Kevin Drum 🕸

Today has been fun. Several months ago Cox decided to offload their email service to Yahoo, and this was the day. They're transitioning customers in waves, and apparently my wave came up today. So I hopped over to Yahoo for the first time in forever and chose a new password. This went wrong in some ...continue reading "I had a lovely time today getting my email unfucked"

This is so tedious: Restaurants for months have said menu prices in California would rise as the state raised the minimum wage for fast-food workers. Now they are following through. ....Since September, when California moved to require large fast-food chains to bump up their minimum hourly pay to $20 in April, fast-food and fast-casual restaurants ...continue reading "No, a minimum wage increase in April didn’t raise prices last September"

Obviously I'm way out of date, but I learned something new today from Charles Homans' big Donald Trump piece in the New York Times. The setting is one of Trump's campaign rallies: As the speech neared its conclusion, the room once again filled with music, a stately cinematic swell of synthesized strings. This recording, an ...continue reading "Donald Trump loves the QAnon song"

What are the signs that democracy is failing in the United States. Here's a comprehensive list: In 2020 Donald Trump tried to forcibly steal an election he lost. This is true, and a substantial chunk of the Republican Party and Fox News eagerly helped him. That's about as anti-democratic as it gets. But also keep ...continue reading "How are we doing on the democracy front?"

The Wall Street Journal editorial page continues its endless tedious jihad about Joe Biden being old and infirm: When the New York Post asked why Mr. Biden has taken to wearing tennis shoes with his suits, this was the comment from deputy press secretary Andrew Bates: “I know y’all aren’t partial to presidents who exercise, ...continue reading "Does anyone remember that Joe Biden broke his foot?"

Joe Biden has passed a lot of significant legislation, but he's also developed a reputation for "small ball" initiatives: minor rules that attack everyday annoyances. Here's a non-exhaustive sampling: Hearing aids. Allows low-cost hearing aids to be purchased without a prescription. Insulin. Limits the cost of insulin to $35 per month for people on Medicare ...continue reading "Here’s an update on Joe Biden’s small ball politics"

The feds have decided that Tesla's Autopilot technology needs to get better: The issue here isn't how good Tesla's unassisted driving is. The issue is that Tesla is supposed to make sure drivers are paying attention regardless, typically by beeping and alerting when they take their hands off the wheel or their eyes wander. The ...continue reading "How safe are Tesla cars with Autopilot?"

This is from a government record I randomly ran across today: “Document(s)” is used in the broadest sense of the word and shall mean all original written, printed, typed, recorded, or graphic matter whatsoever, however produced or reproduced, of every kind, nature, and description, and all non-identical copies of both sides thereof, including, but not ...continue reading "What is a document?"

Here is Hilbert surveying his vast domains, like Alexander after he had conquered the known world. Known to him, that is.

The Guardian today has a piece about Allan Lichtman's famous "13 keys" to winning the White House, which have a strong record of predicting the eventual winner. The party in the White House has to lose six of them to get voted out, so let's play along. Here are the 13 keys along with my ...continue reading "Joe Biden is going to win!"

David Brooks has a remarkable column in the New York Times today dedicated to one thing: our rising national debt. The reason it's remarkable has nothing to do with the subject matter. I'm not a big deficit hawk, but the long and steady rise in the national debt is at least concerning: Even after removing ...continue reading "America needs higher taxes"

March was another good-news-bad-news month for PCE inflation: Headline PCE inflation dropped a bit to 3.9%, but core PCE increased to 3.9%. The inflation level is proving to be a little more stubborn than anyone hoped for. On a conventional year-over-year basis, headline PCE came in at 2.7% and core PCE was 2.8%.

Due mostly to laziness, I suppose, I've been laboring under the impression that last year the International Court of Justice ruled there was a "plausible" case to be made for genocide in Gaza. But Joan Donoghue, who was president of the court at the time, says this isn't so: The court decided that the Palestinians ...continue reading "International court didn’t say there was plausible genocide in Gaza"

We've banned TikTok and now we're considering a ban on DJI drones because maybe the Chinese can use them to collect personal information and spy on us: “DJI presents an unacceptable national security risk, and it is past time that drones made by Communist China are removed from America,” Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New ...continue reading "Hobby drones are the latest target of the China panic"

I noticed something odd yesterday. There are many different ways of estimating the net number of new jobs each quarter, and one of the least known is the quarterly BLS report on employment dynamics. It measures the number of jobs gained from businesses opening or expanding minus the number of jobs lost from businesses closing ...continue reading "How many new jobs are we really creating?"

This is a scarlet ibis spreading its wings at the LA Zoo. They're really quite magnificent creatures.

A friend of mine recently got back from a trip to Japan and says their tour guide told them something remarkable: the Japanese spend more on adult diapers these days than they do on baby diapers. Huh. But then he asked Microsoft's Copilot, which is based on ChatGPT, about the United States. It said the ...continue reading "Just how big is the global market for baby diapers?"

David Pecker, the publisher of National Enquirer, is still testifying in the Trump hush money trial. I'm not sure how they've managed to fill up three days with Pecker—and that's before any cross examination—but they have. The New York Times tells us about a snippet of his testimony this morning: Pecker has just given us ...continue reading "National Enquirer boss says Trump bragged about hush money in front of the FBI director"

The Atlanta Fed should hang its head in shame. GDP growth in Q1 clocked in way below their forecast, rising only 1.6% in the first quarter: Is this good news or bad news? We have to play the usual game here: it's bad news because it suggests the economy is getting weak. But it's good ...continue reading "GDP grows an anemic 1.6% in Q1"

A few facts about the H5N1 avian flu virus: Humans who are in close contact with sick birds like poultry farmers and slaughterhouse workers are at a high risk of infection.... Despite confined examples of person-to-person transmission occurring since 1997, constant transmission has not been observed. ....H5N1 was first discovered in humans in 1997 in ...continue reading "Raw data: Avian flu cases, 2003-2024"