Kevin Drum 🕸

The answer, generally, is anywhere in the South, and specifically, South Carolina: The safest state, for some reason, is Rhode Island.

In August Waymo reported about 300,000 driverless taxi trips carrying 500,000 passengers in California. All (or nearly all) of this was in San Francisco. This amounts to 10,000 rides per day. The average Waymo taxi ride is about six miles, fairly average for taxis. Usage has been growing 30% per month over the past quarter. ...continue reading "Raw data: Waymo taxi trips in California"

This is shameless sleaze: They just revised down the estimated job gains in both August & September by a combined 112,000 Remember last month when I said the jobs report from Biden-Harris were fakes used by media to give them positive headlines? I told you so! 👇 https://t.co/IOByFmJxpj — Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) November 1, 2024 ...continue reading "Republican crackpottery is now conventional wisdom"

Donald Trump is getting raked over the coals for an interview he did yesterday where he mused about Liz Cheney being killed: "Let's put her with a rifle standing there, with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let's see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face." By ...continue reading "Have Republicans really become anti-war?"

Patrick Ruffini has a warning for obsessive poll watchers: Right now, you are anchored in a poll-driven reality that it's going to be within a point in 3-4 states. But mentally prepare yourself for the fact that it's highly likely to be something else. — Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) November 1, 2024 This is very true. ...continue reading "The election might be close. Or it might not."

My mother has a black and white cat named Luna. But she's also been adopted by another cat that comes around for dinner every night. That makes it hers de facto, and it looks just like Luna. So its name is Fake Luna. Here's a rare picture of Fake Luna, who is not especially sociable ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 1 November 2024"

The Washington Post has a nice piece today about an underappreciated part of the recent surge in illegal immigration: the transition of smuggling operations from inefficient amateurs to large-scale professionals who operate with military precision. It's big business: With revenue estimated at $4 billion to $12 billion a year, the smuggling of migrants has joined ...continue reading "As the border becomes more militarized, so do smuggling gangs"

The American economy gained 12,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at -78,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate stayed at 4.1%. The jobs survey is in the field early each month, and October's survey may have been affected ...continue reading "Net new jobs fall in October"

Over at Tablet, Park MacDougald has a piece called "The Democrats’ Insanity Defense." The gist is that Democrats do such unhinged stuff that people won't believe you if you just describe it truthfully. MacDougald starts out with Kamala Harris's (now) famous statement in 2019 that she supports access to transgender surgery for prisoners. Fair enough. ...continue reading "Conservatives are crazy, Part 847"

Tyler Cowen points me to a paper from OpenAI that tests how well their AI does at answering simple, factual questions. These are questions that have a single, indisputable answer, like "What are the names of Barack Obama's children?" The answer, it turns out, is that GPT4 suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect: it doesn't know ...continue reading "AI suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect"

I've noticed lately that my Google searches deliver a lot of hits for Reddit groups. John Herrman explains why: The backstory here is a bit fuzzy and contested, but the basic outline is this: Late last year, Google began prioritizing certain sources of user-generated content in Search in an effort to surface more “first-person perspectives” ...continue reading "Why has Reddit taken over your Google searches?"

Did you know that over the past decade the amount of rail freight has declined even if you don't include the plummet in the number of coal trains? It's true: Why is rail freight down down even though the economy has expanded by a third over the same period? It's not because freight charges have ...continue reading "The story of freight trains"

Not that it matters to anyone, but here's a way to look at today's inflation report: Inflation right now is within a hair of Donald Trump's average before the pandemic. The pandemic created the surge and the pandemic ended it. It's over. Everyone can relax.

This is a Francois' langur at the LA Zoo. There are fewer than 2,500 left in the world. He looks very venerable, no?

RFK Jr. is a crackpot. He spent years as a left-wing crackpot and has recently transformed into a MAGA-loving right-wing crackpot, but the through-line is that he's been a certifiable crank for more than 20 years. So when Donald Trump says he's going to let his pal "go wild" on health and medicine if he ...continue reading "Would RFK Jr. ban vaccines in a Trump administration?"

What the hell has been going on with Truth Social stock? DJT has been steadily rising since the end of last month, but then it suddenly spiked up nearly 50% starting last Thursday. Then it plunged back starting Tuesday. DJT is basically a bet on whether Trump will win the election. But what happened on ...continue reading "The rise and fall of the DJT empire"

Today's economic data dump produced a whole crop of good numbers. Disposable income is up 2.3% from a year ago. Total compensation (salary + benefits) is up 4.8%. Consumer spending is up 2.2%. All adjusted for inflation, of course—which clocked in at a nice, low 2.1%. And yesterday's GDP report showed healthy growth of 2.8%. ...continue reading "Today’s economic news is all blue skies"

PCE inflation ticked up a bit in September, but the headline rate remains at a very solid 2.1%: On a conventional year-over-year basis, headline PCE was 2.1% and core PCE was 2.7%. These are excellent numbers indicating, once again, that inflation is well under control.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson today: We want to take a blowtorch to the regulatory state. These agencies have been weaponized against the people. It’s crushing the free market; it’s like a boot on the neck of job creators and entrepreneurs and risk takers. I know this is standard Republican rhetoric, but I wonder ...continue reading "We don’t need to take a blowtorch to regulations"

The Washington Post reports today that the federal government's routine election monitoring—in place since 1965—is in trouble. Thanks to the Supreme Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, the Justice Department can only enter polling places with permission from state officials—and Republican states are increasingly denying them that permission. That's a problem. But ...continue reading "Federal election monitoring is alive and (fairly) well"