patrick.net

While I am not a fan of Cupertino school district, but I definitely do not want my kids to start off in an easy school and be left behind when it is time for him to apply for college. I probably will start my kids off the most competitive school I can find (private or public) which accelerates the hell out of their curriculum - and trust me, I went through this kind of drill as a student and came out not depressed nor unhappy, in fact I miss the school days a lot. Once in class, my teacher pointed to those "happy students" from other so-so schools and said, one day you are going to eat their lunch. The kids may be happy in a crappy school, but then he will more likely face a crappy life. Doing the drill for 20 years to get off easy for the rest of your life is a good deal. Once you get into the right college (in the right subject), right grad school, the rest will be so much easier than someone who didn't, unless he comes from the right family. But for those who of us who didn't win the womb lottery, schooling is probably the best way to attain a financially secured life. Nobody in my kids' generation will be able to goof off and enjoy middle class American lifestyle any more. They will have to fight competition not just from Chinese and Indian students in America, but the best, brightest and more driven students all over the world for the same piece of pie. Get ready.

Bank Failure Friday: 1, 2, 3, .... and counting

For those of us who can't afford the RealtyTrac subscription, Trulia pulls in the RealtyTrac foreclosure info. They display the street, but not the number. If you are savvy enough, you can use Zillow to find the street number by matching the square footage numbers ( and then PropertyShark to pull the loan information). Yes, I've done this... And for the unbelievers: MARINA IS STILL PRIME! Pull it up on Trulia if you don't believe me. (Well, full disclosure... Randy H. has a ForeclosureRadar subscription and claims there are a couple of foreclosures in the Marina neighborhood. See the latest thread on capitalsm2.org. The Trulia info may be slightly out of date...)

What is Marina's zip code?

There are even foreclosures in Atherton, Los Altos Hills, and actually plenty in Hillsborough, I do NOT believe that Marina has zero foreclosure.

The Federal Reserve took on more than $74 billion in subprime mortgages, depreciating commercial leases and other assets after Bear Stearns Cos. and American International Group Inc. collapsed. In its biggest disclosure of the securities accepted to stabilize capital markets, the Fed said yesterday it had unrealized losses of $9.6 billion on the assets as of Dec. 31. The bonds, swaps and notes were taken in from Bear Stearns, once the fifth-biggest Wall Street firm by capitalization, and AIG, which had been the world’s largest insurer. The losses on securities backed by assets such as home loans in Florida and California signal that U.S. taxpayers may be forced to reimburse the central bank through the Troubled Asset Relief Program, according to Christopher Whalen, managing director of Torrance, California-based Institutional Risk Analytics.

In rich towns, more kids She's traded her BMW for a Honda van, and entered a separate appointment schedule on her iPhone for each of her three children. Yet, still there are days when Kiran Khanna sits back and thinks: Wow, it would be great to have another child. Khanna laughed with recognition at the phrase — "Three is the new two" — a saying that echoes through many of Silicon Valley's most affluent communities. "Two," she said, "it almost feels like, from what my friends say, it's almost a little incomplete." While the population of young children is relatively flat throughout Santa Clara County, new census data shows a surge of young children in many of the valley's more affluent communities, including Palo Alto, Los Gatos, Cupertino and Los Altos. Experts point to fertility treatments and parents feeling financially comfortable, at least before the recession, raising more children as a few reasons for the increase. ............ ........... Chi Huang looked on as her 4-year-old daughter, Skylar, learned how to wait her turn. "Three is the new two," said Huang, of Palo Alto. She has two close friends about to give birth to their third child, but she considers herself "old school" because she only has two. Turning to her friend, Huang said, "I would have a third in a heartbeat." If only, she said, her husband would agree to it.

Khanna and her husband, Ramaneek, a software architect, had twins — Rani Sam, a girl; and Krishen, a boy — using in vitro fertilization in 2007. She grew up in California as an only child, and both she and her husband wanted a larger family, like the five or six children that were typical of their parents' and grandparents' generations in India.

What is Marina’s zip code? 94123. According to Wikipedia The area is bounded to the east by Van Ness Ave, on the west by Lyon Street and the Presidio, on the south by Lombard St. If you use Trulia, you can specify different neighborhoods within San Francisco.

American Journeys Searching for Silicon Valley http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/travel/escapes/17Amer.html?ref=technology WHILE on a bike ride in the hills behind Stanford University, I was helping a fellow cyclist fix a flat tire when a rental car full of lost Italian tourists pulled over. Clutching a map in his hands, the driver beseeched us, “Can you tell us where we can go to see Silicon Valley?” The cyclist, Tony Fadell, an Apple engineer who led the iPod and iPhone design teams, and I grinned at each other, but we had to sympathize with the driver’s plight. Perhaps more than any region, Silicon Valley has transformed the world in the last half century. Yet exploring — or even finding — this patchwork quilt of high-tech research and development centers, factories and California suburbia can be baffling. That’s because the valley is as much a state of mind as it is a physical place. Over the last four decades, the dream of being the next Jobs or Wozniak has captured the world’s imagination and turned the valley into a global crossroads. Nowhere is that more clear than on a visit to the Naz 8 Cinemas in Fremont, the manufacturing community southeast of San Francisco Bay. Billed as the first multicultural entertainment multiplex, it shows Bollywood movies from India as well as films from Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Taiwan, Korea and the Philippines on eight screens with 3,000 seats and 5,000 parking places.

Tony Fadell Current SVP, iPod Division at Past CEO and Founder at Fuse VP, Strategy and Ventures at Philips Electronics CTO and Senior Director, New Business, Philips Mobile Computing Group at Philips Electronics Lead SW/HW Engineer at General Magic Education University of Michigan

View from the Top - Shantanu Narayen, chief executive of Adobe By Chrystia Freeland and Paul Taylor Shantanu Narayen, aged 45, is modest about his personal accomplishments - which include holding five patents - but passionate about technology, Silicon Valley and Adobe, the $3.6bn-a-year desktop software pioneer he now leads as chief executive. Before joining Adobe in 1998, Mr Narayen, an electronics engineer from Hyderabad, India, who loves golf and his two sandy-coloured Labrador dogs, worked at Silicon Graphics and Apple, and co-founded Pictra, an early pioneer of digital photo-sharing over the internet. As Adobe's president and chief operating officer until he took over the chief executive's job in December 2007, he helped spearhead the $3.4bn acquisition of Macromedia, a deal that expanded Adobe's software portfolio and strengthened the company's presence in key markets ranging from enterprises and vertical industries to mobile devices and multimedia publishing.

Yahoo Real Estate also lists foreclosures by zip code, and has "featured houses by RealtyTrac". So I guess they pull in the numbers from them too. As mentioned above you get the street, stats, and sometimes a photo so you can do some legwork and fiture out the street address number. Marina is 94123. Yahoo shows 2 NODs, 1 foreclosure sale, and 1 REO. The REO is actually on Marina Blvd. and is shown at $2,187,000.

Actually San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties aren't part of the BA, and Marin/Sonoma/Solano counties are. Fortunately I have an "Idaho sized" collection of guns and ammo, sufficient to ward off the sissified attacks of any nanny-state Oregonians.

Efrain Rojas and Patrick.net is getting quoted on the Big Picture Blog today http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/04/read-it-here-first-what-good-are-economists/ Here is a link to to the original posting: http://patrick.net/housing/contrib/vegetables.html

These are the kinda things that happen to those kids who're pressure cooked in the elite high schools: http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/02.19.04/saratoga-0408.html http://cbs5.com/local/stanford.student.suicide.2.458868.html In the second story, Mr. Zhou was "angry" at the police because they didn't identify "the real killer". A poignant irony.

The foreclosure close to home For two years, this crisis has played out almost entirely in our distant suburbs and our poorest communities. Now, as we’re only beginning to discover, no neighborhood in the Bay Area is immune. Several great (back)stories to the foreclosed homes that are profiled. WHAT HAPPENED: The former owner, a single executive who is active in the philanthropic community, doesn’t want to talk about it. “It’s too painful,” she says—but not unusual, real estate agents claim. After buying the 15-year-old manor in 2005 for $1.6 million from owners who’d paid $710,000 just five years before, the executive bet the house that property values would continue to rise: She refinanced it at 120 percent of the purchase price—and she works in finance. “Even a year and a half ago, the Peninsula was insulated. Not any longer,” explains Athena Chilicas Saldanha, the real estate agent for Coldwell Banker who has been marketing the home since October.

Trulia has outdated information.

@Lollipop I truly agree. Anxiety is so prevalent in our society as it is . I am a nurse practitioner and a good percentage of my patients are on mood altering meds due to nonspecific fears, and depression, anorexia, etc Only certain fields of endeavor require mind numbing memorization, regurgitation, and competition. Medicine is one of them, however, I would say that many of the docs I work with, really regret their career choice. Their life can be hell. On the other hand, there are the entrepreneur types who seem to be able to flunk their way through school and become more successful than anyone with walls of degrees. If we continue going into an Economic Depression through deflation or hyperinflation - all the degrees in the world will not help if our economy collapses. Why torture our young if all the rules can change tomorrow. There needs to be some balance in their lives. Torturing them with excessive expectations with the excuse that it is for their own good is beyond mean. What I have seen in my friends' children is more that the parents ego is at stake. Parents can brag about their choice of schools and their children's grades. How pointless is that? Parents who do this, can expect to pay for Therapy, Drug Rehab, and Meds for emotional disturbances. I am old enough to have seen it with my friends. Kids need LOVE and Acceptance most of all. The rest should be secondary.

Today's Zero Hedge posting on the news page is sobering. I know someone in LA who had a paid off house, but in 2007 took out a $700K mortgage to fund the purchase - with minimal down payments - of five pieces of commercial real estate. I told him at the time that he was going to regret this action. In his greed and hubris he told me to shut up, that real estate always goes up, and that he was going to be "rich". Zillow now estimates his house is worth $630K so he's underwater on that, and I would presume the same with those five commercial properties. Commercial mortgages have extremely short terms of five or ten years, so possibly the piper will need paying in 2012.

Danville, Interesting comments about the medical profession -- what is the most common reason for regretting being an MD? What I have heard is that around Silicon Valley they are displeased for not automatically landing on top of the social (or should I say financial) hierarchy, but there must be more to it than that?

DennisN, Yeah, wondering how your old buddy was getting along? Over the weekend the wife and I took stock of all the personal impacts we've had to endure as a result of the HB and the list was staggering! From meddling in-laws trying to pawn off a failed flip on our daughter and SIL to our local bank cratering to being painted into a corner on a property we simply didn't want to buy. Those were just a few of the highlights. When you factor in all the people she no longer... works with and the smoking hole that was once a stock market, it's easier to calculate what aspect of your life *wasn't affected by this crime wave? Along with the oh-so-predictable embracing of a "return to the basics".

@Justme The docs I work with at a large HMO are squeezed tighter than I am because they don't belong to a Union. I work 10 hour days (get paid for 8) and they are there even longer. The pressure to produce numbers showing high productivity, high patient satisfaction, and high safety is overwhelming. At the moment, most of the old time docs are gone and we have a group of new young ones. Wonder how long before they burn out. I can only cope with this myself by working half time.

Danville, I see the picture. From the patient side, there is also lack of satisfaction and also concerns about quality and safety. One can hope that modernization an automation will help some, but I am not convinced. The basic problem is that we already spend more per capita than any other nation on healthcare, and we get less in return. In other words, SOMEBODY is making off with the money, and perhaps the wrong people. One of my observations as a patient is that I do not have a good understanding of how the system works internally at the medical offices and clinics. That is, I do not understand the internal motivations (financially and otherwise) for providing or not providing certain forms of care, and so on. Knowing more about this would be helpful. I suppose this is one form of transparency that we could need. It is similar with lawyers, I think. Unless you have spent 5 days a week inside a law office one would not understand how lawyers really operate.

justme: As with many oddities in our current situation, dig into your history. Before the '50s, very few people had health insurance, you went to the doctor, he did what he thought was right, you paid him and went home. End of story. Doctors had prestige, were leading people in their communities, made boodles, and most everybody was happy. We also had the best health care in the world. Enter taxes: Higher Incomes were being taxed at marginal rates that exceeded 70% (and for a while exceeded 90% in some cases). Companies found other ways to compensate their executives, one of them being paying for their health insurance. Loophole. Gradually extended to more of the base White-Collar folks, and also demanded by Unions, etc. Also at the same time, the other end of the spectrum was covered by Medicare/Medicaid by huge expansions in Johnson's Great Society spending spree. We were getting stories of Medicare/Medicaid denial of service and fraud throughout the '70s. Meanwhile, the prestige and remuneration of being a Doctor start going out the window, while prices sky-rocket. What happened? What do you think happens when you put a third party between the payer and the payee? The third party, be it Medicare, an insurance company, an HMO, whatever, starts to think it is *their* money, and so they are reluctant to pay out. The first thing a bureaucracy will say is "no!" And then there is a huge amount of money involved, centrally located, which invites fraud and corruption. And they take their tithe, which causes prices to go up. And then, since the proceedures, drugs, office visits, etc. are "covered", their prices can go up far beyond what the average person could actually pay out-of-pocket. A Medical Services Bubble that benefits no one but the Financial institutions and the Federal Government. Which is why this post is On-Topic for Patrick's housing bubble blog. Sounds awfully similar, no?

Trulia has outdated information. Unfortunately, they have the best interface. I really wanted to start throwing my mouse at the screen after wrestling with Yahoo!RealEstate. They do allow you to extract foreclosures and resales by neighborhood, which is feature that I want. But you have to scroll through several screens to get all the listings... ughhhh! Has anybody found something better for these types of searches?

MST, Respectfully, there are some aspects of the story that do not rhyme. 1. renumeration of being a Doctor start going out the window 2. HMO, whatever, starts to think it is *their* money, and so they are reluctant to pay out 3. prices can go up far beyond what the average person could actually pay out-of-pocket. 4. A Medical Services Bubble that benefits no one but the Financial institutions and the Federal Government. Items 1-2 cannot occur at the same time as 3, unless the insurance middleman takes a larger and larger cut. I doubt the insurance overhead is all that is growing. See http://www.nchc.org/facts/cost.shtml for some 2008 numbers. Item 4 does not make sense. How does the government benefit from paying out lots of Medicare/Medicaid? I think the real reason is more along the lines of aging population, status seeking MDs that all want to be specialists, and the appetite for expensive end-of-life procedures rather than preventive and steady maintenance.

On the back of my insurance card it says to call MedWatch to pre-certify. For member services call Allied. For PPO provider info call Private Healthcare Systems. For Rx info call MedCo. It usually takes 3 calls just to see if I can go to a certain doctor and about 10 calls for any type of billing issue. My only conclusion is that the executives of these 4 companies are just well dressed thieves stealing our healthcare dollars and in turn stuffing the pockets of politicians to keep the scam going…

justme, True, some of those issues no -longer- matter. MST was simply showing us 'how' we arrived 'where' we've arrived. As a kid growing up in the 60's and 70's my family didn't have Health Insurance. None. We weren't poor, it just wasn't all that common at the time. We had the good fortune to have been fairly healthy. For the life of me, I don't recall my parents complaining about medical bills, at all. That was for "old people". The other issue was that we really didn't have cafeteria plans where younger payers subsidize older users. With all that everyone's been through, a doctor's diminished sense of prestige is the least of our worries. As HC consumes an ever larger portion of our GDP year after year, at some point we have to ask ourselves if a few more years of life is worth it? IMHO.

moonmac, Thank you. And further I notice that my wife's HC Provider changes about every year. So that means another layer of benefits people in HR milking the system too. The frustrating part is that just get used to (1) system..!

moonmac, Sounds like Kaiser. I could never figure out how to work the system there. Kaiser (or the telephone bank guardians thereof ) treat the members/patients as if they are all imbeciles that are not able to tell whether they need to see the doctor or not. If I call, I have already determined that I need to see a doctor. What I need is an appointment, and pronto! Never kaiser again unless someone publishes a guide to bypass the Pretorian Guard.

Question for the group... I saw a *great* report on the coming pay-option-ARM resets which I think was archived on scribd. However, I've since lost the link. Anyone else seen this?

kewp, The most recent I could find was from Credit Suisse, circa 2007. Evidently that stuff is classified now and you and I simply don't have "the need to know"!

The Economist had an interesting article on health care last week. I will try to look it up for you, if it is online. My biggest concern is the lack of transparency in fees. On a recent trip to the dentist, I was first quoted $130, but somehow the fee ended up being $200. I asked what changed and was told, "I don't know why anyone would have said $130." So I asked for a fee sheet so that I could plan for the next visit, and I got, "He doesn't like for us to give out that information." That happens everywhere in healthcare. It is the one and only situation in which Americans regularly and happily write blank checks. Heck, I didn't care, either, until we ended up in an HSA plan. The out-of-pocket aspect leads me to pay more attention. I would love, love, love to see clinics and dental offices with a nice, clear list of fees right at the front desk. Why can't we have that?

The Oz 'single payer' system or 'socia1ised medicine' which is similar to Canada's of course also has an intermediary, but the govt simply pays up to 100% of most common procedures out of tax dollars (originally pegged at 85% back in 1975). It's not just for old people like US Medicare but everybody. Nobody is too upset about this system. I don't know if families back in the 50s just 'paid the doctor and everybody was happy' because it would have cost a lot, and a lot less illnesses could be treated successfully back then. A lot has changed in a few decades. At least Medicare can run queries on a national footing and find doctors overprescribing and overservicing and take them to task over it (as presumably can HMOs and other insurers, although I believe the health insurance system is an inferior one over the universal guarantee approach). Certain drs are hauled up to answer to the Health Insurance Commission if there is a pattern of overprescribing differing significantly from the average. Dentistry is still not covered in Oz under Medicare, only private health insurance, although noises are being made about including it. The British NHS includes many dental procedures. The Oz Medicare system is of course not-for-profit as a govt system, as is the NHS, and guarantees universal healthcare regardless of income -- this may be one of the main differences with the health insurance approach as the middleman -- ref 'Sicko'.

@EBAY guy By using www.redfin.com in combination with www.ziprealty.com and www.propertyshark.com, I can get a pretty good information on a property. However, it would be nice to have everything all in one spot.

Eliza, Excellent question! Recently I had a deviated septum corrected. I'd put it off for years ( at the risk of sleep apnea and all the baggage that comes along -with- it! ) as it had been deemed "unnecessary". After absolutely grilling the specialist's office on the -exact- amount of the out-of-pocket-cost I was given a figure of $200. I said are you sure..? Yes, we're sure. I called back 2 weeks before the procedure, are you sure? Then a week prior, are you sure? Three months after the surgery ( I'd waited at least 5 years to have done ) I got bills in the mail of over $2,000! BLAM! I'm right on the specialist's doorstep. WTF!? Uh... Low and behold, they'd -already- turned them over to collection agency, that's how I found out about it! I called the our state AG and told them this is total BS. They actually seemed a little shocked anyone had the brass to say anything? I said, look, had this been an auto mechanic or a dry cleaner or ME or anyone else you guys would be all over them like a gorilla in a cheap suit! The explanations I'd rec'd from the clinic were flimsy at best and I'm still actively contesting them. All on my FICO of course. I guess since most people just fork over the cash they have to feign surprise when anyone raises the slightest objection. I went to the local dentist for a teeth cleaning ( once ) and I now get bills in my mailbox on a monthly basis! Once!

DinOR Says: > After absolutely grilling the specialist’s office on > the -exact- amount of the out-of-pocket-cost I > was given a figure of $200. > Three months after the surgery I got bills in the mail > of over $2,000! I went in to the dentist a few years back for a cleaning and they ended up giving me a full set of X Rays. A few months later I was told that the X Rays were not going to be covered by my insurance and I got a bill for about $1K. After I didn’t have any luck talking to the dentist and explaining that I should not have to pay for something that I did not ask for I took a photo of his building (he mentioned a few years back that he bought the building) and sent him (via Certified Mail) a “Brokers Opinion of Value” form with a bill for $1,000. He called me about the bill and I told him that I was ready to take a day off work and go to small claims court to collect if he did not pay my bill, but I would be happy to forget about the bill for something he did not ask for if he would forget about the bill he gave me for something I did not ask for (I got a letter telling me I did not have to pay for the X rays later that week)…

DinOR: Exactly, the 'how'd we get here' is important. Doctor prestige? It is important: I overheard a conversation the other day. A fellow somewhat younger than me was holding forth about having seen the trends in the late 70s, how Insurance Companies and Corporations and the Governement were taking over health care, so he and his contemporaries decided that instead of going into the formerly lucrative, prestigious medical field, they would go into finance instead (I wonder how many potential M.D.s wound up on Wall Street selling CDSs). I'm in Boston, and these were Harvard types, not a bunch of dummies. There are shortages of medical personnel now. The two *are* related. Prestige as a motivator is real. Whether we like it or not, or think it is deserved, it still drives people. Agreed that MONEY is the primary motivator now. And of course we haven't touched on the wave of Medical Malpractice suits that started in the late '70s which ran off more potential MDs. (Anticipating justme's defense of malpractice litigation, I'll say it doesn't matter if it is justified; it has the net effect of heavily increasing doc's expenses and questioning their *prestige*, and therefore knocking substantial numbers of good people out of choosing medicine as their profession, and finally utterly denying some areas health care. (Areas of Mississippi were devoid of OBs for a good while there b/c they were run out of business by outrageous local jury awards.)

And by the way, DinOR. I worked at MBNA for a year. We pretty much ignored medical debts/collections on credit reports. Even credit card companies are well aware of 1) what ass-hats they have doing medical billing/insurance etc. 2) that the person may not even be aware there is a collection outstanding on his Credit Report in the first place. *Nobody* else puts $10 fees (Co-Pays!!!) into collections! Hospitals do. Doctor's Offices do. Radiologists do. I've seen 'em on the reports. Almost *no one* is completely free of them.