Kevin Drum 🕸

As we all know, Jimmy Carter lost his 1980 reelection bid against Ronald Reagan thanks in part to the long-running Iranian hostage drama. It's long been suspected that Reagan's team actively tried to persuade Iran not to release the hostages so that Carter wouldn't get a victory bump, but there's never been any firm proof. ...continue reading "Reagan team tried to sabotage hostage talks before the 1980 election"

With the release of ChatGPT, the chattering classes began to chatter about the safety of artificial intelligence. Partly this was about things ChatGPT could do right now (help kids cheat in school, for example) but mostly it was about the possibility of AI destroying humanity at some point in the future. But there's an odd ...continue reading "The real danger of artificial intelligence is natural intelligence"

If you want to project the state of the economy, one of the key metrics is personal saving. But this is harder to estimate than it seems. Here's one crack at it: The dashed line is the "normal" quarterly saving rate and the orange line is the actual saving rate. As you can see, it ...continue reading "Excess savings are all used up. Or are they?"

You should check out Kiera Butler's piece at Mother Jones about Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Sarasota, Florida (naturally). A couple of months ago the "medical freedom" movement suddenly decided to target them: With an unprecedented 300 people at the February meeting, attendees lit into Sarasota Hospital physicians, accusing them of killing Covid patients....That’s when things ...continue reading "The MAGA mob goes after a Florida hospital"

The stock market fell last week after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, and it's been on a roller coaster this week as news about the banking system goes from good to bad and then back to good in the space of a few hours. And yet, here's what all the panic looked like by ...continue reading "Investors remain happy, happy, happy"

This is Charlie being bad. He knows he's not supposed to be on the other side of the fence, but he goes out there anyway. Luckily, a teenager or a dog or something always comes along pretty quickly, which scares him back into the yard. In fact, Charlie is an excellent outdoor cat. He sometimes ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 17 March 2023"

I've been trying to figure out exactly what warning signs regulators supposedly missed in the months before Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, and I haven't come up with much. The $15 billion hole in SVB's bond portfolio was mildly concerning, but no more than that since it didn't affect SVB's books. The outflow of deposits seemed ...continue reading "Were FHLB loans a missed red flag before Silicon Valley Bank collapsed?"

Courtesy of the BLS, here's how much it costs to employ various types of workers: You can find more breakdowns here.

We have dates! My CAR-T treatment is scheduled for April 25. There are several days of pre-treatment, so I will be up at City of Hope starting on April 19. I'll return home whenever they think I'm ready, probably around the second week of May. And then we wait to see if it worked. Tick ...continue reading "Health update"

Israel is in tumult over an attempt by its current hard-right government to strip the Supreme Court of power. Former Likud prime minister Ehud Olmert, no one's idea of a dove, says Israel is facing an existential crisis: This moment, he says, is different from previous political crises that Israel has faced. “If you love ...continue reading "The future of Israel gets dimmer every day"

The Atlantic reports today that three researchers have performed a re-analysis of swabs taken at the Huanan Market in Wuhan early in the COVID-19 pandemic. The original analysis, done last year by a Chinese team, drew no conclusions about the origin of the virus, but the new analysis strongly suggests that the virus developed naturally ...continue reading "New DNA analysis adds strong evidence for natural origin of COVID-19 virus"

Why are teen girls so depressed these days. Jonathan Haidt thinks the answer is smartphones and social media, and I expressed some doubts about that a few weeks ago. Haidt is back today and, among other things, shows us this chart: You can see one of the reasons for my skepticism here: the starting point ...continue reading "Teens are depressed because they spent their childhood in a bubble, not because of smartphones"

I overslept today, so I asked GPT-4 to write a limerick about oversleeping: There once was a fellow who'd doze, He set his alarm but he chose, To hit snooze a few times, And waste precious chimes, Now his blog is a void and that blows. I modified the final line, but the rest is ...continue reading "Yet more poetry from GPT-4"

I've set this video from Microsoft to start at 7:54. Go ahead and watch about 30 seconds of it.  As a former high-tech marketing VP, I can confirm that marketing writing is generally pretty undistinguished. You don't have to be Shakespeare to put together a brochure or a PowerPoint presentation about a new product. ...continue reading "Marketing in the era of GPT-4 is a doomed profession"

This is a silhouette of a tree in Modjeska Canyon late in the day. And, um, that's about all I have to say about it.

The New York Times reports that people who work at home are taking off lots of time in the afternoon. Golf has boomed: A new study from Stanford shines a light on the rise of afternoon leisure. Using geolocation data near golf courses in the United States, the study found there was 278 percent more ...continue reading "Working from home? How about a round of 3 pm golf?"

This is insane: It's insane that maternal mortality has gone up 3x since 1990. It's insane that it increased 40% in 2021 according to the latest data from the CDC. 40%! It's insane that Black women have a maternal mortality rate 170% higher than white women. Something seriously doesn't make sense about these numbers. Why ...continue reading "Maternal mortality exploded in 2021"

This whole mifepristone business is just infuriating: The federal judge who could upend access to a key abortion medication seemed open on Wednesday to the argument that the drug had not been properly vetted and could be unsafe — claims the Food and Drug Administration and leading health organizations strongly contest. While the antiabortion group ...continue reading "Texas judge is close to banning medication-induced abortion"

The latest hotness in inflation studies is to focus on inflation in the services sector. Why? Because that's what's highest right now, so it allows you to make a plausible argument that inflation is still a big problem and we need a nice, big recession to finally get it under control. For some reason this ...continue reading "A look at services inflation in February"

Over the past few days, a million pundits have become instant experts on the finances of Silicon Valley Bank. They are outraged that no one before now noticed the bleeding obvious: SVB was a reckless and fragile bank, a literal time bomb on the edge of collapsing thanks to foolish business practices. Now, 20/20 hindsight ...continue reading "Silicon Valley Bank was fine. It’s Silicon Valley that’s broken."