Kevin Drum 🕸

Relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran have been on a roller coaster for the past four decades. Relations were bad after the Iranian Revolution but improved during the Gulf War. They soured again when Iran began pursuing a nuclear program and then again after an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US ...continue reading "Why did China broker the new agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia?"

I don't mind saying that I'm a little confused about the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Here's some basic financial history: After a huge runup during the tech boom of 2020-21, deposits slowly fell back to earth in 2022, reaching $169 billion in February 2023. Since the start of 2022, SVB has seen withdrawals of ...continue reading "Was SVB management incompetent or just unlucky?"

Sid Pandiya, a 22-year-old student at UCLA, has discovered that remote work "can get really isolating and boring.” His answer: Pandiya came up with Kona, a software application aimed at making Slack more than a chatroom focused on tasks and deadlines. Kona greets its users every day with a pop-up that asks a simple yet ...continue reading "Slack now officially the worst app ever"

Let's give the furballs a break this week and instead bring in a foreign star to gawk at. I found this little guy in a tiny little park in Les Andelys, France, where he was puttering around and begging for attention. He allowed me to provide that attention, but eventually got bored and curled up ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 10 March 2023"

Hey, remember that Cochrane meta-study showing that masks don't work? The Cochrane folks have apologized and explained what the study really showed: Interventions to increase mask wearing may or may not work. The evidence is inconclusive. The study doesn't even address the question of whether mask wearing itself helps to reduce the spread of respiratory ...continue reading "Cochrane: We didn’t even study whether masks work"

Silicon Valley Bank collapsed today in the second-biggest bank failure in US history. Why? Because it put a ton of money into long-dated government and mortgage bonds. This would normally be pretty safe: When the Federal Reserve began raising rates last year, however, those holdings became less attractive because newer government bonds paid more in ...continue reading "Second-biggest US bank failure in history hits Silicon Valley"

Today I learned about a new fad on Instagram: pantry porn. But it's not what you think, so get your minds out of the gutter for just one second, you filthy perverts. Ahem. Anyway, pantry porn is the name given to carefully curated photos of lovingly stocked and organized pantries. And Jenna Drenten, a marketing ...continue reading "Pantry porn is the story of America"

Another Scandinavian country has weighed in on gender-affirming care in children and teens. This time it's Norway: Ukom recommends that puberty delaying treatment (puberty blockers) and hormonal and surgical gender confirmation treatment for children and young people are defined as experimental treatment. This is particularly important for teenagers with gender dysphoria. (Ukom is the Norwegian ...continue reading "Norway suggests slowing down on gender affirming care for teens"

The American economy gained 311,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 221,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate increased to 3.6%. This jobs report is weaker than it looks at first glance. The number of unemployed people jumped ...continue reading "Chart of the day: Net new jobs in February"

From the New York Times: Saudi Arabia is seeking security guarantees from the United States, help with developing a civilian nuclear program and fewer restrictions on U.S. arms sales as its price for normalizing relations with Israel, people familiar with the exchanges say. Why in the everlasting fuck should the United States be on the ...continue reading "Saudi Arabia asks us to please bribe them"

A couple of days ago I asked what lessons we should have learned from the COVID pandemic. Today the Washington Post tells us what lessons we did learn from the pandemic: At least 30 states, nearly all led by Republican legislatures, have passed laws since 2020 that limit public health authority....Health officials and governors in ...continue reading "What we learned from the pandemic"

Matthew Desmond has a very odd op-ed in the New York Times today. His topic is the lack of improvement in poverty despite 50 years of effort: What accounts for this lack of progress? It cannot be chalked up to how the poor are counted: Different measures spit out the same embarrassing result. When the ...continue reading "Helping the poor has been one of the great triumphs of the progressive movement"

Welcome to Paris, home of the greatest subway system in the world. Only New York comes close. Anyone disagree?

I've mentioned several times that the bulk of the scientific evidence points to a natural origin for the COVID virus, but you may be wondering just what that evidence is. First off, there's this: The early cases of COVID in Wuhan clustered almost entirely around the Huanan Market. That's a helluva coincidence in a city ...continue reading "Three reasons to believe that COVID evolved naturally, not in a lab"

Today Freedom House delivered its report on 50 years of political rights and civil liberties around the world. The United States managed to avoid another year of decline, but has still fallen precipitously over the past decade: Currently the United States is rated just above Poland and just below Mongolia. At the risk of being ...continue reading "USA autocracy score doubles over past decade"

The response of the punditocracy to ChatGPT has entranced me. I mean, here we have a tool that, judged by ordinary standards, is absolutely remarkable. It's not playing chess or Go or Jeopardy! It's a computer program that produces high-school level text on pretty much any subject you throw at it—and will likely produce college-level ...continue reading "The descendants of ChatGPT will eventually be smarter than us"

Check out the bicycle cops at LAX waving for the camera just before our trip to France last year. But where's the fourth bicycle?

I always assumed that Rupert Murdoch founded Fox News, put Roger Ailes in charge, and then pretty much ignored it after it was up and running. He had black-tie fundraisers to attend, wives to divorce, and all the other accoutrements of the modern billionaire. Why waste time overseeing the daily ops of a cable news ...continue reading "What did Rupert Murdoch know and when did he know it?"

The Wall Street Journal has a seemingly insatiable appetite for trend stories that just aren't true. Here's the latest: Women’s Return to the Workforce Piles Momentum on a Hot Economy American women are staging a return to the workforce that is helping propel the economy in the face of high inflation and rising interest rates. ...continue reading "No, women aren’t returning to the workforce at an unusual rate"

I've been wondering for a while what lessons we should take from the COVID pandemic. We've had three years to collect data, after all, and another pandemic is likely to come along someday. Nobody with real expertise seems to have written about this, so I figure I'll take a crack at it. If nothing else, ...continue reading "What should we do differently in the next pandemic?"