Monday, May 23, 2011
FiveBooks Interview: Jason Zweig on Personal Finance
Bill Gross of PIMCO, the world’s largest bond fund, has written articles saying the US treasuries market is a Ponzi scheme. The stock market has been through a terrifying plunge. Traditionally we learned that our own home, at least, was a safe place to invest our money – but a lot of us have lost on that as well. What’s to be done right now in terms of personal investing? What should our approach be?
It certainly is a frightening time. People had come to regard the entire world around them as an ATM. The bond market was making double digits every year. The stock market provided a double-digit return. Your house would go up at a double-digit rate. You didn’t even have to be smart; no matter what you did, no matter what happened, you would just keep compounding your wealth at 10% or better every year. Because 10% is a round number, it had a strong effect on people’s perceptions and they came to regard it as a right, as a given. Anything you put your money into would go up at least 10% a year for the rest of human history. That never was true, of course. It just took a while to be proven false. Now that it has been proven false, people feel they have lost their moorings. They’re adrift. They don’t trust their brokers, they don’t trust exchanges, they don’t trust regulators, they don’t trust anybody. And, frankly, they probably shouldn’t.
So what do we do? Do these books you’ve chosen offer a clue?
There are a few basic principles that people should keep in mind. There’s an old expression on Wall Street that I’m very fond of, which is: “You get the returns you deserve.” People who had gotten to the point of believing that high returns were a given didn’t deserve to earn them, because the markets don’t exist for our convenience. They don’t exist to make people rich. They exist to transfer capital from people who have an excess of it to people who have a more immediate need for it. Sometimes those are great growing companies that will take that capital and put it to very productive use. At other times, it might be somebody selling bundles of crappy mortgages, and you’re going to lose 95% of what you put in. The reason you get the returns you deserve is because if you put the time and effort into proper research – and into forming realistic expectations – then you’re a lot less likely to get wiped out or be caught by surprise. The real lesson for people from what happened over the past 10 years should be that investing done properly requires either a considerable amount of homework and research, or an enormous amount of emotional equanimity. Ideally it takes both. You have to be prepared for anything and you have to be very humble about the abilities of the experts and yourself to predict what’s about to happen.
It certainly is a frightening time. People had come to regard the entire world around them as an ATM. The bond market was making double digits every year. The stock market provided a double-digit return. Your house would go up at a double-digit rate. You didn’t even have to be smart; no matter what you did, no matter what happened, you would just keep compounding your wealth at 10% or better every year. Because 10% is a round number, it had a strong effect on people’s perceptions and they came to regard it as a right, as a given. Anything you put your money into would go up at least 10% a year for the rest of human history. That never was true, of course. It just took a while to be proven false. Now that it has been proven false, people feel they have lost their moorings. They’re adrift. They don’t trust their brokers, they don’t trust exchanges, they don’t trust regulators, they don’t trust anybody. And, frankly, they probably shouldn’t.So what do we do? Do these books you’ve chosen offer a clue?
There are a few basic principles that people should keep in mind. There’s an old expression on Wall Street that I’m very fond of, which is: “You get the returns you deserve.” People who had gotten to the point of believing that high returns were a given didn’t deserve to earn them, because the markets don’t exist for our convenience. They don’t exist to make people rich. They exist to transfer capital from people who have an excess of it to people who have a more immediate need for it. Sometimes those are great growing companies that will take that capital and put it to very productive use. At other times, it might be somebody selling bundles of crappy mortgages, and you’re going to lose 95% of what you put in. The reason you get the returns you deserve is because if you put the time and effort into proper research – and into forming realistic expectations – then you’re a lot less likely to get wiped out or be caught by surprise. The real lesson for people from what happened over the past 10 years should be that investing done properly requires either a considerable amount of homework and research, or an enormous amount of emotional equanimity. Ideally it takes both. You have to be prepared for anything and you have to be very humble about the abilities of the experts and yourself to predict what’s about to happen.
Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide'
When the government gathers or analyzes personal information, many people say they're not worried. "I've got nothing to hide," they declare. "Only if you're doing something wrong should you worry, and then you don't deserve to keep it private."
The nothing-to-hide argument pervades discussions about privacy. The data-security expert Bruce Schneier calls it the "most common retort against privacy advocates." The legal scholar Geoffrey Stone refers to it as an "all-too-common refrain." In its most compelling form, it is an argument that the privacy interest is generally minimal, thus making the contest with security concerns a foreordained victory for security.
The nothing-to-hide argument is everywhere. In Britain, for example, the government has installed millions of public-surveillance cameras in cities and towns, which are watched by officials via closed-circuit television. In a campaign slogan for the program, the government declares: "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear." Variations of nothing-to-hide arguments frequently appear in blogs, letters to the editor, television news interviews, and other forums. One blogger in the United States, in reference to profiling people for national-security purposes, declares: "I don't mind people wanting to find out things about me, I've got nothing to hide! Which is why I support [the government's] efforts to find terrorists by monitoring our phone calls!"
The argument is not of recent vintage. One of the characters in Henry James's 1888 novel, The Reverberator, muses: "If these people had done bad things they ought to be ashamed of themselves and he couldn't pity them, and if they hadn't done them there was no need of making such a rumpus about other people knowing."
I encountered the nothing-to-hide argument so frequently in news interviews, discussions, and the like that I decided to probe the issue. I asked the readers of my blog, Concurring Opinions, whether there are good responses to the nothing-to-hide argument. I received a torrent of comments:
- My response is "So do you have curtains?" or "Can I see your credit-card bills for the last year?"
- So my response to the "If you have nothing to hide ... " argument is simply, "I don't need to justify my position. You need to justify yours. Come back with a warrant."
- I don't have anything to hide. But I don't have anything I feel like showing you, either.
- If you have nothing to hide, then you don't have a life.
- Show me yours and I'll show you mine.
- It's not about having anything to hide, it's about things not being anyone else's business.
- Bottom line, Joe Stalin would [have] loved it. Why should anyone have to say more?
One can usually think of something that even the most open person would want to hide. As a commenter to my blog post noted, "If you have nothing to hide, then that quite literally means you are willing to let me photograph you naked? And I get full rights to that photograph—so I can show it to your neighbors?" The Canadian privacy expert David Flaherty expresses a similar idea when he argues: "There is no sentient human being in the Western world who has little or no regard for his or her personal privacy; those who would attempt such claims cannot withstand even a few minutes' questioning about intimate aspects of their lives without capitulating to the intrusiveness of certain subject matters."
But such responses attack the nothing-to-hide argument only in its most extreme form, which isn't particularly strong. In a less extreme form, the nothing-to-hide argument refers not to all personal information but only to the type of data the government is likely to collect. Retorts to the nothing-to-hide argument about exposing people's naked bodies or their deepest secrets are relevant only if the government is likely to gather this kind of information. In many instances, hardly anyone will see the information, and it won't be disclosed to the public. Thus, some might argue, the privacy interest is minimal, and the security interest in preventing terrorism is much more important. In this less extreme form, the nothing-to-hide argument is a formidable one. However, it stems from certain faulty assumptions about privacy and its value.
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Elephant in the Green Room
by Gabriel Sherman
On Monday afternoon, March 28, Fox News chairman Roger Ailes summoned Glenn Beck to a meeting in his office on the second floor of News Corp.’s midtown headquarters to discuss his future at the network. Ailes had spent the better part of the weekend at his Putnam County estate thinking about how to stage-manage Beck’s departure from Fox, which at that point was all but inevitable. But, as with everything concerning Glenn Beck, the situation was a mess, simultaneously a negotiation and a therapy session. Beck had already indicated he was willing to walk away—“I don’t want to do cable news anymore,” he had told Ailes. But moving him out the door without collateral damage was proving difficult.
Ailes had hired Beck in October 2008 to reenergize Fox’s audience after Obama’s election, and he’d succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest hopes, tapping deep wells of resentment and igniting them into a vast, national conflagration. The problem was that it had almost engulfed Fox itself. Beck was huge and uncontrollable, and some of Fox’s other big names seemed diminished by comparison—and were speaking up about it. Beck seemed to many to be Fox News’s id made visible, saying things—Obama is a racist, Nazi tactics are progressive tactics—dredged from the right-wing subconscious. These were things that weren’t supposed to be said, even at Fox, and they were consuming the brand. Ailes had built his career by artfully tending the emotional undercurrents of both politics and entertainment, using them to power ratings and political careers; now they were out of his control.
“Let’s make a deal,” Ailes told Beck flatly.
During a 45-minute conversation, the two men agreed on the terms: Beck would give up his daily 5 p.m. program and appear in occasional network “specials”—but even that didn’t solve their problem. Tensions flared over how many specials he would appear in. Fox wanted six, Beck’s advisers wanted four. At another meeting, Beck choked up; he and Ailes had always had a bond. And when Ailes thought Beck’s advisers were jerking him around, he threatened to blow up the talks. “I’m just going to fire him and issue a press release,” he later snapped to a Fox executive.
On April 6, Fox and Beck announced he would be leaving the network. Both were careful to squelch the anonymous backbiting that had been going on for weeks in the press. Ailes knew that a public meltdown would alienate Beck’s legions of fans who had become loyal Fox viewers. Most of all, he didn’t want Beck’s departure to be seen as a victory for the liberal media; that would ruin the most important story line of all.
Ailes is the most successful executive in television by a wide margin, and he has been so for more than a decade. He is also, in a sense, the head of the Republican Party, having employed five prospective presidential candidates and done perhaps more than anyone to alter the balance of power in the national media in favor of the Republicans. “Because of his political work”—Ailes was a media strategist for Nixon, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush—“he understood there was an audience,” Ed Rollins, the veteran GOP consultant, told me. “He knew there were a couple million conservatives who were a potential audience, and he built Fox to reach them.”
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The Science of Self Delusion
by Chris Mooney"A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point." So wrote the celebrated Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger, in a passage that might have been referring to climate change denial—the persistent rejection, on the part of so many Americans today, of what we know about global warming and its human causes. But it was too early for that—this was the 1950s—and Festinger was actually describing a famous case study in psychology.
Festinger and several of his colleagues had infiltrated the Seekers, a small Chicago-area cult whose members thought they were communicating with aliens—including one, "Sananda," who they believed was the astral incarnation of Jesus Christ. The group was led by Dorothy Martin, a Dianetics devotee who transcribed the interstellar messages through automatic writing.
Through her, the aliens had given the precise date of an Earth-rending cataclysm: December 21, 1954. Some of Martin's followers quit their jobs and sold their property, expecting to be rescued by a flying saucer when the continent split asunder and a new sea swallowed much of the United States. The disciples even went so far as to remove brassieres and rip zippers out of their trousers—the metal, they believed, would pose a danger on the spacecraft.
Festinger and his team were with the cult when the prophecy failed. First, the "boys upstairs" (as the aliens were sometimes called) did not show up and rescue the Seekers. Then December 21 arrived without incident. It was the moment Festinger had been waiting for: How would people so emotionally invested in a belief system react, now that it had been soundly refuted?
At first, the group struggled for an explanation. But then rationalization set in. A new message arrived, announcing that they'd all been spared at the last minute. Festinger summarized the extraterrestrials' new pronouncement: "The little group, sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction." Their willingness to believe in the prophecy had saved Earth from the prophecy!
From that day forward, the Seekers, previously shy of the press and indifferent toward evangelizing, began to proselytize. "Their sense of urgency was enormous," wrote Festinger. The devastation of all they had believed had made them even more certain of their beliefs.
In the annals of denial, it doesn't get much more extreme than the Seekers. They lost their jobs, the press mocked them, and there were efforts to keep them away from impressionable young minds. But while Martin's space cult might lie at on the far end of the spectrum of human self-delusion, there's plenty to go around. And since Festinger's day, an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning" helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, "death panels," the birthplace and religion of the president, and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.
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Sunday, May 22, 2011
Y Combinator: Boot Camp for Startups
The Y Combinator offices sit at the dead center of Silicon Valley, in Mountain View, on a street called Pioneer Way. Outside, the traffic hums along CA-z85 headed either south to Cupertino or north toward Google headquarters. Inside, the decor of the main room combines modern office (big whiteboard, bright orange noise-dampening panels) with camp dining hall (long trestle tables). Y Combinator shares space with a company called Anybots—which makes robots that can be controlled remotely—and occasionally a droid will motor through the room on a Segway-style base.
On this November day, the Terminator itself could be roaming around the main room and the young men (and the occasional woman) gathered here wouldn’t notice. They are attending Interview Day, a chance to compete for a spot in what has become the tech world’s most prestigious program for budding digital entrepreneurs. The interviewees include former product managers at Google, a Midwestern accountant, and a 17-year-old high school student. They hail from Philadelphia, Minnesota, Greece, Russia, England, Spain, and San Francisco. And like would-be starlets flocking to Hollywood, they have come to Mountain View in the hope that Y Combinator will turn them from nameless coders into Silicon Valley celebrities.
Technically, Y Combinator is a launchpad for startups, but that description doesn’t quite capture the experience it provides or the influence it wields. Twice a year, the company—under the tutelage of its founder, Paul Graham—hosts a three-month boot camp. Each team that’s accepted receives seed funding—$11,000 for the group, plus $3,000 more for each member of the founding team. In exchange, Y Combinator gets a small stake in the startup, usually 6 or 7 percent. But the seed capital is almost beside the point. “Really, the money is just for living expenses,” Graham says. “Like a scholarship to go to college.” The program’s real draw is an unmatchable entrée into the otherwise closed world of high-stakes Internet entrepreneurship. Over a period of 13 weeks, enrollees hobnob with some of the industry’s most powerful investors and innovators as they attempt to turn their embryonic ideas into full-fledged businesses. And, at the end of their tenure, they get to participate in Demo Day, a kind of funding free-for-all during which they present their plans to the world’s most respected venture capital firms and angel investors.
Anyone accepted to Y Combinator joins a group that includes many of the elite startups of the past five years. The founders of Dropbox, Reddit, Loopt, and Scribd were all discovered and nurtured by Graham. Indeed, his picks have been so prescient that getting chosen by Y Combinator has become a geek version of the Good Housekeeping Seal. Tech blogs always cover the launches of Y Combinator companies. Angel investors clamor to fund them. Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb—a breakout Y Combinator startup that matches travelers with private lodgings—compares Graham to legendary music producer John Hammond. “Just as Hammond found Bob Dylan when he was a bad singer no one knew, Graham can spot potential.”
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Brutal
[ed. No other way to describe it, this is a terrible place to be. Usually you can find a little trap door at the bottom that allows you to slip under and come up behind a wave as it rumbles over the top. Not here. That second little curl near the base kills that option. With the wave starting to throw and everything closing out behind, I'm guessing this unfortunate person had maybe half a second before they got flipped, churned and thoroughly crushed.]
via:
Rejected
by A. Barton Hinkle
Dear Congress, your credit application has been turned down.
The Honorable _________
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
The Honorable _________
United States Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510
Dear Mr. or Ms. _______,
Thank you for your interest in the American Public Trust's Gold Card credit program. Rest assured your application has been given thorough and careful consideration by the American people.
After reviewing the information provided in your application as well as your credit report, we regret to say that we are unable to extend you further credit at this time. The reasons for our decision are as follows:
(1) Inadequate income.Our records indicate that your annual income for the 2011 taxable year was $2,170,000,000,000. You have requested a credit limit of $17,000,000,000,000. These figures exceed the American Public's debt-to-income guidelines for credit issuance.
(2) Excessive spending. The receipts you provided indicate your annual expenditures for the 2011 fiscal year total $3,820,000,000,000, or $1,650,000,000,000 more than your total income for the year. The American Public prefers that its members of Congress maintain a positive or neutral rather than a negative cash flow.
(3) High debt utilization. Your credit report indicates that you have a credit limit of $14,300,000,000,000, and of that amount you have utilized $14,300,000,000,000, for a debt utilization ratio of 100 percent. Consumer banking industry guidelines recommend a debt utilization ratio of no greater than 30 percent for standard creditworthiness, and 10 percent for exemplary creditworthiness. A debt utilization rate of 100 percent meets our classification of "You're *&^%$#@! kidding, right?"
Dear Congress, your credit application has been turned down.
The Honorable _________
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
The Honorable _________
United States Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510
Dear Mr. or Ms. _______,
Thank you for your interest in the American Public Trust's Gold Card credit program. Rest assured your application has been given thorough and careful consideration by the American people.After reviewing the information provided in your application as well as your credit report, we regret to say that we are unable to extend you further credit at this time. The reasons for our decision are as follows:
(1) Inadequate income.Our records indicate that your annual income for the 2011 taxable year was $2,170,000,000,000. You have requested a credit limit of $17,000,000,000,000. These figures exceed the American Public's debt-to-income guidelines for credit issuance.
(2) Excessive spending. The receipts you provided indicate your annual expenditures for the 2011 fiscal year total $3,820,000,000,000, or $1,650,000,000,000 more than your total income for the year. The American Public prefers that its members of Congress maintain a positive or neutral rather than a negative cash flow.
(3) High debt utilization. Your credit report indicates that you have a credit limit of $14,300,000,000,000, and of that amount you have utilized $14,300,000,000,000, for a debt utilization ratio of 100 percent. Consumer banking industry guidelines recommend a debt utilization ratio of no greater than 30 percent for standard creditworthiness, and 10 percent for exemplary creditworthiness. A debt utilization rate of 100 percent meets our classification of "You're *&^%$#@! kidding, right?"
Shades of Grief
When does mourning become a mental illness?by Virginia Hughes
Sooner or later most of us suffer deep grief over the death of someone we love. The experience often causes people to question their sanity—as when they momentarily think they have caught sight of their loved one on a crowded street. Many mourners ponder, even if only abstractedly, their reason for living. But when are these disturbing thoughts and emotions normal—that is to say, they become less consuming and intense with the passage of time—and when do they cross the line to pathology, requiring ongoing treatment with powerful antidepressants or psychotherapy, or both?
Two proposed changes in the “bible” of psychiatric disorders—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)—aim to answer that question when the book’s fifth edition comes out in 2013. One change expected to appear in the DSM-5 reflects a growing consensus in the mental health field; the other has provoked great controversy.
In the less controversial change, the manual would add a new category: Complicated Grief Disorder, also known as traumatic or prolonged grief. The new diagnosis refers to a situation in which many of grief’s common symptoms—such as powerful pining for the deceased, great difficulty moving on, a sense that life is meaningless, and bitterness or anger about the loss—last longer than six months. The controversial change focuses on the other end of the time spectrum: it allows medical treatment for depression in the first few weeks after a death. Currently the DSM specifically bars a bereaved person from being diagnosed with full-blown depression until at least two months have elapsed from the start of mourning.
Those changes matter to patients and mental health professionals because the manual’s definitions of mental illness determine how people are treated and, in many cases, whether the therapy is paid for by insurance. The logic behind the proposed revisions, therefore, merits a further look.
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Saturday, May 21, 2011
Super Heavy
by Andy GreeneFor the first time since the Rolling Stones formed nearly 50 years ago, Mick Jagger is part of a new band: Super Heavy – featuring Dave Stewart, Joss Stone, Damian Marley and Indian film composer A.R. Rahman. The band has quietly been recording together over the past 18 months, with their debut LP planned for sometime around September. "It's different from anything else I've ever been involved in," Jagger tells Rolling Stone. "The music is very wide-ranging – from reggae to ballads to Indian songs in Urdu."
The group got its start two years ago when Dave Stewart called Jagger from his home in Jamaica. "I live in Lime Hall right above St. Ann's Bay," says Stewart. "It's kind of the jungle, and sometimes I'd hear three sound systems all playing different things. I always love that, along with Indian orchestras. I said to Mick, ‘How could we make a fusion?' We were talking about an experiment, and then we started talking about voices. It was all born from that conversation."
Jagger loved the idea, and after lots of brainstorming and phone calls around the world, they settled on Stone, A.R. Rahman and Marley - whose rhythm section helped flesh out the band. "We wanted a convergence of different musical styles," says Jagger. "We were always overlapping styles, but they were nevertheless separate."
About 18 months ago, the band gathered in a Los Angeles studio. None of them had prepared any music. "We didn't know what the hell we were doing," says Stewart. "We were just jamming and making a noise. It was like when a band first starts up in your garage. Sometimes Damien would kick it off and then Joss would sing something on top of it. We might have a 22 minute jam, and it would become a six minute song."
The loose method was inspiring for Jagger. "One of the beauties is that, just speaking as a vocalist, I did other things," Jagger says. "I played guitar and harmonica, but there's four vocalist on the album. Not everything was reliant on me.” The band’s name came from some improvised vocals by Marley. "He was just singing 'Heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy, super heavy,'" says Stewart. "We thought that sounded good and it sort of stuck with us."
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All In the Family
Healthcare, schools, police, tax breaks: which would you keep, slash, or cut? The axe has to swing, so where, if you were the lumberjack, would you aim it? It's the central, polarizing question in this age of austerity. by Umair Haque
Or is it? Maybe relying on cuts to reboot prosperity is a bit like starting a diet to treat Alzheimer's: probably not going to work.
Consider an allegory: a household racking up debt not just because they have easy credit, but because they're a dysfunctional family to begin with. Meet the new Joneses: they're a little less Cleaver and little more Soprano.
Dad Jones is the CEO of Toxico, a major, blue-chip energy corporation. He's an imperious millionaire, but he's stingier than Scrooge McDuck. Though he rakes it in, he flat-out refuses to contribute much, if anything, towards basic household costs--and when the family sets up rules to make him, he quickly finds loopholes. In fact, last year, instead of contributing to the household purse, he managed to find a way get a net contribution from it.
Then there's Grandma Jones. She's not elderly by today's standards, and she's got plenty of years ahead of her. But even now, she demands nothing but the best of care, even when she might not need it. Worse, she won't hear of taking out of her own retirement account to finance it.
Spamalytics
by John Markoff
For years, a team of computer scientists at two University of California campuses has been looking deeply into the nature of spam, the billions of unwanted e-mail messages generated by networks of zombie computers controlled by the rogue programs called botnets. They even coined a term, “spamalytics,” to describe their work.
Now they have concluded an experiment that is not for the faint of heart: for three months they set out to receive all the spam they could (no quarantines or filters need apply), then systematically made purchases from the Web sites advertised in the messages.
The hope, the scientists said, was to find a “choke point” that could greatly reduce the flow of spam. And in a paper to be presented on Tuesday at the annual IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in Oakland, Calif., they will report that they think they have found it.
It turned out that 95 percent of the credit card transactions for the spam-advertised drugs and herbal remedies they bought were handled by just three financial companies — one based in Azerbaijan, one in Denmark and one in Nevis, in the West Indies.
The researchers looked at nearly a billion messages and spent several thousand dollars on about 120 purchases. No single purchase was more than $277.
If a handful of companies like these refused to authorize online credit card payments to the merchants, “you’d cut off the money that supports the entire spam enterprise,” said one of the scientists, Stefan Savage of the University of California, San Diego, who worked with colleagues at San Diego and Berkeley and at the International Computer Science Institute.
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For years, a team of computer scientists at two University of California campuses has been looking deeply into the nature of spam, the billions of unwanted e-mail messages generated by networks of zombie computers controlled by the rogue programs called botnets. They even coined a term, “spamalytics,” to describe their work.
Now they have concluded an experiment that is not for the faint of heart: for three months they set out to receive all the spam they could (no quarantines or filters need apply), then systematically made purchases from the Web sites advertised in the messages.The hope, the scientists said, was to find a “choke point” that could greatly reduce the flow of spam. And in a paper to be presented on Tuesday at the annual IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in Oakland, Calif., they will report that they think they have found it.
It turned out that 95 percent of the credit card transactions for the spam-advertised drugs and herbal remedies they bought were handled by just three financial companies — one based in Azerbaijan, one in Denmark and one in Nevis, in the West Indies.
The researchers looked at nearly a billion messages and spent several thousand dollars on about 120 purchases. No single purchase was more than $277.
If a handful of companies like these refused to authorize online credit card payments to the merchants, “you’d cut off the money that supports the entire spam enterprise,” said one of the scientists, Stefan Savage of the University of California, San Diego, who worked with colleagues at San Diego and Berkeley and at the International Computer Science Institute.
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Whose Failing Grade Is It?
by Lisa Belkin
Since the subject today is schooling, let’s start with a quiz:
Since the subject today is schooling, let’s start with a quiz:
1. A third grader in Florida is often late for class. She tends to forget her homework and is unprepared for tests. The teacher would like to talk to her parents about this, but they fail to attend parent-teacher conferences. The teacher should:a) fail the student.
b) fail the parents.
2. A middle-school student in Alaska is regularly absent, and his grades are suffering as a result. The district should:
a) fail the student.
b) fine the parents $500 a day for every day the student is not in school.
3. A California kindergartener has been absent, without a doctor’s note or other “verifiable reason,” 10 times in one semester. The district should:
a) call the parents.
b) call the district attorney and have charges brought against the parents.
The answer, under state laws that have been proposed (No. 1), or recently enacted (No. 2 and No. 3), is “b” on all counts: If a student is behaving badly, punish Mom and Dad.
Teachers are fed up with being blamed for the failures of American education, and legislators are starting to hear them. A spate of bills introduced in various states now takes aim squarely at the parents. If you think you can legislate teaching, the notion goes, why not try legislating parenting?
It is a complicated idea, taking on the controversial question of whether parents, teachers or children are most to blame when a child fails to learn.
But the thinking goes like this: If you look at schools that “work,” as measured by test scores and graduation rates, they all have involved (overinvolved?) parents, who are on top of their children’s homework, in contact with their children’s teachers, and invested in their children’s futures. So just require the same of parents in schools that don’t work, and the problem is solved (or, at least, dented), right?
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The Charms of Eleanor
by Russell BakerIn 1918, during the fourteenth year of their marriage, Eleanor Roosevelt, age thirty-three, discovered that Franklin, age thirty-six, was in love with her young social secretary, Lucy Mercer. Long afterward, Eleanor told her friend Joseph Lash that the discovery was devastating, that the bottom seemed to have dropped out of her life. Yet as her subsequent history persuasively testifies, it was also her liberating moment, a life-changing event that opened a world of glorious possibilities for a woman not too timid to explore them.
Until then she had been bound to a stifling marriage in which her life was spent in unobtrusively loyal service to Franklin’s gaudy ambition and in childbearing. There had been six pregnancies in the marriage’s first twelve years; sex, she later told her daughter Anna, was an ordeal to be borne.
It was a marriage under constant surveillance by Franklin’s mother, the omnipresent Sara Delano, a live-in mother-in-law out of a Gothic soap opera. Sara cast an authoritative shadow over household operations, child rearing, and, worst of all, over Franklin. He was her only son, and she adored him but seemed determined to keep him her boy forever. This desire to clasp him in unending maternal embrace may have accounted for her refusal to surrender her tight control of the family’s considerable wealth.
The discovery that he was having some sort of affair with another woman produced a family crisis fraught with great pain for Eleanor and great danger for Franklin. To those who now think of them as giants at ease on the world stage, their behavior in this moment of emotional turmoil may seem astonishingly youthful in its innocence. Yet they were certainly not young, and the year, after all, was 1918, a time when philandering husbands were a Washington commonplace that capital society shrugged off as part of the local culture.
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