I'm not sure whether I should be impressed or repelled by the tenacity of human lust, but it seems like one of the first businesses in New Orleans to re-open will be a strip club. What customers are there to be had in the ruined city? Military and law enforcement... some of whom are driving drunk.

The social situation is deteriorating in New Orleans, with the looters now including police officers. Officials are saying that the city may be uninhabitable for a month.

If you have funds to spare for the relief effort, the Red Cross is taking donations.

David Bernstein is blogging again about the collapse of the housing bubble, which has led me to check into exactly how much value I can lose on a house and still break even over a given period of time.

The average price of a house in the Baton Rouge area appears to be about $220,000. I'm currently paying $510/month on rent. The shortest period in which I could end up staying here is probably six months, one hiring cycle in academia. This means that if I end up losing more than $3,060, or about 1.4%, in the difference between my buy and sell price plus whatever I ended up paying interest-only, it's cheaper to rent.

David Bernstein over at the Volokh Conspiracy is seeing potential signs of pressure on the housing bubble.

Independence day has just ended, and in the spirit of a holidy, I have something positive to report: some parts of the U.S. are making significant progress in improving their environment, meeting the Kyoto standard even though the White House failed to support it — and rather than going bankrupt doing it, they're actually coming out ahead economically. The trick appears to be to take a large number of little steps, all couched in terms of solving other problems that citizens want dealt with (such as traffic congestion or energy costs), redirecting saved money from energy into public transit, and nudging businesses to support public transit. Portland, Oregon's carbon dioxide emissions are at pre-1990 levels now.

I found out through Rox Populi that Austin, Texas is putting up for a vote a measure to ban smoking in most public places. Smokers, such as the ones at Pandagon [Edit: that link doesn't seem to have survived Pandagon's reorganization, but there is an Internet Archive copy available] and Norbizness are already ranting about it, making the usual claims that it is going to destroy the economy, kill off live music, and is a violation of smokers' rights, along with the somewhat less usual claims that the worker health issues are unimportant because they're just the cover for the evil liberal commie non-smoker agenda to burn smokers at the stake and tear down the rock music scene, after taking away all their pot and setting fire to their SUVs.

There is a fascinating article over at Talking Points comparing what Clinton was trying to do in his final years (shoring up Social Security) with what Bush is trying to do now (complete destruction of Social Security, to be replaced with stock market accounts). It is well-supported, and well worth a read.

With all the other things to worry about (people in the US, even US citizens, being made to disappear without any semblance of due process or judicial review, a pro-torture yes-man being shoehorned into the attorney general's office, North Korea with yet another nuclear weapon, a rapidly destabilizing Middle East), it's kind of funny that the thing with the most emotional impact on me would be a casual statement by a Chinese economist.