last more than 10 years, reports the Resource Center.
Talk about your negative impact on parenting: spending time on the phone or computer dealing with these problems take Americans away from their kids and can increase the credit costs of buying a house or car. And you can’t discount the general anger and anxiety such theft is likely to cause.
So far, I’ve been lucky. I have a lockdown on my own accounts. Maybe the hackers will all be imprisoned before they hit me. Maybe not.
One thing LexisNexis didn’t provide was what they had about me in their database; I plan to call them up and find out. Oh, and if you hear a loud grinding noise coming from the vicinity of my house, I decided a wood chipper would make the best shredder. No paper jams, I can use it to trim the forest we call our back yard, and I’ll have compost to boot.
Housing prices continued their upward march in Southern California and much of the nation, reports several newspapers. In the Los Angeles area, the median home price rose 15 percent, reports the Los Angeles Times.
The slower rate of appreciation matches forecasts for the area. Overall home sales continued to be near-record levels despite a 4.5 percent decline from a year earlier. The median home price in San Bernardino County – where I live – broke $300,000 for the first time. Not surprisingly, homes priced over $700,000 are taking longer to move while those under $500,000 are snapped up.
Other regions are complaining that Southern California investors are now causing surges in their markets. Median home prices in Portland, Ore., jumped 15.3 percent over last year, reports The Oregonian. While that may not seem high to Californians, it’s the best performance in a decade for the region. Writes the Oregonian:
Oregonians have scorned new residents from California for years, but now they have investors – not just new residents – from the Golden State competing with them for housing. …
“There’s a big rumor mill in California telling people Oregon is on its way to doing what California has done and get on for the ride,” (realtor Peggy) Hoag said.
The rising prices, while boosting the wealth of homeowners, also have bred resentment among some concerned about their changing property taxes and neighborhood character, said Hoag, who added she has received e-mails from angry homeowners.
“They said, ‘You’re ruining our market and overpricing your properties,’ ” Hoag said.
The eastern Phoenix suburbs – where I lived in the 1990s – saw a 24.4 percent increase in home prices since last year, reports the East Valley Tribune. The median home price is now $193,800. While Arizonans looking for property may not be happy with such increases, a family of four from Southern California crammed into an 800-square-foot home and struggling with a $600,000 mortgage, must drool at the possibilities. I know we do.
Getting Seth into preschool wasn’t easy. The first couple places we tried had waiting lists of 20 years or so. Since we didn’t want our son starting preschool during my retirement years, we finally found a pretty good one at the only synagogue within 50 miles.
While some of the kids there are a bit wild, I can’t say any of them should be expelled. Now isn’t that a strange word to be used in conjunction with a youngster in preschool?
I thought so, but apparently a child in preschool is more likely to be expelled than those in kindergarten through 12th grade, reports The New York Times on a new study. About 6.7 children for every 1,000 in preschool are expelled each year, the Yale Child Study Center finds. That’s about 5,000 kids nationally a year. Only 2.1 K-12 kids are expelled each year.
“No one wants to hear about 3- and 4-year-olds’ being expelled from preschool, but it happens rather frequently,” study author Walter S. Gilliam, tells The Times. While the study reveals a problem, Gilliam didn’t study for the “why.”
“I’ve certainly heard people say the problem is getting worse,” Gilliam says. “But maybe the reality is that we’re serving more children these days. Maybe we’re serving more at-risk children than we served in the past, and that’s a good thing.”
Maybe, but the study also reveals that boys are expelled 4.5 times more than girls. So it’s equally possible that privately funded preschool teachers don’t feel obligated to deal with the more difficult sex. Since many preschools have huge waiting lists, a teacher can dispose of any child they don’t like.
After all, for-profit schools and faith-affiliated centers were the most likely to expel preschoolers, according to the study. Expulsion rates were lowest in publicly-funded preschool programs.
Regardless of the underlying cause, preschools use a wide range of behavior as reasons to expel a child. Here are some of the top criteria, according to the Times: “aggression toward the teacher or other children; actions that violate a zero-tolerance policy, like taking a toy gun to school; or anything that might cause a teacher to worry about injury and liability, like running out of the classroom to the parking lot.”
Keep in mind, these are 3- and 4-year old kids. Coping with aggression and running around wild is what kids do at this age.
But parents certainly are not off the hook here. Are parents working too many hours, leaving their kids in the hands of underpaid, unskilled day-care employees? Are parents indulging their children with sugar-laden junk food? Are the parents teaching their kids anger management and self-control, which is crucial during the toddler years?
If not, than one can hardly blame beleaguered, underpaid preschool teachers. Hopefully, the study’s authors will next look into whether preschool teachers are “perceiving” a problem, or whether there is a true parenting problem.
When I was about 8 years old, I was relegated to deep center field because the coach determined that was the least likely place for the ball to land. I spent much of my summer out there examining the weeds that grew between my toes or the fluffy clouds of central New Jersey.
At the end of the season, a game-closing fly ball had been hit to me and some parent yelled, “Oh no, they hit it to that kid in center field. We’re doomed; He can’t catch anything.” Actually, I think the parent used swear words.
I caught the ball with a huge degree of satisfaction, but from that point on I was never all that interested in becoming a baseball star, much to my grandfather’s chagrin. In high school, I became a quasi cross-country star. Screaming voices are difficult to hear when you’re running a 4:40-minute mile.
I bring this up because exactly two months ago I joked in this post that a story on youth sports would be hitting the news soon. Ever helpful – but not my doing – the Los Angeles Times writes about parents who obsess over their children’s athletic “careers.”
Here’s some of the story:
Today, psychologists and coaches agree that many parents have become more passionate – obsessed, in some cases – about their children’s athletic pursuits than mothers and fathers of the past. Micromanaging a child’s sports career and agonizing over his or her success on the playing field may be the most public expression of the so-called “helicopter parent” phenomenon; that is, the tendency of today’s moms and dads to “hover” over their children.
I don’t know if today’s parents are really any worse than past ones, but experts in the Times’ story certainly relate behavior that I don’t really care much to see:
Parents who belong to this new breed are easy to spot. They shout more on the sidelines, barking directions at their children, and often struggling to control their emotions. They pester coaches about their kids’ playing time. They complain more loudly if a child isn’t chosen for an all-star team.
Uggh. That’s the exact sort of behavior that Chip over at Daddychip2 expressed dismay at in March. Chip suspects that part of the behavior comes from deep insecurity within some parents:
It was a way to kill off those parts of these boys’ identities, emotions, and feelings that did not comply with the narrowly constructed role of “real man,” the way they’d been killed off in the adult men (and male partners of the adult women) who were verbally abusing these kids.
Other possible reasons for bad behavior may come from deeply unhappy parents, or parents trying to attain sports glory through their children, reports the Times:
Parents who struggle to maintain a healthy perspective are often aging ex-jocks who push their children too hard because they are reliving past athletic accomplishments, or perhaps chasing glory that eluded them in their own youth. These mothers and fathers often believe that their budding star can be the next Michael Jordan or Annika Sorenstam, despite the astronomical odds.
To me the problem seems to be just a handful of parents, though they may be ruining it for a large number of kids. I’ve been to a handful of youth sporting events in Southern California and noticed that usually it’s just one or two parents screaming away. I once saw a young dad screaming like a madman at his 6-year-old daughter – go right, go left, kick damn it, kick – during a soccer game. He would jump up and down displaying histrionics beyond anything I’ve encountered in my adult life.
A handful of co-workers tell me that their leagues monitor parents behavior and officials will approach those who are out of control. But it takes only one bad apple for a child to feel humiliated for a lifetime, which was how I felt after that parent yelled “he can’t catch anything.” I remember the moment so vividly that I still get worked up just writing about it now. That doesn’t mean my son won’t participate in organized sports if he wants to, but my wife and I will be vigilant – not obsessive – in keeping tabs on how other parents behave.
Because my wife and I are having our children late in life, we had some concern over fertility. Two miscarriages scared us prior to having Seth and a longer-than-desired delay made us apprehensive before my wife’s second pregnancy. But we now have Seth and expect a girl in July.
Not all couples are so lucky, as you can discover by reading A Little Pregnant or Chez Miscarriage. For those of you still struggling out there, I received a press release recently about The Fertility Road Show, which will be in Los Angeles while I’m out of town.
The educational show is designed to help couples trying to conceive and includes topics such as in Vitro Fertilization, financing, coping with infertility, fertility 101, alternative treatments and adoption. While I can’t vouch for the quality of the program, it is being sponsored by inFertility times magazine. It costs $45 per person or $80 for a couple.
The show was in Chicago on Saturday, but here’s the rest of the schedule:
This was supposed to be a post on The New York Times new series on class, but alas, their website has been down for the last 30 minutes. So instead, I found a site via Lifehacker on how to calculate the eye color of future children.
This reminds me of high school biology when we were taught how to use Mendel’s discoveries on heredity. I did a pretty good job of guessing that Seth’s eyes would be blue or green, but I decided to try out the calculator, which is run by TheTech, for our daughter due in July 2005.
Before I post the results, I should point out that it’s a tough call labeling eye color for me, Seth and my mom, who has hazel eyes.
When I was growing up, I always thought my eyes were brown, but as I became older it became clear they were more a dark blue – not the steel blue-gray of my maternal grandparents – with a hint of green. Seth’s eyes have more shades of green and brown than I do. Again, the calculator does not take these anomalies into account.
But by pigeonholing my relatives' eye color, here are the likely results for our daughter:
30 percent blue
70 percent green
0 percent brown
So, presuming this calculator is accurate, I guess I should be really suspicious if baby grows up with brown eyes.
Fear of the Measles-Mumps-Rubella vaccine may be playing a role in a mumps epidemic in the United Kingdom, reports the News-Telegraph. The majority of those coming down with the disease are young adults who were born before England required the mumps vaccine.
But immunization rates in the UK may be below 80 percent for children born since 1995, a result of fear among parents who believe that the MMR vaccinations contributed to rising rates of autism. That link has not been proven, but a mercury-based sterilizing agent called thimerosal was being used in MMR vaccines.
By school age, American children are more likely to get their MMR shots, DadTalk reported last year. In some parts of London, as few as 60 percent of 2-year-olds have been vaccinated.
About 28,500 cases of mumps were reported in Britain during the first four months of 2005, marking an 18-fold increase in reported cases. Researchers are also seeing an uptick in young children developing the disease.
While mumps, which is highly contagious, is not a particularly deadly viral infection, it can cause testicular swelling in males that occasionally results in sterility, reports the Scotsman. The disease is well-known because it causes intense swelling of glands between the ear and jaw in most victims, reports the UK Independent.
“Complications may require treatment in the hospital,” reports WebMD. “Medications to relieve pain associated with orchitis, meningitis, pancreatitis, and other complications may be given.” Symptoms usually last 10 days.
If you’re a dad who feels like a second-class citizen in this country, you’re not alone. Single dad William J. McGee writes in The Washington Post that even American business fails to value the father role.
Movie theaters offer “Movies for Moms” while advertisers seem to think that dads don’t go grocery shopping. McGee points out these famous ad slogans:
American media seems equally oblivious to dad’s existence, writes McGee, who cites headline examples such as this one from Parenting magazine: “Moms Dish on How They Handle Misbehaving Kids.” Another gripe: Hollywood often portrays dads as the comedic fall guy.
But there is a danger of dads always being portrayed as goofs or losers, writes McGee:
Is it any wonder that it’s so hard to find changing tables in men’s rooms? Is it any wonder that so many judges consistently fail to recognize the rights of fathers in family courts?
Anyone who has spent time in family court can testify that there are plenty of terrible parents of both genders. But in a lot of courtrooms, fathers are seen as little more than the keepers of the checkbooks.
Suddenly, an easily ignored societal bias becomes a real issue.
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