Kevin Drum 🕸

Bird flu update: Dairy cows must be tested for bird flu before moving across state lines under a federal order to be issued Wednesday, as evidence mounts the virus is more widespread than feared among cows in the United States. Biden administration officials said the move is meant to contain transmission of the virus known ...continue reading "Bird flu is spreading beyond birds"

Let's just get right to it: This is tentative. We won't know anything for sure until we get the results of the PET scan at the end of next month. But it strongly suggests that my prostate cancer hasn't spread to the lymph nodes. This is very good news. Once prostate cancer has metastasized to ...continue reading "Health update"

The Wall Street Journal tells us about Tesla's first quarter results: The Texas-based car company reported net income of $1.1 billion for the January-to-March period, down 55% from the year prior. Revenue fell 9% to $21.3 billion, reflecting a decline in both vehicle prices and deliveries. Tesla’s operating margin narrowed significantly, dropping to 5.5% in ...continue reading "Tesla stock climbs on grim news"

Here's some good news: FTC Final Rule recommendation on #noncompetes! Will be voted on in the open commission meeting shortly. 🍿⚡️ pic.twitter.com/RapGJYUCM0 — Kenan Fikri (@kenanfikri) April 23, 2024 The vote was 3-2 in favor of banning noncompete agreements for new workers and voiding them for all existing workers (except C-suite executives). This will eliminate ...continue reading "Noncompete agreements are dead"

Some ferns at the Laguna Coast Wilderness Park. Very soothing, aren't they?

According to the BLS, only 70.2% of college graduates who received bachelor's degrees in the spring of 2023 were employed by October. This is the lowest non-recession number in recent years.

In the Trump hush money trial, David Pecker, publisher of the National Enquirer, testified today about paying off informants to hush up sex scandals: Before court adjourned for the day, Mr. Pecker testified that Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump had asked him what he and his magazines could do “to help the campaign,” a crucial ...continue reading "National Enquirer publisher says Trump payments were to help his campaign"

Donald Trump might be stuck in court for the next few weeks, but that doesn't mean there's no good news on the horizon. On Tuesday, after the closing bell on Wall Street, he will qualify to receive another 36 million shares of his social media company. Hooray! Here's the thing to watch. All those additional ...continue reading "Trump stock set to lose value yet again"

Big news today: San Francisco's $1.7 million bathroom finally opened and it ended up costing only about $700,000. What's more, the toilet itself is a prefab unit that was donated by a Nevada company, so the city's net cost clocked in at only $200-300,000. And it's a good thing it was donated. Nevada is one ...continue reading "Bay Area toilet comes in way under budget"

Do pro-Palestinian protesters support Hamas? Probably most of them don't, but the language they routinely use leaves room for doubt. This is from Students for Justice in Palestine: Settlers are not “civilians” in the sense of international law.... Resistance comes in all forms—armed struggle, general strikes, and popular demonstrations. "Resistance" includes armed struggle and Israelis ...continue reading "How strong is support for Hamas in the US?"

It's common knowledge that, on average, educated people live longer than less-educated people. But now a team of researchers says that even if you yourself are a high school dropout, you can reduce your chance of dying merely by living in a neighborhood with lots of educated people: There are several reasons this might be ...continue reading "Being around nonsmokers is good for you"

Today I have a mystery chart for you. Take a look at it: What do you see here? Obviously the trend changes around 2022, but when exactly would you say it changes? The beginning of 2022? The middle? Towards the end? My take is pretty simple: the trendline quite obviously starts to jump right at ...continue reading "Why I’m skeptical of interrupted time series"

This is the last of the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park. It's called Spruce Tree House because.......those are spruce trees nearby? All of these dwellings, by the way, were built in the 1200s after Puebloans had been driven from their previous homes by a long and destructive drought in the 1100s.

I smell a PhD dissertation in the works! But start collecting your data now.

Here in the People's Republic of California we like to keep things fair. And two of our legislators have had enough: A pair of Orange County state senators from opposing parties — who frequently fly between their districts and Sacramento — are both boosting a first-in-the-nation proposal critics say would ban the expedited security screening ...continue reading "California wants rich people to stop cutting the line in airports"

As you know, I've spent a long time arguing that the Fed's interest rate hikes aren't responsible for lower inflation. This is because inflation started to ebb within a few months of the hikes, and that's way too fast. It takes a year or two for interest rate changes to affect inflation. Well, it's been ...continue reading "Why is the economy so good?"

Test your knowledge: Q: How long does it take the FDA to approve new drugs? A: About seven or eight months on average. No, no, wait. It takes years. Everyone says it takes years. What nonsense is this? It's not nonsense. Once a New Drug Application is submitted, the FDA typically turns it around in ...continue reading "Do we still need Phase 1 clinical trials for new drugs?"

The House has finally passed three separate foreign aid bills. Here's how the money breaks down: Ukraine: $61 billion Israel: $17 billion Gaza humanitarian aid: $9 billion Taiwan: $8 billion In addition, the House passed a bill that sanctions Iran and Russia and would force the sale of TikTok. All of the bills go to ...continue reading "At last, Ukraine aid etc. passes the House"

Every year an outfit called Climate Action Tracker publishes an estimate of how much warming we're on course for by the year 2100. Cipher, a news site focused on climate change, has collected those estimates for the past decade and made a chart out of them: The projected amount of warming has dropped from 3.7°C ...continue reading "We’ve made surprising progress on climate change over the past decade"

I just saw a tweet about Groq, an AI chatbot that uses Meta's LLaMA-3 engine. It's incredibly fast! You should try it! So I did. And it is incredibly fast. But there are still problems. I asked it about myself and got five paragraphs in return. Four were basically fine, but there was also this: ...continue reading "I am now a physical chemist"