Aggregator

Via Tyler Cowen, this is from the abstract of a recent paper that examines mortgage loans: Interestingly, we also find that same-sex couples default significantly more (53.9%) than similar different-sex couples. But that's not quite right. Here's what the paper itself says: Male-male loan originations are associated with 2.053 percentage point higher delinquency rate relative ...continue reading "Gay men apparently default on home mortgages at high rates"

St. Louis residents can choose a variety of different city projects they believe should receive portions of the funding.

Three key concerns for Madison County Chairman candidate Chris Slusser are property taxes, economic development, and trash issues. He visited with C.J. Nasello, the host of Our Daily Show! on Riverbender.com recently. The other candidate for the chairman position, incumbent Kurt Prenzler, will be interviewed soon on the show and also have stories posted about his appearance. EDWARDSVILLE - Madison County Chairman candidate Chris Slusser, the incumbent county treasurer, gets many visits from patrons to his office about property taxes. Many want reform in this area and if he is elected, he plans to make this a top priority. “We have to expand the tax base so don’t have to increase property taxes,” Slusser said. He also said adding more manufacturing and business to the area would help regarding property taxes. “I feel we have missed some opportunities with economic development,” he said. Slusser will converse more on the country and economic development

Continue Reading

This morning the head of the city’s Building Division personally paid a visit to the LGBTQ bar that a St. Louis police SUV ran into in December. There, Building Commissioner Frank Oswald stressed to the owners of the building that the city has no intention of condemning their property or shutting down the bar located there. 

St. Louis is set to get 28 new murals throughout the city by this summer through a partnership between St. Louis city and the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis.  The effort, dubbed the St. Louis Mural Project, is funded through RAC’s ARPA for the Arts initiative.

Management changed and repairs lingered from a previous pipe burst.

The Missouri Supreme Court must now decide if a directive in the state’s redistricting law that says cities and counties must be split as little as possible in legislative district maps allows them to be split at all. In the first case testing provisions added to the Missouri Constitution in 2020, the court on Thursday […]

The post Missouri Supreme Court hears challenge to state Senate district map appeared first on Missouri Independent.

Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler has made a pretty penny cleaning out his guitar closet.  The BBC reports that a recent auction of over 120 of the rocker’s guitars and amps brought in over $10…

Source

I missed this story a few days ago: The FBI violated people’s constitutional rights when it opened and “inventoried” the contents of hundreds of safe-deposit boxes during a raid on a Beverly Hills vault in 2021, a federal appellate court ruled Tuesday. ....As part of its case against the vault, prosecutors had alleged that some ...continue reading "Court actually rules against FBI in egregious civil asset forfeiture case"

US Private Vaults has an interesting business model. It offered something akin to end-to-end-encryption for physical goods. Unlike banks and their safety deposit boxes, US Private Vaults did not collect or retain information about its customers. Nor did it retain master keys that would allow it to access stored goods. This lack of master keys […]

Every president since Gerald R. Ford through Joe Biden has issued a statement honoring the spirit of the month.

Dive into Godot – a rising star in the game engine world. You’ll learn to create platformers, RPGs, strategy games, FPS games, and more as you master this free and open-source engine with easily expandable systems. Plus, you’ll also explore techniques for game design and game asset creation – giving you the ultimate techniques to […]

Then-President Donald Trump speaks with reporters on the South Lawn of the White House in August 2019. Now in his third presidential candidacy, Trump continues to vilify the news media.

Public Domain/Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour

How a candidate treats the press while on the campaign trail is usually a good indicator of how they’ll treat them while in office. And as the 2024 general election nears, our U.S Press Freedom Tracker is making a public record of just that — cataloging statements against the press by candidates for federal office and efforts by them to diminish the media’s newsgathering capabilities.

It was certainly true for Donald Trump. From the time he declared his first candidacy for president in 2015 through to his account suspension on X (then Twitter) in 2021, Trump tweeted negatively about the press an average of more than once a day over those 5 ½ years, according to the Tracker.

And this year, as a candidate and presumptive presidential Republican nominee, he’s doing it again. His campaign, for example, barred an NBC reporter from attending an event in New Hampshire in late January, but did not provide any explanation why.

And this year, as a candidate and presumptive presidential Republican nominee, [Trump's] doing it again.

Only five days earlier, the former president said that CNN and MSNBC should “have their licenses or whatever they have taken away,” after the networks only aired a portion of his Iowa caucus victory speech.

Other candidates use similar playbooks. U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler, a Republican running for reelection in a tossup district in New York’s Hudson Valley, recently ended a monthslong effort to restrict media access to his public town hall events. Vivek Ramaswamy, who’s now suspended his Republican presidential bid, used his opening statement at a November GOP debate to target NBC News anchor Kristen Welker and the “corrupt media establishment,” while falsely claiming the media rigged the 2020 election.

From now until Election Day, our Tracker team will continue to document and highlight relevant sidelining of, attacks on, or outright barring of press from major campaign events across the United States.

Follow the Tracker’s Election Blog here.

Labor productivity was up 3.2% in the final quarter of 2023. That's nice. But for some reason I was curious about long-term averages over the past few decades. Here they are: The last five years have seen the highest productivity growth of the past 50 years with the exception of the dotcom boom. But why? ...continue reading "The pandemic produced a permanent change in productivity"

The lawsuit brought by voters contends that Senate districts in suburban St. Louis and western Missouri’s Buchanan County violate the state constitution.

The home was condemned by Brentwood's planning and zoning department found debris, animal waste, insect infestation, and other safety concerns.

Congresswoman Cori Bush, whose criticism of Israel after the October 7 terrorist attack drew a serious primary challenge and whose employment of her husband has now drawn a Department of Justice Investigation, is choosing to face her critics head on on both fronts.  Yesterday, the St. Louis Democrat appeared on MSNBC's The ReidOut and defended paying her husband Cortney Merritts for security services, saying that her campaign had trouble retaining quality staff and that Merritts, a military veteran, worked security for the campaign as a volunteer before taking on a paying role. 

The company alleged her property encroached on their proposed 147-unit neighborhood near land her late husband’s family had owned for over a century.