Kevin Drum 🕸

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."

This is the altar of the Church of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine, a few minutes walk from our apartment in Paris last year. The building was begun as a church; interrupted by the French Revolution; redesignated as a monument to the Grande Armée by Napoleon; and eventually finished as a church. It was designed in the neoclassical style ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Here's an odd thing. I asked GPT-4 to write a poem about the Ides of March and it produced one with rhyming couplets. I asked it to try again without rhymes, but it just produced a poem with different rhymes. So I asked it a third time, and then a fourth: I apologize for the ...continue reading "GPT-4 is a little too good at rhyming"

Bethany Mandel, a conservative writer, had a bit of brain freeze on live TV yesterday and was unable to define woke for her interviewer. This gave us lefties a chance to laugh at her, and fair enough. That's life in the arena. I really don't understand why movement conservatives haven't yet figured out a simple, ...continue reading "What is woke?"

Here's a chart that must be driving all the ex-managers of Silicon Valley Bank nuts: One of SVB's problems was a portfolio of long-dated Treasury bonds that was $15 billion underwater. But 10-year Treasurys have fallen by more than 50 basis points since Peter Thiel's run on deposits put SVB into receivership. Their portfolio has ...continue reading "It was necessary to destroy the bank in order to save the bank"

We have good news and bad news today. The good news is that producer-level inflation was negative in February: This doesn't tell us anything about inflation in services, so it's limited good news. Still, good is good. The bad news is that retail sales fell for the sixth straight month: Of course, this is good ...continue reading "Today’s economic news in two handy charts"

It is the Ides of March. If you happen to have any friends named Brutus—or anything else vaguely Latinesque—you might want to stay home today.

It's time for some serious geekery. This post will (once again) address the question of whether the 2018 bank deregulation law had any effect on the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Yesterday I looked at SVB's capital ratios and concluded that they were higher than required either with or without the law. If deregulation had ...continue reading "Silicon Valley Bank would have passed every test for liquidity"

It's hummingbird season again, and I have several who buzz around my window these days. The top picture is (I think) a mature Allen's hummingbird, while the bottom picture is a young 'un. I realize that I posted a picture of a hummingbird just about a month ago, but what can I say? I like ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Well, how about this? Our long national nightmare is finally over.

Today is inflation day, and the BLS reports that CPI moved sort of sideways in February: Headline CPI dropped from January's high reading, but core CPI moved up a bit. This makes three months in a row that core CPI has been creeping upward. (In case you care—which you shouldn't—the year-over year rate that news ...continue reading "CPI in February ticks up, but supercore is still in good shape"