Monday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Occupational licensing for opticians is bad.

2. Cyberpunk scenes from Chongqing.

3. China takes the lead in gene-editing trials.

4. The debate over Confucius Institutes.

5. I love you Amazon but please don’t choose Fairfax County…Maryland is so nice!  You don’t need to be that close to me to send all those books.

Comments

Chrbes A.

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#4 Confucius Institutes are red fascism trojan horses.

Anon7

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Yes, Brazil has a serious problem with red fascist trojan horse Confucius Institutes.

Charbes A.

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It wouldn't surprise me because the Chinese want to ensave ALL mankind. However, my point is simple. America must be aware that China is strenghtening its satanic grip on Hollywood, our governmenr, our schools, our press, our business and even our government. If making America great again is to be more than a bitter joke, red China must be fought and destroyed.

Thiago Ribeiro

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Stop impersonating me.

Charbes A.

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

50 Cent

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Get Rich or Die Tryin' !

Charbes A.

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So that's it. To get rich is glorious.

Capitalist

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It's not?

Golden Elephant

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Is that why Chinese authorities "banned hip hop culture" on TV?

http://time.com/5112061/china-hip-hop-ban-tattoos-television/?utm_campaign=time&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&xid=time_socialflow_twitter

Anon

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The goal of these institutes is to turn Chinese Americans into 5th column. Probably won't succeed in the USA as there is too much intermarriage and US culture is too strong, but Chinese communities in poor countries and even Australia are susceptible.

Charbes A.

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It is a shame.

John Thacker

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I would like anything that gets Fairfax County upzoned. There's far, far too many places in this county with absurd R-1, R-2, and R-3 zoning.

Jan

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+1

a clockwork apriori

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Tophat!.......Doctor, what the fuck, what the fuck, jackpot! I don't know what your're talking about. It ain't it me. I'm not the one. Food coma! Food coma! Food coma!

lil wayne

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we ballin now!

byomtov

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Wow. Only $40 for the optician paper. A bargain at twice the price, surely.

Borjigid

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There's a free working version here

https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/Timmons-OpticianLicensing.pdf

Clay

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If Amazon can come jack my home value up another 50% (I’m 5-10 minutes from one of the proposed sites) I’ll gladly cash out and move across the area or to a different region altogether ....or better yet, when Amazon scoops up some well paid person to make him super-well paid, I’ll gladly step in and be merely well paid. If both those fail I’m sure I can at least be their Uber driver while hawking non-gmo beard gel.

I know, traffic, prices, subsidies, yuppie hipsters, culture, blah blah...it’s going to go somewhere, and if you know that stuff is coming and you have any means at all you should think up a way to benefit from it.

I do concur that the chance for multiple levels of subsidy bidding makes this area attractive - but stop spoiling i it, we don’t want people pointing it out and ruining things here.

Mulp

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Baltimore already has at least two facilities with thousands of employees, and growing. During my 3 week visit west of Baltimore I got half a dozen deliveries by Amazon workers (AMZL).

The Amazon HQ2 has little to do with delivering goods. It will be figuring out services.

P Burgos

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Even Cowen is a NIMBY!

Clay

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...and complacent to boot!

dave schutz

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Maryland's unfunded pension liability is $3400 per capita, Virginia's is $2700. Bezos would put his large expensive and highly taxable facility in Maryland just why, exactly?

Jeff R

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He'd want to be closer to the Hagerstown Outlets.

Gabe Atthouse

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New luxury outlets in Clarksburg. Closer, nicer, and not as crowded as you might expect them to be.

Jeff R

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Thanks to people shopping at home on Amazon?

Art Deco

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Bryan Caplan's wife works for "a stew of rent seeking and regulatory arbitrage"* known as 'Freddie Mac'.

*Arnold Kling said that.

gab

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So, opticians make on average $16.75 an hour, and licensing raises their wages 17%? Without licensing then, they'd make $14.30/hour.

Something not adding up here.

Hazel Meade

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#5. Can't you afford to move further out, like to Loudoun county or something? It's so much nicer. There's even a small regional airport where you can park your private jet.

Clay

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Well, one of the proposed sites is along the Loundon/Fairfax line near Dulles...not the same as that nice real estate around Lovettsville perhaps, but far enough to be an outside the beltway concern.

Bob

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I suppose with The Washington Post and now a new headquarters in Fairfax County or somewhere else in the DC area, Amazon will basically be immune to antitrust.

Borjigid

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Its also got like 10% of retail sales, so not much chance of antitrust to begin with. Maybe cloud computing, but that's a very young industry to be drawing antitrust concern.

carlospln

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"Amazon will basically be immune to antitrust"

Cowen is already on retainer to Bezos.

'Winning!'

Clay

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Well, one of the proposed sites is along the Loundon/Fairfax line near Dulles...not the same as that nice real estate around Lovettsville perhaps, but far enough to be an outside the beltway concern.

Jay

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"You don’t need to be that close to me to send all those books."

Shouldn't you be downloading books to a Kindle?

Bob

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You don’t need to be that close to me to send all those books.

They also don't need to send you all those books that you don't even read.

Thor

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Don’t go Prior on us, Bob.

Some people read quickly and pragmatically, with impressive recollection etc., and Tyler is presumably one of those.

clockwork_prior

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Come now, I like to provide quotes and links - 'Tyler Cowen sits with a cranberry juice and a pile of books he no longer intends to read. He's at Harry's Tap Room, near the Air France ticket counter in the main terminal of Dulles International Airport, on his way to São Paulo. Two days ago he e-mailed me his reading list for the trip—27 books—and I vowed to keep up with it. Already, before he boards, he has assembled a pile of discards. "Unger. I'd say I browsed it. I looked at every page," he says. "There's nothing wrong with the book. It's a good book to stir up leftists." Roberto Mangabeira Unger's The Left Alternative falls with a thud to the table.

Cowen, 49, has round features, a hesitant posture, and an unconcerned haircut. He handles each book as he ticks it off his list. "This I discarded. It appeared to get a good review, but there's no framework, just scattered vignettes. I looked at 20, 30 pages." Sarah Vowell's Unfamiliar Fishes, thud. Cowen's first rule of reading is as follows: You need not finish. He takes up books with great hope and no mercy, and when he is done—sometimes after five minutes—he abandons them in public, an act he calls a "liberation."' https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-05-26/tyler-cowen-americas-hottest-economist

Tanturn

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5. At first I thought it said "China, Unhampered by Races..."

Daws

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MIA please blue up FL

Brett

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5. They're going to put it in the DC Area. Amazon's existing HQ is in the western US, so the best location would be to have it in the eastern US. DC is more expensive than putting it in Atlanta or Dallas would be, but it also puts the HQ close to the federal government and potentially makes it easier for them to lobby and administer whatever federal contracts they're aiming for (such as that contract they got recently to build a classified cloud server for the Department of Defense with Amazon Cloud Services).

Ray Lopez

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+1. It was obvious to me last year DC would win, as I told some people, based on some almost confidential (but not to me) information. Also keep in mind the internet runs from northern Virginia, in and around Reston, VA, historically (not to mention the internet meme that Al Gore invented the internet, which I had a hand in starting, long story, trust me).

Sondre R.

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5. Love the genre. But some of these look very much like renderings and not actual photos (the one with the giant buildings in the background

Viking

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I have taken a Chinese class at Confucius institute. The amount of propaganda is minuscule, here is a representative example of the propaganda they are spreading:

http://vimeo.com/77773755#

I don't think they are measuring up to Voice of America. They are just tilting the scale towards spreading skills in the Chinese language, by offering really cheap classes, perhaps $5 per hour, with a low student to teacher ratio.

Regarding learning Chinese, the automatic translation technologies are advancing faster than I am learning.

Charbes A.

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Like Mir used to publish cheap, nice books and the Patrice Lumumba University used to educate Third Worlders for free? Don't you see it is the typical communist totalitarian strategy at work? Will you sell your soul for a mess of pottage? It is a cynical ploy for naked power. Communism is actualy anthitetical to Confuncan idwals and Chinese culture. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticize_Lin,_Criticize_Confucius

Viking

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Seems like the education didn't take!

Charbes A.

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So you will sell your soul for a mess of Chinese pottage. People like you sickens me.

Viking

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Do you speak any other language than English?

Charbes A.

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Spanish, but I would never support Franco.

Charbes A.

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I also can read Italian and Portuguese wihout supporting Latin American juntas and death squads or Mussolini.

P Burgos

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Is the implicit criticism of US foreign policy and exercise of soft power intended?

Viking

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I guess I was saying indirectly that VOA is a propaganda outlet, and might be more successful than the Chinese. Is this a criticism of US foreign policy and use of soft power? Probably not, but it would be a reminder that we don't have a standing to be legitimately outraged by anything the Russians are doing, since we do the same.

Also, this is not a general defense of the Chinese, I simply didn't detect anything political about Confucius Institute during my two eleven week classes. If you want no punches pulled commentary about the Chinese (or Trump, but without the derangement syndrome), read Cristopher Balding:

https://twitter.com/BaldingsWorld

or

http://www.baldingsworld.com/

P Burgos

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My comment was meant to be directed at Charbes, but I do think that it is worth asking why we continue to try to influence political outcomes and opinions around the world, especially when many of us are outraged when others do the same. However, from at the least the time of the Cold War I don’t think that anyone had had a choice; once you have at least one nation plotting to overthrow every other regime on earth, every other regime has to react somehow, and once that apparatus is in place it is unlikely to be dismantled, sort of like nuclear disarmament is unlikely to happen.

carlospln

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Its Mandarin.

Anon7

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4. Academia already traffics a lot in communist propaganda, so it's a natural complement. Bonus points for including postcolonial rants about the "Yellow Peril."

Charbes A.

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America must be aware that China is strenghtening its satanic grip on Hollywood, our governmenr, our schools, our press, our business and even our government. If making America great again is to be more than a bitter joke, red China must be fought and destroyed. Will America fall to communist aggression like Tibet and Hong Kong? Or will it resist like Finland and Afghanistan? What wil it be? Freedom or slavery?!

Hazel Meade

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It will resist! The way the Brazilians resisted Paraguayan aggression!

Charbes A.

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Americans do not have the moral charavter of Brazilians, or they would rise up now to defeast the savage Red Chinese aggressors.

Charbes A.

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

50 Cent

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I got shot like 9 times and lived!

P Burgos

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Defeast! I love it! Is that when you steal hors d’oeuvres from a function you weren’t invited to?

P Burgos

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Also, at 50, I still think you are better than Kanye.

Charbes A.

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It is an impersonator, probably working for the 50 Cent Party.

msgkings

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Charbes, do you have similar animosity towards Japan?

Charbes A.

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I have no animosity against anyone, I believe in defending America and the West against forein aggression.

msgkings

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Do you believe Japan is a foreign aggressor similar to China?

Charbes A.

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Less powerful, but as much evil as China. They never apologized for their crimes.

msgkings

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How about Uruguay? Do you think they have a legitimate claim to a much larger part of Brazil than they occupy now?

Viking

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The Chicoms are probably more capitalist than the average American academic. After all, their property market is a bigger Ponzi scheme than even bitcoin, in terms of total amount of money at stake. And this is financed through low paid peasants painstakingly saving some money, and putting it at risk two ways, (1) by depositing money in Chinese banks that are speculatively lent to developers and condo buyers, (2) by helping their sons and daughters come up with the 30% down payment.

Art Deco

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1. Reading glasses are available over the counter. You're going to the optician for prescription lenses.

Can we please open up faculty slots at GMU to bidding on Ebay? It's only fair.

Charbes A.

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I bid $10 for the whole lot.

anonymous

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The odds of the rest of the country allowing Amazon its tax subsidies if they locate to a Confederate state are lower than if they relocate to a non-Confederate state. Bezos may be too rich to care, of course. But it is the truth.

If that makes no sense - isn't there some place where Amazon can raze to the ground ugly infrastructure and build something nice? Maybe they would like ten miles of continuous lots along the DC- Philadelphia Amtrak line!

anonymous

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Laurel trees are surprisingly effective, well grouped, at sound abatement. And the highlight of the DC-Philly ride might be the Christo-like artworks the energetic young Amazon employees string along their railside lots: maybe reflecting solar panels with subtle and tricky dragon and constellated promised land hill country designs, repeating once or twice for those who did not notice at first. Better even than the well-remembered swoosh of telegraph lines outside the train windows - the clean enough ones, anyway, of every year since the invention of trains and telegraph lines (the telegraph lines forming, from the first day they were 'born', rising and falling first derivatives with singularities at every "pole" fashioned from some tree whose sapling days are far behind us, measured in revolutions around the sun or even measured in the slow movement (not infinitesimal radials) among the spiral arm of the galaxy of our warming sun that we are all moving with, unaware of the whole slow shock wave aspect of the great thing, along/around (just to cover two descriptions of the several vectors) - along/around the local gravitational center symbolized (symbolized! not just) by an energy/light/mass/background field singularity in Sagittarius, which, from Fairfax, would be reached on a straight line going somewhere through (at this time of year, at midnight) the clouds over the counties of the Palmetto state that are closest to the ocean (the Atlantic Ocean, for those who do not know).

anonymous

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Why laurel trees? Before the internet, I learned, from an article in Science Magazine, which came out weekly, that the northernmost natural stand of laurel trees is on Fire Island. North of the DC-Philly train line!

Also, if you have ever walked next to a line of laurel trees, they are not only quiet themselves, but they are a source of quiet around them (like, analogously Orson Welles said on TCM the other night, as Falstaff - the source of humor for others line).

Why would the federal political tax advantage tend towards disappearance if a formerly Confederate state got to fill the envied dance card? That is easily derived as an exercise in political science.

anonymous

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If you feel you wasted your time reading the 7:59 comment, imagine a few phrases therein as if they were drawn by H.A. Rey. Particularly, perhaps, that little journey from Fairfax County to the center of the Milky Way via the nighttime moonlit clouds over the seaboard counties of the Palmetto State (!)

Anon

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#4 Universities are financially driven institutions. They host and defend these institutes because Chinese students are a major source of income for them. It's as simple as that. But what about academic freedom, free inquiry, and the freedom to criticize orthodox viewpoints? It's a complete fucking joke as events have proven time and again. The only things that counts is money.

Charbes A.

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So that's what we have become. As Marx said, there is left "no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'”.

Robert

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RE: optician licensing. This is purely anecdotal, but I just moved Austin, Texas after spending a decade in Berlin (Germany), where glasses prescriptions can be written by unlicensed opticians. A month ago I visited an optician here in Austin and discovered that my lens prescription, written for me in Berlin by a young, seemingly inexperienced and unlicensed employee at a glasses shop, has been partly responsible for two years of excruciating migraines. A good, well-trained doctor would not have made the mistake during my eye exam that the German shopkeeper made.

This is the first instance I have encountered of consumer protections being more stringent in Texas than Germany, and my "quality of services" suffered dramatically as a result. This study, to me, seems to be a classic example of how statistical "proof" (the abstract's assertion that "optician licensing appears to be reducing consumer welfare by raising the earnings of opticians without enhancing the quality of services delivered to consumers") is entirely a matter of the values one imports into the research design.

A Reader

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As someone is living in a dying middle sized US city, how I wish that we would have gotten Amazon... How absurd that Fairfax County is brazen enough not to gorge itself while the getting is good.

When I lived in Toronto, while expensive, it was great to see the fire that growth caused.

Dan in Euroland

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Well to be fair, Fairfax county gorges itself on America writ large.

clockwork_prior

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And to be truly fair, Fairfax County has already been devoured by Til Hazel's vision of a much better world.

blah

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#3 - makes one wonder if there are many US gene scientists looking to relocate to China for better research opportunities (I can't read the article as it is behind pay wall, but it would be nice if someone who has access tells me if the article addresses that).

CD

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This seems like the key paragraph:

"They’re kind of like restaurant franchises: Open the kit, and you’re in business. American universities can continue to collect full tuition from their students while essentially outsourcing instruction in Chinese. In other words, it’s free money for the schools. At many (though not all) Confucius-hosting campuses, students can receive course credit for classes completed at the institute."

Administrators *love* this kind of thing. Helps the budget, adds a new program, raises their image in terms of international engagement... At my campus there has been a steady trickle of people peddling these semi-scams. Here is a similar effort: https://qz.com/590909/the-hindu-right-is-quietly-funding-and-lobbying-american-universities/

Roy LC

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Amazon should move to Raleigh, in five to ten years the HQ will move from Seattle to DC and in ten to twenty they will abandon it and move the entire back office to Louisville or Columbus, either that or Denver. Somewhere centrally located with lots of water 4 seasons and a lot of very new air and ground capacity in a place either small enough they can buy the state or somewhere actually desirable, bright, shining and new like Denver with good restaurants, skiing, hiking for visiting senior executives. Yet tons of cheap housing as the city merges with Cheyene and the Springs with subdivisions stretching to Limon. Nobody of working age ever really leaves Eastern Slope because of the weather.

Ajay Pandey

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