Author name: Mike M.

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Supreme Court Chief Justice lets Trump fire FTC Democrat, at least for now

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1935 Supreme Court is key precedent

The key precedent in the case is Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, a 1935 ruling in which the Supreme Court unanimously held that the president can only remove FTC commissioners for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office. Trump’s termination notices to Slaughter and Bedoya said they were being fired simply because their presence on the commission “is inconsistent with my Administration’s priorities.”

The Trump administration argues that Humphrey’s Executor shouldn’t apply to the current version of the FTC because it exercises significant executive power. But the appeals court, in a 2-1 ruling, said “the present-day Commission exercises the same powers that the Court understood it to have in 1935 when Humphrey’s Executor was decided.”

“The government has no likelihood of success on appeal given controlling and directly on point Supreme Court precedent,” the panel majority said.

But while the government was found to have no likelihood of success in the DC Circuit appeals court, its chances are presumably much better in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court previously stayed District Court decisions in cases involving Trump’s removal of Democrats from the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

In a 2020 decision involving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the court said in a footnote that its 1935 “conclusion that the FTC did not exercise executive power has not withstood the test of time.” If the Supreme Court ultimately rules in favor of Trump, it could throw out the Humphrey’s Executor ruling or clarify it in a way that makes it inapplicable to the FTC.

But Humphrey’s Executor is still a binding precedent, Slaughter’s opposition to the administrative stay said. “This Court should not grant an administrative stay where the court below simply ‘follow[ed] the case which directly controls,’ as it was required to do,” the Slaughter filing said.

Supreme Court Chief Justice lets Trump fire FTC Democrat, at least for now Read More »

who-can-get-a-covid-vaccine—and-how?-it’s-complicated.

Who can get a COVID vaccine—and how? It’s complicated.

ACIP, CDC, COVID-19, fda, health, mRNA, pharmacists, robert f kennedy jr, vaccines / /

We’re working with a patchwork system, and there are a lot of gray areas.

Vaccinations were available at CVS in Huntington Park, California, on August 28, 2024. Credit: Getty | Christina House

As fall approaches and COVID cases tick up, you might be thinking about getting this season’s COVID-19 vaccine. The annually updated shots have previously been easily accessible to anyone over 6 months of age. Most people could get them at no cost by simply walking into their neighborhood pharmacy—and that’s what most people did.

However, the situation is much different this year with an ardent anti-vaccine activist, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as the country’s top health official. Since taking the role, Kennedy has worked diligently to dismantle the country’s premier vaccination infrastructure, as well as directly hinder access to lifesaving shots. That includes restricting access to COVID-19 vaccines—something he’s done by brazenly flouting all standard federal processes while providing no evidence-based reasoning for the changes.

How we got here

In late May, Kennedy unilaterally decided that all healthy children and pregnant people should no longer have access to the shots. He announced the unprecedented change not through official federal channels, but via a video posted on Elon Musk’s X platform. Top vaccine and infectious disease officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—which sets federal vaccination recommendations—said they also learned of the change via X.

Medical experts—particularly the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG)—immediately slammed the change, noting that data continues to indicate pregnant women and children under age 2 are particularly vulnerable to severe COVID-19. Both medical groups have since released their own vaccination guidance documents that uphold COVID-19 vaccine recommendations for those patient groups. (AAP here, ACOG here)

Nevertheless, in line with Kennedy, officials at the Food and Drug Administration signaled that they would take the unprecedented, unilateral step of changing the labels on the vaccines to limit who could get them—in this case, people 65 and over, and children and adults with health conditions that put them at risk of severe COVID-19. Kennedy’s FDA underlings—FDA Commissioner Martin Makary and top vaccine regulator, Vinay Prasad—laid out the plans alongside a lengthy list of health conditions in a commentary piece published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The list includes pregnancy—which is evidence-based, but odd, since it conflicts with Kennedy.

What was supposed to happen

When there isn’t a zealous anti-vaccine activist personally directing federal vaccine policy, US health agencies have a thorough, transparent protocol for approving and recommending vaccinations. Generally, it starts with the FDA, which has both its own scientists and a panel of outside expert advisors to review safety and efficacy data submitted by a vaccine’s maker. The FDA’s advisory committee—the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC)—then holds a completely public meeting to review, analyze, and discuss the data. They make a recommendation on a potential approval and then the FDA commissioner can decide to sign off, typically in accordance with internal experts.

Resulting FDA approvals or authorizations are usually broad, basically covering people who could safely get the vaccine. The specifics of who should get the vaccine fall to the CDC.

Once the FDA approves or authorizes a vaccine, the CDC has a similar evaluation process. Internal experts review all the data for the vaccine, plus the epidemiological and public health data to assess things like disease burden, populations at risk, resource access, etc. A committee of outsides expert advisors do the same—again in a totally transparent public meeting that is livestreamed with all documents and presentations available on the CDC’s website.

That committee, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), then makes recommendations to the CDC about how the shots should be used. These recommendations can provide nuanced clinical guidance on exactly who should receive a vaccine, when, in what scenarios, and in what time series, etc. The recommendations may also be firm or soft—e.g., some people should get a vaccine, while others may get the vaccine.

The CDC director then decides whether to adopt ACIP’s recommendations (the director usually does) and updates the federal immunization schedules accordingly. Those schedules set clinical standards for immunizations, including routine childhood vaccinations, nationwide. Once a vaccine recommendation makes it to the ACIP-guided federal immunization schedules, private health insurance companies are required to cover those recommended vaccinations at no cost to members. And—a key catch for this year—19 states tie ACIP vaccine recommendations to pharmacists’ ability to independently administer vaccines.

What actually happened

Days after Kennedy’s X announcement of COVID-19 vaccine restrictions in late May, the CDC changed the federal immunization schedules. The recommendation for a COVID-19 shot during pregnancy was removed. But, for healthy children 6 months to 17 years, the CDC diverged from Kennedy slightly. The updated schedule doesn’t revoke access outright; instead, it now says that healthy children can get the shots if there is shared decision-making with the child’s doctor, that is, if the parent/child wants to get the vaccine and the doctor approves. ACIP was not involved in any of these changes.

On August 27, the FDA followed through with its plans to change the labels on COVID-19 vaccines, limiting access to people who are 65 and older and people who have an underlying condition that puts them at high risk of severe COVID-19.

FDA’s advisory committee, VRBPAC, met in late May, just a few days after FDA officials announced their plans to restrict COVID-19 vaccine access. The committee was not allowed to discuss the proposed changes. Instead, it was limited to discussing the SARS-CoV-2 strain selection for the season, and questions about the changes were called “off topic” by an FDA official.

ACIP, meanwhile, has not met to discuss the use of the updated COVID-19 vaccines for the 2025–2026 season. Last year, ACIP met and set the 2024–2025 COVID-19 shot recommendations in June. But, instead, in June of this year, Kennedy fired all 17 members of ACIP, falsely claiming members were rife with conflicts of interest. He quickly repopulated ACIP with anti-vaccine allies who are largely unqualified and some of whom have been paid witnesses in lawsuits against vaccine makers, a clear conflict of interest. While Kennedy is reportedly working to pack more anti-vaccine activists onto ACIP, the committee is scheduled to meet and discuss the COVID-19 vaccine on September 18 and 19. The committee will also discuss other vaccines.

Outside medical and public health experts view ACIP as critically compromised and expect it will further restrict access to vaccines.

With this set of events, COVID-19 vaccine access is in disarray. Here’s what we do and don’t know about access.

Getting a vaccine

FDA vaccine criteria

Prior to Kennedy, COVID-19 vaccines were available to all people ages 6 months and up. But that is no longer the case. The current FDA approvals are as follows:

Pfizer’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine (COMIRNATY) is only available to people:

  • 65 years of age and older, or
  • 5 years through 64 years of age with at least one underlying condition that puts them at high risk for severe outcomes from COVID-19.

Moderna’s mRNA COVID-10 vaccine (SPIKEVAX) is only available to people:

  • 65 years of age and older, or
  • 6 months through 64 years of age with at least one underlying condition that puts them at high risk for severe outcomes from COVID-19.

Novavax’s protein subunit COVID-19 vaccine NUVAXOVID is only available to people:

  • 65 years of age and older, or
  • 12 years through 64 years of age with at least one underlying condition that puts them at high risk for severe outcomes from COVID-19.

Who can get a COVID-19 vaccine and where now depends on a person’s age, underlying conditions, and the state they reside in.

States-based restrictions

The fact that ACIP has not set recommendations for the use of 2025–2026 COVID-19 vaccines means vaccine access is a messy patchwork across the country. As mentioned above, 19 states link pharmacists’ ability to independently provide COVID-19 vaccines to ACIP recommendations. Without those recommendations, pharmacies in those states may not be able to administer the vaccines at all, or only provide them with a doctor’s prescription—even for people who fit into the FDA’s criteria.

Last week, The New York Times reported that CVS and Walgreens, the country’s largest pharmacy chains, were either not providing vaccines or requiring prescriptions in 16 states. And the list of 16 states where CVS had those restrictions was slightly different than where Walgreens had them, likely due to ambiguities in state-specific regulations.

The National Alliance of State Pharmacy Associations (NASPA) and the American Pharmacists Association (APhA) have a state-by-state overview of pharmacist vaccination authority regulations here.

For people meeting the FDA criteria

In the 31 states that allow for broader pharmacist vaccination authority, people meeting FDA’s criteria (65 years and older, and people with underlying conditions), should be able to get the vaccine at a pharmacy like usual. And once ACIP sets recommendations later this month—assuming the committee doesn’t restrict access further—people in those groups should be able to get them at pharmacies in the remaining states, too.

Proving underlying conditions

People under 65 with underlying health conditions who want to get their COVID-19 shot at a pharmacy will likely have to do something to confirm their eligibility.

Brigid Groves, APhA’s vice president of professional affairs and the organization’s expert on vaccine policy, told Ars that the most likely scenario is that people will have to fill out forms prior to vaccination, indicating the conditions they have that make them eligible, a process known as self-attestation. This is not unusual, Groves noted. Other vaccinations require such self-attestation of conditions, and for years, this has been sufficient for pharmacists to administer vaccines and for insurance policies to cover those vaccinations, she said.

“APhA is a strong supporter of that patient self-attestation, recognizing that patients have a very good grasp of their medical conditions,” Groves said.

For people who don’t meet the FDA criteria

There are a lot of reasons why healthy children and adults outside the FDA’s criteria may still want to get vaccinated: Maybe they are under the age of 2, an age that is, in fact, still at high risk of severe COVID-19; maybe they live or work with vulnerable people, such as cancer patients, the elderly, or immunocompromised; or maybe they just want to avoid a crummy respiratory illness that they could potentially pass on to someone else.

For these people, regardless of what state they are in, getting the vaccine would mean a pharmacist or doctor would have to go “off-label” to provide it.

“It’s very gray on how a pharmacist may proceed in that scenario,” Groves told Ars. Going off-label could open pharmacists up to liability concerns, she said. And even if a patient can obtain a prescription for an off-label vaccine, that still may not be enough to allow a pharmacist to administer the vaccine.

“Pharmacists have something called ‘corresponding responsibility,’ Groves explained. “So even if a physician, or a nurse practitioner, or whomever may send a prescription over for that vaccine, that pharmacist still has that responsibility to ensure this is the right medication, for the right patient, at the right time, and that they’re indicated for it,” she said. So, it would still be going outside what they’re technically authorized to do.

Doctors, on the other hand, can administer vaccines off-label, which they might do if they choose to follow guidance from medical organizations like AAP and ACOG, or if they think it’s best for their patient. They can do this without any heightened professional liability, contrary to some suggestions Kennedy has made (doctors prescribe things off-label all the time). But, people may have to schedule an appointment with their doctor and convince them to provide the shot—a situation far less convenient than strolling into a local pharmacy. Also, since pharmacies have provided the vast majority of COVID-19 vaccines so far, some doctors’ offices may not have them on hand.

Pregnancy

It’s unclear if pregnancy still falls under the FDA’s criteria for a high-risk condition. It was included in the list that FDA officials published in May. However, the agency did not make that list official when it changed the vaccine labels last month. Some experts have suggested that, in this case, the qualifying high-risk conditions default to the CDC’s existing list of high-risk conditions, which includes pregnancy. But it’s not entirely clear.

In addition, with Kennedy’s previous unilateral change to the CDC’s immunization schedule—which dropped the COVID-19 vaccine recommendation during pregnancy—pregnant people could still face barriers to getting the vaccine in the 19 states that link pharmacist authorization to ACIP recommendations. That could change if ACIP reverses Kennedy’s restriction when the committee meets later this month, but that may be unlikely.

Insurance coverage

It’s expected that insurance companies will continue to cover the full costs of COVID-19 vaccines for people who meet the FDA criteria. For off-label use, it remains unclear.

Groves noted that in June, AHIP, the trade organization for health insurance providers, put out a statement suggesting that it would continue to cover vaccines at previous levels.

“We are committed to ongoing coverage of vaccines to ensure access and affordability for this respiratory virus season. We encourage all Americans to talk to their health care provider about vaccines,” the statement reads.

However, Groves was cautious about how to interpret that. “At the end of the day, on the claims side, we’ll see how that pans out,” she said.

Rapidly evolving access

While the outcome of the ACIP meeting on September 18 and 19 could alter things, a potentially bigger source of change could be actions by states. Already, there have been rapid responses with states changing their policies to ensure pharmacists can provide vaccines, and states making alliances with other states to provide vaccine recommendations and vaccines themselves.

Photo of Beth Mole

Beth is Ars Technica’s Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes.

Who can get a COVID vaccine—and how? It’s complicated. Read More »

“first-of-its-kind”-ai-settlement:-anthropic-to-pay-authors-$1.5-billion

“First of its kind” AI settlement: Anthropic to pay authors $1.5 billion

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Authors revealed today that Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion and destroy all copies of the books the AI company pirated to train its artificial intelligence models.

In a press release provided to Ars, the authors confirmed that the settlement is “believed to be the largest publicly reported recovery in the history of US copyright litigation.” Covering 500,000 works that Anthropic pirated for AI training, if a court approves the settlement, each author will receive $3,000 per work that Anthropic stole. “Depending on the number of claims submitted, the final figure per work could be higher,” the press release noted.

Anthropic has already agreed to the settlement terms, but a court must approve them before the settlement is finalized. Preliminary approval may be granted this week, while the ultimate decision may be delayed until 2026, the press release noted.

Justin Nelson, a lawyer representing the three authors who initially sued to spark the class action—Andrea Bartz, Kirk Wallace Johnson, and Charles Graeber—confirmed that if the “first of its kind” settlement “in the AI era” is approved, the payouts will “far” surpass “any other known copyright recovery.”

“It will provide meaningful compensation for each class work and sets a precedent requiring AI companies to pay copyright owners,” Nelson said. “This settlement sends a powerful message to AI companies and creators alike that taking copyrighted works from these pirate websites is wrong.”

Groups representing authors celebrated the settlement on Friday. The CEO of the Authors’ Guild, Mary Rasenberger, said it was “an excellent result for authors, publishers, and rightsholders generally.” Perhaps most critically, the settlement shows “there are serious consequences when” companies “pirate authors’ works to train their AI, robbing those least able to afford it,” Rasenberger said.

“First of its kind” AI settlement: Anthropic to pay authors $1.5 billion Read More »

microsoft-open-sources-bill-gates’-6502-basic-from-1978

Microsoft open-sources Bill Gates’ 6502 BASIC from 1978

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On Wednesday, Microsoft released the complete source code for Microsoft BASIC for 6502 Version 1.1, the 1978 interpreter that powered the Commodore PET, VIC-20, Commodore 64, and Apple II through custom adaptations. The company posted 6,955 lines of assembly language code to GitHub under an MIT license, allowing anyone to freely use, modify, and distribute the code that helped launch the personal computer revolution.

“Rick Weiland and I (Bill Gates) wrote the 6502 BASIC,” Gates commented on the Page Table blog in 2010. “I put the WAIT command in.”

For millions of people in the late 1970s and early 1980s, variations of Microsoft’s BASIC interpreter provided their first experience with programming. Users could type simple commands like “10 PRINT ‘HELLO'” and “20 GOTO 10” to create an endless loop of text on their screens, for example—often their first taste of controlling a computer directly. The interpreter translated these human-readable commands into instructions that the processor could execute, one line at a time.

The Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) was released in January 1977 and used the MOS 6502 and ran a variation of Microsoft BASIC. Credit: SSPL/Getty Images

At just 6,955 lines of assembly language—Microsoft’s low-level 6502 code talked almost directly to the processor. Microsoft’s BASIC squeezed remarkable functionality into minimal memory, a key achievement when RAM cost hundreds of dollars per kilobyte.

In the early personal computer space, cost was king. The MOS 6502 processor that ran this BASIC cost about $25, while competitors charged $200 for similar chips. Designer Chuck Peddle created the 6502 specifically to bring computing to the masses, and manufacturers built variations of the chip into the Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System, and millions of Commodore computers.

The deal that got away

In 1977, Commodore licensed Microsoft’s 6502 BASIC for a flat fee of $25,000. Jack Tramiel’s company got perpetual rights to ship the software in unlimited machines—no royalties, no per-unit fees. While $25,000 seemed substantial then, Commodore went on to sell millions of computers with Microsoft BASIC inside. Had Microsoft negotiated a per-unit licensing fee like they did with later products, the deal could have generated tens of millions in revenue.

The version Microsoft released—labeled 1.1—contains bug fixes that Commodore engineer John Feagans and Bill Gates jointly implemented in 1978 when Feagans traveled to Microsoft’s Bellevue offices. The code includes memory management improvements (called “garbage collection” in programming terms) and shipped as “BASIC V2” on the Commodore PET.

Microsoft open-sources Bill Gates’ 6502 BASIC from 1978 Read More »

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Lull in Falcon Heavy missions opens window for SpaceX to build new landing pads

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SpaceX’s goal for this year is 170 Falcon 9 launches, and the company is on pace to come close to this target. Most Falcon 9 launches carry SpaceX’s own Starlink broadband satellites into orbit. The FAA’s environmental approval opens the door for more flights from SpaceX’s busiest launch pad.

But launch pad availability is not the only hurdle limiting how many Falcon 9 flights can take off in a year. There’s also the rate of production for Falcon 9 upper stages, which are new on each flight, and the time it takes for each vessel in SpaceX’s fleet of drone ships (one in California, two in Florida) to return to port with a recovered booster and redeploy back to sea again for the next mission. SpaceX lands Falcon 9 boosters on offshore drone ships after most of its launches and only brings the rocket back to an onshore landing on missions carrying lighter payloads to orbit.

When a Falcon 9 booster does return to landing on land, it targets one of SpaceX’s recovery zones at military-run spaceports in Florida and California. SpaceX’s landing zone at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California is close to the Falcon 9 launch pad there.

The Space Force wants SpaceX, and potentially other future reusable rocket companies, to replicate the side-by-side launch and landing pads at Cape Canaveral.

To do that, the FAA also gave the green light Wednesday for SpaceX to construct and operate a new rocket landing zone at SLC-40 and conduct up to 34 first-stage booster landings there each year. The landing zone will consist of a 280-foot diameter concrete pad surrounded by a 60-foot-wide gravel apron. The landing zone’s broadest diameter, including the apron, will measure 400 feet.

The location of SpaceX’s new rocket landing pad is shown with the red circle, approximately 1,000 feet northeast of the Falcon 9 rocket’s launch pad at Space Launch Complex-40. Credit: Google Maps/Ars Technica

SpaceX is in an earlier phase of planning for a Falcon landing pad at historic Launch Complex-39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, just a few miles north of SLC-40. SpaceX uses LC-39A as a launch pad for most Falcon 9 crew launches, all Falcon Heavy missions, and, in the future, flights of the company’s gigantic next-generation rocket, Starship. SpaceX foresees Starship as a replacement for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, but the company’s continuing investment in Falcon-related infrastructure shows the workhorse rocket will stick around for a while.

Lull in Falcon Heavy missions opens window for SpaceX to build new landing pads Read More »

fcc-chair-teams-up-with-ted-cruz-to-block-wi-fi-hotspots-for-schoolkids

FCC chair teams up with Ted Cruz to block Wi-Fi hotspots for schoolkids

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“Chairman Carr’s moves today are very unfortunate as they further signal that the Commission is no longer prioritizing closing the digital divide,” Schwartzman said. “In the 21st Century, education doesn’t stop when a student leaves school and today’s actions could lead to many students having a tougher time completing homework assignments because their families lack Internet access.”

Biden FCC expanded school and library program

Under then-Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, the FCC expanded its E-Rate program in 2024 to let schools and libraries use Universal Service funding to lend out Wi-Fi hotspots and services that could be used off-premises. The FCC previously distributed Wi-Fi hotspots and other Internet access technology under pandemic-related spending authorized by Congress in 2021, but that program ended. The new hotspot lending program was supposed to begin this year.

Carr argues that when the Congressionally approved program ended, the FCC lost its authority to fund Wi-Fi hotspots for use outside of schools and libraries. “I dissented from both decisions at the time, and I am now pleased to circulate these two items, which will end the FCC’s illegal funding [of] unsupervised screen time for young kids,” he said.

Under Rosenworcel, the FCC said the Communications Act gives it “broad and flexible authority to establish rules governing the equipment and services that will be supported for eligible schools and libraries, as well as to design the specific mechanisms of support.”

The E-Rate program can continue providing telecom services to schools and libraries despite the hotspot component being axed. E-Rate disbursed about $1.75 billion in 2024, but could spend more based on demand because it has a funding cap of about $5 billion per year. E-Rate and other Universal Service programs are paid for through fees imposed on phone companies, which typically pass the cost on to consumers.

FCC chair teams up with Ted Cruz to block Wi-Fi hotspots for schoolkids Read More »

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reMarkable’s newest E-Ink writing tablet is a 7.3-inch, $449 handheld slab

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Fans of reMarkable’s series of notepad-like note-taking E-Ink tablets have something new to get excited about today: a new version of the devices called the reMarkable Paper Pro Move, which takes the features of a typical reMarkable tablet and puts them in a smaller 7.3-inch device that can be carried one-handed and easily slid into a pocket or bag.

The Paper Pro Move is available to order now and starts at $449 for a version with reMarkable’s standard Marker accessory and no case. Adding a Marker Pro accessory, which includes a built-in eraser and a nicer-to-hold texture, adds another $50. Folio cases for the device range from $69 to $139, or you can order the tablet without one.

Like the full-size reMarkable Paper Pro we reviewed a year ago, the Move uses a Canvas Color E-Ink display to support note-taking and highlighting in multiple colors—according to the spec sheet, it can render 20,000 distinct shades. Both the Paper Pro and the Paper Pro move advertise up to two weeks of battery life, similar 12 ms writing latency, 64GB of storage, a USB-C port for data and charging, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and 2GB of RAM. The Pro Move is somewhat thicker (0.26 inches, up from 0.2 inches for the Paper Pro) and uses a dual-core Arm processor instead of a quad-core model. But the Pro Move also weighs less than half as much as the Paper Pro, making it much more portable.

reMarkable’s newest E-Ink writing tablet is a 7.3-inch, $449 handheld slab Read More »

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OpenAI announces parental controls for ChatGPT after teen suicide lawsuit

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On Tuesday, OpenAI announced plans to roll out parental controls for ChatGPT and route sensitive mental health conversations to its simulated reasoning models, following what the company has called “heartbreaking cases” of users experiencing crises while using the AI assistant. The moves come after multiple reported incidents where ChatGPT allegedly failed to intervene appropriately when users expressed suicidal thoughts or experienced mental health episodes.

“This work has already been underway, but we want to proactively preview our plans for the next 120 days, so you won’t need to wait for launches to see where we’re headed,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post published Tuesday. “The work will continue well beyond this period of time, but we’re making a focused effort to launch as many of these improvements as possible this year.”

The planned parental controls represent OpenAI’s most concrete response to concerns about teen safety on the platform so far. Within the next month, OpenAI says, parents will be able to link their accounts with their teens’ ChatGPT accounts (minimum age 13) through email invitations, control how the AI model responds with age-appropriate behavior rules that are on by default, manage which features to disable (including memory and chat history), and receive notifications when the system detects their teen experiencing acute distress.

The parental controls build on existing features like in-app reminders during long sessions that encourage users to take breaks, which OpenAI rolled out for all users in August.

High-profile cases prompt safety changes

OpenAI’s new safety initiative arrives after several high-profile cases drew scrutiny to ChatGPT’s handling of vulnerable users. In August, Matt and Maria Raine filed suit against OpenAI after their 16-year-old son Adam died by suicide following extensive ChatGPT interactions that included 377 messages flagged for self-harm content. According to court documents, ChatGPT mentioned suicide 1,275 times in conversations with Adam—six times more often than the teen himself. Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that a 56-year-old man killed his mother and himself after ChatGPT reinforced his paranoid delusions rather than challenging them.

To guide these safety improvements, OpenAI is working with what it calls an Expert Council on Well-Being and AI to “shape a clear, evidence-based vision for how AI can support people’s well-being,” according to the company’s blog post. The council will help define and measure well-being, set priorities, and design future safeguards including the parental controls.

OpenAI announces parental controls for ChatGPT after teen suicide lawsuit Read More »

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Ars Live: Consumer tech firms stuck scrambling ahead of looming chip tariffs

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And perhaps the biggest confounding factor for businesses attempting to align supply chain choices with predictable tariff costs is looming chip tariffs. Trump has suggested those could come in August, but nearing the end of the month, there’s still no clarity there.

As tech firms brace for chip tariffs, Brzytwa will share CTA’s forecast based on a survey of industry experts, revealing the unique sourcing challenges chip tariffs will likely pose. It’s a particular pain point that Trump seems likely to impose taxes not just on imports of semiconductors but of any downstream product that includes a chip.

Because different electronics parts are typically assembled in different countries, supply chains for popular products have suddenly become a winding path, with potential tariff obstacles cropping up at any turn.

To Trump, complicating supply chains seems to be the point, intending to divert entire supply chains into the country to make the US a tech manufacturing hub, supposedly at the expense of his prime trade war target, China—which today is considered a world manufacturing “superpower.”

However, The New York Times this week suggested that Trump’s bullying tactics aren’t working on China, and experts suggest that now his chip tariffs risk not just spiking prices but throttling AI innovation in the US—just as China’s open source AI models shake up markets globally.

Brzytwa will share CTA research showing how the trade war has rattled, and will likely continue to rattle, tech firms into the foreseeable future. He’ll explain why tech firms can’t quickly or cheaply divert chip supply chains—and why policy that neglects to understand tech firms’ positions could be a lose-lose, putting Americans in danger of losing affordable access to popular tech without achieving Trump’s goal of altering China’s trade behavior.

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Porsche’s next Cayenne is fully electric—we drove the prototype

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The original Cayenne saved Porsche. How will the fourth-generation model do? Porsche

But I spent much of my time behind the wheel at more moderate velocities, winding around the narrow, blind roads that work their way around the Catalan region of Spain. Porsche hasn’t yet quoted a curb weight for any of the Cayenne Electric flavors, but however far it tips the scales, it still feels light and nimble. Steering is firm but sharp with decent feedback, and this big SUV dives into and screams out of corners with perfect poise.

It was only really over big, unsettling movements, speed bumps and the like, that I could feel how much mass was beneath me in the Cayenne Electric. When summiting asphalt imperfections like that, the curious shape of that central OLED really shone.

That display is bent at roughly a 45-degree angle, a profile that allows it to perfectly conform to both the angle of the dashboard and that of the center console. Porsche placed a padded wrist rest right beneath that and then designed the user interface to position the most important controls along the lower portion of the display, the part that’s in line with your hand.

The result is you can rest your wrist there comfortably, queue up your favorite playlist, and crank the ventilated seats, all without making any accidental taps on bumpy roads. And despite this car not entering production until next year, that software was snappy and responsive. It didn’t lock up on me once during a full day behind the wheel.

A prototype Porsche Cayenne Electric drifts in the dirt, throwing up a rooster tail.

You’ll need a low-grip surface if you want to go sliding around. Credit: Porsche

Yes, next year is a long time to wait for the Cayenne Electric to enter production. It’s hard to know what the American EV scene will look like in three months, never mind 12, but for now, at least, Porsche’s next SUV is shaping up extremely well. When it does hit the market, it will sit in dealerships alongside the existing Cayenne, which will continue to be available. Choice is good, and if you’re in the market but not in a hurry, I’d suggest waiting for this. If the price is right, it will be a clear-cut winner.

Porsche’s next Cayenne is fully electric—we drove the prototype Read More »

traffic-and-transit-roundup-#1

Traffic and Transit Roundup #1

Traffic / /

Traffic and transit are finally getting a roundup all their own.

I’ll start out with various victory laps on the awesomeness that is New York City Congestion pricing, which should hopefully now be a settled matter, then do a survey of everything else.

We spent years fighting to get congestion pricing passed in New York City.

Once it was in place, everyone saw that it worked. The city was a better place, almost everyone was better off, and also we got bonus tax revenue. And this is only the bare minimum viable product, we could do so much better.

We had a big debate over whether congestion pricing is good until it was implemented. At this point, with traffic speeds downton up 15% and business visits improving, it is very clear this was exactly the huge win Econ 101 predicts.

Cremieux: The first empirical evaluation of New York’s congestion pricing has just been published.

Spoiler: It worked really, really well.

…

On average, road speeds went up by a whopping 16%!

But here’s something interesting:

Speeds on highways went up 13%, arterial road speeds went up by 10%, and local road speeds increased by 8%.

None of that’s 16%, and that’s important: This means congestion pricing sped roads up, but also sorted people to faster roads.

In response to having to pay a toll, people not only got off the road, they also made wiser choices about the types of roads they used!

Now let’s look at the times of day, as a check on the model.

It works: Congestion pricing just boosts speed when it’s active and shortly after:

As another check, let’s look at the effects by location.

In the CBD, trips are faster. Going to the CBD, trips are faster. Leaving it, trips are faster, but not much. And outside of it, where congestion pricing is irrelevant? No effect.

The thread continues, and the news only improves from there.

Feels Desperate: Is there any evidence there was uptick of public transportation?

Could be net economic loss.

Cremieux: Yes! Foot traffic also went up, Broadway ticket sales got better, noise pollution declined. Congestion pricing seems to have delivered better times all around.

Even honking complaints are down 69%. Nice.

The comments somehow consistently still fill with people saying how horrible everything must be and how we can’t trust any of the data, no way this can be happening, it must somehow be a huge disaster. We ignoring these silly wabbits.

Every NYC mayoral candidate supported congestion pricing. There’s a reason.

Alec Stapp: NYC congestion pricing is going extremely well even though it’s only a static tolling system.

Imagine how good it would be with a dynamic tolling system based on real-time traffic data.

If business is actively up, what more is there to say?

The only real enemy left is Donald Trump, who is determined to wage war to kill congestion pricing, presumably because he hates Manhattan and wants us to suffer, or perhaps because of his belief that Trade Bad. But he’s the President, and he’s commanding the Department of Transportation to go to war over this, and there’s a decent chance they will win and make all our lives substantially worse.

Because Trump does not like that New York has this nice thing, and is trying to kill it.

The good news there is that it seems the good guys are winning for now.

Joe Weisenthal: *NY WINS BID TO STOP US FROM WITHHOLDING FUNDS OVER CONGESTION

The wording on the surveys here are weird since they asked whether ‘Trump should permit this to continue.’ What business of Trump’s is New York doing congestion pricing? But the results are telling, especially in relative terms. The results here are now months old, and the more people are exposed to congestion pricing and see the results, the more they approve of it.

David Meyer: the congestion pricing polling upswing is here.

Matthew Yglesias: This is the pattern we’ve seen in other cities around the world — road pricing is controversial when introduced but sticky once it’s in place because like the reduced congestion.

In particular, those who drive into the central business district several times a week (also known as ‘those who pay the fee’) support congestion pricing 66%-32%, and those who do it a few times a month support 51%-47%, and Manhattan residents (who take the cabs that also pay fees although modestly less than they should) support 57%-36%, but support statewide remains in the red, 27%-47%.

Erin Durkin: Fascinating. State voters overall oppose congestion pricing 27% to 47%, but people drive into the congestion zone support it — 66%-32% for those who drive every week and 51%-46% for those who drive a few times a month. The people who actually pay the toll support it the most!

Nate Silver: Have heard several anecdotal accounts about this, too, from people commuting into the congestion zone from NJ, Long Island, and northern Manhattan.

The caveat is that all of these are people with high-paying jobs. If you’re billing hours / valuing your time at a high rate, it’s a great deal, less true for working-class jobs.

Reis: I drive in from NJ every Tue, Wed Thu. Get up at 4 and breeze through the tunnel, but not quite early enough to avoid the toll. But I try to get out by 2: 30 to avoid the crush back out. Since congestion pricing it doesn’t really matter if I wait until after 3. I barely wait to get out anymore. Worth every penny, even though there is no way it’s going towards “infrastructure.”

The only way you are worse off is if your hourly for being in traffic is low, so either you have to pay a toll without getting value in return (if you pay the $9) or not take the trip (if the trip wasn’t that valuable to you). In the second case, system is functioning as designed. What Reis is doing is totally the system working as designed. The first case is slightly unfortunate redistribution, but this was never supposed to be a Pareto improvement. If you wanted to do some (very small) progressive redistribution to fully compensate, that would be super doable.

Traffic in some areas outside NYC’s congestion pricing zone may have gotten slightly worse, as opposed to the bridges and tunnels where things are much improved. Meanwhile the buses are packed and moving much faster. Sounds like we need more robust congestion pricing.

Here’s a fun bonus:

Toby Muresianu: Subway crime is down 36% – and traffic fatalities down 44% – since congestion pricing started.

…

As the article notes, there are also more cops in the subway now and that may be a factor.

While more security on trains is good in my book, the decline also started before that was implemented (which was gradually between 1/20 and 1/23).

The declines here are absolute numbers, not per trip, so per trip the drop is bigger.

I presume those numbers are too big to purely be congestion pricing, and the cops obviously matter, but so does ridership, both quantity and quality. Critical mass of people on mass transit makes you much safer, in addition to justifying better service. It’s basically great until the point where you don’t get a seat. Then it’s no big deal until when you start to be nervous about getting on and off. That sucks, but I continue to find that to be mostly a peak of rush hour 4-5-6 line problem.

As for many other complaints, this seems definitive?

Foot traffic is what matters for business, not car traffic. The false alarms were all ‘foot traffic is way down.’ If that went the other way, we’re golden.

Avi Small: Someone make sure this @amNewYork front page gets into the @USDOT morning clips!

“Manhattan businesses thriving, subways booming in congestion pricing era”

Effective Tranis Alliance: Today Hochul & the MTA confirmed that the planned end-to-end runtime of the IBX has been cut a full 10 min down to 32 and projected ridership is up 41k to 160k/day. This is the power of grade separation and the All Faiths tunnel.

Hunter: This single light-rail running through Queens and Brooklyn is projected to have 58M riders annually, more than all of SF’s BART system lol

Will have 45% of the Chicago L’s total annual ridership despite being just a single line.

Having this line available would shorten travel times in a lot of non-obvious ways, since it lets you more easily transpose between train lines. If this is buildable and could run the whole way in 32 minutes it is an obviously excellent pick.

There would also be a lot of value in extending the Second Avenue Subway properly, especially to take pressure off the Lexington (456) line, but that looks like it is simply not doable logistically at any sane price.

New York City bus fare evasion rates are up to 48%. Under the new mayor I wouldn’t be surprised to see it a lot closer to 100% and I expect to have zero motivation to pay his administration for a bus ride. I see two options.

  1. Give up, reduce friction and make the bus free. This would be my instinct. You want more people taking buses, doing so is good for everyone, and you weren’t enforcing the rules anyway. The homelessness (or ‘sleep on the bus’) problem is the main reason why not, but there are solutions.

  2. Put plainclothes officers on the buses and have them earn $600 each hour (Claude’s estimate, I think it could be even higher) for the city writing tickets until people stop evading the fare?

Why wouldn’t option two work? The MTA has indeed declared, ‘no more free bus rides for fare evaders,’ using a similar strategy, and somehow people are arguing it won’t work? The only argument why not I can think of is unwillingness to scale it?

Ana Ley and Anusha Bayya (NYT): On Thursday, a group of eight police officers and eight transit workers stood waiting for a crosstown bus on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, some with ticket-writing pads in hand.

When the bus arrived, they boarded and led a woman in black scrubs out onto the street and issued her a $100 summons for skipping the fare. The officers and transit officials had singled the woman out after receiving cues from an undercover inspector who was observing riders on the bus.

…

Enforcement is especially difficult on buses, where there are no turnstiles or gates to block access. Union leaders advise bus drivers not to confront passengers who skip the fare, out of concern for the drivers’ safety.

…

M.T.A. union leaders said the money for enforcement would be better spent to fully subsidize fares.

…

Civil rights advocates raised concerns that the tighter fare enforcement would disproportionately affect the city’s most vulnerable residents.

…

“This is yet another example of the M.T.A. choosing public relations over public safety,” Mr. Cahn said. “It is a guaranteed way to lose money.”

Once again, I ask, how is sitting there writing $100 tickets unprofitable, and enforcement ‘a way to lose money’? Is collection of tickets so bad that you cannot pay the hourly cost for a police officer to write the tickets, even if you discount the incentive effects? I find this beyond absurd.

And seriously, the ‘civil rights advocates’ are giving such causes a bad name. If you want the bus to be free and pay with other taxes instead, advocate for that, and I’ll potentially support you although recent findings have tampered my enthusiasm for that solution. Don’t tell us not to enforce the law.

There is no third alternative. Half of people not paying is approaching the tipping point where no one pays. Indeed, there would soon be active pressure not to pay, as paying slows down boarding.

It is remarkable how well enforcement works, and how well it then reduces crime.

Josh Barro: DC Metro has achieved an 82-85% reduction in subway fare evasion through a combination of taller fare gates and enhanced enforcement. Crime on the system has also fallen to its lowest level in seven years.

Shoshana Weissmann: I was actually skeptical some of this would work, but glad it has. Saw so many people yell at me to go through while they force doors to stay open.

In other places, they’re not even trying.

Thomas Viola: I was in Seattle last weekend and it turns out their metro system is kind of new, and they haven’t figured out how to get people to pay to use it yet. Everyone just walks on.

I legit couldn’t find a spot to buy a ticket. There’s no turnstiles. Occasionally you’ll have a guy come around on the train and “check tickets” but I never saw one, and if you tell him you didn’t know he just says well buy one next time.

On first principles, free mass transit (such as the free buses recently promised to NYC) seem like an obviously good idea. You want people using them, you want people wanting to move around more, transaction costs are high and money is fungible.

But conventional wisdom says not so fast. Tallinn is the most often claimed example of mass transit being made free and it not helping, and several comments illustrated why all of this can get complicated by selection effects.

Alex Forrest: Tallinn, Estonia, made all transit free for city residents in 2013. By 2022, transit use had dropped from 40% to 30% of commutes, while car use had increased from 40% to 50% of commutes. Among low-income residents, car use doubled, and transit dropped from 60% to 35% of commutes.

As far as I can tell, the lack of fares didn’t *discourageridership, it just failed to make transit any more attractive, while structural factors encouraging car use went unaddressed. In other words, *fares were not a discouraging factorfor ridership.

Phineas Harper: This is misleading. Between 1990 & 2000 public transport use in Tallinn was in free fall (from 77% to 31%) as private car use shot up following independence. Making public transport free was an attempt to stop the free fall which is (just about) working.

Thomas Strenge: The same happened in Kansas City. Eliminating fares allowed more homeless and mentally ill to ride the bus, which made them less safe. This led to adverse selection with more “good” people avoiding the bus.

Robert Bernhardt: germany had also the ‘9€ ticket’ in 2022. all local & regional trains for a whole month for 9€, ie almost free. and yet car usage didn’t really drop.

Border Sentry: There are two buses that travel into town near me. I take the one that costs more, because there are fewer people and they’re more civilised.

The core question is, are the fares actually stopping people who you want to ride?

My personal experiences say yes to some extent, especially when you’re considering a zero marginal cost alternative like walking, or when the annoyance of paying the fare enters play, and when you are young. It matters some, especially at lower incomes.

Having fully free buses also means that children who don’t have money can get home.

But ultimately, everyone who studies this or looks at their own experience seems to agrees this a relatively minor concern. How often and how reliably the bus or subway comes, how fast it goes, how comfortable and crowded it is, and how safe you feel are all more important factors. And without the money from the fares, yes money is fungible but the political economy involved means funding will likely decline.

In addition, the people who will ride a lot more for free than for a small price are exactly the people others do not want to ride alongside. We have the experiments that show that cracking down on fare evasion greatly reduces crime and generally makes transit more pleasant, which generates positive feedback loops.

So sadly, I have learned my lesson. I no longer in favor of mass transit being free, although I do think that heavy encouragement of buying monthly passes is good so that marginal cost drops to zero. Ideally this could be attached to tax filing?

I do also still think free is superior to technically not free if that is unenforced.

San Francisco restaurants often close before 10pm, one reason is that workers have to commute and the BART stops at midnight. I am absolutely baffled, as a New Yorker, that they don’t run trains after that. The NYC mind cannot comprehend.

Quietly, the MTA union convinced the state legislature to mandate two train operators per train. Hopefully Hochul does not sign this outright theft.

Caroline Spivack: The @TWULocal100 has quietly championed legislation that would require two workers operate a train. The bill, if signed into law by Gov. Hochul, would be a big setback to the MTA’s efforts to reduce labor costs.

Sam D’Amico: They should have zero operators.

David Zipper: More evidence that transit improves public health: When a new rail station opened in Osaka, nearby residents’ health expenditures fell ~$930 per capita over four years.

Bella Chu: I am unaware of any US study that has attempted to estimate the health costs and consequences associated with displacing walking-as-transportation at the population level. I expect the numbers would be staggering.

The study seems to have tracked a cohort over time, avoiding most selection effects. It seems like an extreme result, but if true then presumably it more than pays for itself.

Also a reminder to never ever get on a motorcycle if you have any choice in the matter.

California high speed rail connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco is a great idea.

Or it would be, if you were able to actually lay the track. There’s the rub.

Hayden Clarkin: California HSR will connect two metropolitan areas with a combined GDP equivalent to that of Australia in just 2 hours and 40 minutes. How am I supposed to not think this is the most transformational transportation project on the continent?

“Well flying is faster!” Yes, if you’re going to San Bruno and not San Francisco or San Jose, and if you want to talk about the mess that is flying in and out of LAX, be my guest.

Forget the issues associated with the project for a moment, it’s hard to argue a fast train that connects every major city in a state with the fourth largest economy in the world quickly isn’t a bad project, period.

All those mad about projects being over budget never talk about how Texas is spending $9 Billion to add another lane to a highway. Road and highway projects get rubber stamps and transit and bike lanes need every penny scrutinized. Be fair in your criticism

If I recall, something like 60-80% of domestic travel in Japan is by train…

Push the Needle: Japan’s shinkansen high speed rail map overlaid on the west coast to scale.

Danielle Fong: when

Yes, the complaints are all about the terrible execution, but also that seems sufficiently terrible to sink all this? The part where they take in a lot of money and then do not build HSR seems like a fatal flaw.

Mayor Pete had a ticket to ride in all the wrong places, but at least he’s in the game.

Former Secretary Pete Buttigieg: We’re working on the future of America’s passenger rail system—funding high-speed rail projects in the West and expanding service for communities across the country. Get your ticket to ride!

This is of course a deeply stupid map. Why do we want a second line from Minneapolis to Seattle, when you can take the existing one to Portland and then ride to Seattle? Why do we put a high speed rail line from Charlotte to Atlanta, and Dallas to Houston, and not upgrade the Acela line?

Whereas here’s how people having a normal one do it.

Hayden: In case you’re wondering how far behind the USA is on infrastructure, France is building 120 miles of automated subway lines with 65 stations for $45 billion in 17 years.

The lack of focus on Acela in the previous plan, in particular, is completely insane. The United States has one area where high speed rail would actually be a great big deal, where all the passengers and people are, that is economically super valuable. That is the eastern line between Boston, New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

Improving that line to be true high speed rail would be an absolute game changer. We could then discuss extending that effort elsewhere. Instead, it gets completely ignored. And no, I don’t want to hear about permitting issues, you’re the government. Fix It.

Compared to that, all the other high speed rail proposals are chump change, and they don’t fit together into anything cohesive, and also we don’t seem to be able to actually build them. I’m sufficiently gung ho that I think they’re still good ideas if we can actually make them exist, and once you have some good pairwise connections you can look to expand from there, but that seems to be a tall order.

Yoshie Furuhashi: Why don’t Philadelphia landlords lobby for faster HSR than Acela from Philadelphia to NYC, bringing the travel time between the cities under 45 minutes, so they can raise Philadelphia rents?

Joe Weisenthal: Unironically, seems like the economic gains would be massive. But we all know that it will never happen, and why.

Because it’s politically impossible to do construction at that scale in the US.

Well, maybe. But what if this was actually feasible?

Matthew Yglesias: Kate is mildly concerned that too many train takes will lead to mass flight of subscribers and the collapse of our business, but I cannot resist the temptation to write about the NYU Marron Center Transit Cost Project’s new report on Northeast Corridor High-Speed Rail.

The report’s authors make some striking claims:

  1. It’s possible to create Northeast Corridor HSR such that both Boston-NYC and NYC-Washington would take about 1: 56.

  2. Trains would run every ten minutes between Philadelphia and New Haven, and every fifteen minutes1 north and south of there.

  3. This can be done for a relatively modest price: $12.5 billion in new infrastructure and $4.5 billion in new trains.

This is a lot less than the $117 billion that the Northeast Corridor Commission is asking for in its high-speed rail proposal. The difference is so large that it’s not just that the TCP plan is cheaper and would save money — the NECC plan is so expensive that it’s simply not going to happen under any conceivable political alignment.

The TCP plan, by contrast, could actually be achieved if the relevant stakeholders (which I think is primarily the governors of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland) want to do it. They would, of course, want some money from Uncle Sam, and there would be the difficult question of portioning out the state spending. But it’s clearly within the means of the region.

It would also be a genuinely lucrative franchise, such that I think it’s pretty easy to imagine the capital being raised privately and the operations being undertaken by a new private company rather than Amtrak.

This project seems obviously worthwhile even at $117 billion if it would actually happen. At $17 billion it is absurdly great and yes the region should be happy to fund, or for a private company to fund since I agree it sounds profitable. If I had an extra $20 billion lying around I would be seriously plotting this out and seeing if various states and the White House would sufficiently play ball.

The cost is that this kills off the Northeast Regional, which cuts some stations off from intercity rail. I think Matthew Yglesias is right that this is a worthwhile trade, but I worry that it is politically a very big problem for such a project. I’d be willing to (inefficiently) give back some of the gains here to fix that in one of various ways.

Hayden: Today, Los Angeles and the Bay Area will see 130 flights in both directions, equivalent to a plane departing every 6.5 minutes for 18 hours a day. Hard to argue it’s not a perfect candidate for fast trains.

Noah Smith: If California could ever actually build even a single mile of high speed rail, this would be the place to build it!

But they can’t, so this will never happen.

Sam D’Amico: Once you realize I-5 has a *medianthey could have put tracks on you become the joker.

Alex Tabarrok: Sam is correct, a rail line could be built on the I-5 from San Francisco to LA and indeed the French operators SNCF proposed just that.

Rejected for political equity reasons!

Matthew Yglesias: The reasons for rejection were bad, but I don’t “equity” is a good description — it’s the political influence of the Central Valley cities who wanted direct service.

Weak parties + decentralized political institutions is bad news for trains.

Alex Tabarrok: Agreed.

It’s good when people ride your trains. Or is it?

Palmer Lucky: lmao, Caltrain’s tweet claiming their trains are “100% Billionaire-free” got deleted after me and a bunch of other Caltrain-riding billionaires responded.

Don’t they know that techno-autists all love trains?

Marc Fisher tells us that Bike Lanes Are Not About Bikes, because there are not many bikes. He claims it is instead about intentionally shrinking the roads to discourage driving. I find this remarkably plausible.

Privatization via private equity that comes along with new investment improves airports in terms of number of airlines, number of flights, profitability and user experience. They do not find evidence that going around privatizing all airports on principle would work. The model here is that some airports would give good returns on investment, and selling those outright to those willing to make the investments works out, and works far better than merely selling control rights.

Young debater goes 19-1 arguing for Jones Act repeal, including 7-0 across the nation and at the national championship, their favorite part is watching judges laugh at the absurdities. Which feels like cheating – if you win your debates purely because your position is correct, that doesn’t seem fair.

Ritchie Torres: The Jones Act is a tax on Puerto Rico, whose three million American citizens are subject to federal dominion without federal representation. Puerto Rico is ground zero for taxation without representation.

For the Jones Act is a hidden tax on the energy needs of an energy-poor island. US policy is perversely producing energy scarcity in precisely the place where energy is scarcest.

Jared Polis (D-Gov of Colorado): The Jones Act is a tax on all of us, raising prices on everyday products like food, clothes and electronics. It hits the people of Puerto Rico and Hawaii particularly hard, but it hurts all Americans including landlocked Coloradans.

Without the Jones Act we could use ferries on the Great Lakes, with 60 million people living on their coastlines.

Brian Potter asks whether US ports need more automation. Surprisingly he does not consider this a rhetorical question. Especially strange is saying union rules make it hard to take advantage of automation, rather than union rules being the reason to do automation so that you can reduce reliance on the union. Mostly he seems to be saying ‘automation is far from the only problem to solve,’ and sure, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t automate. And I have no doubt if automation currently isn’t good enough that automation would then start to pay much bigger dividends within a few years, as AI advances flow through to automated terminals.

By contrast, Cremieux estimates gains from automation are enormous, and recommends simply paying off the Longshoreman’s Association to permit this.

Cremieux: The potential gains to port automation are so enormous that Trump is making a huge mistake if he goes along with wishes of the mobsters in the ILA.

The gains on the table are so large that increasing an average port’s capacity by just one ship increases total trade by 0.67%.

It seems Cremieux is taking ‘automation makes the ports run faster’ as a given. I find it very hard to argue with this, after the things I’ve read about how manual ports work, and the failure of our ports to run 24/7 – obviously an automated port need never close, but most of ours do.

If you read Trump’s explanation of why he is opposing port automation, it’s literally zero-sum thinking that ‘these foreign companies should hire our American workers’ without asking the question of whether this makes the ports run better or worse. This is a man who scribbles ‘trade is bad’ on reports and thinks tariffs are good.

California closed a refinery and had to import fuel, so Because Jones Act it had to import the fuel across the Pacific, shipping within America is too expensive. Similarly, Puerto Rico gets its LNG from Spain, while our mainland exports LNG to Spain.

A cost comparison:

Colin Grabow: Maersk orders 16,000 TEU containerships from a South Korean shipyard for $207 million each.

Meanwhile, US-built (Jones Act) 3,600 TEU containerships go for $333 million each (2022 price).

South Korean-built ship per TEU: $13,000

US-built ship per TEU: $92,500

Sad: Even Joe Biden considered coming out for Jones Act repeal, but the president ‘personally didn’t want to do anything that was anti-union.’ Sigh.

They’re building a private rail line between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. It’s a short line, but what about a private line between Las Vegas Airport and the Las Vegas Strip? We’re still waiting.

We are also doing it by changing the name, Oakland Airport to potentially be changed to San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport. San Francisco has threatened to sue, because this sounds suspiciously like someone might build something or engage in a real world physical world action. We can’t have that. Actually, their reason is that ‘they own the trademark’ and that SFO is one of the busiest airports in the world. Well, yes, so they should welcome there being more flights to OAK instead to free up space?

I notice that I keep not considering the possibility of flying into or out of OAK instead of SFO when visiting from New York, despite this not being obviously worse. I never check, because there is no easy code for ‘OAK or SFO’ when booking, which we need. You should be able to say ‘SFB’ or something, the way you can say ‘NYC’ and get JFK, LaGuardia and Newark.

Whereas one thing we are not doing is building or expanding airports where they would be most valuable. Brian Potter asks why, and provides the answers you would expect. Airports are huge. Airports and airplanes are noisy. No one wants them around, and environmental groups oppose them as well, including (he doesn’t say this but it is obvious) because such people simply do not want planes to be flying at all. So this is the final boss of obstruction, the result of which is that where we most need airports there is no hope of ever building a new one.

I defy this data, still, wow that’s weird.

Ben Schiller (Fast Company): Local stores next to the protected bike lane have seen a 49% increase in sales.

New York may have dropped in a recent ranking of cycling cities. But it does have some world class infrastructure, including a “complete street” on 9th Avenue, with a protected bike lane. Built in 2007, it was controversial at the time (like everything else bike-related in the city). But a study by the Department of Transport finds that it’s paid dividends economically. Local stores between 23rd and 31st streets have seen a 49% increase in sales, compared to an average of 3% for Manhattan as a whole.

I mean, no? Or at least, this is not causal. There is no way that the bike lane is boosting sales by a 46%. There are not enough bikes for that, this makes no sense. I have to assume that the street in question happens to be doing well, unless this is (and it would not shock me, shall we say) a massive data or calculation error.

California High Speed Rail subsidized the Bakersfield to Merced portion of track first, despite this being obviously not economically valuable, because the area had… bad air pollution? Because the Federal subsidies were so completely everything-bageled that this was the only way to unlock them. So there goes over $30 billion dollars. Meanwhile, going from Los Angeles to San Francisco would cost another $100 billion. I am down for even a remarkably expensive version of this project, because I think such efforts are transformational, and can then be extended. But also I have no faith that if we gave them $100 billion they would give us an operational high speed rail line.

The Brightline, by contrast, is a new privately constructed railway in Florida, by all accounts quite efficient and lovely, and doubtless providing a lot of surplus.

Michael Dnes tells the story of the M25 in London, for which there are no alternatives. No alternatives can be built, because the United Kingdom is a vetocracy where building roads is impossible. They decided not to widen the M25 because it would draw even more traffic there, creating more problems, but that means no solutions at all.

Remember when from 1840 to 1850, private Britons cumulatively invested 40% of British GDP into the country’s first rail network?

Beware Unfinished Bridges points out that often people will only buy a full set of complementary goods. Putting in a bike lane will only be helpful if it is sufficient to induce bike rides that use the lane, so doing this for half of someone’s commute likely provides as much value as a bridge halfway across a river.

The other thing building half a bridge does is provide strong incentive to finish the bridge, or to adjust where things are.

Whenever one builds capacity, especially infrastructure, it likely opens up the possibility of building more capacity of various types, as well as ways to adjust. This can then trigger a cascade. If you only built things that were profitable on the margin without any such additional building or adjustments, you would often miss most of the value and severely underbuild.

This is one reason I am typically eager to proceed with rail lines and other mass transit, even when the direct case does not seem to justify the cost. You have to start somewhere. If for example we do hook up a point in Los Angeles to Las Vegas via a new high speed rail line, then there is hope that this provides impetus to go further, also most of the gains are impossible to capture. So given a private group is remotely considering doing it, we should be ecstatic.

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Texas suit alleging anti-coal “cartel” of top Wall Street firms could reshape ESG

esg, Policy, Science, syndication, Wall Street / /

It’s a closely watched test of whether corporate alliances on climate efforts violate antitrust laws.

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Since 2022, Republican lawmakers in Congress and state attorneys general have sent letters to major banks, pension funds, asset managers, accounting firms, companies, nonprofits, and business alliances, putting them on notice for potential antitrust violations and seeking information as part of the Republican pushback against “environmental, social and governance” efforts such as corporate climate commitments.

“This caused a lot of turmoil and stress obviously across the whole ecosystem,” said Denise Hearn, a senior fellow at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment. “But everyone wondered, ‘OK, when are they actually going to drop a lawsuit?’”

That came in November, filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and 10 other Republican AGs, accusing three of the biggest asset managers on Wall Street—BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street—of running “an investment cartel” to depress the output of coal and boosting their revenues while pushing up energy costs for Americans. The Trump administration’s Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission filed a supporting brief in May.

The overall pressure campaign aimed at what’s known as “ESG” is having an impact.

“Over the past several months, through this [lawsuit] and other things, letters from elected officials, state and federal, there has been a chilling effect of what investors are saying,” said Steven Maze Rothstein, chief program officer of Ceres, a nonprofit that advocates for more sustainable business practices and was among the earliest letter recipients. Still, “investors understand that Mother Nature doesn’t know who’s elected governor, attorney general, president.”

Earlier this month, a US District Court judge in Tyler, Texas, declined to dismiss the lawsuit against the three asset managers, though he did dismiss three of the 21 counts. The judge was not making a final decision in the case, only that there was enough evidence to go to trial.

BlackRock said in a statement: “This case is not supported by the facts, and we will demonstrate that.” Vanguard said it will “vigorously defend against plaintiffs’ claims.” State Street called the lawsuit “baseless and without merit.”

The Texas attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

The three asset managers built substantial stakes in major US coal producers, the suit alleges, and “announced their common commitment” to cut US coal output by joining voluntary alliances to collaborate on climate issues, including the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative and, in the case of two of the firms, the Climate Action 100+. (All of them later pulled out of the alliances.)

The lawsuit alleges that the coal companies succumbed to the defendants’ collective influence, mining for less coal and disclosing more climate-related information. The suit claimed that resulted in “cartel-level revenues and profits” for the asset managers.

“You could say, ‘Well, if the coal companies were all colluding together to restrict output, then shouldn’t they also be violating antitrust?’” Hearn asked. But the attorneys general “are trying to say that it was at the behest of these concentrated index funds and the concentrated ownership.”

Index funds, which are designed to mirror the returns of specific market indices, are the most common mode of passive investment—when investors park their money somewhere for long-term returns.

The case is being watched closely, not only by climate alliances and sustainability nonprofits, but by the financial sector at large.

If the three asset managers ultimately win, it would turn down the heat on other climate alliances and vindicate those who pressured financial players to line up their business practices with the Paris agreement goals as well as national and local climate targets. The logic of those efforts: Companies in the financial sector have a big impact on climate change, for good or ill—and climate change has a big impact on those same companies.

If the red states instead win on all counts, that “could essentially totally reconstitute the industry as we understand it,” said Hearn, who has co-authored a paper on the lawsuit. At stake is how the US does passive investing.

The pro-free-market editorial board of The Wall Street Journal in June called the Texas-led lawsuit “misconceived,” its logic “strained” and its theories “bizarre.”

The case breaks ground on two fronts. It challenges collaboration between financial players on climate action. It also makes novel claims around “common ownership,” where a shareholder—in this case, an asset manager—holds stakes in competing firms within the same sector.

“Regardless of how the chips fall in the case, those two things will absolutely be precedent-setting,” Hearn said.

Even though this is the first legal test of the theory that business climate alliances are anti-competitive, the question was asked in a study by Harvard Business School economists that came out in May. That study, which empirically examines 11 major climate alliances and 424 listed financial institutions over 10 years, turned up no evidence of traditional antitrust violations. The study was broad and did not look at particular allegations against specific firms.

“To the extent that there are valid legal arguments that can be made, they have to be tested,” said study co-author Peter Tufano, a Harvard Business School professor, noting that his research casts doubt on many of the allegations made by critics of these alliances.

Financial firms that joined climate alliances were more likely to adopt emissions targets and climate-aligned management practices, cut their own emissions and engage in pro-climate lobbying, the study found.

”The range of [legal] arguments that are made, and the passion with which they’re being advanced, suggests that these alliances must be doing something meaningful,” said Tufano, who was previously the dean of the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford.

Meanwhile, most of the world is moving the other way.

According to a tally by CarbonCloud, a carbon emissions accounting platform that serves the food industry, at least 35 countries that make up more than half of the world’s gross domestic product now mandate climate-related disclosures of some kind.

In the US, California, which on its own would be the world’s fourth-largest economy, will begin requiring big businesses to measure and report their direct and indirect emissions next year.

Ceres’ Rothstein notes that good data about companies is necessary for informed investment decisions. “Throughout the world,” he said, “there’s greater recognition and, to be honest, less debate about the importance of climate information.” Ceres is one of the founders of Climate Action 100+, which now counts more than 600 investor members around the world, including Europe, Asia, and Australia.

For companies that operate globally, the American political landscape is in sharp contrast with other major economies, Tufano said, creating “this whipsawed environment where if you get on a plane, a few hours later, you’re in a jurisdiction that’s saying exactly the opposite thing.”

But even as companies and financial institutions publicly retreat from their climate commitments amid US political pressure, in a phenomenon called “greenhushing,” their decisions remain driven by the bottom line. “Banks are going to do what they’re going to do, and they’re going to lend to the most profitable or to the most growth-oriented industries,” Hearn said, “and right now, that’s not the fossil fuel industry.”

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