Kevin Drum 🕸

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"

Earlier today I came across a tweet from Kristen Soltis Anderson about a Pew Research poll asking people which federal agencies they viewed favorably.¹ Her primary takeaway is that between 2019 and 2023 Republican views of nearly every federal agency have cratered. I was noodling around with this, and finally decided that much of it ...continue reading "Raw data: What Democrats and Republicans think of federal agencies"

Despite all the rain, it doesn't seem like we're in for a poppy superbloom this year. But the sunflowers are looking terrific. Here's a few of them out in the desert near Indio.

As we all know, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis took revenge on Walt Disney Co. last year after its CEO dared to criticize DeSantis's anti-gay stance. Unfortunately for DeSantis, he didn't really think things through. First he decided to get rid of the special assessment district that Florida granted to Disney World back when it was ...continue reading "Ron DeSantis is not a smart man"

We have a few months to go before we hit the federal debt ceiling and the United States goes up in smoke because it can't pay all its debts. Republican leadership agrees that we shouldn't let the country go up in smoke and that increasing the debt ceiling is therefore imperative. There's an obvious way ...continue reading "A conversation about the debt ceiling with my GPT twin"

Here is Tucker Carlson following the mass shooting in Nashville at a Christian school: The trans movement is the mirror image of Christianity and therefore its natural enemy. How appalling does Carlson have to get before Rupert Murdoch finally pulls him off the air? Is there literally nothing he can say that crosses the line ...continue reading "Tucker Carlson descends ever further into the muck"

Reed O'Connor is the go-to judge if you want to get a ruling against Obamacare. O'Connor hates Obamacare. As near as I can tell, he'll rule against it no matter what's at stake or what the legal justification is. So guess what? A federal judge in Texas said Thursday that some Affordable Care Act mandates ...continue reading "Obamacare hating judge rules yet again against Obamacare"

You've all seen plenty of punditry about GPT-4, almost all of it based on the generic version available to plebs like us. But that's nothing. There are also dozens of companies that have been building specially trained versions of GPT-4 for different industries ("vertical markets," or "verticals," if you want to sound like you know ...continue reading "GPT-4 will (almost) be your next doctor"

This is the St. Martin Canal in the 10th arrondissement of Paris. I believe the view is looking north from the bridge at Rue Léon Jouhaux.