Author: Serkadis

 

The Housing Crisis and Wall Street Shame –  One out of four homeowners is now under water, owing more on their homes than the homes are worth. Why? The biggest single factor behind the housing crisis is rising unemployment. According to the latest ABC-Washington Post poll, one out of every three Americans has either lost their job or lives in a household with someone who has lost a job. Today it takes two and sometimes three incomes to buy the groceries and pay the mortgage or the rent. So if one of those incomes is gone, a homeowner can’t make the payment.  – Robert Reich’s Blog

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How Joseph Stiglitz Blew It On Fannie And Freddie – John Carney – How could three prominent economists have been so dumb-foundingly wrong about the systemic risk of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?  Today’s Wall Street Journal discusses a 2002 paper declaring that “on the basis of historical experience, the risk to the government from a potential default on GSE debt is effectively zero.” It’s authors were  Jonathan Orzag, Peter Orszag and Joseph Stiglitz, who had won the Nobel prize in economics the year before. We’ve embedded it below so you can read the whole thing. … – Business Insider at Clusterstock
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FHA Considers Ways to Boost Its Reserves – By NICK TIMIRAOS – … Shaun Donovan, secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, plans to ask Congress on Wednesday to raise the cap on the annual insurance premium that the FHA can charge borrowers. … The FHA will also limit the amount of money that sellers can provide for closing costs on home sales to 3% of the home price, from the current level of 6%. … – Wall Street Journal

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FHA to toughen rules for borrowers – By Dina ElBoghdady – The Federal Housing Administration is proposing to increase the up-front cash paid by borrowers as part of an effort to shore up the agency’s finances, which have been staggered by rising defaults in its flagship mortgage insurance program, according to FHA officials.  The changes also include raising minimum credit scores for borrowers who receive FHA-backed mortgages and limiting the amount of money sellers can kick in, including paying closing costs or giving free upgrades. – Washington Post 

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S&P downgrades 226 classes of 2002-2004 Alt-A Residential Mortgage-backed Securities – Research Recap

A lot of penetration testing assignments include the famed Social Engineering test. When reading about it, or looking the social engineering scams on a TV series it looks very straightforward – you come in all nice and smooth-talking and every door opens for you.

The harsh reality is that a lot of social engineering penetration tests fail, which adds up to increased costs and a failed engagement for the consultant. In the extreme situation, you may spend some hours in the offices of corporate security or even the police, until the pen-test authorizations are verified.

Here are the most common ways to fail a Social Engineering Penetration Test

1. Come unprepared – Just walking into a company and asking for confidential documents sounds stupid. But trying to perform a social engineering attack on your first visit is even more stupid. Until you do proper amount of recon and research you have no idea what the company relationships are, who is in charge of what and what exceptions or processes may be used to succeed in a social engineering attack.
2. Just Wing It – Wake up call- you are not Frank Abagnale from “Catch Me if You Can” and you are not Danny Blue from the TV series “Hustle”. During a social engineering attack you need to think on your feet and being creative always counts. But not preparing a background story supported by a nice set of evidence is a great way to fail a social engineering pen-test
3. Be outright aggressive or arrogant – Nobody likes people who are bossy and arrogant. While having an air of authority helps during a social engineering attack, you don’t want to start from position of authority with an aggressive approach. That is the best way to get people to close up in the cocoon of procedures and regulations, or they’ll simply call your bluff – in both ways you fail. Instead, you need to be friendly, courteous and polite. Maintain your air of authority, but never overuse it.
4. Choose the wrong person for the job – Social engineering is achieved through appealing to the people’s urge to help others. But certain profiles of targets tend to be more helpful to different persons. For instance, a target group of young men will be very helpful to a nice looking woman of their approximate age or just a bit older – to maintain the advantage of implied authority through the age difference. But this same woman is considered a threat by target groups of young women, so for them you need to choose a different attacker. The same principle applies to phone based social engineering attacks.
5. Dress for failure – In social engineering, always remember that clothes make the man. If you perform a social engineering attack on a bank, you don’t want to appear in jeans and sneakers. But if you are performing a social engineering on a software development company, you may actually miss by a mile by wearing suit and tie. Go back to point 1 about preparation 🙂

Have any more ways to fail, or good examples? Share in the comments!

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Paul from MoDaCo, who previously published an epic walkthrough of the HTC HD2 has now posted a similar one for the X2.

If’ you’re interested in the phone, it’s well worth the watch, though at 26 minutes long you might want to get a cup of coffee now

 

To Our Clients, Colleagues and Friends, 

• We normally stay at the Olympic Hotel in Seattle , but this time, our assistant booked us into the Monaco , just a block away.  We liked it and we’ll probably stay there again.  It’s just as elegant as the Olympic but not as stuffy.
• The Texas Ratio is a pretty good predictor of bank failure, and a number over 100% means things are pretty grim.  These days, anything under maybe 20% is pretty good. Maybe even under 40%. Here are a few California banks and their Texas Ratios, chosen mainly because we know them or figure you would:

5%   Commonwealth Business Bank	53%  Hanmi Bank
7%   Bank of San Francisco	103%  Saigon   National Bank
19%   Silvergate Bank	109%  Tamalpais Bank
25%   Bridge Bank	157%  Imperial Capital Bank
28%   City National Bank	204%  First Regional Bank
43%   Far East National	248%  Pacific Coast National

A few others are WestAmerica Bank (32%), Bank of the West (28%), Bank of Marin (5%), and Union Bank (17%).  We counted 17 banks with a 0% ratio, but they were all pretty small.

• The state of Washington has eight banks with a ratio over 200%, while one out of every four banks there is above 100%.  Uh oh.
• In college many years ago, we took introductory Physics from Edward Teller, a Nobel Laureate and the Father of the Hydrogen Bomb. He hated having to deal with undergraduates, and his politics didn’t exactly lend themselves to Berkeley at the time.  He showed up for the first few lectures, announced that he didn’t want to be there anymore than we did, and told us we were a bunch of unkempt, spoiled, and ungrateful unpatriotic brats who would be fighting communism in the rice paddies of Vietnam if we truly loved our country.  He then disappeared for the rest of the semester, with the lectures given by a graduate student who didn’t speak English. 
  Anyway, Teller once told us all that “When you get to the end of all the light you know and it’s time to step into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing that one of two things will happen: either you will be given something solid to stand on, or you will be taught to fly.”  That was pretty inspiring, especially from someone so uninspiring.  Ten years later, he became an advisor to President Reagan and came up with the idea for Star Wars.  He also thought we should launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Russia and bring them to their knees.   He won the Nobel Prize but was a crummy teacher and kind of a nutcase as well.
• Did you know that this is the 75^th anniversary of the FDIC?  Roosevelt pushed it through Congress in the darkest days of 1934 with the Great Depression at its worst.  That year, unemployment was a horrific 25%.
• You know how an opened coke or diet coke tastes flat the next day, even if you chill it?  We just discovered that this isn’t the case with Cherry Coke or Cherry Coke Zero.  Next time you have an open can sitting around for a day or two, put it in the freezer for 15 minutes and it will still taste good.
• Remember in 9^th grade when you thought that you’d get drunk if you drank coke and swallowed an aspirin at the same time?  Aren’t you glad you’re no longer in 9^th grade?
• Forty years ago today on December 5, 1969, Greg Noll surfed a 65-foot wave on the North Shore of Oahu, still the highest wave ever recorded. And today is Tyra Banks’ 36^th birthday.  If you have a teenage daughter, you’ve probably seen her on America’s Next Top Model, and they don’t come any prettier.
• A great video of a French stuntman.   http://glumbert.com/media/stuntman
• The San Francisco Chronicle noted yesterday that if the ice at both poles melted, the ocean level would reach the road deck on the Golden Gated Bridge .  And not to be an alarmist, but we’ve seen those photos from satellites of the North Pole, now and 20 years ago, and it sure appears to be shrinking and doing so rapidly.
• The Class of 2004 California de novos is celebrating its fifth birthday.  The excellent Findley Report points out that of these eleven banks, the biggest has grown to $262 million (Santa Cruz County Bank) and the smallest is only $62 million (Mother Lode Bank).  With an average of $192 million, that’s not a whole lot of growth over five years.
• It’s shocking to read that six months after mortgage loans have been modified, half of them are in default again!  There’s a new verb, with borrowers re-defaulting.
  
• The Pontiac Silverdome was where the Detroit Lions played for years. It was sold last week for $583,000.  You’d think someone would have paid more if only to get their hands on the 127 acres. But the 80,000 seat stadium, built thirty years ago for $56 million, went for less than a one room condo in New York City .
  
  The same week a Macau casino was the winning bid for Michael Jackson’s white rhinestone glove.  They paid $350,000.
• In 1960, 50% of all working-age adults hadn’t graduated from high school.  That’s kind of stunning, isn’t it?  Today, only 8% don’t graduate from high school.
• Regulators think that brokered CDs always lead to bad loans, but isn’t it really the opposite? Aren’t banks that are chasing poor quality loans the precise ones that then chase brokered CD’s? Better regulate inferior lending and you’ll go along way to eliminating brokered CD’s.
• But wait a minute.  Check in the Wall Street Journal, and a lot of the brokered CD’s have rates that are lower than your local rates.  In cases like this, aren’t brokered CD’s good for you, bringing down your cost of funds?
• A few thoughts on blogs, social networking sites, and all that….stuff.  So many people and businesses are using them now, but are they really effective?  It seems that the more blogs exist and the faster they grow, the fewer people will visit them. Their growth leads to an oversupply, and when there are just way too many of them, the overkill may overwhelm people and numb them.  Kind of the Law of Diminishing Returns, where their very growth and success might lead to their very failure.  We   met the head of corporate communications for a $2 billion bank which is now twittering (or tweeting).  It sounded like no one was reading it. Anyway, we may be totally wrong.  But we still wonder.
• Remember when Orange County ( John Wayne Airport ) and Ontario were funky little airports where you walked out on the tarmac to the plane? We kind of miss them, Burbank ’s airport ( Bob Hope Airport ) may be one of the last of that type.  Old, tired, no fancy bars or white tablecloth restaurants, small and uncrowded. And we like it.
• And what’s with this naming of airports after people like Bob Hope or John Wayne?  If someone’s going to do that, why not name the airport nearest Queens the Joey Ramone Airport , and Memphis can be renamed Elvis Presley Airport . Actually, there was an attempt to rename the San Francisco airport Joe DiMaggio International. It died when people learned what a jerk he’d been. A great ballplayer but a real arrogant and unpleasant person.
• One of the pleasures of our job is to meet and work with people with extraordinary courage, and these are people like Jack Choi (Commonwealth Business Bank, CA), Bill Valerian (Liberty Bank, Ohio) Joe Adams, (1^st Security Bank, Washington), and Donn Costa (Golf Savings, Washington). These four are Presidents of their banks, and no matter how well their bank is doing, it takes great courage, undaunted courage to run even the healthiest of banks in this period of intense regulatory scrutiny.  Hemingway defined courage as “Grace under pressure”, and all four of these bankers fit that definition. 
  

And a few thoughts for today:  Be responsible for your own actions,  demonstrate perseverance, don’t complain, keep your promises, be a good listener, don’t hold grudges, be tolerant, show compassion, study the lives of great people, try new things, and have fun.
Garrett, Watts & Co.  Check out:  Laws of Lending    and   Board DecisionsHelping mortgage lenders increase revenues, control costs, and better manage risk.

• Joe Garrett ([email protected])
• Mike McAuley      ([email protected])
• Corky Watts ([email protected])

Try as we might, many of us find the temptation of pancakes too hard to resist. Maybe it’s the sweet, buttery aroma of the batter on the griddle or the soft doughy texture, or that eating something with the word “cake” in it for breakfast just feels so deliciously naughty. But it doesn’t have to be. There are decent Primal substitutes. Pancakes made with almond meal or coconut flour are a good option, but can be pretty heavy and, for some, overly filling. And then there’s this dish sent in by Jack Etherington for the Primal Cookbook Challenge. His Almond Banana Pancakes contain just three ingredients: banana, egg and almond butter. You can whip up a batch in five minutes flat and top the pancakes with a pat of butter, a scoop of nut butter, or fresh berries.

Almond Banana Pancakes are slightly delicate so you’ll want to keep the size fairly small and wait until the edges are nicely browned before flipping them. This shouldn’t deter you from trying the recipe – the delicate texture of Almond Banana Pancakes is the very thing that makes them so irresistible. If you’ve tried pancakes made from almond or coconut flour and find them slightly grainy, you’ll really love the silky, airy texture of these cakes. The flavor is sinfully close to banana bread; add a little vanilla and cinnamon to the batter if you really want to get decadent.

As is evident from the comment board of last week’s recipe, this (very similar) recipe may be too carb-centric for some of you. For those that are no-carbers or are restricting carbs for weight loss purposes this recipe might not fit into your personal Primal plans. For others it might be part of your 20%. And for others that are extra active or have already achieved your preferred body composition this recipe might be a perfect fit. In any case, remember that the Primal Blueprint is primarily about guiding principles. It’s up to each of us to adapt recipes and fitness choices within the context of the PB as it relates to our personal goals and circumstances. Enjoy!

Ingredients:

• 2 ripe bananas
• 1 egg
• 1 heaping tablespoon of almond butter

Instructions:

Mash the bananas, add the egg and mix well.

Stir in the almond butter, adding more than a tablespoon if you want a more pancake-like texture.

Warm butter in a pan and pour batter into small cakes.

Brown on each side and serve warm.

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Related posts:

1. The Many Uses of Almond Meal
2. The Many Uses of Coconut Flour
3. No Oat Oatmeal… It’s No-atmeal!

Filed under: Motorsports, BMW, Ford

In case you missed it, the 2009 LeMons season ground to a halt a few weeks back at Thunderhill after the third running of the Arse-Freeze-A-Palooza (full disclosure — I work as a Judge for the 24 Hours of LeMons). Filthy 2009 proved to be a pretty hectic season for LeMons, what with ten $500 car races at various mud pits locales around this great country of ours. However, ’09 will pale in comparison to the frenzied, property-devaluing idiocy that the 21-race 2010 season is sure to bring. We’d like to apologize to our understanding women-folk and potential home buyers in general in advance.

Still, the 2009 season was filled with all the wonderful elements that make LeMons the fastest growing motorsport in the world: namely, fires, terrible driving, whiny drivers, cheating mechanics and totally excellent BBQ. Oh, and lots of cars blowing the hell apart. You’ll learn all about this year’s champs after the jump, but we’d just like to point out that the 2009 Deconstructor Championship belongs to Ford. If you don’t know, the Deconstructor goes to the manufacturer that builds the cars that blow up the most often.

Why Ford? Mostly for the numerous SHOs that lunched their engines and transmissions all over various LeMons paddocks, coast to coast. To quote LeMons’ second banana, Nick Pon, after he strolled through a typical three SHO/three dead cars pit in Louisiana, “Looks like someone tossed a Taurus grenade in here.” Just seems to be the Taurus’s week for winning awards. OK — now make the jump.

Continue reading 24 Hours of LeMons announces 2009 Season Champions

24 Hours of LeMons announces 2009 Season Champions originally appeared on Autoblog on Sat, 05 Dec 2009 09:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Infosync has given the HP Glisten a good going over and are pretty unimpressed with the smartphone.  Scoring the device only 69/100, they were happy with the hardware, battery life, and business features, but marked the smartphone down for not having good non-business features, calling the camera poor and lamenting the lack of a good media player of social networking features.

They concluded:

With the HP iPaq Glisten, we wonder if HP has been paying attention to the phone market for the last couple of years. The phone is the most basic, barebones Windows Mobile 6.5 device you could imagine, with almost no extra software or convenient tweaks to improve the user experience. Business users will enjoy the tight integration with Microsoft Exchange and the solid build quality. The phone also packs a large battery and can hold a charge through a busy day’s use. Plus, the keyboard is nice and large for easy typing, definitely a solid competitor to RIM’s BlackBerry Bold 9700. But beyond the basic business features, the phone comes up short. As more business users rely on a single device for their work and personal lives, the HP iPaq Glisten performs poorly at Web browsing, multimedia functions, taking pictures and just about anything other than serious work. The interface is difficult to use by touch alone, which is why most manufacturers, like HTC with their Tilt 2 on AT&T, improve it with some sort of enhancements. But with the HP iPaq Glisten, all you get are the basics, and that might not be enough for many users. Release: December 2009. Price: $180.

Pros: Solid build quality. Great battery life. Large, easy full-QWERTY keyboard.

Cons: Barebones set of Windows Mobile features. Web browsing, multimedia and camera features all below average. Interface still not entirely touch friendly.

Read their full review here.

How badly are the government’s loan modifications doing? 

Here’s the money shot from NYT reporter Floyd Norris’s investigation earlier this week:

Chase disclosed in November that:

• nearly a quarter of trial modifications had failed because the borrower did not make even a single payment

• nearly half had failed to make all three payments required before the modification could become permanent.

• Of those who had made all three payments, only about a quarter had submitted all the required documents.

Add all that up and approximately 25% of applicants are making it through the loan-mod trial period.

So what’s the real reason the mods aren’t working?  Because the loans never should have been made in the first place.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Here’s The Real Reason Loan Modifications Aren’t Working
• Judge Slams Indymac, Sets Aside Defendant’s $292,500 Mortgage
• CHART OF THE DAY: We’re Still Generating Too Many Negative Equity Mortgages

Mapping the world online poses a lot of different challenges not only from a technical perspective but also from a political one. Google has some of the best software engineers in the world so it’s safe to assume they can tackle any technical issue to overcome and, for the most part, so far they have. Some problems, though, are a little more tricky and don’t have anything to do with the actual product, but with trying to satisfy all the different views, customs and opinions of the people around the world.

One problem that arose time and time again when creating Google Maps was how to handle regions or geographical features on which different countries had different and a lot of times conflicting views. One common issue is with water bodies that regularly have different names in the countries bordering them or which they cross. Google exemplifies with the “Yellow Sea” as it’s known in the English-speaking world. However, in China, it is known as “Huáng Hǎi” and in Korea it is known as the “West Sea” or “Sŏ Hae” in Korean.

Google handles this by showing both labels in the English or other international versions of Google Earth and Maps. In Earth, there is also a text box explaining the existence of the two names. However, the local ve… (read more)

When Google decided to create a new browser, it knew it had an opportunity to avoid many of the problems facing existing browsers by coming up with new ways to do things and building a solid basis from the start. One of the smartest decisions was to give each individual tab its own process thread, which would solve a lot of security and stability issues.

It was a more complex technical approach, but it paid off in the end. However, it’s not possible to give each tab its own process every time, as there may be shared resources between them, so Chrome had to make a compromise between security and compatibility. Now, though, Google is giving developers the possibility to force links to be opened in new processes thanks to a little HTML 5 trickery.

“Google Chrome already uses separate OS processes to isolate independent tabs from each other in the browser, so that crashes or slowdowns in one tab won’t affect the others,” Charlie Reis, software engineer, writes on the Chromium blog.

“In many cases, though, Google Chrome needs to keep pages from related tabs in the same process, since they may access each other’s contents using JavaScript code… In practice, web developers may find situations where they would like links to other pages to open in a separate process. As on… (read more)

Digg may not be the hottest thing in Silicon Valley at the moment, thanks to Facebook and Twitter stealing all the spotlight, but don’t discount the social news aggregator just yet. As it turns five years old, the site is looking forward to a new chapter in its history as the features implemented over the past year begin to shift Digg towards a new but promising direction. Oh, and it also gets a rather official recognition, as December 4 gets proclaimed Digg.com Day in San Francisco where its headquarters are.

“Five years ago today, Digg.com went live. What started as a simple idea has certainly come a long way. From a vision of a new way to surface news, and a team of three, to 40+ million monthly visitors and 80+ passionate employees…well, suffice it to say that I’m very proud of what we’ve become,” Digg Co-founder Kevin Rose wrote on the site’s blog.

“There have been a lot of memorable moments over the years. From the Paris Hilton phone hacking incident to cracking the HD-DVD key, you guys have defined Digg and are the reason for our growth. To date, we’ve had over 14 Million stories submitted and Dugg by you,” he added.

The site has come a long way from its launch five years ago but, at the same time, it has managed to maintain its co… (read more)

PDAfanclub.com has published a comparison between the two Windows Mobile titans at the moment, and it is interesting to see the Omnia 2 really holding its own in many ways.

The most striking is in screen quality (above) where the vibrancy of the AMOLED screen on the Samsung Omnia 2 really shines through.

Samsung’s attention to detail is also obvious in the camera comparison, with the Omnia 2 clearly taking much better quality pictures.

HTC HD2 (left)           vs                  Samsung Omnia 2 (right)

See PDAfanclub.com for further comparisons, including video quality comparison and a table comparing the specs.

Via CareAce.net

Google wants to provide users with the most relevant results, it goes without saying and it’s obvious why. Better results means satisfied users, but also that the ads served with the search are more likely to be of interest to them. But in order to provide better results, Google needs to know more about them, sometimes more than people would like it to know. And it’s about to know even more, as Google has introduced Personalized Search to signed-out users as well.

“Today we’re helping people get better search results by extending Personalized Search to signed-out users worldwide, and in more than forty languages. Now when you search using Google, we will be able to better provide you with the most relevant results possible,” Bryan Horling, software engineer, and Matthew Kulick, product manager, wrote.

“Previously, we only offered Personalized Search for signed-in users, and only when they had Web History enabled on their Google Accounts. What we’re doing today is expanding Personalized Search so that we can provide it to signed-out users as well,” they added.

So, how exactly does it work? When a user is signed in and has enabled Web History, Google will keep track of their previous searches and the results that were more relevant to them. This way, it ca… (read more)

Catnip (nepeta cataria) has been appreciated by thepeople for at least 2000 years. The plant was familiar to early Roman cooks and physicians and has long been a part of people’s gardens and health repertoires. It is often enjoyed as a tea for its soothing relaxing benefits.

It shouldn’t really surprise anyone at this point, but there are now rumors that MySpace will be rolling out Facebook Connect Integration sometime in the first part of 2010. Yes, the arch-enemies of just a couple of years ago are now making “friend requests.” But 2009 is not 2007, Facebook has clearly won the social-networking wars and MySpace has shifted strategy and is now looking to become an entertainment hub. And what any media outlet needs most is audience, and Facebook, with 350 million users, can certainly deliver on that.

Inside Facebook cites industry sources and claims that Facebook Connect will become an integral part of the site sometime next year and Facebook features will be leveraged in various sections of the social network. It is expected that Facebook’s social graph will become just as important as MySpace’s own and both will be available to users.

For a start, Facebook share buttons should be rolled out on MySpace Music and other content-focused areas. Facebook users should also be able to log in using their credentials to access some of the features on MySpace. What it means for MySpace users who may or may not be Facebook users as well is less clear, but perhaps a merger of the two accounts or at least the possibility to share the friends list is not com… (read more)

When Google says it’s in “acquisition mode,” it’s not kidding. After staying mostly quiet on this front for the past two years or so, Google made its fourth acquisition in just a month. The company acquired AppJet, the startup behind EtherPad, a real-time collaborative word processor, for an undisclosed amount that some put around $10 million. EtherPad will close down on March 31 and the team will go on to work on Google Wave.

“We are happy to announce that AppJet Inc. has been acquired by Google. The EtherPad team will continue its work on realtime collaboration by joining the Google Wave team,” AppJet and Google announced on the EtherPad blog. “If you are a user of the Free Edition or Professional Edition, you can continue to use and edit your existing pads until March 31, 2010. No new free public pads may be created. Your pads will no longer be accessible after March 31, 2010, at which time your pads and any associated personally identifiable information will be deleted.”

For EtherPad users, the deal is not exactly good news. The product will be shut down, no new Pads can be created at this point and they have four months to get all their documents out. Professional Edition, the paid version, users will be able to export all of their data in one big ZIP file, the rest will presumably have to do it one at a time. But there’s some… (read more)

Could depression be as deadly as smoking cigarettes? Researchers from Norway and England think so. Their research, recently published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, found that depression holds a similar risk for death as smoking. (But don’t let that depress you!)

Researchers utilized a survey of more than 60,000 people and a comprehensive mortality database. However, for depressed people with some anxiety, there may be a silver lining.

The research found that depressed people with anxiety were less likely to die than those with depression alone. Dr. Robert Stewart, who led the team at the Institute of Psychiatry in Norway, said that one of the big messages from the research is that a little anxiety may actually be good for you. Researchers explain that help-seeking behavior associated with anxiety may be the key.

Dr. Stewart explained,”It would certainly not surprise me at all to find that doctors are less likely to investigate physical symptoms in people with depression because they think that depression is the explanation, but may be more likely to investigate if someone is anxious because they think it will reassure them.”

Help with Managing Depression

If you suspect you’re depressed, talk with your doctor about how you’re feeling. You can even invite a friend or family member to go with you. Symptoms of depression include frequent and prolonged feelings of sadness, loss of interest in everyday activities, lack of energy, sleeping too much or too little, difficulty with concentrating and making decisions, thoughts of suicide, and feelings of guilt or worthlessness.

Many depressed people benefit from lifestyle changes like increased exercise. Therapy involving talking with a professional, often for at least an hour each week, is helpful as well. Some depressed individuals may need medication or additional therapy.

(Image via stock.xchng)

Post from: Blisstree

Which is Worse: Depression or Smoking?