FRIDAY short TAKES.

Evergreen.  "Prosperity flourishes when businesses serve customers, not ideologies—and when customers choose, not coerce. Perhaps we’d all do better to prioritize peaceful exchange and good service, rather than political lockstep."

We have the oldest and most stable constitutional system in history.  America, with its unique Constitution is indeed exceptional.   “Constitutional crisis” is not a serious talking point.

Politics divides.  "Fed Up Man is the engine of our revolution."

Yes, Virginia, there is a fourth branch of government.  "The President of the United States is acting like he’s in charge of the executive branch. No, really. It remains entirely true that warnings about the threat to 'Our Democracy' are, in fact, warnings about the threat to Our Bureaucracy."  Or worse.  "You begin to detect that by 'our democracy' they actually meant 'our everlasting grift.'"

The weekly round-up of mostly pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM.

Alon Levy is with New York University's Marron Institute, focusing on urban transportation.  He recently sat down with an Asterisk correspondent.  "The United States has the most expensive transportation infrastructure in the world. That’s because we refuse to learn from experts, other countries, and our own history."  That might be the thesis.  Everything you need to know, dear reader, is in the opening exchange.

Asterisk: The overarching question in your transit policy career has been: Why is America so bad at building transit systems? Earlier this year, your team at NYU released a massive report comparing transit costs in Istanbul, Italy, Sweden and Boston, and then, of course, New York. It culminates in your fantastic case study of the Second Avenue subway line. And that’s where I wanted to start. What went wrong?

Alon Levy:Let’s go back to John Hylan.

Hylan was a populist mayor between 1918 and 1925. He ran against various corporate interests, which at the time included private streetcar companies. Hylan was hostile to the private operators. This led to bustitution — using buses to undercut the streetcar companies, though even then it was clear that the buses were providing inferior service that cost more to provide.¹

And he was also against the private companies that were running the subway. So the city started building something called the Independent Subway System, commonly known as IND (because the private companies were called IRT, Interborough Rapid Transit). It was built by the city with the express purpose of driving the privates out of business — so the lines were kind of duplicative of the older lines. Only in two places did they truly expand into new places that were not served before. One is the G train, the Crosstown Line between Long Island City and downtown Brooklyn. The other is the Queens Boulevard line.

It added value. But it was also redundant on purpose — and it culminated in the city buying out the private operators at Depression prices.

Ah, yes, John Hylan, also known as John "Red" Hylan.  "Populist" is being polite.  And yes, he thought city management could provide a better subway service than that offered by the two private companies, the Interborough and the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit, or BMT.  (And if you wonder why some New York subway routes are letters and some numbers, well, the old A train was a BMT route.)  Most of the interview focuses on the sort of process worship that followed from the city's construction protocols.

No, 13,000 people in the United States work for a state government who are appointed by the governor or lower-level official. The governor may choose to appoint a technocrat, but it’s not expected. And then there’s also the indirect people, the people who these appointees hire as their personal staff. When these people walk into the room, the experienced civil servants lower their heads a little bit. When you tell the civil service that it’s always going to be on the lower end of the class system, you’re going to lose the best people. The best people will pick a career path that lets them be on top, which in this system means they’re doing many different things and never learn one thing well.

What do I keep telling you, dear reader, about complexity confounding coordination.

There's a lot to digest in the article, it comes down to the absence of anyone with the vision of Alexander J. Cassatt and the drive of J. Edgar Thomson. "But Penn Station has actually languished at the hands of another simple reality: No one has the leverage to fix it. "  It's another inheritance from the truly most destructive generation of the modern era, the process-worshippers of the Silent Generation.  "Since the 1970s, even as progressives have championed Big Government, they’ve worked tirelessly to put new checks on its power—to pull it away from imperious technocrats who might use government to bulldoze hapless communities."  It's enough to make a Marxist giggle (a phrase that I lifted from Trains editor David P. Morgan, who noted the rigamarole strangling Commuter Rail service in New York in the late 1950s.)

Mr Dunkelman is still a believer in the power of Governance by Wise Experts.  "To rebuild faith in the power of government to do good, responsible leaders need the power to pursue the public interest."  I fear, though, that he has really made the case that the best thing for the Wise Experts to do is to go away.

First, though, we might want the government to go away.  Red Hylan had a counterpart in Detroit mayor James Couzens, who thought the way to keep the investor owned streetcars of the Detroit United Railway (itself, as this was easier to do with infrastructure inherited from horse-car companies, an amalgamation of several streetcar lines) from overcharging commuters was to build a city-owned streetcar system and a fleet of Birney Safety Cars (yes, the same as Milwaukee's dinkeys) to serve the passengers.  As was the case in New York, the municipal operation was with a view to getting Detroit United to sell to the city.  That Detroit was becoming known for its production of flivvers adds spice to the story.  From 1920 when the first Couzens Cooties, er, Birneys, started running, until 1956, when the last Detroit Street Railway cars went out of service, that government took more interest in providing the infrastructure for the products its residents assembled.

A HYPOTHESIS BECOMES HARDER TO REJECT.

There's nearly forty years of accumulating evidence that the campus rabbit culture is not good for your health.

Badger Herald editorial writers Michael Warner and Dorothy Freiberg looked at the scene on 21 April 1987, with the following:

So why should men marry and start families? It must be said that we know a fair number of college-educated young men in their late twenties, making good salaries, who seem never to have thought about marriage. They remain in a state of suspended late-adolescence, living and acting as they did as seniors in college, only now they have plenty of money for dates and toys.

"This is an enormous waste, and a shame. So many young men never grow up, never taking the responsibility of supporting a family and never knowing that God made families to draw each of us out of the selfish squalor of our personal lives and devote us to loving and helping others.

"One has to wonder how different things would have been if feminism had demanded economic freedom for women and denounced the sexual revolution in the interest of preserving womens' traditional role as the guardians of chastity. This would have gained for women the equal pay and opportunity they deserved while at the same time ensuring that women who wanted to raise families would find willing husbands-to-be.

"Such a situation would also have spread the gains from feminism. Today the only victors in the sexual revolution are those men and women who are good-looking and clever enough to enjoy multiple partners with a minimum of emotional and financial commitment. The dowdy and the not-so-clever (or not-so-unscrupulous) are used by the well-endowed, and find loneliness and frustration where, in a previous generation, they would probably have been able to start families."

That's from the early days of Cold Spring Shops, and we have seen that passage invoked a few times since.  It's not surprising that Rod Dreher would have called attention to the waste, and the shame.

It's not that things are any better today, notes Rod Dreher.  "The truth about the Bolshevik Revolution was to be found in the gulags. The truth about the Sexual Revolution is to be found among the poor in our inner cities and trailer parks."  He's basing his pessimism on a day chatting with people who work among the inner city poor, and on an essay by Mary Eberstadt.  "What the MeToo moment proves above all is that the time for magical thinking about the sexual revolution is over. Until now, many people simply accepted the realities of the post-Pill world as non-negotiable facts. It’s time to challenge that worldview as one that lacks moral and intellectual maturity."

That might be argumentation consistent with the priors of people running opinion shops such as American Conservative and Weekly Standard.

CONTEMPLATING URBAN FORMS.

Andrew "Post-Suburban Future" Burleson attempts to make sense of the logic of town formation.  His post notes that the private automobile is a Marshallian improvement, but as each car takes up more space than a pair of sneakers or a bicycle, and stabling a car is more practicable than stabling a coach and four, what he calls the Geometry Problem arises.

Simply put, the Geometry Problem is that cars are much bigger than humans. They have quite different spatial requirements, both in motion and at rest, than any other mode of transportation. This is neither good nor bad, it’s just a physical constraint.

But these physical differences mean that when we optimize places for cars, they end up not working well (or working at all) for any other mode. They become car-only places.

Like all design decisions, the decision to make car-only places has tradeoffs. The key tradeoff here is that car-only design requires a large amount of space to work well, and that conflicts with and stifles the natural economic growth of cities. Let’s unpack this.

What follows is an instructive exposition of the evolution of cities.

[T]o optimize for the car, we need to spread everything out. Speaking purely in terms of transportation design, this is fine. But, unfortunately, transportation design isn’t the only thing we care about.

Economic activity wants to agglomerate. This is how and why cities exist - they are convergence points of economic value that attract people.

Cities naturally grow as economic activity increases. Space at the convergence points becomes more and more valuable. To keep the economy growing we use the space more and more efficiently to keep it affordable. At first this means we put buildings closer together and cover more of each lot. Then we start to build taller.

In historic small towns you can still see how this used to work. Right at the city center there are a few tall buildings. Then there’s a Main Street with small buildings side by side. Just off the Main Street you have houses on small lots. As you spread out the lots get bigger. That’s the natural economic shape of a city.

Trigger warning: this idea of space being used efficiently is called “density.” Healthy cities gradually spread out around the edges as they also gradually grow denser in the center.

Sometimes those near-city-center houses on small lots give way to apartment blocks.  I quibble with his use of the term "efficiently" as it appears to be the restricted sense of using fewer materials, rather than the identification and harvesting of gains from trade.  One could build the apartment blocks farther from the central business district, to take advantage of the bid-rent curve, but that might not be the most efficient way to trade land costs for transportation costs.  Those houses on bigger lots?  Back in the day, that land was less valuable for retailers or whatever industries located along the railroad tracks, which might make buying a larger parcel suitable for a house with a stable the locationally efficient use of the land.  (And I haven't gotten into yet another complication, which is that there are many dimensions along which houses can vary, leading to the equilibrium householder being indifferent among the bundle of rooms, the lot size, travel time, and proximity to noxious facilities at various places in town.)

IT'S NOT DUMPING WHEN WE DO IT.

As the Government Efficiency examination continues, Members of Congress begin to argue that their pet appropriations are not government waste.

Republican Sen. Katie Britt has been working to make sure the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency doesn't hit what she called “life-saving, groundbreaking research at high-achieving institutions,” including her state's beloved University of Alabama.

Kansas GOP Sen. Jerry Moran is worried that food from heartland farmers would spoil rather than be sent around the world as the U.S. Agency for International Development shutters.

And Idaho GOP Rep. Mike Simpson warns national parks could be impaired by cutbacks at the start of summer hiring in preparation for the onslaught of visitors.

Do you wonder, dear reader, why shutdown theater and earmark-rich continuing resolutions are so popular with the political class?

And of course, those sacks of grain marked "A gift from the people of the United States of America" look so good arriving on the dock at some famine-stricken country, particularly on the evening news.  That in any other context those sacks would be subsidized production dumped into another country is of no import.

LOSING SKIPPERS BLAME THE WIND.

Mike Lofgren, who some time ago decided playing the role of renegade Republican to make self-styled progressives comfortable with their certitude, is at it again.  "Time to end the media silence over the American people’s headlong dive into authoritarianism."

Isn’t there also a no-fault doctrine that applies to the American voter, a doctrine that is for the most part rigidly observed by journalists, pundits, and the self-proclaimed wise men who monopolize the op-ed pages of the prestige newspapers?

From the platforms of the chattering classes, we frequently hear calls for “accountability:” for politicians, tech moguls, and the like. Holding someone accountable implies that the person in question is a functioning adult who can be considered responsible for his actions. How telling then, that there are no such calls for accountability when it comes to the American people.

Turning back to Bush, his reelection did not end his reign of error. His policy of radical financial deregulation, about which he and his underlings bragged incessantly, and about which the public had to know if it were remotely paying attention, led in his second term to the greatest financial meltdown in 80 years.

Temporarily chastened, voters latched on to Barack Obama as the savior du jour. It turned out that Obama was no Moses leading the people to the promised land. A nominal Democrat, he was more an old-school Rockefeller Republican whose two terms were mostly an uneventful placeholder in history—not that such administrations are necessarily bad, as the current all-enveloping chaos demonstrates.

But placid, play-it-safe presidencies are boring, particularly for an increasingly infantilized public that needs 24/7 entertainment to stave off that worst of mental states: honest self-reflection. So they grew tired of Perry Como’s crooning, hankering instead after Ozzy Osbourne smashing his guitar and biting the head off a bat. That explains a good deal about how we got Trump 1.0 and 2.0.

Wouldn't it be easier to abolish the People and install another?

FIRST, CULL A FEW DEANLETS.

Here I have stood. 

From the founding of Cold Spring Shops we have maintained two core beliefs about higher education.  First, the faculty are the proper stewards of the curriculum.  Second, administrative usurpations, particularly by failed scholars or by people with no faculty experience, contribute mightily to the failure of universities in the past forty or fifty years.

I cashed out ten years ago.  Fortunately, Minding the Campus contributor Kenneth Corvo is on the job, calling attention to the continuing crisis.

The American university is in distress. Enrollment is declining, tenure is disappearing, administrative costs are ballooning, and public trust in academia is eroding. More concerning, however, is the deeper structural crisis that has transformed universities from bastions of knowledge into battlegrounds of ideological warfare and administrative overreach. At the heart of this crisis lies a fundamental shift: the weakening of faculty authority and the erosion of academic freedom, driven by political polarization and the corporatization of higher education.

It ought come as no surprise that when the institutional ethos is one of denigrating normal people, that the Militant Normals get, well, militant.  What's more amusing is that once the mode of inquiry is that of being oppositional to everything, sooner or later the academy itself becomes something to oppose.

Once seen as institutions dedicated to reason and empirical inquiry, universities now find themselves under attack from both the left and the right. Conservative politicians, emboldened by the populist distrust of “elites,” have sought to defund academic programs, impose ideological tests on tenure, and surveil faculty for perceived biases. State legislatures in Florida, Indiana, and Idaho, among others, have passed legislation directly forbidding types of speech, degrading tenure, and defunding programs that they find problematic. Meanwhile, postmodern academic currents, rooted in identity politics, have questioned the legitimacy of objective truth itself, sometimes using administrative mechanisms to censor dissenting voices.

The result? A climate where neither the political right nor left fully supports open inquiry.

Instead, faculty are squeezed between reactionary state legislatures that punish ideological nonconformity and progressive administrators who enforce ideological orthodoxy through “diversity, equity, and inclusion” mandates and speech codes. The once-proud tradition of shared governance between faculty and administration has been systematically dismantled in favor of top-down bureaucratic control, further weakening the university’s mission as a space for free intellectual exchange.

Exactly.  "It takes a heart of stone not to laugh at 'cultivated ignorance' from a leader in an academic enterprise that 'decenters' hard-won wisdom of millennia; that makes students cowering subjects of Student Affairs deanlets; that cultivates ignorance and calls it access."

DO CLOTHES MAKE THE MAN?

Elliot Ackerman suggests they can help ... or hinder.  "There is nothing emasculating about being deliberate with your appearance. In fact, to do otherwise is unmasculine and childish."

We might still have John T. Molloy offering such advice.  Let Mr Ackerman offer reinforcement.

Men are on the rise. Kamala Harris’s Brat Summer led to Trump’s Bro Fall. But so many of these “manosphere” dudes look like clowns. Leaping tech titans in too tight—or too baggy (looking at you, Zuck)—T-shirts. Political appointees with American-flag pocket squares. Do you blow your nose into Old Glory? And do I really need to mention Senator John Fetterman—who isn’t a tech bro, but still—who thought the inauguration a fitting venue for a hoodie and shorts? C’mon, bros. Do better.

That might be reading too much cultural change into the election returns, which is an annoying tic of the coastal cosmopolitans, irrespective of their politics.  His advice, though, can be distilled into a short take.  "And if you are in fashion today, inevitably, you will be out of fashion tomorrow. Style is different. If done right, it lasts forever."

I'LL NEVER LACK FOR MATERIAL.

Fifteen years ago, it would be work I wouldn't lack.

Last week, Our President and Japan's new prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, held a meeting in Washington that concluded with a cordial joint statement.  "President Donald J. Trump and Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru held their first official meeting today in Washington, D.C., where they affirmed their determination to pursue a new golden age for U.S.-Japan relations that upholds a free and open Indo-Pacific and brings peace and prosperity to a violent and disorderly world."

GENERAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE EXPENSES.

The latest Northern Star "Faculty Spotlight" highlights a deanlet, Vicki Gerentes, NIU’s director of Fraternity and Sorority Life.  I wonder if any indirect cost returns finance her office.

“I have a senior associate director who’s with me and then a graduate assistant. The team of three is responsible for making sure that we have a wonderful program for students to be able to join. We manage rosters and provide grade reports to each organization as well. Between my staff and I, we each oversee two councils. I’m advising the National Panhellenic Council and the Panhellenic Council, but we both meet with every single chapter in some way.”

“We’re here to support the students, we are here to find ways that help the students in this process. My role is just to make sure that we have a really strong and great community. If there is an opportunity to have the Center for Greek Life, that by the time it gets there, that it’s just something that enhances a wonderful program. I’m here to make sure that experience is well supported, that we have staff members and resources that can help you work through challenges.”

Over the years, university administrators have toggled between working with the Greek-letter organizations and turfing them out.  The current posture appears to be "working with."

“There was a task force put together to help revitalize Greek Life, so a lot of administrators, students and alumni came together and put together this ultimate report after lots of conversations, lots of listening sessions, about how we can take Greek Life into the next phase. That hasn’t quite been funded yet and totally launched, but the land is there and there are secured plans for what it could look like.”

Curiously, for a faculty spotlight, there's little mention of faculty participation in that plan.  But there are plenty of other deanlets and deanlings to get to know.

“I think I’m just a new person, right? A lot that is really just learning more about the university, how we do things here, what kind of forms do you fill out in order to oversee certain things, which offices manage different programs and support students in different ways. It is a lot of relationship building and you can’t meet everybody in a day. It is a lot of time that I also have to spend, not just getting to know them [the students], but also colleagues, peers, the campus and the greater area.”

Whether that will pay off in increased enrollments and graduations is yet to be determined.

BOUGHT-OFF DEMOCRAT VOTERS IN THE FACULTY LOUNGE?

Our President's recent actions to reduce indirect cost recovery rates on government grants have surely provoked the research-industrial complex.

In a Friday night move that quickly drew howls of protest from the U.S. biomedical research community and a legal challenge, President Donald Trump’s administration announced it is immediately reducing by at least half the so-called indirect cost payments the National Institutes of Health (NIH) makes to universities, hospitals, and research institutes to help cover facilities and administrative costs.

A 15% indirect cost rate will now apply to all new and existing grants, NIH said in a memo from its director’s office. Typically, about 30% of an average NIH grant to an institution is earmarked for indirect costs, according to NIH’s notice, but some universities get much higher rates. In 2023, NIH, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, spent nearly $9 billion on indirect costs; the change would likely leave research institutions needing to find billions of dollars from other sources to support laboratories, students, and staff.

“It is … vital to ensure that as many funds as possible go towards direct scientific research costs rather than administrative overhead,” NIH wrote in the memo. The new rate brings NIH into line with the maximum indirect cost rates allowed by private foundations, NIH stated, and is higher than the minimum 10% indirect cost payment NIH says it is required to provide. “This rate will allow grant recipients a reasonable and realistic recovery of indirect costs,” the memo stated.

Unless there is a "The Secretary shall issue ..." provision in legislation establishing the Institutes, such a change might require an Act of Congress.  The tussle between Republican presidents and federally funded researchers, however, has been going on for a long time, with "government efficiency" being the most recent talking point.

REDUCE THE ROLE OF POLITICS IN RESIDENTIAL DEVELOPMENT.

Federalist contributors Jonathan and Paige Bronitsky unleash a polemic.  "‘New Urbanists’ Want To Bulldoze The Suburban American Dream."  I suspect it's part of a Militant Normal pushback against California's nanny-state (excuse the redundancy) politicians taking advantage of the recent Los Angeles fires to impose their vision of urban renewal on Altadena or the Pacific Palisades.  But they have something more general in mind.

Picture this: a four-story residential building perched atop an artisanal coffee shop and a yoga studio, its micro-apartments stacked like shoeboxes in the name of “sustainability” and “resilience.” Now picture something else entirely: a pristine, master-planned community where every house has a front porch, the streets are lined with picket fences, and everything looks as if it were plucked from a Norman Rockwell painting — except there are few if any houses of worship, the zoning codes are suffocating, and the price tag ensures only the elite can afford to live there.

These are the two faces of New Urbanism, an ideology that, masquerading as “traditionalist,” conservatives have tolerated for far too long. On one end, you have high-density urbanism, where developers — in cahoots with machine politicians — cram as many people as possible into apartment blocks, eliminating cars and personal space under the guise of environmentalism and a sense of community. On the other, you have the faux-traditional, highly regulated enclaves of Seaside and Celebration, Florida, prohibitively expensive and ironically more artificial than the suburban developments they criticize.

It used to be those four-story buildings with apartments (or perhaps the proprietor) living above the storefront occurred as a matter of course.

There were no streetcars along Milwaukee's Ogden Avenue back in the days of The Milwaukee Electric Lines, and the tower block closer to the lake is newer construction; whilst tower blocks of about the same vintage as that three story building with residences perched atop something (part of the first floor is the church annex) are a short walk from this corner.

FOURTH TURNINGS ARE LIKE THAT.

What Zero Hedge's Jeffrey Tucker describes as "The Most Dramatic Narrative Shift In Modern History" is what one expects when the old saecular order shatters.

It's been a long time in coming.

When voices left, libertarian, and right raise similar objections to an established order, might that order be in trouble?

That voices left, libertarian, and right see different ways to replace that order, suggest troubling times might be ahead.

It's a time when the existing social order loses its legitimacy, it's a Fourth Turning, even if people don't use that terminology.

IT'S STILL COLORED WATER IN A BLUE CAN.

Not too long ago, Miller Lite and Bud Light trashed their value proposition with Normals, provoking a boycott that I was quite willing and able to go along with.

Yesterday was Super Bowl Sunday, and the only team to have won three consecutive NFL titles remains the Packers.  Anheuser-Busch bought air time ostensibly to make amends with Normals.

Free Press contributor Anson Frericks elaborates.

The ad, which features Shane Gillis, Post Malone, and NFL great Peyton Manning having fun at a wild barbecue,fueled by bright-blue cans of Bud Light beer, is no ordinary TV commercial. With its almost cartoonish celebration of masculine excess, the spot communicates two conventional beer-commercial messages: Bud Light is fun, and Bud Light is for guys. What makes it notable, though, is a third point, one it communicates only by implication: Bud Light is really, really sorry.

Bud Light is still trying to make up with the customer base it alienated on April 1, 2023. On that day, a brand that had been the top-selling beer in America for over two decades launched a social media campaign that would rock its customers, and not in a good way. Starring a transgender activist, Dylan Mulvaney, it celebrated Mulvaney’s first year of “girlhood.” Bud Light even sent Mulvaney a personalized can to mark this milestone date in Mulvaney’s transition from biological male to transgender woman, which millions had already followed on Instagram and TikTok.

This was not an April Fools’ Day prank as some believed, but a serious effort by the world’s largest beer company, Anheuser-Busch InBev, to “rebrand” its product.

What happened next was not amusing.  Anheuser might have gone woke as much to placate institutional investors who got their latest management fads from the World Economic Forum as to expand its market appeal, say, to the Diet Coke demographic.  But market tests, as ever, have steep grading curves.

On April 1, 2023, the ESG bubble popped. And Anheuser-Busch was caught holding the pin.

The reaction to the company’s partnership with transgender biological male Dylan Mulvaney was the culmination of America’s growing frustration with corporations shoving progressive politics down customers’ throats. The transgender issue was a hot topic. And a divisive one. Did most Americans care how people dressed or identified? No. But sex-change surgeries for kids were a different matter. Sixteen states had recently passed laws regulating the practice. Twenty-five states had banned biological males from competing against biological women in K–12 sports.

And Bud Light and the Jarrett regency handed Donald Trump a winning issue.  Then, notes Red State's Ed Morrissey, their advertisers overcompensated in their apology.

This made no impression among my friends at the party, as most of us were having too much fun socializing to pay much attention. If we had seen it, it would have produced gales of laughter, and not in the way Bud Light intended. Rather than return to the usual focus on friends and parties, Bud Light instead chose to parody men by making their masculinity ridiculous.

The nadir of this overcompensation was the sequence with the leaf-blowers used as phallic symbols while [careful, Ed, CAREFUL!] uhhh ... ejecting Bud Light out of excitement. The positioning of the tubes is anything but coincidental and would have made Freud himself blush. (In fact, check his grave; he might still have blushed.) That sequence starts 18 seconds into the ad, which seems just a tad premature, no? The whole thing looks like something Heinerscheid would have cooked up as her idea of toxic masculinity.

Whatever.  Captain Ed concludes,  "The message is clear: political correctness and The Shrieking of the Progressive Karens are dead."  And Bud Light is still colored water in blue cans, and attempting to sell it to dumb guys is still a thing.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS FREE PARKING.

Streetsblog brings word of the passing of Donald Shoup, who made a research career out of that insight.

Donald Shoup, the author of the groundbreaking The High Cost of Free Parking and UCLA Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus in the Department of Urban Planning at UCLA, passed away last Thursday evening, February 6, 2025.

Shoup earned a doctorate in economics, and brought that training to his studies of parking policies. The High Cost of Free Parking demonstrated how urban parking policies, especially low-cost or free parking and minimum parking mandates, were damaging cities economically and culturally.

The High Cost concludes with three solutions to the dilemma, which have been adopted to at least some degree by cities across the country: charging fair market prices for curb parking, returning parking revenue to the neighborhood where it was collected for community investment, and removing off-street parking requirements for new development.

Shoup committed decades to researching flawed fundamental assumptions that governed minimum parking requirements, clear writing to educate a wide audience, and engaging decisionmakers with how his findings should shape policy.

His message was simple, although at first few wanted to hear it. “Parking is free for us only in our role as motorist--not in our roles as taxpayer, employer, commuter, shopper, renter, as a homeowner," he would point out. "The cost of parking does not cease to exist just because the motorist doesn't pay for it.”

Indeed.  As P. J. O'Rourke quipped about health care, wait until you find out what it costs when it's free.  Professor Shoup refrained from referring to traffic jams and parking hassles as road socialism, perhaps to be polite to urban planning types of a more socialist bent, and yet, in pointing out the follies of treating parking as an entitlement, wasn't he doing exactly that?

Parking spaces are productive assets, and ought be priced accordingly.  It's not so much the lack of pricing that contributes to the high cost of free parking, it's the rules that dictate how many spaces be provided that do.  Like much else that I lament, it began with good intentions.  "Motorists would circle the block, seeking limited curb space to park their cars, contributing to congestion. Thus mandatory parking minimums were born, a well-meaning initiative meant to ease traffic."  The good intentions broke down, though.  Parking mandates that assured drivers of a place to park wherever they went encouraged more driving, until the roads and then the parking lots got congested, and eventually something had to give.

That's from my review of The High Cost, and Professor Shoup's final commentary, in Streetsblog, continues the theme.  "Free parking has a veneer of equality, but it is unfair."  Under other circumstances, that's Friday short take material, isn't it?  The continuation is instructive.

Crowded curb parking is a great opportunity disguised as an insoluble problem. Almost like urban alchemy, parking benefit districts can transform a parking shortage into public services. Such districts can be politically popular, financially successful, environmentally sustainable and socially just.

Finally, here’s a thought experiment: If you live on the Upper West Side, would you prefer free public transit or free curb parking on your block? If you don’t own a car or park off-street, you will probably want free public transit.

Put another way, a neighborhood sovereign wealth fund, with the royalties distributed in the form of farecards?

Maybe the best thing is for the government to go away.

Here's where that nasty bid-rent curve gets in the way.  On the one hand, rent gradients are steeper if transportation costs are higher; as a consequence there's "no affordable housing" downtown.  On the other hand, if transportation costs are lower, rent gradients are less steep, but the affordable housing is still at a distance.  It's likely, though, that land markets subject to fewer zoning and parking constraints will allocate resources more efficiently than the outcome the Wise Experts have saddled us with.

That might be a stretch for students of urban planning, and yet, once urban planners start thinking of their streets and parking spaces as productive assets, their minds might turn to relying on markets more generally, whether or not a neigborhood quango is enforcing the property rights.  R. I. P.

MORE BUZZ-KILL FROM SAM PIZZIGATI.

He could have left well enough alone.

About three score years ago, on a January Sunday afternoon in 1967, some of us gathered in college dorm basement lounges to watch pro football’s historic first “Super Bowl.” A good bit has changed since then—in football and America.

The changes in pro football could hardly be more striking. Today’s players dwarf the size and strength of players back then. National Football League linemen here in the 2020s, for instance, weigh on average well over 300 pounds and stand almost six-and-a-half feet tall. Pro football players of that size simply “didn’t exist” before 1980.

Contemporary players earn much more as well. The first NFL collective bargaining agreement, signed a year after that initial Super Bowl in 1967, set a $10,000 minimum annual salary for veteran players, the equivalent of some $90,000 today. In 2024, NFL players averaged $3.2 million, with a median base pay of $860,000.

But pro football players these days pay a steep price for their paychecks. The average player career now lasts only a little over three years. But the much longer careers of players in positions that don’t face much physical contact distort that average. Running backs regularly last no more than two years.

Pro football player lives, more significantly, often run markedly shorter than the lives of their generational peers. Those shorter lifespans reflect both the violence of the collisions between today’s much bigger and stronger players and the much longer length of today’s NFL season. Players participating in that first 1967 Super Bowl only competed in 16 games. Players on the 2025 Super Bowl’s Philadelphia Eagles squad will have competed in 21 games once this season’s competition ends.

The Packer and Chief players of that first NFL-AFL Championship Game had to start their off-season jobs, such as Jimmy Taylor's wreck-diving work in the Gulf, two weeks later than previously.

1929, 1930, 1931; 1965, 1966, 1967.

The standard is still five titles in six attempts in eight seasons.

Last night, the Philadelphia Eagles dashed the hopes of the Kansas City Chiefs, who were the first team to qualify for the Super Bowl after winning the previous two.

Packer Nation has been paying attention.  "Vince Lombardi's Packers say don't call Chiefs' quest for 3 straight titles a first."  In fact, one of the players who helped set that standard notes the "five titles in six attempts" matters.

While the Packers do feel slighted, they also respect what the Chiefs have accomplished these last few years with coach Andy Reid, quarterback Patrick Mahomes and tight end Travis Kelce.

“First of all, yes, it does bother me,” Hall of Fame guard Jerry Kramer said in a phone interview. “I'm aware of it. I'm not crying. I'm not hysterical. I'm not having a fit. But there's a little resentment there. But when I look at the Kansas City Chiefs and I see the quality of play and I know the coach from Green Bay and I watch Mahomes and Kelce, they're doing everything well. They are a great football team. I understand that and I appreciate that and I know how difficult that is.”

Even if the Chiefs do win Sunday for their third straight championship and fourth in six years, the Packers still hold something over them. Green Bay also won NFL titles in 1961-62 and is the only team with five championships in a seven-year span.

“We’ll have to start talking about five out of seven,” Kramer said. “They still have a little hill to climb. I've gone from three in a row to five out of seven. I hope they do it, really. My life has been complete. I've had a wonderful ride.”

Bill Belichik, Tom Brady, and the Patriots combined for six titles between 2002 and 2019, with their only opportunity for a third straight appearance coming in the 2006 season, when the Colts beat them out to beat the Bears.  The year after that, the Giants beat them.

Kansas City will not be able to achieve five in seven years, starting with their 2020 title and two more in 2023 and 2024 as they just had their sixth.

Might it be harder to get to the top of the pro football hill these days?  Quite possibly, with the longer regular season, free agency, and larger, stronger players giving their best.  But until the record-keepers reset all records to "Super Bowl era" or "sixteen or more games in a season" Packer Nation will be heard from.  They still aren't: during that Philadelphia drubbing of Washington to get to the Super Bowl, reporters invoked both Elroy Hirsch and the 1940 Chicago Bears when the subject of rushing touchdowns came up.

LONG CHANCES SHORTEN LIVES.

Online trainwatching has become way more convenient in the last couple years, with several networks of cameras making arrangements to place them on buildings with a trackside view. There might be promotional considerations involved with the host eateries.

Every so often, a motorist applies for a Darwin award.

When it's a tie at the level crossing, you lose.  These motorists avoided that rundown feeling.  The train made an emergency stop, and Austell, Georgia, including the crossing with the other railroad, was tied up for a few minutes while the train pumped up and any required inspections took place.

Cross crossings cautiously.

DO THE PACKERS LIKE THE CHOICE OF SLOGANS?

Red State contributor Teri Christoph is less displeased now that "End Racism" will be replaced as the end zone slogan during the Super Bowl with "Choose Love" and "It Takes All of Us."  Her characterization?  "Only marginally better."

FRIDAY short TAKES.

We need the expertise of our faculty.  "Contemporary assessment is a tyrannical regime and a scourge of the college professor."  Professors, exercise your stewardship.

The weekly round-up of mostly pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

THANKS, BARACK.

Barack Obama might have goaded Donald Trump into seeking the presidency the first time.

Long before that happened, though, his Obama Care web site failed miserably.

No worries, comrades, there's an executive order for that.  "The [United States Digital Service] was an Obamacare office created to make government software better. They were essentially software development for the bureaucracy."

All Donald Trump had to do was change one word.  "Trump renamed the United States Digital Service (USDS) the United States DOGE Service which even kept the acronym the same. Not only did repurposing an appropriate existing department allow Trump to ensure there was funding for DOGE without having to fight with Congress - he also ensured its legality."

There's been some pretty good staff work going on between November 6 and January 20.

Trump has power to set priorities for Executive branch departments but there are limits. In the case of DOGE, Trump clearly had a team of lawyers looking at ways to accomplish this goal legally.

USDS was already there and funded for the specific purpose. 44 USCS Chapter 36 is the law that facilitates much of USDS. It is generally about developing tech for the government. This means that focusing on efficiency and evaluating the entire government through the lens of the IT that runs it is not really substantially altering the agency - just its focus.

There's more at the link, including a libertarian prayer at the end.  "I don’t like that this has to be done and think the executive branch has far more authority than they should. That said, this order was very well done and Trump and Musk have really done a good job strategically here."

Perhaps, somewhere, there are congressional Democrats who are figuring out that giving Barack Obama powers without review simply gave Donald Trump those powers.

THE WORLD THE TRACTION COMPANIES MADE.

It looked a lot like the so-called fifteen minute cities.

Picture living in a bustling neighborhood where all your friends, basic needs, and even your job are reachable by a quick walk or bike or bus ride. (Something many people experience, possibly for the first and last time, on college campuses.) In such a city, parking areas may have been reclaimed as urban greenways, chance encounters with neighbors might be more common, and small local businesses would proliferate and thrive.

This vision is sometimes referred to as “the 15-minute city,” a concept pioneered by Franco-Colombian scientist and mathematician Carlos Moreno. It means basically what it sounds like: Instead of expecting residents to get in their cars and drive long distances to work, run errands, and take part in social activities, cities should instead be designed to provide those kinds of opportunities in close proximity to where people live, reducing overdependence on cars and increasing local social cohesion.

Just what we need, a new sort of intelligent design to undo the effects of a century of not-so-intelligent design.

“It’s an invitation to reinvent our lifestyles and urban practices to build a better future, where sustainability, equity, and well-being are at the heart of our concerns,” Moreno writes in the book. I spoke with Moreno over Zoom and e-mail about the growth of the 15-minute city concept, some sources of backlash, and whom he hopes to reach with his new book.

Sure.  Chant the right worship-words and hope for the best.

YOU DON'T HAVE TO MAKE A FEDERAL CASE OUT OF IT.

That used to be a schoolyard expression somebody would deploy to defuse a situation.  It's relevant to situations that arise in adult life as well.

Perhaps it is time for the people who run the theaters to rethink their business model, which seems to be based on upselling at the concessions, and endless commercials. Nearly half an hour of previews? Seriously? We're already doing the theaters a favor by purchasing tickets and their popcorn, and we can tolerate the high prices intended for popcorn lovers at the concessions.  When the scheduled start time for the feature is 1.30, start it no later than 1.35.  Don't make me wait until two.

It's not yet a federal case, although in Connecticut there oughtta be a law.

A new law could force movie theaters to list the actual start times of features allowing viewers to skip lengthy commercial intros.

The bill was proposed by Senator Martin Looney of New Haven, Connecticut on January 21.

The legislation would, 'require that each movie advertisement or listing include, and separately list, the scheduled start time for (1) the movie trailers and advertisements that precede the advertised or listed movie, and (2) the advertised or listed movie.'

Looney says he put forward the bill as a way to save his constituents' precious time after being contacted by disgruntled members of the public.

'It seems to be an abuse of people's time,' Looney told the Register Citizen. 'If they want to get there early and watch the promos, they can.

'But if they just want to see the feature, they ought to be able to get there just in time for that.'

The reactions are instructive.  "Several movie theaters including AMC, the world's largest movie theater chain, already include disclosures which state that audiences should allow around 20 minutes for commercials."  I wonder if somebody at AMC heard me.  "I once sent Carmike a letter detailing these things ... it was after my feature picture advertised for 1.30 started a few minutes past 2, which way exceeds my patience for business necessity.  They have not yet responded.  I have not gone back.  Nor, apparently have many other viewers."  (That Carmike link now takes readers to AMC.)

LET'S ALL GO TO WIGAN PIER.

The freak magnet is still with us.  "I've never fully understood how every sort of exotic preference somehow attaches itself, or gets itself attached, to Marxian thinking."

"Progressives Won’t Help the Working Class by Abandoning Marginalized Groups" does little to enlighten me.

Working class is as much an identity as gender, religious affiliation, immigrant status, place, race, and ethnicity. All of us hold multiple identities. But in the political context, “identity politics” is often a dog whistle for Black and brown communities or members of the LGBTQIA+ community. Political leaders and pundits’ calls to deprioritize communities of color and marginalized groups distort the nation’s power dynamic and risk sidelining voices working to build a more equitable society. Such takes also pretend the far-right offers credible solutions to pressing economic issues while minimizing the critical role progressives play in challenging the systems that drive economic inequality. Any critique of movement or “identity politics” without a power analysis misses the forest for the trees.

That passage does a pretty good job illustrating why critical theory is not Marxian.  "Working class" means alienated from ownership of the means of production.  The populist right never lacks for opportunities to produce white folks with normal sexual appetites who get privilege-shamed in order to "prioritize" those holding more Oppression Olympics medals.  That "power analysis" (I'm using "power" to mean "the ability to direct the action of others," which can mean at the point of a gun, on pain of your job, or by the trading of cash or favors) elides the very real power the human resources department has over an employee's promotion, or Student Affairs has over your Permanent Record.

WIN ONE FOR THE GIPPER.

Happy Reagan's Birthday.  "Oh, there are those who say 'today’s GOP wouldn’t nominate Reagan!' – to which I respond with a contemptuous sigh, before telling the critic to listen to 'A Time for Choosing', and tell me who Reagan more resembles; Arne Carlson, or Scott Walker?"

WILD MARY KEEPS ON ROLLING.

Axios provided a cheat sheet describing coming rail transit attractions in Charlotte, North Carolina.  I direct your attention to a vision of the Commuter Rail service.

Charlotte Area Transit System visual retrieved from Axios.

The commuter rail service will be called the red line, with the streetcar called the gold line, a light rail or bus rapid transit service proposed as the silver line, and the existing light rail service called the blue line.  (As long as there is a red line and a blue line, what are the sweater colors of the Hurricanes?)  The authority also propose a new rail station to "replace the outdated Amtrak station" and serve the red, silver, and gold lines.

I doubt there is going to be a stylized fireball on the red line's locomotives, let alone a BL2 on the head pin.

ENOUGH OF THE PEACE PROCESS ALREADY.

I took some stick on social media for mocking Hamas as the only entity that could turn beachfront property into a slum.  "Never mind that Hamas could have avoided all the trouble by, oh, not attacking that music festival in the first place, or, once they figured out the Israelis were serious, returning all the prisoners, surrendering the ringleaders, disbanding their government, and inviting the Kuwaitis, who have some experience with beachfront property, to be trustees for Gaza."

A PITTANCE HERE, A PITTANCE THERE.

I wonder if the presidential advisors sailing under the banner of government efficiency are doing the taxpayers a solid by calling attention to all the special projects that have been continued possibly since some time in the Clinton presidency.  "The usual Congressional wrangling is getting in the way of a set of proper appropriation bills, and all the good-to-be-rid-of entries in the bloated budget are likely to survive in a continuing resolution."

That's been an ongoing Cold Spring Shops theme.

It was on Militant Normals to call attention to those line items for the Commodity Credit Corporation and public radio and the national endowments and the essential air subsidy, and to pressure their Members of Congress to reduce or eliminate those things.  One reason the debt-ceiling-government-shutdown-continuing-resolution drama goes on and on is the manufactured crisis mentality is a good way to sneak in all those things while people pay more attention to whether the "omnibus" or "supplemental" or what have you passes than to what's in it.

Thanks to Elon Musk and his techie apprentices with speedy search algorithms, going through the books line by line and dime by dime doesn't take the better part of the year.

NOTICE OF DISCONTINUANCE.

Sometimes there's a recognition lag.

Several years ago, I read a book--was it Chris Kyle's "American Sniper"?--and in a chapter about Navy SEAL training was this observation:  you could drop out if you wanted to, but if you decided it was a rash decision, they'd let you change your mind and stay in.  No one who changed their mind ever finished SEAL training; once that thought of quitting entered into your consciousness, it was impossible to shake.

That appeared at Right on the Left Coast in August 2023.

I was not aware that the thought of ringing out, even when your comrades first talked you out of it, led to candidates ringing out.

Last week, though, the thought of quitting entered into my consciousness. I thought no, I'll keep posting, but as in SEAL training, the thought is impossible to shake.

I've started some new activities, I need the time, and after almost 14,000 posts I'm ready to leave this blog in the ether and turn my time to these other pursuits. I'm sure that, once in awhile, I might be moved to post something, but I probably shouldn't--I should let it go, ending on my own terms, on what I consider a high note. I have some unfinished draft posts on some rather controversial topics that I'll leave unfinished.

Slowly I work through the blog-roll, and slowly, sometimes very slowly, it gets updated.

TONIGHT'S RAILROAD READING.

Trains contributor Doug Riddell, a retired Amtrak engineer, makes use of his special knowledge.

All [Seaboard Coast Line] defect detectors were audible, broadcasting the condition of a train and its axle count on the railroad’s radio frequency.

After we uneventfully passed a third detector, the local trainmaster radioed us.

“Rock Train,” he said, “that’s the third time you’ve gotten an odd-numbered axle count. That’s an error. When a defect detector transmits a false report, you’re required to stop and inspect your train.”

“False report?” I asked.

“I’m not aware of any cars with an odd number of axles,” he sneered. “Your crew would appear to be in violation of the rules.”

“Sir, we have a dead-in-tow engine with five axles — two in front, and three on the rear, so the axle count is correct.”

“You are pulling my leg, aren’t you, Mr. Riddell?” he asked, a little hesitantly.

“No, sir,” I said. “Come take a look.”

“No, that won’t be necessary. Carry on.”

A cat might be born with nine lives, but diesels have to go to the works every so often.

THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE IS A CONSTITUTIONAL ANOMALY.

National Review's Andrew C. McCarthy suggests that what Donald Trump seeks, with a little help from his friends, is "an overdue rebalancing of government."  The Apprentice moment comes for some inspectors general, and it might herald a long-overdue restoration of enumerated and separated powers.

Although the officials caught in the crossfire worked, at least nominally, in the executive branch, their pink slips implicate a constitutionally anomalous building block of the administrative state: the proposition that Congress, in defiance of separation of powers principles, is free not only to create hybrid positions and agencies, but also to impose legislative controls on the president’s power to remove executive officers at will.

The immediate flashpoint of this dispute is a claim by the fired IGs that the president violated the law in terminating them. (Yes, the plural is “inspectors general,” but for simplicity’s sake I will refer to them as “IGs.”) Their problem is that the law on which they rely is unconstitutional — an infirmity I believe Congress was cognizant of, which is why it provided no remedy for the “violation.”

Mr McCarthy begins his story in the 1970s, although the Congressional actions whose constitutionality he questions might (I'm an econ guy with some experience with regulated industries, not a lawyer, not even on television) be a straightforward extension of the independent regulatory commissions that started cropping up a century previous.

The 1970s were a turbulent time in which progressives reared on New Deal lore were ascendant in the Democratic Party. The Watergate scandal dramatically weakened President Richard M. Nixon, and his resignation — along with high inflation and an oil crisis attendant to the 1973 Yom Kippur War — resulted in huge majorities for Democrats in both houses after the 1974 midterms, and subsequently to the 1976 election of President Jimmy Carter, theretofore Georgia’s little known Democratic governor. Carter proved more than happy to sign off on congressional Democrats’ raids on the president’s constitutional powers.

The ne plus ultra of the American Founding had been liberty. Government was seen as a necessary evil that could preserve liberty only if effectively limited. The conceit of the Framers was that the separation of powers — in particular, the complete division of the power to make law from the power to enforce it — was more essential to the protection of liberty than any bill of rights could be.

Yesterday, we looked at Congresses giving presidents the power to stop the worst Congressional excesses, today are we looking at presidents giving Congresses the power to stop the worst presidential excesses?  Or might there be more at work?

For progressives, to the contrary, the central goal is to improve society as a whole (at least that’s the positive spin; my own view is that the goal is to empower progressives). They thus regard government as a necessary good, vital to coercing people in the direction of “progress” (as they see it in that moment), even if that means eroding individual liberty. Hence, like liberty itself, separation of powers is seen as a nuisance that impedes government’s capacity to marshal its resources in pursuit of the collective good.

Progressives eschew discrete branches checking each other while exercising their separate powers, as well as a system of laws made and executed, respectively, by political branches accountable to the people affected. They prefer governance by bureaucracies of theoretically non-partisan experts who should be insulated from political accountability because they are altruistically devoted to _____ [fill in the abstraction du jour: Science, the Rule of Law, Sustainable Growth, Equity, Good Governance, or, of course, Progress].

A few years before Herbert Croly and Woodrow Wilson, however, came the independent regulatory commissions.

Suppose the demand and cost conditions were such that one firm could undersell any combination of two or more smaller firms and it made no sense to break it up?  Well, if you can draw the cost curves, you can surely draw up a regulatory commission and have those Disinterested Experts determine the fair prices and provide a reasonable return on investment.  The problem with that approach, as Leonard Weiss, no Austrian School type he, noted years ago is that businesses learn what their costs are by doing: no such market test exists for regulated monopolies.  About the best you can do is have the regulators make their rulings and let the courts sort it out.  In that tale is the origin of the administrative state, ultimately the field of administrative law, and the concept we know as Chevron deference.

That post continued in a way that suggested the president, Congresses, and courts preferred some of the work to be done by those theoretically non-partisan experts.  "Let me note before going on that numerous appellate and Supreme Court findings have noted the 'questionable utility' of a court in handling many economic matters, and there is a long history of courts preferring to leave the creation of agencies to legislatures or Congress and to trust the commissioners to do a proper job."

THE FIRE NEXT TIME.

While the Los Angeles wildfires were still mostly not contained, word reached Cold Spring Shops of a fire at a battery factory in west central California.

Authorities in Monterey County, California lifted all evacuations Friday night, one day after a fire broke out at one of the world's largest lithium battery storage facilities.

The Monterey County Sheriff's Office made the announcement shortly after 6 p.m. local time. Health officials still advised residents near the Moss Landing Vistra Power Plant, located about 90 miles south of San Francisco, to limit outdoor exposure and to keep doors and windows closed until further notice.

California, the land of the crumbling infrastructure, with the risk of being poisoned.

Assemblymember Dawn Addis and Monterey County Supervisor Glenn Church, who spoke at the earlier press conference, addressed the media after the flare-up and voicing safety concerns for their constituents.

"There's been three incidents here. There's been the PG&E incident. It's really time to put a stop to it and take a breath and make sure that we can assure the public they're safe," said Addis. "This incident does look and feel very different. It's a different configuration, the fire is different."

However, by around 3 p.m., the flames had once again subsided and the black smoke being produced by the fire turned white.

Also on Friday afternoon, CBS News Bay Area obtained a statement from the Environmental Protection Agency regarding the Moss Landing facility fire.

"Last night, the Monterey Fire Department requested EPA technical assistance to provide perimeter air monitoring at the Vistra Moss Landing Power Plant in Moss Landing, Monterey County. EPA and contractors were mobilized and arrived on scene. Additional EPA personnel, including four air monitoring specialists, and equipment are currently en route. The fire is ongoing, and EPA has joined Unified Command. At this time, Unified Command is led by the City of Monterey's Fire Department.

Evacuation and safety decisions are being made by the Incident Command. EPA is supporting the local authorities by gathering air monitoring data to help the fire Incident Command and local public health officials those decisions. Please reach out to the local fire department for more information."

The fire started at around 3 p.m. Thursday afternoon at a power plant and battery facility operated by Texas-based Vistra Energy. The plant is a natural gas-powered electricity generation plant in Moss Landing, an unincorporated area of the county.

"Stop and take a breath" might not have been the most felicitous way to urge calm.  And calm, notes Michael "From Poverty to Progress" Magoon, is not the proper frame of mind where lithium battery factories are concerned.  And even when the works was functioning properly, it would not have been able to power even a small electric furnace steel plant.  "If I understand the units of measurement correctly, the entire battery system can output 750 MW of electricity for a total duration of 4 hours."

Power Line's John Hinderaker suggests the green delusions will be costly.

Their Green Dream is collapsing ignominiously, and meanwhile, the Chinese are opening new coal-fired power plants at the rate of at least one per week. If we continue down the futile energy path we are now on, we will lose out to the Communist Chinese. And, frankly, if we are that dumb, we deserve to lose.

Yes, and if we rely on Chinese steel, our infrastructure will crumble around us.

WELL, YES.

Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds introduces a lament about what sponsored research has become with "Given that the purpose of a system is what it does, the purpose of the NIH is to centralize control of scientific research under a federal bureaucracy, not to produce the best or most innovative science."

That's the pithy elaboration of a traditional Cold Spring Shops theme.

The James G. Martin Center's Edward Archer characterizes grantsmanship as fostering "The Intellectual and Moral Decline in Academic Research."  In particular, "My experiences at four research universities and as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) research fellow taught me that the relentless pursuit of taxpayer funding has eliminated curiosity, basic competence, and scientific integrity in many fields."

Well, yes.

And, just before the corona tyranny descended, there were people you might have since heard of characterizing the grant-getting as a glass bead game with indirect cost returns attached.

GIANT CONVEXIFIERS OF SPACE AND TIME.

Grist associate editor C. E. Thompson poses a question, "When you envision the future of sustainable living, do you picture a dense city or the rural countryside?"  Her interviewees tend to be of the urbanist and environmental sort.  Toward the end of the article, she interviews Sarah Carlson, affiliated with Practical Farmers of Iowa (does that include showing up at the caucus to support the ethanol subsidies?) with a vision worthy of a featureless plain (which Iowa, contrary to public perception, is not):

She wants to see a world where more people are drawn to rural life, rather than lured away by opportunities elsewhere, creating diverse, thriving communities.

But her dream vision would involve an even greater overhaul of land use. “To me, it’s concentric circles,” she said. “Nearest to the humans would be the most highly perishable crops — so, around small towns is more fruit and vegetable production. The next layer out from that would be milk and dairy systems that would be grass-based as much as possible.” And extending out from there, fields of broad acre crops would be grown in varied rotations.

I wonder if she dreamt it auf Deutsch.

In 1810 [Johann Heinrich von] Thünen began gathering data for the book for which he is remembered, Der isolierte Staat (1826; “The Isolated State”). In it he imagined an isolated city, set in the middle of a level and uniformly fertile plain without navigable waterways and bounded by a wilderness. He used this model to demonstrate methods of maximizing agricultural production in concentric zones. Heavy products and perishables would be produced close to the town, while lighter and more durable goods could be manufactured on the periphery. Because it would cost more to transport goods to areas distant from the city centre, the returns to the outlying areas land would diminish until, at a certain distance, land rent would become zero. Moreover, methods of cultivation would vary—with land cultivated more intensively near the city, because the more valuable land near the city would demand a high rate of return. Subsequent writers have often built upon the model that Thünen devised.

The book von Thünen wrote is still in print.  And indeed, subsequent writers have built upon that model.  Again it is helpful to know your Germans, as Walter Christaller and August Lösch developed central place theory in order to make sense of large cities surrounded by smaller cities, with towns filling in the space, and orchards and milk sheds in Thünenesque rings around the cities.

Central Place Theory sought to explain the economic relationships of cities with smaller settlements. It also seeks to explain why cities are located where they are geographically and how they serve the surrounding smaller settlements with speciality goods and services.

The theory was used to explain a generally isotropic landscape, in other words a flat and homogeneous surface, and how varied urban locations dispersed on such surfaces. The population was seen as generally evenly distributed with settlements being generally equidistant.

In the standard view, consumers and sellers also have generally equal economic and purchasing power, which affects markets and placement of services. Given these assumptions, then a number of results are observed.

First, as settlements get bigger, then fewer large settlements emerge. The larger settlements grow the further larger settlements are from each other. As settlements grow, its range and functions that it provides also grow. As settlements grow, they tend to specialize more and provide greater services.

Central Place Theory can be visualized is a pattern of hexagons and networks that form when setting up the arrangements of the different order of settlements. Over a homogenous landscape in terms of population distribution, soil fertility, and transportation systems, lower order settlements (villages and hamlets) form a hexagon pattern around intermediate order settlements (towns) which in turn form a hexagon around higher order settlements (cities).

Distribution of goods and services is then served to the settlements closest to the central place. High order settlements offer specialized goods and services that requirement [c.q.] a higher threshold of demand.

That class of location and land use models stipulates a featureless plain in order for the math to work out.  (I speak from experience.) The interaction of scale economies and information spillovers leading to population centers, let alone population centers getting bigger, is messier still.  It's easier to get a handle on those dynamics by running simulations rather than deriving them with the help of a very large blackboard, even if you're Paul Krugman.

COME UP WITH A BETTER TALKING POINT.

[Editorial note, 4 pm: Our President's tariff ukases involving Mexico and Canada, noted in the continuation below the jump, are on pause.]

Ralph Nader predictably objects to a president he disagrees with doing what presidents are prone to do.  "He is using illegal executive orders as poisoned spears against just about every program the federal government administers to advance the health, safety, and economic well-being of all Americans."

Complete with what we've come to expect.

Seriously.  "Yes, without food, healthcare, and safety initiatives, Americans will die or get sick, whether they voted for Trump or not."

Yes, we've all learned helplessness from a hundred years or so of the administrative state, haven't we?  Unsurprisingly, Mr Nader concludes by illustrating how little he understands of limited government.  "He is now ruling by dictates that are getting more sweeping and penetrating by the day. He should read a history book."

THE DERAILMENT THAT RERAILED THE TRUMP TRAIN.

Two years ago today, a bearing burned off a car of a Norfolk Southern freight train in East Palestine, Ohio.  Our focus at the time was on the things that ran off the rails, and yet, we couldn't avoid the election follies.

There is emerging bipartisan agreement that transportation secretary Pete "What, me worry?" Buttigieg is out of his depth.  From the left come calls for, predictably, more administrative state rulemaking.  "Progressives are demanding that U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg improve rail safety regulations in response to the unfolding public health disaster in East Palestine, Ohio—the site of a recent fiery train crash and subsequent 'controlled release' of toxic fumes that critics say was entirely avoidable."  From the right comes slagging on the secretary for seeming to worry more about the multicultural makeup of construction workers than noting the crumbled infrastructure.  (Never mind that the railroads maintain the freight mains out of their own funds.)  In some cases, there is agreement across political lines, with Erin Brockovich being quoted in that Common Dreams roundup, and also appearing with Geraldo Rivera on Fox News Channel's morning report.

By the time the National Transportation Safety Board issued its preliminary findings, it's possible the derailment had already become a campaign photo opportunity.  "The political types, predictably, continue to exploit the situation.  'But few people here trust the authorities.'  Representatives of the Jarrett regency have stayed away, while its noisiest critics show up."  Newly elected Ohio senator J.D. Vance looked in on his constituents.  He's now the vice-president of these United States.  Donald Trump stopped in, with a trailer load of water and other staple supplies.  Did he stand first responders to McDonald's while he was there?  He's again the president of these United States.

Two years into the Jarrett regency came a freight train derailment and the senile figurehead figured sending an underling to do for safety vests what Michael Dukakis did for tanker helmets would be gesture enough.  Oops.  "The drive between Butler, Pennsylvania, and the Ohio village of East Palestine is less than 42 miles long. In between are the villages and boroughs of Lyndora, Connoquenessing and Evans City on the Pennsylvania side before you cross the state line directly into the village of East Palestine."

Donald Trump was still in the wilderness, but it's possible that when he showed up there, with a trailer load of supplies and a tab at McDonald's, it got him back to the White House.

One reporter got it right.