Kevin Drum 🕸

The Wall Street Journal is skeptical about economic doomsaying: I don't know about that. I'd put it at about five months right now. My read of the evidence is that the economy is in OK but fragile shape, and by summer a whole bunch of things are likely to coalesce. This will be triggered by ...continue reading "We can’t put off a recession forever"

I hauled out the telescope a couple of days ago for some testing after I added a new part, and as long as it was all set up I decided to take some pictures. As usual in my backyard, I had very few choices and I eventually picked M106, a Type 2 Seyfert galaxy with ...continue reading "Bonus weekend astrophotography"

Emmanuel Macron wants to raise the retirement age in France from 62 to 64, and the French people are not happy about it. Rokhaya Diallo explains why: If it is adopted, Macron’s reform would disproportionately hurt more vulnerable populations: low-income workers, women and citizens from the French overseas territories, who are overwhelmingly people of color. ...continue reading "The French public is woker than you think"

What. The. Fuck. This is from a paper written in December by Yu Takagi and Shinji Nishimoto of the Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences in Osaka. Subjects were put in an MRI machine and shown a series of pictures. The fMRI data was collected, and then software using an algorithm called Stable Diffusion attempted to ...continue reading "MRI machines can now (sort of) read your mind"

They're so adorable when they're sprawled out, taking a nap together. I'm not really sure where the odd coloring came from in this picture. I shot it using my flash unit, but for some reason the flash malfunctioned and provided much less light than it should have. When I corrected it in Photoshop, I ended ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 3 March 2023"

Peggy Noonan has a remarkable column in the Wall Street Journal today about the COVID lab-leak theory. Before I get to that, though, let's review why we're talking about this at all. A few days ago the Journal reported that: The Department of Energy had gathered some new intelligence about the possibility of a lab ...continue reading "Peggy Noonan and the common sense of COVID"

A conversation the other day prompted me to reevaluate the way we talk about teens and social media. It's usually framed as whether social media is good or bad, and that's obviously not very useful. The internet has a tendency to bifurcate things. Most famously, I believe that the internet makes smart people smarter and ...continue reading "How to think about teens and social media"

Tyler Cowen today: Recently I discussed the connection between high neuroticism and left-wing politics. In passing I mentioned that the right-wing had its own problems, leading a few of you to ask what those were. The classic response would be to accuse (credit?) conservatives as being low in empathy. Whether or not you agree historically, ...continue reading "We have nothing to fear but (conservative) fear itself"

Over at Vox, Alissa Wilkinson peddles an increasingly stale meme: It’s important for the purposes of this article that you know my age: I am on the verge of turning 40. Having been raised in that brief interregnum between the Cold War and the war on terror, I, like many of my peers, assumed that ...continue reading "The (not kids anymore) are doing alright"

Inflation is usually blamed on higher prices for commodities, which in turn raise the prices for finished consumer goods. Add in higher labor costs and you get the dreaded spiraling inflation. But Reuters reports that European central bankers are finally waking up to something else: Huddled in a retreat in a remote Arctic village, European ...continue reading "War profiteering? How about pandemic profiteering?"

Our president today: I support D.C. Statehood and home-rule – but I don’t support some of the changes D.C. Council put forward over the Mayor’s objections – such as lowering penalties for carjackings. If the Senate votes to overturn what D.C. Council did – I’ll sign it. — President Biden (@POTUS) March 2, 2023 I ...continue reading "Home rule for me, but not for thee"

This is the Capitol Building in our nation's capital. As you are reading this, America's legislators are carrying out their solemn duty to promote the general welfare with no thought for themselves. Let us all thank them for their selfless service to our nation.

I'm just fiddling around here, but thought this was interesting: When you hear about e-commerce, it's commonly described as about 15% of all sales. Which is fair enough. But that includes things like gasoline and eating out, which can't be purchased online, plus autos, which are still mostly an in-person business. If you look at ...continue reading "How big is e-commerce? It depends."

Here's the latest from California, bellwether to the nation: Swept up in unproven voter fraud claims, the Shasta County Board of Supervisors has upended the county’s election process, canceling its contract with Dominion Voting Systems and opting this week to pursue, among other options, the possibility of counting votes by hand. Supervisor Kevin Crye, part ...continue reading "California county dumps Dominion over voting conspiracy theories"

As productivity goes, so goes the nation. Or something like that. In the fourth quarter of 2022 labor productivity increased at an annual rate of 1.7%. That's a little higher than the average of the past decade. Here is productivity since the end of the Great Recession: Productivity shot up during the first quarter of ...continue reading "Chart of the day: Productivity was up in final quarter of 2022"

Matt Yglesias writes today that certain progressive tropes produce feelings of helplessness and depression, rather than the sense of power and optimism needed for political movements to succeed. One of these is the routine assertion of "harm" or "feeling unsafe" when someone does something you find offensive or even just disagreeable: Objecting to bigoted or ...continue reading "On “feeling unsafe”"

One of the most common suggestions from police reform advocates is to stop using armed police officers for a wide range of tasks that might be better handled by trained dispute moderators and social workers. In Los Angeles, the police union said today it was willing to negotiate this: As part of its upcoming contract ...continue reading "LAPD says it’s “willing” to hand off duties it never liked in the first place"

Hot off the press from the BLS, here is the 2022 unemployment rate for each region of the US: Want to know how your state did? Just click here.

You may recall that a few weeks ago I set up my telescope in the backyard to do a little testing. I was extremely restricted in my view, and I ended up semi-randomly taking a picture of M81, aka Bode's Galaxy. It was surprisingly good. A few days later I took another picture, and although ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Ron DeSantis has written a book! Let's see what's in it: DeSantis, who this week begins a media tour to promote his new book “The Courage to Be Free,” launched a “Prescribe Freedom” campaign in January that proposes permanently limiting Covid-19 vaccination and mask requirements and giving cover to physicians whose medical views depart from ...continue reading "Ron DeSantis wants to ban masks permanently, forever, eternally, infinitely, forevermore, til death do us part"