Matthew Yglesias:

A new study from U.S. PIRG gives us perhaps the most detailed yet look at the “peak car” phenomenon whereby America’s passenger-miles driven keeps falling. As Ashley Halsey writes, perhaps the most important contention of the report is “data that show the cities with the biggest drop in driving suffered no greater unemployment peaks than those cities where driving declined the least.”
 
 Specifically, the second- and third-largest declines in car commuting were seen in the Washington, DC and Austin, TX metropolitan areas which had two of the most robust job markets during the recession.
 
 PIRG’s takeaway is that it’s time to stop lavishly funding new highway construction and instead focus money on a mix of maintaining existing infrastructure and improving mass transit services. I agree with that, but the budget allocations are in some ways the smallest pieces of the puzzle. The real gains are to be made in rolling back the implicit subsidies to parking and barriers to multi-family apartments, leveling the regulatory playing field between private cars and private transit, and looking at operational issues that prevent cost-effective transit operations in the United States. All of which is to say that while money is nice, what’s really needed is a much broader change of mind that doesn’t regard all alternatives to living in a detached single-family house with one car per adult as deviant behavior that needs to be regulated into a special box.

Samuel Arbesman:

I noticed recently that books with the phrase “The Last Man Who Knew Everything” all share in common that their subjects lived during the period close to the Scientific Revolution, roughly between 1550 to 1700. (The examples I own are about Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit priest born in 1602; Thomas Young, who studied topics such as optics and philology and was born in 1773; and Philadelphia area professor Joseph Leidy, who was born in 1823.)
 
 It’s as if the Scientific Revolution — and the knowledge it spawned — killed the ability to Know Everything. Before then, it was not only possible to be a generalist or polymath (someone with a wide range of expertise) — but the weaving together of different disciplines was actually rather unexceptional. The Ancients discussed topics such as ethics, biology, and metaphysics alongside each other. The Babylonian Talmud discusses everything from astronomy and biology to morality and law, weaving them together into a single compendium.
 
 So what changed? Scientific knowledge exploded in size, mainly due to the application of the scientific method to our surroundings. As that knowledge base and its domain experts grew exponentially, we began classifying and ordering all that we understood — from the classification taxonomy of Carl Linnaeus to manuals for categorizing mental disease. We made sense of our world by dividing information into manageable portions and distinct areas of proficiency.

Veronica Kalas:

I have been asked to write a report for the International Center of Medieval Art newsletter concerning recent events in Turkey whereby Byzantine churches that long have held the status of state museums and cultural heritage sites are being converted into mosques. It is crucial to raise awareness about this very critical issue. The examples include the church of the Hagia Sophia in Iznik (Nicea), the church of the Hagia Sophia in Trabzon (Trebizond), and the plans for the church and associated monastic complex of St. John Stoudios in Istanbul (Constantinople). Although these events have been ongoing for quite some time, the world started watching more closely in recent months when certain representatives of the Turkish government publicly called for the conversion of THE Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. For every example, the original Byzantine church building testifies to the vast contribution of Byzantine culture and civilization to the history of medieval art and architecture and world architecture more broadly. These churches were converted into mosques under Ottoman rule and subsequently into museums under the Turkish Republic.

osvehicle:

Macchi decided to leave the corporate world and start a project of their own to change the way vehicles are created, making them open source, low cost and with zero initial investment on DIY/DIT production anywhere over the world. This project became known as OSVehicle.

via Denis Metzger

Paul Downs:

I can assemble a roster of plans at different price points and model the effect of offering various employer/employee premium cost splits. I can also see what happens if I offer a defined contribution instead of a percentage split — and what it would cost me to fund health savings accounts for workers who choose a bronze-level plan. Of course, I will have to confirm that I can actually purchase my preferred configuration with my agent or insurer, but the estimates I make should at least be good enough to narrow my options.
 
 To do my projections, I created an Excel sheet that allows me to analyze up to 20 plans at once. I’ve been playing around with different plans and incentives, and I’m finding ways to save tens of thousands of dollars from the cost of the first plan my broker recommended. Would you like to try it? I put extra time into making it easy to use, and you can try it free. All you need is your roster of employees, with their ages, and a quote from any source. Spend some time messing around with numbers and you, too, might save significant money. The sheet and the instructions for how to use it are on my website. Be sure to read the instructions!

Fabius Maximus:

Automation need not be feared. Many of the dooms we fear will disappear along with the lost jobs. Automation improves productivity, giving us more national wealth and income. We need only adapt our society to gain its benefits, minimize the trauma of the transition, and share the benefits (which we have failed to do with the gains from the last 30 years). We want to succeed like Britain did in the 1760 – 1840 period, with internal peace and prosperity. We do not want to follow France’s path during that period.
 
 Planning for success requires reassessment of America’s strengths and weaknesses. For example, economists consider as strengths our relatively high fertility and attractiveness to immigrants. Not so as automation destroys jobs by the millions during the next few decades.
 
 In the 21st century population growth will not be necessary for economic growth. Perhaps the 21st century will reverse that, making Japan is the nation best prepared for the next wave of automation — as seen in the below graph from “Japan Meanderings”, Christopher Woods, CLSA, 5 December 2013:

Wolf Richter:

Average loans for new cars jumped by $756 to $26,719 in the third quarter from a year ago, the highest increase in five years, according to Experian Automotive, which collects registration data from motor vehicle departments and financing data from lenders – an essential cog in the perfect surveillance society. Despite the jump in loan balances, the average monthly payment rose only 1.3% to $458, due to two factors:
 
 Magically lower interest rates. Though interest rates elsewhere in the economy rocketed higher in Q3, auto lenders just ignored them, and average rates actually dropped to 4.27% from 4.53% a year earlier.
 
 Dizzyingly long terms. The average term grew by one month to 65 months. A stunning 19% of all new-car loans were stretched to over 72 months, up from 16% last year.
 
 Used vehicles saw similar dynamics. The average amount financed rose 1.8% to $17,900, but the average monthly payment remained flat at $350, thanks lower interest rates and longer terms.
 
 Leasing – a fancy word for “long-term renting,” something dealers, lenders, and automakers love because they get to extract more money out of you, and you don’t even know it because the monthly payments are deceptively low – made up 27.2% of all new financing in Q3, up from 24.4% a year ago, up from 14.2% in 2009, and up from the mid-single digits back when I was still in the business (and we loved, loved, loved leases!).

The Economist:

WHEREVER automotive engineers gather, some wag will sooner or later announce that hydrogen is the fuel of the future—and always will be. The hydrogen-powered car has been just around the corner for decades. However, judging from announcements by Honda, Hyundai and Toyota at last week’s motor shows in Los Angeles and Tokyo, hydrogen cars will be hitting the showrooms from spring 2014 onwards. It seems the future is about to arrive.
 
 Hydrogen’s attraction as a transport fuel is that, unlike petrol, diesel, kerosene, natural gas and every other hydrocarbon fuel, it contains, well, no carbon. Burning it therefore creates no carbon-based greenhouse gases—at least, not in the engine. However, if air is used as the oxidiser instead of pure oxygen, burning hydrogen produces all the noxious oxides of nitrogen that fossil fuels generate. These are an even bigger curse than carbon dioxide as far as damaging greenhouse gases are concerned.
 
 That is why work on using hydrogen as a fuel for a modified internal-combustion engine has been more or less abandoned, even though getting such a power unit into production was considered cheaper than any of the clean alternatives. BMW built a couple of hydrogen-powered supercars, only to find them no cleaner than clunkers from the days before catalytic converters.

Jeff John Roberts:

Digital marketers, weary of online scams, will start placing more ads on Facebook rather than run the risk that their ads will be shown to robots instead of actual people.
 
 That was one conclusion of an ad industry breakfast in Manhattan, titled Bagels and Bots, where executives last week explored the pervasiveness of botnets — networks of corrupted computers that provide an easy way for criminals and hackers to defraud big brands out of billions of dollars. Here are some new numbers, and the implications for advertisers.

Michael Spector:

From Galileo to Servetus to Mendel to Einstein. Revolutionary science has always incited visceral hatred on a mass scale. Galileo told us that the Bible was wrong and he was chastised for denying the word of God. Mendel was engaged in the devil’s work. And Einstein “invented a weapon that killed millions” because of his original theories of physics.
 
 It’s a lot easier for a reaction to something new to turn into repeated statements of evil, supported by anecdote and innuendo, and eventually turn into a meme, ultimately becoming the commonplace perception. Melissa McEwen is a blogger who writes about sustainable agriculture and healthy eating. She recently penned an article titled “Just Kale Me: How your Kale habit is slowly destroying your health and the world”. She chastised Kale (a very healthy vegetable) as being deadly (http://huntgatherlove.com/content/just-kale-me-how-your-kale-habit-slowly-destroying-your-health-and-world). She used innuendo, extrapolation, unscientific references, out-of-context facts and statements to make her point. Her “fake” article spread like wildfire and for about a day was considered “truth” by many “healthy living” bloggers and readers alike. The very next day, she edited the article and admitted to the truth—she was trying to make a point that it is so easy to demonize something without clear logic and fact, and still get everyone to believe you and repeat the bottom line. Her declaration was that when you read “an article that demonizes a food, think about whether or not there are citations and follow those citations”. Her article struck me as very poignant, in light of all the GMO research I had been doing in the prior weeks. There are so many articles (some are repeatedly published) that are wholly inaccurate, based in half-science, extrapolation, innuendo, and out-of-context rhetoric. When I did my own research—to the source and in the science—I was amazed at how far these inaccurate statements had gone and how wrong so many people were, thinking they were right because they repeated the same things others did.
 
 Perhaps Monsanto should have adopted the mantra that Paul Bucheit so cleverly and timely introduced at Google in 2000—“don’t be evil”. Just saying that was their mantra has helped Google countless times avoid the evil designation that so many people have tried to hurl their way over the years. It has worked.
 
 Did you know: Google sues more of its customers each year than Monsanto does? Google spends 3 times as much as Monsanto on Federal lobbying? There are more ex-Googlers in the Obama administration than there are ex-Monsanto employees?
 
 I could go on. But a lot of the “bad things” being said about Monsanto are simple truths about the nature of doing business at scale. On the list of top lobbyists on payroll in DC, Monsanto is not even in the top 50. The “Monsanto Protection Act” is actually called the “Farmer Assurance Provision” and was drafted and written by a number of farm groups, including the American Farm Bureau Federation, American Soybean Association, National Corn Growers, and others, to help ensure farmers aren’t denied the right to grow crops that are approved and regulated by the Federal agencies, protecting them from emerging state propositions that aren’t based on science or research.