‘SHOULD CALIFORNIA LEGALIZE MARIJUANA ,’ at Care2Causes.com.

An upcoming bill could make marijuana legal in California. Could Californians be coming home after work and rolling a joint instead of cracking a beer?

If passed, the bill, A.B. 390, would cause marijuana to be regulated similarly to alcohol. If you’re over 21, it’s okay to smoke, and you can grow up to 10 plants as long as they’re not visible to the public. It still won’t be legal to possess or sell marijuana on school grounds, and of course, won’t be legal to sell to people under 21. The bill would also legalize the cultivation of industrial hemp, a very environmentally sustainable and versatile crop that can be used in cloth, paper, pains, plastics, food, fuel, cosmetics, and many other useful products.

Marijuana has been used for centuries as a healing herb. Today, medical marijuana is helping people cope with AIDS, cancer, nausea, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, Crohn’s disease, migraines, glaucoma, and a number of other illnesses. Many people think marijuana is mainly used to treat serious diseases, but in California, 40 percent of medical marijuana is used to ease “chronic pain”. Marijuana is also prescribed for help with depression and as an appetite stimulant–it seems like more and more people are finding help for their ailments with marijuana, why not make it legal and spare people the trip to the doctor?

Some worry that making marijuana legal will lead to increase use by teens, but countries that have already legalized marijuana, like the Netherlands and Switzerland, actually have lower rates of adolescent marijuana use than the U.S. It’s possible that if we took away the cache¢ naughtiness of smoking pot, fewer kids would be inclined to do it.

Although, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (the DEA), Alaska tried legalizing marijuana in the 1970′s and it led to their teens using it at more than twice the rate of other American teens. Was this because the weed was finally legal?

The bottom line in this debate might be that legalizing marijuana could save California from debt. It costs the state $170 million a year to arrest, prosecute, and incarcerate people on marijuana charges. According to retired California judge James P. Gray, marijuana prohibition, “doesn’t make pot less available, but it does clog the court system”. Marijuana sales would also bring in taxes, at the rate of about a dollar per joint.

Teens report that it’s easier to get marijuana than buy cigarettes. Even some suburban ‘soccer moms’ are getting on board with marijuana decriminalization–they fear that their kids are buying pot from someone dangerous, and would rather the sale be safe, out in the [state-regulated] open.

More and more research is shutting down claims that marijuana is addictive, or that marijuana is a “gateway” drug. According to one European medical journal, it’s no worse than alcohol or tobacco. Could legalizing marijuana be the answer to California’s financial and social prayers? Or would decriminalizing pot only lead to a lazy, hazy, California munchies epidemic?

Since 1986, marijuana legalization has failed 5 times in Oregon, Nevada, and Alaska. The latest attempt was in Nevada in 2006: marijuana decriminalization polled strong, but ultimately only got 44 percent of the vote. According to a February 2009 poll, 54 percent of California voters support marijuana legalization. To see legalization become a reality, Californians should put down the pipe, get off the couch, and tell their legislators to support A.B. 390.

You can sign a petition telling Governor Schwarzenegger you want marijuana legalized in California.

Visit the Marijuana Policy Project or the National Organization for Reformation of Marijuana Laws (NORML) for more information.

‘THE COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE MARKET IS GOING TO GET WORSE, ‘ in the N.Y. Times.

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

Published: January 7, 2010

There are 920 football fields of available office space in Manhattan. More than 180 major buildings totaling $12.5 billion in value — from Columbus Tower at 1775 Broadway to the office tower 400 Madison Avenue — are in trouble, meaning in many cases they face foreclosure or bankruptcy, or have had problems making mortgage payments. Rents for commercial office space fell faster over the past two years than in any such period in the last half century.

“I have been in the business for 12 years. I have never seen it this bad,” Peter Von Der Ahe, vice president of investments for the brokerage Marcus & Millichap, said of New York City’s commercial real estate market. According to more veteran colleagues, he said, things have not been so dire since at least the early 1990s.

And that is not the most sobering assessment.

“It hasn’t hit bottom,” Mr. Von Der Ahe added.

He is not alone. More than half a dozen experts on commercial real estate in New York City said that despite some flickering signs of economic recovery here and elsewhere in the country, the universe of big buildings and giant apartment complexes has further to tumble.

Rents, they say, will go lower. Vacancy rates are likely to rise, too. Owners of troubled properties will face a final day of reckoning and in some cases lose their properties.

“We’re projecting the biggest value losses in the nation,” said Aaron Jodka, a senior real estate economist at Property and Portfolio Research, a Boston-based independent real estate research and advisory firm. He predicts that by 2011, the value of New York metropolitan area office buildings will decline by 58 percent from its late 2007 peak. It is already down 40 percent.

Some experts point to the bright sides of a down market — for example, the opportunity to snap up some great bargains. They say that investors who already have been shopping in London for skyscraper deals may set their sights on Manhattan later this year to find deals, and that may fuel some growth in overall sales. Some New Yorkers, especially businesses who have found the market too costly, also may find some deals.

“A correction might give opportunities,” said Jonathan Bowles, director of the Center for an Urban Future, an independent research group. “I think it’s healthy for the city’s real estate market to have a down cycle.”

But most members of the real estate industry are lockstep in their pessimism, and the reasons are multiple: Jobs must recover first to fill offices with workers, and job growth in New York City has been all but invisible. Many buildings are also tied up in complex financial arrangements that could take years to unravel.

Robert Bach, chief economist at the real estate brokerage Grubb & Ellis, compares recovery of the commercial market — which includes everything from office towers to rental apartment buildings to retail space — to turning a big ship around.

Taxes on commercial buildings also make up a sizable share of the revenue base for the city. Residential and commercial development generated $307.7 million in tax revenues, not including property taxes, from 2000 to 2007, according to the Real Estate Board of New York. In fact, the industry had a $12.4 billion effect — including construction costs like salaries and purchases made by workers — on the local economy during that period.

“The tax base is enormous,” said Michael Slattery, the board’s senior vice president of research. “It helps fund many of the basic services that make our city operate.”

Richard Persichetti, director of New York research for Grubb & Ellis, said that when the economy started to slide, office rents fell faster than in any period recorded in at least 50 years. The city has become stuck with more available office space than any other central business district in the nation except Chicago, Washington and Boston. Mr. Persichetti predicts it will take until 2014 to make a major turnaround.

“Rents probably won’t start to recover until job growth is created and some of that available space is absorbed,” he said.

Some foreign investors may swoop in this year and buy up some of the city’s most desirable and stable skyscrapers, said Robert White, president of the research company Real Capital Analytics which tracks the city’s troubled properties. Then the city will be left with properties in financial difficulties that are half empty and in less coveted locations. Recovery for those buildings, Mr. White said, “is going to take a little bit longer. It’s not going to be in a rush.”

No prospective deals on these buildings are apt to be helped by the fact that they are tied up in complicated mortgage structures that grew popular in the boom years. Joseph Harbert, chief operating officer for the New York City region of the commercial brokerage Cushman & Wakefield, says that working out ownership disputes for these buildings will take much longer than in past real estate meltdowns.

“In the ’90s, when you had the real estate workouts, you had a lot of single-lender properties. There are more parties and interests in every deal,” said Mr. Harbert.

Regardless of these complications, Mr. Harbert, who remains generally optimistic that parts of the real estate economy could recover this spring, says that lenders, skyscraper buyers and renters will not feel comfortable moving forward until they really see that jobs are being created.

“They’re kind of waiting for positive signs in the economy,” he said. “When jobs are going to recover, that’s the signal of when people are going to lease and buy.”

‘CHEAP MOBILE CALLS, EVEN OVERSEAS, ‘ in the New York Times.

Cheap Mobile Calls, Even Overseas

By JOANNA STERN

Published: January 6, 2010

Recently, my parents returned from Italy with a few bottles of Chianti and $750 in AT&T calling charges. Buon giorno!

With Skype Mobile, users can make free calls to other Skype phones, or calls to non-Skype phones for a fee.

Truphone permits you to make free calls to other Truphone users or to sign on to your Skype account.

Racking up exorbitant mobile charges is easy to do if you are not careful about using your cellphone internationally. AT&T charges 99 cents a minute to use your phone in Italy (rates vary by country), and that is if you pay for the carrier’s international calling plan. If you do not, the charge goes up to $1.29 a minute.

What my parents did not realize was that they could have nearly eliminated those charges if they had set up their (in this case) iPhone and BlackBerry to take advantage of mobile Internet calling services: That $1.29-a-minute charge would have gone down to a much more reasonable 2.4 cents a minute (or nothing at all if they were on a Wi-Fi network).

The Internet has been used to make calls for some time. One of the largest providers of the service, Skype, was founded in 2003 and has more than half a billion user accounts. And while many people gather around the PC to talk to far-flung friends and family, new apps and services can replicate that experience (and that savings) on cellphones.

To transform your mobile phone into a device capable of making cheap international calls, you need to consider a few things. Ideally, you have a smartphone that can access Wi-Fi, like an iPhone or a Droid. Wi-Fi ensures the best call quality, since it’s carried over a high-speed Internet connection rather than through third-generation, or 3G, cellular networks.

But if you don’t have a Wi-Fi-enabled smartphone, you are not out of luck. There are calling services that use local phone numbers rather than wireless data connections to place calls, making them compatible with a wide range of devices. Applications can dial a local access number as if you were placing a regular call; and your call is routed over the Internet at similarly discounted rates.

There are also free calling mobile applications, each with its own layout, feature list and call quality. In my tests of more than six different applications by calling friends in Europe and Africa, these stood out:

SKYPE FOR MOBILE Like the program for Mac and PCs, Skype Mobile lets you make free calls and send instant messages to fellow Skype users. You can also call non-Skype landlines and cellphones using Skype Credit, a fee-based service that charges pennies per minute for international calls.

Skype offers several mobile versions, including Skype for the iPhone and iPod Touch, Skype Lite for Java and Android phones, and Skype for Windows phones.

The application for the iPhone and iPod Touch most closely resembles Skype’s familiar desktop program. Though I could send text-based chat messages to my Skype-using friend in Belgrade over AT&T’s 3G network, I needed to connect the phone to a Wi-Fi network to make a call. (You currently cannot make Skype or other Internet-based calls on the iPhone via AT&T’s 3G network, though that could change soon.) After a simple tap of the call button, I could clearly hear his familiar accent without any noticeable lag or choppiness.

Similarly, a call I made to a friend’s cellphone in Senegal using Skype Credit was crystal clear in sound and connected in only 15 seconds. We chatted for 10 minutes, which cost me only $2.40. That same call on AT&T, even if I signed on to its international calling plan (which costs $4 a month), would have cost $8.80. Without the international calling plan, the fee would have climbed to $27.80.

For those without iPhones or Windows Mobile devices, Skype provides its Skype Lite application. Skype Lite cannot make calls over Wi-Fi or 3G networks, but instead routes calls through a local cellphone number.

It isn’t as complicated as it sounds: when using a MyTouch 3G phone, I selected a Skype contact in London. The application started the phone’s dialer and automatically routed the call to a local number. My British pal came through clear and static-free.

One thing to remember is that while calls made with Skype Lite are local and your carrier won’t exact a long-distance fee, you are technically making a call. So those calls will count against the minutes in your calling plan.

FRING Picking up where Skype Mobile leaves off, Fring provides an even richer experience on more phones. It supports calling over Wi-Fi and 3G on Android and Nokia devices; iPhone 3G calling is on the way. In addition to free calling to Fring members anywhere in the world, the service connects to Skype, Google Talk and MSN Messenger contacts.

After installing the Fring application from the Android Marketplace on Sprint’s HTC Hero, I tapped into my Skype account to call my Belgrade friend over Sprint’s network. Since I didn’t need to be in a Wi-Fi hotspot, I made the call while walking down a noisy New York street.

THIS IS ONE VERY FUNNY & INTERESTING READ. ‘BANKERS & ATHLETES,’ by James Kwak at baselinescenario .com.

Bankers and Athletes

Bill George, a director of Goldman Sachs, defending the bank’s compensation practices, said this: “The shareholder value is made up in people and you need the people there to do the job. If you don’t pay them for their performance, you’ll lose them. It’s much like professional athletes and movie stars.”

The idea that the level of inborn talent, hard work, dedication, and intelligence you need to be a banker is even remotely comparable to that of, say, NBA basketball players is ridiculous. But leaving aside the scale, there are some similarities. Most obviously, athletes on the free market–those eligible for free agency–are overpaid. John Vrooman in “The Baseball Players’ Labor Market Reconsidered” (JSTOR access required) goes over the basic reasons, but they should be familiar to any sports fan. There is the lemons problem made famous by George Akerlof: if a team gives up a player to the free agent market, it probably has a reason for doing so. There is the winner’s curse common to all auctions: estimates of the value of players follow some distribution around the actual value, and the person who is willing to bid the most is probably making a mistake on the high side.

Another common factor is the mistake general managers make in overpaying for luck. Take any group of .265 hitters, give them 450 at bats, and a handful will hit .300. On the free agent market, they will be paid like .300 hitters, especially if they are young and they do not have a long history of hitting .265 behind them. This is the exact same as one bank making a huge offer to a trader from another bank who just had a great year.

For another, the apparent productivity of a player in a team sport is largely due to his team and cannot simply be reproduced individually. John Vrooman in “The Baseball Players’ Labor Market Reconsidered” cites the sad case (for New York Mets fans, of which I am one) of Bobby Bonilla, who racked up spectacularly numbers hitting ahead of Barry Bonds for the Pirates, but flopped with the Mets. The same trader who makes big profits at Goldman based on its low cost of funding, sterling reputation, and tremendous client connections will not necessarily do nearly as well on his own.

Finally, while there is a strong relationship between pay and past performance, there is only a loose relationship between pay and future performance. Look at the teams that won the World Series between 2000 and 2009: Arizona Diamondbacks, Anaheim Angels, Florida Marlins, Boston Red Sox, Chicago White Sox, St. Louis Cardinals, Boston Red Sox, and Philadelphia Phillies. Only the Red Sox were among the sport’s traditional big-market teams. Yes, there is a correlation between payroll and number of wins (the Yankees do win the World Series more than other teams), but the random factors play a big role as well.

So yes, bankers are like athletes. Their individual contributions are overrated relative to their supporting environments; they are overpaid; they are paid based on where they randomly fall in the probability distribution in a given year; and paying a lot for bankers is no guarantee that your bank will be successful in the future. Team sports, like banking, are an industry where the employees capture a large proportion of the revenues. And one with negative externalities, like upsurges in domestic violence around major sporting events. Neither one should be a model for our economy.

By James Kwak