Tag Archives: number

NYPD Slowdown Not Likely to Tell Us Much About Broken Windows

by LorrineBucher Posted on December 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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As long as we’re talking about crime today, the New York Times reports that the NYPD’s slowdown in citing people for minor violations doesn’t appear to be doing any harm:

In the week since two Brooklyn officers were killed by a man who singled them out for their police uniforms, the number of summonses for minor criminal offenses, as well as those for parking and traffic violations, has decreased by more than 90 percent versus the same week a year earlier, and felony arrests were nearly 40 percent lower, according to Police Department statistics.

….Yet reports of major crimes citywide continued their downward trajectory, falling to 1,813 from 2,127 for the week, a nearly 15 percent drop, according to Police Department statistics.

Mike the Mad Biologist thinks this might be a useful natural experiment:

Here’s the thing: this might not be like the sanitation workers strike. Then, it was obvious what the consequences were—mounds of rotting garbage. But what happens if, after a couple weeks of slowdown, there’s no uptick in violent or property (i.e., breaking and entry) crime? That would undermine the current policing philosophy of the NYPD (and many other cities)….If violent crime doesn’t increase, then arresting people for minor violations doesn’t seem like a good strategy.

Helluva experiment. Let’s see what the outcome will be.

Unfortunately, I doubt that this will tell us anything at all. The timeframe is too short and there are too many other things going on at the same time. Crime statistics have a ton of noise in them, and it’s hard to draw any conclusions even from a full year of change. You need years of data, preferably in lots of different places. A few weeks of data in one place is basically just a null.

So….yes, it’s potentially an interesting experiment. In real life, though, it’s not. It’s just a howl of protest from the police that will tell us little about anything other than the state of relations between City Hall and the NYPD.

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NYPD Slowdown Not Likely to Tell Us Much About Broken Windows

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The Cost of US Wars Since 9/11: $1.6 Trillion

by IXYEmeryebk Posted on December 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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The cost of US war-making in the 13 years since the September 11 terrorist attacks reached a whopping $1.6 trillion in 2014, according to a recent report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS).

The $1.6 trillion in war spending over that time span includes the cost of military operations, the training of security forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, weapons maintenance, base support, reconstruction, embassy maintenance, foreign aid, and veterans’ medical care, as well as war-related intelligence operations not tracked by the Pentagon. The report tracks expenses through September, the end of the government’s 2014 fiscal year. Here’s a breakdown of where most of that money went:

The key factor determining the cost of war during a given period over the last 13 years has been the number of US troops deployed, according to the report. The number of troops in Afghanistan peaked in 2011, when 100,000 Americans were stationed there. The number of US armed forces in Iraq reached a high of about 170,000 in 2007.

Although Congress enacted across-the-board spending cuts in March 2013, the Pentagon’s war-making money was left untouched. The minimal cuts, known as sequestration, came from the Defense Department’s regular peacetime budget. The Pentagon gets a separate budget for fighting wars.

In the spending bill that Congress approved earlier this month, lawmakers doled out $73.7 billion for war-related activities in 2015—$2.3 billion more than President Barack Obama had requested. As Mother Jones‘ Dave Gilson reported last year, US military spending is on pace to taper far less dramatically in the wake of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars than it did after the end of the Vietnam War or the Cold War.

Other reports have estimated the cost of US wars since 9/11 to be far higher than $1.6 trillion. A report by Neta Crawford, a political science professor at Boston University, estimated the total cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—as well as post-2001 assistance to Pakistan—to be roughly $4.4 trillion. The CRS estimate is lower because it does not include additional costs including the lifetime price of health care for disabled veterans and interest on the national debt.

Chart by AJ Vicens.

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The Cost of US Wars Since 9/11: $1.6 Trillion

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Facebook Is a Widely Beloved Company

by DonetteCoughlan Posted on December 8, 2014

Mother Jones

Alex Tabarrok mulls the question of whether advertising-supported products are fundamentally less attuned to customer needs than, say, Apple products:

Apple’s market power isn’t a given, it’s a function of the quality of Apple’s products relative to its competitors. Thus, Apple has a significant incentive to increase quality and because it can’t charge each of its customers a different price a large fraction of the quality surplus ends up going to customers and Apple customers love Apple products.

Facebook doesn’t charge its customers so relative to Apple it has a greater interest in increasing the number of customers even if that means degrading the quality. As a result, Facebook has more users than Apple but no one loves Facebook. Facebook is broadcast television and Apple is HBO.

No one loves Facebook? This is a seriously elitist misconception. It’s like saying that Tiffany’s customers all love Tiffany’s but no one loves Walmart.

But that’s flatly not true. Among people with relatively high incomes, no one loves Walmart. Among the working and middle classes, there are tens of millions of people who not only love Walmart, but literally credit them with being able to live what they consider a middle-class lifestyle. They adore Walmart.

Ditto for Facebook. I don’t love Facebook. Maybe Alex doesn’t love Facebook. And certainly Facebook’s fortunes rise and fall over time as other social networking products gain or lose mindshare. But there are loads of people who not only love Facebook, but are practically addicted to it. And why not? Facebook’s advertiser-centric model forces them to give their customers what they want, since happy customers are the only way to increase the number of eyeballs that their advertisers want. Apple, by contrast, was run for years on the whim of Steve Jobs, who famously refused to give his customers what they wanted if it happened to conflict with his own idiosyncratic notion of how a phone/tablet/computer ought to work. In the end, this worked out well because Jobs was an oddball genius—though it was a close-run thing. But how many companies can find success that way? A few, to be sure. But not a lot.

“Quality” is not a one-dimensional attribute—and this is an insight that’s seriously underappreciated. It means different things to different people. As a result, good mass-market companies are every bit as loved as companies that cater to elites. They’re just loved by different people. But the love of the working class is every bit as real as the love of the upper middle class. You forget that at your peril.

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Facebook Is a Widely Beloved Company

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Good News from the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report

by VeraLNVsjwvas Posted on November 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Everyone’s favorite CDC publication, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, passes along some great news today: cigarette smoking is down. Among Americans 18 and older, only 17.8 percent now smoke cigarettes, down from 20.9 percent in 2005. What’s more, the proportion of daily smokers declined from 16.9 percent to 13.7 percent, and among daily smokers the number of cigarettes smoked also declined. By region, the highest level of smoking is found in the Midwest, followed by the South, the Northeast, and the West. Poor people smoke more than non-poor, and generally speaking, those with less education smoke more than those with more education.

In case you’re unpersuaded by all this, I’ve appended a trivial chart on the right showing the overall prevalence of smoking. It’s down. Are you persuaded now?

In any case, you’re probably not surprised by this news. So here’s something a little more interesting: it turns out the prevalence of smoking is considerably higher among the gay population than the straight population (26 percent vs. 17 percent). Is this common knowledge? Maybe, but I didn’t know it, and I sure wouldn’t have guessed it. Of course, all the gay people I know are well-educated West Coast folks, who probably have a very low rate of smoking regardless of sexual orientation. So I suppose I’m just too cloistered to have any clue about this.

Link: 

Good News from the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report

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Europe’s plastic bag rule is a breath of fresh air

by EllieHypes Posted on November 24, 2014

Europe’s plastic bag rule is a breath of fresh air

By on 24 Nov 2014commentsShare

Plastic bags are the worst. They’re made of oil, they’re filling up the oceans, they’re showing up in sea turtles, they’re killing birds and plankton, too, and they’re even threatening human health, as plastic works its way up the food chain to the top predator: us.

That’s why the European Union worked so hard on a new compromise aimed at cutting Europe’s throwaway plastic bag use by 80 percent over the next decade. E.U. governments unanimously approved the measure last Friday, reports Newsweek.

Yes, that’s right. Political actors from states like Denmark, where folks use four lightweight plastic bags per year, on average, found a happy medium with the likes of Portugal, whose residents go through them at 100 times that rate, and all sides agreed to the deal because the ecological damage is too great to ignore. Having lived scarcely two decades, I can’t remember anything quite like this multinational legislation.

The original proposal’s outright ban on so-called oxodegradable bags was downgraded to appease the U.K., a country that remains displeased with the binding elements of the agreement. The Guardian explains the ratified deal:

Under the new proposal, EU states can opt for mandatory pricing of bags by 2019, or binding targets to reduce the number of plastic bags used annually per person from 191 now to 90 by 2019 and 40 in 2025. Measures such as bag taxes could also be considered as equivalent.

Even as communities around the world do their damnedest to oust this ubiquitous symbol of modern consumerism, Big Plastic will try anything to keep us addicted to the convenient, single-use totes: Slap on misleading labels, dub them reusable to get around bans, and, of course, put nearly every product, even fruits and veggies at many stores, into its own plastic bag called packaging. Despite the countermovement, we use more than a million plastic bags every minute worldwide, each one for an average of 15 minutes.

What to do about this oceanic mess? Involving a higher authority like the E.U. sounds like an alright complement to the proliferating small-scale measures to sack the sack.

Celebrate the progress, but beware of complacency. In terms of environmental impact, the type of bag we use is far less important than what we put inside it (or don’t).

As for the new rule, my question is (as always): Does it apply to produce bags or only at the checkout line?

Source:
EU Government Approves Law to Curb Plastic Bag Use

, Newsweek.

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New York Times Signals More Newsroom Layoffs Are Imminent

by OliverTrevino Posted on November 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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The New York Times indicated today that it’s getting close to a round of forced layoffs of its journalists.

The newsroom-wide email sent Thursday morning, obtained by Mother Jones, details responses to employee questions about a scheduled buyout program from Janet Elder, a deputy executive editor at the company. The email states that, “the most frequently asked question is about scale and whether or not there will be enough buyouts to avoid layoffs. Given that the buyout window is still open, it’s hard to have an absolute answer to that question just yet. Early efforts to handicap the outcome regrettably point to having to do some layoffs.”

The email says the buyout window for newsroom employees closes on December 1, 2014. Danielle Rhoades Ha, a director of communications at the New York Times Company, confirmed the email from Elder and said there would be no further information made public at present about the buyout program or layoffs.

The Times announced a plan in October to cut 100 newsroom jobs starting with a buyout program. Dean Baquet, the executive editor, wrote to staff then that layoffs were possible if not enough volunteers stepped forward: “We hope to meet this number through voluntary buyouts. But if we don’t get there we will be forced to do layoffs.â&#128;&#139;” At the end of October, the New York Times Company reported lower-than-expected quarterly revenue, and projected a further slowdown in ad sales, according to Reuters.

The Times had some other bad news for employees who are considering taking a buy-out package: Certain perks are going away, including free access to MoMA. “We’ve been asked a lot of questions about everything from “Can I keep my laptop?”… to “Does my retiree ID card allow me free access to museums?” (Most of the museums we’ve asked have said yes except for MoMA.)”

Rhoades Ha added in response to Mother Jones: “The company supports certain cultural institutions and as a result, employees get discounted entry fees. It’s not part of anyone’s ’employment package.'”

The full email is reproduced below:

Date: Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 10:01 AM
Subject: A Note From Janet on Buyouts

Dear Colleagues,
The window for voluntary buyouts closes on Monday, Dec.1, at 5 p.m. We’ve been asked a lot of questions about everything from “Can I keep my laptop?” (it depends, talk to Walt Baranger) to “Does my retiree ID card allow me free access to museums?” (Most of the museums we’ve asked have said yes except for MoMA.)
But the most frequently asked question is about scale and whether or not there will be enough buyouts to avoid layoffs. Given that the buyout window is still open, it’s hard to have an absolute answer to that question just yet. Early efforts to handicap the outcome regrettably point to having to do some layoffs.
For the most part, we’ve been trying to review and either accept or reject voluntary buyout applications as they come in. Not all applications can be approved. Some jobs are too critical to our mission to let go. Many of you may still be contemplating the buyout. If you think it works well for you and your family, we urge you to give it serious consideration.
It is worth repeating here that if we do go to layoffs, there will not be any taps on the shoulder. Throughout this process, Dean has urged everyone to have a frank conversation with his or her supervisor about whether or not their goals match those of The Times. That’s still a good idea.
If you have any questions in the coming days please do not hesitate to reach out to Dean, Ian, Susan, Matt or me.

— Janet

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New York Times Signals More Newsroom Layoffs Are Imminent

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Voter ID Laws: Terrible Public Policy, But Probably Pretty Feeble

by FFJLaunaxxkc Posted on November 19, 2014

Mother Jones

Republican-led voter-ID laws may be pernicious, but Nate Cohn says there are three reasons to think their actual electoral impact is overstated:

To begin with, the true number of registered voters without photo identification is usually much lower than the statistics on registered voters without identification suggest. The number of voters without photo identification is calculated by matching voter registration files with state ID databases. But perfect matching is impossible and the effect is to overestimate the number of voters without identification.

….People without ID are less likely to vote than other registered voters. The North Carolina study found that 43 percent of the unmatched voters — registered voters who could not be matched with a driver’s license — participated in 2012, compared with more than 70 percent of matched voters.

….There’s no question that voter ID has a disparate impact on Democratic-leaning groups….But voters without an identification might be breaking something more like 70/30 for Democrats than 95/5. A 70/30 margin is a big deal, and, again, it’s fully consistent with Democratic concerns about voter suppression. But when we’re down to the subset of unmatched voters who don’t have any identification and still vote, a 70/30 margin probably isn’t generating enough votes to decide anything but an extremely close election.

When I looked into this a couple of years ago, I basically came to the same conclusion. Only a few studies were available at the time, but they suggested that the real-world impact of voter ID laws was fairly small. I haven’t seen anything since then to suggest otherwise.

None of this justifies the cynical Republican effort to suppress voting via ID laws. For one thing, they still matter in close elections. For another, the simple fact that they deliberately target minority voters is noxious—and this is very much not ameliorated by the common Republican defense that the real reason they’re targeted isn’t race related. It’s because they vote for Democrats. If anything, that makes it worse. Republicans are knowingly making it harder for blacks and Hispanics to vote because they vote for the wrong people. I’m not sure how much more noxious a voter suppression effort can be.

These laws should be stricken from the books, lock, stock and extremely smoking barrel. They don’t prevent voter fraud and they have no purpose except to suppress the votes of targeted groups. The evidence on this point is now clear enough that the Supreme Court should revisit its 2008 decision in Crawford v. Marion that upheld strict voter ID laws. They have no place in a decent society.

At the same time, if you’re wondering how much actual effect they have, the answer is probably not much. We still don’t have any definitive academic studies on this point, I think, but Cohn makes a pretty good case. It’s possible that Kay Hagen might have lost her Senate race this year thanks to voter ID laws, but she’s probably the only one.

Source – 

Voter ID Laws: Terrible Public Policy, But Probably Pretty Feeble

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If you build bike paths, cyclists will come

by JermainMacintyr Posted on November 7, 2014

PEDAL POWER

If you build bike paths, cyclists will come

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6 Nov 2014 8:11 PM

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Science says you should keep babies away from ledges and going bald is upsetting. The latest from the Journal of Duh: More people ride their bicycles when infrastructure makes it easier and safer to get around on two wheels.

The Obesity Society just publicized results of a study by University of North Carolina researchers examining how the development of the Minneapolis Greenway — an intercity system of bike freeways connecting the places where people live and work — affected commuters’ habits over a decade.

In short, folks who live near the off-road trails switched to cycling to work at a higher rate than people who don’t. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of U.S. bike commuters has increased 60 percent over the last 10 years. The shift to pedal power in Minneapolis has been even more pronounced: Bicycling among workers who live within three miles of the Greenway shot up 89 percent during the decade of data.

The study, led by TOS veep Penny Gordon-Larsen, is framed in terms of public health: “Active commuting” is associated with healthier hearts and weights; thus these findings support building bike-friendly transportation infrastructure as a useful instrument in the anti-obesity toolkit. Moreover, promoting cycling by adding bike lanes and bike paths contributes to other health-related advantages of urban bike-ability. As we’ve written about before, some research indicates that biking becomes safer as more people hop on their two-wheelers. Heck, bicycle-crazy Portland saw zero bike fatalities in 2013. Oh, and bicycle traffic jams don’t pollute the air we breathe, either.

So really, it’s not riding a bike that’s hazardous to your health.

Source:
Study Shows Bicycle-Friendly City Infrastructure in U.S. Significantly Increases Cycling to Work by Residents, Which Can Improve Health of Locals

, The Obesity Society.

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Holy sh*t, a town in Texas just banned fracking

by AlysaFernandes Posted on November 5, 2014

Holy sh*t, a town in Texas just banned fracking

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5 Nov 2014 3:31 PM

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This was the year of the fracking ban, at least in local elections: Eight municipal and county-wide bans went to voters in Ohio, Texas, and California on Nov. 4. Considering the money poured in by the opposition, they did pretty darn well: Four out of eight won by a country mile.

California 

Happily for local farmers like Paul Hain, San Benito County’s moratorium on “high-intensity petroleum operations” passed with flying colors (at least by American standards): 57 to 43 percent. And in Mendocino County, Measure S won with even more of the vote: 67 to 33 percent.

In oil-rich Santa Barbara County, however, where oil and gas interests poured nearly $6 million into their campaign against Measure P, the ban lost by margins just as wide: 37 to 63 percent. It’s a big loss for the folks behind the measure, but, as they posted on Facebook, they’re hardly defeated: “This campaign was the beginning of the fight. Not the end!!”

Ohio

Four Ohio towns put fracking bans to voters, too, and one of them took home the gold: Athens, whose citizens had tried and failed to get a measure on the ballot in 2013, overwhelmingly supported one this time that will keep the practice out of city limits. The bans failed in Gates Mills and Kent, though. And while anti-fracking campaigners in Youngstown gave it a fourth shot, after a third proposed ban failed last year, it got royally slammed again. Argh.

Texas

But perhaps the most meaningful results cane from Denton, Texas: The town’s fracking ban is the first ever to pass in Texas, the nation’s biggest oil and gas producer (California was No. 3 in crude last year). Denton already has 275 fracking wells, so a moratorium on the practice here says a whole heck of a lot about the future of fracking — and, dare we dream, of fossil fuels?

Denton Mayor Chris Watts anticipated this, claiming that “the vote is not the end of the story.” Oil companies will probably contest it in court, but, he said in a statement, “The City Council will exercise the legal remedies that are available to us should the ordinance be challenged.”

Bring it, Texas Oil, bring it. The people have spoken.

Source:
Record Number of Anti-Fracking Measures on Nov. 4 Ballots

, Inside Climate News.

Why Oil And Gas Giants Are Trying To Buy Three Local Elections In California

, Think Progress.

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You know it’s good when your biggest transportation problem is too many cyclists

by CharlesLabarber Posted on October 20, 2014

You know it’s good when your biggest transportation problem is too many cyclists

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20 Oct 2014 6:11 PM

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It must be nice to be Dutch: While the rest of us are dealing with ensuring reasonable access to reproductive healthcare and violent seasonal pumpkin festivals, in the Netherlands, people are taking to the streets to protest poor bike traffic planning.

While we’ve fretted about the possibility that there are TOO MANY bikers in the Low Country before, the truth is more complicated than that.

Citylab’s Sarah Goodyear points out that despite our utopian mental images of happy Dutchmen gleefully coasting along their superior bike infrastructure, even the most advanced of biking societies still have logistical speed bumps to work out when it comes to bike traffic. Case in point: In Utrecht, where an estimated third of trips are taken on two wheels, certain intersections have cyclists waiting so long for a green that some of them have just started running the light. And then the police started doing what they do best: writing tickets. The resulting backup last week was more than 100 bikers deep and rattled the city to its polite and measured core.

So last week, volunteers from the local chapter of Cyclists’ Union broke out the radical tools of social change — sweet rolls and pamphlets — to soothe their impatient compatriots and gently called attention to another of the poorly designed intersections last week. And it’s working! A day after the first incident, city planners conceded that the traffic signal’s timing was off, and readjusted it to cycle more cyclists through faster.

In the U.S., where cars vs. bikes sometimes feels like a physical battle of wheels more than a civil battle of wills, it’s nice to see what can happen when a large number of people ask nicely for a thing that will make their lives better. I don’t mean to go all Kumbaya on you here … so I’ll let Goodyear do it for me:

As the number of people riding bicycles on the streets and roads of the United States and other countries continues to rise, the need to create better infrastructure only becomes more apparent. That includes better bike-specific signal timing and bike-specific regulations such as the Idaho stop (which allows bikes to treat stop signs as yield signs).

Change is possible, even though it may take time. Someday, more places will be lucky enough to have Utrecht’s problems — and, one would hope, also its willingness to find solutions.

Source:
What We Can Learn from a Dutch Bike Traffic Jam

, CityLab.

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