These tips are not only for parents. As a sufferer from depression, Therese J. Borchard, the author of the book Beyond Blue: Surviving Depression & Anxiety and Making the Most of Bad Genes has some good insights. The interviewer has some good ideas herself.
There is also a Beyond Blue Blog and a Beyond Blue Community.
Forbes.com web site has a very good interview with John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Mutual Fund company.
Bogle always has sensible advice. I only wish I had the courage to follow it. I make this post so that I can remember the link to the interview. I may go back and read it a few times so that I can contemplate really following his advice for once.
Chris Barth, Forbes: One of the topics you cover in your latest book is “What’s Wrong With Mutual Funds.” That seems like a strange idea to push, given that you are the founder of one of the world’s largest mutual fund companies. So what is wrong with mutual funds?
John C. Bogle: Well, let me start off by saying that’s the reason that in the subtitle of the book, I have the word mutual in quotation marks, and a lot follows from that. Because mutual funds are not mutual. That is, just in general. Vanguard happens to be the only exception to that rule–we can talk about that a little later on, maybe. But in any event, they’re not mutual. Entrepreneurs or international conglomerateurs, or large financial institutions buy or create mutual fund management companies to create a return on their own capital. It’s capitalism at work, where the rewards tend to go to the managers rather than the investors.
And that’s why we have a big problem with fees, we have a big problem with mutual fund governance, we have a big problem with mutual funds participating in the governance of our industrial corporations and other kinds of corporations in the U.S. They don’t take the responsibility for ownership, because that doesn’t produce any returns for the owners of the management companies. Curiously enough, that idea of “mutual” funds was originally mentioned in a speech by Emmanuel Cohen, who was a wonderful chairman of the SEC, a long, long time ago. His speech on mutual funds that’s referenced in the book was maybe in 1960 or something like that. So he saw it then, and I see it now. And the reason I created Vanguard was to create a truly mutual mutual fund.
There are also valuable comments on the state of the economy, politics, and this country.
Here is one quote that is not related to his usual advice of investing in low cost index funds.
Only in America can we name a loose monetary program after a mothballed luxury liner, the Queen Elizabeth II. And only in America can we name a panel to investigate the causes of the stock market collapse and pass a law six months before they make their report. Some of the stuff that goes on out there is a little bit nutty, let’s face it. And my guess is that quantitative easing is the wrong move. My own personal conviction is that we should be doing more fiscal stimulus than monetary stimulus. And we see in the performance of the market after the announcement that QE2 was coming along, that interest rates did not go down, they went up very perversely. And that story is still to be fully written, but the initial impulses are not good.
Apparently it is too hard to prove, in a court of law, the bribery of our Federal Government officials and staff members. So there is probably little hope of reforming the system by toughening bribery laws.
President Obama has tried to impose rules for members of his administration from immediately upon leaving government taking a job with a company with which they dealt while in the administration. This is not enough, because it does not cover enough people and it is not a big enough deterrent.
I suggest that a law be implemented which says that any earnings a federal elected official, appointed official, or staff member gets from eventually working for a company that gained a benefit from legislation or executive or judicial rule making be taxed by the Federal Government at a rate of 90% with no deductions allowed. It could also be made a federal crime to try to disguise any such earnings so as to try to make them appear to not be earnings from such a company. There could be a separate bureau in the IRS to monitor the earnings of former federal legislators, executives, and judges.
This rule alone would cut the sweetheart deals that corporations get to such an extent that our deficit problems would practically solve themselves. Any money the Federal Government would earn from the tax would just be gravy.
By comparison to the case of the oil billionaire in Russia, Khodorkovsky, our outrage ought not be that he was prosecuted because he was a political foe of Vladimir Putin. Our outrage ought to be that friends of Putin do not get prosecuted for similar crimes. We then ought to turn our outrage on the prosecution of people in this country for being foes of the party in power or the lack of prosecution for friends of the party in power.
I was looking at theREALnews web site’s list of best stories in 2010. The first story I looked into was Obama Big Pharma Deal (Devastating Video) by Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks.
Perhaps the most galling part of this presentation is that a huge part of the $4 or $5 trillion dollars that needs to be cut from the budget in the next ten years was given away to the pharmaceutical industry in the health care “reform” bill just passed this year.
A quick second on the galling scale is the multiple ways that Congress, the President, and the staff of the executive and legislative branches are being bribed by industry, the phramaceutical industry in particular in this presentation.
I’d have to rate the third place on the galling scale to this behavior being exactly what Obama promised to stop while he was running for President. (The above video shows you Obama saying this in front of an audience.)
I found this article in The Boston Globe. There does not appear to be a link to it on the web, so I have scanned in the first page of the article.
The paragraph that sprang to my attention was:
The fob also has a remote start feature. We discovered that it works from a distance after inadvertently starting the Routan while opening the front door to our house with an armload of packages, one of which squeezed against the fob, activating the starter. We found the Routan happily running several minutes later when heading back out for more bundles.
I am surprised that the author did not jump on this “feature” as a potentially fatal safety hazard that merited an immediate recall. Can you imagine this vehicle being parked in an attached garage and accidentally being started just before a family went to bed? It is highly likely that by morning the whole family would be dead from carbon monoxide poisoning.
We have a fob like this for controlling our garage doors. We have to be extremely careful with keeping this fob in our pockets. We have accidentally opened the garage door any number of times just be bending over with the fob in our pocket. We usually treat this fob very gingerly. When we enter the house, we carefully pull it out of our pocket and hang it from a hook in the kitchen so that we won’t accidentally open the garage door and cause our pipes to freeze in the winter cold.
I have reported this problem to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration.
| Project: | NHTSA Hotline Center |
| Case: | Safety Issue With VW Routan |
| Case Number: | 319849 |
| Escalation: | None | Status: | Closed |
| Date: | 2011-01-03 | Time: | 17:43:18 |
| Creation Date: | 2011-01-01 | Creation Time: | 12:11:38 |
They made quick work of it.
The New York Times has the article A Pinpoint Beam Strays Invisibly, Harming Instead of Healing.
The treatment Ms. Faber received, stereotactic radiosurgery, or SRS, is one of the fastest-growing radiation therapies, a technological innovation designed to target tiny tumors and other anomalies affecting the brain or spinal cord, while minimizing damage to surrounding tissue.
Because the radiation is so concentrated and intense, accuracy is especially important. Yet, according to records and interviews, the SRS unit at Evanston lacked certain safety features, including those that might have prevented radiation from leaking outside the cone.
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Despite their complexity, the multipurpose devices are less regulated than their more simply designed competitor, the Gamma Knife, a device engineered specifically for stereotactic radiosurgery.
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For years, the Gamma Knife provided the necessary power and accuracy to accomplish its goal.But many institutions could not afford it; the device costs upwards of $3 million and requires its own room, and treatments take longer. There is also the added difficulty of handling and replacing radioactive material.
“It doesn’t pay to have a Gamma Knife unless you have a large number of patients,” said Dr. Amols.
When I needed brain surgery for a meningioma, I am sure glad I was living close to Portland, Oregon where I could receive Gamma Knife Surgery from a doctor who had studied with the inventor of the machine. It is too bad that the hospital could not figure out how to transfer the MRI results to a neurologist in Massachusetts after I moved back here. So what if the neurologist here has no way of comparing my current condition to what it was just before and just after the surgery. I guess it is not important. After all it only involves my life.