Category Archives: News commentary

Employers are increasingly demanding that remote workers return to offices or other workplaces. Some are offering bonuses and pay increases to return to work while others are threatening to fire employees who don’t return.

Click image to download a copy of this report.

Employers such as Disney argue that the creative work they want out of their employees requires collaboration that can only be found when employees are working together. Others say that working in one location creates a work culture that is vital to the success of their companies. Continue reading →

Emissions of carbon dioxide in the United States peaked in 2007 at 6.14 billion tons. Since then it declined, initially due to the 2008 recession but later to use of more efficient fuels (mainly natural gas instead of coal). By 2019, it had declined by 0.76 billion tons, or 12 percent, while in 2021 it had fallen another 0.37 billion tons, or 18 percent less than 2007. Some of the decline in 2021 was due to COVID, but some was due to continuing efficiencies.

Source: Our World in Data.

Over the same time period, 2007 to 2021, emissions in China grew by 4.49 billion tons, or almost four times the decline in the United States. As of 2021, China was producing almost two-and-a-half times as much carbon emissions as the United States. Much of the increase in China was due to burning of coal that we and other countries that are busy reducing their carbon footprints are exporting to China. Continue reading →

Last month, a non-profit group called OpenAI made available an artificial intelligence program called ChatGPT that has educators worried that students will use it to write fake essays. ChatGPT relies on information it can find on the World Wide Web up through the end of 2021 and is able to converse on a wide range of subjects.

When it first came out, I was doing research on the history of steam locomotive technology for my other blog, Streamliner Memories. I asked it some questions that I already knew the answers to and it made some reasonably intelligent replies. Continue reading →

My first real job was a summer internship with the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group (OSPIRG) in 1972. Steve McCarthy was the flamboyant director of OSPIRG, and my work that summer on low-cost ways to improve TriMet, Portland’s transit system, helped propel him into the job of TriMet’s general manager. He implemented some of my suggestions and made other improvements and by the end of the decade Portland was one of the few urban areas in America where transit ridership had grown faster than driving.

Steve McCarthy growing pears in bottles that will soon be filled with Clear Creek pear brandy. Photo courtesy of Clear Creek Distillery.

Nearly two decades later, Steve invited me out to lunch in Northwest Portland where he had started a new business making pear brandy. Over lunch, he told me that after leaving TriMet he took over his father’s business making hunting accessories and then bought a pear orchard in Oregon’s Hood River Valley, where his family had been in the fruit-growing business since 1910. He wanted to prove to other orchardists that they could make more money by adding value to their fruit than by just selling fruit to grocers. Continue reading →

Is urban sprawl overrunning the countryside? To answer this question, it is important to define the difference between urban and rural. The Census Bureau is proposing to change its definition, but I don’t believe the proposed change makes sense.

Is this urban or rural? Under the Census Bureau’s old definition, it is urban, but by its new definition, it is rural. Photo by Visitor7.

In 1900, the line between urban and rural was pretty easy. If land was in an incorporated city, it was urban. If it was outside the city limits, it was rural. The main transportation of the day was streetcars, and if you couldn’t get somewhere on a streetcar, it wouldn’t be developed. If a developer built a new streetcar line outside the city and developed that area (which is how most suburban streetcar lines got built), the city would quickly annex the newly developed land. Continue reading →

The Antiplanner disagrees with Charles Marohn, of Strong Towns fame, about a lot of things. But I agree with him that the Minnesota Board of AELSLAGID (that’s Architecture, Engineering, Land Surveying, Landscape Architecture, Geoscience and Interior Design, in case it isn’t obvious) was wrong to fine him $1,500 and censure him for being late in renewing his license as a professional engineer.

Charles Marohn in 2016. Photo by SEAGreenways.

Marohn is trained as a professional engineer and started practicing, with a Minnesota license, in 2000. Though he stopped practicing in 2012 to form Strong Towns, he kept his license up and continued to call himself an engineer on his resume. However, he moved his residence in 2018 and forgot to notify AELSLAGID, so when they sent him a renewal notice he didn’t get it. He eventually renewed, paying a $120 late fee. Continue reading →

In a controversial ruling, the New York Court of Appeals recently decided that elephants are not people with constitutional rights. While this would seem to be a no-brainer, animal rights advocates believe that giving animals more rights is a natural progression from a few hundred years ago when only the aristocracy had what we conventionally regard as human rights. Since then, rights were extended first to property owners, then all white men, then women, and then blacks and other minorities.

Elephants at the Bronx Zoo. Photo by Wally Gobetz.

In the New York case, two elephants in the Bronx Zoo were forced to live together in a confined area even though they did not get along. A group called the Nonhuman Rights Project argued that such imprisonment violates the right of habeas corpus and the elephants should be allowed to sue so that they could be released into a larger sanctuary. Continue reading →

Few people other than debt watchdogs noticed when the national debt reached $29 trillion last month. The debt has been rising at more than a trillion dollars per year since 2017, so it is almost certain to reach $30 trillion sometime in 2022. The Office of Management and Budget actually predicted it would exceed $30 trillion by the end of 2021, but it didn’t quite make it.

Although the national debt has long been a subject for debate, it didn’t start growing rapidly except in wartime until the late 1970s. Why then? My theory is that the post-Watergate election brought so many liberal Democrats into Congress that they were able to strip fiscally conservative Southern Democrats of power, and the latter were no longer able to serve as guardians of the public purse.

Just for perspective, $29 trillion is more than $87,000 per resident. Although the latest numbers for other countries are hard to come by, it is likely that only Japan has a greater per capita national debt. Back in the 1960s, national debt per capita was about $1,500. I remember thinking, “I don’t have $1,500, but I could probably earn that if I had to in order to pay my share of the national debt.” Today, when 40 percent of Americans can’t cover an emergency expense of $400, I doubt many would be able to repay an $87,000 debt. Continue reading →