Kevin Drum 🕸

I went out to buy some eggs this afternoon but my local Ralph's didn't have any. Not at any price. Bird flu is hitting hard here in California. But then I went to my local Gelson's and picked up a dozen eggs for $6.49. Using the rule of thumb that everything at Gelson's is overpriced ...continue reading "Semi-raw data: The price of eggs is lower than you think"

In North Carolina's Supreme Court race, Democrat Allison Riggs beat Republican Jefferson Griffin by 625 votes. Griffin demanded a recount, and Riggs expanded her lead to 734 votes. So it's over? Riggs won? By no means: Griffin has also filed election protests against 60,000 ballots in all 100 counties that could extend the race indefinitely. ...continue reading "North Carolina Republicans can’t abide even a single Democratic win"

When I was out in the desert last week taking a picture of the Heart Nebula, I also did another test run of the Milky Way with my regular camera. To give you an idea of what I photographed, here's a diagram of our galaxy: During the summer, Earth is pointed toward the galactic core ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

For fuck's sake. Another four years of this? Here are the highlights of Donald Trump's press conference this morning. The Gulf of Mexico should be renamed the Gulf of America. Fact check: Too late. Mississippi already proposed this a decade ago as a joke. He might seize the Panama Canal with military force. Fact check: ...continue reading "Trump blathers inanely at press conference"

Mark Zuckerberg says Meta is getting out of the misinformation business: We're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with Community Notes, similar to X.... The fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they created, especially in the US. ....We're going to move our trust ...continue reading "Meta joins Team Trump"

Net hiring in November (hires minus separations) went up slightly, but not enough to matter: Net hiring has been basically flat for the past two years and is roughly at its pre-pandemic average:

According to the Stanford AI Index Report, AI models have gotten really good at passing medical boards. GPT-4 Medprompt got 90.2% of its answers correct in 2023. I would have guessed that it would be considerably higher by now, but according to the leaderboard maintained by Papers With Code, not so much: The best performance ...continue reading "AI has gotten very good at being a doctor"

Conservatives are up in arms about the Rotherham scandal, a decade-old investigation of Pakistani rape gangs in the UK. The remarkable thing about this is why they're suddenly up in arms: Elon Musk. On January 1st, out of nowhere, Musk started up one of his now infamous Twitter jihads. The subject was Rotherham, for no ...continue reading "Elon’s puppets are at it again"

This is the staircase at our hotel in Vienna. I don't remember if this is looking up or down, but there must be some clue that tells us.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, writes that he's almost bored at the prospect of developing mere human-level intelligence. He's already looking past that: We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word.... Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are ...continue reading "Sam Altman says superintelligence is near"

The Wall Street Journal provides a master class this morning in how to mislead with statistics. The subject is unemployment, and every statement here is 100% true: On average, it now takes people about six months to find a job, roughly a month longer than it did during the postpandemic hiring boom in early 2023. ...continue reading "Unemployment is up, but hardly apocalyptic"

The Great Walkback continues. First, Donald Trump said he couldn't guarantee that his tariffs wouldn't raise prices. Then he admitted that he couldn't bring down the cost of groceries after all. Today comes news that he's backing down from his sweeping tariff plan on everyone: President-elect Donald Trump’s aides are exploring tariff plans that would ...continue reading "Trump preparing to abandon yet another promise"

Marc Dunkelman has a new book coming out next month called Why Nothing Works. His thesis is that America once did big things but now seems stuck—and much of it is the fault of progressives: America is today the victim of a vetocracy that allows nearly anyone to stifle progress. While conservatives deserve some blame, ...continue reading "Yeah, America can still build stuff"

Republicans continue to complain that "not a single home has been connected" by Joe Biden's $42 billion rural broadband program (aka BEAD). That's true. And it won't happen this year either. The plan from the beginning was for the FCC to create basic maps of broadband service and then spend 2024 and 2025 on grant ...continue reading "The progress of rural broadband is no secret"

I was puttering around on something else when I ran across this: What is a “pharmacy benefit manager”? https://t.co/wQSRCreBDK — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 31, 2024 Well, Elon, a pharmacy benefit manager is a company that handles negotiations with pharma companies on behalf of health insurers. Three big ones control almost the entire market and ...continue reading "Elon Musk killed PBM reform without knowing what a PBM is"

A team of researchers recently tested whether GPT-4 was biased. The answer was very definitively yes: GPT-4 is a liberal Democrat. Here are the two key charts: The left-hand plot is simple: the researchers asked GPT-4 to answer the well-known "Political Compass" questions. As you can see, 100% of its answers were in the lower ...continue reading "ChatGPT is a Democrat"

Remember the snail darter? It's a tiny endangered fish discovered in 1973 that stopped construction of the Tellico Dam in Tennessee for a while in the late '70s. Yesterday the New York Times wrote about a new study which suggests the snail darter was never a new species at all. It was just the eastern ...continue reading "Did the snail darter never really exist?"

In the New York Times today, Jonathan Weisman tells the story—well, a story—of how Democrats lost the white working class. It's all about economic anxiety. Maybe so, but even Weisman himself acknowledges the obvious: It started in 1968 with "hardhats for Nixon." This was long before de-industrialization. It was all about Vietnam and the counterculture. ...continue reading "The working class story is about culture, not economic anxiety"

This is from the Stanford AI Index Report: Slovakia’s 2023 election illustrates how AI-based disinformation can be used in a political context. Shortly before the election, a contentious audio clip emerged on Facebook purportedly capturing Michal Šimečka, the leader of the Progressive Slovakia party, and journalist Monika Tódová from the newspaper Denník N, discussing illicit ...continue reading "Here’s how AI disinformation works in the real world"

According to the AI Incident Database, the number of reported "harms or near harms" caused by the deployment of AI is increasing: These incidents include such things as AI generated nude images of Taylor Swift, unsafe autonomous cars, and privacy concerns over romantic chatbots. On the other hand, the database also includes an incident of ...continue reading "AI “incidents” are increasing"