Your neighbors may turn up their noses, but keeping your gas-guzzling sport utility vehicle, or buying one coming off a lease, may be a smart move….

….Given the plummeting demand for big vehicles and the rise in gas prices that is responsible for the market turmoil, it is probably tempting to ditch your own large vehicle and trade down to something smaller.

But many experts suggest sitting tight, for a variety of reasons.

Here are some questions to consider if you are tempted to get rid of your gas guzzler, and some tips for figuring out whether it may be more financially sensible to hang onto it for a little longer….

Complete story here.

WITH the nation embroiled in a housing crisis, one would expect the Department of Housing and Urban Development to be playing a central role. But HUD is a marginal player. Although its Federal Housing Administration division has agreed to underwrite new mortgages, it is merely following the leadership of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department.

This is no accident. HUD’s sidelined role is a product of its anachronistic approach to both housing and cities. It might be best to simply close the agency and create a new cabinet-level commitment to urban development.

Complete story here.

The United States observes no national holidays, that is, holidays mandated across all 50 states by the Federal government. The United States Congress and/or President can only legally establish an “official” holiday for its “federal” employees and the District of Columbia. States and municipalities are free to adopt holidays enjoyed by the federal government or to create their own.

Boston was the first municipality (city/town) to officially designate July Fourth as a holiday, in 1783.

The Declaration of Independence, unanimously declared by the thirteen United States of America, was adopted by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. The task of getting the document signed began on August 2, 1776. Congress made sure that all states would have access to an authenticated copy of the Declaration by ordering a special printing of multiple copies on January 18, 1777.

In Philadelphia the Declaration of Independence was publicly read on July 8, 1776.

1776- The Pennsylvania Evening Post is the first newspaper to print the Declaration of Independence

1791- The only Fourth of July address ever made by George Washington occurs at Lancaster, Pa.

1802- The U.S. Military Academy at West Point is formally opened

1875- In Augusta, Georgia, the white military celebrates the Fourth, the first time in that town since the Civil War; several blacks and possibly one white are killed when a fray erupts at a Fourth of July celebration held at the Court House in Vicksburg, Miss.

2006- The first ever launch of a space shuttle on Independence Day occurs when shuttle Discovery lifts off at Kennedy Space Center

Source:

James Heintze, Librarian at American University, Washington, D.C http://gurukul.american.edu/heintze/fourth.htm#Designation

Some key points (all of the following are direct quotes from the story):

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

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The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

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The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

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“…we risk turning into ‘pancake people’ — spread wide and thin as we connect with a vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

]]> http://varbuzz.com/is-google-making-us-stoopid/feed/ http://varbuzz.com/wharton-professor-todd-sinai-on-the-credit-crisis-and-home-values/ http://varbuzz.com/wharton-professor-todd-sinai-on-the-credit-crisis-and-home-values/#comments Sun, 22 Jun 2008 00:05:19 +0000 Scott Brunner, CEO of VAR http://varbuzz.com/?p=384 ShareThis

By any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged.

I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

From yesterday’s NYT, here’s an excellent point-counterpoint on the psychology of buyers and sellers in today’s real estate market by Ron Lieber. It’s presented in the form of a letter to a seller from a market savvy-buyer explaining his low-ball (or more realistic, depending on your perspective) offer on the seller’s home, followed by the seller’s equally market-savvy reply.

A taste:

A few years ago, when multiple bidders would show up at a real estate open house, the truly desperate resorted to writing love letters to the sellers.

Their plaintive scribblings painted a picture of first-time buyers chasing the American dream or growing families hungry for more space. The letters dripped with compliments for the property and ended with a plea for mercy (and a signed contract).

Today’s real estate market, however, calls for a different kind of letter, less a fuzzy valentine and more like a cold splash of water. It’s what you write to accompany a bid that is so far below the listing price that it cries out for explanation.

Inspired by the success of a friend who used this tactic, I drafted a sample letter that buyers who fear overpaying might send to homeowners. Then, I crafted a reply that confident sellers could fire back.

No seller would be happy to get a letter like this. The most powerful missives stoke doubt and create fear. Sellers who get them may be tempted to write off the bidders as lowballers. But it makes little sense not to at least reply, given the number of competing properties in most places and the difficulty lately in getting mortgages.

A special program about the housing crisis. We explain it all to you. What does the housing crisis have to do with the collapse of the investment bank Bear Stearns? Why did banks make half-million dollar loans to people without jobs or income? And why is everyone talking so much about the 1930s? It all comes back to the Giant Pool of Money.

For REALTORS® and the folks who love them (and work for them, like I do), I’d say it’s a must-listen-to. Here’s the direct link to download it for your iPod or other mp3-playing gadget:

http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=355

You can also subscribe to This American Life on iTunes. It’s a free weekly podcast. Just search “This American Life.”