Kevin Drum 🕸

Interesting news: G.M. said its fourth-quarter sales rose 21 percent from the period a year earlier, to more than 755,000 cars and light trucks. The company’s sales of electric vehicles more than doubled to 43,982 vehicles. Ford sold more than 530,000 vehicles in the quarter, a gain of nearly 9 percent. That included 30,176 electric ...continue reading "EV sales up at GM, Ford"

Here's an interesting AI chart. A team of researchers set up a "Choose Your Own Adventure" game called MACHIAVELLI in which players are explicitly asked to pick from menus of actions with varying degrees of immorality. The game has half a million scenes and a GPT-4 agent was set to play the game thousands of ...continue reading "How honest is your AI?"

I have nothing new to say about this. I just want to endorse it 100%. The fact that Biden got 100 times more scrutiny for ending a failed war than any of his predecessors got for continuing it will never cease to infuriate me. https://t.co/FnIoP5vB5Z — Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) January 2, 2025 Read the accompanying ...continue reading "Joe Biden was the only hero of Afghanistan"

My car has adaptive cruise control and automatic lane keeping. This doesn't allow me to ignore the road, though—far from it. It's not 100% accurate, which means I have to pay even closer attention to the road than usual. But it does reduce stress by taking care of 98% of the driving, and it also ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

The Wall Street Journal explains why Donald Trump is going to have trouble carrying out his immigration agenda and then tells us what he plans to do about it: Trump’s advisers have said that he hopes to test the limits of the law by issuing policies he knows to be unlawful, or even unconstitutional, in ...continue reading "Trump already planning to break the law"

What we've learned about the New Orleans truck killer: He didn't cross the border two days ago. It was a month ago and it was someone else. He's not an immigrant. He's a US citizen born in Beaumont, Texas, who served as a staff sergeant in the Army. He acted alone, not with accomplices. He's ...continue reading "A brief review of initial reports about the New Orleans killer"

Which country invests the most in AI? The United States by a mile. No one else is close. But things look a little different if you adjust for the size of the country: It may not come as a surprise that Israel has a high concentration of AI activity, but Sweden? I sure didn't expect ...continue reading "Raw data: Global investment in AI"

Happy New Year!

The Woke Index rose four points in the final quarter of 2024: Elon Musk has his work cut out for him.

When it comes to inflation reporting, the Wall Street Journal can always find a hook: I can only imagine how this went down. After scouring the detailed CPI numbers for weeks, an intern finally noticed that a couple of the items near the top were breakfast staples. Huzzah! We've got our story, boys! I hardly ...continue reading "At the Wall Street Journal, it’s always a good day to write about inflation"

Here's one last set of AI charts for the year. We'll have more in 2025. The US has a huge lead over everyone else. Why? Maybe because of this: Is this cause or effect? Do we have a thriving AI industry because we attract all the best people with sky-high salaries? Or do we pay ...continue reading "The US is kicking everyone’s ass in the AI biz"

No comments. By publication date. The Count of Monte Cristo, 1844, by Alexandre Dumas Crime and Punishment, 1866, by Fyodor Dostoevsky Southern California: An Island on the Land, 1946, by Carey McWilliams Youngblood Hawke, 1962, by Herman Wouk The Chronicles of Amber (first series), 1970, by Roger Zelazny Time Enough for Love, 1973, by Robert ...continue reading "My 20 favorite books of all time"

Most of these charts are intriguing, not literally the most important trends of the year. But some of them are! Enjoy. 1. Abortions are up The data now broadly agrees: ever since Dobbs the overall abortion rate has gone up, not down. Telehealth across state lines and pharmaceutical abortions have driven the increase. 2. Extremist ...continue reading "Top 20 charts of 2024"

This is the cathedral of St. Stephan in the German half of Passau.

Here are my top ten wishes for 2025. I guess you could call it a bucket list. I expect none of them to come true. Waymo sells me a driverless car. Price is no object. Medical boffins invent a cure for multiple myeloma. AI writes my blog for me. Cheap fusion demonstrated at scale. Vladimir ...continue reading "My top ten wishes for 2025"

I continue to be a little dumbfounded by the reversal of Joe Biden's fortunes among liberals. Less than a year ago he was being hailed as the best president since FDR, a guy who had unexpectedly exceeded every expectation for his progressive accomplishments. Today he's derided as an almost epic failure. The proximate cause for ...continue reading "Biden never finished his biggest projects. That’s a good thing."

It's the end of another year and that means it's time for some top ten lists. Let's start with my top ten photos of 2024.

Here's an AI chart you probably haven't seen: After rising through 2019, AI adoption by businesses has been dead flat for the past five years. What's more, the vast bulk of this is old-school "AI" that doesn't deserve the name, not generative AI of the kind that's been the focus of all our attention for ...continue reading "Businesses are not rushing to adopt AI"

I've been hearing so much about bird flu lately that I wanted to see how steeply new cases in humans had gone up. It turns out they haven't: After a big burst in October the number of human cases has steadily dropped off. Is this because there's less bird flu? Or because farm workers are ...continue reading "Raw data: Bird flu cases in the US"

Vivek Ramaswamy and Mickey Kaus on the "working class struggle": All for downsizing the bureaucracies, but this seems like BS. Long term trends have shifted the balance against the working class 1) Increasing returns to skill/education 2) Trade (unskilled labor performed abroad) and 3) Immigration (unskilled labor comes here). Maybe AI will… https://t.co/90qGy1cpMB — Mickey ...continue reading "The “working class struggle” is a myth"