"The Birds and Bees Text Line offers one-on-one exchanges that are private, personal and anonymous. And they can be conducted free of parental scrutiny. That lack of oversight is what galls Bill Brooks, president of the North Carolina Family Policy Council.

"If I couldnt control access to this information, Id turn off the texting service," he said. "When it comes to the Internet, parents are advised to put blockers on their computer and keep it in a central place in the home. But kids can have access to this on their cellphones when theyre away from parental influence and it cant be controlled.""

Teenagers Get Sex Education Via Cellphone - NYTimes.com

Can anyone tell me, coherently, what those kids at the New School are even protesting?

If these kids were smart, they'd have a website up.  They'd optimize it for search and maybe even buy some keywords to advertise against "New School" searches.  The ads should say "Why we protested" or something like that... and the site would have a well-written, neatly laid out list of demands.

Instead, after searching around a fair bit, I can't find anything substantive about their plea.  I don't know how I'm suppose to sympathize with their cause if I don't even know what their cause is.

They don't like the way the school is run...or something that?

Huh?

Apparently, the faculty isn't a fan of the way the school is run either--particularly Bob Kerrey's attempts to run the school like an economically viable business. 

God forbid.

Let's get one thing straight.  The costs of education are spiraling out of control--and do you know why?  It's in big part because you've got PhD faculty getting paid 100k a year to teach one class a semester--using the same syllabus they've been using for 20 years--and to publish research in academic journals that maybe 10 other academics ever read. 

Do you think the average tenured college professor works half as hard as the average NYC public high school or elementary school teacher--who is by the way making less than half the pay?  When 95% of university faculty vote against something--I have to question what could all universally make them so upset.  Yup... do more work for the same amount of pay ought to get everyone up in arms.  As an adjunct making $4,000 for the one class I teach each semester, I can't say I have a lot of sympathy for them.

Let's pretend this school was a company.  Could you imagine shareholders or employees trying to affect change the way these students were acting?  Do me a favor.  If you support these kids, the next time you have a problem with your boss, break into his office and "occupy" it.  When security comes to usher you out, scream like a lunatic.

See how far that gets you.

And as for police brutality, I watched the videos. I saw a metal barrier being hurled at police, lots of screaming, and one kid get knocked down by a cop.  That kid proceeded to scream and resist arrest while cops yelled "Stop resisting!"

When are people going to realize that when you throw metal things at cops and resist arrest, you might get a bit jostled during the arrest process?   Thus far, in my 29 years of living in NYC, I've been able to avoid getting beat up by NYC police.  There's a trick to it:  Don't throw metal things at cops and resist arrest.  I know, I know, it seems difficult, but you have to try.

You know who was even angrier than those protesting kids?  The kids who are paying tuition who actually wanted to come in on those days and use those buildings to study.

Here's the way to affect change: If you don't like the way your school is run, you could...

1) Transfer. 

2) Run for student leadership positions and try to get rules enacted or changed by working together with the administration.

3) Expose the issues you have with the school to local media, donors, trustees, etc...with a good old fashioned PR campaign. 

Or, if you'd rather look like a bunch of spoiled rich kids who think they know better than everyone else:

1) Unlawfully commit breaking and entering, carrying mace and crowbars into school buildings. 

2) Create a public disturbance that puts the general public in harm's way (you know, b/c most people's noggins don't mix well with hurled metal barricades). 

3) Completely fail to get any kind of coherent message across. 

At the end of the day, I don't know if Bob Kerrey is good for that school or not--and that's kind of the problem.  By completely failing to make any kind of articulate case against him, these protesters utterly fail to draw any sympathy to their cause.  I put them in the same bucket as the people who spit on US soldiers returning home from Vietnam--so crazed over the idea of protest that they fail to identify any kind of logical and reasonable means to promote their ideas.

The American Dream has always included buying a house.  Saving up enough for a down payment on your own house was something to aim for and be proud of.  Renting, conventional wisdom held, was throwing money away. 

In fact, our whole tax structure was setup in such a way to significantly incentivize people to take out a mortgage and buy a house.  Would we be in the financial position we are now if you didn't get to deduct mortgage interest off your taxes?  Less people would have purchased homes and the government wouldn't have had to return all that cash after mortgage interest deductions--maybe the deficit would have been a little smaller.  Maybe our own deficits would have been a little smaller, too, since buying a house tends to come with lots of little (and big) unforseen expenses.

Put aside the market crash for the moment.  I think it might be worth reexamining our lemming-like participation in this asset class as a society.

Moreover, owning a home tends to keep you geographically anchored.  Think about what society  and the working world is placing a premium on these days--flexibility.  People with an expertise--be it consulting, languages, engineering, etc.--go where the work is and get highly compensated for the "inconvenience".  At the same time, people who can be flexible about their own cash outflows can take more entrepreneurial risks, whereas lots of people with good ideas or passions can't join startups because they have a mortgage to pay. 

Your average Detroit autoworker, on the other hand, is not only in danger of losing his job, if he hasn't already, but, his family they can't even move.  So forget the pie in the sky notion of getting retrained to take a cleantech job working on building and repairing windmills in the Great Plains, because they can't sell their house.

When I was at GM, we took part in the leveraged buyout of AMF, the bowling company.  One of the first thing the buyout fund that led the deal did was to do a sale-leaseback.  In other words, they decided that owning a bunch of real estate wasn't a good way to capitalize this business, so they sold it, put the cash towards higher ROI investments in the company as well as a dividend to the shareholders, and just paid rent as an expense. 

Historically, bubble aside, owning real estate is a lower risk, higher cashflow investment--certainly meant to return less than the equity markets.  So why do we push so many young people and young families to try and buy a home?  Shouldn't they be putting their capital into potentially higher returning investments?

You might provide examples of real estate transactions that have worked for people in rising markets... and I'm sure there are lots--but the historical, long term performance of the asset class isn't that high.  Excess returns from individual transactions not only incur a boatload of unsystematic risk (like that you accidently built the house on a sinkhole), but require alpha on the part of the manager.  Like most illiquid/private asset classes, the diversity of returns among managers is very high.  In other words...  You can make a killing in real estate if you know what you're doing and you wind up getting lucky enough to bet on a good property, but don't be so quick to assume everyone can be better than average. 

What are some of the other things young people might invest in.  Well, think about my specific case?  In order to buy an apartment (you know, since I did the silly thing of buying something I could afford), I moved out to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, a 45 minute commute into the city.  On average, I go into the city six days a week.  That's about an extra 4 hours of time compared to if I was living in the city per week.  Multiplied over a whole year, at a rate of $100 an hour (let's say I chose to do consulting with that time), you're talking about $20,000 a year.  I never factored that cost in.  Nor did I factor the social cost.  Who am I not building better relationships with because I live further away?  Isn't investing in my social network at this point a higher potential return than real estate as an asset class--especially given that I'm an entrepreneur? 

So what would the issue be if we just rented our whole lives?  People might say that you wouldn't have anything to leave to your kids--but we tax the hell out of inheretences anyway--not to mention the fact that you shouldn't need to buy a house to save money.  Personally, I think if we de-anchored ourselves from one spot for a big chunk of our lives, we might be better suited to take advantage of career opportunites, meet new people, and experience new things.  Tell me where the flaw in this argument is. 

As the Dow dipped into the 6000's and we wondered how low it would go,perhaps even 5000, is there any doubt in our minds that fear is the mantra of the day and investors are just running scared?

Forget fundamentals.  Forget earnings.

Everyday, we keep hearing how much worse it's getting.  Jobless claims, layoffs, falling revenues.  It's economic armageddon in an echo chamber.  Turn on the TV and feel like shit--and the networks are tripping over each other to make it sound worse and worse.  Remember, fear drives ratings.

"How the falling economy increases preditory behavior on MySpace...  tonight at 11."

"Mother of four kills her neighbor and feeds him to her kids after getting laid off.  What's the job status of the people on *your* block?"

"When we come back, what you don't know about the stimulus could kill you."

Well, is it me, or isn't the government supposed to be really good at keeping secrets and lying to us?  I mean, it's been almost 60 years since Roswell, right?  We still don't know who shot JFK either. 

Why can't we get some good old fashion men in black action on this economy?  For starters, let's start releasing economic data that isn't as bad as expected--and little by little turning it up.  So, one month we have job losses that aren't as bad as predicted.  Next month a little better.  Next month, flat unemployment.  Would anyone even really notice the difference between 8.5% unemployment and 8.3%?  It's not like turning on the TV during a blistering heatwave and having the government trying to convince you that it's 45 degrees. 

Then, we'll start paying off reporters and influencing them to write positive stories about people returning to the malls and getting jobs.  I'm sure there are more than a few reporters, given what they make, that would post a slanted story in exchange for having their credit card debt just mysteriously disappear due to a "computer glitch".  Economic stories are slanted anyway.  Think of all those holiday shopping stories.  You can't say anything significant about same store sales just by walking the stores, yet hundreds of stories get written every year before the numbers come out about how good of a season it is--and it directly affects how many people come out and shop.  It's all a matter of crafting a story--and some story angles would be a lot more helpful than others right about now--instead of the same old media scare tactics. 

See...  It's happening already.  Did you see this bullshit housing starts data?  Up 22%!!  Who in the world is *starting* a house right now?  Is there anyone out there who has seen ground broken on a new house?  No... no one... It's totally made up data, but yet the market rallied on the news.

Am I ok with being lied to?  Absolutely.  Why?  Because right now we're being bombarded with so much "truth" and in such a manner that it's almost like being lied to.  Sure, financial institutions are in serious trouble... and yes, some people might have to move out their houses into apartments...maybe many...  but half of this whole financial armageddon is due to the media preying on people's fears.  Is it me or aren't you afraid to even open up your wallet?  Because of fear, valuations can't stabilize.  I say the government should be acting like a doting parent and not only telling us it's going to be ok, but backing that up with some fuzzy math that says it is ok.  I'll pretend I believe it.

Good idea:

"...welcome foreign innovators. Harvard research fellow Vivek Wadhwa reports that immigrants have founded more than half of all Silicon Valley start-ups in the past decade. These immigrant-led, American tech companies employed more than 450,000 workers and grossed $52 billion in 2005. For U.S. companies to employ a highly specialized foreign worker, the employee must hold an H-1B visa, but current law allows for the issuing of only 65,000 H-1B visas per year. The H-1B cap was established to prevent foreigners from taking American jobs, but, in fact, an education gap frequently leaves American candidates less qualified for these positions. Lawmakers could improve the situation all around by removing the cap on H-1B visas while imposing a 10 percent payroll tax above and beyond the benchmark salary for any position being filled by holders of such visas. The proceeds of the payroll tax could be channeled into U.S. reeducation programs. This compromise would bring the best innovators to work here while subsidizing the continued education of American talent."

Bad idea:

"...match funds for venture capital and angel investments. Venture firms and investors need financial incentives to invest in companies that create U.S. jobs. What if firms with credible histories could receive as much as $100 million in federal matching funds if their investments create jobs in the United States?"

Reid Hoffman - Let Start-Ups Bail Us Out - washingtonpost.com

"The discrepancy between the grandeur of the failure and the stature of the man is a puzzlement. We are still trying to compute it."

Op-Ed Columnist - A President Forgotten but Not Gone - NYTimes.com

People have been asking a lot about ways for us to continue the momentum of the Obama campaign. How do we make sure that the country doesn't snap back into apathy and how do we work together to identify and address our problems. Clearly, the internet is going to be a major organizing mechanism... but how? With which tools?

Here's an idea I've been toying around with:

Make local.change.gov into a directory of discoverable placenames... local.change.gov/11209 or local.change.gov/Bay_Ridge. On those pages, mashup and localize a few services that are meant to inform, encourage collaboration, provide feedback and ideas, etc. Here's what I would add:

Get Satisfaction: A place where people could not only complain, but provide ideas and solutions, too. Make sure my local elected representatives are on it, too, so they could be accountable when someone posts an issue and no one responds. I think local government (and education, too) are hugh opportunities for GS to seed pages for people to discover.

Meetup: They should create a placeholder Meetup for Change group in every zipcode, so that people aren't just adding their ideas to the cloud--they're getting out of the house and doing something about them. List other local Meetups, too, and make it easy to create new ones right from these pages.

Outside.in: What's the community talking about? What's going on around you? Seems fitting that hyperlocal news should be fed into this platform, not to mention the fact that Outside.in's local placename taxonomies are probably going to come in very handy in creating these pages in the first place.

Blogging: I don't really care what blogging platform gets used, but if we're going to be creating these local organizing places on the web, giving more people a voice seems appropriate.

Community event calendar: No brainer. Not only allow people to publish events to it one at a time, but allow groups and organization to publish calendar feeds to it as well.

Non profit opportunities database: Do you know many times people have asked me where they can go to find a good cause to get involved with? I have no idea where to send them. Seems like that's got to be out there somewhere, but if not, let's create it here and allow syndication of the data to everyone can have it and add to it.


Community Forum: Here's something I actually think it best to avoid. Forums always spiral into hate and troll behavior. Let's keep the discussions here to user publishing on their own blogs, syndicate it around, and also in the structure of GS idea and issue posts, or in a focused Meetup with an organizer.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Anyone want to just build this? (Or at least start wireframing.)

"When asked on ABCs This Week where Mr. Obama stood on the issue, Mr. Emanuel seemed to suggest that Mr. Obama, as a last resort, might be open to tapping the rescue fund to help carmakers, calling the auto industry an essential part of our industrial base."

Emanuel Urges Aid for Auto Industry - NYTimes.com

Umm... Yeah, I happened to watch this morning's This Week.   George Stephanopolous pressed Emanuel over and over again to try to get him to say that Obama would use the $700 billion rescue fund for the auto industry.  Emanuel did not say that.  Instead, he clearly stated that there were other funds that had been offered, that there were other resources they could tap and that the gov't would look into options because the auto industry is really important.  However, to write the headline "Emanuel Urges Aid for Auto Industry" and to suggest that that aid is coming out of the rescue fund is totally irresponsible journalism.

I've been having a Twitter exchange with James Eiden about how you can call an election with such small percentages of the votes in for a state.  I didn't think it's that difficult to figure out how it's done, but apparently, it needs more than 140 characters so here goes:

News organizations triangulate from a number of different sources: primary voting, new voter registrations, previous elections, demographics, and yes, exit polling.  Exit polling, given its unpredictability, I imagine is mostly used as a backup check at this point--to make sure long tail events didn't occur. 

So how do you call a state with 1% in?

Let's take our example state of Jesusland:

Jesusland has 100 voting districts, each representing an equal number of voters.

What are things we know about Jesusland before the election happens?

- Number of registered voters for each party in each district. 

- Primary results from that year.

- Historical records.

We know most people generally vote along party lines, so when you have districts that are heavily Republican or Democrat, you can pretty much count on those folks to go to one side or the other right away.  This is where exit polling comes in.  When you exit poll all of Jesusland's Republican heavy election districts and it seems like there wasn't a major shift against the tide, you can count those votes as in the bag within a margin of error--especially if those same districts turned out in strong numbers for these same candidates in Jesusland's primaries.

That may leave only about a third of the population of Jesusland really in play, making each district about 3.33% of the contested group.  To put the statistical significance of that number in perspective, there are about 180 million potential voters in this whole country.  When national polls are conducted, they're done with less than 10,000 voters and statisticians put them at a 3.5% margin of error.  To get 3.33% of votors responding would be like getting 6 million people nationally to answer a Gallup poll.  So when you see 1% of people reporting and you think it's too early to call, keep in mind that's orders of magnitude more than Gallup usually gets and they're able to get within a few percantage points.  When you get that large of a percent in key districts that are highly contested, you can pretty much call the rest of the race within fair degrees of certainty assuming no major cross-party upheavals.

I mean, it's no different than the whole map of the US, really.  If Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania polls closed at 4 in the afternoon, we'd know who the president was by dinnertime.

Via Heif... 

"What happens to the Obama "network" after the election? It's an intriguing question. The capacity that has been built to mobilize people's time and money greatly exceeds that of the parties. Think about it: Obama's campaign has mobilized on the order of two million or more individuals in one fashion or another. It has raised unprecedented amounts of money from unprecedented numbers of people. This is not a typical case of a campaign as an ad hoc organization that goes into mothballs for four years. The lights are not going off on this operation. If Obama loses, the network provides him an instant infrastructure to run again. The more intriguing question to me, as a student of politics, is what happens if, as seems likely right now, he wins."

Complexity and Social Networks Blog: The party after the campaign

Aside from my belief that he is not only the best but the most appropriate candidate for the job, the thing that really excites me about Barack Obama is how many young people I know are seriously interested in politics now--and how active and motivated they have become.  Many times before, candidates have tried to mobilize youth, and come up sure.  This time, it appears, it's for real--and that's great because there's only one policy that guarantees better results from your government: an interested and active populace.  No matter what your persuasion, you have to agree that the second people become detached from and disinterested in the actions of their government, it's over.  We, as a people, have lost.

So, every last one of you who went knocking on doors in Ohio or Pennsylvania, or who called their grandparents in Florida--don't let up!  

I believe Barack Obama is a great man, but the minute we stop pushing as hard as we are now, he'll fail.  We campaign against politics as usual, but if we the people go back to apathy as usual, we wasted a whole lot of effort.  The potential for change he represents requires everyone to give not only their verbal support, but their action and interest.  The tools are there.  The organizational structures are in place.  Don't let up.

"From TampaBays10: The head of the Hillsborough GOP, David Storck, distributed an email from a Republican Party volunteer saying the voters are a threat. That's because, as the volunteer says in the email, he sees "car loads of black Obama supporters coming from the inner city to cast their votes for Obama." It goes on to say, "This is their chance to get a black president and they seem to care little the he is at minimum a socialist and probably Marxist in his core beliefs." The Republican volunteer says that is because, "After all he is black- no experience or accomplishments but he is black." Read on...

 

If the McCain/Palin campaign has done anything, it has exposed the worst in our society."

FL GOP Chair Sends Out Racist E-mail: Beware Of The Car Loads Of Blacks | Crooks and Liars

I can't wait for election, because, no matter who wins, that will be one less thing for us to be uncertain about. When you see the markets bounce around a few hundred points everyday, you know it's because they're in the dark--just not enough real information about the future so they're going on gut and emotion.

I think you'll see a runup right after the election, especially if there's a clear and decisive victory that gets called before we all head to bed. Then, it will be up to whoever wins to follow through in the next year+ on the hope for a better tomorrow that has been entrusted to them.

Powell cites McCain's inability to provide clear answers on the economy, his campaign campaign tactics, and the Palin nomination.   He said that Obama displays an intellectual curiousity and vigor, and brings the kind of approach we need.

"Because of his ability to inspire, because of the inclusive nature of his campaign, because he is reaching out all across America, because of who he is and his rhetorical abilties... as well as his substance...he has met the standard... he is a transformational figure... and for that reason I'll be voting for Senator Barack Obama."

Ten minutes that should effectively end the McCain-Palin campaign... 

That's what CNN said and I agree. So, hats off to the Republican party for coaching her enough to prevent her from throwing up on herself again--verbally or literally.

What was obvious to me, though is that she doesn't even come close to grasping the isses that she spoke to. Her answers were memorized and delivered in a kind of exhausitive unease reminiscent of a second grader at a spelling bee waiting for the bell to ding, and breathing a sigh of relief everytime it didn't.

What's more was that Biden, too, exceeded expectations. He started off really slow, but gathered a ton of steam as things got rolling. His answers on foreign policy were thoughtful, nuanced--exactly what our policy hasn't been the last eight years.

And when it came time to relate to the little guys, Joe actually shined. Palin's doggonnit Alaska hockey mom thing got old quickly. She used it in uncomfortable places, while on the other hand, Biden's own emotions around his family snuck up on him. His getting choked up as a parent was so genuine, and Palin didn't even seem to notice it. She was too busy repeating lines in her head to pay attention.

What was also great was when Biden called bullshit on the whole "Maverick" thing. It's been tired for a while and Joe put it to bed.

Did Biden wipe the floor with her? No. Did he prove himself to be infinately more qualifed and prepared to be VP?

Unquestionably.

The more that I think about $700 billion, the more I think that kind of dependence on debt we can't handle is how we got into this mess in the first place.

Roger says that this bailout is about keeping the credit windows open for small businesses to "support both business and personal economic growth," but at some point don't we ever have to pay the piper?  Shouldn't we at least have to feel a little hurt from all our excesses?

Sure, the markets tumbled 7% today, but you know they'll be up 4% tomorrow, and if not tomorrow then I'll bet you they'll be up for the week.  Either way, that's not my food money in there and for most of us, stock market jitters only effect our long term retirement plans.

Housing is a different issue, and we keep talking about people losing their houses like it's the end of the world.  Let's keep in mind that if someone has to bite the bullet on their house, they don't automatically become homeless--they just move into a smaller house or rent.  Not everyone needs a big McMansion they couldn't afford in the first place.  My brothers shared a bedroom growing up--a room that I thought was really small when it was just me.  Maybe some kids from the entitlement generation will have to bunk up, get a few less cable channels and send a few less texts.  Jeans from Walmart anyone?  I wore hand me downs...  how many kids today do that? 

I just don't feel like paying for everyone who made bad decisions.  I bought a place in Bay Ridge in 2005 because I couldn't afford to buy closer to or in the city--you know, because I didn't want to buy something I couldn't afford.  Silly me.  Had I known the government and other taxpayers would have bent over backwards to

My point is that, maybe in the long run, a bit of hurt isn't so bad and maybe we should just take our medicine now.  I don't want to crash the system, but it reminds me of why I don't like taking pain medications.  If my knees hurt after playing sports, I don't take anything, because I did something to my knee that is causing pain.  I don't want to just mask the pain, because then I might reinjure it worse.  I'd rather suck it up, so that I know when it stops hurting and I can get back on the field again.

I don't often agree with Penelope, but I definitely thought this same when I heard about her family.  Penelope has special needs kids and a similar home life...

"Okay. Look. I wasn't going to tell you what I think of Sarah Palin, but so many people are asking, so fine. Here it is. She is nuts. And the Republicans are nuts for putting her on a ticket. She has a five-month-old kid with Down's Syndrome."

Palin's children should take priority over being Vice President » Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk

"Now, I want to be clear and speak directly to those of you who LOVED that Palin interview. You're an idiot. I mean that. This is not one of those cases where we're going to agree to disagree. This isn't one of those situations where we debate it passionately and then walk away thinking that the other guy is wrong but argued well. I'm not going to think of you as a thoughtful but misguided person with different ideas who still really cares about the country and the world. No, sorry, not this time. This time, if you watched those interview excerpts and weren't scared out of your freakin' mind, then you're mentally ill, mentally disabled, or mentally disturbed."

Michael Seitzman: Sarah Palin Naked