New York’s state and local governments and their taxpayers are on an unsustainable fiscal path, despite some improvements and a public perception that the outlook is far brighter, a nonpartisan task force found in a report released Tuesday. The state is plagued, as it has for decades, by “structural budget problems” and partisan politics in budgeting, the task force found. The long-term state deficit “has been papered over with gimmicks” that continue, it said. “There is no assurance that the state’s structural debt is sustainable,” the report stated. It also warned of a “growing number of illiquid, near-insolvent cities and counties with structural budget deficits.” “New York’s fiscal future sits on shaky ground,” the report concluded.
Quotes
The real lesson here isn’t about the legal implications of Instagram’s terms of service — it’s about how little we trust Facebook to do the right thing.
Automobiles kill more people on our streets than guns do,” Philip Van Cleave, the president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, said on CNN’s “Piers Morgan” show Monday night. “This was a maniac in a state that had a lot of gun control.
A Rising Chorus, But Not Quite Consensus, On Guns – NYTimes.com
COOL! LET’s BAN CARS!!!! BIKES FOR ALL!!!
As the NY Tech Meetup moves forward, it has an opportunity to establish itself not just as the representative body of in increasingly important constituency of technology makers in the country’s greatest city, but also as a critical link between that constituency and the rest of the city.
What are the sustainable business models that successful civic startups are using, whether they use legislative data or other reuse of public sector information? What are the real costs associated with opening up government data to make it usable, both for government and entrepreneurs? And how does it balance against what datasets, at the federal, state or local levels, are the most valuable? Are they open and usable? If so, who’s using them and to what effect? If not, why not?
The Bloomberg administration sees crowdfunding as complementing, rather than supplanting, government services to Sandy victims. “Our low-interest loans can serve different needs,” a spokeswoman said. “Crowdfunding sites generally work best for highly consumer-facing businesses, [such as] a dynamic brand that consumers would want to contribute money to. The emergency loan requires no competition to meet a target.”
NYC businesses crowdfunding Sandy Relief | Crain’s New York Business
Mayor Bloomberg has brought more openness to all areas of city government than anyone else,” Benjamin Branham, a spokesman for the corporation, said. “E.D.C. is pleased to work with the comptroller to provide additional transparency to its operations so that New Yorkers can better understand the resources being committed to increase economic development and job creation throughout the five boroughs.
Traditionally in Christianity, sin was what you did to other humans,” said Kallistos Ware, a prominent Orthodox theologian based in Britain, “but Bartholomew insisted that what you do to the animals, the air, the water, the land can be sinful, not just folly, and that was quite a change.
A news app needs to care about its software to the same high degree that print publications care about their paper, page design, and distribution.
Many people believe that living on the Web grants them membership in an exalted class to which old laws cannot possibly apply. This sort of arrogance takes your breath away, until you realize just how brilliant a corporate strategy it is. If you stopped to reckon with every 80-year-old zoning law or tried to change the ones that you knew your customers would violate, you’d never even open for business.