Art West, Inventor of Doritos, Dies: Art West was a marketing executive at Frito-Lay when he invented Doritos, the first national tortilla chip brand. He died this weekend at 97. A statement from West’s family says that they plan on “tossing Doritos chips in before they put the dirt over the urn.”
Is AMR Going Bankrupt? American Airlines’ parent company has only posted two profitable years in the last decade, its stock is at a one-year low, and Moody’s has just downgraded AMR’s stock outlook to “negative,” according to this report in the Star-Telegram. Some industry watchers believe the company is running out of cash, and when the “b-word” was raised during an investor conference, AMR’s treasurer “didn’t completely dismiss the possibility.”
Finally It’s Official: A&M Joins S.E.C: Yesterday, Texas A&M University announced that it will join NCAA’s Southeastern Conference beginning on July 1, 2012. Teams like Alabama, Auburn, LSU, Arkansas and others will begin massacring the Aggies on the football field beginning in the 2012-2013 season.
Summer intern Kelsy McCraw attended a Back on My Feet run one morning in July. She thought she’d go out, do one run with them, and then do a quick report. But after that initial run, McCraw, a former soccer player at Washington and Lee University, was hooked. She spent five weeks running with the BoMF group. Below is her report.
Sheretta Bodem is shy—not bashfully shy like a child, but hesitantly shy like somebody who’s never been able to depend on anyone. This tough-skinned 25-year-old is about 5 feet 2 inches tall with a curvy figure that is usually hidden in t-shirts, pants, and sneakers. A baseball hat sits atop her braided black hair, slung so low that it just shades her dark brown eyes, as if to reiterate her don’t-mind-me timidity. She sits across the table from me in a back storage room at Dallas LIFE, as she tells me why she walked into the shelter’s doors last November.
She’s a woman of few words, most of Bodem’s answers to my questions are succinct and to the point, but the tall wall she’s built was how she learned to survive.
Bodem says she was spoiled growing up—she always did and got what she wanted. Her mother was a truck driver, so circumstance may have edited the scope of those desires. Nevertheless, her mostly absent parent gave her little in the form of life direction. When her mom would go on her three-month driving stints, Bodem and her younger brother would stay at their less-than-attentive aunt’s home in Richland.
With no discipline, Bodem dropped out of high school at 17 because, as she explains it, it just didn’t seem that important. So, she settled at her aunt’s house with no job, no schooling, and no desire for either. Bodem describes this time in her life as “nothing,” just doing nothing and no plans to change it. At 21, she had her daughter, and at 23, her son. Bodem ruled out living with either of her children’s fathers. “I didn’t want my children to grow up in that kind of environment,” she says. Her “nothing” life at her aunt’s lingered on for a few years until her aunt began clearly favoring one of her children. Bodem wouldn’t elaborate about what happened other than “some other stuff happened…just bad stuff.” She says she really had no choice but to move out. At this point, she had lost contact with her mother and brother. So, with no other place to turn, she sought out Dallas LIFE.
And here they are, courtesy of the DBJ
UPDATE: Forbes says we’ve got the second-most of any city in the U.S. By state, Texas has the third-most.
What a 1976 Trial Tells Us About John Wiley Price: The latest investigative brouhaha surrounding County Commissioner John Wiley Price isn’t the first time the politician has been backed into a legal corner. But what does an acquittal in 1976 tell us about how Price will handle the latest trouble? In short, don’t expect him to be eager to cooperate with the prosecution.
North Texas Economy Strengthens Guanajuato Ties: Most urban areas in the United States tend to draw migrants from specific regions of Mexico, and in the case of Dallas, it is the mountainous Guanajuato (which is one reason why someone needs to launch a new MLS team, Club León USA, and stick them in the Cotton Bowl, but that’s besides the point). In the current economy, in which the North Texas economy is outpacing other parts of the country, the labor-pool network remains entrenched and stronger than ever (sub req).
Bush Raises More Than $300 Million for Library: George W. Bush still has some serious fundraising swagger.
Ryan Avent looks at Perry’s “Texas Miracle” and finds that it is a product of our four major cities. Dallas was second to New York in creating jobs in the last year. Dallas and Houston alone accounted for 10 percent of all new jobs in the U.S. One reason is energy, of course. Another reason is our tight government regulation of home financing (yes, government regulation!). But the third is our availability of housing and our openness to newcomers, wherever they come from:
Yet the big secret to success is Texan cities’ willingness to capitalize on their advantages through an extraordinary openness to growth. Relative friendliness to immigration is one source of strength. Between them, Dallas and Houston welcomed over 600,000 new residents from abroad over the past decade. That welcoming spirit extends to other Americans attracted by low housing costs.
That may explain Dallas, Ryan, but what about New York, which beat even Dallas in job creation? Top cities for job growth after the break.
A 50 percent increase in the price of bread, among others. Maybe somebody other than Rick Perry should have prayed for rain back in April? I’m not saying God doesn’t pay him much heed, but after four months I’m beginning to wonder if he’s as close to the Almighty as he claims to be.
In his zeal to undermine Rick Perry — which Zac Crain did yesterday with fewer words and more accuracy — Paul Krugman set out Sunday to prove that the Texas economy is an “unmiracle.” Kevin Williamson at National Review takes a look at Krugman’s analysis and finds it not only factually wrong but deliberately misleading.
First he suggested that we end all software patents. Now he’s got a plan to create jobs. Cubes writes on his blog:
Democrats are right, we should borrow more money. The Dems are wrong that the government knows how to spend the money. The Republicans/Tea Party are right that we have a spending problem. The Republicans/Tea Party are wrong that cutting taxes will result in more jobs.
His solution? An online system that would allow companies to bid on government loans or even equity investments. I don’t know. Might work, might not. I’m more in favor of the tried and true method of reducing unemployment. I say we go to war with Germany.
… and Farmers Branch has the biggest decline – 3.6 percent, mostly on residential valuations. Overall, the county is down about 1.7 percent this year, which is actually good news, since the county based its 2012 budget on a drop of more than 4 percent.
But back to that Farmers Branch decline. A FrontBurnervian messaged to ask how this jibed with former Mayor Tim O’Hare’s premise that the town needed more stringent ordinances to combat illegal immigration, because an influx of undocumented aliens was driving property prices down. Was his theory incorrect, or is the fact that the ordinances are still tied up in court to blame, and O’Hare is just remarkably prescient?
While attention is riveted on the debt-ceiling drama in Washington and Rick Perry prepares his presidential announcement, D CEO contributor Mitchell Schnurman reports a startling fact over at the Star-Telegram:
In an article titled “Put Your Money On Texas,” numbers just released by Advertising Age show Texas now with 3,613,473 millennials, a 14% increase from 2000 to 2010. The 24-35 year old age group “is critical to a state’s future because they represent the next wave of families, new home buyers and big spenders.” Telling: Of the top ten states with the greatest increase in millenials, not one was east of the Mississippi.
It sure seems like Rick Perry is going to throw his hat into the presidential race. If he does, he’ll point to the relative strength of the Texas economy, especially as the national news remains bad, as proof that he knows what it takes to get our nation back on financial track.
But an editorial by Bloomberg today says that Texas is where it is not just because of low taxes and relatively little regulation, as Perry would argue. Our state is blessed with a growing population, a young population, and low wages — factors that can’t be easily replicated:
In high-skill professions, such as management and petroleum engineering, Texas salaries often exceed national norms. For unskilled labor and service employees, austerity rules. The Texas Workforce Commission, a state agency, says hourly workers have earned 4 percent to 7 percent less than their counterparts nationwide for most of the last decade. For 2009, the U.S. Census Bureau placed Texas third among states in income inequality.
Dishwashers in Texas averaged $7.90 an hour in 2009, 10.3 percent below their peers nationwide. Texas sewing-machine operators made do with $9.35 an hour, 12.6 percent below the 50- state average. Some 9.5 percent of hourly workers subsist at or below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That leaves Texas tied with Mississippi for the largest share of the population earning no more than the minimum wage.
Texas’s wage gap “matters a lot” in fueling job growth, says Mark Dotzour, chief economist at Texas A&M’s Real Estate Center, an academic research group financed with real-estate license fees. As he explains it, companies are leaving higher- cost states and moving to places where they think their expenses will be lower. Texas is working that trend to its advantage, but this is hardly a formula that the other 49 states could, or should, copy.
As Tim said, Twitter is pretty powerful. Take, for example, Angela Hunt’s weekend tweets about the “bums” in Main Street Garden. Based on what she had to say, it looks like some changes may be coming to Main Street Garden. But I do take issue with some of what’s being said about the homeless in the park.
I use the park every day. It’s where I met most of my friends. It’s where I take the dog for exercise. And, yeah, it’s where I run into some homeless. But I rarely find them aggressive. Most of the time, they’ll make a comment about the dog, and that’s it. Sometimes, I’ll engage them in conversation. (Some of the best conversations I’ve had occurred out there with homeless people.) And sometimes, but rarely, they ask me for money. But if I say I don’t have cash, they leave it at that. The only real problem that comes from them hanging out there is that they’ll leave chicken bones behind, which is really dangerous for the dogs. But I don’t avoid the park because of the homeless population.
Or at least that’s what Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider would have us think. His headline for the quarterly Fed survey report is:
Dallas Disaster: Texas Regional Index Plunges To -17.5
Enjoy the rest of your afternoon. And make some money. Apparently, we need it.