Tag: Wall Street Journal

California/General interest/Lifestyle/Money/Politics & Causes/seniors/USA/Women
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A quick solution for the national debt

by Fran Johns

I was just idly reading through the Wall Street Journal‘s Weekend Journal, a fine way to start a leisurely weekend morning and one of those niceties of life one cannot enjoy in front of a computer. Come on, folks, buy a newspaper for crying out loud.

In case you missed it, there are a few pages of Distinctive Properties & Estates for sale, and one of them might be just the thing for you. Skipping over the second home suggestions in the Turks and Caicos Islands ($9m and change) or New Zealand (Bay of Islands hotel, price on request) we find a comfy waterfront estate in Boca Raton, majestic views, $17,900,000, or a skier’s dream in Whitefish, MT for a mere $20m… or you might prefer urban living in the Big Apple in any of several condos with views for way under $25m.

I was particularly drawn to a shady Virginia estate overlooking the James River, where I learned to sail and to bum drinks from friendly millionaires (those were the days when a million was real money) sunning on their docks. It has garaging for 5 cars and a children’s stage on the lower level, and you can pick it up for a mere $4.8m, after which your children will no longer have to suffer with makeshift cardboard boxes for their theatricals.

Included in the 30-acre digs of a little piece of Garfield, MN heaven are a caretaker’s bungalow so you won’t have to worry about those professionally landscaped grounds going to pot, plus a couple of guesthouses for your friends who come to play midnight tennis on the lighted courts. That one’s a steal at $14.9m. Or maybe you’d be more interested in a fixer-upper in Los Angeles: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House, with separate staff quarters, can be yours for $15m and it is already “stabilized and awaiting future preservation.” Frank, whose designs were prone to have leaky roofs so caveat emptor, will surely bless you from the wherever-after of architectural geniuses.

Finally, mid-page, we learn that country superstar Alan Jackson’s pad (am I the only person who isn’t familiar with Alan’s oevre?) in Franklin, TN, is available for the first person to come up with $38m, and it has a bunch of rolling acres and a lot of two-story porches all of which “allude to the grand Southern plantations of years past.”

So here’s the deal. At the risk of being labeled a commie pinko redistribution of wealth fink, I am suggesting that we start a campaign of charitable giving to the national debt. It strikes me none of these prospective buyers and sellers (the above are only the tip of the golden iceberg) could possibly miss a couple million.  They would be honored at a grand ball, no crashers allowed, at the White House, possibly receiving a copy of Going Rogue, unless some Obama fan snuck in and wanted to choose Dreams From My Father. The point is, they would get a whole lot of honor and acclaim, and if a few thousand of these folks — even if it took two grand balls — each enlisted a hundred or so of their closest billionaire friends we could pay off the national debt and throw the leftovers into funding universal health care.

Since I am NOT a commie pinko anti-capitalist scum, I am only recommending this as a one-time event. You don’t pony up, you don’t get another chance at fame and feel-good glory. Then we all go back to our CA Prop-13-protected homes or our suburban underwater mortgages and life goes on.

Could anyone possibly argue with that?

General interest
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Doctors, neckwear & the male brain

by Fran Johns
Bob-baldric
Dr. Liner in his Baldric

This space is happy to offer up-to-the-minute insights, today’s concerning connections between neckties, germs, the male brain and other organs.

First, reporter Rebecca Smith writes in today’s Wall Street Journal that neckties may be helping spread flu germs, and many people inside and outside the health care industry think they should go.

“The list of things to avoid during flu season includes crowded buses, hospitals and handshakes. Consider adding this: your doctor’s necktie.

Neckties are rarely, if ever, cleaned. When a patient is seated on the examining table, doctors’ ties often dangle perilously close to sneeze level. In recent years, a debate has emerged in the medical community over whether they harbor dangerous germs.

Several hospitals have proposed banning them outright. Some veteran doctors suspect the anti-necktie campaign has more to do with younger physicians’ desire to dress casually than it does with modern medicine. At least one tie maker is pushing a compromise solution: neckwear with an antimicrobial coating.

BUT HOW ABOUT JUST SWITCHING TO THE BALDRIC?

My friend Robert Liner MD, a distinguished physician/piano player/tango dancer/fellow board member of Compassion & Choices of N.CA and general Renaissance man, made this switch some time ago. In rather characteristic Liner fashion, he then established a company which produces Baldrics in order that others may enjoy them.

Earlier Baldrics were worn by most respectable Scots so they would have something handy from which to hang their swords. But for the 21st century, as Liner writes on his company web site:

We are re-inventing the Baldric for present day men and women on the go. I originally conceived the idea of the Baldric as a new fashion statement for men. Instead of a constricting necktie, a man could dress up with a Baldric. Instead of carrying a sword, the modern man could employ his Baldric to carry his sword equivalent: a cell phone, I-Phone, Blackberry or other p.d.a.. Additionally, in place of a bulky wallet, he could keep credit cards, folding money and small personal items easily accessible in a secret pocket in his Baldric. The Baldric is a hybrid: it’s a necktie alternative that performs like a sleek, modified, minimalist messenger bag.

Contacted today about the germ issue, Liner reports he had indeed heard of such. “Of course, it’s seemed to me,” he muses further, “that the more significant problem with neckties from the point of view of health and world peace is the possibility that neckties reduce blood supply to the male brain. This may account for a good deal of what looks like irrational behavior on the part of my sub-species. This can especially be a problem during adolescence and at other times (ie. most of the time) when demand is placed upon the male circulatory system to divert blood to an organ that is not the brain but sometimes functions in place of the brain. Under these circumstances, the male blood stream can hardly afford to have any restriction placed upon the “choke point” by a necktie so that what little blood is left available to go north to the “main brain” is impeded, resulting  in chaos on a global scale.”

Considering the problems of H1N1 and other viruses, and the potential for advancing world peace as Dr. Liner suggests might happen with fewer neckties, this space hereby blatantly endorses the Baldric.

California/General interest/Lifestyle/Money/Sports/USA
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Finances after 50: Have we learned anything from the Great Recession?

by Fran Johns

Too soon poor, too late smart? A story by WSJ staff reporter Glenn Ruffenach in the November 14/15 Wall Street Journal “Encore” section  asks if we’ve learned any lessons from the financial crisis. And just in case you’re feeling smug about having done so, a quiz inside may shine a sober light of reality. It also contains a lot of data you will find useful, interesting and possibly surprising.

Amid the tumult of the past year, financial advisers are telling us that the Great Recession has produced one invaluable benefit: an education.

We now know, for instance, that our nest eggs can lose almost half their value in a matter of months; that “diversifying” our holdings doesn’t necessarily safeguard those holdings; and that our homes—our one investment for later life that was supposed to be foolproof—can make us look like, well, fools.

How much have you taken away from the events of the past year? Try our quiz and find out.

OK, so it isn’t much of a silver lining. But even worse is that we’ve supposedly learned these lessons before—after each recession, sell-off and market bubble since the 1960s. And yet, we continue to make the same mistakes.

How much have you learned about retirement finances in the past year? And has it sunk in this time? Our quiz will offer you a chance to see if you know where you stand—and provide some guidance for the future.

You’ll have to pick up the Weekend Journal for the quiz, but here’s one freebie in advance:

Q – In retirement, Social Security will likely replace what percentage of your pre-retirement income: (a) 23%; (b) 33%; (c) 43%; (d) 53%.

A – Well, don’t guess high.

Or:

Q – The single best cure for a battered nest egg is: (a) invest more aggressively; (b) save more money; (c) Work longer; (d) Plan to withdraw less money from retirement savings

A – And just when that pile of books to read is so inviting… sorry. (c)

The quiz is full of useful data and interesting insight (fully 40% of men and 41% of women ages 40-50 are considered obese by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, for instance; you knew?) One overall message seems to be, in fact: If you have one, don’t quit your day job.

General interest/Lifestyle/Politics & Causes/USA
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Right time for gay rights?

by Fran Johns

President Obama, having repeated his promise to end “don’t ask, don”t tell” on Saturday, got an additional nudge from the National Equality March on Sunday. Tens of thousands of gay rights supporters from across the country poured through the streets of the nation’s capital to demand equal rights for LGBT citizens. They have their work cut out for them. With a few small, scattered gains having been made, there are battlegrounds shaping up everywhere from Maine to California over the issues highlighted by the events of this past weekend.

My friend Joe, who celebrated 35 years with his partner last summer, asked why I haven’t written about gay rights. Boomers and Beyonders, he says, have a unique perspective. “We have won a few battles that won’t have to be fought again, but there’s a long road ahead and the netroots now taking the lead need to have strong support from the veterans.”

So here goes.

While reiterating his promise to end “don’t ask, don’t tell,” Obama  gave no timetable for doing so. It’s time. Given everything else on his plate, those of us who support gay rights may be willing to cut the president a little slack, but this small step toward clearing some of the large injustices gays and lesbians have lived with since approximately forever is one Obama should be taking soon. 2010 sounds about right.

Other gay rights battlegrounds are active in Maine, where a ballot measure would repeal marriage rights for gays and lesbians, in Washington where a referendum must pass if full domestic partnership benefits are retained, and elsewhere. Meanwhile, according to Change.org, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops “is planning a major statement on marriage in November, preparing to issue new language about how the church views same-sex marriage. Unfortunately, the new language is more of the same… hateful, tired and representative of a theology that views people who are LGBT as less than.”

Compared to the record of togetherness set by Joe and Robert, my marital history is pretty lousy. (Up until this, my final marriage, that is, and its extraordinarily happy 17 years.) So it is hard to see my marital state being threatened by theirs being legitimized. Joe and I were also part of an AIDS support group during the 1990s, and witnessed tragic injustices suffered by dying young men whose hospital doors were barred to those who loved them best. A lot more needs changing than just “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Michigan) was quoted by Elizabeth Williamson and Neil King in Monday’s Wall Street Journal as saying it was “now possible ‘to get a buy-in from the military’ to end a policy opposed by gays and many liberals since it was passed by Congress in 1993.” The monumental pile of global problems to be solved may keep Obama from seizing this good opportunity; gay rights supporters could keep that door open until he does act.

Global issues aside, one home front fact remains: LGBT Americans have been unjustly treated in innumerable ways, for innumerable years.

Getting rid of “don’t ask, don’t tell” seems a very good way to start putting things right.

General interest/Health/Money/USA
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The AwareCar: Smarter than we are

by Fran Johns

OK, I do have a personal relationship with my car — her name is Iris, she plays soothing music (unless my granddaughter’s been in the front seat) while I’m navigating traffic and is a fine, fairly recent replacement for the ’77 Volvo my husband bought new. Although I’d rather walk or take the Muni almost anywhere, Iris keeps my grousing, and driving problems, to a minimum.

But now comes the AwareCar. The AwareCar proposes to figure out when I’m tired or distracted, remind me to put away the cell phone (not a problem, I do not cellphone-talk and drive), check my blood pressure, and when all else fails and I crash into something anyway, send vital information on ahead to the ER so they’ll be ready for me.

The AwareCar is the brainchild of the folks at AgeLab, an MIT project confronting the daunting fact that the 50+ population is the fastest growing segment in the world. Add to this the fact that we’re tending to live longer (unless you’re unlucky enough to be in Somalia or Iraq), with an American turning 50 every seven seconds, and you can see how AgeLab has its work cut out for it. No problem; they maintain that “an aging society is the opportunity to invent the future of healthy, active living.”

Wall Street Journal staff reporter Anne Tergesen recently alerted the world to the coming of the AgeCar, hopefully in time for some of these hordes of hard-driving Boomers. In an interview with AgeLab Director Joseph Coughlin and Associate Director Bryan Reimer (who hold those same titles with New England University Transportation Center) Tergesen quoted Dr. Coughlin’s response to her question, “As they age, what are Baby Boomers likely to want in a car?”:

Unlike their parents, this is a generation that isn’t going to say, “I’m getting older, so I’m not going to travel as much.” The boomers are working more and are far more engaged in daily activities than their parents were at a comparable age. Their expectations are far greater for products that facilitate their independence and mobility as they age. The impact on the car isn’t going to be about design, because no matter how old we get, we want our cars to look forever youthful. Instead, the boomers want the car to allow them to lead a forever-youthful lifestyle. That means it has to provide not only mobility but also safety and semi-automated features.

Thus enters the AgeCar, who is indeed likely to put Iris and her nifty sun roof in the shade. Its prototype — or perhaps more accurately its forerunner — is a Volvo XC90 currently cruising around Cambridge, MA with, Tergesen tells us, “$1.5 million of medical, computer, camera and robotic equipment. The goal? To create an AwareCar capable of sensing when a driver is distracted, faitgued or otherwise prone to accidents — and intervening to ensure a safe ride.”

To which I say, not a moment too soon. My son is about to turn 50.

General interest/Health/Money/Politics & Causes/USA
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Pills vs. Time: The Power of Patience

by Fran Johns

Another interesting article about slowing down our rush-to-treatment healthcare mentality (see Pills & Perils below) appeared in Tuesday’s ‘Personal Journal’ section of The Wall Street Journal. This one is a lot simpler: do nothing, just wait. WSJ‘s Melinda Beck is writing less about serious afflictions than about the minor problems that plague us all; still it points once again to our cultural tendency to Do Something, whatever it is.

What cures colds, flu, sore throats, sore muscles, headaches, stomach aches, diarrhea, menstrual cramps, hangovers, back pain, jaw pain, tennis elbow, blisters, acne and colic, costs nothing, has no weird side effects and doesn’t require a prescription?

Plain old-fashioned time. But it’s often the hardest medicine for patients to take.

“Most people’s bodies and immune systems are wonderful in terms of handling things—if people can be patient,” says Ted Epperly, a family physician in Boise, Idaho, and president of the American Academy of Family Physicians.

“I have a mantra: You can do more for yourself than I can do for you,” says Raymond Scalettar, a Washington, D.C., rheumatologist and former chairman of the American Medical Association. But, he says, “some patients are very medicine-oriented, and when you tell them they aren’t good candidates for a drug they’ve heard about on TV, they don’t come back. I have colleagues who say, ‘You can take this pill and get better in two days, or do nothing and get over it in 48 hours,’ ” says Dr. Scalettar.

Of course, we know this. Most of us have some genetic strain of either the leave-it-alone-it’ll-be-better-in-the-morning or the shut-up-and-tough-it-out approach to all aches and pains. But we also have those constant messages from the TV set, and increasingly from the computer screen, that say one little pill will make it all better, right this very minute. And we are a right-this-very-minute society.

Almost all viral infections resolve on their own, unless you have a compromised immune system. As a rule of thumb, Dr. Epperly says, infections in the nose, throat, stomach and upper respiratory tract tend to be viral. Infections elsewhere in the body are likely to be caused by bacteria, and those can get worse without antibiotics. About 80% of urinary-tract infections resolve on their own, for example, but about 20% develop into more serious kidney or blood infections. And even if they don’t, the symptoms can be very uncomfortable.

Some chronic maladies follow predictable courses, according to many medical experts ,whether or not they are treated.

Colic is almost always gone in four months. Some 70% of acne is gone three to four years after it first appears. “Frozen shoulder”—a painful restriction of the shoulder joint—is typically painful for three to six months and stiff for the next four to six months, and resolves completely after one to three more months. Temporomandibular joint (TMJ) pain tends to go away by itself in 18 months. Sciatica resolves on its own in three weeks in 75% of cases.

Not many of us do pain and misery very well. As a repeat TMJ sufferer, I can promise you if I tried to wait it out without pain killers for 18 days, let alone months, my entire neighborhood block would evacuate. Pain (see Caitlin Kelly’s Broadside post a few hours ago) is in a category all its own. Actually, though it is hell to pay, sometimes it can serve a purpose. My good husband wound up in the emergency room with a gall bladder infection that would’ve had anyone else, surely including myself, shrieking in agony; he does not feel pain. That is great when you’re young and macho, not so good when you get a few years on you and could use a signal that something’s wrong.

But for the minor issues, things wrong can often right themselves without outside interference. Now… if I could only start over again with everything I should or shouldn’t have taken…

When Doing Nothing Is the Best Medicine – WSJ.com.

General interest/Money/Politics & Causes/USA
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Will consumerism rise again?

by Fran Johns

For some reason, maybe it’s the stock market, maybe it’s just wishful thinking-of-anything-but-wars-&-health-reform, consumerism is all over the news of late. Summer tourists didn’t tour as much or buy enough, clunkers were eagerly turned in for cars, caution abounds in the land. People are even beginning to save for the rainy days that have not yet cloudburst upon them.

A closer look at all this was taken through a couple of recent studies reported on by the San Francisco Chronicle’s Tom Abate this morning. Abate focuses on California, but the trends are all over.

California will trail the nation in emerging from the Great Recession, as consumers save more and spend less in a behavior shift that will slow growth and job creation in the short term but eventually lead to a stronger economy.

That message emerged from two separate reports released Tuesday by the UCLA Anderson Forecast and Beacon Economics, a consulting practice with offices in San Rafael.

Both forecasts characterized California as the epicenter of back-to-back consumption binges fueled by the dot-com boom and the housing bubble, and argued that now the state faces big adjustments as it recovers from ills that have long plagued the U.S. economy.

“Consumers have been on a spending binge ever since 1995,” said Jon Haveman with Beacon Economics, as soaring 401(k)s and, later, inflated home prices made Americans feel so wealthy they stopped saving money.

California, of course, rather outdid itself in the business of spending too much, buying too much and borrowing to do more of the same, but none of this was peculiar to the left coast.

It did not go unremarked, however, by one of the current candidates for Mayor of New York, Rev. Billy. You don’t know Rev. Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping? You’ve been missing something. The Rev, probably going on the ballot as Bill Talen, does not get the coverage that other candidates do, but he is dead serious about his mission and pretty raucous about delivering the message. He is seriously running for Mayor. He doesn’t like consumerism, or the corporate takeover of America, or war. At times his church becomes the Church of Stop the Bombing. In any event, if we’d been listening to Rev. Billy all these years we might have missed getting in quite so deep a mess — but we’d also have missed a lot of Starbucks lattes.

Now comes word that senior shopping at Walgreen, Rite-Aid and Family Dollar stores is going to be made more comfortable, just in time for Boomers to start turning 65 in 2011. According to a recent Wall Street Journal story by Ellen Byron, in one exercise designed to help participants in a Kimberly-Clark program understand the difficulties confronting senior shoppers, Kimberly-Clark executive Don Quigley tried going through the aisles with dark-tinted glasses, un-popped popcorn in his shoes and his thumbs taped to his palms. This rather hurts my senior-shopper feelings if it is how Rite-Aid sees me, but I will try to appreciate the effort.

It appears that we current savers/cautious spenders are not expected to change back to rampant consumerism overnight, which is good news to the senior seniors of us, brought up so rigorously in the save-first-spend-later mode that we feel better within it anyway.

Ed Leamer, director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast, said consumers usually roar back from recessions with spending that lifts production and fuels hiring, but he thinks that is unlikely during this recovery because Americans have been living beyond their means for too long – borrowing too much and importing more than the country sells abroad.”We need to turn our shopping malls into factories,” Leamer said “Our economy over the next decade is going to have to build more of the stuff we buy.”

Haveman said the painful adjustments now under way should eventually benefit California and the Bay Area, which lead in technology, biotechnology, clean energy and other cutting-edge industries.

“The light at the end of the tunnel is visible, but it’s still a long way off,” he said.

That business about turning shopping malls into factories and living within means — that’s going to please Rev. Billy.

Fundamental economic shift underlies recovery.

General interest
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On Getting Started, and Re-started…

by Fran Johns

Front pages of the two east coast newspapers that arrive on our west coast doorstep every morning featured references to a few of the primary issues this column proposes to address: staying active and upbeat while confronting one’s mortality; the multiplicity of housing shifts in late generations; and whether one’s life experiences lead to rigidity or understanding.

 

Even the front page of today’s True/Slant, in Scott Bowen’s innovative take on Boston Globe books and publishing writer David Mehegan’s Over and Out, takes up the end-of-life choices question which has consumed much of my time and energies over the past decade and which I tackled (albeit anecdotally) in a 1999 book, Dying Unafraid.

 

Now. If life experience can be applied to mastery of T/S’s technological tools – which are not, after all, quite so daunting as the above – it will be great joy for Boomers &Beyond to explore these through headline grabs, riffs and commentaries and perhaps some lively reader responses. Stay tuned.

 

 

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