MARKING OFF.

It has long been my custom to post a Festive Season video, highlighting progress on the permanent model railroad and featuring vintage tinplate trains under the Christmas tree in the traditional fashion, to a musical accompaniment.  Here is this year's video.

Thank you for looking in. I'm going to take a couple of weeks away from the social media frenzy.  Catch you next year.

LET'S GET THE SERVICE RIGHT.

Disaffected ferroequinologist Randal O'Toole directs his scorn at the proposed Front Range Passenger Rail service, at this time intended to link Cheyenne, Denver, and Pueblo by way of several college towns.

The Denver Post, which was a major cheerleader for Denver’s $4.9 billion FasTracks plan until it became the $7.9 billion FasTracks plan, by which time it was too late, is now a major cheerleader for the Front Range passenger train plan. It claims that an Amtrak train between Chicago and Milwaukee “shows what it could be.” Yes, because Fort Collins (population: 170,000) and Pueblo (population: 112,000) are just like Milwaukee (population: 577,000), and Denver (population: 715,000) is just like Chicago (population: 2.75 million).

Mr O'Toole did not provide a link to that Post article. Here it is.  The challenge is coming up with the right kind of project and the proper use of the freight tracks the trains will use.

The possibility of a similar arrangement between Colorado and Amtrak means that for all the costs and hurdles facing the creation of a Front Range rail line — and there are many — it’s closer to reality than it might appear.

For one thing, a heavily favored 191-mile corridor between Pueblo and Fort Collins mostly would follow existing freight-rail tracks. Even with modifications needed to support passenger trains, starting up a line likely would cost a fraction of the eye-popping $10.7 billion price tag estimated by a state report earlier this year.

That estimate was for a full build-out of dedicated double-track for the entire length — a long-term, gold-standard scenario that by 2045 would allow for two dozen roundtrips each weekday serving an estimated 6,900 riders.

Building the project by increments makes sense. Amtrak's Hiawatha service started with three trips each way, and a full day in Milwaukee was not possible.  It had a two-track railroad in pretty good shape to start with, and that railroad got some improvements for faster intermodal trains.  The augmented service of today, with the Milwaukee airport stop, came later.

When Lily Trienens boarded a train in downtown Milwaukee that would take her more than 70 miles to visit family in the north Chicago suburbs, she got a glimpse of the possible future of rail travel back home in Colorado.

The 35-year-old Lyons resident had flown to Wisconsin’s most populous city for a quick business trip. Looking for an easy option to make the trek south, she found it for $24 — an hourlong journey on Amtrak’s Hiawatha train that deposited her at a station in Glenview, Illinois, close enough to be picked up.

“It’s worked out perfectly,” she said on a recent Thursday morning as the crop fields and barns outside her window in Wisconsin and northern Illinois gave way to Chicago’s sprawling suburban landscape. “It’s been so convenient. It’s been really easy. It’s affordable. It’s fast.”

In the early days of Hiawathas calling at the airport, that service came as a pleasant surprise to northern Illinois residents whose planes sometimes had to divert to Milwaukee.  Denver Post readers get a favorable review of the existing service.

As Colorado looks elsewhere for inspiration, the 86-mile Hiawatha line stands out as a well-established yardstick.

It costs $25 for the full trip from downtown Milwaukee’s Intermodal Station to Union Station in Chicago, a journey that includes three brief stops in between and takes just under 90 minutes — often faster than driving. Wireless internet is available and electrical outlets are at each seat. In Wisconsin, Amtrak Thruway-branded buses have connected several other cities to the Milwaukee station for two years.

The Hiawatha can reach speeds up to 79 mph in some sections, helping it to grow into Amtrak’s highest-ridership Midwest train prior to the pandemic, carrying nearly 880,000 riders in 2019. Its recent on-time rating was 95%, according to Amtrak data.

Ridership has been recovering gradually since pandemic service cuts were reversed in May, though the early August trains still included three passenger cars instead of the usual six.

As a train pulled out of Union Station just after 5 p.m. on a recent weekday, workers who commute from Wisconsin to downtown Chicago opened their laptops. Other riders sat with shopping bags from downtown stores at their feet.

For the first 10 minutes, the three-year-old Siemens locomotive pulled three older Amtrak coach cars slowly past warehouses and redeveloping westside neighborhoods. Then it accelerated, a change noticed by a 5-year-old boy with curly blond hair as he looked out the window.

“The train’s going fast!” he said.

“We’re getting up to speed,” replied his mother, Amy Bell-Ferries.

Yes, the former Milwaukee Road trackage is posted for 79 mph north of Pacific Junction, but that's not what "really starting to move" used to mean. Never mind that: you build the service for the infrastructure you have, provide the extra frequencies, and only then start thinking about free rein to 125.  Get too eager to spend Federal money to build capacity for bullet trains in a relatively sparsely settled region, and you run into trouble.  Think about connecting Denver to the Southwest Chief route at Trindad, and then start thinking about something resembling a corridor service toward Lincoln and Omaha or extending toward Texas.  Otherwise you well might be creating a boondoggle.  Note in that High Speed Rail post discussing connectivity in the Front Range the example they cited.  "Planners should look at projects like Brightline Florida, which launched with hourly service. Frequent departures are important to making sure these projects are truly useful to passengers."  The service did not start with hourly trains, although as rider interest increased, so did frequencies.  In addition, Brightline's trains are diesel formations capable of free rein to 125 with proper signalling and grade crossing protection, meaning they don't require the really expensive tracks.

PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN.

Buzz Feed conducts a survey.  People Are Sharing The Things The U.S. Has That Europe Lacks.

It's likely that the metrofexual aesthetes (see the first comment) will cringe at some of the entries, e.g. college sports, large meal portions, and large houses, but it's hard not to argue with root beer, complimentary ice water at eateries, and ethnic foods of all nationalities done well.

IV. ADVENT.

We'll close with a secular symbol of a fallen world.

The festive season of 2019-2020 turned out to be the final season for the Holiday Lights Train in Waterman.  The Illinois corona tyrants placed limitations on outdoor gatherings that obviated any Easter 2020 train, and by October of 2020 the railroad had been sold and I hope children of all ages somewhere in Indiana are enjoying it.

TODAY IN SEASONAL FUN.

Last year, we contemplated the ferroequinology in White Christmas, as the protagonists made their way, by rail from Florida to Vermont.

We return to the tale this year, with the nightclubbing at Novello's where the boys met the girls.  Novello's qualifies as a supper club, according to supper club maven Ron Faiola, and he also confers that status on the Carousel Club in New York City (doesn't that interfere with the change of trains in New York, as well as to the protagonists being short on funds??) and he then notes that when the guys get to their former commander's lodge in Vermont, their server delivers a relish tray.  Can't get more Wisconsin than "radishes, black and green olives, and celery," even in Vermont.  Maybe the cheddar was from Wisconsin, too.

That supper club book also clarifies something I noted in the earlier post, about Milwaukee's Frenchy's as very different from your canonical Wisconsin supper club.  "Didn't strike me as belonging to the same category as Clifford's Supper Club, still in business with the same neon sign they had when your Superintendent was in grade school, along Forest Home Avenue in Hales Corners." Shows what I know. "Clifford's Supper Club owner Clifford Schill bought Frenchy's, kept the name, but changed the concept to Dixieland."  That didn't end well.

Now I'm checking this week's television listings to see whether White Christmas will be on air somewhere.  I would like to see listings for Bells of St. Mary's and Going My Way, which used to be seasonal regulars.

ANOTHER WAY AARON RODGERS COULD OWN THE BEARS.

He's raised the argument in the sense of winning all the games.  But if the Bears stopped attempting to hold up Chicago politicians for stadium subsidies, he could have more conventional ownership rights.

The Green Bay Packers have won their last six meetings with the Chicago Bears and are looking like possible Super Bowl contenders. The Bears, meanwhile, look likely to miss the playoffs again. But that's not the biggest difference between the teams. The Bears have been threatening to move to the suburbs unless the Chicago city government pays to upgrade their stadium. The Packers, despite playing in the National Football League's smallest market, are asking their fans to fund their stadium improvements voluntarily.

That works because the Packers have an unusual ownership arrangement, dating back to the Depression and made possible in part by Bear owner George Halas, whose descendants, in the manner of the House of Hanover, have not lived up to the standards set by Papa Bear.  Ownership rights are minimal, shareholders don't vote, and there is no solicitation of proxies authorizing Aaron Rodgers, who is the employee of the shareholders, to exercise whatever discretion he sees fit as owner of the Bears.

The use of public money for stadium subsidies (for a lot of notionally private purposes, to be serious) is a misuse of taxpayer money and of taxpayers, though, and selling even for fun shares to fans, rather than putting all taxpayers on the hook, makes some sense.

The Packers have an exemption: The team has been owned by stockholders since 1923, when it sold shares of the organization to keep the team afloat and to keep it in Green Bay. To prevent owners from selling the team to move it to a larger market, these shares could only be sold back to the team at a fraction of the price.

The Packers held similar stock sales in 1935 and 1950 to financially stabilize the team, and in 1997 and 2011 to fund additions and redevelopment to their stadium. Another stock sale is ongoing now. The shares provide minimal benefits: an ownership certificate, an invite to the annual owners meeting, and trivial voting rights on the future of the franchise. Even so, the sales have been enormously popular, with the offerings raising $24 million in 1997, $64 million in 2011, and a projected $90 million this time around.

It's common for sports teams' billionaire owners to push cities into bidding wars for new taxpayer-funded stadiums. The Bears' current threats are hardly the only example. The Raiders recently moved from Oakland to Las Vegas, where Clark County shelled out more than $645 million in bonds to fund a stadium.

Clark County got hosed. As did the Twin Cities, although they have bigger problems than the money they're losing on that pathetic purple gang.

Thus, although Reason's Eric Peterson sees some humor in the Bears taking an idea from "the hated Packers," rather than become another corporate welfare drain for the Combine, it might be balance returning to the universe, with George Halas's suggestion coming home.

GETTING THE BIDDING RIGHT.

It's been nearly two years since a Saturday bridge column, have I really been that preoccupied with the world gone wrong?  In that column, though, I had yet another gripe about the simulation being programmed to do some odd things in bidding.  That 18 January column depicted a disastrous down three on a grand slam contract, and the 4 January column depicted more artificial intelligence quirks, with the bot chickening out on a relatively mundane jump raise.

Sometimes, though, man and machine get it together.  In the following diagram, the East bot deals.

East passes, I open 2♣, West passes, North bot has the expected 2♦, thereafter neither East nor West bids. I show my long suit with 2♥ and North raises to 2♠.  I continue with 2NT and the bot offers 3♣.  Here's where it would be useful to have a live partner who understands that my 4NT is a call for aces.  (There are several different interpretations of 4NT in play, and several different methods of responding.)  North, with no special Cliff Notes interpretation of what's next. continues 5♠ and I offer 5NT.  North then offers 6♦, showing a second suit, I offer 6♥ and the bot raises to 7♠.  That would be feasible with these cards, but I'm still fearful that in a slam bid on a suit contract, the defender will open with a long suit, the other defender will be void in that suit, and a low trump messes up the contract.  Thus we play for Seven No Trump.

The opening lead is the ♦3.  (Why not the ♣3?  The artificial intelligence might change the way people play the game, too.)  Take stock: four Spade winners in hand, and an extra winner on the board.  Two Heart winners in hand, save one of those losers for a Spade lead off the board.  Two Diamond winners in hand, and two more on the board, as well as two Club winners in hand, and an extra one on the board.  That's ten winners in hand and four extra winners on the board, more than enough to account for those three Heart losers.  Just save enough entries.  Win the opening lead with the ♦K (short side first), cash the ♥ King and ♥ Ace, discarding a low ♣ and a low  ♠, then cash the ♣ Ace and ♣ Queen, finally leading the ♦4 to the board, using the two additional Diamonds and the ♣ King to wash out the low Hearts, and we're done.

Something else Bridge Base has done recently is revised their scoring system.  That deal, plus the three other hands in it, scored as 21st best in their history.  That's encouraging when more recently the system is telling me some fifty thousand people have handled the deal better.

I DON'T CARE WHO GETS THE CREDIT.

What did I tell you in 2005? "Huh? I'll never lack for work explaining the backward-bending labor supply curve. The Left and the Right have been trading shots for years over whether it's unions or economic growth that contributed to rising wages, and whether the shorter workweek antedated the Fair Labor Standards Act."  Did I change my mind in 2011?  "That's long been a pet cause at Cold Spring Shops, although it's something more likely to emerge out of a multitude of small decisions long before any new Fair Labor Standards Act codifies it."

Dear reader, note a few of those small decisions.  Don't hold your breath waiting for that next labor standards act.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus, the biggest bloc of liberal lawmakers in Congress, on Dec. 7 endorsed a bold bill proposed by Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif., which would seek to implement a four-day workweek. It's a measure that has no real prospect of becoming law in the near term, but it's a compelling idea that's garnering more attention worldwide—and it could serve as a potential point of focus for the American left in the future.

Or the law could simply codify that which is already taking place in the economy.

Simultaneous boosts in well-being and productivity have also been reported at companies in the U.S., New Zealand and Japan. Businesses that have had success with the model have reported using strategies to streamline the work day by doing things like reducing meetings and blocking out time for uninterrupted work. It also seems to help that employees also are able to attend to personal business outside of work hours with the spare time, making any given day more focused.

There's a Parkinson Law at work in that reference to meetings, isn't there?  But I'm still betting on emergence.

AFTER THEY'VE TRIED EVERYTHING ELSE, THEY'LL TRY LOGIC.

In October 2020, before vaccinations, when the Wuhan coronavirus got into the White House, and gave Donald Trump a scare, I suggested, "Yes, there's a comprehensive quick-testing routine for anyone coming into the Executive Mansion, but tests can yield false positives (not infected, show a positive level of a coronavirus, you're not going in today) and false negatives (infected, but it doesn't show up on your test, in you go and it's in the wind.)"  The tests have pretty good power against both types of error, but even so, with as much testing as there is going on, there are going to be a lot of infected-but-not-detected people sharing their germs, as well as a lot of people hunkering down until their next test comes up accurate.  In my monthly assessments of the failure of the strict corona regime in Illinois, of late I've been asking, "How many people walking around with 'asymptomatic infections' ought properly be understood as 'false positives?'"

Ask, and ye shall receive.

Up to 40% of people infected with COVID-19 globally experience no symptoms early in their illness, a study published Tuesday by JAMA Network Open found.

However, these asymptomatic individuals still may be susceptible to "long-haul" COVID-19 complications, such as severe chronic fatigue, and also may pass the virus to others unknowingly, the researchers said.

In the analysis of data from 95 studies that collectively included 30 million participants, 0.25% of those tested for the virus were positive but reported no symptoms, the data showed.

That could be both bad news and good news.

The findings highlight the importance of widespread, comprehensive testing, as asymptomatic infections should also be isolated and undergo contact tracing, [study co-author Min Liu, an epidemiologist in China] said.

Research published in January also suggested that as many as 40% of COVID-19 cases are asymptomatic.

This may mean that case totals are underestimated, perhaps by as much as 80%, the January study indicates.

Is it not then time to start thinking that more people have gotten through this virus than Our Political Masters would like to admit, or that a positive test is not a death sentence, let alone a spur to worry about being chronically ill?

That is, think along the lines Kevin "Healthy Skeptic" Roche is thinking.

Despite extremely high vaccination rates across [basketball, football, and hockey] these sports, teams are having high numbers of players and staff test positive and be quarantined and are then testing other players and staff and quarantining them and so on. Almost all these “cases” are asymptomatic. I simply don’t have a big enough audience, because I explain repeatedly, and this is just common sense, that if you keep using PCR tests the way we have been, we are going to keep finding non-case “cases”. And that is what is happening in professional sports. The only solution is to stop any testing of asymptomatic persons. Period. And to take positive tests of symptomatic persons and retest them immediately, regularly culture a random sample of positives, and define an infectiousness threshold that only isolates persons who are actually likely to be infectious. And quarantining asymptomatic persons is similarly dumb policy, especially if the person is vaccinated. We have to stop this, and maybe because professional sports is big business, they can draw some attention to how stupid these policies are, as we watch fifth string quarterbacks play in meaningful games.

Put another way, quarantining "asymptomatic persons" has a lot of quarantining of what we ought understand as "healthy persons" and absent an infectiousness threshold those fifth string quarterbacks and those kids eating their school lunches outside are a lot of casualties of bad faith.  Perhaps spelling out an infectiousness threshold is something constructive that public health officials could do, rather than just chant, like a bunch of priests, maskem omnibus, injectus infinitus.  National Review's Philip Klein suggests there's a "public health mafia," but doesn't this description sound more like something a clergyman, particularly an unimaginative one, might say.  "When the policies that they propose do not produce the promised results, and as one variant after another surfaces, the response is to argue that we have shown insufficient respect to them and that we need to make amends by being more loyal to their guidance."

I must credit radio talker Ben Shapiro for that final argument, as it was he who reminded his listeners that bad stuff happened to Job despite Job following all of God's requests, and that it was the pagan priests who would scold the tribe for not rain-dancing enthusiastically enough or otherwise not doing enough to propitiate the gods.  It was never bad advice from the elders, no, never.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

These will be the final Friday short takes until after Three Kings.  I'm going to take a break from events, whether events will give me a break is another matter.

1.  It is time to abolish "emergency" corona powers.  Make it past time? "Maybe it's time to break them."

2.  May the corona tyranny go the way of the 55 mph speed limit.  "It’s time for people to ignore that false speed limit and use their own judgment in driving safely, until Covid-19 policy is back in the hands of sensible people."

3.  Never again?  "What has this freakish experiment in federalist dictatorship taught us?"

4.  Cracked icons.

5.  Do not be deceived.  "There are no 1967 Stingrays in the Build Back Better utopia. "

6.  We're noticing its absence. "A hallmark of a free society is a free press."

7.  Live not by lies.  "That is not valor, that is vandalism."  And we will be judged by the monuments we've destroyed.

8.  Why Raggedy Ann ages a year each month.  "I understand she’s just a mindless mouthpiece for a senile president, but you can tell she’s starting to crack. Piling untruth on top of untruth has to be grating."

9.  Donald Trump is his own worst enemy.  "The primary political battle is to get the right people in office, first in the midterms, then in 2024, all while continuing to push for election integrity on every front."

10.  Deny coherent beliefs, enjoy the incoherence.  " When our political class can no longer distinguish between citizen and non-citizen, male and female, a more muscular defense of truth is needed."

11.  Small children think in binaries.  A sampling:  "You don’t get to be 'against the rich' if the richest people in the country fund your party in order to preserve their government-sponsored monopolies. You are not 'a supporter of free speech' if you oppose free speech for people who disagree with you."

12.  The Dems do moan and groan well.

13.  Mrs. 'Arris goes to Paris.  "Harris’s pain has to be the feel-good story of the day."

14.  The latest in unlimited class spinnaker reaching?   "Shouldn’t we get supply chains sorted out again before returning to the era of Horatio Hornblower?"

15.  What's missing from this assessment? "America faces such possible disasters unless the political system can detach itself from the massive corruption of corporate lobbying and campaign financing by the rich."

16.  History rhymes.  "The policy responses to post-1965 mau-mau were lax policing, lavish welfare for single mothers, racial quotas and preferences. The results were sky-high crime, broken families and overmatched students on campuses."  Da capo al fine:  "All this hearkens directly back to 1979-1981, the late Carter years and the peculiar emotional combination of confusion, powerlessness and rage that seemed to emanate from the liberal ruling class when its off-the-shelf answers to pressing questions just didn’t assure anyone that they knew what they were doing."

17.  Amen.  "Please Stop With the Omicron Panic."

I WANT BETTER CHOICES.

Chicago's Sun-Times gave space to their former editor, Mark Jacob, who was also once editor of the Tribune (is there a better paradigm of the self-dealing swamp than that?) for what is best understood as an unhinged rant.  "It’s not your grandfather’s Republican Party now, unless your grandfather was a fascist. The GOP is dangerous, and we must take action to make sure our children live in a free country."  He's not advocating that people vote for Democrats, just don't vote for Republicans.  Now, if he had suggested that people reject the false binary, or contemplate libertarian or socialist or for all I know free-soil alternatives, I'd be happy to sign up.  Instead, he regurgitates six Democrat talking points.

His colleague S.E. Cupp, despite an ongoing case of Trump derangement, is enough in touch with her inner libertarian to at least engage in a bit of both-sides-ism.

Dems turned mild-mannered Mormon Mitt Romney into a woman-hating, dog-killing monster in the 2012 election, before deciding he’s actually a hero for voting to convict Donald Trump in both of his impeachment trials. Today, the party’s taking a page from Republicans and effectively redistricting opponents out of office.

The real problem is Democrats haven’t figured out the new right-wing playbook — the one the GOP’s been running for more than five years now.

Republicans and Fox News personalities start with a real problem — inflation, rising gas prices, inner-city crime, a border crisis — and exaggerate or even lie about the causes and severity, maligning entire groups of people in the process. Then Democrats respond by dismissing the whole issue or telling voters it’s not that bad. Biden’s chief of staff says inflation is a high-class problem, for example.

By inserting fake bogeymen like Big Bird, critical race theory, Dr. Seuss, and Kyle Rittenhouse into real issues that many voters do care about — like vaccine efficacy, parental rights, political correctness and crime — the right often gets the left to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Instead of telling voters the sky isn’t blue because Fox says it is, Democrats need to acknowledge the truth while exposing the lunacy of the right’s solutions.

Alas, she, too, is too inclined to go along with the false binary rather than to suggest voters contemplate additional choices.  Perhaps, as V. D. Hanson argues, Democrats are not in a position to expose "the lunacy of the right's solutions" because to many Democrats, what the "Republicans and Fox News personalities" see as problems are in fact the outcomes to be desired.

After gaining control of both houses of Congress and the presidency - with an obsequious media and the support of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, higher education, popular culture, entertainment and professional sports - the Left has managed in just 11 months to alienate a majority of voters.

The nation has been wracked by unprecedented crime and nonenforcement of the borders. Leftist district attorneys either won't indict criminals; they let them out of jails or both.

Illegal immigration and inflation are soaring. Deliberate cuts in gas and oil production helped spike fuel prices.

And enough people are seeing the consequences of the policies the Democrats have been able to implement that it's going to be hard for the party, particularly the docked tail waving the big dog, to close the sale.

Amid a series of setbacks this week, Rep. Pramila Jayapal acknowledged that progressive lawmakers are currently limited in their ability to advance a pro-working class agenda—an implicit endorsement of Sen. Joe Manchin's advice to elect more left-leaning candidates if the goal is to win transformative policies that are popular and would benefit the vast majority.

In an interview with Politico published Thursday, Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Jayapal (D-Wash.) said that her caucus has been unable to prevent right-wing Democrats from gutting the party's Build Back Better Act (BBB) because "we don't have enough control."

Not only that, part of the so-called rainbow coalition is seeing what the so-called progressives are about, and not having it.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Democrats have seriously erred by lumping Hispanics in with "people of color" and assuming they embraced the activism around racial issues that dominated so much of the political scene in 2020, particularly in the summer. This was a flawed assumption. The reality of the Hispanic population is that they are, broadly speaking, an overwhelmingly working class, economically progressive, socially moderate constituency that cares above all about jobs, the economy and health care.

That could be an opportunity for Republicans, but it's not clear whether those partisans can create a manifesto that appeals, although there are commonalities between Trumpian mercantilism and economic progressivism as Byron York understands it.

Is it too much to ask, though, for people to think beyond the two major parties?

WILL INTERCOLLEGIATE SPORTS RUN AFOUL OF THE FACULTY LOUNGE?

We've long understood that intercollegiate athletics drain resources from higher education, and at best might attract students who don't, shall we say, raise the academic profile?

It's not a surprise that the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, might get involved, but with a market test? "Should Institutions Support Sports Programs That Don’t Make Money?"  No, and follow the money going down the tubes.

Most athletic programs are not profitable. Each year the National Collegiate Athletic Association issues an annual report on the finances of intercollegiate athletics. The 2020 report found only 25 Division I programs had revenues exceeding expenses. No Division II or III program had revenues exceeding expenses. There are 1,102 Division I, II and III schools.

Athletic programs may not necessarily benefit student athletes. Recent court cases have focused on how the profitability of sports programs may violate student athletes’ rights. In June 2021, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in NCAA v. Alston et al. that the NCAA could not bar student athletes from being paid. In O’Bannon v. NCAA, the court ruled in favor of O’Bannon regarding using a student athlete’s likeness for commercial purposes. Also, instances exist where student athletes did not receive the education promised. A 2017 report about the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill detailed a decades-long practice of providing fake classes for student athletes.

"Eligibility studies" has become a thing more generally, but yes, it probably began with the so-called revenue sports. Whether professors will take enough interest in their curriculum more generally to go after special education in the service of retention more generally is best deferred to another day.

TAKING STOCK OF VOTER PARTICIPATION.

Chris "Intellectual Int-ing" Arnade reflects on how much thinking about voting the irregular voters must engage in.

How we highly education news obsessed Front row types think about politics is almost entirely divorced from how most people think about politics. Which is rarely. Most people in the Back row treat elections like most Front row people treat the NFL. As something in the background that doesn’t impact them. Sure they might tune into the Super Bowl, because everyone else does, but they don’t have a huge stake in it. Sure they might have a team they root for, but they are just watching, not playing. So why care too much.

National politics rarely touches them, not in a dramatic way at least, beyond screwing them over. Like the roads still being all messed up, factories still closing, drugs still filling their town, and taxes still going up. Doesn’t matter who is in power. Bush, Clinton, Bush again, Obama. Their life keeps going on, mostly as a series of obstacles and dramas to overcome. So both parties are equally corrupt, equally indifferent to them, and largely inter-changeable.

And thus does Donald Trump win a term as president. The front row types (was I really questioning their authority in 2018?) might have turned out enough middle-row voters to swing the presidency in 2020, and Donald Trump was his own worst enemy in the Georgia runoffs, but business as usual is not turning out so well.  First, the Front Row Kids botched the corona tyranny.

No matter how non political you are, it impacts you. The original closures, flip flopping on masking, then opening again, then closings, then openings again, then closings, then mandates, the masking, then no masking, has been confusing and frustrating as hell.

It also has felt to the Back row, immensely unfair. At almost every level, at almost every decision, the policy seems to have been designed to favor the Front row. The ones with second homes, and laptop jobs. Meanwhile, it has screwed over the Back row. Many who still had to trudge into work, while denying them their local communities, which is their primary source of meaning. As someone quipped, “Keep stuffing those crates at the Amazon warehouse, but don’t you dare BBQ with your friends.”

The Back row knows this, and it has made them angry, even if stuff has gotten better. The whole things hasn’t been the government’s finest hour. At all.

The coot ran on crushing the pandemic, not the economy. Now he owns it.

STILL NO PLANS TO RESTORE THE ROARIN' ELGIN.

Streetsblog Chicago made an observation that might in other weeks merit mention as a Friday short take. "This Tribune article about a new study that found (surprise!) Chicagoland congestion is horrible mentions traffic-inducing expressway widening as a possible 'solution,' but does not contain the words 'transit,' 'public transportation,' 'CTA,' or 'Metra.'"  That's the Tribune referring to the same study I noted here, the one in which the Sun-Times editors at least alluded to extending the rapid transit beyond Oak Park.

Tribune editorial writers offered a correction after the various non-car commuter advocates sounded off.  That didn't help.  What the Streetsblog reaction suggests, however, is that there's nothing quite like the prospect of sticking somebody else with the bill (which is what porkulus transportation bills do, bipartisan infrastructure talk or not) causes people to take leave of their senses.

There are also some good points about the need for better suburb-to-suburb transit; more frequent off-peak Metra schedules; and smoother Metra-CTA transfers. The piece also questions the wisdom of the state paying $6.5 billion to subsidize a dubious “transit hub” at the proposed One Central development.

But among the many inane statements in the new Tribune piece is the suggestion that reserving lanes on the Eisenhower for bus riders and car-poolers wouldn’t do anything to address congestion, while in reality it could help take cars off the road. (However, according to IDOT spokesperson Maria Castaneda, the department has also proposed letting solo drivers who pay a toll use these lanes, which would likely prevent there from being a major time-savings for transit riders and car-poolers.)

The Tribune article also implies that “people who want to improve things for drivers” and “activists who want to motivate people to get out of their cars and onto transit or a bike” have equally valid POVs. In reality only the latter approach is going to take us where we need to go in terms of reducing congestion, crashes, and emissions. The editorial also complains that building protected bike lanes “costs traffic lanes,” when they’re really an example of reallocating part of the roadway from a traffic-clogging mode to a space-efficient one.

The piece goes on to call for spending lots of money to build a redundant train to O’Hare for elites (didn’t Chicago already decide that was a foolish idea?), and reviving the Crosstown Expressway, a destructive highway boondoggle proposal from the 1970s. The writers also rail against, uh, articulated buses. Pretty silly stuff overall.

But the Tribune certainly didn’t corner the market on asinine statements about transportation this week. Here’s Governor J.B. Pritzker (who, in fairness, generally has a decent record in this department) boasting on Twitter that “Illinois is a leader in the fight for a green planet,” and then going on a few hours later to celebrate the expansion of a highway by 50 percent, which will induce more driving and worsen the climate situation.

High-occupancy toll provisions on carpool and bus lanes, properly priced, have the effect of reducing congestion and increasing economic welfare, although treating expressways as productive assets and applying congestion charges to traffic entering downtown have more potential.  Although a hyperloop from downtown Chicago to O'Hare looks like a massive boodoggle, a railroad improvement project in the fashion of London's Heathrow service (which uses Paddington Station and a spur off the Great Western Main Line) running from Union Station to O'Hare using a spur off the Wisconsin Central has promise.

HILLARY CLINTON COULD HAVE STAYED HOME AND BAKED COOKIES.

She'd pay more for the privilege this year.

The inflationary mechanism of more dollars chasing the same number of goods is too simple (and inconvenient) to be worthy of intellectual objectification. Unfortunately, too simple doesn’t mean wrong.

This year saw inflation escape into the common narrative. Money given to non-elites as part of COVID recovery chased the same goods—notably, labor—and, predictably, prices went up, dramatically in many instances.

Let’s start with the Christmas Cookie Inflation Index, a basket of 10 ingredients I use to bake cookies. These are the same ingredients my grandmothers used for decades baking the same cookies. In other words, this basket is comparable over time without needing substitution or hedonic adjustments, two mechanisms used to suppress inflation during the first two phases of the inflation story.

If we're doing serious work on cost of living studies, we have to pay attention to substitutions and to changes in the quality of goods.  That, dear reader, is why you cringe whenever somebody says rising prices put people in the position of having to choose between heating and eating (or whatever other choice you want to get outraged about.)  In reality people do cut back, and they replace more costly with less costly items, and they, demonstrably, are worse off even after having made substitutions.  Also in reality, when improved items become available at lower prices (there was no such thing as a personal computer in 1965 or a farm tractor in 1885) people are demonstrably even better off for having made those substitutions. Thus, it's not quite gaslighting to suggest that substitution and improvement are present.  "The way you know that substitution and hedonic adjustments are a gimmick is that they only work in one direction."

It is, however, not comforting to learn that you might have to work additional hours (or is it minutes these days?) to procure the ingredients for a party-sized batch of Christmas cookies.

The Christmas Cookie Inflation Index conveniently avoids substitution effects (don’t you dare substitute these ingredients) and also hedonic adjustments, since it is the same base ingredients year after year. This year, it is up 10.6% over last year, including some items that are up more than 20%, such as almond bark (27%), coconut flakes (23%), and molasses (20%).

It might be prudent to lay in a supply of whiskey to spike the egg nog as well, because, substitution to cheaper ingredients or not, hedonic improvements or not, the 1970s are calling and they want their stagflation back.  "Early, painful feedback on our hubris is necessary to avoid the long-term pain and suffering wrought by our folly."

AMTRAK ANNULS JOE BIDEN'S ORDERS.

Last week, Amtrak warned passengers that some trains might be annulled if employees did not comply with the latest vaccination dictates.  "The three trains so named are among the more popular on the long distance routes. Make of that what you will."

That's the usual trick of bureaucrats, you threaten to close the Washington Monument in order that the voters will put pressure on their representatives to approve the latest continuing resolution.

The voters might see those vaccination dictates as an infringement on individual rights, and this week, Amtrak plans to keep the daily trains running.  "Amtrak CEO William Flynn advised employees on Tuesday that the company will refrain from enforcing a company decree that workers who were not fully vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus by early January would be terminated."

Neither Amtrak nor the contracting carriers, which also operate freight trains, are enforcing the ukases.

Last week Amtrak President Stephen Gardner said in a congressional hearing that service reductions were likely on long-distance trains because some crew bases serving those trains had a relatively high rate of noncompliance with the vaccination mandate.

However, the passenger carrier is now pointing to court action staying enforcement of an executive order issued by President Joseph Biden ordering federal contractors to require that their employees be fully vaccinated.

In the wake of those court orders, the three Class 1 railroads that had ordered their workers to be vaccinated – Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific and BNSF – have rescinded enforcement of those rules, at least temporarily.

Press coverage of the change in corporate attitude notes that relatively few railroaders affected by the executive order have not been vaccinated. But if there are division points where relatively few railroaders have been vaccinated, enforcement of the original requirement might produce a local shutdown of the railroad.

While the railroad reports that 97.3 percent of employees have gotten at least one shot, rates are lower in smaller crew terminals, particularly along the long-distance routes. If those unvaccinated employees couldn’t work, it was likely Amtrak would not have enough people to run some services. Currently, fewer than 500 active Amtrak employees are not in compliance with the company mandate.

Whether the powers that be will attempt to reintroduce the requirement after the year-end travel peak abates remains to be seen.

IS DEMOCRACY A DRAG ON CIVILIZATION?

Yes, dear reader, that is a deliberately outrageous title, although it invokes one of my favorite maxims, "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."

That's a short maxim.  A mini-dissertation follows below the jump.

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 14,796.

The geographic area and population of Illinois are both similar to those in Sweden, and there are similarities of the Chicago and Stockholm metropolitan areas.  But  Springfield politicians are hazardous to your health.  Governor J. B. Pritzker (D-Lake Geneva) continues to micromanage and destroy local businesses.

A service called Worldometers has been keeping track of coronavirus infections and deaths, disaggregated in a number of ways.

The latest report from Sweden counts 1,229,217 infections and 15,158 deaths.

The latest report from Illinois counts 1,904,259 infections and 29,954 deaths.

I repeat a question that I'd like to hear others asking.  How many people walking around with "asymptomatic infections" ought properly be understood as "false positives?"

The indoor mask mandate and Chicago travel advisories went back into effect just before Labor Day.  Nearly a thousand Illinoisans have died with coronavirus since our last report.

Is there any evidence that the mask mandates and travel notices are doing any good?  "The state is losing an average of 38 lives to the virus each day — a rate that has more than doubled over the past month."  A chart that accompanies the article suggests there is nothing like last winter's massive increase in infections going on this fall.

As of this afternoon, the state counts over eighteen million doses of the various vaccines administered; they're still not disaggregating among finished and partial vaccinations, and the state's total count of the scary variants includes around twenty thousand of the primary strain of Delta, up from around fifteen thousand a month ago, and all of one Xi Omicron being reported. Gamma infections have joined the Bears as no longer relevant to the playoffs.

These posts will continue, less frequently, as long as update information is available.

At Veterans Day, the governor trailed by 13,981.

At Leif Erikson Day, the governor trailed by 13,101.

At the start of the professional football season, the governor trailed by 12,307.

At Roller Coaster Day, the governor trailed by 11,502.

At Bastille Day, the governor trailed by 11,187.

At Flag Day, the governor trailed by 10,944. 

Note the time series: a margin of terror that used to be growing by hundreds in a week was growing by  less, that is, until the ukases went back into effect.  The details for the past seven months are on page 2.

IRVING FELT, PROPHET.

That's Irving Felt of New York's Felt family, which is to say the local nomenklatura providing their name to the (since renamed) Felt Forum upstairs from Penn Station, who responded, as quoted in Lorraine Diehl's The Late, Great Pennsylvania Station, as saying in 1962 to architects protesting the "redevelopment" of The Pennsylvania Station, with "Fifty years from now, when it's time for our Center to be torn down, there will be a new group of architects who will protest."

It's closer to sixty years, but Ed Driscoll caught exactly that.

It happens first as tragedy, then as farce: The story of Penn Station has come full circle. After all, the 1963 demolition of the original 1910 Pennsylvania Station — an opulent Beaux-Arts building modeled on the Roman Baths of Caracalla — was considered such a grave crime against architecture that it gave rise to the historical preservation movement itself. Now that same movement is seeking to provide safe harbor for the reviled underworld expanse that still carries its name.

Among the monuments we will be judged for having destroyed must be numbered common sense, smothered under layers of process worship.  City Lab contributor Kriston Capps correctly concludes,

The idea of even thinking about saving a facility so hostile to light and joy and sensible wayfinding as Penn Station — even for the larger purpose of preserving some arguably historical structures in the neighborhood — ought to be a clear sign that something has gone off the rails. At the very least, it should be a reset for the blunt tool that historic preservation has become in the hands of artisan naysayers who want to stop the future in the name of saving the past.

I bet, though, these "artisan naysayers" are quick to declare their pronouns and otherwise participate in destroying those parts of the past that worked.

III. ADVENT.

In the church calendar, Advent serves as a way to keep the faithful patient, as the glad tidings are to come at Christmas, but it is still time to contemplate the sinful world not yet offered the gift of redemption.

In the secular calendar, though, we might as well be counting down.  That includes delivering Santa Claus to Schuster's department store, or perhaps the contemporary re-enactment thereof.  Outdoor gatherings are again safe enough that the East Troy Electric Railroad rolled out the latest parade train on 4 December.

Enjoy.

IT'S HAZARDOUS TO BE A PEDESTRIAN IN MILWAUKEE.

In the wake of the Waukesha Christmas parade massacre, we noted the hazard to pedestrians represented by reckless drivers on Milwaukee stroads.  Go off the main roads, and the dangers are still there.

Sherman Park resident Jordan Morales said that when he bought a home to accommodate his family of five children, he wanted them to feel safe enough to play in the front yard.

Just three years in, however, and he said the idea of them doing that is “terrifying.”

Near their intersection, Morales said two light poles have been knocked down and several trees hit by reckless drivers.

To protect himself, and the other neighbors on the corner of North Grant Boulevard and West Hadley Street who all have small children, Morales used signs and barriers leftover from a lead service line replacement project to construct a makeshift traffic circle. Somewhat similar to a roundabout, the circle forces drivers to slow down because they must turn slightly to pass through the intersection.

That's one small project, and it might work, although a reckless driver with a stolen car might just bust through the cones and barriers. There are plenty of reckless drivers.

Reckless driving, which has been a prominent issue in Milwaukee for several years, has seen an uptick since the pandemic. Last year represented the deadliest year for traffic fatalities in Milwaukee County in decades, with 107 people killed, and some community leaders have expressed interest in increasing enforcement and penalties for reckless driving.

Aaron Townsend, whose parents have lived in the Sherman Park neighborhood for over a decade, said it's always been a problem.

Although Townsend is careful to check several times before crossing the street with his 2-year-old black Lab, he said he's more scared to drive around his neighborhood. “People drive crazy,” he said. “People just don't have no respect for the laws anymore.”

He said drivers constantly run red lights and stop signs, and he's disappointed that police are not doing more to stop them.

“There's not enough police to police anymore,” he said. “You've got people driving with no license plates and the police don't even care.”

He's not alone in calling for more traffic enforcement in the neighborhood. Calls to "reimagine the police" come from a position of privilege.

MORE ECONOMIC WISDOM FROM RAGGEDY ANN.

This meme circulated earlier this year.

It gets better.  Now a senatorial request for the Congressional Budget Office to perform a sensitivity analysis creates a fake score.  Seriously.

Q Thanks, Jen. Republicans are circulating a modified version of the CBO score for Build Back Better. In their version, it included extensions of programs without being paid for, which we understand is not how the President put forward this legislation. But the reason that they’re saying they did that is because — Lindsey Graham says, “If you believe these programs [are going to] go away [after] one, [or] two…years, you shouldn’t have a driver’s license.” We all know Child Tax Credits are not going to go away after a year. What does the White House say to that?

MS. PSAKI: Well, to quote, of all people, Norm Ornstein at the American Enterprise Institute who put this quite well — quote, “You can’t assume programs will be extended just because Lindsey Graham wants to assure that. An estimate based on what’s not in the bill is bogus and fundamentally dishonest.”

I mean, this is not a CBO score. This is a fake CBO score. It’s not about the existing bill anybody is debating or voting on. This is about proposing the extension of programs that has not been agreed to without the commitment of the President — which he’s made repeatedly, publicly, that he would never support extending these programs if they weren’t paid for, period. That has been his commitment. That is his commitment.

That might work in Washington, where budget gimmicks, sunset provisions that might as well be written on the hot side of Mercury, and all sorts of magic beliefs about the "out years" are just another day at the office. I'm not persuaded, however.

BASTIAT, VINDICATED.

Chris "Intellectual Int-ing" Arnade visits the negative turnpike at Breezewood, Pennsylvania, and discovers that although the strip might be unjustly dumped upon as the paradigm of stroad hell ("A place representing what is wrong with capitalism and small town America: a landscape of ugly franchises feeding fat people obsessed with rampant consumption:" there is, for instance, a popular picture of a Cleveland area interchange that shows the same sort of clutter) there's not a lot of prosperity accompanying the businesses people get to consider stopping at whilst they're stuck in traffic.

But Breezewood isn’t your normal truck stop town. Its an awkward connector between a toll road (I-76) and an interstate (I-70), that only exists because of an old law saying they can’t directly connect. The result is millions of vehicles that don’t want to be there are funneled through a short stretch of a two lane road, with some stopping at stores that sprung up to cater to them, and others trying their best to zoom through as quickly as possible.

There's a little more to that interchange than that. Once upon a time I was enroute from the Washington area to Altoona, which has an interstate connection at the next interchange Pittsburghside of Breezewood, and there's no toll for someone going from Seventy to that Interstate along the turnpike.  More Pennsylvania idiosyncracy, I suppose, as the Edens Expressway (Interstate 94) ties into the Tri-State Tollway directly, the better to clip tourists.

In the Breezewood area, hang out at the bars, listen to the people tell their stories.  Yes, the interchange area is a convenient place for people to get food and fuel and tap a kidney, but there's no gold mine at the end of that road.

That is especially sad because there is a lot of pain and suffering that needs to be seen. Not along the one mile strip in the photo, but just outside Breezewood.

In the bar, after everyone stopped laughing about the picture, I heard stories of addiction, death, and joblessness. I heard stories filled with hopes, prayers, and long tales of wrongs and injustices. Stories like I have heard all over America.

The next morning, after a night sleeping in a bed rumbling from passing semis, I walked to an empty McDonald’s past a hotel that rents by the month, its parking lot filled with busted up cars, and its rooms filled with people who looked like life had been hard on them “for a minute.”

Every direction I went beyond the strip was ruggedly beautiful rural landscape, but one I knew all too well — Hills, creeks, farms, pastures, fields of corn, old arched bridges, small ranch homes, Dollar General stores, and all the signs of crack, heroine, and meth.

At weekdays, when the tourists aren't out, even the abandoned turnpike section is depressing.

On my various trips through the area over the past five years or so, the political signs that stand out are Trump signs.

WHAT'S MISSING FROM THIS ESSAY?

I'll give you three guesses, and the first two don't count.  It begins, "The most outrageous injustice is that the same people who lack access to water and sanitation are usually the ones most vulnerable to the effects of climate change—and the least responsible for causing it in the first place."

Expect the usual language.

In the end, those left furthest behind end up bearing the brunt of increasing water scarcity and poverty. These marginalized populations – women, children, and those living in extreme poverty – face a vicious and unjust cycle, in which a lack of access to water and sanitation is aggravated by extreme weather events, leading to more expensive, and unaffordable, services.

Expect the usual nostrums.

But where the problem starts may also be where the solution begins. We need a radical approach that guarantees the human right to water by tackling inequalities and putting people’s needs front and center – especially the needs of those whose voices continue to be marginalized and disregarded.

This is both a necessary response, and a step toward ending the climate change crisis, as it offers benefits both for mitigation (stopping climate change) and adaptation (adjusting to the new normal).

The good news is that the solutions are well known and readily available. Well-managed water systems can protect access to reliable water supplies during times of drought. Strong sanitation systems can resist floods.

And protecting water and sanitation services from extreme weather is highly cost-effective – for every $1 spent upgrading flood-resistant infrastructure, $62 is saved in flood restoration costs.

Gosh, that sounds like an awful lot of $20 bills on the sidewalk (or perhaps in the ditch?) waiting to be picked up. Will anyone?  Of course not.

And, they must align climate and water policies so that access to water is equitable, climate risks are reduced, and there is more money available for adaptation.

After all, ensuring effective climate action and sustainable access to water and sanitation are matters of human rights. This means that we must years [c.q.].

And if food becomes more dear, and households more sparse, so be it.

As we look to COP26, we need to ensure that climate decision- tackle the root causes of the water crisis globally and ensure prioritization of water for the realization of human rights, over other uses, such as large-scale agriculture and industries, including extractive industries.

To realize these rights, municipalities and villages also must be supported to improve their capacity to manage their water sources sustainably and efficiently.

Without urgent measures to slow climate change and adapt to the damage already done to our planet, there is a real risk that people’s access to water and sanitation will worsen rather than improve. And, without sanitation, we cannot guarantee the right to education; without hygiene, our health is diminished, and without reliable access to water, gender equality can never be achieved.

Good grief.

WE'RE NOT SHUTTING DOWN FOR CHRISTMAS.

Last Festive Season, Chevrolet might have been ahead of the curve, advocating for people to get together for Christmas, pandemic panic porn notwithstanding.

The sentiment seems to be spreading this season.  An AT&T commercial, telling the story of Simon the Snowman, includes a dedication "To the ones we've waited all year to be with."

Then there's Lexus, a company that I have sometimes slagged on, also with the Festive Season visits, and the observation, "We've been waiting all year to come together."

Never mind the doomsayers, enjoy your Festive Season.

STUFF YOUR MANDATE, AMTRAK JOE!

Amtrak crews are among the reluctant.  "Amtrak will likely have to reduce train service, particularly on long-distance routes, in January due to sluggish COVID-19 vaccination rates in smaller crew pools, particularly on long-distance routes."

Let's see how this plays out.

Amtrak President Stephen Gardner told congressional leaders that the railroad would announce next week what routes will be impacted.

Amtrak must comply with a federal mandate effective January 4, 2022, that requires all employees of government contractors to be fully vaccinated. Gardner said that while 94 percent of employees are fully vaccinated and 96 percent have received at least one shot of the COVID-19 vaccine, immunization rates are lower along its long-distance routes. Gardner said the issue was compounded by the fact that many employees retired during the pandemic and Amtrak slowed hiring down. Officials said the railroad will not have enough fully vaccinated employees in some places to support full service.

Gardner said long-distance routes would most likely be impacted by the service reductions. Last year, train service was reduced to tri-weekly on most long-distance routes, including California Zephyr, Empire Builder and Coast Starlight. Daily service resumed earlier this year. Gardner noted that the service reductions would only be “temporary.”

The three trains so named are among the more popular on the long distance routes. Make of that what you will.

A CASE FOR TRADE-TESTED BETTERMENTS?

Planetizen contributor Todd Litman poses The Roadway Expansion Paradox.  "Motorists want expensive roadway expansions provided that somebody else foots the bill, but when required to pay directly through tolls, the need for more capacity often disappears. What should planners do?"  It's a bind a long time coming, and probably the long-established reliance on planners working under the belief that roads are internal improvements too important to be left to crass commercialism.  But if the Bastiat argument about living at the expense of others catches on outside libertarian circles, let us be cheerful!

When people purchase a motor vehicle they expect governments to provide roads for their use, and when those roads are congested motorists want bigger roadways, provided that somebody else foots the bill. However, if required to pay directly for the added capacity, the justification for those projects generally disappears. Motorists are like a rude restaurant guests who order the most expensive menu item but disappear when the check arrives, forcing others to pay.

What's amusing, though, is that Mr Litman ultimately sees the obvious.

After tolls (CA$3.15 for cars and CA$9.45 for trucks) were eliminated on Vancouver-area bridges in 2017, traffic increased about a third on the Port Mann Bridge, from 112,000 to 150,000 average daily trips, and 38% on the Golden Ears Bridge, from about 40,000 to 55,000 average daily trips.

In these and other examples, governments spent billions of dollars to subsidize highways, but the need for those projects generally disappeared if users are required to pay directly, evidence that most motorists are cheapskates who will choose alternative routes, modes or destinations to save a few dollars. This has bankrupted many private, for-profit highways.

A basic economic principle is that, to maximize efficiency and equity, consumers should “get what they pay for and pay for what they get” unless subsidies are specifically justified to achieve strategic goals. Urban highway expansion projects that cannot be financed by user fees are economically inefficient – their costs are greater than their benefits. This means that governments often spend two dollars to provide facilities that users only value at one dollar, and because roadway expansions induce additional vehicle travel, this increases external costs such as downstream congestion, crash risk and pollution emissions. As a result, these contradict other community goals and are bad investments.

Most people assume that traffic congestion can be solved by expanding roadways, but no government can afford to build enough lanes to meet all potential demand, and doing so is inefficient and unfair.

Private, for-profit highways are going to have trouble competing against publicly provided, tax-supported highways, but the taxing authority can never hope to raise enough money to provide the highways, and thus do we get those budget-busting bipartisan infrastructure bills every few years.  Ultimately, though, the Tragic Vision provides clarity.

Economists recognize that congestion reflects underpricing: driving is so cheap that it becomes inevitable. You can have free roads or you can have free-flowing traffic but it is economically infeasible to have both.

Urban highway expansions represent a huge public subsidy to a relatively small number of future users. Anybody who will not drive regularly on these new facilities should protest this inequity.

There are a number of other items in the public budget that also qualify as regressive transfers.  The beginning of wisdom in the infrastructure lobby might be with the understanding that there is no such thing as a freeway.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

The moronic variant of Wuhan coronavirus has a lot of mutations on its spike protein, possibly because it's been sharing hosts with the other coronaviruses that show up each winter as one form or another of the common cold, and, right on schedule, seasonal flu and common colds are showing up again.

It is long past time to stop the charade.

1.  It is time to move on.  "Politicians are enjoying their 'emergency' powers far too much, and the [palace guard] media plays into every fearmongering statement."  They panicked once too many times.  "The saddest part is that the Biden administration, despite its many positive moves to restore respect to scientific rigor, followed fear more than science in its first major action in response to the Omicron variant."

2.  It's beginning to look like oligarchy, everywhere you go.  "It’s beginning to seem like 'democracy' just means 'progressives getting what they want.'" But we're wise to their ways.  "[I]f Democrats are going to make the test of legitimacy whether they get their way on policy questions, then they can expect the same thing from at least some parts of the Right."

3.  Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.  "If you describe existing laws as a mix of 'full-blown tyranny' and 'petty tyranny,' the masses won’t think you’re crazy."

4.  No secular first or second commandment.  "Secular people have put their faith in science the way the devout put their faith in a God — right down to anointing the most pious among us as institutional figureheads."

5.  Another round goes to reality.  "Calamity Joe has a staggering list of failures, and nary a success in sight."  But wait, there's more!  "He can either lay off the [corona] panicmongering or paint himself a loser."

6.  That bipartisan gerontocracy.  "The issue of leaders staying too long on the political stage has relevance right now."  The true destructive generation owns the current government failures.  "Democrats in power today came of age in the 1960s, when Great Society programs were popular and the radical counterculture reigned supreme. They have learned nothing from those failures, and in their dotage, they have failed to contain the progressive forces."

7.  Murderapolis endures.  "It seems that it will take a lot more violence, a lot more disorder, and a substantial decline in property values to dislodge the city’s left-wing majority from its smug complacency."

8.  Government schools self-immolate.  "Advocates of government-dominated schooling accuse proponents of education choice of wanting to kill government schools, but those public institutions don't seem to need any help as they incrementally terminate their own participation in the teaching business."

9.  Ridiculous parity, indeed.  "One of the most invidious and injurious side effects of wokeism is to validate 'other ways of knowing' as being on par with modern scientific knowledge."  (Long article, worth careful study.)

10.  All I want for Christmas is proper Hiawatha service.  "Would that a train including a first-class option, meal service provided at tables (to all passengers) and a dome-lounge were available now."

11.  A bust to the Fatal Conceit.  “If you knew what I was going to have, why did you even ask me?”

12.  Own it, Democrats.  "[R]aising the debt limit is more like applying for more credit cards to cover the existing credit card bills you've already rung up."

13.  Bet on emergence.  "Long live classical liberalism, and the permissionless innovation in self-governance that it fosters."

14.  Nailed it in one!  "Democrats Have a Woke Rogue Prosecutor Problem."

15.  Our Political Masters find themselves in the position of the sorcerer's apprentice.  "It turns out to be much easier to dump trillions of dollars into the economy than it is to control what happens after you do."

16.  Revealed preferences.  "Lots of people move from strict states to lax states. Hardly anyone goes the other way."  Complete with unintended consequences!

17.  Self-styled progressives ruin cities.  "We live in the aftermath of the progressives’ triumph over institutionalization, and it looks like San Francisco’s Tenderloin District or L.A.’s Skid Row."  If only somebody had noticed.  It's the supposed beneficiaries of all that progressivism who are hardest hit.  "Sadly, the riots, arson, looting and destruction that has taken place in so many large cities may be turning what were food deserts into food wastelands."