Author: Larry Littlefield

I generally get my weather directly from the National Weather Service website, where in addition to the text forecast I make use of the "Hourly Weather Graph" and radar to decide the mode (bicycle, subway) and timing of my commute. When something big may be going on, I also read the detailed "Forecast Discussion," which includes the thinking behind the forecast, information about models not in agreement, possible changes as events develop, etc. I certainly did so over Christmas weekend, with travel planned for my immediate and extended family. But I couldn't remember when the forecast changed.

So I went through the archived "Forecast Discussion" from the NWS, and found the following. As late as Christmas Eve, the storm was expected to basically miss most of the NY metro, excluding eastern Long Island and Connecticut. On Christmas morning, the possibility of a 6 to 9 inch snowstorm was forecast, and a “Winter Storm Watch” was issued. Someone should have been watching, because Christmas afternoon it was suddenly upgraded to a “Blizzard Warning.” It was still expected to be a powerful but not devastating storm in NYC until just after noon on Sunday, the day the storm hit, when the snow accumulation totals were updated. Bottom line: this storm put out more fakes than Michael Vick, so it is no surprise that a stunned city and MTA shanked a punt to Desean Jackson. The four “Forecast Discussions” follow in full: bold and italics were added by me.  If you bore easily, just read those parts.

I just read them over. They require all parked cars to be removed from a limited number of streets, and no travel on those streets without snow tires or chains. What is really needed in a blizzard this severe is for legally and safely parked cars to just stay put over much of the city, so the plows can work. And buses to be pulled from the streets. But that isn’t what the rule says.

The whole response needs to be re-thought for different scenarios, particularly since severe snowstorms are apparently becomming more common — and people need to be told to get where they are going or stay put ahead of time. The rethinking needs to take into account the fact that the number of vehicles that rely on street parking is right up to the number of potential spaces in many parts of the city. Anyone driving somewhere in these conditions will have no place to park when they get there, other than the middle of the street.

"Another problem on Monday was transportation for train operators, themselves. Many were having trouble getting to work, and Mr. Seaton said that a dearth of workers had contributed to the decision to shut down the entire B line."

Just thought I'd add what the New York Times missed. I hope I won't be hearing that some plows didn't run because the state legislature decided those from outside the city should be able to be NYC sanitation workers (but localities outside the city could continue to ban city residents from taking those jobs).

I walked from Windsor Terrace to that spot and didn’t see a plow on the street other than a Parks Department pick-up. But there must have been six to eight plows or garbage trucks with plows stalled within a block of 5th Avenue and 9th Street with their engines running. Along with a transit bus, a Boro Park-Williamsburg bus abandoned in the middle of the street, and a bunch of stalled cars. There was also a stalled bus up on 7th Avenue.

The side streets have four foot snow drifts — the plows running through last night before most of the now fell was a waste of time. The snow emergency routes had evidently been plowed during the night — you could walk in those streets — but more snow was blowing on to them.

Looks like New York lost another two seats in Congress, but NYC’s share of the state’s population is going up. I wonder how they are going to take one or both of those seats out of New York City, without putting existing suburban legislators at risk from being voted against by new voters?

Texas gains four. It seems that most of the growth is in Blue portions of Red states.

Over the past near 40 years, the share of the personal income of both Americans and New Yorkers spent by state and local governments on cash assistance for the needy has plunged, a long term look at data from the Governments Division of the U.S. Census Bureau shows, while the share spent on payments to private sector medical care vendors, generally under the Medicaid program, has soared. The data, in the attached spreadsheet, shows that public health and hospital spending has fallen as a share of personal income in New York while rising in the U.S. as a whole, while spending on social services has increased in both areas, though by much less than Medicaid-funded health care vendor payments.

I just glanced over this report, and was struck by the chart on page 1, which shows the share of U.S. income taken by the top 1.0% of earners from 1914 to 2006. It shows the share of U.S. income going to the wealthy soared in the 1920s, just before the Great Depression, and in recent years, just before the Great Recession. This is nothing I didn't know. But what struck me was the almost exact match to the total credit market debt to GDP chart, found on this website. Total U.S. debt also soared in the 1920s, fell in the Great Depression, remained low for a while, then soared again in the 1980s and 2000s. Party on!

People in education, who knew that this was coming along with the expiration of federal stimulus money for education and state budget cuts, didn't want the job of presiding over the re-decline of the NYC schools.  When Bloomberg said that if Black didn't get the job no one else would take it, he apparently wasn't just making it up.

MSM reporters should read this article, in which a Los Angeles Times reporter admits the press failed to cover a massive 1999 pension enhancement that has devasted public services for millions of people for years to come in California. "The bill won approval on the final day of the state legislative session in the fall of 1999. But searching this week for contemporaneous coverage of the law, I found little to nothing. Reporters…gave plenty of attention to an agreement that would allow an expansion of Indian gambling operations around California. A lot of attention also went to a couple of bills that cracked down on illegal sweatshops. Another piece of legislation, providing gay students a legal shield against abuse, also made front-page news. But SB 400 got only a handful of mentions."

New York's similar pension deal passed in 2000. A massive pension increase for NYC teachers passed in 2008, casually mentioned at the end of a press conference on horse racing. The NYC teacher pension is now one of the most underfunded in the country. For years, amidst strident conflict over symbolic social issues breathlessly covered by the press, Generation Greed has sold out our collective future all but ignored (boring!), and not just on pensions. It's a disgrace.

From the Times: "Richard Ravitch, the lieutenant governor of New York, is among those warning that states are on an unsustainable path, and that their disclosures of pension and health care obligations are often misleading. And he worries how long it can last."

“They didn’t do it with bad motives,” he said. “Ninety-five percent of them didn’t understand what they were doing. They did it because it was easier than taxing people or cutting benefits. We’re getting closer and closer to the point where we can’t do that anymore. I don’t know where that is, but I know we’re close.”