ужасы соседнего городка

As San Francisco struggles under ballooning pension and health care costs, the city’s retirees will receive unexpected cost-of-living bonuses totaling $170 million. The city’s anticipated budget deficit for the coming year is $360 million.
/.../
On Jan. 4, an actuarial firm reported that the $13.1 billion San Francisco Employees’ Retirement System now had an unfunded liability of $1.6 billion — triple its shortfall a year earlier.

Логично. Тем временем:

Jerry Brown, California’s governor, declared a state of fiscal emergency on Thursday for the government of the most populous US state to press lawmakers to tackle its $25.4 billion budget gap.

Тут, впрочем, объявляй, не объявляй...

хозяйке на заметку

New York Times имеет дурацкую привычку требовать от читателей онлайновой версии залогиниться. К счастью, есть сравнительно простой способ этого избежать. Дело в том, что NYT хочется фигурировать в гугле, а робот гугля логиниться не умеет. Поэтому если взять фразу из статьи, найти её поиском на гугле, и потом кликнуть на линк через гугль - то логин спрашивать не будут.

анекдот

Paying homage to his guest, POTUS cited a Chinese proverb that says, “If you want one year of prosperity, then grow grain. If you want 10 years of prosperity, then grow trees. But if you want 100 years of prosperity, then you grow people,” before toasting the growth of Chinese-U.S. relations.

Не знаю, как насчёт выращивать, но по крайней мере сажать в Китае умеют. Не только кукурузу.

diversity

Гарри Рид оговаривается:

“I am going to go back to Washington and meet with the President of China. He is a dictator. He can do a lot of things through the form of government they have.

Ах, если бы Риду такую форму правительства, он бы горы своротил! Но что это? Он сказал слово "диктатор"! Это неполиткорректно, надо извиниться:

Maybe I shouldn’t have said dictator, but they have a different type of government then we have, and that is an understatement,” Reid said in the interview.

Итак, вышла новая директива политкорректности - диктатура теперь называется "different type of government". Можно ещё "alternatively democratic government". Надо понимать, заключение в Китайской тюрьме будем называть "выращивание людских ресурсов в тепличных условиях". 

науки юношей питают

Government teacher at East Ridge High School in Clermont /.../ sent the Florida Senate President a packet of nearly 100 letters – all of them opposing merit pay for teachers – which his students had written as a class assignment. In a cover letter, the teacher claimed that he had presented the bill (S.B. 6) to the students with “a neutral connotation.” And the teacher also expressed “total amazement” that every single one of his students wrote a letter opposing merit pay.

Yet, included in the packet – no doubt by accident – was the teacher’s actual assignment, which included “talking points” against S.B. 6 that had been copied from a memo (also enclosed) written from the teachers unions’ perspective. No arguments in support of S.B. 6 were included with the assignment. So, it was no great surprise that the students’ letters echoed the arguments found in the union’s “talking points” memo – sometimes word-for-word.

Сколь многому может научить ввереных ему молодых людей  такой учитель!