Kevin Drum 🕸

Over at National Review, Kayla Bartsch says shoplifting is rampant: The Left says retail crime is going down. The truth? Theft has become so pervasive — and ordinary — that retailers have simply stopped reporting it. The well-documented surge in shoplifting in the U.S. has.... Let's just stop right here. Bartsch specifically links "well-documented" to ...continue reading "Is shoplifting up or down?"

This is a very sociable horse that I met in Colorado. All the other horses ignored me, but this one cantered right up and let me stroke her face. I felt kind of guilty that I didn't have an apple or something to give her.

You probably don't watch much Fox News, do you? If that's the case, you're behind the times. Your impression of Fox News has been formed by folks like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Bill O'Reilly, and so forth. Conservative, sometimes crazy, but basically just political outrage artists. That's not the Fox News of today. Hannity is ...continue reading "Yes, Fox News has gotten even worse"

I wrote this about artificial intelligence in 2017: Even if Moore’s law slows down or stops, the total power of everything put together—more use of custom microchips, more parallelism, more sophisticated software, and even the possibility of entirely new ways of doing computing—will almost certainly keep growing for many more years. ....We’ve finally built computers ...continue reading "AI is almost here"

In an unsurprising turn of events, the DC Circuit Court has ruled that Donald Trump doesn't have legal immunity for anything he happens to have done while president. Trump's lawyers continue to assert that this means "every future president who leaves office will be immediately indicted by the opposing party," but the court put quick ...continue reading "Court says it’s OK to prosecute Trump"

Yesterday I casually dismissed some common complaints of Millennials about their lot in life. You will be unsurprised that I got some pushback. So here's a rundown of the complaints I listed along with evidence that they're untrue. I expect approximately zero Millennials to be convinced by this. But it's all true! Young people always ...continue reading "Are Millennials really as well off as Baby Boomers?"

Today I learned that the moon is getting smaller: The moon’s shrinking has been measurable, but small. It has contracted about 150 feet in diameter over the last few hundred million years. Small indeed! That comes to about a quarter of a millimeter every 10,000 years. At that rate, by the time the sun turns ...continue reading "The moon is shrinking"

I happened to come across a short piece by Lydia Polgreen about the "Fast Cars" duet at the Grammys featuring Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs. In a throwaway sentence at the end she said this about Chapman: She was a poet of the despair wrought by the cruel economic vision of the Reagan years. What ...continue reading "What would a poet of despair say about the 21st century?"

I honestly can't tell anymore if border hawks object to the Senate immigration bill for real reasons or made-up political reasons. But for what it's worth, here are the main objections from NumbersUSA: Codifies catch&release Codifies admin. rule allowing asylum officers not judges to grant asylum Instant work permits to asylum seekers Fails to end ...continue reading "Here’s a quick look at objections to the Senate immigration bill"

This is a glass thingamajig at the Istanbul Home shop on the Balboa peninsula. I don't think it has any function. The shop is full of these things, and they seem to be purely decorative.

Yesterday Dean Baker asked a good question: why do media outlets keep telling us that it's all but impossible for young Millennials to own a home? It seems that cost-cutting or other measures prevent reporters at CNN and the New York Times from getting the data that the Census Bureau publishes quarterly on homeownership rates ...continue reading "Young people buy a lot of homes"

I suppose the Senate immigration bill doesn't really matter since Republicans have made it clear they plan to sink it. But there's still the theoretical question of whether Democrats ought to support it. That is, not as a compromise just to get Ukraine aid, but on its own merits. Is the border security part of ...continue reading "How should liberals feel about the border bill?"

Over at National Review they're still arguing about whether Democrats will "switch out Biden." Their consensus: probably not. It's insane that people are still talking about this. "Democrats" don't have any way to force Biden to drop out any more than "Republicans" can force Trump to drop out. Biden can't possibly make it any clearer ...continue reading "It’s gonna be Biden vs. Trump. -30-"

The text of the bipartisan border security bill has been released. Here's the money part: $20 billion for border security $60 billion for Ukraine $14 billion for Israel $10 billion for humanitarian aid to Gaza $5 billion for Taiwan Here's my best quick take on the specific border provisions of the bill $3.2 billion to ...continue reading "Senate immigration bill expands detention, increases asylum judges, and allows the president to shut the border"

Here's the last of my charts from Nat Bullard's climate deck. But first, here's a look at the overall venture capital market: After peaking in late 2021, the VC market has returned to its normal pre-pandemic levels. But climate tech is taking a bigger and bigger share of that: The total amount of VC funding ...continue reading "VC interest in climate tech kept on rising in 2023"

I was fiddling around yesterday and happened to notice something a little odd: Average hours of work per week fell sharply in January. It's now lower than it's been since the Great Recession with the exception of a single month at the start of the pandemic. But then, because of my musing about seasonal adjustments, ...continue reading "Hours worked per week fell dramatically in January"

A decade ago San Francisco banned 8th grade algebra in an attempt to improve math outcomes for students of color. The Wall Street Journal reports: A study by Stanford University researchers released in March 2023 found that San Francisco’s policy largely failed in its equity goals, with the proportion of Black and Latino students enrolling ...continue reading "San Francisco cries uncle in the algebra wars"

I know it's a little pointless to keep highlighting the endless lunacy of Republicans these days, but, I mean, come on. Check this out: Gov. Ron DeSantis has endorsed legislation pending in the Legislature that would make it a criminal misdemeanor to manufacture, sell, or distribute “cultivated meat,” defined as “any meat or food product ...continue reading "DeSantis: No lab meat in Florida, thank you very much"

Here's a tweet today about the high cost of renting: I’m not a big RETVRN guy but we really do need to get back to the time when urban housing was so cheap and plentiful that any kid could show up in San Francisco or New York and find a place to live that they ...continue reading "The myth of postwar New York City"

Caitlan Flanagan has an odd piece in the Atlantic today asserting that American university professors are no longer interested in presenting both sides of controversial issues—and I use the word assert advisedly here. The piece is odd because she presents literally no evidence for her argument even though she's written a whole book on the ...continue reading "How to think for yourself"