links for 2008-08-27

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  • MediaPost Publications – The Semantics Of Local Search – 08/27/2008
    Why local search is hard. Buried in the column is some info that should help inform local businesses how they should structure their online presence for success.
    (tags: search searchengine local)
  • Applied Rationality: Immigration enforcement should start with the <em>News & Record</em>
    Ribar asks the Greensboro News & Record's columnist, who is all for the ban against illegal immigrants' children being allowed to attend community colleges and is a hardliner on illegal immigrants in general, why the newspaper is delivering newspapers to illegal immigrants. He also asks that if cracking down on illegal immigration is so important, why doesn't the N&R require their carriers to confirm the legal status of households before beginning delivery. These things are a lot easier when someone else has to do them, huh?
    (tags: illegalimmigration)
  • The Knowledge Handoff
    Biz Week article about how companies are prompting soon-to-retire baby boomers to impart their knowledge and wisdom on the Gen-X and Gen-Yers.
    (tags: business businesscommunication)
  • Credit-Card Rage
    Article about the proposed changes to credit card industry regulation. My take is that the credit card companies got greedy, treated the rest of us like a bunch of suckers, and even Congress is blushing at the amount of abuse the banks have heaped on consumers.
    (tags: banks)
  • Bloomberg.com: Worldwide
    "Loans 90 days or more overdue, deemed troubled by the FDIC, jumped 20 percent to $162 billion from $136 billion in the first quarter, the FDIC said. Real-estate loans accounted for almost 90 percent of the rise in the past three quarters, the agency said."
    (tags: economics banks)

Standing in for the Winston-Salem Journal

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So I woke up and flipped on the TV at the ungodly hour of 5:45 a.m. to check the weather on WXII and see what the youngest should wear to the bus stop.  Had I hesitated a mere three seconds to fully wake up I’d have realized the TV wasn’t necessary as it was raining so hard it sounded like Santa and his mangy reindeer were on my roof four months early and playing a game of soccer.

As I eased into full consciousness I realized that the anchors were talking about the Winston-Salem Journal and so I turned up the volume.  Seems that the Journal is having some issues with its printing press so they turned to WXII to let their five remaining subscribers, me among them, that they need not wade through their ponds yards in search of their paper since they won’t be delivered anytime before leaving for work.  Fully appreciating the irony, and wanting to help my homeys downtown in that bustling hive known as the WSJ newsroom, I’ve decided to provide my fellow readers with a faux-Journal until the Journal’s back on its feet.  Here goes:

  • The following government agencies had meetings last night.  This is what they talked about.  Don’t ask us what it means.
  • Someone robbed someone else.  Police are searching for some suspects, have found others, and will keep us posted.
  • Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center is a big hospital and be sure to read our daily story about something to do with it.
  • Ask SAM features another question pulled from Life in Forsyth
  • Letters to the Editor Summary: If our leaders would just remember that everything they need to know is in the Bible then everything would be good.  Amen.
  • Editorials: Someone did something, and while we think they’re swell and all and we’re sure they’re trying their best, really they’re a bunch of flaming idiots.  Here’s what we think they should do and we know best because, you know, we’re editors. (Isn’t this deliciously ironic considering it’s being written by a guy who spouts off on an eponymous blog?)
  • Business: Krispy Kreme did something.  Reynolds did something.  Wachovia still afloat and really still our hometown bank.  What’s BB&T?  Here’s an AP article about some small business in San Diego, which we’re running because we don’t have any small businesses here.
  • People died.  Some have gone to be with their creator, others are walking peacefully with Jesus, and some are even dearly departed.
  • Virginia Foxx did something and we disagree with her.
  • Sports:  As always NASCAR’s our lead, but we’ll figure out which major development to run under the story about Brian France’s hemorrhoids.
  • Finally our question of the week: If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it does it really make a sound?

If this doesn’t do it for you I guess you could just go to the Journal’s website.

links for 2008-08-26

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  • WebWorkerDaily » Archive A Tuneup for Your Windows PC–Free «
    Free Windows "cleaning" utilities. Me thinks I might need one of these.
    (tags: windows utilities)
  • The Credit Crunch Cuts Deeper and Wider
    Most interesting points to me from this Biz Week article re. the credit crunch:

    – Most if not all credit related problems trace back to mortgage ills. So much for last year's assurances that the mortgage meltdown could be quarantined from the rest of the economy.

    – Exports and savings might be the salvation and the future of the US economy. If that's the case then we're in for a long, painful economic ride but one that will eventually make the country more secure.

    – If the second point is true then we won't be returning to 'normal'. I'd say that's a good thing, right?

    (tags: economics)

  • Architects: 1998 called and it wants its web sites back – (37signals)

    I absolutely love this description of "overly Flash-y" websites: "It seems almost without fail that they are either blowing my browser window up full size, asking me to read light grey 9px text, overflowing with obfuscatory flashterbation, teasing me with custom designed scrollbars that don’t behave as you’d expect, or asking me to evaluate their work based on postage stamp sized photographs." "Obfuscatory flashterbation" is my new favorite term.

    (tags: funny website design)

Realtor Reality Land

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Remember the Chamber of Commerce and local realtors insulting our intelligence the week before last when they tried to justify calling for a moratorium on development regulations by, among other things, saying that the decline in zoning board cases was due to the "difficulty in doing business here" and conveniently forgetting that we’re in an epic credit crunch?  Well, today brings us a whole new case of what I’ll call "Realtor Reality."  From today’s Winston-Salem Journal article titled July Home Sales Fall:

In Forsyth County, the housing market is not as bad as some parts of
the country, said Julie Poplin, the president of the Winston-Salem
Regional Association of Realtors.

She said that comparing July 2008 to July 2007 is skewed because last year was an abnormally good year for the local market.

"We are getting back to a more normal marketplace," she said. "We’re
flat, but that’s not a bad thing. The good news is that we are having
sales, and that’s great."

At Allen Tate Realtors where Poplin is a broker, Poplin said that
brokers are active but having a lot of trepidation because of news
reports about overall woes in the housing market. But they are busy and
finding creative ways to market homes.

"They are really working hard for every deal," she said.

Poplin advises sellers to have their houses competitively priced and be ready to move.

"But if you are a buyer, you need to take advantage of these
interest rates before they go up, and they will be going up," she said.

I tell you what, they must be serving some mighty fine happy juice over there at Allen Tate.  I mean what she’s saying is akin to saying, "Well you just totaled your car and had both your legs and one arm amputated, but we’ve seen cases similar to this where people have lost all their extremities and gone blind and deaf too, so in the grand scheme of things you’re not doing too bad."

If you want to be more honest about local real estate you should say this: "Well, in the Triad we’ve suffered through agonizing economic times while the rest of the country experienced unbelievable growth, thus we never had a real estate bubble.  Heck, we didn’t even have a real estate burp so you could say that we didn’t have as far to fall. Yet we’ve fallen anyway.  Yeah for us!"

Her statement that 2007 was an abnormally good year for the local market has me curious as to what her frame of reference is.  Abnormally good compared to the last five years?  Ten years?  Twenty years?  I mean we’ve been bleeding jobs around here for over a decade, and when the rest of the country had houses appreciating at incredible rates each year while ours inched up incrementally.  Don’t believe me?  Here’s a report on real estate from 1997-2007 prepared by Donald Jud, who was also interviewed for the story in the Journal (and I’d guess he wouldn’t necessarily agree with Ms. Poplin’s view of the situation). And I quote:

Since the 1st quarter of 1997, existing home prices in the Triad have risen at an average annual rate of 3.2 percent, outpacing the consumer price index (CPI) which has increased an average of 2.5 percent annually. The appreciation of housing prices in the Triad has lagged substantially the rise in housing prices nationally. For the nation as a whole, existing home prices have risen at a 7.6 percent annual rate from 1997.1 through the 4th quarter of 2006, according to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO).

In short our houses appreciated at less than half the rate of the average of the rest of the country.  You don’t want to know how far we lagged behind hot markets like Washington, DC, California, etc.  So if you want to say that 2007 was better than we’d had for the last five or ten years, then well I guess you could be right.  Or not.

If 2007 was such an abnormally good year, how much better was it than 2006?  Let’s see what the report says…seasonally adjusted home values increased 4% so that’s good, but on the other hand the number of homes sold decreased by .1%, the time on market increased by 9.8% and the spread between the list and sales price decreased .8%.  Abnormally good?

Now in her defense maybe she was just referring to July existing home sales so if you go to this page on the Winston-Salem Regional Association of Realtors statistics page with links to all the monthly reports and compare all the July reports you can see that indeed July 07 had higher sales than July 06 by about 6%, and that 2006 was significantly higher than the previous few years and that July 08’s numbers are back in the range of 05 and before.  Still, that doesn’t mean that 07 was great, just that it and 06 weren’t as crappy as the last decade or more.  And that’s just looking at the number of houses sold, not things like price, time on market and spread.

The best you could say is that we might have gone from really miserable in the early ’00s to kind of miserable in the last couple of years and are now returning to really miserable status.  Not a real comforting thought unless of course you live in Realtor Reality Land.

Disclaimer: I have a few friends who are realtors and brokers.  They are smart people who see through un-tinted glasses and I hereby officially exclude them from the Kool-Aid bunch who live in Realtor Reality Land.

Littany of Ills

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Sitting in the waiting room at WFU MRI Center and it’s 10 P.M. Some guy is telling everyone that will listen about his 200+ kidney stones. I quote:  "The ones you pass are different than the others. The ones that set will make me draw double like a guy having a heart attack."

We’ve also heard about the belts he’s had custom made since his size is hard to find. Oh, and he’s been a furr-fighter, oh wait, a firefighter. I was worried there for a second

The TV is tuned to NBC. Worst reality show ever is on now (Democratic Convention) and the second worst just ended…some show that had normal people pretending they were on Deadliest Catch. 

Now the guy is talking about Michael Moore’s health care movie (I believe that would be Sicko). Said it made a lot of sense

He says he’s been here for two hours. His wife girlfriend just got called back and set him loose on the rest of us

Now we’re hearing about the ills of health insurance. I’m with him there.

People are leaving and I might end up alone with him.

I’m trying to hide

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

More on Textbooks

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Update: 8/26/08 – I received a follow up email to further clarify what they’d told me and you can see those updates highlighted in the bullet points below. It ends up that this will be discussed at tonight’s Board of Ed meeting.

Last week I wrote about learning that in some of my son’s middle school classes they don’t have textbooks for everyone, rather they have textbooks in the classroom, "classroom sets", and if students need to access them for homework they can do so online.  As I wrote in my post this troubled me, so I emailed the powers that be in the school system and heard back from them late last week.  Before I go on I’d like to say that they replied during what has to be a very busy time for them, it being the week before school starts and all.  They told me they’re going to dig into the details and send them to me, but in the meantime they gave me the rough version:

  • Not enough funding from the state for textbooks for everyone
  • They chipped in local funds but it still wasn’t enough
  • They had to choose between using old textbooks for everyone or buying new textbooks, using classroom sets augmented by online access for some –Update 8/26/08– I received a follow up email that corrected this (I reported correctly, it was a miscommunication on their end): "we apparently still have the option to return to last year’s textbooks and use them one more year."
  • Textbook purchasing is system wide so this isn’t peculiar to Meadowlark
  • Some middle school classes have classroom sets, and then arrangements with the publishers to access the text online — Update 8/26/08 — I received a follow up email that corrected this (I reported correctly, it was a miscommunication on their end): "we have a CD of the book for every book that we purchased, but a sales rep told our folks that the on-line version could be purchased for a fairly small fee."
  • Students are able to check books out overnight if they need to
  • Those students without at-home internet can use any of the over 40 Winston Net stations located in libraries, rec centers and churches throughout Forsyth County

They also said that they will review this policy at the end of the school year and if it caused problems they’ll determine what changes need to be made.

Like I said this is just the rough version and I’ll wait and see what the specifics turn out to be, but I’d say that in general it’s a good explanation. Those who don’t like this particular prioritization might want to speak up at future board of education meetings. I’ll let you know as soon as I get the details.

links for 2008-08-25

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Now That’s a Toll Road

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I read this article in the Washington Post with great interest.  It’s about HOT lanes being built on the Capital Beltway in Northern Virginia that will have fluctuating tolls depending on such factors as the average speed on the road, the number of users at a particular time, etc.  According to studies done for the HOT project the average rush hour cost would be about $1.54 per mile an the lanes will run 14 miles from Springfield (home of the infamous "Mixing Bowl" where the Beltway, I-95 and I-395 all converge) to the Dulles Toll Road.  So that comes to an average toll of about $21.56 to use the full 14 miles, but if the traffic is really and the traffic is threatening to overwhelm the HOT lanes the toll operators can raise the price to price out people who don’t really need to get where they’re going that fast.

The article gives average time savings for the HOT lanes as well, and they don’t sound that impressive, but again that’s average.  At peak times I have a feeling that you’ll have people paying a lot of money to save significant amounts of time.  I used to use that route regularly when I lived in NoVa and I can tell you that that stretch of road at the height of rush hour can literally take you hours to get through, especially if it’s raining.  Since I haven’t lived there for four years and I know how much worse the traffic gets year by year I can only imagine how bad it is now.

If I still lived in NoVa I could easily imagine paying the toll on an irregular basis in times that I needed to make one of the kids’ school events or had a meeting I could not miss.  Unfortunately I could easily imagine paying that toll, whizzing through that 9 mile corridor and finding myself stuck in a traffic jam on the other end.  Thus you understand one of the motivations we had for moving the hell away from NoVa.  That ain’t a way to live.

links for 2008-08-22

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That Explains the Sirens and The Lost Guy With the Boat

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Earlier today a bunch of fire trucks went roaring by our house and at one point a guy towing a boat stopped and asked my son if he knew where a certain street was.  The roads around here get kind of screwy with Styers Ferry becoming Concord Church and then turning back into Styers Ferry as just one example, so we’re used to the emergency personnel making multiple passes to try and find what they’re looking for.  Anyway a body was found floating in a pond a mile or two from here and now the deputies are looking into it.

The article on the Journal site mentions an interview with a teenager who says that people use that pond to party and swim.  He also says that he often hears gunfire.  I can back up that last sentence since we often hear gunfire in the distance, but we never knew where it was coming from until now.

Here’s a Google map showing the pond with the satellite view.

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