If you usually ring in the holiday with a freshly cut evergreen, your reality this Christmas could very well be a scrawny Charlie Brown tree instead — or you may wind up paying more for a lush Fraser fir.

This year, there is a tree shortage. Most growers blame the tightened supply on the Great Recession, says Valerie Bauerlein, who covered the story for The Wall Street Journal.

A decade ago, “we were in a global economic malaise,” Bauerlein tells NPR’s Michel Martin. “And Christmas tree growers couldn’t sell the trees that they had cut, and for the price that they had in them, so then they planted less.”

Christmas trees, as magical as they might seem, are still an agricultural crop. “Trees grow about a foot a year,” Bauerlein says. “So eight, 10 years later, there’s a shortage. There’s more demand [now] because the economy’s prospering. And there are fewer trees to meet that demand.” The total acreage in production has dropped at least 30 percent since the early 2000s, she says.

Even if you’ve seen plenty of trees in lots or in cut-your-own tree farms around your area this season, you’ll likely be paying more the farther you live from the biggest tree-producing states. Oregon and North Carolina now face reduced selection and higher prices, Bauerlein says.

There is also been a movement of growers exiting the business. In recent years, “you also saw a lot of dropout of growers themselves, especially smaller growers, in western North Carolina — one of the main producers” of trees, Bauerlein says. “You’re also seeing fewer growers and [less] acreage in Oregon, which is the biggest producer; they account for about 30 percent of the market.” A lot of growers in Oregon are turning to grapes for wine and, a smaller number, to cannabis amid the booming marijuana industry, she says.

The cost of a Christmas tree has more than doubled since 2008, according to data from the National Christmas Tree Association; last year, the average retail value for a fresh-cut tree was $74.70.

This year, Bauerlein says, “it’s the high-end trees that are really coveted: The Fraser firs out of Oregon that are tougher to find, especially at the height of 8 feet or above.”

If this crop complication is dimming your holiday spirits, you can still break out some pine-scented candles, opt for an artificial tree — or jump on an Instagram-friendly trend to get the pine without the needles: Particularly in apartments and smaller spaces, some people have taken to decorating pineapples.

Lawrence Wu and Natalie Winston produced and edited the audio of this story.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Republicans call their tax bill the Tax Cut and Jobs Act. But critics say maybe it should have been named the Tax Cut and Robots Act.

That’s because it doesn’t create new tax incentives that specifically encourage companies to hire workers and create jobs, some employers and economists say. But it does expand incentives for companies to buy robots and machines that replace workers.

Republicans say that lowering taxes will boost the economy and spur job creation. But critics say that the tax legislation would create an imbalance favoring machines over workers.

“I think they really need to re-look at the name [of the bill] and add the missing component of the worker,” says Carl Pasciuto, president of Custom Group, a high tech manufacturing company in Woburn, Mass.

His factory floor is full of machines that look kind of like enclosed ski gondolas. Inside them, oil is being sprayed on blocks of metal as automated robotic cutting tools zip around shaping the aluminum or steel into precision parts for nuclear submarines, jet planes, and a range of other applications.

There are many more machines here than actual workers. And under the emerging tax bill (there are two versions — one in the House, one in the Senate), companies would have incentives to buy more.

For one thing, they could write the full value of the equipment off their taxes right away.

Pasciuto says he’s definitely OK with that. “Absolutely. We’re always happy to get any break we can get,” he says.

But Pasciuto says he needs well-trained workers more than he needs equipment. “The equipment is readily available. The workforce isn’t,” he says.

Pasciuto says he has positions that he can’t fill because he can’t find skilled workers. So he’s sometimes forced to buy machines to do the work.

But he says he already has a training facility at his factory. Pasciuto says he and other employers would definitely take advantage of a tax incentive to train workers and it would create more jobs.

“I think that the federal government really needs to look at what they put in the bill and even it out from an equipment side to a training side as well,” Pasciuto says.

And some labor economists agree. Daron Acemoglu is an economist at MIT who researches automation and robots and their impact on the labor market. He says automation is often a good thing. It can increase productivity and be an important part of keeping the U.S. economy competitive.

But, he says, “the problem is when you subsidize heavily the adoption of machines instead of people.”

Then you’re putting your thumb on the scale against workers, Acemoglu says.

He says the Republican tax bills would do that. And here’s how. Suppose a business could buy a machine to replace three workers, but there’s no great cost savings. “That means that machine is not a great machine,” Acemoglu says. “It’s fine, but it’s marginal.”

So if the tax policy was neutral, the business probably wouldn’t buy the machine and it would keep the workers employed. But Acemoglu says even the current law favors machines, and the Republican tax bills tip the scales even more. So if you buy the machine, you’ll get “a huge handout from the government,” he says.

Like Pasciuto, Acemoglu would like to see incentives for hiring and training.

“To balance the scales it would be good to encourage firms to invest in their workers,” Acemoglu says. Germany “has invested much more in robots than we have,” he says. But it’s done it in a way “that still has kept employment growing in the manufacturing sector.”

Acemoglu says building hiring and training incentives into the tax bill could have helped push the U.S. more in that direction.

Gavin Ekins, a research economist with the conservative leaning Tax Foundation, says it’s OK that the scales are tipped toward machines. “In the long run it’s better for the economy,” he says.

Ekins says some machines kill jobs, but others create jobs. If you buy a backhoe, for example, people have to build it and someone has to drive it. And he says incentives for training programs would be great to have down the road if Congress would design effective ones and pass them into law.

But he says there wasn’t time to devise good incentives for training workers in this legislation.

Ekins does agree with Acemoglu on one thing. The House version of the bill would drastically raise taxes on many graduate students and workers who get free tuition.

And he says in an economy that needs a better-skilled workforce, “taxing the benefit of getting a free education — this is something that really shouldn’t be taxed.”

Ekins hopes the Senate version wins out on that point.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Editor’s note: This story includes explicit language describing alleged sexual assaults.

Bryan Singer, the director best known for the X-Men series of films, is being sued for allegedly raping a 17-year-old boy during a party 14 years ago.

Singer has denied the accusation.

In a complaint filed in Superior Court of the State of Washington for King County on Thursday, plaintiff Cesar Sanchez-Guzman says that he met Singer in 2003 at a party aboard a yacht owned by technology investor Lester Waters, who the complaint says “frequently hosted parties for young gay males in the Seattle area.”

Guzman alleges that Singer, while giving him a tour of the yacht, lured him into the yacht’s master stateroom, shut the door and demanded oral sex.

When Cesar refused, “Singer forced him into acts of oral and anal sex,” according to the complaint. Cesar says he repeatedly pleaded for Singer to stop.

“Later … Singer approached Cesar and told him that he was a producer in Hollywood and that he could help Cesar get into acting as long as Cesar never said anything about the incident,” according to the complaint. “He then told Cesar that no one would believe him if he ever reported the incident, and that he could hire people who are capable of ruining someone’s reputation.”

Guzman says the alleged incident left him with “severe psychological, mental and emotional injuries.”

The latest revelations add to a growing list of charges of misconduct in Hollywood in the wake of those against producer Harvey Weinstein. However, the accounts of misconduct extend beyond Hollywood and have engulfed various media outlets, including NPR.

The director’s attorney Andrew Brettler said in a statement that his client “categorically denies these allegations and will vehemently defend this lawsuit to the very end.” Brettler also threatened to file a malicious prosecution lawsuit against Guzman.

Singer has been the subject of several sexual abuse and sexual assault accusations in the past, but each of them was dismissed.

On Monday, Singer was fired by Fox from the Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. Variety reports that his dismissal was “due to repeated failures to show up on the set” and that he’s been replaced by director Dexter Fletcher.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

High-ranking U.S.-based Volkswagen executive, Oliver Schmidt, has been sentenced to seven years in prison and ordered to pay a $400,000 fine for his part in a decadelong diesel-emissions cheating scandal.

Schmidt was the chief of Volkswagen’s engineering and environmental office in Michigan. In August, he pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to defraud the federal government and violation of the Clean Air Act by participating in a scheme to circumvent federal emissions tests with rigged devices in diesel cars. Federal regulators uncovered the plot in 2015.

Volkswagen already has admitted guilt to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, customs violations, obstruction of justice, as well as violation of the Clean Air Act. The German company has paid more than $20 billion in fines and settlements.

In a letter to U.S. District Judge Sean Cox of Detroit, Schmidt acknowledged his guilt. Reading a written statement in court, Schmidt broke down saying, “I made bad decisions and for that I am sorry.”

Federal prosecutors also have charged eight other current or former Volkswagen executives. As The New York Times reports:

“But most of the people suspected of taking part in a conspiracy to defraud United States regulators are out of reach of American justice in Germany, which normally does not extradite its own citizens. Mr. Schmidt may well turn out to suffer the harshest punishment for the emissions fraud even though he was not by any means the only participant or the highest ranking.”

Schmidt was arrested in January while vacationing in Miami with his wife.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Then he got an idea, an awful idea. The Grinch got a wonderful, awful idea.

I know just what to do, the Grinch laughed in his throat. All it will take is a few keystrokes.

But of course he didn’t actually muse. Because the Grinch in this case is a bot. It’s automatic. It doesn’t snooze.

Online scammers with an arsenal of cyber bots are stealing Christmas by buying up the most popular toys of the season and selling them for a hefty markup on third-party sites such as Amazon and eBay.

While the demand for the hottest toys is particularly high this time of year, shoppers are competing against a growing army of bots. For years, scalpers have taken advantage of software robots to scoop up event tickets, but now scammers are employing the same tactics to cheat Christmas shoppers, says MSNBC anchor and economics correspondent Ali Velshi.

“Regular people could never buy them at face value,” he tells Here & Now’s Robin Young. “The idea that it was bots — scalpers using algorithms — to buy up all the tickets in the first place, and then sell them either via a third-party vendor or independently to people, and this has now moved its way into the hot holiday toy sales industry.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer is calling on retailers to crack down on “Grinch bots” who use complex software to identify the product page of a popular toy before it even goes on sale. The program rapidly purchases thousands of products before customers have time to buy them. Oh, the Whomanity!

“Grinch bots cannot be allowed to steal Christmas, or dollars, from the wallets of New Yorkers,” Schumer said. “Middle class folks save up — a little here, a little there — working to afford the hottest gifts of the season for their kids but ever-changing technology and its challenges are making that very difficult. It’s time we help restore an even playing field by blocking the bots.”

Velshi says consumers are encountering hundreds of percent markups over retail on these products. For instance, the must-have Fingerlings, the interactive animal-shaped toys, sell at a retail price of $14.99, but have been showing up on websites for as much as $1,000. The Super Nintendo NES Classic Edition, which is currently out of stock on most sites, is being sold for nearly $13,000 by third-party sellers.

Schumer wrote a letter to the National Retail Federation and the Retail Industry Leaders Association this week urging them to investigate infiltration of their members’ websites by these computer programs. Both retail associations agreed to heed the New York Democrat’s call.

“Retailers want to ensure that items purchased from their stores and online are purchased legitimately. The industry is committed to taking precautions to mitigate fraud and illegal transactions to ensure American consumers have a safe and secure holiday shopping experience,” Christin Fernandez, a spokesperson for the Retail Industry Leaders Association, said in a statement.

Last year, Congress tried to block cyber scalping by passing the Better Online Ticket Sales Act of 2016, but that law only applies to event tickets.

“There is simply no competition between a bot and even the most organized human,” Omri Iluz, co-founder and CEO of PerimeterX, a Silicon Valley-based startup that designs anti-bot technology, told Consumer Reports, adding that bots aggressively mine thousands of sites at hundreds of times per second, preparing to pounce when a product is launched.

Velshi says people should find out the retail price of a product before they begin shopping to avoid being scammed.

“The problem is these bots find out things are popular before people do themselves,” he says. “So by the time you’ve decided this is all the rage because you’ve heard about it from your kid’s friends or from someone else, it’s hard to” buy it.

While avoiding the “holiday who-be what-ee” may explain the appeal of online shops, Velshi says maybe this year, consider the store to keep away from bots.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Republicans say the tax-cutting overhaul being debated in Congress will jump-start the U.S. economy, leading to a lot more investment and hiring by companies.

But some economists say the tax plans — which would sharply cut corporate and business taxes and eliminate numerous deductions for individuals — come at precisely the wrong time. Lower taxes could also be undercut by Federal Reserve policymakers, who are gradually raising interest rates, they say.

Tax cuts can be a good way to stimulate the economy when growth is slowing down, by encouraging businesses and people to keep spending when their finances are growing tighter.

But the economy is in the midst of its longest postwar recovery on record, with an annual growth rate of 3.3 percent last quarter. The unemployment rate is down to 4.1 percent.

Economists often argue that during periods of growth like this, governments should be paring down debt, giving them more fiscal breathing room during the next recession.

“It’s always valuable to keep your powder dry, if you can, so you do have fiscal space if there is a downturn,” says former Fed governor Randall Kroszner, now a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

But the Republican tax cuts would create more than $1 trillion in debt over the next decade, according to Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation.

“I think the timing of this tax cut from the perspective of the deficit is completely upside down,” says Jared Bernstein, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

He adds, “When you get to this stage of recovery and you’re closing in on full employment, you absolutely want your deficit and debt to be coming down.”

There’s an even bigger, macroeconomic problem with pushing through tax cuts right now.

If tax cuts are done right, they can increase incentives for investment and lead to productivity growth, Kroszner says.

But they can also lead to higher inflation, which can spur the Fed to raise interest rates. “If it’s seen as something that’s just short term, the Fed is likely to offset that by making sure the economy doesn’t overheat and inflation doesn’t get too high,” Kroszner says.

That’s a real concern right now. To Fed policymakers, the economy is already at or near full employment. They’ve already raised rates twice this year and are widely expected to do so again this month.

While supporters say that tax cuts would boost growth, Fed officials may decide they amount to more stimulus than the economy needs.

“I think they would say we already have pretty much a fully employed economy. A boost to aggregate demand is not exactly what the doctor ordered at this point. So maybe we should offset some of it by raising interest rates faster,” says former Fed Vice Chairman Alan Blinder, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal last week, New York Fed President William Dudley said he supported efforts to make the tax code simpler, but he appeared to question the need for a tax cut.

“It would be a reasonable question to ask, is this the best time to apply fiscal stimulus, when the economy’s already close to full employment?” Dudley said. “It’s probably not the best time.”

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

There’s more than cars at an auto show.

Auto shows are not only a place for consumers but for vendors, executives, reporters, activists, investors and consumers. They are more like conventions. With 10,000 parts on a car, that means a lot of vendors.

This year’s LA Auto Show definitely had its stand out cars. Jeep redesigned the Wrangler. Volkswagen’s latest entry in the electric car world seems aimed at Tesla. Porsche’s fans were all abuzz about word of plug-in hybrid 911.

All these cars and concepts were cool, but there wasn’t some game-changing technology that was introduced to overtly change the world (car CEOs nowadays often ape the tech world bombast). Walk around the show and you’ll find some technology and advances that aren’t necessarily sexy but are changing the way we move around.

Baby you subscribe my car

Economists and sociologist have been talking about consumers beginning to prefer access instead of ownership. The newest car subscription services are the industry’s long-awaited answer to car sharing services. Book By Cadillac costs about $1,600 a month, including insurance and maintenance, and you can get any Cadillac. Book was introduced in New York this year, and is coming to Los Angeles, with a national launch pending.

Volvo announced its own service for its XC-40 crossover and there’s a similar service from the struggling Lincoln brand.

“Lincoln and Volvo’s moves to new vehicle subscription services are reflective of a broader shift we’ve been seeing across the industry as sales decline,” says Jessica Caldwell with Edmunds. Automakers “appear to be more open to exploring new business models.” It’s an attempt to make their brands stand out and keep more customers while also grabbing market share from the competition, she says.

ICE ICE baby: New twists on the internal combustion engine

As cool as the slew of hybrid, all-electric and other alternative fuel vehicles are, we still live in the world of the gasoline engine. While the internal combustion engine is the Rodney Dangerfield of the car world (“I get no respect!”), engineers continue extraordinary innovation.

Karl Brauer with Cox Automotive points to the Infiniti QX-50’s new variable compression engine as sign of the leaps being made. “It allows you to get more performance when you need it and more fuel savings,” he says.

In addition, there’s Mazda new compression-ignition engine, which represents a leap forward in fuel efficiency. Brauer says this innovation could keep the internal combustion engine around for a lot longer. “They keep making electric cars and even hybrid cars seem a little better and then that damn internal combustion engine evolves again,” he says. The constant innovation of the “boring” ICE is what keeps its lead “in terms of cost versus efficiency,” he adds.

Build a better map

As we look toward a world where computers drive cars, maps and map technology become more important. Google Maps, Microsoft and Tom Tom don’t just provide maps for your phone but for automakers and various other industries that need them.

One of the smaller companies that’s trying to change the mapping space is what3words. It creates addresses that make sense to both computers and humans.

“Think of how frustrating it is when you call an Uber and you spend 10 minutes trying to find each other,” says company executive Clare Jones. “Try to find Juarez Street in Mexico City,” she jokes. That’s because the city has more than 600 streets with that name.

The company has divided the world into a grid, with trillions of 10-foot squares. Each square gets a three-word name. “The computer wants to hear longitude and latitude, and people don’t think that way,” Jones says. The point of such services is to make it easier for the transition to autonomous cars.

My bicycle: Personal transport

As the big car companies’ race toward the electric and self-driving future, there’s growing competition for the personal transportation world. Think everything from skateboard to three-wheeler. There is intense demand for small personal conveyances. Companies such as Micro Kickboard, Razor USA, Propella Electric Bikes, and the foldable scooter Urb-B were some of the exhibitors.

Current motorcycles and mopeds use gas or diesel and often have lower fuel economy and high soot output which contributes to air pollution and greenhouse gases. These new electric alternatives could aid in cutting pollution in major cities around the globe.These companies are aiming at the what’s called “the second commute” — the trip from the train station to the office, for example.

These new vehicles currently appeal to the young, but they could help provide mobility or ease transportation for older and disabled people. The hope of many in this mini-industry is that as cars go autonomous the roads will get safer for smaller vehicles.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

There is no need to charter a sleigh pulled by reindeer for your air travel to holiday destinations after all. American Airlines and its pilots have worked out a deal to staff cockpits in late December after a scheduling snafu threatened to cancel thousands of flights.

Because of what the airline is calling “a processing error” in its scheduling system, American mistakenly allowed many more pilots to take time off over the holidays than it should have.

Capt. Dennis Tajer, who serves as spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association, told NPR earlier this week that many of his fellow pilots “went to their sons, daughters, husbands and wives and said, ‘Guess what? I’m off for Christmas! First time in 10 years!’ “

But it turned out to be too good to be true, and Tajer said more than 15,000 flights between Dec. 17 and Dec. 31 were without a captain, first officer or both assigned to fly the plane. He said the scheduling mess-up threatened to cancel many of the flights.

The airline tried to cover the scheduling error by staffing flights with reserve pilots and offering some pilots premium pay to work. But the union filed a grievance saying the airline’s efforts to restrict premium pay and trip trading for December flights violated terms of the pilots’ contract.

The timing of the snafu couldn’t have been worse, said transportation professor Joe Schwieterman of Chicago’s DePaul University. “You look at the holiday season and [full flights] and you throw this kind of problem into the mix and no doubt, travelers get nervous,” he said. “Many dread the crowds already without this lingering uncertainty.”

The world’s largest airline had a lot on the line, and not just because of the possibility of ruining holiday travel plans for thousands of occasional customers.

“American has a huge business traveler base that they need to keep happy,” said Schwieterman, adding that he expected the airline to “open the wallet to fix this the best they can.”

American apparently did just that. After a meeting Friday between union leadership and American’s senior management, they reached “an agreement in principle addressing our respective needs, and we have withdrawn our grievance,” the Allied Pilots Association said in a statement.

American Airlines thanked its pilots “who are doing their part to cover the holiday schedule and beyond.”

“We can assure our customers that among the many stresses of the season, worry about a canceled flight won’t be one of them,” the airline’s statement adds. “In short, if Santa is flying, so is American.”

Let’s block ads! (Why?)