Postcards on the Edge

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Old Techies Never Die; They Just Can’t Get Hired as an Industry Moves On

By AARON GLANTZ

Silicon Valley may be booming again, but times are still tough for the 200 out-of-work professionals who crowd into Sunnyvale’s City Hall every Thursday morning.

Most of them hold advanced degrees in engineering and have more than a decade of experience in the technology sector. They fill all of the seats in the City Council chamber and spill out into the aisles.

They are members of Pro Match, a government-financed support group and “interactive career resource center” for educated older workers who have suddenly, and usually involuntarily, found themselves on the job market. Most have been out of work for months.

The job market “is not the same as it was years ago,” said Massimo Sutera, 45, a microprocessor engineer who was laid off last year when his firm, Zoran Corporation, a video chip maker, was acquired by the British firm C.S.R., which promptly scaled back its Sunnyvale operations, discontinuing its investment in digital television systems-on-a-chip. “It’s a mess.”

While Web-based companies like Facebook and Google are scouring the world for new talent to hire, older technology workers often find that their skills are no longer valued.

Part of the problem, analysts said, is that many of the companies shedding jobs are technology manufacturers, while most of the companies that are hiring are Internet-based.

While employment figures published by the state Employment Development Department show that Silicon Valley’s technology sector has more than made up for job losses that occurred early in the recession, the rebound has not helped everyone.

Cisco Systems, a maker of computer networking equipment that is Santa Clara County’s largest private employer, laid off 1,331 workers last year. The semiconductor sector, which used to be the lifeblood of the South Bay’s economy, has lost 4,600 jobs since 2008.

“These are people who know how to run a factory floor, but most of these new companies don’t care about that,” said Connie Buck, a career counselor who helps run Pro Match.

As a result, the South Bay’s unemployment rate, which stood at 8.9 percent in December, remains higher than the national average.

“The pace of change is just breathtaking,” said Russell Hancock, president and chief executive of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a research group backed by businesses and local governments. “We’ve entered a strange new world. There are opportunities, but they are different. You have to be edgy and supercreative.”

“You’re not going to get a job that’s going to be assembly and filing and coding,” Mr. Hancock said, “and frankly, that can leave a lot of the older set a little bewildered.”

Hiring managers at the Bay Area’s fastest-growing technology companies were blunt. Seth Williams, a director of staffing at Google, said his firm was looking for candidates who are “passionate” and “truly have a desire to change the world.”

Brendan Browne, who heads hiring at the professional networking site LinkedIn, said his firm wanted every new hire to be entrepreneurial. Mr. Browne said that approximately 25 percent of LinkedIn’s new hires came from the company’s recruitment efforts at colleges and universities.

Lori Goler, the head of human resources and recruiting efforts at Facebook, said her company was looking for the “college student who built a company on the side, or an iPhone app over the weekend.” The company also hires more-experienced workers, if “they are results-focused and can deliver again.”

Regardless of age, Ms. Goler said, “We ask: Are they going to get to do what they love to do for fun at work?”

Some observers say much of this language is just code for age discrimination. They point to the case of Brian Reid, a 52-year-old manager who was fired by Google in 2004 — nine days before the company announced plans to go public — after his supervisors, including the company’s vice president for engineering operations, allegedly called him a poor “cultural fit,” an “old guy” and a “fuddy-duddy” with ideas “too old to matter.”

Mr. Reid sued Google for age discrimination and said that his unvested stock options would have been worth at least $45 million if he had stayed there.

Google denied the charges and asked that the suit be dismissed, calling such remarks “stray comments.” But the California Supreme Court ruled that the claims, if true, would constitute discrimination. The case was resolved out of court “to the mutual satisfaction of all parties,” said Lori Ochaltree, Mr. Reid’s lawyer, who declined to say how much the settlement was.

A Google spokesman declined to comment on the case or the amount of the settlement.

In an interview, Norman S. Matloff, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who has studied hiring patterns in the technology sector, said workers over 35 regularly face discrimination by technology companies.

Kris Stadelman, director of NOVA, the local work force investment board, which released a survey of human resource directors at 251 Bay Area technology companies last July, said that in her experience, candidates began to be screened out once they reached 40.

“Especially in social media, cloud computing and mobile apps, if you’re over 40 you’re perceived to be over the hill,” Ms. Stadelman said.

Getting hired is especially difficult for unemployed workers who have been laid off after many years at a single company, Ms. Stadelman said, because highly sought-after engineers often change firms regularly in an effort to stay on the cutting edge.

The issue of discrimination against laid-off workers has caught the eye of lawmakers. Earlier this month, Assemblyman Michael Allen, a Democrat from Santa Rosa, introduced a bill that would make it illegal for an employer to “intentionally refuse to offer employment to an individual because of the individual’s status as unemployed.”

Ms. Stadelman said that her agency encouraged unemployed workers to emphasize their achievements rather than their experience, not only in interviews but also on their résumés and LinkedIn profiles.

“I had a LinkedIn profile before, but it did not include my branding” to show strengths rather than just job experience, said Euclid Taylor, a veteran account manager who was laid off last September when his company, dpiX, a sensor array maker, shut down its offices in Palo Alto and moved to Colorado Springs.

On his current LinkedIn profile, Mr. Taylor, who has gray hair around his temples, plays down his decade of service to dpiX and advertises himself as an “analytical thinker and creative problem solver who effectively collaborates with multifunctional high-performance teams.”

Such retooling has brought success to many of Pro Match’s members, but few of them have been hired by Silicon Valley’s more glamorous tech companies.

According to the organization’s records, 253 of its 583 participants found jobs last year, but just four were hired by Google. Apple, whose headquarters is just three miles away, hired one. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter hired none.

Still, said Ms. Goler, the Facebook executive, older workers should not be discouraged from applying. She said her company wants to hire people of all ages and experience levels. “If you’ve built great things before,” she said, “you can build great things again.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/us/bay-area-technology-professionals-cant-get-hired-as-industry-moves-on.html?scp=2&sq=bay area news&st=cse

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

A Renewed Public Push for Somewhere to Sit Outdoors

By ZUSHA ELINSON

On recent sunny day in San Francisco, Rebecca Scalfaro left her office to eat lunch and read a few pages of a John Steinbeck novel in Civic Center Plaza in front of City Hall. As usual, Ms. Scalfaro, a petite 48-year-old who works in accounting, found a seat along one of the low-lying concrete walls that surround the square patches of grass on the plaza.

“They’re very uncomfortable,” she said as she sat on the eight-inch high ledge and tried to rearrange her legs.

“A bench would be great,” she said. “Or even if it wasn’t a bench, just some chairs would be really nice.”

All around the city, San Franciscans can be found seated on steps, curbs, retaining walls and on the grass — but not on benches. In a tacit surrender to the overwhelming problem of homelessness, the city has simply removed public seating over the last two decades. Benches in Civic Center Plaza were removed in the 1990s. Those in nearby United Nations Plaza were ripped out in the middle of the night in 2001, to discourage the homeless from congregating and camping there.

“Because San Francisco has been unwilling to deal with homelessness in a serious way, we have instead removed public seating from virtually the entire city,” said Gabriel Metcalf, the executive director of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, an urban policy research group. “It’s such a sad statement and it makes the city that much less livable for everyone.”

Despite its problems, some people are now speaking out for public seating. In the last two years, a movement has been growing to create small, lively public spaces with places to sit. Inventive miniparks, called parklets, are popping up in parking spaces around the city, some of them with permanent seats, albeit uncomfortable ones — to discourage prolonged sitting. Food-truck operators bring temporary tables and chairs with them. Public rights-of-way are being transformed into plazas, like the Castro’s Jane Warner Plaza, an erstwhile intersection where residents now sit at tables sipping coffee in the sunshine.

“The city is focused on improving the public realm and that’s demonstrated by projects like parklets,” Christine Falvey, a mayoral spokeswoman, said.

This resurgence has reignited the debate over public space and homelessness. Scott Wiener, a supervisor who represents the Castro, has introduced legislation to prohibit people from smoking, camping or parking shopping carts in Jane Warner Plaza and nearby Harvey Milk Plaza.

The legislation, which Mr. Wiener said could be expanded to cover parklets across the city, has been met by an outcry from some old-time Castro leaders and advocates for the homeless.

“It’s really ridiculous, it’s stirring up the anti-homeless sentiment,” said Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness. “It targets a class of people that may find themselves sleeping in a plaza or pushing a four-wheel shopping cart.”

Ms. Falvey said “the city has been doing significant work on homelessness. In the last seven years, we have moved nearly 15,000 people off the streets.”

San Francisco city planners are now working on plans that could reintroduce some outdoor seating along Market Street, the city’s major thoroughfare, from Civic Center to the Embarcadero. Granite benches were removed from Market Street in the 1990s after business owners complained about homeless people, according to a 2010 study.

Neil Hrushowy, an urban designer for the city who is working on the Market Street project, said that past planning based solely on “the fear of quote-unquote undesirables” was not good for urban design — and did not actually work.

“There is a pretty broad agreement that depriving the public of seating is not going to solve the problem of who has access to public spaces,” Mr. Hrushowy said. “The question is, how can we happily coexist?” Indeed, the homeless still hang out in United Nations Plaza, a 2.6-mile pedestrian mall whose benches were removed 10 years ago. On a recent sunny day, Wayne Biggs, 61, was in the plaza waiting for a truck that offers free lunches.

Mr. Biggs, who said he was homeless, was neatly dressed and seated on a cement retaining wall next to a large suitcase filled with his belongings.

“There used to be benches here,” he said. “They even had these dividers so people couldn’t sleep on them. Now there’s just this concrete. It’s cold and there’s always pigeon poop on it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/us/in-san-francisco-a-push-for-public-benches.html?scp=5&sq=bay area news&st=cse

[davidstvz]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

I work in IT and with any luck will finish my Ph.D. in Computer Science in this semester... a bit late as I'm 32. I definitely feel the constant pressure to keep up with technology that changes at enormous rates. At the end of the day, I don't think it's possible for most people to keep up. I think this is less a problem of unemployment and more a problem with the nature of the industry. I'm planning to use the Ph.D. to teach a class on the side, that way I have an out if things go belly up. The incredible increase of education costs due to FIRE and the inevitable backlash is worrisome though.

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

MALLS GONE GREEN

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

Cleveland’s Galleria at Erieview, like many malls across the country, is suffering. Closed on weekends because there are so few visitors, it is down to eight retail stores, eight food-court vendors and a couple of businesses like the local bar association.

So part of the glass-covered mall is being converted into a vegetable garden.

“I look at it as space, I don’t look at it as retail,” said Vicky Poole, a Galleria executive. “You can’t anymore.”

Malls, over the last 50 years, have gone from the community center in some cities to a relic of the way people once wanted to shop. While malls have faced problems in the past, the Internet is now pulling even more sales away from them. And as retailers crawl out of the worst recession since the advent of malls, many are realizing they are overbuilt and are closing locations at a fast clip.

The result is near-record vacancy rates at malls of all kinds, both the big enclosed ones and the sprawling strips. Sears Holdings is closing up to 120 stores, Gap Inc. 200 stores and Talbots 110. Abercrombie & Fitch closed 50 stores last year, Hot Topic, almost the same number. Chains that have filed for bankruptcy in recent years, like Blockbuster, Anchor Blue, Circuit City and Borders, have left hundreds of stores lying vacant in malls across the country.

Most cities, looking at shrinking budgets, cannot afford to subsidize or knock down ailing malls, and healthy retailers that are expanding — like H&M and Nordstrom Rack — generally will not open at depressed locations. So, as though they were upholstering polyester chairs from the 1960s with Martha Stewart fabric, urban planners and community activists are trying to spruce up and rethink the uses of many of the artifacts.

Schools, medical clinics, call centers, government offices and even churches are now standard tenants in malls. By hanging a curtain to hide the food court, the Galleria in Cleveland, which opened in 1987 with about 70 retailers and restaurants, rents space for weddings and other events. Other malls have added aquariums, casinos and car showrooms.

Designers in Buffalo have proposed stripping down a mall to its foundation and reinventing it as housing, while an aspiring architect in Detroit has proposed turning a mall’s parking lot there into a community farm. Columbus, Ohio, arguing that it was too expensive to maintain an empty mall on prime real estate, dismantled its City Center mall and replaced it with a park.

Even at many malls that continue to thrive, developers are redesigning them as town squares — adding elements like dog parks and putting greens, creating street grids that go through the malls, and restoring natural elements like creeks that were originally paved over.

“Basically they’re building the downtowns that the suburbs never had,” along with reworking abandoned urban malls for nonshopping uses, said Ellen Dunham-Jones, a professor at the College of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.


There are about 108,000 shopping centers in America, according to a 2009 survey by the International Council of Shopping Centers. Just a few years ago, developers competed to build malls, betting that continued growth would support them, but the recession threw those plans off course.

A new enclosed mall has not opened in the United States since 2006, according to Professor Dunham-Jones, and many ambitious projects, like New Jersey’s Xanadu just west of Manhattan, have lain half-finished for years.


In Seattle, city planners are looking at reworking a still-thriving mall as a focus point for more development.

“We’re at this interesting moment, because in cities, land is very scarce,” said Marshall Foster, city planning director for Seattle, which is trying to make Northgate Mall, a popular mall built in 1950, a center for urban life. “We can’t afford to overlook these opportunities any longer.”

The city is adding transit and trying to increase jobs and living space there. It has restored a creek originally covered by a parking lot, and is pushing the mall owner and retailers to add a street-grid layout and remodel stores so they are accessible from the street.

Cleveland, too, has given over some plots of land to the greenhouse effort at the Galleria mall.

The shift to gardening began with the carts that used to sell jewelry or candles, where Ms. Poole, the director of marketing events, had herbs planted in the disused retail carts inside the mall. She learned how quickly aphids proliferate indoors (solution: release 1,500 ladybugs into the mall).

The garden now produces lettuce, strawberries, basil and other crops, which are sold to visitors and used for the mall’s catering business. An unexpected benefit has been an influx of visitors, which has prompted related retailers to open in the mall, like a company that sells rainwater collection barrels.

“This has been sustaining us throughout these hard years, but now we’re looking at the potential of turning things around,” said Ms. Poole while preparing kale and spinach seeds for spring planting.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/bu...ef=todayspaper

aka old school: gone to seed . . .

[dbarberic]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Cleveland’s Galleria at Erieview, like many malls across the country, is suffering. Closed on weekends because there are so few visitors, it is down to eight retail stores, eight food-court vendors and a couple of businesses like the local bar association.

So part of the glass-covered mall is being converted into a vegetable garden.

“I look at it as space, I don’t look at it as retail,” said Vicky Poole, a Galleria executive. “You can’t anymore.”

I work across the street from this mall and stop over there sometimes for lunch. The NY Times description is pretty much true, it is a dead mall with a small food court made up of a mix of franchise/chain fast food and independent quick service restaurants. There is not a single store in the building worth shopping in.

During the glory days (~mid 80's), this downtown Cleveland mall was a luxury retail location. It even had a Banana Republic before it was acquired by GAP.


The article makes it sound as though floor tiles are being broken up and a massive garden is being planted. That is not the case. The "green house" is a small 10x12 (roughly) building set in the middle of the mall like a kiosk. There are some plants being grown, but it is mostly for demonstration and advertisement by the hydroponic store that sponsors it. A small change I suppose, but it’s hardly representative of a massive mindset change.

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

this may be it . . .

leaving Jim Kunstler heartbroken . . .

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

I reckon it would leave Kunstler feeling somewhat validated.....although I guess if the Amish were selling potatoes there and they had dedicated horse parking he's be jumping for joy.

Anyone ever seen this?

Dead Malls:

http://deadmalls.com/features.html

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Having fled upstate New York in my teens, the bizarre Destiny Mall was pitched as the savior for a once powerful manufacturing center. Now it's on the Dead Mall list without ever coming into existence. That may, in the end, be its unique contribution.

http://deadmalls.com/malls/destiny_usa.html

[mmr]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

I thought that one was dead too, but was in Syracuse a few weeks ago, and wondered what the big white object behind the old mall was. Lo and behold...

Without missing a beat, eco-friendly Destiny USA will open this spring in Syracuse

January 16, 2012 – Set to open in late spring this year, the new eco-friendly mall in Syracuse, New York boasts the moniker largest green shopping in the country. Destiny USA is a 2.4 million square-foot destination with shops that have already been pre-certified as LEED Gold.

The eco-friendly mall in Syracuse, Destiny USA, is set to attract another nine million visitors a year [right...]. The tenants will include nightclubs, a bowling alley and stores like Saks 5^th Avenue, BCBG and Michael Kors.

Looks like the US may regain the illustrious title of having the world's largest empty mall from China. Hate to think what the heating bill on that thing will be, environmentally friendly or not.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Having fled upstate New York in my teens, the bizarre Destiny Mall was pitched as the savior for a once powerful manufacturing center. Now it's on the Dead Mall list without ever coming into existence. That may, in the end, be its unique contribution.

http://deadmalls.com/malls/destiny_usa.html

I just biked a quarter mile to the corner store for some limes and cilantro. I also bought some great looking mushrooms and an enormous clutch of yellow chrysanthemums. Almost all the produce is grown by neighbors trying to make a little “egg money.” Half of it probably arrives on foot.

Then I came home and watched the Destiny promo and burst out laughing

[Chris Coles]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

I just biked a quarter mile to the corner store for some limes and cilantro. I also bought some great looking mushrooms and an enormous clutch of yellow chrysanthemums. Almost all the produce is grown by neighbors trying to make a little “egg money.” Half of it probably arrives on foot.

What is happening, right across the planet; everyone is coming to realise that we all have to return to the roots of the prosperity of our local community economies. Here in the UK, traditionally, every market town was the centre, the market place, for all the local production; particularly of food and home essentials. Globalisation removed the foundations of that local economy by sourcing from outside the nation to supply the local market place; in the process, destroying the wider economy.

The circle has turned fully back to where we must have been many centuries ago here in the UK when everyone came to realise that, without Rome; we had to fend for ourselves. Here, we built a free enterprise nation based around free market places in each substantial town. The process of change will take a long time and we have nothing to lose by getting fully involved in it's ongoing success.

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

I've been lookin' everywhere . . .

At 47, Holly Kiluk of Ashby, Mass., is helping her family get by with bargain hunting.

By JENNIFER MEDINA

MORENO VALLEY, Calif. — Tell people here that the economy is getting better and they look quizzical. Perhaps the numbers say so, but they can hardly see it in their own lives.

A decade ago, this was a place where the middle class came to nurture its dreams — buying a house, enrolling children in a decent public school and shopping at any one of the dozens of malls dotting the landscape. But the bust hit hard here. This city — and the towns that surround it in Riverside County — became an emblem of the housing foreclosure crisis with one of the highest unemployment rates in the state.

The numbers are improving now, though. The foreclosures have subsided. Unemployment has fallen to 14.4 percent last month from 17 percent in 2010. But still, it is hard to detect a sense of optimism.

Instead, a feeling of frustrated hope could be heard in dozens of interviews here and in other towns like it across the country — in north-central Massachusetts, Belvidere, Ill., and Seattle. Each place has its own signs of an improving economy — a few new construction sites, even a batch of job openings. And heaven knows, people want to be optimistic. But most of them, for the most part, are not feeling it yet.

“I don’t see anybody doing anything for our country or our situation that is making much of a difference,” said Mark Bouldin, 36, who once made a decent living here in the suburban sprawl about 60 miles east of Los Angeles, working construction, renovating homes and doing small repairs. “I’ve looked for work every single day, and there’s just nothing.”

In 2009, with work drying up, he closed shop. Now, he is in school to become a minister at his church. The only thing that keeps him going, he said, is a belief in God. “Everybody is fighting for the little scraps of whatever they can get,” he said.

Even in places where fresh jobs have sprouted, some stubborn gloom persists.

Take Belvidere, an old manufacturing town not far from the Wisconsin border, where unemployment had reached 17.4 percent, among the highest in Illinois. The Chrysler assembly plant in Belvidere announced this month that it would hire 1,800 workers by summer to support the production of a new model. One local newspaper said it was “the biggest and best news we’ve had in the Rock River Valley in years, perhaps ever.”

Today the factory employs more than 2,700 people, up from just 200 when the company emerged from bankruptcy in 2009. People are flowing in from all over the region — the company said it had to stop accepting applications after more than 7,500 were submitted for the new positions.

Donald Hardt, 60, has been out of work since August, when he was laid off by a machine products supplier in Wisconsin because of downsizing. On Wednesday, Mr. Hardt was at the Chrysler plant to fill out an application.

But other than Chrysler’s good news, there are not many signs of improvement in the area.

“I’ve been looking every day since August,” Mr. Hardt said. “I’ve been seeing minimum-wage jobs, but you can’t make a living on minimum wage.”

In so many ways, the sluggish economy permanently changed people’s lives and attitudes.

Holly Kiluk, 47, has become used to the seasonal ebbs of her husband’s job as an asphalt worker and feels her family is “one of the few that are getting by,” in her town of Ashby, Mass., near the New Hampshire line northwest of Boston. She has made it work in part by bargain hunting. She buys men’s sweatshirts that can perform double duty — she shares them with her grandson who lives with her. And when gas prices rose, she moved her five children to a school closer to home.

Ms. Kiluk’s daughter, Katie, said that few of her friends have found well-paying jobs, and many have joined the military instead. And few of those returning from Iraq have landed a job.

For the most part, Ms. Kiluk blames President Obama for the economic stagnation. “I don’t think he’s helped us. I think he picked up a mess and made it bigger,” she said, adding that she was particularly disappointed by the stimulus. “It was all a gimmick, all a farce.”

Still, she has little faith in the Republican Party, either.

“Every candidate wants to cut this, cut that,” she said. “There isn’t anything I agree with, with the people running now. I wish it were different.”

For many of those interviewed, politics seemed almost beside the point. While some faulted the president, others felt he had not gotten enough credit for improving the sluggish economy, even if those improvements have yet to trickle down to their own lives. Even those who hope to elect a Republican to the White House this fall say they doubt much will change.

“I don’t know who to blame and I don’t know if it much matters,” said Kim Barron, 48, of Moreno Valley.

Ms. Barron and her husband once made a living buying and fixing up used cars. But two years ago the work vanished and it got too expensive to gas up the cars. Lately, her only work has come with occasional odd jobs. “I pray and look for work every day, but I just don’t see it coming to me or anyone I know.”

She encourages her daughter to move to Colorado, where her sister has been able to keep a steady job in a medical office.

“Maybe things are better anywhere else outside of here,” she said.

In Seattle, things have been a bit better for Kevin Long, who calls himself “fallout of the great recession.” After working as an executive for Washington Mutual for years, he lost his job soon after Chase took over the bank.

Mr. Long was unemployed for a year, but with plenty of savings he viewed the time as “terrific,” as he spent more time with his children.

Mr. Long was a self-proclaimed soccer dad when he found a job as the executive director of Seattle United, a nonprofit youth soccer club.

“I feel that things are starting to turn a corner,” he said, but he had a difficult time pinpointing the evidence. “I don’t know if it’s tangible.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/11/us....html?_r=1&hpw

[dbarberic]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

this may be it . . .

leaving Jim Kunstler heartbroken . . .

Yes, that is is. When the NY Times says "So part of the glass-covered mall is being converted into a vegetable garden.", the green house in the center is what they are talking about. Not very impressive.


You can look at the store fronts and see all the empty space. At one time they housed Banana Republic, Gucci, and other high end retailers.

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Mommy and daddy soldier on . . .

In the year 2000, 8.3 percent of all American women between the ages of 25 and 34 were living at home with their parents. Today, that figure is up to 9.7 percent. In the year 2000, 12.9 percent of all American men between the ages of 25 and 34 were living at home with their parents. Today, that figure is up to an astounding 18.6 percent.

Take a moment and let those statistics sink in.

Nearly one out of every five American men from age 25 to age 34 are living at home with Mommy and Daddy.

When you look at Americans age 18 to age 24, it is even worse. Among Americans age 18 to age 24, 50 percent of all women and 59 percent of all men still live with their parents.

We desperately need our economy to get healthy again so that our young adults can get good jobs, get married, set up households, raise families and be productive members of society.

When there is civil unrest, it is not those 65 and older that take to the streets.

You don't have to be a genius to see trouble on the horizon.

What is going to happen when the next major financial crisis comes and the economy gets significantly worse than it is now?

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/a...th-mom-and-dad

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Affluent, Born Abroad and Choosing New York’s Public Schools

Lyn Bollen and her boys outside Sam's school, P.S. 89 on Warren Street in Lower Manhattan.

By KIRK SEMPLE

Miriam and Christian Rengier, a German couple moving to New York, visited some private elementary schools in Manhattan last spring in search of a place for their son. They immediately noticed the absence of ethnic diversity, and the chauffeurs ferrying children to the door.

And then, at one school, their guide showed them the cafeteria.

“The kids were able to choose between seven different lunches: sushi and macrobiotics and whatever,” Ms. Rengier recalled. “And I said, ‘What if I don’t want my son to choose from seven different lunches?’ And she looked at me like I was an idiot.”

For the Rengiers, the decision was clear: Their son would go to public school.

“It was not the question if we could afford it or not,” said Ms. Rengier, whose husband was transferred to the city because of his job as a lawyer and tax consultant. “It was a question of whether it was real life or not.”

In New York, the affluent typically send their children to private schools. But not the foreign-born affluent. In a divergence, a large majority of wealthy foreign-born New Yorkers are sending their children to public schools, according to an analysis of census data.

There are roughly 15,500 households in the city with school-age children where the total income is at least $150,000 and both parents were born abroad. Of those, about 10,500, or 68 percent, use only the public schools, the data show.

That is nearly double the rate of American-born parents in the city in the same income bracket.

The census data include both immigrants and those temporarily stationed in the city for work. The disparity is even sharper for foreign-born parents with household incomes of $200,000 or more. About 61 percent send their children only to public schools, compared with 28 percent of native-born couples in the same income bracket.



In interviews, affluent foreign-born New Yorkers said that like all conscientious parents, they weighed various criteria in choosing schools, including quality, cost and location. But many said they were also swayed by the greater ethnic and economic diversity of the public schools. Some said that as immigrants, they had learned to navigate different cultures — a skill they wanted to imbue in their children.

“When they go to public school, they’re in a whole new world, a whole world of different people and different values, which is what the world is like,” said Lyn Bollen, who grew up in Birmingham, England, and attended — and taught at — state-run schools. “Shielding them from that is doing them a disservice.”

Ashima Dayal, a lawyer who arrived from India as a child, said her parents had instilled in her an immigrant’s toughness and resourcefulness. She said this experience had probably made her less demanding of certain amenities and more accepting of some of the public system’s shortcomings.

“Speaking to my American friends, they say, ‘The cafeteria is not nice,’ ” Ms. Dayal said. “I don’t give a damn if the cafeteria is nice! I would like there not to be splinters in the gym.” She paused, adding, “I just come from a different place.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/ny...ef=todayspaper


in related news . . .same day, same paper, 18 pages apart . . . .


After Girl’s Injury, Elite School Sees No Malevolence but Vows Cultural Shifts

By JENNY ANDERSON

More than three months after a 14-year-old girl was kicked in the head and severely injured by fellow students at the Brearley School’s Halloween event, the school has concluded that the episode was the result of “adolescent exuberance,” the school’s leaders told parents in a letter sent Monday evening.

An investigation by the school and an outside lawyer determined that there was “inappropriate and unruly behavior” but no malicious intent in the episode, in which at least one younger student kicked an eighth grader hiding under a sheet inside a haunted house set up in the cafeteria.

Still, Brearley, an all-girls school on the Upper East Side that is one of Manhattan’s most esteemed private academies, has decided to end the longstanding tradition of the haunted house, according to the letter, and to strengthen its “social and emotional curriculum” and establish a student life committee on the board to make sure the school’s activities align with its values and mission.

The episode has been a source of outrage and introspection at the institution for months. Parents have expressed frustration that the school took so long to respond, and questioned why school officials demanded that parents and teachers stay silent on the matter. The event also prompted discussions of an alpha-girl culture, in which achievement is paramount, competition fierce and social pressures legendary.

The victim sustained a concussion and neck injuries, and did not return to school full time until late January. Her name is being withheld by The New York Times to protect her privacy. Her family has not made any public statements, but a person familiar with their situation described the past few months as “extremely traumatic.”

“The assault was bad, but equally bad has been the response, and the way she felt at school,” the person said, noting that the girl felt isolated and no longer welcome in the school community for being a reminder of something that the school had hoped would disappear. “They have not demonstrated any genuine concern for the victim.” It was unclear whether the main victim would re-enroll at Brearley in the fall.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/nyregion/unruly-behavior-led-to-girls-head-injuries-at-brearley-event-school-says.html?scp=1&sq=after girl's injury, elite&st=cse