Kevin Drum 🕸

I'm just fiddling around here, but thought this was interesting: When you hear about e-commerce, it's commonly described as about 15% of all sales. Which is fair enough. But that includes things like gasoline and eating out, which can't be purchased online, plus autos, which are still mostly an in-person business. If you look at ...continue reading "How big is e-commerce? It depends."

Here's the latest from California, bellwether to the nation: Swept up in unproven voter fraud claims, the Shasta County Board of Supervisors has upended the county’s election process, canceling its contract with Dominion Voting Systems and opting this week to pursue, among other options, the possibility of counting votes by hand. Supervisor Kevin Crye, part ...continue reading "California county dumps Dominion over voting conspiracy theories"

As productivity goes, so goes the nation. Or something like that. In the fourth quarter of 2022 labor productivity increased at an annual rate of 1.7%. That's a little higher than the average of the past decade. Here is productivity since the end of the Great Recession: Productivity shot up during the first quarter of ...continue reading "Chart of the day: Productivity was up in final quarter of 2022"

Matt Yglesias writes today that certain progressive tropes produce feelings of helplessness and depression, rather than the sense of power and optimism needed for political movements to succeed. One of these is the routine assertion of "harm" or "feeling unsafe" when someone does something you find offensive or even just disagreeable: Objecting to bigoted or ...continue reading "On “feeling unsafe”"

One of the most common suggestions from police reform advocates is to stop using armed police officers for a wide range of tasks that might be better handled by trained dispute moderators and social workers. In Los Angeles, the police union said today it was willing to negotiate this: As part of its upcoming contract ...continue reading "LAPD says it’s “willing” to hand off duties it never liked in the first place"

Hot off the press from the BLS, here is the 2022 unemployment rate for each region of the US: Want to know how your state did? Just click here.

You may recall that a few weeks ago I set up my telescope in the backyard to do a little testing. I was extremely restricted in my view, and I ended up semi-randomly taking a picture of M81, aka Bode's Galaxy. It was surprisingly good. A few days later I took another picture, and although ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Ron DeSantis has written a book! Let's see what's in it: DeSantis, who this week begins a media tour to promote his new book “The Courage to Be Free,” launched a “Prescribe Freedom” campaign in January that proposes permanently limiting Covid-19 vaccination and mask requirements and giving cover to physicians whose medical views depart from ...continue reading "Ron DeSantis wants to ban masks permanently, forever, eternally, infinitely, forevermore, til death do us part"

According to a recent report from the CDC, here is the change in vaccination coverage of 2-year-olds over the past couple of years: This is the most recent data available. Every single vaccination series is up. The complete 7-vaccine childhood series is up. The number of toddlers with no vaccination coverage is down. Here is ...continue reading "Vaccination coverage of toddlers has increased over the past two years"

For what it's worth, here is the most recent set of expected inflation numbers from the Cleveland Fed: The 5-year/5-year forward inflation measure is currently at 2.2%, which closely matches the Cleveland Fed 5-year estimate. Note that all of these figures are continuing to go down even after January's re-benchmarking and the bad January inflation ...continue reading "Raw data: Expected inflation is low and getting lower"

Hey there. Have you seen a sign like this lately at a nearby fast food joint? That seems pretty excessive, doesn't it? Fast food places must be desperate for workers to offer this kind of money. But not really. First, of all, you won't see this kind of sign in Oklahoma, where they pay fast ...continue reading "20 bucks an hour for burger flippers?!?"

I think I said once that it's impossible to take an interesting picture of a cow. This is because cows are inherently boring creatures who do nothing except eat grass and stand around listlessly. I stand by this, but I think I came close on Sunday. This is a handsome looking cow doing its usual ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Last month The Nation published an article based on records from early 2020 regarding the origin of the COVID virus. The scientists involved, it turns out, were initially receptive to the idea that the virus might have been the result of a leak from a Chinese lab in Wuhan.¹ But after a week of study ...continue reading "DOE or no, the COVID lab leak hypothesis is still pretty unlikely"

The Supreme Court heard arguments today about President Biden's student loan forgiveness program. Most of the news reports suggest that a majority of the court was skeptical that Biden had the authority to enact this program via executive action. The Supreme Court currently has before it a number of cases that could demonstrate its rank ...continue reading "Supreme Court seems likely to rule against student loan forgiveness"

William McGurn says the danger of East Palestine's chemical spill has been exaggerated. The EPA and private scientists have declared the air and water safe, but a lot of residents don't believe them: Today’s fear is the price Americans are paying for the public-health authorities’ response to Covid. So many things experts claimed in the ...continue reading "How science works: A very, very brief primer"

I don't have any special reason for posting this, but I happened to be checking out some abortion polling numbers and came across the latest from Gallup: Support for more lenient abortion rules had been rising steadily since 2013 and then skyrocketed after the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision was leaked in early 2022. Only 15% ...continue reading "Abortion support skyrockets in 2023"

A few days ago we got a glimpse at a deposition in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News. It showed that primetime stars like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson knew that conspiracy theories about ballot machines were nonsense, but didn't want to stop talking about it because it might be bad for ratings. ...continue reading "Murdoch admits that Fox News hosts touted voting conspiracy theories"

Over at National Review, Nate Hochman is annoyed at Stanford University: The demographic profile of Stanford University’s class of 2026 is out, with 1,736 matriculated students in the freshman class of one of the world’s most prestigious universities. But as some perceptive critics were quick to notice, one key demographic is disproportionately underrepresented: While whites ...continue reading "Does Stanford under-enroll white students?"

I realize this will seem sort of pitiful to you folks east of the Mississippi, with your frigid weather and routine winter blizzards, but we don't get many blizzards here in Southern California. This weekend we did, and we're all pretty excited about it. So today we have a diptych of Saddleback, a pair of ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

A few weeks ago I reported that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wasn't through with Disney. After eliminating Disney World's special taxing district in an act of revenge, he now planned to reinstate the district but with a board appointed entirely by him. It seemed as if DeSantis was taking further revenge, but not everyone thought ...continue reading "Ron DeSantis reverses epic tax screwup in signing ceremony today"