Kevin Drum 🕸

I've long been puzzled by something related to remote work. There's a big gap between two different metrics: Based on a variety of estimates, the number of office workers who actually work in the office (i.e., not remotely) has declined from 90% to about 70% today. But every estimate of office occupancy in big cities ...continue reading "Why is office occupancy down so much?"

A couple of days ago the Director of National Intelligence declassified a report written by an advisory group about the dangers of Commercially Available Information (CAI). This is information compiled by private companies and then sold to whoever pays for it—and it includes an astonishing array of data about individuals: CAI can be obtained from ...continue reading "Intelligence agencies can track your every move—and they can do it without a warrant"

Another triptych today. During the early part of my stay at City of Hope, while I was still mobile, I drove up to Mt. Wilson. I'd never been there before—when it was open, anyway—and it turned out to be a very serene place. It was a few acres of pine trees and telescopes but almost ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Over at New York today, Zak Cheney-Rice has a long piece about the imminent death of affirmative action if the Supreme Court, as expected, kills its final foothold in higher education later this year. It's a good piece, with loads of historical detail, and Cheney-Rice is certainly correct that the backlash against affirmative action in ...continue reading "Was affirmative action doomed from the start?"

The Wall Street Journal says that investors are feeling good about credit card debt: Missed-payment rates on these loans have ticked higher from ultralow levels hit during the pandemic, but they still sit well below the heights reached during past downturns. Over the past few months, the easing of bank stress has helped keep the ...continue reading "Raw data: Credit card spending since the pandemic"

I've seen a lot of stories like this lately: Tech companies that led the way in embracing remote work early in the pandemic are increasingly leading their workers right back to the office—whether they like it or not. Alphabet-owned Google, Lyft, Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Salesforce have all recently walked back remote-work policies they ...continue reading "Companies are finally getting fed up with remote work"

For 30 years Roy Emerson held tennis's record for men's Grand Slam titles at 12. His record seemed all but unbeatable until, finally, Pete Sampras broke it in 2000. But only barely: Sampras finished his career with 14 titles. Then, over the course of only 20 years, three players all broke Sampras's new record. By ...continue reading "Novak Djokovic is the best men’s tennis player of all time"

Conventional wisdom says that rising wages feed through into rising inflation. Thus, the only way to reduce inflation is to tighten monetary policy until wages start to decline. But a research letter from Adam Hale Shapiro of the San Francisco Fed casts some doubt on this: The estimates on both goods and housing services inflation ...continue reading "Rising wages have only a tiny impact on inflation"

At age 92, he's stepping down: George Soros, the legendary investor, philanthropist and right-wing target, is handing control of his $25 billion empire to a younger son—Alexander Soros, a self-described center-left thinker who grew up self-conscious of the family’s wealth and wasn’t thought to be a potential successor. The 37-year-old, who goes by Alex, said ...continue reading "They won’t have George Soros to kick around anymore"

What a bizarre story: Trump uses Democrat Matt Damon's voice in post-indictment video When I read this I thought it was yet another bit of AI fakery. But no. The Trumpies literally lifted a Matt Damon monologue from the movie Air and used it as narration for a campaign video. I guess they figure that ...continue reading "Trump steals Matt Damon’s voice for campaign video"

Earlier today Paul Krugman plugged the Stone Center, which recently created The GC Wealth Project, a cross-country database of wealth and wealth inequality. I decided to go play with it, but I didn't look much at inequality. I mostly looked at average wealth in half a dozen advanced economies: As recently as 2012, every country ...continue reading "Raw data: Wealth around the world"

According to the CDC, fewer than 4% of Americans are completely unprotected from COVID. The other 96% are either vaccinated or have been previously infected: These figures are taken from blood donors, who might be systematically different from the population as a whole. The study sample was weighted to account for this, but even so ...continue reading "Raw data: Herd immunity from COVID-19"

I want to highlight this excerpt from the Trump indictment: What's interesting to me is not the obvious obstruction of justice, which we know is a core part of the indictment, but Trump's obsession toward "my boxes." His sense of possession is palpable: even though he knows better, he's convinced they are "my" boxes and ...continue reading "Donald Trump and his obsession with “my boxes”"

Self-driving cars are here! Sort of. Mercedes will sell a car in 2024 that can drive on highways with no hands on the steering wheel. But there's a catch: The 'DRIVE PILOT' system can only operate on highways during daylight at speeds not exceeding 40 miles per hour, the DMV said. Mercedes-Benz said in a ...continue reading "True autonomous highway driving is (sort of) here"

As near as I can tell, there are three primary defenses of Donald Trump coming from Republicans: Trump didn't sell any of the documents, destroy or alter any documents, or give them away. So how bad can it be? Hillary did it too. DOJ and the FBI are corrupt and have been weaponized against Trump. ...continue reading "The Republican defenses of Donald Trump"

Are we in the middle of a great moral decline? It's a common belief. But it turns out it's always been a common belief. Every year for the past 70 years, anyway. A new study tests the belief in moral decline by examining survey items conducted since 1949: Typical items included: “Do you think that ...continue reading "Belief in moral decline is widespread, popular—and wrong"

The indictment against Donald Trump in the classified documents case has been unsealed. It includes 37 separate counts: The bulk of the charges in the 49-page indictment, unsealed Friday afternoon, relate to willful retention of national defense information — a violation of the Espionage Act that pertains to whether individuals broke the rules for the ...continue reading "Unsealed indictment charges Trump with 37 counts of illegal behavior"

What exactly was Donald Trump talking about in his recorded conversation about secret documents and Mark Milley, his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? And what document was he waving around during this conversation? Here's the background. In the middle of 2020 Milley nearly resigned because he believed Trump was "doing great and irreparable ...continue reading "Here’s what Trump was talking about in that taped conversation"

Yesterday we had a bunch of city workers on the street outside our backyard, and they had lots of machines that made loud noises as they dug up the roadway. This is why Hilbert looks a little startled in this picture. He wanted to play in the backyard, but he wasn't really sure about all ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 9 June 2023"

By an odd chance, today brings yet more evidence that young people are becoming more conservative. A PRRI poll asked whether people believed there were only two gender identities (man and woman) and Gen Z respondents showed a huge increase over the past two years: Every age group showed an increase, which is yet another ...continue reading "Yet more evidence for the growing conservatism of Gen Z"