This year, California will spend three times as much operating its prisons than running the UC system.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Jonah unkindly mentions that California will spend three times as much operating its prisons than running the UC system. Doesn't that reassure you so much about America's priorities?
In California, the state's spending on prisons is about to exceed their spending on universities. They're about to spend $7.4 billion on new facilities, with an operating budget over $10 billion.
I wonder how much of that budget is consumed in ridiculous efforts to punish non-violent drug users, or…
Zuska reminded me that today is the one-year anniversary of the suicide of Denice Denton, an accomplished electrical engineer, tireless advocate for the inclusion and advancement of women in science and, at the time of her death, the chancellor of UC-Santa Cruz.
I never met Denton, and a year ago…
By Kim Gilhuly
Reforming California’s sentences for low-level crimes would alleviate prison and jail overcrowding, make communities safer, strengthen families, and shift resources from imprisoning people to treating them for the addictions and mental health problems at the root of many crimes,…
A factoid is "something that sounds like a fact, is thought by many to be a fact (perhaps because it is repeated so often), but is not in fact a fact."
(From The Economist Style Guide.)
"Factoid" meaning a phony fact was coined by Norman Mailer, who used it in his biography of Marilyn Monroe to describe the studio system's technique of creating false histories for Hollywood stars. The current most prevalent meaning is the precise opposite- a perhaps trivial but interesting fact. This meaning was popularized by CNN. It's not surprising that a TV network denatured the meaning of a word that has value in understanding how media works.
With all due respect to the Economist, my (American) dictionary defines a factoid as a "brief or trivial item of news or information". Perhaps this difference in semantics is one of those minor Anglo-American differences, like theatre vs theater.
Prisoners don't pay out-of-state tuition. You could probably reverse this trend if Calfornia stopped feeding their prisoners.
Maybe "factoid" and "factoid" are homonyms. Yeah! That's it!