New York City's many Chinatowns

This isn't breaking news, but I thought it was interesting: Queens has two Chinatowns, Flushing and Elmhurst, and Flushing has a larger Chinese population than Manhattan's Chinatown. Brooklyn also has its own Chinatown in Sunset Park, which is dominated by immigrants from Fujian Province. This is not to be confused with Little Fuzhou, an enclave in Manhattan's Chinatown of immigrants from the capital and largest city of Fujian Province. There is apparently a budding Chinatown in Edison, NJ, though it's more like a downsized version of Monterey Park rather than the traditional crowded urban Chinatowns. Monterey Park was the first suburban Chinatown, which has expanded such that Asians constitute a majority of the population of the sprawling San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles (which, of course, has a more traditional downtown Chinatown).

LA's partial parking privatization

The LA Times reports that Los Angeles is considering "privatizing" ten public parking garages to fill a budget shortfall. The story is, unfortunately, a reminder of how infrastructure "privatization" is often little better than the status quo, and how media reporting of the issue can doom real reform.

Whereas pure privatization would mean selling the buildings and underlying land to anyone for any use, this scheme is actually a 50-year outsourcing of the garages' management (mostly, at least) and profits (again, mostly). The new "owners" could only use the structures to park cars, and using them to house people and businesses that would increase the walkability of the areas where the garages are located is out of the question.

True privatization would also bring in more money for the city, which is the stated goal of the privatization. The garages would be worth more if they were being sold with complete development rights, and the tax revenues from whatever's built on them (not to mention possible increases in adjacent properties' values) would probably exceed the "small negotiated share of future proceeds" that the city "could retain."

The only possible benefit I can see to this plan is that parking rates will move upwards towards the true market price. But even that would be too much for the city to stomach, as the city would "retain authority over parking rates at the garages" – and who wants to guess which way they'll be pressured to push prices?

The potential downfall of this plan, however, is that the public may forever associate privatization with this pseudo-corporatism, as happened in Russia in the early 1990's and Chicago's parking meter privatization scheme last year, which could impede future, more truly libertarian urban reforms.

Denver beats LA in per capita medical marijuana dispensaries

Despite all the hype about California's medical marijuana dispensaries, it looks like the metropolitan area with the most dispensaries per capita is not even in the state. It's Denver, according to NORML. Denver has about one dispensary for every 3,000 people (200 dispensaries spread amongst 600,000 people), compared with Los Angeles, which has only 1,000 dispensaries serving 10 million people, or one for every 10,000 residents.

According to US News & World Report, Colorado was actually the first state to tax medical marijuana (which ensures that money-habit state legislatures will have an interest in the industry's survival), since California law treats the dispensaries as non-profits, not subject to taxes. The Washington Times, however, claimed that it was "the second state, behind California, to tax and regulate medical-marijuana sales," but I have a feeling they're confusing "and" with "or."

Nevertheless, California may reclaim its title as the most pot friendly state if they outright legalize the drug through a 2010 ballot initiative.

DEA: most marijuana is laced, smoked at rock concerts; Rohypnol common, but rarely encountered

This is what the DEA had to say about marijuana consumption in Delaware in 2008:

Adults remain the predominant users of marijuana, especially in large social gatherings, such as rock concerts. Reports indicate that marijuana is typically smoked in combination with crack cocaine, heroin, and PCP.

In my book, "typically" means "most of the time," or close to it. Also – "rock concerts"? Seriously?

Update: I also found another doozy in the DEA's 2008 California summary. In the prescription drugs section, it says "Rohypnol is rarely encountered by law enforcement within in the greater Los Angeles area," but then a couple paragraphs later, in the other drugs section, it says "Vicodin, Ritalin, Rohypnol, Ketamine, and Valium are commonly diverted pharmaceutical narcotics."

Public ranting sessions in NYC

The NYT has a funny and interesting article on a peculiar New York City custom: allowing any and all citizens to have their say about a law at its signing. In this case, Mayor Bloomberg had to endure four hours of public comments by people supporting and opposing (apparently in equal measure numerically, but I'm not sure about time-wise) the City Council's recent vote to give Bloomberg a shot at a third term. This goes against the result of referenda in 1993 and 1996, when New Yorkers voted to impose the current limits, though Bloomberg argued (and a bare majority of the City Council agreed) that the financial crisis obliges him to seek another term in office. The Times has a little history on the city's practice:

The tradition of allowing the public to speak before a bill is signed dates back at least as far as the 19th century, and has been known to sway a mayor. Once, after hearing hours of fiery testimony in 1897, Mayor William L. Strong vetoed a bill regulating sidewalk vendors.

I like the example they chose, and I think the practice would be particularly useful with regards to those sorts of anti-libertarian laws that largely affect individuals, small businesses, and generally groups without access to lobbyists. Maybe it would have stopped Los Angeles from passing this law affecting food vendors in that city.

Then again, maybe not – I imagine that if there were any modern instances of mayors or council members changing their minds after hearing public comments, the Times would have mentioned them.

Voltaire: a detriment to public health, safety, and welfare

Robert Darnton has an article in the New York Review of Books about the history of written information, and in it he discusses textual stability and the weak de facto intellectual property rights of authors. Apparently, even the best engaged in and profited from what America's two biggest cities say is "detrimental to the public health, safety, and welfare":

The most widely diffused edition of Diderot's Encyclopédie in eighteenth-century France contained hundreds of pages that did not exist in the original edition. Its editor was a clergyman who padded the text with excerpts from a sermon by his bishop in order to win the bishop's patronage. Voltaire considered the Encyclopédie so imperfect that he designed his last great work, Questions sur l'Encyclopédie, as a nine-volume sequel to it. In order to spice up his text and to increase its diffusion, he collaborated with pirates behind the back of his own publisher, adding passages to the pirated editions.

Mexicans threaten American way of life

On NPR today was an interview with Joe Matthews, who recently wrote a piece for the Washington Post in which he made a startling discovery: Spanish-language news in Los Angeles is undoubtedly better and more serious than its English-language counterparts. The article details the news one night on an English-language station – the usual local news fluff – and then gave a minute-by-minute run-down of the content on a Spanish-language station, and the difference was clear:

"There's no comparison in the coverage," says Josh Kun, a communications professor at the University of Southern California who closely follows Spanish TV. "For people here, there are two places to look for better news: BBC News and Spanish-language news."

The one catch is that Spanish-language TV is more biased, mostly with issues regarding immigration:

The two stations' immigration coverage is deeply sympathetic to undocumented immigrants, with on-air reporters encouraging viewers to join national immigration rallies. Macin, the KMEX general manager, notes that her station's philosophy is "a su lado" (on your side).

This seems like a pretty minor issue, considering the complacent and blatantly biased journalism that passes for news in the media these days.