Daily Archives: September 12, 2007

A billion dollar boondoggle?

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Main%20Street.jpgKevin Whited reports that downtown Houston’s night life continues to dissipate from lack of demand. This despite the fact that various local governmental entities have invested at least $1 billion in the downtown area by building a baseball stadium, a basketball arena, a convention center hotel, a light rail system and assorted other goodies.
Sort of makes you wonder what would happen if even a portion of that $1 billion were invested in something that Houston really needs, such as improvements to flood control and traffic hotspots? My sense is that such an investment would dramatically lessen the risk that citizens would lose their lives or suffer property loss in the event of heavy rains (which occur with some regularity around here) or a traffic accident. Thus, we aren’t as safe as we could be, but our local governmental officials have seen to it that we are as comfortable as reasonably possible while being entertained. Gotta love those priorities.

Another Justia.com search tool

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justia.jpgAs noted earlier here and here, Tim Stanley and the folks over at Justia.com are developing some of the best and most useful legal search engines on the Web. I’ve been meaning to pass along a recent email from Tim, which introduces yet another cool tool:

“We have put online the Federal District Court case opinions and orders that are available using the opinion report in the Federal Courts’ ECF. These are updated daily. We have categorized the opinions by state, court, type of lawsuit and judge and combinations of judge and type of lawsuit. You can also subscribe to each of categories through RSS feeds to track a judge or court’s decisions on different issues. And we also give the cause of action for each case.
We are using Google’s hosted Business Custom Search Engine for the full text search. Google is now OCRing PDF image files, so even PDF files that have images of scanned documents will be in most cases full text indexable and searchable. Like the OCR of Google’s Book Search. You will need to look at the cached copy to see the highlighted searched text though, and then find in the original PDF to be 100% that what you are reading is correct. Google should be doing a pretty good job of indexing and ocring these court decisions, although it may take a few days for a new document to show up in the index.
We have also noted on the federal district court case filing database when we have a judge’s opinion (you will see a little gavel. The case filings are at here.”

Only in New York (or make that New Jersey)

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newmeadowlands-large.jpgI recognize that real estate is a bit more expensive in New York than in other places. O.K., make that a whole lot more expensive.
But $1 million per season for a football luxury suite?
This is crazy expensive and it doesn’t even include the cost of beer and brats. But it makes sense in a New York sort of way. If you are a hot-shot broker entertaining the next great hedge funds, you can’t just go out and buy a luxury suite to a Giants game (although maybe you could for a Jets game ;^)). Inasmuch as the suites are being sold on 10-year contracts and rarely change hands once they are sold, a big shot has no way to ensure that he will be able to enjoy a game in 2015 in a luxury suite unless he owns a suite. In short, it’s become the quintessential asset that money can’t buy by the time the games are being played, so the big shots better pony up now or they will be out of luck.
And when New York eventually swings a Super Bowl, can you imagine the price that these babies will be selling for?