Welcome to Sensible Talk

SensibleTalk.com is a community devoted to media, business, arts and technology criticism. We invite readers to share their observations in a public journal on the site.

I had a dream last night. (No, not that I would begin an entry with a wretched cliche - just indulge me on that, okay?) Laurie and I were going to throw a dinner party with another family, and Laurie had just left for the store to pick up a few final items.

Our guests arrived early, but they weren't the close friends I'd expected. Instead, they were college friends of Laurie's, who just happened to be in town, I guessed. Then the doorbell rang again. It was a high school friend of mine, with her children. But where were my kids? Were they upstairs with their friends? I realized that I didn't know where they were, only that they were not at the party.

More people arrived: People who worked with former colleagues, but whom I hadn't met. High-school classmates of Laurie's, whom I'd met at a reunion. Someone who'd been reading my website and wanted to say hi.

No point in waiting to eat now, I thought. I told folks to dig into the food set up in the kitchen. But the crowd had spilled out of the kitchen now and into the living room. I sent a few guests down to the garage to bring up extra tables. As I was setting them up, I wondered: why wasn't I getting any updates from Laurie? Where was she?

A former girlfriend arrived, one with whom I hadn't communicated in years. We said nothing ourselves or about why we'd made no attempt to contact each other for more than 20 years, only small talk about other people we barely knew, in and out of the room. The her sister showed up, someone I'd not spoken to once in my life.

By this time, the entire house was packed. Hundreds of people from the periphery of our lives had crowded our home, but still there was no word from Laurie and no sign of my kids. No sign, either, of the family friends we'd expected.

I awoke, and wondered just what the heck that dream could have been about. Then I realized, oh my Lord, I just had a dream about Facebook.

Here's the long version of an essay that I wrote for the American Youth Soccer Association, which appeared it is Whistle Stop national e-mail newsletter for youth soccer referees.

It's got some good stuff in it for youth sports officials, I hope.

--

Two weeks ago, I ran center ref for my son's BU10 [boys under 10 league] game. The day was cool and rain began to fall during the match, but we played on. (The games after ours would be cancelled.) My son's team fell behind 2-0, and with a couple players not at the game, at halftime coach put my son in goal.

(This is my son's first year in AYSO and he'd never played keeper before. And this is my first year as a ref, in any sport.)

In the second half, a player from my son's team tripped an opponent. It wasn't intentional, in my opinion, just a missed kick on a rutted field. But it was a hard kick, and the opponent fell to the pitch, hurt. I blew the whistle immediately, waved over the coach and ran to the boy.

The boy would be okay and play on, but I needed to call the foul. And at that moment, my brain was putting everything together: We were in the penalty box. It would be a penalty kick. And my son is in goal.

At that point, I had a vision of my son, sitting on a therapist's coach, 10 years in the future, blaming everything that had gone wrong with life on that day when his dad hung him out to dry at an AYSO game. But fair is fair, and I couldn't not make the call because my son would have to defend the penalty kick.

So we lined up, I signaled the kick, and (you can see where this story is going, can't you?)... my son saved it.

His side erupted in cheers, with chants of his name. With a steeled look, he played the rest of the half, making several impressive saves.

My son's team lost, 3-0. After the game, my son climbed into the back seat of the car, mud encasing his shoes, rain dripping from his chin, his teeth chattering from the chill. And he said, "This was the best day of my life."

If I hadn't made that call, I would have denied my son the opportunity to rise to the challenge of this game. That wouldn't have been fair. That wouldn't have been fun. And, frankly, it wouldn't have been safe for any of the players on that pitch.

Even if my son isn't directly involved, if I, or any other ref, chooses not to call a substantial foul, we deny others' sons and daughters the opportunity to rise to the challenges of this game. That's not fair, fun or safe for any of them.

Yeah, I had a knot the size of a soccer ball when I realized I'd called a PK my son would have to defend. But I'm proud I didn't back away from the call. Almost as proud as I am of my son for standing on that line and facing that kick.

FWIW, This is how you follow a story.

And this is not.

I think many journalists and analysts are missing the core story underlying the populist revolt over the Bush administration's proposed Wall Street bailout.

People aren't merely upset with the idea of their tax money going to prop up rich Wall Street businesses and investors. They're disgusted with an American economy that increasingly values gambling over work. Not only that, many of these Americans are perfectly willing, even eager, to watch this gamblers' economy fail.

In many neighborhoods across the country, families can no longer afford to buy a home and anticipate a comfortable retirement on the money that they make working. Salaries and wages just don't provide enough cash.

According to National Association of Realtors, the median home price in the United States in July 2008 was $212,400. (That means half the homes sold in the U.S. that month cost more, half cost less.) However, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median family income was just $50,233. Using a traditional (pre-housing bubble) standards, a typical American family, earning that median income, could not afford to buy that median-priced home. And that's after housing prices have dropped 10%-40% from their peak prices, depending on the city. That typical family, earning the median income, likely would qualify only to by a home in the $125,000-$175,000 range.

If you wanted to buy your first home anytime during the past six years, you had to gamble. I know that buying a first home always has required a bit of a leap of faith. Will you keep your job? Will the economy hold up? But even keeping your job in a flush economy wouldn't have given you enough money to get to a home during the bubble, as the above number show. Instead, you had to gamble, borrowing way more than you could ever hope to pay back on your salary alone, hoping that housing prices would rise, so you could borrow against the increasing value of your home in order to pay for it.

Sounds crazy, huh? But that's what millions of Americans did over the past six years.

What about retirement? Smart Americans long have put aside part of their earnings to have enough money to live after they leave their jobs. Maybe you'd invest a little of that in blue-chip companies, ones built for the long-term and that offered slow, but steady, increases in their stocks' value.

Today, there are no blue chip companies anymore. When the Reagan administration slashed tax rates on the rich, no one cared about deferring income anymore. Instead, the Wall Street mantra became, "get it now." So companies started playing to the short-term. In the newspaper industry (where I worked for 15 years), for example, profitable newspapers laid off employees to satisfy investors who demanded ever-greater short-term growth.

Without blue chip stocks to buy, investors gambled. Forget buying a stock and holding on to it for years; which company's stock can I ride up for a few months, weeks, days or even, hours?

For professional investors, even short-term trades weren't enough. They started gambling on others' investments, buy "derivatives," whose value was based upon what would happen to the value of other investments, such as stocks and mortgages.

In a gambler's economy, people who want to play it safe can't play at all. Families that refused to gamble on ever-rising home values couldn't afford to buy any home. Mortgage lenders that wanted to enforce traditional lending standards saw their stock prices tank, forcing managers to "play along" and fuel the bubble. Investors who wanted to buy stock in other companies with a long-term view saw their investments tank, as Wall Street punished any business that didn't sell out its future for immediate gain.

And taxpayers, who played by the rules and sent their money to the IRS, now may be left holding the bag for Wall Street gamblers who bet billions on derivatives based on fraudulent mortgages, short-sighted lenders and fishy investment schemes.

This is sick. Americans want an economy that's based on people getting paid for building things and providing services that people actually need. Not on derivatives, investment schemes and money management that's less stable than walking into a Las Vegas casino.

When you gamble in Vegas, at least you know what the odds are. The house edge, the odds against winning -- they're all public record. Smart gamblers can watch the cards at the poker table, look up the odds on the slots, and make informed decisions about risking their money.

On Wall Street, though, the average American is lost, as Wall Street sharps cook their books to leave customers in the dark, and work Washington to stick taxpayers with the tab for any investments gone wrong.

We're sick off this economy. Let it fail. And let's spend our tax money instead on building a new economy, one that values and rewards real work instead of Wall Street gambling.

Laurie and I have put our home and cell phone numbers on the U.S. federal Do-Not-Call list, but that hasn't stopped solicitors from calling. Curiously, though, the sales calls we've been getting tend to come in clumps (more pronounced that your typical Poisson distribution) and often ask for the same wrong name.

Clearly, our numbers have gotten on some list, associated with a variety of wrong names. Given that we tend to get a new string of calls every month, we figured this isn't random chance resulting from someone writing down a wrong number on an application someplace. Furthermore, the folks who call us rarely have any idea what the do-not-call list is (tipping us that they don't work for large, established call center firms), and often will keep going with their pitch even after we tell them that there's no one by that name here.

What's up? By talking with some of these callers, combined with some online sleuthing and a little deduction, here's what we've figured out.

In an effort to get around the federal Do-Not-Call list, scammers are scraping telephone numbers from the Internet and selling those lists to marketers, telling would-be buyers that these are "clean" lists of people who have agreed to take business calls. (Presumably, because they've published their numbers online, though the buyers aren't told that's where the numbers came from.)

The "better" lists associate the numbers with names found elsewhere on the same website; other lists don't bother even with that effort. The buyer doesn't realize that the names and numbers don't match until they've bought the list and started making calls. The lists aren't just pitched to telemarketers, either. Every month, we get pitches from a no-name phone company in our postal mailbox, addressed to people registered on my wife's violin website, but using our office street address.

It's the same principle behind e-mail spam, but this time applied to phone numbers and street addresses.

Of course, making phone calls and sending snail mail costs much more than sending out electronic messages. Who pays for those calls, then? Again, not folks working for brick-and-mortar call centers, where numbers can be traced and owners fined for Do-Not-Call violations. The callers tend to be people who have signed up for "work at home" scams, where the scam is that they've paid money for a "lead list" that turns out to be a bunch of random names and numbers scraped from the Web. The callers figure out within a few calls that the names and numbers never match, so that's why they don't stop when you say "I'm sorry; you must have the wrong number. No one by that name lives here." They already know that; they've paid for the list, so they're plowing ahead with the pitch hoping that you'll bite anyway.

My favorite callers have been those selling work-at-home schemes. (Like, oh, say, the one you just bought, buddy?) Other callers have claimed to represent collection agencies, which can be fronts for phishing scams. ("Oh, I'm sorry for bothering, to confirm that you are not so-and-so, could I have your Social Security number?" No, you may not. FWIW, I never tell these callers my real name, either.) Still, though, I wouldn't rule out that some failed e-tailer isn't out there trying to make a few bucks selling "bad debt" to would-be collectors that consists of nothing more than scraped phone numbers and phony accounts.

So... scammers scrape phone numbers (and sometimes street addresses) from the Internet, creating bogus lead lists that end up fueling phishing scams, work-at-home scams, and fly-by-night marketing campaigns. It's scammers scamming scammers. I'd say that they're all just getting what they deserve, if they weren't annoying me in the process.

I've been a bit quiet on the blog in recent weeks, as I have been working on launching several new projects.

I will announce each one here, as it launches. After that flurry, though, I will continue to blog here, from time on time, on topics that do not fit well into any of these other projects. So sub the RSS feed to keep up with the new posts, when they happen.

Thanks for reading, and I hope that you will follow me over to some of these new sites, as I am quite excited about each one of them. Details TK