Over a year ago, the presidents of three homeowners' associations in southwest Richardson lobbied the city to stop "half-hearted" development. What is half-hearted development? The answer was kind of fuzzy, but presumably converting old fast food restaurants into doctors' offices is considered to be half-hearted redevelopment. And it's clearly not wanted.
What I said about this topic when it came up in November, 2009, can be read here. After the jump, what's new.
Paul Krugman -- Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist (I don't know which of those makes him more suspect to Texas readers) -- has been looking into the conventional wisdom that the Texas economy has been a great success in this recession. He compiles a telling graph showing unemployment trends for Texas and New York for the last decade. I challenge you to tell which state is which without looking at the legend. Krugman suggests that "the miraculous Texas immunity to the recession is mythical."
After the jump, Krugman's explanation for why Texas, for a long time, has had faster-growing employment and population than the Northeast.
Twitter tracks from December, 2010:
After the jump, more Twitter tracks.
Consider that an order. This is a Public Service Announcement:
"Colorectal cancer screening helps people stay well and save lives. Regular colorectal cancer testing is one of the most powerful weapons for preventing colorectal cancer. Removing polyps prevents colorectal cancer from ever starting. And cancers found in an early stage are more easily treated. Nine out of 10 people whose colon cancer is discovered early will be alive 5 years later. And many will live a normal life span. But too often people don't get these tests. Then the cancer can grow and spread without being noticed, like a silent invader. In many cases, by the time people have any symptoms the cancer is very advanced and very hard to treat."
-- American Cancer Society
After the jump, what the PSA above doesn't tell you about colonoscopy.
It's that every-two-years time again. The Texas legislature is set to meet. Its biggest challenge is to close a projected $20 billion budget gap. I'll let Senator Kirk Watson (D-Austin) explain how the legislators will work their magic:
"Every session, the Texas Senate passes one version of the budget and the House of Representatives passes another. At that point, a few legislators are appointed to what's known as a Conference Committee, and they get together (often behind closed doors) to add some spending and programs to the budget, remove some investment that some folks care about, and make other changes. Then, after a month or so of work, the Conference Committee report - which is basically the final draft of the budget - gets filed in both the Senate and the House. And legislators, advocates, the media, and other Texans generally have about 48 hours, if that, to sort through an almost 1,000 page document. Even with the best of intentions and effort, folks are left scrambling to discover what's been changed, added, subtracted, divided or multiplied as they try to figure out how lots of money covering lots of items - more than $180 billion in the current budget (which includes $87 billion in discretionary money) - will be spent."
After the jump, Senator Watson's simple suggestion for improving the process.
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A child on a road trip with his family asks, "Where are we?" and the father answers, "Let's check the map. We're off the blue roads [the Interstate Highways marked in blue on the road atlas]. We're off the red roads [the US and state highways]. We're off the black roads [the county highways]. I think we're off the map altogether." It was always my dream to be off the map altogether.
After the jump, a few of the random places (and I mean random literally) that I visited vicariously last month that are "off the blue roads".
