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Links: The Fugitive Life, Broadband, Parking Hell, Birth Rates, Transit, Sexting, and More!

* If you read nothing else today read “Financial Hazards of the Fugitive Life, which concerns Alice Goffman’s brilliant book On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. It will be cited in our future proposals.

* Big Cable says broadband investment is flourishing, but their own data says it’s falling. It will no doubt come as a shock to discover that Comcast and Time Warner are lying.

* The remarkable Neal Stephenson interview.

* “Check out the parking lot: Hell in LA.”

* “Birthrate among teens fell to record low in 2013.” This is likely to mean fewer grants for teen pregnancy prevention or abstinence education. Consider our post a warning about the next grant waves.

* Is tax evasion the key to understanding nonsensical-seeming data about first-world indebtedness?

* “The IPO is dying. Marc Andreessen explains why” is about much more than its headline implies, and there are too many good excerpts to pick one. Highly recommended.

* “Intelligent life is just getting started,” from biologist Nathan Taylor; an unusual perspective and an example of why blogging is so important.

* “. . . most crime statistics are garbage, they told me, because cops can make crimes go away by reclassifying them. This is the cop equivalent of our post “Studying Programs is Hard to Do: Why It’s Difficult to Write a Compelling Evaluation.” One could also cite this as another example of how to lie with numbers.

* “The philosophy of great customer service;” incidentally, when you call Seliger + Associates, you will get a live person on the phone (as long as someone is in the office).

* “How Denver Is Becoming the Most Advanced Transit City in the West.”

* “America’s Public Sector Union Dilemma: There is much less competition in the public sector than the private sector, and that has made all the difference.”

* The law of unintended consequences.

* “Hysteria Over Sexting Reaches Peak Absurdity.”

* This is not a boring story: Seattle begins boring its next light rail tunnel.

* “How will we know if the ACA is working?” Or: Questions that are rarely asked.

* Sam Altman on Net Neutrality.