A snippet from a longer column. It’s no less worrying to us living here.
State of Paralysis
… What’s really alarming about California, however, is the political system’s inability to rise to the occasion.
Despite the economic slump, despite irresponsible policies that have doubled the state’s debt burden since Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor, California has immense human [...]
Now this is pretty cool (and a little depressing for some of us). Neil Freeman has a nifty set of subway maps, all at the same scale, of a bunch of major cities. The contrast is striking.
Here’s Paris:
Tokyo:
and BART, (San Francisco) Bay Area Rapid Transit:
The Bay Area does have a smattering of other rail systems—SF [...]
Matthew Yglesias has a post on The Declining Demographics of Suburbanism, which by all means read, but what caught my eye was this graph:
The change isn’t quite so dramatic as it appears at first glance (it’s based at 40%), but it’s dramatic enough. There are two relevant trends, say the Census Bureau.
Increases in longevity [...]
80° on the coast today. The horizon, sharp in the morning, has gone all hazy. Where’s that G&T, Jeeves?
The USGS has a nice collection of scanned historical maps of the San Francisco Bay Area. Here’s the one I was after, a c1902 map of the area where I now live.
These maps are available in medium-resolution JPEGs (this one at 1600×2161) and higher-resolution MrSID files (this one at 6614×8933). Mac users can use a [...]
The FRBSF’s Kevin Lansing wonders, and concludes with a rather noncommittal “further research is needed”; “unsatisfying”, says Mark Thoma. It seems to me that Lansing’s actual views are clear enough, a little earlier in the Letter.
Monetary Policy and Asset Prices, by Kevin Lansing, FRBSF Economic Letter
…
Beyond the setting of short-term nominal interest rates, a broader [...]
There’s always a good reason to visit the San Gregorio General Store, especially on a weekend, but this Sunday there’s a better reason than usual. SGERC does a terrific job of stream monitoring on the San Mateo County coastside, and they can use all our support.
Brother Don and Friend Gillian, proprietors of the online runners’ supply (among other things) store ZombieRunner, have opened a physical (offline?) store in the old Fine Arts theater on California Ave in Palo Alto CA (if you’re not familiar with the terrain, think Silicon Valley, Stanford, etc, and you’ll have the general idea).
Go there for [...]
My local school district serves a Silicon Valley bedroom community on the Pacific coast. The district has been shrinking for the last decade, but beneath the steady shrinkage are some interesting demographic changes.
I posted an article on the subject at Coastsider.com.
Itamar Moses’ Bach at Leipzig is in repertory at Shakespeare Santa Cruz; I saw the matinee performance on Thursday.
The NYT’s Charles Isherwood was not impressed in 2005.
Sitting through Mr. Moses’ reverent attempt to mimic the brainy irreverence of Tom Stoppard is like being forced to consume glass after glass of flat Champagne, with no hope of giddy [...]
I wrote a piece over at Coastsider.com on what is, in the event, a rather minor agenda item from the last meeting of our local school board.
The district’s middle school has reached the final stages of NCLB’s “Program Improvement” (that’s what California calls it; I think the Feds say “School Improvement”). Having failed to made [...]
Just before sunset, on my way home this evening. The view is from Highway 1, just north of Lobitos Creek. Mustard and wild radish, I think.
There’s a new link over there on the left to a nice (if I say so myself) SF Bay Area weather page.
The National Weather Service has a lot of useful information, but my favorite, the Area Forecast Discussion, can be pretty hard to read until you get accustomed to its all-caps (and sometimes rather abbreviated) [...]
Bob Herbert in the NY Times:
Our Schools Must Do Better
The latest federal test results showed some improvement in public school math and reading scores, but there is no reason to celebrate these minuscule gains. We need so much more. A four-year college degree is now all but mandatory for building and sustaining a middle-class standard [...]
Dean Baker, What’s the Problem With Less Crowding?:
It would be reasonable to think that a densely populated island with exorbitant land and housing prices would be happy to alleviate its crowding problem. That’s not the thinking at the Washington Post.
The Post had an article this morning noting the surprising fact that the number of [...]
I’ve added a new category, “local”, for posts of local geographic interest.
Where’s local? I live on Lobitos Creek overlooking the Pacific ocean, on the San Francisco peninsula, along Highway One, a few miles south of Half Moon Bay. My first “local” posts concerned the Cabrillo Unified School District, which extends roughly from where I [...]
In the previous post, we reviewed the ballot argument for Measure S, and its rebuttal. Here we look at the argument for the measure, and its rebuttal. See this post for an overview of CUSD’s latest parcel tax request.
Arguments Against Measure S
Cabrillo Unified School District wants another $875 from local homeowners with this proposed tax. [...]
(See the previous post for an overview of Measure S, CUSD’s latest parcel tax request.)
In this post, we look at the ballot argument for Measure S, along with its rebuttal. My intention is to refrain from taking sides, but to clarify ambiguous or potentially misleading language in the Measure S ballot arguments. Feel free to [...]
The Cabrillo Unified School District is asking for a $175 parcel tax on the upcoming June ballot. Measure S is the district’s fifth attempt at a parcel tax in recent memory; the preceding four all failed, more or less narrowly, to achieve the 2/3 vote required in California since Prop 13 for such taxes.
In this [...]