Out of Control

Sprawl hits Japan; the government hits back:

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport would together submit legislation before parliament next year to tighten regulations against large new commercial and public facilities in suburbs, a trade ministry official said.

While suburban mega-stores have yet to take off in Japan in the same way as in the United States and many other industrialized countries, urban flight has been a growing trend.

Excluding the greater Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya areas, the centers of Japanese cities of more than 200,000 people have lost about 10 percent of their residents and 15 percent of their offices in the past 10 years, the trade ministry official said.

Whole article here; via ADC.

For more on global sprawl, go here.

Sierra Club Head Honcho Carl Pope and Skeptical Environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg debate the state of the earth here; via AL Daily.

When you’re Amtrak, says Nick Gillespie.

Read on, here. (Nick also digs into Amtrak’s lousy food service and—with toilet doors spontaneously flying open—bathroom service doesn’t seem much better.)

His post spurred quite a lot of discussion about subsidies and whether Amtrak is more of a drain than say, highways, transit, or the airlines (who are always happy to receive government bailouts).

Here I give the lowdown on federal subsidies, highways vs. transit.

And here Bob Poole cites this Bureau of Transportation Statistics study and adds other modes to the mix:

The results should put to rest spurious claims that highways are more subsidized than Amtrak. On the basis of net federal subsidy per thousand passenger miles, Amtrak finished first, at $186 per thousand, over the 1990-2002 period. In second place was transit, at $118 per thousand. For highways overall, the comparable figure was minus $2—i.e, highway users paid in more than they got back. And in aviation, the airline subsidy was $6 per thousand, while general aviation’s was $90 per thousand.

And in case you are wondering what might be obscured by the normalization by passenger miles, let’s also look at the total dollar amounts of net federal subsidy. By this metric, urban transit got the most, averaging $5.1 billion a year (in 2000 dollars) during this time period. Airlines were second, averaging $1.9 billion a year (mostly for FAA safety-related costs covered by general fund appropriations). Amtrak was in third place, averaging just over $1 billion per year over this 13-year period. And over this same period, the highway system was a net provider of federal funds to the tune of $7.4 billion per year (though that’s been trending downward since it peaked at $11.7 billion in 1998).

And here (no link) Bob cites the Federal Highway Administration's 2002 Highway Statistics report to go beyond federal subsidies:

Table HF-10 of that report shows that gas taxes, other auto excise taxes, and tolls amounted to over 76% of total federal, state, and local highway spending. Even after accounting for the fact that nearly 14% of those user tax monies are diverted to non-highway purposes, the table still shows that 60% of total highway spending comes directly from user taxes and tolls. A longer-term analysis shows that monies collected from highway users over the years 1961 through 2002 ranged from a low of 66% of all highway spending (in 1981) to a high of 92% (in 1996).

Even if all of our cars vanished we’d still need roads for, say, emergency services (better than having EMTs take heart attack victims to the hospital via Amtrak). Some say issues like that provide good justification for some general revenue dough going to roads. Plus the vast majority of stuff that we buy gets to stores by trucks that travel on roads.

And a bit more on transit: Although some vanpool services are in the black, all U.S. transit systems operate in the red (see the “recovery ratio” column on the far right).

And sadly, the fact that all transit agencies lose money is actually a rhetorical advantage for individual agencies. It gives the impression that transit is, by nature, a money loser.

That’s not exactly true, but you’ll have to leave the states to find examples of in-the-black transit. And even in America there are ways to lose less money (e.g. competitive contracting.)

BTW, Nick points to this article. Some nuggets:

The Bush administration yesterday endorsed a recommendation from the Transportation Department inspector general that Amtrak eliminate its food service and sleeper cars on some long-distance routes in a drastic effort to cut costs.

The dining and sleeper cars cost Amtrak more money than they generate, but railroad officials have told Congress they are important parts of their customer service.

"Overall, our analysis shows that eliminating sleeper cars, dining cars and other amenities on Amtrak's long-distance routes could save between $75 million and $158 million per year in operating costs and avoid an additional $79 million in planned annual capital expenditures," a report released yesterday by Transportation Department Inspector General Kenneth Mead said.

Other amenities the report recommends cutting include on-board entertainment, lounge seating and checked baggage service.

...

Last year, Amtrak lost $600 million on its 13 long-distance routes of more than 500 miles.

They include the Capitol Limited that operates between Washington and Chicago and the Auto Train the runs between Lorton, Va., and Sanford, Fla., near Orlando.

The Capitol Limited lost $208 per passenger in sleeper cars last year compared with $112 per coach passenger.

None of Amtrak's routes nationwide operates profitably, when infrastructure costs are included, including the 23 shorter regional routes, such as Pennsylvania's Keystone route and California's San Joaquin route.

For more background on Amtrak, go here.

Hayek devotees and fans of books like Steven Johnson's Emergence -- which discusses the concept of emergent order in biological systems, computer science, and cities -- will certainly enjoy this article. Research on a new transportation network model offers some interesting findings regarding variable road pricing:

What do slime mold, airline traffic, fungi, cancer tumors, and computer networks have in common? They all transport something -- nutrients, planes, or information -- from one place to another.

Although there are many examples of systems that solve the classic problem of getting from point A to point B, the extent to which decentralized, or perimeter routes, versus centralized, or hub-like routes benefit the complicated networks of the real world remains an open question.

Researchers from Oxford University in England have tackled the problem by examining the congestion costs within a network model that combines paths that go around the perimeter of the network and central hubs that provide shorter paths through the network. Real-world networks are too complicated to describe exactly mathematically. The researchers' model is simple enough to solve exactly, yet realistic enough to provide insights into real networks.

The research is aimed at finding ways to ease bottlenecks in networks involving manufacturing, the Internet and traffic, and ways to disrupt networks like tumor blood flow and terrorist supply chains. The findings could also help design better networks.

. . . .

In each case, the same interplay between centralized and decentralized pathways and control arises. "Going through the center has the advantage of shorter distance but has a higher risk of congestion and hence longer overall journey-time," said Johnson. "Going around the center has a lower risk of congestion but a larger geographical distance," he said.

. . . .

The model is a busy wheel-and-spoke road network that feeds cars into the center at a steady rate. The cars experience a bottleneck in the center which adds a delay or cost to the journey time, said Johnson. At the same time, cars that travel around the ring road typically have to travel further, but experience no cost.

"So the question is, for a given cost, what is the optimal number of roads carrying traffic into the center -- where optimal means that a driver going from A to B and free to use the ring road, the roads to the center, or some combination of the two -- will typically have the shortest journey time?" said Johnson.

The details of the roads in the city center will determine exactly what time delay drivers using the hub will experience, said Johnson. The number of roads feeding cars into the center, and hence how many cars are being fed into the center also affects the cost, he said.

In the simplest case no delay arises, the cost is zero, and it is always better to add more roads through the center. When the cost increases with the number of roads to the center, however, there is an optimal value for the number of roads, said Johnson. For a 1,000-node network with a cost-per-connection to the hub of 1, the optimal number of connections to the hub is 44.

The model showed that above a certain number of roads to the center, adding a new road always increases the bottleneck to such an extent that the added benefit of a new route is outweighed by the time delay due to increased congestion in the center. "The interesting and counter-intuitive result that we found is that in such situations we should actually reduce the number of roads connecting to the center," said Johnson.

The problem can also be turned on its head, said Johnson. "Given the number of roads which exists to the center and which we assume cannot easily be changed, what cost should be imposed for passing through the center [so] that drivers between A and B experience a minimum journey time," he said. "This charge could be an artificially induced time-delay -- lights or ramps with long waiting times -- or monetary."

The researchers' model showed that in London, where a flat fee of five pounds is charged for passing through the center, a usage-dependent cost would make the network more efficient. "These costs could be advertised on electronic boards around the ring road so that people decide ahead of time whether to use the center or not," said Johnson.

The model shows that the structure of a network is only part of the story of why systems work the way they do, said Johnson. In biological systems, and perhaps also in technological ones, it might be possible for a network to spontaneously rewire itself to respond to traffic. "Maybe this is what we are observing in nature when we see, for example, that different fungi have different types of network shapes," said Johnson.

"Taking it to a more speculative level, maybe… the network structures that we observe in nature have their structure emerging from their function rather than the other way round," said Johnson.

I'd be curious to see what would happen if they tweaked the model to represent a transportation network with multiple centers, a la Houston or Atlanta.

I also think that the implications of this type of research for land use and urban growth are interesting as well. It seems fairly obvious that micromanaged, long-range land use planning that attempts to impose a fixed pattern of future development would choke off the ability of the "network" (people, homes, businesses, etc.) to spontaneously reorient itself to adapt to changing conditions. Research into emergent systems seems to reinforce the argument that in a complex system like urban development, the only reasonable control mechanism is one that respects the inherently dynamic nature of the system. Like market-oriented planning!

(via American Dream Coalition)

According to the WaPo, Virginia officials are considering a public-private partnership proposal for the Dulles Toll Road in Northern Virginia:

A consortium of the region's leading road builders and operators said yesterday that it plans to offer Virginia a lump sum of more than $1 billion in return for revenue generated by the Dulles Toll Road for the next 50 years.

The consortium said it also would pay for operations and maintenance of the road, one of Northern Virginia's main commuter routes. It would make 19 improvements, including construction of new access ramps from the Capital Beltway and other roads, repaving of the entire length and modernization of toll collection.

The revenue paid by the consortium to the state could cover Virginia's share of extending Metrorail through Tysons Corner, a project estimated to cost $2.4 billion, up from the $1.5 billion figure that prevailed last year when the rail financing plan was set.

The proposal would push forward the frontier in Virginia's effort to privatize its transportation system and would be the latest in a small but growing number of such deals in the nation.

In recent years, Virginia has signed a handful of deals in which private groups agreed to build or widen roads in exchange for toll revenue. This deal would differ because it would exchange the tolls from an existing -- and profitable -- public highway for cash. Virginia would still own the road.

The group behind the proposal includes some of the biggest names in the road-building industry, including Clark Construction Group, Shirley Contracting, Dewberry LLC and Autostrade, which operates the Dulles Greenway, a private highway that links to the Dulles Toll Road. The group also includes former governor Gerald L. Baliles (D).

Story here.

Our friends at Heritage Foundation released a new paper yesterday, Colorado’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights Should Not Be Breached.

"Colorado’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights imposes sensible tax and spending limits on the state government, reducing the burden on taxpayers and creating a better climate for economic growth; but rather than make politically difficult belt-tightening decisions, lawmakers have proposed Referendum C, a $3 billion tax increase that will permanently change TABOR, increase the size of government, and pose long-term fiscal risk."

TABOR is critical to limiting government growth...that's why 25 states are now considering some form of it! See Reason's previous work for some background.

From the "THAT'S gonna happen" file:

The new mayor wants to change Los Angeles' car culture, though his push for mass transit comes in the same month of the London subway and bus bombings.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is starting small, asking Los Angeles residents to give up driving just one or two days a week. The theory is that getting a few more cars off the road would go a long way toward easing gridlock and air pollution that are the worst in the nation.

"Los Angeles has a history of over-reliance on the single-passenger automobile, and we're going to have to change that history," said Villaraigosa, who went to Washington last week to lobby for more funding for transportation projects.

Since freeways overtook a once-thriving trolley system half a century ago, attitudes toward public transportation in Los Angeles have ranged from blase to hostile.

Story here.

Sometimes, truth is indeed stranger than fiction:

The sculpture, a plastic bottle of water full of melted ice from the Antarctic, was intended to be a telling comment on the dangers of global warming.

But one light-fingered, and presumably thirsty, visitor to the exhibition may have missed the point.

Rather than musing on the hazards that will be created if the icecaps melt, the visitor is believed to have drunk the piece.

Police have been called in to investigate the mystery of the missing water bottle, which vanished from the Way With Words literary festival at Dartington Hall in south Devon.

I'm sure citizens will be relieved to know that the police are on the case.

(Via JunkScience.com)

This is particularly interesting in light of NASA’s long-delayed return to space and the strangely timed announcement that future shuttle flights will be grounded until officials can figure out why foam chunks keep falling off during liftoff:

British entrepreneur, Sir Richard Branson, has teamed up with aerospace designer, Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites to form a new aerospace production company. The new firm will build a fleet of commercial suborbital spaceships and launch aircraft.

Called The Spaceship Company, the new entity will manufacture launch aircraft, various spacecraft and support equipment and market those products to spaceliner operators. Clients include launch customer, Virgin Galactic—formed by Branson to handle space tourist flights.

The Spaceship Company is jointly owned by Branson’s Virgin Group and Scaled Composites of Mojave, California. Scaled will be contracted for research and development testing and certification of a 9-person SpaceShipTwo (SS2) design, and a White Knight Two (WK2) mothership to be called Eve. Rutan will head up the technical development team for the SS2/WK2 combination.

Interestingly, The Spaceship Company will build spaceships for other customers, not just Virgin Galactic.

Whole article is here; thanks to Don for the tip.

For my recent interview with Burt Rutan, go here.

And for Rutan's recent licensing headaches, go here.

Here’s something that’s about as infuriating as the article cited in Len’s previous post—that is, infuriating in an equal-and-opposite kind of way.

In an effort to separate drinking from sexual conquests, British anti-booze nannies have banned the use of hunky actors in alcohol ads:

Lambrini, the popular sparkling drink, is the first to suffer. Its manufacturers have complained after watchdogs rejected its latest campaign because it depicted women flirting with a man who was deemed too attractive.

The offending poster featured three women “hooking” a slim, young man in a parody of a fairground game scene. Harmless fun to lead its summer campaign, Lambrini argued.

But the Committee of Advertising Practice declared: “We would advise that the man in the picture should be unattractive — overweight, middle-aged, balding etc.”

The ruling continued: “We consider that the advert is in danger of implying that the drink may bring sexual/social success, because the man in question looks quite attractive and desirable to the girls. If the man was clearly unattractive, we think that this implication would be removed.”

What?! That would make the booze-gets-you-chicks implication even stronger.

Say an impressionable British lad sees an ad in which a hunky model drinks Lambrini and gets chicks. He might assume that the model’s hunkiness had something to do with him getting the chicks. If that same lad sees a slob drinking Lambrini and getting chicks he’s more likely to think that there’s something special in that drink that drives the ladies crazy. So in his mind it’s the right drink that matters.

And since he considers being in good shape less important, CAP’s approach might also make him less likely to exercise, something those pudgy Brits could use a bit more of.

When it comes to sexual harassment law observers have long suspected that ugly guys get more lawsuits than those with Pitt-like mugs (who just get more phone numbers). The British example looks like a case of the opposite—where policy discriminates in favor of the homely, in this case homely actors and models.

Here’s more:

The new CAP code instructs that “links must not be made between alcohol and seduction, sexual activity or sexual success”. Romance and flirtation are not forbidden but adverts must not be aimed at the under-18s or use celebrities in a “sexy” or “cool” manner.

The Bacardi adverts that turned Vinnie Jones into a “party animal” would now be banned, and the measure could affect George Clooney’s £2.5million deal to advertise Martini.

The similarly desirable Brad Pitt reportedly earned £4 million for his recent Heineken advert, which was shown mainly in America. However, the family-sized Peter Kay will presumably be approved to retain his John Smith’s contract.

Whole article here; via Sploid.

Forget the tangible impacts of development (traffic, water, noise, etc.)...apparently planners should be concerned with ugliness:

In the planning of cities these days, there's one critically important factor that is, to our great misfortune, routinely overlooked: ugliness.

While debating the proper use of land -- whether or not homes should be built where farms used to be, or how much traffic should flow along the Hanlon Parkway by 2010 -- there is no official debate about the attractiveness of development. We have statistics on water supply and sewerage, on setbacks and view lines, on the numerical conformation of developments to all the zoning bylaws. But we have almost nothing on how well a development appeals to the eye or the affections.

This is a huge oversight. Good taste has no official status. Any cowboy without a shred of esthetic training can create a butt-ugly housing project or shopping development as long as the paperwork is in order. And we have to live with it for the next century.

What is "good taste" when it comes to designing cities?

How about...letting the market work, allowing it to respond dynamically to changing consumer needs and preferences? How about ditching highly prescriptive zoning and subdivision ordinances that micromanage all creativity out of development projects, implicitly creating the incentive for developers to design for the purpose of code conformity rather than giving them the leeway to innovate?

How did we get here? Why is it we so blithely sacrifice timeless beauty, classic civic design, and the proven principles of Christopher Alexander's pattern language for such hideous homogeneity? Why is it that places like Guelph that still have civic character are so willing to give it up to corporate blandness, transforming our distinctive someplace into an indistinct no-place, wrecked and sprawling like all the other esthetically bankrupt no-places?

It's plainly dereliction of duty. Politicians, supposedly in the business of building a great city, are instead approving these monstrosities without a blink, perhaps because other cities are doing it, so what the hell. Hell indeed. Rather than taking the opportunity to beautify, they are uglifying Guelph.

Shamefully unschooled in what makes a city aesthetically great, and unwilling to pay attention to those who are qualified in the design of greatness, they are, in my opinion, committing serious crimes of bad taste. And the effects will last a lifetime and beyond.

Ugly is ugly. You never learn to love it, only wonder how it ever came to be acceptable.

Don't get me wrong...I share a certain degree of visceral repulsion at the sight of [insert big-box store with massive empty parking lot here] just like the next guy. But I'm not going there to satisfy my soul's deepest longings; it would be silly to harbor an expectation that a trip to the local big box retailer or fast-food strip is going to satisfy any aesthetic appetites I may have. Function trumps form there. I can satisfy urban aesthetic needs with a trip to the city park or downtown arts district.

And the idea of allowing regulators to decide what constitutes "beauty" or "places worth loving" is frightening indeed. Would you trust your local politician or city bureaucrat to decorate your home's interior? I'd suspect the answer for many is no. So it's indeed puzzling that so many people want to give them such power on a grand scale.

I may be wrong, but isn't beauty in the eye of the beholder?

We’re all familiar with the gripes about offshore outsourcing. Many don’t like American companies shipping jobs overseas.

But what if work goes overseas and then comes back again?

This boomerang effect is bringing jobs to the Lakota Sioux of the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota, where unemployment stands at 80 percent:

Increasingly, American Indians are looking to outsourcing as a way of boosting economic opportunity without having to stray from their lands.

On the Pine Ridge reservation, a local Indian-owned marketing and Web design startup, Lakota Express, can thank sloppy handwriting for its outsourcing fortunes.

"We're people that have really been left out of the opportunities of the Industrial Revolution and now are being welcomed into the world economy in the Information Revolution," said Mark Tilsen, a Lakota Express executive.

Eight Lakota Express employees vet the accuracy of electronic documents that are transcribed in China by workers who, while understanding English, often have difficulty deciphering Americans' handwriting.

The work amounts to reverse outsourcing (performed as it is for a foreign company that has itself in the employ of a U.S. business). And experts expect plenty more of such work to become available.

"There's nothing better than watching a reservation community thrive. You're seeing newer cars in the parking lot. They're buying homes. And I've watched that happen," said Carey Wold, a consultant who helped set up tribally owned companies on Northern Ute reservations in Utah.

Whole article here.

American lawmakers have penned over 200 anti-outsourcing bills. But did they intend to trip up this kind of outsourcing? Once again the market evolves faster than regulatory definitions.

The definition of outsourcing has always been blurry and it’s getting blurrier all the time. It’s kind of like defining a “foreign” car. What do you call a Toyota Camry that’s built in Kentucky? And when it’s shipped to Japan and sold there is it an import?

In other globalization news, a Kenyan government official offered Bill Clinton 40 goats and 20 cows for Chelsea’s hand. (Thanks to Brad for that one.)

Doubtful...

In 2003, Gov. Jennifer Granholm launched a “Cool Cities Program” aimed at “building vibrant, energetic cities that attract jobs, people and opportunity to Michigan.” The program is based on the work of Richard Florida, an economic development professor at Carnegie Mellon University and author of “The Rise of the Creative Class.” Florida’s thesis is that significant economic activity can be spurred by attracting creative people — and particularly young people — to cities through arts, entertainment and street life.

But whatever the program’s academic pedigree, can bureaucrats really determine what’s “cool”? The program appears likely to lose its way and simply redistribute wealth in the state, suggesting that there are better ways to develop Michigan’s economy.

. . . .

Gov. Granholm’s attempts to revitalize Michigan’s economy through the Cool Cities initiative might seem honorable, but it is ironic that the state is handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars in dubious grants at a time when legislators are debating the per-pupil funding for schools, money for higher education and restraining Medicaid benefits. With Michigan’s unemployment rate skyrocketing to 7.1 percent in May — tying with Mississippi for the highest unemployment rate in the nation — perhaps it is time for the state to reexamine its priorities. It should shift its focus to providing a secure environment that is open to new business by restructuring the single business tax, rationalizing its regulatory environment and removing other roadblocks to economic development.

Be sure to check out previous posts on "cool cities" here, here, and here. And don't forget to re-read Chris Fiscelli's piece from Privatization Watch last year on the limits of using public policy to create "cool."

Connecticut Gov. Rell vetoed a bill yesterday that would have limited state privatization efforts:

Democratic leaders of the state legislature decided against trying to override Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell's nine vetoes on Monday, despite pressure from a labor union to resurrect a bill that limited privatization of state services.

While there is a veto-proof margin in the Senate, Democrats don't have a two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives.

The legislative leaders said they may take up contracting reform and the privatization issue later this year in a possible special session.

. . . .

Many Democrats were surprised that Rell vetoed the state contracting reform bill, one of the key bills of the session. Rell said the provision would have limited her administration's ability to privatize state services for at least two years. She said that would have affected hundreds of state contracts, including agreements with drug treatment programs and private group homes for the mentally retarded.

But AFSCME Council 4, the state's largest AFL-CIO union, is continuing to pressure the legislature and Rell by running newspaper ads calling for the privatization language to be replenished. The union said the two-year ban is needed to provide time to come up with new regulations for privatization, especially in the wake of last year's government corruption scandal that chased Gov. John G. Rowland from office.

. . . .

The legislation creates a new State Contracting Standards Board, which will oversee all contracting arrangements in state government. Rell attempted to resurrect language creating the board, among other reforms, by issuing an executive order. Senate Democrats are questioning whether that order violates the state constitution's separation of powers. They've asked Attorney General Richard Blumenthal for an opinion.

Full article here.

Funny

From the "making a bad situation worse" file:

Montgomery County officials yesterday froze home building in most new subdivisions across the county while officials examine a variety of lapses in the once-vaunted planning process.

With County Executive Douglas M. Duncan and County Council members reacting to widespread building violations in Clarksburg Town Center, buyers waiting for homes to be built in Montgomery could face considerable delays and possible cost increases.

Duncan (D) and the chairman of the Planning Board have frozen the issuance of building permits in subdivisions that require site plans -- about 80 percent of pending residential projects -- until builders can verify that the projects meet height and setback requirements. Projects under construction can proceed, but those that have not broken ground will be subject to another review.

. . . .

Duncan's announcement came an hour after four council members proposed a broader moratorium on new building permits until projects' site plans are thoroughly reviewed by county leaders. The council will vote on the emergency legislation, which would be in effect until winter, next week.

Combined, the two approaches represent a rebuke to a planning process that for a generation has tried to steer growth into designated areas near major transit routes. But at least in Clarksburg, one of the county's fastest-growing communities, officials have acknowledged that they were ill equipped to oversee that growth.

So in essence, the County is saying let's stop building because our planning process is flawed. Isn't that just compounding the error? It's hard to see how they're going to improve things by making the development approval process even longer and more uncertain.

And they don't appear to be looking at the situation critically. They need to ask themselves what's more flawed: arguably minor divergences between specs on approved site plans and the final, built product, or a planning process that attempts to micromanage development at this level?

At least someone got it right:

[Developer Tom] Bozzuto, chairman of Bozzuto Homes, predicted that a slowdown will drive up the price of existing homes. "It's a supply-and-demand market, and the less supply there is, the greater the price people will be able to get for existing inventory," he said.

(via American Dream Coalition blog)

Lance Armstrong keeps doing his thing and the Postal Service keeps doing its thing:

The Postal Service must revamp its operations to stay on firm financial footing, according to a Government Accountability Office report released [in May].

So this San Diego Business Journal article of mine from two years ago feels kind of current again:

Even those of us who aren’t particularly interested in cycling marvel at Armstrong’s dominance. We tried to savor some of the exhilaration he felt when he stood on the winner’s platform, worn but victorious. The “Star Spangled Banner” played in tribute to this champion who so exemplifies the romantic spirit of America.

Armstrong even received a very special congratulatory phone call from the Postmaster General. Imagine the thrill. Who among us hasn’t dreamt of getting a call from the most important mailman of them all?

Actually, that’s not right at all. After all, the U.S. Postal Service exemplifies the bureaucratic sprit—sluggish, dreary, and frightened of competition. Which makes it all the more ironic that the postal service would use Armstrong as its spokesman. Have sponsor and spokesman ever epitomized such differing values?

BTW, Lance isn’t ruling out a career in politics.

Despite a brief respite, smart growth is back in Loudoun County, VA:

A diverse majority of Loudoun County supervisors voted last night to support far-reaching growth controls that could help shape development in one of the last remaining open spaces in the Washington region.

The dramatic 5 to 4 vote ran counter to the expectations of some landowners and developers who in November 2003 helped elect a Republican majority on the county's Board of Supervisors with the hope of avoiding such controls. The decision also represented a vigorous response to a March ruling by Virginia's Supreme Court, which threw out a set of tighter building limits on a technicality.

The proposed development restrictions -- backed by two Republicans, two independents and the lone Democrat on the Board of Supervisors -- would prevent the construction of tens of thousands of houses worth billions of dollars in a scenic expanse that constitutes the western two-thirds of the county. A final vote is still required.

The proposal would allow builders to more than double the 9,200 houses the county says are now in the area. A competing proposal that could have more than tripled the number of houses in western Loudoun was turned aside yesterday. Current rules allow as many as 55,000 houses there.

The plan endorsed yesterday would replace the three-acre-per-house zoning requirement that covers much of western Loudoun. Landowners would start with a requirement of an average of 20 acres per house in northwestern Loudoun and 40 acres in southwestern Loudoun. They could build twice as many if they follow guidelines for maintaining open space.

The plan's most unusual feature is the introduction of an option to rezone property in exchange for contributions for roads, schools and other costly public projects. Such arrangements generally have not been employed in western Loudoun. Landowners willing to provide those funds could, with county permission, build a house every 7.5 acres in the north or every 15 acres in the south. The plan also allows landowners to sell individual parcels more easily than under the overturned restrictions and gives families rights to subdivide.

Here's the article. The anti-sprawl crowd is certainly celebrating this victory, which is puzzling since it will effectively (1) mandate large-lot development (which anti-sprawlers often malign as "McMansionization") in western Loudoun County; (2) will force development further out, perpetuating the regional sprawl that anti-sprawlers claim to abhor; and (3) artificially constrain the housing supply, which will place upward pressure on housing prices and price low- and mid-income families out of the market.

To claim that these mandates (if ultimately approved) will do anything to prevent sprawl is a stretch of the imagination. It's really just another illustration of the potency of reactionary NIMBYism and pastoral nostalgia.

So to the smart growth crowd I say: enjoy the celebration, but don't come back complaining about social equity or the impacts of low-density development 5 or 10 years down the line when the chickens have come home to roost.

A while back I noted that a Virginia Wal-Mart had adopted the German-inspired practice of hosting a singles’ night. Sadly, for Dale Firebaugh and others, there will be no more of that:

Corporate officials in Wal-Mart's Bentonville, Ark., headquarters abruptly ordered the Roanoke store yesterday to cancel its month-old Singles Shopping program, the only one of its kind in the nation.

Singles were encouraged to sport a red bow on their shopping carts to let other lonely-hearts bargain hunters know they were available.
…
Disheartened single Dale Firebaugh, 63, of Roanoke said he showed up last night hoping to meet an attractive woman only to be told by store employees that corporate higher-ups buckled after several people complained about the program.

"I'm disappointed," Firebaugh said. "Where can someone over 40 who doesn't smoke or drink or go to bars meet someone? I'm really disappointed that they would let a couple of little complaints stop Singles Shopping."
…
Firebaugh said he went to the Wal-Mart the previous Friday during Singles Shopping hours and met a beautiful 45-year-old woman with whom he later had a dinner date.

Last night, after learning of the program's demise, he bought a red ribbon in the store's fabrics section for 26 cents and stood by the front doors, partly in protest and partly in hopes that single women would recognize the ribbon as an invitation to chat.

Wal-Mart suits won’t say why they squashed singles' night. But the whole thing has the feel of a lame corporate cave-in.

Whole thing here.

(Via Sploid.)

According to Joel Kotkin, the survival of 21st century cities depends on shifting focus back to the primary function of government -- protecting the lives and livelihoods of urban denizens:

Though current fashion is to blame causes such as energy, food and water shortages for urban decline through the centuries, the truth is that far more cities have fallen due to a breakdown in security. Whether the menace is internal disorder or external threat, history has shown repeatedly that once a city can no longer protect its inhabitants, they inevitably flee, and the city slides into decline and even extinction. While modern cities are a long way from extinction, it's only by acknowledging the primacy of security -- and addressing it in the most aggressive manner -- that they will be able to survive and thrive in this new century, in which they already face the challenge of a telecommunications revolution that is undermining their traditional monopoly on information and culture, and draining their populations.

. . . .

It's too early to tell how businesses or individuals might react over time if terrorist attacks were to become commonplace. But the historical record isn't promising. Many of the earliest cities of antiquity -- in places as dispersed as Mesopotamia, China, India and Mesoamerica -- shrank and ultimately disappeared after being overrun by more violent, but often far less civilized peoples. As is the case today, the greatest damage was often inflicted not by organized states, but by nomadic peoples or even small bands of brigands who either detested urban civilization or had little use for its arts.

Kotkin provides an interesting perspective on the matter, viewing recent urban depopulation and economic decentralization trends in a greater historical context. He also challenges the currently in-vogue notion of "creative cities" (popularized by author Richard Florida) -- the idea that the path to urban revitalization lies in becoming "hip and cool" and attracting young, creative residents:

The U.S. cities that have declined most precipitously and consistently -- Baltimore and Detroit are obvious examples -- are those plagued by the nation's highest crime rates. Attempts by mayors in these cities to be "hip and cool" have not turned them around, in large part because they are still perceived as unsafe. Baltimore's Mayor Martin O'Malley has cultivated an image of coolness for himself and encouraged other "cool" people, including singles and gays, to add to his city's "creative class." Yet as one Baltimore resident suggested to me recently: "What's the point of being hip and cool if you're dead?"

While cities do face numerous challenges that must be addressed -- such as underperforming schools, a stifling regulatory climate, and aging infrastructure -- Kotkin makes a valid point that cities cannot afford to take their eyes off their primary mission: providing a secure environment for citizens and businesses to pursue their livelihoods. He also wisely cautions that strategies matter; security policy that comes at the expense of personal freedom and privacy can have the unintended effect of degrading the urban quality of life.

Read the whole thing.

(via Planetizen)

Remember the Akaka Bill? It might be in trouble.

For updates, stick with Hawaii’s own Grassroot Institute.

We humans aren’t the only ones that need to worry about robots taking our jobs. Looks like pets might have to start looking over their furry shoulders:

Furby is back in a new version that has 500KB of memory, which is six times what the original had, and uses voice recognition to respond to its owner. The latest Furby has a wider range of expressions, movement and vocabulary. It can laugh, smile, frown, gasp, yawn and express fear or boredom using its flexible beak, ears and eyebrows. Most intriguingly, the new Furby responds to vocal commands. If you ask Furby to tell you a joke, it will most likely deliver a knock-knock zinger.

Another transit-avoiding politico:

[Massachusetts Gov. Mitt] Romney, who lives in Belmont and is frequently driven around the state by an aide, visited the T stop yesterday to reassure commuters that the Boston subway remains safe despite the latest explosions in London …

Romney was also asked by a reporter yesterday about when he last rode the subway. He could only recall recent press events at T stops.

''Let's see it was, we did it with the Charlie card and then also the . . . it was with [Senate] President [Robert E.] Travaglini -- I'm trying to recall," he said, asking aloud, ''We were at a station, what was it . . . Ashmont station? Ashmont station, it was Ashmont station . . . It's not my regular commute."

Flashback:

Turns out, when asked by the Washington Post, only five out of 10 board members said they rode the system regularly (two others refused to talk, so it’s probably safe to file them under "infrequent transit user"). Not one is a daily user, and most have either never ridden a Metro bus or can't remember the last time they did.

The Philadelphia Inquirer found similar results after questions SEPTA board members: Only four of 14 members interviewed use the system at least twice a week.

Back to Romney.

While taking an up-close peek at transit, he got a taste of what regular transit riders encounter regularly—he got hassled by a homeless guy. His next run-in was of the somewhat less common variety:

Later came the ''cat lady" -- Heidi Erickson, locally infamous for allegedly hoarding cat carcasses in her Beacon Hill apartment -- who screamed, ''You killed my cats," and scuffled with transit police as Romney spoke at Park Street Station.

Whole article here.

Commuters arriving at the subway station near 42nd Street and 8th Avenue during the morning rush today were met with this greeting from a police sergeant bellowing into a white bullhorn:

"Attention passengers: All purses and bags in the subway system are subject to inspection. If you do not agree to inspection, you must exit the system."

This is the reality of life for commuters in New York City on the day after London suffered its second bomb scare in two weeks. Police here began random searches last night of backpacks and packages carried by commuters on the city's subways and on area rail lines, and New Yorkers for the most part seemed to take it in stride.

Read on, here.

For more on new hassles confronting Big Apple straphangers, go here.

Many companies burdened by the costs and complexity of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act requirements are turning to India for help.

Call it one of the unintended consequences of the corporate reform legislation. While the 2002 law was seen as a cure for sloppy financial reporting and the frauds it can cover up, it has also resulted in more work being sent overseas, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Some Indian outsourcing companies told the newspaper that their Sarbanes-Oxley-related business is rising at more than 50 percent a year.

Read on, here.

(Via the Outsourcing Times.)

For more on outforcing, go here.

This NYT article notes that the first wave of hybrids got crazy mileage, as high as 70mpg:

But the pendulum has swung. The 2005 Honda Accord hybrid gets about the same miles per gallon as the basic four-cylinder model, according to a review by Consumer Reports, a car-buyer's guide, and it saves only about two miles a gallon compared with the V-6 model on which it is based. Thanks to the hybrid technology, though, it accelerates better.

Hybrid technology, it seems, is being used in much the same way as earlier under-the-hood innovations that increased gasoline efficiency: to satisfy the American appetite for acceleration and bulk.

Here’s Jalopnik’s take:

When the Honda Accord Hybrid hit the streets, we were elated — finally somebody had come up with a real-world application for hybrids that married performance and economy. Think of the hybrid Accord this way — it has the fuel economy of a large-ish four and makes more grunt than some recent 8s, using the hybrid system as a power-adder.

Now the Times, flagship paper of a city of people whose knowledge of cars often doesn’t go beyond the back seat of Crown Victorias or Town Cars, starts hemming and hawing over the fact that some people out there would actually want hybrid performance cars. In essence, they’re comparing kumquats to watermelons. Where they should be comparing the Accord Hybrid to vehicles like the Dodge Charger and Pontiac Grand Prix, they’re instead trying to force it into an Insight metric, which, to quote the mighty Hüsker Dü, makes no sense at all.

According to the Russian think tank INDEM:

[T]he Russian state itself is "the country's biggest racketeer", with the shadow economy at least twice as large as the state budget.

The report says any interaction between citizens and the country's bureaucracy will inevitably involve corruption in the form of paying bribes.

Commerce and business are the worst affected areas, the think-tank says …
Its annual report on corruption says that bribes paid to officials by businessmen may have grown as much as 10 times over the last four years alone.

The report estimates the total value of such bribes as 2.5 times the whole national state budget.

Among the most corrupt institutions, the report identifies education - where parents may buy university places for their children - and the army, where young people and their families pay to avoid military service.

Since most people don’t want to be bothered with surveys, transportation researchers are always complaining about how tough it is to get good data. Lots of people have proposed lots of ways to get around this problem—from monitoring drivers with GPS devices to shoving travel surveys under the noses of those summoned to jury duty.

Pennsylvania has discovered another way:

Over the next three months, Pennsylvania state troopers will be pulling over innocent motorists on interstate highways and secondary roads so the state's department of transportation can conduct a random survey. The survey will take place in ten counties throughout the southwestern portion of the state, but PennDOT has declined to release specific times and locations because it believes motorists would attempt to avoid the stops.

State police will set up checkpoints to block traffic so motorists can each be held for five minutes of questioning intended to gather data that will help to better distribute transportation funding throughout the region.

And the local ACLU guy just shrugs his shoulders:

The survey will be an inconvenience, but it's legal, said Larry Frankel, legislative director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania.

"I'd be more irritated than anything else," he said. "I don't think it raises any constitutional issues."

And unlike using night vision goggles to nab unbuckled motorists, this isn’t just some half-baked idea that will get reversed by public outrage before it really gets going. Similar surveys have already been conducted near Philly and in West Virginia and Texas.

For more on check point fever, go here.

Wal-Mart Canada employees have refused being unionized by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) again, for the sixth time in less than two years. Results of a democratic vote to determine whether automotive sales and service employees in seven B.C. Wal-Mart stores would be represented by the UFCW were released on Friday by the British Columbia Labour Board. These Wal-Mart employees voted against union representation by the UFCW, and in favour of dealing directly with the company.

Read on, here.

(Via ALP.)

From the all-news cable channels to the blogosphere yesterday, Washington's talking heads and pundits had all but named U.S. Circuit Court Judge Edith Clement of New Orleans the nominee to the Supreme Court.

Then President George W. Bush stepped in, and Clement's name moved into the great pantheons of speculative missteps.

From fabulously famous to footnote in one day. Wonder what it was like waking up as Edith Clement this morning.

Whole story here.

For more on the one who did get the nod, see Orin Kerr.

And Matt Welch poses seven questions to John Roberts. My favorite:

5) You're on a lifeboat, but it can only hold 8 of the original 10 amendments without sinking, killing your whole family. Which ones go?

Here’s a profile of the guy who W will nominate to the fanciest bench in the land.

New York's Medicaid program, once a beacon of the Great Society era, has become so huge, so complex and so lightly policed that it is easily exploited. Though the program is a vital resource for 4.2 million poor people who rely on it for their health care, a yearlong investigation by The Times found that the program has been misspending billions of dollars annually because of fraud, waste and profiteering. A computer analysis of several million records obtained under the state Freedom of Information Law revealed numerous indications of fraud and abuse that the state had never looked into.

…

New York's Medicaid program is by far the most expensive and most generous in the nation. It spends far more - now $44.5 billion annually - than that of any other state, even California, whose Medicaid program covers about 55 percent more people. New York's Medicaid budget is larger than most states' entire budgets, and it spends nearly twice the national average - roughly $10,600, more than any other state - on each of its 4.2 million recipients, one in every five New Yorkers.

This shows what kind of a mess the system has become:

It has drawn dentists like Dr. Dolly Rosen, who within 12 months somehow built the state's biggest Medicaid dental practice out of a Brooklyn storefront, where she claimed to have performed as many as 991 procedures a day in 2003. After The New York Times discovered her extraordinary billings through a computer analysis and questioned the state about them, Dr. Rosen and two associates were indicted on charges of stealing more than $1 million from the program.

Whole article here.

Over the weekend a bunch of governors got together and griped about Medicaid:

The governors hope that by staying on message they can lend legs to a proposal before Congress to dramatically overhaul the state-federal program that funds health care for 53 million poor and disabled Americans. Without reform, governors say the program -- which recently eclipsed elementary and secondary education as the largest single portion of state budgets -- will collapse under its own weight.

Whole article here.

Teaching Ebonics to school kids is indeed very controversial, but there’s no denying that it helped familiarize countless middle aged white guys with the internet and email. When the Ebonics issue surfaced round about ’96, Ebonics jokes quickly clogged inboxes everywhere.

Prepare for a second wave:

Incorporating Ebonics into a new school policy that targets black students, the lowest-achieving group in the San Bernardino City Unified School District, may provide students a more well-rounded curriculum, said a local sociologist.

The goal of the district's policy is to improve black students' academic performance by keeping them interested in school. Compared with other racial groups in the district, black students go to college the least and have the most dropouts and suspensions.

Blacks make up the second largest racial group in the district, trailing Latinos.
A pilot of the policy, known as the Students Accumulating New Knowledge Optimizing Future Accomplishment Initiative [nothing Ebonics-like about that name], has been implemented at two city schools.

Meanwhile Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) has busied himself with this:

Tucked into a massive appropriations bill approved without fanfare late last year by Congress is the requirement that every one of the estimated 1.8 million federal employees in the executive branch receive "educational and training" materials about the charter on Constitution Day, a holiday celebrating the Sept. 17, 1787, signing that is so obscure that it, unlike Arbor Day, is left off many calendars.

That's not all: The law requires every school that receives federal funds -- including universities -- to show students a program on the Constitution, though it does not specify a particular one. The demand has proved unpopular with educators, who say that they don't like the federal government telling them what to teach …

Yeah, the whole thing seems kind of anti-states' rights and not exactly in the spirit of the Constitution. Maybe Byrd is trying to be ironic.

(Via Sploid.)

Remember this?

U.S. workers say they squander over two hours a day at the workplace, with surfing the Web, socializing with co-workers and simply "spacing out" among the top time-wasting activities, according to a survey…

“What’s the big deal?” asks Lisa Belkin:

There is a point, of course, where distraction becomes blatant slacking off, but I would argue that some percentage of time wasted during work is actually a part of the work. I call it gel time, when a corner of your brain noodles with a problem while the rest of your brain checks the baseball scores or looks for replacement coffee mugs on eBay. In other words, gel time is what you have to do to make you ready to do what you need to do.

(Via Lifehacker.)

I had an article in yesterday’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

We're used to members of Congress going on and on about transportation spending. Some want more for highways, some want more for transit, some just want to impress their constituents with the piles of pork they haul home. And talk of spending can easily slip into talk of subsidies.

If all of us --- from motorists to transit users --- are swimming in subsidies, it gets harder to separate good investments from bad. Why not, for example, take a stab at a new commuter rail line? But we shouldn't let the political hurly burly confuse the issue.

Read on, here.

Let's hope that some of the celebs who organized Live8 have a look at this just-posted reason.com book review:

Robert Guest, Africa editor for The Economist, begins The Shackled Continent by asking why “Africa is the only continent to have grown poorer over the last three decades.” After six years of covering the continent’s civil wars, genocide, famine, and disastrous monetary policies, his answer boils down to this: Africans are poor because they are poorly governed.

Guest channels Hernando de Soto and points out the problem of insecure property rights:

“One of the reasons that Africa is so poor,” Guest explains, “is that most Africans are unable to turn their assets into liquid capital. In the West, the most common way to do this is to borrow money using a house as security. This is how most American entrepreneurs get started.”

Guest estimates that 90 percent of housing in most African countries is owned informally. In Malawi, a country that is “peaceful, stable, off the beaten track and fearfully poor,” houses are built on “customary” land, which means that “the plot’s previous owners had no formal title to it. The land was simply part of a field their family had cultivated for generations. About two-thirds of the land in Malawi is owned this way.…If there is a dispute about boundaries, the village chief adjudicates.”

The problem with land ownership at the pleasure of the chief (or king or president) is that it cannot provide the title security that supports impersonal markets. As Guest puts it, “no bank will accept [a contract signed by a local chief] as collateral because it is not enforceable in a court of law. Rather, it is an expression of traditional law, which is usually unwritten, unpredictable and dependent on the chief’s whim.” Although “the chief may be a wise, just and consistent fellow,” Guest writes, “the bank does not know this.”

Sure it’s easy to get down on all those celebs hepped-up on their own self-righteousness:

This was organizer Bob Geldof to the G8 leaders:

"Now feel the force of the gale that's hit you."

And the not-so-Material Girl:

The clunkiest photo op moment went to Madonna, who sang "Like a Prayer" to a woman who had been a starving child in Africa 20 years ago. The woman stood board-stiff throughout.

Coldplay front man and Apple daddy Chris Martin hollered:

"[This is] the greatest thing that's ever been organized in the history of the world." (That was probably the text of Geldof’s thought bubble from this picture.)

Again, with that potent mix of self-love and naiveté it’s easy to get down on the fancy people. But I think few of us really want to live in a world with down-to-earth megastars. Plus it’s futile to try to get them to change.

Something that’s a tad less futile is steering all that glitz toward something that really would help make poverty history—like expanded trade.

And for more on the “Trade or aid?” question, check out my interview with James Shikwati.

If democracy doesn't give you what you want, sue!

A federal appeals court rejected on Friday an effort by a dozen states and cities, along with environmental groups, to have the Bush administration regulate greenhouse gases that spill out of the tailpipes of new cars and trucks.

A new report proposing ways to meet Colorado's long range is the old glass half full. I was impressed to see it deals seriously with the need to expand water storage systems, including resevoirs--usually a bugaboo to environmental activists. But I was disappointed that the report entirely ignores water prices. G

Gee, we want people to conserve water, but lets not consider the role of the price they pay.

Exec Summary here

Full report here

On current and future federal spending, that is. This gloomy conversation with Dave Walker, Comptroller General of the GAO is enough to put you off your dinner.

The federal government's long-term liabilities and unfunded obligations now total $45 trillion, or $365,000 for every worker. In one year, long-term liabilities rose by $13 trillion, mainly because of the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit. In contrast, the federal government's entire annual budget is $2.5 trillion.

He is also full of solutions _ reinstate budget reforms, set pay-as-you-go rules, be realistic about long-term ramifications of spending and set a national strategic plan based on what works and what doesn't, because "we don't have a clue about whether we're really making progress" with regard to how other nations are preparing for the future.

The inimitable Philip Stott, University of London biogeography professor and proprietor of the indispensable EnviroSpin Watch blog, shares his thoughts on the G8 climate change resolution, and as usual, few can match his ability to make substantive policy discourse an enjoyable read:

Since the Rio Conference in 1992, the Greens and their camp-following Guardianistas have tried, with Cromwellian zeal, to employ the threat of 'global warming' to induce Protestant guilt in us all, to cap growth, to change lifestyles, to attack the car, industry and the Great Satan of America. Now it is surely time to face the facts: there isn't a snowflake-in-hell's chance of this altering real life. Indeed, it would be disastrous for the developing world, the other plank of the G8 agenda, if it did. Without increasing demand in the countries of the North, there is no way in which the poorer countries of the South will be able to grow out of their poverty. The attempt to cap growth through the environmental proxy of 'global warming' is a sleight of hand too far. Luckily, it appears that the general public has no intention of being conned.

But the failure of the Greens is not just with the public. While playing the climate-change card at the G8 Summit, the final Gleneagles' declaration shows that the leaders of the developed world have no intention of sacrificing growth and economic success for an ascetic 'global warming' religion.

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

Last week I posted on corporate "concern" over global warming as a thinly-veiled form of rent seeking. Here's a great example:

Britain's oil giants should get cash help from the Government so they can work towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the chief executive of BP said today.

Lord Browne said his firm was working on a pioneering reduction technology, but argued that companies would need the lure of subsidies to take up on the technique, called "carbon capture", which experts claim can reduce greenhouse gases significantly.

The call is likely to anger motorists, who are facing increasing petrol costs on the forecourt, and MPs, many of whom have been urging the Government to slap a windfall tax on the oil companies which have seen profits soar on the escalating prices of oil, which has risen by about 40 per cent a barrel this year.

From lingerie to lawn mowers, Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer prides itself on offering its customers truly one-stop shopping. Now, customers at a Roanoke, Va., Wal-Mart can peruse the aisles for something extra: a date.

Singles can head to the Roanoke Wal-Mart tonight for the third of the store's weekly singles nights, held every Friday evening. Billed as a way singles can meet their match while filling their cart, participating customers select shopping carts adorned with red bows identifying them as singles looking to mingle. The rest is up to them.

Turn out has been light so far, but Germans are apparently into this kind of thing.

Whole article is here.

(Via Sploid.)

Lost in the debate over offshore outsourcing is the fact that other things “steal” many more jobs than third-world foreigners. Take machines and humans’ ongoing war with the heartless job-nappers.

And machines are always eyeing new ground. They’re poised to take jobs from manicurists, nurses, EMTs, even TV news anchors. (More on the ultra-lifelike robot anchor Repliee Q1 here.)

Now meet Nuvo. It or one of its relatives might one day replace human housekeepers.

This writer takes a closer look:

Home robots have been slow to materialize because their weight and size tend to make them impractical and because their clusters of sophisticated motors drive the cost out of reach. Nuvo is only 15 inches tall and contains 15 motors, about half the number found in prototypes developed by Honda and Sony.

Nuvo has been marketed as a household helpmate and as a mobile baby monitor and security device, because it can relay photographs to cell phones that have access to the Internet …

I arranged to live with Nuvo for four days to gauge whether it is, in fact, the forerunner of a new technology that will change our lives, as the home computer did, or a passing novelty...

Once I had Nuvo up and running in my apartment with the help of its creators, I tried to work it into my daily life. I asked it for the time and the date, which it provided in a female voice with a Japanese accent. When I said, "Nuvo, music," it played New Age music the inventors had programmed into it.

Housekeepers can find some relief in Nuvo’s very limited domestic skills (Nuvo takes a picture of the writers’ laundry, but it can’t actually do laundry). Nuvo can’t mimic human housekeepers that well, but it does a better job of mimicking something even more human:

I came to understand that for all their purported helpfulness, home robots are largely about companionship ...

I came to enjoy Nuvo's odd attention. When I came in from jogging, I looked across the apartment to see Nuvo facing me. When I said, "Nuvo, I'm back," it bowed to me, a traditional Japanese greeting.

I decided to sleep with Nuvo next to me on my large bed, plugged in and recharging through the night. Its blue power light slowly pulsated, as if it were breathing …

My boyfriend called me the next day and asked if I was sleeping in the same room with Nuvo. When I told him we were sleeping in the same bed, there was an awkward pause.

(Reminds me of Homer Simpson's take on artificial insemination: “You’ve got to be pretty desperate to do it with a robot.”)

More Nuvo info here.

See also this:

Consultant Richard Samson argues that the replacement of human workers by technology is a bigger deal than the much-publicized offshore trend …

"It's happening every day, right before our eyes, but few notice," Samson said in a statement Friday. "A child born today will find very few of today's jobs in the want ads when graduating from college. Most work tasks done now by people will be done by smart technology within 20 or 30 years."
…

Samson is confident that technology is the larger issue. He argues that automatic systems have eliminated most jobs in farming, helped cut manufacturing to less than 17 percent of the nonagricultural work force and are now displacing white-collar workers such as bank tellers. "Offpeopling has much more impact than offshoring or outsourcing," he said. "Yet it's not in the headlines or on TV."

And machines aren't the only ones stealing jobs from Americans. Americans steal lots of jobs from Americans.

This week I had an article in the OC Register:

We can learn a lot from close calls. How many of us have considered putting a bunch of money into a hot new stock only to decide against it at the last minute. When the stock tanks we get a zap of adrenaline and ponder what might have been. Orange County had its own close call with light rail and a new study reveals just how wise it was to pass up the billion-dollar CenterLine project.

Read on, here.

Following up on yesterday's post, the Texas Senate has now approved a bill to prevent the exercise of eminent domain for economic development purposes. The House and Senate will now work to reconcile their respective proposals:

After a spirited, four-hour debate, the Texas Senate approved a bill Wednesday limiting state and local governments from seizing homes and other private property for economic development.

Senate Bill 62, which passed 25-4, is similar to a proposed constitutional amendment passed by the Texas House earlier this week. Now, each chamber can consider the other's legislation.

Gov. Rick Perry added the eminent domain issue to the agenda for the special session so lawmakers can respond to a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allows local governments to take private property for economic development purposes.

"While most people, including me, think they knew what public use was, the Supreme Court said that public use could include things like economic development," said Sen. Kyle Janek, R-Houston, the bill's author.

"The ownership of land is precious to the people of this state," Janek said. "I think people value those investments as much as they do anything else, perhaps maybe more than we do our pickup trucks."

Now that's saying something...

Another recent article from former Portland METRO director Richard Carson (see my previous post), this time opining on Oregon's Measure 37, the initiative passed in 2004 that requires local governments to pay landowners if land use restrictions reduce the value of land, or waive the restrictions:

Certainly there is a lot of hand wringing and wailing by Oregon planners these days. But the one thing you won’t hear is anyone acknowledging that planning caused this revolt. Indeed, in typical response, the planning profession simply says, "The voters just didn’t understand. If only we could have explained it to them." I have been a professional planner for over 25 years and I hear that refrain a lot.

Why is it is never a failure on our part as planners to understand what citizens really want? Why is it always a failure on the citizens' part to understand what a wonderful gift we are giving them? Do we not understand that we are guilty of the sin of pride and the ballot measure was the price of our prejudice? Why do we continue to believe that the voters aren’t capable of making intelligent decisions?

As a professional planner of almost 30 years, I am ready to say “mea culpa.” But then I have written numerous essays that foreshadowed this day. I have railed against the sins of centralized planning, social engineering and faux citizen involvement. This is especially true about the grand Oregon “experiment” that in time became institutionalized into a monolithic and unresponsive planning bureaucracy.

Read the whole thing. As a planner, it is so refreshing to hear a voice like Carson's because there are so few of them in the planning community-at-large.

In 2003, columnist Charles Krauthammer famously identified a psychiatric disorder -- Bush Derangement Syndrome -- that currently afflicts so many on the left. He defined it as "the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency -- nay -- the very existence of George W. Bush."

From my experience in planning, I'd have to say that there's a more subtle, but nonetheless pervasive, affliction among planners probably best termed Sprawl Derangement Syndrome. Having spent several years in SDS recovery, I think that I can offer a good stab at a definition: the acute onset of revulsion against current development patterns (and those that voluntarily choose them or otherwise perpetuate them), combined with delusions of grandeur that give one the false and hubristic impression that no policy proposal is too restrictive or damaging as a means to change said patterns. The Smart Growth movement is the logical outgrowth of SDS and also the dominant vehicle for mass SDS transmission into the future.

Carson has a knack for tapping into the 'delusional planner' mentality, probably because he's worked in the field for so long at such high levels that he's seen it in all its varied forms. I'd highly recommend a read through his essays here for more insights along these lines.

Before reading my previous post, Brad Hutchings had already made the dog size-living standards connection in the EconLog comments section. He tells me he was just wisecracking, but perhaps he’s really some helluva trend spotter.

Former Portland METRO director and current Clark County, WA Community Development Dept. Director Richard Carson -- a self-described "contrarian planner" (we need more of those) -- has an article in Architecture magazine this month that assails the urbanist mentality:

I recently attended a public meeting where an elected official asked a group of planners the rhetorical question, "What is sprawl?" One planner's response was that sprawl occurred when the rural area was divided into large-acreage lots in order to build "McMansions." The official's response was, "Would you be happier if people located low-income trailers there instead?"

This dialogue troubled me. For the advocates of recent planning trends—such as smart growth and New Urbanism—to attract financial supporters and sympathetic voters, they use pejorative labels like sprawl, big-box, and McMansion. In order to demonize sprawl you need a demon. Rural farmers and foresters can't be vilified because planners are supposedly conserving resource lands for their use. And it's politically incorrect to malign lower-income families living in trailers. So who do special-interest groups scapegoat? Rich people and McDonald's are easy targets—thus: Rich people + McDonald's = McMansion.

This Orwellian doublespeak has been used by proponents to subliminally sell a political agenda that attacks a longstanding American institution: the land-settlement patterns of a culture dominated by automobiles and low-cost postwar subdivision housing. Their social agenda exploits fear and classism to advance their cause—at the expense of someone else's socioeconomic beliefs and well-being.

The whole article is well worth a read.

The lab has topped the American Kennel Club's list of registered canines for 12 years straight. How did it happen?

Its ascent may have something to do with the supersizing of the American home. Prior to the Labrador's reign, the cocker spaniel held the AKC's top spot for eight years; before that, the poodle was No. 1 for a remarkable quarter-century. Labs, which can weigh more than 80 pounds and measure 25 inches from paw to shoulder, are Goliaths compared to these breeds. Even the standard poodle, which is bigger than the miniature or toy poodle and can be almost as tall as a Lab, usually weighs 15 to 20 pounds less. And Labs are an infamously rambunctious breed; they need more space to frolic and flourish than poodles or cocker spaniels.

Which is why the Labrador's increasing popularity may be tied to the advent of exurbs and McMansions. Since 1971, the average size of an American home has risen 55 percent, to 2,320 square feet. Families aren't having more children to fill up the extra space, so there's plenty of room for a Labrador to romp around.

Keep your eyes peeled for an upsurge in English Mastiffs (180 lbs).

Internet-based telephone services are still very inferior to traditional phone connections in reliability and sound quality, according to an extensive study that judged Vonage and AT&T CallVantage best among the top providers.

Keynote Systems Inc., known for measuring the performance of popular Web sites, also found that the reliability of Voice-over-Internet phone service is significantly affected by the provider of the high-speed Internet line used to dial a call …

Disruptions in the ability to make or receive a call was a key problem, the study found. Keynote said service availability ranged from 99.4 percent of the time to as low as 94.8 percent, meaning that for customers of the worst performers, one out every 20 call attempts failed.

Whole article here.

Well, it's not as much as the Administration wanted, but it's a start:

House-passed government spending bills would shut down 37 of the 99 federal programs the [Bush] administration recommended for elimination in 2006. About two-thirds of those are Education Department programs.

Those bills also target another 62 federal programs for elimination that the administration had not recommended be scrapped.

[...]

In its 2006 budget proposal, the administration targeted the Education Department for the most program cancellations. Of 48 programs the administration proposed to cut, the House agreed to 21.

The administration’s proposed program cuts would have saved more than $8 billion, while the House plan would save $4.5 billion.

So far, the Senate has passed only the Interior, Energy, and Legislative Branch spending bills. Those bills would ax at least four programs proposed for elimination by the administration: Interior’s Jobs in the Woods and Water Quality Cooperative Agreements, and Energy’s Nuclear Energy Plant Optimization and Nuclear Energy Plant Research Initiative. The House, however, disagreed with the Senate and the administration to cut the Water Quality Cooperative Agreements program.

(from the Federal Times)

The feds are stepping up their efforts to spread 'smart growth':

Responding to a growing number of requests from states for assistance in managing growth, three former governors with a long history of promoting smart growth -- Christie Whitman (New Jersey--also former EPA Administrator), Parris Glendening (Maryland) and Angus King (Maine) -- today joined EPA and the National Endowment for the Arts in announcing a new Governors' Institute on Community Design. The Institute is intended to support governors' leadership in good community design and sound planning.

"States have always been laboratories for innovation," said Governor Whitman. "Through the Governors' Institute we hope to inspire a new level of innovation that will make our communities economically stronger, healthier, and more attractive places to live and work."

The Institute, funded by EPA and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) will be jointly administered by two organizations with extensive experience in helping states address development and related quality-of-life issues -- the Smart Growth Leadership Institute and the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education, both at the University of Maryland.

"Many governors want to address housing, transportation, health or other issues related to land use and development, but need the tools to do so," said Governor Glendening. "There are many examples of successful community design. Our goal is to share those strategies with governors and their staffs."

EPA and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) are each providing $200,000 to launch the Institute. EPA's funding is being provided through its national water and smart growth programs. EPA's Smart Growth program encourages development that protects environmental resources and human health, expands economic opportunity, and creates and enhances places that people love.

For the moment, let's set aside a couple of obvious problems with smart growth:

• higher densities intensify traffic congestion and air pollution;
• growth boundaries and other burdensome land restrictions don't protect land from development as much as they just shift development to other areas;
• the argument that sprawl threatens human health is shaky at best;
• smart growth planning reduces housing affordability;
• existing planning systems fail trying to meet rational planning goals;
• smart growth runs counter to well-established consumer preferences; and
• opposition to sprawl is based more on opposition to lifestyle preferences than concerns about density, congestion, and the like.

What I want to know is this: is it a legitimate function of government to "enhance places that people love?" Maybe we could all agree that the Grand Canyon is worth setting aside, but when we're talking about the built environment, one man's suburban family home in a good school district is another man's example of waste and consumerism. Conversely, one man's dense, thriving urban neighborhood is another man's claustrophobic nightmare full of crime and bad schools.

I, for one, don't feel comfortable with the idea of the NEA & EPA being the arbiter of what kinds of communities are worth loving. Average Americans can make those choices for themselves, thank you very much. Unless the 'smart growth' crowd gets its way...

Yesterday, the Texas House approved a measure -- by a 132-0 margin -- that would amend the state constitution to prevent state or local governments from exercising the power of eminent domain for economic development purposes:

Seeking to circumvent a recent, controversial U.S. Supreme Court decision, the Texas House on Tuesday approved a measure to prohibit state or local governments from seizing homes and other private property for economic development purposes.

Reflecting widespread support from Republicans and Democrats, the proposed amendment to the Texas Constitution was approved 132-0 and will go on the Nov. 8 ballot if it wins approval from the Senate.

The Senate was expected to debate a related bill today. That measure would spell out details of the new restrictions should voters approve the constitutional amendment.

"The constitution is to protect the citizens from the government, and I think that is what this accomplishes," said Rep. Frank Corte, R-San Antonio, the proposal's primary sponsor.

The NAACP will target private companies as part of its economic agenda, seeking reparations from corporations with historical ties to slavery and boycotting companies that refuse to participate in its annual business diversity report card …

The group's strategy will include a lobbying effort to encourage cities to enact laws requiring businesses to complete an extensive slavery study and submit it to the city before they can get a city contract.

Such laws exist in Philadelphia and Chicago, which can refuse to grant contracts because of a company's slavery ties although neither city has done this. Detroit and New Orleans are considering similar bills.

Whole article is here.

(Via Sploid.)

Tech Central Station's Carlo Stagnaro opines on the global warming statement that emerged from the G8 summit:

So the expectation was that the meeting would produce a joint "agreement to disagree" on climate policies. In other words, the G8 was expected to result in no significant political change. Instead the group issued a joint statement on climate: the leaders of the eight most industrialized countries agreed (although they didn't put it this way) that seven of them were wrong and just one was right. The one was President Bush.

The extent to which the American position on Kyoto has been endorsed by the others doesn't lie just in the fact that the Kyoto Protocol is not even mentioned in the document -- as the White House negotiators had asked long before the meeting. The point is that Kyoto supporters -- especially European leaders -- rejected the very logic behind Kyoto.

[...]

Do you see "cap & trade"? I don't. Do you see mandatory limits to emissions? I don't. What I rather see is the awareness that emerging economies are playing a key role in creating the problem -- so the problem can't be solved by developed countries alone, as is the fatal conceit behind Kyoto. Also I see a tendency to look beyond 2012 -- if the problem is in the long run, you can't address it just by cutting emissions in the next decade or so. Finally I see the acknowledgment that to pursue long-term reductions in GHGs emissions you need cleaner technologies -- not bureaucratic mechanisms -- and to have cleaner technologies you need societies that are wealthy enough to invest in research & development on the one hand, and to afford a widespread adoption of new technologies on the other hand.

Well put.

A follow-up to yesterday's post on the push for a new definition of trans-metropolitan geography -- the "megalopolis" (note: I incorrectly called it 'megapolis' in the previous post). A new article in the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy's Land Lines newsletter goes into much more detail about the concept:

Megapolitan areas are integrated networks of metro- and micropolitan areas. The name “megapolitan” plays off Jean Gottmann’s 1961 “megalopolis” label by using the same prefix. We find that the United States has ten such areas, six in the eastern part of the U.S. and four in the West [...].

Megapolitan areas extend into 35 states, including every state east of the Mississippi River except Vermont. As of 2003, megapolitan areas contained less than one-fifth of all land area in the lower 48 states, but captured more than two-thirds of total U.S. population, or almost 200 million people. The 15 most populous U.S. metropolitan areas are also found in these megapolitan areas.

[...]

A megapolitan area as defined here has the following characteristics:


• Combines at least two existing metropolitan areas, but may include dozens of them
• Totals more than 10 million projected residents by 2040
• Derives from contiguous metropolitan and micropolitan areas
• Constitutes an organic cultural region with a distinct history and identity
• Occupies a roughly similar physical environment
• Links large centers through major transportation infrastructure
• Forms a functional urban network via goods and service flows
• Creates a usable geography that is suitable for large-scale regional planning
• Lies within the U.S.
• Consists of counties as the most basic unit

As I suggested, along with the push for this new conceptual unit of geography is likely to come a call for megapolitan land use and transportation planning. In fact, here's the first that I've seen:

Any new geographic category can reshape public policy. Given that megapolitan areas as proposed here redefine the space where two out of three Americans reside, their impact could prove significant. There are countless ways that megas may alter the policy landscape, but this discussion focuses on two issues: urban sprawl and transportation planning.

[...]

This analysis indicates that there is a Southland versus Piedmont style of megapolitan sprawl, which could affect regionwide strategies for addressing future growth. For example, given that Southland is already densely built, altering its pattern of sprawl could mean better mixing of land uses to facilitate pedestrian or transit-oriented development. The same strategy would not work in Piedmont where densities are low.

[...]

If officially designated by the U.S. Census Bureau, megapolitan areas would be the country’s largest geographic unit. Their rise could spark a discussion of what types of planning needs to be done on this scale. In Europe, megapolitan-like spatial planning now guides new infrastructure investment such as high-speed trains between networked cities. The U.S. should do the same. The interstate highways that run through megapolitan areas, such as I-95 from Boston to Washington, DC; I-35 from San Antonio to Kansas City; and I-85 from Raleigh to Atlanta, would benefit greatly from unified planning. A new Census Bureau megapolitan definition would legitimize large-scale transportation planning and trigger similar efforts in such areas as economic development and environmental impact.

Federal transportation aid could be tied to megapolitan planning much the way it has recently been linked to metropolitan areas. The Intermodal Surface Transit Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA) required regions to form metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) in order to receive federal money for transportation projects. In a similar vein, new super MPOs could result from future legislation that directs megapolitan areas to plan on a vast scale.

It's useful to remember here that there were numerous regional planning agencies nationwide that eventually took on the MPO duties dictated by the 1991 ISTEA. So it is not unreasonable to suggest that the creation of Super MPOs could ultimately spawn the reverse -- super-regional planning agencies that attempt to coordinate land use policies across wide geographic areas. Given the extent to which current regional planning agencies promote regional anti-sprawl policies, it seems likely that the smart growth movement would make a concerted push to impose their anti-choice, regulation-heavy agenda on a large scale.

As I mentioned yesterday, what we've seen so far with regional planning indicates that the likely result would be a diminishing of local land use control (and hence, representativeness), upward pressure on land and housing prices, and reduced housing affordability. Once you cede policy authority to some remote governmental body, it is far easier to impose anti-market, anti-choice policies on a public that is so far removed from the process.

Ford Motor Co., the second-largest U.S. automaker, began taking orders yesterday for a hybrid version of its Mercury Mariner sport-utility vehicle a year earlier than planned in response to increased interest.

The vehicle follows the Ford Escape Hybrid SUV, which was introduced last fall. Production of the Mariner will begin in October, with 2,000 vehicles available in the first model year. The company expects to double production the following year …

The Mariner hybrid gets 33 miles per gallon in the city and 29 miles per gallon on the highway, a 50 percent improvement over the base vehicle, according to Ford. The vehicle sells at a base price of $29,840, while the traditional version with standard trim starts at $22,040.

Whole article is here.

The Post also compiled the following list of hybrids that are on the market now or will be soon.

Ford
Escape SUV
Mariner SUV
To be introduced over the next three years:
Mazda Tribute SUV
Ford Fusion
Mercury Milan

Toyota
Prius
Highlander SUV
Lexus RX SUV

Honda
Civic
Accord

General Motors
Hybrid bus
Chevrolet Silverado pickup (starter hybrid system)
GMC Sierra pickup (starter hybrid system)
Saturn Vue SUV ("mild" hybrid) -- to be introduced at end of 2006
To be introduced in 2007:
Chevrolet Malibu ("mild" hybrid)
Chevrolet Tahoe SUV
GMC Yukon SUV

DaimlerChrysler
DaimlerChrysler expects to start selling hybrid vehicles in late 2007 or early 2008.

For more on hybrids, go here and here.

According to the Wall Street Journal's John Fund, eminent domain is a civil rights issue:

In 1954 the Supreme Court declared in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. But that same year it also ruled in Berman v. Parker that government's power of eminent domain could be used to seize property in order to tear down "blighted" areas.

It soon became clear that too often urban renewal really meant "Negro removal," as cities increasingly razed stable neighborhoods to benefit powerful interests. That helps explain why 50 years later so many minority groups are furious at the Supreme Court's decision last month to build on the Berman precedent and give government a green light to take private property that isn't "blighted" if it can be justified in the name of economic development.

Within a week of the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Kelo v. New London, Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee and the longest-serving member of the Congressional Black Caucus, pronounced himself "shocked" to be joining with conservatives in backing a bill to bar federal funds from being used to make improvements on any lands seized for private development. He noted that the NAACP, Operation PUSH and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights all believe "this court opinion makes it too easy for private property to be taken and [this is a practice] that has been used historically to target the poor, people of color and the elderly." The measure blocking federal funds passed the House by 231-189. A companion resolution condemning the Kelo decision was approved 365-33. Only 10 of the 43 members of the Congressional Black Caucus and only two members of the Congrssional Hispanic Caucus voted against the latter measure.

[...]

No one argues that struggling cities or states don't have a right to improve themselves through redevelopment. But the new civil-rights coalition forming in reaction to the Kelo decision says that need can't justify land seizures from which politically connected players stand to gain at the expense of individual civil rights. If the half-century since Brown v. Board of Education has taught us anything, it is that some rights are and must remain nonnegotiable.

(via Instapundit)

As a follow up to this post from Saturday, it looks like the number of states looking to limit the use of eminent domain for economic development purposes is on the rise:

Several states -- including Delaware, Georgia, Minnesota, New Jersey and Texas -- have legislative eminent-domain bills pending that are aimed at transfers of property to private commercial interests. Several are expected to act this year.

One of the first could be Alabama, where Republican Gov. Bob Riley plans to introduce a bill in a mid-July special session of the Legislature. Legislators in two other states, Illinois and Pennsylvania, also plan to introduce bills this month, said ALEC officials who have been monitoring the issue in the states.

In Massachusetts, House Minority Leader Brad Jones has filed a nonbinding resolution denouncing the court's decision that has broad bipartisan support in the heavily Democratic chamber. The Republican said he expects it to "sail through the House," possibly this week.

He also has drafted a statute and a state constitutional amendment, both of which would ban land seizures in the state for commercial purposes.

More here.

(via Instapundit)

U.S. workers say they squander over two hours a day at the workplace, with surfing the Web, socializing with co-workers and simply "spacing out" among the top time-wasting activities, according to a survey released on Monday.

Most U.S. companies assume about an hour of wasted time, but workers admit to actually frittering away more than twice as much time at a cost of $759 billion in annual paid salary that results in no apparent productivity, an online survey conducted by America Online and Salary.com showed.

Wasted time did not include the standard lunch hour.

Of 10,044 employee respondents, 33 percent said they engaged in time-wasting activities because they didn't have enough work to do. Nearly a quarter of those surveyed said they squandered their work hours because they were underpaid.

(Read on, here.)

(Reminds me of that old SNL skit where a Japanese executive--played by Dana Carvey, I believe--goes into spin-control after calling American workers fat and lazy: “Some are fat, some are lazy, and some are fat and lazy. But I did not mean to, you know, generalize.”)

If anything the "over two hours" figure probably understates the amount of slacking off. After all, survey respondents typically sugarcoat their answers (according to travel diaries no one has ever visited a nudie bar).

Nick Gillespie points to the AOL wrap-up which includes a state-by-state breakdown (Missouri tops the slacker list with 3.2 hours of screwing off per day).

In a roundabout way this should make managers warm up to telecommuting. Many resist it precisely because they’re worried about workers screwing off at home.

But lots of evidence suggests telecommuters are actually more productive and, as the AOL/Salary.com survey suggests, being “at” work is no guarantee that workers are actually working.

We’re often quick to notice the potential distractions at home, but as this British study points out, there are plenty of productivity-sapping distractions at the office.

In 80 clinical trials, Dr. Glenn Wilson, a psychiatrist at King's College London University, monitored the IQ of workers throughout the day. He found the IQ of those who tried to juggle messages and work fell by 10 points -- the equivalent to missing a whole night's sleep ...

This Harvard study argues that presenteeism—when workers are at work, but out of it—costs businesses m