think on this.

Walmart often faces strong local opposition when trying to build a new store. Opponents often claim that Walmart lowers nearby housing prices. In this study we use over one million housing transactions located near 159 Walmarts that opened between 2000 and 2006 to test if the opening of a Walmart does indeed lower housing prices. Using a difference-in-differences specification, our estimates suggest that a new Walmart store actually increases housing prices by between 2 and 3 percent for houses located within 0.5 miles of the store and by 1 to 2 percent for houses located between 0.5 and 1 mile.

Hey, how bad do you want to feel right now? Do you want to feel bone-crushingly bad? Like all the way through? Well then you’re in luck! Here are the stories of a bunch of adorable New York City kids and how they are treated by the NYPD.

Here are some other likely effects on land use and commuting patterns:

• Greater density around suburban subway stations. Right now, suburban subway stations tend to be surrounded by a sea of parking lots in order to accomodate riders who live too far from the station to walk to it. And that’s unfortunate because massive parking lots deter developers from building high-density housing within walking distance of the station. Self-driving cars solve this problem by making taxi rental cheaper than car ownership. In a world of ubiquitous self-driving taxis, there’s no reason to provide any parking spaces on the valuable real estate near a subway stop. So subway ridership is likely to go up even as more land is opened up within walking distance of suburban subway stations for apartments and businesses.
• Virtually no parking spaces. Matt’s right about this, but I think he’s understating the phenomenon. It’s likely that once all cars are self-driving, we’ll barely need any off-street parking spaces at all. During peak periods, virtually all cars will be on the roads driving people around. During off-peak periods, cars will still be on the roads, they’ll just pull over to the side of the road and stop. As Brad Templeton points out in the middle of the night cars could double- or triple-park on 6- or 8-lane boulevards, park in front of driveways, and so forth. This won’t be a problem because they’ll be able to instantly get out of the way if they’re blocking the path of another car. So the only people who need off-street parking will be rich people who insist on spending extra for a private car rather than going the more affordable taxi route.
• Higher road density. One of the benefits of self-driving cars will be that people can take exactly the right vehicle for each trip. Once likely consequence is that small, light vehicles will become viable for use in urban areas. And given that most cars at rush hour have a single commuter in them, that will create a market for half-width, single-occupant cars. These cars, combined with the superior driving skills of computers, will make it possible for two cars to drive side-by-side in a single lane.

  Also, the superior reaction times of self-driving cars, and their ability to warn each wirelessly about impending stops, means that self-driving cars will be able to safely maintain smaller following distances than human drivers can. Both of these effects will increase the throughput of each traffic lane, reducing congestion and making driving more attractive relative to mass transit.

• More nimble “buses.” Current bus systems are designed to economize on one of their most expensive components: the human driver. Contemporary buses are enormous and run infrequently. At off-peak times, they’re almost empty. Buses that drive themselves will be dramatically cheaper to operate, which means that we’ll be able to afford many more of them. Instead of a full-size bus stopping every 15 minutes, it’ll be feasible to have a van stop every 3 minutes. And because each mini-bus will pick up fewer passengers, travel time will be lower.

The Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs have repeatedly promised to do a better job of handling the medical evaluations of wounded and disabled service members. Instead, they are doing worse.

The processing of disability cases is getting slower, not faster. Efforts to ensure a “seamless transition” out of the military are falling short. Men and women are languishing without treatment, struggling to readjust to civilian lives as they cope with post-traumatic stress disorder, brain injuries, drug addiction and other service-related afflictions. The system that should be producing reliable results is mired in delays and dissatisfaction.

A new report by the Government Accountability Office lays out the problem. In 2007, the two departments began combining their separate, complicated and cumbersome processes for disability evaluations into one system. The system is now in place worldwide, and officials from both departments promised the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee a year ago that it had become “more transparent, consistent and expeditious.”

But the accountability office found otherwise. It said processing times for disability cases had actually gone up — to an average of 394 days for active-duty troops and 420 days for National Guard members and reservists in 2011, well over the departments’ goals of 295 and 305 days. In fiscal year 2010, 32 percent of active-duty troops and 37 percent of Guard and Reserve troops completed evaluations and received benefits within established timelines. Last year, those figures fell to a dismal 19 percent and 18 percent.

The illegal trade in kidneys has risen to such a level that an estimated 10,000 black market operations involving purchased human organs now take place annually, or more than one an hour, World Health Organisation experts have revealed. Evidence collected by a worldwide network of doctors shows that traffickers are defying laws intended to curtail their activities and are cashing in on rising international demand for replacement kidneys driven by the increase in diabetes and other diseases. Patients, many of whom will go to China, India or Pakistan for surgery, can pay up to $200,000 (nearly £128,000) for a kidney to gangs who harvest organs from vulnerable, desperate people, sometimes for as little as $5,000.