Kevin Drum 🕸

This is . . . something: A quirk in federal tax law may be incentivizing wealthy people who want to avoid paying taxes to simply not file their returns. That’s because it’s a felony to file false tax returns but only a misdemeanor not to file a return at all. And due to limited IRS ...continue reading "Let’s all stop filing tax returns"

Wait a second: Kind of remarkable Elon Musk bought Twitter, cut 90% of the staff and things worked fine, then annoyed users and advertisers through platform and algorithm shifts so the value tanked; then used it to train an AI company now valued at $40 billion https://t.co/kxTiSV8dhm — Arpit Gupta (@arpitrage) December 5, 2024 Originally ...continue reading "Elon Musk downsized Twitter by 60%"

Hmmm: There's some evidence that movie runtimes have crept up in recent years, but it's all a little iffy. I prefer the data nerd approach taken by Przemysław Jarząbek, who wrote a script to extract all the films from IMDb and plot them by average length each year. Here it is: This is pretty steady ...continue reading "Movies have gotten slightly longer over the past 60 years"

I don't really know what this is. I mean, it's a stream flowing down from Mount Baldy alongside Mount Baldy Road, but I don't what it's called—or even if it has a name. It must, right? But I can't find it on a map. Can any SoCal locals help out?

The Census Bureau revealed today the latest sales figures for manufactured homes, which were up 0% from the previous month. Boring. But the trend over the past 65 years is kind of fascinating: Mobile home sales surged in the '60s and then collapsed utterly in the space of two years from 1973-74. What the hell ...continue reading "Raw data: Mobile home sales in the US"

From the New York Times this morning: This is pretty disturbing. Are we really at the point in our Trumpesque anti-establishment fervor that we celebrate the deliberate murder of corporate executives we dislike? The story continues with this: The dark commentary after the death of Mr. Thompson, a 50-year-old insurance executive from Maple Grove, Minn., ...continue reading "How angry are people at health insurers?"

Here's the latest on the lead front: We estimate that by 2015, the US population had gained 602-million General Psychopathology factor points because of exposure arising from leaded gasoline, reflecting a 0.13-standard-deviation increase in overall liability to mental illness in the population and an estimated 151 million excess mental disorders attributable to lead exposure. As ...continue reading "Add mental illness to the list of lead’s sins"

Email from a friend: So one month out, I'm a bit surprised at how little I care about anything Trump-related. Usually, political obsessiveness, work avoidance techniques, etc. kick in after a couple of weeks of post-election frustration, but honestly, I legitimately have no interest in what this person does or says. Doesn't mean I don't ...continue reading "Are you tired of Trump’s vaudeville act already?"

With most of the vote now counted, the big picture of the election has come into focus. If 2% of the electorate had switched their votes, Democrats would control the House of Representatives and Kamala Harris would be president. Democrats still would have lost control of the Senate, thanks to a horrible map, but by ...continue reading "Democrats lost the election by 2% of the vote"

Tennessee passed a law last year that bans trans kids from receiving medical treatments such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy if those treatments are prescribed to help them transition. Today the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on whether the law is constitutional. Ian Millhiser explains that the legal question at issue is whether the ...continue reading "The Supreme Court’s naked partisanship continues today"

Politico reports that "Biden aides" in the White House are discussing the possibility of pardoning Democrats who might be in Donald Trump's crosshairs: Those who could face exposure include such members of Congress’ Jan. 6 Committee as Sen.-elect Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Trump has previously said Cheney “should ...continue reading "Will more Democrats receive preemptive pardons?"

The New York Times has a pretty interesting piece today about Google's latest and greatest AI weather forecasting tool, GenCast, which extends reliable forecasting from 10 days to 15: A new artificial intelligence tool from DeepMind, a Google company in London that develops A.I. applications, has smashed through the old barriers and achieved what its ...continue reading "AI weather forecasting swamps the competition"

This is the Flaming Star Nebula, aka IC 405, a combination emission/reflection nebula in the Auriga constellation. I took this picture Sunday night after a multi-month layoff, and it was the best night of astrophotography I've ever had. Usually something goes wrong during the imaging session—it's always weird and different each time—but the sky was ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Are you wondering how your county did last year? I'm here to help. Here is real GDP growth for the 20 biggest counties in the US: Silicon Valley did well, with all of its component parts in the top ten (Santa Clara, San Mateo, and San Francisco counties). My hometown of Orange County did the ...continue reading "Throckmorton County, population 1,440, doubled its GDP in 2023"

Another nomination from Donald Trump: President-elect Donald J. Trump will nominate Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur who led two private missions to orbit on SpaceX rockets, as the next NASA administrator. Mr. Isaacman, the chief executive of the payment processing company Shift4 Payments, is a close associate of Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, and, ...continue reading "Musk pal tapped to run NASA"

Matt Stieb writes today about the food freedom movement: How Raw Milk Went From Hippie to MAGA This seems right, but it's not. Raw milk certainly had a MAGA moment earlier this year—completely unrelated to RFK Jr.—but its conservative roots go back well over a decade. Here's a Politico piece from 2014: As buying local ...continue reading "Raw milk has always been a right-wing cause"

Looks like maybe the jig is up for Pete Hegseth, who possesses the unique combination of being both the biggest asshole and the most aggressively unqualified nominee in history to run the Defense Department: NEW: The nomination of Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense is in trouble, a senior Trump transition source told CNN. ...continue reading "Pete Hegseth’s future may not be in an E-ring office after all"

I'm not the world's biggest fan of "both sides" criticism—i.e., that reporters constantly bend over backward to show that Democrats are just as bad as Republicans—but holy shit: Justice Dept.’s Apolitical Tradition Is Challenged by 2 Presidents The special counsel named to lead the inquiry into Hunter Biden, the president’s son, has just seen the ...continue reading "Guess what? Biden is now just as corrupt as Trump."

A friend and I were discussing California's infamous high-speed rail to nowhere today, wondering why Gov. Gavin Newsom continues to support this boondoggle. The answer turns out to be fairly simple: After passing in 2008 by a margin of 53-47%, the project has remained moderately popular. In fact, it's gained a bit of popularity: Even ...continue reading "California’s train to nowhere is surprisingly popular"

Just to keep everyone up to date, here's what Donald Trump's scam social media company looks like a few weeks after the election: There was a big spike for some reason at the end of October, but it only lasted a few days. Aside from that, DJT stock has been hovering around $30 for a ...continue reading "Trump’s stock has steadied out at $30"