Technology journalist Brian Merchant says he’s tired of PR flacks from tech companies refusing to talk unless it’s off-the-record:

After my experience with Amazon, I decided that on all matters of importance, I am no longer going to listen to a public relations representative try to change my mind on background with unquotable statements attributable to no one. No reporter should, not when the stakes are as high as they are. If an actual source—an engineer, or a policymaker—wants to go on background for protection, that’s one thing. But a spokesperson should either go on the record or get off the phone.

I get that day-to-day journalists have a different job than I do. They need responses from tech companies when they write about them, and they genuinely want to hear both sides of a story. Nevertheless, it’s inconceivable to me that they routinely let companies get away with this. And not just tech companies, either. This goes for everyone. As Merchant says, a background briefing allows a company flack to say anything without being held accountable. They can fill your mind with any kind of nonsense as a way of trying to change what you write, and it’s all but impossible to check out the truth of what they’re saying.

I have long refused to talk to anyone on background. Obviously this is pretty easy for me, especially since I don’t talk to very many people in the first place. But the truth is that corporate PR shops aren’t very useful even when they do talk on the record, and little is missed if you give up the routine practice of “asking for comment” on every story. Inevitably, the comment is either “no comment” or “we deny it.” Who needs it?

Either talk on the record or shut up. Those should be your choices.

Over at National Review, John McCormack says that Kamala Harris is being “preposterous” about her Medicare for All plan:

“Senator Sanders says that that is impossible to achieve without a middle class tax hike,” CNN correspondent Kyung Lah says. “I’m not prepared to engage in a middle class tax hike,” Harris replies, suggesting that taxes on Wall Street and financial services can fund the $30 trillion program.

There might turn out to be something preposterous about this eventually, but there’s nothing preposterous about it yet. It all depends on what kind of plan Harris proposes and what the total funding source will be. If Harris were a Republican, she’d just issue a vague, one-page description and then punt on the funding, saying that she’ll work with Congress to figure out the hard stuff. But since she’s a Democrat, I’m sure we’ll eventually get a 30-page white paper about the whole thing.

Politically, I think something along the lines of Joe Biden’s plan is probably the best bet. I’d keep Obamacare; add a Medicare buy-in; phase in a corporate health care mandate that eventually covers everyone, with the option to either provide insurance or pay a payroll tax; and guarantee subsidies such that no one ever has to pay more than 10 percent of their income in premiums. That’s the bare bones, with lots of details to be added. Overall, I’d say the goal should be for public financing to cover 80-85 percent of all health care expenses.

Homeless in LA.Kevin Drum

A couple of years ago LA passed a big bond measure to address its homelessness problem. The money is mostly earmarked for permanent shelter, which is, needless to say, expensive and time-consuming to build. I’ve long thought that this makes little sense, but I’m no expert—as people are fond of reminding me whenever I write something about homelessness—so I’ve just kept quiet.

Today, however, the LA Times features a pair of op-eds suggesting that Los Angeles should ditch its permanent shelter model and follow the New York model instead, which focuses on getting people indoors and then working from there. Here is New York’s Dr. Marc Siegel:

Whereas L.A. has focused (unsuccessfully) on trying to create long-term affordable housing, New York City has focused on creating temporary shelters. As a result, today only about 5% of New York City’s homeless population is without shelter. In Los Angeles, 75% of the homeless population is without shelter. Our homeless numbers are not that different from yours in Los Angeles, but in New York, few people are living on the street.

….As a physician, I witnessed firsthand a huge shift when New York began its emphasis on providing shelter for all. Mental illness, drug addiction and contagious diseases like hepatitis A, B and C were still a problem, but they weren’t nearly as severe as when so much of the homeless population was “bedless,” living in cardboard boxes or in the subway. It is simply impossible to provide good treatment to a patient with mental or physical illness living in that way.

In Los Angeles, local government officials are dispatching more garbage trucks and portable toilets and showers to skid row, but that’s just a Band-Aid. As long as there are thousands of people living on single city blocks, there will be problems with garbage disposal and human waste, which means rats will abound. And rats carry fleas, and fleas are carriers of typhus bacteria, which causes fever, muscle aches, and severe headaches, among other symptoms.

Darrel Steinberg, a longtime mental care advocate in the California legislature, who is now mayor of Sacramento, agrees:

I still believe strongly in the concept of housing first, but I’ve also come to see that focusing primarily on permanent housing is insufficient. We simply don’t have the housing stock necessary to address our current crisis, and building it will take too long and cost too much. We need an infusion of short-term shelter and housing options to serve as a bridge for those currently living on our streets.

….In 2019, New York City will spend about $1.6 billion to shelter 75,000 people. Our unsheltered population numbers about 90,000. I believe the cost of getting them indoors would be a bargain considering what California spends on public safety and cleanup without actually getting people off the streets. I think Californians would overwhelmingly agree.

In California, at least, permanent housing is practically a mantra—and in an ideal world it’s a good idea. In the real world, unfortunately, it’s simply too hard and too expensive to build enough permanent housing in all the places it’s needed. What’s more, not all homeless people are able or willing to live in permanent housing in the first place.

As Siegel says, we should focus primarily on getting the homeless indoors any way we can. Different people are willing to tolerate different rules and different levels of supervision, and we should accept this if that’s what it takes to get them to take the first step off the streets. And if, for some people, that’s the only step they’re ever willing to take? We have to accept that too. If we can keep them relatively clean, safe, and accessible to medical care, that’s a big win all by itself.

Andrej Sokolow/DPA via ZUMA

The New York Times says that automakers are resetting their expectations for self-driving cars after discovering that there’s more weird behavior on the road than they anticipated:

Argo’s chief executive, Bryan Salesky, said the industry’s bigger promise of creating driverless cars that could go anywhere was “way in the future.” He and others attribute the delay to something as obvious as it is stubborn: human behavior. Researchers at Argo say the cars they are testing in Pittsburgh and Miami have to navigate unexpected situations every day. Recently, one of the company’s cars encountered a bicyclist riding the wrong way down a busy street between other vehicles. Another Argo test car came across a street sweeper that suddenly turned a giant circle in an intersection, touching all four corners and crossing lanes of traffic that had the green light.

I’ve said before that the bellwether for autonomous cars is Waymo, so what do they have to say?

Waymo operates a fleet of 600 test vehicles — the same number it had on the road a year ago….“We are able to do the driving task,” Tekedra Mawakana, Waymo’s chief external officer, said in an interview. “But the reason we don’t have a service in 50 states is that we are still validating a host of elements related to offering a service. Offering a service is very different than building a technology.”

This is a fascinating quote. But what does it mean? If Waymo can “do the driving task,” does that mean they can really, genuinely, 100 percent do the driving task? And if that’s the case, why not ditch the whole taxi service idea and just sell self-driving cars to individuals? (Or lease them or whatever.) Hell, I’d be interested in a car that just did highway driving with 100 percent reliability—i.e., reliability so high that I can take a nap instead of keeping my hands on the wheel. So what’s up with that, Waymo?

Still bored. My Twitter mentions are a cesspool right now. The white nationalists are out in force this evening for some reason.

Anyway, here is year-over-year growth in wages for blue-collar workers for the past 20 years. We’ve had a nice uptick over the past year or so, the fifth time since 1999 that wage growth has been above 1 percent for a sustained period. The dashed orange line shows the average over the period of the chart.

However, wages have already started to tick back down. Here’s an up close and personal look at just the past few years:

I don’t have any good reason for posting this, but I’m bored and wanted to remind everyone of how corporate America is responding to the Republican tax cut that was supposed to supercharge capital spending. Here you go:

Still nothing. But a new report is scheduled for next week. Maybe that will finally be the one that shows the tax-cut driven boom in the American economy.

A hazy shade of winter? No, just a foggy spring morning along the Blue Ridge Parkway. This was taken about halfway between Blowing Rock and Price Lake.

Vox reporter Jane Coaston is trying to turn over a new leaf:

So, in other news, something I am working on is avoiding “nutpicking” — finding the most bananas example of a certain group and extrapolating that that is the group itself. So I’d like to preface the following by saying that this is not general of the conservative movement.

— Jane Coaston (@cjane87) July 16, 2019

Hooray! More people need to be familiar with this term, which was a team creation back in 2006. I suggested that we needed a word for “trawling through open comment threads to find wackjobs who can be held up as evidence of crazy liberals”:

Needless to say, this practice is almost self-discrediting: if the best evidence of wackjobism you can find is a few anonymous nutballs commenting on a blog, then the particular brand of wackjobism you’re complaining about must not be very widespread after all. So how can we mock this practice effectively enough to make people ashamed to indulge in it?

Bill Wasik, now gone on to bigger and better things as a deputy editor at the New York Times Magazine, was the judge, and he chose “nutpicking,” which had been suggested by commenter BlueMan.

Not only do I think this meme deserves more widespread use, I’d even broaden the definition a bit these days. An awful lot of reporters now trawl through Twitter looking for performative comments without checking to see if the tweeter actually has a following of any serious kind. I’m not suggesting that the Washington Post should only quote people with big Twitter followings, but I am suggesting that if your goal is to find flamers and trolls and randos, maybe you should just stop. You’ll certainly find them, but what’s the point?

The once and future Ahwanee Hotel.Kevin Drum

Here’s some good news to take the taste of Trump out of your mouth. The dreadful new names plastered on the hotels and villages of Yosemite National Park a few years ago are finally being removed and the historic old names are being restored:

The Majestic Yosemite can be called the Ahwahnee Hotel again. The National Park Service on Monday reached a $12-million settlement in a long-running legal battle with Yosemite’s former facilities operator that permits that name — and several others — to be restored to their historic attractions.

….The dispute began in 2015 after Delaware North Companies Inc., which had operated the park’s restaurants, hotels and outdoor activities, lost a $2-billion contract renewal bid to rival Aramark. Delaware North sued, claiming that when it took over operations in 1993, it had been required to purchase the previous concessionaire’s intellectual property, which included the names of the attractions. The company wanted to be paid more than $50 million to allow Aramark to continue using the disputed names.

Curry Village, a collection of cabins that had carried the name since the 1880s, became Half Dome Village. Yosemite Lodge at the Falls was renamed Yosemite Valley Lodge. Wawona Hotel was renamed Big Trees Lodge, and Badger Pass Ski Area became Yosemite Ski & Snowboard Area. For about three years, signs advertising many of the attractions were simply covered with tarps bearing the temporary names.

On Monday, the tarps came down.

This whole sordid episode was solely the result of Delaware North’s greed. There was never any question that the Park Service would have to pay them for their intellectual property when their contract ended, but Delaware North tried to squeeze an absurd $44 million price for it. The $12 million price they finally settled on is far closer to fair market value. Of that, the feds will pay $4 million and Aramark, the new concessionaire, will pay $8 million. In 2031 rights to the names will revert permanently to the Park Service.

It’s not really worth writing very much about the whole Harris-Biden busing hoo-ha. Forced busing for purposes of addressing discrimination is 50 years in the past and no one seriously thinks it’s going to make a comeback. But today is a dex day, so I’m feeling energized to write about a couple of things that maybe haven’t gotten enough attention. In one sense, none of it is important because it’s so long in the past, but in another sense that’s exactly why it is important. Even a lot of people my age have forgotten about this stuff, and people younger than me never knew it at all.

The first thing to remember is that busing was primarily a Southern thing. The South fought it for a long time, but eventually court rulings forced them to integrate their schools and busing was a part of that. This happened in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

Elsewhere, for all the brawling and backlash it produced, forced busing barely even happened. There were several high-profile cities that adopted busing—Boston and Los Angeles most famously—and the opposition in these cities was savage. This opposition made lots of headlines and created powerful political movements, but the truth is that not all that many kids were ever bused. Outside of the South, the number of cities with forced busing programs was small, and most of those programs lasted no more than a decade. In Los Angeles it lasted only three years.¹ And even many whites who were sympathetic to busing eventually came to the conclusion that it was ineffective. If you used a technical definition of segregation that merely compared school populations to the overall population of school-age children, you could say it worked, but the acceleration of white flight was so pronounced that most school districts weren’t any more integrated in a real sense even after years of busing. Here’s an example from Minnesota:

In August, 1981…Minneapolis Tribune writer Greg Pinney reviewed the progress and the changes in Minneapolis public schools since August, 1971: “No longer does the city have ‘minority schools’ in the center and ‘white schools’ everywhere else. Minority and white students have been spread around to such an extent that it is difficult to put those labels on any school anymore.” There were other major changes in the district as well. Total enrollment of whites declined from 58,000 students in 1971 to 29,000 students in 1981, a decline of 50%; and minority enrollment increased from 8,700 in 1971 to 13,000 in 1981, an increase of 70%.

In terms of actual interracial exposure—i.e., significant numbers of whites and blacks attending the same schools—this chart shows what happened across the country:

This comes from an article in the William & Mary Law Review written in 1995, when scholars were first trying to make sense of what had happened once busing was mostly in the past. What it shows is that desegration genuinely worked in the South: interracial exposure increased substantially over just a few years in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Conversely, nothing happened outside the South. Literally nothing. In fact, over time schools became slightly less integrated. The effect of white flight overwhelmed the effect of busing and other anti-discrimination measures.

However, the fact that only the South integrated their schools in any significant way gives us a way of figuring out whether integration worked. That is, did it help black kids perform better in school? And did it do any harm to white kids? First, take a look at this chart:

Roughly speaking, the only region that showed a significant reduction in the black-white testing gap was the South—which was also the only region that showed a reduction in segregation. But when did the testing gap narrow? And did it happen by raising black test scores or lowering white scores? I don’t have this broken down by region, but here’s the answer for the US as a whole:

These charts show two things. First, the black-white gap narrowed most strongly in the ’70s and ’80s, just when integration efforts were at their strongest. Second, the gaps narrowed solely because black kids did better. The scores of white kids were consistently either flat or up, not down. This is national data, but it’s still a very strong indicator that integration really did improve black test scores while doing no harm to whites.

There was surprisingly little rigorous research into busing back when it was happening, which makes it difficult 50 years later to say for sure how well it worked—for whatever definition of “worked” you happen to prefer. Still, the evidence we do have points in a consistent direction: integration of public schools helped black kids and probably would have had an even stronger impact if states outside the South had been forced to do it more and do it longer.²

¹In Los Angeles, as in many other places, busing was replaced by voluntary measures like magnet schools, which were designed to be so attractive that both black and white parents would want their kids bused to them. Voluntary measures, however, were never enough to overcome the desire of white parents to keep their kids in local schools that were predominantly white.

²In fairness, busing was different in the South, where black and white kids often lived in nearby neighborhoods and were bused to segregated schools during the Jim Crow era. To a large extent, the South could achieve integration simply by eliminating busing and letting kids of all races attend their local schools. Also, segregation in the South was as much a rural issue as an urban one, and even urban areas in the South were smaller than the big cities of the north. Where busing was used to reduce segregation, the bus rides were often relatively short. Outside the South, things were very different. Neighborhoods were so segregated that the only way to integrate schools was to implement busing from the start, often requiring very long bus rides within large cities and their outlying areas. Along with the acceleration of white flight, this is one of the reasons that forced busing outside the South was never all that popular with black as well as white parents.