ELECTRIC VEHICLES CHARGING AHEAD

 Electricity is really just organized lightning. ~ George Carlin  

Watt have we been waiting for? Will the era of electrified transportation finally arrive, after being promoted assiduously for years without much to show for it on roadways? Electric vehicles (EVs), nevertheless, have contributed to Elon Musk becoming the world’s wealthiest person.

It seems from recent events that EVs will at some point get much more numerous. Alas, the EV boulevard to nirvana still has several potholes. EV market-makers need to organize their lightning, so it’s not just a “storm” in the San Francisco Bay Area, but everywhere in America.

San Francisco amid a lightning storm, August 2020.

First, the encouraging news. Mary Barra, chief executive of General Motors (GM), announced on January 28 that GM will eliminate production of gasoline- and diesel-fueled light-duty cars, vans and SUVs by 2035 and become carbon-neutral by 2040. Her statement represents a fundamental U-turn and shift for GM, who upset environmentalists when it agreed with #45s reductions of auto fuel-efficiency rules in 2019.

GM is now “all in” and charging ahead with EVs. It expects to invest $27 billion in EVs and associated products through 2025 and will eventually sell about 30 kinds of EVs. The media has characterized GM’s announcement as game-changing. It may be, although the event’s timing leads some to believe it’s as much a political message as a corporate one, coming a week after President Biden’s inauguration.

GM is not alone. Volkswagen, our planet’s largest vehicle manufacturer, is expecting to introduce nearly 70 new EVs in the next decade. Other manufacturers like Toyota, Ford and Volvo also have made big EV investments. The EV market champion remains Tesla Motors, which produces nothing but EVs. Tesla has dominated the market ever since it began selling cars in 2008. Its EV market share hovers around 80%. Nice work, Elon.

Taking a macro view of the US vehicle market, GM along with its traditional competitors like Ford, Fiat Chrysler, Toyota and Volkswagen have been facing a much-changed market for some time. The recent public voltage about how EVs will reshape transportation has been asserted for years without much actual confirmation.

The real upheaval in the auto business has not been EVs slender gains. It’s been customers’ lane-shifting away from wanting traditional cars to buying light trucks, which include not only pickups but SUVs and minivans.

Very, very few car purchasers have been buying Buick sedans, like my grandfather actually did way back in the day. US and Canadian customers’ overwhelming preference is for 4-wheels that are not connected to a traditional sedan. This big shift has progressed since the mid-1990s.

Customers have strongly favored SUVs and pickups, as shown below. Last year, at least 90% of every major domestic car manufacturer’s sales were light trucks, which include SUVs and minivans.

Light Truck* Share of US Vehicles by Manufacturer, 2020 

Light Truck Sales /  Manufacturer	GM	Ford	Fiat Chrysler	Total US
By vehicles sold	90%	91%	91%	76%
By retail value	92%	94%	91%	81%

 Source: Bloomberg Businessweek. *Includes SUVs & Minivans   

SouFor this reason, the sun has already set for sedans’ production at GM and mostly at Ford. Say goodbye to GM’s Chevy Impala and Ford’s Fusion, along with 24 other sedans these two firms made. Chrysler-Dodge will continue making its two sedan types. Not to worry sports fans, thankfully the Mustang, Corvette and Rolls Royce Dawn (starting at $356,500) will still be available.

The 12-year-old US market for EVs remains a thin one. EV sales represent just 1.2% of 2020 US new vehicle sales. GM and other veteran car manufacturers who are placing large gambles on EVs clearly want to change that, as does Tesla.

Throughout EV market history, massive optimism about future growth has far outweighed actual EVs sales. A recent forecast stated that EV annual sales in 2030 will exceed 3.5 million vehicles, which is more than 20 times as many EVs sold last year.

This might happen, but such giant changes in customers’ car purchasing seems founded in fantasyland. What’s very clear is it won’t occur at all without an enormous push via federal, state and local government intervention and a revolution in consumers’ predilections for EVs.

Large increases in EV sales have already been promoted by Dems in the form of significant subsidies that began for the 2010 model year. Subsidies remain vital because EVs cost more for customers to buy than comparable gas-powered vehicles. Many potential purchasers are sensitive to the level of such EV subsidies. When the State of Georgia and Hong Kong eliminated their EV subsidies, sales crashed.

Purchasers of eligible EVs may now receive an IRS tax credit from $2,500 to $7,000. These federal tax credits are available if the manufacturer has not yet sold 200,000 of the EV model. Currently both new Tesla and GM’s EVs cannot qualify because they’ve sold more than the maximum allowed. Such subsidy phase-out is a good idea, that also has been used for solar panels, so they don’t become eternal.

States also offer subsidies, including California, which has been on the forefront of the EV market. By itself, California accounts for 48% of all EVs sold nationwide. The SF Bay Area has surged to having the highest market share of EVs in the nation.

The California Air Resources Board (CARB), offers up to $7,000 in EV rebates for the purchase or lease of new, eligible EV vehicles. The CARB also has mandated that zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) like EVs achieve specified minimum market shares in the state’s light-vehicle sales.

These mandates began in 1990, none of which were met nor could have been attained by manufacturers at that point. At best, the mandates  were aspirational and took no account of existing customers’ preferences. They did push needed EV technology development, meaning battery performance. For a long time, the CARB did nothing to enhance EV “infrastructure” in the state.

The CARB’s current ZEV mandate, stated in 2003, is for ZEVs to attain a 10% market share. Most recently, the EV share of cars sold in California is 7.9%. It’s the largest of any state and still below the required CARB mandate, 17 years later. EVs remain a big policy priority for California, but not for Californians.

Eight years ago, Governor Jerry Brown signed an executive order that set a long-term target of having 1.5 million ZEVs on California’s roadways by 2025. By December 2019, 670,000 EVs had been cumulatively sold in the Golden State.

In addition, Governor Gavin Newsom announced last September that California will disallow the sale of gasoline-powered cars by 2035. Take that, you heathens who keep buying non-EVs.

Not to be left behind, the Berkeley city Council is considering how to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles by 2027, eight years ahead of the rest of California. Prematurely instituting such a ban could reduce the city’s tax revenues by at least 10%. Berkeley's business tax revenues have already shrunk 13.2% due to Covid and it faces a $40M budget deficit. Do the councilmembers absurdly think their non-EV car-buying residents won’t simply drive a couple of miles to purchase such autos in Oakland or elsewhere. Perhaps the Council plans to pull up its drawbridges seven years from now.

President Biden has already signed an executive order that calls for the federal fleet of about 645,000 vehicles, principally of the US Postal Service, to be converted to electric power. He has also vowed to expand charging stations for EVs, revise and extend EV tax credits and tighten fuel economy standards for gas-powered vehicles. It’s doubtful that he will use reconciliation to legislate these actions, so when this becomes law is unknown.  

Such actions and incentives will help, but immense changes in the nation’s vehicle fleet will not be possible without vastly more consumers choosing to buy EVs. Mainstreaming our EV market will require convincing “regular people” like the Katharine and Jack Cooper family, who have 2 young, mini Coopers, to buy an EV, and not feel like they’re being forced to. In the main, pro-active EV policy makers have mostly forgotten about folks like the Coopers. Instead, they’ve principally dealt with suppliers of EVs, hoping that more supplied EVs will in turn create more demand for them. Such thinking was popular among 19th-century economists, but not since then.

The sooner Katharine and Jack become convinced about EVs, the better for our environment. People like the Coopers represent more typical, and far more numerous, car purchasers than many of the privileged folks, to use a currently-popular term, who have bought most EVs so far.

Changing the Cooper’s long-established automobile purchase habits so they actually consider buying an EV will require coordinated government influence. It will be marathon rather than a dash. To date federal and state EV policies have been sadly unidimensional, offering mainly financial incentives, which are useful but not sufficient to radically electrify transportation. Typical car-buyers’ behavior will need to change appreciably, if EVs are to become mainstream.

What’s needed? First, capable, moderately-priced EVs must be available in the marketplace. This will happen over the coming years. Thanks Elon and now Mary.

Second, these vehicles must be comparable with non-EV vehicles, regarding cost, range, performance and supporting infrastructure, especially having a sufficient number of standardized, fast-charging stations across the US, including at multi-tenet buildings.

Nationally, there are about 115,000 gas stations and only 25,000 EV charging stations. Sadly, EV infrastructure is lagging due to an electric chicken-and-egg problem. Increasing the number of charging stations will be costly with so few EVs amping along our roads, but without more fast-charging stations, less people will be interested in buying/leasing an EV. A typical Level-3 commercial, fast-charging station can cost $50,000, taking about an hour for a full charge. A Tesla “supercharge” facility can cost five times as much.

Successfully creating an integrated, electrified transport system is ultimately up to us consumers. Manufacturers like GM, Ford, Volvo, Tesla and others will contribute by offering an expanded variety of attractive, high-value EVs. But there’ll not be any EV tangoing in Paris Kentucky, Paris Oregon or Paris Wisconsin without folks like the Coopers becoming satisfied, repeat EV owners. As Hamlet said, there’s the rub.

 

SHOULD I MOVE BACK TO PHILADELPHIA?

Venus favors the bold. ~ Ovid 

It seems to me that the fall election will be the day after tomorrow. The intensity of media’s circus about all things electoral is being ratcheted way up – with more than Barnum’s three (3) rings and a mere 46 days remaining before November 3.

A growing bask[1] of poll results are published daily. Incessant interviews with allegedly undecided voters pervade the media. Come on, how could any semi-cognizant person 18yrs or older remain unresolved about voting for either Biden or Trump? The number of “swing” or “battleground” states –where someone has decided the expected election results are “too close to call” – have multiplied this time around. Past elections have categorized three or four states as swingers, not now. Last week there were 12 to 15 states that have been labelled “swing/battleground” by various organizations.

Fifteen states, really? Absurdity lives on both sides of the screen. Either the polls’ always-suspect forecast accuracy is getting worse, or the cabal of pollsters and media have determined it’s decidedly inequitable that only a couple of states get so anointed. Each of the 15 swingers must deserve a participatory blue or red tinted ribbon.

According to one analyst, Pennsylvania will likely decide the presidential election among the swingers. Sorry Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio and Florida. Your time in the election spotlight’s glare has apparently dimmed. So, if the Keystone State is indeed the key state, should I move back there – I grew up in suburban Philadelphia – and vote to help Joe win? Is my additional vote worth more there than in the People’s Republic of Berkeley, where I’ve resided for decades?

To see if I can still actually legally cast a vote in Pennsylvania I visited the comprehensive www.vote2020-womentowomen.com/ website that Patrice and her friend Linda Saulsby recently launched. I learned I need to relocate in PA no later than October 2 and register by October 19. It would be a rather quick hop, skip and a long jump back to Liberty Bell-land. Recent polls of likely voters in PA show Biden leading #45 by 3% to 7%, indicating that more Biden voters will help.

Each and every vote counts of course, and in the last presidential election Sec. Clinton beat The Donald by a significant 30.0% margin in my home state, California. In Alameda County, where Berkeley dwells, her victory margin was an incredible 63.6%. She received 5.4 votes for every vote Trump got. These results illuminate California’s and my home county’s status as deeply midnight blue territory. The most recent polls of likely voters in CA show Biden leading from 29% to 30%.

On the other hand, #45 won Pennsylvania in 2016 by a miniscule but vital 0.7% margin even though the state has been Democratically-aligned for a long time. The Dems’ presidential candidates have won PA in 10 of the 17 elections since 1952. Before 2016, the Dems triumphed the last six straight presidential elections. But now politicos believe PA is getting redder. As Democrat cognoscente James Carville stated, “Between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is just Alabama.”

I cast my first presidential vote in November 1968 for Hubert Humphrey when I lived in Montgomery County, one of Philadelphia’s four “collar counties” that surround it. In 2016, Montgomery County gave Sec. Clinton a 21.3% winning margin.

In order for Biden to win PA this time around, these four collar counties (and Pittsburgh’s Dem majority) must surmount #45’s strength throughout the far less urban rest of the state. That, unfortunately, did not happen in 2016. It most assuredly needs to happen this November 3.

In his disastrous town hall meeting held in Philadelphia this week, #45 talked about “herd mentality” – yet another of his ever-lengthening list of spoken misnomers – when he likely meant herd immunity. Actually, from this I believe he and his deceitful campaign has been exposed for using heard mentality to inure his base from the real world and instead accept his fearfully-spoken dark fantasies.

I haven’t booked a flight to PHL yet. I’m hoping Joe and Kamala will continue bolstering their fearlessly bold and clear advantages to the voting public. They should keep emphasizing their positivism, humanity, knowledge, credibility, common sense and perhaps most importantly, empathy for every US resident.

I also haven’t scheduled a journey to our closest planetary neighbor, Venus. I found the report that astrobiologists may have discovered phosphine (PH3) in Venus’ atmosphere emotionally-positive news. On Earth, phosphine can be produced either by microbes or chemists (including as a lethal by-product of hazardously-operated meth labs).

That’s right, possibly some beyond-strange microbial lifeform could be floating next-door in the Venetian atmosphere. Wow; welcome to the planetary neighborhood. Unfortunately there’s no beaches to travel to (it’s a toasty 900°F on the surface), but what an escape from the onslaught of a covid-flu twindemic, wildfires, the on-going viral recession and vicious politics.

To Venus and beyond…

 

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[1] A bask is the collective noun that describes a group of crocodiles, a treacherous reptilian carnivore. 

FAREWELL TO 2018, A NOTABLE AND ARDUOUS YEAR

Please cherish the craziness that we all have within ourselves. ~ Nobukazu Kuriki[1]

Happy New Year! Welcome to 2019, the year of the Pig, according to the Chinese Zodiac. At the turn of this New Year it seems more challenging than ever to maintain an affirmative attitude. Our positivism and empathy quotient have faded from the onslaught of both political and personal anxieties. The media’s implacable focus on what’s unsuitable in this nation and the world makes being an optimista ever more challenging.

I refuse to succumb to such pessimista opinion. As I highlight below, humanity is still improving, despite disparities, tragedies and imperfections. 2018 was, in the largest of pictures, probably the best year ever. The sun does shine on the world as a whole amidst the clouds of misrule, inequity and selfism.

Before delving into our part of the world, the achievements we’ve made globally as well as nationally are as impressive as they are unprecedented.

The year’s single-most key political advancement (I hope) is the Democrats have regained control of the House of Representatives, again under the able leadership of NDP (as Nancy Pelosi now appears to be referred to by the inside-the-Beltway crowd, where initials become names).

Outside of the overly-nasty political realm, 2018 was in many ways the best year yet to be a human living on Earth. The Economist has nicely summarized several of our vital collective accomplishments that unfortunately are not as acknowledged as they should be.

The liberal world of the early 21st century is more prosperous, healthy and peaceful than ever before. For the first time in human history, starvation kills fewer people than obesity; plagues kill fewer people than old age; and violence kills fewer people than accidents. If you think we should go back to some pre-liberal golden age, please name the year in which humankind was in better shape than in the early 21st century. Was it 1918? 1718? 1218?

This summary harkens Franklin Pierce Adams’ apt quote: Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory. Average US life expectancy in 2018 was 78.6 years. 1918 celebrated the end of World War I, which killed up to 100 million people worldwide; the Spanish Flu pandemic hit the US (in Kansas); and US troops engaged Yaqui Indian warriors in Arizona, one of the last battles of the American Indian Wars. US life expectancy was 53.5 years. 1719 saw British forces defeat the Scottish Jacobites and their Spanish allies; Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe; Andrew Bradford started the American Weekly Mercury, Pennsylvania's first newspaper. Average life expectancy was 36 years. 1218 Damietta, Egypt fell to the Crusaders after a siege and thereafter St. Francis of Assisi introduced Catholicism into Egypt; the windmill was first introduced to China. Life expectancy in the middle ages was 31.3 years.

Here’s some additional, worthy socio-economic achievements that should be recognized about the recently departed 2018, published in Quartz. Worldwide, the number of people living without electricity fell below 1 billion. Electricity access is essential to health, education, and economic stability and all of those measures also improved in the past year. One of the simplest ways to assess global poverty is to compare the difference between what the average person makes a day, and a predetermined global poverty line. The difference was about $0.25 in 1990, and is now nearing $0.05; every year the poverty gap closes a little more. Meanwhile, literacy rates have progressively climbed for decades, and even a small change can make a huge difference: The 0.23 percentage-point increase from 2015 to 2016 means about 11.5 million more people can read. Global public health continued its steady improvements. World infant mortality declined in 2017 to 29 deaths/1000 live births. In 1990 it was 65 deaths/1000 live births. Global average life expectancy at birth rose to 72.0 years in 2016; in 1990 it was 62.4 years. Over the last 65 years the global literacy rate increased by 4% every 5 years – from 42% in 1960 to 86% in 2015. Although only 12% of the people in the world could read and write in 1820, today the share has reversed, only 17% of the world population remains illiterate.

Global education levels continue to rise. In 1970, 28% of primary-school-age children in the world were not attending school, today this share has decline to 9% -- equivalent to 60 million children not in primary education. Data published this year show that in 2016 there were 99.7 girls enrolled in primary and secondary school for every 100 boys. For comparison, in 1986 that number was 85.1, reflecting an impressive and needed boost to gender-based educational equity.  

It’s also not all pessimista in the US now, despite assertions that our nation is suffering as never before. Key positives of 2018 include the following. US median household income reached a record $61,372 in 2017, up 1.8% from 2016. This marks the third year in a row that median household income has increased. The poverty rate also fell for the third consecutive year. In 2017, the official poverty rate was 12.3%, down from 12.7% in 2016.

A large drop in oil prices provided broad economic benefits in the last half of 2018. Petroleum that cost $107/bbl. in June sold for only $45 by year-end. For consumers, that meant gasoline prices that fell to an average $2.38/gal., compared with their peak of $3.70 in April. All told, the drop in oil prices was equivalent to an annual tax cut of about $750 per American family. The US, using its pioneering fracking technology (that has nasty environmental effects), has become an important global petroleum producer and has directly influenced the drop in world oil prices, much to OPEC’s dismay.
The average price of a residential solar photovoltaic power system is less than one-half its level in 2010. Nearly two million US homes have solar panels installed on their roofs, representing 10 times the solar capacity as in 2010. And for the first time the share of global energy that was produced from renewables passed 10%.

Despite what nightly local news stories portray, the number of reported violent crimes committed in the US has dropped 48% since 1992. The birth rate for American teenagers dropped to 20.3 births per 1000 girls ages 15–19 in 2016 (most recent year), according to the latest fertility data. This teenage pregnancy rate represents a 9% decline from 2015 and a 67% reduction from the modern-day peak in 1991. It’s the lowest teen birth rate since 1940.

The US Labor Department just reported one of the strongest months of job gains in the last decade, with employers adding 312,000 people to payrolls in December. Wages, which had been lagging until recently, showed impressive gains. December’s year-over-year increase was 3.2%, tying October for the biggest surge since 2009. Unemployment inched up to 3.9% from last month’s 3.7%, but remains much below the 4.61% Natural Rate of Unemployment in 4Q2018. For perspective, towards the end of the last recession, the unemployment rate was 10.0%. Real Wages for lower-income workers in the US also increased in 2018. November figures show that the real cash income of hourly workers rose by a 0.8% after adjusting for inflation. This positive result is augmented when cash benefits are added to income. And finally, who could forget that the US men’s curling team won their first Olympic Gold medal last February in South Korea. You don’t remember this impressive athletic feat? [Actually they used their brooms more than their feet as they swept to victory.] Praise be.

But of course it’s not been all sweetness and growth. Casting an infectious economic pall, the media has been offering an increasing number of stories about a possible recession around a future corner. Here are five of the 64.1 million Google results I found from “the coming recession”: “Markets are signaling higher odds for a 2019 recession;” “The next recession is coming…”; “Stocks are nosediving, is a recession coming?”; “The next recession is really going to suck”; and “The next financial calamity is coming.” A recession seems almost certain, doesn’t it? Perhaps not, if you remember that economists and the markets have predicted nine of the past five recessions.

If you’re not concerned about the coming recession, then maybe you’re convinced that some facet of the inequalities of life and commerce described by newspapers, magazines and broadcasters could cloud your prospects. There certainly have been many descriptions of the ever-expanding flavors of inequity the media has been announcing. I start with the two most basic and traditional types of inequality, income and wealth.

Income. A nation’s income inequality has been an issue ever since Corrado Gini first published in 1912 his statistical measure of the distribution of income by decile of population, now known as the Gini Index. The higher the index, the more unequal is the income distribution. The US Gini Index has been slowly increasing for the past three decades. According to the World Bank, the 2016 US Gini index is 41.5, and ranked 58th most unequal of the 160 nations listed. California’s Gini Index (49.9) is the fourth most unequal state; the District of Columbia’s Gini Index is the most unequal.

Wealth. A nation’s wealth is usually more unequally distributed than income; the US is no exception. Wealth is the cumulative net worth of a person (or nation), the total value of a person’s assets (like homes, automobiles, personal valuables, businesses, savings, and investments) minus their liabilities (like loans, mortgages). Income is the amount of money that a person (or nation) receives in return for their services, sale of goods, or profit from investments during a particular period of time, say one year.

The share of our nation’s total wealth owned by the top 1% of the US population was 37.24% in 2014. In contrast, the top 1% accounted for 17.99% of gross income in 2014. By 2017, the richest 1% owned 40% of US wealth; the top 20% (folks who earn $115,000/yr or more) accounted for 90% of US wealth. The distribution of wealth in the US, like many nations, has grown more unequal since the mid-1980s.

Liberal/Progressive Democrats have made increasingly strident proclamations that the current income and wealth inequalities must be seriously remedied. Over time, reducing income and wealth inequality may increase the nation’s overall economic growth mostly because people in the middle-class and below spend a higher percentage of their income on goods and services than higher-income folks.

Progressives vow to significantly reduce economic inequality, which will require two sets of federal and state policies that are politically fraught. First, income and other taxes will need to be increased. Second, government redistribution programs will need to be expanded and/or created. Progressives strongly favor increases in welfare (e.g., food stamps), public social services, universal health care, free college, higher federal minimum wage, payoff student debt, improve infrastructure and enlarge social security. With luck, decent design, fortuitous timing and effective implementation such programs could reduce inequality over time. After Congress and the presidency are led by Democrats in 2020, such expansive redistribution programs might be politically possible.

Income and wealth redistribution requires more active government that administers more taxes and fees and expands more programs that provide services to less fortunate folks. An October 2018 national Gallup poll found that 50% of Americans say the government is doing too much, 44% say the government should do more, with 7% undecided.

Such programs are very expensive to implement. Progressive politicians rarely mention how much such redistributive programs will cost, because it could lead to electoral downfall. Relatively few voters would agree to have their taxes increased as much as these programs would require under some of the PAYGO rules that the Democratic House just passed.

Remember the fate of Washington State’s two propositions to impose a state-based carbon tax to mitigate climate change and environmental inequality? Both went down to defeat, the latest this past November. Large electoral thrashings also occurred several years ago in Colorado and Vermont, Bernie’s home state, regarding implementing state-wide Medicare for All (M4A). The legislatures couldn’t find the money except through higher taxes, and voters didn’t want to pay more taxes. California’s M4A ideas were shelved last year after initial cost estimates were calculated.

Progressives imply or explicitly state such programs would simply require increased taxes on just the rich, meaning the 1%. That’s fake news. Tax increases limited to the “rich” will be entirely insufficient to fund these programs. Liberal media sources estimate such redistributive programs could cost $42.5 trillion (T) during the next decade. Conservative estimates are much larger. There are not enough rich people and even their pockets aren’t deep enough to pay for all such programs.

To put this $42.5T in perspective, the federal government is projected to collect $44T in total tax revenues from all sources over the next decade. The 2017 Republican Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, understandably and universally decried by Democrats as irresponsible (and by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as “Armageddon”), will cost less than $2 trillion over the decade. Thus, if these redistributive programs are implemented, they will need increased taxes from many middle-class income-earners as well as all the rich.

Other interesting and sometimes peculiar forms of inequality cited by the media include the following.

The environmental inequity of wildfires. This story mentions the 2015 Napa, CA fire that displaced scores of “poorer folks who never re-occupied their places.” Consequently “fire produces gentrification,” so even Mother Nature is pushing a localized Gini Index higher. Oh my.

Another story theorizes that data-driven medicine can worsen inequality in society. The author says that data-driven medicine will help people, but its “technological advances threaten to make a crushingly unequal system more so.” She hypothesizes that data-driven, technology-based medicine’s “knowledge gaps” between socio-economic groups will lead to better access for “privileged” groups and worse for “poor” groups. Should medical Luddites unite against more sophisticated medical databases and assessment? Perhaps.

Inequality is made worse by K-12 schools’ long summer vacations. This story fixes its attention on the impact of schools’ long-vacation-induced “summer learning loss” that is apparently not shared equally among students. In the US, children from low-income families fall farther behind in reading during the summer than peers from richer families with more access to books, museum trips, and camps. The author puzzlingly suggests that “in an era of longer lives, we should have longer, slower careers with more frequent breaks instead of short, intense careers that end abruptly in long (and costly) retirements. And in an era of lifelong learning, perhaps the school year should be changed to a year-round model.” Curiously, she doesn’t specifically suggest eliminating the multi-week Hanukkah/Solstice/Christmas/Kwanzaa vacation. And I’m not sure what a “longer, slower career” might be. From my own experiences at the local high school, teachers and staff, not to mention operators of and counselors at full-season summer camps, and possibly parents would take strong exception to her “year-round school” recommendation. This story is consistent with the sense that pretty much everything can cause increased inequality. So of course, long school vacations add to inequality.

Corporate cannabis is squandering legal weed’s promise of a more equitable society. This story laments the passing of a popular but hazy dream of better, “more equitable” times for small growers when weed is legalized. The author states that after legalization, large well-funded cannabis growers make it nearly impossible for smaller independent growers to compete with lower prices. I must have missed this particular weed mantra; that once legalized, society will become more equitable. The well-established and large black market for marijuana in California seems to be doing OK, despite legalization.

“The icon for cannabis is going to become the Marlboro Man,” Lynda Hopkins, a Sonoma County supervisor who took a lead in licensing marijuana businesses, said referring to the symbol of the tobacco industry, to which critics often compare the legalized cannabis business. “In California we’ve done what we always do — regulate, regulate, regulate, which ultimately gives significant advantage to large companies with significant economies of scale.” Legalization has been liberating for big players but for hundreds of smaller producers the paperwork alone has been enough to put them out of business; or more likely, stay in the black market’s sizeable business. A cannabis producer must submit applications to as many as five state agencies, including obtaining a certificate to ensure they are able to use a scale.

In California, Canada and every other place where recreational marijuana has been legalized, the numerous, encompassing rules, regulations and taxes favor growers and distributors who have big-time resources. The utopian dreams of small-time, mom and pop (maybe even former hippie) growers succeeding in a legalized and thus more equitable world are just that, dreams gone up in smoke.

Library fees are eliminated because they’re inequitable. Yup, the Berkeley Public Library has stopped charging late fees for overdue teen and adult books, DVDs, CDs, and magazines in an effort to make the library “more egalitarian.” The Library’s justification apparently linked disproportionate overdue fee charges to library card holders in 3 lower-income ZIP codes in Berkeley. The Library and city concluded that such fees were a “barrier to use [of the Libraries].” Before the change, if you owed overdue fees, you couldn’t check out other books.

This story illustrates the bizarre lengths my fine city will go to in using inequality as a spurious rationale for policy changes. What this will do for the already-circumcised Library budget is pretty clear. The elimination of library late fee revenues will require Berkeley taxpayers to more heavily subsidize the Library’s operations. My jaundiced view is that the Library employed this politically-correct but perverse link to “inequality” to reduce the cost of borrowing books to zero even when one doesn’t return them on time (or ever, now). More to the point, the new no-fee policy is most likely due to the Library’s desperate attempt to get more folks to actually use its services. In this Age of Google and Amazon, far fewer students and other folks ask reference librarians to help them learn the causes of the War of 1812, or actually use the library’s books. There may not be a free lunch, but in Berkeley there are “free” books. We’re now bound forever in library egalitarianism.

Onward towards a satisfying and more equitable 2019.

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[1] Mr. Kuriki was a Japanese mountaineer who, starting in 2009, attempted to climb Mt. Everest. He never summited. He died during his eighth attempt last spring. He made an art of hardship and spoke of breaking down “the barrier of negativity.”