The following links are just news items and opinions that pass my desk throughout the week. I don’t necessarily support or advocate any of the items, they are just interesting reads.
“The Latino Century” by Mike Madrid: An Insightful Investigation of the Shifting Latino Vote and How it Will Impact Politics and Democracy for Decades to Come -In 2020, Latinos became the second largest ethnic voting group in the country. They make up the largest plurality of residents in the most populous states in the union, as well as the fastest segment of the most important swing states in the US Electoral College. Fitting neither the stereotype of the aggrieved minority voter nor the traditional assimilating immigrant group, Latinos are challenging both political parties’ notions of race, religious beliefs, economic success, and the American dream. Given their exploding numbers—and their growing ability to determine the fate of local, state, and national elections—you’d think the two major political parties would understand Latino voters. After all, their emergence on the national scene is not a new phenomenon. But they still don’t.
Republicans, not because of their best efforts but rather despite them, are just beginning to see a movement of Latinos toward the GOP. Democrats, for the moment, still win a commanding share of the Latino vote, but that share is dwindling fast. In The Latino Century, veteran political consultant Mike Madrid uses thirty years of research and campaign experience at some of the highest levels on both sides of the aisle to address what might be the most critical questions of our time: Will the rise of Latino voters continue to foment the hyper-partisan and explosive tribalism of our age or will they usher in a new pluralism that advances the arc of social progress? How and why are both political parties so uniquely unprepared for the coming wave of Latino votes? And what must each party do to win those votes? Read More > at California City News
California’s insurance crisis is rattling the real estate market. It could impact ‘almost every sale’ – Before insurance companies started retreating from the state, home insurance was divorced from the process of searching for a home. Only after getting their offer accepted would buyers begin to look for insurance, which is required for a mortgage. Now, with the insurance market in turmoil, some sellers like Koehn are finding buyers backing out due to the high cost or unavailability of insurance. Buyers, meanwhile, are scrambling preemptively to obtain insurance, making all-cash offers or choosing not to purchase homes at all.
“Homeowner’s insurance used to be a rounding error, depending on where you lived. It’s not that way anymore,” said David Russell, a professor of insurance at CSU Northridge.
The problems are especially acute in areas of high wildfire risk, but they have rapidly spread across the state, including the Bay Area.
In Lake County, the availability and affordability of insurance has been an issue for several years, according to Marie Wotherspoon, a real estate agent in the area. But the effects of the crisis have begun manifesting elsewhere. In San Diego, where Wotherspoon was based until last year, Foremost Insurance’s decision to stop offering condo insurance caused a number of condo owners to lose coverage, she said. Even in some coastal cities, buyers have struggled to find insurance, she said. Read More > in the San Francisco Chronicle
California Tax Receipts Are Down Again as Budget Deficit Looms Large Over State’s Government – The California budget deficit for the upcoming year, which is estimated to be at least $38 billion, might be getting worse.
Gavin Newsom’s Department of Finance released a new bulletin that showed that state tax receipts had brought in disappointing revenue that was underneath expectations set by the department earlier in the year. This spells more trouble as state lawmakers are already struggling to come up with a balanced budget.
According to the Department of Finance bulletin, California’s tax revenues as of March were $5.8 billion, or 4%, below the forecasted amount government officials were hoping for.
Personal income tax receipts contributed to $3.4 billion of the revenue shortfall, with personal income tax payments being down $4.7 billion to forecast. Corporate tax receipts were $1.4 billion below forecast.
The California Department of Finance reported that personal income in California has managed to increase by 4.2 percent in 2023, which was a positive change after a 0.2 percent decline in 2022.
However, California’s income growth was less than the 5.2% average growth experienced by the rest of the United States in 2023. Read More > at Savvy Dime
California Fast-Food Chains Are Now Serving Sticker Shock – Restaurants for months have said menu prices in California would rise as the state raised the minimum wage for fast-food workers. Now they are following through.
Consumers picking up burgers, burritos and chicken sandwiches at chains in the Golden State are grappling with prices that for months have been rising at a faster clip than in other states, according to market-research firm Datassential.
Since September, when California moved to require large fast-food chains to bump up their minimum hourly pay to $20 in April, fast-food and fast-casual restaurants in California have increased prices by 10% overall, outpacing all other states, the firm found in an analysis of thousands of restaurants across 70 large chains.
Prices at Chick-fil-A, Domino’s, McDonald’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Jack in the Box and other fast-food chains have increased since September, the firm found. Chipotle said in an investor call Wednesday that prices at its nearly 500 California restaurants climbed 6% to 7% during the first week of April compared with last year, playing out across its menu.
“The state isn’t making it easy,” Chipotle Chief Executive Brian Niccol said in an interview.California restaurants already hadprices in the country, according to market-research firm Revenue Management Solutions. Every month since October, California fast-food and fast-casual restaurants have raised prices across a greater percentage of their menus compared with restaurants in the rest of the country, Datassential found. Read More > in The Wall Street Journal
Long-predicted consumer pullback finally hits restaurants like Starbucks, KFC and McDonald’s – It’s finally here: the long-predicted consumer pullback.
Starbucks announced a surprise drop in same-store sales for its latest quarter, sending its shares down 17% on Wednesday. Pizza Hut and KFC also reported shrinking same-store sales. And even stalwart McDonald’s said it has adopted a “street-fighting mentality” to compete for value-minded diners.
For months, economists have been predicting that consumers would cut back on their spending in response to higher prices and interest rates. But it’s taken a while for fast-food chains to see their sales actually shrink, despite several quarters of warnings to investors that low-income consumers were weakening and other diners were trading down from pricier options.
Many restaurant companies also offered other reasons for their weak results this quarter. Starbucks said bad weather dragged its same-store sales lower. Yum Brands, the parent company of Pizza Hut, KFC and Taco Bell, blamed January’s snowstorms and tough comparisons to a strong first quarter last year for its brands’ poor performance.
But those excuses don’t fully explain the weak quarterly results. Instead, it looks like the competition for a smaller pool of customers has grown fiercer as the diners still looking to buy a burger or cold brew become pickier with their cash. Read More > CNBC
Restaurant surcharges will soon be illegal in California – The California attorney general’s office confirmed on Tuesday that a new California law that bans junk fees will apply to surcharges at restaurants, following months of anxiety and confusion in the food industry.
Starting July 1, under SB478, California restaurants will no longer be able to charge service fees — which have become an increasingly common tool to sustain higher wages for workers as food businesses move away from tips — and must instead fold them into menu prices, the attorney general’s office said. The law applies to all fees other than taxes, the attorney general’s office said, including other surcharges restaurants use to offset costs, such as San Francisco’s ordinance requiring businesses to provide health care or credit card processing fees.
This will have dramatic consequences for California’s restaurant industry, owners said, including significant pay cuts for employees and price increases for diners. They’re worried it will unravel a movement toward more equitable pay structures in an industry that’s long struggled with wage disparities. The law could also spark a wave of lawsuits against restaurants, similar to the many disability lawsuits filed under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Some predicted that the disruption could be enough to convince some operators to close their restaurants entirely.
It feels like the state “lit the fuse to this bomb” and is “standing back to see what happens,” said Tim Stannard of Bacchus Management Group, which operates Bay Area restaurants including Spruce in San Francisco and the Village Pub in Woodside.
“It is terrifying,” he said. “We can’t pay the wages we’re paying now unless we dramatically increase prices and hope guests actually come in and pay those prices.” Read More > in the San Francisco Chronicle
California electricity prices now second-highest in U.S.: ‘Everyone is getting squeezed’ – Propelled in large part by PG&E, which hiked residential electricity rates by 20% for about 16 million Californians in January, the state’s high electricity prices are second only to Hawaii, which is always an expensive outlier because of the costs of shipping oil to the far-flung archipelago.
A pack of New England states have historically had some of the nation’s highest electricity prices (the federal government doesn’t track rates but rather calculates prices using customer counts, sales and revenue data) due to factors such as a shortage in natural gas pipeline capacity plus the region’s reliance on costly fossil fuels to generate electricity.
But California has joined them in the past 10 years, leapfrogging with Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire to periodically hold the title as the most expensive state for electricity usage in the lower 48. (Even though Californians pay a high amount for each unit of electricity, their total bills tend to be lower than other states in the Northeast and South due to the West Coast’s relatively temperate climate.)
East Coast residents are paying higher prices during cold winter months with Californians paying higher electricity prices for a brief period nearly every summer since 2014, likely when people must cool their homes during heat waves.
It is unusual for Californians to pay higher prices than the East Coast in the depth of winter. This year alone, typical Northern and Central California households (which use about 500 kilowatt-hours of electricity each month) will pay over $400 more annually on their PG&E bill.
PG&E currently charges the most for electricity among California’s three investor-owned utilities with an average residential rate of $0.397 per kilowatt hour. The company’s residential electricity rates have risen more dramatically than the other utilities, jumping 128% over the last decade. Read More > in the San Francisco Chronicle
Police Officer Hiring Increased For First Year Since 2020, Survey Says – The hiring of police officers is rising for the first year since 2020, a new survey shows.
Police departments across the U.S. have struggled to remain staffed for the past few years as officers left in droves following the Defund the Police movement and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and rioting that peaked after the death of George Floyd in 2020. For the first time since the nationwide unrest and lockdowns, total staffing has increased among police agencies with some small and medium bodies reporting more sworn officers than in January 2020, according to data obtained by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF).
“For the first time since the start of the pandemic, agencies reported a year-over-year increase in total sworn staffing. Responding agencies reported hiring more sworn officers in 2023 than in any of the previous four years. Agencies saw fewer resignations in 2023 than they did in 2021 or 2022, though they still had more officers resign last year than in 2019 or 2020. And retirements dropped back down to roughly where they were in 2019 after being elevated for the previous three years,” the survey reads.
“Small and medium agencies now have more sworn officers than they had in January 2020. In large agencies, sworn staffing slightly increased during 2023, but it is still more than 5 percent below where it was in January 2020,” the survey continues. Read More > at the Daily Caller
Ford just reported a massive loss on every electric vehicle it sold – Ford’s electric vehicle unit reported that losses soared in the first quarter to $1.3 billion, or $132,000 for each of the 10,000 vehicles it sold in the first three months of the year, helping to drag down earnings for the company overall.
Ford, like most automakers, has announced plans to shift from traditional gas-powered vehicles to EVs in coming years. But it is the only traditional automaker to break out results of its retail EV sales. And the results it reported Wednesday show another sign of the profit pressures on the EV business at Ford and other automakers.
The EV unit, which Ford calls Model e, sold 10,000 vehicles in the quarter, down 20% from the number it sold a year earlier. And its revenue plunged 84% to about $100 million, which Ford attributed mostly to price cuts for EVs across the industry. That resulted in the $1.3 billion loss before interest and taxes (EBIT), and the massive per-vehicle loss in the Model e unit.
The losses go far beyond the cost of building and selling those 10,000 cars, according to Ford. Instead the losses include hundreds of millions being spent on research and development of the next generation of EVs for Ford. Those investments are years away from paying off. Read More > at Yahoo! Finance
Is This the First AI Hate Hoax? White Principal Accused of Racism Based on Fake Audio – A pretty dramatic story out of Baltimore today which reveals what may be the first hate hoax perpetrated with the help of artificial intelligence. The principal of Pikesville High School, Eric Eiswert, was accused in January of making blatantly racist comments behind closed doors after an inflammatory audio file was posted on a popular Instagram account.
In the recording, the person speaking refers to “ungrateful Black kids who can’t test their way out of a paper bag.”
The speaker goes on to question how hard it is to get those students to meet grade-level expectations. He uses names of people who appear to be staff members and says they should not have been hired. The speaker sayshe should get rid of another person “one way or another.”
“And if I have to get one more complaint from one more Jew in this community, I’m going to join the other side,” the voice in the recording stated.
The Superintendent denounced the comments and launched an investigation. For his part, Eiswert denied having ever made the comments and a union leader immediately suggested the “recording” had actually been produced by AI. The president of the local NAACP also condemned the statements saying she was “disappointed but not surprised.”
Eiswert was apparently removed from his school and reports suggested he received threats and had police guarding his home.
But last month the Baltimore Banner revealed that experts had concluded the “recording” was AI generated:
Siwei Lyu, director of a media forensics lab at the University at Buffalo, said the audio is not particularly sophisticated. Lyu has developed technologies at the State University of New York for spotting audio and images created using artificial intelligence.
This audio is “not a challenging case for the algorithms. I believe someone just made this using an AI voice generator,” Lyu said, adding that he doesn’t believe the person who made it put a lot of effort into the task. Online voice generator tools, like one from Eleven Labs, are available to anyone and advertise their ability to instantly create audio that’s indistinguishable from human speech.
There is, however, clear evidence the audio was manipulated, Lyu said.
Today we got further confirmation of that as police arrested the man they say created that audio in an effort to get back at Eiswert for an earlier investigation. Read More > at Hot Air
The Revolution Has Begun in the UK – February 17th, 2024, was the day I became confident that childhood was going to change for the better. On that day, several people sent me an article from The Guardian, with this headline: ‘It went nuts’: Thousands join UK parents calling for smartphone-free childhood. The article described the efforts of two British women who each had children in the 7-9 age range, the age at which many British kids are given a smartphone. (In fact, 24% of British kids aged 5-7 have their own smartphone.) They could see what had happened to children who burrowed into their smartphones and never re-emerged. They didn’t want their kids to be next. So they started a WhatsApp group to find other like-minded parents who would join them in breaking the norm, resisting, and maybe even trying to create a smartphone-free childhood.
It turned out that most British parents were feeling the same fears, the same sense of being trapped, and the same desire to scream. That’s why their simple call to join their WhatsApp group “went nuts.” Clare Fernyhough and Daisy Greenwell tell their story below. I reached out to them as soon as I read the article, and together, we put on a public Zoom call for British parents on March 21. We had over one thousand people on the call, discussing the challenges we faced and the power we had to change things as our numbers swelled.
By the end of the call, it was clear: The UK reached its tipping point in February 2024. Parents are up in arms about what addictive, distracting, and omnipresent digital technology is doing to their children at home and at school. They’re not going to take it anymore. ites for British parents are Smartphonefreechildhood.co.uk, which is the site that Daisy and Clare created, and also DelaySmartphones.org.uk, created by Hannah Oertel.
American parents and parents everywhere: Let’s do it too! Let’s unite the way British parents have. Let’s change norms and laws. Let’s roll back the phone-based childhood now! For American parents, please start by signing up at our site, AnxiousGeneration.com. At the bottom of the page, you can sign up for our mailing list, and also find links to dozens of other excellent organizations, including some in Spain, France, and Australia.
One important note about ages: In the four norms I’m promoting to roll back the phone-based childhood, norm #2 is “no smartphones before high school.” In the U.S., students generally move from middle school to high school (or secondary school) in 9th grade, around the age of 14. It is vital to keep middle school clear of phone-based life, which is why I picked high school as the best “bright line” to serve as a universal minimum age. But in the UK, age 14 falls right in the middle of their secondary school, which runs roughly from ages 12-16, so it would be terrible to flood secondary schools with phones just for the older kids. The line would not hold at 14; it would drop to 12. Therefore, in the UK (as in Spain and other countries), the bright line is after secondary school, which is around the age of 16. Daisy and Clare proposed 16 as a more ambitious minimum age, and it seems to be working. In fact, two-thirds of British parents support keeping smartphones away from children under the age of 16, according to a recent survey.
And now, here is Daisy and Clare’s story, as told by Daisy: Read More > at After Babel
Colleges Have a New Source of Protest on Their Hands: Irate Parents – Colleges already have a student revolt on their hands. Now their parents are rebelling, too.
Parents paying as much as $90,000 for their sons and daughters to attend elite universities are angry and frustrated with colleges’ responses to the Gaza protests—on both sides of the political divide. Whether their kids are protesting, counterprotesting or trying to stay out of it, parents are demanding that schools do more to keep them safe and learning.
“They are not getting the education they expected and paid for,” says Zev Gewurz, a Boston real-estate lawyer whose daughter is a senior at Barnard College in New York City.
Parents are preparing to push back financially. They are requesting tuition refunds where classes have been canceled and contacting college counselors to ask how to get their money back. Parents are also threatening not to donate in the future.
College officials say they are trying to keep students safe, adding security measures while also trying to respect students’ rights to demonstrate. But tensions have exploded in the past few days. Read More > in The Wall Street Journal
Do women make better physicians? New study finds patients with female doctors have a lower risk of death and hospital readmission rates. – Are patients in better hands if they’re being treated by female physicians? Yes, according to one new study. Although the positive impact was greater in female patients — particularly those who were severely ill — the research revealed that both men and women under the care of female doctors generally had a lower risk of death and lower 30-day hospital readmission rates. The study, which was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, used a nationally representative sample of more than 700,000 Medicare patients aged 65 years or older who were hospitalized during 2016 to 2019, and treated by hospitalists, who are doctors that work exclusively in hospitals.
“In our opinion, female physicians may be better than male physicians at making rapport with female patients and effective communication with patients, leading to more likely agreement about advice provided,” Dr. Atsushi Miyawaki, co-author of the study and lecturer at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Medicine, tells Yahoo Life. “Also, female physicians may have fewer gender biases than male physicians in assessment of symptoms and illness against female patients, leading to the possibility to notice changes in severely ill female patients earlier.”
This isn’t the first study to find that a doctor’s gender can affect patient care. A December 2021 JAMA Surgery study found that female patients had worse outcomes when treated by male physicians, but the same wasn’t true for male patients treated by female physicians. A 2018 study found that male doctors underestimated stroke risk in female patients, while female physicians did well in assessing stroke risk in women. And a 2017 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that female physicians are more likely to adhere to clinical guidelines and evidence-based practice compared to male physicians. Read More > at Yahoo! Life
Exercising in Midlife May ‘Reverse’ Years of Inactivity, Large Study Finds – As the world’s aging population grows, and dementia, cardiovascular disease, and osteoporosis reach epidemic levels, people of all ages want to know how they can live healthier, not just longer, lives.
For women in their 40s and 50s, it’s not too late to take action. A study that tracked more than 11,000 women in Australia has found that midlife is a crucial time to meet physical activity guidelines of at least 150 minutes a week.
Women in the study who said they maintained those guidelines consistently over the next 15 years had better physical health scores than those women who did not.
Even participants who did not exercise regularly before middle age benefited from the new routine. In fact, at the final follow-up study, this group’s physical test scores were virtually the same as the group of women who regularly exercised before their 50s – three percentage points ahead of women who never or rarely met the exercise guidelines.
Future studies are needed to see if these physical benefits also extend to men in mid-life, but there is good reason to suspect they might. Read More > at Science Alert
A new lost generation: Disengaged, aimless, and adrift – More than a quarter of America’s school-aged children were absent from school 10 percent or more of the time last year. There’s no shortage of explanations on offer for this surge in “chronic absenteeism,” mostly blaming the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath: lockdowns; lowered expectation; health and hardship; bullying and school safety issues. Remote learning and “Zoom school” made attendance optional, which is a hard habit to break.
A letter from U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona to chief state school officers a few weeks ago cited “multiple, often interconnected factors” for chronic absenteeism. High school students, he wrote, might face “competing demands such as staying home to be caregivers to younger siblings or a sick family member or working outside the home to support themselves or their families.” While that may be true for some number of students, I fear there’s a larger and even more troubling trend at work. A New York Times report, circling but not quite landing, came closer than Cardona when it suggested that “something fundamental has shifted in American childhood and the culture of school in ways that may be long lasting.”
Since the start of the school year, I’ve been visiting schools and talking to educators about faltering school attendance and learning loss associated with the pandemic, which vaporized twenty years of achievement gains at a stroke. I’m left with a nagging sense that we’re misreading chronic absenteeism almost entirely. It fits a larger pattern of young people absenting themselves not just from school, but from life. Read More > at Fordham Institute
15 extinct giants that once roamed North America – Until the end of the last ice age, American cheetahs, enormous armadillo-like creatures and giant sloths called North America home. But it’s long puzzled scientists why these animals and other megafauna — creatures heavier than 100 pounds (45 kilograms) — went extinct about 10,000 years ago.
Rapid warming periods called interstadials and, to a lesser degree, ice-age people who hunted animals are responsible for the disappearance of the continent’s megafauna, according to a study published in 2015 in the journal Science. Other studies have placed more blame on humans, and some researchers say many factors are to blame.
Both research and the debate surrounding the reasons for the extinction of these animals will undeniably continue. In the meantime, researchers continue to find fossils of these massive creatures. Here’s a look at 15 extinct animals from the last North American ice age, and what scientists know about their lives.
1. Saber-toothed cat
The saber-toothed cat (Smilodon fatalis) lived from about 400,000 to 11,000 years ago, according to the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County. It was a big feline, weighing around 350 to 620 pounds (160 to 280 kg) and measuring an average of about 5.75 feet (1.75 meters) from its rump to its snout, not including its tail, according to the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. S. fatalis was about the size of a modern African lion (Panthera leo) but with shorter and more robust limbs. Its blade-like, serrated canine teeth, or sabers, were impressively big, at nearly 7 inches (18 centimeters) long.
2. Ice age coyote
The ice age coyote (Canis latrans orcutti), also known as the Pleistocene coyote, was much larger than today’s coyotes. The ancient member of the family Canidae weighed between 33 and 55 pounds (15 to 25 kg), meaning that some were as large as some modern-day wolves (Canis lupus), a 2012 study in the journal PNAS found. Today’s coyotes (Canis latrans) weigh only around 22 to 40 pounds (10 to 18 kg), according to a statement describing the study.
Compared with today’s coyotes, the Pleistocene coyote had a thicker, deeper skull and better teeth for eating meat. These features suggest the Pleistocene canine could kill larger prey and was more carnivorous, the study found.
3. Ancient bison
The ancient bison (Bison antiquus) lived from about 240,000 to 10,000 years ago, according to the National Park Service (NPS). It was 25% larger than the modern American bison (Bison bison), at 7.5 feet (2.3 m) high, 15 feet (4.6 m) long and 3,500 pounds (1,600 kg). Its horns were also longer than those of modern bison. These herbivores are likely ancestral to American bison, according to the NPS. Read More > at Live Science
Romick in Oakley 