Kevin Drum 🕸

Big companies just can't help themselves: Some of the largest consumer brands in the country have continued to raise prices aggressively this year while raking in large profits, posing a tough problem for the Federal Reserve as it aims to tame inflation. Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Unilever have each reported raising prices significantly in the second ...continue reading "Prices and profits keep going up, up, up"

Ron DeSantis decided today he has something on his mind: Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), when asked if he would consider naming 2024 Democratic candidate RFK Jr. as his vice president: “Sic him on the FDA if he’d be willing to serve, or sic him on CDC.” pic.twitter.com/C7wASCmbt6 — The Recount (@therecount) July 26, 2023 DeSantis ...continue reading "Ron DeSantis dives head first into RFK Jr. cesspool"

I got the itemization of charges for my CAR-T treatment today. Check it out: Yes, that's seven digits. There are some other trivial charges, just a few measly tens of thousands of dollars here and there, that bring the entire cost of the procedure to about $1.2 million. Under the circumstances, I guess I can't ...continue reading "I’m now the million-dollar man"

This is a cloudy peak on the road to Mt. Baldy. I was about ten miles from the top when I took it, and hoping to get a good picture of Baldy itself. But it turns out you can't, really. The only place you can get a good picture of Mt. Baldy is way down ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

It's really high: And the Wall Street Journal reports that it might even be worse: The true level of China’s unemployment rate for young people ages 16 to 24 may be even higher than indicated by official data. Zhang Dandan, a Peking University economist, estimated the real youth unemployment rate in March could have reached ...continue reading "Raw data: Youth unemployment in China"

Jonathan Chait has a long piece in New York about the right's latest "master theory" of political war: namely that ever since the '60s the left has engaged in a cultural "long march" that has steadily taken over practically every influential American institution—entertainment, universities, big business, etc.—and the only hope for conservatives is to wage ...continue reading "Americans mostly hate Republican cultural beliefs"

A couple of weeks ago Christine Emba wrote a piece for the New York Times about the grim state of young men in her social circle these days: They struggled to relate to women. They didn’t have enough friends. They lacked long-term goals. Some guys — including ones I once knew — just quietly disappeared, ...continue reading "About that crisis among young men . . ."

Since January, asylum applications at the Southwest border have been handled by an app called CBP One. The idea is to bring some order to asylum requests by requiring applicants to make an appointment via the app and then show up legally at a port of entry. For the past two months, if you cross ...continue reading "Judge tosses Biden asylum rules"

President Biden has proposed a new rule that would require all new electric water heaters to use heat pump technology by 2029.¹ The obvious reason for this is to reduce electricity consumption and thereby reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Department of Energy estimates a reduction of 15 million tons per year, which is only about ...continue reading "President Biden wants your water heater to be powered by a heat pump"

This is not a streetlight in Paris glowing at night. It's a streetlight in Paris at dawn with the sun directly behind it. For some reason the illusion tickled me, so I snapped the shutter.

World Weather Attribution, a group that does rapid estimates of weather events, has calculated the odds that our current heat wave would have happened with and without climate change. Their final synthesis is the purple bar at the bottom. For the southwestern US, climate change has made the heat wave 3,000-11,000 times more likely, with ...continue reading "Climate change has made our heat wave 10,000 times more likely"

Here is a mystery: Attempted suicide among teens has stayed the same since 2000, but the number of successful suicides has gone up by a third. Why? Are teens getting better at committing suicide? Maybe it's a problem with the data? The numbers for attempted suicide come from a survey and they show that about ...continue reading "Teen suicide is up, but attempted suicide isn’t. Why?"

This is insane.

This almost makes me laugh more than it makes me outraged. In March Silicon Valley Bank suffered a huge run because it was in trouble and most of its deposits were uninsured. So what did the rest of the banking industry do? Reduce their level of uninsured deposits? Ha ha. Of course not. They just ...continue reading "Big banks try, but fail, to fool FDIC"

Kevin McCarthy wants to pass a couple of spending bills sometime soon, but as usual he's having trouble with the far-right wing of his party. However, Rep. Chip Roy says he thinks things can be worked out: McCarthy’s biggest hurdle in the funding debate is a bloc of House Freedom Caucus members who want even ...continue reading "Domestic spending is already going down"

This kid was having a blast bouncing around on the "Ocean Motion" ride at the Balboa Fun Zone, which is located at the far end of the Balboa Peninsula here in Orange County. The day was warm but overcast, and it even rained a little bit later on.

A new paper delivers the non-shocking news that rich kids have a way better chance of being admitted to super-elite universities than merely affluent kids even if their test scores are the same. This is due to a combination of legacy admissions, athlete preferences, and non-academic credentials, which provide elite universities with all the wiggle ...continue reading "Elite universities really love the top 1%"

The state of Florida requires instruction in African American history in all grades, and as you might expect it's pretty thin in the primary grades. But it picks up a bit in middle school, with 14 separate standards mandated for grades 6-8. One of them is this: This footnote has caused an uproar in the ...continue reading "Here’s the real problem with Florida’s school standards for slavery"

The New York Times has a long piece today about the "steep cost" of Ron DeSantis's loose COVID policies, and it's a little hard to follow. But there's a simple way to judge the results of anyone's COVID policy: excess mortality. Here it is for Florida: Florida's excess mortality during the big Delta surge of ...continue reading "Florida’s COVID performance has been mostly average"

Social Security has a modest funding shortfall. If nothing is done, benefits will have to be cut by a quarter in 2033 or thereabouts. Several Republican candidates for president think this is just fine as long as we cut only the benefits of young people. That's kind of cynical, but politics ain't beanbag. If young ...continue reading "Fixing Social Security in two easy steps"