Month: April 2008

Thinking About This

Let’s imagine a nice little community of 400 homes. It’s a perfectly average American community, and it could be anywhere: in town, in the ‘burbs, in the countryside.

Thanks to the often-cited statistic that 68% of Americans own their homes, we can deduce that perhaps as many as 32% are rental homes, or 128. However, we are going to assume there is an apartment complex down the road, and that only a third of that number are in fact rental homes. We’ll round down to 42.

Because it is a perfectly average community, roughly 5% are currently available. Most of them are for sale or lease. A few have sales/leases pending — the sign is still up, but only because the deal hasn’t actually closed yet. Another few are being prepped for sale/lease, but frankly if you made the owner an offer out of the blue he or she would likely take it.. That’s 20 homes. A lot of these homes are currently not occupied.

Right now, 2 of them are in foreclosure, like one out of every 194 homes nationwide — more than double last year’s figure. Once the bank takes them back, they will be added to the list of homes currently available.

In addition, since 6.8% of American homes are currently financed at least in part with a ARM sub-prime mortgage, there’s 27 homeowners that don’t know what their payment will be next year. Since there are 75.1 million home owning Americans and “over 7.5 million first-lien subprime mortgages outstanding”, you can see that one out of every 10 homes in this average community are involved in the subprime mess in one way or another. That’s 40 homes. There is reason to suspect that a disproportionate number of these homes are currently rented, because a lot of investors had to resort to subprime lending. Suddenly, Hope Now’s efforts seem quixotic.

So let’s take a look at how this could play out in the next few months. Those two foreclosures alone will drive our available homes figure to 22, an increase of 10%. This doesn’t seem like a big deal in one community of 400 homes, but multiplied out across a metropolitan area, it can be huge. The bank does not particularly want to own this property, and in many cases is willing to sell at a loss. This drives down prices across our community: why would buyers pay more to a private owner, when they can get a comparable bank-owned home for less?

This in turn creates another problem for our homeowners with subprime and ARM mortgages. Some of those people would like to refinance, but can’t. Some now owe more than the current market price; that combined with whatever personal financial issues resulted in them having this mortgage in the first place prevent them from getting affordable refinancing. Some of these people are going to have to sell their homes, if not simply walk away. If as few as 2 of them do so, we have raised available housing by a total of 20% across the community.

We haven’t even discussed the impact of a major lender going out of business. While the mortgages owned by such a lender would be sold off — they are assets, after all — that would reduce the pool of available lenders, and available funds with which to make mortgages for honest, bill-paying homeowners. It obviously also reduces the money available to people trying to refinance. In a nutshell, that is why the government has to “bail out” some lenders: not because we are rewarding their bad behavior, but because of the impact on the public.

Most of the currently discussed legislative solutions focus on owner-occupied homes. The reasoning is that investors should have known better and it’s only fair that they sleep in the bed they made. This reasoning fails to account for the decent, rent-paying residents of our community. If these homes are foreclosed upon, the leases are generally terminated, leaving the resident to scramble for a new home through no fault of his or her own. Does that seem fair to you? Furthermore, by leaving these homes out of the “solution”, we have the potential of adding dozens of homes to a real estate market that normally only has 20 available units. The law of supply and demand suggests that is a recipe for plunging prices, a problem which already exists.

Problem exacerbated by the solution.

But what if our community isn’t perfectly average? According to the latest foreclosure data:

In the first quarter, 1 of every 54 homes in Nevada received some type of foreclosure filing – more than any other state. Its largest city, Las Vegas, had 1 out of every 44 homes go into foreclosure.

Stockton, Calif., had the highest foreclosure rate out of any U.S. metro area, with 1 out of every 30 homes receiving a notice – nearly seven times higher than the national average. The Riverside/San Bernardino region had the second highest rate in the quarter, with one of every 38 homes in default.

Only two metro areas in the ranks of the 20 hardest hit were outside the Sunbelt – Detroit, which ranked sixth in the nation with 1 in every 68 households in default, and Cleveland which saw 1 in every 105 homes go into foreclosure.

That means that if our typical community is in Nevada, there’s 7 homes in foreclosure; if it’s in Las Vegas, there’s 9; Stockton, there’s 13; Detroit, there’s 5 or 6; Cleveland, there’s 3 or 4. Multiply all the problems above accordingly. And keep in mind that these problems are currently impacting the economy in a negative way.

Any real legislative solution to these issues must take into account all parts of the problem: lenders, homeowners, real estate investors, renters, even home builders and investors who purchased mortgage backed securities. To implement half a solution is worse than no solution at all.

Cross-posted on The Moderate Voice and Bridget Magnus.

The Truth About Evolution

It happens.

It’s why there’s a different flu vaccine each year.

It’s how corn came to exist.

It’s why antibiotic resistant bacteria exist.

It’s how these little lizards came to be quite different little lizards in roughly 35 years.

It’s why syphilis no longer has symptoms including “Boils that stood out like Acorns, from whence issued such filthy stinking Matter, that whosoever came within the Scent, believed himself infected. The Colour of these was of a dark Green and the very Aspect as shocking as the pain itself, which yet was as if the Sick had laid upon a fire.” I think the author of the news item put it well: “First, it contrasts markedly with modern experiences with the disease…. Second, it is reasonable to suppose that a sufferer of [these] symptoms… would be unlikely to get a lot of dates.”

How and why evolution happens? Yes that’s a theory. But to ignore evolution altogether is to ignore a law of nature.

In closing: dying for lack of insurance; the recession diet as endorsed by TheStreet.com (way to get to that hard hitting economics and market news there, Jim Cramer must be sooooo proud); OPEC tells the truth, that high oil prices are at least partly because of the weak dollar (which is in turn because of certain Bush Administration policies); young voters more likely to be Democrats; it turns out that of the 53 teenage girls taken from the FDLS compound, 31 were moms or moms-to-be (I think that’s grounds enough to keep the 53 girls away from that place permanently); it turns out that all that hands-on math teaching with “manipulatives” and lots of word problems may be making it harder to learn math; “fat but fit” turns out to be largely untrue after all; and renovated robot rides again.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Shorties

Taser Follow Up and Then Some: True stories and film compiled by an Earth-Bound Misfit.

Taking Stuff Away: We aren’t even secure from the people who are supposed to be insuring our transportation Security.

So much for the Republicans being the party of fiscal restraint: Deficit at record levels. At least “tax and spend liberals” have the money before they go spending it.

Maybe striking the head of the snake is a bad strategy: Chicago braces for “a long, bloody summer” after “a deadly breakdown in discipline among gang members after a crackdown over the past few years put many of their leaders behind bars.” With no leaders, rank and file are left to their own deadly devices. Ultimately, disorganized crime is proving more dangerous than organized crime. Of course, it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with an influx of inexperienced gang members as legit jobs become more scarce, could it?

“It is never a good thing if many of your customers can no longer afford what you are selling.”: The topic is Health Insurance. More about that topic here and here.

Wow, who spiked his Kool-Aid with Rational Juice?: Defense Secretary William Gates says we should try to avoid getting into another Middle East war, that we should think and use “loyal dissent when the situation calls for it,” and that he feels personally responsible for all those young men and women at West Point.

Someone’s in the kitchen with Tama, Someone’s in the kitchen I know….: Sumimasen, eki-chou wa neko desu! [Excuse me sir, the station master is a cat!] Why are you surprised? Cats end up in all sorts of professions these days.

Speaking of the Japanese: A robot built by Honda will conduct the Detroit Symphony.

Judge finally decides that subpoenas are a good thing: What part of “The Fourth Amendment says you need a search warrant and FISA says you can even get the damn thing 3 days after the fact” was it that was giving you trouble?

Burma hasn’t gone away: The Junta is still in charge.

Slow Motion Business Implosion: Sure, you can buy a gizmo that makes an annoying sound only teenagers can hear, and it will keep them away from your place of business. And you know what? They will remember that 10 or 20 years from now when they are your target demographic. For that matter, are the prevented fights worth the prevented sales from keeping them away from the mall?

Middle Path: Ok, marrying off and/or impregnating girls as young as 12 is a bad idea. But is there a shred of evidence that any boys or any kids younger than puberty have been abused in any way? Save yourself and Child Protective Services a big headache, Your Honor, and once the DNA tests are done send everyone under the age of 10 home.

An interesting program [probably not] coming to a community college near you: Pre-Ninja Studies.

Great timing there, Senator: John McCain picks a heckuva time, Brownie, to condemn the government handling of Hurricane Katrina. Somehow I think that is not what he was thinking in this picture.

It took a man to reclaim feminism: Shaun Mullen on why Hillary is not a feminist.

The Shoes! We may no longer be able to control shoe costs by just shipping production to a cheaper country.

Insert appropriate Homer Simpson noise here: Beer prices on the rise, just like everything else.

Become part of the regulatory process: Start Here.

And that’s it for this, the anniversary of the Trojan Horse. Peace, Out!

Mothers Day Blogswarm for Maternal Death

On Mothers’ Day you will find both the ShortWoman and the ArchCrone at the head of a parade. This parade is a protest to another procession, that one a publicity stunt designed to bring attention to the babies fetuses and embryos killed involved in a terminated pregnancy. Although I encourage you to read it all, here’s a choice quote from the ArchCrone herself:

Never do you see the crosses and funeral processions for the WOMEN that DIED from forced pregnancies (coerced through legislation and/or misinformation or lack of abortion providers). Never do you see crosses and funeral processions for the mothers and infants that die from their mother’s lack of adequate health care.

[snip]

What should have happened is that women who died from pregnancy should be honored on Mother’s Day. It’s a damn shame that these people refuse to help the living.

Well, comments ensued, and it has been resolved that we will honor the women who died from pregnancy. We will honor the lives ruined or outright ended by forced pregnancy. We will honor the children brought into this world to unwilling or unable parents.

They have chosen to honor those who only had the potential of life; we will instead honor the living and the women who died unnecessarily.

Any blogger who wants to join the parade, please leave your email and url in comments or use the ArchCrone’s contact page, which is private. Comments here are moderated, so it won’t be going to the general public if you haven’t posted here before. Although some general posts will be needed, we absolutely need posts that focus on a specific sub-issue, such as Darfur or South Dakota or parental consent laws or the availability of physicians (a list of suggestions is in the works, and it can be emailed to you). We will publish a parade roster a few days before the event.

Education Reform

Or: A Series of Ineffective but Obvious Quick Fixes for Complex Problems

Let me begin, if I may, with two items on that oft-quoted report from 1983, A Nation At Risk: the first from Carrie’s Nation basically calls out the fact that several of the key assertions actually had very little data to support them; the second from the Economic Policy Institute manages to cram in a couple of key ideas, namely that better schools were never going to save Detroit, that you can’t blame the schools for our current economic messes, that education “reform” isn’t going to magically transform our poorest neighborhoods, and that kids who “need better nutrition, health care and dental care” are going to have a hard time learning no matter what the curriculum du jour is. A Nation At Risk turns 25 this week, so happy birthday to it. You can read it here. Here’s what the Christian Science Monitor had to say about it upon its 20th anniversary.

Now, I think we can probably all agree that our schools, in general, could be doing a better job. In fact, there are some schools that are doing such a bad job that we can legitimately consider them “failing”. Over the years, there have been a number of approaches to improving schools across the board, with a special eye towards those “failing” schools. Some of those approaches have worked better than others.

Maybe you remember from science class that a scientist starts by making an observation, such as “Hey, this school doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job of teaching 1st graders to read.” He or she moves on to a hypothesis, such as “I wonder if that’s because there is only one teacher is trying to teach 25 students of various skill levels at the same time.” While some people would start campaigning for class size limits at this point — based on a perfectly logical theory, and a plan that stimulates the local economy by putting teachers to work! — the scientist would like to test the theory before implementing an expensive fix that might not work; the scientist suggests “Let’s try hiring an extra teacher at this one school so we can get the average class size down to 18 and see if that helps,” or “Let’s get an assistant or reading specialist to rotate between classrooms, so we can have groups of about a dozen students and a more narrow range of skill levels.” After a period of weeks or months, the scientist would take a look at the data again to see if this intervention really worked before asking the superintendent to implement this solution across the district.

But what if the scientist looked at the data and found there just wasn’t enough improvement beyond what pure chance could have done? What if she noticed that students in Ms. Smith’s class did better than students in Ms. Brown’s class no matter how many students there were in each? And what if he sat in on a classroom and heard the teacher suggesting that students look at the pictures to figure out what the words were, or guess based on the first letter and how long the word was? Or what if she happened to be in the breakroom when she overheard a couple teachers talking about a couple children who “would never learn anyway“? What if the scientists sat down with the curriculum and found things that were confusing?

The sad truth is that most people never look at the actual data produced by education “reform” efforts to see if it is working, and even the people who do often don’t understand statistics well enough to interpret that data.

And that brings me to a real scientist, Zig Engelmann. He started by teaching his own kid, and brought only one assumption to the table: if the kid doesn’t understand it when I am done, it is because I am doing something wrong. The result was a teaching model called Direct Instruction. Like Toru Kumon a decade before, he examined where students needed to end up, compared it to where they were right now, and devised a series of logical steps to get from one place to the other. However, while many parents are likely to have heard of Kumon, or even sent their children, relatively few people know about DI, and some only happen to know because of an ill-fated little story called The Pet Goat.

When it’s your kid in the “failing” school, you want a quick answer that fixes the problem, and nobody can blame you. And often the administration is more than willing to implement a quick fix that at least appears to fix the problem: kids have contraband so we’ll ban bags you can’t see through; we have a violence problem and some parents accuse us of playing favorites, so we’ll implement a “zero tolerance” policy; some kids don’t have certain skills, so we’ll have standardized tests to make sure they do; some kids just won’t sit still long enough to go through the reader so we’ll give them pills (kindly ignore the subset of these kids who can sit in front of the video game console for several hours!).

Education is expensive and necessary. Without quality public education, you will not have access to people like doctors and lawyers, plumbers and carpenters, accountants and teachers, policemen and firemen. Without quality public education, you won’t be able to count on other drivers knowing what a “do not enter” or “left on light only” sign means. We owe it to ourselves to do find out what works, stop doing what doesn’t work, and move on.

Cross-posted on The Moderate Voice.

In closing: please do not go mountain climbing in high-heels; tax reform is too good a campaign issue to actually do it; I want to be Charlie’s kind of middle class American!; the flip-side of the ticking time bomb argument; Howard says it’s time for Superdelegates to place their wagers; absurd birthday parties for kids; the Collapse of the American Economy; the ugly side of tax cuts; and I hope everyone has a great weekend.

A New Take on an Old Line

Let me tell you how it shall be: There’s one for you, nineteen for me!

Most of you recognize that as the first couple lines of Taxman by the Beatles (off the Revolver album, probably their best single work). No no no, I’m not talking about taxes today. If you want to see me talk about taxes, you can hit the archives.I’m talking about polygamy.

By way of disclaimer: polygamy and polyamory are two different things. If three or more consenting adults decide to enter into a fully informed plural relationship with mutually agreeable ground rules, more power to them. And good luck! What they do in private is none of my business and none of yours either, just like your bedroom is none of my business. That’s not what we’re talking about today.

You haven’t been able to watch the news this week without hearing about that polygamist compound that was raided in Texas, supposedly to find a 16 year old mother and her child — they don’t even know who or where she is.

You might have noticed something. We aren’t talking about consenting adults. We aren’t even talking about legal adults. We probably aren’t talking about all parties being fully informed, and we definitely aren’t talking about mutually agreeable ground rules or she wouldn’t have called the cops. See, there’s some key differences here.

But here’s where the story gets weird in my mind. This article from the Houston Chronicle was published several days ago, and includes this paragraph, emphasis mine:

Authorities believe the girl, who has an 8-month-old daughter, was 15 when she was married. A 2005 change in state law, prompted by concern about the sect, raised the state legal age for a girl to marry from 14 to 16.

Alright, follow me on this: it took until 2005 for Texas to raise the marriage age to 16. Texas’s age of consent has been so low for so long that it was a plot point in Gypsy! Can’t you just imagine the legislators debating: “But now, we can’t have those polygamists marrying off their 14 and 15 year olds! That’s only for our own daughters! We’ll fix those polygamists by making them break two laws instead of just one.”

Then there’s this article from USA Today. Apparently there was what amounts to a group sex room in the temple. I’ll leave off the snarky comments, as this is strange enough to stand on its own.

And then there’s this item from CNN, where they admit that these 400 kids are going to need foster homes (hey, some of them can be fostered with their own child-parents!) and that is going to be a big culture shock. They should have seen that coming, since our missing child bride “said that sect members warned her that if she ever left, outsiders would hurt her and force her to cut her hair, wear makeup and have sex with many men.” Hmm, and this is worse than living with one man who “beat and raped her” regularly while the other wives held her baby in what way?

Oh crap, I better paint my face before the makeup police come and force me to come to the group sex room at the temple!

Oops, </sarcasm>

On a more serious note, right now the Texas Department of Family Services has information on their front page about what is going on (from their point of view) and what you can do if you want to help. If you look at the timeline, it is really remarkable how fast they managed to get this all in motion, and I don’t envy them the task of finding homes for 400+ children, many of whom are related to one another.

In closing: how is it controversial that the Doctor has a daughter when they introduced a grandchild in episode one?; if only he put this much effort into his job they wouldn’t have fired him; Krugman on home prices and men who aren’t working; on health care; on not having health care (thanks to Suzie); Bruce Schneier said everything that needs to be said about the lady who let her 9 year old take public transportation home; Expert Ezra on soaring food costs and what a girl (or any other worker) wants; “You are going to get back into that jury room and keep deliberating until you find these scumbag terraists guilty!”; and finally, a heartwarming story about a woman who decided the time had come to speak her mind… in English.

Let me make sure I have this right…

Our choices for President of the United States are a woman who makes up stories to show how experienced she is, a white guy who is sufficiently out of touch with reality that it doesn’t matter whether he makes up stories, and a black guy who knows somebody who is a racist.

Which one would you rather answered the Red Phone at 3 AM?

In closing: Japanese school uniforms; you have no rights on an airplane, not even human rights; 4 things we should do to improve American disaster management, 2 of which would cost no taxpayer dollars and 2 of which should not cost any more in taxes than we are now paying; you call that a sex scandal?; and the Solar System’s long lost cousin.

Prom Shorties

Follow up Friday is a little early: faulty nipple ring searches; top 10 false reasons Hillary should keep ripping the party apart stay in the race; a majority of doctors — particularly in the disciplines that see the most people — think Medicare For All is a good idea (Hey, AMA? AOA? Listening?); all 50 states have gotten extensions to comply with REAL ID, even those that didn’t want any extension (way to tell them off, Chertoff!), and don’t forget that REAL ID mandated the much hated border fence.

Just maybe letting the fox bunk in the henhouse is a bad idea: lawmaker thinks the FAA is too cozy with the folks they are supposed to be regulating.

Now we know what it takes to get us to drive less: Average gas prices of $3.28 have (at least partially) caused the first drop in miles Americans drive since 1980. Other potential factors? Oh I don’t know, maybe losing the job, losing the home in exurbia, and internet shopping. Oh, don’t forget that rising fuel prices result in rising food prices.

At least the kids are alright: yet more babies being dropped off at the Jikei Hospital in Kumamoto, Japan.

Short version of the memo: The president doesn’t have to follow the law. He doesn’t have to follow international law, and he sure as heck doesn’t have to follow the laws Congress passes, even if he signs them. Now get back in there and give ’em the ol’ Abu Gharib!

Don’t forget France: They’re sending more troops to Afghanistan. “Hundreds” of French soldiers will soon be on their way. That’ll show everybody who’s in charge of Kabul!

Meow? Presented without comment, the Swiss Cat Controversy.

Yes, that does summarize it nicely: The BondDad points out at the end of his commentary called The Financialization of the US Economy the following: “Notice we’re still paying more interest than our total growth rate… You have to pay back debt at some point. Yes, you can refinance it etc…. but that doesn’t eliminate the basic problem — you still owe the money. And at some point, that’s going to bite is hard.”

I’m still a Deaniac: even if the IHT thinks Howard Dean doesn’t have what it takes. He got Lieberman out of the party, didn’t he? He managed to take out Hillary’s status as Presumptive Heir, even if she’s not out of the race, didn’t he? I like a little subtlety in my politicians. (Note to Harry Reid, not that much subtlety, mmkay?)

Uhhh, what? Meatscapes.

On that note, I’m out of here.