Make Your First Home Your Last: The Case for Not Moving Up It’s a tough moment for big decisions. Think more about what you’ll want in three years — and not just three months, when we’ll still be shut in.............. With schools and businesses signaling that these conditions will extend at least through the spring ........... right now, with mortgage rates at record lows, it’s tempting to go as big as possible. ......... A more modest home can leave more money in the budget for travel, expensive hobbies, or a getaway abode by a lake or mountain. Living smaller also helps the environment. .......... over the past 20 years, the average increase for single-family homes priced at 125 percent or more of the median home price in their region is just 3.4 percent annually. For homes at the 75 to 100 percent level, the gain has been 4.3 percent. ...... A newer home — say, less than five years old — might require just 1 percent of the purchase price in annual expenses .......... But if your home is 25 years old or more, 4 percent is a better estimate ........... putting money into stocks over periods measured in decades should yield a better return. ........... More often, they have two rooms they rarely use. ....... An addition to your home might be possible — and cheaper than a move. .......... “The people who are generally the most happy are the ones who avoid the more, more, more and understand what is enough for them,” Mr. Wolniewicz said. “That takes courage, to stand firm on what your enough is, especially if it’s in contrast to what the world says you should want more of.”
Covid-19: Government identifying 30 crore who will get vaccine on priority high-risk population and first responders — from healthcare workers to police, sanitation workers as well as the elderly and people with co-morbidities ......... around 50-70 lakh healthcare professionals, over two crore frontline workers, including police, municipal workers and armed forces, about 26 crore persons above 50 years of age and another set aged less than 50 but with co-morbidities.
The World’s Largest Tropical Wetland Has Become an Inferno This year, roughly a quarter of the vast Pantanal wetland in Brazil, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, has burned in wildfires worsened by climate change. ....... For centuries, ranchers have used fire to clear fields and new land. But this year, drought worsened by climate change turned the wetlands into a tinderbox and the fires raged out of control......... In places like California, small animals often take refuge underground during wildfires. But in the Pantanal, scientists say, fires burn underground too, fueled by dried-out wetland vegetation. .......... Now, biologists are braced for the next wave of deaths from starvation; first the herbivores, left without vegetation, and then the carnivores, left without the herbivores. ........ The ecosystem’s grasslands may recover quickly, followed by its shrublands and swamps over the next few years, said Wolfgang J. Junk, a scientist who specializes in the region. But the forests will require decades or centuries. ....... In less than 20 years, it found that the northern Pantanal may turn into a savanna or even an arid zone.
How to Help Kids Open Up About Anything Tips for creating safe spaces and developing emotional intelligence in your children. ........... children feel more empowered “after their feelings have been validated.” ........... a “feelings check-in.” ......... Self-awareness, or knowing what you feel and how you feel it, is an important component of emotional intelligence ........... Showing children how to calm down, stay focused on a goal and remain optimistic despite setbacks is another aspect of emotional intelligence ......... When my daughter is frustrated and trying to explain herself, I make her take big breaths in and out before continuing. ........... a safety circle. In this circle, we sit face to face to create a feeling of equalness. She is allowed to share anything with me without the fear of consequence — unless it is against one of our “limits,” which include stealing, hurting someone else, intentional lying, and not taking responsibility for her actions ................. even though she can express herself freely, she still has a responsibility to be a good person. .......... “If your child is crying, instead of assuming they are sad, ask descriptive questions around what they feel, how it happened, and why they feel as they do” ..“The child may discover that the emotion they feel is frustration instead of sadness. ” .............. Once, she told me I spent too much time on my phone when we were supposed to be watching a movie together. Now, I limit checking my phone when we watch movies — even if we are on our 18th viewing of Frozen .............. When situations may be too challenging for children to verbalize what they are experiencing, consider talking to your child in writing. My daughter and I keep a journal where we share our day-to-day thoughts. It allows her to express freely without interruption and helps her to read my thoughts as well. .......... It is never too late to start opening new communication channels with your child
The First Amendment in the age of disinformation. This month, Trump retweeted a response to a Republican member of Congress, Mark Green, who suggested that Speaker Nancy Pelosi could stage a coup. ............. The United States is in the middle of a catastrophic public-health crisis caused by the spread of the coronavirus. But it is also in the midst of an information crisis caused by the spread of viral disinformation, defined as falsehoods aimed at achieving a political goal. (“Misinformation” refers more generally to falsehoods.) ............. The conspiracy theories, the lies, the distortions, the overwhelming amount of information, the anger encoded in it — these all serve to create chaos and confusion and make people, even nonpartisans, exhausted, skeptical and cynical about politics. The spewing of falsehoods isn’t meant to win any battle of ideas. Its goal is to prevent the actual battle from being fought, by causing us to simply give up. .......... effective disinformation campaigns are often an “elite-driven, mass-media led process” in which “social media played only a secondary and supportive role.” ........... Though Fox News is far smaller than Facebook, the social media platform has helped Fox attain the highest weekly reach, offline and online combined, of any single news source in the United States .......... the mass distortion of truth and overwhelming waves of speech from extremists that smear and distract. ........ the separate problem of “troll armies” — a flood of commenters, often propelled by bots — that “aim to discredit or to destroy the reputation of disfavored speakers and to discourage them from speaking again” ............. the “use of speech as a tool to suppress speech is, by its nature, something very challenging for the First Amendment to deal with.” ........ Other democracies, in Europe and elsewhere, have taken a different approach. Despite more regulations on speech, these countries remain democratic; in fact, they have created better conditions for their citizenry to sort what’s true from what’s not and to make informed decisions about what they want their societies to be. Here in the United States, meanwhile, we’re drowning in lies. ....... Mill and Meiklejohn stand for the proposition that unfettered debate — Holmes’s “free trade in ideas,” or the “marketplace of ideas,” coined by Justice William O. Douglas in 1953 — furthers the bedrock values of the pursuit of truth, individual autonomy and democratic self-governance. ............ the use of propaganda to “make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism.” ............ good ideas do not necessarily triumph in the marketplace of ideas. “Free speech threatens democracy as much as it also provides for its flourishing” ........ “Once a defense of the powerless, the First Amendment over the last hundred years has mainly become a weapon of the powerful” ........... Instead of “radicals, artists and activists, socialists and pacifists, the excluded and the dispossessed,” she wrote, the First Amendment now serves “authoritarians, racists and misogynists, Nazis and Klansmen, pornographers and corporations buying elections.” .......... Justice Elena Kagan warned that the court’s conservative majority was “weaponizing the First Amendment” in the service of corporate interests, in a dissent to a ruling against labor unions. ....... The purpose of free speech is to further democratic participation. “The crucial function of protecting speech is to give persons the sense that the government is theirs, which we might call democratic legitimation” .......... the conservative media did not counter lies and distortions, but rather recycled them from one outlet to the next, on TV and radio and through like-minded websites. ............. In the eyes of many conservatives, news outlets like The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN do not fill that role when they challenge a story that Trump and Fox News promote. ........... Content that prompts hot emotion tends to succeed at generating clicks and shares, and that’s what the platforms’ algorithms tend to promote. Lies go viral more quickly than true statements ......... some fact-checking methods significantly reduce the prevalence of false beliefs ........ a misleading message in a microtargeted ad “remains hidden from challenge by the other campaign or the media” ........... In Europe, there is historically an understanding that democracy needs to protect itself from anti-democratic ideas. .......... there is no equivalent of Fox News or Breitbart in France. ....... In March, the World Health Organization appealed for help with what it called an “infodemic.” ........... Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple have monopoly power in their markets like that of the “oil barons and railroad tycoons” of the early 20th century. ........... The ideal subject of fascist ideology was the person “for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience),” Arendt wrote, “and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
Trump’s Overhaul of Immigration Is Worse Than You Think This administration has attacked every aspect of the immigration system — and it won’t be easy to undo. ........... how meticulously the Trump administration has pursued the destruction of immigration in America ......... Through administrative orders, strict enforcement and mere threat, the White House has attacked virtually every aspect of immigration, legal and illegal. ......... This transformation of the American immigration system has been perhaps the administration’s boldest accomplishment ......... Between 2016 and 2019, annual net immigration into the United States fell by almost half, to about 600,000 people per year — a level not seen since the 1980s — ............ To scare people from bringing their families over the border, Jeff Sessions, the attorney general at the time, said, “We need to take away children.” ............ In Barack Obama’s last year as president, the ceiling for refugee admissions was 110,000. For the current fiscal year, it’s 15,000. .......... “Are you having a good time with your refugees?” he said with smirk to a roaring crowd in Minnesota recently. .......... The administration had threatened to furlough 70 percent of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services employees, blaming the pandemic, but some of those employees said the real problem was restrictive policies and delays in visa applications that have sharply reduced revenue from the processing fees that fund the agency. ........... Mr. Trump also has ended “temporary protected status” for 400,000 people from El Salvador, Haiti, Sudan and elsewhere who have legally lived and worked in the United States for decades after being provided a haven from war or natural disaster. ........... rejecting, by law and action, the Trump administration’s racism, cruelty and xenophobia would reaffirm that America is a nation of immigrants who help revitalize the country — an ideal that most Americans support.
Editor’s Note: The Editorial Board’s Verdict on Trump’s Presidency And an urgent call to action. ......... Kids who are too young to remember anyone else have now learned that racism, xenophobia and bullying tweets are hallmarks of presidential behavior. They don’t remember a Republican Party that wasn’t an obsequious cult of personality or presidential debates that weren’t confusing shouting matches. They think it’s normal for every other word out of a president’s mouth to be bravado, innuendo or, too often, a lie. ............. they live in a country where representative democracy is under assault from algorithmic gerrymandering, institutionalized voter suppression and foreign and domestic disinformation campaigns. ......... his record of racism and corruption to his utter administrative incompetence. ...... In the midst of an economic calamity unmatched in generations, a pandemic of global scope and a nation more divided than in modern memory, the stakes couldn’t be greater.
