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The national cannabis oversupply problem

May 14th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
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A fascinating look at a big problem in the cannabis market.

Along the West Coast, which dominated U.S. marijuana production long before states began to legalize it, producers face what many call the failed economics of legal pot.

There is vast supply, thanks to great growing conditions and a wealth of expertise, but any surplus remains officially trapped within each state’s borders due to the federal ban on marijuana. Prices have plunged and producers have struggled.

“I’m at rock bottom,” said Jeremy Moberg, who owns CannaSol Farms in north-central Washington and, like many licensed growers, complains that the state’s 37% cannabis tax leaves virtually no profit margin for producers. “I’m tired of running a failing business.”

No one in the industry expects a fractured Congress to help out anytime soon by legalizing the drug, allowing pot businesses to deduct expenses or even just easing banking restrictions that frequently cut them off from loans or credit.

Instead, some are pinning their hopes, however faint, on President Joe Biden’s administration clearing the way for marijuana trade among states that have legalized the drug. That would allow the West Coast — with its favorable climate and cheap, clean hydropower for indoor growing — to help supply the rest of the country, they argue.

[…]

Twenty-one states have now legalized the recreational use of cannabis by adults. Sales just began in Missouri, are expected to begin in July in Maryland and totaled $300 million in the first year of New Mexico’s program.

How states have set up their markets has implications for how their industries are doing now — and how they might fare should businesses be allowed to sell out of state.

Washington and Colorado were the first states to legalize recreational marijuana in 2012. Many of the early regulations Washington adopted to keep the Justice Department at bay — including restricting the size of growing facilities and banning out-of-state investment — remain in place.

That has helped some smaller growers thrive. But it could hamstring those hoping to compete in an interstate marketplace alongside larger, more efficient producers from Oregon or California, who operate under fewer limits.

In Oregon, where sales began in 2015, large growers have achieved some economy of scale that could give them a leg up in a broader market. But in the meantime, the state’s oversupply is considered the nation’s worst.

In February, the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission reported marijuana businesses were sitting on about 3 million pounds (1.36 million kilograms) of unused cannabis, as well as 75,000 pounds (34,000 kilograms) of concentrates and extracts.

Steve Marks, then the commission’s executive director, said Oregonians already buy as much weed as they can use. Federal inaction poses “an existential crisis” for Oregon’s industry, he warned.

“Cannabis in Oregon is like corn in Iowa,” said TJ Sheehy, an analyst for the commission. “If you put a box around Iowa and said you can only grow corn in Iowa to sell to Iowans, you’d have exactly the same dynamic.”

None of this has anything to do with Texas right now, of course, because we only allow a narrow medical use of cannabis. As you well know if you’ve read this blog for any length of time, it’s highly unlikely that situation will change in any meaningful way as long as Dan Patrick is in charge of the Senate. But nothing lasts forever, and things will eventually change, so it’s worth considering what the prospects for Texas-grown cannabis might look like some day. If the federal restrictions remain in place, then Texas growers would have sole access to the Texas market. Good for them in terms of limiting competition, not so good in terms of growth potential. If the federal restrictions are removed or at least weakened, then established suppliers will be racing in to meet the demand we’ll surely have. Not so good for the local growers, though being the “locally sourced” option can be an advantage, but potentially great for the consumers, who will have more choices and thus hopefully lower prices.

All this is theoretical, of course. At the rate we’re going, the rest of the country may be growing and selling cannabis before Texas ever gets around to allowing it here. I’ll leave it to you to decide how business friendly that would be.

Cruise comes to Houston

May 12th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

I’m genuinely curious to see how this goes.

Cruise, a General Motors autonomous vehicle subsidiary, is bringing its self-driving cars to Houston with the goal of offering driverless rides.

The cars will begin testing next week, said Megan Prichard, Cruise’s vice president of ridehail.

“We designed the technology to launch first in San Francisco with the idea that we would see all sorts of challenges: everything from roller skate parties, to heavy traffic to raccoons in the roads,” Prichard said. “And we thought that if we designed our technology for a dense urban environment, that we would be able to then pick it up and put it into other cities around the country and around the world with only a little bit of fine tuning.”

Initial tests will be supervised drives, with a Cruise employee in the vehicle as a backup safety driver while the vehicle learns about Houston streets. The company did not specify where it would be tested in Houston, and the first drives will be closed to the public. Prichard said there was no timeline for when rides to the public will be offered. The company declined to say how many vehicles it planned to have in Houston.

After launching in San Francisco last year, the company started running its autonomous vehicles — a fleet of Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicles equipped with sensors — in Austin and Phoenix.

Prichard said the company is expanding to Houston because it’s a large and growing metropolitan area.

“The area that we operate (in) will be the area that we determine to be safe, and the hours that we operate will be the hours that we determine to be safe. And then we’ll expand that out over time,” Prichard said.

See here and here for some background. While the Cruise app rolled out in Austin in January, they only began testing the cars on the streets there in March, and that was not yet the public rollout. As such, I have no idea how it’s gone in Austin, so I don’t have any basis for predicting how it might go here. For that matter, and for all the hype about autonomous vehicle delivery services in Houston, I have not seen any reporting on how that’s been received by the public. I haven’t seen any stories of spectacular failures, so that’s a positive sign. I’m still unsure how big the market actually is for any of this. You can specify a driver who doesn’t talk to you when you order an Uber, so how is this any different? Like I said, I don’t know, and I’m looking forward to finding out. Does this appeal to you at all? Leave a comment and let me know. CultureMap, which answers one of my questions by noting that a Cruise ride would be cheaper than an Uber, and Bloomberg have more.

DPS victimized by credential stuffing attack

Mar 1st, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

That’s the technical term for this.

The Texas Department of Public Safety was duped into shipping at least 3,000 Texas driver’s licenses to a Chinese organized crime group that targeted Asian Texans, DPS Director Steve McCraw told a Texas House committee on Monday.

The crime group worked through the state’s government portal, Texas.gov. The agency, which discovered the security breach in December, will begin notifying victims in letters to be sent out this week, the DPS chief said. More victims are still being identified, he said.

“We’re not happy at all, I can tell you that, one bit,” McCraw said in testimony to a House Appropriations subcommittee. “They should have had — controls should have been in place, and they never should have happened.”

The crime organization, which McCraw did not name, was able to get its hands on the Texas driver’s licenses by first pulling personal data on individuals with Asian surnames from the “dark web” and other underground data-trading portals.

That info, including previous addresses and family names, allowed thieves to correctly answer password security questions on the Texas.gov site and use stolen credit cards to order duplicate copies of active licenses — such as those ordered by people who misplace their licenses or report them stolen. A replacement license costs $11.

The state-run Texas.gov site is the central portal for Texans wanting to renew licenses, obtain driving records and registration, and obtain birth and death certificates, among other things.

The investigation into the stolen driver’s licenses spans at least four states and also involves fraudulent licenses duplicated from victims in other states as well as Texas. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are also investigating, according to the DPS letter to lawmakers.

House Appropriations Vice Chair Mary González, an El Paso Democrat, blasted DPS agency chiefs for letting so much time lapse while Texans were unaware that their identities were being used fraudulently.

“Somebody could be going around as Mary González right now for two months, and nobody’s been notified, I [wouldn’t have been] notified,” González said.

DPS officials are not calling the incident a “data breach” because they say no hacking was involved and vast amounts of data were not being stolen. Instead, the crime group used data obtained from underground sources to bypass a simple password security system — laying bare a security vulnerability that “should never have happened,” McCraw said.

Texas.gov is operated not by DPS, but by the Texas Department of Information Resources.

DPS officials declined to provide details about the security loophole that left the site open to fraud but told lawmakers that it had been closed.

DIR spokesperson Brittney Booth Paylor dismissed the notion that the incident was a cybersecurity breach, calling it “a case of fraudulent criminal activity based on factors unrelated to state systems.”

[…]

The problem was first detected in December when a third-party Texas.gov payment vendor “alerted DPS to an increase in customers challenging credit card charges for online transactions,” according to a February letter sent to lawmakers from the DPS. The credit cards used to buy the fraudulent copies were also stolen, authorities said.

Before investigators shut down the operation, McCraw said, the license thieves were able to use the site, billed as “the official website of the State of Texas,” to obtain driver’s licenses that are “Real ID compliant” — not cheap copies, McCraw said.

These stolen licenses can pass verification methods and be used fraudulently all over the country because they are real driver’s licenses being used by people who can pass for the photo on the original card, McCraw said.

See here if you want to learn a bit more about what a credential stuffing attack is. Long story short, don’t reuse your passwords and enable two-factor authentication where you can.

Putting my cybersecurity hat on for a minute, I will say that the DIR response to this is disingenuous. It’s true that there are plenty of pwned password lists available on the internet, and that it’s not Texas’ fault if people reuse passwords. But there are services that the state can subscribe to that would alert them to email addresses in their database that have been found in those pwned lists, which would then give DPS or DIR or whoever would have that responsibility the impetus to contact those address owners proactively and tell them to update their password. They could also enforce, or at least offer, a two-factor solution, and there are other proactive steps available as well. DPS/DIR isn’t “responsible” for this, but DPS/DIR absolutely could have done something to prevent or minimize it.

Rep. González’s complaint about the delay in notifying the affected users is addressed in a later Chron story. I drafted this originally Monday night, so I will do a separate post on that. Short answer, there is a legal requirement in Texas to report data breaches, but there is an exception for when there is an active law enforcement investigation, which DPS has invoked here.

Given the upsurge in violence against Asian-Americans, Rep. González also asked if this could be considered a hate crime, which McCraw avoided answering. It may not be possible to tell from what they know right now, but it is possible to try to figure it out. I’m glad DPS is in contact with the FBI and DHS about that, and I hope that leads to some action. I hope the Lege will press DPS and DIR to do better, and to share the results of the investigation when it’s over. The Lege – and the media – should also focus on McCraw’s statement about controls not being in place and demanding to know what is now being done about that. Either we learn from this or we risk having it happen again. The Chron has more.

Harris County settles Juul lawsuit

Feb 23rd, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
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From the inbox:

Christian Menefee

Harris County Attorney Christian D. Menefee announced a settlement of the county’s lawsuit against e-cigarette company JUUL Labs, Inc. over claims that JUUL deceptively marketed its products to children. The county received the second largest settlement for a local government in the nation.

“I’m proud of this outcome settling our lawsuit against JUUL. We’re bringing real money to the county to ensure we’re protecting our youth from e-cigarette use,” said Harris County Attorney Christian D. Menefee. “This case was always about reducing youth nicotine addiction in our communities. I want kids across Harris County to go on to live long, healthy lives. That’s one of many reasons why I plan to do everything I can to protect public health.”

In 2021, Harris County became the first governmental entity in Texas to file suit against JUUL. Harris County’s settlement is part of a global settlement with JUUL Labs, Inc resolving numerous cases brought by government entity plaintiffs, including school districts, cities, and counties. The distribution of Harris County’s settlement funds will be decided by Commissioners Court.

See here for the background. Googling around, I saw a news item from September about Juul settling with the state of Texas, which was part of a larger class action settlement, and a news item from December about a $1.7 billion settlement of over 5000 lawsuits nationwide. This was separate from all of those, which I confirmed with the County Attorney Office. I was also told that the settlement amount was $20 million, which was discussed at this week’s Commissioners Court meeting. And now you know what I know.

The ongoing referee shortage

Jan 31st, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
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This news is not new, though the cause being cited is different than the last time I read this kind of story.

The official shortage seen in the Houston area is part of a nationwide issue, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. So much so, in fact, that the NFHS — which oversees state associations like the University Interscholastic League in Texas — has launched a  campaign called “Bench Bad Behavior,” aimed at providing a remedy for abuse against officials during games.

The NFHS has dedicated resources to its member state associations to improve the behavior of coaches, parents, players and other fans.

NFHS chief executive officer Karissa Niehoff said pre- and post-COVID-19 numbers reveal that around 50,000 high school sports officials nationwide have left the profession.

“Despite our efforts for five years now to do a recruitment campaign, we still realize that loss,” Niehoff said during a Zoom session with national media last week. “We have some numbers that are coming back slowly, but we really want to not only call attention to the loss itself and the crisis itself but the reasons — more importantly, why? What we’ve found is the reasons officials do not stay in the profession really center around behavior.”

When the National Association of Sports Officials conducted its most recent nationwide survey during the summer of 2017 — drawing more than 17,000 participants — 57 percent said sportsmanship toward officials was getting worse. When it was asked who caused the most problems with sportsmanship, parents (39 percent), coaches (29 percent) and fans (18 percent) were identified as the top culprits. When it was asked who was most responsible for improving that sportsmanship, coaches (54 percent) and parents (23 parents) were again the top two answers.

NASO president Barry Mano also stressed the importance of school administrators correcting bad behavior in the stands. He said schools should be doing more to make officials feel protected and appreciated.

“Referees are in charge of the game; we’re not in charge of the environment,” Mano said. “So when a crew of sports officials comes to a site, they need to be better taken care of. They need to be recognized; they need to be secure. Do some things that make them feel welcome, make them feel respected. It’s not about money. We could solve the problem we’re taking about today if we started paying $500 a game for high school. We’re not going to do that. The shortage is not going to go away, so we need to do these other things.”

Over the summer of 2022, the Texas Association of Sports Officials took a hard stance and adopted a new policy aimed at stopping the abuse of officials. The two-section document is short and to the point. The goal is to “collaborate with schools where excessive verbal and/or physical abuse has occurred to provide a safe and more positive climate for all participants.”

The first section of the policy focuses on the abuse and warns that schools will be reprimanded if the TASO presidents council deems there is a culture of failing to control players, coaches or spectators. If those accusations are not met with sufficient action and results, the consequences will be severely punitive. It states, “For schools that fail to address their negative culture of abuse, a notification will be sent indicating that, effective on a certain date, there will be no TASO officials, in any sport, assigned to home games for that school until the issues are satisfactorily addressed.”

Other states also are taking action to battle the issue. The California Interscholastic Association, for example, implemented a bylaw that bans fans who assault officials from attending any future events.

Mano said attacks on officials have become a way-too-common occurrence in recent years.

“Today, we are getting reports in our office every single week of physical assaults against sports officials,” Mano said. “I believe it is important that administrators come to the realization that they are going to have to put some lines in the sand, saying that certain types of behavior are not going to be tolerated.”

Back in 2017, when I last wrote about this, the issue was simple demographics – Texas’ population, which very much includes the school-age population, was growing faster than TASO’s membership, which was trending older. I’m sure bad behavior by fans was an issue then as well, and I’m sure that demography continues to be an issue now, but the bad behavior issue is more acute. I’m a little surprised that the pandemic, which has been blamed for worse behavior by the public in a lot of other contexts, wasn’t mentioned here. I kind of think that a bigger problem is that we have an ever-increasing share of the public that doesn’t feel restrained by the kind of behavioral norms that we all lived by for generations – you know, all that “we live in a society!” stuff. There’s an obvious parallel to modern politics and the behavior of a certain class of politician that I’m sure you can infer on your own.

On that score, I’m a little surprised that there isn’t a lobbying effort to criminalize or enhance the punishment of this kind of abuse. I don’t know that that’s the best way forward, but I do believe that there have to be consequences for being that much of an asshole at a scholastic sporting event, and that it probably does make the most sense to put the onus on the schools to control their own fans. I hope it works.

Meanwhile, there is that other issue, and this time it seems that maybe there’s been a bit of progress.

Recruitment and retention are key components to battling the official shortage, both in Texas and across the country.

When faced with scheduling issues, Simpson started to take action. The Houston Soccer Officials Association does not appear to have a social media presence, so she decided to take matters into her own hands.

“I just started tweeting,” she said. “I got the link on how to become a ref from the HSOA website and started sending it to every college in our area. I sent it to friends. Three actually signed up. I was focused on getting as many refs as we needed to recover so we don’t have to do this (scheduling) plan.”

Another solution is trying to get younger people involved in the profession. For those who have already joined on, it’s about using the available resources to train, develop and retain them.

“As far as the guys doing it, even though there are some younger guys that are having to call games they’re not ready for, the Houston chapter has done a really good job of putting veterans with those young guys and mentoring them, training them and leading them the right way,” Heston said.

Carl Theiss served as a high school basketball official for 26 years and is currently the Bay Area representative on the state board for the Texas High School Basketball Officials Association. He has also spent time on the TASO state board and officiated junior college basketball in the area for more than 20 years.

Theiss said one of his primary goals as a member of the THSBOA education committee is to get younger people involved. It starts with providing an avenue to learn about officiating.

Simpson and Heston are both local high school coaches. I also noted in 2017 an effort by the Houston chapter of TASO to recruit women to be football referees. That subject was not noted in this story, but as I had wondered about TASO’s recruiting efforts back then, I’m glad to see that at least someone is taking action. This really would be a good job for social media, especially if you’re trying to reach a younger audience. Fixing the abuse problem will surely also help, but actively finding the next generation of refs and umps needs to be a priority for these organizations. I wish them luck.

Egg smuggling

Jan 27th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
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We live in strange times.

As the price of eggs continues to rise, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials are reporting a spike in people attempting to bring eggs into the country illegally from Mexico, where prices are lower.

The jump in sightings of the contraband product can be best explained by the high price of eggs in the U.S., which soared 60% in December over a year earlier. A combination of the deadliest bird flu outbreak in U.S. history, compounded by inflationary pressure and supply-chain snags, is to blame for the high prices shoppers are seeing at the supermarket.

It’s forcing some drastic measures: some grocery store chains are limiting how many cartons customers can buy.

And some people are going as far as smuggling eggs from out of the country, where prices are more affordable, and risking thousands of dollars in fines in the process.

A 30-count carton of eggs in Juárez, Mexico, according to Border Report, sells for $3.40. In some parts of the U.S., such as California, just a dozen eggs are now priced as high as $7.37.

Shoppers from El Paso, Texas, are buying eggs in Juárez because they are “significantly less expensive,” CPB spokesperson Gerrelaine Alcordo told NPR in a statement.

Most of those people arriving at international bridges are open about their purchase because they don’t realize eggs are prohibited.

“Generally, the items are being declared during the primary inspection and when that happens the person can abandon the product without consequence,” Alcordo said. “There have been a very small number of cases in the last weeks or so” were eggs weren’t declared, and then subsequently discovered during inspection, Alcordo added.

If the products are discovered, agriculture specialists confiscate and destroy them, which is routine for prohibited food. Those people are fined $300, but the penalty can be higher for repeat offenders of commercial size illegal imports.

There’s a joke in there somewhere involving Greg Abbott and the Texas National Guard, but I don’t quite feel up to the task. If you want to know more about why eggs are so expensive right now, it’s all about avian flu, as Your Local Epidemiologist explains. If you’re planning a visit to Mexico sometime in the near future, please be aware of what you can and cannot bring back with you. (If you’re planning a, um, unofficial trip to Mexico, you’re on your own.) In the meantime, know that this too shall pass. CNN and the Current have more.

Driverless taxi service arrives in Austin

Jan 9th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
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Brace yourselves, Austinites.

A rite of passage as an Austinite is feeling bewildered at other drivers’ choices behind the wheel, but that’s starting to change. Cruise, a driverless ridehailing app, has completed its first driverless rides in Austin, marking its official launch.

It was a quick turnaround for the company, which announced its intentions in the Capital City in September, calling the feat “going from zero to driverless in about 90 days.” The service is only in three cities so far — based in San Francisco and expanded out to Austin and Phoenix — but given the success of that timeline, it’s reasonable to expect much more as soon as the company announces it.

“Folks, we are entering the golden years of [autonomous vehicle] expansion,” tweeted Crusie CEO Kyle Vogt while announcing the achievement on December 20.

Vogt seems to be right, at least in Austin. News about driverless vehicles keeps popping up, from pioneering autonomous Lyft rides to independent delivery robots for Chick-fil-A and Ikea. A major difference is the patron; while most other autonomous driving news is centered on using the technology for a well-known company providing value in other spaces, Cruise is driving for itself. (It has, however, received investment funds from companies like Honda and Walmart.)

Rider testimony focuses on safety with an aura of giddiness. Even amid the novelty displayed in a video Vogt shared, riders talked about the vehicle’s caution and smoothness. A safety page on the company’s website claims several measures including constant 360-degree vision, a sensitivity to even very light external touch, and communication between fleet vehicles to assist in machine learning. And if all else fails, the company emphasizes “end-to-end redundancy,” meaning that the system can compensate for failures.

See here for some background and a bit of caution about the actual experience. I don’t really know what the appeal of a driverless taxi is, but whatever it is, Austin would be the first place I’d look for it in Texas, too. If this is something you feel you must try, go here and get on the wait list. And please, please tell us all about it after.

Here come some hydrogen-powered trucks

Jan 4th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
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There’s more than one way to do no-emissions transportation.

The first time Rodrigo Peña climbed into the Hyzon truck’s cabin and eased his foot off the break, it wasn’t the awe of being inside the first hydrogen-powered freight truck to be operated in Texas that struck him.

It was the silence.

“I could hear rocks pinging off the gravel in the yard — I could hear people blocks away,” he said. “It was like being in a huge golf cart.”

Peña and two other drivers for logistics company Talke will drive the Lone Star State’s inaugural hydrogen-powered freight truck route, delivering plastic resins from Mont Belvieu to the Port of Houston for Exxon Mobil as part of a two-week pilot.

While the pilot is temporary, civic and corporate leaders along the Ship Channel expect it to help jumpstart new investments and government incentives aimed at using hydrogen to help decarbonize the shipping and trucking sectors. Five entities, including the University of Texas at Austin, Chevron, Air Liquide and the Center for Houston’s Future announced last month that they had applied to the U.S. Department of Energy to be designated as one of as many as 10 regional clean hydrogen hubs, a distinction that could bring the region a slice of $7 billion in federal funding for hydrogen projects.

Subsidies like that will be key to get hydrogen trucking off the ground, said Parker Meeks, president and interim CEO of Mendon, New York-based Hyzon Motors. He said the hydrogen hub funding would help on the fuel side, but it doesn’t include funding for the trucks. That changed with the Inflation Reduction Act signed into law this year, which will pump $400 billion into clean energy funding, including funding to help lower emissions at ports.

“This transition at the start is quite expensive, and if we put all that on operators it will take a long time,” Meeks said. “We don’t anticipate being on subsidy longer than we need to, but the IRA gives us that immediate opportunity. We always planned on getting a truck to Houston, and that time is now that we’re getting that subsidy money to Houston.”

Houston is already the largest producer of hydrogen in the country, used largely for refining and petrochemical processes. But the region, and much of the country outside of California, lacks the infrastructure to make it feasible for use in freight trucks or cargo ships. Even the hydrogen used for the Port of Houston pilot projected was shipped from an Air Liquide facility in North Las Vegas, Nevada, even though an Air Liquide facility produces hydrogen just up the road in La Porte.

The Nevada facility is one of a handful of sites in the country that can liquify hydrogen, packaging it at a pressure of 7,500 pounds per square inch, said Laura Parkan, Air Liquide’s vice president of hydrogen energy for the Americas. Only three hydrogen fueling stations exist for heavy trucks, all in the greater Los Angeles area.

This was a two-week pilot program, and I drafted this before Christmas so you probably missed it. But hydrogen power makes sense for larger vehicles, because they can require batteries that are too large to be of practical use. This is one reason why Metro is seeking to test hydrogen-powered buses along with electric buses, as they look for alternatives to fossil fuels. Another consideration is the ability of the electric grid as it now exists to handle a new fleet of electric trucks. I’m of the belief that we should be open to all reasonable options. If that also turns out to be a boon for Houston and the result of the Biden infrastructure bill, so much the better.

Thirty million Texans

Jan 1st, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
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We reach another milestone.

Fueled by migration to the state from other parts of the country, Texas crossed a new population threshold this year: It is now home to 30 million people.

New estimates released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau put the state’s population as of July 1 at 30,029,572 following years of steady growth. This makes Texas the only state, other than California, with a population of more than 30 million.

The state’s population has been on an upward trajectory for decades, accompanied by demographic shifts that have reshaped everything from its politics to its classrooms as people of color have powered its growth.

Texas’ population increased by 470,708 people since July 2021, the largest gain in the nation. Texas regularly holds that top spot on the bureau’s annual population updates. Roughly half of that growth came from net domestic migration — the number of people coming to Texas from other states — while the other half was split almost evenly between net international migration and natural increase, which is the difference between births and deaths.

The state’s source of population gains often fluctuates year to year. The bureau’s estimates from 2010-19 showed Texas’ growth based on natural increase and net migration, including both domestic and international, were close to even over the decade.

I imagine that between the pandemic and Trump-instituted restrictions, the numbers for international migration have trended down. We’ll see how that affects the next decade.

On a related note, looking at the historic Census figures for Texas, thirty years ago the average State House member in Texas represented about 120K people. Twenty years ago that would have still been less than 150K people. Now that State Rep has 200K constituents, and rising. A State Senator now represents nearly one million people. We’re not going to do anything about that, but we really ought to think about it. Just putting it out there.

Driverless taxi update

Dec 12th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
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Things to watch out for in the nearer-than-you-think future, with Austin first in line.

When transit systems experience delays, the reason usually isn’t very interesting: congested streets, medical emergencies, mechanical problems. But the cause of a recent holdup on San Francisco’s MUNI system at least had the virtue of being novel.

On Sept. 30 at around 11 p.m., an N Line streetcar ground to a halt at the intersection of Carl Street and Cole Street because an autonomous vehicle from Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, had halted on the streetcar tracks and wouldn’t budge. According to the city’s transportation department, the 140 passengers riding the N line that evening were stuck in place for seven minutes before a Cruise employee arrived and moved the driverless conveyance. (Cruise did not respond to questions about what happened that night.)

This incident, which was not reported in the media at the time, is one of many in which autonomous vehicles roaming San Francisco’s streets have disrupted the city’s transportation network. In April, a Cruise vehicle blocked a travel lane needed by a siren-blaring fire engine, delaying its arrival at a three-alarm fire. Last fall, dozens of self-driving cars from Google’s Waymo subsidiary drove daily into a quiet cul-de-sac before turning around, much to the frustration of nearby residents.

Because of California’s insufficient and outdated AV reporting requirements, many incidents like these have escaped both public attention and regulatory consequences. Facing minimal scrutiny, AV companies have little incentive to avoid mucking up the public right of way—or even keep city officials informed about what’s happening on their streets.

With Silicon Valley a few miles away, San Francisco has become the top urban location for AV testing and deployment. With California officials granting their first AV deployment permits allowing passenger service this year, the city now offers a preview of what’s to come in other places where self-driving companies are now fanning out, with expansions announced for Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Austin.

Based on San Francisco’s experience, residents and officials in those cities should brace for strange, disruptive, and dangerous happenings on their streets. And they should demand that state officials offer the protection that California is failing to provide.

[…]

The National Association of City Transportation Officials, representing municipal transportation departments across North America, submitted its own letter to the NHTSA that flatly opposed GM’s request that the Cruise Origin receive an exemption from vehicle safety rules. (NHTSA has not yet made a decision.) Kate Fillin-Yeh, NACTO’s director of strategy, said urban transportation leaders nationwide are watching events unfold in San Francisco with growing concern. “I know that AV companies can make more money in cities because there is a density of people there,” she said, “but they’re unhelpful to the many people who rely on transit or walk.”

Indeed, beyond the wow factor of stepping inside a self-driving car, it’s unclear how exactly the introduction of robotaxis improves an urban transportation network. But the risks—including disruptions on public roadways, increased congestion, and reduced transit use—are very real.

Fillin-Yeh said her top request for federal and state policymakers is that they empower local leaders to monitor and manage AVs using their streets. “Cities need to be a part of these conversations about permitting and regulating AVs,” she said. “That isn’t always happening.”

In their letter to NHTSA, San Francisco officials proposed several ways to improve AV oversight. They suggested that NHTSA treat “travel lane failures that block roadways” as a key measure of AV readiness, adding that NHTSA should also quantify and publicize AV companies’ response times to vehicle emergencies.

Riggs, the University of San Francisco professor, agreed on the need to evaluate AV companies’ emergency response times, adding that governments must be especially careful to protect so-called vulnerable road users. “We should be collecting autonomous vehicles’ near-misses with pedestrians and cyclists,” he said.

Driverless taxis have been a thing since 2016, with the first domestic service beginning in Phoenix in 2018. As the story notes, GM subsidiary Cruise has opened a waitlist for its service launch in Austin, supposedly by the end of this year, among other cities. While this story is mostly about the failure of the state of California to provide oversight of these things, the point is that other states will soon have the same opportunity to fail to provide oversight. The Lege has largely rolled out the red carpet for companies that want to test autonomous vehicles – you’ve seen my regular series of posts about autonomous trucks and various driverless delivery services. Given the Republican urge to screw cities, along with the law passed a few years ago curtailing cities’ ability to regulate rideshare services, I think we can predict how this will go. Barring a Republican legislator getting mowed down (or stuck behind) one of these things, it’ll be laissez-faire as usual. Get ready for it. In a bit of good timing, this Sunday’s episode of What Next TBD has more.

Nuro keeps on expanding in Houston

Sep 18th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
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Someone must be using these services. I’m not, but someone must be.

Houstonians will soon be able to get completely autonomous delivery of their dinners, groceries, and more thanks to a new 10-year partnership.

Uber Technologies, Inc. and Nuro have cut a deal that will provide autonomous, electric vehicles for food deliveries in Houston and Mountain View, California, beginning his fall, according to a news release. A Bay Area expansion will follow, but Houston’s no stranger to Nuro-powered deliveries. California-based Nuro has launched five delivery pilot programs in Houston since 2019 with partners Kroger, Walmart, CVS, Domino’s, and FedEx.

With this new partnership, users will have access to meals, groceries, and other goods available on the Uber Eats platform — as well as the opportunity to support local businesses.

[…]

The company tapped Houston as its first full-scale operational city. Nuro previously told InnovationMap that was because the city offered a wide range of variation in the infrastructure across Houston’s neighborhoods.

“Houston is our first full-scale operations city,” Sola Lawal, product operations manager in Houston, told InnovationMap in January 2020. “All eyes at Nuro are focused on Houston.”

As the story notes, Nuro is now licensed to operate these autonomous vehicles in Texas, Arizona, and California. I’ve followed Nuro’s advances in Houston as it’s moved from groceries to pizza to pharmacies and more. I see their mapping cars in my neighborhood all the time. I can’t say I’ve ever seen an actual delivery from one of their vehicles, but as I said someone must be using them. If you’re one of them, I’d love to hear about your experience.

Texas will get a lot from the Inflation Reduction Act

Aug 20th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
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Thanks, Biden!

Texas’s clean energy sector is expected to be one of the largest beneficiaries of the climate and health care legislation President Joe Biden has signed into law, according to estimates released by the White House Wednesday.

Over the next eight years, Texas is expected to see $66.5 billion in investment through the legislation, expanding wind and solar energy, advanced batteries and other sources of clean electricity — more than California, New York or Florida.

Named the Inflation Reduction Act, the bill provides almost $370 billion in federal funding for the clean energy sector, with government officials hoping to spur far larger investment from the private sector.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan described the legislation in a press conference Wednesday as, “the linchpin to putting us on path to reach net zero (greenhouse gas emissions) no later than 2050.”

“It invests in American workers, the back bone of this country, by spurring supply chains for clean energy,” he said.

Texas has long led the nation in clean energy, with three times as many wind turbines as the next closest state. And while California still has the most solar energy capacity, Texas is beginning to catch up, with more installations last year than any other state, according to the Solar Energy Industry Association.

Here’s a quote of interest from Bloomberg: “Of the top 10 congressional districts in the country for operating and planned wind, solar and battery capacity, four are in Texas, more than in any other state and including the No. 1 district, Texas’ 19th.” So of course every Republican voted against it. Which won’t stop them from claiming credit for the good things that will happen. It’s the circle of life.

Fortunately, at least some of the goodness should go places that can honestly claim credit.

U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee wants environmental justice funds in the Inflation Reduction Act to flow into northeast Houston as freely as the concrete batch facilities that have come to plague the predominantly Black area.

Legislation passed Friday includes $60 billion for environmental justice programs that can help communities such as Trinity and Houston Gardens fight polluters and reduce emissions, the congresswoman said during a Sunday event at Trinity Gardens Church of Christ attended by around 25 community advocates and concerned residents.

Issues such as the illegal dumping of industrial trash, cancer clusters stemming from creosote used by rail companies and air and water contamination from a growing number of industrial sites make the city’s northeast corner “a fitting example” of communities the legislation aims to help, Jackson Lee said.

The bill also earmarks $3 billion for community centers that can “address disproportionate environmental and public health harms related to pollution.” Northeast Houston should have one such center, she said, describing the area as the new “concrete batch Mecca.”

The bill offers a hand to advocates in communities across Texas, where restraints on polluters are lax. Earlier this month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said it was investigating state environmental regulators accused of violating residents’ civil rights when Texas updated its standard permit for concrete batch plants.

The plants have become infamous in the community for billowing dust clouds and concrete-laced water seeping into neighboring properties. There are three schools within a half-mile of the plants, said Keith Downey, super neighborhood president representing Kashmere Gardens.

Jackson Lee told advocates the new federal funds can offer relief for a community fighting these fights largely by themselves.

That would be great. Rooting for this to happen.

The West Texas earthquake problem

Jul 25th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

We’re number one!

Earthquakes were never anything people in West Texas thought much about. Years would pass in between tremors that anybody felt. Even after the shale revolution arrived in force a decade ago and oil crews started drilling frantically in the region’s vast Permian Basin, there seemed to be no impact on the land.

But then, suddenly, in 2015, there were six earthquakes that topped 3.0 on the Richter scale. And then six again the next year. And then the numbers just exploded: 17 became 78 became 181. And in the first three months of 2022 alone, there were another 59, putting the year on pace to set a fresh record. Lower the threshold to include tiny tremors and the numbers run into the thousands.

All of which means that West Texas, the proud oil-drilling capital of America, is now also on the cusp of becoming the earthquake capital of America. Even California and Alaska, home to massive fault lines and a never-ending series of tremors, appear bound to be overtaken soon at the current pace of things.

There’s little doubt that there is a link between the drilling and the jump in seismic activity. Huge quantities of wastewater spew out of wells as the oil gushes out, and injecting that water back into the ground—the cheapest disposal option—puts stress on the Earth’s fault lines. Industry insiders even acknowledge as much.

That none of the quakes so far has been big enough to do much damage—just a cracked wall here and a loosened skylight there—is of little comfort to those who watched a similar pattern develop in the oil towns of neighboring Oklahoma a few years ago. What followed there was a gradual pickup in size that eventually gave the tremors enough force to start ripping walls off homes and buildings. Oklahoma only broke the cycle and steadied the ground after regulators forced drillers to slow the pace of water disposal in the area and haul some of it miles away.

This is one I drafted awhile back and hadn’t gotten around to before now. The article jumps from topic to topic, so it’s either quote too much of it or tell you to read the rest. There’s not a clear technological remediation to this – as noted, the solution in Oklahoma was to do less of the thing that was exacerbating the situation. Given that that means drilling less oil, at least for now, good luck with that. But at some point we’re going to have a quake that does real damage – as the story notes, in the last two years, there have been four tremors measuring 4.5 on the Richter scale in Oklahoma; Texas will surely follow along that path – and then we’ll be at that familiar place of trying to figure out why it all went wrong and who’s to blame for it. We know how it goes from there.

UIL still nixes NIL

Jul 23rd, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
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Sorry, Texas high school athletes. You’re still not getting paid.

Even if state lawmakers change legislation to allow high school athletes in Texas to profit off their name, image and likeness, the University Interscholastic League may not be ready to give the green light.

“Given what we’ve seen across the country at the NCAA level, given what we’ve seen in some of those states that have allowed it at the high school level, I’m not sure there’s going to be much of an appetite for it,” UIL deputy director Jamey Harrison said Sunday at the Texas High School Coaches Association Convention.

Texas is among 26 states that prohibit high school athletes from benefiting from NIL, according to endorsement platform Opendorse. There are 13 states that allow high school athletes to profit: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota and Utah.

Any decision from the UIL’s legislative committee would have to wait until the Texas Legislature makes a change to current laws. Passed last summer, Senate Bill 1385 prohibits any individual or corporate entity to enter into any NIL arrangement with a student athlete “prior to their enrollment in an institution of higher education.”

“Until there is some movement there, there will be no change from the UIL,” Harrison said. “And even if there was movement there, we would have to see in what way it moves, what kind of guardrail they put around it.”

Guess the Quinn Ewers story didn’t move anyone. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, there’s plenty of money being made by other people, all adults, as a result of these athletes’ labor, and it seems logical that the athletes themselves should get a piece of that, as they now can in college. On the other hand, these high school athletes are for the most part still minors, and the potential for financial exploitation is higher. I would like to think there’s a regulatory scheme, with real enforcement powers, that could be put into place to allow at least some NIL payments to these athletes while still protecting their interests and not turning the whole enterprise into a free-for-all, I just have no idea what it might be. We could maybe check out what California is doing with NIL, if the thought of Texas emulating California in any way didn’t make some people’s heads explode. I dunno. I just don’t think that a blanket “No” is a sustainable answer, and the sooner we try to find something that is, the better.

USC and UCLA to join Big Ten

Jul 2nd, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
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Wow.

USC and UCLA have been accepted as the newest members of the Big Ten conference with league officials approving their membership Thursday night. The programs have announced their respective departures from the Pac-12 beginning in 2024 with the pair marking a significant acquisition for the Big Ten that will significantly change the college sports landscape.

“Ultimately, the Big Ten is the best home for USC and Trojan athletics as we move into the new world of collegiate sports,” USC athletic director Mike Bohn said. “We are excited that our values align with the league’s member institutions. We also will benefit from the stability and strength of the conference; the athletic caliber of Big Ten institutions; the increased visibility, exposure, and resources the conference will bring our student-athletes and programs; and the ability to expand engagement with our passionate alumni nationwide.”

“After careful consideration and thoughtful deliberation, UCLA has decided to leave the Pac-12 Conference and join the Big Ten Conference at the start of the 2024–25 season,” said UCLA chancellor Gene D. Block and AD Martin Jarmond in a combined statement. “… Each school faces its own unique challenges and circumstances, and we believe this is the best move for UCLA at this time. For us, this move offers greater certainty in rapidly changing times and ensures that we remain a leader in college athletics for generations to come. As the oldest NCAA Division I athletic conference in the United States and with a footprint that will now extend from the Pacific to the Atlantic, Big Ten membership offers Bruins exciting new competitive opportunities and a broader national media platform for our student-athletes to compete and showcase their talents.”

Big Ten presidents and athletic directors first met Wednesday night to discuss adding USC and UCLA to the league, sources told CBS Sports’ Matt Norlander. A subsequent vote was held Thursday night to officially welcome the programs into the league beginning Aug. 2, 2024.

“As the national leader in academics and athletics for over 126 years, the Big Ten Conference has historically evaluated its membership with the collective goal to forward the academic and athletic mission for student-athletes under the umbrella of higher education,” Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren said. “The unanimous vote today signifies the deep respect and welcoming culture our entire conference has for the University of Southern California, under the leadership of President Carol Folt, and the University of California, Los Angeles, under the leadership of Chancellor Gene Block.”

I did not see that one coming. The ACC and the Big XII had lost members to other conferences before, including the University of Colorado to the PAC12, but this is earth-shaking, at least on the scale of UT and Oklahoma jumping to the SEC. The PAC12 will now have to negotiate a new TV contract without its two flagship schools, who were motivated to seek greener pastures in the first place because the PAC12’s TV contract wasn’t all that lucrative.

History and tradition have long been dead as reasons for conferences to exist and stay together, but I would have thought geography might have been a limiting factor. Not so much now, as the Big Ten literally spans coast to coast, with members in such heartland states as California, Maryland, and New Jersey. At this point, I wonder when we’ll get to a place where the “conference” idea is wholly discarded in favor of divisions, like in the NFL. I also wonder what effect this will eventually have on non-football schools that have become national powers in basketball, like Gonzaga.

A bit of local perspective from the LA Times:

“This is the most volatile and uncertain era in the history of American collegiate athletics,” USC athletic director Mike Bohn said in a statement. “USC must ensure it is best positioned and prepared for whatever happens next, and it is our responsibility to always evaluate potential opportunities and be willing to make changes when needed. Ultimately, the Big Ten is the best home for USC and Trojan athletics as we move into the new world of collegiate sports.”

UCLA athletic director Martin Jarmond told The Times, “College athletics is changing, and UCLA has always led in times of change. For the sake of our student-athletes, and for preserving the legacy of Bruin excellence, we cannot afford to stand still.”

This new, changing world Bohn and Jarmond referred to is one in which college athletes for the first time can earn money from the use of their name, image and likeness (NIL) — a right the NCAA and its member schools long denied to players in the name of the ideals of amateurism.

With so much unknown about where athlete compensation is headed beyond NIL, USC and UCLA leaders felt they had to address the long-term financial viability of their programs.

“As the oldest NCAA Division I athletic conference in the United States and with a footprint that will now extend from the Pacific to the Atlantic, Big Ten membership offers Bruins exciting new competitive opportunities and a broader national media platform for our student-athletes to compete and showcase their talents,” UCLA chancellor Gene Block and Jarmond said in a joint letter. “Specifically, this move will enhance name, image and likeness opportunities through greater exposure.”

[…]

In moving to the Big Ten, USC and UCLA also solve another issue that’s long plagued the Pac-12: Kickoff times. Both schools were often relegated to the late window on Saturday nights, neither often finishing before half the country was asleep.

“For our fans, Big Ten membership equates to better television time slots for our road games, but the same number of home games either at the Rose Bowl, in Pauley Pavilion or other UCLA venues,” Block and Jarmond wrote.

As members of the Big Ten, late kickoffs are almost assuredly a relic of the past. The most glaring problem for the Pac-12, however, has long been what happened after kickoff.

We spend a week or two each year on the west coast visiting family. That makes for some great sports-watching opportunities, because the games start as early as 9 AM and then go all day. If USC and UCLA fans don’t mind some early morning kickoffs and never having an evening home game going forward, then I guess this will work out fine for them. ESPN, Slate, and The Ringer have more.

Who wants to have their dinner delivered by a robot?

Apr 1st, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

Here’s your chance.

Heads up, Houston: the robots are coming.

Coco, the Los Angeles-based business that offers a remotely piloted delivery service, has hit the streets of Houston with its food-delivery bots as part of its expansion to targeted markets. Fueled by a recent funding round that garnered the company $56 million, Coco has already launched in Austin; its expansion plans also include rolling out bots in the Dallas and Miami markets soon.

Here in Houston, locals can look forward to delivery at restaurants including Brookstreet BBQ, Rustika Cafe, Ruggles Black, and Trendy Dumpling, according to the company.

Here’s how it works: Customers place a restaurant order like usual, then a Coco bot — operated by a “trained pilot” — drives to the restaurant to pick it up. The restaurant staff loads the bot as soon as the food is ready, and Coco arrives at the customer’s door within 15 minutes. Each bot is locked until it reaches the customer, so no one can tamper with your pizza or egg rolls.

The company claims that compared with traditional food-delivery methods, its bots decrease the time it takes food to reach the customer by 30 percent, and that the service has an on-time delivery rate of 97 percent.

Of course, Coco bots won’t be zipping up I-10 for a long-haul delivery; they’re meant to work at shorter distances and on mostly pedestrian paths. As the company’s website notes, “A surprisingly large portion of deliveries are done within less than 2 miles. We believe there is no reason to have a 3,000-pound car deliver a burrito over short distances.”

That “trained pilot” is a person working from home, according to Engadget. You can see a little video on the Coco homepage, and there you can see why this is a thing that will be using sidewalks and bike trails and other pedestrian-friendly routes to make its deliveries. You can already get things like pizza and groceries and prescriptions delivered via automated vehicles, so the concept here isn’t novel, but the method is new. I’m the type of person who’d rather walk to the restaurant and eat the food there, at an outdoor table if possible, but I have never claimed to be representative of anything. We’ll see how well this works.

OAN sues AT&T over being dropped from their service

Mar 19th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Worth keeping an eye on.

Right-wing cable network One America News is suing Dallas-based AT&T and DirecTV, alleging the companies breached their contract with OAN and conspired with a company currently suing OAN’s owners.

AT&T and DirecTV became the target of liberal criticism over the last year for continuing to carry the pro-Donald Trump OAN network — which helped spread misinformation about the 2020 election being stolen — in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The NAACP condemned AT&T for its relationship with OAN and allegations that it helped originate the idea for the network. DirecTV informed OAN it would not renew its agreement with the channel in early January. The current agreement is set to expire in April, according to OAN’s lawsuit.

The suit, filed by OAN owner Herring Networks, also attempts to link AT&T executive board chairman William Kennard as part of a sweeping conspiracy to “silence” OAN and remove it from DirecTV. AT&T spun DirecTV off into its own company last year, retaining a majority interest in the new company. Kennard previously worked as Federal Communications Commission chairman under President Bill Clinton and again for the Obama administration in 2009 as ambassador to the European Union.

“The damage caused by DirecTV’s non-renewal, if not addressed and reversed in the near future, will result in damage to Herring exceeding $1 billion,” the suit said.

[…]

The suit was filed March 7 in California superior court just days before Republican attorneys general in six states, including Texas’ Ken Paxton, called on DirecTV to reverse its decision to drop OAN.

A.J. Bauer, a conservative media scholar and professor of journalism at the University of Alabama, said the lawsuit against AT&T and DirecTV reads like a “fishing expedition” for OAN.

“This feels to me like more of a calculated way to raise some conspiracy allegations in a way that will guarantee press coverage,” Bauer said. “You don’t need all of that in order to win a contract dispute… you just need to say, ‘Here are the terms of the contract. Here’s how the contract was not fulfilled.’ ”

I haven’t followed this story closely, other than a couple of links I’ve dropped into the Sunday roundups. I’m certainly glad to see AT&T (very belatedly) do the right thing here, and I agree that this is very likely to be much more show than substance on OAN’s part. The fact that they’re trying to make a connection to Dominion Voting Systems and their enormous lawsuit against OAN for flagrantly lying about the 2020 election and causing damage to Dominion in the process is quite telling. I have to admit, my first reaction on seeing the headline for this story was “I bet Ken Paxton files an amicus brief on OAN’s behalf”. Then I read the story, and I see I’m very much on the right track. Take this as yet another reminder, as if you needed one, that Ken Paxton has got to go. The Dallas Observer has more.

Why the business response to the state’s right wing assault has been so muted

Mar 17th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

A really good in depth article on the subject from the tech press, which is a source I hadn’t thought about for this before.

When Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in February directed state agencies to investigate anyone who provides gender-affirming treatment to transgender children for alleged “child abuse,” he drew a swift and vocal backlash from civil rights groups, medical organizations and the White House.

Tech companies also spoke up, signing pledges or reiterating offers to help employees affected by the order. South by Southwest, the world-renowned tech, music and film festival slated to start in Austin on Friday, condemned Abbott’s order. “The governor’s latest directive puts trans children in harm’s way once again and we unequivocally condemn this action,” SXSW told local newspaper The Austin American-Statesman.

But that’s done nothing to budge Abbott or his supporters from accelerating the shift further to the right in Texas politics.

Indeed, the governor’s directive about trans youth was just the latest in a series of laws and orders targeting social issues, including voting, reproductive and gun rights. But for a state that has seen such an influx of new voices — Texas has the ninth-largest economy in the world, is the third-fastest growing state and has added more people than any other state in the past decade — the overall public response to this slew of laws and orders affecting individual rights has not been as resounding as political observers expected. That’s especially the case when it comes to the booming tech community, which has played a key role in the state’s expansion in recent years.

That dynamic underscores the tradeoff that tech companies — and the liberal employees who have moved to Texas — must reconcile as their values collide with their wallets.

Tech and Texas have become intrinsically linked. It’s no coincidence that the so-called Texas Miracle, which refers to a decade-long period of economic expansion after the Great Recession, has continued as technology companies relocate or expand in the Lone Star State. The companies include the likes of Tesla, Oracle, Hewlett Packard, Apple, Google and Amazon.

“Businesses are having a really difficult time deciding how to position themselves on these issues of social justice and public policy,” Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, said over Zoom.

The reason? Taking a stand on social issues is hard when you are benefiting from a fiscal and regulatory agenda that makes Texas a business haven, according to several experts. Compared with other states, especially California, doing business in Texas is much less expensive. Texas has no state income tax or capital-gains tax on individuals and has fewer business regulations. By moving to Texas, tech companies are “escaping high taxes and a regulatory environment,” Bill Fulton, director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Houston’s Rice University, said over Zoom.

[…]

Indeed, the hard turn right in Texas politics hasn’t taken a toll on the state’s economic growth prospects or even on recruitment efforts of tech companies located in the state, especially those in the ever-expanding and liberal-leaning metropolitan areas of Austin, Dallas and Houston.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the radicalization of Texas social policies won’t have an impact on the state’s economic or social future. Political experts, academics and business leaders interviewed by CNET expressed concern that the trend — assuming it continues — will eventually tarnish the Texas brand and make it increasingly difficult for companies to attract and retain top talent.

But also at stake is the role that corporate America can play in society at a time when consumers and employees expect business leaders to advocate for social responsibility.

“Texas will become a textbook example of what happens when social policy and marginalized, underserved, underrepresented communities become the collateral damage of corporate political giving,” Jen Stark, senior director of corporate strategy at Tara Health Foundation, a nonprofit focused on engaging private companies to advance gender and racial equity, said over Zoom. “Companies have been complicit in setting up an extremist government in Texas and other states.”

I found this article in a completely serendipitous fashion. The Sunday print edition of the Chron carried an excerpt from the New York Times story about how the 2030 Census might be done, and when I did a Google search for it I also got this story among the results. You never know.

The story goes into demography, the fact that some actions companies had taken in the past had little effect even among their own employees, data about people not wanting to move here because of our wingnut politics is more anecdotal than anything else, and because living in mostly Democratic urban areas provides some illusion of comfort. The somewhat ironic good news is that if these current trends continue, which have among other things contributed greatly to the fast growth in Democratic and Dem-trending urban and suburban areas, we really will turn the state blue in a few more years. Of course, a lot of damage can be done in the meantime, and as we well know by now, waiting for demography to do your work for you is at best a deeply frustrating experience. My takeaway from all this is that nothing will beat good old fashioned organizing, the kind we’ve been getting better at lately. Lord knows, there’s no time to spare. Read the rest and see what you think.

Using the Texas model to protect voting rights

Feb 23rd, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

Some blue state needs to do this.

In the midst of the ongoing debate over Republicans’ siege on voting rights in states they control, here’s an unconventional suggestion: Democratic state legislators should take a page from the Republican playbook and empower private citizens to sue people who are “aiding and abetting” voter suppression efforts.

After all, that’s exactly what the Texas GOP has done with the abortion bill it enacted last year, which effectively bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, despite the fact that our Supreme Court has ruled that women have a constitutional right to abortion until a fetus is viable, which is generally about 24 weeks into pregnancy. As the Supreme Court declared in 1992 in its ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, there’s a “constitutionally protected liberty of the woman to decide to have an abortion before the fetus attains viability and to obtain it without undo interference from the State.”

[…]

While personally I believe this law is atrocious, if the GOP is going to use that legal model to infringe on the rights of women, why can’t Democrats use that same tactic to accomplish a monumental goal of their own: protecting voting rights? Democrats cannot simply roll over and let the GOP suppress the vote — and potentially rig elections — because new federal voting rights legislation was recently blocked by way of the filibuster in the U.S. Senate. Democrats need to be tenacious fighters on this all-important issue — and that means using every single tool available.

One way to show that commitment would be for states with Democratic governors and legislatures to enact laws that enable private citizens to sue anyone who is found “aiding and abetting” making it more challenging to vote. And if the person wins, they would be rewarded with $10,000 plus the cost of their legal fees from the defendant for each action they took that “aided and abetted” in restricting voting.

For example, New York could enact a law that enables people to sue any person in the state who is found “aiding and abetting” the GOP’s voter suppression efforts. This arguably would include elected New York Republican officials, such as Rep. Elise Stefanik, who championed former President Donald Trump’s election lies that have been used to justify the voter suppression laws in other states. That includes Stefanik claiming that President Joe Biden’s win in Georgia was because “more than 140,000 votes came from underage, deceased, and otherwise unauthorized voters — in Fulton County alone.” And in May, she was on Steve Bannon’s podcast, where she continued to further Trump’s “big lie.”

Lawsuits could also be potentially filed against GOP donors living in New York who give to organizations like the Republican National Committee, which has been vocally opposing federal laws to protect voting rights and continues to recognize Trump as its standard-bearer. This could all arguably be considered “aiding and abetting” the GOP’s voter restriction efforts.

The law could even be crafted so that Republicans in other states who engage in “aiding and abetting” the restriction of voting and do “business” in New York can be sued in the Empire State since it would arguably fulfill jurisdictional requirements. For example, when Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis — who touted and signed into law sweeping voting restrictions in his state — traveled to New York in September for a political fundraiser, he was in effect “doing business” in New York by targeting New Yorkers for their donations. And he would be fair game to catch a lawsuit under this hypothetical anti-voting restriction law.

Further justifying this law is that voter restrictions in any state ultimately affect those in blue states since they impact races for federal office, and those federal officeholders in turn can enact laws that impact the entire nation — such as on climate change and gun safety.

I get that this sounds unconstitutional and insane — but it’s built in the exact image of the Texas abortion law. A women’s right to abortion in the first 24 weeks of pregnancy is a constitutional right — just like freedom of speech. Given that the GOP-controlled Supreme Court didn’t swiftly strike down the Texas abortion law, it would be hard-pressed to strike down these “protect the vote” laws without exposing itself as being nothing more than an arm of the Republican Party.

I have no doubt that this Supreme Court is up to the challenge of justifying the Texas abortion law while knocking down this hypothetical statute, but having the fight and making them do it would definitely be worth the effort. I also agree that it’s all ridiculous, but given all that’s happened it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this is the most feasible path available at this time. New York and California, y’all are the best bets for this. Someone please get the ball rolling on it.

Quinn Ewers

Dec 9th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

This story caught my eye.

They got played by an 18-year-old.

Depending on your sports acumen, hearing the name Quinn Ewers either makes your ears perk up or leads you to ask, “Who?”

The former Ohio State quarterback’s name is back in the news – again – after announcing that he’s leaving the school to enter the transfer portal. Just a few months ago, Ewers made national news when he skipped his senior year of high school to enroll early at Ohio State so that he could capitalize on NIL money. It’s been reported that he’s made over $1 million.

“If I enroll at Ohio State, obviously I’d be able to make money off the deals, and I feel like it’d be a big advantage of learning the playbook and getting comfortable with the campus and all my teammates,” he told Yahoo Sports in July. “But if I stay and don’t get paid, I may be able to win a state title.”

Because Texas, where Ewers is from, is a terrible place run by a litany of unintelligent Republicans, the state’s University Interscholastic League has a rule that won’t let high school athletes like him profit off NIL – even though he was the state’s biggest recruit, wanted to stay home and play, and was the No. 1-ranked player in his class.

So, since the system wanted Ewers to leave over $1 million on the table, Ewers finessed them by graduating early and enrolling at Ohio State in a glorified redshirt season that put a lot of money in his pocket, while also getting him acclimated with being a college athlete. And after only taking two snaps all season, Ewers is back on the market, and it’s expected he will wind up on a roster in Texas next season a whole lot richer than when he was when he left.

The Texas connection and the mention of a rule about NIL for high school athletes intrigued me, so into the Google rabbit hole I went. First, I found several stories about Ewers’ pending transfer, which may be to UT, A&M, Texas Tech, or who knows where else, but none filled in the blanks for me about that “rule”. I searched more specifically about the Lege and “name image likeness”, and found this Trib story.

College athletes in Texas will soon be able to receive compensation from outside businesses that want to use their name, image or likeness under a new law Gov. Greg Abbott signed Monday evening.

State Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, said he sponsored the bill to keep Texas collegiate athletic programs competitive as other states have passed similar legislation. At least 15 states have passed bills lifting the ban on allowing student athletes to be paid by outside parties since California was the first state to approve the change in 2019.

NCAA rules ban athletes from receiving any kind of compensation other than scholarships for playing college sports. This law would not change that ban on direct payment by a college or university, but would allow college athletes to receive payment elsewhere.

The bill overwhelmingly passed the Texas House and Senate, though some lawmakers expressed concern it would negatively affect college sports, which multiple lawmakers said should “be played for the love of the game.” Supporters said college athletes deserve to benefit from the industry in which they play a major role.

“The biggest winner in this needs to be all of the student athletes,” said state Sen. José Menéndez, D-San Antonio, on the Senate floor in April. “We gain entertainment. Universities gain revenue, and they need to share in that because of their hard work.”

The NCAA Board of Governors voted to allow players to be paid for their name or likeness in October 2019, but the Division I Council postponed a vote on specific rules in January as it continued discussions with the federal government over rules.

I did not blog about that at the time, though I did note the California law and its potential effect on Texas back in 2019. The bill in question is SB1385, but it’s about allowing college athletes to get paid, not preventing high school athletes from doing the same. Still, it’s the most likely vehicle for such a restriction, and in reading the text of the bill, we see the following:

No individual, corporate entity, or other organization may:
(1) enter into any arrangement with a prospective student athlete relating to the prospective student athlete’s name, image, or likeness prior to their enrollment in an institution of higher education

That right there appears to be the prohibition on high school athletes making the same kind of arrangement for themselves, and indeed a visit to the UIL webpage confirms that:

It is the opinion of UIL staff that a transaction in which a student-athlete is engaged “to promot[e] a product, plan or service related to a UIL sport or contest” using the student-athlete’s NIL in exchange for compensation received by or on behalf of the student-athlete would be in violation of Section 51.9246 of the Education Code and Section 441 of the UIL Constitution and Contest Rules.

It is the opinion of UIL staff that the student-athlete would be in violation of this section if an agreement was executed prior to the student being enrolled in an institution of higher education, even if the student, or a third-party receiving compensation on behalf of the student, does not receive compensation “until all athletic competitions are completed in the 12th grade.” Section 441(a)(2) prohibits the receipt of “valuable consideration,” which covers any inducement, including a promise of future compensation.

They are referencing the section of the Education Code that was revised in SB1385, so that’s that. I strongly suspect that the supporters of this law did not envision the Quinn Ewers scenario, but now that it’s happened I wonder if there will be a push to amend the law to close that loophole. The Texas college that gets him on their team will be happy for this (though one could argue they’d have gotten him a year sooner if the law hadn’t been in place in this form), but his high school can’t be too happy about it. I’ll be interested to see which of those 800-pound gorillas can prevail if they disagree about the unintended side effects of this law.

Anyway. Nothing earth-shattering here – as the Deadspin story notes, Ewers comes from a well-to-do family, so this was more about the principle that he should have been able to pursue this money than the need for the money – but it’s fascinating and not something that had been on my radar. And now you know, too.

We’re #2!

Aug 1st, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
13 comments

More people have died of COVID in Texas than any other state except California, as Texas surpasses New York’s total.

Texas has passed New York to become the state with the second-most COVID-19 deaths, a feat experts say was driven by an inability to control transmission of the virus here.

Texas reached the milestone Wednesday, hitting 53,275 deaths, despite trailing New York by more than 29,000 fatalities last summer. Since then, though Texas is 54 percent more populous, more than twice as many Texans as New Yorkers have succumbed to COVID-19. California, the most populous state, leads the nation with 64,372 virus deaths.

Spencer Fox, associate director of the University of Texas COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, said he was surprised Texas had not passed New York in mortality sooner, since the northeastern state did a far better job limiting the spread of virus after it endured a horrific surge last spring.

“They enacted really strong, precautionary measures that overall are well based in the available science,” Fox said. “It seems that many of the Texas policies were put in place to try and prevent health care collapse rather than trying to prevent transmission.”

By June 30 of last year, as the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic swept through the United States, New York tallied 31,775 virus deaths. Texas had just 2,481.

While New York City hospitals were pushed to the brink in the spring and the region became a global epicenter of the virus, Texas had kept the virus at bay and begun to ease restrictions.

Over next 13 months, however, the states reversed roles. New York kept restrictions and mask rules in place longer and consistently maintained a lower positivity rate than Texas. In contrast, Texas endured two surges of the virus and is in the early stages of a third, as the Delta variant now sweeps the country as a fourth wave of the virus.

During that time, Texas steadily closed in on New York’s death tally, a Chronicle analysis found.

Another way to put it is this: Since June 30 of last year, 13 months ago, there have been about 51,000 COVID deaths in Texas. (That’s the official count, which as we know is too low for a variety of factors, but it’s what we’re using for comparison purposes.) In that same time period, there have been about 22,000 COVID deaths in New York. Texas, with 54% more people than New York, has had 131% more COVID deaths than New York in that time period. It’s mind-boggling, enraging, tragic, devastating, and all of it can be laid at the doorstep of Greg Abbott.

The rest of the story is a timeline of those past 13 months, the various things that governments in New York and Texas did and didn’t do to deal with the changing infection rates, and so on. New York has been far more restrictive than Texas has, sometimes to the point where its residents complained and experts questioned the risk calculation involved, but the numbers are what they are. New York also has a higher vaccination rate than Texas, so this trend is going to continue, and probably accelerate, in the foreseeable future. Indeed, given how much more vaccinated California is than Texas, we could conceivably catch up to them as well. Not a goal we should want to achieve.

But we’re well on the way, and Texas’ hospitals are bracing for impact.

When Terry Scoggin left work at Titus Regional Medical Center in Mount Pleasant on Tuesday evening, there were five patients at the facility being treated for COVID.

Overnight, six more people suffering severe coronavirus infections were admitted to the rural Northeast Texas hospital — pushing the facility to its capacity limit and putting Scoggin, the hospital’s chief executive, on high alert for what he’s calling “a fourth surge.”

“We’re at it again,” Scoggin said.

That same night, hospitalizations in Bexar County rose by nearly 8%. Almost 100 people were admitted with severe COVID to local facilities on Tuesday alone, Bexar County officials said on Wednesday.

“These numbers are staggering and frightening,” said Eric Epley, CEO of the Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council for Trauma in San Antonio.

Hospital and health officials across Texas are seeing similar dramatic jumps, straining an already decimated health care system that is starving for workers in the aftermath of previous coronavirus surges.

[…]

Fueled by the highly contagious delta variant of the coronavirus, which is contributing to skyrocketing cases not just in Texas but across the nation, the rising hospitalizations rates have spread outside of the heavily populated metro areas that first began to report increases a few weeks ago. Now they are being seen in all corners of the state, triggering pleas from hospitals for state-backed staffing help to handle the increasing pressure.

Trend forecasters at the University of Texas at Austin’s COVID-19 Modeling Consortium said Wednesday that most regions of the state could see a return within a couple of weeks to the capacity-busting hospitalization rate facilities were experiencing in January — the height of the pandemic — if people don’t resume masking up and social distancing.

In Florida, hospitals are already seeing the numbers of COVID patients exceeding levels they saw during the worst of the pandemic, and consortium researchers told The Texas Tribune that Texas is not far behind.

“We are absolutely on a path to hit a surge as large, if not bigger, than the previous surges right now” said Spencer Fox, associate director at the consortium. “If nothing is done, we’re on a crash course for a very large third wave.”

The situation has caused health officials from both rural and metro areas to plead for more resources from the state.

“On behalf of the 157 rural hospitals across Texas, I am writing to ask you immediately take steps to provide additional medical staffing which we anticipate will be needed in our rural hospitals in short order because of the new COVID surge,” John Henderson, president and CEO of the Texas Organization of Rural and Community Hospitals, wrote in a July 26 letter to Gov. Greg Abbott.

And what was Abbott’s eventual response?

The story is behind their paywall, but the basics of it that I could glean were that the state of Texas is declining to use any COVID stimulus funds to pay for more hospital staff. Instead, the state is directing cities and counties to use their own COVID funds for that. Because we’re all in this together you’re on your own, Jack. And remember, it’s all your fault and will be your fault when more people have died of COVID in Texas than anywhere else in the country.

Astros again seek to dismiss Bolsinger lawsuit

Jul 16th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

They will probably succeed.

Did not age well

The Astros have submitted their proposal for a Harris County judge to dismiss former Toronto Blue Jays reliever Mike Bolsinger’s lawsuit against the team.

Bolsinger has alleged trade misappropriation and sought more than $1 million in damages in the wake of Houston’s sign-stealing scandal in the 2017 season.

[…]

In the Astros’ 17-page motion to dismiss submitted on Tuesday night, the team pointed to Bolsinger’s misinterpretation of Texas’ trade secrets law and called Bolsinger’s lawsuit an attempt “to turn a headline-grabbing sports story into a cash recovery.”

According to the Astros’ motion, Bolsinger needed to prove ownership of the trade secrets, misappropriation of them and injury caused by the misappropriation to recover any damages under the state’s trade secrets law. The club claimed he did not.

The motion, submitted by Astros attorneys Hilary Preston and James L. Leader, challenged the notion that Toronto’s signs are even secrets at all.

“The signs are not trade secrets, and, to the extent that any party can “own” hand gestures meant to convey pitching strategy, the signs are owned by the Toronto Blue Jays, not (Bolsinger),” the Astros wrote in their motion.

“The signs are hand gestures made in front of thousands of spectators, and the mere fact that the Blue Jays attempted to conceal the meaning of those signs from the Astros’ hitters does not turn those gestures into trade secrets under Texas law.”

See here for the previous update. As noted, Bolsinger had sued in Los Angeles originally, but that suit was tossed on the grounds that California didn’t have jurisdiction, so he re-filed in Harris County. I don’t buy his argument and expect the suit to be dismissed, but we’ll see.

Here come the young people

May 18th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

I’m just sitting here waiting for the Census data.

Garima Vyas always wanted to live in a big city. She thought about New York, long the destination for 20-something strivers, but was wary of the cost and complicated subway lines.

So Vyas picked another metropolis that’s increasingly become young people’s next-best option — Houston.

Now 34, Vyas, a tech worker, has lived in Houston since 2013. “I knew I didn’t like New York, so this was the next best thing,” Vyas said. “There are a lot of things you want to try when you are younger — you want to try new things. Houston gives you that, whether it’s food, people or dating. And it’s cheap to live in.”

The choices by Vyas and other members of the millennial generation of where to live have reshaped the country’s political geography over the past decade. They’ve left New York and California and settled in places less likely to be settings for TV sitcoms about 20-something urbanites, including Denver, Houston and Orlando, Florida. Drawn by jobs and overlooked cultural amenities, they’ve helped add new craft breweries, condominiums and liberal voters to these once more-conservative places.

The U.S. Census Bureau this coming week is expected to formally tally this change by releasing its count of population shifts in the once-a-decade reallocation of congressional seats. It’s is expected to lead to the Sun Belt gaining seats at the expense of states in the north.

Most projections have Texas gaining three seats, Florida two and Arizona, Colorado, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon one each. Expected to lose seats are Alabama, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, West Virginia — and California.

The relocations have reshuffled politics. Once solidly conservative places such as Texas have seen increasingly large islands of liberalism sprout in their cities, driven by the migration of younger adults, who lean Democratic. Since 2010, the 20-34-year-old population has increased by 24% in San Antonio, 22% in Austin and 19% in Houston, according to an Associated Press analysis of American Community Survey data. In November’s election, two states that also saw sharp growth in young people in their largest cities — Arizona and Georgia — flipped Democratic in the presidential contest.

These demographic winners are almost all in the Sun Belt, but climate is not the only thing they have in common.

“These places are growing not just because they’re warmer, it’s because that’s where the jobs are and young people are moving there,” said Ryan Wiechelt, a geography professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

Welcome to Houston, but I have to ask – you thought the subway system was confusing? I figured it out as a high school freshman, but to each their own. It’s an interesting read, and there’s a lot to think about in terms of how voting patterns have changed and what the near-term future trends look like, but let’s keep a couple of things in mind. One is that a big part of the shift in 2018 and 2020 was higher-income college-educated white people who had been living here changing their votes. You don’t see the kind of dramatic and fast shift in CD07 and HD134 without that. Indeed, there was polling evidence following the 2018 election to suggest that native Texans voted for Beto O’Rourke at a higher rate than people who moved to Texas did. That’s just one data point, and it doesn’t negate the observation that young newcomers have greatly shifted the center of political gravity in the big urban areas like greater Houston. Two, for what it’s worth home prices in Texas in general and in the Houston area in particular have been rising sharply of late. We’re still a cheaper place to live than New York or California, but there are no inexpensive homes to be had in a lot of neighborhoods.

The story also touches on the state politics in places like Texas and Florida, which are well out of step not just with younger people in general, but on some key issues with the public as a whole. I don’t know if that might make Texas in particular less attractive to these folks, but this is one big reason why there’s been a lot of corporate pushback to voter suppression and anti-trans legislation – the companies want to make sure they can get the workers they want, and those workers don’t want to live places that they see as backwards and repressive. There’s a lot in tension, and something will have to give sooner or later. I know what outcome I’m hoping for, but it’s not going to happen by itself.

(Note: This is an older story that I had in my drafts and hadn’t gotten around to publishing just yet. We of course now have the apportionment data. Doesn’t change the thesis of this article, but since the timing was mentioned, I wanted to clarify.)

Former MLB pitcher re-files lawsuit against Astros

May 17th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

It’s the second attempt to sue them for damages over the sign stealing scheme from 2017.

Did not age well

Continuing to maintain that the Astros’ 2017 sign stealing cost him a job in the major leagues, former Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Mike Bolsinger refiled his lawsuit against the team in Harris County District Court on Thursday afternoon.

Bolsinger, who hasn’t pitched in the majors since allowing four runs and four walks in a third of an inning against the Astros on Aug. 4, 2017, contends his signs were trade secrets under Texas’ Uniform Trade Secrets Act. He is seeking more than $1 million in damages.

A judge in California dismissed Bolsinger’s lawsuit in March, citing in part an attempt by Bolsinger and his attorneys to try to extract sympathy from potential jurors who were fans of the Los Angeles Dodgers, the team the Astros beat in the 2017 World Series. In March 2020, the Astros asked a Los Angeles Superior Court judge to dismiss the suit in a motion that called the case “utterly devoid of merit.”

[…]

Bolsinger’s new suit claims the Blue Jays’ signs are defined as “trade secrets” under section 134A.002(6) of the Texas Uniform Trade Secrets Act. Bolsinger alleges “willful and intentional misappropriation of the trade secrets.”

“The owners of these trade secrets had taken the reasonable measures customary in the baseball industry to keep the signs secret,” Bolsinger’s suit reads. “Moreover, the signs derived independent economic value, actual or potential, from not generally being known to, and not being readily ascertainable through proper means by, another person who can obtain economic value from the disclosure or use of the information.”

See here and here for the background, and here for a copy of the lawsuit, which is also embedded in the story. I either missed the dismissal of the original case or I just never got around to blogging it. Regardless, and in my vast legal experience as some guy on the Internet, this sure seems like a longshot. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if the signs were a trade secret, they wouldn’t be trivially easy to crack. I have a hard time believing this will survive a motion to dismiss. You actual lawyers out there, please feel free to tell me why I’m wrong about this.

Twitter lawsuit against Paxton dismissed

May 14th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

That’s not quite the end of it, though.

Best mugshot ever

A federal judge in California on Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit brought by Twitter against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose legal efforts to investigate the social media platform after it suspended President Donald Trump’s account led the company to sue.

Twitter’s lawsuit included a request for a temporary restraining order that would keep Paxton and his office from enforcing a demand that seeks documents revealing the company’s internal decision making processes for banning users. Judge Maxine M. Chesney said the company’s legal action was “premature.”

Paxton, a passionate supporter of Trump, sent Twitter a civil investigative demand after it banned Trump from its platform following January’s deadly siege at the U.S. Capitol. Twitter wrote in its suit responding to Paxton that it sought to stop him “from unlawfully abusing his authority as the highest law-enforcement officer of the State of Texas to intimidate, harass, and target Twitter in retaliation for Twitter’s exercise of its First Amendment rights.”

The company claimed Paxton’s “retaliatory” investigation violated the First Amendment as an inappropriate use of government authority.

“Twitter’s lawsuit was little more than an attempt to avoid answering my questions about their large-scale censorship and content-moderation policies,” Paxton said in a statement Tuesday.

See here and here for the background. I Am Not A Lawyer, but when I see that the suit was dismissed because it was “premature”, that says to me this didn’t have to do with the merits or legality of the suit, just the timing. The Trib story doesn’t give any explanation of that, so I looked around and eventually found this AP story, which answered my question.

In her Tuesday ruling, Senior U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney of San Francisco ruled that Paxton’s administrative summonses were not “self-executing,” meaning that Twitter was not bound to comply with them absent a court order.

In her seven-page opinion, Chesney noted that Paxton had taken no court action to enforce his summonses and that Twitter was not bound to comply with them without court action. So, she dismissed Twitter’s suit, noting that its request for an injunction or court declaration against Paxton was premature.

Law and Crime explains further.

Paxton’s office issued civil investigative demands (CID)—subpoena-like requests for information— to Twitter, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple, seeking the companies’ content moderation policies and practices. The Texas attorney general, who has been under the legal microscope himself due to securities fraud charges and allegations of bribery, said that for years the tech companies “have silenced voices in the social media sphere and shut down competing companies and platforms,” couching his concern as a First Amendment issue that “chills free speech.”

Twitter responded by suing Paxton in the U.S. District Court for Northern California, seeking an injunction barring the AG from “initiating any action” to enforce the investigatory demands and a declaration that the probe is barred by the First Amendment as “unlawful retaliation against Twitter for its moderation of its platform, including its decision to permanently suspend President Trump’s account.”

In a seven-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Maxine M. Chesney, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, found that Paxton opening a probe and issuing CIDs to Twitter did not amount to a “cognizable adverse action” against the company as required for a First Amendment retaliation claim.

Chesney reasoned that, unlike subpoenas, CIDs like the one issued by the attorney general’s office, are not “self-executing” discovery instruments, meaning that they can be ignored, without penalty, unless an additional court order is sought.

“[T]he Office of the Attorney General has no authority to impose any sanction for a failure to comply with its investigation. Rather, the Office of the Attorney General would be required to go to court, where the only possible consequence adverse to Twitter would be a judicial finding that the CID, contrary to Twitter’s assertion, is enforceable,” Chesney wrote. “Accordingly, as, to date, no action has been taken to enforce the CID, the Court finds Twitter’s lawsuit is premature, and, as such, is subject to dismissal.”

In other words, because Twitter is not currently obligated to comply with Paxton’s demand for access to its communications and moderation policies, it’s too early in the legal process for a federal court to decide the controversy on the merits.

Should Paxton pursue a court order, Twitter would likely make the same arguments regarding the investigation being barred as unlawful retaliation under the First Amendment, resulting in a merit-based ruling.

I think that’s pretty clear. I hadn’t realized that Paxton had taken the same action with those other companies, who I guess either decided to ignore them or wait and see what happened with the Twitter case. In any event, now they all know – this is just sound and fury, at least for now. We’ll see if Paxton raises the ante, or if making the news was all he was interested in.

Census apportionment numbers are in

Apr 27th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
24 comments

Texas will gain two seats in Congress, which is one fewer than had been expected based on population growth estimates.

Texas will continue to see its political clout grow as it gains two additional congressional seats — the most of any state in the nation — following the 2020 census, the U.S. Census Bureau announced Monday.

Thanks to its fast-growing population — largely due to an increase in residents of color, particularly Hispanics — the state’s share of votes in the U.S. House of Representatives will increase to 38 for the next decade. The new counts reflect a decade of population growth since the last census, which determines how many congressional seats are assigned to each state. Texas is one of six states gaining representation after the census. The other five states are each gaining one seat.

The 2020 census puts the state’s population at 29,145,505 — up from 25.1 million in 2010 — after gaining the most residents of any state in the last decade. More detailed data, which lawmakers need to redraw legislative and congressional districts to reflect that growth, isn’t expected until early fall. But census estimates have shown it’s been driven by people of color.

Through 2019, Hispanics had accounted for more than half of the state’s population growth since 2010, a gain of more than 2 million residents. And although it makes up a small share of the total population, estimates showed the state’s Asian population has grown the fastest since 2010. Estimates have also shown the state’s growth has been concentrated in diverse urban centers and suburban communities.

With its gain of two seats, the state’s footprint in the Electoral College will grow to 40 votes. But Texas will remain in second place behind California for the largest congressional delegation and share of Electoral College votes. California is losing a congressional seat but will remain on top with 52 seats and 54 votes in the Electoral College. The other states losing seats are Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Florida, Colorado, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon will each gain one seat.

[…]

Texas ultimately fell short of the three congressional seats it was projected to gain based on population estimates. Census Bureau officials on Monday indicated the state’s 2020 population count was slightly lower — a difference of about 1% — than the estimates.

In the lead-up to the census, Republican Texas lawmakers shot down any significant funding for state efforts to avoid an undercount in the 2020 census, leaving the work of chasing an accurate count to local governments, nonprofits and even churches. Texas is home to a large share of residents — Hispanics, people who don’t speak English, people living in poverty and immigrants, to name a few — who were at the highest risk of being missed in the count.

I’ve been blogging about this for a long time, so go search the archives for the background. We’ll never know if some effort from the state government might have yielded a higher population count, but other states with large Latino populations like Florida and Arizona did not get the apportionment gains they were expected to, while New York only lost one seat and Minnesota didn’t lose any. California grew by over two million people over the past decade, by the way, but its share of the total population slipped, and that cost it a seat. Yes, I know, it’s crazy that the US House has the same number of members it has had since 1912, when each member of Congress represented about 30,000 people (it’s about 760,000 people now), but here we are.

The Chron goes into some more detail.

“We’ll have to wait for more granular data, but it certainly looks like the Texas Legislature’s decision not to budget money to encourage census participation combined with the Trump administration efforts to add a citizenship question cost Texas a congressional district,” noted Michael Li, an expert on redistricting who serves as senior counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

Census Bureau officials said Monday they were confident in the results, noting the state’s actual population was within 1 percent of the estimates.

The new population figures come as lawmakers in Texas prepare to redraw political boundaries, including for the state’s congressional delegation, which will remain the second-biggest in the nation as it adds two more members, for a total of 38. That trails California, which is set to lose a seat for the first time in state history, and will have 52 members.

Republicans will control the redistricting process and are expected to use it to reinforce their control of the delegation.

[Mark] Jones at Rice University said the party now just has to decide how safe or risky it wants to be with the new seats. Republicans can play it safer by tossing the new districts to Democrats while shoring up GOP votes in the 22 seats they hold now, which would keep them in control of the delegation. Or they could use the new seats to break up Democrat districts and try to gain ground.

[…]

Li expects the two additional seats to bring “demands for increased representation of communities of color, which will be at odds with the party that will control redistricting.”

Li said chances are high that the maps Texas Republicans draw will end up in court for that exact reason, something that has happened each of the last five decades.

“That’s almost a certainty,” Li said. “Every decade, Texas’s maps get changed a little or a lot because it’s never managed to fairly treat communities of color.”

Of course, we have a very hostile Supreme Court now, and no Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. It would be very, very nice if the Senate could find a way to pass the two big voting rights bills that have been passed by the House, but until that happens we’re looking at a lot of sub-optimal scenarios. I’ve been saying what Prof. Jones says here, that the approach the Republicans take will depend to a large degree on their level of risk aversion, but never underestimate their desire to find advantage. There will be much more to say as we go on, but this will get us started. Daily Kos, Mother Jones, and the Texas Signal have more.

Harris County Attorney sues Juul

Apr 8th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
9 comments

From the inbox:

Christian Menefee

Harris County Attorney Christian D. Menefee filed a lawsuit Thursday in California state court against e-cigarette company JUUL and several of its executives. Harris County is the first governmental entity in Texas to join the nationwide fight to hold JUUL accountable for the deliberate and deceptive marketing of its highly addictive and destructive products to young people.

“JUUL took its marketing plan from the tobacco industry’s template by creating an image that would lure teenagers. JUUL’s vaping devices are designed to appear like a slick, high-tech gadget that’s attractive to young people. The brand even offers kid-friendly flavors like mango and cool mint,” said Harris County Attorney Menefee. “Cigarette companies were long ago barred from engaging in this type of marketing. Our youth do not deserve to be exploited by a company looking for a lifetime of profits. My office will hold JUUL accountable for its exploitative and negligent practices designed to create the next generation of nicotine users. Lawsuits were a major reason that federal regulators finally reined in cigarette industry, which has caused so much death in this country. I will continue that tradition by making sure JUUL doesn’t get away with the same behavior.”

The lawsuit contends JUUL targeted young people by using social media to showcase the product as a lifestyle brand. The company also adopted a “Make the Switch” campaign to mislead the public that e-cigarettes were benign smoking cessation devices, even though JUUL was never designed to break addictions.

In fact, JUUL’s e-cigarettes were designed to maximize addiction through its patented nicotine delivery mechanism. The CDC’s website warns of nicotine’s harmful effects on the developing brains of adolescents, and how JUUL’s products have also caused lung and cardiovascular injuries. JUUL also took advantage of the loose regulations for e-cigarettes, and made sure its products and advertising do not contain any health risk warnings.

As part of this lawsuit, the Harris County Attorney’s Office is also suing cigarette giant Altria, which owns 35% of JUUL and other companies like Philip Morris. Altria was instrumental in helping JUUL develop its marketing tactics, using its well-developed playbook.

You can see a copy of the lawsuit here – it’s quite long. This was filed in California because that’s where Juul is based, but there’s more to it than that. There’s already a bunch of lawsuits against Juul over its marketing practices in California, and they are basically combined in what is known as a Judicial Council Coordinated Proceeding, their term for when there are multiple similar lawsuits across different judicial districts. This Law.com article, which is mostly paywalled, gives a bit of an outline of what that means. If you look at the Harris County filing, you’ll see that it’s also in this JCCP, in the same court that the Law.com story references.

As I understand it, these cases all have similar claims, some filed by government entities and some by private plaintiffs, and a subset of lawyers from them will lead the litigation. The idea is for Harris County to be among them. Harris is the first county in Texas to file this kind of lawsuit against Juul. The county needed to get permission from the Attorney General’s office to hire outside counsel for the suit, on a contingency basis, which it has received. Other state AGs have taken action themselves, including California and New York. It’s certainly possible that Texas will follow along that path – I’m old enough to remember the massive tobacco lawsuit settlement that Texas and then-AG Dan Morales got in the 90s – but that remains to be seen. If that does happen, the state can file its lawsuit here.

The only news story I found relating to this when I looked was from Click2Houston, which mostly recaps the press release. I’ll be keeping an eye on this.

Paxton responds to Twitter lawsuit

Mar 18th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

He said something about it, anyway.

Best mugshot ever

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said Wednesday that a lawsuit by Twitter won’t deter his office from investigating the content moderation practices of the social media giant and four other major technology companies.

Twitter sued the Republican official this week in an effort to halt his probe, which the company claimed was retaliation for banning the account of former President Donald Trump following the deadly January insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Days after the riot, Paxton announced an investigation of what he called “the seemingly coordinated de-platforming of the President.” His office demanded a variety of records and internal communications from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Apple.

On Monday, Twitter asked a federal judge in California to effectively stop the probe and affirm that its decision to ban Trump was protected by the First Amendment. Paxton responded Wednesday that “most of the companies have cooperated” and called Twitter’s suit “remarkable.”

“Apparently they have some fear of disclosing what they’re actually doing if they’re asking a California judge to rule on Texas law,” he said during an online forum hosted by the conservative Media Research Center. In its demand for records, Paxton’s office cited the authority of Texas’ Deceptive Trade Practices-Consumer Protection Act.

Lawyers for Twitter wrote in their complaint that the company had sought for weeks to “put reasonable limits on the scope” of Paxton’s demands but were unable to reach an agreement with his office. A spokeswoman for the company declined to comment Wednesday.

See here for the background. Not really much to add, but it gave me a second chance to see if I could find any analysis of the lawsuit. I did find this:

As previously noted by Law&Crime, Twitter is a private company and therefore has a First Amendment right to moderate its platform as it sees fit. The First Amendment also protects the company from having a government actor dictate how it operates its online platform, a point the company makes in the opening lines of the lawsuit.

“Twitter seeks to stop AG Paxton from unlawfully abusing his authority as the highest law-enforcement officer of the State of Texas to intimidate, harass, and target Twitter in retaliation for Twitter’s exercise of its First Amendment rights,” the lawsuit states. “The rights of free speech and of the press afforded Twitter under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution include the right to make decisions about what content to disseminate through its platform. This right specifically includes the discretion to remove or otherwise restrict access to Tweets, profiles, or other content posted to Twitter. AG Paxton may not compel Twitter to publish such content over its objection, and he may not penalize Twitter for exercising its right to exclude such content from its platform.”

A spokesperson for the company reiterated the free speech issue at the center of the controversy in a statement on Tuesday.

“A core part of Twitter’s mission is to protect freedom of expression and defend an Open Internet,” the statement read. “We work every day to protect those interests for the people who use our service around the world. The First Amendment protects everyone’s right to free speech, including private businesses.”

The company alleges it made several attempts to reach out to Paxton’s office to narrow the scope of the all-encompassing CID, but said the AG refused to budge.

“Instead, AG Paxton made clear that he will use the full weight of his office, including his expansive investigatory powers, to retaliate against Twitter for having made editorial decisions with which he disagrees,” the complaint states.

Seems pretty simple, but we’ll see what a judge says. I also found this Twitter thread that came to a similar conclusion, in response to some other guy claiming that Twitter’s lawsuit was garbage. So far my conclusion is that Twitter has the better argument, but I am open to someone who knows more about the law than me saying otherwise.

Twitter sues Paxton

Mar 10th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
12 comments

How the tables have turned.

Best mugshot ever

Twitter filed a lawsuit against Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a California federal court Monday and asked a judge to halt the state’s top lawyer from investigating the company.

The social media giant’s court filings include a request for a temporary restraining order that would keep Paxton and his office from enforcing a demand that seeks documents revealing the company’s internal decision making processes for banning users, among other things.

Paxton, a fervent supporter of former President Donald Trump, sent the company a civil investigative demand after it banned Trump from its platform following January’s deadly siege at the U.S. Capitol.

Twitter wrote that it seeks to stop Paxton from “from unlawfully abusing his authority as the highest law-enforcement officer of the State of Texas to intimidate, harass, and target Twitter in retaliation for Twitter’s exercise of its First Amendment rights.” The company claimed Paxton’s “retaliatory” investigation violated the First Amendment as an inappropriate use of government authority.

[…]

The attorney general is among Texas Republican leaders who have launched a campaign against technology and social media companies after officials and followers faced repercussions for sowing the election doubts that fueled the Capitol insurrection.

Twitter is one of five tech and social media firms to which Paxton issued civil investigative demands to learn about the procedures such companies use to regulate postings or user accounts.

Paxton, who attended the rally that preceded the attack on the U.S. Capitol, criticized companies’ moves after the siege, which included Twitter banning Trump from its platform.

“The seemingly coordinated de-platforming of the President of the United States and several leading voices not only chills free speech, it wholly silences those whose speech and political beliefs do not align with leaders of Big Tech companies,” Paxton said in a Jan. 13 news release.

Last week, Gov. Greg Abbott touted Texas legislation that seeks to crack down on social media companies’ perceived censorship of conservative voices. Senate Bill 12 would prohibit social media companies — including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube — from blocking, banning, demonetizing, or otherwise discriminating against a user based on their viewpoint or their location within Texas.

I’ve looked around but have not seen any legal analysis of this lawsuit, but Texas Lawyer adds some useful details.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California Monday, asserts that Paxton issued a civil investigative demand just five days after the company announced its ban of Trump. The Attorney General’s Office demanded “volumes of highly confidential documents concerning Twitter’s internal content moderation processes—the public disclosure of which would undermine their effectiveness, and compromise Twitter’s ability to effectively and efficiently moderate content on its platform,” according to the complaint, which was surfaced by Law.com Radar.

Twitter alleges that Paxton violated the First Amendment by issuing the investigation targeting its editorial practices. The company says in the lawsuit that it attempted to work with Paxton to tailor the document requests but did not reach an agreement.

“Instead, AG Paxton made clear that he will use the full weight of his office, including his expansive investigatory powers, to retaliate against Twitter for having made editorial decisions with which he disagrees,” wrote Wilmer attorneys Patrick Carome, Ari Holtzblatt, Peter Neiman and Mark Flanagan. “Now Twitter, already targeted because of its protected activity, is left with the untenable choice to turn over highly sensitive documents or else face legal sanctions.”

Twitter is seeking an order declaring that Paxton violated the tech firm’s free speech rights and a temporary restraining order enjoining the office from continuing the investigation.

A Twitter representative said Paxton is misusing the powers of his office in an attempt to silence free speech. “As we’ve repeatedly stated, and recent research underscores, we enforce the Twitter Rules judiciously and impartially across our service,” the representative said in an email statement. “In the words of AG Paxton: ‘…[i]t is one thing to use the legal system to pursue public policy outcomes; but it is quite another to use prosecutorial weapons to intimidate critics, silence free speech, or chill the robust exchange of ideas.’”

You can see a copy of the lawsuit embedded in the story. Still no analysis, so I have no idea if it’s mostly noise that won’t survive a motion to dismiss or if it’s likely to succeed, but that helped. We do know that Paxton is a complete bootlicking toady for Donald Trump, and we do know that his lawsuit to try to overturn the election was trash, so it’s hardly a stretch to think that his “investigation” is something less than top-notch lawyering. I think we can also agree that SB12, if it manages to pass, will draw a multitude of lawsuits within days of it becoming law. I say pop the corn and enjoy the spectacle. Reform Austin and the Current have more.

Are people leaving the Republican Party?

Feb 16th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
6 comments

Some people are, in at least some states, if you go by voter registration data.

In the days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the phone lines and websites of local election officials across the country were jumping: Tens of thousands of Republicans were calling or logging on to switch their party affiliations.

In California, more than 33,000 registered Republicans left the party during the three weeks after the Washington riot. In Pennsylvania, more than 12,000 voters left the G.O.P. in the past month, and more than 10,000 Republicans changed their registration in Arizona.

An analysis of January voting records by The New York Times found that nearly 140,000 Republicans had quit the party in 25 states that had readily available data (19 states do not have registration by party). Voting experts said the data indicated a stronger-than-usual flight from a political party after a presidential election, as well as the potential start of a damaging period for G.O.P. registrations as voters recoil from the Capitol violence and its fallout.

[…]

The biggest spikes in Republicans leaving the party came in the days after Jan. 6, especially in California, where there were 1,020 Republican changes on Jan. 5 — and then 3,243 on Jan. 7. In Arizona, there were 233 Republican changes in the first five days of January, and 3,317 in the next week. Most of the Republicans in these states and others switched to unaffiliated status.

Voter rolls often change after presidential elections, when registrations sometimes shift toward the winner’s party or people update their old affiliations to correspond to their current party preferences, often at a department of motor vehicles. Other states remove inactive voters, deceased voters or those who moved out of state from all parties, and lump those people together with voters who changed their own registrations. Of the 25 states surveyed by The Times, Nevada, Kansas, Utah and Oklahoma had combined such voter list maintenance with registration changes, so their overall totals would not be limited to changes that voters made themselves. Other states may have done so, as well, but did not indicate in their public data.

Among Democrats, 79,000 have left the party since early January.

But the tumult at the Capitol, and the historic unpopularity of former President Donald J. Trump, have made for an intensely fluid period in American politics. Many Republicans denounced the pro-Trump forces that rioted on Jan. 6, and 10 Republican House members voted to impeach Mr. Trump. Sizable numbers of Republicans now say they support key elements of President Biden’s stimulus package; typically, the opposing party is wary if not hostile toward the major policy priorities of a new president.

“Since this is such a highly unusual activity, it probably is indicative of a larger undercurrent that’s happening, where there are other people who are likewise thinking that they no longer feel like they’re part of the Republican Party, but they just haven’t contacted election officials to tell them that they might change their party registration,” said Michael P. McDonald, a professor of political science at the University of Florida. “So this is probably a tip of an iceberg.”

But, he cautioned, it could also be the vocal “never Trump” reality simply coming into focus as Republicans finally took the step of changing their registration, even though they hadn’t supported the president and his party since 2016.

A more detailed case against this thesis is made by G. Elliott Morris, who notes that voter registration is not the same as voter behavior – in states where people register by party, they don’t necessarily vote that way – and that at least some of these former Republicans have changed their affiliation because the establishment GOP didn’t support Trump enough following the election and the insurrection. In other words, some number of these folks aren’t any more likely to vote for a Democrat. Finally, the total numbers here are really small in terms of overall voter registration, well less than one percent. In other words, what we have here looks more like a drip than a stream.

On the other hand, the public now has a very low opinion of the Republican Party and a significantly more favorable view of the Democratic Party. Republicans also have issues with corporate donors, which may be a drag on them at least through 2022. And while President Biden’s current approval ratings are extremely polarized, I note that he’s basically the inverse of Trump with independents, getting 60% of approval there where Trump had 40% at this same point in their presidencies. Who knows where any of this will go from here, but right now, you’d rather be on Team Biden than on his opposition.

None of this applies directly to Texas, since of course we don’t register by party. We measure affiliation by primary voting, so we will have much more limited data until whenever we get to have primaries in 2022. That said, the forthcoming special election in CD06, to fill the seat left vacant by the passing of Rep. Ron Wright, may provide a yardstick as well. Trump carried the district in 2020 by a 51-48 margin, basically the same margin by which Ted Cruz carried it in 2018. Rep. Wright won by a more comfortable 53-44, and Trump won it 54-42 in 2016. A Democratic win in what I presume would be a June runoff would surely be a big deal, while a Republican victory would be seen as evidence that nothing much has changed. It’s super early and we have no candidates yet, so hold onto your hot takes for now.

SCOTUS mostly punts on Census apportionment shenanigans

Dec 22nd, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

They seem to be hoping that the problem will solve itself, while applying a partisan litmus test to when it is appropriate for them to step in.

The Supreme Court dismissed a challenge to Donald Trump’s final sabotage of the census on Friday, deeming it premature. Trump seeks to exclude an estimated 10.5 million people from the data used to divide up congressional seats among the states because they are undocumented immigrants. This policy, if successful, would strip seats in the House of Representatives from diverse states with large immigrant communities. Because it has not been implemented, however, the Supreme Court determined, by a 6–3 vote, that the case is not yet ripe for resolution. All three liberal justices dissented.

Friday’s decision in Trump v. New York does not come as a surprise: At oral arguments, several conservative justices seemed to be looking for a way out of deciding whether the president has the power to manipulate the census this way. A few, including Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, even appeared to recognize that Trump’s policy is unlawful. The Constitution requires the apportionment of House seats based on “the whole number of persons in each state,” and the government has never before in history sought to exclude undocumented immigrants. By declaring that an entire class of immigrants are not “persons” who reside in the United States, Trump is trying to pass a modern three-fifths clause—except his policy reduces millions of immigrants to zero-fifths of a person.

Still, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority decided that this threat was insufficient to create a live controversy due to the uncertainty that plagues this case. (It did so in an unsigned opinion apparently joined by all six conservatives.) The federal government does not actually know how many undocumented immigrants live in each state. Trump has directed the Census Bureau to use existing administrative records to obtain these figures. But this process is ongoing, and the bureau has warned that it may not produce the data for weeks—possibly not until Trump has left office. (Joe Biden will undoubtedly retract the policy if it has not yet been executed.) The administration has speculated that it may narrow its goal by excluding only subsets of immigrants, like those in detention. (There are more than 50,000 people in ICE detention today, so even that exclusion could affect apportionment and funding.)

In light of this uncertainty, the majority found that the plaintiffs—which include states that may lose representation and local governments that may lose funding—lacked standing to attack the policy in court. Trump’s policy “may not prove feasible to implement in any manner whatsoever, let alone in a manner substantially likely to harm any of the plaintiffs here,” the majority asserted. In other words, Trump might fail to carry out his scheme, which would spare the plaintiffs any injury. Moreover, if the president only excludes a subset of immigrants, like ICE detainees, the plan might not “impact interstate apportionment.”

The court also found that the case “is riddled with contingencies and speculation,” declaring that “any prediction how the Executive Branch might eventually implement” Trump’s policy is “no more than conjecture.” As a result, “the case is not ripe,” and the plaintiffs must come back when they can contest a more explicit policy. The court clarified that “we express no view on the merits of the constitutional and related statutory claims presented.”

[…]

Friday’s ruling also entrenches a new rule that emerged after Barrett replaced Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Plaintiffs only have standing when they are challenging a policy that the conservatives do not like. In November, by a 5–4 vote, the ultraconservatives blocked a COVID-19 restriction on New York City churches that was no longer in effect. As Roberts explained in his dissent, the restrictions were not in force when the court issued its decision. Yet the court blocked them anyway, reasoning that the governor might enforce them again in the future.

It is difficult to square that decision with Friday’s census punt. Trump has stated his policy in stark terms and directed the government to execute it as soon as possible. There is a serious, looming threat that his administration will carry it out in the near future. No one actually knows whether Biden or Congress can reverse the policy after it has been implemented. Yet the conservative justices still considered the case premature. This inconsistent approach gives the impression that at least five conservative justices are manipulating the rules to roll back blue states’ COVID orders while giving Trump leeway to test out illegal policies. Friday’s decision is not the end of this litigation, and the administration may ultimately fail to rig the apportionment of House seats. It is framed as a modest, narrow, technical decision. But the court has revealed its priorities, and they have nothing to do with restraint.

See here and here for the background. Texas would also likely lose a seat or two if this went into effect, not that you’d know it from the total radio silence of our state leaders. My hope is of course that the Census does not deliver this data before January 20, in which case the Biden administration could just drop the subject and proceed as we have always done. It’s not great that we have to rely on that hope, of course. Daily Kos and TPM have more.

More on DPS and data protection

Dec 1st, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

A followup from the DMN about that data breach involving every drivers license number you’ve ever had.

Some other states do not sell [drivers’ license] data, but Texas does. State lawmakers could change the law in their 2021 session.

I first reported this in 2015 when I learned that several state government departments sell information to outsiders. In an open records request that year, I learned that in 2014 the Department of Motor Vehicles earned $2.4 million in sales.

This year, CBS 11/KTVT reporter Brian New updated those numbers. DMV made more than $3 million in 2019 selling drivers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and VIN information, he reported.

[…]

The buyers are data-mining companies, insurance companies, banks, police departments, car dealers, toll companies, school districts, corporations, private investigators, tax-collecting law firms, tow truck companies and electricity companies, to name a few.

Follow this — the biggest loophole. In Texas, it’s against the law for companies who buy the information to use it to sell to us. So to get around that some companies sell the lists to other marketing companies, which go ahead and use the information to sell — and annoy us.

Because our information isn’t sold directly to marketers, the state doesn’t have to give us a privacy statement when we buy a car or apply for a driver’s license. We don’t get to opt out, as residents of California are now allowed to do.

State lawmakers could fix this, giving us privacy statements and allowing us to opt out of the information sold. Or they could go one better and prohibit the sale of the databases entirely. Other states do.

If you bring this up, state departments other than DMV complain loudly about how these are open records that often can help consumers. (For example, your car is towed, and the towing company can figure out who it belongs to). Besides, selling our data makes a lot of money for the general fund.

One way to see how loosey-goosey Texas is with our information is on the paid subscription lookup site, PublicData.com.

Years ago, there were multiple states listed where you could quickly look up a person’s driver’s license information. Now there’s only Florida and Texas. The other 48 now have higher standards of privacy.

Same goes for vehicle information. Only five states are listed for searching, but four are marked “[OLD].” The fifth is up to date and active. That’s us.

If you get unwanted spam email, postal mail or phone calls and wonder how they got your information, often enough it’s because of our state’s lax laws. Thank you state leaders.

When it comes to cheap and easy data distribution that violates our privacy, we’re number one. Hoo-ray for Texas.

See here for the background. California has a data privacy law that is modeled on the European GDPR scheme. I work with GDPR quite a bit, and it gives people a lot of control over their data while putting some real teeth into enforcement. One of the main ways that GDPR works is that it requires notifications to affected individuals when their personal data is stolen, deleted, or otherwise inappropriately accessed. That’s a lot better than what we have now.

There’s some federal data privacy legislation out there, which largely has the support of the big players like Facebook and Google, which on the one hand means it has a chance to pass but on the other hand means it’s not anything those companies consider to be bad for their business models. I’d rather see something more stringent than that – to me, GDPR is a starting point. We’re not going to get anything like that in Texas, I feel confident saying that. But feel free to call your State Rep and State Senator and tell them that you would like to have the ability to opt out of having your drivers license data sold by DPS. The amount the state takes in for these sales is pennies compared to the state budget. We can very easily do with less of that.

UPDATE: This Slate story about the need for a federal data privacy law is a good read, and addresses the ways we can learn from GDPR for an American version of that law.

We’re number one (million)!

Nov 12th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

One million COVID cases in Texas. Hooray?

Texas’ grim distinction as the national leader in terms of COVID-19 infections came as little surprise to some local medical experts, who blamed politicians for conflicting messages about the virus and warned the worst is yet to come.

Texas this week breached a milestone of 1 million cumulative cases since the start of the pandemic, recording more infections than any other state in the U.S. For reference, more people have been infected in the Lone Star state than live in Austin, the state’s capitol.

If Texas were its own country, it would rank 10th in terms of total cases, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, placing it higher than European hotspots like Italy.

The big numbers are not a shock in a state that’s home to roughly 29 million people. The number of cases per 100,000 residents is lower here than in about half of the states in the country. But Texas also had more newly reported cases in the last seven days — an average of about 8,200 — than other large, hard-hit states such as New York, California and Florida. Only Illinois has a higher seven-day average.

Dr. David Callender, president of the Memorial Hermann Health System, called the 1 million cases “a sobering statistic.”

“It’s not a surprise in the context of all that’s happened,” Callender said. “But it’s a significant number — 3 percent of the population — and cause for worry about the trend continuing as we go forward.”

Callender attributed the high number to “too much division” in the attempt to contain the virus.

“To me, politics entered in an inappropriate way,” said Callender. “People making a political statement with their behavior — that the pandemic is a hoax, that no one can make them wear a mask — really interfered with efforts. It was the wrong mindset.”

To be fair, California is a couple of days behind us, and may have passed one million by the time I publish this. Of course, California also has ten million more people than Texas, so.

The state’s positive test rate is now 11.24%, compared to 7.64% a month ago.

Hey, remember when a 10% positivity rate was considered to be a “warning flag” by Greg Abbott? You know, as part of his famous “metrics” for reopening the state?

Abbott’s office didn’t immediately respond to messages Tuesday.

Too busy propping up Donald Trump’s ego to deal with this kind of trivia, I suppose.

Meanwhile, in El Paso…

The number of coronavirus patients in Texas hospitals has nearly doubled since October, and average infections are at their highest point in almost three months — leaving health officials bracing for a potential crush of hospitalizations going into the holidays.

In El Paso, hospitals are so overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients that in early November the Department of Defense sent medical teams to help, and the county has summoned 10 mobile morgues to hold dead bodies. Local funeral homes are readying extra refrigerated storage space, as the number of hospitalized coronavirus patients in the far West Texas city has shot up nearly tenfold since the start of September.

The new wave of infections stands in contrast to the summer surge, when Gov. Greg Abbott held regular press conferences about the virus and mandated that face coverings be worn, earning him the ire of the far-right. Now, state officials seem reluctant to crack down on the virus’ spread by further curtailing economic activity — and are fighting the El Paso county judge’s attempt to impose a curfew and a stay-at-home order in the face of record-breaking cases.

The state will not do anything to help, and you local leaders are not allowed to do anything to help. You’re on your own. If you’re very lucky, maybe you won’t have your health insurance taken away while you recover. Did I mention that disaster and emergency response ought to be a big theme of the 2022 election? Texas Monthly has more.

UPDATE: Nothing to see here.

Here comes another rideshare company

Oct 14th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Seems like a less than optimal time to be expanding, but here we are.

Alto, a new rideshare company based in Dallas, will roll into view in Houston as it looks to expand its reach and compete with Uber and Lyft.

The app-based service, which [arrived] in Houston Thursday, looks to distinguish itself in the market by offering what it calls a consistent experience by managing its own fleet of 200 luxury Buick sports utility vehicles and hiring employees to drive them rather than relying on independent contractors, as competittors such as Uber and Lyft do.

[…]

Alto’s expansion comes as a debate rages in California over how companies such as Uber and Lyft should treat its drivers. There, a new state employment law requires the gig economy companies to classify drivers as employees, but voters could exempt the companies via a ballot measure in November.

Alto also is expanding as the coronovirus pandemic batters the ride-hailing industry. Uber, the market leader, reported a 75 percent decline in ridership during the quarter ended June 30, as people grew wary of leaving the house and entering enclosed spaces.

Alto’s business has shrunk, too. Business is still down about 30 percent from pre-pandemic levels, [Alto CEO Will] Coleman said. “There’s some people in Dallas that are going to continue to not get into cars,” he said, “so our total customer base is smaller.”

That makes expanding into new territories more important to the company’s growth, Coleman said. Houston seemed like a natural next step, he said, given its proximity and size — it’s the nation’s fourth largest city. It also appealed because the company caters to the business community, which in Houston is large and international.

Business travel from the airport was a big sales driver before the pandemic, he said, and is beginning to pick back up. “People are looking for safe ways to move again,” Coleman said.

Not surprisingly, Alto costs more than Uber; the story does not do a comparison to a taxi fare, which would have been interesting. As someone who thinks Uber and Lyft treat their drivers like trash, I like Alto’s model, I just don’t know what their prospects are, even without factoring the pandemic into the equation. But if you’re the type of person who uses this type of service, and you’ve been wishing there was an alternative to Uber and Lyft, here you go.

(Also, can we please come up with an alternative term for “rideshare”? That doesn’t fit all that well any more for Uber and Lyft, and it makes even less sense for Alto, which actually owns the vehicles and employs the drivers. They’re basically a livery service, but that word makes me think of horse-drawn carriages with footmen. I am open to suggestion here.)

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