Coyote Blog

To the surprise of no one who reads this blog, Phoenix Light Rail continues to fail at every goal it set for itself, despite over $2 billion in cumulative expenditures and over 10 years of time to "catch on."  In fact, the only goal it has succeeded in is to allow our local leaders to virtue signal with their peers that they have a "modern" transit system, "modern" for some reason defined as increasing the use of a 150-year-old transit technology.

Here are the numbers, relatively fresh from Valley Metro's ridership reports.  Valley Metro has stopped (for reasons likely to become clear in a moment) publishing long-term ridership trend charts, so I have made my own from their data.

The original Phoenix light rail line cost about $1.4 billion.  The one line was expanded midway through the 2016 fiscal year by 31% in length and 36% in cumulative dollars spent (to very little obvious effect).  To date, well over $2 billion has been spent on the line.

What we can see here is exactly what Randall O'Toole of Cato has been saying for years -- that light rail projects tend to actually hurt total transit use as they scavenge resources from other modes, like buses.  This is because light rail costs so much more to move a passenger, both in terms of capital investment and operating cost, so $X shifted from buses to rail reduces total system capacity and ridership substantially.  We have seen this in Phoenix, as light rail costs have forced closing or reduced services in a number of bus routes, with obvious results in the ridership numbers.

There are a couple of ways to look at the ridership numbers and our $2+ billion light rail investment.  First, this investment has gained us an additional 1.25 million round trips on the system, at a capital cost of $1600 per added annual round trip ($2B divided by 1.25MM).   For someone who commutes 250 days a year, this means the Phoenix taxpayer has spent $400,000 per incremental daily commuter on the system.  I used to predict that we could more cheaply buy every rider a Prius with the money we spent on the system, but I obviously underestimated how bad it was.

Another way to look at this is that in fact we did not increase ridership at all, but decreased it.  From 1997 to 2008 the system increased ridership by an average of 5.6% a year.  Had the same growth rate obtained for the last 11 years since light rail was put in place (and certainly Phoenix has continued its fast growth in this period) the ridership of the system should have been north of 110 million trips a year.  By this metric, we spent $2 billion to shift to a costlier, less flexible transit mode that lost us 45 million annual trips.  Even if transit had just grown with population we should have seen 80 million or so trips in 2019.

The problem with light rail (and the reason it is popular with government officials) is that it is an upper middle class boondoggle.  There can be no higher use of transit than to provide mobility to poorer people who can't afford reliable automobiles.  Buses fulfill this goal better than any mode of transit.  They are flexible and can reach into many corners of the city.  The problem with buses, from the perspective of government officials, is that upper middle class people don't like to ride on them.  They like trains.  So the government builds hugely expensive trains for these influential, wealthier voters. Since the trains are so expensive, the government can only build a few routes, so those routes end up being down upper middle class commuting corridors.  As the costs mount for the trains, the bus routes that serve the poor and their dispersed commuting destinations are steadily cut.

Some of my other posts on Phoenix light rail are here.  As you can see from this 2008 article, I am not just a Monday morning QB but predicted exactly this failure in advance and explained why from data.

source

First, it turns out our state's taxpayers were subsidizing a new Nike plant somewhere in AZ.  I am just exhausted writing about how stupid it is that we spend taxpayer money in this state relocation game.  The state takes away capital from current AZ businesses and gives it to Nike?  Even beyond the obscene power game going on here, taking from the small and giving to the rich and well-connected, what evidence is there that having Nike invest my money is better than having me do it in my own already-in-AZ business?

But then the story just gets stupider.  Apparently Nike was going to produce a sneaker with a colonial version of the American flag on it.  But then Colin Kaepernick said that African-Americans would be offended by it, which seems stupid.  Then Nike cancelled the sneaker, which seems even more stupid.  And then our governor said "hold my beer" and decided to cancel subsidies of Nike that shouldn't have even existed based on this product development decision by Nike.  Here is how a local commentator calling himself James Madison (I assume that is a pseudonym) crows about how awesome he thinks Governor Ducey's move is (sorry I get this as an email so I don't have a link)

Nike was planning on coming to Arizona to set up shop. A few hundred jobs were on the line. The city of Goodyear already approved their arrival. Then the anti-American, hateful little idiot that Nike hired a couple of years ago once again opened his bigoted mouth. Colin Kaepernick announced that Nike's new sneaker with the Betsy Ross American flag was "offensive." Nike caved to political correctness and pulled the shoe. Mr. Ducey responded by saying he was disappointed in Nike's decision and embarrassed for them. Mr. Ducey also instructed the Arizona Commerce Authority to withdraw any financial support that was promised to Nike for the move to Arizona. Mr. Ducey is right.

Nike has shown once again that they don't care about Americans--the primary source of their success. The sneaker was meant to be a tribute to America's founding, even hitting the store shelves the week of July Fourth. But, Nike would rather put their support behind American haters--like Mr. Kaepernick and others.

Is it any wonder our politics are broken? -- talk about taking a trivial issue and raising the stakes to wildly disproportionate levels.  Conservatives rightly get upset when student groups try to oust professors from their jobs over trivial, often unintentional, slips into political incorrectness.  But Conservatives have their own definitions of political incorrectness and are willing to run a few hundred innocents from their jobs for trivial violations of these norms.  I can't believe Ducey's decision is being haled as a brave act of some sort.  It is just silly, the Conservative form of the same virtue-signalling the Left revels in.My guess is that in a few days Ducey and his advisers will wake up and find themselves a touch embarrassed over all this, and find a quiet off-camera way to walk it back.

Good!  One state down, 49 to go.

UPDATE:  This article has been heavily edited.  It turns out that solar installations without extensive battery systems do NOT act as a backup to grid outages.  By utility rules, the solar system has to shut itself down when the grid shuts down.  I should have done better research, but frankly I could not believe that the system shuts down EXACTLY when you most need it.  For me this revelation (which came from several readers, thanks!!) was a bit like finding out that your flashlight has software to shut down when it is dark outside. 

Our house has always been a good candidate for solar.  It has a large flat roof, good sightlines to the south, and we live in just about the best solar location in the country (Phoenix).  The problem has been two-fold:

• Even with large tax rebates and other subsidies (e.g. ability to sell power into the grid at retail rather than wholesale rates), the payback periods are long.
• Given that we are working in 10+ year paybacks, it has never been clear to me that most panels have the life needed.  All solar panels degrade with time and sometimes fail and I am not sure most economics include those factors.

What finally changed our minds was a question my wife asked me a few months back.  She would really be distressed at losing the A/C during a Phoenix summer, and asked if we should get a backup generator.  I told her such generators were large and expensive, but that if we really wanted some grid backup in Phoenix, solar seems to make sense.  Sure, it only backs up in the day, but that is when we really need it here.  The backup aspect was the cherry on top of the economics that put us over the top.

We knew we did not want some sort of leasing or pay-for-power arrangement that would encumber our home if we ever had to sell it so that meant we could shop for about any sort of panel we wanted.  In shopping for things nowadays, there is seldom consensus on the best, but right now there seems to be a near consensus in solar panels.  The SunPower panels have the best efficiency, the lowest efficiency reduction from high temperatures, the least efficiency drop off with time, and the longest warranty.  You pay for all that of course and they are pricey, but I decided to go with the pricier panels where I could be more sure of the economics in the out years.  We have made other investments in our home that have essentially represented a decision to stay for the long-term, so we invested for the long-term here.  I will say that it is possible we could have gotten better economics with another panel that was cheaper, even considering a shorter life, but I did not do the math for every panel.***  The panels we are buying are a huge step ahead of the old ones, as they have built -in inverters in each panel and so they produce AC directly.  This greatly reduces the wiring and installation costs.

Interestingly, the efficiency did not buy us much (at least today) because our total installation was limited by our service panel limits, which total to 400 amps.  This means that the efficiency really only saved us roof space which we had more than enough of.  However, while I chose not to do a battery system this time around (too expensive and too many safety questions), I may do one in the future so I wanted space for more panels to charge a future battery system.

The total payback comes to just about 10 years for our system.  At historic cost of capital numbers this probably does not pencil out but today with ZIRP it makes sense, especially with the extra benefit of some immunity from outages.  Even to get to these numbers you folks had to chip in to help my economics, in the form of the 30% tax rebate you are giving me and the above-wholesale price you are paying me for power I put into the grid.  This payback is mainly from getting rid of a LOT of our on-peak power usage, which costs us way more per KwH than off-peak.  A second project to add more solar charging batteries for evening use will have more challenging economics and will likely have to be justified purely on grid independence.  On the other hand, your economics in another location may be better, since our off-peak power costs of around 10-12 cents is pretty cheap.  On the gripping hand, you may not have as good of a solar insolation factor where you live.  My summary is that if you live in certain parts of SoCal with high electricity rates, this is a no brainer; if you live where I do it is marginal but works if you value some grid independence; and most everywhere else it is a real stretch and maybe closer to a rich man's toy than a sensible investment**.  However, those of you who have had good economics doing this elsewhere are welcome to comment below.

I will give more reports in the future as we go through this.

**  I would argue that experience from some place like SolarCity does not necessarily count as they never have and (as part of Tesla) likely never will make money, so there is an added subsidy in the equation there from well-meaning but naive stockholders.

*** It is hard also to do the full installation math on every panel as most installers have a limited range they work with and we only had the energy and time to engage a few installers for quotes.

A few weeks ago I posted Valley Metro's own numbers that showed that the billions spent on light rail in the Phoenix area have done nothing but case the stagnation of transit ridership in Phoenix.  Light rail ridership actually fell substantially despite an expensive extension of the line.

Today, the Antiplanner has an update on light rail in Phoenix, and it is not pretty:

As of 2016, light rail carries less than 0.2 percent of all travel in the Phoenix urban area. The 2016 American Community Survey says that the same tiny percentage of commuters take light rail to work, which is unusual as transit’s commuter share is usually much higher than its total share. Phoenix light-rail ridership in the twelve months ending in June, 2018 was down 4.4 percent from the previous twelve months. Transit ridership for Phoenix as a whole is down 5.6 percent for the same time period.

Phoenix is one of many Sunbelt urban areas in which rail transit makes no sense at all. Aside from the Antiplanner’s argument that buses can move more people than light rail, rail systems only make sense where there is a high concentration of downtown jobs that a hub-and-spoke transit system can serve. According to Wendell Cox’s calculations, downtown Phoenix has only about 26,000 jobs, which is just 1.4 percent of jobs in the metropolitan area.

Phoenix is particularly unusual (though not unique) in that its suburbs are actually denser than the city itself. According to the 2010 census, the city of Phoenix has about 2,800 people per square mile, while its suburbs have nearly 3,500 people per square mile. With both jobs and population spread out, the region needs nimble, low-capacity transit if it needs any transit at all.

Arizona State University students make up a “substantial component” of light-rail riders. Until this year, students were able to buy transit passes for 200 for the nine-month school year, plus $75 for the other three months. The same passes would cost other members of the public $768 per year. Despite the steep discounts, student weekday ridership dropped by around 40 percent between 2011 and 2015.

The last paragraph reminds me that I forgot to discuss the issue with ridership and ASU students in my last post.  A huge portion of Phoenix light rail ridership comes from two sources:  subsidized ASU students and fans going to downtown sporting events.  This helps to explain why the commuter share of Phoenix ridership is so low -- essentially, many of the light rail riders are not commuters but in these two other groups.  Why we should be spending billions to subsidize bar crawls for already heavily-subsidized ASU students or to save sports fans money on downtown parking** is beyond me.

He has this good news:

The Phoenix city council is considering delaying or even killing some planned light-rail lines because it is concerned that city streets are falling apart and too much money is being spent instead on an insignificant form of travel.

** much of the downtown parking revenue for sporting events goes to the city and county, so cannibalization of this revenue is yet another hidden cost of light rail.

Well, another year's ridership numbers are out for Valley Metro and Phoenix light rail and they are just as grim as they have been every year since Phoenix spent the first $1.4 billion on the first leg of the rail system (source)

Now, this picture is bad enough, until you realize that Valley Metro completed a huge extension of the rail line in 2016.  In 2016 the line length was increased by 31% and the cumulative capital investment increased by 36%.  With, as you can see, essentially zero effect on rail ridership in red.  The only small highlight was that after falling for years, bus ridership actually perked up a few percent.  As you may remember from earlier posts, bus ridership could be expected to fall due to cannibalization from light rail, but in fact it tends to fall even faster than rail ridership rises, causing total ridership to fall.  The reason is that light rail costs at least an order of magnitude more (including amortized capex) per passenger mile than busses, and so light rail tends to starve the bus system of funds.  Every light rail system implementation has been met with the need to slash bus service to pay for the huge light rail costs.  So despite enormous operating subsidies and more than $2 billion in cumulative capex, rail ridership has been flat and total transit ridership has fallen.

But in fact the picture is worse than this when you look over a longer timeframe, which is why Valley Metro has probably changed their practice from graphing nearly 20 years of history to graphing just 6.  Here is an older chart of theirs I posted years ago: (the top year in this chart is the bottom year in the chart above)

I will get back to the annotation in a moment.  But notice that despite all the cost and disruption and higher taxes from the light rail system, total ridership this year of 66.8 million is less than any year since light rail was opened and baredly 8% higher than it was before light rail opened 10 years ago in 2008.  Just organic city growth and recovery of the economy since 2008 should have driven faster growth than this.  In fact, in the 10 years before light rail was opened, Phoenix transit ridership grew 70%.  If that organic growth rate in bus service had been allowed to continue without the backbreaking costs and limited capacity of light rail being added to the mix, we should have expected 105 million riders this past year, not 66.8 million.

It has never rained in Phoenix, at least in the last 120+ years when records have been kept.

Yes, we have dust storms that put megatons of dirt in the air and force me to power-wash the walls of my white house every so often.  But the dust in the air also makes for the most amazing sunsets of any place I have lived.  This is a panorama I took on a walk this evening of about 270 degrees, so both west and east.  The sky was amazing in every direction, not just towards the setting sun.

The sunset behind palm trees is one of my favorite photograph subjects.  One example from a few days ago:

Update:  LOL, a reader says it looks just like the mural on the wall in the office in Scarface (warning: quite violent)

Much of Phoenix is generally pretty flat but at the same time we have peaks rising from right in the middle of the city to as high as 1400 feet above the mean ground level of the surrounding city (we are also ringed my mountains around at least three sides of the city, which is why we call ourselves the valley of the sun).  Anyway, here is a view from Camelback Mountain taken just the other day, probably the last day under 75 degrees we will have for 6 months.  This is a 360 degree panorama (you can see the same dude with bright yellow shirt on both ends).  You can click on it to get the full effect.

We took the Echo Canyon trail which is pretty challenging (there are several long stretches where one is basically climbing from rock to rock rather than just marching up a trail).  It is worth it though - it's pretty unusual to have this sort of climb and end up dead in the middle of a major city.  The one block of undeveloped space at the right end of the picture is actually prime real estate and would be all city-fied were it not for the fact that it is Native American tribal land, one of the fortunate tribes (unlike the Navajo) who were shoved onto cr*p land but land which eventually ended up near a major city and so became valuable.

Ironically, while most cities don't have any feature like this, we have at least two:  Not even 5 miles away is Piestewa Peak that is just a few feet shorter, has an easier trail, and oddly has a totally different geology (you can see it just to the left of center in this photo).  Piestewa Peak used to be known as, and is still referred to by locals, as Squaw Peak -- a name that has been officially deprecated for moderately obvious reasons of wokeness.  The city struggled for years with changing its name, not knowing what to change the name to, when opportunity emerged out of tragedy when a young, local Native American woman serving in the US Army was killed in the Middle East.  Piestewa Peak is surrounded by a large tract of open space that is hilly and largely pristine desert landscape (around the center of the photo).  It is so large that one hike in it and, despite it being right in the center of the city, one can completely lose sight of the city in all directions and really get a desert hiking experience without actually going out of town.

Was at a bar in the new Andaz Hotel in Scottsdale, at a restaurant called Warp and Woof.  I like the contemporary vibe of a lot of Andaz hotels, including this one in particular.

Anyway, over the bar, rather than some random college basketball game, they had Bob Ross painting shows on a loop.  Excellent.

Updated:  I am thinking of an Anchorman - Bob Ross mashup here:  "See the happy, happy scotch.  Scotchie Scotchie Scotch.  Oh, look, I didn't realize I ordered a double.  We don’t make mistakes. We just have happy accidents."

Via the AZ Republic

Two Democratic lawmakers are trying to give transgender and non-binary Arizonans the chance to more accurately represent themselves on state-issued documents — in life and in death.

House Bill 2492 would offer driver's-license applicants a third gender option, "non-binary," to indicate they don't identify as male or female.

House Bill 2582 would require death certificates to reflect gender identity, one's emotional and psychological sense of gender, including when it appears to conflict with a person's anatomy.

This is what happens when you forget what the purpose of something actually is.  The individual descriptive information on a driver's license is for identification purposes -- it is not a Facebook profile page to communicate our sense of self or current emotional state.  One's personal, inner "emotional and psychological sense of gender" is useless on an identification document because a third party can't sense that in any way.

If the argument is that gender is not a useful identification tool, then remove it entirely from the damn license or death certificate and let's move on.  Or replace it with something that is useful and discernible by a third party (how about "has external genitalia y/n" lol).

Postscript:  Well, I just looked at my AZ licence and it does not use the word "gender" anywhere.  It says "sex".  Now, people I know who self-identify as "woke" have explained to me that "sex" is a function of biological plumbing whereas gender is more a function of state of mind and social programming and such.  Well, the license says "sex" so why are we talking about gender at all?

'nuff said

Trump considering pardon of Joe Arpaio

Years ago I wrote about the Sheraton hotel the city built:

For some reason, it appears that building hotels next to city convention centers is a honey pot for politicians.  I am not sure why, but my guess is that they spend hundreds of millions or billions on a convention center based on some visitation promises.  When those promises don't pan out, politicians blame it on the lack of a hotel, and then use public money for a hotel.  When that does not pan out, I am not sure what is next.  Probably a sports stadium.  Then light rail.  Then, ?  It just keeps going and going....

When Phoenix leaders opened the Sheraton in 2008, they proclaimed it would be a cornerstone of downtown's comeback. They had one goal in mind: lure big conventions and tourism dollars. Officials argued the city needed the extra hotel beds to support its massive taxpayer-funded convention center a block away.

Finally, we may be at an end, though politicians are still hoping for some sort of solution that better hides what a sorry expenditure of tax money this really was

Phoenix has entered into exclusive negotiations to sell the city-owned Sheraton Grand Phoenix downtown hotel —the largest hotel in Arizona — for $255 million.

The city signed a letter of intent with TLG Phoenix LLC, an investment company based in Florida, to accept the offer and negotiate a purchase contract, city officials announced Tuesday evening.

But the deal faces criticism from some council members concerned about the loss to taxpayers. The city also attempted, unsuccessfully, to sell the hotel to the same buyer for a higher price last year.

If Phoenix ultimately takes the offer, the city's total losses on the taxpayer-funded Sheraton could exceed $100 million.

The city still owes $306 million on the hotel and likely would have to pay that off, even after a sale. That would come on top of about $47 million the city has sunk into the hotel, largely when bookings dropped due to the recession.

...

In addition to taking a loss on the building, Phoenix would give the buyer a property-tax break — the city hasn't released a potential value for that incentive — and transfer over a roughly $13 million reserve fund for hotel improvements.

By the way, the hotel -- after just 9 years under city ownership -- will require a $30 to $40 million face lift from the owner.  Why do I suspect that part of the sales price problem is that the government, like with every other asset it owns, did not keep up with its regular maintenance?

Update:  Phoenix is in the top ten US cities in terms of hotel room capacity, so city government of course detects that there is a market failure such that the city ... needs more hotel rooms, so it gets the government in the business of building more.  Good plan.

If one is curious why the public is economically illiterate, look no further than our media.  The AP's Paul Wiseman managed to write 1300 words on the loss of teenage summer jobs, and even lists a series of what he considers to be the causes, without ever once mentioning the minimum wage or the substantial restrictions on teen employment in place in many states.  I do not know Paul Wiseman and so I will not guess at his motivations - whether ignorance or intentional obfuscation - but it is impossible to believe that this trend isn't in part due to the minimum wage.  As I wrote in the comments on the AZ Republic:

How is it possible to write over 1300 words on the disapearance of teenage summer jobs without once mentioning the minimum wage?

Two of the most substantial criticisms of the minimum wage are 1. it prices low-skilled workers out of the market (and there is no one more unskilled than an inexperienced teenager) and 2. it put 100% emphasis on pay as the only reward for work, while giving no credit for things like gaining valuable experience and skills. We clearly see both at work here, and it is likely no coincidence that we are seeing this article in the same year minimum wages went up by 25% in AZ, as they have in many other states.

By the way, in addition to the minimum wage, AZ (as has many other states) has established all sorts of laws to "protect" underrage workers by adding all sorts of special work rules and tracking requirements. In our business, which is a summer recreation business, we used to hire a lot of teenagers. Now we have a policy banning the hiring of them -- they are too expensive, they create too much liability, and the rules for their employment are too restrictive.

Without evidence, he treats it entirely as a supply problem, ie that teens are busy and are not looking for work. But the data do not support this.  The teen unemployment rate, defined as employment by teens actively looking for work, is up.  The workforce participation rate for teens is down, but the author has nothing but anecdotal evidence that this is a supply rather than a demand issue.  It could be because teens are busier or buried in their cell phones or whatever or it could be because they have given up looking for work.

Forbes produces an annual list of the market value of various sports franchises.  If I were a grad student, a great study would be to try to figure out what percentage of these valuations came from public funds (free stadiums, tax abatements, direct subsidies, etc).  I bet the number would be high.

In the case of the Phoenix Coyote's hockey team, the percentage would actually be over 100%.   The team is worth barely $100 million, at best, but has received hundreds of millions in subsidies.  About 13 years ago the city of Glendale, AZ (pop: 250,000) built them a $300 million stadium.  Almost immediately after that, the team started to threaten to leave, and the pathetic city of Glendale city counsel voted subsidy after subsidy, paying the team $10 million a year in direct subsidies.  When the Goldwater Institute successfully sued to end this practices, the city found creative ways to hide the subsidy, for example giving the team a management contract for the stadium whose price was inflated by the amount of the subsidy (the contract was for $15 million a year but when it was finally competitively bid, it came in at $5 million).

After all that, the team apparently has no shame is coming back to the trough yet again:

The Arizona Coyotes and National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman on Tuesday threatened to move the franchise out of Arizona if the Legislature does not approve $225 million in public financing for a new arena in downtown Phoenix or the East Valley.

Bettman sent a three-page letter to state Senate President Steve Yarbrough and House Speaker J.D. Mesnard encouraging them to push through a public-financing bill that is stalled in the Senate amid a lack of support from lawmakers. The struggling NHL franchise wants out of Glendale, saying it's not economically viable to play there even though that West Valley city financed its 13-year-old Gila River Arena specifically for the Coyotes.

"The Arizona Coyotes must have a new arena location to succeed," Bettman wrote. "The Coyotes cannot and will not remain in Glendale."

Good God, what brass!

Postscript:  I was immediately embarrassed to see that I had use maw's instead of maws.  I make stupid grammar mistakes but this generally is not one of them I make that often.  Unfortunately, on the road, I had no way to fix it. Fixed now.

It is hard to pick out the most egregious example of bad legislation that has been considered by our state legislature, but this one is certainly close:

Claiming people are being paid to riot, Republican state senators voted Wednesday to give police new power to arrest anyone who is involved in a peaceful demonstration that may turn bad — even before anything actually happened.

SB1142 expands the state’s racketeering laws, now aimed at organized crime, to also include rioting. And it redefines what constitutes rioting to include actions that result in damage to the property of others.

But the real heart of the legislation is what Democrats say is the guilt by association — and giving the government the right to criminally prosecute and seize the assets of everyone who planned a protest and everyone who participated. And what’s worse, said Sen. Steve Farley, D-Tucson, is that the person who may have broken a window, triggering the claim there was a riot, might actually not be a member of the group but someone from the other side....

There’s something else: By including rioting in racketeering laws, it actually permits police to arrest those who are planning events. And Kavanagh, a former police officer, said if there are organized groups, “I should certainly hope that our law enforcement people have some undercover people there.’’

“Wouldn’t you rather stop a riot before it starts?’’ Kavanagh asked colleagues during debate. “Do you really want to wait until people are injuring each other, throwing Molotov cocktails, picking up barricades and smashing them through businesses in downtown Phoenix?’’

This is the sort of law that is almost guaranteed to be abused and enforced in an asymmetrical manner.  This is one of those laws where the "Am I comfortable giving my political opponent this sort of power" test is particularly useful.  Conservatives rightly complained about the Obama Administrations asymmetric IRS scrutiny on Tea Party groups, but this law would create a far greater potential for abuse.  We no longer have Sheriff Joe any more (which is one reason I don't join so many others in complaining about the election of 2016) but does anyone doubt that Arpaio would have used this law to shut down every pro-immigrant protest he could learn about in advance?

Frequent readers know that I am a strong supporter of immigration**.  Unfortunately our two major political parties have more mixed feelings, at best, about immigration.   Here is your one-sentence guide to the two parties' positions on immigration:

Republicans want immigrants to work but not vote, while Democrats want them to vote but not work.  Latest proof here.

I will add that I don't understand this line from the linked article:

I don't personally care all that much about the level of illegal immigration. The current numbers strike me as reasonable.

I am not sure how anyone can consider the levels of illegal immigration reasonable.  Some Republicans obviously consider these numbers unreasonable because they want the immigrants gone.  But I, even as a strong immigration supporter with many immigrant acquaintances, think the number is unreasonable as well.  If we are going to de facto let these folks stay, why should we make every step of their life, from driving to banking to working, a total hassle?  Why make all these hard working and generally law-abiding people afraid every moment that they may get deported, or make them subject to the harassment whims of some jerk like Joe Arpaio?

There seems to be a large portion of the country that is willing to allow these folks to stay but want to create some kind of lower-tier immigration status for them.  Fine, then let's do that.  Let's create a lower-tier (e.g. reduced access to government services and benefits) of legal presence in this country -- guest worker, whatever -- that is simple to obtain and does not involve waiting on lists for a decade.

** This is something I have probably moved the furthest on in my life.  At sixteen, when I was a traditional Texas Conservative Republican, I supported immigration restrictionism.  Since then, I have found such a position incompatible with my belief in individual rights and free markets, and through my experience in life have come to appreciate the value immigrants bring to this country.

From New Zealand:

There's no point trying to fight climate change - we'll all be dead in the next decade and there's nothing we can do to stop it, a visiting scientist claims.

Guy McPherson, a biology professor at the University of Arizona, says the human destruction of our own habitat is leading towards the world's sixth mass extinction.

Instead of fighting, he says we should just embrace it and live life while we can.

"It's locked down, it's been locked in for a long time - we're in the midst of our sixth mass extinction," he told Paul Henry on Thursday.

....

"I can't imagine there will be a human on the planet in 10 years," he says.

"We don't have 10 years. The problem is when I give a number like that, people think it's going to be business as usual until nine years [and] 364 days."

He says part of the reason he's given up while other scientists fight on is because they're looking at individual parts, such as methane emissions and the melting ice in the Arctic, instead of the entire picture.

"We're heading for a temperature within that span that is at or near the highest temperature experienced on Earth in the last 2 billion years."

Instead of trying to fix the climate, Prof McPherson says we should focus on living while we can.

"I think hope is a horrible idea. Hope is wishful thinking. Hope is a bad idea - let's abandon that and get on with reality instead. Let's get on with living instead of wishing for the future that never comes.

Our company operates a number of public campgrounds and parks, including about 35 in Arizona.  This is a letter I sent early this morning to the agencies we work with in Arizona

It appears that the ballot initiative for a higher Arizona minimum wage is going to pass, raising minimum wages as early as January, 2017 from $8.05 to $10.00. This is an increase of 24%, and comes on very short notice.

Currently, about half of our total costs are tied to wage rates (both payroll taxes and workers compensation insurance premiums are directly tied to wages and go up automatically by the same amount wages go up). Because of this, a 24% increase in wage rates will result in our costs going up on average by 12%.

It had been my intention to keep fees to customers flat in 2017, but that is now impossible in Arizona. This 12% expense increase is about twice the amount of profit we make -- there is no way we can absorb it without a fee increase. I apologize for the late notice, but I have never, ever had a minimum wage increase imposed on such short notice.

We will have to look at our financials for each permit, but my guess is that on average, we are talking about camping fee increases of $2 and day use fee increases of $1. This range of fee increases will actually not cover our full cost increase, but we will try to make up the rest with some reductions in employee hours.

If you know anyone in the Phoenix area who might be interested, have them apply.  Please do not apply by putting something in the comments section.

Phoenix digital marketing specialist for campground company

Update:  fixed the link

From the WSJ:

Americans are leaving the costliest metro areas for more affordable parts of the country at a faster rate than they are being replaced, according to an analysis of census data, reflecting the impact of housing costs on domestic migration patterns.

Those mostly likely to move from expensive to inexpensive metro areas were at the lower end of the income scale, under the age of 40 and without a bachelor’s degree, the analysis by home-tracker Trulia found.

Looking at census migration patterns across the U.S. from 2010 to 2014, Trulia analyzed movement between the 10 most expensive metro areas—including all of coastal California, New York City and Miami—and the next 90 priciest metro areas, based on the percentage of income needed to pay a monthly mortgage on a typical home.

I can't tell you now many people I know here in Arizona that tell horror stories about California and how they had to get out, and then, almost in the same breath, complain that the only problem with Arizona is that it does not have all the laws in place that made California unlivable in the first place.  The will say, for example, they left California for Arizona because homes here are so much more affordable, and then complain that Phoenix doesn't have tight enough zoning, or has no open space requirements, or has no affordability set-asides, or whatever.  I am amazed by how many otherwise smart people cannot make connections between policy choices and outcomes, preferring instead to judge regulatory decisions solely on their stated intentions, rather than their actual effects.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio is way behind in the polls.

I find that the local newspaper in most towns is generally a strong supporter of most every business relocation subsidy or tax incentive that comes along -- whether it be for Apple or an NHL team or a movie production, the local paper benefits from having more newsworthy activity in town.

But the AZ Republic actually ran an article this weekend questioning movie tax incentives, perhaps the only government subsidy dumber than buying sports stadiums for billionaires

States, including Arizona, that don't offer movie and television tax breaks usually are smart not to do so, a researcher contends.

Nearly all states have lured Hollywood productions at one time or another with special tax incentives, but a University of Southern California professor says such spending fails to deliver the long-term economic benefits promised by industry lobbyists and lawmakers.

“The subsidies are a bad investment," said Michael Thom, an assistant professor in USC's Price School of Public Policy, in a prepared  statement. "States pour millions of tax dollars into a program that offers little return."

Arizona doesn't currently offer tax incentives for the industry but spent $23.7 million on subsidies between 2005, when the program started, and 2010, when incentives ended amid a state budget crisis.

Thom, who has led two recent studies on the topic, looked at job growth, wage increases, entertainment-industry output and other factors for each state.  "On average, the only benefits were short-term wage gains, mostly to people who already work in the industry," he said. "Job growth was almost non-existent. Market share and industry output didn’t budge.”