Kevin Drum 🕸

Philip Tetlock's Forecasting Research Institute conducted an exercise last year on the topic of human extinction events. Why? Who knows. Their report was released yesterday and, long story short, a group of various experts predicted a roughly 10-20% chance of catastrophe by 2100 (10% of human race dies) and a 1-6% chance of total extinction ...continue reading "Some AI experts are really rattled by the whole extinction thing"

Well, this is weird. A few years ago police investigators found out that four state troopers in Connecticut had been entering fake traffic tickets into an internal police database: Four troopers had collectively entered at least 636 fake tickets into the state police computer system over a nine-month stretch to make it appear they were ...continue reading "Need to improve your racial profiling image? Just issue a bunch of fake tickets to white people."

Flyers crossing into the international terminal at LAX.

The city of Los Angeles is thinking about starting up a public bank: The City Council voted in October 2021 to study the viability of forming a city-owned bank and to create a business plan for doing so. With new political leadership and support from a number of community organizations, the city is now preparing ...continue reading "Los Angeles probably doesn’t need a public bank"

In hindsight, a lot of people overestimate how many schools were closed during the pandemic. In reality, about half were fully open for the 2020-21 school year and upwards of 90% for the 2021-22 school year. And yet, the evidence so far suggests that kids fell behind considerably anyway and haven't made up any ground ...continue reading "COVID really did a number on America’s kids"

The other shoe drops: The Biden administration said it intends to move forward with the long-promised sale of F-16 jet fighters to Turkey, hours after that country’s president withdrew his objections to extending membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to Sweden. National-security adviser Jake Sullivan rejected suggestions that advancing the sale to Ankara was ...continue reading "Turkey gets its reward: Sweden for F-16s"

I've noticed lately an odd mythology building up about how scientists were all wet about the COVID vaccine stopping transmission of the virus. There's an element of truth to this, but it's far from the whole story: What's true is that although the vaccine was effective against transmission early on, that's not the case with ...continue reading "Do vaccines slow the transmission of COVID-19?"

Turkey—aka Türkiye—suddenly abandoned its long opposition to Sweden joining NATO earlier today. No explanation, as near as I can tell. Very weird.

The Watts Towers silhouetted against the morning sun. Simon Rodia spent 33 years building his towers, and then finally gave up because he was getting old and he got tired of battling the city for permits.

Will robots take away all our jobs? Steven Rattner says no: Almost exactly 60 years ago, Life magazine warned that the advent of automation would make “jobs go scarce” — instead, employment boomed. Now, the launch of ChatGPT and other generative A.I. platforms has unleashed a tsunami of hyperbolic fretting, this time about the fate ...continue reading "Please God, no more about the Luddites"

The LA Times reports that rental life is grim everywhere, but especially in California: Minimum-wage workers shouldn't bother trying to find a two-bedroom apartment anywhere in the country. According to a new federal report, "in no state, metropolitan area, or county in the U.S. can a worker earning the federal or prevailing state or local ...continue reading "Rent in California is high, but income after rent is about the same as a decade ago"

The US citizenship test is due for an upgrade and apparently "some advocates" fear it will get harder. There's a bit of angst over the history section, but mainly it's about changes to the English skills section: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services proposes that the new test updates the speaking section to assess English skills. ...continue reading "English test set to get more rigorous in citizenship test update"

In the summer the water is always warm off the Gulf Coast of Florida. But this summer is off the charts: "Not sure I've ever seen the water around Florida look quite like this before... at any time of year," says Brian McNoldy, the researcher at the University of Miami who created the map. The ...continue reading "Sea water near Tampa hits record-setting 90ºF"

Here is an interesting tidbit via Alex Tabarrok. It's a study of low birth weight in babies from Maxim Massenkoff of the Naval Postgraduate School. Here's the most basic US data: US birth weights peaked in 1985 at about 3,350 grams (7.4 pounds) and then declined over the next 20 years to about 3,290 grams ...continue reading "Air pollution doesn’t affect the birth weight of babies"

The St. Louis Fed's GDP Nowcast is forecasting that GDP growth in Q2 will be 0.28%. The Atlanta Fed's GDPNow is forecasting growth of 2.1%. Big difference! So who's right? No offense to the St. Louis folks, but it looks like the Atlanta forecast has a considerably better recent track record. GDP growth in Q2 ...continue reading "Atlanta victorious in dueling GDP forecasts"

Over at the Washington Post, Heather Long says, "If we avoid a recession, we can thank Black and Hispanic workers." I was all set to scoff, but she's right. Here's the basic employment pictire: White workers have only barely recovered their pre-pandemic employment levels while nonwhite workers are all 10-13% higher. But a better metric ...continue reading "Nonwhite workers are powering the economy back to work"

The LA Times has a story today about a couple of fraudulent PACs that scammed both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016. The bad guys are now behind bars, but I was intrigued by this brief aside: The two groups made more than 275 million robocalls over a 16-month period and netted nearly $4 ...continue reading "Robocall fundraising sure is inefficient"

Normally it takes a couple of days to settle payments in the banking system. But no longer. Later this month the Federal Reserve is introducing FedNow, which allows instant payment settlement 24 hours a day. Are you ready for the 20-minute 4 am bank run? In addition to losing revenue from the time between a ...continue reading "Fed poised to make bank runs easier than ever"

This chart shows total US greenhouse gas emissions—nearly all of it CO2 and methane—for the past two decades by sector: Emissions peaked in 2007 and have fallen 12% since then, due almost exclusively to the fact that we've cut our use of coal-fired power plants in half.¹ These coal plants have largely been replaced by ...continue reading "Raw data: US greenhouse gas emissions"

I'm not really sure why I made this chart: I know that M2 as a measure of money supply isn't taken too seriously these days, and M2 as a cause of inflation even less so. But last night I got curious about the sources of our recent inflation. Is it exclusively a result of reduced ...continue reading "Does M2 still matter?"