The satisfaction of making three jars of jam/preserves with like 1.5tbsp left in each disappear.

I seem to remember a @gpropheter.bsky.social paper about this in Colorado. I assumed it was a fairly standard affair for mostly rural states.

I have an hour meeting with our VP for Research on Friday (as part of a faculty dev thing I’m a part of), and you better bet that this will be the entire conversation.

One byproduct highly volunteer, part-time suburban elected officials is that there’s little expertise to push back when police and fire depts ask for truly insane things (more and bigger things than they need). You get massive fire engines and all officers in solo SUVs because no one said no.

It’s perhaps not surprising that so many academics are also endurance athletes—doing a thing that takes a long time and the end seems impossibly far away; when everything tells you to stop, you keep going; you learn what’s good pain and bad pain. Physical toughness->mental toughness.

I love that Macs ship with old Mac (System 7-early OSX; Geneva and Monaco) fonts, but for some reason not Chicago.

Wake up, hon. The USNWR public affairs rankings just dropped, and they’re janky as hell.

Coming back to Ellen’s APPAM presidential address in JPAM. I agree with all of this. We should focus more policy and management research on local governments; however, we should do so with an understanding of them. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.10…

Revenue is now up 4.2%, or $1.6 billion, three-quarters of the way through the fiscal year. @benszalinski.bksy.social reports.

This one hurts.

Some exciting stuff here.

Related to my posts about the Cook County property tax report and schools.

There’s a lot to unpack in this that has almost nothing to do with the title of the article. If you’re familiar with IL politics, you’ll immediately clock them.

My students are often surprised when we discuss the kinds of things that the state does for distressed local governments in IL—which is basically nothing. The level of distress must be so high that immediate insolvency is the concern. There’s a whole range of distress that is being ignored.

I don’t talk about this much, but today is proud husband day.

Time for this again

Wait, Strange New Worlds pulled a “All Good Things…”!?

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S3e7 “What is StarFleet?” Seems aimed right at our time. Uhura: “StarFleet is the people, not the other way around” (Yes, I’m behind. Yes, this is the best Trek since DS9.)

Whew, Operation Eagle Claw vibes, except it was (thankfully) successful.

Preaching to the choir here. But also, yes!

I forget every single year that the Tour of Flanders is streamed (in the US) on the one service I refuse to subscribe to. Being back the glory days of GCN.

I remember during the Bosnia bombing campaign (1999) Yugoslavia shot down a F-117. I was at my grandparents, who were deeply anti-war. And yet, my grandfather woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me we rescued the pilot. You always celebrate, no matter what.

👇

This is very good

This is a fantastic way to visualize these data.

People in town for MPSA: I’ll be downtown on Friday (4/24) for some other stuff (roughly 4-6pm), but before and after are open. I’d love to see some of you!

This is bad for several reasons, but, as a reminder, SBE funding supports all kinds of data collection efforts, some of which have been ongoing for decades.

A new study argues an Illinois millionaires tax could raise $4 billion for property tax relief, K-12 funding or both. And Democrats may not get a better moment to push it, @brendenmoore.bsky.social writes. buff.ly/ZaTgB5G

Convergence! Mostly due to a slowdown in private employment, not local govt employment.

People in town for MPSA: I’ll be downtown on Friday (4/24) for some other stuff (roughly 4-6pm), but before and after are open. I’d love to see some of you!

Argh at the journal editors that send me stuff to review that’s well outside my wheelhouse but also super interesting. I want to say no, but I also would like to read the paper!

Interesting. Uses the Zotero API (rather than a local db) to do most of this.

Move fast and break things, they said. Oops, we moved too fast and triggered an ice age. Sooorrrryyyy.

I’m waiting for the day when I review a paper that says this.

The teaching economic development gift that keeps on giving.

Seems more appropriate now than this morning.

So this is what seeing Apollo 8 was like.

Couple of things. 1. It’s unusual for state-level folks to (appropriately) blame school districts. They’re the largest portion of the total levy in almost every place. 2. School districts basically have no other revenue source than the property tax, so if costs rise, this is their only option.

Academic hiring should happen on a more normal schedule.

Resisting the urge to show that pic of Charlie Day with the strings everywhere while I lecture about the site selection process and consulting industry.

It turns out when I am trying to type “gt” (the R tabling package), I often muscle memory this into “git”. Which is always fun to troubleshoot because my brain cannot distinguish the two.

@timbartik.bsky.social (2019) Making Sense Of Incentives: Taming Business Incentives to Promote Prosperity. Link: www.upjohn.org/research-highl…

I don’t like that all the Belgian one days renamed themselves. Like, I don’t know what In Flanders Fields is, but I do know Gent Wevelgem (they’re the same for none cycling folks).

Saturday night is the perfect time to note that I finally published the historical Chicago zoning data I put together a few years ago danielkayhertz.com/zoning

There are a lot more local governments than you think.