August 18, 2014

QUOTE OF THE DAY

needs_auster

NY Mag: This Indictment Of Rick Perry Is Unbelievably Ridiculous

They say a prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, and this always seemed like hyperbole, until Friday night a Texas grand jury announced an indictment of governor Rick Perry. The “crime” for which Perry faces a sentence of 5 to 99 years in prison is vetoing funding for a state agency. The conventions of reporting —  which treat the fact of an indictment as the primary news, and its merit as a secondary analytic question —  make it difficult for people reading the news to grasp just how farfetched this indictment is.

Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg —  a Democrat who oversees the state’s Public Corruption unit —  was arrested for driving very, very drunk. What followed was a relatively ordinary political dispute. Perry, not unreasonably, urged Lehmberg to resign. Democrats, not unreasonably, resisted out of fear that Perry would replace her with a Republican. Perry, not unreasonably, announced and carried out a threat to veto funding for her agency until Lehmberg resigned.

I do not have a fancy law degree from Harvard or Yale or, for that matter, anywhere. I am but a humble country blogger. And yet, having read theindictment, legal training of any kind seems unnecessary to grasp its flimsiness.

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Pew: Food Stamp Use Shows Continued ‘Underemployment’ Pain

Luxuries were affordable for Linda Fish before she lost her job in retail management in 2009.

“I won’t lie. The dinners out, the perfect martinis, the salon visits with a master stylist, and the rooms at nice hotels when I was too lazy or tired to do the long commute home—these things I could afford and they made me very, very happy,” the Chicago resident wrote on her blog soon after she became unemployed.

But in the years after she lost her job, Fish “learned to stop worrying and love minimum wage.”  She gained a new appreciation for beans, pasta, and oatmeal when she took a $9 per hour job as a bookstore clerk.  It was a shock, Fish said, to go downscale “in a culture where we have been systematically weaned from living with family, cooking our own food, sewing our own clothes, walking,” she told Stateline.

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Tech Crunch: Algorithms Are Replacing Unions As The Champions of Workers

Quality of life is perhaps the single largest factor underpinning human happiness, and that quality is largely determined by one’s job. It should be no wonder then that so many activists and politicians have made improving work a key element of their advocacy for generations. The history of America is, in many ways, the history of work.

So when I look around the world today and observe who are the next champions of workers, I surprisingly don’t see them where you would normally expect. Unions were once the bastions of progressive improvements for labor, but they have been relegated to defending the status quo and are facing serious irrelevance in the United States today. Politicians as well seem almost ignorant of the changes underway in our economy, proposing laws that do little to help people and everything to help their campaign donors.

They have been replaced. The people with the most potential to fundamentally improve our jobs over the next ten years are in fact much more familiar to us. With the rise of the On-Demand Economy, Silicon Valley is taking the lead on building a better environment for work. Through labor marketplaces and mobile apps, we are creating a world where workers are fundamentally in control of their economic lives, while simultaneously questioning society’s deep-seated notions of what work should look like.

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FEE: Unicorn Governance

Our problem is that we have to fight unicorns.

Unicorns, of course, are fabulous horse-like creatures with a large spiraling horn on their forehead. They eat rainbows, but can go without eating for years if necessary. They can carry enormous amounts of cargo without tiring. And their flatulence smells like pure, fresh strawberries, which makes riding behind them in a wagon a pleasure.

For all these reasons, unicorns are essentially the ideal pack animal, the key to improving human society and sharing prosperity.

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Chicago Tribune: CPS trying to unload dozens of closed schools

More than a year after Chicago Public Schools closed nearly 50 schools for under-enrollment, there has been little progress on finding new uses for most of the now-empty buildings.

Just three of the buildings have been opened for bidding to potential developers and buyers. Aldermen, who have been charged to gather community input on preferred use of the buildings, have scheduled meetings on seven other schools.

“I think it’s moving slow,” said Ald. Walter Burnett Jr. , 27th,, who has six closed buildings in his current and former ward boundaries. “For me to have all of these meetings, my schedule doesn’t allow me to do it immediately. It should be (Chicago Public Schools) doing this, but they’re asking us to do it because they’re trying to be sensitive to the community and the aldermen. That type of sensitivity takes time.”

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Yahoo Finance: An Amazing Healthcare Revolution Is Happening In Maryland — And Almost No One’s Talking About It

When Dr. Joshua Sharfstein first visited the  Western Maryland Regional Medical Center one year ago, he thought he entered the wrong building. The hospital was too quiet.  There were no patients in the halls. No crowds in the waiting rooms. The hospital’s staff showed him entire wards that were being closed down. It was a great sign.

“I left, and I described it as the ‘anti-gravity zone’ for healthcare,” Sharfstein, the state of Maryland’s health secretary, told Business Insider in an interview last week. “Just everything was incredible. I think they were pretty far out ahead of the country at that point.”

Sharfstein had just visited what would become the foundation for Maryland’s grand experiment in healthcare reform. He was thrilled to see concrete signs fewer people were being hospitalized there.

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BGA: Paying Big for Illinois’ Local Government Glut

Without question, Illinois has too many units of local government.

The U.S. Census Bureau counts nearly 7,000 units in Illinois—about 2,000 more than any other state. The Illinois Comptroller counts more than 8,400 units of local government. And in FY 2012, collectively, those units spent in the neighborhood of $60 billion. Needless to say, that’s a lot of money.

Given governments’ share of financial struggles (like the State of Illinois) with underfunded pensions, massive debt and limited streams of income, they should turn over every stone to look for savings. And trimming units of government found to be duplicative or otherwise unnecessary should be at the top of the list. That’s why the Better Government Association has tabbed “smart streamlining” as one of its top legislative priorities.

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Business Financial Services: Top Industries for Growth in 2014

Next time you drive by a construction site, get a nail in your tire, and end up with a flat that makes you an hour late for that crucial call to Toledo, don’t get mad. Just tell your boss you were doing your part for the American economic recovery, because according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics and Sageworks that construction is what’s helping lead to our lowest unemployment in years and an improved economy.

But if you’re not so much up for thanking the errant developer who put a nail in your tire, there are a bunch of other industries that’re rapidly growing and getting this country back to where it belongs. Here are a few of the biggest growth industries, in terms of dollars and jobs, as well as some others who’ve made a mark.

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Washington Post: How much teachers get paid — state by state

How much do teachers across the United States get paid?

Here is data, state by state, collected from the National Center for Education Statistics by Jon Boeckenstedt, associate vice president at DePaul University in Chicago. The data are for 2013 and represent the estimated average annual salary of teachers in public elementary and secondary schools. Boeckensted’s original map, here on the Higher Ed Data Stories blog, has information for earlier years, as well. You can find theNCES original data here.

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CARTOON OF THE DAY

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