State expects $1.4B less in tax revenue; more cuts expected

[The state's chief economist Arun] Raha sees no indication things will turn around soon. "The Great Recession is turning out to be a never-ending nightmare," he said. "I truly wish I could assure you this nightmare is about to end, but I see no end in sight."
This story fills me with ( Read more... )

Apparently one industry that's still doing well in the economic downturn is craft brewing. This AP article claims that demand is growing so much that some craft brewers are reducing distribution to serve the local market. I'm not convinced that this is an actual trend, but the article is still an interesting reflection of the gradually evolving U.S ( Read more... )

On Sunday the Seattle Times published a story with the provocative headline, "Why straight-A's may not get you into UW this year". I haven't read the story, but the gist of it, as far as I can tell, is that the UW is cutting the number of freshman slots reserved for in-state students by 150 this year. They admitted 4017 in-state freshmen last year ( Read more... )

Edward L. Glaeser's NYTimes article "How Seattle Transformed Itself" has many hallmarks of an ideologue promoting a pet theory, but it's still an interesting overview of the evolution Seattle's economy has gone through in the past 130 years. It's undeniably true that the city is much more economically diverse than when I moved here in 1984, and ( Read more... )

Interesting rah-rah piece at time.com about some of the ambitions behind the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (a.k.a. the stimulus) and how things are going.Snippet ( Read more... )

I'm guessing that most locals will have heard this news already, but there may be a few out-of-towners who would be interested: Elliott Bay Book Co. moving to Capitol Hill. The new location is between Pike and Pine on 10th, just a block off Broadway. The interesting tidbit in this story is that they didn't move because of rent, but because of a ( Read more... )

Used copies of the DVD for Tarsem Singh's The Cell (2000) are available at Amazon for as low as 78 cents. I'm not sure I understand the economy behind this price.

So I stopped by Cellophane Square on my lunchbreak today. I picked up used DVDs of Jean Cocteau's The Blood of the Poet (Le sang d'un poète, 1930) and John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China (1986). Both were tagged $12.99. "I know for a fact that that's mistagged and should be $6.99," the guy behind the register said about Big Trouble. Well, ( Read more... )

Sheesh, go away for a couple of weekends and the whole neighborhood goes to hell! Walking past Mad Pizza this morning on my way to Roxy's Diner, I saw a sign in the window saying they have closed shop in Fremont. Apparently they still have a store in South Lake Union, which I didn't know about. We're mostly a Pagliacci household, but I liked Mad ( Read more... )

The University has finally learned what the budget cut is going to be this biennium. The state is cutting its contribution to the budget by 26%, but it is allowing the University to raise tuition enough that the actual reduction of the budget will be 12%. This is obviously still a massive cut, and there will be layoffs. Administrative units such as ( Read more... )