CityLab: Rating Europe's Most and Least Happy Cities

Among European city dwellers, residents in Prague are most confident about finding a job, while people in Zurich feel safest. Romans distrust their administration more than anyone on the Continent, while no one thinks it’s harder to find an affordable apartment than Parisians. Everyone except residents of Valetta, Malta, thinks that their cultural scene is great, while most Europeans still feel that foreigners bring more benefits than problems. [...]

Europe’s happiest cities are overwhelmingly on the northern side of the Continent, but results suggest it’s not wealth alone that is a driver for happiness. While the top three may be among the usual suspects—Oslo, Zurich, and Denmark’s third city of Aalborg—the next two in the ranking are less obvious: Belfast and Vilnius. [...]

Size may also be a factor. The populations of these cities are between 206,000 (Alborg) and 648,000 (Oslo). The happiness scores suggest the charms of a medium-sized city: big enough to be lively but small enough to be easily navigable and capable of fostering tight community links. [...]

The list of cities where people thought good housing was least easy to come by, meanwhile, reads like a litany of success: Paris, Munich, Geneva, and Stockholm topped the ranking. This is essentially a survey or perception rather than reality, however. Residents in low-rent Berlin felt that good housing was harder to come by than Londoners did, even though housing costs in London are far higher even when you take wage differences into account.

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Alternet: Bernie Sanders Makes a Powerful Case for Continuing the Revolution—Under a Clinton Administration

Former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders offered a compelling argument this week to those of his supporters still hesitant about a Hillary Clinton presidency. He explained that the success of the revolution relies not on who is president, but on the people continuing to fight for progressive ideals. [...]

"There was a significant coming together between the two campaigns and we produced, by far, the most progressive platform in the history of the Democratic Party,” Sanders said at the Democratic National Convention in July. “Our job now is to see that platform implemented by a Democratic Senate, a Democratic House and a Hillary Clinton presidency. And I am going to do everything I can to make that happen.” [...]

“I want to see Clinton become president,” Sanders continued. “And the day after that, I and the progressive members of Congress, and hopefully millions of other people will say, President-elect Clinton, here is the Democratic National platform, it is a progressive document. We are going to be introducing legislation piece by piece by piece—on trade, on raising the minimum wage, on making public colleges and universities tuition-free, on a Medicare-for-all single-payer program, on rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure.”

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The Intercept: Major New Court Ruling Says “Even The President” Can’t Declare Torture Lawful

IN A ROBUST RULING in favor of Abu Ghraib detainees, an appellate court ruled Friday that torture is such a clear violation of the law that it is “beyond the power of even the president to declare such conduct lawful.”

The ruling from a unanimous panel of judges on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstates a lawsuit against a military contractor for its role in the torture of four men at the notorious prison in Iraq.

Last June, a district court ruled that a “cloud of ambiguity” surrounds the definition of torture, and that despite anti-torture laws, the decision to torture was a “political question” that could not be judged by courts.That ruling echoed the widely discredited legal theories of the Bush administration, which argued that the war on terror gave the president the inherent authority to indefinitely detain and torture terror suspects, and conduct mass surveillance on Americans’ international communications.

But the Fourth Circuit soundly rejected that theory, saying that the United States has clear laws against torturing detainees that apply to the executive branch.

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Politico: Mass transit takes the lead in connecting up

Big data like this allows TfL to regulate intervals between buses, ending that bane of commuters: long waits followed by clumps of buses. It also helps cut pollution — a key election pledge of Mayor Sadiq Khan. TfL does this by making sure buses keep moving instead of idling in traffic, spewing out CO2. It will soon also tell passengers when the air is particularly bad via onboard screens.

Reed said traffic lights at 2,500 intersections are now equipped with sensors that receive a short-wave signal from an approaching bus. During the 2012 Olympics, London tested a system that kept lights green for traffic in and out of the Olympic village. In all, the city already has more than 7,000 sensors out on roads. [...]

The next stage for traffic light communication is adding the ability to determine how full each bus is, Reed said. This would prioritize packed buses while holding empty ones back to pick up more commuters. TfL is already working on a system that uses onboard cameras to determine how many seats are free for display to boarding passengers; it’s only a matter of time before that data is transmitted too. [...]

Daimler ran a self-driving bus with passengers on a 20-kilometer stretch of road this summer between Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport and the city of Haarlem. The key to success was having a dedicated lane reserved for buses, reducing the risk of collision with other traffic.

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FiveThirtyEight: The Weird Economics Of Ikea

Marston echoed this empirical finding. “On average, the prices would go down, from year to year, 1 percent overall,” she said. “Some prices could go down with a huge jump. Other prices may increase slightly. But overall, year on year on year on year, we’re trying to reduce prices.”

Some mysteries persist. One is the company’s international pricing discrepancies. “They’ll sometimes reduce prices in the United States and make them go up in Canada, which makes even Canadians mad,” Baxter said. (The horror.) Marston said each country has “its own unique competition profile” that influences how the company prices its goods.

Some of these oddities may be explained by one principle: Ikea is sui generis — in a class by itself. The company navigates largely uncharted waters for traditional economic strictures. “Ikea continues to be nearly unique,” Baxter said. “I would’ve told you that they would have competitors all over the place by now, 15 years ago. I would’ve been horribly wrong. There’s only them.”

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