Kevin Drum 🕸

More bad news on the inflation front. The Producer Price Index, which measures wholesale prices, surged in February. Goods remain below their peak prices of 2022 but spiked up 15.5% between January and February on an annualized basis. Services continued their steady rise and were up 3.6%. PPI tends to be volatile, and two-thirds of ...continue reading "PPI inflation index jumps in February"

The primary objection to Chinese ownership of TikTok is based on stats showing that something like a third of teenagers "regularly" get news from TikTok—which could make them targets for Chinese propaganda. But this is based on survey data, and most people have a very wide definition of news. It includes celebrity news, sports news, ...continue reading "America’s teens probably don’t get very much real news from TikTok"

Denmark has given us Legos, Earth Shoes, Danish pastry, Google Maps, the Egg chair, Scanpans, Carlsberg beer, C++, Christmas plates, the international wheelchair symbol, open-faced sandwiches, and Ozempic. Clever people, those Danes.

Fishing off the Seal Beach pier on an overcast winter day.

Comments are back up! Apparently some kind of noaccess code got mysteriously added to the site, but Bluehost deleted it and now everything is fine.

After being let go from CNN, Don Lemon cut a deal with Elon Musk for a show on Twitter. Lemon's first episode was an interview with Musk, after which the deal was abruptly canceled. Why? His approach was basically just “CNN, but on social media”, which doesn’t work, as evidenced by the fact that CNN ...continue reading "Elon Musk says Don Lemon is a Jeff Zucker sock puppet"

Among the various ways of estimating worker pay, one of the most accurate is the BLS calculation of employer costs. This is released quarterly, and in Q4 of 2023 wages and salaries for civilian workers increased by a whopping 10%: From Q3 to Q4, wages increased 3.1%. Adjusting for inflation and then annualizing the quarterly ...continue reading "Worker pay increased 10% last quarter?"

Today the House passed a bill to effectively ban TikTok unless it's acquired by an American company: Republican leaders fast-tracked the bill through the House with limited debate, and it passed on a lopsided vote of 352 to 65, reflecting widespread backing for legislation that would take direct aim at China in an election year. ...continue reading "Banning TikTok might very well make things worse"

Did you know that Ukraine has destroyed a third of Russia's Black Sea fleet, nearly half of that just since September? I didn't: The victories have been all the more surprising because Ukraine does not have a traditional navy or a fleet of warships. Instead, Ukraine has used sea drones and missiles to attack Russian ...continue reading "Ukraine has sunk a third of Russia’s Black Sea fleet"

You're aware of the practice of judge shopping, right? Most often it's used by conservatives, who file suits in specific locations where they're guaranteed to get a wingnut judge who will issue a nationwide injunction based on even the flimsiest evidence. Favored judges include Matthew Kacsmaryk (mifepristone, "Remain in Mexico"); Drew Tipton (immigration); Mark Pittman ...continue reading "Conservative judge shopping finally gets banned"

Hum de hum. A couple of reasonable folks have recently weighed in on the question of whether TikTok should be banned in the US. The first is from Noah Smith, who says it should be and points to two pieces of concrete evidence: (1) a study showed that TikTok suppresses videos China doesn't like, and ...continue reading "Is TikTok an existential threat to American society?"

It's time for some zoo pictures. The LA Zoo, for some reason, requires you to walk several hundred yards up a "promenade" after you get your ticket but before you get to the zoo itself. This is boring because there's very little along the way except for a few little pop-up shops. But. There is ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

The Justice Department has released a transcript of Joe Biden's interview with special counsel Robert Hur, and the Wall Street Journal has read it: Other news outlets basically agree, mostly opting to present their findings as "nuanced" or providing "context." But they fundamentally say the same thing: Biden was being Biden. He joked, he veered ...continue reading "Transcript shows Biden was fine during Hur interview"

Yikes! The BLS reported CPI inflation of 5.4% in February. Core CPI was lower at 4.4%: This is a big increase, driven by inflation in services and an increase in gasoline prices over the past month. Other commodities were either flat or down, including food, which showed no price increase from last month. On a ...continue reading "CPI inflation surges upward for fourth month in a row"

The Stormy Daniels hush money trial is scheduled to begin in two weeks. Naturally this means that Donald Trump's legal team is just now getting around to asking for a delay while we wait for the Supreme Court to rule on whether Trump is automatically immune to prosecution for anything he did while president. The ...continue reading "Trump makes a desperate bid to delay his hush money trial"

The whole Kate Middleton Photoshopping scandal is bizarrely inexplicable. Journalists have now identified nearly two dozen edits to the Mother's Day picture, and the inexplicable part is that they're both clumsy and pointless. Kate says she did the edits herself, which is kind of believable. Certainly no expert did this stuff. And why? The edits ...continue reading "The Kate Middleton scandaloid is truly strange"

This is from an article Derek Thompson wrote for the Atlantic last month: 3) In 2003, the typical female pet owner spent much more time socializing with ppl than pets. By 2022, this flipped. Today, the avg woman w/ a pet now spends more time “actively engaged” with her pet than she spends hanging out ...continue reading "Women and their pets"

Sometime in the next few months a star called T Corona Borealis is going to explode. How do we know this? Because T CrB isn't going to be a supernova—which would be unpredictable and destroy the star for good. In fact, T CrB isn't even a single star. It's a binary star: a white dwarf ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

In case you're curious, here's a breakdown of the president's FY25 budget proposal: The two pink regions represent approximately 5% of the defense budget and 5% of the domestic discretionary budget. The whole interminable fight before we finally agree on a budget will be entirely about those two slivers—or less. Those fights will seem very ...continue reading "A preview of next year’s budget fight"

President Biden released a new campaign pledge federal budget today: President Biden on Monday called for major new spending initiatives to lower costs for health care, child care and housing and enough new taxes on the wealthy and major corporations to pay for those proposals and also shave $3 trillion off the national debt over ...continue reading "Yet another budget tome lands in Washington DC"