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Why Suburban Swing Voters May Be Less Common Than You Think – CityLab – Pocket

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Why Suburban Swing Voters May Be Less Common Than You Think – CityLab – Pocket

The popular image of America’s suburbs as a realm of swing voters, moderates, and independents is wrong, a recent poll suggests. In fact, suburban voters are much less likely to be political independents than either urban or rural voters. Only 15 percent of the poll’s suburban respondents were independents, lower than the rate among rural or urban residents.

What makes the suburbs politically distinct in America may not be moderation, but rather a more even split between Democrats and Republicans than exists in left-leaning cities or right-leaning rural areas.

My perception is that suburbanites are generally more educated, and the more formal education a person has, the more likely they are to have a solid conception of how the world works, and the better that they are finding facts that support their own opinion.

Every Exit on I-84 in Hudson Valley To Get New Exit Number

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Every Exit on I-84 in Hudson Valley To Get New Exit Number

New York is finally embracing mile based exit numbers. The Taconic Parkway now uses mile based exits, as does Interstate 890 in Schenectady (because there is an exit nearly every mile).

MUTC 2009 Edition required all states to use mile-based exits on roads built after that year, but they did not include a set year for changing over existing highways, although the draft document called for a deadline of 2019, but now that's just the preference. Compliance with MUTC is required for federal highway funding. Virtually all states outside of New England switched over to mile-based exits in 1970s and 1980s.

The moral of the story: Expect to see a lot of New York highways with changing exit numbers in coming years, and "Old Exit XXX" signs.

Did Cellphones Bring Down Crime Rates in the ’90s? – The Atlantic

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Did Cellphones Bring Down Crime Rates in the ’90s? – The Atlantic

The intriguing new theory suggests that the arrival of mobile phones made holding territory less important, which reduced intergang conflict and lowered profits from drug sales. Lena Edlund, a Columbia University economist, and Cecilia Machado, of the Getulio Vargas Foundation, lay out the data in a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. They estimate that the diffusion of phones could explain 19 to 29 percent of the decline in homicides seen from 1990 to 2000.

“The cellphones changed how drugs were dealt,” Edlund told me. In the ’80s, turf-based drug sales generated violence as gangs attacked and defended territory, and also allowed those who controlled the block to keep profits high. The cellphone broke the link, the paper claims, between turf and selling drugs. “It’s not that people don’t sell or do drugs anymore,” Edlund explained to me, “but the relationship between that and violence is different.”

It's often underestimated how much technology changed that ways of human relationships, and while I doubt cellphones entirely drove the drop in crime over the past two decades, all the evidence suggests that crime has dropped due to many different factors.

GM-Ford Merger? Rnything’s Possible

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GM-Ford Merger? Rnything’s Possible

I have my doubts that regulators would ever allow GM and Ford to merge, just because it would lead to consolidation of 3/4rd ton and 1 ton pickups down to two brands -- Ram and Ford-GM. There really isn't a lot of competition left for the big trucks, and they are some of the most profitable vehicles for the automobile industry.