Publicly financed Stadiums: Dallas says no to a giveaway

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Gary Cartwright:

THE POSSIBLE RETURN OF THE DALLAS COWBOYS to their 1960 birthplace at Fair Park seemed so right that you just knew it was going to go wrong. Until the Cowboys moved to an Irving freeway intersection in 1971, they were Dallas’s team?all of Dallas, not just the rich suburbs?and certainly not America’s team. But with the announcement in August that the team’s new home would be Arlington, which isn’t even in Dallas County, the dream died, doomed by the laws of physics: the collision of an irresistible force like Cowboys owner Jerry Jones with an immovable object like Dallas mayor Laura Miller and the political inertia that resulted.

I applaud UW Grad and current Dallas Mayor Laura Miller’s realistic position on this. Quite different than the local Miller Park fiasco….. Background links: Alltheweb | Clusty | Google | Teoma | Yahoo

Japan: one Gigabit/sec for $40 a month

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Norie Kuboyama and Tomomi Sekioka:

Softbank, the second-largest provider of high-speed Internet access in Japan, said Monday that Yahoo Japan and Softbank BB would start offering a new optical fiber-based broadband service. Softbank will provide the service at speeds of up to one gigabyte per second and charge users ?4,200, or $38, a month, the company said in a statement.
(Surely this is a typo — the word here has to be Gigabit.)
Softbank and NTT, the nation’s former state monopoly for domestic telephone services, are competing to become Japan’s largest provider of high-speed Internet access . . . NTT last week said that it would cut its basic monthly fee by ?50 in order to compete with Softbank and KDDI, Japan’s second-largest mobile phone company.

Via David Isenberg

Cisco CEO Chambers calls for education reform & broadband push

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Chambers did not get specific with respect to education reform, but did mention some problematic data:

  • Fewer than 6 percent of master’s degrees issued in the U.S. in 2001-02 were in engineering, and fewer than 1 percent were in math, Chambers noted.
  • The U.S. is also lagging behind most industrialized nations in broadband adoption, Chambers said. Japanese consumers have access to broadband speeds 400 percent to 500 percent faster than in the U.S., he said. “We’ve got to move faster,” Chambers added.

David Isenberg summarizes Japan’s successful broadband approach here. He also notes that the US has fallen to thirteenth vis a vis other nation’s broadband adoption rate.

Recent Rental Cars

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I’ve rented a variety of cars recently. Car magazine does a nice job of rating autos using their “Good, Bad & Ugly” approach. Here goes:

  • The Good

    Mazda6. Excellent handling, mileage, four cylinder engine overworked, turning radius not great (reminds me of the soon to be retired Taurus’s poor turning)

    Toyota Camry Machine like, excellent quality, could use some style.

    Nissan Altima Points for some style, decent handling, V-6 reasonably fun

  • The Bad:

    2004 Toyota Avalon Terrible handling… difficult to read dashboard

    2004 Ford Mustang. I assume the 2005 will be much, much better

  • The ugly

    Ford Expedition Hard to see the point, very big, poor mileage, essentially a very expensive pickup truck.

Political Jihad and the American Blog – Jay Rosen

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Jay Rosen takes a useful look at Journalism & Big Media (or MSM – Main Stream Media to some). I like this:

  • The real job of journalism is to help make the public lfe of the nation work well.
  • For journalists, the rise of citizen comment on the Internet should be something to celebrate and learn from.
  • The bias discourse has descended into meaninglessness, which doesn’t meant the press isn’t trapped by its own preconceptions.
  • The survival of Big Media is not critical, the survival of journalism is. There’s a big difference between those two.
  • Bloggers "who care about facts and ideas," and there are many of those, should be wary of the Orwellians on their own side, who are themselves engaged in propaganda– the charge they are most likely to hurl at others.

Interesting Spin on City Tax Hike….

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Judith Davidoff:

City taxes on an average house in Madison would increase $82 under Mayor Dave Cieslewicz’s proposed 2005 executive budget.
That means the owner of an average $205,359 home would contribute about $1,597 to city operations, exclusive of county, MATC or school taxes.
Overall spending under Cieslewicz’s budget would increase 3.6 percent, though the property tax levy is going up 5.4 percent.
Brasser said that was due to the reductions in state aids and other revenue sources, as well as having less in reserves to plug the budget hole.
Last year the city had $4.7 million in reserves from the mayor’s hiring freeze.
“When all other revenue sources don’t keep pace with the inflation in our expenditures, the property tax is what has to make up the difference,” Brasser said.

Ideally, this article would include some history – spending and tax increases over the past decade vis a vis population growth, inflation and city employment, among others. If find this obfuscation disingenuous….
If you have views on this, send them to mayor@cityofmadison.com (keep in mind that our total property tax increase will include school and county increases as well).
UPDATE: Dean Mosiman summarizes the Mayor’s tax increase plans.

(more…)

National ID Card?

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Declan McCullagh:

Rep. David Dreier wants to force all Americans to carry a national ID card around with them. The California Republican is not about to describe his new bill in those terms, but that’s the reality.
Dreier’s legislation would prohibit employers from hiring people unless the job applicants first obtain new federal ID cards with their photograph, Social Security number and an “encrypted electronic strip” with additional information. Any employer who fails to comply faces hefty fines and prison terms of up to five years.
Dreier is smart enough to realize that these federal IDs would be immediately forged, so he takes the next step of linking them to an employment eligibility database that’s queried by card readers whenever the ID is swiped. The employment database is required to include “all such data maintained by the Department of Homeland Security,” combined with what the Social Security Administration has on file.