Manhattan Rents Dropping
But they're still incredibly high, even by L.A. standards.
Dynamist Blog
Prison Reform as Budget Reform
Though anything but plush, California's prisons are scandalously expensive, thanks largely to the bipartisan clout of the prison guards' union. The SacBee's Dan Walters reports:
It is, by a very wide margin, the costliest prison system among the largest states, with a per-inmate cost that prison officials tag at around $45,000 a year, roughly what it costs to send a youngster to one of the more prestigious private universities.
The average among the nation's 10 most populous states, according to one recent calculation, is $27,237 per year per inmate, including states with substantially higher incarceration rates, such as Texas. Therefore, prisons consume a much-higher portion of California's general fund budget than those of other states — more than 10 percent.
The other nine states' prison costs range from less than 4 percent of their general fund budgets (Florida) to 8.2 percent (Michigan) with an average of about 6 percent. Or to put it another way, were California spending an average amount on its felons, it would be spending about $4 billion less each year.
Given the state's financial collapse, Walters concludes that Schwarzenegger is right to endorse privatization: "If it's time to get serious about cutting our prison costs, private management could scarcely be worse than what we have now."
Mark Kleiman is always good for some creative ideas on producing better, cheaper criminal justice. And he's hardly some kind of Republican tool.
Remembering the Good Old Days
Jonah Goldberg puts the WaPost's salon scandal in context:
Perhaps what really offends is the flier's truth in advertising. If the Post didn't try to charge for attendance, most journalists, politicians and lobbyists would have leaped at the chance to attend. That's the way things used to work for Weymouth's grandmother, Katharine Graham, who hosted Washington's most famous high-powered salon for decades.
Of course, that was when newspapers were hugely profitable and money was the tawdriest medium of exchange. That's what makes all the outrage so quaint. It's like passengers on the Titanic refusing to leave their cabins before the steward lays out their evening clothes. Some things just aren't done.
And before Kay Graham was hosting those salons, Ben Bradlee was kickin' it with JFK.
Naomi Wolf and the Phenomenology of Angelina Jolie
Naomi Wolf's Harper's Bazaar essay on Angelina Jolie has attracted contemptuous comment. "An absurd, overwrought, swooning love letter," Willa Paskin called it on DoubleX. Paskin's disgust recalls Ron Rosenbaum's condemnation of Tom Junod's 2007 Esquire profile of the actress, which worked a strained and inappropriate post-9/11 angle.
Unlike Paskin, I do not regard Wolf as "a serious feminist and thinker." She's a feminist, certainly, but neither serious nor a thinker. She is an emoter, whose work typically generalizes from her narcissistic neediness to "the female experience." It is usually an intellectually frivolous approach.
But this time it works brilliantly, though not in the way Wolf intends.
Read the rest at DeepGlamour.
Glamour and Guts
Courtesy of Flickr user .faramarz, who has many, bloodier photos from the protests.
[Cross posted from DeepGlamour]Everyone an Author
In 1898, Nym Crinkle (the pen name of Andrew C. Wheeler) made the following prediction for a century hence. He was only 20 years or so off the mark:
Every person of fairly good education and of restless mind writes a book. As a rule, it is a superficial book, but it swells the bulk and it indicated the cerebral unrest that is trying to express itself. We have arrived at a condition in which more books are printed than the world can read. This is true not only of books that are not worth reading, but it is true of the books that are. All this I take to be the result of an intellectual affranchisement that is new, and of a dissemination of knowledge instead of concentration of culture. Everybody wants to say something. But it is slowly growing upon the world that everybody has not got something to say. Therefore one may even at this moment detect the causes which will produce reaction. In 100 years there will not be so many books printed, but there will be more said. That seems to me to be inevitable.
[Via PaleoFuture]
America's Ugliest TVs
The search is on.
Plus Sizes: The Big Picture
[Cross posted from DeepGlamour.net]
The malls are empty, and retailers are crying for customers. American women are getting heavier by the day. Yet stores like Ann Taylor and Bloomingdale's, and lines including Liz Claiborne and Ellen Tracy, are slashing their plus-size offerings — turning away potential sales and generating angry denunciations of "sizeism." What's going on?
As I explain in this article on Double X, the new women-oriented spinoff of Slate, there's a perfectly rational explanation that doesn't require an animus toward larger women. It does require graphs to explain, however, and The Washington Post, owner of Double X and Slate, has saddled the ladies with a design that can't handle more than one graphic per article, let alone multiple bar charts.
Here at DG, however, we have an ace technical and design staff. So here are the missing pictures, courtesy of David Bruner at TC[2]. (Click to see the full-size version.)
Height, by contrast, looks more like a bell curve.
Here are weights for the same two age groups:
Read the article here.
Vegetable Mandate
The state is in fiscal collapse, so the California legislature is doing what it does best--finding new things to regulate. The latest a vegetable mandate for day care center lunches. The LAT's Mary MacVean reports:
The Assembly has passed a bill to set minimum standards for food in licensed child-care centers, requiring a vegetable to be part of lunch and supper and forbidding whole milk for children 2 or older....
"California enjoys a worldwide reputation for its sunny, healthy lifestyle," said the bill's author, Assemblywoman Julia Brownley (D-Santa Monica). "Childhood obesity rates threaten to steal this enviable position."
The bill, which passed the Assembly on Wednesday by a 48-27 vote, now heads to the Senate.
If it becomes law, AB 627 would require low-fat or skim milk to be served to children 2 years old and older. It would limit sugar in cereals and eliminate deep frying and sweetened drinks. It also would establish an 18-month pilot project to evaluate stronger nutrition and physical activities standards.
Next up: a bill to force the kids to eat those vegetables.
Sneaking in Command and Control
The WaPost notes that the "cap-and-trade" bill sponsored by Henry Waxman and Edward Markey is, in fact, loaded with all sorts of direct federal regulation of a decidedly dictatorial command-and-control nature.
In fact, the bill also contains regulations on everything from light bulb standards to the specs on hot tubs, and it will reshape America's economy in dozens of ways that many don't realize.
Here is just one: The bill would give the federal government power over local building codes. It requires that by 2012 codes must require that new buildings be 30 percent more efficient than they would have been under current regulations. By 2016, that figure rises to 50 percent, with increases scheduled for years after that. With those targets in mind, the bill expects organizations that develop model codes for states and localities to fill in the details, creating a national code. If they don't, the bill commands the Energy Department to draft a national code itself.
States, meanwhile, would have to adopt the national code or one that achieves the same efficiency targets. Those that refuse will see their codes overwritten automatically, and they will be docked federal funds and carbon "allowances" -- valuable securities created elsewhere in the bill that give the holder the right to pollute and can be sold. The Energy Department also could enforce its code itself. Among other things, the policy would demonstrate the new leverage of allocation of allowances as a sort of carbon currency -- leverage this bill would be giving to Congress to direct state behavior.
The editorial hints that these sorts of provisions have been inserted because the bill's authors are counting on fellow members of Congress not to read what they're voting on. They undoubtedly remember how easy it was to get Congress to ban incandescent light bulbs by sneaking a provision into the Bush-era energy bill.