Kevin Drum 🕸

How much does it cost to "fill up" an electric car? That depends on two things: the efficiency of the car and the cost of electricity. Assuming that 300 miles equals a "full tank," here's the cost for a sample of cars and states: This was inspired by a friend who was complaining about the ...continue reading "Raw data: The cost to charge an EV"

Emily Hand, a 9-year-old Irish girl, was released by Hamas yesterday. The taoiseach of Ireland released a statement: Twitter went nuts. This girl wasn't "lost"! She was kidnapped! Held hostage! How dare the leader of Ireland insult Israel this way!?! Here's the next paragraph: This is typical of the discourse these days. The LA Times ...continue reading "BREAKING: Sometimes things on the internet are misleading"

The good news for Nikki Haley is that she's risen from 5% to 10% in the polls: The bad news is that in September she was 47 points behind Trump. Today, with Trump doing barely anything aside from writing unhinged posts on Truth Social, she's 49 points behind.

I know this is hardly a brilliant insight, but I continue to be sort of stunned by how absolutist Americans are—or seem to be, anyway—on the subject of Israel and its enemies. It hardly requires a scholar's dedication to nuance to understand that both sides have acted horrifically at various times over the past century. ...continue reading "Israelis and Arabs have both acted abominably over the years"

Our garage still has its original garage door. It's old school: a flat hunk of wood that levers upward on a hinge to open. Marian has long wanted to replace it with a modern roll-up paneled door, but I've resisted because the old one is fine. Why bother? But luckily for her, some house painters ...continue reading "A question for the hive mind about garage doors"

T-Mobile has a feature that transcribes voice mail and then texts it to you. I imagine other mobile carriers do the same. Overall it's remarkably good, but it does have a weak spot: names. I frequently get messages from Kaiser Permanente that begin "This call is for Kevin Drum." The last four of them have ...continue reading "Voice recognition still needs some work"

This is according to the Gaza Ministry of Health through November 10th and the Government Media Office after November 22: Since the beginning of November Israel has been killing a very steady 300 Palestinians per day.

How's the infrastructure bill coming along? It passed in late 2021 and allocated $550 billion in new spending over eight years. That's about $70 billion per year. Here's actual spending: Adjusted for inflation, public construction spending had been trending downward when the infrastructure bill was passed. A few months later spending ticked up and is ...continue reading "Raw data: Capital spending after passage of the infrastructure bill"

Tyler Cowen got me curious about something yesterday. Commenting on the Geert Wilders victory in the Netherlands, he says "much of the world is moving in a right-wing direction." But is that true? Yes, we have the evidence of Italy and now the Netherlands this year. But we also have Poland, where the illiberal Law ...continue reading "Is the world moving in a right-wing direction?"

The Wall Street Journal says real estate data shows that more people are returning to the office: According to a September report by Redfin, about 10% of home sellers in the U.S. are looking to move because of return-to-work policies, indicating that after more than three years of remote-work policies dominating behavior in the housing ...continue reading "Return-to-work has stalled out in 2023"

This is Charlie out front gazing at birds flying overhead. Sadly for him, they are just a dream. The crows around here are about as big as he is.

Arin Dube thinks he knows the answer to an ongoing issue: I am tried of this debate because the answer is yes and we should stop debating it https://t.co/47B2nG6JOL — Arin Dube (@arindube) November 24, 2023 In other words, the answer is yes to both questions. People are concerned about their actual conditions and social ...continue reading "We know why (some) people think the economy is terrible"

In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a hard-right school board filled with Moms for Liberty members was swept out of office in November. But at the last minute they decided in their final board meeting to show their appreciation for the school superintendent who had backed their agenda: A Pennsylvania school board that banned books, Pride flags ...continue reading "MAGA school board leaves the boss a thoughtful gift on its way out"

Do you care about the Dutch elections? No? Fine. I'll keep this short. All the news is about Geert Wilders, the anti-Muslim right-wing nationalist who gained 20 seats in this week's elections. This is a big deal, no question. It was driven partly by immigration fears and partly by the fact that the current centrist ...continue reading "Dutch election analysis: Maybe nothing will happen at all"

I don't have a picture of a turkey, so how about some bare aspens in Colorado instead? I took this picture just a few miles north of Durango.

Why did the board of OpenAI—apparently out of the blue—fire CEO Sam Altman last week? No one has yet provided a definitive account of what happened, but the leading guess is that it was related to the possible development of super-intelligent AI. The board felt that Altman was barreling ahead toward this goal without giving ...continue reading "Did Sam Altman keep the OpenAI board in the dark about progress on super AI?"

National Review points me today to a new study that examines birth rates before and after the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision. The study uses a "pre-registered synthetic difference-in-differences design applied to newly released provisional natality data for the first half of 2023." Here's the result: The authors note that up through 2022 states which now ...continue reading "Do abortion bans result in more births? The answer may shock you!"

I went up to Palomar Mountain last night to do a bit of astrophotography testing, but when I got there I encountered gale force winds even though the weather report—as I was standing there watching the trees bend—told me the wind was blowing at 7 mph. Stupid weather forecasters. Plus the moon was up, which ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Tom Edsall interviews a bunch of mental health folks today about Donald Trump's recent behavior. Here's one of them: “Trump is an aging malignant narcissist,” Aaron L. Pincus, a professor of psychology at Penn State, wrote in an email. “As he ages, he appears to be losing impulse control and is slipping cognitively. So we ...continue reading "Donald Trump is “slipping cognitively”"

I just read yet another review of Ridley Scott's Napoleon, and it made me wonder yet again about biopics. They are always "based on," which is a nice way of saying that they routinely lie about whoever's life they're selling. I gather that Napoleon is especially egregious on this front. But why? Popular biographies in ...continue reading "Why do biopics lie?"