Eric Rosenthal Realtor Serving the Eastern Iowa Corridor

09/24/2026

The 28 rules, in order:
1. The work triangle
2. Sink under the window
3. Vent the range outdoors
4. Deep apron-front basin
5. Cabinets to the ceiling
6. Landing space beside every appliance
7. Butler’s pantry / scullery
8. Counters set to the cook’s elbow
9. Dish-draining cupboard over the sink
10. Fridge away from the range
11. Breakfast nook
12. Wall-mounted faucet
13. Washable surfaces, no crumb ledges
14. Integral drainboard
15. Store it where you use it
16. Aisles wide enough for two
17. One marble slab at the baking spot
18. The toe kick
19. A floor with some give
20. Larder on the cool north wall
21. Two basins: wash and rinse
22. Light the work surface, not the room
23. Wood at the chopping spot
24. Stack wet functions on one wall
25. Dedicated broom closet
26. Hang what you use every day
27. Kitchen as a room, not a corridor
28. Fixtures built to be rebuilt

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1FRrKNhFBC/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Stand in a 1930s kitchen for ten minutes and something clicks. Everything's within reach. Nothing's decorative.

09/14/2026

Entire Opinion Column here….

Yes, Children Really Are Getting Dumber

Covid shutdowns, grade inflation and now AI are degrading the quality of American education.

By Allysia Finley
Columnist Opinion Wall Street Journal

Updated Sep. 13, 2026, at 5:05 pm EDT

Listening to my 7-year-old nephew sounding out words last week, a dark thought occurred: How long before the three Rs become as outdated among young people as Thomas Guide maps? As machines get smarter, kids are getting dumber.

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence have been matched by an astonishing decline in student learning. More evidence arrived last week from the Program for International Student Assessment, which measures skills of 15-year-olds around the world every three to four years.

Between 2018 and 2025, reading performance fell in some three-fourths of countries. U.S. math and reading scores fell by the equivalent of three-quarters of a year of learning and trailed China, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, the U.K., Canada and Australia.

“Most troubling is the decline in the very skills that matter most in the AI age: evaluating information, making connections across multiple sources, and thinking critically about what we read,” the report notes. “The instances of ‘hasty reading’—in which students read quickly but inaccurately—nearly doubled to 9% between 2018 and 2025.”

Adults may be equally guilty of hasty reading, judging by emails that this writer receives. Could Pavlovian ping alerts be fueling a collective attention deficit disorder?

Covid school shutdowns no doubt contributed to the learning loss, though they don’t appear to be the primary culprit, given that scores fell in countries that kept schools mostly open. But there are two common denominators across most countries where scores fell: increasing classroom distractions and reliance on artificial intelligence.

About one-third of students on average in developed countries reported that noise and disorder disrupted lessons, with 29% saying classmates don’t listen to teachers. One in 5 reported that they couldn’t work well because of distractions. Countries where students reported stricter discipline (e.g., Taiwan, Japan and South Korea) experienced small or no learning declines.

As for AI, nearly half of students in economically developed countries say they use chatbots every week. Kids who didn’t use AI for drafting text scored 28 points higher on average than those who used it almost every day—equivalent of 1½ school years. Correlation doesn’t prove causation, but it does suggest AI may be becoming a crutch.

“In the same way that we do not become fit by watching sports but by doing sports, learning does not occur through the consumption of content, but as a productive cognitive struggle of the mind with new material,” the report says. “Where technology short-circuits the productive struggle of learning, it will undercut students’ development.”

The latter presents a growing problem in the U.S. and likely other countries. Kids spend much of class playing games and watching videos on devices. Teachers award A’s for no effort. Since many schools have banned homework, kids while away their afternoons on social media where proper grammar and syntax are passé.

According to a Thomas B. Fordham Institute survey published last week, half of high-school students and recent graduates say they use social media during class every day. When devices are supposed to be used for instructional purposes in class, 58% said peers watch videos, use social media or engage in off-task activities.

Are students really to blame? As a result of their less mature brains, kids exhibit less impulse control and self-restraint than adults. Assigning in-class lessons on devices invites kids to rush through them so they can goof off. The result: hasty reading and math.

At the same time, AI is making it easier to succeed in school without putting in the work. Forty-eight percent of students in the Fordham survey admitted to using AI to solve math problems, 36% to summarize books, 29% to write first drafts or essays, and 26% for help during quizzes and tests.

Sixty-two percent agreed that most students are using AI for assignments that are supposed to be completed without it, and 57% said that peers who have done no real work are getting good grades thanks to AI. Academic standards have also eased, with 69% saying they are allowed to retake tests at least once to improve grades.

Grade inflation has become so endemic that 44% of students who scored below 1000 on the SAT—roughly the bottom half—reported receiving all or mostly A’s. The College Board in 2024 shortened SAT reading passages and the exam itself to help kids with short attention spans.

Because of this dumbing down of education, “in a world increasingly flooded with information, our students are less likely to think deeply and separate signal from noise,” PISA reports.

Politicians and so-called AI doomers are sounding alarms that AI could destroy humanity. The clearer and more present danger is that young minds, liberated from work and struggle, turn into slop.

Covid shutdowns, grade inflation and now AI are degrading the quality of American education.

09/07/2026

Commodity markets are saying everything you need to know.

Even as rate hike expectations and Treasury yields rise, commodities continue to push higher across the board.

Inflation has now been above the Fed's 2% target for 65 consecutive months.

And, the Fed's 2% target appears to be distant at best as oil prices near $100/barrel again.

The reality is that the denominator of these assets, the US Dollar, is undergoing a historic loss of purchasing power.

Prices are not just rising; the currency they are priced in is losing value.

We have a long road ahead.

08/26/2026

“Stanley Druckenmiller, billionaire founder of the Duquesne Family Office but a former mentor of Bessent’s when the pair worked for Soros Fund Management in the early 1990s, penned an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal that attacked his former pupil’s effort to tamp down yields and engineer discipline in the world’s largest bond market.

“Let the bond market speak,” Druckenmiller wrote. “The long-term Treasury yield is the most important price in the world [and] the only fiscal disciplinarian the U.S. has left. Governments defending prices against fundamentals always lose.”

https://www.barrons.com/articles/druckenmiller-warsh-bond-market-bessent-453f6cb4

08/22/2026

If you write “do not press” on a big red button, then someone is going to try to press it. This basic feature of human psychology appears to have escaped US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent, who finds himself caught in a stand-off with currency traders more than a fortnight after the US and Japan jointly intervened to buy yen for the first time since 1998.

The move strengthened the yen at the start of August, but it has since given back roughly half of its post-intervention gain. Currency analysts warn the fundamental drivers of a weak yen, especially a yield gap between Japan (where rates are 1%) and the US (where rates are over 3.5%), have not gone away.

Bessent knows a thing or two about currency trading, says The Guardian. He was part of the George Soros team in 1992 that made a billion dollars by forcing the pound off the European Exchange-Rate Mechanism. His intervention to stabilise the yen wasn’t an act of charity. Japan is a “cash spigot”, with the cheap yen funding a global “carry trade” that helps prop up US technology shares.”

If the yen’s slide continues, then Japan might be forced to respond with “aggressive” interest-rate rises. That could quickly unwind the carry trade and trigger a Wall Street rout, as happened two years ago when a surprise Japanese rate rise sent global markets tumbling.

Don’t worry, the risk of a “disorderly” unwind “seems low”, Masayuki Nakajima of Mizuho Bank tells Katie Martin in the Financial Times. The danger of higher Japanese rates is now “extremely well understood” by traders, who have made appropriate preparations. Rather than a snap yen rally, “all the ingredients are in place” for the carry trade to continue and yen selling pressure to persist. “It is increasingly clear that the market is in the mood for a fight” with the US Treasury.

Blood in the water

The “US currency intervention was not only ineffective, but counterproductive”, says George Saravelos of Deutsche Bank. Washington has been encouraging Tokyo to tap an emergency Federal Reserve dollar facility, inadvertently sending a signal that “it is not comfortable” with the “direct US Treasury sales” that Tokyo usually uses to prop up the yen.

If Bessent’s yen “ruse” was designed to keep US borrowing costs under control, then it has failed (see below), agrees Simon Nixon on Substack. Washington’s use of “unorthodox” tools, including selling euros rather than dollars to fund the yen intervention, has only “deepened the anxiety it was meant to soothe”. Bond traders sniff out hesitation like sharks detect blood in the water.

The spike in government debt isn’t only affecting America. Japan’s own ten-year yield hit a 30-year high on Monday, while France’s has topped 4% for the first time since 2008, potentially pushing the country closer to the brink of a “debt crisis”.”

If you write “do not press” on a big red but­ton, then someone is going to try to press it. This basic fea­ture of human psy­cho­logy appears to have escaped US Treas­ury sec­ret­ary Scott Bes­sent, who finds him­self caught in a stand-off with...

08/21/2026

Investors have long wondered whether Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent would stand with a safety net to catch falling bonds in times of true distress.

They don’t have to wonder any longer.
As bond prices dropped, Bessent on Wednesday said that starting on Sept. 9 the Treasury will buy back at least $2 billion more in long-term debt in each operation than previously communicated, through Nov. 4. Markets weren’t expecting a buyback announcement—and the impact was felt around Wall Street.

On Friday, one of the ripples of the Bessent move was becoming clear, with the prices of gold and other metals rising. Gold closed the week strong, notching a 2.4% increase on Friday and a total gain of 5.9% since the Treasury’s buyback announcement.

Silver and platinum also rallied on Friday, bringing their total gains over the last three sessions to 8.6% and 9.3%, respectively.

Taking out an additional $2 billion is nothing when investors buy up over $230 billion in 10, 20- and 30- year bonds every quarter. But the timing was a surprise, given the Treasury had just given its routine quarterly update on buybacks on Aug. 5.

The move on buybacks came after Bessent on Aug. 5 unexpectedly opened the door to potentially reducing the amount of long-term bond issuance. Late last month, Bessent oversaw the coordinated effort by U.S. and Japan to strengthen the yen, an action that was seen as a way to ensure Japan didn’t have to sell any of its $1.1 trillion in U.S. debt holdings to do its own yen buying.

Last year, Bessent stepped up to help another ally, Argentina.

With the unconventional intervention Bessent practically told investors worried about falling prices that “‘Don’t worry, we have your back. Go ahead and get involved,’” wrote Head of US Rates Strategy at RBC Capital Blake Gwinn.

“The “Bessent Put” just went from theoretical to actual,” he wrote, referring to the name given to Bessent’s interventionist moves.

But the moves also signal an unwillingness to do what’s really needed: Reign in the debt.

“Markets take a dim view of this and so it’s no surprise that precious metals are up sharply since the buyback announcement,” Robin J. Brooks, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote on Substack.

The logic is simple: If heavily indebted countries like the U.S. don’t show a clear commitment for fiscal discipline—and instead financially repress yields to keep borrowing cheaply from investors—then confidence in the country’s asset and currency erodes.

A weaker currency can also become a deliberate path out of debt since it effectively shrinks the value of debt. And as the dollar losses value, gold, a primary competitor to fiat currencies, becomes more appealing.

Prices of gold, silver, platinum and Bitcoin rose following the Treasury buyback announcement, while the dollar fell.

08/18/2026

Commenting about chip components’ rapid inflation due to the AI revolution:

"It takes at least six months, if not a year, for these price increases fairly far upstream in the supply chain to start to make their way to end users," says Jason Miller, a professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University's business school.

Prices for bare printed circuit boards are soaring thanks to AI-driven demand for chips and the Iran war.

07/25/2026

https://nypost.com/2026/07/18/lifestyle/world-cups-other-winners-losers/

Careers were made, reputations were destroyed, brands became global giants and entire nations changed the way the world viewed them.

07/19/2026

From James Hickman/Schiff Sovereign:

The Latest Flashing Exit Sign for the US Dollar

Washington has a comforting story about Social Security: yes, the trust fund is running out of money, but not until 2032. That leaves six more years to form the commissions, schedule the hearings, and study a problem that has been obvious for decades.

But last week, a man who used to run the numbers for Social Security itself explained why even a measly six years is optimistic.

Jason Fichtner is the former chief economist of the Social Security Administration, which means he spent years inside the building watching the program's finances deteriorate.

According to the latest annual report from Social Security's own trustees, the program's main trust fund will be empty by late 2032. From that moment, incoming payroll taxes cover only 78% of scheduled benefits, which means an automatic 22% cut for every retiree in America.

But Fichtner recently told CNBC that the real deadline has nothing to do with 2032, because the bond market will move first.

He said that well before 2032, “the bond market looks and says, ’Well, you guys have 12 months to get your act in order; you’re going to be looking for another $600-plus billion a year,” which is why, “Fiscal strain could come earlier than trust fund depletion.”

Cutting grandma's check by 22% overnight is the closest thing to guaranteed electoral su***de that exists in American politics. So they'll do what they always do and borrow the difference. Fichtner and economist Veronique de Rugy calculate that filling the gap means roughly $600 billion in new borrowing in the first year, growing to about $700 billion a year by 2036.

And that money doesn't appear out of thin air. The Treasury borrows from the same pool of savings that everyone else uses, the pool that funds mortgages, car loans, and business investment. When the world's largest borrower suddenly demands another $600 billion a year from that pool, the price of money goes up for everybody.

Markets are forward-looking. An investor buying a 10-year Treasury today is holding paper that matures years after the trust fund runs dry, so the question of whether Congress will fix Social Security is already priced into that bond, every single day. Investors won't wait politely until the checks shrink in 2032. They will reprice the moment congressional inaction looks locked in, a year or more ahead of the deadline, exactly as Fichtner describes.

And inaction is the base case. Nine months into fiscal year 2026, the federal deficit has already reached $1.4 trillion according to the Congressional Budget Office, running ahead of last year's pace. This is happening with no major crisis draining the coffers, with the economy growing and unemployment low.

Meanwhile, the lenders who would have to fund all this new borrowing are backing away.

The dollar has fallen roughly 8% from its early 2025 peak. In March alone, foreign holdings of US Treasuries fell by about $240 billion, with Japan selling nearly $48 billion and China unloading another $41 billion. China's holdings now sit at their lowest level since 2008. The single largest pools of foreign capital on the planet are quietly reducing their exposure to the very asset Washington needs them to buy more of.

Worse, they are actively looking for the exits.

China’s alternative fund-transfer systems are increasingly used by sanctioned countries like Russia and Iran.

And on July 9, the European Parliament voted 416 to 169 to push the digital euro into final negotiations, and the stated goal is to reduce Europe's dependence on non-EU payment providers like Visa and Mastercard, which currently handle 61% of card payments in the eurozone.

That is a bureaucratic way to say: Europe no longer wants its money to be forced to move through American companies.

Consider how deep the dollar's dominance runs today: when France-based Airbus sells a jet to Air France, the price tag is in US dollars. A French company selling to a French airline, and the invoice is still written in Washington's currency.

That is the system Europe's political class just voted, by a two-to-one margin, to start engineering its way out of. Every step in that direction shrinks the pool of foreigners who need dollars, and fewer people who need dollars means fewer natural buyers for US government debt.

The real deadline for the fallout from Social Security’s 2032 depletion is whenever the bond market decides Congress won't act. And every lender heading for the exit moves that date closer, because a thinner pool of buyers means the repricing, when it comes, will be sharper.

Higher interest rates arriving years ahead of schedule would hit an economy that runs entirely on cheap debt. The government's interest bill, corporate borrowing, mortgages, the whole structure assumes money stays affordable. And the foreign lenders who could soften that blow by absorbing the new supply are already leaving.

Congress, in other words, is planning around a deadline that exists only on paper.

The bond market keeps its own calendar. And nobody in Washington seems to have asked what happens if the market's calendar runs faster than theirs.

To your freedom,



James Hickman / Schiff Sovereign

07/15/2026

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