Graphic Novels for Five Bucks

I've got a bunch of graphic novels and trade paperbacks up for sale on Ebay if anyone is interested.  All the comic-cons this year have left me a bit overstocked so take advantage.  They're all going for five bucks each.  They include the first ten 100 Bullets collections, 30 Days of Night, Sin City & Hellblazer.  Click here to see the list.

Youngstown Will Demolish 285 Abandoned Properties. Can We Help Do More?

Mayor Williams continues his assault on abandoned properties with $725,000 obtained from state and county funds.  That money will be used to tear down 285 structures in the city.  According  to this article at WKBN.com, the city will have demolished 410 structures in 2010 and more than 2,000 in the past few years. 

This work is vitally important to making the city safer and more attractive. Over the last three decades we've grown accustomed to seeing blighted areas and abandoned properties.  There is no reason for those sights to become the new normal.  The Williams administration has shown that a concerted effort to remove blight can help urban spaces immensely.  Market St. has improved, especially with the help of CCA.  Individual neighborhoods on the south and east sides look better because so many abandoned lots have been returned to green space rather harboring the rotting hulks of abandoned homes.  This kind of focus is expensive but it is worth the effort.

I wonder if it would be worth the effort to hold some sort of fundraisers to accelerate the process of  removing blight.  The cost of demolition is only a few thousand dollars per house so it wouldn't take much effort to raise the funds to really make an impact in the right neighborhood.  Perhaps we could get some corporate sponsorship.  An "Extreme Makeover: Urban Edition" perhaps?

Made in the USA is a Good Thing

Will Ashworth at Investopedia has a good article up today listing the reasons why he thinks 'Made in the USA' makes more sense than imported from overseas.  It's well worth checking out:

For the past several years, I've held the contrarian belief that Canadian and American companies doing business in North America should manufacture closer to home. For me, it comes down to being more responsive to your customers' needs. We've become a society focused on cheap price, and only now consumers are realizing this comes at a price. Manufacturing jobs have moved to Asia by the millions, replaced by lower-paying positions in the service industry. Walmart (NYSE: WMT) argues that saving you money lets you live better. Those on the other side of the argument believe savings in one hand have come at the expense of wages in the other. Who is correct is likely unanswerable. What I do know is that making products thousands of miles away is about as sensible as driving all the way across town to save 5 cents a gallon for gas. I believe "Made in the U.S.A." wins. Here are my reasons why:

Hubbard's NanoLogix Lands a Contract with the EPA

Local company NanoLogix has enjoyed success recently with its new Petri dish capable of detecting micro-organisms such as bacteria and viruses in half the time standard dishes show their presence.  Yesterday the company received more good news.  From Marketwire:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it has entered into a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with NanoLogix. The Agency and NanoLogix will work to design a rapid diagnostic method to detect bacterial threats, including E.coli and Cryptosporidium in drinking and source water. Scientists from the EPA and NanoLogix will use the company's rapid detection technology as a foundation for the new process, with the goal of significantly reduced test times from those achievable with current tests.

Home Security Robo Call Scam

The robo-dialing scam artists are back, this time hawking home security systems instead of car warranties.  As before, they called my business cell phone and followed their standard formula of using a recorded message to get your attention and asking you to press '1' to get further information.  Today's recorded message was meant to scare you using FBI statistics about home break-in's to sell security systems.  They called from (603) 856-0982.

"Joseph" answered when I pressed '1' and represented himself as an employee of the 'Home Security Network' and said they were affiliated with Brinks and ADT.  Joseph knew my phone number and when I asked him where he got it he claimed my cell provider must have given it to them so I could take advantage of their offer. 

"Joseph" was very interested in whether I had a bank account or a credit card and what my credit card score was.  He mentioned an installation fee and monthly management fee but didn't know what the amount of those fees would be.

Alas, "Joseph" hung up on me when I revealed that I was just wasting his time because he called me at work.  I'm sure this is just another scam to get your credit card number and personal information.  Remember folks, nothing good ever came from robo dialers.  Hanging up on them and reporting them to the Ohio Attorney General is the best thing you can do.

The Atlantic Study on Brainpower Proves Poor Education is Hurting the Mahoning Valley

The Atlantic has an article up discussing how a lack of brainpower, or "Human Capital" is harming areas like the Mahoning Valley.  They define Human Capital as "the level and concentration of skilled, energetic, and productive people."  In this case, the percentage of adults within metropolitan areas with Bachelor degrees and higher.  The Youngstown-Boardman-Warren region ranks as one of the worst in the country with only 22% of the population holding such degrees.  Youngstown on its own fares worse with only 12% of the population attaining a Bachelor's or above, which is shocking given that it hosts a fine school like Youngstown State University.

Does this disparity in education between urban areas and cities bode well for cities proper?  According to the author's conclusion: 

...this divergence is, if anything, even greater across cities and urban centers. And since human capital is the key driver of economic prosperity, this means the economic fortunes of American metros and cities are diverging and quite likely to diverge even more in the future. Economic and social inequality is increasingly overlaid with a deepening economic geography of skill and of class. That's a very serious problem - and one that's getting worse.

Youngstown is making a lot of noise with new jobs and opportunities that would seem to stand in opposition to this conclusion but there is an awful lot of growth in businesses and industries outside the city.  Companies like what they see in Austintown, Liberty and other surrounding communities.  Of dire consequence is the current state of the Youngstown city school system.  The failure of this institution could multiply in effect and damage the city proper for years to come unless things turn around quickly.