Big Blizzards Have Become More Common In New York →

If the overall amount of snow has held steady while the number of snow days has decreased, that necessarily implies New York has been getting some heavy snowfalls to make up for the decreased frequency.

This isn’t a total surprise to climatologists. Severe winter weather has received less study by climatologists than other impacts of climate change. But an increasing amount of research has suggested we might expect to experience this pattern in certain climates, mostly because a warmer atmosphere can carry more moisture.

Why Did Vaccinated People Get Measles at Disneyland? Blame the Unvaccinated →

So how does that explain what happened in Disneyland? If you have a group of 1,000 people concentrated in a small space—like oh, say, hypothetically, an amusement park—about 90 percent of them will be vaccinated (hopefully). One person, maybe someone who contracted measles on a recent trip to the Philippines, moves around, spreading the virus. Measles is crazy contagious, so of the 100 people who aren’t vaccinated, about 90 will get infected. Then, of the 900 people who are vaccinated, 3 percent—27 people—get infected because they don’t have full immunity.

Now the Disneyland numbers—six vaccinated infections out of the 34 cases with known records—start to make more sense. (And considering the 16 million or so visitors the park gets every year, we might reasonably expect that number to go up.) Once vaccination levels dip below 90 or 95 percent, there aren’t enough protected people to keep the disease in check—the herd immunity that epidemiologists like to talk about so much. In the US, we’ve been doing pretty well keeping those numbers up. “But there are some fluctuations,” says Cristina Cassetti, program officer at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, “and if vaccination levels dip down a little, you get a situation like Disneyland.”

Robert Reich on Redefining Full-Time Work, Obamacare, and Employer Benefits →

One of the U.S. Congress’s first acts of 2015? Trying to redefine what counts as full-time work, from 30 hours a week up to 40. It’s part of the latest attempt by Republicans to alter Obama’s signature healthcare law, the Affordable Care Act, and has already passed the House of Representatives. But it has also had the perhaps unexpected effect of putting the divide between full- and part-time workers front and center in American politics.

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The House has voted to change the definition of full-time work. It seems like the Senate may as well, and Obama has threatened to veto it. Why does the definition of full-time work end up mattering so much to our politics?

It matters under the Affordable Care Act because if full-time work is defined as 40 hours a week, employers can avoid the employer mandate [to provide health insurance] by cutting the work week down to 39 hours. It’s harder for them to do that if full-time work is defined as at least 30 hours. And of course if employers can avoid the employer mandate relatively easily, that means that more workers lose employer coverage, which, in turn, means that more workers have to rely on the government with regard to their health care, either through the Affordable Care Act or through extended Medicaid. That, in turn, puts a large and potentially growing burden on the federal budget, and could cause the deficit to expand.

Especially with the rise of "temp" work, with so many people unemployed, unable to find "full-time work" as it's currently defined under the 30 hour rule.

The Foreign Policy Essay: The Kurdish Right to Self-Governance →

Editor’s Note: The question of the Kurds is one of the knottiest in the Middle East—and that is saying something. Kurdish rebellions have led to tens of thousands of deaths in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, and now the Kurds in Syria are at the heart of that country’s civil war. Michael Eppel of the University of Haifa argues that the current upheaval in the region may be creating a historic opportunity for the Kurds in their quest for independence and notes that important countries like Turkey are slowly accepting that the Kurds should have more mastery of their own fate...

Democrats Take on Wall Street With Financial Transactions Tax →

...It would apply a tax of 0.1 percent on each stock trade and 0.01 percent on trades of derivatives like options, futures, and credit default swaps. The European Commission estimated that this rate structure would generate an amount of revenue equal to 0.4-0.5 percent of GDP. In the United States, this would be between $70 billion and $90 billion a year.

The best thing about this story is that almost all of the revenue would come from the financial industry....

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To be clear, this is not a story of shutting down the financial industry. The financial industry plays a central role in sustaining a healthy economy. It provides the money families need to buy a home or start a business. It also provides businesses with the capital they need to expand. But the financial sector has grown way beyond the size necessary to fill these purposes, with the core financial sector (investment banking and securities and commodities trading) expanding five-fold as a share of the economy since the 1970s.

We are all sitting too much, and technology isn't helping →

The average American is now sitting or otherwise inactive for over eight waking hours per day — a figure which only rises with age — and no age group above 30 is committing more than 30 minutes to moderate or vigorous activity per day. All adults should aim for at least 150 minutes of physical activity per week — a broadly supported guideline that has been endorsed by the World Health Organization (WHO). However, the new BMJ papers suggest that even that modest goal might be too high for some people and the priority should be to avoid inactivity as much as possible.

The WHO identifies physical inactivity as "the fourth leading risk factor for global mortality" and estimates that it's caused 3.2 million deaths globally.

Announcing (Actually, Confirming) Our Focus on the CBO’s Dubious Models and Political Bias →

The Congressional Budget Office is a formally non-partisan unit within Congress, to help members of Congress (MOCs) figure out the likely effects their proposed legislation would have on the economy. One problem with the way things work is that the CBO must make any and all assumptions that MOCs tell them to make. Every CBO report then needs to be inspected for partisan bias.

...the CBO is going to be the subject of a major political fight over how it prepares its estimates of the economic and fiscal impact of pending legislation. As we’ll discuss below, Republicans plan to mandate that the CBO use something called dynamic scoring, which has the effect of making tax cuts look far more beneficial to the economy than they are, by effectively claiming that tax cuts boost growth, which then boosts tax receipts. It would effectively institutionalize the Laffer curve, which has been widely and repeatedly debunked.

Drone packed with crystal meth crashes near US-Mexico border →

Democratization of the airspace will likely be good overall, but our legal system has a lot of work to do to catch up with these technologies:

Jorge Morrua, spokesman for the Tijuana police, tells the AP that this isn't the first time authorities have seen drones used for drug smuggling. Last year, a source at the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) told a Mexican news outlet that in 2012, drug-packed drones made at least 150 attempts to cross the border. The technology has been used to transport drugs away from the border, as well. Last year, a drone crashed while attempting to transport marijuana to a South Carolina maximum security prison, and a man in Australia was arrested for making a similar attempt near a Melbourne prison.