The Case For Socialized Sidewalk Snow Removal And Mainteance

A 70 year old friend of mine writes on Facebook that she just got a new electric snowblower because her "HOA dues no longer cover snow shoveling driveway and sidewalk."

There are lots of reasons that HOAs are horrible institutions. But one of the things that they do often do well is that they make removal of snow from sidewalks a collective neighborhood function, rather than something that must be done by each individual in the neighborhood.

When are people going to wake up and realize that decentralization and private responsibility is not the solution to all problems?  We seem to understand this for roads, but not for sidewalks.

Collective neighborhood snow shoveling is much more efficient since you can mechanize it with industrial grade snow blowers and snow clearing equipment. 

Even if the work is outsourced to landscaping companies so that it can be mechanized, it is still less efficient to have many separate landscaping companies do the work in the neighborhood in a patchwork fashion, rather than having one provider do it, in addition to being more expensive per unit or for the neighborhood as a whole, despite not providing the service for everyone in the neighborhood.

Also, if the HOA bought its own snow clearing equipment and hired someone directly to do the job (as many municipal governments and school districts do), cutting out the middle man which its scale would often make feasible, it could do it more cheaply than hiring a landscaping firm to do the job, since it wouldn't have to cover the landscaping firm's profit and overhead costs (e.g. marketing, office and insurance costs that the HOA already incurs, billing and debt collection costs that the HOA already incurs, etc.). It could even provide a measure of economic relief to HOA members by preferring to hire residents to do the work (also reducing commuting times and demands on local road infrastructure, and making an inability to do the job at all or on  time due to heavy snow making roads less passable less of a concern).

Collective sidewalk snow clearance also produces much better returns because sidewalks are a network. One delayed or not done at all link in clearing snow from sidewalks dramatically reduces the value of the sidewalk system for everyone, even if everyone else does a perfect and timely job of clearing the sidewalk in front of their house. And, in real life, perfect compliance with early sidewalk cleaning by each homeowner rarely happens for understandable reasons like being out of town, or being sick or infirm, or working atypical shifts like three twelves or having to work multiple jobs, so that you are at work when it snows.

The same logic applies to maintaining sidewalks in good condition when they crack. A badly broken sidewalk in front of one house makes the entire sidewalk network less useful for everyone who uses sidewalks in the neighborhood.

Sidewalks are a good that everyone in the community benefits from, and the homeowner benefits little from having the sidewalk in front of their own home clear. Clearing sidewalks is something you do for the benefit of your neighbors. 

There is a collective action problem which HOAs solve when they correctly treat sidewalks as a common element owned by the community as a whole and managed by an entity that is responsible to the entire community.

This is less true of driveways. Mechanization from economies of scale is still present, although it can be moderated with outsourcing to landscaping companies. But the benefits of driveway snow clearing primarily inure to the homeowner whose driveway is cleared. There isn't the same network functionality problem.

But, of course, in the HOA suburbs no one cares about sidewalks because everybody drives everywhere, which also makes not only the people in the HOA less healthy, but also makes the community less vibrant.

And, then there is the issue that 70 year olds face a vastly elevated risk of serious physical harm when they try to shovel their own driveways and sidewalks. This is true for driveways as well.

The other lurking issue is that many suburbanites in HOAs are cash poor and time rich. Paying HOA dues or a more efficient landscaping company to do the job costs money which many people in these communities don't have. Doing it yourself with a cheap and inefficient snow shovel doesn't cost money, even though you are effectively valuing your own time and effort at a tiny hourly rate when comparing the time it takes you to the time it takes a professional to do it with the proper equipment.

The tradeoff between doing things in the monetary economy v. doing things in the non-monetary household or by barter or volunteering is an understudied issue in economics.

Cherry Blossoms And Climate Change

 

This is a very long data set (1213 years), that wasn't designed by anyone concerned about human created global warming.

New Almanac Data Points

I have my 2026 World Almanac now and there are some statistics I keep a close eye on.

* As of March 31, 2025, the U.S. had 1,307,679 active duty military personnel. This is as small as the U.S. military has been by that measure since before World War II. At its peak, it was more than 50% bigger. Roughly 55% of U.S. active duty military personnel are non-Hispanic white men (with significant variation from one military service to another).

* Birth rates for women in all age categories under age 25 were at their lowest for all of recorded history and prehistory in North America.

* Infant mortality has increased each year since 2020. The anti-vax movement and the impact of the ban on abortions in many states could be factors.

Trump's Misguided Battleship Program

 

The centerpiece of the Trump administration’s revamp of the U.S. Navy is the largest surface combatant America will build since World War II.

The U.S. Navy will buy two new “battleships” as part of the “Golden Fleet” effort, President Donald Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Navy Secretary John Phelan announced Monday at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump said the Navy will start by purchasing two ships and eventually purchase 10, with a goal of 20 to 25 in total for the class with the start of construction planned for 2030.

From USNI. 

Battleships were retired from the U.S. Navy for a reason. The reason hasn't changed, although this is a "battleship" more in name than in fact. 

The last U.S. battleship, the USS Missouri (BB-63), left active service when it was decommissioned on March 31, 1992, after serving in World War II, the Korean War, and the Gulf War, and is now a museum ship in Pearl Harbor.

Battleships were large, heavily armored surface combatants built around multiple very large unguided slug throwing naval artillery guns (up to 16" diameter rounds). The problem was that they were sitting duck targets that could be defeated with modern munitions despite their heavy armor, and had only short range with low accuracy. Guided missiles which had longer range, greater accuracy, and didn't require so much bulk, replaced them.

Nuclear missiles were placed on nuclear submarines which were more stealthy and less vulnerable to counterattacks. 

Every other navy in the world, except Russia, which has one "cruiser" along these lines, has also learned this lesson and many world navies don't even see much use for larger surface combatants like destroyers and cruisers, largely limiting themselves to frigates, air independent diesel coastal submarines, and corvettes.

Trump's proposed nuclear missile carrying "battleship" with 35,000+ tons, about the same number of cruise missiles as existing destroyers and cruisers, a vaporware rail gun, two 5" naval guns, two vaporware large laser guns, four defensive laser guns, about eight air defense guns, and a helipad propelled by a diesel engine isn't what the U.S. navy needs. A price wasn't announced but it would be in the double digit billions per ship.

The last attempt to build a railgun centered ship, the USS Zumwalt destroyer, was an epic failure.

In the end, the Navy will spend lots of money over the next three years (at most) on R&D that will be abandoned when Trump leaves office or dies, if not sooner. 

This "battleship" also is ill suited for the conflicts and likely naval adversaries that the U.S. may face in the coming decades. It isn't suited for a war with China over Taiwan or the waters near the Philippines, for naval conflict with Iran near the Persian Gulf, with Russia, or with North Korea.

U.S. Health Care Spending Still Rising Because Our System Is Broken

Americans pay a huge amount for healthcare, while getting results that are below the developed world norm. Partially this is because a mixed government-private sector system leaves no one controlling costs, so we pay more to all forms of health care providers than any other health care system on Earth. And, partially, we pay much more for administrative costs. Further, the way we finance health care leaves many people either with no access to health care, or facing bankruptcy if they get seriously hurt or sick.

The best evidence we have shows that rising health spending in the United States since 1975 can explain roughly the same share of the growth in income inequality as increased trade, outsourcing or automation. It has pushed down wages, fueled inequality and left families drowning in unaffordable medical bills. Rising health care spending is killing the American dream.

Despite devastating out-of-pocket costs, Americans are generally insulated from the true cost of health care premiums. However, the expiring subsidies on the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, where more than 20 million Americans get their insurance, show just how exorbitant premiums have become. Consider a 60-year-old couple earning $85,000 a year. Without subsidies, their health insurance premiums next year will approach $32,000 (akin to buying a new Toyota Camry).

Those of us who get health care insurance from our employers — some 160 million Americans — may be breathing a sigh of relief. But our health care premiums are also staggering (an average of $27,000 a year for a family of four), and the fact that our employers pay part of the tab isn’t much of a reprieve. That’s because decades’ worth of research shows that, even though employers pay most of workers’ premiums, those costs are passed on to workers in the form of lower wages and fewer jobs. That’s why the rise in health spending above the rate of inflation over the past decade has depressed wages by nearly 10 percent, according to my calculations. And because premiums are a bigger share of total pay for lower-income workers, the job cuts triggered by rising health care spending fall disproportionally on low- and middle-income workers and fuel income inequality.

Americans spend more on health care than other countries because we pay higher prices for identical goods and services, are quicker to adopt new and costly medical technology (whether or not it is cost effective) and have higher administrative costs in our complex, decentralized system. Health care markets have consolidated so much that in many regions, hospitals and other providers can charge near-monopoly prices. The fact that we pay providers per service delivered (rather than a fixed salary) also plays a role.

Next year insurance premiums will increase 10 percent for employer-sponsored plans and 18 percent for individual plans on the exchanges compared with 2025. In both markets, they’re going up because the price of medical care is rising (think hospital mergers, staffing shortages and tariffs that make drugs and devices more expensive) and Americans are increasingly using expensive weight loss and diabetes drugs known as GLP-1s. The exchange plans are seeing a sharper increase than employer plans because of the uncertainty lawmakers created over whether the Affordable Care Act subsidies would be extended. Insurers had to factor in the risk that healthier people would be less likely to buy insurance if the subsidies expired, which would lead to a sicker insurance risk pool and higher costs. . . .

One person’s health care spending is another person’s health care income — profits, jobs and paychecks for the tens of millions of people who work in the health care sector. And some higher spending does lead to better care. As long as they’re in competitive markets, higher-priced hospitals deliver higher quality care. 

. . . [A]s a result of Medicare payment rules created in the 1980s, the government program pays more (sometimes double) for care delivered in a hospital or hospital-owned doctor’s practice versus in an independent doctor-owned practice, even if the care is identical. That makes it more profitable for doctors to merge their practice with hospitals than remain independent. These mergers give doctors and hospitals bargaining power and drive up prices and insurance premiums.

From the New York Times (Opinion).

The loss of ACA subsidies will more than double premiums for people who get their health insurance on the health insurance marketplace, which is mostly made up of self-employed people and early retirees. That's an important reason that I moved back to being a W-2 employee this year after twenty years of being self-employed.

The change disproportionately hurts small businesses, including farms, and because of this, together with massive cuts to Medicaid and immigration changes that make it much harder for hospitals to hire foreign doctors (who disproportionately serve rural areas where U.S. doctors prefer not to work), rural healthcare in the U.S. is on the brink of collapse, with many rural hospitals expected to close and fewer doctors serving rural areas. Red states that banned abortion are also seeing a huge exodus of obstetrics and gynecology doctors, with new graduates also reluctant to take positions in these states.

Indeed, the MAGA base will be hit harder by GOP healthcare changes, and other Trump 2.0 policies from tariffs to reduced access to government benefits than Democrats in blue states, who tend to live in more resilient cities which are buffered by more caring state and local governments, while many of the Trump 2.0 tax cuts will help more upper middle class Democrats than working class Republicans.

Cheese Is Good, Teens Are Tame, Crime Is Down, Lot Of Americans Are Immigrants

* A study linked eating cheese to lower dementia risk.

* Teen alcohol, nicotine, and drug use in the U.S. is at record lows, and cocaine and heroin use, while not at record lows, it much lower than it was a few decades ago.

Teen use of alcohol, nicotine and marijuana remains at record lows, according to national survey results released Wednesday. . . .

Two-thirds of 12th graders this year said they hadn’t used alcohol, marijuana, cigarettes or electronic cigarettes in the previous 30 days. Thirty years ago — before the advent of e-cigarettes — the figure was closer to about one-third.

Among 10th graders, 82% said they hadn’t used any of those substances recently. Among eighth graders, 91% didn’t use any of them. Both are records for those ages in the annual survey. . . .

The new results come from the federally funded Monitoring the Future survey, run by the University of Michigan. The annual survey has been operating since 1975 and has long been considered a top source of national data on teen substance abuse. This year’s findings are based on responses from about 24,000 students in grades 8, 10 and 12 in schools across the country. It was conducted from February to June this year.

Teen drug use has been gradually declining for decades, and fell dramatically at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when students across the country were told not to go to schools and to avoid parties or other gatherings. Experts expected at least a bit of a rebound as pandemic restrictions eased, but that hasn’t happened.

The 2025 results show no increases in teens’ use of alcohol, marijuana, cigarettes or nicotine vapes in any of the three grade levels. In 2024, researchers had noted an uptick in the use of nicotine pouches, but that too held steady this year, the survey found.

Energy drinks are as popular as ever, with daily consumption reported by 23% of 12th graders, 20% of 10th graders and 18% of eighth graders.

The survey also found a striking increase in heroin use. Use by 12th graders in the previous 12 months rose to 0.9% in 2025, from 0.2% the year before. Use by 10th graders hit 0.5%, up from 0.1%. And use by eighth graders also rose to 0.5%, up from 0.2%.

Cocaine use held steady for 10th graders, but rose for eighth graders — to 0.6% — and 12th graders — to 1.4%.

Teen heroin and cocaine use are “leagues below what they were decades ago,” but the increases warrant close monitoring, said Richard Miech, survey team lead at the University of Michigan.

The teen heroin and cocaine figures are small enough that they could just be mostly a statistical random sampling variation.

* Teens in the U.S. are having sex less (from an AP news story of May 13, 2023):

[A]ccording to a recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . . . 30% of teens in 2021 said they had ever had sex, down from 38% in 2019 and a huge drop from three decades ago, when more than half of teens reported having sex.

Teen pregnancies and the teen birthrate are also at record lows for all of history and prehistory in North America.

* As noted in the previous post, property crime rates are at record lows. And, violent crime rates are also very low.

* Meanwhile, prior to Trump taking office, the percentage of Americans that were foreign born was at an all time high.

Quick Hits

* Property crime rates in 2024 were the lowest that they've been since 1976.

Pretty sure that the labeling of this lines is wrong.

* Immensely increased H1-B visa fees will devastate the supply of physicians in the U.S., especially in rural areas, that are already being pummeled by immense cuts to Medicaid funding and ACA health insurance subsidies used mostly by self-employed people like farmers.

* Large office properties in metropolitan Denver are selling at immense discounts. Some of them are being converted to apartments or condos.

* In a broken clock's right twice a day moment, Trump's push for American automakers to start make microcars in the Kei car and Smart car sizes wouldn't be a bad thing, although his opposition to electric vehicles is horrible policy.

Physicians' Specialties And Their Political Identity

Draw whatever conclusions you wish. I suspect that lawyers would also show wide variation based upon the nature of their practice.

Private Equity v. Local Landlorrds

Private equity is playing a larger role in the housing market. Why?

Because rapid increases in interest rates, that have increased faster than the residential real estate market has time to compensate for them with lower inflation adjusted housing prices, has made buying homes unaffordable for home buyers who rely on significant mortgage debt to buy a home (especially, but not only, first time home buyers). This has created increased demand for rental housing which private equity is filling by buying single family homes (it has been a major player in the apartment market for a long time).

But, local government limitations on new housing are still more important to tenants and prospective home owners. Private equity isn't moral, but neither are smaller landlords. The main difference is that private equity concentrates the profits more than ownership by smaller landlords (and is less likely to spend its profits locally). The proportion of landlord owners housing and rental prices are predominantly governed by market forces that affect both equally and are heavily influenced by local zoning and building codes.

How did we get in this mess?

For a long time interest rates were exceedingly low in order to stimulate the economy. Housing prices soared to adapt, but low interest rates made those higher prices affordable. 

But, for a variety of reasons, nominal housing prices are sticky. 

In the short run, listing prices, home value appraisals, and conventional wisdom about fair market value selling prices are based on historical sales prices which are necessarily retrospective and often include comparable sales that pre-date the rise in interest rates, but mortgage rates reduce buyer's ability to pay almost instantly.

In the long run, there are two factors. 

One is that sellers can afford to sell heavily leveraged homes for less than their mortgages and also need enough left over after paying off their mortgage to have a down payment for their next home. And, mortgages are in nominal dollars, not a percentage of the home price. Leverage makes a small decrease in home values disproportionately erode the seller's equity, and most younger home owners have lots of mortgage debt. 

Secondly, sellers are human and psychologically anchor on the price that they bought their home for. Selling at a loss feels like losing, and nobody wants to voluntarily be a loser.

If interest rates had increased more gradually, the fall in affordability caused by higher interest rates would have been more modest giving the housing market time to adjust, and allowing nominal housing prices to hold steady, while allowing inflation adjusted housing prices to fall.

But the economic models that decision makers like the Fed use to set interest rate policies give little or no weight to how fast interest rates change when they estimate the effect that this will have on the economy, because economic models are heavily influenced by equilibrium models even though they acknowledge that the economy is dynamic to a limited, but insufficient, extent.

In short, the main reason that private equity is playing a bigger role in the housing market is that the Fed has flawed economic models and isn't sensitive to the needs of younger middle class people in the housing market. Interest rates were too low in an objective sense. But increasing them so quickly did as much harm as it did good.

If private equity hadn't done it, smaller individual landlords would have, albeit, somewhat less rapidly and in smaller chunks per neighborhood spread out over many landlords in more neighborhoods. Private equity isn't new. It's been around for several decades as an important economic force. It's been around in the apartment market for almost as long. But, the reason we've seen the shift from smaller landlords to private equity is that the Fed created a huge imbalance in the single family home market, and private equity was able to respond more quickly to this sudden change (that created a sudden demand for rental housing which occupants couldn't afford to buy due to higher interest rates) than smaller landlords were.

Winners and Losers

Who is winning and losing in the post-Trump 2.0 economy?

Winning

New York City (tech)

San Francisco (finance and tech)

San Jose (tech)

Losing

Rural America (agriculture)

College towns (higher education)

Manufacturing towns in the South (trade hits to manufacturing)

Las Vegas (tourism)

Washington D.C. (federal government employment)

Disaster hit areas including parts of Florida and Appalachia

Empirical Tests Of Economic Theories

Experience tells us which economic theories are right and which are not, often with unexpected results.

* In theory, a higher minimum wage should greatly increase unemployment. In reality, the effect is almost immeasurable at U.S. levels.

* The evidence from Brexit and from Trump 2.0 and the Smoot-Hawley tariffs demonstrate that globalism is very important for a healthy economy and that departing from free trade does great harm, as does discouraging immigration.

* While a shallow microeconomic analysis would suggest that immigration hurts the job market for native born Americans, experience shows that immigration has the opposite effect, improve the job market and prosperity.

* The evidence from Eastern Europe in the post-Cold War era illustrates that securities laws to reduce the likelihood of things like Ponzi schemes are actually very important even when other protections of property laws and contract laws are in place.

* Economic development studies tend to show that economic development is quite localized and culture driven, rather than being primarily driven by national laws, although national laws do matter quite a bit as shown by comparing the economies of communities on either side of a national boundary where the laws are quite different.

* Notably, lots of the litmus tests for economic development: municipal water quality, roads in good repair, regular trash collection, effective legal enforcement of debts, unambiguous real estate ownership, good quality K-12 education, and the availability of trauma center hospitals, are mostly provided at the local government level, rather than at the regional or national level.

* During the Financial Crisis, two different methods of managing the risk of high loan to value residential loans were compared which have very different regulatory regimes. 

One approach was to make a conventional mortgage at 80% loan to value, and then to have a second mortgage for the next 10-15% of loan to value that was subordinate to the conventional mortgage. This is subject to securities regulation of mortgage backed securities, with risks assessment mostly delegated to thinly regulated and thinly capitalized bond rating agencies (which are basically just credit reporting agencies for the bond market).

The other approach was to issue a single mortgage for the entire loan and to secure mortgage insurance, paid for by the borrower to protect the lender, which covered the lenders' losses if the value of a foreclosed home resulted in a deficiency judgment. This was subject to state insurance regulation.

In the financial crisis, insurance regulation was decisively proven to be superior, with no mortgage insurance firms going out of business, while essentially all of the subprime lenders, mortgage backed securities firms that packaged second mortgages for investors, and investment banks that organized this activity either ceased business entirely, underwent bankruptcy reorganization, or were saved only by bailouts with purchases of the failed firms by healthy large financial companies.

Structural Problems With The Living Constitution

As interpreted the U.S. Constitution has various problems:

* The insurrection clause was gutted by making it not self-executing.

* Presidential immunity from crimes was a horrible mistake.

* No one has standing to pursue too many violations of the law, such as the emoluments clause, the bar on increasing Congressional compensation, some kinds of religious establishment (e.g. not enforcement the ban on political action by religious groups).

* The pardon power is too easily abused.

* Limiting campaign finance by corporations in a partisan neutral way is prohibited (although Citizens United is less of a problem than it is given credit for being IMHO). 

* Term limits for Congress would be good.

* The filibusters has done more harm than good.

* Gerrymandering is an intractable problem and the first past the post system also leads to spoiler effects and a two party system instead of a multiparty system.

* Grounds for impeachment are too feeble and impeachment is too hard to accomplish for genuine crimes.

* The veto power is too strong, undermining Congress.

* The electoral college has proven to be a bad idea.

* The Senate is too distorting.

* The Second Amendment is a bad idea.

* Treaties are too often found to be not self-executing.

* Treaties are not subordinate to domestic laws.

* Given Congress control over election disputes in their own houses was a bad idea. Their roster should be out of their control.

* The unitary executive theory is incredibly harmful and should be actively overruled. The ban on legislative vetos is less of a big deal but also deeply problematic.

* The 25th Amendment on Presidential disability was a good idea, but was executed poorly.

* It should not be possible to be President as your first political position. Prior statewide office, a cabinet post, a top generalship, or service in Congress should be required first.

* The franchise should be affirmatively defined.

Brexit Did A Lot Of Economic Harm

I've said it before, but it remains true that while there is not one right answer for the policies that democracies should adopt, there are many objectively wrong decisions that democracies can make.

Brexit harmed the British economy more than anticipated. Trade barriers hurt the countries erecting them.

This paper examines the impact of the UK’s decision to leave the European Union (Brexit) in 2016. Using almost a decade of data since the referendum, we combine simulations based on macro data with estimates derived from micro data collected through our Decision Maker Panel survey. These estimates suggest that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time. We estimate that investment was reduced by between 12% and 18%, employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%. These large negative impacts reflect a combination of elevated uncertainty, reduced demand, diverted management time, and increased misallocation of resources from a protracted Brexit process. 

Comparing these with contemporary forecasts – providing a rare macro example to complement the burgeoning micro-literature of social science predictions – shows that these forecasts were accurate over a 5-year horizon, but they underestimated the impact over a decade.

From this NBER paper.

Violent Crime Down In Mexico

Ms Sheinbaum’s government says Mexico’s murder rate has come down by 32% in the year since she took office. Analysis by The Economist confirms that the rate has fallen, though by a significantly smaller margin, 14%.

Counting homicides alone misses an important part of the picture, namely the thousands of people who disappear in Mexico every year, many of whom are killed and buried in unmarked graves. A broader view of deadly crime that includes manslaughter, femicide and two-thirds of disappearances (the data for disappearances is imperfect), shows a more modest decline of 6%.

Still, Mexico is on track for about 24,300 murders this year, horribly high, but well below the recent annual average of slightly over 30,000. Ms Sheinbaum is the first Mexican leader in years to push violent crime in the right direction.

From The Economist.

The current Prime Minster of Mexico appears to be quite effective. Reducing violent crime is always a good thing.

Basic Skills In Decline Among Freshman At College

The UC San Diego Senate Report on Admissions documents a sharp decline in students’ math and reading skills . . . 

At our campus, the picture is truly troubling. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of freshmen whose math placement exam results indicate they do not meet middle school standards grew nearly thirtyfold, despite almost all of these students having taken beyond the minimum UCOP required math curriculum, and many with high grades. In the 2025 incoming class, this group constitutes roughly one-eighth of our entire entering cohort. 

A similarly large share of students must take additional writing courses to reach the level expected of high school graduates, though this is a figure that has not varied much over the same time span.

Moreover, weaknesses in math and language tend to be more related in recent years. In 2024, two out of five students with severe deficiencies in math also required remedial writing instruction. Conversely, one in four students with inadequate writing skills also needed additional math preparation. . . .

The math department created a remedial course, only to be so stunned by how little the students knew that the class had to be redesigned to cover material normally taught in grades 1 through 8. . . .

The report attributes the decline to several factors: the pandemic, the elimination of standardized testing—which has forced UCSD to rely on increasingly inflated and therefore useless high school grades—and political pressure from state lawmakers to admit more “low-income students and students from underrepresented minority groups.”

…This situation goes to the heart of the present conundrum: in order to holistically admit a diverse and representative class, we need to admit students who may be at a higher risk of not succeeding (e.g. with lower retention rates, higher DFW rates, and longer time-to-degree).

From Marginal Revolution. 

The deemphasis on standardized tests in admissions, which provide a means to test these skills in a way not influenced by high school specific grade inflation is probably the primary factor.

Admitting students who aren't academically prepared to college isn't doing them any favors.

Musings On NYC And More

My wife and son ran the NYC marathon together (they were just one minute short of getting a mention in the New York Times for it).

It wasn't my first trip to NYC, but each visit stirs up no impressions.

It is amazing how much a tiny hotel room (there was barely room to walk - the bed was almost wall to wall), a suitcase full of clothes, and a credit card with enough money on it to buy food and subway fares makes. We had a kitchenette, so we could have lived there, and led a reasonably dignified life.

While some things in NYC are modern and cutting edge, it is also to a significant extent, an enclave of the past. The engineering behind the subway train operations is ancient, even though the fare system is very modern. The operations of the NYSE are at their core, ancient. Its residential co-ops are historical relicts from the pre-condo era. Its trash collection systems lack alleys or even dumpsters. Its street system doesn't handle car and truck travel well at all, although its bike lanes are modern and work rather well. It has been highly resistant to big grocery store chains found everywhere else. Its rent control system is its own thing found in only a couple of other places in the nation. It is home to the UN which, alas, isn't a modern, functional institution. It tries, but isn't very disability friendly.

We are in the longest government shutdown of all time in U.S. history. The second longest was also under Trump. There is still no end in sight.

The Dodgers won the World Series.

Two words that would seem useful:

* Dila = daughter-in-law (adjacent)

* Sila = son-in-law (adjacent)

These word would cover both engaged people and people who are in a serious long term relationship with a son or daughter to the point where they have met the family and might very well be more or less permanent family members. The need for a compact word to describe someone who has this relationship to you is real.

I haven't seen a full set of 2025 election results, but generally, Democrats did well.

The Shutdown Continues

The federal government shutdown is on day 26, the second longest of all time, and the record holder for person-days of federal employee furloughs. Trump has accounted for a majority of all days that the government has been shut down for all time.

Trump has literally demolished the East Wing of the White House to put up a ballroom (all contrary to federal law regarding how that is done).

SNAP, a.k.a. food stamps, will be shut off on November 1, 2025, out of Trump's spite because there are contingency funds in place to keep it going longer.

Trump continues to deny everyone federal disaster aid.

Trump continues to illegally murder people in boats in the Caribbean, ostensibly because they are dealing drugs, but that isn't grounds for summary execution, the basis for doing so hasn't been substantiated, and Congress hasn't authorized it.

ICE is ignoring the law and court orders in Chicago. On the bright side, someone stole two National Guard tanks in Memphis.

The No Kings Protest on October 18, 2025 extended to large attendances even in deeply red places. About 8.1 million people nationwide participated.

In a political stunt to celebrate the Marine Corps. birthday, they fired artillery rounds over Interstate Highway I-5, where some rounds exploded prematurely over the highway.

Charlie Kirk's wife appears to be deeply connected to kidnappings of Romanian children for adoptions when she was 17 years old in an activity that Trump apparently played a part in funding.

The National Young Republicans Group's racist, pro-Nazi, pro-rape group chat was exposed. The group also stiffed venues where it held events of tens of thousands of dollars more than once.

More than a third of ICE applicants can't pass basic physical fitness tests. About half of them can't pass a basic, open book test, on the part of immigration law that they need to know and the 4th Amendment.

The Toronto Blue Jays are in the World Series.

Trump increased tariffs on Canadian imports by 10% because he didn't like a truthful TV ad playing recordings of Ronald Reagan explaining how bad tariffs are.

Trump is ramping up dubious criminal prosecutions of his political opponents using illegally appointed attorneys in the Justice Department's U.S. attorneys' office.

Trump appears to have received more than a billion dollars of illegal personal gain from his office already since January 20 when he was sworn in.

Trump illegally tried to conduct layoffs during the government shutdown, which a judge halted.

Republicans are refusing to swear in a newly elected Democrat to the house from Arizona because they don't want to release the Epstein files and don't care about the continuing government shutdown.

All of this just scratches the surface of the horrible news that rains down every day.

Extinction Burst!

A video at this link explains the concept of an "Extinction Burst". People go into a rage when something that they used to be rewarded for isn't working any more, until they give up.

This is the most hopeful thing that I've seen for ages.

Could The Military Remove Trump In A Coup?

The number one trigger for military coups is the military not getting paid, which the U.S. is doing right now. And, when Trump has called up the national guard, he has done so for time periods one day short of what is necessary for them to receive full compensation for being called up. VA spending has also been slashed.

Corruption and incompetence are also major factors. But you have to go back to Andrew Jackson to find a President who rivals Trump 2.0 in those dimensions. It doesn't inspire confidence to talk about conflicts between Albania and Azerbaijan, or a European country and Cambodia. His dementia is apparent and was on full display at his unprecedented speech to all generals and admirals.

Humiliation and disrespect for the military can be factors, and Trump has shown both towards soldiers, and in particular, POWs and military casualties. The meeting of all generals and admirals where Trump, a repeat draft dodger, and a Fox News commentator, calling them out for being fat and woke, didn't help.

The meeting, met by stony eyed silence from the assembled military brass to the last man, also potentially broke down the single biggest barrier to a military coup in the U.S., which is the collective action problem of figuring out which officers are on your side. This is why numerically smaller militaries are much more likely to carry out coups. But by showing unanimity of distaste for Trump, he may have inadvertently overcome some of that barrier.

There are other signs that the military has distaste for Trump. For his birthday Army parade in D.C., he wanted a communist style show of force and got a boring historical display. Morale was brought very low when the National Guard gardened and cleared trash when occupying D.C. The National Guard has not been effective in L.A. or Chicago or Portland or Memphis at reducing crime and multiple judges have held that Trump is illegally deploying the military. But when rule of law is the only thing keeping the military subordinate to the civilian government of the U.S., Trump's flouting of the rule of law undermines that singular force. The military didn't get involved in January 6 and like most law enforcement is probably dismayed by the January 6 pardons. Trump's rogue attacks on "drug dealing" boats in international waters in the Caribbean without legal authority is another example.

The military has spent a lifetime opposing enemies like Russia, and supporting traditional allies, but Trump has turned that on his head, making war with NATO, coddling Russia, envying North Korea, threatening Greenland, Canada, and Panama.

The idea that an armed public discourages tyranny behind the Second Amendment is empirically not true historically, and obviously not true now. Gun owners in the U.S. today, not only aren't resisting tyranny, they're the ones welcoming it.

Is a coup likely? Probably not. But it is more likely now than at any other point in U.S. history.

Matter Is Binary

 

For those of you who are literal minded, this is a metaphor.

Catholic Opposition To Trump 2.0

 

In and of itself, this is a relatively minor incident in the overall sweep of Trump 2.0 politics. But Catholics are the largest voting block in the U.S. and if the Catholic church is seen as in opposition to the Trump administration, the electoral impact could be great.

The Shutdown

We are at 14 days of the shutdown (the third time that the government has shut down while Trump was President, including the longest shutdown ever). On Friday, it will surpass the 2013 shutdown during the Obama administration. A week from tomorrow, it will surpass the 1995 shutdown from the Clinton Administration. And, there is no end in sight.

The Democrats are holding out of restoring Medicaid cuts and Affordable Care Act tax subsidy cuts (not healthcare for illegal immigrants or rampant trans surgery as false GOP talking points suggest), which were including the the Trump budget to pay for tax cuts for the rich.

The fact that the Republicans haven't gone nuclear to end the shutdown shows that GOP support for those cuts in the Senate is tepid.

The foreseeable Affordable Care Act tax subsidy cuts were an important reason that I decided that I needed to seek employment with an employer who provided a group healthcare plan, rather than continuing to be self-employed.

Frogs For The Win

 

Mourning Lost Blogs

The demise of the TypePad blog hosting site has obliterated many of the blogs in my sidebar.

An Alternative History Story Idea

 This could have been pretty cool.

Around the turn of the 20th century, inexpensive meat, a product of American prosperity that had long been available to even the poorest immigrants, was suddenly in short supply. Louisiana Representative Robert F. Broussard thought he had a solution: embrace hippopotamus ranching. He even outlined the details in his “American Hippo Bill.” 

What did his plan have to do with the water hyacinth and what became of the proposed solution?

Full story at the Smithsonian Magazine.

The Tide Is Turning In Ukraine's Favor

The Ukraine War seems to have reached a turning point. Ukrainian attacks on the Russian oil and gas infrastructure, and on coal and natural gas fired electrical power plants, often deep inside Russia, are having an impact that ordinary Russian citizens can no longer ignore. And, when Russia can not longer supply oil and gas to Western Europe, European resolve to take a firm stand against Russia strengthens.

In a few cases, strikes deep in Russia have been carried out by Ukrainian special forces acting in concert with domestic minority nationalist groups, raising the specter of a Russian civil war, or at least a renewed insurgency at a time when it's military is stretched thin to beyond a breaking point.

Russia is almost completely out of heavy armored vehicles and has dramatically reduced artillery resources. Russia is still suffering about 30,000 casualties a month, a rate at which it can just barely replace the soldiers it's losing with green conscripts.

Russia's provocation of NATO countries from Poland to Hungary to Denmark is driving these countries in Europe to vigorously prepare for war and take more aggressive measures against it.

Russia is deploying huge numbers of drones, missiles, and glide bombs to Ukraine at unsustainable levels, but many of these are intercepted before they can do harm, and those that done usually result in modest Ukrainian civilian casualties that incited outrage, but have little military effect and have not broken Ukraine's spirit. And, those attacks are unsustainable because Russia's capacity to procure new drones and missiles, and the replace its military equipment losses is far lower than that of Ukraine and its Western allies.

And, while Trump's America has been a feckless ally to Ukraine, it also hasn't turned out to be the solid supporter of Russia that Putin had hoped to receive.

It isn't over, but the tide has turned definitively in favor of Ukraine.

Not All Hope Is Lost (Yet)!

Keep fighting!

Every week (there are rare days of respite) there is news so bad that I vacillate between outrage and despair over the future of our country.

On the other hand, while we have plummeted into a less free semi-democracy, and plenty of irrevocable damage has been done, we aren't yet beyond a point of no return.

The government shutdown demonstrates that Congress can do something. And, with the "nuclear option" well-established in the U.S. Senate now, the fact that the filibuster hasn't be abrogated to end the shutdown means that there is at least some tacit dissatisfaction with the administration among some Republicans in Congress, even if they are too cowardly to translate that into a roll call vote against the President.

While SCOTUS has frequently shut down lower court checks on Trump's assault on the rule of law, the lower federal courts and litigation of blue states has slowed the process down and put serious friction in the way of his bid to become a dictator.

Attempted military occupations of L.A., D.C., Chicago, and Portland (OR), have had far less shock and awe that Trump hoped. His birthday parade flopped and his rally of generals and admirals likewise demonstrated that while the military may reluctantly obey their commander in chief, that he does not have firm control of, or the loyal and enthusiastic support of, the military.

Trump's aggressive secret police style ICE tactics have undermined public backing for his immigration policies, which were a key factor in getting him and the Republicans in Congress who only have a razor thin majority as it is in the House and in the Senate, elected.

Now that the rich have gotten their tax breaks, they don't need him nearly so badly any more, and are shifting to worrying about whether his bad economic policies will deny them any profits to evade taxes on at all.

We are thirteen months away from the midterm elections, at a time when Trump's popularity has plummeted to record lows and where Democrats are vastly over performing in special vacancy elections. GOP gerrymanders are getting a response from Blue state counter-gerrymanders. And, the cost the GOP risks when it grasps for more Republican districts is that those districts may become less safe and flip as public opinion turns against Trump (primarily among disappointed Republicans and independents who voted for Trump).

It is dim, but there is still some light at the end of the tunnel.

A Fire ICE Act

ICE is rotten to the core. Basically everyone who works for it is a corrupt, racist, bad cop, with no regard for the rule of law who lacks moral character.

Democrats in Congress should sponsor the Fire ICE Act. This would:

1. Immediately terminate the employment of every single employee and contractor working for ICE.

2. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from working for any federal government agency or any federal government contractor in any capacity, even as an unpaid volunteer or as prison labor.

3. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from receiving security clearances.

4. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from receiving federal financial aid for higher education.

5. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from eligibility for SBA loans.

6. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from serving as a sponsor for any immigrant.

7. Retroactively downgrade every former ICE employee who is a military veteran to dishonorably discharged status.

8. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from receiving federal farm aid.

9. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from receiving federal housing or disaster assistance, including FHA and VA loans.

10. Revoke all non-vested employee benefits of the ICE employee from any federal government employment.

11. Extend the statute of limitations for civil liability and criminal liability committed in connection with service as an ICE agent to 50 years.

12. Create a private cause of action, including minimum statutory damages of $50,000 and attorneys' fees, for any violation of federal law committed by an ICE agent while employed by ICE or a contractor for ICE. This would include any wrongful deportation and any detention made without probable cause. And, allow any vested retirement funds or homestead property to be used to satisfy any such judgment even if it would otherwise have been exempt from creditors. Make any such debts non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.

13. Bar all companies that provided deportation transportation services to ICE from all future government  contracts.

14. Make all former ICE employees ineligible to serve on the board of any 501(c)(3) organization, or as an officer or paid employee of any such organization.

15. Revoke the visas of any ICE employee who is not a U.S. citizen.

16. Prohibit former ICE agents from owning or possessing firearms.

17. Bar former ICE officers from making new applications for federal disability benefits.

18. Prohibit federal civilian employees and federal government contractors hired in any law enforcement role from wearing masks, or enforcing the law in unmarked cars, subject to very narrow exceptions that are heavily reported upon, required all sorts of red tape, and are limited to circumstances that never include immigration enforcement.

19. Create a list of places like hospitals, court houses, churches, and immigration offices, where immigration enforcement is not allowed.

20. Allow any state or city to prohibit federal immigration enforcement from taking place in their jurisdiction, subject to very narrow exceptions for people convicted of serious felonies within the last five years.

21. End all grounds for denaturalization and punish people who secured U.S. citizenship by fraud with criminal penalties that do not revoke their U.S. citizenship.

22. Place former ICE agents at the bottom of the priority list to receive organ transplants, at at the end of the line for any Medicaid, Medicare, or VA medical benefit for which there is a waiting list.

23. Prohibit former ICE agents from receiving any honor or recognition from the federal government and revoke any honor or recognition that the former ICE agent was previously awarded by any federal government entity, military or civilian.

24. Deny former ICE agents any benefit of U.S. international child custody treaties.

25. Prohibit former ICE agents from notarizing any document used in the federal courts or submitted to a federal government agency.

26. Make former ICE agents ineligible for all federal licenses, including but not limited to, patent examiners, SEC licenses, BLM grazing permits, FCC licenses, interpreter qualifications, pilot's licenses, federal firearms dealer's licenses, and federal fishing or hunting licenses.

27. Prohibit former ICE agents from being buried in military cemeteries.

28. Prohibit former ICE agents from being granted patent or trademark applications.

29. Prohibit former ICE agents from serving as officers of any federally recognized employee unions.

30. Prohibit former ICE agents from attending any federal educational institutions.

31. Prohibit former ICE agents from making mining claims.

32. Impose a 50% excise tax on any vested, deferred compensation payable to former ICE agents on top of any other applicable taxes.

33. Enact a rebuttable presumption in any federal discrimination case that a former ICE agent intended to engage in illegal discrimination.

34. Prohibit former ICE agents from serving a registered lobbyists.

35. Require former ICE agents to disclose their employment with ICE to all future employers, in any commercial contract, in any campaign for public office, and prior to being issued a marriage license.

36. Make status as a former ICE agent an aggravating factor under the federal sentencing guidelines.

37. Prohibit former ICE agents from entering federal parks and federal landmarks.

38. Prohibit former ICE agents from serving as officers or directors of any publicly held company.

39. Prohibit former ICE agents from purchasing cyptocurrencies or selling crypocurrencies that were not owned prior to the enactment of the law.

40. Prohibit former ICE agents from obtaining any federal loan or bailout of any kind.

41. Disclose all internal ICE records and a list of all former ICE agents to the public on a publicly available database that disclosed all internal affairs information, all service information, and all contract information of former agents.

42. Immediately release everyone in ICE detention who isn't an undocumented immigrant convicted of a crime within the last five years that is a felony or worse. Transfer the rest to the federal Department of Corrections.

43. Ban all future private prison contracts of any kind.

44. Deny all de minimis tariff exemptions for former ICE agents.

45. Formally authorize private sector employers and state and local government employers to discriminate against former ICE agents.

46. Give cases in which former ICE agents are plaintiffs, the lowest scheduling priority in federal court.

47. Require disclosure of former ICE agent status in every lawsuit filed by a former ICE agent, and as part of the witness testimony of every former ICE agent in any federal court or federal administrative agency proceeding.

48. Prohibit former ICE agents from participating in clinical trials for new drugs and medical devices.

49. Prohibit former ICE agents from receiving any new federal tax credits.

50. Prohibit former ICE agents from serving as employees or unpaid volunteers in federal funded schools at any level.

If this bill is introduced as a bill in Congress, and secured enough co-sponsors in the House and Senate to have some credible chance of being seriously considered, it doesn't even matter if it passes. 

It will still powerfully discourage people considering employment with ICE from doing so. Every if some provisions are subsequently invalidated by the courts and are severed from the larger bill, the uncertainty would seriously chill anyway from applying to work for it.

Autism May Be Related To Human Level Intelligence

Autism may be related to the human specific evolution of higher intelligence: 

Researchers discovered that autism’s prevalence may be linked to human brain evolution. Specific neurons in the outer brain evolved rapidly, and autism-linked genes changed under natural selection. These shifts may have slowed brain development in children while boosting language and cognition. The findings suggest autism is part of the trade-off that made humans so cognitively advanced.