Continue reading "The Boomer Mascot Muddle and Our DIY Nominees" »
Continue reading "The Boomer Mascot Muddle and Our DIY Nominees" »
in Almost-aging, Creativity, Culture, Marketing, Trends, Zeitgeist | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: advertising, Boomer, culture, emblems, graphics, icons, marketing, zeitgeist
A
pal of mine on staff at UC Berkeley has been watching heads hit the
ground around her for months. My friends who are teachers are fretting
about cutbacks in budgets that had already been slashed to the bone.
From other educators, I know that from pre-K to post-docs, school
funding has slowed to a drip of a trickle. In a thought-provoking
recent NYT piece, "The Uneducated American," Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wonders why we permit starving our seed corn like this.
Continue reading "Starving Our Seed Corn With Cuts in School Funding" »
in Culture, Current Affairs, Economics, Politics, Recession Depression, Zeitgeist | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: education, recession, school funding
As
your friends grow fat and happy (or not), so do your own odds of each
increase, says a fascinating new study. This might seem to be
restating the obvious, but we rarely see it quantified or illustrated
this dynamically.
How the study evolved is also a fascinating story involving two enterprising researchers who produced new renditions of unused data found in dusty old records from the Framingham Heart Study, one of the largest long-term efforts to track thousands of participants for cardiac risk starting in 1948.
All of it is highly relevant to we of the almost-aging. Today we get, as they didn't back then, that these very same cardiac risks factor out far beyond the heart to sustaining healthy bodies and brains as we age. Today we know (or some of us do) that lifestyle change can hugely reduce our risk for other unhappy endings such as Alzheimer's too. And today we are really beginning to see how often healthy habits can even trump our genes. If you had any doubt about any of that, data like this will help you believe it.
But in particular, this latest finding from Framingham adds a vivid picture of how fast and how pervasively health habits propagate between people. It's almost as if Mother Nature was using Twitter and Facebook unseen. Read the whole story and see its great graphics (from Wired magazine) here.
in Almost-aging, Anti-aging, Boomer Health, Emotional Health, Future Aging, Healthy Aging, Longevity, Zeitgeist | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: aging, Boomers, brain, health risks, heart
This gets a "bingo" from me. Boomers don't like to feel like sheep, even when they appear to be moving in herds.
Continue reading "Pitch Points That Work (and Not) for Boomer Consumers" »
in Almost-aging, Boomer Health, Communications, Creativity, Culture, Future Aging, Healthy Aging, Lifelong Engagement, Lifestyle, Marketing, Un-retirement, Zeitgeist | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: advertising, aging, Boomers, marketing, retirement, sales
My hub and I have just become
"micro" workers at a large university. I say "micro" since we are
each committing small amounts of time for what amounts to micro pay. In his case, it is a 1/4 time position at a pay grade miles below his last full-time salary. In brief, he will be netting less than
1/10th of his former pay to give them 1/4 of his time during the
coming year -- all of course with no benefits.
But hey, it's a job. A nice job, in fact, doing something he finds truly neat, bringing business world methods to academic R&D. So it will keep his resume current while doing some good on both sides.
in Almost-aging, Boomer Employment, Boomer Retirement, Boomers in Business, Culture, Current Events, Economics, Financial Independence, Innovation, Un-retirement, Upbeats in Downtimes | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Boomers, employment, encore careers, jobs
Have you been curious about the impact that retiring Boomers are
likely to have on the market for real estate? Dowell Myers, a professor
of urban planning at USC, was curious too. With funding from the Fannie
Mae Foundation, he recently completed a meaty study -- Aging Boomers and The Generational Housing Bubble -- that
can be downloaded from a link at his web site. His"takeaway"
message is that Boomer retirement "could signal the end of the postwar
era" for land use planning and "reverse several longstanding trends."
(Warning: Depressing news to follow.)
Myers opens by noting the ratio of seniors to working-age homeowners is expected to grow quite abruptly, rising by more than 30% in each of the next two decades. As a result, the study predicts, there will be a glut of resales in existing neighborhoods with more sellers than buyers for quite awhile, forcing a major shift in real estate trends.
Among the trends he and his colleagues foresee: an increasing decline in impacted neighborhoods, decreasing gentrification in older areas, less demand for low density housing, and an increasing emphasis on compact development.
I'd agree with the professor's take on higher density in new construction if only to make it more affordable for our offspring who may be less affluent due to the shifting economy. But since we will also have a huge existing inventory of bigger homes on larger lots, I suspect there might be increasing interest in older neighborhoods once nostalgia kicks in and real yards with trees start to seem rare.
Of course, my take begs the question of how many in the Next Gen will be able to afford to buy Daddy's house, or whether Daddy can cut his asking price below his mortgage balance. So Meyers may be correct to suggest that a long-term glut of unsold homes lies ahead, no matter how much the buyers and sellers might wish to seal a deal.
Click here to read more about it. (And thanks to Mike Miller and his "Retirement Revised" blog for leading me to it.)
in Boomer Real Estate, Boomer Retirement, Financial Independence, Marketing, Recession Depression, Trends | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Boomers, housing, real estate, real estate trends, resales
One of my favorite eat-healthy gurus is David Zinczenko, author of "Eat
This and Not That" and a regular Today Show contributor. In his column
over at Yahoo, Dave recently published a"bad restaurant" list for those
who are watching the trend lines on their waistlines and their
cholesterol.
Dave's whole schtick is showing how to eat healthy even in places where health is not at the top of the menu. He often makes his points quite graphically by showing functional equivalents, such as one serving of the such-and-such salad has as much fat as a whole plate of fries. Click here to see the best and worst things to eat at popular places like Mikey D. and Chili's, along with some less sinful alternatives. And while you are there, look at Dave's list of the Best and Worst Brain Foods, some of which may surprise you. And last but not least, here is the link to Dave's new web site. Bon Appetit!
in Boomer Health, Brain Health, Diet & Nutrition, Food and Drink, Healthy Aging | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Boomer, diet, health, nutrition
Continue reading "Study Says Many Red Meat Eaters Die Sooner" »
in Anti-aging, Boomer Health, Longevity, Zeitgeist | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: diet, health, longevity, meat eaters study
Have you noticed how often health experts are speaking to us today as
if our entire Gen will be full of centenarians? First I heard Mike
(RealAge) Roizen on a PBS pledge special last week (links below). Then
today, on Today, Terri Trespico from the magazine Body+Soul did
a meaty, yet concise, segment with her Top 10 tips for healthy aging.
None of it depends on radical regimens, either; all are saying that a
few simple lifestyle shifts can radically improve the odds of our own
lively longevity.
Spoiler alert: I am going to summarize Terri's top ten tips below, but it's still worth clicking through on the links at the end to watch or read the whole segment from the show.
in Almost-aging, Anti-aging, Boomer Health, Brain Health, Emotional Health, Food and Drink, Healthy Aging, Integrative Medicine, Lifelong Engagement, Marketing, Television, Zeitgeist | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Boomers, healthy aging, longevity
This is the first time I have shared a piece of email hot out of the InBox (with an anonymous author to boot) as forwarded by a longtime friend. But it made me grin enough to just jump in and re-post.
Reasons why to follow.
----- begin snippet/ ----------
Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2009
in Almost-aging, Attention, Humor, Memory | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: aging, Boomers, humor, memory
It's fascinating to watch a whole culture re-compile on the fly, and if I want some encouragement during these downer times, it helps me to look at how good we Americans are at re-inventing ourselves while re-shaping our environments. For that kind of encouragement, I can already find many points of light in the blogosphere where new forms of creativity are blooming left and right. Below some recent examples:
1. Creative Perspective
This week I stumbled on a wonderful visualization site, WallStats.com,
the creative overflow stack of graphic artist, Jess Bachman. At left is
a thumbnail corner of the vivid graphic that first put him on my own
radar -- a diagram of what the bailout
might mean to you and me, Jane and Joe Taxpayer. If you go there, click
around. He has a number of interesting messages and data sets that show
his point as much as tell it. If we can't fix this mess anytime soon,
perhaps it's a bit of comfort to gain more perspective.
2. Creative Frugality
Have you begun to
wonder yet how extended hard times might effect younger Boomers and their sibs who grew up accustomed to "living large" in better times? A number of younger bloggers are thinking about that too,
and what you might call "creative frugality" is already gaining buzz among the Twittering and Thumb-texting set who are joining the
ranks of the
newly unemployed (see also item 3 below). One example is the "Nate's Cents"
blog on making the switch to living lean without giving up all
pleasure. We oldsters may smile to see so many of our own former life
themes re-framed, but hey, at least the kids were listening. Perhaps we
can tune into them ourselves and learn a few new things. Meanwhile,
since I am not so far past parenting teens, I got a good grin from this
post which gives a sense of how some 20-somethings might coach each other when they think the 'rents aren't listening.
in Boomer Employment, Boomer Retirement, Boomers in Business, Culture, Current Events, Financial Independence, Marketing, Trends, Upbeats in Downtimes | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Bailout, Boomers, Employment, Layoffs, Retirement, Trends
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