Exclusive: Hands-On With the Tesla Model S 4.0

Tesla is pushing out its first major software update to Model S owners, finally giving Elon’s all-electric golden-child the infotainment features you’d expect of a $100,000 sports sedan.

This 4.0 release addresses what we found to be rather egregious oversights in an otherwise phenomenal vehicle. If your run-of-the-mill domestic econobox offers voice controls for music and navigation, how could a vehicle at the pinnacle of modern engineering come without it?

This update answers that question and a few more. And we got a chance to check it out.

Topping the list of updates is voice control, which is handled through an embedded 3G modem that connects to Google’s voice-recognition system. It’s limited to navigation, telephone and using Slacker Radio, but Tesla’s knocked its first attempt at voice commands out of the park. The process is far easier and more intuitive than most.

Depress the voice control button on the steering wheel, say “Navigate to 520 3rd Street, San Francisco” and release the button. Moments later the destination appears on the gorgeous 17-inch display. Tap the “navigate” button and you’ve got turn-by-turn directions. You’ve got one-shot commands for address (no more providing a city, then a street, then a number) and Google’s search functionality provides ultra-quick point-of-interest searches.

Approach the Model S with the key fob in your pocket and the handles automatically pop out

You also can dial up any station on Slacker Radio by simply saying “Play [artist] radio.” The response was near-instantaneous. This also works for calling contacts in your address book through a Bluetooth connected phone, but it doesn’t allow you to control any locally-stored music on your USB drive or smartphone. Tesla assures us that’s coming soon, and it wants to make navigating your contacts and music easier with a new alphabetical index. It’s something that should have been available from the start, but considering Tesla built this car from the ground up, you can understand why some things were pushed to the back burner.

The software update also corrects one of the coolest, but most pointless, tricks of the Model S — the auto-deploying door handles that pop out of the body. It was cool, but quickly lost its charm as we found ourselves reaching for a door handle that wasn’t there. That’s been rectified in 4.0; approach the Model S with the key fob in your pocket and the handles automatically pop out. Neato.

The two steering wheel knobs were another point of contention in our review; we felt drivers should be able to customize them. The left knob is set for audio volume, but would only allow you to pick a level between one and 11. That’s changed with multiple fractions of volume levels on the low end of the scale. More importantly, the right knob can now be switched from the temperature setting to the fan speed or even the sunroof control. Press the button once and the sunroof opens completely. Scroll the knob slowly and you can select any amount of opening to keep your perfectly quaffed hair muss-free.

Geekier enhancements include a graphical display that more accurately determines how much juice you have, upgraded throttle software that boosts responsiveness and torque delivery and a new “sleep” state which powers down the displays and other non-essential electronics for a claimed boost in range of around 8 miles per day.

One other thing we noticed after playing with the massive 17-inch touchscreen: It’s much more responsive.

One other thing we noticed after playing with the massive 17-inch touchscreen: It’s much more responsive. It was never a slouch, but Tesla obviously tweaked things to maximize the potential of the Nvidia chip in the dash.

Tesla isn’t saying exactly when all Model S owners will get the update, but the method of deployment is novel. The download takes place over the 3G modem while the vehicle is driving, so when the owner gets home and plugs in, they’re automatically notified that an update is available. It can take anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours to upgrade, and it’s not just limited to the touchscreen and drive components. More than 25 internal computers benefit from this 4.0 release, and Tesla is adamant that security and integrity are of the utmost importance. The download takes place over a VPN, the firmware bundle is signed by Tesla, and private and public keys validate its authenticity. So no, don’t expect Cyanogenmod-style firmware hacks to happen anytime soon.

Next up on Tesla’s list is more voice control functionality and WiFi connectivity, but for now, it’s a solid, feature-rich update just in time for the holidays. Santa just came early.

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Another Look at a Drink Ingredient, Brominated Vegetable Oil

James Edward Bates for The New York Times

Sarah Kavanagh, 15, of Hattiesburg, Miss., started an online petition asking PepsiCo to change Gatorade’s formula.

Sarah Kavanagh and her little brother were looking forward to the bottles of Gatorade they had put in the refrigerator after playing outdoors one hot, humid afternoon last month in Hattiesburg, Miss.

But before she took a sip, Sarah, a dedicated vegetarian, did what she often does and checked the label to make sure no animal products were in the drink. One ingredient, brominated vegetable oil, caught her eye.

“I knew it probably wasn’t from an animal because it had vegetable in the name, but I still wanted to know what it was, so I Googled it,” Ms. Kavanagh said. “A page popped up with a long list of possible side effects, including neurological disorders and altered thyroid hormones. I didn’t expect that.”

She threw the product away and started a petition on Change.org, a nonprofit Web site, that has almost 200,000 signatures. Ms. Kavanagh, 15, hopes her campaign will persuade PepsiCo, Gatorade’s maker, to consider changing the drink’s formulation.

Jeff Dahncke, a spokesman for PepsiCo, noted that brominated vegetable oil had been deemed safe for consumption by federal regulators. “As standard practice, we constantly evaluate our formulas and ingredients to ensure they comply with federal regulations and meet the high quality standards our consumers and athletes expect — from functionality to great taste,” he said in an e-mail.

In fact, about 10 percent of drinks sold in the United States contain brominated vegetable oil, including Mountain Dew, also made by PepsiCo; Powerade, Fanta Orange and Fresca from Coca-Cola; and Squirt and Sunkist Peach Soda, made by the Dr Pepper Snapple Group.

The ingredient is added often to citrus drinks to help keep the fruit flavoring evenly distributed; without it, the flavoring would separate.

Use of the substance in the United States has been debated for more than three decades, so Ms. Kavanagh’s campaign most likely is quixotic. But the European Union has long banned the substance from foods, requiring use of other ingredients. Japan recently moved to do the same.

“B.V.O. is banned other places in the world, so these companies already have a replacement for it,” Ms. Kavanagh said. “I don’t see why they don’t just make the switch.” To that, companies say the switch would be too costly.

The renewed debate, which has brought attention to the arcane world of additive regulation, comes as consumers show increasing interest in food ingredients and have new tools to learn about them. Walmart’s app, for instance, allows access to lists of ingredients in foods in its stores.

Brominated vegetable oil contains bromine, the element found in brominated flame retardants, used in things like upholstered furniture and children’s products. Research has found brominate flame retardants building up in the body and breast milk, and animal and some human studies have linked them to neurological impairment, reduced fertility, changes in thyroid hormones and puberty at an earlier age.

Limited studies of the effects of brominated vegetable oil in animals and in humans found buildups of bromine in fatty tissues. Rats that ingested large quantities of the substance in their diets developed heart lesions.

Its use in foods dates to the 1930s, well before Congress amended the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act to add regulation of new food additives to the responsibilities of the Food and Drug Administration. But Congress exempted two groups of additives, those already sanctioned by the F.D.A. or the Department of Agriculture, or those experts deemed “generally recognized as safe.”

The second exemption created what Tom Neltner, director of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ food additives project, a three-year investigation into how food additives are regulated, calls “the loophole that swallowed the law.” A company can create a new additive, publish safety data about it on its Web site and pay a law firm or consulting firm to vet it to establish it as “generally recognized as safe” — without ever notifying the F.D.A., Mr. Neltner said.

About 10,000 chemicals are allowed to be added to foods, about 3,000 of which have never been reviewed for safety by the F.D.A., according to Pew’s research. Of those, about 1,000 never come before the F.D.A. unless someone has a problem with them; they are declared safe by a company and its handpicked advisers.

“I worked on the industrial and consumer products side of things in the past, and if you take a new chemical and put it into, say, a tennis racket, you have to notify the E.P.A. before you put it in,” Mr. Neltner said, referring to the Environmental Protection Agency. “But if you put it into food and can document it as recognized as safe by someone expert, you don’t have to tell the F.D.A.”

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News Analysis: Middle Class Malaise Complicates Democrats’ Fiscal Stance

WASHINGTON — The income stagnation that has hit the middle class in the last decade is complicating the Democrats’ position in the fiscal talks, making it more difficult for them to advocate across-the-board tax increases if a deal falls through.

Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Obama visited a family in Falls Church, Va., last week to discuss extending income tax cuts for most Americans.

Many Democrats have derided the expiring tax cuts as irresponsible since President George W. Bush signed them a decade ago. Yet the party is united in pushing to make the vast majority of them permanent, even though President Obama could ensure their expiration at year’s end with a simple veto.

That decision reflects concern over the wage and income trends of the last decade, when pay stagnated for middle-class families, net worth declined and economic mobility eroded. Democrats who generally would prefer more tax revenue to help pay the growing cost of Medicare and other programs are instead negotiating with Republicans to find a combination of spending cuts and targeted tax increases for higher incomes.

If the two parties fail to come to a deal by Jan. 1, taxes on the average middle-income family would rise about $2,000 over the next year. That would follow a 12-year period in which median inflation-adjusted income dropped 8.9 percent, from $54,932 in 1999 to $50,054 in 2011.

The income and wealth trends of the last decade also create a longer-term dilemma for the party. By advocating the continuation of most of the Bush-era tax cuts, Democrats might find themselves confronting deeper-than-comfortable cuts to spending programs that aid the poor and middle class down the road.

“The goal is not just to make the tax code more progressive, but also to obtain adequate revenue to finance progressive spending programs,” said Peter Orszag, a vice chairman at Citigroup and a former White House budget director. “Making the tax code more progressive but locking into a vastly inadequate revenue base is not doing the notion of progressivity overall any favors.”

According to calculations by the independent Tax Policy Center, if Congress did nothing and all tax increases took effect at the end of the year, the hit would be broad but the brunt of it would fall on high-income households. Taxpayers in the bottom quintile of the income distribution would see a $412 bigger tax bill. For the top 0.1 percent, the average increase would be $633,946.

Only a small handful of policy voices on the left are making the case for the tax cuts to fully expire. In part, that is because the economy is still growing slowly, and tax increases have the potential to weaken it. But it is also partly because of structural changes in the economy.

“This is about math and values,” Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat and the chairman of the Finance Committee, said in an e-mail. “Our first priority needs to be extending tax cuts for the middle class. At a time when we need to cut our debt and are asking everyone to chip in, we simply can’t afford to continue extending all of the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.”

The Congressional Budget Office has found that between 1979 and 2007, the top 1 percent of households saw their inflation-adjusted income grow 275 percent. For the bottom 20 percent, it grew just 18 percent, and federal tax and transfer programs also did less and less to reduce income inequality over that period.

The mounting concentration of wealth is even more dramatic. A recent Economic Policy Institute study found that between 1983 and 2010 about three-quarters of all new wealth accrued to the wealthiest 5 percent of households. Over the same period, the bottom 60 percent actually became poorer.

Such figures are why some Democrats argue that even if the economy were to return to Clinton-era growth rates, its poor and middle class could not stomach a return to Clinton-era tax rates, at least not yet. Moreover, it has led Democrats to expand the “middle class” to encompass the vast majority of taxpayers, with families earning as much as $300,000 a year unlikely to see their taxes go up.

“The causes of the massive rise in inequality that we’ve seen that have caused stagnation for the middle class — stagnation at best — for the past 20 or 30 years are not likely to abate,” said Alan B. Krueger, the chairman of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers. “If they’re caused by globalization and skill-biased technological change, they’re likely to continue or accelerate.”

Last week, President Obama visited the Virginia home of Tiffany and Richard Santana, a high school teacher and an employee at a car dealership, to make the case. “They’re keeping it together, they’re working hard, they’re meeting their responsibilities,” Mr. Obama said of the Santanas. “For them to be burdened unnecessarily because Democrats and Republicans aren’t coming together to solve those problems gives you a sense of the costs on personal terms.”

Mr. Obama’s argument for raising revenue from high-income households and keeping taxes low on middle-income households long predates the recession or his time in the White House. Aides say the position stems in part from his belief that long-term economic changes have rewarded the rich and punished many others.

But limiting tax increases to just a small fraction of households might mean raising too little revenue over the long term to finance the programs that Democrats also fiercely want to preserve — Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, education, supports for lower-income working families and infrastructure, among others, some policy experts on the left say.

“It’s perfectly reasonable for the White House to begin collecting more revenue from folks who have done by far the best in pretax terms,” said Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a former economist for Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “But ultimately we can’t raise the revenue we need only on the top 2 percent.”

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Ravi Shankar, sitar master, dies at 92

Ravi Shankar was already revered as a master of the sitar in 1966 when he met George Harrison, the Beatle who became his most famous disciple and gave the Indian musician-composer unexpected pop-culture cachet.

Suddenly the classically trained Shankar was a darling of the hippie movement, gaining widespread attention through memorable performances at the Monterey Pop Festival, Woodstock and the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh.

Harrison called him "the godfather of world music," and the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin once compared the sitarist's genius to Mozart's. Shankar continued to give virtuoso performances into his 90s, including one in 2011 at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

PHOTOS: Ravi Shankar | 1920 - 2010

Shankar, 92, who introduced Indian music to much of the Western world, died Tuesday at a hospital near his home in Encinitas. Stuart Wolferman, a publicist for his record label Unfinished Side Productions, said Shankar had undergone heart valve replacement surgery last week.

Well-established in the classical music of his native India since the 1940s, he remained a vital figure on the global music stage for six decades. Shankar is the father of pop music star Norah Jones and Anoushka Shankar, his protege and a sitar star in her own right.

Before the 1950s, Indian classical music — with its improvised melodic excursions and complex percussion rhythms — was virtually unknown in America. If Shankar had done nothing more than compose the movie scores for Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray's "Apu" trilogy in the 1950s, he "would be remembered and revered," Times music critic Mark Swed wrote last fall.

PHOTOS: Notable deaths of 2012

Shankar was on a path to international stardom during the 1950s, playing the sitar in the Soviet Union and debuting as a soloist in Western Europe and the United States. Two early albums also had considerable impact, "Three Classical Ragas" and "India's Master Musician."

During his musical emergence in the West, his first important association was with violinist Menuhin, whose passion for Indian music was ignited by Shankar in 1952. Their creative partnership peaked with their "West Meets East" release, which earned a Grammy Award in 1967. The recording also showed Shankar's versatility — and the capacity of Indian music to inspire artists from different creative disciplines.

He presented a new form of classical music to Western audiences that was based on improvisation instead of written compositions. Shankar typically played in the Hindustani classical style, in which he was accompanied by a player of two tablas, or small hand drums. Concerts in India that often lasted through the night were generally shortened to a few hours for American venues as Shankar played the sitar, a long-necked lute-like stringed instrument.

At first, he especially appealed to fans of jazz music drawn to improvisation. He recorded "Improvisations" (1962) with saxophonist Bud Shank and "Portrait of a Genius" (1964) with flutist Paul Horn, gave lessons to saxophonist John Coltrane (who named his saxophone-playing son Ravi), and wrote a percussion piece for drummer Buddy Rich and Alla Rakha.

On the Beatles' 1965 recording "Norwegian Wood," Harrison had played the sitar and met Shankar the next year in London.

Shankar was "the first person to impress me," among the impressive people the Beatles met, "because he didn't try to impress me," Harrison later said. The pair became close and their friendship lasted until Harrison's death in 2001.

Harrison was instrumental in getting Shankar booked at the now legendary Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. They partnered in organizing the Concert for Bangladesh and were among the producers who won a Grammy in 1972 for the subsequent album. They toured together in 1974, and Harrison produced Shankar's career-spanning mid-1990s boxed set, "In Celebration."

But Shankar came away from his festival appearances with mixed feelings about his rock generation followers. He expressed hope that his performances might help young people better understand Indian music and philosophy but later said "they weren't ready for it."

"All the young people got interested … but it was so mixed up with superficiality and the fad and the drugs," Shankar told The Times in 1996. "I had to go through several years to make them understand that this is a disciplined music, needing a fresh mind."

When Shankar was criticized in India as a sellout for spreading his music in the West, he responded in the early 1970s by lowering his profile and reaffirming his classical roots. He followed his first concerto for sitar and orchestra in 1971 with another a decade later.

"Our music has gone through so much development," Shankar told The Times in 1997. "But its roots — which have something to do with its feelings, the depth from where you bring out the music when you perform — touch the listeners even without their knowing it."

In the 1980s and '90s, Shankar maintained a busy performing schedule despite heart problems. He recorded "Tana Mana," an unusual synthesis of Indian music, electronics and jazz; oversaw the American premiere of his ballet, "Ghyanshyam: The Broken Branch"; and collaborated with composer Philip Glass on the album "Passages."

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Publisher Bonnier, Flingo partner to make Smart TV Apps

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – Bonnier, the publisher of magazines like Savuer and Popular Science, and Flingo, the largest publisher of apps for Smart TVs, have partnered to create a series of apps extending Bonnier’s titles onto Internet-enabled TV sets and set-tops boxes like the Roku.

Together, they will release a new app for each magazine, offering videos, images and archival content for fans. Savuer has a couple of web series, including “The Test Kitchen” which helps home chefs learn how to peel garlic or dice an onion. Those videos, currently on Saveur’s website YouTube channel, will resurface in the apps, which will be distributed for free in app markets thanks to advertising and sponsors.

Though smart TVs remain a small segment of the TV market, Bonnier believes it is an ideal platform for leading media companies to extend their brand.

“This is about going after new technologies and being at the forefront,” Sean Holzman, Bonnier’s Chief Brand Development Officer, told TheWrap. “We don’t look closely at what other publishing companies may be doing. Flingo has a universe of 15 million devices and that should double in 2013.”

The emphasis will be on video since research demonstrates that it remains the top activity, even more than gaming.

Ashwin Navin, CEO of Flingo, said that while many media companies are putting secondary titles on Internet-enabled TVs, Bonnier is using its top titles.

“Major media companies aren’t putting their crown jewels on smart TVs,” Navin told TheWrap. He added that when they measure how long users spend online with certain brands, websites register just a few minutes.

“You see 10 times that in a TV app. People are more captive and less ADD.”

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The New Old Age Blog: The Gift of Reading

This is the year of the tablet, David Pogue of The Times has told us, and that may be good news for seniors who open holiday wrappings to find one tucked inside. They see better with tablets’ adjustable type size, new research shows. Reading becomes easier again.

This may seem obvious — find me someone over 40 who doesn’t see better when fonts are larger — but it’s the business of science to test our assumptions.

Dr. Daniel Roth, an eye specialist and clinical associate professor at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J., offered new evidence of tablets’ potential benefits last month at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

His findings, based on tests conducted with 66 adults age 50 and over: older people read faster (a mean reading speed of 128 words per minute) when using an iPad, compared to a newspaper with the same 10-point font size (114 words per minute).

When the font was increased to 18 points — easy to do on an iPad — reading speed increased to 137 words per minute.

“If you read more slowly, it’s tedious,” Dr. Roth said, explaining why reading speed is important. “If you can read more fluidly, it’s more comfortable.”

What makes the real difference, Dr. Roth theorizes, is tablets’ illuminated screen, which heightens contrast between words and the background on which they sit.

Contrast sensitivity — the visual ability to differentiate between foreground and background information — becomes poorer as we age, as does the ability to discriminate fine visual detail, notes Dr. Kevin Paterson, a psychologist at the University of Leicester, who recently published a separate study on why older people struggle to read fine print.

“There are several explanations for the loss of sensitivity to fine detail that occurs with older age,” Dr. Paterson explained in an e-mail. “This may be due to greater opacity of the fluid in the eye, which will scatter incoming light and reduce the quality of the projection of light onto the retina. It’s also hypothesized that changes in neural transmission affect the processing of fine visual detail.”

Combine these changes with a greater prevalence of eye conditions like macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy in older adults, and you get millions of people who cannot easily do what they have done all their lives — read and stay connected to the world of ideas, imagination and human experience.

“The No. 1 complaint I get from older patients is that they love to read but can’t, and this really bothers them,” Dr. Roth said. The main option has been magnifying glasses, which many people find cumbersome and inconvenient.

Some words of caution are in order. First, Dr. Roth’s study has not been published yet; it was presented as a poster at the scientific meeting and publicized by the academy, but it has not yet gone through comprehensive, rigorous peer review.

Second, Dr. Roth’s study was completed before the newest wave of tablets from Microsoft, Google, Samsung and others became available. The doctor made no attempt to compare different products, with one exception. In the second part of his study, he compared results for the iPad with those for a Kindle. But it was not an apples to apples comparison, because the Kindle did not have a back-lit screen.

This section of his study involved 100 adults age 50 and older who read materials in a book, on an iPad and on the Kindle. Book readers recorded a mean reading speed of 187 words per minute when the font size was set at 12; Kindle readers clocked in at 196 words per minute and iPad readers at 224 words per minute at the same type size. Reading speed improved even more drastically for a subset of adults with the poorest vision.

Again, Apple’s product came out on top, but that should not be taken as evidence that it is superior to other tablets with back-lit screens and adjustable font sizes. Both the eye academy and Dr. Roth assert that they have no financial relationship with Apple. My attempts to get in touch with the company were not successful.

A final cautionary note should be sounded. Some older adults find digital technology baffling and simply do not feel comfortable using it. For them, a tablet may sit on a shelf and get little if any use.

Others, however, find the technology fascinating. If you want to see an example that went viral on YouTube, watch this video from 2010 of Virginia Campbell, then 99 years old, and today still going strong at the Mary’s Woods Retirement Community in Lake Oswego, Ore.

Ms. Campbell’s glaucoma made it difficult for her to read, and for her the iPad was a blessing, as she wrote in this tribute quoted in an article in The Oregonian newspaper:

To this technology-ninny it’s clear
In my compromised 100th year,
That to read and to write
Are again within sight
Of this Apple iPad pioneer

Caregivers might be delighted — as Ms. Campbell’s daughter was — by older relatives’ response to this new technology, a potential source of entertainment and engagement for those who can negotiate its demands. Or, they might find that old habits die hard and that their relatives continue to prefer a book or newspaper they can hold in their hands to one that appears on a screen.

Which reading enhancement products have you used, and what experiences have you had?

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DealBook: Live Blog: DealBook's Post-Election Conference

The fiscal cliff in the United States, the European debt crisis and the slowdown in China’s economy have all weighed on deal-making. The 2012 election results were supposed to provide some clarity to our fiscal future, but the outcome of the much-debated tax increases and budget cuts remains uncertain. Our inaugural conference, “DealBook: Opportunities for Tomorrow,” will explore the challenges and the possibilities in this environment.

Writers and editors at The New York Times will interview leaders chief executives from Wall Street to Silicon Valley in a day-long conference at the Times Center in New York. Whether you’re attending in person or watching our video feed above, you can read up-to-minute analysis from our live blog of the day’s events and take part in the conversation on Twitter with the hash tag #DBconf.

The official conference web site includes biographies of the speakers and an agenda for the day’s events.

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States pressed to guarantee Medicaid expansion

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration stepped up pressure on states Monday to guarantee insurance for all their low-income residents in 2014 under the new healthcare law, warning governors that the federal government would not pick up the total cost of partially expanding coverage.

"We continue to encourage all states to fully expand their Medicaid programs and take advantage of the generous federal matching funds to cover more of their residents," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wrote in a letter to governors.

But Sebelius indicated that governors who do not open their Medicaid programs to all eligible low-income residents would forfeit some of the federal aid promised by the Affordable Care Act.

"The law does not provide for a phased-in or partial expansion," the Department of Health and Human Services said in guidance accompanying Sebelius' letter.

Medicaid has become a major issue in the implementation of the law since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that states can decide whether to expand their Medicaid programs in 2014.

The law originally required the states to open Medicaid to all Americans who earn less than 138% of the federal poverty level, a major change for a program that now largely covers poor children and mothers.

To ease the expansion, the law initially provides full federal funding to cover the new population. Currently, Medicaid costs are split between state and federal governments.

Nonetheless, several Republican governors have said they won't expand Medicaid, citing cost concerns. That prompted speculation that some states might partially expand Medicaid programs. But Obama administration officials said Monday the law did not authorize full federal funding for a more limited expansion.

A state that opens Medicaid to only some new low-income residents would qualify for reduced federal aid, requiring the state to come up with the remainder of the funding.

How the guidance will affect state decisions remains unclear.

Alan Weil, president of the National Academy for State Health Policy, said state leaders probably would not make final decisions until they worked out 2014 budgets next year. "A lot of what we have seen so far is posturing," he said.

But the administration's announcement drew quick criticism from the Republican Governors Assn.

"The Obama administration's refusal to grant states more flexibility on Medicaid is as disheartening as it is short-sighted," said Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, the group's chairman. Jindal has said he will not expand Medicaid in his state.

In contrast, the administration's move was applauded by the National Assn. of Public Hospitals and Health Systems, whose members care for millions of the nation's uninsured, often without compensation. Dr. Bruce Siegel, the association president, said it "takes an important step toward significantly reducing the ranks of the uninsured."

The Obama administration is facing additional resistance from several Republican governors who have said they won't set up insurance exchanges — a cornerstone of the law that will allow Americans who don't get health benefits at work to shop for insurance plans that meet new minimum standards. The federal government can set up exchanges for states that refuse to do so.

Also Monday, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, Oregon and Washington got conditional federal approval to operate their own exchanges. The six were the first to apply, and administration officials said approval for other states, including California, would probably follow.

noam.levey@latimes.com

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Farmigo Brings Community-Based Farmers' Markets Online

Farmigo wants to bring locally grown produce to the places you already go — work, schools and community centers — and provide something approaching the convenience of home delivery without the cost.

The company launched its local food communities on Tuesday, an effort to deliver a personalized, online farmers’ market experience to entire communities. The idea is to make it super simple to order vegetables online and pick them up at a convenient location, like your office. Farmigo isn’t catering to individuals, and in fact won’t deliver veggies to anyone’s home. It’s all about going where the people are, whether it’s at work, school, church, whatever. And you’ll need to sign up as a community in order to access the service.

“Home delivery is very expensive,” founder and CEO Benzi Ronen told Wired. “The idea is that you come to work every day. You pick up your kids at their school everyday. You go to a community center if you’re working out there every day. We turn those into food communities, so it’s not an extra place you need to go to. The nice thing about it is that we are automatically going into an existing community of people.”

Farmigo’s local food communities will initially launch in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City, with plans to expand to Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Denver, Chicago and Philadelphia. When you sign up a community, Farmigo provides food coaches, who will survey the people in that community and line up farmers to serve them. Each online market features five or six farmers offering everything from produce and dairy to meat and fish. People place a weekly order, which is delivered to your community location.

The convenience of online shopping and direct delivery could make local produce more appealing to people who don’t already shop at farmers’ markets. But this isn’t something everyone will want, or be able to afford. Fresh eggs cost $6 a dozen, and produce can run $2 a pound or more. That adds up fast.

Farmigo isn’t alone in the food-tech startup space. San Francisco’s Good Eggs also offers local food through a web portal. Whereas Good Eggs makes it possible for individual consumers to buy directly from individual vendors, Farmigo is focusing on catering to groups. Several companies already have signed up, including Brooklyn’s Etsy and San Francisco’s Kiva.

“I call it economies of community,” Ronen said. “We’re not trying to compete on economies of scale like the industrial food system. The only way you can create an alternative food system is to get the community to be part of the solution.”

Farmigo launched in 2009 as a cloud software company catering to farms that provided CSA (community supported agriculture) boxes. It has since expanded to provide software support to hundreds of farms across 25 states, which should make it easier to expand the local food community service. It’s part of a shift toward serving consumers. Ronen notes that less than 1 percent of the country buys food directly from farms through the CSA model. “We started to ask ourselves, ‘How do we become relevant to 20 percent of consumers?’” he said.

Farmigo will take a percentage out of each purchase made through its site. It has also recently raised $8 million in series B funding.

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Luke Bryan cleans up at ACAs with 9 awards

Luke Bryan didn’t want the American Country Awards to end.

He cleaned up during the fan-voted show, earning nine awards, including artist and album of the year. His smash hit “I Don’t Want This Night To End” was named single and music video of the year.

Miranda Lambert took home the second most guitar trophies with three. Jason Aldean was named touring artist of the year. Carrie Underwood won female artist of the year, and a tearful Lauren Alaina won new artist of the year.

Bryan, Aldean, Keith Urban, Lady Antebellum and Trace Adkins with Lynyrd Skynrd were among the high-energy performances.

The third annual ACAs were held at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas Monday night.

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Online: http://www.theACAs.com

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