Death by waiting

Technically, California supports capital punishment. In practice, it does not.

About 30 criminals a year are sentenced to death, but only one criminal a year is actually executed. The backlog is getting larger and larger and the wait is getting longer and longer. More prisoners die in California from old age than from execution.

The average wait for execution in the state is 17.2 years, twice the national figure. And the backlog is likely to grow, considering the trend: Thirty people have been on death row for more than 25 years, 119 for more than 20 years and 408 for more than a decade.

LA's formula for growth

Interesting background and outlook on LA's urban development

Los Angeles ran out of raw land more than 20 years ago and therefore had to move beyond the traditional suburban ideal of single-family homes on tree-lined streets. So it, along with older suburbs stretching from San Fernando to Westminster, is doing what cities have done throughout history -- building up instead of out to accommodate the housing needs of a growing population and an ever-changing set of construction and space requirements for businesses.

This isn't always pretty. But the end result is what L.A. needs to be -- a more urban city....

In the 1970s, when L.A.'s suburbs began sprouting, the city adopted, in 1974, an innovative general zoning plan that called for high-density development around 38 centers in the city, connected by transit, that would absorb most of the growing population. These centers would allow permanent preservation of the vast fields of single-family houses located between them.

The "centers concept," as it was called, was the brainchild of Calvin Hamilton, city planning director from 1964 to 1986. At a time when planning orthodoxy argued that cities had to be "mono-nuclear" -- built around one extremely dense center, like Manhattan -- L.A.'s plan was nothing less than revolutionary. Hamilton's visionary plan acknowledged that L.A. was "poly-nuclear" -- a place with many centers, of varying sizes, all of which had to be strengthened for the city to accommodate new growth.

A reasonable look at immigration issues

Here's a good article revealing the quandary of the American immigration problem: the need for both effective enforcement and realistic laws. If authorities begin enforcing current laws, businesses and the American economy are going to suffer.

But what if, instead of choking the economy, the no-match blitz only drives more of it underground? Some companies will fire their illegal workers and downsize or move. Others will fire and then rehire them -- more deviously or completely off the books. Shady labor contractors will proliferate. Identity theft will skyrocket. Employers who have tried to play by the rules -- asking to see workers' papers, filling out the required forms -- will suffer, while those who deliberately flout the law will thrive and multiply.

The unintended consequences: more underground hiring, more sub-market wages, more mistreatment of immigrants, less tax revenue (most immigrants with fake papers pay taxes -- $5 billion to $10 billion a year in Social Security taxes) and a less regulated, more dangerous workplace for everyone.

Whose fault will this be? Not the feds -- it's their job to enforce immigration law, a job they've neglected for far too long. Some of the blame will lie with Congress, which could have changed the law, making it possible for employers to legally hire the workers they need. But in the end, the mess will be of our own making -- we the skeptical public who signaled to policymakers in May and June that we didn't trust them to rewrite the immigration code.

We told them to enforce existing law without changes, and that's what we're about to get. The question is what we'll do when that doesn't work and whether we can learn from our mistake.

Long Term Results

are more important than short-term success. And there is no better way to learn over the long haul than trying new things and finding out what works and what doesn't.

Tom Peters' observes that the Miami Dolphins' loss in an exhibition game was an example of "failing forward fast," using it as an experimentation and learning experience for longer term growth:

While often credited for "fail forward fast," Peters actually heard it first from a Philadelphia high-tech executive two decades ago.

"I use it routinely," Peters said.

If Peters, who did some consulting with the late Bill Walsh, was coaching an NFL team, he would use it regularly before exhibitions.

"The whole damn purpose is to test stuff, try stuff," Peters said. "And whether you're shooting pool, playing golf or playing violin, the only way you learn is if you're screwing up. My major argument in the world of business is there's too much planning and too much talking, and not enough doing. The only way you grow, for God's sake, is go out and do it, and then correct quick."

So Peters endorses failure, calling it "not only normal but good," so long as that failure is achieved by trying something "with incredible vigor" and not through laziness. He endorses sticking employees in adverse situations, especially employees like Green, who trust the boss enough to understand — so long as you can recognize when an employee needs confidence and you can respond by creating a more favorable situation.