Startup companies in the US raised only $37 billion in venture capital during the first quarter of 2023. That's less than half what they raised during the tech boom a year ago: Part of the reason for the slowdown is simply that booms don't last forever. Another part is that lots of current startups are ...continue reading "Raw data: venture funding has plunged over the past year"
CNN has a transcript of a 2021 conversation in which Donald Trump is complaining that Gen. Mark Milley said Trump wanted to attack Iran. Then he waved around a document that apparently says the opposite: This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information....As president, I ...continue reading "Trump admits he can’t declassify secret documents"
On Monday Ron DeSantis released a campaign video that included images of Donald Trump hugging and kissing Dr. Anthony Fauci: Three of the images in this collage are real. The three that show Trump hugging Fauci are AI fakes. DeSantis's excuse? He refuses to comment. However: A person with the DeSantis campaign told CNN that ...continue reading "DeSantis attacks Trump with fake AI images"
Donald Trump has been indicted on criminal charges related to the classified documents he withheld from investigators after taking them to his home in Mar-a-Lago when he left office: The Justice Department took the legally and politically momentous step of lodging federal criminal charges against former President Donald J. Trump, multiple people familiar with the ...continue reading "Trump indicted in classified documents case"
For technical reasons, the normal rent inflation measure from the BLS lags actual rent by 6-12 months. BLS has been investigating how to fix this, but in the meantime they've come up with an alternative measure that looks only at the rent paid by new renters. This index is released quarterly and leads the normal ...continue reading "Rent inflation is down to zero"
Yesterday I posted evidence from GSS that young men became suddenly more conservative between 2021 and 2022. Here's a follow-up from a Gallup poll released today: This is quite different. Young people have spiked upward in their conservatism, but middle-aged people have spiked up even more. And this is for both sexes, not just men. ...continue reading "Conservatism jumped in 2022—and then even more in 2023"
Eurostat has revised its Q1 estimate of eurozone GDP based on weaker results for Germany. Instead of a slight increase, Q1 GDP fell -0.4% on an annualized basis. This is the second quarter in a row of negative growth: Negative growth in Europe won't affect the US economy hugely, but it certainly won't do us ...continue reading "Raw data: Europe is officially in recession"
Here is the latest reading of my M-protein level from Monday (Day 41 after the CAR-T infusion): It's now down to 0.39, which is a bit of a slowdown from previous readings. However, this probably means nothing. My doctor had already warned me that measurements from Kaiser Permanente—where I'm now getting tested—deviate slightly from measurements ...continue reading "Health update"
Alabama has seven congressional districts and about 27% of its population is Black. Under normal circumstances you'd expect the Black vote to prevail in two districts, but Alabama has never been normal. In 1992 it got its first Black district since Reconstruction, and it's been limited to one Black district ever since. In late 2021 ...continue reading "Supreme Court rules Alabama redistricting is racially prohibited"
As we all know, a week ago Ron DeSantis flew a group of migrants from Texas and dumped them in Sacramento. But there are a couple of things I don't get about this affair. First, California Attorney General Rob Bonta says the migrants were picked up in El Paso: Bonta, who met with some of ...continue reading "Two questions about Ron DeSantis’s migrant abduction stunt"
From the Wall Street Journal: Investors are bracing for a flood of more than $1 trillion of Treasury bills in the wake of the debt-ceiling fight, potentially sparking a new bout of volatility in financial markets. Some on Wall Street fear that roughly $850 billion in bond issuance that was shelved until a debt-ceiling deal ...continue reading "$1 trillion in Treasury borrowing is not a big deal"
The Wall Street Journal reports today that Instagram "helps connect and promote" a huge network of pedophile sites: Pedophiles have long used the internet, but unlike the forums and file-transfer services that cater to people who have interest in illicit content, Instagram doesn’t merely host these activities. Its algorithms promote them. Instagram connects pedophiles and ...continue reading "Instagram has a pedophile problem"
The third edition of CREDO, a study of charter school performance, was released today. It covers the years 2014-2019 and shows much stronger performance for charter schools than the previous two studies: Performance is measured here in "days of learning," with 180 days as the baseline. The latest study shows that in reading, charter students ...continue reading "Charter schools work—but only for Black and Hispanic students"
This is the interior, looking up, of "Connector," a monumental sculpture by Richard Serra. It stands in the courtyard of the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, where it is alleged to connect all its disparate elements.
A few days ago I came across a chart showing that high school boys had gotten suddenly more conservative over the past couple of years. Unfortunately, after a frustrating search I was unable to track down the source data, so eventually I gave up on it and moved on. But I've since seen a couple ...continue reading "Yes, young men are becoming more right-wing"
Here's a couple of interesting inflation data points. Two different groups at the New York Fed have constructed measures of underlying inflation, one called the Underlying Inflation Gauge and the other a more recent measurement called the Multivariate Core Trend. Both are based on similar models that deconstruct the price data, remove the pieces due ...continue reading "Is inflation already down to 3%?"
Reports of unruly passengers skyrocketed during the pandemic, but how are we doing since then? Not so well: IATA, an international airline trade association, reported a couple of days ago that incidents of bad behavior were up 37% in 2022. This is sort of perplexing since the pandemic year of 2021 saw a skyrocketing amount ...continue reading "Unruly airline passengers remain a plague even with the pandemic over"
From Alex Stamos, director of Stanford University’s Internet Observatory, on the capabilities of modern AI language tools: I think we’re entering an incredible era of bullshit. I can hardly wait.
When I first put up this chart in February, Republicans had introduced 362 anti-trans bills. As of June, they've introduced 556: This is stark raving mad, and there's no reason for it aside from pure tribal insanity. The whole business simply beggars belief.
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