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slakr007's comments:
on The Future of Journalism
It seems to me that the best thing to do is give up print and publish completely online. There is, of course, one problem with that: the Internet is not available to everyone, all the time, for a nominal fee.
One thing is for sure, we need to figure out a way to preserve true investigative journalism. Television "news" is pretty much off the rails. Aside from NPR, radio "news" is nothing but entertainment for your political leanings. The Internet has legitimate sources, Reuters, BBC, NPR, but the signal to noise ratio is way too low since every person with an opinion is calling themselves journalists these days.
I am not really concerned about losing newspapers as a print business. I am concerned about losing a standard of integrity. There are a lot of people taking up the task of local investigative journalism on the Internet. The problem is, it is hard to find them in the sea of crap. They need some banner like a newspaper lending them its credibility (and lawyers in most cases).
Finding a way to create that "banner" online and getting the Internet to everyone seem like the next big things we should be focusing on rather than trying to save print media.
posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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on H1N What?
What does Canada's health care system have to do with this?
posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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on H1N What?
Probably the same thing that bothered people in 1976: hysterical misinformation and confusion. Doctors and nurses are not all-powerful, all-knowing, and 100% rational. They can be just as hysterical and prone to misinformation as the rest of us.
The NIH is very fairly representing the vaccine and facts about the virus itself and vaccine production support what they are saying.
posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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on H1N What?
These concerns about vaccines are nothing new. The same stuff happened in 1976. People freaked out because three older people died a couple of days after receiving vaccination shots. Ultimately, it was shown that the flu shots had nothing to do with their deaths, but public relations damage was already done.
There is always a tiny amount of risk with vaccines, and there is no more risk to this vaccine than any other. Every regular annual flu vaccine is different from the last. They made this vaccine the same way they make any other vaccine, it's just a different strain.
The risk to public health has always been much greater than the individual risk from vaccines.
posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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on H1N What?
The 1976 outbreak was a different strain of H1N1, so the 1976 shot will not protect you from the current strain.
This is the reason it is imperative for children to get, for instance, the small pox vaccine. If a child does not get the small pox vaccine and happens to contract small pox, the virus will have a chance to mutate and nullify the small pox vaccines everyone else took causing a whole new outbreak of small pox.
posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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on Home Buying
You know, honestly, I am almost willing to vote for stagnation. Having dealt with the Japanese, it seems that one thing their stagnant period taught them was to think long term. Where American companies think in terms of the next quarter, the Japanese think in terms of the next couple of years.
As for home prices, if you grab the latest data off of the Standard & Poor web page [www.homeprices.standardandpoors.com], the major California metropolitan areas, Portland, and the nation leveled off in May-June of this year. This stimulus took effect in Feb.
The important thing about the numbers, though, is that the levels for those areas and the nation are back on their correct trend lines for the period from Jan '87 to Jul '09. So, they are basically right where they should be assuming a historical average appreciation of ~6% / yr.
People are most likely buying houses based on that trend and throwing out increases from the bubble.
I don't know if it is possible to forecast the numbers without the effect of the stimulus, but the prices were in free fall right up until the stimulus took effect and they leveled off in a matter of months at exactly the right point.
If the stimulus did that, yay! If it was just natural, yay! Either way, if they go down anymore we will have bigger problems. If the prices go down another 30% (using your median home price vs. income numbers) we are going to have a nation of Detroits.
posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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on Home Buying
Actually, the private sector didn't destroy the market all by itself - there was plenty of collusion from government - the watchdogs weren't watching.
A loosening of regulations does not really qualify as the "watchdogs not watching." I will grant to you that a lot of shady things went on that should have been stopped, but those were overshadowed by the newly legal things going on...such as the things that were legalized by repealing Glass-Stegall.
So, our representatives actions showed us exactly why government intervention is necessary for a healthy market. The people cannot be all-knowing and all-seeing, so the government has to be our eyes and ears to provide the balance that makes capitalism work.
And, in this case, their intervention is necessary to help clean up the private sector's kegger.
You may be right. Home prices may need some more correction, but I do not see how expediency is necessary. Stability is more important. A quick correction would be fine if we were all rational.
posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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on Home Buying
Yep, everyone assumed houses would be cash machines.
posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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on Home Buying
@ myself
Wow, I misread "median" as "mean". Median is far less deceptive and I was basically asking for the median of the surrounding counties.
Still talking about home prices in Portland doesn't mean much when there are very few reasons that someone would absolutely have to buy a house in Portland.
posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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on Home Buying
@ skeptictank
I'll agree with you there about not moving up if you do not need to. If you are moving up, you should have plenty of cash for a 20% down payment and should be able to easily afford the new house without a tax credit.
posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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on Home Buying
All this whining for tax credits... basically you're saying that the market cannot work without government intervention.
No, it can't. We just saw what happens when we remove regulations on the market (regulations being government intervention). The tax credit is just a different form of intervention meant to get things moving again after the private sector destroyed the market.
posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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on Home Buying
I must disagree with your current guest: the $8K tax credit is being used as part of the down payment now - FHA is allowing this.
Say you are buying a house on a FHA loan and you have no money to put down. The FHA says: "OK, you can use the $8,000 as your 3.5% down payment."
That does not mean you automagically qualify for a $229,000 house. That was his point. The $8,000 is not considered an asset when considering what you can afford.
If the banks only considered DTI, then a person making $35k would qualify for a $229,000 house under FHA and a person making $39k would qualify under a normal loan. That's not exactly a huge difference.
posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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on Home Buying
Is he using the tax credit to buy a house...in space?
posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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on Home Buying
The $8000 tax credit for first time buyers only makes houses $8000 more expensive than they should be.
I wish. I bought a condo in Florida (primary home) in 2003. At the time Gainesville was still lagging the nation in home prices, so I was able to buy at a reasonable price. When I sold it, I used a sane 6% appreciation over 6 years to get a starting price that was quite fair.
I can't be sure, but I am fairly certain the buyer received the $8,000 tax credit and I had to sell $15,000 under my starting price...which, percentage-wise, was better than comparable condos.
As a seller, you can't use the tax credit against the buyer in negotiations and banks, at least the bank I am dealing with now, will not consider the tax credit when determining what you can afford. So, the credit does not have much effect on the price.
Median home prices in Portland are still over $250K.
Median home price can be very deceiving. Plus, you are talking about a dense urban area. What about the distribution of home prices (how many homes are in the $101k-$125k range? $126k-$150k? etc.) in the surrounding counties?
posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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on Home Buying
How successful do you think the tax credit has been for stimulating the housing market?
I was just asking a real estate agent this question Monday. He seemed to think it has helped, but artificially. In other words, once the tax credit goes away, home sales will drop off again.
I guess that is good enough, though. Part of the problem is that we need to figure out what homes are really worth now before people will have the confidence to resume normal buying/selling patterns, and we can't do that if no one is buying.
Plus, I can't really argue against the tax credit when it helped me sell my condo in Florida after moving out here.
posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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on Future of Public Higher Ed
OK. I did have fun in school too, your original phase ("...best for them as they work and play through school...") just threw me. Other posts that were definitively against subsidizing education colored my perception of your post.
Add to that time I spent in Florida opposing people that believe very strongly that public education of any kind is a total waste of money. This topic and a lot of the posts really shifted me into offensive mode.
I don't think it is really necessary to have a dedicated tax on college degrees, though. The graduated income tax is probably plently. The rest should be handled, as you said later, by shaping public opinion back to a pro-education stance.
Plus, prison advocates are going to run into reality eventually. A state or two may go bankrupt in the process, but no one can really argue that the math of prisons works out. If you spend enough time cutting taxes, criminalizing everything, and shifting more and more tax dollars to build and support prisons, the math is undeniable.
posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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on Future of Public Higher Ed
Ok, I was referring to students coming out of high school that have to work to go to school. But, you are right, adults continuing education have to work regardless. So, that was a pretty d**k think to say. And you are right, having a variety of students does enhance the experience a great deal.
I stand by the rest of my post, though. I basically proposed the university system in most of Europe. It hasn't turned their universities into extended high schools.
...and the European systems have extensive support, including free tuition, for any adult that wants to pursue a degree.
posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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on Future of Public Higher Ed
How many of you people who graduated in XXXX have jobs or careers you like?
Does that mean that, in bad times, the efficiency of a university goes down because less graduates have jobs? Conversely, in good times, when companies are hiring anyone and everyone, does the mean a university is more efficient even though their graduates may not be as well qualified as graduates from other universities?
How does the research universities provide benefit society? ... If we spend $X on a research project what are the tangible ways we can decide whether that investment is effective?
Academic pursuits are very hard to quantify. The focus is completely different from private enterprises. Research in a university setting is a what-if proposition rather than a make-a-marketable-product proposition. The research can be equally valuable in failure as it could be in success, and that value is impossible to measure.
Honestly, you really shouldn't try to measure the value of research. It happens naturally anyway. Students gravitate to the universities that are making news in their field of interest. If a lot of students are excited about going to OSU, for instance, because they are making a lot of news in oceanography, why bother trying to measure the value of their research?
How well does university management use the dollars it receives?
That's very subjective for the reasons listed above. You may not think spending money on, say, researching language is useful, but maybe I do. You might not thinking spending money on pools and gyms for students is money well spent, but I do.
posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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on Future of Public Higher Ed
Why not just stop lowering capital gains taxes instead of creating a whole new tax?
posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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on Future of Public Higher Ed
Hey, yeah, I agree with this idea too. And guess what, I do pay more in income tax. 13% more. Yay, everybody already wins!
Do people here really think they are inventing the graduated income tax?
posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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