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Nicole Gelinas in the Journal on why the SEC should capitalize on San Diego's pension problems to "show they're serious about policing a sector of the investment world that remains vulnerable to similar fraud." The nut of her argument is that all public pensions are potentially prey to the same temptations—San Diego ran into legal trouble with its pension fund because elected officials wanted to keep its municipal workers happy by awarding them more generous pension and health-care benefits, but also wanted to keep taxpayers happy by sticking to a lean budget. The two goals were mathematically irreconcilable. In this week's featured essay, Urbanist Joel Kotkin offers a scorching critique of the Times' Sunday dispatch on cities competing to attract the hip and highly educated—The urban silliness quotient hit a new high this week with the Times’ breathless story on Sunday about cities competing with “hipness” to attract the young. The peg for this oft-repeated tale of surging urbanism was a self-serving release by the Atlanta Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce that crowed about how in the last census their city ranked first in attracting 25- to 34-year-old educated people. [Continue reading The Creative Class Canard] And a surprising list of America's gayest cities (scroll down to the second appendix). Tampa-St. Petersburg?! Hat tip to Otis White, who points to Another interesting finding: The number of same-sex households is increasing very fast, up 30 percent since 2000. This doesn't mean that the number of gays is increasing as fast; rather, researchers told the Seattle Times, it means gays are more comfortable living as couples and disclosing their sexual orientation to government survey takers. "Basically," one told the newspaper, "we're looking at the size of America's closet."
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