Subject Line Ideas: Don’t douse this flame
Turns out it wasn’t all about subprime

Costly slip-up(Funny)

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Feature Article:Don’t douse this flame

Critical Reads:Turns out it wasn’t all about subprime

The Funnies: Costly slip-up

One of the things that has historically made America great is ingenuity. Since its inception, the nation has embraced building, inventing and creating. These are the well-tested battle cries for a nation that has always seemed to march forward into the future. Let’s hope a recent misstep backwards is only a hiccup in the grand scheme of things.

If you’re ready, let's dig in...

Don’t Douse this Flame

By now, you’ve probably heard of Ahmed Mohamed. He’s the Texas teenager who was taken into police custody at school after concern over a homemade clock that, it seems, was mistaken by some as a bomb.

This will be a racial profiling case. It will put school safety procedures under a microscope. It will keep Twitter frantically hash-tagging for a few days. It will become fodder for politicians. I don’t know what you think about those things, but frankly it doesn’t matter. The big problem is something else.

Even though it’s curious that school officials apparently found the homemade clock a credible enough threat to call police but not to evacuate the school, I don’t know enough about proper school protocol to offer a fully formed opinion on that. People smarter than I will give their stances on that matter in a more eloquent manner than I can.

What bothers me the most is that a bright, inventive, 14-year-old kid was punished for having ingenuity. Inventiveness and entrepreneurialism were once encouraged walks of life, and now someone who’s displayed them was instead walked all over.

When we hear the word “entrepreneur,” we tend to think of it in the business sense, a person who starts his own company. While that’s certainly accurate, there’s more to the entrepreneurial spirit than just dollars and cents.

The entrepreneurial spirit embodies self-reliance. It involves building something on one’s own. It stands for independence and innovation. It’s a big part of what America is built on, doing for oneself rather than depending on others.

We’ve gotten away from it. People complain about jobs moving overseas, about income inequality and limited opportunity. But if we want to fix those things, we need to encourage entrepreneurialism. We need to be the country that applauds and encourages the teenager who wants to build and invent things, not the country that puts himin handcuffs.

In real estate, there’s a lot of attention paid to Millennials, those in their 20s and early 30s whose generation makes up a good part of the population. In general, society seems to recognize their buying power and influence, but we worry about whether they can afford to buy homes, start families and do other stuff prior generations historically have done.

If the Millennials fail to live up to expectations we have placed on them, whose fault will it be? If they fail to contribute to the economy the way we would like them to or don’t do their part to make the world a better place, who will have failed? Them?

Or us?

But should we even want them to fall in line? For years, schools seemed to instill the same general notion in children about what was right. Go to college. Get a good job. Punch a clock. Have kids that do the same. Rinse. Repeat. In a lot of ways, those days are gone. Other countries have figured out how to put things together less expensively than we can. The manufacturing economy that once was on our side of the ocean is in many ways gone.

What we don’t need is the ideas and innovation that are behind what’s being manufactured to follow the manufacturing. Is it great that putting together the pieces of innovative products has fallen to those overseas? No. But in this New Economy, we have to adjust the mindset so that the innovators, inventors and imaginators stay here.

And that involves schooling. It means that schools need to embrace innovation and invention and ideas. We give lip service to making American school children better at math and science, but what’s put in place theoretically doesn’t seem to match in practice.

This country needs leaders, not followers. It needs self-starters, not dependence. Teach math and science all you want, but if you don’t challenge those you’re teaching to apply what they learn, what good are you really doing them?

Unfortunately, not everyone has an entrepreneurial spirit. Not everyone has the spark of innovation or the flicker of imagination required to bring ideas to life. Until we figure out how to make that flame less rare, we need to fan it in those who DO have it.

Not douse it.

Turns out It Wasn’t All about Subprime

After the financial industry fell into chaos in 2008, dragged down by bad mortgages, “subprime” loans became a hot topic. Foreclosures were blamed primarily on these subprime loans – those made to people without verifiable income and/or down payments. But now, as this Bloomberg article points out, people are realizing the mortgage crisis wasn’t all about subprime loans.

Guess the Best Time of Year to Buy a Home

It seems that people are trying to time the markets all the time. Stocks are a good example, but real estate’s cycles make people chase that dream, too. The thing is, while it’s near impossible to exactly time a housing purchase, there are certain times of the year when deals on homes are best for buyers. Guess what time of year they seem to fall. If you can’t guess, this RealtyTrac piece will help.

Bank Keeps Telling Customer He’s Dead

Sure, technology has its uses and all, but when computers dictate things humans don’t question, there can be problems. Take, for instance, Aleksander Perstin. He’s filed a lawsuit against the credit bureau Experian because it and his bank’s computer records have him listed as deceased. This story from The Verge explains the plight of a man who claims to be alive but whose bank insists he is dead.

Costly Slip-up

Some news stories you just couldn’t make up.

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