Kevin Drum 🕸

A few weeks ago, coming home from one of my night sky photography sessions, I noticed that dawn looked very nice in my rear view mirror. I wasn't planning to stop, but eventually I caved in and decided to turn around. Having done that, I needed to find an exit so I could get out ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

The Washington Post writes today that Millennials fled the workforce when they were teens but that Gen Z teens are pouring back. Regular readers of this blog are ahead of the curve here, since I pointed out three months ago that Gen Z, on average, seems to like work more than previous generations. But how ...continue reading "Wait! Is Gen X the real slacker generation?"

Riddle me this: what happened to the United States during the aughts? If you ask people how the nation is doing, it normally depends almost entirely on the economy. If we're in a recession, America is going in the wrong direction. If the economy is expanding, America is going in the right direction. We aren't ...continue reading "The Aughts"

Over at National Review, Charles Hilu is pissed: Incoming University of Michigan Medical School students staged a walkout of the school’s White Coat Ceremony Sunday to protest the choice of a pro-life doctor as the ceremony’s keynote speaker. ....On its face, this collective decision by many of the incoming students is inappropriate for civil society ...continue reading "Is walking out on a speaker no longer allowed?"

Inspired by a Twitter conversation last night, here's the answer: As of now, about 3 million people work for the federal government; 5 million for state governments; and 14 million for local governments.

Rep. Lee Zeldin is running for governor of New York. Yesterday, as he was talking to a small crowd about public safety, a drunk guy apparently got tired of listening to him: Video footage of the encounter showed Mr. Jakubonis wielding a pointed plastic self-defense tool shaped like the face of a cartoon cat as ...continue reading "Cat-shaped thing implicated in New York attack"

Over at National Review, Michael Brendan Dougherty looks at the decline of marriage in the US and places some of blame on the LGBT movement in general and the Supreme Court's 2015 Obergefell decision in particular: Proponents of same-sex marriage like Sullivan and Rauch won in the courts, and in a thin slice of the ...continue reading "Marriage in the US has been declining since 1949"

This is Charlie about to attack Hilbert's tail—though Charlie is hardly to blame for this. There are, after all, limits to what you can expect when you start waving your tail in somebody's face.

I don't have any special reason for posting this. I was just curious about it.

Hey! I wrote this afternoon about the FCC shutting down all those fake auto warranty robocalls, but I missed the big story: This is about all robocalls, not just the auto warranty guys. Years ago I remember writing about STIR/SHAKEN, a protocol for verified caller ID that the FCC was working on, but then I ...continue reading "Bye bye to all robocalls?"

This is a lovely red alstroemeria blooming in our front yard garden this spring. Isn't it pretty?

This happened two weeks ago, but for some reason Bloomberg wrote about it today: The Federal Communications Commission has ordered phone companies to stop carrying traffic related to robocalls about scam auto warranties. US voice service providers must now “take all necessary steps to avoid carrying this robocall traffic,” or provide a report outlining how ...continue reading "Bye bye to auto warranty scam calls"

The Washington Post takes on one of my favorite questions today: Why don't we use more heat pumps here in the United States? There are two kinds of heat pumps, and I love them both. The first type should really be called "a cheap air conditioner," because that's what it is: an air conditioner that ...continue reading "More Americans should have a heat pump"

Paul Krugman writes today that he was wrong about inflation. Fair enough. But suppose, just for the sake of conversation, that inflation goes like this over the next year or so: This is not a projection or even a guess. Just a possibility. But if the core PCE index—the Fed's favorite!—follows the dashed line or ...continue reading "Is high inflation here to stay? Let’s hear from everybody."

The Russians must think they're doing pretty well in their war for the Donbas region in Ukraine: In recent months, Russian forces have concentrated their assault on eastern Ukraine, which by all indications Russia appears determined to annex as it did Crimea in 2014. But on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov told the Russian ...continue reading "Russia wants a free path to Crimea"

Secret Servicegate is slowly coming into sharper focus. Here's what we seem to know: On January 16, 2021, Congress sent a "broad" preservation and production request to the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service. Another was sent on January 25. Both requests were aimed at preserving records related to the 1/6 insurrection. ...continue reading "I think we all know what the Secret Service did last year"

In honor of my new astrophotography hobby, here are a couple of pictures of the Vermont/Sunset station on the LA Metro's red line. This is the station closest to the Griffith Observatory, so it's decked out with a faux star chart. At least, I think it's faux. Do those look like real constellations to anyone? ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Why isn't Attorney General Merrick Garland pressing charges against Donald Trump? Surely the 1/6 insurrection hearings in the House have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt just how deeply Trump was involved with the mob attack on the Capitol and the effort to stop Mike Pence from certifying the election results? In the LA ...continue reading "Why is Merrick Garland holding back on Donald Trump?"

This is a familiar story by now, but the BLS released the latest figures for full-time weekly earnings yesterday so we might as well take a look at them. Here they are: Men's wages are down 3.7% since the start of the pandemic and women's wages are down 1.5%. Since their peaks in summer 2020, ...continue reading "Raw data: Weekly wages in Q2 of 2022"

The LA Times reports on an announcement that Obamacare premiums will rise an average of 6% next year: Individual health insurance premiums are set to rise by an average of 6% on the state marketplace next year amid rebounding demand for medical care and uncertainty surrounding federal financial assistance, Covered California said Tuesday....Each year from ...continue reading "Obamacare premiums set to fall 2.3% in California"