Trip’s morning reading

New Mexico relies most heavily on the state gross receipts tax for its revenue — to the tune of 36.1 percent, according to a new report. By comparison, the state income tax comes in third as a revenue generator, behind licenses and other taxes, producing just 15.8 percent of the revenue to pay for state government and other services, according to a study completed by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation. The foundation examined all 50 states to see where their revenue to pay for state government and other services came from. Stateline.org wrote a story about the report today.

We’re only days away from a special session of the New Mexico Legislature. And Priority 1 is the yawning budgetary shortfall that seems to be growing by the week. A few weeks back, the shortfall between the state’s revenues and its expenses was estimated at $433 million. Now some state lawmakers who’ve participated in preliminary budget negotiations with Gov. Bill Richardson’s negotiating team are throwing around the number $700 million as the gap between revenues and expenses for the year that ends July 1. The special legislative session is not going to be pretty, nor is it going to be fun. Let’s just hope it doesn’t turn into a bloodbath. New Hampshire could serve as today’s cautionary tale. State workers there are bracing for layoffs after they rejected a new contract agreement that would have cut $25 million, according to the Concord Monitor. The agreement was cobbled together by union negotiators and Gov. John Lynch.

Meanwhile, Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s major fight appears not to be of the budgetary kind. He’s fighting accusations that he is most secretive governor to lead Texas in years. The latest ammunition fueling that accusation is Perry’s refusal to release documents he reviewed in the hours before the Cameron Todd Willingham execution. The Dallas Morning News writes that his refusal is the latest example of Perry’s willingness to fight over records kept by his office. Perry has faced increasing pressure in recent weeks to turn over the records he reviewed in the Willingham case. Perry refused in 2004 to stop Willingham’s execution for the deaths of his children. They died in a house fire that a local fire inspector said was a case of arson perpetuated by Willingham. But an arson expert who had reviewed the case warned prior to Willingham’s execution that the investigation of the fire was flawed, casting doubt on his guilt.

On to the tech beat: a few years back, Internet traffic was distributed among tens of thousands of networks. “Now, instead of traffic being distributed among tens of thousands of networks, only 150 networks control some 50% of all online traffic,” a post in ReadWriteWeb today explains. RWW quotes from a study just completed by Arbor Networks, which has just completed a two-year study of 256 exabytes of Internet traffic data, the largest study of global traffic since the start of the commercial Internet in the mid-1990′s. Google, in fact, accounts for 6 percent of all traffic, according to the study.

Here’s an excerpt from the RWW post:

According to Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at Arbor Networks, this shift represents the Internet’s move into a second phase where it’s no longer “all about contacting websites.” Rather, “over the past two years larger organizations have been buying up the smaller websites and by July 2009, 30 per cent of the internet was owned by a few large sites.” The acquisitions, the result of billions of dollars spent by large companies snapping up smaller ones, has created a new Internet core of “hyper giants,” a coin termed by the report.

The world is shifting beneath our feet, people.

Today in politics, apparently the White House has declared war on Fox News. I missed that development, but New York Magazine has an essay on maybe why that’s not the best idea.

Meanwhile, newspapers, like state governments, are in a world of hurt. Finances are tight enough at the New York Times that the news organization is looking everywhere to save money. Case in point: the memo that went out Monday informing staffers on the paper’s metro desk — reporters, editors, photographers, etc., who cover the city, nearby suburbs and New Jersey — that the paper would no longer pay for subscriptions to competing news publications. Journalists often keep up with the competition by reading the competition. For example, if a Times reporter wants to keep up with what’s going on in Newark, New Jersey’s biggest city and constant font of great news stories, he or she likely would subscribe to to the Newark Star-Ledger. Except now, the subscription will come out of the reporter’s pocket, not the paper’s.

Speaking of the Star-Ledger, that paper, esteemed for its day-to-day, hard-nosed coverage of corruption, among other things, is about to suffer through another round of buyouts. And if that doesn’t net the cost savings the company hopes for, there likely will be a round of layoffs. The paper already suffered through 150 buyouts last year.

Finally, here’s a post with no reference to politics or hard-time economics. Enjoy it, take pleasure in it. It’s an essay by Dennis Overbye, the wonderful New York Times science writer who tackles all manner of oddities and marvels in the worlds of physics and cosmology. Today he writes humorously about a theory posited by two scientists that they say might explain the rough going the Hadron Collider has had of late. It’s a startling theory, one that you might expect to read in science fiction/fantasy novel. But these scientists are for real, meaning they’re not quacks. They’re respected in their fields. To put the theory in perspective, Overbye  invokes the craziness that scientific theories sometimes traffic in by quoting Niels Bohr, one of the gods of 20th century science.

Here’s an excerpt:

As Niels Bohr, Dr. Nielsen’s late countryman and one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague:“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

That made me laugh out loud, given the interesting history of quantum mechanics.