Kevin Drum 🕸

Tyler Cowen links today to a thread about California from a guy named Tiago Forte. After reading it, what I wanted to ask was, Has this guy ever actually talked to a Californian? Luckily I did a teensy bit of due diligence first and learned that he grew up in Orange County; went to college ...continue reading "A few weird musings about California and Elon Musk"

Today I learned, 25 years after the fact, that Princess Diana wasn't killed by swarms of irresponsible paparazzi in that Paris tunnel. The paparazzi were there, of course, but apparently they weren't doing anything way out of the ordinary. Diana died because her chauffeur for the evening was intoxicated; had prescription drugs in his system; ...continue reading "Who killed Princess Diana?"

Earlier this morning I put up a chart showing what inflation looks like if you use a better estimate of rent than the one that BLS uses. I thought this could bear some explanation, so here are two estimates of rent inflation: The official BLS estimate has continued to rise throughout 2022 even though everyone ...continue reading "What’s up with rent inflation?"

This is a woman sketching the scenery near the west end of the Île de la Cité, the famous island in the middle of the Seine in the center of Paris. The bridge up ahead is the Pont des Arts, and the dome to its left is the Institut de France.

John Ray is the temporary CEO named to clean up crypto giant FTX after its spectacular collapse last month. He testified before Congress today about the biggest problems he's uncovered so far: "Loans and other payments" include $1 billion that Sam Bankman-Fried personally received from Alameda, but there was also $2.3 billion for Paper Bird, ...continue reading "SBF made off with about $3 billion from the collapse of FTX"

As always, the BLS released figures for average earnings at the same time as the inflation figures. Here are average weekly earnings for all private employees: Hourly earnings were up 5% for the month (on an annualized basis) but average hours worked were down a bit. The result is an increase in weekly earnings of ...continue reading "Weekly earnings were up slightly in November"

The BLS announced CPI figures for November today, and both the headline rate and the core rate declined substantially: Shazam! The headline rate is below the Fed's target of 2% and the core rate is damn close. As always, I'm showing month-over-month rates that have been annualized. If you still insist on following the conventional ...continue reading "Inflation dropped like a stone in November"

So far, the lame duck Congress has passed: A bill putting the railroads back to work. The Respect for Marriage Act. What's next? There are a few possibilities: The Electoral College Reform Act. Budget related stuff, including a budget. I don't get the sense that ECRA is getting a lot of attention, but it's still ...continue reading "The lame duck session of Congress is nearly over"

You've probably heard by now that the Department of Energy will announce tomorrow that one of their fusion machines has achieved the holy grail: net energy production. That is, the energy coming out will be greater than the energy going in. Not to put a damper on the whole thing, but there's a little less ...continue reading "Warning: The NIF fusion facility didn’t really produce a net energy gain"

Every once in a while I find myself browsing through old photos for one reason or another, and occasionally I find a good one that never got its day in the sun. Today's photo is the original of a Milky Way panorama that didn't get used because it was too distorted to correct properly (though ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

For what it's worth, I would like to remind everyone about the true nature of Twitter: Of the most followed accounts, two out of 50 belong to political actors of any kind. That's about 7% of all followers for these accounts. Other ways of looking at Twitter readership put politics at around 10% or so. ...continue reading "The real Twitter is not left or right"

Twitter sure is annoying these days. I mean, it's always been annoying thanks to trolls and character limits and mob pile-ons and so forth. But now Elon Musk is determined to make it more annoying still by hiring a few writers to trawl through internal documents in order to show that before he took over ...continue reading "The Twitter Files, Parts 2 – infinity"

A new study has concluded that "minorities are 24 to 33 percent more likely to be stopped for speeding" than white people who are driving the exact same speed. This is based on research among Lyft drivers in Florida That sounded striking, but when I was reading through the study I noticed a brief mention ...continue reading "New study says Black drivers get 0.7 more speeding citations per century"

A few Bitcoin fans have dredged up a post I wrote four years ago today that celebrated its plummet over the preceding year. Sure enough, it turned out to be at its lowest point in a while and promptly took an upward turn. Notch a victory for the crypto groupies. Since then I've written multiple ...continue reading "Bitcoin goes up. Bitcoin goes down. Right now it’s down."

This is Charlie hiding behind the drapes in my study. He doesn't do this a lot anymore, but that's mainly because I don't close the drapes very much this time of year. As always, Charlie has to adapt to the weird habits of his humans.

Near the beginning of the movie Arthur, Arthur (played by Dudley Moore) is asked what he does for a living. He answers, "I race cars, I play tennis, I fondle women, but I have weekends off and I am my own boss." Forty years later Apple executive Tony Blevins was asked the same question as ...continue reading "Apple fires senior executive over ill-considered joke"

In the current Senate, with the parties tied at 50-50 and Kamala Harris providing the tiebreaking vote, all committees are split evenly. Since Harris is not available to break ties on committee votes, this slows things down a lot for Democrats. The upcoming 51-49 Senate, where Ds will have majorities on all committees, should smooth ...continue reading "It’s time to turn the tables and investigate Republicans"

Every month, just before the BLS releases inflation numbers, they tease us with a new release of the Producer Price Index. Here it is for November: The PPI for final demand fell slightly to 3.6%. (As usual, this is the month-over-month change converted to an annual rate of change.) The intermediate demand index came in ...continue reading "Producer price inflation remains solidly under control in November"

Did anyone see this coming? The ever-mysterious Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has decided to switch her political affiliation to Independent. She says she won't caucus with Republicans, and if she continues to caucus with Democrats the party breakdown in the Senate will stay at 51-49. If she doesn't caucus with anyone, it will be 50-49. So ...continue reading "Kyrsten Sinema decides she doesn’t want to be a Democrat any more."