The Wall Street Journal reports today that Instagram "helps connect and promote" a huge network of pedophile sites: Pedophiles have long used the internet, but unlike the forums and file-transfer services that cater to people who have interest in illicit content, Instagram doesn’t merely host these activities. Its algorithms promote them. Instagram connects pedophiles and ...continue reading "Instagram has a pedophile problem"
The third edition of CREDO, a study of charter school performance, was released today. It covers the years 2014-2019 and shows much stronger performance for charter schools than the previous two studies: Performance is measured here in "days of learning," with 180 days as the baseline. The latest study shows that in reading, charter students ...continue reading "Charter schools work—but only for Black and Hispanic students"
This is the interior, looking up, of "Connector," a monumental sculpture by Richard Serra. It stands in the courtyard of the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, where it is alleged to connect all its disparate elements.
A few days ago I came across a chart showing that high school boys had gotten suddenly more conservative over the past couple of years. Unfortunately, after a frustrating search I was unable to track down the source data, so eventually I gave up on it and moved on. But I've since seen a couple ...continue reading "Yes, young men are becoming more right-wing"
Here's a couple of interesting inflation data points. Two different groups at the New York Fed have constructed measures of underlying inflation, one called the Underlying Inflation Gauge and the other a more recent measurement called the Multivariate Core Trend. Both are based on similar models that deconstruct the price data, remove the pieces due ...continue reading "Is inflation already down to 3%?"
Reports of unruly passengers skyrocketed during the pandemic, but how are we doing since then? Not so well: IATA, an international airline trade association, reported a couple of days ago that incidents of bad behavior were up 37% in 2022. This is sort of perplexing since the pandemic year of 2021 saw a skyrocketing amount ...continue reading "Unruly airline passengers remain a plague even with the pandemic over"
From Alex Stamos, director of Stanford University’s Internet Observatory, on the capabilities of modern AI language tools: I think we’re entering an incredible era of bullshit. I can hardly wait.
When I first put up this chart in February, Republicans had introduced 362 anti-trans bills. As of June, they've introduced 556: This is stark raving mad, and there's no reason for it aside from pure tribal insanity. The whole business simply beggars belief.
Today I learned about ERIC, a national data clearinghouse that helps states keep their voter rolls accurate. It does this by sharing information among states about voters who have moved, changed their registration, mistakenly registered in multiple places, or died. Since Republicans are constantly complaining about inaccurate voter lists that can lead to fraud, you'd ...continue reading "For Republicans, it’s conspiracies all the way down"
A federal judge today granted a preliminary injunction against the Florida law that bans puberty blockers and other gender-affirming care for transgender teens. In order to do this, the judge had to conclude the plaintiffs were likely to win their case on the merits when it goes to trial. He did so in no uncertain ...continue reading "Federal judge puts Florida anti-trans law on hold"
In a new report today, the World Bank estimates that Fed rate hikes already in place will reduce US GDP by 2.4 percentage points this year: As a result, the Bank has reduced its estimate of 2023 growth to 1.1% and 2024 growth to 0.8%: The Bank says explicitly that reduced growth, both here and ...continue reading "World Bank says Fed hikes will slow growth to 1% this year"
Bill Barr, hardly a woke lefty, says that Donald Trump is getting exactly what he deserves in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case: Bill Barr on the classified documents investigation: "This is not a case of the DOJ conducting a witch hunt...This would have gone nowhere had the president just returned the documents, but he jerked ...continue reading "Quote of the day: “He jerked them around for a year and a half.”"
It turns out that the country behind the September 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline was almost certainly Ukraine—and US government officials have known it all along. The Washington Post reported this today based on intelligence leaks from the Discord Papers: Details about the plan, which have not been previously reported, were ...continue reading "Ukraine was behind the Nord Stream bombing all along"
The postal service announced today, as part of National Dog Bite Awareness Week, that more than 5,300 postal carriers were attacked by dogs in 2022. They list California and Texas as the top dog attack states, but of course this is only because California and Texas are the biggest states. A different story emerges if ...continue reading "Missouri leads the nation in dog attacks on mail carriers"
The ocean is basically a giant heat engine, absorbing heat from the atmosphere and recycling it via rising and sinking waters. It can absorb a vast amount of heat, but it has its limits, and eventually the surface water absorbs so much heat that it can't absorb more without itself heating up. We reached this ...continue reading "Sea temperatures are at a massive record high"
One of the (many) downsides of the debt ceiling debacle is the possibility that it undermined faith in US treasury bonds. If that happened, interest rates on treasuries would increase, potentially costing the government billions in higher funding rates. So did this happen? A very rough back-of-the-envelope look at treasury yields suggests it did—a little ...continue reading "The debt ceiling crisis probably cost less than half a billion dollars"
This is the damnedest thing I've seen in a long time. The Cato Institute recently commissioned a YouGov survey about support for a Central Bank Digital Currency. For what it's worth, only 16% support it, but that's of minimal interest. Cato also asked a few other questions, and for some reason one of them was ...continue reading "A quarter of young people support surveillance cameras in every house"
Here is a triptych of wind turbines. All of them were shot in the vicinity of Whitewater, a pass in the mountains near Palm Springs that's home to a huge wind turbine farm.
stLouIST