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Three Studies Confirm: Obamacare Isn’t a Job Killer

by DiannaSpooner Posted on August 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Among the many (many, many) catastrophes predicted by opponents of Obamacare was that a lot of workers would find their hours reduced against their wishes. Why? Because Obamacare requires firms to provide health insurance only to employees who work 30 hours or more. So lots of companies would do their best to reduce worker hours to 29 or less in order to avoid having to pay for health coverage.

Unlike a lot of the gloomy scenarios tossed out by Obamacare opponents, this one wasn’t entirely ridiculous. Any employer mandate is going to have a cutoff somewhere, and there really is an incentive for companies to drop as many workers as possible below that cutoff. So it’s something that can only be settled by actual research. The question is: was there an increase between 2013 and 2014 of workers just under the 30-hour threshold? Max Ehrenfreund surveys a few recent studies and says the answer is no:

Analysts at ADP studied the payrolls of the firms’ clients, about 75,000 U.S. firms and organizations. They expected that as businesses prepared for the mandate to take effect, they would adjust their employees’ schedules, limiting them to no more than 30 hours a week. Yet ADP found no overall change in employees’ weekly schedules between 2013 and last year.

According to ADP’s analysis, shifts in scheduling were trivial in every sector of the economy, even in industries that rely heavily on part-time work, such as leisure and hospitality.

….ADP’s findings were confirmed in another study by Aparna Mathur and Sita Nataraj Slavov of George Mason University and Michael Strain of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Their paper, published this month in the journal Applied Economics Letters, uses data from the federal Current Population Survey and finds no statistically significant change in the proportion of part-time workers in the sectors most likely to be affected by Obamacare, such as janitorial and restaurant work.

A third study confirmed these findings, and also found that eligibility for Medicaid didn’t discourage people from holding down a job (since they no longer needed a job in order to get health insurance). The study found no difference between states that expanded Medicaid and those that didn’t.

Why does it turn out that employers didn’t cut their workers’ hours? One possibility is that a year isn’t long enough for a study like this. Maybe over the next few years, as the cost of the mandate becomes clearer, companies will start getting more aggressive about cutting worker hours.

But I’d offer another possibility: the mandate didn’t have a big effect because most companies already do something like this on their own. They offer health insurance as a standard benefit only to full-time workers, and the cutoff for full-time status is usually somewhere between 25 and 35 hours. So when the mandate came along, it just didn’t change anything for most employers.

This is why two of the studies looked specifically at things like hospitality and restaurant work. These are sectors where employers (a) already maintain highly variable schedules and (b) mostly didn’t offer health insurance at all prior to Obamacare. When the mandate came along, these folks were faced with a sudden additional cost, but one that they could reduce pretty easily reduce by limiting schedules to less than 30 hours. And yet, even there the researchers found no change—or at least, no change large enough to measure.

This is not the final word, but it’s the best we have right now. Three research teams, including one not especially sympathetic to Obamacare, have all found the same thing: Obamacare isn’t a job killer. Nor is it even a schedule killer. Life goes on normally, except for the fact that millions of people now have health insurance who didn’t before.

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Three Studies Confirm: Obamacare Isn’t a Job Killer

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Scientists will never build a perfect climate model, but that’s OK

by CasimiraShephar Posted on May 14, 2015

model problems

Scientists will never build a perfect climate model, but that’s OK

By on 14 May 2015commentsShare

When we talk about climate models, it’s all all “uncertainty” this and “insufficiency” that — as though there’s some perfect, comprehenisve model of planet earth to compare them to. But no one criticizes NASA for building spacecrafts that aren’t the Starship Enterprise, because they know that the Starship Enterprise is fictional. The same is true for climate models — that perfect simulation doesn’t exist.

This video from Motherboard helps explain why that is (while also informing us that NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies happens to be right behind the Seinfeld diner — a great factoid to tuck away for later!).

Here’s the bottom line: Climate models translate the natural world into math. As anyone who’s ever taken a physics class can tell you, translating even the simplest things into math is hard. I mean, do you guys remember having to calculate how fast that bowling ball was going when it reached the bottom of that hill? Or how high that baseball went when Bob threw it up in the air? Or what happened when those two blocks crashed into each other?

Well, climate models have to do that kind of thing but for pretty much all water and air, everywhere around the globe, all at once. Not only is that hard, it’s literally impossible to do with perfect accuracy. Uncertainties are — and always will be — part of the deal.

We applaud NASA just for building spacecrafts in the first place, because holy shit, space flight is real! The same should be true for climate models. That perfect simulation is a fantasy, so let’s be realistic and appreciate what we have, because holy shit, we can simulate the world!

Oh, and for the record: Climate models are not responsible for forecasting local weather, so give it a rest, Glenn Beck:

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The Most Important Models in the World

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The Gap Between the Rich and the Rest of Us Is The Widest It’s Been In 30 Years. Here’s One Reason Why.

by CharoleXSH Posted on December 26, 2014

Mother Jones

The wealth gap between the richest 20 percent of Americans and everyone else is the widest it’s been in three decades, according to a report released last week by the Pew Research Center. Many factors contribute to this great divide: tax rates on the rich have been falling for decades; the Great Recession decimated the assets of a lot of low- and middle-income folks; and technology is replacing workers. One often-overlooked factor, though, is that 16.7 million poor Americans don’t have a bank account. Lack of access to this basic financial tool cramps poor Americans’ ability to prove credit-worthiness and build assets, and forces them to rely on expensive alternative financial services, trapping them in a cycle of debt and instability.

Here’s a look at banking access in the US and how it affects Americans’ ability to grab onto the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder.

Many more people in the US lack bank accounts than in other wealthy developed nations, according to the latest World Bank data, which is from 2011.

The percentage of Americans without bank access has fluctuated since the Great Recession. In 2009, 7.6 percent of Americans lacked a bank account. In 2011, that number was 8.2 percent, and in 2013, 7.7 percent—or approximately 16.7 million adults—had no banking access, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

Eighteen percent of people in the bottom 40 percent of the income spectrum lacked an account at a formal financial institution in 2011, according to the World Bank. Non-whites are less likely to have a bank account:

The main reason people don’t open bank accounts is that they lack sufficient funds to open one or can’t afford the fees associated with the account. But some people simply don’t trust financial institutions.

Bank fees associated with checking accounts have skyrocketed over the past few years, with the percentage of truly free checking accounts falling from 76 percent in 2009 to 38 percent in 2013, according to the most recent data from Bankrate, a consumer financial services company. The average minimum balance required to open a checking account rose nine percent over the past year to $66, and the average overdraft fee reached $32.74, a record high. ATM fees are at all-time highs, too.

“Even plain vanilla checking accounts have gotten more expensive,” Abby McCloskey, a program director at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote at Forbes last year. “Free checking was long championed by the FDIC to bring the unbanked into mainstream banking, and it has all but disappeared as banks cut costs.” (The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Congress created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to protect average Americans from banks’ predatory practices, is weighing new regulations on overdraft fees.)

When low-income customers close their accounts to avoid minimum balances and fees, they’re forced to rely on alternative financial services including payday lending, money orders, check cashing, and pawn shops—which often charge even more exorbitant fees and penalties. The average household that uses these alternative financial services spends $2,412 per year on interest and related fees, according to a report released this year by the Postal Service’s inspector general. A 2011 Pew survey of 2,000 low-income families in Los Angeles found that using alternative financial services consumed 6 percent of an average household’s income, whereas buying the same services at a bank ate up just half a percent of an average family’s income.

Americans without bank accounts also tend to miss out on tax benefits such as the Earned Income Tax Credit—mostly because people without bank accounts are less likely to file tax returns. More than two-thirds of families with bank accounts in Pew’s LA study filed their tax returns. Just 38 percent of the families without bank accounts filed. Three quarters of the families that filed got a tax refund.

Not surprisingly, low-income people with access to bank accounts are more likely to save money and have better overall economic health. Check it out.

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The Gap Between the Rich and the Rest of Us Is The Widest It’s Been In 30 Years. Here’s One Reason Why.

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Now Wall Street Is Calling for Climate Sanity. Don’t Expect the Right to Listen.

by ElkeAldrich Posted on June 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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Knowing that conservatives will never listen to liberals—or to President Obama—on climate change, many well meaning, science-minded people have sought to identify other messengers who might possibly sway the right.

Accordingly, they’ve tried tapping evangelical Christians, former EPA administrators who served under Republican presidents, and celebrity politicians like the moderate Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s an astute, psychologically sound theory (“trusted messengers” and all that) and yet, it never seems to work. Why does it never work?

We’ll get to that, but first, witness the latest attempt, which is aimed at swaying the business community. This weekend on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, two former treasury secretaries, Henry Paulson (a Republican) and Robert Rubin (a Democrat) went on the air to discuss climate change and, in particular, the new “Risky Business” report with which they’re closely affiliated. The report, emerging from a partnership that also includes Michael Bloomberg and the environmentalist billionaire Tom Steyer, makes the case that climate change will have dire economic costs. On the air, Paulson said point blank that climate inaction entails “radical risk taking.” Rubin added that the risk is “catastrophic.” Watch:

All of this is true and eminently sane. It is also striking to find Paulson, a man who observed economic collapse up close, drawing analogies between how economies go belly up, and how civilizations do. And we should certainly commend CNN’s Zakaria for convening this discussion.

But here’s the problem: Is Paulson, a Wall Street Republican who says he wants a carbon tax, a “trusted messenger” on the right? The truth is that today’s conservatives aren’t the same pro-big business boosters that they used to be. Commenting on the latest industry oriented climate push, American Enterprise Institute scholar Norman Ornstein remarked that among tea party conservatives these days, “big business is seen as a part of the problem more than it is a part of the solution. Companies just don’t have the clout that they used to have.”

Remember, Wall Street has never been in favor of another key tea party maneuver: Debt ceiling brinksmanship, which seasoned economic stewards of yesteryear tend to abhor. So why would the tea party listen to to big business on climate?

Which brings us back to the why “it never works” question. Why do trusted messengers never seem to reach the right on climate change? The answer is that the right is not its old self, and once trusted messengers aren’t trusted any longer.

If this was the United States of 30 years ago, we’d already have a bipartisan consensus on climate change.

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Now Wall Street Is Calling for Climate Sanity. Don’t Expect the Right to Listen.

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Obama Administration Pisses Off Ethanol Industry, Pleases Both Oil Industry and Environmentalists

by Shannon Walters Posted on November 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the Grist website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Here’s a riddle: When is the oil industry on the right side of a public policy fight? I know what you’re thinking: “Never.” But actually there is a potential exception: when their adversary is an equally selfish industrial complex.

On Friday, the EPA proposed to reduce the amount of biofuel required to be blended into gasoline to 15.2 billion gallons in 2014. That’s down from 16.55 billion gallons this year, and it is 14 percent lower than the goal Congress laid out in its 2007 expansion of the Renewable Fuel Standard program.

Powerful Midwestern agribusiness interests are not happy. But the oil industry is pleased—and so are environmentalists.

The EPA’s decision is a byproduct of good news: Americans are using less gasoline. If gas consumption were rising, it wouldn’t be hard to keep increasing the total amount of biofuels blended into the gas supply. But it turns out that U.S. gasoline consumption began a downward trend in 2007, thanks to shifts toward urban living, telecommuting, mass transit use, biking, and more efficient cars. So to keep up with rising biofuel requirements, refiners have had to increase the percentage of ethanol in gasoline. It’s currently at about 10 percent, which is considered by many to be the safe upper limit, or the “blend wall.” If the percentage goes any higher, it could damage cars currently on the road. The EPA disputes that, but car companies say their warranties won’t cover cars that use gasoline with 15 percent ethanol. Oil companies have been whining about the impracticality of the biofuel mandate and requesting relief.

The beneficiaries of the mandate are ethanol producers and corn growers, as corn ethanol is by far the most prevalent biofuel produced in the U.S. They benefit from consumers being forced to buy their product, especially since the inflated demand for corn drives up prices. So they are complaining about the EPA’s decision, attacking it as a setback for the environment and the renewable fuels industry. Here’s a typical quote, via Politico:

“EPA is proposing to place the nation’s renewable energy policy in the hands of the oil companies,” said Bob Dinneen, CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association, a major ethanol industry group. “That would be the death of innovation and evolution in our motor fuel markets, thus increasing consumer costs at the pump and the environmental cost of energy production.”

But don’t be fooled—there is nothing green about corn except the stalks. Corn-based ethanol is not reducing our carbon footprint. As Alex Rindler, policy associate at the Environmental Working Group, noted in a recent blog post, “An Environmental Protection Agency analysis showed that lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions from corn ethanol in 2012 were higher than from gasoline—and will be for years to come.”

Also, when you increase the price of corn, you cause farmers to fill in wetlands, cut down trees, and plant in sensitive areas. Sure enough, as the Associated Press reported last week, we are losing carbon sinks and increasing dangerous fertilizer runoff because of the ethanol mandate. The results are more net carbon emissions, more localized pollution, and more contamination of our waters. From the AP:

As farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and polluted water supplies…

Five million acres of land set aside for conservation—more than Yellowstone, Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined—have vanished on Obama’s watch…

Sprayers pumped out billions of pounds of fertilizer, some of which seeped into drinking water, contaminated rivers and worsened the huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where marine life can’t survive…

The consequences are so severe that environmentalists and many scientists have now rejected corn-based ethanol as bad environmental policy.

Conservative organizations, such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute think tank, are praising the EPA’s decision while complaining that it does not go far enough. They would like to see the ethanol mandate eliminated altogether.

And they are right. The Renewable Fuel Standard is an example of good intentions gone awry. The American government already incentivizes environmentally irresponsible industrial agriculture through farm subsidies. We don’t need yet another program that distorts the free market, transfers wealth from everyday Americans to a handful of big corn growers, and contributes to land degradation, water pollution, and climate change.

Even if ethanol were marginally better for the environment than conventional gasoline, the ethanol mandate is based on a false premise. Better gasoline is not the solution to reducing CO2 emissions. Driving less, and driving more efficient cars, is the way forward. And Americans are already doing it. Instead of creating competing subsidies to undo the damage caused by our subsidies for gasoline and driving, we need to make cars pay their own social cost and put different transportation modes on an even playing field. That would be achieved through eliminating subsidies for oil in the tax code, raising taxes on gasoline consumption, and shifting transportation infrastructure investment toward biking, walking, and mass transit.

Conservatives and the oil industry will fight those reforms with all their considerable political power. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and conservatives are right about corn-based ethanol.

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Obama Administration Pisses Off Ethanol Industry, Pleases Both Oil Industry and Environmentalists

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Anti-fracking activists celebrate victory in a fourth Colorado city

by Cass Barret Posted on November 15, 2013

Anti-fracking activists celebrate victory in a fourth Colorado city

By

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It turns out that it was a clean sweep for opponents of fracking during last week’s elections in Colorado.

Voters in the city of Broomfield narrowly approved a five-year moratorium on hydraulic fracturing. The initial vote tally indicated that the ballot measure had failed by 13 votes, but by the end of an exhaustive recount on Thursday it was revealed it had actually succeeded by 17 votes. The result is expected to be legally certified today, but because the vote was so close there may still be one more recount.

If the latest vote count holds up, it means that measures to ban or suspend fracking succeeded in all four Colorado cities where they were on the ballot. That despite the oil and gas industry pouring more than $870,000 into efforts to defeat the measures, which were promoted by cash-poor but determined grassroots efforts. Boulder and Fort Collins voters extended existing moratoriums on fracking, while Lafayette straight-up outlawed the practice.

It seems that Coloradans really don’t dig it when energy companies pump their land full of chemicals and pollute their air.

All three of the moratoriums and Lafayette’s ban will face legal challenges from the fracking industry and from the administration of Gov. John Hickenlooper (D). They accuse the cities of illegally “taking” minerals that don’t belong to them.


Source
Broomfield fracking ban: Results flip; measure approved by 17 votes after outstanding ballots counted, Broomfield Enterprise

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Will 2013 be the year of ag-gag bills?

by ansonsten Posted on January 30, 2013

Will 2013 be the year of ag-gag bills?

By Susie Cagle

The U.N. has declared 2013 to be the Year of Quinoa. But it’s also shaping up to be the Year of Ag Gag, those bills that make it illegal to covertly investigate factory farms for animal and ecological abuse. From Bruce Friedrich of Farm Sanctuary:

In 2011, the meat industry backed laws in four states to make taking photos or videos on farms and slaughterhouses illegal. In 2012, the industry pushed similar laws in 10 states. This year, we expect even more.

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In 2011 and 2012, Iowa, Utah, and Missouri all enacted some version of an anti-whistleblower ag-gag law, while similar proposals were struck down in Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, and Tennessee.

This year, more such laws are proposed in Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Wyoming.

Ag-gag laws are hardly the first attempt to keep the prying eyes of the public — activists, journalists, eaters all — away from the truths about animals raised en masse for food. Kansas, Montana, and North Dakota passed less restrictive versions of these laws back in the early ’90s, when the Animal Liberation Front was running around in balaclavas, being surprisingly organized and effective at freeing moneys and minks and smashing up butcher shops. In 1992, Congress passed the Animal Enterprise Protection Act, boosting penalties for these crimes.

The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, passed in 2006, went even further — like, way way further — making it illegal to “intentionally damage” a company’s physical property or its potential profits, even by nonviolent civil disobedience. Under the AETA, activists have been arrested and held for running websites and peacefully protesting animal testing.

But the corporate- and Koch-backed American Legislative Exchange Council wanted to crack down even further. In 2003 it proposed model legislation that would make it illegal to “enter an animal or research facility to take pictures by photograph, video camera, or other means with the intent to commit criminal activities or defame the facility or its owner.” Today’s ag-gag bills are a direct descendant of that far-reaching legislation. From Alternet:

Ag-Gag laws passed 20 years ago were focused more on deterring people from destroying property, or from either stealing animals or setting them free. Today’s ALEC-inspired bills take direct aim at anyone who tries to expose horrific acts of animal cruelty, dangerous animal-handling practices that might lead to food safety issues, or blatant disregard for environmental laws designed to protect waterways from animal waste runoff. In the past, most of those exposes have resulted from undercover investigations of exactly the type Big Ag wants to make illegal.

The three state bills proposed so far this year would require people with knowledge of animal abuse to promptly report it to officials. But if you just upload those photos and video and don’t report them to the government within a day or two, you’ll be breaking the law. Friedrich again:

It’s certainly possible that animal-friendly legislators are supporting [these kinds of bills] out of concern for animals, but of course undercover investigations, whether of a drug ring or organized crime syndicate or factory farm, require that the investigator document the full extent of the illegal activity. If the FBI or CIA stopped an investigation at the first sign of criminal activity, wrong-doers would be inadequately punished, if they were punished at all, because the full extent of the criminal behavior would not be known. Similarly, if an investigator witnesses illegal abuse of animals and immediately turns in that evidence without thorough documentation, the plant may receive a slap on the wrist (at best), the investigator leaves the plant, and business-as-usual continues.

The more of these laws that pass, the more free speech is chilled, and the less likely we are to see the uncovering of abuses. (Activists, you are fucking badass, but I know you also don’t want to go to jail.)

So is 2013 the Year of Ag Gag? Or is that actually every year now?

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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How the Kochs funneled millions to climate deniers through a secretive nonprofit

by marinavhunt Posted on January 25, 2013

How the Kochs funneled millions to climate deniers through a secretive nonprofit

By Philip Bump

Donors Trust, Inc. works “to help alleviate, through education, research, and private initiative, society’s most pervasive and radical needs, including those relating to social welfare, health, the environment, economics, governance, foreign relations, and arts and culture.”

Read that sentence twice. Unintentionally, Donors Trust is giving away its actual goal: Working to alleviate society’s most radical needs, including the environment. Alleviate the environment? That, according to a report from The Independent, it very much does.

The Donors Trust, along with its sister group Donors Capital Fund, based in Alexandria, Virginia, is funnelling millions of dollars into the effort to cast doubt on climate change without revealing the identities of its wealthy backers or that they have links to the fossil fuel industry.

However, an audit trail reveals that Donors is being indirectly supported by the American billionaire Charles Koch who, with his brother David, jointly owns a majority stake in Koch Industries, a large oil, gas and chemicals conglomerate based in Kansas.

Millions of dollars has been paid to Donors through a third-party organisation, called the Knowledge and Progress Fund, with is operated by the Koch family but does not advertise its Koch connections.

The Independent notes that the Koch-directed fund gave Donors Trust $4.5 million between 2007 and 2010. By 2010, the nonprofit was sitting on $18.4 million dollars, according to its IRS Form 990 filing. Over the course of that year, it paid out hundreds of grants to a number of organizations, including:

$23,550 to the pro-oil, anti-fact American Enterprise Institute
$7,577,000 to the Koch-linked Americans for Prosperity Foundation (right)
$1,280,000 to the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, whose director called global warming “man-made hysteria”
$58,200 to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is being sued by climate scientist Michael Mann for defamation
$41,000 to the anti-environment FreedomWorks Foundation
$2,250 to the notorious climate-denying Heartland Institute
$49,300 to the conservative Heritage Foundation
$82,000 to the pro-fracking Manhattan Institute
$21,500 to Montana’s Property and Environment Research Center, focused on “improving environmental quality through property rights and markets”
$30,650 to the anti-wind Reason Foundation

Donors Trust also gave massive grants to libertarian organizations, nonprofits pushing to break down the separation of church and state, anti-labor organizations, and, unexpectedly, animal care nonprofits like “Feline Rescue.” We’ve uploaded the full set of recipients; feel free to see if you can find anything else interesting.

View this document on Scribd

This is the tip of the iceberg, one year’s worth of grants out of a decade. The role of Donors Trust appears to be, in part, to mask who’s doing the funding. The Independent:

The Donors Trust is a “donor advised fund”, meaning that it has special status under the US tax system. People who give money receive generous tax relief and can retain greater anonymity than if they had used their own charitable foundations because, technically, they do not control how Donors spends the cash. …

[Robert Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, said,] “By becoming anonymous, they remove a political target. They can plausibly claim that they are not giving to these organisations, and there is no way to prove otherwise.”

Donors Trust is clear on the scale of its investments.

To date, DonorsTrust has received over $400 million from these donors who are both dedicated to liberty and to the cause of perpetuating a free and prosperous society through philanthropic means. Since inception, DonorsTrust has granted out over $300 million to over 1000 liberty-minded charities.

Your definition of “liberty” — and, for that matter, “charity” — may differ.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Avis buys Zipcar, delighting investors and unnerving customers

by Myrna Posted on January 2, 2013

Avis buys Zipcar, delighting investors and unnerving customers

By Susie Cagle

In 2011, Zipcar, the world’s largest car-sharing company, was valued at $1.2 billion, but it sold today to Avis for just shy of $500 million. If Zipcar’s shareholders approve the sale, it will likely become final in a few months.

“By combining with Zipcar, we will significantly increase our growth potential, both in the United States and internationally, and will position our company to better serve a greater variety of consumer and commercial transportation needs,” Avis Chair and CEO Ronald Nelson said in a statement.

Given the clear downward trend in American car owning and driving, it was only a matter of time until a big corporation got in the sharing game, and the easiest way to do that is always to eat one of the little guys and absorb its start-up life force. According to Nelson, the deal will mean more cars for Zipcar, especially on weekends when most of Avis’ fleet is sitting in parking lots. While Avis’ rivals Hertz and Enterprise started offering hourly rentals, Avis never did, so the acquisition presents a real expansion of services for the old-timey rental dealership.

It’s certainly got investors feeling good — Zipcar’s shares jumped more than 48 percent this morning on news of the deal.

But what about the people who actually use the car-sharing service? There are about 760,000 of them in the U.S. The Atlantic Cities considers other cases of corporations acquiring startups and wonders whether Avis will ruin Zipcar:

In some of these cases that means the end of a beloved service as we knew it. Other acquisitions have allowed the disruptor to flourish — under the thumb and bureaucracy of its new owner, but still. And sometimes even that part doesn’t go well, as we saw with HP’s acquisition of Autonomy, which not only wiped out HP’s profits but led to the unraveling of Autonomy, too. Even in that best case scenario, we have to consider all the possibilities that weren’t. What could the competition between the two companies have led to? We’ll never know. But we will have more than that sub-compact available for a weekend road trip.

So what if the sun does set on Zipcar? In recent years, car-on-demand services have become kind of standard — as mentioned above, Hertz and Enterprise are already offering hourly rentals. Most recently, Zipcar’s style of service has been eclipsed in excitement (if not yet in membership) by ride-on-demand services such as Sidecar and Lyft, which work more like taxis than car rentals, and by newer services like car2go, which don’t require reservations. And if Americans continue to lose interest not just in owning cars but in driving altogether, that would be good news for new ride-sharing services and the planet, but not so great for Avis and that $500 million.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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From bike shares to urban farms, Philadelphia is on the rise

by biglermyrta910 Posted on December 12, 2012

From bike shares to urban farms, Philadelphia is on the rise

By Susie Cagle

It’s been a banner year for urbanism in the City of Brotherly Love.

A West Philadelphia project led The New York Times’ piece on brownfields redevelopment today, and a new report released this week finds that the city’s community development corporations are cleaning up blight, rehabbing houses, and adding millions to Philadelphia’s tax base.

Yesterday, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter (D) officially launched a city Office of New Urban Mechanics dedicated to city innovation and problem-solving. “New Urban Mechanics will have the flexibility to experiment, the ability to re-invent public-private partnerships and the strategic vision to create real change for Philadelphia. I am excited to establish the Office of New Urban Mechanics as a civic innovation tool for urban transformation,” Nutter said in a statement.

Like a lot of “urban innovation” initiatives these days, that is really vague! It could encompass everything from apps for tracking and fixing potholes to brainstorming around some of Philadelphia’s big projects still in the works.

One big project: a bike share! Philadelphia wants to get one rolling. From the local CBS affiliate:

The city envisions getting a business plan together by next spring, then selecting a vendor, with the first bikes hitting the streets in 2014.

“We will need $3 million of city capital money,” says deputy mayor for transportation Rina Cutler, “then we hope to raise an additional five or six million in federal, state, and private funds.” …

Cutler says they’re still working out how users will pay for the bicycles. Credit or debit cards might ensure that the bikes don’t get stolen, but she says they also want to figure out a cash model or cell-phone technology for payment that shows up on your phone bill, so they don’t eliminate low-income users.

Or the office could help set up a new city land bank to fight blight and grow Philadelphia’s urban core. In October, the Pennsylvania state legislature passed a bill paving the way for a Philly land bank. A recent surge in demand for central city housing has motivated the city — with its 40,000 vacant lots — to establish the bank. But there’s no telling yet if the bank will give preference to big developers or small nonprofits, or put everyone on a level playing field.

Things are looking great for Philadelphia! Except maybe (maybe!) when it comes to the city’s burgeoning urban agriculture scene. This summer, the city approved new zoning rules that acknowledge upwards of 350 community gardens and farms spread across 753 different parcels. From Next American City:

Recognizing urban agriculture as a legal land use category helps bolster support for its practice. [Allison Blansfield, farm manager at The Enterprise Center,] says that the real evidence that the zoning code works better is that more problems don’t come up. According to Amy Laura Cahn of the Public Interest Law Center, cultivated vacant parcels are no longer just vacant lots, but are now legally recognized as urban agriculture.

This represents a major shift in the dialogue on vacant lands. Cahn notes that on the whole, the new code is a very positive step, with details needing to be ironed out over the next year of implementation.

But of course, issues remain.

Obtaining permits to build necessary garden infrastructure like retaining walls and fences is still really difficult, and new pending amendments to the code might undo much of this year’s progress and jeopardize more than a fifth of the city’s already-operating farms and gardens.

As it relates to urban agriculture, the changes would outlaw community gardening and urban farming in areas designated commercial mixed use, i.e. commercial corridors … The new code that had made it simpler for gardeners and farmers to be in compliance might now have the barriers built back in.

Come on, Philly — adding extra red tape for urban farmers is not innovative at all. Dig in, get your hands dirty, and please come back with something besides more apps. Please.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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From bike shares to urban farms, Philadelphia is on the rise

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