Our Kids Be Getting Dumber?

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If you measure intelligence by standardized test scores then our kids are stupidifying.  Sadly the SAT remains the most prominent barometer of our children's education, which to me is much like describing the weather by merely looking at the temperature. 

On any given day I could tell you that I've observed the decline of civilization first hand (show me a parent of a teenager who denies this and I'll show you someone even dumber than their kids), but somehow I think my parents would have said the same 25 years ago and their parents would have said even worse 50 years ago. If our kids are so dumb then how the hell did they figure out how to text 4,000,000 words a minute using a phone keypad while their parents struggled to tap out a random OMG in 30 minutes using a QWERTY keypad on a Blackberry?

Tax the Speculators

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As part of a post about the economy Mark Cuban makes a very interesting point about differentiating between investors and traders/speculators:

Our government doesn’t know the difference between an investor and a speculator or trader.  If we did, we would understand that we should tax the trader/speculator more heavily than the investor.

The investor allows entrepreneurs access to capital and allows them to work with it and build businesses, which in turn build employment and do great things for the economy. The trader/speculator pushes companies to make more money now rather than invest in doing the right thing for the company. The trader/speculator dominates the stock market today, which in turn puts pressure on public company CEOs to cut jobs and play games with their financials in order to give the appearance of stability in a far from stable market. The investor understands the bigger picture and is ok if profits fall for several quarters or even several years as long as the company will maximize its return over the long run.

The government should raises taxes significantly on profits from short term capital gains on the sale of public stocks, indexes, commodities, futures held for 24 hours or less and extend the length of time required to qualify for Long Term capital gains and reduce the tax rate on Long Term gains.  This will discourage flash trading, ETFs that move markets purely on cash inflows rather than fundamentals and also reduce the amount of speculation on commodities. It will also reward companies that act in the financial interests of long term holders and their employers. I think the impact on the economy would be far fewer layoffs as CEOs find themselves with more shareholders who think long term rather than short term. Believe it or not, there are shareholders who are fine with companies not beating their numbers if the company is making progress towards a clearly defined goal. I don’t care if the P/E of the stocks I own is 14 or 20. I want the companies investing in being a great company rather than  trying to make traders of their stock happy. Most CEOs give great lipservice to this approach, but they are so focused on marking to market their own personal stock portfolios, they emphasize stock performance over doing the right thing for the company. Taxation can change the focus on public companies and stock trading. That would be a great thing for the economy.

links for 2009-08-25

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  • Top 10 Tricks MacGyver Would Be Proud Of – MacGyver – Lifehacker
    How to release your inner MacGyver. h/t to Dan for the link via Twitter.
    (tags: diy)
  • WXII: Residents Decry Project Designed To Make Road Safer
    Residents of a neighborhood near West Forsyth HS are a ticked that a median is being installed on Lewisville-Clemmons Road just outside the entrance to their neighborhood. One of their arguments against the median, that it would increase response times of emergency personnel, doesn't really seem to hold water but their argument that an increase in U-Turns could be hazardous seems to be a valid one to me. I'm not sure why DOT can't put in a cut to allow at least for left hand turns into the neighborhood even if it doesn't allow left hand turns out of the neighborhood. There's a cut just like that just a couple of miles down the road.
    (tags: winston-salem transportation road)
  • Seth's Blog: The modern talking pad
    Seth Godin has a very interesting idea for doing a presentation. Really it's an idea for not doing a presentation, but turning a presentation into a collaboration.
    (tags: tools communication presentations sales)
  • Seth's Blog: Patient capital, markets that work and ending the endless …
    "When someone in poverty buys a device that improves productivity, the device pays for itself (if it didn’t, they wouldn’t buy it.) So a drip irrigation system, for example, may pay off by creating two or three harvests a year instead of one.

    What does that do for the family that buys it? Well, if you have one harvest a year and you’re living at subsistence, it means your income is zero, or probably just a little below. If you can irrigate and get two or three harvests a year, though, your income goes up by infinity. Now, instead of making -1 pennies a day, you’re making 100 or 200 pennies a day. That’s a surplus of $700 a year. That’s enough to participate in other productivity or life-enhancing investments, like a well, or a roof, or health care. Now, the edge is a lot further away."

    (tags: venturecapital poverty economics finance entrepreneurship business)

Local Vets Stuck in Disability Backlog

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Lex Alexander has a post about the fiasco that is the VA disability program right now.  He points out that while the VA health care system is a good one, the VA disability system is in disarray and he provides some startling numbers to back up that assertion. It seems to be particularly bad here in the Winston-Salem area.  From his post:

First, it takes too long even for straightforward claims to be processed. As of a week ago today, the claim backlog stood at more than 422,000 cases nationally, up about 30,000 from a year ago. (Winston-Salem’s regional VA office, with a backlog of more than 21,000, had more cases pending than any other regional office in the country except St. Petersburg, Fla.) Nationally, more than 20 percent of cases had been pending for six months or more.

Lex later quotes Abraham Lincoln and I think the quote says it all:

As the Civil War was ending, Abraham Lincoln called on America in his second Inaugural Address to “care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan.” For the vets (and in some cases, their survivors) who depend on these payments, we need to do a better job.

links for 2009-08-24

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  • Blog on the Run: Journalism Sucks
    Lex writes: "If the journalism bidness gave a damn for its customers’ well-being, it would gauge its performance on the basis of how well informed the populace is and adjust its performance accordingly. In no developed country in the universe should any significant number of people have been able to believe, years after the fact, that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. But if the journalism bidness did anything at all in reaction to this travesty, it was to blame it on those scruffy, undisciplined, unserious bloggers."
    (tags: journalism)
  • Triad Biz Journal: Triad community banks stuffed with foreclosures
    "One potentially ominous sign for the regional economy evident in the banks’ numbers for the second quarter is a big jump in commercial properties they’d taken over. After two quarters of declines, banks reported more than double the value of those assets on their books since the end of the first quarter of this year, $14.3 million worth."
    (tags: realestate economics piedmonttriad)

links for 2009-08-22

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  • Freakonomics: Shocking Unemployment Numbers
    Why this recession is worse in terms of unemployment than other recessions since the Great Depression: more folks are staying unemployed longer. From the post: "The answer is that the welfare effect of unemployment depends on its duration. Society is worse off at 10 percent unemployment if that figure is concentrated on a small number of long-term unemployed than if it’s spread more evenly across the labor force. A few weeks of unemployment don’t exhaust savings and don’t lead to great depreciation of skills. A year of unemployment can do both."
    (tags: economics)
  • Forsyth County Student Athletes Who Fail In Class Can Still Play …
    Good news if you're a jock in Winston-Salem Forsyth County Schools: If your GPA falls under 2.0 you can still play for at least two more grading periods if you attend mandatory tutoring sessions, even if your GPA stays under 2.0. They're raising the bar I see.
    (tags: education)
  • Colby College | Colby Magazine | Summer 2009 The Digital Revolution Hits Home – Or Does It?
    "The fastest-growing segment of American higher education is now asynchronous or online learning—where the professor is in one place and the student in another, and not always at the same time. We’ve always disdained this as “not our way.” But contemporary technology has significantly narrowed the gap between distance learning (where teacher and student are apart in space or time) and traditional learning (where they are physically together). We are deluding ourselves if we think that the only truly effective teaching and learning occurs when all God’s children are in the same place."
    (tags: education technology)
  • The Education Industry At the Edge of a Cliff | BNET Intercom | BNET
    Thanks to my buddy Dan for linking to this piece on the "digital bomb" that's about to go off in education.
    (tags: education technology)
  • Guerrilla Marketing Defined: Wax On, Wax Off
    You remember sandwich boards? You know, those ads that people would wear while walking in front of businesses on city sidewalks? Well, this guy is a natural "hairy sandwich board" for a body waxing service.
    (tags: advertising marketing funny)

How to Get a $20,000 Loan You May Not Have to Pay Back in Winston-Salem and Forsyth County

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I'm not sure if this made the local news and I just missed it, or if it's been flying under the radar, but there's a program in Winston-Salem and Forsyth County to help folks buy foreclosed properties.  Back in January I got an email from Sen. Burr's office about North Carolina receiving over $52 million for the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, but didn't really hear much after that.  Then today the following item from FindForeclosureProperties.com (nice URL huh?) showed up in my Google Reader:

Housing officials in Forsyth County and Winston-Salem, North Carolina have partnered with the Center for Homeownership and financial institutions to help eligible buyers purchase bank foreclosures for sale for less than the properties’ appraised value.

Under the Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP), eligible homebuyers will be able to receive a maximum of $20,000 as deferred forgivable loan. The funds will be used by the eligible buyer as down payment for buying foreclosure houses, provided that the mortgage holders are willing to sell the properties for less than their assessed value…

Furthermore, the home buying assistance initiative is open to first time property buyers and families or individuals who have not purchased or owned a house for three years.

Eligible borrowers will not be required to pay back the loan under the NSP program if they opt to stay and live in the property for not less than 20 years. Additionally, homebuyers should have the properties under sales contract on or before July 18, 2010 in order to become eligible for the program.

Prospective buyers should have household earnings of equal to or not more than Forsyth County’s 120 percent median income which for a four-member family is $71,640. The median income restriction varies with the family size.

I'm not sold on this being a good idea.  Will this prompt people who may not be financially ready to buy a house and then, a year or two down the road, be in over their heads and threatened with foreclosure themselves?  Normally you might say that the banks wouldn't lend to risky buyers, but given what we've learned over the last two years do we really want to trust the banks with their own due diligence?

I appreciate what the program is aiming to do, but like I said I'm not sold on it's merits.

Here's the link to the county's page dedicated to the NSP.

 

links for 2009-08-21

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  • Vie de Malchance: Renting Foreclosures
    Fec links to a piece advocating for changes in the foreclosure process to give owners the right to stay in their homes and rent them at market rates for an extended (7-10 years) time.
    (tags: economics realestate)
  • A defense industry blog scandal? – The DEW Line
    Not cool: "Boeing [BA] is conducting an internal investigation into a nascent social media effort after a company spokesman posed as an independent blogger and sat in on several briefings of archrival Northrop Grumman [NOC] at a trade show last week." h/t to Arik Johnson for the lead.
    (tags: blog ethics)
  • Biz Journal: Greensboro Home Sales Slip in July
    From the article: "Sales of existing single-family homes fell 12 percent in July compared to a year ago…The average sale price was $164,945 in July, down from $173,422 a year earlier. It was up slightly from $161,973 in June."
    (tags: realestate greensboro)

WSFCS Getting Off to a Rip-Roaring Start

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Ah, school.  On this day last year I went on a bit of a rant about the school textbook situation.  Unfortunately I didn't have enough personal time to devote to looking into that situation as I wanted to, but maybe at some point in the future I will.  This year I'm not feeling too good about the whole schedule thing, but before I get into it I want to emphasize that I'm really not trying to give the folks at school who are dealing with this mess a hard time.  I can only imagine how complex this whole process is and I'm certain they've been burning the midnight oil trying to get it all figured out. 

Here's the deal: the school system has decided that they want all the schools on the same kind of schedule, so our kids' high school had to change how classes are scheduled.  I'd provide details if I understood them, but let's just say the change has caused some problems.  To wit:

  • Last spring when my oldest did his schedule with his counselor he signed up for an economics class at the Career Center.  A week or two ago he got a call from his counselor saying that with the new scheduling system his econ class was impossible to fit into his schedule so he needed to pick another class.  From the limited options he was able to get…Shakespeare. If you're looking for an association between the two I guess you could say that one's the dismal science and the other's the dismal art.  Even worse, that's just for one semester.  The other semester he's going to be doing something like assisting people in the office just so he can get a credit. 
  • We got a letter from the school system saying that because of the scheduling headaches the kids wouldn't get their schedules until they showed up at the open house tonight.  Given what we've already seen happen to our son's schedule I'm interested to see what happens to our daughter's schedule.  I will NOT be surprised if we have a nasty surprise or two.
  • Speaking of surprises, I just got this email alert from West Forsyth H.S.: "This message is to the parents of students who have classes at West Forsyth and the Career Center.  Students should be aware that the schedules they picked up at the Career Center's Open House last night may not be accurate. We are asking our students to pick up their West Forsyth schedule at tonight's Open House before questioning their assigned classes. Thank you!"  In a way I guess you could say our son losing his one Career Center class was a lucky break.
  • On the other hand the booster club is on top of things.  The same day we got the letter about the schedule snafu we also received a fundraising solicitation for all things athletic at the school.  I have no problem with that, but it's a little ironic that while all the students are wandering around thinking they might end up in underwater basket weaving the jocks can rest assured that the uniforms will be shiny and the grass extra green.

You know what? Maybe this isn't so bad after all. The kids are getting a glimpse at how the real world works. You know, the mid-managers (principals, counselors and teachers) get to implement the super-duper plan handed down by upper management (school administrators) and then deal with the customers (students and parents) screaming at them for screwing everything up.  Another lesson is that no matter how well you plan, something invariably goes wrong and you have to adjust.   Finally, unless you want to pony up for private school or go the home schooling route then you have to pretty much abide by what "the man" (government/school) tells you to do. If that means trading in Keynes for the Bard then that's what you have to do. Welcome to life, kids.

links for 2009-08-20

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