"The new majority opinion transformed Citizens United into a vehicle for rewriting decades of constitutional law in a case where the lawyer had not even raised those issues." —Take your time with the Jeffrey Toobin history of Citizens United. Save it for a rainy day! Oh look it's about to rain.
It turned out that the business model for educational content creation (in "language arts," at least) is rather less romantic than I had envisioned. Content assignments are farmed out to an army of small-time contractors with some kind of nominal qualifications — stay-at-home moms, former school librarians, and so on. Overwhelmingly, the assignments are not story ideas or anything the like; the basis is grade level, mean word length, schematic adherence to state educational standards (see above), and volume, volume, volume. I think the pay is per passage, rather than by the word.
The result is a stream of unmitigated crap, crap that is unremitting and remarkably homogeneous. [...]
"Since employment peaked in September 2008, local government has lost 550,000 jobs."
—Hooray, America got its smaller government! Of those jobs, 345,000 disappeared in a year. But let's not even get into these August employment numbers, just released. Why bother? It's a long-term trend, the not-working, and that's the way they ("they"!) want it.
It should perhaps however be noted that the August report does some serious correction on the June and July reports: "The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for June was revised from +46,000 to +20,000, and the change for July was revised from +117,000 to +85,000." So yeah, strike those 58,000 jobs [...]
This makes me feel like I'm going to crap my pants a little just from reading it: A ten-macchiato bike trip around New York City. Talk about your dangerous stunt nonfiction!
