Blog Archives - Jay Evensen

Online sports gambling is change nature of the game

9/30/2015

You don’t have to watch football on television too long this season to see the ads. Go online, select your fantasy team made up of real-life players and win millions. Easy, right?

Well … anyone with experience around hucksters could see through the sales pitch in a second. As people often pointed out to me when I lived in Las Vegas, they didn’t build those hotels and casinos off winners. And judging by how organized sports is jumping aboard the fantasy gravy train, there is a lot of money to be made out there from losers.

Why are people not running for office?

9/29/2015

The government in Millville, a small city in Cache County, doesn’t occupy an imposing piece of the landscape. As with many Utah towns, nature provides enough of a spectacular backdrop that some human-made City Hall monument would seem pretentious.

Still, the city’s government building looks like a temporary structure that could easily be moved somewhere with a pickup, or perhaps a stiff wind. But then, the city has a population just below 2,000.

Utah ranks high as a good place for teachers

9/28/2015

If you were asked to guess where Utah ranks on a survey of the best states for teachers, my guess is you would score it somewhere closer to the bottom than the top. In Utah, an aggressive teachers’ union has conditioned us to believe it can’t get much worse than here.

But Wallet Hub ranked the state 14th best in a study released this week.

When you take the intermountain region into consideration, Utah scored much better than any of its neighbors, other than Wyoming, which finished

Gas prices are dropping; time to get complacent again

9/23/2015

Last week I was in Central Florida, marveling at gas prices that hovered right around $2.03 a gallon at many stations. When I came home, my neighborhood convenience store was offering it for $2.68.

Let’s launch an investigation.

As silly as that sounds, it’s not out of line with how Americans tend to react to the supply-demand-politics-and-terrorism influenced ups and downs of the prices we pay at the pump.

The sage grouse controversy hasn't been settled for good

9/22/2015

It would have been “the spotted owl on steroids,” as Utah’s director of the Department of Natural Resources said at an editorial board meeting earlier this year.

He wasn’t trying to get you to imagine some gigantic bird scooping up dogs and cats with a hoot of indifference. He was talking about the sage grouse and the chance that it might be listed under the Endangered Species Act.

Why computers alone won't help schools

9/16/2015

If you were to guess which public school systems perform best, the ones that provide computers or tablets for their students and spend a lot of time online — like Australia, Denmark or Sweden — or the ones that use technology modestly, such as Singapore or South Korea, what would be your answer?

Anyone following debates at the Utah Legislature the last couple of years might chose the high-tech schools. That would be wrong.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and

A new prison could benefit Salt Lake City after all

9/16/2015

Fall is in the air, and along with cooler temperatures, several local issues are swirling like autumn leaves in a windstorm. Here is my take on a few of them:

Lemonade from prison lemons: The state may have decided to move the prison to Salt Lake City despite objections from city leaders, but the city could see a huge upside. The prison may spur real growth and development in the city’s northwest quadrant — the only vacant land it has left.

No more preventable deaths for children under 5

9/9/2015

One well-timed photograph can change the way people perceive the world. Think, for example, of military personnel struggling to raise the flag at Iwo Jima, or of the lone man defying a row of tanks in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

And now think of the body of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi, washed ashore on the coast of Turkey, the victim of an ill-fated Syrian refugee ship. His image was captured as he lay in the moist sand, waves lapping his lifeless body.

That one photo probably did more than anything to change how Europe is handling its refugee crisis. Unfortunately, photographers can’t be everywhere to capture iconic images of suffering.

Kurdi wasn’t alone. Thousands of children have died from violence in Syria. Even worse, however, millions of children under 5 die each year in developing nations from causes that are entirely preventable.

Why do modern cities not see the value of a large park?

9/8/2015

Now that the prison is officially, if not yet literally, on its way out of Draper, the dreaming has begun.

Go to Draper’s official city website and you can see an artist’s conception. Where today guards roam perimeters and men and women contemplate their sins, tomorrow will stand gleaming skyscrapers that put downtown Salt Lake City to shame.

It all sounds so familiar. And it all sounds so pedestrian, which is not to be confused with walkable. A bunch of buildings clustered together

Seinfeld's son shows why licensing is hurting the economy

9/2/2015

Sometimes, we don’t notice a problem until a celebrity becomes the victim.

Last weekend, the young son of comedian Jerry Seinfeld and a few of his buddies decided to set up a lemonade stand along the road in their Hamptons neighborhood. They were raising money for a charity that helps needy families.

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