Kevin Drum 🕸

This is sort of an odd picture. It's the Washington Monument, of course, but it doesn't really look very tall. Is it because of the trees, which distort our sense of scale? Or about shooting it from slightly above its base? Or about the cropping of the photo? I'm not sure.

Via Alex Tabarrok, here's the racial and ethnic breakdown of inventors in the United States. The figures are from a new demographic study done by Ufuk Akcigit and Nathan Goldschlag: Every nonwhite group is massively underrepresented except for Asians, who are massively overrepresented. Women are also enormously underrepresented: In this study, "inventor" is anyone with ...continue reading "Raw data: Race, gender, and ethnicity among US inventors"

The Chinese team that collected samples from the Huanan Seafood Market three years ago has finally published its report, and an advanced draft has been posted on the Nature website. Let the games begin: A peer-reviewed paper that concludes there is no evidence for zoonotic spillover at the Huanan Seafood Market in #Wuhan has just ...continue reading "New study of COVID origins adds nothing to the raccoon dog hypothesis"

National Review's Jeffrey Blehar is unhappy about the victory of liberal Janet Protasiewicz in Wisconsin's supreme court race: The rollback of the significant Tea Party-era gains made by the GOP in the state now seems, if not foreordained, then on the horizon. Democrats have seized control of the state Supreme Court — once held by ...continue reading "Wisconsin votes to remain in the 21st century"

I think I may have a trip to Los Angeles in my near future: A battle is being waged at the Westlake/MacArthur Park Metro station near downtown Los Angeles. The weapon of choice? Loud classical music....L.A. Metro’s goal with the music and lights is to reduce crime and drive away unhoused people. ....The transit authority ...continue reading "Classical music cuts crime 20% on the LA metro"

Over at New York, John Herrman describes the TikTokification of everything—except worse: You’re stuck in line at the grocery store, so you check your phone. Your brain shuts off, and your thumb takes over. Soon, a tall video plays. A man is tricking a baboon with some sleight of hand. He makes a lighter disappear ...continue reading "How the Chinese are really using TikTok to destroy us"

This is a guy walking his dog on the road up to Idyllwild. The man's politics may be suspect, but his dog was very sociable. I had my car door open and he almost jumped onto my lap.

Just for the record, I'm not deliberately avoiding Trump news because I think it's stupid.¹ It's mostly because events like his arraignment today are already covered in minute detail by every news outlet on the planet and I don't have anything special to add. I am curious to see what the charges are, just in ...continue reading "Trump update"

Let's review the recent history of human communication: 1876-2000: Telephones provide convenient and universal voice communication. 2000-2023: Thekidsthesedays decide they hate telephones and really, really hate voice messages, so instead they use phone infrastructure to send text messages. Today: Kids realize that emojis don't actually represent the full range of human emotion, so they begin ...continue reading "Human voice is the hot new texting technology"

In today's release of economic news for February, job openings continued their yearlong fall and orders for durable goods continued their decline of the past few months (with a brief timeout for Christmas). It was against this backdrop that the Fed continued to raise rates a couple of weeks ago. Good job, Fed.

Man, the minimum standards to qualify as a culture war sure have fallen lately.

This is a bateau chugging downstream on the Seine. A few minutes after taking this picture I myself would be on one of the bateaux chugging along the Seine.

Over at Vox, Miles Bryan writes about a new study of crime in the downtown areas of New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Chicago. The study's conclusion? Actual crime has been pretty stable, but fear of crime has shot up. This, not a desire for remote work, is the biggest reason people give for not wanting ...continue reading "Crime and the (Republican) fear of crime"

The price of crude oil is now down to roughly its price before the pandemic.

The key to the Mar-a-Lago documents case is not the bare fact that Donald Trump left the White House with classified documents in his possession. That might have been accidental. The bigger question is whether Trump refused to give up the documents even after they had been subpoenaed and Trump knew he had them. Indeed, ...continue reading "The Mar-a-Lago documents case is all about obstruction of justice"

Life expectancy has been in the news lately, so yesterday I was diddling around with the state-by-state data. Here it is: Generally, life expectancy increased through 1990, leveled out, and then began to drop in 2000. But the trend wasn't the same everywhere. Some states went up a little, while some dropped more than the ...continue reading "Raw data: Life expectancy in the 50 states"

My understanding is that there are two basic argument for banning TikTok: There's a danger that they might tune their recommendation algorithm to favor content from the Chinese government. China might be able to get access to the personal information of American users. Genuine question here: Suppose both of these things happen. What's the worst ...continue reading "What’s the problem with TikTok?"

For your amusement, here's a citation from a paper I read recently. It is, oddly, in alphabetical order by first name. Must be some kind of woke thing.

Can you unravel the trend here? Richard Nixon commits crimes, but is pardoned by Gerald Ford and never goes to trial. Jimmy Carter: no crimes. Ronald Reagan and his top lieutenants commit crimes, but are pardoned by George H. W. Bush and never go to trial. Bill Clinton: dodgy record for sure, but he paid ...continue reading "A brief timeline of recent presidential criming"

For all the good it will do, I would like to remind everyone yet again that GPT-4 is not artificial intelligence. Neither is anything else. AI, by any reasonable definition, doesn't exist yet. GPT-4 is amazing. It will have a huge impact on the world. It's definitely on the road to AI, the same way ...continue reading "GPT-4 is not AI. Stop calling it that."