Just a few odds and ends for this Thursday morning.

What’s really going on with ERS?

A reader forwarded a recent Civil Beat story questioning the Employees Retirement System’s likelihood of hitting new, slightly lower investment goal of 7.75% annual returns going forward. It was published as the legislature was deciding on a bill to cut pension benefits public employees hired in the future. The story referred to the “roughly $10 billion worth of assets” held by ERS.

So I was interested to see Dave Segal’s story this week in the Star-Advertiser (“State’s ERS gains 3.8 percent to reach near-record levels“), which noted the $11.5 billion in ERS assets, with an increase of 19% in the current fiscal year.

Some have blamed the most dire predictions about public employee pension plan deficits on studies that relied on data reflecting the worst recession since the 1930s, and ignoring the investment gains of the past two years.

Given the fact that a booming stock market has largely restored the losses incurred since 2008 by many individual and institutional investors, I’m hoping for a more nuanced look at the state of the ERS, for personal as well as policy reasons.

Did you catch the Hawaii connection in the recent Scientific American guest blog, “How do you ID a dead Osama?” It was by Christie Wilcox, who is pursuing a PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

And I was impressed by this story from the Oregonian describing the approach of Portland police in responding to potentially violent situations. I wonder what sort of training our HPD officers are getting, given the city’s budget woes? Let me guess….

Also from Oregon, a description of the attorney general’s push to strengthen the state’s public records laws by setting deadlines for agencies to respond to record requests.

And, just for fun, “Shit my students write.“