Via Andrew Sprung, here are the final figures for Obamacare enrollment:

Take a look at the bars on the left. These are from the states that run their own exchanges and actually care about getting people enrolled. There was no decline from 2017 to 2018, even among the unsubsidized population.

Now look at the bars on the right. These are from the states that defaulted to the federal exchange, many of which are either indifferent or hostile to Obamacare. All the losses came from those states.

Bottom line: Nothing is perfect, but Obamacare works fine. That is, it works fine if you put in the minimal effort it takes to administer it properly. Conversely, if you don’t care—or, worse, if you actively try to sabotage it—then it will deteriorate. But that’s true of everything, isn’t it?

Ben Rhodes is an unlikely target of a sophisticated smear campaign. He's the guy on the far left that you don't recognize, behind all the famous people.Anthony Behar / Pool Via Cnp/DPA/ZUMA

The New York Times has obtained a copy of the report that Black Cube compiled on Ben Rhodes, one of the Obama administration’s biggest proponents of the Iran Deal:

A detailed report about Mr. Rhodes, compiled by Black Cube, a private investigations firm established by former intelligence analysts from the Israeli Defense Forces, contains pictures of his apartment in Washington, telephone numbers and email addresses of members of his family, as well as unsubstantiated allegations of personal and ethical transgressions.

It is unclear who hired Black Cube to prepare the report on Mr. Rhodes and a similar report on Colin Kahl, the national security adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., which were obtained by The New York Times from a source with knowledge of their provenance….There is no evidence in the documents that indicate any connection to anyone in Mr. Trump’s administration….One person with knowledge of the reports suggested that the company had been hired by a commercial client with an interest in opposing the nuclear deal.

Not the Trumpies, then—at least, not directly. Politically, then, this is of only minor interest. But I’d still like know what organization had a commercial interest in killing the Iran deal. It’s just not common for a corporate enterprise to think about smearing a political figure—especially an obscure one—as a tactic for getting what it wants. So does commercial really mean commercial, or does it merely mean “not an elected official”? Maybe a super PAC of some kind? Or a Sheldon Adelson donor type?

I’m pretty tired of everything being about Trump. If he’s truly not involved in this, that makes it even more interesting. Just who was the commercial client?

UDPATE: On the other hand, Julian Borger, who broke this story in the first place, says the “ultimate customer” was the Trump camp:

Most explicit statement yet tying Trump circle and #BlackCube dirty tricks ops…@julianborger: “our sourcing who are close to this private security firm said it was clear that, when the tasking for this went out, that the ultimate customer was the Trump team, the Trump camp.” https://t.co/FzZkeZO0Cx

— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) May 8, 2018

AP Photo/Danny Johnston

I imagine most of you already know this, but just in case:

The Mueller probe is no longer a law enforcement investigation. It’s a hit job. This pleases the Left. Removing Trump is the only principle they recognize. Instead of admitting it, they lecture us about the rule of law, as if they actually care about the Constitution. They don’t.

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) May 8, 2018

This is basically the unanimous view on Fox News in prime time. If you watch Fox—or listen to Rush or read Breitbart—this is what you believe. Ignore the fact that the Attorney General, the deputy attorney general, the FBI director, and Mueller himself were all put in place by Donald Trump or his appointees. The developing party line is that once Democrats and their allies in the deep state finally realized that Trump was for real and the jig was up, they invented Mueller. His entire investigation is a monstrous, Democrat-fueled deception designed to bring down a president elected by working-class voters who were finally fed up with liberals destroying our country.

This is their story, and it’s spreading more and more widely in conservative ranks. All the conspiracy theories of the past few years; all the “deep state” nonsense; all the hysteria over Benghazi and Hillary’s emails and the war again Christianity: all of it has been spadework for this. Soon, we’re going to find out if Donald Trump really can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it because the American conservative movement has convinced its supporters that it wasn’t a gun, it wasn’t Trump, no one died, and it was all Photoshopped by Democrats anyway.

This is just nuts:

Hamstrung by troubles with lethal injection — gruesomely botched attempts, legal battles and growing difficulty obtaining the drugs — states are looking for alternative ways to carry out the death penalty. High on the list for some is a method that has never been used before: inhaling nitrogen gas….There is no scientific data on executing people with nitrogen, leading some experts to question whether states, in trying to solve old problems, may create new ones.

….The push for change comes because lethal injection, introduced 40 years ago as more efficient and humane than the electric chair or gas chamber, has not met that promise. Indeed, it has sometimes resulted in spectacles that rival the ones it was meant to avert.

It’s nuts for two reasons. First, there’s “no scientific data”? Technically, sure, there’s no data on using nitrogen in executions. But we all know what happens if you’re put in a tank that’s pumped full of nitrogen: you pass out in a minute or two and then you die. You might feel a little lightheaded or euphoric before you pass out, but that’s it. End of story.

Second, this whole business of desperately looking for more “humane” or “efficient” ways of killing people is creepy as hell. We know perfectly well how to kill people efficiently: firing squads, hanging, the guillotine, etc. The problem is that people who support the death penalty are apparently squeamish about seeing people actually die violently in front of their eyes. I have no sympathy for them. If you want to kill people, you should have the fortitude to watch your handiwork without the pretense that it’s happening in a nice, clean hospital and being performed by nurses. For one thing, it’s unfair to nurses. This is why I’d support a comeback for hanging. If you can’t stomach the thought of a hangman’s gallows, maybe you should rethink your support of capital punishment.

By the way, this was the point that Kevin Williamson was making in his infamous abortion meltdown.¹ He wasn’t saying he wanted exceptionally gruesome executions just for women who get abortions. He was saying that if the state is empowered to execute people, it should always be deliberately gruesome so that people can see what they’re voting for. That was it. And I agree with him.

¹Just to refresh your memory: Williamson believes abortion is murder, and proposed that women who get abortions should be subject to execution. He hedged a bit on whether he himself approved of capital punishment, but he definitely said that abortion should be legally treated as homicide.

I’m just playing around here, but here’s a bit more data on building height in response to my earlier question about why all buildings in a neighborhood aren’t the same height (i.e., whatever height delivers the highest profits). First off, there’s an incentive to build high because people will pay more for offices and condos on upper stories. In New York, however, that height premium has been declining:

Interesting! Nonetheless, no matter what city you’re in, it’s still generally more profitable to build higher since the price per square foot goes down. Here is Dean Dalvit:

For the most common office building size, two to four stories tall, the range is from just over $140 per square foot in Winston-Salem to over $240 per square foot in New York….By taking advantage of savings provided by vertical construction, you will see approximately a 4% savings in cost per square foot by increasing the stories to between five and ten stories….For buildings between eleven and twenty stories tall, there is approximately an 11% savings over the mid rise buildings and 15% over low rise….Over twenty stories starts getting into more unique building characteristics that will drive costs in various ways.

Speaking broadly, then, if a particular neighborhood can support a 20-story building, you’d expect to see a lot of 20-story buildings. But there’s also this:

Even with similar costs per sf developers have different amounts of capital available, different thresholds for acceptable returns, and different tolerances for risk. This all drives variation in project sizes.

— Justin D. (@cznomad) May 7, 2018

In other words, a 20-story building might be the most profitable, but if you only have enough money to build a five-story building, you might go ahead and do that instead of spending time trying to scare up more financing. It’s still profitable, after all.

Beyond this, of course, there are lots of land use restrictions that change over time and can impact building height. The most famous, perhaps, is New York City’s air rights regulation, which limits total building height in an area but allows developers to swap air rights. It’s sort of cap-and-trade for building height. This means that in a neighborhood with, say, a 60-story cap, it might make sense to build a 40-story building and then sell your unused air rights to someone else who wants to build an 80-story building. There’s lots of stuff like that around.

This is just more food for thought, not any kind of final say on this. If you enjoy falling down internet rabbit holes, you might want to try looking into urban design. I do this periodically, and there is no deeper rabbit hole around.

It’s spring, and the swallows have returned to Capistrano. At least, I suppose they have. They’ve certainly returned to Irvine.

Swallows are hard birds to photograph! They might even be worse than those damn honeybees. They never get very close, they’re really fast, and they change direction constantly. Not only does that make them hard to follow, but even on the rare occasions when I manage to follow one for a second or two, the autofocus still needs at least a little time to lock on before the bird decides to pull a 180 and disappear. That doesn’t happen very often.

But it does once in a while. I’ve been experimenting with triptychs lately, and it works nicely with the swallows for two reasons. First, the color of the water changes depending on time of day and whether I’m shooting into or away from the sun. It’s kind of striking to see the different colors all in one place. Second, the individual photos are smaller than usual, which lets me hide the fact that they aren’t completely sharp. Except for the top one, which is really good. And the timing is really nice on the bottom one. The middle one is kind of meh, though.

Our story so far: Team Trump hired a private intelligence firm last year to dig up dirt on Obama aides who had worked on the Iran deal. The firm’s plan was to weasel meetings with their wives and go from there. Everyone suspects the firm is Black Cube, the same one that Harvey Weinstein used to dig up dirt on the women he abused. But Black Cube denies it. The White House denies it too. Then Ronan Farrow at the New Yorker reports that it wasn’t Trumpies who were behind this at all. Finally, this morning, Black Cube fessed up that they were the guilty party after all:

3. This morning, after @RonanFarrow ‘s publication in the @NewYorker , his version changed: “We didn’t know the @guardian meant us. We didn’t know it was us because this report was about #Trump. But then we saw the emails reported by the New Yorker and we know those emails.”

— Emmanuelle Elbaz-Phelps (@manuelbaz) May 7, 2018

4. He insisted “there is no connection to Trump or the #IranNuclearDeal” but he didn’t deny #BlackCube was hired by a private company and even told me the client is “somebody that profits from the sanctions on Iran”.
Question : who is the client and how they connect to Trump?

— Emmanuelle Elbaz-Phelps (@manuelbaz) May 7, 2018

Yes indeed. Who profits from Iran sanctions? And are they connected to Trump in any way?

Andy Abeyta, Quad-City Times/Quad-City Times via ZUMA

As I’m sure you all know, the latest craze among kids is the Juul, a vaping device that produces pure (flavored) nicotine hits. That’s it. No tobacco, no tar, nothing that has ever touched soil. Just nicotine.

Over at the New Yorker, Jia Tolentino writes about Juuling this week. Its main attractions appear to be (a) the nice nicotine hit, and (b) it’s something adults disapprove of. But there’s more:

At Cornell, Jason told me, people Juuled in bathrooms and classrooms, in “every nook and cranny of this campus.”…Jason believes that the Juul craze is fundamentally ironic. “It’s young people doing something terrible for them that’s supposed to be healthy,” he said. He compared the infatuation with Juul to the millennial love of the restaurateur and TV host Guy Fieri—“this completely bizarre food personality that people call Daddy now”—and observed that his generation was most flippant when it came to serious things, “like health, or mortality.”

….In Charlottesville, I went to the main library on campus to meet a freshman from Virginia Beach named Katie McCracken….She took out her phone, opened Snapchat, and scrolled through her saved pics and videos: people hitting multiple Juuls simultaneously, her friends in dramatic poses with deadpan expressions and Juuls in their mouths. I burst out laughing at one captioned “100% Headass.”…I asked Katie if she thought that Juul relieved her generation’s anxiety or exacerbated it. “I don’t know,” she said. “People definitely stress-Juul. But everything we do is like Tide Pods. Everyone in this generation is semi-ironically, like, We’re ready to die.”

I don’t actually have any comment to make about Juuling. But this article was a reminder of something that’s long bothered me about reporting on kids: too much of it is focused not just on college kids, but on elite college kids. In this article, the main message from America’s youth is that everything is ironic and “we’re ready to die.” In political writing more generally, it’s about how liberals need to appeal to kids by supporting college loan forgiveness, urbanization, and bicycle lanes.

That’s fine if your goal is to appeal to about 10 percent of young people. But what about the rest of them? The ones who went to state colleges, or community colleges, or no college at all? On average, they probably don’t care much about college loans, urbanization, or bicycle lanes. They work, they raise children, they pay rent, they buy groceries, and they just generally lead lives that are unironically dedicated to making ends meet.

When we talk about the problem liberals have getting young people to vote, these are the people we’re talking about. Not the already-engaged college kids. They vote religiously. The ones who don’t are high school grads who don’t really care about microaggressions or the Pacific garbage patch or Donald Trump’s lies. They don’t pay much attention to politics and don’t really see that it affects them much anyway. The question is, how are you going to get them to vote? If you actually care about the youth vote, this is the problem you should be obsessed with—even though it’s boring as hell. If you’re not obsessed with this, then you don’t really care about getting young people to vote. You’re just saying you do as a cover for whatever agenda you do care about.

Which is it?

Tyler Cowen poses a conundrum that I’ve also wondered about:

Why aren’t all tall buildings in the same neighborhood the same height?

Let’s say there is a 40-story building and a 60-story building. You would think the different builders face more or less the same costs for their height decisions. If you want to own 60 stories, it is still the case that everyone can build the cheapest-height building, and you can buy the stories you want from a variety of sellers.

If you had lots of companies that needed 60 stories, and you didn’t want to split up those firms across locations, and lots of companies that needed only 40 stories, the differential building heights could be explained rather easily. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Most tall buildings house a variety of tenants, and those tenants don’t “need the whole height” or anything close to it.

Cowen seems (?) to be coming at this with the assumption that the 40-story building is cheaper, so why doesn’t everyone build 40-story buildings? But I assume the opposite: the taller the building, the cheaper it is on a per-story basis. So why doesn’t everyone just build the tallest building that makes economic sense?¹ Is this mostly down to those dreaded land-use regulations (setbacks, air rights, shadow coverage, political tiffs, etc.)? Changes in taste over time? Some kind of practical issue that makes it harder to build higher than I think?

Do any of our urbanist mavens know the answer?

¹Which can vary from place to place. It might be 100 stories in New York and five stories in Peoria.

Rory Merry/AFLO/ZUMAPRESS

In an ad currently running on every TV in California, our well-coiffed lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom, says he was “the first to take on the National Rifle Association and win.” This has unleashed a tsunami of tut-tutting, like today’s column in the LA Times from George Skelton:

You’ve got to wonder what goes through a candidate’s head when his first TV ad contains an indisputable, major falsehood. Maybe nothing goes through it….After Newsom’s TV ad was released April 23, it was assailed in several news media outlets. PolitiFact, a nonpartisan organization that referees political ads, rated Newsom’s claim of being the first to fight the NRA and win as “false.”

In case you’re wondering what’s going on, Newsom did indeed take on the NRA when he sponsored Prop 63 a few years ago. And he did indeed win. This is not a huge accomplishment here in Blue-State-istan, but he did do it. So what’s the fuss?

Well, he wasn’t “the first.” This cracks me up. If Newsom had acted like a Republican, he would have said that he crushed the NRA like an eggshell,¹ that his opponents were all pawns of Big Gun,² and that Californians were finally safe from gun violence.³ Everyone would figure that this was just the usual Republican pandering to the base and would have pretty much ignored it. But if a Democrat tells a teensy little fib, he’s suddenly unfit for office. I love politics.

¹The NRA didn’t even bother fighting Proposition 63.

²Every Democrat in the state supported it.

³Prop 63 didn’t really do much.