ALBANY — New York, whose status as the most populous state has long been ceded, will soon fall behind Florida into fourth place, a long-anticipated drop that is rife with symbolism and that could carry potentially serious economic consequences in coming years.

When the Census Bureau releases its latest population estimates on Monday, demographers expect that Florida and New York will be narrowly separated – perhaps by as little as a few thousand people – and that if Florida does not pass New York this time, it almost certainly will do so in 2014.

The census figures underscore immigration trends, as foreign-born migrants continue to move to warm-weather states such as California and Texas – No. 1 and 2 – as well as to Florida. The newcomers also include winter-weary New Yorkers who move or retire to Florida at a rate of over 50,000 a year, twice the number of Floridians who head to New York.

But the shift also highlights the struggles in upstate New York, which has lost large-scale manufacturing jobs and large chunks of population, offsetting consistent gains in New York City. But the city’s growth has seemingly not been robust enough to stave off hubs in Florida like Jacksonville, […]

No Comments

We are now in a transition period where battery prices are dropping by 20-30% each year. The consequences for the automotive industry are mindboggling.

About a century ago the nascent automotive industry started out by producing electric vehicles. Even big names such as Porsche started their business on a pure-electric basis. In the hundred-year hiccup that followed we have burned billions of tons of fossil fuel, but the clean times of pure electric are returning.

The trigger to this all is simple: affordable batteries. Just as the television business was turned upside-down by the prices of flat-panel TVs in the 90’s and similarly the solar business by plummeting panel prices in the decade thereafter, we are now in a transition period where battery prices are dropping by 20-30% each year. The consequences for the automotive industry are mindboggling.

Battery prices are the main cost drivers of electric vehicles. Last year Volkswagen stated that it would be possible to manufacture a 100% electric vehicle more cheaply than a car with a combustion engine within three years.

Three years ago it was a challenge to produce an electric vehicle with a 300km range for an affordable price. Well, we have seen what happened to the stock […]

No Comments

As private prisons become the norm in the United States, it’s time society takes a look at the institution and asks, ‘Are prisons really being used as rehabilitation/deterrence for crime, or have private interests started attaching price tags to lawbreakers’ heads and exploited their incarceration for profit?’

Here are several key statistics that paint an ugly, troubling picture of the for-profit prison system in America:

500% Increase

The biggest private prison owner in America, The Corrections Corporation of America, has seen its profits increase by more than 500% in the past 20 years. Moreover, the business’ growth shows no sign of stopping, having already approached 48 states to take over government-run prisons.

10-60 Pounds Lighter

One way for-profit prisons to minimize costs is by skimping on provisions, including food. A psychiatrist who investigated a privately run prison in Mississippi found that the inmates were severely underfed and looked ‘almost emaciated.

No Comments

Good news for struggling writers: the key to sustaining your lifestyle is to go to a city that’s struggling more.

A new nonprofit organization called Write-A-House, located in Detroit, Michigan (which, earlier this year, became the largest city in the United States to file for and enter bankruptcy) has found something creative to do with the city’s seemingly endless blocks of vacant homes-gut them from the inside-out, fix them up, and give them to writers.

Sarah Cox, one of the founders of Write-A-House, and an editorial director for the real estate site Curbed, moved to Detroit from New York in 2010 in order to start the site’s Detroit blog. There, she witnessed the city’s desire to rebuild and rebrand, and found what was missing in order to make the dream into a reality.

‘In the past three years, I’ve seen incredible progress, but there is still so much room for more in the literary arts,

No Comments

If you find it hard to wrap your head around the idea that a shrub bearing pea-sized flowers could have anything to do with energy independence, consider guayule. This weedy little plant thrives in the arid climate of the Southwest, and it could provide the US with yet another sustainable source of domestic biofuel while also replacing petroleum as a feedstock for synthetic rubber in tire manufacturing.

We last checked in on guayule over the summer, when ARPA-E provided a grant of $5.7 million to a new partnership for developing guayule biofuel (ARPA-E is the Department of Energy’s transformative technology funding agency).

Given all the activity surrounding weedy-feedstock biofuels (camelina, much?), the biofuel angle isn’t too surprising. What’s new and different is the idea that one plant could double as a biofuel feedstock and substitute for synthetic rubber, too.

guayule for energy independence

The ARPA-E grant involves a company called Yulex, which is aside from its work in biofuels is already showing off the high performance qualities of guayule-based material with the launch of a new guayule wetsuit produced by Patagonia. The guayule wetsuit, which replaces neoprene, made its debut in Japan last December and is now available in the US.

The latest development involves […]

No Comments