Colin Powell used a personal email system. The the difference is that he wiped it all and didn't retain anything, so he can ignore any FOIA requests or subpoena's. The mistake Clinton made was in retaining emails and turning them over to the government as required by law. If she'd wiped them, like Powell, Bush, Cheney, Rove, etc., it would have been illegal, but apparently not made the news.
The previous SoS's also used personal email accounts for non-classified information. And according to the FBI, none of the information in the emails was classified. What is going on now is that in response to the FOIA request they're reviewing the information and retroactively classifying a little of it. That's routine when FOIA requests are for sensitive information. But they're not making any accusation that Clinton did anything illegal or even unusual - that's coming from right-wing politicians, not law enforcement.
Note that she used a classified email system for classified emails, and a non-classified email system for non-classified emails. She didn't do everything through personal email.
Well, since primaries are also "winner takes all" they actually make the situation worse, not better. That is, if the district is gerrymandered so that one party is guaranteed to win, then only that party's primary matters, which is the case for 80% of districts in the US. This means that if the district is 45% Democrats and 55% Republicans, the Democrats' votes don't affect the election, so a block of the Republicans (27%) can determine the primary winner and thus the election.
For example, imagine three candidates: - Democrat with 45% of the vote - Republican1 with 30% of the vote - Republican2 with 25% of the vote
Correction: none of the emails were classified, or contained information that was classified. The process going on now is that the FBI is reviewing and retroactively classifying some previously unclassified information in order to make sure that what they deliver in responsive to an FOIA request is "clean" - a process that is routine with broad FOIA requests of sensitive information.
As for Bush, etc., not being wanted by any government, read http://www.esquire.com/news-po... . Admittedly a bit obscure, but it was a real trial, by a real government.
Well, from what I can tell, what she did was consistent with every previous Secretary of State with email, who used outside email systems for non-classified emails. And none of the emails on the server were classified while she was using the email server - the entire debate around "classified emails" is simply the government retroactively classifying some of the emails before giving them out in response to an FOIA request, which is the kind of review process that they do around any FOIA request for sensitive information.
I'm not saying that running government business through a private server is a good idea. But if you're going to be outraged over Clinton doing it when it was routine and consistent with previous people with the same job, your problem isn't about email security, it's about Clinton. You sure didn't hear the same people complaining when Bush/Cheney (illegally) shut down the white house's email archiving system (required by law) and purged all emails for the white house on the way out of office, to make sure that they couldn't be subject to an FOIA request or subpoena. Compared to that, what Clinton might have been bad, but it was legal and routine.
Actually, what Bush did was worse. He shut down the White House email system, which was secure and properly archived to comply with "sunshine" laws, and had the entire white house staff work in a new system that had no archiving, and which they wiped when he left office, destroying all white house emails in clear violation of the law. And which there was no investigation into, oddly enough.
The mistake that Hillary Clinton made was that she didn't wipe the server to destroy the evidence.
The US uses mandatory standardized testing more than any other country, in part because our system is very fragmented, with states and districts both having sets of tests. The result is that our kids spend weeks in just testing, taking typically 20 state and district tests each year (on top of the usual in-class testing that's actually of educational value). Contrast with Finland, arguably the most effective educational system on the planet, with essentially no standardized testing throughout education - there's one test at the end of high school. Though what's worse than the testing itself (in the US) is that the No Children Left Behind punishes schools quite harshly for low test scores (cutting funding, cutting teacher salaries, forcing firing staff, etc.), which basically forces the schools to spend months on test preparation instead of education. And, of course, once you make a test 'high stakes' it's no longer valid as an education measurement, because the high stakes distorts the process. For example, in Texas where the high stakes testing started, it turned out that the "Texas Miracle" of amazing test store improvements turned out to be entirely due to fraud by the school systems, as they did things like doing paperwork pretending to transfer all of the bad students out of the "good" schools to one "bad" school, so almost all school scores went up, and only one "bad" school was punished for failing. And, of course, there was more obvious cheating, like the school systems in Texas that had the teachers "correct" all of the wrong answers on the test sheets before sending them to be scored. And as NCLB went national, so did the fraud. And not to justify fraud, of course, but when the law says that if your kids don't hit an impossibly high threshold on a test of no educational value you have to fire half the teachers, well, schools have a lot of pressure to do anything you have to in order to save the kids from having their school destroyed, because their primary responsibility is to educate the kids.
You're right that Japan's educational system is heavily testing-driven and high-pressure. That's starting to change, as the pressure leads to astoundingly high rates of suicide and other social problems, which they're starting realize is a bad sacrifice to make just for economic success.
As for the 'gang' stuff, and the rather racist 'ebonics' comment, that's wrong, too. The largest determinant of student performance is parental income. Kids of poor whites are as bad off as poor blacks - when both parents are working crappy jobs just to survive, and can't spend time engaged with their kids, the kids' education suffers, whether that's in Harlem or Appalachia.
She spoke the truth, using a peculiar definition of "value". That is, once a work is in the public domain, the RIAA member companies lose their monopoly on the work, making it harder to make money by selling it. So if "value" is the same as "the people that pay my salary can't make money", she's telling the truth.:-)
Giving someone control over a "turtle" and commanding it to draw shapes is a great way to introduce to the idea of programming, because it's simple, visual, and fairly intuitive. That's true whether it was kids in the 90s or the President in the 10s.
There's lots of innovation in education. The problem is that it's only possible (in the US) outside of typical school settings, so it's research or on the internet. The schools are all heavily regulated to the point where they can't innovate, or even allow individual teachers to innovate, until the "innovation" makes its way through a fragmented, highly political, expensive approval process.
There are companies that make systems that do this. But it takes a long time to make improvements in education in the field. One huge impediment in the US is that every state has its won curriculum and laws regulating what must be taught and how, and decisions are made in a very fragmented and political way (state, city, individual school) so the market is very fragmented with incredible friction, making it an extremely slow business to get improvements not just technically implemented but aligned to state requirements, and through the adoption process. And schools in the US are so test-driven that they typically punish teachers who veer from the approved curriculum and resources, so only a few of the best teachers are willing to try anything new or different. So while there are many people trying to innovate in education in the US, even an attempt requires investing millions of dollars of effort over many years.
While "no child left behind" might sound noble, the way it was written and funded, it's been incredibly destructive to education in the US. It's been tweaked to avoid complete destruction, but schools would be way better off if they were allowed to educate kids to their potential instead of just focusing on getting everyone to pass the test. Because schools now aren't rewarded for kids who excel, they're just punished for any kids who fail, so schools allocated resources to keeping a few kids from failing instead of maximizing educational outcome across all students.
The IRS agent's email (on her laptop) was physically lost when the hard drive crashed, long before any accusations flew, and the IT folks were unable to recover the drive. They later recreated her emails, by retrieving emails for everyone else who she exchanged emails with, or were cc'd on emails to or from her. That took a long time, because it involved scanning archived emails to find the ones that were relevant. When that was done, they handed them over for discovery. And, amazingly enough, no "smoking gun". But they did get to was a few $millions blowing smoke...
Keep in mind that the previous several SoS's also ran private email servers. So it's not a new issue - the only difference is that this SoS is now running for President, so it's politically useful to attack her as if she'd done something that was both legal and routine at the time.
Correction: none of the emails were "marked classified", and it was sent to a known non-government email server, so the recipient can presume that it's not classified, and treat it as such. The FBI reviewed and determined that information in some of the emails was classified. That's bad, of course, but I'd say that the sender is who screwed up - if they took classified information, and sent it as unclassified to an "insecure" email server, they are the ones that crossed the line.
So now let's dig into all of the email from the previous SoS's, who also used private email servers, and see if we can find any information that turns out to be classified.:-)
Probably the same reason that the entire top layer of Bush Jr. administration did, and previous Secretary of States did - the official servers are archived and discoverable via FOIA requests, and they wanted to avoid that. Which isn't a good reason, of course. Of course, it was legal for the SoS to do so, and illegal for the White House. So do you see the same people who are going after Clinton's emails also going after Bush, Rove, etc.? Not yet...
Wow, that's not at all how taxi companies work. The way they work is that they have a local monopoly, and they use the law to eliminate competition and to regulate pricing so they don't have any price or quality competition.
It's not at all for the benefit of drivers. Drivers for taxi companies take all of the financial risk - they have to pay hundreds of dollars a day to be allowed to drive the car, hoping that they'll collect enough fares to pay off the dispatcher and then, if they are lucky, make a profit. So the taxi companies make guaranteed huge profits no matter what happens, but the drivers can (and often do) make less than their daily fee, they not only don't make money, they have to pay the taxi company to work for them. So when people complain about Uber taking 20%, keep in mind that it's still a way better deal than a traditional taxi company. And the taxi drivers often aren't employees, either - they are independent contractors, with no benefits. The only employees at many taxi companies are the dispatchers.
So why was it that I wanted to pay 2-3x higher rates for terrible service again?
Good point. There's no reason that taxi companies can't compete with Uber. The problem is that they don't want to have to compete - if they can charge 2-3x as much for crappy service, by manipulating the market to make competition illegal, why would they want to cut prices or improve service? That's why Uber's crushing them.
Correction - "In a medallion market, the benefits go to the governement" is incorrect. The government issued a fixed number of medallions, but in the many decades since then, the medallions are sold privately, so the money for the medallion goes to the sellers of the medallions. Of course, much more money goes to the current owners of the medallions (who can charge inflated prices to riders, and really screw the drivers, because the market is artificially limited and controlled by the taxi companies).
In NYC, the theoretical argument for limited numbers of medallions is that otherwise there would be "too many" taxis. In practice, Uber cars aren't overcrowding the roads - if anything, people are using Uber instead of driving, reducing the number of cars on the road. And certainly the quality of service is better, and the prices lower, than the taxi company offerings. Drivers like Uber better, too - as much as riders hate taxi companies, drivers hate them more.
My point was that the article left out critical information - that the company was doing extremely well as a business. Which, of course, undermined the author's thesis.
As to the question of the cause of their booming business is, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Other articles about the company report that the boom came as a result of the CEO taking a pay cut and giving everyone else raises. So whether it's due to employee's high morale, positive press, or customers wanting to support a company that treats employees fairly, it's hard to say (since they're all going on at once, it's hard to prove individual cause and effect) but it's a bit academic - in any case, the company is booming because of the CEO's decision. And that all seems relevant to a story attempting to report that the company is "troubled".
Don't leave out that the business is booming, doing much more business than before, and getting tons of applications from high quality candidates attracted by the higher wages.
So yes, the transition might be bumpy. But nobody's salary went down, so they're all making at least what they agreed to for their job. It seems weird to me that people are angry that while they got a raise, but so did lower paid workers, so they aren't making as much more than the other guy as they used to.
Developers could and did write apps for the Apple Watch at launch. Admittedly with a limited programming model (tethered, very similar to the limitations of the early Pebble SDK).
As to why people buy devices that don't run "apps", well, there are hundreds of millions of examples - the iPhone, most "feature phones", iPods, GPSs, and of course, almost all watches. If a device does what people want without additional apps, they'll buy it.:-)
Personally, I think the worse product name I've seen was WinCE. Really, did _nobody_ look at the name before they shipped it? At least Mac OS X (Mac O'Sex) is amusing...
Also, keep in mind that this happened on a train. Trains don't use electricity from a power company, they generate their own electricity, to keep the engine running, and a separate generator for the lights, PA system, etc. So the "cost" of someone using a tiny amount of electricity is zero, because the generator is always running, etc. And the value of letting people use the available electricity is high, because their phone isn't dead when they get where they are going.
Trains in the US have had electrical plugs at all seats (for long-distance trains) for a decade or more. They don't bother on subways and short commuter lines because people aren't on them very long (and they tend to run on external power).
Negotiating a treaty with a country is not the same as "siding with" them. It just means that the countries that sign the treaty agreed on a set of rules of behavior. The alternative to a treaty with Iran isn't "siding against" them, it is having no agreed on rules of behavior, in which case their behavior is unconstrained. So would you rather Iran operate under an international agreement under which they can't have a nuclear program, backed up by inspections and penalties, or would you have them allowed to do anything they want, with no inspections?
That whole analogy makes sense. People would eat your hypothetical free hamburgers because everyone needs to eat and has a choice of what to eat, and free food would displace paid-for food. But building more roads doesn't make people drive more, other than if the road fills a real need, because people aren't going to drive places they don't want to go just because there's a road there now. And people aren't going to drive on the new road because it's free, because nearly all roads are free, and because driving places you don't want to go has negative value.
So your conclusion is exactly wrong - if a new road is built and it immediately fills up with traffic it means precisely that there was high demand for that road. If the were no demand for people to travel that route, it would be a new, empty road.
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Colin Powell used a personal email system. The the difference is that he wiped it all and didn't retain anything, so he can ignore any FOIA requests or subpoena's. The mistake Clinton made was in retaining emails and turning them over to the government as required by law. If she'd wiped them, like Powell, Bush, Cheney, Rove, etc., it would have been illegal, but apparently not made the news.
The previous SoS's also used personal email accounts for non-classified information. And according to the FBI, none of the information in the emails was classified. What is going on now is that in response to the FOIA request they're reviewing the information and retroactively classifying a little of it. That's routine when FOIA requests are for sensitive information. But they're not making any accusation that Clinton did anything illegal or even unusual - that's coming from right-wing politicians, not law enforcement.
Note that she used a classified email system for classified emails, and a non-classified email system for non-classified emails. She didn't do everything through personal email.
Well, since primaries are also "winner takes all" they actually make the situation worse, not better. That is, if the district is gerrymandered so that one party is guaranteed to win, then only that party's primary matters, which is the case for 80% of districts in the US. This means that if the district is 45% Democrats and 55% Republicans, the Democrats' votes don't affect the election, so a block of the Republicans (27%) can determine the primary winner and thus the election.
For example, imagine three candidates:
- Democrat with 45% of the vote
- Republican1 with 30% of the vote
- Republican2 with 25% of the vote
Correction: none of the emails were classified, or contained information that was classified. The process going on now is that the FBI is reviewing and retroactively classifying some previously unclassified information in order to make sure that what they deliver in responsive to an FOIA request is "clean" - a process that is routine with broad FOIA requests of sensitive information.
As for Bush, etc., not being wanted by any government, read http://www.esquire.com/news-po... . Admittedly a bit obscure, but it was a real trial, by a real government.
Well, from what I can tell, what she did was consistent with every previous Secretary of State with email, who used outside email systems for non-classified emails. And none of the emails on the server were classified while she was using the email server - the entire debate around "classified emails" is simply the government retroactively classifying some of the emails before giving them out in response to an FOIA request, which is the kind of review process that they do around any FOIA request for sensitive information.
I'm not saying that running government business through a private server is a good idea. But if you're going to be outraged over Clinton doing it when it was routine and consistent with previous people with the same job, your problem isn't about email security, it's about Clinton. You sure didn't hear the same people complaining when Bush/Cheney (illegally) shut down the white house's email archiving system (required by law) and purged all emails for the white house on the way out of office, to make sure that they couldn't be subject to an FOIA request or subpoena. Compared to that, what Clinton might have been bad, but it was legal and routine.
Actually, what Bush did was worse. He shut down the White House email system, which was secure and properly archived to comply with "sunshine" laws, and had the entire white house staff work in a new system that had no archiving, and which they wiped when he left office, destroying all white house emails in clear violation of the law. And which there was no investigation into, oddly enough.
The mistake that Hillary Clinton made was that she didn't wipe the server to destroy the evidence.
I think so, too.
Nope.
The US uses mandatory standardized testing more than any other country, in part because our system is very fragmented, with states and districts both having sets of tests. The result is that our kids spend weeks in just testing, taking typically 20 state and district tests each year (on top of the usual in-class testing that's actually of educational value). Contrast with Finland, arguably the most effective educational system on the planet, with essentially no standardized testing throughout education - there's one test at the end of high school. Though what's worse than the testing itself (in the US) is that the No Children Left Behind punishes schools quite harshly for low test scores (cutting funding, cutting teacher salaries, forcing firing staff, etc.), which basically forces the schools to spend months on test preparation instead of education. And, of course, once you make a test 'high stakes' it's no longer valid as an education measurement, because the high stakes distorts the process. For example, in Texas where the high stakes testing started, it turned out that the "Texas Miracle" of amazing test store improvements turned out to be entirely due to fraud by the school systems, as they did things like doing paperwork pretending to transfer all of the bad students out of the "good" schools to one "bad" school, so almost all school scores went up, and only one "bad" school was punished for failing. And, of course, there was more obvious cheating, like the school systems in Texas that had the teachers "correct" all of the wrong answers on the test sheets before sending them to be scored. And as NCLB went national, so did the fraud. And not to justify fraud, of course, but when the law says that if your kids don't hit an impossibly high threshold on a test of no educational value you have to fire half the teachers, well, schools have a lot of pressure to do anything you have to in order to save the kids from having their school destroyed, because their primary responsibility is to educate the kids.
You're right that Japan's educational system is heavily testing-driven and high-pressure. That's starting to change, as the pressure leads to astoundingly high rates of suicide and other social problems, which they're starting realize is a bad sacrifice to make just for economic success.
As for the 'gang' stuff, and the rather racist 'ebonics' comment, that's wrong, too. The largest determinant of student performance is parental income. Kids of poor whites are as bad off as poor blacks - when both parents are working crappy jobs just to survive, and can't spend time engaged with their kids, the kids' education suffers, whether that's in Harlem or Appalachia.
She spoke the truth, using a peculiar definition of "value". That is, once a work is in the public domain, the RIAA member companies lose their monopoly on the work, making it harder to make money by selling it. So if "value" is the same as "the people that pay my salary can't make money", she's telling the truth. :-)
Giving someone control over a "turtle" and commanding it to draw shapes is a great way to introduce to the idea of programming, because it's simple, visual, and fairly intuitive. That's true whether it was kids in the 90s or the President in the 10s.
There's lots of innovation in education. The problem is that it's only possible (in the US) outside of typical school settings, so it's research or on the internet. The schools are all heavily regulated to the point where they can't innovate, or even allow individual teachers to innovate, until the "innovation" makes its way through a fragmented, highly political, expensive approval process.
There are companies that make systems that do this. But it takes a long time to make improvements in education in the field. One huge impediment in the US is that every state has its won curriculum and laws regulating what must be taught and how, and decisions are made in a very fragmented and political way (state, city, individual school) so the market is very fragmented with incredible friction, making it an extremely slow business to get improvements not just technically implemented but aligned to state requirements, and through the adoption process. And schools in the US are so test-driven that they typically punish teachers who veer from the approved curriculum and resources, so only a few of the best teachers are willing to try anything new or different. So while there are many people trying to innovate in education in the US, even an attempt requires investing millions of dollars of effort over many years.
While "no child left behind" might sound noble, the way it was written and funded, it's been incredibly destructive to education in the US. It's been tweaked to avoid complete destruction, but schools would be way better off if they were allowed to educate kids to their potential instead of just focusing on getting everyone to pass the test. Because schools now aren't rewarded for kids who excel, they're just punished for any kids who fail, so schools allocated resources to keeping a few kids from failing instead of maximizing educational outcome across all students.
The IRS agent's email (on her laptop) was physically lost when the hard drive crashed, long before any accusations flew, and the IT folks were unable to recover the drive. They later recreated her emails, by retrieving emails for everyone else who she exchanged emails with, or were cc'd on emails to or from her. That took a long time, because it involved scanning archived emails to find the ones that were relevant. When that was done, they handed them over for discovery. And, amazingly enough, no "smoking gun". But they did get to was a few $millions blowing smoke...
Keep in mind that the previous several SoS's also ran private email servers. So it's not a new issue - the only difference is that this SoS is now running for President, so it's politically useful to attack her as if she'd done something that was both legal and routine at the time.
Correction: none of the emails were "marked classified", and it was sent to a known non-government email server, so the recipient can presume that it's not classified, and treat it as such. The FBI reviewed and determined that information in some of the emails was classified. That's bad, of course, but I'd say that the sender is who screwed up - if they took classified information, and sent it as unclassified to an "insecure" email server, they are the ones that crossed the line.
So now let's dig into all of the email from the previous SoS's, who also used private email servers, and see if we can find any information that turns out to be classified. :-)
Probably the same reason that the entire top layer of Bush Jr. administration did, and previous Secretary of States did - the official servers are archived and discoverable via FOIA requests, and they wanted to avoid that. Which isn't a good reason, of course. Of course, it was legal for the SoS to do so, and illegal for the White House. So do you see the same people who are going after Clinton's emails also going after Bush, Rove, etc.? Not yet...
Wow, that's not at all how taxi companies work. The way they work is that they have a local monopoly, and they use the law to eliminate competition and to regulate pricing so they don't have any price or quality competition.
It's not at all for the benefit of drivers. Drivers for taxi companies take all of the financial risk - they have to pay hundreds of dollars a day to be allowed to drive the car, hoping that they'll collect enough fares to pay off the dispatcher and then, if they are lucky, make a profit. So the taxi companies make guaranteed huge profits no matter what happens, but the drivers can (and often do) make less than their daily fee, they not only don't make money, they have to pay the taxi company to work for them. So when people complain about Uber taking 20%, keep in mind that it's still a way better deal than a traditional taxi company. And the taxi drivers often aren't employees, either - they are independent contractors, with no benefits. The only employees at many taxi companies are the dispatchers.
So why was it that I wanted to pay 2-3x higher rates for terrible service again?
Good point. There's no reason that taxi companies can't compete with Uber. The problem is that they don't want to have to compete - if they can charge 2-3x as much for crappy service, by manipulating the market to make competition illegal, why would they want to cut prices or improve service? That's why Uber's crushing them.
Correction - "In a medallion market, the benefits go to the governement" is incorrect. The government issued a fixed number of medallions, but in the many decades since then, the medallions are sold privately, so the money for the medallion goes to the sellers of the medallions. Of course, much more money goes to the current owners of the medallions (who can charge inflated prices to riders, and really screw the drivers, because the market is artificially limited and controlled by the taxi companies).
In NYC, the theoretical argument for limited numbers of medallions is that otherwise there would be "too many" taxis. In practice, Uber cars aren't overcrowding the roads - if anything, people are using Uber instead of driving, reducing the number of cars on the road. And certainly the quality of service is better, and the prices lower, than the taxi company offerings. Drivers like Uber better, too - as much as riders hate taxi companies, drivers hate them more.
My point was that the article left out critical information - that the company was doing extremely well as a business. Which, of course, undermined the author's thesis.
As to the question of the cause of their booming business is, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Other articles about the company report that the boom came as a result of the CEO taking a pay cut and giving everyone else raises. So whether it's due to employee's high morale, positive press, or customers wanting to support a company that treats employees fairly, it's hard to say (since they're all going on at once, it's hard to prove individual cause and effect) but it's a bit academic - in any case, the company is booming because of the CEO's decision. And that all seems relevant to a story attempting to report that the company is "troubled".
Don't leave out that the business is booming, doing much more business than before, and getting tons of applications from high quality candidates attracted by the higher wages.
So yes, the transition might be bumpy. But nobody's salary went down, so they're all making at least what they agreed to for their job. It seems weird to me that people are angry that while they got a raise, but so did lower paid workers, so they aren't making as much more than the other guy as they used to.
A good writeup is at http://www.forbes.com/sites/mi... .
Developers could and did write apps for the Apple Watch at launch. Admittedly with a limited programming model (tethered, very similar to the limitations of the early Pebble SDK).
As to why people buy devices that don't run "apps", well, there are hundreds of millions of examples - the iPhone, most "feature phones", iPods, GPSs, and of course, almost all watches. If a device does what people want without additional apps, they'll buy it. :-)
Personally, I think the worse product name I've seen was WinCE. Really, did _nobody_ look at the name before they shipped it? At least Mac OS X (Mac O'Sex) is amusing...
Also, keep in mind that this happened on a train. Trains don't use electricity from a power company, they generate their own electricity, to keep the engine running, and a separate generator for the lights, PA system, etc. So the "cost" of someone using a tiny amount of electricity is zero, because the generator is always running, etc. And the value of letting people use the available electricity is high, because their phone isn't dead when they get where they are going.
Trains in the US have had electrical plugs at all seats (for long-distance trains) for a decade or more. They don't bother on subways and short commuter lines because people aren't on them very long (and they tend to run on external power).
Negotiating a treaty with a country is not the same as "siding with" them. It just means that the countries that sign the treaty agreed on a set of rules of behavior. The alternative to a treaty with Iran isn't "siding against" them, it is having no agreed on rules of behavior, in which case their behavior is unconstrained. So would you rather Iran operate under an international agreement under which they can't have a nuclear program, backed up by inspections and penalties, or would you have them allowed to do anything they want, with no inspections?
"As the population gets older, there will be more driving going on - not less."
Nope, there's data. Old people drive nearly have as many miles per capita as middle-aged people.
Average Annual Miles per Driver by Age Group
Age Male Female Total
16-19 8,206 6,873 7,624
20-34 17,976 12,004 15,098
35-54 18,858 11,464 15,291
55-64 15,859 7,780 11,972
65+ 10,304 4,785 7,646
Average 16,550 10,142 13,476
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/o...
That whole analogy makes sense. People would eat your hypothetical free hamburgers because everyone needs to eat and has a choice of what to eat, and free food would displace paid-for food. But building more roads doesn't make people drive more, other than if the road fills a real need, because people aren't going to drive places they don't want to go just because there's a road there now. And people aren't going to drive on the new road because it's free, because nearly all roads are free, and because driving places you don't want to go has negative value.
So your conclusion is exactly wrong - if a new road is built and it immediately fills up with traffic it means precisely that there was high demand for that road. If the were no demand for people to travel that route, it would be a new, empty road.