Here you are, find out how your state ranks in the US. Is it being run good, or badly?
David Zalubowski / ASSOCIATED PRESS
Small but nimble, Wyoming is the best-run state in the U.S.
By Douglas A. McIntyre, Michael B. Sauter, Charles B. Stockdale, Ashley C. Allen, 24-7 Wall St.
How well run are America’s 50 states? The answer depends a lot on where you live.
For the second year, 24/7 Wall St. has reviewed data on financial health, standard of living and government services by state to determine how well each is managed. Based on this data, 24/7 Wall St. ranked the 50 from best to worst. The best-run is Wyoming. The worst-run is California.
Comparing the 50 states can be a challenge because they are so different. Some states have abundant natural resources while others rely on service or innovation. State populations also can be more rural or more urban. Some had booming industries that are waning or that have disappeared altogether. Border states with large immigrant communities have populations that are growing rapidly. Many states in the Northeast are not growing at all. All of these factors affect the finances and the living conditions in in each.
Despite these differences, states can do a great deal to control their fate. Well-run states have a great deal in common with well-run corporations. Books are kept balanced. Investment is prudent. Debt is sustainable. Innovation is prized. Workers are well-chosen and well-trained. Executives, including elected and appointed officials, are retained based on merit and not politics.
24/7 Wall St.: The states doing the most (and least) to spread the wealth
To determine how well — or how poorly — a state is run, 24/7 Wall St. weighed each state’s financial health based on factors including credit score and debt. We also evaluated how a state uses its resources to provide its residents with high living standards, reviewing dimensions such as health insurance, employment rate, low crime and a good education. We considered hundreds of data sets and chose what we considered to be the 10 most important measurements of financial and government management.
This year, as a new component of our analysis, 24/7 Wall St. obtained additional budget data for each state. Examining the state’s revenue and expenditures, and what each government opted to spend money on, allowed us to determine if a state overspent limited resources, failed to devote funds to an urgent need of its citizens or spent a great deal of money but with poor results. While we did not use expenditures or revenue in our ranking, these numbers reflect how a state is managed. Together with other budget data, living standards and government services, it provided a complete picture of the management of each state. A fuller accounting of our methodology can be found here.
The 24/7 Wall St. Best and Worst Run States is meant to be an analysis that will focus the debate about state management and financial operations. The analysis should also serve to empower and inform citizens who want who want to better understand the impact government decisions have on each state.
Read it all HERE.
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UK downgrades diplomatic relations with Iran, orders closure of Iranian embassy following attack.
Islamists poised for decisive victory in Egypt’s first post-Mubark parliamentary elections.
Largest UK work stoppage in 30 years sees 2 million public sector employees go on strike.
Former Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo heads to International Criminal Court to face charges of crimes against humanity.
NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg: “I have my own army in the NYPD.”
Today’s Big Read: Woman says she was held aboard a Scientology cruise ship against her will for 12 years.
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45,000 people will be forced out of their homes this Sunday after a 4,000-pound unexploded World War II-era bomb was found in the Rhine River ainear the German city of Koblenz.
“[I]t has been known for some time that this type [of bomb] was dropped over Koblenz [by the British Royal Air Force],” said the city’s press office.
Refusing to risk any injuries, officials have ordered the evacuation of nearly half the city’s residents. According to explosives experts, the bomb, which was exposed due to the rain-deficient Rhine’s dipping water levels, could damage windows up to a half-mile away.
In addition to the British bomb, other unexploded ordnance, including a 275-pound American bomb and a German smoke grenade, was also discovered at the site.
While the large airships are most often associated with Germany, the US Army had a large interest in the craft in the 1920′s and 1930′s. This picture shows two of the airships circling the Washington Monument. It is generally recognized that most of the real innovation in this type of aircraft was done in Germany.
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Kidnapper Sues Hostages For Breach of Contract
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Can there be no trust between a kidnapper and his hostages?
A man who held a Kansas couple hostage in their home while fleeing from authorities is suing them, claiming they broke an oral contract made when he promised them money in exchange for hiding him from police. The couple has asked a judge to dismiss the suit.
Jesse Dimmick of suburban Denver is serving an 11-year sentence after bursting into Jared and Lindsay Rowley’s Topeka-area home in September 2009. He was wanted for questioning in the beating death of a Colorado man and a chase had begun in in Geary County.
The Topeka Capital-Journal (http://bit.ly/skb0Rl ) reported that Dimmick filed a breach of contract suit in Shawnee County District Court, in response to a suit the Rowleys filed in September seeking $75,000 from him for intruding in their home and causing emotional stress.
Dimmick contends he told the couple he was being chased by someone, most likely the police, who wanted to kill him.
“I, the defendant, asked the Rowleys to hide me because I feared for my life. I offered the Rowleys an unspecified amount of money which they agreed upon, therefore forging a legally binding oral contract,” Dimmick said in his hand-written court documents. He wants $235,000, in part to pay for the hospital bills that resulted from him being shot by police when they arrested him.
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My Way “My Way is a web portal and search engine like Yahoo!, but without any banners, pop-ups or spam. No ads means more room for our terrific personalized features like weather, news, sports, finance, entertainment and more. And the My Way search engine is powered by Google, so it’s incredibly accurate.”
Gravity simply exists; it is the universal force of attraction that affects all matter. It is the weakest of the four basic physical forces, but, on the scale of everyday objects near the Earth or that of astronomical bodies, it is the dominant one. The fall of bodies released from a height to the surface of the Earth and the weight of resting bodies at or near the surface are the most familiar manifestations of gravitation, but the rotation of the Earth about the Sun, the motion of the Sun around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, and the geometric structure of the universe itself are equally the results of the force of gravitation. – Provided by Reference.com
Even the most high-tech warplane in the world is useless without its weapons. From the earliest days of aerial combat, fighter planes succeeded or failed depending on the accuracy, lethality and reliability of their machine guns, cannons, rockets and bombs. That’s why the U.S. military is hard at work on a dizzying array of pricey new guided munitions to match its trillion-dollar investment in stealth fighters, bombers and killer drones. Some are super smart. Others, super fast. A few are designed to be tiny. All of them have one purpose: to blow away the target, and only the target.
Unblinking Radar Killer
Fifty years ago in the skies over Vietnam, Russian-made SA-2 surface-to-air missiles string of test failures last year, the Pentagon put the AGM-88E on hold. Testing restarted after a few months. Now the military expects the new-and-improved radar-killer to enter service on Navy and Marine Corps F/A-18s and EA-18G radar-jamming planes in February.
Photo: U.S. Navy
Danger Room – What’s Next in National Security | Wired.com.
100 Incredible Views Out Of Airplane Windows
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Jihadi Hackers Run For Cover
December 1, 2011: On November 22, American FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) and the Philippines CIDG (Criminal Investigation and Detection Group) agents jointly arrested four computer hackers who had been working, on commission, for an Islamic terrorist organization. The hackers had been taking control of corporate telephone systems and selling stolen long distance services.Some of the men arrested had been arrested on similar charges two years ago. It’s unclear what happened to that case, but these two had a history of hacking for money and diverting some of that cash to Islamic terror organizations. Islamic terrorists have long used criminal scams to finance their terrorism. Usually this is local, but Internet based criminals tend to move around and operate internationally.
Read More.
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Google Earth, Foreign Wars, And The Future Of Satellite Imagery
DigitalGlobe, the firm that provides much of the imagery for Google Earth, is launching a next-generation satellite in 2014. However, the super-sharp images of the WorldView-3 aren’t for Google and Bing Maps: They’re going straight to the military and intelligence agencies.
DigitalGlobe, the Colorado-based imaging firm responsible for much of Google Earth’s, Bing Maps’, and Google Maps’ content, has a new satellite on the way. The WorldView-3 is a super-high-resolution remote-sensing satellite slated for a 2014 launch. Ball Aerospace & Technologies is building the satellite and ITT will be responsible for the WorldView-3′s optical imager. However, the primary audience for Worldview-3 pictures won’t be Google. Images from the new satellite are mainly intended to be sold and licensed to the U.S. government.
Firms such as DigitalGlobe and their main competitor, Virginia’s GeoEye, earn most of their money from their satellite constellations (or, for the rest of us, their satellites in space) custom-snapping pictures for customers or from resale of the regular imagery the satellites make. These clients range from Google to mining companies to, most importantly, the U.S. government.
MORE.
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Google’s highly profitable secret war against small businesses and jobs
READ.
Arsenic in Apple Juice Alarming
A new report published by Consumer Reports has parents concerned about the safety of the juice their kids drink every day. Tests of 88 samples of apple and grape juice purchased from stores in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut revealed that nine had total arsenic levels exceeding federal limits in place for drinking water and that one in four also had levels of lead exceeding the bottled-water limit. Long-term exposure to small amounts of arsenic can increase the risk of chronic illnesses like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. More …
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Stonehenge may have been a place for sun worship long before the iconic stones were erected more than 5,000 years ago, according to archaeologists who are carrying out the biggest-ever virtual excavation.
Using noninvasive technologies such as ground-penetrating radar and geophysical imaging, a team from the University of Birmingham’s IBM Visual and Spatial Technology Centre, known as VISTA, and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology in Vienna, discovered evidence of two huge pits positioned on a celestial alignment at Stonehenge.
Measuring more than 16 feet across and at least 3 feet deep, the pits lie within the Cursus, a large enclosure north of Stonehenge, which predates the prehistoric monument by up to 500 years.
“This is the first time we have seen anything quite like this at Stonehenge,” said project leader Vince Gaffney, an archaeologist from the University of Birmingham.
MORE.
Ravens use their beaks and wings to point and hold up objects in order to attract attention, much like humans use our hands to make gestures, according to a new study by German and Austrian experts.
The study is the first time researchers have observed such gestures in the wild by animals other than primates, suggesting that ravens (Corvus corax) may be far more intelligent than previously believed.
Simone Pika from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology and Thomas Bugnyar from the University of Vienna found that the ravens also use these so-called deictic gestures in order to test the interest of a potential partner, or to strengthen an already existing bond.
Children frequently use distinct gestures — such as “pointing” (“look here”) and “holding up of objects” (“take this”) — to draw the attention of adults to external objects. This typically begins around the age of nine to twelve months, before children utter their first spoken words.
Scientists believe these gestures are based on relatively complex intelligence abilities, and represent the starting point for the use of symbols and therefore also human language. As such, deictic gestures are seen as milestones in the development of human speech.
MORE.
Originally posted 2011-12-01 11:38:05. Republished by Blog Post Promoter