The Missouri Supreme Court yesterday ruled that the city of Clayton can’t seize and hand over several parcels of land in downtown Clayton to private developers who are too cheap to pay market value for land to expand Centene Corporation’s headquarters. According to the article, Centene may look elsewhere instead, but unless they’re willing to go somewhere that’s genuinely blighted—say, about 70% of the city of St. Louis—they’re probably bluffing.

I got my Express Mail refund today, although it took at least 30 minutes out of my life at the Clayton post office. On the upside, I did pick up some of those fancy Jamestown 41¢ stamps while I was there, as well as having the rather amusing experience of seeing someone who had brought in at least 20 first-class letters stamped with both a 39-cent stamp and a Forever stamp.

After the postal service ordeal, I ate lunch at Lampert’s Plush Pig BBQ on Forsyth, which was reasonably good although a bit pricey (Hog Heaven in Daytona was substantially better).

EITM today was nicely bifurcated; I understood everything this morning (basically a review of mathematical statistics through Bayes’ Theorem) but a lot less this afternoon (basically a review of game theory through comparative statics), although my vague recollections of my undergrad calculus and differential equations helped somewhat. Lesson of the day: I probably should have crammed in a game theory class at ICPSR.

I also learned today that walking back home from the Metrolink station in the middle of summer at 4:45 pm while carrying a full backpack is not very much fun. Tomorrow’s plan: park and ride, the environment be (partially) damned.

Radley Balko takes note of my hometown’s inability to convince a Missouri Court of Appeals panel that an area of downtown Clayton is ‘blighted’. Quoth Balko:

The idea that expensive office buildings there could be “blighted” is laughable.

Indeed; the corner of Hanley and Forsyth is pretty close to the least blighted area in the St. Louis MSA by any plausible definition of the term.