Kevin Drum 🕸

Which state has the most employers who allow employees to work from home at least part of the time? California isn't even close to the top: The winner is Washington DC! And this is strictly a survey of private businesses, so this has nothing to do with government workers. DC just has a lot of ...continue reading "Raw data: Top states for working from home"

This is Hilbert roaming around the backyard after the rain finally stopped. He is on our teak bench looking for a place to scratch an itch, and eventually he decided to stick his nose into the camera and give that a try. It didn't work so well for him, but it worked great for me. ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 24 March 2023"

From the Washington Post: Florida parents upset by Michelangelo’s ‘David’ force out principal This story is all over the place. Why? A tiny charter school in Tallahassee fired its principal over some dumb thing. How does this become widespread national news? For what it's worth, the Post's headline is typical even though the chair of ...continue reading "BREAKING: Unbelievably trivial story somehow becomes national news"

Total factor productivity is productivity growth after you've accounted for labor and capital. Roughly speaking, it's the share of productivity growth due to technological improvements: TFP took a big jump in 2021 but then dropped in 2022. It is now back to its (sort of lousy) recent trendline.

Here's how much banks have borrowed from the Fed this month: During the Great Recession, this number peaked at around $400 billion in October 2008. That's the highest it's been over the past 40 years. We're nowhere near that, but March 2023 is still in a strong second place.

Here are the results of my brain MRI: FINDINGS: Study is limited due to motion artifact. Small punctate T2 high signal changes 5 mm in the deep white matter region right frontal lobe, nonspecific, likely of small vessel ischemic changes. There is no evidence for intraparenchymal hemorrhage, midline shift or mass effect. No evidence for ...continue reading "Contrary to popular opinion, my brain is just fine"

How satisfied are trans people with their transition? Here's part of an answer from a large-scale Washington Post poll of trans people: Unfortunately, the poll doesn't dig down on this question. Of the trans people who are less satisfied, is this because they think they made a bad choice or because they didn't realize how ...continue reading "How satisfied are trans people after their transition?"

I would really like to see Donald Trump indicted over his efforts to overturn the election results in Georgia. The problem is that it would be a tough case since Trump was savvy enough to avoid saying outright, "Hey, just invent the extra votes I need." Still, everyone knows that's exactly what he meant, and ...continue reading "How about if we indict Donald Trump for something serious?"

This is sunset over the Sheephole Mountains, very near to the spot in the desert where I do my astrophotography. It's a Bortle 2 area, which means it's very nearly the darkest possible area for stargazing. That compares to Bortle 8-9 in my backyard. Bortle 1 is the darkest sky possible. Death Valley is Bortle ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

A brief Twitter exchange yesterday got me to thinking about one of the favorite former topics here in the discourse-o-sphere: neocons. If you're over 40 50 you remember them: the cabal of foreign policy intellectuals who were behind the invasion of Iraq and had visions of an American imperium that stretched across the entire Middle ...continue reading "A second look at neocons and the Iraq War"

Brad DeLong continues to worry at the Chat-GPT4 issue as if he were a dog and it was an old shoe. In particular, he wants a chatbot that thinks like Brad DeLong, but it's not working out: A human neuron would require some 3000 neural-network nodes to model it, with each node connected to some ...continue reading "When will GPT be able to match Brad DeLong’s brain?"

First we had the "Great Resignation." Then "quiet quitting." Now we have "Revenge of the Bosses." The great trend these days seems to be that even CEOs and managers who once supported working from home are souring on it. The Wall Street Journal today has what feels like the hundredth piece I've read about this ...continue reading "Working from home is quietly falling out of favor"

Here's my latest brainstorm: we should set the federal minimum wage at half the average local wage, rounded up to the nearest dollar. Here it is for a random selection of places: This would take care of inflation and geography all at once. And of course states and cities would be free to set higher ...continue reading "Quick and easy minimum wage proposal"

I just got back from a brain MRI. Apparently I still have one. I thought I had done one of these before, but I guess not. At least, I don't remember it. Basically, they lock your head down in a little cage and then shove you into a tube only a couple of inches bigger ...continue reading "Science proves that even after two decades of blogging I still have a brain"

An approaching train at the Vermont/Sunset station on the LA metro red line.

Tick tock. The Fed's rate hike decision is almost here! Can you feel the tension in the air? POSTSCRIPT: Up a quarter of a point. Idiots. How tight do they think the economy needs to be?

Sam Quinones says he knows the solution to the fentanyl crisis. I was eager to hear it, but it turned out to be this: It is hard to believe that two nations that have negotiated complex free-trade agreements cannot come to some deeper collaboration on drugs, upheld across presidential administrations and sustained despite distracting conflicts ...continue reading "Still no answer to the fentanyl crisis"

Very pretty rainbow(s) over our house to end the day. I guess that's one good thing about endless rainshowers.

According to Datalytics, here's how things look on the homicide front so far in 2023: Down 10% so far! And that's on top of last year's 5% decline. This isn't enough to make up for the 30% increase during the pandemic, but we're getting there.

Is the Fed going to raise rates tomorrow? According to the Atlanta Fed's prediction tool, the answer is maybe: Before the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the probability of a rate hike was 97%, a virtual certainty. After the collapse, that probability dropped to 40% and currently stands at 55%. Place your bets. POSTSCRIPT: Needless ...continue reading "There’s a 50-50 chance of a Fed rate hike tomorrow"