Year: 2012
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Still No Final Design as C’ville Bypass Approaches Construction
by James A. Bacon I’m back from Vegas (nothing happened there that had to stay there, by the way), and I’m catching up on what I missed while I was gone. It seems that the Charlottesville Bypass had one of its periodic flare-ups, as many citizens got it into their heads that they should be…
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How Smart Buildings Will (Indirectly) Shape Human Settlement Patterns
by James A. Bacon I had one overriding question when I came to the Niagara Summit: Will the new investment driven by cutting-edge Building Automation technology have an influence upon human settlement patterns? More specifically, will the technology of smart buildings make existing commercial buildings so obsolete that it will make sense to tear them…
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M2M, Big Data and Energy Conservation
by James A. Bacon The movement to squeeze more energy costs from commercial and industrial buildings in the United States has only begun to fulfill its potential. That’s the dominant impression I have so far from attending the biennial Niagara Summit here in Las Vegas. This conference brings together scores of players, from giants like…
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Bacon on the Job: Boning up on Smart Buildings
Here I am in sunny Las Vegas, actually doing work. I’m attending the biennial Niagara Summit organized by Richmond-based Tridium, where my wife works as financial director. Niagara is a software platform for connecting distributed devices — sensors, monitors, control devices — that work behind the scenes in an increasing number of the things we…
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Something Stinks About This Tax Proposal
By Peter Galuszka Pick a number. Any number. Could 49,000 jobs be created? How about 44.000 jobs? It could be 77,000 jobs, or maybe as few as 900 jobs. These are the all-over-the-board possibilities suggested by the grandly-named Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy in Springfield, which touts itself as a non-partisan think tank, when,…
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The Emerging Education Paradigm: Virginia Tech’s Math Emporium
There are no professors in Virginia Tech’s largest classroom, the Math Emporium, writes Daniel De Vise with the Washington Post, only “a sea of computers” and a staff of instructors who roam the lab and dispense assistance as needed. Welcome to the brave new world of higher education, in which 8,000 Tech students a year…
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A Win-Win Way to Restructure Virginia’s Tax Code
Restructuring Virginia’s tax code by taxing services and using the proceeds to roll back business and income taxes would stimulate $340 million in additional investment, create 77,000 jobs and increase real disposable income by $2.78 billion under one of nine scenarios studied by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy in a new study, “Tax…
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Do Houses Pay their Own Way?
by James A. Bacon There is a widespread sentiment among Virginia county officials that houses are money losers for local governments, especially when families have school-age children. Families do not pay enough in property taxes to cover the local share of the cost of K-12 education. Neal Barber, president of the Community Futures consulting firm,…
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Still Waiting for Higher Ed Reform in Virginia
by James A. Bacon Governor Bob McDonnell has let the presidents and boards of Virginia’s public colleges and universities know that he’s not happy with the rising cost of tuition. The just-passed 2012-2014 budget will provide more than $230 million in new funding for the higher ed system. Alluding to mandatory tuition price caps enacted…
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Austerity, Recession and Staving off Boomergeddon
A year and a half ago, I went out on a limb and predicted that the budget austerity plan implemented by the newly elected Conservative Party in the United Kingdom would pay off. While chopping down the size of the budget deficit would act as a Keynesian-style depressant on the economy, I hoped that re-establishing…
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The Drones in our Future
By Peter Galuszka The backyard of my house in the piney woods of southern Chesterfield County is shaped like a half moon surrounded by very tall and skinny loblollies and gum trees. It faces north and can be a good place for aircraft watching. I live maybe 20 miles as the crow flies from Ft.…
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Housing Needs More Freedom, Innovation, Not More Loans
This post is based upon remarks I made in a panel discussion yesterday, a blogger luncheon on Housing & Opportunity hosted by Housing Opportunities Made Equal. — JAB Housing policy is badly flawed, the artifact of the-Post World War II era of boundless geographic expansion of our metropolitan regions. Here in Virginia, we must thoroughly…
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Who’s Paying for McDonnell’s Happy Talk TV Ads
By Peter Galuszka It’s hard to have your ego dunned. Yet it’s happened to Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, who, according to the Quinnipiac University, lost five points in a popular poll thanks to his disastrous 2012 General Assembly session that brought the arrests of pro-abortion rights protestors on Capitol ground and a spate of…
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Boomergeddon Watch: Social Security
by James A. Bacon File this under the “Long, Slow Demise of America’s Democratic Welfare State”… The Social Security and Medicare Boards of Trustees have published their 2012 annual report on the financial condition of Social Security and Medicare, and the news just keeps getting worse. The combination of a slowing economy and a payroll…
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Commonwealth Lines up Talent for Infrastructure Deals
An important story that I (and everyone else) missed… The Office of Transportation Public-Private Partnerships (OTP3) announced earlier this month the selection of its team of consultants to help in negotiations with complex P3 deals. (See the press release.) Developing a bench of outside consultants is critical as the Commonwealth pursues partnerships to build billions…