The most promising new advancement in medicine won’t come from the medical industry. It will come from you. It will be the lifestyle choices you make to minimize your chances of getting a serious disease, and to minimize the disease’s impact if it occurs.
We have an aging population and we have the sickest population in the world. Undeveloped countries suffer from parasites and diseases of poor sanitation. We suffer from “diseases of lifestyle affluence.” These include cancer (colon, lung, breast, leukemia, stomach and liver), diabetes, coronary heart disease, and chronic respiratory diseases.
Education, like many businesses, is in an era of slim times. Districts around the nation have been required to make drastic cuts. Students, parents, staffs, and the communities, themselves, have suffered from cuts in public education funding. We can only speculate on what the long-term consequences of these deep reductions will be.
Fortunately, to date, thanks to the exceptional work of the RBUSD staff and our community, our schools have remained largely unscathed. We are recognized throughout the state for our rising student achievement scores. Our self-proclaimed, multi-year instructional improvement plan is nicknamed “Good to Great.” While times are indeed difficult, we do the business of educating children a little differently around here. We get the job done.
The reason migrating to the internet won’t save newspapers is because rising newsprint costs aren’t the problem. If it were, newspapers would do what they did in the past – raise advertising rates. Young people preferring to get their news online isn’t the problem, either. Newspapers have been available on line for over a decade. The current recession is a problem, but presumably, it’s a temporary problem. The media part of the news media business model is not what’s broken. What’s broken is the advertiser-supported part of the business model.
Slow and steady — that is the new normal as the nation’s economy recovers in 2011 from a difficult fiscal year. Financial institutions across the country will begin to see glimpses of stabilization within the industry.
The well documented collapse of the secondary markets for residential mortgages eventually worked its way into even the wealthiest marketplaces. By the time Fannie and Freddie collapsed in the summer of 2008, inventories of spec new homes were near an all time highs in Manhattan Beach. The record prices of 2007 and early 2008 began to give ground. The perfect storm of inventory peaking at the same time the jumbo loan market evaporated, augmented by a plummeting stock market and general economic turbulence, finally resulted in the malady spreading to our shores in late 2008.
Small shop owners face a particular challenge when economic times are tough. There is no big corporation to lean on, but that very problem contains the solution. Retailers in Riviera Village are delighting in the flexibility they have as independent retailers. A single brick and mortar store run and often staffed by the owner brings a personal touch to every working part of the retail machine, offering opportunities almost forgotten and nearly extinct in today’s Big Box world.
Not long ago, retail stores depended upon newspaper and radio advertising, point-of-purchase promotions and word-of-mouth to ensure that quotas and growth projections were met. How times have changed. While traditional media still plays a part in driving sales at the South Bay Galleria, strategic marketers are arming themselves with multiple layers of communications technology, which is changing at a rapid pace and creating new ways to reach a new, young, hip clientele.
Recent studies indicate that students receiving a degree or certificate from a community college benefit from an 86 percent increase in their wages, from $25,600 to $45,571, within three years of earning their degree. In addition, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there is a shortage in the nation’s labor force of workers with up to two years of postsecondary education.
