Jack

Both Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid now have evidence that their showdown over a Supreme Court pick is paying political dividends — with hard-core partisans, at least.

A pair of national polls from CBS and NBC showed Americans are sharply divided over the future of Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court vacancy, with roughly half favoring Barack Obama to pick a new justice followed by a Senate vote, and the other half backing Majority Leader McConnell's plans to punt for a year. That leaves neither party with a clear edge as they both dig in for a brutal yearlong confrontation.

Still, the split decision in each poll offers an early validation of McConnell’s decision to quickly kill off a potential nomination, rather than stringing out the process with hearings and debate, only to reach the same outcome. If the blockade isn't driving away voters, and potentially threatening GOP control of the Senate, McConnell is likely to press on.

"If you find me a voter who believes Barack Obama should transform the Supreme Court in his image but also wants a conservative majority, my first question will be about the unicorn they rode in on,” said Josh Holmes, a former chief of staff to McConnell. “Nobody should confuse the volume of the outcry with widespread concern in the center of the electorate.”

But across the Capitol, Democrats are arguing that the GOP's preemptive vow to block any nominee will, eventually, prove just as unpopular as the 2013 government shutdown fight over Obamacare.

Democrats are betting that public pressure from critical home-state editorial boards, along with around the clock, months-long coverage of the GOP's blockade, will paint the Republicans as unable to fulfill their basic functions as senators. Adam Jentleson, the deputy chief of staff for Minority Leader Reid, says that McConnell’s campaign to prove his party is a responsible governing majority “might as well be set on fire.”

“On the polls, Republicans are betting everything they own on what is, in the absolute best-case scenario, a coin flip for them,” Jentleson said Thursday. “The wise move would be to wait and see how those poll numbers shift once there is a living, breathing nominee.”

Those sentiments suggest that the political firefight over the Supreme Court will only intensify over the coming months. Senate Republicans are beginning to argue that there should be no hearings on the matter, with McConnell’s strategy to smother the Democrats' message by not giving them a platform in the Capitol.

But that won't stop outside groups and party committees from ratcheting up the tension with tens of millions of dollars of ads, not to mention the endless rhetorical broadsides among Reid, McConnell and their members. A conservative judicial group has already launched at least $1 million in ads backing McConnell’s position, while liberal activists from the Progressive Change Campaign Committee are attempting to embarrass McConnell at his Kentucky offices on Friday by showing up to call for him to a vote on a nominee. Meanwhile partisans are digging through years-old quotes from senators in both parties, hoping something sticks and drags down one side's argument.

And White House press secretary Josh Earnest on Thursday said the GOP obstruction will be a "legitimate" issue for voters come November.

“Given the stakes, it’s something that’ll get a lot of attention. And it’s a good thing: This is something that should be subjected to a vigorous public debate," Earnest told reporters.

But the early polling suggests the fight will be about motivating the party bases, not swinging undecided voters. This could change given the volatility of the issue and the amount of time until the election, but at this early stage there’s no indication that independent voters are breaking either way.

Americans split evenly in both the CBS and NBC polls on whether Obama should nominate a new justice and on whether McConnell should allow a vote. With a party breakdown, the CBS poll showed a neat partisan divide, with Democrats calling for a nominee from Obama, Republicans calling for a delay until the new president is sworn in and independents evenly split between those two approaches.

Fittingly, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and National Republican Senatorial Committee are now openly fundraising off the matter to motivate their most reliable donors and voters. And McConnell has written two fundraising appeals in as many days, telling donors on Thursday: "Senate Republicans are committed to waiting until after the 2016 election to confirm a new justice to the U.S. Supreme Court."

“The Republican Senate majority is the last line of defense against the Supreme Court transforming into a rubber stamp for President Obama's reckless liberal policies,” said Andrea Bozek, a spokeswoman for the NRSC.

And the Democrats say that reliable partisans will help cast out a half-dozen vulnerable incumbents to make Sen. Chuck Schumer the majority leader next year and that eventually independents will come over to their position.

"Republicans have once again shown moderates and independents that the GOP is the party of dysfunction," said Lauren Passalacqua, a DSCC spokeswoman. “Those who care deeply about protecting health care, removing dark money from politics and respecting choice will be especially motivated to support Democrats this election year."

But what’s not clear is how things will shake out in individual states in the Senate elections, where five GOP incumbents are in difficult races in states that President Barack Obama has won and even a relatively safe Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) says there should be hearings on a nominee. In battleground states, however, all those at-risk senators but Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) are standing with McConnell on blocking a nominee. But they are divided on how to get there.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) said that confirmation hearings could mislead voters to think that the GOP was giving serious consideration to a nominee. But Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) says he’d be fine taking a vote on the nominee, which would require not only that the Judiciary Committee hold hearings but also that McConnell schedule a confirmation vote.

But regardless of those differences over tactics, the overall party strategy to block a nomination seems likely to be unshaken under the current political dynamic. Not only would McConnell have to flip and order consideration of a nominee, but the Judiciary Committee would also have to vote out a nominee, and then at least 14 Republican senators would have to support breaking a filibuster.

The outrage from the right would be deafening, so that’s not likely to happen. But no matter how the GOP decides to kill the nomination, Republicans says it’s within their right to perform what they say is the will of the voters.

“People are saying, 'Well, the voters decided when they chose President Obama,'” Johnson said in an interview this week. “Well, the voters decided in 2014 to give Republicans the majority of the Senate and have control over the confirmation process.”

Edward-Isaac Dovere contributed to this report.

Employees work at the checkout counters of a Walmart store in Secaucus, New Jersey. (Reuters/Lucas Jackson)

After nearly two years of testing, Walmart is ready to roll out extensive scheduling changes for its hourly workforce in hopes of improving the daily experience for employees.

For many workers, low wages aren't the only downside of a job in retail. Many have to cope with shifts that can change on short notice in response to store traffic, making it difficult to fit in other priorities like school and childcare.

But those practices been changing over the past year, as companies respond to increasing public awareness around the impact on workers' lives of "just-in-time" scheduling. The changes come as states and cities across the country pursue proposals that would require companies to provide more predictable hours for workers, following first-in-the-nation legislation for retail workers in San Francisco.

Right now, most of Walmart's 4,655 U.S. stores operate on a system of "open shifts," where managers schedule workers within the times the employees said they're available. By the end of the year, Walmart says it plans to make two more options available: Fixed shifts, which guarantee the same weekly hours for as long as a year, and flex shifts, which allow associates to build their own schedules from the hours available, in roughly two-and-a-half-week increments.

Fixed shifts would be offered first to employees with the longest tenure, and then on a first-come-first-served basis as new shifts become available. The company is working on an app that would allow workers to choose and update their schedules on their smartphones.

"The more visibility and information you’re able to show associates about what’s out there, you’re able to make it their choice," says Walmart spokesman Kory Lundberg. And more features might be coming in the future, like the ability to split shifts in smaller increments. “I think everything is on the table, in figuring out how to get people in the store working when people are shopping. There are a lot of things we’re looking at to see how we can make it work."

The company has been testing the new system, which is built on commercial software modified for Walmart's use, at stores in Van Buren, Ark. and Wichita, Kansas for two years. And Walmart thinks the changes will help its bottom line as well: Early results showed an 11 percent decline in absenteeism and a 14 percent drop in staff turnover, which comports with what academic research has shown is possible with greater predictability and worker control.
The new set of policies include a few of the things activists have been demanding for several years now.

In 2013, a campaign project of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union called OUR Walmart had sent the company a letter asking for more advance notice of schedules, more consistency, greater access to full-time work, and a process to allow employees to bid on shifts based on their seniority at the store. Last year, along with a round of wage increases, the company announced a new system that allows workers to volunteer for more hours and switch shifts with their colleagues.

But getting enough hours to make ends meet remained a problem, and according to OUR Walmart's leader Dan Schlademan, the scheduling improvements were unevenly applied: Some stores where workers were active posted schedules in advance, for example, while others didn't.

OUR Walmart — which has since split off from the UFCW — was critical of the new changes, which don't explicitly guarantee more hours for part-time workers who want them. "For workers who have been speaking out, protesting, and fasting for $15 and full-time hours, today’s announcement represents a hard-won victory, but without increased pay or additional hours, it falls short of what most associates need to support their families, and or what is needed to improve customer service," the group said in a statement. 

Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy, says that understaffing persists in Walmart's stores, and agreed that more employees should have access to full-time work. "These operational issues compounded by the need for greater input from employees can mean that new policies don’t always translate into the stable work schedules Walmart is promising," she said. 

While the policy doesn't entitle workers to a fuller schedule, Lundberg says the flexibility allowed many workers to cobble together 40 hours nonetheless.

The move follows several improvements meant to increase worker retention and performance: Wage increases that will bring the base rate up to $10 an hour, for example, and a new training system for helping workers advance into higher-level positions.

The 19-country eurozone, the core of Europe’s economy, grew at an annual rate of 1.1 percent in the last quarter of 2015. But total economic output remained just slightly lower than when the global economic crisis began, in 2008.

Here is Jack Ewing from the NYT.  Here is the blog, run by Thomas Cooley among others, European Economic Snapshot.  And from the FT:

Gross domestic product in Italy — the eurozone’s third-largest economy — rose by just 0.1 per cent in the fourth quarter, missing economists’ expectations of a 0.3 per cent increase and raising concerns that the tepid return to growth that begun in 2015 after three years of recession is already fading.

“Italy is struggling to emerge from the great recession and despite some encouraging signs in the first part of 2015, growth lost momentum in the second half,” says Lorenzo Codogno, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics.

That is why I do not understand the common view that the eurozone crisis is over.  Greece, by the way, has returned to a state of recession.

The post Almost a lost decade appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Russian mammoth ivory exports have been increasing steadily, averaging approximately 17 tonnes per year for 1991-2000 and averaging 60 tonnes per year for 2001-2013.

It is estimated that the mammoth ivory beneath the tundra has the potential to cover several hundred years’ worth of current elephant ivory sales.

That is from the Farah and Boyce paper cited here.

The post Russia fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Every once in a while our society surprises me and that’s what happened in Baltimore recently. When the first police officer in the Freddie Gray case went to court it ended in a mistrial. That was surprising enough in and of itself. I’m fairly sure that when the city, led by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and prosecutor Marilyn Mosby, decided to put the officers on trial they were fairly sure that any jury they seated would bring back a conviction. That’s probably why they fought so hard against moving the case out to an area where they might find a slightly more impartial panel. But the story has taken a turn.

This first trial against Officer William Porter didn’t bring back a verdict, but I’d been assuming that they just ran into one recalcitrant person who wouldn’t vote for a conviction. As it turned out, however, when they considered the most serious charge against him, the opposite was true. (Baltimore Sun)

The jury in the trial of Baltimore Police Officer William G. Porter was one vote from acquitting him of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Freddie Gray, the most serious charge he faced, according to sources familiar with the deliberations.

Judge Barry G. Williams declared a mistrial because the jury deadlocked on all four charges last month. Jurors were two votes from convicting Porter of misconduct in office, and more divided on charges of assault and reckless endangerment, sources said.

How the jury voted was not publicly revealed, and the judge ruled that jurors’ names should not be revealed.

In the end, it would appear that everything came down to the concept of “evil motive and bad faith.” The jurors seemed almost willing to bring in Porter guilty on some form of negligence for not buckling Freddie Gray into his seat in the police van, but all but one of them rejected the idea that he had acted in malice, seeking to harm the suspect.

I have to give the people of Baltimore credit. I was being rather cynical and simply assumed that the avalanche of press reports blaming the police and the lack of support from their own city government would ensure a quick guilty verdict. We won’t know what deliberations went on regarding the evidence presented any time soon (if ever) but clearly the jurors dug into it and attempted to do their jobs.

The remaining question now is what happens to Porter next. The city wants him to testify in the trials of the five remaining police involved in the case, but he’s not interested in doing so. Had he been acquitted on all charges he might have been compelled to testify because Double Jeopardy rules would have prevented him from being tried again and he wouldn’t be giving evidence against himself. Conversely, if he’d been found guilty, a bit of cooperation might have seen a better deal cut for him. But now, with the possibility of another trial looming, it looks as if they won’t be able to force him to the stand to bear witness against his fellow officers.

This story will drag on all through the year, so I’m sure we’ve not seen the last of it here.

Jeff Bezos' net worth just went up by 29 Washington Posts https://t.co/QYX7CR1tBK

— Matt Anderson (@MattAnderson_NY) July 23, 2015

Here’s an interesting letter from “Stockholm” to Seattle

Dear Seattle,

I am writing to you because I heard that you are looking at rent control.

Seattle, you need to ask your citizens this: How would citizens like it if they walked into a rental agency and the agent told them to register and come back in 10 years?

I’m not joking. The image above is a scan of a booklet sent to a rental applicant by Stockholm City Council’s rental housing service. See those numbers on the map? That’s the waiting time for an apartment in years. Yes, years. Look at the inner city – people are waiting for 10-20 years to get a rental apartment, and around 7-8 years in my suburbs. (Red keys = new apartments, green keys = existing apartments).

Stockholm City Council now has an official housing queue, where 1 day waiting = 1 point. To get an apartment you need both money for the rent and enough points to be the first in line. Recently an apartment in inner Stockholm became available. In just 5 days, 2000 people had applied for the apartment. The person who got the apartment had been waiting in the official housing queue since 1989!

In addition to Soviet-level shortages, the letter writer discusses a number of other effects of rent controls in Stockholm including rental units converted to condominiums and a division of renters into original recipients who are guaranteed low rates and who thus never move and the newly arrived who have to sublet at higher rates or share crowded space. All of these, of course, are classic consequences of rent controls.

Addendum: More details on Sweden’s rent-setting system can be found here, statistics (in Swedish) on rental availability in Stockhom are here and a useful analysis of the Swedish housing crisis with more details on various policies (e.g. new construction is exempt for 15 years but there isn’t nearly enough) is here. Jenkins wrote a comprehensive review of the literature on rent controls in 2009 that echoed what Navarro said in 1985 “the economics profession has reached a rare consensus: Rent control creates many more problems than it solves.”

Hat tip to Bjorn and Niclas who confirmed to me the situation in Stockholm and to Peter for the original link.

Comedian Amy Schumer's reflection on the unexpected consequences of privilege is a great reminder of how women were historically mistreated, no matter how high on the social ladder they lived.

Schumer plays a lowly peasant who is suddenly turned into a princess by a member of the royal court, played by fashion guru Tim Gunn:

Gunn enters the home where Schumer, with dirt on her face, is told the seemingly good news:

She initially welcomes the news, presumably as a reference to the fact that marriage was much more popular, and mandated for many royal families throughout world history:

But privilege isn't the same thing as respect, as Amy discovers when she is told she is going to meet a prince to marry him.

The prince (played by Amy) is actually her cousin, which disgusts her:

Princess Amy doesn't realize that the people around her have no intention of respecting her wishes, though:

What saves her life at the end? Watch the full video to find out. Here's a hint: It's not gender equality.

» Self-driving cars could alter how we get around—and also change the way our cities work.

Even the concept of a self-driving car is enough to get people talking in raptures about the potential for a utopian future society. It could fulfill the promise of “personal rapid transit” transportation planners hoped to provide decades ago, offering personalized point-to-point service without the hassle, congestion, or crashes involved with driving.

The autonomous vehicle, some predict, will replace many of today’s forms of transportation and radically expand mobility by allowing people, including the young, old, and disabled, to get around without having to walk, without having to know how to drive, and without having to wait for a bus or train. Operating without a driver and using electricity for power, the autonomous vehicle could be cheap to operate and environmentally friendly. It could, in fact, replace car ownership for many households.

We’re years away from the rollout of any self-driving car that people can purchase, and we’re even further from a future city with no human drivers on the street. But progress toward autonomous cars has accelerated, and companies from Google to BMW to Volvo suggest that they’ll be able to offer such vehicles relatively soon.

How exactly will autonomous vehicles affect our transport systems and our cities in general? As I’ll describe below, they may radically alter the types of public transportation regions provide for their citizens, and they may increase—or decrease—the sheer amount of driving people do. Given the fact that these types of cars are almost definitely coming at some point, it is time to begin the conversation on how to handle them, since their impact on the urban environment is a matter not only of private research and development but also of public policy questions about space, access, and who decides how our transportation system will work in the future.

I gained some insight on these issues at the International Transport Forum (ITF) in Leipzig, Germany that I’ll relate here (full disclosure: as part of the Media Travel Programme, the Forum covered the cost of my attending and traveling to the event).

New forms of mobility: An intermediary step toward autonomous vehicles?

The basic forms of urban mobility have hardly changed over the past century. Walking, biking, public transport, driving, carpooling, and taxiing represent the vast majority of trips. Each of these modes has, in essence, remained technically similar while there has of course been a very significant shift away from public transport toward single-passenger automobiles as cities have spread and become less dense.

Advanced computing is slowly but surely altering the interactions between people and the transportation system, potentially with the endgame of eventually replacing most motorized modes with fully autonomous vehicles, which would represent a radical change in technology.

The development of these new forms of mobility thus far has been evolutionary and taken advantage of the technology offered by smart phones in particular. The creation of hour-by-hour car-sharing options such as Zipcar encouraged people to rely on public transport, walking, and biking for most of their trips but also allowed them access to automobiles on demand, and research indicates that car sharing does, in fact, significantly reduce household car ownership.

Also made possible by new technology, French company BlaBlaCar‘s simplified paid ridesharing allows people to split the costs of long-distance trips for its 10 million users. According to BlaBlaCar head Frédéric Mazzella during a panel at the ITF, the service has yet to enter the U.S. market because with gas prices “at two dollars a gallon, there’s not much to share.” The U.S.’s weak transit systems and sprawling physical environment also limit the ability of users to carpool.

Undoubtedly the most prominent entry in this field of technologically informed transportation solutions has been Uber, whose fleet is generating up to $10 billion in annual revenues. Like Lyft and others, Uber’s offer of cheaper taxi services has been transformative; in San Francisco, for example, traditional taxi rides have declined in number by at least 65 percent over the past three years.

Now other startups are attempting to, in a similar vein, supplant traditional public transportation. Boston’s Bridj guarantees seats, faster travel times, and wifi for customers who are willing to pay slightly more than they would for a public bus.

What’s undeniable is that novel approaches to transportation have relied on tactics that avoid many of the regulations that have been in place for decades, or require them to be altered. Zipcar’s initial implementation, for example, needed a change in Massachusetts’ car rental laws. Uber’s services, more dramatically, require public entities to classify its operations differently than taxis (though that may be changing), allowing its independently contracted drivers to avoid full insurance and reducing the public sector’s ability to cap the total number of driver services being provided, guarantee stable fares, or ensure adequate pay for drivers.

It is true that the arrival of these transportation options has increased the mobility of many people who do not own, or do not wish to use, private automobiles. Uber’s Senior Vice President of Policy and Strategy David Plouffe (who was the campaign manager of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign) emphasized in an ITF panel session that the company’s services are being used in many cities as a gap-filler. “We are very excited about how we help public transportation,” he noted. By guaranteeing transport from the end of a rail line, for example, Uber can ensure peoples’ ability to get home at all hours when they’re not living within walking distance of a stop in a way that less available and more expensive taxis may not be able to.

These new taxi offerings may also be able to reduce costs for their users even further through the use of carpooling; UberPool and Lyft Line, for example, allow two to three people to share the same ride, and its cost, with one driver. Today, according to Plouffe, 20 percent of Uber rides in San Francisco are shared.

For cities coping with congestion, this kind of carpooling does suggest benefits for traffic reduction and Plouffe is right when he says that “the only option is getting more people in fewer cars,” since new highway construction is untenable in most places. Switching people out of single-passenger automobiles and into carpooling-like services could, indeed, reduce traffic. But if these people are choosing not to use transit, they may be making traffic worse. After all, twenty cars with three people each still take up more space per capita than a bus with sixty passengers.

The rapid rate of technological change in transportation has been a challenge for the public sector because of the difficulty of keeping up. For better or worse, the government’s ability to regulate urban movement has been undermined by the speed of the tech companies and their publicly attractive insistence that they’re only increasing mobility. David Plouffe claimed at the ITF that Uber is “hungry for new regulations,” but it’s hard to avoid the sense that Uber simply won’t accept regulations that don’t fit with its revenue motives.

The rise of tech companies effectively making their own rules and then asking the public to accept them puts in question the government’s ability to maintain stability in the industry while ensuring safety and continued access. Is the public sector abandoning its role in favor of crowdsourcing and crowd ratings?

Another question is the long-term impact of the services of these new companies. In making the argument for its importance, Uber’s public relations strategists have emphasized the company’s success in creating 20,000 new jobs per month. Similarly, Bridj suggests that it is providing supplemental services to public transportation, not competing directly, therefore creating more transportation jobs in general. It’s unclear, however, how many taxi drivers are now losing their jobs or suffering from reduced incomes, or whether public bus routes are not being implemented because of the availability of new private options.

The rollout of self-driving cars

The new jobs created by such technological advances may be ephemeral at best, because the autonomous car is likely coming soon, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that transportation companies are licking their chops to reduce the labor costs of their operations. While new services, from Zipcar to BlaBlaCar to Uber to Bridj, continue to rely on drivers to function, what would happen if labor were simply removed from the equation altogether?

There’s disagreement about how soon self-driving cars will come to market, though Google’s autonomous vehicle is already making the rounds, both literally and in the media. The fact that it has been tested on highways across California surely indicates that popular use of the technology isn’t far off—even if the experience of riding in the vehicles leaves something to be desired.

Slate’s Lee Gomes points out that there’s still plenty of work to be done, beginning with the fact that the Google car relies on highly complex maps of every street it drives on, and most streets have not yet been mapped. But it’s hard not to believe that some sort of vehicular automation will be rolled out soon. “Autonomous cars are going to happen so fast that it almost doesn’t matter what you’re going to do between now and then,” Robin Chase, co-founded of Zipcar, told me in an interview at the ITF. She predicts a public rollout in the next five to ten years.

But the question for our cities is how these autonomous cars will be introduced; will they simply replace today’s Uber drivers, or will they be owned by individuals? In an article in CityLab last year, Chase delved into this problem, arguing that individual ownership of self-driving vehicles would be destructive, increasing congestion and encouraging significant increases in car travel by people who order their vehicles to drop them off in front of stores, only to have the car circle the block for hours as they shop. Indeed, the ITF has modeled out scenarios showing increases in miles traveled with the rollout of self-driving vehicles.

Alternatively, a world in which autonomous cars are shared, perhaps operated as Uber-like taxis or alternatively as some sort of publicly or cooperatively owned service, could have significant benefits for cities by reducing the need for parking, encouraging intermodal trips, and expanding mobility by providing lower-cost travel options.

Changes in the role of public transport

As suggested by Uber’s David Plouffe, new mobility options may be providing an important complement to existing public transport systems. Evidence from San Francisco, where technologically advanced mobility may be most instilled in the popular culture, suggests that there hasn’t been a dramatically negative effect on public transportation thus far.

As of December 2013, Uber was already providing 160,000 trips per week in the Bay Area, a number that has likely increased in the subsequent months. Those trips, however, do not appear to have reduced transit ridership. Indeed, according to statistics from the American Public Transportation Association, ridership on buses and trains operated by all four of that region’s major transit operators—BART, San Francisco Muni, Oakland’s AC Transit, and Caltrain—increased between 2013 and 2014.

So perhaps Uber et al. are actually increasing transit ridership. Or maybe ridership is not increasing as quickly as it could given that metropolitan area’s relatively explosive population growth. It is probably too early to tell.

What is likely true is that the prices being charged for these taxi-like services are too high to attract most people out of public transportation for their daily trips. As Robin Chase told me, even UberPool, at “Five to seven dollars a trip, is still not what people can afford to get to work. Fourteen dollars a day, that’s not happening… and that’s [Uber’s] best case scenario!” At those prices, bus and train ridership is not likely to be dramatically affected.

On the other hand, Chase told me that she thinks that automated cars will dramatically change the equation for public transit services because of the much cheaper prices made possible when there’s no human labor involved. For Chase, “buses, shuttles, minivans, school buses [will be] all gone.” Because of the ability to substitute automated cars for these low-capacity transit modes, they will simply disappear from the options available in the urban environment as cities recognize the limited utility of their fixed schedules and inability to adapt to point-to-point demand. And she expects this change to come sooner rather than later.

When I asked her about how this would alter the public sector’s role in transportation, she noted that she expected governments to switch from subsidizing service provision for all to providing vouchers for automated transportation for the poor, much in the same way that the government in the 1970s switched from building public housing to providing rent vouchers.

I raised the prospect that this would negatively affect poor peoples’ mobility, but Chase rejected my premise, arguing that lower-income people would be able to use “the same vehicles that people who can afford it are using… Would you prefer what we have today,” she asked me, where “only poor people use [most transit service] and it sucks, or would you rather that poor people use the exact same thing that everyone else is using?”

It’s an interesting point, but it would require a very significant public role through subsidies if we’re to maintain mobility for low-income people who do not have access to their own automobiles. Are American cities ready to provide direct transportation subsidies for poor people to use self-driving cars? How would those subsidies work, and would people have access to unlimited trips and travel distances?

Paratransit services provided by many cities already offer people with limited personal mobility a point-to-point alternative similar to that which could be offered by automated cars. Today, paratransit trips cost the public purse more than three times as much to provide as regular bus and rail services according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, but that’s in part because of the low capacity of paratransit vehicles, high labor costs, and their non-fixed-route services. Eligible customers in most regions are allowed to take as many trips as they’d like upon advanced reservation, generally at a per-ride fare on par with traditional transit.

But paratransit has been implemented thanks to a federal government mandate resulting from the Americans with Disabilities Act. Without a similar requirement, will cities have the incentive to subsidize poor peoples’ trips? Or will they simply abandon traditional transit and leave those people to fend for themselves, at whatever price point charged by the companies operating automated vehicles?

Chase’s vision—that low-capacity transit operating on fixed routes will be replaced by automated cars that allow point-to-point trips—has become a commonly cited argument among those who suggest that governments cease investment in public transportation. To them, why spend any public money on transportation if all our problems will be solved with driverless cars?

But eliminating bus lines would disassemble the transit grid that makes the network work in most places. A large share of transit users rely on buses to take them to the train, or vice verse. Automated cars could fill some of that gap, but it’s hard to see them replacing local transit routes entirely.

In addition, eliminating bus routes as a component of the urban transit system could terminate one of the biggest perks of living in many cities: the unlimited-ride fare card. For tens of thousands of people—even millions of people in some cities—the unlimited ride card allows people to move about their city on public transit at one fixed price per month, giving them the ability to take side trips and explore new parts of the region. Could trips in automated vehicles be incorporated into such a system?

For Chase, “major, hard routes” like subways and elevated lines—and probably bus rapid transit, though she did not name it—would remain important even with the mass use of automated vehicles. The most heavily trafficked transit corridors, with more than 5,000 people moving per direction per hour, cannot be handled by automated vehicles alone. When operating in its own lanes and in a dedicated right of way, transit also has the potential to be quicker than automated vehicles.

So for dense urban neighborhoods and major job centers, public transit will likely remain a fact of life.

It’s also worth emphasizing that any advances in technology that provide for automated cars could also result in automated public transport vehicles, potentially saving significantly on the cost of operations by eliminating the need for driver labor (it could also reduce the cost of shipping by, for example, eliminating the need for truck drivers). Automated trains are already common for new subway and elevated rail systems, and some train lines in cities like Paris have been converted from driver to automated operation.

Buses moving around the city with no drivers could be more frequent because of reduced labor costs, and certain bus lines could probably be operated profitably. In other words, automobile automation could have a genuine competitor in automated public transport.

Automated buses and trains, much like automated taxis, do come at a cost: Significantly fewer jobs in the transportation business. Is this a tradeoff worth making? Is the robotization of transportation labor a benefit for society as a whole in that while it will eliminate transportation jobs, it will reduce the cost of getting around, producing more jobs in other industries? Or are the well-paid jobs in transportation worth retaining as an essential pathway to the middle class?

Implications for the urban environment

The mass adoption of automated cars could radically alter how the urban environment looks and works—particularly if, as Robin Chase suggests, they’re shared. The easy availability of cheap point-to-point transportation in which passengers are free to read, watch films, or sleep while travelling around could increase the amount of time people are willing to travel each day, increasing overall vehicle use.

Automated cars could also devalue urban cores by making biking and walking, or waiting for transit, less appealing when a robotized car can arrive practically instantly at the touch of a button.

But Chase’s sense is that people “really enjoy clusters.” People like living and working near one another, and that has led to the renaissance many American central cities are experiencing today. Uber itself seems convinced of that fact; the company is planning a huge headquarters complex in the heart of San Francisco filled with walkable shops and restaurants and—intriguingly—it will be directly adjacent to the T-Third Street light rail line. In its urban perspective, the complex is diametrically opposed to the suburban, generally car-oriented campuses under construction by fellow tech giants Apple, Facebook, and Google.

Chase notes that the real benefits of the autonomous cars will actually be to the currently less-accessible parts of dense cities. Today, she argued to me, “If you live in Brooklyn, and you live three blocks from the A [Subway] train, your house is more valuable than if you live within 15 blocks of it,” but with the automated car, people there will feel like they are much closer to the Subway stop and therefore their home values will increase. But living in the exurbs, with no effective public transport available, will remain unappealing to many.

Perhaps her vision is optimistic, but I don’t disagree with her sense that most people won’t want to spend more time in a vehicle—automated or not—if they can help it, especially since they’ll be paying for the privilege.

And the automated vehicle, if widely adopted, could do wonders for the livability of urban neighborhoods by significantly reducing the need for parking. If every automated vehicle replaced 10 now privately owned cars, we would need one-tenth of the parking spaces at peoples’ residences. And retail, parks, offices, and other attractions would need virtually no parking, since the automated cars could simply store themselves somewhere else—or serve other customers—once they’re finished being used.

Eliminating parking would reduce housing costs and free up space for other, more important needs.

Urban transportation politics after the rise of the automated car

Self-driving cars will transform our cities, but how will they transform our urban governance?

At the ITF, Uber’s David Plouffe painted the rise of his company’s services—and the potential future implementation of automated cars—as a sort of reaction to the limitations of our era’s public sector. For Plouffe, many cities “don’t have the ability to build whole new public transportation systems” because they “don’t have room or money” for new subway lines or other investments.

Plouffe’s argument is that the public sector’s role has diminished, will continue to diminish­­, and does not need to stop diminishing. As a result, private actors such as Uber are needed to fill in the gap and, in fact, replace the government in some ways. Uber’s mission, Plouffe said at the ITF, “is to provide more mobility options so that cities can plan better, make better choices, and actually save money.”

But who should be doing the planning: Uber or our democratically elected governments?

There’s no doubt in my mind of the validity of Robin Chase’s evaluation that the current American public transportation system, particularly in smaller cities and suburban areas, is too often a repository for the poor. Inadequate funding has produced inadequate service, leaving people isolated and, frankly, often desperate to purchase their own cars.

But automated vehicles are no panacea, nor are they an excuse for the continued defunding of the necessary and vital transit systems that will continue to serve our cities in the decades to come. Uber’s current shared services, while cheaper than the taxis of yore, are still far more expensive than public transit. Even if self-driving cars lower costs further, it’s hard to see how they could ever match the low operating costs of far higher capacity buses and trains, especially if everything is automated. So we shouldn’t rush into the privatization of every element of our transportation system; we cannot allow it to be hijacked by new technology without first ensuring that changes do not negatively affect the parts of the system that do work.

New technologies offer the opportunity to change the way we think about transportation and likely offer us opportunities to improve our cities. But the public sector, and the civic sector in general, must continue to play the key role in planning, identifying essential investments, and aiding those who are in need.

Image at top: Google’s newest self-driving car, from Flickr user smoothgroover22 (cc).

It's been an amazing, news-packed week — with states moving to bring down their Confederate flags following criticisms that they're racist symbols, the Supreme Court upholding Obamacare's health insurance subsidies, and the court legalizing same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

The Southern Poverty Law Center posted a cartoon that perfectly summarizes the week. The cartoon appears to be an altered version of a strip by Bob Englehart that shows the Confederate flag coming down, but not the LGBTQ pride flag rising.

Looks about right.

As Gandhi never quite said,

First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they attack you. Then you win.

I remember one of the first TV debates I had on the then-strange question of civil marriage for gay couples. It was Crossfire, as I recall, and Gary Bauer’s response to my rather earnest argument after my TNR cover-story on the matter was laughter. “This is the loopiest idea ever to come down the pike,” he joked. “Why are we even discussing it?”

Those were isolating  days. A young fellow named Evan Wolfson who had written a dissertation on the subject in 1983 got in touch, and the world immediately felt less lonely. Then a breakthrough in Hawaii, where the state supreme court ruled for marriage equality on gender equality grounds. No gay group had agreed to support the case, which was regarded at best as hopeless and at worst, a recipe for a massive backlash. A local straight attorney from the ACLU, Dan Foley, took it up instead, one of many straight men and women who helped make this happen. And when we won, and got our first fact on the ground, we indeed faced exactly that backlash and all the major gay rights groups refused to spend a dime on protecting the breakthrough … and we lost.

In fact, we lost and lost and lost again. Much of the gay left was deeply suspicious of this conservative-sounding reform; two thirds of the country were opposed; the religious right saw in the issue a unique opportunity for political leverage – and over time, they put state constitutional amendments against marriage equality on the ballot in countless states, and won every time. Our allies deserted us. The Clintons embraced the Defense of Marriage Act, and their Justice Department declared that DOMA was in no way unconstitutional the morning some of us were testifying against it on Capitol Hill. For his part, president George W. Bush subsequently went even further and embraced the Federal Marriage Amendment to permanently ensure second-class citizenship for gay people in America. Those were dark, dark days.

I recall all this now simply to rebut the entire line of being “on the right side of history.” History does not have such straight lines. Movements do not move relentlessly forward; progress comes and, just as swiftly, goes. For many years, it felt like one step forward, two steps back. History is a miasma of contingency, and courage, and conviction, and chance.

But some things you know deep in your heart: that all human beings are made in the image of God; that their loves and lives are equally precious; that the pursuit of happiness promised in the Declaration of Independence has no meaning if it does not include the right to marry the person you love; and has no force if it denies that fundamental human freedom to a portion of its citizens. In the words of Hannah Arendt:

“The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which ‘the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement, regardless of one’s skin or color or race’ are minor indeed. Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence; and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs.”

This core truth is what Justice Kennedy affirmed today, for the majority: that gay people are human. I wrote the following in 1996:

Homosexuality, at its core, is about the emotional connection between two adult human beings. And what public institution is more central—more definitive—of that connection than marriage? The denial of marriage to gay people is therefore not a minor issue. It is the entire issue. It is the most profound statement our society can make that homosexual love is simply not as good as heterosexual love; that gay lives and commitments and hopes are simply worth less. It cuts gay people off not merely from civic respect, but from the rituals and history of their own families and friends. It erases them not merely as citizens, but as human beings.

We are not disordered or sick or defective or evil – at least no more than our fellow humans in this vale of tears. We are born into family; we love; we marry; we take care of our children; we die. No civil institution is related to these deep human experiences more than civil marriage and the exclusion of gay people from this institution was a statement of our core inferiority not just as citizens but as human beings. It took courage to embrace this fact the way the Supreme Court did today. In that 1996 essay, I analogized to the slow end to the state bans on inter-racial marriage:

The process of integration—like today’s process of “coming out”—introduced the minority to the majority, and humanized them. Slowly, white people came to look at interracial couples and see love rather than sex, stability rather than breakdown. And black people came to see interracial couples not as a threat to their identity, but as a symbol of their humanity behind the falsifying carapace of race.

It could happen again. But it is not inevitable; and it won’t happen by itself. And, maybe sooner rather than later, the people who insist upon the centrality of gay marriage to every American’s equality will come to seem less marginal, or troublemaking, or “cultural,” or bent on ghettoizing themselves. They will seem merely like people who have been allowed to see the possibility of a larger human dignity and who cannot wait to achieve it.

I think of the gay kids in the future who, when they figure out they are different, will never know the deep psychic wound my generation – and every one before mine – lived through: the pain of knowing they could never be fully part of their own family, never be fully a citizen of their own country. I think, more acutely, of the decades and centuries of human shame and darkness and waste and terror that defined gay people’s lives for so long. And I think of all those who supported this movement who never lived to see this day, who died in the ashes from which this phoenix of a movement emerged. This momentous achievement is their victory too – for marriage, as Kennedy argued, endures past death.

I never believed this would happen in my lifetime when I wrote my first several TNR essays and then my book, Virtually Normal, and then the anthology and the hundreds and hundreds of talks and lectures and talk-shows and call-ins and blog-posts and articles in the 1990s and 2000s. I thought the book, at least, would be something I would have to leave behind me – secure in the knowledge that its arguments were, in fact, logically irrefutable, and would endure past my own death, at least somewhere. I never for a millisecond thought I would live to be married myself. Or that it would be possible for everyone, everyone in America.

But it has come to pass. All of it. In one fell, final swoop.

Know hope.

The Vangardist, a German men’s magazine, is printing an entire issue using HIV-infected blood in a quest to educate the public and eliminate misconceptions about HIV and AIDS.

Of course, there’s also the issue of taking this approach to raise the magazine’s literary and commercial value. The Vangardist‘s May issue is already being considered a collector’s item since just 3,000 copies featuring the HIV-positive ink blood have been printed.

There is further information here.

 Truckmaker Freightliner’s newest commercial big rig can steer and drive itself, while the driver relaxes and enjoys the ride. No, I’m not talking about Autobot Ultra Magnus. It’s the Freightliner Inspiration Truck, the first ever self-driving commercial truck to receive a road license plate for autonomous operation on public highways.

The system, called Highway Pilot, operates like the autopilot on a commercial airliner. Once set and underway the system can maintain a cruise without the driver’s intervention. Highway Pilot uses stereoscopic cameras located at the front end of the truck that watch the road ahead for roadside signage, lane markers and other vehicles.

This 3D imagery is fed into the Inspiration Truck’s electronic brain, which then affects the electric steering rack, the drive-by-wire throttle and the automated manual transmission to keep the truck between the lines and a safe distance behind a leading vehicle.

It is not yet a fully autonomous vehicle:

Speaking of the human element, the Inspiration Truck still requires that a driver be in its driver’s seat. A person needs to get the truck moving from a stop, handle complex low-speed maneuvers and to monitor autonomous drive.

Freightliner tells us that the system will notify the driver with visual and audible cues in the event that conditions won’t allow confident autonomy (such as snow, rain or on roads with poorly defined lane markers) and a human is needed to take over. When driving conditions are optimal, however, and the road stretches out ahead, the Inspiration Truck’s driver can set the Highway Pilot and tend to other parts of the business of logistics.

There is more here.

One of the most remarkable discoveries of economics is that under the right conditions competitive markets allocate production across firms in just that way that minimizes the total costs of production. (You can find a discussion of this remarkable property in Modern Principles. See also this MRU video.)

One of the necessary conditions for this result is that firms must face the same input and output prices. If one firm is subsidized and another taxed, for example, then resources will be misallocated and total costs will increase. In a pioneering paper, Klenow and Hsieh measure misallocation across firms in China, India and the United States and they find that micro misallocations can have large, macroeconomic effects. In particular, if capital and labor were allocated as well in China and India as they are in the United States then output in those countries would double.

We can get some intuition for the costs of resource misallocation by looking at water in California. As you may have noticed at the grocery store, almonds are in demand right now whether raw or in almond milk. Asian demand for almonds is also up. As a result, in the last 10 years almond production in California has doubled. That’s great, except for the fact that almond production uses a huge amount of water and water in CA is severely mispriced and thus misallocated.

In my previous post, I pointed out that agriculture uses 80% of the water in California but accounts for less than 2% of the economy. So how much water does almond production alone use? More water is used in almond production than is used by all the residents and businesses of San Francisco and Los Angeles combined. Here’s a chart from Mother Jones:

(Aside: Some of this water is naturally recycled so net use is likely somewhat lower but a lot of water in California is now being pumped from the aquifer and that water isn’t being replenished.)

At the same time as farmers are watering their almonds, San Diego is investing in an energy-intensive billion-dollar desalination plant which will produce water at a much higher cost than the price the farmer are paying.  That is a massive and costly misallocation of water.

In short, we are spending thousands of dollars worth of water to grow hundreds of dollars worth of almonds and that is truly nuts.

Hat tip: Walter Olson.

Hat tip: Daniel Altman.

Izabella Kaminska writes:

George K Fogg at law firm Perkins Coie has been thinking about the problem of past claims (or liens) on bitcoins for nearly 14 months now.

His conclusion: under the United States’ UCC code (uniform commercial code) as long as bitcoins are treated as general intangibles, no high value investor can be sure that an angry Tony Soprano won’t show up one day to claim the bitcoins they thought they received in a completely unencumbered manner are in fact his. In fact, it’s only if and when Tony Soprano publicly renounces his claim to the underlying bitcoin collateral he is owed that the bitcoins stand a chance of being treated as unencumbered. Until then, a hot potato claim risk exists for every future acquirer of Soprano’s bitcoin.

Indeed, given the high volume of fraud and default in the bitcoin network, chances are most bitcoins have competing claims over them by now. Put another way, there are probably more people with legitimate claims over bitcoins than there are bitcoins [emphasis added]. And if they can prove the trail, they can make a legal case for reclamation.

This contrasts considerably with government cash. In the eyes of the UCC code, cash doesn’t take its claim history with it upon transfer. To the contrary, anyone who acquires cash starts off with a clean slate as far as previous claims are concerned. It is assumed, basically, that previous claims on cash are untraceable throughout the system. Though, liens it must be stressed can still be exercised over bank accounts or people.

There is more at the FT link here.  And I have a simple question for all you Bitcoin partisans out there: how large is the largest private sector transaction on Bitcoin to date?  I’m not “anti-Bitcoin,” and I am glad the regulators have allowed the experiment to proceed, still I’m not persuaded by the arguments that it is going to be a big deal.

This post comes via Know More, Wonkblog's social media site.

The graphic below, by Bonnie Berkowitz and Lazaro Gamio of The Washington Post, illustrates how measles spreads in an area without a vaccination program. The differently shaded squares represent four generations of infection, from Patient Zero (the darkest red square at the top left) to the people he or she infects, the people they infect in turn, and so on. The dark squares represent people who die from the disease.

Without vaccinations, each measles case will infect 12 to 18 other people on average every 10 to 14 days. You can see how quickly the disease spreads from the first generation (Patient Zero) to 12 to 18 people in the second generation, 144-324 people in the third generation, and 1728-5832 people in the fourth generation. That adds up to more than 6,000 infections, all within 40 days. In a country with substandard healthcare and malnutrition, up to 28 percent of those infected will die.

Now contrast that with a country with full vaccination: In that scenario the disease would spread to 0.8 people every 10 to 14 days, and less than .3 percent will die.

In a country like the U.S., where most people have been vaccinated but pockets have not, the disease would spread to 1.1 to 2 people every 10-14 days and less than .3 percent would die.

It's a great reminder not to take vaccinations for granted.

Check out Know More's home page, Twitter or Facebook for the best and most interesting visuals, videos and data hits from around the Web.

Retro Seattle police car.

Curtis Cronn

Police in Seattle are just weeks away from implementing pilot program in which 12 officers will test different types of body cameras. It's a first step in a plan to put body cameras on the department's more than 1,000 officers by the year 2016.

Now that plan may get put on ice, due in part to an overly broad public records requests. The Seattle Times reported this morning that an anonymous man, known only by the email address policevideorequests@gmail.com, has made an official request for "details on every 911 dispatch on which officers are sent; all the written reports they produce; and details of each computer search generated by officers when they run a person’s name, or check a license plate or address."

The requestor also wants all video from patrol car cameras currently in use, and plans to request video from body cams once they are implemented. He has requested the information "every day, in spreadsheet form."

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Most every American has some basis to complain about unpredictable weather. As a mid-latitude country with shining seas and majestic mountain ranges and fruited, wind-swept plains, we’re subject to pretty much every type of weather meteorologists have thought to identify. So perhaps you’ve heard the line: “If you don’t like the weather in Chicago, wait five minutes.” Or you’ve heard it applied to a city nearer to you: Denver or San Francisco or Atlanta or Boston.

But where in the country is the weather truly the most unpredictable?

We’re going to answer this question in a specific way, by comparing daily weather patterns against long-term averages.¹² We’ll define the weather as being more unpredictable when it deviates more from these long-term trends.

Meteorologists call these long-term averages climatology. Weather forecasting has moved beyond climatology to embrace more sophisticated techniques, but in some cities climatology does extremely well on its own. Take the case of Phoenix, for example. The chart below compares high temperatures in Phoenix on each day from 2011 through 2013¹³ against the 20-year average for the week¹⁴ in question. On a typical day in Phoenix, the high temperature deviated from the long-term average by only 5 to 6 degrees. You could plan a wedding or golf tournament in Phoenix years in advance and be reasonably confident of what the temperature would be.

This wouldn’t be true for Denver. Over the past three years, climatology has missed the high temperature there by 9 to 10 degrees on average. And misses of 20 degrees or more, which almost never happen in Phoenix, have occurred, on average, once every other week in Denver.

Get the drift? We’ll do this for 120 American cities, one representative from each of the 120 National Weather Service forecast offices across the 50 states.¹⁵ (Generally, we used data from the largest airport-based weather station in the area.)¹⁶ And we’ll be doing it for 10 weather statistics rather than just high temperatures. We can then combine the statistics into an overall measure of weather unpredictability for each city.

As a reminder, our goal is to evaluate how unpredictable the weather is — rather than whether the weather is good or bad. In San Diego, to a first approximation, it’s always 72 degrees and sunny.¹⁷ In Seattle, to a first approximation, it’s always 59 degrees and drizzly. Most people like San Diego’s weather better, but both cities have fairly predictable weather patterns.

Nor are we concerned about how much the weather varies throughout the year — provided it does so predictably. As a matter of practice, cities with high seasonal volatility usually also have high day-to-day unpredictability, but there are exceptions. Phoenix, for instance, has pronounced seasonal variation in its temperatures (the average high temperature there is 67 degrees in January and 106 degrees in August) but the daily values don’t deviate much around those seasonal averages. So its temperatures rate as predictable. Similarly, a city that routinely has thunderstorms in the spring but rarely throughout the rest of the year will rate as having more predictable weather than one where storms can occur at any time.

The statistics we’ll be evaluating fall into three major categories.

First, temperature:

• High temperatures;
• Low temperatures;
• Daily mean temperatures.

Second, precipitation:

• Rainfall, in inches;
• Snowfall, in inches of snow (rather than the liquid equivalent¹⁸);
• A binary variable indicating the presence or absence of precipitation (without regard to the type or amount of it). If there’s any precipitation at all over the 24-hour day, we score this variable as one. Otherwise, it’s zero.

Finally, severe weather and the conditions that contribute to it:

• Wind speed;
• Humidity¹⁹;
• Cloud cover²⁰;
• A binary variable indicating whether there was a severe weather event (a thunderstorm, tornado or hail) in the city that day.

We scrubbed the data to identify extreme outliers and obvious data-entry errors and removed them before calculating the weekly averages.²¹ Then we calculated the root-mean-square deviation for each variable. Because all the statistics are on different scales — degrees Fahrenheit for temperature, mph for wind speed — we standardized them onto a common scale before averaging them together.

That was a bit of work, but it allowed us to generate this fun map:

Among the cities we tested, the one with the most unpredictable weather is … Rapid City, South Dakota. Congratulations, Rapid City!

The ICAO code for Rapid City Regional Airport is KRAP. That’s also a good description of Rapid City’s weather. Its temperature might be 30 degrees in January — or just as easily -12. It’s snowy and windy and prone to big, unexpected winter storms. And it has a thunderstorm on almost 25 percent of days from July through September, more than the national average.

But Rapid City isn’t alone; other cities in the Great Plains and Upper Midwest dominate the most-unpredictable list. After Rapid City, those with the most unpredictable weather are Great Falls, Montana; Houghton, Michigan; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Fargo, North Dakota; Duluth, Minnesota; Bismarck, North Dakota; Aberdeen, South Dakota; Grand Island, Nebraska; and Glasgow, Montana.

For the most part, these cities are landlocked. The presence of lakes or oceans can contribute to weather problems — for instance, the huge amounts of lake-effect snow in Houghton, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (about twice as much as in notoriously snowy Buffalo, New York). But water usually does more to regulate temperatures and severe weather.

The other common thread between these cities is that not very many people live in them. Indeed, among the top 23 cities on our list, none are within the 50 most populous metro areas in the United States. Among cities that do fall within the most populous metro areas, those with the most unpredictable weather are as follows:

1. Kansas City, Missouri;
2. Oklahoma City;
3. Minneapolis;
4. Cincinnati;
5. Indianapolis;
6. St. Louis;
7. Birmingham, Alabama;
8. Boston;
9. Milwaukee;
10. Dallas.

This list, too, is dominated by landlocked cities in the Midwest (depending on how you define the region). There are a smattering of northeastern cities and a few landlocked cities in the South.

To get more insight into the source of these differences, we can break the ratings down into their three major subcomponents: temperature, precipitation and severe weather. Here’s the map for temperature unpredictability:

You can easily make out the path of the Rocky Mountains in this map. Cities just to the east of them — like Denver and Great Falls, Montana — have much more unpredictable temperatures than almost any place to the west of them.

Cities just to the east of the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico have the most predictable temperatures. San Diego’s temperatures are the most predictable of anywhere in the continental United States (Honolulu’s are the most predictable overall). Seattle and San Francisco have highly predictable temperatures, as does the Florida peninsula.

The map of unpredictable precipitation patterns is dominated by cities in the eastern half of the country:

Nothing tops Houghton, which gets about twice as much snow as any other city we evaluated and can also be reasonably rainy in the summer.

But why don’t notoriously wet cities like Seattle and Portland, Oregon, rank higher? Both have precipitation fairly often; Seattle ranks eighth in the country (out of the 120 cities we tracked) by the number of days with precipitation, and Portland ranks ninth. But they usually have light precipitation. Between 1994 and 2013, Portland got at least an inch of rain only 1.2 percent of the time, for example, as compared with 2.1 percent of the time for the average U.S. city. Their precipitation patterns are also quite seasonal, making them more predictable. Seattle has historically received precipitation on 71 percent of days in January but just 19 percent of days in July.

If you want to have an easy life as a weather forecaster, you should get a job in Las Vegas, Phoenix or Los Angeles. Predict that it won’t rain in one of those cities, and you’ll be right about 90 percent of the time.

The frequency of severe weather conditions is more idiosyncratic than the presence of precipitation in general. But the map of areas most prone to unpredictable, severe weather generally follows Tornado Alley, with cities in the line of states from South Dakota through Oklahoma and northern Texas ranking toward the top of the list.

Oceans and lakes tend to reduce severe weather frequency and make its occurrence more predictable. There are some exceptions, however — especially the Atlantic Seaboard from North Carolina through Maine. Cities like Boston and New York don’t have many thunderstorms, but they have fairly unpredictable wind patterns and humidity levels. Those can scale up the severity of a storm in a hurry, especially in the winter months.

Want a more precise estimate of where your city ranks? As we mentioned before, we translated the 10 weather conditions onto a common scale; specifically, it’s a common scale where 66 represents average. Why 66? Because it should be an intuitive value when we’re looking at weather data. The high temperature for the 120 weather stations we tracked was about 66 degrees, on average, throughout the year.²²

Higher values indicate more unpredictability:

• Scores in the 80s or above indicate very high unpredictability.
• Scores in the 70s indicate above-average unpredictability.
• Scores in the 60s indicate average unpredictability.
• Scores in the 50s indicate comparatively predictable weather patterns.
• Scores in the 40s or below indicate highly predictable weather.

There are some limitations to our method. It reflects day-to-day rather than hour-to-hour unpredictability, for instance. And perhaps the weather is more unpredictable within particular microclimates than at the airport-based weather stations we’ve tracked. Still, a few cities with a reputation for unpredictable weather rank lower than you might expect:

• San Francisco’s weather patterns are unusual as compared to the rest of the country (September has historically been San Francisco’s warmest month, for instance). But they’re predictably unusual, at least on a day-to-day (if not necessarily hour-to-hour) basis. And San Francisco, like the rest of the West Coast, rarely gets severe weather.
• Chicago’s weather is slightly more unpredictable than average but not more than that. It has distinct seasons, and considerable temperature fluctuations, especially in the spring. But it doesn’t have especially unpredictable severe weather or precipitation patterns. It isn’t all that windy, despite its nickname, and it very rarely gets lake-effect snow since the wind usually blows west to east across Lake Michigan rather than into Chicago.
• Buffalo does get plenty of lake-effect snow and has unpredictable wind patterns. But its humidity levels and cloud cover patterns are fairly predictable, which cuts down on severe weather outside the winter and early spring.
• Denver, although it has among the most unpredictable high temperatures in the country and can have bouts of severe weather, has fairly predictable rainfall patterns (there usually isn’t much) and cloud cover (it’s usually sunny). And its problems tend to be concentrated in spring; summer days in Denver are often predictably mild.

These cities still have plenty of unpredictable weather. But if you don’t like the weather in Chicago or Denver, be thankful you don’t have to deal with the KRAP they have in Rapid City.

Read on Ars Technica | Comments

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - SEPTEMBER 19: Solar panels cover the employee parking lot on the Patagonia corporate headquarters campus in Ventura, California on Friday, September 19, 2014. (Photo by David Walter Banks/For The Washington Post)

It is widely known that among all the sources of alternative energy, the one with the greatest potential is solar. How could it be otherwise? Staggering amounts of solar radiation strike the Earth each day; the only trick is capturing more of it.

In a new report, the Environment America Research and Policy Center seeks to visualize and quantify this potential as it pertains to the United States. The report argues that the U.S. "has the potential to produce more than 100 times as much electricity from solar PV and concentrating solar power (CSP) installations as the nation consumes each year." It adds that every single state could generate more solar electricity than its residents currently consume.

Here's a visualization, showing states that can get 1 to 5 times their current energy needs from solar, states that can get 5 to 25 times their energy, states that can get 25 to 100 times what they're using, and states that can get over 100 times their current needs:

Environment America, "Star Power: The Growing Role of Solar Energy in America," 2014.

The map above, notes the report, was created by comparing technical estimates of solar potential from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory with state level electricity sales data from the Energy Information Administration.

The report also suggests that 35 million homes and businesses could potentially install solar on their roofs:

Environment America, "Star Power: The Growing Role of Solar Energy in America," 2014.

Here again, the map is based on data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which laid out the percentage of potential rooftops that could host solar panels in various climates.

Granted, it is not that all of this solar potential will necessarily ever be exploited. But then again, we only need to exploit some of it. "It’s technically achievable, and we only have to capture a fraction of it, one hundredth of it to get all of our current electricity needs," says Environment America's energy program director Rob Sargent.

“It’s an ambitious goal, but achievable if Congress and the states continue to support smart, effective public policies such as the solar investment tax credit, net energy metering and renewable portfolio standards," said Ken Johnson, the vice president of communication at the Solar Energy Industries Association, of the new study. "By next year, for the first time, solar will be providing more than one percent of America’s total electricity needs, and our growth trajectory looks very promising."

(Photo by Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images)

The Obama administration recently inflated Obamacare enrollment statistics by as many as 400,000 people by including stand-alone dental plans in their official count, according to a House committee investigation.

The administration in September said 7.3 million people at the time were enrolled in health plans through the Affordable Care Act insurance marketplaces. The House investigation, first reported by Bloomberg, found that this number also counted people enrolled in just dental coverage, a change from how previous enrollment figures have been counted that the Obama administration did not disclose. Without counting those dental plans, enrollment would have been 6.97 million.

That 7.3 million figure reported by the Department of Health and Human Services was down from the 8 million people who had signed up through the end of April. HHS hasn't provided a comprehensive accounting of why enrollment fell — such as how many people didn't pay their premiums or whether those enrollees found another source of coverage.

On Thursday, after news of the House investigation broke, the administration said that its total was "erroneously counted" in recent announcements.

HHS said it made this mistake twice. The agency overstated its September figures by about 400,000. Then in November, it reported an inaccurate figure again when it said 7.1 million people were enrolled at the time; the actual figure was 6.7 million.

"The mistake we made is unacceptable," HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell wrote on Twitter on Thursday. "I will be communicating that clearly throughout the [department]."

Despite these corrected figures, HHS said it still aims to have 9.1 million covered in marketplace plans next year — which is about 4 million people fewer than the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office had projected for 2015.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, accused the administration of trying to obscure the number of people who had dropped out of the ACA insurance marketplaces, or exchanges, during the year.

"Only after repeated requests from Oversight Committee investigators did this egregious discrepancy become apparent," Issa said in a statement. "This Administration still appears to be calling its Obamacare transparency plan from the Jonathan Gruber playbook: dismissing the American public’s right to know with the same deceptive arrogance that helped them pass the bill in the first place.”

As my colleague Erik Wemple wrote just the other night, HHS has been especially stingy about providing enrollment data. Reporters have constantly pushed HHS for more up-to-date information, and the answer from HHS is usually the same: the agency can't provide real-time information because it needs to make sure all the data it's putting out is clean. Today's news obviously undercuts that argument. Meanwhile, some states running their own insurance marketplaces provide much more regular performance updates — like Massachusetts, which releases one every day.

Considering everything that's happened around Gruber's comments in recent days, there's no doubt this "error" looks especially bad for the administration.

This post has been updated with statements from Burwell and Issa.