Kevin Drum 🕸

Just for the record, I'm not deliberately avoiding Trump news because I think it's stupid.¹ It's mostly because events like his arraignment today are already covered in minute detail by every news outlet on the planet and I don't have anything special to add. I am curious to see what the charges are, just in ...continue reading "Trump update"

Let's review the recent history of human communication: 1876-2000: Telephones provide convenient and universal voice communication. 2000-2023: Thekidsthesedays decide they hate telephones and really, really hate voice messages, so instead they use phone infrastructure to send text messages. Today: Kids realize that emojis don't actually represent the full range of human emotion, so they begin ...continue reading "Human voice is the hot new texting technology"

In today's release of economic news for February, job openings continued their yearlong fall and orders for durable goods continued their decline of the past few months (with a brief timeout for Christmas). It was against this backdrop that the Fed continued to raise rates a couple of weeks ago. Good job, Fed.

Man, the minimum standards to qualify as a culture war sure have fallen lately.

This is a bateau chugging downstream on the Seine. A few minutes after taking this picture I myself would be on one of the bateaux chugging along the Seine.

Over at Vox, Miles Bryan writes about a new study of crime in the downtown areas of New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Chicago. The study's conclusion? Actual crime has been pretty stable, but fear of crime has shot up. This, not a desire for remote work, is the biggest reason people give for not wanting ...continue reading "Crime and the (Republican) fear of crime"

The price of crude oil is now down to roughly its price before the pandemic.

The key to the Mar-a-Lago documents case is not the bare fact that Donald Trump left the White House with classified documents in his possession. That might have been accidental. The bigger question is whether Trump refused to give up the documents even after they had been subpoenaed and Trump knew he had them. Indeed, ...continue reading "The Mar-a-Lago documents case is all about obstruction of justice"

Life expectancy has been in the news lately, so yesterday I was diddling around with the state-by-state data. Here it is: Generally, life expectancy increased through 1990, leveled out, and then began to drop in 2000. But the trend wasn't the same everywhere. Some states went up a little, while some dropped more than the ...continue reading "Raw data: Life expectancy in the 50 states"

My understanding is that there are two basic argument for banning TikTok: There's a danger that they might tune their recommendation algorithm to favor content from the Chinese government. China might be able to get access to the personal information of American users. Genuine question here: Suppose both of these things happen. What's the worst ...continue reading "What’s the problem with TikTok?"

For your amusement, here's a citation from a paper I read recently. It is, oddly, in alphabetical order by first name. Must be some kind of woke thing.

Can you unravel the trend here? Richard Nixon commits crimes, but is pardoned by Gerald Ford and never goes to trial. Jimmy Carter: no crimes. Ronald Reagan and his top lieutenants commit crimes, but are pardoned by George H. W. Bush and never go to trial. Bill Clinton: dodgy record for sure, but he paid ...continue reading "A brief timeline of recent presidential criming"

For all the good it will do, I would like to remind everyone yet again that GPT-4 is not artificial intelligence. Neither is anything else. AI, by any reasonable definition, doesn't exist yet. GPT-4 is amazing. It will have a huge impact on the world. It's definitely on the road to AI, the same way ...continue reading "GPT-4 is not AI. Stop calling it that."

The judge in the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News has issued a summary judgment that Fox did, indeed, lie about Dominion's voting machines: In his ruling, Davis determined that the conservative cable-news network had undeniably broadcast falsehoods when it allowed allies of Donald Trump to float baseless conspiracy theories about Dominion supposedly rigging voting machines ...continue reading "Judge rules that Fox News lied*"

Noted without comment: It is not hard to imagine a conservative local prosecutor trying to charge President Biden with, say, failing to adequately guard the border. “This presents the opportunity for potentially thousands of state and local prosecutors to investigate and charge a president without the impediment imposed by D.O.J.’s policy against indicting sitting presidents,” ...continue reading "No, it’s not hard to imagine at all"

This chart shows total household financial assets through the end of 2022: The basic story is easy to see. In 2020 assets grew above normal as spending slowed and the COVID rescue bill started putting money in people's pockets. This peaked in late 2021 at about $13 trillion above the pre-pandemic trend. Then, as the ...continue reading "Raw data: Household financial assets"

It's a showdown on the fenceline. Charlie and our squirrel are having a staring contest, which the squirrel won on sheer speed. It scampered over to the bush near Charlie and then zipped down. It happened so fast Charlie hardly had time to blink. Those squirrels are quick little beasties.

NBC News reports on Audrey Hale, the shooter in the Nashville school shooting earlier this week: Even before authorities said Hale was transgender, users on extremist websites spent hours sharing their hopes that the shooter was trans or nonbinary, the primary targets of hate and harassment campaigns by the infamous extremist site 4chan over the ...continue reading "Audrey Hale might not be transgender at all"

Good news on the inflation front today. The Fed's Favorite Measure of Inflation™ was down from its spike in January: The core rate of PCE inflation is still too high, but the headline rate clocked in at 3.2%, which isn't bad. On a trendline basis, it was around 2.9%. On a year-over-year basis, headline PCE ...continue reading "PCE inflation fell in February"

Over at National Review today I came across a link to a "massively researched, thoroughly reported, and well-thought-out essay" that is "an early contender for essay of the year." NR is a nice, mainstream conservative publication, so I clicked the link to find out what mainstream conservatism finds interesting these days. Here is one paragraph: ...continue reading "How the deep state controls social media and censors conservatives"